DEAD: Darkness Before Dawn (32 page)

The past few nights, there looked to have been a lot of acti
vity in the area. He and Cynthia had heard shooting on at least five separate occasions since they had taken up hiding in their current location. The one thing that they had not seen were zombies.

“So, when do we go dow
n and take a look for ourselves?” Glenn asked as Cynthia came out to join him.

“I think tonight is good.”

They had been planning this for the past several days. They were simply waiting for the right time.

“With that moon so bright, we should be able to find plenty of dar
k shadows to hide in, and at the same time, we should be able to see fairly decent for the most part.” Cynthia was already holding both packs in her hands.

Glenn nodded and slipped his on. Without a word, the two worked their way down into fringes of the town of Moab. They had plotted a general course that took them through a few very large circular crops that had become incredibly dense. The
vegetation, which was now mostly weeds and thickets, was tall enough that they could make their way through standing up.

It took them longer than expected, but eventually they a
rrived at the outskirts of the duplex development. It was clear to Glenn immediately that there had been some heavy fighting in the area that took place since last time he’d been here.

Bodies
, which thankfully only looked like black lumps, could be seen scattered here and there. None of them were moving, which was a good sign.

Glenn led the way as he and Cynthia crept closer to the edge of the development. A few times, they had to detour slightly to take down a zombie that would wander past. It was slow work and it seemed that, for some reason, every single sound was magnified
a hundred times; at least when it was caused by either one of them.

“Stop!” Glenn hissed.

Cynthia froze, but her hand flexed once on the hilt of her machete as if for reassurance. Glenn motioned to a low wall that acted as a fence for a duplex just off to their left. The pair scurried over and pressed their backs to it.

A stran
ge mewling growl came from just around the corner. It sounded like a zombie that was perhaps a bit agitated. It was also in the exact direction that they needed to go if they were going to get a look at that house. Glenn still was not exactly sure what Cynthia hoped to discover. However, he would do whatever he could so that she could get closure. He just hoped that she got it soon so that they could get the heck away from this place.

He scanned the area, but it seemed strange and unfamiliar in the darkness. At last, his eyes saw a flicker of light to the left. The dark silhouette of the copse of trees confirmed that they were in the right place. He pointed it out to Cynthia who was not paying attention to him at the moment. Her eyes were looking over the low wall of the fence they were pressed against.

Twice Glenn tugged at her sleeve, but she did not seem to notice. He got up to his knees and peered over the top to see what she might be looking at. His eyes scanned, but they did not see anything beyond a few hanging bodies. These were like the ones he, Kyle, and Mel had discovered the last time he’d been here. They were hung up from some of the wooden beams that stuck out above the garages of some of the homes as a sort of décor. This would make it so that zombies could get to them, but only do enough damage to the lower extremities.

Cynthia rose to her feet and started for a particular house. Twice her arm came out almost as an
afterthought as a zombie closed in. Each time, the approaching zombie lost its head, body collapsing to the ground. Glenn paused both times to spike the head while the mouth moved soundlessly and the eyes looked up at him in what he considered perhaps the creepiest thing ever.

He caught up to her as she stood at the foot of a driveway. There were a half dozen figures hanging from the overhang. All had been savaged from about the knees down; a couple were missing one or both legs. It took Glenn a moment to realize what he was seeing.

“Kyle,” Cynthia breathed.

Sure enough, dangling from one of the lines was his wife’s brother. The face that stared at them was barely
recognizable, but there was still no mistaking the identity. Two bodies over, hands reaching for them, and easily the most animated of the zombies was what had once been Mel. Her arms would flail, causing the body to spin. This only seemed to infuriate the Mel-zombie. (Glenn wondered only briefly if zombies got angry.)

Cynthia walked up to her brother and stood below him for a moment. She whispered something that Glenn could not hear, then she turned to face her husband.

“We can’t leave them like this. I know it is not really them anymore, but still…” Cynthia’s voice became somewhat choked as the emotions overwhelmed her at the realization of the loss.

“I’ll go up on the roof,” Glenn offered.

He climbed up and moved to where the bodies were all hanging. He decided that he should just finish them all off since he was already there, and so he went along the row, plunging his blade down into the tops of each head.

He finished and was climbing to his feet when he caught a flash of light. It looked like it was one street over. Scurrying to the lip of the roof, he swung his legs over and hopped down.

Cynthia was still standing below the now defunct corpse of her brother. Glenn grabbed her hand and pulled her into the shadows beside the house. He quickly told her what he had seen, and that it looked like it was heading their direction.

While he hated the fact that his wife had actually seen what had become of her brother, he was glad that she had the closure she needed. Now they could get the hell out of this place. The sooner the better as far as he was concerned.

A beam of light suddenly appeared on the street in front of the house that they were hiding behind. It was sweeping back and forth, but did not seem to be actually looking for anything in particular.

After several agonizingly slow seconds, a figure walked past. It was a sentry, but it seemed as if there was only one. Glenn eyed the rifle slung so casually over the person’s shou
lder. He was weighing the pros and cons of attacking the sentry when Cynthia dashed out from their hiding place.

“Looks like that decision is made,” he said as he took off a
fter his wife.

Five minutes later, they had two things: a rifle…and a tied up prisoner.

***

Chad dropped to his knees in a mix of frustration and e
xhaustion. He had heard people say things about reaching a limit, but he had always simply dismissed it as weakness. In his mind, or at least in his mind before the dead rose and began to eat the living, a person’s limits were a figment of that person’s imagination…a manifestation of their own inability.

Yet, here
he knelt, in the middle of a clearing, surrounded by the now decimated corpses of a small pack of zombie children. His body had nothing left, and his leg no longer felt as if it could hold his weight. Twice he had tried to stand; both times he had collapsed to the ground as a dull ache unlike anything he had ever felt shot up into his hip and down to his foot.

He had pulled his pants leg up at one point, but it was too dark to see anything. The clouds had come now and darkness had stolen the world from him.

There were no words for how helpless he felt. He had instead turned to screaming his daughter’s name over and over until his voice, much like the rest of his body, failed him. Now all he could manage was a hoarse wheezing croak.

Clutching the shovel, his head turned at the sound of every twig that snapped or branch that rustled on the breeze…which was beginning to develop into a rather steady wind.

The night dragged on, and the deep-seated exhaustion tried its best to force Chad into a state of unconsciousness. Yet, despite it all, he resisted that urge to give in and close his eyes.
No
, he thought bitterly,
I will not give in to that weakness. My daughter is out there and she needs me. I will find her no matter what!

As a gray dawn began to creep into the sky, Chad at least had an idea of which direction was east. A lot of good that did him. Somewhere around the time he took off across that park for his daughter, he simply lost track of where he was. After resc
uing her, he had not cared which direction he ran since he had her in his arms. He cared nothing about making it back to Dustin’s compound. Not that he had anything against the man, but his only care and concern in the world was Ronni. After that…everything else came in a distant second.

For the first time in a while, he planted the shovel into the ground and used it to try and get to his feet. How he ended up on his back, he had no idea. The taste of bile in his throat was the first indication that he had vomited.
Chad wiped at his mouth with the back of his hand and felt a thick slime coat his skin.

It took him some time, but eventually he managed to make it back up to a sitting position. The shovel was beside him, still jutting up from the ground.

And then his senses returned in full. The pain in his leg had seemed to grow until he now felt it in his skull, each temple threatening to explode. He blinked away the tears and pulled up his pant leg. Now that he was able to see, he wished for the darkness.

The wound on his calf was an ugly, puckered thing. Clear fluid and something greenish-yell
ow mixed with the blood that oozed from it when he touched the angry redness that went almost from his ankle to his knee.

Turning over onto his belly, Chad tried to crawl, but found no more success. The movement of his head caused him to swoon. The world went gray and almost winked out entirely. Freezing like a statue, he pushed the feelings of
nausea away. Soon, he was left with only the pain.

Gently, he eased himself to the ground and simply lay there for a moment as if all he needed was to catch his breath. Minutes ticked away and the world started to melt. He would find himself suddenly aware of his surroundings, which to him meant he must have lost consciousness at some point. His biggest dilemma was in not knowing for how long.

Each time lucidity danced on the fringes, he tried to grasp it and pull himself up. Each time was met with failure. The pain was unbearable, and now he was starting to shiver. He wiped at his eyes but they would not clear.

His mind began to mix everything up. He knew he was su
pposed to do something, but he was not exactly sure what. Twice he thought he heard somebody say his name, but that didn’t make any sense. Who would be calling him here?

As a light rain began to fall on him, his shivering grew steadily worse. Soon, despite the pain, he had curled up into a tight ball. As the darkness claimed him, he had one single m
oment where everything seemed to clear. His daughter! She was alone and in danger.

“Ronni!” Chad cried.

Through the gloom, he saw a pair of legs coming his way…and another…and another. He knew that his time had come. He was defenseless…he welcomed unconsciousness as it would spare him from a horrific ending.

***

“You can say it any way you like,” the woman yelled, shaking a finger at Jody like he was an errant school boy, “but you are offering us up as sex slaves…whores…basically breeding factories.”

Jody pinched the bridge of his nose with his index finger and thumb. This had been going on for over an hour. Not that he felt he had the right to say that they were not handling it well, but he also knew that the clock was running. Pitts had given them twelve hours to return with an answer.

It had been the most painful thing he had ever done in his life, but, and this was the part he hated to admit, he saw Pitts’ point. It might not be the most humane way to do it, but he had trouble arguing against the logic.

The way Pitts had laid it out was simple. His community of between two and three thousand people
had one resource that they could not cultivate: genetics. They were at a ratio of over a hundred to one when it came to men and women. (Although Jody was not fond of the sergeant’s definition of “woman” which included every female of child bearing age.) If they wanted to have a chance at sustaining life and keeping the gene pool viable, they needed to increase their “stock” (Another term he used that made Jody’s flesh crawl.)

“I will make a deal with you, Rafe,” Sergeant Pitts said, “you allow us to bring half of your women to our community and we will give you an equal number of ours. Once they have conceived, you then return the woman and any female child, but keep the males. Both our communities will benefit.”

“You mean your women are basically used as breeders?” Jody had gasped.

“They are treated like queens. They have a detachment of guards any time they go out in public to ensure their safety. We had issues with some of the girls being raped early on, that can cause some serious damage.”

“You’re all heart,” Jody muttered.

“Listen, you can do this the easy way or you can do it the hard way. The hard way would suck since all of the men in your community end up dead. And of course we would run the risk of losing some of the women as collateral damage—” Pitts was saying
this like you might discuss the weather…or crops.