Beside me, Gabe gasps, “What’s plan B?”
“Bust through,” I say between breaths. I know what plan B is now, and it’s my least favorite plan of the bunch.
“Fuck,” Gabe says, but he speeds up.
When we reach the asphalt, Lexers approach through the traffic. Daisy hops onto a sedan, leaps onto the roof and to the hood, then jumps to the next car. I do the same in another lane, then skid to a stop three cars down. The high back of an SUV is next.
Two zombies arrive. I shove my spike into the first’s eye. The other, a woman, grabs me around the legs and sinks her rotten teeth into my calf. I bring my spike into her ear, thankful teeth can’t breach denim easily. The next lane is all sedans, and I hop from one to the next, my pack pushing me forward. Francis is ahead, Troy and Lana two lanes over, Gabe and Lance to my right. The Lexers don’t know who to chase, and they stumble from spot to spot without their usual focus.
Daisy makes it to a roof at the end of the bridge. Troy and Lana reach her first, followed by Gabe and Lance. I close in on Francis as he hops to the asphalt and waves us right, onto another road where a game of cat and mouse ensues, with Lexers moving around cars and the seven of us dodging the larger groups, until we make it down a dead-end street and over the fence of a mini storage. I land on the ground, clothes stuck to my sweat, though there’s no way they’re coming off. That woman bit my leg, and if I needed any further evidence that covering my skin is crucial, I have it.
We head past long rows of metal rolling doors. At the last building, we collapse with our backs against the wall and watch the rear fence. I cap my water bottle after a long drink. “I really hate Plan B.”
The others laugh in gasps, as breathless as I am. Francis pulls out the atlas and points at the field beyond our fence, which is fenced on the other side as well. “Train tracks are behind there. After that is a street that’ll take us to I-5.”
“What if it’s a no-go?” Troy asks, putting into words what everyone doesn’t want to say. No one has a good feeling about I-5 now that we’ve seen the roads. If it was clear once, chances are it isn’t now.
“We can hike up alongside the highway.” Francis taps the lines on the page. “We might find a car if we stick close to the roads.”
Banging starts in the distance—bodies at the front fence. Lana stands with her pack. “Let’s check it out.”
We follow the tracks until they begin to curve south, then we cut across a field behind a fenced compound that resembles a prison, though likely a minimum-security prison if it was one. I ponder whether prisons released their inmates once they understood the magnitude of the virus. On the one hand, people are imprisoned for minor crimes, and they don’t deserve to starve to death in a cell. On the other hand, the inmates who murdered or raped with impunity, and who’d continue those activities if released, might do so with vigor when there’s no law and order.
Maybe someone played God, releasing those who posed the least threat, but there’s no way to be sure how someone will react to a world like this. Carl, the father who attacked us, likely wouldn’t have done such a thing before, while the murderer who reformed in prison might make it his life’s mission to save others. It’s an ethical quandary I’m glad not to have faced myself.
The trappings of civilization are across the way; as we climb the rise to the highway, I make out signs for Fred Meyer and Applebee’s, among others. Midway up the final incline, the top of a tractor-trailer comes into sight. Smaller vehicles are visible a moment later, filling the lanes until the road curves out of sight around the mountains, and, presumably, for miles after.
We duck for nearby trees before the few zombies on the highway spot us, where I breathe deep to calm the rage brewing in my chest. Nothing is easy, or simple, or straightforward. Not even the road that’s supposed to run straight fucking north.
Francis lays a hand on my shoulder and squeezes before he drops it by his side. “I say we check out those stores or the hotels. If we’re walking a hundred-forty miles, we’ll need more food.”
I trail them down the hill toward the shopping center, still seething. As civilization goes, it’s remarkably empty. I see the red sign on a building at the same time as Lana breathes, “Ooh, WinCo!”
“What’s WinCo?” Daisy asks.
“Only the best grocery store ever.”
I smile, my irritation lessening some. Rose loves WinCo for its prices and giant bulk section, and the times she’s dragged me into the store to grab a few things have turned into an hour of exclaiming over the many varieties of granola and barrels of gummy candy. They also sell huge bags of grains and five-gallon buckets for those prepper people who store food. Those folks are probably sitting happily in their fortified houses, eating massive amounts of oats and powdered milk while they count their ammo. I hope they’re enjoying the hell out of it if they are.
After we turn the corner to WinCo’s front lot, it’s obvious it’s a wash: abandoned cars, shattered windows, dead bodies out front. We enter the doors anyway, flashlights ready to illuminate the gloom, though the numerous skylights make them unnecessary.
“Cleanup on aisle everywhere,” Gabe says, muffling his voice like a PA system.
The shelves are bare. The floor is coated with a layer of crumbs, dried liquids, and torn packaging that’s been compacted by shoes and turned a uniform shade of brown. A rotten scent hangs in the air—not dead humans, but in the same family. Decaying produce and meat, most likely. Because hope is truly a ludicrous thing, we walk farther in. There’s nothing. Not even a bag of chips nor a pack of gum in a checkout line.
Though we can hike to Eugene with only the food we have, we’ll be hungry. If you’re hungry and sitting around, maybe you’d be fine. But if you’re hungry and walking twenty miles a day, which Gabe says burns over four thousand calories, you might be very weak. And if you’re weak and hungry and hiking twenty miles a day while attempting to fight off zombies, you might be very dead.
We check the other stores. The hundred dead people inside Fred Meyer are enough to put us off. Grocery Outlet is empty, the fast food joints are empty, the restaurants are empty. Empty, empty, empty. The hotels that once offered deluxe continental breakfast offer no sustenance. But with the sun moving down in the sky, they do offer a place to sleep. A bed with pillows seems the height of luxury after the past few days.
We stand out front of the lobby, looking down at the shopping center. Troy points at the possible prison—a collection of green-roofed buildings set in a square. “How about there? If it’s an institution of some kind, they’d have food. They would’ve been locked up tight. If there’s anything left, we can start off in the morning and not waste time looking.”
It’s too attractive an idea to pass up. As we approach the complex, I draw my gun. Troy flips his pack around to dig inside, then hands me a dark gray revolver. “You’ve only got two bullets. This holds eight, and I have more. Keep it until we get ammo for yours.”
“You sure?” I ask. “You love your guns like children.”
“True enough,” Troy says with a laugh, “but I’m sure. You get extra points if you use it to save my life again.” He drops spare ammo into my coat pocket, nodding at my thanks.
Aside from the fencing, whose upper third curves inward to prevent escape, the buildings could be a high school or something similar. The sign names it as a youth correctional facility, and I find myself hoping they did let these offenders loose. We cut across the grass to the unfenced corner building, where another sign requests that visitors remove all contraband before entering.
Troy’s axe makes short work of the glass, and I keep an eye on the road while they clear it out. When Francis suddenly backs from the doors, pistol raised, I point the revolver that way. Though my hands sweat, my arms are steady.
“Put them down!” a deep voice yells from inside. “Weapons down! We don’t want to shoot, but we will!”
I lower my pistol with the others. Two men appear at the door, each holding a shotgun, tho
ugh they don’t step outside. One, an older man with pale skin and white hair, kicks at the shattered glass with his boot. “Goddamn it, you had to break the glass?”
The younger guy, mid-thirties and Latino, sighs as though he’s disappointed in our behavior.
“Sorry.” Lana hangs her head. “We didn’t think anyone was here.”
“What do you want, anyway?” the older guy asks.
“We were looking for food,” Troy says. “We’re hiking up to Eugene, and we don’t have enough. We can help fix the door, but we’ve got to be quick about it. Sun’s going down in two hours, and we still need to find a place to sleep.”
The two men glance at each other, and then it’s the older man’s turn to sigh. He lowers his shotgun. “Come on inside.”
We’re led through a few institutional corridors lined with offices and then through a metal door with a thick glass panel, until we arrive at a large room full of people ranging in age from infant to elderly. They sit on a giant sectional couch, at tables and chairs, and in a play area full of toys under an inoperative wall-mounted television. Big windows look out on a central courtyard with a field and basketball courts. An attached dormitory holds two rows of beds, all neatly made. Outside the day room, as they call this, are an eating area and another large room that holds more beds along with what might be an aisle’s worth of WinCo.
All of the youths were released, Ignacio, the younger guy, explains. “A lot were local, and some had their families come by for them. But wouldn’t you know it—a bunch came back after they saw what was out there.” Ignacio cuffs a blond kid who sits on the couch with a few other teens. “Right, Nathan? You missed me.”
Nathan, no more than seventeen, laughs with his friends. “As long as I can leave when this is over. Time served.”
“I’ll let you go with your Pops. He’ll keep you in line. We’ve got a job for some of you out front. A broken door that needs to be boarded up. Go see Mandy, and she’ll get you the tools.”
The kids rise from the couch with fewer groans than most teens and head out of the day room. “We’ll do that,” Troy protests.
“Keeps ‘em honest,” the older guy, Norman, says. “They don’t mind working.”
“Idle hands and all that,” Ignacio adds. He gestures at the rooms around us. “This is one unit. There are three more. We took in a lot of local families. We’ve got people living in the gyms, in offices, at the school, everywhere you can think. Good thing we had stores nearby.”
“You did a good job emptying them,” Troy says. “Not a scrap in there.”
Norman smiles proudly. “We’re set for over a year. We’re hoping that’ll outlast them.”
“Then you know it’s not ninety days?” Francis asks.
“Yeah, we know.”
“You heard the weather alert, too?” I ask. “We weren’t sure how far it went.”
“We didn’t hear any alerts,” Ignacio says. “We heard it straight from the source. Want to meet him?”
65
Craig
After we set our things in a cot-filled gymnasium, the two men bring us out an exit and onto a path in the grass. Outside the perimeter of the main buildings, the bottom half of the fences are covered with what appears to be black plastic that renders us invisible to anything lurking outside, and a metal footbridge leads to a newer building in an open field. It’s made up of angular-roofed boxes in neutral colors, with wood beams and huge windows.
“This is the high school,” Norman says. “We moved most of our electrical stuff here to use the solar. They say it has enough power for fifty-five refrigerators. Don’t ask me how much that is, but it’s a hell of a lot.”
It’s a nice building. Modern, yet made with natural materials that harmonize with the distant mountains. Inside, large banks of windows keep the polished concrete floors, neutral walls, and honey-colored wood well-lit.
“The boys love it in here,” Ignacio says of a group of teens cleaning a table-filled room. They’re up to the usual teen hijinks—calling to each other amid the occasional rattail with a towel—but they’re doing their jobs. “You should hear them lecture the newcomers on keeping it nice. That’s where we eat these days, but you wouldn’t know it once they’re done.”
A classroom with a large sink is lined with cooking equipment; stoves and counters were relocated to make a new kitchen. A few rooms have become dormitories, where people lounge at desks beside cots. Another is a science room, with waist-high lab tables set in rows. A man is at one, using tweezers to move something from one petri dish to another. The rest of the school smells of food and cleaner, but a faint odor of zombie rot hangs in this doorway.
“Hiya, Fred,” Norman says. “You busy, or can you talk?”
The man looks up from his work. He’s in his fifties, with brown skin, curly graying hair, and a good-sized belly. He waves us in. “Sure. We can talk, as long as you don’t mind the smell.”
“We’re used to it,” Lana says. “We probably smell just as bad.”
“These folks are staying the night, and they wanted to meet you.” Norman says to us, “This is Fred. Fred Pierce.”
We say hello while Fred strips off his latex gloves, crosses to a sink, and washes his hands. “You have water,” Daisy says.
“They pumped it to one of the town’s reservoir tanks a week or so in, the rest works on gravity,” Norman says. “It’ll take us a while to go through five million gallons as long as no one else is using it.”
Fred finishes at the sink and comes forward, resting his hands on his belly. “What can I do for you?”
“They heard a report saying the Lexers would last longer than ninety days. I said we didn’t have a report, but we had you. They wanted to hear about it.”
Fred drags up a stool. “Mind if I sit? I’ve been standing all day.” He settles himself with a groan. “I’m not sure how much I can tell you. I live here, in Grants Pass. I’m a middle school science teacher.”
I nod, though a middle school science teacher is hardly the official government source we expected. He sets his hands on his knees and watches the wall over our heads. “I went to the Safe Zone after the roadblocks failed. At first, they were telling us to stay put, all was fine, then suddenly there’s what sounded like a war going on. The radio reports changed to stay in your house or come to the fairgrounds. That’s where the Safe Zone was.”
Was. Because I’m standing in the local youth reformatory, it’s no great revelation the Safe Zone fell, but it still comes as a jolt. We’re headed for the Eugene fairgrounds, and those could just as easily be gone. I asked Norman and Ignacio if they’ve had any contact with Eugene, and the answer was a worrisome no, though that’s because they don’t have radio contact with anyone. They’ve heard broadcasts from a few Safe Zones around the country, though, even as far away as New Hampshire.
“The Safe Zone lasted about a week,” Fred says. “But in that time, we were all helping out. They’d gotten a few important people out of California that first night, but the helicopters they expected the next day never came. They were supposed to go to some government facility in Colorado.”
“Probably Cheyenne Mountain,” Troy says. “It’s a government bunker near Colorado Springs. Built to withstand an EMP and nuclear blast. Has its own power and water, too.”
“Maybe we should head there,” Lana says. “Though, if it’s not a secret, half of Colorado Springs probably already did.”
“No one got in who they didn’t want to get in. They would’ve closed those blast doors. They weigh over twenty tons.”
“How the hell do you know this stuff?” Francis asks. “Know anyplace closer?”
“I wish.” Troy motions at Fred, who has watched the exchange patiently. “My apologies. We’ve forgotten how to have polite conversation. Carry on.”
Fred smiles. “It’s nice to see people. All we get are more dead. Anyway, those choppers never came. They had word from the higher-ups that the Midwest was shot, the East Coast gon
e. After that, everything went dark except the shortwave.”
“We heard about the East Coast,” Daisy says. “They used treatment centers to try to stop it before it started.”
“Those treatment centers were more like slaughterhouses. And the sixty to ninety days—thirty was what they said at first—was more hopeful than anything else. They were sure they’d have it eradicated by then. Not treated, mind you, but killed into submission. They were positive, in fact, until they were positive they wouldn’t. But they came up with another plan.”
He rises from his stool and waves us to a table where ten petri dishes sit. Three clear disks are full of something black and fuzzy, another three are half full, and the remaining four contain a chunk of something gray with spots of black fuzz, as well as another gray chunk.
“Fungus,” Fred says. “You’re looking at a fungus found on a subject a couple of weeks before the big outbreak, when they were studying the virus.”
“They knew about it then?” I ask. It’s stupid to be shocked, but I am. They knew about it, they had time, and still it took over.
“They did. And they called in the world’s best mycologists to take a look when this fungus couldn’t be identified. It’s a new fungus—a mold, actually. Harmless to humans, but it’s the one fungus that will decompose the infected. A saprotroph. If you haven’t noticed, they’re not decomposing out there. Or not enough to be worth a damn. The virus resists or repels decomposition somehow.”
“How does the virus work?” Troy asks.
“They said it was a virus and parasite working in tandem. Symbiosis. When it gets into the nervous system, it’s the perfect storm.”
“But where did it come from?” Daisy asks.
“They thought the first cases in Vietnam were a naturally occurring mutation, but when they studied it further, they suspected it was engineered. They didn’t know by whom. No country would take responsibility. No terrorist group, either. They got to work studying it in anticipation of staving it off.”
The Cascadia Series (Book 1): World Departed Page 64
