“I can’t,” Clarence gasped. “My knee.” He heard gunfire in the distance.
Red-hair kicked him again, jumped onto him, and punched his face and jaw several times. Most of Clarence’s body flared in pain, especially his wrist. Once the punches stopped, he opened his eyes, shading them with his hand. Red-hair had backed away and was pointing a gun at him.
“What the hell’d you do, grampa? I swear to fuckin’ God, I’ll blow your cock-suckin’ brains out if you don’t get up and start movin’ right now.”
Clarence attempted to get on his feet but his knee caused him to crumple. He braced himself with his good knee and pulled himself up, but he couldn’t put much weight at all on his right leg. Clarence gave the man a pleading look.
“Ah, shit,” red-hair said. “Bring the girl here!”
Clarence braced himself against the van as he saw Jocelyn being brought out at gunpoint. Faint shotgun fire sounded from inside the store. Clarence wondered why she hadn’t resisted, and then he took stock of his own predicament and realized they would shoot him if she tried anything. She would have been better off without him.
“Shouldn’t you be helping them?” Clarence asked, pointing in the store’s direction and the gunfire.
“Shouldn’t you shut the fuck up? You wanted us to go in there, didn’t ya?”
Red-hair said to Jocelyn, “You help him over to the back door, or we’ll shoot both of you. Fred, shoot her if she tries anything. I’ll keep grampa covered . . . and don’t miss.”
Jocelyn helped Clarence take the weight off his right side and onto her shoulders.
“Cam, I think we should kill them now,” Fred said.
“No, they came here for a reason. Didn’t ya, grampa? Well, you’re going in there with us. Just where you wanted to go.”
“Aren’t you afraid they’ll lose the battle without you?” Clarence asked.
Fred sighed heavily and said into his walkie-talkie, “Ollie, do you copy? You need help? Over.”
“Jesus, Fred,” came the reply. “We lost eight of us, but the zombies are all dead.”
Jocelyn gasped. Clarence guessed she had expected none of them to die, but he knew that was wishful thinking.
Ollie’s voice on the walkie-talkie continued. “There’s only me, Brooke, and you two. Did the van come by out back? Over.”
“Yep, I caught two critters here trying to sneak in the back. One’s got a blown knee. Over.”
“Bring them in,” Ollie said. “Over.”
“Shouldn’t we kill the mother fuckers? Over.”
“I said bring them in!”
“Holy shit!” Clarence could now place a body to the voice of Ollie. He was the largest man of the three—by girth, at least. All three male survivalists were white and had large, unruly beards. They all had thinning hair, though Ollie was older than the other two that had captured them. The woman, who must have been Brooke, had short hair, almost a buzz cut.
Blood and brain tissue covered Ollie and Brooke, and while Ollie had done his best to wipe off his face, Brooke hadn’t.
Clarence spied Jocelyn’s sword, in its scabbard in its shoulder holster, leaning against the wall. He guessed his own shotgun had been left behind in the van.
While the two guards pointed their assault rifles at Clarence and Jocelyn, Ollie’s shotgun pointed downward until he got a good look at Jocelyn. Then he cocked the shotgun and pointed it at her.
“We buried that girl,” he said. “She’s dead!”
“No, she’s very much alive,” Cam said, gun pointed at Clarence. “You must be mistaken. Maybe she’s her twin sister.”
“Maybe, but given all the crazy shit that’s happened here, I’m betting it’s her . . . Brooke, do you remember where we buried this girl?”
“Yeah, Ollie.” Brooke was more stunned than Ollie, unable to keep her eyes off of Jocelyn.
“Well, go check. See if you find her in the grave.”
“I’ll save you the trouble,” Jocelyn spoke. “You buried me alive.”
“We checked her, Ollie,” Brooke said. “I swear to god, she was as dead as roadkill.”
“Oh, I believe you, Brooke. I saw her. We shot her in the back of the head. Right here.” Ollie put his finger just below the crown of his head. “Now there’s no wound to speak of. You two sit down in one of them chairs over there. Put your hands behind the chair and don’t move . . . Shoot them if they so much as move in the wrong direction. Shoot them in the head. Aim for the head. That seems to at least knock them out for a while.”
Clarence was concerned that Ollie was figuring all this out very well.
Clarence and Jocelyn complied, and soon they were sitting on the same side of one of the lunch tables, their wrists held together with zip ties behind the back of their chairs, about six to eight feet apart from each other.
Ollie sat across from them. He smelled of blood, sweat, and zombie. Clarence tried to keep from retching, but when he succumbed, Ollie just laughed.
“Now where do I start?”
“You don’t seem angry with us,” Clarence said when he finished dry heaving.
In response, anger flashed in Ollie’s eyes, and he nodded at Brooke, who gave Clarence a wallop of a painful punch to his jaw.
“I want to pulverize you two. And maybe I should at that. But I’m insanely curious about a lot of things I don’t understand. And if it’s one thing survivalists do, it’s learn and adapt . . . Now, you gonna tell me your story, why you came here, how you got the zombies to attack us but not yourselves, or do we have to soften you up first?”
Clarence and Jocelyn both kept silent. Clarence couldn’t help flicking his gaze over to the sword.
Ollie turned his head and looked in the sword’s direction. “What’s going on over there? Is there something there? . . . Is it that sword?”
He turned and looked at Clarence. Clarence tried to give a blank stare.
“Yes, it’s the sword, all right. Brooke, didn’t you take this sword off of this girl before burying her?”
“Now
