Antonio, in no mood to head back home right away, suggested that they take a drive up through the park and look around. The park was more of a wildlife refuge, and he wanted to see if the sickness had spread to the bison, elk, deer, and many other animals that were supposed to live in the mountains.
“It has two major highways that run through it: 115, which is basically what we are on, and 49. We don’t have to go hiking or anything like that; we could just drive through, maybe camp a night or two and see what is out there,” he said, looking down at the map in his lap while the group sat outside of a gas station eating lunch.
“I don’t know, man. I have never been an outdoorsy kind of person. It really isn’t my thing,” Wes said.
“Don’t mind him, Antonio,” Loui said. “We will go. He has his panties all in a wad because he is thinking of asking Eve to marry him. Besides you know how whipped he has been ever since they started dating.”
Wes threw an old bag of food from the pile they were getting ready to burn at Loui’s head. It was a halfhearted throw and missed by a half a foot.
“At least I’m contemplating it. You have been stringing Vera along for nearly a year now with no promise of a commitment. I mean, man, if you aren’t that into her, let her go. Is she even putting out? Because if she is, she must be good considering all of the time you spend locked up in your room.”
It was Wes’ turn to duck. Loui had pitched a box of stale crackers at him and actually hit him in the arm.
“Man, that is none of your business,” Loui snarled.
“That means no,” Antonio threw in, making the situation worse.
“Hey, at least I have someone.”
Antonio took the comment in stride. He knew his chances of finding another gay man was slim to none. In retaliation, he said, “If you don’t do something soon, I’m going to take yours.”
“If he doesn’t propose soon, you won’t have to worry about taking her. She may come willingly,” Wes added.
The three threw more food and insults at each other than what they threw into the fire, creating a larger mess in the parking lot than was there before they arrived.
“Yeah man, I guess we could take a ride through the park,” Wes finally agreed. “I’m sorry we tend to be so selfish all the time, always wanting to rush back home. Eve isn’t the only reason I like to get back as soon as possible. I mean, she’s the biggest reason, but I also like the comforting feeling of knowing that I’m in a place with more people than I have seen in years. They don’t create a lot of noise, but it’s more than what we hear out here.”
“Yeah, I know what you mean. I just feel as if we aren’t being as productive as we should be,” Antonio said.
The following morning they drove through the park, stopping a few times to take in the scenery and read a few signs. That night they made camp, and the next day they contemplated taking 49 west through the southern part of the refuge, but Antonio decided he had had enough of the view, so they headed back to Cache. Wes thought the whole thing was a little pointless, but they had seen some great scenery on their way up and one lonely bison that had run from the sound of the car on their way back.
Just as they were pulling out of a gas station headed toward the on-ramp that would put them on 62 east and back toward the airfield, they heard the sound of another car.
“Dude, do you hear that?” Loui asked, smacking Antonio’s arm harder than he had intended, causing the other man to jerk the steering wheel to the left a little.
“Son-of-a-bitch, dude. Why’d you do that?” Antonio shouted.
“Do you hear that?” Loui repeated.
“No, what is it?”
“I don’t know. Pull over and shut off the engine.”
“What are you two babbling about?” Wes asked, leaning into the front seat of the Ford Explorer they had stolen from the parking lot of the little airport.
Antonio brought the vehicle to a stop in the dead center of the road, put it in park, and turned the key. Loui looked at his traveling companions each in turn for a long moment, seeing if they were hearing what he thought he was hearing. Only confusion stared back at him.
“You don’t hear that?” he asked, getting out of the SUV.
They did not, but they got out with him. He was looking up the westbound lane of 62, straining to see the approaching cars. He knew he could hear them. The sound was too loud and inconsistent to be just one car.
“Hey, you know what, I do think I hear a car or something,” Antonio said, squinting in the direction the noise was coming from.
“It isn’t just one. There are two. We should probably arm ourselves. There is no telling what is coming our way.”
What was coming was a pitch black 80’s style refurbished Camaro and a bright red 60’s style Mustang equally refurbished. Both were convertibles, and both were loaded down with people.
“Yeah, I think we should arm up.” Loui popped the back hatch of the Explorer and began handing out weapons.
The closer the two cars got, the more they could see into them. The Camaro had two men and two women in it, and the Mustang had one man and two women. The two women in the Camaro looked frightened, possibly even crying, but the rest looked happy. Crazily happy, Wes thought.
“I don’t like the looks of this situation,” Wes said aloud.
“Neither do I,” Antonio agreed.
“Do either of you see the two women in the black car? Is it me or do they look unhappy, maybe a little scared?”
“No, they don’t seem to approve of their current traveling companions. But we do nothing until we know for sure what is going on,” Wes said.
The two cars came to a stop a few yards from where the three men stood next to their Explorer exhibiting their weapons for the others to see. The two men in the Camaro shared a quick conversation before motioning to their friends in the Mustang to get out and come to their car. A short exchange transpired. It looked as if the tall, dark haired man behind the wheel of the Camaro was the leader of the bunch, and he seemed to be giving orders that revolved around the two women in his car. Antonio shifted uncomfortably beside Wes, who nodded in agreement with this silent statement that said the situation was bad, very bad.
The three from the Mustang circled around the Camaro, taking point and seeming to guard the two women in the car. They didn’t appear to be armed, but Wes took no chances. The leader didn’t seem bothered by their weapons, and this frightened Wes, a little. He saw Loui, out of the corner of his eye, watching the surrounding landscape. Taking the cue, he did a little of this as well, but saw nothing, heard nothing.
The leader finally got out of his car and walked toward them with his hand raised. He wore tight blue jeans and a loose, half-unbuttoned, white, short sleeve shirt. He wore boots. Wes could hear them clacking on the pavement. His jeans were pulled down too tightly over them for there to be a gun hiding in them. Even if there was one hiding in the boots, he would never get to it in time.
“I’m not armed,” the man announced, turning around and pulling up the back of his shirt with one hand.
This answered a question Wes had been pondering, but it didn’t make him any less worried about the man in the cowboy boots and his friends.
“That is fine, but we aren’t lowering ours,” Antonio said, taking aim at the people at the car, particularly the man with the two presumable hostages.
“That is no way to greet fellow survivors,” the leader said.
“It is if you have seen what we have,” Antonio replied.
They hadn’t really seen anything, but this man wouldn’t know that. Their life had been pretty uneventful until now, but they had heard Eve’s story and seen plenty of non-sickness type deaths while doing what they do to know what kind of people were left in the world.
Things sort of happened all at once after Antonio’s statement. The man walking toward them hit the ground just in time for the man in the Camaro to lift himself and his weapon up on to the back of his seat. He immediatel
y fired, blowing out a side window on the Explorer. The three men jerked away from the shot and the exploding glass, but still managed to keep themselves together enough to start firing on their own.
Wes put a bullet into the arm of the leader while he lay on the ground. Antonio got a shot into the gunman, hitting him in the center of his torso and slinging him into the back seat of his car. The two hostages screamed and clung to each other. Loui’s first bullet scraped the arm of a girl standing on the left hand side of the car. After the first initial shots, the three people who stood around the Camaro ran back toward their car. A bullet took out the windshield of the Mustang. Another took off the heal of the leader’s boot as he tried to run to the Camaro. This changed his direction and he dove into the Mustang as it began speeding backwards away from them. Two more bullets managed to take out the right driver’s side mirror and left headlight as they swung the car around and sped away.
“Antonio, get the Explorer running. Loui you come with me,” Wes commanded as he took off toward the Camaro and the two screaming women.
By the time Wes had the passenger side door open and was motioning for the women to get out, Antonio had the SUV pulled up beside them. The two women looked at them with shock and distrust.
“I don’t know what you have been through, but unless you want to wait around for them to get back, I suggest you get in so we can get the hell out of here.” He eyed the highway in the direction the group had gone, but he couldn’t see them.
The two hesitated for another second, then scrambled out of the car as the man who lay in the passenger seat next to them started to cough, spewing blood from his mouth.
The two women held each other tight in the back seat of the Explorer as the three men scrunched themselves into the front, Loui practically sitting in Wes’ lap. It would have been a funny sight if they all hadn’t been terrified.
Once they were at the airport, they didn’t bother to load any of the items they had gathered, and Loui loudly thanked God that they had filled the tank when they arrived. As far as they could tell, the rebel gang hadn’t followed them, but they all felt the urgency to leave so badly that every other thought aside from flying the hell out of dodge was forgotten.
Eve had heard the strain in Wes’ voice when he radioed in, so she and Vera drove out to the airport to meet them. Both women had to refrain from running directly into the arms of their significant others as they saw their looks as they departed the plane. Neither one cared to notice that there were two extra passengers on the plane.
Wes pulled Eve into his arms, burying his face in her neck and with a trembling voice told her he loved her for the first time. Eve nearly collapsed in his arms at the sound of those three little words.
That night, Eve, after hearing what had happened, called together their first town meeting. After dinner, she opened the floor up for Wes, Antonio, and Loui. They told the group that they had discovered a small band of what Wes labeled rebels, consisting of three men and two women.
“They are animalistic, but still armed and dangerous. From what Claire has told me, they are city hopping, using what they can and destroying what is left,” Wes said, nodding his head in the direction of one of the women.
The three men took turns telling the group what they had seen and what Claire and Amanda had told them. Then Antonio and Wes put out an idea they had come up with that might secure their safety.
“Are you sure about this? I feel like we might be overreacting to such a small threat,” William said, unsure if this was a good idea.
“You didn’t see them. Ask Claire just how dangerous they were. Ask her about her traveling companions. Better yet, ask Amanda how they killed Stuart, her husband. They gutted him right in front of them.” Antonio looked over at Amanda apologetically, but she was too busy crying into Claire’s shoulder to notice.
“I know. But you said there were five of them, one you are sure you have seriously injured. They are four states away, and they don’t even know where we are,” Lydia pointed out.
“That all might be true, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t others like them out there in the world, others that could come upon us at any point,” Loui offered.
Eve sat back and listened to the exchange between Wes, Will, and the others while watching the reactions of everyone else. Wes and Will were sitting across from each with Lydia at the end of the table between them, dutifully writing down as much of the conversation as she could on other side at the opposite end of the table from where Eve sat. Coming down the line on Wes’ side was Loui, Vera, and Wendy, and coming down the other side from Will was Antonio, Claire, and Amanda, their two new additions.
Eve’s mind kept flashing back to the day Brent Cast had come into her life. Images of things that could have happened if she hadn’t killed him flashed through her head. Fear began to rise in her. She looked over at Vera who was staring hard at the grain on the wood table and gripping Loui’s left hand while his right arm was around her shoulders securing her to him, all the while nodding in agreement with what Wes had suggested. Lydia looked scared, and Claire and Amanda were weeping softly.
“Enough,” Eve nearly shouted to stop the arguing. The entire room silenced. “Will, I understand that you aren’t worried...”
“It isn’t that I’m not worried...”
Eve put her hand up to silence him. He shut his mouth, immediately recognizing her unspoken authority.
“I understand that you aren’t as worried as you should be, as worried as some of us are. That is only because the first people you saw after the sickness were Vera and I.
“Most of you already know that the summer after the sickness I was visited by a man who had gone insane from the lack of human contact. This man would have killed me or, at the very least, raped me if I hadn’t killed him.”
Vera instinctively reached out a hand toward her in a need to comfort her. Wes’s body also jerked out of his seat a little, his instincts telling him to go to her, but he held himself down because he knew that she didn’t need him doing that at the moment.
“Now, I’m not comparing my situation to Claire and Amanda’s. I got off lucky. Maybe it was because I had the home court advantage or maybe he was just a little crazier than the people you ran into, a little less organized. We have to resign ourselves to the fact that we aren’t all always going to get off so lucky.”
Getting up from the table, Eve went to the dining room window, pulled back the curtains, and stared out into the backyards of the homes around them.
“People used to build fences around their properties to mark their land, keep their children and pets close to home, and to keep others out. Before the sickness, the backyard of this house had a wooden privacy fence and the front had a chain link. After the sickness, I put the wooden one up around the front yard. It acted as a security blanket. It is nearly six-feet tall so anytime I was out there before you all showed up I was shielded from the horrors that lay beyond it. I know that it will be impossible to seal up the entire city the way I have sealed up this house, the way Wes is suggesting, but we should seal off as much as we can. We can barricade all the main entrances and post detour signs, bringing all travelers to a secure location controlled by us. We can start out small and spread out as the need arises.
“Claire, you told Wes that there were other survivors, another community like ours?” Eve asked, turning her attention to the other woman.
“Yes,” the woman said in a small voice.
“How do you know?”
“We came across a radio transmission in New Mexico. The voice said there were about ten survivors living in Nebraska.”
“They didn’t give a city name?”
“Not that I’m aware of. That is where we were headed, though, when...”
“That is fine you don’t have to talk about that part of it. Since this is a town meeting, and all decisions will affect everyone, this is what I propose. First, I propose we begin barricading ourselves in. Second, I say that we go a
nd check out these other survivors. If they are sane, I say we invite them to come here. If they don’t want to come that is fine. If anyone here wants to leave that is also fine, as long as the others will take you.”
The meeting lasted another twenty minutes. Both motions where voted in-favor-of almost unanimously, and no one, not even the newcomers asked to go and live with the others. They also agreed that Eve should go with the flight crew to Nebraska, considering she was their unofficial leader.
-----
The visit to Nebraska was quick, lasting only three days. Eve had had no desire to spend too many days away from Caleb or her home. She knew that things wouldn’t fall apart in her absence, but that didn’t stop her from worrying about them. This was the first time she had ever been to the state of Nebraska, not to mention the small town of Ashby.
They found out that these people were in Ashby shortly after they entered the state. Antonio had been steadily scanning the stations and within an hour of entering the state, they picked up the transmission that gave them the group’s exact location. It was also the first time she had ever been on an airplane. The first time she had truly acted as the leader and ambassador of her town.
The group didn’t greet them with full acceptance, but they didn’t complain about their treatment. They would have done similar things to the Nebraskan group if they had come to Richardson. Their leader or leaders were a couple in their forties, Amber and Chandler. Amber had lived in the small farmhouse they took them to. Her husband had lived one town over. They found each other about a year after the sickness. There were thirteen people in their village.
Once the couple had decided that Eve and her people weren’t there to destroy them, the two groups sat down and shared stories. Eve found out that there were at least two more survivor groups. One in upper Maine and one somewhere on the coast of Oregon. She had learned that the one in Maine was large, over a hundred people, and they didn’t want to get any bigger. They were sending any survivors they found to Nebraska or Oregon.
Alone Page 24
