by Chris Lowry
He could see them shuffling around, avoiding each other with a slow graceless lumber in a continuous movement that carried them all across the yard.
“Cap?” Javi whispered at his shoulder.
“We’d burn through all our rounds cleaning that up,” he whispered back.
“And draw how many more out?”
That was the question, thought Sharp. There were more out there and they would come.
“Any other way in?” he asked Turner.
The civilian shook his head, eyes wide in terror. He couldn’t see the zombies, couldn’t know the yard around the bus warehouse was packed with them.
But he knew something was wrong. Otherwise, why would they be stopped.
“I’ve got an idea,” said Jessie.
“Spit it out,” Sharp ordered.
“It’s easier if I show you,” she smiled.
DAD
Maybe it’s a hang over from bygone days, a time when the world swirled around you in starting fits of work and play, everything scheduled and catalogued. Everything in the place where it was supposed to be and on time and disciplined.
Except somebody forgot to lock the freezer or let the monkey out, or hell, two junkies in an alley squatted over a tin can fire, heated up some strange concoction with bent metal spoons and slipped it into their veins with infected needles.
Then the order was gone, the schedules were gone and all that was left were aftershocks and memories.
The memories were worse. I could remember a time when a drive along a country road was populated with car struck animals in various reposes of death on the shoulders. There was a sweet carrion stink of rotting flesh and gas and you couldn’t help but let your eyes slide over to glimpse swollen bellies and skin gone black with rot.
But now, all the bodies were gone. The walking dead ate carrion, I suppose.
The shoulders were picked clean, the animal corpses ripped and shredded into pieces.
There was still the stench though.
It clung to the trees, the thick heavy humid air that hardly moved kept it stuck under the burning mid-day sun, magnifying it in the heat and casting it back at us.
Thunderheads stacked up on the horizon. They were supposed to be a way to cool off the too hot afternoons, but all they served to do was turn up the humidity and make the smell cling to you, like the water washed it into the fabric of the clothes on your back and into your pores.
I scratched at the sleeves that covered my arm and glanced back at the group. They were miserable. They were hot, sweat stained and exhausted.
And they were looking at me, wondering if the pause was cause for concern. I watched fingers grip triggers, nervous in haste and eyes study the woods, study the road.
The trek was taking too long, too slow by far. I wondered if we could take a week on the gulf just to recover, then thought it would be better to hop along the shoreline to points further north.
Florida had too many things that wanted to kill you. Five million people around Orlando made it too dangerous. Gators, mosquitos that carried disease we couldn’t fight if we caught it.
And worse. Other survivors.
I remembered our first trip in this direction with people who were no longer with us, and shuddered.
“You okay?” Anna bit her lip.
She had more reason to be nervous than I did. The memories for her were less pleasant.
“I don’t know,” she said.
There was a lot of knowing in what she didn’t say. Our time together had been a series of mountainous highs, and lulls in violence.
I had saved her life. She saved mine. More than once. I owed her.
“We’ll get out of here as fast as we can,” I said.
I vowed that I meant it, every single word and the look on her face said she believed me.
Forty miles to go. I used to run it on Saturdays. Not this route, and usually a loop so I was only going in this direction for half the time.
I could reach the coast in a day, if I was by myself.
I snickered.
“What?” Anna asked.
“Ever hear that phrase, I ain’t as good as I once was?”
“As good once, right?”
“I was thinking about someone I used to be. Before.”
She shuddered and a line appeared between her eyebrows, marring the smooth surface of skin there.
“I like who I am now,” she said.
I wanted to kick myself. At least it might take the taste of foot out of my mouth.
“I like who you are too,” I said.
“Dad,” the Boy called from point. “You should come see this.”
SHARP
Sharp watched as Javi and Bear ran for the end of the street and slipped around the corner. Jess had a plan, but he didn’t want to send her to execute.
“Are they going back without us?” Turner mumbled.
“They’re going to distract the dead,” Jess smacked her lips.
“How the hell are they going to do that?” Turner stared at the spot where they disappeared.
Sharp didn’t bother to explain. The how would reveal itself soon enough.
Even as he had the thought, it did.
A clacking clanging sound of metal on metal echoed from the direction on the far side of the warehouse.
The rhythmic beat was punctuated by yips and yells that sounded like they were moving away from the gate, drawing the Z to the far side of the long yard.
Sharp supposed they were. Massing them up against the fence, maybe even cutting a hole in the wire large enough to let them through like a cattle chute.
One man on either side of the opening so that no mater which way the Z turned, the other could slam a blade into the back of the rotting skull and drop it as a barrier to the next walking corpse that stepped through.
He readied his rifle and motioned the others.
“Move out.”
They trailed after him across two lanes of black top to the double wide gate.
A rust colored chain linked around the two bars, a yellow and chrome padlock winking in the mid-day sun.
Sharp could shoot it open, but that would defeat the purpose of drawing off the zombies
He could see them herding against the hurricane fencing on the far side of the parking lot.
Bear marched back and forth in front of them, dragging a metal pipe against the links. The press of so many bodies against it made the metal bow out, made it lean toward the moving man, but so far, the poles held.
Sharp guessed they didn’t have time to rip a hole.
“Locked,” he called over his shoulder as he lifted the padlock and let it back down gentle, careful not to make too much noise lest he remind the Z they were breaking in the front gate.
It didn’t matter though, he thought. Once the fence was open, the dead would still be inside, be a threat. They still had to check the buses and make them road ready and who knew how much time that was going to take.
“I have the key,” Turner fished a small ring of keys out of his pocket and worked one into the padlock. “I had to open up some mornings.”
Sharp stepped back and let him open the lock, then helped him feed the chain through the diamond shaped holes link by careful link.
Turner passed the bundle of metal to Jess.
“What am I supposed to do with this?” she whispered.
“You wanted a weapon,” Tuner answered.
“A gun,” she hissed.
The older man shrugged his narrow shoulders, a gesture that suggested to the young woman that she should take what she could get.
She did, though watching her accept it didn’t make him happy.
The truth was, Turner wished she had a gun too. Wished they all did.
He would feel much safer with a pistol just in case the dead began walking in their direction. He lifted his head and watched the mass of bodies across the lot.
The fence bowed further down as they pressed against it harder, workin
g to get to the two men who tapped the metal with a clang, clang, clang.
The top of the twelve foot fence leaned so far forward, one of the poles holding a section was almost bent in half.
Turner lifted the latch and pushed the right gate open. The hinges squealed as metal grated against rusty metal, the sound bouncing across the parking lot, louder than the moans of the Z.
Several dead heads turned toward the noise and began the inevitable shuffle toward them.
“Sorry,” Turner squeaked, a red blush creeping up his sallow cheeks.
“Move,” Sharp barked.
And they ran.
DAD
People have a mentality when it comes to survival. Either they will or they won’t. Most won’t. Especially when there are active predators out there working against them.
We had Z. Walking corpses that infected the living with a virus that killed and replicated, creating more shambling dead.
But the Z were slow. A person could move fast enough to get out of the way. The problem with Z was volume.
We didn’t know what made them herd together, but they did. It was rare to find a lone Z so long after the fall. Usually it was a recently turned body, someone who died and didn’t get the courtesy of a blade to the brain to keep them from destroying the rest of the survivors.
It was hard to outrun a herd for the simple fact that it was impossible to tell where it stretched, where it began.
And let’s face it, most people died by Z now through dumb luck or panic. If you could keep your cool when the world about you was dead walking chaos, it was easier to live.
If you avoided the other survivors.
Turns out, all the good guys got killed in the first couple of months of the Zombie apocalypse as it swept the US.
They tried to help.
They got bit. They died.
Which meant all that was left were the not so good guys.
The hard asses and tough folks who would screw over anyone, who would take and take until there was nothing left.
Bullies, the lot of them.
Which made me wonder where I fell on the spectrum.
Before the Z, I considered myself a good guy. About the only laws I broke were speeding and turning right on red.
I’m sure there were some more obscure laws on the books I managed to bend, but for the most part, when I looked at the man in the mirror, I saw one of the good guys looking back.
If not a white hat, then a light shade of gray that could be mistaken in the sunlight.
Yet here I was, standing with a Winchester repeating rifle aimed at the face of a man with tears streaming down his face, on the verge of taking his food and supplies for me and mine.
“Please,” he whimpered.
The thing about surviving in the Z-lands is that there is no place for empathy. Empathy will get you dead. Or worse.
It can get the people you love and are trying to protect killed.
Empathy was a first world problem.
It had no place in the wastelands.
“Dad?”
The Boy said from behind me.
The man had come out of the woods in a rush to take him out as he marched point on our little column.
He was a scarecrow, a walking sack of sticks and elbows covered by thin flesh and mad eyes. The only thing scary about him was the axe, even though his shriek made us all jump.
Noise does that, especially unexpected. It can buy time, a few precious seconds at the beginning of an attack that gives an advantage to the man who makes it.
It can also be a catalyst for movement.
He screamed and everyone jumped back or flinched away from the noise.
I didn’t. I saw him running toward the Boy, no time to aim, no time to shoot, and so I did the next best thing.
I borrowed a move from old school wrestling and I clotheslined the son of a bitch.
It yanked him off the ground and slammed him into the blacktop. I wasn’t as cool as Hacksaw Jim Duggan or the Hulkster though.
His momentum dragged me off my feet and I hit my knees, earning a couple of good scrapes and a tickle trickle of blood dripping down my shins.
The scarecrow didn’t have much of a brain, but what he did have was still working enough to have him roll over and start begging.
I winced up off my knees and angled the rifle out of the awkward place it had settled across my shoulder, aimed it at him.
“Please,” he snuffled through phlegm and tears, great big drippy ones that coursed down lines across his sunken cheeks and into a scraggly beard.
“Please Mister, please,” another scarecrow stepped out from behind a tree, followed by a third.
A woman and a kid, hair as stringy as the man on his knees begging in front of me, as dirty as he was, as gaunt and desperate looking.
“Don’t play B-17,” Brian hummed in a nervous whisper.
I laughed.
They must have thought me a madman, because the waterworks started up again, and this time all three were wailing, begging, pleading.
“Son of a bitch,” I took a step back toward the Boy.
“I’m okay,” he said, his eyes locked on the trio as the woman and girl dropped beside the man and wrapped their arms around him.
“I’m okay,” he said again as if to assure me.
I took a deep breath.
“Scarecrow,” Brian said, stepping up to take charge. “Dorothy. Mrs. King.”
I shook my head.
“Why are you in such a good mood?” I snapped.
“Those were your favorite pants,” he nodded toward my ripped and tattered knees.
“They were my only pants.”
“Same thing, right? Get up,” he said to the kneeling trio.
They did with a great display of helping each other. I couldn’t tell if the weakness was exaggerated, some ploy meant to distract us while others in the woods were up to nefarious doings.
I glanced around. Tyler was watching our six, Bem backing him up. Raymer studied the road in front of us as it stretched through the afternoon gloom of the forest.
The man who thought to attack us shielded the woman and child behind him.
“What did you think that would do?” Brian asked.
“I thought he was alone,” the man said. His voice was raspy and low, from thirst or hunger.
It almost decided me for him.
Any man that would attack unprovoked was a threat, and I had learned through harsh experience that all threats must be met with exacting response.
The woman and child saved me a bullet.
I didn’t want them to watch him die, not by my hand at least.
Besides, under different circumstances, situations where I had been less lucky, I might have been acting the same way he was.
Brian turned his head to watch me over his shoulder. I gave a slight nod.
“We’re hunting for food,” he said.
“No hunting in these woods,” the man rasped. “Noise brings ‘em.”
We didn’t need to ask which them he was talking about.
“You can come with us,” said Brian. “Share in what we find.”
The man shook his head until the woman put her hand on his arm. He bowed his chin to his chest, defeated. Pride was hard to swallow, and not filling at all.
“Watch him,” I called to Tyler, who took up a pace behind the three of them as we began walking.
I should have called the Boy off point, but I didn’t want him to think this distraction was any fault of his. But I did move three steps closer to him on the march.
And our slow pace grew even slower with the addition of new people who couldn’t move as fast as we would have liked.
SHARP
He could hear them breathing behind him. The old man sounded the worst, a freight train going uphill, hauling a heavy load. He had the wheeze of a two pack a day smoker, and if the zombies didn’t kill him, a heart attack might.
