by D. J. Molles
But no one was screeching. No one was running at them. Lee knew it had only been a few short minutes, but time stretches when you’re certain you’re going to die. Lee moved quickly to the bedroom doorway and looked through, keeping the muzzle of his pistol pointed down the hall and the weapon itself tucked in close to his chest.
He first noted that Stephanie’s bedroom door was shut, which gave him hope that Jack had survived the attack by locking himself in the room. The hall that separated them was littered with dead corpses, and those that still clung stubbornly to life. Their desperate situation did not affect their aggression. Lee watched one of the injured infected crawling over the bodies of others, unable to move its legs, but still biting and clawing at the air.
He waited another long moment, listening to the sounds of the house, but there was only the constant groan. Lee called out to Jack but got no answer. He felt someone move beside him and turned to find Angela standing to his right, pointing the shotgun at the figure crawling slowly towards them.
Lee reached out a staying hand. “Don’t waste the ammo.”
She looked at him, confused. Lee holstered up and took the shovel from the ground. He turned before closing the bedroom door so she and the kids would not have to see the messy cleanup. She looked at him with eyes as blank as any professional poker player, and Lee had to appreciate her guts.
Before closing the door, he nodded to her. “You did really good, Angela. Thank you.”
“Yeah,” was her subdued response.
Lee closed the door and faced the hallway. Dusk had cast the house in a dim gray, but he could still make out the shapes of the bodies, and see the movement of the ones still twitching or clawing for him. Inside the master bedroom, Angela stood like a statue. The only response to the sickening sound of the steel shovel crushing bone, was a blink of her eyelids.
Cleanup was a messy business. It took more than one strike to dispatch most of the crawlers. To be sure he hadn’t merely knocked them unconscious, Lee put the point of the shovel to their neck and stomped down, severing the spinal column. The stench was overpowering, and Lee felt sick to his stomach doing the work. These people that littered the ground, they were less than animals to him now. He was killing the wounded with no more thought than he would give to crushing a bug.
Twice he retched but produced nothing. His stomach was empty. After taking five of them out, he made it to the closed door of Stephanie’s bedroom.
He didn’t want his head blown off trying to open the door, so he tapped it first and called out to Jack, hoping to God he would answer.
“Jack, you with me? Talk to me buddy.”
The response was strained. “Yeah.”
Lee threw the door open and found Jack sitting against the far wall. He was covered in blood from head to toe, but Lee couldn’t tell if it was his, or from the three dead bodies at his feet. Lee needed to check, but he thought he could guess which it was. Jack looked bad, but he was still holding a big Ka-Bar knife that he had produced from somewhere.
Lee stepped over the bodies to get to Jack and knelt down. “You look shitty, devil dog.”
Jack grimaced and Lee saw blood staining his teeth.
“Where’d they get you?”
“Eh...” Jack grunted and leaned forward. “I’m fine.”
“You’re bleeding.”
Jack just gave Lee a look. “Yeah, I know.”
Lee nodded. “Where’s the blood coming from?”
“One of them was swinging a hammer around and nicked me in the mouth...knocked a few teeth out.” The older guy slumped and was silent for a long moment. “And one of ‘em bit me.”
For a perverse moment, Lee thought Jack was kidding. Surely, it was a joke. Then Lee scanned Jack’s arms for wounds. The older man was holding his right forearm with his left hand. He withdrew the hand and Lee didn’t ask the question he was thinking—did it break the skin? On Jack’s forearm there was a near-perfect circle of teeth marks, gouged well into the skin. It could have just been the trauma to the wound, but Lee thought it already looked red and swollen.
Lee wanted to swear, but controlled himself.
Jack immediately saw the look on Lee’s face. “You don’t gotta pussy foot around it, Lee. I know I’m fucked.”
Lee noticed it was the first time Jack had called him by his first name. “Not necessarily...I mean, even if you are, you won’t show symptoms for while.”
“So what?” Jack snorted. “You’re just gonna keep me around, getting sick and going crazy ‘cause you don’t have the stones to do the job?”
Lee grit his teeth. “I’m not gonna kill you, Jack.”
“Fuck...” Jack was quiet. “You have to shoot me.”
“No.”
“Shoot me, Lee.” Jack’s eyes got fierce. “Don’t play this whole comrades-in-arms, never-leave-a-man-behind bullshit with me! I don’t even know you, motherfucker! Put me down! Do it before I start losin’ my mind! Fucking shoot me!”
“I’m not...”
Jack cut him off by lunging for Lee’s pistol. “Gimme that!”
Lee swatted his hand down. Jack grabbed for Lee’s collar, but Lee slammed him back into the wall and shook him hard. His face was red. “Fuck you!” he shouted in Jack’s face. “You’re not the only person trying to survive here, Jack!”
“I’m gonna die anyway!” Jack twisted away.
Lee slammed him against the wall again. “We’re all gonna fucking die!” Jack glared. A few heartbeats passed in intense silence. “We’re all just a step away from it. But right now we are closer than ever and there’s a woman and two children and they’re on the fucking brink!” Lee took a few deep breaths in silence, then lowered his voice. “I need every working trigger finger I can find to help me get them out of here and into someplace safe. You wanna die, do it yourself, but don’t ask me or anyone else in this group to lessen our chances of survival.”
Lee stood up and grabbed the shovel.
Before exiting the room, he stopped and turned. “We need to wash the blood off.”
CHAPTER 15: DECISION TIME
Lee didn’t bother counting the bodies as he walked downstairs, finishing off the ones that were still moving. The hallway was littered with them, and he fought to keep his footing on the steps. There were even more on the landing, piles of them, often stacked three or four high. With the risk of contagion, it was out of the question to attempt to move the bodies out of the house.
Not to mention the smell was becoming too much to bare.
When he had scoured the lower level of the house for stragglers and come up empty, he returned upstairs. Jack was standing at the top of the stairs, looking shell shocked, staring at the wall. Certain death was a difficult concept to wrap your brain around. Knowing that very soon you would cease to exist. Knowing that, for you, there was no such thing as a future.
Lee left him to his thoughts without speaking and went to the master bedroom. Angela was sitting on the bed, holding the two children. The two kids looked like they’d been crying, while Angela just looked numb.
Lee stood in the doorway, not sure what to say.
Angela broke the silence, her voice soft and cracked. “Jack got infected?”
Lee didn’t answer for a long time. He wanted to rub his face, but his hands were sticky with blood. His shirt under his combat vest was clinging to his chest and becoming stiff. His whole body felt like it was coagulating. “Yes.”
Angela’s only response was a long, deep breath.
“It’s almost dark,” Lee’s voice was blank. “You got blood on you. There’s a stream in the backyard we can use to wash it off.”
Lee felt himself brace for some volcanic reaction from Angela, but she only nodded and then slowly stood up. She grabbed the two children by the hands, taking comfort from them as they did from her. Watching it made Lee feel more alone. The trio walked slowly past him, down the hallway, and edged past Jack, who still stood at the top of the stairs.
Lee fel
t a cold nose nudge his arm. He gave Tango a scratch behind the ear. The dog’s fur stuck to the blood on Lee’s hands. They left the master bedroom behind. At the top of the stairs, Lee looked at Jack. He thought of different things to say, but they all tasted wrong in his mouth. After a pause, he simply touched Jack lightly on the shoulder and kept moving.
Down the stairs, over the bodies, he followed Angela and the children out of the house. They all walked slowly down the hill, stepping around the fresh dug graves as though they weren’t there at all.
Shortly after they walked down the hill, Jack exited the house and followed.
***
They decided that the pickup truck in the garage was the best place for everyone to hide out for the night. The smell inside the house was too rancid to live with, even for just one night. The truck was a king cab, so the group fit into the vehicle comfortably, with Tango curled up in the bed. Lee found the keys on the kitchen counter, which was a small miracle in and of itself. The bigger miracle is that the truck turned over and had a quarter tank of fuel left in it.
Lee cracked the windows so it wouldn’t get stuffy and turned the car off, but left the keys in the ignition so he wouldn’t have to fumble with them if they needed to drive away quickly. He left the dome light on, as it was the only light in the garage. Angela and Jack sipped slowly on cups of water. Lee had taken the last gallon or so of water out of the hot water heater. He drank enough to take the edge off his own dehydration and gave the rest to the others.
The two children had taken a few cups of water each and had fallen asleep shortly after. Abby looked slightly better, but Angela was still critically dehydrated. Jack had insisted that she take most of the remaining water for herself, as he thought it would be a waste for him to drink too much of it.
“How are you feeling?” Lee asked him.
He pursed his lips. “Fine.”
“Maybe you’re not infected.” Angela sounded hopeful.
Jack smiled wanly, but didn’t say anything. They all knew that Jack was probably infected. Lee thought about Angela’s husband, who he’d been forced to kill in front of her and her child. She must be familiar with the signs and symptoms of infection, probably watched her husband succumb to them, all the while hoping he’d break out of it, that the impossible would happen and the infection wouldn’t take hold. It would be difficult for her to watch it again.
Lee spoke. “We need to move.”
They both looked at him.
“In the morning, I mean. We’ll sleep here tonight, but we can’t stay here. The little bit of water we had is just holding off the dehydration, not curing it. And we have no food at all. We need to find you someplace to stay.”
“What do you mean ‘find me someplace’?” Angela leaned forward. “What about you?”
Lee twisted in the driver’s seat and looked back at her. “I’ll stay there, too. But I’ll have to leave to get a resupply. I need to leave you guys in a defensible location, that has some food and water.”
Jack leaned back against the headrest and spoke quietly. “Why don’t you tell us about that insurance policy, captain?”
Lee faced him.
“What are you talking about?” Angela asked.
Jack looked back at him steadily. “Your GPS device? What’s on there?”
Lee stared straight ahead and didn’t answer.
“What’s he talking about, Lee?” Angela and Jack waited in pregnant silence for a response from Lee, but he wasn’t sure how to tell them. The facts were likely to only make them angry. The facts were also very dangerous, not only to Lee but to anyone that knew them. And the more people knew, the more dangerous the secret got for Lee.
Then again, they deserved some sort of explanation. He couldn’t’ expect two grown adults to simply trust him implicitly with their very survival. He needed to tell them enough that they would trust his decisions, but not so much that he was putting them or himself at unnecessary risk.
“Fine.” He nodded slowly. “Understand that everything I say is going to be the short version. It’s not because I don’t trust either of you, but it’s for your safety. And what I do tell you needs to be kept between us. Agreed?”
Angela and Jack both nodded.
“There are going to be groups out there. Groups of survivors that have banded together for protection. It’s these groups that I’m supposed to unite and attempt to rebuild a centralized government. However, as one man—especially an outsider—I’m of no value to them. They’ll never trust me, never listen to me. I have to bring something to the table. Something they can’t say no to.
“Think of the GPS as a bargaining chip. It gives me the upper-hand when I’m negotiating with these groups of survivors. It will be what brings them together, not me. The only issue is, with that much sway, I also make myself a huge target. Anyone that knows what’s on this GPS is going to be a target. There’s going to be a lot of people that will believe it will be better to simply take it from me, rather than work with me. Because of that, there are fail-safes in place to keep this bargaining chip out of the wrong hands. The first and most important is that I am the only one with access to it.
“Obviously, if I were to tell you what was on the GPS, or where these things were, you would also become a target. So I won’t tell you, but I’m sure you can reasonably infer what I’m talking about.”
Angela’s eyebrows went up. “Ummm...”
Jack cut her off. “Guns, ammo, food, water, medicine...” He smiled. “You’re holding all the keys to survival. You got everyone by the balls.”
Lee didn’t directly confirm Jack’s theory. “Don’t read anything Machiavellian into it, Jack. I’m here to help, not conquer the world. The only caveat is that I do have an ulterior motive: If you want to play with my toys, you gotta play nice.”
Jack shrugged. “I’ve got no problem with it.”
“So...” Angela seemed like she was still trying to wrap her head around it. “What do we do now?”
Lee looked back at her. “Tomorrow, we have to find somebody to take us in. They won’t want to at first. They’ll be suspicious of outsiders. But I’m pretty sure I can convince them. The hard part will be finding them.”
“What are we looking for?” Jack seemed more in tune now.
“A large group of survivors. Could be individuals that banded together out of necessity and are now holding a defensible location, or it could be a group of people that were already a community prior to the collapse and have fortified their position.” Lee rubbed his face and felt thick stubble. “The most likely places to find these groups will be locations where some sort of security or fortification already exists.”
“What type of security are we talking about?” Angela asked.
“Could be many different things. A factory with a tall fence around it. A gated community. Even just an industrial building with heavy doors on it.”
“I’m not real familiar with this area,” Jack stated. “You guys know of any places like that around here?”
Lee grimaced. “I had a map of places fitting that profile, but it was in my bunker.”
“There’s a gated community a little closer to town,” Angela offered. “I can’t think of the name of the road it’s on, but I know how to get there.”
Lee tapped the steering wheel. “Do you remember what it was called?”
“Timber Creek,” Angela answered immediately. Her voice got quiet. “I had a friend that used to live there. Maggie Dunham. She moved to Raleigh last year.”
Lee and Jack both looked at Angela for a brief moment. Lee got back on track. “We’ll want to avoid population centers, but the outskirts should be good. I think I remember Timber Creek being towards the edge of town.”
Angela nodded. “Yeah. Almost at the city line.”
“How long do you think it would take to get there?”
Angela looked around as though she was disoriented for a moment. “I don’t know. Maybe twenty minutes?”
Lee did mental calculations. Auto manufacturers in the US generally made their gas tanks big enough to carry the vehicle about 300 miles on a single tank regardless of MPG’s. With a fourth of a tank, you were generally looking at between 50 and 75 miles. Lee decided to go with the conservative number. 50 miles was probably enough to get them to where they were going. A twenty minute drive on surface streets was usually about 15 miles. If Timber Creek was a bust, they would hopefully have enough fuel to try for another location.
Hopefully.
This was all barring the possibilities of raiders, rogue military factions, and hordes of infected.
“Alright,” Lee leaned his head back and clicked off the dome light. “We should get some sleep.”
The exhausted group slept deeply, despite their desperate circumstances. Their dreams were dark and hazy and filled with fear and hope. They slept unaware that fate would not allow all of them to reach Timber Creek alive.
CHAPTER 16: ON THE ROAD
Lee awoke to the sound of Tango growling.
In the blackness of the garage, Lee grabbed his pistol from its holster, still half- asleep and unsure of what was happening. The three glowing green dots of his pistol’s tritium sights looked like a UFO hovering in midair. He fumbled for the door handle and popped it. The dome light came on and Jack startled awake.
Lee turned on the vehicle’s parking lights and the garage was bathed in a yellow glow. Tango was still growling, but the garage door was closed, as was the door into the house.
Lee motioned for Jack to remain seated and stepped out of the pickup. He immediately dipped down to one knee and checked underneath the vehicle for any intruders. Finding nothing, he made a slow, cautious circle around the car, all the while Tango still pacing in the bed and growling.
Lee stepped over to the door into the house, but thought better before opening it. They needed to leave, not get in another fight. If anything was in the house, their best option was to leave it behind, not waste time, ammunition, and risk death trying to kill it.
