Survival of The Fittest | Book 2 | Shallow Graves

by Fawkes, K. M.

  I’m not kidding when I say that this was small town suburbia, right here. It could have been in any Hallmark movie. I’d never been a huge fan of towns this small. They could also be in any horror movie, where there was a cannibal neighbor or something.

  I liked this one even less, now.

  Because there were bodies all over the street, just like there had been in Ashland. And they’d obviously died in the same horrible way the others had. There were men, women, and children all over, only in this town, they looked like they’d actually been in a group, standing in the town square, because they were actually…

  “They’re overlapping,” Will said, his voice choked up, as if he was completing the same sequence of thoughts I’d just had. “What does that mean? Why are there so many of them in one place? Why were they standing so close to each other?”

  “They’re from a small town,” I answered, my voice sounding just as choked and sick as his. “Tighter community. Better planning for when a disaster struck. Easier to plan when you have fewer people, really. I’m guessing this town had some sort of community order that said that if there was a disaster or some sort of emergency, everyone would take shelter in the same place. Probable the town hall.”

  I turned and pointed at the largest building on the square, which was labeled with a big sign indicating that it was indeed Town Hall.

  There were also posters and banners advertising things like a town movie night, the local school’s play, and the farmer’s market. Things that the people of this town had done together in the Before.

  “And I’m guessing they probably heard the reports or got some call that brought them all here,” I finished.

  I looked out over the crowd, imagining them alive and running for the safety of the large building, where their mayor—maybe their police chief—would tell them what they were going to do about this whole thing. Having no idea what was going on, but trusting to their town’s leadership to take care of it for them.

  And then I imagined them not making it. I imagined them being struck down by that creeping, horrible powder in the very air they breathed. I imagined them falling to the ground in spasms and screams.

  “The VXM must have made it here before they got to the building itself,” I whispered. “It caught them out here in the open, and they all… died. Together.”

  I could hear Will swallow noisily at the thought, and I agreed. These weren’t the first victims I’d seen. They probably—scratch that, definitely—wouldn’t be the last. But something about them all having died together made the whole thing so much worse. It was like they’d been about to fight it, but then hadn’t had the time to figure out how.

  “Not like being in the building would have saved them,” I finally said. “Unless that building happened to be airtight. Which I doubt. Either way, we’re not going to find any help here. We’re only going to find more death. Let’s go.”

  I turned and started back for the bike, not waiting for him to answer me. Because I didn’t want to have to look at that mass of bodies on the ground for any longer than I had to. Mentally, I was already moving on to the next town—and hoping we’d find something better there.

  Chapter 22

  The drive to Mason took longer. We had to go a full fifty miles to get there, and it required going back to the main highway, then taking another highway toward Mason, which was a lot further out of our way.

  Will also wasn’t driving as fast anymore. And it wasn’t because there were more cars on the road. It also wasn’t because the highway we were on to get to Mason was rougher, or less well-kept. It was a nicer stretch of road, to be honest, because fewer people drove on it.

  But he was still driving as slow as I thought he possibly could, in terms of keeping the bike upright and still moving forward. And I didn’t blame him for that. We'd initially been pretty sure, or at least hopeful, that we were going to be able to find other living people in these towns.

  Now that we’d failed to do that in Towhee, and seen what had actually become of the people there, I was seriously questioning my ability to think rationally. Why the hell would the people in these towns have escaped what had happened to everyone else? From what I’d seen—on both the TV and in Ashland itself—this stuff had hit every city on the planet. It had certainly hit Ashland hard, and if it had hit Ashland, there was almost no reason for it to have somehow missed the smaller towns around it. They weren’t far enough away to have escaped the flow of air that went over Ashland.

  They weren’t far enough away to have escaped the same horrible death.

  And that was assuming that the cult had spaced out their bombs—which we didn’t even know. For all we knew, they’d sent one package, specially wrapped, to each and every town in the US—if not the world—just to make sure they got all the people out there.

  I cringed at that and put the thought away, because it meant we were going to have a lot more trouble finding civilization than I’d accounted for. And I didn’t have the emotional strength to think about that right now.

  Instead, I turned back to thinking about Will’s pace on the bike. I knew exactly what he was thinking.

  And I didn’t want to see what was ahead of us in Mason any more than he did. But we flew toward it anyhow—both of us thinking, I assumed, that we couldn’t afford to judge the town before we’d seen it. We couldn’t afford to not at least try. Because maybe things were okay, there. Maybe there had been some sort of massive panic room where they’d been able to hide. Maybe there were people—and maybe they could help us.

  I didn’t know Will well, but I knew for myself that I would always wonder what we’d missed in Mason if we didn’t at least try it before we left the area.

  By the time we got there, I’d talked myself around to believing absolutely that things might be different in Mason. It was further away, and if the wind was blowing right and all that jazz, then maybe the cloud of VXM powder hadn’t made it this far. Maybe the people were okay. Maybe they didn’t even know what was happening around them, and we’d be able to go right into town and have some coffee and pie at the diner before we went to the police station and started telling them what we knew.

  Mm, coffee and pie. It had been so long since I’d had real coffee—the rich, steaming kind, with just a dash of sugar—that I found myself drooling at the very thought of it, and hoping even harder that we would find some in Mason.

  Okay, yes, I knew that I was living a pie-in-the-sky fantasy. I knew it. But the idea of it was so sweet that I couldn’t help myself. It had been a long time since I’d felt anything like hope, and allowing it for just those few small moments was…

  It was too tempting to pass up, honestly.

  Of course, when we got to Mason, I had to put all of that away and deal with reality again. A reality that I was very quickly coming to really, really dislike. Because though I’d seen what had happened on TV, and had then seen proof of it in Ashland and Towhee, I’d held back a part of myself, thinking that surely somewhere out there, people had survived. Somewhere out there, I would find help and civilization again. I just had to get to the right place.

  As I surveyed the carnage in Mason, though, I was starting to think I’d been wrong about that.

  “Good Lord,” Will whispered, standing next to me and looking out over a town square that looked eerily similar to the one we’d just come from.

  He reached down and took my hand, and I let him. I needed the live human contact just as much as I thought he probably did. I needed the reminder that there were other live humans out there. People I could count on.

  Because the scene here was much the same as it had been in Towhee, with the dead lying on top of each other in the town square. And there were so many more of them. Mason was a slightly larger town and had a significantly bigger population. Which meant, of course, that there had been more people dying when it came right to the moment of truth.

  I didn’t want to count—and wouldn’t have known what the number meant, even if I h
ad—but I had a feeling that everyone in town was now piled up in that square, their arms and legs tangled together, their heads turned toward each other as if their last thoughts had been to check on the people next to them. Perhaps they’d been asking if the other person was okay. Perhaps they’d been asking for help.

  Whatever they’d been doing, it hadn’t saved them. They must have had the same sort of community plan as Towhee, where they’d all been heading for the same place, where they were supposed to go in case of disaster.

  Unfortunately, the disaster had struck before they could get to safety.

  Only it was actually worse here than it had been in Towhee. Worse than it had been in Ashland. And that was something I’d never thought I’d be able to say—until we got here and saw that there was also a whole lot of blood.

  “Why the hell are they bleeding?” Will whispered.

  “What do you think I am, a doctor?” I shot back. “A biologist? I’m a freaking computer hacker who never bothered to pay all that much attention in school. But I can tell you this much. After a week, bodies shouldn’t be bleeding like that.”

  “But there’s still blood in there, right?”

  “Yeah, but if your heart’s not pumping, it doesn’t go anywhere,” I replied.

  “So if there’s so much fresh blood…”

  I caught sight of one of the bodies closest to us, combined it with what he was saying, and gagged.

  “Someone is cutting into them and letting it out.”

  And the body I was looking at bore the signs of it. The woman had a huge gash in her arm, and what looked like a slice of meat missing.

  Before I could stop myself, my gaze was running down her body and trying to figure out what that could mean. Which meant that I saw three other places where chunks of muscle had been cut out of her. Two from her legs. One from her hip.

  Someone was definitely taking slices out of the people laying in that town square. And it was causing them to bleed, long after their hearts had stopped functioning.

  I gagged again just at having the thought and turned away, unable to look at it anymore.

  I’d thought Towhee was the worst it could get. I’d thought that seeing all of those people piled up and knowing that they’d been trying to run as a community, trying to get to the safe spot, was the worst thing I could see. I’d been so, so wrong.

  Seeing that someone was actually doing something to the bodies of the people who had died was so much worse that my brain could hardly calculate it. Honestly, I could hardly hold onto the thought, it was so unnatural. And I definitely didn’t want to look at it once it was in my head. I wanted to forget that I’d ever had it.

  But I knew I didn’t want to look at those people any longer. I knew I didn’t want to know what was going on in this town. And I damn sure didn’t want to see whoever was still here. Because there was definitely something wrong with them.

  I cast my gaze toward the bike, already starting to think about how long it would take us to get back there, and my feet were starting to move already, my hand reaching out for Will’s, when I saw him.

  There was a guy standing across the street from us, staring at us. And it wouldn’t have taken a rocket scientist to see that there was something very, very wrong with him. Starting with the smear of blood he had across his cheek.

  “Will, we’ve got to go,” I said.

  I grabbed his hand and started walking for the bike, thinking that actually running might set the guy off, whereas walking might just look like… we were clearing out of there. Getting out of his way.

  Leaving him to his meal.

  “Who the hell is that guy?” Will asked tensely, his strides matching mine. “And what the hell is he doing?”

  “I don’t know, and I don’t care,” I answered. “I know that I don’t exactly want to make his acquaintance. And I don’t want a single damn thing to do with the knife he’s carrying.”

  At that moment, the guy in question seemed to realize what we were doing—escaping—and decided to do something about it. Because one moment he was standing across the street, watching us walking toward the bike, and the next he was jumping into action and racing toward us, the knife held up before him and an actual howl coming out of his mouth.

  “Shit!” I shouted. “Go, go, go!”

  Will and I took off, racing for the bike and not even bothering to look behind us. Because I already knew what was back there—and I knew that unless we got to the bike and got it started in time, we were dead meat. Literally.

  “How fast can you get those wires twisted together?” I gasped, my heart pounding away with adrenaline and a very healthy dose of terror.

  “Ten seconds, flat,” Will huffed back. “Twist the wires, press the throttle, and we’re good to go.”

  “I’ll give you five,” I answered. “And don’t worry about starting slowly. Let’s get the hell out of here!”

  We jumped for the bike, Will going for the wires in question while I got myself settled on the back, and within seconds—faster than ten, I was sure, though it felt like about forever—the bike was roaring to life and Will was sliding himself into the seat ahead of me and taking the handlebars.

  I risked a glance behind us, then, and saw that the man was almost on top of us. God, he was fast. How had he covered that much ground that quickly?

  “Go!” I screamed. “We’re out of time!”

  Will hit the gas, fought to control the bike as the tires spun and swerved to the side, and then let go of the break, taking us tearing up the street and toward the freeway—and away from the man who had somehow survived the attack on Mason, and had likely turned into a cannibal.

  Chapter 23

  An hour after we shot out of Mason, horrified, we agreed to take a break. It was nearly the middle of the night, now, and we were both exhausted, as well as frustrated and somewhat depressed.

  We’d also gone off-course to get to that last town. A fifty-mile drive to Somersville that should have taken us an hour had extended into journey of over one hundred miles, and we were having to drive a lot more slowly than we would have liked, courtesy of all the cars and motorcycles littering the freeway. Dodging and weaving had been taking its toll on Will for some time, and it was even more difficult in the darkness.

  “We’d better break for a bit,” I said into his ear, my arms clasped around his middle.

  I had to admit, if only in my own mind, that I was glad he was with me. Even more glad that he was so vitally alive.

  I hadn’t set out to have a partner, and I rarely took them on, because they made you more vulnerable. They gave you someone else to worry about—someone else to protect when you were in a bad situation, trying like hell to protect yourself—and besides that, you could never truly trust them. You never knew whether they’d actually protect you, or if they were only in it for themselves. But now that we were in this together, I was starting to realize that I didn’t think I would have survived it alone.

  “You sure?” he grunted over his shoulder. “I can keep going.”

  “It’s not going to do either of us any good if we die in some fiery motorcycle crash, courtesy of you being too tired to keep your eyes on the road anymore,” I noted wryly. “And I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to be lying on the road, half-dead and knowing that no one is going to come save me.”

  He pulled immediately to the side of the road at that particular observation and reached down to unwind the magical wires that had kept the bike running this entire time.

  “That’s a very good point,” he muttered. “Now that you mention it, I don’t think it’s a bad idea to get some sleep.”

  I glanced at the road behind us, my eyes narrowed as I tried to figure out whether that was safe or not. But there were no other lights out there, and if Sally and her gang had truly been following us, they would have been using headlights on whatever vehicle they’d managed to commandeer at this point. Besides, we were no longer on the road from Ashland to Somersville—wh
ich should have been where they were expecting us to go.

  We were on the road from Mason to Somersville. And that might make all the difference.

  There was also the question of time. If they were following us, they were either so far behind us that it didn’t matter or, at this point, ahead of us thanks to the detour we’d taken. Yes, those were assumptions, and they might not be smart ones, but they made just as much sense as anything else in this newly insane and sideways world.

  “Sleep it is,” I said, crawling off the bike and shaking my legs out. “I also don’t want to go into another city in the dark.”

  Will stared at me for a moment.

  “You think Somersville is going to be more of the same?”

  I returned his dark look.

  “God, I hope not. I don’t think I could stand it. But we can’t really take the chance. If it is that bad, I’d rather at least deal with it in the light. Easier to escape that way. Eat, then sleep, in that order.”

  We unpacked our bags, Will working on getting flashlights ready while I laid out what we had in a form of picnic. It wasn’t much, and it definitely wasn’t gourmet, but it was food. And it wouldn’t require a fire—which I would have been nervous about starting, anyhow.

  We had several boxes of cookies, cans of fruit and veggies—each with a pop top, so we didn’t have to worry about a can opener—and bags of chips and dried fruit. I’d even grabbed a couple of bags of beef jerky, just so we also had protein.