Shamblers: the zombie apocalypse by Andrew Cormier Page B

patch over her left eye and she wasn’t eating a double-cheeseburger. Oh, and she carried a sawed-off shotgun. It looked much too heavy for her to handle effectively, but she kept it trained on Marcus the whole time.
    Mr. Eastwood walked toward us in between her and a short blonde. Her eyes were like blue ice. Her ponytail went about halfway down her back from what I could see. She was wearing tight, black yoga pants, a maroon and white windbreaker, and a large knife in a wide belt at her hip. Her hips looked great. She swayed them as she moved. Even pointing a 9mm Glock at us, she still managed to inspire feelings of lust. If no one killed me here and now, I would enjoy checking out her ass in the future.
    The last member of their group was at the far right. He was a towering giant. His tight , white t-shirt hardly contained his iron biceps. He looked like one big muscle in a shirt, really. His hair was blonde. I imagined that he was Swedish or possibly from whatever region Arnold Schwarzenegger had hailed from before he’d been turned into a zombie. Whatever the case, this guy looked like he dieted on pieces of rebar. He was so badass that he didn’t even have a weapon.
    They were a surly lot, for sure. And they were very well-armed. We were pretty surly, too, for what it counted for considering we had no weapons.
    “We can do this a few ways,” Mr. Eastwood instructed. “ Here are your options. Option one: we can send you on your way, and you keep going and don’t look back. Option two: we can kill your whole group right now. Last of all, option three: you can stay here and work with us to defend our town. If you stay, you’ll need to gain our trust, and believe me that won’t be easy. We’ve been betrayed before, so we’re not about to let it happen again.”
    “That’s how I lost this eye,” the redhead motioned to her patch with the barrel of her shotgun.
    “I’m fucking talking, Wendy, God damnit!” Mr. Eastwood said with agitation. “Don’t fucking interrupt.”
    “Yes sir,” Wendy replied and bowed her head.
    I wondered if that was really her name or if they just called her it as a joke.
    “So,” Mr. Eastwood continued, “What would you prefer to do?”
    “We’re fucking dead if we leave as sure as if you cut us down now,” Marcus added. “We’ll stay here and help.”
    The rest of us nodded in agreement.
    “That means you’ll need to work alongside us, under our supervision, for as long as we see fit. You will each pull your fair share. I’ll have no slackers. You break the rules and we either throw you out or we kill you, depending on the severity.” Mr. Eastwood allowed that to sink in for a moment and then asked, “Am I understood?” 
    “Yes, sir, we’re clear on that,” I assured him.
    “Alright then,” he smiled. He clicked the laser-sight of his pistol off and tucked the pistol into a pocket inside of his leather jacket. “We’ll get you your possessions back in a few days. Until then, I assume you’re all hungry?”
    “Fuck yeah we are,” Marcus added.
    “We’ll get you something to eat and go over the rules in more detail afterwards,” Mr. Eastwood said. He paused for a moment, smiled again and added, “Welcome to Payne’s Creek. I’m sure you’ll like it here.”

 
     
     
    Chapter Eight
     
    I spent the next two weeks learning the rules of our new establishment. I learned that Mr. Eastwood’s real name, or at least the name he went by, was Karl Yates. He ran a tight ship. At any given time, five guards were on duty. This included a sniper in the town clock-tower where the old town hall was located (which was also used as our barracks). It had been the unidentified sniper who’d first seen us approaching. He had used a mirror to alert the other townsfolk so they could ambush us. The people we had met in the store with Mr. Yates were considered his elite killers -according to the regular townsfolk.
    In hindsight , I was very glad that we hadn’t been