The Orphans (Book 2): Surviving the Turned (30 page)

Aslin floored it down the now deserted street, back towards Andy’s shop, where they prayed he would be there to greet them. Shaun took Greg’s rifle, dropping the clip, and slammed in a fresh one for him before releasing the charging handle. He handed it to Greg, shaking his shoulder. He was lost in his own world. “Greg, snap out of it, man. We aren’t done today; I need you, man.”

Greg yelled, “Did you see what just happened? You just shot one of our group in the head, Shaun? Did your heart die today too?”

“Did you want to see Kristy as one of those? Did you want to have to take her out? If that happened to me, I pray you would do the same, man.”

“Shaun, I don’t know what we should do if one of those things comes after us and gets us.”

“They don’t get another one of us. We learn every damn thing we can from these guys, and we stay away from them while the government is trying to learn what they need to do to cure these things.”

Greg leaned back against the truck’s bed, staring at Shaun. “If they can’t cure these things, we kill as many of them as we can so they can’t do this to anyone else. No one needs to feel like this. All these things do is hurt. There isn’t anything good left in them.”

Ellie listened and watched the two boys, seeing a new hardness in Shaun and Greg she had not been witness to before. The truck came to a rolling stop in front of Andy’s. The teens looked at it with hope, as the iron gate fence was still intact. All the glass had been broken and most of it lay covered in blood from the Turned’s wounds they had endured trying to fight their way in.

Aslin backed the truck up so that it was ready to go and left it running. Aslin looked around the area. There were no Turned running around, but they were everywhere… at least fifty of them lying in impossibly uncomfortable positions on the ground. Aslin looked out his window and saw that everyone of them was missing a quarter inch of their skull where a bullet had gone in and painted the street with their hair, blood, and brains. He bent around looking in the back of the truck. Clary, Greg, and Ellie all were standing but had their hands in the air. Aslin opened the truck door and a raspy smoker’s voice hollered out from the shop. “You take one more step out of that truck, and I’ll shoot every fucking one of you in the head. I don’t know you, and I don’t need ya. You shut that door and get the fuck out of here, and you do it now, or you can go ahead and consider your life span over.”

Shaun said, “Andy, sir, it’s us.”

“Us who? I don’t know any fucking
us
.”

“Shaun Fox, sir. We were here yesterday with my father… I mean my dad… Frank Fox.”

“Well, what the hell are you doing back in town already? Christ, I gave you enough supplies that you could have lived the entire summer without having to fire one bullet or catch one fish. What the fuck are you already doing back here for? Where the hell is your dad, and who's the big sonofabitch in the back of the truck with you kids? If the Army only sent in one man they really are as stupid as everyone thinks they are!”

“No, sir, we aren’t stupid; we’re homeless.”

“What the hell happened to the cabin?”

Shaun lowered his arms slowly and put the rifle sling on his shoulder. “One of the boys with us stayed behind and burned it down. We thought that my dad was completely responsible for the outbreak yesterday. But it was his assistant who forged records and set the day of hell into motion.”

“Ya don’t say. Well, that peckerwood is one dead man, isn’t he?”

“My dad actually already dealt with him. Somehow, he was Turned into one of those things. I don’t know all the details, but it looked a lot like Dad and him had a fight, and it ended with his assistant having a broken axe handle shoved under his chin and up through his brain.”

“Yep, that’ll do, it won’t it, son? Well, what the hell are you all doing in the back of the truck? Quit wasting your time; we need to get packed up and outta here. This ain’t no place to try and survive. I got a farm on the outskirts of town. We just need to grab some more shit since ya’ll can’t make it without me.”

Clary started to lower his hands slowly, when Andy yelled, “No! I think you ought to keep them up just another minute or two. I haven’t decided if I like yous or not yet. What are you doing here already?”

“Sir, Andy, is it? My name is Clary and me and my SEAL team were air dropped in. There were six of us and now we are down to two. We were suppose to retrieve Dr. Frank Fox’s notes and files. We did that and then the government decided that they could live without us.”

Andy laughed and in the black of the store a single light ignited followed by warm embers on the end of a cigarette. A long glow brightened for a moment and the smell of tobacco burning floated out from the store, followed by a very ill sounding cough. “Wait, you mean to tell me that you got dropped off in goddamn Zombieville, USA, and you were suppose to send the government the research they needed before you got your dumbass back on that plane. Jesus Christ, you must be the dumbest sonofabitch in the world. I’m not sure you two can come with me if you are that damn ignorant.”

“We were just following orders, sir, we…”

“Orders, shmorders, son. You boys got screwed, is what you got. Damn, man, you got enough problems going for ya. Go ahead and put your hands down.”

The steel barred door rattled and the glass that was left shook off and fell to the ground. It opened wide and Andy poked his head out with a filter less smoke hanging from his mouth. He mumbled with it between in his teeth. “Y’all get in here, and quit wasting time, will ya?”

Clary stared at the old man, taking him all in… what little there was left of the old man. He had blood-covered, dingy overalls on and a white shirt that had more blood on it than white at the moment. Clary walked into the store, looking around. He whistled lightly, “Holy shit.”

He stared at the row of assault rifles all set up with scopes and pointing towards the window. Each one of them had a stack of clips next to it, and on the ground a stack of spent ones with more bullet casings than he would be able to count. Aslin held the door for the teens to enter; Shaun nodded and said, “Go on in, thanks. I’m going to get some fresh air. I’ll come inside in a couple of minutes.”

“Don’t go doing anything stupid, Shaun.”

Greg walked past him, patting him on the shoulder. He was feeling down and out but managed a smartass comment nonetheless. “Don’t make Shaun make promises that he’s just going to break, Aslin. He will break your heart, brother.”

Shaun laughed as he returned to the truck and hopped up into the back. “I’ll stay put; don’t worry about me.”

Aslin nodded and put a military crate in front of the door to keep it open. “You see anything, Shaun, you get your scrawny ass in here. Don’t go playing the hero, you got it?”

Shaun did a half-ass salute and looked at the empty, desolate street. Aslin walked in through the door leaving, him to his own thoughts. Andy said, “We need to get outta here, but I don’t want to leave everything I have here. Looters are gonna come eventually, and if they want anything they can go get it themselves from somewhere else.”

Ellie got a shopping cart and started walking behind Andy with it. “Well, why didn’t you leave yesterday, Andy?”

“Are you shittin’ me, sweetheart? The moment you all went to leave and that damn van backfired, those things came from nowhere and were crazy with rage, trying to break into the damn place. I set up them rifles after a few hours, but for everyone of them, I shot another ten took their place. I didn’t know what to do, so I just kept pulling the trigger.”

“Where’d all the blood come from on you?”

Andy looked down at himself for what must have been the first time, “Oh hell, you mean this? Well, some of them were sticking their arms in the windows, and I decided after I was getting worried about the ammunition supply that maybe I’d be better off with chopping some arms from their places. It, uh, got a little messy after a while.”

Ellie looked near the edge of the building where the front show windows once had been and saw the smashed-in glass. On top of it was easily twenty plus arms. Different sizes, small and large but all gorily chopped from their place and bloodied heavily. “Yeah, I bet it did get messy. Have they been out here all day?”

Andy nodded. “Yeah some dumb shit dropped a damn bomb in the middle of town. Once it went off, those damn things came in droves through here. I don’t know what the hell that dumb shit was thinking, but he brought all of those bastards into town.”

Ellie and Tina smiled awkwardly. Tina said, “Yeah, what dumbass would set off a damn bomb in the middle of town? That seems like such a bad idea.”

Andy nodded. “Those things can hear real good, and I think they can smell. I saw them sniffing for blood when nothing was there to smell, and they could tell exactly where it was coming from. A couple people that weren’t turned came running through the streets with packs on their backs. Those things jumped them before they ever knew what hit them. They didn’t stand a chance.”

Ellie said, “Well, I’m glad that we needed to come back here. I don’t like to think what would happen if you had to stay here any longer than you needed to.”

Andy said, “Ah, it wouldn’t have been too bad. Eventually I’d run out of smokes or food and would have blown my brains out. I’m not one to wait around for miracles, but it’s a good thing you did stop by. What’d you do with my van, anyways?”

Tina said, “Well, we had some car problems and had to get something else.”

“Christ, girl. I’ve had that damn van longer than the two of you have been alive put together.”

Ellie said, “We might as well be honest with you from the start. We blew up your van. It died and then these stupid zombies tried putting their heads through the window and everything just kind of went downhill from there. Shaun thought it was a good idea if we tried to blow some of them up. We didn’t quite know yet that those things were going to be so into the whole sound thing. We learned real quick though.”

“You bet your ass. If not, you’d be dead already. You kids had a good thing up in that cabin, but you help me get all this shit in the back of that truck, and we’ll be out of here in no time.”

Clary said, “Andy, I really appreciate you helping us out with this. Never in a million years would I have thought there’d be anything like this happening but in some damn movie.”

Andy nodded. “Yep, it’s pretty much bat-shit crazy. You boys know what the good stuff is. You go get as much as will fit in the back of that truck. If we can kill them with it, I want it. You got it?”

Clary nodded. “You know, they might be able to get a cure with all that stuff we sent to Washington. They might be able to heal these things.”

“I don’t give two shits if they can heal them or cure them. If those things are stupid enough to come out to my farm, then I’m going to put a round through their head, just like I did with all the others out front. Got it?”

They both nodded, realizing if there was a cure to be had and one of those things had their blood rage set on them then there was nothing they could do but protect themselves. It wasn’t their fault, and it wasn’t the fault of the people who Turned. They knew it was better that the other guy lose when shit hit the fan. Clary and Aslin assessed the firearms, packing everything that could be useful, along with more bullets than they'd’ seen in some armories. They had multiple shopping carts packed to the brim, and they made their way to the door. They dropped everything when they heard the gun blasts coming from outside. Aslin looked around the store, not seeing Shaun. He yelled, “Shit! Shaun’s outside; move, move, move.”

The two soldiers ran for the door, guns up and ready to blow away anything in their path. What they saw when they got outside was a street only filled with dead who had already fallen. There was no Shaun. The gun’s fire had stopped, and they knew nothing of where he went. Clary yelled, “Where in the hell did he go, damn it?”

Aslin kicked the truck hard, leaving a dent. “Don’t any of you know how to follow the simplest of fucking orders? I told him not to be a hero, to stay here, damn it. What the hell is wrong with him?”

Ellie yelled in Shaun’s defense, knowing him better than anyone. “It isn’t his fault. He can’t help it; he doesn’t quit, and he doesn’t give up. He is his father’s son and he’ll come back!”

Aslin nodded slowly, seeing the anger and passion in her face, knowing that she truly believed there was little, if anything, that could stop the young man. “Let’s hope so, Ellie. We need to get moving soon though; we don’t have a lot of time to waste.”

Chapter 13: Shelter

Shaun heard the gunshots and sprinted without thinking. If there was something he could do for someone else, he was going to do so. There had been too much bloodshed today, and he did not want to see anymore spilt. He ran for everything he was worth toward the gunfire. When he reached the corner, what he saw made him only want to fire once. He took careful aim, dropping one after another. Ten of the Turned’s blood and brains were spread on the back of the brick building, slowly dripping and sliding their way to the street.

Shaun never lowered his rifle. He kept it aimed, staring with cold eyes at the scene before him. Mike was crouched on the street, head down between his knees; an empty shotgun lay to his side. After the shooting stopped and nothing had eaten him, he slowly raised himself up, looking around cautiously through the tears in his eyes. He gripped his shoulders and stomach and neck to verify there really had been nothing that had eaten or taken a bite of flesh from his skin. When his eyes met Shaun’s, they grew wide and were full of fear seeing the rifle pointed directly at him.

Mike put his hands out in front of him. “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot me. I’m sorry; I know it was a dick move. I just… I just…”

Shaun screamed, “Yeah, you got the dick part right, you son of a bitch! You know why I’ll survive and you won’t? Because I got a group and you don’t.” Shaun fired the rifle one more time and Mike’s shotgun flew in a wild spin across the street. The wooden pump handle split into many pieces, making the gun useless. Shaun turned to walk back to his group. He yelled the last words that he would ever speak to Mike again, “Don’t want anyone having unfair advantages over anyone else, do we?”

Shaun left him there, unworried about his fate. He rounded the corner to see everyone sitting outside. Ellie saw him and came running for him, not worried about anything else. “Shaun, what the hell were you thinking? We heard the gun firing in the distance and when we looked outside you were gone.” She pounded on his chest. “You can’t just go run off—what the hell were you thinking? What were you thinking, damn it?”

“I heard the shots. I thought that there was someone in need of help. I took out some more Turned though.”

“So you were too late to save them?”

Shaun nodded his head. “Yeah, there was no saving this guy. He was already gone; he didn’t stand a chance.”

The two walked up to the shop, hand in hand. Aslin was smoking a cigarette, worried sick over the damn kid. “Well, I guess it was too much to ask you not to do anything stupid, wasn’t it?”

Greg, who was just as worried and pissed about Shaun, yelled, “Dude, I was kidding when I said you couldn’t not do anything stupid. Don’t be a dumbass, Shaun. If you need to go run off half-cocked, let me know and I’ll go with you. Two is better than one. We don’t go off by ourselves if we can help it, you got it? You only got so many chances, man; don’t run out of them, please.”

Clary watched the two, knowing they were close already but knew that a friendship like theirs was going to be something that would make leaders out of the two. They would be able to help each other make decisions when they seemed impossible to make. He yelled, “Get your skinny asses inside now! We need to get packed and gone. There is no telling how long we got until those things come back here.”

Shaun and Greg just stood. Shaun wanted to tell him about Mike but wasn't sure what Greg might think. Clary snapped off like a drill sergeant. “I don’t think I need to say please, goddamn it. Get your asses moving and get it done now. Get in that building and get all the shit in the back of the truck before I snap off my foot in your ass, goddamn it!”

The two jumped, not ready to be screamed at, and got inside. Within a few minutes, they had everything in the truck and were off again. They directed Aslin to the outskirts of town where they thought that they would see less of the Turned. Shaun and Ellie sat squeezed to the sides of the truck, the back packed to the brim. Clary was standing, holding onto the top of the cab, waiting to take out anything that he saw. But to his surprise, there were no more of the Turned that they would encounter that day.

              The door to a shop slammed open and a group of teens ran out of it, screaming. Clary took a knee, pulling his machine gun down and pointing it at the group, which was running for everything they could through the street. Shaun yelled, “Wait! I think they are normal. I don’t think they’re infected!”

              Clary yelled, “How the hell can you tell that?”

              Ellie chimed in. “Well, for one, they aren’t chasing us anymore. And two, they are standing with their hands in the air.”

              Clary looked back, seeing this, and motioned for them to come forward. He yelled in through the window at Aslin to stop and reverse for them. Aslin looked in his rearview mirror and shook his head, defeated. “You have to be kidding me, right? We are purposely taking on more kids. They’re going to be pain in the asses… I can tell.”

              Greg said, “Wait, you said the same thing about us, didn’t you?”

              Aslin looked over, nodding his head. “Yeah, and you ended up being a pain in the ass; maybe not as bad as Shaun, but you're on top of my damn list.”

Aslin put the truck in park, waiting for the kids to make up the distance and climb into the pickup’s bed. Clary was counting them, seeing there were four new mouths that were going to need to be fed. He was not enthralled about the idea of having more responsibility to deal with.

The teens climbed in, two boys and two girls. All roughly the same age as Shaun, but some looked like they’d be seniors in high school. The oldest a boy yelled, “God, are we glad to see you guys! We just barely made it out of that school alive yesterday. My name is Jordan.”

Clary said, “So you’re on your own? You don’t have anyone waiting for you?”

They shook their heads and nothing else needed to be asked. Clary said, “Well, find a place to sit. There isn’t much room, but you are going to have a roof over your head and be safe. Aslin took a main highway outside of town a few minutes and came to a bridge made of ancient steel with a wood platform to drive across. Andy said, “Well, usually this is off limits. They closed it down a few years ago… something about it being unsafe. But when you gots zombies coming after you, do you really worry about the thirty foot drop down into the Raccoon River below?”

Aslin looked over, nodding his head slowly. “Is that a rhetorical question? Or do you really want me to answer it?”

Patrick looked out his window at the river below. “Can we speed it up a little bit there, Aslin? We got, like, a long-ass fall underneath us.”

“Watch your mouth, kid.” Aslin tightened his grip on the wheel, looking down as they drove across the long bridge. Greg sat next to Tina, watching the countryside go by. The crops were just starting to come up. It was something they’d be thankful for in the coming months, he was sure. Tina rubbed his shoulder. “You doing okay, Greg? I’m sorry about Kristy; she seemed really nice.”

Greg smiled, nodding his head. “Yeah, she definitely had something about her. There was potential there, for sure.”

“Do you need a hug, Greg?”

“Well, if you're offering, but I can’t promise that I’m not going to try and enjoy it just a little.”

“It sounds like you are going to be okay if we give you a little time.”

Greg asked, “Uh, are we almost there? I don’t know how much longer I’m able to sit back here; it just feels so weird.”

Andy pointed to an old, white farmhouse. “You’ve been in the truck a whole fifteen minutes, damn it; quit your bitchin’. Look over there. That’s Casa de Andy—you can call it home until you find somewhere better to stay.”

Aslin asked, “Is there a better place than somewhere out in the middle of nowhere?”

“Probably not, but you sure as hell ain’t staying with me forever. You be happy for the time you got. I can’t be wipin’ your asses forever. Eventually you all are going to grow attached to me, and I don’t want to have to deal with the sad goodbyes.” He hocked up a loogie and spit it out the window and wiped his face on his sleeve. “Yeah, I just don’t want ya’ll growing too attached to me.”

Tina watched in disgust, nodding her head. “Yeah, I would just hate to have a tearful goodbye, Andy.”

Aslin pulled off the gravel road onto Andy’s gravel driveway that ran a few hundred yards up and had a large, overgrown yard in front of it. Andy said, “I hope you kids know how to mow. We ain’t gonna want any long grass growing around here in case those things learn how to hunt something for real.”

Aslin stopped in front of the house. There were two stories, each with a walk-around porch on it. The house was twenty years past needing its last paint job, and a screen door hung off of the front entrance. They emptied out of the truck and watched Andy walk slowly up the old wood steps, twisting open the unlocked door. “You bring all that crap in here. We are going to think it’s as good as gold in no time. There’s plenty of bedrooms; you boys can bunk in one. There’s one for the girls and one for you SEALs. Mine is on the bottom and you keep your ass out of there, and don't clean it. I got it just the way I want it, you understand?”

They all nodded, taking a handful of items into the living room and taking the
meals ready to eat
into the kitchen. The new additions to the group helped carry in items and then found rooms of their own. There would no be great meals at the house, but they were not going to starve. Andy pointed out into the field. “We get too hungry, all we need to do is take one of those cows out to the barn with a shotgun. We can smoke the meat and cure it, and we’d be set for months off one of those. There are plenty of them too; we just need to make sure nothing eats them.”

Shaun helped carry everything in, making neat piles that they could easily sort through at a later time. Greg went upstairs, ready to rest away from others and ready to finally let his emotions run freely. The tears fell harder than he thought they would, thinking of the girl who saw him for more than he was and could see something in him that might not have been developed fully yet, but nonetheless knew was there. She knew the man that he would become, even if he didn’t know it yet. Tina went to her room, made the beds, and lay down. Aslin and Clary made sure that every corner of the house had something that they could use to take out one of the Turned with. Andy grabbed a six-pack and a fresh pack of smokes and disappeared into his room, where he lay down and fell asleep before he knew what had hit him.

Ellie walked around the house, looking at the pictures on the walls. Most of them were very old and showed much younger pictures of Andy and his family and him as a young man dressed in his military dress uniform. She walked upstairs, admiring the old house and how nice it could be, but knowing that there was no chance of it being what it could be as long as Andy was around. She peered into the room she and Tina would share and saw that her friend was was out, her pillow wet with tears. She walked up and knocked lightly on Shaun and Greg’s door. She whispered, “Shaun, it’s Ellie. Do you want to go for a walk?”

Greg mumbled through tears, sniffing his nose, “Uh… hey, Ellie. He isn’t in here. Why don’t you check outside?”

Ellie opened her mouth to see if he needed someone to talk to but wasn’t sure if she could deal with any more heartache. She felt like she’d been on the verge of tears all day and didn’t want to worry about opening the floodgates herself. She went down the steps and outside, making sure she had her pistol that Greg had shown her how to use. She looked around the property for Shaun, not seeing him anywhere. She saw an old barn with a door open and walked up to it, slowly stepping in. It was dark and quiet and smelled strongly of farm animals. She walked into the dark looking for Shaun. He was sitting on a milking stool in the dark picking at hay on the ground. He whispered, “What’s up, Ellie?”

Ellie screamed, jumping, startled to death. “Jesus Christ, Shaun, could you be a little bit more creepy, goddamn it?”

“Yeah, probably. If you haven’t noticed, I’m kind of on a roll today.”

“You’ve just been dealing with impossible circumstances. You know that Kristy isn’t your fault. Mike isn’t your fault, either. You’ve just been doing what you thought was necessary to keep people alive. Or in Kristy’s case, to keep her from going through the pain of being one of those things.”

Shaun nodded. “Just because I did the right thing, sure as hell doesn’t mean that I felt I did… you know what I mean?”

Shaun pushed up off of the stool, pacing around the small barn. Ellie came to him, stopping him, and pressed her small palm flat to his chest. She said, “Do you feel this, Shaun? You are still alive. You still have a chance, but you need to be able to let these things go. I know not at once, but overtime. You are going to lose more people, maybe even—”

Shaun cut her off, gripping her thin arms. “It’s not going to be you. If it is, I’ll never see it because I’ll die before I let anything happen to you.”

Ellie pulled herself up close to him. Shaun brushed the hair from her face. They brought their heads in together, slowly and awkwardly, before their young lips found each other’s. They kissed slowly and deeply then Ellie rested her head on his chest. “We both need to make it, Shaun. I don’t think either one of us is strong enough to make it alone.”

Shaun gave her a long hug, kissing the top of her head. “We will make it; we will make it together, Ellie. We just have to watch out for each other. You are all that matters to me. You are everything.”