The Renegades 2 Aftermath (A Post Apocalyptic Zombie Thriller) Read online

  I diverted my eyes from two young children whose faces had been eaten. A stroller lay on its side empty but covered in blood.

  It would have been foolish to think the place was clear. It must have been filled with Z’s. While most weren’t on the ground, we could hear the snarling and moans on the four floors above us. Izzy jumped back as a Z toppled over the edge of a balcony. We didn’t even hear it coming, just the splat as it hit the granite floor in front of us.

  “Have we seen enough?”

  Even Baja was shaking his head in disbelief.

  “Come on, let’s go up,” Specs said.

  “You’ve got to be joking, Specs. We’re not going up there,” Dax shot back.

  “You know something, Dax. If you don’t want to go, then fuck you. Go on with your mission to find this dumb ass signal. You think you are going to find it in this city? I have given myself time and time again to help you all. Now, I’m asking for one time. One damn time, to check out a few things and you want to deny me that? Screw you.”

  And with that Specs went off by himself.

  Dax was as surprised as all of us. Specs wasn’t someone who got irate easily. Maybe the days were beginning to take a toll on him. But he just snapped in that moment.

  It wasn’t like we needed supplies, or ammo immediately. We had come to the city with a purpose, and nowhere in that was risking our lives to go sightseeing. Yet, we all knew that we might not see tomorrow. With that in mind, and because I think Dax actually thought the kid had balls, Dax followed him up. What we didn’t know was the danger that we would face next, would far exceed those that came back from the dead.

  COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF

  They were encircled when we came across them. Dax had pulled me back. He wanted to assess the situation. We were on the third floor. Each of us was laid out in various spots with our assault rifles on the ready.

  We didn’t think anyone was going to walk in, let alone someone of real significance. Prior to their arrival, we had been at the library for close to thirty minutes before the drama unfolded. We used the winding stairs to get up to the different levels above us. It was full of shelves, glass walls, curved canopies above, and high-tech designs. Everything about the place screamed modern architecture. People who had more money than sense. It was just a library for God’s sake; a fancy one, but nothing more than that. Fuck knows what Specs’s fascination was with the place. I enjoyed a library as much as anyone else, but that was before we were overrun with the dead looking to take a chunk out of our ass.

  We figured the place was filled with Z’s by the noise that came from the ground floor, but it was just the echo that made it sound like there were more. Each level had close to twenty of the ugly brutes. A few were fast-moving ape types that shuffled on all fours towards us. We soon slammed their brakes on with a cap in the head. Ten minutes later we had cleared the rest with knives. I’d like to say we were getting used to hacking our way through this new world, but you didn’t get used to it. You couldn’t. Every time I drove a blade into a mangled face of a monster, I couldn’t help but wonder who they were, how they died, and what had become of their own kin. Sometimes I didn’t have the luxury of thinking about it in the heat of the moment. Most often the thoughts came late at night, when I closed my eyes.

  It was then I would see their faces. Eventually they just blurred into one image. It had got to the point that I kept seeing myself pressed against a wall, fighting one and using nothing but my hands to tear its head from its shoulders.

  Was killing them changing us? It had to be. Hours of fear and adrenaline spiking in our systems, repeating over and over. This must have been how our ancestors lived before the dinosaurs were wiped out. Could these monsters ever be wiped out?

  Below, six men in their late twenties toyed with their victims like wolves rounding up prey.

  The prey? Initially there were two men in dark suits until they put a bullet in the head of one of them. The other pushed what looked like an eighteen-year-old brunette behind his back as they cornered them. He laid his gun down and slid it across the floor, hoping to avoid the same fate. Instead they began a violent beating. Kicking him from all angles as he balled up. Then, tossing him between them like a rag doll. While four found pleasure inflicting brutal punishment on him, the others laughed as they tore at the girl’s blouse exposing her bra.

  “This is not right,” I said.

  A Hispanic guy wearing khakis, an oversized white T-shirt, and a pair of Chuck Taylors pawed at the girl’s breasts as Dax pulled me back. All of them wore blue bandanas, identifying them as Crips. Tongan Crips.

  Keeping his voice low, he spoke, “We can’t get involved, Johnny. We don’t know how many more of them there are.”

  “You want to let her get raped?”

  Dax ground his teeth.

  “No, but I don’t want to get caught up in a gang war either.”

  “I don’t think we have a choice.”

  I went to get up, and he grabbed me by the collar. “If you do this, they all die. You want that on your conscience?” I paused, glaring at him for a moment and allowing the thought to linger before pushing him away.

  I motioned for the others to come close. Baja, Specs, and I were going down. The others would provide additional cover from above, especially if any of them tried to bolt. At the bottom we would give them the signal. Staying low as we descended, we hugged the inside of the staircase. Once our boots hit the ground floor, we moved quietly in the direction of the men, fanning out and using stone pillars as cover.

  “I want her first,” one of them shouted.

  Another shoved him back. “Fuck you. This gash is mine.”

  They turned over a table, hiked up her skirt, and bent her over. The girl was screaming as one tried to control her arms while another began unbuckling his belt. These weren’t the type of men that would negotiate, neither would they run from a fight. I looked up and signaled to the others with a closed fist.

  It was over in a matter of seconds.

  Round after round was unleashed until each of the six dropped.

  The girl immediately hurried over to the man that was still alive but badly beaten. She gripped him tight. Her eyes scanned up and down, back and forth like a petrified animal.

  “It’s alright, we’re not going to harm you,” I said.

  I swung my assault rifle to my side and with my hands out moved towards her. She squeezed her eyes tight instinctively as if expecting the worst. Meanwhile Baja and Specs went over and checked that the six were dead. Satisfied, they removed their handguns. The others above joined us on the ground floor.

  She was visibly shaken but when she saw Jess and Izzy her breathing began to slow. It was if by the very fact that other women were okay, she must have figured she wouldn’t be hurt.

  “Please. Help him,” she said.

  “Ralphie, Dax, take him up.”

  “Are we gonna stay here?” Ralphie asked.

  “Just for the night.”

  We had a small med kit on us that we had obtained from Benjamin. It was packed with everything you would need to treat basic to pretty extreme wounds and snake bites; gauze bandages, antiseptic wipes, safety pins, dressing for major wounds, quick clot, alcohol, different types of pills, plastic bags for waste, shears, a thermometer, EDC kit, a tourniquet, and a whole whack load of antibiotic creams and shit. It would have made Specs’s father proud.

  While they were taking care of him Jess and Izzy led the girl up. Over the next five minutes we dragged the bodies into a store that been broken into. It was a café. If there were more Crips out there, we didn’t want them to see their fallen brothers. Specs made sure they weren’t going to make any comeback by pushing a blade into their skulls.

  On our way out we snagged up a can of coffee, and a few bags of cookies we found inside a storeroom.

  “Should we find something to push up against the doors?”

  There were four double doors at the front entrance, all of them were gl
ass, one of them had been smashed in, another torn off its hinges. We couldn’t exactly keep anyone out, but we could make it a little difficult for them to sneak up on us in the night. We searched around for something to tie off the doors from the inside, and then dragged over a bunch of tables and chairs and stacked them on top of each other outside and inside. Again, we knew if someone wanted to get in badly enough they could. But they were going to make one hell of a noise. It just had to work for the night.

  After we were done, we joined the others up on the fifth floor.

  * * *

  Maybe it was the heat of the moment, or fear, but none of us except Specs seemed to recognize who the girl was, when he told me I stopped in my tracks. She was the president’s daughter, Kat Greer.

  “You’re joking?”

  “No, I’m pretty certain,” Specs replied.

  There had been a recent change in power. A new one had come into office three months before the shit had hit the fan. We hadn’t exactly paid attention. Politics had a place next to religion in our household. It was rarely discussed and when it was, it usually came out with a few f-bombs. I scoffed, remembering the way my father would speak about government.

  “They are all good-for-nothings. People cheer them in and then tear them down the next day. They promise the world and deliver fuck all. It’s all one big game, and one I don’t intend to play.”

  He had the same sentiment about anyone who tried to control him, or tell him what to do. I couldn’t help see the irony in it, being as he had spent the largest chunk of his life in the military. An organization where you were paid to jump, run, and shit when commanded. It was why I had no inclination to follow in his footsteps. I was no number. And I definitely wasn’t going to risk my ass in the field just to keep the suits in Washington happy.

  For hours Kat didn’t say much. We talked among ourselves while Dax tended to his wounds. It was mostly bruises and cuts, possibly a fractured rib. We used cushions from chairs to create makeshift beds to make them comfortable. It would take some time before we would find out how they ended up there. Kat Greer stayed close to Garret who we soon learned was on presidential detail for the Secret Service.

  “So we’ll rotate through the night. Just two awake, and then change over after two hours.”

  Specs and I took the first shift. If libraries were quiet when people were in them, the place had an almost eerie feeling at night. You could have heard a pin drop. As the inside of the library had an open concept, from the top floor you could see right out across the city. Above us was a skylight. Through it, it looked like a million tiny fireflies flicking on and off in the darkness. We rested against the ledge and occasionally looked down at the main doors. The rest of the time we gazed out across the city which would have looked beautiful at night if there had been power. Instead all we could see were flames flickering from various buildings. Occasionally we would spot a light flick on then off. There had to be more people out there. Those that weren’t gangs. People who had hunkered down in apartments like Benjamin. City folk who were doing their best to survive.

  Specs lit a cigarette. We didn’t have many left. A pack and a half. The leftovers from what we had scavenged.

  “My father would say there would come a time when something like this would happen. I never quite believed him,” Specs snorted.

  “Isn’t that always the way? We buy insurance to cover for the worst, but we never think about the world going to shit.”

  “Do you remember that time when the power went out in the town for six hours? How everyone started panicking — buying up water, food and talking as though the world had come to an end?” Specs said.

  “Yeah. How could I forget, my old man wouldn’t shut up about why the gas pumps weren’t working and if the power didn’t come on, we’d lose a shit load of meat that he had in the freezer. He then drank his way through an entire bottle of Jack D.”

  I started mimicking my father stumbling around with a bottle in hand. “‘I know the fucking government is behind this, well, you can suck my balls, Uncle Sam, you’re not going to starve me out. I’ll see you in hell. Hoorah!’ Then he collapsed.”

  We both chuckled.

  “Good times,” we both muttered.

  “Then there was my father who was as a cool as ice,” Specs took a deep drag. I watched it glow a deep orange in the darkness before he handed it to me. He blew out smoke rings and I watched them disappear.

  “He kicked on the generator and we just carried on as though nothing had happened. I told him he should offer people a hand. The look he gave me, I still remember it today. It was one of those, ‘are you out of your friggin’ mind’ kind of stares.”

  “Well, he did take a lot of flak from folks in the town prior to that day. You’d think everyone would have learned from that. Did they? Hell no.”

  Specs continued. “Meanwhile people were running around like chickens with their heads lopped off. I could never understand it. They bought insurance for property, bought vitamins to safeguard their health, and made arrangements for where their wealth would go, but no one thinks about floods, earthquakes, tornadoes, a chemical war…”

  “A zombie apocalypse?” I added, blowing out smoke.

  Specs chuckled. “Yeah, I know it’s nuts, who would have thought that the worst thing to hit planet Earth would be our own version of Hungry Hippos.”

  I stretched out my aching muscles.

  “So what do you make of this?”

  “I dunno. It’s odd for sure. Hopefully we’ll get some answers tomorrow.”

  “If she’s in Salt Lake, you think the commander-in-chief is?”

  “Wouldn’t that be something? Not that I think it would matter now. Who the hell is going to listen to him anyway?”

  “Who listened to him before this?” Specs said.

  “True. True,” I said.

  There was a long pause.

  “Makes you think.”

  “About what?”

  “How many can say they have seen the president’s daughter’s tits?”

  I put my finger up to my lips. “Dude, keep it down.” I cast a glance around. It was just like Specs to toss that one in there. He had no off switch. I tapped him on the arm.

  “Right. Yeah, sorry about that.” Then he continued. “But you got to admit it. They were beauties.”

  I snorted, then nodded reluctantly, feeling guilty.

  “You know, I always thought the Secret Service was badass. Like, trained to take down ten men with one bullet, or break arms while tossing a salad.”

  “Specs, you’ve been watching too many Stallone movies.”

  “No, but didn’t you? If that had been me I would have gone out in a blaze of glory shooting like the other guy did.”

  “Yeah, and you’d be a real help to Kat.”

  “But that’s what these guys live for. Dying a warrior and shit. The whole, I was born to take the bullet crap.”

  “You buy into that?” I asked.

  “Don’t you?”

  “Shit no. Is anything as good as it looks? The first time you fuck, the first cigarette you have, the vacation on the beach. Nah. There is always some prick who comes along and fucks it all up. Die a warrior? For what? Some medal you are never going to wear?”

  “But your family will know you earned it.”

  “Specs,” I turned to him. “Do you really think that your family is going to give a shit about a chunk of metal? They would trade a million medals for one day with their kid. So no, I don’t buy the whole die like a warrior shit. I believe in making your life count. But doing it because you want to do it. Not because you give a shit about what the guy over there thinks is cool. That guy is the same one that will be crying for his mother when the mortars are flying over his head, or running for the bulletproof SUV when the gunman on the hill is snapping at his shit.”

  We stood in silence for a minute or two.

  “You think if Arnie and Stallone had a fight Arnie would win?”


  I just shook my head and smiled. Despite all that had gone bad, that was one thing that hadn’t changed.

  UP SHIT CREEK

  There were no safe zones. Whoever had sent out the signal must have believed that the military were about to establish areas that would be beyond the reach of the dead.

  They were wrong.

  I breathed in deeply, looking out across a city that lay in ruin. A bright orange sun peeked over the horizon, bringing a warm band of light that chased away a long night. Smoke rose between the buildings in the distance. Were people burning the dead? Trying to stay warm? Or had they failed to escape and suffered an even worse fate?

  Standing on the ledge of Salt Lake City Public Library I reflected on what Garret had told me that morning. It still hadn’t sunk in. So far, no one else knew. Most were still asleep when he began to talk. They would soon realize and each one would take the news in different ways. We had got our hopes up. Believed that the city would be a safe haven. How gullible were we? And the worst was about to be made known.

  The night before as we rotated shifts, I picked up a second one simply because I couldn’t stop my mind from racing. Even though we had eradicated the dead inside the library, they lived on in our minds, terrorizing us as we closed our eyes. Tiredness would soon catch up with me. It always did.

  Garret had joined me that morning out on the roof.

  “Like I said, I know it’s not the news you were hoping for, but it’s something.”

  He had told me that the only place he knew would hold its ground was NORAD located in the Cheyenne Mountains of Colorado.

  “And you? How did you come to be here?” I asked.

  Garret groaned a little, taking a seat. He kicked at the graveled roof, and tossed a few small stones at a metal air vent. “I’ve been in the Secret Service for the past twelve years. I’ve seen all manner of threats on the president’s life but none that topped this. It should have been a simple in and out visit. No longer than twenty-four hours. Three weeks ago, Air Force One landed at Hill Air Force Base. President Greer was visiting to speak about the economy. Well, that’s all the media knew. What had not been mentioned was that another visit was added to his itinerary. One to the Centers for Disease Control.”