Copyright©2017 Michelle Woods
The beginning…
It started in the summer when the heat rose up off the
pavement in hazy waves of steam. The air was filled with the sound of
children’s laughter and the sweet scent of barbeque on the grill. Time seemed
to pass slower because the days were long and the runs were short. The club had
more than two hundred members at the time, and life was good. No one expected
the horror that hovered on the horizon. The first reports blasted across the
country and were met with disdain and disbelief. Summer was supposed to be
filled with laughter and redneck slip ‘n slides, not death and destruction.
Infection, that’s what they’d called it in the early days.
It was a word used to describe the horror that caused friends to murder friends
and strangers to become families. Those were the days when everyone thought
there would eventually be a cure, but that was only a pipe dream. It couldn’t
be stopped and none of the experts expected the infection to get out of hand.
They didn’t expect it to morph and travel so easily from area to area, they
thought they could contain it, but they were wrong.
Now it was a game of survival and the Crimson Blades MC had
always been good at surviving, even when shit hit the fan and the world went to
hell.
Chapter One
He’d lost count of the number of times that he’d wished they
could go back to those long summer days when the world was normal. He would
have laughed at anyone who told him he’d miss dealing with club rivalry
bullshit or getting harassed by the cops. After two years of living in the shit
storm he dealt with on a daily basis, looking back he could definitely say
those days seemed idyllic and easy. How had they gone from riding hard and
playing even harder, to barely surviving?
Jebidah “Jeb” Blackwell didn’t know, but he wanted things to
go back to the way they’d been before the infected had started popping up all
over the country. As his eyes scanned the sky above him, he let out a long sigh
as he leaned back into the support behind him. The porch creaked under his feet
and he jerked while glancing around his immediate vicinity with his hand
resting on his gun. Realizing it was just the wood settling, he let out a sigh
and relaxed. He still couldn’t believe that this was his life now. When the
first reports started playing on the radio, he’d ignored them. It had seemed
like bullshit when they’d talked about people going crazy and attacking each
other in the streets.
He wasn’t the only one, the whole fucking club had ignored
those reports. What did they care, as long as it wasn’t affecting their family,
or their way of life. Well, Scoot, their very own conspiracy theorist, had paid
attention to those stories. Of course, most of the club had thought he was
nuts—running around, yelling about preparing for the zombie apocalypse. Nobody
had listened, they’d just laughed and teased him about taking his
anti-psychotics and went right on living life just like they always had. Jeb
glanced over to the wall—made from steel sheets and reinforced with heavy
struts—that enclosed the clubhouse and surrounding houses. That wall was thanks
to Scoot, and every man in the club was now grateful that he’d been a crazy old
coot who’d started collecting the sheets of fifteen-foot metal by liberating
them from a construction site about ten miles from the clubhouse just days
after those first reports.
Jeb rubbed a hand over his neatly trimmed beard, letting out
a groan as he shifted, still thinking of the past. One night after a run, he’d
turned the TV on to find an emergency broadcast on every station, even the ones
that weren’t typically stations for that type of story. Hell, even the sci-fi
channel had the broadcast on. It had been eerie and a little disturbing seeing
all those stations playing the same thing on a loop. He’d thought that maybe it
was some prank one of the boys played on him so he’d walked over to Hobbs place
to bitch at him because he was the one most likely behind that shit, being as
Hobbs was the resident computer expert.
Jeb had found sixteen of his brothers camped out in Hobbs
living room watching the same broadcast with varying degrees of alarm on their
faces. That was a freaky fucking sight, because fear was not a part of a
bikers’ vocabulary. Riding with people allowed you to get to know them, and
he’d known that shit was real the moment he’d stepped into Hobbs place because
of the expressions on their ugly mugs. Fuck, that night seemed like a lifetime
ago. Watching that widescreen TV with seventeen bikers who were all shitting
their pants because they couldn’t figure out what the fuck to do with the
information they were watching.
Jeb dug the pack of cigarettes out of his pants pocket. He
shook one out of the pack, realizing it was the last one. Damn, he’d known that
he was going to run out, but he’d hoped to make it till they went into town to
scavenge. He pulled out his lighter and held it to the end of his cigarette,
taking a long drag. He flicked his lighter closed and shoved it back into his
pocket along with the empty pack. Looking up at the sky again, he noted that
the stars seemed brighter tonight. Every night the sky seemed to be clearer and
less polluted, with more stars coming into focus. He’d never thought that
cleaner, fresher air would be something he found depressing, but it was. It
must be nearing summer because it was hot out and it had been dark for at least
an hour.
After taking another long puff, Jeb jumped off the porch and
started his nightly perimeter check. Not that he needed to check the perimeter,
it was just something useless he did every night, mostly out of boredom. He
realized as he walked towards the wall that he’d forgotten his radio back at
his cabin. Jeb shrugged it off—he didn’t need it inside the walls anyway. He
looked up nodding to Kicker, who was positioned on the wall above him, keeping
an eye out for trouble. Jeb headed down the south wall checking for any weak
spots by shaking the supports, not that any of the steel supports had ever
moved. Twisted had been a construction worker before he was part of the club
and knew what he was doing when he’d laid out the plan for the wall.
Log on September 7th for the rest of Chapter 1
Also tune in every Tuesday and Thursday
this month to read about Jeb and the world he lives in...
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