“You can’t leave me out here, mister. Those things will kill me… I don’t have anyone or anywhere to go,” he pleaded with me.
“I guess maybe next time you’ll think with your brain and not your dick, huh?” I stated and sped out of the parking lot.
“Don’t leave me!” He cried as I drove away, heading back over the overpass.
Chapter Three.
The further I drove through the rainy night, the more I thought about the young Kid. It was like some kind of disease that was eating me alive and the more I fought against it, the faster it would consume me until nothing was left. I hadn’t fully put aside my morals, I had just found a way to deal with them – shut them off like a light switch when I needed to do something bad.
“That little horny bastard held a gun to my head… a damn forty, four magnum at that. Jeez, the gun was almost bigger than he was,” I said aloud to myself, not sure if I was trying to convince or talk my way into or out of something.
I stomped on the brakes and the pickup slid sideways coming to rest in the middle of the road. The undead at the two gas stations heard the tires sliding on the pavement and slowly began to shuffle my way. I wasn’t concerned about them as I sat there debating what I was thinking about. “What in the hell am I about to do?” The ghostly apparition that had found me from time-to-time was nowhere, so I had no one to argue with or even be belittled in my moment of need for answers. “Damnit!”
A few of the undead began banging on the passenger window and I looked at them, watching how their feeble minds were unable to assist them in opening the door, where their counterparts, I had been introduced to, would have had no such problem.
I gunned the gas and spun the pickup around, knocking several of the undead down and headed back toward the overpass. There was no rhyme or reason for my actions, only the slender shard of morals that were somehow still hanging on to me and refused to give up. It was almost like a warrior returning from battle, changed by the constant violence and death endured over a long period of time, yet still somewhere deep down that last spark of innocence had not yet been extinguished, leaving hope that there was some form of recovery.
I wasn’t that hardened soul void of emotions. Not yet, anyway.
Crossing the overpass I could see the Kid fending off several undead and knew that he was quickly beginning to tire, and when that moment came they would be all over him with no mercy. They were no longer bound by such flaws as we the living were and would not tire, grow old and slow, run out of stamina when chasing someone down. No, they were perfect in a weird way, almost admirable if you really broke the nuts and bolts of it all down to the fullest.
Headlights cast across the Kid and he used a trash can to knock one of the undead down before looking in my direction. I pulled up with the window down and the rifle barrel sticking out, as I watched in real-time as the fear took shape on his face. No doubt he thought I had changed my mind and had come back to kill him.
“Why did you want my truck and money?” I asked him.
The undead on the ground slowly picked itself up and came at him again. He used a windshield washer to crack upside its head, and then kick it as hard as he could in the stomach. It fell once more.
“You’re running out of juice, kid. You better tell me before it’s too late,” I added.
“Why, so you can shoot me?” He stated.
“Okay, then why the need for my money?” I asked. “There’s no need to buy things anymore, in case you haven’t noticed recently, there’s no one around to take your money or mine for that matter, so what good would the money do you?”
“It was habit,” he replied.
“So you’ve robbed others in the past have you?” I asked with the thought of shooting him in the for ground of my mind. It was little punks like him that made the old world the way it had been. It was because of him and others like him that we had to lock our homes and cars, why we had to have security systems, and why we had to be aware of our surroundings at all times, missing out on the joy of an afternoon out with the family in order to ensure we made it home alive and with our wallets.
He grabbed the gas nozzle and swung it over his head several times before launching it at another undead and taking him down. He looked at me. “She said we would rob you and that’s the first thing that came to my mind,” he said in between large breaths of air. He was getting more tired. “There was never anything said about shooting anyone. I didn’t even load the damn gun, like I told you
and
showed you earlier.”
“So, she planned all of this and you just went along with it to make her happy, stealing a gun from someone or killing them for it, just to rob folks?” I asked.
“I only met her two days ago and she told me that’s how she’d survived so long. And as far as the gun goes, the owner was already dead when I lifted it from him. I didn’t think he’d need it anymore since he was dead,” he answered. “I, however, did.”
Three more undead rounded the corner of the gas station and I quickly pointed toward them. “Looks like you got some more friends coming to play.”
He saw them and quickly looked around for something to use to defend himself. There wasn’t much to choose from. “Are you going to sit there and watch them kill me, or do you think you could offer some help?”
“You held a gun to my head and threatened to kill me, so why should I help you?” I asked. “In all actuality, I should sit here and watch them rip you apart, shoot them when they are done with you, then drive away.”
“Jesus, Christ! The damn gun wasn’t even loaded!” He shouted, the anger was coming on full speed now. “How many damn times do I have to tell you that before you understand that? I don’t even know shit about guns to begin with!” He offered in return.
“And robbing a store with an unloaded gun will still get you an armed robbery charge and a trip up the river, sport.” I said sarcastically.
“If you’re not going to help me in anyway, could you at least shut up so I can focus here?” He asked, looking at me as though I had just kicked his puppy.
I offered both hands for him to see and sat there watching him wonder what his next move would be as the three new undead closed the gap. I figured he had enough left in him to handle at least one of them before the other two took him to the ground, so I settled in to see if I’d be right.
The three undead attacked at the same time and the Kid was able to get one of them off balance, wasted a bit too much time in the process and the other two took him to the ground. It was over for him and all he could do was the one thing anyone of us would have done. He screamed while trying to keep the gnashing teeth from sinking into his soft flesh.
Two silenced rounds put both undead into permanent night, night. I exited the pickup and finished the last one, as well as two others that the Kid had managed to knock down and get them caught up, so they couldn’t stand.
He pushed them off and slowly got to his feet, not sure if I was about to shoot him or let him go again. Movement caught his eyes and he looked to see several more coming from behind the store.
“Here’s how this is going to go. I’m going to ask you a question and you are going to answer it, and at any time I feel you are bullshitting me, I’ll shoot you in the leg and leave you here… for them.” I said in a stern tone. “Are we crystal clear on that?”
He simply nodded as he brushed the dirt from his pants.
“What were you going to do with the truck?” I asked, although I continued before he could answer. “Ride around until it ran out of gas and then murder someone else for theirs?” I asked, holding the rifle in a manner that let him know I could kill him before he even attempted to rush me. Just in case that stupid idea worked its way into his pea brain.
“No!” He exclaimed. “We heard a broadcast on the radio yesterday saying there was a town that was safe and anyone who wanted to go there could. They said they had food, shelter, and more than a hundred soldiers to protect us,” he explained, keeping a vigilant eye on the still approaching dead. “They’re getting pretty close, mister. Do you think you can hurry this up?”
I answered by turning and gunning one of them down. With my attention fully on him, I asked. “That’s one less to worry about,” I stated. “Now, about this supposed broadcast. What town and where?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know we only caught the last few minutes of it. The car we had ran out of gas not long after that, and the battery died a few hours later as we waited to hear the broadcast again. It never happened.”
My suspicions of his tale were starting to make me wonder if he was telling me the truth or simply stalling while more of his friends moved closer, hidden by the rainy darkness. An ambush was something that could easily happen and we were in the perfect location if one were to unfold. Apparently he could see the odd look in my eyes and put both hands in the air. I guess it was his way of letting me know he wasn’t going to try anything stupid. Good for him.
“How convenient is that?” I said.
He looked hard at me. “It’s true, mister, and had you not ventilated her head, she’d have backed me up,” he spoke quickly.
“If you don’t know the name of the town, then how did you plan on using my truck to get there? I mean that sounds a little sketchy, don’t you think? You even said yourself that you waited around for the broadcast, but never heard it again. I’d be willing to bet that if it were a real broadcast, then they would have played it more than once.” I said.
“The broadcast said once you were on the interstate to head west, you’d see the signs,” he said pointing toward the interstate behind us. I didn’t take my eyes off of him.
“There’s a sign a few hundred yards up with directions on it. We saw it a few hours ago and that’s why we came here, to get some food and not long after that you showed up. We thought your truck would be perfect, as we could load up as much of the shit in that store and take with us, that way they’d welcome us in for sure.” His words were still up in the air. “Besides, it beats where we were.”
“And where was that?’ I asked.
“A local place around here that I’d rather not go back to empty-handed,” he replied.
I wanted to believe what he said was true. I wanted to believe it more than he did and head there this very instant, but like I had found out for myself in the past week, that there was no safe places anymore. It was all an illusion used by those that wanted nothing more than to take what wasn’t there’s and put you in the ground, and what better way to ensure you would reach a wide spread audience than to use a radio station to increase your victims. If the broadcast had really taken place that is. And that’s a might big
if
to begin with.
I’m not saying that a few good people could put together a community and build walls around it to keep the undead out, but that would take a lot of cooperation. And cooperation between survivors was never and easy task to achieve. There were always one or two bad apples in the bunch that would do whatever they could to sabotage what the others were putting together. It was simply because those few bad apples
had
to be in charge or everything was stupid and wouldn’t work. It was people like that who ruined it for the rest of us and I despised them with a passion. There was also the virus or disease, whatever the hell this thing was. No one in their right mind he didn’t understand what was going on or how to spot the early symptoms of this would allow anyone to just enter into their perfect little town with no questions asked. I might have been dumb to some degree, but I sure as hell wasn’t stupid. There’s no way in hell these people were real and if they were, then going there would be no different than going to the high school where I had just recently escaped from.
“What place?” I asked him.
He shrugged his shoulders to me. “It really doesn’t matter now.”
“There is no safety, kid. All of that shit went to hell when the rest of the world did,” I told him in an unfriendly tone.
“But I heard it! I heard the damn broadcast with my own two ears,” he argued.
“No, what you heard was a group of people hoping for easy and unsuspecting targets looking for any way out of the hell they are currently in. People taking full advantage of other’s with no intentions of helping them,” I told him. “You go there; they rob you, kill you, and bury you in a shallow grave… that’s the truth.”
His expression changed and he looked hard at me. “What bad thing happened to make you this way, because you don’t strike me as a bad guy?”
It was none of his business what had or had not happened to me. I was the way I was because of the Young Woman, because of Smith, and Officer Morris. I was this way because I had lost my family and the will to continue forward, yet here I was still pressing onward even though I really had no reason to do so. I could try and hide from the fact that my son was dead all I wanted to, but eventually I’d figure that out. Johnny and Kember were gone and I had a long way to go to get back to them, if they were even there. I had no idea if they had made it back to the military base, as they could have ran out of fuel on the way and had to put the bird down elsewhere, and then there was the possibility that they could have crashed, as the bird did take fire when they were leaving the school complex. I was this way because I was sick and tired of people taking advantage of others. The false pretenses they put forth to draw the innocent in and kill them. I was this way because I was tired of whom I had been… and I wasn’t going to be that person anymore. That person was dead. He died with his family that night not too long ago.