Awake
an excerpt

Chapter 22

Jason’s crashed Explorer was a mere blip of twisted metal on the horizon as he looked back over his shoulder to check on Erin. The tire iron she held in her hands was little more than decorative at that point, as she was far too shellshocked to actually contribute anything to their defense.

He didn’t blame her. He loved Ryan too, but she really bonded with him. A half hour with the kid, and anyone would have thought she’d raised him from infancy.

“Doing great, baby,” he assured her as he stepped up to swing the bat at the head of a teenaged boy in a McDonald’s uniform.

“Look over there!” she shouted enthusiastically. “He’s still got his gun!”

He looked where she was pointing and saw a police officer staggering across the drugstore parking lot. One of his arms had been stripped to the bone from elbow to shoulder. Because of his sheer size, being killed and reanimated probably didn’t have too drastic an effect on how quickly he moved.

“Follow me.”

He marched into the sea of dead flesh, swinging widely with the baseball bat to clear a path. A Marilyn Monroe impersonator of questionable gender with half of his/her face eaten away was the first to fall. A young man with longish brown hair was the next.

They all seemed to run together to him at some point. The graying skin, the vacant, soulless eyes, the deep wounds, the lurching step--- It all ran together at some point. He was glad Erin spotted the policeman--- He wasn’t entirely sure he would have even noticed on his own.

He wasn’t entirely sure how the policeman even remained on the force—It seemed that any physical fitness requirements would have weeded him out a whole person’s worth of weight ago. As he heard their approach, he slowly turned to face them, half of a pair of visor-style sunglasses hanging from his face above a throat that no longer existed.

Jason swung the bat, the glasses crunching as they came into contact with his round face. He half expected the ground to shake as the officer fell to the ground.

“You won’t be needing this anymore, Officer Matthews,” he said as he handed the bat off to Erin, then unbuckling the gun belt. With great effort, he rolled the policeman’s body over enough to slide the belt out from under him. He tried fastening it around his own waist, but to say that there were no holes where he needed them would have been an understatement. Erin could have climbed inside the belt with them, and it still might have been around their feet in seconds. He gave up and draped it over his shoulder bandolier-style.

“Try it out,” Erin urged him.

He hesitantly pulled the gun out of the holster, feeling a bit awkward as he held it in his hand.

“Do you know how to use one of those things?” Erin asked him.

“I’ve never even held one before right now,” he answered.

He glanced around the area and spotted a teenager in a Smashing Pumpkins hobbling toward them dragging a useless and nearly completely severed left foot behind him. Jason raised the gun in one hand, his arm perfectly straight like he’d seen in action movies a million times. He flexed his finger, but the trigger never depressed.

“The safety,” Erin reminded him.

He raised it quickly to his face and found the button. Once again, he held the gun in his right hand, fully extending his arm. The young man in the Smashing Pumpkins t-shirt was only five feet away.

As he squeezed the trigger, the recoil made the gun jump out of his hand. He turned back and watched it land at the feet of an older lady in a bloodstained shawl.

The cold hands grabbed him from behind. As close as he was to the teenager, he had missed completely.

Ducking under the gaping jaws, he grabbed the bat from Erin once again, bringing it up into the face of the teenaged boy. Before the re-dead body even hit the ground, he was already spinning to swing at the old lady. As she slumped to the ground, he leaned over and picked up the gun.

“That was some good shooting, Tex,” Erin chuckled.

“Shup.”

“Perhaps it would be more deadly if you just actually threw the gun at them.”

“Was there some part of ‘Shup’ that was unclear?” he grinned.

There was a time and place for learning to shoot, and the streets late at night when surrounded by a sea of dead people was neither, so he snapped the gun back into the holster and gripped the bat in both hands.

As they worked their way through the crowd, expending the energy to attack only those who drew close enough to touch, they faintly heard the low rumble of an engine.

Jason squinted through the crowd and saw tiny puffs of smoke from in front of the Mapco service station. Blood was smeared on the side of the FedEx truck, but it was certainly still functional.

“Follow me,” he told Erin just to make sure she was paying attention.

He heard her footsteps close behind him as he dodged and weaved, looking for the path of least resistance as they fought their way through the crowd. Occasionally, he swung the bat to knock down a stray walker, but they made it through the field of dead comparatively easily.

As they reached the truck, Jason spun and took one last look. They had time to get into the vehicle without fighting again.

The driver threw his face up against the glass, giving both of them a start. A pudgy man with a red crewcut and a bloody wound showing through his torn workshirt pawed at the window as if it wasn’t there at all, looking more than a little perplexed at his inability to reach them.

Jason cautiously reached for the door handle, trying to figure out the safest way to get the driver out of the truck and him and Erin into it with the least amount of exposure. He could open the door and let the driver simply stumble out, but they weren’t exactly fast movers and---

Erin reached over his shoulder and grabbed the revolver from the holster. Gripping it in both hands, she pressed it against the head of a young woman that came just a little too close as Jason pondered how to get into the truck. She pointed it at the head of dead teenaged boy roughly eight feet away and put him down with a clean shot between the eyes.

“Nice,” Jason said.

“What can I say? Dad wanted a boy,” she shrugged.

She stepped a few feet to the rear of the truck as Jason pulled at the door handle.

The driver, who was one death beyond understanding the concept of coming down from truck level to street level, fell flat on his face in front of the door. Jason raised the bat high over his head, crushing it between his aluminum and the pavement.

“I have no problem letting you do all the shooting, at least until we get more guns and you can teach me a little,” he said. “I’m f*cking useless with them.”

“Not a problem,” she answered. “I’m not super experienced, but I know which end of it to point.”

Jason popped the truck into reverse, slowly backing over two dead as he pulled out of the parking space. Erin had no passenger seat, so she crouched as she held onto the back of his seat.

“Any idea where to go from here?” she asked.

“I’m still thinking the same as I was before. Music World parking garage. But we need a hardware store first. And if we see a gun store, I damn sure wouldn’t complain about us picking up some more weapons. I’m hoping we’ll have others to fight with us soon.”

“Do you regret leaving your house?” she asked him.

He thought about it before he answered. “Yeah. Yeah I do. Ryan turning on the road like that--- It could have killed you, or Gary, or Cindy, or Jillian. But if he had gotten you, I don’t think I could have mustered the will to fight. I just would have sat down and let those things get me.”

She leaned in and wrapped her arm around him. “You’re not getting rid of me for a long time,” she told him. “In fact, have you got any plans for the next fifty years?”

“One day at a time,” he said, gently wrapping his arm around her waist.