by D. J. Molles
Bus slung the empty duffel over his shoulder. “Keep in mind, that’s what I was able to scrounge up, so don’t waste it all today when you guys go out to get your gas. Avoid a fight if you can.”
Lee smiled. “Goes against my nature, but okay.”
Harper came walking up lugging two red five-gallon fuel cans. He set them on the edge of the pickup’s bed and slid them in. He looked at the four firearms in front of him. “You choose your weapons already, Captain?”
Lee gestured politely. “You first.”
“Okay,” Harper rubbed the back of his neck. “I’ll take the shotty and the pistol. You take the rifle and the revolver.”
“Sounds good.” Lee agreed.
Bus had turned and was now looking out beyond the perimeter fence. There was about thirty yards of overgrown weeds that built up into old-growth forest with a wide dirt road meandering through it towards the highway. “Where are you guys gonna look for gas?”
“Well,” Harper sighed. “We usually hit up all the abandoned cars in Timber Creek for gas, but I don’t think it would be wise to go back there so soon. Place was probably about tapped, anyway.”
“Gotta be some big wrecks and leftover traffic jams from when everyone was trying to get the hell out,” Lee observed. “Probably would be easy pickings along a main highway.”
“Highway 55 is close,” Harper offered. “I remember there being a nasty wreck up closer to town. Of course, no tellin’ how much gas is left in those cars—I’m sure we’re not the first to think of draining them.”
“It’s a start.” Bus looked nervous. “How long do you guys think you’ll be?”
Lee didn’t like being pinned down to a timeframe, but he knew how nerve-wracking it was for someone to be in the position of waiting an undetermined amount of time in a possibly life-threatening situation. Lee had worked on both sides of that coin and had come to the conclusion that it was simply a shitty coin.
Still, Lee felt obligated. “Ideally, a few hours. I’d say...four o’clock, latest?”
Harper seemed to agree with a bob of his head. His hairless scalp was beginning to bead with sweat and glistened as he moved. It wasn’t until Lee noticed the sweat that he realized he’d begun to sweat himself. The air was a comfortable temperature if you could find shade, but the sun was hot.
“Good luck,” Bus was about to turn, but seemed to remember something he had left in the bottom of the duffel bag. He plunged his hand in and brought out a pair of old army fatigue pants and offered them to Lee. “I got these for you. Figured you should have some real pants, rather than just running shorts.”
Lee felt truly grateful, as he’d felt ridiculous in the shorts. He accepted them with more excitement than he’d felt about a pair of pants in quite a while. “Damn, Bus. You made my day.”
“Well, it wasn’t really up to me.” Bus pointed to Lee’s bare legs. “I was receiving complaints.”
Harper snickered quietly and Lee pulled the pants on with a grin. They were too large and too long but Lee didn’t hesitate to make do. He rolled up the pant legs so they weren’t dragging on the ground and then pulled the draw string from his running shorts and threaded it through the belt loops on the fatigues.
Presto, a field-expedient belt.
“Thanks again, Bus.” Lee slapped the big man firmly on the shoulder.
“Don’t mention it.” He pointed to both of them. “You guys be careful.”
CHAPTER 6: TWELVE GALLONS
The wide dirt road leading away from Camp Ryder emptied out onto two-lane black top. Lee cranked the passenger side window down to allow some airflow in the stifling car, and to set the muzzle of the .308 bolt gun against the side-view mirror for quick access. The warm wind gusted through his open window as Harper drove at a steady pace out towards Highway 55.
Harper didn’t say much since leaving camp. He nervously chewed on the inside of his lip, steered with his left hand and kept his right hand on the shotgun that lay between him and Lee. His squinted eyes scanned the roadway, back and forth, then checking his mirrors for anything coming up behind them.
Lee kept his eyes on the woods and pastures that framed the roadway. A few houses, but mostly they were still on back roads. He looked for anything out of the ordinary, even kept his nose in the wind and his ears perked for the tell-tale howl of the infected. The signs of devastation were less evident here. There were no burned-out apartment complexes or looted business to disturb the picture of business as usual. For brief moments Lee felt normal, but this sensation was fleeting, gone as soon as he tried to grasp it.
His new reality was survival. It was looking over your shoulder at all times. It was waking up in the middle of the night with your heart pounding. It was tensing at a rustle in the grass or the snap of a twig. It was the dull throb of fear that underscored every waking minute. But underneath all of that was something clearer and sharper that kept Lee focused.
He felt justified.
Complete.
Purposeful.
Like he was born for this fight.
The Nissan’s brakes squealed a bit and the vehicle slowed. Before them stood a four-way intersection. Here, the trees stood farther back from the roadway. The stop sign facing them was canted to the right and bent at the base, as though someone had run it over. A signal light that once flashed red swung dormant from the power lines that crossed the intersection. From a telephone pole, someone had nailed a poster board that had crinkled and weathered in the elements. Though faded, Lee could still read the words written boldly in black paint.
THIS IS GOD’S JUDGEMENT
Harper looked both ways at the intersection. “This is 55,” he said. To either side, the road stretched away from them, empty and devoid of life. A gust of wind blew up a short-lived dust devil that twirled across the road and dissipated on the shoulder. “Which way should we go?”
Lee pointed to their left. “Is that towards town?”
“Yeah.”
“Probably have more cars that way.”
Harper seemed hesitant. “More infected too.”
Lee shifted in his seat, getting a good grip on his rifle. “Don’t go far from the truck, and keep an open line of sight both directions.”
Wordlessly, Harper turned the steering wheel to the left. The power steering groaned against his grip and Lee wondered how long their machines would last without parts and maintenance. On his list of valuable people to rescue, he mentally highlighted “mechanic.”
The small pickup moved slowly through the intersection and headed northwest, towards downtown Angier.
Harper kept it at a steady but cautious thirty miles-per-hour.
Nothing but trees and power lines to both sides.
The wind bore no scent but the stale baking smell of the blacktop.
The tires whined, the engine hummed along, settling into third gear. Beyond that was the hypnotic slurry of nature’s constant background noise, louder now for man’s lack of interference. The cicada call, rising and falling, the chatter of birds, a million other life forms acting out their daily existence, oblivious to the changed world around them and the plight of the one species on the planet that seemed to doom themselves at every turn.
A glint of unnatural color ahead.
Lee focused at the road before them, gently curving to the right. In the bend, just coming into view, a small white vehicle had run off the road and mired itself in the ditch on the far side of the shoulder.
“Slow up,” Lee mumbled, but Harper was already pressing the brakes.
The vehicle was a little more than a half of a mile away. A sniper’s arithmetic produced facts in Lee’s mind without even thinking about it: the vehicle was roughly a thousand yards from him. The shimmering mirage of the roadway was running right-to-left, caused by a strong westerly wind. They were just inside the effective range of anyone with a rifle, but Lee was less concerned due to the wind. Only an experienced marksman with a good cartridge would be able to take them at this range.
Lee leaned into his rifle, resting his cheek on the butt stock. The scope mounted on the Savage was overpowered for almost any application but punching holes in paper at long distances. He guessed it was somewhere between 30x and 40x magnification. During Scout Sniper school, Lee had trained with a variable power scope that topped out at 9x magnification. The less the magnification, the easier it was to track a moving target, so Lee preferred low-magnification scopes.
Still, the overpowered scope gave Lee the ability to see details, even at this distance. Anything that might tell him about the car in the road: a moving shadow, the dark shape of feet underneath the vehicle, or even someone looking out from the backseat. But Lee saw nothing but an abandoned vehicle. A Chevrolet Cavalier, with the front right hubcap missing and a white cloth draped in the window that stirred occasionally in the breeze.
Lee turned his suspicious eyes to the nearby tree line.
The bright, midday sun cast the forest in dark streaks and mottled shadows. Beyond the first screen of leaves glinting in the sunlight, Lee could see next to nothing.
About a minute ticked by.
The pickup rumbled slightly at idle.
Lee looked up from the rifle. “Looks okay.”
“You want to check it for gas?” Harper was already easing the Nissan forward.
“Yeah. Pull up right next to it.”
They moved forward, covering the half-mile in just a few seconds. As they drew closer to the abandoned vehicle, more of the road further down became visible. A little more than a quarter-mile more from the Chevrolet Cavalier, the sun glinted off of several windshields.
Harper pointed. “Accident?”
“Some sort of pileup,” Lee nodded, turning his attention back to the woods.
As they pulled up alongside the Chevy, Lee felt a small measure of disappointment. The gas cap was removed and hanging down. Someone had already tapped this vehicle for gas.
Harper made a face. “Sonofabitch…”
“We can still check it out.” Lee opened his door. “Might be a little left.”
Harper didn’t argue. He exited the vehicle and grabbed a gas can and a short section of black tubing. Lee let the man set up the siphon as he swung into the back of the pickup truck. The metal roof of the cab was uncomfortably hot against his skin as he settled his elbows on it, using it to prop himself up and survey the area around them.
Harper began coughing and then gagged.
Lee gave the man a sidelong glance. “Anything?”
Harper was bent over, hands on his knees, with a thick trail of saliva coming from his mouth. He shook his head steadily, the saliva swinging from side to side. “Just fumes. God, I forgot how much I hate doing that.”
“Let’s roll on,” Lee suggested. “I’ll stay back here.”
Harper yanked the black hose from the barren gas tank of the little Chevy and tossed it and the gas can into the bed with Lee. He grumbled as he settled into the driver’s seat: “Good thing I didn’t have anything to eat this morning. I would have lost it.”
Lee took a firm hold of the roof and gave it a tap to indicate he was secure. “You’re a trooper, Harper.”
The older man mumbled something unintelligible and unpleasant sounding.
The pickup moved further down the road, towards the new group of cars. Lee had scoped it while he had been waiting for Harper and it did not seem like a man-made barricade, nor did Lee see anyone around it. As they closed in on the cluster of cars, Lee got a better picture of how they had gotten there.
A large SUV had crossed the grassy center median from the opposite direction. Twin gouges in the grass could still be seen, despite the untrimmed overgrowth. A box truck had swerved to avoid the head-on collision and tipped over on its side. Three smaller vehicles had piled up on the undercarriage of the box truck.
A chain reaction of idiots following too closely.
But their poor driving habits meant good pickings for Lee and his partner. Surely one of the five vehicles would have some fuel left in its tank. Perhaps they would be so lucky as to fill up all twelve gallons.
The body of the box truck lay across the roadway like a felled beast and created a perfect defensive position. Lee kept a wary eye on it as they approached. No one jumped out and started shooting. The wrecked vehicles remained still and silent, like statues depicting a single moment of some violent scene.
Harper swung wide to the right and then cut it to the left so their passenger’s side was facing the vehicles. Lee hopped out and swiftly began clearing the vehicles while Harper snatched his hose and gas cans from the bed again. The vehicles were all empty. In two of them, the airbags were deployed. One of them had a broken passenger window. To the left and right the grass on the median was worn down to the dirt. Lee thought that explained the lack of gridlock behind this accident. Everyone heading inbound towards Angier had just gone around the accident.
Lee wondered if they had gone around it when the people were still trying to drag themselves out of the cars. What happened to the drivers was a mystery. Maybe they just wandered off. Or maybe a horde of infected had taken them.
Harper coughed and spluttered. “Goddamn…” he wheezed.
“Eureka?”
“Oh yeah,” he spat. “Gonna be a minute, though.”
Lee nodded and turned his attention to the box truck. He scanned the woods and further down the road as he moved to the roll-up door on the back end. It was emblazoned with a bread company logo and showed pictures of various freshly baked loaves and rolls. Just looking at the pictures made Lee’s mouth water and his stomach growled at him.
Taking another long look around to make sure no one was sneaking up, Lee bent to the latch of the roll-up door and found it unlocked. He flipped the latch and then grabbed the canvas strap at the bottom of the door and yanked it up—or sideways, as the truck was now horizontal.
The door stuck at first and Lee pulled harder.
It finally gave way and slid about halfway before jamming again.
Lee peered into the darkness.
He noticed the smell almost immediately. Not rancid like rotting meat, or overpowering like the shit-and-body-odor smell of the infected. It was a strange musty smell, like an old house that hasn’t been cleaned in years.
Lee wrinkled his nose.
All the bread in the back of the truck had gone bad, he was certain from the smell, and had little desire to investigate further into the dark cargo area. He was about to turn away, but thought better of it and pulled the door shut again. He was pretty sure nothing dangerous was inside. But not positive.
“Anything?” Harper called over to him.
Lee looked back and saw Harper standing over his slowly filling gas can, one hand on his hip and the other shielding his eyes from the sun. The shotgun was resting against the car while it transfused its fuel into the big red canister. Lee shook his head. “It’s all moldy.”
“Figured.”
Yes. Lee should have figured that as well. A month in the dark of the box truck, with heat and humidity to boot, and not much was likely to be unspoiled.
Lee faced away and leaned against the box truck. He sighted through the scope again. The overly magnified image forced him to strain his focus. He saw the middle of the road. In the hazy distance, an overpass? Perhaps. The image jumped and quivered with the tiny unconscious movements of his body. He swept to the left, across the median where everything was empty and the overgrown grass nearly blocked his view of the opposite lanes, then up the shoulder to the wood line on the far side of the road.
All clear.
He swept right, back across the median, back across the road that he now stood on, saw the cloudy, shimmering silhouette of the overpass. Up the shoulder. Up the embankment, to the woods. And there he saw a dark shape, hunched low to the ground, disappear into the woods.
Lee jerked back like he’d been touched by something hot.
Was that...?
He was about to call behind him,
but decided to double check himself. The movement had been so rapid and sudden that it could have been a mirage, could have been an animal, could have been a sun spot in the lenses of the scope.
He put his cheek against the rifle, hard this time, his focus intense. He sighted at the furthest point in the road before it dipped out of sight on a gradual downslope. There, on the embankment, not fifteen feet from the road, just at the hill crest, he had seen something.
Something crouched down low.
And human, he thought.
He felt his heart quicken its pace, like a worried horse moving from a walk to a trot. He stared at the woods with obsessive focus, but the sunlight reflecting off the leaves blocked his view of what was beyond them.
“Uh...Harper?” Lee called behind him.
“Yeah,” Harper sounded gruff and unconcerned.
Lee tried to make himself sound level but that bad feeling was putting a tourniquet around his gut and tightening it down. “You might want to speed it up.”
He didn’t take his eyes of the woods. Behind him he could hear the light metallic click of Harper taking up his shotgun.
“Did you see something?” Harper blurted in a harsh whisper. “What did you see?”
“Just...” Lee took a deep breath, forcing relaxation into his muscles. “Just get the gas. Focus on getting the gas. But hurry.”
“It only goes so fast!” Harper snapped.
“Can’t you start on the next can?”
“I only have one hose!” Harper growled. “Shitfire...”
Then from the woods rose a bloodcurdling howl that seemed to go on for minutes on end, searing through them like a white-hot fire that started in the sudden dump of their adrenaline glands and radiated outwards like a shockwave until it stung their fingertips and dried their mouths and throats.
