ZWD: King of an Empty City (36 page)

             
The wounded kid didn’t live long enough to make it back to the church. He bled out while they were trying to get him there. Ashley was the closest thing we had to a doctor and these kids hadn’t been trained in how to handle a shooting victim. When they brought in the first kid who was killed at the scene, I recognized him as one of the kids from the showers earlier today, the one who’d talked to me.

             
The dead guy from the black truck was the last of the unknown men from the photograph, aside from the leader who was now the only one left that we knew of, and it looked like he was taking hostages. I kept telling myself that this was the act of a desperate man. But I was actually the desperate one. I wanted to kill him. I wanted to get Ashley back. I wanted to pour my rage into his destruction. I knew it was going to end up with him and me in a showdown. I knew I was going to unleash all the months of stored-up frustration and anger and rage, and I was going to not just kill him, but savage him brutally like a rabid animal. I was going to tear him apart with my hands and I desperately wanted him now.

ZWD: King of an Empty City Chapter 32

ZWD: Dec. 27.

We scouted for two days, eyes everywhere, nothing. Our invitation came in the form of smoke and flames.

Christmas day passed and nothing happened. There was no word from the black truck guy, nothing to indicate that he was up to anything other than business as usual. The kids at Trinity had tried to celebrate Christmas, but there was little cheer. We had scouts out everywhere but the wind had started blowing hard again and by that night a haze started to form in the streets.

               The next day wasn’t any different except the wind had died down some and the haze had gotten thicker. And it seemed to make it feel colder. That damp kind of cold that seeps down into your bones. Donny had re-stationed kids around our little kingdom sitting in houses looking for any sign of the black truck.

              Our plan was simple. We were going to find the truck, follow it to wherever it came from, and kill anyone associated with it. If there were prisoners, we’d free them, kill all the zombies they had working on their treadmills, and end this madness with them once and for all.

              Our only problem was the black truck wasn’t anywhere to be found. Several kids tried their tracking skills from the night of the party to see if they could follow the tracks to the hideout, but with the wind, some rain, and other tracks on Roosevelt Road, the trail went cold fast.

             
Nobody had thought to ask the wounded kid, William Mackintosh, what he saw before he died. I couldn’t blame them; they were just trying to help a friend. The dead guy from the black truck didn’t offer much information either. After searching his body, we found that he was a Kiss fan and someone named Frankie was important enough to him to have a date and a face tattooed on his arm. He had no identification, no secret map leading us to his hideout, nothing to tell us anything. He was a real nobody.

             
We were on the roof of the Safeway on the third day of waiting. To keep ourselves busy, we’d started packing and readying things to be moved down to the base house. We’d decided to move into it permanently. We were going to keep a few things up here for a while just for safekeeping and as a backup plan. After all, with the electrified ladder, few people would be able to make it up here to take anything.

             
Jr. and Jamie had adopted us as their parents and I was still getting used to her having such a fond attachment to me, but my girl assured me it was just because Jamie was missing her father and she was a daddy’s girl. Looking back, I suppose she was right. Jamie really had little to do with me, but she stuck to my girl like glue.

             
We had several big plastic totes packed and ready to be lowered to the ground. We were going to try to come up with a way to move the Page family gun safe to the base house and we were going to store all the guns we had there. Jr. and I had set up a tripod on the roof and using a single pulley we’d lowered one of the totes to the ground. I was stuffing it into the back of the Pages’ Ford F-150 when Jr. called down to me, “Do you smell something burning?” I couldn’t smell anything.

Then my girl came to the edge of the building on the alley side where I had the truck parked and said, “You should get up here and check this out.”

             
By the time I got to the roof, the three of them were standing on the other side of the building staring into the thick haze that filled the air. We could hardly see the end of the post office across the street, the haze was so thick. How it managed to stay that thick with the wind blowing like it was puzzled me. The wind seemed to be blowing strongly from the west, but it wasn’t moving the haze an inch.

             
But there on the breeze something was definitely burning. It smelled of wood and petroleum. Occasionally, you could actually feel puffs of heat in the air. It wasn’t long till a kid came running from the direction of Trinity and stopped in the middle of the parking lot. He whistled at us and shouted, “You better come take a look at this!” Then ran back into the haze.

             
We didn’t bother running like we normally did. We all got into the truck and drove over to Trinity, where Keith was waiting. With him were a few adults from nearby in the neighborhood and a few of the littler kids. He was preparing to move the kids to safer places.

             
After the shootout at the party we’d decided that it was going to be war with the black truck. We didn’t know just how many of them there actually were left. If you went by the photograph there was only one remaining, but if you went by historic record, then for every drug monster that fell, there were at least two more to take his place. In a few days we’d killed five of the six we knew about. Did that mean that there were ten more gunning for revenge? Or did that mean there was just the one left?

             
To err on the side of caution, it was decided that the littlest kids were going to be scattered around the community, now that we had a community. This would make them harder targets. The older kids would basically form a militia. We’d split that into two groups. Joseph took out the first group; they’d actively hunt for the black truck. The rest would try to fortify what they could. Since we didn’t have walls or a fort or anything but open houses, we picked high ground and peppered them with snipers.

             
They’d been assigned to sitting in houses and on top of buildings or wherever they could to keep an eye on the key roads that the black truck and the other cars known to be with them had been known to travel. The snipers were stationed all along Chester, Roosevelt Road, Broadway, Main, and Seventeenth Street.                 

              But it was too few snipers and too much territory to cover with any real hope. That was where Joseph came in. His small team was out there patrolling, asking the people who lived on the edges of our kingdom if they’d seen or heard anything. They’d even ventured outside the kingdom and went searching as far west as Battery and as far east as Bragg Street. They went down as far as Twenty-Ninth Street to the south. We had no luck, so everyone just waited.

             
“What’s going on?” I asked Keith as we got out of the truck. It wasn’t lost on me that there had been half a dozen guns pointed at us as we pulled up. Luckily nobody got foolish and shot first then asked questions.

“From what I can tell,” Keith reported, “the black truck came in from the west and set the Chester Street Baptist Church on fire this morning.”

“What is it with this guy and fires?” I muttered. “Did anyone see the truck?”

“No, we don’t have anyone over at that stretch.”

“Where are Eddie and Donny?”

“Eddie and Uncle Andrew went this morning over I-630 with a few people. They decided last night it would be a good idea if we had a fire truck for just such an occasion, so they went to hot-wire one. They aren’t back yet.” Again with the irony, I thought.

“And Donny?”

“Over at the burning church.”

               My girl turned to the bed of the truck and started rummaging around in it till she located the gun bag with the M107 .50 caliber sniper rifle in it and pulled the gun out. She also grabbed a pair of binoculars and while calmly pocketing a handful of extra ammo, kissed me on the cheek and said, “Give me time to get in place.” Then she and Jamie took off running down Spring Street.

              Grimly, I thought about what we’d agreed upon but said nothing; I’d been out-voted at the meeting. Keith took his group of little ones north on Spring Street to a house where they’d be safe for a while. Jr. and I left the truck at Trinity and jogged the five blocks to the Chester Street Baptist Church.

              The church was fully engulfed in flames when we got there. As we ran up Wright Avenue, we could see the black plume of smoke rising up through the thick fog that made everything else in the world disappear. We ran in from the back of the building on the northeast corner and circled around to the south side. As we came around that corner, I could see the parking lot open up to view. There were several kids there in the middle of the lot, standing too close to the burning building for my comfort. They weren’t looking at the burning building, but at the black truck at the north end of the lot. Had we continued running down Wright Avenue, we’d have come up behind the truck and could have had a surprise advantage. As it was, the spiky-haired guy with the soul patch on his chin saw me.

“Is that you, cowboy? Come on over here and join the party!” He had two guns, one in each hand. One gun pointed at the crowd of kids and the other was pointed at Ashley’s head. The black truck was at his back. He was leaning against the back double cab door. The driver’s door was open and the truck was running. Since he’d seen me and had guns pointed at other people I decided to go on over and join his party. Taking a chance that Jr. hadn’t been seen, I told him to run, and he did.

             
As I came closer to him and the truck, all I could think about was how he kept his hair so spiky in all this damp air. Hell, he even had blond highlights. This was the first time I’d gotten to see him up close and I wanted to know who I was dealing with, especially if I was going to get Ashley back alive, and I desperately needed to do that. She was a nurse and the only trained medical professional we had in our community. I needed to get her back alive.

             
I glanced at the kids who were watching me as I moved closer. I had to give them credit, each one looked like they were ready to rush him at any moment. They ranged from about age nine to sixteen and they didn’t look scared of this madman with a gun. I don’t know if that was a testament to their character or the times we lived in or both, but I was glad they were there if I needed them.

             
When I cleared the little crowd of kids, I saw immediately why they were chomping at the bit to get their hands on this guy. There were three bodies on the ground. One lay motionless in a pool of blood. One lay there rocking back and forth, writhing in pain holding his leg. The third figure was moaning and lying face down on the cold snow-covered pavement. It was Donny.

“Donny? You alright, kid?” I asked, moving over to him.

“No, no, no. Stay right where you are, cowboy,” said the black truck’s driver.

“He’s hurt,” I pointed to Donny.

“He’s dead,” he replied.

“Fuck you,” came Donny’s muffled voice from the snow. The truck driver laughed. I tried to ignore him and talk to Donny.

“You alright, kid? Talk to me.”

He managed to roll over to his back and there was a gunshot in his lower left side, just above the hip. He’d packed it with snow and was pressing his hand hard into the wound.

“I’ve had better days,” he said through gritted teeth.

“Uh-uh. Over here, cowboy. You pay attention to me. I got your woman. I’m running your show.” My woman? I turned to him.

“Ashley, how are you doing, dear? You alright?” Before she could answer, he shoved the gun barrel into her mouth and shouted at me.

“You’re talking to me, cowboy! Not the dead kid! Not her! Me!”

“Ok,” I offered flatly. “How are you today?”

He smiled at me. “I’m having a stellar day, thanks for asking. And it’s just getting better and better.”

“Who are you?”

“What?”

“When you tried to burn me alive, you forgot to introduce yourself. Who are you?”

He just smiled at me. From behind him in the middle of Chester Street, Jr.’s head popped up over the hood of the truck and he glanced around. He spotted me and gave me a thumbs up, then darted back down. A moment later I saw him from the corner of my eye running up Wright Avenue the way we’d come on the far side of the burning building. I had no idea what he was trying to tell me. Donny started laughing.

“What’s so funny?” the truck driver asked. I wondered that myself, then I noticed the red dot of a riflescope centered on the truck driver’s forehead.

“The Commander is going to kill you and I’m going to dance on your grave,” replied Donny.

“That what they call you, cowboy, the Commander?”

“You can call me that if you like,” I said. I shifted a little to my right till the red dot disappeared. I’d placed myself in the line of fire. I had to find out more from this guy. Oh, he was going to die today, but I needed to know if there were more of his kind out there. I needed to know where his drug warehouse was located and how many people he had in his damned nets. I couldn’t let our sniper kill him yet.

“Stop moving,” he snarled. And I had to smile this time, because he had no idea I just saved his life.

“So now you know me, who are you?” I asked.

“Well, Commander, fuck you, this is my show.”

“Ok then, why don’t you just shoot me and get it over with, because I don’t care for your show. You got my woman. You got me here, what do you want? How do we make you go away?” I never took my eyes off his face and I saw the red dot appear again. So I took a few steps to the left till I saw the dot disappear again. When it did, I turned my back to him, trying to figure out where it was coming from. The answer was instantly apparent. The old Wrightsell School to the south. I caught a brief glimpse of movement from one of its upper windows and knew our sniper was moving back and forth through the upper floor rooms from one end of the building to the other to get a clear shot from that distance.