by Q J Martin
The truck lunged forward. He slammed through a couple cones and reached the road. He turned the truck to head south towards Rochester, driving as quickly as he could to get out of the range of Skylar’s men.
“Jane!” he yelled when they were safely out of sight. “Jane!” There was no response.
Section VII
“You’re never at home!” Elizabeth spat accusingly. There was fire in her eyes.
“Of course I’m not at home,” Logan replied, meeting her gaze head-on. “I’m at work! It turns out that there is a much higher demand for bodyguards who are modded than for those who are unmodded. So we can thank you for our greatly increased income.”
Elizabeth crossed her arms and rolled her eyes. “Great. So you’re off living your dream job day in and day out. I have a career, too, you know. But I’m still able to make it home every night. I’m here, in my house, taking care of my children!”
Logan brought his arm down. It flew right past a picture of the two of them posing with Glenn shortly after he was born. They were so happy then. They were holding hands. Their fingers were intertwined. Now Logan’s finger was pointing at Elizabeth in denunciation.
“They’re our children, Elizabeth, and you better not forget that.”
“How can they be ’our’ children? That would imply that they’re both of ours. That would imply that you didn’t spend every free moment at the bar with Randell, or God knows where else. When do you ever make time for them? When do you ever make sacrifices for them? If you’re a father, be a father! If not, then in my eyes, you’ve disowned them, and so what good are you to us then?”
Logan shouted a stream of curses. He swung his arm out and grabbed Elizabeth by the throat, pinning her to the wall. Elizabeth gasped for air and struggled in vain to pry at his fingers.
“Sacrifices? I’ve made sacrifices!” Spittle spewed from Logan’s clenched lips as his face reddened with fury. “I’ve done everything for our children. I’ve given up everything for them, and you of all people know that! Don’t you dare accuse me of being a bad father!”
In the other room, Roselyn began to cry. Elizabeth’s face was changing colors, becoming a light shade of purple.
“Good—fathers—don’t—hurt—their—children’s—mother.”
Logan’s face clenched and unclenched over and over as he looked at this woman with blind fury. He hated her. He hated her more than he had ever hated her.
But there was something… There was something that didn’t add up. Confusion slowly crept across his face, a lack of understanding, and suddenly he was filled with unequivocal regret. He let Elizabeth go, and she took a big gulp of air, then coughed, her throat raspy and sore.
“You—You got another mod without telling me, didn’t you?” she croaked, massaging her neck.
Logan turned around. He put his hand up on the wall, just inches from the picture. He didn’t say a word in reply to her.
“A strength mod? Logan, you of all people know what those can do to you! Why didn’t you talk to me about it before you got it?”
“Talk to you?” Anger twitched across his eyes again. He swung around. “Why would I talk to you? You sure as hell didn’t talk to me before you went out and ordered me your precious perception mod.”
“Logan! That’s not the same thing, and you know that!”
“Not the same thing?” Logan shouted. “You egotistical, self-righteous hypocrite!”
Logan turned and slammed his fist at the wall. The picture frame was in his way. He busted through it, sending shards of glass everywhere, and putting a gaping hole into the wall behind it. He pulled it back out, and blood gushed from each of his knuckles, painting the walls in spurts.
Elizabeth just stared at him. Finally, she spoke. “I’ve cheated on you, Logan,” she said.
Logan looked at her, wide-eyed and unresponsive.
“Scott Spencer, from college. I work with him. He treats me better than you ever did, and that was before—before you changed. You’ve become a monster, Logan. You’re a danger to everyone around you, to yourself, to me, and most of all… to your children.” Elizabeth walked off. As she reached the stairs, she turned around and said, “I’m leaving, and I’m taking them with me.” Then she walked up the stairs, and she was gone.
Logan fell backwards against the wall and slid to the ground, smearing blood the entire way down. The picture was on the floor next to his foot, in a little pile of glass. Blood covered his smiling, youthful face, and there was a gaping tear right where their child was.
“I did it for the children,” he mumbled. “I did it for the children.” Tears welled in his eyes. “I did it for the children.” A tear rolled down his cheek.
“I did it all for them.”
Chapter XXII
“Jane!” Logan called out again. “Jane, are you there?” He tried to glance over to see if he could spot her, but he couldn’t take his eyes off the road for long—not with all the abandoned vehicles that cluttered the highway.
Another minute passed by with no response. Just as Logan had given up hope, the passenger door swung open, and Jane threw herself inside.
“Are you alright?” Logan asked.
Jane began to examine herself.
Logan glanced over at her and saw that her thin grey shirt was torn to shreds. It was only hanging onto her torso by a thread. However, she appeared to be completely unharmed.
“I’m alright,” she said.
“You sure?” Logan asked, looking her up and down.
She seemed to suddenly become aware of her immodest appearance, and she couldn’t help but laugh. “Don’t let this distract you,” she grinned mischievously, gesturing towards her body. “Just get your eyes back on the road before we have a problem.”
The highway slowly became more and more deserted as they made their way out of town. There were a couple car wrecks here and there, but it seemed as though the vast majority of the city’s occupants never even had the opportunity to make it out so far.
Logan sat in his chair, driving the truck without saying a word. The silence extended to the point of awkwardness.
“What’s wrong?” Jane asked finally.
“I guess it just hit me,” Logan said. “We left them behind. We left all of them behind.”
Jane sighed. “Zachariah knew what he was risking, what they all were risking. You heard what he said. ‘If you go back, you die.’ What good would you be to your children if you died trying to save them?”
“I just…” Logan paused, squeezing his fist on the steering wheel. “I just keep thinking of that girl, the fear in her eyes, the sheer terror of imagining what would happen to her if she was caught trying to escape. And now, everything she feared, everything that terrified her and kept her from moving when the opportunity for escape came, it’s all coming true. Her worst nightmares. And the thing is, when I picture her, it’s not Petra’s face I see. It’s Roselyn’s face.”
Logan sobbed as he said this, and Jane put her hand on his leg.
“We’re going to get them,” she said. “We’re going to find your children.”
⌬
“Five miles to Rochester,” Jane said, reading the sign ahead of them. “We’re almost there, Logan.”
“Almost there,” he repeated. “Please be there.”
They rode on for another minute, passing the sign behind, before Jane finally asked, “How did you meet their mother?”
Logan squirmed in his seat. “It’s a long story,” he said uncomfortably.
“It’s been a long trip,” she said, the slightest hint of a smile crossing her face.
“Well,” he took a deep breath, “I saw her for the first time in a coffee shop.”
“A coffee shop? Really?”
“Yeah,” Logan risked a smile himself. “There was just something about her, about the appreciation that she had for the classic and the antique, that really drew me to her, and we just hit it off.”
“Just hit it off immediately,
huh?”
“Well, after a few weeks… when I finally got up the courage to go talk to her.”
“I see,” Jane laughed. “So I guess you’ve gotten bolder in your old age.”
“I wouldn’t say that,” Logan blushed. “And I wouldn’t call myself ‘old,’ either.”
“Well, it only took you one conscious day to get naked with me. I’d call that pretty bold.”
“That’s definitely not how it happened.”
“That’s definitely exactly how it happened,” Jane said. She paused for a minute, then continued, “So what went down between you two? You had two children together, and then… what?”
“And then, I messed up.” Logan took a deep breath. He tried to turn, to look at Jane in the intervening moments of silence, but he couldn’t bring himself to take his eyes off the road.
“You messed up?”
“I became something I hated. I did things I wish I could forget, but they constantly replay in my head again and again and again like a horrible movie on repeat. I was a terrible person, and she deserved better.”
Jane looked him up and down. “A terrible person?”
Logan clenched his eyes shut, if only for a moment.
“We all make mistakes,” Jane said. “Or, at least, I assume we do. From my two weeks worth of experience, I’d say we do.” She chuckled half-heartedly.
“But some mistakes are worse than others,” he said. “I—I put a hand on her. I hurt her.”
“You never should have hurt her. You’re going to hell for that.”
Logan looked at her, shocked.
“Is that what you want to hear? It’s true. It’s absolutely true that you shouldn’t have hurt her. But you can’t let the person you were back then keep you from being the person you ought to be today. Maybe you did do some terrible things when you were together. Maybe it’s better for both your sakes that you got divorced and barely ever see her anymore. But look what you’re doing now. Look how much of yourself you’ve sacrificed for the sake of your children, even for the sake of your ex-wife, because you are a great, great parent.”
Logan nodded slowly. He was just about to reply when a group of Infected jumped out from inside a crashed bus and ran straight for the truck.
⌬
“Watch out!” Jane shouted.
Logan rapidly glanced around the road to see if there was any path he could take to avoid them. The bus blocked his way on the left, and there were a couple cars on the right side of the road.
He gripped the steering wheel as tightly as he could, his knuckles turning white, and stepped on the gas. He aimed for the middle of the road, right between the two obstructions.
He grazed one Infected, slinging her out to the left. Then he drove over another, and another. The fire truck shook up and down over and over again. Logan was getting jostled around. He bounced off the seat and hit his head. He lost control of the steering wheel, and the truck’s wheels turned sharply to the right. The firetruck crashed into a telephone pole just beyond the cars.
Jane was thrown out of the vehicle in the process.
Logan slammed into the windshield, putting a crack in it. Blood trickled down his forehead. His vision went dark. The edges of his peripheral vision faded into blackness. Then he heard Jane screaming.
“No!” he exclaimed, willing himself to consciousness.
He shoved himself up out of the heap that he was laying in. He pushed with every muscle in his body, until finally, he was able to wiggle his way out of the truck.
He walked onto the highway. The first thing he saw was the gun that he had been using. It was thrown from the vehicle when they crashed. He ran to the best of his abilities and went to pick it up.
He walked around the firetruck, cautiously heading towards the sound of Jane’s screaming. He was limping as he walked, every step growing more and more painful.
There were five of them surrounding Jane. Three more were sprawled out on the road. It seemed as though they were the ones that Logan had run over. Their bodies were completely healed up. Their chests were moving rhythmically, up and down, up and down, but other than that, they were completely unresponsive. A couple more were running from the bus.
Jane was kneeling in the dirt. She threw her hands in front of her. Blood trickled out of her eyes. She held her quivering hands up. The Infected stood around her, snarling, looking at Jane with sideway glances, but otherwise unmoving.
Logan walked right up to the first one in the circle and shot it. His bullet burst through its chest and it fell to the ground. He shot the second and third one through the head. They likewise fell to the ground. The others seemed to suddenly jerk to alertness. They all turned and charged Logan.
He kicked one in the stomach. It doubled over. He grabbed it by the hair and swung it into the next one. They both toppled to the ground. By then, the one he had shot in the chest was rising back up being him. Logan spun around and shot it in the head, then ducked as the remaining Infected leapt for him.
He jumped to his feet right as it was in mid-air above him. He flipped it over and tossed it to the ground. He rose over it and pounded it in the stomach again and again and again with the butt of his machine gun. It's stomach flayed open, healed up, then flayed open again. The whole time it was getting thinner and thinner, becoming more and more pale. Finally, he hit it in the head and it stopped moving.
The final two Infected were almost on him. He whipped around, shooting one of them through the head, but the other one tackled him, and he lost his grip on the gun. The Infected sat on top of him. It tried to bite him, but he held it just out of reach of his flesh. He shoved it up, but it slammed him back to the ground. He couldn’t get out of its grasp.
It pinned both of Logan’s hands to the ground, then reared its head back and growled. Logan attempted to wiggle himself free, but he was powerless to do anything. He clenched his eyes shut, dreading what was about to happen.
There was a loud bang.
The Infected’s grasp on him weakened. He opened his eyes again, and saw it sitting motionless above him. He shoved it off, got shakily to his feet, and saw Jane behind him, the gun smoking in her hand.
“Thank you,” he gasped. “Thank you.”
He fell back to the ground and closed his eyes, losing consciousness.
Chapter XXIII
“That’s it,” a voice said gently. “That’s it. Wake up.”
“Ugh,” Logan groaned, clutching his temples. “What happened?”
“You passed out,” the voice, which Logan was now able to identify as Jane’s, answered. “I think you were dehydrated. Here, drink some water.” Jane opened the lid of a water bottle and handed it to Logan.
“Where did you get this water?” Logan asked, eyeing the bottle suspiciously.
“From the bus,” Jane said, then added, “Don’t worry. It was sealed.”
Logan brought the bottle to his lips. He took one tentative sip, then finished the whole bottle in one big gulp.
“So you were thirsty,” Jane laughed.
“Please don’t tell me it’s been another two weeks.”
“No,” Jane laughed. “It’s only been an hour.”
Logan leaned up on his elbow. “Were you hurt? After the accident? I couldn’t tell.”
“Not a scratch,” Jane said, raising her hands and turning so that Logan could see her whole body.
“Thank God,” he said, coughing. “What about the Infected?”
“You managed to kill them all before you passed out. Otherwise who knows whether or not either of us would still be here. I still haven’t been able to control them like I used to.”
Logan rose to his feet, clutching Jane’s arm for support. He was a little bit unstable at first—he wobbled back and forth a couple times—but soon he regained his balance and limped along with a nice, even pace toward the fire truck. He climbed into the driver’s seat and attempted to turn it on. The engine spun and spun, but it didn’t start.
“I
t looks like we’re going to have to walk the rest of the way,” Jane said, sighing. “No vehicle, no supplies, and a gun,” she pulled out the clip and examined it, “with two shots left.”
“That sounds about right,” Logan said, hopping back out of the truck. “It’s probably for the best that we don’t pull into town in a big firetruck, though. The closer we get to Minneapolis, the more Infected we’re going to come across. It’s safer to walk.”
Jane nodded and crossed her arms. “Understanding the benefits and being grateful for them are two different things.”
Logan stuck his hand out in request, and Jane handed him the rifle. He made sure the safety was on, then cocked it, slinging its strap over his shoulder. “Are you good to go?” he asked Jane.
Jane considered everything. “I’m good,” she nodded.
“Then it’s settled. Let’s go.”
⌬
They managed to walk all the way to the outskirts of Rochester over the course of the next hour. The firetruck had been invaluable in their journey, but Logan knew it was nothing compared to the time they had lost. As they reached Elizabeth’s exit, Logan couldn’t help but imagine what he would find when he arrived at their house.
He pictured himself opening the door, taking a step inside, and coming face to face with the terrible forms of his former children, snarling and grey. Even worse, he pictured himself walking inside the house, turning around the corner, and stumbling over their bloody remains.
He vaguely recalled the nightmare he had experienced the night of the rollout. He remembered the way his children had looked, the way Glenn’s skin appeared as it melted off his skeleton, the way Roselyn looked, like another one of the monsters, with her hideous smile.
“There it is,” he said, pointing to the exit sign. “One more mile.”
Jane nodded. She looked like she was prepared to ask a million questions, but she thought better of it, and remained silent. Logan took a deep breath, glanced over at her, then reached his hand out. They walked hand and hand together the rest of the way.
