Road to Grissom: Part three of the Aftermath series

by Duncan McArdle

  John had yet to see one of the vehicles he was fairly certain Geoff was now referencing. The stories went that some of the sturdier trucks of the previous world were covered in metal plating to prevent the undead from clogging its wheel arches, armed with the kind of heavy duty spikes that could hold a good few bodies, and then kitted out with wheel chains and stripped of all their unnecessary weight, to help them become the perfect vehicles for exploring the undead wasteland. Such vehicles were seemingly the only way to get anywhere in a city as infested as Chicago, making them a hot topic for the residents who had already made it – either by vehicle before things got quite as bad as they were now, or by boat ever since.

  “If somebody… or some people”, Geoff hesitated, “Have gotten their hands on the kind of vehicles that can get right up to our gates, we might have a problem”.

  “What makes you think this whole mess was the same group?”, John asked, making the assumption that Geoff was suggesting as such.

  Geoff simply looked up at John and laughed, “How often do you hear about someone making it to this place by land?”.

  Geoff had a point. Even John, during his most crazed of moments where getting his daughter back was all he wanted, had quickly realised that an attempt for Chicago by land was almost certain suicide. If anybody out there was well equipped and experienced enough to deal with the masses of undead in this infected city, they were more than likely few and far between. The much more worrying thought however, was why they might be trying to scope out a settlement such as this one.

  “So what’s the plan here?”, John asked, knowing there was a reason he’d been summoned.

  “I’m hoping you’ll tell me”, Geoff replied. “I want to know who the hell this is, I want to know how the hell they managed to get one of their guys into our camp, and I want to know just what the fuck they’re planning”, he said, his temperament growing with every passing second, “Because John, today someone came into my house, and gunned down one of my men, and I do NOT intend to just sit here and let it happen”.

  John remained silent and still, allowing his boss to take a few moments to cool off.

  “Take a couple of men, take a truck, and find out what’s going on”, Geoff instructed.

  “A truck?”, John asked, “In this city?”.

  “One of the armoured ones”, Geoff explained, before sensing that such a small change made little difference to the magnitude of danger involved in the task he was dishing out. “Look, I’m not suggesting this is going to be some easy thing that you have finished by tomorrow. I know it’s dangerous out there, and I have no idea what’s waiting for you if you manage to track these assholes down”, he said, “But I don’t wanna’ find out what happens if we just leave ‘em to it”.

  “Understood”, John replied, “But what exactly do you want me to do if… when, we find them?”.

  “I’ll leave that up to you”, Geoff instructed, “I wouldn’t trust anyone else in this place with a job like this”, he continued, “And I trust you’ll make the right call”.

  With that, there was nothing left to say. John turned on his heel and began pacing towards the escalator, descending quickly before emerging back out into the brightly lit street. The crowd in front was beginning to disperse, and guards had been summoned to take care of any evidence surrounding what had happened. But even now, passing pedestrians were discussing what had taken place, the story altering regularly with the pace of a well-played game of Chinese whispers. John was the only person there who knew the truth about any of this, and he was certain that was a good thing. If anybody else knew there was a rival camp gunning for Chicago, there’d be chaos on the streets.

  Chapter 6: Choices

  “You’re kidding, right? Please tell me you’re kidding?”, Michelle pleaded, “Please tell me you didn’t just go ahead and sign up to this like it was nothing?”.

  “I didn’t… sign up to it”, John replied, not looking at his clearly aggravated wife, his attention more focused on sorting through his small cache of personal belongings in search of whatever he felt he might need on a potentially long trip out of camp. “It was an order from Geoff, I couldn’t say no”.

  “Yes, you could have!”, Michelle insisted, “You don’t HAVE to do anything he tells you to do!”.

  “Well then maybe I wanted to”, John said, immediately causing his wife’s face to drop. “Look, we’re safe here, we have food, water, Hayley even gets an education! All of that is because people like me did things like this, selfless acts to better this place!”.

  “But there are plenty of people here like you who don’t have a family!”, Michelle pointed out.

  “And plenty of those people lost their families because they didn’t have a place like this”, John reminded her, “So it’s up to me to make sure that stops happening”.

  Michelle wasn’t happy. All the convincing in the world couldn’t make her come around to the idea of her husband leaving the gated, well-armed safe-haven of the downtown Chicago survivor’s camp in favour of the barren wasteland outside, an area where the camp itself recommended steering clear from. But one thing she knew only too well, was that no amount of arguing was going to make her husband – the only person she knew of that was more stubborn than she was – change his mind. When he set his heart on something, he was going to do it, so it usually worked out better to just let him get on with it.

  “Fine”, Michelle finally relented, “But please, baby, be careful out there. Come back to us. The last thing either of us wants is to be apart again”.

  “Believe me”, John began, taking a break from his packing to pay attention solely to his wife of thirteen years, “There’s nothing in the world that’s going to keep me from getting back here, not after everything we’ve been through”.

  Michelle nodded, a single tear rolling down her left cheek, glistening in what remained of the dwindling natural light reflecting in from outside the apartment.

  Embracing Michelle in the most comforting way he could muster, John held back emotions of his own in favour of showing strength and solitude. But as he did, he also caught sight of the one other important part of the currently developing situation.

  “Hayley”, John said, looking over Michelle’s shoulder to their daughter’s bedroom, where she stood in the doorway, evidently having heard just about everything. Slowly releasing his grip on Michelle, John walked gingerly over to his daughter, awaiting what he was certain would be a much more difficult to argue with reaction.

  “Listen sweetheart, Daddy’s gotta’ head out for a little while”, he began, “It might be for a few days, but I’m gonna’ get back here just as soon I can, I promise”.

  “It’s okay Daddy”, Michelle replied, in a tone not nearly as compromised by emotion as John had expected. “I know you have a lot to do, I’m always telling my friends how important you are”, she explained.

  John smiled, in one of those rare, uncompromising full lipped smiles that showed the kind of true joy only a child could give to a parent. “Thank you”, he said, before leaning in to kiss his daughter on the forehead, and giving her the same, comforting embrace Michelle had received a few moments prior.

  “Alright”, John finally said as he leant back from the second embrace and walked over to grab his backpack from the side table. “You two take care of each other”, he instructed, looking between his still perfectly chirpy daughter, and his less so wife, who was thankfully now putting on a front. “I’ll be back before you know it, and I might just have some new people with me, who knows”, John lied, knowing that if he were to run into anyone on this particular mission, it was unlikely to end peacefully.

  With that, John took a few steps toward the door, opened it, and exited the apartment, clicking the lock into place as soon as he’d left. Immediately the hallway descended into near-complete-darkness, the window at the end of the hall a particularly grimy one that let little light through even during the daytime. “Parker, why in the hell are you doing this again
”, he said to himself, though he already knew the answer.

  A decision had been made that the best time to head out would be just before sun-up. Although still a fairly dangerous time to be out in the wild – and in the wilderness that was the remains of Chicago for that matter – this time of day was the sort of time where even the most vicious and violent remained in shelter from the night before, and by now John was fairly certain their unknown friends in the unknown vehicle would be long gone.

  Danny had waited on top of the radio tower just long enough to track the fleeing vehicle for a good few blocks, before losing it in the metropolis in front. But using his rough details of its route, and a by now fairly extensive knowledge of the local area, John was confident he knew the most likely places he himself would set up camp, so he was fairly certain that would be a good indication of where he might find somebody else that had done the same.

  The streets at this time of the night – the point where the sun wasn’t far off but the area remained only dimly lit – were almost silent. The mentality of those in the outside world since the apocalypse had taken hold had been to stay indoors until the sun was well and truly out, providing light to illuminate whatever strange things lurked in the shadows. Yet here, in this safe, secure camp, people had struggled to break free from such habits, and so although some of those that had been here the longest had started to adjust, spending their evenings and early mornings outside watching the world go by instead of cooped up inside in fear, most remained indoors.

  John paced through the streets with a great level of intent evident in his every stride. He was out here for a reason, he was going to complete a task, and then he was going to return, nothing more. It was the kind of military mentality that had been instilled in him during his years in the armed forces, and was something that he imagined would firmly stick with him until the end of days.

  John had opted for the classic M16 semi-automatic assault rifle, available in plentiful supply in camps such as this one and more importantly, a weapon that made use of an ammunition that was practically infinite at this point. Even if the camp’s own supplies had been low, the once heavy military presence in Chicago meant that magazines carrying anywhere from a few unspent rounds to an entire set could be found as often as pennies and dimes on the city’s pavement, a now invaluable attribute that made it the perfect place for scavenging, if not for the mass infestation of the undead.

  In addition to the shoulder-slung rifle was his trusted Ruger SR22, the very same pistol he’d had in his possession since the very beginning. Tiny to most – and much more so to a man of reasonable size such as John Parker – the pistol often looked ridiculous when wielded, enough so to force John to re-evaluate his decision to keep it on more than one occasion. But every time he was forced to fire a shot, the light and nimble nature of the weapon had more than compensated for its aesthetic flaws. The pistol was a weapon to be used in a tight squeeze, and that battered old Ruger was about the best option for a tight squeeze that John had so far found.

  Finally in John’s arsenal was a serrated hunting knife. The eight-inch blade seemed lethal even to look at, and was more commonly used to skin and gut wild animals. But John had found it to be the perfect combination of violent and rugged required to survive the new world, and had noted how good a job its serrated edges did at galvanising the innards of undead skulls well beyond repair. If nothing else, such a gruesome looking weapon was much more intimidating than your average kitchen knife, a fact John was sure to use to his advantage in any situation where intimidation had the option to replace deadly force.

  Both the knife and pistol were held firmly in their respective holsters on each of the man’s reasonably sized thighs. John had famously arrived to the camp with both gun and blade held in two pistol holsters, attached to an old belt using staples and then slung around John’s waist. Although he’d been sure to keep to his roots in some respects – including the tattered old hoody he always wore and both the blade and gun themselves – he was happy to swap that old belt out for something a little more sophisticated, especially when both of his new holsters bore emblems of the US Army.

  Not one to get caught short, John had also been sure to bring along a backpack. Another relic from his pre-Chicago-period, John’s British Assault Pack was huge, lightweight and incredibly flexible, meaning it did little to hinder his movement while allowing for the maximum amount of storage. He’d recovered it from a home in the town of Ashton sometime prior, and had carried it with him on every expedition since. Historically, it had been stuffed with whatever random and almost always out of date scraps of food he could find while scavenging out in the wild, but now it held only the bare essentials needed for a few days beyond the walls. After all, John now had the rare luxury of knowing he had somewhere half decent to come back to. That said, he still felt the need to bring the huge backpack, should enough opportunities for scavenging present themselves.

  Taking the final few steps towards the main western wall – itself the scene of the majority of the camp’s controlled-culling – John pivoted at the last moment and headed left, towards the rarely used underground car-park. The large metal shutters had been raised up ahead of his arrival by the guards on duty, and a rare sliver of electricity had been procured to power some strategically placed portable lamps inside, one of which flickered and sparked violently in the background as if it were having a seizure.

  Inside the garage were an assortment of vehicles. Despite how the majority of such places were now found, this particular location housed not a single non-functioning car. Each and every one had either a key or some other means of starting it, had all the appropriate modifications made – brake lights removed, oil and fuel regularly checked and topped up, numerous spares housed in the trunk and so on – and was ready to roll at a moment’s notice. There was even a small fleet of school buses parked at the far end of the garage, themselves having been procured in case an event were to arise whereby every last member of that now fairly sizable camp was required to leave, quickly. But John was more interested in a series of vehicles much closer to him, lined side by side to his right after entering, each of them dimly lit by a nearby light, and each looking just as menacing as the last.

  The first option was a particularly meaty looking, yet fairly bland by name, Ford Focus. The smallish hatchback wouldn’t be many people’s first thought when considering vehicles to ride out the apocalypse in, but it did have a few benefits. The first was in its innards, the vehicle was a family friendly, comfortable, accessible, spacious hatch, with enough room in the trunk to store numerous weapons, and good visibility on all sides courtesy of its many windows. In addition, it was a Ford, so reliability issues were uncommon, and parts were easy to come by. But most importantly, it was a Focus RS, meaning it was by no means short on power, and in fact was one of the quickest vehicles the camp had at its disposal.

  The second option was a much more intimidating looking Ford F350 pickup truck. The bigger brother to the F150 John had driven months prior, it was a familiar face to the hooded man, and was something he was certain he knew how to manage. The F350 was big enough to conquer just about anything and everything anybody threw at it, spacious enough to house a huge amount of supplies, and powerful enough to drag its four-tonne weight around without breaking a sweat.

  The final option in this particular series – and only the first one not to feature that same Ford name – was the meanest looking of them all. Sporting a classic black stripe along the length of its dark grey body, the lowered down, rounded headlight, black windowed monster that was the Dodge Charger Hellcat sat uncharacteristically quiet in the corner of the building. Its huge wheels and exposed supercharger making it the obvious choice for a fun, high powered drive around the city or country – now that traffic was a thing of the past – but perhaps not so for the average supply run.

  Each of the vehicles had one additional feature that separated them from all others, the very same feature that was the reason for t
hem being parked separately inside that underground car park. On all three vehicles, covering every conceivable gap in the body – and on both Ford’s cases, some of the windows – was a series of corrugated and sharpened metal sheets. All three cars had been turned into specialist apocalypse vehicles, or SAVs as they were affectionately known, and had been specially altered to make them all the less likely to get hunkered down by the new environments of the world, and all the more likely to keep their inhabitants alive when they did.

  “I like the F350”, came a voice from behind John, prompting him to turn to his rear.

  The man in front was an incredibly tall, incredibly handsome individual who went by the name of Devon. Truly a God amongst men looking character, Devon was exactly the kind of driven, notoriously strong and experienced ex-military man that John gravitated to in the new world. A special request – and one Geoff had been reluctant to grant – Devon was considered a “captain” amongst the guards, and was looked up to about as much as John was, if not more.

  “Well that doesn’t surprise me for a second”, John replied, smiling to greet the man before looking back to Devon’s choice; the F350, the least armoured yet probably still the most hefty of the three options.

  “Come on”, Devon reasoned, dumping his own gear onto the ground alongside John, “It’s got the space, the power, the weight-“.

  “The thirst”, John jumped in, pointing out its biggest flaw – its need to be refuelled incredibly often when driven with the weight of all its armour plating – and quickly reducing Devon’s own grin. “We need something more efficient than that, and I seriously doubt we’re gonna’ find that with the Charger”.

  “So we’re taking the Focus!?”, Devon asked in disbelief, “Bro, I was promised an adrenaline fuelled road trip here, I got told to bring extra ammo, please don’t start off with us getting into a car destined for the grocery store”.