The Dead Hunger Series: Books 1 through 5 (70 page)

I moved quickly toward the woods, my gun out.  I kept my eye on it, and realized it seemed to be getting smaller as I approached it.  A light?

Was that a screen?  I could almost make it out.  Seven more steps and I’d be there.

A radio.  I looked around, releasing the safety on my H&K.  I saw no one, and bent over to pick it up.

I held a Yaesu portable Ham radio in my hand, identical to the one I used when I was on the move.

And it was powered on.  I turned to run.

A sound came from overhead, and a body dropped down on top of me.  Then two more beside me.

My gun was out of my hands in a half second, a hand was over my mouth, and I found myself being propelled backward through the forest.  Seconds later a hood was pulled over my head.

I heard my name in the distance, but I couldn’t respond.  Maybe they would hear the rustling as I was pulled deeper and deeper into the woods, but I could see nothing, and now that I was unarmed, blind, and dumb, I was a prisoner.

I tried to relax.  I tried to breathe and take in what was happening to me.  I would use my mind to analyze the situation and gather any data I might be able to use later.

I thought of Charlie.  My Charlie.  My god, how worried would she be?  What would she do?  We’d just lost Cynthia and Todd, and now she would believe she’d lost me.

How long had we been moving?  A half hour?  Was Flex running through the woods toward us right now, guns ready to blaze and free me from these men?

I felt the men slowing.  They stopped.  Waited.

“We’re at E point,” said one of them.  “Clear.”

“In five,” the voice came over the radio.  “Prepare.”

Then out of nowhere, the voice said, “Welcome, professor Chatsworth.  I’ve been wanting to meet you since
Georgia.”

I would not have know what to say even had I been able to speak at that moment.

All I could think of was Charlie.

I heard the chopper long before I felt the wind churning from his spinning, deafening rotor blades.

My heart pounded with it.  I was going away.  So far away from my friends, my family.

My wife. 

I could do nothing to stop it.

I was whisked toward the waiting chopper, and I felt the grass whipping around my legs as I was thrown aboard and it lifted from the ground.

I heard machine gun fire over the rotors, felt a bullet rip through the fuselage near me.

I heard and felt them firing back, hot shells peppering my body where I lay, hooded and helpless.

And then, there was only the sound of wind and the chopper.

I was gone.

Chapter 7

My name is Charlene Chatsworth, and I’m not supposed to be writing this.  This was supposed to be Hemp’s chronicle. 

He’s my husband, and he was taken from me on what I can honestly describe as the shittiest day of my life.  If I didn’t have Flex and Gem and the two girls, I can’t tell you that I’d have lived through it.

Can’t leave out Dave and Lisa.  They’ve become like my own brother and sister, even though I’m an only child and have no idea what it would be like.  I’m pretty sure I missed out on all the teasing and bullshit from an older brother, but I would’ve loved to have a younger sister like Lisa.  She’s full of piss and fire like me.

I only say that because I have no idea what vinegar has to do with anything.  Never have.

But fire.  I know fire.  I have it, and she has it.  It’s in our eyes and in our hearts.  I want that kid to have a good life.  She deserves it as much as little Trina and Taylor do, who have both been through so much crap it’s ridiculous.

And I’ve seen changes in her that I’ll share with you later.

But I’m alive.

Cynthia isn’t.  She wasn’t like me, Gem and Lisa.  She was a sensible woman, a mom.  She was the kind of person you’d share your most innermost secrets with, and she’d offer advice that you wouldn’t necessarily get from a Gem, Charlie or a Lisa.

Not that their advice would be wrong; it would just be different.  If you wanted the conservative approach to something, you’d go to Cyn.  If you wanted the balls to the wall approach to a situation, it would be me or Gem.

I didn’t say Lisa because she’s young yet, and she’s not likely asked for advice much at her age.  When she does get some years on her and young women begin to look up to her and ask for her advice, I can already tell she’s gonna be  a bit more edgy than Cyn would’ve been.

God.  I think about this and I can’t stand it.  Cyn had just found someone who I think she loved, and Todd sure as hell seemed to be taken with her.  They spent every minute with each other, and
Taylor loved him.

He’d tell stories – mostly made up from what I could tell – but he was a damned good storyteller, and she would sit there and go into a trance as he spoke of his childhood out hunting with his dog Rocky and stumbling on a family of Grizzly Bears, led by an almost nine-foot-tall mama bear.

Like I said, probably bullshit, but fun to hear.  I miss them both, and I’m sorry for how they died. 

Horrible.  Rats.

Back to my purpose of sitting here at this laptop.  We think these chronicles are important, which is why we’ve split the duties of writing them.  Sharing our experiences, the roads we came down to get to where we ended up.

I don’t really have the words right now to tell you all the emotions I felt when Flex showed up at the brewery without the man who had taken my heart and twisted it out of shape.

Before I met Hemphill Chatsworth, I was sure I’d be this punk chick forever, living my life day to day, not taking things all too seriously.  But he changed me. 

Don’t get me wrong; he didn’t take away who I am, or wipe the piss and fire from this soul of mine, but he inserted something else – added to it.

A desire to make plans.  With him.  And once I met him, I knew I wanted to have a child with him.  That was a big deal, because if you believe you know me so far, you’re right.

I couldn’t have been described as the motherly type.

Okay, I know you’ve seen me interacting with Trina, and I seem like I’d make a good mom based on that. 

Then I met
Taylor, and I realized it wasn’t just
that
kid, Gem’s Trina.  It was kids in general.  We had something in common.  We had dreams and imagination and selfishness and laughter in common.

There are a group of boys here in
Concord, ranging in age from thirteen to sixteen or so.  Their parents are all dead.  They’ve refused to be taken under the control of the pseudo-leadership in town, and insist on making their own way.  They appear to already have a hierarchy, and their own leadership. 

And that is Jimmy Dickson.  He’s a smartass, but respectful at the same time.  What I mean by that is he’ll be sarcastic and act like a know-it-all, but in the end will take your advice and thank you with all sincerity.  He’s got long red hair just past his shoulders, and a side part, causing it to always be in his eyes.

His complexion is fair, and the typical redhead freckles adorn his nose and cheeks.  He’s about 5’10” and he’s the oldest of the group at sixteen years.

I’m only glad he’s got common sense and respect for his elders.  I say that, because even if he didn’t, the other kids would still follow him, because he’s just got that kind of personality.

Just knowing of him a few days and meeting him only twice, I can tell the little bastard is a born leader, and everyone – including the adults – sense it.

We’re not giving them guns.  They carry baseball bats and a couple of them do have simple bow and arrows, but the community has said no to anything beyond that for now.  They’ll have to do some proving before we’ll hand them guns.  There’s no telling what they’ll find and hide from us, but with their leader firmly in place, we probably don’t have anything to be overly concerned about.

Okay, screw it.  I wasn’t going to do this, but everyone else has.  I need to tell you how I got where I got when Flex and Gem found me.

The best day of my post-apocalyptic life.

****

I’m about to describe the worst day of my pre-apocalyptic life.  The day I lost my mother.

Let me start a couple of days earlier, with a fight I had with my boyfriend Tommy .  I’d been planning on dumping him for months, but all my shit was in his house, and I kept putting it off for convenience.

You know the story.  You say to yourself it’s not that bad, you can hang in there a bit longer, and you justify the crap out of it until doomsday.

Did I say doomsday?  How damned ironic.

So we lived in a little wood frame house on the edge of the woods in
Gainesville, Georgia.  It’s about fifteen miles from my mother’s place on the edge of Lula, where Flex lived.  The house had two small bedrooms a comfortable little living room with brick hearth fireplace, and rustic wood floors.  I think it was built sometime in the 1930s, but it was just a comfortable place where I loved to be alone.  We had a good sized, private lawn in the back, and we grew our own weed, along with some veggies like tomatoes, peppers and various herbs. 

Tommy worked in construction, and he was still busy, despite the major slowdown.  In slow times, his boss would take work in remote areas, and the crew would stay in nearby campgrounds, or just set up camp wherever they could.  Maybe it wasn’t typical, but it kept the workers busy, and they were willing to do what they had to for some income in a crappy economy where the US government seemed to be on its own road, promising equality among all people, and unable to deliver on their fantasy.

I loved it in that house, and as I alluded to earlier, I’d known Tommy wasn’t my forever man, as they say on the bad talk shows, but I didn’t really care.  I lived my own life, had sex with him occasionally so he wouldn’t change the locks, and I worked at a store where they gave tattoos, sold used records, and told fortunes.

Man, that last part was bullshit.  Nobody saw this coming.  Nothing like a zombie takeover to prove the medium who said she could see the future was only a master of predicting the likely, not the mysterious unknown.

So I’d come home two days before the world’s shit hit the fan to find Tommy in bed with Jenny Pike.  Funny, because I swore I smelled sex in the air the moment I unlocked the front door and pushed the door open.

I’d opened it very quietly, of course.  I’d seen the girlie-looking moped parked on the side of the house like it was hiding or something.  Had a pink seat.  Didn’t think it was Tommy’s, and he didn’t have a kid sister.  The garage door was up about two feet, so I could see Tommy’s pickup was there, too.

So when I tried the front doorknob and found it locked, I knew something was up.

Unusual, because the dickhead couldn’t even remember to close his underwear drawer after sliding into a pair of ripped bun huggers with a four inch skid mark that I’d told him a dozen times before to throw out because they disgusted me.  He could barely remember to close a door he’d walked through, much less close and lock it.

So I crept in nice and quiet-like and put my worn leather purse gently down on the table.

I listened.  Moaning, along with a rhythmic thumping such as a headboard against a wall might make.  I tip-toed down the hall about four steps, and saw a shadow against the daylight pouring out of our bedroom, and I heard the sounds of raw sex much more clearly.

Notice I didn’t say lovemaking.  With Tommy it was always raw sex.  He wasn’t much good at tenderness, which only means it’s a good thing I wasn’t in love with him, because if I were, I would have demanded something besides animal fucking now and then.

And that
something
is something he would be unable to deliver.  Satisfied I had the picture straight, my fun switch clicked on.

I knew I wouldn’t stay with the asshole now.  There’s one thing giving it to him occasionally when you thought it would keep the situation comfortable, and you were the only one.  Once I got verification he was fucking other women – I say that because she certainly wasn’t the first one – I had no illusions I’d be sticking it out with him. 

Like I said, it had been easier.  After this episode, I sure didn’t intend to fuck him again – I do not want to contract any skank-borne diseases, and Tommy didn’t use condoms.

So, with my piss and fire roiling up inside me, I walked silently but directly to the hall closet where I kept my crossbow.  I withdrew it, mounted an arrow in it, and pulled it back, locking the arrow in.

I slipped my sandals off to make my stealth trek from there into the bedroom.  I got to the doorway, and I couldn’t help but smile.  I stood and watched for a few moments.

His full back tattoo of Tom Petty’s black and white Flying V guitar was in full view, the inverted V converging at his tailbone, stretching down onto his ass, and the neck and frets tattooed up the center of his back like a musical spinal column.  At the top was the Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers logo with the banner and heart logo with a miniature flying V guitar jammed through it.

Jenny the slut was beneath him on MY bed, lying on her stomach, and he was going at her doggy style.  The guitar on his back flexed as he thrust in and withdrew with gusto, and I could tell they’d been at it a while from the glistening sweat that coated both their bodies. 

I raised my crossbow and took aim.  My finger tensed on the trigger.

And I screamed at the top of my lungs, ready to fire.

I had to hold my breath to keep from laughing, or I’d really kill someone.  At the sound of my piercing scream, Tommy did exactly what I though he would do.  He pushed off her and jumped back onto the floor and off to the side.

I fired.

The arrow hit an inch above the center part in her hair, and stuck dead center into the headboard with a loud thud.

She screamed as she went to raise her head and hit the arrow just above it.  I hadn’t brought a second arrow. 

She rolled over and yanked the covers over her skinny-ass body, her breath heaving, and she babbled something.  I interrupted.

“The window’s there,” I said.  “I’ve got to go get another arrow, so you have some time.”

I left the room.  Behind me I heard scrambling, and the window sliding up.  I didn’t go back there.  Instead, I went to the front door and opened it.  I sat in a faded wooden rocker on the porch, and heard the little moped engine fire.

Seconds later, the little scooter went by with two naked people on it clutching their clothes.  They fishtailed briefly, then regained control, which was a shame.  I was hoping these two naked idiots would lay it down in the gravel and that would have been the moment I let it all out.

So I didn’t see Tommy again until the next day.  Let me tell you about that.  It’s nowhere near as amusing as what I told you on these last pages.

****

Tommy didn’t come home at all to try to talk to me.  He didn’t like confrontation, so I wasn’t all that surprised.  I didn’t have a lot of stuff at his house; a stereo, some killer Kenwood floor speakers ala old-style, pre-Bose technology, and my clothes and bathroom shit.

I had some mac and cheese along with a Red Stripe beer I found in the fridge, and went out to the front porch.  I sat in the rocker again, put my feet up and found a roach in the ashtray on the side table, which I lit and got three good hits off of.

I only thought about Tommy briefly, and realized my only disappointment in the episode earlier in the day was that it forced my hand.

I hated moving.

I sat there for about half an hour, just mellowing out a bit, and decided it was time to pack my shit.  I took my time gathering it up, slowly tucking it all inside my red ’98 Jeep Wrangler.  I’d bought the Jeep used from Joey Fiocchi, one of the tattoo artists at the shop who gave me too good a price for it and even offered to let me pay him off a little at a time.  He only did it because he wanted to screw me, and I only ignored that fact because I really needed a vehicle.  Hell, I can’t control other peoples’ motives, and I don’t really care to put forth the effort.