Fortunes & Failures - 03 (37 page)

With that, everybody took off.  Once again I was relegated to the rear. Even then, Sunshine and the doctor had to wait for my gimpy ass to catch up.  I got across the small “drawbridge” that Billy had constructed from one of the picnic tables and then helped to pull it across.  Sure, a living person could clear the trench without too much effort, but they would be very vulnerable for a moment.

We followed the footpath around the backside of the big hill. It would lead us around to the front if we took one fork; or up to the backside of the house if we took the other.  Dr. Zahn led the way as we hurried—such as it was for me anyways—up the one that took us to what served as a backyard to our residence.

Buster was lying on the concrete slab that served as the back porch, apparently unimpressed not only by the flare that had been fired earlier, but by our arrival as well.  We entered through the gate, and by the time I closed it, Dr. Zahn and Sunshine had already disappeared inside. Meanwhile, Buster had finally popped his head up and was watching me intently, probably trying to discern whether I would be presenting him with a snack.

“Some guard dog you are,” I scoffed. The Border Collie yawned and rolled onto its side with its eyes closed.

By the time I’d worked my way through the kitchen and arrived in front, Sunshine and Dr. Zahn had already seen enough of whatever was happening to exit out the front door.  I heard what sounded like shouting and urgent voices from outside and hurried as fast as my gimpy leg would allow.

When I arrived on the porch, Jon, Beebe, and Sanchez were helping the biggest, blackest man I’d ever seen in my life carrying a blanket that was acting as a stretcher for a petite, mocha-with-extra-cream-colored woman who looked to be bleeding profusely. Dr. Zahn and Sunshine had taken off in a sprint, leaving me pretty much alone.

Looking around and realizing that I could serve almost no purpose, I opened up the double doors and secured them with the small floor-mounted hooks. After that, I went inside and ensured that the path was clear all the way to the doctor’s little exam room.  Just as I made my way back into the open visitor’s center, the cluster of people arrived.

“…just please help her,” the big man was begging.

“Sir, Mister Cribbs, I will do everything in my power, but I need you to try and calm down and stop upsetting my patient,” Dr. Zahn said in her authoritative-but-compassionate voice.

“Baby, do like she says,” the tiny woman managed through clenched teeth.

The group wove their way back to the tiny space where Dr. Zahn and Sunshine pushed everybody out once the patient had been laid out on the exam table.  The door shut with finality.

“Grab your gear and meet me on the porch in two,” Jon snapped.  Sanchez and Beebe hurried off.

“What the—”

“It was Jason.” Jon edged past me, heading presumably to where he kept his gear at the ready.

The big man, Mr. Cribbs from what I’d heard from Dr. Zahn, stood at the door with a look of being lost, confused, and—as strange as it looked on a man his size—scared.  I wanted to follow Jon and find out what in the hell he was doing, but knew that, as was so often the case these days, I’d only be in the way.

“Steve Hobart.” I stuck my hand out to the big man.  He stared at it for a few seconds, then reached out and shook my hand.  Almost as soon as he touched me, he jerked away.

“Oh! I’m sorry.” The man tried to wipe his hands on his pants, but they were not only dirty, but bloody as well.

“Hey,” I said, placing my hand on one of his thigh-sized biceps.  “It’s okay.  You’ve got nothing to be sorry for.  In fact, let’s take you out back and let you try and wash up a bit.  Maybe you can tell me what happened.”

“I can’t leave Melinda.”

“She’s with Dr. Zahn,” I said, attempting to gently get him to start moving.  I would have had about as much success trying to pull the house closer to the nearby river.  “There’s nothing you can do here, but you’ll need to be clean when she says you can go in and see…Melinda was it??

“Huh?” He looked down at me as if he were just now realizing I was there.  “Oh…yeah. Melinda.  My wife’s name is Melinda.” Then. Almost as an afterthought, “My name is DeAngelo, DeAngelo Cribbs.”

No way
, I thought.  I had to actually pretend to be calm.  It would’ve been very inappropriate to completely freak out. DeAngelo Cribbs had been the Seattle football team’s first pick in the draft.  Hell, I probably knew more about him than I did any of my companions. A standout defense tackle in college, DeAngelo showed up at the pro combines measuring in officially at six feet, five inches tall.  He tipped the scales at three hundred and twenty-seven pounds and set a bench press record of fifty-four reps on the two hundred and twenty-five pound station.  During his rookie season he led the league with nineteen quarterback sacks, all of them earned while fighting through double and sometimes triple teams. DeAngelo Cribbs was known as “The Beast.”  Not a very original moniker, but very fitting.

“Well…DeAngelo…come on, let’s get you cleaned up,” I finally managed to speak.    As we walked back into the front area of the house, Jon and his men rushed by with packs and what looked like half the armory.

“I wanna come,” DeAngelo started forward.

“Whoa, big man!” Jon held his hands up.  “My men and I are trained.  We’re gonna move light and fast.  You need to be here, especially when your wife comes out.” With that, he gave a curt nod to me and hurried out the door with his men.

DeAngelo took one step as if to follow.  There would be absolutely no way I’d be able to stop him if he decided to go, and the condition of my leg had almost nothing to do with it.  Fortunately, he stopped.

“You said there was someplace I could go and wash up?” he asked, shoulders drooping.

“Compound fracture of the tib and fib.  I’m told I was fortunate that it was so clean.  Dr. Zahn had to put in a plate and some screws or something.”

“Here?” DeAngelo sounded incredulous.

“Hospitals are a little dicey these days.” I shrugged.

“Damn.” He sounded more than a little impressed and I hope that helped him be just a bit more at ease knowing that his wife was in such good hands.  “So she’s an honest-to-God, real-life
doctor
?

“Yes,” I answered, turning on the spigot so that gravity let water begin to flow.

“That’s…amazing,” DeAngelo said as he began to scrub his enormous hands together, washing away his wife’s blood from them.

“So…if it’s not too much…what happened.”

“We’d been living in this military-run camp since about two weeks after this stuff all happened,” he began.  I braced myself for his next statement.  “This group of lunatics…herded is the best way I can describe it…hit us with a huge pack of zombies, then followed them in and started shooting up the place.  It didn’t make any sense.”

“Did it happen at night?” I asked.

“Yeah,” DeAngelo’s head popped up, “how’d you know?”

I told him about Serenity Base.  After sharing information, other than the names, it sounded as if we were coming from the same place.  He and Melinda had been on their own ever since.  They’d followed I-90 through most of their trip form just outside of Seattle.  I couldn’t help, I had to ask.

“How did the Jet City fare?”

“Great for all of about two days,” DeAngelo sighed. “The worst was the facility that they set up at the two stadiums.  They didn’t figure out in time that even the slightest bite would be enough to turn a person.  That area became worse than the hospitals.”

“Damn.” Not eloquent, but it was all I could think to say.

“Then there were the airstrikes on the islands like Bainbridge and Whidby.  The folks out there tried to keep the mainland folk off.  A pair of ferry boats headed out, but they were sunk.  Word had it that some crazy faction had gone over to the island the first night or something.  Bastards had fuckin’ RPGs! The naval base sealed itself and went all-in with the citizens.  One night an airstrike came.  That place still glows at night according to some of the folks that managed to escape downtown.”

We’d steered away from the topic I’d initially been trying to get information about, but I figured I’d wait. If I gave him time, I had no doubt that DeAngelo would get around to it.

“I heard that only one of the submarines was out. No tellin’ what happened to those poor bastards.  It’s not like there’s anyplace they can pull in. they gotta be out of food or damn close to it by now.

“We felt pretty safe at Camp Emerald,” DeAngelo continued after he dried his hands.  “Everybody was working.  The soldiers were really friendly and even that government guy held regular town halls to keep everybody up to date. Once a week, at least in the beginning, we had a welcome party for all the new arrivals.  Then it was once a month.  But we hadn’t had one in about six weeks when that raid went down.

“We ran for our lives that first night.  I think a couple folks were tagging along, but by morning, it was just the two of us.  We decided to try and head south…towards Texas where she and I are from.  We didn’t expect to find our families, but it was something to do.  Right?”

“Seems kinda out of the way, being out here,” I said after he’d gone silent again.

“We wanted to skirt anything resembling a city.  Figured it would be best if we slipped into the tiny little towns.  We had maps of Washington, Oregon, and Idaho.  Figured as we got close to the next state, another map would make itself available.

“Then we saw that man.  At first, from a distance, it looked like he was stringing up a pair of zombies…only…that gal was too tan to be dead.  We’d run into some bad folks out there, usually in his groups.  This was just one so I figured that I could take him.  He tied that rope off and I swear I thought that he didn’t know we were even there.  Melinda kept pulling at me sayin’ that she didn’t think we should get involved.  Some of the stuff we’d seen since leaving Emerald…she was spooked.  But me?  I was pissed.  I was tired of folks doing all this sick crap.”

DeAngelo’s eyes teared up and he wiped at them so ferociously that I thought that he’d gouge them out of his face.  Then he looked down at me with so much sadness that it felt like something physical.  It really made my heart hurt.  I know exactly what he was feeling: 
It’s all my fault
.  The same thing that I struggled with after Barry and Randi Jenkins and the others died.  That throat-tightening grief I felt when I thought Thalia was dead.

“He didn’t say a word,” DeAngelo whispered, snapping me out of my reverie. “He just turned and said, “You niggers are like fucking cockroaches…I keep steppin’ on ya, but you keep crawlin’ out of the woodwork.”  And then he opened up on us with this ugly looking military rifle.”

One of our M4s
. I winced.

“I pulled my gun and shot back, but he ducked behind some cars and slid down the hill on the side of the road. We’d been heading to the campground on our map hoping that we could find someplace out of the way to rest up for a couple of days before pushing on.  I smelled smoke from a fire and hoped to God that it meant people, and that those people weren’t more of the type who shot Melinda.”

I hadn’t even thought about how the smell of our cooking fires might carry.  Well, it was a safe bet that zombies didn’t smell because we had a fire going almost continuously lately.

“Steve?” Melissa emerged from the house.  I hadn’t even realized that DeAngelo and I had migrated back around front.  “Dr. Zahn needs you.  She’s taking blood from Fiona and says you’re next.”

“Is my Melinda okay?” DeAngelo asked, dread creeping into his voice.

“I honestly don’t know, Mr. Cribbs,” Melissa answered.  “But I do know that if anybody can help her, it’s Dr. Zahn.”

I hurried up the steps as much as I could.  Melissa grabbed my arm as I passed.  “We need to talk as soon as you’re done.”

Thalia! Crap, with all this going on, I’d completely forgotten.  No wonder she was so upset.  My little girl’s heart was broken and, as usual, I’m off taking care of everybody else’s problems.  “Melissa, this is DeAngelo Cribbs. DeAngelo, this is Melissa Blake.  She’ll stay with you until I get back.”

The big guy nodded and I went inside to give blood.  Why was it that every time we tried to have just a little happiness, everything seemed to fall apart?



Six hours later, Dr. Zahn walked out into the big, open visitor’s center. Everybody was sitting around waiting with DeAngelo, even Thalia and Emily were there…curled under each of Teresa’s arms.  A pair of lanterns, along with a fire in the big fireplace were the only light.  It wasn’t a lot, but it was enough to see the expectant look on DeAngelo’s face.

“That’s a very stubborn little woman you have, Mr. Cribbs,” Dr. Zahn said with a tired smile. The big man sprang to his feet, but the doctor held up her hands like she could actually stop him if he wanted to try and get past. 

“Hold on! She’s sleeping and that’s how I want her to stay for a while.  She is recovering, but needs her rest.  You can see her in the morning.”