He looked at me with confusion and then his eyes went to his injury. His eyes went wide and then he started shaking his head.
“It’s not what you think, cupcake,” he started babbling fast. “I had a touch of bad luck is all. I caught my arm on a piece of metal sticking out from the shelf at the end of the checkout aisle we had to jump over to get out of the store.”
I took a tentative step closer and examined the wound as Jim knelt down and opened his pack, pulling out a first aid kit. It was a long, jagged rip in his arm, but having seen enough bites in my life, I could tell for certain that it was a gash and not a bite. Relief flooded me and my knees actually went wobbly for just a moment as I processed this bit of information.
“Thank God,” I gasped.
“Now, let’s get this taken care of and then go home,” Jim said as he grabbed a bandage and started wrapping up his arm. A few minutes later, we were headed back for Platypus Creek. I had a journal full of notes and observations to share with Dr. Zahn and Jim had his musket thingy.
All in all, I had to feel pretty good about my first excursion out into the field as a child zombie observer. I was already running over things in my head as to how I would do things differently the next time.
16
Juan moved up onto the walkway that ringed the barricade made from the seemingly endless supply of trees that the Alaskan Wilderness had to offer. Della was at his left and Denita at his right.
“How many you think?” Della asked.
Juan shaded his eyes. “Perhaps a few thousand.”
Della reached up and grabbed the rope. It was connected via a series of wheels and pulleys to a group of barrels that were full of oil that had been harvested from rendered animal fat.
“Not yet,” Juan whispered.
“I know,” the girl huffed, that last word being drawn out in the way that it seemed only a teenage girl could manage.
Juan took a moment and looked at the girls. Their thirteenth birthday had been just a few weeks ago. They were looking more and more like their mother every day. Both girls had her athletic shape and long legs. Their long, black hair was kept in braids that dangled around the middle of their backs.
He could not believe they had been here for almost six years. In that time, their community’s size had not grown that much. Other than addition by the occasional birth, they had only had four people from the outside come and actually stay.
That was fine with him.
Over the years, he had come to the conclusion that he’d made the right choice in staying here and not moving on to Anchorage. That fact was reaffirmed when a massive fire destroyed about half the town a few years back. The plume of smoke could be seen even from way out here. The word was that over three hundred people lost their lives in the blaze and the resulting breach in the walls. Some said that over two hundred thousand zombies converged on the town, drawn by the fire.
Juan had joined a small group that traveled to Anchorage to offer assistance and help with repairs on the wall. He’d been happy to run into Keith during his brief visit. They had only seen each other once since he’d decided not to continue on to Anchorage.
The two shared a few beers, and Juan had actually stayed with Keith and his family while he was in town to work on the wall repair job. That brief period reminded him of how right he had been in choosing to stay in the village. Hell, the place didn’t even have a name. Juan had once asked Kit what they called the place.
“Home.” That had been the one word reply. It was good enough for Juan.
“Papi?” Della whispered.
Juan snapped back to the situation at hand. The zombies were well inside the clearing now and had shifted their slow trudge in the direction of the walls. Still, they were not close enough.
“Not yet,” Juan said with a shake of his head. He earned a sigh of annoyance in response.
Yep, they are definitely teenagers
, Juan thought.
Actually, that was more of a reason to celebrate than it was anything else. His little girls were growing up. Despite living in a world where the undead ruled, both his girls were growing up healthy and (for the most part, despite their seemingly endless griping and complaining about practically everything) happy.
Not that it had been easy. Far from it. There had been the blizzard a couple of years back that almost punched the cards of everybody in the small community that they called home. Despite all the cabins being well-equipped, and the stocking of the food supplies that were the norm during the winter months with just that exact possibility being planned for, the snow did not seem to stop, and by the time it had stacked up to the point where you could no longer see out the windows, everybody was cabin-bound.
Even with rationing, they were almost totally out of food by the time that he’d been able to dig his way out. He’d found the tops of a few of the cabins and dug down. The first one had almost been his last as the occupants had suffered a terrible fate. One of them had been immune and obviously infected. The undead face that was standing there when he managed to clear enough snow to open the door had been enough to scare the piss out of Juan…literally.
He’d sought Kit’s cabin next. The man was nearly starved to death. The third cabin had been Dee’s, and she was actually doing well. The two of them had managed to eventually dig their way to others and help free them. It was determined that Juan’s cabin being up on a raised platform had been the reason he’d been able to get free. After that, all the cabins had been modified so that they had an additional four feet of clearance underneath. Of course, since then, they had not experienced another winter quite so terrible, but who knew what the future would hold.
“Now?” Della elbowed Juan; her tone made it obvious that she had tried more than once to get his attention.
Yes
, Juan thought, he was okay with his life.
The leading edge of the herd was just now reaching the trench. A few had already been nudged over the lip by those coming up from behind.
“Now,” Juan whispered.
Della almost squealed with joy as she tugged the line. One by one, the barrels tipped and dumped the oil into the trench. Denita brought her bow up after lighting the strip of cloth wrapped around the tip of the arrow. Pulling back, she let it fly.
The flaming projectile flew in an easy arc, plunging down into the trench. There was a moment, and then a “WHUMP” as the oil caught. A black cloud roiled up and flames rose up above the edge of the trench. Just as planned, the zombies bringing up the rear surged forward to get closer to the heat. The zombies in front were shoved forward where they instantly caught and added to the conflagration.
Other people on the walls were performing the same task. In no time, the entire trench was a wall of flame and the zombie herd was being dispatched by the drive and unexplainable desire to get close to a large heat source. To add to the clamor, the three sirens mounted along the wall were now being cranked to add noise to the mix.
“Tight,” Della whispered.
“Like a tigah,” Denita added.
***
“Fall back!” somebody yelled.
Vix looked around for the source, but it didn’t matter. Whoever it was doing the yelling was correct. The undead were now in control of everything from the seventh floor on down.
She glanced over her shoulder as she retreated. The androgynous faces of the undead stared back. It had long since become almost impossible to tell the gender, but she also saw a few fresh faces in the mix. She had to figure those were additions from some of the communities that had fallen to Dolph during his campaign.
Emerging into a long corridor with a dozen others, she spied Paddy giving instructions to a pair of young men and then smacking them in the hip to send them on their way. She strode over to him and her eyes immediately went to the rip on his right arm.
The man glanced down at it and shrugged. “One of ‘em caught me just a few minutes ago. My damn blade got stuck in the skull of one of them freshies. Forgot how hard the skull was on the newly turned versus the older ones.”
Vix looked into the man’s eyes and saw the start of the tracers. Her throat grew tight. Despite everything they’d already endured in the past day and a half, it did not make it any easier to see the man in the early stages. He apparently saw the look in her eyes and his face lit into his usual wide grin.
“Not like I plan on living long enough to turn, lass.” He grabbed her hand and gave it a squeeze.
“But if we manage to escape this, I think I am going to miss you.”
“You know better than that,” Paddy crowed. “We are as dead as those idiots who thought to make a run for it.”
That comment actually made Vix shudder. There had been about fifty or so people who decided that they would chance trying to run. She and several who had tried to warn them all watched helplessly from the roof as Dolph’s men sprung up from several locations where they’d been placed obviously well in advance of the main force’s arrival. One team was so close to the Waterloo complex that it had made her shudder to think of how close she might have come to such a fate.
What had been done to those people defied description. The inhumanity shown was horrifying. In those moments, the death of even Harold paled in comparison to what she witnessed.
“Where is Seamus?” Vix asked as the two stepped in to help bar the door using the materials that had been set at each stairwell door as they awaited the arrival of the Undead Army.
For the first time in as long (or as briefly) as she had known the man, she saw a look of sorrow on his face. The man finished driving in a nail before he replied.
“Went down under a dozen of those bastards a couple of floors down. We were in the stairwell accumulating quite a stack of corpses; he reached for the accelerant as I prepped the torch and somehow lost his footing. I never knew if one of the cursed things had managed to grab his ankle, or what exactly, but when he fell, it was like a wall of serpents lunged out. Arms took him and yanked him away before I ever got the chance to even end the poor, big bastard. His screams were blessedly brief. That is me only solace.”
Vix shuddered at the thought. She had considered more than once taking the quick way out as many of their number had. Still, there was simply something in her that refused to allow it. She’d had a difficult enough time helping Chaaya. The woman had pulled Vix aside and explained that she could not kill herself. But, she had rigged a noose, and all she needed was for Vix to kick out the chair. The women had held hands and prayed silently to whatever might still be listening, and then, Vix had helped end the woman.
She had kicked out the chair and then given the legs a firm yank. After that, she had grabbed the chair and climbed up so that she could drive a spike in the woman’s temple; with that done, she left the room, closing the door behind her. That had seemed like an eternity ago.
And so the rest of the day went. Vix now made a point to keep at Paddy’s side. She did not know where Algernon, Gable, Randi, or Mike had gone, and until they had finally retreated to the roof, she had not even realized that she cared. The only one of that group to meet her and Paddy was Gable.
There were no questions about the fate of the others. It was pointless to recount the obvious. If they were not on the roof, then they had obviously fallen. It would not matter one iota how they had fallen, and, if anything, it would simply add to the pain. Vix, for one, did not feel her system could accept any more emotional pain at this point.
A few dozen other people had made it this far. Vix looked around, searching for expressions of recrimination, but all she saw was fatigue. These few remaining souls had battled and fought for almost forty-eight hours, taking any brief respite they could find before another floor fell to the rising tide of the undead.
It had actually been quite remarkable in its own way to see the zombies flood into the building. They had discovered the use for those squat vehicles with the poles in front. After some observations involving how the vehicles were handled and the fact that anybody tasked to drive one was suited up in what looked like space suits, but were obviously to shield the wearer from radiation, the consensus was that each one of those boxes contained radioactive material that drew the undead like bees to honey. They punched into the bottom floor of the building; then it was simply a matter of guiding the zoms with the noisemakers in close enough for the monsters to become aware of the radioactive payloads.
Once the bottom floor was breached, the undead piled up rather fast, making the destroyed stairwells a non-factor. Nobody knew exactly how Dolph managed to entice the undead to go up, but once the fighting started, it didn’t really matter. The zombies had come and they were not leaving any time soon.
Vix found herself at the edge of the building, looking down into a massive sea of the walking dead. Well back, Dolph’s army had made camps in a massive ring around their location. Her eyes drifted to the Waterloo complex. She wondered if the zombie children had joined in the assault. Then she looked back across the Thames in the direction of Buckingham Palace.
Both directions posed their own mysteries. The behavior of the zombie children…the rumors of the palace now being home to an unknown number of radioactive zombies? It was too much, even for her. And perhaps none of it had mattered. Certainly none of it did now.
“Care to join me, Vix?” a voice said from beside her.
Vix looked down to see Paddy staring up at her with his tracer-riddled eyes. It took her a moment to get past the fact that he’d actually used her name instead of calling her lass; then it took another for her to realize what he was asking. Then she realized that, in singles, pairs, and even a few groups, people were stepping off the ledge and plummeting to their death.
She pulled a blade from her hip and glanced at her wrists. “Seems this way might be just as good,” she whispered.
“Nonsense,” Paddy exclaimed. “They are going to come through those doors any minute now. Your body will not even be starting to chill. You want to give them a free meal? I say we take the leap and squash as many as we can when we land.”
“Says the man who will be lucky to hit more than one or two.” Vix was surprised that she had the energy to make a joke, much less offer a bit of a laugh as well.
“So,” Paddy spoke after a moment where the only sound was the constant banging on the other side of the doors that led to the roof.