DEAD: Darkness Before Dawn (22 page)

The low moan of a nearby zombie carried up to her ears.
So not much has changed
, she thought, amused by her own dry wit.

She made a complete circuit of the building and noticed a few small groups of walkers here and there, but nothing too wo
rrisome. She also saw a flicker of firelight from more than two dozen locations in every direction.

She wondered where everybody hid during the day
, because a few of those fires were back the way they had come. That made her more easily accept the idea that perhaps they had actually just stumbled onto this place with all of its supplies. Still, if that was the case, where did
these
people go…and why?

She sat down and let her legs
dangle over the side. In that single act, she was transported back to the days when she was a young girl back in rural South Dakota.

She had grown up in a pretty normal middle class home. She played sports in school and was better at many of them than some of the boys. That had gotten the whole “dyke” rumor star
ted. Of course it could not be skill, talent, and practice…no, the only reason Catie Rose was any good at sports was because she was a carpet muncher.

That had set her on a course that she was not proud of and had regretted to this day. For most of her junior year, Catie slept with just about every single guy she could. Considering that she was above average in the looks department, it had not been diff
icult. Of course she was no longer being called a lesbian or any of the more colorful euphemisms, but now she was a “slut” and a “whore”. She eventually discovered that she preferred the lesbian rumor to the slutty truth.

Then a day came along that changed her life. A recruiter visited the school shortly after 9/11. She saw a few things right away that appealed to her. For one, she would get to shoot guns…really big ones. And second, she could give a little pa
yback to those bastards who had dared to do such a terrible thing.

Enlisting on the spot, Catie left for boot camp the week after graduation. The recruiter had even told her that she could enjoy her last summer first, but she saw no reason to delay getting away from home and the town where her name was more often used as a
punch line than anything else.

Of course it did not take long for her to see past all of the smoke and mirrors of the recruiter’s spiel. But in the end, she had not regretted her decision. By the time she graduated boot camp, troops were
fighting and dying all over the Middle East and the bastard responsible was living in a cave and laughing.

However, she still remembered the day she got off the plane and found herself in
Baghdad. Those first months, they were treated like heroes. And then she lost her first friend (of many) to an IED.

After her first reenlistment, Catie was shipped back to the states, but she had really found her niche in life overseas and begged to be sent back. For some reason, she found a great deal of satisfaction and personal reward in being able to help people who had lived their lives as victims. She picked up enough of the language to be able to communicate with the locals and found that the media was missing the big story: these people were f
inally being allowed to live their lives without fear of death squads.

It would all change when her convoy that was loaded down with supplies for a village that had been hit by terrible flooding was attacked by insurgents. Her APC was flipped by an IED and she suffered a terrible injury to her spine. Doctors said she might never walk again. Catie never believed them for a moment.

After three years of painful rehab, she became an ambassador for the Army and spoke at a lot of fundraisers, but they would not let her have anything beyond a desk job ever again. Her days in the field were over…and then the dead got up and started eating people.

She was on a plane to Washington D.C. and on a layover in Columbus of all places when a message came with top
priority. The president’s daughter was close and needed to be saved if possible. She made a few calls and discovered that there were over a dozen National Guard units within less than twenty miles.

The one she ended up with was strictly luck. She could have just as easily hooked up with that lunatic Major Beers. The thing is, she had no idea how it would have turned out. Sometimes she actually saw the major’s point. This was a new world and it was about survival. But then she would think about all those she had encountered over the years that had seen her uniform as a sign of hope. She remembered her oath to protect against all en
emies…foreign and domestic.

She had melded in fine with her new unit…until order star
ted to crumble. When that group of men had been discovered that were basically running a black market based on their fellow female soldiers, Catie had found her first real mission.

After they were dealt with, she had hung in the background, letting some of the higher ups think that it was their idea. That was something that had always amazed her about most offi
cers…they were fantastic at taking somebody else’s idea and accepting the credit for its implementation.

As time passed, she started finding more and more that her thoughts returned home. Not the people who had tormented
her, she could give a damn about their fate, but she had friends and family. She had seen how the big cities had fallen, but she held on to a fantasy that it would be different for her hometown.

Still, Catie was no fool; she knew that to embark on such a journey by herself would not end well. The
n, Kevin and his group arrived. She tried to keep her distance and observe, but they had been the first civilian survivors that she had seen in months that were not living out some sort of deranged
Mad Max
fantasy.

On a few occasions when she had hung out on the fringe of this little group, she heard something that made her pay closer attention. More than once she had heard South Dakota me
ntioned. Still, she had not dared to hope. These people had stumbled into safety. They could relax now; and from the sounds of it, Kevin and his people could use the break. All of them were suffering at least mild malnutrition and varying degrees of frostbite. Yet she saw a spirit in them, and it emanated from the unlikely hero, Kevin Dreon.

She was not surprised when the word leaked out that they would be leaving.
It seemed that none of them were too keen on a new life under the military umbrella. She had gone on one field mission with Aleah and seen firsthand how the woman would never fit in with soldiers…no matter the gender.

She had followed them when they left. To be more specific, she had deserted the unit. They were becoming the bully and had stopped even trying to find survivors. In the early days they had been sending out patrols in an attempt to find women and rescue them. This
zombie scenario had turned into the perfect storm for every abuser, rapist, and pedophile to come together and act with impunity on every sick and twisted fantasy that they ever imagined.

The last few months, the missions out to find and help had turned into scavenge and take. It was time to move on.

At first, she had just been so glad to be away from the constraints of the unit. However, she bristled at the lack of routine. For a decade, her life had been all about order and knowing what came next. And then there was that desire that burned inside her to help others in need. Yet this group actually seemed to be focused on survival of themselves and nothing more.

When they found the children, she finally felt like things were right in her world. They had done a good thing and rescued those in need
, and now they were on the way home. Sure, Kevin had his spot all picked out, but if her hometown had in fact survived like she had imagined in all her fantasies, then maybe he would see that he did not need to travel any further.

When he went down, Catie had simply shifted into military mode. While the commanding officer was absent, the group needed structure and a purpose while they awaited his recovery. The only problem with that was her ideas and priorities did not always sync with Aleah—self-proclaimed queen of the realm in Kevin’s absence. She could not explain it; there was just som
ething about the woman that bothered her.

“You need to snap out of this, soldier,” she chastised herself as she looked out over the dead remains of Chicago. She made a vow right then
to let the soldier retire.

***

Sean was afraid to move. Deanna had snuggled in tight and he was scared that if he so much as twitched, she would get up and go climb into her cot. He really enjoyed these moments when she was all his and not trying to save everybody at once.

He pushed them down, but he could not deny that he
often had to struggle with feelings of jealousy when she ran around all day making sure that every single person in their group was taken care of except him. Of course he should be able to take care of himself, but he liked it when she fussed over him.

As he sat here reveling in her closeness, he had to wonder if she would get tired of him eventually. After all, everybody else did…even his own parents.

Sean let his mind drift down that dark path that he tried to keep closed most of the time. It was always more difficult when he was tired.

He thought of all the choices in life he had made that led to his current situation. Sean Fields had been in and out of juvie most of his life. Shoplifting, petty theft, breaking and entering, a few minor assaults; all of these led up to the day that he got tired of hearing his drunken excuse for a mother tell him what a huge disappointment he had been to her since his birth.

“I got pregnant with you right after graduation…I never had a chance to live my life,” she slurred after staggering in one morning around three. “I had my whole future ahead of me and then
you
had to come and ruin it!”

Sean just stood there; after all, he had heard this story a hundred times if he’d heard it once. Next she would tell him that his behavior was constantly ruining any chance she had to meet a nice guy.

“If you could just straighten up for a few months, I could meet a nice guy and we could have a real life,” Julia Fields said as she staggered down the hall.

Sean knew the last bit was coming, but when his mother stumbled into her room, he thought this time he would not have to hear—

“I wish you would have never been born!” his mother’s voice echoed down the hallway. It seemed to amplify and almost slam into him with a physical presence.

“Yeah?” he called back, suddenly tired of being on the r
eceiving end of this routine every night his mother came home from one of the local taverns. “Well maybe if you could keep your legs closed, every guy in town would not see you as little more than an easy fuck!”

There was silence for a moment and he thought that perhaps she had passed out and missed his retort. Then she was in the hallway and coming at him with hatred in her eyes. He was so surprised that she had slapped him at least a dozen times before he ever thought to put up his hands and defend himself. A well placed hand to his face snapped him back to the moment.

His vision seemed to blur around the edges and he balled up his fist. Just as his mother lost steam and dropped her hands, he swung. His punch caught her square in the eye. He actually felt a small crunch. He could not explain it, but he suddenly understood all those nature shows about sharks where they slip into a feeding frenzy.

Sean began to swing haymakers. His fists rained down on his mother in a flurry. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he heard her screaming, then crying, then begging him to stop. But he kept on, all the years of listening to her berate him and wish for his non-existence had finally boiled over.

And so that is how the police found him when they kicked in the door. He was sitting astride his mother raining blows down on her. At some point she had lost consciousness.

He was in a haze for a while, but eventually the fog lifted. He saw blood all over his hands and splattered all over his body. Glancing up, the
reflection of a face in the window stared back through a mask of crimson.

He still did not really come around and realize what he had done until
sometime in the back of the police car that took him to jail. That first morning, as the sun rose and he still sat in a holding cell, the pain in his hands finally drew him to complete awareness. They had been broken in several places, the knuckle of his right index finger looked like it had been pushed back an inch or two, and a couple of the fingers were crooked. He found himself wondering what his mother must look like if his hands were so totally ruined. He could almost understand why his hands looked the way they did, but what he did not understand was how come his throat felt like it had been scoured with sandpaper.

He did not see his mother for over a week until the initial a
rraignment…and he had barely recognized her. He had heard enough from his friends and just people passing, so he had known that his mom was pretty. The thing in the courtroom that day was hardly recognizable as human. The face was a misshapen lump with slits for eyes that were constantly leaking.

The police gave brief statements of a crazed maniac beating a defenseless—and apparently by the time they arrived, also u
nconscious—woman. They told about how they arrived at the scene of a domestic disturbance and could hear the screaming from outside before they opened their doors and exited the vehicles. They had kicked in the door to discover Sean Fields beating his mother and screaming obscenities at her.