The Week of the Dead (33 page)

The thought of a meal outside was icing on the cake. Not only were they going to have a real, nonprocessed meal in good company but that the meal was being prepared by an actual chef. Devin loved junk food, but it made him sluggish. The sugar was good, but he had sugar crash easily afterward.

Clint also told them that his wife was a school teacher. His daughter, Raine, was eighteen years old, and the two boys were fifteen. Clint gave future insight about their children. Gavin used to play instruments in his spare time, and Rune didn’t speak for some reason. This new apocalypse brought out something new in their children, and they loved them all the same. Within the last week, their lives had crumbled, but they rebuilt it, their way. They had all learned the need to survive.

After Clint grilled hunks of the cow over the fire, the family and the groups were sitting around the fire. Faith was leaning against her husband. Gavin was sitting up on a tree limb. Raine was sitting on a log, sharpening her knife on a wet stone. Rune was asleep in a tree. Razor came and sat next to Raine. His body shook the log, interrupting Raine’s progress. She turned and gave him a cold stare. With a mouth full of sweet, succulent beef, Razor looked at her knife in her hand. “Know how to use that thing?” She moved her bangs behind her ear. She sat the blade and the wet stone down. She looked him in the eyes. She placed her hand on the side of his cheek and pulled his face closer. He closed his eyes, thinking he was about to be kissed.

With her free hand, Raine grabbed the dagger from his belt without making a sound. She pushed her hand on his cheek away and brought the dagger to his throat. “No, but I know how to use this!” Everyone laughed, including Razor himself, trying to break the ice-cold stare she was giving. “Easy, but if you’re going to lift a blade, make sure you keep a firm grasp on it in one motion. Like this.” He motioned for her to release the grip from his throat. He took the same blade and placed it back in his belt. He took a bite from the beef and motioned for her to try again. Clint stopped loading his magazine and began to sit up noticing Razor talking to his daughter. “You don’t have to worry about him,” Malik said.

Rubbing his glasses on his shirt, he spoke: “Razor has an Achilles’ heel for young women…His sister was killed when she was in college.” He spoke as they all watched Razor show her random defense moves. “He was just ten years old when she was kidnapped. All the time we’ve been together, he’s taken the women aside and showed them a thing or two about survival. You should have seen him. One time, he let a six-year-old zap him with a stun gun once just to show how it worked.”

Jamison broke the laughter from Malik’s story. “This is amazing, Clint.”

Clint kept his eyes on his daughter and the biker as he told Jamison about how it wasn’t important what you ate as long as you had some spices to go with it.

Billy was laying in his armor. He camouflaged himself with leaf-covered ghillie suit. His suit was wrapped around him like a blanket, and he slept in a set of bushes, concealing his body. The Vikings were stretched out on the ground. It was a lot better than lying in the back of the armor vehicle’s metal box. They’d get up every morning to break out of their armored car and kill creatures that had found them. Tonight was different. Devin and Erica were cuddled against each other. Jamison and Walker had finally come down from their adrenaline-fueled-energy-drink–overconsumption-sugar crash, which was a lot better than the alternative of one of them getting sleepy behind the wheel, the other would fire a pistol outside the wind. Mostly into creatures walking toward their convoy but some were just in the air to scare the shit out of the other.

Rune was awake along with Ferret keeping watch. Ferret was lying on his back, listening as he watched the night sky. While Rune had taken a place on top of one of the vehicles, he sat quietly. With their bellies full, everyone slept soundly. The crickets chirped, and the cicadas were beating their wings in a vibrating racket that faded into the darkness. Ferret listened as he heard inconsistent snoring coming from all sides. This was the first night they slept outside the vehicles. While it was nice to be free and stretch out, it offered a new sense of alertness since they were out in the open. Clint and Faith were both confident that there wasn’t any danger in the woods. They said most of the creatures stayed in populated areas.

Rune sat on top of the canvas truck. He was sitting Indian style, carving things into his chunk of wood. The fire had died down to the embers. It was a cool night, but not enough for a fire. Ferret was still looking at the sky. He was happy. He knew there were other humans alive in this crazy world, and he was glad they weren’t trying to kill him. The crickets suddenly stopped chirping. The cicadas fell silent. Ferret sat up and looked to Rune, who also stopped what he was doing. His animalistic instincts told him there was something that made the critters go silent.

Ferret grabbed a flashlight from a nearby bag. The campground was mostly pitch black. He fumbled around the tiny LED flashlight until a bright-blue beam came from his hand. He pointed it at the ground below him. He heard Rune snarl like an angry wolf. “Someone is watching,” Clint said quietly from the trees.

“Are there more humans in the park?” Ferret whispered.

“There was another family here, but I thought they had left. Even if it was them, they know not to sneak up on anyone at night. Wouldn’t they have flashlights or something?” Clint asked from the tree.

There was a sound coming from the darkness from the way toward the way down to the water. Wet footsteps that sounded like they were dragging something came closer. Rune crouched on the canvas tarp. The sound came closer. “What the fuck is out there!” Ferret shouted. He called out to the noisemaker and to alert everyone in the camp. The snoring stopped, and the humans were standing up. “Guns up!” Devin called to the humans who had them.

“Form a wall!” Redbeard shouted in his mighty voice as the old and young stood up in awkward commotion.

“Lights!” Clint called to Gavin who flipped a switch somewhere behind them. Christmas lights and florescent tubes pointing outward flickered on. The humans were illuminated, and ten feet of space in front of the camp site were illuminated.

The dragging sound came closer into the light. There, in front of the guns pointing out behind the shields of the Vikings stood a child. He looked to be about eleven years old with something wrapped around his ankle. Rune, who remained on the top of the truck, let out a throat noise. “What the hell?” Walker called out. The boy didn’t move.

“Hey!” Faith called out. The boy didn’t move.

“Are you human?” someone called out.

“Maybe he’s deaf?” one of the old people said. The old man with the bolt action came out from behind the shield wall.

“Get back here, old man!” Redbeard called out.

“It’s just a child!” he responded. The old man walked toward the motionless child with his gun down.

“Maybe it’s one of them, you old fuck!” Clint said from behind someone’s shoulder.

Tank was standing on the end of the shield wall. He had Ferret to his left and was exposed to the elements on his right. Tank noticed rustling leaves to his side. He turned his head to see multiple glowing eyes standing at waist level. “Ambush!” Tank shouted as he broke from the shield wall and forced his shield into a child creature’s brittle body. The old man turned around right as the eleven-year-old latched onto him and took a bite out of him. Little sloppy feet were heard in all directions except toward the vehicles.

Tank, Malik, and Razor were beating zombie children to pieces while Raine, Gavin, Faith, and Clint were taking them out as they stayed on the back side of the defensive circle. “What the fuck!” Devin shouted in between firing his pistol with a flashlight in his other hand.

“Fuck!” someone shouted. The Vikings were using their weapons. Devin and the others, including Erica, Isaac, and Jamison, were using firearms.

This new family was using a mixture of weapons. Faith used a weapon that looked like a shovel that had been sharpened and began smashing it into malleable skulls. It was too dark to use her bow or rifle. Raine was keen with her double daggers. These were homemade as well. They were the length of daggers but had rapier-style hand protectors on each handle. She was using these as brass knuckles and beating her opponents in the face.

Clint started running and jumped on one of hood of the cars. He fired all the rounds his shotgun held. He slung it to the side. His button-down shirt was ripped back to reveal an undershirt and a belt with holsters sewn in. He had a series of revolvers in holsters sewn into a belt and a couple of semiautomatics in an underarm holster. He fired a revolver and replaced it with another fully loaded one from his belt. Gavin and Rune were using pieces of timber and teamwork to annihilate this small army of infected children. Gavin held one down with a long stick, followed by Rune who smashed it with his stump.

The first child who made his appearance made his way to Tara. She set her gaze upon it. She beat the child-zombie to death with a burning piece of wood. The extension cord wrapped around his ankle made racket as it dragged across the hot asphalt. The tip of the cord was caught around the base of a tree. Tara stabbed the zombie with the wooden stake. The rotting boy was engulfed in flames as Tara moved to her next challenger. Some of the humans climbed in their vehicles and drove off in the darkness. One of the SUVs backed into the row of Viking motorcycles and sped off into the distance without looking. The taillights faded into the distance as they left the park.

Jack and his aging father had joined the group from the Millington base. They had seen all that the group was capable of. Jack’s instincts came in, and he decided to flee with his father and anyone else in the car. He felt bad about backing over the motorcycles, but they shouldn’t have been parked there. Everything was always someone else’s fault when it came to Jack’s thought process. Jack redlined the vehicle climbing out of the basin and back onto the highway. He didn’t give a shit about anyone except his dad and himself. He threw the SUV toward the way they were headed. The highway was dark, and Jack threw the high beams on. His heart finally stopped racing, and he looked over to his dad. His dad was slumped against the car door. “It’s going to be OK, Dad; we’re getting the hell out of here.”

All of a sudden, Jack stomped on the pedal, and the brakes screeched to a halt. In the high beams, bodies turned and faced him. The red eyes were locked on the people in the car. As Jack threw the vehicle in reverse, he made it about thirty feet before he heard a grunt from his father in the passenger seat. The woman in the backseat kept her eyes looking backward as Jack was backing up. The SUV shifted into the drive as Jack began trying to do a U-turn. The body of his father began to look around, readjusting itself to its environment. Jack held the wheel at 10 and 2, and he made the turn. His father’s teeth latched on to his right forearm. Jack let go of the wheel and hollered in pain. With one arm in his father’s mouth, he tried to push his father’s head away, letting the wheel go as the road went. The woman screamed and jumped out of the moving BMW, only to have her legs crushed by the back wheels. She lay on the warm pavement as feet and shoes began to fill her vision.

She could smell the musk coming from these creatures. She screamed in pain as the razor-sharp teeth latched down on her soft skin. Jack got out of the car and tripped over his own feet as he tried to run back to the campground. The vehicle slowly rolled into a ditch. With his father’s corpse crawling out of the vehicle, Jack began to run.

Jack didn’t make it very far when he saw clumsy shadows coming from the banks of the highway. He held his wrist and ran, and the shadows were getting closer. He could feel the heat coming from their bodies. Soon, he was encircled by these creatures. Their hands and mouths were open, and they began to claw and snap at his appendages.

“Let’s get the hell out of here! There are too many!” Devin shouted over the gunfire.

“Back to the vehicles! Everyone retreat!” Walker said. The loud beeping of the SWAT van could be heard moving toward the opening of the campground. Devin was lucky enough to grab the side mirror as he drove off. Jamison started the transport truck and fired out the window blindly.

Those who had weapons held down cover fire for those who ran for their vehicles or the exit. Faith gathered her children into the back of Jamison’s truck. Clint made his way to the roof of the truck and continued to fire his handguns. Jamison decided that it was time to go and set the large truck back of the hill and out of the campground. Jamison held the automatic rifle out the driver-side window and fired wildly into the night air as he put the truck in reverse. “Fuck me!” Clint said to his family as he flipped inside from the roof. Faith wasn’t sure if it was because he landed on the supplies in the truck or if it was because their quiet campground had been overrun in such a short period of time. They watched as faces turned to feast on those they had captured.

Jamison’s truck was the last one out. Some of the old people didn’t make it. Some of the zombies latched on to them and dragged them down to the ground. One of the girls in scrubs ran into the woods, never to be seen again. Tank was last seen carrying a saddlebag and shield bashing wildly like a crazed maniac.

Artillery

Chapter 69

Friday 0400 CST

Cross Creeks National Wildlife Refuge

W
hen Jamison made it to the highway, he saw Devin’s van had stopped at an awkward angle with Devin in the back rummaging through the weapons. In his headlights, he saw Devin motion for Jamison to kill the headlights. Jamison left the engine running and got out. He saw a group of vehicles had stopped down the highway. Isaac’s ambulance and some of the other civilian vehicles had left ahead of Devin trying to get out of the forest. Ahead, Jamison saw a pair of taillights backing up to them.

Redbeard and a couple of the Vikings had returned holding on to the side of Isaac’s ambulance. “What is it?” Jamison asked to them.