“Where?” Catie asked as she climbed to her feet. “And is there a bathroom…I need to pee.”
“No time for that,” the man brushed off her request and started for the door.
“Suit yourself, but I won’t be the one mopping it up,” Catie snapped.
“You can hold it.”
“Clearly you have never been pregnant.”
The man turned to regard her and his eyes drifted to her belly as if noticing her condition for the first time. With an over-exaggerated sigh that was more fitting of a petulant teenage girl than a man so outwardly rugged looking as this one, he did an about face and took them the other direction up the hall a ways. As they walked, they passed four more racquetball courts. Two of them had covers over the small windows.
The man stopped at a door and took a parade rest pose beside it. He pointed with his hairy chin and then turned his glowering face to Braden. “You pregnant too?”
“Oh…” Braden guffawed, “you are a funny one!” He slapped his thigh for emphasis and then his face went back to solemn. “I’m good.”
Catie shot a raised eyebrow at the young man and then entered the bathroom. It had actually been a ladies locker room by the looks of things. They had taken out the old bathrooms fixtures and replaced them with a row of portable toilets. A woman dressed very similar to Jess was standing beside the blue box on the far left. Her arms were folded across her chest and she regarded Catie with what almost passed as indifference.
“Bathroom escort?” Catie chortled. “What a shitty job.” She forced a fake laugh and then returned the armed woman’s apathetic expression with a roll of her eyes.
She was always entertained by people who tried to put up a front. This girl was maybe in her early twenties. She had a pair of blades at her hips that were too big to be considered knives but too short to be a sword. Her brown hair was pulled up in a topknot and her leather attire had strips of chain that looked to almost be embedded. She was not wearing her gloves and had them tucked into the broad belt that she wore. The girl was short and almost verging on petite which made her look a bit silly with all the gear she was wearing.
“Is somebody out there?” a voice called from inside the portable toilet.
Catie pressed her lips together in thought. The acoustics of the room was playing tricks on her. That voice had sounded amazingly familiar. Only, she knew it couldn’t be who she thought it was since that sort of thing just didn’t happen. Like Kevin always said, “This ain’t the movies.”
Her bladder was suddenly feeling as if it had done a reverse Grinch and shrunk three sizes. The baby was not helping as it seemed to discover it and make it into a punching bag or soccer ball. She was just glad that she hadn’t really dealt with too much nausea.
Catie was halfway across the room when the door opened to the toilet on the far left. There was a single moment when the person emerging had her head down and Catie could not see her face. That had not made a bit of difference. She knew exactly who it was standing in the open doorway to the portable toilet.
Unlike Catie, this woman was not carrying any of her weapons. She was wearing what looked like a rough spun tunic and over-sized flip-flops. She was currently cinching the thin belt that looked as if it could wrap three or four times around the woman’s waist.
Catie froze, her body fighting every single urge to go for one of the weapons she was carrying. Her eyes flicked from the emerging woman to the guard. Either she was doing an excellent job of hiding the emotions that swirled inside her, or the young woman was simply to ignorant to realize or understand. In any case, the guard had moved to the side and had made yet another mistake that told Catie she had no business being part of security.
The guard had moved to the other side of the portable toilet which basically put the woman emerging out in the open and no more than three strides away from where Catie now stood frozen. In that single instant, time seemed to stop. As the woman’s head was raising and turning just slightly so that she would be looking directly at her, Catie had that instance to wonder if the woman would recognize her.
It would not surprise her if that was not the case; but, when the woman’s eyes met Catie’s, it was clear that recognition came quick. The woman’s eyes went wide as it was apparent that she knew exactly who was staring back at her.
Catie felt her lips pull back in a snarl as two words slithered out, fouling her tongue with the taste.
“Cherish Brandini.”
9
I wasn’t going to sit here and wait while somebody was killed. If it was one of my people, then I was going to help. If it was one of the bad guys…well…there might be more. It’s not that I’ve become some sort of bloodthirsty killer, it is just that I am angry and sick and tired of people thinking that just because the zombies came, they can now act any way they want.
As I have said before, I am an avid reader. I love a good story, but I also enjoyed reading history. I was fascinated by the way that the world grew up and seemed to just take off all of a sudden when technology got so out of control that the day you got the newest thing, it was supposedly already out of date. I have no idea how that worked, but I have heard the stories and read from the stack of old magazines that our community has collected over the last several years.
I reached the ground and another series of shouts and screams that sounded an awful lot like somebody either very scared or in a lot of pain erupted from the woods to my left. There was a pause, and then came the explosions…one after another. Jim was now in the mix.
That was all going on sort of downhill from me, and for that I was thankful. It is much easier to sneak up and gain position on somebody that you are above versus coming up at them.
Moving along the natural ridge that kept me out of the trees, I hurried. I paused every so often to listen. There was definitely a fight going on. I could hear shouts now in amongst the screaming and the crying. It sounded horrible and reminded me of the sounds I heard the night that Suzi McFarlane’s camp was taken down.
Suddenly I just needed to be there myself. I knew why I had been put on the second line with so many others my age. We were put there to minimize the possibility that we died today. If the adults broke and were beaten, I had to think a lot of the younger folks hunkered down and trembling with a machete that they had probably never used on anything other than a practice dummy would break and run for their lives if the bad guys showed up. I wanted to at least see for myself how the fight was going. If my side was winning, then I could continue to hang back. However, if I saw where I might be able to help, then that is what I was going to do.
For just a second, my mind flashed on how Jim had tried to warn me off of my first kill. He said that it would change me forever. Maybe this was what he meant. At this very moment, the thought that I might have to kill another human being to defend my home…Stevie…well, that was something that I was okay with. I won’t say I was at peace, but I was okay with knowing it might be the eventuality.
I reached a spot that gave me a view down the hill. Sure enough, on a logging road that ran parallel but below where this old highway used to run was now the scene of a nasty skirmish. I instantly understood why Billy had insisted that all of our people wear red strips of cloth someplace on their person. From up here, it was just a bunch of dark blobs running around like ants that have had their hill kicked, but even from so far above the fray, I caught a flash of red every so often.
I was about to start down and try to find a spot where I might snipe one or two of the bad guys when I heard it. The moan of a zombie is something that you just know. It is like a dog barking or a bird chirping. Sure, you may not know exactly what you are dealing with, but you at least know that it is one of the walking dead.
I had to stand still for a minute, and I almost thought that I had imagined things until I caught movement out of the corner of my eye. Scurrying back to the old highway, I saw the first of them as they rounded a distant corner just down the road a ways.
“Damn,” I breathed to myself.
Coming up the hill was at least fifty of the worst sort of zombie you can encounter. Children.
According to Dr. Zahn, she believes that the child version of a zombie may show limited cognizance because of the fact that a child’s brain is in such a high state of development. She has hypothesized that the child version might even retain memory fragments. There has been more than one case reported where somebody has confronted the child zombie and it not only didn’t attack, but it actually retreated. Billy has stories that many people have a hard time believing, but I know Billy well enough to know that he is not prone to exaggeration. If anything, he minimizes. His story about encountering Emily is pretty incredible.
The approaching zombie children were clustered together, so it was difficult to get numbers, but I had to guess there to be over fifty. I looked over to where I knew another one of the second ring personnel should be positioned. It took me a few seconds, but at last I spotted a dark lump that had to be a person. It was hunched down in some rocks up on the slope above the highway and just a bit behind my position.
I had to climb back up onto the bus (which annoyed the hell out of me; after all, if this person had not seen me waving my arms as I walked, how well were they keeping a lookout?) At last the figure detached from the boulders and stood up, shielding his or her eyes.
I motioned them over. They paused for too long and I made my gesture more emphatic. Whoever this was, when this was over, I was going to rip them a new one. At last the person made their way down the hill. He or she created quite a bit of noise as gravel and small rocks slid down the embankment. I glanced over my shoulder and noticed that the zombie children had obviously heard. They had re-oriented on the sound. Their advance was still slow and I had a moment to take them in.
Unlike regular zombies that lurch and stumble, these sort of creep along. They have their arms out a little from their bodies as if they are preparing to either launch an attack, or turn and run. Of course they don’t actually run, but I had a feeling that they would definitely scurry away if spooked.
I turned back just as the person that I’d waved over came up at a slow jog. I quickly swallowed my annoyance. I recognized the boy. His name was Timmy Jameson. At age thirteen, he was the minimum age that Billy had allowed to be pressed into serving. He had curly brown hair that was far too long and shaggy for normal field work. His eyes were big and brown…and scared. The fear seemed to almost pour out of him as he stood looking down at me from his abnormally tall height of under just six feet. He was as skinny as a bean pole and his giant hands and feet looked almost comical at the ends of his scrawny arms and legs.
“W-w-we aren’t supposed to leave our p-posts,” Timmy stammered the edict given at the briefing.
I took his hand and brought him around the bus so that he could see down the highway. I felt his grip suddenly tighten to the point of painful and had to pry my hand loose.
“Now,” I turned him so that he was facing me and looking me in the eyes, “can you hear the sounds of fighting down below?” I gave him a second to let the noises of battle register. He looked at me and nodded. “Yes, well they will hear it too.” I pointed down towards the zombie children.
He looked from me to the zombies to the embankment leading down to the fighting. Then, he looked back down at me. “We aren’t supposed to leave our posts.”
I bit my tongue. This poor kid was terrified. I don’t think he’d ever been outside the walls until today. That was something I would discuss with Billy when this was over.
“I need you to take position in my spot.”
He looked at me, and the fear now warred with confusion. He started to take a step back and I grabbed his arms.
“I have to get those zombie children to head in another direction, otherwise they might just go down to that little fight and add to the problem. I need you to hold my post. It is an important one.” I reached into my pouch on my hip and pulled out a long cylinder made of bamboo. “This flare needs to be fired if the bad guys start up the hill. You will see them best from on top of that bus.”
“But we aren’t—” Timmy started to recite again.
“Just do what I am telling you!” I snapped perhaps a little harsher than I intended.
Timmy’s mouth clicked shut and I saw his eyes get a little bit glassy looking. It took me a few seconds to realize that he was welling up.
Great
, I thought,
I just made this boy cry
. I let my hands slip down to his and I took them gently.
“Listen, our fighters are doing the hard part. That yelling and screaming that you hear is them fighting the bad guys. We can’t have zombies stumble down on them and make things worse, can we?” He shook his head as the first tear leaked from his left eye and carved a trail through the dust on his face from when he’d slid down the rocky embankment. “You will be a lot safer here than you would be up on that hill.”
He blinked away the tears and his expression changed a little. “For reals?” he asked with the tears in his eyes causing his voice to crack just a bit.
I opened my mouth and then considered what I was saying. That last bit had just come out, but I didn’t have any idea how that might be possible, yet, apparently, my having said it was swaying his reluctance.
“Absolutely,” I said slowly, drawing out that word as my mind raced to come up with an explanation or reason to support such a random claim. “If our line breaks and the bad guys come, you will be able to lob a few of these.” I produced my little clay explosive devices. Timmy’s eyes went wide. Everybody knew about Jim and his explosives, but not many got to actually handle them…other than Jim, of course.
“What do I do with them?”
“You just light this cloth strip. I already have a small torch up on the bus that is burning, as well as a few extras if you need to light a fresh one. After the strip catches, all you do is throw as hard as you can in the direction of the bad guys. It will catch everything in a pretty big area on fire, so be sure who you are throwing at and that none of our guys are in the mix.”
“Look for the red flags,” Timmy spoke the words as if in a trance. His eyes were locked on the little explosive that I held in my hand. On a whim, I raised my hand just a bit and lowered it. Sure enough, he followed the gesture, giving a slight nod of his head.
“Be sure!” I reached over and guided his chin so that he was looking at me again. “This stuff burns hot and nasty.”
“Okay.” He accepted the two explosives that I handed to him and stuffed them in the large pouch on his hip and then went to the bus. I waited until he was all the way up before I turned and started for the zombie children.
I still had four of the fire bombs in my own pouch. If I couldn’t just re-direct this mob, then I would use the fire bombs to try and take down the small herd.
I had to struggle to keep my adrenaline rush from sending me over the edge and making me do something careless. Running at zombies was just not something you ever wanted to do; zombie children made that idea even more daunting. There have actually been reports of zombie children luring people into traps where they would end up someplace with no clear exit and find themselves surrounded by a pack of the child zombies.
Our little neck of the woods has another aspect to add to the legend. Billy swears that the group of children that he ran into when he says he saw Emily were in the company of several cats. Everybody knows that cats don’t turn, but they do carry the virus if infected. Over the years, it is believed that cats fed on a steady diet of the undead and have become not only immune, not only carriers, but they supposedly pass on the infection to their kittens. Every cat is now considered a carrier. There have been concentrated efforts to completely eliminate them from the earth, but it was eventually decided that it would be next to impossible.
There is a town near here that is supposedly overrun with the feline beasts. If you believe the stories, there are houses full of useable supplies from the Old World, but nobody dares to go into that place. They have become so ferocious and territorial that supposedly a group of immunes went in and were torn to ribbons.
As I headed down the gradual slope and towards the herd of zombie children, my eyes were scanning the sides of the road intently and trying desperately to see if there might be more of them hidden and waiting to ambush me. Once I was within about fifty or so yards, I stopped advancing.
“Crap,” I swore.
Weaving in and out between the legs of the zombie children were cats…lots and lots of cats. That pretty much made up my mind as to how I was going to deal with these things. The thought of trying to perhaps lure them away was now replaced by the idea that I had to torch these things right now.
I reached in my pouch and pulled out the first of the fire bombs. I had plenty of open space between them and me so I knelt on the spot and pulled out my tinderbox. There was plenty of sticks, twigs, and such just lying about to feed into my flame once I got it going. In no time, a small fire was sputtering. I dipped the cloth wick or fuse or whatever it was in the flames and stood up. By now, the zombie children were about thirty yards away.
I stood up and took a few steps back out of sheer reflex at seeing that many zombies so close to where I stood. Distance is a funny thing; when I looked at them as a threat, they were pretty close, but when I considered how far I would have to throw this explosive, they were a long ways away.
As much as my mind screamed in protest, I needed to get closer. My best chance for maximum impact was for this little baby to land in the midst of the herd. As soon as I started for them, a few of the zombie children stopped advancing. Slowly, the rest followed suit until they had all ceased moving. That was creepy all by itself, but the cats stopped as well, seemingly content to weave in and out of the legs of the little zombies.