Look Away: an apocalyptic survival thriller (180 Days and Counting... series Book 5)

by B. R. Paulson

  The smell of rotting bodies and spoiled food brought tears to Margie’s eyes. She stepped back, unable to go inside. “Ryker, are you sure your mom isn’t dead?” She hated being the one to point out realistic issues, but that smell was undisputable.

  He looked at her, shaking his head. “No, that’s my brother and my dad. My mom and sister are still alive.” He kicked at the welcome mat on the wooden porch. “At least they were an hour ago. I needed a break so I went for a walk and then decided to get the Cure when I saw you.” He held open the door and Margie covered her nose.

  He didn’t seem affected by the stench that had permeated the furniture and the walls.

  “I’m going to open some windows, okay?” Margie held one arm to her nose and didn’t wait for his permission as she wended around furniture and slid open three windows in the modest front room and propped the door open by folding the rug.

  As the smell lessened in strength, she cleared her throat. “Okay, show me where your mom and sister are.” She hoped they weren’t with the dead bodies that he’d spoken so matter-of-factly about. She wasn’t sure if she could handle that right then.

  She’d seen plenty of death as a nurse, but usually in a controlled environment. Plus, she had never seen victims of the virus and what they looked like. She had no idea what stages were at the end and what wasn’t.

  Swallowing her anxiety, she followed Ryker deeper into the house, bypassing the hovel-like feel of the furniture shoved against the walls and the dim lighting coming from night lights set up in lower electric outlets.

  Besides the smell there was a general morose feeling to the house, like the occupants had waited as long as they could.

  Ryker coughed and shoved open a door. Margie cautiously followed him, looking around while clutching the strap to her bag with both hands.

  The smell was more concentrated in the bedroom and Margie didn’t hesitate to rush to the window and slide it up. Then she looked around, glancing at Ryker who stared at the two females in the large bed. He lifted a hand, pointing at the forms as he spoke. “My mom and my sister.”

  Margie’s lips turned down of their own accord. Sadness moved her forward slowly as she took in the shapes of the dead women – or rather one woman and the other was just a young girl, maybe eight or nine.

  Both had a dark substance streaked from their ears, eyes, and nose. They had been tucked in and obviously taken care of, but they had to have been dead more than an hour. Their bloated faces and the presence of flies suggested much longer, but Margie wasn’t a coroner. She had no idea how long they’d been gone.

  She moved to stand beside Ryker, wrapping an arm around his seemingly frail shoulders. Turning him, she walked alongside him and spoke softly. “Ryker, I’m sorry. It looks like they didn’t make it.”

  He nodded, but continued walking. He headed toward the front door and Margie followed, more grateful to escape the smell than to comfort him, although comforting him was high on the list.

  He flopped onto a bench that had been set on the small patio, surrounded by hydrangea plants and an aloe plant that had been placed outside. The new start was only five inches or so tall and in a small pot. Aloe. Margie swore by it, so did Cady. The windows were open to the left of them, letting out the rancid smell and Margie was grateful for the sweet, cloying scent from the flowers as they tried to overwhelm the odor of decay.

  Margie unhooked her bag from her shoulder and let it fall to the wooden deck with a thud. She leaned back and watched Ryker for a long time before speaking softly. “My husband died the other night. He… I stopped for gas, you know? I went inside and when I turned around…” She shrugged, disbelieving her own words. The facts were never easy to swallow, never easy to accept. At least she only had to talk about the one. Ryker had four and maybe even more. “What was your dad like?” She leaned forward, rubbing around her eye socket and down her cheek.

  Ryker sniffed, wiping his nose and sitting with his legs sprawled in a V-shape. “He liked to call us crazy. Everything we did made us crazy. But he loved us. I’m the middle kid and he’d say all the time that I was like the peanut butter of the family – holding us all together.” He laughed and stared at his shoes. “My brother was perfect.” The way he spoke of his brother didn’t sound bitter or even envious, but like he was in awe of the young man. “He was so tall and he could dunk basketballs! He was so funny, too.”

  And like a dam had broken, Ryker talked about his family while Margie sat there and listened.

  She’d rather listen to him talk about his family then think about the still-flickering lights all along the street and what they meant.

  Chapter 15

  Cady

  The pain was already starting. Cady hadn’t needed her mom in years, but the itching burn had worked its way under her skin, reminding her she wasn’t invincible and bringing out the weak little girl she’d always hated.

  Sitting on the edge of her bed, she took a deep breath, staring out the window at the moon as it peered down on the ravaged world. The landscape was unhindered, as if nothing had happened, as if there wasn’t mass death littering the houses and buildings. The man in the moon was the same that Margie would be seeing, that Jackson would be seeing.

  Cady hadn’t thought of Jackson in a while. She’d just wanted to get from one day to the next without facing the virus. But now, as her mortality reared its ugly head, she was forced to face what Jackson was, and what the virus represented.

  Had she followed through with the things she’d planned in college, she’d be a rich scientist with a cure for cancer. Not that microbiologists came up with cures but Cady would have liked the chance. Instead, she’d traded everything she wanted to be on a man she’d come to not like very much and for a daughter who hadn’t cared much for her mother until the end had come.

  While Cady hated the sickness and what it was doing, she couldn’t hate it completely. With the presence of the virus in their lives, Bailey liked her mom again. Cady needed that small connection with her daughter before she died and she’d gotten it. Bailey listened to her, talked to her, had been concerned for her. There was nothing more precious than that.

  A small part of her was grateful to Jackson for that. In a twisted way, she appreciated that he was all in with his principles, all in with his level of commitment to doing what he believed needed to be done. Unfortunately, that was as far as the admiration went. Jackson had killed more people than Cady could comprehend. His goal had been mass annihilation and he’d succeeded.

  He’d said he would be coming up that way and that he would start the world over with either Cady or Bailey. Since Cady was going to die, that left Bailey. She hadn’t really thought about what that meant before that moment. Did that mean Bailey would be raped to produce children? What about Jessica or Jason? Jackson would probably kill them or anyone else who had the audacity to survive his apocalypse.

  “The man is egotistical and more than a little insane.” Cady chuckled. Look at her. She was talking to herself like she didn’t know that already.

  Cady pressed her fingers against the bridge of her nose and leaned forward to think. What was she going to do? To make things as easy on Bailey as possible, Cady needed to be proactive on how to take care of herself. If she wanted to help Bailey, then she needed to live and protect her from the psychosis of Jackson.

  But where did she start? Thinking about how to care for Scott had been easy since it had been about someone else. She’d focused on relieving his pain and his torture. That was really all she could do. Curing him wasn’t an option and she’d accepted that.

  How did she do the same for herself? If she could relieve herself as much as possible, she wouldn’t be as much of a burden to Bailey toward the end. If she could look at it with that same pragmatism, then she wouldn’t be trying to cure herself, she would just try to make herself more comfortable.

  Okay, making herself the patient, she would first take vitamin C and the oils she applied to Scott’s rash. She could
put on the oil palliatively and try to prevent the rash from growing too large, or she could wait until the rash completely presented itself. While there was raised and red skin, there were no identifiable heads or pox as of yet.

  What else would she do for a skin ailment? She’d been studying for a while on how to treat illnesses and wounds without easy access to a doctor or hospital. Skin problems could usually be treated with oatmeal baths – at least initial stages – as long as the goal wasn’t to cure but to treat the symptoms of itching, irritation, and burning. She’d start there.

  Wandering into the master bathroom, Cady leaned heavily against the wall to remove her undergarments and pajamas. Sitting on the edge of the tub, she ran water, wincing as it heated up. Every nerve seemed to shrink from the hot steam.

  Okay, so heat wouldn’t feel good. Immersing herself in cold water didn’t sound appealing either. She found a tepid lukewarm temperature and searched for her package of oatmeal under the sink. Dumping that in, she lowered herself into the water, unsure if it was cold or warm.

  Fevers had a funny way of confusing the system and while Cady understood that, it didn’t make it easier to figure out how it was affecting her.

  Leaning back, Cady tried absorbing the calming effects of the water, but couldn’t relax. After a few minutes – okay, more like thirty seconds – she realized she just wanted to climb into bed and sleep. Rest. That’s what she’d helped Scott get. She would do the same for herself.

  Climbing from the tub was more painful than she’d thought it would be. Oatmeal might not have been the best idea. Would pain pills work? At the rate she was going none of it mattered. She wouldn’t sleep, she would be stuck in a painful loop and she’d never find relief. If nothing else, she could take some ibuprofen. Too bad she’d dumped out the codeine with Tylenol she’d had from a previous sickness.

  Cady wrapped a towel around her and dug through her top drawer in the vanity.

  Where was… a bottle of Ambien caught her eye. She could sleep. If she took a sleeping pill, she’d be able to actually sleep. That’s what she needed – rest.

  Popping an entire pill because she wasn’t leaving anything to chance, Cady cupped her hand under the faucet and sipped some water to swallow the pill. She pulled on her underwear and a t-shirt and made her way to bed.

  There was too much thinking involved in trying to take care of herself. She would do more in the morning. She flopped onto the mattress, her fingers curling softly inward toward her palm as she relaxed on the comforter and sank into the folds of her bed. The back didn’t hurt like she knew it would. Just the dull ache was like a friend for the moment, a really annoying friend she wanted to punch.

  A haze took hold and pushed weights on her eyelids. A disturbance broke through the fuzziness the pill was already bringing on. Something outside of her room.

  Bailey’s voice was raised in alarm. Then Jason said something and stomped down the stairs. None of their words made sense and came in clipped pieces.

  She could capture their meaning as a cloud of fatigue dragged at her. Cady’s eyelids pulled down and she tried to sit upright on the bed. She had to wake up so she could find out what was going on. She didn’t get there, and ended up in a half fetal position on her side.

  Cady struggled not to fall asleep, she did, but the dose was too much for her. Almost as suddenly as the medicine worked on her, the power went out. No flickering, no warnings. The house just went silent and all the lights went out. The nightlights blacked out and Cady could hear the harshness of her breath in the silence. She hadn’t realized how loud the fundamentals working of a home were until they all disappeared.

  She was too tired to even pull her blanket on or to situate her head on her pillow. She closed her eyes and listened. Bailey’s quiet crying worked its way through the door and the drag of the sleep aid. Cady opened her eyes, blinking as she worked through the reality of what she was hearing.

  If Bailey was crying, something must have happened. Wait, when she thought it like that, she just felt stupid. Of course, something had happened.

  But what? That’s what she meant to wonder. Cady couldn’t focus. What had happened?

  Then the unthinkable occurred to her. Had Scott died? Was that why Bailey was so upset and Jason had run? Scott had died. The end of the sickness was faster than Cady had assumed. She only had three days left to live, if Scott’s death was any indication.

  Three days. Was that going to be enough time to do what she needed to do? It wouldn’t be if she couldn’t find the energy to stay awake.

  Chapter 16

  Jackson

  Waking came suddenly with an abruptness Jackson wasn’t prepared for. He swallowed, his throat scratchy but no longer sore.

  His legs hung off the edge of the bed, a blanket pulled across his chest. The slight chill in the air could have been because of the lost electricity. The only light coming in the top portion of the window from the full moon gave him a sense of furnishings and placement. There was a decided lack of electricity that he could almost feel in the air.

  Glancing at the T.V. where Dr. Phil had been the last few times he’d worked himself from sleep, Jackson waited, certain the ole doc would start laughing or chiming in with his idiotic sayings.

  But the screen stayed blank, mocking him with its black glass and cracked center where he’d shoved one of the stakes on a previous delusion. The blank screen didn’t mean anything.

  Another trick. Jackson wasn’t stupid. He knew to watch for the doctor. He’d been tricked already and it wasn’t going to happen again.

  He pushed himself up from the mattress, wiping at a layer of stickiness across his forehead. Pulling his hand down, he winced. Blood stained his fingers with a crimson shine, creasing in the lines of his fingertips. Okay, his fingers were sensing the same thing as his eyes, that had to be a sign he was progressing, unless now they were sharing in the delusion instead of working apart.

  He reached up, touching the crusty surface beneath his nose and under his eyes. What had he suffered through?

  Scrapes on his palms had the dried, scabby look as he stretched them. Everything ached but with a purity of pain. There was no presence of a numbing agent or even something to dull the ache. The translucent shimmer he’d noticed on the things during the last argument with Dr. Phil had disappeared.

  He’d never been so grateful for pain in his life. The sheets were stained with red in multiple places and Jackson stood, unsteady but stronger than he’d been.

  Stepping around the bed, he stumbled, stepping on the sharp edges of a stake lying on the ground as if abandoned. His feet hurt dully, like a constant pressure would increase the pain, like anything would increase the pain.

  Was he still hallucinating? No, because the thirst and hunger were real, twisting in his stomach and throat with a demanding need.

  Where was Phil? He squeezed his eyes shut tight against the dark, bursting a red shot through his vision. Reset, that’s what he needed. If only he could reset his mind, maybe then Dr. Phil would show back up and quit playing his games.

  But upon opening his eyes, Jackson found there was no headache, just a dull awareness that his body had been through hell and he needed water.

  If there was no power, would there be water? He made his way into the bathroom, stopping every few feet to rest his feet. He must have damaged them when he’d broken the chair legs with his bare soles. He could remember that… at least.

  He had to take a shower and rinse away the sweat, blood, and what he could identify through smell as urine. How many times had he wet himself? As soon as he could steady himself, he had to get out of that motel room.

  The bathroom was dark and he closed his eyes as he turned on the faucet. Cold water flowed over his fingers. Relieved, he opened his eyes and turned it off. Chances were high there was no hot water, but it wouldn’t be the first time he’d showed in freezing water. It would be the first time he was relieved to take a shower – cold or not.

  As he
turned to the shower, he paused, listening for the chuckle of the Texan doctor who had haunted him during his torture by toxin.

  There was no sound.

  Bending down he turned on the bathtub and let the thundering cascade of the water drown out any possible noises that might pop up.

  He didn’t have to hear Dr. Phil taunting him. He remembered and the red rinsing down the drain cemented his delusions in his mind. His reality had been twisted and contorted. To survive what he needed to, he would have to learn to forget the last few days – or however long he’d been incapacitated – and not try to piece together his fractured memories of what had happened.

  There was no other way to survive.

  He stepped into the chilly water and winced, lathering up the soap and getting his skin thoroughly scrubbed. If he was back to himself, he would need to get food, water, and get clean clothes on. He had a trip to finish and a woman to find. Without GPS, it was going to be hard to locate Cady. He had an idea of where she was, but an idea wasn’t worth much without a plan to execute.

  None of it mattered right then. He’d survived the vaccine, exposure to the virus, and lastly the toxin. He’d faced the end of the world as he’d created it, and he’d come out victorious on the other side.

  Nothing could stop him now.

  Chapter 17

  Bailey

  Jason thundered downstairs, panic etched into the youthful angles of his face. He’d all but thrown Jessica into Bailey’s arms when he’d realized his uncle had left like a thief in the night. The thought that Scott was out there was terrifying. They didn’t want to lose him. What was he capable of and how delusional was he? Because that’s what he had to be, right? To leave in the middle of the night, as sick as he was?