The Undead World (Book 5): The Apocalypse Renegades (10 page)

“How do you know any of this? You’ve been stuck in here for days.”

“Your dad told me this morning. And I believe him. He was acting like it was Christmas for goodness sake. You have to stop Jillybean no matter what. She’s leading the others into a trap.”

“I don’t think I can,” Sadie said, feeling the pain in her chest deepen. “My dad found the radio days ago, and I haven’t been able to find another to replace it. All I have is this.” She held up the baby monitor. “It’s pretty cheap. Neil picked it up ages ago.”

Grey took it and squinted at the writing on the back. “This could work,” he said, “precisely because it is so cheap. It doesn’t have a secure setting; some of these have a frequency hopping setting that keeps them from being received by just anyone.”

Sadie gave a half shrug, not quite understanding. “So this one can be heard by anyone? How is that good?”

“It can only be heard by someone listening on the same frequency this is set at. I can only hope Neil has picked up a scanner. What’s the range on this by the way?”

“A thousand feet,” Sadie answered. “That’s what it said on the box.”

Grey looked stunned. “That won’t even reach across the river!” He ran a hand through his hair and walked to the back of the cage where he hung his head. “Don’t bother with it. They won’t be able to hear you. They’d have to be right outside the fence for it to work, and I told them to go to Fort Campbell. It’s miles away across the river.”

She was just about to ask a follow-up question when Randy began groaning on the ground next to her. She considered kicking him again, but couldn’t bring herself to do it, knowing that his revenge would be all the worse. Quickly she asked, “So what do we do?”

Now it was Grey’s turn to shrug. “Pray,” was his simple answer. “You can try broadcasting with the baby monitor, but don’t expect much...”

“You bitch,” Randy growled, interrupting Grey. Ponderously, like a bear waking from hibernation, he slowly got to his feet. There was an evil glint to his eyes that paralyzed Sadie with fright. It looked like he was going to tear her head off. With a snarl he launched himself at her; too late she leapt back as he swung one of his heavy fists at her face. Somehow it missed, breezing within an inch of her pert little nose.

“Run!” Grey yelled. He had Randy by the back of the pants, holding him to the cage where the man was twisting and cursing.

Sadie ran. She sped for the locked door at the end of the room and began tapping on it impatiently. When one of the guards opened it, she blasted past him. “Sorry!” she yelled over her shoulder. In seconds she was outside and racing back to the River King’s lair, strangely hoping to find protection in her father’s care.

When she came dashing into her father’s office, breathing in great gasps and red in the cheeks, he only smiled his usual rakish smile. “What sort of trouble have you been up to?” he asked.

“The usual,” she replied, trying to sound nonchalant. “Do you mind if I hang out in here with you? It’s never too early to learn the family biz, you know.”

Now his eyes narrowed. “What did you do? And where on earth is Randy?” She started to shrug her way into a lie but then he chuckled. “You know about Jillybean, don’t you? And the new bridge.”

“New bridge?” Sadie asked.

“Don’t play dumb, Sadie. I knew Grey would tell you it and about Jillybean and I knew you would overreact.”

Sadie realized she had been played by her father. “And now you have an excuse to, what? Take Eve from me?” she demanded.

“Perhaps just temporarily,” the River King said. “Depending on if you behave. We’ll start with an overnight visit with Paula and Georgio. And, of course, you will have to be confined to your room until Jillybean and her friends are re-captured. I know you’ve been stuck there a lot lately, but it’s for your own good. Now, let’s get you back there and get Eve’s stuff packed up.”

He smiled at her because he had won. He had a new bridge of some sort; Jillybean was walking into a trap. Grey was making him money, and at the same time, killing off his opponents, and now he was selling Eve to the highest bidder.

He could smile because Sadie had lost everything.

All around them in the dark, the moans were a constant wail; it was enough to shrivel Neil’s soul down to the size of a gnat’s ass. His hands were numb and his wrists, where the rope cinched them together, burned while his shoulders, pinned back as they were, ached with every breath. Even so, he barely felt a thing. His death was far too imminent for him to worry over an abrasion or two. They were practically surrounded by zombies and their captors were flying off through the corn, their trucks flattening everything in their path.

“This was your plan?” Deanna asked, incredulously. She turned a slow circle, staring at the thousands of undead that were virtually surrounding them. A slim lane, where the trucks had sped off through the corn, was the only hole in their ranks.

“Yeah,” he answered, seeing the lane and judging the slim odds of getting through it alive.

“Well, it was a stupid plan.”

“Maybe… Come on!” He took off in a wobbly run. Unable to piston with his arms, his body swayed from side to side as he ran for the fast-collapsing lane. With her longer legs and younger muscles, Deanna zipped past him, leaving Neil to feel the claws of the nearer zombies tear at his clothes and his flesh. A diseased hand dug three furrows across his cheek.

“Mother!” he cried, leaping over a zombie that was pulling itself along, using only its left hand; the rest of its limbs having been broken as it had been run over by three consecutive trucks. In front of them were many zombies in a similar state; it made Neil feel as though he was running an obstacle course; the world’s most deadly obstacle course, where a single stumble would mean his death by a thousand teeth.

He was starting to think Deanna was right about the stupidity of his plan, and then the corn gave way to a slight rise that ran up to the blacktop that ran north to south. Deanna was there looking scared out of her wits, dancing from foot to foot as if the roadway was burning her feet through her shoes.

“Which way?” she asked. It didn’t seem to matter. Down both directions of the road were a slew of zombies looking like stumbling shadows in the moonlight.

“This way,” Neil said, crossing the road and jogging down the hill on the other side. In front of them were more rows of corn. They stretched further than either of them could see. There were zombies here as well.

The pair were thirty yards into the field when they heard a low moaning coming from in front of them. Deanna had been ahead, again out-racing Neil, but, at the sound, she turned and collided with him with jarring force. They both went down, Neil landed awkwardly, taking the brunt of the fall on his bound hands. There was a jolt, like fire that shot up his right shoulder.

“Oh, jeez!” he hissed.

Deanna, who didn’t notice his pain, was rolling to her knees. “Which way, Neil?” He couldn’t answer. He was exhausted by all the running they had done and now his shoulder was in complete agony. He literally couldn’t speak. Deanna stood over him, puzzled. “Get up!” she pleaded.

She tried to nudge him up with her foot but succeeded only in nearly over-balancing him and sending him sprawling. Forcing the pain out of his mind, he got to his feet just as the zombies started falling down the hill behind them and more were becoming visible in front through the corn.

“This way,” Neil said, heading to his left, southward. They ran through the corn, both fatiguing quickly; their breath came loudly now, while behind, the sound of the onrushing zombies grew.

Neil was just considering simply throwing himself down on the ground and playing dead when Deanna whispered, “Look out, there’s a stream.” His mind pictured something greater than the reality of what he found—in front of him was a black stripe that ran through the corn in a straight line. Though it held water, it wasn’t a stream. It was some sort of irrigation canal that either ran water to or from the Mississippi. Either way he knew there had to be some sort of culvert or pipe to let the water pass under the road.

“Left… Left,” he gasped to Deanna after they had splashed through the knee-deep water. A second later there was a splash behind them as the first zombies hit the irrigation canal; the little ditch was a much greater barrier to them, giving the two humans a breathing spell.

Neil took the lead, hurrying along the ditch back toward the road. Thankfully it wasn’t far because he was about done in. The corn stopped at a neat edge thirty feet from the hill and the ditch ran out into the open. “Remember…act…like…a zombie,” he wheezed to Deanna.

It was dark, he was covered in mud, sweat, and who knew what, and with his arms tied behind his back he didn’t look much like a human, especially since he was staggering from exhaustion and no longer running. He glanced back; Deanna had adopted a zombie persona—she wasn’t very good. Her back was too stiff and her legs too supple, too human. Yet it was good enough to fool the slow-minded zombies who were moving in a curling wave over the hill just down the road from them.

The culvert, a three-foot high hole in the earth, was as black as anything Neil had ever seen. “Get in,” he said. He wasn’t just being gallant. Deanna had to go in first because he feared his shoulder wouldn’t allow his body to contort itself well enough to get into the pipe without making a lot of noise… he was really worried he would scream; the fire in his shoulder was that bad.

Deanna squatted easily and then duck-walked into the pipe. In seconds, she was enveloped in the impenetrable blackness. She had made escaping into the pipe look easy. Despite being three inches shorter than her, Neil had a much harder time of it. His feet constantly caught the many ridges in the pipe and when they did, he either fell forward on his knees, which, in spite of the water really smarted, or he fell to the side. If he fell to his right side, it took all his will to keep from screaming in pain.

After ten agonizing minutes, Neil saw the end of the tunnel as a faint blue/black glow. Deanna squatted just inside. “There’s still a lot of them on this side,” she hissed. “I can hear them in the corn.”

Neil tried to peer through the darkness to see if any were very close, however he couldn’t make out anything besides the gloomy silhouettes of corn stalks. Closer, he spied something useful. The edge of the pipe was jagged and rusty. He pointed it out to Deanna who cautiously slid out into the open, and then with Neil’s guidance backed to the edge of the pipe and began a slow motion up and down movement against the edge. It seemed to take forever for the first strand to part from the rest and by the time the rope finally dropped away, Deanna was covered in sweat.

“Your turn,” she said, massaging her wrists.

Neil knew it would hurt, but he had no idea how much. He almost threw up after only a few seconds. “I can’t…my shoulder, it’s dislocated, I think.”

She tried to inspect his shoulder in the dark however her touch had him whimpering in the most unmanly fashion. “Don’t, please. It hurts too much.”

“I’m so sorry. Hey…hey wait here. I’ll be right back,” she said, lightly touching his good arm. She scared Neil half to death by scampering off looking too much like a human being. He was glad to see that when she returned, five minutes later, she did so moaning and schlepping, looking far more zombie-like than ever before.

“Oh my God, they’re all over the place,” she said, her voice trembling. She held up a shard of glass for him to see. “Turn around.”

Cutting the rope seemed to take forever and with each downward stroke it felt like the glass wasn’t cutting into the rope but digging into the socket of his shoulder. When the rope finally dropped from his wrists and his arm swung forward, the pain and the relief was so equally overwhelming that he dropped to his knees.

“Are you all right?” Deanna asked, hovering around him. “Can you get up? The zombies are coming.”

Did I scream?
Neil wondered. He tried to stand with his head swimming from the pain. It was a struggle even with Deanna’s help. Holding on to her sleeve like a child clutching his mother on the first day of school, he dared to look down at his right arm. It hung uselessly at his side and perhaps worse than the pain was that it looked wrong. “Tell me…is it longer than the other one?” he asked.

Deanna put her hand to her mouth as she stared at his two arms. “It is…what’s that mean?”

It meant he was very, very screwed. “I don’t know. I can’t seem to move it, though.”

“Then what are we going to do?” she asked. “I mean, how do we get back across the river with you like this?”

Neil, who couldn’t stop staring down at his arm, engrossed by the fact it no longer like it was his own flesh, as though some demon had slapped on a stranger’s arm to his otherwise normal body, answered, “We don’t, not yet. We still have a job to do.”

Even if it kills me
, Neil thought.

With Big Bill dead and Neil in such constant pain that he could barely move, the job that “we” still had to do fell squarely on Deanna’s shoulders.

First thing was surviving the night. It wasn’t just the zombies they had to fear. The river’s frontage road was alive with cars and trucks and each sprouted spotlights that beamed everywhere. Word had gone up and down the western bank that the renegades had been spotted. It made any sort of walking about extremely dangerous.

To travel quicker, she left Neil behind in the irrigation pipe. Her goal was to find the bodies of their original captors. They had weapons and food and clean water and most important, they had at least two trucks.

Deanna, her eyes scanning back and forth, crept through the corn. She was constantly forgetting to stay in zombie form. She tended to skitter, mouse-like, moving in short bursts, stopping every few seconds to listen and peer all about. When zombies did come by, she’d stop in place before moving in slow motion and groaning sadly, resembling a zombie in the process of freezing in the arctic. Thankfully the dark and the wild look of her kept them at bay until she made it to the lone farm.

She went to Jeb’s corpse first; it was a struggle not to grab his assault rifle and point it out where all the zombies were like a normal person would. Reluctantly, she slung it on her back and then dug through Jeb’s pockets, finding two full clips and in the process covering her hands in blood. She was about to get up and search for the others when she paused over Bill’s body. Was it right to just leave him like that, unburied and unmourned? It didn’t seem right.

“God, please bless his soul,” she whispered, earnestly. That was all she had time for. She heard a truck on the frontage road slowing as it neared the farm. She shrank back, again praying, this time that it would go on and leave her in peace. The prayer went unanswered as the truck turned down the drive, crunching gravel under its tires. Deanna’s heart leapt in her throat when the truck turned directly to the barn instead of heading to the house as she had hoped it would.

Again forgetting to act like a zombie, she ran to the corn and hid just a few rows in. Slowly, she pulled the gun off her back as the trucks stopped a few feet away from Jeb’s body.

“They were right here,” a man said, hopping out of the truck and beaming a flashlight around. “Yeah, there’s that stupid fuck you shot…” He faltered, looking confused. “Hey, he had a gun, remember?” The beam from his flashlight swept the ground, and the bodies, and the tractor and then, finally out into the corn. Deanna drew in a sharp breath as the light swept right over her. It made crazy shadows among the stalks as it passed. The light zipped in a circle and then started to creep back in her direction.

“Shit,” she cursed in a whisper, smooshing her face into the soft dirt. She could almost feel the weight of the light on her as though it were a physical thing. In her mind she was sure it was casting the angles of her partially hidden body into something humanlike. Fearing that even then one of the men was drawing a bead on her, she looked up just as the flashlight swept across her once more. The light transfixed her and she stared into it like a deer in the road.

“Hey!” the man with the flashlight hissed. “That’s the girl who was with the little twerp. She’s right there in the corn.”

Deanna’s skin flared with goose bumps and, although adrenaline spiked her heart rate, she couldn’t force herself to move. She simply laid there staring into the light knowing that at any moment they would come for her and rope her up again and she’d be sold in some sleazy market.

From the truck a gun flashed and the sound of its firing went right to her heart. Her mouth fell open uselessly as she made a strange sound that was a cross between a frightened grunt and some foreign sounding word: “Uhn.” The gun fired again and again and with each bang, she only blinked, wondering how close the bullets were flying…she didn’t hear whipping by. Realization slowly came over her that she wasn’t actually being shot at. The men in the truck were firing at the zombies which were suddenly everywhere, swarming like bees.

Now, Deanna reacted. She pushed herself to her knees and pulled the assault rifle from her back. Her hands were like wood and the gun like an alien object. She was still fumbling with the safety mechanism when the man who had been carrying the flashlight leapt into the truck and then its engine was roaring as it plowed over the undead. It was heading right for her!

Under her thumb, something clicked. The safety! Deanna brought the gun up and started ripping rounds into the windshield of the truck. With the headlights blinding her, she couldn’t tell what, if anything she was hitting. However, the effect of her firing was immediate: the truck turned hard to the left, almost spilling the men in the bed out among the zombies. In seconds, the truck was in full retreat, bucking and bouncing through the horde. The men in back were shooting all over the place but if any of the bullets were directed at Deanna they were missing high as she threw herself into the dirt once again.

She kept her nose pressed there until the truck raced up the incline to the roadway. It turned south and tore away at top speed. Deanna lay among the old cobs and dried husks, trembling from the terror of the last few moments. It was many minutes before she felt strong enough to pick herself up and when she did she was happy to see the zombies were flocking southward after the truck.

Even more reluctantly than earlier she stowed the rifle on her back, she had suddenly become attached to it in a way she never had with any weapon she’d ever used before. It felt good in her hands and she wanted to keep her finger on the trigger, however she knew that it was in camouflage and patience where her safety lay. There were simply too many zombies to confront, too many for the rifle to be of any use against.

With it on her back, she walked hunched over with all her senses keyed up. Around the back of the barn she found two corpses. One of the bodies no longer had a face left to it; bullets fired from close range had torn it off. The other body was easily recognizable as one of the men who’d been with Jeb. Their weapons were cast on the ground as forgotten as their lives had been. Deanna bent quickly to grab them and as she did a zombie came shuffling around the corner of the barn. Instinctively she picked up the closest gun, an M4, and fired without aiming.

Just as her finger pulled the trigger, she realized that she recognized the zombie! It was Neil. And then the trigger was all the way back and her heart stopped in her chest. The gun made a light “click” noise and once more she began to tremble. She had almost killed Neil. “Shit,” Deanna whispered, when she was able to breathe once again.

Using his good, left hand, Neil touched his chest where the bullet would’ve ripped into him, massaging the spot as if he’d had a minor heart attack. He tried to smile but it squirreled into a grimace. “I’m starting to feel like a cat and I’m pretty sure I’m out of lives.”

Deanna could only say, “Sorry.” Her stomach was quivering and her hand shook over what she had almost done.

“Don’t worry about it,” Neil said, trying to sound cool. “It’s a risk I take, right? So, what happened? I heard all that shooting and I was sure I was coming back here to find you like a piece of Swiss cheese.” Now his smile was more like his old one, however Deanna was still sufficiently freaked that the words “Swiss cheese” didn’t register as a joke.

“I… I…there were zombies all over the place. They saved me.” The very thought had her shaking her head in disbelief. “Yeah, they saved me, can you believe that? They saved me from those guys that had left us here to die. I think they came back for the guns and bullets.” She held up the gun in her hands to show him what she meant. “But one of them saw me and then, I don’t know. There was all this shooting.”

“And that brought the zombies,” Neil said, finishing her thought. He gazed southward for a moment and added, “If I had a guess, I’d say they’ll be back, and pretty soon, too. Right now all they’re doing is drawing the zombies away and then…”

“Yeah,” she said, understanding. “They’ll be back.” Quickly, she started frisking the bodies and found a total of three clips and one set of keys. There had been two trucks parked up at the house. Since their tires weren’t sagging and they weren’t covered in the ageless dust that marked the truly abandoned vehicles left over from the old world, it was clear these were the trucks that Jeb and his friends had used.

“Come on,” she said, holding up the keys for him to see. She started to rush off toward the house but Neil stopped her.

“Deanna, please. You’re scaring the hell out of me.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s the way you walk, it’s too…normal,” Neil explained. “You don’t look anything like a zombie. You look like, you know, a person.”

She looked down at herself and all she saw was muck and grime; in her eyes she didn’t see a person at all, certainly not a person she recognized, but that didn’t mean the zombies saw her in the same way. “Thanks. I didn’t know what I look like. How’s this?” She went into the same routine she’d been using since Jillybean had taught her how to be a “monster.”

“That’s much better,” Neil said, the relief obvious in his voice.

Though she now looked and acted like a zombie, Neil didn’t. He walked with his left hand holding his right arm in place—not at all zombie-like. And his face wasn’t slack and vacant as Jillybean had demonstrated. He went about with a grimace and a look that made it seem as though he was very close to tears. She decided against saying anything about his appearance however. The poor man was clearly in agony.

She walked in front, thinking she’d draw away any zombies that came in their direction. There were only a few, and perhaps because of the dark, none paid them the least attention and that was in spite of the fact that they hurried at a speed that was just on the cusp of being un-zombie like. They had to risk speed and it paid off because just as soon as they got to the trucks, the sound of an engine rumbled in the air.

“Oh, shit,” Deanna said, throwing off any zombie pretense and running for the passenger door. She opened it for Neil and then tried not to scream at him to hurry as he gingerly lifted himself into the truck. She helped him as best as she could but was afraid to do too much and hurt him.

Finally, he was inside and she shut his door just as a set of headlights breached a far hill and shone down on the farm. She froze in place, knowing that movement drew the eyes. Neil tapped on the window and asked, “What are you waiting for?”

“They’ll see me.”

Neil shook his head. “No they won’t. They’ll go to the barn first.” That was likely true, but she didn’t care. The only thing in question was how quickly they would see her. “Trust me,” Neil said.

After his plan to choose death among a horde of zombies, she wasn’t exactly keen to place much trust in the man, and yet, she was at a loss as to what to do next. They couldn’t just drive away; they’d be seen; and they couldn’t stay put because it wouldn’t be above a few minutes before the men would come and check out the trucks parked in front of the house.

“Start the truck,” he said when she had slid in.

“But…”

“No buts. Start it now before they get too close,” Neil demanded. “But whatever you do don’t turn on the lights.” The truck was diesel and thus when the engine rumbled into life both she and Neil cringed at the noise. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “They can’t hear us.”

How could they not
, she wondered. The engine was ridiculously noisy. Still, the other trucks didn’t break or turn in their direction. They trundled on to the barn where their red tail lights flashed into the night.

“Okay, Deanna,” Neil said in a calm voice. “Don’t touch the gas or the brake. Just put it in gear and we’ll coast out of here, nice and easy.” She put the truck in drive and let it drift forward. Neil became agitated at this. “Not the driveway! Into the corn,” he said. “Try to run in the ruts.”

It wasn’t easy, especially as a number of slow moving zombies were standing like planted trees haphazardly here and there in her path. When they spotted the truck, they came plodding forward and she was forced to run them over at six miles per hour. Their groans and the crunching of their bones were bad enough, but every once in a while Deanna would hear a popping sound, followed by the awful squish noise of guts shooting out. When this happened, Neil and Deanna would cringe and glance at each other, uneasily.

Their slow getaway was horrible but it worked. They ghosted—if one could call 5000 pounds of metal driven by a V-8 diesel engine, ghosting—through the corn, until the field ran out. Neil pointed to the left. “Go up to the road and when you get close go to the left. Make sure it’s obvious.”

“We aren’t going to the left I take it?” She certainly didn’t want to go to the left because the River King’s men were in that direction, and yet to the right was Cape Girardeau and all sorts of trouble. It was a far way off, however the idea of getting even a little closer to the River King seemed crazy. Putting her fears on hold, she did as Neil suggested, turning hard to the left, digging fat ruts in the dirt of the incline and leaving muddy tracks on the blacktop. After a few minutes she braked. Far down the road, two miles or more was the farmhouse and the barn. The truck was still there with its lights on but now the lights were moving. They were searching.

“Okay, let’s turn around,” Neil said. “Just don’t show your taillights to them.” She turned around in a slow circle and drifted back north, gradually putting miles between her and the River King’s men. She drove with half her attention centered on the rearview mirror, afraid she’d see headlights suddenly blazing after them.