"Give me Angie and take our kids to a safe place."
He shook his head and looked down at his daughter. Her breathing was ragged and she looked worse than the mother did.
"Give me Angie, Douglas!" The wife held out her arms to him.
The teenage girl grabbed hold of her brother and pulled him back away from their parents.
"Mom…Mom…"
"Ricky, go with your sister," she answered firmly. "Douglas, give me Angie."
The man began to weep as he neared his wife. She looked as good as dead, looking worse by the moment. Reluctantly, he held out the small, precious bundle to her.
"Now, go with our other kids to safety. Go!" Catherine held her daughter tightly to her, cradling her head against her shoulder. "Go!"
Jenni motioned to the kids to get on the bus and they obeyed. They looked shell-shocked and terrified, but they obeyed. Curtis took hold of Douglas' arm and guided him to the bus. The man could not take his eyes off his wife and child.
"If we can get them to a doctor…" he mumbled.
Curtis shoved him up into the bus and climbed in after him.
Catherine stared at Jenni sadly and her grip tightened on her daughter as the small form began to thrash and growl. Blood splattered across her cheek and lips as she gripped the child close.
Jenni raised the rifle and the woman looked down at her undead child that was tearing away at her breast. She nodded tears on her cheeks.
"Catherine! Catherine!"
Jenni could hear the woman's husband and children screaming.
She fired.
The first shot stilled the child and tore a hole through Catherine's chest.
The woman was falling when the second bullet caught her and ripped the top of her head off.
Jenni turned and got onto the bus in silence. She looked at the father who was clutching his children to him and weeping. She gazed at the two kids who were near hysterics as they clung to their father.
Curtis was pale and had tears in his eyes. Bill looked calm and resigned to it all.
Jenni slammed the door shut and leaned against it. Tears slid down her own cheeks as she thought of her dead children and once more felt the sting of their deaths. She hated the world in that moment. Hated everything about it. How it stole children from parents and parents from children. She never wanted to experience this again. Never wanted to see a family torn apart by this plague of living death. But she knew that she would and it made her angry.
If she could help it, she would never let it happen again.
"When we get back, I'm going to hug Jason so tight," Jenni said softly to Bill.
He nodded at her and put the bus in gear and they started the return trip back to the fort.
2. The Quiet Before The Storm
Katie walked up the stairs to one of the main platforms overlooking the new entry point. The sun was setting and the construction crew was working hard until the last shards of light faded.
It was coming along quickly, with the construction crew working around the clock. It was rough going and stressful. There had been a few attacks by zombies, but the guards had managed them with no loss of life. As the days wore on and small raiding parties went out into the town (always within a few blocks of the fort) to salvage what they could, a trickle of survivors began to arrive. They were usually pale shadows of the people they had been, near starvation, and sometimes severely dehydrated.
Belinda, the town librarian, had hunkered down with a stack of medical books and tried hard to make do with the supplies that had come in from the local drugstore and the convenience store. She wanted desperately for them to raid the clinic, but Juan had explained that the clinic was packed to the gills with zombies. If they went into the clinic, it would have to be carefully planned out and loss of life would have to be expected.
Katie rubbed the tip of her nose and sighed. Her face was slowly healing and now there was just a pale swath of green and purple bruising. Her lip had healed and the soreness was fading. But she still felt battered and bruised from that huge battle. The terror she had felt plus the raw energy of the kills, and shooting that man and just not giving a damn.
That still haunted her. She had killed him and not cared. At first, she had not been certain why she had found it so easy to pull the trigger, then after her dream, she had understood.
After someone was bitten, the end result was inevitable. To put them out of their misery quickly and efficiently was not only humane, but also necessary for the safety of all. She knew that, of course, in theory. But the sheer horror of knowing that Lydia was still out there, undead, destroying other lives, was too much to bear if she gave it too much thought.
Looking over what had been accomplished so far, Katie couldn't help but smile. The outline of the enormous lock system was up. A sturdy, high wall, three feet thick, extended the length of a block and a half. They had blocked both ends of the block to construct the wall with the storage containers and other heavy equipment. They had gone into each empty, abandoned building to make sure it clear. The wall had gone up as fast as they could get it up. The abandoned businesses had not been incorporated into the fort due to their dilapidated condition, but the wall had been built right up against them.
Travis explained they planned to use the rooftops for sentry duty. Any entrances to the roofs of these buildings had been cemented over. Nothing or no one could get up on top of the buildings or scale the wall. Fire escapes had been dismantled and the parts moved into the fort. Everything that could be used was being salvaged.
The new gates were being tested. They had been giving the workers some trouble, but it seemed the problem had been solved. The second set of gates would be going up soon inside the long narrow entry point. Already a fence was being constructed to keep guards safe and slow the zombies down in case of infiltration.
"Looking good, isn't it?" Travis joined her and smiled.
"Awesome, actually. It almost looks like a castle."
"Yeah, I can see that," Travis responded with satisfaction.
The only way into the new area at this point was by long ladders.
Looking over the new area gave her a sense of hope.
"It almost feels like we're on top of this," she said.
"Yeah, almost." He glanced back at the hotel and the many windows shimmering with the fading sunlight. "That's gonna be the big victory."
"When are we going in?"
"As soon as the entrance is done. You can see by discoloration of bricks where they bricked up a back entrance of the hotel. We'll go in there. But I'm not comfortable just breaking in and going in. If there are more zombies that we think in there, they could flood the fort as soon as we break open the wall."
"So, what are you planning?" Katie tilted her head and looked up at the back end of the hotel. Her blond hair billowed around her face in the cool breeze.
"Build a small wall encapsulating the new doorway and use the old wrought iron gate as the door. When we go in, we'll have the gate locked behind us with guards standing post," Travis answered solemnly.
Katie sighed and shook her head. "Everything we do comes with such a great risk."
Travis also sighed and leaned back against the railing. "We have a great opportunity right now to get ourselves secure before we get slammed with a bunch of those things again. I feel them coming, don't you?"
"Everyday," Katie answered truthfully.
Travis nodded. "Once the gate is fully operational, we'll extend our search out a few more blocks."
"We may just lure more back here," Katie warned him.
"I know, but I have a feeling any survivors out there are quickly running out of time."
Katie turned her gaze toward the reinforced truck perimeter. It had been built up higher and now spikes rose up before them. If there was a push to get to the trucks, the zombies in the back would end up impaling their comrades in front of them.
"We need to get into the hotel, too. Things are getting cramped in here.
We're up to a hundred survivors."
Travis made a face. "We don't have enough men, Katie. "
"Then teach the rest of us how to do it. I can probably help build that entrance to the hotel you are talking about."
Travis studied her and laughed. "Yeah, probably."
"Jenni is going out on rescue missions. Jason and Curtis are trying to figure out how to make new weapons. Belinda is working hard to become a self-taught doctor. Peggy runs inventory like a general. Give me something to do, Travis." She gave him an intense look. "And stop protecting me."
He looked startled at her comment. "You got hurt."
"Yeah, but I'm healing."
"I just thought…"
Katie raised an eyebrow.
Night was settling over the fort and people were lighting lanterns on the tables set up in the "residence" area of the site.
Travis just stared at her. "Okay, okay, I'm trying to protect you."
"Why?"
Rubbing his face, the tall man sighed. "Um…because…look, I need you to help me figure all this out. I can't risk you getting… You've been hurt twice…You…"