by Bryan Smith
Aubrey frowned at the ruined buildings. “Looks like a war zone.”
Nick nodded. “That’s exactly what it was. A war we lost.”
“Maybe we should stay on the interstate a while longer,” Noah said, glancing at Nick. “Once you get past the city there’s some smaller suburban areas. They’ll be safer to check out and will probably have most of what we need.”
Nick scratched his beard as he thought about it. “I’m inclined to agree. It looks like shit really hit the fan in a big way here. Some serious firepower was deployed. Machinery of war. A bunch of those buildings were shelled pretty heavily.”
Noah frowned. “Why would that happen?”
Nick shrugged. “I imagine it had a lot to do with how fast things fell apart everywhere. In the case of the military, you had a seriously disrupted chain of command. Some overwhelmed, cut-off units may have opted to utilize some of their deadlier assets in a last-ditch effort to turn the tide against the dead things. Bear in mind, I’m just speculating.”
Noah’s thinking had developed along similar lines upon encountering other scenes of destruction during the first days of his journey. His take on it, however, had been slightly less generous in regards to the military, but he supposed that had been unfair to a degree.
After they’d walked on in silence another few moments, Aubrey said, “My feet hurt. I need some better shoes.”
Noah glanced at her. “Maybe we should raid a bike shop. Pedal our way across the country.”
Nick chuckled. “Or find some horses and a wagon to hitch them to.”
Noah smiled, enjoying the image of him and his traveling companions making the rest of their journey Old West style. “That’s not the worst idea ever, actually. Assuming any horses are still around, that is.”
“Once we get out into the country, we’ll scout out any farms we happen across,” Nick said, a thoughtful look on his face. “Of course, any horses that were stabled at the end are likely either dead or surviving out in the wild. Still, it’s something to keep in mind.”
Aubrey groaned and tugged at the straps of her travel bag. “Ugh. Could we stop a minute? I feel like I’m about to give out.”
Nick glanced at Noah, who shrugged. “All right. Everybody take five. Or ten. Whatever.”
No additional prompting was needed as they all came to an abrupt halt and began the process of shrugging off their various burdens. Noah unbuckled the straps of his backpack and let it fall to the ground with a careless clank.
Linda fell wearily into a sitting position with her back against the concrete median. Noah eyed her curiously as he sipped water from his canteen. She seemed aware of his scrutiny, but wouldn’t meet his gaze. It was part of a continued pattern of avoidance. Most of her rare conversational contributions had been directed at Aubrey. Noah was trying not to take it personally. After all, the horrendous abuse she’d endured for so long had been perpetrated by a man. Yes, he’d been a victim of the same monster, but in her traumatized condition this might be a meaningless distinction.
To be fair, Noah had contributed to this pattern of avoidance, rarely seeking to engage Linda in any way. At a guess, they’d directly exchanged no more than ten words since leaving the old man’s house, the bulk of these being one word replies to simple queries. He examined his role in this now and decided a lot of it was shame-related. She had seen him at his weakest and most ineffectual. A man several decades his elder had beaten him senseless and had done so with ease. And now she was being made to trudge hundreds of miles—so far—toward a destination that meant nothing to her. So maybe she was harboring a fair amount of resentment in addition to a general distrust of men.
She glanced up when he approached her. The look on her face was carefully neutral, evincing no obvious signs of disdain. But there was no warmth there, either.
He offered his canteen. “Water?”
She nodded. “Please.”
He knelt in front of her and let her take the canteen from him, helping her hold it when her hands began to shake. As she drank, he couldn’t help eyeing her ring finger. There was no ring there, but an indentation in her skin indicated one had been worn there for a long period. A wedding or engagement ring from Patrick, probably. Noah supposed the old man had stripped it from her at some point.
She finally pushed the canteen away, wiping her mouth with the back of a hand as Noah screwed the cap back on. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
He hesitated a moment and then sat next to her against the median. She didn’t flinch or otherwise react when he did this, which he chose to interpret as a positive sign. They sat there in silence a while as Nick and Aubrey quietly conversed several yards away.
Then Linda’s head turned in Noah’s direction. “You shouldn’t feel bad. There was nothing you could do. He was strong. It wasn’t your fault.”
Her words took him by surprise. He wanted to say something but was too overcome with emotion to verbalize what he was feeling. Linda seemed to understand and took his hand long enough to give it a light squeeze. She let go of it after barely more than a second and nothing else was said for the time being, but for Noah this was plenty good enough. He suddenly felt better than he had since letting the old man get the drop on him that day.
Twenty-odd minutes later, they were headed down the road again.
27.
They ran into trouble a few days later outside Jackson, the first city of any real size west of Nashville. Until then the one-hundred and twenty-some miles between the two cities had been mostly desolate territory. They encountered no other living humans and no zombies.
Twice they entered smaller towns along the route to hunt for supplies. In one of them, they broke into a boarded-up sporting goods store, where Noah was finally able to exchange his clunky and burdensome old-fashioned frame backpack for a more ergonomically designed one. Nick and the others explored the store while Noah transferred his things from the old pack to the new one. He did this quickly, keeping a wary eye out for Aubrey as he crammed his weed stash into the deepest recesses of the pack, though he believed he didn’t have much cause to worry. As he’d suspected back in Crossville, she’d found and disposed of the last Maker’s Mark bottle, but she left his pot alone. This likely had a lot to do with the way he’d packaged it. It didn’t look too different from his food bundles.
Both towns yielded a generous quantity of basic necessities, things like canned food, bottled water, and toilet paper. The latter was a particular luxury to Noah after years of wiping with an assortment of old sponges he constantly had to clean in buckets of well water. Out on the road, hygiene had become even more problematic. He’d packed two sponges, but cleaning them regularly wasn’t possible, at least not in an effective way. In one particularly dire moment of need, he used yellowed pages from one of his old western novels. To say the least, it was not a soothing experience. So when they found the stash of Charmin in the back of a ransacked Rite-Aid store, Noah felt like he’d discovered the Holy Grail. The only issue was making sure to parse out enough of it at a time so it’d last until they happened upon the next cache of ass-coddling paper nirvana.
By then Linda had been able to start carrying a light bag. They packed it with Charmin, a few cans of food, and a couple plastic water bottles. The practical difference for the others didn’t amount to much, but being able to contribute even in a small way had a discernible elevating effect on Linda’s mood. She wasn’t suddenly smiling all the time, but some of the darkness that’d hung about her like a cloud lifted. Not only that, but she was looking better by the day. No one was ready to pronounce her out of the woods yet, but the overload of antibiotics they’d been feeding her on a daily basis seemed to be doing the job, so much so that they’d begun stepping the dosage down by the time they neared Jackson.
The first hint of something amiss initially appeared as an indistinct dark blur on the distant horizon. Upon seeing it, Noah was strongly reminded of his first glimpse of the giant Crossville
crater. At first he was sure another section of road had been inexplicably bombed, but that impression diminished after another few moments of scrutinizing this new anomaly. Whatever it was, it was still too far away to perceive details, but his subconscious picked up on something in the raw visual data, because he was suddenly sure the anomaly was moving.
He screwed his eyes shut for a moment and rubbed at them with his fists. It’d been a long day of walking and he was tired. The afternoon heat had turned his clothes damp with sweat. He squinted when he opened his eyes again, hoping the perception of movement had been a fatigue-induced illusion. Because if something that size was moving, it could potentially be very bad news.
Nick came to an abrupt stop and raised the binoculars hanging around his neck. The others stopped at the same time, waiting as he adjusted the focus and studied the blur on the horizon. Several silent moments elapsed. As the tension mounted and his impatience for information grew, Noah cursed his lack of foresight. He should have swiped an extra pair of binocs from the sporting goods store when he had the chance. In retrospect, it seemed like an obviously vital tool for survival on the road, but he’d been too focused on making sure his weed was safely stashed away in his new pack.
Aubrey stamped a foot in frustration. “For fuck’s sake, what do you see?”
Nick passed the binoculars to Noah. “We’re gonna have to get off the road.”
For a moment, all Noah saw through the binoculars was a dark blob blocking both sides of the highway. That changed when he adjusted the focus. “Oh, fucking hell.”
He heard rapid footsteps on the asphalt and then Aubrey ripped the binoculars from his hands. She put them to her eyes and held them there a moment before lowering them with a startled gasp. Noah heard terror in the sound. He couldn’t blame his sister. He was pretty terrified, too.
Noah glanced at Nick. “How far away, you think?”
Nick’s brow furrowed. “Couple miles, maybe. Get out that atlas.”
Noah tugged off his pack and knelt in the road as he opened it. He pushed aside some items and pulled out the battered atlas, which was already folded open to the detailed Tennessee map.
As Noah stood up, Nick moved over and studied it with him. The ex-soldier traced a red line on the wrinkled page with an index finger. “Shit.”
Aubrey moved in for a look. “What is it?”
“The next exit’s five miles up ahead.”
“And the last one we passed is four miles behind us,” Noah added.
Aubrey made a fretful sound. “Well, shit. How far are we from Jackson?”
Nick’s index finger traced the red line again. “Bit under twenty miles.”
Noah took a look around. They were still on the long stretch of interstate between Nashville and Jackson where it narrowed to two lanes on each side. Another ten or so miles up ahead it would widen back to four lanes per side, but even that wouldn’t give them enough space to fight their way through that many zombies. Getting off the road was their only option. The problem was that this section of interstate was bracketed by dense stands of forest, some of which undoubtedly covered some tricky terrain.
Aubrey pushed Nick’s hand away and moved her much smaller index finger over the page, deviating from the red line in a northward direction. Noah saw her eyes flick to the distance scale in the corner of the page. Then she tapped a spot where her finger had lingered. “This open area here, it’s not even a mile distant. And look at this little line here…” Her finger moved over the page again. “Shit, I’m not even sure if it’s a road, there’s not any fucking names or numbers or anything helpful like that, but it might be something, some little back country road. And if I’m right…”
Nick nodded. “Eventually it’ll lead to a way out. Shit, it has to, we’re not that far from Jackson.” He took the binoculars back from Aubrey and draped them around his neck. “Saddle up, gang. Time for a nature walk.”
Noah zipped up his pack and pulled it on again. He sensed Linda staring at him and turned in her direction, unable to help wincing as he imagined her climbing the guardrail and negotiating her way through possibly hazardous terrain. On the other hand, she’d endured much worse things.
“You up to this?”
She shrugged. “I don’t exactly have a choice. Do I?”
Noah shook his head. “No. Sorry.”
She almost smiled, a slight twitch of her mouth that was gone so fast Noah wondered if he’d imagined it. “Not your fault.”
Aubrey was already headed for the guardrail. “Stop flirting. In case you haven’t noticed, the zombie part of the zombie apocalypse is a thing again. Let’s go.”
The apocalypse quip made Noah grin. It was the closest Aubrey had come to sounding like her old self since before her long absence. But the grin slipped as the “flirting” part of the comment registered. Sure, Aubrey was being flippant, but, for murky reasons he wasn’t ready to examine too closely, it bothered him.
Linda was no longer looking at him. Noah figured she was feeling some level of vague embarrassment. It felt like a mild setback. Obviously that hadn’t been Aubrey’s intent, but when someone was as emotionally fragile as Linda, it didn’t take much to derail any meager progress. That was something he knew well from personal experience.
But they were in the midst of a crisis and there was no time to worry about it. Nick and Aubrey were already on the other side of the guardrail. Noah cast another glance westward. The horde of zombies was still miles away and moving at the standard sluggish pace, but the dead things weren’t standing still either. Movement was now detectable with the naked eye. Lingering here even a moment longer than absolutely necessary would be a mistake.
Noah and Linda hurried to the side of the road and climbed over the guardrail.
28.
Once they were through the tree line, the ground rose steeply upward, precipitously so. They were forced to crawl up the hill, reaching for and grabbing onto every available handhold. It was similar to mountain climbing, only they were doing it without proper gear and weighted down with supplies. The strap of Noah’s rifle kept wanting to slip off his shoulder. Several times Linda missed grabbing a handhold. Noah was there to steady her every time, otherwise she would’ve gone tumbling back down the hill. The first few times she quietly thanked him, but after that she kept her mouth shut. At first Noah took this as additional evidence of embarrassment, but when he looked at her, he saw nothing but determination in the tight set of her features. She was frustrated by her relative weakness compared to the rest of them and was straining herself to push harder.
After a seeming eternity, they arrived gasping at a more level patch of land and were able to shift from a crawl to walking slightly stooped over. Despite his relief at this development, Noah kept himself positioned behind Linda in case of emergency.
As they continued trudging through the dense woods, Noah’s thoughts turned back to the dead things on the highway. Until just a few minutes ago, he’d been sure the possibility of encountering zombies in large numbers was virtually nil. The original apocalypse zombies had long ago fallen victim to decomposition. Those still animate in spite of decomposition were nonetheless too deteriorated to go shambling down the highway. And so few people were left in the world that the possibility of new hordes of zombies rising should have been remote verging on impossible.
On one of the last news transmissions he’d seen before power went out at the cabin for good, a haggard newscaster said the human race stood “poised on the brink of extinction”, with a projected worldwide death rate in the ninety percent range. Another person on the same broadcast labeled this a conservative estimate, insisting that ninety-five percent was more realistic, with ninety-eight percent not out of the question. It was at about that point that Noah decided to delve into his father’s Blu-ray collection again.
“Hey, Nick?”
The big man was only intermittently visible. He kept disappearing as he threaded his way through the dense greenery. His reply, howev
er, came back loud and clear. “Yeah?”
“You know how there’s basically hardly anyone left in the world?”
The back of Nick’s head came into view for a moment through the foliage. He continued moving ahead without glancing back. “What about it?”
Noah ducked beneath a branch. He experienced a moment of intense panic when he popped back up and realized he’d lost sight of all three of his traveling companions. A big tree—probably the tallest and thickest he’d encountered yet—was right in front of him. He shuddered in relief as he stepped around it and caught a glimpse of Linda’s back.
Once the distress of the moment passed, he pitched his voice louder to catch Nick’s attention again. “So how do you explain that undead mob back there on the interstate? There were hundreds of them, maybe thousands. And they looked more or less freshly risen.”
Aubrey piped up before Nick could respond. “Isn’t it obvious? Some large group of people was holed up somewhere. I guess they were all able to stay safe for a long time, but something happened and now they’re all fucking dead.”
His sister’s theory seemed plausible. And the implications were pretty frightening. “Well, here’s my concern. Whatever happened to wipe out a group this big might still be out there. If we cross paths with it…”
Aubrey grunted. “We’re fucked.”
“Yeah. Basically.”
“You’re both making some big assumptions.” Nick’s voice came in clear as a bell, though he was somewhere well up ahead and out of sight again. “Think back to how it was in the early days. How fast it spread. Maybe these people got complacent about security. All it’d take is one dead thing getting in undetected long enough to infect a few people. Pretty soon, they’re all dead. There’s not necessarily some other big threat looming out there. In fact, I’d bet against it.”
