Murphy's Law (Roads Less Traveled Book 2)

by Dulaney, C.

  Some things never change.

  I took another sip of coffee, watching the guys lay up another course of block, and contemplated all the things that had changed since my last birthday.

  “Everything except my dog…” I sighed and closed my eyes, but before that broken down, hollowed-out feeling could settle into my guts again, little Sam broke away from the other kids and ran over next to me.

  “Hey, Miss Kasey,” he panted.

  “Hey, Sam.” He looked up at me and for some reason, reached up and started rubbing my back. It was so cute I had to laugh. “What do you need, little man?” I asked.

  His face turned serious as he looked out the window. We watched the men across the golf courses work for a long quiet moment before he finally spoke up.

  “I don’t need anything, just wanted to stand here with you for a little bit. Can I?”

  He actually looked like he was expecting me to say no. Made me wonder how his parents had treated him. Probably like a nuisance, judging by his behavior and self-sufficiency. I smiled again and squeezed his little shoulder.

  “Sure, why not. Got nothing better to do, right?”

  I made small talk with him, asked about breakfast and about the other kids, the sorts of things that interest a kid his age, making sure to avoid any topic that might remind him of his old life. We talked long after my cup was empty, so he followed me to the kitchen for a refill. Then he followed me back to the window, talking the whole time. When we passed the study, I thought I heard chatter on the radio, but it was faint and Sam was flapping his jaws, so I didn’t think much of it.

  After another hour of watching the men work, and listening to Sam talk, I decided to give my eyes and ears a break and go back to my room.

  “See you at lunch, Miss Kasey!” Sam yelled and ran through the living room, trying to catch up with the others, who were apparently in the middle of a rowdy game of Tag.

  “Later, Sam,” I called after him.

  Halfway up the stairs I heard Nancy yelling at the kids to slow down and get out of the kitchen before someone lost an eye. Gus had also had enough; he caught up with me at the top of the stairs with his tail between his legs. I let him lead me to our room. The place was like a maze, and I hadn’t really paid attention when I went downstairs for coffee earlier. I discovered that my room was at the end of the western hallway. It probably wasn’t called the “western hallway,” but that’s how I kept it straight in my mind.

  I didn’t flip the light on after shutting the door behind me. It was mid-morning and the curtains had been pulled back, so the room was bright enough already. To be honest, I really didn’t know what to do with myself. I knew what I wanted to do. The problem was it wasn’t what I needed to do. How often are we reminded of the difference between the two? I stood in the middle of the room, looking around at the furniture, noticing my guns and ammo next to the door, and waited. For what, I don’t know. The next shoe to drop? Possibly.

  Life in a zombie world has a way of making you like that.

  I spotted the clothes I’d been wearing the day before in a pile on the floor next to the dresser, so I dug out the crinkled pack of cigarettes from my very smelly flannel and walked over to the desk. There was a mini-fridge on one side of it, a long bookcase on the other, and a window directly in front of it. I pulled the chair out and plopped down into it, lit up, and stared out through the lacy curtain. Gus had already made himself comfortable on the bed, but surprisingly wasn’t asleep yet. I leaned back in the chair and looked over at him.

  “What do you think, boy?”

  He tilted his head, but didn’t answer me.

  “Never were much of a talker, huh?”

  He sighed heavily and stretched out.

  “Yeah, tell me about it.”

  I rubbed a hand over my face, the ends of the stitches scratching my palm, then tilted my head back and stared at the ceiling for a while. I tried to turn my mind off, to ignore the dozens of thoughts that kept circling like buzzards. There was a laundry list of things that needed to be done, that I thought should be done, such as boarding up the downstairs windows, and I was having a very difficult time accepting the fact that I wasn’t in charge anymore. This wasn’t my home, and I couldn’t go about doing as I pleased. The others had survived long enough to know what needed to be done, I just had to trust they would take care of it. Keyword being trust.

  * * *

  “Alright ladies, back to work,” John said.

  Michael, Jake, and the other men finished off whatever assorted drinks they’d been nursing during their break and shuffled back to the stack of concrete blocks and wheelbarrow full of mortar.

  “Is it lunchtime yet?” Todd asked.

  He was a lazy bastard, always trying to find a way out of work. He and Eric, the other lazy bastard, had already been threatened more than once after slacking off, and John was about to blow his top. He spun around and grabbed the first man by his shirt collar, yanked him off his feet, then tossed him against the stack of blocks.

  “You’ll eat when I tell you to eat. Keep dickin’ around, and I’ll put your ass down the road. Got it?”

  Todd wrinkled his face, about to smart-off most likely, but thought twice about it and went back to work. Granted, he mumbled and bitched about it the whole time.

  “Take it easy, big guy,” Michael said next to John’s right shoulder. “We’ll get it done.”

  John let out a breath and looked down the road towards the woods, his mouth curved in a deep frown.

  “Not in time.”

  Michael followed John’s line of sight, staring hard at nothing. The breeze picked up again, and he remembered why they were in a hurry. He mirrored John’s worried expression and got back to work as well, with the faint and distant smell of death swirling all around them.

  * * *

  Everyone kept their faces buried in their plates at lunch. Those of us who’d been in the house wondered what was going on, and those who’d been outside weren’t telling. A few of those sitting around the long dining room table talked, but not about anything important. The kids were at the table too, down at the far end, and they were even quieter than usual. The silence itself could have been explained away—hunger, sore and aching muscles, exhaustion—yet it was the look in Jake and Mia’s eyes that confirmed it for me. Mia had been on the roof until noon keeping watch. Jake had been working on the wall. There was something wrong outside, and the look on both their faces was one I’d seen there too many times. Nancy and I exchanged glances all through lunch, both of us thinking the same thing: deadheads. Gus wouldn’t sit in his customary place by my feet either; he sat with his back to me and his nose to the window. I waited until the kids were finished and out of the room before finally breaking the silence.

  “Alright, guys. What the hell is going on?”

  Everyone had pushed their plates back; some leaned back in their seats, others leaned against the table, all stalling. I was leaned forward, with my hands folded on the table, so I could see all their faces. My eyes moved from one to the next, and by the time they stopped on Michael, I had all the information I needed.

  “How much time do we have?” was my next question.

  “Depends,” he answered. His voice was flat, like he had given up. Resignation, that’s what I saw in all their faces. Of course this pissed me off, and I let it show. No sense in hiding it, not now.

  “Depends on what?” I asked.

  “On how many runners are with them,” he said. I flipped my eyes to Jake.

  “They’re four, maybe five days out.” Jake glanced at Mia before continuing. “That’s just goin’ by the smell. Won’t know for sure ‘til we send some scouts out.”

  They had learned a great deal since the end of the world, including how to judge the distance between us and a swarm of deadheads from the smell alone. Sure, they were wrong sometimes, but not very often.

  “I’ll take Jake, see if we can get a location on ‘em,” Jonah spoke up.

&n
bsp; Michael and John both nodded. I agreed as well; Jake was good in the woods, and from what I’d seen from Jonah so far, he was pretty handy too.

  “Make it quick, and radio us as soon as you find something.” Michael paused and stared hard at the two men as they stood from the table. “And… don’t do anything stupid.”

  Jake jumped as if he’d been slapped. “Stupid? Us?”

  Jonah, who was walking ahead of Jake, said, “Speak for yourself, boy.” Then to Michael: “You’ll be hearin’ from us.”

  Jake was grinning when they left the room, which prompted Nancy to jump out of her seat and follow him outside, no doubt to warn him a thousand times to be careful and to do as Michael had said. In the meantime, those of us remaining at the table refocused our attention back to each other, and stared through the dead silence that fell between us.

  * * *

  We didn’t hear from Jake or Jonah until suppertime. Everyone went to work on the wall after lunch, going at it balls to the wall to get as much done as we could before dark. Well, everyone minus one person to stay on the roof and keep watch. The kids stayed inside, the older ones promising not to let the younger ones burn the house down or poke any eyes out until the adults came back. Michael had his radio on, but it was Abby’s voice, not one of the scouts, who got his attention.

  “Hey, Michael, are you deaf?” she asked.

  Her voice was breaking up slightly, and there was a faint snowy noise coming across the walkie talkie. Michael grabbed the radio from his belt and waved the rest of us off of our work.

  “Go ahead, Abby.”

  His face was red from hard labor, and the rest of us were happy to get a break while he talked. Mia and Nancy shared a bottle of water, and I shared one with Gus, whose hardest task had been getting up and moving from one warm spot to another as the sun ducked behind the trees.

  “Jonah has been calling you for the last ten minutes,” Abby answered. John and Michael exchanged a confused glance.

  “Thanks, Abby.” He looked up at the sky, which I didn’t understand at the time, then looked past us to the treeline surrounding the property. “Jonah, this is Michael. You still there?”

  I shot an eyebrow at Mia, then stepped closer to Michael so I could hear the radio. Someone on the other end keyed their radio, but all we heard was static. It was so loud Michael held his arm away from his face, waiting until it stopped before calling Abby.

  “Was that him?”

  “I don’t know what the hell that was. I’ve been getting a lot of static on mine all afternoon, but I just figured the batteries were dying.”

  Michael’s eyes sharpened. Without taking them off of John, he brought the radio back to his mouth and tried again.

  “Jonah, this is Michael. Respond.”

  This time, in between bursts of static, we could hear someone talking. It wasn’t Jonah.

  “Squad leader…form up on…”

  Static.

  “…affirmative, waiting…confirmation…”

  Static.

  “…coordinates being relayed…”

  Michael stared at John for a long time before looking at the rest of us. His face said it all. He was scared shitless. He was the military guy here, you’d think he would have been happy. The fact that he wasn’t scared the rest of us even more.

  “Michael, are you there?” Jake’s voice suddenly called out crystal clear over the radio and made us jump.

  “Yes, yes, Jake, I’m here. What’s going on?” he answered, not doing a very good job at all of keeping the panic out of his voice.

  “You won’t believe what we’re seein’ man. We’re on the ridge across from the prison, and guess who finally decided to set up shop?”

  The prison we’d left sat on top of a high ridge, Blueville was in the valley below. As the crow flies, the country club was four ridges north of the prison, in the river valley. Jake and Jonah were evidently on that first ridge, the one directly across from the prison. West Virginia’s terrain might have been a pain in the ass to travel across, but it was superb for getting a good look from a distance.

  “Have you been spotted?” Michael’s voice was short and clipped, making it obvious he wanted to be off the radio.

  “No, least I don’t think so,” Jake answered.

  “Get back here, now.”

  “Will do, on our way.”

  Michael bit his lip and stared at the ground for a long moment, then looked up at the rest of us and impatiently motioned towards the wall.

  “Well? Let’s get to it, people.”

  It didn’t take a genius to figure out what was going on, or why Michael was shitting his pants. Maybe the government hadn’t died, maybe they’d been organizing and coordinating shit all along, maybe they were preparing to strike back and fight against the zombie army.

  But I had my doubts.

  * * *

  By the time Jonah and Jake returned, it was dark and we had finally given up on the wall for the night. It was halfway done, only ten feet high instead of the planned twenty. John figured we would be able to complete it by sundown the next day, if we started at dawn and worked through lunch and supper. Considering what was out there, that was a sacrifice we were all willing to make. Once the guys got back, everyone gathered in the dining room and drank coffee while they filled us in on the details of their scouting trip.

  “Yeah, there’s another swarm on the road headed towards Blueville. Don’t look like there’s runners with ‘em, and they don’t seem to be in a hurry,” Jonah explained. “I don’t think there’s anything to worry about from them, unless they wind us at the bottom of the hill.” He was referring to the turnoff for the country club, where Route 18 cut off the main road.

  “That shouldn’t be a problem. We were all in vehicles when we traveled that,” Mia said, drawing nods of agreement from the others. “Well, except for Kasey, but she came in through the woods way down the road from the turnoff.”

  “Yeah, and if they catch her scent by the time they get there, which isn’t likely after that rain, they’d never make it across all the ridges,” Jake said. Another round of nods, then Michael spoke up.

  “What about the prison?” he asked.

  “Definitely military. Looks like National Guard, don’t know from where. Maybe West Virginia, maybe a consolidation of the tri-state area. Hard to say. A lot of equipment, vehicles, troops. And I’m talkin’ heavy equipment. A Bradley, few Humvees. Saw one Blackhawk,” Jonah said.

  Michael rubbed his chin, deep in thought. “I don’t have any idea who those guys are. Back when this shit first started, yeah. But now? After so much has fallen apart? They could have come from anywhere. Could be a bunch of guys like me, who were lucky enough to find each other and get organized again, or could be the government has had these guys tucked away somewhere, waiting until things calmed down to let them loose. If the government still exists, that is. No doubt in my mind that it does. Personally, I’m praying it’s the latter. Because the last thing we need is a bunch of goddamn commandoes out there playing Rambo. No chain of command, no order. I hope they’re regular military. Real soldiers, not assholes with big, shiny toys.”

  No one spoke for several minutes after Michael finished. There was really nothing to say. We knew the location of the next swarm, knew we were most likely going to dodge that bullet, and we basically knew what was going on at the prison. Soldiers of some type were using it as a staging area. And there was nothing we could do about it. So we did the only thing we could do: went to bed and tried to get some sleep. We had a wall to finish at dawn.

  * * *

  After a very restless night and a breakfast on the go, everyone able to lift a block, use a trowel, or mix mortar with a hoe was sweating it out under the March sun, moving as fast as they could to get the wall finished. The kids stayed in the house with Gus, hopefully playing and not coming up with new and improved ways of tying the youngest of the litter to couch cushions and pushing them down the long and winding staircase. That, h
owever, is a story for another day. The general mood was surprisingly lighter than the night before. I’m not sure why, unless it was caused by having a solid goal in sight that had nothing to do with keeping your ass attached or running for your life. That always helps.

  “Good job guys. At this rate, we’ll be finished by 2 o’clock,” Michael said and passed around a jug of water.

  He was right. For the first time since jumping in to help, I looked around and noticed how close we actually were to the riverbank. So close in fact, that I could see the boats tied to the dock behind the club. This bit of security made me smile, and looking around at the others, I wasn’t the only one. For the time being, the military and the swarm had been forgotten. Once again, the repetitive and overwhelming nature of hard physical labor took our minds off everything else, and allowed us to focus again. Almost felt normal. Almost.

  As we prepared to lay the last course of block on the last section of wall, a distant rumbling noise suddenly broke through the air. Having gotten used to a new “world,” devoid of cars and people, a noise like that got our attention immediately. Everyone froze; John, Jonah, Todd, and Eric holding blocks, Troy, Michael, Jake, and myself holding trowels loaded with mortar, and Abby, Mia, and Nancy standing around the wheelbarrow mixing the last batch of mortar. We looked around at each other, no one saying a word, and listened as the rumbling grew louder and louder. It wasn’t a vehicle (it was coming from above), and it wasn’t thunder (the sky was clear and beautiful). Before I could figure out which direction the noise was coming from, Michael dropped his trowel and jumped off the makeshift scaffolding we had set up.