30
Matt
The sun was rising steadily in the sky. Matt was exhausted, and out of breath. His clothes were filthy, completely caked with dry, sand-like dirt.
He’d been sweating, and he couldn’t shake the feeling of thirst that hung around him, enhanced by the dry air. They didn’t have enough water with them to drink,, so he had to sip it slowly and carefully, being wary not to consume too much.
But water was the least of his worries.
He’d just come back from a short, solo scouting trip to the road. The homemade tank-like vehicle from earlier had apparently followed them down. While Matt, Jamie and Judy had been diligently hiking off the road, making sure to stay far away from the view of any passing vehicles, the strange survival truck had been driving north on its own, and was now at roughly the same position they were. Over the last couple of hours, it had apparently been driving up and down a short stretch of road, not progressing on to Santa Fe, and not heading back toward Albuquerque.
“What’d you see?” said Jamie anxiously. She sat next to Judy under a low juniper tree, trying to get some shelter from the sun.
“Same as before,” said Matt wearily.
“It’s still out there? But we haven’t moved.”
“It’s still there. It’s driving up and down Route 14.”
“Are you sure?”
“Am I sure? I don’t think I could mistake that thing for anything else.”
“Yeah. Good point.”
“Did you see anyone in it this time?”
“Just a glimpse,” said Matt. “Nothing more than an impression of a face.”
“Male or female?”
“Male. But that’s about all I know.”
“I just don’t get it,” said Judy. “You’re saying that crazy homemade tank is driving up and down Route 14, just looking for us?”
“It seems like they’re following us,” said Matt.
“But that’d be crazy, right?” said Jamie.
“Yeah,” said Matt slowly. “But all their other behavior is pretty crazy.”
“What’s crazy about building a homemade armored car?” said Jamie. “I mean, sure, before the virus, people probably thought they were nuts. But now? It seems pretty practical.”
“I’m not trying to argue against the practicality of whatever type of vehicle that is,” said Matt. “Not now, anyway. They’re still alive.”
“But it’s all senseless,” said Jamie.
“Exactly,” said Matt. “Their behavior doesn’t make any sense. At least not to us.”
“What do you think happened? What is it they’re trying to do?”
“My guess?” said Matt. “I think it’s someone, or someones, who spent so long preparing for a survival situation that they got all caught up in it. Now that something’s happened, they can’t break out of fight-or-flight mode. And they’re stuck in fight mode. Their system is all keyed up.”
“You think they’re hunting us down?”
“Maybe,” said Matt, shrugging. “Or it’s just a coincidence. I don’t think it matters that much.”
“It doesn’t matter?”
“What I mean is that it doesn’t matter that much what their motives are, simply because their intentions are crystal clear. If they see us, they’re going to shoot us. Simple as that.”
Judy was nodding along. “And,” she said, “unfortunately we’ve got to hit the road for a while to get to my cousin Joe’s property.”
“Right,” said Matt. “Now you’re sure there’s no way to avoid it?”
“No,” said Judy, shaking her head. “I’m sure of it. We’ll have to be on the road for about a mile.”
“One mile,” said Matt, as if he was testing out how the distance sounded out loud.
“You think we can make it?”
“It depends,” said Matt.
“Why don’t we just wait it out? It’s got to move on at some point, right?”
“Right,” said Matt. “Theoretically, it should. For some reason, I just don’t get the sense that it’s going to.”
“You really think it’s pursuing us and is just going to wait on that stretch of road, somehow knowing that we’ve got to cross it? That doesn’t make sense.”
“No,” said Matt. “It doesn’t make sense. And like I said, their motives, well, we just don’t know what they are. But what we do know is that their behavior doesn’t seem to make a whole lot of sense.”
“So what does that mean for us? Practically?”
“I think we should wait.”
“Wait?”
“Wait and see what happens.”
“But you’re saying it doesn’t sound like the tank’s going anywhere, right?”
“Exactly. But I don’t think we have much of a chance if we go now.”
“But we can’t wait forever.”
“Who said anything about waiting forever? Just a couple of hours.”
“Here, come with me.”
“What?”
Jamie gave Matt a look that seemed to say, “We can’t talk here,” with a little glance over at Judy.
“What is it?” he said, as they walked about twenty feet away from Judy.
The sun felt hot on Matt’s skin.
“Judy’s not doing well. Look at her.”
Matt glanced over at her, studying her more carefully than he had. After all, he was tired from his scouting trip. And on closer inspection, he realized that she wasn’t looking good. Her face looked unusually tired and there was something strange going on with her eyes that he couldn’t quite put his finger on.
“What’s wrong with her?”
“I don’t know. She was quiet when you were gone. Not talking a lot. She was sitting down the whole time. She won’t say that anything’s wrong with her, but something definitely is.”
“The walk was hard on her,” said Matt. “But I’m sure she’ll pull through.”
“That’s something that we all say, but is it ever really true?”
“Sure,” said Matt. “After a day’s worth of walking. In these conditions. And after what happened? People don’t always feel good. They don’t always look good.”
“This is different.”
Matt was silent for a moment. He knew that Jamie wouldn’t be wasting his time with this if it wasn’t something she was seriously concerned about.
“You gave her water?”
Jamie nodded.
“So I’m guessing that you think that she’ll do better once she’s at her cousin’s place, rather than out here?”
“Exactly.”
“You really think she’ll do better there? What does he have that we can’t give her here?”
“I don’t know,” said Jamie. “I just have a bad feeling...that if we don’t get her somewhere safe where she can rest...that something bad’s going to happen to her.... We’ve lost too many people already...I don’t think I can handle losing another.”
Matt fell silent. He didn’t know what to say. He wasn’t convinced that Judy would necessarily do better at her cousin’s place. Then again, she certainly didn’t seem to be doing well here.
“Judy!” said Jamie, suddenly turning around and rushing over to Judy, who had fallen to the ground.
Matt rushed over too. Judy had broken her fall, but just barely, with her two arms firmly planted against the ground.
“What happened?” said Jamie.
“Just...lost my...balance,” said Judy, her words weak.
It was disturbing to see such a sudden change in Judy. Sure, she’d had her episode earlier and she hadn’t seemed to be doing great all day. But now she was markedly worse.
“Here, let me help you,” said Jamie, bending down and carefully helping Judy into a position where she could lie on her side, with her knees bent and her head resting on the ground.
After a few minutes of giving Judy water and asking her a series of basic questions, trying to figure out what was going on, Jamie and Matt again retreated so that
they were out of earshot.
“No signs of the virus,” was the first thing Jamie said.
“I didn’t see any large veins either,” said Matt. “And no blood anywhere. No hemorrhaging. That’s a good thing.”
“But the bad thing is that we don’t know what’s wrong with her.”
“It might not be anything so specific,” said Matt. “It might be that she’s a little older than us and isn’t exactly in the best of shape. Suddenly putting your body through these long, taxing days is quite a strain.”
“I think it’s something with her heart,” said Jamie. “It fits. The sudden weakness. The disorientation.”
“She’s disoriented?”
“A little.”
“I’m starting to regret having never really studied medicine in even an amateur way,” said Matt. “I’ll be the first to admit I just don’t know much about this.”
“Me neither,” said Jamie. “Most of what I know is from TV shows and junk like that.”
“Well,” said Matt, drawing out his words slowly. “We either stay out here where Judy may get worse, or we try to make it to her cousin’s place, where she may or may not get better and we may get shot along the way.”
“Looks like it,” said Jamie.
The two of them were silent for a long while.
The clock was ticking. They had to make a decision sooner rather than later, or else waiting it out would become the decision itself.
And Matt was keenly aware, as Jamie must have been, that staying in place didn’t necessarily mean they were safe. After all, it didn’t seem as if the homemade tank needed to confine itself to the road. It certainly seemed as if it would be perfectly capable off-road. And who knew what other dangers lurked around these parts. If homemade tanks that massacred strangers were possible, then anything was.
31
Zach
“It’s my thirtieth year around the sun,” growled Zach to himself. “And these bastards have to come and pull a stunt like this.... I could have used the day off for once in my miserable life...”
He was seated behind the wheel of what could only be described as a homemade tank.
The day hadn’t been a good one. The week hadn’t been a good one.
But, then again, Zach’s whole life hadn’t been a good one.
He was thirty years old, but his face was already full of lines. It had that hardscrabble look to it that’s typically reserved by nature for men several decades older.
He was thin and wiry. Plenty of strength packed into his narrow little frame. Not a lot of muscle, but what he had, he knew how to use.
Zach was tweaked out of his mind. His vision was just a tunnel. His hands were shaky. His arms seemed to move on their own.
Everything seemed to be happening very, very fast. When he turned his head, the whole world seemed to swim before him, rushing by.
Nothing looked normal. The world looked sort of flat, as if he’d lost his depth perception.
It’d been at least a decade since Zach had first started using meth. He’d been a responsible user, the type who went to work every day rather than hanging around on the streets. He was the sort of guy who never missed a day on the job. In fact, he felt like the meth just made him a better worker.
It almost would have been a stretch to consider Zach a recreational user, at least at that point in his life. As Zach often reminded himself, methamphetamine had been used for decades by serious workers, and it was still employed in special circumstances by various military forces around the world.
There was a time in America, just a few decades ago, when speed (methamphetamine) was the drug of choice for students, truckers and just about anybody who really needed to get work done.
Of course, in those days, speed had been bought in pill form from pharmacies. It had been legal.
Modern meth was more like a chemical sibling than a cousin to the speed of decades past. It was essentially the same drug, although with a different delivery mechanism. When smoked, for instance, the drug hit the user’s system much faster than its oral use in pill form.
So for people like Zach, who started using meth to work their multiple shifts and multiple jobs (often physically demanding and physically punishing jobs), smoking it really wasn’t the best option. They would have done better with the pills, but those were long gone. The only thing available was the cheap stomped-on stuff that you had to smoke, or maybe inject (which also wasn’t ideal).
Zach had worked the tough jobs. Hands-on demolition. Showing up to a building with a sledgehammer and not much else. Many of the guys on the crew used something to cope with it. Often it was just beer. For others, it was a couple joints, or hits off a weed pipe. For Zach and a few others, they coped by sneaking off and taking a few hits off the meth pipe.
So he never thought he had a problem. He was one of the responsible ones. Sure, there were the occasional side effects. Like being a little shaky. Like losing his appetite. And, as the years progressed, mental symptoms.
At first they were just little things. Like he’d see something out of the corner of his eye, then when he’d turn, there wouldn’t be anything there.
Then the noises had started. Just little strange noises that would catch his attention when he was at home alone after work. He’d head into the other room to investigate and there wouldn’t be anything there at all.
Then the voices had started. That’s when things had gotten really bad.
Unfortunately for Zach, he hadn’t had the insight to realize that it was a classic case of chronic methamphetamine overdose. The voices and imagined ideas, along with the paranoia, were all classic symptoms. The first person recorded in the US to exhibit such behavioral patterns was the wife of the famous Beat writer William S. Burroughs. Joanne Burroughs was found wandering the streets of New York after months of intensive Benzedrine use. Later, William Burroughs, a prolific drug user in his own right, shot her “by mistake.” She is buried near a popular metro stop in Mexico City, where the event happened.
But Zach knew nothing of Beat writers or the medical literature. He was just a regular guy. Hard-working. Determined. Always showing up on time.
But, as his meth use intensified, and as the symptoms of paranoia grew more intense, his mania for hard work was shot into overdrive. Working was the only way he knew to deal with the symptoms that were cropping up. But the symptoms had a way of interfering with his work no matter how hard he tried.
After all, his bosses and coworkers couldn’t help noticing when he started talking to himself, at first in a murmur and later at full volume. They couldn’t help noticing when he slept in his car overnight, so that he could be there bright and early for work. And when they told him he couldn’t sleep at the job site anymore, 4:00 a.m. would find him ringing his boss’s doorbell, seeing if he needed any help with raking leaves.
Soon Zach started getting fired. No one could put up with his bizarre behavior.
By the time he was twenty-five, he’d burned through so many jobs and connections that there wasn’t a construction or demolition project manager that would hire him in the greater Albuquerque area.
By the time he was twenty-six, he’d been unemployed for close to a full year. The fast-food jobs didn’t cut it for him, since they couldn’t contain his meth-fueled energy. Zach needed to use his hands. He needed to use a sledgehammer. He needed to smash things.
At twenty-six, Zach’s paranoia was in full swing. He barely stopped talking to himself throughout the day. He scared his neighbors and he was kicked out of his long-inhabited apartment.
Because of his obsession with work, his Spartan living conditions and his adamant refusal to pay income tax, Zach had quite a bit of money stashed away.
The next four years saw Zach grow more paranoid than ever as he moved out to the desert, a barren red-rock spot half an hour northeast of Albuquerque.
There, all alone, Zach talked to himself and smoked copious amounts of meth. Gradually, he began injecting the stuff a
s well.
His heart rate averaged well over 120 and he slept very little. He poured his prodigious energy, formerly reserved for work, into conspiracy websites.
His paranoia grew. Although not always entirely wrong, he found himself getting sucked down rabbit holes that twisted and turned and seemed all to lead, for him at least, to the same idea.
The idea was that the world was ending, right under his feet. And the only way to survive? Build a tank.
It was like a perverted version of Noah’s Ark. He thought he was getting messages from God through the internet message boards.
But the ideas, of course, were all his own.
He spent two years building his own personal tank, working frantically, smoking and injecting meth all the while, never ceasing to chatter away as he worked.
In the end, it was a monstrosity. But a functional one.
And a deadly one.
A Toyota pickup formed the base of the vehicle. It was durable, with a practically indestructible engine.
The rest of it was built with a lot of corrugated steel. The design was a bit of madness completely unique to Zach. He used his construction experience and his tireless work ethic to construct the vehicle that he believed was going to save the world from the coming apocalypse.
It didn’t look pretty. And it certainly wasn’t street legal.
But it worked. It drove, albeit somewhat slowly, weighed down as it was by the excessive amount of extra metal that had been welded onto the frame and body.
When parked, the vehicle functioned as it was intended. Basically it was a mobile bunker. Zach had cut through the body of the truck, allowing him to crawl from the driver’s seat to the bed of the pickup, where he was ensconced in a huge amount of metal. Narrow slits allowed him to shoot at his targets with a variety of interesting guns. His favorite was the AK-47. Durable and rugged. He liked the thought process that had gone into making it. It was something he could understand.
When the virus had struck, he heard about it on one of the three televisions he kept on at all times, monitoring multiple news stations simultaneously.
“Here we go,” he said, cackling to himself. “This virus is it...the bearer of good and bad news together...the bastards won’t know what hit them...time to take ol’ Betsy out for her maiden spin, her maiden voyage...time to get myself a maiden.”
Last Pandemic (Book 2): Escape The City Page 16
