Five Roads To Texas: A Phalanx Press Collaboration

by Lundy, W. J.

  “That’s…” Sidney stopped and set the phone down. “That’s a ton of shit packed into a short article.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “It means we’re fucked,” she yelled. All the frustration of the past few weeks, the trip, and now this; it was too much. “We’re, what, six, maybe seven hours into this trip? We have less than a quarter tank of gas left, there’s no place that we know of to sleep for the night, there’s no way to replenish our food or water supply, our destination just got extended by another fifteen hundred miles… Let’s see, how many other ways do you want me to say we’re fucked? Oh, I know!” her voice cracked. “Like the fact that I’m fucking pregnant and nowhere near a doctor so I can get a goddamned abortion. How’s that for fucked, Lincoln?”

  “I—I didn’t know you were pregnant,” he stammered.

  “Of course you didn’t. You just kept getting your fucking dick wet and went on having a grand old time while I was struggling with this bullshit.”

  “What? You’re saying it’s mine? It’s only been four weeks.”

  “Of course it’s yours, asshole. That’s how shit works. You cum inside my vagina three or four times a day, it’s gonna end up growing a fucking baby in there.”

  He was silent for a moment before saying, “You never said anything.”

  “Would it have made a bit of damned difference? You’d have just doted over me like some idiot boy who doesn’t understand anything about what a woman can do. I don’t need your sympathy or your assistance. I don’t need a goddamned thing except a doctor.”

  He leaned back against the car door. “I don’t know where this is all coming from, Sidney. I thought things were great between us. I mean, the pregnancy is an unwanted surprise, but—”

  “Pfsh. You think?”

  Suddenly, the car seemed too small, too close for comfort. The air was stifling, and Sidney had to get out, to get some fresh air, or else she’d throw up. Her fingers brushed weakly at the handle. Bile began leaping into her throat, making her mouth taste bitter. Then, the telltale drool began, unbidden.

  “Are you okay?” Lincoln asked.

  “Sick,” she managed to say, then threw the door wide and vomited onto the pavement.

  Behind her, she heard Lincoln say something, but she couldn’t make out what he’d said. Her blood pounded through her ears and they felt stuffed up like she had a cold. He got out of the car, yelling something. She turned her head to see him running around the car, so she sat up.

  That’s when the car door was yanked violently away from her hand.

  She recoiled in horror as an infected man came around the side of the door. His face was a bloodied mask of missing flesh and exposed bone. By his clothing, she assumed he’d been a hunter, what with the camouflage pants and shirt he wore. He made wheezing sounds instead of the screaming she’d seen in the people in DC. It reminded her of the lady who’d stayed near Lincoln’s house.

  Sidney instinctively lifted her left leg out of the car, placing her boot against the man’s chest, and pushed. His fingers raked across the pants she wore, digging so hard into her legs that she knew she’d be bruised, even through the fabric.

  “Ahh!” she screamed, pushing harder against him as her hands fumbled for any type of weapon in the console. There was nothing.

  Then Lincoln joined the fray. He wrapped his arms around the man’s waist and jerked him backward, lifting him off his feet and around.

  The infected scratched at his arms tearing deep, jagged lines into Lincoln’s forearms. He quickly switched his hold on the man into a full-nelson, his hands pressing the hunter’s head down toward his chest. It kicked and let out ragged screeches while reaching back to try to grab Lincoln.

  Sidney twisted around to look at the passenger seat where Lincoln had been playing with his knife. She saw it sitting uselessly on the floorboard. She grabbed it with shaking fingers and opened the piteously small blade.

  “Hold it,” she hissed.

  “I’m trying,” Lincoln replied through clenched teeth.

  Sidney stabbed the creature—for that is what it truly was at this point—in the stomach, her arm thrusting in and out several times. It had no effect on the thing’s movement.

  “Head,” Lincoln panted. He was tiring. If that thing got loose, they were done for.

  She turned the knife over and jabbed it straight down into the infected’s forehead. The blade turned on its skull, sliding down over the creature’s eyebrow and then down along the cheek.

  “I…” She was confused. The zombie television show she watched religiously every week featured hundreds of kills with a simple knife through the skull. Why hadn’t it worked? Was there some technique she didn’t understand?

  “Eye! Get…the eye,” Lincoln demanded.

  The creature’s jaws rattled open and closed, snapping together with a horrible clicking sound as it alternatively tried to reach Lincoln with its hands and bite at her with its mouth.

  Sidney stepped closer and tried to stab its eye quickly, but it turned away, trying to twist its lower jaw enough that it could grab a chunk of her approaching hand. The blade skidded along the cheekbone and gashed a piece out of what remained of the infected’s ear.

  “Dammit! Hold still, you fucker,” she ordered, pulling her arm away quickly.

  “Hurry,” Lincoln begged.

  She chose to go in slowly, to ensure that her aim was true. The tip of blade penetrated the thing’s eyeball and she shuddered in revulsion. A milky, jelly-like substance oozed out along the length of the blade. It’s the only way, she told herself and shoved hard.

  The little blade went all the way to the handle before the creature stopped struggling against Lincoln’s grasp.

  She pulled her hand away, flipping her wrist to fling away the gore that had gotten on her. Lincoln dropped the body heavily to the pavement and lurched sideways.

  “Did you… Did you get bit?” Sidney asked him.

  He looked over his hands and arms, wincing at the ragged scrapes where the creature’s fingernails had clawed at him. “No. No, I didn’t get bitten. You?”

  “No. I’m okay.” She glanced past Lincoln to the tree line where the infected man must have come from, wondering how many more of them were hidden by the trees. Too many, she told herself.

  Aloud, she said, “We need to get going. That thing may have some friends nearby.”

  “Yeah. Yeah, you’re right,” Lincoln agreed, visibly shaken by the ordeal.

  “Linc, I’m—I’m sorry I acted like such a bitch to you. I… I didn’t mean that stuff I said.”

  “It’s okay,” he replied. “You’ve got a whole hell of a lot on your mind, things I didn’t even know about.”

  She wanted to get in the car and drive, just keep on going forever, but she knew that she had responsibilities. Lincoln wasn’t a complete idiot like she’d said, but he wouldn’t be any good at planning their route from where they were, just south of Blacksburg, Virginia, to make it out to El Paso. Somehow, they had to find fuel and avoid more of the creatures. But first, she needed to clean his wounds so they didn’t get infected.

  “Here, let me look at your arms,” she ordered, turning back to the car and grabbing one of the first aid kits from the top of her bag. They’d both ended up getting one on the day they went shopping. Hers was quite a bit more extensive than the one he’d picked up at the grocery store, but every bandage and package of gauze was important.

  “Shouldn’t we get going?” he protested.

  “Sure, in a minute. We have time to clean those scratches real quick. I don’t need you getting sick on me.”

  Lincoln inhaled sharply when she poured a small stream of hydrogen peroxide on the lacerations. They bubbled ferociously, telling her that the wounds were dirty. There was no telling how much crud had been under that guy’s fingernails. She dumped half a bottle of water on his forearms to wash away the antiseptic, then she repeated the process two more times until the hydrogen peroxide barely
bubbled on the third application. Next, she wrapped a wide strip of gauze around each of his arms and secured it with surgical tape.

  “All done,” Sidney announced, surveying her handiwork. It looked worse than one of those toilet paper wedding gowns that she’d been forced to make for friends at a few bridal showers over the years, but she figured it’d get the job done and keep the wounds clean.

  “Thanks.”

  “No sweat,” she replied. “Let’s get in the car and get going. We’ll figure out where we’re going in a few miles.”

  “How are we on gas?”

  She looked at him incredulously. I just told this stupid motherfucker how much gas we have, she swore to herself. A quick, deep breath, and then she said, “We’re down to a little less than a quarter of a tank. This car sips gas slowly, but unless we find an open gas station, we aren’t going to make it more than a couple of hours.”

  “Okay, so are we totally skipping Atlanta and just heading to El Paso?” he asked, walking around the back of the car to the passenger seat.

  “Yeah. That article made it seem clear that Atlanta was pretty much overran. I don’t want to try to deal with that.”

  “Westward, ho!” he said loudly, pointing down the road they were already on.

  Sidney grinned in spite of the stupidity of shouting in an area where they’d already encountered one of the infected. The guy was a goofball, and not incredibly book smart, and he had a few annoying habits, but all of that could be overlooked. Lincoln had a great sense of humor, he was extremely loyal, and he genuinely seemed to want to help, even when he was clueless as to what to do.

  She smiled at her reflection in the rearview mirror before putting the car in drive. He’d risked his life to save hers. He didn’t even hesitate to put himself in harm’s way, and she was genuinely appreciative of it—of him. All the faults that she’d heaped upon him over the past month fell away, and her heart skipped a little inside her chest. Out of all the labels she’d put on him, the most important one was that he was her guy.

  52

  Kilgore, Texas

  April 22nd

  The Toyota’s old wipers did little to clear away the massive amount of water pounding against the windshield as Sidney raced down I-20. She was having a hard time seeing the road and was afraid she’d wreck. She knew that she needed to slow down, but she didn’t want to.

  She glanced at the empty passenger seat and the tears began anew, further hindering her ability to see in the torrential downpour. She was exhausted and had been driving for almost twenty-two hours, but she wanted to put more distance between her and what happened back there.

  “God dammit!” she yelled, pounding on the steering wheel with the palm of her hand. Rick James mewled piteously from his carrier in the back seat.

  They’d been traveling westward, about an hour east of Meridian, Mississippi, when Lincoln finally succumbed to the raging fever he’d developed overnight. At first, they didn’t know what it was, why he’d gotten such a high fever, but a search of the Internet gave them plenty of first-hand accounts of interactions with the infected. Apparently, all it took for the virus or whatever—they still didn’t know—to spread was blood or saliva contact with broken skin. The hunter must have had infected blood on his hands when he scraped his fingernails across Lincoln’s skin.

  They’d stopped at a gas station they found that was still open and only charging twenty dollars a gallon. They were filling up when he first started to feel ill. He went to the restroom and said he got sick and felt much better afterward, and then the fever began within an hour. It spiked so high that she thought he was actually burning up, not just some overused figure of speech. Of course, she didn’t have a way to check his fever; a thermometer hadn’t been on her list of supplies.

  As the fever raged, Lincoln had drifted in and out of consciousness, raving incoherently at times while talking rationally at others. Finally, after four or five hours of the fever, he fell asleep and didn’t feel as blindingly hot as he had before.

  When Sidney pulled into a large fuel center on the west side of Monroe, Louisiana, her travel companion moaned pitifully, so she didn’t want to wake him. Instead, she filled the tank and went inside, past the small, private militia guarding the place, to get a coffee and use the restroom.

  When she returned, the car rocked violently on its axles, and she could see Lincoln trying to reach her cat in the back seat. Thankfully, the seatbelt restrained him. She’d opened the door, intent on scolding him for scaring Rick James. That’s when Lincoln—or, more disturbingly, not Lincoln—whipped his head around and lunged toward her.

  Once again, the seatbelt proved to be too much for him, and he fell, half in and half out of the car. She screamed and a man wearing a greasy baseball cap ran over from the men standing guard at the station’s entrance. Lincoln thrashed, screaming his hatred for the both of them as he reached above his head in an attempt to grab them.

  The man didn’t hesitate. Stepping close to the car, he pulled a pistol from his belt and pressed it against the side of Lincoln’s head, pushing downward. Then he squeezed the trigger, splattering the pavement with gore. Her lover’s body slumped sideways limply as an impossible amount of blood poured from the exit wound.

  He’d seen plenty of their kind back home in Alabama before taking to the road with his family for the quarantine zone, the man told her. When their fuel ran out, he took the job here, hoping to earn enough to pay for gas all the way to El Paso. After giving her his quick life story while Lincoln’s heart continued to pump blood out of his head, the man put on a pair of gloves and reached across the corpse, unbuckling the seatbelt. Lincoln fell unceremoniously to the ground beside the car. The redneck examined the inside quickly and told her that she was lucky none of the creature’s blood had gotten in the driver’s seat, so she’d be able to keep using the car. He wished her good luck before strolling casually back to his post, as if murdering someone was an everyday occurrence.

  It wasn’t really murder, she chastised herself, wiping tears and snot away on the sleeve of her sweater. Lincoln was gone before that man put a gun to his head.

  Sidney had stared in shock at the body for a full minute. She stood there dumbly, trying to determine what to do. She couldn’t bury him, she didn’t have a shovel or even a blanket to cover him up with. She’d called over to the redneck, asking if he could help her drag Lincoln’s corpse to the dumpster, and he agreed. They each grabbed a foot and pulled him through the parking lot, leaving a smeared trail of infected blood in their wake. When they got behind the building, the man said he wasn’t about to pick the body up and risk getting the blood on him, so they settled on placing him beside the dumpster. In a final act of defiling Lincoln’s body, Sidney rifled through his pockets, taking his wallet and putting it in her front pocket.

  She sobbed, thinking about the poor man whom she’d treated like shit for the past few weeks, even if they had made up earlier in the day. He’d done nothing wrong to her, and she’d been an incredible bitch, declaring that she would abort his unborn child the moment she made it back to civilization.

  Who does that? she asked herself. Who threatens someone with something like that? I’m a terrible person for saying that to him.

  The tears flowed uncontrollably, and she was forced to slow the car or risk wrecking it. The rain and the tears were too much for her tortured soul and exhausted body. Lights on the horizon told her she was coming up on a hotel, so she wiped her eyes and willed the car to make it to the parking lot.

  When she arrived, she weaved through several big shipping containers where platoons of soldiers stood guard, ready to kill anything not human. Apparently, the hotel was a sanctioned rest area for refugees traveling to El Paso.

  Inside the perimeter, she saw that the building was a standard roadside motel, the kind with the doors on the outside of the building. She frowned. They usually weren’t the cleanest places since people who used them weren’t required to walk by a front desk each a
nd every time they went to their car. These types of places were known to be frequented by prostitutes, drug dealers, and murderers.

  “Great,” Sidney muttered, wishing for a different option. A quick scan of the surrounding area showed nothing nearby and absolutely nothing else with a military presence, so she pulled up under an overhang to the front entrance and parked the car. She grabbed the cat carrier and dragged a hissing Rick James out of the back seat. If things went to hell, she didn’t want to leave her poor kitty stranded.

  A man met her at the glass doors with a double-barreled shotgun pointed at her midsection. “You bit?” he asked with a Southern drawl.

  “No, sir,” Sidney replied dutifully. This wasn’t the first time she’d had to answer that question since being on the road—although it was the first having a gun pointed at her instead of simply being nearby.

  “Pull up your sleeves,” he ordered.

  “No, I’m not—”

  “Then you ain’t stayin’ in my hotel, and you can get your ass outside that perimeter.”

  “Ugh,” she replied, pulling up her sleeves one arm at a time. “There, you satisfied?”

  He twitched the gun toward her legs. “Now the ankles. Let me make sure you ain’t bit down there too.”

  She complied with that request as well. “You ask me to show you any more skin and you’re gonna have to start slipping bills into my underwear.”