Jessica was more important than the vehicle. And not just as a human being. But for her practical value as a member of the group. Rob knew very well that his own odds at survival were far stronger if Jessica was alive and well.
Rob was pretty sure he’d seen a house on the roadside a couple miles back. He’d just sped by it at the time and hadn’t given it a good look. But there was a good chance, he supposed, that someone local was still there.
He got the Subaru turned around and went speeding on down the road, headed towards that house.
It was a simple home, just one story, with a perched roof that covered a small attic. The yard in front was just dirt. There were a couple odds and ends scattered about, like old tires and rusty bicycles.
There wasn’t a car in the driveway, so Rob parked the Subaru there, making sure to lock the doors and pocket the keys.
Maybe no one was there. Maybe whoever lived there had left. Maybe they’d fled, thinking that other areas of the country would offer them solace. Or maybe they were already dead. Or stuck at work, never to return home again.
There were a thousand possibilities.
Rob felt strange, hoping that someone was actually at home. Normally, it would have been better to stay clear of anyone. People meant danger. People could mean death.
As Rob approached the house, he spotted something in the backyard.
If he wasn’t mistaken, it was a pickup truck hidden under a tarp. Someone had piled up leaves and sticks, trying to hide the shape of the vehicle. But from where Rob stood, it was unmistakable.
Rob gulped down the rising panic.
But this was what he wanted, wasn’t it? He needed to talk to someone.
As he approached the front door, Rob reached for his gun.
16
Jim
Somehow, Jim had reached the shore.
He lay there, gasping for air, breathing heavily, flat on his back.
He was freezing cold. His body was shivering almost uncontrollably. The water had been colder than he’d realized.
But there wasn’t any time to rest. He couldn’t let that fake cop get away.
Jim stood up, his wet pants clinging to him heavily.
Again, his hand reflexively went to the Ruger that wasn’t there.
He scanned his surroundings.
It was mostly just trees. A couple scrubby bushes here and there. A patch of sand. Some kind of beach. A couple of pieces of permanently installed exercise equipment. Pull-up bars and parallel bars.
A house stood about a hundred yards away. A regular, nondescript sort of house. Two stories.
No sign of Andy or the boat. Or the stolen gear.
It was hard to think quickly and clearly with his body exhausted, pushed to the very edge. But he concentrated on his breathing, which steadied his thoughts, and gave him some kind of stability.
Andy couldn’t be that far. Right now, he’d be trying to find a vehicle with which to abscond with the gear. He had to continue on land now, where the boat was of no use to him. He must be somewhere close by, near the shore.
The house. That was the answer.
There didn’t appear to be anyone home. Of course, it wasn’t as if he could go by whether lights were on or not.
But there were subtle signs that his eyes picked up. There wasn’t a car in the driveway. That was an obvious sign.
But there was something else, something about how the flag near the front door had gotten wrapped around the pole in the wind. No one had been there to untangle it.
Or maybe they’d been scared to.
Maybe there was someone holed up in the basement, clutching a shotgun or a butcher knife, shaking with fear.
It was a chance Jim had to take.
He made his way to the front door, his sopping wet clothes hanging heavily on his frame.
He tried the door handle before knocking. Unsurprisingly, it was unlocked.
That almost certainly meant there was no one home.
The door creaked open and Jim stepped across the threshold into the darkened downstairs. The curtains had been drawn and not much light entered.
Normally, he would have liked to take stock of the situation. He would have liked to understand his surroundings, to check to make sure there really wasn’t anyone there, and to check for anything useful that he could use.
But there wasn’t any time for that.
Jim’s body was exhausted, but the possibility of spotting Andy was giving him new energy. He bounded up the stairs, two at a time.
There was a small bedroom that faced the lake. Jim entered, stepping over the things that had been scattered across the floor, as if someone had been packing in haste and abandoned the project at the last minute.
At the window, Jim threw back the curtains.
Outside, the sky was gray. He could see the lake, which seemed to stretch endlessly out and into nothing. He couldn’t believe that he’d swum across it.
No sign of Andy.
Not yet, anyway.
Jim was patient.
He knew that it was normal for the human brain to miss seeing objects that were right there. He’d chatted with a former air force fighter pilot once. He’d just been some nondescript guy who’d wandered into Jim’s shop, and they’d happened to get to chatting. It turned out the guy had been a really good pilot, and he said the trick to it all was in the eyes.
Jim hadn’t known what he’d meant at first, and had asked him more about it.
The eyes, the guy had explained, move seemingly on their own. When there are blind spots, like the pillars in a car that border the windshield, your eyes skip right over them. And in doing so, they tend to miss things near the blind spots.
So, the answer, according to the former pilot, was to force yourself to focus your eyes on three distinct spots that span across the field of vision.
Jim had tried it out in his car, driving around Rochester. He’d found it fine at first, but as he’d kept practicing, he realized that he was noticing things that he would have otherwise missed. And then one day, it saved him getting plowed into by an enormous SUV that was coming towards him in his blind spot.
Jim did the trick now, focusing on three points outside the window.
And then he saw it.
It was the boat, tucked neatly away amid some shrubs.
It was about a half mile to the east.
If the boat was there, Andy would be nearby.
There was no time to waste.
It was unlikely that Andy’d managed to find a working vehicle in such a short amount of time. But there were plenty of other means by which he could escape. All he needed to find was a bicycle, and he could be off Jim’s radar in no time.
Jim raced back down the stairs, threw the door open, and took off at a run towards the east, where he’d seen the boat.
It wasn’t until he was halfway there, that the rush of adrenaline started to die off, leaving him with muscles so exhausted that they felt like nothing but dead weight.
He didn’t think he could keep going.
He slowed to a jog.
And then a walk.
And now he was barely making headway. Each step he took seemed impossibly difficult, impossibly painful. The lake had taken almost everything out of him already. He wasn’t sure how much he had left to give.
When he found Andy, how would he have the strength to fight?
There was no time to rest.
And that’s when he remembered, reaching for his Ruger, that he’d lost it.
His mind must have been scrambled from the fatigue. He should have searched the house for a weapon. For a knife. For a baseball bat. For anything at all.
Now he was empty-handed.
He’d reached the boat, his thoughts distracting himself from the painfully exhausting walk.
Nearby, the water lapped gently against the shore. The sky was gray, and the nervous chatter of small birds was nearby.
Jim looked towards the woods, and he saw Andy, dragg
ing some kind of improvised sled, piled high with Jim’s own gear and supplies.
Jim reached again for the Ruger that wasn’t there, and his heart started pounding in his chest. It didn’t feel good, and it didn’t feel right. The beat felt fast and slow at the same time. It felt heavy, and it made him feel sick. It felt like his blood was cool.
He’d have to think of something. His eyes scanned the area for some kind of weapon. They settled on the boat’s paddle. It was big and heavy. Maybe too unwieldy to swing easily. But it would do serious damage if it smacked into a skull. Andy hadn’t swung it hard enough, but Jim knew that he could.
Off in the distance, Andy seemed to be struggling with getting the gear over something in the ground. Maybe some rocks. Maybe some jagged pieces of concrete that had been left there. Jim’s vision seemed worse than normal, and he couldn’t make it out.
Jim kept his eyes on Andy as he reached for the paddle.
Just as his hand wrapped around the wood of the paddle, Andy turned around and saw him. Andy’s eyebrows shot up and a look of fear took over his face.
A scared enemy was a dangerous enemy.
Andy’s hand went right for his gun. He was fumbling. And he clearly wasn’t a good shot. But it didn’t matter.
All that mattered was that he had a gun and Jim didn’t.
17
Rob
Rob knocked on the door. It felt strange to do so. It felt like he was being overly polite. After all, the world as they all had known it was over. Wasn’t knocking a little antiquated at this point?
Or maybe not.
After all, he didn’t want to get shot.
Maybe going in with his hand on his gun wasn’t the best move. Sure, he had to be careful. But drawing first could lead to problems. Serious problems.
He had to really force his hand to relax its grip on his gun. It wasn’t an easy thing for him to do.
“Someone?” Rob heard, called loudly, from deep inside the house.
And then silence.
Rob knocked again.
Someone was moving inside the house, unseen behind the thick door.
“I mean no harm!” shouted Rob, as loudly as he could. “I’m looking for my friend. I just need some information.”
A long silence.
Rob knocked again. He wasn’t going to give up so easily.
He figured that if he hadn’t been shot yet, chances were they weren’t going to shoot him. If he’d stumbled on the wrong house with the wrong inhabitants, they could have easily aimed down at him from an upstairs window with a shotgun.
“I’m just looking for my friend! Just tell me through the window. Will you just come to the window?”
Rob was feeling now like he wasn’t going to give up.
Rob banged on the door, and he didn’t stop. He just kept going.
Five minutes passed, and he kept banging.
Finally, the door opened.
It happened all of a sudden, and his hand went right through the open doorway, colliding with something.
“Shit,” muttered someone.
“Did I hit you?”
Rob felt his hand inching towards his gun.
Starting off by hitting the homeowner wasn’t exactly good. It wasn’t the first impression that Rob had hoped to make.
“Are you OK? Did I get you bad?”
He still couldn’t see who he’d accidentally hit.
“I’m fine, damnit. Get inside. I don’t like to keep the door open.”
It seemed strange, after so much trouble, to suddenly be allowed access to the home. Especially considering that they didn’t even ask him who he was, or whether or not he was armed.
There wasn’t much light near the door, and Rob stepped across the threshold, his eyes not yet adjusted to the new levels of light.
“Does it hurt?” said Rob.
“I’ve had worse. Don’t build yourself up too much, you’re not that strong. Hell, I could knock you down with a single punch if I had to. I doubt you could say the same.”
It was a man’s voice in the darkness. An old voice. But how old, Rob didn’t know.
Rob didn’t know what to make of the words. Were they meant as threats? As jokes? All bets were off in this new world. Anything could happen.
“Take a seat. Don’t wear out your shoes. You’re probably going to need them at some point. Now what’s this all about? Wait, just know that we’re not going to feed you. You’re on your own with that, young man.”
Rob was more and more starting to feel like he was speaking to a man who had to be at least in his eighties.
The man was talking almost nonstop, not giving Rob a chance to speak.
“Well, what are you waiting for? There’s a couch right behind you. Don’t tell me you’re going to try to rob us. Because if that’s the case, you’d better just walk out the door now. Lonnie’s got a 12-gauge trained on you from the other room. Isn’t that right, Lonnie?”
A woman’s voice answered from the other room. “That’s about right, Danny.”
Rob didn’t want to seem like a threat, so he backed up, still not able to see anything, until the backs of his legs bumped into the cushioned couch.
He fell back onto it and was surprised to find that it was an unusually comfortable couch. His body instantly felt more relaxed. The furnishings of the lake house had, of course, been the last thing on his mind. But suddenly he realized that they were far from the best available.
“Now there’s a candle around here somewhere. I can’t see anything. Lonnie, where’d you put those candles?”
“They’re where you left them.”
“You had them last.”
“I saw you with them earlier today.”
“That was yesterday. Don’t start losing your mind on me, Danny.”
There was a bunch of noise, papers being moved about, drawers being opened. Finally, the noise of a match being struck and then the glow of a candle that illuminated the old man’s face.
Rob had been right. Well, probably. Danny looked like he was in his late eighties. And in pretty good shape. His shoulders were square, and he stood tall. He looked like the sort of man who had spent at least a few decades doing some serious manual labor.
Rob watched as Danny settled himself into a rocking chair, holding the candle in front of him, which flickered in the drafty house.
Rob could see a little over the surrounding room, and more as his eyes adjusted. It reminded him of his grandparents’ house, and other older relatives. There were framed photographs, cute little saucers and plates everywhere, and a piano that looked like it was used regularly.
“So what’s this all about?” said Danny.
“Well,” said Rob, starting to speak.
“Wouldn’t you like some tea?” interrupted Lonnie, from the other room.
It seemed strange to be offered tea by a woman who was supposed to be pointing a shotgun at him. But Rob was getting used to strange things and strange circumstances.
“Come on, kid, have a cup of tea.”
“Uh, all right, sure, I guess,” muttered Rob.
“I’ll get the water boiling,” came Lonnie’s voice.
Rob heard her leaving the room, presumably to enter the kitchen. He didn’t hear her putting down a shotgun. He figured that it’d be pretty difficult to start making tea with a shotgun in hand, so he figured that there really was no shotgun. Not that he was going to say anything. If they didn’t have a gun, that was fine with him. It was smart, actually, to pretend to have one.
But it did give Rob an idea.
“You want me to hand over my gun?” said Rob. “That way you know for sure there’s nothing to worry about.”
Danny nodded stiffly at him. “That’d be fine,” he said. There was something in his voice that made Rob think that Danny had wished that he’d come up with that idea himself. But obviously Danny and Lonnie were just regular people, people who in their past life hadn’t had to deal with threats of violence or the threat o
f home intruders. They were making do the best they could now.
They seemed like nice, ordinary people. Rob hoped they’d be able to hold out. But he didn’t think it was realistic. After all, the hordes would be coming, looking for the lowest-hanging fruit.
Rob was acutely aware that he was in a hurry. In a way, he felt like when he’d visited some elderly relatives before the EMP. He’d always been a hurry to head off to the bar, or to meet up with some friends, feeling like he was trapped there in the stuffy rooms that were decorated in styles that dated back decades.
But he also knew that he needed to gain more of Danny and Lonnie’s trust before they’d tell him what he needed to know.
He tried to bottle the anxiety deep down, stuffing it away somewhere, knowing that he needed to be patient.
“So, you’ve been doing OK since the EMP?” Rob ventured to say.
“We’re fine here,” said Danny. “We’ve got everything we need. But now don’t you get any ideas.” He took Rob’s gun, which he offered to him with the safety on, handle first, and placed it on a small table near him, muzzle pointing at the wall.
“Like I said before,” said Rob. “I’m just looking for my friend. You see, we’re over by the lake.”
“The lake? Which one? There are lakes all over the place.”
“Uh...” said Rob, completely blanking on the name of the lake. He felt like he was back at one of those horrible job interviews where he couldn’t answer the easy questions about former employers and his checkered history of parole violations and DUIs.
Fortunately, Danny just went on talking, not waiting for an answer. “We used to vacation by a lake up in Michigan every year. It got to be too much, you know how it is, I’d imagine. Getting all the gear ready, making sure the car’s in good working order. Not to mention getting the time off work. I used to work in the mill around here. Not that you’d know much about it. You never hear a word about it these days. Closed down a few years back. Worked my way up to foreman...”
“There you go, going on and on, dear,” interrupted Lonnie, appearing in the room for the first time. She might have been several years younger than Danny. There was something about her face and hairstyle that reminded Rob of a great aunt of his that had died a few years back.
Surviving: The Complete Series [Books 1-3] Page 25
