Original Work First chapter of a post apocalypse/action/horror novel

Discussion in 'Survival Reading Room' started by RJB, Nov 27, 2020.


  1. RJB

    RJB Monkey+++

    I have the novel completed. I will post the follow up chapters regularly if you enjoy it.

    The Foreword is written by the fictional author.



    Mountain Warriors: Outcast. Book 1

    Foreword by Author Eric Hildebrande


    I started writing what you are about to read less than a year ago. This story has already been told, documented in film and audio. Whether that has been shared, I may never know. I only wrote this log down in the case the film was destroyed. To be honest, at first my desire was for fame and fortune as a journalist and documentarian. Now, my motivation is simply to make sure that this is written in the history books. I may be dead when this gets out. This writing may be the blunt and final epitaph on my tombstone that never was.

    On the surface, this should be a good read of survival, warrior arts, and practical living skills of a tribe surviving in the wasteland of the Forbidden Zone. However, after recently reading it over, I realize that I was a bit arrogant and not as mature ethically as I am now. Originally, I embarked to demonstrate how to survive in the woods in a post-apocalypse America. However, it was an education on learning to survive more inside myself. When facing the reality of death on a daily basis, what really matters in life becomes much clearer. The true terror is not with vampires, zombies, or another diseased variant of human and non-human remains in the terror of the wilderness, but rather what lies deep within us all. This may sound cliché, but I find that bears repeating to all and most especially to myself.











    Chapter 1


    I felt like exploding, but contrary to my feelings, I sat at the bar like an immobile lump. My life was going nowhere. I had just lost my job during the worst depression in history, literally of apocalyptic proportions. My girlfriend, or ex-girlfriend rather, was reported to be cheating on me with a friend of mine. Who that friend was, I had yet to identify through the rumor mill.

    With my little realm crashing down, I tried to focus on the big picture. The world in general was majorly screwed and a breach of the quarantine wall from The Forbidden Zone would turn the major screw into a total screw.

    I was a journalist. Big emphasis on “was.” I should have been on the front lines covering this tragedy of catastrophic proportions, but I didn’t know how, or even if, the new government would allow me to cover it. Martial law was the rule at the moment.

    Even in the smaller picture, I seemed to be having a major breakdown inside of me that coincided with global events. I was at that odd point in my life when you realize that all the dreams of hitting it big from your teens and twenties can evaporate into drudgery until death. I either had to do something, anything now, or just accept nothing for the rest of my life.

    I was in a dive bar in Northern Virginia, just outside of Washington DC, but close enough to still have the big city vibe. The establishment was a dump as most places had become. Colorful, cheap plastic décor attempted to give a feeling of high life but failed abysmally. Especially since the cheap decorative material aged quicker than a bar hag’s face. The Powers That Be guilted us into doing away with the disposable lifestyle for the sake of the environment, but instead of doing away with disposable products, they convinced us that low quality crap was reusable, indefinitely.

    Speaking of crap, I was drinking what now passed as beer after it all went down. I drained the last warm remains of my fifth, sixth, hell, and maybe even seventh reusable plastic bottle of swill and ordered another. It was a good night when you couldn’t even remember the amount of pollution that you subjected your body to. However many it was, I needed another. The earlier drinks did nothing to ease what frustrations stirred deep inside of me. Where the brew lacked flavor, they over-compensated by adding distilled spirits therefore making a very potent beer.

    I took a drink of my new beer. It was ice cold, so I could hardly taste it. Glaring at the TV, I actually startled myself as I suddenly blurted to the world, “This is all just a bunch of crap!”

    Although my inner longings weren’t stifled by the beer, my powers of reason and restraint were definitely impacted to a high degree.

    “Shut up, man!” Tommy ordered from the seat beside me. He raised an open hand at me like a traffic cop ordering a line of cars to halt, but his eyes stayed locked on the TV screen above the bar.

    I tended to avoid watching anything put out by the mainstream media. My dislike was based on a combination of fear of being influenced by the garbage and possibly a bit of jealousy. A jealousy because all the glory they achieved should be my own. Anybody could pump out the crap that passed for entertainment. Why couldn’t I? However, this show was Tommy’s baby. In fact, the show had started with a pre-recorded segment of him introducing the new episode in a faux-professional voice. I thought it looked forced, but everyone else seemed to believe that he was genuinely concerned for those in the outlands. In fairness to Tommy, my cynicism may have been due to my over familiarity with him through the years.

    Tommy was in the circle of friends that I had grown with, and I knew I would most likely continue to cling to this friendship because there seemed to be nothing else. However, Tommy was by far the most successful person that I knew other than my Uncle Daniel Hildebrande, the current Governor of this FEMA section, of course. He answered to no one.

    I shot back at Tommy, “Dude, why should I shut up? The drones don’t pick up any sounds.” I protested the obvious, but the other patrons glared at me. I then mumbled weakly, “You can’t hear anything, anyway.”

    The people surrounding me were all professionals. They wore gaudily colorful suits made of material that would have passed as extravagant burlap sacks in “the before.” Everything these days was a show to pretend that life didn’t suck.

    At present, the patrons ignored me and went back to the mass hypnosis that the TV screen had induced. They were watching live drone footage taken from inside the Forbidden Zone. The national networks had just begun to experiment on a new angle of entertainment. To fund the defense of the quarantined Southeast FEMA Corridor and possibly a nefarious black budget of secret experimentations, they were using security drones to film the inhabitants in their daily lives and profiting from the entertainment value that was live streamed on national television. It could be something as mundane as watching a woman start a fire using a bow and drill to something as catastrophic as watching a zombie horde destroy an entire settlement. As the FEMA Director of Intelligence Gathering, this was Tommy’s baby. He was on the cusp of a combination of media stardom, great wealth, and a higher position in government. The dreamed of trifecta.

    I should have been happy for my friend. Instead, I looked up at the screen, angry that journalism seemed to be replaced by drones, much like the factory worker was once angered by the robots that replaced him in the auto plants, but who would be crazy enough to willingly go into the quarantined zone? That was strictly a one-way ticket, both figuratively and literally.

    I put aside my anger as I looked to the TV. This episode of drone footage actually caught my attention. Really, it was the people themselves in the film who caught my attention. You couldn’t help but feel the passion in the grim determination and hope on the faces of the refugees getting filmed. Four people trekked a trail in the high Southern Appalachian Mountains. They had a definite vibe of being a family. It was led by a man with ragged clothes, a huge pack on his back, longish hair and a short beard. Although exhausted, his eyes were ever vigilant. Two weary children followed him. Bringing up the rear was a worn out looking woman carrying a baby. Despite her unkempt appearance, I could see that she was a very beautiful woman. Oddly, I found myself falling for her. Her eyes were so expressive. The journalist in me desired to know her story.

    Everyone in the family except the baby had multiple weapons on them. I guessed there was probably a small knife concealed in the baby’s wrappings as well for the mother to grab if needed.

    The father had a battered M-16 looking gun that hung on his shoulder, probably something cobbled together during their two years in the post apocalypse world, a handgun at his hip and two swords strapped to his belt. The wife and children seemed to keep their weapons and valuables more concealed. Although from prior experiences in warzones, I could see the bulges of the concealed weapons in strategic places like the waist and under the shoulders. I had the feeling that the man wanted himself to be the target as added protection for his family.

    As much as the lady with the deep eyes captured my attention, I still desired to stick to my guns as the cynic in the room. “Big deal,” I said. “Some survivors are taking a hike.”

    “Quiet!”

    “Shut up.”

    A few random voices scolded. I didn’t bother to look at them as I sat with my arms folded across my chest.

    I watched the screen as the father looked up and ahead, and stopped. He held up his hand, signaling his family to halt.

    Tommy pointed up to the screen and spoke in a tone like he was mocking his own TV voice. “The dude senses something awry. He knows it’s someone or something else. Robbers? Zombies?”

    “Yeah. This is about to get good,” someone behind me said. I could hear the speaker’s feet stepping nearer to the TV to get a better view. Unfortunately, I could also smell his BO covered by even more offensive cheap cologne. I noticed that when people picked a bad cologne they wore it heavier than someone with a decent type, and they were always the first to violate the social distancing ordinances of the quarantine.

    “You deserve a Captain Obvious award,” I said. I was tempted to say something about social distancing to avoid the spread of disease. I mean, I social distanced before it was cool, but these days it was seen as a geeky admonition.

    “Quiet,” someone hissed at me again.

    I smiled at the annoyance that I caused.

    A chill took hold of me. “Holy crap!” I exclaimed as I saw six cloaked and hooded figures in black in the far background on the television. They stood on the hill above as if waiting to observe the coming fight. “What the hell are those people?” No one else seemed aware of them, not even the vigilant father on the screen. “Are those the vampires that we’ve been hearing about?”

    No one answered.

    One of the vampires had a willowy figure, a woman. Despite the almost palpable aura of evil in the group, there was something attractive about her. I could almost see the depths of her dark eyes in the cavern formed by her hood. Despite the foreboding, there was something about her that grabbed me. Maybe as a vampire, she was the ultimate bad girl.

    In my drunkenness, I literally slapped myself. With the issues with my current girlfriend, I found myself falling for anything with a skirt.

    “Who are they?” I asked.

    “Quiet!” someone yelled. I looked around but no one else seemed to notice the vampires or care.

    On screen, the father directed his family to hide in a bushy stand of rhododendrons. In the winter landscape, it was the only tree with concealing foliage on the mountain. The father glared at the drone and flipped it (and us, the viewers) the finger. He dropped his large backpack and then boldly stepped forward on the trail as if he were alone.

    He was instantly met by four men. The father pretended to be shocked by the chance encounter. The four men appeared to be genuinely surprised. Although we couldn’t hear the words, it was obvious the four strangers were belligerent and by their motions were interested in the father’s backpack.

    The father kept talking, trying to calm the men. His hands were palms down, and he moved them in a relaxed manner as the four men circled and closed in. The father seemed reasonably calm despite the situation. However, I could tell that talking his way out was a losing battle. He seemed to realize this as an odd smirk spread across his face in acceptance of his fate.

    As the men drew closer, he suddenly drew two katanas, thrusting his chest boldly forward with the action, holding both swords at his side. The points aimed at the sky as if challenging the very gods above him. His eyes glowed fiercely at the challenge. The smirk left his face as his grim lips formed a thin line.

    The robbers instantly responded by drawing their own blades. One of the father’s swords blocked a slash from one of the robbers. The other sword sliced through another robber’s throat.

    The three remaining would-be bandits backed up fearfully for a moment as their comrade fell to his knees, slowly choking on his own blood. Then they slowly advanced with their own weapons, swords and machetes, and returned the father’s determined look.

    “He’s screwed,” I said.

    “I’ve seen him fight before. I think he stands a good chance,” said Tommy.

    “Yeah, he’s good,” the man with the BO and bad cologne agreed. He spoke right in my face, and I added bad breath to his list of offences, but I otherwise ignored him. The plight of the small family had my full attention now.

    “Why doesn’t he draw that gun at his hip?” I wondered aloud. Why didn’t they all draw their firearms, I wondered to myself.

    “Who cares?”

    “Just watch!”

    I was so drawn into the fight unfolding that I barely heard the few people who scolded me again.

    The father was indeed quite the warrior. He didn’t wait for the attack, but instead launched himself at the three men. His swords windmilled effortlessly. It was a continuous movement. One sword attacked as the other one retracted over his head to protect him like a roof from the rain of the robber’s strikes and slashes, or his sword went to protect his side, and then the sword that protected swung forward to attack while the other withdrew back to protect. Every stab, slash and parry was so coordinated that his swords never banged into each other. His skill was beyond impressive.

    Every Sunday, my hobby was to sword fight in the park with padded swords. I thought some of us were really good, but this guy would devastate us, all of us at once. He had less fear advancing into the razor sharp cyclone than I had when advancing against people armed with something that resembled a pillow more than a lethal weapon.

    The father actually seemed to be winning.

    After about a minute, the father kicked out one of the bandit’s knees. The robber dropped to the ground and didn’t get back up. I was sure the leg was broken by the way he crawled to get away from the combat and from the pain registering on his face. His mouth opened in a silent scream and then closed in a twisted snarl. The other two bandits looked unsure for a moment but kept up the attack. It was so intense that even I would have scolded anyone in the bar who spoke up as I had done earlier.

    Suddenly, the wife and the children broke from the hiding place. The mother held the baby in one arm and a machete in the other. The two children also had long knives in their hands. The two remaining bandits leered at the mother as the father scolded his family for breaking cover. Of course, I couldn’t hear the exact words, but it was very obvious the jist of what was exchanged.

    However, the woman and the children did not fight the bandits, but unexpectedly ran between the combatants.

    “What the hell are they doing?” yelled one of the bar patrons.

    Tommy grinned as he said, “Just watch.” Despite the video being live, Tommy could read their reactions like a palm reader. I could only imagine the hours he spent in a darkened room as a voyeur of the Forbidden Zone.

    The father and the two remaining bandits looked past the hiding place where the woman and children came. Terror registered on the faces of the combatants as they formed a circle facing outward with the children protected in the center. Suddenly, the former foes now seemed to be allies.

    “Oh crap,” someone in the bar muttered.

    I swore as well as a horde of zombies approached the survivors. These weren’t the typical shambling things from the old movies. These could actually shamble in a full sprint if they weren’t too rotted. I watched the zombies pour around the six hooded vampires like a river flows around a boulder. I almost swore that the eyes of the beautiful female vamp saw through my soul through the drone camera, but that thought seemed insane. I recalled a news story of a schizophrenic patient who was charged with stalking a news reporter. He thought she was talking to him personally through his TV. I chalked my feelings up to drunken fantasy.

    Some of the zombies immediately descended their slavering teeth on the men with the broken knee and the slit throat. I could almost hear the cries of pain from the men in the silent video feed. The close ups of the zombies terrified me. It wasn’t their rotting flesh or anything else that was ghastly of course, but rather the inhuman hunger in their eyes. They were dead to any intelligent or cogent thoughts. Cats, dogs, cows, even snakes have more humanity in their eyes. With the zombies, there was just a fire for the desire to feed on live human flesh.

    I was distantly aware of a chorus of reverential swearing from the bar around me.

    On the screen, the husband, wife and two bandits put up an awesome fight, but they were so outnumbered.

    “Come on, zombies! Get you some brains!” a patron in the back shouted through a laugh.

    “That’s messed up, man!” someone admonished.

    The zombie fan retorted, “The sooner the zombies wipe out that scum and starve, the sooner the quarantined area will reopen.”

    There was some truth to that and the room quietly watched as another bandit was overwhelmed by zombies, dropped, and was devoured.

    The two children cowered as the mother and baby, the father, and the remaining bandit tightened the circle and valiantly fought on as if they had always been a team. The remaining bandit was a very muscular man with a shaved head and a wickedly long thrice braided beard. He was actually a pretty good sword fighter. He would have been an even match for the long haired father in one on one combat. He used both edges of his broadsword expertly. Where the father took out the zombie with one swing of each blade, the bald bandit sliced through two or three zombies with each mighty swing. I was surprised to see the bandit nudge a child to safety behind him as he continued to fight. The way the father and the bandit were now allies reminded me of how my cousins and I would fight each other viciously as kids, but we’d ban together as a team against any outsider who harassed us.

    The mother used her machete one handedly and I hate to admit, but even with a baby in her hand, she would have easily whooped my butt and I had considered myself a pretty decent martial artist in the past.

    Despite the skill of the fighters, it was a losing battle. The drone moved in for a close up of the father’s face. In the middle of the fight, the man’s glare seemed to pierce me. The raw determination struck me to my heart. I could read his lips as he yelled, “Duck,” to the remaining survivors. That was the last I saw of him on that video clip; that determination despite standing before unavoidable death.

    The father drew and aimed his handgun at the drone.

    A chorus of angry curses erupted through the bar as the gunshot cut the video off.

    The video instantly switched over to footage from another random drone. The camera showed a stupid looking person on the video. He stood, dully looking over a creek as he picked his nose.

    The nose picker looked listlessly at the camera and flicked the booger. It landed and adhered to the lens showing a blurry footage. The drone moved erratically as if trying to figure out the sudden half blindness.

    Everyone took their eyes off the screen. The real show was over.

    “Why did he take time from a losing battle to shoot the drone?” I asked.

    Tommy was furious and growled, “I would like to know that answer, too. They, especially that clown, keep ruining my drones. Especially whenever the footage starts getting good.”

    I was all questions. This really stirred up the journalist in me again. I felt like I was young and about to graduate from journalism school. I somehow, suddenly, found the same passion that I lost years ago. “And why didn’t he shoot sooner? I mean, you don’t bring a knife to a gunfight, right?”

    No one answered. I really wanted to know why. The people around me had their visual meal. For me, it was just a cruel appetizer. It seemed that as a country, we had had one appetizer after another ever since this all went down, but no main course. The answers always seemed to be just around the corner, but each corner led to another wall with no answers. I could no longer rest, or I felt that I would truly spontaneously explode.
     
    Last edited: Nov 27, 2020
  2. mysterymet

    mysterymet Monkey+++

    Seems pretty interesting so far. The vampires and zombies are a bit confusing.
     
    RJB likes this.
  3. RJB

    RJB Monkey+++

    Thanks. I will post the whole novel. It will make sense by the end. The second chapter will be up in a few days.
     
    Dark Wolf likes this.
  4. RJB

    RJB Monkey+++

    Here is chapter 2 of Outcast book 1 from the Mountain Warriors series by R.J. Burle (me)


    CHAPTER 2



    If you asked most people, they would say that the world ended two years ago when the dead began to walk. More correctly, when those who looked like they were dead began to walk, and not just walk, but eat those who still lived.

    The governments of the world cordoned off great swaths of land to quarantine areas that were ruled by these zombie-like things. They curiously called the areas the “Forbidden Zones” as if they were trying to draw upon archaically hidden and dark fears that drew off of superstitious dread and religious taboos. In the before, I never would have guessed such hyperbolic language would be taken seriously in the modern age, but now, times really were that rank. Vast areas of agricultural importance, areas with minerals and oil fields, and areas that supplied what we thought were the necessities of life were off limits with the threat of instant death either from literal monsters, paranoid survivors, or government enforcers. Conspiracy theories served as news, propaganda as truth, and vice versa depending upon who you asked. No one trusted anyone, but everyone thought they had the truth. No one person who claimed to hold the truth agreed with another, and many people believed that that was done on purpose.

    That was the game outside of the Forbidden Zone. Inside, the game was simply survival against every monstrosity imaginable from actual zombies to starvation. It was rumored that the population inside the quarantine area had been annihilated by 90% in the two years of the plague.

    One the other hand, for many in the safe zone, the end of the world meant no longer getting cream in your coffee regularly. Most of the time it was coffee stretched out with roasted dandelion or chicory root. That was actually my only claim to fame. I did an undercover investigation into the one remaining coffee corporation. It was cutting ground coffee beans with dandelion root. I almost faced a lynch mob. People were so pissed at my reporting because it caused the cost of coffee to spike, by 85%. Did anyone wonder if that was because their coffee was 85% something else? No! They preferred coffee, no matter how diluted, at a price they could afford.

    Even worse, I caught heat from my uncle and adopted father, the governor. With the same last name, the fire from both his constituents and the corporation that cut and sold the weakened coffee caused him to sink in the polls. To see all my work paid off in scorn still stung me.

    We also dealt with regular rolling blackouts, leaving us without electricity for an hour or two-- that was the “tragedy” of modern life. It made me laugh out loud thinking about that as a tragedy in retrospect, but the government tried hardest not to ensure food, transportation, energy, and other essentials were in supply, but to ensure continuous streams of entertainment to forget that life was horrible.

    Oddly, an entertainment shortage was the only thing to make the populace riot. While everyone’s lifestyle went to hell, we were still entertained by two very different styles of shows. One was the countless reality shows of celebrities living it up like people did in the before. These were as vapid as ever, but I guess it gave people hope that a return to easier times was achievable, if we just kept faith in the authorities.

    The other type of entertainment was the experimental drone footage of the FEMA quarantined zones. Tommy was attempting to combine his government connections with his natural showmanship to catapult himself as some Media Entertainment Governmental Complex celebrity. That may sound like a conflict of interest, but at that time, government officials not only had unlimited powers, but if they could keep the populace entertained and content enough not to riot, they had pretty much free reign to do anything. The populace, though on edge, was extremely forgiving if offered a treat.


    * * *



    As the bar went back to scattered conversation, Tommy turned to me and said, “It sucks they can’t do something like a documentary in that area. You know, like Survivor Man. Where they film people, you know, surviving. It would make some more bucks than this venture.”

    He gestured to the drone footage on the TV screen. Now, someone on the screen was petting a feral looking dog. Both animal and man shared the same hangdog face of living right on the edge, but there was a friendship between the two. I was expecting the person to get bitten or something, but nothing dramatic happened. I mean, neither the dog nor man looked inclined to such violence, but to make it on TV something inside of me expected such drama and Tommy knew it.

    “Why can’t we do that?” I asked. It wasn’t a rhetorical question. “Why can’t someone go in and document the life? I mean, the drone footage is missing the human touch that only an interview could give.”

    Tommy looked at me as if I had been bitten by those zombie things and laughed. “Are you nuts? Who the heck is stupid enough to sneak into that hell hole? Anyone who tries to return from the Forbidden Zone would be shot on sight and incinerated, even if they did survive the horrors. Hell, you know that.”

    “That’s what a good journalist does. That’s what someone with a vision and balls will risk,” I answered without considering what I was saying. I felt totally sober. The alcohol could not stem the flow of my thoughts, my goals and dreams.

    “Again,” Tommy snorted with cynical laughter, “Who the heck is that crazy?” He paused and asked skeptically, “You?”

    He looked into my eyes as if reading my thoughts and laughed a full belly laugh. “Dude, you wouldn’t last. You are a total wuss. You dropped out of journalism school before going back and finishing! Even when you tried to freelance it in the Middle East and South American war zones you flaked out and had to call your uncle to pull some strings to bail you out of there multiple times.”

    I remained silent as those old wounds were ripped open. I had been athletic, studious and ambitious. It was just in the last year, I succumbed to alcoholic decadence.

    Tommy laughed again. This time it was more sober, like a snort when someone finally figures out an answer to a long standing problem. It was an answer that sat right in front of your face like a stubborn drunk at a bar who refuses to leave at closing time.

    “What?” I asked.

    “Your eyes,” he said looking into my soul.

    “What about them?” I pressed.

    Tommy held his thumb and forefinger in a rectangle and looked at me as if viewing me on a silver screen. He smiled quizzically at me and said like a TV producer, “You look both as determined and as crazy as that father when he shot out the drone.”




    * * *




    As I stumbled out of the bar, I felt the alcohol weighing heavily on my body. In a way, when leaving a bar, I sometimes felt like I was beer itself being poured out of the building. Tonight, my legs had a hard time keeping up with the intoxicated energy of my mind as I poured into the street with the flowing crowd. However, the heaviness did not weigh down my thoughts. I felt like an eighteen-year-old again in my drunkenness. I felt alive. Drinking had made me feel that way for a few months as a teen, then it became a drudgery of numbness where I chased that energy to no avail. Suddenly, I wanted nothing to do with alcohol or anything else to numb me. I wanted to experience life to the fullest. I drunkenly vowed off alcohol forever.

    I wanted to be somebody!

    Tommy and I flowed with the mob of pedestrians heading out at the mandated closing time. The streets and sidewalks alike were packed with herds of partiers, ignoring the recommended social distancing. No one, except those with immense power, had operating cars these days. The only cars to be seen were abandoned and looted wrecks on the side of the road. Most buildings that towered over the people had shattered windows that would probably never be replaced.

    Signs that warned of martial law had faded to the point of being barely legible. The list of rules was forgotten, other than not doing something stupid and standing out to the paramilitary police. You did not want them to notice you in any way. I shook my head as I saw some protesters who had odd qualities of both the hippie and punk cultures. They stood ahead of us carrying signs that said, “Free the Forbidden Zone!” and “The Outlanders are our kindred!” I understood, and in a way respected their love for others, but they needed to accept reality. As long as the virus ravaged the quarantined area, it would stay quarantined. I hated to sound callous, but that was the reality.

    People were now heading home or to private (illegal) after hours clubs. Their feet crunching on shattered glass that littered all the sidewalks.

    Occasionally people would come up and congratulate my friend Tommy. He was definitely a rising star, which only fueled my own desire to shoot through the sky.

    “Dude! I can do it! I can!” I slurred loudly in Tommy’s ear while we walked down the sidewalk. I stumbled and held onto his shoulder for support. I knew I looked like a typical idiot drunk, but I could not let this go. I feared waking up sober, forgetting this drive in me, and continuing to live simply and meaninglessly until I died.

    Tommy stopped, righted me so that I stood straight and brushed his shoulder like my drunken stupidity might leave a stain on his nice suit.

    He frowned, looked me over and simply said, “You are drunk.”

    That triggered something in me. He wasn’t taking me seriously. As we walked to his government issued Lexus, I kept spilling out how much money I could make him as a journalist on the inside.

    He kept brushing it off and rubbing my face in every past failure. It was infuriating me. It made my resolve all the more concrete.

    I caught the glimmer of humor in his eyes and realized that he was intentionally provoking me. Tommy didn’t just rise up in politics and entertainment without knowing how to evoke passion from people. Just what he was up to didn’t dawn on me until later, but then it was too late.

    Tommy stopped walking and grabbed both of my shoulders with his hands and looked me in the eyes. “Only someone with passion and resolve could pull something like this off,” he challenged. “You have neither.”

    I returned his stance and grabbed both of his shoulders with my hands and glared right back at him. “Dude! That’s the old me. I gotta do this. This is my last shot at something.” Inside, I cringed as I could feel my head bobbing with unsteady intoxication.

    I let go of him and cursed loudly at my drunkenness. I screamed my frustration to the night. I wanted to be taken seriously.

    The late night mob stopped moving around us and looked at us. I noticed two police officers in their black paramilitary fatigues glaring at me. Their grip tightened on their sleek, black assault rifles.

    “He’s fine, he’s fine,” Tommy called out. “He’s just had a bit too much of a good time.”

    “The hell I am! I’m not drunk. You’re not listening to me.” I gave Tommy a rough shove.

    Before I could yell or do anything stupid, the cops descended on me like attack dogs. Each one had a hold of both of my arms before I realized the trouble that I was in. I was going to get hauled away. We were in an extended period of martial law after all. They were supposed to keep the peace at all cost, and they were allowed to paradoxically use any brutality to enforce it.

    I looked at their rifles dangling from their straps. I tried to remember some rifle disarms that I had half-assed learned in a martial arts class. Tommy could see the wild spark in my eyes. The look he gave me stifled any stupid attempt to escape.

    Tommy stepped forward.

    One of the police officers let go of me and pointed his rifle at Tommy and barked, “Step back, or you’ll join him.”

    “Gentlemen, gentlemen,” Tommy said calmly as he showed a badge that seemed to magically appear in his outstretched hand. I later found out that Tommy had rigged a contraption up his sleeve so his badge would slip into his hand when he activated a solenoid. Reaching for your ID too quickly could earn you a bullet from a spastic trigger finger protected by qualified immunity, and badges spoke much louder than words.

    The police seemed hypnotized for a moment. The pointed assault rifles drooped as if suffering from erectile dysfunction. Tommy’s badge was just short of gaudy for the high ranking. Had it not been for the fear it invoked, the overly ornate gold trim and a rainbow of colors actually may have been considered over the top.

    They reluctantly let go of me, but I wasn’t free yet.

    One officer read the badge as the other one said, “Sir. We already tapped the emergency buttons on our trans-coms. We have to bring someone in when the reinforcements arrive. A false alarm can get us in trouble.”

    The officer reading it said, “Oh my God! This is Thomas Laurens the Director of…” The officer’s lips quit moving. He looked at Tommy like he couldn’t believe that he was actually there. Like he was seeing some avatar of a god instead.

    “That’s Senior Director Laurens,” Tommy corrected with a friendly smile that didn’t conceal his smugness.

    The officer stammered slightly as he said, “Of course, sir. I love your work. I’m your biggest fan.”

    No one noticed me, so I rolled my eyes.

    The second one swore and then blurted, “That’s a cool device you have, sir, with the mechanism that puts the badge in your hand like that.” The look in their eyes was a mix of fear and the kind of excitement you get when meeting a celebrity. I desired this respect even more as I watched.

    “For safety purposes, I find the badge says more than words,” Tommy said.

    The second one nodded anxiously, “Yeah, we accidentally shot some guy last week--”

    The first cop interrupted with a rumbling clearing of his throat and a glare at his partner. He then said, “Sir, the distress call for reinforcements…”

    Tommy shrugged and held his palms upward as he reasonably explained, “I’m sure you men could find someone else causing trouble to warrant that call.”

    They nodded. We all wished each other a good evening. The police officers quickly stormed over to the protesters carrying the signs of love for those trapped in the Forbidden Zone. I looked away as I experienced a bout of guilt, not just because of what would happen to the protesters, but guilt that I was more relieved that it wasn’t me this time. I heard the scuffle and protest. Then I heard a few cries with crashing blows and the protesters were silent as the crowd quickly looked away as if it never happened.

    I was a little confused. Tommy usually let me get arrested and bailed me out the next day when I did something stupid. That way he’d have a good story to tell on our next occasion out on the town. This went back to our grade school days. I wasn’t just a class clown; I was the lead class clown. If there was something crazy to be done that would bring the entire class to laughter, I was the one everybody, especially Tommy, dared. However, I let it go. Everybody changes, gets better with time, including Tommy. Me on the other hand, I seemed to get worse, but not tonight. I was devoted to making a change.

    We walked past a block of buildings without a single window that wasn’t busted out. I hated the sound of glass crunching under my worn out shoes. In the past, shattered glass was quickly swept up. The glass under my shoes had probably been there for more than a year and would probably still be there until a strong enough storm washed it all down the sewer drain.

    When we were far enough from the cops, I started up again, a little calmer.

    “Hey, man. I’m serious,” I said when we turned a corner on the street.

    “I know you are, Eric, in this moment.” He raised a hand before I could protest my sobriety. “If you’re still serious when you can’t crawl out of your hangover bed tomorrow, I will believe you.” He shook his head as I still wanted to protest. He pointed a scolding finger in my face, “Uh uh. Tomorrow.”

    “Oh alright. Hey, let’s hit The Underground.” I said mentioning our favorite after hours joint. I pointed at my cell phone. I had checked the messages for the twentieth time since almost going to jail. “Jennifer still won’t return my phone call tonight. I’ve heard rumors she’s seeing someone on the side. When I confronted her, she neither confirmed nor denied it. She said it was just a friend.”

    He looked off in the distance and asked, “How did she neither confirm or deny, but claimed it was a friend of yours at the same time? What were her exact words?”

    “I can’t explain. You know women…”

    “That can’t be true, that she’s seeing a friend of yours,” Tommy consoled.

    “Really?” I asked optimistically.

    “Of course. You don’t have any friends.”

    “Go to hell,” I said laughing.

    “It may be best. You wouldn’t want to get arrested again?”

    “What for,” I asked, but already knowing his worn out answer.

    “For dating out of your league. She is too good looking for you, man,” he laughed.

    “Yeah, yeah. So what about the Underground?” I asked, not yet ready to go home. Not yet ready to face the fact that my girlfriend wasn’t going to return my phone calls this evening or rather, this morning. I remembered my swearing off booze just a few minutes ago, and here I was wanting to go to another club. I was already drunk. I could follow through tomorrow when I was sober.

    Tommy stopped walking, and I realized we had arrived at his car. I looked at the emblem of his office. It resembled the Presidential Seal except instead of a bald eagle there was a drone with four rotor blades. Without the emblem on the doors, thieves would have stolen, picked it apart, or at least vandalized the Lexus.

    Tommy seemed to consider his response. He finally said, with eyes still in the distance, “I’d like to go to the Underground, but I can’t. I—“ he hesitated as he unlocked the car.

    “Got a date with a good looking woman?” I asked, nudging him with my elbow.

    “You could say that,” he said as he climbed into the driver’s seat.

    “Then you say it,” I goaded.

    “I have a late night date with a very good looking woman,” Tommy said. He slammed the door in my face and drove away before I could ask for a lift to The Underground.

    Instead of heading to the club, I turned, and headed home. It was for the best that I got a good night’s sleep and avoided The Underground. My mind was still running at full speed. My dreams, goals, and ambitions were alive, almost screaming from the grave for vengeance against the years that I had neglected them. However, I realized, the first thing I had to do was go home, get a good night’s sleep, and sober up. I actually jogged to get home faster.

    I had never been afraid of the late night in the city before, but for some reason I felt that vampire woman had marked me from the TV screen. She watched me from every broken window of every blighted building. I rushed home along the darkened streets as if chased by the hound of insanity rather than actual hounds from hell. I desired nothing more than to wake into the daylight when the looming dark objects of the night made sense.
     
    Srchdawg-again and Dark Wolf like this.
  5. RJB

    RJB Monkey+++

    Here's chapter 3.


    CHAPTER 3


    I woke up at dawn and was out of bed within moments of opening my eyes. In the past, I had never had a dream on a drunken night. I usually sleep like the dead until it is time to rise. That night however, I was plagued by the demons.

    I was tempted to use a literary device to describe my dream so that the reader would have thought that I was describing a harsh reality, and then once drawn in, only then I would reveal to the reader that it was indeed a dream. However, I decided against that because this is supposed to be a documentary and I thought that would dishonestly yank at emotion, but also, I think it would take away from the actual horror that I felt in the experience.

    At first, my dreams had flashed through the night as a collage of scenes from the drone footage. The mother carrying the child. The determination of the father. The terror on the faces of the children. The nobleness of the bandit to turn into a protector of the children. The slavering mouths of the undead. Their horribly fiery eyes. The belligerence of the robbers. The somber vampire figures who sullenly watched.

    The dream then became very real. I walked through the dense woods with a sword in hand. I was in the Appalachian Mountains. The day was cold, misty, and dreary. The ground beneath my boots was spongy with water.

    I experienced things like the weight of the sword as if they were real. Other things felt real although I had never felt them in the past. I felt confident that the refugee family led by the swordsman father actually survived. Yet I knew of no way they could have survived. I desired certainty to that dreamed knowledge.

    The odd quality of this part of the dream was that the influence seemed to come from outside my head. In a typical dream, I might be a participant, but it felt like a movie, my movie projected on a screen in my head. Everything was from within me, whether conscious or subconscious. No matter how weird the story was, I knew that it was written by my subconscious no matter how deeply buried from my mind’s awareness.

    I know this all sounds odd, but in this sequence, I felt an outside presence imposing its thoughts, will, and very being into my dream and subsequently onto myself. It was not quite like a demon possessing the mind, but that is the closest I can describe it.

    In the dream I stood in a darkened forest, in the high mountains, sunk deep into a cove. The sun had suddenly set. A drizzly rain misted. It was like I stood in the actual cloud. A ringed rock formation surrounded me almost like an amphitheater. The ground was marshy, but my feet floated above the water and the spongy mud beneath.

    I then saw the female vampire. Armed with a slender and ornate sword, she walked in my general direction, but didn’t look at me. I was an invisible and untouchable observer. She was also too enthralled with the forest around her to even suspect me. She was as at peace as a vampire could be. Her deep eyes looked over the woods with the fearless gaze of the ultimate apex predator. They were the eyes of a sleek feline, eyes designed to see in the dark.

    Her beauty dazzled me. Her hood was folded back over the shoulders of her cloak. Her lustrous dark hair flowed over her shoulders. I watched her like I was a ghost who was confident of his ethereal presence. My excitement built as she neared. The feelings were simultaneously both fearful and sensual, and I was safe from her. She was no more aware of me watching her than she could have been aware that I saw her from the drone footage.

    She walked closer, and I could have reached out and touched her were I in solid form. I could smell the sweetness of her pheromones. So faint, yet bold enough that I wished to bury my face in her hair and breathe deeply.

    The forest slowly changed. I was back in my bedroom. She walked past my bed. I desired her, and I wished to take solid form.

    She opened her red, kissable lips and seemed to talk to herself as she said, “This is no place for you…”

    I felt terror strike me. I struggled to move, but I was suddenly held down by an unfathomable weight. I helplessly watched as she turned and looked straight into my eyes. She saw me and could kill me. Frozen, I couldn’t move. Beneath the beauty I could see the evil spirit lurking in her eyes. I suspected it was the same spirit that caused this very dream.

    “…Eric. You must not come here.”

    The weight was suddenly removed from me, and I shot bolt upright in my bed. I swore as I sat alone in my blankets. In the stillness, my breathing sounded like heavy equipment laboring. I instinctively looked around my studio apartment for the vampiress. I could have sworn she was there. With what had to be my imagination, I could faintly smell her, but I was alone with my terror.

    I had only been asleep for an hour. It was a long way until sunrise.

    I took a sleeping pill and a melatonin. I struggled back to sleep, but she kept taunting, smiling in my face, rousing me from my sleep. In the throes of the dreams, I couldn’t pin my emotion for her: Fear? Arousal? It was like feeling all of my emotions at once. Despite her warnings and taunts, I could not let go of her pull. I had to see what was at the end of the metaphorical string that she had tied to me. Ironically, I felt a pang of guilt for spending energy on the vampire woman. Jennifer and I weren’t officially broken up, yet.

    Somehow, once awake and seeing daylight stream through the window, her image in my mind disappeared like a moon shadow in the harsh light of the summer’s morning sun. With the morning sunlight, the passions for the vampiress were displaced by the curiosity of the plight of the family.

    It was wishful thinking that dominated me. Despite the odds, I was sure that the father and mother had secured their family. They had too much fire in their eyes to die. If people with that spirit to live could succumb to death, who could survive? Their fight culminated in my own desire to fulfill my own destiny. If they could survive, I could too.

    I stood from my bed and folded it up into a couch. The strewn sheets and blankets poked out. I didn’t care. It matched the clothes, books and other objects that were scattered over the limited floor space. You’d think in a small studio apartment, I would try any trick in the book for more space, but the foldaway bed was the only effort I made. The studio was supposed to be temporary, but in the past few years it became home, and I resented it. In that time, I lived in that apartment like I would leave permanently any day.

    I felt like I walked through a cobwebby fog to the kitchenette. I was still a bit drunk from the booze and woozy from the sleeping aids. The hangover was still a little ways off, and I was hoping to beat it. I didn’t have time for that crap today. Before sleeping the night before, I practically drowned myself in water in an attempt to rehydrate myself past the hangover. I probably drank over a half gallon and stopped just before the gag effect threatened to kick in.

    I made some coffee with a stash of real bean, the full strength, that I saved for special occasions. This was legitimate coffee, uncut by roasted dandelions, other weeds, or chemicals. It was a valuable rarity. The special occasion I had originally had in mind was to impress a date. However, I needed the pure octane of caffeine today. It worked. Halfway through the first cup I felt like the sun’s beams had pieced through an alcoholic dense fog. By the last drop, the fog was burned away. The path before me was clear.

    I quickly got dressed to face whatever task was ahead. I then paced my studio apartment until it was seven o’clock. At that point, I was sure that Tommy was awake. He had remained relatively sober the night before. He derived more pleasure watching me make an ass of myself than indulging himself. Today however was a new day, and I was a new me. I would not drink again, ever.

    I dialed his number and he answered the phone slow and tired, “Yeah?” His voice dragged that word as if it had three syllables.

    I couldn’t help but laugh. “Hey buddy! It’s me!” I shouted with excess enthusiasm to mock his sleepiness.

    “What the...? Eric?” Tommy mumbled. I heard him fumbling as if looking for the clock to see what time it was.

    “Your phone has the time on it,” I said.

    “Yeah,” he answered with irritation. “What the hell do you want?”

    “Remember what we talked about last night? You said to call you first thing if I was still serious! Here I am! Wide awake and serious!” I said with a laugh.

    “Damn you. I was sleeping. Hell you should be comatose after the way you polluted your bloodstream last night,” he laughed sleepily.

    I heard a woman moan sleepily next to him. I couldn’t hear the words, but from the fluctuations of the tone, it sounded like she hummed a question. I heard some fumbling as if he placed a hand over the receiver and scolded her.

    “Um,” he started to say to me.

    “Is that Jennifer, next to you?” I asked jokingly, but it did sound like her.

    He seemed to hesitate just long enough so I wasn’t sure whether he actually hesitated or was just too sleepy to reply quickly and then answered, “Hell no.”

    “Just joking,” I said, although a suspicion tickled an area of my brain that I couldn’t scratch.

    “Hold on,” he said.

    I could hear the creak of him sitting up in bed and the footsteps of him walking to another room. When he spoke again he sounded sharp and fully awake. I could actually picture him in one of his Armani suits instead of pajamas, underwear or whatever he did or did not sleep in. Actually, I couldn’t ever picture him without a nice suit. He probably had a tie and coat to go with his pajamas.

    Tommy basically laid out the plan of my day. He instructed me where to go for a medical physical, for a passport to travel across the state, into Virginia, and a place to go for governmental secrets on the Forbidden Zone. My clearance would be in place by the time I arrived. The first place to go was a governmental office to get my own badge as a personal assistant of his. That title, as it were, would open some doors for me. I was amazed. It was like he had it all planned out for me. In retrospect, I feel like an idiot.

    Before hanging up, I had to ask, “Hey Tommy? What’s up with those vampire things?”

    He paused about as long as he did when I asked about if that was Jennifer in his bed and then answered, “Don’t even worry about them. They are one of the many doomsday cults of losers that occupy the Forbidden Zone. They’re about as dangerous as the vampire wannabes that occupy the Goth clubs.”

    “Hey—“ I started to say something else, but I heard the indistinct mumble of the woman calling for Tommy.

    He said, “I’ll talk to you later, bro,” and he hung up the phone.

    I pocketed my cell phone and immediately walked out the door.




    * * *



    I spent the day going from one place to another. At medical, I was surprised by how much blood they drew for tests. I jokingly asked if they would replace some of it. When the solemn doctor just looked at me, I then asked if he was a vampire. Despite my laugh, he did the impossible and frowned even deeper as he looked up at me from under his brows and over my chart. In fact, he seemed more obsessed with my file and only looked at me when I made what he perceived to be a poor joke. I was glad to move on until I realized that my next stop was the DMV.

    The passport photo went much smoother. It saddened me that I now needed a passport to travel from Washington D.C. into Virginia, but these were the times that we lived in. It’s the new normal. I heard that platitude a lot and it drove me nuts even though I caught myself using it. We’d resigned ourselves to tyranny.

    When I arrived for my passport at the post office, they sent me to the DMV where they now took care of that process. Walking in the doors, I groaned when I saw the multiple long lines at many counters. The workers sat behind bullet proof glass. This was redundant since I had to walk through a metal detector where they took my very small pocket knife that was as dangerous as a toothpick.

    However, once I stepped through the metal detector, an officious little bureaucrat ran up to me before I could get patted down by a goon in a uniform. The goon looked disappointed to be saved from the work. I instinctively looked for a name badge, but in martial law, they did away with name plates for government workers so they could maintain their private lives as they destroyed everyone else’s privacy.

    The bureaucrat kept looking between a photo of me and my face, and muttered, “Follow me, sir. We’ve been expecting you.”

    My connection with Tommy paid off.

    However I stood my ground. “Of course, but could I get my pocket knife back first? It’s not even a weapon.” I asked as I showed no inclination to follow him.

    “Yes, yes, sir,” the bureaucrat sputtered. “Of course. Officer Peterson, could you get his knife— er, I mean, pocket utensil and give it back? Thank you.”

    Officer Peterson scowled but followed the bureaucrat’s request. I smirked at Peterson as I pocketed my property and followed the bureaucrat. I commented that I was surprised they didn’t protect the convenience store workers better, they had a more dangerous job and a more crucial one at that, but the bureaucrat had the same sense of humor as the doctor, or more likely, I am not that funny when I am being an ass.

    The rest of the day went smoothly until I received a text from Jennifer that said, “Call me immediately.” I called her immediately and got her voicemail. I impatiently waited through the slow eastern meditative music that was too heavy on the sitar. Nothing against sitars, but when you were in a hurry to talk to someone and you heard the eastern version of elevator music, it grated on the nerves. After an excruciatingly long time that was most likely only a few seconds, Jennifer’s recorded voice began. She had the sleepy voice of a faux-guru and I pictured her leaving the message sitting in a lotus position on a cloud with snow capped Himalayan mountain tops behind her. The message said, “Greetings fellow journeyers. Let us stop the hate and be the peace we wish to be.” The infernal peaceful music continued for another few seconds. After that pause, she continued, “Please, until we progress enough to channel our thoughts telegraphically, leave your mundane number.” More idiotic music. I had never been so happy to hear an electronic beep. I left a message and she called me back an hour and a half later.

    She asked me to meet her for coffee at four. It was a weird request, neither anything as extravagant as lunch or dinner. It sounded like she wanted a business like communication rather than companionship.

    We met fortuitously at the door to the establishment, each arriving at the exact same time. We greeted each other with a gratuitous hug. I tried to plant a peck on her lips, but she turned her head in disgust so that I kissed her cheek. This irked me. I am usually not too forward with affection, but if I had ever neglected to greet her with a small kiss on the lips, she would ask if something was wrong. She had insisted on this many times in the past. At this point, I felt like I knew the answer to my unasked question and buying a coffee and spending a few moments together was pointless, but we were here already.

    Entering the door, I noticed that all the faux wood paneling and counters were very dark. I wondered if they had picked it because the color was similar to that of a roasted coffee bean or to hide coffee spills. We got a table and carried on some awkward chit chat until the barista brought our watered down dandelion “coffees.”

    Jennifer had her head slightly bowed as she sipped her brew and looked up at me from under her brow and said, “You look alive.” Before I could make a joke she said, “Your eyes. They have a brightness that I haven’t seen in a while.”

    I just nodded. I wanted to tell her about my plans, but spilling the beans on this plan could get me a bullet in my brain and immediate incineration.

    After a moment of silence, she said, “Are you going to tell me what’s going on?”

    I smiled back at her and said, “I am kind of seeing someone.”

    She looked at me with a mix of scorn and perplexion.

    “She’s a vampire chick,” I said with a mischievous laugh.

    She glared at me for a moment and then laughed. “You always had the quirkiest sense of humor. That’s one of the things I have always loved about you.” She ceased laughing and asked, “Now what is going on?”

    I replied without spite, but firmly, “That’s the question that I should ask you. I have texted and called you, but you’ve been ignoring me. I also noticed you referred to my humor in past tense.”

    She leaned in and answered in a distant new agey voice, “I have been going through changes in my outlook. I feel that I am on the edge of a breakthrough. I feel all the potential that I am capable of, yet I feel like you are an unchanging lead weight that is dragging me down. I need to either be free of you so that I can soar, or I need you to change so that you can soar with me. Do you understand?”

    “I’m not sure,” I replied. She was uncharacteristically blunt today, but the metaphors and platitudes still hid a lot.

    “Of course you don’t,” she replied in her mysterious faux guru voice.

    “Listen, I understand your high minded metaphors, but when you say breakthrough, are you talking about some new age platitude, are you talking about a career choice, romantic direction, what?”

    “Maybe all of that and more, maybe none of that and less,” she said, annoyingly cryptic.

    I guessed that she was anticipating me being baffled. Instead I nodded like I understood and said deadpan, “That makes sense.”

    She looked at me with irritation. Then she said as if I had communicated my confusion. “I am a Zen Buddhist. We communicate in koans. They are—“

    “--paradoxes, of course, or not,” I said with a smile.

    “Don’t mock my path,” she said.

    “I am not mocking your path. When did you become a Zen Buddhist?” I asked with genuine curiosity.

    “I didn’t become one; I realized that I was one when I read an article last week in Vogue Magazine.”

    “So the article made you realize that you are a walking paradoxical koan?”

    “No, it’s much more than that.”

    “Then what?”

    She looked to the ceiling as if searching for a queue card. “It’s so much more.”

    “And so much less,” I said dryly.

    She gave me a dirty look.

    “How much more, then?” I prompted.

    “It’s like everything and like nothing,” she said, struggling for more words.

    “I got it,” I said. This conversation was sucking more energy out of me than if she was a literal vampire at my throat. “Now, without paradoxical speaking, are we together, broken up, or in some limbo?”

    At this point I realized it was most likely over between us. That was my logical mind speaking. However, my emotions told me that cutting those heartstrings would have me down in the dumps for quite some time. Despite getting on my nerves on occasions, I had grown accustomed to her quirks. Needless to say, I had my own definite quirks and she had accepted them better than anyone else in my past. I really didn’t want to lose that. I felt like my sarcasm, which may have been self destructive, was also defensive in preparation for the blow.

    She straightened with determination, and I was thankful that she would be the one to break it off. I couldn’t. However, she threw a wicked screwball. “I came here to break it off, but I see something new inside you. Your spirit seemed defeated in the past. Now I see a new fire in you. I still need a couple weeks to myself to get my mind in balance, but I’d like to stay together. However, you must tell me the change that has taken place inside you.”

    The barista walked by, and I ordered another coffee. I had a long story to tell, to get off my chest. Although Tommy was my friend, I didn’t feel like he took me seriously. Everything was a joke to him. I vacillated on telling her too much. I faced immediate execution if she told the wrong person, but once my coffee was placed before me, the Hoover Dam couldn’t hold back my words. It started as a vent as I recounted my shame of screwing things up in the past.

    I then told her about the drone video and the people in it who inspired me. I told her about my desire to infiltrate the Forbidden Zone for a few weeks. I did make a point to leave out specifics that would leave a trail.

    Oddly, she listened without interrupting with her usual tangents and platitudes. She looked me in the eyes the whole time. Her eyes widened so dramatically when I told her my plan for infiltration that I suspected for a moment that it was a poorly acted surprise and not genuine shock.

    I finally finished my tale of new ambitions, and as I stopped, I realized that I was out of breath. After breathing in deep a few times, I took a sip of coffee and waited for her to react.

    She nodded her head and almost blurted, “You are inspiring. I think that has great potential to make you a big hit and of course, bring out the plight of the outlanders. I love how you are thinking outside the box. It gives us a two week break from each other while you do your job, and with Tommy’s help--

    I interrupted, “I don’t remember mentioning Tommy. If I fail, I don’t want him charged as an accessory.”

    “I thought you did mention him.” She smiled and blinked her eyes ditzily. “If not, maybe I just assumed you needed him to pull strings to get to the access point.”

    “Yes, he is a powerful friend,” I agreed. I looked at her. She could go from hard edged business woman to ditz and back in a second. It unsettled me. I suspected it as an act.

    We chatted after that. It felt good to have discussed everything with a friend and intimate partner. I worried that my ambitions were insane, but seeing and hearing her encourage me placed my mind at ease. She reached over the table and took my hand. I held her hand and rubbed the back of it with my thumb. I felt newly in love with her. I felt like I could spend the rest of the day in the coffee bar with her and any trivial subject discussed would be stimulating.

    After five minutes of small talk, I was about to suggest we grab dinner, but at that moment she quickly swallowed the last big gulps of her coffee and said, “I gotta go,” and she abruptly stood.

    We left the building, we hugged and when I tried to let go she gave me that look. “Kiss me,” she said.

    We kissed on the lips. The passion spread from my heart to my lips and arms as I returned her embrace. She pushed away gently with eyes that promised something, not now, but definitely something in a few weeks. It melted my heart further.

    We said our goodbyes and then went our separate ways. I looked back and saw she was on the phone. She gave me a worried look and quickly turned a corner. It placed a small lump of paranoia in the punchbowl of my passion for her.

    Lost in thought, I stumbled into an old man who cursed me even after I apologized. I ignored him and walked on with my mind replaying what happened between Jennifer and me. In the course of our conversation, I resented Jennifer enough to break up at least three times and fell madly in love four more. I told myself that when I grew old I should remember to have more patience with the tempestuous passions of the youth.

    I touched my lips as I could still feel her lips and passion on them. As tight as our intimacy was in that moment, and the more I dwelled it, it felt like a kiss goodbye.
     
    Srchdawg-again, toydoc and mysterymet like this.
  6. RJB

    RJB Monkey+++

    Here is chapter 4 of 18


    CHAPTER 4



    A few days later, I walked into the belly of the beast. Just outside of Quantico, Virginia, Tommy worked in drone headquarters. The building was a gigantic former factory that once made some forgotten necessity. We sent those jobs overseas, and now our factories housed armies that spied on us. Based on the size of the buildings and the number of people employed, spying seemed to be our country’s largest industry these days.

    The ride there was uneventful other than the bus was thirty extra minutes later than the usual fifteen. I cringed as the lumbering vehicle approached, because with the delay, it had picked up far more people than normal. Its suspension was compressed so low that it looked like one of those low riders that were popular decades ago.

    I crammed into the front accordian door, almost overwhelmed by the physical press and stench of the crowd. Somehow the human smell was even stronger than the diesel exhaust that spewed from the overworked engine. I squeezed past the people pressed together in the stairwell and paid the disinterested driver, dropping the money in the box. The bus was so full I couldn’t get beyond the driver, or move back toward the stairs like the others apparently had. The people all around me moved en masse, like a wave from the bus’ acceleration, and I was slammed and held against the windshield, pressed up against the driver, as the bus slowly pulled away. I was partially bent over the steering wheel and was blocking more of the driver’s view.The engine barely picked up speed as it ground in protest beneath the weight of the mass of humanity and attained a speed barely ten miles an hour behind the flow of the light traffic.

    “Look away from window and breathe!” the driver scolded me a few times before I could comprehend his thick accent. The smell of fermented garlic and cabbage seemed to amplify his angry tone.

    “Why?” I asked.

    “Can’t see!” He flung an angry hand in the direction of the foggy windshield and wiped it with a greasy rag.

    I unintentionally exhaled a pent up breath and watched it fog the window he just wiped. I tried to brush the fog that I had just caused with my bare hand but it just smeared the water and grime. The driver irritably slapped my hand. He rolled his eyes and sighed heavily, and this time I could distinctly smell ginger with a touch of onion from his mixed fermented meal.

    I looked out the driver’s side window at the line of long dead cars that rested on long deflated tires and poorly stood guard over abandoned business with shattered glass windows. Transient people wandered in and out of the maze of damage. Miles upon miles of wreckage, both structural and human, and we were supposed to be the lucky ones, I mused. I actually looked forward to infiltrating the Forbidden Zone. It couldn’t be much worse. In a moment of black anger at what society had become, I reasoned that at least the zombies would eat the human debris. I regretted the anger and hypocrisy immediately. Currently, I wasn’t any better than a hobo myself.

    The bus finally pulled in front of the leviathan where Tommy worked.

    I pushed my way off the bus and entered the old factory building where I walked to the front desk in the cavernous lobby. After flashing my badge and ID to a porcine security guard who loved his minor position of power too much, I got a bit of the run around. I finally tired of it.

    “Do you not recognize my last name?” I demanded.

    He just looked at me as if I were the idiot.

    “Look at the picture behind you,” I said as I motioned at the smug visage on the portrait behind him.

    The guard didn’t move.

    I explained, “The Governor, Daniel Hildebrande, the man with nearly absolute power, that’s my uncle. Pretty much my adopted father.”

    The bastard still didn’t move. He should have been scared, but I could see that he didn’t believe me.

    I was about to raise my voice, when his phone rang. He answered it, turned red and started sweating. I could tell that he was getting chewed out by someone. I could guess who that someone was. I gave the camera behind his desk the middle finger and started walking to Tommy’s office.

    The security clown yelled at my back, “Eric Hildebrande, Senior Director Thomas Laurens will see you now.”

    But I was already long past him. “Thanks, idiot,” I muttered well out of his hearing range.

    I walked through a rat maze of hallways and rode the elevator up to another maze complex. The hall cameras swiveled and witnessed my journey. An oddly robotic, yet sexy female voice from the speakers beneath the cameras told me which way to turn when needed. I obeyed.

    I arrived at my destination. As I raised my fist to knock on a sturdy oak door, it swung open. I expected him to do that. Tommy has that persistent, mess with you sense of humor. He’s not that funny, but he keeps himself entertained and that’s what ultimately counts if you’re Tommy. None-the-less, it still startled me. The situation, building, my ambitions, my new sobriety, everything seemed to be weighing on my nerves.

    “Come in, brother,” Tommy ordered.

    I complied.

    I walked past his attractive secretary, while Tommy glanced over me. I was dressed in the gaudy material that was by default fashionable due to it being the only choice. Tommy was dressed in a pre-apocalypse Armani that looked tailored and brand new. “Dang!” He said, “You look like one of those refugees from the Forbidden Zone already. I should call security for that beard alone,” he said with his usual laugh. “Come into my office, we need to talk, but that beard… Dude.”

    I ran my fingers through my weeklong unkempt facial hair as we entered his office and he closed the door. The air in the room compressed as it sealed shut. My beard was a healthy five o’clock shadow when we last saw each other in the bar. It was borderline acceptable to have a well maintained five o’clock shadow. It was to be properly groomed to give the image that you didn’t care, but mostly the current fashion was to be clean shaven to give an air of superiority over those bearded roughians in the Forbidden Zone. I had blasted past having any of the fashionable grooming standards.

    Tommy walked to his desk and fidgeted with something. When he stepped away, I noticed a framed photograph was turned upside down on his desk. However, his desk was cluttered with so much paperwork, that it may have already been faced down. It struck me as odd that despite his usual impeccable demeanor, his work space was a complete mess.

    A large map of the world spread across a side wall like a quilt. It was mottled with striped zones that I figured marked the Forbidden Zones throughout the world. More than three quarters of the landmass was off limits as well as large swaths of the Pacific Ocean with many islands, whole countries in Europe and Africa, as well as the whole island continents of Australia and Antarctica. I swore as I muttered, “All of Antarctica is off limits? How did that happen?”

    Tommy ignored my words and said, “The beard.” He released a comically overdone sigh.

    I wasn’t sure if my lack of shaving was due to laziness combined with an overriding sole focus on my self-imposed mission or if at an atavistic level, I wanted to be like the swordsman I had witnessed. I had barely slept a total of a few hours in the days that passed since seeing the action on the barroom TV screen. In that time, I had gathered all my resources, worked overtime washing dishes at a friend’s restaurant, and borrowed heavily from more successful family and acquaintances to acquire the latest survival, camping, and recording equipment. Any free time that I had left was spent looking over info about the Forbidden Zone. I was so ensconced in the study of that place that I was mentally on edge, like I was surviving there already. Most of what I studied was bootlegged topographical maps for backpackers before it all went down and other hard to come by info. The current government definitely did not want people to feel comfortable enough to attempt an infiltration into the Forbidden Zone.

    Another reason for throwing myself with an abandon into this quest was that I really wanted to succeed. I wanted to impress upon Jennifer how badly I wanted to change our situation. She needed some space for a few weeks to sort things out, and that would be when I came out of the Forbidden Zone. She had accused me of being directionless, career wise, and she was right. I had lazily become a loser, no direction, no real prospects, and unemployed, but I was sure that if I could get some really good video, interviews, and stories from the Forbidden Zone and publish them anonymously through some of the channels that Tommy had connections with, I could be a rich man, in just a couple weeks. Everything in my life was riding on this venture.

    After getting over the self-consciousness with the beard, I looked around his office. Just about everything except the hard mahogany desk top seemed to be covered in a plush maroon colored leather. It fit his personality. Another hint at his success was that his desk was covered with paperwork. With great swaths of forest land cordoned off, limiting access to wood that made paper, most “paperwork” was strictly done on a computer. But top secret information tended to be kept on paper because any computer could be hacked.

    Tommy sobered and said, “You really are serious about this.”

    I didn’t acknowledge with either nod or word, but he smiled as he saw the determination in my eyes as I simply stared back at him.

    Tommy continued, “By the way. I don’t think you;re that crazy anymore. I think the potential profits far exceed the risks.”

    “Of course they’re worth the risk to you because I’ll be the one in danger,” I said with a wry smile.

    He raised his hands, “Hey listen—“ he started to say.

    “Relax brother,” I said. “I’m joking around. I would do this whether you helped or not. I need to chart my own destiny. I thank you for your help. By the way, what are those vampire things I’ve seen on videos?” I had already asked, but I wanted to see if his story changed.

    He shrugged them off, “Who knows? Wannabes. Members of a doomsday cult? Maybe a mutant variation of the zombie virus changed them into that, or their immune system reacts to the virus differently. There is a bunch of weird stuff going on. That’s why it’s quarantined and why you should stay away,” he ended with a laugh.

    I started to laugh when I noticed a medical file on his desk among the books, charts, and files. The medical chart had my name on it and a check out date from two weeks before we even discussed me going in. I pointed that out and asked about it.

    He hesitated and said, “They must have accidentally placed the wrong date on it. I never even reviewed your records until two days ago.”

    I picked it up and looked through it. He rounded the desk in a hurry and tried to take it from me. I held him off and saw something about a blood test that had been drawn after the zombie outbreak quarantined the Southeast, two years ago. They wrote something about the Hildebrande bloodline and DNA. I couldn’t understand all the jargon from just a quick glance, but it said something about how it related to potential immunity from the zombie pathogen and something about vampires.

    “That’s top secret!” said Tommy.

    “It’s about my blood, so it is actually mine.” I protested and placed the folder in my backpack for later reading. I then stared at him letting him know that I was keeping it.

    “Fine, read it later. I don’t care,” he said. “By the way, would you like a drink?”

    I zipped up my backpack and said, “Thanks, but no. I haven’t touched anything since that last outing we had.”

    “I’ve got Jameson’s Irish whisky,” he said with a tempting smile as he rocked two drinking glasses side to side after he placed the bottle on the table.

    My eyes widened. That was my drink of choice, and I had not been able to get it in the last two years, but I said, “No, I can’t.”

    He cajoled me, but I stood firm. I gave one more refusal and he cracked open the fresh bottle and poured two drinks. “You can’t leave me to drink alone.”

    That was my undoing, and as usual one drink led to another. He knew me like Jimmy Hendrix knew his guitar.

    “Let’s get back to our plans.” Tommy said with a toast, “The hardest thing was acquisitioning the thousands of dollars for gasoline for the trip to North Carolina, but I can get work to pay for it, thanks to your Uncle.”

    I whistled. Gas was no longer at gas stations but at heavily guarded depots. I knew that fuel was scarce but I had no idea it was that expensive.

    “You get more benefits from my uncle than I do,” I complained, “but that’s cool about the gas,” I said as I toasted him.

    I then looked out his window and studied the miles of blight that had once been a beautiful city. The whisky was hitting my head and my mind wandered from his words. Alcohol was definitely my undoing. I dwelled on how bad the times were these days. It was hard to believe that not long ago, a trip that far was nothing, maybe thirty dollars in gas.

    “Check this out.” Tommy held up a baseball cap as well as a vest and a waist belt. It had pockets for camera equipment, notepads and other stuff a journalist would need. In short, it looked like something a journalist would have worn in the jungles of the Vietnam era, now it looked like something an amatuer would wear to try to look like a journalist.

    I was sure that there was more to it than what I saw so I said, “It looks like something a dork would wear.”

    I was expecting Tommy to say something smartassed. Instead, he tapped his finger to four different points: the bill of the ball cap, both shoulders and the belt. “You can’t see them, but those are cameras.”

    “Like a body cam?” I asked.

    “Better,” he explained. “They hook up to a computer and match the footage so that it looks like one coherent image no matter which lens takes the picture. The computer’s program generates fill-ins in the gaps due to arm movement and other obstructions. It also makes up for erratic movement so the viewers don’t get motion sickness. Its image is both sharp and reliable as long as at least one camera is exposed. It’s waterproof and has solar panels for recharging as well.”

    All I could do was mutter, “Cool.”

    “It also comes with this,” he said as he held a closed fist up near my face. His fingers sprang apart like a flower blossoming at fast speed. A little insect-like object flew from his palm. It buzzed around me with no more noise than a mosquito and then zoomed to a pocket in the camera vest when Tommy commanded it, “Go home.”

    “What was that?” I asked.

    Tommy smiled proudly and explained, “A mini drone. It fills in the missing gaps from the other cameras. It also flies back to that pocket when its battery is almost used up and it charges itself in the pocket.”

    “Whoa,” I said, genuinely impressed. “That’s perfect. How much did it cost you?”

    “Nothing, I snagged it from work. They’re going to start issuing this to perimeter guards that work under us, but not for another year. After we make our fortune from the show that you film!”

    “Speaking of border guards--“ I said worriedly.

    Reading my mind, he interrupted and said, “I will have no problem redirecting the drones. You’ll have an easy, undetected way in and out.”

    “Cool.”

    He smiled and rubbed his hands together as he said, “But here’s the best news. We have to leave tomorrow.”

    “What! Why?” I was a bit shocked and worried. As much as I had studied the situation and longed for it, up until now, it had all been in theory. I could always back out, but this needed an immediate response. “Why so soon?” I asked.

    Tommy explained matter of factly, “I told them that I wanted to inspect along the outside of the fence, and that it was important to see the terrain and walk it to get a feel of how the drones fly. I’m expected there tomorrow afternoon. Even I have to follow official timelines.”

    I felt an almost literal weight on my shoulders. Every single hole in the fabric of my plans suddenly stood clear in my face like a mental confrontation. I needed more planning. “I can’t go now,” I blurted.

    He smirked as he said, “I knew this was all talk. You never follow through anything.”

    He knew which buttons to push.

    “Get bent!” I growled.

    “That’s the spirit,” he said. “Let’s have one more shot of whisky to celebrate.”

    I stared at the glasses and thought for a quick moment. Tommy was right. The sooner the better. “Sure. Let’s have a drink to this endeavour, my friend!”

    He nodded as he poured the drinks.
     
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  7. RJB

    RJB Monkey+++

    Chapter 5 and 6 are in this post. I hope you all enjoy.




    CHAPTER 5


    “A glorious day!” Tommy declared in a voice as bright as the morning sun. It was a rare, warm winter day and the sun rays smashed through the windshield and burned my eyes when I dared to open them.

    Indeed it was a glorious sunny morning that needled my brain through my dark sunglasses as we drove through the Shenandoah Valley. I should have enjoyed the beauty of the scenery of the seemingly never ending ridge lines and the luxury of my first car ride in years, but I was horribly hung over.

    Tommy had pressured me to drink shot after shot of faux tequila after we left his office. Meanwhile, he laughed off any of my suggestions for him to drink. This was typical of a night out with Tommy, but last night was an extreme. It was my send off, like breaking a champagne bottle against a ship’s hull on its virgin float. Only in my case, I felt like the bottle had been shattered against my skull.

    During that time, I lost track of my backpack with my medical file. Tommy insisted it was in his Lexus and I forgot about it until now. I let it go. I had more pressing worries.

    We had left Washington DC at four in the morning while I was still drunk, and we would arrive at the border of the Forbidden Zone early in the afternoon or late in the morning. Tommy drove a pre-disaster black Cadillac Escalade SUV that was waxed to look shiny, black, and new like Darth Vader’s helmet. I slouched in the passenger seat. Usually Tommy would have a chauffeur, but he waved that off for the sake of added secrecy. He laid the BS on heavy about wanting to save the taxpayers some money by driving the luxury SUV himself. The funny thing was that the Cadillac would burn through enough money in gas to hire a dozen chauffeurs.

    The thought of the cost of gas made me shiver slightly. The punishment for sneaking out of the Forbidden Zone was an immediate bullet to the head and on the spot incineration. All the border patrol vehicles had a five gallon tank of gas to promptly turn a violator into ashes. The government seemed to think it necessary to spend the money to burn away the memory of a potentially infected intruder.

    A large emblem of Tommy’s office was displayed proudly on the hood, side doors, and a final one on the rear door. This emblem was different from the one on his Lexus and was not for the entertainment branch but rather the intelligence gathering. The emblem on the SUV had an eagle with a telescope crossed with a rifle on its chest. I worried that it would gather attention. Tommy said it would do the opposite. That people near the border tended to look away from government vehicles for “safety” reasons. He told me that the enforcement arm had a lot more “leeway” with distributing justice in the border area, to put it mildly.

    That may have been true, but something deep inside felt uneasy with the whole setup. Tommy was too relaxed, but then again, it was my life that was on the line, not his.

    The closer we drew near the Forbidden Zone, the more his prediction proved correct. I saw a young mother, whose face was worn out before its time, not just look away, but push her children’s heads away from our direction as well. It was surreal. I couldn’t help but feel above it all, sitting high in the SUV, until I realized that it wasn’t my power. I was simply leaching off of Tommy and that would be yanked out from under me shortly. With that realization, my headache thundered back.

    Tommy laughed and pointed at the subdued people we passed. “See. Nothing to worry about. Your concern is simply from your hangover. I warned you about not over-consuming last night.”

    I shot him a dirty look which made him laugh. I didn’t bother to say that he didn’t warn me but encouraged me. He continued to laugh until I faked a dry heave.

    “Hey! Not on the carpet. I don’t want to drive back alone with nothing but the nasty smell of your vomit in the car as my last memory of you.”

    I stared out the window and smirked slightly with the knowledge that I actually got under his skin for once. I wish that I could have vomited just to mess with him. However it wasn’t until later when I replayed in my head what he had just said that I realized that I should have seen what was coming.







    CHAPTER 6




    I was surprised at the great leeway and respect that Tommy’s rank had earned him. The fierce, somber border guards followed his orders with as much zeal as they would bash in a lawbreaker’s head. The chills it brought felt like ice water had been poured down the inside of my spinal column as I pondered the power that he wielded. For years I still saw him as grade school Tommy the class clown, or rather the instigator who dared me to be the class clown.

    He stopped at a headquarters building near the border. Immediately after stopping, a big burley, bullet headed border guard sprinted straight at our SUV. I had never seen a man so tall and so wide who moved so quickly and fluidly. There was no sign of fat on his solid body. With the determination on his face and the speed of his sprint directed at our vehicle, I thought he was going to kill us. He had a black military submachine gun on his back and a handgun holstered on his hip.

    I cringed as he opened my front passenger side door and said to Tommy, “Good morning, sir.”

    “Drop the formality, Don. He’s cool,” said Tommy, then he said to me, “Eric, Don will be something like your guardian angel.”

    “You got it, Tom.” Don looked at me and ignored my outstretched hand. “Sit in the back, ‘cool’.”

    I just looked at him blankly for a moment. Don’s brow seemed to darken like a storm cloud rising. He was not used to being ignored. Before he could explode in a verbal torrent, I said, “Oh, no problem, sir,” and I got out of the front seat and moved to the back. Don scared the hell out of me. I secretly wondered if he was brought along in case I got cold feet.

    We drove off with Don and Tommy talking like old buddies. They also talked as if I was not there. I kept quiet. My hangover was starting to go away, but I was a bit unnerved with the realization of just how powerful Tommy was, and Don frankly frightened me more than a horde of zombies. I had never met someone who I was sure had killed another man, but somehow I just knew that Don was a killer. He had a presence that was calm and cold on the exterior, but I felt like there was a neutron bomb about to detonate just under his skin. The fire in his eyes sank deeply in his impassive face, which made a bigger impression on me than anything that he said or how he said it.

    One snippet of Tommy’s and Don’s conversation that I remember, and that I should have taken note of, was when Don said, “Hey, did you hear they may restart the old National Football League. I really think if things had been different, I could have made pro.”

    Tommy nodded and said, “You definitely have the talent. However, what we have planned will be much bigger. Much, much bigger.”

    “You got that right,” Don agreed in a deep growling voice that sounded relatively friendly.

    We cruised along some meandering back roads as gravelly as Don’s grunts, affirmations, and expletives, until we arrived at a path with just enough room for one vehicle to traverse. It had freshly laid, crushed white rock that paralleled the fence of the border. The fence and the road did not seek out convenience in the steep lay of the mountainous land, but rather followed a barrier drawn by a bureaucrat. I was no engineer, but I could see many instances where it would have been easier to lay both the fence and the road along a shallower grade. I could tell that the road suffered heavily from erosion, and regular new graveling was needed.

    I stared with awe at the barrier. I had never contemplated just how high a twenty foot high fence was. It had multiple rolls of razor wire that were laced together and covered from top to bottom on each side. Warning signs of high voltage, infectious monsters, and immediate executions and incinerations from border guards were posted evenly and at a distance so that you could always see the warning.

    We bumped along the winding gravel road for a while, and I lost track of time. My nausea from the hangover was gone, but the sick feeling in my belly was replaced with butterflies. We passed a small crowd of six zombies lingering on the other side of the border fence. I felt a chill as I realized what they were. From a distance, I had thought they were regular people, but their grey, decaying flesh gave it away. They looked out between the fence links with dull eyes, like a goldfish stares out of a fishbowl. For a moment, it was a letdown. I was expecting something fierce, deadly.

    Then the movement of our vehicle caught their attention, and I could see their mouths opened in savage screams. Their eyes seemed to glow with a supernatural fury. They then launched themselves at the electrified barbed wire, and with a shock, three hit first and dropped to the ground. Although they had been electrocuted in front of the remaining three, the others still rushed forward and suffered the same fate.

    “Are they dead?” I asked.

    “No,” Don answered. “Those dumbasses will get back up shortly. I think they actually get high off of the electric juice.” He turned around and looked me square in the face and warned, “Don’t you try to get a rush off the electricity. That will kill you in less than a heartbeat.” He added a snap of his fingers for emphasis.

    I nodded at the unnecessary admonition and looked out the window. We drove in silence. I disliked the way he talked down to me.

    “Stop the truck,” Don ordered his boss.

    Tommy stomped on the brakes almost giving me whiplash as we skidded on the gravel.

    Don opened the door and leapt out before the SUV came to a complete stop and announced, “We’re here. Get out,” he snapped at me like a drill instructor orders a raw recruit.

    Tommy popped the back hatch for the trunk of the SUV from his seat. With no effort, Don pulled out a backpack that seemed like it was as big and as heavy as me. He tossed it right into my chest and I caught it. A smirk flashed and instantly disappeared on Don’s face as the weight almost pushed me to the ground.

    “Quit fooling around and put the pack on!” he commanded.

    Under the heavy load, I followed Don towards the fence line. He bulldozed through a thicket of blackberry thorns like it wasn’t there. I watched the thorns stick to his black and grey camouflage uniform. I didn’t know if he was too mean to feel anything, if he didn’t care, or if it was some tough guy act. I followed, but stopped at the briars.

    “Hurry up,” Don ordered.

    I looked to Tommy who just nodded from the SUV, too intimidated to get out of the vehicle this close to the border. I was expecting my friend to see me off, but I didn’t even get a handshake. Don obviously ran the show from that point on.

    I swore and followed, cursing as the stickers bit me.

    “Quiet,” Don yelled louder than my cursing. “Your big mouth will give away our position.”

    I quit cursing the briars aloud and instead, cursed Don in my head.

    I plunged through, with my eyes mostly closed and felt Don grab me by the throat and shake me. “Stop, you idiot,” he hissed as he pointed to the sign that warned of getting shot and that there were 10,000 volts racing through the fence inches from us.

    He led the way, still holding on to my lapel. We were now behind a rock formation where a boulder the size of a large car balanced precariously on a smaller stone. Don let go of me and kicked away some sticks and leaves on the ground to expose a small opening under the fence.

    “Here’s a steel pipe. It’s wide enough to go through. Make sure you cover it back up when you emerge on the other side, OK? I will be watching from here,” Don instructed.

    Don’t worry, sir,” I said.

    He grabbed me by the throat and pointed in my face. Despite the violence, he spoke in a very calm voice that was even more menacing. “Don’t tell me not to worry. When you tell me not to worry, it tells me that you aren’t concerned and that means you’ll mess this up.”

    “Ok, I’ll worry,” I said in all seriousness. I didn’t want to piss him off. I couldn’t think because it seemed like everything I said and did in his presence was wrong.

    He cuffed me across the head. “I don’t want you to worry about it. Worry will cause you to screw up. I want you to focus. Got it? Focus!” he said as he smacked the top of my head like my grandfather used to smack his ancient TV when the reception was off.

    “OK, OK.” I paused then quickly added, “Sir.”

    “I will be back in two weeks for you. Don’t come back late or early. Do you understand?”

    “Yes, sir.” I wasn’t used to addressing someone as sir, but I did not want to piss off Don.

    “Then get moving,” he commanded as he pointed at the pipe.

    I bent down and crawled into the hole. It was a tight squeeze, but I came to a complete stop with just my head in there. I was stuck because of the large pack on my back. As I backed up to take off my heavy backpack, Don yelled at me.

    “You can’t fit in there with your pack on, idiot.”

    I backed up and pulled the pack off and he tied a rope to it.

    He instructed, “Drag it through when you get to the other side.”

    I nodded and plunged inside. Spider webs greeted me across the face. I spat and backed up as Don’s boot kicked me hard in the butt. The pain of the bruise would last a week, but in that time I would acquire far worse injuries.

    “Move,” he ordered.

    I continued on through the horrid length of the pipe. I hated spiders and spider webs with a passion, but I hated Don even more.

    It was a long crawl, maybe thirty meters, but with no light at the end of the tunnel, I suffered claustrophobia. I pushed aside a stone and some brush that concealed the opposite end and thanked God for the sunlight that streamed into my eyes. Pushing my way through, I finally scrambled out of the steel cave and pulled my pack through by the rope. I covered the hole under Don’s watchful eyes from the other side of the fence. When I was done, I loaded my pack on my back. Although I looked the other way, I could feel his eyes upon me.

    I looked and could see the SUV through the leafless winter trees, but not the driver’s seat with my friend, Tommy. He wouldn’t even get out to wave goodbye to me, I thought miserably. This hurt, but I realized that my hands were shaking. The weight of the job ahead finally hit me. I had to find and befriend the survivors who were most likely suspicious of outsiders. I must also avoid zombies, wild animals, and bandits. I was also feeling a second wind of my hangover returning as I brushed the nasty spider webs off of my face and clothes. I fought against a dry heave.

    “Did you cover the hole well enough, like I told you?” Don asked in a growling voice.

    Without thinking, I gave Don the middle finger. He kept glaring at me with the same level of malevolence as before. After looking at his unblinking features for a few seconds, I lost the stare down. I knew that I would face hell in two weeks when I came back. However two weeks felt like an eternity. I turned to the mountains ahead.
     
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  8. RJB

    RJB Monkey+++

    Here is chapter 7

    Having taught classes on outdoor survival, I really hated writing about the character screwing up, lol. However, at the end of the chapter is where the novel really picks up.



    CHAPTER 7



    I was soon swallowed by the woods. I could barely hear the SUV drive away as the thick stand of forest acted as a muffler. Even without leaves on the trees, the barren winter branches seemed to devour me. I was totally alone. It was an odd feeling. I was a city boy. I had only felt solitude in my own rooms, locked away in my privacy with constant forms of electronic entertainment controlled by my fingertips.

    Although I was alone in the woods, I felt no privacy. I felt eyes upon me. Were they the eyes of people, bears, zombies, or my imagination? I didn’t know, but I couldn’t pull the blinds, draw the curtains, or close the door on the unseen eyes around me in the forest like I could at home.

    The electronic noises I was used to were replaced by the chirps of birds or other things that I could not identify at that time. The high pitched sounds of the unknown animals seemed to drill in my head over the sounds of my panting and the crunching of leaves beneath my feet. Even more unnerving was the scuffling sound of the paws and feet of the unseen forest denizens.

    I purposely crashed through the brush to drown out the chirping of the animals until I heard a loud thrashing in the forest just to my right. It was so loud that my imagination pictured a zombie who had to have been a beefy linebacker for a top ten college football team before he was turned into his monstrous state. This linebacker zombie sounded like he was charging straight at me. The noise couldn’t have been more than five or ten meters away. I couldn’t see it, because whoever or whatever it was, was in a stand of bushes that still had leaves in the winter. I learned later that bush was a rhododendron tree; a miniature magnolia is the best way that I can describe it.

    I stopped as I drew a multi tool. I fumbled with it to open the blade and dropped it in the leaves. I stood still, fearing to move, fearing to breathe, as I listened for more noise from my mysterious opponent, but all I could hear was my thundering heart that increased in volume, intensity, and beats per minute as I held my breath and held my feet still to avoid crunching the leaves.

    Nothing. The lack of a follow-up noise unnerved me even more. How could something that big and noisey just disappear?

    In an explosive, noisey burst, I blew out my breath in a gust. The combination of altitude, walking up hill, and terror played hell with holding my breath. I bent over gasping, feeling like I would never satisfy my lungs’ demand for oxygen.

    When I finally caught my breath, I searched through the leaves at my feet as quietly as I could in order to find my multi tool and extended the three inch knife. Needless to say, it felt inadequate. Tommy should have given me something more than this “pocket utensil,” but the government was very restrictive on personal weapons at that time, unless you were a jackass like Don, of course.

    I had asked Tommy about getting a firearm, a machete or something, but he told me my first priority was to find a band of survivors and that they would take care of me. I then asked for advice if I ran into a zombie, and he told me that the area where I was headed was pretty much clear of zombies due to the rugged nature of the mountains, but I suspected him of lying especially after seeing some on the drive. When I pressed the issue of a zombie encounter, he simply told me to run to the nearest village. I hadn’t thought to ask about what if I couldn’t find a village. I had never considered the true expanse of the wilderness. All in all, I was under informed at best and lied to at worst.

    I took a breath as if I was about to dive headfirst into a cold mountain spring and finally walked into the bush looking for whatever made the noise. I was scared, but it was even scarier not knowing what was pursuing me. I pushed my way through the branches and looked.

    Nothing.

    “Come out, you bastard,” I demanded in a harsh whisper through clenched teeth. I searched the stand of bushes, my small knife leading my way like a flashlight. I was on a hair trigger.

    I stepped on something round under the leaves. A head raised up three feet from me under the leaves ready to strike. It was surely the gray, spade shaped head of a giant rattlesnake.

    I screamed, jumped back and fell on my butt due to the slope of the mountain. I kept screaming and kicking, trying to get away, trying to defend, trying to get to my feet, but all I could do was flail my legs. It was horrifying being on the ground with that snake. I finally calmed a bit as nothing attacked me. Maybe the snake had disappeared when I took my foot off of it.

    I sat there for a moment to catch my breath. I told myself that it was winter and that snakes were hibernating. That didn’t quell my fears much. There were so many rumors and conspiracy theories of new monsters that had been spawned in the Forbidden Zone. After all, a giant rattle snake that thrived in the winter was no less strange than a zombie or a vampire.

    Again, curiosity got the best of me. I crawled forward, then stood and looked the place over. I saw nothing but a large tree branch.

    I swore as I figured it all out: I simply stepped on one end of a branch. That caused the other end to rise. I looked at what I thought was the head of the rattlesnake. It was nothing but a misshapen piece of wood. It looked nothing like a snake. I cursed my overactive imagination and tried to calm myself.

    However, I couldn’t. I was still clueless as to what had originally made that loud crashing noise. I tried to convince myself that what I heard was an overactive imagination, such as mistaking a stick for a snake, but I knew that I did not imagine that thrashing through the leaves.

    I swore again and told myself to get my act together. I found myself talking, mumbling to myself a lot on this hike. I kept forgetting that my recording devices were on and that I probably sounded crazy, but it became harder to talk to myself because I was constantly out of breath. So my talking became breathless mutterings. As odd as it sounds, mumbling like a crazy man somehow kept me sane.

    In the week before all this, I tried to get in shape by walking and jogging a few miles every day around the flat streets of DC. That was so naïve of me, but it was too late to do anything about my lack of conditioning now.

    I kept trudging up the mountain. I probably climbed at a rate of less than a half mile an hour. It was only two miles to the top of the ridgeline, and that was my goal. However, I didn’t take into account the steepness or the many obstacles. So many times, I had to stop, retrace my steps, and go around a rock formation, or I had to fight through a stand of thickets where I had to take off my pack to squeeze through a hole that seemed just big enough for a rabbit.

    It was twilight when I finally reached the top of the ridgeline. It was topped with sharp rocks like the bony skeleton of a snake’s vertebrae. I tried to look through the trees at that vantage point, but was disheartened to see no sign of humans. No people, old buildings, not even smoke from a campfire. Only miles of endless trees and hills. On a postcard it would have been breathtakingly gorgeous. The expanse of the valley, the ridgeline and peaks, I had only seen such scenery in pictures. Pictures that did real life no justice. Now, I could only offer curses to its solitude and beauty.

    The beautiful warm sunny day had turned cold and dismal. I had not noted the change as I had trudged up the mountain. The altitude placed me right up there with the grey clouds. My hot, wet sweat suddenly felt like icy underground rivers running down the skin beneath my jacket. I started to shiver as I took off my backpack, and it immediately started to slide down the hill. As I reached for it, I slipped, fell and slid down the hill after my pack. The downward momentum of both myself and my pack was stopped suddenly by smacking into a thick tree.

    I secured my backpack and looked below me. About twenty yards further down the slope was a dropoff into nothing. I eased down the hill restraining any further fall by grasping onto saplings until I stood on a precipice. It was about one hundred meters of a sheer drop down a granite cliff. I suffered a bit of vertigo as I looked at the jagged boulders down below that would savagely greet anyone unlucky enough to fall.

    I sighed and scrambled back to the ridgeline, looking around for a relatively flat spot to put up my tent. However, there was no such thing as flat unless you pitched a tent for a creature the size of an ant.

    “Screw it,” I muttered.

    The sun had set, so using the light from my headlamp, I pitched a tent on what felt like a 45 degree surface. I tried to follow the directions on the tent’s package, but there was a big sag in the center of the tent, and I had a tent pole left over when I finished setting it up. One nice thing about solitude is that no one is there to see your follies. I then cursed the camera vest and cap and hoped I could delete the whole of today without anyone ever seeing the footage. I never wanted to see it, nor did I want anyone else, particularly Tommy, viewing my awkwardness.

    I hadn’t crossed the ridge to sleep. The rocky ridgeline felt like a wall between me and the unknown. Tomorrow, I would cross. Today I wanted to sleep on the same side where my friend Tommy dropped me off. I missed my home already and desperately.

    I fumbled with a camp stove for a few minutes, but between my cold, numb fingers and lack of familiarity with the gadget, I soon gave up. Besides, my stomach was still too queasy to eat anything.

    Instead, I pulled my sleeping bag out of my pack and brought it in the tent with me, leaving my gear outside. The pack had food and had the potential to attract all manner of critters including bears. I should have tied the pack up off the ground from a tree branch, but I was exhausted. I crawled into the tent and curled up trying to find warmth. I felt like a parrot whose owners had covered the cage with a hood to make the bird quiet. I found myself immediately falling asleep without electronic distractions.

    Unfortunately, the night noises kept waking me up just as I would drift off. I heard the crashing through the leaves that had scared me earlier in the day and started to suspect that it was a quick, smaller creature rather than a man sized zombie. However, until I knew exactly what caused the ruckus, it still scared me at the core. I guess it’s the primitive fear of the unknown. The little bouts of noise and waking carried on annoyingly, but also harmlessly, However, three hours after sunset, I heard something that sent pure unabated terror to my heart.

    I had just drifted back to sleep. Jennifer entered my mind. I can’t remember what she said in my sleepy state, but I remember her radiant smile. I knew I was dreaming, but I felt like I was in my own bed. She soon began to morph and I could feel a foreign influence in my dreams. I watched as Jennifer turned into the vampiress that was on the footage and had haunted my earlier dreams. She seemed to be trying to warn me about something, but I just couldn’t quite hear or understand her. For some reason I wasn’t scared until I heard the crunch of leaves from the placing of a single large foot. The footsteps were not a part of my dreams. I was instantly awake.

    The sound wasn’t the scurrying or crashing through the leaves that I had been hearing all day. Instead, it was a cold, calculated single footstep in the leaves, followed by a pause and another single footstep. It was definitely human or something that once was. It had to be something at least as large as me. It was the exact same sound my footsteps made when I was trying to walk silently on the leaves, maybe heavier.

    I could feel cold sweat instantly beading all over my skin as each slow stalking step, unmistakably sounded like it was getting closer. It stopped ten feet from my tent and I could hear it grunting as it rustled through something. I sat up quietly, holding my breath. I grabbed and opened my inadequate knife and picked up my head lamp without turning it on. I unzipped a small portion of the tent flap, flicked on the headlamp, and shone the light in the direction of the noise.

    I groaned as I turned off the headlamp and zipped up the flap. It was a bear with its hind end towards me. I caught my breath and unzipped the flap again. I aimed my light on him again. It had to weigh at least twice as much as me.

    “Damn,” I swore under my breath. The bastard had literally ripped open the fabric of my backpack with its razor honed claws and was ransacking my food. The bear did it with such smugness, that it didn’t even react to me shining a light on it. The thing was treating my food and my pack like he owned it.

    I zipped the flap back up. The slight fabric of the tent flap felt as inadequate as my small knife, but I had something else for such an encounter. I felt around for the bear spray. Besides my multi tool knife, bear spray was my only weapon. I found it, and aimed it in the direction of the bear, double checking to make certain the nozzle wasn’t pointed at me. I unzipped the flap, hesitated, and sprayed directly at the bear.

    I instantly fell back, coughing in total agony. My eyes stung. I couldn’t breathe. It felt like I inhaled the angry inhabitants of a hornets’ nest. Despite not being able to breathe, I somehow managed to curse enough to make a sergeant in the Marine Corps blush.

    It took a few minutes for me to get my reactions under control and be able to see again. I had a string of snot about three feet long hanging from my nose. As I wiped my hand across my face, it felt like a jelly fish slapped me. I looked at the flap and realized that I shot the bear spray straight into the mosquito netting.

    Looking past the screen, the bear seemed completely oblivious to my plight. He just kept chowing down and scattering clothes, food wrappers, survival gear and camera equipment everywhere. I cursed him loudly, but he still kept eating, so I ineffectively kept cursing.

    The bear pawed around some more and grunted. I guess he ran out of food because he finally turned around and confidently walked towards me. My angry curses turned to screams of horror. The bear stopped a few feet from me, within easy lunging distance and stood up on his hind legs. He looked to be about as tall as that 20 feet high electric fence. My screams turned to reverential swearing and then to prayers as he prepared to lunge, but instead he went back to all fours and wrinkled his nose.

    I saw a stone fly out of nowhere and strike the bear. I tried to convince myself that I didn’t see a thrown stone, because I didn’t want to consider who or what had thrown the projectile. Besides, the bear seemed to have little interest in me.

    With a snort, and a haughty throw of his snout, the bear casually turned and waddled away. The pepper spray offended the bear’s sense of smell. I felt a bit of shame that my greatest method of self defense was simply that the animal saw me as grotesquely inedible.

    Once I felt sure that it was gone, I exited the tent that felt like the inside of ghost pepper. I enjoyed the feel of the cold air against my stinging skin. I poured some bottled water over my face. I breathed in the air like drinking water from a cold spring and breathed out feeling relaxed.

    I suddenly looked over my shoulder and caught my breath. I could have sworn I saw the figure of a hooded, black cloaked being staring at me. I blinked and it stepped back into the gloom, but it was so faint to begin with that I doubted my sanity. Despite the billowing cloak, I was sure it was a willowy feminine form beneath. I thought of the vampiress.

    I told myself that the bear spray had given me a nudge towards hallucinations, as I quickly scurried back into the tent.

    I sat down into my sleeping bag and fell back into my pillow. I painfully tried to sleep after an hour with no further sign of the bear. It started to drizzle and then rain pretty hard. When I saw that there were no leaks in the tent, I relaxed. The rain had a calming effect on my nerves. I figured the bears and anything else would go back to their caves, dens, and lairs. Besides, I enjoyed how the rain would drown out the sound of anything walking in the woods. As silly as it sounds, I liked that because my nerves were frayed and even though most of what I heard was really nothing dangerous, the sound from the unknown creatures scared me. Also, at this point between the long day, constant terror, and lack of sleep from the last two nights, I really didn’t care anymore. I just wanted oblivious repose.

    I finally felt as if I was sinking into sleep. I dreamed I was sinking and then falling down into a black oblivion. I could feel the ground moving beneath me. My eyes widened as I realized I wasn’t asleep or dreaming. I was actually sliding across the wet leaves.

    The rain had made the leaves slippery and my tent had turned into a toboggan as I slid down the hill towards the edge of that cliff with the jagged rocks below. Each time I bounced off a tree or rock I could swear that I broke a bone. I tried to grab some handhold, whether a branch, rock or even dirt, but I was rolling helplessly ensconced in the tent and sleeping bag and couldn’t actually grasp anything but the tent floor. Finally, I crashed face first into a tree and stopped.

    I scrambled to find the zipper as the tent and I slowly started to slip around the tree toward the cliff’s edge. I felt my legs dangle and slide off the abyss of the cliff.

    “Please God! No!” I pleaded in panic. My hand found my knife and I sliced my way out as the tent kept sliding off the cliff. I finally got my hands out of the tent. I hugged the tree that had smashed my nose as my tent, sleeping bag, and everything else plummeted into the darkness below. I listened, but never heard my stuff hit bottom.

    I cursed as I realized that I lost my flashlight.

    Shaking with cold and fear, I scrambled back up to the backbone ridgeline and collapsed, leaning against a tree trunk, panting, exhausted, and beat up. I felt the rain on my face and to my list of miseries, I added soaking clothes whose damp coldness reached my marrow.

    I laid down on the spot where I had put up my tent. The leaves were damp, but slightly less so where the tent had set. I got no rest before I sat up and felt around for my backpack to find a better coat, but it seemed that my pack slid down the cliff with my tent. I curled up under a tree and waited for the dawn that seemed as mythical as a fairy godmother.




    * * *



    I jolted awake. A pink line formed across the dark and distant jagged mountainous horizon, and I felt a small hope growing in my heart. As the eternal night had worn on, I really thought that the dawn would never arrive.

    My teeth were chattering so loud with my shivering that I thought every zombie in the Forbidden Zone could hear the clicking. Actually, I was so miserable, that at the moment, that I scarcely feared anything, until I noticed I had a black cloak laying over me. There was a slight smell of the vampiress from the dreams, the same scent that I thought lingered in my bedroom after I woke up.

    I swore and stood up with a bolt as I pushed the black cloak away, but I was alone and if folklore was to be believed, I need not worry about her or any vampires in the light of day.

    Now that I could see and move without fear of falling off of the cliff, I saw that ice was starting to form on the leaves. As I looked closer, I could see that the cuffs on my pants were freezing as well. I picked up the vampiress’ cloak and wrapped it around me for added warmth.

    I walked to the edge of the cliff and saw my pack, tent, and supplies strewn about the jagged rocks far below.

    “Oh my God!” I wasn’t sure if there was a God or not in that miserable moment, but I said that as a prayer rather than an oath. God or not, at this point, I definitely believed in a hell. I now stood on hell’s summit.

    I quickly summed up my situation: I had no food, thanks to the bear. I had cut a hole in my tent so I had no shelter even if I could find it over the cliff. My clothes, as well as the mysterious black cloak, were soaked and it was below freezing. Any change of clothes were over the cliff and probably wet and torn from the bear ravaging claws. Anything I could use to light a fire was in my pack. I knew that I stood a good chance of slipping into hypothermia and dying in these wet and frigid conditions. And I didn’t know where the band of survivors lived who I was seeking for safety.

    I collapsed in a seated position and fought against weeping. I was a failure. I had no hope but to abandon my adventure if I wished to live. It is embarrassing to admit to almost crying, but this was just a long string of failures in my life. I would be a laughing stock, and this had been my last chance at something better. It was my chance to prove the world wrong.

    Driven by my physical discomfort, the chance of dying in the elements, and hitting another wall of failure, I found myself asking: what was the point of living if I had failed at this latest endeavor, not even twenty-four hours into the mission? This was just another disappointment of many notched into my skull.

    I eased my way down to the edge of the cliff and looked over the ledge. I krept over more so that I stood over a line of jagged boulders far beneath me. I held my breath as something in the darkest recesses of my soul contemplated a jump. It was a brief, but horrific flight of fancy. I pushed it from my mind and told myself that most likely a suicide attempt would not be instant. Instead, my shattered body would probably just lie on the sharp boulders as I awaited something to come out of the woods and devour me. Or, I would get bit, turned into a zombie and lie there unable to move in unnatural life for eternity. Even as a zombie, I’d be a failure. This made me chuckle in morbid humor. I was losing my mind.

    I sat on the precipice and wallowed in my insanity as the tarnished, dime sized winter sun stoically rose above me. How long did I stay? I could not tell. The red dawn light that colored my surroundings slowly turned orange and then a tarnished silvery white. I sat there now numb to my shivering. It annoyed me that I had those suicidal thoughts even for a moment. I could be impulsive but that new and sudden impulse worried me.

    No, I told myself. I had to find my pack and continue somehow. I still had my body cam. I must make it work. I needed a documentary. I was here.

    Something deep inside me, that I didn’t know that I had, propelled me to stand and walk, first around the precipice of course and then downhill. I needed my backpack with a change of clothes.

    I followed the ledge until I came to a more gradual slope. I recognized a rock formation that looked like an old bearded man contemplating the seeming eternity of the mountains. On the way down, I mostly slipped on the icy leaves, fell and caught myself on the closest tree trunk or branch. I would let go of the branch, slip, fall, catch myself again and repeat and repeat. I went into a trance in this manner and lost track of where I was. I soon became numb to the thrashing I received from plummeting through trunks and branches.

    I had no idea where my pack would be. I had trouble forming thoughts. I was dying of exposure, I slowly and dumbly realized. My clothes were still coated in ice. I unconsciously resigned myself to the failure of the mission and simply stumbled downhill to the fence and my way out of this mess. I wanted a hot, hot, very hot cup of coffee more than anything in the world. I didn’t care if it was 99.9% cut by dandelion roots either. Without my gear, I realized I had to return to civilization. I had to sneak across the fence in order to survive.

    A drone checked me out for a moment hovering just out of arm’s reach. The camera head of it cocked back and forth like a child pondering if a goofy uncle was a good or bad guy. I had a flash of annoyance, but then the drone seemed to be a companion of sorts. I tried talking to it, because I was tiring of mad conversations with myself, but it cocked itself again and flew away. Apparently, I was not that interesting.

    It was noon when I stumbled up to the fence. I would have hugged it, but I remembered the razor wire and the raging electricity. I looked, and fifty yards away to my left was the rock formation with the boulder doing the balancing act over the area that hid the steel pipe that would lead me to freedom.

    I was grateful for easily finding it. It wasn’t woodsmanship or even dumb luck. Yesterday, I had simply walked uphill against gravity. Today, I had simply followed gravity by falling back to where I started, but somehow it seemed that the downhill walk (controlled fall) wore me out more than the uphill climb.

    I made my way to the pipe and slumped to the ground and slithered into the hole. I didn’t try too hard to cover the back entrance. I didn’t care about anything other than getting back to my real life and accepting a fate of a life with no ambitions.

    “Hot coffee,” I said to encourage myself as I crawled through the freshly spun spider webs and dirt in the pipe.

    I pushed the sticks and leaves out of my way to exit, and climbed out. I stood up brushing spider webs and other debris off my body. I looked straight ahead thinking of my next move, but instead, I stared straight into three gun barrels. Behind the three armed soldiers in biohazard suits, sat a five gallon gas can for my imminent funeral pyre. I closed my eyes and awaited the impact of the bullets.
     
    mysterymet and Srchdawg-again like this.
  9. RJB

    RJB Monkey+++

    Merry Christmas!

    If you are enjoying this story please like or comment. Writing can be a lonesome journey. Seeing that others appreciate your work makes it all worthwhile. I hope you like it so far!



    CHAPTER 8



    Too many moments passed without feeling the bullets ravage me. I opened my eyes and stared into the emotionless goggle eyes of the armed soldiers’ shiny black biohazard masks. The filters were located in the beak-like area of the front. It was obviously in the style of the birdlike masks from the plagues of the Dark Ages. On TV, the characters wearing them struck me as cartoonish. Seeing them up close with firearms aimed at me froze my heart. The glassy eyes of the gas mask got to me the most. It was like meeting three Darth Vaders. I closed my eyes again and waited for the impact of the bullets.

    And waited.

    What the hell? I thought. These storm troopers were facing a firing squad as well if they didn’t shoot me on the spot. I could swear that I heard their fingers creaking on the triggers.

    I heard one of them say in a youthful high pitched voice, “Shoot him, man.”

    Another one whined, “No, you first.”

    I uncoiled from my cowering stance and looked closer at them. The guns were shaking slightly in their adrenalized hands. I could see just enough behind the goggles that these were eighteen, maybe nineteen, year old kids. Probably just last year they were trying to figure out how to get a cheerleader in the backseat of their car without a clue of what to do next with her. These weren’t killers, at least not yet.

    I stood to my full height and forced my shoulders back in a false display of confidence. “Good morning, Marines.” I didn’t know what they were, but I knew that Marines got mad if you called them soldiers, but not the other way around. Besides, I thought I would flatter them. “I am on a secret mission with direct orders from your boss Senior Deputy Thomas Laurens, and ultimately from my uncle, Governor Daniel Hildebrande.”

    I felt my desperation as I name dropped. Almost like a man in the movies will hold a cross and speak sacred names to a vampire, but luckily it seemed to be working for me. All three men lowered their guns, mere inches, but it was a start.

    I laid the BS on thick. They looked back and forth to each other as they tried to follow my story. It wasn’t really a story; I just said whatever popped into my head to stall the inevitable. I figured when I stopped talking they’d shoot.

    Finally, one of them said in a modulated voice through his mask, “OK, OK man. We’ll take you back to headquarters. Just shut up for now.”

    They slowly lowered their rifles a little more. However, now they aimed the barrels at my crotch instead of my chest. Having a gun pointed at the groin isn’t pleasant from a physical standpoint, but I knew I was getting through to them. In fact, from that point onward, I had a gun constantly pointed at me for the next hour or so. That does wear on the psyche in a way I can’t explain. I was literally under the gun.

    In the robotic voice modulated by the face mask, I heard one of them ask, “Governor Daniel Hildebrande sent you?”

    I straightened and despite my fear, or maybe because of my fear, I knew if I didn’t put on a show of confidence, I would be immediately shot, incinerated, and my ashes scattered. I took on an air of command, and acted like my friend Tommy.

    “Yes. My Uncle Dan, Governor Hildebrande to you, sent me on this mission. It’s also a secret operation, and I can’t say anything more.” In retrospect, that lie was comical in the fact that I had just blabbed a whole load of crap about my supposed mission in the moments before.

    They all put a hand to their left shoulders and seemed to look at each other for a few minutes. I later learned that their left shoulder had a button that allowed them to communicate with each other without me overhearing.

    They finally pushed me ahead with their rifle tips, afraid to even touch me with their protective gloves. They ordered me into the back of a Humvee that was manufactured like a pickup truck. I sat on the hard metal floor of the back bed, but it felt comfortable just to get off of my feet and away from the forest floor. I leaned back and then I almost screamed as I realized I was leaning against a gas can. The realization that I came in contact with the canister that held the fuel for burning my dead remains horrified me to the core.

    When we arrived back at an outpost, a man in a biohazard suit and bird beaked mask stopped the vehicle with an authoritatively raised hand. By his posture, I could tell that he was not going to be a pushover like my three captors.

    The driver slammed on the breaks. “Yes, Sergeant?” he asked as they all stepped out of the vehicle. I joined them now with four guns pointed at me.

    The three men who had captured me received an ass-chewing that made me cringe. I was sure that they would face the firing squad that I was supposed to face. After chewing them out, the Sergeant turned his Darth Vader goggled eyes towards me.

    “Get your ass over here!” he barked.

    I obeyed the order, and he pulled a handgun and placed it against my head. He explained to the kids who captured me, “This is how you shoot an outlander. Get the gas can.”

    I tried to use the magic words again, “But Governor Hildebrande is my--”

    “Shut up!”

    He pulled the trigger. I heard a click and cringed. The sergeant cursed, worked the slide to chamber around and aimed at my head again. My legs gave out, and I fell on my knees.

    The Sergeant hesitated as a black Mercedes with opaque and mirrored windows flew straight at us. I thought I would die by the impact of a car versus a bullet, but it came to a screeching, grinding halt on the gravel road, the bumper lightly tapped my face. I heard the car door open and slam and running footsteps coming up to us, as I coughed on the dust that the vehicle stirred.

    I could hear the fear in the Sergeant’s voice as he said, “Sir, we are just executing—“

    I peeked through squinted eyes to see Don towering above us all. He inspired the same terror, maybe more, into the Sergeant as he did with me. Don said, “You’ve done well, Sergeant. I’ll handle this from here.”

    Don turned his cold mackerel eyes toward me. He had his own handgun pointed at my head. I saw the faintest hint of a smile as he turned the gun from me and shot the sergeant dead center in the chest.

    I saw the Sergeant look at him with the mortal knowledge that he was dying that second. His mouth opened as if to ask the existential question, “Why?” but no words came out. He was dead as he hit the ground.

    Don pumped another bullet into his head.

    Don turned to the three remaining soldiers who were fearfully backing up, “Stand still.”

    They obeyed him out of terror. After he calmly shot two of them, the remaining one turned to run. Don’s shot caught him in the back of the head. The man collapsed.

    The gun circled back to me.

    I was too numb with shock to even cry out. He lowered his gun to his side. “Move the bodies off the road where they can’t immediately be seen. Move! Now!” He roared the last two words.

    I just looked at him, too shocked to move. The violence I had witnessed could torment people for years. I only had a few seconds to appreciate what I saw and could only respond by staring with horror. I was in so far over my head that I could only stare stupidly at him and mutter, “Please, Please. I am sorry.”

    Don pushed me over with a shoving foot on my shoulder and then kicked me in the side as hard as he could. “Move when I say, ‘Move!’ Damn it!”

    I moved and grabbed the boots of one of the dead men. His mask had flown off of him when Don’s bullet shattered his head. His uniform was covered in his own brain matter. Don picked up his phone and made a call. “Yes, he is alive, although barely through my good graces.” He gave me a dirty look and walked out of my hearing range.

    I went back to work hauling the bodies. I never realized how heavy a dead person was until then. I had also never seen a freshly shot dead person close up before. The terror was etched on their faces. The mortal questions blazed in their eyes beneath the slowly glazing and glassed over surfaces. There was an ickiness to even touching them as their muscles had no reaction or resistance to my handling. That was layered with the fear that I wasn’t far from joining them.

    When I finally moved the last body just out of sight, Don walked straight up to me. From the quick and sure swing of his long stride, I thought he was going to punch me or shoot me. Instead he grabbed my hair and pulled me towards the outpost.

    “Aren’t you afraid that I may have some of the germs from the Forbidden Zone?” I asked, hoping he’d let go.

    Instead, he grabbed my hair tighter, smacked me hard across the face, and growled, “Shut up.”

    We entered the drab military bunker that was just large enough for an office with two small jail cells. He threw me in a cell by my hair, but he didn’t bother to close or lock the cell. This actually confused me.

    So I asked, “Aren’t you afraid that I’ll try to escape?”

    He ignored me and made a snorting sound that may have been the closest thing he had to a laugh. He sat down and placed his feet on the lone desk and read a magazine that was on the top.

    “Hey thanks for saving me,” I said. I knew that it sounded lame, but I wanted him to say something that would give me a hint of what was going on.

    He placed down the magazine and looked at me with his fish cold eyes, “You are only alive because my orders are not to kill you, yet. If my orders come down to kill you, you will be dead. Nothing you say will change it or gain you any extra time. However, I can kick your ass all I want in the meantime, so I suggest that you not piss me off. In other words, shut the hell up.”

    He calmly went back to reading his magazine without waiting for me to respond.

    I looked at my hands, which were shaking like I suffered from palsy. No matter what I did, they wouldn’t stop trembling from the adrenalin dump.

    An hour passed and Tommy arrived. He actually looked unfazed like everything was in control and had happened according to plan. “Hey, Don,” he said like he was walking into the office on a normal business day.

    Tommy did a double take when he looked at my face. He greeted me with, “Holy hell. You look like crap. Your face! Are you alright, Eric?”

    “Sure. A little rattled, but I am fine,” I said putting on a brave face.

    “Your face,” Tommy repeated.

    I was about to ask what he meant, but when I curiously touched my face, I winced from the pain and realized I must have appeared badly bruised from the falls I took. In fact, I could see the bruise on the bridge of my nose when I crossed my eyes. I kept thinking I had a bug or a smudge of dirt on it. I guess it was from the face plant into the tree as I sledded down the hill in the tent.

    “Did your captors do this to you?” he asked.

    I looked to Don to see if he was fearful that I might tell on him, but he had no worries.

    “No, Don was kind to me,” I said, still trying to get in his good graces.

    Don showed no emotions and kept reading the magazine.

    Tommy nodded and said, “It must have been the fall down the cliff.”

    I looked at him and the sudden movement hurt my neck. “How did you know that I fell?”

    “Suspicious, aren’t you?” Tommy laughed. “When a city boy such as yourself ventures into the mountains, he’s bound to fall. It was as certain as you screwing up this assignment, but I figured that you'd last longer than 24 hours. Why didn’t you try to find the survivors after you lost all your gear?”

    “How did you know that I lost my gear?” I asked. I suspected that they were watching me the whole time. Now I knew for sure. It irked me that my friend still denied it, like I was out of their circle. I realized I would always be on the outs.

    He looked at me like I was a complete idiot. “You came back with no gear, correct?” He took a deep breath and looked past me, and with hands raised toward the heavens, he acted like he was asking the universe for advice. “Now, what are we going to do with you?”

    The way he said that chilled me to the bone. It was obvious that he had very little say in the matter and like Don, that he was resigned to follow whatever orders came down the chain.

    Just then Tommy’s phone rang. His eyes widened slightly as he looked at who was calling him.

    He held up a finger to me and said, “Hold on a moment,” without looking in my direction.

    He stepped outside the small building, but didn’t bother to close the door.

    “Good morning, sir,” Tommy said into the phone as he looked at the screen. There were only a handful of people who he had to address as sir. I shuddered. After a pause, he said, “Yes. He screwed up again, this time very royally, but we expected that. I think your plan is sound, sir.”

    Don snorted from the corner, but kept reading his magazine.

    After a brief conversation on the phone out of my earshot, Tommy walked back in and held up the screen for me to talk.

    My blood ran cold as I looked at the screen and saw the stern, officious face. “Uncle Dan…” I exclaimed

    “That’s Governor to you.” He then proceeded to curse me with words that would have shocked his constituents. Although he didn’t actively court the rightwing religious votes that much, he still paid Christianity some lip service because most of the people in his area claimed that religion. However, I had a feeling that if over night the Wiccan beliefs became the dominant religion in his region, he would go on TV with a newly purchased broom and a black pointy hat if that’s what he thought was required to garner the votes to keep him in power.

    He vented his wrath at me for a minute or so until I got irritated enough to say, “Hey Gov, I just watched your errand boy, Don, murder four people in cold blood. Your yelling hardly fazes me at this point. Just tell me my fate.”

    He glared at me through the screen for a moment, took a deep breath as if he was about to really excoriate me for another minute, but instead chose a schmaltzier tactic. Rather than screaming, he sighed and said, “Eric, I raised you like a son after your parents passed away. I’ve helped you the best I could with all your hair brained schemes, hoping that you’d be at least half the man that my brother, your father, was. Now this? You really should be dead, but for my mercy.”

    I was exhausted and shell-shocked. I really had no care left to give. I was aware that they already knew my fate. I simply wanted to know the outcome as well. Was I going to jail? Was I just going back to my normal life? Was this moment my last to live? “Cut the crap, Gov! I’m not dead. If I should be, I would be.” I saw Don look at me with surprise and he actually smirked with a hint of admiration. I finished my rant, “Just tell me what’s up.”

    My Uncle sighed and acted like a governor again. Any familial love was gone. He spoke more like an impartial judge rather than an angry uncle, “Tommy, Don,” he said, “Carry out the plan of the day.”

    Tommy nodded and said, “Yes sir,” and took his phone back from my hand. His brown eyes were as dead as mud puddles. I heard Don actually laugh as a black cloth sack was pulled over my head. Don slammed me against the desk and expertly handcuffed me before I realized what was happening. He smacked me across the head as I feebly resisted.
     
  10. mysterymet

    mysterymet Monkey+++

    Interesting story. Hope he gets back out there and tries again. Also interested in what was in his file.
     
  11. RJB

    RJB Monkey+++

    CHAPTER 9


    After getting blinded by the hood and shackled, Don pushed me out the door of the building. I could hear the heavy thumping of a helicopter heading in our direction.

    “Is that bird for me?” I asked.

    “Shut up,” Don said.

    “Tommy?” I yelled.

    “Sorry, Eric. This is the best deal that I could get you.”

    I was worried that I would cry, but I kept relatively calm as I asked. “Am I going to live?” My voice cracked slightly.

    “That’s entirely up to you.” Don said without mercy. “You can’t fight worth a damn, so I suggest you work on your BSing skills. You are now permanently an outcast.”

    A icey hand seemed to grip me and squeeze every last bit of hope from my body and soul.

    When I said nothing, Don added with a cruel chuckle, “Yep. You wanted to make a name for yourself, well here’s your chance.”

    “Take the hood off, Don.” Tommy ordered with a hint of compassion.

    Don complied without question. Although once the hood was off, I could see in his face he didn’t like the order.

    Tommy looked me in the eyes. I could see something that resembled concern or friendship. “You’re getting flown back out there. You’ll have all the filming and computers and solar rechargers needed,” Tommy said. “The Governor wanted you dead, but here you get a chance at a reprieve. I’ll keep working through the channels. Maybe in a year or two things will change enough and we’ll get you out.”

    Don held on like he expected me to collapse from fear, but I was beyond that. I said, “A year or two? I barely survived eighteen hours! I am a dead man! You know it. Please, just let me sneak back. I would rather live as an anonymous homeless bum in DC than out in those woods. Please.”

    Tommy raised his voice to speak over the helicopter that was now hovering over the trees and starting to land in a nearby clearing, “The chopper will take you within a few miles of a settlement.”

    “A few miles? How will I find them?” I asked having already spent a day wandering a few miles.

    “I’m sure they will find you,” Don interjected with his chuckle. As things became more intense, he seemed to actually smile.

    Tommy nodded, “They are very aware of intruders.”

    “I don’t want to be an intruder.” I said as the helicopter landed. Tommy stopped following us and stood watching as Don pushed my head down and ducked to avoid decapitation by the rotor blades.

    “That’s where your gift of bull comes in,” Don shouted as we arrived at the chopper. He guided me in, pushed me through the cargo door and then shouted in my ear once we were both inside. “Oh yeah, so you can’t try to wander back again.”

    I was plunged into darkness as the hood was slammed over my head once more. As we walked the final steps to the bird, Tommy yelled at me over the noise explaining that my mission was the same, to get some good footage and stories.

    In the blackness of the hood, Don guided me and boarded the chopper with me.




    * * *


    The flight wrenched my gut. For one thing, it was my first ride in a Blackhawk helicopter, but on top of that, I experienced the changes of gravity with a blindfold over my eyes. It sucked. I dry heaved a bit and realized that I hadn’t eaten in over a day. I was grateful that I had nothing to upchuck into the black hood. That would have been plain nasty.

    After fifteen minutes flying, Don pulled the hood off of my head. I blinked a few times as I got used to the light.

    A soldier in a biohazard suit and one of the bird masks manned a pretty heavy looking machine gun that pointed out the cargo door. His goggled eyes peered out over the terrain and had no interest in me. The pilots were unseen behind a cabin wall.

    I had read that Blackhawk helicopters can fly over a hundred and fifty miles an hour. I guessed that I was at least 30 miles from the border. Having covered barely two miles on the mountainous terrain on foot, I knew that sneaking back was not an immediate option, especially considering that I had no idea which direction to head.

    Don took off the handcuffs and handed me a pair of headsets. I placed them on. He then handed me the handcuffs with the keys. I could hear his voice clearly through the ear pieces, “Keep the cuffs. You might be able to use them as barter. It’s a different world down there.”

    I pocketed the cuffs and the keys.

    He spoke to me for a few minutes sharing some survival tips and ideas to deal with the locals. He actually seemed fairly fatherly in his advice as if he truly wanted me to succeed. He told me that Tommy would send a drone out on occasion to pick up the computer chip with the footage that I recorded as well as dropping off gifts for me. That would be the extent of our communication.

    He specifically warned me not to approach a drone that didn’t approach me. Don told me that in order to prevent capture, they had enough explosives to level a house.

    I nodded and worried about any drone that got near me after that.

    As he spoke, I kept my mouth shut to avoid angering him. I still suspected that there was a chance they might throw me out of the chopper from a few thousand feet above the ground. I had seen that when I did some reporting in South and Central America.

    I did speak up as I noticed a large gathering of people crammed together in a valley. There had to be thousands maybe tens of thousands. It looked like it had to be some kind of outdoor music concert in the way they were packed together. However, I suspected that the gathering was anything but fun. There was something sinister in the way they moved slowly with occasional spastic jerks.

    “What’s that?” I asked Don. “A music festival,” I forced a joke. Humor seemed to be my go to in times of stress.

    “Nope, those are the zombies. Some of them”

    I swore. Just the magnitude of monstrous humanity froze me to the core. Seeing it in real life was a heavy weight to bear.

    I asked Don, “Why are they crammed together?”

    “They have a herd instinct, like your average human voter. They probably still chant the names of their favorite politicians,” Don snorted cynically as if he was someone who was above the laws, politicians, and other quirks of humanity.

    “Why are they in the valley?”

    Don explained, “They devoured everything in the towns and are looking for food, people, elsewhere. However, they take the paths of least resistance. They won’t venture off the roads unless they smell or hear something that promises easy access to food. Again, humanity hasn’t changed.”

    “What attracts them?” I asked.

    “Anything. Everything,” He said studying the ground below with an eye that held no fear. “Sounds. Gunshots especially. They can hear those from miles away and it promises that something is wounded and an easy dinner. That’s why so many people use swords, machetes, clubs, and bows and arrows. Besides, after two years, bullets are scarcer than tits on a bull.”

    Once we flew over a ridge and I couldn’t see the zombies anymore, I quit talking to Don. It was depressing how little faith he had in humanity. It was even more depressing because I suspected that he may be correct. He was so high up in the secret workings of government, he had to know so much and yet he was by far the most cynical bastard I had ever met. I prayed that it was more of his nature rather than what he actually knew.

    I felt a dread come over me as the helicopter slowed and started to descend. The floor of the helicopter would be my last contact with civilization, indefinitely.

    Don paternally slapped me on the back. “You’ll do fine, kid.”

    He took the headphones off my head and said gently, “Alright. Get going. Some people are on the way to pick you up.”

    In a small clearing, the helicopter lowered to a few feet off the ground as if afraid of making physical contact with the land for fear of contracting the zombie disease.

    I hesitated.

    “Get going,” he repeated not quite as gently.

    “I can’t,” I said truthfully. My feet would not move. I did not want to break from my last contact with civilization. The cold realization that there was no going back slammed hard.

    I suddenly found myself flying out of the large cargo door and realized that Don had literally booted me out. I fell six feet to the rocky mountain soil. I barely rolled out of the way as a huge backpack followed me and landed where I had just fallen. I looked closer and saw that it was the exact same pack that had fallen off the cliff. I could even see scratches from the damn bear that had been stitched up and repaired with rubberized patches. It was heavily re-stuffed gear. Earlier, Don said it had more survival stuff and things to barter to ingratiate me into my new tribe. I had all the proof that this outcome had been planned all along. There was nothing I could do, but my best.

    I looked at Don. Again I flipped him the finger. The Darth Vader like door gunner showed no emotion. Don actually smiled. I could barely hear him over the thumping rotorwash, but through the help of lip reading I could tell that he said, “You’re the one who’s screwed.”

    Even as they flew away, the door gunner kept the barrel aimed at me.

    I actually felt tears threatening to spill as the finality settled on my shoulders. This scheme that I dreamed up, the one that was supposed to help me live my life to my full potential, had in effect just ended it. I pushed my self-pity aside. I had to start thinking like a survivor and also like a journalist. Not just my immediate survival, but my documentation would give me a bit of immortality.

    But first I had to survive.

    For a moment however, I stood watching the chopper leave. Anger replaced my fear once I was beyond the range of the machine gun, then a numbness hit as the Blackhawk formed a soundless black dot on the horizon. I felt the darkest, hopeless doom. It was when both the sight and sound of the helicopter were gone that the oppressive reality hit me. They weren’t coming back. I should have done something worth getting shot over, but again I realized this exile was all planned in advance. Only three people knew about my crime of crossing the border and they all had prior knowledge of the plan. This exile was not out of mercy.

    Even though I had my livelihood in the backpack, everything I needed for making a documentary, even if it was the most kick ass documentary ever, I would never get to enjoy the rewards in a civilized world. Tommy was lying when he said that he would get me a reprieve in a year or so. I knew it. I was officially dead. I just didn’t eat the brains of the living like real zombies, at least not yet. Still, I was not ready to die yet. I had to survive.

    Things chirped, critters noisily shuffled through the leaves, the wind howled, unknown rustlings and screechings. I even thought I heard some very distant mocking laughter. However, I had a hard time hearing between my thundering heartbeat, rapid breathing, and my feet crunching on the leaves as I kept looking for the sources of the noises, spinning in a circle on the forested mountain top like a demented scene from the Sound of Music. I was later told that’s what I indeed looked like.

    I finally caught my breath and quit moving for a moment and just listened. Somewhere in my mind, I knew that what I was hearing was a large animal. It wasn’t just a rustling through the leaves. Rather it was a singular, heavy crunch of leaves. Then a brief pause and another, “crunch.” Like the night before when I heard the bear approach my tent. I could feel my skin get a cold sweaty sheen as I turned to look. I didn’t have my bear spray handy.

    I jumped, screamed, and fell to the ground when I heard something whistle over my head and saw an antlerless deer shoot away through the woods. An arrow shot over its back. I lay there looking to my left as it disappeared.

    I then whipped my head to my right as I heard the noisy thrashing through the leaves like I did the day before when I couldn’t find the source. I screamed again as a squirrel charged straight to my face. The animal stopped inches away. It stared at me in shock and ran the other way in a bolt of brown and red fur. I screamed again and jumped to my feet.

    I realized that the mysterious terror of the day before was simply a squirrel. That is what made the thrashing sound in the leaves. I felt like a dunce.

    I was about to breathe a sigh of relief, but I caught my breath as I remembered the errant arrow that had whistled above my head. That was when I heard the laughter of two men who sounded uncannily close by. I wheeled back to the direction I was just facing and there they were sitting on a log casually observing me from forty meters.

    They were dressed in a mix of brown buckskin and camouflage. It appeared that they weren’t hiding. I had just been too panicked to see what was in front of me earlier. So that as they sat still in their outdoorsy clothes, they were all but invisible to me until they wished to be seen.

    They stood up still laughing. Each held a homemade longbow. With the laughter, archery stuff, and woodsy clothes, I may have confused them with Robin Hood’s Merry Men, were it not for the anachronistic assault rifles strapped to their shoulders, ready for emergencies, and their eyes which were not merry. Yes, the corners of their eyes crinkled with laughter, but something beyond their pupils told a different story. Looking deep into their eyes, I could tell these were killers. They may not have been as evil as Don, but two years in the rough, the windows to their soul told me that they had had to kill to survive.

    One was a short almost fat man (fat for the quarantined area), about fifty-five years old. He wore a ball cap in a crooked manner on his head. Not like a hipster trying to be cool, but rather like a redneck who just didn’t care what people thought of him. He placed a baseball bat over one shoulder and set down his longbow. He had a beard about halfway down his chest. He laughed, and took off his cap. He ran his hand over his bald head as if somehow that would get him to regain his composure. It didn’t. I later learned that his name was Scott. I don’t think he was actually related to anyone in the tribe, but they referred to him as Uncle Scott nonetheless.

    Scott said in a thick accent, “Damn son, I ain’t never saw someone so scared of their dinner.” The accent wasn’t quite the lofty and beautiful southern draw. It was similar in some ways but harsher, like the black sheep of a family.

    The shock of numbness began to leave me. I felt my anger arising, but told myself to keep it in check so my impulsive nature didn’t get me killed. I took him to be a dumbass with his thick accent, which sounded foreign to my North East Coast ears. Having a dumbass speak down to me is probably my biggest pet peeve.

    However, the AK-47 slung over his back scared the hell out of me. It wasn’t so much the gun; it was his casual acquaintance with it. The military police, who escorted me, carried theirs with a tension that screamed anger and fear. Yet this guy didn’t seem to have a care in the world. I had the feeling he could draw the weapon, shoot me and not even pause in his laughter, but thankfully he didn’t seem inclined.

    The other man was tall, lean, mid thirties, longish hair, and a short beard. I did a double take. He kind of looked like that father on that drone footage I watched back in the bar. If the man in the video hadn’t surely met his death, I may have seriously thought it was him. However, this guy didn’t have that determined look. He looked like some mellow hippy, but I guess most of the people out here looked like this due to the lack of hygiene and beauty salons. He had a black assault rifle strapped over his back. I later learned it was an AR-15. A katana sword was sheathed at his side.

    The hippy just nodded his head as a response to Scott’s laughter. I later learned that the hippy’s name was Bryan.

    “Do you men live around here?” I asked.

    “Nope,” said Bryan. Even with his monosyllabic speech, he didn’t seem to have any accent I could pinpoint.

    “Really?” I asked curiously.

    “No,” said the short fat one in one of the worst imitations of a New York accent ever, “A fricking helicopter just dropped us off too like it did with youse.”

    Both men laughed again. They then approached me casually. It reminded me of a video from a safari in Africa. I saw three lions confidently approach a cape buffalo in an almost friendly yet playful manner. They circled it and within a minute they were devouring the poor animal alive.

    “Who are you guys?” I demanded.

    “No,” Bryan said. “Who are you to come into our land? Why is a man who is scared of squirrel and deer, made an outcast to the civilized world?”

    “I’m Eric Hildebrande. I got caught sneaking into the,” I hesitated to call their home the Forbidden Zone. I eventually just said, “Zone.”

    “Hildebrande, like the Governor Peckerhead,” said Scott. He had a way of saying everything in a tone as if it were a joke. Usually just crudely calling someone a peckerhead would have had no effect on me, but even in the circumstance I found something funny about him. Had the circumstances been different, I may have laughed aloud.

    Scott continued, “No wonder you ain’t shot.”

    “This isn’t punishment. I am a journalist,” I stated. It wasn’t the truth, but I wasn’t going to appear like a victim.

    “Of course,” said Bryan dismissively. “What happened to your face?”

    I remembered how bruised it was, so I thrust my chest out and boldly stated, “You should see the other guy’s face.”

    Scott laughed and gently pushed me aside. He and Bryan, without asking and with the casualness of the lions, tore through my backpack. Actually it was more like the bear from the night before, except they unbuttoned and unzipped rather than ravaged my pack with taloned claws. I felt just as powerless as I did last night, especially without the bear spray.

    After a moment, I grew angry enough at the careless way they threw my stuff all over the place, and I stepped forward to stop them but Bryan looked at me and shook his head. There was no threat, no words, in fact he smiled in a friendly manner. The headshake seemed to imply without saying aloud, “We both know you don’t have the balls to stop me.”

    I gritted my teeth knowing he was right.

    “What the hell is all this?” demanded Scott. He held up a telescopic lens that was over twelve inches long and looked through it, “Daggum! This is almost as big as my pecker.”

    Bryan looked at me with a hint of concern. “You won’t last a day out here, man. You have little food, no weapons—“

    “I have this knife.” I said holding up the multi-tool with the three inch blade.

    “’bout the size of your pecker,” Scott laughed.

    Bryan rolled his eyes as if his pecker was the only topic of conversation that Scott engaged in. He then looked pointedly at me, “Dude, they set you up to die.”

    “My mission is to meet up with a group of people like yourself and film how you survive. Like the reality show, Survivor Man or something.”

    “That’s been done to death, even before all this went down,” Bryan said with a hint of sympathy. “I don’t think this will be as glamorous as you appear to think.”

    “Yeah, but what you do is real. I mean, picture it.” I knew it looked cheesy, but I was desperate as I held both thumbs and forefingers up in a rectangle like a television and said, “You’re doing something like lighting a fire—Yeah, been done to death-- but then just as the viewers get bored, a zombie attacks.” I know what I did sounds melodramatic, but I was hoping these people with such little hope would be bedazzled. I was counting on being the savior to give some meaning to their lives.

    Scott laughed hysterically, “That’s gotta be the stupidest thing I done heard of.”

    I had a feeling Scott purposefully spoke horrible grammar for shock value. Everything about him seemed to be an act to get a rise out of someone. I couldn’t tell if I found him to be annoying or funny. Maybe a little of both and that’s probably why I wasn’t sure.

    Bryan casually leaned against a tree with a sad smile that showed that he was acting polite, but that he fully agreed with what Scott had said.

    “Oh, crap,” I exclaimed as I saw a human form lurching towards us. Scott and Bryan had their backs to the thing. Its putrid flesh was falling off of it and I could catch a faint scent of the decaying humanity. I could see the muscles of the face where the skin had fallen away as well as a few molars. Were it clothed, I would not have been able to tell that it was a male, but even that member was probably days away from completely falling off from rot.

    “What’s the matter?” asked Bryan.

    The horror of it overwhelmed my nervous system and all could say was literally, “Wuh wuh,” as I pointed.

    “Son, what in the holy hell is a ‘wuh wuh’?” asked Scott.

    I muttered some more unintelligible syllables. The monster was ten feet behind them.

    In seemingly a single motion, Bryan lazily leaned forward to get his back off the tree, turned to face the zombie, and drew his sword slicing the zombie’s head off. It happened so fast that I stood staring for a moment as I digested what I had just witnessed.

    As soon as the headless thing hit the ground, Bryan pulled out a cloth and an unlabeled plastic water bottle. He then wiped down his sword using a brownish liquid from the water bottle that I took to be an antiseptic. It smelled something like Listerine except a little more astringent.

    “I was wondering when he’d get here,” Bryan said with a bored voice.

    Scott chimed in, “These rotters, like this headless guy here, are probably days away from falling apart. They don’t move so fast.”

    “Yeah,” Bryan agreed. “We saw him standing against a tree in sleep mode.”

    Scott looked at Bryan and said, “And he would have stayed that way if idiot here didn’t wake him up with that damn whirly bird. By the way, nimrod, next time you see a zombie, don’t say ‘wuh wuh,’ say, `Hey guys, there’s a zombie behind you.’”

    Now that the immediate danger was behind me, I realized that I needed these two. I could not spend the night alone in the woods and expect to survive without them. “So what about the documentary?” I asked. “Interested?”

    “And what in the holy hell do we get out of it?” demanded Scott with a mocking laugh..

    “You get your name out there, to the public, your public.” I answered, but saw that it wasn’t selling. I put on a cheesy showman’s voice and dramatically spread my arms for a comical effect. “Fame, fortune, you can keep up with the Kardashians?” I added as a joke.

    They looked at me confused. Finally Scott asked, “The Kar-what-in-the-hells?”

    Bryan shook his head, “Sorry bro, this isn’t going to work. You’ll most likely be dead by morning anyway, so we’ll just take your food,” Bryan said motioning to my pack as if it were already a done deal.

    “What? The hell you will,” I said more in panic than anger.

    “You done scared that deer and caused us to miss the shot,” Scott explained. “That was our tribe’s dinner tonight. Bryan’s gots kids to feed. You owe us, peckerhead.”

    “Besides,” Bryan added. “I highly suspect you as a spy with all that recording equipment.”

    Bryan and Scott started pocketing my camping food.

    “Who the hell would want to spy on a bunch of hillbillies?” I asked. It wasn’t a nice thing to say. I later learned that hillbilly is similar to the n- word in these mountains. However, in the moment, my emotions had taken over my reason.

    Scott barely spoke between his chortling, “Some loser trash who society bashed his face up and discarded from a whirly bird, obviously.”

    That was like a hot iron spike driven into my chest. I felt an impulsive rage wash over me. They could insult me, but they couldn’t steal all that I had left.

    Bryan could see it. He smirked at me. I could tell that he was purposely pressing my buttons. It worked.

    My grip tightened on my small knife and I charged at Bryan. Although I had some training in martial arts, I was fueled by pure brainless rage and desperation. Bryan calmly stepped aside and kicked my foot out as I barreled past him. I sprawled onto the leafy forest floor and lost my knife.

    I sprang to my feet and charged again, swinging my fist at his smug face. Bryan easily ducked the blow. I saw a smile on his face as he drew his sword. The blunt hilt pressed deep against my abdomen and I felt the wind knocked out of my lungs. Bryan moved behind me and I found myself with the back of my head against his chest. I wound up in something like a head lock, but instead of his forearm the blade of his sword pressed up against my throat. He stood with his knee lifted to support my chest. If he removed his knee, I would have fallen to the ground against the razor sharp blade. It would have decapitated me.

    Scott put down his baseball bat.

    “Now, my friend,” Bryan said calmly. “You are going to calm down. OK?”

    I was panting, but afraid to speak for fear that moving my jaw would place more pressure against the blade and my throat. Having a razor sharp blade against one’s neck probably inspires more terror than a gun pointed at one’s head. I felt like I was bleeding, but I couldn’t touch my neck because my hands were grasping Bryan’s arms to support my weight and to keep my head on my shoulders. I wondered if any germs from the killing of the zombie could infect me from the sword’s blade. I hoped whatever the antiseptic was that he used to clean it was effective.

    “OK?” Bryan asked again as Scott pulled the handcuffs from my pocket.

    “Please,” I whispered.

    I thought I was dead as the metal sliced across my throat. I fell to the ground at his feet. My hands went to my neck. It took me a moment to realize there was no blood. Bryan had turned the blade so that the dull back of it rather than the honed blade slid across my throat. Although I survived, to this day I can still feel the cold sensation and the terror of the heartless metal moving against the skin of my throat.

    Scott yanked my arms behind my back and cuffed me. I offered no resistance. All my steam was spent on the two futile charges.

    “Scott, cuff his hands in front so that he can catch himself if he falls.” Bryan suggested.

    “Won’t he be able to fight us with his hands in front?” Scott asked with a sarcastic snort.

    Bryan replied with a single huff like laugh.

    “Yeah, I heard that,” Scott laughed back.

    With Bryan’s sword’s point indenting the skin of my back a few inches, I offered no physical resistance. However, I started screaming. “Help! Help!”

    Bryan shook his head. “That will just attract more zombies.”

    “Then uncuff me so I can fight them, or I’ll keep yelling.”

    Bryan just shook his head and after a moment said, “We’ll need something more deadly than the zombies to scare him. Scott, give him the muffler.”

    “Sure, Bry.” Scott drawled.

    I curiously watched as Scott bent over and untied a fungus ridden boot. He removed his foot that was covered by an equally fungus covered sock. I could not even guess at the sock’s original color. The manner in which he snickered started to scare me.

    “What are you doing?” I asked as he slowly pulled the sock off of his foot. I coughed as I caught wind of the stench that over rode the scent of the rotter. “Geez! Have you ever changed socks in your life?”

    “Why should I?” Scott laughed.

    As he stepped forward I blurted again, “What are you doing?”

    He smiled and I saw a missing tooth. He held up the sock close to my face and answered my question, “Puttin’ a sock in it, son. Now open up as we gag you.” He looked at Bryan and said. “Tie that bandana around his mouth after I stick this in.”

    My jaw clamped shut as he attempted to stick the sock in my mouth.

    I gagged and turned my head away from that atrocity, and begged through tight lips, “Please, I will keep quiet. Please. You have my word.”

    I dry heaved as the stinking thing touched my face. Scott gently brushed it across my cheek like a lover’s caress as Bryan yanked my hair back, forcing my mouth to open.

    Bryan laughed. “I think he learned his lesson.”

    “Oh,” Scott whined as he held it before my open mouth for a moment.

    “Thank you,” I said breathlessly as Scott removed the offensive sock. “That would have been worse than being attacked by a zombie horde.”

    Bryan sadly agreed.

    Scott’s eyes crinkled in an avuncular manner. “I am starting to like you, kid. You’re funny.” he said with a laugh as he blindfolded me. I actually didn’t mind because the blind fold was a cloth that was relatively clean.

    Then a fear hit me. I worried that the blindfold was for a firing squad. I voiced that worry.

    “The blindfold is so that you can’t see the way to our camp,” Bryan said.

    They led me away. I stumbled a lot. I had enough trouble walking in the rocky Appalachian forest with sight. Without it, it was hell.

    After I stumbled a few times, Scott said in a mock reverential tone of a cheesy martial art movie, “We take you to see Grand Masta, young grasshoppa.”

    “Who is that?” I asked.

    “You are grasshoppa. That’s who that.” Scott said.

    “No I mean who is—“

    Scott’s laugh interrupted me.

    Bryan said in his reasonable tone, “His name is Adam. He’s basically our chief. He’ll decide your fate. So I suggest you kiss his ass when you meet him.”

    I trudged along blindfolded to meet my fate.
     
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