Shadow Of Doubt: Z Is For Zombie Book 3 Read online

  In the center aisle were drunk men, trying to rape a third woman, but the one at the right couldn’t keep an erection, so the woman kicked, landing hard blows often. The would-be rapist’s friends laughed at his attempts; they were all drunk and stank with body odor.

  Walt’s boots crackled on the glass underfoot, and one of the men turned to stare at him.

  “You can’t get us all.” The man leered, waving a knife. “Hell,” he said the word as hail.

  Walt pulled the trigger. Got you, though, he thought. The now-dead one had been an idiot for facing off with a man holding a gun. The others blinked in their drunken stupor and showed true colors as they ran like cowards.

  He slid on pooled blood as he ran after the fleeing men who were headed right out where his sons were.

  Gunshots exploded. Walt felt relief that the criminals had been stopped and wouldn’t be torturing any more women. No more courts meant they had to assess crimes and serve punishment themselves.

  “Came running out with knives waving,” Lance said.

  “They deserved it. They are guilty of rape, murder, kidnapping, and torture,” Walt explained so that his boys would have clear consciences over having to kill the men. “They would have killed us, too.”

  All three of the other boys were dead, and Walt saw that one was barely a man, but his sons had put the rapists down, just as dead as they would have put down a zed. Killing monsters was guided by no rules.

  It took a while to get the barbed wire, they called bob-wire, off of the woman even with wire cutters; he had to go slowly and gently, easing some of the wire out of her deep wounds. It was a miracle she hadn’t bled to death with the depth and amount of open gashes.

  After removing the wire, Walt wrapped her in a blanket, wondering if she would survive. They drove a ways and then set up a camp, hoping the men had been alone and that no one would be looking for revenge, but the woman needed some rest, or she would die.

  She wailed in pain when Walt treated her wounds with antibiotics and applied bandages; then, she went quiet for a while.

  She was almost wrapped like a mummy with all the bandages, and on the places her skin showed, she was marked purple and black from bruises, but there didn’t seem to be any broken bones. They felt hopeful when she was able to eat a lot of hot food and drink plenty of water, falling asleep in a tight little ball under the quilts.

  Walt looked around, ready to stop his story if Ali came back into the room. “She never talked about it and now acts as if it never happened.”

  “That’s horrible,” Tory said.

  “She just kind of…put it all out of her head and only told us her name. But she never talked about what those men did or about who the other women were.We didn’t ask.”

  “Maybe she can’t stand to think or talk about it,” Tory said.

  “We got out of there fast,” Walt explained, “there’s an army of some kind building there….”

  “Rescue? An army?”

  “No. They’re just riff raff that got together to make one big group of trash…scum like you can’t imagine…criminals and convicts…raiders, I guess you would call ‘em. It’s as if the people who were no-good before, all gathered for some big party, and almost anything goes with that bunch.”

  “No way.”

  “Get this, they wear these neo-Nazi style uniforms with arm bands as if they are practicing that stuff: killing anyone who isn’t white or making him a slave.”

  Charles stared. “That’s insane to do that to people suffering the same as the rest of us.”

  “Oh yeah, we heard all about them from people running from them. They do the same thing we do in fighting and killing zombies, but some of them catch them and cage them. I won’t even repeat all of what they use them for: one is for torturing and killing those they think are their enemies, and one is a sex thing. Perverted.”

  Tory gagged. “Oh, my God, Walt? Is that true?”

  “We heard from several that it is. They grab people they consider enemies:Mexicans and black people and make them slaves around camp.” Walt was going furious. “They use them as slaves; can you imagine how those folks must feel? Like a slap in the face.”

  “Slaves? That’s sick, to make any human a slave.” Charles felt sick.

  “We’re talking chains and beatings...the works, too,” Walt added, “women traded like barter goods; that’s bad.”

  “And they are organized?”

  “They call themselves the Reconstruction Army or RA, the Rockin’ 4, or Fourth Reich: some white supremacists which that guy Frank leads, along with a few more nuts. One is a scary dude named Lucas; they say he is always with a spooky kid with a messed-up face.”

  “Now, that is all kinds of crazy,” Charles said. “You think it’s true? Did you see it, Walt?”

  “Hail no, we didn’t get close enough to them, but people along the way told us. And right now, the RA is partying: all the liquor, women, and drugs, but some say that soon the RA will start setting up like a real army, gathering supplies and people, as slaves or members.”

  “That’s bad, people doing that to each other.”

  “Now you think that’s bad? You need to hear about that guy Gabe and the kid Zane he is cartin’ around.

  Zane told us this freaky story about a gang of crazy boys who kidnapped him and his family, had some kind of make-believe court trial, and executed all of them except for those two.”

  Zane’s parents and his friends were subjected to a parody of a trial which would have fit better into a comedy skit than into reality, had it not been so horrible with periodic beatings of the ‘witnesses’.

  After being found guilty by the gang of crazy boys, the friends and family of Zane were tied to poles, drenched in inflammable liquid, and set on fire right in front of the Zane.

  After the people were dead, the plans were to execute Gabe and make Zane one of them or kill him, but the heads of those people burned did something astounding.

  “Oh, Walt, there’s no way….”

  “There is too a way, and it’s of the devil himself, Charles.

  I mean little Zane wasn’t one of those boys. We checked it out. And sure enough, we found the burned bodies and buried them. But guess what? Their heads were gone.”

  “Someone took their heads?”

  Zane told them that the raiders were watching when the burned people’s heads, their eyes burning with a glow, went flying off of their necks and straight to the crazy boys, burning them to ashes in a tremendous fire. Only Zane and Gabe walked away.

  Charles and Tory said that it was impossible and that they didn’t think it happened that way, but Walt shook his head stubbornly. “It may sound impossible, but you didn’t hear Zane telling the story or see those headless bodies we buried.”

  “Still….”

  “I’ll let you read the diary that Zane gave me to read. The diary will show you the story is true, but it also tells about a commune, not a crazy-cult commune, but one more like a farming community of would-be hippies that Zane’s parents were part of.”

  “Hippies? Oh, slap my ass, and call me Bob,” Tory said in disbelief.

  “I said hippies, but that isn’t right either. It was a farming community; the members were all college-educated, smart folks, living off of the land. They were not crazed religious nuts or survivalist gun collectors; there were no intermarriages or multi-wife thing. They were just normal people in their own little village, I guess, who stayed to themselves and didn’t get into all of the technology we did, simple and not fancy people.”

  “So, normal but not into recent technology? Interesting.”

  “They were more about nature and education. Zane was home schooled like the rest until each was old enough for college.He had a better grasp of language, math, history, and science than most high school seniors.”

  “Makes sense, I guess,” Tory said.

  “But with all the other technology removed, they did have some rather odd beliefs, odd to us anyway,
but not impossible,” Walt said.

  They all believed in what was said by a woman named Diana, who would have been Zane’s great grandmother. She was already a woman during the hippy-generation of the 1960s and had, no doubt, influenced a few things about the commune she and her friends established. Luckily, they were levelheaded and were not portrayed like some of the other hippies.

  Diana, long since vanished from the commune on some mission, somehow predicted the Red epidemic and prepared her people through her words in her diary. However, they, like most of the world’s population, fell ill and rose to hunt living flesh. Diana felt there would be a showdown between opposing armies on US soil.

  “Like good and bad or what?”

  “Yes, like that,” Walt said, “and she predicted Zane’s birth and things about her granddaughter and even described the RA and one of its leaders, a boy with a withered face and one eye.”

  Tory dropped her glass of tea.

  3

  Popetown/Hopetown

  Beth sighted down her scope, seeing the zombie’s head in acute detail: chomping, dripping mouth; milky white eyes; and torn-open cheek. With infinite delight, she squeezed the trigger, watched a hole appear in its forehead, and smiled as brains and blood shot out the back before the thing fell.

  In some ways, she hated them because they killed and fed with no mercy, like great white sharks; killing them meant no more to her than spearing a fish.

  It was easy to hate something so mindless and deadly. She almost pitied some of them because they were long gone but still had bodies tied to the world and because they were doing disgusting, vile things to loved ones and to other innocents.

  Sometimes, she forgot they once were human and saw them only as rabid beasts to be put down, but then she would see a child or someone less torn up and feel badly that the zombies were walking around.

  With the zombies, they felt nothing but killed indiscriminately, so she felt very little when she killed them. One more dead was one less to worry about.

  “Good shot, Beth.”

  “Thanks.” Beth made a clicking noise and touched her horse’s side gently so she could begin her patrol of the fence.

  “Let’s go,” Hannah told her horse.

  “Don’t kick; only touch; she knows what to do,” Beth corrected Hannah’s riding skills as she watched the pre-teen still learning the basics of riding. She was learning fast but still needed confidence and some fine-tuning of her skills. In time, Hannah would be an expert rider.

  “Gotcha,” Hannah said.

  About horses, Hannah wasn’t an expert, which was kind of a new experience since she was usually well versed in any subject. Being somewhat of a child prodigy, Hannah was the youngest of Len’s trained teams and only allowed to be one through her ability to over-talk his logic and bully him with long, drawn out arguments. “Are you okay?”

  Beth shrugged. “What was okay? I’m dealing the best I can.”

  When Len and George told her there was no sign of her husband Kimball in the parking lot, she mostly took the words straight-faced, with a sense of shock. She didn’t know if she really wanted to go on without him, but they had an adopted daughter, Katie, who needed her. It was easier to throw herself into work now and not think too much about all that was going on.

  No sign of Kim and a few others might mean they were alive but unable to return quite yet, which made no real sense but was okay. The thing was that Beth didn’t feel Kim was dead, and that was all there was to it.

  Beth wheeled around and rode to where Bravo team was almost ready to enter one of the out buildings of the compound. They left the zombies there since they couldn’t get out, but it was time to finish the job. Any of the walking dead inside the compound was a danger they couldn’t afford.

  The big building was close to the fields where corn grew, promising a huge harvest before fall.A big field was growing with squash and pumpkins that the former inhabitants had planted right before Red took them out. Growing crops would not only sustain them against the winter but also would provide healthy, good-tasting food; they were excited about that.

  “You ready?” Pan asked.

  Beth said she was planning to provide back up from horseback. Their teams were a bit changed for now while they adjusted to losing so many who had been good with guns. That had happened when the zombies attacked the place they had used as refuge.

  Months of the team’s using the partially collapsed hospital as a safe refuge ended when thousands of the walking dead over ran it, forcing the team members to get into vehicles and flee.

  That was a terrible night when they lost friends who fought so hard; in fact, nine of the team members were lost, but not one of the civilians, as they thought of the others.

  “I’m in the mood for some killing,” Johnny said. She looked tough as she still sported short hair, once bleached out white but now grown in black so that it looked a zebra. She was slim and still prone to wearing her bad-girl leathers.Bit by bit, she had built her self-esteem as she battled beside her friends as a trusted team member.

  Johnny painfully had lost a pinky finger in a deadly, cruel trap set by raiders right there in the compound, but she had fared better than some of the team on that long, miserable day.

  Her team survived and got out with some help from Beth’s team; the raiders were executed. Now, she thought losing a pinky was a bit of a joke, compared to Beth’s losing Kim, Misty’s losing Mark, and Hannah’s losing her mentor, Andie.

  Johnny kept her eyes on those, as asked by Len. They all worried about those who had lost people.

  “You’re always ready for killing Zs, Johnny,” Julia laughing said. She, like Johnny, Misty, and Beth, had grown up learning to ride horses in Texas. When she sat astride her horse, despite wearing cammo and combat gear, she resembled an avenging angel, or maybe that was how others saw her or how she carried herself. “You ready, Misty?”

  “Sure,” Misty replied.She was only sixteen, had gone back to wearing jeans and roper boots, wore her hair in long braids under a hat, and looked every bit the innocent cowgirl unless one looked into her eyes and saw a hard glint and terrible sadness. Misty often cried when she was alone at night; she couldn’t let go of her feelings with her friends.She missed Mark horribly.

  “Be sure to give us a few to mow down,” Johnny told the others.

  “No way, we get to shoot ‘em up.” Henry waved them off with a big grin. Like the other times, every zombie put down felt like a blow against the virus.

  The levity was more false bravado than anything else and a way to handle the misery of having to shoot fellow humans. At one time, it was unthinkable to kill a person; then, as they accepted that these were zombies and not humans anymore, it was unpleasant and painful sometimes, but necessary. Sometimes they were enjoyable to take out, a venue for them to release rage at the flesh eaters.

  Natalie swung open the weathered door to one of the outbuildings and skipped back out of the way as two zombies shambled out, having heard and smelled food.

  They could have easily shot the two, but Pan came forward, and with a swing of the bat, he hit the first. Pan, a former professional baseball player, showed why he had been an all-star as he slammed the bat right under and upward of the female zed’s jaw. Her head cocked back at an angle. “And that’s how we do it,” he said.

  He took a different angle, and her skull burst under his swings. In a few seconds, she lay on the ground, brains oozing into the soil.

  Randy started on the second one, taking body shots that did nothing but break bones, not even causing the damned things pain, but he knew subconsciously, they were all taking out their fury over the attack on the hospital.

  Natalie shot the third one who came out; she was not willing to expend too much energy on one even though she had lost a friend, too.

  “Check the rest, and then let’s load,” Thurman called out. His joints ached miserably as he thought he was way too old to be doing this, but like his friends George and Benny
said, he had not felt so helpful and useful in a very long while.

  His only regret, besides the death of most of the world, was the loss of the fourth member of their old men’s group; one of the four had died in a valiant attempt to save one of their friends.

  There were no more to be killed, and the people waiting were a little disappointed. “Let’s go, ladies; we have more fences to patrol,” Beth said. She turned her horse around and found a comfortable trot for the rest of the huge perimeter.

  Julia and Misty went a different way for patrol duty. They waved at each other as they separated.

  “Beth is quiet,” Pan said, watching them go.

  “You think she’s okay?”

  “Not really. I think she’s holding in too much anger,” Pan told the others.

  Thurman thought on it. “When I first met Beth and the rest, Beth was innocent and scared, but still responsible and trying hard. She was only an okay shot, and Len was training her.

  Some people were killed while they were kind of on her watch; she actually went into shock. She took the killings that hard. Then, when the hospital fell in on us, she stepped up, and she was a strong team member…went through some bad times with raiders….”

  “The ones Len executed?” Pan asked.

  “Right. And then my friend Tink….”

  “We’ve heard good things about him; I wish we could have known him,” Henry said.

  “Me, too. But she took that hard:he was infected and had to be…yanno. She takes things to heart. I expect she thinks it would have turned out better if she had stayed with Kim and the rest.”

  “Survivor’s guilt?” Pan asked.

  “I guess so. I just hope she finds her way back out,” Thurman said.

  They found no more zombies in the outbuildings; instead, they found a bulldozer and other heavy equipment. It was like a gold mine. They couldn’t wait to show the rest of the group they now had equipment to help with security projects and with new vegetable gardens and fields for food.

  Thurman slapped his team members on their backs and said, “This is a job done well.”“Gasoline and other fuels won’t last forever, but if we use them as much as we can while we can, they will help.”