A Small World

by R. S. Merritt

  Dusk was settling in as he turned into the parking lot of the small school. The school was used for K -12 and supported less than a hundred students. The island was super popular during the summer, but the population dipped dramatically during the freezing winter months. Because it supported everything from kindergarteners to high schoolers there were all the amenities you’d expect for those grades. Basketball courts and miniaturized playgrounds filled the field behind the school. The parking lot had a school bus and several other vehicles parked in it.

  When Randy walked into the parking lot an armed man in civilian clothes with a shiny deputy star pinned to his shirt casually walked over to him. The man was wearing a dark blue jacket and khakis with a pair of black work boots. He had a hunting rifle slung over his shoulder and a pistol in a holster connected to a green webbed belt riding low on his hips underneath a considerable gut.

  “Hey there son. Where are you coming from?” The man challenged Randy from about ten feet away. Randy stopped at the challenge and stood there wishing the man would just let him by. All he wanted to do at this point was see Kelly and put on some dry underwear. Dry underwear sounded like the most luxurious item in the world at this point. He was chafed in a very sensitive area to the point of bleeding. If there’s one place a man would never want to have a blister.

  “I’m Randy. The commander had me on a scavenging mission to the mainland. I just got back. Don’t think we’ve met yet?” Randy held out his hand and moved towards the guard. The man turned his head and spit to the side. He didn’t extend his hand to Randy to shake. He just gave him a look like you’d give a homeless man asking for money to supposedly buy food even though you can smell the liquor on him.

  “Alright. You go ahead up to the school. They’ll get you checked in. Hopefully you got some new clothes up in there and can get yourself looking more presentable. Life may have gone sideways over on the mainland but here we’re still trying our best to keep everything civilized.”

  What the hell was this guy talking about? Randy wanted to scream at the man that they were in the middle of a freaking Zombie Apocalypse. People were eating other people. People were shooting other people. He’d seen people get shot on this island. This guy was worried about him not tucking in his shirt? Randy bit his tongue and mumbled something about definitely trying to look better and headed into the school.

  The gym was packed with cots, blankets, boxes and suitcases. People sat around the gym looking scared and lost. The smell in the air was of a couple hundred unwashed people crammed into a gym. Water was still being provided by the water utility on the island but there was no way of knowing how much longer that would last. Randy knew the utility guys had been meeting with the commander but information on the state of electrical power on the island was well above his pay grade. All he wanted to do was find Kelly and figure out how to crawl onto a cot with her and get some sleep without breaking said cot. It’d been an exceptionally long day.

  He didn’t see Kelly from the door, so he began moving around among the different groups gathered together to try and find her. He finally found her sitting with her arm around a woman he recognized as Joe’s wife. There was a little dark-haired girl sitting with them who was rubbing her mom’s back. Her mom was heaving with great big sobs. Kelly didn’t notice Randy standing there as she was busy trying to comfort the freaked-out woman. The daughter was the first one to notice Randy awkwardly standing there staring down at them.

  “They’re back!” The little girl announced loudly. She’d stood up and was looking around excitedly for her father. Kelly stood up and kissed him. She was looking around for Joe as well. She gave Randy a piercing look and Randy shook his head negatively then looked down at the ground. He had no idea what to say in this situation. He’d never been good at giving people bad news. His daughter had won a goldfish at a county fair when she was younger. She’d thought that fish lived for years. In reality, Randy had been periodically replacing the aging goldfish with new ones after the first one died a day after they’d brought it home, so he never had to tell her the fish died.

  Kelly knew Randy was no good with stuff like this. As Joe’s wife darted her eyes back and forth between Randy and Kelly, she began to sob even harder. Kelly sat down and pulled the hysterical widow closer and tried to get her to calm down.

  “Is my daddy in heaven?” The little girl had come over to Randy to ask the extremely serious question.

  “Yes. He is.” Randy managed to stutter out as the little girl started crying and saying she wanted her daddy back.

  Joe’s wife looked up at him.

  “How’d he die?” She asked Randy. Her voice was cracking from all the crying and she kept wiping her nose on her shirt sleeve. Randy guessed napkins must be in short supply. He wondered how long before everything was in short supply. Maybe that’d encourage the commander to let people leave the island.

  Randy was saved from having to provide a more detailed answer by the armed man who’d greeted him outside coming over. The man told him the commander was in the office and he wanted to debrief Randy on the scavenging mission. Randy hoped this would be an opportunity to stress the mission wasn’t so much of a failure as it was a valuable collection of lessons learned. He kissed Kelly again and awkwardly gave the little girl and her broken-hearted mom hugs goodbye before heading out with the sentry to go see the commander.

  Chapter 20: A Long Way on a Short Road

  Brenda finished what she’d been doing in the large yellow house she’d had Eric stop in front of. She took one last look around the upper middle-class suburban neighborhood before hopping back into the cab of the truck. She nodded at Eric. Eric took another look at the house then rapidly accelerated to get them out of the neighborhood. It’d been risky getting in as it was a gated community and they hadn’t been able to get through the first gate they tried. The other gate into the neighborhood had been standing wide open. A large SUV with a smashed in grill in the ditch across from it.

  Brenda let her eyes slide over the mess that was visible though the broken windshield of the SUV. It was a matter of life and death in this world gone mad to be able to notice things out of the ordinary and quickly respond to them. Just as important as being able to notice a curtain moving or a Zombie running through the woods towards you was the ability to not notice everything. She’d honed the skill by being exposed to so much human suffering and death in the two days they’d been on the road that she felt desensitized to it now. She tried to keep the kids from focusing on it but when you were surrounded by this much death there wasn’t a realistic way to keep them from seeing it.

  The younger girls focused on the video games they’d found at a convenience store that was packed with all sorts of cheap electronics and souvenirs. They’d occasionally look up and out the windows but either Brenda or Caitlyn would quickly get them focused back on their games or a coloring book. Anything to keep those young eyes from staring too long at the obscenity of the scenery around them.

  In normal times they’d have been able to make it to the resort area in about fifty minutes. The traffic in the post outbreak world was a whole new story. So far since they’d left the church they’d stuck to backroads and tried to avoid any places they thought may be packed with Zombies. Ever since the church they’d only seen small groups of Zombies wandering around. The going was extremely slow though as they took every precaution. At times Brenda felt Eric was overdoing the caution. She knew he was paranoid about getting them all killed but she still felt they could really be moving a little bit faster.

  The only thing that kept her from bringing it up was that Eric and his guys had been out in this world longer than she had and they were still alive. Being alive was a pretty solid achievement in this mess. Being alive and out on the road pretty much made you an expert in survival. Plus, she realized she was being impatient about reaching a destination that she really didn’t care about reaching. She was fairly certain as they got closer, they were going to realize that the wh
ole area was crawling with diseased people trying to eat them. They’d have to wave off the annual pass idea and go with her idea of retiring to a nice condo on the beach instead.

  They switched vehicles. No one felt super safe in the open bed of the pickup truck, so they opted for a huge, black Escalade instead. The biggest problem with their new ride was the larger size made it harder to maneuver. It also required crazy amounts of gas. Luckily, the cars sitting in most driveways had gas that they were able to siphon during their pit stops. Brenda found herself getting impatient again to reach a final destination she cared nothing about as they drove down yet another road in the middle of nowhere surrounded by thick green vegetation.

  The large tires easily crushed the branches and debris that littered the road. Staring out the front windshield Brenda wondered how much longer you’d even be able to tell where the road was. Given a few years of neglect Mother Nature would reclaim this road. It’d be swallowed up like it never existed. She wondered if that was going to be the same for the whole human race. She hoped not for her granddaughter’s sake, but she didn’t see a whole lot of reasons for optimism. They’d seen and dodged some lethargic Zombies and a few that had been almost like normal people in their response time, but they hadn’t seen another normal human since they’d met Eric and his team back at the church.

  The preacher had been annoying at the beginning of their journey, but he’d pretty much shut up at this point. Eric had made it obvious that he didn’t really care to bring the man along who’d abandoned his brother-in-law and niece to die in a hallway. The shepherd who’d left his flock to be devoured by the wolves while he hid away in his hidey hole. Eric and the rest of his crew were all ex-military. They all shared the distaste for the cowardly actions of the preacher. The men had met before this all happened through a military outreach program Disney had for its employees. That same program had organized the five-day deep-sea fishing expedition they’d gone on at a deeply discounted rate. The expedition had ended up being the reason they were still alive.

  Brenda was mulling over how weird all this was when Eric turned the steering wheel hard to the side. He turned it hard enough to make her smack her head against the passenger window. Brenda tasted blood from her cut lip. She looked around trying to figure out why Eric had pulled that maneuver. She saw a line of people coming out of a gated townhouse area up ahead. The people were running full speed straight for the SUV with the lopping, heedless gait that identified them as Zombies.

  These weren’t the slow ones they’d seen limping around the suburbs as they drove down the side streets. These ones were coming at them inhumanly fast as Eric tried to coerce the big, black, beast they were driving to perform a three-point turn. The debris covered narrow road they were on wasn’t conducive to this maneuver. They’d passed by enough corpse laden cars stuck in ditches to know that panic would just lead to them being ripped apart and left to rot in the hot Florida sun. Eric was focused on keeping his senses about him and staying calm while he worked on getting them turned around and moving in the opposite direction.

  He wasn’t going to make the turn before the first wave of the Zombies reached them. He must’ve sensed this and realized the predicament they were in. If the Zombies reached them while they were trying to turn, they’d throw themselves all over the SUV and start bashing their way through the windows. Eric wouldn’t be able to see and that’d slow them down enough so that the slower Zombies would be able to reach them and then they’d be pinned down by the mass of Zombies that’d start crawling all over the SUV. Eric may not have had time to think all of that through, but he’d been in situations in his military career that he’d only made it through by going with his gut. Right now, his gut was telling him they were running low on time.

  Eric stopped the truck and yelled for John and Tim to try and take out the leaders while he worked on getting them turned around. John and Tim were two of the guys who’d served in the marines. That meant they could take being miserable and eating horrible food. It also meant that they both could shoot under stress. They didn’t have any assault style rifles. They’d looked for them as they raided houses for supplies but hadn’t found any. What they did have were a couple of long guns that were typically used for deer hunting. The barrels of these were stuck out the opened windows of the Escalade as the two men began methodically taking shots at the approaching Zombies.

  Eric gave them twenty seconds to empty out their magazines before he recommenced trying to get them turned around. John and Tim were being handed rifles with fresh magazines by one of the other men jammed into the SUV with them. The smell of gun powder filled the car. The acrid smell of fear mixed in with it as the children cried and huddled down in the floorboards. The insane, hate-filled screeches of the Zombies washing over them.

  Zombies started slamming into the SUV as Eric worked to get it turned around. He began accelerating as Tim almost got ripped out the window by a Zombie who managed to grab him by the wrist. Tim lost the rifle he’d been shooting but managed to pull his arm back in out of the Zombie’s grasp without being bitten or scratched. Brenda saw him jump back in his seat and stare at his wrist in terror. When he saw that his skin wasn’t cut anywhere you could see him physically deflate as the stress flowed out of him.

  Caitlyn had Doreen and Zoey wrapped in her arms as they all squatted down in the floorboards. Myriah was pressed in on them as well holding Zoey. Big tears were flowing down her cheeks as she squatted down there terrified the Zombies would get in and eat them. They’d all seen the partially eaten bodies and smashed cars. They knew it could easily be their fate. One wrong turn and they’d be porcelain corpses with their guts ripped out in a bright red pattern on the side of the road. They knew they’d suffer the indignity of being fed on by rats and vultures as the indifferent Zombies slumped off after ripping them apart.

  For Brenda, the horror wasn’t for her. The reason she couldn’t breathe right now was the images that popped in her head of her granddaughters being killed. Lifeless eyes looking up from their crumpled little bodies. Without realizing it she started sobbing as well. She turned her head to look out the window. An instant later, they all felt the tires lose their purchase on the ground and the big vehicle go careening down the road completely out of control. They were screaming like a bunch of sorority sisters starting down an insane drop on a huge roller coaster when the tires finally latched back onto the asphalt. They surged forward away from the charging Zombies.

  Eric cut the wheel hard to the right to avoid sliding off the road. Finally regaining control, he tapped the brakes lightly to bring their speed under control. Once they were driving at a safe speed again, he checked the rear-view mirror and saw that a few of the faster Zombies had almost caught back up to them. He accelerated as much as he felt was safe on the slippery road and they began to put some real distance between themselves and the Zombie pack. Realizing how close they’d all come to dying no one even minded that they were having to backtrack to where they’d started the day at.

  In the back of the SUV the preacher started praying. The men around him joined in.

  Chapter 21: A Shallow Grave

  Kyler was jarred awake by a series of loud bumps. He looked groggily around to see what they were running over before he was ripped completely out of his slumber by the jerking sensation of rapid swerving. He stared over at Mike. Mike gave him a shame faced grin and indicated he’d hit the bumps on the side of the road. Kyler’s mom had always called those bumps drunk bumps. The name was dead on in this case. Mike had been taking hits out of his little plastic flask pretty regularly. He barely even tried to hide it any more. His eyes were constantly red, and he was constantly slurring his words. It’d been against Kyler’s better judgement to let Mike drive while he took a nap, but he’d been too tired to really put up much of an argument.

  “Where are we?” Seth asked from the back seat. He’d been napping also, judging by the sound of his voice.

  “Close to getting on the 202.” Mike
said as he over corrected again to get them back into the center of the road.

  Kyler looked around on the floor until he found a loose bottle of water. They’d scavenged it during their last pit stop at a small convenience store that’d already been looted at least once. The front doors to the store were locked and had a chain wrapped around them, but someone had taken the liberty of breaking the plate glass windows of the store front to get in. Whoever had done it had been pretty thorough with their looting. Kyler and Mike had still been able to find some useful stuff, but they’d had to dig for it. The bottles of water had been at the bottom of a pile of garbage shoved into the corner.

  Sipping on the warm water now Kyler thought about what Mike had just said. They’d already discussed that once they hit the main roads, they’d probably see a serious uptick in the number of Zombies. There was a good chance they may run into some normal humans who may take a shot at them as well. There was no way to know in advance what the landscape was going to look like. They were making plans and coming up with ideas based on Zombie movies they’d seen. The movies were turning out to be uncannily accurate depictions of what the real apocalypse was like. They were still planning to drive to Westerly to hook Seth up with his relatives. In addition to wanting to rid himself of the responsibility that was Seth, Mike also kept droning on about how they could get armed up at his house. Knowing the kind of gun nut Mike was Kyler fully anticipated that to be true.