Joseph Talluto - Taking It Back

“Oh no.”

Tommy stopped what he was doing and looked off into the distance. He didn’t look at the two small bodies lying side by side in the sun. “They hung them.” Tommy’s voice was barely above a whisper. “Two little boys who probably never hurt a thing in their lives. They hung them like they were useless pieces of meat. I mean, what kind of animal…” Tommy’s voice cracked and he looked down, resuming his digging.

I had nothing to say. I had seen a lot of things since the world went upside down and I had thought I had seen the depths of depravity humans were capable of. But every time I thought I had seen the bottom, another layer got exposed. Was the line of lawlessness that close? Was the beast of man that close to the surface, waiting to be loosed? I didn’t know. But the cold fire had started burning and I did know one thing and I said it aloud, more to myself than anyone else, although perhaps it was to the dead family.

“Men will die for this. I promise.”

Charlie nodded, then went to the garage for more shovels. I headed back to the house to bring the father out to be buried with his family.

It took an hour, but we buried the family together, hoping that wherever they were, they would appreciate the effort. I found a couple of boards and fashioned a crude cross to place at the head of the grave. We stood silently for a moment, each of us reaching out to the deceased family with our prayers.

We gathered our supplies and as we were putting them in the truck, Tommy said, “Hold up.” He walked off into the field on the other side of the tracks and looking around, I saw what had attracted his attention. A lone zombie was wandering through the field at a snail’s pace, tripping over vegetation and the uneven ground. Tommy walked straight to the zombie, which raised a groan at his approach and lifted its hands to the oncoming meal.

Tommy never slowed his advance, never took his eyes off his target. He unslung his melee weapon, a length of gas pipe that had a t-junction on the end, hammered into killing points. Just as the grasping hands nearly had him, Tommy hit the zombie in the head with the makeshift mace. The power of the swing smashed the zombie’s head off the body. Charlie and I watched as Tommy followed the head into the brush and repeatedly smashed it.

I understood how he felt. I wanted to crush something, make it suffer for what had happened here, and the frustration of not being able to strike out made it worse. There would be a reckoning.

Tommy walked back, dragging his weapon through the grass to get the worst of the ghoul gore off it. He wiped the rest off with a bit of cloth taken from the dead body, then climbed back into the truck.

None of us said a word. We had things to do. The sun was high and we had to hit three more towns before the end of the day.

We drove on, sighting Kinsman relatively shortly. I didn’t see the landscape pass by, didn’t pay attention to anything, really. My mind was wrapped around the family that had been brutally murdered. What kind of monster could hang little children? What monster lurked out there that had just waited for the veneer of civilization to erode away? I had killed and based on the way I was feeling, I was going to kill again if I had the chance to even the score. Was I any better? I liked to think so, but some might argue not. I never killed anyone who did not wish to harm me and I liked to think I was protecting a larger ideal. Just because the trappings of civilization had fallen away did not mean we had become uncivilized.

We pulled into Kinsman and immediately I could see something wasn’t right. There were people about, but they didn’t look at us, or if they did, they tried not to notice us. That was weird. I could see several people out working in a field, most of them older men, women, and children. This wasn’t adding up at all.

Charlie and I got out of the truck and walked over to what looked like an old fashioned feed store. There were three men standing outside the store and they looked down as we approached.

“Excuse me. Is this Kinsman?” I asked, knowing full well it was, but I had to start the conversation somewhere.

The man in the middle looked up at me. He was about fifty or sixty years old, wearing a faded flannel shirt and stained work coat. His tired blue eyes looked into mine.

“Yes, sir, it is. Can I help you in some way?” His voice was full of fear and I couldn’t figure out why.

“Just glad to see I’m headed in the right direction. My name is John and this is Charlie. We’ve come from Coal City to let anyone still alive know they’re welcome to come live there if they want to. But you all seem to have a decent town here, people working to grow food and such. We’ll let you get back to what you’re doing.” I turned to walk away when the man grabbed my arm.

“You ain’t with them, then?” His voice was a hushed whisper and the other men with him quickly looked around.

“With who? You saw me and my friend come down the rails. Who do you think we are?” I was more than curious as I disengaged my arm.

The men looked around again. “A group of about twenty came in at the end of the winter, looking for supplies and a place to rest. We obliged, them being the first people we’d seen for a while. Well, they had another notion, and we were overwhelmed in short order. They took our food, took our young women, shot a few who resisted, and made the rest of us work to keep them in food and supplies. They threaten to kill the kids unless we help them.” The man’s voice shook with anger as the other men nodded their agreement.

The man continued. “They say they have a horde of zombies at their place that they’ll let loose on the kids if we don’t do things their way and then tie up the parents for the kids to eat.” The man hung his head. “We don’t have any weapons and we can’t leave. We’re trapped.”

I thought about this for a second. Rock and a hard place, for these people. I made a decision. “Where is their base?”

The man on the left, a shorter, heavyset man of around sixty said, “We don’t know for sure. They tend to head back in a northerly direction, so we figure they’re up that way, but the last guys to go looking came back as zombies.”

“What protection do you have from the occasional zombie or three.?” Charlie asked.

“We use garden tools, even though the group said they would protect us. The attacks have been less, lately, but there’s still one every other day or so.”

My response was interrupted by the sound of a vehicle coming down the road at a high rate of speed. Charlie and I sidled into the store so as not to be seen. I could see Tommy slide out of the truck bed and work his way into the ditch by the tracks so he could see under the truck. Charlie opened a window up on the store and knelt down, aiming his rifle in the direction of the noise. I waited by the door to see what was going to happen.

I didn’t have long to wait. A black truck barreled around the corner, screeching to a halt in front of the general store. The three men out front looked very scared and tried to keep their eyes down.

The truck belched out four men, all in various clothing, most of it black. Two of the men wore t-shirts that had large skulls on them and the other two, teenagers, wore typical youth dress. All of them sported earrings and necklaces and all of them were wearing black leather jackets. I was reminded of the dead man we found at the farmhouse and the cold fire began to burn again. All of the men were armed with a pistol in their belts, ala Pancho Villa style, with two of the men carrying AK-47 variants. I was a little disappointed, since we wouldn’t be able to use the guns once we dealt with this.

The leader of the group immediately started screaming at the men at the store. “What the fuck is going on? Whose truck is that? You know the goddamn rules, no fucking strangers! Do I need to make an example out of you, you old fuck?” The screamer was a man about twenty-five years old, with dirty blond hair and what I called ‘trouble eyes’. His tirade caused the men to flinch, but he didn’t notice the fist the oldest man clenched at being addressed by this punk.