By the time the sun set on that hellish day, she had finally left the city behind. Without regard to Artie’s wish to go back to his hometown, she went south, as she had planned. He didn’t notice as he spent most of the time hiding from beams beneath his coat.
She drove long after it was safe—meaning she drove after it was dark and the zombies were more energetic and seemed to multiply in numbers. Still, she managed to find a roadside bar outside of Aquia, Virginia that had, at one time, been fortified against the beasts. Its windows were boarded over and it possessed sturdy doors of oak. It even had a fireplace and a small amount of alcohol left on its shelves.
Artie did not partake in any of the alcohol, nor did he come to sit by the little fire Sarah had kindled. Instead, he stumped about, squinting through the cracks of the boarded windows until he had convinced himself they had traveled the wrong way. He confronted Sarah over this seemingly insurmountable fact, waving his pipe as he spoke.
When he was riled he made her nervous. When he was riled and swinging the pipe she was nervous enough to keep her hand on the grip of her .38. “It was the government, again,” she explained, riffing off the top of her head. “They, uh, they switched the directions: north is now south. They’re trying to confuse us, but don’t worry, I got it covered.”
Not only did he believe this, he fully endorsed the idea and couldn’t wait to see the sun rise in the west or to see if the stars in the sky had been moved as well. He went back to the windows to watch. Sarah found a bottle of tequila and drank until he no longer seemed so crazy. It took a lot of tequila to get her there.
“Love you Eve,” she whispered before closing her eyes. Then with them closed she added, “Love you Neil and Sadie and Brit…” her mind cast a fleeting glimpse of Jillybean across what was left of her conscious, but Sarah didn’t add the little girl’s name to her list.
“If I do, she’ll die because of me,” Sarah said, slurring the words that gradually dropped into less than a whisper. “Everyone I love has to die…unless I go first.”
The next morning her hangover was intense. A warm shower would have helped but God had sent her a cool rain instead. It was better than nothing. She stood under a downspout with her .38 hanging on a nail within arm’s reach. The water and the soap sloughed away a good deal of her peeling skin, and for the first time in days it didn’t hurt to smile. When she was done she tried to get Artie to shower as well, which he refused to do on account of the beams of course.
“They can’t get you in the rain,” she said, as though she were an expert on the subject of nonexistent beams. “They wash right off.” He began to shake his head at this and she tried: “What about Beth?”
“What about Beth?” he asked slowly, looking at her through partially slitted eyes.
“Don’t you want to look good for her when she comes back? Remember New Eden and going to see the prophet? He can help us. He can…he can heal her.”
“But she’s in Easton. I know she is. We’re supposed to be going back to Easton. Maybe we can get her and bring her with us. Does that sound good?”
Sarah’s teeth ground together in frustration, but she did her best not to let it show. “Yes it does, but only if you get cleaned up first. You don’t look like yourself anymore, that’s why I didn’t recognize you at first back in that alley in Easton. It’s probably why you didn’t recognize me, Janice, either.” He started to look at her with his crazier-than-usual eyes so she added, “But, if you don’t care enough to look good for your wife…”
He insisted that he did and when he went out in the rain armed with soap and shampoo, Sarah slid down the wall, wondering how she was going to fool him into thinking he was going to Easton, Maryland when every road sign they passed would be pointing them to Georgia. “He’ll forget,” she told herself. “He’s so crazy he doesn’t know which way up is. He will forget all about this in a few hours.”
But he didn’t forget. Artie latched onto the idea of seeing his wife. He even allowed Sarah to cut his hair and trim back his beard and, later when they passed an outlet mall, he was the one who suggested they stop and get him clothes that were presentable.
She tried her best to get him fixated on a new idea, such as beams or Area 51 and, for an hour, the Bermuda Triangle, and he would, for a little while, stop torturing himself with the vision of Beth. But he never forgot they were supposed to be going to Easton and he grew quickly suspicious with every road sign that pointed them to Richmond, or Charleston.
At first she stuck with the concept of the changing polarity of the earth’s magnetic force and how that would work to deviate their perceptions. “It’s all alien cell technology,” she insisted.
This worked for the remainder of that day until in the evening when they slipped across the border from North Carolina into South Carolina.
“This is wrong,” he said, pointing out the car window at the sun which hung just above the horizon far to the west. “That sun is wrong and this road is wrong. This is all wrong! You’ve been taking us south haven’t you?” His pipe rested against the SUV’s door. When he grabbed it she put her hand in her coat pocket, wrapping her fingers around the butt of the gun and slipping one around the trigger, ready to put a hole in her coat and in Artie.
She started to shake her head but then his eyes went wide and he pointed again out the window. “They’ve changed the poles back!” he cried. “That’s what they did. North is north. That’s what happened. I know.” Unexpectedly, he opened the car door and she only just managed to stop before he jumped out.
He raved at the sky while Sarah seethed in fury. “How is this happening to me?” she demanded, punching the steering wheel. The answer slipped into her consciousness: Because you are using this poor, crazy guy and you deserve everything you get.
This was truth.
“Yeah, but…” she said as a hundred rationalizations sprang to mind. Yeah, but nothing. You’re as evil as all the rest.
More painful truth.
With a sigh, she opened the door to the Navigator and slid out. With her mind so jumbled between sort-of right and sort-of wrong, she almost left the .38 behind. A charging zombie reminded her. She ran back for it and, displaying her growing confidence with weapons, she put a burning hunk of lead into the zombie’s forehead from ten feet,
Before it was done flopping about, she went to talk to Artie.
“Did you hear the good news?” he asked her. “They’ve changed the poles back. We can go home to Easton. I’ll be mayor and Beth can be deputy mayor. That’s a new position, but I’m going to need her help. I know. But thank God about the poles, right?”
“It’s not that simple,” Sarah said, feeling her soul wrinkle and shrink within her.
Artie turned on her. “Why? What have you heard?”
“It’s the gravity,” she said. “It’s been adjusted. We’re being pulled south. We can’t fight it.”
Artie’s knees buckled and he dropped to the grass at the edge of the road. He began to cry miserably. “Why would they do that? Why would anyone?”
“Because the world is evil now and people are evil,” she said, admitting as much truth as either of them could handle at the moment. “I promise you, Artie, I’ll do my best to get you home when this is all over.”
He seemed like a little boy just then with his tears and his hair that he couldn’t seem to overrule. “When will that be?”
Unless something went horribly wrong, they’d make it to New Eden the next day and she planned on stealing her baby back as soon as possible. “Very soon,” Sarah said. She then pointed up at the darkening twilight. “We’d better find a place to sleep. They don’t call them moonbeams for nothing.”
It had meant to be a joke, but Artie no longer understood humor and so he hurried back to the Navigator, leaving Sarah alone with the greasy feel of evil coating her insides. She meant to keep her promise to Artie, if she lived, but she knew that was going to take a miracle.
That night they slept in a lonely
farmhouse. It had a perfectly useable barn with a loft that would guarantee them protection, only Sarah couldn’t force herself to go into it. Barns and haylofts had been hers and Neil’s thing. It almost felt like cheating on him to use one.
So she stayed in the farmhouse with Artie and fell asleep to the moans of the undead in the pasture. By ten the next morning they crossed into Georgia and by two in the afternoon they were on the edge of a field looking up at a familiar silo. The air hung about them stiff and unmoving; the field was silent and empty; the corn was alive with the dead. Sarah wore a sheen of sweat, though the day was as nice a Georgia day as you could ask for.
“Are we here?” Artie asked.
“Yeah.”
Chapter 26
Neil
Western Appalachians
The night Nico was shot they slept in a cabin deep in the backcountry of West Virginia. There didn’t seem to be much more to the state than backcountry, Neil thought. It all seemed rather tree-ish and dirty, and there were far too many bugs in West Virginia for his tastes.
The cabin wasn’t up to his refined sense of discrimination either. It was only slightly larger than the outhouse which sat at the edge of the backyard. What’s more, the cabin was filthy in a manner that skeeved him out. Nothing looked to have been vacuumed or dusted in years. In the kitchen the walls were waterproofed and hermetically sealed by a quarter-inch of layered grease. A number of dead cockroaches lay, legs up, in the sink. Neil walked about with his hands pulled in and forbid Jillybean to touch anything.
The cabin did have one thing in its favor: it had running water. Not in the traditional sense with taps and a faucet, instead it had a well and a hand pump. There was even a garden hose that could stretch into the kitchen or to the little cube of a room right off of it. They called this the bathroom, though once again it was a most incomplete bathroom since it held only a claw-footed bath tub and a mirror.
Despite his exhaustion and the stress of the long day, Neil cleaned the bathtub, started a fire, heated round stones that Jillybean collected for him, and filled the tub three different times with warm water so everyone could bathe. Nico refused his opportunity. His arm pained him too much and he feared it would get infected if it got wet. It was only when Neil boiled water especially to clean the wound that he allowed them to touch his bandages.
The process turned out to be a mistake. The bandages, sodden and black with congealed blood were so bound to the wound that by taking them off, Neil accidently started Nico bleeding again. Regardless, Neil bathed the wound and wrapped it a second time. Unfortunately, it leaked blood in a steady manner despite everything Neil tried. By the time midnight rolled around, Neil had a mound of blood-soaked rags that sat higher than his knee.
Nico had either passed out or had fallen asleep at this point and Neil finally went to bed and was so exhausted that he didn’t care his mattress was nothing more than piles of grass Sadie had tucked under a sheet.
Sadie came to him the next morning when he was picking ants out of his hair and looking around blearily. “I know you want to find Sarah,” she said, “but we have to do something about Nico, first. We need new bandages and antibiotics and I don’t know what else. He won’t stop bleeding, so we’ll need stitches probably. I don’t know anything about stitches. Do you?”
“I think it’s sort of like sewing,” Neil replied, hoping the shiver that went down his back wasn’t as noticeable as it felt. The idea of sewing real human flesh skeeved him out worse than seeing what had been left in the outhouse.
She hadn’t noticed the shiver; she was staring blankly at the floor. “I can’t sew at all,” she whispered as if it were a personal failing on her part. “My mom never taught me and I didn’t take Home Economics in school. Only the ugly girls took Home-ec.”
“Is that right?” Neil said. He had taken Home-ec for two years in high school. At the time it seemed more suitable for him than Shop class, which was chock full of bullies. “I think I could manage a stitch or two.” As long as I don’t throw up in the process, he thought.
Their main problem wasn’t Neil’s weak stomach; it was the fact that they were still being hunted. At midday, after many miles of driving, they had searched the offices of three small-town doctors and came away empty-handed. They decided to creep down out of the hills and see what the town of Edray, West Virginia had to offer.
“Pocahontas Memorial Hospital,” read Neil from a phonebook he had liberated from a now defunct gas station.
“Pocahontas?” Jillybean asked. “Is that for reals?”
“Looks that way,” Neil replied, tossing the book out the window and tuning south on route 55.
“Will it have that little dog?” Jillybean asked, staring all around at the remains of the dead town. “Or the raccoon? I can’t believe this is for reals. Oh, my goodness! Look, there’s a sign. That word is Pocahontas, I know it. It is for real.”
“What are you talking about?” Neil’s mind wasn’t following the little girl’s odd questions, it was consumed with the horrific images of what he would find in the hospital. How many zombies would there be roaming the halls or chained to beds? And what sort of state would they be in? And how hungry would they be? He began to sweat.
“Pocahontas,” Jillybean said as way of explanation. “It was a movie with a dog and a raccoon and a hummingbird, and an Indian girl, and a guy from England, though he sounded like he was from Philly, like me. Ipes said it was true but I thought that he was being a jokester as always. But, wow, there really is a Pocahontas.”
Neil, who had zero experience with children’s movies, only grunted in reply. He was busy planning. “Jillybean, you’re going to wait in the car with Nico. Make sure you don’t draw attention to yourself, but if for some reason you get in trouble, honk the horn. Sadie, you take the shotgun. I’ll have my axe…”
Sitting up high in her seat, Jillybean was watching ardently for the coming hospital with a hopeful expression on her face. This turned to bug-eyed fear the second the building came into view. “Stop! Stop the car. Look!”
There was a green-camouflaged Humvee parked square in front of the main entrance to the hospital. Neil hit the brakes so hard, everyone was flung forward.
“Please be careful,” Sadie said as Nico grunted in pain.
“If we’re still alive in five minutes, I’ll be careful then,” Neil shot back, turning the wheel sharply and gunning the car around in a tight circle. He blazed down route 55, while behind him a soldier dashed into the hospital.
“They saw us,” Sadie cried. “Hurry, Neil!”
He pushed the Tercel to its greatest speed which wasn’t in any way blinding, however, by the time the soldier had rushed back out of the hospital and jumped in the Humvee, Neil had a four minute head start.
This he did not squander on a high-speed chase down the highway. Although the forest and hills was the terrain the Humvee had been created for, Neil took the little Toyota off-road as soon as he was out of sight. It was a completely unexpected move and they were able to breathe a sigh of relief a few minutes later as they saw, below them, the army vehicle continue on down the interstate.
“This isn’t happening,” Sadie said in disbelief. “How do they keep finding us like that?”
“Ipes says it’s easy since they know where we are and where we’re going,” Jillybean said. “He also says we should…never mind. He’s being bad again.”
Neil wanted to know what the zebra had to say, but Sadie overruled him. “We need to stop relying on Jillybean and what she hears from…other sources.” She gave Neil a pinched look which he took to mean he wasn’t supposed to bring up Ipes anymore.
He gave her a shrug and asked, “Then what do we do and where do we turn? I’m almost out of ideas here.”
Sadie dropped her head and said, “Maybe if I took Nico and left, you could…”
“Stop it,” Neil said cutting her off. He started driving again, southwest just as he had all morning. “You’re my family now, Sadie. We d
on’t leave family behind. We’ll keep going, is what we’ll do. I’m sure we’ll find another hospital or something.”
They did find something, and just in time. In spite of Neil’s care, or perhaps because of it, Nico’s wound would not stop trickling blood at a steady rate. He grew sickly pale and drowsy in a worrisome way. As the afternoon faded he seemed confused about where they were going and he sometimes spoke Russian in angry tones. Sadie insisted they keep driving regardless of the night and the waking of the undead. She feared that if they waited until morning to find help he would be too far gone.
This fear had been planted in her head by none other than Ipes, who had earlier been placed in the trunk for an hour for misbehaving. According to Jillybean, he came out with a better attitude and described the nature of shock, what he worried was happening to Nico.
“I thought shock had to do with getting a bad fright,” Sadie said. “You know, like if you see a ghost, you go into shock.”
“No, it’s what means he’s doesn’t have enough blood,” the little girl explained in awed tones of fright. “Like a vampire got him, ‘cept it’s on account of his wound. We saw it on a show about doctors but it was for grode-ups and was sorta boring so I didn’t pay attention so much.”
Neil knew it was a real condition, so he ruled out Sadie’s ghost theory. “Did the TV show explain what to do when someone’s in shock?”
“Take him to the hospital?” Jillybean said with a shrug. “They also covered him up and put his feet in the air a little, but I don’t really know what else.”
Sadie moaned at this. “We have to do something. His heart’s going really fast.”
Neil promised that they would “figure something out” but all he knew to do was to keep driving and hoping. In the dark, the woods felt extremely close and the turns very tight. He was forced to drive slowly which made bumbling over zombies a queasy endeavor. Still he persevered until he rounded a twist in the road and not twenty feet away was another military Humvee. It had them dead to rights and Neil could do nothing but sit there waiting on the inevitable.
The Apocalyse Outcasts Page 22
