Ran (Book 1): Apocalyptica

by Joshua Guess

  All of a sudden the adrenaline meant nothing. The wind fell from my sails.

  The fight was over. The nearest zombies were distant enough I didn’t need to worry about them and moving toward Len and his crew. I reckoned it was plenty of leeway and decided to make myself scarce.

  I ran as fast as I could while decked out in armor. Apparently it was fast enough; as I followed the bank of the creek in the direction I’d told Robert to move in, I caught sight of him. Gregory lagged behind a dozen paces or so, but seemed doggedly set on keeping moving. Even at a distance I saw his chest heaving with effort, the heaviness of his limbs, but he kept on moving forward. My estimation of him ticked up a few notches.

  “Gregory!” I said as I closed in on him. He slowed and turned, surprise etched on his face. I grinned, wincing as the cuts on my face stretched.

  “You’re okay,” he said, seeming relieved and put off in even amounts. I realized my mouth was bleeding pretty badly and reached up to wipe it away with the gorget in my hand.

  Movement in the corner of my eye stopped me. Robert had turned around and approached.

  “Hey,” I said to him as he got close. “We should—”

  In the space of a second his eyes flicked from my mouth to my neck. I realized the black lines that appeared with a bout of Shivers would be obvious. Would be for half an hour or so before they’d begin to fade. I closed my mouth, trying to think of how to explain.

  Then Robert raised my own gun and shot me in the chest four times. The impact of the bullets and my utter shock caught me completely off guard. I staggered drunkenly to one side and fell right off the edge of the world and into the water below.

  24

  It could have been worse. Being handcuffed would have killed me, for example. The creek was deceptively deep, a gash in the landscape ten feet or more straight down. The flow wasn’t overpowering, which was a good thing since my left arm wasn’t working properly.

  Blood loss and overall shock conspired to knock me unconscious. I fought against it as hard as possible, alternating between sweeping waves of exhausted disassociation and desperate surges of one-handed swimming. My brain fuzzed out often, sometimes badly enough to almost drown me. There was no keeping track of the number of times I nearly breathed in a lungful of water.

  A long, long time passed this way. At some point the land began to flatten, the steep walls lining the creek melting down to become close to level with the water. My sense of time and distance were the first casualties in the fight to stay alive, but the sky was darker when I finally snagged a tree root and came to a halt.

  My left arm hurt too much to use. In a way I was thankful for the pain; it signaled that at least the nerves were still firing. After laboriously hauling myself out of the water, I flopped on my back and maneuvered my left hand beneath the front of my armor to keep it from dangling around.

  I wriggled further up the bank to get my feet out of the creek, every inch sending screams of pain through my chest and shoulder.

  Then I passed out for a while.

  It was like blinking. One second it was light out, and dark the next. Aches filled my bones, but I was alive. Probing my armor with my good hand, I was pleased to discover my handiwork was responsible.

  The armor was certainly enough on its own to stop almost any round from a handgun, but during my illness I added some extra protections. The plate situated behind the fabric, right over my heart, had prevented one of Robert’s shots from blowing right through the hole created by the shot before it. At the range he’d fired from, shooting the same spot twice should almost have been expected.

  My upper chest was good, but he’d put one through my collarbone, maybe, or close to it. Another bullet had clipped the upper edge of the armor and tumbled badly as it disintegrated. The spray of tiny wounds across my shoulder and neck—and one in my jaw, yay!—told the story clearly.

  “UghhhhhFUCK,” I said reasonably as I hauled my tired ass up.

  There weren’t any helpful signs to aim me in a particular direction. I mean, I wasn’t expecting a bright orange billboard with an arrow and ‘FRESH HOT FOOD AND MASSAGES BY A SHIRTLESS CHRIS EVANS’ written on it or anything, but there wasn’t even a foot path. Just the same overgrown scrub in drab greens and browns, with a bit of color thanks to the random drops of blood I was leaving all over the place.

  I wondered how well zombies could smell. The blood might be a problem.

  My hand went down the holster on my leg and came up empty. The knife I’d had in my hand was gone, too. I still had a spare, a dinky folding blade, tucked in my boot. But that was pretty much it. My pack, canteen, and food was all left behind in the Jeep.

  With a sigh, I picked a direction and began to hobble.

  Following the creek worked out for me. It took forever, but I eventually ran across a driveway.

  I felt bad for whoever lived in the house for having to drive across a crumbling, narrow bridge to get home. The concrete span was clearly homemade, and not well maintained. Still, it was perfectly safe to walk across.

  The house itself was set back a good distance from the shitty county road, but I at the moment I didn’t care about the road at all. It was shelter, a bed, a snack, and with any luck at all some medical supplies I was interested in. I was still soaked to the bones. About the only advantage I had was the time of year, so I wouldn’t die of exposure. You know your life has gone thoroughly off the rails when not freezing to death is on your list of things you’re thankful for.

  I knocked, not wanting to get another shotgun barrel jammed in my face, and when no one answered I let myself in. The exterior was paneled in old cherry boards, silvering with age, but the interior was a kind of modern rustic. Drywall rather than plaster or more wood panels, but lined everywhere with enough western touches to make me wonder if the owner had a cowboy fetish.

  There were cans of food in the pantry. I helped myself to cold beans and a tin of spicy fajita beef, solely because I’d never seen canned fajita beef before and had a powerful curiosity. Not bad.

  After struggling for a few minutes I managed to strip off most of my clothes. Not wanting to be caught off guard totally naked, I kept my underwear on and rifled through drawers for replacements while mine dried. That’s how I ended up naked from the waist up, wearing giant old man pajama bottoms patterned in ropes and anchors.

  I found a well-stocked medical kit in the bedroom. Standing in front of the adjoining bathroom’s mirror, I saw the dull lumps of bullet fragments embedded in my flesh. There wasn’t an exit wound in my back from the larger bullet hole. Wonderful.

  Taking a deep breath, I gripped the large tweezers and got to work.

  This is where your hero, newly bandaged, grunts in occasional pain but for all intents and purposes is all better while she saddles up and hunts down the bad guy.

  It doesn’t really work like that.

  The bandages were on, but after I finished taping them down over the now bullet-free wound, I ate some more, took a shit, and slept for twelve hours. I only woke up because my bladder threatened to go nuclear.

  I don’t have the kind of pain tolerance that would allow me to stitch my own wound shut. More importantly, I haven’t got the sort of medical expertise that would make that a reasonable course of action. The bullet hole was a big, angry void in my flesh, but the pressure of my muscles and whatnot slowly pushed it closed. Or close enough. It still bled when I moved too much.

  I moved around the house slowly, careful not to bump into anything. I got tired after ten minutes on my feet, so I tried to make every jaunt count. There was a decent amount of food in the pantry. Plenty of canned stuff, and some dry goods I had no way of using short of eating raw flour or uncooked pasta. Water was a bigger concern. The three-quarters full jumbo pack of bottled stuff in the kitchen and the half-gallon in the fridge would only last so long.

  Of course, I could always shuffle to the creek and get some more. Boiling would make it safe to drink, assuming there weren’t lots
of hazardous chemicals in it. But that would mean fire, and fire meant smoke. The smell could draw attention from any number of sources, not to leave out that a column of it in the sky was giant finger pointing right at me.

  One weird thing that worried me a lot was the constant presence of the black veins on my neck. They’d grown darker than I’d ever seen them. It was weird in a lot of ways. They didn’t go away as they had after my previous bouts of Shivers, but I wasn’t feeling the effects that usually came with them, either. No giddy destructiveness, no bouts of seizures. Nothing other than being really hungry. Even that wasn’t as strong as it usually was.

  As with most of the disturbing things in my life, I put it in the back of my mind. There wasn’t anything I could do about it.

  Instead of setting out on the road and killing my enemies with righteous kung-fu moves, I spent the next two days searching the house. Well, not just searching. That only took the first day. On the second I started to make some modifications.

  In the den I found an old projection screen TV. It was hooked up to a VCR of all things, so I guessed the owner of the cowboy house was either old, a Luddite, or both. I spent half an hour taking it apart, reveling in the simple work, and removed its Fresnel lens.

  I went into the small garage and worked with hand tools for a while, then put my creation on the concrete slab behind the house. I used a four-wheeled lawn cart to haul empty buckets and bottles down to the creek and filled them up.

  Their contents went into a huge stock pot sitting beneath the rudimentary stand I’d made for the lens. It took some work with spare bricks and pieces of scrap wood, but I got the focal point of the lens centered on the surface of the water.

  Fact: a large Fresnel lens can create a hot spot capable of melting metals. I figured it would be more than sufficient to boil my water. No fire needed.

  The TV was a stroke of luck, but I’d gamed out several other ideas. Now to find something with charcoal in it to filter out chemicals…

  I went on this way for several days. While I didn’t find any guns—though the open gun safe told me the owner wasn’t averse—that isn’t to say I was weaponless. My ability to work was hampered by my injury and how easily I tired, but the workshop was well stocked.

  I modified a tool belt to work with the attachment points on my armor. After cutting away bits, slicing them up, and gluing them back together in new configurations, I had a new weapons harness. Snugly secured in it were a handful of screwdrivers with wickedly sharpened ends. They weren’t pretty, but they’d do the job. It also held a collection of other things. Lengths of thin chain, some wire made into a crude garrote, and a half hatchet dangling from a loop.

  Like a moron, I thought by the time I had it finished I would be ready to go. While I did get stronger day by day, it wasn’t very fast. My wound, which I checked before going to sleep each night, wasn’t healing miraculously. I tried not to think about how much trauma had been committed against that small patch of me.

  Leaving before I regained enough strength was suicide, and if I’m one thing, it’s a survivor. So I busied myself with projects.

  I took the kitchen cabinets apart and sawed them into useful lengths of wood. I began using my left hand, increasing the degree little by little. The first time I held a piece firmly enough to be helpful, I wanted to scream.

  By the end of the week, the pain was entirely manageable. I had also used the pieces from the cabinets along with every spare piece of wood from the workshop to secure the windows. I was more a metalworker than carpenter, but the work looked solid. Plenty of light came through the gaps.

  I stayed at the house for eleven days total. There was a lot of food left over when I filled my makeshift pack, so I hid the cans and jars inside several of the heating vents. I figured the cowboy house might make a good safe house again in a pinch.

  It would be a lie to say I looked anything other than ridiculous when I set out. My gear was ragged and patched. I wore a shemagh cut from bed sheets around my head to keep the sun from bearing down too hard. A mutilated tool belt hung at my waist, a machete on my back. My left arm was at maybe fifty percent, and I still ached all over, which made me limp and occasionally shuffle.

  As I set out, my endurance wasn’t my main concern. I’d spent the previous four days pushing myself to make sure I could handle it. No, everything else was the problem. The specter of Len and his merry band of cannibals loomed large in my consciousness. Only slightly less prominent was the danger of walking into a herd of zombies at any moment.

  I wasn’t worried about the basics. Food and water were covered. It was fighting that concerned me. Though it went against every instinct I had, I knew making it home meant being cautious bordering on cowardly. No mistakes. No stupid risks.

  The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. The first one for me was figuring out where the hell I was. I started looking for street signs.

  25

  I kept hoping to find an abandoned vehicle with the keys in it. This desire was amplified when I finally found a road name I was familiar with. The damn creek had carried me entirely out of the county. I should have stoically grunted and carried on. Instead I found a comfy front porch to sit on and took a break.

  As I tightened the fabric secured to the soles of my boots—to muffle my steps so zombies wouldn’t hear me—I mulled over the situation. The good news was that I was deeply southwest of where I’d fallen. Far away from the farm Len and his people used as a home base. I was making a lot of assumptions there, but I figured it was unlikely they’d have pulled up stakes just because I had been there once. Their trips into town were about as stealthy as a herd of sumo wrestlers dancing on bubble wrap. They weren’t worried about being seen.

  They were the predators, after all.

  Still, it was pretty unlikely I would run across them here. I was fifteen miles from home at least, and while the homes nearby were growing more dense, I wasn’t wandering through a neighborhood or anything. At best my environs were a collection of nearby properties, each sitting on a handful of acres or more.

  I did the only thing I could. I walked.

  And walked.

  And fucking walked oh my god so much walking.

  I walked for four straight hours. It was all I could manage.

  A healthy adult human being walks at about three miles an hour. It’s called preferred walking speed. We certainly can go faster, even without running, but for a variety of reasons ranging from laziness to the complex evolution of our instinctive need to maximize distance while minimizing energy use, we don’t. Three miles an hour is where the bell curve centers, and the people in the central arc can be tall, short, skinny, fat, anywhere in between or combinations of those types.

  What those people definitely are not—or were not, given that the world’s apocalypse setting was now set to ‘post’—is injured. Injury flips predictive systems in the same way a drunk flips a card table when he’s losing.

  Being generous, I’d say I covered six miles. Probably closer to five. A lot of it was uphill.

  I found an abandoned car with no keys and shambled to it. I barely remembered to lock the doors before I curled up and fell asleep.

  I woke up a few hours later and started the whole process over again. Walk until I couldn’t, rest, walk more. Eventually the landscape grew familiar.

  A hundred yards into my fourth such repetition, I spotted some zombies. The roads had been remarkably clear until then. I guessed the zombie population wised up at some point to the fact that any living people, also known as dinner, didn’t live on roads and had begun hunting deeper into the properties lining them.

  Fortunately, the zombies didn’t spot me. A football field separated us, and as soon as I saw them I froze. Then I moved slowly, situating myself in the ditch on the side of the road. I crouched with the hatchet in my strong hand, making myself small and listening carefully.

  The small herd made a hell of a lot of noise as they traipsed through the ta
ll, dry grass. The glance I’d managed was enough to convince me they had found some kind of prey. Bright red blood down their fronts, still gleaming wet, had been like a warning flashing at me.

  Where they were headed, I couldn’t guess. The nerd in me kind of wanted to follow and find out. Would it be a deadfall? Or maybe an abandoned building? If I could begin to put together a data set, then predictive models could be built. Lives saved.

  No. I was in no shape for taking risks. My left arm was getting better, but I wasn’t even close to healthy.

  So I waited. The herd passed close—they were on my side of the road—but came out of the grass thirty feet behind me and heading back the way I’d come. I craned my head around to watch, because honestly I’d have been a fucking moron not to, and not one of the seven of them looked back at me. They trundled along, happy and full, toward whatever destination drew them. They cut across the road along the straight diagonal line they followed, disappearing after a minute into the woods.

  I waited until I was sure they weren’t coming back, then slowly unfolded myself and rose to my feet. Oh, the cramps. Thankfully I hadn’t had to fight. Getting up made me feel eighty, and was a slow process. I’d have been eaten for sure.

  Rather than follow the road, I decided to see where the zombies had been. The trail was easy to follow; stalks of grass stamped down and broken in a path four feet wide were practically an invitation to snoop.

  What I found at the end of the oddly straight line broke my heart and probably saved my life. A small family, a man and woman with a teenage child, mauled. They had set up camp here. I didn’t try to work out the logic ending in that decision. Like people who believed the Earth was flat despite all proof to the contrary, the concept simply did not compute for me.

  The hard glint of metal at the waist of the man, nearly obscured by gore, caught my attention.