Deadfall: Hunters (5 page)

We met with the big man. He spoke clearly and smoothly. I had expected a person with a slight mental impediment from everything that I had heard. Instead, what I heard was a smart man, articulated and complete.

“Janine tells me that I am to thank you for probably saving my life?”

I know human beings can’t read minds, but when Tague and I looked at each other, we both knew what the other was thinking.

Blevin was young, only twenty three. None of the stereotypes fit him. He was NOT a former football player. He had some college education. No criminal background. Nothing that would make me want to hate him, and even worse, nothing that explained why he watched over the girls while Cain did what he did.

He sat on his large chair as we exchanged our stories. He was especially happy to hear that many other people had survived and had found the tower cities a fascinating idea, even commenting why he hadn’t thought of that as well. For his part, he told us how he had come to Miami with his father to try to get funding to restart his business in Tampa after the fiasco of Deadfall. The two of them had managed to survive in some apartment complex for several weeks until they decided to bust out of there to try to head home. Sadly, they had run into too many hordes and his father had been killed. Blevin spent the next month or so hiding about, as he put it, studying the enemy. He wanted to know how to kill them better to avenge his father. I easily understand the sentiment.

He had been on a rampage through the streets when he had run into Cain. He related to us how Cain had insisted he had saved him and that he had then given his word to owe him his life. Janine jumped in at this point: “You have to know he’s lying.”

“It could be. But I still gave my word,” he gently pointed out.

I could tell Janine was disappointed. This was certainly something they had talked about a lot.

His father had inspired on him the notion that a man’s word is absolutely everything and that you never go back on your word for any reason at all. And here was the crux of our situation. As we talked to him about what the girls had told us, always with the possibility of us being crushed to death if he decided to, it was clear to us that he agreed with the young girl. He apparently thought nothing good of Cain and yet clung to his oath of loyalty. He knew what Cain did with the women and didn’t like the idea, to the point that he protected the girls, but would do nothing against it.

“So if we try to get Cain?” I asked.

“I would defend him,” was his reply. There was no hatred in it, just a matter of fact statement.

We left him to rest some more as we were out of ideas. That is why I'm glad I didn’t always have to come up with the ideas.

Janine found us later that afternoon. We had been rummaging through a library nearby. Tague had wanted to find some technical manuals, if possible. She came to inform us that she had a possible plan. She wouldn’t quite tell us what, but dragged us back to the school. We found Blevin, this time in another room, still resting, but looking quite better. Having seen him standing up for the first time, might first guess was that he was at least six foot ten inches, all muscle, or maybe even titanium, cast iron, adamantium. He was eating supper and beckoned us to sit down and eat with him. He explained to us that he ate alone so that the girls wouldn’t serve him. He always felt bad when they did. It was Cain’s orders that they serve him.

“Blevin, you said you’d defend Cain against Brian?” Janine began.

“Again with this?” he interjected, looking a little annoyed.

“You can’t fight Brian,” Janine started. Blevin listened, “you can’t. He saved your life. You owe him your life too.”

It started to dawn on me what the little girl was doing. Blevin began to understand as well.

“Go on,” he said, putting his fork down and putting his elbows up on the table.

“Swear your life to Brian too, then you can just stand by and let Brian kill him,” she related.

I swallowed hard. I had never killed anyone. Before I could say anything though, Blevin jumped in.

“Hah. You're the smart one aren’t you,” he said, grabbing the girl and hugging her.

He looked right at me and I felt myself falling into one of those horrible situations you walk into blindly and then wonder in hindsight if there was anything you could have done to get out of it. As I tried to think about that very thing at that very moment, I was beat to the punch.

“Brian, you saved my life. I owe you my life and swear a life debt to you.”

“No, wait…” was all I could stammer out before I knew I was stuck.

He even had the audacity to laugh, a good full hearty laugh. He understood just what had happened. The man probably had his own disdain for Cain and had now come up with a solution to his problem that didn’t involve him going against his own code.

I really need to think better about these situations before I stumble right into them.

Not even a whole day at this new place with these new people who were still essentially complete strangers and it was on me again to solve their problems. Tague and I talked about it later and really debated on just getting on the boat and leaving that place as the risk was potentially far higher than any possible reward. When we thought about it, there was essentially no reward, nothing that we got out of risking our lives in this situation other than a possible clean conscience. A good conscience was quickly turning into a liability in this world. Lucy though, would hear none of it and jokingly, or not, threatened to not allow us back on the boat until we had taken care of this Cain. Easy for her to say, she was on the boat and Aaron was safely with her. She wanted a former journalist and a former high school teacher to take out a former military trained individual who was currently a mercenary. Those odds were horrible.

Yet, there we were.

All was not lost though. As easy as Blevin was willing to give me this burden, he was just as quick to tell us exactly how we could take care of him without any major risk. It turned out that Cain, while wildly paranoid of the other mercenaries he had expelled from the island, seemed completely certain that no others would show up here, just as we had. Blevin assured us that we could surprise him completely if we could sneak into his resort, especially at night. Cain had his one loyal guard, a man everyone called Hammond, who, according to Blevin, was just as clueless to the guarding of their island as Cain was. Both men were trained killers, but had gone soft in their new kingdom.

I asked him why the mothers never rose up against him and the answer was obvious before he even answered. Cain threatened to harm, or worse, their daughters if they did anything. Just as the daughters wouldn’t escape, so were the mothers trapped by the fear of what might happen to their children. When it came down to it, that’s the only reason I was willing to do this.

That and these people are really starting to make me angry. I'm never surprised that humans decide to act with such barbarity, especially when there is no check to their power, but it makes me no less angry.

So we hid out the rest of that day. Janine became our contact point with the rest of the girls and even took it upon herself to go over to the resort to spy under the guise of picking up some supplies. She assured us that Cain and Hammond were just as clueless as they had expected. She had told no one, not even any of the women that a possible rescue was at hand, just to be sure of complete surprise, but did leave a specific back door propped open.

I will admit, looking back, that once again, there was just too much luck on our hand that night. We did have the element of surprise, but really, that was it. Had Tague and I really thought about it, we were going up against trained mercenaries. It was virtually a suicide mission. But at the time, the thought never really crossed our minds, certainly not in any fashion that would throw up red flags in my mind as they would have in most cases. The main reason for that was the lack of zombies.

On board of the boat, we had grown accustomed to sleeping with ease and just living with far less caution as opposed to what we had endured while on land. We had arrived here at this island, firm ground, and had yet to see a single zombie, and the attitude we had enjoyed on the boat stayed with us here. I'm not saying that having zombies around was better for us, just that, being on our toes was not entirely a bad thing.

On to that evening. Tague and I headed out after sunset and headed over to the resort with the girl, Janine, guiding us. She got us close enough for us to see where the open door was. Along the way, she explained to us how to get up to the top floors where Cain was believed to be, using a maintenance stairwell. She was confident we could reach the top without being seen by anyone. Once we were up there it was up to us to do what we were going to do.

To that point, she was right. We entered the resort and walked down the dark hallways up to where Janine had indicated the staircase was. We headed up the thirteen stories until we reached the top floor, the penthouse floor. We could have sworn we heard voices in the floor just under that one when we had come up to it, but saw no one and had seen no lights shining through the small window in the doors. There were lights on the top floor though. We pulled out our guns, oblivious, really, to what we would do next.

Tague glanced through the window on the door and saw nothing, so we popped it open as quietly as we could, and stepped through into a hallway. The light was coming from floodlights that had at one time been the emergency lighting. The hallway was shaped like an L, going down in one direction, and turning left shortly after the staircase exit. I peered down the corner and saw nothing. Tague and I then decided to go the opposite way, slowly and quietly.

As we walked down the hallway, we could hear voices growing louder and louder, women's voices. It wasn’t anything loud, just consistent, women talking to each other. We came to the end of the hallway as it turned right. We looked around the corner and saw the hallway reach a large open space, a large room, with a large set of doors on the far side, the penthouse suite, Cain's throne room.

I turned to talk with Tague, but noticed down the hallway we had just come down by, a woman, standing there with a jug or pitcher, looking right at us. We hadn’t heard a thing. I waited for a split second to see if our plan was up, if the woman would scream and gunfire would come raining down on us. Instead, she just stood there. I raised my finger to my mouth and she shook her head yes. She put the pitcher down and came walking up to us.

"Who are you?" she whispered when she got close to us.

"No one," Tague replied, but I said "We're here to help."

Tague gave me the stink eye...

Before she could reply to our confusing statements, I began explaining to her about our meeting with Blevin and all we knew about their situation and what we intended to do.

"You're going to kill Cain and Hammond?" she asked, with a hint of incredulity.

When she put it that way, it did seem ridiculous. But I answered that we wanted to help, and if killing the man was the case, then we would. She asked us to follow her as she stepped out into the main room, walking toward the doors. I was about to go right after when Tague grabbed my arm. I shrugged my shoulders and went after her. At the time, to me, there seemed like nothing else to really do. Again, I am not a trained professional assassin. Tague followed me begrudgingly. He told me later he couldn’t believe I was simply walking into it.

The other women looked at us in shock, but the woman we were following indicated to them to be quiet. We came up to the double set doors and she simply pointed in there, and then pointed at our guns. It was time. She came up to me and whispered in my ear:

“Big room, just shoot at everything.”

You can imagine my confusion at such a statement at the time. What I remember even more than the confusion was that my heart was racing so fast I think my whole body twitched with every heartbeat. In a few seconds, we were either going to kill someone we didn’t know or be killed in the process. I looked over at Tague who displayed his typical coolness and disregard for emotion, but even he told me afterwards just how terrified he was at the moment. I sure wish I looked as cool as he did.

We opened the door and the initial scene was completely unexpected. It was a large penthouse room, with a small hallway leading into a large room, set down lower than the hallway. The whole opposite side of the room was one large window, with couches of all sorts up against this invisible wall. I assume that the view of the ocean from this vantage point would have been fantastic had it not been ruined by the utter shock of what I saw.

There was a man lying on a couch facing the large door, seemingly passed out. That was the normal part of the scene. To either side of him, dangling from the ceiling, were the bodies of two women, strung up by wire or rope. The bodies had been gagged, but I instantly saw from the way they twisted to look at me that they hadn’t been permanently killed. As soon as we opened the door, they began to moan through the gags covering their mouths. To the far left of the room was a large makeshift cage, bolted or welded from the floor to the ceiling, and inside were at least a dozen or more zombies, all of these also muffled and gagged. They began crashing onto the bars of the cage as well, groaning and moaning, making a considerable amount of noise that initially did nothing to wake up the lone figure on the couch.