Dead: Winter (29 page)

“Sorry, man. I really am.” With all his strength, he brought the blade down on the crown of the deader’s head. He no longer saw JoJo.

He was suddenly very tired. As everybody climbed into the boat, he looked around at the faces of people he didn’t even know the names of. Not one of them appeared to notice that one of theirs was not coming home.

A thought struck him hard and twisted his insides. Would he have cared if it had been one of th
e
se people that he didn’t know anything about, not even their names? He would be the only one to mourn JoJo until he returned to the island. Then Thad, Keith, and Mackenzie would share his pain, but to many of these ind
i
viduals, he was just another face lost in a sea of anonymity.

That
will
have to change
, Juan decided. He was probably more guilty than most. His life before had not prepared him for being social.

Thad was waiting for them as he pulled alongside the tiny dock. A handful of deaders were a
l
ready scattered about the fence as the first ones that had been forced into the water began to find their way ashore. Juan directed the team in the boat to deal with them and then went to Thad.

“I didn’t see it until it was too late,” Thad whispered. “I was scanning the whole area watching for anybody who might need my help. I saw the two on JoJo, but when I looked, it was like they were just standing there…waiting for him to take them down. I didn’t think anything of it. JoJo doesn’t flinch when it comes to taking the little ones down. He sees it as doing them a favor.”

“Wait,” Juan said. “What do you mean they were just stan
d
ing there?”

“I can’t explain it any better than that. The zombies were just standing there. They weren’t even reaching for him or not
h
ing.”

“Well I don’t know what happened,” Juan finally said. “We were working back-to-back. He didn’t say anything. I just heard him scream and that was it.”

The two men stood in silence. Neither of them able to understand what had happened. Twenty minutes later, everybody was walking the long road back home. Juan tried his hardest not to be a
n
noyed by the casual attitude the others showed. He couldn’t blame them. They didn’t know the man. Plus, how many of them had already experienced the first hand loss of somebody they knew…loved? How many had lost children, husbands, wives, and friends.

Christ
, Juan thought,
I didn’t lose anything when this all started.
The emptiness of the life he had lived up to that night when a hand had slapped the window of his car and woke him came crashing down. He’d never given a thought to relationships. A runaway at age thirteen, Juan had grown up alone. In and out of jail all his life, he hadn’t made one single
real
friend. He’d had sex with his fair share of ladies, but it had simply been a place to stick himself for a few minutes…feel good…and move on.

As the group reached the area everyone called home, they began to peel off. Eventually, it was just Juan walking alone. By the time he arrived at the front porch to the house where he had first e
n
countered Margaret and Mackenzie, the tears were stin
g
ing his eyes and making it hard to see.



Chad stood over the body of the man. A rivulet of blood ran down one cheek, but it wasn’t Chad’s. Another body lay sprawled in a heap just up the road a ways, his blood still stea
m
ing in the snow.

This third man—Jonas had been his name—was the easiest to kill only in the fact that he had stopped running when he heard the screams of his dying friend. As for the actual taking of a
n
other man’s life…

Chad fell to his knees and wretched. The steam from his sick rose with that wafting off of the blood of the two dead men who shared this stretch of road with him now. He looked over at the man beside him in the snow, and his eyes were drawn to the dark gash that opened the man’s throat. Chad was fixated on the tiny-by-comparison cut that he’d given the man only moments earlier when he’d first suspected something was going on i
n
volving his daughter.

In the distance he heard the shouts of alarm starting to spread. Getting to his feet, Chad didn’t care for the weakness in his knees one little bit. He took his first few steps, each one feeling a bit stronger than the last, and began the trek back to the village.

The walk seemed a lot further than he remembered going when he’d been in pursuit of these sorry excuses for human b
e
ings. He couldn’t tear his gaze away from the tracks in the snow that had been made during the pursuit of two of the men who had stood watch in the stairwell while the third had waited ou
t
side the room—presumably waiting his turn—and the fourth prepared to rape his daughter.

The one thing he was thankful for was the fact that the man had not managed to actually force himself into his daughter. He was only privy to that fact because Andrea Stillwell, the woman he’d left Ronni with before leaving in pursuit of the men who had assaulted his daughter had taken her into the bathroom after he’d carried her inside.

“Unless he’s got the smallest dick in history, he didn’t ma
n
age to get that far,” Andrea said with a shake of her head.

Chad had stared at the woman with what he imagined to be a clueless, if not stupid, look on his face. After a few seconds where she stared at him as if she expected him to ask more questions, she f
i
nally clued him in.

“Your daughter is on her period.”

Chad still didn’t see how that had anything to do with her ability to discern whether or not he man had raped his daughter.

“Your daughter’s tampon is still in place.”

Chad felt a shudder even as he recounted that revelation. A daughter’s feminine hygiene is simply not something a dad wants to hear too many details about…ever.

The fact that the men had not accomplished their goal did not do anything to soothe Chad’s anger. Certain that his daughter was safe, he’d left in search of those responsible. He’d been su
r
prised to find the two men he’d encountered on the stairs still in the lobby of the resort hotel that had become their home.

Frank, the one he’d nicked with his blade was dabbing the cut with a towel and talking loud about how the person responsible “was lucky he’d been caught by surprise or else there’d be a lot more blood to clean up, and by God it would not be
his
.”

“Is that right?” Chad said from the stairs.

Jonas had recognized the look on Chad’s face right away and ran. Frank had obviously counted on the skinny man’s su
p
port to extract all that blood. There was a handful of seconds where the two men simply stared at one another…then Chad drew his blade. That was all it took to dispel Frank’s claims of brav
a
do.

The chase through the snow was almost anti-climactic. Frank ran, pleading for his life the entire time and claiming that he had “no idea what Grant and Mitch had planned.” Running in the snow is treacherous business, and twice, Chad thought he was going to slip and fall. Unfortunately, it was Frank who made the first misstep. He landed unceremoniously on his face, and Chad was able to close the distance in a few bounds. He dove on the man, plunging his knife into his back. Frank barely made a sound when his throat was cut.

When he looked up, Chad saw Jonas standing in the middle of where there used to be a road, but now there was only knee deep snow. He had stopped running and obviously witnessed the murder of his friend or whatever Frank had been to him.

“Please, man,” Jonas had begged, “we weren’t gonna hurt your little girl. We didn’t know Mitch was gonna pull some freak shit with your daughter. Swear to God!”

That last line had been spoken through tears in a voice that was more shriek than anything else. The skinny man stared up at Chad with his hands literally folded under his chin like he was in prayer. There had been no hesitation. Chad grabbed a handful of greasy hair and cut deeply into the man’s throat. With one jerk, he brought the blade across. It wasn’t actually as easy as it seemed on television or at the movies. The larynx proved quite difficult to saw through in one clean stroke; he had to put a little effort into it. Then there was the blood. A severed jugular can shoot an impressive quantity of blood in those first dozen or so hear
t
beats.

“Step away from him, man!” a voice ordered from behind him.

Chad looked around and realized that a half a dozen ind
i
viduals had fanned out around him. None of them had drawn any weapons, but most had their hands on the handle of a blade or bat. Loo
k
ing down, he realized that a lot of blood had splashed his clothing. The knife he still clutched was dri
p
ping and had left a trail all the way back to Frank and Jonas.

Then he saw him. He didn’t remember if his name was Mitch or Grant, but he knew that it was the man who had been in the hallway.

“You!” Chad hissed and lunged forward.

He went to the ground under several bodies. An arm wrapped around his neck. Chad kicked and struggled. He knew he only had seconds. He felt his world tilt on its side. His gut twisted with fear; fear for his daughter. Who were these people? Why were they being allowed to…?

Chad’s body twitched twice and was still. His lungs emptied in a rush that sounded like a sad moan.



Unable to move, Samantha wished that she’d strapped hersef to a gurney; at least that way, she would be more co
m
fortable. Death was coming.  She could taste it in the back of her throat. It was foul like spoiled milk and rotten eggs. She could feel the sweat run down the back of her neck, b
e
tween her shoulder blades. Her body felt as if it was on fire, yet she was freezing.

Her head swam and she thought that she heard a hiss of air far away. A low buzz intruded on her mind as she struggled to remain conscious. Her fear was twofold: first, that her findings had been i
n
correct; second, that she would become one of…
them
.

Her head drooped to her chest and her breathing became slow and shallow.



“Samantha!” Lena breathed. She would have screamed if she’d been able, but what she saw caught her so off guard that words struggled to find purchase on her tongue.

She rushed to the chair where her colleague and, if she dared to admit it, friend, was securely fa
s
tened. Samantha’s head was down with her honey-colored hair hanging in sweaty strands over her face. The color of her hands was an almost bluish-white.

“What have you done!” Lena finally cried.

Without considering her own safety, she rushed to Samantha’s side and knelt beside the chair. A sour smell came off her that reeked of sweat, feces and urine. Looking down, the crotch of Samantha’s coveralls was dark from midway up the torso down to almost the knees.

She could hear a wet rasping sound that rattled in the woman’s chest. She sounded like a person in the late stages of pneumonia. A thick strand of saliva dangled from her lower lip and swung like a liquid pendulum.

“What have you done?” Lena repeated.

Standing, her eyes found the binder with Samantha’s pr
e
cise, tight script filling the pages. Picking it up, she only had to read a few lines to understand.