by North, Geoff
A woman started screaming from the building behind them. Roy looked towards the entrance. “The nurse I punched.”
“She’s dead, or she will be soon.”
The fat dead corpse from the third floor lurched out onto the steps. Moments later the old lady Roy had murdered with his hammering fists followed. The upper part of her body was hanging forward, flopping from side to side, with only skin and a bit of spine left to support it.
“I killed her,” Roy whimpered. “I fucking smashed her chest in. She can’t be alive... she just can’t be.”
“She isn’t.” The comatose man stumbled out after them. His face was black from the throttling Roy had given him, but he was back on his feet nevertheless. “None of them are alive anymore. Only the things inside are keeping them going now.”
“Don’t you have some kind of spray to use? Didn’t your scientist buddies develop a repellent for the little fuckers?”
The question was so ridiculous it actually made sense. The DSC would have undoubtedly been working on a way to kill the spread of something so vile. If they were weaponizing the swarm, surely they would have developed a counteragent—or as Roy had put it, a spray—to neutralize them with. HR was right. I would’ve made a shitty disease research scientist.
The puddle of black fluid from the deer was headed for them. The dead residents of Green Forest Haven were headed for them. Louie ran out into an open field, and Roy followed. “We have to keep out of the forests,” he gasped. “These things can travel faster than us now. Open ground... we have to stay in the open so we can see them coming.”
Roy had caught up to him. “Monsters. You and all the assholes you worked with. No better than the fuckers that dropped the bombs.”
Louie wanted to point out that Roy had a monstrous streak of his own, but there wasn’t time to argue. They had to keep ahead of the swarm, and that was going to be a difficult thing to do.
Tracy hid in the small space under the desk and waited. She had dove under there when the remains of Mrs. Brown rolled down the stairs from the second floor. The woman had always been large, but the thing she had become was a tank—a bloated, purple mass of dripping flesh. Mr. Combes, the comatose resident in room 207, had also put on an extraordinary amount of weight. He hadn’t moved from his bed in three years. Tracy watched from around the desk leg as Maureen Whitaker descended the steps behind Mr. Combes. The ancient spinster was Green Forest’s oldest resident. She had been a kind old woman, and she had been in her room on the second floor for at least a decade.
None of them were alive anymore, but there they were, lurching and jerking and stumbling for the front doors. They left a trail of blood and black goo. Tracy turned in the tight space and saw their bloated ankles and feet. They left the building.
Tracy started to cry. She was alone. All alone now.
Through the tears she saw a line of black creeping over the back of her hand. It travelled to her thumb and entered under the nail. Tracy jumped back and hit her aching head on the underside of the desk. It felt as if someone was jabbing spikes under all of her finger nails. The agony spread into her hand and intensified up her arm.
Twelve seconds later the swarm found her heart and put Tracy out of her misery.
Chapter 8
This wasn’t possible. Caitlan slammed the steering wheel, hoping that rage alone would start the car again. Maybe the vehicle would sense this anger—like all those travelling in the Audi with her—and listen to her demands. The car remained quiet, and so did the five passengers.
“Fucking piece of shit. Goddamned German piece of fucking shit.” She turned her head slowly and saw Angela staring at her. The woman’s face was ashen grey. The boy sitting on her lap looked even more shocked. Caitlan rested a hand on his knee. “I’m sorry for the swearing, sweetie. It’s nothing to do with you.”
Angela opened her door and the boy slid outside. “Well then maybe you could control that temper a bit better before you fly off the handle like that. For God’s sake, Caitlan, the car ran out of gas.”
Caitlan nodded. The doors in the back opened and Hayden, Amanda, and Michael stepped out. “I can’t help myself. I see red, and I let the expletives rip.” She rubbed her palms along the wheel, as if trying to soothe to the car after her outburst. “So many people are dead now. All the millions of cars no longer running... I never imagined finding gas would be so hard. There’s oceans of it sitting in the underground tanks of every gas station in North America, and we can’t get to a single drop of it.”
“That’s what happens when the power shuts off. No sense beating your car up over it... or anyone else.”
Hayden knocked softly on Caitlan’s window. She opened the door instead of lowering the window; the battery had to remain charged as long as possible. They were in the middle of nowhere, the night would grow cold, and the car was the only shelter they had. “Yeah, I know,” she told him, “I’m sorry I swore again in front of the kids.”
Hayden shook his head. “It’s not that. There’s a town maybe six miles west of here called Brayburne. With any luck we might be able to find a vehicle with fuel inside.”
The leather car seat squeaked as Caitlan pulled her big body out of the car. “I ain’t built for walking, handsome. Take Angela and see how you make out.”
Hayden shook his head again. “I’ll be honest... Nicholas hasn’t exactly warmed up to you yet. I’m not leaving him here with you as the only adult.”
Caitlan got that look in her eye—it seldom left—and her big shoulders hunched up. She started towards Hayden and he held his hand up. “Don’t try and break my nose again. I won’t let you.”
“You gonna hit a woman?”
“It wouldn’t be my first choice.”
Angela was out of the car now. “The two of you stop it!”
“I’m not going to get into it with him again,” Caitlan told her. “I was going to start walking to this town he’s talking about. Hopefully find a container and some gas.”
Nicholas ran to Hayden. Hayden steered him back to the car. “You’re going to stay with Angela, okay, buddy? We’ll be back before it gets dark.” He protested, but settled down once he was standing next to Angela. The woman had a way with kids, Hayden had seen it with the Fulger twins. They gravitated towards her. Fighting with Caitlan wouldn’t have been his first choice, and leaving his son with an almost complete stranger wouldn’t have been his second, but Hayden had very few choices left. He looked at Angela, and then looked at the passenger window towards the glove box.
She nodded. Caitlan had a gun stored in there the guards back at the Sandman had missed. “Nicholas will be fine.”
Hayden nodded back. “Maybe we’ll luck out and find a few cars along the way. Hopefully one of them will have something to carry gas in. We could be back in half an hour.”
“Sure.” Angela watched the two head west. Luck wasn’t something she put much faith in.
You’re alive, girl. Wouldn’t you call that lucky?
She ignored the voice in her head and took Nicholas’s hand in hers. “It’s just you, me, and the twins for the next little while, sport. What should we do for fun?”
Michael and Amanda were sitting on the Audi’s hood. “I used to play video games for fun.”
“That isn’t an option anymore,” Angela said.
“I spy with my little eye?” His sister offered.
“Something grey,” Michael countered. “The sky, the ground, and the frigging road.”
“I was gonna say yellow... that’s the color of Nicholas’s shoelaces.”
Michael leaned back on the car and covered his face with both hands. “I should’ve taken a handheld console from the toy store. And a million batteries.”
***
“You sure there’s a town up ahead?”
“Positive. Brayburne’s the first town across the Manitoba-Saskatchewan border, been through it hundreds of times.”
Caitlan side-stepped around a dead skunk in the middle of
the highway that had been mowed down weeks before. The smell was bad, but it had probably been worse a few days earlier. “I thought you were a farmer. Sounds to me like you spent most of your time driving from one hick town to the next.”
“Farming doesn’t simply involve sitting on a tractor twenty-four hours a day... I used to get out. What do you do for a living... I mean what did you do?”
“I suppose you’re just itching to know what a fat black chick is doing driving around in an eighty-thousand dollar car. Is that what you’re asking me?”
Hayden shrugged. “I could care less how you got the Audi. It was a simple question. I told you I was a farmer.”
“I’m a writer. And don’t go waiting for me to say I was a writer, because I still am.” She pointed to her forehead. “I’m storing it all away up here.”
“You wrote about end of the world stuff?”
Caitlan laughed. “As a matter of fact, I did. Good market for that shit, but I made most of my money in erotic romance. Enough to buy a different Audi for each day of the week.”
“I didn’t think people even read anymore. There aren’t as many bookstores around.”
“It’s all on-line these days. You can have an e-book in your hands in less than ten seconds. Erotic, science-fiction, end-of-the-freaking-world. All it takes is a credit card.”
“I’m afraid your publishing days have hit a snag.”
“Tell me about it. Farming’s gone to shit as well.”
They continued down the highway. A mile further they came across the first abandoned car sitting on the gravel shoulder. The doors were locked. Caitlan smacked one of its windows. “Why did so many people lock their damned cars? Did they wander off expecting to find a mechanic to fix the things?”
“I didn’t get the chance to lock any of my vehicles.” Hayden was staring south, out across a desolate field. “They were incinerated in my yard.”
“Didn’t you say you came from up north?” Hayden nodded. “I can see them wiping out the bigger cities, but what was so important that way?”
Everything, Hayden almost responded. My farm, my animals, the woman I loved. My life. “I think it was a dud. Probably meant for something further south. There were missile silos just south of the Canada/US border.”
“Hell of a fuck-up.”
Hayden didn’t respond. He was digging his fingers into the abandoned car’s gas cap cover, trying to swing the metal door open.
“Not like that.” She pushed down on it and it clicked back open. “Farm boys should know how to open a gas tank.”
He unscrewed the black plastic cover within, and peered into the small hole. “We need some kind of tube to feed in there.”
“Oh, I’ve got about ten feet of it in my back pocket. I also have a jerry can shoved up my ass in case of emergencies.”
They found another locked vehicle half a mile on. Hayden took a rock from the ditch and smashed his way in through the passenger side. He rummaged through the glove box and console finding nothing of value. He tried the trunk button, but it did nothing. Caitlan was already a hundred yards down the highway.
“You can break into a hundred of these things along the way,” she said once he’d caught up. “It ain’t going to help without something to carry the gas in. Hopefully we’ll find what we need in that town of yours. How much further?”
“Two miles... maybe three.” He shoved his hands into his pockets and slowed his pace, allowing the shorter woman to keep up. “Did you have family, Caitlan?”
“Everyone’s got family.”
“You know what I mean. Were you with anyone when it happened?”
“I was with my partner, Megan.” She looked up at Hayden. “You gonna give me flack for being a lesbian, too?”
“I could care less that you’re gay, or that you’re black... Or that you’re a bad-tempered, paranoid bitch. I’m just trying to make conversation.”
Caitlan studied her worn sneakers as they walked, and remained quiet for a full minute. When she spoke again, her voice was much softer. “We were thirty miles east of Winnipeg when it happened. We pulled over onto the side of the road like all the other folks were doing and got out to watch. My God, Hayden... I never thought I would see a real mushroom cloud. I wrote about stuff like that, you know? Pictured it in my mind dozens of times. But to see it actually happening before your eyes?” She started to weep. “It was... beautiful. I hated myself for thinking it, but it was true. I still think it’s true. Watching something that destructive, that powerful... all the people it wiped out.”
Hayden hadn’t seen it happen. He had been nestled inside a hole in a hill with his son and horse. He thought about Jake Heez. Jake had seen it happen. It had boiled skin off his body, and burned the sanity from his mind at the same time. As bad as it had been for Hayden, there were others who’d suffered far worse.
“What happened to Megan? Why isn’t she with you now?”
“Some asshole driving a semi came along, gawking along with all the rest of us. Megan wasn’t standing far enough off the shoulder... he ran her over doing fifty miles an hour.”
Hayden stopped and watched her walk along another half dozen steps. “I shouldn’t have called you a bitch.”
Caitlan turned to him. “You calling me that stuff is probably the nicest thing you’ve said since we met, and I deserved every word of it. Yeah, I lost the woman I loved... but you lost loved ones, too. So did your boy, so did Angela, and those twins... Jesus Christ, those poor kids.”
“Those poor kids,” Hayden repeated. He walked up to her and held his hand out. “Let’s try this again... Hayden Gooding.”
She shook his hand. “Caitlan Turner.”
Chapter 9
There were more vehicles further on. These ones hadn’t been simply abandoned; they had been smashed and burned. All that remained were the smoking metal frames and the charred husks of tires. Hayden counted a dozen in total, some of which were difficult to distinguish from one twisted mess to the next.
Caitlan commented on the scene first. “You think there was like a big pile up when the bombs hit... more people staring out the side windows instead of watching the road?”
“Not this many vehicles... not on this stretch of the Number 1. Looks like it happened recently, maybe in the last day or so.” Two of the cars had been flattened, as if a giant hand had pressed down from the grey sky and pushed until all the tires popped out to the sides.
“Then what the hell happened?”
Hayden could make a guess, but decided to keep it to himself. Brayburne was less than a mile ahead. As they approached, a question that had nagged in the back of his brain for the last two weeks resurfaced—where had all the people gone? He’d spoken to Angela about the small amount of survivors they’d come across since the bombs hit. Most of the population had been wiped out in the city—and probably every other major city in North America, Hayden was certain—but it didn’t explain the almost total desolation of the rural areas. They’re keeping themselves hidden away, Angela had offered. They’re scared of radiation sickness and disease outbreak. They’re in basements and dirt cellars. They’re storing up, and waiting it out in sewage tunnels. Anyplace underground where the air is still clean and the water hasn’t been poisoned.
It had started to make sense to Hayden; a vast majority of the cars no longer worked, so there were very few people driving between the destroyed cities. But still, there should’ve been more people—people like them—wandering out in the open, searching for others.
Many of those questions were answered at the outskirts of Brayburne. It had once been a small farming community with a population that never exceeded a thousand. There had to be at least triple that number now. Giant tents had been set up in the streets, making it look as though the circus had arrived in town, but the tents were dark green, and this circus was run by the army.
“I don’t like soldiers,” Caitlan mumbled as they made their way through the first cluster of survivors. “It’s g
uys like this that got us into this mess.”
“They’re just doing the job they were trained to do... helping people, offering food and shelter. They didn’t drop the bombs. The dimwit world leaders were responsible for that.”
They spoke to a few people as they worked their way towards the town center. Many had been on the Trans Canada Highway when the attack took place. Their vehicles—those that had been within fifty miles of an impact site—had stopped running, and they’d either walked to Brayburne from whatever direction they were headed, or they had been picked up by the military convoys days after. Brayburne, it seemed, was that one town furthest away from most of the immediate fallout. It was approximately a hundred miles west of Winnipeg, and a hundred miles east of the next major Canadian city, Regina. No one spoke of the “dud” missile that had missed its southern target and wiped out so many of the northern farms where Hayden had come from.
They learned from a haggard-looking man that the silos in North Dakota had launched all of their weapons before finally being destroyed. He was from Fargo, and he’d been heading to some northern lake with his son for a week of fishing. “My wife was killed with everyone else there. I told her she should’ve come with us... told her for years we had to do more things together.” He looked down at his son who was sitting cross-legged in the dirt. He was chewing on something that looked like a hamburger without a bun. “But we made it, didn’t we, Todd? And we hit them assholes right back. The US showed those Russians and North Koreans what was what.”
Caitlan wanted to punch his teeth out. His wife was dead because of ideological differences and ignorant racism, and here he was, passing along the same line of bullshit to his son. She pulled Hayden along.
A soldier approached them. “You guys look new here. Have you been assigned a sleeping area? Any injuries or illness to report?”
“We’re not sick,” Hayden answered. “And I’m not sure if we’ll be staying. We have friends east of here, waiting for us to get back with fuel. Do you have any to spare?”