Throwing open the barn doors, I let the light of day inside. I have a knot in my neck from sleeping in the truck and as I rub it, I look around, wondering what’s happening out there in the desolation. Is there someone else out there looking on the horizon, wondering if I’m out there? I rummage through my pack and make my way out into the open and scan the surrounding area with my binoculars. There’s a community to the south. I can see the buildings and I immediately decide that it’s worth avoiding. Keep moving south. Get to Gainesville and find out where the girls have gone. That’s the plan and that’s what I need to stick to.
It’s the north that keeps me in constant concern. I turn my gaze in that direction and search for any sign that there’s someone who is coming after me. I look for dust clouds or figures, but there’s nothing on the horizon so I let out a sigh and lower my binoculars. I know that someone will be coming after me, but maybe setting fire to the city gave them bigger, more pressing concerns to deal with right now. I search the west and the east and see nothing but the small dots where farmhouses linger, abandoned. There are lots of dead trees on the horizon, but they’re rotting and falling over with each passing day. I lower the binoculars again and make my way back to the truck, enjoying the flavors that still linger in my mouth.
There’s nothing particularly useful in the barn so when I fire up the truck and pull out. I decide that it’s time to leave this place. Part of me wants to burn it so no one else can use it, but maybe one day it will be needed by someone who is decent, so I leave it standing. Instead, I search through the radio and eventually, I find someone who has a station still running. I pick up rather quickly that he’s coming out of Augusta since he calls himself Augusta Pete and continually refers to himself in the third person. I lean back in my seat and smile at the sound of another person’s voice without it meaning that I’m in sudden and imminent danger.
“Folks, you heard it here first,” he shouts into the microphone. “Augusta Pete, the finest voice on the airwaves. Some fucking genius has shown those assholes in Atlanta what’s what and given them a proper whooping. We have eye witness reports that Atlanta is, in fact, burning. Now, there are no confirmed reports yet as to what is the source of this inferno, but Augusta Pete is speculating that it’s probably from internal strife. Augusta Pete thinks that all those fucking lunatics finally got what they deserved. So if y’all see any crazy fuckers on the road, Augusta Pete gives you permission to put a hole or two through them and send them to the Almighty.”
The road is curving toward the community to the south and I begin debating whether I should turn off and make my way across the wasteland toward the south until I find another road. Avoid the towns and cities. That’s always been my mantra for traveling. Every time I set foot inside of a town or community of any kind, terrible things happen. I can barely steer this truck without smacking into something because I made the stupid, stupid decision to stop and search a town. Besides, I have enough food and water to get me all the way to Florida and then all the way back up to Michigan if I wanted to leave. Hell, I have enough supplies that I could go anywhere in the world that I wanted.
“Stop, let’s check it out.” I can hear her voice as clear as day in the depths of my mind, exactly as she had said a dozen times before. She always was inquisitive, curious, and reckless. I shake my head. No. There’s no way that I’m veering off the path to explore some stupid, abandoned town. “Come on,” I can hear her memory. “Let’s just stick around and have a little look. There might be something worth checking out.”
“No,” I shake my head. “I don’t need anything there. I’m set, so I’m going south.”
“What harm is going to come from stopping and having a look?” I can hear her voice.
“Fine, damn it,” I sigh. The road goes through the town, so it’s not going to hurt anything to just drive through. If I see something interesting, I’ll stop, have a look, and check it out. But if there’s nothing in this town that’s worth stopping for, then I’m keeping to the main road and heading south. I’m not losing another hand.
To be honest, I’m surprised at the entire lack of destruction that this town has taken on. In fact, there’s hardly anything that would indicate that the town has been raided, attacked, or looted. It almost makes me wonder if there are survivors in the town. I don’t know what the town is, the sign has been run over and the earth has started to reclaim it. I don’t bother to stop and look at it, hopefully there will be businesses that have the name of the town on their signs. I take it slow, pushing cars out of the way as I drive. The streets are packed and jammed with cars that had desperately attempted to flee the town when the chaos and the panic happened. There were wrecks everywhere, bottlenecking and choking the town. As I drive, I see a lot of businesses that have been boarded up with plywood. Most of their attempts to board up before returning and reclaiming their shops have failed. Boards hang loose or have fallen to the ground, revealing the stained and tarnished windows underneath. The fact that the windows haven’t been smashed and the boards all ripped down is another sign that there aren’t many people passing through this town. In fact, I wonder how much of an impact Atlanta has had on the state.
If that broadcast has been playing over and over for more than a year now, then those who were sitting in their basements starving probably were more than willing to give up their beliefs to join those well-fed psychopaths. I know that I would have been tempted. Anyone would have. I drive past a hardware store and a movie theater that has lost its glittering and luminous sign. It has fallen down onto the sidewalk and the cars nearby, smashing into a dozen pieces and caving in the cars. I don’t see much that looks promising in this place and I’m beginning to wonder why I stopped here at all. There’s nothing here that looks remotely useful.
It occurs to me that I haven’t seen any Zombies either in this town. That strikes me as odd. There should be easily a couple dozen wandering around, shambling and tearing off boards. The town hall looks like a mess. There was clearly a fight here. The windows are all shattered, there are the fallen remains of bodies left to rot in the heat of the day and part of it looks like it was burned on the inside. I stop the truck and look at the hundreds of shell casings and the bullet holes that have pock-marked everything in the little plaza and dead garden surrounding the building. There are several police cars parked in a barricade around the plaza that had been burnt and are now scorched black and hideous memorials of whatever battle took place here. Whoever won this fight definitely got to relish their pyrrhic victory of a short period. There’s no one in charge of this town. Everything is empty and vacant. The bodies in the street have been looted, stripped, and there are no guns to be seen. I’m assuming that means the attackers won. I figure that since the bodies have been looted, the winners have moved on or travelers have looted the battlefield.
Continuing on, there’s nothing any more promising in the town. There’s a grocery store that has been barricaded with sandbags, salt bags, and cars to build a fort where there are hundreds of bodies around and on. The grocery store behind the barricade has been burned down, which is an indicator that whoever assaulted it failed in holding their ground. From the looks of the bodies, I’d say that’s where all the Zombies went. The remaining survivors of the town must have holed up inside of the grocery store and built the fortifications, but the Zombies must have been too many. Maybe a roaming pack came across the town. If that was the case, then there was probably no way to hold them off. I drive on.
The residential areas have all been looted. The boards have been torn off the windows and the doors, the kind that indicate that there are people within. The doors have all been kicked open and the windows are shattered. There’s furniture and other debris out on the dead lawns, scattered and looted through. Everything has been ransacked and searched. There’s nothing here but the hollow ruins of what used to be a town. Everyone is dead or gone. I suppose that this shouldn’t be overly unique or surprising. I’m beginning to think that less an
d less people will be in the towns that I’m traveling through.
I think back to the man who had taken over Blanchester and sucked the town dry. Lindsay had barely found food enough for the two of us to survive there as long as we did, and I’m pretty sure she found those at my attacker’s little hidey hole. If he was that low on food after taking over the entire town, then food was getting very, very scarce. So the likelihood of there being food in towns any longer became a more and more ludicrous idea. So if there was no food in towns like these, then there probably weren’t people. I immediately chide myself for having eaten three of the MREs so far. I need to save those, ration them out. Who knows how long I’m going to need them? I decide to stick to a strict regimen of rationing out all of my food that I have left. After all, very soon I’m going to be with my girls and I’m going to need enough food for them to eat as well. I can’t be living like a king at their expense. No, it’s time to buckle down again. I’m skipping a meal just to make up for my gluttony.
Eventually I make it to the edge of town and start heading south. “There was nothing there, Lindsay,” I chide her memory that haunts me. If anything, it had been a waste of time and now I’m behind again. I’m so far behind that I wonder if I’ll ever be able to make up the time. The truck is a good start, but I can’t keep making these little detours. I weave through the cars, passing a burned out semi-truck that’s sitting on the side of the road. Eventually, I’m completely free of the town and pushing south once more.
“You should go back.” I can feel the nagging in the back of my mind and it drives me insane. “You should go back and have a look.”
I stop the truck and think about it for a moment. There was a gas station on the south side of the town and I still need a map. I stuffed my maps into Lindsay’s pack before she died and I had left them with her when I fled into the night like a coward. If anything, she’s right. I should go back and get a map. I need to know where I’m going. South is a great general direction, but I’m getting close enough now that I need to know exactly where it is I’m going. I don’t want to miss Gainesville and end up in the Keys.
“Fine,” I grumble at the nothingness around me. “I’ll go back and have another look, but this is the last time we go looting through a town together. It’s too damn dangerous.”
The only response is silence. I’m going crazy. I know I am, but I don’t think I care. How can I not be going crazy? After everything that I’ve gone through, insanity seems like the only reasonable reaction to the world around me. When the world goes crazy, the sane are the mad ones and I don’t think I have much left in me to fight this slippery slope. I back up the truck, smacking the rear bumper into the side of a forgotten minivan, and shove it out of the way before turning around and heading back for the town.
There’s an abandoned Stingray Corvette sitting at the pumps and as I step out of the truck, I walk over to it and admire it. I always had a soft spot for fast, beautiful cars. It’s a shame that the world will never get to experience the majesty and the beauty of these cars again, or any sports car for that matter. But the more I think about it, soon there will be no more cars. There won’t be gas to run cars and their maintenance will fall by the wayside and soon they’ll all be dead and abandoned on the side of the road. Everything is fading now. Everything is washing away with the storms and the floods. I’m afraid that humanity is almost gone as well.
Inside the gas station is a mess. All the windows have been shattered, probably shot out from back when there were guns still everywhere. The dust has filled the interior of the store, but the humidity and the recent rain has solidified it and turned it to a sort of legitimate dirt coating everything. Like every other gas station that I’ve been to, the food has been looted and taken away. The cooler cases have all been smashed into, the glass scattered across the floor. I take a pair of sunglasses from a tipped-over stand and put them on before looking for a map. I notice that all the cigarettes have been taken as well, along with the chew. Some people have weird priorities.
Walking into the back, I find the office where there’s a woman seated at a desk with the old, rusty stain on the wall behind her. She’s leaned back in the chair, her head unnaturally tilted back and her whole body limp. I can’t find the gun anywhere, but the room stinks of rot. She looks like she might have been over three hundred pounds when she decided to end it all. I look through the office to see if there is anything of use. I don’t find a single thing worth taking, and head back out into the gas station. I stop for a moment before kicking over the displays, listening to the metal shelving slam against the glass coated floor. The loud bang is surely enough to bring someone down on me if they’re in the town.
There’s nothing here. Not a god damn thing. So why am I so haunted by it? Why do I keep wanting to come back here? What’s drawing me to this little dried up speck on the map? Someone has busted into the fountain drink display, throwing the cups and lids everywhere across the floor. I kick them aside before walking up to the Coke and pressing the button. Nothing happens. A guy can dream.
Outside, I listen to the breeze and wait for the sounds of footsteps or someone coming out to find me. If there’s no one in this town and there’s nothing left to take with me, then what the hell am I doing here? What am I doing in this little worthless town looking for something? There’s a knot in my stomach and I begin to suspect that I’m going insane and that I’m letting the madness make the calls. I can’t have that. I need to stay alert, stay in control. I have to get to the girls. I can’t just go wandering off toward random, stupid hunches in the middle of nowhere.
But I can’t shake the feeling that I’m missing something. I walk around the exterior of the building, searching for a sign, something that I’m supposed to understand, to make sense of all of this. Maybe I’m trying too hard. Maybe I’m forcing myself to be distracted from the horrors of reality. I open the bathroom door and find nothing inside, except that the septic tank has overflowed. Slamming the door shut, I decide to head back to the truck, until I see it.
There’s no reason why a two story house should be such a vortex, calling to me, but there it sits, like a great monolith, waiting for me to discover it. I take a step toward the house and feel myself understanding. That’s it. Yes, that’s why I’m here. Even though she’s dead, gone, and in another life, I know that Lindsay would have me go check it out. I know that this is exactly the sort of thing that would make Lindsay smile with glee and excitement. It’s a red house on a slope just a hundred yards away from the gas station and now that I look at it, I see the footsteps in the mud leading down to the gas station. Yes, there’s someone in there. There are boards over the windows and there is nothing over the door. I turn around and look at the earth beneath my feet. There were people here. Someone has walked to this bathroom or at least to the gas station.
That’s it? I look at the house and feel a sinking uncertainty in my stomach. There’s no reason for me to go up there. If that house hasn’t been looted, then that means there is probably someone living in it. It is high enough up on the hill that it has a pretty good look out over the town from its second story. It also has a pretty good view of the south route out of town. If I was to pick a place to set up camp in this town, that would be a pretty tempting choice. But then again, that was Lindsay’s expertise. I’m the traveler. She was the hunter, the camper, and the killer.
“This is it,” I say to myself, taking a step back. I turn toward the truck and start walking. I open the passenger door and grab my pack and strap on my machete and bladed stump harness. I take my time getting ready, keeping my ears open for any sign that they’re on to me. If they know I’m coming, then they’ll be more likely to prepare for me. I’m starting to regret kicking over those shelving units. I close the driver and passenger side of the truck, locking it with the keys before going around back. I could haul all of the food into the front of the truck, but that wouldn’t really stop anyone if they saw them. I can stop them from taking the truck thou
gh.
I walk over to the Corvette and crouch down next to the tailpipe and stuff the keys into it, hiding them so that if I don’t make it and Lindsay’s ghost ends up getting me murdered, no one is taking that truck on a joy ride. Standing up, I draw my machete and take in a deep breath. “I’m about to do something very, very stupid, Lindsay,” I say to the ether before making my way toward the house.
Chapter Eight
With every footstep, I’m beginning to realize more and more how much of a stupid plan this is. I reach the base of the hill and look up at the house. The boards were put on pretty terribly, which means that they were in a hurry or they don’t know a damn thing about putting nails through boards. There’s also no real signs of exterior reinforcement or fortifications. Whoever this is must feel pretty certain that they’re alone in this town or that they’re safe. Or, I could be a fucking lunatic who has no idea what’s real anymore and just feels like wandering strange towns and entering into stranger houses still. I shake my head and approach the house. I only have one machete left, so I sheath it. I’ll only take it out if I truly need it.
I climb the hill and almost immediately realize how out of shape and damaged my body truly is. I’m malnourished, weak, and completely in need of some serious medical attention. My face hurts like hell and my stump is killing me after the freak in the encampment decided to try and rip off my arm after strangling it. I ascend the hill with labored breathing and aching joints, wondering how much longer I can keep this up. I should find a pharmacy and look for some supplements or something to take to try and level out my condition. Maybe there is still protein powder out there. That might do some good.
LEFT ALIVE (Zombie series Box Set): Books 1-6 of the Post-apocalyptic zombie action and adventure series Page 41
