Enduring Armageddon

by Parker, Brian

  I held out my rifle that had been so effective these last few weeks and asked, “Do we just leave these here?”

  “No, we’ll need their long range and the scopes on the rifles later on once we’re traveling south,” he said.

  I nodded and slung my rifle over my shoulder across my body so it wouldn’t fall off, then I took one of the military weapons from Jesse and looked it over. He quickly showed Trisha and me how to load it and change magazines. I learned the importance of the three-round burst for suppressing fire to keep someone’s head down, but that it also used up ammo three-times as fast. Good to know.

  When he was satisfied that we could operate the rifle, Jesse pulled a set of keys from his pocket. “Found these too,” he said. “Allan’s got a big four-door truck that he keeps in the garage out back. He’s got it all tricked out with big front and rear bumpers so we can push through stuff without breaking a headlight, and a snorkel so it can run through deep water. But the best part is that there’s a 250 gallon gas tank in the bed that he kept full, so we can make it a long way before we need to find more fuel.”

  “Holy shit, that dude really was prepared for the end of the world,” I said in awe.

  “Yeah, he knew a lot of shit. If he hadn’t gone off the rails, he would have been our best hope for survival,” Jesse replied. “We should load up the truck with as much food and survival gear as we can before taking off.”

  “Good idea,” I replied. “What do we grab?”

  “This way,” Jesse said. “He has entire rooms full of stuff.”

  We made our way towards the back of the shelter and I closed the door to the bedroom. My anger had subsided a little knowing that Allan hadn’t gotten the opportunity to actually rape my wife. But he would have and he forced my pregnant wife to take a sleeping drug. There was no telling what that would do to the baby. Plus, he’d ordered the deaths of thousands of people during the course of our raids and now the remaining six or seven thousand people in Virden were in danger as well. I used that as justification for killing him.

  The supply rooms gave us sleeping bags, water purification units, solar panels for generating electricity, GPS watches, maps, canned food, a couple of cans of ammunition for our new weapons, even a complete set of riot gear. The dude may have been bat-shit crazy, but if we make it out of town, Allen’s supplies may save us, I thought.

  We packed it all away in a large tan four by four truck. The truck bed was covered by a hard tonneau cover so we threw everything in the back except the ammo and a couple of sleeping bags. We used them to prop up Rebecca so she wouldn’t get injured during our escape. Jesse did another quick once-over of the place while I ran out to the El Camino and grabbed our bug-out bags that we’d picked up on the way over here. If we’d gotten distracted for a few more minutes… I forced the thought from my head. It didn’t happen.

  I put the four backpacks in the cab of the truck where we could easily get them if we crashed and had to run on foot. “Alright, I think we’re ready,” I said when I came back down the stairs.

  Jesse smiled and held up a large bottle of brown liquid. “Found this hidden away. One shot for good luck before we go?” he asked.

  “Sure. I could use the pick-me-up,” I said.

  He found two cups in the kitchen and poured each of us two fingers of scotch. “Cheers mate. Let’s get the fuck out of Illinois!”

  “Amen,” I said and tapped his glass. The fluid burned more than any whiskey I’d ever had before. “Holy shit, that’s strong,” I coughed out.

  “Yeah, it’ll put hair on your chest,” he laughed. “Okay, I’m ready. Let’s go.”

  I nodded and went to Rebecca’s side. It took a little work, but I fit the mask over her face and got it sealed. By the time I was finished, Jesse and Trisha both had theirs on and Sam was tapping her foot on the landing. Jesse pushed me gently out of the way and said, “I’ll carry her. You keep an eye on our rear.”

  “Thanks,” I said. I knew that I could carry Rebecca the entire way, but Jesse was easily double my size and it would be a lot easier for him than it would be for me.

  We got everyone settled in and buckled up, and then Jesse opened the garage door and eased the truck into the alley. Within minutes we turned west on Dean Street and sped along the southwest side of the wall. “There’s a fake section of the wall just up ahead,” Jesse shouted over the hum of the truck’s engine. “There are only a couple sheets of tin metal over it. That’s the emergency escape point that will feed us out onto Nine Mile Road and then we drive west until we can turn and head south.”

  “What if they’ve got Dean Street blocked off like they did Highway 4?” I yelled back.

  “The back gate was D’Andre’s idea. He and I snuck out here a few weeks ago and set it up. No one knows about it.”

  I nodded and prayed that the way wasn’t blocked on the inside or outside of the wall. Either way, we’d find out very quickly if it was.

  “Hold on!” Jesse shouted as we drove directly into the fence. Sam screamed as metal screeched against the bull bar on the front of the truck and scraped the paint off the side of our vehicle. We barreled through, directly into the side of a small truck that was pulled across the road.

  Our truck had enough speed and power that we were able to push the blocking vehicle out of the way into the ditch beside the road. Jesse sped up slowly to avoid fishtailing on the snow and a few of the attackers who’d woken up when we burst through the fence fired pot shots at us. Most of them decided to sneak into Virden through the undefended gap that we’d just created. As we drove away I heard the shooting begin in earnest inside the town.

  * * *

  We traveled westward down Nine Mile Road for about six miles until it turned sharply south. Jesse stopped the truck to check the map and figure out our next move and I hopped out to check the damage to the vehicle. The bull bar had taken most of the impact when we’d hit the truck parked across the road so I wasn’t too worried about our truck’s ability to make the journey south. It was a good thing that they’d only gotten a few of the lighter vehicles around to that side of the town or else our escape might have been cut short.

  Jesse had two options chosen by the time I got back inside. “The Mississippi River is a major problem. There aren’t very many bridges that go over it so we could keep going west, way out to this town here in Missouri,” he said as he placed his finger on a town called Louisiana far to the west of where we sat.

  “Looks like we have to go north to go back south,” I said.

  “Yeah, we’ll have to turn around on this road and hook back up to 104, then work our way cross country down these back roads until we can hit Highway 54, then head south.”

  “Um, well…” I said.

  “Or we could keep going down the road we’re on, link back up with Highway 4 and go through Carlinville to shoot around the outskirts of St. Louis. That way would probably be more dangerous because the proximity to the city and all the radiation over there.”

  “Let’s go west,” Trisha said tiredly from the back seat. “I don’t want to see any more violence.”

  “I just want to be safe. If that’s west, then let’s go that way,” Sam agreed.

  Jesse looked at me. “I say west,” he said. “The roads are narrower and we might get stuck, but there will definitely be fewer people and probably less radiation as we move away from any major cities. What do you think?”

  I glanced at Rebecca’s sleeping form and then back at the map. There wasn’t much we could do about the violence. If it came to it, Jesse and I were prepared to do whatever needed to be done to keep everyone safe. “Let’s go west,” I said as I also thought about the sick radioactive freaks that we called zombies. “The less radiation we’re exposed to, the better.”

  Jesse nodded and did a three-point turn and headed north so we could begin our trip westward and then eventually turn south across the river.

  SEVEN

  “What was that?” Rebecca asked as she grabb
ed my forearm.

  “I didn’t hear anything. What was it?”

  “I thought I heard a tinkling of glass downstairs.”

  I grabbed the tomahawk that I’d picked up in the last town we passed through and pressed my baseball bat into Rebecca’s hand. “Wait here, I’ll go check it out,” I said as I lifted the corner of the shade covering the office door’s window. I grabbed my mask from the counter and started to fit it into place with a practiced motion. “Lock the door behind me, okay?”

  Rebecca rushed over to me and stopped my hand before I slid the mask down over my face. “Be careful, Charles. Knock three times and I’ll open the door,” she said and then kissed me on the mouth. I kissed her back and situated the military-grade gas mask back over my face. I opened the door leading down to the warehouse floor carefully and eased my body outside. Rebecca closed the door behind me and I heard the deadbolt slide home.

  I contemplated going to the next office to see if Jesse or Trisha had heard anything, but if there was someone in the building, the noise that would cause would likely just alert them to our presence. We’d made it all the way to just outside of what used to be Lebanon, Missouri before we had to stop and get some legitimate rest. For almost four days straight we’d switched drivers every couple of hours and meandered our way southwest along back roads, stopping only to satisfy bodily functions and to siphon gas when we stumbled across an abandoned vehicle.

  We’d been lucky and avoided people almost entirely until our last attempt at getting gas two days ago outside of Camdenton. That one ended with Jesse getting a leg full of shotgun pellets and another notch on my belt for all the people I’d killed. I didn’t like to think about it too much, but killing got easier the more you did it. I didn’t even blink an eye when I sank the spiked end of my tomahawk into the back of that man’s head.

  With Jesse’s leg full of holes and Rebecca’s back beginning to spasm, we decided to seek shelter in a place that we could lay down to sleep. We found a boat manufacturing warehouse along the highway and decided it was our best bet since we could hide the truck inside. We had to ram the locked gates and negotiate our way past all the boats in the lot surrounding the building. On one such attempt to bypass a speedboat, both of the front tires pitched through ice and I probably alerted everyone in the area that we were there while I revved the engine to get enough juice to pull the tires out of the boat-testing lake.

  We’d eventually made it inside and Trisha, Sam and I cleared the building. When we didn’t find anyone, the ladies used the shop’s first aid kit on Jesse’s leg while Sam and I used a pair of large push brooms to cover our tracks in the snow and we wrapped the chain around the gates to keep them closed. It wasn’t much, but maybe it would pass a courtesy inspection in the watery light that we had these days.

  There were two offices in the warehouse, one for the foreman and one for the manager. Rebecca and I hauled our sleeping bags and backpacks to the foreman’s office while Jesse and Trisha took the other one. Sam had known Jesse and Trisha a lot longer than us, so she decided to stay with them.

  The office was littered with union paraphernalia which made a cheerful, and quite romantic, fire in the trash can. We had nothing to do on the long drive from Virden except to talk and Rebecca had finally been convinced that she hadn’t been raped by Allan. That went a long way towards boosting her morale and for the first time in several weeks Rebecca allowed me to make love to her. I hoped that it wouldn’t be our last time.

  That brought us to now. Normal people knew that you didn’t go anywhere at night. In today’s fucked up post-apocalyptic world, doing anything at night automatically meant you were up to no good and the unofficial law of the land said that anything goes when you’re defending yourself at night. The metal stairs rattled a little as I stepped onto the landing. I lifted the axe beside my head so I could quickly strike out at one of the creatures, or worse a scavenger, and slowly crept down the stairs. Each step seemed to echo across the warehouse’s vast expanse. I tried to visualize where both the big garage door and the small entryway doors were and silently hoped that Becca had been hearing things. We’d locked the doors and leaned a couple of thin glass panes against each of the doors as a form of early warning if one of the doors was opened.

  I stepped off the stairs and went into a low crouch. Even though I’d learned a lot during my time in Virden and become quite proficient at hunting man, I still felt a little bit silly doing it. I’d seen hundreds of movies where the hero crouched to make themselves a smaller target, so maybe there was something to it. I did a quick 360 degree turn and didn’t see anything so I rushed over to the nearest wall and pressed my back against it for some protection. I slid my way along towards the exit that was closest to the office.

  The moonlight shining through the small windows near the roofline cast eerie shadows across the warehouse floor and the uncompleted boat hulls made it difficult to see farther than a few feet in any direction. In my mind, every distorted shadow was a scavenger waiting until I’d passed by him to spring from his hiding place to bash my brains out. Even though it was probably in the forties inside the building, I was sweating freely from every pore on my filthy body.

  The glass that we’d placed on the garage door was still in place so I continued to circle around the outside of the warehouse floor towards the smaller single-person door. I crept as silently as I could while scanning the interior of the building for any movement. I stopped when a shadow detached itself from the far wall and headed towards the stairs to the offices where my friends were sleeping. I could clearly see the outline of a trench coat and the canisters of a gas mask.

  I snuck across the floor and stayed to the shadows as much as possible. In my experiences so far, scavengers were loners, but it wasn’t unheard of that they’d be with others, especially as supplies continued to dwindle. If that’s the case, we may be screwed, I thought. Jesse and Trisha could defend their office for a little while, but Rebecca only had the baseball bat and the M-4, which she barely knew how to use. I tiptoed silently after the scavenger, continuously scanning in the direction that he’d come from to see if he had a partner, but it seemed like he was alone.

  He tentatively set a foot on the metal staircase and it creaked in protest. He froze and crouched just as I’d done earlier and I saw the glint of moonlight off of metal. He was either holding a knife or, if he was dumb, a gun of some kind. Most people that we’d run into since we left Illinois didn’t carry firearms anymore because the sound of one going off only attracted mutants or scavengers looking to clean up after the fight was over. We’d used them heavily in the defense of Virden’s hardened perimeter, but out here by yourself? No way, it was suicide to fire a weapon, especially at night when the zombies were more active.

  I slunk behind a large pile of unformed fiberglass in the shadows of the floor. The next move I made would take me out into the open. For the thousandth time I cursed that bastard Allan for getting greedy and signing the death warrant for everyone in Virden. I don’t know how long Springfield would have held off their attack, or if they would have broached some type of partnership, but I do know that they wouldn’t have caught us in the open like they did if he hadn’t sent us over there to attack them. Hell, we might still be safe behind the Virden’s walls, not out here in the middle of nowhere.

  The scavenger was already about a third of the way up the stairs but he was looking up towards the offices and the lenses on his mask would obstruct his periphery vision. I took a silent gulp of air, wiped my sweaty palm across my trousers and slipped the tomahawk’s leather strap over my wrist so I wouldn’t drop it if there was a struggle. This was it. Time to put up or shut up, as they used to say.

  I leapt from the shadows and rushed the few feet to the stairs. The metal steps rattled horribly as I bounded them two at a time. The scavenger whirled around, but it was too late, I brought the spiked side of my weapon down right between his neck and shoulder blade.

  He let out a muffled scream fr
om behind the mask as I wrenched the tip of the blade from his body. He weakly tried to slice me with the large kitchen knife he held, but the fight was already coming to an end as his lifeblood gushed freely from the wound in his neck. I smashed the axe into his forehead and he crumpled like an empty sack.

  I heard booted feet running away from the shadows of the production floor back towards the smaller door. I sprinted towards the exit as fast as I could while dodging the half-constructed boats. The doorway opened and then slammed shut. I reached it a few seconds later, my weapon held high again. I eased the door open, wary of being hit from the side. It was pointless. In the distance I saw a smaller person working their way through the knee-deep snow. I watched as they slid through the still-locked gate and jumped into the driver’s seat of an old truck with large dog cages in the back. Slavers.

  I returned to where I’d killed the man and made sure to finish the job before I explored the scavenger’s body for useful items. I was temporarily taken aback after I removed his gas mask and discovered that my attacker was a female. I recovered quickly and continued taking inventory. Her gas mask would definitely come in handy as a back-up in case one of ours got lost or broken. I pulled off the heavy trench coat and grabbed her knife but the boots were too small for me, maybe one of the girls could use them, or we could trade them for something down the road. She had a few scraps of questionable meat, a couple of worthless American dollars and an ash-smudged photo of some girl.

  I assumed the girl in the photo was the same one I’d watched run like hell across the manufacturer’s parking lot. I started to pray that she would be able to make something of herself other than a whore or a meal for a zombie and then I remembered that the two of them were intent on killing or taking us hostage so I discontinued the prayer and instead spat out a curse for our current world.

  Maybe we should have had more praying and less cursing before the apocalypse and we wouldn’t be in this predicament, but the time for wishing was over. It was kill or be killed and I stood by my “shoot first, ask questions later” stance. According to the new unofficial laws of the land, no one who was up to any good left the safety of their shelter at night.