Love and Decay, Volume Eight (Episodes 9-12, Season Three) (20 page)

Harrison shot me a wide-eyed grin over his
shoulder. It said, “Whew, that was a close one!” I wanted to punch
him.

“They have the right idea!” Haley
shouted.

Reluctantly I agreed. “I’ll cover you!”

I followed her over to a Jeep and shot
anything that tried to get to her. Then she turned to cover me
while I joined her at the top.

It wasn’t safe ground and I wanted to
immediately abandon the idea. The metal shifted beneath our feet.
Our bodies rocked unsteadily with the force of our guns’ recoil.
But we stayed put because we could see again and the Feeders
couldn’t hide as well.

Tomás and his men shouted behind us and even
though we didn’t understand them, I knew it was a warning for us to
pull back.

But pulling back wasn’t something any of us
did well.

We continued to shoot, to kill and to refill
our weapons.

Just when I thought the horde had started to
thin, a new wave of Feeders came crashing toward us.

“Where are they coming from?” I asked Haley
as we stood back to back, just like the old days. I knew what we
were doing. The reality of killing Zombies and fighting for our
lives was never hard to forget. But fighting with Haley like this,
standing together and watching each other’s backs was something we
hadn’t done in a very long time.

It made me rather nostalgic. And despite the
carnage and god-awful smell, I loved it.

“Where do they ever come from?” she asked
dryly. “The pits of hell.”

“But they haven’t bothered the cathedral the
entire time we’ve been there. Why now?”

We fell silent for a few minutes while we
tried to stay alive. The Feeders came in one aggressive line. Their
dead legs carried them quickly over the street and their moaning
screams warred with the rapid fire of our guns.

I didn’t look at any one of them for too
long. Their gruesome, rotting faces often haunted my dreams, so I
tried to avoid eye contact. As long as I could aim, fire and move
on, I would sleep better tonight.

From the corner of my eye, a flag across the
street flapped in the breeze catching my attention. It was tangled
and torn down the middle, hanging from a long-abandoned shop.

Mexico’s flag waved proudly from the iron
setting it had been mounted on. As dirty and tattered as it had
become over the years, the symbol of Mexico was still proudly
displayed.

It gave me hope in a weird way. It wasn’t my
flag and I had never felt a personal connection to Mexico before we
stepped foot on this soil, but I couldn’t help but feel the
stirrings of something in my soul.

We weren’t just fighting to survive, we had a
purpose. We
lived
with a purpose.

Behind the church doors we protected,
humanity thrived in ways we hadn’t seen. There was no warlord here,
keeping slaves under his thumb. Tomás wasn’t a tyrant insistent
upon world domination. There was no teenage boy pretending to be
king, sending his subjects off to die for the fun of it.

For the first time since Gage died, we had
found people that lived freely, that lived in peaceful
community.

This church represented something more than
sanctuary from the storm. This place was more than a beacon of
light in the darkness.

These people represented the future.

At least that was what I believed.

I had to.

I couldn’t continue fighting for a better
world when the only things to live in it were dictators and evil,
greedy men. What was the point of ensuring the future of the
planet, if the only people to inhabit it were pond scum?

I needed to believe there were good people
left. I needed to picture a world that could rebuild and
repopulate, but also get along and live in some kind of
harmony.

I had to believe there were at least a few
people worth all of this agony.

My gaze scanned the storefront beneath the
flag. There were more flags hanging from the ceiling behind
shattered windows. The store had been completely ransacked in the
post-apocalypse chaos, but not everything had been taken. I
realized it had been a soccer store. Heavy scarves and
multi-colored jerseys littered the floor and still hung from metal
racks.

Different South American countries were
proudly displayed on the fronts of t-shirts. Brazil. Guatemala.
Colombia.

Colombia.

We had a purpose, but we also had a goal.
Getting to our destination was more important than ever.

I thought back to Vaughan, suffering and
fighting death. He needed medicine… he needed a cure.

We knew they were working on one. If they
were still alive… if they had somehow survived the brutality of
this world.

What if they had one already?

Suddenly, getting to the research station
seemed more important than ever.

“There!” Haley shouted, pulling my attention
the other direction. “Look who it is!”

I followed her outstretched arm, but didn’t
see anything for a minute. I fought off Feeders and tried to glance
back in that general direction, hoping her hysterical words would
start to make sense.

Three dead Zombies later and after I’d wiped
sweat from my brow, I could finally make out a group of people
standing on top of a bus stop overhang.

“No way!” I growled. “What do they think
they’re doing?”

Haley’s shoulder pressed more firmly into
mine. I felt her muscles tense and stiffen. Her fear became a
palpable thing in the air. “Does it look… Does it look like he’s
directing them?”

I sucked in a breath and held it. I couldn’t
remember how to let it go. There was too much congestion in my
chest and it seemed easier to hold it in than remember how to
breathe.

Damn.

And I’d thought we were on our way out of
Crazy Town.

“How is he doing it?” I demanded. My
attention turned back to the closest Feeders and I felt a sicker
sense of satisfaction now that I knew where this current threat was
coming from.

“Do you think he expected us to live this
long?” I asked Haley in a voice loud enough that she could hear
me.

“I’m guessing that he probably expected us to
die the second we exited that tunnel!” She shouted back.

“So what does he want?” I squinted so I could
see the Rat King more clearly. He stood straight with shoulders
squared and head held high. A cape billowed behind him, clasped at
his neck and he held a tall stick that had the look of a
scepter.

Haley didn’t speak for a few minutes. She
couldn’t
speak. She was too busy killing anything that got
near us. “My guess would be our new home!”

“We have to get out of here!” I declared.
“This is going to be a war and if we don’t leave now, we’re going
to get trapped in it!”

“We don’t have a car!”

“Look around, Hales! There’s plenty to choose
from!”

“Hey!” Harrison shouted. “Do you see this!” I
followed his gaze and found it on the same thing Haley and I had
just figured out.

“We need to go!” I hollered back.

Harrison quirked an eyebrow at me.
“Inside?”

“Like
go
-go! We need to get your
family and get the hell out of Dodge! We don’t want any part of
this!”

Harrison nodded once, “Then stop standing
around and get your ass in gear!”

“He needs his mouth washed out with soap,”
Haley grumbled just loud enough for me to hear. I couldn’t have
agreed more.

“King, ready?” I turned around to call his
attention, but it was a stupid mistake.

He had been aggressively focused on killing
Feeders that were trying to climb up his vehicle. When I called his
name I distracted him and he looked up at the wrong time.

A Feeder grabbed at his ankle. In a panicked
move, he tried to jump back and forgot the surface he stood on. He
shot right off the top of the sedan, arms thrashing, bullets flying
wildly.

“On, no!” I ran to the edge of the Jeep and
waited three, incredibly long seconds for him to resurface. He
didn’t.

“King!” I shouted again. That caught
Harrison’s attention and he spun around in a full circle looking
for his brother. “Over there!” I yelled at Harrison. “He’s on the
ground.”

Harrison, King and I made a triangle of sorts
with our positioning. Both Harrison and I were equal-distance from
him but in opposite directions. Both of us had to get to him as
fast as possible or he was going to get swarmed.

I jumped from the roof to the hood and then
to the hood of another abandoned car. I scrambled to the top of
that car, down to the trunk and jumped to another hood a few feet
away.

My shaking legs landed with a hard thud and I
dropped to a crouch to keep from toppling off too. The flat tires
kept the car from shifting too much, but the metal was just barely
strong enough to hold my weight.

I stood up on rubbery knees and climbed up
the next roof.

That was how I continued to make my way down
the street. From one car to the next, I leapt across recently dead
Feeders and decaying corpses.

By the time I reached King, he had already
scrambled back to the hood of the car. His body was spread eagle as
he tried to regain his balance and fight through the panic of being
caught off guard.

“Are you okay!” I yelled at him.

He didn’t respond verbally, but he did pull
himself to his knees. He didn’t have time to reassure me before he
was back to shooting Feeders.

“Is anything broken or sprained!” I yelled
again.

“I’m fine!” he finally shouted. “No bites! No
broken bones! I just scared the shit out of myself.”

My shoulders dropped with the weight of my
relief. I hadn’t realized how worked up I’d gotten. The fear that
something could happen to him had propelled me across this street
and I barely remembered jumping the long distances from car to
car.

I turned around to see that Haley had
followed me. “We should move the car now!” She yelled. “That way we
can load up right into it.”

“Good idea! See anything big enough to hold
all of us?”

We scanned the area in between killing more
Zombies. I was on my fifth handgun and I’d run out of extra ammo.
This was it for me. I had to go back inside anyway.

I just knew it would be my last time.

I had no idea what Tomás’s expectations were
for us or how long he expected us to stay. He had never forbidden
us from leaving and we had made it very clear that we never
intended to stay. But my faith in humanity had become a very
fragile thing.

While I had just praised the humanity of this
place minutes ago, the real test would come when we tried to
leave.

For Tomás’s sake, I hoped he planned to keep
his word.

“There!” Haley pointed out a moving truck
that had run into a fire hydrant.

The front bumper had been dented, but it
didn’t look like it was in too bad of shape. All of the tires were
still intact. It also wasn’t huge. It was the small kind used to
move couches or bookshelves.

It wouldn’t be the fastest thing on wheels,
but it would hold all of us. Plus, the driver had been killed just
as he tried to exit. His body looked severely gone from where I
stood, but part of it was still propped up on the floor of the
cab.

That probably meant it had a serious issue
with flies and insects, but there would be keys nearby to get it
started.

It would also smell bad.

Like I said, not the most perfect getaway
vehicle in the world, but it would do.

Harrison landed next to me. “You think it
still runs?”

I shook my head. I had no idea. “Only one way
to find out.”

“Go get my brothers!” He demanded. “King and
I will get the truck and meet you over there.” He pointed to a
clear spot that was as close to the cathedral as he could get.

I shook my head again, this time more firmly.
“No way. We’re not leaving you.”

“Go, now, Reagan! Or we’re not going to get
another chance. That kid brought an army with him. And he looks
like an idiot with that cape on. That can only mean one thing, he’s
a complete psychopath. I’m not sticking around to see what else he
has up his sleeve!”

Hadn’t I just said that? He was right, but
leaving him and King was against everything I believed in. My
entire body rebelled against moving away from them.

“Go!” Harrison shouted. “We will be
fine!”

I looked at Haley. She shrugged and jumped
down to the street. When she started sprinting back to the church,
I had no choice but to follow her. Even if this was the dumbest
idea in the history of ideas.

By the time we reached Tomás, I was convinced
that I would go on record for the shortest marriage during the
Zombie Apocalypse. Because when I explained this to Hendrix, he was
for sure going to file for an annulment.

I would be divorced before I ever lost my
virginity.

Then I would obviously throw myself into a
horde of Zombies because there would be no point in living after
that.

“Where you going?” Tomás shouted at us as we
dodged his men’s bullets and raced for the door.

“You’re at war!” I told him. “The Rat King is
coming for you!”

His sweaty face broke into a wide grin. “The
Rat King? Let him come!”

“We’re leaving!”

“No!” Tomás disagreed. “We need you!” he
waved his hand at the advancing horde.

“No,” I mimicked him. “I have to get my sick
friend to safety! If we wait, we’ll get trapped in this fight and
he will die.”

Tomás bounced his head back and forth from
shoulder to shoulder, thinking my argument through. “Where can you
possibly take him? There is nowhere to go south of here.”

“There’s one place,” I answered. “But if we
don’t leave now, we’ll never make it in time!”

“I should make you stay!” His face had taken
on a stubborn quality that I recognized. Maybe from Diego. Maybe
from myself.