Day 336 - Untitled Zombie Story Chapter 4.1 - (1,151 words)

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UNTITLED ZOMBIE STORY

By Wayne Webb

Chapter 4.1 

The countryside was a blur through the car window, Derek was sitting in the back seat looking at the two people in the front, alone and unarmed, driving to nowhere he knew about.

“Ugh.” The car hit a bump in the road, a pothole left untended even before the world collapsed in on itself. The jolt brought his forehead hard against the glass he had been staring through, and giving him a painful but transient crack.

“You right back there?” Ben Johnson’s voice came to him from the driver’s seat and a half glance behind him before looking back at the road and swerving to avoid another pothole. “You should probably sit back and put your seatbelt on, just in case. The road ahead looks … challenging.

As if to underscore his assessment he swerved again and clipped the edge of another hole and the car juddered again, throwing Derek around in his seat once more. He reacted by sitting in the middle and wrapping his hand and wrist in the lap belt, but not securing it, instead taking it like a rodeo rope on a bull’s back.

“I told you a seat belt saves lives. But do you listen to me? No. What would I know after all? Just been alive longer than both of you put together, what could I know about anything?” Margaret was sulking in the passenger seat.

“Give it a rest would you, Mom please? Just wait patiently and we’ll be there soon.” Ben gripped the steering wheel hard enough to turn his knuckles white with the tension.

Derek piped up from the back seat. “Why don’t you just slow down then? That would be safer still.”

“Well Derek, there are two very good reasons why I should not slow down. Firstly because we need to get to the outpost before dark, and we do not want to be out on the open road in the dark. That’s one.”  Ben fell silent.

“And the other?”

“Because when we get to the outpost we’ll be leaving Margaret there. The sooner we get there the sooner Margaret will be safe and we can move on.”

He looked at his mother who was staring out the window pretending not to listen. Ben flicked his eyes to the rear view mirror and hoped that she would not see him wink and grin to the man looking back at him there. “For her safety, I want Marg… my Mother to be safely in the outpost where she won’t be exposed to any of the dangers we pose.”

Derek nodded to himself and smiled back, but his concession was to keep that to himself, if Ben saw it that was fine, but he was not going out of his way to alleviate the tensions in the car. “Family. It’s important to keep your family safe and close. I understand that. I’m not sure that you do though.”

“Derek. We spoke about this at length already. You know why we had to … look, it’s not that simple, it never is. He could not come with you, that’s all there is to it. He and that other one, Rusty, they posed a threat and we could not take all three of you, in the end I only had room and need for one.” Ben looked into the mirror again and got a flat-eyed stare in return. “One. Okay?”

“No. It’s not okay.” Derek was angry over what happened to his brother, he would not forgive Ben quickly. He understood it, he was sure that in a reversal of fortune he would be equally ruthless. He had seen his grandpa be that ruthless, make the hard call and carry out the executions himself. Could he have done that? Could he ever do that? Derek did not know for sure.

He knew Ben was capable. He knew Margaret was more than capable.

“Just be patient, we’ll be at the outpost soon and then trust me, you’ll want in on what we are doing, you will I guarantee it. The rewards will be well worth any momentary discomfort, and you’ll be a part of something much, much bigger. We all have to make sacrifices to get there.”

“Sacrifices? What would you know about sacrifices?” Derek countered in a accusatory tone.

“He has made his, I have made mine, and no one escapes unscathed these days.” Whispered Margaret in a voice that instantly silenced both of the men in the car.

They drove forward in silence.

James was staring out the window at the countryside flicking past, in the opposing direction to the way that Derek was going, they were headed back to the City, and away from the graves they left freshly covered back at the bend in the road.

James was sitting in the back of the mini van with Reid who was making adjustments and repairs to some of the sonic devices that somehow pacified and drew in the Zombies. He had started asking questions but Reid’s answers were mostly useless.  The problem lay in the fact that Reid knew exactly how they worked, but he expended no effort in putting the functions in layman’s terms for the uninitiated James.

Then they had lapsed into silence and James watched the countryside whizzing past them as they drove at high speed towards an unknown destination. They had passed the turn off to James and Derek’s hometown and just keep speeding off in a direction that made no sense. They were driving to the middle of nowhere.

This ‘City’ that Ben had told them about, the one that sounded like the best prospect they had for survival, was not a conventional one, it was a loose collection of new buildings and patching in of other infrastructure and set on stilts above the ground. From the way Ben had described it the City

was a sprawling metropolis of barracks and facilities a few meters in the air, loosely tied together and linked by rope bridges that required some skill to navigate, on the off chance that one of the undead ever made it in, or if one of their own died while living there.

The City was in the hills, it had to be but where and how to find it James would have had no show on his own. The altitude was climbing high with the rise of the road as they took twisting and steeper cuts into the hillsides as they drove up.

They had separated the brothers and taken one on with the leader Ben, and the other was an insurance policy, held in a non-threatening ransom demand for his good behavior and cooperation in this mysterious mission.

It had been a bizarre and long couple of days.