Haven (Book 1): Journey

by Switzer, Brian M.

  That evening, his father called the teen into his bedroom. The man laid on his bed, wheezing, his features contorted in pain. His wizened hands that never come clean, no matter how hard he scrubbed them, held a thick wad of American bills. Casandro’s mother and eight-year-old sister stood at the foot of the bed, hugging one another and weeping.

  “Take this money,” he said in a weak, raspy voice. Casandro couldn’t imagine where the money came from. “Meet the coyote at Matamoros. Give him what he demands out of this. He will get you across the river and past the desert. Go north. You have cousins in the Kansas, at Too-peek-a. They will help you find work. Send money back to your Mother and sister.”

  Those were the last words his father ever said to him.

  For an extra four hundred dollars, the coyote had a friend willing to get Casandro to Topeka when they emerged from the desert. He hung around the tiendas there for four days before he found someone that could lead him to a cousin. His father’s relatives were delighted to meet him and promptly found him a job busing tables at a Mexican restaurant. For Casandro, who had worked hard outdoors since he was a young boy, it wasn’t gratifying employment. After a few months, a new friend explained Home Depot and the day labor system in America and he quit the busboy job. The cousins were displeased.

  Tall and sinewy, with broad shoulders and well-defined muscles under his tee-shirts, Casandro had no problem getting picked for the crews that trimmed lawns, framed houses and hauled furniture for Topeka’s upper class. He worked hard and possessed a variety of skills. He soon owned a cell phone, and two carpenter-crew foremen and a man that ran a landscaping crew would call him the night before a job and pick him up at his apartment to take him to the job site in the mornings. No more getting up at five in the morning in order to be among those standing in front of the Home Depot at daybreak.

  A language barrier existed; he had no formal education and they never spoke English at home. Between that and the shyness that afflicted him his whole life, he spent most of his non-working time alone. After work, he returned to his apartment with carryout from the local tienda or he cooked tortillas and huevos, chorizo, or lengua. He topped it off with salsa casera and ate while watching Telemundo on the satellite. He wrote his mother long, beseeching letters, begging her to bring his sister and move to America with him.

  That’s how two weeks passed before he knew about the outbreak. He knew something was going on; for ten days he heard alarms, sirens, and screams outside his apartment at all hours of the night and day, and his phone stopped ringing to call him to work in the morning. He refused to investigate. Not because he was scared, but because whatever was happening outside, it sounded like nothing but trouble for an illegal immigrant that didn’t speak the language. After ten days, there were no more alarms or sirens, just occasional screams and a smattering of gunfire. Once he heard a man crying and begging in Spanish, “No, no Thomas, don’t! You must not hurt your Papa. Please, Thomas.” That was followed by a despairing scream and a wet, ripping sound.

  Casandro finally left his apartment when his kitchen cabinets were bare. He armed himself with a thirty-two-inch Curtis Granderson Louisville Slugger baseball bat he kept in a corner near the door and walked outside. What he saw made him cross himself. The streets and sidewalks were empty; trash blew through the avenues. Most of the businesses sported broken windows and the goods inside were scattered all over. Splashes of blood and bits of gore were everywhere- in the streets, on the buildings, on the sides of cars. He saw two buildings on fire, and so much smoke billowing on the eastern horizon that the fire creating it must have engulfed blocks. He walked ten blocks and stepped around three bodies. They were bloody pieces of meat, barely identifiable as human. He watched a pack of dogs fight over a human leg.

  Eyes glazed, jaw slack, his head spinning, he almost missed the body lying on the sidewalk. He stopped and looked. It was a man, his expensive-looking suit torn and bloody, his body bloated. Casandro made the sign of the cross again and walked around the body. As he did, a hand grabbed his ankle.

  Casandro shrieked and tried to twist away, but the dead man clamped onto his leg with a vise-like grip. The man moaned a terrible sound that haunted Casandro’s dreams for months afterward. His eyes were cloudy and rolled in his head as he tried to bite through the terrified teen’s work boots. Panicked, Casandro swung his bat, hitting the man in the arm. A bone snapped, but the grip on his ankle didn’t loosen. Casandro hopped on one foot, dragging the man across the sidewalk and flailing at him with the bat. He adjusted his aim and hit the man’s wrist, smashing and grinding it into the hard sidewalk. He swung six times, pounding the man’s wrist into jelly before he pulled his leg free.

  He backed up warily. The man struggled to his feet and lurched toward him in an awkward manner, his smashed arm hanging at his side. Casandro waved the bat but the man never slowed. His bloated skin had a gray cast to it and he looked at Casandro with dead eyes. The man moaned and snarled, and drool dripped down his chin as he drew near. He waited until the man was close, then lashed out. Swinging as hard as he could, he rammed the bat into the man’s rib cage, doubling him over and driving him to the ground. Breathing hard, Casandro backed up and looked around. If anyone witnessed him beat a white man with a bat, they would call la policia, no matter how strong his reason might be.

  No one was around. He was still trying to piece together what the hell had happened when, to his wonder, the man rose to his feet. Wonder turned to shock when he saw pieces of broken rib bone protruding from the man’s chest; he didn’t even seem to notice. Shock turned to fear when the man snarled and lurched for him again.

  Someone whistled nearby. Backing up and keeping one eye on his nemesis, he looked for the source of the sound. The door to a nearby house was open and a small, unkempt, old man in a ratty bathrobe stood in the doorway.

  “La cabeza,” the man called out, pointing his finger at his own head. “You have to hit la cabeza!”

  Casandro nodded.

  The man approached again, snarling and weaving. He reached for Casnadro with a filthy hand. The teen swung as if his life depended on it and the bat made a thunk sound when he connected with the man’s head. His eyes went blank and he fell. Casandro wasn’t taking any more chances. He brought the bat down three times, violent arcs that smashed the man’s head into an unrecognizable mess.

  The old man whistled and clapped. When Casandro looked in his direction, he stopped clapping and made a come here motion. The old man’s name was Arnold, and Casnadro stayed with him for a week. Using pidgin Spanish, pictures drawn on a small chalkboard in his kitchen, and lots of hand gestures, Arnold got the outbreak’s pertinent details across to his guest.

  On Casandro’s eighth day at Arnold’s, he looked out the old man’s front windows at a bizarre scene. Three men and a woman were going house to house on the other side of the street, putting down undead along the way. He had Arnold hail them over, and that was when he first met Danny, Coy, Clay, and Brianne. Brianne was fluent in Spanish and Clay took two years in high school, so they were able to explain to him why they were scavenging and where they were going. Before they finished, Casandro was packing his few belongs and biding Arnold goodbye.

  Chapter Eight

  * * *

  The commissary doors were locked and the automatic sensors that opened them were useless without electricity.

  “Jiri, you’re up,” Danny said.

  Jiri nodded, hefted his ax and took a quarter-swing at a plate glass panel, just enough to create a long, jagged crack. He tapped the crack with the head of the ax and turned away from the window, covering his face with the crook of his arm. The glass panel quivered and sagged, then showered to the ground in a thousand shattered pieces. Jiri swept the glass particles aside with his foot while Danny and Casandro picked the few remaining shards still stuck in the window frame. One by one, they stepped through the empty frame and into the store.

  There was a large display featuring fifty-pound bags
of Purina dog food near the entrance. “Let’s stack these bags waist-high in the window in case the slobbering dunderheads wander up,” Danny said. “We’ll put them down if they’re still in the parking lot when we leave.”

  Not long after they placed the last bag there was a loud bang from outside the building. Through the window, he saw a creeper walk into the plate glass, bounce back a few steps, resume walking, and smack right back into it again. Danny watched with an amused grin and shook his head. “Let’s sweep this place,” he said.

  They worked from east to west, sweeping each aisle for creepers. They moved through the deli and behind the meat counter, checked the bakery and burst into offices. It was miserable work. The hot, stale air seared his Danny’s nostrils. Sweat dripped from his brow and left a trail of droplets on the floor behind him. As he came to the end of an aisle his heartbeat quickened and he tasted a metallic tang, the signal that his nervous system had sent a jolt of adrenaline rushing through his veins. They turned the corner hard and fast with him on point, gun at the ready. His crew fanned out behind him, weapons up and ready. Heart hammering in his chest, he led the team as they put down any creepers in the aisle. And if the lane was empty, they walked its length and prepared themselves to turn the corner and do it again.

  Good fortune smiled on them- the commissary was free of creepers. The only trouble came in the meat department. As the group swept through grocery stores during the long journey south, Danny had come to hate the meat section. He had endured tear-inducing stenches in his life, but nothing compared to the odor of beef, pork, chicken, and seafood left out for months in a brick building that the sun transformed into an oven. The stink hung in the air, thick and noxious; the harsh, rank, smell of rot and decay. As the meat decomposed it left a slimy, viscous fluid that seeped down the counters and pooled on the tile floor.

  He passed by green and black pork loins and T-bones, and ground beef putrefied into slime. Holding his breath as much as possible didn’t help; his stomach still roiled from the smell. He put his right foot down and it came out from under him, almost causing him to fall. When he looked, he saw his boot had slipped in a putrid and slimy pool of liquefied meat. It was more than his stomach could take, and for the first time since the left the ranch, he threw up.

  When he finished, he walked back to his team, spitting and wiping his mouth. Tara gave him a sympathetic smile and offered a bottled water. Danny took a swig and spit, repeating until the taste of bile faded. He took a final drink, swallowed and returned it to her.

  Jiri smacked him on the back of his head to get his attention. “Can you believe this shit?” he said, gesturing at the surrounding aisles. “Not one creeper in the whole goddamn building. Maybe we ought to set up on the base for good like we discussed before we met George.”

  Jiri Horski had come to the United States when he was two. He came with his dissident father when he fled their native Czechoslovakia. They settled in Yorkville, a Czech and German enclave in New York City, where there was a smattering of cousins from the old country. Havel Horski worked any menial job he could find and saved every penny he could for Jiri’s education. “In this country, college diploma opens doors,” he told his son.

  Jiri was always taller than the other kids his age. When he was eight, he discovered basketball and spent hours at the neighborhood boy’s club, perfecting his shooting and ball-handling skills. Even though court time cut into his studies, Havel allowed it. “In this country, sports open doors that college diplomas don’t open,” he would say.

  He attended Columbia University on a basketball scholarship. Tall and broad-shouldered, with gray-blue eyes and an easy, confident manner, he had no problem making friends. He knew the basketball skills that paid for Columbia would not take him any further; he didn’t have the talent to play at the professional level. So he concentrated on his studies and graduated magna cum laude with dual degrees in English and French Literature.

  During his sophomore year, the basketball team traveled to Lawrence to play an early season game at the University of Kansas. Columbia was over-matched and routed by the perennial hoops powerhouse. Jiri, the tenth man on an eleven man squad, sat on the bench and barely noticed the game. Ever since the flight in, his surroundings had him entranced. The flat land, the crisp, clean air, the absence of dirt and decay- he didn’t know such a place existed. Life out here was the antithesis of living in New York, and the landscape reminded him of pictures he had seen of his homeland.

  He flew through the Master of Fine Arts program at Columbia, then completed his doctoral requirements. He applied and was hired for a teaching job in The English Department at Kansas State in Manhattan, where he spent five carefree years. His classes were popular with the students. He avoided office politics and spent his spare time learning the history of his new home and the people who lived there. He could always find a pickup basketball game somewhere on campus and he kept himself in shape by playing often.

  After the outbreak, he was trying to make it from Manhattan to the KU Medical School in Kansas City when he encountered Will and his growing group near Topeka. It took little convincing to talk him into joining them.

  “You stay here, Jiri,” Danny smiled at him. “I’m going west with Will.”

  “Yeah, that’s probably best for me, too.”

  “Alright- let’s shop.” Danny consulted a list that Becky and Kathy had put together for him. “Salt, sugar, canned goods (vegetables and soup; it says to avoid Chef-Boyardee and Franco-American), and beef jerky. Look for tomato sauce and syrup. Bouillon cubes?” He looked up and shrugged his shoulders at the unknown term.

  “I’ll show you,” Tara said.

  “Okay. Let’s see.” He peered at his list in the gloomy light. “Jello mix. Saltine crackers. Spam?” he asked, his lips curling in distaste.

  “That stuff keeps forever,” Jiri said. “I don’t think it can go bad unless the tin is opened.”

  “Yeah, but it tastes like sweaty monkey balls. No Spam. Let’s see; dried beef, tuna.”

  “Make sure the tuna is canned and not those packets,” Tara added.

  “Yes’m. Oatmeal. Flour, granola bars, canned fruit, pickles and any canned meat we can find.” He finished with a flourish and then made an executive decision. “Except Spam.”

  “Should we get water?” asked Casandro.

  “No water,” Tara told him. “I was with the girls when they were working on the list. Water has always been an easy find on the road, and enough water for the whole group would use up all our storage room.”

  “Jiri, you and Tara start here. Andro and I,” Danny said, using Casandro’s nickname, “will start on the far side. One person looks for items on the shelves, the other person gives them cover.” He lifted the rifle for emphasis.

  He thought of the meat department and shuddered. “And stay away from that meat counter.”

  Danny called a halt to the grocery shopping when their bags were half-full. “We still had to hit the exchange,” he explained, “and the supplies we’ll be looking for over there are bigger and bulkier than these groceries. So we need to leave room in the bags.”

  When they got to the doors Danny’s shoulders slumped and he shook his head. The trio of creepers was still there, pinballing back and forth between the dog food bags, the closed door, and the windows.

  “I’ll give the fuckers this,” Danny said as he rubbed the bridge of his nose. “They’re persistent. Give them a trifle more brain power and we could make world-class used car salesmen out of them.”

  Tara jerked a thumb at the dead. “How long would they have waited?” she asked. “What would have to happen for them to give up and go away?”

  “They don’t have any memory,” Danny said. “It’s not a ‘they saw us go in, so they stayed here and waited for us to come back out’ situation. This is where they were the last time what’s left of their brains received input. So here is where they will stay until something happens that stimulates them to go somewhere else.” H
e eyed the creepers. They pressed up against the stack of dog chow, lined in a row. Two khaki-clad soldiers and a woman in a janitor’s uniform, they stared at the living with dead eyes made eerier with their opaque cover. They pulled back their yellow lips and snarled, revealing their black and decaying gums. Their swollen, blackened tongues lolled over chins made slick with saliva. They reached for the team over the barrier, but in an awkward way, as if they were new to using their arms. They moved them in erratic jerks and spasms instead of a fluid motion. The trio reached out with open hands, their fingers splayed wide, like concert-goers in the first row reaching for the musicians on stage. Haunting moans that sent chills up Danny’s spine interspersed their snarls.

  Danny sighed. “Let’s shut up that God-awful hooting before they bring a herd crashing down on top of us.”

  Jiri gave him a thumbs-up, hefted his ax, and faced the creepers. He extended his long arms until his elbows locked to gauge the distance, pulled it to his shoulder, and swung. He honed the blades daily, keeping them razor-sharp. His first stroke split the creeper’s head and went on through its neck, chest, and stomach, not stopping until the ax head reached its mid-section. The two halves pulled away from each other and drooped toward the ground like the opposite sides of a willow tree. He grimaced and pursed his lips. “A little too hard,” he said, his tone apologetic.

  He swung with less force the second time and buried the ax in the creeper’s head straight through to its nose. When he pulled the weapon back, the creature crumpled like a bag of manure. His third shot was off-kilter. He shaved the creeper’s ear off its head and drove the weapon deep in its shoulder, but missed hitting any gray matter. The creature staggered from the impact but recovered right away. “Son of a bitch moved his head at the last second,” he muttered, his cheeks reddening. He took another swing, and this one rang true, dropping the last of the three.