The Coalition: Part II The Lord Of The Living (COALITON OF THE LIVING Book 2) (2 page)

Before, Ron would have heard those screams of mindless rage and gone in the opposite direction
, but two weeks with Jean and Oliver had done something to him. The mere presence of the two had awakened compassion in his heart and although he still felt it was a weakness, he couldn’t resist the urge to help. Not anymore.

Instead of going the way he’d intended, down streets he’d planned to traverse, he found himself drawn toward the screams and wailing. There was no way the dead scum had not also heard those same screams, and so he knew that he’d have to fight when he got to where he was being drawn. It was as if he was caught tight in a net and couldn’t get loose. Is that what humanity did to you?

Cutter was a good four blocks from his home when he heard the screams. They’d started soon after he’d felt the chatter of automatic gunfire. He had to assume that someone had been accidentally shot, or bullets hadn’t stopped the advance of the dead, or two parties of the living were at one another’s throats. They were out there, he knew: people who would prey on other humans. There didn’t seem to be many of them, but just as in the days before the collapse, such people walked the Earth. He had to assume the worst, and so he moved carefully and more furtively as he got closer to that cry of human anguish.

At the corner of Rankin Avenue and Bass
Parkway, he stopped and crouched behind an old, blue postal box. It had been pried open for some time and weeds were growing out of it. That was okay for him, because it offered him some extra cover and broke up the lines of his body against the granite backdrop of the looted bank tower behind him. Across the street from his location there was the unmistakable plodding of zombies. True to what he’d feared, the screams had pulled them out of the recesses of overhangs and doorways and into the streets. They were headed for a bloody feast and soon their numbers would swell.

Better he should have blocked out the screams and gone where he had intended. He needed lead to make new bullets, and he had spotted a barrel packed with balancing weights in a garage less than a mile from his place. All he would have had to do was carefully make his way there, load about fifteen pounds of the soft metal into his pack, and go back to safety and to Jean and Oliver. He squatted there at the corner, beside the ruined mailbox and argued with himself, the smart Ron trying to convince the stupid Ron to break off this silly adventure and do what he’d left to do.

And suddenly a new scream tore into the summer wind. It was a woman. There was not just terror in her voice, but a bloody, pathetic sorrow.

“You dumbass,” he said to himself as he stood and bolted from one hiding place to another, heading toward the yelling voice, ready to help.

At least there had been no more gunshots. Along the way, darting from one waterlogged auto with doors standing permanently wide, to abandoned shipping crates that had been shoved off of flatbeds, to piles of trash dumped by garbage trucks driven by men anxious to save the weight to drive a few miles more, Cutter made his way closer and closer.  Within less than a minute, he could see people. There were four people in the center of the street. A year and a half before, they would have been in the middle of an intersection in full light. But now, with Mother Nature having run rampant for almost two years, the streets were filled with tall grass and small shrubs. Who could have figured she’d reclaim her territory from us so quickly?

Now
, to make his task more difficult, the shamblers were building up in groups and pods, as they aimed their white eyes toward the wailing and lifted dead feet to shuffle mindlessly on. Within a few minutes, there would be hundreds of the hateful goddamned things converging on this spot. Ron would have to make sure that they were not there when those few minutes were done.

Knowing that he would be better served to make his presence known to the people he could see, he stood out from concealment and called out to them.

“Hello! My name is Ron! I’m Ron Cutter and I’m coming to help you!” He wanted to remind them not to shoot, but he’d already drawn more than enough attention to himself. A dead thing that he hadn’t seen lifted itself out of a patch of sumac sprouting from beneath a faded Escalade and reached for him. Ron unfettered his trusty ball peen hammer and smashed its ugly cranium, splashing his calves with the pale and runny contents of its skull.

He ran. It was still going to be a long time, if ever, before he could break into a full on dash. His knee still ached and he might never regain full mobility in the joint. But he could put out a burst of speed if he really had to. And now, he decided, was a moment for speed. If he ran toward the obviously panicked group, they couldn’t draw a bead on him and accidentally shoot him
, and the shuffling dead that were congregating at the intersection wouldn’t be able to latch their wet and clumsy paws on his body.

As he got to them, he recognized everyone present. It was the
Lunds, the family he had intended to ask to take in Oliver. But only Mrs. Lund was there screaming. Her husband was dead on the cracked and root-buckled pavement, his body blasted almost as if he had been hugging some kind of explosive when it had gone off. He was cut virtually in half and everything in him that might have been an organ had been converted to a red soup that steamed in the daylight beaming down through the concrete towers.
What had happened?

Ron looked up. This was it. This was the place. This was where Old Fifty-two lived. This was where the crazed gunman could look down from twenty floors and blow a person to little specks of crimson with those tremendous guns of his.

The next shot whizzed past his shoulders, and later Ron would be horrified to note the geometric crease the tumbling shell made on his leather jacket as it came within a lizard’s whisker of his back. The fist-size wad of metal smacked into the asphalt beneath the tangle of weeds and sent a little shockwave through the feet and shins of everyone present. In that instant, without thinking much about what he was doing, Ron spread his arms wide and grasped Mrs. Lund and her two children and slammed all three of them to the ground.

For the first time since he’d gone out for his run to find metal, the woman ceased to scream. He didn’t know if it was from the contact with his body, or the blow of being smashed to the
ground, or if she’d just come to her senses. Whatever the cause, she was suddenly very quiet. For just a second or two, Ron lay there, covering the three people beneath him. He could feel them breathing, feel the beat of their hearts, the pulse of their blood. They were alive and alone.

And Ron would save them.

Goddamn, he would save them.

Already he could hear the soft thrash of undead legs moving through the weeds and leftover trash of society’s retreat. The zombies who had shoes were crunching small stones and sand under what remained of those bits of clothing. It never ended. Why didn’t they just all fall over and stay dead? Why was it such a struggle to make them lie down and turn to dust?

Ron went to his feet, his right hand already drawing the .45 free of its hip holster. His eyes were full of salty sweat and even tears, so he almost didn’t see in time.

“Put that away, son.” The voice was low and cool and it did the job.

“Colonel Dale. Where did you come from?” A silly question, perhaps, but how had the soldier appeared so suddenly, as if by magic. Ron looked at the man who was dressed now in what appeared to be a military uniform other than an American one. It looked similar to what he’d often seen on soldiers in the States, but altered in some ways. And immediately, Cutter realized that Dale was wearing one of his actual British uniforms, medals and all.

“I was on my routine, son.” The man turned and looked back toward the building where the .52 caliber killer was safely sheltered. “We’d best be moving. I can already count a good one hundred of the dead folk zeroing in on us. In a few minutes it’ll be a thousand, and then two thousand…you know the drill.”

Instead of saying anything, Ron only nodded, turning his attention immediately to what remained of the Lund family. The trio just stood, saying nothing, doing little else but breathing. Cutter figured that shock was setting in, if not already in full blossom. His eyes went to Mrs. Lund and he found her staring at the ground and followed her gaze to see that she was looking at nothing at all. “Mrs. Lund,” he whispered. “We have to get out of here. Can you go? Can you run?”

She finally peeled her eyes from whatever scene she was viewing and met his gaze. And she nodded. “I can run,” she said. A crazy kind of smile turned up the corners of her mouth; Ron felt a chill go through him despite the heat. Somewhere nearby there were big, fat, blue bottle flies buzzing around, looking for a place to lay their eggs. Not in the zombies. They never laid eggs in zombies. That wasn’t, apparently, fit food for maggots.

“We can take them to a safe place,” Colonel Dale said. Already the officer had the children by the hand and was leading them away. “It’s not far away,” he continued, moving swiftly but not running. Not yet. At their backs the dead moaned to see more food fleeing the scene. But there was one body lying still, surrounded by a still-warm pool of blood and guts. They would eat that, most certainly.

Peering over his shoulder as he and Mrs. Lund followed in Dale’s wake, Ron saw the first of the rising tide of
shamblers reach the shattered halves of Dan Lund’s body. Those undead fell to their knees, to all fours, crouching and crawling, crabbing forward to reach out with half-ruined hands to grab that one thing they always desired: human flesh. For the next minute or so, he kept looking back, stealing glances, watching in disgusted fascination as the monsters pulled at their prize, tearing it into fist-sized gobbets, into hanks and streamers of flaccid guts, of sweating meat and unyielding tendons. They fought and snarled; pushed and pulled, snapped at one another until they had enough to retreat with a handful or their jaws filled with red pudding, there to find a peaceful spot to gnaw and swallow.

They turned a corner and dove quickly into a shadowed corridor of an alleyway. In a moment
, they seemed to be alone; the scene in the center of that intersection was only a dimly heard buzz in the background.

Ron increased the pace and Mrs. Lund stayed with him, her grip sure but her eyes remaining downcast. They pulled up to a single step behind Dale and the two kids. “Where are you taking us?” he asked. There, within inches of the Colonel, Ron could not only see the man in detail for the first time, but could smell him. He was completely clean. He’d not only been able to shower or bathe at leisure at some recent time, but his uniform was spotless and pressed; and there was the unmistakable scent of fabric softener emanating from the fellow. Ron couldn’t remember the last time he’d encountered that once-familiar and very pleasant odor.

“We’ve been getting on with things,” Dale said. “You folk who want to stand apart are welcome to do so, but the rest of us are intent on pulling things together. We’ve been making some changes around this city, and we’re going to do our best to set it as right as we possibly can.” The admonition in the soldier’s voice was apparent, but Ron had been immune to it for so long that he could only acknowledge it without feeling any guilt whatsoever.

“Okay,” Ron replied.
“I Roger you on that, Colonel. But where the heck are we going with this family? You say it’s not far. But how far away, exactly? And what is this place, precisely?”

Instead of pointing, which would have required Dale to release his hold on one or the other of the
children, he merely nodded his head, indicating a building to their left and less than a block away. Once upon a time it had been a department store, but had been closed up for most of a year before the rising of the dead. It was eight floors high and took up a good quarter of the block on which it was constructed. Ron wasn’t sure, but it probably dated back to the 1930s or so.

Looking at the place, Ron initially thought that it was still just a set of gutted walls, but as they approached it he saw subtle signs that there was something going on there. Formerly bare windows had been patched and curtains placed over them. Trash and weeds had been efficiently removed from doorways and driveways, and barricades of wood and concrete had been placed strategically around the building.
Some of the barricades had well-built guardhouses cobbled together from diamond plate and welded together. There were gun-slits cut into places and none of them seemed to be manned at the moment, but it was obvious to Ron that they were intended for that.

“How many here?” Ron asked.

“This? This is the hospital,” Colonel Dale informed him.

“Hospital?”
He wanted to stop and look at the building before they got any closer. He was afraid to stop however, for fear of upsetting Mrs. Lund, who seemed at this point content to just walk and stare at the ground and not think of the father of her children lying in bloody bits on the street less than a mile away.

“Best we can do, for now,” Dale answered, never pausing. Far ahead of them, more than three blocks north, Ron could see zombies moving into the street, probably drawn out of their hiding spots by the
deliberate movement of the little group of tempting humans. As he looked at them, their heads exploded into neat little flowers of bone and brains. Somewhere there were snipers watching the streets, but either they were out of earshot or were using guns equipped with some kind of silencer. A few more zombies moved up to replace them and were put down in a carbon copy of the first response, and after that, nothing moved.