The Apocalypse Fugitives

by Peter Meredith

  Deanna nodded with clenched teeth as she tried to blink away the image of Gloria; the bullets had chopped her up. It looked like someone had taken a hatchet to her; there were a lot of pieces missing. "Anyone else know any medical stuff?" Dee asked around large steadying breathes. The truck was quiet.

  "It's ok," Tina said in a tired whisper. "It doesn't hurt anymore, not like it used to. Now, it just feels like I'm sorta leaving. I kinda wanna. Just for a mo..."

  She died with her tongue poking out of her mouth and her eyes open and staring blankly at Deanna. Dee wanted to push Tina's head away so the woman wouldn't keep staring at her, but she was afraid of touching the dead body because it only looked a little dead. In her mind she was certain that Tina would grab her hand if she tried. Like morbid theater, everyone watched Tina for another minute but she didn't put that tongue back in her mouth and she didn't blink.

  "Turn off the light," Deanna said. Jackie didn't. She pointed it at Deanna's face instead. "I said turn it off."

  "I don't have to," Jackie answered petulantly. Deanna heard the regression in the woman's voice; she sounded like a five-year-old.

  "Ok," Deanna replied. She didn't have it within her to argue. She could barely bring herself to take the next breath. The truck rocked back and forth and she watched listlessly as Tina's eyes were eased down to cracks by the motion. In the movies a person would've finished the job and shut them altogether, but she couldn't bring herself to touch Tina.

  Eventually, Jackie pointed the light at the other corpses. There were only five, which was surprising. There were three more who were almost corpses. Two were silent and so covered in blood that they went unrecognized. The third was a girl named Rachel. She was barely sixteen and had been a favorite of Major Grant's before he had grown tired of her and sent her to the platoons. Deanna always thought Rachel had the prettiest skin. Normally, her face was smooth and milky white, now she wore a spray of blood freckles across her cheeks.

  She also had a hole in her stomach that she could fit her fist into. Deanna knew this because the girl was sitting propped up with the edge of the bench in her back while she had her hand wedged into her abdomen up to her wrist.

  "Dee?" she asked, long after Tina had died. "Could you shoot me? Please?"

  Deanna stared at her, blinking slowly, her mind dulled by the horror around her. Finally, she asked, "Does it hurt?"

  "Yeah. That's why I need you to do it."

  "I can't," Deanna said with everyone watching her. Jackie had the light on her again. "I can't work the gun. Someone else should do it." She brought out the gun and held it up for someone to take, but no one wanted the light on them or the guilt that came with it.

  "Maybe you could stab me then," Rachel said.

  Jackie wouldn't move the light and the new tears in Deanna's eyes were silver points that caught the light and shined brightly. "Someone else," Deanna begged.

  Rachel was singularly focused. "Please, you do it."

  For her there was no one else. Around the beam of light were only ghostly faces that turned away when she looked in their direction. Deanna wanted to make another excuse to get out of stabbing the poor girl, she didn't have a knife, after all, but she knew one would be magically pressed into her hand if she said it and stabbing a precious creature like Rachel would be impossible.

  Summoning what was left of her courage, Deanna took out the pistol and looked down on it, studying it, seeing in the white light the trigger, the hammer-thing, a button on the handle, and a small lever pointing at the word safe. With her thumb she pivoted the lever.

  "Is it ready to fire," she asked.

  There was a long pause before Joslyn answered: "Yes. But I won't shoot it. It's your gun, now."

  A tear splashed on the barrel of the gun; the tear looked black as though she was dripping evil. Deanna shook her head.

  "There are no more hospitals, Dee," Rachel said. "I'm not going to get better. Do you understand?" The words were broken up, spoken through gritted teeth. Her pain was obvious in the dark.

  "Yeah." Deanna stood, wobbled as the truck lurched, and accidentally stepped on part of Gloria. Deanna was barefoot and the part was horribly wet and squishy. Her eyes felt like faucets and now when the light, angled from below, hit her tears they spread diamonds on the canvas roof amid the spatter and brains. She went to Rachel and knelt.

  "Hold…hold on, ok?" Rachel asked, suddenly. "Not yet." A sudden renewed fear of death fought against the overwhelming pain of her wound for control of her mind and it was a few minutes before she gathered her courage, gritted her teeth and nodded. "Now."

  Deanna cried over her until Rachel reached up with her free hand and wiped the tears from her chin. "It'll be alright, Dee. I always liked you." Rachel turned her pretty face away.

  It took everything she had to put the gun to the back of Rachel's head. "I…I…" Deanna said, stammering, trying to think of something, some way to save this poor creature.

  "Don't draw it out," Rachel said. Now tears were visible on the perfect line of her jaw. Each was round and smooth and accented her beauty rather than detracted from it. If it wasn't for the blood, Deanna would have thought she was sitting for a portrait. There was no way she could kill such a beautiful being.

  Rachel felt the gun waver and begin to pull away and said, "Please, it hurts bad."

  Dee's tears came harder now and her chest began to hitch. She had to use two hands to steady the gun and still she could barely pull the trigger. It seemed so stiff that she was just wondering if it needed to be oiled when the gun banged and bucked in her hand.

  Rachel slumped over, her brains a fresh pink spray of matter scattered over the other dead bodies.

  "One less mouth to feed," Joslyn said.

  The gun in Deanna's hand seemed to come up on its own and where before the trigger seemed stiff, now it eased back effortlessly, guided by a fantastic ungovernable fury inside Deanna's chest. All the pain and the humiliation of the last six months boiled up in a rage that was so white hot that she couldn't control it. She fired the gun a second time, aiming right between Joslyn's wide brown eyes.

  Chapter 10

  Captain Grey

  Lewis Smith Lake, Alabama

  Outwardly he was his usual stoic self, inwardly he was irked and tired. There was a dull ache in his chest where he'd been shot two days before and his neck stung where he was missing a chunk of flesh.

  "Neil, you pain in the ass," he whispered, only to have Jillybean raise one of her soft eyebrows. "Don't start with me. A grown man can curse."

  "They're called bad words, and that's what means they're bad," the little girl reasoned. "Maybe even grode-ups shouldn't say them. So, do you think Mister Neil had to drive away from the monsters?"

  "Probably," was all he answered. There was really no way to tell. Earlier, when they had pulled off the road and onto an open patch of scrub-weed, the ground had already been well marked up by zombie tracks. In the dark he couldn't tell a new track from an old.

  Jillybean said, "Hmm," as she scanned the ground, her hair hanging like a growth of ivy over her face. Under the stars with her feet covered in mud and her clothes ripped and stained she looked like a zombie herself.

  "I wouldn't waste your time," Grey said, easing himself down against a smooth-barked dogwood. He started to unlace his still soggy boots, adding, "Probably a whole mess of zombies came through here so tracking will be useless. And you shouldn't worry, he'll be back. We should try to relax until he does."

  "What if it was bad guys?" Jillybean asked from the middle of the pavement, twenty feet away. She was squatting on her hunches with her knees jutting.

  Had it been anyone else, Grey would've dismissed the question. "What is it? Do you see something?"

  "Spit. A big gob of it."

  "Hmm," he replied, his mind turning on the word spit. Neil was definitely not the spitting kind of man and Sadie, in spite of her dark clothes and her rebellious facade, was far more prim than she liked to let on. "Is it
fresh?"

  "Yes sir."

  "Hmm," he murmured again, thinking, What if it was bad guys?

  The easy and most likely answer was that Sadie and Neil were screwed. Even if he could find whoever took them, there was little he could do to rescue them, armed as he was with only a stick and a rock. While he was thinking on this Jillybean had moved a few feet away from the spit and was squatting once more. Grey almost didn't want to know what she was looking at. He could see a dark wet patch and he feared it was blood.

  "Oil," she said after taking her finger and touching the spot. She then bent very close and stared at it from every angle trying to get a good look at it in the dark. "It's fresh, too. There aren't any bugs in it or dust or nothing. And we weren't parked here. You know what that means."

  He could hear the fear in her voice. "Settle down now. We don't know anything at this point. Yes, it could be the same raiders those people back at the boat had been going on about, but it could also have been someone coming by who needed a little help. Or it might have been that when Neil was luring zombies away from here someone else drove by. We don't know."

  "It was the bad guys, I know it," Jillybean insisted. "Ipes says Mister Neil would've left us a clue if there had been monsters."

  "Really? This is Neil you're talking about. What kind of clue would he have left?"

  She shrugged. "A dead monster, I would think. That would be a good clue to leave. But there isn't one, or even part of one, like a hand or a nose or something. And you know what? If he had left with a good guy he would have left us a note, don't you think?"

  "Did you look for a note or did you jump to conclusions?" Grey asked.

  Now her shrug was small and embarrassed. "I jumped on conclusions I guess."

  "That's ok, we all do it. Look around, if he left one it would probably be nailed to a…"

  Since first coming back to the road and noticing the Humvee missing, their focus had been searching for clues left on the ground. Now they saw a clue hanging against the trunk of a tree about eight feet off the ground.

  The clue squirmed in her baby sling.

  Grey was off the ground and running to the tree in a blur. "This isn't possible," he said as he reached up and unhooked Eve's sling. He brought the sleeping baby down to chest level and stared at her uncomprehendingly.

  "Is she ok?" Jillybean asked, standing on her tip toes to see better.

  He inspected the baby as best as he could without waking her. "She seems fine, I guess, but…but what the hell? Who would hang a baby up like that and then leave her? Neither Neil or Sadie would, I know that."

  "A bad guy would," Jillybean answered.

  Grey wondered about that. All the real bad guys he knew would have either taken the baby to see what they could sell it for or they would have tossed it aside without another thought. Hanging her in a tree meant something else.

  "Whoever it was couldn't be too bad. Eve has her pacifier and a full bottle in her sling," Grey said. Without realizing it he had begun swaying slightly in place, subconsciously rocking the baby as he spoke. "I know it doesn't make much sense, but maybe it was Neil who did this. Jillybean, look around this tree, tell me if you see anything."

  She went all around it, first looking at the ground and then at the trunk and finally up at the branches. All the while she squinted mightily and sniffed occasionally. She's like a human bloodhound, Grey thought.

  The blood hound came up empty. "I don't see anything," she said. "I don't know why Mister Neil would do this. It doesn't make any sense."

  "He wouldn't unless he was forced to by circumstance." When Jillybean's brows came down in confusion, Captain Grey added, "By that I mean he was forced to leave her, which means you were right: Neil and Sadie have been captured by raiders who didn't want to be burdened by a baby."

  "That's what means evil," Jillybean said, her soft face set. "How do we get them back?"

  Grey shook his head. Suddenly he was out of ideas and energy. He'd been going too hard for too long. His injuries and lack of sleep were beginning to wear on him. With a long sigh he eased down the tree and settled Eve to his chest. "I don't know, but whatever we do will have to wait until tomorrow. We can't hope to track them in the dark and either way, I'm spent. I can't do anything without sleep."

  Jillybean didn't argue. "Me neither," she said, settling down. She tried to snuggle up to the hard soldier by resting her head against his chest. Having the baby curled up on him was bad enough, he didn't need Jillybean thinking this was going to be some sort of kindergarten cuddle-fest. He gave her a glare which she either missed in the dark or just plain ignored as she nuzzled in close with her toy zebra tucked up under her chin.

  "For now," he whispered, thinking that she would roll over at some point.

  He woke to a dishwater grey dawn with her still in the same position. Eve had shifted at some point and was splayed across his chest, looking like she was trying to hug him. Her empty bottle was somehow clenched between her teeth in spite of the fact she was soundly sleeping.

  Nearby a zombie was eating the broad leaves of a fern, chewing vacantly and looking far more bovine than human. Grey watched him, figuring everyone was going to get a jolt when the zombie realized that the little clump of sleeping bodies wasn't a pile of corpses. Minutes went by before the thing turned away, moving deeper into the forest. Just then Jillybean mumbled, "I'm sorry," in her sleep.

  Grey clamped a hand over her mouth and she jumped a little before looking around with bleary eyes.

  "Mombie?" she half-mumbled-half whispered around his hand. He nodded and withdrew his hand. In the forest the zombie had turned back toward them but as yet hadn't figure out what had made the sound. It stood glaring about in confusion and anger, eager to attack.

  For a long time Grey watched it through slitted eyes, when he happened to look back down, he saw Eve reaching out a pudgy hand to Jillybean and smiling behind her bottle. Jilly nosed the end of the bottle and then, after a quick glance at the zombie to make sure it wasn't watching, she put Eve's fingers in her mouth and pretended to eat them. Eve liked it but Grey found the juxtaposition of the zombie and the play cannibalism unsettling.

  A glance back up showed him that the zombie was looking directly away from them. Gently he lifted Eve and handed her to Jillybean. "Don't watch," he said to her, and then wondered why he had. She must've seen hundreds of zombies die in the last eight months and this one death wasn't going to be any worse than those. He shook the thought off, slipped up behind the zombie, and then killed it with his rock. The thing had been small and skinny. It had never been much of a danger beyond the virus it carried.

  "Do babies eat peanut butter?" Jillybean asked the second the zombie had pitched forward spurting black blood out of the top of its head.

  "Sure, why not?" Grey replied, tossing away the rock and looking for a new, less bloody one. "But start with only a little at a time." As Jillybean and Eve breakfasted on peanut butter, Grey went to the road and inspected it for more clues. There was nothing more to see than what Jillybean had detected in the dark.

  "Any ideas?" he asked her when he came back.

  She shook her head. "No, but I have questions. How does a thing as crunchy as a peanut can be gotten so smooth? Ipes says they use a steam roller and smush them but I think then you'd only have, like peanut dust. What do you think?"

  "I was talking about ideas concerning our present situation," he said, taking the jar from her. He scooped out a gob and handed it back. Without anything to wash it down, it was like eating peanut butter flavored glue.

  Jillybean was smacking her own lips in a struggle to swallow the peanut butter. When she got enough down to speak she said, "Oh that. Ipes doesn't want me to tell you what I think, but that because he's only being a chicken…you are too!" she said to Ipes. He said something to make her brows to shoot up. "Do you want me to put you in time out? Ok then little mister."

  "What's the idea?" Grey asked wearily.

  "We should find those
people from yesterday with the Christmas tree boats. You said they weren't bad people but only ascared. They could help us out."

  He couldn't believe what he was hearing. "They were going to torture me," Grey told her. "So no, they're about the last people I want to see."

  It was out of the question, he thought as he turned, looking out in a full 360 degree arc. Forest all around; road to the east; lake to the west; nothing else but zombies and a few insects that were waking up with the warming day.

  "Here's the plan," he said, "We find a house nearby to use as a base. We'll fortify it and from there make a few exploratory expeditions for food and weapons. It won't take more than a few days before I can begin a proper search for these raiders. From there, we'll see how they like it being the hunted for a change."

  His mind was filling with bloody images of revenge when Jillybean interrupted his thoughts, saying: "We'll need formula and more bottles for Eve."

  "Yeah, I'll get them."

  "And diapers and wipes, too."

  "Of course."

  "And you'll need to get some more clothes for both of us. My panties are too tight. Mister Neil got the wrong size."

  "No problem."

  "And we'll need…"

  "Stop," Grey ordered, crossly. "I know what we need and I know what you are suggesting: that I need help taking care of you and Eve. And you may be right, but those people are seriously messed up. They are not only paranoid as hell but they're also looking for revenge. What do you think will happen if I go marching up to them? They'll think it's a trap and they'll string me up by the neck."

  "But what do you think they would do if I went up to them?" Jillybean asked. "They seemed...caring? Is that the word? Oh, thanks Ipes. Concerned. They seemed concerned about me, and I think they would be even more concerning if I went with Eve. Also, I could tell them what a nice army man you are."

  Grey shook his head. "No. That's too much of a gamble. I couldn't…" He paused as he remembered Shawn saying: We've seen the bodies. We know what they do already. Grey had a good idea what the raiders were going to do to Sadie. She was a pretty girl and young, which meant the raiders would rape her repeatedly and then probably sell her into slavery. But what were they going to do to Neil? Grey could think of a thousand tortures but why they would do any of them to him didn't make sense. Neil Martin was probably the most harmless man Grey had ever met.