Enduring Armageddon (8 page)

“So you see, you’ve got to stop firing your guns or it’s just gonna attract more of them,” she said when she finished telling Jesse roughly the same version that she’d told me earlier.

“Okay, so what do you suggest we do about it?” D’Andre said as another shot rang out.

“Well, for one, stop shooting the damn things!” she exclaimed. “They are attracted to the sound and every time you shoot at one of them, you’ll just end up bringing three more.”

“Hey boss,” I cut in. “We know these things can be killed just like a normal human, so why don’t we just bash in their brains when they come up here? It’ll be quieter, plus it will help save ammo.”

“Alright, let’s do it,” he answered. “Chuck, you’re in charge out here. I don’t want to hear any more shooting unless something really fucked up happens. Got it?”

“Yeah,” I said glumly. “I’ve got it. I’ll let the boys out here know what we need to do.” Me and my big mouth.

* * *

I learned a lot about killing that night. I also learned that the men and women on the gathering squad were pretty sadistic. I have no problem with killing one of those things with a well placed blow, or three, to the head or an axe to the throat, but some of the folks took it way too far and seemed to enjoy killing those things.

Justin, another member of D’Andre’s personal hit squad, was particularly evil. When given the opportunity to kill a creature without any more of them around, he took his time. I saw him break the kneecaps of one so it was immobile and then he used one of those short Japanese knives, I think it was called a
tanto
or something, to systematically cut it to shreds. I overheard him say that he’d always wanted to know how realistic the ancient Chinese
Death of a Thousand Cuts
was on an actual person. It took a long, long time for that thing to die. It was a gruesome, but valuable lesson. When you took away human emotions and the ability to feel pain, one of those creatures could sustain a lot of blood loss from minor wounds. The key to defeating them was brutal, overwhelming, and rapid blunt force trauma.

The zombies seemed to come in waves. We’d bash in the heads of two or three at a time, then there wouldn’t be any more for twenty or thirty minutes, then several more would stumble out of the woods around the distribution center. It was strange given what I’d seen previously. Every one of the freaks that Rebecca and I saw when we were on the road was solitary and even attacked others like themselves. These didn’t seem to pay any attention to the creatures traveling with them anymore. They just wanted to get at the uninfected and kill us.

I decided to file that information away for our trip south. We saw the freaks as more of a nuisance than anything else, but if these things started working together in a pack, then we might have a problem.

We fought all night long against these little groups of creatures and by the time the watery sun appeared through the dense grey sky in the east, I was dog-tired. My hands ached from clenching my baseball bat too tightly and I’d taken several hard hits to my shins as I stumbled around in the dark trying to bash in the skulls of people who’d gotten sick and crazy from the radiation.

Even though we’d been up all night, the guys who’d been on guard stayed outside in the cold and continued to keep watch while the others finished loading the trucks. Jesse stopped by with Jillian in tow to speak to us. “You all did an amazing job out here last night,” he said as he surveyed the seventy-five or so corpses on the ground around the back side of the building. “Because of what you did, we’ll be able to finish loading up the supplies and return to Virden today. Your families are safer because of what you’ve done.”

He pointed to our newest recruit and said, “We also owe Jillian a big ‘thank you’ for telling us about these mutant fuckers. If she hadn’t come forward, we probably would have continued shooting them and just ended up bringing more of them from wherever the hell they stay. I know you’re tired, but I need you to remain vigilant out here and when we’re done in a couple of hours, you can rest the entire trip back. Don’t worry, you won’t be responsible for unloading the foodstuffs, the rest of us will take care of that.”

Jesse pounded my weary back and gestured for me to walk with him. Jillian followed closely behind for some reason. “Chuck, thank you. You could have just left Jillian in with the other prisoners and made your job easier. I think most of us would have. She’s already proven invaluable and has a keen mind about economics in our new society. You’ve shown initiative and intelligence ever since you came to our town.” He stopped and looked me in the eyes, “I’m promoting you.”

To say I was floored would be an understatement. I was glad that my mask covered my features; otherwise he would have seen my mouth hanging open. “Um, I—thanks?” I stammered.

“I know it’s kinda out of the blue, but D’Andre, Jillian and I have been talking. We need to have a full-time dedicated security force for our gathering missions. You’ve shown your worth, both in Taylorville and out here,” he said as he gestured towards the splattered blood on my clothes.

“What about D’Andre? He should lead the outfit, not me,” I said as I wondered how the hell Jillian was somehow involved in the decision making chain already.

“You’re right, he would be an excellent choice, but I need his brain power and planning ability on the gathering squad. So, he’s going to continue to be my number two man and you’re my choice for our security chief. You’ll have to attend all the planning sessions and all of that, of course, but once we arrive on scene wherever we go, your men will be the ones out here protecting our asses.”

I thought about turning him down. I mean, I was planning on leaving in a couple of days. The words were on my lips when one of the men behind me let out a blood-curdling scream. We whipped around to see a creature tearing at his throat. Blood fountained from the man’s neck as the zombie ripped his trachea away from his body. Two of the men on my new squad rushed forward and bashed the thing’s brains into a pulp with a two-by-four and a tire iron.

“What the fuck happened?” I yelled before Jesse had the opportunity to. I’d already made the switch in that instant and I didn’t even realize it.

“The fuckin’ mutant came out from behind the dumpster and jumped Henry. It must have snuck up in the dark when we couldn’t see it,” one of my crew said.

“Jesus Christ. Okay, check behind everything and make sure we don’t have any more surprises,” I said as I gestured around the loading area and at the tractor-trailers waiting in the parking lot to be driven back to Virden.

We walked over to where Henry lay. Blood poured from the wound in his throat. He tried to gurgle something, but it just caused more blood to bubble from the hole in his neck and ooze back into his lungs. I knew that if he didn’t die of blood loss or drown in his own fluids, he was a prime candidate to turn into one of the infected creatures.

I knelt down beside him and said, “Henry, you’re going to die. I’ll give you one minute to make your peace with God, then we have to finish you off. You know we have to. I’m sorry.”

His breathing increased as he realized what I’d said, then slowed as he mumbled something. I assumed he was praying. I stood beside him and gave him a few extra seconds. When I raised my bat above my head he started to hyperventilate and his eyes flew from side to side as he sought help from the angel of death that I’d become.

I brought the bat down square into the middle of his forehead and he stopped breathing as rapidly as he had been. I smashed down again and again until the bat had completely fractured his skull and bits of brain and a lot of blood seeped from his ears. The smell of feces drifted through my paper mask when he shit himself as he died.

Jesse looked at me in awe and Jillian stared at me in revulsion. “I’ll take the job,” I said.

We turned to walk back towards the distribution center and it started to snow. It wasn’t the beautiful, fluffy snow that brought happiness to all the school children and joy to the snow plow drivers. It wasn’t even the wet, heavy snow that meant traffic nightmares for everyone in the city. This snow was grey with radioactive ash, stank like burned plastic and meant death for all the plants and animals that had somehow survived this long.

The snow continued to fall hard and heavy onto Henry’s lifeless body. For a while, it melted wherever his body heat escaped, but eventually his body cooled and he became an indistinguishable lump in the rapidly graying world.

* * *

I slept during the entire trip back to Virden. The constant fighting of the night combined, with my aching muscles from carrying boxes of food to the trucks yesterday, to create a level of physical and mental exhaustion I’d never felt before. The moment my ass touched down into the truck seat I slumped against the door and passed out.

I didn’t see D’Andre and several others make their way back to the distribution center and set fire to the building. I also didn’t hear the screams of the men and women we’d taken prisoner and locked in the building’s office as they were roasted alive.

The weather became absolutely rotten in the former state of Illinois. The foul-smelling ash-snow mixture continued to fall for the next three days. Travel became even more treacherous as the trucks slipped on the snow and ran off the roads when we could no longer see the shoulders. They spent the first day back from Jacksonville unpacking the trucks into the buildings near the center of town while my security crew took a much-needed rest.

The town was transforming into a fortress right before our eyes. The seemingly haphazard wall of heavy-duty wire fencing and overturned cars had been replaced in many sections by a four-foot high cinder block wall. There were several large semi-truck trailers parked with building supplies. Apparently there was a separate gathering crew for construction materials. I’d heard about them, but still hadn’t met anyone who worked for them, and the fruits of their labor could be seen as a legitimate wall slowly began to encircle the town.

We even had intermittent power in Virden that wasn’t coming from a gasoline-powered generator. Besides building materials, Allan had his secondary gathering squad collect up as many pieces of gym cardio equipment as they could find. He had electricians rig the ellipticals, stationary bicycles and rowing machines to connect to the town’s electrical grid somehow and we now had entire groups of people whose jobs were to exercise and generate the town’s electricity. It wasn’t steady power by any stretch of the imagination and no one was allowed to use their home’s lights, but it was enough to heat water and power the floodlights around the walls.

It was unintentional, but we didn’t leave Virden in a couple of weeks like we’d planned. We became complacent and my new duties as the food gathering squad’s security chief kept me busy. Almost every other day, we’d go out gathering supplies. Most of the time, we got into firefights with the defenders of wherever we were going, but it was generally accepted that Virden was a regional power and we weren’t to be fucked with anymore.

Becca loved teaching the town’s children and before we knew it, a month had passed. The shitty, probably radioactive, weather was a part of the reason we stayed, but towards the end of the month we figured out why my wife had been so horny for those first several days in town. She must have been ovulating and her body subconsciously told her to have sex, a lot of it. Now she was pregnant. It was like a miracle after nearly ten years of flirting with the possibility of having children and wanting to earn enough money to ensure we’d be able to provide for our potential kids. Our emotions warred between joy and the sheer terror of bringing a child into this world where I was nothing but a glorified gang leader who was trying to kill other survivors before they killed us.

We continued to stockpile supplies for the southbound trip that I still believed we needed to make, but it became increasingly less likely that we’d go anywhere. Virden was becoming just a little more secure every day and the countryside was falling more and more into chaos. We’d had several people murdered in the most heinous ways imaginable in the past week. The mutants had started working together in roving packs of terror and the scavengers were becoming increasingly bold as their supplies dwindled.

I met Allan after our mission to Carlinville. That was one crazy-ass trip and it was supposed to be the final small town before we asserted ourselves in the city of Springfield. The city of St. Louis had been slagged during the nuclear exchange and Carlinville was just on the edge of the devastation, but it hadn’t been completely spared. Anything taller than a single story was destroyed, either by the superheated blast winds or in the freakish tornado-like storms that followed in the days immediately afterwards.

Most of the town’s residents had been baked alive. Those that survived were the sick and diseased creatures that we called zombies. The place was crawling with them. We parked the heavy semis several miles outside of town and I drove right through the downtown square with my security team gunning everything we saw. Jesse said it was just like when he’d been in the army and his unit invaded Baghdad. He’d been part of a mechanized infantry unit and they did the exact same thing by running around the outskirts of the city destroying all of the military formations they saw. He called it the “Thunder Run” and said it was a very famous maneuver from the Iraq War. I agreed that it was a good strategy to draw out some mutants and kill them before we got out of the trucks, but I’d never heard of the Thunder Run.
Must not have been all that famous
, I thought.

We drove as fast as we could through the filthy snow-covered streets honking our horns and taking pot-shots at random creatures as we went. We had to double back on our tracks a couple of times when the way became blocked by debris from the blast. On the far side of the town we parked our vehicles and dismounted to fire into the crowd of mutants that followed us out of the ruined municipality. We formed a loose line of men and women and methodically picked our shots in order to save ammunition. We didn’t have to hit ‘em in the head like the zombies in the movies, but it sure did the job a lot more efficiently than shooting them five or six times in the chest.