I felt extremely exposed as I made my way over the open parking lot towards the building and my mind was unconsciously picking out places to hide if I came under fire. The snow was less than ankle deep and I could tell by the huge piles of snow ringing the parking lot that efforts had been made recently to keep the area clear of snow build-up. There were a couple of vehicles sitting vacant in the lot, but not many.
About the only modern-looking part of the old log hotel were the double glass doors leading inside and the lighting fixtures that no longer had power to juice them. I walked up to the doors and pulled them open. Several people sitting on couches in the lobby looked up from books and board games at me. I felt a little silly standing there with the snow blowing in softly from outside, staring at a group of what appeared to be extremely civilized people. I felt their eyes on me and I could feel myself begin to sweat a little bit in the surprisingly warm air of the lobby.
“Well, don’t just stand there. Come in or go back out. All the warm air is escaping!” an older man said from a barstool that had been placed against the customer side of the service desk.
“I… Uh. Oh, sorry,” I muttered and stepped completely inside to let the door close behind me. I looked around the room and the scene before me was surreal. A few seconds ago, I’d been standing in a winter-bound post-apocalyptic America and now…this.
The main lobby was fairly large and cozy with lots of couches and a giant fireplace that emitted more than enough heat to keep the room warm. Most of the furniture and artwork were southwestern in nature and I saw more than a few old cow skulls on the walls. The people ranged in age from a few children up to the man at the counter, who I’d guessed to be about sixty. If I’d stumbled in here before the bombs, the only thing out of the ordinary would have been the man along the rear wall facing the door. He was dressed in army clothing and held a rifle similar to mine across his lap. Thankfully, he was a black man, so I didn’t think we’d have a problem for Jesse if these people actually could provide us a place to stay for the night.
“Come in. Come in,” the old man said as he gestured me over to the counter.
I felt it was appropriate to stomp the snow off of my boots and then walked over. “Hi, I saw the signs…”
“Now, wait a minute son,” the man cut me off. “Around here, we consider it rude to talk to each other with one of those fancy masks on.”
My hand absently touched the canister on my gas mask. I’d been wearing it for so long and had gotten so used to talking with it on that I’d completely forgotten that I was wearing it. I lifted my hood back from my head, pulled off the beanie cap I wore, then took off my gloves and loosened the buckles that kept my mask tight against my face.
“Much better,” the man said after I’d removed my mask. “Now, please go on.”
I nodded and said, “I was walking down the road and saw the signs. I don’t have much in the way of trade, but your signs said it was cheap to stay the night.”
“It sure is. The only payment we require is information from the outside world,” he replied.
“That’s it?”
“That’s all, son. We’re sandwiched between Tulsa, Oklahoma City and the McAlester Army Ammunition Depot, just to the southeast. All three of them took direct hits from the nukes. Mark over there,” he gestured to the soldier in the corner, “thinks that OKC took two because the size of the population and the air force base there.”
“Geez, we really got hit hard didn’t we?” I muttered.
“If you’re gonna hit something like the United States, you better make sure it’s a knock-out punch or else we’re gonna kick your butt to next Tuesday,” the soldier in the corner said.
“Don’t mind him. He should just be thankful that he wasn’t on the base and he’s alive. My name’s Jasper, what’s yours?” the old man asked as he extended his hand to shake mine.
I grasped his hand and said, “Chuck. I’m coming from Illinois, making my way south.”
“Alright, I bet you got lots of information then!” Jasper said as he clapped his hands together slightly. “We’ve got some soup. Don’t taste like much, but it’s warm and will fill you up…” he paused and assessed my appearance. “You traveled all the way from Illinois on foot? Where’s your backpack?”
“I didn’t know what to expect, so I hid it in the woods before I came in,” I replied truthfully.
“That’s smart, Chuck,” Mark said. “Well, don’t worry. Besides me, the most dangerous thing in here is Monica’s cooking.”
“Shut up, Mark,” a lady about the same age as Jasper, whom I assumed was Monica, retorted. “The only thing dangerous about you is your gas!”
That brought about a few chuckles from the others in the room and Mark waved his hand to dismiss her. “We don’t mean anyone any harm,” he continued. “But mark my words: If you start any trouble, you’ll regret it.”
I stared at him for a moment and wondered what he meant. “Well, don’t worry, Mark. I’m not one to cause problems. We’re just passing through and this looked like it might be a nice place to stop,” I replied.
“Who else do you have with you?” Jasper asked while he searched over my shoulder through the glass doors. Shit. That was the second time in as many minutes that the old man had either noticed something or caught a slip in my conversation. He was extremely observant and I’d have to keep an eye on him.
“I’ve got some traveling companions—also in the wood line with my backpack,” I said as an aside. “We didn’t know what to expect, so I came in to check it out.”
“Most expendable one in the group, huh?” Mark asked. I didn’t like him.
“No, I volunteered to come in and check things out,” I replied.
“Well, Chuck. As you can see, we’re harmless,” Jasper said. “Most of us was here before the bombs and we were lucky enough to have a trucker staying overnight at the hotel during the attack.” Jasper leaned forward and placed a hand over his mouth and made it seem like he was going to speak so only I could hear. But then he began talking louder than he’d done before and I could tell he got a kick out of teasing the soldier. “Mark was in the National Guard. He was a trucker for a food distribution company and had a full semi truck full of food. Crazy bastard had his uniform and that gun in his truck with him.”
“Good thing too, Jasper. You’ve needed me.”
“Yes. Yes, you’ve came in pretty handy,” Jasper said to Mark. “Anyways, even after what, five or six months? We’ve still got quite a bit of food because we ration it and stretch our resources. All that snow outside is drinkable once we boil and then filter it through the hotel linens a few times, so we usually make soup from the melted snow and one or two cans of whatever comes off the truck next. It keeps us alive until the spring. There has to be a spring soon…” he trailed off and began rubbing his thumb along a rock. I recognized it as an old worry stone by the groove that his thumb had made over the years.
“I appreciate your offer to let us stay,” I said. “There are five of us, plus two children. We’d only need one room.”
“Bah, we’ve got an entire hotel. We can give you anywhere from one up to six rooms, but we only heat the lobby, so it may get cold in your room. That’s why most of us stay here instead of our rooms during the day.”
“Homes, Jasper. Those are our homes now!” Monica chided him as she paused in her knitting.
“Our ‘homes’,” he corrected himself as he made air quotation marks with his fingers. “Anyways, we’re isolated out here. Too far north of Interstate 44 to get a lot of foot traffic and we’re starving for information. Most of our electronic things were fried by the EMPs from the nukes that detonated all around us so the radios don’t work and neither do any cars made after 1980.”
“Yeah, that happened where we lived before too,” I replied.
“Yes sir, so we’ve got no radios and not very many travelers, so anything you can give us about the state of affairs in America will be more than enough payment fo
r a night or two.”
I weighed my options. We could continue traveling and hope to find a house or barn to shelter in for the night or we could stay here and get some much-needed rest. The people in the room seemed expectant, but I wasn’t sure if they were thirsty for knowledge or something else. I hated that I had to second guess these people’s motives, but that’s where we were now.
“Alright, I’ll go get my friends out of the cold,” I said. “We can tell you what we’ve seen during our trip from Illinois, but we haven’t really talked to many people. It’s more dangerous than you’d imagine out there.”
“Oh, I don’t know. I can imagine a lot,” Jasper said. “Every couple of days or so, we get these extremely dangerous people wandering up to our building. Damnedest things you ever saw. There’s no talking with them and they’re so violent that, unfortunately, the only thing we can do is to put ‘em down.”
“I know exactly what you’re talking about. They’re everywhere. More the closer you get to the cities that were nuked. My group doesn’t know where they came from, but it’s a death sentence for your people if you let one of them near you.”
“Oh, we know. One of them bastards tore poor Chris Hayden apart before we knew what to do with ‘em,” Monica called out from the couch.
“Well, if one of them bites you, you end up catching whatever they’ve got and turn crazy too,” I replied.
“See that? You’ve already earned yourself a night of rest,” Jasper said. “That is very important news that we didn’t know!” He clapped me on the shoulder appreciatively. “Go get your family before it gets too dark and one of those things comes around. We see more of them at night than any other time, but if we stay quiet, they usually pass us by.”
“Yeah, we know. We’ve had quite a few run-ins with those things…” I trailed off as I got lost in my unpleasant memories for a moment.
“Well, we can talk about it in a little bit. Go get those people, we’ll make sure a few rooms are ready for you as close to the lobby’s heat as possible,” Jasper said.
I nodded and replaced my mask, hood and then my gloves. I hoped that I made the right choice bringing everyone into the hotel.
* * *
After the introductions were made, we secured our gear in two rooms. Each room had a non-functioning electronic lock and a regular metal key. Jasper stated that there were only two keys per room and gave us one of them so we wouldn’t worry about anyone coming in our rooms. Sam stayed with Jesse and Trisha while Jordyn and Jackson stayed in our room. The water didn’t work, but Jasper showed Jesse and me where the buckets were for collecting snow that could be boiled and used for bathing or drinking.
Everyone was cleaned up within the hour and we reconvened in the lobby where the teenagers went off to the side to play with the hotel’s children. The adults settled in as best we could on the couches and some folding chairs that were brought in from the hotel’s banquet hall. Mark was absent from the group, but Jasper said that he went to the roof at night with one of the other men so they could watch for the creatures.
“Welcome to Seminole, Oklahoma!” Jasper said to our little group after we were finally settled. “We’re stuck here where not many people come through off of Interstate 40, how’d y’all happen to come this way since you’re coming from Illinois?”
“Well, sir, we…”
“Please, son, call me Jasper.”
“Alright, Jasper,” Jesse continued. “We followed I-44 southwest for a ways, but we had to veer south down back roads to get past Springfield, Missouri because it got nuked. We linked back up with the 44 somewhere near Vinita, but before we’d gone very far, we had to move off the road again because that led right into a nuclear Tulsa. We worked our way south and west around the city and eventually came to I-40 and lost our vehicle near that big lake.”
“Once we were on foot, it didn’t make any sense to stick to the bigger roads,” I said while I scratched idly at the newly formed scar tissue where my pinkie used to be. “There were way too many people on the road. All those people just attracted more of the zombies and scavengers, so we shot off south and picked up the little side road that brought us here.”
“Well, when you take off again, you’ll have to thread the needle between OKC and Dallas. Both of them got hit pretty hard we’ve been told by travelers going the opposite direction that you folks are headed,” Jasper said.
“Thanks for that. We might have drifted further south towards Dallas, but we’ll be sure to steer clear now,” Jesse said.
“Alright, that covers how you got here, how do you guys know so much about the creatures?”
“We’ve been dealing with them since a week or two after the bombs went off,” Jesse replied. “We were about forty-five miles north of St. Louis, so they’ve been a constant thorn in our side.”
“Are they zombies?” Rick, a retired sheriff’s deputy from Georgia, asked.
“No. Well, I don’t know. What’s a zombie?” I asked rhetorically. “I mean, they’re not undead because you can kill ‘em, but they sure don’t give a shit about pain. We think that they’re so mutated from radiation that they’ve just gone crazy and want to kill everything in sight.”
“Okay, pass along all the info you’ve got. Pretend we haven’t dealt with these things at all, maybe you’ll give us some info on how to stop them,” Jasper said.
“Let’s see. We know that they were normal people before the apocalypse, so they aren’t like an alien or something. I can’t guarantee it, but I’d bet they’re hot as hell… I mean they probably give off radiation so you’ll want to ensure that you don’t have skin-to-skin contact with them. I think they come from the cities that were hit. They weren’t consumed by the fires, but were changed somehow. They’re not necessarily stronger than a normal person, but once they get their mind set on something, the only way we’ve found to stop them is to kill them.
“To do that, they can absorb a lot of rounds. Think about all the news stories you used to see in the 1980s about PCP addicts. They’d get shot seven or eight times by the police and still keep coming. It’s the same with these things. The only way to put them down quickly is to give them a fatal blow to the brain or heart…” I paused as I thought for a moment. “Actually, I slit one’s throat open and it bled out very quickly and died. I’ve also choked one to death. We’ve had a bunch of them die slowly from blood loss, but they continued to be dangerous until their heart finally stopped.”
“Geezus! How many of these things have you dealt with?” Monica asked in amazement.
“Between Jesse and myself, easily over a hundred of them,” I replied to a general gasp of surprise.
“We’ve seen less than ten. I had no idea that there were that many of them,” Jasper muttered. “What the hell are you guys, Special Forces or something?”
I chuckled and said, “No, I was a mutual fund salesman.”
“I delivered the big containers of water to office buildings so people could gather around the water cooler and talk about last night’s episode of whatever,” Jesse said.
“In Virden, where we ended up for a few months before going on the road, we were part of a gathering force that went out and collected food and supplies from abandoned warehouses,” I explained with only a slightly modified version of the truth. “So, as you’d guess, we ran into a lot of things while we were running around near St. Louis and Chicago.”
“Hmmm, I bet you ran into a lot of other things as well,” Jasper replied. Again, he was more observant about what was left unsaid than he should have been.
“Yeah, well we did what we needed to do in order to survive,” Jesse stated.
“Hey, calm down, big fella. I ain’t saying anything negative about what you did or didn’t do. I’m just pointing out that I’m sure you saw a lot of action up in Illinois. What caused you to leave?” he asked, turning back to me.
“We decided it was time to go,” I said as I stared him dead in the eyes.
“Bullshit! Vi
rden got wiped out by a bigger, meaner bunch than we were and we barely escaped!” Sam burst out. “I’m sorry, Chuck, you’re awesome, but if they’re looking for info, you’ve got to tell them the truth. That Allan fucked up and tried to attack a city full of crazies.”
I shook my head slowly and thought about what the hell I’d have to say to the kid later. Out loud I said, “Yeah, Sam’s right. The town’s leader decided that the city of Springfield, Illinois had resources that we needed and sent us there to get them. We went into the city with almost three thousand people. Four survived that I know of.”
Everyone in the room stared at Jesse and I in shock. Finally, Rick spoke up and said, “Four people? That’s it? What the hell happened?”
“They were waiting for us. There was a traitor that told them we were coming. She has a special hatred for Chuck, so it was imperative that we get out of Illinois ‘cause she’d just hunt him down,” Jesse said.
“What the hell happened up there? Armies of people, American citizens, fighting one another over food. Maybe you all went crazy up there,” Jasper said.
I bristled for a moment and then relaxed and placed a hand on Jesse’s knee to let him know it was alright. “Maybe we did,” I agreed. “Not everyone was a willing participant, but it was definitely madness. It makes me glad to hear that everywhere isn’t like it was up north. Maybe there were just too many survivors competing for the same resources. Or maybe the survivors let madmen be in charge and we let the events overwhelm us. I just hope that we find more people like you folks as we move further south.”
“Well, I appreciate that, but we ain’t nothing special,” Jasper replied. He held up a finger and began counting off points. “So, one, don’t go north! Two, the creatures can be killed just like you and me, but if it’s not a catastrophic wound, they can take a lot of damage. And three, your friend over there probably shouldn’t be allowed into meetings where you guys are trying to keep personal details quiet. No offense, sweetie.”
Enduring Armageddon Page 17
