Enduring Armageddon (7 page)

At my side, D’Andre searched through the scope for a full ten minutes but didn’t see any other “targets” moving in the town. He startled me from my ant-watching vigil by yelling out, “Okay, guys, it’s clear. I don’t see anyone else.”

Jesse ran over to us in a crouch holding a giant cannon in his hand. The flashy, nickel-plated pistol would be great at close range, but wouldn’t do shit at the distances that D’Andre was shooting. “Yeah, I was starting to wonder. The firing stopped after you popped that last dude,” Jesse said. “Either they ran or Jacksonville had fewer defenders than we anticipated.”

“I knew these fuckers were a bunch of pussies.” D’Andre looked pointedly at me and said, “Hey, Chuck, why don’t you go see if anybody else is hurt besides Roger and let everyone know that we’re going to be moving out for the town in five minutes, so they need to patch up and load up. We’ll treat them in the warehouse.”

“Um, okay,” I mumbled and turned away. As I jogged back to our little column of vehicles I heard D’Andre say something about revenge for senior homecoming and I heard the two of them high five. What the hell was going on?

* * *

The road into Jacksonville led through the scattered homes where the people had fired at us from earlier. I could see a few faces in the upper story windows and no one looked happy to see us. We stopped at one old wooden-sided house when an old man in overalls fired a shotgun from the front porch and fled inside. From my seat in the truck, I saw D’Andre and a couple others go to the door and kick it in. Before they could enter another blast rang out from the shotgun and the doorjamb splintered and broke into a hundred pieces.

D’Andre sent two of the men around the back of the house while he fired into the house from the front porch. The old man fired at the doorway again in response. After a few seconds another shot rang out from inside the house that sounded different and the men who’d went around back came out dragging the old man’s body. He had a single bullet wound to his head. They propped him in his rocking chair on the porch and took the shotgun.

We didn’t have any more problems as our convoy rolled the rest of the way into town. A man in a semi-clean suit met us at the food distribution center. He had a white pillowcase tied to a fishing pole that he waved over his head repeatedly until Jesse stepped out of the truck. I was starting to get the idea that Jesse wanted me to go with him wherever he went, so I got out of the truck and followed along.

Jesse glanced over his shoulder at me and shrugged to D’Andre as he joined us with his three men who’d helped him at the old man’s house.

We walked up to the gentleman with the flag. “Um, hello. Welcome to Jacksonville. I’m the town’s mayor, Jeff Goldstein,” he said as he stuck out an unsteady hand.

Jesse shook it and replied, “Hi, Mr. Goldstein, we’re here to empty the distribution center and take the food back to Virden.”

“So that’s where you’re from. How is Al Grable doing? You know, he and I were very close friends. We worked together on the Macoupin-Morgan Counties Collaborative Initiative last year.”

“Mayor Grable isn’t around anymore,” D’Andre cut in.

“Oh… Well, I’m sorry to hear that. The people of Jacksonville need the food in this distribution center. We will starve without it.”

“Look, Mr. Goldstein, there are too many people in Jacksonville for this food to do anything but prolong the inevitable, so we’re taking it to Virden. We have a plan and a way to sustain our population. It’s not up for debate, we’re emptying the warehouse,” Jesse said in a much colder voice than I’d heard him use before.

“Wait, what about Carlinville, or Litchfield? Hell, Springfield is huge. Go scavenge your supplies from them.”

Without warning Jesse punched the mayor square in the jaw. He crumpled to the ground and D’Andre grabbed his arm and yanked him up. “That’s not how you show respect, Mister Mayor. We’re ‘gatherers’ for the town of Virden, not ‘scavengers.’ The scavengers are barely human and will kill anyone that they come across for no reason. We were having such a pleasant conversation until you said that and made Jesse angry.”

“Don’t worry, Mr. Goldstein. All of those towns are on our list. We just started with the biggest thorn in our side,” Jesse said as he patted the mayor on the shoulder. “Look, Virden is an open community and we’re willing to take in all productive members of your town, but we’ve got to be able to feed them. Surely you understand that if our species is going to survive, we’ve got to have strongholds against those mutant zombie-things and a way to feed our population. Our new mayor, Allan, understands that.”

“All I understand is that you people are animals. You’re condemning us to starvation!” the mayor shouted.

This time, before Jesse could punch him, D’Andre hit him in the back of the head with the handle of his pistol. The mayor fell to the ground again.

“Shit, man!” D’Andre exclaimed. “I’ve always wanted to pistol-whip a mother fucker! That was great!”

“Chuck, pick him up,” Jesse said to me as he gestured towards the mayor.

I walked stiffly forward. What the fuck was going on?
We
were the bad guys, not the other way around. I’d been lied to. The people in Jacksonville weren’t scavengers, they were the residents of the town.
What the fuck am I going to do?
I screamed to myself.

“We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Jesse said as I helped the mayor to his feet. “We’re taking the food and whatever the fuck else we want. Our town needs the supplies that you people are hoarding. Spread the word to the residents of Jacksonville to stay out of our way and everything will be fine.”

“Except those men you killed earlier, you sick bastard,” the mayor spat as he jerked his arm away from me.

“We were fired on first!” Jesse yelled as spittle flew from his mouth. “I didn’t want any trouble. We came here to peacefully gather supplies for Virden to help feed our growing population. You fucking Jacksonville assholes fired on us!”

“I hope we killed some of you too. You’re not taking this warehouse without a fight. It’s full of the residents of this town and we’ll fight you for it tooth and nail.”

“Your townies may, but you won’t. You’re done,” Jesse said. “Chuck, go with Justin and Olan. Take him to the truck and tie him up.”

The mayor whirled on me suddenly and my head exploded as he hit me with a right cross. My knees gave out and I fell to the ground. It was the first time in my adult life that I’d ever been punched. It hurt a lot more than I remembered from the couple of fights I’d gotten into as a kid. Through tear-streaked eyes I saw the mayor running towards the distribution center yelling something.

Beside me, D’Andre’s pistol blared to life. “Fuck!” he shouted and fired again. “Shit!” he exclaimed as he missed again. Jesse pulled out the monster pistol that he carried and fired several shots at the retreating man.

“Shit. Olan, shoot that fucker before he gets away and does something stupid,” Jesse said as he gestured with his useless gun.

Olan, one of the men who’d gone inside the old man’s house, raised his lever-action hunting rifle to his cheeks and sighted down the iron sights. He exhaled slowly, then caught his breath and gently squeezed the trigger. From my knees, I watched the mayor pitch forward to the ground. He tried pathetically to crawl away, but the huge crimson stain spreading across his back at the entry wound meant that his front side was totally destroyed where the bullet exited. He’d be dead before too long. I don’t know much about guns, but I do know that the entry wound is a lot smaller than the exit wound.

I guess that was all the defenders of the warehouse were waiting for. They opened up from the roof and doorways with everything they had. Puffs of dirt shot into the air all around me as they shot. I stood and ran as fast as I could back towards the trucks. I didn’t weave or jerk side to side, I just ran. It worked though, because I didn’t have a scratch on me. Olan wasn’t so lucky. He must have been the primary target because his body was riddled with holes and remained right where the meeting with the mayor occurred.

“Fuck yeah, this is awesome!” D’Andre shouted as he crouched behind the truck next to me. “We’re gonna need to pick up some armored trucks or something though, because these things are taking a beating!”

“Did Jesse really mean it when he said we were going to all those other towns?” I asked over the sound of rounds impacting our vehicles.

“Yeah, man. We’ve been preparing for this for a long time. Allan knew it would come down to this if we ever got nuked. About half of the men in the gathering platoon have been training with him for a couple of years.”

Shit
. My stomach dropped and a hard knot settled into it. We really were the bad guys. I’d inadvertently joined some crazy nut-job prepper militia. Well, maybe not
too
crazy given our current apocalyptic situation, but still, it wasn’t where Rebecca and I needed to be.

“So, the plan is to become like a regional power or something?” I asked.

D’Andre popped up, fired a round from his rifle and sat back down again. “Yeah, something like that. Look man, Allan is a genius. He predicted all of this would happen. We all just started hanging out with him in the beginning because we liked to learn new ways to hunt and because we did a lot of shooting.” D’Andre grabbed both of my shoulders and looked me in the eyes, “He’s fucking brilliant man, wait until you meet him.”

I’d never really looked into a crazy person’s eyes before, but what I saw staring out of the depths of D’Andre’s soul made my blood turn cold. I’d seen him kill three men in cold blood and take part in the deaths of two more, but he was way more dangerous than I’d ever thought. He was a fanatic about this Allan guy, I could tell. If I survived the day we had to get out of Virden as fast as possible.

* * *

Jesse devised a plan to send several of our snipers around the side while the rest of us stayed in place and took an occasional potshot at the building. It worked brilliantly and before too long, all of the defenders on the roof of the building were either dead or had run off.

That only left the men and women inside the building. Once they realized that we’d taken out their people up top, they surrendered pretty quickly. I suspect that more of them than we realized just slipped out the back door, but in the end we had about twenty prisoners that we locked in the distribution center’s office and put under guard.

The rest of the day was spent loading trucks and caring for our wounded. There had been several deaths and even more with minor gunshot wounds. The loss of those men just made the loading up even harder on the rest of us. We did have a stroke of luck with two more semi-trailers sitting at the back dock. Both of them started and one was even partially filled with foodstuffs. They must have been either loading or unloading it when the bombs dropped and never finished the job.

By the time nightfall hit, we’d filled up both of the trucks that were at the dock when we got there and were busy filling trucks three and four that we’d brought with us from Virden. Then the first of the creatures appeared. It shambled up the stairs from the parking lot and attacked one of the men as he came out of the truck. We were able to beat the thing to death, but Lance, the man who’d been attacked had to be put out of his misery before he got sick as well.

Jesse posted guards and they shot several more of the creatures as they emerged from the wood line. After the third or fourth diseased freak showed up, the prisoners in the office were beating so hard on the glass that Jesse finally sent me over to find out what was going on.

I opened the door cautiously and peered into the gloom of the office. “What the hell is all the racket guys?” I asked into the darkness.

“Shit! Finally,” a voice came from inside. “You idiots have got to stop shooting those things. They’re attracted to the noise of gunfire.”

“Then why the hell were you guys shooting at us?” I asked.

“Lesser of two evils,” a woman said. “Let me out. I’ll work with you guys.” Several people objected to her offers of help, but a small woman’s face appeared in the doorway.

“Let me out, I can help you,” she pleaded.

“Why would you help us?” I asked.

“Because the alternative is staying here in Jacksonville and starving to death,” she replied.

“Good point.” I thought it over for a moment then said, “Okay, come out of there.”

She shot out of the room and quickly closed the door behind her. “They’re planning on breaking out in the middle of the night,” she said as she pointed towards the door.

“Alright, thanks, I’ll let Jesse know. What about the mutants?”

“The what? Oh, the messed up people. Yeah, they’re pretty scarce in the daytime, unless they’re hungry…” She trailed off in thought a moment until I snapped my fingers in front of her face. “They come around more at night and they are attracted to loud noises—especially gunfire. You think you guys are doing a good thing by shooting them. All you’re doing is attracting more of them. The sound of gunfire travels for miles you know.”

“Yeah, I know,” I said more harshly than I meant to. I softened and said, “How do you know so much about these things? We haven’t seen very many of them down in Virden.”

“Maybe because we’re closer to Chicago than you guys are. Hell, I really don’t know. But I do know that these people are messed up from radiation and if you get bitten, you’ll catch whatever they’ve got and in a couple of days, you’ll end up just like them. End of story. Shit, maybe they are a real-life version of a zombie.”

“That’s what we call them most of the time. They act just like the zombies in the movies, except they’re not ‘undead’ because they still need food and oxygen. If you shoot them enough that they bleed out, they’ll die too,” I said as I thought about the creature that had killed herself trying to get to me at Ali’s shop.

“Okay, let’s go talk to Jesse. He’s in charge so he should know that you guys have had more run-ins with these things than we have.”

We marched to the back dock where Jesse and D’Andre were directing the action. The woman—Jillian—introduced herself and indicated her willingness to cooperate and possibly be a part of the Virden community. Then she told Jesse about the problem with the creatures.