“Bullshit! There are some fates worse than death. Being forced to live on in this shit while everything you love withers and dies around you is one of them.”
“Don’t start with that. You wouldn’t let me carry on like this, you don’t get to either; we fight until we can’t. Your brother is one of the most tough-as-nails gunslingers I’ve ever met. We don’t mourn till we’ve got to. Get up and let’s go.”
“And do what? Go where?”
That’s a great question and I don’t have an answer. “Where would Ruiz go?”
Katia stands and shrugs. “Why are you asking me? You act like we’re psychically connected.”
Clouds are starting to move across the surface of the sun. Maybe my ears are playing tricks on me, but I swear I can hear the hunger pangs of the Rabid echoing up from the corpse-clogged alleyways of downtown Dallas. “Maybe we should do our thinking on the road, from the safety of the Humvee.”
She has her hips cocked, her hands resting on the hilts of her swords, just staring at me. “Lead the way, Tim!” She flares her eyes.
“Ladies first.”
She huffs and stomps past me.
4
We’re out of the city. Driving northeast. We’re not navigating any map; Katia is just following the signs, taking us up I-30 towards Arkansas. The road has narrowed down to two lanes on either side. Instead of towering buildings, we’re surrounded by open fields, which are occasionally supplemented by patches of civilization: gas stations, Baptist churches, and roadside BBQ joints. Everything appears drawn in on itself, like it’s all been violated and cursed, dark secrets resting behind open doors and broken windows. Scenery that may have once aroused feelings of welcome and a certain childlike inquisitiveness are now wicked tableaus screaming, All is lost, turn back, ye who would enter here.
As the minutes tick by, the sun sinks lower over the horizon. Eventually, we will have to stop, draw our weapons, and once more tempt fate in the name of refuge. The farther we get from the city, the thinner our options will become. Stores and churches and restaurants will become rest stops and forest. But we’ve got an ocean to cross and the only way to cross it is to venture out of the shallow water and hope a shark doesn’t bite our ass before we get to the other side.
There is a silver lining.
The Rabid population has thinned out considerably beyond the borders of Dallas. We still have to move slow and steady, navigating frequent wrecks and other obstacles, but we’re able to do so without some gray-skinned, milky-eyed monster pounding at the glass every second.
“Okay, so you gotta think, where would Ruiz go?” I grab hold of the rubber handle above my head as Katia jumps off the shoulder to avoid an overturned four-by-four.
“I am thinking.” She jerks hard left, putting us back on the road.
“Think harder.”
“I hate that phrase. It’s stupid. Makes no sense. Think harder. Like, what the hell? There’s thinking and there’s not. I don’t have some switch in my head to unlock special thinking abilities.” She stomps the brakes hard to avoid careening into the back of a Prius; I’m saved from the dashboard by my seatbelt.
“You alright back there, Sonny?” I check the slack on my seatbelt and give Katia an irritated sideways glance.
“No harm, no foul.”
We pass yet another sign letting us know we’re headed towards Arkansas. It’s crooked and bullet-riddled, but the bold, white letters still read clear.
“Y’all ever been to Arkansas?”
Katia doesn’t answer.
Sonny leans forward between the seats. “I went to Arizona once.”
“Yeah, not quite the same thing.”
“You been there?” Sonny goes on, unabated.
“To Arizona?”
“No, Arkansas.”
I nod. “Yeah, once, for family vacation. Went to Hot Springs. We were going to see my dad’s family in Little Rock, so we just made a thing out of it.”
“How was it?”
“Kind of awful, really. Hot Springs had some cool stuff. There was this tower on top of a mountain that was pretty neat. But I wouldn’t really call it a mountain. It was more like a big-ass hill with a tourist trap on top. Lots of bathhouses and spas. I remember they had this really bad Italian restaurant with the worst crab cakes. But the bed and breakfast we stayed at was great, little old lady that ran it had this black cat that Bethany and me would play with every morning while my folks slept in. That’s probably my fondest memory of the whole trip; my sis and I and the cat.”
“Huh.” Sonny rubs his teeth together as he stares straight ahead through the windshield.
I shrug. “Who knows, maybe the apocalypse gave it a facelift.” Hot Springs wasn’t much, but I’m convinced that every journey is bearable if you’ve got someone you love to share it with. With that thought in mind, I look to Katia. “Okay, so maybe Ruiz got out of there with the USB drive. Maybe he’s gonna try to get online. That’s what Bytes was trying to do.”
She remains stone-faced, both hands clenching the wheel. “Yeah, that’s what he was trying to do.” She wets her lips and keeps talking. “That’s not much to go on, Tim. That’s so thin…it’s anorexic. What if he didn’t get out of there with the drive? Or…”
What if he didn’t get out of there, she doesn’t have to say it.
“Yeah, it’s thin, but it gives us a needle to go with our haystack. It can’t hurt to follow the thread. We just need to find somewhere to get online.”
“Not following you,” Katia says before sending an overturned car spinning off the side of the road with the nose of the Humvee.
“Ruiz said that when they put the USB drive online, it will pipe out across the globe. Remember, I was against the idea?”
“Oh, I remember, trust me.”
“Then shouldn’t we be able to trace that signal back, see where it’s coming from?”
“That’s some hacker stuff, Tim. You a hacker now?”
“I mean…it doesn’t hurt to try, right? What else do we got?”
She snorts and gives a wicked little laugh before hammering the gas pedal again.
“Until you come up with something better, you probably shouldn’t throw stones.”
“I had something better, but you insisted we sit on our hands because you’re scared of the dark.”
“Bullshit, Katia!” I point a finger in her face. “Don’t take your frustration out on me, that ain’t fair! Your judgment is clouded and you’re saying stuff you don’t mean!”
She smashes the brake and throws the gearshift into park. “You’ve got three seconds to get your finger out of my face.” Her jaw is clenched. The words hiss through her teeth. “One…two…”
I drop my finger slowly, not wanting to give her the impression that she’s instilled any sort of fear in me.
A thick and uncomfortable silence fills the cabin of the Humvee. Sonny clears his throat and begins whistling; one look from Katia in the rearview quiets him. We’re enclosed, on all sides, by destruction. The two-door sedan to my right is burned black; the two front seats are nothing more than springs and wires. There’s a horse trailer in front of us missing a tire, sitting off balance, the backdoors thrown wide open, the pale skeleton of some deceased beast hanging halfway in the road. The wind blows hard across the silent battlefield, stirring clouds of ash. Flocks of birds soar out of the patch of trees to my right, calling out to one another, taking no notice of our plight as they fly overhead and shit on our windshield.
Katia pops the balloon. “Listen…I’m just tired and I feel like we’re flying blind. I hate it. I’m used to having some idea to go on, some plan, but there’s nothing. Ruiz could be a thousand miles from here and we wouldn’t know it.”
Sonny slides between the seats, head turned sideways, looking up at Katia. “You know, maybe we could take some engine grease and leave messages for Ruiz every couple of miles, let him know what direction we’re going in, just in case he happens to come through here.”
Katia sighs, closes her eyes, and drops her forehead against the steering wheel. “Sonny, do me a favor, just…don’t talk. Sit back there and keep your eyes up. You see a gun pointed at us or a Rabid coming our way, holler. But if you get any more ideas, feel free to keep them to yourself.”
I feel bad for Sonny as he slinks away. But he’s a big boy, he can handle his feelings. Besides, Katia’s an emotional powder keg at the moment and the fuse is still sparkling. I’ve got to keep it non-confrontational if I’m going to stamp it out. “I know you don’t like it, but we can only do what we can do. Way I see it, we can turn circles out here and bang our heads together trying to figure out which way is up, or we can just keep driving and keep surviving until we come across something we can use; be it an internet uplink, tire tracks, or smoke signals. That’s all we got.”
“A shot in the dark.”
“It is what it is.”
“I suppose so.” She lifts her head, shifts it into drive, and begins trying to navigate the wreckage. “Whether we find Ruiz or not, promise me we see this through to the end? Promise me we find some way to make all this stuff right?”
“I promise.”
She lifts her eyes to the rearview.
Sonny stutters to life. “Yuh—yuh…yeah…yeah, I’m with y’all, to the end.”
The sun is setting when we finally enter Arkansas. Nothing changes as we cross the state line. The conga line of death and destruction continues. In some twisted way, I guess the apocalypse has united us.
5
We are approaching total darkness and have yet to pin down shelter for the night. The interstate was nothing but rest stops and forest. We need something more secluded, something out of the way, so we take to the farm roads. An hour passes before we find a potential winner.
We pull the Humvee up to an iron gate. It’s chained and padlocked. Beyond the gate, sitting at the end of a winding gravel driveway, is a small, white house in the middle of a big field, its exterior dimly lit by rogue bands of fading sunlight. The field is encircled by a sturdy fence made up of wooden posts and wrapped in thin wire, woven together in a grid shape; too small for cattle hooves to get tangled up in.
“Probably raised cattle in here, maybe alpacas.” I am propped against the grill of the Humvee, warming my back.
“What’s an alpaca?” Katia wiggles the gate. There’s some give. We could each squeeze through individually, but that would mean leaving the Humvee behind and hauling all of our gear up the driveway—not an inviting proposition. Besides, we don’t know what’s up there. If we’ve gotta make a quick getaway, I’d rather it not be on foot.
“They look like a llama, kind of. They’re really fluffy. People take them as seriously as they take their cows; groom them, take them to shows, there’s even an alpaca owners association.”
“You sure as hell know a lot about alpacas.”
“I grew up in Georgia; breed it, shave it, eat it, that’s our state motto.”
“I can’t wait to visit, truly.”
“I remember there was this infomercial that played when I was a kid about buying into the alpaca market; promised that you’d strike it rich by breeding and selling alpaca fur.” I kick off the front of the Humvee and walk a few feet down the fence line, looking for any obvious structural compromises. “I always wanted one.”
“And did you?”
“Hmm?”
“Did you get one?”
“Nah, I told you, we had chickens.”
“Oh yeah, that’s right.” Katia holds up the padlock in one hand. “You wanna just shoot the damn thing?”
I shrug. “May as well. Better than standing out here for the next hour fiddling with it.”
“Could just drive through it.” Sonny is standing up in the back of the Humvee, the top half of his body rising out of the roof.
“Too much noise,” I respond. “We don’t know who’s up there. We could be dealing with a school of Rabid or some wild-eyed prepper with a small arsenal at his back; best to go in quiet.”
“You’ve learned well, Two-Step.”
“You and your brother may have taught me a thing or two.”
Katia stands back while I shoulder the M4 and take my shot. The suppressor dampens most of the sound, but not all of it. There’s still a sharp crack that pierces the night and causes me to pause for a moment to listen for the gurgling of Rabid.
“Let’s do this.” Katia swings up into the driver seat as I peel the gate back.
I get in beside her, winding my window down and keeping the M4 clutched close to my chest. “Slow and easy.”
“Yep.”
Katia taps the gas and we waddle up the driveway. I go with the movement of the vehicle, wobbling back and forth as the gravel shifts beneath the tires, my eyes glued on what’s in front of me. The high-beams are on, cutting wide swaths across the property, revealing snippets of life before the apocalypse: an old fashion black Chevy with spotless whitewall tires, a hammock strung between two lone trees, a child’s bicycle with the training wheels still attached.
“Looks more like a typical red, white, and blue family and less like a wild-eyed prepper,” Katia says.
“Who says you can’t be both?”
“Guess we’re about to find out. Best case scenario, no one’s home.” Katia parks a few feet back from the Chevy and jumps down. She draws her swords and spins them once in her hands. She cracks her neck and rolls her shoulders, like an athlete getting ready to take the field.
I pile out with Sonny at my back. I don’t feel the need for any theatrics. My trigger finger, the only muscle that counts, is plenty warm.
Katia falls in behind me and makes Sonny cover the rear.
We move towards the front porch, a square of old wood, held together by rusty nails. It’s about the size of my old porch, just in worse shape. I keep my eyes on the front door. Anything could emerge: a desperate survivor, a hungry Rabid, a hailstorm of bullets. I clench my teeth as the bottom step squeals beneath me. Not a damn thing I can do about it.
“Shit,” Katia whispers. She taps me on the shoulder and slinks onto the porch ahead of me. She slides up beside the door and glues her back to the wall. She waves me down and I take a knee, my aim steady.
Sonny crouches on the first step, panting, fighting his nerves.
Katia sheathes a sword and reaches for the doorknob; it gives a little, but it’s locked. She looks at me, holds up an invisible gun, and pulls an invisible trigger while dipping her head towards the knob.
Really? I mouth.
She nods rapidly.
I don’t know,I mouth again.
“Shoot the damn thing!” she snaps.
“Sonny, you got the door covered?” I mumble over my shoulder.
“Yep.”
I pull the trigger. The wood around the knob explodes, and the brass ball of metal falls away and thuds against the hard surface.
Katia back kicks the door open.
I flinch at the noise and begin to wonder if she’s forgotten the meaning of slow and easy.
The foyer is now dimly lit by the fading light streaming in from behind us, but the further reaches of the house remain cloaked in black.
“Sonny, stay on me.”
This time, Katia takes up the rear guard.
The smell hits me as soon as I enter.
Death.
Thick, putrid death.
“Bodies,” I say.
“Not worried about the bodies, worried about what killed them. Everyone stay close.” I envy the rock-like confidence in Katia’s voice.
In the living room,the smell gets stronger, but there are no bodies present—at least not that I can see. Sonny and me hold things down while Katia begins throwing back curtains. There’s a couch and a recliner, a coffee table, and a small television with a pair of rabbit ears on top. There are toys on the floor and pictures sitting on shelves. This place belonged to a family of three, judging by the pictures. The mom and dad were probably somewhere in the
ir forties and their spawn was somewhere around ten, assuming the pictures are current.
“Smell is strong over here.” Katia is standing behind the couch by a sliding door.
Me and Sonny stack up behind her.
“Pull it, we’ll cover.”
She takes a deep breath and gives it a yank.
The smell hits us like a freight train and we all recoil.
Sonny gags and doubles over.
Katia muffles a cough.
“Just don’t breathe through your noses.” I take a step into the room and stop, giving my eyes time to adjust. “If there was Rabid, I think they’d have jumped us by now.”
“Still, be careful.” Katia’s breath is warm against the back of my shoulder.
I can see the outline of the bed and the outline of two bodies resting atop the mattress. “I think I found the culprits. Someone wanna open the blinds?”
“Those fuckers twitch and you better shoot the shit out of them.” Katia edges around the bed to the two windows on the far side of the room, a sword tip pointed towards the bodies.
“I’ve got it.” My sights are set on the small space between the two figures.
Katia pulls back the curtains and the tale of what occurred here slowly reveals itself, horrifying detail by horrifying detail. It’s the mother and father…well, it’s definitely the father; I’m just assuming it’s the mother because her face isn’t exactly intact. It’s been blown off by the giant, silver revolver in the father’s right hand; her brains are plastered on the wall, framing the hole where the bullet came to nest after taking the light out of her eyes. The father’s end was a bit tidier. He looks to have stuck the barrel in his mouth. He’s missing a couple of teeth and the top of his skull is embedded in the headboard like grenade shrapnel, but at least I can still recognize his face.
Katia swings her swords around and sheaths them as she approaches the bed. “Looks like a murder-suicide.”
“Maybe she couldn’t pull the trigger and asked him to do it.”
“Either way, they’re about as dead as it gets.” Katia leans over the bodies. “She is tore up.”
The Rabid: Fall Page 2
