Zombie Rules (Book 3): ZFINITY (22 page)

I intentionally faced my truck east so the morning sun would wake me up, but it didn’t matter. I probably got all of an hour’s worth of sleep and lay there watching as the sky slowly brightened. When my watch indicated it was five, I got up, stretched, and turned the CB on.

“Come in Saigon,” I said. Andie answered almost immediately.

“Saigon here. Where are you? I’ve been trying to call you.”

“I’m heading over to Fred’s,” I said, “come by if you have a chance.” I turned the radio off without waiting for a response. My mood had not improved since yesterday and I didn’t feel like talking or answering any questions.

Fred was sitting on his porch drinking coffee when I drove up. He had another cup sitting on a homemade table and poured me some dark liquid out of a thermos. I sat down in one of the chairs, thanked him, and looked at the table. It was bare of any paint and crudely built.

“The boys built it one day,” Fred said in explanation. I nodded quietly, knowing he would keep it until it rotted.

“Terry came by here last night looking for you,” he said. I nodded again but said nothing. “He said there were some harsh words spoken at the dinner table.” He glanced over at me and waited for my response.

“I’d like to stay here for a few days if you don’t mind,” I said. He was silent. I shrugged. “If you’re still feeling unsocial, I have no problem living out of my truck.” I finished my mug and refilled it.

“You know you’re welcome here anytime,” he finally said. “I suppose I could use some company.”

“Everyone is hurting,” I said, “some of the gang are taking it personally that you’ve withdrawn from us.”

“Understandable,” Fred responded. I looked at him and grunted. Same old Fred, I thought.

Our dirty white van pulled into the driveway about the time we were having our third cup. Julie was driving. Andie and Terry got out first and walked over with a picnic basket.

“We brought breakfast,” Andie said, “and Julie wants to talk to you in the van, unless you want to eat breakfast first.”

I shook my head and walked over to the van. “Hello,” I said as I got in.

“Fred told Terry you didn’t stay here last night,” she said. I didn’t answer. “You look like you’ve either had a wild night with some tart or you slept in the truck.”

“Take your pick, whatever answer I give will be wrong and will no doubt reflect my lack of good judgment,” I retorted. I had not slept well at all and was feeling quite irritable.

“You don’t have to be so mean.”

I glared at her. “I didn’t sleep very well last night. The only thing I could think of was the woman who promised she’d stick with me until the end is suddenly a stranger to me. Forgive me for not being all warm and fuzzy.”

“Mom said you’d try to make me out as the bad person in all of this,” she said with her own scoff.

“Yeah, you’ve been listening to her a lot lately. It’s very confusing to me considering everything she’s done in the past, or don’t you remember?”

“She’s changed,” was her only response. I chortled.

“She said you’d try to blame her as well.”

“Well, she certainly has all of the answers. I mean, how in the hell did we ever get by without her sage wisdom? Let me answer. We were doing pretty good up until she moved in. Now look at us.”

“Yeah, look at us. Tommy’s dead because of you. If you had gone on the fuel run instead of obsessing over a zombie that got the best of you, he’d still be alive.”

I think my jaw literally dropped open. “How do you figure?”

“Terry said you would have spotted the problem on the road immediately. I wanted you to go with them, but you couldn’t be bothered with it.”

I felt my fists clenching. “Do you really believe I’m the reason they died?” I asked incredulously.

Julie didn’t respond, instead she looked out of the front window. For a moment, I was tempted to tell her about the day I found Tommy. I wanted to tell her about the two men whom her mother had called friends. I wanted to tell her how one of them raped Tommy while the other one watched and laughed gleefully. I wanted to tell her that was the reason I killed those two men, and, I wanted to tell her I was the one who rescued him and brought him home, but I didn’t. It seemed like a moot point now.

“I see,” I muttered and looked toward the porch. “I’ll tell Terry to load up my clothes and bring them over.”

Julie looked at me sharply. “I’m miserable, Julie, absolutely miserable. You’ve shut me out and question everything I do as if I were a pathetic screw up and not the man you love. You’re blaming me for the death of your little brother which is absolutely ludicrous. You’ve turned against me, Julie.”

I waited for a response, but got none. “Well hell, I never thought your mother would steal you away from me, but I guess I was wrong. She’s sure done a number on us.”

I got out of the van and walked back to the porch.

“How’d it go?” Andie asked. I shook my head ruefully and walked inside.

It was on the third day when I started to wonder if I was being a damned fool.

On day one, I was totally pissed off with the female gender. Granted, I’m eighteen and still don’t know shit about what makes them tick, which always seems to work against me. Case in point: I thought I’d extend an olive branch. I went into Nolensville, found some feminine products, bagged them up in one of those cellophane gift bags, and presented what I thought was a nice present to Julie. I was hoping she would melt at the kind gesture and maybe it would go from there.

Boy was I wrong. Julie took one look into the bag, called me a sexist after contemptuously rolling her eyes and walked back inside without a backward glance.

I was at a loss. I had no idea how to proceed, and the not knowing pissed me off. I sat in my truck, not quite ready to drive away, but I couldn’t bring myself to walk into the house and convince her to talk to me. While I was sitting there fuming, Terry appeared out of the barn and walked up.

“What’s going on, bro?” he asked. “You moving back home?”

I gripped the steering wheel in frustration and shook my head. “Ride with me,” I finally said. Terry eyed me, but got in without asking why. I drove the short distance to the barn.

“Hang on,” I said, “I’m going to grab some stuff.”

Terry followed me in the barn and watched in silence as I stuffed a knapsack full of ammo and MREs. When I put the ghillie suit on, he couldn’t stand it any longer.

“What the hell are you about to get into?” he finally asked.

“I’ve got to get away from here for a few days. Drive me down to Mack Hatcher Parkway and drop me off. I’m going to do some hunting.”

Terry stared at me a few seconds. “You’re crazy, dude.”

Much to his credit, he didn’t try to argue with me. He got in the driver’s seat and started the truck. I had him drop me off at the location where we first trapped Big Bastard and told him to come looking for me if I wasn’t back in a week.

I spent the first day in a sniper position with a wide kill zone of the entire intersection, lying in an uncomfortable prone position, waiting for my nemesis to make an appearance. He was a no-show. Even so, I still had a productive day.

They would appear randomly. Sometimes they would be alone, sometimes in small groups between two and ten. I’d pick them off with single shots to the head at three hundred yards. I had no idea where they thought they were going. They were of various ages, genders, racial makeup, but oddly, there were no children among them.

I didn’t want to blow my cover, so I didn’t take the time to inspect them or set them on fire. Instead, I’d kill a couple, low crawl to a fresh spot, and then wait for the next group to appear.

As I lay there, all I could think about was Julie. Her words really hurt. Maybe it was merely a phase our relationship was going through, I had no idea. The only thing I knew for certain was I felt as though she had betrayed me, and that feeling was very painful.

The warm morning sun did a number on me and I dozed off at one point. It was only for about ten minutes, I think, but when I came to, I saw something which made my skin crawl.

There were about a dozen of them, and they were low crawling through the tall grass, maneuvering their way toward the sniper position I had previously occupied. One of them crawled by within a few feet of me. The only thing that saved me was the camouflage my ghillie suit afforded.

I sat motionlessly, controlling my breathing until the thing had crawled past, and watched as they slowly but steadily crawled along. They converged on my previous spot about ten minutes later, about fifty yards from where I was currently lying. When they reached the spot, one of them struggled to his feet and looked around. I peered at him through my scope. The long crawl had torn the front of his shirt open, exposing his torso, which was also scraped and torn. Black ooze seeped out, but he was oblivious to any pain. He made some type of guttural grunting noise and a couple of them managed to get to their feet.

It shocked me. The bastards were now able to communicate with each other! It was at a primal level, sure, but a year ago these things were completely mindless. It partially explained how they could set up an ambush. When I got back home, I was going to carefully review my notes and maybe even talk it over with the psychologists.

They stood there looking around, ignoring their comrades who were not able to get to their feet. I aimed between the eyes of the apparent leader and took him out first. The others looked at him when he fell to the ground. Now they were without direction and stood there like morons. I made quick work of all of them.

On day two, I spent the entire day slinking about and started working my way toward I-65. The only action I had were two lone zombies hung up in a fence. I dispatched them with my machete.

I saw no other zombies that day, which made me smugly think it reflected the good work we’d been doing of eradicating them, but there was also a little tickling in the back of my mind telling me it was a sign of something more ominous. I pondered this feeling the rest of the day, but no answers came to me.

I slept that night on the top of an abandoned tractor trailer. On the third morning, I awoke to a squirrel less than a foot away from me, noisily eating on an acorn. My ghillie suit was covered in dirt and enhanced the camouflaged effect. When I sat up, I must have looked like an apparition. The little rodent emitted a loud shriek as it scurried off the trailer.

As I enjoyed some beef jerky for breakfast, I finally admitted to myself how foolish I was acting. I was doing this more for the escape from everyone and finding Big Bastard was only an excuse. I was unnecessarily putting my life at risk. There were at least one or two people who still cared about me. Besides, there was work to do back at the farm. It was time to get my act together and go home.

Unfortunately, it was going to be Fred’s home I was going back to, and it was about seven miles away. I worked my way down to the Interstate and started the long walk back. I’d not explored I-65 in a while and wanted to see if anything had changed.

The Interstate was silent, its lanes filled with immobile vehicles. In spite of my head injury a couple of years ago, my memory was still sharp. I remembered every car and truck. Nothing had changed with only one exception. There was an SUV on the side of the road about a mile from the Concord Road exit that had been burned down to the frame. I thought it was odd. Nobody had mentioned it. I looked it over for maybe a minute and continued on my way.

The condition of the roadway was slowly but steadily deteriorating and I idly wondered how long it was going to take before the roads would be in total ruin. Abandoned cars were grimy and tires were going flat. Every once in a while I happened across skeletal remains and could only speculate about how they ended up here.

When I got close to Concord Road, I saw a portion of the fence alongside the Interstate knocked down. On a whim, I decided to take the cut through and work my way to the back of the school. I don’t really know why, but I wanted to watch them for a while, see what they were up to.

I climbed the embankment, crossed over Lipscomb Road, and headed toward the school, which was about a hundred yards away. I only walked a short distance when I came across a fresh path in the woods. One direction of it led to the school, but I had no idea where the opposite direction led. All I could readily discern were the fresh footprints. Somebody had definitely used it since the last rainstorm.

Curious, I followed it. It emerged from the woods to the back yard of an older house. Small and worn out looking, it had a small detached shed in back. It reminded me of the home my grandmother raised me in. The lone window to the shed had been boarded up, which seemed odd. I was standing there wondering why someone from the school cared enough about this house to visit it, when the door to the shed suddenly opened. I ducked back and crouched down among the trees and bushes.

I watched as Anthony emerged, looked around, and then shut the door, padlocking it behind him. He then began walking toward the path. Something told me not to jump up and say hello. Instead, I remained ghostly still as he walked by. The ghillie suit once again proved effective. He didn’t notice me and walked casually, disappearing down the trail a moment later. I even heard him chuckling to himself.

I waited five minutes and then went to the shed. He was hiding something, and I wanted to see what was inside. Whatever it was, it must have been good to have him in such a mood.

I took the head cover of my suit off and studied the padlock. Since I had none of my lock picking tools with me, I looked around until I found a big rock and smashed the hasp off the old wood. As a precaution, I led with my rifle as I slowly opened the door. As the sunlight illuminated the dark confines, I gasped.

There, cowering in the corner, naked, dirty and emaciated, was a live human. I almost didn’t recognize her.

“Oh, my God,” I uttered, “Jessica?”