by SD Tanner
Anna blanched and replied meekly, ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to offend you.’
Hoping to close the conversation, he said abruptly, ‘I’m not offended.’
They both lapsed into silence, but Anna continued to throw the odd glance towards him while she drove. Even though he was quite deep in thought, he knew she was hoping he might break the silence, but he didn’t.
TL was an optimist, Pax was a “cover your ass” doer and he was a pragmatist. He focused on achieving objectives for least effort and risk. Pax and TL usually had opposing views, which made him the deciding vote between them. Being analytical, controlling and intent on their objectives, he usually took the most obvious path and wasn’t easily distracted by irrelevancies. With their natural temperaments, he’d taken on the role of leading the mission.
Right now, he was thinking about Pop’s self-sufficiency agenda. It meant the Ranch already had a storm shelter, solar panels for water pumps, stables, barns, a main house and wind turbines with back-up generators. It was perfect for their needs and they intended to have civilian groups and families drive RV’s to the Ranch. The RV’s would be both homes and transport for them if they needed to bug out. Fagan was currently looking for RV’s for the camp, but there was still a lot to be done. Being remote, the area would probably have few hunters and shamblers, but it still needed perimeter lights and sentry towers. He planned to protect the Ranch using the same approach they implemented at the Base. Perimeter lights with sentries. He was just thinking he would need to get Jordy, their electrician, to check there was sufficient capacity for the perimeter lights when he saw movement ahead in front of a roadside diner.
He ordered, ‘Slow down.’
Anna took her foot off the accelerator and asked, ‘What’s the problem?’
‘That,’ he replied, pointing at 10 or so shamblers in front of a dusty and faded roadside diner. The shamblers were facing the diner, staring and shuffling intent on something, or more likely someone, inside.
Through his headset, he said, ‘Dave. Jay. We’re gonna need to check that diner out.’
‘What are you going to do?’ Anna asked.
Still assessing the situation, he replied, ‘Shamblers don’t eat at diners unless there’s a warm body on the menu. There may be survivors in there. Stay in the truck with Ip and keep it runnin’.’
Sounding annoyed, Anna replied sharply, ‘What! Do you think I can’t take care of a few shamblers?’
Sighing inwardly, he thought Anna was really getting on his nerves, but he said calmly, ‘It’s not that. I need someone at the wheel in case we need to bug out fast.’
That seemed to mollify Anna and, looking at the shamblers, she said, ‘I guess there are quite a lot of them.’
Having pacified Anna, he turned around in his seat to look at Ip and saw she’d woken up and was watching them talk. As if amused by their conversation, she smirked at him and he thought, don’t be laughing at me, Ip, or I’ll make you sit next to her. Ip’s expression shifted and she suddenly looked slightly alarmed.
He smiled at her and thought, that shut you up, didn’t it? Returning his focus to the shambler problem, he said, ‘Ip, honey, stay put.’ Pushing himself out of the truck, he began to walk towards Dave and Jay.
Anna turned to look at Ip and said, ‘Guess you’re the one without a job here today.’
Ip stared blankly back at Anna, huffed and then looked away.
Ip thinks: This woman is foolish. This man does not care. He is not with her. His heart is elsewhere. I know him well. I see his thoughts. He is for me and not for her.
He, Dave and Jay quietly walked over to the shamblers. Each were carrying machetes, but all had their handguns and M4s just in case the crowd got wild. He didn’t expect they’d need them.
‘Okay let’s do this quietly,’ he instructed through his mike. ‘Machetes only. We shouldn’t need guns and we don’t need the noise, it’ll only attract more of ‘em.’
‘Roger that,’ they both replied in unison.
The shamblers were moaning and moving sluggishly as if they were bored and waiting for a bus. They stank like a truckload of roadkill, which was unsurprising given more than one of them was dripping maggots. The three men picked their first target and almost in unison swung the machetes down across the back of their target’s neck, severing the brain from the brain stem. Three shamblers fell and lay twitching at their feet as they selected their next target.
Dave was clearly feeling disgusted by the job and shouted, ‘Eww, man that stinks!’
Grunting as he slammed his machete into his next target, he said sarcastically, ‘Yeah, that’s what I meant when I said, let’s do this quietly, Dave.’
Dave looked sheepish and, in a quieter voice, he said, ‘Aww, sorry man, my bad.’
Dave hammered another shambler to the ground, yanking his machete out of its spine with one foot on its back. Slashing the brain stem of a relatively fresh shambler took a bit of effort and all three men were working up a sweat. By now, some of the shamblers had noticed there was something going on behind them and were turning to face them. One was wearing the torn remains of checkered golf pants and it turned just as Dave was swinging his blade across its neck. He took the top of its head off and black slime oozed and splattered onto the ground between them.
Dave visibly paled and he gurgled, ‘I’m gonna chuck.’
Jay chortled as he swung his machete in the neck of his next target and said, ‘I told you not to eat the chicken crap from your MRE.’
The half-headed shambler was still on its feet. Dave swung his blade, slashed through its leg and it toppled to the ground. Pax taught them if they cut through the legs, the shambler couldn’t move and it was a good tactic to quickly reduce the threat of a horde. Worrying they might be shot by a nervous survivor hiding in the diner, he thought the Base teams often seemed to forget basic threat analysis. He’d noticed some of Pax’s newly trained guys drifted into dangerous situations as happily as they’d once wandered into McDonalds. Pax told him it was a recruitment problem, and that half of his troops weren’t cut out to be soldiers and probably never would be.
As the last shambler fell, he ordered, ‘Get up against the wall, away from the window.’ As they moved into positon, he said, ‘Jay, take lead.’
He could have taken lead, but Pax wanted the new boots to learn through experience. It was a high-risk way to train, but they didn’t live in peaceful times. As far as they were concerned, the war had already started.
Jay positioned himself by the side of the entrance, still shielded by the wall, and called, ‘Anyone in there?’
A high-pitched and strained male voice replied, ‘Yes. Yes. Please don’t shoot us.’
Jay asked, ‘How many of you are there?’
The wobbly voice replied again, ‘There’s four of us. Plus two kids.’
Jay asked, ‘You got any weapons?’
The wobbly voice replied anxiously, ‘No. No. We dropped them getting in here.’
Jay glanced over to him to confirm he was on track and when he nodded to him, Jay continued, ‘Okay. We’re friendlies. I need you to walk out one at a time and don’t turn around.’
One by one, Jay had them walk out and kneel, except for the children who he had sit with the adults. Jay and Dave kept their guns trained on the survivors just in case one of them decided to get overexcited and pull out a concealed weapon.
Nodding in approval, he said, ‘Dave. Check the diner.’
Dave ducked into the diner quickly scanning for any movement and, as he checked every room, he called out, ‘Clear.’
Pax was right about these guys and he was glad they were going to the Ranch. He thought, both were pretty good for new boots with nothing more than basic training.
Jay lowered his weapon, stood in front of the nervous group and asked, ‘What happened here?’
The group quickly introduced themselves and the man with wobbly voice was called Frank. Still shaking slightly, he explained, �
�Our car broke down a mile back. We were walking hoping to find some help, and then we were chased by the shamblers. We hid in the diner, but they found us anyway.’
Jay turned to look at the group and said, ‘We’re heading up to a ranch where we plan to set up a civilian camp. You’re welcome to come with us.’
The older woman in the group replied honestly, ‘We’ve nowhere else to go, and no way to get there even if we did.’
Putting the kids and Frank in the back seat with Ip, the other three survivors travelled with Jay and Dave. While Anna drove, Frank observed, ‘You guys look pretty well set up.’
Not wanting another pointless conversation, he replied curtly, ‘We’ll talk when we get to the Ranch.’ Through the rear vision mirror, he saw Frank cross his arms and sit back in his seat, looking petulant.
Ip thinks: This angry man, why does he rage? The stronger man has removed his cage. His thoughts are muddled, his feelings too. It is a dangerous mind that contains a fool. The strong man worries, I hear him well, there is something ahead that he cannot tell. I want to calm his anxious thought, for we are one and no more two.
As they pulled up to the Ranch, it looked like it was closed for business. The stables were shut, the house looked unoccupied and there were no vehicles in sight. Thinking their home looked abandoned, he felt his anxiety creep up a few more notches. Stepping out of the truck, he stood facing the house, when a bullet hit the ground next to his feet spraying dirt and gravel across his boots. Diving behind the truck, he pulled his handgun from his holster and wondered why the hell he wasn’t carrying his M4A1.
A gravelly voice shouted at him from above and to his front and right, ‘Ya betta have a good reason for steppin’ on my land, boy.’
Recognizing the voice instantly, he shouted, ‘Pop? Do we gotta do this every time I come home?’
‘Bob?’ The voice called back. ‘Well I’ll be…’
The front door of the house burst open and a tall well-built woman with her white hair pulled into a loose bun, came out carrying a shotgun. She stopped, and propping her gun against the wall, broke into a huge smile as she strode towards him with her arms out and said, ‘Oh good Lord…Bob…honey…’
He closed his eyes feeling slightly dizzy with the surprise and relief at finding them both alive. Hugging him tightly, Mom cried, ‘I can’t believe it.’
Pop was a leanly built man of average height with a heavily weathered face and he walked over from the barn grinning from ear to ear. Grabbing him from his mother’s arms, he hugged him fiercely and whispered, ‘Where are ya brothers?’
He whispered back, ‘They’re safe, Pop.’ He heard his father sniff and thought the old man might be crying.
Everyone else had got out of the trucks and were watching the family reunion taking place on the graveled driveway. Ip walked over to Mom, cocked her head curiously and then smiled at her. It broke the moment and he started to introduce everyone.
Smiling warmly at the group, Mom said, ‘You can call us Mom and Pop, everyone does, but we’d best get in now. It’s getting dark.’
‘Hey Mom, we brought supplies,’ he said. ‘Want us to bring ‘em in?’
‘No, honey, leave it to the morning. We got plenty to go round,’ Mom replied.
Following the others, he walked into the house with his father and asked, ‘How ya been copin’ with this shit, Pop?’
Pop laughed and said, ‘Not too badly. We was always pretty self-sufficient. End of the world just meant the end of the IRS.’ Looking somber, he added, ‘Life didn’t change much for us, son, but we’ve missed ya boys. Bin real worried.’
He nodded at his father and said, ‘We’ve been worried about ya too. I kinda expected the Ranch to be empty.’
Pop nodded, but neither man was quite ready to talk about what they’d assumed to be true about the other. Now was not the time for a serious chat, but he’d no doubt it would come later.
Changing the subject, he asked, ‘Ya seen any hunters?’
Nodding, Pop said, ‘If ya mean the skinny lookin’ bald ones, then yeah. I took one down a coupla months back.’
Impressed by his father, he thought even in his mid-60’s, the man was still a force to be reckoned with. Curious how his father killed the hunter, he asked, ‘How’d ya kill it? The damn things don’t stop movin’ even when ya destroy the brain stem.’
Shrugging nonchalantly, Pop said, ‘I didn’t. I buried it. It was still kicking too, but ya bury anythin’ deep enough, it don’t get up again.’
Laughing loudly, he slung his arm around the older man’s shoulders and said, ‘I’ve really missed ya, Pop!’
While Mom and the women brought out hot food and drinks. Everyone sat around an old heavily worn and scarred wooden table with mismatched chairs, eating and drinking happily. With the exception of him and his Mom and Pop, no one knew one another well and they were busy trading stories, enjoying the normality of the moment.
Mom was organizing where people could sleep and she said to him, ‘Bob, you can sleep in your old room.’
Anna looked at him and asked in a flirtatious tone, ‘So, Gears, who’s Bob?’
Laughing, he said, ‘I was for 30 odd years until I met some greenhorn who said I looked like a guy in a game. Name stuck and I’m kinda used to it now.’
Dave snorted and said with a grin, ‘You really do look like Marcus.’
Looking at Dave with a confused expression, he asked, ‘Who the hell is Marcus?’
‘Marcus is the lead guy. The main man,’ Dave enthused. ‘And you really do look like him.’
The man who awarded him his nickname was a popular member of their platoon. When he was killed in action, everyone started calling him Gears as a way to remember him. It seemed to cheer them up, and he figured he’d been called a lot worse, but he didn’t really know who Gears was.
Disinterested in finding out the source of his nickname, he turned to Mom and said, ‘I got somethin’ for ya.’
Pulling a computer tablet from his backpack, he switched it on and began to flick through the screens. Before he’d left, Benny offered to take some footage using the tablet cam. None of them expected Mom and Pop to be alive and they didn’t usually waste any power on luxuries, but Benny nagged them into it. Mom and Pop clustered around the tablet and he tapped the play symbol on the video clip. The sound of TL, Pax and his voice rang out across the table.
Pax could be heard and seen shouting, ‘Hey Mom. Hey Pop. Love ya both.’ In the clip, he heard himself say, ‘Ass kisser!’ Pax laughed and declared, ‘Ya just jealous ‘cos ya ain’t gettin’ any ass.’ Both TL and he shouted in unison, ‘Shaddup Pax!’
He paused the video, looked over at his mother and said apologetically, ‘Benny was supposed to delete that.’
Mom’s eyes misted over and she said warmly, ‘Thank Benny for me. He was right not delete that. If you boys are still fighting, then I know you’re happy, but let’s watch the whole thing together later.’
Nodding at Mom, he thought, Benny was right and he was glad they’d wasted power. Mom looked as happy now as she had at Thanksgiving when she had last seen them and it made him feel good to see her smiling so easily.
After they cleared up, people readied themselves for bed and Ip was playing with Fuzz, Mom and Pop’s Blue Lacy dog. He headed up to his room, where he laid down on his old bed wearing just his baggy ACU pants. He thought it felt good to be home and, for a moment, it was as if the world ending had been a bad dream. That brief moment of contentment was followed by a sharp sense of loss knowing it was only an illusion of normalcy.
There was a soft knock on the door and Anna poked her head inside and asked in a soft voice, ‘Can I come in?’
He didn’t move and frowning slightly, he replied, ‘Sure. What’s up?’
Anna walked over and sat down on the edge of the bed facing him. Carefully placing her left arm on the other side of his body, she leaned into him and across his waist. Puzzled by her behavior, he looked up at her quizzically
. Other than finding Anna mildly annoying, he hadn’t given her much thought and was surprised she was now practically lying in his lap.
Anna smiled, raised her eyebrow and said softly, ‘I thought you might like some company.’
He wasn’t interested in Anna that way, but he hadn’t been with a woman in a long time. He and Ip did share a bed most nights, but not in that way. It wasn’t that he didn’t want her, but he didn’t know how she felt about him and he felt too protective of her to push her into anything he didn’t know she understood. Her limited ability to communicate left him stuck and tonight he was feeling out of sorts. He was home, but he wasn’t home and he finally understood the magnitude of what they’d all lost. He wanted some comfort and Anna was offering it.
‘Maybe,’ he replied. ‘But ya know this is jus’ for tonight?’
Anna smiled and purred, ‘I’m just looking for some fun tonight.’
Smiling back at her, he said, ‘Then ya might wanna lock that door.’
Anna came back to the bed and removed her shirt. She wasn’t wearing a bra and while he admired her full breasts, she stepped out of her ACU pants and, unexpectedly for current times, was wearing small lacy white panties. Smiling widely, he stretched up and put his large calloused hand around the back of her neck and pulled her on top of his body kissing her deeply as he did.
‘Ya still wearin’ too many clothes,’ he told her.
‘So are you,’ she replied.
Grinning, he said, ‘I don’t need to be as naked as you’re gonna need to be.’
Anna adjusted her position and she slid her hands down the front of his ACU pants. Her eyes widened and she said, ‘You’re right. You probably don’t.’ Wriggling out of her panties, she climbed on top of him and, true to his word, he hadn’t needed to completely remove his pants for Anna to push him deeply inside her.
It didn’t take long for either of them, but by the time they were done he was completely naked and sprawled on the bed sweating. Anna had curled up into his body with her leg stretched across his thighs. She had her full breasts pressed into his side and his arm was loosely wrapped across her shoulders, but he wasn’t holding her close.
