Survival of The Fittest | Book 2 | Shallow Graves

by Fawkes, K. M.

  I stared through the glass while he worked, watching for the person I’d heard, half of me expecting to see a real live zombie ambling toward us. But I still hadn’t seen anything when I heard the lock slide into place again, and I whirled away from the mall the moment Will was on his feet again and took a step toward the parking lot—before my more rational mind took control once more.

  Because there might not have been bodies in the mall, and we might have been able to spend the last twelve hours or so away from all the death, but that was about to change.

  And that wasn’t all. For all we knew, that parking lot held something even more dangerous than a crazy person who had been isolated for a week.

  I stuck my hand out and stopped Will before he could go any further toward the parking lot.

  “Wait. Let’s at least try to figure out whether Sally, Bruce, and Jameson are out there before we go sprinting right into the middle of a gunfight,” I said quietly, my eyes on the parking lot.

  Will blew out a quick breath, his green eyes narrowing.

  “Good plan. I didn’t even think of that. God, you’d think this was my first time doing anything dangerous.”

  “Don’t beat yourself up,” I said, giving him a wolfish grin. “It probably is your first time having someone hunt you down like an animal. I’m guessing you’re usually on the other side of the equation.”

  He gave me an extremely sarcastic look.

  “Let’s just see if we can see anything, shall we?”

  We both crouched down and stared out into the parking lot of death. There were just as many cars out this door as there had been through the one we came in at, and I could see that there were quite a number of bodies out there, as well. I didn’t look too long at those. Instead, I let my eyes glance off of them, skimming quickly over them and noting their presence, but not stopping to observe their faces—or anything else.

  I’d seen enough of that to last me a lifetime. And to be honest, it was all starting to look the same. All starting to look disturbingly familiar. Like a horror movie I’d already seen thirteen times and was watching again because it was the only thing on in the middle of the might.

  I wasn’t sure whether I should be relieved about that… or disturbed.

  What I didn’t see, though, was any live human being out there. There was no one sneaking from car to car, no one pointing a gun in our direction. No telltale glint of the reddest hair I’d ever seen.

  Every human out there was dead. And that was good enough for me.

  “I think it’s safe,” I told Will. “At least for now. Let’s go.”

  We jumped to our feet in synch and sprinted out onto the blacktop, our packs bouncing on our backs as we raced for the closest car—and the best cover. Once we got there, we dropped to our knees and froze, waiting to see if anyone was going to react to our sudden emergence from the mall.

  But there was nothing out here. Only corpses.

  “Everyone out here still looks dead,” I said quietly. “What do you think?”

  When I looked at him, though, I was surprised to see that his eyes weren’t on the parking lot. Instead, they were directed back toward the mall. I followed his gaze and realized that he was looking at the motorcycle parking spaces up front.

  The spots held one huge Harley and a tinier motorbike, both of them just sitting there, waiting for their owners to return.

  “Bikes,” Will breathed gleefully.

  “Um, what?” I asked, completely confused.

  He turned his eyes quickly to me, his face caught between elation and relief.

  “We need a vehicle,” he said quickly. “If we’re going to get out of here quickly, we need to be on wheels rather than on foot. And hotwiring bikes… well, it seemed like a natural transition from lockpicking—plus it gave me a way to get something that seemed really, really cool when I was fifteen. Something my mom would never have let me have in real life. I’ve been stealing them since I was a kid.”

  He was up and running before I could ask him any of the obvious questions—like how the hell we were supposed to find any shelter on a bike, and why he couldn’t hotwire a car instead—and I dashed after him, hating that I hadn’t thought of the fact that we needed a vehicle—and sort of loving the fact that he had.

  I had to admit, I hadn’t trusted him at first, and I still didn’t know whether I did or not—I mean, I was carrying rat poison in my bag that I hadn’t told him about, which I guessed meant that he hadn’t totally earned my trust yet—but he was awfully handy to have around in a dangerous situation.

  He also wasn’t bad to look at. Like, at all. Though I shoved that thought right into the farthest corner of my mind.

  I wasn’t in this for the romance. I didn’t want some end-of-the-world relationship born under the worst of circumstances. I just wanted to live. And if he could help me do that, then I didn’t care how hot he might be.

  I only cared about how useful he was.

  And once we got to the bikes, he proved himself incredibly useful once again. He dropped down next to the Harley, muttering something about how it would be bigger and give us more space.

  “Isn’t it slower than the other one, though?” I asked.

  He gave me a look that I assumed was intended to be withering.

  “A Harley can reach 110,” he said. “And they’re going to be on foot. I don’t know about you, but I think the Harley is going to win that contest every time.”

  Right. Well, I never said I was a motor head.

  “I guess it’ll at least mean I’m not having to sit in your lap,” I noted.

  I caught the grin on Will’s face just before he ducked down over the bike, found the ignition switch, and yanked off the casing around it. He used one of his lockpicking tools to pry the ignition itself out of the housing, and then let it drape casually down the side of the bike. A few quick snips, some stripping of wires, and then some rapid twisting, and the bike roared to life, sounding like a boat on land.

  I jumped back, surprised at how quickly it had all happened.

  “So now it just runs whenever we want it to?” I asked, surprised.

  Was that really all there was to it?

  Were all vehicles that easy to steal?

  He shrugged.

  “I’ll have to work the wires again every time we want to do it, but basically, yeah. I’m lucky this was an older model. If it had one of the newer ignitions, it would have required the key, which would have a sort of magnetic chip that triggers something inside of it to get it to start. As it is, all we need is to cross the right wires.”

  “Works for me,” I told him. “Let’s go.”

  He mounted the bike and I got on behind him, trying very hard not to notice how muscular his back was as I held onto it. He turned and secured his bag in one of the side compartments of the bike, and I did the same on the other side.

  Then, I wrapped my arms around his waist, he revved the engine, and we went tearing through the parking lot toward the freeway.

  Chapter 20

  As we ripped onto the highway and turned south, dodging between the cars and motorcycles parked on what had once been a fast-moving road, I left the driving to Will and did what I could do in the meantime.

  I kept my eye on the countryside around us, looking for any sign of life. And when I wasn’t doing that, I kept my eye on the road behind us, looking for any sign of someone chasing us.

  All signs pointed to us having left the mall before Sally, Bruce, and Jameson had arrived—if they were going to, which I was still betting they would do. We might have had a head start, but we’d also come to the most obvious place possible, and I was betting that Sally was smart enough to figure that part out. But we hadn’t seen them in that parking lot, and we’d definitely been there for long enough to have spotted any movement.

  So unless they’d managed to hide that entire time and chosen not to attack us while we were distracted, then also hotwired a vehicle themselves, I didn’t think there would be
any pursuit on their part.

  The chances of them knowing how to hotwire a car were slim, at best. They might be criminals, but they weren’t the highest echelon of criminals. They were, from what I could tell, common thieves. And hotwiring wasn’t exactly a common skill. It had been a fluke that Will knew how to do it, honestly. We’d been damn lucky to find a vehicle so quickly.

  I just didn’t see Sally and her men having that sort of skill, or that sort of luck.

  That didn’t mean I was going to stop watching the road behind us, though. I figured that at this point, the road ahead of us was Will’s problem. The road behind us was mine. That, and the land around us. Because I wanted to see whether there were any other signs of life out there.

  I wanted to see if other humans had started banding together and trying to survive.

  It was what I’d thought when I'd first ventured back into Ashland, and I still believed it. When something bad happened, like some insane cult deciding to attack the world with a biochemical weapon to bring on doomsday, the best chance any humans had was to band together and fight it out as a team. Combine their skills, combine their brains, and work together to figure out how to survive.

  It was one of the reasons I hadn’t understood what the hell Sally and her people were doing, shooting at anything that moved. It turned out Sally had ulterior motives, though—namely to strip the town of anything they could use. They weren’t looking to help other humans survive. They were looking to help themselves survive.

  I wasn’t so selfish. I wanted those other humans, though I never in a million years would have guessed it in the Before, when I hadn’t really liked people all that much. Now that most people were gone, though, I realized that I actually needed them. I actually wanted a group of us working together to bring back a society full of humans, so I could go back to hating them.

  So, I kept my eyes on the horizon, looking for them.

  When I spotted the first bonfire, glowing against the darkness, I almost shouted in glee. I pointed quickly toward it, almost throwing the balance of the bike off, and shouted to Will.

  “Fire!” I said, right into his ear. “People!”

  “God, are you trying to deafen me?” he grumbled over his shoulder, his eyes on where I was pointing. “You think that’s going to make me agree with you more often or something?”

  I pinched him in the waist for that.

  “I’m trying to point out the first actual sign I’ve seen of life!” I shouted, my voice rising up above the wind.

  He paused at that, and I knew exactly what he was thinking. The same thing I’d been thinking: that there were people there, and that we might find safety with them. We might find allies.

  “They might also be enemies,” he finally shouted. “They’re out in the middle of nowhere, rather than heading for the city like us. What do you think that says about them?”

  I pressed my lips together. That was a very good point. If they were people who were fighting to get civilization back on track, and had a large city so close to them—relatively speaking—it would have made sense for them to be heading in that direction, rather than camping in the wilderness.

  Yes, they could just be camping for the night. Waiting until day arrived so they could set off again. But if they weren’t… camping in the wilderness could mean avoiding the cities and their laws. It could mean people who didn’t want to rejoin civilization at all. Out here in the wild, there was no telling what those people might be like. We might find more thugs like the ones we were currently running from. And we didn’t have time for that sort of mistake. We also weren’t exactly armed for taking on a large group of people.

  We needed to get to a city, where they (hopefully) still had some form of law. Some form of structure.

  “So, we keep heading for Somersville,” I said, decision made.

  “We keep heading for Somersville,” Will agreed, turning his head back to the road ahead of us.

  “And we’re going to pass by a few towns between here and there. The smaller ones. The ones no one might be thinking about. Towhee. Mason. If we want to search for life, I say we do it there. It also comes with the added benefit that Sally won’t expect us to go to such small places,” I added.

  He nodded his agreement, and I tightened my grip around his waist, taking just a moment to press my cheek against his back and collect myself. I’d been so excited to see signs of human life again—so excited to know for sure that others had actually survived—that it had gotten right into my blood and built a fire of hope.

  Putting that fire out again was more than a little bit painful.

  But Will was right. We needed cities. We needed structure, both metaphorically and literally. We needed people who were trying follow the law, to bring civilization back.

  I lifted my head and turned my eyes back to the land around us, letting myself enjoy for a moment the irony of a lockpicking thief and a professional hacker intentionally seeking out the law.

  Chapter 21

  When we pulled over to get a snack and recover from the wind battering us, Will gave me a serious, considering look.

  “What?” I asked, feeling my face to check if I had something on it. I glanced down at my shirt, and then checked my hands as well. Had we run right through a group of bugs or something?

  But there was nothing on my face. Or on my shirt.

  So what the hell was he staring at?

  “What?” I asked again, when he didn’t answer me the first time.

  “How well do you know this area?” he asked, in what seemed to be a question that didn’t have anything to do with anything.

  I narrowed my eyes, immediately suspicious—and remembering that I didn’t actually know him that well—and decided to play it cool. Yes, we might be allies. For now. That didn’t mean I was going to trust him with everything about my life. And I definitely didn’t want him thinking that he could do something like kill me and dump me out here—or that I wasn’t going to come in handy for the rest of the journey, which might lead him to thinking that killing me and dumping me was the right thing to do.

  No, I wasn’t scared of him. It was just that he was a whole lot bigger than me. Knowing that he could overpower me if he wanted to was just rational thinking.

  “Well enough,” I said slowly. “I didn’t spend my entire life here. But I was in Ashland for quite a while before this whole thing happened. I know my way around the county, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  He gave me an abrupt nod like that had been exactly what he was asking, threw the wrapper from his candy bar back into the bag with our supplies, and leaned forward, elbows resting on his knees and his eyes sparking with excitement—or intensity, depending, I supposed, on what his big idea was.

  “You probably know it better than me,” he said hurriedly. “I mean, I was here for a while. Long enough to know that there are other towns around here. But I wasn’t here for like, years or anything.”

  “Riiiiight,” I said, drawing the word out. “And your point is…?”

  “My point is, I know it well enough to know that there are other towns between us and Somersville. Smaller towns, yeah. Maybe not towns that the people of Ashland would have driven to for work or anything like that. But—”

  “But towns that are closer to our current location. And towns where we might find people,” I finished for him. “Towns where we might find help. Like I mentioned earlier.”

  There were other, smaller communities between here and there. And smaller communities were still communities. Maybe they’d been better prepared. Maybe they hadn’t been hit as hard—and maybe their police departments were still whole and working.

  Best of all, we could actually hit those communities on our way to Somersville. Yes, Mason, at least, would take us about fifty miles out of the way. But if it meant that we found help earlier, then it was well worth the detour.

  And going so far out of our way might also put Sally and the others off our tracks. They’d probably be
expecting us to head straight for Somersville. Hell, it was what I’d expect anyone to do—and that was where I’d go if I was following someone who was running from me and they suddenly disappeared.

  I probably wouldn’t even bother with Towhee or Mason, the two other small towns in the area.

  Which made those smaller towns the perfect place to go first.

  “Well then, let’s get to it,” I said, getting to my feet.

  I shoved the food we hadn’t eaten back into the bag and pushed it back into the saddlebag on the bike, and by the time I was done, Will was already in his place and twisting the wires again to start up the bike.

  Moments later, we were back on the road and heading for the side road that would take us to Towhee. The town wasn’t far from here, and wasn’t that far off the highway.

  Which meant that within half an hour or so, we might find people. We might find civilization. We might find help. The very thought had my heart racing and a smile stretching my lips. I’d never had much use for people in the past. Never really even liked them.

  These days, the idea of seeing a group of them sounded freaking amazing.

  We reached Towhee a lot faster than I anticipated, thanks partially to the fact that there were fewer cars on the road to this town, and partially to the fact that Will seemed to be trying to beat some record for speed. When we got into town, I actually had to force my elbows to unbend from the grip I’d had on his waist, my fingers to unclench themselves.

  And my face felt like I’d just been through the most intense exfoliation experience of my life.

  I made a note to at least put a bandana or something over my face before we set off again, and then made another note to figure out how to drive the motorcycle myself.

  And then I saw the town around us, and my entire heart sank right into my shoes.

  The place looked exactly like Ashland had, only in miniature. It was a smaller town, so there was only one main street, with several others breaking off and heading in different directions. The main street held all the most important things, though: the bank, the grocery store, the dry cleaners, the hair salon. I knew from having been here before that the side streets held the less important shops and led to the neighborhoods and the outlying farms. There was also an elementary school around here somewhere, though if memory served, the kids had traveled back to Ashland or to Somersville for high school.