by Chris Lowry
“Screw that, I made a mistake,” Sharp said. “It might have cost me two of my best.”
Pam kept quiet. She knew he was angry, most of all at himself, and nothing she could say would change it.
“We’re going to raid the supplies here and get the people ready,” she assured him.
“Twenty four buses,” Jacob said.
“It’ll be enough,” Pam answered before Sharp could. “It’s going to have to be.”
MICKEY
“I’ve crapped tougher shits than you,” Mikey threw an empty can of chili across the deadwood fire.
It bounced of Mickey’s chest and careened into the darkness.
He was on his feet and moving, hands flashing up in rabbit punches. Left, right, left and Mikey fell back across the log he had scrounged up.
“Never forget,” Mickey pointed a finger and Mikey and spat onto the ground next to him.
Something crashed into the side of his head and knocked him into the oblivion of darkness.
Sunlight burned his eyes. Eyes that felt packed with sand, and grit. He tried to crack them open, but they wouldn’t respond.
He reached up and touched his face. It was grotesque, swollen, a goosegg on his forehead. His finger ached at the touch, broken.
Mickey began to cough and struggled to sit up. His ribs were bruised, his stomach a tender mass of fire and aches.
Upright, he used his other hand to clear grime from one eye and squinted across the blazing blacktop.
The desert sun baked the asphalt, shimmering heat waves undulated off the surface to turn the horizon into a hazy smudge.
Or it could be his eyes.
Someone hit him, he surmised and tried to snort a smile at the thinking. If he could think, then they didn’t hit him that hard.
Not at first, at least.
By the feel of it now, they had worked him over pretty good once he was down.
He sat in the sun and took an inventory. One finger at a time, he flexed and tried to bend. The left hand had two breaks, the pinky and ring finger.
The right hand was okay, sore, bruised but still passable. Same for his legs. He tensed each muscle from foot to thigh. Again, there were bruises, and pain, but nothing he couldn’t deal with.
His stomach and torso was a concern. He tried taking a deep breath, and it hurt. A couple of ribs were busted, but nothing cutting into his lungs, not yet. His gut ached. Probabably a couple dozen kicks to the middle. The same with his lower back. He’d be pissing blood for a month.
He tensed up his shoulders and felt the knots, the dull throbbing ache at the base of his skull. A kick to the head too, he bet. Not too bad, not as bad as it could have been, at least, but another worry to consider.
He ran his tongue along the inside of his mouth. Cuts, scrapes, but all of his teeth were there. Mickey used the fingertips of his right hand to feel around his face.
There was massive swelling over his right eye, the eyelip closed and puffy. The same with his lips. Cut and puffy. And the goose egg on his brow, plus another tender spot at the crown of his head.
“But I’m alive,” he managed to mumble.
Four hundred miles from home, he thought. He moved his head slowly from left to right and back again, staring up one stretch of the lonely three lane highway to the other.
It dragged across the flat Arizona scrubland unbroken to the horizon. He supposed it kept going east, but he knew it ended in the west.
Where it ended even. At the start of the argument that carried over to a roadside campfire and left him stranded here.
No car. No weapon. No food. No water. And injured.
“But at least it’s not raining,” he giggled.
The sun was marching across the sky to hang directly overhead, the hottest part of the day. He could feel his skin pinking up around the bruises, feel the hot sticky crust of sweat drying on his skin.
“This is gonna be good,” he rolled over to his hands and knees and howled when his broken fingers scraped over an upturned rock.
He could feel the blood thrumming and rushing in his heat addled skull and knew he had to be careful. He was on the verge of a faint. Falling forward would be bad for him. He wasn’t sure why, but he knew that much.
Mickey took a couple of deep breaths and got one foot up. He pushed up with his right hand and right foot, got his left underneath him and stumbled as he fought for balance.
He almost lost it, almost crashed down onto the baking blacktop, but somehow righted himself and stood with wide feet, one on the asphalt, the other in the harsh roadside dust as waves washed over him. The world bounced and jittered in his eyesight and he waited for it to stop trying to spin.
It passed and he was able to stand fully upright. His kidneys howled in protest, his stomach chimed in with complaints and his legs threatened to quit, but everything agreed to cooperate after a few moments.
“Vegas,” he grunted to the cloudless sky.
The argument had been about going to Vegas. Mikey and the rest of the men wanted to detour up there to see what was left. He told them nothing was left, and even if there was something, some community holed up against the zombie hordes, they had a job to do.
So much for doing what’s right, he thought.
He turned his boots toward home. It was four hundred long and painful miles, twenty five to the last town exit they passed and he wasn’t sure how far it was from the highway.
They had seen no buildings, no gas stations, nothing but dusty and battered signage announcing the town.
But at least he knew how far it was.
In the other direction, he couldn’t spy an exit. Just the long road that stretched interminable to what looked like forever. Maybe all the way to the Atlantic ocean with nothing in between. Nothing living anyway.
Twenty five miles or so, he could do. No food. No water. Hot sun baking his skin. It wouldn’t be an easy twenty five. It sure as hell wouldn’t be fun.
But the signs on the town were on the north side of the highway, and north was the direction he wanted to go.
Vegas was north, and he had a few men he wanted to have a discussion with.
CHAPTER
DEL
Del sat up straight in his seat, fingers touching the dial, back stiff. Be licked his lips and fought the urge to glance over his shoulder.
The man standing behind him made it tense. Just his presence was like an electrical charge, a thunderhead ready to lash out with lightning and destroy whatever stood in it's way.
Roger Ballentine, the Chairman of the Council. The man who saved America. Or what was left of it, at least. The part west of the mountains that separated California from the rest of the country.
While the world collapsed into chaos around them, Ballentine took charge. He built the wall, a giant metal construct, reinforced with concrete and supports, taller than the Great Wall of China. It ran from
CHAPTER
2. Pam works with Jacob to organize the caravan.
The Z flakes over run the gate and throw it open. They refuse to leave their loved ones behind.
Silas lead the Z into a trap in a bldg, but it's where all the supplies were stored.
They wait for the soldiers to return to kill the Z.
Pam goes to the gsge when she sees the buses.
Someone sets the bldg of food on fire.
3. Sharp goes back for ten more buses.
He sends Jess with Javi and Bear to get food and gas.
Sends Georgie and Doc to scout the road.
Prob. Javi and Jess find a shop with food. Bear goes to secure transport. Two guys overpower Javi and Jess. They start to assault her. Bear kills one, wings the other.
Jess kills the guy.
They pack the truck with everything. Bear offers to let her drive.
MICKEY
The walk wasn’t so bad at first. The heat served to loosen his muscles, so the ache and soreness didn’t leave exactly, but receded to a dull throb that was easy to ignore.
<
br /> The lurch turned into a shamble, the shamble evolved into a stutter step shuffle that settled into a twenty minute mile pace. The heat washed up off the asphalt like something solid, a thick vicious cloud of moisture robbing hell.
The sun glared like a merciless god. Three miles an hour would turn his trek into an all day ordeal. A day without water, when he had gone so long already, and the sun baking the sweat off him, turning his skin red and crusty.
He pulled his shirt off and turned it into a bandana to cover his head and shoulders, and it helped for awhile. Until the salt dried to a crust and turned it into a fabric scratch pad exfoliating his burned skin with each step.
He turned red, and then purple and then it was too much, to painful to even be under the sun. But there was nowhere to hide, and nothing to block the burning god from turning him into a walking pillar of salt and fire.
He imagined his sister for awhile, imagined Ballentine, telling the big man no.
But the man was the only one who ever scared him. Something in his eyes, a madness that hinted at confidence beyond the ken of normal men. He was the big dog, the big cheese, the head mofo in charge and he knew it.
Mickey had known his like, but never his equal, and here he baked for the man.
“Should have gone to Vegas,” he rasped to himself, a dry chuckle scratching out from his parched throat.
He was going anyway. Better to have given in to Mikey and the others, and he would be with them now.
But if they’d gone to Vegas, Mickey had the feeling the other men would stay, Ballentine would know and there would be hell to pay.
Maybe worse than the hell he was in now.
The sun began creeping down toward the line of the horizon and he chased it, nothing to stand between him and the engulfing rays but an occasional gust of wind that sent him shivering.
His feet began to ache after a few hours, then everything cascaded into agony from there. He wanted to lay down, he wanted to stop and rest, but he knew that if he did, night would come and he might not get back up.
So he kept going. One foot in front of the other. One step, then the next. There were no zombies out here. Probably burned and baked into mummies by now, he thought, then spent twenty minutes wondering if Z got sunburned.
Step by step, he moved. Always west, always toward the horizon that seemed to recede in front of him, and a permanent ache in his heels and toes, his stomach and nose.
His skin blistered, and popped and blistered again, until he finally decided it was over. Better to sit and wait, and maybe make the trek in the cool of the dark. Even if he knew he wasn’t going to get up again. Just a little rest, that’s all he needed, he told himself.
But he didn’t stop.
He kept walking, and muttering to himself.
When he saw the sign, he sobbed and broke down in tears. He was too dry for them to fall, so he let the breath hitch as he wobbled forward.
There was still two miles to go, and the sun was hitting the edge of the horizon. It would drop below and bathe him in purple twilight, then stars in the cool of night.
But two miles was nothing. Two miles was another half hour, forty minutes. Two hours he could manage. Eight thousand steps.
He counted them off and lost track, his mind too foggy to keep focused. The sun disappeared in a flash of pink and red, and the twilight crept from behind him, covering the sky in velvet darkness with a scattershot of white sparkling stars to keep him company.
And then he was at the exit. The signs for the town were there, even if he couldn’t read them in the darkness.
He kept trudging as he turned north. Almost there he told himself. Almost.
DAD
I don’t think it’s a question of the way the world is supposed to be. If the world was the way it’s supposed to be, then I wouldn’t have watched my children grow up from a distance.
Another man wouldn’t have taught them how to ride their bikes, or helped them with homework every night, while I got every other weekend and an occasional holiday.
Nope.
The world is not fair.
Anyone who expects it to be is just looking for someone to listen to them complain.
“Gross,” said Bem.
I watched her hand reach over, almost without thinking, and grip Tyler’s free hand.
I slid the end of the pike out of a rotting Z skull and flicked the drippings into the dirt.
“You can say that again,” I grunted as I lined up for another.
There were eight of them, walking shambling corpses in various states of rot and decay. Skin gone, smell putrid.
The only pieces that seemed whole were the teeth, gnashing and biting as they shambled toward us.
The rest of the group was spread behind me, not quite a single file, but definitely a ducks in a row kind of vibe to the spacing.
They had my back, or eyes on it at least as I faced off on the small herd of Z. Eight turned to six, turned to four, just as fast as moving.
A pike was a Brian invention, or reinvention if you gave him the time to tell you the story.
Based on a medieval design, it was a long metal fence pole with a machete wire wrapped and duct taped to one end, with a rounded fence cap on the other to provide balance.
Nine feet long, it kept distance between whoever used it and the walking dead trying to nibble on their face.
It sliced. It stabbed. It poked and pried. Even the cap could smash through a decaying skull and spread Z brain across the ground.
We only had two.
I had the one at the front of the group, and Brian carried the other at the back.
We had a couple of pistols with ammunition, but I wanted to save those for really hairy situations.
Four smashed down to two and a double whack with the edge of the blade knocked it down to zero.
I wish I could say I didn’t break a sweat.
But it was Florida, with thick humidity like walking through a wall of moist cotton candy.
Hard to breath.
Even harder to stay cool.
And killing zombies made the sweat drip and glaze the skin in a syrupy sticky mess that begged for a dip in a cool spring or tannin colored creek.
Except for the dinosaurs that monitored the waters.
“Clear,” Brian didn’t quite shout up.
I nodded and kept us moving up the road.
There was a bridge ahead that crossed over a body of water that might have been a river, or large canal.
Once upon a time the wet streams might have been home to gators.
Then the Z virus turned almost all the population of Central Florida into the dead, who did not worry about gators.
They lumbered into the water and turned themselves into meals.
The gators gorged on the fresh supply of rotten meat and in turn grew massive.
We could hear them splashing in the shallows, twisting and spinning over a new zombie, probably one from the mini-herd I just dispatched on the roadway.
“Come on,” I motioned and kept walking.
Our footsteps were silent on the dirt covered blacktop.
People who drive on roadways every day gave no thought to what might happen to those same roads once the driving stopped. Storms blew through and knocked down leaves, palm fronds and carried dirt onto the asphalt.
Since there were no cars to stir it up in passing, the dirt expanded, settled and covered the roadway.
SHARP
CHAPTER
They gathered the citizens in front of the courthouse. The people came in groups of two and three, the air tense like they were expecting bad news.
Sharp watched their faces. Lined. Tired. Old before their time. The way of the new world, but to him, they looked like pioneer faces he had seen in history books.
Those people hitched up their wagons to horses and took off for a brave new frontier. Hardy, brave and stupid. If they had known what lay between them and the promised land of the West Coast, would they have
even started?
He wondered if he was stupid, if the choice they were making was stupid. He had lost men. Lost people.
