The Living and the Dead Page 8

  “What are you waiting for?” Kilgore practically screamed. The word of the child arriving at the Manor had worked its way back up through channels to Kilgore. For some unknown and unfathomable reason, he said he had to see the girl and he had to see her NOW.

  When it came to orders, Private Newman knew that a Colonel outranked a Corporal, so he broke from his current orders to take on Kilgore’s command. It was a bit disconcerting, though, because Kilgore seemed almost crazed with his hair looking half burned and with what seemed like a bad sunburn circling his head. Newman was no psychologist, he was just a soldier, so he sped off to find the little girl, glad to be away from both Lodwick and Kilgore. Lodwick was a major asshole and Kilgore seemed unhinged.

  Newman jogged along wondering if he should take a hint from the others that had deserted and just keep going. It sure seemed like things were unraveling around him, but in a world of the undead, he felt safer with crazy people and assholes with guns that out there on his own.

  Gary Kinsler felt his world starting to turn sideways. His thoughts were muddled, and it was hard to put together coherent ideas as he ambled along one of the empty dark corridors. It was similar to the way he felt when he learned that zombies were, indeed, walking the earth. That is the kind of event that changes your perspective and it does it quickly. This time, though, it was more like someone had either dropped a curtain on him or raised one. Raising was probably more appropriate, but he still felt like he was in the dark.

  He hadn’t wanted to hear what Sergeant Jones had to say, but things were starting to play out just the way Jones had said. Kilgore was clearly over the edge, falling, and looking back up with a smile and a top hat as he plummeted further from sanity, ready to do a mad jig as he fell. Lodwick, the sadistic and power-mad asshole he was, was more than ready to have his way with the people at the Manor and he seemed to be almost gleeful about it.

  Since leaving Lodwick over ten minutes ago, Kinsler had just wandered the dark hallways in the Manor. In some places, he passed by guards and in other places he walked by places where guards should have been. Where those guards were, Kinsler had no idea, but it was just another piece of mounting evidence that their stay at the place was circling the drain.

  The way he looked at it, he had three choices; stay with the program, get the hell out of Dodge, or do something to right the ship.

  Staying with the program was looking worse with every minute as Kilgore fell further into cuckoo for Coco Puffs land. Running seemed like the best option.

  Hell, everybody else was doing it, why not him? Righting the ship seemed like the worst choice. It meant going up against an increasingly crazier and dangerous man. Then there was Lodwick.

  But Corporal Kinsler wasn’t a man who backed down from difficult choices. He had made a thousand of those hard decisions since the world went to hell in a handbasket. He had even had to shoot a few of his own men when they had become infected. It rarely got harder than that, but this did look like a mountain of shit to climb. A mountain of shit that was on fire and ready to explode.

  His world began to steady some as he made a decision to do something. What he did know, was that he wasn’t going to do it alone. He turned around and started jogging down the corridor, hoping he wasn’t making a huge mistake.

  Madison kept her eyes on the floor, afraid to look up. All she saw were her two worn leather sneakers, caked with mud, and a pair of dull looking shoes directly across from her feet.

  “Look up to me, child,” a calm voice said.

  She didn’t want to. She had seen this man rush into the room. His hair looked like someone had burnt it selectively in places and his eyes looked intense. Intense in a crazy sort of way. At least, that’s how she saw it.

  “It’s okay,” the voice said. “No one is going to hurt you. My name is Colonel Kilgore and I’m in charge here.”

  His voice was so calm, yet oddly commanding. She couldn’t help herself, so she did look up.

  Much of the intensity was gone from his eyes, but she could see that something was missing behind them. Something akin to sanity. He seemed both frightened and dangerous at the same time.

  “What is your name?” Kilgore asked.

  It took a few seconds to work up the courage to reply, “Madison. Madison Bloom.”

  “Well Madison Bloom, where did you come from?” Kilgore almost chuckled. To his eyes, it seemed as if she was some sort of mystical creature like a gnome or hobbit, sprung up out of the ground like magic.

  She took a moment to get the details of the story she and Mr. Schultz had worked up, then she answered. “Well, sir, I was with my mom and we were traveling through the woods trying to find somewhere safe. The zombies had killed my brother and dad. We had been staying in an abandoned house a few miles from here. My dad and brother had been out looking for food when they had been attacked. My brother made it back to the house, but he had been bitten. They followed him back. We just ran. My mother got...got…”

  The emotions of her real story started to work its way into her fictional story. Her own father had turned. He went on to bite her brother. Her mother, knowing what happened to people who had been infected, took her brother and disappeared into the night. That’s how she had really become an orphan. Joel and Kara had taken her in and treated her like she was their own, but the grief and longing for her real family was still there.

  Kilgore completed her sentence, “She got taken too. So, how did you end up coming here?”

  “I just ran and ran, then I walked. I don’t know for how long.” She looked back down at the floor. A pang of worry ran through her middle. She wondered if he could somehow see through her story.

  “So, you’re all alone in the world,” he said, but she felt as if he weren’t saying it to her. It was more like he was saying it abstractly, as if he were really talking about himself.

  He slowly lowered himself down to one knee and put both of his hands on her shoulders.

  When she looked up, she saw that every bit of his crazy intensity was gone. Instead, she saw a man lost and almost broken. His face sagged down with a tremendous weight and tears streamed down his cheeks.

  She heard the shuffling of the feet of the two soldiers who had escorted her to Colonel Kilgore. She could sense that this display from their commander was making them very uncomfortable.

  “You know, I had a daughter just about like you before…” he stopped talking and waved a hand slowly in the air as if to express the passage of time. “She had eyes the same color as yours. Blue. Blue like a Sunday morning. Bright and full of possibility. I never told anyone, not even my wife, but my little Caitlyn was my favorite. My boys were great, but this little girl had my heart from the day she was born.”

  She felt his pain and something in her started to melt. She knew that sort of pain herself. She had that same sense of loss and longing, but that was in the background of his eyes. What she saw now was some sort of desperate love. A genuine expression of warmth. It was so real and overwhelming that she felt she could really trust him despite what Mr. Schultz had told her. That maybe Mr. Schultz had been wrong, and this wasn’t a bad man. He wasn’t possible of hurting their friends. Not this man. This man could really save her when no one else could. Joel was gone and Kara with him, leaving her almost on her own.

  He leaned in close to her and whispered, “You and I could run away from here. Escape to where nothing could find and hurt us. Just you and me. I’d make sure no one ever hurt you. Or us.”

  One of the soldiers behind her cleared his throat. Colonel Kilgore snapped his attention toward the sound and looked past Madison to the soldiers. Some of that scary intensity came back as he gave the men a hard stare. She heard their feet shuffle again and she could tell they were stepping away from her, giving them space.

  “What do you think?” he asked turning his attention back to her. All of the earnestness was back in his eyes.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “What about this place? Isn’t it safe?”


  “No, no, no,” he said shaking his head back and forth. “I don’t think so. Not anymore. Bad things can find me here. I need to get away.”

  She didn’t know how to respond. Some of the scary-crazy look was back in his eyes. He wasn’t speaking to her at all. He was talking more to himself and she could see that he was rocking back and forth, only slightly. He seemed more like a small child wanting something. Something that made them feel safe again after something terribly traumatic. She knew the feeling all too well.

  The crazy intensity faded again, and she saw him imploring her with his eyes. Asking her to run away with him to a place where he would never let anything happen to her.

  Despite what Mr. Schultz had said and while this man had looked a little crazy when he had come into the room, a feeling inside her wanted to trust him. Maybe he could make her safe? Things seemed safe at the farmhouse, but how long could that last? Mr. Schultz was pretty old and the two sisters were even older. What if Joel and Kara never came back? What would happen to her if they all died?

  Of course, all this was moot because of what Mr. Schultz was going to do. She hadn’t forgotten that, but it had drifted from the front of her mind with what this man was dangling in front of her. Maybe he could do what he was saying? Maybe he could offer safety when others couldn’t? Maybe?

  Chapter 14

  A Hail Mary Pass

  I awoke tasting blood in my mouth. It was my blood. My head ached like a thousand elephants were marching through my skull.

  It only took me a full three seconds before the reality of our situation hit me.

  Marlow had Kara.

  An alarm went off in my head in a long shrill, dissonant klaxon-like blaring, the sound increasing in intensity. While I was conscious, I was far from functional, but that didn’t stop me from trying to make something happen.

  But where the spirit was willing, the body was not. I was able to tilt my head slightly.

  “Don’t try to move,” a soft muted voice said, sounding a thousand miles away over a bad connection. I did recognize it as Brent’s.

  I felt two sets of hands on my side, working to get under me to roll me over. My body shifted and Brent’s face came into view along with Brother Ed’s. He looked terrible. The lower part of his face was caked with dried blood and the area under his eyes was starting to blacken. His nose looked twice its normal size with all the swelling.

  “He probably gave you a concussion,” Brent said, staring down on me with a concerned expression.

  “Uhhhhh,” was the best I could respond.

  Brother Ed’s face moved closer into view, pushing Brent’s face out of the way.

  “He’s got Kara,” Brother Ed said and I could hear the pain in his voice.

  Their words were almost completely clear now. The world was shifting back to me in full. Full of pain, both emotional and physical, ripping and rending me from the inside out. My chest ached from the blow from the shotgun. My head pounded from being kicked, but my soul was in agony. That bastard had my Kara.

  After about thirty more seconds, I regained enough strength to push myself up on my elbows. My jaw felt puffy and hot from the kick. I ran my tongue over my teeth and they all seemed to be there, but one was a little loose.

  “How long has she been gone?” I finally asked.

  “Five, maybe ten minutes,” Brother Ed said.

  I moved my head and saw Linda, sitting next to Jason who was laid out on the floor looking almost as bad as I did.

  Against my body’s protests, I sat up. It felt like someone had placed a partially deflated basketball inside my head filled with gasoline that was on fire. “How’s Jason?”

  “He’s just a little stunned right now,” Linda said. “They hit him pretty hard, but we think he’ll be okay if he gets some rest.”

  My mind switched to Naveen, and although my head and neck stringently said, “No,” I turned my head toward where I thought Naveen would be. What I saw broke my heart.

  She was curled up in the corner, her knees drawn up to her chest. She hugged them as if her life depended on it, pulling them tightly to her body. While that was bad enough, it was her eyes that broke me. In the darkness of the room, I could see them, open wide and full of sadness. Tears rolled freely down her cheeks.

  “She gave herself up for me,” Naveen said, her voice barely above a whisper.

  “She did what she had to, honey,” Brother Ed said and there was a thickness to his voice. It could have been the damage to his nose, but I knew it was more.

  The whole tableau was heartbreaking. In all my time after the fall of the world, I don’t think I had ever felt worse. I had seen some terrible things. I saw my mom turned into a zombie. I saw one of my best friends be eradicated in a bomb blast. And there was the countless number of people I had seen killed by the undead.

  But this scene seemed to top all that human suffering because I had allowed it to happen. I had decided to heed the call of a God that had obviously abandoned us at our time of greatest need. I had us on this crazy mission northward, spurred on by some divine calling. We had no real idea of what we were doing or what we would really find when we got to where we were going. That is if we made it at all -- which was becoming more doubtful by the minute.

  The cruelty of the situation incensed me. My failure had amplified back on us and Kara was paying the price, in God only knows what way. I would have screamed but I didn’t have the strength.

  That’s when it hit me. My vision from days earlier.

  MAKE THE CALL!

  This was what God had shown me. Me at my weakest and all of us broken. The vision had directed me to look at my boot. It was telling me to turn on the satellite phone and to make a call.

  I had no idea what would happen if I did. My guess was nothing good, but seriously, I didn’t think it could get worse than the situation we were in.

  It took me a moment to reach down, open the hidden slit in my boot. My hands shook as I pulled the phone free.

  “What is that?” Brent asked.

  “A satellite phone,” I said.

  “Does it work?” Brent asked

  “We are about to find out,” I said as I thumbed the power button.

  It would be my tragic luck that the battery would be dead. It had been days since I had charged it. The phone remained as dead as a rock for several seconds, but suddenly a light flickered on its tiny screen. The battery indicated it was down to about ten percent of battery life. Thank God for little miracles, I told myself.

  “Who are you going to call?” Linda asked.

  “Yes, who are you going to call?” Brother Ed asked.

  “I’m calling home,” I said.

  “What is home?” Brent asked.

  “We have friends back where we came from,” I said.

  Brother Ed stepped towards me, his brow creased with worry. “But they are miles away and probably up to their eyeballs in trouble.”

  “Brother Ed, I saw this in a vision. If we are going to trust this whole crazy mission from God shit, then we have to trust what He told me,” I replied.

  “Visions?” Brent said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “God sends me these little messages from time to time. They are usually as cryptic as hell, but this one was pretty specific.”

  “Visions from God,” Linda said and her tone dripped with skepticism.

  “I know, I know, this sounds crazy,” I said.

  “But what good is it going to do, anyway?” Brent said. “If what you said is true, that your friends are miles away, then they are too far away to help. If they even came, they’d have to fight Marlow and his men.”

  “Okay, here’s the deal,” I said, watching the phone complete its full boot up process. “I’ve kept this phone off and only turned it on for a minute or two at a time, at most. We think that this phone, once it’s on, can be tracked. I doubt I even have to make a call because I’d really not be calling our friends, but our enemies.”

  It took a m
oment for that to sink in and Brother Ed said, “That would bring those military men down on us.”

  “I see them coming down on Marlow and, well, us,” I said. “Kilgore wants Jason. I don’t think he will stop looking for him.”

  “What are you talking about?” Brent said.

  “A whole mob of men from the Army took over our home base. That’s why we are on the run.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” Brent said. “Why wouldn’t they help you? And why did the military want you?”

  “They don’t want me. They want him,” I said, pointing toward Jason.

  “Why?” Linda asked, looking more than a little concerned.

  “Well...because he is immune to the zombie virus,” I replied.

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Brent asked. “No one is immune.”

  “He is,” I said. “We know he is.”

  “Then why don’t you turn him over to the military?” Linda asked. “Wouldn’t they try to make a vaccine or something?”

  “You’d think that,” I said, “but they are really going to kill him.”

  “That makes no sense,” Brent said.

  “No, it doesn’t,” I replied. “It doesn’t always make sense to us. I wasn’t kidding when I told Marlow we were on a mission from God. We,” I paused and pointed at myself, then the others, “me, Naveen, and Jason, have all received these weird-ass visions or messages. Whatever you want to call them. They’ve told us to get Jason to Columbus.”

  “But why would the military want him dead, if he might have the cure within him?” Brent asked.

  I knew what I said next only made me seem crazier, but I was already in for an inch, so why not go for a mile?

  “Because I think their commander is being compelled to kill Jason.”

  “Compelled by who?”

  I knew what I said next would make them want to slip a strait jacket on me and give me high doses of sedatives, but I said it anyway. “The devil.”