Enduring Armageddon (17 page)

“Look out!” Sam hissed and swung a piece of wood like a bat over my head and into the body of another creature that lurched towards me. It was knocked off balance enough to stagger backwards and decided to go after Sam instead of me. I struggled to pull myself out of the hole so I could help her out. Suddenly, Jesse rushed out from behind a burned-out convertible. The big man swung a metal rod into the head of the creature that had been intent on attacking Sam after she hit it. I flinched as I heard bones snap and the rod indented the top of its head a good three or four inches.

That zombie crumpled like a rag doll and Jesse hit the second one in the shoulder with his bar. It was enough force to knock it over and I shuffled forward in the snow and jumped on top of its back. I grabbed the thing by the forehead and pulled its chin away from its chest. My knife slid across the mutant’s throat and I was rewarded with a rush of putrid air and a satisfying fountain of blood in the snow.

I heard Jesse grunt as he beat the last creature’s head to a pulp. He gave me a thumbs-up and sauntered over to the first creature that he’d hit and used another overhand swing to bring the bar down onto the back of its head. He swung again and again until a bloody pink mass oozed out of the zombie’s ears.

I nodded to him and went to the first mutant that I’d paralyzed and flipped it over with my foot. Its mouth continued to open and snap shut while the eyes looked around wildly. I bent down beside it and drove my KA-BAR through its eye socket into its brain. The thing died with its mouth open, still waiting to bite an unfortunate passerby.

We made our way back to where Robert sat. He regarded each of us and asked, “Did any of you get bitten?”

“I’m fine. What about you, Chuck? Looked like you were in another up-close fight with that first one.”

“I’m good, he never got close enough to bite me,” I replied. “Thank you for saving my ass, Sam. It’s a good thing that you came along when you did, Jesse. I don’t know if we could have handled all four of them.”

“No problem, bro. You’d have done the same for me,” Jesse said with a pat on my shoulder.

Robert’s shoulders began to heave up and down softly. Jesse placed his hands on his hips and asked, “What the hell is wrong now, Robert?”

I looked back and forth between the two. It was evident that Jesse either didn’t like Robert or didn’t like being held back by an injured member of our group. Robert let out a little sob and blubbered, “I’m useless. Abso-fuckinglutely useless to you guys. I would have been attacked by those things and there’s not much I could have done to defend myself without using a gun.” He jabbed at his facemask to wipe the tears. “Fuck!” he hissed in frustration at the plastic goggles and pulled his mask away from his face to dry the tears.

Jesse cocked his head to the side and stared at the injured man. “Look, Robert, I’m sorry that you’re injured, but you’re still part of the team. I’ve been acting like a dick because I’m worried about my wife and want to get back to Virden as soon as possible.” His shoulders slumped a little bit and he said, “I’m sorry, man. Let’s get going so we can find a car and you can get some rest on the way back.”

Jesse reached out his hand. Robert took it and he pulled the wounded man to his feet. Once he was standing, Jesse shook his hand. “I’ll do my best to get you back safely, alright?”

“Yeah, man. Thanks,” Robert replied.

“Aww, how sweet,” Sam inserted herself into the conversation in a way that only a teenager could do. “You guys need some more time? Maybe a room?”

“Shut up, kid,” Jesse said as he placed a big, meaty hand on the top of her head. “If you weren’t so darn cute, I’d leave you out here for the zombies to eat.”

“Geez, get your paw off of me!” she said as she squirmed away. “Even through this mask I can smell your armpits when you raise your arm. It’s called soap. There’s more than enough of it around now that most of the people are dead, so use it!”

Jesse raised his arm again and pretended to sniff his pits. “We’ve gotta get you a new mask, I can’t smell anything.”

“Good. Glad to see that everyone’s made up. Let’s get the fuck away from here before ten more of those things show up,” I muttered while I gestured towards the four mutants that we’d just killed.

Where there was one zombie, there was usually another not too far away. That was one thing that we could all agree on. I slid my KA-BAR back into the sheath and made a mental note to not forget my baseball bat sitting beside the front door when I picked up Rebecca and our backpacks. The knife was great, but the blunt baseball bat was better and I should have known better than to leave it at home.

* * *

We made it through Chatham and found an old farmhouse along Highway 4 that had a truck parked in back. We hadn’t brought the gathering squad this far north along the highway because it was so close to Springfield and it seemed like they hadn’t come this far south yet, so the farmhouse was still intact.

I crept up onto the porch and stood to the side of the door in case the owners tried to shoot through it. Then I knocked. There wasn’t any answer so I knocked again, harder. Still no answer but I knocked a third time. I shook my head at Jesse and he went around the side of the house to peek in the windows.

He shuffled his way back around the other side after a few minutes. “There’s a couple of bodies inside, but I didn’t see anyone else,” he said.

I turned the handle and it wasn’t locked so I pushed the door open. “Hello?” I said as loudly as I dared for fear of attracting more zombies. There still wasn’t any answer so I pulled out my knife and went inside with Jesse right behind me.

The house was a total wreck. It appeared that the former residents had broken apart most of their furniture to use as firewood. The fireplace contained half-burned pieces of wood and fabric from clothing long since burnt out. I walked over to the old man and woman huddled together under mounds of blankets on a loveseat near the fireplace. They looked peaceful, almost like they were asleep.

I couldn’t resist myself, so I shook them to see if they were still alive, but they weren’t. We searched the house and found some food in the pantry and plenty of water, but not much else. Jesse went out to bring in Robert and Sam while I played medical examiner.

There was a hatchet on the floor beside the loveseat, but I determined that it was for chopping up pieces of furniture for the fire instead of a murder weapon. They’d piled all sorts of clothes, towels and curtains around the room to use as fuel. In the end, it seemed like nothing kept them warm enough and they froze to death.

Then I had an idea from an accident that had happened to neighbors when I was a kid. I bent down towards the fireplace and looked up the flue into the chimney. I was right. All the shit they’d been burning had coated the inside of the chimney with a thick tar-like substance that built up over time and almost completely blocked the smoke’s escape route at the top. The smoke and chemicals from the treated wood and fabric had nowhere to go but into the house. The poor bastards probably died in their sleep from carbon monoxide poisoning, not from freezing to death. I regarded the man and woman again and was glad that they died without knowing the horrors that awaited others in this world.

Jesse and Sam came in with their arms wrapped around Robert to support him. “Figured it out,” I said.

“Figured what out?” Robert asked.

“These people,” I replied. “The chimney’s closed up, so they must have died from carbon monoxide poisoning when they were burning all this furniture and stuff.”

“Hmpf,” was all I got out of Jesse.

“And I found the truck keys,” I said as I tossed them to him.

“Now that’s important news!” Robert responded excitedly and high-fived Sam.

“I’m gonna go start ‘er up and make sure it runs,” Jesse said.

“Wait!” I said. “Let’s get what we can from here and then all go to the truck together. If it starts up, we can just go. I don’t like the idea of making more noise than we have to since those woods are right there beside the house. If we start it, then come back inside, there’s no telling what will creep out to see what’s going on.”

“Good point. I’ll see if they have any bags or anything that we can put the food from the kitchen into,” Jesse said as he nodded his head.

I looked around the room to see if there was anything else we could use while Robert hobbled to the bathroom to relieve himself. There wasn’t much, but I did find a couple of sweatshirts that hadn’t been sacrificed to the fire before the former occupants died.

Jesse came back from the kitchen carrying a plastic grocery bag full of canned goods and four bowls. He sat down on the floor and opened a family-sized can of pork & beans, which he then poured into the bowls evenly. The table was probably one of the first things that the old man chopped up, so we made do by leaning against the wall.

I kept my social commentary about the state of what we’d become comfortable with to myself. Here we were sitting ten feet from a pair of dead bodies and we didn’t care at all. I thought about my unborn child and wondered if things would still be this bad by the time he or she was old enough to understand what was happening around them. I hoped not. I hoped that we’d be able to make it past these dark days and reemerge as a peaceful society. I hoped, but after the last few days—months—of violence, I wasn’t optimistic.

The three of us had finished eating by the time Robert finally reemerged from the bathroom. “Do not go in there,” he said waving his hand in front of his nose.

“Eww, gross, man. Did you wash your hands?” Sam asked.

Robert shook his head and worked his way along the wall to where we were sitting. We waited for him to complete his meal before collecting everything up. We didn’t know how long we’d be on the road, so I used some old clothes to clean the bowls and silverware and wrapped them in a clean t-shirt to be packed away in the plastic bag as well.

“Alright, looks like everything is set. Let’s go,” I said.

We went out the back door and got into the truck. I didn’t want to risk being confined to the cab if something stumbled out of the woods so I sat in the snow in the bed of the truck while the other three sat inside. The truck took several attempts to start, but thankfully the battery wasn’t dead and it finally cranked up. Jesse gave an ill-advised whoop of excitement and I hopped down and forced my way into the cab of the truck.

We made our way cautiously down Highway 4 towards Virden. We’d started early again today and walked for about five miles through the snow, but the radio’s clock showed that we’d taken a lot longer than we should have. It was nearing 6:00 p.m. and would probably be dark before we made it the twenty-five miles back to the stronghold. Jesse drove cautiously, but at a steady pace that ate up the miles faster than we could have ever hoped to travel on foot.

The time passed fairly quickly as Jesse drove, but something kept nagging me to urge him to drive faster. I didn’t say anything though because we were already traveling faster than was safe in these conditions. Jesse pushed it since we were literally the only people on the road, although I was certain that there were several times when we’d completely left the road and were driving in the ditch.

The old man must have kept the truck in peak condition because the engine was quieter than I’d have thought the old clunker would have been. As we got nearer to Virden, we could hear automatic gunfire over the engine’s dull roar and the low, dark clouds sitting over the town reflected the light from a hundred dancing fires. “Shit!” Jesse exclaimed and punched the gas pedal down.

We burst around a corner to a scene of utter chaos. Virden was virtually surrounded by an armada of trucks and SUVs studded with added-on armor and roll cages. Whereas our force had been made up of semis and means to transport looted goods, this was an army specifically designed for war. We’d been overmatched when we went to their city and fought against an enemy that we never really came face to face with, but now that I saw the equipment that they operated with, I was positive that we’d been fooled into attacking a much stronger opponent.

“Whoa,
Mad Max
to the extreme,” Sam muttered.

People milled around the vehicles and stared at us as we wove our way through the ring of trucks surrounding Virden until they finally realized that we weren’t part of their crew. Several of them took pot shots at us when we burst through the inner ring of vehicles and went through an open section in the wall. As we drove by the ruined fence, I realized that they’d hooked chains up to it and pulled it apart with tow trucks. Smart and effective.

The windshield splintered and spider-webbed as it received several rounds from defenders inside the town. I pulled out my little armband and held it out the window as we continued to race towards the barriers set up inside the wall facing the hole we’d just driven through. Jesse slammed on the brakes and yelled out the window, “Stop firing you stupid fucks! We’re from Virden!”

It took him a few more shouts, combined with my pathetic armband-waving, to get the defenders to stop shooting at us. The leader at the barrier was one of the men I’d seen the other day at Allan’s house. “Jesse, is that you?” he asked tentatively.

“Yes Nabih, you stupid idiot, it’s me. Let us through, we’ve got to go see Allan,” Jesse replied.

“Who else do you have with you?” Nabih asked.

“I’ve got Chuck Broussard, Robert Cavender and Sam…what’s your last name?” Jesse asked as rounds impacted the back of the truck from a few attackers who continued to fire at us.

“Hustead,” she replied from underneath Robert.

I took the opportunity to raise my head above the dashboard and peek out at the defenders. I wasn’t certain, but most of the shapes seemed much too small to be the men and women that I’d taken with me to attack Springfield.

“Alright, come over, but you won’t be able to make it through,” Nabih said. Jesse eased his foot off the brake and drove forward. He pulled the truck off to the side of the road where it was blocked from the view of the attackers and we got out. Several children peeked over the rows of cars that they’d set up as barriers and I knew that they were all goners if they stayed to defend this town.