She could have a hot shower. She could sleep in a real bed. She tried the light switch and found there was, of course, power. Behind the cereal had been a few cans which she could heat up.
From outside, she heard a faint, sharp bang. Was that a gunshot? Maybe not, but she wasn’t safe here with only a pry-bar holding the door closed.
It took longer to find the bags than to fill them. Four near-identical hold-alls that nearly held everything she needed. Food, blankets, pillows, toilet paper, toothpaste, and Pete’s toothbrush: once boiled, it would be better than nothing. How she’d boil it was a problem to solve later, but from everything she’d seen that morning, it was going to be weeks before any shops reopened. Some cutlery, some crockery, some clothes, and the bags were nearly full.
What was missing was a spare phone, radio, or even a working TV. His screen was plugged into his laptop through which he got every television channel in a way that he’d insisted wasn’t technically illegal. The laptop required a password, and she didn’t want to waste time trying to guess it. Nothing the news had to say would change her circumstances. Not now. Not yet.
She looked again at the bags, then at the room, and knew why she was reluctant to leave.
“Goodbye, Pete,” she said aloud. “Thank you.”
She pulled the pry-bar from the bottom of the door, picked up two of the bags, and made her way outside.
Along the hall, the door to number 314 opened. A man stepped forward, though not quite outside, lingering in the doorway with his right hand hidden behind the frame.
Head and shoulders taller than Olivia, the man wasn’t athletic, though his clothing was. His face was a riot of battling emotions. Nervous. Anxious. Angry. But not alone. There was at least one person standing behind him.
Before either could speak, Olivia went first. “Oh, it’s so good to see people again,” she said. “I thought everyone had already left.”
“What are you doing?” the man asked.
“Getting my boyfriend’s things,” Olivia said decisively. “We’re leaving town, I think everyone else has already gone. You don’t want to be the last here. Did you see what happened to the hospital? I was working there yesterday. But it burned down. No one came to put the fire out.”
“The hospital burned down?” the man asked, sounding genuinely curious.
“You didn’t know?” Olivia said. “It was a nightmare there last night. Gunshots, car-wrecks, fights, fires.”
“Zombies?” another man asked, the other person in the apartment, opening the door a little further so he could see out.
“No,” Olivia said. “There were no zombies. Just people acting crazy. I went back to work another shift. The whole building was on fire. Now I’m— We’re leaving. Everyone out there is. You should do the same. Get out while you can.”
As she spoke, she’d taken half steps along the corridor. Now she took full ones, striding along the hallway. Not wanting to wait for the elevator, she took the stairs, walking not running, listening but not looking back. She wasn’t followed down to the garage, but it was half empty and nearly pitch dark. Pete’s truck was where she’d parked it when she’d brought it back for him, close to the entrance through which bitterly cold light streamed. The two bags went on to the passenger seat. That left two up in the apartment. She took a step away from the car, then changed her mind. She’d brought the food. The clothes and other things could be found elsewhere or she would do without. She put the key in the ignition and drove.
Driving summoned a comfortable memory of familiarity, an illusion of safety that was shattered when a red and silver eighteen-wheeler ambled across the intersection ahead of her. She had plenty of time to brake; the juggernaut barely managed ten miles an hour, but it was travelling southwest along an east-west street, heading from Woodlawn Boulevard but completely missing the diagonal turn onto Wilbur. Instead it rumbled on, mounting the kerb, churning the civic apron of grass to mud before doing the same to the corner plot’s front lawn. The truck swerved slightly to the right before it slammed into the brown-brick single storey house. Glass shattered as windows smashed, but the slow-moving juggernaut finally stopped.
Olivia slowly released her grip on the wheel as, outside, the clatter of falling masonry subsided. Slowly, she got out. No one else did. The doors of the truck remained closed. With the house’s front door partially buried beneath its massive wheels, she didn’t expect the homeowner to come out that way, but no one made their way around from the back of the house. Nor did anyone appear from any of the neighbouring homes. Surely not everyone could have fled the city, not from all of the windows she could see. Not yet. Could they?
A pattering of bricks from within the partially demolished building was followed by an echoing grind. The driver still hadn’t opened the door, and there were two possible reasons for that. She suspected the worse, but on the slim chance they were merely trapped rather than dead, she grabbed the pry-bar before hurrying over to the juggernaut.
It had New Jersey plates. She could fill in the rest of the blanks. The driver had taken a few pills to stay awake on the long escape-drive west, but had a heart attack behind the wheel. Except…
When she’d got into Pete’s truck, driving from his apartment, she’d slipped into automatic, and had headed back to familiar roads close to her own apartment. The river wasn’t far to the east, while the interstate was still a couple of blocks further north. The trucker couldn’t have been fleeing, but heading to somewhere specific. This house? Wherever it was, they weren’t going any further.
She pulled herself up the steps to the driver-side door. The windows were coated with dust, mud, and spider-web cracks from the collision. But from inside, she heard movement.
“Hello? Are you okay? Can you hear me?” she called.
The handle was jammed. She slid the pry-bar in, and slammed her entire body against it, levering the stuck door open with a grinding crunch. The door swung outward, forcing her to jump down. She landed unsteadily on the rubble-strewn mess beneath the person-sized wheels. Looking down to find her footing, it was a second more before she looked back up and saw she’d been wrong. The driver was dead. The woman, wearing blue dungarees, a plaid shirt, and a green cap, was covered in blood and slumped forward over the steering wheel.
Was there someone else in the cab? Olivia quickly pulled herself back up. There was a man in the passenger seat, and he was certainly dead. He’d been shot, from close range. Twice, by the look of it. Once in the chest, once in the head.
The driver gasped, and Olivia lost her footing, falling once more outside the cab, but landing on her feet among the debris.
“It’s okay,” she said. “I’m here to help.”
Bone grated as the driver twisted her broken neck, flexed her fractured body, tugging against the seatbelt holding her in place. Her arm reached towards Olivia. The forearm was broken in at least two places, giving an unnatural curve to the limb.
“Don’t move!” Olivia said. “Don’t…” The words trailed into silence as she finally understood what she was seeing. “You’re infected. You’re… you’re…” She couldn’t bring herself to say the word aloud, but that didn’t stop it being true. The driver was undead. No longer human. A zombie.
Olivia backed off and ran back to Pete’s truck, got behind the wheel, and tried the ignition. The engine wouldn’t start.
She didn’t hear the seatbelt snap, but she heard the crunch as the zombie fell out of the cab. The undead driver landed on broken arms, and crawled more than walked, lurching forward on its four broken limbs before slipping and rolling to its side. In the process, somehow, it managed to get a knee beneath its body. Slowly it unfolded upright. Standing, it staggered on.
Olivia turned the key again. Still nothing. Again. Nothing.
The zombie lurched nearer.
From nowhere, a ball of fawn-coloured fury ran at the zombie. The dog sprang sideways at the last second, circling behind, barking and snarling at the zombie who snarled back in tu
rn. The zombie spun, swiping its broken arm at Rufus who kept circling. Kept barking. Kept snapping. He was trying to scare, to subdue, a task for which he must have been trained, but the zombie wasn’t going to be intimidated. On the video footage she’d seen on TV, and on her phone, the undead had advanced into a hail of gunfire, and then kept walking. A dog would be no more trouble than a person. She tried the engine one last time. Still it wouldn’t start.
Olivia grabbed the pry-bar and got out, but she couldn’t run.
Rufus walked backwards as the zombie swiped its arms towards it. How did he find her? How did he know not to bite? Could dogs get infected? She bundled the questions around her doubts and pushed them aside, to be dealt with later.
“Rufus! Heel!” she called, hoping that was the right command. The dog understood his name, at least, and backed off a step, then darted left, sprinting in a curving half circle until he’d come to stand a little in front of Olivia.
“Now what?” she asked.
Rufus yipped.
“That’s not very helpful.”
The food was in the truck. And it was the only vehicle for which she had a set of keys. She could run, but carrying the bags, could she outrun a zombie? No.
The broken-armed monster limped closer, dragging its left leg behind it.
“Rufus, get in the truck!” Olivia said.
The dog rose to a half crouch, eyes now on the zombie, clearly ready to charge.
“Stay!” Olivia said.
She looked in the dead trucker’s eyes, and wished she hadn’t. There wasn’t even a spark of recognition in those lifeless depths. She raised the pry-bar and swung it like a bat, straight into the zombie’s outstretched arm. Bone snapped, but the zombie staggered on. Olivia backed off. Rufus charged, accelerating from zero to a surging ball of defensive anger, slamming into the zombie’s legs. The undead driver flew up before falling down, hard, while Rufus tumbled sideways, across the road.
“Rufus?” Olivia called. The dog whined.
Anger rose, quickly turning to fury, then a blinding rage as memories of the dead and dying at the hospital came back to her, settling on a memory of Nicole. Of Dante. Of Mack. Screaming now, a feral bellow of justified rage, she swung the pry-bar up, and slammed it down on the zombie’s skull. But as the bone cracked, reason returned, and she backed off, until her legs hit something hard. Spinning around, she saw she was back at Pete’s truck. She spun around again, but the zombie hadn’t moved. This time, it was well and truly dead.
She breathed out slowly, and realised Rufus had gone.
She looked up and down the empty street. No one had come to a window. No one had come to a door. No one had come to help her, except Rufus. And now the dog had vanished as mysteriously as he’d arrived.
She got back into the truck. This time, the contrary engine started the first time. She was about to drive off, when she paused. Leaving the engine running, giving the corpse a wide berth, she went to the truck’s cab. There was a gun on the floor, beneath the steering wheel: a cheap nine-millimetre, which explained how the passenger had died. She grabbed it. Near the stick was a small wash bag. She grabbed that, too. Neither was what she was after.
She wanted answers. An explanation. She’d settle for a map, but couldn’t see one. Her eyes settled on the radio on the dash, covered in gore from the shot-dead passenger. But Pete had a radio in his truck.
Taking gun and wash bag with her, she returned to Pete’s truck and turned on the radio, flipping through stations as she drove back to Mrs Mathers’s house.
Chapter 8 - Trooper State
Indiana & Michigan
With cold water and bleach, she cleaned the pry-bar, then her hands, then the skirt, all the while wishing she’d gone back for clothes from Pete’s. Too big would have been better than damp and smelling of chlorine. After, she sat in the lawn chair in the kitchen, sipping from the gallon jug of milk, considering her options. They weren’t great.
On the positive side of the ledger, she had a truck with nearly half a tank of gas, enough cereal to last her a month, a roof over her head, and water coming out of the faucet. She had a firearm. In the truck driver’s wash bag, she’d found a spare magazine, a thousand dollars in twenties, neatly tied together, and twelve plastic pill jars that were labelled Vitamin-D, but almost certainly weren’t. The pills had gone into the trash. The bills and the gun, now unloaded, were on the kitchen counter.
She ran through the mental list again, but couldn’t come up with any other positives. The negatives were far more numerous.
She had no electricity and little clue what was happening in the world. The radio stations she’d skipped through on her drive back hadn’t helped. Each frequency still broadcasting had yelled, mumbled, or preached a variation on it being the end of days, the end of the world, and nowhere was safe. What had been lacking was some kind of official government statement about where to go, where to avoid, where to leave, or where to stay. Perhaps that would come in time. Until then, she was on her own, which brought her back to her mental list.
The infected had reached South Bend. One truck driver from New Jersey might be the first, but she wouldn’t be the last. There’d be other cases between here and New York, and more every hour. There was no sign of the National Guard. No sign of the police this morning. No fire service either. From the acrid tang settling over the city, the hospital wasn’t the only conflagration. She had no phone. No address book, either. Pete was in Hawaii, which might as well be the moon. Nicole was dead. Mrs Mathers was in Florida. A half tank of gas in an unreliable truck wasn’t going to get her far. There was no sign of life at Jenny’s house at the end of the street, and in the entire city, she couldn’t think of anyone who’d give her a better welcome than a stranger.
Sensing that her list was drifting into a litany of self-pity, she turned to her choices. Essentially, there were two. Her eyes fell on the letter, still on the counter. Either she stayed in the house or she went to the cabin.
Those quiet afternoon fantasy conversations with Pete, usually the morning after the alien invasion series had aired on TV, came back to her. Most of those time-wasting dialogues had been spent discussing what they’d haul up there in the back of one of the store’s delivery vans. Sometimes it was two vans. Sometimes it was one of the grocery store’s delivery trucks, already conveniently full, collecting Nicole along the way. What they’d not really considered was, in a real apocalypse, they wouldn’t be the only people wanting to escape.
No, reality was different from fantasy. The cabin’s power came from a generator which was always drained at the end of a stay, and no one had stayed there in months. Not since she’d gone up there with Mrs Mathers to help pack up her husband’s old things. A lot of which were now in boxes in the den. There might be a few sticks of furniture left behind, but nothing else. There was an open fire, and the woods were full of trees, but she didn’t have an axe, let alone a chainsaw. There was an old well, but she wasn’t sure the water was potable because, when she’d gone up there with Mrs Mathers, Nora had insisted they bring water with them. The cabin was four walls and a roof in the middle of the woods. Remote, yes, but that came with dangers as well as benefits. There had to be another choice.
Her eyes fell on the gun. An hour ago, she’d killed someone. That there’d never be any repercussions was more terrifying than the act itself. That she felt no regret was worse still. But she’d been in shock since she’d turned on the TV yesterday. Since then, so much had happened that she was thoroughly numb.
A long time ago, about the time she’d cut ties with her mother, she’d realised that there was a time for emotion, and a time for it to be boxed up, put away. This last year, in the company of Pete, Nora, and Nicole, she’d let her emotions come out. Let herself feel safe. Feel normal. As if life could be lived in colour, rather than in shades of grey. Today, they’d been permanently tinged blood red.
In high school, a counsellor had told her that life could always be split into binary choic
es. Do something, or don’t do it. Here it was stay or not stay. Her eyes fell on the gun once more. That was what life would become if she stayed here, in the empty city. And it was why so many people had already left. Staying required fighting to keep what she had, and what little there was in the house wasn’t worth the cost.
She went into the living room and began sorting through the boxes to find what she’d take with her.
Half an hour later, the truck was loaded. From the driveway, she looked up and down the street, her eyes lingering one last time on Jenny’s house, but there was no one there. There was no one anywhere. Everyone was hiding until the nightmare was over, and it was time she did the same. A grey pall of smoke loomed over the city to the south. From its size, an entire block was burning.
“Thank you, Nora,” she said, climbing into the truck. “And thank you, Pete.” She checked the mirrors, then out of the windows, looking for the dog. Instead, she heard the sharp crack of a rifle. “And thank you, Rufus,” she said, and started the engine.
When she left the housing subdivision, this time, she went north.
The cabin was fifty miles across the state line in Michigan, north of Paw Paw, and west of Kalamazoo. She knew the general route well enough: up to Niles, then Dowagiac, Decatur, then through Paw Paw until she saw the farm with the blue water tower. Then it was a right turn. The cabin, and the woodland included in the deed, was off a short track marked with a trio of battered, official-looking signs, warning about landslides. Mr Mathers had put those up to discourage unwanted visitors. Or was it a left turn at the water tower? Worrying about the last few miles could wait until she got there. For now, she had to get more than a few miles from South Bend.
To the east, the St Joseph River was her occasional companion as she drove a straighter path north. The further she travelled, the more confident she was that she’d left just in time, if not a little late. A small house had already burned to the ground, while its neighbour, a far larger, far grander home had a trio of pickup trucks outside. On the back of one stood a woman with a rifle who half-raised her weapon as Olivia stomped on the gas. Something told her those trucks didn’t belong to the owners of the home. At other houses, she was sure people were inside. Watching. Waiting until nightfall to either flee or loot, but though she saw an occasional curtain twitch, no doors opened as she drove by, and she saw no reason to slow. Not until Lilac Road became Coop Road as she crossed into Michigan, and then came to the intersection with Bertrand Road, and the barricade.
Surviving The Evacuation | Life Goes On (Book 2): No More News Page 6
