Greg slid the rifle towards the back and out of the strangers reach. He held it not out for the man to take but for him to get a good look at. He said, “It’s what the military uses, it’s a Colt, Clary says you can’t beat a good Colt. My dad always shot Remington and Glock but you know, I think the reliability of these are awesome.”
The man shook his head while looking at the kids questioningly and asked, “How old are you? Who are you? Who’s Clary?”
“My name is Greg, this is Joey. I’m eighteen, I'm a survivor, and we have a much bigger place than you that would probably be safer than this place.”
The man laughed and said, “Yeah, I'm sure you do, where is that at?”
Greg pointed in the direction of the base. “We are staying a few miles away at Camp Dodge.”
The man paused while thinking about the base and the fact that he had never thought of it himself almost made him sick to his stomach. He asked, “So you and he have been staying on that base this entire time by yourselves?”
“No sir, we’ve been staying there with a group of probably fifty or more. I’ve been training with my friends for the last nine months and the rest of the group has been learning for about three.”
It was obvious that he was having a very difficult time dealing with all of this and Greg could see why. He said, “Look there’s plenty of time for answers sir. I have a friend who isn’t doing so hot. I need to run down and grab her, is there an empty apartment on this side of the building that we can hold up in until our ride gets here?”
“You can just bring her right in here if she wasn’t bitten of course.”
Greg said, “No, I don’t think she was. I’m pretty sure that she just hit her head and cut herself pretty bad. We bandaged the wound but we aren’t doctors.”
The man said, “Well my name is Lou. I’m not a doctor but I am a registered nurse. If she needs stitched up, I got plenty of stuff here to do it with. Do you guys need help bringing her up here, or can you handle it?”
Greg said, “We have a sled that we pulled her here on, but I’d definitely prefer to be able to cover you guys and not have my hands full with carrying her. I really appreciate you taking us in for a while. I’m hoping it won't be for too long. Like I said, we have plenty of space on the base if you would want to come with us.”
Lou nodded his head to the side as an entire floor of people had come out of their apartments by then. Greg smiled, thinking of the possibilities of how many people could still be out there. He asked, “So what have you been eating, what have you been living off of?”
Lou said, “There’s a gas station across the street. We went over there and got every canned good that we could. Until the power went out we had plenty of cold food, we had to eat a lot of gas station pizza but it could have been worse, much worse.”
Lou looked over his shoulder and yelled “Karen, Theresa, I'll be right back. These guys need some help bringing someone up here.”
They both looked around him trying to get a look at the boys. They’d been pent up in the apartment for what seemed like forever. Lou explained, “These are my daughters.”
Greg saw then trying not to look awkward. He smiled and said, “Hey, good to see more people.”
Lou gave Greg a firm look and advised, “You don’t get any stupid ideas, or I'll hurt you rifle or not.”
Greg nodded slowly holding up his hands. He looked at the other families who’d assembled in the hallway looking hopeful and let down that it wasn’t the military. Greg yelled to them, “We have a large facility we can take you all to if you are interested. There are gates and weapons and training for those of you who want it. There’s plenty of food and over time we are going to be the safest place in the state, if not the United States, that you can be.”
The thought of not being prisoners inside of the walls of their apartments filled them with a bit of new hope. One man walked forward and said, “So is it just teenagers or are their other adults that are on the base?”
Joey said, “There are a few other adults on base, that is who have been training us.”
“What do you mean by training?” Lou asked.
Joey said, “We got the best showing us stuff.”
“We can go over all of this later. I really want to get my friend from downstairs. She doesn’t have anyone watching her back,” Greg said.
Lou agreed and they went back down the stairs, slowly checking that the second floor door was still secure. They went back to the first floor pushing dead bodies out of the way. Lou asked, “Christ kids, who the hell has been teaching you guys?”
“Mr. Clary and Aslin teach us. It’s pretty much all we do for the mornings.”
Lou looked at the zombie on the steps with its head caved in and brains spilling out in the open, and the other’s that looked like they had their skulls unzipped from the front back. “Who are they, just more survivors that you met?”
Greg shook his head no and said, “Well it’s kind of a long story.”
Lou said, “Shit kid, we’ve been with the others you’ve seen for a long time, there isn’t a new story that we have heard in months. I think we were the lucky ones though since most of the others are all dead on the other floors. We had all decided after the first few days to get some distance between us and the ground. The third floor seemed like the only idea that we could come up with to put that much distance. We’d watched the news reports and saw those things everywhere downtown and how the military had been taken over down there, the shelter that so many went to had been decimated by those freaks.”
Greg nodded, “You know we don’t really talk about the past honestly. But to make things short and sweet, Clary and Aslin are military, Navy SEALs really to be exact. They got dropped in with their team to try and find the cure to these things. We met them and gave them a hand. Their ride never came, and we just kind of stayed together. During the first six months we went out helping to gather people. When we got the final news report about the Turned, we stopped going out and we started training everyone that wanted it. The hope that was there was lost, and we needed to replace it with something else.”
“Wait, we haven’t gotten any reports in forever, what are you talking about?” Lou asked.
“You sure you want to know? The news sucks and there isn’t anything good about it.”
“Never been able to say I've been happier being ignorant kid.”
“There is no cure. The papers we found explained how to make it, but the guy that created it wasn’t trying to find a cure for it, it was a cure.”
Lou stopping walking, then turned and looked at him, and asked, “Who the hell are you? How the hell do you know so damn much?”
Greg went to say something but Joey cut him off. “Because he knew the guy that made it. We are best friends with his kid.”
“Wait, what are you talking about?”
Greg didn’t want to go down the road again but he thought if a guy was going to get saved and judged by him that he could deal with it. Greg said, “Frank Fox was the scientist who made the drug. His fiancée at the time was dying of cancer, he tried to cure her, it was what he did. He thought that he had the drug the way that he wanted it but his assistant changed it and lied about the data…”
Lou just stared and asked, “Then what?”
“And then Hell was unleashed, I think you know the rest from there.”
Lou said, “I think we’ve figured out quite a bit as things unveiled themselves. Don’t let them touch you, definitely don’t let them bite you, and stay the hell away from them. Keeping things quiet is the smartest thing to do if you want to keep
them
quiet.”
Greg said, “The last report we got was six months into this. The CDC came over and told everyone that there was no cure, no one would be saved from these things and that what government that was left was falling. They wouldn’t be able to cure them. The only way to put them down is with a shot to the head, or breaking their skulls open.”
Lou sat down on the step shook his head back and forth in disbelief then hung it in his hands in despair. He finally looked up, defeated. “So this entire time we have been hoping, no, praying, that someone would come for us and save us. That there would be a way to cure these things, that there’d be a mass cure that would just put things back the way they were, or at the least take away the threat of them. We could rebuild, my girls wouldn’t have to stay locked away their entire lives.”
Greg treaded on thin water and said, “You do realize that even though they aren’t adults, they are still capable. They could still be helpful and still help, right?
Lou puffed up his chest a little. “I’m keeping my babies safe. After my wife didn’t make it back on the first day, we were quite sure that she had found somewhere to hide. Once we saw her car in the ditch when we made our first trip to the store across the street. It was crashed, the doors were ripped off, and blood covered the inside. Let’s just say that we weren’t too worried about her being well and alive after that. We saw her walking across a street a few weeks later with no clue where it was that she was going. It was the saddest thing that I have seen in my life. It broke my heart and my daughters’. I’ll do anything I can to protect them, regardless of the cost.”
“Right, and that’s great don’t get me wrong, please. I don’t think that you saving them and protecting them is a bad thing, but what do you do when they go out on their own, when something happens to you? If they don’t have someone new to step in and try and take care of them when you aren’t there, then they might as well go outside now and get served up on a platter for those freaks. I can’t assume that you want that to happen to them right?” asked Greg.
Lou looked down at the ground, his chest a bit less confident. He looked at the Turned lying there and their muscles that looked like they wanted to burst from their skin. He thought of his teenage daughters, knowing they’d never out run one of them and never out power them. He said quietly, “So if we came back with you, would they and I and the others be able to learn? There isn’t something that would keep us from being able to train by arriving later right?”
“As long as you haven’t got something against listening or learning or taking direction then no….no there shouldn’t be any reason why you aren’t able to stay. It really should be the best chance that you have to save them. Eventually those things are going to come up here and when they do, if you aren’t trained and you don’t have any way to save yourselves, they’ll rip those doors from their frames and do things that no parent would ever want to see done to their children. I’m sure you know that the Turned are Hell unleashed on earth right?”
Lou contemplated it, thinking of his wife then said, “Yes I can probably take a pretty good guess at the horrible things that they’ve been doing everywhere across the United States. We just call them the dead though.”
Greg pulled out his backup pistol for Lou. “Do you know how to use this Lou?” he asked.
“No, before all this I didn’t believe in them. But now, well now, I'd have to say I am a pretty big damn fan of the idea of them. As long as everyone around me is safe with them I don’t have a problem with firearms, but the last thing I will subject myself or my friends and family upstairs to would be a bunch of teenage cowboys.”
Greg thought of the fact that he had left and lied and that he had caused a lot of trouble because of it. He always was looking at Lou and thinking of the multiple apartments that had opened their doors and the hope that he had seen in the people’s eyes. If finding these people because of this bad choice on his part was wrong, then as long as the small group made it through this, he could live with the decision. He said, “Usually things go pretty smooth for us and we don’t do anything stupid. Today was kind of a special day, we don’t usually leave base.”
Joey yelled, “We don’t ever leave base, but Greg lied and we are going to be in sooo much trouble when they catch up to us….if they catch up to us.”
Greg looked at Joey, putting a hand on his shoulder. “They are going to find us. We need to get Ellie upstairs and then we will do what Shaun said and keep moving through the radio channels until we find someone. It’s as simple as that.” He looked back to Lou, who wasn’t looking like he knew what to think at the moment, and said, “Lou, sir, we are going to be ok, I promise you that. There will be another group of people coming for us. You know why, because they aren’t going to be happy when they find out we left, and one thing about our group is that we don’t let people get hurt, we take care of each other. So once they know, we will have a ride back. We might not be able to get you back on the first round, but I'm sure that you can talk to them and we will be able to figure out something to come back for you.”
Lou said, “Hey we aren’t stupid. We have garages attached to this place. All we need to do is make sure we have a clear run out and we’ll get our cars and go. We filled those things up to the brim and have full gas cans galore in them as well. We are ready and packed. We’ve been living out of suitcases for months praying that someone was going to come for us. But if you are going to be some sort of troublemakers, maybe the best thing for us to do is just to stay here and wait for something else to happen.”
Greg started walking towards the front door letting them fall in behind. “Sir, if you are expecting something better than us, I think the only thing that will do a better job is going to be if God himself comes down to help you. We can offer you weapons, training, food, and a warm place to sleep, with a big ass gate around all of it. Now if you can do better than that, feel free to just stay here. I totally understand, but if you don’t think that is possible, then well maybe you ought to seriously consider taking me up on this offer which, if you’ve been stuck in this place for nine months, I can’t assume that you’ve had too many of.”