by Caleb Cleek
“I’m still here,” she blubbered through tears. “Please come home.”
“I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
Chapter 10
I looked around the cafeteria. It was empty. Besides Toby, there were no kids anywhere. I peered through the windows which had been hazed from decades of sprinkler mist blowing onto the glass and leaving hard water deposits. The mineral buildup bent and refracted light passing through the glass and created a real life version of a Monet painting framed within the institutional metal window frame. I could see small pockets of bleary kids, most of whom were crying. The majority had already fled the school grounds. I could see teachers making futile efforts to coax fleeing kids back onto school property. They were having no more success than I had experienced trying to corral leaves in the wind as a child.
It was a lost cause. The virus was out. It might still be possible to keep it within the borders of Lost Hills. Even that was dubious. If Claire made it through the roadblock, there would be no stopping the spread. She grew up here and was an outdoors person. She knew every back road and four wheel drive trail in the county. The only good news was that she had a limited time before she succumbed to the infection. If she took back roads the whole way, she wouldn’t make it to the airport within the short window of time she had left.
“Toby, it’s time to get you home. Your mama needs to see you.” The scene in the cafeteria was a carbon copy of Mary’s minus the bodies on the floor. Trays and lunch boxes were strewn across the floor. Milk cartons lay tipped on their sides, their white, liquid contents pooled around them. Milk was still dripping off tables onto the benches and off benches onto the floor. The room showcased the chaos and panic that had transpired minutes before. We stepped over trays, mashed potatoes, beef stroganoff, mixed vegetables, and silverware that littered the floor as we walked hand in hand to the door. When we stepped through the door, a gust of wind whipped across the playground, sending a cloud of dust whirling off the baseball field and across the black top. I squinted to protect my eyes seconds before the small pieces of dirt and debris pelted my face, stinging as a thousand tiny projectiles assaulted my skin. I let go of Toby’s hand and placed my hand over his eyes to shield them from the onslaught. As suddenly as it began, the wind dissipated and the dust and sand settled back to the ground.
Fifty eyes watched as I walked to the patrol car with Toby at my side. Each small group turned towards us as we passed. They were faces seeking reassurance that everything would be okay. They were faces looking for comfort. Those were things I didn’t have time to offer. It pained me to wantonly ignore them as I walked past. The problem with responsibility is it often prevents you from doing what you want to do. Right now, I was being pulled from twenty-five different directions and I couldn’t respond to every pull vying for my attention.
I opened the door for Toby and helped him buckle the seatbelt. Then I walked around the front of the car, opened the driver door, dropped into the seat, lifted my legs up and pivoted them into the car. Reaching across my left shoulder, I pulled the seat belt across my chest and snapped the buckle into the clasp. As I was pulling my door closed, I heard a siren wailing in the distance. Matt was in town and tearing down Main Street. I turned the patrol car around and waited for Matt to round the corner toward the school. Five seconds later his car came into view, lights flashing. As always, I was startled by how loud the siren was. You don’t get the full effect when you are inside the car with the speaker pointing away from you. With the speaker pointed at me, the sound was ear-splittingly loud, even with the doors closed. As if reading my mind, Matt cut the siren off. He pulled his car next to mine, facing the opposite direction, driver window to driver window. I quickly rolled my window up. I reached to my radio extender and switched to the extender-to-extender frequency. Mashing the transmit button down, I said, “I’m going back to Mary’s. Follow me over there. We have a mess to clean up inside.”
“Copy that,” he said as he pulled forward and performed a three point turn. The narrow street wouldn’t accommodate a u-turn.
Less than a minute later, we were stopping in Mary’s parking lot next to the ambulance. Lawrence was leaning over the ambulance hood, shotgun pointing at the front of the diner, daring someone to try to leave. Bertha, Mary and Kimiko were huddled together close to him, terrified at the prospect that anything might come out the front door.
“Stay in the car,” I said to Toby. “I won’t be long.”
I exited the car as Matt simultaneously climbed out of his truck. “Keep your distance and stay upwind of me,” I yelled to Matt. “Do you have some bullets for me?”
“No, I heard your call at the school and came straight here. How many do you have?”
“I probably have enough for now. You better get the Remington,” I said, pointing at the shotgun between the two front seats. “You’re going to need it. Get your gas mask, too. You don’t want to breathe the air in there without it.”
Matt opened his trunk to retrieve his gas mask and I turned to Lawrence. “Anything change while I was gone?”
With his gaze still fixed on the front of Mary’s, he replied, “Yep, there’s a bunch of ‘em moving around in there. You can’t see ‘em now, but if you keep watching you’ll see ‘em move past the door.” The diner windows were tinted to fight the summer sun. The door had the only untinted glass in the diner.
I turned back toward the front of the diner and caught motion inside. “How many do you think are up and moving?”
“I can’t tell for sure. My best guess is more than twenty.” He hesitated for a couple seconds and then, “Connor, we’re sick. All three of us have been coughing and my head feels like it is going to explode. We have fevers, too.”
“I know,” I said. “I noticed before I left.”
“How are you doing?” he asked, finally breaking his gaze away from the diner and looking toward me.
“I’m fine,” I said, feeling guilty at not being sick. “How about if I borrow that shotgun from you? I’ll trade you for the AR-15 in the Electro-Lock.” Lawrence was a veteran of the first Gulf War back in ’91. He had been an Army Ranger and was much more comfortable with the AR-15 than he was with the shotgun. It was virtually the same as the M-16 he had used except that it was semi-automatic, one shot for each trigger pull. Both shotgun and rifle had their uses, but the shotgun was better for up close and personal applications. Inside the small interior of the diner it would be as destructive as a rabid shark, chewing up everything in its path.
Lawrence tossed the shotgun to me. He still had my second set of car keys from earlier. He pulled them from his pocket and tossed them into the air as he walked toward the patrol car to get the rifle. The sun glinted off the shiny surface as the keys reached the apex of their trajectory. Gravity pulled them back and they landed in his hand with a jingle. I nodded at Matt and we began our approach to the door.
I didn’t have the diner keys to unlock the door and I didn’t need them. Double-ought buckshot is the ultimate lock pick. I lowered the muzzle of the gun as I approached the door and placed it an inch from the lock. When I pulled the trigger, nine lead balls, each slightly over one-third inch in diameter, hurled down the barrel at over thirteen hundred feet per second. They collided with the door and punched the lock out of the metal frame, leaving a jagged hole in its place and broken glass along the edge of the frame. I racked the pump, ejecting the spent case, and jacked a new shell into the chamber. As soon as the action clicked shut, I placed another shell in the magazine tube, bringing it back to a full load. I pushed through the fractured metal door into the interior of Mary’s Diner. As much as it was going to hurt my conscience to shoot innocent men and women, I had to do it. They were no longer people. They were occupying the bodies of people, but they had morphed into something else. We were probably too late to stop the spread, but we had to try.
As soon as I entered the room, I hooked to the right and immediately swept across the room with the barrel of the shotgun,
searching for a target all the way to corner to my right. Matt followed immediately behind me and hooked to the left. We were each responsible for clearing one hundred eighty degrees of the interior. As I was finishing my sweep, Matt’s gun boomed behind me and then a second time. Matt was taking care of business and I trusted him completely. My side of the diner was clear save three bodies on the floor. That meant there were a whole mess of them on Matt’s side. I pivoted to the left side of the room and took two quick steps toward the center so that Matt would not be in my field of fire. There were two corpses on the floor about six feet in front of Matt and nothing else. Both of the corpses were on their backs, their faces obliterated from close range shotgun blasts.
“They must be in the kitchen,” Matt said. “I’m right behind you.”
We stacked up at the swinging door into the kitchen. I was about to burst through when I heard Lawrence open up outside with the AR-15. I hesitated, about to turn back to help him, but I knew he could handle whatever was going on out there. I hit the swinging doors with my right shoulder and pivoted to the right, sweeping my entire half of the room with the barrel of the gun. Nothing. I turned back to Matt’s half of the room, expecting to hear shots before I finished my turn. The interior was silent. The room was empty. The side door and the back door were both open, the frames splintered. Looking through the doorways, I could see nearly twenty of the infected out each door. They were fanning out in small groups, running at full speed. Neither of us shot. They were out of range.
Chapter 11
Matt and I rushed outside in time to see the last of the infected disappear between the houses and other buildings. There were three on the ground that were not moving. One was trying to crawl away. When it came out the side door, Lawrence’s fusillade of bullets destroyed its knees. Even without the ability to feel pain, it couldn’t walk; there was nothing left in the joint to support its weight. The creature was awkwardly dragging itself with its elbows, leaving a trail of blood from its mangled knees across the rough asphalt. When I closed to about four feet, it suddenly turned and lunged at me. A grasping hand clenched onto my ankle and its teeth snapped closed on air as I jerked my leg away from its gaping maw. A single shot to the back of the head ended its attack. I still continued to underestimate these creatures.
I turned and walked back into the diner, looking at the three bodies laying unconscious on the floor. One was female and two were male. I searched for a pulse on all three and found nothing. They were dormant. I shifted the shotgun to my left hand and drew my pistol. A single shot fired into each head ensured they wouldn’t wake up again. Two hours ago, there had been nearly fifty tourists here. Now, over forty of them were raging outside, exposing more people to the infection.
I looked around the room. Filth covered the floor. There was blood everywhere. My eyes came to rest on Yuto’s mangled corpse. Looking at his bloodstained body, I could not help feeling sad for him. He died in terror, in a strange country and ultimately alone. He was surrounded by people he had known as an adolescent, but fifty some years later, they were not really friends. The only one he had been close to was the one who brought him to his end. That was no way to die.
There was no putting this back in the box and sealing it up again. I had done everything I could to prevent the spread and I had failed. I had given myself to this town for the past five years. Now it was time to be with my family.
I walked out of Mary’s for the final time and was struck by the afternoon. A warm breeze, carrying the fragrance of spring in bloom, slowly propelled fluffy clouds, floating listlessly, through the deep blue sky. It was the kind of afternoon that brought joy to life. I smiled to myself at the irony.
I turned to Lawrence, Mary, and Bertha. “I’m not going to tell you what to do other than stay away from healthy people. You all know where we stand. We have three or four hours left. My wife and son have both been exposed. I’m going to spend the rest of my time with them. “
“We’ve talked about it and decided we are all going to go to my house,” Bertha said, trying to give off a positive air to overshadow her smeared mascara and tear streaked cheeks. “Mary and I have been talking about having a Scrabble tournament for a couple weeks now. This is as good a day as any. Larry said he’s going to join us.”
In spite of the destruction surrounding us, memories of late night games of Scrabble I had played with Lawrence at the station while waiting for a call nearly brought a smile to my beleaguered face. “Don’t let his made up words fool you. The more convincing he sounds, the less likely his word is actually real.” Even Mary couldn’t help but smile a little. “Good luck,” I said as I turned away from them and toward Matt.
“You always said you wanted to be the boss. Have fun.”
“That’s not funny, man. What am I supposed to do?” he asked.
“Keep that mask on, and don’t get bit. Kimiko has been through a lot. If you can, find somewhere safe to stash her. After that, if I were you, I’d get a case of bullets and stick them in the back of your car. As far as this mess goes,” I said, pointing back at the diner, “I don’t think there’s anything you can do. You saw them scatter. There’s no way you’re going to be able to hunt them all down. Between this group and the exposure at the school, there is no way to contain the disease by yourself. You’ll get some help in a few hours. In the mean time, keep a low profile and don’t end up like me.”
The morning’s events replayed in my mind as I turned back to my car. I saw people getting sick, dying and attacking their loved ones. I saw terror and misery. I halted mid-step and turned back to Matt. Without looking him in the eye and in a quiet voice, embarrassed to say what I was thinking, I asked, “Matt, would you swing by my house in a while and check on us? Four hours should be long enough.”
He held up his right hand in the universal signal to stop. “If you’re asking me to do what I think you’re asking, the answer is absolutely not! Do you intend to do that for Katie and Toby?”
“No,” I sighed. “I couldn’t shoot them, even if they had turned.”
“Then don’t ask me to either. You guys are like family to me,” he said, dropping his hand back to his side.
I nodded my head in understanding, ashamed to have even mentioned it. “Take care of yourself, Matt,” and I turned back to my car.
“Connor,” Lawrence yelled. “I still have your gun.”
“Give it to Matt,” I yelled back, sliding across the worn fabric of the front seat. “I don’t need it anymore than you do.”
I looked at Toby who was sitting in the seat next to me. “What do you say we have a little excitement and not wear our seatbelts?”
“Dad,” he said with a huge grin on his face, still oblivious to what was actually happening. “That’s against the law.”
“Yeah, I guess it is.” As the car rolled onto the freshly paved road, I punched the gas. The car leaped ahead, all two hundred fifty horses roaring in delight at having been loosed from their bonds. The needle flicked through seventy as the freshly painted lines on the road popped by faster and faster. At ninety, the noise of the wind howling over the light bar eclipsed the roar of the engine. The needle peaked at one hundred thirty and the road was a blur, fence posts and tall grass on the roadside blitzed past without distinction. After two seconds, there was a change in the resonance of the engine and the speed dipped down to one hundred twenty-eight, where it held steady. With my turn rapidly approaching, I removed my foot from the gas.
Air resistance increases exponentially with speed. At one hundred-twenty eight miles per hour, massive amounts of air were piling up in front of the car, causing a ton of drag. Without huge volumes of fuel dumping into the cylinders, the engine couldn’t produce the horsepower needed to keep the car pounding through the resistance ahead and it rapidly slowed. At ninety, I started applying the brakes. Our road was closing fast. I braked hard. The calipers squeezed the rotors like a goat in the clutches of a three hundred pound anaconda. With the speed rapidly dissip
ating, the front of the car bowed to the approaching turn like a peasant before the throne of a king who was to be his judge. When the speed reached forty, I eased my foot off the brake; I turned the wheel to the left, initiating the turn. All four tires howled in opposition, but they held fast to the road. Halfway through the corner, I moved my foot back to the gas. By the time the car straightened out of the turn, the engine was screaming again at full throttle.
Toby sat in the seat beside me with a silly grin on his face. “Faster!” he screamed to be heard over the engine and wind. “Can I turn on the siren?” Nobody else lived on our road so nobody would be bothered except for the cows in the field before our place. Toby loved “Code Three” driving. There was no emergency right now, just one last ride with my boy. I desperately wanted to see his “Code Three” grin. He didn’t disappoint me as he set the siren to wailing.
I slowed just enough to avoid losing control as we transitioned from the asphalt road to the gravel driveway. As I made the right hand turn, the back end of the car lost traction and drifted to the left. I had anticipated the change in traction and was already counter steering when the back end slid out. I only put in enough left steering to maintain control. I stepped on the gas to ensure the back end stayed sideways for a complete lap around the circular portion of our driveway. By the time we were done with our lap, all we could see was a cloud of dust. Toby was laughing so hard he couldn't get out what he was trying to say.
Finally, he was able to mutter, "You’re gonna to be in big trouble with Mom," between continued outbursts of laughter.
"You're right, buddy, I'm going to be in big trouble. We threw gravel all over the lawn. She’s going to be all over me in a minute."
The thought of me being in trouble got him tickled all over again. He doubled over in the seat, trying to catch his breath as his body heaved between clutches of laughter. Tears rolled down both sides of his face. I opened my door, walked around the car, and opened his door. I grabbed him up and tossed him over my shoulder like a sack of dog food and walked toward the house.
