“It’s not going to work like that. You’re going to start walking now, walking west on this road, and we’re going to watch you until we can’t see you anymore, or until we get tired of following you. Understand?”
We’re going to watch you? That is what he said.
“Chase?” It was Dave.
There was no need for a pissing match. I had no idea how many “we” equaled, but I knew my “we” was just the four of us, and one of my four was fourteen years old. I gave some vigorous head nods, knowing full well they could see us. I’d wager some rifles held us in crosshairs. That wasn’t a farfetched assumption. “Fine. You want us to just keep walking, we’ll just keep walking. Appreciate the Pennsylvania hospitality. I’ll be sure to tell friends and family to stop by if they’re ever in your back-ass, redneck part of the woods.”
“Daddy!” Charlene hushed me. She was right. There was no need to tempt this group of strangers. We knew nothing about them. Getting to walk was better than getting killed.
“Sorry,” I said, whispering. “I’ll take point. Stay close.”
I led them. We took several steps away from the plane. The progress was slow. I wasn’t about to start running. Part of me hoped to catch sight of them, or of at least one person watching us. I wasn’t going to do anything about it if I saw them, but I just wanted to see them. I didn’t like the bully-tactics, however, I did understand them. What was becoming par for the course was protect your own. The guy talking to me could be some guy just like me, with a girlfriend and kids and some friends, and he didn’t know us, didn’t trust us. He didn’t have a reason to trust us. I think given the same set of circumstances--some plane falls out of the sky during a zombie apocalypse, and a small band of heavily armed people emerge--I’d send them walking, too. I know I would.
“How far we going to walk?” Dave said.
“Until we’re sure they’re not following us,” I said.
“And then what?”
“We find a place to hole up for the night. And in the morning, we keep walking,” I said.
“Somewhere with food and water,” Charlene said.
“Ideally,” I said.
That was when the screaming started; screaming and shots fired.
Chapter Twelve
“They’re in trouble,” Allison said. It was a needless statement. We all knew it. Maybe because we kept walking, she felt like it needed to be said.
“We’re not stopping.” I looked back, toward the sound of gunshots, toward the sound of screaming. The moon was out. I still could not see a thing beyond a few yards. Not even shadows. It was just darkness from where we had come. “The things must have come out of the woods. Was more than just those people back there.”
“We’re not going to help them?” Allison said. She spoke in a whisper. I heard the tug in her words. She wanted us to stop.
“They weren’t going to help us,” Charlene said. “They kicked us out, made us leave.”
They weren’t going to help us.
She was right, of course. We just wanted somewhere safe to rest. Food. Something to drink. They weren’t going to help us. “Wait,” I said.
“What?” Dave said.
I had to think about the future. There was no guarantee one way or the other about anything, except I knew if we were to survive as a civilization, as fucking humans, even if they weren’t going to help us… Did we want to be like that? Did we…did I want my daughter to be like them, pushing people away, not afraid to help, but unwilling to do so?
She’d be safer, yes, but she’d be alone. I wasn’t always going to be here; wasn’t always going to be around. It was parenting. My job wasn’t done. She was tough. She’d proved as much. She could handle weapons, and heartache and adaption. Where was the compassion and empathy going to come from, if not from me?
God, my thoughts made me nauseated. Mushy, and fucking flowery, but I was right. I knew I was. I knew we needed to do this. We had to make a difference. “We’re going back.”
“What?” Charlene said.
“What if that was us. What if we were the ones back there fighting off those things. Wouldn’t we want, wouldn’t we pray for help?”
“We might,” Charlene said. “But we wouldn’t expect it from a group of people we’d just chased off, that we’d just threatened.”
“Exactly. That’s why we’re doing it, going back.”
Allison pursed her lips and nodded.
“Dave?” I said.
“I’m with you. Have been since the beginning. If I wasn’t, I’d just tell you to go fuck yourself.”
I laughed. “I know that you would.”
We weren’t going to be heroes about it, though. I told everyone, as always, to stay close. We went in packed tight and staying in the center of the road. Each of us had weapons drawn. Dave and Allison had their side arms out, Charlene and I had our swords.
We’d walked further than I’d thought. I was just starting to make out the shape of the airplane in the road. I saw the white flash of rifles being fired off toward the right, toward the high school, and pointed. We didn’t want to get caught in crossfire, or accidentally mistaken for zombies. That really hadn’t been something I’d thought of, not until now, anyway.
And then I saw them. Just beyond the plane, on the grass by the front of the school. The band that had forced us away was huddled together, not unlike us. They were taking shots down the road, east.
“We’re here to help,” I said, loudly. I wanted them to know they had actual people behind them, and that we were not sneaking up on them.
A man spun around, rifle aimed at us. “Who’s here to help?”
“Gene!” It was a woman.
Gene turned back to face the zombies and fired.
“They’re getting closer,” a man said. “There might be too many of them!”
“There are,” a different woman said.
Dave ran forward, knelt beside the group and fired off six shots. I had no idea how he’d improved his aim in days, but he had. Four of the six shots were head shots, and those hit, fell and stayed down.
Allison joined them, firing round after round.
I looked at Charlene. I knew she knew what I was thinking. The guns were great, especially for hitting targets further away. All the ammo being spent had to force people to realize that once it was gone, it was gone. You might carry extra bullets or magazines, but how long would they last? A few extra days? Weeks? And you might find more, but the question didn’t change. How long until your guns were useless? The answer was simple, if vague. Eventually.
A zombie got close, on the right, and Charlene walked toward it. She held her sword in both hands, blade pointed at the moonlit sky. She resembled a ballplayer in the batter’s box. I almost yelled for her to stop, to let me handle it, but was startled when Dave shouted my name.
Two creatures were close to me, so close, so silent that Dave couldn’t get off a shot. The tip of my blade had been pointing at the grass. I brought sword up and swung right to left in a single fluid motion. Passing through an arm and ribs and the other arm did little to detract from the impact of the swing. I felt the impact in my hands. The sharpness of the blade and the power behind the swing cut the first and closest in two. The top half of the body slid off from the lower, it made a thwash sound as it hit cold grass. The arm stumps raised and reached, and its head still had the sense to gnash teeth as if it were moments from a meal, instead of seconds from me driving the blade through its temple with a fisted plunge.
I heard a gunshot and thought I heard a single bullet whiz by my head. Allison’s target had been the second zombie. Like Dave, she’d improved. The female monster collapsed, thick black blood oozing from an entry wound above the decaying left eyeball.