Considering what happened in the next few days, she might have been the smartest one of us all.
26
The bunker was hot as an oven by noon. There was no way we could keep on staying in there, and I sure as hell didn’t want them staying, because they were drinking up all the water by the bucketful and sweating it out even faster.
136 liters. 6 liters in 4 hours. And that was with them trying to control themselves.
No matter what had happened out there that morning, we couldn’t stay inside any longer.
We all agreed that we needed to get outside before we cooked to death. Then everybody promised to follow the new rules about not leaving the group’s sight.
The whole time, Craig stared me down like a mad dog.
After that, we walked back out into the blazing light carrying some 2-liter bottles with us.
We avoided the spot where Violet had died.
“What the fuck are we supposed to do out here?” Craig asked.
“Not roast to death,” Noelle snapped.
“We can get up on one of the RVs,” I suggested. “The bugs can’t get us there.”
After a brief moment, everybody agreed that was a good idea.
I led them over to Grams and Pop’s RV, and we all climbed the ladder to the top.
Once we were up on the roof, I immediately regretted it.
The bugs were pretty much finished, but you could still see Violet’s skeleton out a ways from the bunker. Most of the bones were there, still a bloody red, though it looked like the bugs had scraped most of the meat off them. Her skull was scattered a few feet away from her body. Bits of hair still clung to the scalp. Her ribs were sticking in all different directions like a giant firecracker had gone off and blown all the bones outwards. I could make out a couple black shapes rooting around inside her ribcage. Her shirt was mostly gone, but rags torn from her shorts still littered the ground. Underneath her body was a red-stained patch of dirt. That would be sucked dry by mid-afternoon.
“Don’t look over there,” I said, and tried to get Noelle to face the other direction.
“What?” she said, and looked anyway.
As soon as she saw Violet’s body, she clamped one hand to her mouth, leaned over the side of the RV rooftop, and threw up.
Great, I thought. A can of food, wasted.
Craig held on to her shorts so she wouldn’t topple over the edge. “Good going, genius,” he sneered at me.
Kristin only got a short glimpse. She turned away with a shriek and covered her eyes.
I looked over at Jon apologetically. “Sorry…I didn’t think about it…”
But he wasn’t even looking at me. He was staring out at the remains as the bugs picked over them.
“The entire streets of L.A. were like that for the first week,” he muttered. “Can you believe that? Thousands of bodies everywhere, and those things eating them…like packs of wild dogs you read about in stories. Jesus, what did we do to deserve this? What did we fucking do?”
I just stared at him until Noelle shrieked and scrambled back from the edge of the rooftop.
“What?! What is it?!” Craig shouted.
I had a pretty good idea, but I leaned over the edge and looked down anyway.
Sure enough, a couple of bugs had scurried out from the bottom of the RV and were chowing down on Noelle’s puke.
I leaned back so I was all the way on the roof. It was bad enough seeing them eat your own vomit, which I’d done before, but watching them eat somebody else’s was totally worse. Even if it did come out of a hot girl.
“Aren’t you going to fucking shoot them?” Craig asked angrily.
“They aren’t gonna get us,” I said.
“What the fuck?! There’s two scorpions right underneath us, and you’re not going to shoot them?!”
“I have 120 bullets,” I said, as cold as I could. “I don’t wanna waste them on a couple of bugs that can’t do us any harm.”
“What if they try to get us when we get down?!”
“Then I’ll shoot them.”
Craig shook his head. “You’ve got 120 bullets, and you’re just going to sit there.”
“If I killed 120 in the next 5 minutes, another 120’d take their place 5 minutes after that,” I snapped.
He shook his head again and pulled Noelle under the little shelter I’d built, where he put his arm around her. Kristin joined them.
Jon was still watching the bugs pick over the skeleton.
I didn’t say anything. I just sat there and waited, the gun cradled in my arms, and watched Craig the whole time.
I wasn’t afraid of anything underneath the RV, but I was damn sure nervous about what was on top of it.
27
After a couple of hours the bugs were finished with Violet’s body. There wasn’t any red left. Every scrap of meat, every blood-stained chunk of dirt was gone. So was the hair. So were the bits of her clothes. Only a couple of bugs stayed behind to gnaw on her bones, which looked slightly pink against the brown dust.
The girls didn’t look over there anymore. Craig would look over occasionally, but he was more interested in the highway. Jon was the only one of us who just watched the whole fucked up thing, like it was a football game or something.
Craig pointed down at the highway. “There’s our car. Where’s the nearest gas station?” he asked me.
I gestured to the north. “Four miles up that way.”
“Four miles.” He scratched the blond stubble on his chin. “That’s a fucking long way to walk.”
No shit, Sherlock, I wanted to say, but I kept it to myself.
He suddenly perked up. “We’ll just take a car from here.”
I looked over at him. “What car?”
“Any car,” he said, and looked all around us.
Reality slowly dawned on him. You could see it in his eyes as he figured it out.
There were a good dozen cars and trucks still left in the trailer park, but most of them were up on cinder blocks. Rusted-out junk heaps the owners had meant to get around to fixing or towing away, but never quite worked up the money or the interest.
“There’s not much here,” Craig said.
“Nope. The day after It happened, anybody with a car loaded up their family and anybody else that would fit and took off.”
“Where’d they go?”
“Los Angeles, mostly.”
“Jesus,” Craig muttered. “That was going from the frying pan into the fire.”
“Some of them went to Edwards Air Force Base. A bunch of people thought the military would save us.”
“What happened?”
“You seen any planes flying around the last month?” I asked.
Craig looked out in desperation at the boneyard of dead cars. “There’s got to be gas in some of them. We can siphon it out and take it to our car.”
I shrugged. “You can try, but that was what they did when they left.”
“What?”
“Siphoned out everything they could get and put it in their own cars. Most of them didn’t bother to put the gas caps back on. My guess is, even if there was some down in the bottom of the tanks, it’s gone and evaporated since then.”
“Fuck,” Craig muttered.
“Why didn’t you go with them?” Noelle asked.
I thought back to when everybody left. There were three cars and two trucks that were okay to travel. I remembered them being crammed with people, ten or more in the truck beds, people even in the car trunks. I remembered the fighting and the screaming as people begged to be taken along. I remembered the fist fight that broke out where Steve Bedeker punched Dale in the mouth and knocked him down.
Then the bugs came rushing out and gutted Dale in front of us while the others climbed in the cars and trucks and took off.
Pop was already dead, and they weren’t about to take Grams. Not at 75 and with a heart condition. Not when there were plenty of 50-year-olds who were only taking a couple of pills a d
ay.
I remembered people fighting about that – who was younger, who was old. Who was on Medicare, and who was just on Medicaid and disability.
Course, after It happened, Medicaid and disability meant shit. Whoever was gonna live was gonna have to do it without government pills, that was for damn sure.
Well, if they weren’t gonna take Grams, I wasn’t going, even though Mr. and Mrs. Simmons offered to take me. But they wouldn’t take Grams. The ones of us left behind watched the cars and trucks disappear in clouds of dust as they roared out of the trailer park.
I don’t think any of them made it. I think they all broke down somewhere. They probably roasted in their cars for awhile, then they tried to get out on foot and got eaten alive.
At least, that was what I hoped.
“I wasn’t invited,” was all I told Noelle.
28
“We’re fucked,” Craig muttered under his breath.
“Why do you say that?” Kristin asked.
“Weren’t you fucking listening? There’s no gas left in the cars.” Craig sulked for a few seconds, then perked up again. “Are there any generators?”
I shook my head. “There are, but we used up all the gas the first week, trying to keep the lights and TV’s on. I mean, you can look, but I don’t think you’ll find much.”
“Shit. Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit,” he groaned.
Truth to tell, I wish there was some gas just so he’d leave.
He could let Noelle stay, though.
I watched her. She was still as beautiful as ever, even with little bits of dried puke on her shirt. Okay, that part was gross, but I ignored it. When your life goes to hell, you get surprisingly good at that – ignoring the parts that aren’t real pleasant, but which don’t mean much to you overall. The non-life-and-death shit. It’s amazing how you forget about B.O. and bad breath and an itchy asshole when there’s something outside your door every night that wants to scrape the meat off your bones.
"Is there any more water?" Kristin asked.
"No," I said. We’d already drunk both bottles we’d brought with us.
“I’m thirsty,” she complained.
“So am I. Let’s go get some more,” Craig suggested.
I clenched my teeth, but didn’t give away what I was really thinking. “Alright, bring some back, then.”
“You’re not going?”
“No. You’re going to have to come right back, anyway.”
“Why?”
“Cause it’s about 300 degrees down in that bunker right now.”
Craig looked at the ground, then looked at me. “We need the gun.”
“No you don’t. I can cover you from up here. Besides, they’re not gonna mess with you.”
“How do you know?”
“Cause I’ve lived here the last two months, and I know how they act.” Jackass.
“I still think you should let me take the gun,” Craig argued.
I shook my head no.
“I’ll go with you,” Jon offered. I guess he was through watching them tear up Violet’s bones.
“All right, let’s all go,” Craig said.
“I’m not,” I said.
“I’ll stay up here with Ben,” Noelle said.
Craig looked real annoyed at that.
“I think I’ll stay up here, too,” Kristin said.
“No, come with us,” Jon urged her.
“Why?”
“Just…come with us.”
She rolled her eyes. “Fine.”
“What about the bugs under the RV?” Craig asked.
“The ones that ate the…stuff?” I asked, trying to be delicate about Noelle’s puke.
“Oh God,” she muttered, and looked a little green.
“Yeah, them,” Craig said.
“They won’t bother you. But if they do, I’ll hang over the side and shoot them if they come out.”
Craig looked like he didn’t believe me. “I think you should give me the gun.”
“I have a better shot up here at anything that comes at you.”
He shook his head in disgust, then headed for the ladder. He paused as he started to go down it.“Well?”
I sighed and got on my belly. I let the rifle and my arms hang down over the side so I could aim at the ground. “Jump off from the side when you get close to the bottom of the ladder, just in case.”
“If I had the gun – ”
“If you had the gun, you wouldn’t see them coming till they got you,” I snapped. “Just jump off the bottom of the ladder as far as you can and you’ll be fine.”
He grumbled and made his way down, then jumped off the ladder and landed four feet away from the RV. Nothing came out to get him.
Jon and Kristin followed him down, jumped away from the RV, and they all moved out in a group for the bunker.
I couldn’t have been happier.
For the first time since they all showed up, I was alone with Noelle.
29
I switched to lying on the top of the RV like a sniper, watching for anything that might head towards them.
But the whole time, I was thinking of who was on the rooftop with me. My boner was pressing hard as a rock between me and the roof of the RV.
Jon and the others got to the bunker doors without a problem.
“How did you know?” Noelle asked once they were inside and the doors were shut.
“Know what?”
“Know that the things under the RV wouldn’t run out and get them.”
Actually, I didn’t. Not for sure. I was kind of hoping they would run out and get Craig.
“The ones that hang back and hide, they’re not the ones that run you down and try to eat you,” I said, which was true. “They just kind of eat whatever the others leave behind, or whatever they can get without too much of a fight.”
She made a face. “Well. I guess I shouldn’t have fed them.”
“You just didn’t see the sign.”
Her face went blank. “What sign?”
“You know…‘Don’t Feed The Animals’…?”
It took her a second, but she actually laughed. “Yeah, I missed that one.”
I relaxed and felt good about myself for a second. I’d made her laugh, that was a good start. I had no idea how I was going to get to first base from there, but one thing at a time.
She ran her fingers through her hair. “Oh, god, I must look like a wreck. I haven’t had a bath in…five weeks? After the water shut off, we used to bathe in a swimming pool in the apartment building, but it dried up.”
“You…you look beautiful to me,” I said. And it was true, she did.
She smiled kind of shyly. “Thank you.”
I didn’t know what to say next, so I just asked what I really wanted to know. “You and Craig…you’re pretty serious, huh.”
She shrugged her shoulders and looked off in the distance. “I don’t know. Yes. I guess.”
‘I guess’…that was good. Better than just ‘Yes.’
“What do you mean? I thought you were boyfriend and girlfriend.”
“We’d only been dating four months when everything happened.” She shrugged and looked back at me with a smile. “I wasn’t sure it was really going to work out, actually. I was thinking about breaking up with him the week before all of this happened.”
My heart skipped a beat. “So…why didn’t you?”
“The end of the world didn’t seem like a particularly good time to trade out boyfriends.” She looked off in the distance again. “He cares for me, I know that. He’s taken good care of me the entire time.”
“I’d take care of you,” I said quietly.
She looked at me in a way I wasn’t sure I liked. Like she was uncomfortable being up there with me. Then she smiled – but not a real smile. More like she was being polite. “Thank you, that’s sweet.”
“I mean, you know…that’s a guy’s job, is to take care of his girlfriend,” I stumbled on. “Not that you’re my
girlfriend – I just meant if you were my girlfriend, I’d take care of you, too.”
I could feel myself dying.
Shut the fuck up shut the fuck up
She smiled again politely. “Well, Craig’s done a great job of that. He’s a natural protector.”
Then she looked away, out in the distance, and pointed. “You should probably get the gun ready.”
I looked out. There was Craig closing the bunker doors – alone. He jogged towards the RV, a 2-liter coke bottle and a couple of open cans in his hands.
I bellied down on the RV roof again and looked through my scope.
For a second I thought about how easy it would be to kill him…one little hole, right between his eyes…
“Where’s Jon and Kristin?” Noelle shouted at him, and I snapped out of my daydream.
Craig grinned as he tossed the cola bottle up on the roof, then climbed the ladder one-handed, holding on to the cans with the other.
You stupid asshole, I thought. What if the bottle split and you wasted all that water?
I really, sincerely hoped a monster-sized bug would come up out from under the RV and drag him back down.
No such luck.
“They wanted a little ‘private time,’” he said as he got to the top of the RV. Then he added, “Bumpin’ uglies,” like he hadn’t already been 100% clear.
I blushed a little.
They’re down there having sex! my brain screamed at me.
Noelle let out an exasperated sigh, then shook her head. “It’s good to know they’ve got their priorities straight.”
Craig shrugged. He was still wearing a big shit-eating grin. “Hey, man, that’s a pretty big priority in my book.”
He handed her an open can of peaches, then sat down and started in on a container of spaghetti and meatballs.
No third can for me.
I could feel my temper rising. I clamped my hands down on the rifle.
“Where’s Ben’s food?” Noelle asked. She was pissed off, which made me feel a little better about messing up when we were alone earlier. I guess I didn’t screw up so bad that she hated me yet.
Bottle Full Of Scorpions Page 7
