"Of course, Brother," said Franklin, stepping forward. Bud stood silent but expectantly, his wild hair slowly collecting snow.
"I need you to stay behind and keep an eye on our friend back there. The Lord has a plan for him, he just doesn't seem to realize it yet."
Franklin adjusted a red and black hunting cap on his bald head. "For how long, Brother?"
"Hard to say," said Joel, pondering the snow. It began to fall harder, collecting on trees around them. Bare branches clawed at the darkening sky overhead. "He may know the location of at least one of the children. Follow him if he goes anywhere. Report to me if he leads you to a child."
Bud nodded, his snow-coated hair bobbing against his shoulders. "Got it."
"You know how important the children are, brothers," said Joel.
The men nodded.
Joel looked up at the sky, letting the snow fall gently on his cheeks.
"We will get our reward," he said, and smiled.
* * *
Park shut his front door and walked onto the stoop. He slung his rifle over his shoulder and walked down the steps. It had started snowing.
"Great," he said.
Reaching the ground, he turned to walk around the side of his trailer. He stopped, his chest tight. He considered waiting until morning. He wouldn't be leaving until then. He could give it one more night. His chest throbbed. He coughed and shook it off, and resumed walking. He was silent, his boots crunching in the snow and whatever twigs and dead leaves were underneath.
A soft groan came from the backyard as he reached the corner. He stopped again.
"Damn it," he said, snorting into the wind. "Fuck it all to hell."
He rounded the corner and headed into the backyard. It was growing dark. Night was falling fast, but there was still enough light to see. He wished there wasn't.
His daughter Lori sat chained to a stump. She was dead, and had been for years. She moaned softly, grinding her teeth as snow fell onto her cheeks.
"Hey kiddo," he said, stopping a few feet from where she sat.
She groaned at nothing. A dark spot on the front of her jacket marked where she'd been shot by her bastard of a stepfather. Park had killed the asshole and enjoyed it. Park hated the man for killing Lori.
But now he mostly hated himself for not putting Lori out of her misery sooner.
"I'm sorry, Lori," he said, feeling like he was choking. "Should have done it long ago."
She groaned and shifted around on the stump. Her chain clinked.
For the first six months, he had tried feeding her raw dead animals he’d hunted. She wasn't interested. He'd considered letting her eat him, but he didn't want to come back. Eventually he realized she didn't need to eat at all. Corpses didn't eat because they needed to.
He raised the rifle, aiming at her forehead. His chest was almost too tight to breathe.
"Sorry again," he said. "Love you baby girl."
She moaned at him, blinking in the falling snow.
He fired.
Maylee Land gripped the cold metal of the ladder and peered out into the trees. She was maybe twenty feet up, a few feet over the makeshift walls of World Memorial. World Memorial was a town her mother had built. Or the closest thing that passed for a town these days.
Walls of wooden planks and sheets of metal surrounded what had once been a medium-sized farm. Behind the walls sat trailers, sheds and crude shacks people had managed to cobble together. At the front of it all was a small farmhouse. Maylee lived there with her mom and her brother. The town had grown up around them.
It was so cold her worn gloves almost stuck to the ladder. There were several ladders like it spread across the town, nailed and chained together atop each other so as to stick up over the walls. They served as guard posts. The Town Guard consisted of those healthy enough to defend the town from the dead who wandered the landscape, looking for the living to consume. And Maylee was now in charge of the Guard, despite being only eighteen. Healthy young adults were in short supply and she had proven herself many times over the years. For the first year, before others had shown up, it had been her doing most of the defending, especially after Mom had been hurt.
Beyond the wall was a large field, covered in snow. Beyond that were woods, acres of frozen trees stretching on for miles. She stared into the trees, watching. The morning sky was bright, cold and clear. She blinked, staring harder.
"I got something!" she yelled out. Beneath her, a guard ran to a nearby alarm rope. The ropes were set all over town. They ran up to large collections of scrap metal and wood. The guard yanked on the chain, over and over. The metal and wood clanged and clattered, loud enough to be heard over the whole town.
Maylee took both feet off the rung she stood on and straddled the ladder. Using her gloves to guide herself, she slid down the ladder and landed hard in the snow. Her legs complained but she didn't care. She ran to a large metal gate that led outside. The gate had once been used to close off an area for livestock, but had since been extended and covered with wood and metal until it stood over twice its original height and had no openings. She nodded to Walsh, who was already opening the gate. He was maybe sixteen, almost too young for the Guard.
Maylee rushed out into the snow and veered off where she knew a driveway to be. The driveway had been covered by so much snow it was indistinguishable from the land around it. It led to a nearby road that cut through the countryside. No one ever came down that road.
She reached a snow bank and dropped to her stomach, looking out across the field.
She heard other guards come up behind her. She pulled her scarf down, sputtering in the snow, and put a battered pair of binoculars against the bridge of her nose. She scanned up and down the nearby trees and hills, but saw nothing.
"Are you sure you saw something?" said Walsh from behind her.
"Shhh!" said Maylee.
"She's showing off," said an older man's voice behind her. It was Elton Hayes. Elton had positioned himself to be leader of the Guard when Derek, the last leader, died at the hands of three half-frozen corpses. The Guard had elected Maylee.
"She's showing off to show she's up to it," said Elton. A few guards chuckled with him. Not everyone had voted for Maylee.
"Suck a dick, Elton," said Maylee, turning the knob on the bridge of the binoculars.
"You should respect your elders," said Elton. Elton had lived nearly forty five more years than her eighteen. He worked out furiously every day to prove he was as tough as the youngsters in the Guard. He was lean, muscular and his long grey hair was tied back in a taut ponytail.
"I'll get right on that," said Maylee, moving her gaze to the right.
The binoculars landed on a corpse wandering in the snow, staggering among the few dead trees that dotted the field.
"There!" said Maylee.
Where?" said Walsh behind her.
"There," said Maylee. She pointed, not taking the binoculars from her eyes. The corpse was a man, fat and bald. Large black wounds were coated with frost. He worked his cracked, frozen lips up and down over rotten, dark-yellow teeth.
"There's nothing," said Elton. "She wants to prove she's special like her freak brother."
"I see something," said a young woman named April from behind Maylee's right shoulder. "There. Moving in the trees."
"What?" said Elton. "That's a speck. A great big speck of nothing."
"For fuck's sake," said Maylee. She lowered the binoculars and pushed herself up to her knees. She whipped the binocular strap over her neck and stood. "I got this one. Wait here."
"Wait!" said Elton. Maylee heard him and the others scrambling. She didn't bother to look back or stop.
She ran out into the field, rounding a tree as she undid a belt strapped diagonally across her chest. She reached up over her shoulder as the belt fell away. Her hand closed on the handle of an aluminum bat the belt had been holding in place. The bat was dented and dirty, with several large nails driven through it. “Ella” was written across it in black magic marker, a reminder of older times. She whipped it over her shoulder and held it in front of her as she ran.
She rounded a snowdrift and neared the corpse, holding the bat out to one side.
"Heads up fucker!" she yelled. The corpse whipped his fat bald head to face her. It blinked its clouded eyes and hissed past its swollen tongue.
Screaming, Maylee swung the bat for the fat corpse's head. It thudded into its temple, driving a large rusty nail into its skull. The corpse shook with the impact and groaned, black fluid leaking from its mouth.
Grunting, Maylee twisted the bat back and forth, then wrenched the nail free. A portion of the corpse's skull came loose, spilling dead skin and dark goop across the snow. Maylee brought the bat up and slammed downward as hard as she could on top of the corpse's skull. The corpse's head crumpled inward, dark gore shooting from its ears and nose. It toppled backward and was still.
Maylee smirked down at the corpse and turned to face the rest of the guards as they rushed across the snow.
"Too slow!" she said, laughing. Then cold dead hands closed on the back of her neck.
"Whoa," she said, feeling dead flesh brush against her cheek as a corpse leaned in to bite. She whipped the bat up over her shoulder, slamming downward where she guessed the corpse's head to be. She heard a
crunch
and winced as the handle smacked into her shoulder. The corpse groaned and let go.
The guards rushed across the snow in front of her. Dunwoody, a middle-aged man with a thick beard and a limp, held out a battered rifle. "Duck!" he yelled.
Maylee dropped to her knees, her shins crunching into the snow. She heard - almost sensed - the corpse leaning down behind her. She spun around and dropped to her back, kicking upward. The corpse, a thin man missing a chunk of his face and with frost covering the blackened edges of his wounds, jerked to a stop as her foot hit his chest.
"Hurry!" she shouted to Dunwoody behind her.
Dunwoody's rifle cracked into the cold air and the corpse's head exploded. Dark goo and bits of skull rained across the snow. The corpse slumped down, Maylee's foot scraping along his chest, and collapsed to the ground beside her.
She stared at the sky for a moment. Snow was falling as her heart pounded. Clouds were blowing in, slowly but speeding up. She became aware of more shots being fired. Lots of shots. Lots of yelling. She climbed to her feet.
Corpses were emerging from the clusters of trees spread across the field, heading right for them. She whipped her head around, trying to take them all in. There was no time to count. The corpses groaned and jerked as the guards’ bullets hit home.
She scanned the tree line at the edge of the field. Corpses were coming from almost every angle. There was a very good chance there weren't enough guards with her to hold them back.
"You dumb little bitch!" yelled Elton, firing a bullet into the head of an elderly woman missing an eye. "You led us into this!"
She took one last look at the corpses emerging from everywhere. She pushed down the fear that Elton was right.
A corpse approached Elton from behind, a young woman with her throat torn out. Elton didn't see her.
"Look out!" yelled Maylee. She flung her bat toward the woman. It whipped past Elton and smacked the woman across the forehead. She groaned and staggered backward.
"The fuck you doing?" said Elton, looking behind him. Maylee rushed across the snow.
"Just get out of the way!" yelled Maylee.
"Fuck that," said Elton, noticing the corpse behind him. She hissed and chattered her teeth, reaching for him.
Maylee reached her bat and dropped to her knees. She picked up the bat in her right hand and whipped it into the woman's knees. Rotten and frozen, they cracked and the woman toppled.
"I got her!" yelled Elton, pointing his rifle down at the woman's skull.
Maylee heard him but had already brought her bat up over her head. She whammed downward into the woman's skull, splitting it open and spilling dark gunk onto the snow.
In the same moment Elton fired. The shot blasted against Maylee's bat, knocking it from her hands and sending sparks into her face.
Maylee stood, her hands stinging. "What the fuck is wrong with you?" she yelled, stepping closer to him.
"I told you I had her!" yelled Elton, keeping his gun down but holding it between himself and Maylee.
Maylee walked away to retrieve her bat. Shots and screaming rang out around her. The rest of the guards were focused on the corpses. Maylee knew she should be too, but her chest was pounding and she wished she could beat Elton's head in. She gripped the bat tightly and stomped back over to him. "I don't know what you think you're trying to prove, but—"
"Prove?" yelled Elton, almost spitting the word out. "I've been proving myself since before your mother farted you out, kid! And when I say I got something, I fucking got something!"
"Deer!" yelled a guard.
Maylee stepped away from Elton and whipped her head around, looking. Three deer, snorting their hot breath into the cold, were racing toward them. They looked angry and ready to kill. Maylee felt no sympathy for them. None of the Guard did. All animals were predators now.
"Shit!" yelled Maylee. "All fire on the deer!"
"But the corpses!" yelled April, turning as the corpse she'd just shot fell face forward into the snow.
"The deer will get here a lot fucking quicker!" yelled Maylee, running toward the animals. She veered toward a stumbling corpse, an old man with a flap of frozen skin hanging from his ruptured torso. She whipped her bat around as she ran, cracking the man's skull open. "Just do it!"
The guards complied, firing into the onrushing deer. Bullets whizzed around her, thudding into the deer. The deer snorted in anger, their blood spilling into the snow. None of the shots were lethal.