Timothy Long - Beyond the Barriers

I fell out of the car more exhausted than I had been since Special Forces school. I left the guns in the SUV and stood up to greet my rescuers. One of them, a tall man with gaunt features and a long, straggly beard of brown and gray, walked toward me. He slung his assault rifle over his shoulder—M-16 or AR-15 from my very brief glance. He had a big smile on his face, as if we were old friends. Then he tugged a handgun from a holster at his waist and pointed it at my head. He stopped a good five feet away, too far for me to try any heroics like a grab and sweep. Professional all the way, or he had learned a lot over the last few months.

“Tell me who you are, how you got here, and, more importantly, why I shouldn’t blow your brains out.”

Things were just getting better and better.

“Name’s Erik Tragger. I been holed up in a cabin for the last four or five months. I bugged out when the shit went down.” I tried to keep my voice neutral, but having a gun pointed at my face wasn’t making me a happy camper.

“That’s a great story, Tragger. Only the goddamn ghouls have gotten better and better at sending in people closer to being, well, people.” On the outside, he was all polite, but there was a sense of tension that told me I didn’t have much time to convince him my story was true.

“I wish I knew what you were talking about. Look, man, I been out in the woods for months. Living on MREs and what little I could hunt or fish. I have been out of the mix. I don’t have the slightest fucking clue what’s going on, except some crazy guys that don’t look much like the zombies I gunned down months ago just tried to take me apart.”

The truth in my words seemed to be getting through. He lowered the gun just enough so I could see his eyes and not the eye of the gun barrel. He was younger than me, but not by much. His eyes were a gray color that was hard around the edges. He had seen some crazy shit, and I knew he would just as soon shoot me in the head as have to worry about me turning on them. They must have needed me for something, because they helped me get in the compound.

“When did you escape?”

“A couple of days after it started. I was busy watching the news, just sitting around not sure what to do, when I decided to head to an old cabin my friend has up on Mount Arrow. I took all I could safely carry, stopped at this very store and grabbed a couple guns, ammo, and some supplies and left. I haven’t heard anything since then. Radios are dead, and I couldn’t get a signal on my cell. Besides, man, you must need me or you wouldn’t have helped back there.” I looked at the street, where a small mob of ghouls was creeping up on the fence.

“Only saved you for your car. We need more transportation. You? I say we just kill you and be done with it. No offense, but we’ve survived this long by not trusting anyone. Besides, we don’t usually let creepers in.”

Creeper? Was that another version of the monstrosities I had just fought?

“Oh come on. Just keep a guard on me or something. I can help you out. I have a lot of training.” I couldn’t believe how badly this was going. What happened to returning to civilization? Coming back to a world that worked the old way—buy, sell, stay at home and stay out of the limelight. Right now, I felt like every cold eye in the world was on me.

“What kind of training?”

“Hey, I think I know this guy,” someone spoke up. One of the men moved behind the leader and squinted at me. I didn’t know the guy. Never seen him before in my life. He was stocky, dressed in black, and had a long dark beard. His eyes were hollow, lined with circles like he didn’t sleep.

“You do?”

“Yeah, guy saved my life when I worked here. He came in when the shit was going down. Just walked in with this no-nonsense attitude. Smashed a couple of displays and took knives and a pair of guns. Then he handed me the shotgun that saved my life, and told me to go and protect my family. It was like a wakeup call. I went home less than an hour later, and we hid up until the enforcers got started. I shot ten or fifteen zombies with that gun, man. Saved my life.”

I couldn’t remember the guy’s name, nor could I remember if I even looked at his nametag when I went storming through the store. I was happy that he made it, though, but not so happy that he and his friends were about to shoot me.

“Really? You sure you know him, Pat?”

“I’m sure.” And the guy smiled at me.

There was a moment that passed, a moment when I felt my life hanging in the balance between life and death. Call it cliché; call it a sense of déjà vu. I had faced death more times in that one day than I had when I was enlisted and trained to take on the world.

The guy lowered the gun at last, and we both breathed a sigh of relief. He held out his hand. I found myself taking his in mine and shaking with a firm grip. We smiled like we were old friends, and just like that, the tension went out of the situation.

“You said you had some training? What kind of training?”

“I went out for Special Forces and almost passed.”

“Real badass, eh? Almost passed—is that like almost getting laid?” His voice had a hint of humor to it.

“It’s a long story.”

“How far did you get?”

“Right to the end. They called me back for a family emergency, and I was offered a chance to start over. But I didn’t take them up on it. Finished my tour and got out a year later so I could be with my girl.”

“Did she make it?” No hesitation, no dancing around the subject. This was a different world. If I had been asked that a year ago, it would have been met with a lot of skating around the question.

“Don’t know. So can you fill me in on what I’ve missed over the last few months?”

“Not much to tell. The world went to hell and was overrun by zombies.”

“I remember that part. Where did those other guys come from? They don’t exactly act like those undead things did when I left.”

“The ghouls. Yeah, they are a real problem. Damn things. See, the zombies didn’t take much to put down; they were dumb as a box of rocks. Make a bunch of goddamn noise and they come running, then we shot them or blew them up, or sometimes just set them on fire. We started to run out of ammo. Had to teach the survivors how to shoot with a purpose. It’s surprisingly hard to get Mom and Pop to blow people’s heads off, even if they are trying to eat them.

“Sure there are a lot of zombies out there, but the real problems started when people got hungry and turned to cannibalism. Hard to believe, right? But this ain’t the same world, ain’t the same damn world by a long shot.” He sighed and dropped his hood. His hair hung long and lank, and he had a halo around the top of his head where he’d lost a lot of hair. I imagined no one really cared for monthly haircuts anymore.

“See, eating people is bad enough, but then they started eating the zombie flesh—just a few at first. It changed the people that did it. Made them a weird hybrid, like they had half a brain. It didn’t affect everyone that way, though. Some it just made stronger and meaner. Now they drive the army of zombies before them, like some weird slave drivers. Messy business, all those half-changed people running around.”

“What’s with the green glow?”

“Don’t know. Something to do with the virus. It changes people’s chemistry, makes their blood toxic. Well, toxic in that it would change you into a damn ghoul if you got any of that shit in your system.”

“Is that the same for the creepers you mentioned earlier?”

“Creepers? Nah. Those are the people that live on the outskirts. The ones that don’t want to find a group to stay with. They prefer to go solo, so to speak. We call them creepers.”