A Small World

by R. S. Merritt

  Kelly disappeared into the bathroom after rummaging around in her bags and gathering together everything she needed to take a shower and get ready for dinner. Randy settled back in the leather recliner in the corner of the room and began clicking through the news stations on the flat screen TV that was tastefully concealed in the ceiling when not in use. The bellhop had spent a few minutes explaining how the AV equipment in the room worked. There was evidently surround sound and all sorts of cool effects which could be created in addition to the TV coming down out of the ceiling. Randy and Kelly had both nodded dutifully to the bellhop without either one of them really comprehending any of it. The bellhop explaining how to engage the surround sound was kind of the same thing as the stewardess explaining how to open the emergency door on the plane. You had to look like you were listening and then signify you’d understood but there wasn’t going to be a test afterwards or anything.

  The different news outlets were focused on this late summer storm hitting New England. One weird item that popped up was that international flights had been grounded temporarily by order of homeland security. The anchor on the news station mused it could be due to the storms in the New England area as well as the heightened terror threat level. She noted that several European and Asian countries had also locked down their international flights temporarily. Domestic flights were still running as scheduled except for the areas expected to be impacted by the storms.

  Kelly caught the tail end of the news report as she walked out of the bathroom with a fluffy looking complimentary robe on and her hair up in a towel. She watched while the news switched to the weather report showing satellite images of the massive storms moving in on them.

  “You really know how to schedule romantic getaways.” She said after the news switched to a commercial about cheap razors you could order online.

  “I tried for a time when I knew you couldn’t actually leave the hotel without facing almost certain death. Cuts way down on our expenses if you’re not able to get to the primary shopping areas without risking getting your hair caught in a hurricane.”

  “I thought your cheap tipping was going to cover the shopping?” Kelly shot back as she disappeared back into the bathroom to run through the bizarre ritual women follow to get ready to go out for the evening.

  Randy had a sudden impulse to call the kids and see if they were alright but decided to wait for Kelly to get out of the bathroom. That way they could both talk to the kids at the same time. If he called them right now Kelly would just emerge from the bathroom and abscond with his phone anyway. He turned his attention back to the TV. The news anchors were discussing a massive new guerrilla conflict taking place in Central America. The people there were evidently so fed up with the government that they were attacking armed groups of police and soldiers with nothing but their bare hands.

  Randy kicked the chair back and watched as the light faded from outside the window. The rain started coming down in sheets, driven sideways by the suddenly howling gale force winds that had sprung up out of nowhere. He idly wondered whether he should tell Kelly now or wait until she’d gotten dressed that they probably weren’t going anywhere. Hopefully the hotel happy hour had food. If she’d gotten dressed and they had nowhere to go this wasn’t going to be a pleasant evening for him.

  Chapter 3: A Long Walk

  Kyler was up before the sun. His sleeping bag covered in predawn dew. He shrugged his way out of the bag and looked around the clearing in the faint light of dawn. He’d fallen asleep at some point in the night despite the stress and worrying about his mom. Shimmying completely out of the sleeping bag he pulled on his boots and got them laced up. Mike was still in the same position they’d left him in last night. Leaning back against the canoe with his sleeping bag wrapped around him and his mouth wide open with the occasional snore-snort erupting out of him.

  Kyler started to just walk out of the camp and head up the road. Giving it a moment of thought he decided he should let someone know what he was up to. He squatted down beside the sleeping bag next to his and poked the small shape curled up inside the thick bag.

  “What do you want?” A muffled response came from inside the sleeping bag. Kyler pulled the bag down so that he could see Seth’s face.

  “I’m going to go hike up the road a mile or two and see if I can figure out what’s going on. No one ever came back last night. I need you to let everyone know where I went so no one freaks out. Got it?”

  Seth nodded and grunted some words as he pulled his head back into the sleeping bag like a tortoise retreating into its shell. Kyler stepped over Seth and walked towards the packs that were lined up against the canoes. He thought about waking up Mike, but it would probably take a fairly substantial amount of effort to accomplish that task. He was about fifty percent sure that Seth may remember to tell everyone where he’d headed off to. Oh well. Hopefully he could be back before everyone even really woke up for the day.

  Kyler grabbed his walking staff and his canteen. He took a minute to make sure his Gerber knife was still hanging off his belt where he could get to it easily. He’d slept fully clothed except for his boots. Enough of their ‘sleeping under the stars’ experiences had turned into ‘trying to setup tents in the middle of a thunderstorm at four in the morning experiences’ that all of them now slept fully dressed. Taking one last look around at the bundled-up campers scattered around on the ground Kyler adjusted his belt and moved out.

  The access road to the canoe launch area was paved and had enough room for one car to drive on it at a time. If another car came along in the opposite direction one would have to pull off onto the side of the road and let the other pass. That’s what Kyler assumed anyway. He’d never actually seen another car on the road any of the times they’d come out here. Walking down the road was slowly working the stiffness out of his muscles. He walked without stopping until the sun was completely over the horizon. He stopped and took a big swig out of his canteen once the sun was fully up and he had better visibility.

  He figured he must’ve hiked at least two miles. He’d been walking almost an hour and keeping up a steady pace. Up ahead there was a ‘T’ intersection where the access road dumped out onto the main road that circled the park. The road went from the gate to the big park by the river and passed through all the different tent campsites people could use. The camp sites here were pretty spread out. A lot of people preferred to go into the back country anyway, so it was hit or miss if you’d see a lot of people around on any given day.

  Both sides of the access road were lined with tall pine trees. The evergreens grew densely enough that you weren’t able to see more than twenty feet in any direction off the road. The thick pine needles did a great job of absorbing sounds, so the forest always seemed eerily quiet. Kyler began to feel a little uneasy as he approached the feeder road up ahead. He wasn’t sure why, but he felt like he should be cautious about how he rounded the corner. With that in mind he moved over so that he was hugging the side of the road as he walked.

  The closer he got to the intersection the closer he moved over towards the tree lined ditch on the side of the road. By the time he was within twenty yards of the intersection he’d started walking right along the perimeter of the trees. Instead of just walking up and turning along the road Kyler decided to approach the road through the forest at an angle. This would let him take a look at the road ahead before completely committing to walking along beside it. Feeling a little childish for being scared of the road for no good reason Kyler cut through the woods and looked for a place he could peek out at the road ahead. He was thinking Seth’s apocalyptic alien ramblings from the day before must’ve gotten to him.

  After stomping through a forest floor covered in dead branches, pine cones and briars Kyler finally found himself a good vantage point to check out the main road. All he saw was more road. Mentally cussing himself out for the uncharacteristic cowardice that’d overcome him he broke out of the tree’s perimeter. After another quick look at the road,
he began walking again. Just to prove to himself that he wasn’t letting his fear control him he started walking along the side of the road instead of hiding by the tree line. This road was the standard black asphalt two-lane road. Two cars could easily pass each other going in opposite directions now. The road wound through the park forming a circle that would eventually lead you back to the main entrance no matter which direction you walked.

  Because it was a curving road there was still the issue of not being able to see too far ahead as you were walking. Kyler was wondering why he still hadn’t seen any vehicles. At the very least there should’ve been a ranger truck driving by. There was always some sort of maintenance to be done around the park. He was also pretty sure they were supposed to patrol the park and make sure the campers were ok. If nothing else, they should be driving around handing out tickets for things like littering and leaving your fire going without the proper rocks around it.

  Kyler didn’t care if they were all busy trying to protect picnic baskets from larcenous bears. He knew it was early and everyone was still asleep, but it would have made him feel a million times better to have a car blow past him. Not to mention that he’d decided hitch hiking in this situation was absolutely the right move. As long as someone didn’t roll up offering free ice cream and asking for him to get in their white van with aluminum foil covering the windows and search for their lost puppy Kyler was ready to score a ride from pretty much anybody. He checked his phone as he walked. There still wasn’t even the ghost of a signal. Where it should have showed bars in the top corner of his phone there was just a big ‘X’ next to the words ‘no service’. He was so busy checking his phone he didn’t even notice the vehicles on the side of the road that appeared around the next bend.

  When he finally looked up from his phone, he saw a group of cars parked along the side of the road up ahead. He sped up as he recognized the shape of his mom’s minivan in the middle of the three cars. The other two vehicles were both trucks. He recognized both of them as he got closer. One was a shiny new F-150 that belonged to Mike while the other was an old suburban that belonged to the scoutmaster. It didn’t look like anyone was in the vehicles.

  The front of the F-150 had a spiderweb of cracks in the windshield and a dent in the fender that hadn’t been there before. The red stains covering the yellow hood told the rest of the story. Kyler’s first thought was that if he’d smashed up Mikes truck, he probably wouldn’t have dared to show up at the canoe launch either. Mike loved that truck. The guy rarely had more than five dollars in his pocket and his house was the kind that could be hooked up to a truck and driven away but he got to drive his dream truck.

  As he kept getting closer Kyler’s mind started racing. If the person driving Mike’s truck had hit a deer or something, then they’d have called the ranger and kept coming. Hitting a deer wouldn’t have necessitated them leaving all the vehicles on the side of the road for over a day and not sending anyone to tell the scouts what was going on. What if it hadn’t been an animal that’d gotten hit? What if it’d been a person?

  If they’d hit a person, then they would’ve stopped and tried their best to help whoever they’d hit. It still made no sense that they wouldn’t have figured out some way to alert the scout troop as to what had happened. Another alternative was they’d all left to go to the hospital with the person they’d hit. Maybe the rangers had come along and gotten the police involved and they’d all been brought back to the station as witnesses. Knowing Mike, it was even possible there might be an illegal weapon or two concealed in the cab of the F-150 that may have gotten them all in trouble.

  Still, the cops would’ve sent someone to let the scouts know. Kyler was jogging at this point. His brain was circling around other avenues of thought as to what may have happened. He was rejecting those ideas firmly. He’d already lost his dad. The universe wouldn’t be cruel enough to take his mother from him as well. His jog turned into a sprint as he got close enough to see that the driver’s side doors were open on the suburban. Gasping for air he skidded to a halt. There was a human shaped lump on the ground by the hood of the F-150. Breathing deeply and trying to get his fear under control he walked slowly up to the lump on the ground.

  It was hard to tell with the face smashed in and the skull dented but the body looked like that of a teenage girl. Kyler made that assumption based more on the gore covered clothes and long matted hair than anything else. The body had been smashed by the massive grill of the pickup truck. Legs and arms were all twisted the wrong way. Kyler stared at the body for a few seconds before spinning around, falling to his knees and puking a stream of watery puke onto the ground. He stayed on his knees watching his vomit pool for a minute before he stood up and slowly turned back around.

  The broken body was still there. He’d hoped he’d imagined it. How could the body still be there? Where was his mom and the others? Close to panic Kyler began opening the doors on all of the vehicles and searching for any sort of clue. He found nothing. It looked like the minivan had been left turned on since it didn’t make any of the normal beeping noises when he opened the door. He leaned forward and tried to honk the horn. He was hoping someone would hear it who could come explain to him what’d happened. When that horn refused to do anything, he got out of the van and ran back to the passenger side of the F-150.

  He let himself in and worked his way over to the driver’s seat. The bright yellow Ford with the screwed-up windshield had been turned off. Kyler picked the keys up out of the passenger seat as he worked his way over to the driver’s side. He leaned on the horn and yelled as loud as he could for his mom. When nothing happened, he got out of the truck and yelled her name some more. Careful not to step on the dead body of the young girl he walked all around the trucks looking for clues. He stopped occasionally to yell for his mom and the others. He listened intently each time hoping to hear his moms voice drifting back to him. Nothing came back.

  He went and sat in the truck. He was at a loss. There was the body of a girl laying on the ground right outside the truck he was sitting in. His mom and her friends were missing. Cell phones weren’t working. Then he saw them coming. A group of about twenty people were scrambling out of the woods and making their way towards the vehicles. Chris saw his mom was one of the ones in the lead and he stuck his head out the window and yelled for her.

  “Mom!” He waved. He blocked out the body of the dead girl that was lying in the dirt less than ten feet from where he was waving for his mommy like a lost toddler. His mom and a few of the others with her locked their eyes on him and they started running.

  The joy he’d felt on recognizing his mom began to fade. The joy turned into terror when his mom let out an inhuman screech as she sprinted towards the truck. Kyler was in a state of shock, but his self-preservation kicked in. He leaned back into the truck and rolled the driver’s window up before firmly pressing the lock button to make all the doors in the cab snap shut. Less than three seconds later his moms face smashed into the glass. Her fists started hammering on the window. The others started arriving. One of them jumped into the bed of the truck and started hammering on the roof and the glass window in the back. They were all over the truck now hammering away at the windows and letting loose terrifying high-pitched screams.

  The window in the back cracked loudly. That tore Kyler out of his stupor. He’d been staring at the face of the monster that used to be his mom. It was still her skin and bone structure, but her eyes had changed. All the humor and love were gone. The eyes are windows into the soul and Kyler didn’t see anything when he looked into his moms’ eyes now. She was slobbering and slamming herself against the truck. She was wearing a T-Shirt from a steamboat they’d ridden one year when they went to Nashville on vacation. It was a red T-Shirt but now most of the front of it had been dyed an even darker red. She was missing a few teeth and her face had big red welts all over it from where she’d run through the brush and briars face first in the woods.

  Looking into the back-seat Ky
ler recognized the scoutmaster shoving his leg into the backseat through the broken sliding glass window in the back. A jagged shard of the glass was ripping the man’s leg wide open but that didn’t seem to be slowing him down. His mom started head butting the window right beside him even as another man Kyler had never seen before had gotten on the hood and was smashing away with his feet at the windshield. Kyler knew he had to get out of there if he expected to survive.

  He put the truck into drive and accelerated slowly. He couldn’t see anything through the windshield except for the Zombie trying to get at him. Looking in the rearview he saw the scoutmaster working his second leg into the window and trying to widen the hole. Kyler floored it for a few seconds then slammed on the brakes. The two men attacking him on the hood went flying off and onto the asphalt. Kyler saw them both jump back up and start rushing back towards the truck. Kyler slammed his foot down on the gas pedal again and ran them both down. One went under the truck and the other one managed to go headfirst into the other side of the windshield and then somersault into the truck bed. Kyler turned his head to see what was going on in the back right as the scoutmaster finished pulling himself fully into the back seat.