It was no surprise to Chad that he woke to his daughter nudging him in the ribs. “Time to get moving, old man!” She laughed and danced back nimbly from his half-hearted swipe.
“That looks…” Chad rubbed his eyes and squinted.
“Yellow?” Ronni gave her Tweety Bird hat a tug, pulling the flaps down over her ears.
“At least I won’t have any problem finding you when you wipe out. That thing can probably be seen from space.”
Chad grabbed his bag and ducked into the bathroom to get suited up. The way his body felt, he probably could have slept another several hours. Leaning forward to be closer to the mirror, he hefted the candle and inspected his face. According to the doctor, the cancer would probably come on fast. He had likened it to a wildfire. Right now, it was smoldering coals, but when it caught, it would be swift and brutal.
He could not help but chuckle at the irony of his situation. He had survived a zombie apocalypse and a myriad of horrible things over the past several years only to fall prey to prostate cancer.
“Hurry up!” Ronni urged, giving the door a solid thump.
“Maybe I will fall and break my neck,” Chad mumbled. “At least then I would never have to tell her.”
Twenty minutes later, the two of them were in the lobby of the mountain resort. Looking out the window, a light snow was falling. The light from the lanterns mounted along the walkway that led to the slopes and cross-country trails were flickering as the large flakes swirled around them.
After some oatmeal, toast with wild mountain blackberry jam, and a hot, sweet rice drink, the father and daughter headed outside. Dawn was just breaking, and they actually had the slopes to themselves for the first couple of hours. Chad showed his daughter some of the snowboarding basics on a gentle slope. She was not thrilled with his insistence that she stay at the bottom of the slope as he made her practice stopping on her heels over and over.
“Stopping is the most important thing you will learn,” he kept insisting.
Her frustration only got worse when a handful of other people arrived and began making runs from the top of the hill. She watched one girl about her age as she hit a mogul and went airborne, turning a full three hundred and sixty degrees before landing with a happy squeal.
At last, Chad seemed satisfied and allowed her to start making runs from farther up the hill. She was certain that her first attempt would have him insisting that she return to the bottom of the hill when she lost control and ended up falling on her butt and then flipping several times before coming to an unceremonious stop in the thick skirt of a large pine tree.
At first she didn’t move, certain that the scolding was about to begin in regards to her obvious lack of control. When she heard nothing, she turned her head and was surprised to see her dad stopped just a few feet away. He was looking down at her with a big smile on his face.
“What’s so funny?” she huffed as she sat up. That action shook all the lower boughs of the pine tree, sending a massive amount of snow cascading down onto her. She shrieked when a bunch of it went down the back of her jacket and made contact with her skin.
“That!” Chad burst into a full on belly laugh. With a hop, he turned his board back down the fall line and let gravity begin to take him away. “See you at the bottom!” he called over his shoulder.
By the time Ronni managed to crawl out from under the bottom limbs of the tree, she was covered in snow and her teeth had started to chatter as a chill wind whipped up and seemed to find every single bit of snow dampened skin on her body all at once.
When she reached the bottom, her dad was sitting on a rock, his board leaning beside him. “How about we go grab something to eat, let you change, and then come back for another try?”
“Just let me make one more run?” Ronni pleaded.
“You sure?” Chad asked, dropping his board and sitting down to strap in, already certain as to his daughter’s answer.
They made their way over to the tow rope that would drag them up the hill. They let go at the spot on the hill that he insisted she not go beyond and made their way to the start of the run.
“You go first,” Chad ushered her past. “I want to actually watch your run this time. We can go over anything that I see when we have lunch.”
Ronni moved to the lip, waving away her dad as he insisted she keep an eye on the fall line. Honestly, she was tired of hearing that phrase. She got it….the fall line was the way the hill sloped.
“Be careful, that hill does not exactly point you in the direction we want to go,” Chad warned. “Make that switch just past the boulders and veer left!” he called after her.
She saw the spot he was talking about and was ready to cut left when she felt like she was about to fall. Throwing herself back, she overcompensated and the board cut hard right and shot over the lip of the little ridge. She was now headed for the thick copse of trees at a speed that was sure to cause injury if she crashed into them. She flopped back and continued to slide several feet until coming to a stop.
She sat up, making sure that there were no snow-laden branches this time, and saw her dad crest the ridge, his speed allowing him to go airborne just a bit and land with enviable ease as he veered towards her.
He was laughing, and then suddenly stopped. His expression changed from playful mocking to horrified in the blink of an eye. She was about to ask him what was wrong when she felt something grab her leg.
***
“We got a live one,” Jess said, motioning Jody over.
The ambush had gone off even better than he could have hoped. His people had managed to slip into position without being noticed. When they popped up from their various locations and fired at the riders, they had taken down all five and even managed to snag all the horses.
Jody walked over to the woman that had survived. She had three bolts sticking out from various locations, fortunately (or not) for her, none of them had struck anything vital. She had one in her left shoulder and two in her left leg, both jutting from her upper thigh.
“How many people in that house?” Jody knelt by the woman.
“Screw you!” the woman managed through clenched teeth.
Reaching down, Jody grabbed the bolt sticking out of her shoulder and yanked it free. The woman screamed and her head lolled back as her eyes rolled up into her head, showing nothing but the whites.
“Wake up!” Jody slapped the girl on the cheeks a few times, not hard, just enough to sting and hopefully bring the woman back around.
When her eyes finally fluttered and she once again looked up at him, there was now a bitter hatred swirling in with the contempt. Personally, Jody could care less. These people had been in on a plot that had involved kidnapping his little girl. Additionally, he was pretty certain that they had plans to attack the community that he had helped carve out into the middle of nowhere.
He remembered thinking that being in such a remote area would reduce the chances of ever having to deal with humans with the exception of the occasional raider. Certainly he had never anticipated having another community spring up. However, he guessed that it was simply a matter of human nature. Weren’t armies one of the first things that societies established throughout history? Certainly it was not to deal with wild animals (or zombies as was the case now), but rather, to protect itself from other humans who wanted more and were not happy with their own lot.
“We can do this the easy way, or you can hold out and see how much pain it takes for you to offer information that you will give up eventually.” Jody reached down and grabbed one of the bolts jutting from her thigh. “And if you think I will let you bleed out, you are mistaken.”
“You people are exactly the kind of animals that George said you were, and you can just go ahead and kill me because I ain’t telling you a damn thing,” the woman managed through the pain.
Jody shrugged and yanked out the next bolt. He heard a few of his crew suck in some air between their teeth in a kind of sympathy to the pain. He was pretty sure that his reputation, whatever it might have been before, was basically ruined at this point. He gave it only a passing thought as he recalled that feeling in his gut when he had discovered his daughter missing.
He woke the woman after he had tied strips of cloth to each of the wounds and pulled them tight. They were already soaked with blood and the woman’s color was such that he did not think she would live much longer at this rate.
Standing up, he turned to the three members of the team that he had simply referred to as Red Shirts up to this point. “Take her back to Hope. Find Danny and tell him to get this woman patched up if she survives the trip. I want her alive when I get home if that is at all possible.”
There were some uncertain looks and Jody screwed on his best impression of a hard core sergeant. “You were chosen to come on this mission by me. This is my mission and I give the orders. Are we clear?”
That received some fast nods and the trio scrambled to get the woman secured, throw her over the back of a horse and a few minutes later were on their way back to Hope. Once they were gone, Jody let out a long sigh that allowed him to release some of the tension that had been building during this period where he had slipped into something uncomfortable and foreign. He suddenly had a new appreciation of Charles “Slider” Montero.
“You okay?” Jess asked after the riders were well out of earshot.
“Not really. I almost feel like I am channeling some sort of evil spirit.” Jody cast a sideways glance at the woman. “Does that make sense?”
“Perfectly,” Jess said with a nod as she patted the man on the shoulder. “You are one of the good guys, Jody. But right now, you have to wear a different hat. You need to be a warrior. That can mean that you have to hold human life in a sense of disregard. If you weren’t bothered by all this, I think I would be having second thoughts about you as our community leader.”
“But I haven’t been the leader in a long time,” Jody protested.
“You may not think so, and that is yet another reason why a majority of the citizens of our community see you as such. When you held that trial, a lot of people realized that we were facing something unprecedented and that we needed somebody to get us to the other side.”
“But like this?” Jody threw his hands up, gesturing to the dead bodies still scattered about them.
“I’m surprised it took this long.” Jess walked over to one of the corpses that showed signs of stirring. Without missing a beat, she knelt and stuck her blade into the temple of the man who appeared to be re-animating. “We are going to have to deal with this probably for at least a generation…most likely a couple. That is simply the way of man.”
The pair started up the road and veered towards the house/outpost that the riders had come from. When a volley of arrows arced up from the house and plunged into the ground about ten feet from them, Jody stopped.
“Not a step closer,” an amplified voice called.
There was a distinct eeriness to the voice as it seemed to echo across the open ground and reverberate. It was definitely a woman’s voice, and six arrows jutted from the ground.
“Is this really the way we want to do this?” Jody finally called back. There was a long stretch of silence and Jody could feel the eyes on him, studying him and plotting his demise.
“You killed our people, do you think we have anything left to discuss?” a new voice finally called.
“We didn’t start it, and I can leave now if you like. But when I come back, I am bringing hell with me and we will wipe your entire community out if that is the only way we can deal with each other.” Jody glanced over at Jess who shrugged and wrinkled her nose.
There was a long silence, and then the answer.
“Bring it.”
***
Entry Thirty-One—
That was interesting.
So, I was actually almost ready to just walk up to the place and knock on the damn door. This Kenneth Mead was seemingly more reclusive than a teenaged boy after getting his first Xbox. For those who do not know what an Xbox was, it was this thing you plugged into your television and played games on. Oddly enough, some of the most popular games involved killing zombies. Sort of ironic, eh? I wonder how many video game geeks were praying for the reset button about five minutes into the apocalypse.
Anyways, I sat and I sat. Every so often, some of the kids would slip out on an errand. Most times it seemed to be a hunting expedition. Usually later that day, whoever left the place would return carrying a fresh hide that they apparently used to carry the meat back to the compound.
It was the fifth day when I was just returning from my twice a day trip to the nearby stream where I would relieve myself, rinse off and then return to my hole in the ground. I always hated that first twenty minutes or so after just returning. That is when I would really be able to tell how funky it was in that hole. After the fresh air, that stink could almost make even a guy with an iron stomach like I have want to puke his guts out.
So, I had just slid into the hole when I hear some commotion from the building where I know this little gang is staying. Four kids emerge with Kenneth. At first, I think he is about to join them on their run for whatever they were going after, but he hands a pack to one of the youngsters and then stands there watching them go. (I would find out later that the reason he was seeing this particular group off was because they were going on a recruiting mission and it was his habit or superstition to watch them until they disappeared into the woods.)