“Oh my god oh my god what am I going to do?” Matthew was frantically trying to cover his shoulder where the zombie had torn his skin off his bones with its broken rotting teeth. He looked pleadingly to the men around him. There was panic in the man’s eyes and he found cold compassion in the stares of the other men around him. They knew what had to be done.
Charles the retired Airman was the first to break the heavy grief laden silence, “you know what has to be done now Matthew. We can take care of you ourselves,” with a long swing of his arms Charles indicated the other men standing around Matthew, their guns set at the ready. “Or you can take matters into your own hands.” Charles pressed his pistol into Matthew’s hands, his fingers were numb and Charles had to fold Matthew’s fingers around the gun.
An intense steely hardness flared in Matthew’s eyes as he turned the pistol over in his hands. He nodded, confirming in his own mind that this was the only option left to him. Matthew turned the gun over again and looked intently into the black void of the gun barrel. Sanchez waved the group back as he went over and looped his hands under Charles’ armpits and began to drag the Airman away from Matthew. As he walked back Eric chanced a look over his shoulder and saw Matthew pressing the barrel of the gun under his chin. He turned away from the scene just two seconds before the echoing thunder clap of a gunshot crashed against the cinder block walls of the warehouse.
The stillness of the room was crushing and gripped at Eric’s chest like a distressed beast on the verge of drowning. The moment of reverence was short lived; Charles’ gruff words tore into the gloomy calm that had settled in the room. “Matthew was a good man, I’d known him for years but make no mistake gentlemen, those are the only two options any of us gets if we get bitten. I’ll put a bullet in my head or any of yours if I have to. Survival is the only option for us and that’s the only way to keep our objective intact.”
“Let’s finish up what he came here to do,” Sanchez’s words spurred the rest of the group to action thought their movements were slow, their limbs dragging like people walking through quicksand. Eric stole a look at Sanchez as he passed him heading back to the employee door. The Hispanic cop’s eyes were heavy lidded and Eric was confident that there were more wrinkles around the man’s eyes then there had been three days ago. The toll that the dead extracted was pulling hard on Sanchez. The pitfalls of leadership Eric thought.
The group of men pressed through the employee door and found themselves in a half lit loading dock. Charles had been right; two semi trucks were pressed against the dock with their trailers open and nearly empty. The body lying in the middle of the room was the thing that had drawn all the men’s attention as they entered the room. The flesh had been pulled and torn off most of the man’s exposed body. His face was gone; the only remains were the man’s hair which the zombies must not have found particularly appetizing. The skull screamed in bitter silence at the men gathering in the load dock. All around the body was a dark pool of near purple blood and a few measly scraps of flesh that hadn’t found their way into a zombies belly yet.
Everybody stood in utter shock at the devastation that two of the zombies could work on a body. They hadnt managed to work around the guy’s denim overalls but every bit of flesh that wasn’t covered by the tough denim had been attack with primal viciousness.
“Anyone here know how to drive a big rig?” Charles asked the group. Dan’s hand shot up and one of the two twenty-something’s’ hands came up a few breaths behind the farmhand. Charles looked at them with his calculating eyes before a little hint of a smile crossed his hard wrinkled face. “Good cause we’re taking these trucks with us.”
The work picked up quickly from there. The groups kept to their teams and moved through the warehouse inventorying all of the supplies on hand and loading hand trucks whenever they came across a vital supply. They had managed to load the first truck to capacity in just a few short hours. The group of men were now taking a midday break sweat plastering shirts to their chests and stomachs, one guy was wringing out his baseball cap which was creating a sizeable puddle on the cement floor. The seventeen year old kid, his name was Travis had tried to make up for his earlier mistake and had broken into the vending and soda machines. Eric was nursing a dark brown cola like it was the last one on Earth which in a moment of crushing depressed reality he realized might very well be true.
Sanchez sat next to Eric spending more time staring into his bag of ranch potato chips then eating them. “The answer to life’s mysteries aren’t at the bottom of that chip bag you know?” Eric thought the light humor might ease the cop out of his dark mood but he realized as the words came out that they were just as likely to make things worse.
Sanchez continued to stare into the chip bag for a few long moments while the rest of the group tried to pretend that they were distracted by their own thoughts. “I wanted to save people,” Sanchez finally with a marked effort pulled his eyes way from his chip bag and stared with the watery eyes of a bulldog at Eric. “That’s why I talked Davis into going on that last call to your house. I knew I had to try and save someone. We could have left Davis, Kirk, and me and if we had Davis would be alive.”
“Thanks for that, I don’t think I had thanked you till now.” Eric realized that while Sanchez like himself wanted to save as many people that he could the weight of failure fell directly on the Hispanic cops shoulders simply because others had unconsciously elected him their leader without his own say in the matter. Charles might very well take over in the future but for the time being everyone was deferring to Sanchez. The Rearden survivors owed Sanchez their lives just as firmly as the Spokane survivors did even if the Hispanic cop hadn’t had to buy their lives with bullets and blood. “Nearly a hundred people owe the last two days of their lives to you and any days that follow after today.” Eric saw his gentle words lift off a part of the burden that Sanchez had put on himself but not enough to raise the man out of his melancholy. “If you want to devout all your time and energy to saving anyone and everyone we can find once things get settled at the farmhouse I’ll back you up.”
Sanchez turned his heavy sad eyes on Eric. The loss of three people in three days was dragging the man down but Eric could see by the infinitesimal spark in the deep brown wells of Sanchez’s eyes that Eric’s offer had plucked Sanchez from the abyss of depression. “Once things get set up at the farmhouse we’ll go get everyone we can.” His voice was flat and meek but there was the first traces of confidence in them too. He grabbed Eric’s hand and the two men shook on their deal. Sanchez pushed himself off the wall and started following the other men who were already heading back towards the load dock.
They labored through the next few hours without taking a break except to take some of the water from the drinking fountains in loading dock. The by the time the sun started falling towards the western horizon they had loaded the two semi trucks to capacity. Charles was going back over the list he had been writing up as the trucks were loaded. They had taken anything of immediate value such as picks, shovels, chainsaws, axes, fertilizer, seeds and shoots, weed killer, and pesticides. Eric knew that the broader plan was to start farming the land around the farmhouse but the details of how it was going to be done and who was going to oversea the conversion of the forested land into irrigated farmland was something he wasn’t yet privy to.
They were just closing up the truck trailers and securing the locks when the guard who had been post at the front came running in. Darren was one of the mid twenties, the one without the knowledge to drive the semi. The group had been steadily rotating out the guard except for Charles, Sanchez, and Eric who had to a man refused to leave the heavy lifting to others. The small town of Rearden was mostly evacuated to the farmhouse so there’d be few if any zombies left in the town.
“You guys aren’t going to believe this,” the young man was spitting out the words between heavy breaths. Darren was not in particularly good shape and it was made all the more obvious by the fact that his barely two hundred yard sprint left him sucking air like a vacuum. “There’s some guy out front wants to know if we can help him.”
“What kind of help does he want?” Charles as looking sidelong at Sanchez, the retired Airman had proven that he was far more suspicious of people’s motives then Sanchez was. There was a barely concealed antisocial nature to Charles, an us versus them mentality that made sense in a military setting but wasn’t going to work with the vision that Eric and Sanchez shared about what the farmhouse and the work they were doing meant. The two ideas were going to rub against one another like sandpaper and Eric was afraid that sometime in the near future the two ideas were going to spark a fire that might consume the whole community of survivors.
“That’s all he told me, said that he needed help.” Darren was bent over double at the waist hands planted firmly on his knees as he sucked in air like the giant billows of a forge.
“You two,” Charles pointed at Travis the clumsy seventeen year old and Dan, “you two stay here and keep your guard up. We’re going up front to see what this guy wants.” To punctuate his words he pulled back on the slide of his pistol and chambered a round. “Let’s go see what this strange wants from us.” He stared walking with the crisp stride of a military march. Eric and Sanchez shared a significant look at one another before trotting quickly to catch up with Charles. Eric had seen it in Sanchez’s eyes. Charles was assuming command of the men on this mission and would probably try and grab control of the farmhouse if they didn’t find a way to divert his attention.
The Airman was use to war against a defined enemy with a set number of combatants set against him. The world they were in now had no clearly defined army and near limitless troops bent on their destruction. The community of survivors wouldn’t make it through a year of every living person was treated as an enemy or leper looking for a hand out. Sanchez and Eric knew by the nature of their jobs before the world ended that people survived when they pulled together not when they made it their mission to set people apart. They’d have to come up with a plan soon or the whole village they were creating was doomed to fail.