Judgment Day (Book 3): Retribution Page 9

  “Okay, set up the tents. It looks like we’re staying for a while.”

  “If we stay here for the winter, we’ll need more than tents,” Halliwell complained.

  “Then we’ll start cutting wood for a cabin,” Jeb shot at him and turned to check on the others.

  “I don’t like this,” Halliwell continued.

  Jeb spun on his heel, marched up to Halliwell, and jabbed him in the chest with his index finger. “You’re welcome to leave. I’m tired of your bitching and moaning. If you don’t shut the hell up, I’ll feed you to the zombies myself.”

  He left Halliwell standing speechless with his mouth open and his face pale as a ghost. Karen laughed aloud. He turned on her but she just glared back at him a moment, and then walked away. He didn’t know if she found humor in his confrontation with Halliwell or in his threat, but he didn’t need her stirring up more trouble. No one trusted her. A few feared her. Any sympathy they may have once felt for her plight had vanished long ago, drowned by their own struggles to survive. In their eyes, she was his problem.

  In many ways, she had become more independent – doing her share of the work, cooking, even killing zombies – but in other ways she still clung to him. He wasn’t sure if she still harbored some love for him, or if he was simply a reminder of all her troubles and being near him fed the anger that she needed to survive. He had given up trying to reach her, to break through the barriers that separated them. Each effort left him exhausted, bewildered and angry and drove her farther away. Hope that time would heal her wounds had faded. Now her presence only served to remind him of just how much he had lost. She was a shell of the woman she had been and he was becoming a shell of the man he had been.

  After the tents were set up, they sat by the fire watching the New Apostles preparing for night. The group worked in close harmony, each doing his or her assigned task without complaint. A feeling of jealousy swept over Jeb as he watched. He could see that they were satisfied with where they were and what they were doing. They had no other goal than the immediate task set before them. He envied them their joy. At the ringing of a small bell, they dropped what they were doing and filed into the large tent. He was curious about Brother Malachi’s message, but no one in his group suggested that they attend the evening service. He chose to remain with them.

  A few curious zombies wandered around the edges of the camp but none entered it. Jeb tried to define the differences between this group of zombies and those that had attacked them a few days earlier. Physically, they were identical. Some wore articles of shabby clothing, while others remained naked, oblivious to the cold. Once or twice, he heard a series of calls and grunts repeated and wondered what message, if any, was being conveyed. He saw no sign of tool use, though a few carried broken branches that they could use as weapons, a decided advance over brute strength.

  An air of unease permeated the camp. He couldn’t blame his people. In spite of the show of non-belligerence, he didn’t trust the zombies. He wasn’t sure if he trusted Brother Malachi but was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. As his people prepared their meal, they kept one eye on the church tent and the other on the woods surrounding them. Finally, curiosity won out over caution.

  “I’m going to check them out,” he said and rose from the stump upon which he had been sitting.

  “I’ll go with you,” Antonov said.

  “No. You stay here. Keep an eye out. I’ll go alone.”

  Antonov shrugged. “If you want.”

  On the way to the tent that Brother Malachi had called the Temple, Jeb examined a few of the other tents and buildings. Most contained only blankets, clothing, and a few personal items, though a few had some pieces of simple hand-made furniture. He noticed no weapons. He remembered that Vince had said the New Apostles had been armed when he had encountered them. He wondered if they no longer felt the need to defend themselves. It made a weird kind of sense. The things they would most need defense against, zombies, now protected them. They lived in a topsy-turvy world.

  He heard Brother Malachi’s voice calling for silent prayer as he approached the Temple. Suddenly, the tent flap threw back and the Indian named Ahiga stepped out. He looked at Jeb for a moment, finally moving aside as the man who had gazed at them upon their arrival with distrust emerged. Jeb noticed that he was almost as tall as Brother Malachi was, with snow-white hair that cascaded to his shoulders and a long white mustache and goatee. His eyes held no warmth as he stared at Jeb.

  “I am Brother Ezekiel,” he said, “Brother Malachi’s assistant. Did you come seeking solace?”

  “I came seeking answers.”

  Brother Ezekiel smiled, but like his eyes, it too held no warmth. “Answers depend on the question.”

  “Your leader, Brother Malachi, has the look of a zealot to him. I understand what he’s trying to do.” Jeb squinted at Brother Ezekiel. “You look like a fighter. Why are you here?”

  “I follow Malachi. I keep him safe. I keep him from making foolish mistakes.”

  “Like bringing us into your midst?” Jeb ventured.

  “The New Apostles have dedicated themselves to assisting the Children to grow. You are killers.”

  “Zombies are killers. We killed to survive. I understand you sacrificed a few people to the Children of God. I would call that murder.”

  Brother Ezekiel frowned. “It was God’s will.”

  “God changes his mind a lot.” Jeb jabbed his finger at Ahiga standing silently beside the tent. “He was a Hunter responsible for a lot of misery.” Jeb leaned closer and spoke quietly to Brother Ezekiel. “If you cause any trouble to any of my people, I’ll put a bullet in your head and call it God’s will. Now, do we understand each other?”

  If Jeb’s directness bothered the New Apostle, he didn’t show it. Neither did Ahiga’s expression betray what he was thinking. “Brother Malachi has offered you sanctuary. The Children have accepted you. You will be safe here as long as you follow our rules. They are few but you must adhere to them strictly. If you harm one of the Children, you will die.”

  Jeb backed off. “Fair enough.”

  “If you wish to build more permanent structures, we will help you. We will share our food with you. My personal beliefs will not color my allegiance to Brother Malachi or our goal. Do not let yours.”

  “My only belief is that man is better than the zombies. Forced to choose, I’ll take man every time. We’ll stay until the weather clears, then be off. Personally, I think you people are insane.”

  With that, he turned and stalked off. Behind him, he heard the worshippers exiting the Temple. Sounds of life returned to the small village – snatches of conversation, laughter, the sounds of preparing and eating dinner. In the distance, a howl reminded him that zombies, the Children of God, surrounded them. Could he leave or was he a prisoner? As the thick forest swallowed the last vestiges of sunlight, he decided not to test their boundaries at night.

  During the first week of their stay, they slept in tents and kept their bags packed, ready for a quick exit, but as the days grew shorter and the weather worsened, Jeb decided to accept Brother Malachi’s offer. Over the next two weeks, they built two small wooden huts, hardly larger than the tents, but a small stone fireplace with a chimney made of discarded #10 food cans provided warmth and a place to cook meals. Most settled into a routine – making chairs and beds to sleep above the cold ground, mending worn clothing, cooking, eating, and wandering the New Apostle camp. No one ventured into the woods. However, Karen became morose and turned inward, refusing to talk or interact with anyone, even Jeb. Her sullen behavior drove most of the others outside or into the other hut. On one particularly bad day, Jeb confronted her.

  “Karen, you’ve got to stop this,” he said. “You’re making the others hate you. We’re in close quarters here. You need to snap out of it and try to cooperate.”

  Her reaction stunned him. “Snap out of it?” she screamed. “We’re living with stinking zombies and you want me to be happy
? I can smell them from here, corrupt, filthy creatures. We should kill them all and these fools who worship them.”

  “Shut up,” he snapped at her. “We have to stay here, at least until the weather changes.”

  She glared at him. “In another month, you’ll be wearing a white robe and kissing zombie ass. Get away from me you murderer.”

  She pushed him to brush past him. He grabbed her by the arm, spun her around, and slapped her across the cheek. A smear of blood ran from her busted lip. “I should have left you there in that place,” he told her. “People died to save you. You weren’t worth it.”

  She stared at him and then pulled away rubbing her arm. “Never touch me again.”

  She pushed the door open and walked out. He followed her to the door and slammed it behind her, symbolically closing the door on their unsteady relationship. He realized that his wife was lost to him now, had been lost to him since the day she had rushed to the hospital with their son, Josh. He had been dead or dying of the Avian flu by then, but to her the world had conspired to remove her son from her care, starting with Jeb, who in her eyes had abandoned them to find food. Her trauma at the hands of the military had been too much for her fragile mind to handle. Given time and the proper surroundings, he might have made her whole again, but in a world gone mad, the mad fit in too well. It became impossible for them to see their defect. In Karen’s mind, everyone else seemed insane.

  A soft knock at the door drew his attention. He sighed and called, “Come in.”

  He was surprised to see Brother Malachi. He offered the New Apostle leader a seat on the bed. He graciously accepted the offer, grunting as he sat down.

  “My arthritis is getting much worse. These cold days don’t help,” he chuckled. “A year ago I would have taken Glucosamine for my joints. Too bad there’s no pharmacy handy.”

  Jeb was in no mood for idle chitchat. “You didn’t come to discuss your aches and pains.”

  Brother Malachi spread his arms and nodded. “No, I came to see if you would accompany me to the Children of God village.”

  In the weeks since their arrival, Jeb had refused to visit the zombies or see how the New Apostles were interacting with them. His first instinct was still to kill them on sight, though he knew such an act would doom everyone in his group.

  “Maybe it’s time I go,” he said.

  His answer pleased and surprised Brother Malachi. “We should go now.”

  The zombie village was two miles from the New Apostle village on a point of land at the junction of two streams. They approached from a low ridge overlooking the village, a collection of daub and wattle huts strewn randomly across the point. Zombies sat around fires or waded in the ice-rimmed streams grabbing fish with their bare hands and flinging them onto the bank, where others used wooden clubs to kill them. Children clung to mothers or scurried around the village grunting and yelling.

  “Did you do this?” he asked, incredulous at what he was seeing. It could have been a scene from a page of a history book, prehistoric man in his environment.

  Brother Malachi leaned heavily on his staff, exhausted by the long walk. He smiled. “We showed them the basics of construction. They caught on very readily. Their results are somewhat crude, I admit, but they keep out the snow and rain. Fire was more difficult, but they have learned to keep it burning and use it to sear their meat.”

  “It’s … incredible.” Jeb was enthralled in spite of himself. He had thought of them as dangerous, mindless creatures, humans thrown down the evolutionary chain by a virus. Now, he was witnessing their rapid rise.

  Jeb noticed two zombies watching them from the edge of the woods from which he and Brother Malachi had emerged. The two had not confronted the visitors, but kept a close eye on them.

  Brother Malachi continued. “The children learn very quickly. Often, they are the teachers of the parents. I’ve listened to their sounds for hours. I think I now recognize a dozen or so of their meanings – eat, hunt, go away, danger, etc. I don’t think they have a word for ‘mine’, as they share everything.”

  “Do they let you into the village?”

  “Oh, yes, but we don’t venture there too often for fear of disturbing their behavior. A few come to us, Alpha males usually. We show them things and they in turn teach the others.”

  “But you don’t know why they tolerate you?”

  Brother Malachi became pensive. “I think it is because God speaks to them. We stopped listening to God centuries ago. That is why mankind fell. They are a young species, closer to their creator. Our purpose is to guide them.”

  Jeb recalled the friends who had been killed by zombies. “Not all zombies are so friendly.”

  “No. Some are still closer to animals, but they, too, will evolve.”

  “Not if the military has anything to say about it. I’m not sure I disagree with them. Man didn’t die out. He just slipped. In the future, it will be man against zombie for survival. What then?”

  “Some, like these, sought remote places where contact with humans will be limited for many years. They will learn. Perhaps man can learn as well.”

  Jeb grunted derisively. “Considering what we’ve done to ourselves, I’m not as optimistic as you seem to be.”

  “Perhaps it is my belief in God.”

  “Or maybe you’re just naïve,” Jeb retorted.

  “That is possible, though I prefer to think my life has purpose. Before Judgment Day, I was a plumber. Even on the best day, I dealt with people’s crap. God offered me a vision of the future. I do not declare myself a prophet. I do not say it will come to pass, but I must do all I can to help bring it about. There will be room enough for both mankind and the Children of God for many years. Perhaps by then, we will have learned to coexist.”

  Brother Malachi’s unyielding faith roused Jeb’s latent cynicism, made more profound by his recent fight with Karen. “We don’t do so well with our own species. Extending the hand of friendship to creatures that eat us might not be so easy.”

  “The task is daunting, I agree, but most worthy tasks are. Now, I think it is time we return.”

  As they were leaving, Jeb glanced back down at the village. It was easy to imagine the creatures as primitive humans. His attention was drawn to one zombie male making marks on the side of one of the huts with the charred end of a stick from the fire. The marks looked remarkably like a crude rendering of an elk. The significance of this act was not lost on him. Were the zombies developing a sense of wonder about the world around them, appealing to a God, perhaps the same God Brother Malachi swore by, to aid them in the hunt? He shook his head.

  “Next they’ll be painting cave walls.”

  Brother Malachi looked at him. “What?”

  “Nothing,” he replied, “just musing.”

  9

  Tucson, Arizona

  Fifteen wary men crossed silently on foot beneath Interstate I-10 traveling west on Orange Grove Road. Opposite them on the eastern side of the Interstate, the cloying stench of death rose from an abandoned sand pit that had become a funeral pyre for tens of thousands of bodies during the onset of the plague. Overwhelmed by the sheer number of dead, burying them became impractical. Later, dead zombies had been tossed into the flames, which had smoldered for weeks. Staring down into the pit with its grisly remains and the pool of dank, putrid water at its bottom, Captain Lacey had fought back the horrors that the scene invoked. His clothing still reeked of the foul odor.

  So far, they had spotted no live zombies in the area, but still, they carefully followed a standard infiltration procedure with small groups moving forward while others covered them from secure positions. It seemed a method more suited for advancing under enemy fire, but the military had its traditions, and they were slow to change even in the face of a zombie threat. As they passed beneath the elevated Union Pacific tracks, their booted footsteps echoed like applause from an invisible audience. Captain Nathaniel Lacey was hoping they had no audience. He wanted a simple get in-get out
mission with as little difficulty as possible. He carefully scanned the area for possible lurking zombies. In the past year since the plague began, they had become more organized and more dangerous. They were no longer mad packs of hungry animals. He detected method in their madness.

  Debris from the summer monsoon rains littered the cracked asphalt and blocked the drains in the low-lying underpass, creating swamp-like conditions. Mounds of moldy newspapers, election posters, broken beer bottles, and plastic water bottles protruded like islets from murky pools of water. Brittlegrass, saltbush, buffel grass and young palo verde saplings thrust sunward from piles of dirt, like sea oats clinging to sand dunes. Chuckwallas and Sonoran Collared lizards rushed for the safety of holes dug in the packed earth. The tracks of Gila woodpeckers, wrens and mourning doves, lizards, and small mammals, like jackrabbits and packrats, marked the mud at the edge of the pools. The bare footprint of an even larger creature caught Lacey’s eye – a zombie. He cautioned his men to make as little noise as possible as they waded through the puddles. Sun-bleached human skeletons showed white through rotten, tattered clothing as a grisly reminder that Tucson was a dead city. However, not all of its inhabitants were dead. If the fresh footprint was not proof enough, some of the bones around them were fresher than others and showed signs of recent gnawing

  “Stay sharp, men,” he advised as he kicked away a jawless human skull with the toe of his boot. It rolled away and ended face up staring at him through empty eye sockets. Around him, he heard the soft click as soldiers disengaged the safeties of their M16’s. He did the same to his weapon.

  Lacey was pleased with the progress that Hugh O’Malley’s railroad snipes had made on the tracks. The line was clear as far as Vail, southeast of Tucson. Trains would soon be able to supply a permanent base in Tucson. The obvious choice for such a base was Davis-Monthan Air Base with its plethora of jets, but first he had to secure suitable temporary quarters for his troops and O’Malley’s railroad men, preferably where the two groups had as little contact as possible. His men were soldiers, disciplined and on a mission; O’Malley’s crew were drinkers, brawlers, and as undisciplined as men came. As long as they did their job, he didn’t mind, but any conflict between the two groups could prove disastrous. A few disparaging words had been flung carelessly about already. It was only a matter of time until the conflict became more physical.