Elixr Plague (Episode 6): Refugees

by Richardson, Marcus

  The air outside was noticeably colder, and the first breath shocked her lungs, but had the added benefit of bringing her to full alertness in a heartbeat. Truth be told, she’d always found this kind of weather—brisk, but not brutally cold—invigorating.

  The grass under her feet crunched with a thin layer of crisp white frost that spread out from the barn and covered the leaves on the trees as well. The sky arched overhead in a brilliant dark blue that was almost purple in the west, and rosy pink in the east.

  She moved to the edge of the corral so she could see around the barn, wincing with every crunch-step, and placed her hands on the cold split-rail fence. Footprints cris-crossed the open space between the house, the helicopter, and the barn. There were tracks everywhere. The zombies had been busy last night.

  “Where the hell did everyone go?” she muttered to herself.

  As far as she could tell, the place was deserted. The lights were still on in the house, so that was encouraging. She also couldn’t see any obvious damage to the windows or doors.

  She reached the corner of the barn and peeked around to get a better view of the southern slice of the farm and froze. Clumped together in a tight knot out in the open space, were what looked like upwards of two dozen zombies. They stood shoulder to shoulder, hunched forward like a rugby scrum. Her heart thudded in her chest and Edith worried they’d surely hear, but after a long moment, she realized they hadn’t even noticed her. They moved in rhythm together—a slow, undulating rocking back and forth—as if just being near each other and moving kept them warm.

  “What the fuck is that?” hissed Finley over her shoulder.

  Edith almost screamed. She spun and half-shoved, half-hit him until he moved back around the corner of the barn and she could get out of sight of the weird…whatever it was…over there. “What the hell is wrong with you, sneaking up on me like that?” she snapped, once they were safely behind the barn again. “Jesus!”

  “Sorry,” Finley said, not sounding like it one bit. “But seriously, what the fuck?” he asked again, gesturing around the corner.

  “Got me,” Edith admitted, trying to calm her heart. “But whatever the hell they’re doing, I think they’re distracted enough we might be able to make it to the house.”

  “There’s a lot more of them out there this morning then there were last night,” Finley added.

  “Oh, God,” Kathy whimpered upon peeking around the corner to see what they were talking about. “Oh, God…” she said, her hands covering her mouth, eyes wide and showing white.

  “Hey, guys, we still got a plan, right?” Edith asked, trying to get them to focus. “We get to the house, we resupply, and we start taking these things out. There’s plenty of food and guns in there,” she said, jerking a thumb at the farmhouse, diagonally opposite from where the zombie gathering was taking place.

  We should call it a board meeting…

  “Oh, God…” Kathy muttered again.

  “I think she’s broken,” Finley whispered.

  “Kathy, hey—hey,” Edith hissed. She snapped her fingers in front of Kathy’s face until the other woman blinked and seemed to return to herself. “You with us or did you want to stay here with them?”

  “I don’t know about you, but I really need to go to the bathroom,” Finley added.

  “I…I can’t…” Kathy muttered.

  “You have to—we can’t stay out here forever.”

  “As soon as we step around the barn, they’re gonna spot us,” Finley said, hefting his manure speckled 2x4. “I feel better having this in my hands, but still…there’s a lot of ‘em out there.”

  Edith pursed her lips, thinking. “We need a distraction.” Inside the barn, Drumstick, the rooster, crowed to announce his presence. The crotchety bastard was always—

  A smile spread across her face. “I got it. Get over there by gate and get ready to run when you see them move.”

  “Wait, what are you going to do?” asked Finley, his face creased with a frown.

  “I’m turning the chickens out. It’s cold so they’ll want to stay in the roost—but Drumstick hates me, so if I chase his ladies out, he’ll be making some noise and coming after me. If I yell and holler a little, maybe they’ll come over to check out all the noise…and we can slip over to the house when they’re distracted.”

  Kathy made a face.

  “Hey, you got a better idea?” Edith demanded, the vapor in front of her face briefly obscuring Kathy’s dubious frown.

  “Sounds good, let’s do it,” Finley replied. Upon getting a look from Kathy, he shrugged. “I really gotta take a leak…”

  “Please,” Edith said, frowning. “Just get ready.”

  The others moved into position and Edith slipped back into the barn. As she suspected, the chickens were none too pleased with the idea of going outside—whether they feared the zombies as much as the local wildlife seemed to, or they didn’t like the cold, she couldn’t tell. But after being chased for a few moments, the iridescent blue birds eventually got the message—after a few minutes of clucking, fussing, and flying feathers. Drumstick, finally catching on to what was happening, raced across the pen squawking and nipping at her ankles. Edith yelped in mock fear and ran out into the chicken run, scattering the little flock all over again, creating quite the racket in the process.

  Drumstick crowed again, loud and crass, declaring his intent to slay the intruder.

  “It’s working!” Kathy said, from inside the chicken roost.

  Thank goodness she’d decided to run through the barn and report, rather than yell from the other side—and potentially draw their enemy in exactly the wrong direction.

  Edith rested her hands on the reinforced wire—deer fencing, her father had called it when he’d installed it years ago to protect their flock from predation—and shook the enclosure a little, just to test its strength. She hoped the chickens were fast enough to avoid becoming breakfast if the zombies managed to tear down the fencing. It seemed stout enough, though…certainly felt more solid than the barn door they’d been pounding on for half the night, and that was still in place.

  She hesitated, even when the first zombie appeared, a man with half a face and a scraggly black beard. He shuffled around the corner of the barn, rheumy red eyes looking slowly over the new scenery. He immediately spotted the hens fluttering about and squawking as Drumstick attempted to regain some control over the untenable situation he’d discovered.

  Then it saw her. Those eerie blood-red eyes found hers and locked on. He stopped walking and stood there, one rotting arm out to steady himself against the barn. He moaned loudly with half a jaw—she didn’t even want to think about what could have taken off the lower half of his face like that—and shuffled forward a step.

  The noise must have attracted his friends, because another appeared—a younger version with long hair and a plaid dress. Edith put a hand over her mouth and stepped back from the fence. God, she was just a teenager. That was a school uniform. His daughter.

  The girl stopped in her tracks, just like the man had, but instead of moving immediately forward toward her target, she threw her head back and let loose with a loud, strangled yell—almost like a shriek of pain, mixed with a hint of rage.

  The sound echoed off the trees and a dozen blackbirds shot up into the sky in a flurry of feathers and indignant quorks. They swirled up and disappeared, leaving only the zombies in their wake.

  “Whatever the hell you’re doing, it’s working! We should go!” Finley said from the doorway, standing next to Kathy, his eyes just as wide as the reporter’s.

  Edith waited just a moment longer, though her limbs had grown numb with fear and her heart threatened to burst from her ribs. She wanted to make sure that the message had been received—if that’s what the girl’s scream had been.

  It didn’t take long.

  In mere seconds, three more, then five more appeared around the corner, groaning and shuffling, snapping jaws and clacking teeth. All those blood
-red eyes locked on her or the chickens, who were now thoroughly disabused of any good coming from the situation. They panicked and attacked each other to get back inside the safety of the barn, thus clogging the entrance and making sure none of them got out of sight of the approaching monsters.

  That was exactly the situation Edith had hoped for. As scared as the birds were of the zombies, when she ran at them, they scattered, causing even more of a ruckus and attracting the zombies further. By now, the first of the infected were clinging to the deer wire and shaking, trying to tear it down. Edith paused at the door and watched as her father’s fencing rattled, but held firm under the onslaught. She blew a kiss to the guy with the missing jaw—who groaned loudly in return—before she slipped back into the barn.

  “Now’s our chance!” Finley said, when she appeared in the corral a second later.

  “I—I can’t!” Kathy said, balking at the last second when be threw open the corral gate.

  “What?” Finley complained, already standing in no-man’s land and looking around as if expecting a zombie to rush them from any direction.

  Even at top speed, from what they’d seen so far, the infected couldn’t move faster than a walk. But Edith felt the same nerves tingling up and down her spine at the prospect of being out in the open. One or two fo the things were totally manageable, she figured. But a group of 20 or 30…that was a nightmare on legs.

  Edith stepped up next to Kathy. They were running on borrowed time—she had no idea how long the zombies would be tricked by the chickens.

  “You can do it—we just need to cross that little open space. There’s no point in trying to sneak. Just run as fast as you can and get inside. Come on, just follow Finley. I’ll be right behind you the whole way.”

  Kathy stared at her for a long moment, as if trying to determine the truth of her words, then finally nodded.

  The noise from the other side of the barn was increasing. Between the chickens squawking in terror and the zombies groaning and hands clawing at the deer fencing, the noise was comparable to when they’d been pounding on the barn door. It was go time.

  “Finley, move!” Edith said.

  The pilot didn’t need any more motivation. He turned and sprinted for the house, not looking at anything but his destination. Kathy stumbled after him, looking left and right as she ran. She gasped when she drew far enough from the barn to see the zombies on the other side, but Edith shoved her with a well placed hand between the shoulder blades, and got her moving again.

  They made it to the house, all of them breathing hard and trembling, and moved around to the far side, out of view of the undead. “Everyone okay?” gasped Edith.

  “Yeah…inside, please?” replied Finley.

  Kathy nodded, her eyes welling with tears. The poor woman was about to lose it. They needed to get inside, pronto.

  “Okay, Finley, move to the front and check it out, I’ll stay here and guard the rear in case anyone followed us.”

  Kathy covered her mouth and shook, trying her best to contain the sobs that threatened to burst from her lips, and Edith largely ignored her. There wasn’t time for crying. Not yet, at least. She could feel a good cry coming on too, but…damn.

  “Fuck, fuck, fuck!” Finley said as he rejoined the group.

  “What?” asked Edith, glancing over her shoulder. So far the zombies at the barn hadn’t even looked their way yet.

  “There’s more out there on the driveway and in the woods. Some are just milling around, but the others are coming this way!”

  “It’s the noise,” Kathy muttered in a dream-like trance.

  “Damn it!” Edith hissed to herself. She went through their options. They could go back around the house and reach the back door, hoping the zombies at the barn don’t notice. They could race around the front of the house and get to the porch—and hope either that the zombies out front don’t notice—or that they could get inside and prep to repel the newcomers with firepower. Or, she could lead them in through a window on the side of the house, potentially making a weak point and a way for both zombies and cold weather to get inside the house later.

  The only way, Edith realized quickly, they could ensure getting inside before anyone saw them was to go through the side window. They’d just have to deal with the consequences of breaking the window when they had time. If they didn’t get inside right then, there wouldn’t be a later, anyway.

  Edith narrowed her eyes at the window just over Finley’s shoulder. It lead into the reading room, just off the kitchen on the side of the house. If they could lift someone up high enough to break the window and open the latch, they could pull the others through quickly enough. Maybe slide one of her dad’s big heavy bookcases in front of the window to block the broken pane…

  She nodded to herself. “Okay, new plan.”

  3

  On the Road Again

  St. Charles, Illinois

  In the end, they didn’t spend too much time at Ward’s house. Survivors had pretty much picked it clean already. That in and of itself was worried Seneca—they had just left the place the day before. Despite most of Ward’s surplus cache being gone, there were a few stashes he’d hidden away in obscure spots, like bathroom closets and under the basement stairs.

  In the end, Seneca and Ward ended up with another couple days’ worth of MREs and bottled water, enough for their little group of five. It wasn’t much, but with luck, it would get them to Plum, who hopefully heeded Seneca’s order to stock up a few weeks back.

  Sam, Kendra, and Jo were finally able to get down off the roof of the big ambulance, and the women surprised everyone with the contents of their two bulging trash bags: food—the non-perishable stuff like crackers, canned meats, and vegetables. Being restaurant supplies, they were in larger #10 cans, but with five mouths to feed, that wouldn’t be a problem.

  Inside the ambulance, they were fairly safe from the infected. It was built like a tank and proved too high for the zombies to clamber aboard. Conversely, as big as it was, their emergency vehicle proved to be a target to other survivors. They weren’t at Ward’s house more than thirty minutes when someone put a gun to Sam’s head and forced a standoff to steal the damn thing.

  The situation ended when Seneca tried talking the man down from threatening Sam, and Ward put a round between the man’s eyes from around the corner of his house. Sam had jerked away from the falling body, then kicked it as blood puddled in the street, and took the man’s pistol.

  To make the women feel a little easier, Seneca and Ward handed over pistols to them too, promising to teach them to shoot once they’d escaped the city. But the near-holdup had made Seneca ready to depart immediately—even more than narrowly escaping a grisly death on Main Street.

  At least with the zekes, you knew what was coming and where. With survivors, they could turn on you in an instant and be hiding...anywhere.

  By noon, the big ambulance rumbled north on a car-choked Randall Road, heading for Wisconsin. No one said anything as they made their slow progress north out of St. Charles and into the countryside south of Elgin.

  Seneca hoped that South Elgin, a smaller river town than St. Charles, would be clear of the infected, but they found a handful of abandoned cars. Most of the streets were deserted. It created an eerie effect, one that wasn’t lost on Ward.

  “See? You see this shit, man?”

  Seneca grunted from behind the wheel. The road ahead, straight through the heart of Elgin proper, looked clear, so he pushed the pedal down and increased speed.

  “We go through living hell back there in St. Charles, then we pop out the other side, and nothing’s wrong. It’s bullshit.”

  “I wouldn’t say nothing’s wrong,” Kendra said from the paramedic jumpseat in the back. She peered out the tiny window next to her and tapped it with a finger. “Look at the houses...there are a lot of people hiding. You can see curtains moving and lights. They’re watching us go by.”

  “Does this thing have a radio?” asked Sam.


  Ward nodded and flipped a switch on the dash. The eerie sounds of an emergency alert’s synthesized human voice filled the cabin.

  “...test. The President has authorized this activation of the National Emergency Alert System. A severe, highly contagious, and often fatal illness is spreading rapidly in your area. For your own safety and for those around you, stay inside and do not leave your homes for any reason. Do not let anyone you do not know to be healthy inside your homes. Isolation is the best strategy to keep you and your loved ones safe. Emergency officials will inform you when it is safe to venture outside...”

  “Well, that explains a lot,” muttered Ward.

  The broadcast continued after a brief burst of static: “...activated the National Guard in your area. Do not attempt to make contact with them. If you come across an infected person, do not approach them. People infected with the virus often display irrational and violent behavior...”

  Sam snorted. “No shit? I hadn’t noticed…”

  The longer the message went on, the faster Seneca pushed the big diesel ambulance. He didn’t like the details he was hearing, but it was critical intelligence. The syndrome hadn’t spread across the entire country yet, but was pretty severe in pockets, like the area outside Chicago—including St. Charles, evidently—and several other big cities, especially New York.

  “...stay tuned to this channel for hourly updates. As information is gathered, this message will be repeated. Advisory: 4:15pm Eastern Daylight Time.” Three warbling electronic beeps chirped, followed by a long blast from what sounded like a dying buzzer. “This is an activation of the National Emergency Alert System. This is not a test. The President has authorized...”

  “4:15? That was yesterday,” Kendra noted.

  The ambulance cabin was silent for a moment until Seneca cleared his throat. “We’re not safe here.” He glanced at Ward. “That intel is almost 24 hours old.”

  “A lot can change in a day,” Sam muttered.