“What!?” John whisper-asked.

“Shut up!” Wes whisper-answered, never taking his eyes off whatever had gotten his attention out beyond the camp, out past the marker five feet in front of him, out into the seemingly endless black of open ground. He cocked his head slightly to the right, trying for a better listen.

You could hear a pin drop.

The wind had died down and there was now only the clear sound of low rustling leaves. Barely audible footsteps. Getting closer. Getting louder.

All five men were on high alert.

John was staring straight at Wes, who was carefully unholstering his rifle. Mick had quietly made his way behind both Wes and John, shotgun in hand. Their makeshift campfire was being put under boot by Manny in steady, deliberate thump-a-thump crunches, his pistol reaching out to the sparse field surrounding them, almost invisible in the dead of night.

Derek had not yet come out of the trees.

Wes and John traded quick glances, interrupted every few moments by another muffled sound off in the distance. Although Wes had accepted the mantle of experienced group elder with pride and a small sense of entitlement, the chill that now coursed through his system seemed to very quickly do away with any notion that as leader he was somehow immune to………to whatever was coming their way.

Four men now lay behind several trees at the back of the camp, ready to attack or to run for their lives. Derek had drawn the short straw for the night’s watch. He was well aware that the group consensus had always maintained a need for an elevated watch post. It had saved their lives on more than one occasion. As he slowly shifted his weight to the main branch to his left, he already knew that tonight could very well be his last on earth. As a human.

Manny was the first to pick up Derek’s distress signal. They had spent more than one night in the wild huddled together discussing what signaling system would serve the two most basic purposes for the watch post: alerting the others to a specific danger and doing so without giving away their position. In the end, the streetlight made things simple and easy to remember: Red meant stay put, Yellow meant get ready to fight, Green meant run like hell.

Manny had trained his eyes on Derek’s position; twenty yards ahead and twenty feet up. He even thought he heard the click when Derek cracked alive one of the fluorescent tubes from his jacket. He spied Derek turning slowly to face them, careful to keep the glowing light nestled at chest level and cupped in one hand. Then he saw the color he feared more than any other…

“He’s at it again. Jesus.”

RIIIIIIIIIIIIIIPPP!  CRACK!

“John, leave it alone, will ya?”

Crrrrrrraaaaaaaaackkkkkkkk.

“They don’t know what that means. That’s a scare tactic that’s been used forever, man. These things don’t get scared. They can’t get scared.”

THUNK!

“Almost………..(grunt)………..done!”

“Voila!”

The five man group stood and gazed at John’s latest creation. They stood and rolled their eyes. Just as barbaric tribes had done for centuries, this war party had left its mark on the battlefield. Staring back at them was a zombie’s head on a pike. The lower jaw, having been just removed by John’s carefully honed technique of placing the severed and still snapping head under his boot, pinned against the quick forearm-generated thrusts of a rusty crowbar. Up on the stake, its bewildered and blackened eyes slowly trained on each man in the group, in turn. A horrific anatomical impossibility; impossible, that is, until now.

Wesley, the unassuming sixty-something leader of the rag-tag bunch, sat back down in front of the campfire and lit up a smoke.

“John, come here. Sit down.”

John carefully backed away from the staked zombie head, watching as a slight breeze danced through its dark strands of blood-caked hair. He crouched down into a catcher’s stance, arms neatly folded into the open pockets of his Washington Redskins sweatshirt.

“What?” John asked, clearly impressed with himself.

Wesley took a long drag from his cigarette. “John, do you believe these undead fucks mean us any harm on a……..personal level?”

John thought for a moment, but before he could reply, Wesley stood abruptly and bellowed:

“Because if you do, then you don’t have the slightest fucking clue about anything that’s gone on here!! You don’t think I want to tear every one of these mothers a new ass? You don’t think I want revenge for my family? My country? My whole goddamned planet!?! Do you think these things are people? They are walking disease, my man. A walking virus. It looks like a person, but it has as much in common with a person as bugs!!”

“I know all that, Wes” John said with a sigh. “It just….I don’t know. It makes me feel like I’m doing something more. There are probably hundreds of little groups like us, maybe thousands. They’re out there. Maybe doing better than us, maybe not. We’ve got guns, ammo, food, water, and each man in this group is someone I’d trust with my life. We’ve got some hope, man. Not to make things the way they were. Not the five of us. But….I don’t know. Maybe some other group, not doing as well, feeling lost, alone, feeling hopeless, maybe they come across this spot. Maybe they see that rotting head on a stick. They look into its eyes, it looks back. Maybe it sends a message….”