Mad World (Book 3): Desperation (4 page)

We had heard of many similar instances, though none that had ended so badly. Most of the time a town had an escape route planned, vehicles waiting. Making a last stand holed up in a park, surrounded by a fire-filled trench that was, in turn, surrounded by zombies sounded like a nightmare. I couldn’t see how any town could survive that if there were hundreds of the infected. They must not have realized they’d be so overwhelmed.

“Considering the town’s plan of action, I don’t think they were every expecting more than a few dozen zombies.” I swallowed some more water. “Any more, and such a retreat plan would be naturally doomed.” I shook my head. 

Underestimating your opponent was a lethal mistake, one we ourselves had made two days ago in a lone field outside of Winnipeg. 
You could never know what to expect, really. The plague was changing so much; we were fighting a completely different infection today than the one my parents had encountered 25 years ago.
You could only try, and overprepare, if that were possible.

We were headed toward Thunder Bay, it was around two in the morning, and we were all exhausted. Driving in such conditions was dangerous, you were just asking for a slow reaction time, which was deadly in our current world.

“I’m going to pack us in for a few hours, until dawn at least. The last news out of Thunder Bay was promising, but that was two weeks ago and we don’t know the situation right now. I want to be able to see and be awake,” Dad said, pulling off the road onto a turnoff with bathrooms.

We had just passed the little town of Emo (whose name always made me smile) and were not yet to La Valle, another small border town. Skirting the international border as we were, in Ontario but close to Minnesota, the temptation to slip into the U.S. was great. But then we would’ve had to go south of the Great Lakes, and close to the Minneapolis area, a known hotbed of zombie activity. You didn’t go near that big city unless you wanted a sudden and painful death. Or worse.

“Sounds like a plan, Jake,” said DeAndre, yawning.
We parked and then all took turns keeping watch and visiting the rest stop bathroom. Washing in a sink was better than nothing, I thought as the icy water hit my underarms. Oooh, that was cold!

We slept for five or six hours, until dawn pinked the sky and our eyes opened to frost on the windows. Looking closer, I saw it wasn’t frost, but just the warmth from us inside condensing on the windows because of the cold morning outside. It coated every window and effectively blocked the outside from view.

Four

“Want to hit the bathroom, Luke?” whispered DeAndre. He and Zach were awake and looked ready to hop out of the SUV. 

“How are you feeling, Zach?” I asked, wiping the sleep from my eyes and stretching. I sat up straighter as D roused Risa, Jonathan and Dad.

“Much better,” Zach said, smiling. "I think I feel good enough to conquer the world." he stretched out and bent his back and arms. I could see his biceps and deltoids straining against his T-shirt in the morning light diffused through the window. I swallowed and felt that warmth in my chest again.

“Well, hold on there, Zach,” said Jonathan, coming up to us and yawning. “Take it easy for a while; you’re still recuperating.”

“I know,” Zach said. “But I feel great, like I could run a marathon.”

Laughing, Dad walked up to us, and patted Zach on the back. “I like your attitude, Zach.”

I chuckled.

Zach smiled at me.
I smiled back, holding his eyes for a minute longer than usual.

Risa jumped up, “Okay you love birds, break it up,” she said. “I need to hit the bathroom, so come on, let’s go.” She grabbed her shotgun and opened the door, looking out. “Coast is clear, come on.”

“Love birds????” I looked back at Zach. He had ducked his head, trying to hide his smile. 

I hopped out of the SUV after Risa; DeAndre followed me, then the others. As I walked to the small building, I thought about Zach. 

I felt a hand grab mine as he hurried to catch up to me.

“You okay?” He asked.

“Yes. I think so,” I said. Smiling, I walked on, looking straight ahead. I don’t think I would have been able to talk if I had been looking into his eyes. “My whole life, I’ve been too busy to think of ...,” I cleared my throat. “What I mean is, the last 15 years have been filled with school, training, and practice. I’ve had time for little else.” I glanced over at him. “Being on the Sanctuary team, your days are completely filled. Training, practice, debriefing, rescues, travel.” 

I got to the door and pushed it open. Walking through, I held it for him. 

“Sounds like you’ve had a very busy life,” he said.

I rolled my eyes. “You have no idea.”

DeAndre, Jonathan and Dad had joined us in the bathroom and were washing up. Zach and I dawdled, talking in the corner.

“You guys had better finish up, we should be moving out soon,” Dad said as they exited out the door.

I turned to go into a stall.

“Do you like to read, Zach?”

“It’s only my favorite thing to do,” he said. I smiled.

Exiting the stall, I walked up to a sink to wash my face. He finished up and came to stand next to me, turning on the faucet of the sink next to mine.

We both washed in silence, each of us taking peeks at the other when we thought he wasn’t watching.
I began brushing my teeth and looking in the mirror, I saw Zach staring back at me. His eyes squinted in a small smile as he used his finger to clean his teeth.

After we washed up we started a water fight. At least, I did. He was pulled into it, I guess.

“HEY!” he said as I sprayed him with icy water from the faucet. He sputtered. I had caught him right in the face. He sprayed me back, laughing.

“AHH!”

Laughing just as hard, I ran out the door … and straight into Dad, who was running in.

WHAM!

The impact nearly knocked us both down.

Holding his head, he looked in the bathroom wildly.  “Are

you two okay? We heard yells.”

“Yes, Dad,” I giggled, holding my own head. “Um, we were just horsing around.”

Zach dissolved in giggles. I glared at him in mock rage, then started laughing myself.

“Oh! You two clowns get in the SUV,” said Dad, in mock anger. “Go on, get! We gotta go.” Shaking his head and smiling, he followed us to the SUV.

Giggling, we both had a hard time getting into the vehicle. We both tried at the same time, and that set us to giggling even harder. I felt my legs beginning to collapse under me as I laughed.
Zach hopped in, laughing as he made his way to the back seat. I felt a hand grab the back of my jeans and hoist me up onto my feet.

Looking up into the eyes of my father, I giggled. He grinned back, shaking his head, as I climbed into the vehicle. We all settled in for the ride into Thunder Bay.

As Dad pulled back onto the road, Zach and I sat in the back seat, talking.

“How long have you fought on the Sanctuary team?” Zach asked.

“Oh, ever since I was five,” I said. “My family came from the states and found Sanctuary in Winnipeg when I was five years old.”

“What? Oh, wow,” he said. “So you’ve had a lot of training and practice?”

“You could say that,” I said. Then I looked at him. “You look like you could hold your own in a fight, though.”

“I’ve been working with livestock for over a decade; that’ll put muscle on you,” he said. “But I haven’t been formally trained to fight at all. Other than a few fights in school, I wouldn’t know what to do in combat.”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “If you want to join the Sanctuary team, they’ll train you. But you should know: it’s pretty intense. You will be very sore for the first few weeks.”

His face looked excited at the prospect. “You have no idea how eager I am to tackle some zombies,” he said fervently. “After what I saw them do to my little sister, and then having my whole family wiped out, I want nothing more than to kill zombies. I want to bring down as many as I can.”

“Then you’ll need proper training, young man,” DeAndre said as he joined us. “Months of training. You don’t want to make a stupid mistake and get hurt because you haven’t learned to defend yourself. Trust me.”

“He’s right,” I said solemnly. “I’ve been training for nearly 18 years, and with every practice I grow better at it. You can always improve.”
 

Yeah,” said DeAndre, ruffling my hair. “Now you’re a lean, mean, fightin’ machine.” he said, laughing. I smiled at him fondly. 

Despite my great hybrid strength, DeAndre, Risa, Caitlyn, Mom, and Dad had basically taught me nearly everything I knew about fighting, about defending myself and the people around me.
You needed specific skills when fighting alone as opposed to part of a group, and if people needed to be defended, that figured into things strongly. We learned to fight with shotguns, long knives, and sometimes with our bare hands. They had taught it all to me.

No one else could really risk hand-to-hand combat with the zombies except for me. But they trained for it. We never knew when we’d need the skills, and as a last-ditch effort, it was important to know. Of course, for anyone else, if it got to hand-to-hand combat, the chances for infection were very high, so it was important to learn rescue techniques as well. We’d been trained in those, too. How to kick or punch or karate chop or shoot a zombie off your friend, and grab anything you could to drag them the safety.

After a few hours of driving and talking, I took out a sketchpad and tried to do justice to the surrounding landscape. I made an attempt at drawing Zach, but it just didn’t come out right at all. He laughed when he saw it, and I stuck my tongue out at him.

“Here, let me try,” Zach said, reaching for the pad of paper. I handed it to him, and he drew a cartoon of us all in the SUV, riding through a huge lake of zombies and shooting out the windows at them, like we were in an Old West stagecoach under siege from outlaws. It wasn’t half bad, in a corny kind of way. I told him so, and he just smiled.

“Zach,” DeAndre said, coming back to sit with us. “Jake wants to know what you’d like to do. We’re coming up to Atikokan and, if you want, we can drop you off here and send word back home for a pickup. It might take some time: they usually average about three week turnaround for a non-emergency. Or you can continue on with us. I don’t know if Luke has gone into detail about what our trip is about …”

“I have,” I said. “Mostly.”

“…but I can almost guarantee you that you’ll be safer if we drop you in town here. We’re driving into some dangerous territory, and the danger is very real,” DeAndre finished. “Let us know soon. We’re coming up to the turn off for Atikokan, and after that there’s little else until Thunder Bay.” He left to go sit up front.

I turned to Zach. “He’s right. We’re going into an area that is nearly overrun,” I said. “New England has some really bad parts that are nearly impassable, that’s one reason the two-week schedule is so tight. Those kinds of things tend to slow things down a lot.”

Zach was undeterred. “I understand the danger. I want to help you guys, though,” he said. “I want to fight, and help you get to Boston.”

I looked at him, deep in thought. On the one hand, we could always use an extra fighter in combat. Things could and often did get very rough, and one extra pair of hands wielding a shotgun could mean the difference between success and failure. On the other hand, I was worried about Zach’s lack of training, and his physical state.

“How are you feeling?” I asked. “How’s your burn?” I looked down at his leg, still wrapped in a neat, white bandage.

“Jonathan put some kind of salve on it yesterday, and put some more on today,” he said. “I think it’s healing very fast. It barely hurts anymore at all.” He patted the leg. “See? It doesn’t even bother me.” He flexed it and then stood up and bounced up and down a few times on his haunches. Looking into my eyes, he smiled. I had to hand it to him, the guy looked in top shape. His thigh muscles bulged as he bounced in another deep knee bend, and then up again. I swallowed.

“I’m going with you,” Zach turned and called over his shoulder to the others in the front. “If it’s okay with you, Jake.”

“It’s more than okay, son,” Dad said, looking over his shoulder at Zach. “We’re glad to have another strong soldier added to our ranks.”

Dad turned to DeAndre and said, “Check which weapons we can arm Zach with, he’s going to need at least two firearms, and some kind of knife.” Nodding, D went to go look into the rear compartment behind us.

I turned to Zach. “Stick near me if you can. I’ll watch your back,” I said, smiling.

“I won’t let you down, Luke,” he said.

Turning around to DeAndre, who was still in the rear weapons container, I asked, “D, how long till we get to Thunder Bay?”

“It’s about 100 miles, so around 2 hours, give or take,” he said. “Barring any mishaps, of course.” He looked grim. There were times when mishaps were more the rule than the exception. Then he sat down next to Zach with an armful of different gear.

“Okay, Zach,” DeAndre said, handing him different weapons as he spoke. “First of all we have a shotgun, this will be your main weapon.” Zach whistled as he took the heavy, black weapon.

“Yeah. We use a different model than the general public. This is a Saiga 12-gauge combat shotgun loaded with brenneke rounds. It is lethal. It is a rotating-bolt, gas-operated gun that feeds from a box magazine.” He spent the next 20 minutes going over the weapon, showing Zach how to hold it, how to use it and instructing him on gun safety. Zach got an intense look of concentration on his face, listening intently to every word DeAndre said.

“Okay, next we have this Smith & Wesson M&P semi-automatic pistol,” said DeAndre, displaying a lethal looking black handgun. “It’s your backup weapon. Not as lethal as the Saiga, but just as deadly when you’re fighting at close range. It will go clean through a man and hit the guy behind him. So be careful with it.” D then spent another 15 minutes on handgun instruction and safety. He took apart the pistol and showed Zach every piece, then snapped everything back together again.

“Lastly we have your backup knife,” DeAndre said, handing Zach a huge knife, which could almost be called a short sword. “It’s our own design, and it’s mostly a ninjatō sword, but with elements of the large Bowie knife.” We each carried one of these in a sheath on our back. DeAndre took the knife from Zach and slipped it into a sheath with straps. “Luke will show you how this goes on your back. The hilt will stick up behind your head, and you can grab it,” he mimed reaching behind him and grabbing an imaginary sword. “It’s great to know it’s there, because sometimes it’s your last weapon left. It’s basically a short sword, the blade is razor sharp and nearly 20 inches long, and there’s barely any hand guard to it, so be careful.” He handed the blade to Zach, who took it and began to examine the sheath and buckles.

“I’ll show you how to strap it on. You should keep the sheath on at all times,” I said, showing him how to put it on. “We load up with our weapons when we leave the vehicle. You never know when you might need them, so keep them close at hand inside when they’re not on you. See?” I patted my shotgun, which was beside my leg, propped up against the seat.

Zach spent the next few hours studying the weapons, while I went up front to sit with my dad. The terrain we were covering was wilderness and wetlands, not much to see. I dozed off after a short time.