The North: A Zombie Novel Read Free Page B

room.
    “You’ve got a heavy left foot. It’s a little louder than your right foot and that’s how I know it’s you. Kenny’s heels click on the floor and Dawson glides when she walks – an amazing feat when you consider she’s wearing combat boots like the rest of us.”
    “Pretty cool trick,” I said. “How can you tell if it’s Sid?”
    She glanced at me through the corner of her eye. “Two reasons. One, he smokes cigarettes so I can smell them on him and two, he likes to announce his presence by farting.”
    I chuckled and made a sour face. “Yeah, there’s something wrong with that guy’s guts, man. What are you looking at?”
    She pointed to our location on the map. “Obstacles and odds. We’re going to have to make some difficult decisions.”
    I bent over and examined at the map. The armory was on the western edge of the downtown core in a city that once had a population of more than a million and that meant there were probably a million or so creeps waiting to rip us apart. To make matters worse, our location was in the geographic center of the city. The Bow River flowed in from the mountains and was located just a few blocks north of us, and the roadways were jam packed with abandoned and burned out vehicles as far as the eye could see.
    “We should have bugged out of town five months ago,” I said. “This old armory might be a fortress but every fortress throughout history has been breached. I can’t see how this one would be any different.”
    Cruze made a grunting sound. “No shit on that one. How are you and Jo doing after what happened to your mother?”
    Anger bubbled up in the pit of my stomach as my mind flashed to the suicide note. It was just four sentences long. Four rambling sentences and not even the word goodbye written down anywhere. Just a lot of “I’m sorries”.
    “We’re fine,” I said coolly.
    Cruze snorted. “No you’re not. Christ, I know it took me weeks after—”
    “After your parents were attacked,” I said, finishing her sentence.
    Cruze lost her mom and dad in those mad first weeks after Day Zero when the world began to burn amid wave after wave of monsters. A detachment from the King’s Own somehow managed to get Cruze and her parents to the armory alive. They were attacked while they slept by a member of the Combat Support Section who’d turned in the night. Cruze was on night sentry and heard noises in the small dorm room her parents were assigned to when she saw their wounds. She killed the creep and then put a bullet in both her parent’s heads – that left her pretty much catatonic for days. She’d lie on her cot staring at the ceiling. She refused to eat, she didn’t wash. Cruze was simply frozen in place – her mind fused to that bloody moment in time.
    We all took turns caring for her and I’d spend my nights reading from Pierre Berton’s book
Niagara
to kill off the silence. I wanted to get her talking and I was willing to do anything that would snap Cruze out of reliving the hell of shooting her own parents. The fact that both were dead the moment they’d become infected or that she killed them before they transformed did nothing to diminish the sheer totality of her loss. It took some a couple of weeks, but Pam Cruze came back to us – this time with a fire in her eyes and a desire to mete out payback to the monsters that destroyed her family.
    “You got me through the death of my parents and I want to help you get through this, Dave,” she said. “Jo needs you – we all need you.”
    I took a deep breath and kept my eyes fixed on the map. Cruze was only trying to help, I knew that, but Mom abandoned us. She gave up and shot herself because she couldn’t cope. She stopped caring about survival and because she’d killed herself, I couldn’t place her in the same category as those who’d died through no fault of their own. Cruze’s family were victims. Sgt. Green was a victim. Anyone who survived an attack from a creep and