by Thomas Baker
Over the pop and crackle of the roaring cabin, JT heard a moaning sound. He followed it, immediately thinking once again Harold had somehow escaped. JT traced the sound. It led him away from the cabin and down the road. He tracked the noise for about a hundred feet. Hannah and Tyrone followed. They stopped together. They had found the source; it was coming from the right side of the road, in some underbrush.
"If this ends poorly, you grab Hannah and you get the hell out of here. Do you understand me?" JT turned to Tyrone, grabbing him by his collar and whispering in his ear.
Hannah wanted to protest when she saw JT head into the bushes, but Tyrone silenced her with a finger to his lips.
JT approached, strafing around the spot and going behind a tree. JT leapt out, ready to fight. Instead, he was shocked to find Gus, lying in the grass,badly wounded, holding a ragged hole in his belly. Somehow he had pulled himself out of the house and away from the fire.
"Oh, thank baby Jesus! It's you, kid. I almost became a piece of extra crispy KFC," he tried to joke, his voice weak.
"Guys help me, it's Gus, and he's alive!!" JT shouted, overjoyed. JT and Tyrone carried him out onto the road as gently as they could.
"You tough old son-of-a-bitch," JT cried, kneeling down to examine Gus. "You beautiful bastard."
Hannah knelt down beside JT, crying again. "Oh Gus. I'm so happy we didn't lose you too. You just don't know how much." She took his blood soaked hand in hers and held it close.
"There, there, darlin'. I'm gonna be okay. Where is Dusty? Alan? What happened to the Mad Hatter Harold?"
"Alan's dead, Dusty's dead, Harold's dead. Alan tried to kill Harold, and Dusty finished the job. He earned my respect. He died to save us."
"Good job Sarge, I knew ya had it in ya," Gus said in a raspy voice, then closed his eyes.
"We'll get you fixed up Gus, don't you worry," JT said, blinking at the blurriness.
JT saw Tyrone had tears rolling down his cheeks too. When he noticed JT looking, he turned away, back towards the flames engulfing the cabin.
"Shit man, there goes my iPod, my jersey, my everything. What am I going to do now?"
"Every store is open now, 24/7, every iPod is free, refunds and exchanges always accepted. You can have your pick man," said JT, with a half-assed attempt at a smile. He very much wanted to lighten the mood just then.
"Yeah, I guess you're right," Tyrone accepted. "iTunes though, that's another story."
Even with all they had been through, they were able to laugh a little at that. It felt good, even important, to JT.
Hannah figured she had sent up more silent prayers to God in the last thirty minutes than the rest of her life combined. For the lost souls of Ashley, Dusty, Alan. For Gus not to die. For JT and Tyrone to be okay. For her Mom, who had to be still alive somewhere. She had one more silent prayer at the end, thanking God for sparing her life.
"I feel like we should say something for all of our friends who didn't make it," Hannah said, opening her eyes as she finished. She got no disagreement from the rest, so she went on. She took several attempts to get through their names without breaking down. "Dusty, Alan. Even Mike and Thomas. It-"
Hannah broke down again and cried uncontrollably. What's wrong with me? Why can't I make it through this? JT put an arm around her. She let herself melt into him. She had another silent prayerafter all, thanking God for putting JT in her path. Her cheeks ached and the well inside seemed bottomless. When she felt as if no more tears were inside her to weep, she unwrapped herself from JT.
Hannah continued on. "It was unfair, a tragedy, what happened to you. You were all good people."
She wiped at her eyes. As drained as she felt, she wasn't sure she would be able tofinish the next part. She grabbed JT's arm and put it around her shoulder.
"Ashley, you were my best friend in the entire world. You are for sure in a better place. I...I love you and I will miss you more than you will ever know."
She was done. She stood, looking at the ground, trying to still believe that it really happened. That it was now all over.
"How about we just bow our heads, have a moment of silence? Think about our nicest memories of our friends," JT offered.
Hannah smiled at the thought. Ashley, you deserved much better, but at least we can do this for you. Mom, you too. My life will not be the same without you.
"Damn straight. That's a good idea." said Tyrone through his own tears. "It's only fitting we stay and watch this damn horror house burn to the ground."
"Yeah, like a funeral pyre, for our fallen friends," JT said.
Hannah knelt down to Gus. She took his bloody hands in hers and prayed for his recovery. JT and Tyrone joined her on either side. JT gave her a weak smile, then lowered his head. She did the same.
Tears spent for now, she sat on her knees, listening to the crackling of the fire. Feeling it's warmth on her face. Harold and his cabin would be nothing but ash. That was a happy thought but a poor consolation. Gus's groans broke her out of the trance she must have fallen into.
"So this is what the expression 'like a stuck pig' must feel like," he said. "If I make it through this, I might have to give up bacon. Might."
"Nonsense Gus," Hannah said, brushing his scraggly cheek. Her voice was hoarse now. "You'll get better. Then I'll find a way tomake you a whole plate of bacon."
"Sounds like something worth living for darlin," said Gus. A violent cough then shook his body.
"Come on Tyrone," JT said, standing up. "We have some work to do. We better take care of Mr. Gus."
Hannah knew what that 'work' was. JT would recover Ashley's body, along with the other women, bury them, and burn the boat house. She appreciated him for that more than he would ever know.
"I'll stay here with Gus." What she left out seemed to hang in the air. In case he dies.
JT and Tyrone went off, skirting the inferno.
Hannah laid down in the grass beside Gus still holding one of his hands. She looked up at the countless stars. She wouldn't be sleeping soon. Her body felt tight, worse than any day after any cheerleading practice. She was sure she would have nightmares of Harold if she closed her eyes.
Gus will survive. He has to. I can't take any more loss. Not now.
She didn't know if she'd closed her eyes or what, or for how long. She must have and it must have been for a while. When she sat up, she saw the fire was burning low. She wasn't sure if she had fallen asleep or passed out in shock. If she slept, it had blessedly been Haroldless. Hannah looked over at Gus. In the dimming light, she could see his chest was still rising and falling in fits.
JT and Tyrone emerged from the woods. Both looked grim and pale in the firelight.
"Hannah, we're going."
JT and Tyrone picked Gus up like he was a precious statue made of glass. Hannah dropped the tailgate on the truck and set him in the bed, on a pile of sleeping bags.
"It feels filthy to use something that belonged to Harold," Hannah said.
"We need it. We need to get to help as quickly as we can," JT said.
JT was right, without using it they wouldn't get very far. Without a word Hannah jumped in the back with Gus.
Slowly JT eased it down the dirt road. Surprisingly, Hannah had more tears leftafter all. She watched the blurry sparks of falling embers as they pulled away.
Copyright © 2017 by 6K Press
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DEDICATION
Thanks to my wife for all her help with the Real Life stuff so I could have more time to pursue this writing thing.
Thomas of coursefor pushing me along and bouncing ideas back and forth. Thanks to our editor for all the time and effort. And to a
ll of you, the readers.
Robert
"You gotta hit every gosh darn bump and pothole in the county?" Gus wheezed out from the bed of the truck. Another coughing fit took hold of him. When it was done he moaned and held his side. He grimaced, his face a mask of pain.
They stretched Gus out in the back of the pickup, on a bed of sleeping bags. Hannah was beside him, one hand gripped on the side of the truck, the other holding a washcloth to Gus's head.
"Hey old timer," JT called through the open glass pane. "This isn't exactly a smooth NASCAR track where I'm only making left turns."
They were traveling on some old gravel back road as I-70 had become impassable. This was on the outskirts of Topeka. They had run into an impassable snarl, all the wreckage left from people trying to get away. A couple of turns here and there after the exit they took and now they found themselves off the pavement. Dust flew up behind the truck in an obscuring cloud. JT pushed the truck's speed to the edge of his comfort level. It wouldn't do any of them any good to wipe out or roll the truck in the middle of fucking nowhere.
It had been a few days since they had left Harold's cabin. A pile of charred remains and ash was all that was left of the place. They stayed long enough to pick and prod through the cooling embers to try and find anything salvageable, but everything useful had pretty muchwent up in the fire. Thinking about Harold or his cabin always made JT automatically think about how he found Ashley. Looking like a wax statue, dressed for her wedding to the sicko. JT knew he would never think of wedding dresses the same way again.
Harold's other victims were down there too. JT and Tyrone had dug graves for the bodies in the dirt floor of the cellar under the boathouse. Only then, after cleaning up any trace of what Harold had done, JT burned the boathouse. It was nothing but ashes and the odd blackened wooden beam now. Just like the cabin. All the places where Harold's horrible acts took place were now erased. JT came back to Hannah, who had stayed with the hurt Gus. Thankfully, she didn't ask any questions about what they had found.
Before moving Gus into the truck, they had to do something about him bleeding to death. Not knowing what else to do, JT did something he had only seen in movies. He found a piece of flatish metal, stuck it into the dying fire, and seared Gus's gut and shoulder wounds. They had nothing to numb the pain. Gus ended up passing out after the first few seconds, to everyone's relief.
With Gus temporarily patched up, JT knew staying put would have done them no good. Gus needed more help than an ex college football player turned bouncer, a college cheerleader, and a High School kid could provide. So they took Harold's old, worn down pickup truck, laid Gus in the back, and picked a direction. Harold wouldn't mind if they took it, considering he was dead.
They were left in sad shape when it came to weaponsas well. JT had a shotgun they had found along the way, left in a crashed police car back along the interstate. It sat across Tyrone's lap right now. In the back of the truck with Hannah was a crowbar they found in the bottom of Harold's boathouse of horrors. That was about the extent of their artillery for now. To be fair, that hadn't been the focus of their searches since leaving the cabin.
Their last search was earlier that morning. Before the interstate got bad, they had gotten off on a hunch JT had. When he saw the sign, he thought it would be a town right there off the exit. Instead, they had to follow a two-lane highway for miles before coming to the town itself. The sign proclaimed this was the town of Tonganoxie
JT found one of those small town pharmacies and stopped out front. He and Tyrone checked it out while Hannah stayed with Gus. They left the shotgun with her.
After everything they had gone through at Harold's cabin, Tyrone had become his right-hand man. The experience had replaced his happy-go-lucky attitude by a sullen one ever since leaving the nightmarish cabin behind. It was understandable but sad. The kid who believed it was only a matter of time until someone saved them and everything would go back to normal, seemed gone.
They walked towards the pharmacy slowly. JT wished he had a weapon better than the beat up crowbar he was gripping tightly. It might do them good to look for some guns to while stopped. This was the heartland; he figured every other house here should have a gun. Could they spare the time was the thought he always came back to. If they hit a pack of the undead, Tyrone could run back to the truck in a flash. With his bum right knee, JT knew it would be more fight than flight for him.
The doors to the building were wide open. JT and Tyrone stepped inside, eyes everywhere at once. The place was so small you could see the back wall where you picked up prescriptions easily from the front. There were only four aisles. The place looked pretty ransacked. Boxes and bottles were all over the floor. Other scavengers had stripped the area under the front counter where you usually would find all bare. JT looked at Tyrone and shrugged.
"We're already stopped, might as well still check it out." He had been avoiding the big cities, after his previous experiences, so this would be the best chance they would have for a while.
They stepped over a large, dried red stain on the linoleum floor at the end of an aisle. They didn't come across any dead bodies though. Neither the reallydead variety nor the walking around kind. It was a relief to JT. On the way back to the pharmacy section, Tyrone singed.
"We're on a road to nowhere, come on inside. Taking that ride to nowhere, we'll take that ride. I'm feeling okay this morning and you know, we're on the road to paradise. Here we go, here we go."
Him singing was more like the fun and carefree Tyrone JT first met in what seemed like years ago. The song though, sounded a lot creepier than the upbeat stuff Tyrone usually sang.
"Tyrone, why that song?"
"Places like this usually have Muzak or elevator music playing and I don't know, that was the first song that popped into my head."
It was an answer JT guessed. He looked up and saw the distorted vision of he and Tyrone in one of those round security mirror on the wall. He had kept himself clean shaven but his hair was shoulder length and with his big stocky frame he looked like he was robbing the place. JT tried the door that led behind the counter where all the good stuff was. Surprisingly, it was still locked.
"Let's jump the counter," Tyrone offered. "I bet that's what the other people did."
"My ass ain't fitting through there buddy," JT said, eyeing the small space between the bottom of the counter and the glass coming down. "I'm knocking the door down."
It took three running starts but the lock eventually broke under JT's assault. It looked as if someone had been back here, but the mess wasn't nearly as bad. They split up, rummaging through the bins. He hoped to find some bandages and what JT knew for sure were some painkillers. There were other prescription medications scattered around. They had exotic names like Bystolic, Coreg, and Oleptro. JT had no clue what they did. It wasn't like he could whip out his phones and Google the information to find out. The pharmacist sure wasn't around to help. JT took the drugs anyway.
Back out in the main store, he also found some Neosporin and some hydrogen peroxide. Looking under shelves, he also found two boxes of bandages and one big roll. Maybe this would at least keep any infections away. JT's slim hope was to come across some professional medical help somewhere down the road. Maybe by now there might be something like a Red Cross or FEMA camp set up somewhere. He wanted, no needed, to find it before it was too late for Gus.
They both were filling up plastic bags when the horn of the truck beeped. Tyrone beat him outside. When he got there, he saw a group of ten, meandering down the middle of the road.
"Undead," Tyrone's voice was a whisper.
Since leaving the cabin, JT had seen no signs of any living people or any zombies. Unless they were getting close to a big city. He did occasionally see roaming cats and dogs at the few stops before this one. What were once beloved pets looked to have gone wild, left to fend for themselves. Like the zombies that roamed the streets, they also traveled in packs.
So much for looki
ng for more weapons. Time to get out.
That was fine with JT. He had lost most of the fire he had to go after zombies. Most days, he felt so beaten down; it was a chore to keep motivated and focus on moving ahead. Even if he had a rocket launcher and a flamethrower he still would have made the same decision, to get in the truck and drive on.
"Here they come, let's go."
Sound always attracted the zombies, and Hannah's horn was a beacon in the silence. He got in the truck, leaving the undead behind. If there were any living people left in Tonganoxie, it was their problem. He wasn't going to save them. He was no hero.
Now here they were, driving down dirt roads. Possibilities of real help turning into a fleeting hope. A fool's dream. Yet he didn't wholeheartedly regret his decision to leave the interstate. The day after day, long drive to nowhere was grinding him down. The endless plodding caused the realization to sink in this really was like some kind of doomsday, end of the world shit. He felt like he was driving through that old miniseries The Stand, except instead of a super flu, it was man-eating monsters killing everyone.
I probably think this at least once a day but I can't believe all that has gone down the past few months. Not only did I have to deal with flesh-eating zombies, but the first person who took us in and seemed helpful was a crazed psychopathic killer.
"Maybe I should start driving to Nebraska," JT chuckled to himself.
"What did you say?" Tyrone asked. He looked at JT with glazed over eyes.
Again JT noticed except for a burst here or there, like at the pharmacy, Tyrone was a much quieter person now. After burying Ashley was when he noticed Tyrone withdrawing. He spent more and more time staring silently out the window, or going off by himself when they stopped for the night. JT thought it was probably just the shock of it all. He couldn't blame the kid. Not when dead people are trying to eat you while running from a homicidal maniac who also tried to kill you, after he murdered your new friends.
