The Survival Pact

by Christy Sloat

  She handed me my sandwich and my stomach gurgled. I was hungry but I didn’t deserve food.

  ****

  “We’re running a bit low on gas,” Lou said, waking me from a small nap. I couldn’t believe I slept. I wasn’t trying to, but with the soft sounds of the road in this massive Jeep, I had no choice. Sleep won and I felt pretty good.

  “Sure.”

  Lou laughed at my sleepiness and pulled into a small gas station. We looked around, again searching for signs of weird. I saw nothing coming or any people in this small town.

  “You see anything?” I asked.

  “No. Which is freaking me out, because this is normally a busy town,” Lou informed me. “I’ll get out and go check the inside; you stay here and guard the Jeep. We don’t know if anyone will try to jack our stuff.”

  She patted the gun on my leg and I knew what she meant; use it if you have to. I got out and stood guard, while watching her back. She walked quietly into the Gas n’ Go and I scanned the area listening for sounds of anything human or dead.

  After sixty seconds, Lou came out shaking her head.

  “Gas it up,” she said, as she pulled her gun out and took watch. I asked no questions as I pulled the lever off and filled up the Jeep until it was full.

  I was informed by the machine to see cashier inside but I ignored it.

  Without permission from Lou I walked up to the front of the store and grabbed a plastic gas can and filled it to the top. She opened the trunk and I placed it inside where there was just a small amount of space. Looking at the food we had, I frowned.

  “Lou, we have way too much food. Will we need all of this?”

  She bit her lip.

  “Not sure. I don’t know what’s in store for us. What if the cabin is overrun by assholes and they want to kill us for our stuff. What if it’s surrounded by those things?”

  She had a point. I closed up the back and that’s when I heard it; something behind me that sounded off.

  I touched Lou’s arm to get her attention.

  “What?”

  Without speaking I pulled my gun from its holster and put up three fingers.

  Silently, I counted, “One. Two. Three.”

  We spun around; guns pointed and saw what it was that was sneaking up on us. Two of the most evil looking Lifeless stood across the street from us. As strange as it was to notice, they were dressed in their Sunday best. Both of them were female. One was wearing a white dress that almost looked like a nightgown; the other was wearing a dress that once probably had been red.

  But the reason they looked evil wasn’t their rotten bodies or their jaws that had seemingly fallen off due to age. No, that wasn’t it.

  It was in their eyes.

  They were red; the purest blood red that you could ever see.

  If you stared too long you could see the inside of hell in those eyes. They weren’t shining, but almost bloodshot and the pupils were totally red.

  And it was at that moment that I believed that these Lifeless were not God’s doing. God would never send the dead to rise and kill mankind. He would never cause such an evil thing to rise up.

  Yes, we had become an evil race of man; probably his worst fuck-up ever.

  And we were guilty of so much hatred. Riots, robbery, mass killings, total disrespect for our country, and that’s just a few of the recent problems. But if there was one thing I knew of God, it was that he loved us and he forgave us for it all.

  “Kill them,” I told Lou. I didn’t realize I had pulled the trigger until they stopped moving toward us.

  Lou put her hand on top of mine and I put the gun down.

  “I think they’re dead enough, girl,” she said with a laugh. “You’re a great shot, Kami. You shot it right in the eyeball.”

  I walked over toward them and sure enough, there were two holes in one of their eyes. I sure as hell did shoot its evil eye. Lou shot the other girl in the head and they lay still and unmoving.

  “Speaking of their eyes, what’s up with how red they are?” I asked Lou. “Lou?” When she didn’t answer me right away I thought maybe she was merely thinking about her answer. I turned around and Lou wasn’t there. She had simply vanished.

  I slowly walked back toward the Jeep as my heart beat a mile a minute. Where could she be?

  As I got closer I could hear muffled sounds but I couldn’t make it out.

  A head popped out of the driver’s side that was not Lou.

  “Get your ass in the car and don’t ask questions!”

  11

  Somehow Emma had found us before we made it to the bar. I didn’t ask questions, just like she told me not to, and I did indeed get into the car. I jumped into the driver’s side right on top of her as she cried, “Get off me, weirdo. I love you, too. But we got two demonoids on our tail and I don’t want to wait and see what they want.”

  I climbed off of her and fell into the back seat. I was so elated to see her that a permanent smile was plastered on my face for the first time in days. I didn’t care that there were in fact two Lifeless following us as we drove away. They began walking faster as we turned the corner.

  “Where? How? What the hell, Emma!” I yelled.

  She waved her tattooed arm at me and said, “I don’t even freaking know, Kam. Call it fate if you want.”

  Sure, I could go with that.

  “I am up for reenlistment and I just didn’t know what to do,” she began as she got us out of the town and back onto the highway. “I had plans to camp out in the Smoky Mountains but it just didn’t work out. Too many people thinking the same thing. You know how I am.”

  Boy did I ever. She hated being around big groups of people, especially when she had a lot on her mind and on her heart.

  “So I drove up to Pine Mountain on the Kentucky side. I camped there once with Dean when we were together.”

  Dean was Emma’s ex when she thought dating was a good idea. It didn’t end well. Emma is more of a non-relationship person and less committed. Needless to say she doesn’t date.

  “It was so peaceful for a while, then it just got, I don’t know, lonely. I started thinking about you guys. It was like something told me I needed to be near you.”

  She turned us down an old abandoned dirt road that was absolutely not on the map.

  “Emma, where in the hell are you taking us?” Lou asked, taking the question literally out of my mouth.

  Emma patted Lou’s hand and said, “Trust me, I know where I’m going. I came from this way and I know it’s safe.”

  Lou nodded and let Emma take us down the road against her better judgment, which for her must have been hard.

  “So how did you find us?” I asked, realizing that nobody had answered that yet.

  “As I was saying, I needed a break and I was missing you guys something awful. So I decided to come into town and pay Roadside Bar a little visit.” She made a sound out of her mouth which told me things didn’t go super well at the bar. “I planned on calling you guys as soon as I had service on my cell, but once I hit town, nothing happened with my phone. And I didn’t find it weird that no one was actually walking around the town until I went into the Roadside.”

  I looked at my phone just to check and see and just like she said, there was no service.

  “I walked into the bar, hoping for a drink and was met with pure chaos. Those demonoid’s were killing everyone in that bar. I totally froze, man. I reached for my gun but it was too late, everyone was already dead. I killed as many of those things as I could and then I ran outside. My plan was to find you guys and get us the hell out of here.”

  The look on her face was something I had never seen before, because it was the face of fear. Emma hardly ever looked scared. Even the night that we got caught by her dad smoking cigarettes and drinking underage for the first time in Washington, s
he wasn’t scared. I almost peed my pants when he yelled at us, but not Emma. She just sat there and listened to him talk about how bad it was for us. And the time we wrecked the car on the way to Florida for one of our annual girls vacations. We hit another car all to avoid running over an alligator. I was scared out of my mind, but not Emma. Even Lou cried that day.

  This time Emma was terrified and it told me that I needed to be as well.

  “I walked around the corner as quiet as I could because I knew that there were some drifting demons walking around. And I saw Lou’s Jeep.”

  “How’d you know it was mine?” Lou asked.

  Emma laughed. “You’re the only one I know who has BIOHZRD as their Tennessee plates, Lou.”

  I hadn’t even noticed Lou’s plate. I cracked up at how funny and perfect Lou’s plate number was to our current situation.

  “What? I knew this was gonna happen and I knew my Jeep would be holding some biohazardous women inside.”

  “We aren’t hazardous, trust me. Those things in that bar, they were,” Emma said, as she drove the Jeep over the sandy hills. “They all don’t have the blood eyes but the ones that do are the worst. They’re a bit faster than the others. Anyone know what they are yet?”

  I shrugged my shoulders. “Lou seems to think that they’re God’s way of cleaning up his mess again. But I don’t think so.”

  Lou shook her head at me and said, “What else could they be, Kami?”

  “They’re the work of something evil. That’s the Devil’s doing,” I said. They didn’t have to agree with me on the subject but I knew that this was the work of evil. I would do my best to find out who sent them and how to kill them all. I was a reporter after all, wasn’t I?

  “Oh shit!” Emma yelled, pulling me from my trance. I followed her gaze and saw what looked like a tornado crashing through the mountain road we were headed up. Emma threw the Jeep into Reverse and backed up as fast as she could. Then slamming it back into Drive, headed back to the town we were driving away from.

  “We have to get away from that thing and get to shelter fast!” Lou advised.

  Without saying one word Emma did just that. She was back to being the Marine I knew and drove the empty streets until she got onto the highway. Once there we saw where all the people in the town had gone. They were stuck in the biggest traffic jam I had ever seen. This one could put NYC traffic to shame. All cars were at a standstill. Most of them packed down with belongings.

  As we got closer I noticed the bodies hanging out of the cars or onto the road. The dead were still ripping people from their cars and ending their life as Emma drove down the shoulder lane passing people by. Some people tried fighting back while others were completely helpless. I looked behind us and I saw the tornado coming right for us.

  Why was it following us?

  It was like it was headed for us no matter where were went.

  “There!” Lou pointed to a toll booth garage. Emma drove around the toll booth, without paying of course, and tucked the Jeep between the garage and another building to the side.

  “What are you doing? You have to put the Jeep in the garage! Drive straight through it.” Lou yelled, referring to the locked garage doors as the wind outside picked up drowning out her voice.

  “No! Those doors are too strong for this Jeep. They’ll ruin the car and our way to safety. Trust me.”

  All three of us held hands as the wind screamed outside and the car shook back and forth. We were going to die in Kentucky where a wild tornado sprung up out of nowhere. We would never even get close to Washington.

  Parts of the building crashed down on the car and the front window was covered in a matter of seconds by debris. Emma remained calm and quiet while Lou screamed as things hit the car. I cried and whimpered quietly. Then I did something I haven’t done in years, not since I was a little girl; I prayed.

  God wasn’t something that I believed in as a teenager or an adult. I let him go just like I let my priorities in life go.

  But it was then that I realized he didn’t let me go.

  I prayed to him then and asked him to let us live.

  I promised him that we were going to kill those Lifeless and we would save as many lives as we could along the way, as long as we could just get to our destination. I promised to never let him go again. I also promised to journal all about this story so others could know what happened to us all in the future. If there was a future.

  When the wind stopped, I said Amen. And the sound and the shaking stopped like it had never even started. It was instead eerily quiet.

  I pushed the door open and ran outside looking around us. The garage was totaled and all of the cars on the highway were gone, and the lifeless with them.

  I realized that the tornado wasn’t following us at all.

  “Kami are you out of your damn mind!” Lou yelled, as she came out of the Jeep.

  There was a stillness to the land before me that I hadn’t seen in a long time.

  “I know why the tornado came our way and why it did what it did,” I told her in a quiet voice.

  She looked at me sideways. “You’re scaring me, Kami.”

  I looked at her and said, “That tornado wasn’t trying to destroy the earth or to hurt us.”

  “Oh no? What was it then?” Emma asked, as she got out of the car.

  “It was sent here to destroy the lifeless that filled that town. And to take the dead and the living that remained on the road,” I said, pointing to the road.

  “Sent here? By who?” Emma asked.

  It took me a moment to admit, but once I did I felt better. “God.”

  “’God will come like a thief in the night,’” Lou recited.

  I nodded.

  “So the lifeless are the Devil’s doing and the tornado was God?” Emma asked, as she bit her lip.

  I nodded. “That’s my theory anyway. Now let’s get out of here before more Lifeless come our way.

  We got back into the Jeep and hit the now clean highway.

  12

  Sometime during the drive I nodded off. When I woke up I had an awful cramp in my neck and an ache in my head. I wished that I could say that I felt better after my little nap, but that would be lying. Instead, I felt worse.

  Emma was asleep in the passenger seat and Lou was now driving. I didn’t know when they switched but it must have been while I was drooling on myself.

  “Where are we?” I whispered.

  “We just crossed over the Kansas state line about an hour ago. We have an hour to go before we hit Colorado. You hungry?” Lou asked. I was hungry actually, which was probably the source of my headache. I nodded and she tossed me a bag of crackers.

  “Thanks. I can’t believe I slept through Missouri.” I ate and watched out of the window looking for Lifeless lingering in the shadows. Shit, it was almost dark!

  I slept the whole day away.

  “Yeah, you slept through two pee stops and one gas up. You’re an incredible sleeper.”

  I shook my head. “No. I just haven’t gotten much sleep. Hey did you sleep?”

  She nodded. “Yeah. I’m good. Don’t worry about me. Hey I want to apologize to you for earlier.”

  “When?” I asked, trying to jog my memory.

  “When you told me about your theory about the lifeless being the work of evil. I totally didn’t believe you and I’m sorry. I guess I just hoped that evil wasn’t here on earth. I do think they’re demons, now that I really think about it. It makes sense.”

  I shrugged.

  “It didn’t matter that you didn’t believe me, Lou. You didn’t have to agree with me is all I’m saying. The truth is we don’t know what the hell is going on. Shit, we may never find out.”

  “But we will survive,” she said, like it was a promise. “I tried to call Ida but she ain’t picking up. I th
ink she’s dead.”

  Her eyes went glossy and I felt my hunger go away and nausea take over. I put the box of crackers down and hung my head. I was a murderer.

  I didn’t say anything to Lou because I was also a coward. As I sat back in my seat the visions of me helping Ida die replayed in my head. The darkness outside my window flew by me and I saw Lifeless among the trees.

  “Shit! There they are!” I said to Lou, pointing to a group of Lifeless right out my window.

  She slowed the car down and spotted a cluster of them out her window.

  “They’re all over this highway,” Emma said, as she rubbed sleep from her dark eyes. She pulled her long hair up into a high ponytail and urged Lou to speed up instead of slowdown more than she was. Lou hit the gas and we sped away from the lifeless. Some of them followed us faster than others. It was hard to see how many were following us, but it looked like a good cluster of about thirty.

  They limped and some crawled, but then there were the runners. They creeped me out the most. They were the freshest of the dead. They probably died recently, which explained the lack of rot in their bodies.

  “We have to get off this highway,” Lou said. I couldn’t watch the runners any longer or I’d never sleep again. “I think we should try to find another route. I’ve seen cars on this highway, which is good, but I don’t like the darkness ahead of us.”

  The lights that normally lit up a highway were gone. It was like the electricity was out all over and we were driving with just headlights to guide us; which was fine, but eerie.

  “I don’t know what we’re going to see up ahead.”

  “You mean like in Kentucky?” I asked her.

  She nodded.

  “Where do we go if we bypass highways?” I asked. “If we take side roads we might run the risk of being near mass gravesites and towns. We can’t be near towns right now. I vote we just keep driving.”

  Lou looked at Emma awaiting her response.

  “I agree with you both for different reasons. I understand that we might hit another pile-up like in Kentucky, and that was impenetrable. But then again we can’t go near major towns. I say we just keep driving for now and if we hit a pile-up we do plan b.”