Breach (The Blood Bargain) (3 page)

There was already a crowd of guards gathering by the north lookout.  The post that looked out over the main road into town that led to highway 69.  I recognized some of the faces from our off the books meetings at
Smitty’s some months prior, others from around town and shift coordination meetings.  All of them were heavily armed and in heated discussion.

Ben was there, the six foot and a crap ton of inches red head towered over the rest with a frown on his hard face.  Arms the size of tree trunks were stuffed into a trench coat, which I knew from experience was hiding a handful of deadly toys.  Ben was an axe man, brute strength worked to his advantage.  He was a good friend of Cole’s, but I didn’t like the guy since he brought his love triangle to my doorstep; dating both the sweet nurse who helped me recover and my best friend
who also happened to be my housemate.

Cole approached him immediately and joined the male murmuring circle while I started climbing up the wall
to get a look. 

Pegs were placed every foot or so to allow us a nice way of up and over to take out threats. The climb was the hardest it had ever been for me.  My freshly healed legs protested, muscles tense and burning from under use.  Despite the pain I refused to look weak or give up, men in this colony were quick to try to enforce gender roles as they were centuries past.  I would not give them the opportunity to question my abilities, even if I did have a temporary handicap.

If we were under threat I had to know.  I had to see it.  Thankfully, everyone was too preoccupied to tell me to stop, get down, go home and cook something. Relying on my arms more than my legs, I pulled myself up over the edge, careful not to graze my skin on the pieces of metal that had been haphazardly welded together on my right.

I had no comprehension of what I was looking at.

The only association I could make in my mind was a comparison to a rock concert.

These were not screaming fans however, this was a collection of undead men women and children.  There were no bright shirts with band logos on them, most had lost whatever garments they had on at the time of infection.  Caked with mud and long decayed, their mutilated bodies were virtually sexless, only their height
giving an indication of what they may have been.  There was a sea of them, moving as one across the horizon in our direction. Slow and steady and not vocal. When the throes of hunger hit they would try to pick up the pace and make a hell of a sound.  Neither of those things seemed to be occurring, which meant they were just aimlessly headed our way?  That wasn’t right.  Deadheads did not migrate in the last decade that we had observed.  Either way it was a gift, slow moving meant more time.

Not that time would help us much.

I jumped down from the wall pegs, thinking about our disaster preparedness planning. There was no contingency for this.  No account for a new holy shit event.  Why would we need one with our vampire protection?  It was something that would have been laughed out of council.

In a daze, I walked over to the crowd and edged in beside Cole.

Things did not appear to be going well, Ben had slapped some guy who was gibbering nonsense.

“What the hell man...what the hell.”  Someone else stepped to the man’s defense, not that the third man was threatening, he didn’t stand past Ben’s chin.

“Shut up.” Ben snapped at him as if he were a child.

“You mother f-“

“Why don’t you just back off!”  Other voices added to the chaos, a rising crescendo of fear driven by memory.

“Everyone calm down, we need to think this through and develop a strategy before it’s too late.  Rational and calm
people or I’m kicking your asses outta here.”  The man who was clearly in charge barked stepping into the center of the group. Scanning the crowd one by one to make sure they understood. Those steel grey eyes fell on me for a fraction of a second then continued on.  Eyes belonging to Rylie Everen. 

The
Rylie Everen.

There were many that thought Zack’s appointment to the council should have gone to him. Hell, probably more
folks that would say the same for yours truly.  We’d never spoken a word to each other, but I knew of him and I could only assume he had heard of me.

Rylie
was a colony man, a guard on the north end before the wall was even done.  He pulled long hours, double shifts working with any weapon available, anything for the safety of the community.  Fiercely loyal to the council, he was level headed and dependable.  Before the outbreak he had been in in the Army, serving in Afghanistan for a number of years. This made him one of the few real soldiers who survived.

His
was a face scarred, shrapnel from a homemade concoction during the first year of the deadheads had grazed the side of his face.  His left ear was also said to be mangled, but none would know from looking at him.  The truth was hidden under waves of black hair that was cut just above his collar line.  What was visible allowed him to pass for an attractive man despite the fact that his nose had obviously been busted a few times; strong jaw masked in a perpetual five o’clock shadow, a pair of deep set eyes that had the single girls whispering when he went by, naturally tan skin always covered in threads that screamed utility, military camo and cargos. Although his commanding presence came not from his clothes or his height-which I’m guessing was about six foot even-but from his booming voice and aura of command. 

If don’t screw with me was a cologne, he’d be in all the commercials.

When Rylie spoke, it worked. His singular tone cut through them all.

Everyone at once took Ben’s advice; they shut the hell up.

“Now what are our options?”  Rylie put his hands on his hips when he spoke.

“
Molotov’s?”

“Stupid.  Next.”

“We could send someone out as bait, have them run around till nightfall?”  Cole offered up.  My chest tightened, if he thought he was going to volunteer for that we were going to have more than words exchanged.  To my relief, Rylie didn’t seem too into it either.

“Possible, but I’m not putting our people in harm’s way like that if we don’t have to.  It’s likely a death sentence.”

“We could just wait it out till nightfall?”  Several people agreed, someone shouted let the blood suckers handle it which incurred even more cheers.  Rylie shook his head.

“There is a damned sea out there!  Bodily force alone they are going to cause serious damage quickly, not to mention if they start stacking.”

Silence stretched on for minutes that felt like hours, maybe it was a blink of an eye.  All I know is my mouth was the next one moving. “How many ranged weapons do we have?”

“We’ve got a few crossbows, a couple of old fashioned pull backs in the shack.”
Rylie looked me in the eye with an intensity that made me feel like he was looking through me when he spoke.

“No.” I shook my head and made a hand gesture prevalent in small children.  Index finger out, rest of my digits curled inward, thumb up.  “I mean guns.”

“Guns make noise.”  The guy to the left of Rylie chimed in, I’d seen him before at Smitty’s.  He was the one who had continuously eyed me like I was a piece of meat.  At the moment I was glad to see the threat of imminent death put the kibosh on his libido, the only thing on his face was terror.

I laughed. “You really think that matters right now?”

“What do we have for guns?!”  Ben parroted my question, his quick trigger temper flaring.

“Plenty, they’re in storage though, haven’t been fired in years.”

“Liv, no one’s actually used a gun in ages, now we’re going to try to do headshots?” Cole asked me, worry thick in his voice.  It was funny from a man who kept one tucked in his waist.

“You have a better idea?  We can’t put boots on the ground out there, it’s too thick.”  I turned to
Rylie, talking with my hands to make my point.

“Look.  We don’t have to take them all out, just hold them off the wall till the sun sets.” Trying to back up the theory, my eyes went up to gauge the descent of the star we revolved around.  “Four hours, five tops.”

“We have maybe an hour of prep time before they start getting too close.”  Some guy I didn’t know chimed in.  Rylie stared hard at me for a moment, those gun metal orbs taking weight of my position.  I held his gaze, showing him the strength of my conviction.

With a curt nod, the military man started throwing his weight around, his voice barking orders in a clipped tone.

“You three.  Guns. Now. Round up all the people you can find to help fire them on the way.  Have a civilian notify the vamps we need them as soon as the sun dips.”  He pointed at Cole. “You’re with me to get the shack let’s get those bows handed out.”  The shared nod between the two men was more than a passing glance.  I knew from one of Cole’s rare moments of openness about his life before the colony that Rylie had been the one to find him and his mother.  The two of them had been struggling along the back roads, moving from house to house in search of food and some signs of life.  It had been a pure miracle their paths had crossed.  Cole respected the hell out of him, it was obvious Rylie felt likewise. 

The pair of them started moving away from me, I felt myself frowning.  I was not going to be left behind when I could help.

“And me?”  I called after him.

“And you?”  I knew from his look he was criticizing my combat readiness.  True I wasn’t dressed for it nor had I been through any real situations or training in months.  Outside of the need to know members of the council, my injuries had been explained away as a horrible fall when I
scaled the wall for guard duty one day.  No one outside of Ben, Cole and Adam knew the whole truth.  I could imagine Rylie worried that I would have a relapse or terror when faced with the same situation that landed me in a hospital bed.  Yet, in my heart I knew the same as he did, none of these reasons measured up enough to cast me aside. 

That was the thing about life and death situations.  Those that are trained for that little slice of hell, for the real rough times, no matter how much temporal distance you place between them and those memories, those skills, those fight not flight reactions, are never forgotten.

“Give me a bow I’ll kill anything you put in my path.”  I declared, crossing my arms.  To which Rylie actually smiled at me. Maybe I had misjudged his perception.  I had figured someone who had been so loyal in the defense of Junction would absolutely hate me for my reputation as an obstinate lone wolf.

“Then go get one and make it happen.”

Everyone worked fast.  We had reinforcements at the wall, guns being unloaded from storage crates and ammo being distributed before the deadheads hit the first marker.  Ben was giving a quick firing tutorial to everyone who had gathered around.  I watched unsteady hands work on loading clips and stuffing duffels.  No matter how confident I had fronted to Rylie, my palms sweated as much as the next man despite the cold. None of us really knew how this was going to pan out.  Death had come knocking and we very well could all be leaving with it.

Shive
showed up along with my Dad.  Graham, both big and little, had apparently started rounding folks up making sure everyone was indoors and secure. No surprise to me that they would want to be as far away from the front lines as possible.

Just in case things went south.  Not that it would.

Positioning was the hard part.  The wall was not designed for many to transverse it at once.  We shoved as many people who would fit without shooting each other into the watch tower, then one by one climbed up the pegs and straddled the edge of the barrier.  As many clips as we could carry shoved into every pocket and duffels thrown over backs.  Not a round was spared in prep for this.  Long term this could be problematic for us.  Not that anyone cared, if we didn’t live to tomorrow who gave a shit about a month from now?

If my limbs were hurting before climbing that wall a second time should have been agony.  Yet as I pulled and stepped up those pegs I felt nothing.

Adrenaline, life’s original painkiller.

We were fifty percent in position when the deadheads noticed us.  It started with the closest one, obviously female, her once brightly colored sundress which now hung loosely off of her emaciated limbs.  Milky white eyes tilted up, to where we were shouting and moving along, arms rose while the shuffling speed of her feet increased.  Perhaps it was my own ego, but it looked like she was staring right at me.  The deadhead’s jaw opened, I could only assume a hungry moan worked its way out of those cracked and withered lips.  It was not a sound I could hear over the noise the guys next to me were making with their guns, checking clips and arranging their supplies.

That changed in an instant.

One sound became many, other feet increasing their pace.

It was starting.

“Everybody ready!” 
Rylie shouted from the center of our spread.  His booming voice carrying over the howls of the impatient dead.

When I brought my .45 up, the forehead of that summer songstress was the first to go.

I did not get her in the center of the forehead, rather the upper top of her skull, it imploded down the center like a spoiled cantaloupe.  The body crumpling into the grass, disappearing behind the many that took its place.