The Rotting Souls Series (Book 1): Charon's Blight [Day One]

by Ray, Timothy A.

  Chapter 6

  Left Behind

  Todd

  Tucson, AZ

  He considered buying more canned goods but there were already some in their Bug Out Bags, and the place they were heading was well stocked in the event of something like this. He didn’t need to focus on any of the heavy stuff either; that had been taken care of.

  Instead he made sure to grab a four-pack of butcher knives and a rolling pin, though he couldn’t imagine what he’d hit with it. It was just the sturdiest thing outside of a mop handle they had in the store. He then rushed over to the chemical aisle to load up on disinfectant and towels. Finally, after grabbing various types of medicines, he made his way back towards the grocery part of the store.

  Since most of their basic supplies were well taken care of, he focused more on the novelty stuff; the things they might never have again. He snatched three party size bags of Cheetos for his wife and took the full case of David Sunflower seeds from the bottom shelf of the nut section. Looking to his right, he stared at the beef jerky. Unable to help himself, he grabbed three of every kind and then pushed his already heaving cart to the soda aisle. Stocking up on Coke and Crush, he put the last bottle on the top and held it in place as he made his way back towards the registers.

  He found an empty line and began to unload before the cashier had time to sign in and start ringing him up. He got some worried glances from his co-workers, who saw how frenzied his unloading was and he mentally tried to slow himself down.

  Attention was not something he wanted at the moment.

  They were used to his briskness, but not the panicked “run for your life” attitude he was displaying. He was usually more social with the cashiers and they noticed the ignorance he was greeting their questioning looks with.

  After the last item was on the conveyer belt, he rushed the cart to the turn style that held the loaded bags and immediately began emptying them back into the cart. Nicole was his cashier and he had chosen her purposefully on his bid to get out of there quickly. Unlike some of the others, she was quiet and didn’t like to talk up her customers while ringing them up. If he had gotten Cisco or Nikki, he’d be there all morning.

  He looked into her dark eyes, the black make up and dark hair making him remember his wild fantasies he’d once had about her. They were fleeting and didn’t amount to much; he was happily married, to more than one woman, and was not currently looking to add to his busy life.

  Still, he had noticed her when he ignored pretty much everyone else. Now he was standing there, rushing out of work because a friend of his told him the world was ending, and he was going without letting a single person know that it was happening.

  Did he take a moment and try to warn her?

  He looked into those dark eyes again as his hands flew back and forth loading his groceries and tried to make a decision. Playing out the conversation in his mind, he couldn’t organize his thoughts into anything that would make a difference on the outcome.

  Hey, you need to get out of here, the world is ending?

  How?

  I don’t know, I just know that it is and you need to go!

  Why?

  Because this nerdy teenage hacker says that it’s happening, so it must be!

  Where?

  Who the fuck cares? All that matters, is that you get the fuck out of here.

  He sighed heavily and kept his mouth shut.

  In all the scenarios that played through his mind, she remained at that register. Nothing short of taking her by force would get her to go with him and he wasn’t going to do that. The worst possible outcome would end in getting his ass thrown in jail as the world around him went to shit. Not only was his family relying on him to get them to safety, he would be signing his own death sentence as well.

  No matter what he told them, no matter how convincing he could be, in the end, they wouldn’t believe him. He would have wasted his only chance to get out quickly by trying to be a hero. His family didn’t need him to be everyone’s hero; just theirs. They came first. Above all else he needed to get them to safety.

  Everything else was secondary.

  He worked on clearing his mind, doing his best not to dwell and move on. He tried to keep his face passive; nodding here and there with the flow of the short conversation. She hit the total button and he slid his card, not even bothering with his discount. That got a raised eyebrow and he realized that if he had wanted to keep things looking normal, he probably should have taken the time to do it. Anything out of the norm would draw attention.

  He didn’t bother to look at the total, their rent was in there waiting on a pending check. He doubted he’d be back anytime soon to worry about the eviction process when it bounced. If this all turned into nothing, he’d contact Sean and ask to stay at the compounds for a while until they got a new place to live. They could hire movers to retrieve their things long before the locks got changed.

  However, that was just a pipe dream. Ben had never been wrong before and while there was a first time for everything, there was something in his soul telling him that this was not one of those times.

  Once the receipt began printing, he thanked Nicole and rushed towards the entrance, ignoring her as she waved the receipt at him. He got stuck behind an old lady who was pushing her cart slower than a tortoise on ice. He had this overwhelming urge to shove her out of the way and push past. His cart kept nudged forward slowly and it took everything he had to keep from acting on it.

  As she moved to go towards the exit, he rushed past her and went through the entrance doors instead. “Excuse me,” he muttered as he pushed past a couple walking in. They stared daggers at his uncaring back.

  He was focusing so much on the ground that his heart stopped when the cart impacted a set of legs that had rushed into view; stopping him in his tracks. His daughter Michelle was standing there looking at him expectantly and his hands let go of the cart handle.

  When she was younger, he had been thankful she had her mother’s good looks. Not so much now that she was the dating age. She had also inherited her mother’s pale skin, which looked burnt rather than tanned in the summer. Her short brown hair was also cropped like her mother’s, and with his wife’s youthful looks; they often passed as sisters rather than mother and daughter. She was wearing a tight black rubber suit, which must have looked conspicuous to those approaching the store, even with the regular clothing she wore over it. She was already sweating, the added insulation a nightmare in the Arizonan heat. Luckily, it was overcast and the wind was kicking up. The suit ran from neck to ankles and was form fitting. It was thick to prevent teeth from tearing the skin and tight to prevent anything from getting a grip on the wearer. It looked like a diving suit; which had to look odd in the middle of the Sonoran Desert. He didn’t care how ridiculous it looked as long as it got the job done.

  He glared at the passerby that eyed her suspiciously, and they moved on; stealing glances over their shoulders as they entered the store.

  Her seventeen-year-old hands ripped the cart from him and flung it towards his two sons, who were standing in front of the cargo door on their white Ford Windstar. The mini-van might not be stylish, but when you had six people to transport, it got the job done. No one was cramped in a small ass back seat.

  His oldest son was fourteen and tall for his age, his short dirty blonde hair glared even in the muted sunlight. Nicholas’s acne was apparent on his face and he was evidently trying to grow a moustache like his father. It wasn’t working out too well.

  His younger son Caleb was trying to help his older brother unload, but Nick was taking the majority of the bags himself and pushing his younger brother out of the way. He was also blond, with his father’s hazel eyes and a pair of glasses sitting on his nose. He was the only one other than his mother that needed to wear them at the moment. He was also the only one with fear spread openly on his face. The others were working hard to remain passive. He wanted to tell his son to just get in the van and let Nicholas f
inish with the loading, but he knew that his sensitive son would take it as a slight. He didn’t want to push him over the edge.

  Avoid a scene, he repeated in his mind; a mantra to keep him focused. They were also wearing their black rubber suits and for a moment he considered rushing to the bathroom to change into his. Judging by the looks they were getting by the passing customers; he didn’t want to chance it.

  Skye was doing her best to throw the grocery bags over the rear seat and on top of their stowed gear. She was trying to squeeze as much as she could back there but was running out of room. She was the youngest of the group, only nine years old, and had a mixture of both parents. She had light brown hair, blue eyes, and her mother’s face. She was rail thin like her mother and he had hoped that she would put on weight as she grew up. As she loaded the bags on top of the gear they brought, he began to wonder if she would get that chance or if the end was looming closer than he realized.

  Would they all perish while loading these damn groceries?

  The cart was finally shoved away, the Wal-Mart bags packed to the roof of the back hatch. The last of which were thrown on the floor and nudged under the seats.

  Thirty-five minutes had passed and it already felt like he was running out of time; that the overcast clouds would soon darken further and hellfire would begin to fall on them all. His eyes were cast towards the sky, as if expecting one of the Four Horsemen to suddenly appear with a scythe in hand to end their lives.

  He was giving himself the spooks.

  He checked both sides of the road before heading towards the front of his van. His phone went off again as a reminder that they needed to get moving.

  Ben: I-19 n 10 clear atm

  He looked up from his phone just in time to catch a bundle hurdling his way. His wife hadn’t noticed what he was doing when she launched his suit at him. He almost dropped the phone while catching it. Cursing, he wondered why the hell she always felt the need to throw things at him. It was one of her favorite past-times. What was he going to do, change into the suit out here in the parking lot? They were getting enough attention as it was without him getting butt ass naked.

  That would surely turn some heads.

  He was of average weight, having spent a lot of time working out in the past couple of years, but he was nothing special to look at. There were also bundles of protective pads lying on the floorboards of the van, not yet fastened over their suits. Once that happened there would be no more curious glances, they’d become hardened worried stares. In this day and age of paranoia, it would definitely result in a call into the authorities.

  “You didn’t forget anything, did you?” he asked his wife as they passed each other; crossing in front of the van and barely touching hands as they parted.

  “Put in a call to both our parents; nothing so far,” she responded, sounding worried. It was early yet and she hadn’t gone into full-blown panic mode. He wanted to be well on their way if that time came or they’d never get out of town. She loved her mother and sister so much that she’d risk it to physically go to their houses and drag them along. If he let her get that far in her thinking, he’d never be able to convince her to keep going and would constantly be badgered to turn around. No, if they were going to do this, they were going to do it full throttle and do what they could for the others along the way.

  “Sam going to meet us over on Houghton?” he asked, trying not to worry before he had too. Sam had four kids with her other husband and he could just imagine how hard it was to get them all moving; they weren’t as well trained as his kids on how to respond when something like this happened.

  “That’s what she said,” Monica returned, getting a couple of snickers from the kids in the back.

  He didn’t need to fish his keys out of his pockets; his wife had left the engine running. His hand had been digging in his pocket on its own volition and he jerked it back into his control. He opened the driver side door to the van and felt a rush of cold air from the maxed-out air-conditioning. That was to be expected from what the rest of his family was wearing, but his slacks were pretty thin, and he knew that it’d be a cold trip for him until he got his own suit on.

  He watched his wife hop in the van and tried for a moment to forget everything that was happening. Her short blond hair was cut in a style reminiscent of Gillian Anderson’s in X-Files, which seemed quite fitting at the moment. Her suit was tight around her slender body, accentuating her features; especially the ass he loved so much. She hadn’t put the protective pads on either and her one-hundred-pound frame moved fluidly as she worked to get settled. Her seatbelt clicked and she was looking at him expectantly. She didn’t look like she had ever given birth to four children. The fact that the first was cesarean dictated that the rest were as well; making it so her hips had never gone through that part of the process. It was something that he knew his wife was thankful for. Her youthful looks had garnered him more than a few jealous stares over the years; just reminding him of what he had and wanted to keep.

  He rolled down the window as the cargo door slammed shut; the kids beginning to settle down in their accustomed places. His eyes scanned the skies. Was there some alien craft up there bearing down on them? Was there a nuke heading their way? If there were, he wouldn’t see it through that cloud cover until it was too late. He chuckled and drew curious stares from his family. He doubted his eyes would catch something flying that fast even if the skies were clear.

  He was frustrated; not knowing the nature of the danger was making it impossible for him to come up with a sufficient defense. What if someone had launched a missile at Tucson? They’d be targeting either Davis-Monthan AFB or Raytheon, both in their path out of town. Should he go north through Phoenix instead? Ben had said that I-10 was clear, but not which direction to head. The indecision was paralyzing him and he didn’t hear what his wife had been saying. “What?”

  She sighed at him and glared, she hated repeating herself almost as much as he did. He looked in the rear-view mirror and saw that his children were all ready to go. Someone had pulled up behind them, honking for him to move out of the way. He felt five pairs of eyes boring into him; wondering what was taking him so long to get moving. How could he explain to them that this was the moment where he left his previous life behind for whatever there was to come?

  The second the van moved there was no going back.

  He could still fix things with his boss, could still return the groceries he bought. Once they were on the road though, that was it. It was a heavy thing for him; he was the kind of person that hated change. He needed routine to make it from day to day. How did he just break from that mold and start anew?

  A horn honked again and he took one last look at the two double doors of his work, then shifted into drive and pulled away. As he coasted around the corner into the side parking lot, his wife told him that she had texted Naima and Saint while she was pumping gas.

  He barely heard her over the yammering of his warring mind.

  Unconsciously choosing to avoid the rubber necking at the front of the store, he swung around the back and headed for the parking lot exit and the street ahead. A flicker of movement caught his eye and his foot immediately applied the brake before his conscious mind realized what it was doing. A coworker of his was walking along the back of the store pulling a pallet-jack of RPCs; the black containers produce came in. He had nearly run him down; so mixed up in his own thoughts.

  He needed to snap out of it.

  Erik had begun to wave at him, but had stopped mid-way; eyes narrowing. His face must have alerted his coworker that something was up. They had been hired on the same day, shared a locker for three years; and had spent their breaks smoking and bullshitting. How could he not say something? How could he just drive away? His own hand came up in a half-hearted wave; the smile he cracked feeling fake and weak. It did nothing to dissuade his friend that everything was okay.

  The inner struggle continued as they rolled past, an insane idea of jumping out an
d forcing Erik into the van coming to the foreground of his thoughts. His foot was almost on the brake when he looked once more into his rear-view mirror and saw the four faces watching him. He sighed and put his foot back on the gas; no matter what happened his kids came first. He had to wake the fuck up if he was going to get them out of this; they needed him.

  He took another long look at his friend as he coasted to a stop at the edge of the parking lot. He mentally told Erik and his former life goodbye, then floored the gas and pulled onto Valencia.

  He heard the sound of a clock ticking in his mind. His heart leapt to life, starting to pump adrenaline through his veins and clearing some of the numbness away. For better or worse, they were on their way.

  His wife was still talking to him and he hadn’t heard a thing she had said. He picked up on the name Naima though and he replied without thinking. “You know she’s just going to ignore your text messages,” he told her, holding out his phone. “She never really liked you, try mine. I shouldn’t be using it while driving anyways.” He had been friends with Naima since the eighth grade and twenty-four years later she had grown into being his best friend and godmother to his children. The fact that she was his first girlfriend hadn’t put her on easy terms with his wife, who had also gone to school with her and shared the same classes. The two talked occasionally, but the conversations were forced and his wife did it more for his peace of mind than any actual need for it.

  Todd hadn’t spoken to her much over the last few years, as he had grown increasingly involved with his “cult” as she liked to call it. He had tried to explain that they weren’t religious in any way, that they were just a group of people trying to create a safe place for their families to go in case the world came to an end. What was so crazy about that?