The Undead World (Book 2): The Apocalypse Survivors (8 page)

All the men, including Scott, nodded along at this. Now that they were no longer pointing their weapons at him they seemed to be just a normal group of guys.

“Maybe I can help you,” Ram offered. “I have to go into Philly. If I live long enough maybe I can get the
Blacks
the message that you want a cease fire. That’s if you plan on letting me go.”

John
scratched beneath his cap again and asked in a surprised voice, “Why on earth would you want to go in the city after what I just told you?”

Ram flicked his eyes to Scott and said, “Revenge. Retribution.”

“If you’re going into the city, you won’t live long enough for either,” Scott said. “They don’t take prisoners. If they get you alive, they feed you to the zombies. And then just as you turn they’ll set you free among your own people. I don’t know if you know what that’s like, seeing a friend in that state. It’s horrible what they do.”

The idea made that queer feeling inside
Ram ramp up in tempo. It was like the distant clouds—a storm was coming and there was nothing he could do about it. “I’ve seen my share of friends who have turned, and had I known all this crap was happening I don’t know if I would’ve come. You can only take revenge so far, however…” Here he paused and then opened his shirt to show the angry scratches that were at his throat. “I got careless this morning and now I don’t have much to lose.”

The men backed away.

“There’s one thing you have to lose,” Scott replied. “A good death. A proper death. It’s something you can’t take lightly these days.”

Ram knew that was true, but he didn’t know how true until an hour later when he sat trussed to a tether ball pole in an elementary school playground as three angry men took turns punching him in the face.

Chapter 7

Ram

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

“Don’t do it, man,” Scott said. “Don’t go. It’ll only end badly for you.” He made to put out a hand to Ram, however the presence of the virus in Ram was like a force-field that kept the man at bay. He pulled his hand back, curling his fingers in as an extra precaution.

“Listen to him,”
John advised. He squinted at Ram. “How long do you have left? Two hours? Three?”

Ram touched his face with gentle fingers as if to assure himself that he hadn’t changed already. “Four hours I think…I hope. Do I look that bad?” His insides had really begun to bother him and now he could feel a fine sweat at his brow.

“You don’t look good,” Scott said. He then glanced down to the ground where the grass was still bent from the scuffle and added, “I’m, uh…I’m sorry for how we treated you. My brother disappeared a few days ago and I’m not dealing with it well.”

“It’s alright,” Ram said
, still with his fingers on his face. He had a deep sense of expectancy about him as if his doom was in the air he breathed. “It’s understandable, I guess. But I have to go. I can’t just sit around waiting to die.” He had seen too many of his fellow soldiers wallowing in their own sweat, pissing themselves in the extremes of the fever. That couldn’t be him, and yet his Beretta at his hip never seemed further away.

“It’s too bad this had to happen to you right now,” one of the others mentioned. “That’s some real bad timing.”

This brought a rueful chuckle out of Ram. “When’s it ever good timing to get scratched by one of them?”

“You don’t know?” the old man asked uneasily. “You haven’t heard?”

“Heard what?” Ram asked with a sinking feeling.

John
glanced at the others as if asking for help, but even more they seemed extra interested in the everyday minutia than in catching his eye. “There’s a vaccine,” John said finally. “Some guy in New York City figured out how to make one and he’s selling them for a thousand a vial.”

Stunned
at his ill-luck, Ram sagged at the news and could only ask, “A thousand? A thousand dollars? That’s weird, you can get money anywhere.”

“No. A thousand rounds of ammo or a hundred gallons of gas, or their equivalent. The
re was some kid who came through the other day with this big ass missile launcher. He’s gonna try to get ten vials”

“And
the vaccine works,” Ram said. It wasn’t really a question, it was more of a statement concerning the present state of his luck which wasn’t good.

“That’s what they say,” Scott put in. “There’s some who are skeptical so they’re doing a demonstration.
It’s supposed to be in a few days. John and I, and a few others are hoping to go as representatives, but we’ll have to see.”

The subject seemed to cast a pall over the group of men and Ram took a guess at what the issue was from the tenor of the man’s words. “You don’t have enough ammo
or gas?”

Scott gave a half shrug, lifting only his right shoulder as if a full shrug was simply too much work. “We do, but we really can’t spare that much, not when we’re at war.”

“You can have mine,” Ram offered. “And the gas in the hummer. I just need my Beretta and enough fuel to make it into the city.” He certainly wasn’t going to need much else. If he came across a horde of zombies he’d shoot fourteen of them and then himself. And if the
Blacks
were in the mood to fight…he didn’t think he would. Not so close to death. Not with heaven or hell on the line. However, he would kill Cassie if he got the chance, and do so with a clear conscious.

His offer pleased the men, who went right to work draining the
Humvee of its excess gas and stripping it of anything that Ram wasn’t going to need: extra food and water, clothing, and medical supplies.

While they did this,
John offered him a beer. “It’s warm, but they say warm beer is better than no beer.” The old man drank his with relish, and among the many things he talked about as they sat in the darkening afternoon was of a way into the city. The
Whites
, as they called themselves, had turned a Volvo upside down on one of the bridges and by using the bumper of his hummer he could spin it like a revolving door. “Just make sure you spin it back," John reminded him.

Ram decreed that he would and then pretended to give his warm beer another swig. The little
of it he had drank made him so nauseous that he was forced into hurrying his goodbyes and as soon as he was out of sight of the tall tree and the little group of men, he pulled over and stood, bent at the waist until he vomited.

Over and over he hurled until at last, dizzy and weak he went to his knees and knelt over the hot mess until he was sure he was done.

“Damn,” he whispered to the pale man in the hummer's mirror. With the heavy clouds glooming the sky, his skin was already a shade of grey that portended things to come. Groaning, he felt his neck, however the adenoids hadn’t swollen yet, and neither had his fever progressed beyond
mild
. Mostly the virus was in his guts, turning them to knots, and in his muscles, making him feel kitten-weak.

“A little further,” he added and then turned his attention to driving, making sure to keep
his pace slow enough that his precious little fuel would last him to his destination. The bridge with the overturned Volvo was five miles to the south and when he saw it he gave a sad little laugh; he’d seen the Volvo earlier that day and had not suspected a thing.

Now he came up to its edge with the hummer and gently turned it sideways. It
scraped back, grinding loudly on pebbles and loose grit. When he had gone through the new lane he kept his word and backed the hummer around to use its power to swing the car back into place.

T
hen it was just him, a few hundred thousand zombies and the city, hiding its remaining human population. Like all major cities, Philadelphia was thought to be a veritable nests of zombies. Even John had filled him with tales of stiffs uncountable streaming down the streets like dead grey waves, killing and eating everything in their path.

Yet, as Ram drove around the many obstructions in the streets he hardly saw upwards of a hundred and these were like their suburban neighbors and seemed content to mosey about as if in a fog. Though to be on the safe side he either steered well clear of them or crushed them beneath the wheels of his beastly SUV.

Although he was thankful for the lack of zombies the constricted streets had his head beginning to pound, which in turn made his stomach feel all the worse. Frequently he had to stop the truck as a shiver of steel seemed to lance through his innards, and once he had to race into a nearby bank to squat in a pitch black bathroom stall in order to relieve himself of a mass of watery stool.

He came out sweating and moaning. “Just a little longer,” he pleaded with the universe as he started the hummer up again. His pleadings went unanswered and he grew ever sicker as he wound slowly along not bothering to pay much attention to where he was going.
It didn't matter whether he paid any attention or not: his route had been chosen for him. The streets were clogged in such a way that he had only two options: forward and back.

Fifteen
minutes from the bank a disabled pick-up truck resting on deflated tires forced him off the street and into an alley where the next obstruction was a dumpster. Thankfully this was the sort of dumpster that had wheels. Ram hopped down from the hummer to push aside the obstruction and that was when a man emerged from the shadows, pointing a gun square into his face.

“That was easy enough,” the man said with a grin.

Ram had to agree. He’d been caught so effortlessly that he had to wonder if the virus had already begun to destroy his brain. He was about to make a pleasant greeting when a second man came up from behind him and smashed him in the side of the head with something heavy.

The once DEA agent dropped like a rock and found himself staring up
as though from the center of the world or from the bottom of a vortex. The dark clouds above turned wide circles, while nearer at hand the buildings leaned in and raced around Ram, faster and faster. The two black men were joined by a third and it felt as though Ram was on a merry-go-round.

M
oaning he put a hand out to one of the men who slapped it away.

“Shit, Trey! Now we’re gonna have to carry his sorry ass,”
the man said.

“Just…just a minute,” Ram said, blearily as he tried to sit up, but failed. “I’ll be…ok.” Somewhere in his rattled mind he thought he had done something wrong.

The man who had hit him, the one called Trey, dropped a brick onto the floor of the alley and then smiled benignly, saying, “See that? He’ll be ok in a minute. In the mean time I don’t think you’ll be needing that gun anymore.” Trey frisked him and when he didn’t find anything beyond the gun his smile disappeared.

“Ain’t
nuffin in the hummer, neither,” said the third man. “Not even no gas.”

“Shit,” Trey said.

“Shit,” the third agreed. “No guns, no gas, no food? What the fuck?” It was a moment before Ram understood that:
What the fuck
was a question rather than an exclamation and that it was directed at him.

“Oh, I’m supposed to be finding someone…I think,” he said. Just then
his mind was so rattled that he couldn’t remember who it was he was supposed to be finding. “Julia?” he asked, but then remembered she was dead. She had been killed by Cassie…now it all came rushing back.

“Don’t know no
fuckin, Julia,” Trey said. “But if I did I’d fuck the shit out of her and turn her into grey-meat before giving her back to you.”

Ram took all this in with slow blinking eyes. “Right,” he said at last as the world stopped its mad turning. “I’m not actually here for her. I’m supposed to be brokering a cease fire between you and the
Whites
.”

One of the men snorted. “Damn Trey, you scrambled this mother-fucker’s eggs. He don’t even know what color he be and shit.”

Trey laughed as well. He squatted down in front of Ram and asked, “Have you seen a mirror lately. Sorry to break it to you spic-n-span but you ain’t white.”

“I know,” Ram said. “I’m not from Philadelphia, so I’m not a part of all this. I was just trying to do the right thing. I’m supposed to see your leader and set up a meeting.”
John had suggested a month long cease fire followed by a meeting on the Passyunk Bridge to try to hammer out a real truce.

To this, the first man who had stopped Ram said nothing but only sneered at him with a deep hatred brewing behind his eyes. Trey made a noise of disgust. “Shit, that ain’t happening. She
gots a hard-on for killing Whitey.”

Ram’s face went hard. “She? Your leader’s a woman? Is her name…”

Without warning, the tall quiet one stepped forward and kicked Ram in the chest; his steel-toed work boots sent Ram to the paved floor of the alley and left a wide boot print square in the middle of his shirt.

Trey nodded along gently as Ram struggled for breath. “Let me interpret the meaning of
Jermy’s foot for you Mister Spic-n-span. I think he was trying to let on that it’s us who’ll be asking the questions, and it’s you who will be doing the answering. That right Jermy?”

“That’s right,”
Jermy intoned. “Let’s get him moved.”

Before Ram was even half recovered the three men hoisted him and carried him across the alley to a playground behind the local elementary school. It had been a somewhat rundown schoolyard even before the apocalypse, but now it
looked as though a tornado had struck. There seemed to be more of the school littering the playground than was left inside. Desks, chalkboards, chairs, and kindergartener’s cubbies were flung about or stacked in piles as tall as a man.

Ram was brought through all this and then stood up against a tetherball pole in the center of the playground.
Jermy stooped and pulled off one of Ram’s shoes and yanked out the laces. While he was tying Ram’s hands together behind his back, Trey covered him with the Beretta and the other man kept watch.

When Ram got his breath back enough to wheeze Trey leaned in close and warned in a quiet voice, “Not too loud, my Brother. There’s a jillion little zombies in there. I mean the little
, little ones, Pre K and shit. If they hear you they’ll come swarming out and let me tell you those little fuckers are hungry. The problem is they’re so short they’ll start their feast just below the belt. Ya dig?”

As his balls tried to retreat up into his body Ram nodded. “Yeah, I get it. But you have to believe me, I’m not your enemy. I’m not from Philly; I’m from California.”

“You’re from Cali? Must be nice,” Trey said with a smile. It was an evil smile that Ram in no way trusted. “Was it as nice as that gay-ass country club the
Whites
hang out at?”

“I never went in…it looked nice
from the outside. Like a palace, sort of.”

The tall quiet one had finished tying Ram’s hands together around the pole; they were already turning the purple of a drowned man. “He be lying
. He ain’t never been to the
Whites
place,” the man said, simply.