The Red X_Complete Edition

by Robert P. Sullivan

  When I had about an eighth of a tank left, I knew there was only two options, head back to the blocked and clogged highway and make the trek out of Ashville on foot. Or, risk running out of gas surrounded by zombies looking for a way out. It was a hard choice to make, but I had to ditch the car. I tried to think of any other way that I could maybe get gas, but every idea I had, was either terrible, or so risky, I would probably mess it up bad enough that I’d get myself killed.

  I drove back to the highway and lured as many of the zombies away from where I was going to be getting out by driving around the block a couple of times. It wasn’t hard to lure them, I laid on the horn, but the tires were a loud enough sound to get their attention. When the time came, I just about cried when I had to get out of the safety of the car. I was terrified of having to face those walking nightmares again. But I remembered that hesitating is what got the group of zombies pinning me in the garage. I knew that if that same thing happened out here, on foot, it meant death.

  I opened the door and stepped out onto the road. I looked back at my home town one last time. Memories of my favorite restaurants, hang out spots, friends, and family flooded my mind. I started to tear up, but I knew that I couldn’t afford an emotional breakdown out here. So, I turned my back on it. I was walking away from almost everything I had ever known, because it was the only way I thought I might survive.”

  Barry looked at Jake and said “That’s pretty rough for a fifteen year old to handle.”

  Jake smiled and gave a quick retort “If I had known what I was gonna go through later, I would have thought that was the easy part.”

  To which Barry gave a look that asked what he was thinking, “What happened to you?”

  “Anyway…” said Jake returning to his story.

  Chapter 6

  “I started to walk down the highway. At first it was a huge cluster of cars that were abandoned. I remember walking past a good few of them trying to get my head straight when an arm reached out and grabbed me.

  There was a zombie in one of the cars that had its window opened just enough to get its arms out but not enough for its head to fit through. When it gave me a good yank, I let out a scream. It was not my proudest moment, and doing so got the attention of a few more zombies nearby. I ripped my arm from its grasp and took a look around. There were a few of the bastards, heading my way from where I was trying to go. Your heart races the first couple times you have to deal with them.” Jake said before leaning towards Barry and asking “You ever seen one up close?”

  Barry squinted and gave a quick peek to the ceiling before responding. The question made him uneasy. “I’ve seen zombies in videos, but no I haven’t ever actually seen a real one.”

  Jake gave a nod, half out of understanding the fact that the younger generation had for the most part never seen a zombie, and half knowing that his generation had done a good job seeing to it that it was that way.“Well it’s a bit different then seeing them in real life. When you know something is going to kill you if you don’t move, even if it’s as slow as one of them you start to get worked up.

  So, I knew that there was a small horde back the way I came from, and I had to go forwards. I tightened my grip on the hatchet and got moving. I was more careful this time round though, looking at all the cars and ground before moving. I was able to get about a hundred feet up the traffic jam, when I had to kill one of them to get by. The cars were smashed together, I guess because when they blocked the people off they tried to force their way through. The zombie was coming at me, and was just about to grab on when I swung. But this time I did things a bit differently than back in the garage. I turned the hatchet around so the backside would hit the skull. It made a nasty cracking noise as it hit. But it didn’t stick, and the zombie fell lifeless just as before.

  I was significantly relieved after that moment. I could handle them and not get myself in trouble every time I killed one. My heart was still racing, but it was like how you are after you have a car wreck. You know, how you get all shaky from the adrenaline, but at the same time you are just happy you’re ok. Unlike a car wreck however, I had to keep moving or I would get surrounded.

  It was about a football field length of cars that I had to cross through till I got to the military road block. The roadblock was a few concrete barriers with a chain link fence that lead to the military section of the quarantine zone. I guess they had been checking people for bites, and moving them to safe locations if they weren’t infected, but from the looks of it they had been overrun. The chain link fence had been pushed back, and a section had collapsed under the force of the people pushing against it. Corpses lay on the inside of the fence, while bullet shells covered the ground on the other side. I knew something bad had happened here, because if they wanted to stop zombies they could have just blocked the road with a bus or something. No, those bullets were shot at the people who tried to break through the quarantine.

  After I passed through the fence, I saw the camps they had set up off the side of the road. I looked around hoping maybe there would be a rifle I could use somewhere in the wreckage. When I got to one of the larger tents that had the back of it obscured, I was appalled at what I found. A few bits of corpses were in the room that they were using to inspect people. It had two chutes that they sorted the infected and healthy people through. The healthy chute went out to a holding area. But… the other one, when I walked into it, I found what I saw hard to believe.

  It was a room with a few hazmat suits on the wall, and a drain clogged with rotting blood in the floor. One chair sat in the middle of the room, there was a dead man in that chair, and a bloody hammer on the floor behind him. A table off to the side of the room had what looked to be a few medical instruments on it. This included a number of hypodermic needles, and a bag that was poorly labeled ‘vaccine’. I peeled the fake label off to find it was just a bag of saline; you know salt water. It was an executioner’s room. The government didn’t even give them a chance to be saved. If they were bitten, they calmed you down with a fake bag of ‘vaccine’ so they could kill you without you struggling. They knew that the infected had to be put down to stop them, but killing living people like that… I mean before they turned… It was appalling.”

  Jake paused at this point still looking baffled by what he had seen all those years ago “It wasn’t even like a special medical hammer, just a claw hammer, like from a hardware store.”

  Barry looked at him confounded. “Was the world so different back then that they would even make a special hammer for killing infected people?” he asked Jake.

  “Yeah, it’s something you would kind of expect to have happened back then. It’s true a regular hammer is cheap and effective, but… I don’t know the pre-outbreak days were weird. They had all kinds of special tools that they would make for things. I guess it just surprised me.”

  Jake shook his head and got back to the story. ”I’m getting off topic. After they killed people they dragged their bodies out a hallway in the back of the room, and hosed down the kill zone before the next person came in. I went out through where they took the bodies to. It led to a giant gas powered furnace. It was hooked up to a propane truck that ideally kept it burning long enough to incinerate everyone that got infected, but that didn’t matter when the place got overrun. There were small chunks of people that hadn’t fully burned in the furnace, and there was a pile of ashes off to the side big enough to fill a few semi-trucks. It was nauseating.

  I continued searching for some kind of gun, in the immediate area, but there weren’t any. I know they had guns there at one point, however between the military retreating from the area, and anybody else that went through after that there was nothing worth taking. The propane truck was missing its keys, and there wasn’t a single other useable car on the side of the roadblock where it could have helped me, which meant I had to walk.

  I could see the mountains off in the distance, which gave me hope, but there was something I didn’t think about at the time.
When you drive a car you can travel in one hour, farther than you can walk in two days… And that is if you don’t have to worry about getting food and water, or zombies eating your ass. After I had walked about ten miles my feet were hurting, and the sun was getting a bit low in the sky. I thought to myself it would be night soon, and that scared the crap of me. Night out there, with the zombies, was going to be like trying to sleep through a bomb going off. The only difference was instead of the noise that scares you being loud, it was every single rustle.

  I actually got lucky the first night out there though. I had to backtrack about a mile to a wrecked car, but the doors were open, and when I got inside I could close and lock them… And to think I only had to pull one dead guy out of the car before I was comfortable inside.”

  Barry snickered a little bit before saying, ”Sorry.”

  “Don’t be. It sucked back then, but time has a strange way of making things funny.” Jake said as he popped his neck. “I actually slept well that night. It was dark and quiet out there, oddly peaceful, although, the next morning was a pretty rude awakening. I stirred, just a little as I heard something bumping on the window. When I opened my eyes, I just about shit myself as the guy I pulled out of the car last night was back on his feet, and trying to eat me. I guess he wasn’t as dead as I thought he was.

  After, moving to the other side of the car, I got out and dealt with him easily enough. I was glad I pulled him out of the car, but mad at myself for not hitting him in the head before I tried to move him. There is no reason you shouldn’t bash a dead persons brains out before dealing with them.” said Jake, with the last part being directed more towards himself, than to Barry. “Anyway, I had to travel north for a good few days before I got the hang of doing it. See, there were plenty of houses out there, they just weren’t on the road. If you walked about one to two hundred feet off the side of the road, you could actually see more of them, than if you were on the road. Those houses, were the gold mines for me, they had all the food and water I needed. Well at least they did for a while. As, I traveled more north, I started coming across houses that had already been striped.

  Someone out there got the idea to spray paint the front door of the houses they raided so they wouldn’t waste time checking the same ones. It was pretty smart of whoever did it, and it even saved me a lot of time after I figured it out.”

  “What did they paint on the doors?” Barry asked.

  “I don’t really rememb…” Jake said before bursting into laughter. ”Oh my gosh! I totally forgot about that. Thanks for reminding me.” Barry just sat there looking confused, before Jake yelled out “Dicks! They drew dicks on the doors. I had to walk into about five of ‘em before I realized penis houses meant they were empty. I was so confused about that too.

  Well, I spent most of my nights in the abandoned houses, as it made keeping yourself safe pretty easy, and the houses out there are almost all on well water, so even a dick house usually meant I could go pump the well manually and get water. The problem was the farther I got north, the more and more houses I found that were marked.

  At first it had me worried, but as it turned out it didn’t matter too much, dried food kept well, even if I found one house in three days that wasn’t raided I could completely restock my food supplies, and when I was only about a day’s walk away from the next town, things were looking up. I tried to settle down in a nice ranch home for the evening. I walked past the spray painted door, and started to do a quick sweep of the house, just to make sure that there were no zombies inside. I walked into the bedroom and got hit on the head hard enough to not remember what exactly happened after that.”

  Chapter 7

  “When I came to there was this pretty little lady pointing a gun in my face. She was probably two years older than me, blonde, but I couldn’t really make out her body because she was wearing an oversized coat. Well, that and the room was pretty dark, except for a small amount of light pouring through the gap in curtains. She was shaking a little bit as she pointed the gun in my face.

  It’s a little bit strange as you get old you start to have trouble remembering what you had for breakfast, but some memories shine so bright in your head, like a beacon from the past. This is one of those memories. If you had a line-up of guns I could point out the revolver she was using. Even mundane things, like how she had salt on her fingertips and the way it glistened in the light.”

  “Why did she have salt on her hands?” Barry asked.

  “I don’t know… from eating chips I guess.” Jake replied, realizing he was starting to stray from his real story. “The point was it’s a vivid memory, but I guess if she was eating, that means she didn’t know I was there until I was in the house. Which… actually explains why she attacked me instead of running out the back. I guess I cornered her.

  The truth is I probably should have been more scared than I was, but she was the first person I had seen in about a month that wasn’t dead and trying to eat me. So when I realized I had found another survivor I got some cheesy grin on my face as she told me “Get up!” She was still shaking a little bit as I got to my feet. She backed up so that I was out of her reach, but I couldn’t help but say something to her.

  “Hi my name is Jake!” I almost screamed at her. I came to realize however, she had taken my bag, and hatchet from me and threw them in the corner of the room.

  “Shut up” she said and walked cautiously over to the window, peeking out of the curtains. “Are you alone?”

  “Yeah, I have been alone since the start of this whole end of the world thing. Please just put the gun down?” I asked her and gestured with my hands, patting downward.

  “Oh yeah?” She said looking out the window “Then who’s your friend out there with an ‘X’ on his back?” she asked.

  At this point I realized her aim had swayed off of me. She was completely focused on whoever was out of the window, and the door behind me was open. If I wanted I could have ran right then, but I didn’t, instead I told her “I don’t know anybody out there. Look, I’ve been alone a long time. You are literally the first person I’ve met, and I don’t want anybody to get hurt.”

  She looked back at me, and the gun fell to her side. She sighed heavily with relief. “You really are alone.” She said pointing over to my bag. “Go ahead and get your stuff.”

  I walked over to my bag and slung it over my shoulder as I said “What about the guy outside?”

  “There’s nobody out there.” She said sitting down on the empty bed and looked relieved, but still wary of my movements. “I had to know you weren’t one of them, so I gave you the chance to run and yell if you were.”

  “I don’t get it.” I told her while rubbing the top of my head where she hit me. It hurt quite a bit.

  “The red ‘X’s!” She said trying to get through to me, but I just looked at her with a confused stare. “Ok, so there is this group of people out there who paint big red ‘X’s on their backs, and they are worse than the zombies. They capture anyone they can, and kill anyone they can’t. I figured if you were one of them, and had the chance to run and alert one of them, you would have. That is, if you were one of them. Since you didn’t I guess you’re telling the truth… But that still doesn’t mean I trust you!”

  “That’s ok, just as long as you don’t shoot me.” I said as I walked out the door that I came in.

  “Where are you going?” she said a little panicked that I left her sight without her expecting it.

  “I’m going to go sit down in the living room. Unless you want me to come in there and get comfy with you on the bed” I joked while I walked down the hall.”

  Barry got a sly look on his face as he bumped Jake with his elbow and asked “So, did you get comfy later on?”

  Jake looked at Barry with a look of disappointment, when he realized Barry was close to the person who he used to be. “No, we never did go back to the bedroom. And, while I didn’t see it because I was on my way back into the living room, I’m sure she r
olled her eyes at me when I made that stupid comment.

  After a moment she followed me into the living room and sat across from me in one of the chairs. I rubbed my head again where she had hit me and asked, “Am I bleeding?”

  “Yeah, sorry about that.” she said, as she mimicked the same rubbing motion on her head. I think that was when she realized that I wasn’t really any different from her, just a teenager in a world that went to shit. She sighed deeply. “Ok… We got off to a bad start… What’s your name?”

  “Jake Grumman.” I replied, and got something to clean the wound “and you?”

  “Clara Douglas… I’m sorry about the head.”

  “Don’t worry about it, I probably would have done the same thing.”

  As for the rest of the day, it was pretty uneventful. She got more comfortable as we talked and shared a meal together. We were both pretty stressed and I remember wanting to just talk to someone, but neither of us wanted to talk about what had happened. Instead of that, we just talked about how our lives used to be, you know movies, our stupid friends, crap like that. For the most part, it was just two stupid teenagers talking for about three hours, but that was the best three hours I had in a month.

  I got tired and went to bed after making sure everything was locked and, double checking that only we were inside. I went into a different room than she did of course. I slept well that night… Perhaps a bit too well.” Jake said, looking at his now empty beer bottle. “Sure you don’t want a beer? ‘cause I’m getting another one.”

  Chapter 8

  “Alright, yeah I’ll take one, but what did you mean too well?” Barry asked, looking from his chair into the kitchen.