by Wood, J N
‘I think we’re gonna be seeing more dead bodies. You’re not gonna freak out on me are you?’ I asked, genuinely concerned.
‘No I’m fine, honestly. If you don’t freak out, then I won’t freak out.’
‘Well, I can’t guarantee that,’ I replied.
‘It’s a shame Keith couldn’t come on this holiday,’ Jack said. ‘He would have come in quite handy right now.’
‘Why, do you need some light bulbs changing?’
Jack laughed. ‘Well, actually his electrical skills would probably be needed at some point. But I’m guessing the Royal Engineers taught him things other than how to change a light bulb.’
‘Yep, to be honest I wouldn’t wish this shit on anybody.’ I looked out of the window at the apocalyptic scenes. ‘But I do kind of wish Keith had come with us. He would at least know how to use those guns. More than you know anyway.’
‘How fucking dare you Christopher. The instructor at my one and only lesson told me I was a natural.’
We had been driving for fifteen minutes since leaving the petrol station. We may have been on the outskirts of Fort Collins, or maybe this was the middle of Fort Collins, I honestly didn’t know. I noticed a Whole Foods Market over on our left.
I stopped the car and pointed towards the supermarket.
‘What’s the matter? What’s happening?’ Jack asked, in a panic.
‘Nothing, calm down. Just wondered if you fancied a spot of shopping?’ I asked.
The expression on his face quickly turned from worried to annoyed.
‘It’s taken us ages to get here, and it’s gonna take us a lot longer than the time you totally pulled out of your arse,’ I said. ‘Maybe we should go in. We definitely need more water after your home made car wash attempt.’
Jack sighed. ‘Yeah suppose you’re right, in the movies something bad always happens in supermarkets.’
‘It’ll be fine,’ I told him.
I put the gear lever back into drive, and weaved us through the abandoned cars on the road. The car park was almost empty, so I drove right up to the front of the shop and stopped outside the main doors.
‘Right, probably time to give me a quick lesson on my gun then,’ I said, nodding to the now fully loaded guns at Jacks feet.
Jack quickly told me as much as he knew about the Sig, which wasn’t much. After he pointed out where the safety catch was, and quickly showed me how to reload it, we donned our gloves and masks and climbed out of the car. Jack had to wait for me to get out, before crawling over to my side to use the driver’s door.
‘We need to get a new car,’ he declared. ‘We passed a few car dealer places about ten minutes ago. We should have stopped.’
‘I was just trying to avoid seeing a dead person, so I wasn’t really looking for a new car,’ I replied, and waved my gun around. ‘I’m pretty sure we’re gonna kill each other with these fucking things before we get the chance to get a new car.’
‘Stop waving it around then,’ Jack said.
‘Don’t worry. The safety is on.’ I quickly checked to make sure it was. ‘Isn’t it?’
The automatic doors still worked so that was a bonus. None of the lights were on in the shop though, so I took my phone out and turned on the torch app.
I looked down at the gun in my hand. ‘Hey Jack, the sight on my gun glows in the dark, that’s pretty cool.’
Jack shushed me, his finger on his lips. ‘I think I just heard somebody,’ he whispered.
I immediately crouched down, and tried to listen for any sounds, not hearing anything other than mine and Jack’s breathing. Suddenly, I saw a beam of light from a torch shine up to the ceiling from behind one of the aisles. I nudged Jack on the shoulder before pointing at the light. He started to edge backwards.
I grabbed his arm. ‘Wait, let’s talk to them,’ I whispered.
Jack responded by grimacing and shaking his head, so I added. ‘We’ll keep our distance. We’ve got the gloves and the masks.’
‘This was your rule Chris, not mine, no interaction with people.’
‘We’ll be careful.’
I stood up and shouted at the top of my voice, ‘Hello, we’ve just come in for some water, fancy a chat?’
Jack flinched, and looked irritated to say the least.
‘Fucking hell Chris. How is that being careful?’ he whispered.
I lowered my voice back down to a whisper. ‘What? We don’t want to surprise them and get shot do we? Everybody had guns in this country before the apocalypse.’
‘We didn’t have to surprise them, we could have just left.’
‘Well, I’ve said hello now, we might as well wait.’
A few moments later a woman’s voice shouted back to us. ‘We’ll come to you. It’s just me and my husband, but we wanna warn you, we’re armed!’
‘Okay!’ I shouted back, before adding, ‘Oh, so are we!’ I waved my gun at nobody in particular, as they wouldn’t have been able to see us.
Jack gave me a disappointed look and shook his head. I smiled and shrugged my shoulders in response.
I tucked my gun into the back of my jeans, thinking I’d rather shoot myself in the arse cheeks than lose my balls. Jack watched me and did the same.
It was an agonisingly long time before the two people appeared from the darkness, probably only twenty seconds, but it felt a lot longer. There were a few times that I was really tempted to pull my gun back out or, much more likely, turn and run away.
From behind the breakfast cereal aisle, appeared first a woman holding a torch, then a very small man. I thought he was a child until I saw the greying hair.
They stopped about ten feet from us, maybe having the same worries about keeping a reasonable distance from other people. They both had scarves pulled up over their faces to just below their eyes.
‘Hey, either of you sick?’ The woman asked, quickly pointing at me with a gloved hand, and then at Jack.
I pulled down my mask to show them all of my face, trying to give them my friendliest, I’m not sick smile. ‘No, we haven’t got it, clean as a whistle.’
‘Gonna shine my flashlight in your face okay? Wanna get a better look at ya,’ the man said.
‘Okay, that’s fine,’ Jack answered. ‘We’re going to need to see your faces as well though.’
‘Okay,’ the man said, before almost blinding me with his torch.
After they were satisfied we had no visible signs of the virus, they shone the lights on themselves.
‘What are we actually looking for here?’ I asked.
‘The eyes are the first sign, they go real bloodshot,’ the woman said.
I remembered seeing Madison’s eyes, just before she painted the side of our car a delightful blood red.
We agreed on no physical contact, just to be safe, and headed back outside to talk. It turned out the pair had also been on holiday. Their names were Alex and Maria Weaver. They were trying to get back home to North Platte, in Nebraska.
Initial impressions were that they seemed like a nice couple. I thought they were interesting looking to say the least. Six foot odd Maria towered over Alex, who couldn’t have been much over five foot. They looked like they were both approaching fifty, although they could have been early forties. I’m really not very good at guessing people’s ages.
‘We’d been on vacation for three weeks when the shit hit the fan,’ Alex said. ‘We should have been driving home yesterday, if none of this had happened.’
‘We’ve been holed up in our motel watching the TV for the last two days.’ Maria explained. ‘Too scared to leave basically, the virus went through Fort Collins so damn fast. No one had time to do anything. Reckon anybody left alive is either hiding in their homes, or driving north. Y’all are the only people we’ve seen today, alive that is.’
‘Do you know how many people have died? What was the TV saying before it stopped working?’ I asked.
‘Approximately seventy million confirmed dead,’ Maria said sombrely.
‘It’ll be a lot higher than that now though.’
I turned to Jack and whispered, ‘Fucking hell.’
He didn’t pull his eyes away from the floor. It looked like the blood had completely drained from his face.
Alex leaned over and held his wife’s hand. ‘We have to get back to our kids. They’re all grown up now and…’ He paused to take a deep breath. ‘I’m sure they’ve left already, but we have to make sure.’ He looked to Maria, and they gave each other reassuring smiles.
Jack looked up from the floor. ‘My wife is in California, we’re going to get her before going to Canada.’
Alex looked troubled. ‘That’s a long way to drive even at the best of times, and over some difficult terrain, I’m a truck driver, take my word for it.’
If you were to tell me one of these two would be a truck driver, I’d have put my money on Maria.
I didn’t think it was possible, but Jack looked even more disheartened after Alex’s words. I patted him on the knee.
‘Well that’s where we’re going, not much choice.’ I turned my attention to Alex. ‘Any advice from a professional driver?’
Alex opened his mouth to speak but Maria interrupted her husband. ‘Well you don’t need to be no truck driver to know you should avoid driving through Fort Collins. I think all the roads are blocked anyway, but there’s just so many dead there, reckon it’d be impossible not to catch the virus going that way.’
‘Yeah Maria’s right,’ Alex said. ‘There’s a road that runs along the Horsetooth Reservoir, hopefully that will be clear for you guys. Get yourselves a decent truck as well. Personally I’d go for a Ford 150 Raptor. That’s what I’m on the lookout for, she’s a beauty.’
‘We ain’t stealing no truck,’ Maria said, scowling at her husband.
‘We just stole food,’ Alex replied, trying to placate his wife.
‘That’s different, we can afford to pay that back.’
For a while, watching these two arguing was incredibly awkward, but it was soon resolved after Alex agreed with his wife that they wouldn’t steal a new truck. Once that was settled, we carried on trading information. Alex and Maria provided us with a lot more than we gave them.
‘Before the TV and radio had gone down, we watched most of it happen,’ Alex said. ‘The first we knew of it was on Wednesday evening, when Tilly, our eldest, rang to tell us to put a news channel on.’ He turned to his wife. ‘What time did she call us?’
‘Must have been about ten I think,’ Maria replied. ‘We turned on the TV and pretty much watched it all unfold until about nine on Thursday night. That was when our TV in the motel stopped working. We hardly slept because we were worrying about everyone back home, so we watched a lot of TV. We don’t usually watch it that much.’ She looked away like she was ashamed.
‘We tried to leave first thing on Thursday morning,’ Alex added. ‘We almost walked into a cop car as soon as we left. They told us to get back inside. They also told us some cops were shooting people who were out on the streets. We didn’t see any of that, but Maria saw videos on Twitter—.’
Maria interrupted him. ‘There was a lot of stuff on Twitter and Facebook about people dying all across the south, but everyone thought it was fake news. I reckon it all happened so quickly the TV news, the police, and the army just didn’t have time to respond. The TV news said hospitals were being overrun, and in a lot of cases they were forced to turn sick people away. All the news reports felt incomplete, and everybody had a different opinion on what was happening. First they were saying it was bird flu, then Ebola, and then they didn’t know what it was, and started calling it the Florida Virus. We thought that was strange, because a lot of the news stations said it first originated in Louisiana.’
‘I saw some videos on Facebook that showed the Air Force bombing the major roads,’ Alex said. ‘Apparently to keep the sick from getting out of the south and spreading the disease. I’m not sure if I believe it though.’
‘I believe it,’ Maria said. ‘I saw videos on Twitter showing the army down there shooting at people. Trump would do anything to save his own ass. I hope D.C. was the first to go.’
Alex gave us an apologetic smile. ‘Maria isn’t a big fan of our President.’
‘That’s okay. I don’t think many people are,’ Jack said.
‘I hope he didn’t make it out, last thing we heard was that he was being evacuated to Hawaii,’ Maria said.
Alex grimaced. ‘Maria, that’s not very Christian.’
‘He’s probably to blame for all this,’ she said.
‘We seen a lot of dead bodies in Fort Collins on the way here,’ Alex said, obviously trying to move the conversation on. ‘More than you would ever want to imagine.’
‘How did you get here from the motel?’ I asked.
‘We drove here,’ Alex replied. ‘If Fort Collins is anything to go by, you don’t wanna be walking through cities anytime soon.’
We found out that one of the main reasons they had survived the last few days was because Maria was an E.R. nurse. She told us that if they had to touch anything new, they’d clean it with anti-bacterial wipes, even though they would always be wearing disposable gloves. She also instructed us on how often and when we should be changing the gloves. It seemed to have become an obsession for them. It had obviously worked, so Jack and I vowed to do the same.
‘Get used to not touching your face with your hands,’ Maria instructed. ‘If you’ve got an itch, just live with it.’
As we were saying our goodbyes, still without any physical contact, Alex decided to give us one last bit of advice.
‘If you do have to go over the Rockies, and I seriously recommend you do not, make sure you’ve got good winter tyres and extra windshield washer fluid. You do not wanna be caught driving through a blizzard and run out of washer fluid. I’ve used gallons of the stuff in the past. I’ve been over the mountains maybe ten, or eleven times in the winter, and it can be hellish, but that said it can also be real easy, just depends if you get lucky with the weather.’
After the Weavers left, we went back into the Whole Foods to stock up, grabbing a trolley each. I got as much bottled water and canned food as I could fit in. I searched the aisles for alcohol, but we had somehow stopped at the only supermarket not to stock beer. I was glad I’d picked up that bottle of whiskey and the beers from Marky Mark’s place. Jack’s job was to get the washer fluid, anti-bacterial wipes, and all things health and safety when it came to avoiding the virus. He also returned with a full trolley.
After loading the car, carefully avoiding the bloody side, we drove back the way we had come. We were looking for one of the car dealerships Jack had seen earlier. The first one we saw had a large Ford sign outside. Alex’s recommendation had been a Ford, so I hoped we’d get lucky.
I parked the car. Jack did his awkward exit.
‘Hopefully that’s the last time I have to do that,’ he said.
The doors to the Ford dealership were locked, but after looking through the windows for a few moments, I spotted a red F-150 Raptor, the same one Alex told us we should look for.
Our luck was definitely in.
After both agreeing we should throw something through one of the plate glass windows, we spent ten fruitless minutes looking for a suitable rock. When we couldn’t find anything, I decided the best course of action was to use our old car as a battering ram. It turned out to be a good idea. I carefully crashed the Toyota into one of the large windows, near to our new truck, so we could easily drive it out.
We found the keys to the truck in a cupboard in one of the offices, and set to our new cleaning regime, deciding to wipe down the outside of the doors as well as the whole of the interior. It took about forty minutes, but from now on we weren’t taking any chances. Our luck could only last so long.
The Weavers had also advised us to syphon fuel from other cars, or better yet punch a hole in the tank using a screw driver, and catch the escaping fuel with some kind of container. Ther
e was about a quarter of a tank in our new truck. Jack told me he wanted to use a petrol station while it was still an option for us. I agreed. It would be much quicker and a lot less messy than the alternatives. I slowly drove the truck out through the empty space where the large sheet of glass had once been. We had managed to scrape most of the broken shards out of our path using a big advertising board that had been left in the showroom.
We found another Shell station on our route around the south of Fort Collins. After pulling in and stopping at one of the pumps, Jack started to fill her up, while I went into the shop to find some Jerry Cans. There were ten of them in the shop so I grabbed them all.
I didn’t know if Jack felt the same way, but I definitely felt more confident after our meeting with the Weavers. It also helped that we were now in our new truck, which I have to say felt pretty amazing to drive.
I’d never been a car person, but it turns out I might be into trucks.
My new found confidence soon evaporated as we neared the junction where we would be turning right onto Centennial Drive, the route Alex had told us would be the best way around all the death in Fort Collins. It was completely blocked. It looked as though some kind of lorry or tanker had crashed into a pile of other vehicles. There was a lot of mangled metal, crushed together and burnt into a blackened ugly mess. The fire must have been incredibly hot, because all that was left were the metal husks of the vehicles. The tarmac on the road had melted away in the inferno.
We sat in the truck and tried to figure out a way around. The Horsetooth Reservoir was on one side of the road, and on the other side were steep hills. There was no way around the pile up.
Jack kept his eyes on the map, saying, ‘I reckon we drive down to Masonville, and then through the Arapaho and Roosevelt National Forest. It will only add a few hours on to the journey anyway, and also, we don’t have much choice.’
‘Pretty sure Alex said to avoid the Rockies,’ I reminded him.
‘It’s not the Rockies.’