Enduring Armageddon (16 page)

I was almost asleep when Jesse said softly, “When you and Rebecca leave Virden, Trish and I want to go with you.”

I lifted up on my elbow and looked at his shadowy form sitting across from me. “Okay man. We’re going to go as far south as we can to try to escape some of the cold.”

“Sounds good to me. I’m done with Allan and his thirst for power. He’s going to bleed the region dry,” Jesse said hoarsely. “We had such a beautiful plan for what our new society could be, but that’s gone now. It’s just a perverted, twisted shell of what it could have been.”

“We never should have tried to attack Springfield,” I admitted.

“No, you’re right. We should have found a way to stand up to him and stop this. How many people are dead because of our orders?” he asked.

“Hundreds. Maybe even thousands,” I replied. “But they weren’t our orders. We can’t think like that. The bastard is holding our wives hostage and forced us to come here. The blood is on his hands, not ours.”

“Maybe you’re right. Hell, I don’t know. I just know that I’m done with Allan and Virden.”

“Alright. Our bags are already packed, how much time do you need?” I asked.

“Thirty minutes, tops. I’ve kept a bug-out bag prepared in case the zombies made it into town. I just need to pack a few extra things that aren’t packed because I use them all the time. After that, we can go get the ladies from Allan.”

I nodded, even though he couldn’t see me. “Alright, let’s plan on going to our homes, getting our gear and meeting back at the stage in an hour. From there, we’ll go together to get Trisha and Rebecca from Allan’s house.”

“Agreed,” he said with a renewed strength in his voice. There was a glint of shiny metal in his lap and I realized that he had that big pistol out, ready to shoot anyone who opened the front door. Or maybe he was visualizing the things that he could do to Allan with it.

I lay back down and began to drift off again when I heard the light footsteps of Greg and his family coming back down the stairs. In the darkness of the house I could see five pairs of eyes glittering as they glanced furtively into the room where Jesse and I were. The door to the basement opened and then a large metal door clanged shut like a vault. Several locks were thrown from the inside and that was the last time I ever saw Greg.

* * *

We left Greg and Doreen’s house in the morning. It was a good bet that they wouldn’t resurface for several more weeks so I took the purple spray and the bottle of alcohol and crammed them into Jesse’s pack. I also took their broom and cut off the bristles to make a crutch for Robert. Sam wasn’t nearly as lippy this morning as she usually was, but I assumed that would return with time as she regained her strength.

We crept slowly out their back door and secured the broken lock as best we could. The world that met us outside of the house that morning was absolutely different than when we left it last night. The sounds of gunfire from the night before were gone and birds flittered from dying tree branch to dying tree branch. It was a blessing that I couldn’t detect the ever-present smell of ashes and death through my mask. If I suspended reality for a moment and closed my eyes, then I could almost visualize that we were going out for a fun-filled day in the snow.

The exhaustion of the previous night was replaced by a deep, total body ache from being pitched all around the cab of the SUV when we rolled. We hobbled along slowly and Jesse suggested that we remove our arm bands since we were in “Indian country” as he phrased it. It was a good suggestion, so we pulled them off and hid them away where they wouldn’t be easily found if we were stopped and searched, but where we could still reach them if we ran into a group from Virden.

It took about two hours to make it to the edge of the field where our trucks had been parked outside of Springfield. We huddled together inside a row of thick bushes and observed the carnage. They’d found our assembly area like Jillian had said. About half of the trucks still sat where they’d been parked, but there were several bullet holes in the windshields of most of those. My guess is that they had snipers in the very bushes we sat in now and picked off the drivers. I wondered how many actually got away or if the trucks that weren’t on the field had been confiscated and already driven off.

“It looks like they hit us hard—like we’d been planning to do to them,” Jesse observed as he scanned the scene.

“Well fuck, what do we do now?” I asked dejectedly.

“Look, over there. There’s a group of people!” Sam said as she pointed off to the far eastern side of the field.

I followed her arm and saw a group of five or six people shuffle slowly along. Each went to one of our trucks and pulled dead bodies from the cabs. Then they got in and drove them back into the city.
Guess that answers the question about what happened to our trucks
, my inner voice remarked sarcastically.

“It looks like our entire strike force got wiped out,” Jesse said. “We should skirt this field and head back to Virden.”

“It’s thirty miles!” Robert exclaimed quietly. “I can’t walk that far on my new stump. Hell, just the mile or so from Greg’s house is killing me.”

“I know, Robert. I thought we’d have transportation once we got here too, but we don’t. We have to go. Maybe in a few miles we can find a vehicle, but we can’t afford to be seen or heard here,” Jesse stated.

“Please, Jesse. I can’t make it a few miles. Maybe we can just take one of the smaller SUVs and no one will notice,” Robert pleaded with him.

“Grow the fuck up, Robert,” our teenager told the older man. “They’ll see us trying to steal their shit and shoot us just like they did everyone else. These are not nice people—hell, none of us are nice people anymore.”

I finally voiced my opinion. “The only thing I’m certain of is that these people will shoot first and not bother to ask any questions if they see a group of people running across the field
away
from the city. I think they’re right,” I gestured towards Jesse and Sam. “We need to get away from here before we draw any attention to ourselves.”

Robert looked back and forth between us and finally nodded. “Okay, I’ll try to make it a little further.”

“Alright! That’s the spirit, man,” Jesse whispered while he pulled out his battered
Road Atlas
. He examined it for a few moments and said, “Given the situation in the field, they must know that we came from the south along I-55…the lake will stop us from going straight south across country, so either we take our chances on the I-55 bridge or go farther west to this Iron Bridge Road.” His finger rested on a road that ran straight south.

“What’s that?” I asked as I pointed to what looked like a small back road with a bridge.

“Hmm,” he followed the very small lane north until he found the name. “It’s the Interurban Trail,” he replied.

“Oh, I used to mountain bike along that before…all of this,” Sam said excitedly. “It’s a totally awesome nature trail that runs over the lake and takes you to the next town over.”

“If it’s a nature trail, I bet there’s a lot of trees and underbrush that could provide us good cover to get out of the city. According to the map, the Iron Bridge Road is the only other major bridge to the south. They’ve probably already got the big bridges locked down, but they might not have a little foot bridge closed off,” I reasoned with our small group.

Jesse thought about it and examined the map some more. “You’re probably right,” he said. “Let’s head west and take the nature trail south over the lake. Then we’ll figure out what we need to do to get to Virden.” It was clear that he had resumed the role as our leader in this tactical situation. I didn’t mind one bit, the first—and only—mission that I led was a total rout with an untold number of casualties.

We edged our way back to the city side of the bushes and walked as normally as we could. There was really nowhere we could hide on the south side of the city, so we tried to act like the residents would. When I thought about it though, it was kind of silly because the residents who weren’t part of the fighting were huddled in their homes trying to survive another day, not out walking in the radioactive snow. But we made do with the situation that we were presented with.

It turned out alright. If there were snipers watching us through hunting scopes, then we must have passed their test and been allowed to survive. We reached the point where the trail went underneath the I-72 overpass and turned left onto the trail. It was pretty open right around the highway, but quickly became a tree-lined lane leading the way to safety.

We traveled extremely slowly for four or five miles down the trail and across the lake because of Robert’s foot. We needed to find a spot to either rest or get a functional vehicle of some kind that hadn’t already been cannibalized for parts. Our route brought us into the town of Chatham, but there was nothing left of it. Sure, there were some skeletal structures still standing, but it was clear that the entire town had been torched weeks ago. We picked our way carefully and ran from shadow to shadow in the murky light. As in Springfield, there were massive amounts of dead bodies, except these were different.

In Springfield, we’d seen tons of bodies just lying around or piled up off of the streets, but in Chatham, we saw proof of torture. Bodies were tied to trees and covered in wounds. Arms and legs had been ripped off, probably by tying them to a vehicle and pulling. Remains of people could be seen hanging from second story windows of homes that hadn’t completely collapsed. Men and women were impaled on iron fences around the churches. There were areas where small mounds of children looked like they’d huddled together for warmth and slowly frozen to death.

The carnage was almost impossible to take in. Hundreds of people had met their ends horribly. “Who could have done this?” Jesse asked rhetorically as we leaned against a low brick wall.

Even though he didn’t expect an answer, I said, “It must have been the people from Springfield. You heard Greg. He said that the crazies were running the asylum.”

“One of the reasons I left,” Sam interjected.

“Same thing is happening in Virden. Allan’s lost his freaking mind. What the hell were we thinking attacking this city with only three thousand troops?” Jesse asked.

I could visualize the wheels turning in Jesse’s head as he surveyed the scene. “They did this to their neighbors. They know we came from Virden. They’re going to attack Virden and do the same thing.” He surged to his feet and shouted, “We’ve got to get back there and warn everyone!”

“Robert needs to rest, he can’t make it much farther,” I said quietly.

Jesse’s eyes blazed in his mask as he glared back at Robert. I could tell he was thinking about leaving him again. “We need to stick together, Jesse,” I reaffirmed.

“Five minutes, then we leave,” he replied and stalked off around the corner of the building.

I watched him go and stared at his footprints in the snow after he’d gone. Robert tapped me on the shoulder and pointed across the street. Fuck! A zombie was slowly pushing its way through the shin-deep snow. It must have heard Jesse’s outburst and came out from wherever it had been gorging itself on the flesh of the dead. Sam’s eyes were as wide as saucers because she knew the rules about gunfire in the open. We tried to take care of things as quietly as possible because gunfire just brought more of them.

The creature let out a soft moan, unsure if it had heard someone or not. I turned my head slowly, we were pretty well camouflaged against the wall, but I couldn’t risk it seeing us and attacking Robert. I unbuttoned the snap holding my KA-BAR knife and drew it out from the sheath on my belt. The damn creature snapped its head around and I swear it looked right at me. Then it turned its head to the side and took up a perfectly human stance of listening intently. I eased my back off the wall so I could spring up and fight if I needed to.

Then all three of us heard Jesse stomping his way through the snow around the corner at the same time. The mutant started struggling against the snow to reach the sounds and I jumped to my feet and took an angle so I’d be able to intercept it. My foot shot down into a particularly deep drift of snow and I fell to the side in a momentary delay.

“Jesse, look out! Zombie!” I yelled.

The creature stopped and turned. No doubt about it, the thing saw me this time. I was a dark splotch of moving human against the dirty snow. It turned and made a beeline right for me. I pushed myself up again and took a fighting stance with my knife held low. I wished that I had some thicker padding on my forearm, but I couldn’t help it now.

The creature stumbled and fell in the snow, but it righted itself and continued forward towards me. I’d probably faced more than twenty zombies on my own over the past couple of months so I was pretty confident that I’d be alright, but I was worried about my footing in this damn snow. Then, one of the worst things possible happened: three more mutants came from the same direction. One of them was a little further behind because it was dragging a useless leg behind it, but it was still a threat.

Shit. My heart began to race. How the fuck was I going to fight four of these things at the same time with a knife? I glanced over my shoulder to where Robert sat. Propped beside him was my rifle. Did we risk drawing more of them to our area or should I try to use the knife and stay quiet?

The first one got within reach so I slashed out with my knife and sliced through the tendons in the arm that reached for me. Its hand flopped downward uselessly, but it didn’t even phase the damn thing that it couldn’t open and close that hand anymore. It simply bumped against my raised arm with the useless appendage. I stepped to the side and it stumbled into the same hole that I’d fallen into a minute earlier.

It fell forward and caught itself on hands and knees but before it could push itself back up, I jumped on its back and jammed my knife into the base of its skull. It must have separated the spinal cord because the creature’s entire body collapsed and fell forward with its face buried in the snow. Even though it couldn’t turn its head, the damn thing continued to open and close its mouth as it tried to bite me.