by Paul Hetzer
A man wearing only dirty white boxers was walking toward us in the distance. He seemed to be unaware of his surroundings as he strode along the grassy berm with his head down.
“Get down!” I whispered to Kera, dropping to a crouch myself. I went to single point on my rifle and switched on the sight, thumbing off the safety and bringing it up to my shoulder.
The Loony was about seventy-five yards away and still hadn’t seen us yet when I put the holographic reticle over the center mass of his chest. My finger slowly took up the slack on the trigger.
“Others will hear the shot,” Kera warned.
“We’ll have to take our chances. If we try to run and hide it’ll see us.” I waited for the shambling creature to get closer. I took half a breath and held it, then pulled the trigger the rest of the way. The gun bucked loudly and the Loony took another step before stumbling to the ground. I stayed crouched counting to five, intently watching the collapsed body for any movement. When there was none, I stood up and started walking toward the fallen creature. Kera was beside me, scanning along the tree line with her shotgun.
I kicked over the Loony with the toe of my boot. The bullet had torn through his sternum without exiting the body. He must have been dead before he hit the ground. His eyes peered up at me lifelessly, however, something was different. My heart squeezed in my chest when I realized what it was. The sclera of his eyes was stark white.
“Good shot,” Kera praised me, barely pausing at the body before she continued walking down the road. I just nodded in return, feeling the bile rise up in my throat.
My God! I just killed a man – not a Loony, but a man!
I stepped over the body, willing my knees not to collapse, and followed after her.
Oh shit! Oh shit! What have I done? I killed a survivor. What was he doing walking out here in only his boxers?
I would never be able to bring myself to tell Kera what I had just done. I had just killed a man again, although this time it wasn’t self-defense, it was murder.
It was early in the afternoon when we approached the Route 208 intersection. Our stops had become more frequent as Kera succumbed to fatigue from the heat and her wounds. What should have taken a few hours to walk was taking considerably longer.
I put the dead man out of my thoughts, probably locked away in the same compartment that my grief over Holly was stashed in. It was something that I could just not deal with now. I centered my thoughts on finding my son.
The signs of civilization had become more prevalent again as we got closer to the end of the road, and with those signs came Loony activity. We were already hugging the tree line when I stopped Kera.
“Let’s move into the woods,” I said to her. A large condo community was visible over the tree line not far ahead of us. I wanted to be as invisible as possible when we skirted it. I led her into the thick shade and underbrush. Our progress slowed to a crawl as we pressed forward, silently stopping whenever we spotted groups of Loonies moving about.
The forest ended at the start of a large field of tall corn that sat at the top of a gentle rise. We sat in the cool shade of the trees and stared out across the field to the intersection. A school, a few stores, banks, and gas stations littered the area. Loonies were everywhere around the buildings, staying mostly to the shaded areas.
“Do you see anything?” I asked, straining my eyes to pick out the truck among the multitude of cars abandoned and parked around the area.
After a moment she shook her head. “Nothing that looks like the truck.”
“That doesn’t look like a place I would want to wait, too many of the infected.”
“Maybe they stopped further down the road.”
“They had to have. Frank would have found someplace safer.”
We rested for a few more minutes while I double checked the two roads for the Ford. When I was absolutely convinced they weren’t down there I pulled Kera up and we walked out into the field of tall corn, our ears on alert for any Loonies in the thick green rows. Dust kicked up in thick puffs from the dry soil of the corn row as we worked our way to Route 208, which ran nearly unerringly south past the intersection. We crossed back onto the road well distant of the crossroad and walked along the manicured grassy shoulder, always watchful for any movement ahead of us, or behind us.
The afternoon dragged on and we alternated walking and resting. I was hopeful that across every dip or turn we rounded that the Ford would be sitting on the shoulder with my boy sitting on the tailgate waiting patiently for me. Every time the road lay empty disappointment set in deeper.
Finally the road dipped into a small valley and rose up into another crossroads, this one with a dead traffic signal. Buildings and a housing community surrounded the intersection, and there amongst a small jumble of stalled cars was our truck. We were still too far to make out any detail. I quickened my pace to a slow jog down the sloping road. It was just after two in the afternoon by my watch, the sun high in the sky and beating down fiercely. We still had time.
Kera fell behind as I raced up the slope toward the crossroads. I was desperate to get to my son. The pickup came into view. It sat with both doors open wide. The tarp had been removed from over the bed and lay discarded in a jumble on the side of the road. I didn’t see my son anywhere around the vehicle.
I slowed my pace as I neared the vehicle. It was parked on the gravel berm. A handful of other vehicles in various positions around the intersection sat empty and baking in the heat. When I topped the rise I could see that a battle had taken place here. Bodies were strewn about the pavement centered around the pickup. Several were child-sized. I approached apprehensively, fear rising in my stomach. Shell casings littered the area around the bodies, they clinked loudly as I shuffled through them.
I knelt down next to a boy’s body whose head was a mess of dried blood and gore. The smell of death hung heavy in the air as I nudged him over with the barrel of the rifle and a cloud of flies lifted off the corpse. It wasn’t Jeremy. I went to each in turn. None of the dead were Jeremy or Frank. I said a silent prayer of thanks.
“Where are they?” Kera asked, striding up behind me, breathing hard from her exertion.
I shrugged my shoulders and walked toward the truck, my jaw clenched in anticipation of the worst. There was no one inside. Shattered glass from the windows still covered the rear seats from our fight several nights ago, along with dried patches of blood. Of my son there was no sign. My heart dropped.
At least he wasn’t among the dead, I consoled myself.
I removed Holly’s rifle and the stuffed pack and sat them on the front passenger seat. It felt good to be relieved of their weight. The truck keys stuck solemnly out of the ignition slot.
Kera walked to the other side of the truck and laid her shotgun on the driver’s seat, then turned and sat on the trucks running board and began to cry.
“Where are they?” she muttered through her tears.
I didn’t know how to respond. I didn’t know where to look next. They had obviously run into a horde of infected while they were waiting here for us. At least a dozen bodies lay scattered about the truck. They had fought them off and must have been forced to abandon the vehicle, but where would they have gone?
I scanned the area. Several multi-story office buildings graced the properties to the east and a housing development lay close to the road behind me to the west. One three-story brick office building was severely burned and partially collapsed. Wisps of smoke still wafted into the air from its smoldering center.
I didn’t see anyone moving. I thought briefly about calling out loudly for Jeremy, then thought better of it as that might attract the kind of attention we didn’t want.
By the looks of the bodies, the firefight had taken place sometime yesterday or last night. Swarms of flies and the heat were already quickening their decomposition.
I climbed into the cab of the truck and found the briefcase containing my lab work on the floor and pulled out the contents, stuffi
ng them absently into my pack.
I walked around to the open truck bed and looked at all the supplies that Holly, Jeremy and I had packed just a few short days ago. Several ammo cans lay open with the ammo scattered about like someone had been in a rush to grab what they could. I spotted the bag that held our spare magazines, unlatched its straps, and reached in and grabbed a half dozen full 30 round mags for the Colt and shoved them in my pants pockets. I also took two full five round magazines for Kera’s shotgun.
“Are you thirsty?” I called to her. She wiped her tears away and nodded her head, her sweat matted hair hanging down over her face like a black veil. I pulled a bottle of water from the supplies in the truck for each of us and handed her one when she walked up beside me. She tilted her head back and took long swigs of the warm, clear liquid. She gave me a forced smile. I drained my bottle in one long drink then threw the bottle off to the side of the road.
Holly would have been pissed at my littering, I thought to myself grimly.
Kera swiped her hair back behind her ears and looked at me with her bruised face. “Where to now?”
“I don’t know, Kera. Let’s hang out here a bit and formulate a plan.”
I climbed up and into the truck bed looking for a travel bag that held some miscellaneous clothing items. After tossing some supplies aside I found it near the bottom of the pile. A bullet had pierced the nylon material of the bag, leaving a neat hole through its top and had passed out the bottom after traversing the contents. The .308 bullet had mushroomed out against the steel of the truck bed. I opened the bag and found what I was looking for. The round had thankfully missed it.
I sat on the edge of the bed and motioned Kera over as I opened up the large tackle box that held Holly’s first aid supplies. Kera ambled up beside the truck and looked at me questioningly.
“Let me get your dressings changed, they’re starting to look a bit gnarly.”
I unwound the gauze from her head and tossed it aside. The bandage underneath was stained from bloody lymph seepage. I gently pulled it off, exposing the crusty looking wound with the butterfly bandages still holding it tightly together. It looked like it was healing well with no signs of infection. The cut on her nose was healing nicely also.
“How does it look?” she asked while I cleaned her wounds with rubbing alcohol and put topical antibiotic cream and fresh band aids across them.
“You’re healing nicely,” I replied, smiling at her. “You’ll probably have a bit of a scar on your forehead and nose, but they won’t be that noticeable. How does your lip feel?” Her lip had also scabbed nicely and was healing faster than the other wounds.
“It doesn’t feel like a fat piece of sausage anymore.” She laughed.
I decided to leave off the gauze wrapping to allow the air to get to it. The swelling all about her face had subsided nearly to the point of normalcy and the bruises were turning yellow as they healed. She was starting to look and sound like her old self.
“One more thing,” I said when I finished bandaging her face. I held up a black baseball cap with the Colt emblem embroidered on its front, leaned over, and placed it on her head. After adjusting its band and pulling her hair through the hole above the back strap I sat back and admired my handiwork. The brim sat cocked up over the bandage on her forehead, but would effectively keep her hair out of her face.
Her face radiated her pleasure up to me. “I’ve been meaning to find a barrette to clip it back, but never had a chance.”
If her face wasn’t so ravaged by the beating she had taken she would look attractive wearing the ball cap.
“That looks good on you,” I told her.
She smiled. “Any food in there?” she asked, indicating the back of the truck. “I’m tired of vending machine junk.”
“Let me see what I can find.”
I made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on stale bread. It tasted like ambrosia after the junk food we had been forced to eat over the past several days. We ate like starving wolves at a fresh kill and devoured a pile of the sandwiches that would have probably won us a contest at some hick town fair, if there were still hick towns… or fairs. Hell, even the sight and smell of the dead bodies didn’t dampen our appetites.
After we ate, I pulled out one of the Samurai swords and set it on the front seat with Holly’s rifle. I thought it may come in useful for close combat with the infected if I ever ran out of ammo again.
“Is that an authentic katana?” Kera asked when I backed out of the passenger compartment. She sat in the shade of the truck with her back to one of the large tires and drank from a bottle of water.
“Yep. My grandfather brought it back from Okinawa, the hilt is leather made from human skin.”
She wrinkled her nose. “That’s gross!”
I laughed. “Yeah, I guess it is.”
When I opened the driver’s door, Kera loudly sucked in her breath.
“Oh shit!” she exclaimed and jumped to her feet. “Frank! It’s Frank!” she shouted and took off at a run in the direction of the housing complex. I spun around and looked toward where she was running. Frank’s unmistakable figure was rounding a row of hedges that surrounded the entryway to the development. His shirt was missing and he looked injured.
When he spotted Kera yelling and running with her arms waving in greeting he accelerated in a burst of speed that seemed uncanny for such a big man. I ran around the truck after her. Something wasn’t right. Something was off in his movements and in his lack of acknowledgement as Kera closed the distance.
“Kera! Stop!” I screamed, running to catch up. She had left her shotgun on the front seat of the truck. She was defenseless and the thing that was running for her was no longer Frank.
I don’t know if she heard me yell or whether she was close enough to the man to finally see what he was, either way she came to a skidding halt. She tried to back-peddle, then lost her footing in the grass and fell onto her back.
I unclipped the sling from the front of my rifle and activated the sights. The Frank Loony was over a hundred yards away and Kera maybe seventy-five. He would get to her first. She rolled over and tried to get to her feet and run at the same time. The big man hit her like a linebacker sacking a receiver with the ball. They plowed hard into the ground. Somehow Kera was able to break free and scramble backwards on her butt. He got to his knees and lunged after her. I could hear his snarling growl over the pounding of the blood rushing through my head. I raised the rifle as I closed the distance.
He grabbed her viciously by her ankle and yanked her back, causing her to scream in terror. His other hand clamped tightly around her delicate throat and he bent down with his mouth agape, bloody spittle dripping in viscous strings from his brown, matted beard.
The top of his shaggy head exploded sending gray brain matter, white bone fragments and bright red blood fanning out in a wide plume behind him. I kept the holographic reticle on his chest as I approached and was prepared to pull the trigger on the rifle again, then the corpse of what had been Frank teetered sideways and toppled to the ground like a mighty oak at the hands of a skilled lumberjack. Kera screamed again and crawled backwards away from the corpse that continued to pump pulses of arterial blood into the air from the gaping wound in its head. As its heart eventually succumbed to the inevitable, the blood flow slowed to a trickle, his legs continuing to kick spasmodically.
I reached Kera’s side, keeping the barrel of the rifle trained on the big man’s corpse, expecting it to jump up and resume its attack, however, there was no life left in the body. I was grateful to see its blood-red eyes.
“You killed Frank!” Kera screeched, her eyes wild with fear.
“Calm down, Kera!” I yelled back. “He wasn’t Frank anymore! You know that!”
She put her head into her hands and sobbed, her small shoulders shaking with the intensity of her grief.
I clipped the sling to the front of the rifle and cinched it tight to my chest then knelt down and put my arms around he
r. She threw her arms around my neck and cried heavily into my shoulder.
“It’s okay. We’re okay,” I reassured her.
But it wasn’t okay, was it? Frank, my son’s protector while I was absent, had become infected. What did that mean for the fate of my little boy? Was he one of them too? I couldn’t let myself think that. He had to have escaped unharmed. He was safe somewhere waiting for me, I just knew it. I couldn’t rest until I found him!
“I’m sorry I said that to –”
“Shhh!” I cut her off as I spotted movement coming around one of the houses in the development. I pulled her up with me as I stood, our arms still wrapped around each other.
“Are you okay?” I asked, untangling myself from her arms.
She nodded hesitantly, but still managed a small smile of reassurance.
“We have more company coming. Let’s get back to the truck.” I grabbed her hand and started running away from a group of Loonies that had rounded the house and were sprinting after us.
We reached the truck well ahead of our adversaries. I jumped in the passenger door and slid across to the driver’s seat, pushing the packs, guns and sword out of the way. Kera jumped in behind me and slammed her door shut. The Loonies were in a dead run across the field that separated the road from the housing complex, although they were still over a hundred yards away.
I turned the key and heard a ‘click’ in the engine compartment, but nothing more. The dome light dimmed at the same time. I reached out and slammed shut the driver’s door hoping to conserve a little more battery power. When I turned the key again I was rewarded with the same ‘click’.
“Fuck!” I yelled. “The battery’s dead!” I looked at the approaching Loonies, we wouldn’t have time to find another vehicle.
“Grab your stuff and get out!” I ordered Kera.
Without hesitating she grabbed her shotgun and pack, threw open her door and slid out. She looked back at me questioningly.
“Head on down the road, I’ll catch up.”
