Uncivil War: Evolution

by B. T. Wright

  As they drove along I-64—they had just passed a sign to exit for the city of Covington, Virginia––Jake stopped writing. The sun was plummeting fast behind the surrounding mountains. If he’d been on that drive at any other time in his life he would have been thinking about the beauty that surround the road they were traveling. Instead, he could only continue to worry what might await around the next bend. Jake had never heard of Covington, Virginia, but the Attractions sign showing that there was an historic downtown to visit, and even a place called Falling Spring Falls, made him wish they were on this road trip for entirely different reasons. A pleasure trip instead of one of survival. It was only a brief respite from his current writing, but it was nice to take a breath.

  He put his pen back to paper and continued sketching out a plan for moving forward. A half hour more passed, and his thoughts turned to how they could fight back against the aliens rather than just how to survive them. Jake was trying to think long term. Once they made it to Mount Weather, the only logical next step in his mind was to fight back. He wasn’t the type to just roll over and die, but if there wasn’t a lot of the military left, the prospect of getting earth back from billions of black-eyed invaders seemed dismal. It was a constant battle in his head to fight thoughts of that nature. His main hope moving forward was that Emily and whoever else was at the facility with her had made some strides the last few days in studying the infected. He needed to talk to her—to see if his brother had made it there yet, and to tell them about what was happening with Amy. Maybe Emily could help him figure out how to leverage Amy’s abilities to gain advantage over the aliens. Either way, he wasn’t going to solve anything in that SUV, and he knew it. So he placed the notebook back in his bag, just before Tyler laid on the brakes.

  “Ho . . . ly . . . shit.” Tyler said.

  Jake leaned forward in between the front seats. Their worst fear from even before they started their journey was staring him right in the face. It was the entire reason he wanted so badly to stick to the river. The road stretched in front of them, visible for a least a mile, just before it wound to the right up a mountain. And every single lane, and the entire median in between, was packed full of cars, going nowhere, which was now exactly what they were doing.

  Tyler was forced to stop the SUV when they came to the beginning of the end of their journey on I-64.

  There was no way around it—the road was completely impassible.

  20

  Jess had woken from sleep when she felt the brakes and heard Tyler gasp. “What’s going on? Where are we?”

  “Stuck in the middle of nowhere, with no place to go,” Tyler answered.

  Jake picked up his AR-15 and exited the Tahoe. He left the door open so Amy could see what was going on. Jess and Tyler exited with him, and he heard the guys getting out of the SUV behind him. He placed his gun’s strap over his head, grabbed the luggage rack atop the Tahoe, and pulled himself up. The cut from the axe earlier stung his side from the stretch.

  “See anything?” Tyler said.

  Jake watched as he fidgeted his leg.

  “Go ahead and take a piss if you need to,” Jake said. Then he took a long look in front of him. The golden light was bright enough to see that there was no end in sight of the bumper-to-bumper vehicles. He did a 360 spin, taking in the mountains around him on all sides. “No. Nothing but cars and trees.”

  “What are we going to do now?” Tyler’s voice went up an octave. His leg was still shaking.

  “We’ll have to walk.”

  “Walk?” Jess said, looking up at him. Bryan, TW, and Mark walked up beside her.

  “How’s the arm?” Jake said to Mark.

  Mark was the quintessential country boy. He looked strong and stocky under his John Deer T-shirt, and his face underneath the Miller Lite hat seemed young to Jake. They hadn’t had the conversation, but he couldn’t have been a day over twenty-one.

  Mark shrugged his shoulders. “I’ll live.”

  “What do you think?” Bryan asked Jake.

  “I think it’s going to be dark soon and we need to find a safe place to crash for the night.”

  “Shit,” Tyler said, walking off the tension in circles.

  “Any ideas?” TW asked.

  “I looked at our map notes a second ago. Lexington, Virginia isn’t far. But we can’t get there on foot before nightfall.”

  Tyler walked up to the Tahoe. “What if we walk up to the top of the hill there and the cars aren’t blocked anymore? Then we can drive on out of here.”

  Jake thought about it for a minute.

  “I saw a sign for a motel just about a half hour back,” Mark said.

  “I saw that,” Jake said.

  “No way,” Tyler said. “We can’t stay out here in the middle of nowhere. Not when the aliens could be anywhere.”

  “We might have to.”

  “So I guess it makes no sense to even try what I said?”

  “It does, Ty, I just don’t think it’s smart.” Jake turned and looked off into the valley that stretched to their right. “I’d say we have about an hour of daylight left. Maybe less here in the mountains. If we walk up to the bend there—about a mile, mile and a half—and there’s nothing but more cars, we won’t be able to find a safe place for shelter. It’ll be dark by the time we walk back this way.”

  Tyler walked away from everyone.

  “He’s right,” Jess said. “I don’t want to stay out here either, but I for damn sure don’t want to be caught out in the open on this road when it’s dark.”

  Jake strained his eyes down the valley. He couldn’t be certain, but it looked as though there was a small sliver of white amongst all the green trees.

  “See something?” Bryan said.

  “Maybe.” Jake pulled his rifle up and put his eye behind the scope. He could just make out a dormer on the right side of the white thing he’d seen. “Looks like a house.”

  “Nope.” Tyler stomped back over to the group. “No fucking way. I’m not trekking through that valley to some abandoned house. And then what? Try to sleep there? Hmm-mm. Nope. I’ll stay right here in the car.”

  “Seems smarter to me than going back to the motel,” Bryan said. “Might be more infected population back that way.”

  “Seriously? Am I the only one that thinks staying out here is crazy?”

  “No, Ty,” Jake answered. “We all know it’s crazy. But you seem to be the only one that thinks we have a choice.”

  Jake hopped down from the roof.

  “I’m not going in those woods. I’ll stay right here in the truck.”

  “Suit yourself,” Jake said, then popped open the back gate. “But it’s going to get awfully lonely out here by yourself.”

  Tyler didn’t answer. Jake tugged open a couple of the grocery bags in the back. “Let’s eat now,” he said to the group. “It will be less we have to leave behind, and less we have to carry.”

  The group gathered around, and Jake passed them some bread and some lunch meat he’d found. TW opened a can of beans with his knife, and Mark opened a bag of barbecue chips someone managed to pack along. Jake looked around and was happy with the group of people that had come along. He was sad that they had already lost a couple men, but overall it could have been so much worse.

  Tyler had finally come over and started to eat with the rest of them. Even though he’d said what he said in front of Jess earlier, Jake loved the pudgy bastard. When he looked over at Jess, he could see the storm behind her eyes. He knew it wasn’t because they had to abandon the SUV to walk—it was because of Tyler’s words. Jess was about the most easygoing woman in the world, but there was one thing she hated more than anything: a liar. Jake and Jess had been together long enough for her to know what his silence meant earlier when she asked him what Tyler meant. That silence, to her, was as good as a lie. It was eating away at Jake as he chewed on his ham sandwich. He was going to have to talk to her about it before the night was over. Sleep was difficult enough at that s
tage, but it would never come at all if he didn’t unload his conscience. More importantly, he wanted to unload hers. He always thought that trouble with the one you love most was the most unbearable burden in life, and Jake didn’t want to be the cause of that for her any longer. She deserved better.

  Everyone finished eating, and all of them changed their clothes. Jess checked Jake’s cut before he put on a fresh V-neck T-shirt she had grabbed for him in the clothing aisle of the store. Then she handed Amy a can of Coke. Amy smiled, and Jake couldn’t help but smile with her as she took a big gulp. They all packed up as many of the essentials as they could, stuffing things in backpacks and anywhere else they could. Jake hated leaving behind most of the water, but there was no choice. They would have to ration until they came across a gas station or grocery store that still had some bottles.

  Everyone gathered around Jake—ready to go. Jake strapped on his go bag and looked back at Tyler. “Still staying in the Tahoe tonight?”

  “No, Jake. I’m not. Can we just get going before it gets dark? I really don’t want to enter the haunted house in the hills without some light.”

  Amy spun around and looked up at Tyler. “You think it’s haunted?”

  “Don’t listen to him, Amy,” Jess smiled. “He’s always been a big pussy.”

  Everyone laughed at Tyler’s expense.

  Tyler snapped back. “Oh, yeah, because ghosts are scarier than the aliens that are following us, right?”

  TW scoffed. “Don’t you know when to just shut your mouth, son?”

  Tyler put his hands on his hips. “Oh, so now stating the obvious makes me an asshole? Maybe I should just stay in the truck.”

  TW stepped forward. “Maybe you should.”

  They glared at each other, but Tyler didn’t back down.

  Jake looked at the two of them, then glanced up at the sky. Darkness was closing in. “Okay, that’s enough. No one is staying behind. The house won’t be haunted. And the aliens are nowhere near us.”

  That last sentence being about aliens didn’t give anyone any confidence about the night ahead. How could it when they had literally watched as everything around them turn into a living hell?

  21

  Darkness began to creep in all around them. The trees had mostly shaded the last of the golden light once Jake and everyone had stepped off the road. The hill down into the valley was steep, and few of them had lost their balance and fallen, but no one had been hurt. Amy was doing a better job than most of them at navigating the terrain—she said it was due to the years she’d spent in the woods behind her grandparents’ farm. Tyler had the toughest time. Being front-heavy as he was, his belly pulled him forward down the hill. After Jake offered the advice of leaning back a little farther on his heels, things had gotten a little easier for him.

  A few of them still had some battery left on their phones, so they were the ones leading the group with their flashlights. Jake had taken point because he had an actual flashlight. The dense foliage encapsulated them, and the sound they made as they moved through fallen leafage seemed to echo through the hills. Every step made Jake nervous, and he wasn’t a nervous man. The snapping of tree branches and their feet rustling the fallen leaves sounded like symbols crashing to him.

  There were other worries on Jake’s mind as well. He could no longer look at Amy without thinking of her as a beacon for the aliens. They knew nothing about the aliens’ capabilities, so his fears had continued to grow after she made contact with all of them down by the river. It was terrifying to think that all of the aliens could see where she was all the time because of it. Like a window into her mind had been left open. Though the aliens had moved in on them at the grocery store, since then, there had been no other reason to believe they could see their every move. Unless of course they were waiting until Jake and crew were vulnerable. But weren’t they always easy targets? There were only seven of them now. If the aliens knew enough about where Amy was at all times, they could have just clogged the road earlier and stopped them. The numbers were so massively in the aliens’ favor that a fight wouldn’t last long.

  Jake’s fears on that subject subsided a bit as he thought it out. He felt better about the aliens not knowing exactly where Amy was, because he did believe they would already have tried to stop them if they did. So, then it was on to the next concern. They weren’t but a couple hundred yards from the house in the woods. What would be waiting inside? A survivor that will fight to the death to save his property? People that live rurally didn’t take too kindly to strangers wandering around. Would the people that lived there be aliens at that point? If so, how many would there be? And if they had to shoot them, would they attract more aliens that could be nearby?

  Just as in a combat situation, every step was a new concern. Jake had ventured with his men into many similar situations where they had to enter foreign territory in the Army and as a Delta operator, with no real idea of what awaited them. He would handle this in the same manner by securing the perimeter, then secure the house one room at a time. It was a blessing to have Bryan there with him. Jake felt as if he could clear the house on his own, but having someone with military experience watching his back would make things much less nerve-racking.

  Jake heard someone move up next to him. He turned and saw that it was Bryan.

  “You and me secure the house first? Then bring them up once it’s safe?”

  Bryan had been having the same internal conversation.

  “That was my thought,” Jake said. “Gunfire is a last resort.”

  “Copy.”

  Jake stopped and let everyone catch up to him and Bryan. All of them gathered around. With no one walking, the woods were still, and the silence was total.

  Jake spoke softly. “Bryan and I are going to secure the house and make sure it’s safe. The rest of you stay right here. Form a circle and face outward, that way you’ll have a 360 degree view. We won’t be long. Either Bryan or I will come back down and walk you up.”

  “What if we see something out here?” Tyler said.

  “Shoot as a last resort. If you see something, all of you get to the house so we can fight together.” Jake gave everyone in the group a look until each of them gave him a nod of understanding. “We’ll be right back.”

  “Be careful, boys,” TW said. “Hard tellin’ what could be up there.”

  Jake took his axe from its loop and held it up. “Don’t worry about us.” Then he winked at Jess. She only gave him a faltering smile. There was a storm brewing between them—one he hoped would pass without catastrophic damage.

  Jake turned and started the walk up toward the house. It was nestled into the hillside and completely surrounded by the woods. It was a miracle that he had seen it from the road. The sun had been hitting just right on the white siding. He shined his flashlight forward. They were still a couple hundred feet away, but Jake could make out a wraparound front porch and a black roof. One thing was certain: if there was something inside that house, whatever it was would have no problem hearing Jake and Bryan coming. There was just no way to keep from making noise with all the foliage underfoot.

  Jake took his axe in his left hand and pulled his silenced pistol from its holster. He and Bryan started up the hill. It was no use watching where he stepped, because no path to the house would be a quiet one. Instead, Jake pricked his ears and focused forward. The steep incline rose quickly, and Jake slowed his pace as he made it to the steps of the porch. Whatever road lead to the house was obviously around back. Jake wanted to see that before he went in, and he wanted to check if there was a vehicle.

  Bryan moved in behind Jake as he walked around the house. There were a couple of rocking chairs on the back porch, a pair of old work boots by the back door, and a few potted plants hanging over the rail. There was no sign of movement, but that didn’t mean the house was empty. Jake turned the corner and saw a row of bushes which lined the side of the house. There was a window about halfway down, but the curtains were drawn, so nothing
could be seen. A slight breeze rustled through the trees and raised goosebumps on Jake’s sweat-covered skin. The smell of rain wafted along with it. A thunderstorm was normally something he would welcome, but tonight it would only make things harder.

  Jake made it to the edge of the house. A driveway twisted up the hill in front of him. His flashlight found what looked to be a fairly late-model pickup truck in front of a one-car garage. Worst case scenario, they could pile in the back if they had to make a quick exit. As the two men walked to the front of the house, there was no sign of life. Jake tried the door of the truck, and it opened. The keys were dangling from the ignition, which wasn’t much of a surprise to him. The people that lived here didn’t worry much about neighbors. As far as Jake could tell on the way in, there weren’t any. He pocketed the keys and moved on. The driveway was gravel, and the front porch mirrored the back. It was time to go inside and see what the immediate future held.

  Jake hoped their first night away from the university wouldn’t be nearly as eventful as the day had been. He looked at Bryan, then over at the front door. Good or bad, it was time to find out.

  22

  Emily could feel some sort of vibration affecting her body. But it was dark—zero light whatsoever. Where was she? Where could she have gone that was completely pitch black?

  Emily felt the vibration again. A low rumble beneath her arms. Why only beneath her arms?

  “Where am I? What’s going on?”

  Emily wondered if she’d heard that correctly. It was extremely muffled. It sounded like a woman’s voice but like it was coming from the bottom of a well. Then the vibrating returned, only this time it was even stronger.

  “Help me!”

  Emily’s eyes shot open and she raised her head. She stared at Karen, the infected woman—alien—that she had injected with Beritrix some time ago. Karen was thrashing inside of her restraints. Emily had fallen asleep with her head resting on her hands at the foot of Karen’s gurney.