by D. J. Molles
Lee motioned for Jack to join him.
The lanky man got out of the car slowly. He looked bad. Dark circles rimmed his eyes and his skin seemed pale and waxy. Lee wasn’t sure whether it was the onset of symptoms, or whether the dehydration was catching up to him. Lee’s own mouth felt like it was full of sand. He kept swallowing, trying to encourage his mouth to make some saliva, but it was bone dry.
Lee’s voice was parched and cracked. “How are you feeling?”
“Under the weather,” Jack said. His voice was hollow. Defeated. “Feverish.”
The two men shared a long and awkward silence. “Look...” Lee began.
“I should ride in the bed,” Jack said flatly. “I don’t know if it’s catching or not, but there’s no sense in risking it. Besides, looks like Tango could use some company.”
Lee only nodded.
Jack looked at the dog, who was now silent, but still pacing in the truck bed. By now, Angela and the two kids had woken up, but were sitting quietly in the cab, watching Jack and Lee. “What’s wrong with him?” Jack asked, nodding towards Tango.
“Smelled something he didn’t like?”
Jack smiled. “I smell something I don’t like, too...Me.”
“We need to get out of here, but there might be something in the yard. Think you can open the garage door and jump in the bed in time for us to tear out of here if we need to?”
Jack shrugged. “Sounds do-able.”
Luckily the pickup truck was backed into the garage. Lee got into the driver’s seat and cranked it up. He regretted leaving the house behind without a thorough search for any supplies they could have used, but given Tango’s growling, Lee felt this was the safer option. He just prayed they would get to someplace with some food and water soon. Ammunition would be a big plus as well.
“You guys sleep okay?” he asked his passengers.
There was a mumbled chorus of “yeah’s” and “ok’s.”
He checked his watch. It was just after dawn. They must have been tired. Lee didn’t recall waking up at all during the night. During the last two days he’d only slept for a few hours total. His body had felt the effects, even if his mind was too wired to notice. He’d slept hard the night before.
Jack signaled that he was ready with the garage door. Lee put the pickup truck in drive and prepared to floor it at the first sign of attackers. He nodded back to the old Marine standing ready and he lifted the garage door up with one heave.
A lady in a dirty gray business suit, still holding her handbag, was leaning against the door and flopped over into the garage when Jack opened it. He jumped backward as what appeared to be a dead body at first, raised its head and reached for Jack.
“Motherfucker!” Jack hauled ass into the bed of the truck.
In the fleeting moment before Lee smashed the accelerator, he wondered if she was simply some tired refugee, trying to rest before continuing on her journey. Then the pickup truck ran her over and Lee didn’t slow down. He hit the street, taking only a moment to look back at the yard and see the two pock-marks in the dirt where his 40mm grenades had hit the night before. He thought he could see body parts sticking out of the long grass. Maybe one of them moved.
He made a left on Morrison Street and stepped on it, speeding up to 60 and then leveling off. He didn’t feel much of anything at all. His heart rate had barely raised. In the rear view mirror, Jack gave him a thumbs-up from the truck bed, while in the backseat Angela held the two kids in her arms with her eyes squeezed shut as though waiting for a nightmare to be over.
***
They passed more houses as they drove.
Lee didn’t dare stop at any of them. Some looked ransacked. A few were boarded up. Others looked like they’d been burned. They left the country road behind and started heading towards town. The single houses set back on huge acreages began to be interspersed with what were once quiet subdivisions and county parks. There were very few abandoned cars on the road. So far, none of them were pushed into the travel lanes to create a roadblock, but Lee took his turns carefully and kept a watchful eye for anything that resembled an ambush. The neighborhoods they passed looked desolate. Curtains billowed out of broken windows. Trash filled the streets.
The kids were surprisingly quiet. Lee had expected them to be whining about hunger and thirst, but they hadn’t said a word since leaving the Petersons’ house. He thought perhaps the violence and stress of the last few days were beginning to cause the children some emotional breakdown. No one—including Lee—could live through something like this and come out unchanged, but the children would be affected on a much deeper level than he was. He had long ago made peace with the malevolence and tragedy of human existence. Children just didn’t know any better.
After another pillaged subdivision, Lee saw a welcome sight. To the left of the road was an old convenience store with a few fuel pumps out front. Lee tempered his hope with realism: over the course of a month it had most likely been picked clean by looters and passing refugees.
But still, it was worth a look.
Lee slowed down to a crawl and gave the area a good, hard look-over. He checked for signs of foot travel through the overgrown weeds all around the convenience store. He surveyed the nearby tree lines for anything out of place. As he crept closer he could see that most of the windows were busted out. The sides of the building were vandalized with graffiti that Lee didn’t understand. But the place looked abandoned.
He turned the truck around in the parking lot of the convenience store and backed it as far behind the building as he could to hide it from the view of any passersby.
“Is this where we’re going, mommy?” Abby asked.
Angela was looking curiously at the gas station. “No honey.”
Lee stepped out of the pickup and leaned back in. “Give me a second to clear it. Stay here.” He thought for a second. “Actually, get in the driver’s seat. If you hear me yelling, just drive away.”
Angela nodded.
As Lee stepped away from the vehicle, Jack jumped out of the bed, looking sore and tired. Lee left his M4 in the truck, since it was out of ammunition. He cleared his MK23 from its holster. Jack had acquired the shotgun and its remaining three rounds from Angela and held it at a low ready as they proceeded around the corner to the front of the store.
Their footsteps crunched in the broken glass that littered the parking lot. Lee looked through the broken storefront windows as he walked by. The interior of the convenience store looked like it had been emptied out. Most of the shelves were tipped over, and what shelves were still standing were empty. The coolers lining the walls were empty as well. Lee pulled on the door and found it unlocked. He stepped through first, Jack following just behind him. The cash register was busted and the cash drawer removed. Little good cash would do anyone now. The tobacco shelves had been completely wiped out. Someone had even taken all the scratch-off lottery tickets.
Jack stooped down and picked something up off the floor. A few pieces of broken glass glittered to the ground. It was another scratch-off lottery ticket. Jack smiled wistfully. “I used to play these all the time.” His voice was hoarse. “Drop a twenty every week on a twelve-pack of beer and scratch-offs. Never won shit.” He laughed.
Lee smiled along with him, more at the sight of seeing him cheered.
“You ever play a scratch-off?” He asked.
“No. Never was big into games of chance.”
“Well,” Jack held the ticket out. “Try it out.”
Lee laughed this time, but shook his head. “Nah, I’m good.”
“Come on,” Jack leaned over on the counter and fished a coin out of the give-a-penny-take-a-penny tray in front of the register. “This might be the last scratch-off lottery ticket you ever see. It’s a piece of American history now.”
“Well, you have to preserve it, then.”
Jack made a rude noise. “Fuck preserving. Scratch this bitch.” He held out the penny.
Lee chuckled. �
�Alright. First and last lottery play ever.”
Jack held his grimy hands in front of his mouth in mock anticipation. “You’re lucky. This is gonna be a winner.”
Lee took the penny and scratched away at the little piece of paper. Having never played before, he didn’t really know what to look for, but Jack narrated his progress as he went.
“Got a diamond there, that’s not worth anything...13 isn’t one of the winning numbers...43...nope...”
Lee finished the scratch off and blew the shavings away.
“Holy shit,” Jack pointed. “You won a hundred goddamn bucks, you sonofabitch!”
Lee stared at the paper. “I did? How can you tell?”
“27 is one of the winning numbers, and you got a 27. The prize is a hundred bucks!”
“Ha!” Lee smiled. “Too bad it’s not worth anything anymore.”
“Bullshit,” Jack folded the ticket and offered it to Lee. “Hang on to it. It’ll be good luck.”
Lee nodded and stuffed the ticket in a pocket on his combat shirt. “We could use all the luck we can get.”
“Who knows?” Jack began to meander around the store. “Maybe someday things will get back to normal and you can cash it in.”
“Yeah...maybe.”
Jack made his way to the back of the store while Lee poked around in the piles of trash for something to eat. Maybe a bag of peanuts or some Cheez-Its. Anything, really. Something big scraped across the floor and Lee jerked up to see Jack pulling a fallen shelf off the wall.
“Oh yeah...” Jack turned and smiled. “Storage cooler?”
Lee abandoned the piles of trash and joined Jack at what appeared to be a door into the cooler section that led behind the shelves of beer and soda. It was padlocked.
“It’s like no one has even tried to get in there,” Lee said in amazement.
“Might not be anything back there worth wasting your time on,” He looked around briefly. “But...maybe they just weren’t as hungry as we are.”
Jack found what he was looking for and pulled up a fire extinguisher. He walked back over to the door and swung the fire extinguisher hard, aiming not for the lock, but for the whole door-handle. It took him three hits and he had sufficiently mangled it enough that when he and Lee yanked on it together, the door popped open.
The interior of the cooler was dark, and not exactly cold, though it was definitely less than room temperature. The two men both simultaneously smelled the air wondering if anything had spoiled, or perhaps died in the cooler. But it just smelled like a cellar. Cool and dank.
“You got a flashlight?” Jack asked.
Lee shook his head. “Not on me.”
Jack fished his lighter out of his pocket and flipped it on. With the little butane flame burning, he stepped into the dark cooler for a closer look. Lee covered him with his hand hovering over his holstered pistol. His eyes strained to see in the dark. The flickering lighter was barely enough to illuminate the small room, but after a few short moments, Jack found the far wall and the light from the flame cast a fluttering glow over several cases of water, soft drinks, and sports drinks.
“Oh, sweet Jesus!” Jack was ecstatic.
Lee allowed himself to feel a moment of relief. A tension in his gut that he didn’t know he’d been holding suddenly let go. Jack was already grabbing a case of water. Lee followed suit.
“Let’s grab as much as we can.”
After a few hurried trips, looking over their shoulders as though this stroke of good luck was about to be stripped from them at any moment, they were able to grab three cases of water and a case of sports drinks. They threw them in the bed of the truck and Lee ripped into a case of water and started handing the bottles out with the same instructions: drink slowly.
If everyone kept a bottle of water down alright, he would give everyone sports drinks. The electrolytes would help them retain the water they would drink afterwards. It wasn’t until he grabbed a bottle of water for himself that Lee noticed Tango was not in the truck bed. In the excitement of finding the water that might save their lives, he hadn’t noticed Tango’s absence.
He looked around for a brief moment before asking Angela and the kids, “Where’s Tango?”
Abby spoke without hesitation. “He throwed up.”
“Tango threw up?” Lee looked to Angela for some adult clarification.
Angela nodded. “Yeah. He started heaving and hopped down out of the truck bed. He wandered off into the grass over there.” She pointed to the passenger side of the vehicle.
The poor dog was as dehydrated as the rest of them. Got the dry heaves and was trying to find a puddle of water to get something to drink. Lee grabbed another bottle of water and walked around to the passenger side of the vehicle. He didn’t want to whistle or yell to Tango for fear of drawing unwanted attention, so he clicked his tongue and called for the dog’s name in a normal conversational voice.
After a moment of silence, he could hear rustling in the brush at the end of the parking lot. Paranoia grabbed him and he moved to draw his pistol, but saw Tango’s long, wolf-like face poking through the tall weeds. The dog wasn’t moving at his usual break- neck speed. He simply walked along, his tail at half-mast and his head lower to the ground. What little resources they’d had, Lee had given to the humans in the group and he felt a pang of guilt for letting Tango’s condition worsen.
Lee bent down to one knee and opened one of the bottles of water. “Come here, boy.”
The dog walked to his master, tongue lolling out of the side of his mouth. The corners of his mouth were strung with that frothy yellow substance that dogs sometimes vomit up. Lee poured water into his cupped hands and offered it to the dog. Tango went straight to Lee and without hesitation planted his muzzle in Lee’s hands, lapping up the water. In about two gulps, the water was gone. Lee repeated the process a few more times, but didn’t want to give Tango too much at one time, as he would likely not hold it down.
Tango kept panting, but at least held his head up.
Lee capped what was left of the dog’s water and wiped the slick saliva from his hands. Tango followed him back to the truck and after a moment of staring up at the truck bed like it was an insurmountable obstacle, he jumped in with Jack.
Jack didn’t look much better than the dog, though he leaned against the back glass, with his eyes closed and a faint smile on his face. The sun was warming the sky and Lee felt for the first time that the air did not feel as dense or humid as the previous few days, and the sky seemed free of the usual summer haze.
Lee didn’t interrupt Jack from his reverie. The man had a few miserable days left. He should enjoy the small satisfaction from the sun on his face and a little water in his belly. Lee got into the driver’s seat and cranked the truck up again. They pulled out from the back of the convenience store’s parking lot and got back onto the road. Inside the vehicle, the mood was lighter than before. A brief moment of levity while Sam and Abby found the time to giggle at something for the first time in days, possibly weeks.
It would not last long.
CHAPTER 17: TIMBER CREEK
Lee drove another half-mile before Angela directed him—somewhat unsurely—to take a left on a two-lane highway that ran east to west, with downtown Angier a few miles to the north. Lee found himself reaching to turn on the blinker and nearly laughed at himself. Perhaps if the circumstances were different it would have been funnier.
He drove with the window down and his arm hanging out. The air smelled like summer, and not at all like the end of the world. The sunlight flashed in and out of the trees as they drove by. Lee felt that if he could just close his eyes for a brief moment, he would wake up, driving down a country road with a beer in his hand and Deana in the passenger seat next to him.
It was then that Jack began screaming.
Lee’s first instinct was to accelerate, rather than stop. He looked in the rearview mirror and couldn’t see Jack. In the span of a half-second, Lee was certain that Jack had turned a
nd was flying into a blind rage. Lee would have to gun him down. And then Jack’s hand pounded the back glass and he began screaming Lee’s name.
This time Lee slammed on the brakes. There was a tumble from the bed and the yelling choked off. “Stay in the car!” He said over his shoulder. Lee threw the vehicle in park and was out of the car before it even skidded to a stop.
He drew his pistol and pointed it at the bed, not sure what he would find. There was a flash of bloody arms and legs and Jack threw himself over the side of the bed and landed on his face in the middle of the road.
Following the man overboard, Tango thrust his head over the side and began snapping his jaws. Lee thought it looked like he was barking, but there was no sound. It was like the dog was trying to bite Jack, but couldn’t reach. Bloody slobber hung in frothy ropes from the dog’s mouth, dangling back and forth and sticking to the side of the truck.
The dog’s eyes were wild and strange.
“Fuck!” Jack stood up unsteadily and backed away from the truck. He had bleeding marks all over his arms and face. “Lee...Dog...Bite...Dog bite! Dog bite!”
Lee lowered his pistol and looked Jack in the face. Behind the blood seeping from several bite marks, Lee could see the man’s eyes were confused and frustrated.
Jack saw the look of pity on Lee’s face and grabbed his hair with both hands, like he was trying to pull it out, his face twisting into a grimace. “Fuckdammit...words are hard.”
Confusion. Loss of speech.
Tango let out a hacking bark. Lee turned to his dog and pointed a stern finger at him. “Tango, leave it!” The dog looked at Jack, then looked at Lee. He sat down, but his eyes were fixed on Lee. The aggressive snapping jaws turned into that stupid smile, with his tongue hanging out of the side of his mouth. His eyes regarded Lee with what looked like relief, as though to say, “Hey, I know you. You’re a friend.”
Lee turned back to Jack. “Slow down and breathe. Think about your words.”
“Ah...umm...” Jack kept rubbing his hands over his head, raking his hair back with his fingers. “I...I...”
