Running with the Horde (28 page)

             
“Go, Rosie!” he shouted with a heavy voice.

             
“I love you, Tegan Matthews!” she shouted and blew him a big goofy kiss.

             
Tegan’s right arm rose slowly to his mouth as he blew her a final kiss in return. Then she whimpered and looked away as she made her exit out the window and out of the few remaining moments of Tegan’s life.

             
I had already witnessed Tegan’s demise and had no desire to revisit that again, especially now with the new perspective of how deeply devoted to Rosie he had been. I sat down on the sodden remains of the bed and dried my eyes.

             
Tegan’s corpse just stood there staring off into space like a big dumb heroic idiot. This had been a dangerous man, whom I both hated and feared. I supposed some part of me always would, it’s hard to break first impressions but as I looked at him I couldn’t help but feel sorrow and pity for the love he found so briefly and then lost.

             
Of course, the way he died had been no picnic either but it hadn’t been a waste. He died saving the life of his love and her sister for that I wanted to end his misery.

             
The window was still wide open, letting in a developing wintry mix of rain and sleet that was making my stay in the room even more uncomfortable. I cinched the zipper of my parka up tighter and popped my head out the window.

             
The streets below were still tightly packed with the undead. I saw no sign of my pursuers. My assumption was that they were still regrouping or looking elsewhere. I couldn’t hear anything save for the ever present atonal droning of the undead. I looked up, the roof was only two stories above my head. It wasn’t a tall building just a series of high end condos conveniently located for the great city sightlines and easy access to the nightlife.

             
The rope ladder was long gone. That meant it had been part of a helicopter rescue. I couldn’t imagine any other reason for Rosie and company to climb to the roof unless they were still up there which seemed like a silly notion. I stood there awkwardly staring up at the roof for another minute as if waiting for Rosie to poke her head down at me and wave. I had no idea what happened to them or where they went.

             
I shut the window and sat back down on the mattress. I glanced up at Tegan who was entertaining himself by staring at the wall. I really wanted to put him down but I needed to know who Rosie had coordinated their rescue with and more importantly where they went.

             
That was the only way I was going to have a shot at finding them. I sighed and once again prepared to take a dive into Tegan’s pool of memories. I would be going further back this time. Wishing for some popcorn and a large cherry soda, I made myself as comfortable as possible and jumped in.

Chapter 35

“A Requiem for a Backstory Part 2 in 3D”

             
Tegan Matthews was a hard man and a killer. A veteran of two tours in Afghanistan, he had seen and done things he would never forget. Things that would forever prevent him from getting a good night’s sleep. He left the marines with his body intact but with his mind flayed like a few choice cuts of beef.

             
When he returned to his home state he took the only job he was truly good at, which was working security and protection. He hated it because it was unmercifully boring compared to what he’d grown used to but it paid well. He bounced around playing bodyguard to a few politicians and local dignitaries until he eventually fell into the employ of Mr. Henry Flowers.

             
Initially, the job had been uneventful like all his other protection gigs had been but as the weeks went on Tegan began to truly appreciate his new charge.

             
Mr. Flowers treated Tegan well, introduced him to powerful people like he was something more than just a bodyguard and often asked for his counsel on issues Tegan had little to no experience with.

             
At first, the former soldier assumed Flowers was patronizing him but in time he came to see him as a mentor and take him at his word. It wasn’t long before Henry bought out Tegan’s contract from the protection company and took him on as a permanent employee.

             
In Tegan’s estimation, Henry Flowers was a very powerful and committed man. When he had a goal in his mind, nothing and nobody kept him from achieving it. In that way Flowers reminded Tegan of a handful of excellent leaders he had known or served under in the military.

             
The longer he worked for him, the more Tegan thought the man would have made an excellent field general if he had chosen a life of military service.

             
The one blind spot Henry had, in Tegan’s opinion, was his family. His wife was great. She was nice to look at for an older woman, smart and worked with her husband like they were a team but always deferred to him when it counted. His daughters were a different story.

             
Dealing with the spoiled daughters of Henry Flowers was a never-ending chore soaked in frustration for Tegan. He was very happy only Violet still lived at home. The other Flowers girls were intolerable. Tegan was a military brat before he was military himself. His father had some seriously old fashioned ideas about women. He had inadvertently programmed his son with those same ideas. While Tegan was smart enough in his vocation to usually keep his opinions to himself, his upbringing meant he never really had lasting relationships with any woman except his mother.

             
Tegan had been Mr. Flowers’s shadow for almost four months when word came down from the man’s numerous connections that something big was looming on the horizon. No one was exactly sure what it was but the message was clear, it would be a world altering event. No one was dropping the A word but all the important people were nervous. It all seemed preposterous to Tegan but Flowers was a believer.

             
Mr. Flowers remained as confident and stalwart as ever but Tegan could tell he was nervous. That was unsettling for him, Tegan didn’t like to see Flowers nervous. He wanted the man to know he had his back no matter what. He worked harder than ever and maintained a level of organization that would make a colony of ants blush. Flowers took notice and soon had Tegan taking the lead on many aspects of his elaborate preparations in anticipation of whatever face the coming event would take.

             
One of his projects was to beef up security personal for the family’s residence in Friendly. He recruited two dozen former colleagues from the service and oversaw the very confused construction crews as they were contracted to retrofit the large Flowers Mansion into a secure compound. It was during this time that Tegan was introduced to Bill Swanson, a former friend of Flowers that was undertaking similar work on his own property in Legend Heights. While it was obvious the two men shared a rough history concerning their two youngest children, Tegan didn’t think too much about it, they seemed to be getting along okay at the time of the construction projects.

             
Tegan’s main job was to keep construction running smoothly. He did this by making sure the crew didn’t ask too many questions and making sure they understood the consequences for breaking confidentiality agreements. He was quite good at this aspect of his job, nobody talked out of school. He partnered with Mrs. Flowers on occasion when a softer touch was necessary, like when they had to deal with the neighbors. Mrs. Flowers handled them with grace and charm that Tegan didn’t possess but could admire.

             
Everything flowed smoothly during the massive overhaul except where it concerned that blind spot, the daughters of Henry and Susan Flowers.

             
In his opinion, all three girls were stuck up and spoiled beyond redemption, constantly bitching about what they perceived as an upheaval of their lives. The twins, really more women than girls, pitched a tandem fit when their father informed them they would be moving back home from their apartment in Minneapolis.

             
They screeched and cried and refused to acknowledge there may be a greater purpose at play than their own discomfort. In spite of their protests they came anyway, kicking and screaming. Their move-in day was a time of terror for Tegan he wouldn’t soon forget. The twins barked orders at him like he was some kind muscled butler built only to live in their servitude.

             
In short, the twins were almost completely unbearable.

             
The youngest wasn’t as bad but Tegan felt that was solely because she was preoccupied, pouting over the loss of her boyfriend. With the women living in the mansion, Tegan kept his distance as best he could. Though there were times interacting with the ladies couldn’t be helped. The twins seemed to like messing with him, especially Rosie, as though she in particular could tell women made him very nervous. Tegan couldn’t figure it out, he always engaged them in as professional of a manner as he could conjure up.

             
In his mind they were the worst combination three women could have, spoiled rich and ridiculously hot. All the men were nervous around them, their own mother often appeared to be jealous of them and the only person who had ever told them no was their dad. Tegan was of the mind they only listened to him because he held the keys to the financial kingdom. The one thing they would never risk losing was access to their father’s money.

             
So Tegan kept his distance. Flowers made it clear to him that nothing in the world was as important as his daughters. He could look but not touch, Flowers had said with a weird chuckle. It was the first time Tegan had thought the man might be a little crazy but he blew it off, all great leaders were a little crazy after all.

             
Tegan made it clear to the men he brought in, that the girls weren’t even to be looked at let alone approached or propositioned. Everyone was afraid of him so everyone complied. In time, Tegan got over his nervousness around the women, much to Rosie’s displeasure.

             
He came to view them as pretty fixtures of the property that happened to make noise. Once that happened, life resumed for him as it had been prior to their moving in with one major difference.

             
People everywhere started getting sick. Authorities were scrambling but it was spreading like wild fire. It dominated the news and the talk shows but no one had answers. It was declared an epidemic with no name, quickly on its way to pandemic status. After a few days it became simple known as the Sickness.

             
The Sickness hit you like flu and palsy disease rolled into one. Mix in some stroke-like symptoms for flavoring and a coma for a cherry on top. Even worse, no one seemed to be beating it. It was a nasty and scary virus that was throwing the world into chaos. A few had already died from it but most that got it just stayed comatose, sucking up hospital beds and resources.

             
Surely this must be what we’ve been preparing for, Tegan would opine as he listened to the news. But Henry Flowers didn’t agree.

             
“This isn’t it,” he told Tegan, “This is bad but there’s something worse coming, just wait and see.”

             
He wouldn’t expound on what he thought that might be. Tegan didn’t think he really knew. The man was overworked and stressed to the max so he decided to give him a pass.

             
But Henry didn’t stick his head in the sand where the Sickness was concerned. He instituted a strict quarantine for everyone living in or working on the mansion. It became a little like the famed walled city of Jericho. To get in, a person had to jump through some serious hoops to prove he or she was healthy.

             
Anyone already inside and acting strangely at all was immediately ‘put out of the camp’ as it were. Tegan lost two of his men and some of the construction crew to this policy.

             
In spite of the Sickness, the work on the mansion progressed and at last the project came to successful completion. The Flowers family and company were ready to face whatever was coming. Or so they thought.

             
They didn’t wait long. Three weeks after the compound was finished, three weeks into the boring routine of waiting, the world exploded into madness. The shock of the undead arriving at their gates was so profoundly terrifying that it immediately broke the weakest minds and severely tested the strongest.

             
The first few days, two of the men committed suicide. The ladies of the house were unbearable in their fear and Mr. Flowers was outraged beyond reason at some type of betrayal he perceived to have come from whoever had been feeding him information from the beginning.

             
He called Tegan and a handful of his best men into a meeting were they planned a recon mission into Minneapolis for the next day. They would have gone forward with it too but as luck would have it that was the night Violet did her disappearing act.

             
Over the next several days Tegan had the privilege of watching Henry Flowers, a man he respected and had come to love, devolve into madness. Flowers got it in his head that Danny Swanson was responsible for Violet’s disappearance. His sole focus was getting into Bill Swanson’s highly secured compound to question the boy. Of course, the Swansons were not interested in allowing any such interrogation of their only son.

             
Tegan’s world turned into chaos, conducting dangerous and fruitless search missions for Violet, fighting zombies when they got in the way and acting as an ineffective negotiator with the Swansons. Against his will, he became a key player in what was quickly on its way to becoming a bizarre and needless blood feud.

             
Men were lost to the zombies and new men were found to replace them. These were strangers to Tegan brought in by Flowers on a few of his crazy solo search missions to take up arms in preparation for war with his true mortal enemies, the Swansons.

             
The new guys were brought in two or three at a time. Tegan imagined Flowers out there desperately searching for Violet who had to be long dead. Instead of finding her, he found and recruited small groups of survivors to take up his cause. Their payment was a place in the compound with all the food and ammunition they would need. It may not seem like much but it’s everything when a person’s sole purpose is just to survive to see another sunrise. Plus Flowers could be persuasive as hell. Before long, several new men came to live in the compound including the man who would become their de facto leader, the man George would come to know as the cowboy hat guy. His God-given name was Lance Smith.

             
Where Tegan was a creature of rigid discipline and self-control, Lance was laid back and smooth like peanut butter. He was a filthy snake but nobody could see it except for Tegan. It wasn’t long before Lance had the ear of Henry Flowers who had been spending less and less time at the mansion.

             
Tegan hated Lance from the start and that hatred grew like a living organism as he watched him gradually take control over portions of the mansion and its operations. In time, the compound became a madhouse, working its way toward an epic meltdown. Organization and communication broke down as the house became divided into two camps, Team Tegan and Team Lance.

             
Tegan wanted to maintain control over the supplies so he moved his men and the Flowers women into the basement and the pole barn at the second site a block away. The women were happy to follow Tegan because Lance’s men were pigs and just scary people in general.

             
Said pigs were left to occupy the second floor of the house. Of the Flowers family, only Henry maintained his residence up there, staying in his office as though everything in the house was business as usual.

             
Said house became a nasty place of filth and violence which enraged Tegan but Flowers turned a blind eye to it. He refused to let Tegan take the house back cautioning that when things with the Swansons escalated, they would need every available man to fight.