900 Miles (Book 2): 900 Minutes Page 7

  For a moment, the deafening cry of the firefight rattled through the air. There were shouts and screams, and then the turret gun went silent, putting an end to the fight which was over as quickly as it had started.

  I could already smell the discharged remnants of burnt gunpowder filling the air as Kyle and I darted across the roof toward the side facing the parking lot. Sliding into place at the edge, just out of sight, I watched as a few of the pebbles were pushed over the side. Holding my breath and digging my head into my arms, I found myself waiting for whatever or whoever was below to hear the noise.

  Opening my eyes and slowly letting the deep breath out, I realized that if anybody had heard the rocks clatter across the ground, they hadn’t thought to look up. Lifting my head, I followed Kyle's gaze down to the parking lot. A group of twenty or so men, all holding large firearms, was surrounding Mr. Mullet and the Three Amigos. Our friends were still alive. However, I felt my teeth grind together as I realized that Mr. Mullet had what appeared to be a bullet wound through the side of his stomach.

  Blood dripped down his leg, pooling up into a sticky mess below his knees which were firmly planted on the pavement. He said something to the guy standing above him. I couldn’t quite make it out, but I guess the guy didn’t wholeheartedly agree with Mr. Mullet. Lifting a black machine-gun above his head, the guy swung it down, slamming the butt of his gun into Mr. Mullet’s chest, causing blood to burst from his mouth as he pulled himself back up in an attempt at defiance.

  The Three Amigos, lined up on their knees next to him, started to jump up at the hostile act, but soon settled down as twenty of their new best friends all lifted their weapons in unison and aimed directly at them.

  There were a number of vehicles circled around our Hummer and the pickup. These guys had been waiting for us. I found my mind racing to try to figure out why. That is until that son-of-a-bitch stepped out of his very own Escalade SUV.

  At first, I couldn’t believe it, but there he was. Mind spinning, my eyes went wide as I realized it was Gordon Green standing there dressed in a red turtleneck covered by a black military-style jacket. He wore a matching red beret that covered a closely shaven head. He was confident but darker looking than I remembered. My hand was clutched around my rifle, and for just a moment, I had the urge to take a shot.

  I wish I had…

  Glancing at Kyle, I could see the anger building in his now red face. He shot me a look and mouthed the words“What the fuck”before we both turned our attention back down to the parking lot.

  As Gordon began heading toward our friends, I noticed the cane that accompanied his right hand. Each step came down on the concrete with a subtle click that could be heard even from our perch.

  Everybody was quiet as he stepped around Mr. Mullet to face the four men on their knees. He didn’t say anything at first, as he simply marched in front of them and stopped, lifting his cane up toward Mr. Mullet’s head.

  “One of these things is not like the other,”Gordon shouted out to a roar of laughter from his men.“You’re not looking so good,”he said, making eye contact with Mr. Mullet.

  Mr. Mullet pulled in a big honking swig of blood and spit it out toward Gordon’s cane.

  “That wasn’t such a hot idea, my friend.”Gordon said, without alarm, as he wiped the blood covering the end his cane across Mr. Mullet’s shoulder.

  He then nodded to a hulk of a man standing behind Mr. Mullet, who stomped forward and threw what looked like a reinforced dog catcher collar, attached to a pole, over Mr. Mullet’s head, locking it in place firmly around his neck.

  One of the other Amigos tried to stand up in protest, but took a butt of a gun across his forehead, causing a gash to split open and pour a wash of blood into his eyes.

  I heard the gravel rustling under Kyle, and looked over to see him sliding his gun into his shoulder, pointing it directly toward Gordon.

  A shift in the shadows caught my attention down by the front door. I couldn't completely make out Jarvis and Rodgers lurking in the darkness, but I did manage to see the muzzle of the AR-15 rifle that Jarvis carried peeking out just past the door hinge.

  The hulk of a man pulled Mr. Mullet, who struggled and fought to no avail, and forcefully pushed him face down in his own pool of blood, directly in front of the Three Amigos. Pausing for a moment, making sure Mr. Mullet was done with the struggle, he then looked up at Gordon for his next command. Gordon held out his hand as if to say, hold on a sec, then took a moment and looked up at the sky.

  The sick bastard was enjoying every second.

  Taking a deep breath in and then exhaling, he looked over toward the school.“I’ve been waiting for this moment for a long time, Jarvis!”he screamed out, emphasizing“Jarvis”with what I can only describe as glee.“Come on now, I know you’re in there watching us. Why don’t you come on out? I’d like to have a chat with a dear old friend.”

  Stunned, I noticed my hand shaking only when I heard my wedding ring rattling against the pebbles beneath it.

  “You can tell your two buddies on the roof to come down as well. We’re not going anywhere until they you do. Kyle and John, isn’t it?”

  Dropping my head down and closing my eyes, a new sense of fear finally made it all the way up my spine and entered the back of my skull. I started to hyperventilate before glancing back up at Kyle, only to see him raise his eyebrows while pulling his face into the sight on his gun. For some reason, his confidence had a calming effect on me. Kyle knew death well, and if anybody was going to put an end to this, I knew he would.

  “Oh, I recognize the urge to go ahead and try to take a few shots at us from where you’re standing. I can promise that would be a mistake. I wouldn’t want anything to happen to your dear friends at Avalon prematurely.”Gordon continued with a determined note to his voice.

  From the shadows of the front hallway I heard Jarvis call out,“What do you want, Gordon? What crooked game have you cooked up this time?”

  “It’s a good one, Jarvis, and you’re one of the key players. Please, come on out. Let’s not waste any more time here. Trust me when I say, there reallyis no choice.”

  Nobody moved for what seemed like an eternity. Gordon sat patiently, waiting for Jarvis to make a move.

  That’s when Jarvis emerged from the shadows of the hallway.“What are you planning to do, Gordon?”he spat with anger.“You could have killed us here if you wanted to.”

  “Oh, there’s plenty of time for the details, old friend. What’s important is that you have a rare chance to save many lives by giving me back what you took from me.”

  “You lost it, Gordon. You turned something that could have been good into another one of your twisted games. You turned the people against you. Only this time, you didn’t have the money to bail yourself out.”

  “Ahh, but Jarvis. Don’t you see? It was perfect. We had the perfect hierarchy built. The leaders of the world were at the top. The worker bees were in their rightful place, serving us. It would have been a utopia. Don’t you understand that you could have been a king in my world? Instead, you settled for a king in yours. Trust me, old friend, mine would have been better.”

  In chess, there are kings and pawns. At that moment, I got the feeling that Kyle and I were the pawns on the board. There was some sort of feud between these two that went back much further than our little revolt during the first weeks in Avalon.

  Sometimes pawns are sacrificed. Sometimes they are just enough to change the game.

  The only thing I knew for sure was that my son depended on this lowly pawn.

  Gesturing with his cane toward his captives, Gordon looked over at the front door.“You’re not keeping very good company these days, Jarvis. Is this what we have to face at Avalon?”Sticking his cane under the chin of the Amigo with the gash split in his head, Gordon prodded his face up, forcing him to make eye contact.“Do you know what you’re fighting for, little man? Do you know what you’re going to die for?”

  Lifting his head ba
ck up toward Jarvis, Gordon laughed out loud with a smugness that made me inadvertently grip my rifle.“Good thing we cleared this school of creatures for you. I can promise that it was a real mess in there. You see, Jarvis, I had to make sure we’d get our chance to chat. You should actually be thanking me, old friend.”

  “How would you have known we were heading for this school?”Jarvis finally challenged.

  “Ohh, Jarvis. Do you really think that I wouldn’t have some friends still lingering amongst your ranks? Well, now, it seems that you’ve underestimated me a bit. I would have expected more from you. I know everything you do. Everything.”

  Another long pause as Gordon lowered the cane and began to rhythmically tap it on the ground. I saw him look out toward his men with a smile, and then back over toward the front door. Finally, his gaze landed on Mr. Mullet.“Jarvis, Jarvis, Jarvis. Come on now, I don’t want to have to be more persuasive. I mean, really, you need to be thinking about the fate of your men kneeling here before me.”

  “If you’re gonna kill them, you’re gonna kill them, Gordon. I don’t believe that me coming out there is going to change one thing,”Jarvis yelled out defiantly.

  “Yes, that’s probably true. You know me better than anybody, I suppose. I do miss our chats. Why don’t you just come out now? Let’s discuss this face-to-face. No need to hide in the shadows.”

  “The end of the world must be getting to you, Gordon. You’d have to know we’re not going to just come out and give up.”

  Gordon was smiling once again, but didn’t say a word. I watched him pull the red beret off his head and pat it against his leg. He then slid his forearm across the top of his brow.

  What the hell was the bastard waiting for? Where was the big reveal? Of course, he would know that we wouldn’t be willing to give up.

  There are seconds in each person’s life where they know what’s about to happen before it actually does. Not any sort of a mystical clairvoyance or phony crap like that. It’s really a simple gut instinct. These tiny seconds are never enough time to act, just enough to scare the shit out of you.

  Even from the distance, I saw it in Jarvis’s face a moment before I realized it. Gordon was distracting us. He had planned this whole fucking thing, and we were nothing more than bugs caught in this elaborate spider web.

  Nodding over to a man who was holding a CB, Gordon said two simple but horrifying words,“Move in.”

  The man echoed the phrase into the radio, and before Kyle or I could do anything about it, we had seven armed men rushing out the door to the roof behind us. I heard the crunching of their feet racing along the pebble-filled rooftop before I had time to react.

  Kyle was up on his feet in an instant, but it was too late.

  They had us.

  Chapter 10

  Now, THAT was a contest!

  The still warm blood from Mr. Mullet’s wound soaked into my pant leg, a sure sign that his life was much too quickly dripping onto the concrete below. Kneeling before Gordon, along with Kyle, Jarvis, and Rodgers, I found my mind racing at the thought of what came next.

  Looking around for the backpack that Jarvis had filled with the meds, I found it resting in a pile along with our weapons. It was fairly full. I knew Jarvis wasn’t kidding when he said he’d hit the mother lode.

  Drawing my attention back to the man in front of me, I found Gordon sharing his biggest smile with us. However, he didn’t say a single word at first. Instead, he walked over to the man holding the CB. I could hear a request to signal their ride slip through his lips, calling it back to our location at the school.

  The wind picked up a bit, and from time to time, I would hear some of Gordon’s soldiers get spun-up at the chance to kill another approaching Z. They reveled in every kill. I can’t say I blamed them. After all, I didn’t mind bashing a few Z heads. But not even the exaggerated weapons’fire bouncing off the walls of the school could pull my mind from the myriad of questions plaguing my mind. As we sat in silence, I couldn’t help but wonder why the hell these maniacs were keeping us alive. Why would Gordon have lured us here…and who the hell helped him from the inside?

  “Thirty minutes‘til they’re here? Well now, that gives us time to have a little fun,”I heard Gordon say in a deep, sensationalized voice, loud enough so we could hear it.

  The rhythmic click of the cane got louder as Gordon stepped back over toward his captives. He finally stopped right in front of us, but behind Mr. Mullet, still held face down by that giant hulk of a man. Up close, the Hulk looked as dumb as he was big. His face was near expressionless, with larger than what I would consider human eyebrows, and a slight dumbfounded smirk that seemed to be permanently painted across his face.

  Raising his cane into the air, Gordon finally spoke.“So, gentlemen, we have a little spare time ahead of us while we wait for our ride. This presents us with an interesting opportunity.”

  His men were gathering around us now, grinning ear-to-ear along with Gordon. They followed his every movement, listening to each syllable.

  “I’ve got the perfect idea,”he pronounced. After nodding over toward a few of his men, they circled around our little group and prodded us to our feet. At gunpoint, they marched the lot of us over toward the side of the school where I remembered seeing the playground from the rooftop.

  As we turned the corner, I immediately noticed that the former children's stomping ground held all the normal playthings. A set of swings led up to a pole attached to a large rolling slide set in the middle. Surrounding it were a few benches, now covered in dark red blood that had come from the creatures killing the fat man. Gordon’s team had taken them out as we approached. The playground had a pirate theme, and there was a torn black flag displaying a skull and crossbones. It reminded me of the broken-down playground where we’d found Leonard, or Michael as he first introduced himself to us, in that first week of the apocalypse.

  I have heard the term innocence lost. I’m not sure I can believe in loss without gain. However, what I am absolutely sure about is that what we were getting ready to experience felt a whole hell of a lot more like innocence torn away.

  It wasn’t the slide or the swings that Gordon led us to. It was the prominently oversized monkey bars set in the shape of a large dome sitting just to the right of them. The dome was made up of bars painted red, white, and blue, and it had small chips of rust spread across its cage-like structure. It reminded me of a spider web in the shape of an upside down bowl.

  My heart was beating out of my chest as we approached the structure. Kyle marched next to me. I saw him looking around shrewdly, clearly trying to find a way out of this mess. The Three Amigos were standing next to each other, and the Hulk was dragging Mr. Mullet along across the grass, the life nearly drained from his body.

  “This will be where we’ll have our little competition,”Gordon said as he pointed toward the dome of bars.“Yes, this will be perfect!”he continued, looking back at us as if looking for some sort of approval.

  “OK, here is what I’d like to do. First, I want the three of you to crawl into there,”he said, pointing his cane over toward the Three Amigos.

  The Amigo with the gash went wide-eyed and let out a slur of words in Spanish. I’ll never know exactly what he said, but clearly, it was some serious shit. Not even when Gordon’s crew raised their guns at the Three Amigos’chests did they take a step forward. They clearly had no intention of willingly entering that pseudo cage…until one of Gordon’s men lunged forward and stuck a knife through the arm of one of the Amigos. That seemed to clear things up for them.

  When the Three Amigos crawled under the bars and entered the cage, it was immediately clear just how little space the three of them had in there. They were short but still had to duck down. There was elbowroom for them, but it was tight.

  The Hulk slid the near-lifeless body of Mr. Mullet under the bars and into the dome as well, and then gave the dog-wrangling collar a shake, unhooking it from his neck. Looking back at Gordon for ap
proval, he then pulled one of the knives that had been confiscated from the Amigos from a small bag.

  Gordon nodded as the Hulk took the knife and squeezed it, along with one giant arm, in through the bars. Kyle tried to step forward, letting out a yell in protest just as the Hulk lifted the knife up and drove it down into the center of Mr. Mullet’s back. Mr. Mullet didn’t make a sound. I’m not sure if he was already dead, or just didn’t have the energy left to fight.

  The Hulk, then stood, leaving the knife protruding from Mr. Mullet’s back, puncturing what I imagined was his heart. Towering over Kyle, who had been held back by a few of Gordon’s men, the Hulk’s face remained unchanged as he sidestepped him. I got the sense that he really didn’t have an understanding of what he’d just done.

  The ignorant bliss of a giant.

  Gordon then raised his voice in the most magnificent tone he could pull off while looking at the terrified faces of the Three Amigos.“There are three of you, one knife, and a creature that is getting ready to spring to life.”Pausing for effect… “The last man standing will be set free.”

  Grabbing the bars above them, the Three Amigos swung their heads from side to side, looking at each other. None of them said a word as their eyes landed on the knife. Aside from the rising and lowering of their chests, not one of them moved…

  That is until Mr. Mullet started to twitch wildly on the ground. Just before the Amigo that had been stabbed in the arm dove forward to pull the knife out, I heard him cry out in Spanish. To me, it looked like they were trying to kill the creature, up until the point where I heard a scream as one of the Amigo’s legs took a set of teeth into its flesh.

  Instantly all three of them dove down into the mix, all fighting to kill the creature, twisted together in that upside down bowl of human spaghetti. I cringed as the low grumble of the Amigo that had been bitten turned into a primordial scream. Its blood-red eyes locked on its former brothers.