Her technique was good. And she got pleasure, despite the circumstances, in knowing that she’d executed the move just the right way.
Her Krav Maga teachers would have been proud. She performed the technique flawlessly.
She felt the kick hit his legs. In just the right spot. It was a good kick, good and hard.
He did just what he was supposed to do. He fell. Heavy. With a grunt of pain as he hit the cement floor.
She was already moving towards him, ready to attack. Her hand was formed into a fist. Since she couldn’t see, she’d strike him anywhere she could. Then, if she found his neck, she’d go for that with both hands. Strangle him to death. It was a quick way to end the situation. Or, if she only had one hand free, she’d punch him hard in the neck. It was a good way to disable him for the moment while she worked on other options.
In the dark, amid the horrible stench from the man, her mind was racing. It was working again. It wasn’t stuck in fear. It was doing what it was supposed to do. And she was taking advantage of her most powerful asset, which was her well-trained, well-educated, sharp-as-a-tack mind.
“You’re going to regret that,” he hissed, his heavy hot disgusting breath reaching her like a furnace blast.
She knew where he was now. She lashed out, her arm whipping around towards the source of his voice, her hips turning expertly in a snapping motion, throwing her weight behind the punch as much as she could from her position.
Her fist collided with his face. Hit a protrusion. Probably his nose. Something warm covered her hand instantly. Blood.
Good. She’d hit his face.
He growled. No words. Just a guttural noise. And not a noise of pain. More like a primal expression of anger.
Maddy had a plan. She wasn’t scared now. She felt once again confident. Once again ready. Once again in control. Once again smart.
She was scrambling, trying to get into a different position, trying to get her body around so that she could attack. Go for the throat. Put this piece of trash out of his misery. She’d relish it. There was no saving someone like this.
She was turning a corner, mentally. She was learning something about herself. She was a badass, basically. She could do just about anything.
She was almost in position, the cold concrete beneath her, when she heard the unmistakable sound of a gun. Metal on metal. A slick sound. Something she’d heard before in the movies. It sounded different in real life, but it was still very much recognizable.
“Now die,” was all the man said, his words barely intelligible, his mouth thick with the blood pouring from his nose.
And those were the last words she heard. The last thing she smelled was the man’s horrible stench. The last thing she felt was the disgusting and dirty rag of a shirt he wore brushing up against her skin.
Maddy never had time to hear the gunshot.
18
Jessica
Jessica knew that the guy was just playing games with her, just trying to get her scared. She may not have known a lot of what there was to know in the world, but at least she knew what she did know. And at least she was streetwise enough to know when someone was messing with her head.
He couldn’t see her in the inky darkness, or else he would have attacked her already. Shot her. Or run at her. Tackled her. Whatever. He would have done something.
If she moved suddenly, he’d probably spot her. The eyes and brain were good at detecting movement.
She’d mentally called his bluff, just remaining still, and apparently it’d been too much for him to take.
Now he was falling into his own trap.
She heard him running, his footsteps heavy.
He was coming towards her, but not directly. She could see his silhouette as he lumbered along. There was something strange about his gait. His arms were shuffling along rapidly at his sides. It seemed as if he should have been running faster than he really was. In reality, he was moving somewhat clumsily, somewhat slowly.
There was something wrong with him. Something strange. She didn’t know what it was. But she just had a gut feeling about it.
It was OK with her, though. It was better to have an enemy that wasn’t all there, rather than one that was really with it.
“There’s no chance now!” he yelled out. At first glance, he wanted to make himself more of a target than he already was, not satisfied with the noises he was making by crashing through the quiet night.
If he kept running the way he was going, he’d pass her by, with over fifteen feet of distance between them. He was headed off at an angle away from her.
She could let him just keep running. Off into the night. Maybe she’d never see him again.
Or maybe he’d boomerang back around.
She couldn’t risk it.
She had her gun out in front of her. Steady hands. She wasn’t scared. Not any longer. Her belly and legs were pressed into the cold ground. A good position. Stable.
Her one eye wasn’t working. But that didn’t matter. She only really needed one. She knew how to adjust her aim.
She lined up the shot. Easy. He was moving at a steady pace. More or less.
She squeezed the trigger. The gun kicked. The man fell heavily to the ground.
Her ears rang with the gunshot. Nothing else happened. Nothing moved.
She knew that if she could have heard it, the world was nothing but silent.
She lay there for a full five minutes before getting up. She wanted to make sure that she was alone.
Jessica approached the corpse slowly, keeping her gun trained on it, and keeping her one functioning eye moving constantly, making sure to track it back to the corpse.
There wasn’t much chance that he wasn’t dead, but it didn’t hurt to check. She knelt down, grabbed the man’s arm, and pressed her index and ring finger forcibly against the corpse’s wrist. She pressed hard because if there was a pulse, it was still possible to miss it. She knew that people sometimes forget that it’s hard enough to find their own pulse, let alone an injured person who appears dead, lying on the ground.
But there wasn’t a pulse. He was dead.
She grabbed his gun, checked it. She didn’t recognize the brand name. Appeared to be some kind of off-brand. She couldn’t see it that clearly in the light, but the gun felt cheap in her hand. Things that should have been smooth had a rough feel to them, and things that should have been a little rougher, like the grip on the handle, felt slick enough to slip right out of her hand.
The cheapness of the gun surprised her. She’d thought that most of those outlaw biker guys knew their guns. She’d seen plenty of them at the range back in Rochester. Well, maybe this guy knew his guns but was too cheap to buy the real deal. Or maybe this was just some gun he’d found somewhere else, or taken off a dead guy. These were crazy times, after all, and the man may very well have been without his own gun.
Why was she bothering to think about this at all?
Probably because minds wandered when they were fatigued. Well, some of them did. Others shut down completely.
In the man’s pockets, there were a couple clips of spare ammunition. Jessica pocketed these.
There were some little baggies of white powder, and a couple of empty vials. Some kind of illicit narcotic. Jessica tossed these to the ground and left them there. She didn’t want to have anything to do with that stuff. It hadn’t done this dead guy much good, anyway.
There was all manner of junk in the pockets. Little reminders of the world that the EMP had destroyed. There were big balls of dryer lint. It’s not like there were going to be any working mechanical dryers ever again, not that they’d had an opportunity to wash their clothes since the EMP. There were stubs to porno movies. Were there even porno theaters anymore? She thought they’d died out with disco. Maybe in some of the big cities. There were gum wrappers and plenty of orange plastic prescription pill bottle vials. Some of them had a couple pill fragments left in them. Jessica tossed these on the ground as well.
Finally, after sorting through the junk, she found something useful. It was a big stick of beef jerky. Nice and thick, almost an inch in diameter. She’d never seen one like this before. It didn’t even have a brand name on it. Maybe it was one of those homemade kinds, that you might find on the roadside in a very rural area. The plastic wrapper had been peeled back and a couple big bites had already been taken out of the jerky. Normally, she wouldn’t have wanted to share germs with a creep like this dead guy, but under the circumstances, she didn’t care at all. She didn’t even think it over. She just bit into it. A couple huge bites. She couldn’t help herself. She quickly pocketed the rest of it, knowing that if she didn’t, she’d eat the whole thing, get sick, and possibly vomit it all back up, wasting all the calories that she desperately needed.
Within just a few minutes of taking a couple bites, Jessica felt warmth starting to creep back into parts of her body that had been so cold for so long she’d almost forgotten that they could be warm. Her toes start to heat up, and the tips of her fingers became more nimble and warm. It was the chronically high adrenaline starting to ease up just a little, her metabolism finally having some fuel to burn.
The rest of the dead man’s pocket contents were mostly things like keys, a wallet, credit cards, plenty of cash, a couple cell phones, a pair of headphones, a flask of what smelled like cheap whiskey, and plenty of other odds and ends. She took the cash and the flask, stood up, and realized that she needed a plan.
A plan was the tough part.
Well, not really.
She knew what she needed to do. Find Jim and the others.
The only hard part was figuring out how to do it.
Well, it wasn’t really that bad, if she took a mental step back from the situation and carefully thought about it.
Her eye was damaged, and her body was a little bruised and battered. But everything else more or less worked. She could still use her legs to walk with. She could use her arms to shoot with, or stab with, whichever was necessary. She was tired, exhausted, really. But she could go on. She’d done it before and she could do it again.
She didn’t know where Jim, Aly, or Rob were. But she knew where they’d been. The pharmacy. It was the best she could do. Head back there.
Sure, she didn’t know exactly where she was now. But it shouldn’t be rocket science. She just had to head back to the main road, figure out which way north was, and head along the road until she came to the pharmacy. It’d be recognizable, that main drag with all those shops on either side.
With only a small grunt of pain, Jessica rose up to a standing position. Her eyes turned briefly towards the sky, looking for the moon, but it wasn’t there.
It was as if the moon were some kind of sign of hope. Not seeing it, she shivered in the cool air.
But it didn’t matter to her if she saw a sign of hope or not, whether or not there was a beacon up there in the sky. It would matter to some, but she remembered now that she wasn’t like the others.
She’d just go on. She’d do what she had to do.
The lack of moonlight was good, actually. There was enough light for her to walk by without running headlong into anything. And there wasn’t enough light for anyone to see her from a good distance, and hopefully she’d remain a good distance from everyone else for the whole night.
Hopefully she’d get to the pharmacy by morning, before sunrise. And hopefully Jim and the others would be there with the RV. And then they’d continue on down south, finding their place in the woods where they’d be safe from everyone.
It sounded too good to be true. It was too good to be true. It sounded more like some fairy tale than real life.
But maybe it was just what she needed to tell herself. Maybe it’s what she needed to keep on going.
After all, no matter how strong she was, and how good her outlook was, the truth of it was that she was all on her own out there in the middle of the night, in a world that had been torn apart.
What would she do if she never found the others?
She knew she wouldn’t simply give up. But that’d be the temptation, just to let that feeling of weakness and hopelessness completely take her over, letting herself sink down to the ground, too weak and disillusioned to even look for food or water, or even protect herself when it came to that. A lot of people would succumb to that, to hopelessness and fear.
She wouldn’t. She knew that. But it would take everything she had just to fight against that.
Jessica understood what so many didn’t, which was that the mental terrors that could haunt an individual could be just as dangerous and just as lethal as the real physical dangers like a lack of food, or a guy with a gun jammed in your face, ready to blast your head off.
Giving the corpse one last little kick, just for good measure, almost like a good luck gesture, she was off, heading alone into the night, her hand wrapped tightly around her gun, her ears perked for the slightest sound that didn’t belong, her good eye scanning the dim surroundings for something, anything, that meant trouble.
19
Bill
Bill was angry.
Angrier than he’d been in a long time.
Rod’s plan hadn’t worked, and he’d promised him that it would.
But instead of a Stockholm Syndrome woman who would become his very own, Bill had nothing except a dead, lifeless corpse.
Instead of a woman who would grow to love him over the coming weeks and months and years, he had just a dead body.
And what good was a dead body to him?
None. None at all.
He didn’t know why he’d done it exactly. Except that everything had happened quickly and it hadn’t seemed like he’d had any time to think.
Not that thinking had really ever been his strong suit. He liked to let others make the plans for him. The way he saw it, why should he go to all the trouble of coming up with a plan on his own when a perfectly good one was already there?
It was easier to go through life as a cheat than an original. In fact, Bill hadn’t even come up with that slogan on his own. He’d stolen it from his father, who for all Bill knew had stolen it from his own father.
Bill was covered in blood. He was just lying there next to the dead girl and wondering why he always had such bad luck. It was like he could never catch a break, no matter how hard he tried.
If there was one thing he was very, very good at, it was avoiding responsibility, and doing whatever it took to avoid blaming himself.
He recognized his talents, to some extent. And to the extent that he recognized them, he was fine with them.
Finally, after long minutes of lying in the darkness, Bill pushed the corpse off of him and rose to his feet.
He headed off to the corner and grabbed the flashlight from where it lay, illuminating only a small patch of wall. As he picked it up, the light flooded through the basement. Bill pointed the light at the corpse of the young woman.
He sighed when he saw her. She really was pretty. Beautiful even. A real shame. She could have been his.
Bill dug out a little plastic baggie from his pocket and took a couple deep sniffs of the off-white powder. It burned, and his head got that familiar expanding feeling that he loved so much. Bill didn’t use as much as Rod. Usually just enough to recenter himself, to gain some perspective. It was helpful in moments like this.
And now he felt the energy from the drug starting to pour through his system. He felt his arms start to tingle, and he took another hit for good measure. This was an unusual situation, after all.
Now there was more energy coming through.
Good. He felt good. Very good. He felt like he wanted to go for a run. A sprint, maybe. Or a marathon.
He started bouncing up and down, just because it felt good to use up some of that energy.
He was really starting to feel good when there was a gunshot off in the distance.
A gunshot?
Shit.
He didn’t know if it was good or bad. But he k
new it meant something.
Rod was likely involved. Somehow. Either he’d shot someone, or he’d been shot.
In other circumstances, Bill might have shrunk back from a fight where a gun had already been discharged. Sure, it was supposed to be the gang against everyone else. It was supposed to be everyone in the gang defending everyone else. The whole was more important than the individual. But it had never really been like that. Sure, in theory, yeah, but when you throw in the complications of life, not to mention the legal system, things start to change pretty quickly.
And since the EMP, well, things obviously weren’t the same as they’d been. He and Rod had broken off from the others. They had their own ideas on how to do things.
And what if it came down to Bill risking his neck for Rod? Or the other way around?
If he were being honest with himself, Rod might have liked to hide there in the basement and wait until the smoke had settled, so to speak.
But he wasn’t feeling shy at all. He was full of this energy that was practically boiling over. He wasn’t even standing there normally, he was rocking back and forth on his heels, and doing that thing where he flexed and relaxed his muscles repeatedly without actually moving them. Isometric, he thought it was called. He’d actually dated a physical therapist for a little while. Well, that was the way he told the story. In actuality, she’d put a restraining order against him.
But those were thoughts for another time.
Without a second thought, Bill burst out of the basement, leaping up the multiple concrete steps in a single bound.
His eyes weren’t adjusted to the darkness, but he had the flashlight.
He wasn’t thinking about whether or not the flashlight made him a target. After all, he wasn’t the victim type. He wasn’t prey. He was a hunter. He’d always been, and he always would be.
He ran towards the sound of the gunshot.
As he ran, the rifle that he had slung across his back bounced against him. He considered grabbing it but thought better of it. This was a time for a handgun. Not because of the actual situation itself, but more because he didn’t feel like staying back, lying patiently on his stomach, looking through the sights and waiting until he saw something. Sure, maybe it made the most sense strategically, but he just didn’t feel like doing it.
Surviving: The Complete Series [Books 1-3] Page 44
