by Unknown
Maybe this was a bad idea after all.
“We’ll let you stay the night, but just one night and everyone will need to give up their weapons.” She said. “We’ll need to keep watch over you while you are here. Trust isn’t something we give freely anymore.”
I turned around and moved towards her. “How about you start by being civil and tell me your name.” I held my hand out as a sign of greeting.
“Shannon.” She shook my hand. “Let his friends in and take them to the kitchen to get something to eat.” She turned and started walking to the back of the building. “Follow me; you friends will join us soon.”
“Again, no. We’re a team and we stick together or we leave together. Trust goes both ways.” I replied.
She stopped and turned back to me. “Fine."Brian, bring them to the banquet room.” She turned again and spoke to the other woman I had seen earlier for a brief moment and then headed down the walkway.
I turned to the glass doors and gave the thumbs up to everyone waiting in the truck. I waited as they exited the truck and entered into the main shop area. “We’re good. Follow me.”
The team handed over their weapons reluctantly, they trusted me and did as they were told and followed me as I followed Brian.
The banquet room had several areas sectioned off by makeshift walls of cloth and cubicle partitions. The area was clean from debris or trash and seemed organized. I wasn’t sure how many people were here, but it looked like they had quickly come up with a plan to keep this place safe from the infected and other people that up to no good. These might people we should try to make an alliance with since they weren’t that far from Butch’s parent's place. We run into them again sometime down the road.
Shannon led us to an area that had a conference table and some chairs. She pointed to the chairs that were facing into the makeshift room, placing our backs to the open room as she moved to the other side of the table. She opened a cooler and pulled out some water bottles placing them on the table for us to have. She grabbed some wrapped granola bars she got from a basket next to the cooler on the counter behind the table. She sat down and opened her bottle of water, took a drink and waited for everyone to get comfortable, to drink and eat a little.
I was surprised at how thirsty I was and downed most of the water bottle. “In the heat of the battle, it’s easy to forget that you need to stay hydrated and fed.” She said, watching us all. “Keep that in mind in the future, it could mean the difference between living and dying.”
We all opened our granola bars with Jamie finally snapping out of her trance and helping Cindy with her granola bar. While I was watching Shannon, the others were looking around, making sure there were no dangers close by. Shannon was only watching me.
Cindy quickly ate her food and drank her water, finishing before the rest of us. “Honey, slow down or you’ll make yourself sick,” Shannon said to Cindy. “We’ve got some food that we can share with you. It's stuff that was in the freezer and needs to be used up before it all rots since the electricity went out yesterday.”
Shannon was a pretty woman, in her later twenties, early thirties, with an air around her of confidence and strength. She commanded your attention and I was intrigued to hear what she had to say.
“Tell me how you guys ended up here in this town.” She asked. “We’ve had limited interactions with people outside of the town and some rough characters have passed through in the last four days. All the news channels are offline, the internet isn’t working and cell connectivity seems to be down.”
I gave her the short version of our trek from Charleston, leaving some of the details out as I didn’t want to give too much away. Information was power and right now, she had all of the advantages. After telling her about our last four days, I asked, “What about you guys? What happened here?”
Chapter 23
Shannon was walking her daily rounds through the truck stop, ensuring all areas of the business were being managed properly and taking care of any customer requests, questions, problems or needs that her area supervisors needed when the world as she knew it went to hell.
Her father was at home that day preparing for a hunting trip to Alaska, something he did every year since her mother had passed away. He was packing, getting his guns and gear together, shutting up the house for the trip. He planned, as always, to be gone for a month and this year told Shannon to handle things while he was gone. She was the oldest of the three children and her two brothers were still a bit reckless and got distracted too easily to manage the business fully by themselves. She planned to drive her dad to the airport in Parkesburg later the next day, but that didn’t happen as planned.
That day started as all days began at the truck stop; truckers driving in, tourists dropping by to pick up the last of the supplies they needed before hitting the lake and the locals coming into the cafe for morning coffee and the huge cinnamon rolls the cafe was known for. She did notice that more people were coughing, looked a little sick and more people than usual were anxious or hurried.
At ten in the morning, Shannon began her normal walk around the complex to check on everyone. She started in the retail space, checking the temperature of the drink coolers and freezers that held frozen treats and foods, changing out the breakfast fast foods for the lunch items, straightening the shelves and notating what she would need to grab from the back room to restock the empty shelves. She finished all of the work in the retail space and handed off control to the cashier so she could move to the gas pump area.
At the pump supervisor’s station outside the truck stop, she checked the various logs and metrics the gas system provided to see if they were on track for daily goals and talked with the current supervisor on duty, Adam. He was a good looking guy and Shannon secretly had a crush on him, but couldn’t do anything about it since she knew her dad wouldn’t approve of the relationship.
Adam was talking about an incident a tourist had told him about, something about a car on the side of the road back in Parkersburg. Shannon wasn’t really paying attention as she was looking at Adam instead. He said the tourist told him that the driver of the car was moving around the car, from door to door, window to window, hitting them and trying to get to a woman who was locked in the car. The woman looked terrified and was moving around the inside trying to secure the inside of the car. The witnesses called the state patrol as they drove by; because they didn’t want to get involved and reported what they thought was a domestic dispute.
Shannon didn’t think anything about the story, domestic violence between people happened all the time in the backcountry, even though it was wrong, but she was little concerned that women in the car might be in trouble, especially since it wasn’t on the truck stop property. The next time she saw a state trooper, she would talk with them about it.
It was normal for the state police to stop at the truck stop for their breaks to get a cup of coffee, or a cinnamon roll or to gas up their patrol cars.
She told Adam let her know if anything new came of the story he had told her and to keep up the good work. She left Adam and headed into the truck stop garage area to talk with her brother, Rob, who managed the garage and dealt with the various service trucks they used for roadside assistance for travelers and truckers that were broken down on the highway. Rob told her that they really weren’t that busy; they didn’t have very many calls yet today, but they did have a strange situation earlier, but he was waiting for the mechanic that was dispatched to return before getting her involved.
The garage received a call from a trucker that was broken down about twenty minutes west of the truck stop and Rob had sent out his mechanic, Garrett, to handle the broken down trucker.
Garrett called in when he got to the broken down trucker and was getting ready to go and talk with the trucker, but he didn’t see the driver around the truck. He assumed that the trucker was in his cab waiting for the service tech. He was going to go out and see if the driver was in the cab as he thought and would radio
in once he had an update.
About thirty minutes later, Garrett radioed in and told Rob that he had been attacked by the driver and that the driver had bit him during the scuffle. Once he was able to get away, he climbed back in his service truck, drove away and left the trucker on the side of the road still broken down.
Garrett tried to call the state patrol to report the incident, but he couldn’t get through to them; he just kept getting a busy signal. He thought he might be in a bad cell area, so he called the garage over the CB radio. He was going to head to the Parkersburg to drop by the urgent care center to get the bite looked at and cleaned.
So far, Garrett hadn’t returned to the truck stop or checked in via the radio or cell phone. Rob was a little worried and had sent out another mechanic to check on Garrett at the urgent care facility.
Shannon told Rob to let her know when Garrett was found and what the situation was. She also told him to call the urgent care center to see if either of the mechanics had arrived.
She left the garage and moved inside the truck stop and heading to the cafe, passing the community showers the truckers used when they were on a long haul. As she passed the men’s shower, a half-naked trucker came bounding out the entry and bumped into her.
“That fuckin dude is eating Burt!” He screamed and continued to run to the front door with his boxer shorts on. She was surprised by what the guy had said but also wasn’t quite sure if she heard it right.
Had someone eaten someone else? That was crazy talk.
She radioed Brian, her other brother, and let him know what had happened and that he should meet her in the men’s shower ASAP just in case something was happening. Brian was head of security, so he needed to be involved.
She walked in the locker room area, announcing herself and found four men restraining another guy against the opposite wall of the entry door. The guy being restrained, the apparent attacker; was covered in blood from head to toe and fighting with everything he had to get free from the guys restraining him.
One of the guys holding him was yelling at him, saying that the guy had bit him and that he was going to kill him.
Another guy was yelling at the guy complaining about the bite to shut the hell up so they could try to calm the attacker down.
The whole scene was chaotic and out of control.
To top it all off, lying on the floor in front of them was another guy, apparently the one that had been attacked. He wasn’t moving and there was a pool of blood forming around him on the white tile floor. His stomach was torn open with his intestines lying on the tiled floor, but his eyes were wide open. Shannon couldn’t believe what she was seeing; this had to be some kind of joke.
It had to be.
She didn’t know what to do, for once she just wasn’t sure, and she was at a loss on what she should do next. She just stood there looking at the scene unfold in front of her.
Brian walked into the locker room and found Shannon standing there, with her mouth open, just staring at a dead body on the ground while the other people in the room tried to handle a guy that seemed out of his mind.
He moved to the guys holding the apparent attacker against the wall and helped to get the guy on the floor and after several minutes of forcing the attacker down and got his hands and feet tied wrapped; Brian looked over at Shannon who was still stuck in the same place staring at the dead guy on the floor.
He was busy with the guy struggling on the floor so he screamed at Shannon to get her to focus on the situation, telling her to get on the phone and call the 911. After several attempts at getting her attention, Shannon finally broke her trance and used her cell phone to dial 911, but it was busy. She tried again, thinking she must have hit the wrong numbers, but it was still busy.
People were starting to come into the locker room to see what was going on.
Rob moved people aside, telling them to step away and to get out of the locker room pushing his way into the room asking what was happening. Many of the people crowded into the locker room were videotaping, but some were trying to contact authorities. No one seemed to be successful at reaching them and the video takers were all complaining about the Wi-Fi being down or their service provider's network being offline.
Shannon finally came back fully to reality and realized that she had to take control of the situation, so she started barking orders to everyone in the locker room.
She told the crowd to get out of the locker room as she pushed them physically out the entry door.
Coming back into the locker room, she told Rob to help the guy that had been bitten. Rob took the guy to the sink area of the locker room and started to run water over the bite to clean it out.
She told Brian that this was a crime scene and that as head of security, he needed to control it while she tried to get a hold of the Sheriff. This meant he needed to deal with the guy they had restrained.
She counted on them to manage their areas of responsibility and she would handle hers she told herself. She ushered the remaining people out of the locker room, telling them to go back to the cafe and wait for the sheriff, she was sure they would want to question everyone.
She headed for the main office to make more calls using the landline and to make sure that the surveillance video system had a tape in it. It wasn’t unusual for the system to run without a tape as her dad was cheap and her brother was forgetful.
In the office, she found that the system did, in fact, have a tape in it, so maybe they had caught some of the attacks on tape. She tried 911 again but it was still busy which was now starting to concern her. She tried using the landline to call her dad.
He answered immediately and told her that something was wrong; he had been watching the news which was showing people going crazy, attacking each other, attacking authorities, just going crazy. He was leaving the house to meet them at the truck stop.
She was relieved that he was coming in to help them. He had a way about him that people felt comfortable around him and he was good at handling a crowd, not to mention difficult situations. He had a leader’s presence and people were quickly ready to get behind him. She used the landline to call 911 again and was finally able to get through.
Mary Sue, the dispatcher for the region was unusually short and direct. Shannon had known her since grade school and she was always sweet and patient. She wasn’t that way today. Mary Sue explained that all the deputy’s and state patrol officers were out on calls and that they were experiencing a larger than normal call volume. She told Shannon that something was going on, but she really didn’t know what, just that there were multiple reports of people attacking each other and that it required calling all of the off duty officers to help deal with the call volume. Mary Sue told Shannon that it might be a good idea to close up and hunker down. Mary Sue hung up without saying goodbye, again, something she never did.
Shannon thought that was unusual and she was starting to get concerned. She really wished that her dad would get here to help with the situation.
Shannon headed back to the shower room where she found two bodies on the ground and her brother Brian reloading his pistol.
Brain stopped reloading and in a composed and relaxed state explained what had happened. Shannon was kind of spooked by his casual way of explaining it.
There were two dead people on the floor.
He continued his story saying that the original guy that was on the ground, the one who had been attacked first, with the stomach torn open, had come back to life and attacked the truck drivers that were restraining his attacker. All of the truckers got freaked and scrambled running to exit the locker room as quickly as possible; some of them ran to the back of the shower looking for the back exit. The guy they had restrained broke free from the plastic restraints and both of the infected turned their attention to Brian.
Both of the undead moved quickly across the room in an aggressive way. It was enough to scare Brian that he pulled his gun and shot both guys point blank in the head. The shots were
extremely loud in the tiled locker room.
Once the shots were made, the remaining crowd in the locker room scattered leaving Brian in there by himself with two dead bodies. He knew he’d have to answer for the shooting, but he knew deep down, inside, that what he did was right; it was the right thing to do. He stayed to ensure the room was secured for when the Sheriff arrived.
Shannon told him that she didn’t think the Sheriff would be coming, that they were on their own for the time being. No one was coming to help them, their dad was on the way, but no one else was. Shannon told Brian to help her get everyone out of the truck stop and lock it down. It was time to shut down and do what Mary Sue had suggested; get the place locked down.
She instructed Brian to find Rob and get people out of the truck stop.
Shannon’s dad, who lived just a few blocks away, finally arrived as she locked the front doors and pulled the security grates over the windows. Her dad explained that even the short distance he had to travel was chaos with people fighting, some looting starting and deserted cars all over the place. He had to backtrack multiple times just to get here. It would have been quicker if he had walked.
She told her dad what had happened explain the situation in the men’s locker room. The employees were scared so she offered all the employees the option to stay here or go. They all had chosen to leave to find their own families and loved ones. A few of the customers were still in the building because their cars were being worked on and they couldn’t leave just now.
