DEAD: Darkness Before Dawn (27 page)

Forcing his mind to dism
iss all of the creepiness that this entailed, Chad rose to his feet. The zombie children responded by fanning out.

“This is getting worse every second,” he whispered.

Yet, for some reason, they still did not advance. Chad decided to take a step forward. Nothing. He decided to try another tactic. Raising the shovel, he thrust it at them. His hope was that they would act like frightened animals and scamper off. Instead, they reverted to acting like zombies. Arms reached and the group lurched towards him.

Homing in on the closest one, Chad gauged
the distance and swung when he was certain the zombie was within reach of the shovel. The metal head connected with a child’s skull and burst it like a melon.

While their behavior had certainly been peculiar, they proved no more difficult to kill than any other zombie…as long as he blocked out their age. Although, at the end there was one more surprise: one of the zombies actually looked to be trying to escape.

Chad had just swept the feet out from one—a little girl who might have been twelve, which would make her the “senior citizen” of the pack. He placed his good foot in the middle of the chest and drove the shovel down, separating the top of the head from around the middle of the bridge of her nose on up. Looking around, he spied a smallish shadow just as it ducked into some wild blackberry bushes.

Chad limped over to discover the tiny thing tangled in all the thorny vines. It turned his way as he approached and made a weak and pitiful moan. With a grimace, he raised the shovel and brought it down with all his might. The reverberation sent a pins-and-needles sensation through both hands. It took two more blows for the body to be still.

Looking around, Chad felt a new fear grip him. He had completely lost his sense of direction. He could not tell which way was which, and at some point, clouds had started to move in.

Looking skyward, he felt his heart tear through his mouth as he screamed his daughter’s name.

“Ronni!”

***

“He wants us to do what?” Danny spat.

“I don’t see what the hell you could say that will make an
ybody agree to that,” George added.

“How about we either consider this offer, and by consider I mean accept, or else we go to war. And if you did not see what they are packing, let me tell you, it is a war we will lose. They have M32s for crying out loud!” Jody said with palpable awe in his voice.

“For those of us not up to date with the military numbered system, you mind sharing what the hell that means with the rest of us?” George snarled.

“
Freakin’ six-shooter grenade launchers.” Danny’s voice carried its own level of reverence now. “They could sit a few hundred yards away and blow us into oblivion. Those are straight up video game weapons.” When he saw a few looks of confusion lingering on some of the faces of the men gathered around, he elaborated. “Imagine a six-shooter pistol like from the cowboy movies. Now, instead of it firing bullets, it fires freakin’ grenades. And if my memory serves, those babies can toss a round about three hundred yards or so. They would blow through our defenses in a matter of minutes.”

“Be that as it may, I still think you are going to have a hard sell,” George said with a shake of his head. “I sure as hell ain’t gonna be the one to drop this bomb.”

Jody did not like it either. It was a deal that made him feel dirty. He hated to even think about how Selina would react.

“I hate to be the one to say this.” Old Man Joe stepped into the middle of the group; he had his ever present ball cap in his hands and was wringing it like a wet rag. “You folks are thin
king with your hearts. This is a new world…like it or not. And unfortunately, none of the old rules apply anymore. We may hate what we have to do sometimes, but the bottom line is that we need to do what we can in order to survive. And I don’t want to point out the obvious, but they will end up with what they want one way or another. We may as well get something for ourselves in the deal. And that whole part about how we get to stay alive has some promise to it given the circumstances.”

“So you want to be the one to tell everybody?” George rounded on the much older man with clenched fists. He spun back to Jody. “Maybe you want to think this over. While you think about it, try picturing the look on Selina’s face…or maybe that youngster, Kat.”

“I’m not saying that it is what I want,” Jody countered. “What I am saying is that we might not have a choice…other than dying.”

They continued to argue in circles, sometimes coming close to blows as everybody weighed in on the subject of Sergeant Pitts’ offer until finally the boy who had been sent to bring ev
erybody back returned. As Jody watched them coming up the road, he was struck by how few of them there suddenly seemed to be.

He thought back to just a few days ago when he once co
nsidered them a fairly large and formidable group. Now, as the women and children arrived and he looked at their numbers, he knew that there was really no choice in this matter. Of course anybody who was dead set against it could try to make a run for it, but Pitts had already thought of that.

“If you or your people try to run, Mister Rafe,” the sergeant had said at the end, “I have this entire area being patrolled. You are actually only seeing just over half of my fighting force. We number over five thousand. You got what…two or three hundred in there? Anybody that makes a run for it becomes fair game. Do the right thing, Rafe.”

Of course he could be bluffing. But Jody seriously doubted it. As much as he hated it, he saw no choice but to agree to the demands.

Twenty minutes later, every single man, woman, and child was inside the gymnasium. The silence was something he could practically feel and taste
; it was so thick and heavy. Every set of eyes in the place was fixed on him. When they had returned, Pitts’ army was still just up the road. Everybody saw them as they came back. The grim faces on the men told them that bad news was coming.

Jody stepped up on the stage after squeezing Selina’s hand. Her lack of response told him all that he needed to know in r
egards to how she felt. He had told her the briefest version of what he was about to lay out in detail to the citizens of Hope. He wondered if they would vote for a name change to their town when he was finished.

14

While the Geek’s Away…

“Is that back where we were staying?” Deanna asked out loud.

“Sure looks like it,” Heather and Catie said together.

Everybody except for Kevin was up on the roof. It was in the middle of the night and more than just a little chilly outside. That made everybody gather in a close cluster, but what they saw might have done it as well.

To the south and east of their location a massive fireball rose into the sky. Catie was less concerned about the actual blast and more concerned about who had caused it and how.

She knew very well what sat unattended in some of the military depots. This had the earmarks of some powerful ordinance, but the ordinance by itself was nothing more than a giant paperweight. It was the delivery system that would be something to worry about.

She already knew that fuel was useless by now. The shelf life had long since passed. Sure, there might be anomalies here and there, but for the most part, humanity had been knocked back to the horse and buggy era within the last month or two. She had tried a few vehicles on some of the times she had slipped off by herself. It wasn’t that she was planning on just abandoning the group, but if she could find a way to get home quicker, she wanted to at least try. If nothing else, she could o
ffer to take a few of the kids with her. However, that was just a fantasy.

“Is that a nuclear bomb?” one of the younger kids asked.

This caused a sudden surge of chatter from several of the kids at once. Catie had to finally raise her voice to get them to be quiet. She only briefly marveled at how quickly concerns of the walking dead could be replaced.

“No…that is not a nuke,” Catie said. “But it is some pretty impressive ordinance. Whoever used it has access to some
very serious military hardware. My suggestion is that we get everything we can cram on to those carts and get our butts out of this area. We have no idea what else they might have…or where they will use it next.”

“Are you saying we might have been their target?” Aleah asked.

Catie turned to the woman. Actually, that thought had never occurred to her. She had dismissed it as those two groups that were fighting; The Guardians and the group of immunes. However, now she had just the smallest pinhole in that theory.

“I am not suggesting that it was directed at us…but now we have to also add that to the list of possibilities,” Catie admitted.

“You were a soldier,” Heather stepped up beside the other two women, “what sort of weapon could make an explosion that big?”

“There are too many to know. The only thing that I feel pretty confident about is that it was not homemade.”

“How can you be certain?” Aleah asked that question in her head three times before doing so out loud. She did not want it to sound like a challenge; she was genuinely curious.

“Because I was standing here and heard it fired and then saw the blast for myself. Somebody fired that from the east of our position.”

“Well then I guess we get packed and on the move by first light,” Heather said with a sigh. She had actually enjoyed the abundance of supplies. They had eaten their fill this evening. While they did not starve out on the road, there had been times when you were only able to take the edge off the hunger. Also, this place had cots…after the last few months, they had felt like the most plush and expensive beds in the world. And then there were all of the medical supplies.

“Wait!” she blurted so loud and sudden that she cause se
veral of the kids to jump. “What about Kevin? He is in no condition to travel. Are we just going to put him on a stretcher or something and drag him along? That seems a bit risky.”

Everybody was silent and looked back and forth from Heather to Catie…until Aleah stepped forward. All of the past few weeks had made many of the children skittish anytime she and Catie got into any sort of conversation. It had led to a few fights and a lot of yelling.

“You all go,” Aleah said. “Heather and Catie and I will sit down with a map so I know the route that you took. We will follow as soon as we can.”

“
You can’t stay here alone,” Heather disagreed, grabbing the woman’s hands in hers. “I will stay with you.”

“I think that is a bad idea,” Deanna said as she stepped fo
rward. “Why can’t we all just stay here until he gets better? We can’t know if that attack was directed at us.”

“And we can’t know that it wasn’t,” Catie countered. “And whether it was or wasn’t does not matter. If people are fighting like that in this area, we can just as easily end up a casualty of being in their crossfire. We need to move and we need to do it now.”

“Then I will stay,” Deanna said, crossing her arms in stubborn finality.

“Catie will need you and Sean
along with the rest of the older kids to keep the younger ones in line,” Heather spoke up again. “I know Kevin would appreciate your wanting to stay, but he would also want you safe.”

“And she is absolutely right about helping with the other kids,” Catie added.

“And what about me?” Trent spoke up. “You guys act like I’m not even here most of the time. I get the fact that you have to be able to trust me, but how long do I have to be part of things for that to happen?”

“Maybe never,” Sean said just loud enough to be heard. Deanna elbowed him in the ribs.

“Actually, it would be nice if you stayed,” Heather spoke up. “Catie will have plenty of help, but Aleah and I could use another set of eyes…and a gun if it gets ugly.”

It took a couple of hours, but eventually Catie, Sean, Dea
nna and the rest of the children were packed and ready. Several meeting places were circled on the map. Catie was to travel west to a place called Shabbona Lake for her first leg of the journey. They had a half dozen places picked out as possible meeting spots as well as a crude code that would let Heather and Aleah know the actual location once it was decided. They would wait there for ten days before moving to the next location. The same procedure was designed for each spot all the way to Sioux Falls.

Heather and Trent watched until the procession had va
nished from sight before returning downstairs where Aleah was sitting beside Kevin’s cot. As the day drew on, the three took turns standing watch up on the roof. Other than a few zombies and the black column of smoke that grew into something so big there was no doubt it could be spotted for miles in every direction, there was not much to see.

“Maybe it will keep the heat off of us,” Trent said when Aleah came up late that afternoon to relieve him.

“What do you mean?” Aleah asked absently; her mind was still down with Kevin. He had been tossing and turning, occasionally crying out. Also, he had a terrible fever that just would not break.

“That big plume of smoke from the blast. Hopefully it will draw people that way and away from us. I know you all like to joke about this not being like the movies…well I could use a nice break because you all have had more action in the short time I’ve known you than I have since a couple of months after this whole thing started.”

“What do you mean?”

“We walled up our location and after we had it out with some of the crazies from the nearby prison, there was not much happening in our little community,” Trent explained. “I guess that is why I do not understand this desire to travel so far. We were able to raid surrounding neighborhoods and did just fine for ourselves. We dealt with zombies only when we had to and mostly it was just to keep them from building up around our walls.

“When winter came and the snow fell…it was almost like life was normal. There were a few folks that got sick and passed, but there was not much action.”

Aleah thought back to their winter. If it were not for that l
unatic Major Beers and her followers, perhaps she could have said the same.

“You just got lucky,” Aleah said with a shrug. “There is a lot out there…and zombies are no longer the biggest problem. It is now more about the survivors, they are far more dangerous. Kevin thinks that the cities will start attracting more attention this year now that the zombies have sort of dispersed. He b
elieves that the living will return like roaches.

“He actually has a laugh when he talks about it. He says that in the movies it was always the norm to say that the zombies were acting out of habit…like memories from their former selves coming through, but in reality, it is the living. They want to return to what is familiar…despite the fact that it was so br
oken.”

Trent considered the words for a moment. He wondered what it must be like to spend an hour inside Kevin’s head. That guy had no shortage of ideas…and most of them were pretty damn good. And for somebody so socially awkward, he seemed to have a pretty good grasp on human nature.
When it was clear that Aleah was not really paying him any attention, Trent headed down to grab something to eat and get some sleep.

He allowed himself a moment to remember the life he’d once had before. Maybe his old life was why he now relished the boredom. He certainly had not been able to just sit back and r
elax for hours at a time with nothing to do.

As a long haul truck driver, his life was one of constantly being on the go. Some folks might think it is no big deal to sit behind the wheel of an eighteen wheeler, but those were the same folks who bitched and moaned about their commute of thirty minutes to an hour! His life was one non-stop commute where he had to deal with the worst drivers in the world all day and night.

He still recalled those first few reports that came across the radio. Initially, a lot of the truckers thought it was some sort of huge practical joke. After all, who ever thought that zombies would ever be a real thing? He had tried to listen to a few of the titles when he swapped out his audio book selections every so often, but they had just seemed too silly. Most of them sounded like a bunch of conspiracy theory nutjobs trying to take jabs at technology. Flu shots…secret government labs…aliens; a bunch of nonsense as far as he was concerned. Just give him a good Western and he could sit in traffic all day.

That had been hi
s stance until he had pulled into the Little America truck stop as he was headed east to Fort Wayne, Indiana. At first he thought that there was a fight. It was not unheard of for a couple of truckers to settle their business in the back lot of a stop. It only ever became a situation when some busy body stuck their nose in where it wasn’t needed.

He set his brake and climbed out onto the stoop of his cab. From his vantage point it was one of those situations that he ha
ted and blamed on the younger generation. Back when he was getting started, a fight was between two men and settled when it was over. But this looked like four or five against one.

Trent reached in and grabbed his club, the one he named “The Equalizer”. He hopped down to the ground and was a
pproaching the fight when one of the punks who had ganged up on the one poor soul turned his way. The first thing that he noticed was that the man’s eyes were…weird. It was like they were all white and filled with goop, but then laced with black tracers.

That was bad, but all the blood was worse. The topper was when two more of the attackers turned to face him. It gave him a perfect view of the pair that were on their knees ripping the guts out of the guy on the ground and stuffing the ropy strands and dark jelly-like pieces into their mouths.

He probably should have run inside the truck stop, but instead he jumped right back into the cab of his rig and hauled ass over to the pumps. Nobody was around and that had never been the case in all his years and the hundreds of times he had passed through here. He swiped the company card, filled up, and then hauled ass.

He drove all the rest of the day and into the night. He co
ntinued to listen to the radio which now was beginning to resemble those gawdawful stories. There was even one case where those things got into a cab. Somehow the mic was keyed open and broadcast the whole thing…the screams, the ripping and tearing…

The screaming.

That was when he knew it was real. Nobody could scream like that and be pretending. He drove past stop after stop, each time he neared the more dense population, he saw them. He was thankful for the darkness so that all he saw were the headlights…until he saw the line of red lights in the distance that indicated the traffic had come to a halt.

He had pulled over, climbed out, and hooked up with about thirty other people. And a month l
ater he had met up with some others and they had built their sanctuary. They had taken in lots of people those first days, but most were only “passing through” as they insisted on trying to reach friends, family, and other loved ones.

The sound of a bottle skittering along the floor snapped his focus back to the present. He had his machete in his hand before he had hardly realized it. That sound had come from downstairs.

Heather’s head popped out from one of the rooms down the hall. “What was that?” she whispered.

Trent shrugged and then put a finger to his lips. He poi
nted to the stairs. Heather drew the pistol at her hip, but after a vigorous shake of the head by Trent, she put it back and drew her own blade.