by Chris Lowry
“What did you do?”
He wasn’t being serious. It was that same tone of voice he used to use when they came to visit or we stayed in the hotel, a mock accusation. It took me back to a dozen times when he had asked the same question in the same way, and we dissolved in laughter at whatever excuse I could manage to create on the spot.
God I loved this kid.
Zombies to the left of us, survivors all around and he still wanted to laugh with his dad.
My heart tripled in beat and I smiled through a shimmer of tears.
Everyone talks about the way a mother loves, but let me tell you a secret about a father’s.
It’s a love without end. Infinite.
It’s guilt for missing and not being there, and guilt for still feeling that love. As if you don’t deserve to feel that way.
I didn’t have that with my dad. But somehow God smiled on me with my kids and I had it with them.
Not their mom’s so much.
I cleared the lump in my throat and saw his eyes were shimmering too. The price of a zombie plague was my boy had to grow up too fast, and he relished this tiny moment. This connection.
“I took his milk money,” I said. “I cut in front of him in line.”
“In traffic,” he smirked.
Even in the Z times, my hatred of traffic lived on in legend.
“He didn’t use his blinker.”
He snorted out a small giggle. Muted. Not anything like the giant guffaws, he once spewed. This was a trained way to laugh, something to keep the Z at bay, and a hiding place undiscovered.
“Tell me about your sister.”
“We were out of food,” he sniffed. “She took another kid that was here and they went hunting for it. But they never came back.”
I breathed in, breathed out.
It was time to collect details.
There were a lot of Z I had seen in North Little Rock. She could be one of them. She could have been one of the ones I shot earlier.
“I told her I would wait for her.”
“Did you know where she was going? Did you check there?”
He shrugged.
“We tried some houses around here, but there’s still gangs. She was going to go up to the college and see if the cafeteria had food.”
I had passed the road to the community college on my way down here. Literally two blocks from the place.
It was surrounded by tons of apartments, prime hunting ground to scavenge. Also, the potential for a ton of Z.
The fact that she hadn’t come back in ten days left me feeling numb in my stomach, an ache worse than the ATV groin punch earlier.
But I also knew the key to survival was action.
“We’ll go look at sunrise,” I told him.
“I looked,” he said again, ever the pragmatist.
“But this time you’ll have two eyes.”
That seemed to satisfy him and he curled up in his blanket. He didn’t seem to mind that I started at him while he fell asleep. I nodded off after an hour of doing just that.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
That night I dreamed of Brian, and wondered why it wasn't about Anna. I missed her. I suppose the dream was a way of telling me I missed him too, and now that I had one third of my family back, my brain was turning to the other survivors.
In the dream, he didn't speak to me, just sat by the fire we had built, and stared into the flames. There was no Peg, no Byron, no one but the two of us sitting across from each other in front of a fire.
When I woke, I was troubled.
A nagging sensation that I turned over in my mind, twisting the thoughts this way and that to see how they might fit together differently.
I had dreamed before the world was full of Z, and though I did not believe in fortune tellers or other less pragmatic things, I also once did not believe in zombies.
The reality of Z made me rethink my other preconceptions, and as some certain philosophers had pointed out in a dead free world, once you realize how much you don't know only then can you start learning.
I was open to the possibility that my brain was trying to tell me something, and the eerie feeling of dread the dream left me with lingered once the Boy woke up.
He rolled over and rubbed sleep from his still tired eyes and smiled at me.
"I wondered if I dreamed you," he said.
Then he scooted closer using his elbows and feet and curled up next to me, snuggled up against his dad and rested there.
I remembered reading that body language was ninety percent of communication and in that moment, my son was speaking a novel to me.
Glad I was there.
Glad I came.
Glad he wasn't alone.
"Me too," I told him.
"What?"
"I'm glad I'm here."
He nuzzled then, just twitching his arm and shoulders pressed against me. It lasted only a moment and not near long enough, and then he asserted his manliness by taking charge.
"We should go," he said.
I didn't want to go. I wanted him to sit back beside me, and I wanted Bem to walk through the door and settle in on the other side. And I wanted T to crawl up next to us, and we could stay there forever warm by the fire.
But my daughters were still out there.
There was no time to rest, no time to wait, and no time to consider dreams or what they might mean.
There was only time to get moving. To find weapons, find food and find the girls.
"Guns," I told the Boy. "Food. Bem."
It was a simple checklist.
In the Z world, simple checklists were the best to follow.
The Boy stood up and wiped his hands on his leather pants.
"Okay Dad, where do we start."
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
The first thing we needed to do was get food. The cafeteria had been emptied out so it was into the surrounding neighborhood. Lucky for us their tiny little Catholic elementary school was in the middle of a lot of homes.
I told the Boy to be quiet and follow me, then led him down the sidewalk until we reached the River Trail. Little Rock created an attraction worthy of a much larger city when they installed the asphalt trail that ran seven miles along the river, crossed over at the Big Dam Bridge, and seven miles back up the other side. The trail was connected by three pedestrian bridges downtown to make one long loop.
When they first built it, I ran it every visit, which the kids hated and did not understand.
The Boy and I made our way along the trail past a rehab center to a new subdivision of riverfront mini-mansions. We checked doors and windows and broke in. The first had been cleared out.
We hit pay dirt on the second in the form of a full pantry. A couple of bangs on the doors inside proved we were alone, so we hunted for bags to carry the food.
The boy found a pretty princess backpack, and I didn’t make him wear it after we had a can of soup each. Cold soup is not great, unless you’re starving, in which case it tastes like ambrosia.
“Good,” he smacked his lips and put the empty in the sink.
We searched the house, but couldn’t find weapons. His gun was for show, the bullets long gone.
I knocked on the door to six other houses, but they were all fruitless searches. No more food. No guns.
I did find a hoe and rake in one garage, a rarity since these houses used a landscaper to do the yard work. I broke off the ends of each to make a five-foot sharp stake.
Perfect if we ran into a vampire. I guess it would work on the Z too.
Then we kept going up the River trail. I knew a shortcut that would lead us to the college on a mountain bike path that cut up the ridge from the north side next to Burns Park.
It took ten steps before I realized the Boy wasn’t walking beside me. I stopped and shook my head. I was going to have to make sure I kept up with him, with all of them. He wasn’t going to get out of my sight.
He stepped off the trail, stood next to a tree and be
gan to pee.
“It’s important to stay hydrated,” I said to his back.
He turned his head halfway toward me and flopped to the ground like a puppet with the strings cut.
My stomach fell with him, my heart a microsecond behind as I listened for the echo of a gunshot. I willed my legs to move to him, to run but there was a short circuit in the wires. Voice didn’t work. Legs didn’t work.
“Don’t move,” a man stepped out of the woods behind me.
Camo insulated overalls made him look bigger than he was. The rifle I recognized, a .306, steady in his gloved hands, trigger finger cut out. He had a wool knit cap that covered his head, a scarf over his mouth. I could only see his wide eyes and the rifle that shot my son.
Something bubbled in my stomach.
He took a step toward me, gun aimed at my head.
“Dad!” the Boy shouted.
The gun swung toward his voice. I jumped forward as he jerked it toward me and tried to step back.
I got a forearm under the barrel and knocked it up. He squeezed the trigger and shot next to my ear. All I could hear was a ringing, and someone screaming.
By the time, I realized it was me, I knocked the hunter over like a turtle on his back and watched him struggle to roll over. I helped him flop to his stomach, grabbed the scarf and pulled until he stopped fighting, stopped moving.
I climbed off the body and turned around.
The Boy was standing ten feet away, scared eyes watching me. I took a step toward him and he stepped back.
“You killed him,” he stuttered.
“I thought he shot you,” I explained.
“I saw him moving,” the Boy gulped. “I tried to hide.”
“Don’t do that,” I stalked to him and wrapped him in a hug. “You’re too good at playing dead.”
He was stiff in my arms for a moment, still scared I guess, then relaxed into it.
“We’ve got to go,” he whispered into my shoulder. “Z.”
He pointed up the road. Z were streaming from the trees, drawn by the sound of the gunshot.
Maybe drawn by my screaming.
I bent down, grabbed the rifle and stripped a pack from the dead body before we rushed away from the Walking Dead.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The hike through the woods was nice. The wind whispered through the leaves, the air was crisp but not cold, and my boy was behind me. I had a gnawing feeling in my stomach, but we finally had a gun that worked and food in a pack.
I had seen a couple of boats in the marina in front of the mini mansions that gave me an idea and if we didn’t find Bem, we could bed down in one of them and search again tomorrow.
I wasn’t sure how we were going to do a search pattern.
It would have been easier if we had cell phones. I’d just call her up and we could talk to each other until I found her.
Absent that I was going to set up a search pattern.
If the Boy knew which direction she had approached the school, we could have gone that way.
But they didn’t coordinate like that.
It was a lesson learned.
Once I had her back, we would always have a plan.
I took heart in the fact that the plan worked. Sometime in our past as we sat at dinner or in a hotel room in west Little Rock, I told them if something ever happened, leave me a note. I’ll find you.
Who knows how that topic comes up.
I’m sure we were watching a TV show on the Disney channel that had zombies, and I said something off the cuff.
“Hey kids, if there’s ever a Zombie Armageddon, write me a note and I’ll come find you.”
Except I did.
And they did.
Which means here we were.
Bem forgot to leave a note.
That didn’t mean I couldn’t find her. Just that it would take longer.
But it didn’t.
It took long enough for us to walk past the Veteran’s Home at Fort Roots perched on prime real estate above the River with an expansive view to the north and south.
We rounded a building that led to a quad across the street and a campus building beyond that.
There was a tower on the edge of the property, and a girl on the tower. Underneath her was a gang of men, boys really.
They sat waiting while she was tied to the tower so she wouldn’t fall. I couldn’t tell if she was sleeping or passed out.
“Back,” I told the Boy and he ducked behind me.
Our movement so far hadn’t attracted any attention and I did a head count. Eight boys under the tower, maybe more where I couldn’t see. They all wore black head to toe, black tee shirts, black pants, black ball caps. I could see black metal glinting in their waistbands, pistols, but no one carried a rifle.
Five of them sat on the ground, backs leaning against the legs of the cell tower. Three catcalled up to her or roamed around underneath.
She was trapped.
“Do you know them?”
The Boy squinted around my shoulder.
“I think one is the brother of a kid that stayed with us a couple of nights. He got bit.”
“Gang?”
“I think so.”
Not everyone was swept up in the Zombie plague. Little Rock had one of the worst gang problems in the country and it was California’s fault. A lot of people didn’t think about what happened when criminals got a second strike.
The idea behind the Three Strikes law is if you’re arrested and convicted of a crime three times, you’re a habitual criminal and will go to jail for life. That’s great for privatized prison industry, not so much for kids from the inner city who don’t have a shot at a normal life. A lot of them hit their second strike before they were out of their teens.
Well-meaning parents or someone in their life decided to ship them off to a relative in Little Rock instead of San Quentin to save them from a life behind bars.
When the west coast gangs hit Mid-America, they brought the gang culture with them and descended on an unsuspecting populace. Drugs and violence followed in their wake as their numbers grew. Petty thugs who were low in the organization suddenly found themselves in fertile ground to become kingpins.
The gang wars started. It was bad enough that Little Rock made lists, all the while California was claiming a reduction in crime rates and a decrease in recidivism.
That’s part of the problem with America. They don’t solve problems, they just move them to a new location.
In Little Rock, good people abandoned the inner city to the gangs, which allowed them to run rampant.
It spilled over into North Little Rock and imitators popped up in the suburbs surrounding the cities, but Little Rock remained the epicenter.
Until the Z came.
I snickered.
“What?” the Boy asked.
“Gangs of Z are competing with the Bloods, Crips and whatever street Vice Lords now.”
“That’s not funny Dad.”
“Not ha ha funny, but,” I shrugged.
“You’re weird. Maybe getting shot in the head affected your sense of humor.”
My Boy, folks. He’ll be here all week.
I glanced around the corner.
Eight of them.
I checked the magazine on the rifle. Six shots. I wasn’t sure how long she had been up there, but I could see she strapped herself to a leg of the tower. There was an open backpack on her shoulders, and a couple of empty cans of food on the ground that could have been hers.
There was no time to wonder though.
Thugs had my girl trapped.
I don’t know why. I didn’t really care.
The familiar bubble of red gurgled in my stomach, and I let it wash up.
Six shots left five of them dead, the ones sitting by the tower. The other three scrambled for cover, shooting in the air in our general direction as they scattered.
“Stay here,” I told the boy and ran with the rifle to the tower.
I frisked the pistols from the bodies around the base, and watched the perimeter, sticking one in the small of my back and two in the front.
“Bem!” I screamed and repeated her name again.
“Dad?” she sobbed.
I glanced up as she unbuckled the belt she was using as a strap, but her arms were too weak to hold herself up. She flipped over backwards and fell.
I dropped the rifle and caught her, just enough so we both went down to the ground. I cradled her in one arm and kept the pistol moving with the other, trying to watch our back, watch in all directions just in case any of her trappers came back.
“Can you walk?”
I hitched her up to carry her.
“My arms are asleep,” she said in a daze. “I can walk.”
She could, but barely. I think it was sheer willpower.
I’m glad she was hunched over because it gave us an excuse to duck as we shuffled back to the building.
The Boy grabbed her and hugged her close.
“It’s Dad,” she told him.
“I know,” he assured her.
“I told you he would come.”
“You doubted me?” I asked the Boy.
“There were a lot of zombies Dad. And people were trying to shoot you.”
“We can wait here for them to come back and shoot me,” I said. “Or we can move you someplace safe and get you food.”
She nodded in slow motion.
I lifted her up, held her in one arm and directed the Boy back to Fort Roots.
“Take us back to the trail.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
“I need to rest,” she said and collapsed.
“How long were you up there?” the Boy kneeled beside her and held his water bottle to her lips.
“What day is it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Then more than three,” she said. “Maybe five?”
“Is that why you smell like pee?”
“They wouldn’t let me down to do it.”
“What did they want?”
“Me.”
“You.”
“Me.”
“Why?”
She gave him the look then, the one older sisters have been giving younger brothers since cave siblings walked upright.
