by J. Thorn
“I promise I wasn’t going to hurt you,” the man said.
“Are you alone?”
The man nodded.
“I swear, if you’re lying to me, I’ll slit your throat.”
“I’m not, I swear.”
Dax glared at the old man for another moment before taking a step back. He kept the knife in his hand as a precaution, but he dropped his arm to his side. The old man exhaled.
“Thank God.”
“Were you creepin’ on me back there?”
The guy shook his head. “I was just surprised to see you, that’s all. I’ve only seen a handful of folks pass through here in the past few weeks. All the others, I’ve managed to avoid. I’m not much for confrontation, you see.”
Dax didn’t need to be told that. He thought the guy had probably pissed his pants upon seeing him jump out, but his clothes smelled so awful that he couldn’t be sure.
“How long have you been here?” Dax asked.
“Nearly my whole darn life. My house was a couple of miles from here. Burned down a couple weeks ago. I decided to move into town ‘cause hardly anyone is left.” He looked Dax up and down. “You look like you’ve been through hell, friend. Where you from?”
“New Orleans.”
“What are things like there?”
“Long story.”
“Well, we got time. Right?”
“Not really. I was going to try and find food and water, then head out of here. I gotta keep movin’. Can you tell me if there’s any food or water left in this town?”
“I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but no, there’s not. Ever since the Crazies showed up and people went nuts, there hasn’t been junk around here.”
Screamers. That’s gotta be what he means.
“Ah,” Dax said. “All right.”
“My name’s Calvin. What’s yours?”
“Dax.”
“Well, all right then,” Calvin said, scratching his head. “Uh, Dax, I do have some squirrel left if you’d like to share some of that with me.”
Dax curled his lip. He didn’t want that. Not in the least.
“We can even eat it on the road,” Calvin added.
Dax furrowed his brow. “On the road?”
“You gotta get goin’, right? Well, there’s nothin’ left for me here. I’ve been thinking about leaving for the past week or so, but I haven’t been able to summon the courage to. Afraid I might pass out on the road and die from heat stroke.”
“And you still might, even with me. Plus, you’ll slow me down.”
“But I won’t. I promise. I just need to get to the next town, and then you can continue on by yourself.”
Dax didn’t want to take the old man with him. But he had mentioned seeing the vampires. Was there a chance he was more than just a crazy old redneck? Could he know something Dax could use?
“I’ve even got a little bit of water, and I’ll share it with you, Dax.”
Dax hesitated. Then he smiled.
“You at least got some ketchup or something to put on that squirrel?”
4
Calvin had made camp at the Magee Motel. And based on the other places Dax had seen while following the old man over, it appeared to be the best option. Most of their other options had been rundown gas stations or raided restaurants. A Wal-Mart Supercenter had tantalized Dax on the way, but as Calvin had pointed out, that was one of the first places people would have checked for supplies as they came through town. And although the expansive superstore had plenty of places to hide, it wasn’t worth the risk.
On the other hand, the motel had less than forty rooms, the majority of which sat snugly behind a strip of suites containing businesses, similar to the one Dax had slept in the night before.
Calvin had made his home in a room on the second story of the motel. If people did raid the hotel, they would naturally start with the bottom floor, giving Calvin time to either hide or escape. At this point, Dax had a hunch that the man had intentionally embraced an ignorant, redneck stereotype.
Calvin stopped in front of room 214 and reached into his pocket, retrieving a key.
“You have a key to this place?” Dax asked. “Did you work here or something?”
“Nah,” Calvin said. “This place has been here a long time and, needless to say, not many tourists are stopping in Magee to have a look around. They don’t have those magnetic access cards like the big chains. These little mom-and-pop motels usually keep the keys right behind the counter on the wall, in plain view of the guests.”
The door swung open, and the stench knocked Dax back a few steps. He’d thought he would have become accustomed to foul smells by now after spending the weeks since the Blackout in the cesspool that New Orleans had become, but he hadn’t. He wondered if the odor originated from Calvin, or if the hotel had always had the smell attached to it. Probably a little bit of both.
Then he identified the source of one of the odors when he saw scorched meat skewered on a stick that was lying on the bed. The old man picked it up and offered it to Dax.
“Still interested?”
Dax wasn’t. But what else was he going to eat? With the trip ahead of him, he wasn’t going to make it far if he didn’t fuel his body. And as disgusting as roasted motel squirrel sounded, it was protein. He shrugged.
“Guess I don’t have much of a choice.”
Calvin smiled and gave Dax the squirrel kebab.
“Where’d you cook this, anyway?”
“I’ve got a little fire pit out back. I light it up as close to the building as possible, so it doesn’t attract anyone on the road. It smells, but doesn’t everything now?”
That’s an understatement, Dax thought as he looked at all of the dirty clothes and other debris lying around the room.
Dax turned his attention back to his breakfast. His stomach rumbled.
“You think you’re living now,” he mumbled to himself. “Just you wait until you taste that.”
And then, after another momentary hesitation, Dax bit into the meat.
Closing his eyes, he tried to convince himself he was enjoying a New York strip steak. Then he imagined grilled chicken, realizing the texture of what he was eating was more similar to poultry. He gagged when his tongue hit something foreign—a texture he didn’t recognize. Dax reached into his mouth and pulled out a tuft of fur. He wanted to spit out the squirrel immediately at the sight of it, but instead he pinched his nose and swallowed.
Covering his mouth to keep from vomiting, Dax coughed.
“Good, ain’t it?”
He doubled over and fought to keep the oily, furry meat from coming back up. Dax looked at the old man. “You’ve got to be kidding me. How do you eat this shit?”
“Don’t have any other choice, friend,” Calvin said, shaking his head. “You’ll get used to it.”
The food in prison had been nothing more than processed food scraps spread on a plate, but it had allowed the warden to claim he was doing the humane thing, at least keeping the inmates nourished. Dax would have begged for one of those meals now. He would have cleaned toilets for it—maybe worse.
“You can’t think about it,” Calvin said. “Finish it and get it over with. You gotta eat.”
Unfortunately, the old bastard had a point.
Dax ate the remaining two hunks of squirrel, trying to think about practically anything else to get his mind off the grotesque flavor and texture. When he was finished, he drank half the water he had remaining in his bag. By that time, Calvin had a bag over his shoulder and was approaching the door as he came from the restroom.
“Feel better?” Calvin asked.
Keeping the impulse to vomit in check, Dax nodded. “Yeah. Sure, man.”
“Well, then come downstairs. I got another surprise for you.”
“Can’t wait,” Dax said, holding his stomach.
The slightly less putrid air outside the motel room helped ease some of Dax’s discomfort. He followed Calvin down the stairs, to
where the old man stopped in front of a blue Chevy pickup from the 80s. He smiled as he looked at Dax and dangled a key chain.
“No air conditioning, but we won’t have to walk. She should have enough gas in her to get us to the next town.”
Dax smiled and then allowed himself to chuckle. And even with a belly full of squirrel, he started to feel better. He may even have gained a little more hope.
5
It was mid-morning when they hit the road. Calvin, much to his liking, allowed Dax to drive. The old pickup wasn’t a Jeep, of course—it was a piece of shit. Without power steering, Dax practically had to wrestle the vehicle into a lane. And without air conditioning, it was probably hotter inside the cab than it would have been outside. But driving still beat walking.
For the first few miles, neither man said much. Dax focused on the road while Calvin looked out the window at the passing scenery, which was mostly trees. Dax broke the silence.
“So, what’s the next town?”
“We’ll pass through some small places. I’d like to get to Florence, if possible.”
“How far is that?”
“Only about half an hour.”
While Dax appreciated the old man’s company, he would be happy to go it alone again. He wondered how he could convince Calvin to let him keep the truck without taking it by force and then feeling guilty about it. Dax hoped he’d left the prison mentality behind—forever.
“I gotta ask you,” Calvin said. “What’s your story? Like I said earlier, and I mean no offense, you look like shit.”
“Thanks.”
“Sorry… I’m curious what happened to you.”
Dax gripped the steering wheel and looked out the side window, turning his eyes as far away from the old man as possible. Calvin had mentioned the “Crazies” earlier, obviously referring to the vampires, but he hadn’t brought it up again. It seemed a little odd, but in fairness, Dax hadn’t brought it up either.
“I apologize for asking,” Calvin said, looking back out the window, maybe sensing how uncomfortable the question made Dax.
The man had been nice to him, though. He’d shared his water, and fed him—squirrel, but still—and he’d given him a vehicle to get him further along on his journey. A thirty-minute drive could take ten hours on foot.
“When the power went out, I was in prison,” Dax said.
“Damn,” Calvin said. “What’d you do?”
Dax glared at him.
“Sorry,” Calvin said, his cheeks blushing.
“I went into the city, and it was absolute chaos,” Dax said, trying his best to move beyond the awkwardness his past had created. “Found an old friend, got caught up with some of the wrong people, and eventually found my way out… which led me to you and your squirrel breakfast.” Dax looked out the window, knowing he’d left out most of the story. “Not much to tell.”
“You spent weeks down in New Orleans, in all that shit, and that’s it?”
Dax shrugged. “Pretty much.” He doubted the old man was buying it, but he either would or he wouldn’t, and Dax didn’t care which was the case. “What about you?”
“Nothing interesting, really. When the power went out, I stayed put. My place was in the middle of nowhere. Lived in that house for twenty-two years. I was alone. My wife, you see, she passed in 2000.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Why? She saw a lot less evil in the world than she could have, dying before 9/11.” The old man laughed, stifling a cough, and then continued. “All that rain started coming down and I saw some of the damnedest storms I’ve ever seen. My place was lucky enough to survive Katrina. She had died down a lot by the time she made it up this way, but it was still a violent storm. A category three hurricane, if I’m remembering correctly. But all this rain… Nope. Gosh darn lightning bolt struck down a pole near my place. It fell right on my house and set it on fire. I sat out there in the rain and watched it burn.”
“That’s unfortunate,” Dax said. “I’m sorry to hear it.”
“You know, you’re sorry a lot.”
Dax didn’t respond. He couldn’t tell if the man was being serious or not.
“To be honest with you,” Calvin continued, “I was glad to see it burn down.”
“Why?”
“Nothing in this world lasts forever. Yet, we hold on to things like they will. That house was everything to me. So many memories were buried in it, like in that movie Up. That old bastard was so stuck on his house because his dead wife lived there with him for so long. But he eventually realized he had to let it go.” Calvin shook his head. “So that’s what I had to do. Besides, seems a little selfish to be bent out of shape about a house with all the other crap going on. I’m alive, ain’t I?”
The man grinned, and Dax faked one in return, but it quickly disappeared.
They rode in silence until they passed the town of Star. A few more minutes down the road and Dax slammed on the brakes and swore.
“Son of a bitch.”
Having not been paying attention to the road, Calvin squinted to look through the hazy windshield to where Dax was pointing. Ahead, a bridge had collapsed. It had stretched over a creek, but the water was now running over the top of it. Judging from the height of a few nearby trees, Dax estimated the water to be at least 8 feet deep, and maybe more.
Dax stepped out of the truck, approached the wreckage, and looked down.
A minivan lay in the middle of the break, the front end of the vehicle poking through the rushing water. Looking closer, Dax saw a foot protruding from the driver-side window. He bent down and looked through the open window and saw another body face down, floating alongside the van’s other side and tethered by a hoodie that was tangled in the seat belt.
Calvin walked to the edge of the road and stood next to Dax. He looked down, then immediately turned around and vomited on the highway. The old man seemed to be mumbling something to himself, and Dax had spent enough time in prison to recognize the rhythmic cadence of a man in prayer.
Dax started to say something, searching for words to comfort Calvin. But what could he say? The more he thought about it, Dax doubted the man had spent much time on the streets during the chaos—not if this was how he was reacting to a few dead bodies.
“What happened?” Calvin asked.
“No idea.”
“I mean, seriously. Bridges like this don’t just collapse. And a damn storm didn’t do this.”
Dax had watched the bridge in New Orleans fall, and thought maybe something similar had happened here. He doubted it, though, and wondered if Screamers had had something to do with the scene. Calvin stood up and shook his head, brushing imaginary dirt from his pants as if signaling to Dax that he was ready for the next challenge.
“What are we supposed to do now?” Calvin asked. “Nothing we can do for them,” he said, pointing at the minivan coffin.
Dax looked at both sides of the road. The creek snaked as far as he could see in both directions, and the water appeared to be running high and fast. Trees shadowed the ground bordering the highway, and there wasn’t enough room to maneuver the truck through the thick trunks. Even if they could have, the abundant rain had turned everything not made of concrete into mud. And Calvin’s truck wasn’t a four-wheel drive.
“We really only have two options,” Dax said. “We can swim across, which would be the quickest option. Or, we can backtrack in the truck and look for a way around the creek. Although there’s no guarantee, we’ll find a way around, but we could run out of gas in the meantime. I know this, though: the truck won’t make it through—the water’s too high.”
“No way I’m getting in that water,” Calvin said. “Besides the fact that there’s no telling what’s in there, I can’t swim.”
“So, what do you suggest? I don’t have time to backtrack and find another way around.”
Calvin shook his head. “I’m sorry, Dax. But if you’re planning on swimming across, then I think the road ends here for me. I’m gonna hav
e to turn around and try to make do in one of those other small towns we passed. Might try hangin’ my hat in D’Lo for a bit.”
Putting his hands on his hips, Dax nodded. He returned to the truck, retrieved his bag from the cab, and stepped back as Calvin slid into the driver’s seat. The old man stuck out his hand, and Dax shook it.
“You take care of yourself, Dax.”
“You, too.”
They let go, and Calvin slammed the truck into reverse. Dax called out his name then, and the old man looked over. Dax approached the open window.
“One more question. Before, I heard you mention something about ‘Crazies’. What exactly do you know?”
Calvin smiled and patted Dax on the arm. “You be careful out there and watch your back. You hear me?”
And then, without waiting for Dax to respond, the old man turned the vehicle around.
Dax watched the rusted tailgate fade into the horizon.
6
Dax arrived on the outskirts of Florence as the sun dropped below the horizon. The fallen bridge had set him back until he found another place to cross where the overpass had not been washed away, but thanks to Calvin and the mileage he’d covered in the truck, he’d still traveled farther that day than he would have had he not met the old man.
When he entered the small town, he stopped at the first intersection. Off to his left, behind a carwash, he saw duplexes tucked away behind some trees. They sat under cover but weren’t too far from the interstate, so he took a left and headed for the buildings.
Having been around his fair share of poor neighborhoods, Dax had seen this kind of low-income housing before. Ten homes bordered each side of the road. Several units still had cars sitting outside, and Dax thought he might be able to get one of them running in the morning. But first he had to make sure the homes were vacant.
With several units, the front door sat open, trash piled at the threshold and blowing inside. Blue shopping bags littered the lawns in front.
Dax walked to the nearest open door. The smell knocked him back, and he heard flies buzzing. Stifling a cough, he pulled out his flashlight and turned it on. The beam cut through the darkness and illuminated the living room.
