Into the Badlands

by Brian J. Jarrett

  The carrier just stared at them. Brenda kept the pistol in her hand, finger off the trigger, waiting to see what happened. It would be useless at that range, but she wanted to be prepared. She looked behind them to make sure they weren't being pursued by anyone or anything. They were alone. Alone, except for this strange carrier standing motionless in the road in front of them.

  They stood this way for what seemed like an eternity. Neither moved. Then the carrier simply turned around and continued walking. Tammy sighed and took the gun off her shoulder, pointing it toward the ground. She looked at Brenda.

  “That's a carrier, right?” Brenda asked.

  “I don't know. It didn't look infected. It's pretty far away though; tough to tell.”

  “Ever have one see you and turn away?”

  “No. They always come running.”

  “Me neither,” Brenda replied. “Let's double back, and head the other direction. Either way, I don't wanna follow it.” She turned to leave.

  “I don't think we have much choice,” Tammy said. “He's coming back.”

  Brenda turned back around to see the figure walking toward them.

  “Should I shoot it, you think?” Tammy asked.

  Brenda thought for a moment. “Not yet. Let's see what it does. I don’t want to draw any attention.”

  They watched the figure walk toward them. It stared straight ahead, right at them, but somehow Brenda felt it was looking through them. It continued walking, very gradually gaining ground. As it came closer Brenda was more and more convinced this wasn't a carrier. It didn't have the mannerisms, the gait, or any of the gimpy limps they often had.

  And if an uninfected man was walking toward them, she didn't want to find out what he wanted.

  Suddenly the figure sat down in the middle of the road.

  “What the fuck?” Tammy said. “What is this shit?”

  “I don't know,” Brenda replied. “He's not infected, I'm pretty sure of that.”

  They watched the man for some time. He remained in a sitting position, staring at the ground, rocking gently back and forth. Maybe he was injured or sick? Brenda wondered. If so, what help could she and Tammy provide? It took all their resources just to care for themselves.

  But for some strange reason she was curious; wildly curious, actually. She couldn't seem to shake it. “Let's go see what his deal is,” she said to Tammy.

  Tammy's face was incredulous. “What? Are you for real?”

  “Sure I am. Draw a bead on him; if he tries anything, put a bullet in his head.”

  Tammy wasn't convinced. “I don't think this is a good idea.”

  “Maybe not,” Brenda replied, smiling.

  The two women walked toward the sitting figure. As they neared him they noticed he had no backpack or bag at all. He was just sitting on the ground, staring.

  They also noticed his face was covered in dried blood.

  “Where the hell did all that blood come from?” Tammy asked.

  Brenda shook her head. “Let's ask him.”

  They came within thirty feet of the man, then stopped. Now both Brenda and Tammy were sure he wasn't infected. They weren't sure, however, if he was safe. Being covered in blood wasn't helping his credibility.

  “Who are you?” Brenda asked the man. She kept the pistol partially raised, ready to fire if necessary. Tammy had the man's head directly in her sights.

  The man spoke, never looking up. “Who are you?” he asked.

  Brenda and Tammy both looked at each other.

  “What's your name?” Brenda asked. The man just stared at the ground. “What's your name?” she repeated. The man looked up, the left side of this face covered in dried blood. His hands were covered with it as well.

  “What...is...your...name?” she repeated slowly, sounding out each syllable.

  “They’re gone. I don’t know where they are.”

  “Who’s gone?”

  “They’re gone,” he repeated. “I lost them.”

  “What is your name?” Brenda repeated again.

  The man didn't reply. He kept looking into the sky, as if he were searching for the answer there. Eventually he spoke.

  “Dave,” he told her. “My name is Dave.”

  “Why are you covered in blood?” Brenda asked.

  “I didn’t know I was.”

  “Well, you are. Look at your hands, man.”

  Dave looked at his hands then continued staring at them. Brenda thought he looked as if he was on a bad acid trip.

  “What are you doing here?” Brenda asked.

  “Why would I have blood on me? Is it mine?” Dave asked, seemingly unaware of Brenda's prior question.

  “I don’t know if it’s yours. I don’t know you,” Brenda replied. He seemed very confused. She decided to try once more. “What are you doing here?”

  “I don’t know,” Dave replied.

  “How’d you get here?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Who’s blood is that on you?” Tammy asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  Brenda looked at Tammy; her faced wore a perplexed look. “What do you remember?”

  “The outbreak, a border town. We got kicked out; we’ve been on the road for a while now.”

  “Who’s we?” Tammy asked.

  Dave turned to look at her. “My wife, Sandy, and our friend. His name is Jim. I don’t know where they are. I lost them. I was supposed to protect them, but I lost them.” Dave returned his gaze to the ground, then began rocking back and forth.

  Tammy turned to Brenda. “This guy is fucked,” she said. “For all we know he killed and ate the last person he met,” Tammy offered.

  “Maybe,” Brenda replied.

  Tammy thought for a moment. “We should leave him here.”

  “You might be right.”

  “What do you mean, I might be right? Are you fuckin' nuts?”

  Brenda took a deep breath, then exhaled. “I don’t know. For now, sure, leave him here. I'm not sure what to do with him just yet”

  Tammy raised her eyebrows. “That doesn’t make me feel any better.”

  Brenda looked back at her friend. “Me neither.”

  “Leave him for now then,” Tammy said. “Let’s go check out some of these houses. If he’s still here when we get back, we’ll figure out what we wanna do.”

  “Deal,” Brenda replied.

  The two women made their way into four houses after leaving the stranger. They found some additional canned food, some matches, and a few other items they thought might be useful. Brenda also found a pair of insulated gloves and a school backpack. On a whim she kept them for the stranger, just in case.

  Each time they walked out of a house they peered down the street to see if the stranger was sitting where they'd left him. Each time he was. They spent almost an hour pilfering through the houses they thought might prove fruitful. When they were finished the stranger still sat in the street, rocking back and forth.

  Tammy and Brenda walked back down to where the stranger sat, keeping their guns trained on him in case he made an aggressive move. He didn't. He remained seated on the street, rocking back and forth. Brenda looked at Tammy, raising her eyebrows.

  Tammy shook her head. “Leave him,” she said. “Maybe this guy’s crazy, or maybe he’s crazy like a fox. Either way, it’s a bad idea.”

  Brenda considered Tammy’s comments. It was dangerous to bring him along. They didn’t know anything about this guy, save for his name. Keeping the gun pointed at him, she tossed the backpack and the gloves down on the ground beside him. Maybe he was dangerous, but that dazed look he had...she’d seen it before. She opened her mouth to speak, but never made it that far.

  “Oh shit,” Tammy said. “Here comes trouble.”

  Brenda looked up. Coming from the end of the the subdivision street were three carriers, moving slowly and aimlessly. Brenda's skin crawled at the sight of them. Based on their level of disinterest she was reasonably certain hadn
’t been spotted yet.

  “We gotta get out of here,” Tammy said in a low voice.

  “But our friend here...” Brenda began.

  “We have to leave him.” Tammy was visibly impatient.

  Brenda glanced from Dave back to the three carriers. “They'll tear him to fuckin' pieces.”

  That’s his problem, sister, not ours.”

  “Yeah,” Brenda replied. She looked down at the stranger. “You said you’re name is Dave, right?”

  He looked up at her.

  “Listen to me. You need to run. Deadwalkers are heading this way.”

  He nodded at her.

  “I mean it,” Brenda told him, then both women turned to walk away. She glanced down the street at the carriers; they were still well into the distance and still meandering. It wouldn’t take long though before they were spotted.

  She then looked back at the stranger. He was still sitting where they’d left him.

  “He’s not moving,” she said to Tammy.

  “That’s not our problem, Brenda.”

  They continued walking. Brenda glanced back at the stranger. She watched as he looked directly at the carriers, then returned his gaze back down to the ground. He continued rocking as if they weren't even there.

  Brenda stopped walking. “Wait,” she said to Tammy.

  Tammy stopped and turned around, looking at Dave. “Fucking leave him Brenda!” Her voice was filled with nervous frustration.

  Just then the carriers spotted the girls and began running toward then. Two of them were slow, injured or weakened, but one was much faster than the others. It bore down on Dave with frightening aggression and speed.

  “I have to do something,” Brenda said. “We can’t just leave him here.”

  “Yes we can. The only thing we have to do is run.”

  “But they’ll kill him, and that'll be on our conscience,” Brenda countered.

  “That’s not our problem anymore. We can’t save the fuckin’ world, Brenda. If we stay here they’ll kill us too.”

  Brenda watched the carrier in the lead; he was closing the gap quickly.

  “C’mon!” Tammy pleaded. “Move your ass!”

  Brenda stood, motionless, contemplating. If she left this stranger here she was complicit in his death. Could she live with that? She wasn’t sure she could trust him, but she felt confident that he wasn’t himself. He was still a human being, after all.

  And hadn't she been left behind when the virus hit?

  “I’m going back for him,” she said. She ran toward the stranger.

  “Shit!” Tammy yelled. She knew once Brenda had made up her mind it was virtually impossible to change. She raised the rifle, sighting it in on the carrier in the lead. It was moving fast.

  Brenda continued running toward the stranger. When she reached him she grabbed his arm, just under the armpit, then yanked him upward. “Get up!” she yelled.

  He just sat there.

  “Get up!” she yelled again, hitting him twice in the side of the head as hard as she could. That seemed to snap him out of his fog. He stood up. She looked up to find the two slower carriers still in the distance while the faster one bore down upon her. It was less than forty yards away.

  “Run, you idiot!” she yelled.

  Then Brenda heard the report of the rifle shot. Tammy fired at the running carrier, but missed. It was moving quickly, closing the forty, third, and twenty-yard gap with ease.

  Brenda saw this and reached for her pistol. Just then another crack sounded and the deadwalker in the lead dropped in its tracks like a stone. It lay on the ground, blood running out onto the street from an exit wound in the thing’s back.

  Brenda yanked on Dave’s arm again. He resisted her efforts. “Do you want me to hit you again?” she yelled at him. She yanked harder, feeling him budge a little.

  She yanked one more time, harder than ever, and then he began to run. They quickly caught up to Tammy.

  “You know you're batshit crazy, right?” Tammy said.

  “Yeah,” she said, breaking a slight smile. “I do.”

  She looked toward the two remaining carriers in the distance. They were slow, but were still closing in. Then, from behind one of the houses a hundred yards or so away, another carrier appeared. It was then followed by another.

  “They heard the shots...I didn’t want to have to use it,” Tammy said. “You didn’t leave me much choice.”

  “I know,” Brenda replied. “Just run.”

  CHAPTER 9

  Ed remembered a time before cellular phones. At one point in his past he could have simply walked to a random phone booth and looked up the address of a Walgreens. Cell phones had rendered these paper books useless relics. It wasn’t without irony that he noticed the Walking Death had rendered cell phones useless relics now too.

  Being that as it was, he still needed to find a pharmacy. They had exactly one day’s worth of daylight to find one and hopefully get the antibiotics to the young girl they’d found. If they failed then they’d have to hole up somewhere during the night and wait it out until dawn. Ed wasn't sure if the girl would make it through the night without care and water.

  He and boys set out at the break of dawn, right on schedule. They were able to get some water down the girl, but she didn't regain consciousness before they left. They left a full jug of water by her bedside, along with a glass in case she awoke while they were gone and was too weak to pick up the pitcher.

  Without a phone book, or a map more detailed than the one they carried, they were on their own searching for a drugstore. Ed figured the place to start would be the exit where they'd found the girl. He didn't remember a drugstore there, but he figured he could at least get his hands on a phone book he could use to track one down.

  They walked the mile or so it took to get back to the exit, covering the distance with little difficulty. The empty road bore no ill-mannered travelers, nor did it host any rabid carriers. Aside from a few squirrels and some birds they saw no movement.

  They arrived at the exit, then made their way down the ramp in the same fashion as they'd done the first time through. Ed felt the familiar sense of trepidation return. This time, however, they passed up the Target and walked to the center of the parking lot. They looked around for a drugstore; a Walgreens, a CVS, or anything else. They saw nothing.

  It looked as if they were going to need a phone book after all, but procuring one in the aftermath of the cell phone might be difficult. Like many other exits along this area of the highway, the residential zones butted up against the commercial zones; there were plenty of houses to search just on the other side of the shopping center. Ed figured there had to be at least one phone book amongst them. At least he hoped there was.

  “Let’s go, guys,” Ed said. The boys followed.

  It took a little less than ten minutes to make it over the parking lots of the defunct stores and into the adjoining residential area. They walked through an old subdivision, keeping their eyes open for any infected. The bodies of the dead littered the streets here, just as they did every else they’d been. Ed found that he never really got totally used to it; rather, the just accepted it as a commonplace horror.

  They searched six houses before they found their first phone book. Luckily folks were fairly predictable, and the phone book had been right beside the telephone. On the wall just above the telephone was a framed photograph of a couple well into their seventh or eighth decade; Ed was doubtful they'd ever owned a cellphone between them.

  While the boys acted as lookouts Ed scanned the yellow pages for pharmacies. He found a CVS and a Walgreens, both appeared to be within walking distance from where they were. The Walgreens was closest, about a mile and a half away, as near as he could figure. He ripped out the page from the phone book, stuffed it into his front pants pocket, and then exited the house with the boys.

  They traveled quietly and carefully through the side streets. It was their modus operandi. The streets remained eerily silent
as they walked. Around them trees grew unabated over sidewalks and weeds grew through cracks in the street. The grass was mostly brown, but had gone to seed since the outbreak. Broken glass lay all around, glinting in the sunlight. Bodies in varying states of decay lay all around them.

  It took less than an hour for them to make it to the pharmacy. It sat on the corner of the street, looking familiar yet out of place within all the neglected homes and streets. Ed noted wryly that even at the end of all humanity, he could still count on Walgreens to be there on virtually every street corner.

  They approached the front doors to the building slowly. The locks appeared to be broken, otherwise the door was mostly intact. Two bodies lay outside the front doors, almost in the parking lot. They suited up, then Ed drew his gun and brought the boys into a single file line behind him.

  “We’re gonna do this just like the others,” he whispered to the boys through his face mask. “Jeremy, you watch our back. Zach, you watch our sides. I’ll watch our front. In and out.” He looked at both boys. “Ready?” he asked. They nodded to indicate they were.

  “Then let's go.”

  The sun shone brightly from directly above them, and once inside the store they could see reasonably well. They walked cautiously through the aisles making their way toward the pharmacy. They stepped over or went around the larger debris, but they couldn't avoid stepping on smaller pieces littering the floor. Luckily for Ed all Walgreens stores were pretty much the same, so he knew exactly how to get right to the pharmacy.

  The inside of the store was wrecked. Shelves were overturned, cash registers broken, and all the food that had been on the shelves appeared to have been raided. Glass, leaves, and other garbage littered the floor. Seeing all that looting didn’t bode well for the pharmacy supplies, but Ed tried not to get discouraged.

  They made a beeline to pharmacy counter; one glance told them it had been wrecked along with the rest of the store. It wasn’t completely empty though, so there was still some hope. If they could find some form of antibiotic then he would grab it and run. There were almost definitely more, but these were the only antibiotics he was familiar with.