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

  “Anna,” I stopped her.

  “I'm going first,” she insisted.

  “And I'm going to let you,” I cradled the rifle and extracted the sawed off from her hands to rack a shell into the chamber before passing it back to her.

  She grunted.

  “Was that a thank you?”

  She grunted again.

  “You're welcome.”

  I put a hand on her shoulder and followed her into the house. The living room was dark, empty so I held her up and we listened. The house felt abandoned, a fine layer of dust over everything. There were no ticks and hums from electricity, nothing to make us feel like there was another presence there.

  “Let's clear it,” I said to her and we proceeded from room to room.

  The house was empty.

  We raided the kitchen and found some home canned veggies and jams, plus a jackpot of tins of SPAM under one of the cabinets. There must have been thirty cans stacked in neat little rows. I set four aside and rummaged a pillow case off the bed to fill up with the rest.

  We put the canned mason jars and Spam by the front door to load into the car, then Anna helped me haul the bedding out into the living room, and tip over a cabinet to block the back door and set one beside the front door to do the same once we were settled.

  There was no running water, so she lifted the back of the toilet lid and refilled our water bottles with a couple of gallons she could pull from there. It had been sitting for weeks and we'd have to boil it, but at least we had water to drink.

  I set up the hiker's stove in the living room on the coffee table and hung blankets across the windows to block any light we might make, and our prep for the night was done.

  We had made good time and there was still daylight outside.

  “Let's move the car around back,” I told her. “I don't want to attract any attention.”

  “From the one person left?” she quirked up one side of her mouth. It was a cute gesture, made even more so by the sparkle in her eyes.

  She grabbed two pillowcases of food and hauled them into the backseat, then drove the car around back while I followed with the rifle.

  “That church looks nice,” she pointes as she got out.

  I followed her line of sight but couldn't be sure if she meant the simple wooden building beside us or the solid looking structure across the highway.

  “Would you mind if I prayed?” she asked.

  “You can't do that out here?”

  “I can,” she said. “I do. But I like to pray in church too. It makes me feel closer to God.”

  “Even after all this?”

  I motioned around, but it was a poor choice of timing. Right now, the sun was slanting westward and bathing everything in a soft golden glow. The wind filtered a grass scented breeze across us, and everything looked like a picture on a postcard. All this, if it was just this moment, would be perfect.

  I thought for a moment that if I could be happy here, if I could be happy not knowing, that this would be a good place to ride out the end of the world.

  “Especially after all this,” she motioned too, and I could see she was grateful. Maybe for just the moment, but that's all we really get, moments. Once the past has happened, it's done, and the future now was so uncertain it was a joke. We had the now, we had this exact time and it was beautiful. There was food to eat and a safe place to sleep and right now, no one trying to kill us. I guess even I could be grateful for all of that.

  “Before you pray, we need to do something.”

  She looked at me then with wariness in her eyes, something that spoke of her past more than I could know. Maybe she would choose to tell me one day, maybe she would bury it deep and let it fester into a rage much like my own, something she could tap into and release upon the world in destructive fits that left her scarred but unbent. In that moment, her eyes looked like my own when I started at them in the mirror, the reflection cast back broken.

  I almost asked about it.

  In a past life before the Z I might have. But now, she was as cracked on the inside as I was. I had been broken long before the Z apocalypse, before the dead came back to life. I knew it as much a part of my make up as the receding hairline and the scar over my right eye from an encounter with the sharp end of a coffee table when I was three and fell off the bed.

  Broken. Bent. It didn't matter what you called it, and I hadn't spent any time in a psychologist's chair to understand it. I just knew I had it, and looking at her then I knew she did too.

  “We need to add to our weapons,” I explained and watched the wariness in her eyes recede.

  I lifted the trunk and grabbed metal wire, wire cutters, duct tape and machetes from a supply run with Brian before we left them, along with a pipe cutter from a hardware store. I led Anna to the dog run and clipped the fencing away from two poles, then cut them at the base.

  “Stick the machete in the end,” I instructed showing her how with the first pole so she could work on the second. We wrapped and secured the machete tight with the metal wire and duct tape, then wrapped a couple of grips near the middle and end to create “pikes.” They were Brian's brainchild, and I stole his idea because it was so good.

  Noise attracted more Z, and sometimes more than Z so if we had to stop a few, there really wasn't anything better than the pike.

  The poles were ten feet instead of the twelve I thought, but it kept the Z far enough away that the twenty four inch loss didn't matter. The machete on the end were good for slicing and stabbing, and the blunt end of the pike could serve as a miniature battering ram.

  Anna would have to practice on the balance of the pole because it was awkward until she got used to it, but she held it lightly in her hands as she swung it through a couple of arcs.

  “Use these first,” I told her. “Keep the Z at bay, and make sure you have a way out. This is an escape tool. We always want to escape.”

  She nodded, a good student. I know she saw me use the pike at the church when I rescued Hannah, so I hoped she would remember it wasn't a stand your ground and hold the hill weapon. It was a cut and run, slash and dash tool, designed to cut through a crowd of zombies without allowing them close enough to bite, grab, scratch or splatter you with their guts and gore.

  The sun was just over the tops of the trees by the time we were done. I wanted to lock up in the house and settle in for the night but I promised her she could pray so we made our way to the front of the church.

  The front doors were held closed with a loose chain and padlock, like they do in some small towns when the locks stop working. I slammed the end of the pike into the padlock and broke it open.

  Anna zipped the chain through the handle and opened the door.

  The sanctuary was full of Z. More than I could count in the faint light filtered through row after row of stained glass windows. They were a mass of shadows standing still in the darkness, all facing the door and the noise we made opening it.

  The first one moaned and shuffled toward us. The herd followed after him, their moans added to his.

  Anna made a sound like a cross between a chirp and a yelp. Or maybe it was me.

  She fumbled to bring her pike up with one hand and unsling the shotgun with the other.

  “Door,” I barked and piked the first Z, then the one behind it, stabbing and shoving them back.

  They grabbed the pole and pulled and I was yanked off my feet.

  I grabbed the doorframe before I lost my balance and fell through and grunted as I hauled myself backwards. My feet slipped out from under me and I plopped on my bottom, scrabbling backwards, slipping in the built up dust on the porch as the Z filled the empty doorway.

  Anna slammed the door shut on them and set her shoulder against it. The weight of the Z inside began inching her backwards as her slick converse sneakers scratched and scrabbled for purchase.

  “Help,” she gasped.

  I slammed my shoulder into the door and shoved it further back. Anna slipped the chain back t
hrough and when she couldn't get the padlock to work, wrapped it around the handles again. The Z inside strained against the solid wood doors.

  “Wire,” I called.

  She ran around to the dog kennel where we left the tools and ran back with the spool of wire. She threaded it through the chains and twisted it down tight a couple of dozen times.

  I grabbed her pike and we stepped back to see if it would hold.

  It did.

  “Are you bit?” she asked.

  “You?” I shook my head.

  She shuddered and I could see the goose bumps pop on her arm.

  “Not even close.”

  It had been a close call. Why would someone just lock Z up in the church? I glanced behind us as the sun disappeared and only left twilight behind. The yellow brick church squatted there but it didn't look inviting or menacing. It looked like it might have a gut full of Z too. I wondered if I imagined the moans or if I would even be able to hear them over the sounds coming through the doors of the First Baptist Church..

  I started walking back to the kennel. We had just a few minutes to gather the tools and material so I could get another pole to replace the one I lost. Of course I'd have to find another machete, but maybe there was a hardware store in the shopping center up the road we could check out tomorrow.

  Anna kept pace with me, helped with the wire and duct tape and pliers and we locked ourselves into the small cottage. I got the hiker's stove lit and the tiny flame cast a small orange blue light around the room as I settled in to make us dinner.

  Anna sat on her knees on the mattress next to me.

  “I guess I can pray in here,” she said.

  I looked up to catch her grinning and couldn't help but return it. Killing Z was serious, and I didn't like it, but after the shock wore off and the adrenaline surge calmed down, I was left with a feeling of gratitude for having survived. I bet she felt the same way. That seemed like a good thing to pray about.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  I turned the hiker's stove down to its lowest setting and lit the living room with a barely perceptible light that turned us into little more than shapes in the dark. I laid on the queen mattress from the master bedroom and Anna curled up on a twin next to mine, a little gap and pillows between us.

  We had eaten two cans of SPAM, cut into little strips and fried in a pan and home canned green beans warmed up in the left over grease. Anna took the pan and cleaned it with a cloth and packed everything away next to the door. We were back to silence again, that feeling of just being together like we had in the car. It was comfortable.

  She was younger than me, by a decade at least, maybe more. I thought to ask her at some point and let it go because frankly I liked the quiet.

  I lay in the nest of blankets in another person's house and listened to the strange clicks and thumps as the wood settled and the world outside shifted over toward the dark of night. My rifle was close at hand, and I kept a pistol beside it, but I wasn't too worried. With a dresser in front of each of the doors nothing as coming through without making a lot of noise, so I felt a sense of safety for the two of us. I sent a quick prayer up that my children felt the same, but I wouldn't be surprised it no one answered it.

  I had killed men, not just Z, and I had done it with no feeling in my heart other than it was something that had to be done, like putting down a rabid animal. I did it to protect the people I was with, but that gave me little comfort.

  I was surprised at how little I felt about being a killer. Maybe I was psychotic, or a high functioning sociopath. I grew up believing in the ten commandments, and even as an adult I thought killing and murder were just wastes.

  A waste of life, but according to the news that I watched, those wastes of lives were happening to people who were no big loss. Criminals, or drug dealers, drug users, or just plain bad people.

  Now I had to wonder.

  Maybe they were living in a world much like this Darwinian one we now found ourselves in, only they weren't fighting Z. They were fighting gangs, and poverty and all sorts of other troubles I could only imagine.

  Before the Z, I had never gone hungry, except on purpose. Maybe fasting was a privilege of the rich. I had never considered myself rich, but now that I had been hungry, I couldn't imagine not eating for the fun of it.

  Before the Z, maybe the poor, the disenfranchised were in a battle with the elements, and influences and the government and I was clueless to this war going on. It was only now, after the Zombie fall that I was part of a war. A war between the Z, a war with the militia, and a war with myself for how easy it was for me to accept it and become a killer.

  “Do you want to do it?” Anna asked in the flickering darkness.

  “Do what?”

  “It.”

  “It?”

  “Sex,” she sighed. “Do you want to have sex with me?”

  For the record, if a beautiful woman asks for sex, I usually jump at the chance, especially in a post apocalypse situation.

  “Do you want to have sex?” I asked instead.

  Stupid question. Dumb idiot move. The teenage boy in me wanted a time machine so he could fast forward just to kick my ass.

  She shrugged.

  I could hear it in the blankets, in the movements of shadows on the wall.

  “It's what they do.”

  “Who are they?”

  “Guys. At the Church. They said I had to if I wanted to stay safe.”

  I propped up on my elbows and looked over at her in the glow of the light from the burner. All I could make out were two dark eyes staring back at me, pools of black.

  “I'm all for having sex with you,” I told her and licked my lips.

  I could feel a stirring in my groin at just the thought of it.

  “I don't say no as a general rule,” I told her. “And the next time you ask, I will say yes with abundant enthusiasm. So don't ask until you're ready and only if you want to.”

  I could see her staring at me. After a moment she rolled over and curled up in her nest of blankets and scooted a little closer my way, her head almost on my arm. Even though she stayed on her mattress, I could feel her breath against my shoulder.

  “Okay,” she sighed.

  I laid back down, and listened to the litany of curses the primal parts of my brain tossed at me. I was almost asleep when she whispered.

  “Thank you.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Anna shook my arms but I was awake before she touched me. The alarms in my head were going off as we both reacted to the voices outside the window. They weren't shouting, weren't even that loud, but in the silence of the darkness they carried.

  Someone tried the front door but it didn't budge.

  I drifted my hand over the pistol and lifted it up to aim.

  “Locked,” they called out.

  “Try the Church,” a second voice answered.

  We could hear the footsteps clop across the porch and down into the yard. The voices didn't move to the back of the house, or they would have seen the car and tried again.

  I sat up and extracted my arm from Anna's vice like grip, and scooted over to the window, careful that it didn't move when I peeked out.

  It was hard to see anything but shapes, but a truck was parked on the road between the two churches and men moved between them. Short men, most of them around five feet tall, though a couple of heads bobbed above the others. Details were hard to make out in the dark.

  Three of them moved away from the parsonage and toward the church.

  “Chained,” said a high pitched voice, the one that tried our door.

  “Hiding something,” the man at the truck called back. “Get a light.”

  Flashlights popped on, beams slicing through the night as they zeroed in on the chained door. In the ambient backwash of light, they looked like kids.

  “Should we open it?”

  The man from the back of the truck hopped out and marched closer. He was the tallest among them and in the faint light,
looked more teen than man. He had dark hair, dark eyes and was clad in camouflage, just like the rest of them. Padded camo jackets, padded pants, gloves, like a group of kids out hunting and each of them had a rifle.

  The leader walked up to the door and kicked it with a thick soled boot.

  Even inside we could hear the Z moan.

  “Zombies,” he said.

  “Should we ice 'em?” the high pitched voice asked.

  The leader considered for a moment and shook his head.

  “They're locked up in there, let them eat each other. We don't have to worry about them.”

  “What about the store in town?”

  “We'll come back on our next trip,” said the leader. “Load up.”

  The boys meandered across the road and climbed into the back of the truck. The leader slapped the roof and they took off down the road in a squeal of tires and slinging gravel. Someone whooped, and they disappeared into the darkness.

  “What was that about?” Anna whispered in my ear.

  I jumped and almost pulled the trigger on my gun.

  “Jesus,” I said.

  She giggled.

  “I didn't mean to scare you.”

  “Damn good at it,” I said and chided myself. I had been wrapped up in what those kids were doing outside, wondering if they were going to open those Church doors and how they would react if I busted out to shoot the Z. Would the boys shoot back at me? Could I stay inside and let them handle it?

  I'm glad they didn't give me a choice to make, but anyone could have sneaked up on us while I was zeroed in on them.

  Anna put her hands on my shoulders and rubbed some of the tension away. I leaned my forehead against the wall and let her.

  “Were those boys or really tiny men?”

  “Boys,” I said. “Teenagers maybe.”

  “What are they doing out here?”

  I shrugged. She kept rubbing my shoulders, kneading the muscle under her strong tiny hands and I let the tension bleed away in a sigh.

  “I don't know. We may never know,” I said. “They were headed back the way we came. One said they were on a trip, maybe they come through here again, but we'll be long gone.”