Five Roads To Texas: A Phalanx Press Collaboration

by Lundy, W. J.

  He pulled the pistol out of the box, loaded the magazine, inserted it, and racked the slide.

  Jack put the pistol in his waistband and pulled his jacket on, zipping it just enough to cover the gun. He walked out to the hall and stood in front of the elevators for a minute, debating about the safety of the power supply versus the prospect of walking down twenty-nine flights of stairs. He decided on the elevator, climbed aboard, and pressed the L button.

  As the car descended toward the lobby, Jack’s stomach tensed up, almost bringing him to his knees. He worried about what he was going to find when the doors opened in a few seconds, and suddenly, seven bullets in a gun he’d never shot didn’t seem like enough protection. He touched the handle of the pistol, wondering for the first time if it even worked.

  It chambered a round well enough. Nothing you can do about it now but trust it, he consoled himself.

  He felt his knees protest as the car slowed down on approach to the lobby. It settled and stopped, and a second later the doors slid open. Jack drew the gun and held it ready as he peeked out of the elevator. There was no one in sight.

  He crept out of the car and turned right, heading toward the West Lobby. The overhead lights were off, with just the accent lights around the periphery providing illumination in the waning daylight. The big plasma TV mounted high on the wall behind the security desk was tuned to Fox Business, but Shepard Smith was on the screen instead of the usual financial wonks. According to the closed captions, he was warning everyone the video they were getting ready to show contained graphic violence and appeared to be authentic. Viewer discretion was advised.

  The screen cut to the video that Jack had watched earlier.

  He scanned the lobby but saw no sign of security or any other people from the building. He guessed that everyone had already fled, leaving to get home before things got bad.

  As if on cue, something slammed into the glass panel next to the revolving entry door. Jack jumped and fumbled with the .45 in his waistband, finally drawing it, and getting it aimed in the general direction of the noise. Over his shaking hands, he saw a bloody-faced woman watching him through the glass. He took a couple of steps to the side, and she reacted by running headfirst into the glass again. She left a splat of blood running down the pane where she impacted. This time she wobbled on her feet and fell over backward, landing hard on her backside and hitting the back of her head on the concrete. Jack watched as she tried to get to her feet and failed, flopping on her side. She pulled her knees under her, and weaved her way into an upright stance, with a hard list to the left. She wandered off, limping, seemingly having forgotten about trying to get into the building.

  Jack watched her stagger away until she disappeared around the side of the next building, and then he renewed his focus on getting to the parking garage. It was only one block over and one block down. On a typical day, it would be a five-minute walk, but this was no typical day. He decided to take Court Place over to Fifteenth Street, then Fifteenth to Tremont. He felt like Court usually had fewer people on it, so maybe it would tonight as well. His other option was to go down the Sixteenth Street Mall to Tremont, and the mall was always packed with people.

  You’re wasting time, overthinking this thing. Get moving and get to Sarah, he scolded himself. He took a deep breath, pushed through the revolving door, and stepped into the plaza between the twin twenty-nine-story buildings.

  The first thing to strike him was the smell. Smoke mostly, but underneath it, a mélange of odors. The coppery scent of blood, the tang of gunpowder, a whiff of pepper spray. The haze floating through the downtown area was thick enough that it left an acrid taste in his mouth. He spit, trying to clear it away, and started walking to the corner.

  He looked westward down the length of the pedestrian mall. He was right—it was packed with people, but most of them were in some state of distress. Dozens of people were busily attacking hundreds of others. He checked the other compass points, up and down Court Place and up Sixteenth Street to the east. The situations were similar, but with far fewer people.

  He heard something pounding on the glass to his right. Inside the restaurant that only served pasta-based dishes, several people beckoned him to join them inside. He waved them off and set out across the street.

  He made it to the opposite sidewalk, partway past the Irish pub where he usually ate lunch, before one of the crazed people noticed him. The man screamed and ran at Jack. He drew the .45, lined up the sights, and squeezed the trigger. The gun required more pull than his .40 at home did, and when it fired he’d pulled too hard. The shot went wide right, shattering a car window.

  Heads popped up all over the area. More crazies were now alerted to Jack’s presence.

  At least we know it works, he thought.

  Now that he knew how hard he needed to pull the trigger, he shot again, hitting the man in the chest. He tumbled to the street, blood spilling out of the wound. He kept crawling, trying to get to Jack, but it was clear he was losing his strength.

  The twenty other crazies now running his way were not running out of strength, however. Jack turned and began running toward Fifteenth Street, hoping he could stay ahead of the crowd. As he ran, he passed more crazies, who seemed surprised by his passing, but quickly joined the pursuit. By the time he neared Fifteenth Street, more than fifty people were chasing him. As he angled to make the turn to the west, he saw a massive green garbage truck approaching from the east. The driver honked, causing the crazies to look his way. He slowed down, and waved at Jack, telling him to get across the street. Jack sped up a little.

  The diesel engine rumbled, and as the stream of crazed people got to the street, the truck mowed through them, sending them tumbling, or crushing them under the massive wheels. As he passed Jack, the driver honked again.

  A quick glance over his shoulder told him that he only had about a dozen lunatics after him now, and they were farther back than before. The truck had taken out the leading eighty percent of the horde.

  The truck driver was keeping his speed to about twenty miles per hour, steadily pulling away from Jack. He honked every fifteen seconds or so, and crazies from all directions began running after him. Jack realized that, except for the ones following him, the rest of the people would think he was chasing the truck just like they were.

  Assuming they DO think, old boy. The thought rattled in his head, distracting him for a moment from the burning in his lungs.

  He was running so hard he almost passed the entrance to the parking garage. He braked hard, but his dress shoes provided less than ideal traction, and his right foot slid out from under him. He teetered for a second, but he kept his balance. He made the turn into the garage entrance and ran past the empty toll booth. A few of the people chasing him went straight, following the still-honking garbage truck, but enough of them turned into the garage to be a problem. He thought about the woman who’d run headfirst into the glass back at the office building.

  Good thing they’re not so hot with doors, he thought.

  He passed the elevator, dismissing it because it would take too long to open, and would keep opening every time a crazy stuck an arm or leg between the doors. No, the stairs would be the way to go.

  He found the stairwell entrance, just past the elevator, and pulled on the door handle. It wouldn’t budge.

  “Shit!” he said aloud, still pulling on the door. Footsteps behind told him he was running out of time.

  He turned around and raised the gun, firing quickly. The first crazy’s face disappeared in a spray of blood. The man fell to the concrete, and the next three tripped on the body. The rest trampled them en route to Jack.

  He fired again, this time missing them altogether—or, at least, there were no visible signs of damage. He fired again, hitting a woman in the shoulder. She kept coming. His next two shots were similarly ineffective, and the slide locked back, the magazine empty. The man in the lead launched into him.

  Jack turned at the last second and flippe
d the pistol around in his hand, using it as a hammer, beating on the man’s head. It was marginally effective, for it stunned the man, and he fell backward into the others. He pushed at Jack as he fell, knocking him into the wall next to the door. He felt something poke him in the ribs and heard a click.

  He glanced down and saw that a green light had come on in a plastic casing. It was an electronic badge reader. Jack remembered he had Gil’s wallet in his jacket pocket.

  Of course! Gil’s access card unlocked the door. Get moving!

  Spurred on by his internal dialog, he pulled on the door handle, and this time the door opened. He slipped through as the remaining horde recovered their balance and charged, but they only impacted with the door, forcing it to shut. They pounded it at, trying to break through, but it didn’t budge. Jack leaned over, putting his hands on his knees, and threw up.

  He felt light-headed, so he kept his hands on his knees and focused on his breathing, taking deep breaths and exhaling quickly. After a minute he felt better, and though he hadn’t completely recovered from his run, he felt good enough to climb the stairs to the second floor of the garage. When he reached the door, he pushed it open a crack but pulled it shut when he heard an all too familiar growl on the other side. More crazies.

  Jack kept climbing the stairs, spiraling his way up, floor after floor, until he reached the tenth level. He cracked the door open and waited a few seconds. He didn’t see or hear any signs of life, so he pushed his way through the doorway. Straight ahead, he saw Gil’s Mercedes. Jack glanced up, and over the rooftops, he could see the penthouse offices of his company, the lights still on. So close, but so very, very far.

  He climbed in the SUV and pressed the start button. The engine rumbled to life.

  “Okay, Gil,” he said out loud. “You may be an annoying, humorless ass, but this is a seriously nice car.”

  He put it in gear and pulled forward, winding down the ramps and attracting a few crazies along the way. One slammed into the side of the vehicle, startling Jack, but he kept his focus on the narrow path to the exit. At the first floor, he glanced back and saw the crowd that’d been chasing him still pounding away at the door.

  There must have been a transponder in the car, because as he approached the booth at the exit, the black-and-yellow arm lifted on its own, and Jack pulled out on to Tremont and turned right. He was a little disappointed about the gate. This may have been his only chance to blast through one of those things.

  Oh well, he thought. Maybe you’ll get to run over some people. There’s always that.

  He chuckled at his macabre joke as he approached the intersection where Tremont met Thirteenth Street and Colfax Avenue in a three-way clusterfuck of traffic. Tonight was no different, except the cars were all abandoned. He avoided the whole mess, using the SUV’s ground clearance to hop the curb. Dodging around the trees that lined the storefronts on the corner, Jack made his way onto westbound Colfax.

  He was on his way to Sarah.

  21

  Longmont, Colorado

  March 27th

  Sarah checked her watch again. She’d gotten to the fairgrounds in just under twenty minutes. It was an eternity for the normally short cross-town trip, but she’d made it without major incident. A car ran the light at County Line Road, and as it wove around the traffic, it barely clipped the front of the Axiom, but there wasn’t any significant damage. Besides, there was no way she was going to stop and exchange information, not with the lunatics from the new hospital running around attacking people. She almost hit one of them when she made the turn onto Highway 119.

  In any case, she made it to the rendezvous spot unharmed, with the vehicle and trailer intact, and she’d been sitting here for another twenty minutes. She had her hand on her phone the second after she put the Axiom in park and got the All circuits are busy message for the one hundredth time. It’d been an hour and fifteen minutes since she talked to Jack, and she was getting worried.

  “Oh, shit!” she said aloud and grabbed her phone again, unlocking it with her thumb, then started flipping through several pages of apps. She’d never cleaned out the ones that she didn’t use, even though she’d thought about it several times. She reached the last page, sighed, and started working her way back.

  There! She spotted it on the next page and tapped the icon. The “Find Friends” app opened, and after a few seconds, filled in the map with a blue dot—her location—in the middle of the empty lot on the south side of the county fairgrounds. Under the map was a circle with Jack’s picture in it, and underneath that, it said, “Locating…”

  What the? It said Jack was in the same parking lot.

  She looked around and didn’t see anyone, and then a man got out of a big, boxy SUV that she somehow missed when it pulled into the lot. She didn’t know how long it’d been there, but the man was walking her way. He drew a little nearer, and…

  “Jack!” she screamed and threw the door open. She tried hopping out before she undid her seatbelt. She growled in frustration and pressed the release to break free from the vehicle. She ran at Jack; never in her life had she been as glad as she was now to see her husband.

  As she reached out to throw her arms around him, he put his arms straight out and stepped backward, keeping her at arm’s length.

  “Jack, what’s wrong?”

  “I think I’m infected, Sarah.”

  “What? No way. You can’t be.”

  “I can. Gil was infected, and when I…well, when I took care of him, some of his blood got on me. In a wound. I’ve been listening to the radio on the way up here, and that’s how it spreads. Bodily fluids. Blood. Saliva.”

  “Yeah, but that doesn’t mean you’re infected, right? I mean…”

  “We can’t take any chances. I bandaged everything as best as I can, but I don’t want to risk infecting you.”

  “So, what are you saying? What do we do now?”

  “We go to Dad’s cabin like we talked about, only we do it in two cars. I’ll lead the way in Gil’s beast, and you follow in the Axiom. By this time tomorrow, we’ll know whether I have this…whatever it is, or not.”

  “And what if you do, Jack? How are we going to get you help if we’re at your dad’s cabin?”

  “Haven’t you been listening to the news? There is no help. If you’re infected, you go crazy.”

  “Yeah, but they don’t know everything about it. I mean, people with fevers get crazy too. They don’t know enough about this to know it can’t be treated.”

  “Let’s just get up there and take what comes next when it comes, okay? The longer we stay down here, the worse it’s going to get, and more likely we both get infected.”

  Sarah looked over at Gil’s Mercedes. The wraparound push bar bumper was bent on the driver’s side. The passenger side mirror was broken off, and the hood and passenger side of the car was streaked with what looked like blood.

  “You had to kill Gil?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Jack said. He could see her wince when he confirmed it. “It was him or me. You have no idea what it he was like.”

  “I’ve seen more videos. It just seems too surreal. How was it getting out of Denver?”

  “It was rough, at first. It took a while to get to the interstate, and that was bad for a while too, but I got into the HOV lanes, and it was a little better. I will say this about Gil; he picked a helluva vehicle. This thing has a lot of power, and it’s tough. I had to move some cars out of my way, and this did it no problem. Plus, it’s insanely quick. I don’t think the Axiom would have gotten me out of there.”

  “Well, if he infected you, giving you his car is the least he could do.”

  He smiled at her. He was about to tell her he loved her, but screams from the parking lot of the strip mall across the street interrupted his thoughts.

  “Let’s get going,” he said. “I’ll lead, but you should hang back a bit in case I have to smash through something. We don’t need you rear-ending me.”

  “Okay.
Be careful.”

  Sarah suddenly remembered the bag with his gun in it.

  “Oh! Hey, hold on a minute!” she called out. She ran to the Axiom and retrieved his gun, duty belt, extra magazines, and extra ammo.

  More people were shouting across the street. Sarah looked toward the shops, her hand on the butt of her pistol, while Jack put his on. He racked the slide to load the .40-caliber and put the extra magazines in the carrier attached to his belt.

  “Thanks,” he said. “Okay, now let’s get going.”

  They climbed into their respective SUVs, and Sarah waited as Jack turned the Mercedes around. Then she hit the gas and followed him out of the parking lot, making a right on Nelson Road, headed west toward the mountains. She glanced to her right as they passed the strip mall. At the corner was a block of shops—a pizza joint, a cell phone store, a Chinese restaurant—with several people crowded around a fight. One man had someone on the ground and was savagely tearing at them. Sarah saw blood flying through the air as his arms flailed at the body on the ground. The crowd was giving the assailant a wide berth. A man in a cowboy hat ran over with a baseball bat and swung on the run, connecting with the assailant’s head. Sarah fought back vomit as the head rocked back at an impossible angle, blood spraying all over a half dozen of the bystanders.

  She turned her attention back to the road, lest she crash into something and end this escape. Her thoughts returned to what Jack had told her about bodily fluids being the vector for transmission. If it was bodily fluids, then it wasn’t an airborne virus like the one that caused the flu. Maybe it was like the virus that caused hepatitis, which could live for weeks outside the body but also had to be transmitted by blood. Or it could be a bacterium, like the one that caused tuberculosis, or a parasite, like the one that caused malaria. Whatever it was, she wondered how many of those bystanders were just infected.

  She frowned as she followed the road west, Jack’s taillights a few hundred feet ahead of her.