His pupils were dilated as hell and I wondered if they had drugged him in some way.
“Hey, Kid,” I spoke softly to him. “Ready to get out of here?”
Tears misted his eyes and tracked down his cheeks. I felt myself get super emotional for all the things he had to suffer through… from his dad. His dad was the one that did this to him.
That fact couldn’t even register in my head. My dad had been the gentlest person I had ever known. He was a true academic but more Nutty Professor than Albert Einstein. He forgot almost everything, but his mind worked beyond us… like beyond the tangible, day-to-day things. He was lost in chemical equations and bio-nuclear mathematics.
Were those real things? Probably not, just jumbles of half-memories and pictures of his notes strewn all over the house that were now only my coveted memories.
I jumped to my feet and got out of the way so Vaughan could scoop Miller up again. We took off immediately into the forest without looking back. I could hear the shouts of men and the rustle of feet pounding through dead leaves and over hard-packed dirt behind us, but so far no gunshots.
The goal was to meet Gage and Tyler back at the Suburban.
They hadn’t been exactly straightforward with how they would escape but asked us to trust them. What else could we do in this situation?
Vaughan lagged behind us with Miller providing such a heavy burden. And he couldn’t see his feet very well so he stumbled a few times. Eventually, he threw the kid over his shoulder. It wouldn’t be ideal for someone as badly hurt as Miller, but we had to consider getting out of here first. Then we could worry about nursing Miller back to health.
The sun had set some time ago and we were forced to run the forest in the dark. Under the thick canopy of leaves, there wasn’t starlight or moonlight to help us find our way.
Nelson had a flashlight that still managed some dim, yellow light and we had a compass. These were our only tools to use to find the Suburban again.
Gage and Tyler had been outfitted with the same utensils but there was a chance they’d lost them in their confrontation with Matthias.
I couldn’t think about that. There were too many “what-ifs,” too many problems that could keep us from getting back to the compound.
I had to force my brain to shut down and center only on our path, our objective. Our next few steps.
Madison dragged behind me. I tried pulling on her arm, but she was slowing down. I gave her the stink eye but she was wheezing and out of breath.
“Come on,” I panted at her. “We have got to move.”
“I’m trying!” She grabbed at her side. “I haven’t done a whole lot of exercise lately.”
And this was why people died in the Zombie Apocalypse. They found a safe place and gave up on their workout routine.
Or more likely, she had been locked in a house with that atrocious ogre for the last two years and hadn’t been allowed to do more than darn his socks. The misogynistic bastard.
“I understand that, but if we don’t pick up the pace, they’re going to catch up to us. Do you want them to catch up to us?”
She seemed to get the point then and renewed her pace.
A few minutes later, I heard the first shout of, “There! They’re over there!”
“Give me Miller,” Nelson demanded. Vaughan shook his head. “Now, or we won’t make it.”
Vaughan tossed Miller to Nelson and we were off again. Miller was eleven but tall for his age. He hadn’t been eating much lately and I could tell how skinny he had become, but he was still significant weight for someone to carry while they were running. He moaned on Nelson’s shoulder but if he was awake he didn’t complain.
A bullet zinged nearby but nobody screamed out so I surged forward and ran harder. Madison tripped over something and we both stumbled and fell. I pushed to my feet ignoring my skinned knees and palms and grabbed her hand so she could get up to.
The boys had slowed down so we could stay together.
As soon as we were on our feet we saw it. The light came first, bright and fiery in the shallow distance. I had just enough time to think something like, “What is that?” before the blast hit us full force.
We only got remnants of heat and the rain of falling debris, but it was the vibrations of the blast that hit us the hardest.
Dynamite.
It had to be.
Which would explain why Gage hadn’t wanted to be open about their escape plan.
Dynamite was only slightly difficult to come by. I knew a kid in high school that used to brag about the stick some uncle gave him. However, it was highly volatile and super fickle.
Especially if aged. Which this one obviously had to be.
I would not have been comfortable traveling from the compound had I known he had it. And I really wouldn’t have wanted to run through the woods with it strapped to his chest? Shoved in a pocket? I didn’t even want to think about which unsafe part of his body Gage had been keeping it in.
I thought all of this while I flew ten feet and landed belly down on a large log. The wind knocked out of me in a rush of air and I gasped for breath against the stinging pain. My forehead had also smacked against the log, but it only felt like a scrape. No triple concussion for me.
Maybe some minor whiplash.
And a sprained wrist.
Possibly, some bruised ribs.
But that was it.
I crawled to standing and had to lean back against the same log. My ears were ringing and in a hysterical moment I realized I didn’t remember hearing the blast… only feeling it. I laughed at the strangeness because I knew there had to be sound at the time.
Movement in front of me, that I couldn’t hear yet, pulled me upright. I stumbled over to find Vaughan pulling himself to his feet. We looked around together without speaking and found Miller and Nelson in a tangled heap. It looked like Nelson took the brunt of the fall but he was still conscious. We reached for his hands and in a group effort helped him up. He swayed unsteadily so Vaughan reached out for him. When he was strong enough to stand on his own, he bent over and picked up Miller. Miller was completely out of it again, which I expected, but there didn’t seem to be any crazy bleeding from his sagging body.
The ringing started to fade and the world came back into focus slowly. I shook my head, hoping to aid the process but it was no use; my body didn’t want to listen to reason.
I looked around for Madison, frantic to find her. I hoped she hadn’t gotten lost out here or tried to run back to the Colony. I hoped she wasn’t spooked by a little bump in the road.
Dynamite was just par for the course in this season of my life.
I looked forward to an early retirement.
When I could finally hear again, the first thing I heard was her strangled moan. I ran to the sound with Vaughan right behind me.
She was on her back, propped up against a tree, so that she was almost sitting up. Her hands cradled her side and she stared down at her stomach with horror. I followed her eyes and gave my own strangled cry.
She had been stabbed with a medium-sized stick, right in the side. Probably she landed on it. The small branch stuck straight out of her waist.
“Oh, no,” I whispered. I dropped to my knees and carefully assessed the situation. I tilted her to the side and she screamed out in pain. Vaughan crouched in front of her and reminded her that she had to be quiet, no matter how much it hurt.
The good news was that the stick had not gone all the way through. At least, I thought that was good news. I wasn’t entirely sure.
We needed to start moving again and before we did that I was going to have to pull out the stick.
Oh, geez.
“Madison,” I said gently. “I’m going to pull this out and then Vaughan is going to carry you out of here, alright? We’re going to get you to safety and someone is going to fix this, okay?”
She nodded and gritted her teeth. I leveraged my knees on her thighs and gripped the bloody stick at the base. Vaug
han took some initiative and held her down by the shoulders. I took a deep breath, mentally counted to three and pulled on the stick as hard as I could.
It did not come out easily.
And I knew I would remember every second of those frantic moments for the rest of my life. I was desperate to free her, to savor her, and yet I had to wrestle with a damn stick first. When the stubborn thing finally did come out, she started gushing blood from her wound. Vaughan took a moment to tug off his long sleeve t-shirt and I turned it inside out to find hopefully cleaner material. I pressed it against her wound.
“Time to go,” Vaughan growled. He carefully pulled her into his arms and we were off again.
I was now the only one with a free hand to offer some cover. But thanks to the blast, Matthias’s men seemed a little further out of reach.
When I strained to listen, it was only our footsteps that could be heard in the dark, only our heavy breaths that broke up the quiet night.
It took us forever to get back to the Suburban. We had to stop several times and consult the compass and even then we seemed to wander around in the darkness for hours looking for the exact place we’d hidden it.
By the time we stumbled upon it, Tyler and Gage were waiting for us. And by that, I mean, they had passed out with burn marks and blood loss. They were both beat up really bad, their faces swollen and all kinds of shades of purple. Gage had been shot in the calf; we learned that when we tried to move him to the backseat. Tyler had been mostly just beat up but they were both pretty singed from the explosion.
I didn’t know how they beat us here, but I was thankful that they had. It might have had something to do with this being their home and they knew their way around better than we did.
And I was even more thankful to Matthias for keeping this area of the woods so Feeder-free. It was a miracle Gage and Tyler hadn’t been eaten by now.
Maybe they had only just gotten here.
I lay a now unconscious Madison in the back next to Miller. Tyler and Gage took up the next seat. Vaughan, Nelson and I looked at each other tiredly.
Just another night in hell. Nothing to worry about here.
Vaughan went to fish the keys from Gage’s pants, while I climbed into the front seat with Nelson. I collapsed on top of him and he let me, opening his arms for me to nestle against his chest.
Eventually, Vaughan rejoined us. He had just put his keys in the ignition when another Suburban whizzed by us on the highway. I didn’t think they saw us as we were tucked behind an old gas station, but we saw them.
And they had been coming from the direction of the compound.
“What the hell?” Vaughan said lowly.
“That cannot be good,” Nelson offered.
I looked back at four different people that were seriously injured and at the three of us that were beaten, exhausted and out of adrenaline.
A niggling worry took root in the pit of my stomach, but I had to be practical. “We don’t even know if some of these people are going to make it. We have to get back to the compound now, or they might die.”
Vaughan nodded tiredly and Nelson squeezed me tightly against him. “But it doesn’t feel right, does it?”
“No,” Vaughan agreed. “Something’s wrong.”
We took off in the dark night toward the compound. We had to stop once to add gas we kept in the trunk, but we planned that. We heard Feeders stumbling through the woods to get to us but we managed to have the tank partially refilled before they broke the tree line.
Hours later, still in the dark part of the night, we pulled up to the compound.
Nobody was hanging around or paying attention to let us in.
Vaughan honked the horn once but it was still a very long time before somebody came out to open the gates.
When we pulled in and parked, the guy I recognized but didn’t know, met us with a very grim expression. We told him about all the injured people in the back and he ran in for help.
It took a very long time to get everyone inside and then we were barking out orders to get them cleaned and their injuries looked at.
We asked the whole community- well those we had managed to wake up- to pitch in. This helped speed things along, but I still felt that unnerving paranoia.
What was worse was that the longer we worked, the more suspicious it became that none of the other Parkers or Reagan was here to meet us.
Vaughan, Nelson and I handed the injured four off to the volunteers as soon as we felt like we could leave them. One of the older men offered to look at their extensive injuries. He had been a livestock veterinarian in his previous life and while it wasn’t perfect, it was better than anything we had to offer.
I wondered idly why Gage hadn’t used him before, but pushed those thoughts in favor of being terrified.
Vaughan finally couldn’t take it anymore and asked a few people if they had seen any of his brothers. They all said they hadn’t.
We climbed to our floor and walked down the hall, each of us waiting for someone to come out and greet us.
That never happened.
“Hendrix?” Vaughan called out.
Muffled cries met his question.
I recognized that sound. I had heard it earlier tonight when Kane had been tied up in that storage room.
I stood out of the way when Nelson and Vaughan crashed through their curtain. I followed slowly behind, too afraid to see. I didn’t want to make sense of the sounds. I didn’t want to figure out what the problem was.
I just wanted to clean up and go to sleep.
I wanted everything to be fine and good and I wanted to never think of the Colony, Matthias or Kane Allen again.
In the boy’s bay, Hendrix, King and Harrison had all been tied up and gagged. Hendrix was the only one of them cognizant. The other two boys looked clearly out of it.
Vaughan had already ripped off the duct tape that kept Hendrix from screaming out. The poor guy was wild-eyed and crazed with fury. Even with only one candle burning for the whole room, I could see him vibrating with rage.
His voice had gone hoarse from who knew how many hours of screaming. “They took them,” he rasped. “Reagan and Page are gone.”
Those words settled over us with a finality that seemed impossible. I couldn’t even comprehend them. I couldn’t make my brain accept them.
“What?” someone that sounded like me asked. It might have been me. I might have asked the question, but I couldn’t correlate my motor functions to my sanity. I felt completely fragmented.
Hendrix started explaining what had happened while Vaughan and Nelson untied them and woke King and Harrison. I sunk to the floor and crossed my legs.
I wanted to cry, but I couldn’t make myself. I wanted to scream, but I couldn’t get my body to cooperate.
I was exhausted and beaten up from the long day and I couldn’t get my stupid brain to make sense of any of this.
There was a lot of yelling around me. Vaughan and Hendrix and Nelson went back and forth for a long time. They gestured madly around them and Hendrix never seemed satisfied. He was like a caged animal, ready to kill the very next thing that ventured close enough.
He noticed me after a while. I had no concept of time in this strange place I’d gone to.
Shock… this was shock, my mind vaguely recognized.
Hendrix pointed at me and yelled at Nelson some more. Nelson shouted back but then came to my side.
He said comforting words but I couldn’t hear them right, they didn’t make sense to me.
The hour ticked by. Nelson helped me wash and change into new clothes. He checked on Hendrix and screamed some more but then finally walked me to my bed.
He had washed and changed, too, although I couldn’t remember the finer details of those moments. Everything had turned into a hazy blur.
He coaxed me to lie down and I did. He was right behind me, pulling the blanket over us and wrapping his arms around me.
“Haley… Haley… I need you to come back to me
. Please, Haley, I need you.” I started to break from the pain in his voice. It wasn’t just my best friend that had been taken, or the little girl that I loved more than my life, it was also his friend that was gone… his brother’s girlfriend and his little sister.
A sob broke through my paralyzed shock and all at once reality rushed back in. I turned over and threw my arms around his neck. He hugged me as forcefully as he could, holding me against his body as we clung to each other for support.
Cries racked my body and even though he didn’t weep hysterically like me, I felt wetness fall from his eyes and land on my neck. He was shaking with rage and grief and fury.
I made promises that I couldn’t keep and oaths that I would do anything to see through.
He didn’t say anything. It was like now that I wasn’t in danger, he was free to go to his own painful place.
After an indeterminate amount of time like that, he finally pulled back a little and told me what happened.
“Hendrix said they were waiting for the girls after they got back from dinner. Reagan had taken Page to their room to get ready for bed. When my brothers went to their bay to do the same, they were jumped. My brothers fought back, but then two other guys walked in with Reagan and Page at gunpoint. There wasn’t much of a fight after that. Hendrix couldn’t do anything without risking both of their lives. Matthias’s men tied them up and knocked them out. That was hours ago.”
“Well, we know they took them back to the Colony. We’ll just go get them.”
Nelson kissed my forehead. “I think they’ll be waiting for us this time. It won’t be as easy as it was today.”
I thought about Tyler beaten to all hell. I thought about Gage with the bullet wound in his calf. I thought about Miller and the trauma and torture he had endured over the last few months. And I thought about Madison and what she had been through prior to today and the wound that was even now threatening to take her life.
Easy. Right.
“It doesn’t matter.” And it didn’t. I would go to hell and beyond for Reagan. She meant more to me than anyone ever had. Yes, I loved Nelson and one day he would probably mean the most to me. But Reagan was my sister-in-arms. We had started life the best part of life together years ago; we endured the suffering of middle school and the catty politics of high school together. We killed our first Zombies together and we had kept each other alive to date. Nelson was a relatively new addition.