The Great Wreck

by Stewart, Jack

  I hopped so or everything I had been through to survive would be for nothing, “Birch said I could get a few supplies from you. Would that be OK?”

  Harriet nodded and began pulling out cans and dried foods from a panty that seemed to stretch back forever. I caught a glimpse of thousands of cans, dried meets, soups, and other dry goods that would last a long time. Harriet pulled out cans of stew, more tuna, dried eggs, and packages of beef jerky until the counter in front of me was overflowing, “Think that will be enough?” she asked.

  “Yes and thank you.”

  “Thank me again when we see each other in Sandia. Now scoot so I can finish my cooking,” she said with a smile.

  I gathered up my goods and made my way back to my room. I packed up all the food and now my pack was nearly full to bursting. I hefted it and pulled in the arm straps. It felt good. Solid and not too heavy. I figured James and I would stay with these folks a few more days, then start heading north again.

  Which lead me to wonder what the Doc was going to do with James when everyone left in the morning. I imagined they’d cuff him up again and transfer him with us to the warehouse shelter. But what then? Did they have a cell over there? Probably not. They probably had a plan so I put it out of my mind and lay back on my bed.

  An hour later, there was a small knock on my door. Marti stood outside and said, “Dinner’s ready, but let me warn you,” she said with a big smile, “Don’t eat too much of Harriet’s cooking. One, it’s spicy, and two, it’s fatty.”

  “Sounds great,” I said.

  “Oh, it is until about an hour later, then the pain hits followed by, well let’s just say the results are explosive. And by ‘explosive’ I mean the diarrhea will explode out of your ass,” she said laughing.

  I laughed too, “I will ensure that I eat a lot of fiber,” and made our way down to the kitchen.

  The group gathered at the back was subdued and talk centered around the approaching dead but the food was magnificent. Harriet had created a gourmet meal out of canned goods and dried beef that tasted like nothing I had ever had before. She had cooked fajita, tacos, a type of bean soup, tortillas, and a spicy salsa that, after one tiny taste that nearly burned off the tip of my tongue, I avoided.

  It was so hard to stop eating, to slow down, to not overdue it. The food was so good, but I listed to Marti’s advice and ate small portions, filled up on the freshly made bread and tried to avoid the ultra-spicy foods that were laid out.

  I meet the others of the group as they came in and sat down. Everyone introduced themselves and we swapped stories. I would find that whenever I met a new group of people, a similar pattern would emerge: introductions and then questions; where you going, where you coming from, what happened? The stories of where we were when the event began that started to all sound the same. Each one sounding much like the other. A normal life of earning a living somewhere, watching as the outbreak went form a local story to as national one, seeing the first dead, seeing their family consumed, running, and finally, surviving.

  First there was Dan Birch who had a wife a three kids and worked at a local garage here in Las Cruces. One of his kids had been bit at school by an infected teacher. They had brought her back home where she died then came back and ate her little brother and other little sister. She was about half way through her sister when her mother walked in and was bitten. Dan came home, found the carnage and barely escaped. He returned after a few weeks and found them still locked inside their shitty little house on the west side of Las Cruces and put them all down. He said he had to, that he couldn’t just leave them to wander around for eternity trapped inside that house.

  Bill Reid said he woke up with his live-in girlfriend standing in the doorway. He asked her if she was OK and she screamed like nothing he had ever heard and lunged at him. He was able to beat her head in with the night table lamp and get out of the trailer they shared.

  Allen Stover went to get his parents from the old folks home when the shit was really picking up speed. He was nearly consumed by thirty of the residents as he ran around the deserted facility searching for his folks. He walked into the cafeteria and found them all finishing off what was left of the staff. They rushed him but he was able to jam the doors to the cafeteria closed and make it out of the facility unscathed. The last thing he saw was his dad’s half eaten face as he banged on the window trying to get at Allen.

  Zuri and Tia Arnold, one of the few married couples I meet that survived together had been out in the mountains for weeks camping. When they came back into town the shit storm was in full force. No kids and no family in town. Most of their relatives were up north in Arizona at the Navajo reservation. They hopped that because the reservation was so isolated, their people may have been able to avoid the outbreak.

  Doc was working at local hospital and saw the first signs of the outbreak. It’s a miracle he survived having come in contact with so many dead.

  Marti had already told her story and was one of the few with most of her family safe in Sandia.

  Harriet was a cop and was the first to start closing off the Green Zone with a few of the others and gathering up survivors. She saw her husband eating the remains of their teenage daughter. She put several bullets in his head, then two in her daughter’s, buried them both in the backyard of their home, and made her way to the Green Zone where she had helped the others survive, clear out the dead, and seal up the walls.

  After we shared our stories, the conversation turned to the approaching walls of dead, “These ones are moving really fast,” Birch said, “It’s like they are in a big old hurry to get somewhere.”

  “Doc says two days or so, right?” Harriet asked.

  “Yep. If they don’t speed up, they shouldn’t get here until day after tomorrow and by then we’ll be long gone,” Birch replied. People stopped talking after that and all you could hear was the sound of knives and forks against their plates. The thought of a few million dead heading our way wasn’t going to stop us from eating.

  “As I came across the desert, I saw this starting outside of Phoenix,” I said into the silence. People stopped eating and looked up at me, “In Tucson, all the dead were standing completely still, looking north. Outside of Tucson they walked out of the desert to the south heading north day in and day out. I spent four days in a power line tower outside of Deming waiting for a break. I just made it through a small one before they started up again.”

  “Doc said there are a finite amount of dead and that eventually this will peter out,” Allen said, “Then we’ll come back, clean out the stragglers, and seal up the Green Zone again. Maybe seal up that southern gate so it won’t come down no matter how many dead push up against it.”

  “And then what?” I asked, “Are you going to stay down here for good?”

  Allen thought about it for a moment, “This is home. I grew up here, went to school here, settled down here. I haven’t traveled more than a day in any direction from here. But I think it’s time for me to move on. I’ll wait here for the winter and leave with the Doc when the good folks from Sandia come and get us.”

  “Get you?” I asked.

  “Yeah, most of us were getting ready to head north when the folks up there heard we had a doctor. A real doctor not a veterinarian or one of those fucking holistic doctors. When they found out Doc was on the uh…aged side, they said if we wait until winter, they’d send a whole convoy down here and pick us up. Save us a whole shit-ton of walking through the burning dessert.”

  I imagined what it would be like to have drove across the southwest. I could have made it out of Los Angeles and to Sandia in two or three days. Sandia was only a six hour drive from here. To get in a car, turn on the AC and just drive north…

  “Yeah, I know what you’re thinking,” Birch said reading the look on my face, “But it’s not that easy. No gas stations so you have to carry your own fuel, lots of wrecks in the road so every few miles or so you’re getting out and pushing some burnt out husk off the highway,
and the dead really like the sound of a engine so they’d be following along just waiting for you to get stuck in a ditch or for your car to break down. So, yeah, it sounds nice, but it’s just as risky as walking. Maybe even more so.”

  “Ah, but air conditioning! I’ve been broiling in my own sweat for weeks!” I said and everyone laughed. Each of us drifted off into our own thoughts as we finished eating and helped clean up. When everything was put away and the dishes washed and dried, I headed back up to my room and stripped down to my underwear. I neatly folded my cloths and set them on my desk, then pulled the chair up to the small window that overlooked the inside of the green zone.

  It was an eerie sensation to see the empty streets. I was used to seeing the streets crammed with the dead, dead bodies, and every manner of debris. Here they had cleaned out the corpses, removed the burnt out wrecks, and picked up all the trash. All the ground floor windows were sealed up and there were a few cars parked on the sides the road. I wondered if they worked. It looked so calm, so peaceful almost like a movie set. And yet a quarter mile away, the large concrete walls rose on all sides and beyond that, the world of the dead.

  I sat there for a long time watching the sun go down and letting my mind wander. Eventually I went over to my bed as the darkness descended. I didn’t like looking out the window into the inky blackness that had enveloped the streets below. My mind was too willing to fill the shadows with hidden dead waiting to rush us when our guard was down.

  At nine o’clock sharp, the lights went out as Birch turned off the generator. I still wasn’t sleepy so I just lay on my bunk staring up at the ceiling going over and over in my mind what I would do if the dead breached the walls while I slept. It was a habit I developed as I made my way across the dead world to imagine what I would do if my hiding spot was ever breached.

  I heard a tap on the door. Marti! I had forgotten that she had said she might stop by. My heart raced as I opened the door.

  Marti was standing there in a tee shirt and cut off shorts holding a small flashlight, a large bottle of water, and a small box of something I couldn’t quite identify.

  “Want to buy some girl scout cookies?” she said and held up a box of Samoa girl scout cookies for me to inspect.

  “Well, yes, miss, I would, but I’ll have to take a closer look at your selection,” I said and opened the door wide to let her in. Marti slipped into my room with a giggle, “How much?”

  “Ten dollars,” she said and set the flashlight down with the cookies and water on the desk.

  “Ten dollars?” I said with mock surprise, “My mom says I can only spend five.”

  Marti leaned back on the desk with her arms behind her “Do you see anything you might like?”

  “I may have to sample a few to see what I like best,” I said as I moved in close to her and wrapped my arms around her waist. She rocked back a bit and wrapped her arms legs around me. I pushed up her shirt and ran my hands over her white belly. I could feel a small, metal piercing their and looked down: it was a small diamond set at the end of a finely linked chain. I bent down and kissed it then ran my tongue over it and her belly button. Marti giggled then sighed as I moved my hands further up, slipping under her bra and over her small breasts.

  I gently squeezed and caressed them as I worked my lips up brushing them along her sides, up over her ribs and the center of her chest until I found her nipples. I ran my tongue over them, alternately squeezing and sucking while Marti rocked her hips back and forth against me.

  I undid the front clasp of her bra and pushed the two halves aside as Marti pulled down my shorts and began stroking me. I could feel the heat in my face and chest as I moved up to Marti’s neck then found her lips.

  I brushed my lips across hers and for a brief moment we kissed softly. Then the heat ignited in both of us and we didn’t so much kiss as attack each other with our tongues fighting to get as deep into the other’s mouth as possible. I was rock hard as Marti frantically stroked me.

  She released me just for a moment as I pulled her shirt up over her head and removed her bra. I stepped back before she could grab me again and took my shorts off. Marti leaned back on the desk, her legs spread, her chest heaving, her lips slightly part, looking up at me, almost daring me to take her.

  I stepped forward and grabbed her by the waist of her shorts, pulled her to her feet. I jerked open the button of her shorts, pulled down her zipper, and yanked her shorts down to her knees. Her bikini brief panties were white with little pink flowers all over them. I pulled her towards me and kissed her savagely. She kissed back with such force I thought we might bruise each other’s lips. I ran my hands down her back and under her panties grabber her ass and pulled her tightly to me. She had spread her legs a bit, grabbed my cock, and was rubbing it up and down the center of her panties.

  I moved my right hand around to the front and felt my fingers brush across her tightly cut hair. Then I slipped my thumb into her. She was slick and the heat poured out of her. I slid my thumb in and out of her increasing the force of my thrusts. She had tried to keep stroking me but gave up and leaned back against the desk jerking her hips against my hand.

  She bent her head down and bit her lips and I tried to make her come with just my hand but I couldn’t wait an longer as the red crept into my vison and I began to lose control. I pulled her up onto her feet, buried my tongue in her mouth, bit and sucked on her neck. She was panting, moaning as I turned her around to face away from me and bent her over the desk.

  I stepped back looking at Marti resting on her elbow, bent over the edge of the desk. Her long legs lead up to her small buttocks and narrow hips and were spread apart with her knees bent in slightly. Her panties, riding high up her cheeks were wet. She was looking back at me over her shoulder, her face red and sweaty, her eyes burning with passion and a hint of fear.

  I place one hand on the small of her back and with my other, jerked her panties down to her thighs. I grabbed my dick and positioned the head just between the lips of her vagina and put both of my hands on her hips.

  “Do it. As hard as you can,” she breathed then grabbed a pillow and buried her face into it.

  I pulled her hips back against mine as hard as I could slapping her ass against my hip bones. I slid in to her wet heat until I could go no further, then pulled her hips up until she stood on her tip toes. Marti cried out into the pillow as I rammed her over and over again trying to get deeper and deeper inside of her with each stroke.

  I could feel Marti getting wetter and wetter until I felt her contract all around my cock. She screamed so hard and loud I thought that the folks in the other rooms had to have heard us as she slammed her fist done on the desk over and over. Then reached back and grab my wrist, raising her head up off of the pillow, “Stop, please, stop.”

  I stopped moving and slipped out as she stood up and turned around, “Your turn,” she said and pushed me towards the bed. I lay down and she straddled me, then slipped me inside of her and began to ride me like an animal. She grabbed my shoulders and began jerking her hips back and forth violently until I felt my orgasm rushing towards me. I grabbed her hips and rammed myself into her as hard as I could until I blew everything up inside of her. She felt me coming and arched her back against me pushing me deep inside her.

  I felt the orgasm pass but before I could lose my erection completely, I rolled her over and we switched places. I began plowing into her as hard as I could with my quickly diminishing erection. She wrapped her legs tightly around me and I fucked her for all I was worth until I felt her nails claw deep rivulets out of my back as she came again and I felt a short intense seconds orgasm and blew into her. I collapsed on top of her sweaty body, panting and waiting for the little black spots that had accompanied my last orgasm to pass.

  “My god, can we do that again?” Marti said and giggled after a few minutes of silence.

  “I don’t know, I think you just broke my dick off,” I said and rolled off of her to the side.

  She
reached for my dick, found it, and gave it a quick tug, “Nope. Still there,” she said as she rolled onto her side and spooned with me.

  It was hot, we were soaked in sweat, and the single bed was narrow but the feel of her body against mine was worth the discomfort. So we stayed like that enjoying the quiet glow of each other until Marti said, “You could stay with us. At the warehouse.”

  I had already thought about staying and about all the different ways I could ditch James and make my way back, “I want to, but I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “James.”

  “We could handle him. Either keep him locked up, or kick him out of he gave us trouble.”

  “You don’t know James. He’s crazy, but he’s killer smart. He would wait until we’d settled down into our routine, wait until our guards were dropped, then he’d…”

  “He’d what? Kill us?”

  “Worse.”

  “What could be worse than killing us?” Marti asked shifting her naked butt against my hips. I felt my cock harden just a bit.

  “I don’t know exactly, but James would find a way to make each and every person here suffer to the fullest extent before killing them. If I leave with him, he won’t care about you guys anymore. You will be able to seal your selves up in the warehouse and he’ll never be able to get back in. He’ll eventually lose interest and find whatever it is he’s looking for out in the dead world. You will be safe and I will be in Sandia waiting for you.”

  Marti felt the beginnings of my erection and began to slowly move her rear against me, “Or he might kill you.” she said taking my hand and moving it between her legs. I slipped my middle finger in and began to move it in and out.

  “I don’t think so. James needs me. Something happened in Phoenix. He was heading back towards Los Angeles and then he came after me. I don’t know why, but I don’t think he wants to kill me, I think he wants me to watch his back while he….uh…does whatever it is out there that he does,” I said. I was fully erect now.