by Jason Brant
With a gas can in one hand and a piece of hose in the other, she shook her head at Lance as she walked out of the garage.
Chapter 5
The throaty roar of the Stingray’s engine made Lance grin as he floored the accelerator.
He sped down the driveway and over the road before pulling the emergency brake as he crossed into the church parking lot. Spinning the wheel, he slid the Vette sideways, the tires screaming across the pavement. Smoke billowed from the rubber as the car lurched to a stop fifteen yards from the Silverado.
The doc’s eyes grew large as he stared at the Corvette.
Lance stepped out of the car with an enormous smile covering half his face. “Ain’t she a stunner?”
“My God.” Brown walked over, ogling the curved fenders. “I used to have one of these!”
“Really? Lucky bastard.”
“I had to give it up when I went to medical school. I couldn’t afford to drive a car.”
Lance jingled the keys. “Want to take it for a spin?”
“I wish.” Brown nodded to his wounded arm. “I couldn’t shift it.”
“Will you guys stop screwing around and help us?” Cass glowered at them as she cut a length of the hose away with a knife. “I’d like to get somewhere safe before the sun goes down. You know, so we don’t get eaten alive?”
Lance put his hand on Brown’s shoulder. “The world has ended and men are still playing with toys while women yell at them to do something worthwhile. The more things change, the more they stay the same, eh Doc?”
He said it loud enough for Cass to hear and waited for the fallout. Though he’d almost been murdered this morning, he found his attitude turning more jovial by the minute. Finding the car had lifted his spirits.
He wondered for a moment if he was losing his mind. They didn’t have much to be happy about at the moment.
“Do you see this axe on my back? I’m going to shove it up your ass so far you’ll be shitting splinters for the rest of your life.”
“Next she’s going to threaten to withhold sex.” Lance winked at Brown, who turned his back to the women so they wouldn’t see him laugh.
“Sometimes I wonder why I saved you in that alley. You’re such a dumbass.”
“A dumbass that you have sex with.” Lance walked over to a beat-up Ford Taurus and opened the gas cap. He held his open hand up, signaling for Cass to throw him the section of hose she’d cut to an appropriate length.
“Ugh. Don’t remind me.” She whipped the hose at him and it bounced off his chest with a slap.
Lance chuckled as he rubbed his skin.
Eifort brought the gas can over to him, shaking her head. “You guys are crazy.”
They took turns sucking gas from two different cars, each spitting and gagging as the foul liquid filled their mouths. The Silverado had a large tank that took quite a while for them to get three-quarters full.
When they finished, Lance tossed the can and the hose into the back of the truck, knowing they’d have to use them again later.
“Who wants to ride in the Vette with me?” Lance went back to the muscle car and opened the door.
“I’ll drive the truck with Emmett.” Eifort fidgeted with the dog tags hanging around her neck. “You said I needed to protect him, so I can’t let him ride in another car without me.”
Brown shrugged and climbed into the passenger seat of the Silverado.
Lance had a feeling that protecting the doc wasn’t the only reason Eifort wanted to ride with him.
Cass glared at the red car with open contempt. “Why do you want to take that thing? It has zero functional use for us.”
“I believe it was you who told me to have fun while I could. Something about having a short life span nowadays.”
She pursed her lips. “Fair enough.” She started toward him. “But I get to drive it.”
Lance grinned and tossed her the keys, running around to the other door.
Cass opened the small trunk and put her axe inside. She fell into the bucket seat and slid the key in. The beefy engine rumbled to life. From the corner of her eye, she looked over at Lance, who was still grinning at her.
“What?”
“I can tell that you’re just being a pain in the ass because you don’t want to admit how sweet this car is.”
She sighed. “Damn it.”
“Damn it? Does that mean I’m right?”
“Fine, you got me. I’m still trying to recover from this morning. But yes, this is pretty bad ass.”
Lance pumped his fist in the air. “Ka-ching.”
“What?”
“I think that’s the first time I’ve ever been right about what a woman was thinking. We’re on the same page, Cassie.”
“Buckle up, dumbass. And if you call me Cassie one more time, I’m going beat the shit out of you.”
The Stingray fishtailed out of the parking lot, already doing forty miles an hour. Cass shifted with experienced ease, coaxing the car to eighty before laying off as they approached a bend in the road.
“I bet Eifort is cursing at you right now.” Lance looked in the mirror on his door, seeing the truck a few hundred yards behind them.
“She’s probably too busy staring at the doc.”
“You noticed that too?”
“A blind man could see that she’s into him.”
“He’s like twenty years older than she is.”
“So? You’re ancient compared to me, and I still deal with your old ass.”
“Good point.”
Lance thought about what he’d learned of Brown over the past week. His wife died of cancer almost a decade ago, leaving him broken. He’d poured himself into his work, refusing to even consider dating someone again. Childless and unattached to anyone, the man had practically lived at the hospital for the past ten years.
He was a man of singular focus. Lance could appreciate and admire that.
Eifort’s husband left her while she was stationed in Iraq. She tried to call home one day and he simply stopped answering the phone. Her friends finally got a hold of him, only to find out that he’d been sleeping with someone else for a month.
Like so many others of her generation, she was a Dear John, or Jane in her instance, victim. It takes a real piece of shit to leave someone while they are in the middle of a war.
Her parents died during the first week of the infection, leaving her alone and frightened, even as her job with the military required her to keep everyone else calm and safe. She was a hero in her own right, setting aside her own problems to help others.
Oddly enough, the four of them had found each other in the aftermath of the apocalypse. A handful of damaged souls, brought together by an extinction event.
Cass slowed down as they approached a flipped-over school bus in the middle of the road.
Bloodstains ran from several broken windows, trailing into a grass field beside a drainage ditch. Lance grimaced at the idea of children being taken. He knew that most of the world’s kids had been killed just like everyone else, but he tried not to think about it.
Some things were just too horrible.
The truck caught up to them as they drove around the wreckage, using the gravel shoulder. Cass was careful with the accelerator, keeping the car from fishtailing into the field.
She kept their speed down after that, never going above thirty.
Lance watched the calm countryside out the window, letting his mind wander to his earlier conversation with Cass. Her reluctance to go to Greensburg had him questioning what they should do. She’d been right about not wanting to stay at Heinz Field. Was she right about this as well?
They had found, and saved, Eifort and Brown, so the trip hadn’t been without any success. Still, she had amazing instincts and he would be a fool to ignore them.
“Are you sure we should avoid the safe zone?” he asked a few minutes later.
“Yes.”
They passed by a field with a handful of daywalkers shambl
ing through it. Their skin was veined and thinning, the infection twisting their bodies.
“OK.”
“What?” She squinted at him, obviously unsure if he was serious. “That’s it?”
“That’s it. You’ve been right about everything else. Let’s drop Brown and Eifort off, if that’s what they still want, and go somewhere else.”
Cass downshifted, slowing the car down as they descended a large hill. “I thought you said you wanted to hang around there for a while? See if anyone wants to come with us.”
“I want to be with you more.” He shrugged, knowing how corny it sounded. Hell, it was corny, but that didn’t make it not true.
She smirked. “I think all of that loser stuff you told me about yourself was a lie.”
“What? Why?”
“Because you’re pretty damn smooth when you want to be.”
He laughed again. “I don’t know what to say to that. It’s like I’m a completely different person now.”
“It’s hard for me to picture you as some depressed couch potato.”
“Ask my wife. She’ll tell you all about it.”
“You think she’s still alive? I wonder if she’s at the safe zone.”
“Who knows? Maybe we’ll run into her and Don, that sack of shit.” Lance rubbed his jaw absentmindedly. “I owe him one.”
The sun fell closer to the skyline behind them, the shadows of trees extending onto the road.
“We need to find a place to stay soon. I don’t know what could be secure around here though.” Cass scanned the fields around them.
“I think we’ll be all right in a barn or a house, honestly. We’ve only seen a handful of the daywalkers lately. There can’t be many Vladdies out here.”
“It only takes one to wipe us out.”
They spotted a farmhouse twenty minutes later, nestled several hundred yards into a field.
Cass slowed and carefully navigated a long, pothole-filled driveway that split the field.
The driveway opened up just before the house with two F150s parked by a side door. Three barns stood in staggered positions behind the home.
A tire swing hung from a butternut tree in the front yard, swaying slightly in a low breeze.
Lance kept his eyes on the house as he climbed out of the Vette.
Eifort and Brown parked behind them and climbed out of the truck.
“Why are we stopping here?” Eifort asked. Her voice had finally regained its normal volume.
“We need a place to stay for the night.” Lance pushed the tire swing, hearing water slosh in the bottom of it. “This looks as good as anything else.”
“We’ll be sitting ducks in there.”
Lance turned back to her. “Any suggestions on where else we should go?”
She shook her head after a moment of reflection.
Brown looked at the fields around them. “There aren’t any other houses within sight. Maybe we won’t have any issues out here. If there weren’t any people, then the odds are that we won’t run into any of the infected.
“I’m going to search the house,” Cass said, already moving toward the front door.
Lance followed her, pulling his knife out. He made a mental note to look for a better weapon. The knife was a great tool of last resort, but he hated its pathetic range. That and Cass’ axe gave him a form of penis envy.
The farmhouse was large, as they often are, with a multitude of rooms and high ceilings. Dated wallpaper covered too many surfaces. Aging appliances and peeling countertops made up the sparsely decorated kitchen.
An old console television sat on the floor in the living room. It wasn’t even plugged in.
Cass went up a dilapidated staircase as Lance worked his way through a dining room and office.
Several guns rested in a rack in the backroom. Boxes of shells and bullets were in a desk underneath it. Equipment to reload ammunition covered the desk.
Lance grabbed a pump-action shotgun from the rack and worked the slide. A shell tumbled to the floor. He grinned as he picked it up.
“Bingo.”
A black-handled pistol with a long, silver barrel caught his eye. He picked it up from the desk, shocked at its heft. He couldn’t be certain, but he thought it looked like the gun Dirty Harry used in the eighties.
“I found the owners,” Cass called from upstairs.
Lance put the shotgun back in the rack and shoved the pistol into his waistband. Its ridiculous bulk made him feel like a bad ass.
He bound up the stairs two at a time and paused at the top landing. “Where are you?”
“Back here.”
Lance went down a hallway to his right, peering into open doors as he walked by. Cass waited for him in the last room. She stood by an aged canopy bed, staring at two bodies atop it on a flowered comforter.
The smell hit Lance as he crossed the threshold of the door, making him hold a finger under his nose. The stench hung in the air like a fog, coating his tongue.
An elderly couple lay side by side, arms wrapped around one another. Their skin had darkened. Lance could barely bring himself to look at them.
Empty pill bottles stood on a nightstand atop a handwritten note.
Lance picked the paper up, reading the cursive scrawled on it.
“What does it say?” Cass asked.
“They asked forgiveness for taking their own lives. Says they couldn’t bear the thought of harming another person, even unintentionally. They willed their property to their two children. Their names were Jayce and Kate.”
Cass went to a closet on the opposite side of the room and opened one of the doors. She pulled a sheet from a shelf and used it to cover the bodies.
“This is pretty horrible,” Lance muttered.
“They chose how they wanted to go out.” Cass looked at the human outlines under the sheet for a few more seconds before turning back to the hallway. “We should all be so lucky.”
Lance closed the door behind him and followed Cass back outside. Eifort stood watch by the truck as the doc siphoned more fuel from the gas tanks of the Fords.
“There are guns inside.” Lance cocked his thumb at the house. “Room in the back of the house on the first floor.”
“What’s with the cannon?” Eifort pointed at the pistol in his waistband.
He pulled it out and held it up for everyone to see. “Pretty bad ass, right?”
“You’re going to eat that thing the first time you try to shoot it.” Cass shook her head at him. “Make sure you let me know when you’re going to fire it so I can watch.”
“Don’t be jealous.” Lance stuck his tongue out at her.
“Yeah, I’ll be really envious when that barrel knocks out your front teeth.” She walked around the house, heading for the first barn. “Come with me, Clint.”
The first barn was mostly empty. Old cow shit covered large parts of the floor. Flies buzzed greedily over the feces.
“They probably let the animals go before they offed themselves.” Lance inspected the open gates of all the empty animal stalls.
He hoped they would find something they could slaughter for meat.
The second barn had tractors and other equipment that Lance didn’t recognize. He lifted a pitchfork from a crudely constructed tool rack on the wall.
“What do you think? It’s a helluva lot better than my knife.”
Cass dismissed it with a wave of her hand. “Too long. If anything gets in close, you won’t be able to use it.”
He grunted and dropped it to the ground. A chainsaw hung from a large nail. He grabbed it.
“Eh? We could use this to go after those prepper dicks, Leatherface style.”
“And bring every Vladdie within a mile down on our heads.”
“You’re a real curmudgeon, you know that?” He tossed the chainsaw aside and picked up a scythe. The curved blade had to be three feet long, the handle closer to six. “Death comes to Greensburg.”
Cass just shook her head.
/> Lance glowered at her. “What do you suggest then? I don’t see any other battle axes lying around.”
She walked over to him, hunching her shoulders with exaggerated annoyance. After looking over the tool rack for several seconds, she grabbed a sickle and felt the weight in her hand. “This is probably too light to take out anything of consequence.”
“Anything of consequence? Who talks like that?” He pointed at the sickle. “That thing worked in Children of the Corn.”
She tossed it aside. “You watched too many movies.”
“That’s what happens when you don’t have a job.”
A sledgehammer stood in the corner of the barn. Lance lifted it, felt how heavy it was, and immediately put it back down. “I’m not man enough to swing that.”
Cass handed him a hatchet. “This isn’t bad.”
Lance looked from the small axe in his hand to the large one on Cass’ back. “You just want everyone to know that you have a bigger dong than I do.”
“What’s gotten into you?” Cass cocked an eyebrow in his direction. “You’re acting crazy.”
“I don’t know. Ever since I thought that guy had cut my throat open, I’ve felt... anxious. Excited. I don’t know.”
She turned back to the tools. “I know something that’ll calm you down. We need to find you a weapon first though.”
“What something is that?” He tried to look innocent, though he knew exactly what she meant.
“Stop being a tool bag and help me look.”
They finally settled on a wooden baseball bat. It was light enough that he wouldn’t struggle to carry it, but it could induce enough damage to be worthwhile.
Cass rooted through a tool chest. She produced several long, rusted nails. “These will work.”
“Work for what?”
“Watch and learn.”
She secured the baseball bat in a vice attached to a thick, filthy bench. Over the next ten minutes, they hammered the nails through the business end of the bat, turning it into a lethal mace.
Lance held the handmade weapon up, inspecting their handiwork. Nails protruded from several angles, ensuring that he would do maximum damage no matter what direction he swung from.
“Not bad,” he said, impressed with what they’d made.
