“You have to pull the trigger. You’re running out of time. Do it,” Jarvis whispered.
Kyle reached down and placed his hand on the pole sticking out of Jarvis’s mangled leg.
“Sorry about this, old friend,” he said. With a quick jerk, he rocked the metal pipe, along with Jarvis’s thigh, back and forth, breaking it free from the roof of the cockpit.
Jarvis bit hard, and I could see a tear roll down his red face, but he didn’t scream. Leaving the metal pipe firmly in his leg, Kyle pulled Jarvis up into a sitting position against the wall of twisted wires and metal.
The radio crackled again. “Come on, guys, you’re not giving up already are you? We have so much fun ahead of us.”
Keeping his distance from me, Rodgers screamed out toward the radio in vain, calling for help. He then fixed his gaze back on the weapon. I could tell that he wanted to stop me, but I was holding all the cards, and he knew I wasn’t in a bluffing mood.
Lifting Jarvis toward the front of the chopper and bracing himself against the seat above, Kyle looked over at me.
“You ready for this?”
“No,” I replied, looking directly in his eyes.
“Me neither,” he said with a grim smile. I looked back at Rodgers as I pulled the weapon up toward the glass.
Two hundred miles to go, a madman hot on our tails… the odds were stacked against us. However, sometimes it’s the long shots that payoff the biggest.
“Don’t you do it, man. John. John. Please man, don’t do this. There’s got to be another way!” Rodger pleaded with me, edging closer.
The radio cracked one final time “Come on up, men… this game has just begun.”
Cringing at his voice, I peered through the cracking window as one single thought ran through my mind. The clock was ticking. We only had fifteen hours left. With each second counting down, it was a number that left us with no more than…
900 Minutes
_________________________________
Earlier that day, before we were stuck in an underwater grave with the dead crawling outside… and a madman hot on our tail.
Chapter 2
In this new world I’d become a dealer of death, and that hammer was my deck of cards.
I had two weeks’ worth of stubble. Might have been a beard if I could actually grow one. Instead, mine was a patchy mess, and covered only parts of my face. Reflecting back in the mirror, the puffs under my eyes appeared heavier than normal. Taking a deep breath, I watched my lungs lift and drop as I realized my face seemed to have aged ten years in the seven months since the dead began to… well, not stay dead.
Buried deep in the underground bunker, I often wondered if we had made the right choice… that fateful decision to return to Avalon. Even at the time, heading back to a place where we were forced to fight as gladiators in the Arena while sparking a revolt within the walls of that supposed safe haven had seemed like a pretty awful idea.
In the end, we returned mostly because we had nowhere else to go. With Fort Gordon in Augusta, Georgia being a dead end, we were out of any real options. Besides, they were willing to welcome us back with open arms. The heroes of the Arena. The men who’d helped to take down the Elites.
Personally, I felt like it was all bullshit. We were just trying to survive.
Rinsing a three-inch metal razor under warm water in the sink, I watched as the clear liquid filled up the metal bowl before spiraling down the drain. Shaving cream was a rare commodity these days, and I’d been avoiding this for far too long.
Pulling me from the mirror, a tiny cough came from the dimly lit makeshift crib across the room. Setting the razor down, I shook a plastic bottle that I’d prepared earlier that night, stepped around the table, and passed the long side of the bed to where Tyler was lying. His deep blue eyes peered up at me as he pulled his tiny feet to his face and gummed them.
Reaching down with my left arm, I lifted him up from the base of the crib, and we plopped down together on the couch. The room was huge compared to what most people at Avalon had. I think the others just stuck us in it, away from the common area, so they wouldn’t have to listen to the crying in the middle of the night.
Trust me, I wasn’t complaining.
Slowly putting the nipple of the bottle into his mouth, I looked down at his now-closed eyes as he chugged down the milk. You’d think he hadn’t eaten in days, but I’d been up doing this same routine just hours earlier.
Rinse and repeat all night long until the morning.
Those dark nights with my son, holding him close, feeling his heartbeat, should have been the most precious moments of my life. Instead, it simply seemed to create too much time to think. Too much time for memories. Too much time for pain.
Sitting there in the silence, trying to keep my mind clear, I couldn’t help but glance down at his face. Feeling my eyes beginning to well up, I tilted my head and looked at the rust creeping across the metal-covered ceiling, once again, taking a deep breath of recycled air into my lungs.
He looked so much like her…
My mind would drift, often to the last time I’d seen my wife. Memories always seemed to find their way down that dark path to the moment she’d turned. Those savage red eyes staring blankly at me.
I would think back to her grave.
Most everything about that day is a blur… except the moment I had buried my wife.
I remember using a rusted shovel that blistered my hands against that worn handle as I pulled up heaps of red Georgia clay to create the shallow grave… leaving her body to rest in a nameless field just outside the landing pad in Augusta.
A wife torn from her husband. A boy who would never know his mother.
We couldn’t take her with us, and I wouldn’t leave her to rot. I remember standing above the grave, reaching down to my wedding ring, twisting it around a swollen finger. She’d told me the ring was a lifetime ring, made of titanium, a nearly indestructible metal. As a symbol of our lives together, we were supposed to last forever. With my hands covered in blood, dirt, and God knows what else, a flash of rage screamed through my body as I yanked the ring off and threw it down into the fresh dirt resting below. I didn’t deserve to wear such a sacred vow.
I had let her die.
Feeling my knees tremble, I dropped to the ground to sturdy myself.
In that moment, my wedding ring caught my eye. I’m not going to call it fate, or anything more than the sun gleaming across it, but I felt compelled to reach down to brush the dirt off its base. Pausing, I picked it up and slid the vow back across my finger.
I couldn’t let myself off the hook that easily.
Eventually, we all get knocked down. Sometimes, we get hit harder and more brutally than others. The question always is will you have the strength to get back up? On that day, I was able to dig down and find what I needed to lift my head to keep moving.
No matter how hard I was hit and how easy it would have been to curl up and die… in the end, I had more than myself to think about.
After all, I still had one thing worth living for. My son.
Wiping a sleeve across my face, I sat up, pulling my foot from the table in front of us, and leaned over to adjust the nebulizer. That small medical device that vaporized liquid was designed to push the fine, lifesaving mist deep into Tyler’s lungs. Rubbing his soft cheek with the outside of my finger, I let out a deep sigh as I made sure the face mask sitting over his nose and mouth was firmly in place.
Administering the precious medicine directly into his lungs, my own chest tightened as I realized this was the last of the medication here in my room. I’d need to head back to the Med Center to pick up more before tomorrow’s dose.