DUSK
Reed watched the miracle unfold before his eyes. God be praised, the messiah sat up right there in the courtroom. The great one would now bring peace, and an age of enlightenment would begin. He fell to his knees and shouted praise as the messiah climbed to his feet.
Then he noticed something was wrong. The messiah’s eyes were vacant and hungry. Drool flowed from the messiah’s mouth, and he moved without grace or elegance. No! Reed thought. This wasn’t the messiah! This was a twisted flesh eating monster, just another leper. Nobody else seemed to notice, and Reed dared not speak out. If he was wrong, his thought would be blasphemy. Maybe there was a reason the messiah would return in this form. God worked in mysterious ways.
“Praise God!” David Emerson, one of the elders, shouted.
David ran to the messiah with his arms opened, smiling, grinning, and shouting all the way. In his mad dash, David leaped over the table and rushed past the guards who tried to stop him. The joyous elder hugged the messiah. The messiah grabbed David by the head and pushed his cranium back, exposing the neck and gnawed away a mouthful of flesh. As the elder’s death scream escaped, the messiah took a munched on the dying elder’s arm like it was the wing of a chicken. The messiah’s followers gasped in horror as they saw their savior feast upon the flesh of his victim like any normal human did upon death.
Reed placed his M-16 on the floor, next to the table, and pulled out a thirty-eight caliber revolver. He aimed for the space between the messiah’s eyes and squeezed the trigger. Thankfully, the shot did not do too much damage to the messiah’s face, but was enough to stop his mindless rampage.
Reed felt tears spill down the side of his face in a steady flow from the eye that still worked. He raised his pistol again, and put the barrel in his mouth. Reed tightened his finger on the trigger, but hesitated.
There must have been a reason the messiah came back like this. Maybe it was a test of faith. Until he did return, the followers were in for hard times, and they would need leadership. Reed would not forsake his people, for doing so would damn him to the eternal flames of hell.
He lowered his pistol, and placed it back into the holster on his belt.
*
The resurrection and subsequent re-execution of the messiah provided more than adequate cover for Sam to make his way to the elders. Everybody’s attention was towards the messiah, so sneaking up behind the elders was no chore.
One of them, a man about fifty-five years old, of medium build and not much muscle, was standing a few feet behind the rest of the elders, and there were no guards around him. He would be an easy target for a snatch and grab. Sam had no way to know if the cultists would value the life of an important official, but this was his best shot. He pressed the barrel of the pistol against the back of the elder’s head.
“Make a sound and the last thing your mind’ll be on is your friends over there,” Sam said and moved back two steps.
“Walk backwards, slowly,” Sam said.
In the world before, Sam would have been part of an effort to defuse a hostage situation. Now, in this present world, Sam was the one holding the hostage. It was a mad world, but this was a bad time for sanity to kick in. However strange his actions were, they had to be done.
The elder walked backwards as Sam instructed.
“Good keep moving.”
They reached the door before the scar looked up.
“Stop right there, heretic!” the scar shouted.
“Anybody moves towards us and I shoot. When he’s dead, I’ll start shooting the rest of you bastards at random!”
The attention of every guard in the room turned to Sam. The stunned crowd watched as the drama unfolded. Needless to say after today their lives were forever changed. For them it had been as drastic as the day of the first headlines reading “The Dead Walk,” and Sam assumed that the same was true for him. If he returned, the colony he called home would seem smaller than ever.
“You’re not leaving this building alive, even if we have to shoot through Mr. Thorp,” the scar said.
Though the scar talked as though the hostage didn’t matter, but they hadn’t fired through him. They would do their damnedest to make sure Sam never left the building, but at least Sam would take someone important with him.
*
After the shock of survival faded, Jack and Helen had gathered their weapons and any others from the dead soldiers in the hallway. Most of them had been carrying standard M-16’s, so Jack could carry a load of extra ammunition. They still had ten unused grenades, as well as those wired to untriggered traps, but there was no time to gather those.
Jack and Helen each picked up spare ammunition for the thirty-eight caliber handguns, which the cultists had been packing. It seemed like a better idea to bring weapons compatible with the ones the cultists inside would be using. However, Helen rejected any spare M-16’s for her trusty rifle.
Moving out of the building had been simple. There were no guards waiting for them to leave. Since the guards outside were busy with the crowd, Jack and Helen were able to navigate their way to the executive building unmolested. Until they reached the fifth floor, where the courtroom was, there were no guards in the building. In fact, there were no guards outside of the courtroom at all.
“Stay back or I punch a hole in his head!” Sam shouted from the doorway.
“Come on! He needs help.” Helen said.
Jack nodded, and followed Helen into action.
Sam stood just outside of the courtroom doorway, holding a man dressed in a red and white robe. There was a tall hat lying on the ground by the hostage’s feet. The man with the gun physically looked like Sam Porter, but did not resemble the fearless leader Jack had known all his life. What he saw was a mad man stuck in a corner, and it made Jack wonder what horrors they had subjected Sam to.
“Sam!” Jack shouted. “You need a couple of extra guns?”
“You showed up just in time,” Sam said.
Jack peered into the courtroom while Helen covered the rear. There must have been over a hundred guards aiming their guns at the doorway.
“Anyone makes a wrong move, and not only does you buddy die, but my friend here sprays the crowd and starts tossing grenades,” Sam shouted. “Helen, you take the hostage.”
Helen moved over to the man in the red and white, and aimed her rifle at the back of his head.
“Do what we say and nobody else has to die today,” Helen said.
“Rot in hell you Judas whore!”
Helen hit the hostage on the top of his head with the barrel of her rifle.
“We’re not leaving until we have the cure,” Sam said.
“I know,” Jack said. “That was the plan.”
“Good, we agree,” Sam said. He looked into the courtroom and yelled at the spectators and soldiers inside. “Listen up. We get what we came for. We leave and your friend here comes with us. You don’t follow us or try to stop us and he lives. We’ll let him walk back to the compound from a safe distance when we know we’re not being followed. Then you never see us again. You don’t cooperate, and things get ugly.”
“Do what he says,” a man wearing a red and white garment, similar to the hostage’s, said.
“He’ll do it!” the hostage said.
All but one guard in the room lowered their guns. The guard standing near the window, where Calhoun had been killed, kept his gun raised, and had a look of utter frustration and rage on his scarred face.
“You cowardly pigs, you’ll rot in hell for this!” the man with the scar said and lowered his M-16.
“Good. We’ll do this my way,” Sam said.
“We got a walk ahead of us. Calhoun’s quarters are on the eighteenth floor,” Helen said.
“How dare you speak his name? You are not worthy to speak his name,” the hostage said.
Helen thumped the barrel of her rifle on the top of the hostage’s head again.
*
Through most of the walk up to floor eighteen, everybody was silent. The only conversation happened when Sam asked for directions and when Helen gave them. Calhoun’s room was behind the third doorway to the right. It was the only one with a door.
“Jack,” Sam said, “get this wire off my wrists, then watch the hallway and make sure we don’t get any visitors.”
Jack reached into his back pack and pulled out a pair of wire cutters. Careful not to cut Sam’s wrists, Jack cut each individual strand of wire until the restraint fell from Sam’s wrists to the floor. Jack then stood outside of the doorway, with his M-16 still slung over his shoulder, watching the staircase and listening for any noise.
Sam and Helen escorted the hostage inside.
Calhoun’s room was twelve feet by twelve feet. The windows were covered in red drapes. In contrast to the decor of the rest of the rooms in the rest of the buildings, the walls and ceiling were both painted in a light shade of blue. All over the walls, paintings of religious scenes and crucifixes were hanging.
In the corner by the window, there was a large black safe with a combination lock. It was the same kind of safe Sam had seen in a million movies. In the movies a robber would hold a stethoscope to the door and listen for the latch as he turned the knob. They might not have had a stethoscope, but they had Helen.
“You think it’s in there?” Sam asked.
“If it’s in this compound.”
“How are we going to get it opened?”
“I know the combination.”
Helen’s answer surprised the hell out of Sam. She must have been closer to the messiah than she originally let on.
“It’s a long story, but I know a lot of things nobody else here knows.”
Sam turned to the hostage and said, “You, face the wall, spread your legs and put your palms against the wall.”
The hostage did as he was told without protest.
“You give us any trouble and your buddies’ll be cleaning blood off of this wall.”
“They’ll hear if you shoot. Then you won’t have anyone to hide behind,” the hostage said.
“Then I’ll just have to use a knife,” Sam said. “Helen, pass me a knife.”
Helen handed Sam a knife with a six inch blade, and turned to the safe.
After a couple of seconds, the safe clicked opened.
“Jack pot,” Helen said.
“Move and you die,” Sam told the hostage.
Sam peered into the safe and saw several documents, a bible, a forty caliber pistol, and a blue cube shaped cooler with sides roughly two feet long. The lid was white, and the latch looked sturdy.
“A lot of this isn’t going to be too important,” Helen said.
“Let’s skim through this,” Sam said, keeping half an eye on the hostage. “I want to see if there’s any documentation related to our treasure.”
They skimmed through the documents and in a briefcase. There was months worth of documentation about the cure. Apparently, vaccination was administered as a once in a lifetime injection, so the colony’s medical unit would not need to worry about replenishing the supply too rapidly, but Sam still worried. The cure would not pass from parent to child, so they would have to cook up new batches for every generation of children being born. And they would need more and more for however fast the population grew. He had no idea how they were going to replicate the serum in the first place.
Sam supposed those problems were to be dealt with in the long run. Right now, they were only a daring escape away from victory. If the survivors could get back home with this cure, the deaths of the others would not have been in vain.
“Helen, you lead the way with the hostage in front. They’re going to give us hell on the way down, the scar down there wasn’t too happy.”
“We don’t have to go down that way,” Helen said.
“I’m listening.”
*
Reed decided that the spineless elder was not worth allowing the prisoners to escape. If he could kill all three without hurting the worm, then he would. However, Reed didn’t think that outcome was likely.
After the heretics moved upstairs, Reed quickly moved all of the civilians out of the courtroom, and instructed the guards outside to keep extra watch on the crowd. The last thing they needed was a riot in the absence of the savior, and under Reed’s watch that would not happen.
When the civilians were gone, Reed had all of the guards aim their firepower at the stairway. There was no escape for the heathens now.
*
Three stories down, on the fifteenth floor, a rope bridge connected the executive building to the building on the north side. Even if troops were sent up stairs, they would not arrive in time to stop their query from escaping. To insure the clean getaway, or at least a head start, all the fugitives would have to do was cut the bridge loose when they got to the other side.
The other structures around the executive building would still be abandoned, and Lennux probably pulled every guard at the border to their death when he tried to prevent the assassination, so there would be no resistance and no watching eyes as they left the compound.
Helen and the hostage led the way. Jack, with the cooler, and Sam, with the briefcase, took the rear. As he moved behind the group with the cooler in hand and an M-16 slung over his shoulder with no hands on the rope railing, Jack made the mistake of looking down. He saw of just how high up fifteen stories was. His head swam for a moment and Jack felt like he was going to tumble. He held his place for a moment before recovering. It made him think of an old Hitchcock movie he watched a couple of years ago.
Below, several dots moved about, but none seemed to notice the escapees above. How could they? Jack was tempted to drop the ten unused grenades into the crowd, but his survival instinct won over his blind hatred. They would all die another day.
When they reached the other side of the bridge, and were all safely inside of the building next door, Jack and Sam set their treasure down and took out their knives. They hacked through the thick rope as though they were cutting wood with a saw. After a few knife strokes, the rope strands broke and the bridge fell, draping the side of the executive building.
They moved down the inside of the building. When they reached the second floor, the fugitives took the fire escape down. Helen climbed down first, the hostage followed, and then Jack climbed down. Sam passed the cooler to Jack. Jack set it down, and Sam passed the briefcase. When the objective was on the ground, Sam climbed down.
They met no resistance on their way out of the compound, but stopped when they reached the border.
“Wait,” Sam said and pointed up.
They had stopped under Paul’s naked, crucified corpse. Their dead comrade thrashed, trying to break free of the nails holding him in place. Paul was wearing a crown of barbed wire, and had gun shot wounds in his leg and shoulder. He probably bled to death long before Jack and Helen made their way to the base this morning.
“I wish there was some way we could bring him with us,” Sam said.
They all knew the body was too heavy to carry, especially while they had a hostage to watch.
“Helen, do you still have a silencer?” Sam asked.
“Yeah,” Helen said.
She reached into one of her pockets and threaded a silencer on to a pistol. She handed the gun to Sam.
“Thank you,” he said, “I can’t leave him like this. It… It’s… He’d never want to be left as one of them.”
Sam sighed, aimed the gun at Paul’s head, and fired. The shot hit Paul between the eyes. The corpse stopped thrashing, and hung motionless from the cross.
“You should have seen Zach just before he died. He didn’t seem scared at all. He handled himself so well,” Sam said.
He seemed to be on a distant world, reflecting on events that happened a million years ago.
“To think I was worried he’d get us all killed. I should have known better. You know, I couldn’t have worked with a better group,” Sam said.
Tears began to run down his cheeks.
“We have to keep moving,” Helen said.
Through the walk to the Mustang, the survivors did not run into any resistance from the cultists or the undead. There was no hint that they were being followed.
They were home free.
When they reached the Mustang, Helen popped the trunk and set their treasure inside. Jack kept his M-16 trained on the hostage.
“What about me?” the hostage asked.
“You’re free to go,” Sam said.
“What if I run into a leper?”
Helen started the car. Sam walked across the alley to a dumpster, and set something down on top.
“Here, I’ll leave behind a gun. When we leave, you can pick it up,” Sam said.
Without taking their eyes off of the hostage, Jack and Sam climbed into the Mustang. Jack sat in the front passenger seat, next to Helen, and Sam sat in the back. As they road off, the former hostage retrieved the weapon.
The three survivors, forever bonded by their struggle were silent through the trip back. They had almost a full tank of gas, which was almost enough to get them back home. They would have to stop once anyway, and when they did, they would refill the tank.
When they passed the decimated compound, where the cure was created, and the course of the mission changed so drastically, their mood grew more somber than ever. The place held a sinister significance which none of them would be able to forget, but it was also the site of a miracle.
Sam pressed his hands against the glass and moved his face close to the window, taking one last look at the final resting place of so many soldiers, scientists, and civilians. No doubt, he was thinking of what ever horror he had witnessed inside of the ballroom. For the rest of his life, Sam never spoke a word of what he saw the other night to anyone.
They avoided the city, and stayed mostly on back country roads, but were still unable to avoid the undead entirely. They still walked, limped, crawled, bumbled, and stumbled about, but they were not as menacing as they once were. Their time in the sun was almost over, and not just in the world around them, but In Jack’s dreams.
For the first time since his mother died, Jack did not feel afraid or lonely for he knew that Sam and Helen would be with him no matter what. He had also found more ferocious things to fear, and had come out alive and victorious. It was more than he could say for many of his friends, but because of their sacrifice, the world would be a better place for the next generation. The monsters of the present would become the monsters of the past, as they always seemed to do.
More than anything else, Jack looked forward to the future, and wondered what was in store for him and Helen.
Jack looked ahead and saw not only the road home, but a bright future.