Battlefield Z (Book 2): Children's Brigade Read online

  BATTLEFIELD Z

  CHILDREN'S BRIGADE

  by

  Chris Lowry

  Copyright 2016 by Lowry Publishing

  Orlando FL

  All Rights Reserved

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  FOREWORD

  This is a story about a man trying to get to Arkansas to save his kids after the Zombie Apocalypse. He makes the Georgia border with a small group of survivors. Brian and Peg, Hannah and her daughter, Hannah, and a mysterious dark haired woman named Anna. The six are all that remain of a group of fifteen who banded together to escape Orlando.

  BATTLEFIELD Z – CHILDREN'S BRIGADE

  Georgia is a big state. When I drove this direction to go visit my children, it was a straight shot up 75 to Atlanta, just six hours or more depending on traffic. From Atlanta, I'd take the bypass around the south side of the city and hook up with Interstate 20 to roll into Alabama and points west. Atlanta was only forty something miles from the Alabama border, so when I travelled to Arkansas the trip seemed shorter when we flipped over into Central Standard Time. The clocks reset to an hour back and it felt like you gained something, even if the trip was nine hundred fifty six miles no matter which way you drove it.

  We stayed west of I-75 as we crossed into Georgia. There was a brown sign on the side of the road in a pine forest that told us one minute we were in Florida and the next second it was Georgia. No change in the landscape, no change in the atmosphere, nothing to let you know it was anything different except for a sign.

  A half mile down the road we found another sign. This one made us stop. It said GO BACK. Written in red that ran down the whiteboard looking for all of the world like bloodstains.

  Brian pulled the car over to the side of the road. We could have stopped in the middle of the two lane highway without much worry because we hadn't seen anyone or anything since our last encounter at the Church. After rescuing Hannah from religious nuts determined to sacrifice her to God, we were attacked by a militia General bent on revenge. He wanted me dead for killing his best man. One of our group, Julie, blew herself and several of his soldiers up with a hand grenade to buy our freedom.

  We stopped just enough to clean up and get some supplies, and a second time to change cars when the first one started to run low on gas. But no one spoke.

  Brian kept the speedometer locked at twenty five, just fast enough to keep us making good time and still be able to stop if something popped up.

  Like a sign on the side of the road telling us to turn back.

  "What do you think?" he glanced over his shoulder to where I sat in the rear passenger seat.

  Anna had been sleeping on my shoulder, with Hannah sprawled against hers, but both stirred when Brian shut off the engine.

  I shrugged, checked the rifle by my side one more time to make sure it was loaded and stepped out of the car.

  The air smelled like rotten meat.

  Not a good omen, I thought. But then most of the places smelled like that now. Towns were full of rotting corpses walking around. I called them Z. Some may refer to them as the walking dead, or zombies, but I was linguistically lazy and just trying to act cool when I came up with Z.

  Z's stink.

  So the odor I was smelling could be coming from the woods, or carried up the road on what might otherwise be a pleasant breeze. It could be dead bodies of people, caught in an ambush, their blood used to make the sign. It could even be in my imagination, the stench of this new world just stuck in my nose and no way to get it out. Not enough water in the world to shower it off, like a skunk spray that clings to you until a long bath in tomato juice cleanses the pores.

  But I had smelled Anna in the car. Fresh soap and water made her smell clean, nice, and stolen deodorant from the medicine cabinet added a powder scent to her as she slept against me.

  I was sure the stench was coming from outside.

  "How's it look?" Brian called through the open window.

  "You can see what I see, right?"

  "Yeah, but you know, your eyes might be more practiced."

  "At what?"

  "Seeing Z."

  "If I see a Z I'm getting back in the car."

  "What about Marauders."

  "Do you see any?"

  He peered through the bug crusty windshield and then craned his neck out of the window to double check the road behind us.

  "I don't see any."

  "Then we're both looking at the same thing."

  "What about an ambush?" Peg called over him.

  Peg was Brian's partner, though I don't know what they were to each other before the Zombie apocalypse. I think they got together at a house where a group was hiding until a kid got sick and died in his sleep. He went Z and killed a couple more and their hiding spot was no more. I ran into them on Hwy 1792 when they were running from a herd of Z.

  I was hiding in between rows of stuck cars from my own herd, and when the two merged I thought we were in trouble.

  But we worked together and stopped them.

  Blew them up actually, though I can't recall exactly whose fault it was blowing up a couple hundred cars to kill a couple of hundred zombies. It really seemed like overkill, even if it was accidental.

  The woods looked safe to me. Or the same, if not safe.

  If someone was hiding there, the camo they were using was effective. I gave a moment's thought to another militia and recalled that Valdosta was near by and home to a military base.

  "I don't see anything," I returned to the car after walking around and watering the ground past the trunk. I really hoped no one shot me while my pants were unzipped. I mean give a guy a little bit of dignity.

  Besides, I had already been shot in the head. Technically it was a deep graze, stitched up now with Frankenstein stitches courtesy of Anna who I learned after got all of her medical training from binge watching Scrubs on Netflix. But a bullet wound along the skull is still being shot in the head no matter how you want to get technical about it, so I was going to wear that particular badge of honor with distinction.

  I climbed back in the car.

  "Well?"

  "Did you see any other roads back there?"

  The last one I recalled was thirty or forty miles ago and it was pointed southwest. If we turned around now we'd lose daylight, lose gas and lose miles, and that thought alone made me anxious. I was trying to get to Arkansas to reach my kids, and going backwards was not in my plan. A sixteen hour drive had already taken five days, mixed with walking, running and fighting with militia and religious groups. I wasn't ready to add turning back to find another route to the list.

  "It's probably safer to go back."

  A Z lumbered out of the woods and began to slip and slide up the side of the road toward the car. A second followed from the tree line and lumbered our direction.

  "I don't think anywhere is safe anymore," said Harriet.

  Brian cranked up the car and dropped it in gear.

  "We're going to have to change rides soon," he said as he pulled back onto the road and sent up a twirling whirlwind of leaves in our wake.

  I nodded as we kept going forward and wondered what exactly we were driving ourselves into.

  CHAPTER TWO

  "Are you sure?" Brian stared at the scuffed toes of his boots. We were standing outside the moat, a literal twelve foot wide creek that circled a Queen Anne style home in the middle of a pasture. The house had
two large sheds between it and what he hoped was a large stocked pond, so it was surrounded by water on all sides. The long winding drive was paved, but crossed over a deep culvert onto the island. As far as forts went, he could do worse.

  The sheds were stocked with food, some from the previous owner, and the rest from a raid we made into the neighboring towns, which set me back three more days. It did give them enough provisions for months, and with the protection of the moat, it was as safe a place as could be found in this new Z infested world.

  Brian of course wanted me to stay.

  "I've got to know," I said and checked my pistol. We had only known each other less than a week, but war makes strange bonds, and strong bonds at that. We had been through a couple of battles together, and that was making the goodbye harder than it had to be.

  If I didn't need to keep going to Arkansas I would have stayed.

  He still had plenty to do.

  "Board up the windows," I told him. "I'd see if I could fix the motor in the shed so in case you get overrun by the front, you have a way to bolt across the pond."

  "Lake."

  We had this debate before, and neither of us had Google to ask about the difference between a pond and a lake. My experience with lakes were the reservoirs built by the Corp of Engineers that stretched for miles and created a couple of hundred miles of shoreline. Brian was from Florida so a lake was any body of water big enough to hold a gator or three and a pond was what held storm runoff. It was a fun little argument over a couple of room temperature beers he found in a cabinet.

  "Lond? Pake?" I ventured and he gave me a grin.

  "Pake," he said. "I like that. That's what we'll call it."

  He held out his hand and we shook.

  "If you see something coming this way, pull the truck across the road on this side of the bridge and blow all four tires," I kept going on the defense.

  "We've got it," he said. "Are you going to try to make it back this way?"

  I studied the blue sky full of puffy clouds strung out like wisps of cotton candy toward the horizon.

  "I don't know."

  "Damn, you could at least lie a little."

  I nodded.

  "Once I get my oldest two I have to go find my third," I explained.

  My youngest daughter by the second wife was missing somewhere on the East Coast. Or Missouri. Her mother and stepfather had packed up and disappeared into a wave of refugees heading toward a camp in South Carolina per the government's instructions. I had no way of knowing if they made it out of Florida or were trapped in Savannah, or in a camp that was still there or didn't exist.

  There was no way to communicate, and no want to get information now. I didn't want to think of it as hopeless, because that was all I really had. Hope.

  Hope to make it. Hope to learn something. Hope to find them. Hope to know what to do once I did.

  I'd ask for rumors from travelers if we ran across any, but so we'd only rescued a group of women accused of being witches, and a trio from a house who died on our escape from Florida. The rest of our encounters had been with bandits. That was the nice word I used for the military turned militia who were robbing and pillaging the countryside, setting up miniature little kingdoms. I didn't often use nice words when referring to them.

  "Ready?" I asked Anna.

  The thin brunette we had rescued from being burned at the stake as a witch had opted to come with me. Harriet had blamed her for her daughter's abduction by religious fanatics and there was some residual resentment brewing I suspected. She was a willowy five six, with pretty brown eyes and a keen mind. To be honest, even though I could move faster I didn't mind the company. I wasn't sure what I would find in Arkansas, but if it was bad news, it might be better for me to have someone around.

  She climbed behind the wheel of a gray car with a full tank of gas we found in town and started it up. I watched Brian, Peg, Harriet and Hannah in the side mirror until we turned the final bend in the driveway and pulled out onto the two lane blacktop headed west.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Anna drove at a steady twenty five miles per hour which felt molasses slow but did a great job at conserving our gas. We cut across the state of Georgia in a zigzag pattern avoiding Quitman and bypassing Albany to the South.

  We stopped for a lunch of canned tuna and peaches and refilled water containers from a fountain that still worked at a city park in a one stoplight town. I checked the gas station there for a printed map, but there wasn't one to be found. We scored a compass that I stuck to the dashboard and a couple of boxes of stale candy bars I shoved into our backpack.

  Anna didn't say anything while driving, and I kept the rifle in my lap and ready. We drove past lumbering Z on the side of the road, and could see them in pastures or cleared areas as we drove by. They would stop what they were doing and look up at the car, shift direction and start lumbering after us.

  We didn't talk about what she did before, or what I did. We didn't speak of the cult I had rescued her from, or what I planned to do once I found my children. She just smirked a little as she drove, as if we were some kind of odd couple on a roadtrip vacation and she knew the secret jokes I was about to tell.

  I was glad for the silence. It had been a week since I'd been shot in the head and the headaches had finally disappeared. Technically I hadn't been so much shot in the head as a bullet that was aimed at my noggin glanced off the bone and grazed my skull. It burrowed a shallow groove in the bone, bled a lot and left me with a Frankenstein looking scar giving me a part in my hairline where hair would never grow. It was still an ugly red pucker wound, but the stars that danced in my vision had gone, and the pain had finally subsided.

  The silence was a welcome respite.

  It got old after four hours. We drove without music, without talking, just the thoughts in our heads and mine kept coming back to Arkansas and South Carolina. I was trying to make plans, A-Z full of what if scenarios and if then outcomes, and my head was starting to hurt from the wheels turning inside of it. I wished I would have kept one of the beers we had round and vowed to grab a sixer as soon as we found another store.

  “How are we on gas?” I asked Anna.

  She flicked a gaze down to the gauge.

  “Half a tank.”

  I glanced at the watch on my wrist. The hour hand was edging toward five o'clock. Back before the Z I would have just kept driving in the dark, and even at twenty five miles an hour it might not be that dangerous to just keep going. But another four or five hours of driving would put us on the side of the road out of gas around midnight and I didn't want to hunt for a new ride in the dark.

  I also didn't want our headlights to be a beacon advertising our presence to every bandit, marauder and Z we passed. I fought down the anxiety that bubbled up on how much time I was losing and reminded myself it had been five weeks since Z Day one, and getting myself killed in the dark wouldn't help anyone.

  “We should look for a place to stay in the next town we come to,” I told her. “Hole up for the night.”

  She didn't say anything which I took to be a yes, and that lifted some of the pounding in my head. I didn't realize how much I wanted her input.

  The next town was only five miles up the road and we stopped next to a Welcome to Cuthbert sign, blue letters painted onto a white backdrop. The population was printed out at 8,706 but someone had scratched through it and painted the number one in precise black strokes.

  “Think he's still here?” Anna asked.

  “Could be a her.”

  “I don't think a woman would fix the population sign,” she said.

  I nodded and gripped the rifle tighter as we heard a moan echo on the wind. I didn't see Z but that didn't mean they weren't there.

  I could see a couple of churches that bracketed the road ahead, and houses on either side closer to us. Further up the road what looked like a small shopping strip made up the downtown area.

  “We can explore that tomorrow,” I told her. “Pick a
house.”

  I watched her finger twitch as she pointed first to one, then the other and her lips moved as she whispered the “eeny meeny tiger toe” song. It reminded me of something that my youngest did and a pang seized my heart and I almost insisted we keep driving. Stopping was a waste of time, and the road ahead couldn't be worse than the one we just drove through.. We could stop and find gas instead of shelter, and keep rolling.

  I quelched the thought, buttoned down the feelings though. I couldn't recall exactly where Fort Benning was, but knew it was north of us and east and we had to be careful to stay far away from it. I didn't trust the military, not yet.

  Anna settled on the white frame house to the right, and I gave her an encouraging smile because it's the one I would have picked. I could see a twelve foot fence that looked like a dog kennel behind it and the church next door was a simple wooden clapboard construction as opposed to the yellow stone monstrosity across the street.

  We drove closer and I hid a chuckle.

  Anna had picked the First Baptist house and not the Second Baptist directly across the highway. The small house must have been the parsonage. We'd still check the larger red brick home beside the larger church for supplies before we left, but the tiny cottage would do nicely for the two of us, if it was safe.

  She rolled into the driveway and shut off the car.

  “Stay here,” I told her and climbed out.

  “Screw that,” she said and opened her door. She grabbed the shotgun from the seat beside her and followed me to the front door.

  “Then stay back,” I warned her and knocked on the door with four loud raps. I tried the knob, twisted it open and stepped to one side with the rifle ready for anything that popped out.

  Nothing did.

  “You want to stay here or go first,” I smirked at her.

  She smirked right back and advanced on the door, shotgun at the ready.