“I’m going to take my hand away now,” said Luke calmly, “please don’t scream or he’ll find us.” He removed his hand.
“Who are...” she started to say, but was cut off by Luke again clapping his free hand over her mouth. He put a finger over her lips and shook his head before taking his hand away again.
“I can hear him in the alley,” Luke whispered as he leaned in close over us. “It sounds like he's searching the car.”
I heard it first, or at least I reacted to it first, looking up toward the ceiling. The rumble of a helicopter closing overhead grew louder until it filled the kitchen. Oh crap, a chopper, it’s the Chinese. There was a shout from the alleyway.
“Sounds like he’s running back to his truck,” Luke said, releasing the girl's mouth. “I'm Luke and this is Isaac,” he said, answering the question that his hand had silenced.
“Come on, and stay down,” I said and headed toward the dining room. I entered just in time to see the armed kid running past the plate glass window at the front of the diner. If he saw us he didn't show it. We cautiously made our way to the window and watched as the kid sprinted for the truck. The older teen had apparently heard the helicopter too, and was herding the kids into the back of the pickup. He motioned for the shotgun toting kid to join them and jumped into the cab.
We watched as the truck started up and tore off down the street. The captive children in the back were huddling in fear while the armed kid leaned defiantly on the back of the cab. We could not see the helicopter from our vantage, but from its sound it seemed to be following the truck. Then the kid made a very bad mistake. His last mistake. He aimed his shotgun skyward and pulled the trigger. In immediate response, a whining roar sounded someplace over us, and I silently willed the pickup to go faster.
Do you know how, in the movies, a line of machine gun fire will leave little pockmarks in the road as it creeps toward a target? That didn't happen. A section of road about two and half feet wide and fifty feet long was pulverized to powder by the rapid fire heavy ammunition. At the end of the trail of destruction, the Toyota pickup was sawed in half by the withering fire.
“No!” I screamed helplessly, thinking of the blameless kids in the back of the truck. I had lost sight of them in the flying debris and dust, and that is something I am thankful for.
My heartbeat thudded in my ears as we waited under the window. Would the chopper land and its occupants search the area? If so, we were toast. From the look that Luke gave me I could tell he was thinking the same thing. Finally after what seemed like an hour, but was in fact probably only five minutes, the chopper flew off. It was then I noticed the gentle sobbing between Luke and me. I looked down at the girl, but left it to Luke to comfort her. I was too angry at the murder I had just witnessed to do anything else.
I knew that the time had come to leave and after seeing the fate of the truck, I was not sure that driving was the best idea. I still had no idea where to go, but it was the girl who helped us find our direction.
Her name was Sarah. While Luke was comforting her, she revealed that she and her friends had come from Providence, an older girl had been driving them north toward some sort of refuge when the looters in the red truck had waylaid them a couple of miles outside of Fort Carter.
Poor Sarah was obviously frightened and traumatized by her recent experiences, so getting information out of her was like pulling teeth, but over the course of the next couple of hours, we managed to learn the important parts of her story. Sarah and her friends had been at a bible school Christmas retreat that was supposed to last from the day after Christmas until New Year’s Eve.
The last time she had ever seen her parents was when they had put her on the bus to be taken to the retreat. Speaking of them brought a fresh bout of tears but she persevered with her story after some coaxing. When the adult counselors started getting sick that night, there had been a panic. The adults, every last one of them struck by the illness within a few hours, had left to seek medical attention, leaving the children in the care of Barbara, a sixteen year old high-school student who was counseling at the camp for the first time.
When New Year’s Day had arrived and no adults had shown up to help them, the children had confronted Barbara. They knew that she had been hiding the worst of what had happened from them. She had been watching the television as their whole world was swept away by the biological strike. Now that the airwaves were silent and it was clear that no-one was coming, she had told the children everything. She had comforted them, letting them know that God was still watching over them. I felt a bitter stab at that, but kept silent, not wanting to upset Sarah.
It was Barbara who had found the message while cycling through the static of silent radio waves looking for news, or anything to say that they weren’t alone.
On one particular frequency the static would be interrupted by a series of beeps every hour and the beeping would last no more than three minutes at a time. Some of the kids said it sounded like Morse code when they listened to it with Barbara, but when Sarah's ten year old brother Johnny, who had recently studied Morse code in the scouts, wrote out the message it didn't seem to make any sense. At least not until Barbara realized that it was written backwards.
Sarah couldn’t remember the exact message, but she did remember enough for us to get excited. She remembered that it was about a place, some kind of safe gathering place in New Hampshire and it instructed listeners to go to the ‘dragon’. Sarah was adamant that the safe haven, as Barbara had named it, was the answer to their prayers. Literally. Apparently Barbara had no clue of where it actually was, but the plan had been to head to New Hampshire and worry about the rest later.
Sarah told us it was a place where all the children of America were gathering, a place where the Chinese couldn’t get to them. I knew that the message had been embellished by Barbara; for her, this Morse code message had seemed like a sign from God, she had told the children as much.
Soon after, she had duly loaded the kids in her charge into the church bus and started the trek north to New Hampshire. They'd almost made it to Fort Carter, less then fifteen miles from where they had started in North Providence, when the red Toyota had run them off the road and the two boys had taken them prisoner. It had been January 4, the same day that I had ventured into town to find supplies.
The two looters had taken their captives to a trailer park that they had made their base. Sarah wouldn't tell us about what had happened while she was a captive of the looters, other than to say that the oldest looter had taken Barbara off to a separate trailer almost as soon as they had arrived and the kids had never seen her again.
Every day since, the looters had loaded them into the pickup and taken them on scavenger runs. I assumed that Barbara was captive in one of the trailers…or worse, dead. But we didn’t have time to go hunting for her, Sarah had no idea where it was or even how far away.
They had been on a run that morning. And the stop near Walt’s Diner had been the first of the day. When the young looter had not been paying attention, a boy named Johnny had convinced her and a seven year old boy named Brent to make a run for it. The shotgun toting delinquent, clearly not as distracted as they had thought, had shot Brent in the back as they jumped out of the back of the truck, and then given chase to Sarah and Johnny. As they ran around the side of the diner, Johnny had stumbled, and his last words to Sarah had been to tell her to keep running. His death had been the result of the second shot I had heard while retrieving the revolver.
There was an old radio in the kitchen. Luke and I had never turned it on, but after hearing Sarah's story he checked it and the batteries still worked. We moved the station bar around for a while, looking for anything other than static, but found ourselves getting no place fast.
“Maybe the place…this dragon safe place, has been taken out by the Chinese already,” Luke said with a shrug.
“Just a little bit longer,” I said, moving on to another station frequency. “It was a church retr
eat, right? Maybe they were listening to AM.”
“Nobody listens to AM radio, man,” Luke said, looking at me like I was stupid or something.
“My foster mother did, on Thursday evenings AM1107 used to have a gospel hour program that she enjoyed.”
“Alright, we can try it if you want,” he still sounded incredulous, but like me, was willing to try anything. I could tell that he wanted the safe haven to be true as much as I did.
I pushed the button that switched the radio from FM to AM and began slowly cycling through the frequencies. Less than a minute later I had found the broadcast. It was just as Sarah had described – sequences of long and short beeps. I knew nothing about Morse code, and although Luke was a scout, Morse code had never been his strong point. Apparently he was more into the outdoorsy and sporty stuff, so we made no attempt to translate it. We simply accepted that the message would be largely the same as Sarah had relayed it to us.
Luke and I grinned at each other over the radio, while an exhausted Sarah slept fitfully on my pile of belongings in the corner. We were excited to finally have an objective, a place where we could try to go to. Then a look of consternation crossed Luke's face.
“New Hampshire is two states away, and we don't know where in New Hampshire this haven might be. This could suck.”
“Oh it's going to suck alright,” I replied. “It’s the middle of winter, and we are going to be walking.”
“What! Why?”
“I think the Chinese are looking for vehicles moving around, probably with satellites or something. Didn't you notice that the first moving vehicle we've seen in days shows up a few minutes before a Chinese chopper? I don't know about you but I don't really want to be driving along when the car I am in is turned into metal confetti by cannon,” I said. Luke blanched, probably thinking of the red pickup's fate.
“It could have been a coincidence,” he said quietly.
“Do you really want to risk it?” I asked.
“Fine, we walk. We're going to need some warmer clothes though.”
“Yeah, our first stop's gonna be Walmart. Hopefully it's as well stocked as the grocery store was. Now what about this dragon clue? Maybe we can work it out and find the place on a map.”
“Okay, I’ll think on it, and we should be able to find a map or an atlas at Walmart,” he said, his face turning thoughtful.
Luke packed up what food we could take with us to eat on the road while I carried a linen tablecloth from the diner's storeroom and went out to the alley. Sarah’s friend Johnny was face down on the cold hard concrete.
It was the third dead body in a week and it didn’t get any easier. In fact, it was worse seeing a little kid like that than it had been seeing my foster parents. Tears stung my eyes as I draped the cloth over him and then knelt next to him. The waste got to me, the life that would never be lived. I cursed the Chinese and the dumb cruelty of the looters as I put my hand gently on the shape of his head. I felt like I should say a prayer or something but the best I could manage was a hoarse, “Rest in peace buddy.”
5
Although we dressed as warmly as we could, we didn't end up taking that much food with us when we left Walt’s – we figured that traveling light was the best bet. Sarah was scared to leave the warmth and safety of the diner, and it was all Luke could do to convince her that it was for the best.
I remember the hard, practical side of me thinking at the time that it might be better to leave her behind, to just slip away while she slept...but I couldn't bring myself to suggest that course of action to Luke. He would have argued anyway and it would have ended in a fight. Looking at how things turned out for Sarah, I've been wondering if leaving her there wouldn't have been kinder.
The walk to the Walmart took us past the shredded remains of the red pickup, and we steered Sarah to the far side of the street and walked so that Luke and I blocked the view of the wreckage. As we were passing the remains of the truck, which had been literally shredded by the high caliber rounds, Luke told me to keep walking as he went across to the wreck.
“Watch it, there's a ton of broken glass and sharp metal that could cut you,” I warned as I gently propelled Sarah on, my hand on the small of her back.
“I'll be careful,” he replied. “I think I see something that could be useful.”
I watched over my shoulder as he reached across the body of the driver and pulled out one of the shotguns that the looters had been using. Miraculously it was undamaged and he raised it over his head triumphantly and ran back to us.
“It's a pump action 20-gauge, my dad and I used a gun just like this for duck hunting last year,” he said. “I'm not going to dig through that mess for extra ammo though; hopefully we can find some at Walmart.” I paused for a moment to check it over; it didn’t have a scratch on it.
“I wouldn't mind an extra box of bullets for my .38 too,” I said, handing it back, before looking up and down the street. “Come on, let's get going.”
“Am I going to get a gun too?” Sarah asked, looking frightened by the prospect.
“No, guns are dangerous,” I replied, thinking back to the first time I had fired one, hitting the sick looter in the leg. “Luke and I will be able to protect you just fine, you don’t need a weapon.” Looking back now, those words make me feel like a liar, but at the time I couldn't have known how things would play out.
We continued walking down Main Street toward the Walmart; it was a walk of about six blocks from the wrecked pickup. The wind picked up, its cutting chill piercing right through my jacket and sweatshirt. I hoped that I could find a more comfortable jacket at the Walmart, perhaps one designed for ski trips, or arctic conditions.
By the time we reached the end of Main, I was starting to second guess my decision to not take the car, wondering whether dying in a shriek of twisting metal and hot raining lead would really be worse than freezing to death in a ditch someplace between here and New Hampshire.
One look at Highway 102 disabused me of that notion however, while in town the streets had been relatively clear of vehicles, the highway was absolutely littered with them. It looked as if anybody that could drive had tried to escape town, and been caught up in the largest traffic jam in history. I wasn't sure that I'd be able to get a car out of town on the highway even if I wanted to. I found myself wondering how many of these cars held the corpses of their owners, claimed by the infection while they tried to escape the town.
“Damn…” Luke said, shaking his head. I waited for him to continue his thought but he lapsed into silence.
“I guess there's no need to look both ways before crossing,” I said, starting across the highway toward the Walmart parking lot. It was meant to be a funny tension breaker, but it came out weak.
“What if there are more bad people like…Bradley, the guy who had us in the truck?” Sarah said, grabbing at my arm from behind. “They could be waiting for us in Walmart... it’s a perfect place to trap people.”
“There could be bad people any place,” I said, trying to sound reassuring. I could tell that the poor girl was on the edge of breaking down into tears again. “We need to get stuff from inside of this place or else we are not going to be able to keep going. It’s a risk that we're going to have to take.”
“Besides if anybody tries to hurt you they've got another thing comin',” Luke said, holding up his shotgun. I felt a ping of dismay as I remembered how useless the kid’s shotgun had proven to be against the Chinese helicopter. Let's hope it doesn't come to that, I thought.
The glass of the large door at the front of the store had been smashed in. We stopped at the threshold and I kept my hand on the gun in my pocket as we surveyed the scene. We could tell at once that some looting had been done here, items were scattered over the floor. In places the shelves had been pushed over, but it seemed to still be fairly well stocked. I still haven’t gotten used to empty stores; they are always like haunted houses, places that once bustled with people on errands and day to day tasks. Remn
ants of the world that was.
I stepped through, careful not to cut myself on the glass around the edges and waved the others through. Once inside we stopped to listen intently, and when after a few minutes we had still heard nothing, I turned to Luke.
“Want to split up, or stick together?” I whispered. That’s the other thing, even though you know these places are empty, you always feel the impulse to stay quiet.
“Together for now,” Luke said, looking a little spooked. “It might take us a bit longer, but I don’t think Sarah should be out of sight. We're not in a hurry, and besides, I'm happy to be out of the wind.”
“Okay, where should we start?”
“Girls clothing,” he said, nodding toward Sarah. “She's by far the most under-dressed of us for this weather, so I know if I'm cold she's gotta be freezing.”
“Girls clothing it is,” I said, with a nod of agreement. “After that, some warmer clothes for us and a trip back to the camping section might be in order.”
It didn't take us that long to get Sarah bundled up with some good winter clothing, including a pair of galoshes and some extra pants and thermal shirts which we put in a new backpack for her. She was mostly quiet, nodding her head yes or shaking it no as we suggested various items of clothing to her.
Looking back, it is easy to see that she was still in shock from what she had seen, heck, from everything that had happened to her since Christmas. In reality we should have all been in shock, but I guess my history was helping me to adapt more readily than would otherwise be the case. As for Luke, well, apart from the slight crack in his voice when he mentioned his parents, he seemed to have weathered the storm remarkably well. He's just made of sterner stuff, I guess. Don't get me wrong, Luke was most certainly affected by the situation, and still is. It’s just that he does a good job of hiding it, he has the heart of a hero... if he'd been born six hundred years ago he would have been a knight, always rushing off to rescue the damsel in distress. After everything that has happened since, I am grateful that we found each other after the infection. I’m not sure that either of us would still be here if we hadn’t.
The After Days Trilogy (Book 1): After Days Page 5
