by Kate Morris
“Dammit,” he swore to the empty room.
Roman kicked and tugged to free his foot but ended up setting the pallet off center and to the left of where it had been. He picked it up and rested it against the wall so it wouldn’t be in his way again. As he bent for the crate again, something on the floor caught his attention. He pulled his flashlight out of his jacket and flicked it on. More wood. His foot had skidded some of the dirt on the floor to expose wood beneath it. Why would there be wood beneath dirt on a floor that was supposed to just be dirt?
He squatted and swiped away some of the fine, crumbly dirt. More wood, this time revealing that it wasn’t just wood but planks like a hardwood floor. He lifted the other apple crate and moved the last pallet closest to the back wall. Dusting with his hand again, he came up with more dirt lightly covering wood planks. Then his hand grazed across something more than dirt. He held the flashlight closer. A heavy metal O-ring drilled down into the hardwood. He hooked his finger into it and pulled. It came right up. There was a hole, about twenty-four inches square, with a box inside of it. Roman pulled it up out with a great deal of effort it was so heavy. He paused, feeling slightly wrong about nosing through Jane’s family’s things. Then he remembered that nothing was normal and that he’d never do this under any other circumstances.
Roman opened the box and could not have been more surprised than if three leprechauns jumped out of it. The entire box was filled with silver pieces, coins, and what looked like a few gold coins. There was also a note, so Roman opened and read it.
Jane,
If you’ve found this, then I’m gone, and you’ve been read the will by my lawyer. You also need to look behind the bookcase in the living room. Good luck, my darling girl. Go out into the world and do something wonderful with your life and never look back. You have made me so proud, and I love you more than you’ll ever know.
Nana Peaches
He carried the box of silver and gold to the first floor and pushed the bookcase out from the wall. There was, indeed, a vent cover there. However, it was not screwed into the wall but just resting there, so he pulled it off. Roman reached in and took out a cloth bag. He opened it and found a huge wad of cash. There were at least ten such rolls. He sat back on his heels a minute and tried to wrap his brain around this. Everyone he knew, his own parents included, had mocked and ridiculed this woman for not selling her little farm so that they could build mansions on it and tear down her homestead. They all assumed she was poor and that so was Jane by association. She was now, even in death, the richest woman in the area. His father had tied up all of his money in the stock market. Roman was, essentially, broke; the inheritance he would’ve had someday, gone in a matter of weeks. Jane was cash rich, rich in silver that could come in handy for trade, and rich in the pure love she’d been given from her grandmother.
A noise outside alerted him. It sounded like someone walking toward the house.
He grabbed the rifle from the corner and went into the kitchen to wait. His hands did not shake. Whatever was out there would get blasted if it came inside, be that man, animal or a combination of the two. This time, it was just a man.
“Who the fuck are you?” the man shouted angrily.
“Get outta here!” Roman yelled and aimed the gun right at the man’s chest. It wasn’t that big of a kitchen. This was very close range. It would kill him.
“Who are you?” he yelled again.
Maybe he was infected, after all.
“There’s nothing here for you. Just go,” Roman said, trying to reason with him.
“Yeah? Sure looks like you looted this place,” he accused angrily.
“I’m not looting. This stuff’s ours,” Roman corrected him.
“It’s not yours, you little liar,” the man said and advanced a step.
“Stay back! I’ll shoot you. I won’t hesitate. Don’t take another step toward me.”
“What’d you do with them?”
Insane. Irrational. Angry. But his light eyes weren’t bloodshot.
“What? With who? Are you looking for someone? I can’t help you, man. I’m trying…”
“Are they here?”
“Your family? No, sorry. Nobody’s here. It’s just me.”
“Where are they?” he asked with growing irritation as he looked around Roman into the living room.
“You need to leave,” he warned the stocky man.
“I ain’t leavin’ without my family,” he stated. “Jane! Jane, if you’re here, call out for me, baby!” The guy leveled a glare at him, “If you hurt her, I’ll kill you.”
“Wait, what?” Roman asked. “You know Jane? Jane Livingston?”
“Yeah, she’s my daughter. Who the hell are you?” the man asked with antagonism.
“I-I’m her…friend. She’s my friend. I live over there,” Roman said, pointing out the door toward the brick wall in the distance.
“Where’s my daughter?” he asked and stepped closer as Roman lowered the gun. “And where’s her grandmother?”
“Sir, Jane’s at my house,” he explained. “I felt she’d be safer over there.”
“I’ve been trying to call her all day,” he said.
“Our phones aren’t working great. Sir, you might want to sit down. There’s a lot I should tell you.”
Roman sat at the small kitchen table with her father after introducing himself and after her father did the same and told him everything that had happened in the past few weeks.
“I’ve been on a goddamn mountain in West Virginia,” Gyles Livingston told Roman. “Then we heard about this shit last week. We came down off the mountain, just left the job site, and couldn’t get through.”
“What do you mean?”
“They had the freeways and main roads blocked off down there to quarantine the night crawlers. That’s what some folks in the hills are calling them on account of them moving around more at night,” he explained.
Roman thought he detected a slight bit of an accent. He wondered where her father was from originally.
“Finally, we said enough’s enough and rammed the barricades. That’s when we got into some trouble with the military trying to get through and were detained in quarantine for a week to make sure we weren’t sick with the flu. They’re tryin’ to keep it from spreading state to state. I just got out last night and drove straight through to get here.”
“It’s everywhere already. I don’t know why they think stopping people from crossing the state line is going to help,” Roman pondered. “She’ll be glad to see you, sir,” he said, thinking how upset she was tonight. “I’m just moving everything out of here. I don’t think this is a safe place to stay. I live in a gated community…”
“That ain’t safe for much longer, son,” Gyles said. “You been hearin’ those air raids and bombings here yet? They’re droppin’ shit in the infected zones trying to kill those night crawlers.”
Roman swallowed and paused before saying, “I don’t understand.”
“The quarantined zones. They’re getting them all rounded up and droppin’ chemicals or some shit on them to burn ‘em alive. We heard it from the guys in the Army quarantine zone we were detained in. They said it was like Napalm, only worse. It’ll burn everything in a three-mile radius.”
“Like a nuclear weapon?”
“No radiation, no fallout. Course, we also heard from some others that they were plannin’ a nuke out in the West somewhere. Russians are doing the same. They never gave a shit ‘bout their people anyway. Now that everyone knows they unleashed this shit, China’s invadin’ ‘em. Don’t know what they think that’s gonna accomplish, but I don’t think Russia will be able to withstand an invasion. Their war in Europe just about bankrupted ‘em. If it weren’t for Sweden, they’d be screwed. Might not matter. Looks like they all better start learnin’ Chinese. Anyway, this area will be burned soon, or close to here.”
“But this isn’t a quarantine zone,” Roman told him. “We’ll be safe in my neighborhood
.”
“Maybe for a couple more days or so, but this area here is what’s considered a high-infection zone, and they’ll be burnin’ it soon. They might not hit this neighborhood, but the city will look like a charcoal briquette when they’re done. That’s what they’re doing in the high-infection zones. They talked about it on the broadcast tonight. Didn’t you kids hear it?”
“No, sir. We…well, we had all this to deal with.”
“Aw, hell, I saw it at the military detainment camp before I heard it on the radio anyway. I snuck in and saw they had maps marked. I knew I had to get here to Peaches’s place to get them. They have areas mapped out where the infected people were higher in population and concentration, and they’re burnin’ it all. Especially in the cities. They’re trying to round them up into specified bombing zones and then burnin’ ‘em, buildings and all. They’re bombin’ other areas, too where they just can’t seem to catch ‘em. We can’t stay here. You would’ve gotten force evac’d tomorrow or the next day anyway.”
“I thought they were taking them to prisons and stuff?”
“Hell, they can’t round up that many damn people,” he swore. Roman was pretty sure he was from Texas. He wore a black cowboy hat, which also reinforced the accent theory of his home state. “We now got more people infected than not infected.”
“But where would we go?”
“My place, down in the hills. It’s safe. Not a whole lotta’ people livin’ around me, so it’s safer than here. Any of the cities with more than thirty-thousand people are being evac’d and burnt. You can see ‘em from the freeways.”
“Shit,” Roman swore quietly.
“Yeah,” her father concurred. “Can’t expect the military to go hand-to-hand or fight it out in the streets with the crawlers. Ain’t like they’ve got automatic immunity. Military’s numbers are down, too. Only way to stay safe is to get outta these high-population cities and out away from everyone. The night crawlers don’t cluster together on their own. They aren’t social, so it makes it hard to take out big groups of them. But it seems like they’re sticking to the highly populated areas to kill and feed.”
“They’re not eating people now, are they? They said on the reports that they weren’t.”
“No, but if they run outta options, they might do that someday. That’s why we gotta get the hell outta’ this area. We’re sitting ducks. The cops and the military are gettin’ overrun. Friend o’ mine on the rig had a pirated video sent to him through a satellite of different big cities around the world like New York, Moscow, Beijing, L.A. Those folks were screwed. That’s when we all said, ‘let’s get the hell outta here.’ They sent troops in to round up the infected, but they ended up either overrun and killed or got sick themselves. There were some aerial shots filmed by people in high-rises. Man, it was like watching rats swarming. There were thousands of them night crawlers runnin’ the streets chasing down people, killing ‘em. Just like rats, and they come out more at night.”
“We heard that, too. Actually, we’ve had some experience with that, too. Where do they go during the day?”
“They go into hiding, some say hibernation. They think it has something to do with the eyes maybe. It’s all a bunch o’ guesswork at this point. Docs got ‘em locked up and are studying ‘em and shit, but who knows? It’s all a matter of time before they’re infected, too.”
Roman hadn’t thought of that. They were scientists. Surely, they were taking precautions against becoming infected. Maybe it didn’t matter. “What will happen if they can’t find a cure for this?”
“Guess this is all gonna lead up to a global apocalypse situation at that point. Don’t know. Maybe they’ll figure it out. Till then, I’m takin’ Jane and gettin’ the hell outta Dodge. You can come, too, you and your little brother.”
“Yes, sir. Thank you. I’d like that. We don’t have any other family other than my grandparents in Florida, and my dad tried to get ahold of them the other day and couldn’t.”
“Not surprising,” he said. “Phone lines ain’t workin’ for shit. Hell, I called Jane three times last week to let her know I was being detained in the quarantine center. Didn’t get her, though.”
“Yes, she was trying to reach you, too. She’s been really worried about you.”
“People at the quarantine center said the power grid’s gonna go down, but we ain’t seen that yet. Things are gonna get real basic everywhere if there isn’t electricity anymore.”
“I saw on the news the other day they were talking about that,” Roman added. “The President and his Secretary of the Interior or one of those dudes were saying that they were keeping every power plant in the country going, including nuclear.”
“If nobody can report to work anymore ‘cuz they’re dead, power’s going out.”
Roman nodded. Her father was a very blunt, plain-speaking man, but he liked him. That was fine by him. He didn’t want frills and fluff and lies right now. He needed the truth, and her father didn’t pull any punches or try to shield him from the truth like a lot of the other adults were doing.
Gyles, so sure of himself and their new purpose, nodded to signify the end of the conversation. Then he got to his feet and said, “Let’s pack up the rest of this and get on over to your place so I can see my Jane. I’ve missed her somethin’ fierce.”
“She’ll be glad to see you,” he told the man, who had the same eyes and hair color as Jane. He seemed kind but hard, as well. “I took the liberty of packing as much of her clothing and things I thought she’d need. Plus, I found this,” Roman said and rose to retrieve the box of silver and the wads of cash.
“Good ole Peaches,” Gyles said with a smile and took the note and box of silver to the kitchen table. “Damn shame. She was a good woman. Took good care of my Janie.”
Roman nodded with agreement to that statement. She was a wonderful person and didn’t deserve for her life to end that way. Knowing what little of her he’d come to know, Roman understood that there was no way she’d rather have left this life than in the protection of Jane.
Around three a.m. they finished and drove to his house, he in Jane’s truck and her father in his own. He pulled the truck with the loot into the garage. They left everything in the truck but the guns and the box of silver, which now also held the rolls of cash. Her father had his own cache of guns, one on his hip, which Roman hadn’t seen when he was threatening him in Jane’s kitchen, and some sort of big rifle with a scope.
“Nice place,” her father said as he walked around scoping out his home. He was assertive and seemed comfortable checking it all out without Roman’s permission. “Those gates ain’t gonna keep out the freaks or the looters for long, though. People will be running this place over real soon. Surprised they haven’t already.”
Roman just gave a single nod. So much for his plan of staying in his house because it was safer. Apparently, her father had a lot more experience and maturity when it came to bad situations, which made him wonder if his background included the military.
“I don’t wanna’ wake her. Where is she?”
“Upstairs in my room with my little brother,” he told him. Her father’s eyebrows shot up. “No, sir, it’s nothing like that. I just wanted her where she’d be safe and have the higher ground if anyone broke in.”
Gyles nodded. “I’ll sleep on the couch, keep watch on those back doors. You take the room in the back. We’ll lay down a perimeter watch.”
“Yes, sir,” Roman said. “Were you a cop or in the military?”
“Army,” he answered evasively.
“Were you doing specials ops or something? It’s just that you seem relatively calm in the face of all this.”
“When you’ve been over eight hundred days in country,” he said, confusing Roman, “you get used to just about anything.”
He figured that expression, ‘in country,’ must’ve meant in a foreign country but didn’t want to ask and look like a moron. “What’d you do in the Army?”
�
��I was a Ranger, which got me a first-class ticket to hell, or as civilians call it, North Korea,” he said and then laughed as if it were funny.
He’d fought in the second Korean War. He didn’t know that about him. He didn’t know much about Jane or her family, but it was changing quickly.
“Is that a sniper rifle?” Roman asked. He was always curious about guns but didn’t get a lot of time with them. His father took him hunting when he was younger, but that was about it. Roman used to read gun magazines and wished he had some of the handguns and rifles pictured in those. Her father definitely had a .45 government model and some sort of rifle in what looked like a 7.62 or .300 caliber. It was badass.
“The genuine article,” he said. “Go get some sleep. We’ll pack up whatever you and your brother want in the morning. He’s not gonna shoot me if he finds me in here, will he?”
“He’s eight, so…”
Her father paused in fluffing a throw pillow, tossed it on the sofa, and nodded and said, “Sorry. I didn’t realize he was just a kid. I thought when you said ‘brother’ you meant someone closer to your age. Shit, that sucks. But at least he’s still got you.”
Roman didn’t know what to say. He just nodded, as well and left the room.
He didn’t sleep that night in his parents’ bed. It wasn’t because he was worried about the infection transferring from his mother to him. It just didn’t feel right. This was always their room, where they slept and talked and sometimes argued so loud he could hear them even with the soundproofing. They’d loved each other, though. Of that he was sure. And they’d loved him and Connor. He hadn’t even heard from his half-sisters. Where they went, the phones definitely weren’t going to work anymore. He checked both parents’ phones this morning and only found emails and texts that pertained to work. It seemed fitting. They’d been defined by their work, accomplishments, and wealth. It hadn’t gotten them anywhere in the end. This infection knew not of people’s wealth and circumstance. It was a killer that turned its victims into equally dangerous killers.
