by Ben Reeder
“Clip one of those to your back belt loop, and put the other one in your front pocket,” I told her as I held my hand out. She cupped her palm under my hand to catch them, and I demonstrated by clipping one of my own to my rear belt loop.
“What are they?” she asked as she looked them over.
“Handcuff keys. Some cops carry them to keep from being locked up with their own cuffs.” She wasted no time in tucking one to her belt loop, and I stuck the second one in my front pocket.
“You don’t already have some of these?” she asked with a smug little grin on her face.
“Nope,” I said. “Before things went south, I wouldn’t carry them. I didn’t want to give the police the wrong impression if I ever had to deal with them. But…things change.” She nodded. By then the water in the Kelley kettle was boiling, and I took it off the base and poured some into the small pot that came with the kettle’s cook set. Three minutes later, I had Ramen noodle soup.
“So, what’s the plan now?” she asked after I finished my soup and headed back to the truck.
“We find an encrypted radio and contact Nate. After that, we wing it.”
“Oh, is that all we have to do?” Amy said sharply. “Let me check, I think I had an encrypted radio around here somewhere. Dave, seriously, where the hell are we going to find one?”
“National Guard armory,” I said as I picked up the AR-15 and hit the power button on the red dot sight. The little illuminated circle glowed into existence, and I turned the power off before I set it down. “Or, if we’re lucky, we might find a convoy or some kind of mobile command post.” The AR had two mags, just enough to get me into serious trouble. The shotgun was a little better off, with a hundred shells. Since they didn’t require a magazine to load, that wasn’t so bad. The Glock only had the two mags, which meant I would probably have to rely more on the SOCOM than I would have liked, since I had fewer rounds for it. The only saving grace was the snub nosed revolver. It was chambered for .357, and it had a holster that looked like it was designed to be strapped to an ankle. While I wasn’t ready to go putting guns on my limbs, it wasn’t a bad fall back gun even if it did only carry five rounds.
“That’s the third time you’ve checked the guns,” Amy said from behind me. “We’re good, Dave. The guns are cleaned, all the magazines are loaded, our swords are cleaned, sharp and oiled, and our vests are almost dry. Your boots are the only things that still need to dry, and that’s because you won’t take them off.” She stepped up beside me and nudged me with her shoulder.
“Sorry,” I told her. “I’m a worrier when I don’t have a clear plan.”
“What, ‘find an encrypted radio’ isn’t a plan?” she asked.
“It isn’t what you’d call a plan so much as a guideline; a goal, really,” I said in a bad pirate accent.
“You must really be stressed,” she said, laughter in her voice. “You went five whole minutes without a movie quote. You chill. I’ll keep an eye on things.”
“Okay. I’ll just make sure the rest of the gear is okay-” I started to say.
“Five times,” Amy cut me off. “Seriously, you’ve already poked and prodded at it five times. We have a week’s worth of food, all the other gear is fine. The only thing you haven’t checked out is the sleeping bag. Why don’t you give it a test run and let me know if it’s working okay.” I held up my hands and sat down on the tailgate to take my boots off. As soon as the first one came off, she took it from me and set it near the fire base for the Kelley Kettle. The second one ended up on the other side a moment later.
“Wake me up in… three hours,” I said, yawning partway through the sentence.
“Whatever you say,” she said as she headed for the ladder that led into the barn’s upper level. While I wasn’t happy about how flippant she sounded, I figured I could trust her to wake me up if she got too tired. I crawled into the bed of the truck and took a look into the cab. The keys were still in the ignition, just like they had been an hour ago. Through the front windshield, I could see the truck’s shadow against the doors, cast by the faint light of the fire behind the tailgate. Behind my seat, the box of radio parts I’d grabbed from Radio Shack while Amy was updating her wardrobe was still secure. Satisfied for the moment that we were okay, I lowered myself onto the sleeping bag.
I woke to the sound of my own voice in my ears and a vague memory of a zombified Maya trying to tear my throat out with her teeth. My heart was pounding in my chest as my head came off the pillow. It was dark, and I was okay. Beside me, I heard the soft rasp of a girl’s snore, then a hand fell on my shoulder.
“’Sokay, Dave,” Amy muttered sleepily. “You’re awright…jus’ a badream.” She patted my shoulder a couple of times before her hand fell away. I sat upright a second later.
“Amy!” I snapped. “What the hell are you doing? Wake the hell up!” I heard the rustle of fabric and a moment later blue light flooded the bed of the truck. I squinted and snatched the LED flashlight from Amy’s hand and pointed it in her direction. She propped herself up on her elbows and squinted at me.
“Damn it Dave,” she groaned at me. “Chill out. We’re fine.”
“We’re not fine! You were supposed to wake me up so I could take the next watch. What if someone attacked us?”
“The coyotes would warn us before they got close,” she said as she let herself fall back onto her sleeping bag. I stopped dead at that.
“Coyotes?” I asked. She nodded and pointed toward the outside of the truck as I heard a short bark nearby. Another bark answered it, then a third gave a longer bark with a high pitched yowl at the end.
“Yeah, they showed up about an hour after you fell asleep,” she said through a yawn. “Go take a look.” Determined to do just that, I turned the light to the tailgate and found my boots near the end of my sleeping bag. I stuck my feet in them and did a sloppy job of tying them without lacing them all the way up, then climbed the ladder and headed for the opening at the front of the barn. The quarter moon was low on the horizon, and in its faint light, I could see three coyotes sitting on their haunches and looking up at me. One of them yipped at me twice, then gave out another longer bark. In the distance, I heard a coyote howl, and the three outside answered. Then silence fell again, and the one that had barked at me looked back up at me for a moment before it trotted around to one side of the barn. I shrugged and let out a grunt before I retreated back to the truck.
I wasn’t sure how long I laid there and tried to get back to sleep, but it felt like it was forever. Eventually, I crawled out of the truck and grabbed the AR, then made my way back to the loft. The moon had set by the time I settled back into place, so I concentrated on listening as I let my eyes adjust to the dark. Without the usual light pollution obscuring it, the Milky Way was a ribbon of stardust overhead, and I spent most of the next few hours alternating between marveling at the sky and listening for anything approaching. Eventually, the stars faded and the gray light of dawn crept across the sky behind me.
By the time Amy woke up, I had water boiling and breakfast was about to be rehydrated. Freeze-dried food was still the best thing I knew how to put together without an ice chest and a full camp stove. Amy slid out of the truck bed feet first and slipped her shoes on before she came over and sat down. Before, she’d never been a morning person, but she was clear eyed and alert as she took the bowl I handed her.
After breakfast, I started Amy’s driving lessons by letting her drive the truck out of the barn and a little ways down the dirt road to get her used to it. Half an hour later, we were back on the road, with the barn cleaned up behind us and our gear stowed. It felt good to have my vest back on and the Deuce close to hand. We headed north, further into Nebraska for a little while, then turned west on another farm road. After a few miles, Amy pointed ahead. I followed the line of her finger to a white building on the right side of the road. “We’re alive! 4 miles N” had been painted in red on the side of it with an arrow pointing in the right direction.<
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“You think we should check it out?” Amy asked.
“They might be able to tell us if there’s an armory nearby or something. Might be worth checking out.”
I looked over to her, and she shrugged. People were always a crap shoot. But, you also never won if you never took the chance. I took the turn just past the white building, and shook my head at the red “Infected inside. Do not enter” stenciled in red paint on the door. About three miles down the road, I pulled over and turned the truck off.
“I’m going to go on ahead and check things out. If things look okay, I’ll call you in. But if you don’t hear from me in about thirty minutes, give one call out. If I don’t answer, or if I say ‘All is well’, go back to the last intersection we passed before we turned and wait until tomorrow morning. If I don’t make it back to you then, head for Wyoming.” I watched her face to see if she was going to argue with me, but she just gave me a dark look and nodded. Not terribly reassured, I tuned the shortwave on the dash to the same frequency as the Marine radio I had and got out. I didn’t want to risk losing the AR, so I grabbed the Mossberg and shrugged the Takedown’s carrying case on my shoulders. I’d stocked it with some basic gear as well, so it would be a compact survival kit if I needed one. Geared up, I started walking.
At first, the only sound I could hear was my boots on the cracked asphalt. Then the sound of birds, insects and wind. But one thing was missing, a sound I’d even heard sometimes out in the forest with my grandfather as a kid: the soft hum of traffic. Even out here, the sound of a car would travel for a long way, and you could usually hear the sound of rubber on asphalt. I walked for about twenty minutes, and finally found signs of human habitation. Oddly enough, it was the barnyard smell that hit me first. Then, I caught the scent of wood smoke on the wind as the road ahead of me curved around a hill that rose up on my right. As I rounded the curve, several bodies came into view. All of them were lying sprawled on the road as if they’d been left where they fell. I brought the shotgun up and sidestepped to my left, scanning left and right with the shotgun. On the far side of the road from me was a chest high stone wall that led to a metal gate blocking a road that ran up the hill and curved out of sight to the left. I didn’t see anyone pointing a gun at me, but that didn’t mean someone wasn’t there. Slowly, I approached one of the bodies and spared a glance down at it. Dessicated brain matter was pooled around the back of its head, and its eyes were milky white, but I could still see the black veins running through them, a sure sign the corpse had been infected before it died. Without turning away from the gate, I checked the other corpses. All of them had bullet holes through their heads, and all of them looked infected. Whoever had been doing the shooting didn’t seem to be targeting the living. I didn’t see any bloodstains, so I figured they hadn’t shot any living people and hid the bodies. Still, I didn’t feel like taking chances.
With my shoulder blades twitching, I stalked up to the gate and looked it over to see how it was secured. A chain was padlocked around one side, and a wire as tied to the chain itself. I followed the thin wire with my eyes as far as I could but it disappeared into the brush a few yards away from the fence. The wire itself was under a little tension, so I suspected it was weighted to prevent someone from simply cutting it to bypass it. Anything that ran into the gate would probably sound some kind of alarm, but little things like birds or the wind didn’t seem likely to.
Since I didn’t want to risk drawing any infected, I figured the best thing to do was to ring the doorbell. Before I could chicken out, I reached out and grabbed the top of the gate and moved it back and forth a few times, then darted to the left side, toward the gate’s hinges, and knelt down beside the wall where I wouldn’t be immediately visible to someone coming down the path.
A few minutes later, I heard the slow, measured sound of cautious footsteps approaching. A man in blue jeans and a gray button down work shirt came into view, his scuffed and worn work boots making only the faintest of sounds as he crept up on the gate. Most of his face was obscured by the stock of the rifle he held against his shoulder and a John Deere ballcap. Weathered hands were wrapped around the rifle’s stock and fore end, and I could see the corded lines of muscle under her skin as he slowly lowered the gun. The gun’s receiver looked familiar, and I guessed he was carrying one of the original versions of the M14, the rifle the M39 I’d lost in Kansas City was based on.
“Howdy,” I said as he straightened. The gun came up and pointed in my direction. The man’s eyes were wide in his narrow face, but he didn’t pull the trigger.
“Stand up where I can see you,” he barked. I got to my feet slowly and grabbed the shotgun by the barrel with my right hand. As I straightened, I held it out away from me with the stock in the air.
“If I had meant to shoot you, I would have done it before I said hello,” I said as I stepped away from the wall. “I just figured you were a pretty good shot from a distance, so I didn’t want you to think I was infected or anything. I’d hate to get shot by mistake.”
“You damn near did anyway,” he said as he lowered the rifle again. “Who are you?”
“My name’s Dave. I’m a survivor, just like you. I saw your sign down by the road. Figured I’d come by, see if I could help out, or maybe trade a bit. What’s your name?”
“Del,” the man answered cautiously. “I didn’t put up no sign. Nearest road’s about five miles from here.” His eyes narrowed, and I could almost hear the alarm bells going off in his head.
“It looked pretty old, and it said ten miles down. Look, Del, I’m not asking you to take us in or anything. Hell, you don’t even have to let us in the gate. We’re not looking to stay in the area. I’m just looking for some information, and I’m willing to trade for it.”
“Us? Who’s with you?” he demanded, his eyes scanning the road and the brush behind me.
“My daughter. She’s parked down the road a little ways.” I didn’t like the way his eyes shifted or the speculative look he got on his face. Then he turned his head to look back up the road he’d come down, and I heard a woman’s voice.
“Del, you all right?” the woman asked. She walked into view a second later, a thin woman with plain brown hair and dark circles under her eyes. Her floral print shirt clung to her spare frame, and her denim skirt covered her narrow legs to mid-calf, where a pair of cowboy boots took over..
“I’m fine, Penny,” he answered.
“Who’re you talking to honey?” she asked when she caught sight of me.
“His name’s Dave,” he said. “Him and his daughter are just passin’ through, and he was looking to trade for some information.”
“Hi, ma’am,” I said as I slung the shotgun and waved with my left hand. They exchanged a look, and she nodded.
“Why don’t you have your daughter come on up, and we’ll see if we can help each other out,” Del said. His wife smiled at me as I stepped back and pulled the radio from its pocket on my vest.
“Amy, it’s Dave. You got your ears on?” I said.
“Sorry, left them in my other purse,” Amy replied a few seconds later.
“Smart ass,” I said. “We’re mostly good here. Come on up.”
“Mostly?” she asked.
“Yeah, mostly,” I said as I turned away from Del and Penny. “But an ace up your sleeve wouldn’t be taken amiss.” I pitched the last part low enough that it wouldn’t carry more than a couple of feet.
“Roger that,” Amy said. “I’ll be right there.” I turned to face Del and Penny to find that Del was opening the gate.
“Why don’t y’all come up and have a bite to eat with us,” Penny said.
“We wouldn’t want to impose,” I said. “I know times are…well, strange, and every little bite of food helps.”
“Nonsense,” Penny said with a smile and a wave of her hand. “We’ve got it to spare, and it’s been more than a week since we’ve seen anyone out here. All we can get on the radio is that awful government station and th
e Solomon Bible University Gospel Hour out of Tulsa.”
“You still have power?” I asked as I heard the truck coming up the road.
“For a few hours a day,” Del said as he swung the gate out and gestured for Amy to drive on in. She stopped at the edge of the road and looked to me.
“Sorry, she’s just learning to drive,” I said. “Hop in, we’ll give you a lift the rest of the way.” Del had Penny climb in the back with Amy, and took the passenger seat to guide me the rest of the way up the hill. The road forked two times on the way up, and Del informed me that the first fork led down to the gardens his grandfather had carved into the side of the hill, and the second went to the barn and animal pens at the base of the hill. Then we hit the top of the hill, and I let the truck roll to a stop and just stared in awe at the view. A two story house dominated the plateau before me, with a thick stand of trees on the north side. To the south, we could see for a couple of miles. Rolling fields were edged with lines of trees and narrow gray roads, a postcard perfect tableau. Trees blocked the view to the west, but to the east, the only thing between us and the horizon was a windmill and a waist high metal tank that was filled with water.
A boy about Amy’s age was standing on the front porch with a double barreled shotgun in his hands, looking us over with a frown on his face. Off to the south side of the house, I could see a dog on a chain that was connected to a tree. A circle of dirt marked his territory, and he sat looking at us from the edge of his domain. When we got out of the truck, his tail thumped in the dirt behind him a few times, then went still. Del came around the truck and gestured for the boy to come over.
“This is Tad, he’s my oldest,” he said as the boy approached. Tad was a wider version of his father, with plenty of baby fat still rounding out his cheeks and a sullen, almost drowsy look about him. He stuck out a hand and clamped onto mine with an almost painful grip. “Tad, this is Dave.”
“Pleased to meet you,” he said with a smile that didn’t make me think he was.
