DEAD (Book 12): End (38 page)

“I guess there are worse ways to go,” Vix sighed.

The two gripped hands. Vix leaned down and kissed the man on the cheek. Together, the two took one last look at the handful of people still trying to decide how they wanted to come to their end. Vix noted that none of the faces were familiar.

With a nod to each other, they stepped off the ledge.

***

Ronni wiped her eyes and set down the axe. It would be dark soon and she wanted to get inside before those clouds moving in managed to dump any of their rain on her. Scooping up some of the wood that she had just cut, Ronni went into the cabin.

A blast of warmth greeted her along with the smells of something savory cooking over the fire. She was just finished with stacking the wood beside the hearth when she heard the steps outside on the porch. She hurried to the door and threw it open just as she heard a loud groan and accompanying creak of that one section of her porch that she kept meaning to fix but somehow never got around to.

“Mark!” Ronni welcomed the big man with a hug and a kiss on the cheek.

“That’s all I get after I brought you this?” he said with feigned hurt feelings as he produced a plainly wrapped package from the pouch at his hip.

Ronni accepted the package with a look of suspicion. She stepped back and gestured for him to follow her inside. Walking to the table, she set the package down and then made it a point to wipe her hands off on the rag hanging over the edge of the bucket of soapy water.

Using her belt knife, she sliced through the twine that helped secure the package and then pulled at the paper, doing her best not to tear it as she peeled away the adhesive gum that had been used. Mark had stepped up beside her and made a sound of anxious annoyance.

“Really? You gonna fold the wrapping paper up as well?” he chided.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Ronni said with an abundance of sarcasm, “did we suddenly discover a surplus of things like paper? Or has the process finally been streamlined so that it is now in mass production.”

Mark might have muttered something just barely audible about spoiled brats or pains in the ass, but when Ronni shot him a hard glare, he made an over-exaggerated display of locking his lips with an imaginary key and tossing that key away.

She peeled back the last layer of paper and discovered a hand-carved frame. In it was a near perfect likeness of her and her dad drawn in what looked like charcoal.

“I know you don’t do Christmas or your birthday,” Mark stammered, suddenly sounding uncharacteristically bashful. “But I wanted to give you a present anyway.”

Ronni held the picture up and stared at it for several seconds. Her lips pressed tight and her brow knitted just enough to make a furrow between her eyes.

“Crap,” Mark breathed. “You hate it.”

“This is beautiful.” She looked up at the man and a smile had to force itself onto her face.

It was a rare thing to see, and Mark thought he could count on one hand the number of times he had seen one on the woman’s face since her father’s death over eight months ago. That day, she had made the announcement that she was not going to return home. For the first few days after Chad’s death, she insisted that she was going to just go back to living in the wilderness.

Eventually, she made a sudden reversal. She wanted to join the security team at the resort. When Mark asked her what made her think she was in any way qualified, she reminded him that he had been the chief of security when a bio-dome full of zombies had emerged from the nearby woods. She went on to recount that it had been her and her dad who made that discovery while on vacation.

“If I am that good on vacation, imagine how amazing I will be when it is actually my job to keep the perimeter secure.” And with that, Ronni had returned to the cabin that she had checked into with her dad when they had first arrived.

Mark had given her a few days to “come to her senses” before he had paid that first visit. He had been stunned when he arrived and discovered a pyre burning out behind the cabin with at least a dozen bodies stacked on the flaming base.

“You have a break in the perimeter just on the other side of that little inlet where the stream dumps into the lake,” Ronni said by way of greeting. “With all the fresh zombies in the area, you might want to get that taken care of.”

She didn’t need to say anything about her dad and how he had almost fallen under a small swarm of new walkers. They had engaged in that conversation while she had waited for her dad to recover. Sadly, that recovery had been very short. He had not been present when Chad died, and when the news reached him, he was ready for the blasting that he expected Ronni to give him. He had been stunned at how calm she had been when he did finally arrive. When he eventually asked how long she would make him wait before she “let him have it”, she had told him very plainly that her father’s death was not his fault.

“However,” she had added, “if anybody is bitten while I am here on vacation, that will be a different story.”

“You really like it?” Mark asked cautiously, shaking himself from his short trip down Memory Lane and back to the present.

“I think it is amazing. Did you do it yourself?” Ronni asked, carrying the frame with her as she rummaged through a small cabinet and produced a hammer and a crude nail.

“Yep,” he said, trying not to sound too proud of his work. “I had help with the frame. I’m not much of a carver, so one of the guys did the fancy stuff around the edges.”

With a few taps, she had the nail in place and then hung the picture. Stepping back, she folded her arms across her body and stared at it for a few seconds before reaching over and adjusting it just slightly so that it hung level.

Once she was satisfied, she turned back to Mark. “I heard rumors of a team being sent east next month. Rumor has it that there is some incredible warm springs resort that used to exist a few valleys over.”

“Yeah,” the man said slowly, marveling at how she could have heard about this considering the information had just arrived yesterday. “One of the supply traders came in with a map to the place. She says that it looks like it escaped looters and that it might only take a few weeks to clean out. A perimeter security zone would need to be built, and if nothing terrible happened, the place would be ready to accept guests within a year.

“I don’t imagine that you have the entire team picked, so I would like to throw my name in the hat. I only have one condition.” Mark didn’t say a word, so Ronni continued. “I want the security chief post.”

He guessed that he shouldn’t be surprised. He’d seen the name on the Old World map when they had compared notes with what the merchant had shared: Chad Springs.

Three weeks later, Ronni was leading her team east. Henry was at her side along with two other former residents of the defunct bio-dome. The team numbered a total of twenty members. By the following fall, Chad Springs Resort was accepting its first guests.

Ronni stood up on the wall and waved as Caroline and her family signed in at the gate as the first official visitors. Her eyes scanned the line of thirty-seven men, women, and children who would be the first guests waiting to be admitted.

After one more look, she made her way down the ladder and crossed the compound to her office. The sign above the door read: Chad’s Chief of Security. Taking a seat behind her desk, she started on the week’s watch rotation and roving security assignments. Every so often, her eyes would drift to the framed picture on her desk and she would smile. That smile was usually accompanied by her pausing long enough to fondle the necklace she wore. It had once been a bracelet with just the word “DADDY” carved into the wooden cubes, but now it had been modified, which was why it was a necklace. The extra cubes helped spell out the rest of the phrase: DADDY’S LITTLE GIRL.

***

Five days. It had been five days. Jody slid down with his back against the post and stared up at a sunny sky that did not show any signs of providing relief in the way of rain. How had this happened? How had everything fallen apart so quickly?

The moans of the undead raged like a storm that was trapped inside his skull. Looking down, he saw familiar faces in with the massive herd that stretched on in every direction. Yes, they were still moving, but that did not mean anything. He was almost certain that they were just swirling around the platform that he had managed to reach three days ago when the entire northern and western walls folded like paper.

Honestly, he really had not believed the situation was as bad as it was until he had climbed up on the wall that first day to see for himself. He was reminded of a plague of locusts that were coming to wipe out everything in their path. Farmers could do whatever they wanted, but they would not be able to stop the swarm. This was much the same. And now, as he looked down once more, he felt as if he might be in the eye on an undead hurricane.

“Hurricane Zelda,” he mused, though his heart was not in it.

He looked over to where he guessed the entrance to the emergency bunker to be. Long gone were the sides of the train cars. If the main outer walls of the city’s defenses had fallen when the full force of the undead flood arrived, those had simply vanished in the blink of an eye as if they had never existed. He remembered the day those last adjustments had been made and the final bolts torqued down and secured. Everybody had felt that not even the worst zombie mob out there would be able to breach those defenses.

They had been so wrong. And now he just hoped that Selina and the few that had made it inside would someday be able to come out. He knew that he would not live to see that day. Already, his tongue felt as if it were three times its normal size. He could not even manage enough saliva to spit. The last drops in his canteen had trickled into his mouth yesterday morning.

The sun overhead was doing its part to hurry things along and he truly doubted that he would last the three days they say a person can survive without water. More than once he had stood and walked to the edge of the platform he was on and considered taking a swan dive into the sea of faces that looked up at him. The first time he’d done so, Danny’s undead visage stared up at him and moaned pathetically.

In the end, he simply had not been able to do it. He’d heard the screams and he was not prepared to take that sort of pain. Call it cowardice or desperate clinging on to the hope that something amazing would occur and he would be saved. That first night, when he’d fallen asleep, he had hoped beyond hope that he would wake to find the zombies gone.

Not only were they still there, but that was when he started to think that perhaps they were just swirling around his location and would do so for eternity…or until somebody caught their attention and sent them someplace else.

Looking out across the mostly flat landscape, Jody could see almost no sign that this used to be the location of a community. Nearly all of the buildings had been knocked over. He had to marvel at the force these undead were capable of in such large numbers. The only things that seemed to have survived were the tall sniper towers. Jody thought it had to do with the fact that the poles were so relatively thin that not enough of the walking dead could jam up against them to knock them over.

It was almost funny that zombies had become such a minor thing over the years. They were no more worrisome than any other sort of pest or vermin when encountered in reasonable numbers. Looking at this crowd, he had to guess the numbers to be well over a million.

As the day passed, Jody slipped in and out of consciousness. Every single time he roused from those restless instances, he would foolishly hope that maybe this time they would be gone. Each time, he was disappointed. At last, he closed his eyes and they did not open again.

Three weeks later, a hatch in the ground creaked open. The undead had finally gone. Not even the stragglers remained. The air still held the lingering stench of rot and filth, and the ground was a putrid mess of mostly unidentifiable remains. The massive swath of land where the herd had traveled could easily be seen and it was clear to all those who came forth from the open bunker door that this area was no longer inhabitable.

Slowly, a handful of survivors emerged.

***

Entry One Hundred—

I should not be surprised that six months later, Glick has become the leader of the bunch. There was just something about her from the first day that made her stand out from the others.

We just took our first job. Oddly enough, it was for that little village that I first came across all those months ago when I initially arrived. I think back to how casual they were about the volcano. Much like them, I have also learned to respect Mount Saint Helens instead of fear her.

Some days, I can go out to a small hill that sits across the valley from the open mouth of the mountain and watch her spew varying sizes of ash plumes into the sky. Sadly, we won’t be seeing the mountain for a while. The job we have been tasked to do will take us into Montana.

Glick has the load out list and is in town gathering what we need. This is no ordinary run. That much was clear when the group of people arrived at my cabin door. I guess they heard about me from a former client and have spent the better part of the year following my trail until locating me.