The Apocalyse Outcasts

by Peter Meredith

  A soldier came at them and Neil forced a smile onto his face, while his mind tried desperately to come up with excuses and aliases, with elaborate back stories, and plausible reasons why they had a bleeding Russian traveling with them. He blanked on everything including common sense.

  He rolled down his window and said, “Hi. Can we get…”

  With a cry, Jillybean pointed and grabbed his arm just as the soldier grabbed his other arm. Her hand was small and her nails were painted purple. The soldier’s hand was large and grey. It was missing all of its finger nails and it smelled of rotting flesh.

  Neil slammed the Tercel in reverse and spun them back, leaving the zombie standing there, holding nothing but a strip of shirt and a little of Neil’s flesh.

  “I would stop if I was you, Mister Neil,” Jillybean informed him as he backed around one turn and then another.

  “Yeah,” agreed Sadie. “That was a soldier zombie. It could have guns we could take. Better guns than this stupid shotgun.”

  Jillybean agreed with an emphatic nod. “Also that was an amba-lance…I mean an am-bu-lance. Didn’t you see the big red cross? That’s what means amba-lance in the army.”

  “I guess I didn’t,” Neil said. He touched his neck where the zombie had scratched him, saying, “Ooh, that smarts.”

  “Thank God, you’re immune,” Sadie said. She smiled in a bittersweet manner, probably remembering Ram just as Neil was. Her look changed to one of mild alarm. “Oh crap, here comes that zombie. He’s got a helmet on. Maybe you should use the shotgun.”

  “No, I don’t want to draw everything else in the forest to us. It’s bad enough with these lights on. I’ll just give him something to think about.” Neil revved the little four-cylinder engine and sent the Toyota buzzing at the onetime army medic. Since there wasn’t a lot of room to gain speed he ended up crushing the thing’s legs and dispatched it seconds later with a blow from his axe to the back of its neck as it crawled toward him.

  Another zombie, this one in a green uniform as well came limping from behind the humvee. Sadly it looked like it had been mostly eaten before it turned. Since there wasn’t much left to it, Neil put it out of its misery, stoutly swinging his axe like a woodsman.

  “Wait here,” he said, leaning down to look into the Tercel. “Hopefully, they have something of value.”

  Behind the boxy ambulance Neil found a dreadful number of bodies. They were the rotting, fly-covered corpses of soldiers. They were heaped in three great piles, each twice as tall as he was. The stench was overpowering and Neil turned away and dry-heaved. Had a zombie come by just then he would have been powerless to fight it.

  When he stopped heaving and belching, Neil pulled his shirt up to cover his face and turned to investigate the ambulance.

  He found guns without bullets, food in brown plastic that said: Meals Ready to Eat, gallon-jugs of fresh waters, and a saggy, half-empty med-kit. This he opened under the full light of the Tercel’s headlamps.

  “What’s in there?” Sadie whispered. She stood with one leg out of the car and one leg in, ready to go in either direction quickly.

  “Uh…some bandages,” he said, squinting at the writing. “And uh, what does that say? Normal Saline? It’s some sort of fluid for IVs. Here’s a BP cuff, a tourniquet…oh, here are some pills.” Neil held it up to the light and read aloud, “Narcan. Don’t know what that is. I know what Naproxin is, it’s a pain reliever. They also have Tylenol.”

  That was it for the med kit. He brought it all to Sadie. “Stay in the car. See if you can read the little print on the bottle that says Narcan. Maybe it will help.”

  Neil hurried back to the ambulance to search inside, and again felt the need to vomit, which he fought, but just barely. Inside the Humvee he started opening drawer after drawer, most of which were empty, however in one he found a gas mask and because of the smell he pulled it out of its handy little carrying case and forced his head into it. Now that the smell was diminished, he could breathe much better but his vision was severely compromised. The lenses in the mask were thick and slightly distorted, and the plastic hood that framed his face and draped over his shoulders gave him zero peripheral vision.

  His lack of vision didn’t really matter; there was nothing to find that would help Nico.

  The last place he checked was in the front. The cab was layered with trash and the spent brass casings of rifle bullets. While pawing through it, hoping to find at least one actual bullet, he found an ammo box under the driver’s seat. Excitedly he pulled it open but blinked behind his round lenses at what he saw: bottles of pills and among them were a few ampoules of clear liquid.

  “I guess it’s something,” he said.

  In three trips he transported the food and the water to the Tercel.

  When he finally climbed in and pulled off his mask, Sadie held up the Narcan. “It’s got something to do with morphine. Like it counteracts it or something. It’s not what we need.”

  Neil showed her the ammo kit. “Look.” They both reached in and started reading labels one after another until Neil found Amoxicillin. “Here we go. Take two by mouth three times daily until gone. This should help, don’t you think?”

  “It couldn’t hurt,” Sadie said.

  After he swallowed his pills Nico passed out and Neil drove on until he found a suitable place to make camp: another of the classless hillbilly homes. This one they were forced to share it with a family of raccoons which lived under the porch.

  They tried the tourniquet on Nico’s arm, which turned his fingers blue, but slowed the rate of bleeding greatly. Neil then brought out the IV kit and the fluids but without instructions he didn’t know what to do.

  “The bleeding will stop on its own,” he said to Sadie who was white with worry. “Don’t you think?” She didn’t know. Exhausted, they dropped off to sleep—Jilly happily sleeping with the Velveteen Rabbit and Ipes, snuggling up to Sadie on the lone mattress. Nico got the couch and Neil slept on more bundled grass. He woke frequently from the itching and the constant comings and goings of the raccoons.

  His sleep was so awful that he slept half the next day away as Sadie drove them further south and west. Nico was neither better nor worse that day. He rallied after sipping on a gallon jug of water until the empty plastic rattled on the floorboards, but then relapsed when Neil tried to get circulation to the cold fingers of his wounded arm by undoing the tourniquet. It was hard, anxious day.

  They made camp that night in northern Georgia near a town called Clayton. They were three hours from Atlanta and already they were seeing orange Xs on doors that denoted someone had been there and searched them.

  Nico’s sluggishness and rapid pulse had Sadie in a frantic state. “Should we give him four of the amoxicillin? Do you think that’ll do anything?” This she asked of Neil but when he only shrugged, Jillybean answered.

  “You want to know what Ipes thinks?” she asked sweetly enough.

  “No!” Sadie practically screamed. “I don’t. I want to know what you think. If you have an idea then spit it out, otherwise…I don’t know what, but you need to stop listening to his voice in your head. It’s not right.”

  The little girl’s mouth came open and in a whisper she said, “He’s just trying to help.”

  “I’m sure he is,” Neil put in, taking her hand. “We’re just worried about you. A make-believe friend is normal, but it can be unhealthy if you let it take over your personality.”

  “I don’t think Ipes is doing that at all. I’m the boss of him. He can’t boss me around if that’s what you mean.”

  “Yeah, that’s what we mean,” Sadie said. “Look, I’m sorry, but you can’t let him do your thinking, Jillybean. You are very smart. Now tell me what your idea is because I’m going out of my head. Nothing is working.”

  “Ipe…I mean, I think the pills and the bandages aren’t working because we haven’t gotten to the…what’s the word, Ipes? Oh yeah, the root of the problem. That’s what means he thinks part of the
bullet may still be in Nico’s arm. If it’s sharp it’ll keep being like a saw, you know what I mean? Every time he moves it’ll cut open the old healed part. That’s what Ipe...I mean that’s what I think.”

  Neil and Sadie looked at each other. He could tell she was realizing the same thing as he was: one way or the other, somebody was going to have to operate on Nico.

  “You do it, Neil,” Sadie said in a rush. “I’ll screw it up. I’ll kill him, I know it.”

  The words made his head go light so he sat down on a chair. They were once again in gentlemen farm country where the houses sprawled out over the smooth hills and the homes retained their charm even though their owners had long ago died in great violence.

  Neil couldn’t see the charm just then. His mind was fixated on Nico’s wound, on the idea of gouts of blood and maybe a great bubble of pus hidden in the black edges of the wound. Taking a deep breath he tried to order his thoughts. “I’m going to need some boiling water to sterilize everything, and Nico’s going to want to have some of that morphine. And…and I need some towels to soak up the blood and…and I think I may throw-up. Jilly can you get me a bucket or something?”

  He was able to hold down the MRE he had eaten for dinner, barely. When the feeling of nausea passed he took stock of what he had to work with and knew it wouldn’t be enough. Their sharpest knife was a bowie-knife which was more of a stabbing instrument. It had a great point, and with it he could kill a zombie in one blow, however its edge was too dull to slice even paper.

  A second problem confronting them was that they didn’t have any surgical thread to sew up the wound when he was done and Neil feared that using anything else would only bring on more infection. The third issue Neil had was with their environment. The house was nice but it wasn’t sterile, not even close.

  “I can’t do it,” he said. “Not here, not with what I have to work with.”

  Sadie’s hands crumpled into fists which shook in her anxiety. “But this is all we have. We’ve looked everywhere from here to West Virginia and this is it. You’ve seen the Xs. Who knows how far they’ve gone looting everything. So, you have to make do with what we have. Somehow.”

  “I might kill him,” Neil said in a whisper. “There’s an artery right in his arm, a big one. My knife is really dull, if it slips, that’ll be it.”

  “Then don’t slip!” Sadie cried.

  “I know where there’s stuff that might help him,” Jillybean said with her hand in the air. Before she went on, her eyebrows shot up and she stared at her zebra in amazement. “Why are you talking like that? It’s not too dangerous.”

  “What is it?” Neil asked. “What’s dangerous?”

  Jillybean went from confusion to cool assertiveness in the blink of an eye. “It’s nothing. Just a mix up, but we’ve got it straightened out.”

  “Ipes?” Neil asked, feeling his stomach drop. “Is that you?”

  Jillybean cleared her throat and said, “Yes.”

  Sadie’s dark eyes were round circles of black fear in her head. She knelt down in front of the little girl and said, “I need to talk to Jillybean. Let me talk to Jillybean. We need to hear her idea, ok? Please?”

  “No,” Jillybean stated. “It’ll get her killed and I know that doesn’t concern you, but it concerns us very much.”

  Quick as lightning, Sadie shot out her hand and snatched the zebra from Jillybean’s slack grip. The Goth girl then took a firm hold of the stuffed animal and started twisting Ipes’ head around. “Tell me or else.”

  “I wouldn’t do that if I was you,” Jillybean said. Despite her cool words, her lips were tight against her teeth and her fingers were hooked into claws. “What do you think will happen to me if you destroy…my body? Do you think I’ll go away? If there’s nowhere for Jillybean to put me, I’ll be forced to stay inside her, and there’s not much room in there.”

  Neil stepped forward to come between them. “Sadie, don’t hurt the zebra, and you, Ipes, there’s a life on the line here.”

  “Yes, Jillybean’s. All she ever does is give and all you guys ever do is take. If you cared about her, it would be different, but she’s just the weird kid that hangs around, forgotten until it’s time for her to bail you guys out one more time. She’ll die for you, Mister Neil, even though you were the one who wanted to trade her. Who knows what craziness you have planned for her when you get to New Eden, another trade, maybe?”

  “No,” Neil replied in a weak voice.

  “As for you, Sadie, all she wants is to be…to be…” It looked as though Jillybean had lost her train of thought or that she was trying to remember some key bit of information that was very important.

  “Jillybean!” Neil yelled suddenly, making Sadie jump and Jilly blink.

  “Yeah?” she asked. “What’s wrong? Why are you yelling, Mister Neil? Why are you guys looking at me like that?”

  Neil forced a fake smile onto his face, but tempered it with concern in his voice, “Jillybean, honey, there’s something…”

  Sadie interrupted, “Sorry, Neil, first things first. Jilly, we need to know your plan to help Nico.”

  Jillybean put a hand to her head, touching it like it had grown big or didn’t feel the same. “Um…All that stuff you need? I think it’s at the CDC,” she said. “Miss Sarah told me they had a hospital and she told me everyone left in a rush, like in only a few minutes. There’s no way they got it all out of there in time. So it’s probably just sitting there.”

  “You’re forgetting the germs,” Neil said. “That’s the reason people left in the first place. We can’t go within a mile of that place.”

  “Maybe you can with that.” She pointed at the gas mask. “I’d also get like a scuba-man suit and some gloves and some big rubber boots. All that stuff we can find easily. It’ll keep the germs off of you and in all the doctor shows surgery stuff is sealed up in plastic. So that should be safe if we can wash it really well.”

  “Will this really work?” Sadie asked Neil.

  He was slow to answer as his mind worked feverishly to come up with a reason why it wouldn’t. Eventually he had to concede, “I don’t see why not.”

  All that night he stretched his imagination for a reason why it wouldn’t work. Unfortunately he couldn’t come up with one, which meant he was stuck going into, what he considered was one of the scariest places on earth. With a feeling of dread like a cold boulder sitting in his belly, Neil got them going early and drove without stop to the CDC.

  Chapter 27

  Sarah

  New Eden

  The doors to the silo opened with a heavy creaking. It covered the sound of her swallowing, which was loud in her ears, as was her breath that ran in and out with gathering speed. Sarah couldn’t feel her hands. It was as though she possessed ghost hands and the feeling, or rather the lack of feeling, was slowly spreading up from her wrists.

  Behind the door were armed men. To her surprise one of her former traveling partners was among them, Sadie’s ex-boyfriend, Mark. He was a big man and carried a big gun, however she knew that he was also somewhat of a coward. He was the slowest of the five to step forward.

  “Whatchu two want?” one of the men demanded in a drawl. He had a bit of a gut and more than a bit of a swagger to him as he came to stand close to Artie. Sarah recognized him as the door warden from her previous trip to New Eden and she knew that he’d be thorough in his search of her. He’d find the pistol that sat clenched in one of her ghost hands down deep in the pocket of her coat.

  Sarah cleared her throat and, pitching her voice a little lower than usual, said, “We’re looking for the prophet Abraham. We heard…” Her mind suddenly became a complete blank as Mark turned his attention on her. He had been eyeing Artie but with the door warden staring down at the lunatic and clearly intimidating him, Mark looked closer at Sarah.

  “Ya heard what?” the door warden demanded.

  “That, that, y-you’d take us in,” Sarah said. With Mark so close she couldn’t stop herself
and she dropped her chin, unable to look him in the eye. “We heard this was a place for believers.”

  The door warden bobbed his head at this. “It is and it isn’t, dependin’ on what it is y’all believe.”

  He was clearly looking for them to explain what it was they believed, but it was then that Mark touched her chin with one of his large hands; lifting it with gentle pressure to get a good look at her face. She tried tightening her lips, drawing them in so that they didn’t look so full, and she let the Georgia sun strike her eyes so that she had an excuse to blink and squint.

  Still, recognition was slowly dawning in his face when Artie spoke up: “I know we believe in beams, and the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, and all that is seen and unseen…like the beams. And that the government is sucking us down and we believe that I’m the mayor of Easton and that I was fairly elected by one vote regardless of what dead Ponytail Bob thinks.”

  The men, including Mark glanced at each other and then at Artie. “What beams is that?” the door warden asked. His beard, large as it was, could not hide the fact that his lip was curled in manner that suggested Artie was distasteful to him. “What’s he on about?”

  “Only that we’re from Easton,” Sarah answered, quickly. “It’s in Maryland near Baltimore. He’s Artie and I’m Janice Sills. We heard that there was a prophet that took in good people if they believed and we wanted to see for ourselves this, uh, paradise.”

  “The beams can’t get you underground,” Artie added, tipping the door warden a wink.

  “I get it, it’s another one those shitheels,” Mark said, abrasively, displaying his trademark toughness and courage when he was certain there was nothing to fear. The door warden elbowed him back.

  “What did I say about y’all’s cussing?” he barked before turning back to Sarah and apologizing. “Sorry ‘bout that ma’am. He’s still green, but for cryin’ out loud he shoulda knowd better.”

  Before Sarah could say anything, Artie put in, “It’s the beams. They’re melting his brain. Why do you think they all turn grey? It’s their brains melted out of their heads. Ask Janice, she knows. She knows and I know.”