by Josh Vasquez
CJ pauses before continuing.
“Did Lexx go about it the right way? I don’t know. I just know that my uncle is all I have left and he’s out there somewhere.”
Tensions calmed, fists relaxed.
“I’m sorry, Son. I’m not insinuating those people were innocent,” Black said.
“I know,” CJ said, taking a deep breath afterwards.
The five of them stood there in silence.
Chapter Twenty Six
The ATV’s engine groaned as Tori pushed it faster, zipping between the trees.
C’mon baby, just a little faster!
Tori pulled the steering handle hard left, nearly missing a large Cyprus tree.
“Jeez!” Josh yelled from the back seat.
She ignored him and concentrated on not dying.
They plowed through a patch of swamp; the mud shooting up behind them in small fishtails. The runners that were close enough received a healthy shower, dousing any lingering flames on their charred bodies. They did not seem thankful for this act of kindness.
Dicks, she thought.
“Can you go any faster?” Josh yelled. “I think we’re losing them!”
“I’m givin’ ‘er all she’s got captain!”
“I’m going to save my comments on your Star Trek reference until we’re out of danger!”
Tori smiled as she redlined the four-wheeler.
The runners slowly became small, glowing torches far behind them. Tori continued to press on deeper into the woods, the screams and shrieks growing fainter as she put distance in between them and their pursuers.
How long has it been since we crashed through the fence? She thought.
When they reached the outer perimeter fence, against her better judgment, Tori decided to barrel through the wooden structure. They both ducked down, Josh tightening his grip around her abdomen. The only negative was that in the jolt of the impact, Josh lost his grip on the rifle and it fell. They did not stop to retrieve it.
Now, they were weaponless, minus Josh’s hatchet. In their escape from the house, Tori lost her knife.
She tried to push that fact to the back of her mind as she focused on dodging the trees. The light from the headlights cast a yellow cone in front of them, giving her only several yards of room for error. Her arms were scratched and itchy from a few close calls.
“I think we can stop now,” Josh said, giving her arm a squeeze.
She had not realized how tense she was until he squeezed her arm. Easing off the throttle, the ATV slowed and eventually came to a stop. Tori shut the engine off, causing the lights to go out as well.
Their eyes adjusted to the darkness. Around them, nothing but trees and woodland shrubbery. The moon peeked through the towering branches of the Georgia pines.
“Any idea where we are?” Tori asked, keeping her voice low.
“I was trying to keep track, but if we kept mostly straight from the direction we left the house, we should be north. There were a few twists and turns in there, so I’m not sure exactly. We should try and find a road. I might be able to pinpoint our location better then.”
Tori sighed. The chirping of crickets and cicadas answered her.
“Plus, it’ll be safer to get out of the woods,” Josh added. “Too much can sneak up on us out here.”
They got back on the ATV and began driving in the same direction they had been. Away from the house.
***
They came out onto a moonlit road, the woods continuing on the other side of the pavement. The country road twisted and turned, snaking away in both directions. Tori stopped the four-wheeler, but left the engine running so they could use the light. Josh got off and looked down both stretches of road. Tori could tell even in the dim light, that he had no idea where they were.
Betchu he tries to act like does though, she thought, smiling to herself.
“I have no idea where we are,” he said, turning back to face her.
Surprised by his answer, Tori got off her seat and looked around. She never came out this far west. The country was not really her thing. Big trucks and mud boggin’ never did anything for her. She had friends who melted for that kind of thing, but not here. She always considered herself more of a rocker-chick. She’d take a T-top Camaro with AC/DC blaring any day of the week.
“You’ve never been here before? That’s surprising. You’ve been everywhere,” she said.
“Yeah,” Josh said. “In the daytime. Things always look completely different at night.”
He looked up at the sky.
“It must be near midnight. The moon is almost directly above us. If we wait a little bit and see which direction it dips in, we might be able to figure out which way to go.”
“I thought you said we were headed north?” she asked.
“I said I thought we were headed north. I don’t know that for sure.”
“Ugh,” Tori moans.
“I’m sorry.”
She looks at Josh.
“I’m not blaming you,” she said. “I just wish we knew where we were.”
“I know. I can tell by your voice.”
“What do you mean you can tell by my voice?”
Josh chuckled.
“I’m married. You don’t think I’ve picked up on female voice clues yet?” he said.
“Oh, so because I’m a female, you think you have us all figured out? That’s sexist,” she said, crossing her arms across her chest.
Josh smiled.
“And you didn’t think that I would try and act like I knew where we were, just because I’m a man? Hmm?”
“I did no such thing, Joshua,” she responded, playfully tilting her head away from him.
When he did not answer, she peeked back and noticed that he was trying not to burst into tears. He held up his hand and put the other over his eyes.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered.
“You okay? I’m sorry if I said something wrong-”
“No, it’s not that,” he said, clearing his throat. “It’s just that, Laura was the only one who ever called me Joshua…”
Tori put her hand up to her mouth.
Damn! How could I have known that? She thought.
“Seriously, it’s okay. I’ll be fine,” he said after regaining his composure.
“I really am sorry. For everything.”
He waved his hand at her.
“Let’s just focus on finding our way back,” he said, his eyes returning to the sky.
The moon overhead was nearly full, just a sliver of black running down one side. It sat directly above them, in what seemed to be the exact middle of the heavens. Stars, too many to count, flickered and glistened in a sea of black. Without the constant competition from man-made lights, the stars filled the void and seemed so much more vibrant.
“You never see stars like this,” Josh said.
Tori looked up and couldn’t help but let her jaw drop slightly.
“Wow… I’ve never seen them like this,” she said.
“It’s sad that it took the end of the world to notice something that has always been there to begin with.”
Tori looked over at Josh, who was still trying to count the heavenly bodies. Every time she thought she had him figured out, he said something like that. He could be so brash about everything else, but every now and then, he revealed just a splinter of the deeper side of him.
The ATV rattled.
“Oh no…” Josh said.
The engine knocked again, and then shut off, leaving Josh and Tori alone with the moon and stars.
Chapter Twenty Seven
The group decided that Jeremy, Lexx, and CJ would take first watch, while Black and White would sleep. The two officers slept in the bed of the truck. Black snored loudly until White kicked him, causing him to roll over and sleep much quieter.
Jeremy and CJ sat by a makeshift fire in the middle of the road, several feet away from the truck. They both had gathered a small amount of branches to use as kin
dling. It was not much, but it should at least keep them warm. Jeremy suggested they didn’t let the flames get too big, or else they might gather unwanted attention.
Lexx had wandered off and not returned.
Jeremy looked at the boy, and wondered how he was able to keep it together. After Jeremy saw his mother killed by the zombies, he lost it. The thought of it plagued his memory. Of the anger, the rage tearing through him. The sheer exhaustion afterwards. He could barely hold himself up in the shower.
Yet, CJ seemed to be holding himself together much better than any of the adults had the entire time. The kid was something else.
CJ stared at the fire, the petite flames of their fire cackling in the night.
“Hey,” Jeremy started. “You okay?”
CJ’s eyes looked at Jeremy. They were heavy and tiresome.
“I don’t know,” was all he said.
Jeremy regretted asking.
“So, what do you think your uncle would do right now?” he asked, trying to change the subject, if only slightly.
“He’d probably try to get back to the cabin. But he’d wait until morning. Too dangerous now.”
“You think so?” Jeremy said.
“Yep. He’s too cautious.”
CJ laughed to himself.
“What’s so funny?” Jeremy prodded.
“Oh, nothing. I just never thought that my uncle would be the cautious one. He was always doing crazy stuff when I was younger. This one time, when we lived down in Florida, my dad and uncle worked at this church. There was this huge hill there with a road all the way down. It probably wasn’t even that big of hill, but it was ginormous to me at that age. Anyways, I talked my uncle into skateboarding down the hill. Without hesitation, or consulting his wife, he jumped on the skateboard and rode it most of the way down.”
“Most of the way?”
“Yeah, he bailed before he hit the dip at the bottom. Came to a rolling stop, his elbows and knees all banged up from the pavement. It was hilarious.”
“So, when did he start becoming more…”
“Careful?” CJ interrupted.
Jeremy nodded.
“I don’t know. I guess within the last year. Since…”
CJ began crying, the tears coming out against his apparent desire to hold them back.
“Since they found out about the baby…”
Jeremy felt his heart sink. It was easy to forget about the baby, but it was one of the casualties among the attack. To be so close to life and have it ripped away. Jeremy could not process what CJ was going through. If Josh was alive out there, Jeremy shuddered to think of what was going through his mind.
Lexx walked back over from wherever he had wandered off to and sat down by the fire. He took notice of CJ’s tears and looked at Jeremy. Jeremy forced a smile; Lexx took the hint and kept quiet. The three of them sat in the silence of the night, staring at the fire, the flames consuming the small branches.
“It was easier with Hailey,” CJ said, breaking the eternity of quiet.
Jeremy looked up from the hole he was staring into the ground.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
CJ wiped the dried moisture from his cheeks.
“With Hay, I don’t know, it was just easier to accept.”
“That she died?” Jeremy said.
“Yeah,” answered CJ. “It’s weird, but I guess because she was killed by zombies. As crazy as that sounds, it was just easier to accept that, then for people to kill my family.”
He paused.
“I guess I just thought with all the zombies, people would stop killing other people.”
Jeremy slowly nodded his head. It made sense. Once the dead started coming back to life, you would think that the living would have banded together and put their differences beside to fight a common enemy. If you think about it, what did Jeremy have in common with Lexx, or Tori, or Ben, when he first met them? Not much. Except that, they all wanted to avoid becoming zombie food. They joined up together for mutual benefit. And when they met Josh, and then his family, there was not much hostility there either.
But there were the hipsters in Savannah. The redneck trio in his gather’s neighborhood. The Lumberjack. Now these junkies and their messed-up messiah. When the world gets flipped upside down, it may be true that some will decide that society is worth preserving. Others, not so much. You look at any other time the shit hit the fan before this, whether natural disasters, riots, or Black Friday, people always go crazy. Looting, muggings, general forms of violence.
What makes people say, “Fuck it. I’m doing whatever the hell I want.”
“Maybe this zombie apocalypse only brings out the best or the worst in people,” Jeremy said.
He looks over to Lexx. Lexx’s eyes have not moved from the fire.
“Lexx?” Jeremy said.
Lexx loses his staring contest with the flames and looks up.
“What?” He asked.
“You think this brings out the best and worst in people?” Jeremy said, giving the man a weird look.
“Yeah. People are assholes.”
He looked at CJ.
“Sorry about the language kid,” he added.
“It’s okay,” CJ said. “People are… you know… what you said.”
Lexx smiles at the kid’s inability to say asshole.
“Look, you two can get some sleep, I’ll stay up and keep watch,” Lexx said, standing up.
“You sure? We can just wait until our shift is over,” Jeremy said.
“No, it’s okay. I got this. Can’t really sleep right now anyway.”
Jeremy nodded. He knew that Lexx meant he was worried about finding Tori. Jeremy stood up and put his hand on Lexx’s shoulder.
“We’ll find her,” he said.
“I know.”
Jeremy forced another smile at Lexx and motioned for CJ to follow him to the truck. He let CJ sleep in the cab, while he went to the back of the truck, and laid down in the bed. White opened his eyes and picked his head up.
“Is it our turn?” He asked.
“No,” Jeremy whispered. “Lexx is going to keep watch. You can go back to sleep.”
White nodded and closed his eyes.
Jeremy put his arms behind his head and stared up at the sky. There was not a cloud in the sky and you could see stars for miles. The moon was just over them, full and yellow. The last time Jeremy saw the sky this photogenic was in a magazine.
Sleep came quickly. The day had been a long one and much had happened. It seemed like years ago when they left the house for Statesboro, but in reality, it was only that morning.
Chapter Twenty Eight
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Tori said.
In the dark, she saw the outline of Josh move towards the ATV. He turned the key in the four-wheeler and the lights turned on, but the engine does not crank.
“We’re out of gas,” he said, nonchalantly.
“No? You think?” She asked, her voice noticeably agitated.
“I don’t know why you’re getting upset with me; I didn’t siphon all the gas out before we left.”
Tori tried to relax.
“I’m not blaming you, just really frustrated, okay?” She said.
Josh lifted the seat up and opened the small compartment underneath.
“We have a fire starter, a handful of some water purification tablets, a few sticks of jerky, and oh! A compass! Good news is we don’t have to wait on the moon to figure out which direction to go in. Bad news is we’re walking.”
Tori sighed.
Why not? She thought. Why shouldn’t anything else go wrong?
“Let’s use the headlights to find some firewood and we’ll wait until morning to start our journey-”
“Wait,” Tori interrupted. “Why wait until morning?”
“Well, for starters,” Josh said, holding up one finger. “We only have my hatchet for a weapon. Number two on my list is, it’s dark out and we don’t know where we ar
e yet. Thirdly, I’d much rather walk in the daytime, you know, when I can see stuff.”
He smirked.
“Sarcasm can go both ways, Tori.”
She wanted to call him an ass, but he did just lose everything, so she decided against it.
Later, she thought.
“Fine. Let’s get the firewood before the battery dies and we have no light,” she said.
They both separated, but did not wander too far from each other, or from the cone of light that came from the ATV’s lights.
Tori bent over and picked up her first limb. The wood felt damp to the touch, so she set it back down. Finding dry wood were they were might end up being more of a challenge than either one of them thought. Tori walked a few more paces and picked up another branch. It was small and dead, but it was dry.
It’ll have to do.
She looked over at Josh, who had several pieces of wood in his arms. Not to be outdone, she started picking up more, dry or not. If it looked good, it was worth a try.
Of all the people she had to be stuck with, it was Josh.
It was not that she did not outright unlike him. Something about him just always seemed to rub her the wrong way. She couldn’t pinpoint what it was. She had tried, but always come up with nothing. From when he suggested leaving Lexx behind in Savannah, to the way he just assumed he was in charge because he was the only one who paid attention to zombies before they became real, to his sarcastic-ass comments, he could be a real dick.
And that was before he lost his family, so it’s not like this is a recent development.
A part of her did feel for him in that aspect, but it did not change her opinions of him that much.
But, and a huge one at that, he did always know what he was doing. That was the frustrating part. His being a zombie-nerd before the apocalypse paid off. Good for him.
I shouldn’t be too hard on him. While he can be an ass, he does have some redeeming qualities. He did invite us to the cabin, Tori, she told herself. His family was extremely welcoming. And he didn’t seem like such a jerk when they were around.
“Is that all you could find?”
