“Z’s?” She asked.
“Yeah, short for zombies. What do you call them?”
“Biters. That’s what they call them here. We called them infected when I was out there, with my family. I guess zombie makes sense, though.” She shrugged, pulling a brush from under a layer of cardboard and began running it through her fine hair. I winced as I saw how much was coming out. She glanced at the brush and frowned. Her hair looked like it had once been beautiful and vibrant, a flash of bright color in a sea of grass and mud colored compatriots. Now, it was a dull orange, almost brown.
“This isn’t how it has to be. The place I live, my home, it was secure, and the men, they were good. I’m going to get out of here and get back to our compound. You can help me and we can get out together. You can come with me,” I whispered.
Her frown deepened and she looked up and met my eyes. “I don’t know if I can, Alexis. They…it’s bad, but they feed us and keep the biters away. If you try and escape, they kill you…but not before…well, it’s bad.”
“This isn’t how it should be, I have to try.”
“Then good luck to you, but I don’t know if you’ll be able to get any help. No one wants to piss the men off. Now, I’m going to try and get some sleep, the daytime is the only time they really let you be.” She laid down on her bed of rags and closed her eyes, her breath slipped into a rhythmic pace in only a few short minutes.
How she could sleep that quickly was beyond me. There would be no sleep for me.
ZACH
How do you explain to a superior officer that you are holding civilians in a house for interrogation purposes? It was hard and I thought he might draw at some point, but by the time we let him in the house he was only slightly wary. He still looked uncomfortable when he stepped over the threshold with his men at his back, but we had dished it straight.
If they turned on us, we were screwed.
“I want to see them,” he said quickly.
“Follow me.” I led him down the hall and opened the door.
The group was strewn around the room. Some were sitting on the bed, the old lady had her back to the corner. Clem was curled up in a ball at the foot of the bed.
The Major crossed the floor and pushed at Clem with his boot. Clem rolled over and looked up at the Major. He was still a little out of it.
“Heard you like to kidnap and sell women, son,” the Major said flatly.
“We doing what we got to survive, where was you military men when this shit happened months ago? You ain’t here, ain’t no one here. We did what we had to do,” one of the men said from the bed. “We take care of ourselves and suddenly y’all knocking on our door with your guns. We were starving. We did what we had to do to eat.”
The Major looked at me and he couldn’t disguise his disgust. He pushed out of the room and closed the door, patting Martinez, who was guarding the door, on the back.
“Y’all have more restraint than I would have in this situation. You’re positive they took them to Lakeview?” he asked.
“Positive,” I replied. “It’s the only place they could have brought them. They have a couple of cases of MREs in the back of the car, disaster supply cases. They sold my…my, they sold the women for a couple cases of MREs.” I stumbled over the thought of Lex being bartered for a few cases that the National Guard would have gladly handed out before Z.
“Well, looks like we showed up at just the right time, seems we got something in common.”
“What’s that?” I asked the Major.
“We both want to take out this group of worthless pricks that calls themselves a biker gang.”
“Oorah sir,” I agreed.
“Well, Marine, let’s do a little recon then.”
ALEXIS
“Senior’s property, get your ass in gear,” the old woman screeched.
I stood and put on the clothes that I had picked out. The heels were insane, but they were the only ones available to wear that were in my size.
The woman held the door open and motioned for me to follow her out of the room. I hadn’t worn heels since before Z and I wobbled my way back to the front office, the old woman pulling me along like a child. The bikers looked like they were just getting up and moving, yawning and moving things around.
The woman hissed under her breath, “You will do whatever he asks you to, you got that? Anything. If he says jump around like a little school girl, you do it. If you don’t, he’ll get pissed and take it out on all of us. You are his toy, his property, you ain’t got no rights. While he’s doing his business, your job is to just sit there and look pretty, fetch him his drink or his food. You understand, girl?”
I nodded glumly. I wasn’t looking forward to my new job.
She sat me down on a sofa that was pushed against the counter and I was told to be quiet and only speak when spoken to. So, I did. When Senior finally came out of the office to join the gang, he made a show of pawing at me and regaling his group about how he had fucked me senseless the night before and then given me the shiner that I was now sporting.
They all laughed. The pigs. They all leered.
They would all die.
BLAKE
The plans were rudimentary at best. Set up shop in the high school across the street from the gang, spy on the gang, and attack when ready. This was the Major’s brilliant plan. Zach and I wanted to just go in guns blazing, but the Major was more cautious and since he had more men to provide, we were letting him semi-lead this operation.
We would have to come up the back way, along I-10 so we would avoid detection. The goal was to drive in from the east and park the vehicles at the church right near the Canal Boulevard exit ramp, where the rest of the Troopers and Guard were holed up, waiting for orders. Then we would hump it from I-10 to Robert E. Lee, a good ten blocks, to the high school. Assess and attack when ready.
I personally thought we had enough manpower and guns to take on a full-frontal assault, but the Guard boys just looked at me like I was an overeager Jarhead. Fucking Army. Typical.
I needed to kill something soon or I was going to crack. I couldn’t believe the rednecks were still alive and holed up in the guest room. They should be dead. They would be dead if the Major hadn’t shown up. These people showed up at the worst time possible, ten minutes later and every single one of those redneck motherfuckers would have had head wounds as decoration.
I looked down at my hands. They were shaking. When I looked up, I noticed Zach’s eyes were on me. The adrenaline and stress did crazy things to your body, and if I didn’t find an outlet soon I would be useless. Can’t fucking fight the good fight when you’re shaking like an epileptic poodle.
“We’ll head out at first light. I know you’re on a timeline to get those girls out of there, but I would love to check out Textron. We’ll have enough hardware to equip a small Army if we go in there,” the Major said.
“We need to get them out,
now.
To play it straight with you, we head out with or without you,” I said.
“You’d go in there alone?” he asked.
“Before you showed up, that was the plan.”
“What is the plan for the captives? You plan on killing them?”
“What else would you have us do?
We let them go, they do it again. I can’t lock them up, I can’t let them go. Apocalypse justice. If I came upon a group like this in the Sandbox, we’d take them all out. They’re tainted and have no remorse for selling females for food.
They’ll do it over and over again. I don’t give two fucks if the human race is on the extinction list…there are some genes that shouldn’t propagate.”
By the end of my tirade I knew I had gone a little too far, but the Major didn’t seem fazed. In fact, he was almost nonchalant about it, patting me on the shoulder and walking over to one of his men that I hadn’t been introduced to.
“Not the woman though, just the men,” he called over to me and I was willing to concede. I could deal with this. The woman was as good as dead anyway, without the men to protect her, she would be zombie chow in a few days.
The man he was talking to grabbed two other members of the Guard and they headed back into the house. They came down ten minutes later, their guns drawn, leading the three men out, the woman trailing behind.
“Are you letting us go?” the woman’s shrill voice questioned. No one spoke or answered her question.
The Major walked over to the group once they were on flat ground. He pulled the woman to the side, sitting her down on the steps of the camp.
“Now, all four of you have been accused of human trafficking, kidnapping and just being straight-up sacks of shit. In this world, the closest you’re gonna come to a judge is me. I find every one of you guilty, or guilty by association. Line ‘em up. The sentence is death.” He looked over at the soldiers. “And for you ma’am,” he looked at the woman, “I know you are just as guilty as your boys, but I’m not gonna have my men shoot a woman. You are sentenced to watch your men die and then charged to survive, alone. I think that’s justice enough. Petra, Webb, Lafanure, you can handle this?” He looked at the soldiers surrounding him. All three nodded. “James, Miller, get ‘em ready if you want to join the party.”
He motioned for us to join the firing squad.
I stepped forward and brought my M4 forward. The woman began wailing. The Guards stepped back, lining up with Zach and me. When the men realized what was about to go down, they all began to panic. Just as the first one made a break for it, we opened fired. It was like shooting fish in a bucket.
Post-Z death row.
I didn’t feel any better. I wouldn’t feel better until I laid eyes on Alexis.
ZACH
I felt no remorse as the last bullet left my gun. They deserved death, there was nothing else for them.
I watched as the Major untied the woman and she ran to the dead bodies of her fallen men. They protected her, no matter how screwed up their priorities were, she was going to die without them.
“I hate you!” she screamed at us as we stood around, watching the drama unfold. The only one that I saw turn away was Jimmy. I guess we were all too desensitized to be affected by her emotional reaction. We left her there on the ground, the bodies around her. Jimmy went and grabbed our SUV. He would ride back to the compound with Ito, the rest of us would ride in with the Guard.
It took us an hour to make it to City Park. It was a chore getting there, especially in the dark and through the neighborhoods that were teeming with the dead. Packs of zombies roamed the streets like dogs. They weren’t in huge groups, but enough to stop us and make us go around each time. By the time we got to City Park, the large park that separated Lakeview from the fairgrounds area, there was only one path to take. We had to go straight through the forested area on an overgrown road, in the dark.
This was going to be interesting.
The park was densely vegetated with immense amounts of oak trees that covered the road and blocked out any light. The undergrowth between the trees was now overrun with weeds and creeping kudzu and bush killers vines. The thick vines were now dead in the winter, and they fell, dead and clawing at the SUVs. This area of the park was used mainly for conservation and hiking and wasn’t usually very populated. Now it was downright creepy.
The vegetation was overgrowing most of the narrow roads that ran through the park and even though we were in SUVs, we couldn’t go too fast and risk hitting a hidden obstacle. We could barely make out where the road ended and the underbrush began.
On two different occasions we had to exit the vehicle to move some sort of obstruction out of the way. There were fallen branches and debris scattered everywhere that looked almost staged. Probably another defense for the bikers.
At about the halfway mark, we encountered a large pack that was heading west through the park. When the lights of the vehicles outlined them, they all turned as one and began to shuffle in our direction. There had to be at least fifty of the fuckers.
“We can’t go around,” the Major called over the radio.
“We have to engage, no gun fire, blades only,” I said in return. As if as one, the doors opened in the motorcade and ten soldiers and officers slipped out, their blades drawn. I was carrying one large combat Bowie and Alexis’s tactical tomahawk, which I had come to really enjoy using.
The first one was close. I swung with the tomahawk, slicing across its face, but not taking it out. With an overhand chop, the tomahawk entered its brain and the zombie fell. There was very little blood spray, these were rotten Z’s. Old. They stunk of decay and feces, the cloying scent thick and oppressive in this dark landscape. The next zombie was jockeying up to me before the other one collapsed completely. It was the perfect height, so I stabbed it with my Bowie, jamming the 14-inch blade through its soft skull with little resistance.