between four walls than out here in the middle of God and everything. Not that I thought God was present this night.
He’d left the work tonight to darker things.
There were only the five of us now and even though I trusted my life more with Fannie Mae than I did any of the others, she still didn’t have a visible weapon and of all of us she’d had the least use of it. I still wanted her to maintain it for later as a just in case kind of weapon. Honestly most of the reason I wanted her to keep it was for the time when I finally took a bite or a hit and needed to be taken out. I knew that no matter what there was between us she’d be capable of doing the job. I hoped.
We made Fannie Mae stay in the middle. I took point even though Washington wanted the job. I made him take rear, Shaggy took the left and Kevin took the right. We did our best to make sure we were protected on all sides, although we only had three flashlights between us. We made our way slowly in the direction of mine and Fannie Mae’s trailers. We had to go back in the direction of the House but we swung a very wide arc around it. There was still the occasional tinkle of broken glass and screams as someone was found by the zombies.
Wash winced at every single scream that came out of there. He took each one as a personal failure. I didn’t blame him; I felt the same amount of responsibility, too. I just tried not to show it. After one particularly loud, drawn-out scream I muttered to him, “We should have set the place on fire when we left.”
He stopped in his tracks and whirled to face me. “Really, Duke? That would have been your solution? Set the rest of the survivors on fire in hope that it would have killed the zombies? How heartless are you?”
I sighed and faced him. “Do those people sound like they’re surviving anything to you, Wash?” I swept my arm back in the direction of the House. “What few people were left alive when we took off would gratefully accept the mercy of the flames, believe me. Can you,” I looked around at them all, “can any of you imagine the pain of being eaten alive by a zombie? And to know that when it’s done for you you will die and become something less than yourself? To know that you will still be stumbling around in that empty shell that used to be you and is now crawling, walking or shuffling around killing everyone and everything else that you hold dear?”
I’d begun yelling toward the end, but I couldn’t help myself. “And to know that you would be responsible for anyone that you eat after that? Which one of those people dying right now wouldn’t have rather died by a shot in the head or the welcome embrace of the flames had they known what their options were?”
Silence greeted me when I stopped my tirade. Fannie Mae was gripping my arm tightly. “Duke,” she whispered, “maybe you can tone it down a notch, okay? We don’t want to alert the zombies to us.”
I shook my head, trying to clear the rage that had filled it. I was more angry at myself than Wash or anyone else right now. I lowered my head and put my hand up, rubbing my temples. God, I was so very, very tired. I just wanted all this to be over.
A roar of engines suddenly broke the silence. My head shot up so fast that I felt something twinge in my neck. A surge of something that could only be hope passed through me. I looked at Wash.
He shook his head at me. “I think the others just took off on their motorcycles. Both Walter and Clark have Harley’s. They must be trying to back road it or something.”
I grimaced. “Damn those guys. They’re going to pull the zombies away from the House. They’ll come back out here looking for us. We need to get going.”
That’s when Kevin screamed. He had a surprisingly girly scream for such a big guy. We all flashed our lights on him and it wasn’t immediately evident why he was screaming. He wasn’t being attacked. Hell. Oh fuck. He was pointing to the side that Shaggy was covering. The side that the House was on.
We all turned in horror movie slow motion to look and see what it was. An uncountable zombie horde was slowly making their way toward us. I say uncountable because I really have no clue how many there were in the group. They were packed in tightly together like sardines and it made totaling their numbers next to impossible. Regardless, they were all headed ever so slowly in our direction.
Oh, crap.
“Let’s go, people!” I shouted hoarsely.
I turned back the direction we’d been heading and Fannie Mae and I took several running steps forward before I looked back to see that Wash and the others hadn’t moved. I skidded to a stop. “What the hell are you guys doing? Let’s go!”
Wash looked at me, a weird look on his face. Eyes gleaming in the darkness and hands shaking, he said, “Won’t they just follow us, Duke? Shouldn’t we just make a stand now?”
I ran back to him furiously. What an idiot. I told him, “Are you an idiot?” I looked at them all. “Are you all idiots? You know they will find us eventually. We need to get to the trailer and make our stand there. Board it up as best we can so we have a little bit of something protecting us and then we can fight back. We can wait for daylight and fight them then.”
Wash shook his head at me. “If you and Fannie Mae want to try to get to safety, you can. The rest of us will stay here and protect your trailer.” He turned to look at the zombies and then looked back at me. “As long as we can, anyway.”
I looked at Shaggy. At Kevin. “You guys aren’t falling for this heroic bullshit, are you? If you decide to make a stand here you might as well just shoot yourselves in the head and give me your weapons so that I can try to keep me and Fannie Mae alive.”
They just stared at me. Shaggy looked serene. Ready to accept his fate. Kevin had that wild look in his eyes like he still couldn’t believe what was going on. I didn’t think there was any way he wanted to stay here and sacrifice himself for two snot-nosed teenagers. Wash had a resolute look on his face. His hands had finally stopped shaking and the sweat was no longer dripping down his face. He’d decided this was the place he was going down, for whatever reason.
I took another couple steps toward him and put my hand on his shoulder. I whispered to him. “Wash, you don’t need to do this. You have nothing to prove to me or anyone else here. There’s no point in committing suicide like this.”
He shrugged off my hand. “We never should have left those people to die.” His eyes looked haunted and the lid was still twitching madly. “Who knows how many we could have saved if we hadn’t run off like cowards?”
“You couldn’t have saved any of them,” I said. “There were too many zombies and the place was overrun. You would have accomplished nothing by staying. Nothing but get us all killed.”
