Kirk Allmond - What Zombies Fear - A Father's Quest

Something struck me as not quite right though. There were no noises at all. No crickets chirping, no birds singing, no frogs croaking, nothing. Not even a breeze stirring the leaves. I half stood to tell John about the oddness when something slammed into my back and I ended up face down on the ground. I turned my head to see John firing his gun, muzzle flashing so rapidly it looked like one constant jet of fire in the darkness. I was unable to move to see what he was firing at - his hand blurred like Leo’s when she moves at top speed. This was John. I didn’t have to look. I knew each of those bullets were lethal.

He reached down still firing with one hand and flipped one of the two spare magazines out of its pouch in his belt up into the air. A millisecond after he squeezed the trigger on the second to last bullet, the empty, used magazine fell out of the bottom of the gun, and he caught the fresh mag with the pistol’s grip, like he actually threw the magazine into the pistol. His hand came up and slapped the fresh mag in place as he fired the round in the chamber. The entire reloading process had taken less than one second. To this day I’m not sure if I dreamed it, because I blacked out right afterwards.

15. The Sportsman’s Club

I regained consciousness with a start and a gasp. The pain in my back caught my breath at the halfway point. I focused on relaxing the muscles in my back, and breathing slowly. Over the course of what I think was an hour, I focused on breathing. I couldn’t see anything, I was wearing a blindfold, and there was not a single bit of light leaking in around my nose, leading me to believe I was sitting in a dark room. The room was completely quiet. I focused on feeling my bonds, I was duct taped at the wrist, with very little wiggle room. It felt like I was in a wooden chair. I shifted my weight and felt a little give in the chair.

I thought about Max, he’d lost his mother; he’d lost all of his friends, most of his toys, almost everything he knew. Now he was surrounded by paranoid, gun toting adults. At least he had his Gramma and Uncle Marshall. He was at a place he’d been coming to his whole life, and although it had changed a bunch with our defensive improvements, it was still our home.

I began to formulate a plan based on assumption and my senses. I had to be inside the indoor shooting range, it was the only thing I could think of that explained the complete lack of any sound. I’d been inside this range before, there were two doors. One door led out to the stairs heading up, the other to a vault where the owner kept most of his guns. There’s no way it would be open, but I had to check. This group holding me would have to be monumentally stupid to leave me alone in a room full of guns. I couldn’t yet attest to their intelligence level, but they did manage to capture me, even with John on my side.

The pain in my back had subsided to a solid ache, but the stabbing pains were gone. ‘No time like the present to start this shindig,’ I thought to myself.

With that, I leaned back on two legs and then over on to one leg. I bounced three times on that one leg before the chair splintered, and I collapsed in a heap, causing the stabbing pain to return. I laid there on the ground trying to straighten my legs without wrenching my back. Once they were out from under me, I rolled over on my side and started working my wrists back and forth. The duct tape stretched some, rolled a little and little by little I worked my hands free. If my back had not been so sore, the process would have gone much faster. As it was, I didn’t have much strength to flex my shoulders; every time I tried it took a number of minutes before I could breathe again. Finally free, I removed the blind fold and discovered I was indeed in the pitch blackness. A quick check of my pockets showed I’d been searched and everything taken. I picked up one of the chair legs, and started slowly feeling my way to the wall.

I managed to find the wall, only cracking my shin once on a chair. I was glad that this was a sound proof room as the chair skittered loudly across the concrete floor I must have been just to the left of the door. I turned right at the wall and followed it around all four corners, past the locked vault door. Finally I found the door to the stairway, those two things confirming that I was in the vault.

The doorway was locked, but right inside the doorway I found the light switch. I flipped on the lights, and to my surprise, they came on.

The room was empty, except for two chairs, a bench rest, and the small pile of lumber that was the chair I’d been in. There was no telling when they would come for me, but I had no expectations of living through that encounter.

I had a sense that I’d been out for a couple of hours, although really I had no idea how long I was. It could have been an hour, or it could have been a day. If they’d captured or killed John, Leo would come looking for us when we weren’t back by midnight or so. If John had escaped, it was only a short walk to the farm. He would load up on guns and ammunition, bring Leo and the two of them would come for me. I hoped they were careful; the thought of anything happening to them on my account was unbearable. They were special, they were more than friends, they were my family, but more than all of that, they were Max’s protectors. We all were.

John had the Glock with him, which had a magazine capacity of seventeen rounds. He had two extra magazines - fifty-one bullets, plus one in the chamber to start with. John could have taken out up to fifty-two zombies. Or people, whichever these were. Mr. Spaulding had been the only living person we’d encountered, and he was infected by the time we got to him. If there had been more than fifty-two people here, what would drive them to continue the fight taking those kinds of losses? When you combine his speed and accuracy, any humans would have run away, unless something very scary was driving them. It was much more likely that it was zombies. If there were more smart zombies like Penelope, they could have collected undead from a long way away. There was only one reason I could think of for them to be staging a zombie army two miles from my doorstep. I felt so stupid, we’d been so focused on looking for survivors, looking for supplies, building up our own defenses, and I never thought to send out a scout. I had no idea what was at the edge of my property.

There wasn’t anything I could do, the heavy steel door wasn’t going to budge, I had nothing with which to even try to pick the lock; but besides that, I had no real idea how to.

I turned off the lights again, and stood just inside the door with my ear to the cinder block wall. I spent the next four hours counting seconds and wondering how long it would take for something to happen.

16. Escape

Finally, I heard something muffled through the cinder block wall. It sounded like footsteps coming down the stairs, and they were fast. I scrambled to my feet, and prepared myself as I heard the key in the lock. As the door started to open, I raised my chair leg over my head. The door opened, and I swung my chair leg like a bat. The first man through the door dropped like a stone. I caught his outstretched wrist with my second swing before he hit the ground, breaking his arm. The pistol fell to the floor.

I dove around the open door, which had swung into the room, and braced my feet against the wall and my hands against the back of the door. With all of my strength, I slammed the door into the second to enter the room. My back screamed in agony with the pressure. The door smashed the second man’s face in, I heard him hit the wall behind the door and slide to the floor.

The first guy’s gun was on the concrete next to him, and then it was in my hand, where it felt very familiar. The fucker had my Sig! That pissed me off, coming at me with my own gun. One hand pulled the door open, the other holding my gun. As the door cracked, I peeked around the corner. Every inch I opened the door, I could peer another ten degrees around the corner, until I’d methodically made sure the entire stairway was clear.