The Undead World (Book 5): The Apocalypse Renegades (11 page)

Neil held their speed and direction in check until they had driven for half an hour. Only then did he allow her to take a left, westward. A part of her wanted to stomp the gas, blaze out of there, and race to Colorado, but there was something stopping her and it wasn’t little Jillybean and really, it wasn’t the other ex-whores, either. There was someone else on her mind, though who, she didn’t even want to admit to herself, except there was definitely something in him that was more than just the safety he seemed to offer…if he was free, that is. But what it was about him she really didn’t know. She just knew that when the other renegades had come sliding down from the bridge and he had not been among them, she had been as heartbroken as Jillybean had been.

It made no sense to her. Nothing in this new world made any sense to her really.

She tried to cast Captain Grey’s face out of her mind but it remained right up until Neil pointed to the right at a turn; he wanted them to go north. “But that’s in the River King’s direction. Are you sure?”

Neil was pale and sat slack in his seat, holding his arm. He swallowed loudly before turning his eyes Deanna’s way. “This is my fault. You know, Big Bill and Jeb and all of them. I should have known better. I bet every farm and crossroad from here to the Mississippi state line, is being watched by the River King’s men. I was so stupid! I deserve this,” he said, indicating his arm. It looked even uglier than it had; the fingers at the end were the color and the consistency of wax grapes. “The smart thing to do is to either try to cross in Louisiana or we try to slip by right under the nose of the River King.”

“What?” Deanna asked, confused. “What do you mean? You want to go to Cape Girardeau? That doesn’t make sense.”

“Actually it does,” Neil said, shaking his head wearily. “It’s the one place the River King won’t have people watching. I’m not saying we’ll cross right at the bridge, I’m just saying we need to get close.”

Deanna glanced down at the dashboard and then grimaced. “Maybe I can get you close but not that close. We’re almost out of gas.”

Neil groaned as he checked the gas indicator. “Okay, head west at your first opportunity. We can’t scrounge for supplies this close. It may seem counterintuitive but we need to get further away in order to get close.” The remaining diesel got them only another 30 miles until they reached a tiny, little no-named village. The pair checked themselves into a motel room off the side of the road, hiding the truck around back.

The night was hell on Neil. His pain was horrendous and he could find no position that was comfortable. At around two in the morning Deanna went out in search of some painkillers. Tylenol was easy to find, but she wasted another hour searching in vain for something stronger. At first light she left again, and despite going through every house, barn and shed, she struck out, finding neither meds nor fuel.

It seemed Neil had expected exactly that. “There’s a town twelve miles away where we might be able to get some supplies.”

“Twelve miles?” she asked in disbelief. He was white as a ghost and his lips trembled constantly. There was also an unhealthy pale dullness to his eyes and his skin was bathed in a constant light sweat. “I don’t think you can walk even one mile.”

“I won’t have you walk that far alone,” Neil said. “It’s out of the question.” He stood, tottered for a moment, and then went through the door. He adopted a modified zombie gait that was just on the edge of terrible. His moan on the other hand was sadly perfect, simply because he wasn’t faking. He took them cross-country, heading northwest across more farmland. They rested frequently and ate sparingly since the only food they possessed was the cheese and crackers from an MRE that had been in Neil’s pants pocket. It wasn’t enough food for a single person for a single meal. At least water wasn’t an issue as they passed stream after stream.

By noon, as Jillybean was emptying the armory at Fort Campbell and Captain Grey was worrying over his fight with Demarco, Neil was practically in a delirium of pain. Deanna had them stop at the first farmhouse they came across. The place had been ransacked from top to bottom. “I need just a little rest,” Neil said, as if stopping there had been his idea.

She laid him down on the couch in the front room and, even with the pain, he was snoring in seconds. Deanna then made a halfhearted search of the house; there was nothing of value. They were still four miles away from the town of Newberry; an hour’s walk both ways. She left, heading straight for it, forgoing any attempt at looking like a zombie. The undead were hiding from the blazing sun and she wanted to get as much mileage underfoot as fast as she could.

The hike took slightly more than an hour since she came across a number of zombies dozing in the corn. Most were too slow to catch on that she was a human and thus she only slowed down a little and moaned her way past them, but one chased her across a field of radishes where she wished she could have stopped to eat. The next field over was an overgrown acre of wheat. She scampered low and lost the zombie.

Then she came to the town of Newberry. It had been just about the prettiest little town Missouri offered back in the old days. Now it was a haven for zombies, but that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. She went back to schlepping and moaning, and not a single zombie looked her way, not even when she leapt the chain-link fence of a boarded-over home. Someone had gone to great lengths to protect the place and had failed. Though the front door was still stout, the back door had been ripped off its hinges, and there were clear signs of a desperate fight.

In the kitchen there were four bodies, long dead. Another two were in the hall leading to the second floor and when Deanna went up the stairs to the master bedroom she found eight more, two of them were corpses of humans who had been too thoroughly ripped apart to ever be raised again.

Among the bodies she found a .45 caliber pistol and a sawed off shotgun. There were dozens of rounds for both. She kept the pistol, sticking it in the cargo pocket of her BDUs. When she went back down to the kitchen she found an interesting assortment of food: flour, nuts, raisins, canned vegetables, jarred peaches, and smoked meat of some sort. She dug into the meat first. It was salty and dry, but tasty.

With a prayer on her lips she went to the garage and found a fully gassed up Toyota 4-Runner. “Yes! Thank you God,” she cried as her fingers lightly touched the black hood. The battery was days away from being dead and only sluggishly turned the engine over. Deanna couldn’t be more happy. She went back to the house, grabbed the shotgun and all the rounds she could carry and hurried back to the garage. In all, it took her nine trips to load up all the food and weapons. There was also medicine. She grinned at the bottles as she placed them in a Tupperware container.

Minutes later, she was racing back to the farmhouse. She found Neil still sleeping. She decided to let him sleep and as she waited, she dozed off as well. Sometime around four in the afternoon, Neil let out a groan. “Hey there, sleepyhead,” he said. “We can’t sleep the day away. We still have to make it to Newberry before dark.”

Deanna felt a bit of giddy happiness as she held up the box of medicine in one hand and a jar of peaches in the other. At his amazed look, she let out a full throated laugh and said, “I’ve already gone and come back, and look, peaches.”

“Great,” he said, unenthusiastically, though he did try to smile as if the peaches would be his salvation.

“I also have these.” She held up the container of pill bottles and rattled them. “There’s better pain meds in here,” she said, opening the lid. She dug through them until she found a white bottle of oxycodone. She handed him five of the pills. He dry-swallowed the pills and then nibbled at the peaches and chewed on the meat, but couldn’t force himself to swallow more than a few mouthfuls.

A half-hour passed, during which time he gazed at the bottle, stupidly. He then asked for four more pills. She didn’t say anything to that but when twenty more minutes went by and he asked for two more, she tried to stop him but he grabbed the bottle. “No! You’re going to have to put my shoulder back in the socket if I start to moan or whatever, I know you’ll chicken out.”

It wasn’t a kind thing to say, yet it was fully accurate. Still, she feared that he might overdose on the pills but, before she could protest, he grabbed his stomach and looked queasy. “I think… I think I’m gonna puke,” he whispered in a voice made slow by the drugs. Standing, he went to the kitchen table and sat down. “You better do it quick.”

“I don’t know how. Do you?” She had no idea what she was doing; her greatest fear was that she would end up hurting him worse.

“No, not really.” He seemed unsure of his tongue, like it was new to his mouth and had been sized wrong. “Just stick it in the socket. It’ll fit unless, maybe there was swelling. You don’t think my joints swolled up, do you?” She certainly hoped not, because what would she do then? Again she was clueless.

Neil stared at her for a minute before smacking the table with his left hand. “What are you waiting for? Come on let’s get this over with for goodness sakes.” He tried pointing at his shoulder but ended up with his fingers gesturing at the wall.

Slowly, softly, she touched his arm and of course he winced making her pulled back.

“Just do it!” he ordered.

Gritting her teeth she grabbed his arm and tried to feed the head of it back in the shoulder socket. It wasn’t easy. Neil screamed and tried to leap back; he fell out of his chair, with Deanna riding him to the ground. She was on top, pinning him down, working his right arm in ugly, grinding circles. He was going mad with the pain; he screamed so loudly that she almost didn’t hear the “clunk” as his arm went back into place.

Neil cried and held his arm. Deanna stood; she had tears in her own eyes and all she could say was, “Sorry, sorry,” over and over again. She was so worked up emotionally, that she didn’t see the first of the zombies until one walked into the kitchen almost as if it had once lived there.

The pain left him gasping and, coupled with the oxycodone, turned his brain to mush, he was unable to comprehend their danger. He was still cringing on the floor when Deanna started scrabbling the assault rifle from her back. For half a second, when she swung it in his general direction, he thought she was going to shoot him for being too loud.

She brought the gun up and fired three times over him, paused and then fired twice more. This brought Neil around long enough for him to turn and see what was coming for them: zombies were piling through the front door like a gray wave of corpses washing inward. Already three lay in a heap on the floor of the foyer; Deanna kept blazing away with the gun, firing into the mass. She wasn’t the best shot and more bullets went uselessly through necks and torsos or worse, into the frame around the door, sending splinters flying.

Behind the stiffs in the doorway were the shadows of many more coming for them. Grunting and grimacing, Neil climbed to his feet. “Come on, Dee. We’ll go out the back door!” He grabbed her pack with his good left hand and started racing through the house. The view out the windows was horrifying; he could see countless heads bobbing at the level of the windows, heading for the house, drawn by all the shooting.

Deanna charged after him. She ran with her body turned halfway around, shooting in the general direction of the front door, again, hitting the walls and ceiling with a greater frequency than she did the zombies. There was no time to criticize. Neil ran with his useless arm flapping and hope dwindling inside of him. From outside, the wail of the zombies was nearly as overpoweringly loud as Deanna’s gun; it meant he was running from danger, into worse danger.

At the back door he paused to peek out—and then very quickly, he slammed it shut again. There were zombies in the yard, too many for them to take on. “We’re trapped!” he cried to Deanna, putting his back to the door and feeling the first of what was to be many crashes on the wood.

They were in the narrow mudroom. It had hooks on the walls for coats and a cat litter box that was more feces than litter. The rectangle of a room branched off the family room. Neil pointed back the way they had come. “We need to get upstairs,” he yelled. His ears stung from the constant work of her M4 and he couldn’t tell how loud he was being.

“Give me the pack!” she demanded, holding out a hand. Neil started to protest this waste of time but she snapped her fingers and he gave it up to her, figuring she was burdening herself, unnecessarily. She slung it across her back, reached in her pocket, and produced a shiny pistol. Before handing it over to him, she jacked the slide back and said, “Fourteen shots. Make ‘em count.”

A part of him became indignant since her kill ratio was atrocious, but before he could say anything she had ducked back into the family room and began firing again. “Wait for me,” Neil cried, rushing in after her.

Firing a gun left-handed was an experience. It seemed huge in his hand; unwieldy, and definitely cumbersome. It made him feel as though he were using a gun made for a grown man and he was just a kid. The pull of the trigger was stiff and his first shot missed completely, the bullet going who knew where. His second shot was better, mainly because he fired with the zombie practically looking down the barrel. The room was packed and the beasts were crowding so close that he was constantly being sprayed with warm blood as his bullets struck home.

Deanna fired and fired, but when her gun went dry, there seemed to be more zombies than when she had first started. “Neil! Shit! We’re going to die!” she screamed, as she reloaded.

He couldn’t disagree and yet he didn’t have a moment to spare to calm her nerves; his own were frayed near to the breaking point. She started shooting again piling corpses all over the room. They lay in bloody clumps higher than the furniture. The mounds slowed the zombies down more than their bullets did and Neil found himself with a few seconds to take in their near-hopeless situation.

He spied a door to their left and cried, “Deanna! Over there; get to that door.” He had no idea where it led; he only knew it had to be safer than where they were. Together they charged, shooting as their feet trod upon runs of intestines and squished awfully in blood that was beginning to rise above the level of the shag.

“Get the door,” Neil demanded. To open the door himself he would have to drop his gun and that was something he wasn’t willing to do even if his life depended on it.

“It’s a basement,” Deanna said. “And it’s clear.” For some reason she hadn’t gone down the stairs. Neil fired his last two rounds and then pushed her down into the dim, shadowed basement. Two steps down he paused and said, “Here, take this.” He handed her the scalding pistol and then turned and shut the basement door in the face of a dozen zombies. Stepping back he stared at it, hoping it would hold as they thundered upon it. It never would. He knew that eventually the striker plate would give way or the flat panels would crack and then
they
would get in.

As Neil was staring uselessly at the door, Deanna reloaded the pistol with a fresh clip and then did the same for her M4. “Don’t just stand there, come on,” she said heading down to the basement.

He followed, feeling a heavy doom hanging over his head and wondering if this was the day his luck would give out. As his arm felt like hot silver was cutting into his shoulder joint, he figured it was. “I’m sorry,” he said to Deanna. “This is all my fault, you know? If I hadn’t…if I hadn’t, uh, done what I did, you’d be safe now.”

“What are you talking about?” she asked, trying to peer through the gloom.

“I’m not sure,” Neil said, slowly. The feeling of doom was thick in his mind and the pain in his arm was intense but, worse, he seemed to be having trouble thinking clearly all of a sudden and he didn’t know why. Nor could he remember exactly how they had got there. He remembered the zombies and all the shooting; and he remembered his arm hurt and running through the corn, but there were big chunks of time missing in his memory.

Deanna came back to look him in the eye. Grunting, she said, “That’s the oxycodone talking. You didn’t do anything, Neil except for maybe take too many pills.”

“Ooooh,” he said slowly. That made sense. Now that there was a pause in the excitement, he realized it was the drugs in his system that he was feeling— the sensation was like a cross between being drunk and stoned, meaning that he could not exactly put into words what he was feeling.

He could barely make sense of what was around him. The unfinished basement was altogether normal and contained the usual banalities: a dusty, unused weight bench, a shelf of assorted camping supplies, boxes of Christmas gear and more of Halloween decorations. A wedding dress in a discolored white bag hung from the rafters which were home to more junk: water skis, crutches, a telescope and its tripod.

The edges of the basement were indistinct made blurry by the subterranean dark. Neil blinked slowly around at everything and when he focused his eyes again Deanna was also becoming indistinct as she went deeper into the dark basement. In seconds she disappeared causing Neil to freak out. “Deanna! Deanna! Where did you go?”

A whisper can back to him, “I’m back here. Come on.”

It was too dark for him to feel comfortable about just walking normally. He reached out with his good arm and shuffled sideways as if the family who had lived there had a collection of spears that they stored pointing haphazardly in all directions. He looked ridiculous.

Deanna came back to him, saw him staggering, and said, “You better sit down.” She pushed him down onto a box labeled “winter clothes” before scurrying away. Neil couldn’t tell what she was doing exactly. She would run from wall-to-wall making little leaps but for what purpose he had no idea. His mind was just too muddled.

There came a crash from the basement door that was louder than the rest and with it was the clunking, plunking sound of pieces of wood bouncing down the stairs. He turned sharply and felt the pain in his arm again. “I’m going to have to do something about you,” he said to his arm. Was it still dislocated? Again he didn’t know. He tried to wiggle his fingers and was happy to see that they moved.

Wearing a grim expression, Deanna came hurrying back; he grinned in spite of the fact that she looked as tall as a giant to him. “Can you climb?” she asked.

“Like a tree?” Neil was remembering the time he had saved Sadie in the field outside of New Eden. He had been brave that day and there was a tree. That was something he could remember.

Deanna snapped her fingers under his nose. “Neil, focus, please. Not a tree, but a ladder. Can you climb a ladder?” Before he could answer she glanced back the way they had come with fear on her face as more pieces of wood began to bounce down the stairs.

“Sure, letters are easy,” Neil replied with a wave of his good hand.

“No!” Deanna cried through gritted teeth. “A ladder. Can you climb a ladder?”

“Ooooh, a ladder. Of course. I don’t want to brag but I used to clean out my own gutters. Did you know that? And they were way up, like you know really high.”

“Good, good. Come on,” she said, pulling him up. He stood, but they didn’t move, instead she glanced back again toward the stairs where there was strange snapping and thumping noises occurring. He tried to turn to see what had her so nervous, only she wouldn’t let him. She pulled him along to one of the walls where she had shoved a rickety wooden ladder under a tiny little box of a window.

“Go, Neil. Don’t look back!” she hissed, pushing him upward.

“S’fine,” he slurred. It was a most difficult task she had set before him. The ladder seemed to have been poorly constructed. The rungs were never where his feet expected them to be. At first Deanna helped him along, but then she spat out a long string of curses and began shooting again. “Do ya need help?” he asked.

“No. Just get out. Go through the window and keep quiet.”

That didn’t make sense. “Keep quiet? But you’re being so loud with that gun, you’ll wake the neighbors.” He looked through the open window. It was dark and there was a moaning in the night. “Oh yeah. They’re all dead.”

“Go!” Deanna said, hitting him on the butt.

I don’t need to be told twice
, he thought to himself as he pushed through the small window. It was splintery and hard, and he had to squirm. “I feel like how, you know, a robot feels being born,” he said to Deanna when he was halfway through.

She fired her gun twice before whispering, “Please be quiet.”

“S’fine. I’ll be quiet.” Finally, he was free of the window and found himself on the side of a house that he didn’t recognize. A hundred questions welled up in him but he bit them back—there were zombies trying to climb up the side of the porch at the end of the house. “I gotta be quiet,” he muttered.

As he stood there, he heard a whining sound, like an injured dog and then a whisper, “Neil, help. One of them has me.” Deanna was half-in and half-out of the window; her face contorted in misery and fear. “Do something.”

He stared, open-mouthed for a few seconds as his drug-dulled mind came up with a simple plan. “Hold on,” he said, but then reversed himself immediately. “No, I mean let go. I’m gonna pull you through.” Had he not been so spaced out from the oxycodone he might have revised the plan, after all, he was small and relatively weak and only could use his left arm. However, in his present state of mind, he didn’t feel there was anything he could not do.

With his legs braced, he squatted and took hold of her BDU jacket, and then he heaved her through the window, dragging her a few feet through the dirt until she was fully stretched out on the ground. Immediately, she turned over and inspected her legs and feet. One of her shoes had been ripped off her foot but the sock was intact.

“Holy hell, it almost got me,” she said, with a voice that shook.

Now it was Neil’s turn to shush her. He put a finger to her lips and said, “Quiet. There’s monsters.” It was too late, the monsters had heard her and were charging them. “Holy crap!” he yelled. “Let’s get out of here.”

They ran for the Toyota Four Runner that Deanna had picked up. Neil was slow; the driveway was like the ladder and his feet went sometimes too far apart and sometimes kicked each other and other times they swung outward instead of forward. “They should fix thish road,” He said.

Even with only one shoe on, Deanna went much faster. Breathless, she made it to the truck ahead of Neil and threw open the door for him. She watched over his head at the onrushing zombies and said, “Neil, you gotta hurry!”

“I am hurrying,” Neil replied, huffing up the drive. “This is me hurrying. I don’t get much faster than this.” The second he got to the truck, Deanna shoved him into the passenger seat and then ran around to get into the driver’s side. As the zombies reached them, she cranked the Toyota into reverse and floored it, causing Neil to be thrown forward to crumple under the dashboard. Even with the drugs in his system, he cried out in pain.

Deanna gave him a sudden guilty look. “I forgot your pain meds. They’re still in the kitchen.”

“That s’okay,” Neil said, already forgetting the pain of a moment before. “I feel fine.” This was the last thing he remembered of the night. The next thing he knew he woke in someone’s living room, stretched out on a dusty couch. The air was hot, the kind of muggy heat that had him sweating just lying there. Outside, the cicadas were loud, their endless: rheeeeeee, drilled into Neil’s head, making it ache. He had cottonmouth, bleary eyes, and, although he had just woken, he was already in need of a nap.