Here We Stand (Book 2): Divided (Surviving The Evacuation)

by Tayell, Frank

  He got back in the SUV and drove forward. He raised his foot over the brake, but, wanting to end the confrontation quickly, slammed it into the gas. The SUV rocked as it drove over the bodies of the twice-dead until he reached the trailing line of zombies drifting back to the house. The bumper slammed into one zombie. He swerved left, dragging another under the tires. Right, and he’d lost too much momentum. The creature was pushed along the road, its arms slapping against the hood. He hit another, and then stopped three feet from the broken white-picket fence. The zombies moved toward him. In the mirror, he saw one of those he’d mowed down slowly stand up. Before he could be surrounded, he put his shoulder to the door, slamming it open and into a snarling face. Not waiting to finish the creature off, he grabbed the carbine and clambered onto the roof.

  The SUV rocked as the zombies walked into it. His feet slipped as elbows and arms, knees and legs, faces and palms beat against metal and glass. As those grasping, reaching hands stretched up to him, he tried to aim, but it was as much as he could do to stay on his feet. He fired, missed, and hadn’t braced the gun properly. The recoil put him off balance, and as the vehicle rocked sideways, he slipped, falling to his knees. Cursing his stupidity and the ridiculously small target a head made, even at such a close range, he fired at shoulders and arms and any piece of necrotic flesh he could see.

  “Go! Go! Go!” a voice bellowed. Out of the corner of his eye, he registered that the door to the house had opened, and people were running out. Three or six, he wasn’t sure. He fired again, now trying to keep the creature’s attention. When he glanced at the house, he saw a small mob running out the door. A grey-haired man was in the lead. He slashed a bowie knife across the neck of a zombie with such force it neatly decapitated the creature. The others weren’t so well armed. With crude wooden clubs, or the butts of their rifles and shotguns, they beat and struck at the zombies. The air filled with the sound of breaking bone and primal screaming that drowned out the low rasp of the undead.

  With the arrival of this new prey, the zombies turned away from the SUV. It stopped rocking, and he was able to stand, aim, and fire. Aim. Fire. Aim. Fire. And with one last savage slash of the bowie knife, the old man killed the last of the zombies.

  “Tom?” a familiar voice called in a tone of sheer disbelief. He turned. He saw Helena.

  “It is. It’s you!” she said.

  He jumped down from the vehicle, his feet landing softly on a road covered with dark brown gore. “Sorry, I’m a bit late.”

  “Tom?” the grey-haired man asked, walking over to him. “As in Tom Clemens?”

  “I am,” Tom said. “I remember you. You live in Crossfields Landing.” He didn’t remember much more than that. The man was about sixty, and six feet tall, with a lined face that spoke of experiences of twice that number of years. The slight paunch he’d been developing the last time Tom had seen him was starting to disappear.

  “Jonas Jeffreys,” the man said. He didn’t extend his hand. Instead he carefully peeled off gloves covered in dark brownish blood. “So this is the guy, is it?” he asked Helena.

  “This,” she said, “is the guy.”

  “You’re the one who tried to stop the outbreak?” a younger man asked. “He clapped Tom on the shoulder. “Our savior! We ran out of ammo. Would have been in trouble if you hadn’t turned up.”

  “Wouldn’t have had any problems at all, Gregor, if you’d kept a proper watch like I told you,” Jonas said, running a rag down his monstrous blade with a theatrical flourish.

  The young man dropped his head and walked a few steps back to the house. The others, a mixture of men and women of a variety of ages, watched Tom with a mixture of interest and caution.

  “What happened, Tom?” Helena asked.

  “The short version?” he asked.

  “The very, very short version,” she said. “I’ve told them all you told me.”

  “It was Charles Addison,” Tom said. “He was behind it. The cabal recruited him at some point during the election campaign. They wanted someone in Max’s administration who could be blamed for all that happened. He figured that out and began killing off the conspirators himself. He drugged the president and arranged for the military and other assets to be moved to the countryside where they’d be safe from the undead. He intended to redeploy them once he’d secured his grip on power. He got Max to appoint him to the cabinet and began killing off those in the line of succession. That was his plan. It was never going to work, and in the end, it didn’t.”

  “He was behind the zombies?” Jonas asked.

  “No. I don’t know who was,” Tom said. “Did she tell you about Dr Ayers? Well, the only reason they abducted her was because I had looked up her address on a computer that they found when they were looking for me. Though they got there first, they were actually following me. She didn’t know how to stop the zombies, and they wanted me alive because, in part, they thought I did. The other part was to frame me as the one responsible for all this.”

  “What about the bombs?” Helena asked.

  “You heard about those? Russia or China, I guess. There was something Addison said that made me think we retaliated. There was a failsafe plan that devolved command and control to the field, and I’m pretty sure that was put into action. Addison’s dead. I shot him myself. A nuclear bomb was dropped within twenty miles of the place they were holding me. Factor in the people Addison killed, and though there might be a few members left, the cabal’s effectively been destroyed. But they killed the president, and the first family. That’s a story for somewhere else.”

  “What you’re saying is that it’s over,” Jonas said.

  “Yeah. I’d say so. On my way here, I met a few people and learned that bombs fell on Los Angeles and Houston, and somewhere along the Canadian border, probably close to Montreal or Ottawa. There have to be other bombs, but the good news is that I found a Geiger counter, and from the border with Vermont all the way here, the reading has been normal.”

  “It’s over,” Jonas said, speaking to the group. “Which means we’ve only got to worry about food, water, the zombies, the weather, and disease. Get your gear. Get the trucks loaded. We’re moving out in twenty minutes. Gregor, keep watch. A proper watch this time. And… yeah, pass out the ammunition. But keep your safeties on, everyone. I don’t want a repeat of what happened a couple of nights ago.”

  “And… and what about Bobbi?” a dark-haired woman asked.

  “We’ll take her body back with us,” Jonas said. “Go on, move.”

  The survivors hurried back to the house, all except Helena.

  “Hey,” Tom said.

  “Hi,” she said. A smile crept over her face. “You’re alive.”

  “So are you. And you’re here.”

  “This is where you said we should go,” she said. “After the helicopter landed, I drove the truck. Kaitlin stayed behind with the rifle.”

  “She did?”

  “Of course. She stalked through the woods. She was going to shoot them, but they took you on board before she could get a clean shot. There’s a lesson there, Tom.”

  “And Kaitlin? The children?”

  “Fine. All fine. Kaitlin was taking a group south today. She wanted to see whether the bridges could be demolished. The kids are in the village. It’s a… it’s a nice place. I go to sleep at night inside a house, knowing I’ll wake in the morning. I never thought that would be as much as I’d need, but it is.”

  “The sign by the road, the one warning of a quarantine zone, that was you?” he asked.

  “Sort of. I told them what we’d seen near Providence. Everyone was worried about too many refugees coming.”

  “They didn’t come?” he asked.

  “A few people arrived after we did, but not many. Not enough. Have you seen many others?”

  “Since I escaped, since the bombs fell, there was a farmer who was infected. She died. And there were six soldiers, and one guy in a small town. And now you.”

&nbs
p; “You two can catch up later. For now you can help,” Jonas called from the house.

  “Help with what?” Tom asked Helena as they walked up the path.

  “Supplies,” she said. “We’re collecting everything that’s not nailed down from everywhere that’s nearby. Then we’re going to come back for the nails. What we can’t make, we need to find, and what we can’t find, we’ll have to learn to do without. That’s what Jimmy says. It’s become his mantra”

  “Jimmy? The kid who runs the restaurant? He’s still here? I thought he’d have gone bankrupt.”

  “Well, that’s something we never have to worry about again,” Helena said.

  “Here, Tom, give me a hand,” Jonas called. He led Tom inside, and to a front room where a dead woman lay on the floor. She looked almost peaceful. It was an odd sight, but it took Tom a moment to work out why. It was that he could see her face. No one had destroyed her brain.

  “How did she die?” Tom asked.

  “Bled out,” Jonas said. The dark-haired woman passed him a sheet. “Thank you, Naomi,” he said.

  Together, they wrapped the woman up. “Tom, take her legs.”

  Tom grabbed hold, and together they carried her out to the pickup.

  “She didn’t turn,” Tom said, as they placed her in the back of the vehicle.

  “No,” Jonas said. “She was bitten as she was trying to get the box of ammo from the van. My fault.” He sighed. “We need to conserve ammunition, and this lot, they shoot at shadows. We’ve Kaitlin and a few veterans, but most people haven’t even been on a range. Lost a couple to friendly fire a few nights ago. Literally a couple. They went for a moonlight walk. Didn’t tell the sentries.”

  “Damn.”

  “Yeah. So I was keeping the ammo in the truck,” Jonas said. “I thought that would be safer, get people out of the habit of relying on guns for when the ammo is gone. It was a tragic miscalculation, based on never having seen more than a couple of the undead at a time. Don’t know where those zombies came from. I mean, they came from over there.” He gestured to the north. “You can see the trail they cut, and they must have heard the sound of the engines, but where they started from, that’s the real question. One that’s going to give me a lot of sleepless nights.” He rested his hands on the tailgate. “You worked for the president. They say you were some kind of secret agent.”

  “Entirely civilian,” Tom said. “I worked for him before he was elected. When Addison realized he was going to take the fall for the conspiracy, he set me up.”

  “I guess what I’m asking,” Jonas said, “is whether you know of… I don’t know, a military command or… Is it just us? Is any help going to come?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Helena said something about Britain being free of the zombies. That they were putting together an evacuation or something. You think they might have survived?”

  “Who knows where the bombs have fallen? But I might be able to find out. And there might be other survivors. I saw a few, but I was held prisoner for over a week. Their attempts at torture were crude and brief, but it was far from restful. The bombs saved my life, but since then I’ve been on the road. Ask me my opinion after I’ve had some sleep and a decent meal, and I might have a better answer.” He looked down again at the corpse. “She didn’t turn.”

  “No. Bled out before she could. I think an artery was cut, though the position of the wound is wrong. I could carry out an autopsy, I guess, but to what end? Dead is dead. That’s even more true now than before.”

  Chapter 21 - The Village At The End Of The World

  Crossfields Landing, Maine

  Tom drove, following Jonas and the others back to the village. Helena sat in the passenger seat. The rear was filled with half-empty boxes and hastily packed suitcases.

  “I can’t tell you how good it is to see you,” Helena said. “There’s been so much bad news of late.”

  “Getting here was that difficult?”

  “It wasn’t easy,” she said. “I’ll tell you about it sometime, but we got here. That’s what matters. And they let us in. I wasn’t sure they would. Martha swung it. Or the presence of the children did.”

  “Who’s Martha?”

  “You’ll meet her. We’re living with her, me, Kaitlin, and the kids. She and Jonas are running things. Well, not exactly running. It’s not as organized as that. They know what to do, or they act like it, and everyone else is happy to follow. More or less.”

  “Who’s ‘everyone else’?”

  “It’s a mix,” she said. “Some are locals, if you count anywhere within fifty miles as local. Some are refugees, and there’re a few who lived here years ago, moved away for work, but headed back because they couldn’t think of anywhere safer. Not everyone stays. That’s the weird thing. People sometimes leave. Not in the last couple of days, but there were a few who decided to take their chances elsewhere. They were hunting for a better refuge than we had to offer. And there were three guys who…. well, I don’t know what happened, but I think Jonas kicked them out. He’s a good guy. Most of the people are. Sort of.”

  “Sort of?”

  “I don’t know, Tom. It’s all too much to take in. Against what standards should their actions be judged? The old ones seem inadequate. Everything works for now, and it will probably work tomorrow. That’s as far ahead as I’m willing to guess, particularly after… after the bombings. What’s it really like out there?”

  “On the road? I’m still processing it.” The convoy began to slow. They passed another sign warning of a quarantine zone ahead. Just behind it was a pile of twice-dead zombies.

  “Abigail was worried about so many refugees coming that their farm would be overrun,” he said.

  “Who’s Abigail?”

  He told her about the old farmer he’d met, reaching the point where she died just as the convoy came to a halt.

  “It’s the roadblock,” Helena said. “They’ve got to move the razor wire out of the way.”

  A moment later, the minivan started moving again. As he drove past, Tom saw a great mass of razor wire to the side of the road. Thick wooden boards had been attached to the side so that the wire could be moved, allowing the vehicles to drive through. Once all three vehicles were past, the wire was dragged back into place. Fifteen feet deep, it stretched off to either side of the road, wrapping around trees, occasionally reinforced with concrete and metal.

  “Impressive,” he murmured.

  “It stops the zombies. Not that there are many,” she said. “Only a couple a day. Until today.”

  The barricade beyond the wire was little different to the other hastily built emplacements he’d seen. Metal and wood, reinforced with concrete, set around a movable gate. Behind it was a crude rampart, currently manned by a pair of sentries who looked simultaneously bored and curious as to who this new arrival was.

  “Is it really over, Tom?” she asked.

  “The conspiracy, yeah, I think so. I think Jonas had the right of it. All we’ve got now is the zombies, starvation, radiation, the weather, and all the rest to worry about. I guess it really could be worse.”

  The convoy came to a halt on Main Street.

  “We’re using the old tackle shop as a storeroom,” Helena said, getting out. Tom followed her. A small crowd had gathered, though their attention wasn’t on him but on the corpse that Naomi and Jonas were maneuvering out of the truck’s bed. Tom stood and watched, not looking at the funereal labor but at the people. Living, breathing people. Some looked upset, others tired, but none looked scared.

  “Too many zombies came,” Jonas said. He didn’t shout, but his voice carried clearly over the small crowd. “About fifty of them, all told. Bobbi died. It’s sad. It’s very sad, but some of you are meant to be on guard. For everyone else, we’ll be burying her in the old cemetery in half an hour.”

  Tom watched as people went to help carry the dead woman’s body. He wanted to help, but it wasn’t his place. He hadn’t known her, and
his presence would only bring questions that would detract from a moment that should be about the life of a woman who’d died.

  “The children will want to see you,” Helena said.

  “Sure. And I’d like to see them,” he said.

  They were staying in a house off Second Street. Almost big enough to be a hotel, it was a private home, belonging, he guessed to the spry woman who opened the door. Her fiery-red hair would return to grey when the dye ran out, and there was a taut smoothness to the lines around the mouth suggesting a recent lift, but nothing could hide the experience in the eyes or the kindness in her smile.

  “This is Tom Clemens,” Helena said.

  “It is? How wonderful,” she said. “I’m Martha Greene. I’m sure we’ll have lots to talk about, but for now you can distract the children. I saw the body from the top window. Who was it?”

  “Bobbi,” Helena said.

  “That’s sad,” Martha said. “Any death would be, but hers, now?” She sighed. “If you can watch the children, I’d like to go to the cemetery.”

  “You came back!” Luke exclaimed. Only a protest that he needed to wash and change prevented Tom from being mobbed. He was halfway through a cold shower before he realized why the children were so excited. In this new world, when people left, they seldom returned. Washed, and wearing someone else’s clothes, he had no excuse not to go downstairs. Luke was waiting in the hall, Soanna in the doorway to the front room.

  “You have to tell us what happened,” she said. Her tone was accusatory. He let himself be led into the room. Other than an old sofa, older armchair, and very new TV, it was sparsely furnished. The children were rectifying that with an odd assortment of toys, a semi-permanent blanket fort, and almost as many books as had been in the library of the house they’d stayed in the first night he’d met them.