The Renegades (Book 3): Fortress Read online

  “And yours?” I asked.

  The military kid thumbed to the kid with the Mohawk. “That’s Spike, this is…” Before he could say it the goth-looking dude interjected.

  “Damian.”

  “And I’m Alec.”

  “Well, ladies, how long you been up here?” Dax chimed in as he walked around looking at the place. It was small. It had all the basics except water and electricity. From up there you could see right across the tops of the trees. A deep orange sun had already disappeared behind the snow-peaked mountains.

  “Maybe two weeks,” Alec said before lighting a cigarette and hopping up onto the countertop. “Yeah, our town is Centennial. It’s just northeast of here.”

  “A lot of people there?”

  They laughed among themselves as if being privy to a joke.

  “Yeah, if you can call two hundred and seventy people a lot.”

  “Holy shit and I thought Castle Rock was small.”

  “You’re from Castle Rock?” Spike asked.

  “You know it?”

  “Yeah, you have that zombie run. What’s it called?”

  “Zombiegeddon,” Baja replied.

  “Yeah, yeah. Fuck, I love that shit. I wanted to get up there but my old man wouldn’t do it. He kept harping on about how if I could come up with the gas money he would gladly take me. What an asshole.”

  “Oh yeah, and tell him the best part, Damian.”

  He nodded. “My old man owned the gas station.”

  They started cracking up laughing.

  “So what’s Centennial like?” Benjamin asked.

  “It’s an old mining and logging town. If you close your eyes longer than three seconds while driving through, you will have missed it,” Damian said. “It’s a drop of spit in Wyoming.”

  Spike jumped in. “Not a lot to do there except play music, drink, and smoke pot.”

  “Sound like my nirvana,” Baja added. They tossed him a look as if he just uttered the secret words to their club.

  “The sign on the door, what the hell is that?”

  “Oh that’s what we call ourselves. The Zombie Squad.”

  I chuckled. “And I thought our name was shitty.”

  Alec jumped down. “Show a little respect. You don’t know us.”

  “True.”

  “So, got any food?”

  “No. Do you think we would have let you up here if we did? That’s what we were hoping you had.”

  Benjamin pulled off his rucksack and yanked it open.

  “Does that stove work?”

  “You bet your ass it does. Propane-based baby.”

  He tossed him a couple of cans of baked beans. “Cook ’em then.”

  The three of them looked at each other as if they had found gold.

  As the night wore on, we sat around drinking, smoking, and getting settled in for the night. We were curious about what had led them here. Alec spoke up while the other two went out and circled the perimeter. It was a small narrow walkway that went around the lookout itself. The lookout was completely closed off from the elements. It was basically a square box with windows and one door. Outside we could hear the sound of the dead wandering. The snarls and gnashing slowly became faint as they slunk away.

  Alec leaned back resting his head against the window. He began to get this faraway look in his eyes as he began to recount what had happened in their town.

  “Three weeks ago. Everyone was fine. Usually about this time we get a whole bunch of hunters that come into the town. They hole up in my parents’ hotel. Like clockwork they show up, check in, and go off into the forest. Usually we wouldn’t see them again until the evening. When they came back one of them looked like he’d been attacked. They were ranting and raving and saying it was a human that bit them. We just thought they had too much to drink. Seems not. Anyway. Next morning the cleaners were doing their duties and that’s when it began. There was blood everywhere. I’ve never heard people screaming so loudly. I watched one of them sink his fucked-up teeth into this cleaner’s breasts. Now don’t get me wrong. I wouldn’t have minded doing that but they were tearing these beauties apart.” He sighed. “What a waste. So police showed up and at that point they didn’t know to shoot them in the head. These suckers were going down and getting straight back up again.”

  Spike came in. “That’s when we came into the picture. You see, we’ve seem practically every zombie movie under the sun. Hell, we lived and breathed Day of the Dead and I can tell you something right now. This was no fucking day of the dead. These motherfuckers were like Olympic sprinters trying to win gold.”

  “So you hid?”

  “Fuck no. We aren’t pussies.”

  “So how did you stop them?” Baja asked.

  “We took my old man’s truck down to the local butcher’s. Of course old Al the butcher was long gone by the time we got there. So we plowed the truck through the window. Like you do when you need a good T-bone steak and you have forty Z’s on your ass. We hooked up a line to the back of the truck with a few whaling hooks and packed them with as much meat as we could find.”

  Spike started laughing as he popped open a beer. “Yeah, you should have seen it. We were like the Pied Piper of Hamelin leading those suckers to their very own BBQ.”

  “BBQ?” Dax asked.

  “Yeah. This is the best part. We dragged their asses towards the gas station. Once we reached it, we covered that bitch in gasoline then waited until they caught up and started chomping down. Then BOOM! Blew them to high heaven.”

  “Like manna from the sky, it was raining chunks of meat,” Damian said.

  “But that couldn’t have been all of them?”

  “No, once our parents had been attacked we got out of there. We knew about this place because we used to break in on the weekends they didn’t have anyone renting it.”

  “So what about food?”

  “We had some for a while. We make use of rabbit mostly. Pain in the ass to nab those suckers but lucky old Spike here is a master at catching wild prey. Eh, Spike?”

  He nodded affirmatively.

  As the evening wore on we all found a place to lay our head. I turned on the comms unit and listened in for any activity back at the fortress. In the back of my mind I knew that it might not have been a wise choice to leave. But there were at least one hundred and fifty of them, fully armed. Having us five wasn’t going to make much difference. If they couldn’t fend off an attack from the military, they weren’t going to have much luck with any other groups that strolled up on them. There was no way to learn how to survive in this new world except being thrown head-first into the fire. I rolled up the blanket I had taken with me and tucked it under my neck. As I lay there I turned the dials on the comms unit, hoping to pick up a frequency coming from NORAD. Was it possible? If it was, it was probably very slim.

  I gazed across at Spike, Alec, and Damian, they reminded me of Baja, myself, and Specs when we were a lot younger. They had that same gung-ho attitude that is usually found in small-town folk.

  As the night wore on we took turns going in shifts looking out for any potential threats. Alec said it wasn’t necessary. They hadn’t seen a single person, at least not a live one around here since they had arrived. I had asked them what their plans were. No one could stay here forever. I could tell behind their rough exterior that they were afraid. Maybe not of the undead. In fact, they seemed to have that part figured out — but the future, going hungry or dying from a bullet. That was another thing entirely.

  The question was. Was there a future without family or social structure? We had become so used to living life with Netflix, jobs, stores, and always having our kin around. But this new world wasn’t like that. Everything had been flipped on its head. The world we had once known lay in ruins as did theirs. Now we relied on each other.

  What was it about the future that bothered us? Was it the unknown? If so, not much had changed. I thought about what life was like before this. Everything was unknown. We
had no way of knowing if we would land jobs, get a home, and live out our lives in peace. The news was always filled with a constant threat looming. Terrorists, global warming, disease, and inflation. It never stopped not even for a minute. So was this new world any different? No. The rules had just been changed. The wolves at the door were something that was physical. Something that would attack, rob, and kill.

  The sound of a Z’s cry could be heard as I drifted off into slumber.

  A final reminder that we had to find hope within ourselves, for what lay outside those doors, down below in the darkness, wasn’t just horrifying, it was soul destroying.

  THE FALLEN

  The call came in around five in the morning. It was a desperate voice filled with fear. At first I was certain it was part of my dream. The radio crackled again. My mind drifted in and out of sleep.

  “Johnny, come in, Johnny?”

  I turned over on my side trying to get comfortable on a floor made of hard wood. My eyelids fluttered for a moment.

  “Johnny, this is Specs. Dude, pick up. Please, man.”

  “Specs?” I mumbled, barely awake.

  I sat up, my body ached as I wiped sleep dust from the corner of my eyes before running a hand over my face. I need a shave. That was what came to me first, not who is calling my name. Again I thought it was just a dream until I heard him a third time.

  “Please, Johnny, Baja, someone pick up.”

  It was coming from the radio. I pulled it out of the bag, pressed the button, and spoke into it.

  “This had better be good. I was having a nice dream about some gorgeous dark-haired beauty.”

  My mouth was dry.

  “We’ve been attacked.”

  “Say that again?” It wasn’t that I hadn’t heard him. But my hearing wasn’t much good in the early hours of the morning.

  “So many are dead, Johnny.”

  “What?”

  “Some of us managed to escape to the underground bunker but they’re still out there, killing.”

  By now Dax had woken up. “What’s going on?”

  “The fortress has been overrun.”

  “Z’s?” I spat into the mic.

  “No, military.”

  My stomach sank. The first thing I thought about was the decision to not kill the guy at the trailers. The second was the decision to not turn back. Elijah and Benjamin looked over from their sleeping quarters.

  “We need you back here, man. They have us pinned down.”

  Now what he didn’t realize was we were at least fourteen hours away by foot. If we had a vehicle we could be there in just over two hours but essentially we were closer to NORAD than we were to them. Okay, maybe not. NORAD was about three days away but still the only reason we would be going back would be for Specs’s sake.

  Dax grabbed the comms unit from me. “Specs, how many of you are alive?”

  “Um…” there was silence for a minute. Voices could be heard in the background. “Thirty, maybe thirty-four?”

  “They killed all the others?”

  “No, some of them are still fighting out there.”

  That’s when we heard Theo’s voice. “They have my daughter.”

  I grabbed the unit from Dax. “Say that again?”

  He repeated himself.

  “Fuck.”

  “How far away are you?” he asked.

  We told him. He made it clear that if there was any way we could get back, any help we could give them, it would be appreciated.

  “Hold your ground. We’ll be in touch,” Dax replied.

  In the background I could hear Specs trying to reassure them that we’d come to help.

  “We need to go back,” Dax said.

  “Brother, you know how far we have traveled already? If there were over one hundred and fifty of them and they couldn’t hold them back, what the hell do you think five of us are going to do?”

  “Eight,” Spike said.

  I turned to him, my eyebrow went up. “Oh, well that makes it better. Five men and three kids who might as well be wearing diapers.”

  “Hey, shut the fuck up. We allowed you up here. You might be older than us but that don’t mean shit. I can still put a bullet in your head,” Damian said, getting up in arms.

  I shook my head.

  “Someone deal with his adolescent outburst so we can figure out what needs to be done here,” Benjamin said.

  Damian walked out. The sun hadn’t even begun to come up. I reached for a cigarette. Baja was still sleeping. Through all of the noise we were making he was snoring up a storm.

  “Anyone going to wake him?”

  “Don’t bother.”

  “I’m not going to speak for all of you but I say we go back,” Dax said.

  “No matter what I say, someone is going to take issue with it. If I say we keep moving on to NORAD, you’ll balk because that’s being selfish. But in reality both of them are in bunkers. The chances of anyone being able to get at them are pretty bloody miniscule.”

  “But we’re talking about Specs here.”

  “And I’m talking about Jess, Izzy, and Ralphie. These people had to know that eventually their place would get attacked. There is no way around that. Unless you hide in some bunker that isn’t seen by the outside world. But if you build a fortress in the middle of a forest someone is going to come across it.” I paused. “So we go back. What the hell can we offer?”

  “It’s not about winning, Johnny. It’s about helping them,” Dax said.

  “What do you think?” I looked at Benjamin and Elijah.

  “Don’t look at me, dude,” Elijah said. “It’s not my call, I’m just along for the ride.”

  “Ben?”

  He breathed out hard and gazed out the window. “I’m with your brother on this. It’s within our means to help them. Even if it’s only to provide more manpower. And anyway, didn’t you like that girl?”

  I felt my cheeks become flushed. Ben’s eyebrow shot up. “Don’t make this harder than it is.”

  “I don’t get you, Johnny. You were the one who wanted to help Caitlin and Millie and you didn’t even know them. But this girl…” Dax continued.

  “I don’t know her,” I said.

  “But you liked her.”

  “Dax, don’t turn this into some way for you to get what you want.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “A war. Your own personal war.”

  “You think I want this? You think I like fighting?”

  “Don’t you?”

  He stared at me as if he was looking at a stranger.

  “Do you want them to die?”

  “Don’t go there, man.”

  “Well, that’s exactly what we’re talking about here.”

  “Of course I don’t want them to die but you heard Theo. Even after we risked our necks to bring two of his people back he tossed us out like garbage. And now he’s asking us for help. Fuck him!”

  “He’s not asking. Specs is. Do it for him.”

  I cast a glance out the window.

  “What is the problem here, Johnny?”

  I didn’t reply. I simply got up and walked out. I tossed over the rope and slid down to the ground. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to go back and help. As if we could even offer any help. If one hundred and fifty people couldn’t hold off the military, five guys and three kids weren’t going to offer much. It was a joke. This whole fucking existence was. Every choice we made had consequences. If we moved on or turned back… someone was bound to lose.

  I continued walking a short distance to a clearing that led up to a hill. The sun was beginning to peek over the horizon. A warm band of light painted the landscape, bringing color to what was smothered in darkness. There on the crest of the hill I looked out over a vast forest and valley.

  Jess, I wish you were here.

  She had a way with words that could bring things into perspective.

  I was torn by it all. Every choice I had made that led up to this point.
What I had felt for Danielle that I shouldn’t have. Leaving Specs behind even though he wanted to stay. Allowing that military guy to live. But more than anything it was just being struck with a feeling of wanting to run. To escape it all and having no idea why.

  As I stood there looking out I heard movement behind me. It was Benjamin. He came up beside me.

  “Beautiful, isn’t it?”

  We stared into the sun’s rays for a few minutes.

  “Yeah.”

  “Every time we went out as a unit in the city, I knew there was a chance I wouldn’t come back. Every time I kissed my wife, I knew I might not see her face again.” He breathed out hard, reached down, and picked a stone up. He tossed it in his hands before throwing it out.

  “How did you cope?”

  He breathed in deep. “I just told myself that if I died at least I died doing something for someone else.”

  “Very noble but what about your wife?”

  “She knew what she signed on for when she married me.”

  I shrugged. “But dying for strangers? You were willing to do that?”

  “We’re all strangers until we get to know each other, Johnny. Every person I met was someone’s son, daughter, husband, or wife. They might not have meant a lot to me but to someone else, they were their world. My wife didn’t like it.”

  “Then why did you keep going out there to help?”

  “Because it was my job.” He looked at me and snorted.

  “Come on. Police don’t get paid well.”

  “Honest answer? I’m not sure. I mean I know why some of the others did it. It was ego, a need to feel a sense of worth in the world, for others it was the hero mentality. They wanted to matter. To not just be another face in the crowd, a number or one whose existence hadn’t touched another’s life. But for me, it was different. I guess a slim part of me believed that I could change the world one life at a time. If that meant putting myself in the crosshairs of another, then that’s what I was prepared to do.”

  “Weren’t you afraid?”

  He chuckled a little. “Petrified most days.”

  We stood there in silence, letting the early morning sun pierce the darkest areas of the forest. At that time in the morning you could hear the sound of animals scurrying back into their holes.