Born In The Apocalypse (15 page)

Chapter 34

“Shit!” I lay flat on Judy’s back and prayed she didn’t buck. Trey took his cue from me and did the same, rubbing Pumpkin’s neck and whistling softly to her.

On the far side of the bridge there were four Trippers. I could barely see them in the gloom, but their pale skin stood out. They were walking down the road and would be upon us soon. In between the blowing of Judy’s lungs, I could hear the wheezing of the infected people.

“Hey! Git back here! I gotta come down there, you ain’t gonna like it!” The voice of the man from town echoed down the valley, bouncing off the trees and skimming across the water from the pond.

The Trippers reacted immediately, walking towards the sound and breathing heavier. Unfortunately, that meant they were headed right for us.

“Stay low. Be a part of your horse.” I said softly. “Follow me.” I turned Judy’s head and nudged her with my knees, keeping low on her neck. I could feel her tension, but she stayed true and walked slowly off the road towards the hill on our left. The tall grass silenced her hooves, and I was relieved to see Trey was right behind me. We eased the horses and ourselves slowly through the grass, keeping the Trippers in sight as we let our horses walk away from trouble.

“Where the hell did you two git to, goddammit!” The voice came from lower down the hill. “Whut the hell? Oh, shit!”

The men who were after us must have found themselves face to face with the Trippers, and there was a lot of screaming after that. I heard one man scream he had been bit, another gave out a gurgling cry that ended abruptly, and there was the sound of running feet as one man abandoned his comrades and took off. I heard the meaty sound of a fist striking flesh over and over again, and a deep groan like someone was breathing out his last. If I had to guess, I’d say two men were dead and the third was bringing trouble back to wherever he had come from.

We crossed the small land bridge that separated the creek from the pond and made our way through the forest. Dark branches reached out and caressed our cheeks letting us know we were welcome to stay if we wanted to. Once upon a time there was a campground here, and we rode our horses past the abandoned buildings. These cabins would be useless for defense since they had no fence and were made of thin wood. The only building that might be worth using was the main lodge, but it had huge windows in the front which would be fine until the first Tripper put his head through it.

On the far side of the campground, we hit another wall of brush and trees, and we took a right turn at that obstacle. A hundred yards from there we trotted our horses up onto the road and continued home.

The entire time we spent in the woods Trey and I didn’t say a word. We didn’t know if there were any more Trippers about, and who wanted to bring them home with us?

“Damn,” Trey said.

“No kidding,” I replied. I gave Judy a reassuring pat on the neck, and she rewarded me by putting her ears back and arching her back a little.

We rode back to our houses, and by the time we reached them, it was fully dark. I made a circuit around the perimeter before going in, making sure there weren’t any visitors I didn’t want to have. I put Judy in the garage stall and gave her an extra bit of hay and fresh water. She’d earned it by keeping her cool.

Inside the house was quiet, cold, and dark. It reminded me in a big way that I was alone. I took my gun off and hung the new gun belt off the headboard of my bed. I figured the cowboys of old did it that way. The gun I lay on the side table, easy to hand if I needed it.

I took the books out of the pillowcase and arranged them on the top shelf of my bookcase. I had sixteen new westerns, ten fantasy books, and a few science fiction books. I was set for the winter.

I pulled out the big book, The Lord of the Rings, and hefted it. A book that weighed that much had to have some good material in there somewhere. I opened the book and jumped when something fell out and hit the floor with a metallic ring. I put the book down and felt around on the floor, eventually finding a heavy coin. I picked it up and held it to the candlelight.

It was a gold coin with a woman walking on the front and an eagle on the back. The words on the back said “1 ounce Fine Gold.” I set it down and picked the book up again. Opening it carefully, I saw that the pages had been altered, allowing the gold coins to sit in the book without anyone being the wiser. I counted fifty gold coins in the book, along with fifty more silver coins.

Suddenly I had real wealth, and had no idea what to do with it. Disappointed I couldn’t read the book, I put the fallen coin back, set the unusual bank on the shelf with its brethren, and promptly went to bed.

Chapter 35

The first serious snowfall hit us about a week later. You could smell it for almost half a day before it arrived. The flakes came down in groups and blanketed the cold ground almost immediately. I had spent the previous week gathering even more wood and laying in supplies, so I wasn’t worried about being snowed in. If I didn’t have Judy to care for, I probably wouldn’t have gotten out of bed for much more than to eat and set another piece of wood in the stove.  My dad had put small cast iron stoves in each of the bedrooms early on when the world fell apart. He knew the utilities would fail eventually and made sure we would survive the winters. The stoves sat on ceramic tiles and the pipes went directly out the side of the house. I don’t remember dad installing them, as I was just a baby, but I was grateful these days for the thought he put into making sure his family survived. As I always did, I wished again to have him and my mom back.

I padded downstairs and checked on Judy. She was restless, so I led her outside, and let her walk around a bit. She danced a little in the snow and kicked a few flakes off of some of the bushes. She kept prancing around and shaking her mane, snorting as flakes got in her nose. I had to laugh, since she was acting like a long legged colt who was enjoying her first winter.

She finally came back in, and I spent a good hour rubbing her down. I cleaned out her stall and gave her some fresh hay for the day. I refilled her water trough, and just for fun I floated some snowballs in it. She spent a good ten minutes staring at those round balls of ice before she would take a drink, and even then she eyed the snow warily.

I went inside laughing at my silly horse and for a moment forgot how quiet everything was. I went back up to my room where the stove was happily consuming the oak log I had put in there, and I spent the rest of the morning and part of the afternoon in a deep dive into one of the westerns I had retrieved. I liked Louis L’Amour a lot, but that Zane Grey had a way with words that made you think.

The snow fell for the rest of the day, and it was nearly dark when it stopped. I had gone out to my traps and moved several of them closer and had gotten lucky with three of them. The rabbits I caught were still well-fed, so they would be good eating when I got around to them. I skinned the three and covered them with snow before I hung them outside. They’d keep for a good long time depending on how cold it got.

I practiced with my Colt for at least an hour each day. I wished I had the ammo to practice shooting it, but I only had a couple of boxes, and I had to be careful what I used those for. I had enough to fill the cartridge loops on the gun belt, and it held twenty-five. Trouble was, the extra weight again threatened to pull my pants down, so I had to make sure my belt was cinched tight.

I brought the guns from the garage into the house and put them in my closet. The Winchester I loaded with ten rounds and kept that near my bed as well. I read that cowboys did that, too.

The next day I spent a lot of time looking at my parent’s clothes. I figured I would keep my dad’s clothes, using them for myself as I grew up. I hoped to be as big as he was someday, but you never could count on things like that. I decided to give my mom’s clothes to Trey’s mother. She was about the same size as my mom, and she could wear them or make them fit her daughters, I didn’t really mind which.

It had been about a week or so since Trey and I had been into town, and I wanted to see how they were doing. I figured I would go in the morning since it was late, and I was looking forward to burying myself under my new rabbit pelt blanket.

It was sometime really early in the morning when I awoke to hear a sound that didn’t belong in the night. It was a scraping sound, like something was scratching at the gate, and then there was a clicking sound.

I sat up and quickly put on my shirt and pants. That was something my father had taught me. It was always better to walk into danger when you were dressed. For no other reason, it made you feel less exposed.

I picked up my gun, but then thought better of it and grabbed my bow. Even though I practiced drawing the Colt, I knew what I could do with my bow, and was confident of a kill shot at anything under seventy yards. I slipped my quiver over my shoulder and nocked an arrow as soon as I reached the ground floor. I looked out the window and saw a dark shape by the back gate. It was leaning over in the moonlight, holding the gate open with its body while it messed around with something on the ground. I watched for a second and saw that it was trying to prop the back gate open.

“What the hell?” I whispered as I eased open the kitchen window over the sink. It was the only window that opened with a crank instead of being pulled up, and it was the only window that was silent when I opened it.

The cold air crept in like a thief, and I felt it on my feet before I felt it on my arms. I drew back the arrow and aimed across the yard. I adjusted for the slight breeze from the west and let fly. The arrow streaked across the yard and hit what I figured to be a Tripper just below the shoulder in the back. The impact made a loud sound in the night, and the intruder hit the ground. In a flash it was up again, and running off into the darkness.

That was wrong. Trippers never ran. They walked fast, but their minds weren’t capable of managing a run. What I hit was not a Tripper.

I went back upstairs and grabbed my rifle. I put my boots and coat on and went out into the yard. At the back gate, I saw some dark spots in the snow that were probably blood, but I couldn’t be sure until daylight. I checked the gate and saw it was being propped open by a large branch. I pulled it out and closed the gate, securing the latch. If there were any Trippers around, they would have walked right through that gate and would have been a nasty surprise in the morning.

As I went back inside my somewhat warm house my head was spinning. I realized that all at once I had shot an uninfected person; the same person who had propped open my gate to try and get Trippers to kill me. That fact told me Trippers were in the area, and I nearly got the shakes when I thought I almost used my Colt to drive him off. That would have called every Tripper in the area right to my gate, which would have been open at the time.

Chapter 36

In the morning, I took my bow back outside with me, and together we went back to the rear gate. It was a brutally cold morning, and my face was already feeling numb. The sun was low in the sky, although the bright light was welcome. Everything was clear, even at a distance. A mist rose from the creek as the waters battled the ice trying to take over. It was a losing battle for the water. In a week or two, I was going to have to start making trips down to the water to make sure the pipe we had down there wasn’t clogged or iced up. If the creek froze solid, I was going to have to go into snow melting for water, which would eat up my firewood.

Winter was a dangerous time to be outside. There wasn’t any brush to hide behind except for the pine trees and holly bushes. The boxwoods stayed green, as did the pine bushes, but that was it. Any Tripper on a high place could see into homes and yards for a long way.

Sometimes I thought about leaving this area and heading south. My mom talked about the weather being better further south with winters not being so bad. But if I remembered my geography right, it was nearly a three-hundred-mile trip to the southern end of the state, and I didn’t think I could manage it alone as a twelve-year-old.

I listened carefully before I opened the gate, and I kept an arrow ready for anything. I swung the gate wide, and before it was fully open, I could see the footprints of the intruder the night before. Outside the fence was a large depressed area where something had thrashed on the ground. I could see blood traces here and there, and there was a large arc of blood on the ground. My arrow was sticking out of the snow, which explained the blood. Whoever I had shot managed to rip the arrow out, and the blood followed the second flight of it. There were footprints heading off into the woods across the trail, and by the distance between the steps I figured whoever it was had been running pretty well. The prints were deep, which my dad always told me meant a bigger person.

I was so focused on reading the prints I nearly missed the Tripper who was plowing through the snow along my fence, heading right for me. There were three others behind him, and I was too far from my gate to make it back in time to close it.

He was a young man, probably around twenty, and he was pale from the cold, making the spots on his face stand out even more. His bloodshot eyes were locked on me, and his lips stretched back to reveal dark teeth as he advanced through the snow. His companions, a woman and two older men, saw me at the same time and started heading my way. Their wheezing breath split the quiet air and created mists around their heads.

I brought my bow up and released, aiming more by instinct than by sight. The arrow crossed the ten feet between us in an instant and transfixed the Tripper in his right eye, killing him instantly as the point cracked through his eye socket and pierced his brain.

I backed up as I drew another arrow, heading away from the open gate and my home. The three followed me, trying to get through the snow. I pulled my bowstring back and let another arrow go, this time hitting the second from the rear in the chest. He took two steps, stumbled to his knees, and then fell on his face. His last action drove the arrow out of his back.

I pulled another arrow out as I retreated, this time aiming for the woman who was closest to me. I shot her in the mouth as she opened it to scream at me, and the point made it all the way through the back of her head. She died with her eyes rolling up in her skull.

The last man came charging, and as I drew another arrow, I tripped over a log or root that was under the snow, and fell backwards. My bow and arrow were dropped as I tried to keep from falling on my back. The man kept coming, and I fumbled with my coat to get at my knife. I twisted around and managed to get to my feet, standing up to try and face the Tripper that was a foot taller than my five-foot-eight frame and at least fifty pounds heavier.

The man reached out to grab me, and just as I was ready to spin away, his forehead suddenly grew a broad head arrow point, the kind you usually find on a crossbow bolt. He fell on his face, and when he did I could see my very good friend Trey standing behind him with his crossbow. Trey’s face was a mask of hate and rage, and as I watched he dropped his crossbow and brought his arm up to his eyes. That was when I realized Trey was crying.