Whatever It Takes Page 27

  There were a few neighborhoods further out, but they were far and few between. Mostly the city held the occupants while there were a couple dozen houses nestled further out in the hills. Prosperity Wells was on the verge of a boom into a much larger city before the outbreak. The timing of the outbreak had prevented that boom. But it likely had saved the campus survivors.

  As it stood, the people of Brown College had fought hard against the tide of zombies that rolled out of the hills and forest and city and had actually won the fight. There were stragglers, or the occasional horde that came through, but campus was safe. Campus was secure. Fencing and patrols and makeshift walls ensured that safety.

  Percival could see from his vantage point the smoke rising from the downtown area. He couldn’t pinpoint it, but it looked as though it originated from a large enough fire that he wouldn’t need to. Stone and concrete buildings, and most of the modern buildings in downtown were stone or concrete, didn’t burn like that. Wood, plaster, and stone, like those of the college campus, did.

  Zombies didn’t set fires. People did. There was only one reason for the community of the campus to have set a fire outdoors that would produce such a dramatic column of smoke, and that was a mass funeral pyre.

  One that meant the destruction of a horde on a scale that Percival hadn’t seen.

  Worry settled into his mind. If the campus community didn’t start the fire, something else was horrifically wrong. Wrong on the scale of: his home might no longer exist wrong. He hurriedly climbed into the Humvee once more and put it into gear.

  The drive down into Prosperity Wells was deathly silent with only the grumble of the engine to cause sound. Not that much more would disturb the world in the first place, but something oppressive seemed to hang in the atmosphere.

  Percival pulled onto Main Street and got his first unobstructed view of the campus. Bodies lay strewn in the street. Most had the ashen complexion of a zombie, though there were a few who didn’t. Prosperity Wells had been cleared and safe for more than two months, so it didn’t surprise him to see faces outside of the campus walls. It broke his heart to see and recognize the faces among the dead.

  They must have been caught outside when the horde descended. Percival shifted to move his gun, one of the remaining shotguns, closer. He drove slowly down Main Street weaving around the bodies. He had nothing against running over zombies, undead or redead, but he didn’t want to further desecrate the body of someone he knew. Someone who hadn’t become a zombie.

  That thought rocked him as he turned onto College Avenue. The bodies of people outside of the wall had died, but not turned. He hadn’t gotten close enough to check wounds or see how they’d died, but it indicated survivors somewhere relatively nearby.

  More so than the fire and smoke. With enough fuel a fire could burn for a long time.

  Ahead of him despair waited. The makeshift gate that the college community had built in their makeshift wall stretched across the street. Or it had at one point. The gate lay toppled inward with a significant chunk of the wall nearby blown out.

  Zombies didn’t carry explosives. Zombies didn’t carry anything from what Percival had observed. Even the more intelligent and hunter variety of undead hadn’t toted tools to make bringing down prey easier.

  Something else had come to the campus and it hadn’t been zombies. Percival mashed the accelerator and sped forward, heedless of what he ran over. The outer wall might have been breached, and breached by another man it seemed, but there were more secure bits of campus.

  The first and final haven had been the Brown College Student Union, a massive building that had once been the Prosperity Wells mayor’s mansion before it had been donated to and expanded by Brown College in its founding.

  The donation had occurred during the reign of a mayor named Brown.

  Percival sped through streets strewn with corpses and spattered with blood. The brick and mortar buildings blurred by. He knew this campus like the back of his hand.

  He came to the secondary wall. This wall was less a wall and more just a stretch of chain-link fencing that would provide a buffer against any incursion. It stretched between several multi-story buildings including the two dormitory halls, science hall, and history hall. The Student Union was nestled in the middle of the four buildings.

  It also marked the end of his drive. While the fence here had been toppled, he risked getting the Humvee stuck between the two buildings if he drove it. He killed the engine, pocketed the keys, and climbed out. He unsnapped the button that would hold his pistol in place and cradled the shotgun in the crook of his elbow.

  The stench of zombies was something he’d gotten used to in his time ‘abroad.’ The stench of bodies was something he’d learned to deal with. Both smells were thick in the air, but also were undercurrents to the acrid smell of something burning was something that tickled his nose. It wasn’t quite the pungent stench that arose from burning a corpse, but it was close. The more pleasant touches of wood smoke coiled through the less desirable smells. He hadn’t passed the source of the smoke yet, but was dreadfully afraid that he was about to find it.

  The silence, especially after he turned the engine off, was deafening. When he’d left the campus, it had been abuzz with activity and sound. People coming and going about their business and talking. It was as though, even though they didn’t have power, the world hadn’t quite ended on campus. It had just changed.

  Now the same silence he had encountered elsewhere pressed down on his senses. It seemed to have a life of its own and wanted to crush Percival out of a place he wasn’t supposed to be. It was a lonely and forlorn feeling. Death had come to grip the campus and didn’t want anything living or undead within it.

  Percival felt as though he were trespassing on a sacred site. The silence, devoid of even the animal sounds, was discomforting and disturbing. He backed up to the Humvee once more and took the time to dig out an improvised holster for the shotgun and a friend he had come to trust. His sledgehammer. He strapped on the holster and slid the shotgun into it.

  He did his best not to look at the bodies near where he’d stopped. He didn’t want to see them. He didn’t want to accept that his home had been attacked. It had been attacked by something massive and coordinated.

  He shuddered and moved ahead of the Humvee. He cradled the sledgehammer in the nook of his elbow. He stepped onto the chain-link fence and noticed something immediately. It had been cut, snipped in the middle.

  Hordes didn’t do this. Hordes might have bashed the fence down, but something controlling the hordes would have cut it. Zombies. Weaponized. Suddenly desperate to find someone, anyone, Percival sprinted forward.

  He’d held onto the goal of delivering information and help to people he called friends. Close friends that were closer to a giant communal family than just friends, and now they seemed to all be gone.

  He abandoned caution and shouted, “Hello? Hello! Anyone there? Where is everyone!”

  Scattered to the wind. He’d seen a lot of corpses, and the closer to the center of the campus it seemed that the fewer of them were zombie and more were people he knew and recognized. People who had died people and not risen as zombie.

  He sprinted to the end of the alley created between the two dorm buildings. He turned the corner.

  Before him was the Student Union. It was surrounded by another makeshift wall, this one made from heavily stacked stones. He’d helped move those stones into place. The field between was a charnel house. The majority of the dead here were human. He recognized faces, names flashing in his mind. People he knew and liked and…

  As he had feared, the source of the smoke was the utterly demolished Student Union. This must have been the survivor’s last stand against whatever, whoever, had done this to them. Percival could see the bullet holes in the wall surrounding the building that was in shambles and belched smoke into the air. The spent casings on the ground near bodies.

  And the attackers hadn’t taken any losses. Or if
they had, they’d taken their dead with them and left the campus’s out to rot. They’d left almost all of the bodies where they’d apparently fallen. All except four.

  He ran across the field, tripping over limbs as he went. He staggered to a stop a dozen feet from the wall. From the top had been raised six gallows. Beneath four hung Donald, Emera, Rai, and Alem. The four leaders of the community. Along with Percival and Sarah, they’d guided the community they were building. Each corpse had several wounds, though all held a single similarity: a bullet hole in the center of the forehead.

  The two remaining gallows were empty. A sign and symbol that had been left for he and Sarah.

  Percival broke. He dropped to his knees before the hanging bodies of his friends and former teachers. His idealist companions in the foregone zombie apocalypse. His hammer fell from his fingers as he stared up at the corpses as they twisted in the wind.

  Despair and grief crashed through him as his compartmentalized guilt and depression knocked down the walls in his mind and crashed to the forefront. Everything he’d done he’d done to better things here. Everyone he’d lost, he’d continued on to better things here.

  And here was gone. His head dropped down to his chest and he sobbed. Hot tears spilled from between his eyes and pattered down before him. He felt the first drops of the storm that had threatened to break over him for half a day.

  And among the cacophony of the late autumn storm that shed the tears of the sky onto him, he heard a soft feminine voice.

  “Get the fuck up,” she said.

  He lifted his head from his chest, whimpering. He still cried and his lip quivered as he drew his eyes up. In white, untouched by the torrent of rain around him, stood Sarah.

  “You’re… dead,” he whispered. “I watched you die… I held you as you stopped breathing.”

  He stared at her. She lifted a hand and he staggered as he climbed to his feet to go to her. He couldn’t believe it was her as he moved willingly to her embrace.

  He didn’t feel the teeth as they sank through his leather jacket and into his shoulder.

  The End

  About the Author

  Mike Staton lives with his special lady friend and three cats. He’s an avid practitioner of martial arts and enjoys contemplating how he’d best the tackle the zombie apocalypse. If you’ve enjoyed this piece of fiction he can be reached at: IdyllAdventuerer@gmail.com