DEAD: Darkness Before Dawn (20 page)

There had been an occasional shadow that indicated som
ebody or bodies were moving around in the huge residence. Mel had pulled out her binoculars to get a better look, hoping that she might get a peek at the woman she had all intentions of killing, but Glenn had stopped her.

“The sun might reflect off the glass and give us away,” he warned. She cursed herself for almost doing something so car
eless.

At last, the group of roving guards passed by once more.
Kyle had reached just over six hundred alligators. The second and third time proved to be almost identical.

“They are walking a set path,”
he announced.

“Well I noticed a few things as well,” Glenn whispered, having kept his own observations to himself in order not to cause his brother-in-law to lose his count. “For one…they are more interested in their conversation than in paying any real attention to their surroundings.”

“That probably means that they have been free to do what they want for a long time,” Mel said.

“But if this is somehow tied to Xander, then they must know we are out searching.” Glenn glanced over at the woman with an expression that invited her to continue with her explanation.

“Old habits die hard,” Mel whispered. “Besides, they may not think we would dare try anything in the middle of the day. A night attack is much more likely…except we don’t have any way of pulling one off.”

“I hate to say this,” Glenn braced himself before continuing, “but we don’t really have what it takes to pull off a day attack or a night attack. In case you missed it, they were all carrying guns.”

“Which means that we are going to have to be clever,” Mel replied as if it were a reasonable and rational suggestion.

Glenn glanced over at Kyle and hoped to see some su
pport…or at least a glimmer of common sense. There was simply no way that they would be able to make an attack on a group of armed guards.

“It will be tric
ky, that’s for sure,” Kyle said; more to himself by the way he was staring off into the distance.

“Tricky?” Glenn fought to keep his voice down. “It will be suicide!”

He looked first at Mel, then at Kyle. Neither seemed to be paying him the least bit of attention. Kyle was studying the grounds or perhaps the path the group of sentries walked; it was impossible to tell. Mel was on her back staring off into space, but it was clear from her expression that her mind was going at a million miles an hour.

For the first time since this entire nightmare began, Glenn considered the unthinkable. His first priority was Cynthia…pure and simple. He loved his brother- and sister-in-law dearly. He loved Xander almost like he was his own.
But when it was all stripped bare, it was Cynthia that mattered; she came first.

What these two were considering was going to get them killed. If he died, his beloved wife would be alone. It was not an option. He hated that his mind was making this series of dec
isions so quickly, but he had to do what he thought was right.

Kyle spoke and broke the spiral that Glenn’s mind had sent him on. He was already feeling the sourness of shame churning in his belly.

“If I wait until the next time they pass, I can get a piece of line tied off to that water spout on the side of the house. If we wait until they are right on it and I pull, we trip some if not all. From there, we rush them. Mel, you could set up in that little corner under that big window. If we hit them from both sides…I think we will have a much better chance.”

Glenn felt the words slam into a mental dam. There was just no way that he could do this. He could not…no, he
would
not jeopardize himself on a mission doomed to fail. He owed it to Cynthia. Every version of this scenario ended in failure as he played it out in his mind.

“Guys…” he felt the lump in his throat triple in size.

“Go,” Kyle said. He turned to face the man. Glenn expected anything from anger to confusion. What he saw was genuine understanding.

“Yes, Glenn,” Mel echoed. “You go back to Cynthia. Keep her safe…and hopefully we will see you soon.”

***

Chad stood and stretched his aching back. He’d been bent over for so long that he doubted he would ever stand straight again. Setting down his weapon, he placed his hands right at the small of his back and leaned until he was practically able to see what was behind them. Of course the answer to that question was simple…more zombies.

He peeled off his gloves and shook his fingers out to try and ease the cramps that were building levels of pain that rivaled what he felt in his back. He noticed a couple of blisters that had formed and eventually popped. That was quite a feat considering how calloused they were from all the manual labor this past year.

A breeze kicked up sending a cold chill through his body. The stench of the bodies down below rode on that breeze and made him gag just a little. No matter how long you were e
xposed to it, the smell of the undead was just not something that a person ever got used to. Even Ronni stirred a little in her sleep.

Chad had actually woke her at one point just to see if she might be in a coma. Her eyes had flickered
, and in a voice that was barely above a whisper, he heard one word.

“Daddy?”

That had been enough to shake him out of his morose emotional state. He would not give up. He had to stuff the shame of where his mind had wandered up until that moment into a dark hole and pray that he buried it deep enough so it never returned. He had gone so far as to hold his knife to his daughter’s temple. His logic had been that anything was preferable to being eaten alive. He would end her and then himself. However, thinking it was one thing; actually committing the deed was another thing entirely.

Looking out across the growing number of undead, Chad had determined that he would resume killing them. He would shift his position every so often to keep the bodies from piling up all in one spot. When the time came that the first one could gain any sort of purchase on their tiny island of stone, he would make another appraisal of the remaining crowd and adjust his plan accordingly.

He had stabbed the faces of men and women for longer than he believed his body capable. The one thing that he noticed—although to be honest, it was a fleeting thought that clung to the back of his mind and hardly made its presence known—he had not seen any children; at least none under the age of ten or twelve by his reckoning.

It was during this break as he scanned the crowd and tried to get some idea of how many remained that he thought he did see a flash of what might have been some zombie children, but they were gone almost as soon as he thought he saw them
, and so it vanished from his mind.

He was well into his second session of killing as the sun b
egan to hide behind the mountains in the distance. He had become so automatic with his actions that he did not notice how his body had begun to slide forward just a little every so often after stabbing or yanking his weapon free.

What had once been a large man had worked its way to the front of the crowd. It raised its hands in an impotent attempt to grab Chad. Just as he had done to countless prior to this one, Chad raised his arms and then thrust down with a solid stab. However, this man was abnormally tall
, and the way that Chad had almost gone into a trance as he killed worked against him.

The point of the weapon came down, catching the zombie
behemoth just below the nose. It went into the mouth and then the throat. The blade lodged in a spot just inside the collar bone and actually got caught in between a couple of ribs. Chances are, he could not have repeated that shot again if he took it a hundred times.

The zombie jerked back and shifted itself to try and get a better angle on grasping the source of heat just above its head. That movement pulled Chad forward. On instinct, he gripped his weapon tighter to prevent himself from losing
it. A split second later, his mind screamed for him to let the hilt of the machete go, otherwise he would be pulled down into a mob of waiting undead. No amount of heavy welder’s leathers, gloves, and a thick jacket would save him.

There was a war inside his mind that, while rather complex with one side reminding him that he would not only be without a weapon to kill off the zombies, he would also not be able to “take care” of him and Ronni if the situa
tion proved absolutely hopeless; and the other side letting him know that it was all moot the instant he was pulled from his perch and landed in that swirling sea of clutching hands and snapping teeth.

Chad let go and threw himself back, barely keeping from plummeting to certain death. When he did, he tripped over the prone body of his daughter. With an awkward and graceless
pin wheeling of his arms, Chad stumbled backwards three steps…but only had two step’s worth of level surface at his disposal.

Landing on several bodies, Chad was fascinated at how his decent stopped so
abruptly. He had expected to hit the ground and vanish under a sea of filth and decay. He was making his silent prayer of thanks that he had not hit the ground and had the wind knocked out of him which would have made him as helpless as his unconscious daughter with the disadvantage of being very aware while he was torn apart and feasted upon.

Chad was actually able to turn to his side where he came face-to-face with a set of snapping jaws that missed his nose by a centimeter at the most.
Shoving away, he had a moment of regret when he slipped from his perch atop the zombie mob and landed on the ground with a thud.

Adrenaline came in a rush that, combined with the ove
rwhelming stench of the undead, almost made him wretch. He knew that he was about to be torn apart, but he had to at least try to escape. Lowering his head, Chad charged forward, knocking over the first few zombies.

A cold, dead hand slapped against his face, but he batted it aside. With no weapon, all he could do was push and shove as he fought desperately to reach the open ground that was only a few yards away.

Recalling his time years ago on the football field, Chad lowered his shoulder and delivered a solid blow to a few more of the undead. Suddenly, he was out in the open!

Spinning he saw the closest zombie about five feet away. Backing up, he was stunned now that he got a look at where he had been just seconds before. The seething mass
of grasping hands and clacking teeth was like an anthill that had been kicked…only much slower.

Unable to help himself, Chad laughed as relief flooded his body. More heads turned his way. He was starting to get the a
ttention of the remains of the herd.

“Well then come and get some!” Chad hollered.

Still unable to believe that he had managed to escape that mess without a scratch, he continued to check himself as he backed away. He waited until they were almost on top of him before retreating once more. The entire time, he continued to call out taunts, jeers, and insults. He knew that zombies had no idea what he was saying, but it felt good to get it out of his system…and it helped his cause in regards to drawing them further from his daughter.

He reached the edge of the clearing and his next step would take him into the trees. He needed to be sure that the zombies followed him. Since he was starting to feel a bit silly with all of the cursing and trash talk, he changed over to something else.

Chad began to sing. At the top of his lungs, and a surprisingly sweet voice, the lyrics to
Don’t Stop Believin’
drifted on the afternoon breeze. Like a necromantic Pied Piper, Chad wove through the trees with close to a hundred zombies now following along, adding their own off key chorus to his melody.

When the tiny figure stepped out of the brush, Chad’s voice cracked. When six more zombie children emerged, the words died in his throat.

***

“Well, well…Corporal Jody Rafe,” the man said with that easy drawl that others used to mimic in his absence.

The funniest was when Danny would give it a go. A kid from Boston with an accent so thick you would swear he was faking trying to sound like an Old West-style Texan.

“I don’t have a rank anymore. The unit was overrun. It is just Jody now.” He paused for a moment, and then added, “But it was actually sergeant at the end.”

“They named you? I would have thought for sure it would have been that sociopath Monterro,” Sergeant Pitts said with an amused laugh. “He and Gould were always meeting late at night. I just figured he would be the one chosen.”

“Actually, we both were.” Jody left it at that. He was not g
oing to offer up any more information than he felt necessary.

“So, looks like you got yourself a little settlement,” Pitts said when it was clear that Jody was finished talking.

“It’s not really mine. Just a bunch of civvies trying to survive. Stopped there on my way north and decided to stay.”

“Your civvies in the habit of raiding other settlements?” Pitts became very solemn now, and his steel blue eyes bored into Jody
, making him feel every bit the corporal he used to be.