by AJ Powers
Realizing it was time to say goodbye to the comfort of her home, Tessa became overwhelmed with a pit in her stomach. Against her wishes, she was about to leave her home and risk her and her children’s lives for the unknown world outside her gates. The fear gripped her, causing her to stand in place for just a moment longer as she fought against the overpowering trepidation.
Tessa trudged through the overgrowth once more and back to the house. She was welcomed by a smiling three-year-old who was delighted to see her and a petrified teenager who was barely keeping it together. TJ’s innocence prevented him from grasping the hellacious state of the world, and Tessa truly envied that about the boy. She would have given anything to experience his child-like naivety for just one blissful moment, allowing her to enjoy the simple pleasures in life once again. But such was the burden of a parent. From the very moment she found out she was pregnant, Tessa knew she would do everything in her power to protect her children, even if it meant facing an entire legion of demons alone. And today, she would be put to the test.
“How’s my baby boy?” Tessa asked with a smile on her face, lifting TJ out of Naomi’s arms.
“Good!” the boy replied before snuggling his mother.
Tessa’s smile grew as she basked in the sweet moment with her only son but gradually faded when she looked at Naomi. “Are you ready?”
Naomi looked down at the ground and shrugged. “Would it change anything if I said no?”
Before Tessa could respond, Naomi turned and walked back into the house. Tessa, with TJ in tow, trailed closely behind.
“What’s that?” Tessa asked as Naomi carefully placed a pink envelope onto the breakfast table.
“So Dad knows where we are,” Naomi replied.
“Good thinking,” Tessa said, trying to keep the pain and guilt from surfacing. Quickly shifting gears, she added, “Okay, do you have everything you need?”
Naomi nodded. “Think so.”
“Okay. Well, then, we need to get moving, kiddo.”
Tessa followed Naomi out to the garage and over to the Porsche. Keeping up her façade, she dropped TJ into his car seat with an extra oomph, making silly sounds while she reached for the straps. The toddler giggled and squealed as he snaked his arms through the five-point harness for the first time in months. He loved riding in the SUV and asked at least once a day since the outbreak to go for a drive. To him, this was a joyous occasion worthy of celebration.
To Tessa, it was the worst nightmare of her life. Well… second worst nightmare.
Sitting down behind the wheel, Tessa reached up to the sun visor and pressed the button on the garage door opener, squinting her eyes as the sunlight poured in through the expanding gap. She took a deep breath and turned the key.
Goodbye, Trenton, she thought solemnly.
Chapter Five
5 – Indian Hill, Ohio – May 24th
The light on the dash blinked and a tri-tone alarm rang out twice, reminding Tessa that her foolish decision to ignore the low-fuel indicator on her way home had come back to bite her in the ass. She had been so worried about picking up TJ from daycare that she’d disregarded the warning. I’ll get some later, she remembered thinking to herself.
Later had come, and its timing couldn’t have been worse.
With the dash reading seventeen miles to empty, Tessa had no choice but to stop for gas; she just hoped the pumps still had juice flowing to them. Opening the center console, she verified that her wallet was still inside, which is where she left it once she got home. She shut the console door and turned around to look back at the kids. TJ was still giddy with excitement to be leaving in the car, but Naomi was nervously picking at her nails. “Everyone buckled up?” Tessa asked.
“You know I am, Mommy. You buckled me, silly!” the jubilant toddler declared.
“Oh, yeah. Silly mommy,” Tessa said with an artificial chuckle before shifting her eyes to Naomi. “You?”
Naomi tugged emphatically at her seatbelt and sighed.
“Naomi, I really don’t need your shit right now,” Tessa barked, immediately regretting the response. She squeezed her eyes shut for a moment and took a deep breath. “Look, I’m… I’m sorry, honey. I didn’t mean that. But I really need you to work with me here. I’m doing my best,” she said, exasperation filling her voice.
Naomi looked down in her lap as she tore the tip of her thumbnail off. “Sorry,” she mumbled.
Moving past the lapse in judgment, Tessa turned back around to face the front of the car and rested her hand on the leather-trimmed shifter. “Here goes nothing,” she said under her breath as she shifted into gear.
The SUV crept out of the garage and idled down the wide driveway. Her eyes continued searching the street up ahead, looking for anything out of the ordinary. So far so good. As they rolled toward the end of the driveway, Tessa tapped a second button on the garage door opener and the security gate in front of them jolted to life. The motion was accompanied by a loud screeching and squealing as the gate rolled to the side. If she could hear the grinding metal from twenty yards away while inside her car, then any nearby infected could as well.
Lurching out onto the road, Tessa’s body flooded with relief. Even though she had suspected things would be quiet, the cynical side of her had expected they’d be bombarded by a group of hungry beasts the moment the tires left the driveway. But, like it was when she patrolled the fence line a few minutes before, the neighborhood was eerily still.
The dash rang out again, a different melody of tones this time.
“What now?” Tessa grunted, looking for an explanation from the dashboard. “Damn it,” she muttered under her breath as she discreetly reached for her seatbelt and clicked the buckle into place.
Naomi emphatically cleared her throat.
“I know, I know,” Tessa said, raising her hands in submission.
The response had evoked a chuckle from Naomi—the first one in God knows how long—making the hypocritical oversight worth the embarrassment. It lifted Tessa’s spirit to hear her daughter laugh again. And between that and the lack of threats in the area, she felt the trip was off to as good a start as it could be.
By the time they reached the glamorous subdivision’s exit, the low-fuel chime had sounded off again. And despite driving only a mile, the seventeen-miles-to-empty had dropped to thirteen. The last thing they needed was for the engine to cut out with a crowd of infected closing in on them. Getting gas, even just a few gallons, was their highest priority. Fortunately, her usual fill-up spot was just down the road. It was going in the opposite direction she needed to go, but Tessa knew the area well, and the thought of going there made her feel less vulnerable to attack. Unfortunately, as she pulled up to the pumps, she immediately noticed the displays were off. She didn’t bother risking her life to confirm what she already knew. If there wasn’t power going to the pumps, she wasn’t going to get gas from them.
Swinging the SUV around, she drove a couple miles back in the direction she had come from and stopped at another station. Same story. She looked up at the traffic signal just a few hundred feet ahead and saw that there was still power flowing to them, so it wasn’t a grid issue, but rather seemed like the gas station managers had cut the power before abandoning the store.
With less than ten miles left to empty—a number she hoped was grossly underestimated—Tessa darted to the station across the street.
“Yes!” she said excitedly, seeing the soft, orange glow of the pump display as she pulled in.
She juked around several parked cars and a mail truck before having to parallel park the SUV next to a pump.
Killing the engine, she retrieved her wallet from the center console and turned around. “Back in a jiff.”
Tessa thoroughly checked her surroundings before exiting the SUV, and then quietly latched the door shut. She stepped up to the pump with her credit card already in hand and swiped the card, giving no damns about the $11.56 price point for high octane. She tapped her foot and
kept her eyes scanning the area as the computer processed the card.
CARD READ ERROR - - - PLEASE SEE CASHIER
“Oh, come on,” Tessa fumed as she traded the card for a different one.
The same error flashed on the screen with each card she tried. She didn’t know whether it was on the bank’s end or the gas station’s end, but one thing was clear: she wasn’t going to get gas with a credit card.
She contemplated the decision for a moment before she opened the driver’s door and leaned inside. “I need to go inside for a minute. They key is in the ignition, if something happens while I’m in there…” Tessa shuddered. “Just get you and your brother out of here. Understood?”
With a look of terror on her face, Naomi gave a subtle nod. “Just hurry, Mom.”
Tessa softly latched the door again and moved toward the station doors. The ding-dong sound played as she opened the door, causing her to stop dead in her tracks. She quickly surveyed the store for threats but found none. Without delay, Tessa moved behind the counter and stepped up to one of the registers. She tapped on the screen to wake up the computer and was greeted by an employee login menu.
“Shit!” she growled as she tapped the screen in frustration several more times.
A bottle from across the room bounced off the floor, causing Tessa to shriek as she drew her M&P Shield from its holster. She aimed the gun out toward the ransacked shelves, swinging it from left to right. She couldn’t locate the infected, but the scratching noise was getting closer.
The swift spike in adrenaline caused the sights on her gun to bounce while she continued to search for the elusive target. She felt the urge to boldly proclaim that she was armed and not afraid to shoot, as if that would deter an infected at all.
She bit her tongue.
Suddenly, movement on the floor caught her eye, and she swung the pistol toward the target, pulling the trigger.
CLICK.
Tessa, having made a colossal mistake, forgot to chamber a round in the pistol before putting it into the holster. Fortunately, the significant error had not come at a steep cost, as the threat looming out in the store was nothing more than a raccoon rooting through the remnants of food and drinks left on the tile floor.
“Damn trash panda,” she muttered before making her M&P Shield hot by racking the slide.
Despite the empty gas tank, the trip into the store wasn’t a total loss. Aside from having a pivotal dry run that highlighted a fatal error with her weapon, Tessa found an unopened pack of cigarettes on the shelf beneath the cash register. She hadn’t smoked in over sixteen years, not since she’d decided to become a cardiac surgeon, which was also around the same time she’d found out she was pregnant with Naomi. And save a few stressful months of her life, she hadn’t even craved one over the last decade. But now, it sounded better than a pint of ice cream after an hour of hot sex. And since she was a realist about her new life expectancy, she wasn’t terribly worried about the long-term effects the blend of nicotine and tar would have on her heart and lungs. Those concerns were for the old world.
With nothing else in the store worth wasting her time, Tessa stuffed the cigarettes into her pocket and jogged back out to the SUV.
“No gas?”
Tessa shook her head.
“So, what are we going to do?”
“I’ll think of something,” Tessa replied, unconvinced by her own words.
She couldn’t keep wasting what little fuel that remained, hopping from one station to the next without anything to show for it. Her gut told her that the credit card issue wasn’t limited to one station and that she needed to find an alternate fuel source. Though there were abandoned cars all over the road, she’d never siphoned gas before, nor did she want to learn—especially for just a few gallons—without exhausting all other options. She’d find another way.
Pulling back up to the road, Tessa swallowed a gasp as she spotted a half-dozen infected down the street. They hadn’t noticed her yet, so she went the opposite direction to make sure it stayed that way. Turning off on a side street, Tessa kept the needle below twenty as they moved down block after block of houses. Her eyes bounced from one driveway to the next. About three blocks later, she spotted what she was looking for.
A landscaping truck with a trailer.
With the miles-to-empty flirting with zero, Tessa threw the SUV into park and shut off the engine. Please, God, let there be some gas, she prayed as she unbuckled her seatbelt and reached for the door handle.
Naomi protested the idea. This wasn’t like the gas stations where an infected would likely have to cross a lot of open space before reaching Tessa. The small, middle-class neighborhood was packed with houses, some with only ten feet of grass separating them from the neighbors. It was a far more dangerous endeavor, but her options were limited.
“Just keep a look out for me,” Tessa said before opening the door.
She cut across the shaggy lawn and over to the driveway where the truck and trailer were parked. She could see the trailer had two zero-turn mowers strapped down, but no gas cans, so she aligned herself with the bed of the truck.
Bingo.
There were three plastic fuel cans in the bed: two five-gallon cans and a two-gallon can. The two-gallon can had the word STEIGER written with a marker across the side, and Tessa noticed the same name on one of the string trimmers in the bed. She didn’t know a whole lot about lawn equipment, but she was smart enough to realize that some equipment mixed oil with the gasoline, which would wreak havoc on any engine, let alone the highly tuned performance engine of her Porsche. It was bad enough she was going to have to use regular unleaded, but she assumed, like with the cigarettes, she wouldn’t need to worry about the long-term effects the lower-octane gas would have on the SUV’s health. She just needed it to get them to the marina.
Reaching into the bed of the truck, Tessa grabbed the first can of fuel, which was a little less than half full. Setting that one on the ground, she then grabbed the other, which was significantly heavier, and hoisted it over the side. She felt as if a great weight lifted off her shoulders as she hoofed the fuel over to the SUV. Starting with the full can first, Tessa grunted and growled as she struggled to lift the container up to the gas door.
The pungent odor of gasoline reaching her nose was a welcomed smell. She smiled with relief as the fuel babbled and sloshed through the long, yellow spout into her thirsty SUV. She estimated the gas she had would net her around a third of a tank, which was far more than she needed to get to the river. But she’d already had to maneuver around some traffic in the few short miles they had traveled and suspected it would only get worse the closer they got to downtown. Having the extra fuel, just in case they had to take some unexpected detours, was a smart play.
With a little over a gallon left in the first can, Tessa’s arm began to throb as she fought to hold the gas can high enough to keep up the flow. Finally, after another minute, she could hear the last of the fuel pour out, and she dropped the can to the ground with a hollow thunk. Ignoring the pain in her arms, she bent over and grabbed the other can, but was quickly stumped by the EPA-approved spout.
“How the hell does this thing work?” she asked herself.
“Mom! Look out!” Naomi screamed from inside the car.
Tessa looked up just as the runner collided with her, sending them both crashing to the ground. Tessa gasped loudly to replenish the oxygen in her lungs as she frantically reached for her gun. The infected man let out a throaty groan as he climbed to his feet, his prey just out of reach. He took a single step toward Tessa before the first gunshot rang out. The bullet hit low on his abdomen, the wound oozing out a thick, dark liquid. The bullet wound didn’t faze him. She pulled the trigger again. And again. And once more before the recoil had raised her aim enough to finally stop the man with a fatal shot to the neck. With his arms still stretched out, the man took one last step before falling to the ground.
But the threat was far from over. The cries and bellow
s of more infected echoed around the neighborhood. “Shit!” Tessa exclaimed as she scrambled over to the driver’s door on all four, pulling herself to her feet with the assistance of the door handle. By the time she got the door open, she’d spotted the first one emerging from between two houses, and he was closing the gap faster than should have been possible.
Tessa jumped into the car and locked the doors while simultaneously twisting the key in the ignition. The engine roared to life and she immediately threw the shifter into drive, speeding away as soon as the transmission kicked into gear. As they fled the gruesome scene, Tessa glanced into the rearview mirror, watching dozens of degraded bodies chase after them.
“Holy shit, Mom! Are you okay? Did you get bit?” Naomi asked frantically.
“No… I mean, uh, I don’t think so. I’m… I’m okay,” she replied.
Taking a sharp turn at the next intersection, Tessa went down a few more blocks before turning again, hoping to lose the pursuing infected. With her foot heavy on the pedal and her heartrate decreasing ever so slightly, Tessa finally looked down at the dash to check her fuel. Miles to empty read ninety-seven. It was plenty.
When Tessa’s eyes returned to the road, she saw the man running straight at them. Her instinct overrode logic, and she swerved to avoid hitting the human figure in the middle of the road. She clipped the infected with the side of her SUV, causing his body to ragdoll through the air as if she was playing a video game. A volley of screams erupted from inside the car, Tessa included, as she tried to regain control. She jerked the wheel in the opposite direction, narrowly missing a police cruiser before overcompensating and jumping the curb, driving into a tree.
Tessa faceplanted into the deployed airbag.
“I’VE DETECTED THAT YOU’VE BEEN IN A SERIOUS ACCIDENT. WOULD YOU LIKE ME TO CALL FOR HELP?” the onboard computer said.
“Huh?” Tessa grumbled, confused with the talking voice.
