joined them after she finally got herself under control.
'So Tim, tell me again, with clear words, how you were brave?' asked Dora.
Paige stepped off to one side of the man, moving back slightly too. She had the handcuff keys dangling from one hand.
Tim looked at Paige and Mary and said, 'You have to promise you won't let Dora or anyone on the council shoot me, or I am not saying anything!'
'Tim, no one is going to shoot you, the damage is done, we just want to know what you told them.' said Mary.
'Promise!'
'Tim, I won't shoot you unless you don't tell me what the fuck you did.' said Dora, raising the shotgun and pointing it at the man.
'No you can't shoot me at all, you promise me.' Tim said again to the other women.
Paige shook her head, 'No, I don't think so. I can't promise that. I don't have any control of her.'
'I can't either, I don't want Dora to shoot you. Please don't shoot him Dora, but I can't make a promise I know I can't keep.'
Tim started to cry, bowing his head down to his chest he wept like an infant, muttering about how unfair everything was.
'Tim' Dora said firmly, 'If you don't start taking we don't have any use for you. How about if I promise you I won't shoot you? Would that work?'
'No! Promise them! Promise them you won't shoot me, you wouldn't lie to them! Promise them you won't have anyone else shoot me either!'
Dora shrugged her shoulders, thinking of what she could do to Tim if she needed to, there were other ways for him to die, after all, finally she looked at Mary and Paige and in a clear voice she said, 'Paige, lover, Mary, my good friend, I promise not to shoot Tim or have anyone else shoot him either.' Turning back to Tim she asked, 'So what did you do?' Dora lowered the gun and pointed the barrel at an angle away from the man.
'I had to tell them. The little girl was here, you call them the wonder twins. She came to me last night when everyone was sleeping. I had to tell her or she was going to kill me. But I didn't tell her the truth about everything. They have names you know, she was called, Andi. She was not right…not right in the head, not stupid, but more like damaged, like mentally ill. She kept repeating 'Sam Waller says' this and 'Jim Tiller says' that. It was crazy.'
'It was just one then, not a whole group of them? So what did you lie to Andi about?'
'As much as I could, she had this way of rolling her eyes whenever I tried to tell her something that wasn't totally true, it was like she could see through me.'
'Well, honestly Tim…' began Dora before Mary elbowed her in the ribs.
'So I couldn't deceive her very much. I lied about when we were leaving, I told them we needed to fill the buses with diesel today and we were leaving tomorrow. I told her that we couldn't leave today, no matter what because we had people who were too hurt to move and we needed that fuel.'
'Well, that's good really, if she bought it.' Dora's eyes narrowed, 'You told them everything else? That we knew about them keeping us here, knew there were no Iowan's close by?'
Tim nodded once curtly.
'You fucking douche. I mean I knew you were a cowardly little shitbag, but to sell us out so fast? Why? All we ever wanted from you was for you to do your share; that was it. There's little room for 'I' in this new world, the place works together, fights together and dies or lives together and I do not understand how you could still manage to fuck us over chained to a goddamn post in Nina's yard!' Dora raised her shotgun and pointed it in Tim's direction.
'You promised!' screamed Tim.
Dora paused, her voice took on an icy tone, 'You told them everything. Giving them bad information only helps us a little. You told them everything. I cannot believe it. I should have shot you a long time ago, you fucking prick.' slowly, hands trembling, Dora lowered the shotgun and said, 'Paige I think…'
The gunshot rang out in the silence of the morning, it was followed by two more shots, all three of which hit Tim in the upper chest. Mary knocked Willy's arm up and the fourth shot struck the stone wall on the far side of Nina's yard. She wrestled the gun from his small hand and pushed him to the ground where he let go of his blanket and stared back up at Mary defiantly.
Chapter 38
'Oh Willy! What have you done?' Mary said rhetorically as her hands automatically engaged the safety of his pistol. She tossed the gun to Paige and rushed forward to Tim, who was not moving on the ground. Dora was still reeling, she did not know how to react to what had just happened, she wanted to pick Willy up and give him a big hug and a fist bump for doing what she had wanted to do. However, she had not meant for him to be the one pulling the trigger.
'What kind of world do we live in when thirteen year olds can kill unarmed men chained to a post?' Dora muttered to herself as she held out her hand to the boy on the ground to help him up. She got him on his feet and looked him in the eyes, he was a skinny, shivering boy standing barefoot with his overlarge boxers riding low over hips too narrow to hold them up, there was no hint of fear or regret in his eyes. Dora reached down and pulled up his underwear up, saying, 'You might want to hold onto those.' She bent over and picked up the blanket off the ground, it was wet from the dew on the grass, but she put it around his shoulders anyway and hugged him close, whispering, 'Everything will be okay, don't you worry hon, everything will be fine.'
'I did the right thing.' Willy said with confidence.
Dora held him out at arms-length, 'Willy you did the right thing, the thing that needed to be done. But you didn't do it the right way.'
He looked confused for a moment before the confidence came back, 'No, you were going to do it the old way, everything is different now. Jeff says, well said, that if we followed the old rules we would all be overrun by zeds, that is why he liked you so much. He said we have to rely on our instincts and risk making a bad decision rather than making no decision at all. No decision can kill you just as fast as a bad decision.'
'You know I think I should have gotten to know Jeff better.'
'He knew all sorts of stuff. Tim was an idiot, he was a, um, traitor? Yeah, a traitor to us. You promised not to kill him. Paige and Mary promised. I didn't promise. I knew I couldn't let you break a promise, that's all we have now, our word. So I did what you needed to do but couldn't; we worked together.'
'Fuck.' Dora said, flabbergasted at the boy's logic.
'He's dead.' said Mary on her knees by Tim's side. She sat back on her behind and rotated to look at Willy and Dora. 'What the heck do we do now?'
Concerned voices came from inside Dora's house, several men appeared at her back door asking what the shots were and if everything was alright. Nina's back door finally opened to and the slender woman weaved her way through the piles of construction materials towards the partially built building.
'I don't kno… Fuck! Mary look out!' yelled Dora.
Behind Mary, Tim's body had reanimated and was reaching for her. It latched on with one pale hand and grasped her ankle. Paige had two guns in her left hand, Willy's and the pistol she had pulled out when the first gun shots were fired, she tried to move one pistol over to her right hand to get a shot at the zombie, but ended up fumbling both of them to the ground.
For Dora, suddenly the entire world seemed to shift into slow motion, she looked around at the men coming out of her house yelling at them for help, she looked at Nina, who was moving sluggishly towards them and she looked at Willy who was smiling up at her. 'You can do it too?' he asked. 'Good.' then Dora found herself bringing her shotgun up, taking the ten long steps over to Tim and putting the barrel into his mouth, the mouth that Mary's ankle was being slowly jerked towards. The barrel of the gun beat the slow speed of the zombie's hand and with
