“Our next step? I was worried you would go off on your own and leave me and grandma alone,” Abby said as she looked down on the floor.
“Why would you think that?” Paul asked as he lifted her head up to look into her eyes.
“The world is going crazy and you don’t owe us anything. Why would you stay here and risk your life for us when you would be safer alone?” she asked.
She looked down at the ground again since she was still finding it difficult to meet his stare.
He lifted her head up again and softly kissed her lips and then said “I promised you I would always protect you and I meant it. Also if you haven’t noticed, I’ve kind of fallen for you.”
This made her smile and she looked back into his eyes and said “I’ve fallen for you too.”
They embraced again and kissed.
“I hate to interrupt but we need to figure out what we are going to do,” Ruth said from the couch. She turned away from the television to look at the two of them standing behind her.
“I need to go to my motel room, I have weapons there,” Paul said.
“You can’t go out there! It’s not safe,” Abby said with an intense sense of fear in her voice.
“I’ll be fine, I promise. I just worry about leaving you two here alone,” Paul said as he looked at Abby and then at her grandma.
“Then we’ll come with you, I feel safer with you anyways,” Abby answered.
“I’m not going out there,” her grandma added.
“Neither one of you are going out there. It’s safer here and I’ll be quicker alone,” Paul said.
He then gave Abby a firm hug and kissed her on the forehead.
He looked into her eyes and said “I’ll be back before you know it and I’ll have the weapons to protect us better.”
“What if you don’t come back?” she asked with a shaky voice.
“I will come back; you have my word and my heart. A man can’t live without his heart so I have to come back,” he said with a big smile across his face.
She smiled back at him and said “then I have to hold onto your heart forever so you’ll have to always stay with me.”
“Sounds good to me,” he said and kissed her lips once more.
Paul stepped away from her and looked at both of them and said “you guys need to keep all the doors and windows locked, find anything you can to use as a weapon.”
“There are some of my old softball bats in my closet upstairs,” Abby said trying to be helpful.
“That’ll be perfect, you get the bats and you two stay together down here. If it’s okay with you I’m going to take your car,” Paul said.
Abby walked over to a small table by the front door and grabbed the car keys, she handed him the keys and said “please be careful.”
“Thank you and I will. Keep the doors locked and don’t open it for anyone but me,” Paul said as he headed to the front door.
He opened the door and as he walked out he turned back one last time and said “please don’t go outside, I’ll be back soon.”
He walked out and closed the door behind him. He heard the dead bolt lock behind him as he walked down the front steps and said to himself “good girl.”
The car roared to life and he backed out of the driveway. He looked up at the house one last time and said a quick prayer before he drove off down the street. The first couple of blocks along the way were uneventful and it seemed to him that things may not be as bad as the television was making it seem. His doubts about the severity of the situation disappeared in an instant after he made a left turn on to Main Street. He saw up ahead of him a scene straight out of hell, chaos in every sense of the word. Main Street was lined with office buildings and stores that now looked like a war zone. He stopped the car and watched the scene unfold in front of him.
He could see smoke coming from a few buildings down the street and everywhere he looked he could see people by the hundreds attacking each other. It was savagery at its most primal level. It didn’t look like any riot or civil unrest that he had seen before, this was something different. People didn’t seem to be looting and there was no structure to the chaos like he had seen in uprisings in other countries during his time in the Army. This was just mobs of people attacking each other and literally ripping each other apart with their bare hands.
Paul was so lost in watching the scene in front of him that he failed to notice the small group of people making their way towards him. The banging on the passenger door window startled him and he instantly realized his mistake, he hadn’t paid attention to his surrounds.
“You’re going to get yourself killed if you don’t pay attention, rookie mistake,” he said out loud.
He put the car in reverse and backed up; he made a left turn down an alley and came out the other side on to a less populated street. There were still people everywhere on his new route but nowhere near the numbers that were on Main Street. He turned right on to the street and was slowly making his way down the road and tried his best not to attract attention. He thought about leaving the car because he could go unnoticed on foot but he was still a few miles away from the motel. He knew he could cover more ground in less time in the car so he would try and stay in it as long as he could. The option to abandon the car was always there if he needed it.
His number one rule to survival was always leave yourself options, if there is only one way and it doesn’t work than he was dead. He sped up and weaved his way through the mess of cars left abandoned on the road and the small groups of people slowly forming everywhere. Part of him wanted to get out and help the people being attacked but he knew his priority was getting his guns and getting back to Abby.
It was getting harder to find a path through the people and cars the further he made it down the street. He had covered close to two miles but he was driving so slowly now that the car was barely making a difference to the time it would take if he were on foot. The car did prevent the people outside banging on it from getting him but it was only a matter of time before someone broke one of the windows. The slower he drove the larger the mob around him grew and it was beginning to make him nervous. He knew he was going to have to abandon the car, there was too many people behind him to back up and too many people and cars blocking ahead to go forward. Before he left the car he was going to figure out his route through the mob and mayhem outside.
He saw a fire escape on one of the builds off to his left; he scanned the buildings lining the street. The buildings were close enough to each other that he could go from rooftop to rooftop with ease. He searched the car for anything he could use as a weapon but couldn’t find anything that would do any kind of damage. It seemed like Abby had cleaned out the car recently, maybe because of their date the day before or maybe she just kept it clean. He thought about checking the trunk before he headed for the fire escape but he reconsidered after he saw the number of people outside growing by the second.
Paul turned the car off and took the keys out of the ignition; he placed the largest key in between his middle finger and ring finger with the key pointing out. If it came down to it he could punch with the key and do some serious damage. There were two people now banging on the driver’s side of the car and more headed towards him. If he was going to make a run for it than now was the time, before the two became ten.
He threw the driver’s door open as hard as he could and knocked a middle aged man in a business suit stumbling back onto the road. The man landed with a hard thud on his back, Paul took the opening and jumped out of the car and started running for the fire escape.
He was within a few feet of reaching the fire escape when he saw a woman being attacked by a group of people. She was doing everything she could to fight them off but Paul could tell it was a losing battle. He looked again at the fire escape and then back at the woman. For a minute it crossed his mind to head for the fire escape and just put the woman out of his mind but he knew deep inside that he couldn’t live with that.
He j
umped on the hood of a car next to the group attacking the woman and leapt off it and took down three of the men. He got up from the ground and started kicking the men over and over again. He turned his attention to a large man who had the woman’s hair wrapped around his right hand; Paul began to club the man over the head with his fist. The large man turned to look at him and Paul stopped clubbing him when he saw that the man was missing his nose and most of the flesh on the right side of his face.
“What the hell?” Paul said in a hushed tone, he couldn’t fathom how this guy could be that injured and still standing.
The sound of the woman screaming reminded Paul of the situation at hand. The large man still had a hold of her hair and an older woman with half her arm missing had just bit down on the woman’s shoulder. Paul punched the man in the face as hard as he could over and over again. It wasn’t until the large man had fallen to the ground with a large clump of the woman’s hair still in his hand that Paul realized that he still had the key clutched between his fingers. He had punched the man repeatedly in the face with the key and left a void where his face had been. There was a large opening in the man’s forehead where the key had gone through.
Paul turned his attention back to the woman being attacked but it was too late, two more people were already on her and they had all taken large chunks of flesh off of her.
Paul stared at them for a second and saw that the woman wasn’t moving, he whispered out loud as he turned to walk away “I’m sorry I couldn’t save you, rest in peace.”
He could hear the woman being torn apart, the sound reminded him of a pack of wild animals feasting on a carcass. He couldn’t believe that it was humans doing it too other humans.
Paul jumped up and pulled the ladder to the fire escape down and made his way to the roof of the building. He tried to get the woman out of his mind; he had to focus on the mission. Once on the roof he began to survey the horror below him. He looked up and down the street from the safety of the rooftop; the magnitude of the scene was more than he could take. He sat down on the roof and took a minute to collect his emotions. He had seen war and death before but this was the worst of both and it was happening right in front of him on American soil. The only thing he could compare it to was hell on earth, literally a view into hell unfolding on the streets below.
The echoes of people screaming in pain could be heard ringing through the streets. There was also a low hum of what sounded like moaning behind the chaos of noises. Paul sat there for another minute and listened to what sounded like the end of the world unfolding in front of him. He stood up and tried to clear his mind; he closed his eyes and focused on getting across the roofs and to the motel.
The noise around him began to fade and he began to run. He leaped across a large gap to the next building and pulled himself up on to the roof. The next two blocks were fairly easy to travel. Paul made his way across them with ease; he continued to run until he ran out of buildings.
The last building on the block was a small hardware store; he kicked in the roof access door and made his way down to the first floor. The store was abandoned, the front door was open and there looked to have been a struggle near the entrance. Paul found fresh blood splattered across the wall next to the front door and marks that looked like someone had been dragged outside.
Paul closed the door and looked out the front window from behind a large rolling toolbox. He needed to find a clear path across the intersection to the next block but so far all he saw was a crowded street full of crazy people. There were stalled cars and crashed cars scattered throughout the street and intersection. Paul was going to try to make his way to the cars. He figured if he moved fast enough and stayed on top of the cars that he would be able to make it across the intersection with little interaction with the people.
First he wanted to find a weapon before he headed outside and what better place than a hardware store to find a weapon he thought as he looked around the store. He made his way down the aisles looking for a weapon, he picked up a claw hammer and swung it and felt the weight in his hand. He set the hammer down and looked down the aisle; the hammer wasn’t quiet what he had in mind. He continued to search the store and held a variety of tools in his hand but none of them felt right. Some were too heavy or to light and others weren’t durable enough to withstand a fight.
His search finally ended as he held the machete in his hand, he swung it back and forth and felt the weight in his hand. It was the best of both worlds, it was light enough to use for an extended amount of time without getting tired and durable enough to hold up in a battle. Paul stared at the blade of the machete and thought about the only draw back that it had, it was permanent. The damage it inflicted was permanent; it was a deadly weapon with permanent consequences if he chose to use it.
Paul knew that once he stepped out on the street with it he was going to kill anyone that came at him. He thought about it for a minute, he had killed before but that was in war. These were American citizens in an American city, he didn’t know if he felt right about killing them. He walked back to the large window at the front of the store and looked out at the madness on the street. He watched as groups of people tore at each other and killed anyone that was too slow to escape their grasp and he watched as the people began to eat their victims. It was like nothing he had seen before and then it dawned on him where he had seen this before. It was in movies about the undead but this was real life, something like this seemed impossible in real life.
“This can’t be happening, there has to be another explanation,” he said out loud.
He shook his head and made his decision, he was going outside with the machete and he would do whatever it took to survive.
Twelve
It was another hour before he finally stood in the parking lot of the motel that he had called home. The last hour was hard fought and Paul stood in the parking lot breathing hard and covered in blood, the blood belonged to the people he had cut down. Not a single drop of it was his; he had become an expert at surviving and killing over the last ten years of his life. It was something that use to haunt him when he would think about it but now it seemed his skills would come in hand if he was to survive this new world.
The inside of his room was the same as he had left it the day before. He was worried that he would come back to the motel to find the room ransacked but as far as he could tell it had been untouched. Once he was inside the room Paul set his machete down on the table and stripped off his clothes.
He turned on the shower and stepped into it, he felt slightly relaxed as the hot water ran down his body. He knew it had to be a quick shower because Abby and her grandma were still waiting for him. By now they had to be worried that it was taking so long for him to return. He knew he had to hurry but he felt the need to wash the blood off, he wanted to feel clean again. He washed the blood off and stepped out of the shower.
He put on a fresh pair of jeans and a clean black t-shirt. It wasn’t much but the shower and clean clothes made him feel a little bit better. He flipped the mattress up and leaned it against the wall. Sitting on top of the box spring were his three guns that he had journeyed across town to find. There was a black security style pump action shotgun, his 1911 pistol tucked in its holster and an AR15 rifle that he had customized with an attached flashlight and tactical scope.
He walked across the room and dumped everything out of his duffle bags; he looked down at the pile of belongings at his feet. The pile was everything he owned but he knew there wasn’t anything there that he couldn’t leave behind. He turned to walk away but remembered one thing he wanted, he dug through the pile of clothes and pulled out his dog tags. He placed them around his neck and walked back to the bed to collect his weapons.
He took inventory of what ammo he had to go with his guns as he placed the shotgun and ar15 into the duffle bag. He had two loaded magazines for his 1911, three fully loaded magazines for his ar15 and a dozen shells for his shotgun. He put all the ammo into the other duffle bag a
nd threw both bags over his shoulder. He pulled the 1911 out of its holster and turned the safety off then chambered a round. He hooked the holster to his belt and put the gun back in it, he was ready to head back out into the world.
The machete was back in his hand as he stood behind the door, he took a moment to prepare himself before he opened it. He unlocked the door and opened it; the parking lot was empty as he stepped out of the room. He could hear sirens and gun fire coming from a few blocks away and he was instantly brought back to the reality that he now faced.
He was focused on the mission again and was determined to get back to Abby. His first thought was to find a vehicle to make the trip back a little shorter than the journey to the motel had been. If he had to make the trip on foot then he was prepared to do that but if he could find a quicker way back he would welcome it.
He looked around the parking lot for a vehicle he could take and saw a few cars and a pick up truck that he considered taking, he walked over to the truck and looked inside. The truck was unlocked and he slowly opened the door to search if the keys were inside but he wasn’t so lucky, the keys were nowhere to be found. The truck was parked in front of a room and Paul considered searching the room for the keys until something caught his eye parked on the other side of the truck.
It was a Harley Davidson motorcycle and Paul figured it was meant to be when he saw the keys to the bike in the ignition on the side of it. Paul strapped the duffle bags to the back of the bike with a piece of rope he found in the bed of the truck and then sat down on the bike.
The bike roared to life and Paul rode out of the parking lot to begin the trip back to Abby. This time he decided that he would stick to the back roads and try to avoid the madness that filled the main streets of the city. The trip would be a few extra miles longer but he was hoping he would be able to cover more ground quickly if the side streets weren’t as crowded.
Love, Revenge and Zombies Page 9
