DEAD: Reborn by TW Brown

tube that came down from the large plastic container was still in place.
    He’d made sure to leave her with water. After all, he was not an animal. The choice on how quiet she chose to be was her own. If she wanted to yell and scream and bring the deaders, that was solely her decision.
    “Juan, you don’t want to do this,” April said with a hitch in her voice as he climbed the ladder.
    “You’re right,” Juan agreed. “But did you leave me any choice?”
    “Listen,” April pleaded as Juan stood before her now with as little expression on his face as possible, “I may have acted a bit hasty. And that is your leverage…right?”
    Juan remained silent. He would listen to her, but he felt that his choices were already made. He did not enjoy it, but she had actually brought this on herself. She could have kept her mouth shut…she could have actually tried to blow his cover with the group, but perhaps she was right when she said that folks saw him as a leader. Maybe…just maybe they could look beyond his past.
    April had been a paramedic in the Old World. As fate would have it, one of her calls brought her to a seedy hotel in Portland’s Southeast district. A ‘working girl’ had been beaten badly by a john. When she arrived, a man met her on the scene and told her what room to check. He also passed on the information that the police were already en route. Surprisingly, the man turned out to be the girl’s pimp. He had not tried to interfere, and had actually been helpful in providing some of the girl’s personal information before slipping out as the police cars pulled in.
    The reason April had remembered this particular call was the fact that, as she was finishing with putting the girl into the back of the ambulance, the pimp had approached and waved her over to speak in the street just beyond the yellow tape barricade. Since the police were on the scene and close by, she was not too concerned that the man would try anything rash.
    “You might want to send somebody back to the Dumpster,” the man said, and that was it. He turned and walked away before she could ask any questions.
    She had gone around back herself with an officer in tow. In the Dumpster they discovered a man who had been beaten almost to death. From the looks of it, a bat or baton had been taken to the man. It would seem that they had discovered the disgruntled john.
    The police had shown about as much interest in locating his attacker as they had the prostitute’s. The fact that somebody had beaten the man almost to death was filed, but April already knew how much effort would go into finding the assailant even if she were to give them a detailed description of the man. In her mind, while he had been helpful, he had still done something terrible to another human and that did not make him much better in her eyes. In fact, once she read the laundry list of damage inflicted on the john, she built a strong sense of dislike for the supposedly helpful pimp.
    In all her time, she had never had a call quite like it. She o ften wondered if the pimp had done what he did to the john because of the potential damage to his income…which was built on the debasement of women, or was it an actual act of trying to avenge the assault on the girl? She had puzzled over it for months…and then the zombies came.
    She knew who Juan was the moment that she laid eyes on him. She was actually about to rally the others in her group to have the man evicted from the island…until she learned that he was the one in charge.  She sat back and watched, trying to figure the man out. A part of her mind screamed that what was past was past and that there were greater worries. Yet, for some reason, she could not see past the man who had almost killed another human being with his bare hands…and perhaps a bat.
    As time passed, she saw things that caused her to evaluate her opinion more closely. This man seemed gentle and kind. He was also a very charismatic figure. She