by Lorch, Jeff
Finally, all four of us had grabbed sturdy belt knives and had them strapped to our waists.
I looked at the pile of gear we had assembled and felt pretty pleased. I figured overall, I owed Cabela’s a few thousand bucks for the gear, plus the damage done to the front wall breaking in; if we made it out of this safe and sound, I’d be happy to send them a cheque.
I looked at our van; if you ignored the slime and damage to the vehicle, we might look like any average family going camping for the weekend. But with more guns.
Okay, so I guess we’d look like an average American family going camping for the weekend.
We decided since we were already stopped, we might as well get sorted for fuel as well. The front of the store had a green garden hose neatly coiled on a brass hanger, which I’m guessing would normally have been used to wash down the front walkway. I used my new belt knife to cut an eight-foot length of hose free while the kids ran inside to look for gas cans.
They came back a few minutes later, unable to find any red gas cans, but they found five blue plastic twenty litre water jugs which, for the short term anyway, should serve us just fine.
We tried a couple of the cars in the parking lot until we found one with a gas cap we could open. I fed the hose down into the tank and started sucking until I got a mouthful of gas. I spit it out and with gas running out of the end of the hose, filled two and a half of the jugs before the tank ran dry. I figured that was plenty for now, since the van’s gas gauge was still almost on full.
We loaded the cans into the back, made sure everyone had a quick pee in the Cabela’s bathrooms, and we were back on the highway headed north.
It was only ten minutes later that we ran into the roadblock.
CHAPTER NINE
Day 4
We came over a rise on the highway, and I slammed on the brakes, squealing to a stop. Nose to nose only fifty or so yards in front of us, covering almost the whole width of the highway, were two large green military trucks. Behind them I could see a range of other vehicles, both military and civilian, and rows of tents had been set up along the shoulder.
The entire area appeared to be deserted. One of the army trucks had its door left open, and several of the tent flaps were loose and flapping in the breeze.
I rolled the windows on the van down, and shut off the engine, listening.
All I could hear was the wind in the trees. No engine sounds, no voices. No infected.
I started the van again and slowly rolled forward, finding just enough room between the two trucks blocking the road to pull through. Once on the other side, I pulled to the side and left the engine running.
“You guys stay here, keep it running. It looks abandoned but I’m going to go have a look around.” I could see she wanted to tell me not to, but Steph finally nodded her agreement.
“I should come with you!” said Alex. I was coming to learn he was the more adventurous of the two brothers.
“I’m not going far, I’m just going to see if there’s any sign of where everyone from here went. I want you all here in case we have to leave quickly.” In my mind I saw myself running towards the van with a crowd of screaming infected close on my heels. I shivered.
Nervously, I climbed out of the van, and walked towards the tents and other vehicles.
There were several rows of tents covering half of the highway, and vehicles parked along the other side of the road leaving a driving lane more or less up the middle. I checked a few of the tents closest to the road and they looked like a barracks of sorts, tables and several cots filling the inside. I looked briefly for personal gear, signs that whoever had been here left in a hurry but saw nothing.
I went back to the next row and came to a tent that looked to have been some sort of command centre. Its flaps were tied back so one whole wall was open to the roadblock. Inside were several tables and chairs. Map cases were stacked on one of the tables, with a map of the area unrolled and open on its surface.
The table that interested me most was one dominated by a large radio unit. It looked like it was running on battery power as some of the lights and switches were illuminated.
I picked up the handset and squeezed the talk button.
“Hello, is there anyone there? We’re at a roadblock or rescue station on Highway 400 in Barrie but there’s no-one here.” After a second’s hesitation, and feeling a bit like an idiot, I finished with, “over.”
I waited a moment, then repeated my call.
There was no reply, no sound from the radio at all. I didn’t know if it was working, if I was broadcasting or not, or if it was running out of juice. I had no idea. There were dials and markers on it, but I didn’t know what they meant. I dropped the handset back to the table in frustration.
I checked a couple more tents and came across what appeared to be a medical tent. Inside were several cots, all empty, but the cots and sheets were all covered in dried splashes of green slime. I was about to check for any first aid supplies when I heard the van horn blare.
I turned and ran back to the van; I stopped short when I saw two men standing beside the van, one at the driver’s door reaching in and pressing the horn, and the other at the open sliding passenger door behind Steph, his hand on Jamie’s shoulder keeping him in place. Both men were holding rifles.
When he saw me, the man pushing the horn leaned back, and the quiet rushed in.
“Hey, buddy!” he called out in a friendly manner from where he stood beside my wife. “There you are!” He smiled and waved me ahead.
I had started towards the van when I noticed Alex wasn’t in the back seat beside his brother. I didn’t say anything.
When I neared the van, the guy by the driver’s door turned and pointed his gun at me.
“Whoa, friend, I’m just gonna get you to drop that knife of yours on the ground there for me, sound good?” he said with a smile.
I stopped where I was, maybe ten feet away from him.
“No, I don’t think that sounds good at all.”
His smile broadened. I looked beyond him to where Steph was sitting. She looked like I felt: terrified.
“Oh, don’t be like that,” he said, a look of mock disappointment on his face. “I just get nervous around people with knives, that’s all.” He turned and pointed his rifle at Steph, his smile gone. “I won’t ask you again.”
I pulled the knife from my belt and dropped it on the ground in front of me.
Smiling again, he turned back from my wife and lowered his gun slightly.
“See how much better that is? You know we thought we might have missed you somewhere along the way. We had been behind you for a fair way, catching up slowly, and then for the last while we couldn’t see you. Nick over there figured you must have turned off somewhere, but I was pretty sure you had just gotten further ahead of us. Looks like Nick was right, you made a pit stop somewhere,” he said looking at the gear loaded in the back of the van. “I guess I owe him ten dollars, don’t I?” he asked.
“Andy there owes me ten dollars, he bet me you had seen us and taken off ahead,” said Nick with a malicious grin.
“What do you want?” I asked.
“Right to the point, I see. I like that,” said Andy. “Well, to put it bluntly, we want your shit. We wanted whatever shit you had when we saw you go by in an empty van a while ago, so we started following you, but now I can see that you have more shit. Now we really want your shit.”
Jamie tried to jerk himself free from Nick’s grasp.
“Listen man, just go back to the store back there and take wha…” he started to say when Nick smashed a backhanded fist across Jamie’s face. Jamie spit out a mouthful of blood and went to jump out of the van, when the man pushed the barrel of his rifle into Jamie’s stomach. With a grunt, Jamie fell back into the van. Nick pulled the gun back out of the vehicle and stood with it nestled comfortably in the crook of his arms.
“See, we could go back to the store, we could,” continued Andy, nodding, unfazed.
“But I’ve never been much for buying retail. See my daddy raised me to be frugal and always told me to settle for second-hand whenever I could.”
“Besides,” he continued, smiling, turning his head to look at Stephanie inside the van, “I’m guessing some of the goodies you have in here are what you might call ‘one-of-a-kind items’.”
I felt sick to my stomach. I was trying to think of what to say and how to deal with this, when I saw Alex creeping quietly from behind one of the army trucks up to the back of the van. I saw he had a pistol in his hand.
I looked back to Andy, making sure he hadn’t noticed me looking towards the back of the van. He was keeping his rifle pointed in my direction but was looking at Steph.
“You can have the stuff,” I said, getting his attention. “You can have the stuff, you can take whatever you want, just let us go. You don’t have to do this.”
“You’re right buddy, I don’t have to,” he agreed, “but I want to.” His smile slowly slid off his face. “And as of right now, there’s no-one to stop me. The kid in the back seat isn’t going to stop me. I know you’re not going to stop me. And I’m guessing once I get started, that pretty little lady in there won’t even want to stop me.”
Just then Alex leaned past the side of the van and shot Nick square in the back.
The impact blew him forward along the side of the van, his gun flying from his hands, half falling into Steph’s window before sliding to the ground.
Startled, Andy turned toward the sound of the shot, raising his gun.
I charged forward, scooped my knife from the ground, and hammered the blade into Andy’s shoulder up to the hilt. He screamed in pain. He spun back to face me, bringing his rifle up, and I grabbed it with both hands, trying to wrestle it away from him. He fought savagely, twisting and shoving, until suddenly he screamed in pain again and went stiff. I took advantage and drove my knee into his groin as hard as I could. His eyes bugging from his head, he released the rifle and fell to the ground clutching his crotch, groaning in agony. As he fell, I saw a second knife sticking out of his side and saw that Steph had lunged forward and stabbed him in the side through the open van window.
I stepped back away from him and motioned Alex to come and cover him while I ran around the van to check on the others. He stood over the injured man, hands shaking, his pistol held in both hands pointed at the ground.
Jamie was okay other than a bruised face. I reached in through Steph’s open window and threw my arms around her. She said she was okay, wiping the tears from my eyes. Man, I married one seriously tough bitch, I thought with some pride.
My hands shaking, I walked back around the van to where Andy lay on the ground, bleeding and sobbing.
♦♦♦
I had Jamie grab a chair from one of the tents. I pulled one of the tent guy-lines free and used it to tie Andy to the chair in the middle of the road. We dragged Nick’s body around to the back of the van and left him lying on the ground.
Blood from my knife in Andy’s shoulder had coated his left side, the knife still sticking out at a sharp angle, and Steph’s knife was still sticking from his side. This asshole looked like one sorry pincushion.
Once we had him secured, the four of us stepped back and stared at him.
“Alex, are you alright?” I asked. I saw him keep looking at the back of the van where Nick’s corpse lay.
He nodded tersely.
I grabbed him in a tight hug, both of us still shaking.
“Thank you for what you did,” I said into his ear. “You saved us.”
He nodded again after a moment. I could tell he was struggling to hold back tears.
Stephanie explained that, contrary to my instructions, Alex had left the van only a moment after I had, intent on exploring. A short time later, the two other men had come over the railing at the side of the highway, guns aimed at the van. They only asked where the driver was, so obviously hadn’t seen Alex.
There wasn’t anything else I could say, so I just gave his shoulder a squeeze. He looked at me thankfully.
“What the hell are we going to do with him?” I asked the others, quietly.
“Just let me go, man,” he cried, tears running down his cheeks. “Just let me go, I didn’t hurt anyone, I was just talking, I wasn’t going to hurt anyone!”
I stared at him, not saying anything.
“Kevin, we can’t just let this animal go,” said Steph, her voice cracking with emotion. I looked at her, I could see the fury and fear in her eyes.
I looked at the boys. Neither one wanted the responsibility of this decision.
“We’re not going to let him go,” I said finally. “We can’t. People like him can’t be allowed to go free. If Alex hadn’t left the truck, my guess is right now the three of us would be dead, and Stephanie would be wishing she were.”
At this he started thrashing in his seat, swearing and spitting at us.
“Our choices are to leave him tied up, until either he dies of blood loss, dehydration or exposure, or some of the infected find him; or I put a bullet in him and get the hell out of here.”
“Kevin…,” she started, then stopped. She knew the reality of what needed to be done but didn’t like it any more than I did.
He shrieked as I stepped forward and pulled the knives from him, earning myself a gob of spit in my face, and a string of curses following me back to the others.
I was about to tell the others to climb back into the van and pull ahead a bit so they wouldn’t have to see me do this, when we heard tree branches cracking in the woods to the west of us. A howl of fury, soon joined by others, came from the woods as we saw a crowd of infected, likely drawn by the sounds of the gunshot and the yelling, swarming out of the woods at us.
“Get in the van now!” I shouted needlessly, as the others were already several steps ahead of me.
“Don’t leave me here! You can’t leave me like this!” screamed Andy as we ran for the vehicle.
We jumped into the van, locked the doors and rolled up the windows. We were already moving when we could hear Andy’s screams rising above those of the infected swarming over him.
“Saved us a bullet,” I said coldly as we accelerated away. I didn’t look back.
CHAPTER TEN
Day 4
We made it to Sudbury just after two in the afternoon. The fields we had been driving past had given way to sharp stone outcroppings, covered with grass but raw where the road had been blasted through, swelling out of the ground.
Beautiful areas covered with trees spotted the land along the way, and the colours were incredible. Rich browns, vibrant reds, deep auburns with striking yellows mixed among them. This area was known for the beauty of its fall colours as the leaves changed, and I could see why.
As we made our way north, we began to see more signs of traffic including car crashes. I was coming to think that when the health scare hit, many had thought to leave the city and get away from the traffic, fleeing to the smaller more remote centres, and by doing so en masse they had brought the sickness and the traffic with them.
Crowds of the infected were becoming more common. On the drive north, we had only a few times seen a solo infected stumbling along the roadside or out in a field; they almost always seemed to congregate in large groups. Thankfully, all the groups we had encountered were small enough we were able to simply push past them and keep going, but each time I was terrified of getting stuck in their midst.
As we came into the city from the south, we came to an RV-park-style campground on the right which, according to the map, was nestled beside a small resort lake. At this time of year, I was expecting that most of the trailers would be deserted and locked-up for the season, so it should be a safe place to pull over and let everyone get some air and a bite to eat.
We pulled into the parking area past a sign that read ‘Carol’s Campsite & RV Park” and continued slowly along a gravel drive towards a glimpse of water we could see ahead. We came to an area along the
shore of a pretty lake. There was a beach area which, during the summer, would likely have been marked as a swimming area as well, and beside it was a boat launch leading down into the water. The docks were dragged up on the shore, and there were several boats, all tarped for the coming winter, in a storage area off to the side.
As had become our habit, without being told we all rolled our windows down and listened for any sign of trouble.
“Coast seems clear,” Jamie said, and I nodded back at him. Alex had been especially quiet since our encounter at the roadblock. The boy had just shot a man in the back; he had killed a man and, despite it being to save us and not having a choice, the bitterness of having to pull the trigger must be eating at him.
We climbed out of the van, and the boys opened the back, digging out the last of the airport sandwiches. I told them to grab one of the pots and a few soup cans, and I grabbed the axe and saw from the sporting goods store and went looking for some firewood. I had seen there were a couple barbeque grills near the beach area so I figured we could get a small fire going and have some warm soup with lunch. Steph was leaning against the hood of the van looking over the map. She had seemed okay during the drive despite the very real threat of rape and likely murder only hours before.
In no time we had a small fire burning and a couple cans of soup starting to simmer in a pot next to the grill. The boys had stripped down to their underwear after daring each other to go for a swim and had barreled full-speed into the lake, gasping for air at the shock of the cold water. I had warned them not to shout so we wouldn’t draw any attention from any infected nearby, and they both threw a look at me that clearly said, ‘seriously, do you think we’re idiots?’
In such a short while, I had become very attached to these kids, and I knew Steph had as well. I knew it was the situation, and that we were likely projecting our worry for our own kids, but that didn’t change the fact. I prayed that we would be able to help get these boys home to their own family.
