Deadfall: Hunters (4 page)

I saw other heads nodding in agreement, and even the older girl looked away. Something important was happening here and it seemed once again that we were going to be in the middle of it.

I tried standing up and had to lean against the busted Prius.

“Hey, we are only here to try to find supplies and we will gladly leave. Why do you think we can help a sick person?”

Janine took the initiative again.

“Because we just don’t know what to do. He had a cough, then it turned into a fever and now he can barely get out of bed. Blevin is kind of our, guardian,” she paused, “If he dies…”

She faltered.  At that point I remembered something about someone wanting to kill them. I looked over at Aaron, but quickly realized that he was in no condition to make decisions much less stand up. If anything we would need to help him too. I glanced over at Tague and he shrugged his shoulders. It was up to me. The logical part of my brain, the part that helped me survive, said no, walk away. But then, I hadn’t survived due to logic, only luck, so damn that part of my brain.

“We can try to help, but, were not doctors,” was all I could offer.

They pulled two trucks around and we piled in. As we drove down the highway, I told them I would have to radio the others on the boat to let them know we were ok. Over the radio, I explained to Maxie what we had put ourselves into, but on the other end of the radio, Maxie stammered something.

“Wait, I think I know. Hold on.” The radio went silent for a moment until Lucy radioed back.

“He’s digging around for some book of some kind. He’s going on about some sailor’s ailments manual.”

Something about what I had said had made Maxie remember something. Hopefully it was something useful.

The girls drove us down the road and then pulled right down a smaller road until we reached what had been a k-8 school. As we pulled up, we were greeted by maybe half a dozen more girls. Something was feeling odd about this. How had all of these teenage girls survived the zombies? That I know the end of this makes it all the weirder. 

Tague and I were rushed in to the school while some of the girls helped Aaron, who was still wobbly. We were taken in to one of the classrooms, where a few more girls were huddled around something. As we got close, we could hear deathly silence as all the girls hushed at our sight. I do remember clearly trying to swallow and wondering why my throat was just so dry at the moment.

As we were moved to the object they were huddled around, we saw, to our amazement, one of the largest men I had ever seen in my life. He wasn’t an obese man, not large in that sense, just a very large man. He was very white, yet not quite albino, with short bright red hair. He was lying on a cot that was clearly not made for a man his size. He was visibly sick, barely conscious. Every few seconds, he would have a coughing fit, thick and heavy, yet the kind that never seemed to clear. We walked up to him, knelt down next to him, and touched his arm. He was burning up.

This was, though, the extent of my doctoring knowledge.

I called Maxie back up on the radio, hoping he had something for me. Lucy replied that he had found a book and was digging through it. Tague meanwhile asked the girls if they had taken his temperature. They replied they had, that he had gotten as high as 104. Even I knew that was bad. They had given him pain killers which help sometimes, but the last couple of pain killers had done nothing. Something about the situation had me recalling something similar in my life, but at the time, I was just too distracted by the scene that I couldn’t recall anything useful. It wasn’t until Maxie radioed back that I remembered.

“Hey Brian, I think he has pneumonia.”

Then it hit me. My dad had gotten sick once and gotten pneumonia once. Similar symptoms, coughing, fever, hard of breathing. Of course, we had never let it get that far though, and had gotten a prescription for an antibiotic. This man here, Blevin, had been under the weather far longer and had gotten himself far too sick. In the days before antibiotics, pneumonia easily killed people. Blevin was at deaths door.

At that very moment, I found myself imagining a 300lb zombie romping through this school. Not a very good thought.

Maxie confirmed that he needed a treatment of antibiotics, but the few girls that knew what that even was knew for sure they had none. It was time for a raid. Tague and I quickly found out that there were in fact a few pharmacies in town and with three of the girls, were quickly heading out. I tried explaining to Aaron what we were doing and where we were going, but I don’t think he understood.

We found a CVS pharmacy and with Maxie’s help, we were able to identify one of the most common antibiotics available: amoxicillin, a penicillin based medicine. When I mentioned it, one of the girls remembered having used that as well in the past, she just hadn’t remembered what it was for.  As I talked to the girls, I caught, out of the corner of my eyes, Tague stashing a bunch of the medicine, along with some other stuff, into his own bag. It dawned on me that it was quite possible that we didn’t have any of this extremely simple yet useful medicine on board the One Star Wonder.

Back at the school, we made some calculated guesses as far as dosage and force fed the pills into the man’s mouth, forcing him to swallow them along with plenty of water. He drank the water greedily and then slouched back down on the cot, clothes drenched in sweat. I sat back as Tague talked to some of the girls and I radioed back to the boat. I explained to Lucy the full details of everything that had happened, including Aaron’s head bump. He had joined us in the room after we had returned, complaining of a headache, but otherwise, the same. I do remember laughing when he walked up to me and said: “Where did all the girls come from?”

Where did they all come from?

Here is what I got from them, both that night and later on. The girl, Janine, was my biggest source of information. Clever one that girl, she is very aware of her surroundings. Regardless, I’ve confirmed what I have written here with her again. I knew deep down inside when I began hearing this that something awful was going on here.

There were thirty three girls on the island, from the ages of twelve to seventeen. About a third had lived on the island before Deadfall, another third had been on the island for vacation and the other third had been brought there. For every single one of them, they were still here against their wishes. Many of them wished they were dead instead. When the zombies had begun to rise, many of the families that lived here fled the island, but some remained behind, thinking, and maybe correctly, that an island was easier to defend than being on the run. So the ones that stayed behind got together and hired what can essentially be considered as a pre Deadfall mercenary group. I really can’t elaborate beyond this because the girls didn’t quite know who they were, just former military type guys who know worked security details for money. Again, mercenaries.

This security group had done their job very well. They had cleared the island of any zombies and had barred the way into the island for others and then actually went above and beyond and started raiding the mainland for food and supplies for everyone on the island. For those first few months after Deadfall, the families on the island and the mercenaries did well, surviving in safety. Then, two of the mercenaries showed up dead, shots to the head. The leader of the mercenary group, a man named Cain, accused a man, father, of one of the families, of having killed them, and summarily executed the man in front of all the families. When others reacted in shock and horror, he proceeded to have all the men on the island killed. He started out with just a few, but in one night, drug everyone out to the streets and killed every single male.

The self-designated ruler of Biscayne Island had designs to create himself a new kingdom. He offered to each of his men any of the women left over. The only bright part of this horribly dark story is that many of his own men revolted in disgust. To these he offered to let go if they left and never came back. He even allowed each man to take with him a “woman and family” as reward for their service. Every single man that left took as many people as they could with him, just to save them from the doom each one of the former soldiers saw coming.

To those that remained, they now belonged to Cain and his men. But even the men that remained did not last long. As many other rulers in history, Cain became paranoid, dreaming that any one of his men might want to take his new found throne away from him. He began finding reasons to have them executed, slowly though, just one at a time, so as not to start a rebellion. The few that remained were far more interested in having women whenever they wanted to that they swore some kind of oath to Cain. He had them barred from the island, and were only allowed to return twice a month. If they brought him supplies, they could have all the women they wanted for a night, twice a month.

Cain held all the adult women with him and his trusted guard, Horace, at one of the larger resorts along the beachfront. For the rest of the females left on the island, he had entrusted to this giant of a man, Blevin. When I asked the girls about the younger girls, those aged under ten, nobody would answer me. Janine whispered to me later on, that no one talked about it, but that Cain had taken all the younger children away on a boat, and they could only imagine what had been done to them.

Cain had found Blevin somewhere in Miami. The giant brute of a man had been surrounded by a huge gang of zombies and Cain had rescued him. Blevin had owed him his life and had done some ridiculous life debt thing, just like you’d hear about in the movies. The rumor was that Blevin hadn’t needed being saved and that the giant brute was just as efficient with his hands as any weapon was. The story was that Cain had found him surrounded by zombies, yes, but destroyed ones. Blevin had taken care of over thirty zombie with his bare hands. Cain had tricked him into thinking that a far larger number had been near him and that Cain had saved him from them.

Cain put Blevin in charge of watching over the “virgins” as he categorized them. The older girls knew exactly what was in store for them, although Cain had the “decency” to wait until they turned eighteen. Already two girls had reached the dreaded age and had been taken away to the resort. Apparently, Blevin had no designs to spoil any of the girls and so Cain found it useful to have him with them.

When I asked why the girls didn’t simply escape the island, the reason was easy to follow. First, they had no idea how to survive off the island. Cain provided food for them. But more importantly, Cain had warned that if any of them fled, that he would kill the respective mother, and each of the girls here had a mother locked away in that resort. It was a fate worse than death, knowing you can’t escape, and worse yet, knowing that your turn was coming. The older girls seemed resigned to their fates while the younger ones, who might not fully understand it, were more willing, as in the case of Janine, to reach out to strangers to help keep Blevin alive.

Keeping him alive was critical it seemed. Cain had no real use for the younger girls. He didn’t seem like the patient kind and probably wouldn’t wait for years for them to grow up. In the meantime though, Blevin had taken a liking to the girls, and had talked Cain out of just killing them, and so to keep his giant happy, he had allowed them to live. When I heard this, I understood how important it was for them to keep the giant alive. I could only hope that we had gotten here in time to save him.

I also thought later that, we might have just walked into a terrible situation, but after having talked it over with the group, Lucy quickly jumped out to the defense of the girls. As usual, she was right. At least, as far as the girls assured us, Cain and his guard had no idea we were here and the other men were not due back for another week. Our biggest hurdle was the giant of a man still lying on the cot. He might like the girls, but he had sworn his life debt to the tyrant on the island. I wouldn’t want to have saved him just to have to kill him again.

I hoped a gun would kill him if it came to it.

That first night, after leaving the medicine with them, we were left back off at the Marina and we got back on the boat. Aaron crashed right away, something that in the hindsight probably wasn’t a good idea with his probable concussion, but we ignored it at the time. The rest of us stayed up late that night discussing our situation and the possibilities. Obviously we wanted to help, but we would have to be careful. That last thing we needed was for one of us to get hurt or worse. It seemed clear to us that this Cain would kill us if he got the chance, and worse for Lucy. Tague also pointed out that we would need the girls to be 100% onboard with whatever we did, and that might include the big guy.

The next morning we were greeted by some of the girls, including Janine, at the Marina, and Tague and I were taken back to the school. Everyone seemed to be in a better mood. Blevin was looking and feeling much better. They had already given him his second dose of the medicine and when we walked into the room, he was sitting in a chair at the far corner. I wasn’t sure to expect when we walked in. For all we knew, if would just rip my arms off and use them to bash Tague. Thankfully, he still wasn’t fully recovered. As we walked in, Janine went running up to him, standing next to him. No two people could be so completely different from the other.

I asked Janine, as well as a few of the other girls if we ran any risk with Cain finding out about us. They seemed really sure that we wouldn’t. The would-be tyrant kept himself holed up in his resort with his harem and only came out when his men were due back on the island. None of the girls could remember any time he had come out when the other pirates weren’t here. We had to count on that, because if not, all this help would be for nothing.