No Easy Hope - 01 (42 page)

“The first thing we need to do is get you medical attention. We have a doctor and medical supplies at our compound.” Steve said.

As he spoke, I head a faint moan carried on the wind. And then another, and another, growing louder. I sat up and cupped a hand to my ear.

“Steve. You hear that?” I asked.

Steve turned and raised his NVG’s.

“Shit. Creeps, less than two hundred yards out, coming across the field. Lots of them. We need to move.”

I cursed and got to my feet. “We have to get these people to the truck.” I said.

Steve pointed at the four prisoners with his rifle and motioned to Stan and Cody. “Zip-tie those fuckers and bring them with us.”

The two former policemen quickly zip-tied the prisoner’s hands behind their backs and bound them together with a length of Steve’s parachute cord. Robert held his SKS level with the men’s heads as Cody tied their bindings.

“Give me a fucking excuse you cocksuckers. One reason, just one goddamn reason. I dare you. I motherfucking double dare you.” Robert said, his eyes blazing. The prisoners looked down, afraid to meet his gaze.

We had everyone up and ready to move as the first walking corpse appeared at the edge of the fire light. Flames engulfed the house behind us, and a large section of the roof collapsed into the inferno as we began to move away. Robert carried his sister in his arms. Her head lolled to one side as he walked. I hadn’t noticed before that she was unconscious. Not good.

As we set off across the field back toward the forest, Steve put on his NVG’s and began to pick off the infected that got too close. I clicked on my tactical light and lit up the ground in front of us with a bright penetrating beam from the LED’s. The powerful little flashlight gave me good visibility for ten yards ahead. I was as good as ringing a dinner bell for the creeps, but I had no choice. The massive conflagration consuming the farmhouse had ruined everyone’s night vision, and without any light to see by, we would be stumbling blind through a forest infested with the undead. Luckily, Stan and Cody had thought to bring flashlights as well. They guided the victims and prisoners over the uneven terrain behind me. Steve fired off a few rounds into the darkness before he made his way back over to us.

“Eric, you got point?” He asked.

“I got it, cover our rear. Stan, you and Cody keep our flanks clear.” I rounded on the zip-tied prisoners marching behind me single file. “As for you fuckers, if you even think about running and I’ll shoot you in the legs and leave your sorry asses for the infected.”

They blinked and cringed away from the harsh glare of my tactical light. We made our way as quickly as we could across the field and into the forest. Trees and undergrowth made it difficult to spot the undead in the dark gloom. Several times, I had to send multiple rounds at infected before getting a head shot. Judging by the sounds erupting from the surrounding forest, the infected were closing in on us in spite of the efforts of our shooters to keep them away. I drew my pistol and handed it to the man with the badly beaten face.

“Here take this. If any infected get too close, put a bullet in their head. The safety is off, and there is a round in the chamber. You have thirty rounds, so make them count. Remember,” I said pointing a finger between my eyes. “Head shots only. Anything else, and it’s your ass.”  The man nodded and took the pistol.

“And watch where you point that thing.” I added.

I stepped around a tree and damn near got tackled by a ghoul emerging from a thick patch of thorn bushes. I managed to bring my rifle up between us and hold him back. My barrel was too low to shoot him in the head. The thought flashed through my mind that body mechanics are body mechanics, regardless of whether you are alive or dead. I released the fore-end of my rifle and pushed against the revenant’s throat with my left hand while hooking my right leg between his and executing a textbook inside reap. The combined push-pull effect caused the infected to stumble over backward and fall on its ass. The rotten fucker hissed at me and bared its black teeth as I leveled my rifle and put a bullet through its head. I raised the carbine and swept the forest ahead. It looked clear as far as I could see, so I continued on and signaled for the others to follow.

It took us nearly an hour to make our desperate, exhausted way back to the road. Groaning, shambling shapes weaved inexorably through the pitch-black night behind us in relentless pursuit. If it were just the other shooters and I, we could have made it in half the time. The man to whom I had loaned my pistol used nearly an entire magazine keeping the creeps away from the women behind him. The poor girls were having a hard time of it due to their injuries. The one with the broken arm, and the young girl I had tried to comfort, wailed in fear every time a gun fired too close to them. I wanted to turn around and hold them, and tell them everything would be okay. They sounded so afraid. I pushed the thought out of my head and focused on getting back to the truck stashed nearby.

We urged everyone into a slow jog down the dark road. My flashlight illuminated the way ahead much better once that we cleared the oppressive forest. A ghoul staggered out onto the road ahead of me and half jogged in my direction. She had been a middle-aged Hispanic woman in life, but death had turned her into a hideous, blood-drenched abomination. Something had torn her lips away, and exposed white bone shined grotesquely through savaged skin and muscle tissue under the moon light. Black ichor covered her teeth, and a rotten, shredded tongue roiled around in her mouth. I didn’t want to stop long enough to line up a shot, so I took four running steps and put all my weight into a front kick that launched her head over heels backwards. She came to a rolling stop head down in a ditch, thrashing and struggling to get up. I threw the kick so hard that I knocked myself over. Strong hands gripped me under the arms and hauled me to my feet. I turned around and saw the poor man with the beaten face that I had given my pistol to. He flashed a broken toothed smile and patted me on the shoulder. I nodded by way of thanks, and kept moving.  

The horde of infected must have numbered a least a hundred or more, despite the several dozen we put down with our guns. I had to reload twice, and was more than halfway through a third magazine before we reached the clearing where Steve stashed the truck. He fished the keys out from beneath the driver’s seat and hopped in. Stan and Cody loaded the prisoners and rescues in the back. I hopped into the passenger seat after helping Robert lay his sister down in the bed. The freed victims threw all of the assorted junk out to make room for themselves. Stan made the prisoners curl up into balls and pack in tightly toward the truck’s cab. Steve threw the truck into gear, and kicked up dirt and gravel as he brought the vehicle around and bounced across the field back to the road. Once he put some distance between us and the horde, he reduced speed and followed the winding hill country road back to the compound.

The guards on duty at the compound sounded the alarm as our vehicle approached. It was late at night, and all that they could see was the headlights of a large truck coming toward them. As we got close, Steve turned off the lights and pulled up next to the warehouse with his window down.

“Don’t shoot, it’s Steve.” He called out.

Bill came out with Ethan and Earl in tow. Ethan took the people we rescued inside to treat their wounds and get some food into them. As if being horrifically traumatized wasn’t bad enough, they were severely dehydrated and suffering from malnourishment. We kept the prisoners outside. Steve and I spent a few minutes in terse, hushed conversation with Bill about what to do with them.

“There is a lot to talk about Bill.” Steve said. “These guys were doing terrible things. I think they might be the reason that we haven’t found any other survivors in so long.”

“So what do you want to do with them?” He asked.

“For right now, we give them food and water and confine them under guard in the factory.” Steve responded. “Tomorrow, we ask the people they kidnapped what we should do about them.”

Bill paled at that, and nodded slowly. He had seen the terrible condition those poor people were in. Whatever they decided to do with the bastards that hurt them was not going to be pretty.

I helped Steve and a few others secure the prisoners on the factory floor. We found some chains and padlocks, and used them to manacle the sick fucks to iron rings in the concrete that once supported factory equipment. Justin and Rick volunteered to take the first watch so that the four of us who went out that morning could get some rest.

“Watch them close.” I told Justin. “Don’t let them talk, or do anything else but sit there. These fuckers are dangerous, and if you give them half a chance, they will kill you to get away.”

“What did they do to those people you brought in?” He asked, his boyish face stiff with anger.

“Long story short, they beat, raped, and brutalized them. Tomorrow, we will find out everything that happened. For now, we keep these bastards on lock-down until we can decide how to deal with them.”

“I vote we just put a bullet in their heads and have done with it.” Justin said.

“Judging by what I’ve seen tonight, that might be too good for them. We’ll see what their victims have to say about it tomorrow.”

The four of us who captured the marauders and rescued their victims, along with Bill, Ethan, and Andrea, divided our time the next day between debriefing the victims and interrogating the evil pieces of shit that captured them. Stan and Cody turned out to be invaluable. They both had experience interrogating suspects, and suggested how we should go about getting their story out of them. We started with the fat bald one, since he seemed to be the weakest. Steve and I took him away from the others, forced him to strip down to his underwear, and chained him to a tree a few miles from the factory.

“You and I are going to have a little chat.” Steve said, standing in front of the man. “I’m going to ask you questions, and you are going to answer them completely and honestly. Are we clear?”

The man tried to nod, but the chain around his forehead prevented it.

“Yeah, whatever you want man. Just don’t hurt me.” He said. Even though it was cool that morning, sweat ran down the man’s fat jiggling hide in long rivulets. Steve smiled. He looked like a hungry crocodile, and about as cold-blooded.

“Let’s start with your name.”

“Don. Don Grable.”

“Okay Don, how did you come to be a part of that little ensemble you were with?”

“We used to work together at the water treatment plant. When the infection spread out of Atlanta, we all got together and said we would work together to survive if it reached us. We didn’t think it would really happen, but it did. A couple of the guys who had families went north to Iron Station where the military was trying to set up a safe zone. Only one of them came back, and he lost his wife and kids to the infected. The rest of us holed up at Jack’s place out in the country for a while, until we started to run low on food. That was when the trouble started.”

“And what trouble was that?” I asked.

“And which one of you is Jack?” Steve added.

“Jack is dead. He was one of the guys you killed at the farm.”

“Too bad for him.” I deadpanned. “Back to my question. What trouble?”

“We…we were getting desperate. We were starting to fight over food. Jack caught a guy trying to take some stuff and run off one night while the rest of us were asleep. He…uh…stopped him.”

“You mean he killed him.” Steve said.

“Yeah. Fuck, man, Jack was crazy. He always had a screw loose, but it wasn’t until then that I started to realize how fucked up he really was.”

“Explain.” Steve said.

“Well, that night when he caught him, he didn’t kill him right away. He shot him in the foot so he couldn’t run off, and gathered the rest of us around him. He had Ray tied up. He was bleeding all over the place and begging for help. Ray was our friend and all, but we were pretty pissed at him for trying to steal from us. We felt betrayed you know? Jack gave this speech about it being the end of the world, and survival of the fittest, and shit like that. I didn’t pay much attention to most of it, except the part where he told us that the only way we were going to survive was to stick together. That part kind of made sense. He said that Ray was a traitor for trying to run off with our food. He was leaving us to die, and that he didn’t deserve any mercy from us.”

The man stopped talking for a moment as his gaze became distant. Steve snapped his fingers in front of his face. The man jerked, and swiveled his eyes back to us.

“What happened then?”