by J. M. Snyder
Ronnie took the rod from her and fitted one end into the hole in the cover. Replacing the nozzle, Court drifted over to watch. It took some doing, but eventually, with Adam’s help, Ronnie managed to raise the cover enough to slide it off to one side. Then he dropped to his knees again and peered into the dark hole in the tarmac.
“Shit,” he cursed softly.
Court bent over, hands on his knees, to have a look. “What?”
“The tank’s way down there,” Ronnie explained. “I think I might could…”
Trailing off, he lay down on his stomach on the tarmac and reached one arm all the way down into the hole. It disappeared all the way up to the shoulder, and Ronnie grimaced as he held his head up off the ground. Down inside the hole Court heard a rattle as a cap was loosened beneath them, and then Ronnie scooted back, tossing the cap aside. He glanced around—not at them, but farther out, his gaze searching the wall of the station for…something.
Cautiously, Court prodded, “What’re you looking for?”
“We need something to suck up the gas,” Ronnie murmured. “A hose, maybe, or some tubing, something…”
Now the others were looking around, as well, scanning the closest vehicles and then beyond them, at the buildings. Court shielded his eyes with both hands and tried to find a spigot on an outside wall. They used to water the grass, right? So there had to be a garden hose somewhere.
“Maybe in a maintenance shed,” he offered. Then, another idea came to him. “Hey! I bet they have tanks full of gas for their lawnmowers and golf carts and shit.”
“Do you see any golf carts around?” Adam asked. “They probably just filled up here.”
Ronnie stood up and wiped his hands on his jeans. “Why don’t you two have a look around and see what you can find?”
“Us?” Adam’s voice rose in pitch, almost squeaking. He gave Bree a beseeching, wide-eyed stare, as if hoping she’d somehow come to his rescue. When she didn’t, he asked Ronnie, “What are we even looking for?”
“Gas cans,” Ronnie said. “Check the RVs, they might have some spare fuel onboard. Or a hose of some sort we can use to siphon gas out here. Or a maintenance shed, something. I’ll have a look inside the gas station. Bree—”
“I’ll put away our supplies,” Bree offered. “And see if I can’t maybe restock our dry goods. The restaurant has to have a storeroom, right?”
Court glanced over at the restaurant, whose garish colors clashed with the darkened windows and silent parking lot. “Hey, I bet they have rice. We’re running low.”
“God, you and your damn rice,” Bree groused.
“It’s the perfect food!” Court argued. “Lasts forever, boils up in minutes, tastes delicious—”
“Just get going.” Ronnie squinted up into the sky as if trying to tell the time by the angle of the sun. “We’ll meet here again in a half hour, tops. Hopefully by then we’ll have found something we can use to get back on the road. Otherwise…”
He let the thought trail off. Before Court could think better of it, he asked, “Otherwise what?”
Ronnie turned that steely squint on him. “Otherwise we walk.”
Under his breath, Court muttered to Adam, “If that’s not incentive to find something useful, I don’t know what is.”
“What are we looking for, exactly?” Adam wanted to know.
Court had his hands cupped against the tinted window of an RV’s rear door. Even with his eyes shielded from the sunlight, he still couldn’t see much inside, but a faint sickly-sweet smell wafted up from where the door met the jamb, and he didn’t relish the thought of going inside if all he would find were dead, desiccated bodies ripening in the last of the summer sun. Taking a step back, he kicked the door, which jiggled in its frame. “Shit, I don’t know,” he muttered. “What are we even doing this for, anyway?”
“We’re so close,” Adam moaned. “Do you think if we fill up the bikes, we can get there by evening?”
“Where?” Court trailed around the side of the RV, gaze glued to the ground, but when he didn’t see anything that looked like a hose or a canister of gas, he moved to the next RV, parked a few spots down.
Adam kept pace with him. “Sumter. It’s like less than a hundred miles away.”
“So’s Myrtle Beach.” Perking up, Court turned to Adam, gripped with a sudden idea. “Hey, why don’t we just head down there instead? I’m sure the ocean’s still warm this time of year, and it’d be nice to have the beach all to ourselves.”
“And all the rotting corpses strewn out in the sand.” Adam grimaced and shook his head. “Think about it. The worst of the virus struck in the middle of summer vacation, so places like Myrtle Beach are nothing but huge morgues now. A lot of people probably sat out on the beach, watching the surf, thinking the sun would make them better. And when they realized the end was near, they went out for one last look at the ocean and never made it back.”
Court frowned. “And you think Sumter’s better?”
With a shrug, Adam said, “It’s bound to be, isn’t it? I mean, someone’s set up a generator somehow—they have electricity and a radio, right? So someone’s taken charge, and if it were me, the first thing I’d do is have some sort of system in place to bury the dead.”
Cautiously, Court suggested, “Ronnie says Sumter may be overcrowded.”
“There aren’t that many of us left,” Adam protested. “I’m sure it’s—hey, what’s that?”
Court looked where he was pointing and saw something tube-like lying in the tall grass. They hurried over, excitement rippling through them, only to find a foam pool noodle rotting in the sun. “Shit,” Court said again. He kicked the noodle, but it barely moved, so he stepped on one end, hard. The other end shot up out of the grass to bat at him, and he slapped it away. “Damn it. I don’t see why we can’t just stay here.”
Adam took off his glasses and cleaned them on his shirt. “Because Sumter’s only—”
“Sumter sucks!” Court picked up the noodle and flung it out towards the parking lot, but it fell short and bounced off the ground before rolling away to settle in another patch of grass. “This is as good a place as any. You want to go to Sumter? Fine, go. But I’m staying here. That’s it. I’m done.”
Raising his glasses to his face, Adam peered at Court through the lenses but didn’t put them back on. Instead, he lowered them again and buffed them some more. “I bet if Ronnie says otherwise, you’d—”
“Ronnie’s not going to Sumter,” Court snapped.
Adam blinked at him in surprise. His eyes were huge and owlish without his glasses. Carefully he put the glasses back on, hooking one temple behind an ear, then hooking the other into place. Then Adam squinted at Court, as if trying to figure out if he were just saying stupid shit because he was frustrated—they all were—or if maybe he knew something the rest of them did not.
Finally Adam cleared his throat and propped his hands on his hips. “Well,” he said, but there was nothing to follow it. He crossed his arms in front of his chest and frowned up at the sky. After a long moment, he asked, “Seriously?”
Court sighed. “He said it’ll be overcrowded. He did the math. If one percent of the population survived, and there’s like three billion people in the whole United States—or there were three billion, or three hundred billion, or something, that’s still a damn lot of people, and if they heard the same transmission we did, then you know they’re all making a beeline for Charleston.”
“So where’s he want to go instead?” Adam asked.
Court shrugged. “I don’t know. South, if only so we don’t have to deal with snow and ice when winter comes. Hell, here, maybe, if we can’t refuel. Does it really matter?”
Adam pursed his lips and let out a low whistle. “Bree won’t like it. Why didn’t he say something to us?”
“Maybe because he knows Bree won’t like it,” Court said with a mirthless laugh.
“Was he going to say something?” Adam asked.
Court
shrugged again. “At some point, he’d have to, wouldn’t he? Just—look, don’t say anything, okay? Don’t let him know I told you. And God, don’t tell Bree.”
Adam started, “I can’t just—”
“He’ll bring it up sooner or later,” Court reasoned. “He’ll have to. So let him be the one to say it, all right? No need to get her all upset at you.”
With a nod, Adam agreed. “True.”
They didn’t find any gasoline stored in the RVs, and no hoses or tubes they might use to siphon gas out of tanks, either. Dejected, they returned to the pumps, and stood around in the scant shade thrown from the overhead canopies as they waited for Ronnie to return. After a few minutes, Court squinted at Adam and asked, “He said meet back here in a half hour, right? How long’s it been?”
Adam shrugged. “About that, I guess. Maybe he found something.”
With a grunt, Court leaned down to absently scratch at his leg. The wound had healed, for the most part, but sometimes it could get super itchy. There was little relief scratching at it through his jeans, though. If only he could pull them down and really dig in…
“There’s Bree,” Adam said, nodding towards the restaurant.
Court stood and watched Bree hurry across the tall grass towards where they waited. By the time she reached them, she was out of breath, her cheeks flushed with excitement. When she was close enough, she hollered, “Hey guys, guess what? There’s a gennie out behind the kitchen that wasn’t hooked up right or something, so it didn’t kick in when the power went out. It’s full of gas! Ronnie’s back there now draining it.”
“A Jenny?” Court asked with a frown.
“Generator, God.” Bree shook her head as she pulled her hair back into a hand-held ponytail and fanned her neck. “Don’t you know anything?”
“Hey, we were just talking about generators.” Court grinned at Adam, who paled slightly.
Cocking her head to one side, Bree looked from Adam to Court and back again. “What about them?”
“How there must be one set up in Sumter,” Court explained. “I mean, they have radio, right? So they’re running it off something.”
“We’ll find out soon enough for ourselves,” Bree said. “Ronnie told me to come out here and let you know where we were. Did you two find anything?”
Court shrugged as he pushed himself off the gas pump and started in the direction Bree had come from. “A pool noodle. I don’t think that’d help us much, though. He’s around back?”
“Behind the restaurant, yeah.” Sidling up to Adam, Bree threaded her arm through his and bumped his hip with hers. “Why so quiet, handsome? Cat got your tongue?”
Court widened his steps, giving them a little alone time and hoping for some himself when he caught up with Ronnie. The restaurant was a round, squat building, one floor, ringed with darkened windows and dead neon signs. Court skirted around behind it and spotted Ronnie at once, squatting in front of a large metal box that must’ve been the generator. If Court had been the one to find it, he wouldn’t have looked twice at it—to him, it looked like the part of a central air conditioning system that sat outside. He wouldn’t have thought it might have fuel inside. Maybe Bree was right. Maybe he didn’t know anything.
As he came up behind Ronnie, he ran his hands across his friend’s shoulders. The back of Ronnie’s shirt was hot from the sun, and the warmth seeped up into Court’s palms as he rubbed down Ronnie’s arms. Planting his cheek on the top of Ronnie’s head, he savored the heat rising off Ronnie’s hair. “Hey,” he sighed as he leaned into Ronnie. “I hear you have gas.”
Ronnie covered one of Court’s hands with his. “Ha ha, very funny. Did you find anything?”
“Zippo.” Squatting down behind Ronnie, Court opened his knees and spooned up against his friend’s backside. Only half joking, he murmured softly, “You know, we could stay here. If we aren’t going to Sumter any longer, we might—”
Behind him, Bree screeched, “What do you mean, you aren’t going to Sumter? When did you decide this?”
Court spun around, surprised, but his feet twisted beneath him and dumped him flat on his ass on the ground. Bree towered above him, hands on her hips, eyes flashing angrily. Behind her, Adam stared at his feet and refused to meet Court’s gaze. In the sudden silence, he shrugged. “I didn’t mean to tell her,” he mumbled.
Ronnie leveled a hard stare at Court. “You told him?”
“I didn’t think—” Court began.
“You didn’t think he’d tell her?” Ronnie snapped.
Bree butted in. “Why wasn’t I supposed to know? Will someone please tell me what the fuck is going on here?”
She looked at Adam, who cowered into his huge frame and seemed to wilt beneath her glare. Court couldn’t meet her gaze for long, and he scuttled back a little in the grass, afraid she might snap at him. Finally she turned to Ronnie and, hands on her hips, stared him down.
After a long moment, Ronnie shrugged. “I just think Sumter will be too crowded, is all,” he said, his soft voice taking the edge off the tension stretched between them. “If you want to go there, by all means, go. But I want some time alone.”
Court felt his heart clench in fear. “Ronnie—”
“Oh, please,” Bree said dismissively. “He means with you and you know it. But what about us? Adam and me?”
“You can do what you want,” Ronnie told her, standing. His legs unfurled as he rose, and even though he stood a full head taller than Bree, in her fury, she seemed larger than he was. “If you want to go to Sumter, fine. We’ll travel as far as the exit to Charleston and say goodbye.”
Bree’s jaw jutted out angrily. “What if we don’t to want to go now, either?”
“Then stay with us, that’s fine, too.”
Ronnie shrugged in that unnervingly unflappable way he had that seemed to infuriate women. Melissa often said she hated how laid back and easy-going he was in an argument. Court remembered overhearing her complain to Jeanine that it wasn’t worth getting riled up about anything he did because Ronnie simply didn’t know how to fight. “Sometimes I just want him to get mad about…about anything,” she’d said, which Court thought odd at the time. “But nothing bothers him. It’s like oil off the back of a duck. He just lets me scream and shout until I wear myself out.”
Jeanie’s response had been sympathetic. “I have the opposite problem with Court,” she’d told Ronnie’s wife. “He does something he knows will set me off and thinks his handsome good looks and sexy grin will be enough to win me over. And damn it, he’s right.”
Now he watched Bree struggle to hold onto her own anger, but it fizzled out beneath Ronnie’s steady gaze. Letting out a shaky sigh, she ran a hand through her hair and turned to Adam, who gave her a haggard expression Court knew all too well. It was a familiar one he’d often used with Jeanie, a look that said simply, Whatever you say, dear. It hadn’t taken Bree long to get Adam in line.
“Shit,” she muttered with another sigh. “I don’t—I need to think about this. Damn it. You should’ve said something sooner. I can’t just decide…”
“You don’t have to just yet,” Court offered. She glared at him, so he hurried to explain. “We still have a ways to go before the exit, right? So just think about it while you drive. When we get there, you can go to Sumter if you want, or you can come with us. Either way.”
Bree frowned. “But where are you going, exactly?”
Court didn’t have an answer for that. He looked at Ronnie, who shrugged. “South,” he said. “At least for the winter. Then, who knows? Wherever there’s food and shelter. Wherever we want.”
“Shit,” Bree said again, in a defeated tone. But she snatched up one of the canisters of gasoline Ronnie had filled from the generator and stormed off, her free arm swinging wildly in her anger.
A moment later, Adam gave them a tight-lipped smile and hurried after her.
Ronnie came over to offer Court a hand. As he pulled Court to his feet, he said, “You shouldn�
�t have said anything.”
“Do you not want them to come?” Court asked, brushing the grass off his butt.
“They can or not, it’s up to them.” Ronnie hefted the remaining container of gas. “I just knew she’d get upset so I wasn’t going to bother bringing it up until I had to.”
Together they took the same path Bree and Adam had taken. The sooner they refilled the fuel tanks on the ATVs, the sooner they could get back on the road. Court wondered if Bree would decide to stay with them after all, or if she still wanted to go to Sumter. And Adam would go along with whatever choice she made, Court knew, for much the same reason he himself followed Ronnie.
Back on the road, they made great time. The interstate in South Carolina was clearer than it had been further north, and the ATVs sped down lengths of empty road, only slowing occasionally to bypass wrecked vehicles. Court kept his face turned out of the wind, his cheek pressed to Ronnie’s back, and began to notice signs of other life on the highway shoulders. Burnt remains of fires, discarded water bottles, crushed aluminum cans, even some bones and skinned hides from animals that served as dinner for hungry travelers. As they drove farther into the depth of the state, Court even began to see others like themselves—weary bands of people, three or four at a time, weighed down with heavy backpacks and canteens.
The first time Court saw someone, it was a man squatting on the side of the road, hunkered beside a dying fire. He must’ve heard the ATVs approaching from miles away, and when they passed by, he stared openly, the look on his face almost uncomprehending. Court whipped his head around to keep the man in sight, but within minutes, the guy receded into the distance, indistinguishable from the trees lining the road.
“Hey, did you see…” he started to ask Ronnie, but his words tore from his throat and disappeared behind them. If Ronnie heard anything, he gave no notice.
Soon there were others, and Court smiled or waved as they passed. Some of the groups stopped to watch the ATVs motor by; others dashed into the woods to hide. A few stood defiant, hands on weapons, daring Ronnie and Bree to stop and start something.
