He had always been ruthless and uncompromising, but there was a darkness to him now that Connor had never seen before. Even growing up, when the two older brothers had fought like teenage boys do, there was never anything beyond normal sibling rivalry, no extra spark of malice that foreshadowed such a drastic change. He and Jamie would laugh about their fight a few days later, and all would be forgotten. Life would go on.
Since June 23rd though, something in Jamie had died, or more accurately, it felt like something darker had awakened within him. Jamie was still there in flashes at the start, but that part Connor knew so well had been growing ever more distant, and the former soldier wondered how long it would be until his brother was no more, and all that remained was the cruel and malicious darkness that choked what little light was left.
For all the burgeoning darkness that seemed to be consuming Jamie, Connor had still loved him. He was still his big brother, and in the beginning, he could never entertain the thought of harming family; that was one of his father’s teachings that the former soldier did agree with. Instead, Connor chose to direct his efforts towards redeeming his brother, to right the course he was steering from.
Whatever progress he might have made, however, died the same day as Johnny.
A month into the world’s end, the third of the Bancroft brothers was killed while on a supply scouting mission with some of his moron friends. Johnny had been given one of the many Glocks, but his six idiot minions were armed only with a selection of melee weapons. Connor was mystified why Jamie had allowed their younger brother to go out—into the undead infested world—without adequate protection and had only discovered this fact an hour after leaving. The choice to inadequately arm their brother and his crew had been fatal in the extreme.
After finding out what happened to Johnny, Jamie had killed one of his brother’s companions in a frenzied explosion of violence, beating the man to death with the butt of his chromed .357 revolver. While Connor comforted Caleb at their brother’s death, Jamie was consumed by a rage so white and hot, it seared anyone in his proximity. From that moment, all Jamie’s efforts were directed to finding the two responsible; a man in his fifties, and a woman known to Johnny and his morons, called Lockey, though they had no idea of her real name. The woman had called the older man Nate.
Whoever Nate was, he was a crack shot. Johnny had been put down by two clean shots in rapid succession, one in centre mass and a follow up shot almost perfectly between the eyes. It was certainly not the work of any amateur, instead signifying someone with an abundance of both training and experience.
Jamie was impossible to reason with after Johnny’s death, as a single goal consumed him every hour of every day.
Vengeance.
Jamie sent three men out, all armed with scoped rifles from their preciously small stock, to watch key roads through town from elevated positions, desperate for any sign of Johnny’s killers. Each was given the instruction to take them alive if possible, as Jamie wanted their deaths to be long and loud at his own hand, but if not, then ending them would suffice.
“Take no chances,” Jamie had ordered. “You see any vehicle that isn’t ours—any vehicle at all—then you open up and stop it.”
Connor had been incensed by the call, arguing against firing on any potential innocents. They should have been fighting the dead, Connor roared, not the living.
“Until those two fuckers are dead at my feet,” Jamie hissed, “there are no innocents.”
Three days later, the call finally came that one of the men had the pair pinned down having disabled their vehicle. He had them trapped on the main road running between the shopping centre and court building, and they had nowhere to go.
Steve Briggs had led the QRF in response, the only other former military man in Jamie’s employ. Connor had no love for Briggs, as he had taken to the criminal life with gusto, enjoying being the big man in a little pond of amateur thugs.
When Briggs’ hastily assembled QRF arrived on the scene, there was a raging fireball in the road and a massive gathering of undead at the foot of the court building preventing any further investigation, but there was no sign of Jamie’s man, or the odd pair they were hunting, and things only got worse from there.
For the next few days, Jamie had ordered three vehicles, each with four armed men, to patrol the town in search of Lockey and Nate. The radio was constantly afire with Jamie demanding updates, screaming at the incompetence of their inability to locate Johnny’s killers, even as he said how imperative it was they were caught before the fuel run had to be made. He threatened to, “keep those bitches locked up so tight you’ll have to fuck each other,” if no results were forthcoming in the near future.
Jamie was erratic, uncharacteristic of the man before all this madness. Always cold and calculating, and cunning like a fox, the stark change into this wild demon, thirsting for bloody vengeance while abandoning all sense and reason, was a visceral transformation not lost on Connor, nor on Caleb.
“What’s wrong with him, Conn?” Caleb asked, after the third unsuccessful day of patrols.
The hunted pair were ghosts, though Connor assumed they were simply living away from the main town. Likely, they were sufficiently supplied to wait for the heat to die down
