Dead Last (Vol. 1): Dead Last

by Quaranta, Marc

  I slammed on the brakes and turned the wheel. Kurt shot across the back of the van and slammed into the side. I heard him say son of a bitch in a deep pain filled voice.

  "Hang on there, pal," I said to him.

  Once the gear was back into drive, I threw my foot on the gas and took off down the street. I looked back in the mirror and saw the people chasing us. The van easily got away from them and I couldn't see the people in the mirror anymore. I never got to make out what they looked like.

  "Jesus Christ. They came out of nowhere!" I said with adrenaline running through my veins.

  "Just like a fucking straggler, man."

  Besides the purr of the engine, the rest of the van was filled with our heavy breathing. It was amazing that I had grown to know my way around. The few times I had been out, I was able to memorize specific routes. To the gas station. The grocery store. Now the hospital. I was never going to forget this route and now that we were out of that situation, I had to worry about coming up on Cam's dead body lying on the side of the street.

  I looked back and Kurt was still holding onto his elbow. He had his left arm across his body and his right hand was clenched against his elbow. Squeezing it. Trying to stop the pain shooting through his arm.

  "You alright?" I asked him.

  I didn't like the guy, but respected him. As much as we disagreed, we were stuck together. We were like a buddy-buddy cop film when two guys with completely different personalities are paired up to be partners by their captain. They don't like it, but they have to do it and they save the day at the end of the movie. Except, our captain wasn't a captain. Our captain that forced us to work together was the outbreak that stranded us inside the TV station.

  "I'm fine."

  "Have Emily look at it when we get back."

  "I'm fine," he repeated.

  "Sorry. You swung first."

  "You deserved it."

  "So, did you."

  I looked into the mirror and our eyes locked onto each other. It wasn't in anger or the first sign that we were about to start another brawl in the back of the van, but in respect. He looked at me with respect. And I looked at him with respect. We were both sticking to our guns and were not backing down for anything. I liked him very little of the time, hated him most of the time, but grew to always respect Kurt Elkins.

  LII

  Kurt Elkins

  I looked away from Jack Scoville with a lot more respect than I had before. I'd now thrown the first punch twice. Once when he tried to shoot Pete in the Prep Room and now once in front of the van. I didn't like the guy most of the time, but I knew that I would always get a strong opinion from him. Like it or not, I knew I needed to hear what he had to say. He wasn't a shoot-first kind of cowboy, he was just strong willed. He needed to be taken seriously, and as much as I wished it were going to be Haylea, I found my second-in-command with Jack.

  I said I was fine, but the pain was shooting through my elbow and into my neck. I don't know what that meant. I was praying that I didn't tear any ligaments or was going to need a surgery, because surgery really wasn't an option anymore. I was praying, but I don't know if there was anyone up there anymore to hear my prayers.

  Although it really did hurt, I used my elbow as a reason to stay quiet in the backseat of the van. I wanted to watch Jack. I wanted to make sure that he wasn't hiding something. I knew, after our little fight in the street, that I wasn't going to be able to get the information out of him by simply asking him or by beating it out of him. I would never say it out loud, but Jack whooped my ass in that fight. It would take a hell of an effort on my part to beat anything out of him.

  A deer? There were no deer running around. Indiana did have its fair share of deer running across streets so it was likely that it could have been a deer...five months ago. But not now. Not after the airborne outbreak. I hadn't seen one animal walking around the streets anymore. They were all dead. The animal population was wiped out just like ours was. I knew, one hundred percent, there was no way in hell that the van Jack was driving hit a deer.

  I turned my body so that I could look out the front window and see where we were headed. Just like I wanted, Jack was driving on the right route back to the hospital. I wanted to be in the perfect position to see his face. If I kept my head moving, it would look like I was keeping my eye out for Cam from Jack and Frank's perspective, but I wasn't. I was only focusing my eyes on one spot: the mirror. I was in the perfect position to see Jack's eyes. I wanted to see the moment he gave it away. He was going to make a mistake. He was hiding something on this road and his eyes would give away his secret.

  I watched him closely. He wasn't moving his eyes much, though. He was keeping them straight ahead watching the road that we were driving on. It was strange, though. There wasn't anything to watch for. He was driving like he was in heavy traffic. Like he had to keep an eye on the brake lights in front of him so he didn't rear end anyone. He wasn't watching the road like we were the only ones on it for a thousand miles.

  As we continued down the road, he didn't show any signs of hiding a secret. I watched his eyes without blinking and made a mental note of every time he did. Then it hit me. He realized I was watching his eyes. He realized that I was waiting for him to glance to the side or to completely ignore a side of the street, but I was the one doing the ignoring. I was ignoring all of his other body movements.

  We passed a point in the road on the drive when I did notice something. I never asked him about it and never brought it up. But I would go on to spend endless nights thinking about that moment. I couldn't prove anything, but at that point in the drive, I saw him hold his breath.

  He took a deep breath in, held it in, and when we drove passed that spot, he let it out.

  It wasn't just a regular breath. It was a long exhale. A long sigh of relief. He was relieved about something, but I just couldn't figure it out. I couldn't figure out why he was acting the way he was acting.

  My thoughts were derailed when we pulled up to the hospital. The first time I pulled up, it looked like a ghost town. This time it looked worse. Time was creeping up on us and the sun was beginning to lower in the sky. The building somehow looked more run down than it did before. I couldn't even describe what was so different about the building than the time before, but I had a bad feeling about it all.

  Jack put the car into park and turned off the engine. I think Jack noticed something different, too. Although, he wasn't looking at the building. He was looking at Frank. I leaned forward so that I could see Frank's face. He didn't look confident. He looked scared.

  "What's wrong?" I asked Frank.

  "I didn't see anyone," he said.

  He simply shook his head slightly and then opened the door. He hopped out of the van like his ass was on fire and quickly ran to the front doors.

  "What the hell does that mean?" Jack asked me.

  I shrugged and we both followed Frank to the hospital.

  "Frank, what's going on?" Jack called after him.

  Frank didn't answer and he didn't stop. He was speed walking to the front door of the hospital and pushed through the door. The doors were almost fully closed behind him before Jack and I got to them. We pushed them open and stopped a few feet later behind Frank.

  The sight was pure horror.

  Everyone in the hospital was gone. There wasn't a single person there. Before, the entire front lobby was filled with people. Women, men, children, old people. There were dozens and dozens of people. This was Frank's home. Just like ours was WTIX, Frank and his people set up shop at the hospital and were making it their camp.

  There wasn't a person from Frank's camp in sight. Frank looked destroyed. He dropped to his knees and put his hands to his mouth. I went to put my hand on his shoulder but pulled it back when I realized that it wasn't going to do any good.

  Jack started walking around the hospital. All of us had the same expressions. Our eyes were wide and our mouths hung low. We all moved so slowly like we didn't want to make a
sound...we didn't want to make a sound.

  "What the hell happened here?" I asked quietly.

  "They're gone," Frank responded.

  "They wouldn't just up and leave, Frank. Not without telling you."

  "They didn't leave. They're dead."

  I turned and looked at Frank and he didn't have an ounce of hope in his eyes. He looked around the room one more time and that got me looking. Everyone was gone, but they had left everything behind.

  We checked the refrigerators and they were stocked. The cabinets still had all the bread and dried food. All of the beds were still made in the waiting room. Clothes were still folded up in the southern section of the waiting room. There just wasn't a single person around, but one thing was clear. They didn't pack up and leave the hospital. Someone forced them out.

  How could they be dead? There would be bodies everywhere. This couldn't have been an ambush. Unless the killers decided to clean and sanitize the whole building, but that seemed a little ridiculous.

  "They could still be alive," I said to Frank, but when I turned to him he was already gone.

  I ran after him and found him outside leaning on the van.

  "What's going on, Frank? Who did this?"

  He didn't answer me. I walked around until I could see his face and it was bright red like he had been holding his breath. He leaned his head up against the van and pressed the cold medal against his face.

  "Frank?"

  "Remember I told you not to go on the third floor. That there were stragglers up there?"

  "Yea..."

  "They got out. We had them locked up there, but they got out."

  "Your people could still be alive, Frank. We can go find them."

  "If they were alive, they would have come to the station to warn us. They're dead. They're all dead. That is why we saw those stragglers on the road. The ones that came after us. Those were the stragglers we had locked up. And...and now they're out there."

  "I'm sorry, Frank. Maybe some of them made it out."

  "Yea, maybe."

  "So, what do we do now?" I asked him. I wasn't sure what to do now. I didn't want to seem inconsiderate, but we needed to leave right away. If there were guys that were on the loose killing people, we needed to be as far away from them as possible.

  "We leave. We go back to the station, I get Reggie, and I get as far away from this place as possible. Maybe there is a big group of survivors somewhere?"

  "Where?"

  "I don't know. Maybe Chicago or something."

  "I'll take you to Chicago," I heard Jack said.

  "You guys can't be serious. We have a good thing going at the station. Frank, you are more than welcome to stay with us."

  "For how long?" Frank asked.

  "As long as you want to. You're a member of our group now. You and Reggie."

  "And how long is that going to last, Kurt? This was a bigger group than ours," Jack pointed to the hospital. "They couldn't survive in a hospital with brick walls. We're supposed to survive in a TV station that is surrounded by glass windows? Come on. We'll pack supplies, Frank, and leave by the end of the week. Sound good?"

  "Sounds great."

  Frank pulled open the side door of the van and hopped in. I closed the door behind him and pulled Jack away from the van so that I could talk to him.

  "What the hell are you doing? You're just going to leave? People at that station need you."

  "Really? Because you've made it seem like nobody needs me. You've got this all under control. We're not running a Democracy, Kurt. You're running a very Communist system here."

  "Jack, you can't leave."

  "I can do whatever the hell I want. And you won't stand in my way unless you want another broken arm."

  I decided it was best not to hit him. He was right. I wouldn't be able to fight him with the pain shooting through my left arm and he probably wouldn't stop the next time. He would break my arm until it was hanging by a thread.

  "By the way," Jack continued, "I went into one of the back rooms of the hospital. The hallway that leads to Pediatrics."

  "So?"

  "I found his group."

  "You what?" I asked excitedly.

  "Relax," he quieted me. "No survivors."

  I looked at the hospital and felt sudden chills flow down my spine. Once we left the hospital, nobody else was going to make camp here. It made me nervous to just turn around and leave so quickly. What if they came after the station? What if they killed all of us? Haylea? Maybe Jack had it right. Maybe we had to get out of the station. Maybe leave with them by the end of the week.

  We got into the van and drove away. We sat in silence as I watched the hospital get smaller and smaller in the mirror.

  "What if they got Cam? What if he was in there?" Frank asked from the back. There was no life left in his words.

  "I'm sure he wasn't in there," Jack responded.

  Again...that put a thought into my head about Jack's secret. I don't know why I was having these thoughts, but now the picture was becoming clearer.

  At that moment, I thought that maybe Jack knew something about where Cameron, Seth, and Pete had disappeared.

  I looked over to him and stared at him. I stared into him trying to see what he was thinking. Trying to see what I was hiding.

  He looked over at me, too, but quickly looked away. He focused his eyes back onto the road.

  LIII

  Jack Scoville May, 10th 2012. 11:49 a.m.

  A couple days had passed since Kurt and I took Frank to the hospital to look for Cam. Looking back on it, it was a pretty dumb decision on my part to go with them. I knew that Cam was dead. I killed Cam, and his friends. We weren't going to find him. Alive, anyways. So, to volunteer to go with them was dumb.

  I did it because I wanted to keep them away from Intech Boulevard. That was the road I pulled the trigger on them. I didn't want them to drive down that road and find three dead bodies. I didn't want them to come back and turn everybody against me or, worse, kill me.

  But looking back on it I was so stupid. First of all, I volunteered to go on a wild goose chase because I wanted to be safe. But going on that chase lead us into nothing but danger. First, Kurt and I had some choice words for each other that lead to a fight outside of the van. Then, a bunch of crazy stragglers showed up and chased us off the street. And finally, when we got to a safe place, in the hospital. Everybody Frank trusted and loved was dead. He said it was the stragglers we saw on the road. They were the ones that were trapped upstairs on the third floor. They were the ones that killed everyone and then came after us. Hopefully, they never overheard any conversations about our group inside WTIX.

  The thing that really makes me feel stupid, though, is that if Frank and Kurt had gone out by themselves, if I'd just let them go search for Cam, and if, by some crazy way, they stumbled upon their dead bodies, there would be no way in hell that they would have suspected me. The night I went out to kill them, nobody saw me leave. Nobody saw me drive away. Nobody saw anything. There wasn't a single tie back to me that I was the one that killed them. It could have been stragglers, it could have been anybody. But it wasn't me.

  I decided that I needed to relax more. I was letting too many things get to me and if I continued to let that happen, I would end up like Kurt. A man with a gorgeous fiancé who only wants to be with him, but he keeps wandering off at the first sight of trouble. He is trying to save everybody, and I decided that I just couldn't go on living like that anymore. I needed to stop.

  So that morning I grabbed Elyse out of her bed. Emily was already in the office treating Sam and Elyse was still cuddled in bed. I walked by, on purpose, hoping that I would accidentally wake her up. It worked. I told her I didn't meant to wake her and that if she wanted to play a couple of rounds of a card game to come meet me in the kitchen area. She said she needed a few minutes to pull herself together. So of course, I told her that she had natural beauty and that she didn't even need a few minutes.

  I don't
know when it happened, but I found myself with a little bit of a crush on Elyse. It was innocent, though. In terms that I never intended to move with those feelings. She was somebody I became very close with. It was a couple of weeks back, the night after Joe died, when the whole group finally took some time to get to know one another. We sat around talking and telling stories and I ended up in a conversation with Elyse that lasted all night.

  She was a good friend. Although most of my time was spent with Kurt trying to keep our world going, my closest friend in the building became Elyse. She was young but understood the world. She knew how to keep her smile going while everybody else was giving up, while she was trying to make the best out of our situation. I enjoyed that. It was just what I needed. She was a big reason for me wanting to relax.

  "It's your turn," she said to me.

  I looked down at the pile of cards on the table between us. For a second, I felt completely lost in the situation. I felt like a kid that was back at home, before video games and computers and cell phones, playing cards with my old man. He was strict most of the time. Always yelling and worrying about working and money, but there were a few nights, that I can remember, where nothing mattered but me. I really enjoyed those nights.

  "Wait, what are we playing?" I asked her.

  "Egyptian Rat Screw. Jack, we've already played four rounds."

  "Oh, I thought we changed games," I said to her with a smile.

  I laid down a Jack of Hearts and then smacked the pile. I'd explain why I smacked the pile, but the game is quite complicated. I took the pile of cards and tried to ignore the look she was giving me.

  "You know that's cheating."

  "To always win?" I teased.

  "No. It's cheating to take time and think about your move. You're supposed to go as fast as you can."

  "Elyse...wow...I didn't expect to see this side of you. Is this...my God it is...sour loser. Wow."

  She playfully smacked me in the shoulder and told me to shut up. I pretended to almost fall over in my chair to give her the impression that she had more strength than she really did. She was a strong girl, but wasn't going to knock me over in my chair.