The Apocalyse Outcasts

by Peter Meredith

  The day dragged and she grew sleepy. Sarah lolled in the chair and at some point in the early afternoon, she fell asleep. Time wore away and as it did the zombies dissipated, meandering toward their uncertain future. At about the moment Neil slipped the shotgun barrel beneath his chin, Sarah was awoken by the sound of an engine.

  It was a black Jeep, the same sort of vehicle that had chased after Neil two nights before when he was searching for Sadie’s medicine, and, unbeknownst to Sarah, the same vehicle that had been creeping around searching for her. This time it did not creep up the street, it went at a steady thirty miles per hour heading in the exact direction Sarah needed to go.

  When it passed, she hopped up and went to the window to watch its progress, however, because of the angle, she lost sight of the Jeep after only a minute.

  Had it turned east? She had been planning on going east, but now she didn’t know what to do. Hurriedly, she unfolded the map she had picked up at a gas station and stared at it intently. Perhaps it was stereotypical, but she wasn’t good with maps. Just finding her present location took a minute and then she painstakingly oriented the map to the real world so that she could conceptualize directions better.

  She was two miles west of I95 in the very southernmost portion of Philadelphia. It had been her plan to join the highway at Madison Street and then make a dash south before Neil could catch up—in her heart she knew he wouldn’t be stopped by the nasty words she had written, and she knew he would figure out her destination eventually. It wasn’t like she had many options.

  Brittany or Eve were the only choices left in her life, or so it seemed to Sarah. Search for one or save the other. A vain hope or a certain death, that’s what her children meant to her, and even then she didn’t know what the right choice was.

  With depression threatening once again to cloud her mind, she put her finger down on the map. “I’m here…and I want to go there.” She began tracing a new route to the highway, one that was out of the way, but not by more than a few miles. With fuel being so short, she couldn’t spare the miles, however she couldn’t spare getting caught by a bounty hunter either.

  She left as soon as she got the map folded. The Honda was packed with all the gear needed for a trip, including, food, water, and diapers—she may have been a bad mother, but she was still a mother.

  Sarah drove with the windows down, listening for the bounty hunter’s Jeep. On the seat next to her was the Beretta, cold and black. It was the great equalizer. With it she didn’t need to fear rape or robbery. With it she was every bit as tough as a man. She touched it at odd times as if to reassure herself that it was real, and when she took a turn she instinctively put her hand out to keep it from sliding.

  The detour, characterized by Sarah being extra vigilant and jumping at every sound, lasted an hour longer than she had planned. On the way, she discovered a man dangling from the limb of a tree by his neck. He swayed gently, pushed by a soft breeze. She pulled over and looked at him, wondering if he had killed himself or if had he had done something to deserve being strung up like that?

  Taking the Beretta in hand, she climbed out of the Honda and advanced on the dead man. He was so purple in the face as to appear black and his tongue seemed to stick out of his mouth by a foot. Next to the tree was a deer rifle with a round chambered and a few feet away from that she found a backpack with some canned food and twenty more rounds for the rifle.

  “Suicide,” Sarah concluded with a sigh, giving a last glance to the corpse. The sight gave her a nasty feeling that was part-nausea and part-surrender. “I’m right there with you, buddy,” she said, as she took the rifle and the pack and wandered back to the Honda.

  She had always known her mission was suicidal, but it really struck home when she saw the dead man. In a way he was lucky. Abraham had threatened her with death by fire. Whenever she remembered that, she involuntarily touched her long blonde hair. She hadn’t had a proper cut in so long that her hair was like a lion’s mane and it hung down well past the middle of her back. It would go up in flames splendidly when the time came.

  The image of her hair burning like an inferno unfounded her mind, and inexplicably, she pulled out her hunting knife and began to saw at her hair, hacking off foot-long chunks of her golden tresses. After a minute, and after quite a bit of pain, she realized that cutting her hair in that manner wouldn’t do. As though Abraham were chasing her with a lit torch, she jumped into the Honda and drove through the sprawling suburbs until she found a hair salon in a little strip mall. Cute Cuts & Color the sign read.

  The salon was basically intact. Someone had prowled through the drawers at one time, perhaps looking for stashes of food, but of the hair products, and cutting tools nothing had been touched. It was all Sarah’s. There was plenty of light left to the late afternoon and she went right to work with a pair of shears that were still wonderfully sharp. In minutes she had butched her hair, cutting it unevenly with lengths ranging from a half-inch to two inches. For some reason it felt wonderfully liberating. It was as if she were cutting herself out of her own life with each snip of the scissors.

  There was only one thing left to make the transformation complete: black hair dye. She chuckled as she began the dye job—Sarah Rivers was disappearing right before her eyes. Almost too late she remembered that she would have to wash the excess dye out. In a giddy panic, she grabbed a bottle of shampoo, some towels, and a mirror and ran back to the Honda.

  Finding water on the east coast wasn’t an issue; very quickly she passed over a creek. Giddy or not, she kept her wits about her and exited the Honda slowly keeping an ear out for zombies. Streams like this could be deadly. Greenery was thick on the banks and the splashing water could mask the approach of what would normally be a loud zombie.

  Sarah eased down to the water and was slow to begin rinsing out the dye; she had time, there was no sense hurrying when it wasn’t needed. In this instance her caution was for naught and she was able to wash her hair in the chilly water without incident. When she got back to the car she found it impossible to keep from staring at herself in disbelief.

  “It doesn’t even look like me,” she said, touching her face. Without the golden mane, her head seemed small, and her blue eyes fairly blazed in contrast to the black hair. “Will Eve recognize me?” she wondered aloud. It was then that an idea formed. “Would Abraham recognize me?”

  Probably not, she decided, especially if she were to make a few more changes to her appearance. Before going back to the highway Sarah Rivers went shopping. Next to a gas station just down the block was a Goodwill and in it she found a patchwork of different sized clothes that, when safety-pinned in place, gave her a whole new wardrobe. Gone were the casual jeans and the soft sweaters. Her slim figure was disguised beneath layers and in her mind she looked like a gypsy, in other words absolutely nothing like her old self.

  “Interesting,” she remarked as she gazed at her reflection in a mirror.

  Suddenly her mission didn’t seem so suicidal. “I’ll become one of those daft Believers,” she said with a grin. “Oh, praise God for allowing Abraham to build a stupid underground fort instead of stopping the zombie virus! And bless his great, God-like hair and, oops, so sorry, Mr. Abraham fell on a knife six or seven times.” The grin turned into a wicked smile that faltered as she caught sight of something. She went closer to the mirror and looked at herself from different angles. Though the smile was wicked, beneath it she could see hints of the old Sarah Rivers.

  Without effort, she replaced the smile with a sneer and stuck it in place. “Good bye, Sarah.” Her old self disappeared from the mirror and in a second her new self was climbing back into the Honda, sneer in place.

  She drove for the highway and once on it found her progress slower than on the side streets, due for the most part, because of the many zombies who seemed trapped on it. The roadway was bordered by fencing that stymied every effort of the zombies to get away. Some found their way off exit ramps, but an equal number seemed to c
ome on as replacements.

  Sarah, not only had to dodge the zombies, she also had to weave her way around all the stalled-out cars. It was a tedious and mind-numbing way to drive. With not much sunlight left to the late afternoon, she found nearly her entire side of the road blocked by cars. They seemed unnaturally placed. Fearing an ambush, she stopped well back and brought out the deer rifle.

  It had a good scope and she was able to see every detail of the cars as if she were standing twenty feet away. At first nothing moved, which had the adverse effect of making her more anxious over the situation. Then she saw a flicker of blue behind one of the cars.

  “Now I got you sucker,” she whispered, thumbing the switch from safe to fire. She had no qualms about killing first and asking questions later. What sort of person would set up an ambush on a highway? The only answer that came to mind was quite simple: a bad person. “Now just show yourself so I can get this little episode behind me and find a place to hole up for the night.”

  More slow minutes crept by before the flash of blue formed up better on her scope and she saw that it was only a zombie. “Fuck,” she swore. It was the bounty hunter she had expected to see, not some stupid zombie.

  She still couldn't relax. Something wasn't right. Just in case she had missed something, she waited another ten minutes, staring down the scope at the cars and up along the fencing. There was nothing to see but a few zombies and, with the scope, she was certain of their authenticity.

  That odd feeling of something no being right remained, but she had to move. She hurried to get her car past the obstruction, riding up onto the grassy shoulder. She was so nervous that she actually drove with her left hand out the window, training her Beretta outward, ready to shoot the first thing that moved. With her attention divided, and the grass on the side of the road grown thick, she did not see the spike strip that had been purposely placed there until her front tires went over it.

  Both tires exploded like twin shotguns going off, while at the same time the car seemed to rise in the front a few inches before dropping as if settling into a ditch. The Honda ground to a halt.

  “What the hell?”

  At first, Sarah didn’t recognize that she was in serious trouble. She figured she had run over something, glass or a piece of metal, in other words, something innocent. With more swearing, she climbed out and looked down at the damage to the front left tire. It was only then that she saw the rows of sharpened spikes jutting from a long rectangular mat.

  She had never seen a police spike strip before and a part of her still clung to the idea that it was there by mistake. Perhaps it fell from a passing truck, she rationalized. It wasn’t until an electronic chirp sounded behind her that her fear began to ramp up.

  It had come from the piled cars that stretched across the highway, and it repeated every couple of seconds. Sarah swung her Beretta to point at the source of the sound: a little black…

  “What is that?” she asked as she came closer. It looked like a thick black phone sitting under a brick. It chirped again. The sound was a catalyst for her memory and she suddenly knew what she was looking at: a walkie-talkie. It was a two way radio, but what was the brick for? And why was there fishing wire wrapped around it? And why was there a small twig between the brick and the walkie-talkie. It sat squarely on a button that read: Push-To-Talk.

  “Oh shit,” Sarah whispered. She grabbed the fishing line and followed it from the brick to around the axel of the closest car and then right back to the spike strip where her car had severed it. Seeing the simple trap she had stumbled across had her going cold, and expecting to be attacked at that very instant she brought the Beretta up again and trained it all around her, prepared to fight for her life. She progressed in a slow circle, but no attack occurred; there were only a few zombies which she ignored.

  The walkie-talkie chirped again, sending out its poisonous signal. From what she knew of them they could broadcast on different channels and she could imagine the bounty hunter sitting in his Jeep, waiting for signals, each one corresponding to a different area he had trapped.

  In a panic she leapt into the car and stomped the gas. A second later, her rear tires exploded as they passed over the spikes. She let out a little scream, but kept her heel hard to the floorboard. Behind her she left chunks of black, vulcanized rubber—a little at first, however as she swerved back onto the road, a lot!

  The Honda shrieked and rumbled and shook beneath her. The steering was “soft” at first, and then it became chaotic. The car would slide like it was running over butter, then it would hitch and jump as it corrected itself. It stank of burning rubber. She could see smoke in her rearview mirror. She watched the mirror more than she did the road, afraid that at any moment she would see the black Jeep.

  It showed up just about the time the last bit of rubber left her tires and the Honda began making a horrific squealing. The sound could be heard for miles and upwards of a thousand zombies began to head toward it. On a certain level, Sarah knew this, however on a far more overriding level she didn’t care. The bounty hunter had spotted her and was blazing straight down the highway.

  He was far in the distance, just a tiny spec, but that wouldn’t last, not at his speed. She figured she had two minutes before he was on her. Sarah hauled the Honda over to the shoulder of the road where it shuddered to a stop after barely twenty feet. Leaving the keys still in the ignition, she grabbed her Beretta, the backpack that had belonged to the hanged man and the deer rifle. Her eyes fell on the package of diapers and she hesitated.

  “No,” she whispered. At the rate people were having babies, diapers would not be in short supply for many years.

  She left the car and all the possessions she had managed to scrounge and ran for the fence. Zombies ran with her and more ran at her. It was the ones right on the other side of the fence that she worried about. Three quick shots from the Beretta felled the closest of them.

  “Petrovich, Williams, Abraham,” she whispered, pulling her trigger with deliberate cool. By now the black Jeep was at the trap half-a-mile away. She saw a man in camo hop out and drag the spike strip out of the way.

  Sarah had thirty seconds before he would be on her. There weren’t many options left to her: a gun battle that she would likely lose or running away from the bounty hunter and into the arms of a host of undead.

  On the other side of the fence, there was a gentle slope of green that tilted down to the edge of more suburbs. As far as suburbia went, it was at the low end of the spectrum. The houses were tiny, box-like and one step up from mobile homes. There were many hundreds of them crammed into a few acres land. The little town was alive with the undead.

  Sarah chose the dead.

  Chapter 12

  Jillybean

  South of Philadelphia

  At about the time Sarah was scaling a fence with a jeep roaring down on her and a whole throng of zombies converging on her desperate to kill, Neil climbed on his bike and rode away from the little house to continue to scrounge. Bikes were slow and dangerous, especially for Nico who wasn’t vaccinated, however fuel was simply too precious to waste looking for more fuel.

  Sadie was anxious for Neil, and she was afraid in general girlfriend-terms for Nico, however it was her fear for Sarah that occupied her to the greatest extent. How could she do this to us? What was she thinking? Is she trying to kill herself? These three questions Sadie asked aloud over and over. With all her stress, combining with her slowly fading pneumonia she made a poor companion for Jillybean. If she wasn’t worrying, she slept a lot.

  When Jillybean felt Sadie had snoozed long enough, she tried sighing loudly, but the girl didn’t budge. She then did a tap-dance routine that she had learned two years previously. It didn’t have the same flair when performed on linoleum and all Sadie did was roll over.

  “Can’t I go yet?” she asked Ipes when she had finished in a lunge, jazz hands extended and quivering.

  Not yet, he said, shooting her a look. You heard Mister Neil. We h
ave to watch out for her.

  “I don’t thinks that’s what he said exactly,” Jillybean replied. “He said to take care of her. And he told Sadie to stay on the couch. She’s on the couch and she looks taken care of if you ask me. I don’t see what more we can do here. I say we go find that cat we saw before. I’m sure if she’s already in the car, Mister Neil will let us keep her.”

  This nearly did the trick of getting them out of the house. Ipes completely forgot Neil’s instructions and jumped into the planning stage involved in capturing a stray cat and getting it into a car without getting scratched to death. The strategies devised were so in depth that Jillybean also forgot what her main goal was and in the end they stayed indoors, somehow transitioning from building a cat trap to having a tea party.

  “I thought you were supposed to get me up for my evening pills,” Sadie asked a few hours later.

  To this Jilly replied, “Huh? Oh hey, the sun went down.”

  Sadie went to the window and looked out. “It’s been down for a while. Did Nico stop by? He should be back by now, or at the very least he should have stopped by to check in. Did he? No, of course he didn’t. He would’ve woken me up. So what do you think happened?”

  “Nothing, probably. He should be ok,” Jillybean assured her. “He is big even for a grode-up.”

  The Goth girl didn’t find this very reassuring and she stayed at the window long after she should have. Now that Jillybean was aware of the time, she began the steps involved in securing the house: dark sheets went over the windows, she checked the perimeter, and then lit candles for both light and heat.