by Kirk Allmond
I stood up, and pushed back from the table. “I am leaving in one hour. You are leaving in three hours. Leo, there are one hundred fifty men here that I don’t know and I don’t trust, and Max is here. I need you here. I need you to keep Max safe, in case our victory this morning wasn’t what we thought.”
“Tookes, I will defend the house and your son. We all love that little boy; none of us will let anything happen to him.”
“Alright, I’m heading out to get ready. John, I need Sammie, my aught 6, and every magazine and bullet we have. I’ll need the two Sigs; do we have holsters for both? We have six magazines for them right? Leo, can I borrow your old Kukris and holsters?”
Leo poofed and was back with them. Her entry into the room scattered some papers off the side table onto the floor. She was gone no more than one second.
“You got it Tookes, I’ll have them cleaned and loaded for you in thirty minutes.”
“Thanks mate. I’ll see you all at the end of the driveway in one hour. It’s now 8:05. I’m rolling at 9:05.”
My first stop was the medicine cabinet for ibuprofen. I stopped up in my room and checked on Max, who was sleeping soundly. I emptied a daypack, added the ibuprofen, and strapped my backpack on over the Kukris. Stop number two was down at the barn. I greeted some of the men, and told them that we’d have their families safe by lunch time. They all were very cordial, although I think several of them were frightened of me.
At the barn office, I grabbed a five gallon can of gasoline, a spool of electric fence wire, and the solar battery pack. Around behind the barn office was the property’s workshop. Inside there I found small three cans of propane for propane torches and the torch handle. They went into the backpack along with the wire, and the last thing was a bottle of paint thinner, a roll of duct tape and a box of finishing nails.
I had unloaded all of my truck around the property. My tool bag containing my remaining bombs from the bridge was hidden in the rafters, well out of Max’s reach and out of sight. I carried all of this down the half mile driveway, and stowed it under the back seat of a Jeep that had the keys still in the ignition.
Leo was the first to arrive as I stood next to the jeep smoking a cigarette from the pack I’d picked up in the hardware store and left in my tool bag. She grabbed my hand and looked into my eyes. “Vic, come back to me. Us. Max. Don’t be dumb.” She leaned in and hugged me, and kissed me on the cheek.
“I will.” Still holding her tightly, I pushed her chin up and kissed her quickly on the lips.
We waited in silence for John and Marshall to arrive. They had two minutes left.
24. The Haversham Farm
Leo and I waited about a minute in comfortable silence before Marshall and John arrived. John handed me Sammie and the two Sig’s, and a bag full of magazines. Leo walked around to the driver’s side of the Jeep with me and squeezed my hand as she said, “Stay safe Tookes.” I hopped in the driver’s seat and turned the Jeep around. It was a ten-mile trip to the Haversham’s, and I wanted to get there as quickly as possible.
The Jeep was an older model, with a lift kit and oversized tires and tons of off-road accessories. It was canary yellow, and had no top. It felt mechanically sound, although I didn’t do any in depth checking. It drove solidly, even with the larger tires. It made a lot of road noise as I drove along. We hadn’t heard them coming, though so I wasn’t that worried. I’d be pulling off the road about a mile from the school. The trip went quickly, every mile or so a car had been pushed off to the side of the road. Clearly they’d been working on this for a while. I made a mental note to come back soon for the batteries and alternators. I had a great idea for a wind generator, and spent a couple of minutes planning that out in my head.
“Focus Tookes!” I said out loud.
When I reached the big white two story Haversham farmhouse, I pulled into the yard beside the attached garage. I stopped, and tried to focus my thoughts on the inside of the house, listening, looking through the windows for any signs of zombies, and switching to my alternate vision to look for auras. It took some concentration before I could see my hand glowing bluish purple. I was feeling nervous and deadly. I wasn’t sure if that meant something to the colors of my aura, but it bore experimentation. It would be handy to know what people were feeling.
I stood before the front door and considered my options. I looked at all points of entry into the house. Shadows shot out from my body. Almost every one of them was safe, except the option of a running, diving, barrel roll through the front plate glass window. That ended up with me unconscious on the ground, probably with a concussion. Eventually I decided on walking up and opening the unlocked front door.
“Don’t overlooking the obvious.” I said as I opened the old creaky farmhouse screen door, and turned the knob.
Inside the house was very dim. Most of the blinds were closed. The old Victorian furniture was all neatly arranged, nothing upset or overturned. There hadn’t been a struggle in this part of the house.
I checked my watch; it was 9:28 pm. I had work to do, and not much time to do it. The first order of business was to find the keys to the truck. I walked straight back to the kitchen, and found a peg-board full of key rings. I recognized some, from my work on the farm. I took every set, including a Ford key on a Culpeper Ford dealership key ring and headed for the attached garage. Inside was a beautiful, almost brand new pearl white fully loaded F250 four-wheel drive pickup truck. I clicked the remote on the key ring and the doors unlocked.
“Oh, fuck yea! Daddy’s got a new truck!” I slid in the driver’s seat, feeling the cool leather; it still had that new car smell. After starting the truck, I hit the garage door opener, but nothing happened. Feeling like a dumbass, I got out, pulled the string to disengage the automatic door opener and rolled the door up.
I pulled the truck out of the two stall garage, and parked it on the driveway. I removed the keys, and scoured the glove compartment and center console. Inside the console I found a pen and some scrap paper, and hastily wrote a note. Keys on the seat, note folded over the steering wheel, I hopped out and ran around the back of the farm house to the tractor barn. Inside there I dropped a John Deere Key on the second step leading up to the cab of the massive combine, and stuck a Kubota key inside the door of the plow tractor.
Next, I trotted over to the knoll and lay down. Through Sammie’s scope I could see the school. There were at least two hundred fifty people inside the football field, and I counted fifteen zombies around the outside. The principal had moved his office to this side of the building while I was attending school so he could watch football games from his window. I searched three windows with my scope before I found the right one. It appeared to be empty. Over the next several minutes I surveyed the entire building facing the stadium, and saw no sign of the living in the building.
“Stupid zombies,” I muttered as I grabbed my tool bag and took off for a small creek bed running through the field. I had five of my pipe bombs left from the Potomac Bridge, plus one with parachutes. I stepped off every ten feet and laid a bomb covering a fifty-foot section, keeping the last parachute bomb for an emergency. Next, I ran electric fence wire to each of them, and rolled the wire up to the solar battery terminal on top of the hill where I’d be. The wire laid down in the long grass, and other than a few of my tracks, was pretty hard to tell anyone had been through there. The grass on top of the knoll was taller than I was when I laid down. I mashed a few feet down in front of me, and then made an area off to the right. I pulled up a bunch of grass and stuck it in a pile trying to hide myself. I laid out the other treasures from my bag, leaving only the magazines and bullets for the sigs and checked my watch. “Ten-fifteen. I have forty-five minutes until the cavalry arrives. It’s time to do work.” I said aloud.
The trees along the edge of the field gave me some cover as I approached the school. As I walked, I switched to what I now call my ‘aura view’, and tried to suppress my aura. I wish this stuff came with a manual, I th
ought to myself as I managed not to shrink it, but more like turning it clear. As soon as I stopped concentrating it turned back to blue-purple.
At the edge of the tree line, I stopped and surveyed the situation. It had quickly become my habit to contemplate my options. The first zombie was roughly a hundred fifty feet away. I focused on the option of running a direct line to him, and hitting him in the head with the kukri. If I did that, he alerted the zombies in the stands. Instead, I tried a throat chop, which silenced him, and moved on to the next zombie. To my surprise, another shadow shot out from the first. Wondering how far I could push this, I made decision after decision testing and pushing my abilities. Some of them ending in my death, but when that happened, I backed up a step and made a different choice. It took me nearly twenty minutes of choreography, but repeated the dance until I had it perfectly fixed in my mind. I knew that after the third zombie, who I had to hit once in the chest and once across the face I had to spin right. Spinning left caught my foot on a stone. There were shadows all over the school yard. They all slowly solidified. As I started to move, following the first one, the forward decision lines stayed, guiding me through an intricate dance that was about to unfold.
25. The Dance
I ran straight towards the first zombie. Exactly on cue, he looked down the field to the left of us and never saw me coming. I was three steps away when he heard me, but I took his throat out with one level swipe. The curved machete blade multiplied the force of my swing; I almost completely severed his head. My first shadow line disappeared, and I followed the next fifteen steps and into a barrel roll, which brought me up face to face with the next zombie, right as he turned towards me. I drove both blades up through his chin as I popped up in front of him, the tips exiting the top of his head.
The next step was a tricky one; it had taken me at least a hundred tries to work it out. Leaving the swords buried in his skull, I dove at his face, flipping over him, which exerted enough force on the handles of the weapons to split his face and extract them from his head. As I came up from that roll, I hit my back on a rock. I knew that was going to hurt, but I didn’t think it was going to be as bad as it was. I nearly lost my breath, causing me to stumble off of my path. The instant I left my path, the entire sequence of shadows disappeared. I remembered that I had to hit this one across the chest, followed by a slash to the face. I sent out that decision, and saw my shadow get caught by the throat. That wasn’t supposed to happen.
I considered pausing where I was. I considered running every direction, no matter which way I went, the stumble off my perfect path led to discovery. I charged the zombie, knowing he would go for my throat, at the last second I ducked, bringing one machete overhand into his chest and the other from the side into his gut hoping to take out both lungs. He screamed as I hit him, and I saw the nearest three zombies start running my way. One of them was fast.
I let go of both Kukri’s and rolled behind the corpse of the third. The alarm raised, I drew both guns and fired both barrels at the fastest zombie, hitting him half a dozen times in the chest and head. His momentum carried him into me, where he collapsed dead on top of me. As I fell backwards I shot the two closest zombies, winging one in the cheek and hitting the other in the chin, causing his bottom jaw to vaporize, I think I saw the entire bottom jaw fly off.
Bloody cheek and no-jaw kept coming while I struggled to roll out from under the corpse on top of me, by the time I was free one of them had a hand on my leg and actually helped drag me free. I rolled over, twisting my ankle and fired both guns into bloody cheek’s head, covering myself with yet more zombie bits. One last shot ended top jaw’s second life, and for a moment I was in the clear.
I dropped both magazines and reloaded both guns, wishing I was as good as John, or as fast as Leo. What good was being able to see how decisions would turn out, if I was physically unable to follow the plan? It seemed the farther up a decision tree I went; the harder it was to pull it off.
I sent decisions out in every direction, scanning for the next best move. By the time I’d gotten up and reloaded, the remaining nine zeds had gathered and were coming at me from across the football field. My only move was to retreat. I turned and ran, as fast as I could on a twisted ankle for my grassy knoll. Through the waist high grass, I once again scanned through my options, following the shadow to the horse fence generator. When I got there I laid down on my belly and waited about thirty seconds before I flipped the ‘on’ switch on the solar battery. All five of my pipe bombs went off at the exact instant the nine of them stepped into the creek bed. It was a huge explosion, the shrapnel mowed the grass down in a fifty-foot radius, and seven of the zombies were reduced to mush.
I rolled over to Sammie, laid my cheek on the stock, and squeezed the trigger. Levered the bolt, exhaled, squeezed, and watched the last ones head evaporate. Then I closed my eyes and tried to catch my breath. After a couple of seconds, I checked my watch, 10:40. I had twenty more minutes to do this. With a heave I rolled to my feet, and trotted down towards the stadium. That was too easy. That can’t have been this Watley. I was worried about jinxing myself with positive thoughts.
Once again at the stadium fence, I switched to aura view. Not a single zombie in the mix. Where was Watley? This smelled even more like a trap. I called one of the humans over.
“Hey... You!” I said as quietly as I could, trying to keep my voice from carrying.
A young girl, about fifteen looked up and saw me. She looked afraid, I put my guns down on the grass and knelt down, palms out. I motioned her over one more time, and she looked around to see if anyone was watching.
She came slowly over and said, “Go away. Get help, they’re waiting for four people. I don’t know what they’re planning, but I heard Watley talking about four humans who have been giving him trouble. He’s super pissed about them. I saw him fly off earlier today, but he’s never gone this long, so I bet he’ll be back any time.”
“I’m one of those four. I’m here alone; I killed all the guards, all that shooting and the explosion was me.” I said.
“You killed fifteen of them? How?”
“I’m pretty tough,” I said.
“You’re pretty crazy, dude. There are not fifteen; there are at least fifty of them. The ones out here were the ones Watley didn’t like. The real guards are in the school watching.”
I checked my watch, ten minutes until the cavalry showed up. It was time to spring this trap.
I pulled my multi-tool out and started cutting the fence wires one at a time.
“Go tell everyone to get out and head to that farm house. I have backup there. We’re not playing this the way the zombies want. Your fathers and brothers and husbands are safe at my house. Watley sent an army to my house to kill me. Now I’m going to kill him, but not before we get you all to safety,” I said.
She just stood there.
“Go!” I yelled, “Go right now!”
She ran off and started gathering people and pointing as I finished cutting the wire. I stood up and ran over to the dead zombie with Leo’s kukri’s still sticking out of him. I removed them, wiped them off on his shirt and stuck them in the holsters on my back.
The humans started streaming through my hole in the fence, running for the house. I stayed still until the last of them were out of the fence and checked my watch. 11:07 pm. They’d have gotten my note. Right on cue, I heard the massive combine fire up. Marshall was right on cue, and that meant John was at Sammie.
“Watley!” I yelled. What came out wasn’t just a yell. I’m pretty sure mom heard me all the way back at the farm. This was no human voice; it carried through, “Come out here you fucking pussy! You want my son! You’re gonna have to go through me! Come fight me you dumb ass fuck!” My voice carried not just through the normal sound waves, but through something else entirely.
A very large, very fat man landed directly in front of me, shaking the ground. “You know my name; it’s only fair I know yours.”
“My fr
iends call me Tookes. You may call me sir.”
Shadows shot out from both of us. They went in every direction, thousands of possibilities between the two of us. My brain was on fire, I was thinking so fast, intentions were forming and disappearing. Every step I made he countered. Every plan I thought of, he was there first. Every action was matched by his reaction. In the space of a second I played out ten thousand possible attacks. The best outcome was stalemate, before it dawned on me that in addition to being able to fly, Watley had the same ability as me.
26. Watley
I doubled the number of attack options I was sending out. He kept up easily. I tried deciding on one attack and changing my mind at the last minute, but this ability wasn’t fooled, as soon as I changed my mind, a new shadow shot out and was intercepted by one from him. This was not going to work. I realized I couldn’t out think him, I had to not think.
Abruptly, I cleared my mind, concentrating only on Max. All the lines of possibility reversed back into me. I saw the slightest hint of confusion cross Watley’s face.
As he considered his options for attack, I let my heart drive my actions; my need to protect Max, to make the world safe for him drove my machetes forward, impaling both swords in his chest. Pressing downwards on the handles, the curved weapons exited through his shoulder blades, puncturing both lungs, and rendering both arms limp and inoperable.
Entirely on instinct I wind milled around and swung both weapons at his neck. By the time I spun around, Watley was gone. He was hovering about fifty feet up in the air. I watched as his arms started to twitch, then he rotated them at the shoulders, wind milling them to stretch out.
I was so angry. I was angry that I was here, risking my life. I should have been in my nice air conditioned office. I should have been yelling at one of my employees for showing up late for the fourth time this month. Thanks to this piece of shit zombie, all that was lost, my wife was dead, my little boy was in constant danger, I was some kind of mutant, and I slept with a loaded pistol and two extra magazines. “Watley, you too afraid to fight me on the ground? You fucking pussy. How stupid are you that you can’t even manage to capture a little boy?” I goaded him, trying to make him angry. I wanted him as angry as I was; only I wanted him to make mistakes.
