DEAD: Reclamation: Book 10 of the DEAD series (5 page)

His eyes were full of guilt. That is why I took them before he died. He might have continued crying…hard to tell with all the blood.

3

Geek Surprise

“I’m so sorry, Kevin,” Catie said with a sigh and the warning of tears in her voice. She leaned on him and rested her head on his shoulder.

Kevin did not know what he felt as he stood at the edge of a clearing that was being reclaimed by nature. He leaned on his walking stick and felt the months he and Catie had spent on the road sort of sink into him.

The journey had not been one that he took with any real hope; however, it was still a soul crushing experience to see what he accepted as evidence that his mother and sister had not survived.

“I want to go look inside.” Kevin started forward, but Catie grabbed his arm.

“Darling, I know this is something you needed to do, but do you really think you want to see what is in there?”

Kevin turned to Catie and brushed a lock of her hair from her face. She had that look in her eyes that he knew so well. It was a look of fierce protection. While he was certainly able to fend for himself, Catie had been at his back more times than he could remember over the years.

The two of them had never intended for their relationship to blossom into what it had become—into what it was today. The funny thing was that he had Aleah to thank for the whole thing. He shook his head to clear it. Now was not the time for daydreaming.

“I need to go in there for my own peace and closure.” Kevin unshouldered his backpack, placed it on the ground beside Catie’s, and started forward, not bothering to look back. He knew without a doubt that Catie would be there at his side.

Reaching the dilapidated cabin, Kevin gave the door a nudge. Not surprisingly, it fell over with a loud clatter. Stepping over it, Kevin entered what had been his family’s vacation retreat. He had actually hated the place. As a teen, Kevin had been much more comfortable at his desk staring into his computer screen versus out in the wilderness doing things like fishing, splitting wood, and paddling a canoe on the lake just over the next ridge.

The inside was a shambles. It was thick with spider webs and something furry scuttled away and into the shadows in response to his sudden arrival. Still, even with the toll of time, it was clear that things had gone poorly for his mother and sister. One of the windows was gone, which, considering the amount of time that had passed, could be attributed to anything. However, the dark stain that was easily seen on the sill indicated otherwise.

Of course, there were even more obvious signs. At least five bodies had been picked clean, the bones scattered about. He could not tell if any might be his mother or sister. The skulls all had the typical trauma one would expect. One had a nasty split made by an axe most likely. Three had holes made by a small caliber weapon, and one had been decimated with little left besides the lower jaw. That one might have been his mother.

Kevin took in what he could and made an assumption. He knew that it was absolute fantasy to think he had the ability to reconstruct the events that had happened here over a decade ago, but he needed to do it in order to close the book.

In his mind, the zombies had come. His mother had done all she could once she accepted that they were what he had tried to tell her they were. It was just not enough. When they had broken in, she fought until she only had a single bullet in the pistol and one shell in the shotgun. After taking care of his sister, she had used the shotgun to end her own life to avoid becoming one of the walking dead.

“So this was your family’s cabin?” Catie remained on the small porch, her eyes scanning the area, always alert. “I bet you hated it,” Catie laughed, trying to lighten the mood.

“With a passion.”

Kevin backed out of the doorway and turned to look at what had been his first proof that his mother and sister made it here. His mother’s car was slowly becoming part of the landscape as vines and moss practically obscured it from view.

“What now?” Catie called as Kevin poked around in the lump that had once been a car.

“I guess we go back?”

“So you are okay?”

Kevin seemed to think about it for a few moments before nodding his head. “I didn’t expect to find them alive. Now I won’t have to wonder anymore.”

“I am sorry, Kevin.” Catie walked over and wrapped her arms around his waist, leaning her head against his back.

“Seems kinda silly now,” Kevin finally said as the sounds of some distant thunder rolled through the foothills.

“Why?” Catie gripped Kevin’s arms and spun him to face her. “You have carried this burden for so long, and now you at least know—”

“That I sent them to their deaths?”

Catie had been prepared for this part of the argument. She knew that it would be his initial reaction to try and take the blame.

“You could not save the world, Kevin. But look at how many people that you have saved? And those people are having babies…living the best life they can in this new world. Most of them would not have made it without you.”

“But—” Kevin began, only to be silenced by Catie’s finger on his lips.

“We move on and vow to try and do better,” Catie parroted one of Kevin’s many mantras back to him.

“So, do we head back?”

Catie had been ready for that question as well. While it was true that Aleah had been the one largely responsible for her and Kevin becoming a couple, she was not blind. She saw the looks that passed between the two when they met. And in a walled town with a population of less than two thousand, it was almost impossible for them not to cross paths daily.

“I was thinking we could try something new. You have done all you can back home. Maybe it is time that some other people benefitted from that amazing mind of yours.” Catie made it a point to wriggle up against him as she spoke.

She knew every one of Kevin’s weaknesses, and she was not above using them all in this instance. She wanted the two of them to start a real life together. One without Aleah’s shadow cast over them.

Just as she predicted, she could feel his body react to hers. He looked down into her eyes and gazed into them with love. It was more than she ever dreamed could be possible. Hell, at one point, her luck with men had been so obviously bad, she had considered switching to women.

Kevin’s hands moved down her sides and around to cup her buttocks. She threw her head back as he kissed down the side of her neck, pausing to nip playfully on her earlobe before working his way down. A soft moan escaped her lips as his teeth scraped along her collar bone.

***

“That little village we passed the day before yesterday looked kind of nice,” Catie said, staring up at the dark storm clouds that threatened rain any moment.

“I guess we can take a look,” Kevin agreed. “But we best get out of the open and set up camp before this storm hits. It looks like it will be a nasty one.”

As if to add credence to his words, there was a flash in the sky and a sharp peal of thunder. Kevin reached for his cargo shorts and then went about securing his prosthetic foot. Meanwhile, Catie hurried about gathering wood and piling it up under the initial protection of the thick trees that provided ample coverage until she could get the tarp over them.

Kevin chuckled as he set the tent up. All his life he had hated camping as a leisure activity. He had been an avid attendee of survivalist camps in the area, but he had not seen that as camping; that had been preparation.

Just as the first heavy drops began to fall, the couple retreated under the large blue tarp and warmed their hands by the fire. By morning, the storm had passed and they broke camp with a destination in mind.

By midday, they came to the ruins of a town that was under a fine sheet of green. Several of the buildings and homes had either collapsed or were on the verge. Dark shapes littered the ground in places where bodies had fallen and been left to the elements and local carrion eaters.

Kevin marveled at how fast nature was coming back. The documentaries had it all wrong. Unchecked, nature would reclaim this place within the next five years. Sure, there would be evidence that humans once called this home, but the flora was making fast work as vines pushed into cracks and climbed over every surface.

A soft moan brought his focus back to the present. A lone walker stumbled around a corner. It paused and then oriented itself on the couple. As Catie walked over and shoved her own steel-tipped hiking stick into its face and then returned to him, he was amused at how little zombies mattered anymore.

When they had first appeared, of course the reaction had been all wrong and humanity followed the predictable path into near extinction. These days, a zombie was no more frightening than a skunk. You were not afraid of them, but you did not take them completely for granted.

As far as zombies were concerned, they were now only a problem when you encountered one of the massive herds that milled about the country. It was the living that posed the real threat these days. And towns were always something to be entered with caution. Some were full of simple, hard-working folks, but others were warlike mobs, or lawless societies where might made right.

By nightfall, they had come to a ridge that allowed them to see the distant glow of lights of three small communities. Kevin noted that they were almost in the shape of a triangle if you drew a line connecting them. The one they had seen as they arrived a couple of days ago was at the bottom of that triangle and to their right.

It was about an hour before sunrise when Catie shook Kevin. “You need to wake up!”

Kevin batted her hand away and rolled over, but she was insistent. Finally, Kevin sat up and rubbed his eyes. They were in a hammock suspended about thirty feet above the ground. It was always best to be extra secure near settlements. That would be where you found the most zombie activity since they are drawn to sound.

It did not take him long to see what the reason was behind her waking him at such an ungodly hour. The settlement that made the top point in the triangle was on fire.

“That puts things on hold,” Kevin sighed.

“You think maybe the storm caused it? There was an awful lot of lightning last night.” Catie scrunched in close and pulled their sleeping bag up around her shoulders.

“Anything is possible.” Kevin knew that Catie didn’t believe that theory any more than he, but there was no use in getting all worked up over something they had no part in or control over.

As the sun rose, Kevin and Catie sat in the perch their hammock provided and scanned the area with binoculars. Nothing looked out of order. There were no large mobs of the undead or hints of roving bands that might be raiding the area.

“Still want to go down there?” Kevin asked as he slowly swept his gaze in a wide left-to-right pattern searching for anything that  might be the cause of the fire that still burned in that village.

“Maybe they need you now more than ever,” Catie answered with grim determination.

Kevin was no fool. He knew why Catie was so behind this. He could even see her reasoning, but this felt too abrupt. There were plenty of smaller settlements that were not a world away from the place they had called home all these years. But then again, maybe that was precisely the point. They climbed down and rolled up their gear.

“Let’s get down there and see what is what,” Catie said as she slung her pack up and onto her shoulders, giving the straps a tug to cinch them up a bit.

The couple started down the hill and stopped when they reached the banks of a river. Just like the days when man first began to populate the Earth, settlements were usually next to a ready and clean water source.

The waterways had become much cleaner now that man was not dumping everything into them. Still, nobody was brave enough to risk not boiling the water first. Many of the major rivers near big cities were almost worse off now than before as the factories and such fell and sent all the toxins that remained into the water either directly or through runoff.

Still, out in what had been the sticks before the zombie apocalypse, things were noticeably cleaner. What was even more peculiar, Kevin could notice the difference in the smell of the air within an hour or so of leaving a camp or town. And, despite dismissing it at first as just his imagination, he could smell them
before
they arrived. To put it bluntly, humanity stunk.

They were just crossing the river at a flimsy rope bridge when a voice called out, freezing them in a very vulnerable spot.

“Stop where you are and state your business!” a man’s voice growled from somewhere in the brush just on the other side of the gently rolling waters.

“Just a pair of travelers,” Kevin called out in response, making it a point of raising his hands to show he was unarmed. Besides, whoever this was did not need to know that it was Catie who was the more dangerous of the two.

“And where you travelin’ from?”

The deep southern slur in the man’s voice reminded Kevin of the character from
Deliverance
that wore the cap and did those horrible things to poor Ned Beatty. There was something decidedly unfriendly sounding about this person.

“From out west, the Dakota territories,” Kevin answered after deciding that it really did not make a difference if he revealed that bit of information. It wasn’t like whoever this was could just up and launch an attack.