I braved going back into the Wawa to discover that whatever it was I thought I had killed last night was still moving around slowly in the bathroom. However, I was confident it wouldn't have the strength to get at me. Perhaps whatever was controlling and animating the remnants of the human corpse it inhabited, did not die so quickly.
The forces I was up against seemed to dislike fire, and that was all I needed to keep in mind. That and they either consumed electricity or zapped it from existence somehow. This was my hypothesis not based on scientific evidence or prowess at work. Just the average man's hunch and gut instincts, and if I was honest, a little imagination tossed in too. Thinking about these things as objectively as I could soothed me, kept my mind sharp and clear, and warded off the tendrils of insanity.
Like most people living in 21st-century modern America, I'd read my fair share of science articles and understood perhaps an eighth of what I was reading at least half the time. Statistics, am I right?
Grabbing plastic sacks and food for days, water from the warm fridges, and a bottle of Cola packed with caffeine to serve as my morning jolt, I tied these on to my backpack. Their weight was uncomfortable and swung at my sides with every step. But it was a damn sight better than dying of starvation or thirst.
I left the Wawa, half tempted to go in and empty more bullets into whatever was crawling around on the bathroom floor, but decided prudence was the better part of virtue. I'd need bullets for sure later on. There's an irony here: my whole life I abhorred guns, and now it's my saving grace. I'm categorically against killing living creatures and have been a vegan for the past twenty-two years, as an example. Ever since the lights went out? My diet and my morals went with it. Beef jerky would be a staple of my new diet now if I could find some, and like it or not, many of the products I consumed for extra energy now contained milk in the ingredients as well. I would still be vegan if I had my way, but the problem with most items in stores I have had access to is they were focused on pleasing the meat-eating consumer.
At the moment I haven’t been concerned with needing to wield my gun at stray wildlife intent on harming me as they simply haven’t been around. I haven’t even seen so much as a stray cat in days.
Not a squirrel, hell, not even any bugs in the dirt, just that one dying butterfly earlier. It's almost as if basic life forms extinguished and evaporated the same instance that the lights and electricity turned off.
I was nearing the exit for the Turnpike, I recognized the street I walked down now, snarled with cars, doors open, no one in them. It was a residential street right before junction 611 met with hotels, Home Depot, Lowes, and further up a way past a bridge, a Best Buy.
I heard a yell to my right and stopped. It was a distinctly human-sounding yell, but I couldn’t be too careful. I turned in the direction.
It was a woman standing on her lawn, brown tangles of frizzy hair hanging over her pale, angular face and covering her eyes.
I raised my hands above my shoulders, palms facing her as I twisted.
"I have food and weapons, but I'm not a threat," I shouted.
I was in the middle of the street.
“How do I know you’re a good guy?”
“You don’t. But I am trying to get to my wife.”
“I can’t hear you!”
“I’m trying to meet with-find, my wife!”
“What’s your name?”
“What?” I walked a little closer, slowly, arms still above my shoulders. The gun was not far from my reach, and I felt confident if she really was a new breed of zombie I could get to it before she could get to me.
“What is your name?”
Why the sound wasn't carrying, or why I couldn't hear her confused me. With no ambient noises to speak of, this development was too bizarre for me to understand. Maybe neither of us having spoken much out loud in days had changed our way of talking.
“Mike,” I said. “Yours?”
“Julia,” she said.
I squinted. The girl did look familiar, but it was difficult to tell. She was hunched a little forward, something under her pink dress...only that wasn't a dress she wore, it was a bedsheet now that I came closer.
She let it fall to her side and raised a shotgun to her shoulder.
“Stop there,” she said.
“Sorry, just trying to hear you better. I don’t know why the sound doesn’t travel as well here...maybe I’m just getting old and deaf.”
“Huh, you look familiar...Wait a second, Mike? I know you!”
“Yes?”
“Do you shop at White Orchards Market?”
“The one in Jenkintown? Yeah, why?”
“I’m a cashier there.”
“I thought you looked familiar,” I said. I smiled in spite of the ridiculous circumstance of me being held where I was at gunpoint.
“You said you have food? And weapons?”
“And water and half a Cola left if you’re interested in caffeine.”
"Oh, God, yes!" She sounded like she had just been told she was clear of cancer or had won the lottery or some mix of the two pieces of great news.
I lowered my arms and crouched slowly, shrugging off my pack and carefully undoing one of the plastic bags with candy bars, beef jerky, trail mix, and before I knew it, she had snatched it out of my hand. I looked up at her smiling, sunlight falling on my face through the tree-leaves in splotchy patterns. Next, I handed her the Cola I'd half drank.
She grabbed it from my hand fast and slugged it down, brown droplets spilling over her lips and down her chin, threatening to caress her long neck creating a sticky rivulet.
The empty bottle was tossed carelessly behind her back onto the pavement, where it bounced a few times.
She kept her blue-eyed gaze on me as she bit into jerky and simultaneously placed a handful of trail mix in her mouth. There was so much chewing I had no doubt that in about five seconds, her jaws would be aching, but I was so relieved and happy to be around another person that I was glad to wait and watch.
Any human company right now was more than welcome. When Julia had finished, she belched loudly and un-self-consciously.
She held out her hand, and I shook it.
“Thanks,” she said.
“You’re welcome.”
“Can I take some bags?”
“I guess. There will be other convenience stores with food and the like in them.”
“Yeah. I’m not leaving.”
I opened my mouth to say that it was too bad, but closed it and nodded.
"Well, take whatever you want. I can find more, as I said."
“Did you say you were going to meet with your wife?”
“I did. I’m planning to meet her at Dan’s Flying Diner halfway to King of Prussia.”
“That’s a long fuckin’ walk. You really think you’ll make it?”
"I made it this far. Besides, the zombies have been MIA for the last couple nights...well, not true, I ran into one at the Wawa where I got all this food."
“Really?”
"Yeah. They, the zombies I mean, look like us, only they don't talk. They make….sounds."
"Yeah," she said and looked over my shoulder and past me. Before I could say more, she looked at me again, the muscles around her eyes pulled together in a stern look I recognized on a gut level but had no word for, "I saw what happened when it all happened. I was out here on my lawn, gardening. Something flashed, and I turned in time to see the sky. It was purple lightning. Or something like that. Never seen anything like it outside of a picture before. Only...I don’t think it really was lightning. It was...like a reset button. I think it’s aliens that came.”
“Aliens?” My story about Wawa was put on hold for now.
She nodded her head and looked over my shoulder again, then said, “I think its a super-race of beings we can’t even imagine. They come in, wipe us all out with a flick of a quantum switch, and take what they need before moving on.”
"That's an interesting theory," I
said. Julia was dead serious, which made her words all the more chilling. I got a distinctly Dickensian feeling as if giant squid monsters might fall from the sky at any moment and thwart us with laser eyes where we stood, just for speaking ill of them. Shuddering a little I looked at my feet and decided it was safest to continue to tell her what I was about to say to her, "Anyway, when I went back inside to get more food and the Cola the thing I shot to death last night in the bathroom was still moving around in there. I didn't want to look at it…"
“The dead things still move, huh?”
“Yep, nail on the head, Julia.”
She looked at me, her blue eyes piercing and searching simultaneously, “That sucks. They can’t die all the way?”
“It does. I guess they can’t.”
“Good to know…”
“Are you waiting for someone? You’re welcome to join me if--”
“My boyfriend. He’ll be back.”
“He survived the blackout and the whatever?”
"Yeah. He left this morning for supplies. Nice to see another friendly face, though."
"Likewise. I had a buddy second day after this all happened. He left the next morning, but he never came back. I don't know where he went or what he needed…" I shrugged, not knowing how to finish that thought.
“Guess he had other fish to fry. Well, good luck. Thanks for the food.”
"If you change your mind, you know where I'm headed." I let my words drop to almost inaudible as I saw her fingers gripping the trigger a little tighter than seemed necessary. The barrel of her shotgun rested over my foot. If I made a sudden move, she would fire it, and I'd be stopped before getting anywhere before she completed the task of killing me.
I looked into her eyes and nodded again, smiling.
“Right, well...I best be on my way then.” I shoved my glasses up the bridge of my nose, grateful I had them, wishing I could still get at contacts and worried about living long enough to need to change my prescription when the time came.
“Hope you find your wife,” Julia said.
“Thank you. Stay safe.”
And, feeling sad about the loss of the company, I walked away from her.
You can't help but wonder if women you meet are telling the truth about their boyfriends. I was more concerned with her actual safety from the zombies than from me. I could have argued my case, but trust is a bridge that takes time to build between people. If she was telling the truth, then I was happy for her, knowing she would be taken care of. Unless her boyfriend was the unfortunate sort of control-freak, most men are in situations of extreme pressure and duress from seemingly paranormal circumstances. I could postulate back and forth all day long and still not have a clue what Julia's actual intentions were. Maybe she was a psychopath, and I'm safer without her deciding to slit my throat while I sleep and take what little loot I had. In all the zombie/horror movies, I've seen people usually end up banding together. Safety in numbers. That makes sense, but in reality, it boils down to how well any of us can trust someone we don't know. And in the world just before it collapsed all around me, even the people we thought we knew and could trust the most often failed spectacularly when their deceits were uncovered by their spouses or best friends. All that being said, I trust Claire as implicitly as I had ever trusted anyone and didn't see a need not to. The hope that she was still herself and not overtaken by whatever had already occurred was my touchstone, my talisman, my sincerest, and most centralized hope. This hope was the fuel I needed to get through whatever came next.
It occurred to me that perhaps Julia and Claire wouldn't see eye to eye about anything, that their meeting would cause my wife distress. And in that distress cause hard feelings that were wholly unnecessary. It could even be the case that as I journeyed to reunite with Claire, Julia could slow me down. Julia might tell me pieces of her life story that would endear me to her, and bridge the gap between stranger and friend under these harrowing circumstances. If something unfortunate happened to her, I might be trapped in a scenario of caretaker, having to take longer to get to Claire and our rearranged life together.
How long would it take me to get to Dan's Flying Diner from here? If I ran into no further obstructions and didn't stop, I could make it there well past sunset. I'm not a whiz at math, and I've never really calculated the actual mileage between our home and said diner, so with my habit of walking carefully and slowly, I might be overshooting the estimate.
I made good time with my walking speed. I was going based on memory. I knew the exit from the Turnpike I needed to get off, which was helpful. We had frequented this gem of a diner way out in Fort Washington, I believe, enough times for me to memorize the route without GPS. Part of me was hoping I would be able to take some shortcuts and get there a little earlier. Somehow I knew in the back of my mind that if I did take shortcuts, I would almost certainly get lost and bump into more unwanted encounters.
Loud thumping without beat or rhythm assaulted my ears to my left. I looked, fumbling for my gun, and saw a man zombie trapped in his white Tesla Model 3, beating his bleeding head against the sunroof over and over again. He saw me, looked at me for a moment as if he knew who I was, then continued to bang his head over and over against the pane. If he had done this against the roll-down window instead, he might have been freed of the vehicle (which was locked and useless apparently) and coming for me—unless zombies didn’t know how to open doors with simple buttons. I picked up my pace to be safe.
I holstered my gun and kept walking. There would be more distractions along the way, probably similar scenes to unfold before my eyes before my journey was complete.
What I didn’t know could fill volumes.
There was simply no better way for me to get onto the Turnpike with its snakelike snarl of rear-ended vehicles, fires, and smoke as far as the eye could see than to simply walk the curve to get onto the shoulder. From there, I would walk beside the insane mess that humanity had left behind. Once upon a time back in 2007, I think I watched a documentary on the National Geographic channel about what would happen if humans suddenly ceased to exist on planet earth. They described how long it would take for plant life to resume its ordinary course and grow over everything, absorbing vehicles and buildings until it was once again a planet without many traces of humanity's existence. I think it was between ten thousand and a million years. Either way, I may not live long enough to see a better world than what had been left behind for me.
Even though I was immune to whatever had seemingly already eradicated most of the populace, I was not immune to illness, superbugs, or bullets from unknown strangers who might think me a zombie and not think to inquire first before pulling triggers. I got lucky when I ran into Julia. All it cost me were a few of my supplies, which frankly made the going that much easier.
In this area, you can't spit too far without hitting a Wawa. Other grocery stores would be stocked with food, and I would probably be able to get into them as needed. I would almost certainly have to deal with killing zombies in them if they were too stupid to figure out buttons or latches for doors. Life was now a gamble, and even though I'm not a betting man at heart, I had to bet on myself. Claire would.
Just as I skirted past a yellow Jeep with a dead woman in it, her left leg hanging out of the driver’s side door, which was missing, I detected movement up ahead near the toll booths.
Casually this time, carefully, mindfully even, I reached for the gun and ducked low. I read somewhere that most people aim high and shoot wild if they've had no training. I certainly hadn't had any training, but I guessed that if you shot people's legs, or at least at them with some determination and care, you might slow your assailant enough to talk them off the ledge or finish the job entirely.
I shrugged off my backpack, looking at it, and mentally noting by which cars it was and squat-walked as quietly as I could. Regardless of my intention to be stealthy, I could hear my breath coming in and out of my mouth. There was a deep rasp in my lungs now, I wasn’t as youn
g as I thought, and though dressed for the occasion, I was tired and scared.
I saw a pair of feet and legs moving from underneath a semi I was next to. I almost shot at them and then decided to wait. I sat on my knees and pointed the gun, expecting whoever it was to come around the front any second now to face me. When he did, I shot at the ground just before his feet and was lucky not to hit him.
“Freeze,” I yelled.
The man froze and rose his arms. His mustache and tan skin and facial features suggested someone Latino or Mexican. As much as I want the concept of race to be in the rear-view mirror, I am a product of my conditioning. Never mind that my own skin was black, I didn’t hold it against him.
Damn. I was hoping it might be a zombie. As it was, I wouldn't make it to my destination if this took too long. People, men, and women were unpredictable, but men tended towards violence more readily than they did palaver and joint efforts. As exhibit A, I shot first and told the man I meant business with my tone.
“I’m not a zombie,” he said.
“Ok, great. I’m trying to get somewhere. So if you’ll let me pass in peace, we’ll be cool,” I said.
"Do you have food?" His accent suggested Latino..
Damn it.
“Yeah. And water.”
"Listen, man, I don't have anything to eat and no guns. Can you share some food?"
“Are you violent?”
“No,” he shook his head.
Nevertheless, I didn’t trust him and instead kept my aim at his chest as I got up.
"I have a backpack over yonder. Follow me. You make any sudden moves, and I will put you down. You got me?"
I hoped that sounded tough and fair, but who knew?
The mistake of turning my back on him was immediately apparent as suddenly there was a kick on the hollow behind my knee, my leg buckling involuntarily, and me falling to the ground. My arms and hands pistoned outward to break the fall, and I pivoted, rolling onto my back. With some luck, the gun was in my hand faster than I imagined it could have been and pointing up at him. The look on the man’s face was one of intention and sadness, just a tracery of a frown curled his lips, and his eyes looked saddest of all.
One Way Out: A Zombie Apocalypse Novella Page 3