by D. J. Molles
“Think of the GPS as a bargaining chip. It gives me the upper hand when I’m negotiating with these groups of survivors. It will be what brings them together, not me. The only issue is, with that much sway, I also make myself a huge target. Anyone who knows what’s on this GPS is going to be a target. There’s going to be a lot of people who will believe it will be better to simply take it from me, rather than work with me. Because of that, there are fail-safes in place to keep this bargaining chip out of the wrong hands. The first and most important is that I am the only one with access to it.
“Obviously, if I were to tell you what is on the GPS or where these things are, you would also become a target. So I won’t tell you, but I’m sure you can reasonably infer what I’m talking about.”
Angela’s eyebrows went up. “Umm—”
Jack cut her off. “Guns, ammo, food, water, medicine…” He smiled. “You’re holding all the keys to survival. You got everyone by the balls.”
Lee didn’t directly confirm Jack’s theory. “Don’t read anything Machiavellian into it, Jack. I’m here to help, not conquer the world. The only caveat is that I do have an ulterior motive: If you want to play with my toys, you gotta play nice.”
Jack shrugged. “I’ve got no problem with that.”
“So…” Angela seemed like she was still trying to wrap her head around it. “What do we do now?”
Lee looked back at her. “Tomorrow, we have to find somebody to take us in. They won’t want to at first. They’ll be suspicious of outsiders. But I’m pretty sure I can convince them. The hard part will be finding them.”
“What are we looking for?” Jack seemed more in tune now.
“A large group of survivors. Could be individuals who banded together out of necessity and are now holding a defensible location, or it could be a group of people who were already a community prior to the collapse and have fortified their position.” Lee rubbed his face and felt thick stubble. “The most likely places to find these groups will be locations where some sort of security or fortification already exists.”
“What type of security are we talking about?” Angela asked.
“Could be many different things. A factory with a tall fence around it. A gated community. Even just an industrial building with heavy doors on it.”
“I’m not real familiar with this area,” Jack stated. “You guys know of any places like that around here?”
Lee grimaced. “I had a map of places fitting that profile, but it was in my bunker.”
“There’s a gated community a little closer to town,” Angela offered. “I can’t think of the name of the road it’s on, but I know how to get there.”
Lee tapped the steering wheel. “Do you remember what it was called?”
“Timber Creek,” Angela answered immediately. Her voice got quiet. “I had a friend who used to live there. Maggie Dunham. She moved to Raleigh last year.”
Lee and Jack both looked at Angela for a brief moment. Lee got back on track. “We’ll want to avoid population centers, but the outskirts should be good. I think I remember Timber Creek being toward the edge of town.”
Angela nodded. “Yeah. Almost at the city line.”
“How long do you think it would take to get there?”
Angela looked around as though she was disoriented for a moment. “I don’t know. Maybe twenty minutes?”
Lee did mental calculations. Auto manufacturers in the US generally made their gas tanks big enough to carry the vehicle about three hundred miles on a single tank regardless of MPGs. With a fourth of a tank, one could generally look at getting between fifty and seventy-five miles. Lee decided to go with the conservative number. Fifty miles was probably enough to get them to where they were going. A twenty-minute drive on surface streets was usually about fifteen miles. If Timber Creek was a bust, they would hopefully have enough fuel to try for another location.
Hopefully.
This was all barring the possibilities of raiders, rogue military factions, or hordes of infected.
“Alright.” Lee leaned his head back and clicked off the dome light. “We should get some sleep.”
The exhausted group slept deeply, despite their desperate circumstances. Their dreams were dark and hazy and filled with fear and hope. They slept unaware that fate would not allow all of them to reach Timber Creek alive.
CHAPTER 16
On the Road
Lee awoke to the sound of Tango growling.
In the blackness of the garage, Lee grabbed his pistol from its holster, still half asleep and unsure of what was happening. The three glowing green dots of his pistol’s tritium sights looked like a UFO hovering in midair. He fumbled for the door handle and popped it. The dome light came on and Jack startled awake.
Lee turned on the vehicle’s parking lights and the garage was bathed in a yellow glow. Tango was still growling, but the garage door was closed, as was the door into the house.
Lee motioned for Jack to remain seated and stepped out of the pickup. He immediately dipped down to one knee and checked underneath the vehicle for any intruders. Finding nothing, he made a slow, cautious circle around the car, Tango all the while still pacing in the bed and growling.
Lee stepped over to the door into the house but thought better before opening it. They needed to leave, not get in another fight. If anything was in the house, their best option was to leave it behind, not waste time and ammunition or risk death trying to kill it.
Lee motioned for Jack to join him.
The lanky man got out of the car slowly. He looked bad. Dark circles rimmed his eyes and his skin seemed pale and waxy. Lee wasn’t sure whether it was the onset of symptoms or the dehydration was catching up to him. Lee’s own mouth felt like it was full of sand. He kept swallowing, trying to encourage his mouth to make some saliva, but it was bone dry.
Lee’s voice was parched and cracked. “How are you feeling?”
“Under the weather,” Jack said. His voice was hollow. Defeated. “Feverish.”
The two men shared a long and awkward silence. “Look…” Lee began.
“I should ride in the bed,” Jack said flatly. “I don’t know if it’s catching or not, but there’s no sense in risking it. Besides, looks like Tango could use some company.”
Lee only nodded.
Jack looked at the dog, who was now silent but still pacing in the truck bed. By now, Angela and the two kids had woken up but were sitting quietly in the cab, watching Jack and Lee. “What’s wrong with him?” Jack asked, nodding toward Tango.
“Smelled something he didn’t like?”
Jack smiled. “I smell something I don’t like, too… me.”
“We need to get out of here, but there might be something in the yard. Think you can open the garage door and jump in the bed in time for us to tear out of here if we need to?”
Jack shrugged. “Sounds doable.”
Luckily the pickup truck was backed into the garage. Lee got into the driver’s seat and cranked it up. He regretted leaving the house behind without a thorough search for any supplies they could have used, but given Tango’s growling, Lee felt this was the safer option. He just prayed they would get to someplace with some food and water soon. Ammunition would be a big plus as well.
“You guys sleep okay?” he asked his passengers.
There was a mumbled chorus of “yeah” and “okay.”
He checked his watch. It was just after dawn. They must have been tired. Lee didn’t recall waking up at all during the night. During the last two days he’d only slept for a few hours total. His body had felt the effects, even if his mind was too wired to notice.
Jack signaled that he was ready with the garage door. Lee put the pickup truck in drive and prepared to floor it at the first sign of attackers. He nodded back to the Marine standing ready and he lifted the garage door up with one heave.
A lady in a dirty gray business suit, still holding her handbag, was leaning against the door, and she flopped over into t
he garage when Jack opened it. He jumped backward as what appeared to be a dead body at first raised its head and reached for Jack.
“Motherfucker!” Jack hauled ass into the bed of the truck.
In the fleeting moment before Lee smashed the accelerator, he wondered if she was simply some tired refugee, trying to rest before continuing on her journey. Then the pickup truck ran her over and Lee didn’t slow down. He hit the street, taking only a moment to look back at the yard and see the two pockmarks in the dirt where his 40mm grenades had hit the night before. He thought he could see body parts sticking out of the long grass. Maybe one of them moved.
He made a left on Morrison Street and stepped on it, speeding up to sixty and then leveling off. He didn’t feel much of anything at all. His heart rate had barely risen. In the rearview mirror, Jack gave him a thumbs-up from the truck bed, while in the backseat Angela held the two kids in her arms with her eyes squeezed shut as though waiting for a nightmare to be over.
* * *
They passed more houses as they drove.
Lee didn’t dare stop at any of them. Some looked ransacked. A few were boarded up. Others looked like they’d been burned. They left the country road behind and started heading toward town. The single houses set back on huge acreages began to be interspersed with what were once quiet subdivisions and county parks. There were very few abandoned cars on the road. So far, none of them was pushed into the travel lanes to create a roadblock, but Lee took his turns carefully and kept a watchful eye for anything that resembled an ambush. The neighborhoods they passed looked desolate. Curtains billowed out of broken windows. Trash filled the streets.
The kids were surprisingly quiet. Lee had expected them to be whining about hunger and thirst, but they hadn’t said a word since leaving the Petersons’ house. He thought perhaps the violence and stress of the last few days were beginning to cause the children some emotional breakdown. No one—including Lee—could live through something like this and come out unchanged, but the children would be affected on a much deeper level than he was. He had long ago made peace with the malevolence and tragedy of human existence. Children just didn’t know any better.
After another pillaged subdivision, Lee saw a welcome sight. To the left of the road was an old convenience store with a few fuel pumps out front. Lee tempered his hope with realism: Over the course of a month it had most likely been picked clean by looters and passing refugees.
But still, it was worth a look.
Lee slowed down to a crawl and gave the area a good, hard looking-over. He checked for signs of foot travel through the overgrown weeds all around the convenience store. He surveyed the nearby tree lines for anything out of place. As he crept closer he could see that most of the windows were busted out. The sides of the building were vandalized with graffiti that Lee didn’t understand. But the place looked abandoned.
He turned the truck around in the parking lot and backed it as far behind the building as he could to hide it from the view of any passersby.
“Is this where we’re going, Mommy?” Abby asked.
Angela looked curiously at the gas station. “No, honey.”
Lee stepped out of the pickup and then leaned back in. “Give me a second to clear it. Stay here.” He thought for a second. “Actually, get in the driver’s seat. If you hear me yelling, just drive away.”
Angela nodded.
As Lee stepped away from the vehicle, Jack jumped out of the bed, looking sore and tired. Lee left his M4 in the truck, since it was out of ammunition. He cleared his MK23 from its holster. Jack had acquired the shotgun and its remaining three rounds from Angela and held it at a low-ready as they proceeded around the corner to the front of the store.
Their footsteps crunched in the broken glass that littered the parking lot. Lee looked through the broken storefront windows as he walked by. The interior of the convenience store looked like it had been emptied out. Most of the shelves were tipped over, and whatever shelves still stood were empty. The coolers lining the walls were empty as well. Lee pulled on the door and found it unlocked. He stepped through first, Jack following just behind him. The cash register was busted and the cash drawer removed. Little good cash would do anyone now. The tobacco shelves had been completely wiped out. Someone had even taken all the scratch-off lottery tickets.
Jack stooped down and picked something up off the floor. A few pieces of broken glass glittered to the ground. It was another scratch-off lottery ticket. Jack smiled wistfully. “I used to play these all the time.” His voice was hoarse. “Drop a twenty every week on a twelve-pack of beer and scratch-offs. Never won shit.” He laughed.
Lee smiled along with him, more at the sight of seeing him cheered.
“You ever play a scratch-off?” Jack asked.
“No. Never was big into games of chance.”
“Well,” Jack held out the ticket. “Try it.”
Lee laughed this time but shook his head. “Nah, I’m good.”
“Come on.” Jack leaned over on the counter and fished a coin out of the give-a-penny/take-a-penny tray in front of the register. “This might be the last scratch-off lottery ticket you ever see. It’s a piece of American history now.”
“Well, you have to preserve it, then.”
Jack made a rude noise. “Fuck preserving. Scratch this bitch.” He held out the penny.
Lee chuckled. “Alright. First and last lottery play ever.”
Jack held a grimy hand in front of his mouth in mock anticipation. “You’re lucky. This is gonna be a winner.”
Lee looked around to make himself feel better, then holstered his pistol. He took the penny and scratched away at the little piece of paper. Having never played before, he didn’t really know what to look for, but Jack narrated his progress as he went.
“Got a diamond there; that’s not worth anything.… Thirteen isn’t one of the winning numbers.… Forty-three, nope…”
Lee finished the scratch-off and blew the shavings away.
“Holy shit.” Jack pointed. “You won a hundred goddamn bucks, you sonofabitch!”
Lee stared at the paper. “I did? How can you tell?”
“Twenty-seven is one of the winning numbers, and you got a twenty-seven. The prize is a hundred bucks!”
“Ha!” Lee smiled. “Too bad it’s not worth anything anymore.”
“Bullshit,” Jack folded the ticket and offered it to Lee. “Hang on to it. It’ll be good luck.”
Lee nodded and stuffed the ticket in a pocket on his combat shirt. “We could use all the luck we can get.”
“Who knows?” Jack began to meander around the store. “Maybe someday things will get back to normal and you can cash it in.”
“Yeah… maybe.”
Jack made his way to the back of the store while Lee poked around in the piles of trash for something to eat. Maybe a bag of peanuts or some Cheez-Its. Anything, really. Something big scraped across the floor and Lee jerked up to see Jack pulling a fallen shelf off the wall.
“Oh yeah…” Jack turned and smiled. “Storage cooler?”
Lee abandoned the piles of trash and joined Jack at what appeared to be a door into the cooler section that led behind the shelves of beer and soda. It was padlocked.
“It’s like no one has even tried to get in there,” Lee said in amazement.
“Might not be anything back there worth wasting your time on.” He looked around briefly. “But… maybe they just weren’t as hungry as we are.”
Jack found what he was looking for and pulled up a fire extinguisher. He walked back over to the door and swung the fire extinguisher hard, aiming not for the lock but for the whole door handle. It took him three hits and he had sufficiently mangled it enough that when he and Lee yanked on it together, the door popped open.
The interior of the cooler was dark and not exactly cold, though it was definitely less than room temperature. The two men both simultaneously smelled the air, Lee wondering if anything had spoiled or perhaps died in the
cooler. But it just smelled like a cellar. Cool and dank.
“You got a flashlight?” Jack asked.
Lee shook his head. “Not on me.”
Jack fished his lighter out of his pocket and flipped it on. With the little butane flame burning, he stepped into the dark cooler for a closer look. Lee covered him with his hand hovering over his holstered pistol. His eyes strained to see in the dark. The flickering lighter was barely enough to illuminate the small room, but after a few short moments, Jack found the far wall and the light from the flame cast a fluttering glow over several cases of water, soft drinks, and sports drinks.
“Oh, sweet Jesus!” Jack was ecstatic.
Lee allowed himself to feel a moment of relief. A tension in his gut that he didn’t know he’d been holding suddenly let go. Jack was already grabbing a case of water. Lee followed suit.
“Let’s grab as much as we can, but I don’t want to stay in the same place for too long.”
After a few hurried trips, looking over their shoulders as though this stroke of good luck was about to be stripped from them at any moment, they were able to grab three cases of water and a case of sports drinks. They threw them in the bed of the truck and Lee ripped into a case of water and started handing the bottles out with the same instructions: Drink slowly.
If everyone kept a bottle of water down all right, he would give everyone sports drinks. The electrolytes would help them retain the water they would drink afterward. It wasn’t until he grabbed a bottle of water for himself that Lee noticed Tango was not in the truck bed. In the excitement of finding the water that might save their lives, he hadn’t noticed Tango’s absence.
He looked around for a brief moment before asking Angela and the kids, “Where’s Tango?”
Abby spoke without hesitation. “He threw up.”
“Tango threw up?” Lee looked to Angela for some adult clarification.
