Battlefield Z The Collected Adventures Volume 3 (Battlefield Z Collected Adventures) Read online

  Trying to start trouble in my neighborhood.

  "He used to think we wanted his money," said Bem. "That he had to provide for us. So that's all he focused on. Even on our weekends with him and our summers with him, he was always working. On the laptop, on the phone. And now, he thinks that he still has to provide for us. Not with money, but with all he's got left."

  "He's got a lot left."

  "Does he?" asked the Boy. "He keeps getting into situations that are going to get him killed. Get one of us killed."

  It's weird to listen to people talk about you when they don't know you can hear them.

  And this didn't have the flavor of gossip, though technically I guess it was. If it wasn't, it was a close cousin.

  They were discussing me, and I felt awkward. Embarrassed.

  It was true, I did think most of what I was good for in regards to the kids was providing a paycheck.

  I didn't have the best examples growing up, and I wasn't around enough for the little moments to turn those into memories.

  Sure, we had good times.

  We always talked about the two times the boy fainted, and how Bis, my youngest got into the wrong car in a parking lot because it looked just like my rental.

  We talked about games and the hotel room we called home every time I was in town.

  But there was so much I missed, so much I couldn't see just because I wasn't there.

  I compensated by sending money.

  By working hard to give money.

  I suppose that's how I valued myself eventually. Based on how much I could provide.

  When I looked in the mirror, I saw a cash value, and when it came time to no longer provide cash because let's face it, Z worked on a cashless society, I was left searching for what I could provide.

  What I could define myself by.

  "He's gotten us out of a lot of tight spots," Tyler said softly. "Your dad is a fighter."

  The Boy sighed.

  "Do you know who his favorite hero is? Batman."

  "Because he's self made," said Anna.

  I didn't know she realized that. I pressed further into the tree, hiding in the shadow.

  It was too late to step out.

  They would know I had heard something, maybe guessed I'd heard a lot.

  Now it would just be weird.

  So I hid instead.

  "Exactly," the Boy continued. "He talked about this a couple of times. He wasn't an alien. He wasn't a mutant. He was just a guy who worked on his skills and became a hero. Basically, he just said to the world, I am a Super Hero, even though he didn't have any super powers."

  "Your Dad trained to fight?" asked Brian.

  "Probably. We don't know what he did when he wasn't around us, but he had a lot of time to fill. But what he said about Batman, about a lot of super heroes is, did they create their own enemies."

  "Batman made Joker," said Anna.

  "But what he meant was a chicken and egg debate," Bem added. "Yes, the world needed a hero, but did those heroes create super villains just by stepping up? We had a great talk about it."

  "I never would have pegged him for a comic geek," Brian said.

  "My point is you say he keeps fighting for you, but what if he's creating the fights?"

  "He's not," Anna answered quickly.

  "You've seen him."

  "Yes, he's saved us. He said he would come to get us if something like this happened and he did. It's amazing and unbelievable. But he's also made a lot of enemies."

  "Couldn't he have just driven across the country and picked us up? Car hop to get to Arkansas, then car hop to find Bis? Instead, we're fighting. Everyone."

  I wanted to step around the tree and start defending myself.

  I didn't ask for the General to start hunting me.

  I didn't ask for Mags to kidnap the kids, or the cults to kidnap Anna, or her husband to declare a jihad on me.

  I was just a simple guy trying to save my kids.

  Those other people, the bad guys, they just happened to cross my path.

  But what if you don't believe in coincidence.

  What if karma was a bitch and this was payback for dumb choices I'd made in life.

  What if I was making my own villains?

  Could I have just snuck across the backroads of the South to rescue my children, skipping fights, skipping help when asked, and playing the role of a mobile hermit?

  Like Mel in her cabin, just doing my own thing while the world went on around me?

  "I want to tell you a story about your Dad," Hannah spoke up.

  The weight of her mother's death made her voice low and husky, throat torn by ragged sobs.

  She was dealing with guilt too I suspected for her role in surviving.

  She could have talked Byron out of it but didn't.

  "When we first met him, maybe we'd known him for two days, three. It's hard to keep track of time now, but we were still new to each other. He was helping all of us escape Florida when some bad guys kidnapped me. He saved me. He didn't have to."

  "Another kidnapping," the Boy huffed.

  "He saved us all," Brian added. "More than once."

  "It shouldn't happen more than once," the Boy said. "The first time he did it, he should stop putting the group in those situations."

  I couldn't see their reactions, but their silence told me they were thinking about it.

  Did I keep putting them all in danger?

  Was that what I was doing to pay my bills now?

  The only thing I was good for was rescuing them, so if they weren't in danger, they didn't need rescuing.

  If that was the case, I wasn't worth much to the group.

  If I'm not a fighter, what am I?

  "Your Dad is a hero," said Brian. "We can second guess everything, every decision, every fight and everyone we've lost. But if it wasn't for him, we might not be here, and we certainly wouldn't be together."

  "I hope I'm nothing like him," said the Boy.

  It was a kick in the nuts.

  A kick in the nuts with a toe tap that followed.

  I felt hollow, scooped out and empty.

  I could hear my heartbeat thudding in my ears.

  I guess most people get their children's respect, or want it, but I hadn't earned it.

  Being an absent dad had consequences and choosing to help others had ramifications downstream.

  Fighting had consequences.

  So did living.

  A part of me wanted to leave. I quit that pity party fast.

  They still weren't safe. Even if for the moment, the danger had passed, I couldn't abandon them.

  None of them.

  But I wasn’t strong enough to step around the tree. I couldn’t handle the looks on their faces when they say me, when they realized I had heard.

  I turned in the darkness and made my way back to another trail.

  Then I made a lot of noise on the way in again. This time they heard me and stopped talking.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  "Before," I said then stopped.

  I wasn't sure how much I wanted to share.

  But once a woman has wiped zombie guts off of you, bathed you in pink bathwater and picked the gristle and bone from your hair, there aren't too many secrets left.

  "Sometimes, I would sit in my house and feel sorry for myself," I said.

  "I would listen to sad songs and cry because my kids were a thousand miles away. And when I was with them, or in the state waiting to see them, I would cry because my youngest couldn't come."

  I heard her stir and was afraid I said too much, showed too much.

  "Isn’t that sad?" I asked without expecting an answer. "Some broken hearts never mend. I'll never know a life with the three of them under one roof, anything approaching normal."

  She snorted.

  "Are you laughing at me?" I twisted around and looked at her.

  She was. A small smile lit her face.

  "This," she circled her finger to indic
ate the camp, the woods. "Is normal?"

  "Old normal," I corrected.

  "I know what you meant. But maybe it was normal. My Dad had kids with another woman after he divorced my mom."

  "Mine too. I called them his second family."

  "It happens," she shrugged. "People get together when they're young and grow apart."

  "That sounds like making an excuse," I said. "I'm an expert at those, you know. Excuses."

  "I've had a lot of practice too."

  "Did you resent him?"

  I was afraid to ask. It took more courage to let the words out than it did to face down a horde of Z outside a five story building on the outskirts of Nashville.

  If she said yes, I'd be afraid my kids would resent me.

  I crossed half the country to save them, an act of love.

  But what if they couldn't forgive me for not being there in the first place. For being gone.

  "I thought I would," she said. "But I never did. My mom remarried too, and I love my step-dad. Loved him. And my siblings, though they were half, I loved them too."

  "All gone now?"

  She shrugged.

  "It's the way of it. I don't mean to sound glib, but we've lost so many, it's like you grow to expect it."

  "Not on my watch," I said.

  But it was just tough talk. She knew it. We had lost a lot since Florida.

  Too many.

  "Speaking of watch," she said and pushed me away from her. "It's my turn."

  I watched her go to the ladder bolted to the back of the school bus and pull herself up the steps to take her turn.

  Two hours in the cold, two hours away from the fire while the rest of us moved inside the bus to sleep.

  I thought about going up to keep her company, but it was my job to cover the dead hours between 3:00 and 5:00 am.

  I'd need my beauty sleep, and because of the way I looked, I probably needed more than most.

  I nudged Brian to round up the rest of the small group.

  We covered the fire and tromped into the bus and shut the doors for the night.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Armies used to attack in the darkest hour before dawn.

  That was when people were in their deepest sleep, the REM cycle where the brain processed everything it learned that day, dumping it into long term and short term memory.

  It was the time of dreams, and a natural down cycle in biological rhythms.

  Warriors figured it out a long time ago, and the knowledge has stuck, backed by science and tradition now.

  It made sense to be extra alert at that time of night.

  Which is why I picked it.

  I’m not saying I didn’t trust anyone else.

  I am saying that they had yet to earn my trust enough for me to stay off the top of our bus during that time frame.

  Plus, I liked getting up early before the Z showed up, and pulling guard duty when the black night turned to gray as dawn approached made it a favorite time for me.

  I wished for a cup of coffee, amended it to a pot when I saw the shadows move in the trees.

  The thing about advancing light is it’s tricky.

  Depending on cloud cover, the light grows brighter and brighter, extending visibility by grades.

  It is not like flicking a light switch. It’s realizing that oh now I can see the rocks around the campfire. Oh now I can see the tree. Oh hey, the thing behind the tree is moving.

  I placed a rifle against my shoulder and sighted on the patch of darkness.

  A Z would shuffle. Maybe moan. But this thing, whatever it was, did neither.

  And I knew it couldn’t be an animal, because it was trying to be sneaky.

  I’m not saying animals aren’t sneaky. Watch a cat stalk a mouse, or a mountain lion target a jogger as its next easy meal.

  But the majority of non-predators in the forest move like they’re grazing or searching for food, unless something is chasing them.

  If they’re being chased, they don’t flit from tree to tree.

  Only one animal moves like that.

  A person trying to hide. Trying to spy.

  I thought about dropping them and lay my finger on the trigger.

  All the rules shifted after the zombie plague turned what was left of America into a wasteland, but there was a rule I was keen to implement.

  If someone is sneaking up on the camp in the dark, assume they didn’t want to borrow something and waste them.

  We didn’t need that kind of negativity in our new lives.

  But I held back.

  Because of the size of the shape.

  Small.

  It could have been a tiny man. Not a little person, but just a skinny frail fellow hoping to pick through any scraps we might have.

  A wisp of a man, short and feeble.

  Except how he moved.

  And though I referred to him as a he, it could well have been a she, and whoever it was made me think kid.

  Not even a well trained kid, but someone pretending to know what they were doing when sneaking through the woods.

  Like most people, they didn’t look up. Didn’t think we would have watch posted in a nest on top of the bus.

  A mistake that was going to cost them.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  They wrote an IOU.

  There were tracks in the dirt, a trail to follow, but no one in the woods when I went to look.

  I guess I wasn’t as quiet as I tried to be.

  “What was it?” the Boy asked as I stepped out of the trees.

  “Thought I saw something.”

  He studied the woods over my shoulder, and kept watching as I went to the fire, uncovered the embers and started feeding stripped kindling on top.

  I had a small flame going in a minute and a fire within five.

  Not too large, just two logs, large enough to put on a pot of water.

  We found a jar of instant coffee in the last house we scavenged, and the end of the world being what it was, mornings were better with coffee.

  Even instant crystal crap.

  The Boy settled across from me on his haunches and held his hands out toward the fire.

  “Karen is scared,” he told me.

  “She is?”

  “She’s not from around here.”

  “Neither are we,” I pointed out.

  “I told her we were going toward the coast. She said it’s blocked.”

  “Did she come from that direction?”

  He nodded.

  “Blocked how?”

  He shrugged.

  “I’ll ask.”

  Blocked. By what? Z? Military blockades? Something worse?

  “The map is sending us in that direction,” I said.

  “I didn’t think you’d change your mind.”

  “Do you want me to?”

  He looked up from the fire and stared into my eyes.

  “No,” he finally said. “If we can find her, she needs our help.”

  The water in the pot began to boil. The Boy lifted two cups and held them while I dripped water over the instant sludge.

  We used the tips of our fingers to swirl the mix and sat and shared a cup of joe before anyone else got up.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  The good news about bad ideas is how often they tend to crop up.

  "This is a bad idea," Brian muttered.

  "It's not a bad idea," I told him. "Try to be optimistic."

  "I'm optimistic we're going to get killed."

  "No one is going to get killed," I told him.

  But I wondered myself. It wasn’t the best idea I'd had. And since getting the kids back after Mags and Nashville, I had one very important item on the top of my to do list.

  Keep them in sight.