“What happened?”
He drew a deep breath and turned to look away to the west, staring out into the empty space. “We were on the road near the North Carolina coast,” he said, speaking surprisingly softly so that I had to listen carefully to catch his words. “We had parked out front of a diner. It was deserted. The windows had been broken in and everything inside burned or looted. There was blood on the footpath.”
“Yet you stopped? Why?”
“We thought there might be something left worth taking.” He said simply. “Maybe some water or soft drink.”
“So you went to investigate?”
“Yes. I left my wife, Danita, and my two girls in the car. Danita had my handgun and I had kept the engine running.”
“And someone tried to carjack the vehicle?”
Mike nodded. “Some sorry son-of-a-bitch came from a drainage ditch on the far side of the road. It was a trap. He’d been waiting for someone to stop. He was a scarecrow in tattered rags. He looked like he’d come off a deserted island; messy tangle of beard, straggly hair and wild eyes. He ran at the car.”
“What did you do?”
“I heard Danita scream. I was inside the diner. There was a drinks refrigerator in a corner. It had been overturned. I was standing it upright so I could open the doors.”
I asked again. “What did you do?”
“I dropped the refrigerator and ran back outside. The guy was at the car door. He had a gun of his own, and it was pointed through the window into my wife’s face.”
“A rifle?”
“No,” Mike shook his head. “A handgun. Maybe a Glock. I never bothered to check,” he muttered dryly.
“Go on…”
At last Mike turned and met my eyes. “I had the automatic rifle in my hands. The guy had the barrel of his gun to my wife’s head. He ordered my two daughters out of the car and held one of them in front of him like a shield.”
“He wanted the car?”
“He was shouting. Crazy stuff. He was unhinged. He wanted everything – food, water. He wanted me to drive him to God’s house.”
“What?”
Mike shook his head. “He was convinced God lived about ten miles further north of the diner. He wanted me to drive him there. God was expecting him, he said.”
Everything went quiet for a moment. Mike’s gaze became almost introspective – like he was replaying the incident in his mind.
“What happened?” I asked quietly. I was writing all of this down as quickly as I could, the notes almost indecipherable as I tried to match pace with Mike’s story as he told it.
“Danita started to get out of the car and my daughter stumbled. For a split-second the guy was out in the open. I could see his chest and head over the top of the car’s roof.”
“You fired?”
“Yes,” Mike said without hesitation. “I shot him in the chest first. He went over backwards in the dirt. I ran around the car and kicked his gun away from him, then pressed the muzzle of the AR into his forehead and asked him again if he really wanted to visit God, because I was going to show him a shortcut… He made the mistake of trying to scramble for his gun.”
I didn’t ask the next question, even though perhaps Mike was waiting for it. I had read Danita Jackson’s cryptic note in the journal. I knew how the story ended.
‘Mike had to kill again.’
The Jackson family’s desperate flight to the North Carolina coastline had been a journey of blood and horror. The dashed notations barely gave a glimpse of what Mike and his family had endured.
I found another short entry near the middle of the diary and copied it into my notebook before asking Mike about it.
‘Three of ‘them’ killed at farmhouse. Drenched in blood. The sky is black with smoke.’
“By ‘them’, I assume your wife meant ‘Afflicted’, right?”
Mike nodded his head. “That note was from when we tried to hide up at an old farmhouse,” he said. “It was just after sunrise. I knew we had to get off the road. The whole world was burning – fields, forests… you could hardly tell the difference between night and day.”
“And there were ‘Afflicted’ waiting in the house?”
“We didn’t even go to the house,” Mike smiled ironically. “I thought it would be too risky. I thought that maybe the owners were holed up inside, defending their place. So we found a barn that was a few hundred yards away from the main building. It was nothing special – just a typical barn. The doors were closed. I got out of the car real quick, pulled them open, then drove the car inside.”
“Without checking?”
He nodded his head, suddenly disappointed with himself. “It was my mistake,” he admitted and shook his head sorrowfully, the burden of that error still weighing heavily on his shoulders.
“What was inside the barn?”
“Three of the ‘Afflicted’,” Mike said. “They had mutilated a cow. Ripped open its guts. They were eating it, crouched down in a dark corner of the barn in the dirt and filth, digging their bloodied hands inside the dead beast’s guts. The headlights hit them – lit them up. Danita and the girls screamed. It was fuckin’ gruesome, man,” he shook his head. “Never seen anything like it…. And I’ve seen a lot.”
“What did you do?”
“The sound shocked them, but only for a split-second. Then two of them were up, running at the car. One of them threw itself over the hood and tried to smash its fist through the windshield. The other went round to the passenger side and started hauling on the door handle. Danita was choking with fear. There was blood smeared all over the car. I put the muzzle of the 40 cal against the windshield and blew the first one’s head off. Glass blew out all over us. Then I fired a shot right across my wife’s face. I hit the one that was bashing against the passenger side door in the neck. It went down.”
“And the third one?”
“I lost sight of it,” Mike said, and his voice turned ominous. “That frightened me more than the ones that had attacked us. I didn’t know where the third one was.”
“What did you do?”
“I tried to reverse out of the barn. It was chaos. The girls in the back seat were screaming, the windshield was shattered, the windows smeared with blood. My ears were ringing from the concussion of the gunshots and the barn was dark. Everything went to hell in a hand basket for a few minutes.”
“But you got out of there…”
“In a mess,” he qualified. “The car hit the barn door as I was reversing. Something tore off the tail. I never stopped to check. I just stomped my foot hard on the gas pedal. We broke out into early morning daylight. I could see the one I had shot through the windshield lying in the dirt, and the one I had clipped in the neck. It was on its knees, getting back to its feet like nothing had happened. Then the third one came from out of the fucking sky.”
“What?”
“It must have climbed up into the rafters of the barn,” Mike’s expression turned to a look of confusion. He shook his head as though the answer eluded him and then shrugged his shoulders. “I heard it hit the roof just as I was reversing. I spun the wheel hard and the momentum ripped it loose. It went rolling across the ground and came to its feet.”
“Did you keep on reversing?”
“No,” he said pointedly. “My terror had turned to rage. I got out of the car with the AR and fired a burst at the thing rolling in the dirt. Tore it to bloody pieces. I did the same thing to the one I had hit in the neck. It rushed at me, snarling and howling. It was ten yards away when I fired. I hit it in the mouth – tore the top of its head clean off.”
The wind died down and the world turned very quiet. Muffled by the walls of the modest home I could hear the pug dog barking. The smell of smoke came and went on the air.
I thumbed through the journal and found another entry that had leaped out at me as I had been glancing through the rumpled pages. There was no date above the entry. It was just a few dashed lines, obviously written in a hur
ry. I read the words out loud.
‘Coast at last. We found a small abandoned boat. Firefight in the boat yard, but we got away. Mike says we’re safe now.’
Mike nodded his head. “Yeah,” he said. “The boat yard.” He scraped the palm of his hand across his jaw and the stubble of his beard rasped and crackled.
“Want to tell me about it?”
He said nothing.
I persisted. “Mike, this was the pivotal point of the journey. You refuse to let me interview your wife and children, and you refuse to tell me where the island was that you found. At least tell me this; tell me how you got to a boat and got offshore. Who was the firefight with? Other people?”
Mike Jackson said nothing. He balled his fists and buried them back into the pockets of his jacket.
I felt my frustration rising and out of desperation, I made a deal with the Devil.
“Tell me the events surrounding this journal entry, and I’ll go,” I offered. “That will be the end of the interview. I’ll drive off and you’ll never see me again.”
“No more questions?”
“None. Just tell me about this,” I stabbed my finger at the words in the little book.
Mike nodded his head slowly, his eyes narrowed and calculating. “Okay,” he grunted at last. “I’ll tell you, and then we’re done.”
I set the journal aside and snatched out my notebook. Mike squatted down beside me and picked up a fallen twig from the ground. He scratched a map into the dirt at his feet and looked up at me. “We were on the back roads, travelling mainly at night,” he said. “We’d been in the car for almost a week by then, moving slowly. We’d learned that loud sounds attracted the ‘Afflicted’ so we were crawling along, trying to keep the revs low and only using the headlights when we had to. We were somewhere close to the coast. We could smell the salt air, and the side of the road became fringed with mangroves and stagnant swamp water. In the day, we parked up in the bushes and rested.”
“Okay,” I nodded. “I get it. So did you just happen to stumble across this boat yard?”
“Yeah,” Mike admitted. “I didn’t know exactly where we were, just the general direction I needed to keep heading in. The maps were useless. Every time we tried to find a road that would take us east, we had to divert around hot spots.”
“Hot spots?”
“The ‘Afflicted’,” Mike grunted. “They were roaming across the countryside. Houses… whole communities of homes were burned down. Sometimes there would be a wreck of cars blocking the road and we had to backtrack. It was a nightmare.”
“So the boat yard…?” I steered the conversation back onto course. “Tell me about it.”
He hunched his shoulders, stared down at the map he had drawn and then tossed the twig aside. “It was just on sunset. We had only been on the road for an hour. We were driving down this dirt track in the middle of nowhere. We couldn’t see anything on either side of the car. The mangroves were like a wall. Then, suddenly, we came to a wire gate across the road. It was open, hanging back off its hinges like it had been busted apart. There was a sign on the gatepost. It was a boat yard.”
“That was lucky, don’t you think?”
“Yes and no,” Mike said. “It was fortunate, sure. But it was also a consequence of our endeavor,” he said, reciting the phrase like perhaps it was one he had memorized from his days in the military. “We set our objective and we worked towards it.”
I didn’t argue. Now Mike was finally talking freely, I struggled to keep an accurate record of what he said. The words spilled from him in a torrent, and in his voice I could detect hints of the panic, terror and adrenalin of that moment as he relived it.
“There were three boats in the yard. One of them was on its side, up on the shore. It must have been there to be cleaned or repaired. There were two others moored at the end of a jetty. They were both sailing boats. Single masters – just little boats that held a few people.”
“And there was no one around?”
“Not a living soul…” Mike said pointedly. “There was an old truck parked beside a little shack, but the truck was up on bricks – it had no wheels and its bed was rusted out. It could have been sitting there for years.”
“No one in the shack?”
“No,” Mike shook his head. “There were some dirty plates in the sink. The plates were covered in maggots and the floor was thick with rats,” he paused for a moment, frowning. “Best guess? Whoever had been in that shack had left days earlier.”
“And the boats? Tell me about them?”
Mike shrugged his shoulders. “They were little sailing boats,” he looked at me with irritation – as if there was nothing more to explain. “The jetty was up off the ground. It was a ramshackle mess of palings and posts. It must have been high tide. The water was lapping just twenty feet from the shack.”
“So you took one of the boats?”
Mike nodded. “We abandoned the car and transferred everything we had onto one of the boats. There was lots of loose rope lying around on the jetty. It might have been from another boat,” he shrugged. “I don’t know. It looked useful, so we took it too.”
“Anything in the shack?”
“It had been cleaned out,” he said. “There was nothing left in there worth taking.”
I wrote everything down, made sure I had Mike’s story faithfully recorded. I re-read everything twice before I looked back at him.
“But this didn’t end with a simple escape, did it?”
“No,” he said. “You read the journal.”
‘Firefight in the boat yard, but we got away.’
“Tell me what happened.”
Mike Jackson looked suddenly disappointed. “I still can’t work out how they found us,” he admitted. “We were quiet as we could be. There was no shouting, no revving engines… and yet somehow they must have heard us – or maybe sensed us…”
“The ‘Afflicted’?”
He nodded his head. “A dozen of them – maybe more. Danita and the girls were at the end of the jetty, waiting for me. We had the boat loaded up. I was back at the car. There were a couple of bags of clothes – the last things to pack aboard the boat. I heard them behind me. I heard the sound of them running, the shrieking howl of them as they came through the gates. They were like savage animals. They were monsters, drenched in blood and guts, clawing and snarling. They came at a run, incensed, maddened. I dropped the bags of clothes and snatched the AR off my shoulder. I shouted to Danita to untie the boat from the jetty and cast off.”
“You opened fire? Where were you exactly?”
“I was half way between the car and the boat. I was just at the little ramp up onto the jetty.”
“And they attacked you?”
“They came like berserkers,” Mike said. “It is the only way I can describe it. They were just insane – inhuman.”
“How close did they get?”
Mike paused and turned his head slowly. The rush of his words died on his lips for a long moment. “Too fuckin’ close.”
“You ran?”
“For my life,” he admitted. “I put down four or five of them with head shots. They were close range. The others kept coming. I hit a couple in the chest. They went down in the dirt and then got up again. There was simply no stopping them. Even with another dozen guys by my side, I doubt we would have been able to hold them off. They were an enemy unlike anything we have ever encountered before, or ever been trained to confront in combat. They had no morale. They had no feelings. They were just insane, blood-crazed monsters. They can’t be stopped any way other than killing them outright.”
“What was happening on the boat at that time?”
“Danita had got the mooring ropes loose. The boat was just starting to drift away from the jetty. She was firing at the ‘Afflicted’ but she was as much danger to me as she was to them. The girls were screaming, hysterical. I turned and ran along the jetty and leaped for the boat.”
“They chased you?”
“Yes,” Mike nodded. His mouth curled into a snarl. “We didn’t have the sails set – we were just drifting as the tide started to ebb. The only thing that carried us away from the shoreline was our initial momentum. One of the ‘Afflicted’ leaped across the gap and landed on the boat. He flailed an arm at my daughter, Andrea, but didn’t infect her. I blew the ghoul’s head off and the body was flung over the side of the boat.”
“Your daughter was lucky.”
“Yes.”
“And the others? The other ‘Afflicted’ I mean?”
“We were twenty feet away from the jetty by then. We were in the mouth of a river. There were mangroves along the far bank. They wouldn’t make the leap. They hung off the edge of the jetty, but they didn’t go out into the river. I set the sail and finally got up steerage speed.”
I threw down my notebook, raked my fingers through my hair and drew a deep breath. Mike got to his feet and kicked his boots into the dry dusty dirt. I handed him back the precious little journal but to my surprise he shook his head.
“Danita said you can keep it if you want – to help with your book maybe.”
“She doesn’t want the journal?” I was surprised.
“No,” he shook his head solemnly. “We lived through it, Mr. Culver. Whether it’s written down or not, we’ll always remember it. The horror is burned into our minds and memories,” he tapped the side of his head, “and the girls… well they will probably suffer nightmares from all we saw for the rest of their lives. We don’t need the book as another reminder. Take it.”
* * *
Grafton, West Virginia:
There were still blood stains on the walls of the house; dark brown smears that seemed to have been burned like a hot brand into the siding. The scars of old blood were spattered against the windows and around the frame of the home’s back door in crazy hectic dashes and running rivulets. Dead patches of grass surrounded the home as though worn into the earth by the frantic stomping tread of a thousand feet. I’d seen that scorched ground before. It told the tale.
The Enduring: Stories of Surviving the Apocalypse Page 7
