by Maxey, Phil
From behind, Marina knocked the rifle upwards. A few shots clattered out as she pulled it from him and pinned him against the side of the truck. He struggled but was unable to get free.
The look of hate in his eyes shocked Marina, but she still held him.
“Let him go,” said Joel.
Marina frowned then released her grip.
“Whatever this is? It wasn’t us,” said Joel. “If you want answers, go talk to your scientist friends in the back. But right now. I’m getting us the hell out of here.”
The sergeant looked away, then walked to the back and climbed up.
Joel looked at Marina. “Guess you get second shift then.”
He climbed up to the driver’s seat while she got in alongside.
“Where we heading?” she said.
“East.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
They had been driving for an hour. Anna had seen the anxious looks pass between the four from the mountain complex, but none of them had spoken. She had had enough.
“So, what the hell happened down there?” she looked between them, happy for any answer.
Max shifted in his seat, while Hickman looked frustrated. Josh remained passive while Rachel looked as if she was still in shock.
“You guys fucked-up, right?” said Shannon to them.
“We can’t talk about it. It’s classified,” said Rachel.
Shannon scoffed.
A look of bemusement came to Bill. “Classified?”
“Yes. There are rules, and—”
Anna’s eyes widened. “You used what was inside the vials on people… on soldiers, didn’t you?”
Most opposite her looked down.
“It was the general…”
Rachel angrily looked at Josh. “It’s not our place to—”
Josh continued, ignoring his colleague. “He liked the idea of using Joel’s blood. Injecting it into the soldiers to ‘give them a fighting chance,’ but when he learned that we had the pure elixir in the vials from the Copeland Corporation, he ordered it to be used.”
Anna looked shocked and angry. “You forced that stuff on people?”
Josh shook his head. “Didn’t have to. The soldiers were willing to do it.”
“That’s what happened today?” said Evan.
Rachel looked up. “No. The trials started yesterday. At first there was no reaction whatsoever. We couldn’t even detect the scourge virus in their systems. We began to think that the vials were a hoax, that they contained a few base compounds but nothing interesting.” She took a moment then continued. “We had no idea that the virus was somehow dormant, masking itself, but still in their bodies. When the soldiers changed, it happened so suddenly, we weren’t prepared…”
She wiped away a tear. Max held her hand to stop it from shaking.
Anna wanted to question more, but bit her lip.
The old physicist sighed. “Alas, we have lost it all. The vials, the tablet…” He noticed a few eyes looked away when he mentioned the ‘tablet.’ “You have it, don’t you? That is why you were all waiting for Joel?”
“We ain’t got shit,” said Shannon, crossing her arms.
Max leaned forward. “No, but don’t you see? If we have the tablet, then we still have a chance of stopping this thing, or at least—”
“Giving us a fighting chance?” said Anna incredulously, parroting the general’s words.
Max sat back. “Well yes, if that’s how you want to state it.”
The hours passed and they moved into Kansas.
Up front in the cabin, Joel watched as they drove through a flat, yellow-beige landscape of dying crops, peppered with the occasional barn and ranch building.
“You know. I knew the head guy, the one you met. Not personally, but I had heard of him,” said Marina.
“Hal McClure?” said Joel.
“He was a Brigadier General when I was doing my tour. Heard good things about him.”
Images of the general with the whiskey in his hand jumped into Joel’s mind. “Did he like to drink?”
“Umm… I don’t know. Why?”
“No reason. He gave me the whole ‘your blood can save humanity’ speech.”
“Maybe it can.”
“He liked the idea of a hybrid army.”
“Oh…”
“Yeah… like that was going to work out for anyone.”
A few miles in the distance, outside the range of a human’s vision, Marina noticed a cluster of buildings and vertical structures scattered between.
She pointed to the north-east. “There’s a town coming up on our left.”
Joel wanted to keep going. The highway was relatively clear. They had only seen a handful of abandoned vehicles, and they still had at least five hours of sun left, but every part of him ached and he needed to rest.
He nodded. “We’re in the middle of nowhere out here. Vamps should be on the low side, if any.”
“There’s always some…”
“We’ll check any buildings before we make use of them.”
He turned the wheel to the left slightly and they moved onto the exit.
Soon, they were moving along a wide, four-lane road with gas stations and drive-throughs on both sides. As they progressed, the sandy colors of the plains gave way to rich greens and reds of a town populated by fall trees.
Someone banged on the small window between the cabin and the bed behind. “What we doing?” said Hickman through the glass.
Joel briefly held his hand up then turned onto a main road which dissected the town.
“What about that place?” said Marina, pointing to the left.
A large mock Tudor house sat near the edge of the road. A sign outside proudly announced ‘Potters Inn’, and that they still had vacancies.
“Perfect,” said Joel as he pulled onto a small parking lot. It was empty apart from an RV. It reminded Joel of the one he drove a few days earlier.
He rubbed his eyes then, with Marina, got out and walked around to the back. Hickman, Shannon, and Evan were already standing. Evan helped Bill and then the others down.
“Stay here, me, Marina, and Evan will check the building out. We shouldn’t be longer than a few minutes. If you see anything out of place, honk the horn.”
“I’ll go with you,” said Hickman.
Briefly, Joel thought about disagreeing but was too tired to do so. He nodded.
Marina kneeled near Jess, who was having trouble holding onto Flint’s leash, whose tail was wagging. “I think he might want a restroom break,” said Marina.
“Yeah,” said Jess.
Marina pointed to a nearby patch of grass. “Take him over there, but don’t wander off!”
“Yeah, yeah,” said her daughter, taking the dog away. Jasper quietly followed.
Joel approached the back of the large house cautiously, despite not picking up any heartbeats within.
“Not hearing anything,” said Marina.
Images of the multi-limbed thing in the lab flashed in Joel’s mind.
That thing didn’t have a heartbeat either.
He held the handle to a back room, and pulled. The door opened to a kitchen.
A few silver and copper pans sat on the chessboard-patterned floor, but, apart from that, there was no sign that anything was wrong.
He walked inside, not stopping, and moved straight through a small hallway to the front where the lobby was. A high counter stood near the front door. Behind, all the room keys were still hanging on the wall apart from one.
Room seven.
He walked through the pleasantly decorated hallway and up the carpeted staircase, trying to keep to the far sides of the steps to avoid any creaking, and was soon on the first floor.
Marina and Evan moved into the other rooms below.
Room three, room five…
He suddenly remembered how it all started for him when he was investigating the source of screams at his hotel in LA and felt a rush of warmth as he started to
sweat.
If the room number had been on the door where the others were, he would have seen that he had arrived at room seven, except there was a large, splintered hole instead. He leaned forward.
Lying on the floor was the remains of a body. Its fingers were clawed.
Vamp.
Pushing the door open best he could, he stepped over the body and looked around the bedroom. An open suitcase sat on the floor. Tourist brochures laid scattered on the bed, some covered in spots of blood, but the room was empty.
He picked up the body and carried it with him, back down the stairs, through the kitchen, and threw it into a group of bushes. He then beckoned to the others to come inside.
The fourteen travellers quickly divided up the twelve rooms the hotel had, and Mary found plenty of food in the pantry and cupboards in the kitchen.
Joel, Evan, and Hickman barricaded the two entrances with the heavy furniture they found and placed smaller pieces in front of the ground-floor windows.
With a few hours of sunlight remaining, and some food and drink, Marina walked Jess and Jasper to the room she had picked. It contained double and single beds and a large couch. The two kids sheepishly walked to the bed, kicked off their sneakers, and laid down. They both were asleep within a few minutes.
Joel knocked on the door behind her. “Umm… mind if I take the couch?”
She smiled. “Sure.”
He sat heavily on the deep red three-seater, pulled his boots off, and leaned over until he was laying flat.
Marina pulled one of the sheets from her single bed and laid it over him.
“Thanks.”
He looked up at her. “Why don’t we build something of our own? We have been searching for somewhere safe to be, but maybe that’s the mistake we keep making. Maybe we should just create something ourselves?”
A tired smile came to her, and she laid quietly on the single bed. “Maybe. We’ll talk about it more tomorrow, but right now I need to sleep. Evan’s got first watch?”
“Yeah, then Hickman.”
“I can’t get a read on him. One minute I think he hates us, then…”
“We’re stuck with him for now.”
She nodded and turned on her side.
Joel pulled his sheet up over his shoulders. His mind raced with possibilities of a new home. They just needed to find a natural source of water, away from a big town.
No more military bases.
He pictured flowing fields of crops, and Jess and Jasper running through them. Marina stood near an old farmhouse waving at him. Nebraska was the next state over. Their original destination.
The scene brought him comfort, and he quickly fell into the embrace of sleep.
*****
The weather was bright on the California highway. There was a light breeze which Joel took complete use of, letting his hand hang out of the pickup’s window. It was the first moment since leaving LA that the horror of the past few weeks momentarily let up, and he felt vaguely human again.
Joel knew he was dreaming, and for the first time in a long time, didn’t care.
As he drove, he remembered his son. These were not memories of the last time he saw his lifeless body, but a month before when he had taken him for his first ride on a pony. Joel smiled and was just able to force the pain away long enough for him to enjoy the scene of his son atop a dark brown pony, replete with a riding helmet.
Joel yanked the steering wheel hard to the right to avoid a man that came from nowhere. He knew what the small explosive sound that followed was, and the pickup banked and yawned with its front right wheel rim grinding across the concrete.
“No… no…”
The pickup was headed for the pylon and there wasn’t a thing Joel could do about it.
He slammed on the brakes, but the pickup was now on loose dirt and continued relentlessly. He braced for impact. The pickup slammed into the solid wooden pole, forcing the radiator back into the engine block, which whined and spluttered.
Joel smashed through the windscreen, narrowly missing the pylon, and landed hard on the bank. After a number of rolls he came to a stop.
Shearing pain pulsed from his chest. Pulling the flap of his jacket back revealed what he suspected. A piece of pink-white bone pierced his T-shirt.
“Great…”
He suddenly remembered the man that started all of this and looked across the dual-lane road.
A weathered-looking individual stood a hundred yards away, seemingly frozen to the spot. He started walking fast towards Joel.
Joel turned so his back was to the on-comer, and pushed his rib back into place and buttoned his jacket back up. He didn’t understand why he wasn’t dead, or at least unconscious, but then he had seen vamps take a beating many times and keep on coming.
I guess I’m indestructible as well.
“You okay, buddy? You flew through the windscreen and rolled like a hundred times!”
“Yeah, I…” Joel looked at the ground around him. “I hit a soft spot. Got lucky.”
“That’s crazy. I thought for sure you were dead. I tried waving you down, didn’t you see me?”
Joel groggily got to his feet, wincing. “You ran out in front of me!”
“No, I was walking along the road. I heard you coming, and I turned and waved. I thought you were going to stop, but you just kept on coming…”
“Oh, right… yeah… don’t know…”
The man held his hand out. “I’m Russell. Russell Hopkins… and you killed me!”
What? That’s not what happened.
Joel’s confusion of his own dream startled him awake. For a moment, he wasn’t sure where he was. Then he remembered, in the hotel room with Marina and the kids nearby.
He started to relax then heard the click of a Glock handgun being loaded.
His blurred vision quickly cleared to show Jess and Jasper huddled behind Mary in the doorway. He looked up at the sleek barrel of the gun pointed squarely at his head.
“What did you do with my husband!” shouted Marina.
Continued in book three.
BOOK THREE
CHAPTER ONE
Tears rolled down Marina’s face. “Get Jess and Jasper out of here!” she screamed at Mary without taking her eyes off Joel.
Mary did as asked while Evan and Bill arrived in their place.
“What’s happening!” said Bill.
Joel could sense Evan was about to surge forward, and raised the fingers on his right hand a few inches. Evan stepped back.
“You… you mentioned his name in your sleep, and the name of the street we lived in, I’ve never mentioned that! Ever!” she shouted.
While Joel was watching the barrel of the gun wave left, right, up, and down as her words shook her arm, he ran the options through his mind of how he could come out of this without a hole in his head. He was pretty sure that was a wound he couldn’t come back from.
Do I lie? No, she knows I knew Russell.
You killed him.
I know I killed him!
You killed him.
But if I tell her, then what? She’s going to pull that trigger!
He wondered if he could move his hand up quickly enough to push the gun away from his face. If she was still human that might have worked, but now…
Eventually he decided the weight of carrying around what he did was not worth it anymore. Maybe he deserved her firing that gun. Maybe that would set things straight again.
He looked up at her, looking her directly in the eyes. “I met Russell somewhere outside of LA…” He smiled, remembering. “Almost ran him over. Instead, I weaved and crashed into an electricity pylon.”
Marina’s face contorted as she tried to grasp the story she was being told.
“I was going to leave him, but he told me he couldn’t find any cars that ran, and that he was trying to get back to his wife and child. I… err… my plan was to take him some miles, find him a car, then send him on his way. But that didn’t happen…”<
br />
She poked the gun forward again. “What fucking happened? Is he dead? Did you leave him?”
Anna and Hickman appeared behind Bill and Evan. The doctor noticed the sergeant had his M4 with him and it was still pointed at the floor.
“Point the gun at her, she might kill him!”
Hickman frowned. “What do I care if your kind kill each other?” He went to move off when she grabbed it from him and pushed him to the floor in the same move. “Hey!” he shouted from the wooden surface.
“Stay down!” she said through gritted teeth. She then swung the gun around to Marina. “Marina, put the gun down!”
Jess’s mother started to cry again. “He knows what happened to Russell! Don’t you understand!”
“Whatever he knows, or whatever he did, is not going to bring Russell back to you now. Right now, we need the man you want to shoot.”
“What happened!?” she shouted at Joel.
Joel could have backed out of his story at that point, told her that he dropped him off somewhere and that was the last he saw of her husband, but he wanted to be free of the burden of his actions, regardless of the cost.
“We became friends. We had to walk on foot for some miles before we found another vehicle. We stayed in homes, motels, whatever we could.”
“Did he know you were a vamp?”
Joel didn’t bother correcting her, to tell her he was a hybrid.
“No, he never knew…”
She detected a sadness in his voice which sent a chill through her.
Joel sighed.
Going to be soon now…
“I tried to find sources of blood. But I couldn’t. And I didn’t want him to know what I was. I thought if he knew then he would run, and… I didn’t figure his chances of survival… out there. I wanted to help him find you…” A tear ran down Joel’s face. “His family was still alive. Mine was gone…”
Confusion washed over her face.
“One night at a gas station. I couldn’t hold the hunger back anymore. I thought I could, but I was wrong. And I killed him…”
Joel closed his eyes.
