900 Miles (Book 2): 900 Minutes Page 4

  My attention was drawn to a young man who was pulling carrots from the dark soil in the garden and passing them off to a few children that were running them back and forth to our food storage to be canned. We had found a way to work together. A way to make the best of the hand we’d all been dealt. All of them were worth protecting. Every single one of us.

  “Better be careful,”Kyle said with a stern voice.

  “Careful about what?”

  Pausing for a moment, but still leaning back and staring at the sky, he said,“You don’t want to get a beard-tan.”

  Listening to him chuckle under his breath, I couldn’t help but let a long smile grow across my face. He was clearly trying to calm my nerves. At the moment, I really needed the laugh.

  “What are you two jerk-offs laughing about?”Mr. Rodgers asked as he walked up behind us. He’d been outside checking on his“little pets”as he liked to call them. Otherwise known as the creatures in the Dead Shed.

  Neither of us responded, not wanting to let him in on the joke.

  “Fine, don’t give a shit anyway,”he finally sniffed before pulling a lever on his weapon and inspecting the inside of the barrel.

  Rodgers had traveled on his own across the landscape for months before he wound up at Avalon. He’d seen many atrocities out there and had stories that we could only half believe most of the time. He often spoke about his daring escapes, from climbing through a series of trees to move above a group of Zs to hiding in a gutter while in the inner city. He’d done it all…or at least said he had.

  Anyway we looked at it, he was a hard bastard, having survived on his own for so long, and we respected him for it.

  We’d met up with him on a scavenging run. When we found him, he was half- drunk, sitting on the roof of a supermarket. When we first saw him, he was making a game out of throwing empty beer bottles at the creatures below. I heard him calling out the number seventeen when we found him, seventeen being the number of Zs he’d nailed in the head.

  With all his problems, we still felt damn lucky to have him with us. He, Kyle, and I had been making these runs together for months, and he was clearly added value to the team. Like a thick callus on a set of worn hands, the crazy bastard grew on us over time, forming a solid layer of protection that we grew to trust. Looking up from his gun, he asked,“Is it just the three of us?”

  “Nope, we’re waiting on one more,”Kyle replied, still not turning his face from the sun.

  “Who is it?”

  Before Kyle could reply, we heard a cough and turned around to see Avalon’s leader, Jarvis, standing behind us. Dressed in the same black body armor that we were wearing—from the original fallen soldiers of Avalon—he held a metal spear in one hand and had an AR-15 semi-automatic machine gun in a sling around his back.

  “Here he is,”Kyle finally said as he pulled his face down from the sun’s perch.

  Jarvis reached over and shook hands with Kyle. They had become close in the past months, relying on each other to keep the people going. His background continued to remain somewhat of a mystery to all of us. When asked what he did before the end of the world, he would always respond with the same coy answer:“Remind me to tell you later.”

  I had often wondered if he ever let Kyle in on his little secret. If he had, Kyle never shared it with me.

  When Jarvis first started heading out beyond the wall with us, I questioned his actions. After all, he was our leader. I questioned it in the same way one would question why Captain Kirk would leave his ship to head out on the most dangerous missions when he could easily have sent someone in a red shirt.

  Looking back at it, what I’ve finally realized is that our best leaders don’t sit in an ivory tower putting the weight of the world on their people. Our best leaders lead through example, and Jarvis would be the greatest leader Avalon would ever see.

  It made perfect sense for the other three to be the ones to head out into the world, scavenging and doing recon. Most of them had some sort of badass military training. All I’d ever done was simply survive. However, I have to say that it suited me. After all, prior to the end of the world, all I was good at was talking on the phone and giving presentations in meetings. Being a superstar in the corporate world doesn’t exactly prepare one for greatness in the world of the dead. It was the blue-collar worker’s skills that reigned supreme. I couldn’t build shit, and I couldn’t cook shit…hell, in this new world, all I was really good for was cleaning shit—and that wasn’t the gig I wanted.

  “Listen boys, I need you to know something. We spotted a Jeep across the field yesterday. There were three men in it,”Jarvis said as he pointed out toward the field beyond the concrete walls.

  It wasn’t the first-time people had found us. There were survivors out there. However, more often than not, they weren’t stopping by to ask for a cup of sugar.

  Looking back at it, humans must have been the first population in the history of any planet where the terms“survival of the fittest”and“natural selection”did not apply. We took care of the weak, designing ways to support those who couldn’t support themselves. The fat got fatter, the lazy got lazier, and the politicians got plenty of votes to ensure the cycle continued.

  In most ecosystems, a population will self-correct. They’ll run out of resources, or some sort of a disease will kick in. It was Mother Nature’s little way of keeping things under control.

  Man was notably amazing at coming up with ways to dodge these checks and balances. Sure, early on we had our Black Plagues. However, once we got smart enough, we invented medicine and cheap ways to manufacture and deliver food, which kept our seemingly perfect little society on life support for far longer than it ever should have lasted.

  In the end, and despite Man’s best efforts, there simply wasn’t anything stopping Mother Nature from doing what she does best; skimming the fat off of the top of the population line. She always seems to have the final say over how many of any species the world will sustain…including Man.

  One thing was for absolute sure. She must have been pretty pissed, because that line got knocked almost all the way down to the bottom. Who knows, maybe from the Earth’s perspective, one could argue that Man was the plague infecting the world, and she simply gave herself a nice healthy shot of penicillin.

  Either way, in the wake of the apocalypse, she reduced our species to just two types of people. The first were the scared and the feeble who were either lucky enough or smart enough to hunker down and hide. People who fought every day to hold onto the morals and the ways of a society pushed to the brink of extinction.

  The second were the psychos and the marauders. People who would do anything it took to make it, no matter what the cost to those around them. They survived by killing and taking, long abandoning any semblance to what made us human in the first place.

  The inhabitants of Avalon fell squarely into that first category, and we were in a constant state of alert from all that lived…or didn’t, outside our walls. The undeniable truth was that the term“survival of the fittest" was suddenly back in vogue.

  Jarvis continued,“This group has me nervous, boys. It’s been a while since we saw someone just driving around outside our gates. A little too fearless, like they were testing us to see what we’d do.”

  “How close did they come?”Kyle asked.

  “They stayed on the far side of the field, but they just drove around while we watched them from the tower. Didn’t even try to hide, which is what’s got us nervous,”Jarvis said, turning toward Kyle.

  “Do you think it’s anybody we know?”I asked with a slight pitch in my voice.

  They all knew what I meant.

  Jarvis paused and looked over toward Rodgers, then back toward Kyle and I.

  “We don’t know if it’s Gordon or not. He wasn’t in the Jeep, but that doesn’t rule him out.”

  Gordon. The bastard who ran Avalon before the revolt. He’d escaped during the mayhem seven months earlier, taking a small army with him. D
isappearing behind a shroud of broken lives and a twisted landscape, he hadn’t attacked nor tried to return since, but that made us more anxious than if he had. All we could do was assume that the over-bloated prick was either dead, had moved onto another region…or was patiently waiting for his chance to return.

  Nobody knew how he escaped. Last time I had seen him, he was being carried out of the Arena by a mob that looked like they were going to tear him apart…

  I wish they had.

  Chapter 6

  It wasn’t the creatures you could see that worried me…it was the ones that you couldn’t.

  Reaching down, Kyle yanked his gear up over his shoulder with a grunt. Following his lead, we grabbed our weapons and followed him toward the front wall. We set out across the Yard with the pace of men on a mission. It was time to get a better sense of what we’d be going up against.

  Eyeing the top of the wall, I could see a number of armed men and women standing guard as we approached. On the alert, they were posted to help take down any of the rotting dead if things got out of hand.

  They almost always did.

  Taking two planks at a time, I followed Kyle up a steep wooden ladder, which led to the open top of the concrete wall facing the field in front of Avalon. Even before I reached the top, I could hear them. Nearly lost in the background like the steady roar of waves on the beach, it was always there—the slow, methodical moaning of the dead.

  We’d been making runs every couple of weeks for at least three months. The people, who built Project Greek Island under the Greenbriar Hotel, or what we now called Avalon, had thought of everything. Food, water, air compressors, energy…you name it. However, in the end, it would only last us so long, and we knew we would need to scavenge to ensure our long-term survival. As a result, we had a system for moving in and out.

  “When we get back, we’ll need to clear the Yard,”Kyle said as he reached the top.

  Catching up, I peered over the side of the wall, looking out at the dead piling over each other.

  “Whoa. No shit! We really should have cleared this last week,”I replied, lowering my hands to the concrete.

  As I surveyed the Yard full of mangled heads bobbing up and down, one of the creatures caught my eye. He was wearing a grey t-shirt that prominently said:

  “Warning: If Zombies Chase Us, I’m Tripping You.”

  I remember thinking how crazy we all were before the world went to shit. I’d seen people posting things on Twitter like“Can’t Wait for the Zombie Apocalypse”or“Wish I was a Zombie.”

  Guess most of them were probably granted that wish…

  We had hundreds of movies, blogs, radio dramas, and books. We all loved them so much. That is, until the day the first zombie actually stood up and took a chunk out of someone’s neck. It’s ironic if you think about the fact that the“zombie”was kinda famous in a way. Not any particular zombie of course. Just the idea of a zombie. Children would walk around with their arms out, begging for“braaaiiins.”Hell, we got to a point where the number of zombies walking the streets on Halloween night would be hanging in there toe-to-toe with the likes of Dracula, the Avengers and the flippin’Transformers…

  It’s funny how that works. How something gets so big so fast. Before mass media, it used to take a lot more to rally people behind a cause. When America was first built, our“famous people”were the ones who made the world better. Inventors, scientists, patriots, warriors…these were whom Americans looked to as leaders…they were the ones we all looked up to. They had last names like Franklin, Washington, and Jefferson. We read about these heroes in history books, learning about them as the people who changed the world. Flash forward a few hundred years…and suddenly, the fastest way to become famous was to post a dimly lit sex tape on the Web.

  We’d fallen pretty far from grace.

  “We’ll use the siren to get out of here,”Kyle said as he turned back toward the ladder.

  “It’s been doing the trick so far,”I said, nodding in agreement.

  Before turning to follow him down the ladder, I took one last fleeting look down to the grass waving up at us from the field. It had gotten tall…too tall. There was no telling how many crawlers were out there, lurking around, hidden from sight. It wasn’t the creatures you could see that worried me … it was the ones that you couldn’t. They’d be the tricky bastards that’d get you.

  Our four-person team jumped into the yellow Hummer while another four-man team pulled themselves up into a pickup that was outfitted with a large caliber machine gun bolted down in the truck bed. The weapon was great for protection against the living, but not nearly as useful against the dead. Even the most skilled gunner would find it too hard to aim with any real precision, making it nearly impossible to hit the brain…on purpose anyway.

  The pickup held three men in the cabin. They were all Hispanic and roughly five foot four in height. I think they were brothers, but couldn’t understand a damn thing they said. Each of them carried a blade that rested in a black sheath across their chest. I’d seen them take out more creatures with those knives than any other man with a full-on automatic machine gun.

  The Three Amigos were accompanied by a guy who had the best mullet that I’d ever seen in my life. It blew in the wind across his shoulders while the trucker hat atop his head kept the bangs out of his eyes. He seemed to have a permanent mark on the right side of his lower lip, where he’d spent the majority of his life with a fist full of tobacco hidden. He manned the turret in the bed of the pickup and was clearly the right man for the job, having been a gunner in one of those military-style, armor-platted Hummers when he was based in Iraq. I had heard Kyle refer to him as a Whiskey Tango one time. When I asked him about that, he told me it was a military code for W.T. or white trash.

  Hanging his arm out the passenger side door, Kyle gave the signal to a scout on the cement wall, who in turn stepped carefully over to a small gray box bolted to the cement. Lifting the cover, he revealed a red button, which he slid his hand over before looking over his shoulder back at Kyle.

  As I gripped the steering wheel with a set of clammy hands, my eyes fell directly on the metal-reinforced school bus serving as the gate to Avalon. Rising in my seat as I forced a deep breath of air into my tightening chest, my thoughts were on Tyler. This would all be for him, and I knew I had to be strong for both of us. Everything counted on it.

  A loud siren, perched on a tree in the far left side of the field outside the wall, shattered the silence as the scout pushed on the button. The Zs loved noise. This was a trick we’d used many times before. The siren would attract the dead away from our walls and over to the far side of the field. Once the Yard was clear, or as clear as we could get it, we’d roll out the front gate.

  A movement in the guard tower up above caught my attention as a man holding a long sniper rifle leaned in, getting ready to play God. He’d be watching from above, deciding what lived and what died.

  Looking in the rearview mirror, I could make out the Three Amigos. The one in the driver’s seat lifted his arm, holding two fingers out, and shook it back and forth toward the gate, signaling that they were ready.

  A silent hush fell within the walls of Avalon as the driver of the bus, an older man with a long white ponytail, threw a“thumbs up”toward us. Known to me only as Mr. Gate, I’d never had a proper conversation with the man. Although I’d certainly seen that same familiar thumb thrown up toward me countless times before. The thing about his thumb was that it was the only finger he had left on that hand. The rest had been torn off in some sort of accident. It was as if he enjoyed the look on our faces as he flashed the damn thing at us. Maybe an old man’s sick sense of humor. Maybe he was just using what he had available to him. Either way, it still turned my stomach.

  The bus started up, the engine roaring a hair louder than any of us was comfortable with, as he slid it into gear and pulled forward, exposing the outside of the compound. With my white knuckles gripping the wheel, I hesitantly lift
ed my foot off the brake and pulled forward through the narrow exit. Even above the sound of the siren, I could hear my own heartbeat as our companions pulled out behind us and Mr. Gate quickly reversed the bus, covering our only real entrance back into Avalon.

  We were officially cut off.

  With my eyes drawn toward the horde of the dead, who were clawing the bark off the tree that the siren was screaming from, I stepped on the accelerator, pulling through the long waving grass in the field ahead. Even over the rumble of our engine, I could hear the crackling of the brittle blades of grass, dry from the lack of rain over the past weeks, as they were crushed by the tires below. I found myself trying to see through the green brush, watching for any creatures still lurking within its perfect camouflage.

  A broken-down, blown-to-hell car rested lifelessly at the edge of the field. Lifting my eyes from the grass, I honed in on it as we approached. Less than a month earlier, we were forced to fill it full of bullet holes when a small band of, let’s just say“unfriendly people”decided to mount an attack on Avalon when we wouldn’t let them into our gates. It was increasingly difficult to know who was friend and who was foe out there.

  We’d reached the point where, for the safety of everybody inside, we always had to assume we were coming across the latter.

  The idea of humans fighting humans was bizarre to me. There weren't enough of us left to be killing each other. The real enemy didn’t have a heartbeat. Luckily, I’d been able to hold onto the vision that Jarvis had set out for us. Preserve life, avoid conflict when possible. I’m not saying I’ve never shot toward someone. I’m just saying that the only thing I’ve ever killed at that point was a shit load of zombies…and a bird that ran into my windshield while driving to work one day a few years earlier.