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

There was a small group on the far side of the killing zone, out of John’s line of fire; Leo was heading towards them, while he crouched down reloading magazines. I stood up and yelled, “Leave a couple alive!” When I stood up, on the opposite side of the field, a lone figure stood up out of a hole, raised a rifle and pulled the trigger. Leo and John both looked up at me right as the bullet hit me in the left shoulder, spinning me around and throwing me to the ground. I felt like I’d been hit in the chest by a sledge hammer. I fell with my head hanging off the edge of the roof, and laid there trying to catch my breath. It was as if someone had parked a car on my chest.

Leo became a dervish. She was a green blur of death. Her kukri in her hand, baton in the other, at one point she had three heads removed before the first one hit the ground. She was twisting and whirling and diving and rolling. She was graceful death. She was a river of green flowing between the men who were now running in a panic. Every now and then, almost in slow motion, one of them would stop and raise a gun. None of them ever got their rifles to their shoulders. Her machete hit the first three at the base of the skull; she drove her baton into the eye of another one. Leo switched mid swing from the kukri to the baton, clubbing the final two into unconsciousness.

The array of death and destruction was amazing. It brought to mind post battle scenes from movies about the Revolutionary War. Dead men lay in piles and singles. The difference was, there were no wounded. With the exception of the two unconscious combatants, every one of them was dead from either a hole in their head, or lack of a head. Following the fight, the silence was amazing. The entire fight took less than two minutes.

The second the last corpse fell, Leo ran around the building. I think she must have jumped up onto the dumpster, and then to the roof, because in no time she was at my side. “You dumb, overconfident, son of a bitch you’d better not be dead!” She yelled at me. I groaned as she rolled me over to let her know I was alive. “Hurts like hell!” I said with a smile as her face, red with anger at my stupidity

“Tookes, if you die, I’ll kill you!”

“Leo, given that we’re in the middle of the zombie apocalypse, I hope you will. Sit me up, I can walk,” I said. “But be careful!”

She sat me up, and moved around to my back. “Did it go through?” I asked when I could catch my breath. The pain was excruciating if I moved any part of my upper body. “I think my collar bone is broken.”

“Clean through. Pretty ugly back here, you’re going to be laid up for weeks, you big dummy. We have to get you off the roof and get the bleeding stopped. This is going to require some pretty serious stitching, and I’m not very qualified.”

“It’s going to have to be you or John,” I said, teeth clenched. “I’d rather it was you. At least you could do it quickly.” I grinned.

“Oh, Leo, I got you a backpack; you’re going to have to carry it for me though. And don’t forget my new rifle please!!”

I walked over to the access door, and wondered how in God’s name I was going to get down the ladder. I reached for the key before remembering I’d been shot. Moving my arm was a very bad idea.

“Leo. The key to the door is in my pocket. I can’t reach it; you’re going to have to get it.”

“Oh sure,” she said. “I have to do all the work,” she said as she reached into my pocket and retrieved the keys.

She put the pink camo backpack on her shoulders and picked up the Barrett. ”My God this thing is heavy.”

Clutching my shirt with my bad arm, I hobbled down the ladder with my other hand. I could barely walk. My back was shooting stabbing pain down my spine, my bullet wound was on fire, and my collar bone was poking the meat of my chest.

“Let's go get Sammie and meet my remaining captors,” I said. I felt like I was going to die at any moment. The only thing keeping me going was anger at whomever or whatever was behind this. There were not many humans left. Killing any of them was senseless, forcing me and my friends to kill living humans made me angry. Very angry, but that was nothing compared to how angry I was that someone might have been building an army to come get Max.

Inside the gun shop I limped over to the counter and dug out a can of trigger zip ties for making guns safe. I wished I had a pair of pliers and a blowtorch, I was about to get medieval on some hillbilly ass.

18. Information

I stood up straight, grabbed the hem of my shirt to give my arm some support, and walked towards the two unconscious figures on the ground, filled with righteous anger.

“Let’s get them inside,” I said. “I don’t want to be out here in case there are more of them coming back.” Leo and John dragged the two inside, and set them up in a couple of chairs from the back room.

I smacked the first one across the face and yelled, “Wake up!” His head rolled to one side, and I slapped it back the other way as he started to come to.

“What’s your name, son?” I asked, my voice deadly cool. He was not bound, but I didn’t expect any trouble with Leo and John standing behind me.

“Butch,” he said.

“Butch. Tell me what was going on here.”

“They’ll kill me,” he said with a frightened look in his eyes.

“Butch. I’m going to kill you if you don’t tell me the truth. I may kill you by tying you to a tree along the road. Hopefully you’ll die of thirst before a zombie finds you.” Calm and cool, my only chance at getting the information I needed to keep Max safe was to be a bigger threat than the zombies that were controlling these humans. I’d spent the last several minutes wracking my brain trying to figure out what hold the zombies had over these people.

Leo stepped forward and put her hand on my good shoulder, and I shot her a look.

“Butch, tell me what’s going on,” I said coldly. “Why are you working for them?”

“They… They… They have my family.” he stuttered.

“Where? Where is your family?”

“At the high school in Culpeper. There are thirty or forty of them smart ones. The zed in charge is Watley. All the other zeds that can talk call him Mr. Watley.” he gushed.

“Butch, three of us took out your whole crew here. There are more of us, we can free your family, but you have to tell me what’s going on.” I said, softening my tone a bit.

“I don’t know nothin’. Alls I know is they said to come here and find some little kid, and tell them where he was, and they’d let me and my family go.”

“What was this kid’s name Butch, do you know? Do you have a description? How were you supposed to find him?”

“His name is Max. I don’t know what he looks like, ‘cept he’s blonde haired. One of them got a look at him somewhere, but he was in a silver truck and the window was all fogged, all he could tell was that he was blonde.”

With the front passenger side window of my truck shot out, there’s no way a back window could have been fogged. How could it have been fogged? Could that be what Max meant when he said he was hiding from them? I needed to have a talk with him, but I was so afraid of frightening him. He’d handled all of this so well, with maturity way beyond his years.

“When you found this ‘Max’ kid, what were you supposed to do?”

“You’re gonna go get my family? Give me your word.”

“Butch, if you tell me where there is a group of zombies who are looking for some human kid to do harm to him, I’m going to go kill them.”

“We was supposed to take the kid back to Mr. Watley. He was real interested in the kid.”

“Why? What did he want with the kid?” I asked, trying not to give away that it was my son they were looking for.