by K. M. Fawkes
Even if the cars were full of dead bodies, they couldn’t do anything to him—this wasn’t that kind of apocalypse. The thought didn’t make him feel any better, though, and it cropped up again and again as he wheeled his bike into the permanent traffic jam.
He moved forward slowly until the cramp dissipated. It took a while for him to walk it off, but once he finally managed it, he sat down with his back against the tire of a massive black suburban. It made him feel better to lean against something—sort of like adding an extra blanket when you were worried about serial killers after seeing a horror movie. It wouldn’t make a damn bit of real difference, but he’d take what he could get.
Brad pulled his backpack into his lap and grabbed a water bottle out of it. He drank half of the water without stopping for breath. Once his parched throat felt a little more flexible, he forced himself to stop and set the water aside.
He didn’t have nearly as much as he’d need and, although riding along the interstate was faster, it limited his ability to get at any kind of natural resources like streams or rivers. Plenty of those here in Maine were drinkable even without needing to boil the water.
Maybe taking this route wasn’t his smartest move, but it was too late to do anything about it now. He pulled a can of ravioli out and opened it. The smell hit him first and he involuntarily crinkled his nose. His mother had bought quite a lot of it when she was trying to run the household on just her income, but he’d never been a big fan of the stuff. Even when it was warm.
Eating it cold and congealed definitely wasn’t going to endear him to the canned pasta, but he didn’t have much choice. He needed to make up some of the calories he’d burned in his ride today.
He tried to eat as quickly as he could so that he wouldn’t taste it, but it didn’t really work. He used the rest of the water to try to get the taste out of his mouth. That didn’t really work either, but it was better than nothing. He was glad he’d thought to save part of the bottle.
As he moved to put the empty bottle back into the backpack so that he could refill it later, Brad heard a sudden noise. He went still, listening carefully, hoping to God that he’d been wrong. Maybe he’d just dragged the pack along the asphalt a bit. Maybe it was nothing.
He tensed when the sound came again, closer this time. The closer it got, the more constant it was, a rustling scuffle that he couldn’t identify. He got to his feet slowly, looking around. He didn’t see anything, which really didn’t make him feel any better. He tugged experimentally at the door handle of the SUV. To his intense relief, the door swung open readily.
In the dark, the suburban looked as vast as a cavern and just as mysterious. Brad squinted into the dark interior suspiciously. He really didn’t want to end up sharing a car with a body all night long. He sniffed cautiously; he didn’t smell anything odd. And if a body had been in here, cooking in the August sun, he definitely would have been able to tell.
Was it safe to say that the car was empty? Sharing the vehicle with a living person wasn’t exactly ideal, either, but as the rustling moved closer, he scooped up his pack and jumped in almost automatically, closing the door behind him as softly as possible.
No one shanked him, which was always a good sign. He glanced into the dark backseat. The only way to know for sure that the vehicle was unoccupied was to check every seat, and it wasn’t like he planned to sit here in the driver’s seat until morning.
He crawled carefully over the front seat and into the back, trying not to rock the SUV. He had a grim feeling that anyone who saw the car a-rockin’ would definitely come a-knockin’ in this situation.
Two pleasant surprises awaited him when he got to the back of the SUV. The first was that it was empty. The second was that someone had stacked up some pillows and blankets back there.
Whoever had owned the SUV had thought of everything when they’d packed up. But they also would have had to leave those comforts behind when they’d left the car. Brad could understand why. People didn’t tend to think of pillows and blankets as being heavy, but they were bulky. A stack like this would have been too much to carry for sure. If a person had to choose between their memory foam pillow and a bag of food, it was a pretty easy choice.
Brad pulled a few of the pillows down and arranged them carefully. He’d always created a sort of cocoon around him when he slept, and he was going to take advantage of the crazy number of pillows while he could. The lightest blanket in the stack came down too. It was still hot, especially because he couldn’t roll the windows down, but he couldn’t sleep without a blanket—serial killers, and all that. Plus, he’d be harder to see if he was surrounded by what would simply look like a pile of disorganized bedding.
From his position in the back of the SUV, he could see the small sliver of moon that had risen. It was nearly midnight now, and he’d been up since sunrise. He needed to be up as early as possible tomorrow too, but he felt antsy. He couldn’t help but wonder what had been roaming around out there, but he was too tired to get up and look out even if he’d thought that was a good idea. Which he emphatically did not. It could have been anything from a raccoon to an axe murderer.
For God’s sake, stop with the serial killer references, he ordered himself.
Instead of obeying, his mind conjured up an image of a man in a ski mask yanking up the lift gate of the suburban and swinging a machete down into his gut. Brad pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes to try to squash the mental picture.
He remembered his sunburn too late and bit his lower lip to keep from yelping. He should have saved a little bit more of that water so he could put a wet cloth over his eyes; if they were swollen in the morning, it could seriously set him back.
He touched his face gently, trying to see if there was any swelling. It seemed pretty minor. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. Maybe the serial killer would get him before morning, anyway. He sighed. He wasn’t helping himself. It was probably a raccoon, he reasoned. This was Maine. It could be a lot of things. It could have been a moose.
Whatever is out there rustling around is a lot more likely to be animal than man, he told himself firmly. After all, 90% of the animal population wasn’t dead and only 10% of the human population remained. He’d never imagined that he would one day find that statistic to be a relief, but it was the one thing that enabled him to finally close his eyes and drift off to sleep.
Chapter 6
Brad woke up sticky with sweat. He must have slept restlessly because the blanket he’d put over himself had gotten wrapped around him in the night. He must have bumped the rest of the stack at some point, too, because a few more blankets were scattered haphazardly around and over him. He felt like he was slowly roasting; the bright morning sun beaming down on the black suburban hadn’t helped matters.
As he blinked sleep from his eyes and moved to unwrap himself from his unintentional shroud, he realized that it hadn’t been the temperature that had woken him. It had been the voices. He went still, hoping that his struggles with the blankets hadn’t shaken the vehicle.
“I’m not going to ask you again.” The woman’s voice was harsh and so close that Brad nearly jumped. Whoever it was had to be standing nearly at the SUV. “What are you doing out here?”
“Walking,” a man’s voice answered. That voice was rough, too, but Brad thought that it sounded more like exhaustion and dehydration than anger.
“Who told you that you could walk here?” the woman demanded.
“There’s not exactly anyone around to ask.”
Brad frowned at the edge in the man’s voice. He didn’t even need to see the woman to know that she wouldn’t appreciate that tone. Now wasn’t the time to get sarcastic.
“I’m standing here,” the woman retorted. “You didn’t ask me. Drea? Did he ask you?”
Another woman’s voice chimed in. “Nope. I didn’t hear him ask me a thing.”
“There you go,” the first woman said. “You didn’t ask. So why the fuck should I let you go through?”
Brad was going crazy with curiosity. What did the woman have? Obviously it was some kind of weapon, but he had no way to know what it was. And if he didn’t know what it was, he couldn’t plan for it.
“Yeah, well, now you do. This section of I-95 is ours,” she said. “From this off-ramp all the way to the next one. You have ten seconds to turn around and walk back the way you came before I really lose my temper.”
Brad held his breath, willing the man to move on. There wasn’t an ounce of leeway in that woman’s voice.
“But I don’t have any food,” the man said after a long, silent moment. “Could you spare anything?”
The woman’s laugh was even harsher than her voice. It was more like a bark, really. “I have some food, yeah. But I’m not gonna give it to you.”
“Look, anything would be fine,” the man said, his voice hardening. “I haven’t eaten in three days.”
“So what?”
“So, you should have some humanity!”
The barking laugh sounded again. “Because I can always restock, right? I have plenty of humanity, but you’re not mine to protect.”
“Hit the road, jackass,” the younger-sounding female voice chimed in. “Why the hell would we share anything with you?”
Brad went back to willing the man to simply walk away. The guy was either a very poor mind-reader or Brad wasn’t projecting hard enough, because he heard the younger woman exclaim in surprise. The whole SUV rocked and Brad saw a bright flash of blond hair as a woman’s head met the glass.
“Get your hands off of her!” the older woman screamed.
“Give me your food and I’ll—”
The gunshot rang out so close that Brad couldn’t help but give a muffled yell. Luckily for him, the man who’d been begging yelled, too. Unfortunately, he continued yelling, clearly in agony. Wherever the bullet had landed, it hadn’t done the job quickly. When that barking laugh sounded again, Brad knew that it had been fully intentional.
He clamped his hands to his ears, but it didn’t do any good. The man’s ragged screams were so loud that he might as well have been in the car with him. It seemed like an hour or more, but Brad knew that it probably happened in a matter of minutes. Shock set in and the man’s shrieks went to whimpers.
“Did you really think that you could put your hands on my daughter?” the rough-voiced woman asked. “You should have walked away when I gave you the chance.”
Brad put his hands to his ears again, but nothing could have muffled the final shot. He heard a splatter and the light filtering in the window on that side went red, casting a garish hue over the blankets he was still sweating under.
“You okay?” the older woman asked. “He didn’t hurt you? Is your head okay?”
All of the brash toughness had vanished. Brad remembered his own mother sounding like that when he’d fallen off of his bike.
“Yeah, I’m okay,” Drea said, her voice slightly shaky. “I hit my head when he shoved me, but it’s not too bad.”
“Let me see.” There was silence and then the mother spoke again. “There’s no blood, but there is a lump. I’ll keep an eye on it.”
“You know what’s weird?” the daughter went on pensively. “I could have sworn that I heard someone else when you shot that guy.”
Brad went from hot to cold so quickly that he got lightheaded. In all of that clamor and commotion, somehow, this woman had heard him?
“Where?” the mother asked sharply.
“I’m not sure. Inside the car, maybe.”
“Well, let’s take a look.”
Frantically, he balled up the blankets and knocked down the rest of the stack of pillows, then curled up into a tight ball and went as still as possible. His pulse pounded in his ears as he waited, sweat beading on his forehead and running down to sting his eyes. He heard the driver’s side door open and then heard someone rummaging around in the front seat.
“I don’t hear anything,” the mother called. “And I’m not about to go digging through all this crap—for all we know, they could have been infected. Look through that back window and see if you see anything, Drea.”
“I don’t,” the younger woman said, and Brad could tell that she had her face pressed to the back glass. If he so much as twitched, she’d see him move.
He held his breath. The door slammed.
“Come on,” Drea’s mother said. “Let’s go on down the road a little bit and make sure this guy didn’t have any friends hanging around.”
“If he did, they sure as hell aren’t heroes,” the younger woman replied, her tone filled with bitter humor.
The harsh woman scoffed. “It turned out that nobody is.”
The footsteps moved away. Brad, who had never considered himself a hero, counted to one thousand before he peeked out from underneath the blankets, convinced that he was going to be staring down the barrel of a gun.
When he worked up the courage to look out the window, he saw the women in the distance and ducked back down. He could wait here until…and then he realized the flaw in his plan. It would be a hell of a lot better to make his escape while he knew where they were.
He scrambled over the back of the seat, sweaty palms sliding on the expensive leather. When he got to the front seat, he grabbed his pack and put it on, making sure that the straps were tight; if he lost it, he wouldn’t be able to risk going back for it, nor would he survive the ride to the cabin without his supplies, measly as they were.
He jumped out of the SUV and looked for his bike. It had apparently fallen over when the man had made his move for the younger woman. When Brad leaned down to get it, he found himself looking directly into the staring blue eyes of the recently deceased. The man’s hands were clasped over his stomach, which was obviously where the first bullet had struck.
The wound had stained his shirt red and made a big pool of blood underneath him, but that wasn’t the worst part. The woman had finished the man off by shooting him in the neck. His head had fallen forward because of the size of the exit wound, which had basically blasted his throat in half. That explained the splash of blood over the window— the bullet had gone through the carotid artery.
Blood was still dripping down the car door. He could hear the small splashes as it hit the pavement. The man’s body slumped forward slightly and Brad jumped back, bumped into the car door, staggered backwards trying to catch his balance and then tripped over his bike. It fell to the ground with a clatter, taking Brad with it. Why did he have to save all of his clumsiness for end-of-the-world scenarios?
As he got to his hands and knees, he looked down the road. Both women had spun around and were staring directly at him. He jumped to his feet, threw one leg over the bike seat and took off as fast as he could.
“Hey!” the rough-voiced woman yelled. “Hey, stop!”
So you can shoot me in the neck, too? Hell no, lady.
He stood up on the pedals for momentum and took off. For the time being, he was out of range of her pistol. And, clearly, he had to stay that way if he wanted to make it off of the interstate alive.
He left the women behind fairly easily, but he remembered what the older one had said. Everything from the exit ramp he’d come in on to the next ramp was theirs, which meant that he was firmly in the middle of enemy territory. And he didn’t know for sure that those two women were alone.
He swerved around cars, trucks, and abandoned motorcycles as quickly as he could as he fled. It was important not to give the woman a steady target in case she had a bicycle of her own. He was pretty sure that as long as he was headed away from her daughter, things might be okay, but he wasn’t dumb enough to take his chances.
His leg muscles screamed at him as he picked up the pace even more, but he ignored the pain as he swerved around a bright red sports car that was straddling the white lines between two lanes. The windshield of the expensi
ve car was broken and a woman hung halfway out of it, her torso draped over the hood. Her skull was crushed in.
Her passenger hadn’t had better luck. The man’s body hung out of the passenger door. Brad glanced back briefly. One of the man’s arms had been severed off and was nowhere to be seen. Flies were settled in a dark, moving line along the gash.
He jerked his gaze away just in time to avoid running into yet another body. This one was splayed out in the road. It was also missing several pieces. Animals could do something like that, and he really wanted to believe that they had—Maine was home to plenty of carnivores.
It looked, however, like the limbs had been removed a little more neatly than the average carnivore would have done. He thought back to the women on the interstate. They’d said that they were trying to extend their food supply. Maybe they considered meat to be meat in this scenario.
As he left the body in the distance, he realized how glad he was that it had been face-down. There was something about the eyes that unsettled him. Why did they have to look so human for so long after they were gone?
Brad rode until his lungs burned and his side ached. Surely they wouldn’t have chased him this far. He hadn’t heard a single sound of pursuit. Ammunition wouldn’t be easy to come by and he’d avoided challenging them. He had a feeling that the other guy would have lived longer if he’d done the same.
In a life-or-death situation, no one really knows what anyone will do. Whether it’s a stranger or your best friend, you can really only trust yourself.
Brad took the next exit. He could have ducked off of the interstate before, but he’d wanted to be sure that he was out of their territory. Also, he knew the backroads pretty well from here.
It would add some time to the journey, but he’d managed to hold onto his supplies, so that wouldn’t be a problem. He’d been through the small towns several times as a kid. And now that he thought about it, those might be safer. They would certainly have more places for him to hide.