“Not anymore. How far away we talking?”
“Across town.”
That was a problem. They had no vehicle and driving one was going to become increasingly difficult as the city continued to fall apart. There’d be cars and other things blocking roads, victims shooting at cars, and probably much worse.
“We need a motorcycle,” Don said. “A dirt bike would be best. That way we can take the road less traveled.”
“Jerry’s got one. Might have some guns too if nobody’s broken into his place yet.”
“Your friend?”
“Yeah. He’s deployed in Iraq.”
“Where is his place?”
“Not far. A mile or so toward the coast.”
As they talked, they left the apartment and went down a long set of stairs, which ended in an old root cellar. A large black door stood closed in front of them. Beyond was a decent-sized room and Lester locked the door behind them. Don held a flashlight, and that helped them avoid the massive spider webs that covered the walls and ceiling. There was a desk, some chairs, and an ancient rusting file cabinet. Everything was covered with a thick coating of dust.
Don went to the file cabinet and pulled on the top drawer. It was locked. He rammed the tip of his stick into the gap above the handle and pried it open. After a few minutes, the front bent outward, and Don was able to break the lock mechanism.
The draw was filled with money. Maybe ten grand in small bills. Don chuckled. What good was money now? The currency looked old, and had some kind of fungus growing on it. The rest of the cabinet was filled with paperwork.
They continued on through the tunnel, and out into the garage, where they realized taking the passageway had been an unnecessary precaution. They saw no walkers, but they heard them in the distance—barks, howls, and screams of pain and terror, but they appeared to be staying out of sight.
The rain clouds were gone, and the sun beat down on them as they left the garage, sticking to the brick wall until they exited through the front gate. Don didn’t spend long examining the van because he knew that would draw attention, but there were some things he had to do. Like get his men’s tags. The front windows and windshield were blown out, so Don didn’t think that was going to be a difficult task.
Except when he got to the van, he discovered his men’s remains weren’t there. Nothing in the front, or the rear. This made Don nauseous, but also brought a little hope. Maybe they got out and were roaming the city with a pack of walkers? The blood on the front seats and hood made that a hard sell.
“Come on,” Don said. “We’re going to cut through yards. We’ll stick to the street patterns as best we can. I’ll try to avoid high fences, and other impediments.” He wanted to be sure they didn’t get caught in a confined space.
They cut across the first lawn that didn’t have a wall or a fence and went southeast. Lester said there was a bodega that might have caffeine pills on the way. They slipped through a high hedge and came out on a thin private driveway that divided one piece of property into two homesteads. As they walked by the front of the first house, two children stood in an upper window. Don stopped and waved, and the kids waved back.
People were listening. They were staying inside and digging in. Don was thinking that maybe he could still win this thing when a huge dog bolted around the house and headed straight for them. Don and Lester froze, and when the dog arrived, the giant beast simply sniffed them and wagged his tail. Don had yet to see an animal affected by the disease. That was another important thing his people back in the research labs needed to know.
The dog wouldn’t leave them, and as they cut across yards, through gates, and around houses, it padded after, its tongue hanging loose. The area had gone from former rich, to the cheaper properties of the people who had served them. The mid-day sun baked off all the moisture, and Don wondered if the heat might be why the sleepwalkers were staying out of sight. He judged it was a little after noon. There was still almost eight hours of daylight left.
They hopped a tall wooden fence to get to the bodega, and that’s when they lost the dog. He couldn’t climb the fence, and getting him over would’ve taken time and energy. The bodega was trashed, but the walkers who’d wrecked it hadn’t been looking for NoSleep pills. There were two boxes, which was forty pills. They also found three dusty cans of Jolt on the floor, under the beverage rack.
They went out the back entrance and worked their way diagonally through several yards. They came into a backyard filled with palmetto trees, and thick waves of green vines with grape-like purple flowers. The perfume-like scent of the wisteria filled the air.
A young male sleepwalker sat in the shade with his back against a large tree, knees pulled up to his chest. He rocked back and forth, and smacked his gums. Dark blood vessels pulsed against dark skin, and his eyes burned like cinders. He was no more than ten, his dark hair matted with sweat.
Don went to him. He vaulted to his feet, and retreated into the corner of the fenced-in yard, nowhere to go.
“That’s weird,” Lester said through his gas mask.
“No, it’s not. You just haven’t seen one alone. They’re not so aggressive when they are only one or two.”
Lester picked up his pace, and so did Don. The boy looked terrified, covering his face with his arms, and hissing and whining. Lester stepped forward and smacked the boy smartly across the face. The walker screamed and fell back. Don felt a twinge of guilt, but then remembered the sound-gun hadn’t woken the others, so there was no reason to believe it would work now.
A gunshot rang out, and Don and Lester dropped into a crouch. The shot sounded a few blocks over, but they both paused for a few seconds, watching the surrounding trees and listening hard.
“Mister?” It was the timid voice of the boy Lester had just woken.
He wore tattered blue jeans, and black sneakers. His face glistened with sweat, blood vessels shrinking, skin loosening. His right cheek showed the red swelling of where Lester had slapped him. He didn’t seem to notice it, smiling like he understood he’d just escaped a horrible situation.
“What’s your name?” Don asked.
The kid looked up at Lester, smiled, turned to Don, and said, “Tobi.”
Chapter Eight
Maureen and Tim found Geoff in a thick patch of sawgrass. They had run along the water’s edge, investigating the scream they’d heard, when they came upon the blood-soaked chunk of flesh floating in shallow water. Cattails stood all around what was left of the body, and Geoff’s tattered red flannel shirt was the only sign of identification. All his limbs were gone, as was his head. Tattered muscles, shattered bones, and gristle saturated in blood seeped from the torso. The water around the remains flowed red, and tiny pieces of skin and fat floated on the water like dried leaves.
Tim wretched, but his breakfast had already been tossed, so he only dry heaved, and sounded like a horse getting a rectal exam. He bent over, hands on his knees, as his skin faded a few shades of white. Spittle dripped from his mouth, and he breathed in and out hard, trying to settle his stomach.
Seeing people reduced to rump roast or chop meat was common for Maureen. Her hospital caught many accident victims, and it never ceased to amaze her how much damage two tons of metal, plastic, and rubber could achieve when colliding with things at high speeds. But she wasn’t in a hospital, and whatever happened to Geoff wasn’t an accident.
A chilling, all-encompassing angst gripped her. Death is around every corner, watching, waiting, and hoping for a slip-up. She believed most people only realize this when alone, while sitting before the void like patient lemmings thinking about how everything they have, everything they’ve done, could be gone in an instant. It is only then that one realizes how fragile the world is. How fragile humans are. She’d learned this in the ER, and sometimes it was a challenge to beat back the darkness.
She bit her lip. The darkness. She looked over at Tim and he transformed from the man she’d loved into the asshole she now despised
. That night he’d come home wasted, as he’d done regularly before the incident. She asked where he’d been, which launched them into their regular fight, with all its repetitive issues, always rehashed, but never resolved. She’d seen the fire of his anger growing and took pleasure in stoking it. The blow came without warning, a harsh slap that sent her reeling, a thin trail of blood leaking from her lip. He looked at her in horror and cried like a baby. She hadn’t shed a tear.
The screech of a heron brought her back to the present.
Unlike with Hawk, and Lilly’s finger, here there were signs of a struggle. All along the water’s edge the cattails had been flattened, and a blood trail led into the forest, which was easy to see due to the broken tree branches and stomped plants. There were many prints on the shoreline in the soft peat, but it was impossible to tell what type of prints they were, though they were large enough to be human.
They found none of Geoff’s body parts. Maureen tried to convince herself this was evidence that there was a giant gator gorging itself. Bobcats and panthers leave very distinct footprints, and she’d seen no cat prints. What scared her was she couldn’t sell herself the idea they were croc prints. Gators tails and underbellies often dragged when they walked, and she expected to see marks in the peat indicating this, but hadn’t. Also, crocs couldn’t nail someone to a tree with a broken paddle. The only species in the southern Florida bigger than the gators and cats was humans. Yet that thought was unthinkable. In the group’s panic and eagerness to find Lilly and Sheryl, they’d pushed the manner in which Hawk was killed from their minds.
“What now?” Tim said as he cracked his knuckles.
Maureen racked the bolt on the rifle and loaded a bullet. She looked down the path the way they’d come, and nothing moved but the swaying grass and cattails, and the rustling of leaves. Clouds streaked by overhead, and Maureen suddenly felt like she was running out of time. “We follow that trail of blood and find out what did this.”
“I think it’s run for our lives time.”
“That says it all,” Maureen said.
“You think we can do something for Lilly and Sheryl? They’re gone, Maureen. Deal with it,” Tim said. With the increased danger, his balls had grown three sizes.
Maureen paused, composing a statement that would end any hope they could again be a real couple, but instead went with the worst copout available. “Whatever. We have to check it out.”
Silence fell between them. A turkey vulture swooped in and landed on a cypress tree along the shore. It watched them with its gleaming eyes, as if calculating how long it would take to pick their bones.
The Everglades are a tapestry of halftones. There are no bold strokes of color, or a deep esthetic resonance, but in the quiet of the Glades, away from the world of people, Maureen felt empowered. The symmetry of nature, the confident way the animals went about their lives, and the seamless way they fit into their environment made her envious, and she drew strength from the ecosystem.
Tim looked away when Maureen smiled at him. Her neck muscles tightened as she remembered that night two years ago, and all the anger came rushing back. This drove home that she was in the middle of nowhere, with no communication, no clear path of escape, and something was running around eating people. So logically she should alienate her husband, the one person who might be able to help her.
“I’m sorry,” she said. She didn’t mean it, but she didn’t think he knew that.
Tim’s eyes softened, and whatever guilt he may have felt he hid from her.
Maureen followed the drips of blood, and the cypress gave way to oak, royal palm, and wild banyan. Saw palmetto, the spiked-leafed weed of southern Florida, clogged the ground beneath the tree canopy, and vines cut through the treetops providing almost complete shade. Beneath the tree cover the air was cool, but at the water’s edge in the full sun one could cook an egg on a stone. A pelican cawed as it looped overhead, changing direction erratically. Birds fought and screeched, but those sounds faded as they went deeper into the island’s interior.
Maureen stopped short and put her hand up to silence Tim before he could speak. There were whispers on the breeze, and the faint echo of crying. She heard a chain being pulled through a steel ring, the sharp tapping of the rounded metal links hitting the steel loop causing a sharp pain to run down her spine. She clamped down on her lip. The rhythm of the tapping slowed, then stopped.
They had entered a thick stand of dead oak trees, and the saw palmetto’s spiked leaves rose five feet tall, making it difficult to see. Maureen took several hesitant steps, and the rattling of the steel chain rose again, filling the dead forest with the sound of metal on metal.
“Shit,” Maureen said, and froze. “Don’t take another step, Tim!” She recalled several years back when she had been in the badlands with friends, and they’d come across a rattlesnake. There were diamondbacks in the Glades, and that sound was one saying, “Get the hell away from me or I’ll kill your ass!”
Tim cracked his knuckles, and said, “It could be anywhere in here.”
“We’ll backtrack and cut through a little further down,” Maureen said, surprised he’d figured it out.
“That’ll get us through this spot, but these damn things are probably everywhere in here. I’ve got flip flops on for shit-sake.”
Maureen wore wetsuit booties, and had instructed Tim to do the same. He hadn’t listened, and she snickered at his stupidity. Then she scolded herself. She didn’t like what she was becoming. More and more she recognized how toxic she’d become toward Tim. She’d played a part in the deterioration of their marriage, continually torturing Tim, and letting her anger and resentment rule her life. Maybe it was time to let the past go, but she couldn’t get by him striking her. Physical violence is never acceptable.
“Go back and wait for me on the shore,” she said. He had a point, as much as she hated to recognize it. If a diamondback went for her, its bite would go through her booties.
Tim looked at the rifle Maureen held, then said, “No. We should stay together. Wait here for a minute.”
“Where are you going?”
Tim didn’t answer, but he was only gone a few seconds, and returned with several stones. He tossed them. First to his right, then moving left in an arc. The rock he threw directly in front of them elicited the now familiar rattle, and in this way, they adjusted their course, and avoided the beast.
Though it pained her somewhat, Maureen said, “Good idea with the rocks, boy scout.”
Tim chuckled and smiled at her.
They were forced to detour two more times before they broke free of the palmetto and entered a healthier section of forest. Here the ground was dirt, and several varieties of trees filled the area. The ground was mostly clear, but it was so hard packed; seeing a print of any kind was impossible. Maureen deemed that they had reached the center of the island, and she wondered if Conrad had come this way.
“Which way?” Tim asked. While there was no clear crossroad, clearly they were at one, and as usual, Tim deferred to her.
“Wait here. Don’t walk around and mess stuff up,” she said, as she began searching the area.
“Mess stuff up?”
“Yeah, like stepping on something like this and obscuring it,” said Maureen. She bent over a bone fragment streaked with blood. It was impossible to tell what type of bone it was, but Maureen judged it hadn’t been there long. “This way,” she said.
They walked on, an occasional ray of sunlight breaking through the tree canopy like a spotlight. They weren’t close to water so the insects had backed off. No birds chirped, and they saw no smaller game, like gecko lizards, squirrels, rabbits, or muskrats. It was as if a freight train had just passed, and everything still hid from its wake.
There was a growling ahead, and then what sounded like a strangled yelp. Maureen crouched, and shouldered the rifle, looking down its sight into the tangle of trees before her. At first, she saw nothing. Gnats tickled her nose and she sneezed. Something ran
between the trees and disappeared into a small thicket. There were no native creatures that stood that tall.
“Stay with me,” Maureen said, and she started forward, half-crouched, moving from tree to tree, playing army like she had with her brother as a young girl. They moved toward the thicket, slipping around saw palmetto and climbing over a fallen tree. The silence deepened, and it wasn’t until Tim took her by the shoulders and shook her did Maureen realize she was screaming.
A pile of arms and legs with Geoff’s head resting atop it lay before her. This time, she threw up bile filled with specs of egg and sausage. She staggered back, and Tim caught her as she fell. Realizing she was in his arms, Maureen jerked violently, and twisted from his grasp. She got to her feet and brought up the gun.
“Who’s there? Come out now!” She moved the rifle from side to side, looking for a target. When one didn’t appear, she lowered the weapon. “This is nuts.”
All clothes had been torn away, and the body parts looked like crabs had been gnawing on them for days. Geoff’s head was smashed, and missing an eye. Maureen did a fast count and realized two limbs were missing, a leg and an arm. While they were gnawed badly, all the hands and feet appeared to be intact. No missing fingers.
There was blood everywhere, which made it hard to determine which way the missing body parts had been taken. Maureen heard growling, and then a gunshot rang out. It missed wildly, and cut through the bushes to their left. Another shot, then another, and neither came even remotely close.
“That could be Hawk’s gun,” Tim said.
Maureen remembered their dead guide’s pistol was missing from its shoulder holster. “Great,” she said as she stared down the rifle barrel, aiming at the thicket.
“It was six-shooter, so there should only be three shots left,” Tim said. He was behind her now, looking over her shoulder.
They waited.
With a suddenness that made Tim gasp, the world went silent. Every bug, bird, lizard, and frog fell still. Even the wind died away, leaving a stagnant stillness. The smell of dirt and decay saturated the air.
Awake Page 6
