Apocalyptic Beginnings Box Set

by M. D. Massey

  Oddly, he thought of his father at that moment. He knew his dad would do everything in his power to save the woman, and he knew it would let his dad down tremendously if Liam walked in the door saying he left Grandma to fend for herself because “she was inconvenient.”

  Oh, great. I'm now my father.

  But, he had to admit that sometimes—just sometimes—Dad got things right.

  He was startled from his reverie by a presence in the doorway. She was awake at last.

  * * *

  4

  “Grandma!” He ran over and gave her a hug before he knew he was doing it.

  “I'm happy to see you too, Liam. I think we're in a bit of a pickle together.”

  He filed that away as the understatement of the year. Gunshots nearby accentuated the issue.

  “Help me over to my chair, if you would. I'm still a bit wobbly from my—” she hesitated as if deciding to expand her thought. “—fainting spell. Those tornado sirens nearly made me jump out of my shoes.”

  He helped her, then sat down nearby and began speaking in the nervous cadence of someone who has been waiting a long time to talk. He told her about the walk home, in all its detail.

  “Whoa! Take a breath. Are you saying someone shot at you? Are you OK?”

  He forgot to edit that part out.

  “How long have I been sleeping? It's dark outside. Is this still the same day?”

  “You slept through the afternoon. I've been getting a bunch of stuff together in a backpack, so we can escape. I've just not figured out how to travel or where to go.”

  She was thoughtful for a few moments.

  “OK, Liam. I want you to get out of the city. You can escape before it gets too bad.”

  Here it was. He recognized she was giving him his out. He could walk away with her blessing, and it would be a logical story when he reached Mom and Dad's. “She ordered me to go!” He turned it over in his head. Looked at it from multiple angles. But always, he saw his father shaking his head. Would Dad leave her at the most desperate hour like this? Would any man?

  Hell, no!

  “I'm sorry, but I can't leave you. We have to get out together or stick it out here until it’s safe again.”

  “You know that doesn't make any sense. I'm an old woman. I'll probably be dead before you know it, and then you'll be stuck here after things have gotten so bad you can't think of leaving. You have to get out while you still can.”

  “Grandma, I'm not leaving you. My dad would never leave you. My grandpa would never have left you. Great-Grandpa sure as heck wouldn't have thought of abandoning you. I'm staying.”

  Grandma nodded, giving him a grim look.

  He wondered if she was proud of him for making his decision. Or was she disappointed he was putting himself in danger at her expense? She offered no clues.

  “Well, then,” she said, “we have to decide what we're going to do to survive. I'm afraid staying here could be a problem. If there are robbers about, we won't have much hope of stopping them from coming in, and the sick people like Angie aren't going to make getting out of the house very easy either. The police said we have to evacuate to safer places but didn't say where to go that was any safer than here. The most obvious is somewhere out in the country where there aren't as many people. Maybe your mom and dad's place?”

  He was proud he had come up with virtually the same ideas. Getting to his house outside the city did seem the most sensible plan, even if he did have a little fear of showing up after illegally driving across town. Many of the miles he'd logged in pursuit of his learner's permit had been driving Dad to Grandma's, so he knew at least one route home fairly well.

  “Can we take Angie's car? I don't think she'll need it. It was parked on the next street over. Not sure why she put it there, but it was covered in lots of blood and had a—” he grimaced—“a foot on the floor. I think someone stole it from the garage—the car, not the foot. Or maybe she was sick while driving home.”

  He paused as they both sat in thought, then continued, “Also, there are no keys inside it. I checked because I thought about driving it back here.”

  They looked at each other with sudden realization.

  “We have to go up into her flat and find a spare set of car keys,” Grandma said without enthusiasm. He guessed she was worse off than she admitted about losing her friend.

  * * *

  5

  They agreed to spend the night in the flat. For Grandma, this gave her time to recuperate after her “scare” with the sirens. For Liam, it was a chance to pack up everything he would need to help get them out of the city, such as her bottle of ibuprofen, some water, her walker, and a few bites of food. Just enough for a long drive through the inevitable traffic.

  After packing the essentials, they sat down to eat a heaping dinner of spaghetti and meatballs—his favorite. If they were leaving, it made sense to try to use some of the remaining food. The electric was out, but the gas for her old stove still worked.

  Preparing his backpack was initially exciting—a “real adventure” his friend had texted him earlier in the day—but as he realized they were in a true emergency, with real bullets, his enthusiasm withered. Now he wasn't relishing going outside one bit. He was quietly moving the long strands of pasta on his plate, hardly eating them. That seemed to get Grandma's attention.

  “Eat, Liam. You'll need your strength.”

  He looked up and resumed eating with a little more zest.

  She began talking again, her tone more somber. “Liam, I want to talk to you about something important. I know you and your family get set in your ways, but I'm afraid for your soul. You need to think about going back to church.”

  Inwardly, he groaned. He knew she lamented the choices of his family to stop going to church every Sunday—his mom and dad often talked about it—but he saw that as extra free time he didn't want to give up. Sunday services were a bore that he dreaded each time he went. He was unwilling to make promises to her based solely on the mysterious disruptions outside. Surely the government would get things fixed, and everything would soon be back to normal. What then? And was it right to profess faith in God only because you need something? How wrong would it be to tell her he found God, but not really mean it? He saw this as a massively complex question his brain was unable to process with spaghetti hanging off his lips. He felt the shadow of silence growing longer. Something needed to be said.

  “I'll think about it, Grandma. Really. I will.”

  That should do it.

  Shoveling the last of the noodles into his mouth, he focused on eating, hoping to indicate the conversation was over. He felt her hard stare, but she passed some toasted ravioli rather than push him on his vague response.

  He was thankful she dropped it, though it made the rest of the evening a bit awkward.

  Before she finally went off to bed, she summoned him to the living room. “I want you to go downstairs, way in the back in the farthest corner and look for a black plastic box up in the rafters. It's something your father put there for me.”

  As instructed, he made his way into the dark basement, struggling even with his flashlight to weave through the piles of old junk his grandma insisted be kept down there. Not one to let go of old stuff, she had quite a collection of aging rocking chairs, long-since-replaced light fixtures, and many pieces of furniture, tools, and equipment hoarded by her and great-grandpa Al.

  And there in the corner, high above everything else, was the promised black box wedged up into the rafters. He had to use an old walking stick to poke it from its perch and make it fall into his waiting hands. The box was surprisingly heavy. He caught it one-handed, dropped the walking stick, and wrapped his other arm around the box as he balanced himself to keep from dropping it.

  Pass completed, touchdown! And the crowd goes wild!

  As he walked up the steps with the box, he had a pretty good idea what it was. For years, his father had taken him to the local shooting range to practice with a var
iety of weapons. First, it was BB guns, then airsoft guns, and finally the famous .22-caliber rifle. From the box’s size and shape, this was clearly a container for handguns: roughly sixteen by sixteen inches and eight inches thick.

  He set it up on the coffee table in Grandma's living room. Using a small light, she produced a key that undid the safety lock securing the container. It popped open and, just as he had suspected, there was a handgun inside. Two, in fact, packed with gray insulating foam inserts to keep the contents from shifting inside.

  Picking up the first gun with both hands, Grandma placed it on the table.

  “You probably didn't think your old grandma knew anything about guns, eh?” She was smiling as she said it.

  “This is heavier than I remember. This is a Ruger Mark I Target .22. The other one is identical. Your great-grandpa bought both of these way back before you were born. There had been a break-in on our block, and Al told me he wanted me to be ready in case something like that ever happened again.”

  She sat back in her chair as she continued.

  “Oh, those were the days. Simple times. We took these guns out to the country a few times, and I even shot one. Can you believe that? Got pretty good too. But, like so many things in life, it just became too much trouble to practice, to maintain them, to think about them. Someday I'll tell you about my lasso rope that fell into similar disuse.” She chuckled a little at her own joke.

  “Anyway, a few months ago your dad was here telling me I needed to be prepared for anything that might happen in the city—you probably don't remember all that rioting business last year? I told him I was fine and that I even had two handguns. Well, he was not impressed. He had me show him where they were, then he took them and said he was going to clean and service them to make sure they were working properly for me. The next week he had them both back in this case, with this box of 1,000 rounds to go with it. I'm sure he knew I would not be able to use these anymore, but he told me where he was going to put the box, and he said it would be there ‘in case of emergency.’ I guess he was pretty smart about that.”

  He eyed the shiny black objects sitting there. In the darkness, he could only see the harsh lines of the Mark I, but he knew it well. In fact, he was beginning to believe his father was smarter than he ever let on. How else could one explain that Liam had spent considerable time training on a Mark I with his dad? He never thought to ask him where it came from, but it sure seemed likely he got it from Great-Grandpa too. And now, at this critical moment, he would be carrying the same model. Did this make him the gardener with the deadly spade?

  Dad always said the .22 was the best training round because it was so cheap and had very little recoil. He said Liam would eventually graduate to more powerful rounds, but if a person could master the .22, all the others would fall in line. It was all about stance, awareness, and a steady arm. Plus, the consequences of breaking any of the cardinal rules of gun handling was minimized during the learning period with the tiny round. He assured Liam it was still quite deadly, of course; assassins had used the small and quiet caliber to good effect for many years.

  He never pushed for bigger guns because he loved going out and “plinking” with the little one. At least, he used to enjoy it. Lately, his dad would drag him to the range whether he wanted to go or not. Looking back, he realized he was acting like a whiny baby each time he complained he didn't want to go shooting.

  I didn't want to go with him.

  Now he looked at them with a silent appreciation for the lessons he'd been taught.

  “I hope we don't need these, Grandma.”

  “Me too.”

  “Why don't you hit the hay, and we'll get started at first light. I'll be sleeping right out here on the couch. I hope you don't mind that I don't sleep downstairs?”

  “Not at all. Why don't you keep one of these by your side from now on?”

  He picked up the gun. Felt the weight. There was no mystery to it. It was just another item in the toolbox pre-positioned by his father.

  He couldn't help but feel a longing to see his dad.

  A distant explosion faintly rocked the items in Grandma's china cabinet.

  “I can't wait to see the sun rise again,” he said, as much to himself as to her.

  “I'll pray for us before I go to bed.”

  “Thanks Grandma.” He was an agnostic—didn't know what he believed—but was respectful of Grandma's overwhelming faith. “And I meant what I said about considering going back to church.”

  She gave him a kindly smile, turned around, and was slowly off to her room.

  The last thing he remembered of that night was the sound of a car speeding down the street at high speed, followed by the unmistakable sound of squealing tires under extreme braking. He held his breath waiting for the sound of an impact, but it never came. Thirty seconds later, he remembered to breathe again.

  He didn't get any quality sleep, but it did serve as a deep breath before his upcoming journey. He wondered if it was destined to end in extreme braking? Would he and Grandma meet their demise as raw sounds in someone else's bedtime story?

  He drifted to sleep while jumping fences—Angie close behind.

  5

  Angie

  Liam woke up exhausted. When he did sleep, he’d had horrible dreams of zombies, lots of running, and pulling the trigger on a gun that would never fire as he was overwhelmed by plague victims.

  The actual gunfire, speeding cars, and screams from nearby houses insured his slumber was sporadic all through the night. He also heard a big explosion nearby but was unable to pull himself out of his comfy sofa cushions to check it out. He was glad to get things moving at the first sign of light outside.

  He went to Grandma's door and found her already up and sitting in a comfortable chair.

  “I'm an early riser.” She never complained. “Two houses behind us blew up last night and burned to the ground. I watched to make sure the fire didn't spread.”

  “Did you get any sleep?” he asked while peeking out her window.

  “Oh, I got enough. I slept most of yesterday.” It was true enough, but not really a straight answer. Nothing could be done now. “I made you some eggs and bacon. Have to get rid of it.”

  He wasn't a morning person or a breakfast person, but he took the time to shovel down the home-cooked meal.

  “Sorry for eating so fast. I just want to get up there and get it over with.”

  “I understand. I can make you plenty more if you're still hungry.”

  “No, Grandma, but thanks. You stay here, and I'll be right back. Shouldn't be that hard to find Angie's keys up there.”

  She gave him a little salute and watched him walk away. She said she would conserve her energy and stay in her chair to wait for him. “Be careful,” she added.

  “The zombie from up there has already come down,” he replied, then paused. He looked back and said, “Sorry, I meant no disrespect.” He hurried to the front of her flat, through the access door to Angie's stairwell, and up the steep flight. The door at the top was already open, giving him access to the upstairs living area. He stepped around a puddle on the dim landing.

  The room was shadowy because the drapes were thick and dark. He didn't have his flashlight with him. The floor was covered with debris, so he had trouble moving to a window to let in some light. When he finally did pull back the curtains, he was stunned.

  Blood. Lots of blood.

  There were piles of clothes scattered on the floor, along with sofa pillows, a tablecloth, and smatterings of shoes, purses, and other accessories. It appeared as if Angie's entire wardrobe had spilled out onto her floor and got drenched with blood.

  He shuddered to think of Angie bleeding so bad, knowing she was still walking around somewhere outside. It didn't seem possible any disease process could produce such horrible results.

  Is she really dead?

  He'd read books with many different definitions of zombies. Some were back-from-the-dead “undead.” Some
were the recently deceased; they reanimated while still warm but remained clinically dead. Some were alive but infected with something that made them as good as dead. Would the people walking around his neighborhood fit into any of those neat boxes?

  He still had a job to do in the apartment, and he began working his way around the edges of the room where the blood was absent, and some semblance of order remained. He could still detect some of the personality of the woman who, until recently, was someone he admired.

  He found a picture of Angie with her granddaughter—a bubbly blonde with her arms slung around her grandma, giving her a big hug. He picked up the simple desk frame to get a better look in the low light, deliberately turning away from the central part of the room with all the gore on the floor. He wasn't without feelings, but true empathy didn't come naturally to him. However, the events of the last twenty-four hours had awakened something urgent inside him—he suddenly, desperately, wanted to know if the girl in the picture was safe.

  After a deep breath, he resumed his circuit of the main living area. He tried to think where the normally organized woman would put her car keys in her home. His keys were always in his pocket or on his nightstand, so he thought to check the bedroom, but turned up nothing.

  He walked back out the bedroom door and noticed Angie's cat was hiding amongst some of the clothing on the floor. Not in the middle of the room, but near the edge of the cyclone of destruction. The little guy was probably scared to death. He moved to kick off some of the clothes that were on top of it—and saw with horror that the cat was not only dead but lying in a pool of blood with most of its insides ripped out.

  Liam threw up.

  Standing there trying to recover, he noticed the keys hung on a hook right next to the doorframe on the way out of the apartment. If he’d thought to look when he came through the door, he could have avoided this whole mess.

  He grabbed the keys from the hook and rushed out the door toward the stairs. Then …