by Joshua Guess
As I sawed with the sharp edge, I fervently thanked every god and spirit I could think of. The belt wasn’t one I usually wore, and I’d left it on my riot suit by sheer chance. Before realizing I had the tool, my plan had been much less neat and clean. I’m not sure if I’d have been able to snap off a piece of the plastic making up my armor, but I’d have tried. And if it wouldn’t cut the rope, it would definitely cut me. Lubricating my skin with blood might have let me slip the ropes.
But that would have made twice in my life I’d escaped a cell by cutting my wrists, and I’ve always considered myself a trailblazer. Great artists don’t reuse old works.
My heart hammered as I cut through my bonds. I became hyper aware of every small sound, though central to my attention was the low slosh of water coming from a tub above me. The run of pipes gave me a pretty good idea where it was. I followed them with my eyes, a little like reading a map of the house. The bathroom was about fifteen feet away from me, diagonally and to the left. The hot water heater sat below it.
My brain spun through all the errata accumulated about houses and plumbing. It was only when I noted the wires when everything locked into place.
Fact: water pipes coming into a house are generally grounded. Pipes carrying hot water from the water heater sometimes aren’t. I wasn’t sure about the drains, but in a house this old I felt moderately confident nothing was up to any sort of modern code.
The plan blossomed in my head fully formed within seconds. There were a lot of unknowns, but you know what? Fuck it. When one of the known factors is a brutal assault and probable death, you throw the dice.
The ropes parted, freeing my hands. I had to suppress the urge to bolt to my feet. The last thing I wanted was to make noise and draw attention. Instead I stood with care and reached down to pull the chair up through the coiled bonds around my ankles. It wasn’t as easy as I thought; the chair had curved feet that required a lot of wiggling to pull free. After thirty seconds I almost gave up and pulled my feet free of the boots, but got the damn thing free before it became necessary.
After shaking the loose rope off my feet, I stepped silently over to the water heater. Not needing to worry about anything but function, whoever installed it had chosen to put it directly below the bathroom. The tub drain pipe was right there.
I put the chair down and stood on it. It took me a few very careful swipes with the blade of my tool to peel away the insulation around the wire leading to the water heater. I didn’t get all the way down to copper, leaving a paper-thin layer of plastic in place. I didn’t have gloves on, after all. Electrocution was bottom of my list of things to do today.
Well, electrocuting myself, at any rate.
Shoulders burning with the effort of working with my arms raised straight up—short people problems—I carefully flexed the wire, stretching the thin film of remaining plastic. I worked some slack into it, too stretched to flatten back out, and with a quiet sense of joy I snagged the little pocket of plastic and pulled.
Glorious red metal peeked through. I jammed it against the tub drain.
The muted flash of a spark coincided with a shout of pain and a lot of splashing. I heard my guard yell something unintelligible from her post, then rapid footsteps away from the basement door.
I jumped down and hauled ass. I’m 90% sure I did a Barry Allen and momentarily became The Flash.
I’m an only child, but I grew up around a lot of kids. Anyone who has ever played kid games has been chased. As I darted up the steps, memories flooded through me, no less vivid for being twenty years old. Before it had become a prison for malcontents, the basement of the giant house I grew up in was a place where children played. I’d been chased up those steps a hundred times.
The sense of being hit by a slice of slowed time was exactly the same. You know what I’m talking about; the weird loss of momentum you feel when going from running forward to running up. Like your legs are rusted pistons and your body weighs ten tons.
I pushed through it, though. The door grew large and suddenly I was there, praying to whatever old god looked out for wayward ladies confronted with potentially locked doors.
I turned the handle. It opened.
Fuck yeah.
I stepped onto a landing. I’m sure the right side of it went into the house itself, obvious since my guard ran off that way, but I didn’t even glance that direction. All my attention was for the left, which contained another door with a square window, through which I saw the prettiest sight imaginable: open sky.
I yanked it open and booked it, letting my legs stretch out into the longest lope I could manage. It was a rare thing for me to be in a situation where I couldn’t plan or think through the possibilities. On one hand, it was terrifying. I had no resources, no idea where I was, and no way to plan for anything past this run until I was somewhere safe.
On the other, all I had to concern myself with was getting away. I wasn’t in a crazy guy’s basement anymore, and that seemed like a pretty good place to start.
13
I’m not a survival expert by any stretch of the imagination. I know the basics better than your average person, but I can’t make medicine out of plants I find or, like, MacGyver a shelter out of a roll of tape and some old boxes. I’m smart enough to know what I need to survive, have enough ingenuity to make it happen, and enough of a realist to know when I’m beat.
I was beat.
I ran for what felt like miles across the open fields near the farmhouse. It was a stroke of luck that my pursuers, when they realized what happened, went for vehicles rather than chase me on foot or just shoot at me from a distance. The fields I ran through were thick with shaggy yellow grass and pocked with irregular features. One of them was a small creek I jumped. About five feet wide and cutting deep into the side of a gently rolling hill, it would have meant a nosedive into the water for the car following me.
Sure, my captors probably knew that and had thought of a way around. But it bought me enough time to make it into the woods at the edge of the property.
I barely slowed as I weaved my way through the trees. The land here was rocky enough that my boots only touched dirt about half the time, and since I pushed toward the thickest part of the wood, I had a lot of cover. Only a panicked reminder to myself, repeated like a mantra, kept me from slamming into branches constantly. I didn’t want to leave an easy trail to follow.
I slipped through a particularly dense stand of evergreens, so thick there was no way I could be seen from the other side, and took a break. I crouched beside the trunk of a pine and listened.
The sound of loud, angry voices echoed in the distance. Branches snapped. I dug my hands in the dirt near the base of the trunk and rubbed it on my face. Not much I could do about my clothes, but they were already dark. If I could make until night, they’d blend. My light brown skin would be easier to see, and the key to any good camouflage is breaking up regular shapes like faces.
I had no idea if the thick, random dollops of earth running across my face would do the trick, but I fervently hoped so.
Rather than risk being heard, I just waited.
That’s the part Tolkien and his spiritual successors rarely touched on: adventuring is scary, hungry, and often boring. There’s a lot of sitting around. You don’t get into or out of Mordor in a day. There are endless slogs and long nights in between all the action-packed bits.
I listened as the sound of snapping twigs moved and faded. I didn’t relax, but the seemingly endless increase in my stress levels finally topped off and remained steady. The fact that I couldn’t hear anyone approaching me was excellent. It also poked the irrational part of my brain, which demanded that the absence of a threat was in itself terrifying, with a stick.
Minutes stretched, feeling like hours. I shifted my weight as well as I could without making noise. Crouching for a long time was uncomfortable, and the last thing I wanted if I had to dash off again was a cramp.
Forcing myself to be hyper-vigilant for any indication my pursu
ers were close also made me keenly aware of my own body. My stomach rumbled with hunger, and whatever slaking effect my drink of water back at the house had was long gone. I was prepared to go days or weeks without eating—not a stranger to the experience—but I’d been exerting myself pretty hard. Dehydration kills in days, and I was already running a deficit.
“Not the priority,” I muttered under my breath.
Live first, that was the top of the list. I would have plenty of time to suffer the perils of dehydration and hunger if I didn’t get caught or killed.
After a quarter hour there was a change in the quality of sounds coming from the people looking for me. I’ll give them credit; they were thorough. They stayed close enough to where they had last seen me that I had to assume they possessed some degree of tracking skills. The light conspired against them, however, as the setting sun brought deep and heavy shadows to the woods.
The sounds of swishing branches and scraping shoes vanished in a space of a minute, even the distant odd noise I’d been listening for no longer apparent. What I could see of the sky between the thick boughs of pine needles was pale blue giving way to streaks of brilliant red and orange, but the forest floor was inky black interspersed with dark grays.
Horror movies contain valuable lessons. The most relevant being that when you’re being chased through the woods, there is always a moment when you think you’re finally safe and leave your hiding spot. That’s when the dude wearing inappropriate sports equipment pops out and cuts your head off. No thanks.
First rule of survival when you’re lost is to sit still and wait for rescue. The same works when you’re trying to stay hidden and people have moved on from the spot they’ve been searching.
So I settled in and waited, fear keeping me awake even if boredom fought with it for control.
***
I moved out a few hours later. That was a guess, me being without a watch, but full night set in and I kept an eye on the position of the moon to give me a vague idea of how long I’d been sitting there.
Louis County wasn’t small, but neither was it huge. In the years I had lived there, not many corners went unexplored. I knew the basic topography and layout of the roads crisscrossing it, so once I found a road and identified it, I would have some idea where I was and how I could get home.
I ran the risk of being spotted if my captors were out looking for me, the roads being the obvious choice. They probably weren’t the only survivors out there, either, and let’s not forget about zombies. I wasn’t lacking for choices when it came to potentially fatal obstacles out here in the wild.
And it was the wild, no matter how tame this land had been before the cataclysm two days prior. Being experienced with the weird dissonance when expected reality gives way to a nightmare helped me cope a little, but I still had to remind myself that every foot of ground was now, for all intents and purposes, a war zone. Surviving meant treating every step forward as a move through hostile territory.
It took another hour or so to find the nearest road. I stuck to wooded areas and took my sweet time, stopping every few dozen steps to listen for sounds of pursuit by the living and dead alike. When the irregular ground gave way to a wide swath of even blacktop, I cried a little. Then I stepped back into the grass and followed the road without actually being on it. I figured it would be easier to throw myself to the ground and pretend to be a log if I didn’t have to scramble off the road to do it.
I didn’t recognize anything at first. There weren’t many curves or features to separate the road from any generic stretch of asphalt in the county. I trudged along at a slow, steady pace while I fought down a rising weariness. I’d been awake a long time.
Seventeen years later I came to an intersection. I had to get right next to the signs to read them—the moonlight was shit for reading—and saw the names Poplar and Branch at right angles to each other in white-on-green.
I was in the far north of the county, an area thick with farms, a pretty nice Bed and Breakfast, and a small boutique winery. It was as far from my place as I could get and still be in the county.
I breathed a deep sigh of relief. Being lost, even in the larger context of a familiar location, sucks in every way possible. Having a bearing settled me down a little, pushed back on the reservoir of panic barely kept in check from the moment I had been taken. I knew which way to go from here.
I kept to the same routine of following the road without being on it. Despite the exhaustion I fought from being awake for most of a full day, I was lucky to be moving along at night. Zombies seemed to need rest of some kind, or at least recognized night as an overall bad time to hunt efficiently. The closest I came to finding any were some distant moans, which if I’m honest could have just as easily been people having some end-of-the-world sex.
The roads were mostly clear this far from town. The first few miles were pristine, actually, showing no sign of the recent apocalypse. Moving further toward Wallace brought fresh proof, however, most often in the form of discarded clothing and other sundries.
Then I found a car.
It was an older model hatchback, dark in color. It sat half on the road, left wheels mired in the rut running alongside it. There were no bodies in evidence, so I took a chance. The thing might not run—I mean, it was just sitting there—but I was tired enough to risk finding out for sure.
I approached with the wary caution of a Neanderthal clutching his spear in the presence of a great mammoth, unsure if it was dead. I circled the adorable little car, lowering myself to the pavement to look beneath it. No zombies waited to snag my ankles, though there was a wide wet patch of asphalt. Something was leaking. I didn’t smell gas.
Working up the courage to look inside took a few seconds. Logically I knew most of the reasons for the car sitting here were awful, but that didn’t prepare me for what I might see. In the heat of a fight or the stress of an immediately dangerous situation, the sight of death didn’t have the impact it would on a quiet night like this where the dangers were somewhat removed.
Hands curled around my eyes, I pressed against the window to see inside. It looked empty, but the world was too dim to be absolutely certain. Instead of opening the door—my first instinct—I caught myself and decided it would be better to wake up anything that might hiding in there with at least a pane of glass between us.
Nothing stirred when I rapped my knuckles against the passenger side. Then I opened the door. Light filled the car and spilled across the ground, revealing a vehicle empty of occupants. Clothes were piled in the back, filling the floorboard and making a fabric tidal wave reaching into the front. The keys were in the ignition.
I threw myself over the passenger seat and came to rest behind the wheel, then leaned over and pulled the door shut. Pushing down excitement and dread, I reached for the keys with trembling fingers. The key turned, the engine coughed, and after a stutter it caught and purred to life.
An array of lights blazed from the dashboard in the darkness, but I ignored them. If the car couldn’t make it across the county, so be it, but I would waste not another minute of my life worrying. I was in a ride that presumably could move, and I made it do just that.
I didn’t turn on the headlights, and the car was old enough that it didn’t have running lights that were always on. It was pretty much ideal for not being seen from a distance. I couldn’t do anything about the sound, but hey, nothing is perfect. I didn’t have to walk for ten miles. It felt like my goddamn birthday.
I drove as fast as the roads would allow. Even on the straight stretches I had to avoid occasional debris, so it wasn’t exactly Mad Max in a hatchback.
Five miles into the trip I figured out why the car had been abandoned: the radiator was fucked. Steam billowed out as yet more lights winked on across the dash, and the temperature gauge edged into the red. I began to regret pushing the car so hard, so fast. Chalk that up to a profound desire to put distance between me and the assholes who took me captive.
I eased up
on the gas and babied the car the rest of the way home, or rather the rest of the way to where I was taking it. On the off chance someone noticed the trail of smoke and steam belching from the engine, I didn’t want to draw attention to where I lived. Instead I stopped a mile away and abandoned the car. I hoofed it back to my place.
During that jog several possibilities played out in my head. It was likely Jem brought the others back here and all of them were sleeping in the relative safety of the Lair. If the house was locked, that was okay. I could sleep in the Jeep. I had a spare key for it hidden in my shed.
Keeping my eyes open for zombies, I crunched up the gravel driveway. My pace was slow, footfalls heavy, and I was at the end of my physical and mental endurance when my house came into view over the gentle hill. There wasn’t much I could do about the latter, but I decided to address the former in the coming days and weeks with a diligent helping of cardio exercises.
The lines of my house against the starry sky was wrong. Instead of the expected geometry, a shape sat centered on the roof. I walked up to the house, and from five feet away it was easy to make out the face bundled inside the blanket.
I grinned. “You didn’t have to wait up for me. I wasn’t sure I would make it home tonight.” I tried to keep the words light.
Jem hopped down from his perch on the edge of the roof, landing heavily in front of me. “I never had any doubt.”
As votes of confidence went, it was maybe the nicest thing anyone had ever said about me. Jem was good people.
We went inside together.
