The Return

Chapter 1

April 17, 9:41 AM

                “How does it look?” Mike asked. The man was crouched next to his long time friend as the pair scanned the seemingly empty town of Provost. He shivered slightly in the cold morning air as heavy snowflakes fell lazily all around him.

                It was an unseasonably cold April morning, almost a polar opposite of the warm temperatures that they had experience during the middle and latter days of March. But for Alberta, that was the normal way weather acted. As the old joke went, if you don’t like the weather, wait ten minutes.

                Eric Stone didn’t answer right away as he peered through the binoculars. Eric was a big man with short cropped light blond hair and a muscular build. He stood at six feet in height and weighed in at an easy two hundred and twenty pounds. The man was wearing a heavy denim jacket and blue jeans over a black t-shirt. Well worn hiking boots adorned his feet, and there was a large battered fire axe lying on the ground next to him. A scoped hunting rifle was strapped against his back and he had a police issue Glock 22 handgun holstered at his right hip.

                “It’s hard to tell,” Eric breathed out, his words misting in the below freezing temperatures before his face. He pulled the binoculars from his eyes and rubbed them with his left hand. “There is no sign of movement anywhere.”

                That fact tickled something in the back of Mike Harris’s mind, something that he just couldn’t place his finger on. “That’s good news, which means that most of the walkers are probably trapped behind closed doors then. But, why are the streets so empty? We usually see at least a handful of zombies wandering around.” Mike said and he stood up from the crouch.

                “Maybe scavenger bands already hit this town and took out the tangos.” Eric suggested.

                “That would be both good and bad. Good because we won’t have to worry about too many of the undead, bad that maybe they cleared out all the non-perishable foodstuffs from the Safeway already.”  Mused Mike.

                Mike Harris wasn’t quite as large as his friend Eric. He stood at five foot eleven inches in height, what was considered to be average height and weighed considerably less, topping at one hundred and seventy five pounds. Like Eric he was wearing a heavy denim jacket and blue jeans, and had on sturdy hiking boots. A slightly battered and sweat stained Diesel cap adorned his close cropped dark brown hair. Mike had a long machete strapped to his left thigh and, like Eric, a police issue Glock 22 on his right. A Remington 870 shotgun rested lightly in his hands.

                With a slight grimace, Eric got up from his crouch and let the binoculars hang loosely against his chest. Unconsciously he rubbed his right knee. He turned around to face the single Avalanche truck that had brought them to the small town.

                “How’s the knee feeling?” Mike said with concern as watched his friend.

                “Crouching like this doesn’t help, but it’s feeling pretty good.” Less than month before Eric had suffered a badly strained knee while attempting to get out of a burning high rise apartment building in the downtown core of Calgary. It seemed like a lifetime ago, back when there had been some semblance of law and order, before everything finally fell apart, civilization succumbing entirely to the Rising.

                Together they walked back to the truck. Seated in the drivers seat was a young man, nearly out of his teens. He bore a striking resemblance to Mike and anyone looking at the pair would know that they were blood.

Another man stood on the outside of the truck, talking to the younger Harris. “How does it look?” He called out, seeing the two approaching the truck.

“It looks fairly clear Jack,” Eric told him. “The Safeway appears to be intact and there’s a truck pulled up to the loading dock at the rear of the building. Hopefully we can get the beast running and load it up with canned and non-perishable goods.”

Jack stood eye to eye with Mike, but he was considerably larger. It wasn’t fat; the man was just more muscular by far. He too was wearing blue jeans and Nike running shoes, but instead of a heavy denim jacket, he was wearing well worn black leather jacket. The younger man ran a hand through his neatly trimmed black beard as his dark brown eyes scanned the town that lay in the distance. On his right hip he had a large serrated hunting knife, and on his left there was a heavy .357 magnum revolver. There was a heavy compound bow and quiver strapped to his muscular back.

“Standard procedure then?” Jack asked the pair.

Eric shook his head.  He was about to reply when a small, wiry man in a flannel jacket and black military style cargo pants jumped out of the bed of the truck. He had a fedora perched on top of his mousy brown hair and was carrying a 9mm. hand gun in a shoulder holster. He was wearing thick sunglasses that completely obscured his eyes. “Want me to drive?” He asked.

Mike shook his head. “Roger is doing fine, Harold, and he needs the practice anyhow.”

Harold shrugged. “Figured I’d offer.”

Eric cleared his throat and continued to speak. “Yeah, we might as well continue the way we have for the past couple of weeks.” He wiped his nose and looked back towards the town. “Roger, you go through the center of the town and keep the speed fairly low. The sound of the truck will attract any zombies that might be hidden from sight.”

“Got it,” Roger said.

“Once we get to the Safeway, try and circle it, see if there are any visible targets. Depending on how many groupies we manage to gather, we’ll bail and hit the store while you continue to lead them off. Once you’re at least a couple of blocks, leave them in the dust, circle around and come back to the store from the opposite direction. That should give us enough time to clear out any tango’s that are in the store.”

Mike slapped his thighs. “Alright, lets do it people.”  He moved over to the truck and climbed into the passenger seat while Harold, Jack and Eric got into the back seat. Weapons were neatly stowed away and in less than a minute Roger was pulling onto the main highway and making his way to the town.

Everyone kept their eyes on the surrounding buildings and side streets as the Avalanche made its way through the eerily silent town. Over the past couple of weeks since they arrived at Wainwright and joined the thousands of other survivors that had escaped the death trap that Calgary had become, they had quickly integrated into the military forces. Even though they weren’t officially soldiers, they were chosen to be one of the many scavenger teams that on a daily basis risked their lives to locate food and other essentials that were needed by the rest of the survivors on the overcrowded base.

During every single trip, they had encountered the undead. So far none of their small group had suffered a bite, but there had been several close calls. Each community they had visited always had at least a handful of the zombies, but in one occasion there had been literally hundreds of the undead, including a smattering of the far deadlier sprinter version.

But the simple fact that this town was all but deserted set off warning bells in Mike, and he was not the kind of man to ever ignore his instincts. They had yet to let him down. “I don’t like this at all,” he voiced out to his companions.

“Neither do I dad,” Roger agreed. His hands tightly gripped the steering wheel as he carefully watched the snow covered street before him. “I don’t see any tracks in the snow, do any of you?”

Good thinking, Mike thought to himself. He was proud that his son had that idea. Then again, during their various scavenging runs, it hadn’t been snowing. No one answered as they too began to search the snow, looking for telltale footprints. 

In minutes they pulled up to the Safeway and Roger slowly pulled up to the front of the building which was located on the very edge of the small town. There were several vehicles in the parking lot of the store. All the vehicles showed signs of combat, and five of them were nothing more than burned out hulks. The other vehicles, a pair of pickup trucks as well as four cars of various makes were scattered around the front of the building. The windshields were pocked and riddled by small arms fire and the doors had been left wide open. As they drove past, the Avalanche’s passengers clearly saw that there were no signs of bodies. No dispatched zombies on the ground, no one slumped over inside the vehicles, nothing.

The windows of the store had been smashed and there were scorch marks seemingly at random along the front. Numerous holes could be seen in the facade of the structure, made by small arms. There were the unmistakeable signs of looting, but even in the dim cloud covered light, they could see that there were items on the shelves. Roger brought the Avalanche to a complete stop before the entrance and turned on the headlights.

The powerful halogen bulbs pierced the stygian gloom and revealed the wreckage and mess the looters had left during the days following the Rising. Shelves lay half toppled, some still covered in goods, while other shelves were completely barren. Small drifts of snow were beginning to accumulate at the edges of the broken windows and there was a light covering over the first dozen feet or so. Through the beams of light they could see that the floors inside were covered in all manner of garbage and goods.

“Continue around the back,” Mike told his son. He glanced over his shoulder to the back seat of the truck, his eyes meeting Eric’s. “I don’t like this at all, there’s no sign of movement inside the store. At the very least the sound of the truck’s engine should have alerted the zombies.”

Eric’s face was grim. “I hear that, and I agree. There’s something not right about this.”

They rode in silence as Roger circled to the back of the Safeway, where the tractor trailer they had seen was located. As they passed the tractor, Eric reached out from the backseat and placed his hand on Roger’s shoulder. “Stop here; let’s take a quick look to see if we can get that rig running.”

“Shouldn’t we check to see if there is anything in the trailer?” Harold asked.

“Either way we could always use another Semi back at Wainwright.” Eric told him.

Roger brought the Avalanche to a stop less than ten feet from the front of the tractor. As soon as he put it in park, the four men opened the doors and got out of the vehicle, handguns at the ready. Roger turned off the engine and pocketed the keys to the vehicle, while Jack grabbed his large Compound bow and slung it as well as a quiver filled with hunting arrows across his broad back. It wouldn’t be the best weapon to use in close quarters, such as the confined aisles of the store, but it was an excellent long range weapon. Despite the fact that they had access to plenty of ammunition at the military base, it was still best to conserve their ammunition whenever they could.

And besides, a bow didn’t make anywhere near as much noise as a firearm.  One of the things they had discovered over the month since the Rising began was that the sound of a firearm discharging brought the undead like a moth to a flame.

“Jack, take the point, since you know how to drive those beasts.” Eric said.

With a single nod of his head, Jack began to carefully approach the truck. He was less than five feet away when a blood chilling howl came from the center of the town

“What the fuck was that?” Eric bit out through clenched teeth. Whether it was from the cold or from the sound, god only knew.

“Fuck, that sounds like wolves, doesn’t it?” Mike told the group as a visible shiver ran through his body.

A moment later the call was answered by several more loud howls, this time sounding so close that the animals answering the call with a soul freezing cry of their own might be just around the side of the building.

Seemingly unfazed, Harold stood next to Mike and Eric, casually scanning the snow and wind blown grasslands bordering the rear of the grocery store. “I think what we are hearing is a pack of feral dogs.”

“Feral?” Jack looked over his shoulder for a second as he approached the cab of the tractor trailer. “But it’s been just over a month since the Rising began.” A moment later he was pulling himself up the side of the cab, one gloved hand on the metal bar while he held his handgun in the other. He peered into the window of the cab.

The next thing anyone knew there was a nearly ear-shattering scream and Jack was flat on his back. A Zombie was at the window of the cab, its desiccated hands clawing slowly at the glass, trying to break through to get at the man who had just fallen.

It was clear that in life the Zombie had been the driver of the cab. A Day & Ross cap was still perched on its filthy matted hair. The skin was stretched tight over the bones of its skull, which was partially obscured by a patchy beard. Bone was visible where portions of the beard had been pulled free.

All five men started to laugh, even Jack as he picked himself up from the ground. It wasn’t the first time that something like this had happened to them, and they knew that it wouldn’t be the last. Jack stood and brushed snow and dirt off his back and legs before he faced the zombie again. “I’ll open the door and let it out.” He told the group.

Eric walked up and removed his fire axe from an improvised sheath he wore across his back. “Do it.”

Over the past couple of weeks the small group of survivors had developed a fairly effective game-plan when it came to dealing with the zombies. If they weren’t sprinters, they had very little to worry about, and they knew that in this case, it was just a regular shambler zombie, one of the vast majority of the undead that moved slowly and alone was little threat to a well armed group. Mike, Roger and Harold all turned to face different directions, opening their senses to their fullest, staying completely alert of their surroundings.

When Jack tried the door to the truck he found that the door was unlocked. He stood to the left of the door so it acted like a shield and pulled it open. The zombie, who had been leaning on the door when it opened tumbled from the cab and landed in an ungainly heap in the same spot that Jack had found himself only moments before.

Eric took a pair of steps up to the undead trucker, who at that moment was attempting to stand up. The way he swung the axe was deceptively simple and the blow severed the zombie’s skull from the neck. It fell to the ground and rolled a stop a couple of feet away. The dead, milky eyes seemed to glare accusingly at Eric as he stepped up to it and finished the job, ending the zombie’s un-natural life.

Jack manoeuvred around the open door of the truck and peered inside. He blew out a steamy breath and wrinkled his nose at the smell that emanated from the cab. “Damn, even in the cold it still smells like death. You’d figure that the weather would at least help ease the stench!”   After a moment he did a quick once over and called back to the group. “Cab’s clear.”

“Let’s hope that we can get it started then.” Mike called out as he continued to scan the surrounding area for any signs of danger. “Why don’t…” he began when a deep, low growl came from front of the truck.

Everyone froze in their tracks.

A massive German Shepherd stood at the foot of the truck with its head held low and its canines bared in a ferocious snarl. The dog had to weigh an easy hundred pounds and it appeared to be quite well fed.  It was staring at the small group, the threat clear in not only its warning snarl, but in its stance.

“Aw, look at the big puppy!” Harold exclaimed happily he turned his head to stare at the animal.