Mitch walked all night, stopping every hour and half or so to take a break and drink some water or eat a snack. He discovered that he was more fatigued from lack of sleep than he’d thought at first, and his pace was slower than the night before. He reached the long bridge over the Pearl River and Honey Island Swamp between midnight and dawn, and by an hour after sunrise he was once again off the road and bedded down in the woods, this time in his home state.
He slept better that second day and was on the move again by late afternoon, less concerned about being seen now that he was in Mississippi. He stayed on the desolate interstate until he was past the small city of Picayune, then he turned west by climbing down at an overpass to reach a county road that would take him to Highway 11, the old route that ran mostly parallel to I-59. Mitch had planned to follow Highway 11 for the next leg of his journey, but just before he reached it he came to railroad tracks and changed his mind. He’d forgotten about it, but the railroad ran right alongside Highway 11, separated from it by a narrow strip of woods in most places. It occurred to him that it would be a better idea to stick to the railroad. It was unlikely other people would be traveling it and no trains would be running, so he would have it to himself. He would follow it until he reached the point where it was time to turn east for the final stretch to the Henley farm.
A full night of walking the tracks put him far from all the big towns to the south and well into the Mississippi woods he so knew and loved. Dawn brought a heavy overcast with the promise of rain later in the day, but Mitch didn’t care. He found his next spot to bivouac in a dense stand of bushes between the railroad and the highway. There was an isolated farmhouse about a half-mile farther north, but it was on the other side of the road and didn’t concern him. It was midmorning and he had just fallen asleep when he was awakened by the sound of a car coming up the road from the south. The engine was so loud Mitch knew it had to be an old V-8 muscle car, but he was too tired to bother getting up to look. At the speed it was approaching it would be past him in a moment and on its way. At least it should have. But just after it went by he heard the motor suddenly shut off. It was quiet for a second and then he heard the car jerk and the motor cough back to life, only to stop again seconds later. Mitch lay there waiting, hoping whoever it was would start the engine again and keep on going, but that didn’t happen. Instead, he heard a car door slam. Curiosity got the better of him at this point, and he decided to have a look and see what was going on.
Keeping hidden in the bushes just above the shoulder of the road, Mitch crawled to a position that would give him a view of the highway to the north. He had seen a few abandoned cars in that direction before he stopped for the day, but the classic Ford Mustang sitting there now was new and Mitch knew it was the car he’d heard. The hood was up and whoever was driving it was hidden from his view on the other side. Mitch watched and waited, until a figure emerged, stepping back around to the driver’s side door.
He was surprised to see that it was a young woman or girl, maybe even about his age, though he couldn’t tell for sure because he was several hundred yards away. He could see that she was pretty though, with long, dark hair and a slim, graceful figure. He hadn’t expected a female driver when he heard the loud car, and seeing her standing there with the hood up, he wondered what happened to cause it to die so suddenly when it sounded like it had been running fine before. He was sure she was alone after watching for several more minutes, and it occurred to him that maybe he could help her get it started. If so, she might offer him a ride since she was going in the direction he was traveling. Mitch went back to where he’d left his gear and gathered up his things. He had changed into his camo hunting clothes since he’d reached the countryside, and he hoped his appearance wouldn’t frighten the girl. He figured it probably wouldn’t as long as he called out to her before he got too close and didn’t startle her.
He walked back to the roadside still cautious, wanting to take another look from within the trees before stepping out into the open. He was glad he did because three men were approaching the highway from the direction of the house that he’d noticed before on the other side. Mitch figured that they too had seen that the girl was having car trouble and had come out to help. If so, he would just stay put and let them handle it. A ride would be nice but there was no guarantee she would offer him one anyway.
From where he stood it appeared that one of the men was older, maybe in his 40s, while the other two were probably closer to 20. Mitch saw the three of them gather around the car and the girl, obviously talking about the problem but he couldn’t hear anything that was said because of the distance. Finally, the older man got in the driver’s seat after they had looked under the hood and then closed it. Mitch thought maybe they had figured out the problem but then he saw the girl backing slowly away from one of the younger men, who was approaching her near the front of her car. It was hard to tell exactly what was going on, but something didn’t look right. The man kept moving in on her and then reached out to touch her as she leaned back against the hood to get farther away. He seemed to persist until suddenly she slapped or hit him, causing him to step backwards, while holding both hands up to his face. Then, as Mitch watched, he simply collapsed to the ground as if he had fainted. Mitch saw the girl run around the car opposite the driver’s side as the older man got out and the younger one hesitated and then came after her.
There was no longer any doubt in Mitch’s mind that these men were up to no good. The girl was running as fast as she could away from her car now, but the older man who’d been in the driver’s seat was right on her heels. She was running in Mitch’s direction but the man pursuing her was faster. Mitch saw him grab her by the hair before she got far and he was already stringing his bow as he watched the aggressor violently yank her off her feet. The girl fell hard onto the shoulder of the road as Mitch moved quickly to close the gap, keeping close to the roadside bushes as he quietly slipped into bow range, a hunting broadhead now nocked on his string.
By now the other man was catching up to join the action too. Whatever the girl had hit the first one with, it put him down for keeps, but she was still outnumbered two to one and Mitch knew she had little chance without some help. He’d never pointed a real weapon; either firearm or bow, at a fellow human being, but Mitch had no doubt of his ability to put his arrow where he wanted it to go if necessary. He had closed the gap to about 75 yards and neither the girl nor her two attackers were aware of his presence. The one that had caught her and thrown her down now stooped to pick up something she’d dropped, and from where he stood now, Mitch could see that it was a knife. The man clenched it in a reverse grip and moved in on her with clear intention and at that moment, Mitch drew his bow. There was no time to ponder the implications of what he was about to do. There was only time to act.
Sixteen
APRIL HELD HER BREATH as she turned the ignition key again after the Mustang came to a stop. The starter turned the engine to no effect until she finally gave up for fear of running down the battery. Now what? She was beginning to have hope she would make it all the way to Hattiesburg, until this.
She looked around before getting out of the car. The highway was a desolate scene of abandoned vehicles with no sign of life or movement. Darkening clouds to the west she hadn’t noticed before promised approaching rain, and the heavy overcast did nothing to improve the mood of this lonely place or lighten her spirits at the prospect of being stranded. She had thought it safer to travel this smaller, two-lane highway, because it ran through few towns and communities, through a landscape of mostly uninhabited woodlands. Where the Mustang had rolled to a stop, she saw one isolated house set back among a grove of pine trees west of the road, and on the other side behind a narrow buffer of trees were railroad tracks that ran parallel to the highway about a hundred feet away. Looking closer, she could see a wisp of smoke coming from behind the house and figured someone had built a fire to cook or heat water for morning coffee. It was insane how everything had
changed so fast, how modern life had ground to a halt in an instant, and people were trying to adapt any way they could. In a matter of days, most people were already reduced to near primitive conditions, camping beside their homes or in their vehicles.
April got out of the car and walked around to the front of the hood. It didn’t make sense that it would go dead now when it was running fine so far. From the way it sputtered and stopped, her best guess was that it was simply out of gas. With a non-working fuel gauge, she had no way of knowing how much was in the tank when she’d left, and getting more in New Orleans was out of the question. She pulled the latch and raised the heavy hood; it’s rusty hinges squeaking loudly in the silence that hung over the deserted highway. She could hear the ticking sound of hot metal from the engine as she removed the wing nut holding the breather cover to check the carburetor. She sniffed for gas fumes but didn’t smell any. The car was almost certainly out of gas and she had to get more, but how? She screwed the breather cover back on and slammed the hood in frustration.
All these stranded cars around her probably had fuel in their tanks, but how would she get it out? There had to be a way to siphon or drain some, but she didn’t even have a container to pour it in to refill her tank even if she could figure out how to get some out. She looked in the direction of the lone house across the road, wondering if she could get some help from the people there. She was almost afraid to go over and ask, but just as she looked that way, she saw that she wouldn’t have to.
Three men had suddenly appeared from around back and it was clear they had seen her. They were already striding across the lawn in her direction at a brisk pace. April stood by the car and waited. As they got closer, she began to wish they hadn’t seen her. She had been around a lot of rough people in the various places she’d lived, and she was usually able to stay cool in such situations, but the looks of these three didn’t inspire trust, nor did they look like they belonged at a rural house this far from the city.
Just from the way they walked she could tell they had an attitude that didn’t match the fear and confusion of most people she’d encountered since the lights went out. These three had the look of predators zeroing in on their next meal, but April knew better than to show fear and give them even more confidence. She stood her ground as they stepped up to the shoulder of the road from the grass. Now that they were just a few yards away, she could see that two of them were barely older than her—maybe just out of their teens but likely not over twenty-one or twenty-two. The one leading the way, though, looked like he could be forty or older. They all had the hard, tanned look of men who worked construction or some other kind of outdoor labor, but the leader, with his scarred face and tattoos of skulls and Rebel flags all over his arms, looked like someone who enjoyed fighting for his after-work recreation. He was the first to speak:
“Da-aaamm! What have we got here? Is that what I think it is? Is that a genuine 1969 Mustang Fastback?” The older man whistled as he took in the car. Clearly it was the kind of ride that had turned him on even before the blackout—before old relics like this were the only cars that would still run. “I told y’all it was a Ford V-8. I could hear it coming a mile away,” he said, glancing over his shoulder at his companions.
“That’s all right,” one of the younger men agreed, but his gaze had passed over the antique car and was fixed on April. He took her in from head to toe, not caring at all that his appraisal of her body was obvious. The third one was staring, too. It was like they hadn’t seen a female in a long time, even though the blackout had just happened earlier that week.
The older one turned his attention from the car back to April. “Where’d a teenaged girl barely old enough to drive get a car like this? Your daddy buy it for you, sweetheart?” He grinned as he walked to the driver’s side of the car and opened the door and slid behind the wheel. April was still standing in front of the car by the hood.
“It’s my fiancé’s car. I think it’s just out of gas. It was running fine until now, but the gas gauge doesn’t work, so I didn’t know how much I had until it ran out. I was going to walk up to your house over there and see if someone could help me. If you don’t have gas, there’s probably some in these other cars. I just need to get a few gallons so I can get to Hattiesburg.”
“What’s your hurry to go up there? If this Mustang belongs to your fiancé, then where the hell is he? Don’t he know it’s dangerous for a pretty girl like you to be driving around out here all alone? Ain’t many cars that’ll run at all after what happened, and there’s a lot of people that would like to have a car like this about right now. Besides, you fill up with gas here; you’ll just run out again somewhere else. Don’t you know the situation is the same everywhere? It ain’t gonna be no different in Hattiesburg.”
April was about to explain the real reason she had to get to Hattiesburg, but then she thought better of it. These men were unlikely to be sympathetic to her situation, and the best she could hope for now was that they would leave her alone and give her a chance to figure out how to get more gas herself. But she already knew that wasn’t going to happen. The older man seemed to have taken possession of David’s Mustang as if it were his own. He pumped the accelerator and turned the ignition key, grinding the starter as April had done, with the same result.
“Yep, I think you’re sittin’ on empty all right. But that ain’t nothin’ to worry about. Like you said, we can get some gas out of one of these cars. But there ain’t no hurry, ’cause time don’t mean nothin’ no more anyway. You oughta hang around and party with us for awhile. You might forget all about that fiancé of yours that let you set out on the road like this by yourself without any gas. What’s your name anyway, sweetheart? I’m Reggie, and that’s my nephew, T.J.,” the man said, nodding at the one who had stared at her first. “And that’s his buddy, Danny,” he indicated the other man, who had not yet spoken. “They ain’t much older than you, and I’ll bet they’d be glad to have a girl around to talk to.”
“Hey, T.J., why don’t y’all show her over to the house while I see if I can get some gas in this car and get it off the road?”
April said nothing, but glanced over her shoulders as the man was talking, trying not to be obvious, but looking at her options for an escape route. The situation didn’t look good. Even if she could outrun them, which she doubted, if she lost the car, her chances of getting to Hattiesburg would be slim. It would take days to walk there, even from here, and that was assuming she had plenty to eat and the strength to do it. She was determined not to give up the car without a fight.
The older man was still sitting in the driver’s seat of the Mustang, looking at the details, running his hand over the upholstery. “You just don’t know how much I always wanted one of these back when I was a kid your age. Say, where’d you learn to drive a stick anyway? I didn’t think anybody under thirty even knew what one was these days.”
“Girls like her know a lot more’n you give ’em credit for, Uncle Reggie,” the one he’d called T.J. said. “I’ll bet that ain’t all she’s good at.”
April backed up against the hood of the car as T.J. stepped toward her, keeping her right hand behind her, out of his sight as she waited for him to close the distance. If she was going to do anything to stop them, she had to act now and act decisively before T.J. or all three got their hands on her. Their intentions were clear, and if they were this bold right out here on the open road in the broad daylight, they obviously knew there was no one else around to intervene. If they got her inside the house, all bets were off and she wouldn’t have a chance. She was determined to fight for all she was worth to make sure that didn’t happen. The rules had changed, and April knew that if she was going to survive, she couldn’t play by the old ones.
She waited until T.J. grabbed her by the left upper arm and pulled her in close to him. He reached for her hair with his other hand, so sure of his ability to drag her to the house with little resistance that he was oblivious of her right hand, with which s
he was reaching for something in the back pocket of her jeans. April felt the familiar textured grip of her Spyderco, and when her fingers closed around it, it was out of her pocket in an instant, the four-inch blade snapped to the open position with a flick of her thumb. T.J. was so preoccupied with thinking about what he was going to do to her that he didn’t realize what was happening until it was too late.
April twisted her body beneath him and brought her knife hand up between his arms and straight to his unprotected throat, where the short blade could do the most damage with the least amount of effort. When she felt the serrated edge meet soft flesh, she sliced as hard and deep as she could, almost losing her grip with the force of the effort. The effect was immediate. The man staggered back and clutched at his wound, trying to stem the fountain of blood spurting between his fingers while his brain was still able to process the shock of what had just happened. April quickly stepped back and around to the passenger’s side of the car, putting more distance between herself and his companion, who was momentarily paralyzed with disbelief. But then the other one screamed “T.J.!” as he watched his friend collapse to the ground and then turned to her with fury in his eyes.
“STAY BACK!” April shouted, holding the bloody knife in front of her as she backed toward the rear of the car to gain more distance before he could rush her. “I’ll cut you, too, if you don’t leave me alone!” He hesitated for a moment, unsure what to do, as he was unarmed and clearly shocked by what she’d done to his friend, but then she heard the car door slam as the older man got out.
“Get her, Danny! Don’t let her get away!”
April turned and ran as the younger man rushed her. She had enough of a head start to sprint past the rear of the car before he could get around to the passenger’s side, but the older man was right behind her, chasing her down the highway. He was much faster than she had imagined. He caught up with her before she had covered thirty paces, and grabbed her by the hair as he overtook her. She tried to slash at him with the knife, but he yanked her off balance before she could connect, causing her to drop her weapon as she fell hard onto the gravel shoulder. She rolled and twisted to get out of his reach. Her fingers closed around a handful of the small rocks that she was determined to hurl in his face as a last resort. She saw him bend over to pick up the knife she’d dropped, and it was clear that he intended to do to her exactly what she had done to T.J. But then something really strange happened. . . .
Darkness After Series (Prequel): Enter the Darkness Page 10
