900 Miles: A Zombie Novel (13 page)

“I
don’t; I don’t know where they are,” Michael stammered. “Come on.  I’m rich.  I can give you anything. Do you know what Avalon is? I can get you in,” he began to plead.

Pausing, his captor looked over at the girl in the pool, shook his head, and then pulled down on the sheers.  A streak of blood spattered across the wooden deck.  Michael let out a howl that I’ll never forget.  He twisted maniacally under the cops’ weight as the bastard cut again to sever the
finger completely.

In that instant, Kyle pulled me up, and we charged them from behind.  Completely distracted by Michael’s screams, they never saw us coming.  Kyle swung his metal weapon at the first cop, then the second.  They were out in an instant.

I tackled the zombie chopper, driving him away from Michael.  I could see his finger fall from the sheers as we both hit the deck.  The guy had fifty pounds on me or better, and he easily threw me off to the side.  Luckily, I kept my wits and cracked the hammer against his knee as he took his first step towards me.

I could still hear Michael screaming in the background as Kyle stood over us with a pistol aimed directly at the face of the man.

“Move and you’re dead,” Kyle snarled in a dangerously low voice.  “I’ll put one in your chest so you come back as one of those fucking zombie things. Then I’ll put one in your head so I can kill you twice.”

The guy rocked back and forth, holding his knee but made no other move.

I scrambled to one of the unconscious cops, and pulled the keys to the cuffs from his belt.  Unlocking Michael, I then heaved him onto his wobbly legs.

Holding his grossly amputated finger, Michael staggered to his tormentor and drove his foot into his face.  The guy dropped unconscious to the wooden planks, blood draining from his now broken nose.

Kyle pulled the two holsters from the cops’ belts, and tossed one to me.  Strapping the holster around my waist, I felt like a bad ass. I had shot guns before, but only at a target range. Playing army as a kid didn’t really prepare me for this.

Kyle looked over at Michael
, “You going to make it? You okay?”

“No, I’m not okay. Some dick face just cut my finger off.”  He kicked the guy on the porch again, bringing his foot down hard on his chest.

“What was that shit about choices?  I have a choice for
you
.  Don’t cut my fucking finger off.  How about that for fucking choices.”

I looked between the two of them, then up at the sky.

“We need to get out of here.  I have no clue where to head.”

“Any place is better than here,” Kyle replied.

“Yeah,” Michael said. “Maybe we could go someplace where they don’t cut your finger off.”

In that instant, just beyond where Michael was standing, I saw the guy on the porch reach his right arm around to his back.  I could see the small handgun emerge.

“Michael, look o-!” I heard a gunshot, but Michael didn’t fall.

The guy on the deck fell backwards, blood staining the wooden planks, mixing with the blood from Michael’s finger.

I looked wildly at Kyle.  A handgun didn’t do that.  He was staring behind me. I whirled around, my voice catching in my throat. The woman from the pool was standing by the door with the shotgun in hand. She looked up and met my eyes.

“I want to go to Avalon.”

There is a point in time where one hopes that what is happening will just stop, before another killing occurs.

Her name was Sophia.  Aside from killing her husband, who was almost twice her age,   she was actually very accommodating.

Leaving his bloody remains dripping all over the porch, she invited us inside the house.  Knowing that it was too dark to venture from the relatively secure area, we cautiously decided to take her up on the offer.

After cuffing the two unconscious cops to the wrought iron table, making them look like they were sodomizing each other, courtesy of Kyle, we stepped through the rear door.

The house was enormous, and clearly the biggest that I’d ever been in.  The back door led directly into a great room with a fireplace so large that I could literally walk into it.  Kyle shot me a look as if to say, “
This place creeps me out.”  I just nodded in agreement, as we followed Sophia through the house.

“Won’t the gunshot alert your neighbors?” Kyle asked.

She looked back at him, smiled, and with a cool tone said, “Gun shots are a part of life now.  You’ll hear them all night long.  People stopped running towards them days ago.”

As we entered the kitchen, she offered us any food that we could find in the fridge, and then laid the shotgun against a nearby chair as she lit up a cigarette.  Using a cup to flick ashes into, she told us that Richard, her husband, would never let her smoke in the house.  She was eerily calm, almost monotone with her statement.

Warming up to Michael immediately, she gestured with a smile, and went into full nurse mode as he sat down.  She opened a number of doors before she found an emergency kit that contained gauze and tape, with which she began bandaging him up.

Neither Kyle nor I turned down the offer of food, digging around in the fully stocked fridge.

“What is this place?” Kyle asked around a mouthful of deli meat.

Sophia slowed her bandaging and thought carefully.

“It’s our home,” she said.

“Yeah, I’ve got that, lady. How come this town has power when no place else does?”

She went on to explain that the neighborhood was one of the newest in “green” efficiency.  It had become popular to be green in her social circles, and the town ran on a combination of hydroelectric and wind turbines on the other side of the hill.   Each house also boasted a series of solar panels sitting atop their roofs.

“What about the sirens?”  I asked.

“Richard was hell bent on staying here.  He devised the system, and persuaded those who stayed here to help him with the cleanup.  He even offered vacant homes in the neighborhood to people passing by, promising them shelter in exchange for their help with protection.  That is, until the houses were full.  Then he started turning away people. When they wouldn’t turn away…well, he applied more forceful methods.”

“Yeah, we saw the more forceful methods down at the
siren,” Kyle said.

“I didn’t say he was a good man,” Sophia countered.

“He was a fucking dick!” Michael blurted while looking down at his bandaged hand.

Sophia ran her hand through his silver hair, comforting him with an arm around his waist.  Kyle looked at me, shaking his head slowly as he scowled.

“I’m not so sure about this siren stuff.  You remember how the zombies followed us for miles to the gas station.  Who’s to say that the neighborhood watch didn’t just kill the closest creatures…that there are not hundreds more on the way?”

We all looked at each other in alarm, agreeing that we’d better get the hell out of there at daybreak.

Looking Michael in the eyes, Sophia asked, “So will you take me?  Will you take me to Avalon with you?” Michael paused, and looked at us.

“We have another seat in the car,” he said quietly.

Kyle and I stepped to the side and mulled it over for a moment.  Neither of us trusted her for shit.  It was obvious that she had suckered up to Michael from the second we got into the place. However, she did save him out on the deck; even if it was her husband she killed.  For a good reason but still…

“I’ll tell you what, we’ll let you come if you let me use your
phone,” I said to her.

“It’s over there.” She smiled and pointed back towards the great room.

I nodded, and took a deep breath as I walked toward the fireplace and spied the phone sitting on a nearby end table.

My fingers were shaking as I dialed her cell number.  The call went straight to voicemail.

“Hello, this is Jenn.  Leave a message and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.  Have a nice day.”

“Damn,” I said aloud. What did I really expect?  I decided to leave a message.

“Jenn, I’m okay.  We’re held up in a house in Jersey.  Still a long way away I know, but I’m traveling with a few people who I trust, and we’ll be there soon.  There is supposed to be a place in West Virginia that’s safe.  One of the guys I’m with says he can get us all in. Don’t have time to explain here, but I’ll tell you all about it when I see you.  I don’t know how long the phones will work.  If you can get to a CB radio, turn it to channel 14 and make sure it’s on at noon every day.  We’ll be able to talk when I’m in range.  I love you so much.  I
will
find you.”  Beep.

I dropped my head and paused for a moment.

I dialed my home number.  The phone rang, then again, and a third time.  Voice mail.

“John.  If this is you, I’m ok
ay.  I don’t have much time with this message, so listen carefully.  Sue’s dead, John.  She came back as one of those
things
.  Joe was able to push her out of the car. We made it to a nearby cabin.  It’s not Joe’s, but nobody has claimed it.  The baby has not come yet, but I’m just weeks away.  The address is 127 Brown Bear Rd., Blue Ridge, GA.  It doesn’t have a phone, but I left this message from a working land line at a small gas station down the street.  Get here as soon as possible.  I’ll check this voicemail every day.  Please let me know if you’re all right! I love you, John!”

Shaking and sweating like hell, I left the same message for her that I had on her cell phone, adding the phone number inscribed on the inside of the phone I was using, asking her to call me back, should she get this message before we left.

Hanging up the phone, I wiped the tears from my eyes.  She was alive, and I had not missed the birth of my child.

There has not been many times where I felt true joy in my adult life.   It seemed like we grow out of joy a little more with each year of age.  However for that moment, it’s the only way I can possibly describe how I felt.  The relief was so overwhelming, like a weight had lifted from my chest, my heart. To hear my Jenn’s voice…

I heard Kyle, Michael and Sophia laughing from the kitchen.  We were in a wasteland, surrounded by the walking dead, and somehow they still found a way to laugh.  It seemed like not all was lost.

Rubbing the final tears from my eyes, I looked up at a picture hanging on the wall.

It was a painting of a woman and a man.  She was in a yellow dress with a white flowered hat, and he, in a gray suit with a watch chain hanging from his front pocket.  Neither of them were Sophia or Richard.

I looked around at the other framed photos; there were two kids playing on the grass with a ball and a large cocker spaniel.

I noticed a bathroom door open down the hall.  Realizing that I had not taken a piss in a real toilet in days, I stepped toward the bathroom.  Unzipping my pants, I sighed with relief as I did my business.  Once finished, I turned around to wash my blood and filth covered hands.

Taking a look at myself, for the first time in almost five days, was almost as disgusting as the zombies I had killed.  I looked like hell.  My white shirt was covered in
dried chunks of black and red blood.  My pants were torn in multiple areas. My hair was a mess and thick with sweat, to the point of being gummy.  I had clearly lost a number of pounds already, which I wasn’t actually complaining about.  Although losing it from near starvation was clearly not a good weight loss option.

I was admiring how much I looked like shit when I noticed a tiny drop of blood streak down the mirror.  My eyes followed it up to its origin, and there was a circular
bloodstain in the ceiling above.

My heart was racing for the millionth time.  Was there a zombie in the house?  Had someone died upstairs?

I moved into the kitchen, and stepped casually towards the sink, and around the island. I stood looking at Michael’s bandages for a moment, acting as if I cared about how good of a job Sophia had done.  Standing next to the shotgun at this point, I reached down and snatched it up.  Without making any quick moves, I looked over at Sophia.

“What’s up stairs?” I asked, eyeing her carefully.

The room fell silent except for a grandfather clock ticking away in the front hall of the house.

“More specifically, what is bleeding all over the place upstairs?” I demanded.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.” She smiled sweetly, while slowly moving around the island in the middle of the room.  I lifted the shotgun to point in her direction.

“There’s blood dripping from the ceiling in the bathroom.  None of the pictures in this place
has you or your husband in them.  Who is up there?”

“This is our home.  This is
my
home.  Get out!”  She screamed, and then darted from the kitchen down a hallway.  Kyle and Michael stared at the empty doorway, stunned.

“What the fuck was that?” Michael ventured.

“I don’t know what’s going on, but there’s blood in the bathroom. We all just saw her reaction to it,” I replied.

I showed them the bathroom.  The leak was even bigger now.  Kyle pointed over towards a staircase leading upstairs just past the grandfather clock in the front hallway.  No need for words, I knew what he was doing.  In the brief time that I’d known him, I had learned how to read his subtle clues.