Zac
looked at the worried faces of the three women and four men. He did not see Judy.
“Alright,” said
Zac
. “We think the best plan is to go someplace with no roads. We’re going to take a sailboat to an unpopulated island. I know we won’t have many supplies, but we’ll only be about seventy miles from Key West, so we can make a few trips if we need to. We’ve survived this hell for five years, maybe we can figure out how to stop surviving and start living.”
Something’s
Coming
Jefferson raced through the ancient cemetery. Looming monoliths, tributes to long forgotten patriarchs, cast deathly shadows between him and the swollen moon. Jefferson jumped over the occasional open grave. He never bothered to fill them in over the course of the past five years. He listened to the sound of his worn leather work boots thumping the ground. His heart mimicked the rapid pace of his boots. The only other noise came from the moans. Too many bodies lay, trapped in the ground, under heavy marble slabs and six feet of soggy dirt. These long dead bodies could not muster the strength to dig themselves free.
Jefferson assumed it was like this all over the world. He only had Mama Sati for guidance and she never told him otherwise. He assumed the dead rose from the ground everywhere. What he did not know was on the other side of the swamp, a now defunct factory had been dumping their chemical waste into the swamp for years. The waste saturated the ground and created an anomaly in this small Louisiana Gulf town. Of course, that company not only unleashed their toxic waste here, but they also unleashed a presumably safe product on the rest of the world.
Jefferson believed Mama Sati when she told him the dead ruled the earth. He did not know EZ-Thin pills caused it. He did not know Health-
Pharm’s
by-products and waste caused even the long dead to scratch and claw their way out of the ground.
Jefferson dashed into the decrepit plantation house. He found Mama Sati in her usual spot on the long sofa, close to the empty fireplace. Despite the cool evening, Jefferson had to wipe sweat from his brown, wrinkled forehead. He looked at Mama Sati, but she did not acknowledge him.
“
They’s
a
commin
’, Mama,” Jefferson said between deep breaths. Jefferson lost his birth mother years ago, when he was a boy. Mama Sati raised him in post-Katrina New Orleans. They only moved to the plantation after the world ended. He started drawing for Mama Sati long before that.
Jefferson scanned the pictures taped or stapled to the walls of this room. He drew what Mama Sati told him to draw. She got visions and counted on him to make a proper account of them. Now, Jefferson looked for one that might show him what he saw outside. He saw one of a boy holding a baby at Disney World; a man with no face standing atop a steel tower; pyramids and a helicopter; a superhero in a ball of fire. The drawings covered most of the walls and many had come to pass over the twenty years that he drew for Mama Sati. Those recent ones, like the man on the tower, seemed to be make-believe. They had no towers around here, or pyramids. Still, in the last six months, Mama Sati had him drawing all sorts of outlandish things.
“
You,
listen
ta
me good,” said Mama Sati. Her strong voice surprised Jefferson sometimes. He did not expect that out of her frail looking body. With her dark, sagging skin, she did not look any healthier than the corpses shambling toward their home. “It’s time
ta
burn this here place,” she finished.
Jefferson knew the plan. She made him repeat it every day for the past two weeks. They saved one can of gas and a pack of matches for this very event. Jefferson watched her stand from the couch. When he was a boy, someone told him she already had eighty birthdays. Jefferson did not have the math skills to guess how old she had to be now. He went to the kitchen and dumped out the gas can. A pungent
odor
filled the room, but he did not wait to see the liquid seep across the floor and drip into the wide-grated air vent. Almost without looking, he struck a match and tossed it into the room. He could feel the heat of the sudden blaze on his back as he turned to go to the front porch.
Mama Sati stood by the rail. She stared out at the wide front lawn. Jefferson looked in the same direction. The courteous moon lit the field and Jefferson could see the horde that he discovered less than an hour earlier. Mama Sati had predicted they would come one day, which turned out to be today.
A rotund man, at least he used to be a man, dressed as the leader of a marching band led the horde. Behind him, Jefferson saw Miss Teen Louisiana. After five years, she managed to keep her beauty queen sash draped on her left shoulder. However, from the elbow down, she did not have a left arm. Jefferson recognized a few more people he knew when they were alive. He even spotted the New Orleans Saints’ quarterback still in uniform. It would not take this hungry crowd long to reach them, but Jefferson worried that the fire may get him and Mama Sati first.
Then Mama Sati held up a small cloth bag tied with a length of hand woven cord. She started speaking those words that Jefferson did not understand and she rattled the bag. Now he understood why she cut the head off of their last chicken this morning. The bones clicked together in that bag along with who knew what other ingredients. Jefferson marvelled at how Mama Sati always seemed to know what was coming.
All of the zombies stopped at the sound. They seemed to be listening for more. Jefferson wondered how they could hear such a small, delicate sound from so far off. Mama Sati said something else in that strange language that sounded like Creole, but not quite. She shook the bag again and pointed toward the swamp land off to the side of the plantation grounds. Like a pack of scolded dogs, the two hundred or so zombies marched off into the dark woods.
Mama Sati stepped down off the porch and Jefferson followed her a moment before one of the creaking load-bearing walls collapsed. In only a few minutes the once impressive mansion crumbled from three stories into a raging bonfire.
“Time
ta
go
,” said Mama Sati. The blazing fire sparkled in her deep black eyes.
“But what about them?”
Jefferson pointed after the zombies.
“They
gwanna
walk
strade
inta
de Gulf ocean,” she said. “You
haf
ta
take me
ta
Flo-
reeda
.”
Randy fixed his smile and waved to the guards to indicate they release him. The man, who could have been anywhere between thirty and fifty, sagged to his knees, his head drooping and his sallow skin looked translucent in the bright light from the office.
“So let me get this straight,
Berl
.”
Bueller
paced before the man like he was waiting impatiently for something.
“The supplies we worked so hard to scavenge, risking our very lives for. You felt that you had the right to
give
valuable food to raggedy, pan-handling beggars outside of our compound?
Is that right
?
As he spoke, his voice rose in volume until he was bellowing into
Berl’s
face.
“
ANSWER ME
!”
Berl
looked up, a pathetic broken man, who had lost everything but his eyes. Oh, his eyes contained pure granite. They flashed angrily.
“You have a damned responsibility to share food with your fellow man. What kind of monster are you?”
Berl
yelled back.
With a swift motion Randy backhanded
Berl
, who crumpled like an old paper bag onto the expensive carpet.
“You hypocrite.
You’ve been accepting my hospitality here. Haven’t you?”
The guards drew in a breath. They had never seen
Bueller
so angry before. When he was mad, everyone suffered.
Bueller
strode up to the nearest guard, and grasped his gun from the holster at his waist.
“I’ll show you what kind of monster I am, you ungrateful miscreant.”
Without hesitation he unloaded the entire clip into
Berl
, who screamed and twitched.
“Take this trash and throw it to the zombies
now
.” He yelled to the guards. “
Do
it quick or you’ll be joining him!”
The guards scrambled to obey.
He sat once more at his desk and took some deep breaths. He looked sourly at the blood stains in the carpet. The vein in his temple throbbed harder than ever and he reached for his pills.
Then he reached under his shirt and fingered the crucifix on a thick chain which lay against his chest. He looked at his watch. No time like the present for his weekly confession, he mused.
Bueller
keyed a few buttons on his desk computer and was connected by an audio feed to his personal priest somewhere further down the tower.
“Yes my son?”
came
the familiar voice.
Bueller
pictured Max Von
Sydow’s
face, since he chose not to go to the lower levels to meet the priest, or anyone, face-to-face.
“Bless me Father for I have sinned…”
*****
Thanks for taking the time to read Volume 3 of Severed, True Faith by
Sam Lang; we hope you enjoyed it.
Other stories in the Severed Series include:
In the Beginning
Myths & Legends
Sam Lang’s Reprisal Series includes:
Making Plans, Making Memories
The Impeccant
Shadow Boxing
She’ll Get Your Engine Started
The First Cut Is the Best
Sugar and Snails
Other titles by Sam Lang include:
Theoretical
Fishsticks
Vampires’ Guide to Sex
Look for more titles under the Trestle Press umbrella by
simply
typing Trestle Press in the search bar of your e-book store.