After The Virus (Book 1): After The Virus

by Archer, Simon

  “Okay, I got the bags,” Jackie said from behind me.

  “Good,” I told her. “Now, I need your help.”

  “That doesn’t sound good, Henry,” she said. “You need me to help with the body, don’t you?”

  “Yep,” I replied. “Heads or tails?”

  “Ew,” she grumbled. “I’ll take tails and let you deal with the heavy end.”

  “Fair enough,” I said.

  “I know we shouldn’t joke about this, but it helps,” Jackie observed as she climbed up into the truck on the passenger side. “Anyway, why don’t we bring him this way? Then we won’t have to worry about the gear shift or the steering wheel.”

  “I thought that,” I said. “Let’s swap, and I’ll see about starting this party.”

  “You’re really weird,” Jackie said, then squirmed around me and settled by the dead man’s feet.

  In all, I think it took us maybe ten minutes to extricate the truck driver’s corpse and bag it up. After that, we broke into the convenience store for Lysol, paper towels, and deodorizers. It took about fifteen more minutes to get the smell down to a tolerable level. I’d be able to air the truck out much more satisfactorily once we got it back to the farm.

  “What do we do about him?” Jackie asked. “We can’t really bury him, can we?”

  I really hadn’t considered it. Maybe I just planned to leave the corpse lying off to the side of the driveway.

  “Not really,” I replied. “We could put him over on the grass, there, and cover him with something.”

  She nodded slowly and studied me for a minute before we lifted the poor truck driver and carried him out of the driveway and onto the grass. We used what debris we could to make a small cairn, then walked slowly back to the vehicles.

  “Here,” I said, digging through my pocket and coming up with my truck keys, which I handed to Jackie. “Would you follow me back to the farm?”

  “Sure,” she said with a smile. “I’d follow you anywhere.”

  Then she was gone, and I just shook my head and sighed before climbing up and settling into the big Kenmore’s driver’s seat. Our poor friend had a spare key in a horribly cliche spot, over the driver’s side sun visor.

  Almost afraid to check because of the dreaded click of a dead battery, I stuck the key in and turned it. Fortune, however, smiled on me, and the big diesel rumbled to life. It had been a couple of years since I’d driven a truck like this, and I’d let my CDL lapse. Still, it was just like riding a bike.

  Only not really. I managed to stall twice and grind the gears seriously before I backed the tanker out and eased it out onto the roads. The gauges all read good to go, even the fuel one, so I went. Jackie followed in my Dodge.

  It wasn’t a fast drive back. I was going extremely slow and careful since I towed about seven thousand gallons of gasoline behind me. The nineteen or so miles took us almost an hour, and I figured Jackie was getting pretty frustrated riding escort behind the tractor-trailer.

  Finally, I eased the truck down the dirt track to the farm, swung around the house, and parked it near the barn and workshop. Jackie parked in the usual place in front of the house, so I went to meet her. The fuel was sealed in the tanker for now, which gave me some time to go find enough stabilizers for this much gas.

  “I could have passed you and made it back here, even getting lost, in the time it took you,” Jackie exclaimed. “Why so slow?”

  “A test of your patience,” I said with a shrug and a smile. “Really, though, I didn’t want to take any risk of wrecking the thing.”

  She nodded and laughed, then took my arm and started tugging me back towards the Dodge.

  “Let’s get stuff unloaded while we’re here,” she suggested. “Then we can check out anything that looks interesting while we go get propane.”

  “Sounds like a plan to me,” I said, letting her tow me towards my truck.

  Of course, when you have black garbage bags full of supplies, it gets a little weird. If I didn’t need Jackie to drive behind me when I found one of the propane delivery trucks, I’d have left her there to sort the disorganized mess of jerky, chips, and sweets. The assortment of twelve-packs, soda and beer, was a bit less trouble. We piled those into the bottom of the pantry, then just dropped the bags in the den.

  Tonight, we’d sort this shit and put it away. Now, though, we were burning daylight, and I didn’t know if the closer of the two propane stores would have a full truck.

  “Keep your fingers crossed, Jackie,” I told her as we pulled back out onto the country roads.

  “Okay,” she said. “Why?”

  “So we won’t have to go too far for a propane truck,” I answered.

  “Oh! Sure,” she held up both hands with crossed index and middle fingers.

  “Thanks,” I said. “Worst-case scenario, we have to find one of the trucks and fill it up, then drive home. If we’re lucky, though, we’ll be able to just drive home.”

  “I have to follow you again, don’t I?” Jackie asked.

  “Right, but I won’t drive as slow,” I answered.

  “Promise?”

  “Cross my heart and hope to die,” I told her, making the requisite ‘X’ over the middle of my chest.

  10

  Getting filled tank trucks of propane turned out to be a spectacular non-event. Both trucks at Feynman Propane and Grilling Accessories were full and waiting to go. The two tanks outback were both at around three-quarters. If we were careful, we’d have a year or so of cooking and heating fuel from that, so long as there was no leakage or evaporation from the tanks.

  It took less than an hour to move both trucks back to the farm and refill the propane tanks for both the main house and the cottage. I made sure Jackie knew the procedure by showing her how to fill the tank at the cottage, then having her go through filling the storage tank at the house.

  When we finished, I parked the trucks a safe distance from both houses and each other and walked over to join Jackie on the porch. She perched on the railing, watching me curiously with bright eyes.

  “Why not park them together, like under the carport over there?” she asked, pointing over at the old steel carport near the barn.

  “Call it paranoia,” I replied. “But I’d rather not store them where one stray fire could take out both, and probably more.”

  “Oh, yeah. Good point,” she mused. “Sorry for the dumb question.”

  “Unless you’re a new recruit talking to your drill sergeant, the only dumb question is one you don’t ask.” I smiled at her and settled into the wicker chair.

  Jackie raised one of her eyebrows and gave me a curious look.

  “Come on,” I teased. “You’ve seen the movies, yeah? R. Lee Ermey cussing out some dumbass in his skivvies for asking where he’s supposed to piss or something?”

  She shook her head but kept her eyes on me.

  “Anyway, times have changed, but drill sergeants haven’t. They can’t openly haze the recruits, but believe me. They find ways to get to you. It’s supposed to build character, but the whole idea is to break a person down, and rebuild them so that they can do whatever the service needs them to do.” I leaned my head back and closed my eyes. “So, you know my name is Henry Forrest, yeah?”

  “Right,” She said.

  “Guess what the D.I. called me from day one?”

  “D.I.?” she asked, then before I could fill her in, she answered her own question. “Oh, duh. Drill Instructor. Sorry, I’m not thinking.”

  “No worries, Jackie,” I said with a smile, eyes still closed.

  “So, what did he call you?” Jackie asked after a moment.

  “Gump,” I told her. “It was always Forrest Gump jokes, no matter what. All the way through basic.”

  “Didn’t it suck?”

  “At first, yeah. I wasn’t the only recruit with a name D.I. Green could have fun with, but he loved Forrest Gump for some reason, so I had a special place in the hierarchy.”

  Some of t
he jokes and word-plays had been kind of fun, but I’d gotten so sick of “Run, Forrest. Run,” during PT and pretty much every training run from day one, that I was about ready to throw in the towel, especially since I hadn’t been the greatest runner to begin with.

  I toughened up and got over it, though. It had taken a lot of work, but I managed to pass all my PT tests the first time. The Army was something of a wake-up call to a guy who thought he was in good shape when he graduated high school.

  Jackie was looking at me curiously when I opened my eyes. “You’re thinking about something,” she said. “Spill.”

  “Remembering basic training, actually,” I said.

  “From the smile on your face, I’m guessing it wasn’t all bad,” She crossed her arms and leaned back against one of the columns.

  “It wasn’t. Made a few friends, learned some things. M.O.S. training was a lot more fun, really. Turns out I had a knack for things mechanical, which helped a lot, but they shipped me out to the Middle East pretty quick after I graduated,” I said, letting my mind wander back down those years. “I was a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed young recruit in those days, ready to change the world and bring freedom to the oppressed.”

  “How long have you been out?” Jackie wanted to know. She swung a leg idly back and forth as she perched on the porch railing. It was almost hypnotic to watch.

  “A little over six years,” I replied. “Served for six, right out of high school so I could hit the G.I. Bill when I got out, or stay in if I really liked it.”

  “I guess you didn’t?”

  That kind of struck a nerve, but it was an innocent enough question. I shrugged.

  “Well,” I drawled. “I did, actually, but I really did some soul-searching and decided to take my out when it came up. Some bad things happened in my family, and after I got shot, I took it for a sign that I needed to put the army behind me and move on with my life.”

  I met her gaze and smiled faintly, then shrugged again. “I took a shot in the dark and applied to M.I.T. once I got out of the service, made it, and actually managed to finish a mechanical engineering degree in four years.”

  “Finishing any four-year degree in four years is challenging, to say the least,” Jackie said with a laugh, then slid down off the railing and moved to the rocking chair. Out in the yard, the dogs were on a tear, romping back and forth under the trees.

  I liked that they all got along. Points to Jackie for that. She managed to smooth over any ruffled fur that the sudden enlargement of the pack created far better than I could have.

  “You got that right,” I said. “But I hadn’t had much of a social life in the Army, so I just hunkered down and focused on my work. Once I graduated, I took some of the money I saved and traveled a bit before I ended up and my Grandma’s farm.”

  “Why a garage?” she asked out of the blue. “What possessed you to take your background and fix cars out in the boonies?”

  “While I was here, I fixed a couple of cars and a tractor for Grandma’s friends, and folks started to talk like they do. Soon, I had a backlog of people wanting me to look at their machines,” I replied. “They were willing to pay me, too. I talked myself into it, and Grandma helped me get the land and the building put up, and business started rolling in.”

  “Right place, right time, huh?” she said, grinning. “Kind of like how we met.”

  “Lucky,” I agreed and grinned back.

  Jackie blushed a bit and looked away, fidgeting and tangling her fingers together as she stared out at the dogs. “So, what else do we need to do to get everything ready for... well, whatever the world throws at us?”

  “Hrm,” I grunted and leaned back in the wicker chair, putting my feet up on the railing. “We got fuel, food, livestock, guns and ammo, water, and lots of surplus within an easy drive or a long walk. What we’re lacking is any kind of stable source of power, and of course, the fuel isn’t going to last forever.”

  “You said something about solar,” she mused. “I wanted to ask you more about that.”

  “If I can get the panels, batteries, and wiring, then I can make it work. There’s plenty of surface area for panels on the houses, and we’ve got decent sun-facing,” I said. “It’s an option that might keep us going a bit longer while we work out some other issues.”

  “I like it, I think,” Jackie finally turned to look at me again, twisting in the rocking chair and tucking one leg up under her. “Power’s a good thing, and while I’m fine on getting used to not having it, I kinda want it…” She looked down at her hands and blushed again.

  “I’ve been through desert summers,” I said. “Alabama ain’t the place I’d choose to go without ice and air conditioning. In winter, we can build a fire, sure, but heat and high humidity suck.”

  She nodded, smiled, and asked, “How can I help?”

  “Think we can leave the animals alone for a couple of days while we run into Montgomery and see what we can scrounge?” I asked in return.

  “Ugh,” she scowled, and her smooth brow scrunched up into furrows. “I’m not so sure. If it was warmer and we could trust them to not eat all the food in their dispensers, maybe, but none of them seem to want to skip a meal without panicking.”

  “I might have to make the run by myself, then,” I said, frowning. Having someone to watch my back would be a good thing, but with the responsibilities we’d picked up for ourselves, only one of us could really go on a trip longer than a day. The critters hadn’t been happy at all when we spent the night in LaGrange, and that was less than a full twenty-four. Two days would have them in open revolt, I suspected.

  Jackie sighed, and her shoulders slumped.

  “I figured,” she said. “I understand it, but I hate it. Hell, Henry, I don’t even like the idea of you going alone. If something happened, we don’t really have a way to talk.”

  The CBs didn’t have the range, cellphones were basically useless, and I’d need to hit a national guard post to get anything longer ranged. One of the big trucks from such a place might be useful, though, so hitting an armory would be helpful in several ways.

  Unfortunately, the closest one was in Troy, south of Montgomery, so nix that idea unless we sped up the expeditions. We’d burn a lot of gas, but hell, it was going to go bad pretty quick. I could use a hand pump to fill us up at stations, and that way, we could make half-day excursions instead of full-day or multi-day ones, at least for now.

  Although some of the hunting and outdoor stores nearby might have the answer. Handheld HAM radios could reach several hundred miles without much trouble, and they’d be a lot easier to deal with than a larger vehicle unit or a household one. Besides, radio tech had come a long way since the World Wars and Vietnam.

  “I might have an answer about communication,” I said slowly. “Also about getting around the need to make solo trips. You’re right, there’s enough uncertainty that I’d prefer to have someone watching my back, and I’m not happy leaving you by yourself, either, no matter how safe things seem to be.”

  She perked up visibly and turned her hopeful eyes on me.

  “We aren’t going more than an hour or two away. We leave right after feeding the horde, do what we need to do, and drive back. Barring any kind of problem, we should be back the same day.”

  “So,” she continued my thought. “We leave extra food, just in case.”

  “Right,” I said. “Which means we leave bright and early in the morning for Montgomery. I’ll go ahead and gas up the truck, but I’d like to maybe have a look at some of the sporting goods stores around, and the Walmart.”

  “We can’t have too much food, or ammunition, really,” she said, shifted in the rocker, and rose gracefully to her feet. “Daylight’s wastin’, Henry.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” I mock-grumbled and pushed myself to my feet. “I swear, the moment I mentioned shopping, I knew you’d be all-in.”

  “Depends, Mister Forrest,” Jackie said with a laugh. “You mean to buy me something pretty?”
<
br />   I paused and looked down at her where she stood, hands on her hips, smiling up at me, her blue eyes bright with a mischievous spark.

  “Maybe I will,” I said with a smile of my own. “Long as you model it for me.”

  “Maybe I will,” she said, spun on her heel, bleach-blonde hair flying, and flounced off towards the Dodge.

  I let out a sigh and shook my head. What the hell was this girl on about, I wondered. Was she flirting with me? If she really was, I certainly didn’t mind, Jackie was really something; smart, strong, good-looking, and good with animals. What would I pick out for her?

  In all honesty, something practical, unless I got a better read on the situation to decide if there was something between us, or if it was just a case of wishful thinking on my part. I followed her to the truck and started it up. A short time later, we were heading towards I-85. We were going for supplies.

  Yeah.

  That’s it.

  11

  “Tiger Town,” she said with a laugh as we turned into the parking lot of the Opelika Mall. “I should have known.”

  I grinned over at her. “I figured it’d be a halfway decent one-stop-shop and might put a smile on your face.”

  “It did,” she admitted. “A somewhat wistful one, but a smile nonetheless.”

  Tiger Town was a large mall, eighty or ninety stores, with food, outdoor equipment, clothes, and all sorts of other useful items all under a single roof, more or less. I drove slowly around the parking lot. There were a few cars, as well as a security truck parked near a side entrance. Other than that, there was no sign of anyone. Rather than break through one of the big front entrance doors, we went around the whole place, checking main doors and side doors.

  I didn’t expect to find one unlocked, and I was surprised when one was right near the parked security truck. The truck itself was unlocked, too, keys in the ignition, but it was dead. At a guess, the guard had parked to either change shift or take a break, and whatever hit everyone else caught up with him or her. This was probably the closest outside door to the security offices for the mall, and there might be keys, which would be useful.