by Paul Hetzer
I smiled at her. “That’s not an option. Besides, he said that they would wait through tomorrow for us to find them. We have time.” Although my heart was saying we didn’t. “We’ll stay here tonight and go find them in the morning.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah, I’m not going to leave you. We’re a team now.”
She smiled at me through her busted mouth and took my hand in hers. I gave it a squeeze and then stood up. “Hungry?” I asked.
“Yes. And I have to pee something awful.”
“I’ll help you to the bathroom and while you’re taking care of business I’ll see what I can scrounge us up.” I walked her down to the bathroom, handing her the bathroom kit I had put together.
She took it with a sly smile. “Trying to tell me something mister?”
“Yeah, darling, you stink,” I replied half in jest and winked at her.
She wrinkled her puffy nose and sniffed loudly. “Eew, I think you’re right!” She laughed and disappeared into the bathroom, her steps still unsteady.
I searched through the snack aisles of the store to put us together some type of supper and made sure we had enough to carry us over when we got back on the road. It was all junk food. On a bright note, there was plenty of bottled water.
The evening passed slowly, with a scattering of heart hammering dread thrown in whenever any of the infected would get it into their heads to try to breach the entrance again with their sudden pounding. It was often enough that it kept us both on edge. We broke open an UNO deck that I found in one of the aisles and played cards by candlelight until nearly midnight. We finally curled up together on the carpeted floor with Kera snuggling up against my chest and falling instantly to sleep.
Sleep came slowly to me that night. The loss of Holly was raw in my heart and I found myself several times hugging Kera tight to me and silently sobbing over the loss of my beloved wife.
I awoke to find Kera gone. It was dark in the store even though I could see the sun was up by the light pouring in through the front windows. I looked over the counter and saw her exiting the bathroom up front. The pressure on my bladder reminded me that I should get up and do the same.
Kera came around the corner of the counter and smiled at me.
“Good morning.”
“How are you feeling this morning?” I know that question was probably getting overused now.
“My head feels better.” She gingerly touched her face with her small fingers, wincing when they probed her bandages.
The tape I had used to hold her head gauze on was coming undone from her sweating in the heat of the store’s interior. I grabbed some fresh gauze and wrapped it tightly around her head like a scene from The Red Badge of Courage.
“I’m pretty hungry now.”
I smiled. “Well that’s a good sign. Do you still feel lightheaded?”
She shook her head no and I handed her a pack of the peanut butter crackers from the small backpack. She devoured them ravenously.
“Do you think you can leave here?” I asked hopefully. My son was out there somewhere waiting for me. I couldn’t afford to delay any more. It was time to leave.
She nodded and started into her second pack of crackers, grimacing with each bite when the salt stung her injured lips. She finished a bottle of water then got shakily to her feet. She swooned into my arms before regaining her balance.
“I stood up too fast.”
“Take it slow. I don’t want to rush you,” I said, even though I did.
She let go of me and stood on her own, swaying slightly, the top of her head barely coming to my chin. I picked up the rifle, clipped it back to the sling that was still around my shoulder, then threw on the small backpack. I took her by the arm and led her to the drive-up window which I promptly opened, letting in a fresh breeze that felt wonderful in the hot, stuffy room.
“I guess you want me to crawl through that?” she asked with mock skepticism.
I did laugh at ‘cwawl’ although only slightly. “I’ll go out first and make sure the coast is clear then I’ll help you out.”
I stuck my head out the window and craned my neck to look both ways down the access road. Nothing moved in the shimmering heat. It was only 0900 hours and it was already hot and muggy. I ducked back in and threw the small pack out the window, then unclipped the rifle and handed it to Kera.
I slid out the window on my belly, feet first and landed lightly on the curb. Kera handed out the rifle and I surveyed my surroundings. I saw some Loonies far across the intersection, although they paid me no notice, yet. Behind me, Kera grunted as her small tennis-shoed feet poked through the entrance, followed by her filly-like legs. I grabbed her ankles and pulled her through the window and made sure her feet found the top of the curb. When she was standing beside me I retrieved the pack from the ground and looked toward the woods. I took Kera by the hand and as inconspicuously as possible we slinked off toward the cool safety and concealment of the forest.
CHAPTER 16
We escaped from the pharmacy and ran into the shadowed depths of the thick summer undergrowth where Kera pulled me to a stop. I looked back at her questioningly.
“My gun!” she said. “Dude I can’t do this without it.”
I had the rifle and the .45 in my hip holster plus some extra ammo for each, but the bulk of our ammo was in the packs. I also had to admit that Kera could kick some Loony ass with the semi-auto shotgun.
I sighed. “Okay, wait here while I go take a look.” I glanced at my watch. 0920 hours. We still had most of the day ahead of us. It shouldn’t take us long to cover the four miles to my son, that is, if we walked the road. Here in this thick tangled undergrowth, it may take us a day. I removed the small pack and tossed it to the ground next to her.
“If it looks like I can get to them without any trouble, I’ll try, otherwise we’ll have to leave them.” I pulled out my handgun. “Here, take this until I get back.”
She took the gun and thanked me.
“Rest up. I won’t be longer than fifteen minutes.”
She plopped down onto the soft, rotting leaves from last year’s fall. I turned and headed back the way we had come.
When I reached the forest edge I stayed hidden behind the dense green foliage that bordered it. There were only a handful of Loonies left by the pharmacy. Two sat in the vestibule of the entrance, their backs against the hard metal of the case I had shoved across the doorway. They seemed to be sleeping.
If I could make it undetected to the first of the cars stalled in the intersection, I should be able to get to our abandoned equipment without being seen. That first part was a big if. There was about fifty yards of open space I would have to dash across with those creatures half that distance away. Then I would have to run back across that space again carrying all the gear.
I guess the question was – was I feeling lucky today? The closest Loonies I would pass were lying in the shade of a tree near the building. I couldn’t tell if they were truly asleep. They were two men and four women. Most of them had discarded their clothing except for a few odds and ends that still clung to their dirty frames. I could do this, I told myself.
I loosened the strap on the rifle sling so that it was ready if needed, took a deep breath and dashed across the dirt lot between the woods and the intersection. I ran at a half-crouch, staying low and silent. It seemed like it took forever, but I finally reached the first car, a newer model Chrysler Sebring. Both doors were open and black patches of blood stained the leather seats. I glanced through the open doors toward the reclining group of infected. None of them had stirred, and my confidence picked up. I sprinted to the next vehicle, keeping it between me and the Loonies. The guns and packs were sitting next to the dried, dark patch of Kera’s blood. The body of the Loony I had shot lay nearby, already beginning to bloat in the heat. I ducked and ran the rest of the way to the gear and dropped to my knees beside it. I slung both Kera’s shotgun and Holly’s rifle over my shoulder and slid into my
backpack.
I put one of the straps from Kera’s pack over the muzzle of a rifle and thus loaded stood up, and was nearly face to face with a tall, lanky, dark-haired man. I almost screamed. Almost. He put his finger to his mouth to shush me. He quietly snuck around the front of the car to stand before me. I looked back over his shoulder to the group that I had been watching, they still remained motionless.
“They’s all dead,” he stated matter-of-factly in a gritty voice and held up a large blood-stained bowie knife. My apprehension was building.
He gave me a twisted smile, exhibiting a set of crooked yellowed teeth with two missing in the front. He had a wad of chew between his cheek and gum.
I noticed a revolver tucked into the waistband of his dated corduroy pants.
I backed up a step. “Thank you,” I said trying to sound casual. “My name is Steve.”
His crooked grin broadened and became even more unbelievably crooked. “I’m George.”
He held out a bony hand for me to shake. I could see dirt caked behind his long, ragged fingernails. The knife was still displayed in his left hand. A drop of blood rolled down the hilt and onto a finger, then hung there tenaciously before departing on its journey to the ground.
I looked back up into his vacant gray eyes; his smile did not reach them.
Instead of taking his hand I took another step back. My spidey-sense was tingling like mad.
He seemed to not notice my slight and dropped his hand. “I seen you and the young gal leave that there CVS and run off into the woods.” He loudly spat a wad of tobacco juice onto the body of the dead, bloated Loony.
This guy was definitely not hitting on all six cylinders.
“That’s nice, George. Where did you uh, come from?” I stole another step backwards.
His grin disappeared momentarily, revealing something else hidden beneath, something that sent a chill down my spine.
“Was y’all the ones making all that racket yesterday?” He took two steps closer. “Y’all got all them ghouls all stirred up now, you sure as hell did.”
I took a step back and he matched me with a step forward, like some deranged dancer.
“Them ghouls, they killed my May-Bell!” His mouth was no longer smiling, a line of brown spittle spilled down the side of his mouth. “Karen did it, she was one of ‘em, she was eatin’ on May-Bell. Lordy, I couldn’t let Karen be doing that to her.” He patted the revolver at his waist.
That explains the dead waitresses, I thought to myself.
“Where’s yur lady friend at?”
“Listen,” I said calmly, avoiding his question, “I have to get going. It was nice meeting you, George.”
He was having none of that. He spat another wad of juice near my boot.
“Y’all ain’t leaving me here alone with these ghouls. I ain’t for that!”
He reached out quick as a snake and grabbed at my wrist. I barely twisted out of his grasp and leveled my rifle at his chest.
“Now George, you don’t want to do anything stupid.” I emphasized the last words with a shake of the barrel.
His eyes dropped to the rifle. “Well that ain’t nice, fella.” His face darkened with anger as his voice rose.
I couldn’t take my eyes from him, though I knew our conversation wouldn’t go unnoticed very long.
He forced his crooked grin again, “Come on, fella, take me to yur friend.”
The hard, cold look in his eyes left no doubt in my mind what he would ‘do’ to my friend.
“George, you better get on your way. You can’t come with me.”
The grin quickly disappeared and hate and madness that rivaled that of the Loonies filled his eyes.
“That ain’t very nice!” he snarled. His knife hand came up and swung across my belly, snagging briefly on my tee-shirt, but somehow missing the skin. I pulled the trigger on the rifle before he completed the arc beneath it. The round punched a hole through his chest below the right pocket of his blue and white striped shirt. He stared down at his chest in disbelief, then his legs buckled and he fell to the pavement.
“Ow! Ow! Ow!” he screamed loudly, bloody froth mixed with tobacco juice erupting around his lips. He still clutched the knife tightly in his left hand as he rolled around in agony on the ground.
I saw movement in the distance as his shrill screams brought out the Loonies from their haunts like a siren’s call. I thought about putting another round through his skull to shut him up, but then decided this screaming beacon would probably keep the Loonies occupied long enough for me to escape back into the woods.
I ran back along the cars, hearing George’s agonized cries filling the air behind me. I glanced back once when I neared the wood line and saw nearly two-dozen infected converging on the screaming man. By the time I was fifty feet into the woods his cries had been cut short.
Kera was on her feet and nearly in hysterics when I burst through the woods into the little clearing where I had left her. She ran up and threw her arms around me in a hug.
“I thought that was you screaming!” she cried. “I thought they had gotten you after I heard the shot!”
I dropped the packs and guns and hugged her back. It felt good to have the close human contact after that experience.
I pulled her down to the ground with me, my legs collapsing from underneath me. I was still shaking from the encounter with George.
“What happened?” she asked.
I shook my head, trying to formulate my thoughts. “I-I had to kill someone.”
“A loonie?”
“He was kinda off his mental reservation, so to speak, but he wasn’t one of them.”
“Why’d you kill him?”
“Because he would have killed me and then come for you,” I stated bluntly. I ran my fingers through my hair nervously. “I never had to shoot a person before, at least not one that was still human.”
She put her hand on my forearm in sympathy. “I’m sure you had no choice.”
“That’s how close it was.” I grabbed my tee-shirt and displayed the new cut in the already ragged material.
“Are you cut?” she asked with concern.
“No. I was damn lucky.”
There was a loud snarl in the distance behind us that sent a chill down both of our spines.
“Can we get outta here?” She stared back over my shoulder, shivering.
“Yeah.”
We packed the contents of the school pack into our bigger packs then stood and donned our gear. I decided to veer toward the road that I hoped Jeremy and Frank had taken. It was the only main thoroughfare that went west from where we had abandoned the truck. If they had taken another route we might never find them.
We emerged into the bright morning sunshine, already dripping sweat from the hike through the woods in the warm, humid air. The road was clear of infected. We set off at as fast a pace as I could force on Kera, up the grassy berm that paralleled the roadway. After a quarter of an hour we passed the entrance to the housing development that we had skirted several nights ago. My heart squeezed in pain at the thought of Holly lying in her leafy grave so close by. I would give anything to see her again, just talk to her one more time. I knew that her loss would be a hole in my soul that would never be filled.
We walked further from the center of the shopping district, and signs of civilization began to thin out. Soon it was only thick pine and hardwood forest with an occasional home embedded in their midst. We found only the infrequent abandoned car along the road, and the one that did have its keys in the dash had a dead battery.
“Steve,” Kera called out from behind me. “I need a break, my head is spinning.”
We had been on the road for about an hour since leaving the woods. Our packs must have weighed about twenty-five pounds and that along with a shotgun would quickly drain a person’s energy in this heat. Add in the blow Kera had taken to the head yesterday and I was surprised she was holding up as well as she was.
We sat down in the shade
of the woods at the edge of the road trying to stay cool in the stifling heat. I pulled out a bottle of water and shared it with Kera.
“What’s this farm like that we’re going to?” Kera asked between sips of water.
“There is not much to it, a small three bedroom farmhouse with a barn and some outbuildings. It’s pretty much self-sufficient though, as long as we can get the propane tank filled yearly. I guess I’ll have to figure out how to operate one of those delivery trucks.”
She handed me back the bottle and I took another long swig of the warm liquid.
“It’s relatively sparsely populated, which should mean very few encounters with Loonies,” I continued. “There are plenty of game animals and next spring we can put in a garden, which should keep us fed without having to make repeated excursions into town to raid the grocery stores.”
“Is there a creek?” she asked, sweat running down her cheeks.
“There’s a big one not far from the house.”
She smiled. “I bet it’s nice and cold.”
A dip in cold water sounded absolutely wonderful about now.
We sat in the shade by the side of the road for a few minutes more and finished off the bottle before hefting our packs onto our backs and setting off along the road.
“How far do you think we’ve come?” Kera asked after we had walked for another handful of minutes. She was doing her best to keep pace beside me.
“I’m guessing about a mile and a half, maybe two.” I pulled out the Virginia map from my pack’s back pocket and opened it up as I walked, tracing with my eyes the route we were on. “The four mile mark should be where this road dead ends into Route 208.” The map showed Route 208 winding south for about five miles past the intersection before resuming its western trek toward Mineral and from there to the interstate east of Charlottesville. I pointed at the map so Kera could see where we were expecting to meet Jeremy and Frank. I was reaching behind me to shove the map into the pack when Kera grabbed my arm stopping me in mid-step.
“We have a visitor,” she whispered, bringing her shotgun up and pointing the barrel down the road.
