Running with the Horde (11 page)

             
I felt my way over in the dark until I found her. As gently as I could I sat down beside her and felt around her neck for a pulse. I found it beating, slow and steady. She was either sleeping or unconscious. Her face seemed swollen and I wondered what type of abuse she’d been subjected to in my absence. I wondered further if she didn’t deserve it. I didn’t really understand her part in all this.

             
She groaned softly as I pulled her head into my lap. I vaguely recalled someone doing the same for me as I hovered on the stoop of death’s door. A favor for a favor seemed appropriate. I adjusted my position and fell asleep against the cold cement wall holding her.

             
Hours later I woke up having to pee. I was also dry mouthed and thirsty with Daisy still nestled against me, loose hairs from her head tickling my cheek. I extracted myself from her as gently as I could with Daisy muttering a protest in her sleep.

             
The only light in the room was from a tiny crack under the door. I edged my way toward it on hands and knees and used the light as a starting point to scout out the room we were in. It was slow going but eventually I found a bucket Daisy had been using for a chamber pot.

             
While it was an unpleasant discovery, I made use of it then continued my search of the room.

             
A water bottle with a swallow of water left next to an empty paper plate was my next happy discovery. I took the water over to Daisy and forced her to sit up and drink it. She coughed but kept it down. I made my way back to the door and started hammering on it.

             
No one came at first but I kept at it.

             
I heard angry footsteps approaching the door. A key rattled in the lock and the door opened. There stood Steven looking irritated, chewing food and holding a gun in his right hand.

             
“The fuck you want?” he asked with a mouthful of sandwich.

             
I had my hands up in a non-threatening manner as I squinted back at him through glare of the bright light.

             
“Just some water please. Enough for both us,” indicating Daisy on the floor behind me.

             
He swallowed and belched as he said, “Ain’t giving you shit.”

             
I sighed and looked down, “We already have plenty of that in here, I just need some water.”

             
“Fucking smartass,” he said and made to close the door.

             
“Wait!” I pleaded. He paused briefly as I continued. “Look, Tessa made it clear she wants to use us as leverage, right? You were there. You heard her too. In fact, I recall you usually agree with whatever she says.”

             
He just stared at me.

             
“Hey, I get it, man, you like her, you want to take things to the next level but she keeps putting you off, right?”

             
He shrugged sullenly.

             
“Well, how pissed is she going to be if we die of thirst or starve in here before she has a chance to do whatever it is she wants to do to us?”

             
His panicky expression told me I was getting through to him.

             
“That one,” indicating Daisy again, “she is already almost dead because she hasn’t had enough to eat or drink. I used to be a paramedic before the zombies happened. She is close to death. I know what I am talking about. Think about it, dead leverage equals no leverage.” I nodded gravely as I said this like he and I were old friends and I was just looking out for him.

             
I had not been a paramedic and did not know what I was talking about but I was a good bull shitter. He considered me gravely for a moment before giving me a gentle shove and shutting the door. As his footsteps echoed away down the hall I shouted a reminder for him to bring food too.

             
Fifteen minutes later he came back with a cart loaded with water and food. He made me stand in the back of the room while he pushed it in.

             
With ceremony I would not have thought him capable of, he lit a candle on the cart and backed out of the room.

             
“Bon appetite,” he said as he bowed sarcastically and shut the door.

             
With the room now softly aglow, I waited until I was sure he was gone and hurried to the cart. Steven must have really been into Tessa. So much so that the prospect of her being angry at him made him pull out all the stops for me. He left us six bottles of water, four cans of chicken and two cans of peaches. There was even a small first aid kit, some peroxide and a few rags. I drank a bottle of water and ate a can of peaches.

             
They were divine.

             
I made Daisy drink water until she started gaging. Then I propped her up the best I could and set about washing her face and cleaning her wounds with peroxide and the first aid kit. By the time I was finished she was fully alert and very crabby.

             
She struggled to be patient with me as I basically fed her by hand but I did not try to start any meaningful conversations. I suspected she had information I needed to know about our current predicament but knew she wouldn’t be talkative until she was good and ready.

             
We spent the remainder of the day in relative silence just trying to stay comfortable. The only activities that broke the monotony were some very awkward chamber pot episodes for both of us.

             
When Steven refreshed our food and water. I begged him to leave the lighter so I could relight the candle if it went out. He wasn’t going to until I explained that starting fires would only result in me and Daisy burning alive. He saw reason in this and finally relented. He wished us goodnight told us not to have sex as he chuckled and showed himself out. After witnessing Daisy’s last go around with the bucket, sex was the furthest thing from my mind.

             
We feel asleep again huddled together in the corner trying not to breathe in too deeply. It was damn cold in that room.

Chapter 22

“A Requiem for a Back Story”

             
The next morning Daisy was feeling much better and once she got to talking, she wouldn’t shut up. That was when I learned how completely in the dog shit I was, trapped in a melodrama only a bad Hollywood script writer could conjure up.

             
Some of it I had been able to piece together through the questions Tessa asked me and bits of conversation she shared with Steven and the ever silent Rory but Daisy filled in the narrative that completed the tragic folly.

             
The camp in which I was currently residing was located in the luxury townhome complex on Central Avenue between 48
th
and 49
th
Streets. I’d witnessed its construction from the road not all that long ago. I had never been inside any of the homes but they were located on a bluff above a grassy clearing just west of Legend Heights High School overlooking the glorious Legend Trailer Courts and the neighborhood burger joint.

             
There had been two families both quite wealthy for the area. The Flowers, Henry and Susan and Tessa’s folks, Bill and Marcy Swanson. They had been long time friends, had even grown up together. Both families were active in the Minneapolis community and were fairly well known if not by me personally. Their children had all attended the local catholic school for the rich and had also run in the same elite Minneapolis circles.

             
The Flowers owned the big mansion in the Rose Hill neighborhood of Friendly and the Swansons owned the entire development I was currently convalescing in. They lived in the detached building situated behind but above the townhome complex. My guess is at some point in time they’d had a notion to revitalize a downtrodden neighborhood located a convenient seven miles north of the big city but that had never come to pass.

             
Their complex was like the hope diamond in a chest full of old costume jewelry, really just kind of a confusing eye sore. This poor investment choice may have been what led to an eventual falling out between the two families. Maybe money changed hands and was never repaid or maybe it was just haughtiness and pride but ultimately things went south and the two families started feuding the way only proper folk can do.

             
Wealthy people aren’t allowed to have a rough spell financially or play a losing gamble. It’s just poor taste. Gossip starts at social gatherings, nasty rumors abound. That’s how things soured with the Swansons and the Flowers.

             
The rich never really stay down for long. In time the Swansons recovered from their losses but the relationship with the Flowers never did. The two families despised each other. That was all fine and good. People are allowed to hate each other. Usually it doesn’t mean murder or blood feuds. However, for the Flowers and the Swansons two things pushed them from sniping at each other over cocktail-party martinis to sniping at each other behind fortified walls.

             
Those two things were love and zombies.

             
Henry and Susan Flowers had been blessed with three daughters. The twins, whom I’d already met and their youngest, Violet. Did I think he played a little fast and loose in selecting his daughters’ names? Yes. But for all his faults, according to Daisy at least, he was a decent dad.

             
Henry loved the twins but Violet was the apple of his eye. Still in high school getting ready to start her senior year, Violet was everything a proud parent could want. She was beautiful and smart, involved at school with an eye for social injustice (within reason). She was almost perfect as far as daddy was concerned.

             
His baby girl really had only one flaw. She claimed to be in love with Danny Swanson, the youngest child of his former friend turned nemesis, Bill Swanson.

             
And oh…Danny loved her too.

             
Both sets of parents reacted stoically at first, gently discouraging the new couple. But as the relationship bloomed like spring dandelions, they grew very concerned. Ultimately, their love was forbidden, Romeo and Juliet style.

             
Henry and Bill, united on this front, went to great measures to ensure contact was cutoff. Each assuming time would erase the passion of the young. Henry even made plans to have Violet attend a new high school in the fall. The kids appeared to take this forced separation in stride accepting the fate of their doomed love and moving on from each other.

             
But secretly they carried on, hot and heavy as ever. In a world where technology disadvantaged the old in favor of the young, they made plans to run away together.

             
In time their union may have brought the two families back together but we’ll never know. June happened, then July and then world blew up with zombies.

…

              The patriarchs of the two families didn’t find success in life through lack of preparation. Word came down through certain clandestine circles that something big and nasty was going to hit Mother Earth with a good old one-two punch. No one could say exactly what was coming but it would be big and devastating. The two men determined on their own that when the shit hit the fan, they would be ready.

             
In the early days when such things were still an option, both hired engineering firms to fortify their properties. They bought out land from their neighbors. Paid off city and government officials to look the other way on some pretty major city code violations.

             
They actually consulted each other on strategy and even shared resources on multiple occasions, putting aside petty differences in favor of protecting their hard-earned legacies.

             
Things were actually looking up for a renewed alliance. While others who could afford it took their families and ran for places far away and supposedly safer, The Flowers and the Swansons hunkered down and prepared to ride out the storm, thinking they could snag a large piece of rebuilding efforts.

             
They had no idea just how bad it was going to be.

             
Both men hired private security firms to live on site and guard their properties temporarily until things blew over. Bill, the great humanitarian, was somehow able to forcibly evict other owners from his complex and gave their homes to favored friends and extended family.

             
Henry had no interest in friends or relatives. He insisted his twins move home from their downtown condo. They were frightened and therefore happy to oblige. He was pleased as punch in his fortified home with his wife, girls and hired guns.

             
He also had the ingenious tunnel idea. Bill might have his own fortified luxury townhome complex with an actual moat surrounding it but he didn’t have a secret escape tunnel that led to a large pole barn more than a block away filled with vehicles and weapons.

             
With all the food and supplies they had, both men believed they could survive for months if they had to.

             
Things got bad when the Sickness hit but were still going according to plan as far as the two men were concerned. Then things got real bad, people panicked and both places went into total lock down.

             
Violet saw her plans of a life with Danny beginning to wither and die on the vine. She wasn’t going to let that happen. While they still had cell service, they had made a worst case scenario plan. They would meet at a mutual friend’s house located halfway between them and head south and maybe run all the way to Mexico.

             
It was not a brilliant plan in theory or execution. They never discussed when they would make a break for it or how long one should wait at the friend’s house for the other one.

             
Most importantly they never discussed what they should do if they encountered zombies while in route to the friend’s house. They can’t be faulted for that though, the undead had not yet appeared on the stage while they lovingly texted away.

             
The world had been under siege by the undead for almost three days when Violet made a break for it. While I was huddled vigilantly at my peephole in my living room, she was making a mad dash for a friend’s house in the once pleasant Bethany neighborhood of Legend Heights.

             
Her dad found the note she’d left for him and Susan on her pillow when he went to wish her good night. It was short and sweet and signed with love but made very clear her intention to run away with Danny.

             
Henry, instantly enraged by grief and terror, made his first foray into madness that night.

             
He organized a heavily armed search party made convenient by his tunnel system. After grilling the twins he discovered they had known about the plan but didn’t think Violet would actually go through with it. One had only to look outside over the big wall to see the deranged crowds howling and roaming the neighborhood to know it would be suicide to go out there.

             
Armed with maps and a list of possible friends’ houses to check (the twins knew the plan but had not paid the strictest attention to details when Violet had relayed it to them), Henry and his mini-militia began to search the streets of the town for his baby girl.

             
What began as a rather amateurish song and dance routine by a bunch of former soldiers who were used to dealing with a certain kind of enemy, turned quickly into a brutal education into the proper ways to safely engage and evade mobs of the undead.

             
Henry lost some men but gained loyalty from those who survived as he showed a knack for strategy and leadership in very unfamiliar battleground territory.

             
Over the course of time they had crossed all but two houses off the list. The second to last house, marked only as Amy’s house, would be where they would find the only sign that Violet had indeed been there. Her bloodied jacket and the tattered remains of her once fashionable backpack were located in the trashed living room of the modest one-story home but they never did find Violet.

             
Henry stood grief stricken in the overgrown lawn of Amy’s house enraged that his daughter should have found her untimely demise in such a place. It was on that night as he watched it burn to the ground that something snapped in his mind and Henry became a different kind of walking dead.

             
Fueled by a desperate need to understand why Violet had disappeared so recklessly, Henry could think of only one person to ask, the cursed spawn of his former friend turned enemy that had stolen his daughter’s heart.

             
Thus began several attempts to gain entry to the Swanson compound down the road to question the boy, all of which were rebuffed with prejudice. It wasn’t long before Henry started to suspect some darker motive was keeping him from talking to the boy. This paranoia grew into a multi-headed monster that stalked Henry in his sleep and planted seeds of trouble in his mind.

             
If Danny Swanson wasn’t among the dead or undead already, he soon would be.

             
Because Henry and Bill had been so helpful in sharing information with each other about their security arrangements, Henry thought he knew exactly where to hit Bill’s compound. His first coordinated attack of the luxury townhome complex came two days later.

             
It was an unexpected but surprisingly ineffective attack that the Swanson camp quashed quickly because of the greater numbers of Bill’s security team.

             
As it would turn out, that skirmish and the several that followed were only distractions to cover a surprise attack that resulted in the death of Bill’s only son Danny, who unlike Violet, had been too terrified to leave his family after the zombies appeared outside the complex.

             
In the chaotic aftermath that followed, Bill stood by helpless as he watched his shrieking wife hold their son in her arms, dead from multiple stab wounds. He vowed to God and anyone who would listen that he would crush Henry Flowers and utterly destroy his people.

             
After the attack Henry, in spite of his new unstable mental status, experienced several hours of sane clarity. He quickly quashed the brief regret at what he and his men had done to Bill’s son and rushed his people back to his fortified mansion. Once safely home, his wife and the twins treated the wounded while the healthy hunkered down and prepared for the inevitable retaliation from the other camp.

             
Because he had less territory to guard and therefore fewer men, Henry was unable to completely secure his property, this would prove costly. Bill for his part was true to his word to make his enemy pay and also made good use of his knowledge of Henry’s compound. His attack came only a few days later and would prove just as devastating as Henry’s had been.