by Eli Constant
“Yes, that’s the cloth of it, Juan. I wish I had something better to tell you,” AJ responded, deftly adjusting the course of the RV and trailer to avoid several bodies in the road. I don’t know how she missed them all. I also didn’t understand why the bodies were left here, no cars in sight, miles away from any town. They were all in various shades of decay and each looked like they’d served as an all-you-can-eat buffet, their skin ruined by multiple bite marks and missing chunks of flesh. Some were missing legs and arms. AJ nodded her head, indicating the corpses. “We saw a lot of drop sites like this. Bodies half-eaten. I think it has something to do with the way the Z kids heal. They keep a large grouping of Z adults around so they can keep going, travel between towns and find new prey.”
I shuddered, thinking about the implications. “Yeah, Sherry told me about your conversation. That you seemed to agree with what I saw back at the marina. It’s not a sure thing though. You haven’t gotten any government confirmation that these things feed on the Z adults and heal?”
“No, no confirmation. But,” AJ cocked a thumb over her shoulder to indicate the road we’d just passed over, “these feeding grounds in the middle of nowhere. Z adults just dropped and discarded. It makes sense. They ate until the food couldn’t walk anymore and then they abandoned the leftovers.”
“Cristo,” I muttered, covering my eyes for a moment with one roughened hand. “As if things couldn’t get worse.”
“I have a feeling they’re going to get a lot worse, Juan.” She took a deep breath and then spoke again. “Our next major town is Del Rio. Unless you want to go through the middle of it we’ll have to take 277 around the town. That’s also the way to Laughlin AFB. It’s possible we may find help there.”
“Possibilities and a plan. We’re rolling in honey now, Mamacita.” I used the personal nickname without thinking.
“I’m no one’s Mamacita,” AJ didn’t say it like she was angry, just a firmness to her voice that told me I’d overstepped how familiar we were with one another.
“Sorry, didn’t mean anything by it.” I looked out the window at the passing scenery. AJ didn’t say anything else. Soft snores moved through the air. It sounded peaceful and innocent, invisible threads of calming noise that made my stomach feel at ease for the first time in over a week. Eventually, I found the need to cover up the sound of Sherry and Marty resting in the back. The calmness of it soured. “Be nice to have a working GPS. This one,” I pointed at the screen set into the RV dash, “won’t turn on. Must be something with the rig’s electric.”
“Wouldn’t do you any good even if it did.” AJ absentmindedly took her right hand off the steering wheel and fiddled with the controls next to the screen. “Ours was operating fine, but no signal. Just one more bad sign.”
I sighed, leaning my head back and closing my eyes for a moment. I started speaking before I’d reopened them. “I’ve got no intentions of going through a town, so 277 if you really wanted my vote. Slow enough here maneuvering around things in the road. I can’t imagine what a major city would be like. I think the Air Force base should be our next stop. Maybe it’ll be safe. Maybe we won’t even need to go to Albuquerque.”
“Del Rio is far from a major city. It’s only got around 30,000, but you’re right. The road would take us right through downtown. Sure there’re thousands of children there and we don’t have that much ammo…or luck. 277 and we check out Laughlin.” AJ gave a quick nod of her head, as if the bodily movement would solidify the decision.
I was thinking on her numbers, on the potential for thousands of Z kids and monster adults. “Thousands of kids in Del Rio and maybe more on the base, so a place like Albuquerque, New Mexico would have…”
“I’m guessing around 75,000 kids of various ages.”
“Fuck,” I breathed out the word, feeling my stomach begin to twist and turn again. The peace was totally shredded now, so destroyed that I didn’t think it would ever come back.
“Yeah and that probably doesn’t take into account any illegal kids,” AJ rolled her shoulders and shifted her head to crack her neck. “This beast takes a lot of concentration to drive. I don’t think my arms have relaxed for more than a few seconds at a time before I tense back up.”
“Want me to drive for a while?” Driving would help me, let me focus on the thoughts in my head into something useful. I’d been laid up for days and I still wasn’t up to par. I could feel the bruising like it was bone deep, craters reaching in and zapping my energy. At least I could drive.
“In a bit.” She didn’t look at me when she said it, her focus back on the road ahead and what laid beyond.
I got the impression that AJ was the type of personality that liked, no, needed to be in control of things. It was her center in life. I liked control, but not over things. I had to have control over my body, over the muscles and the skin that covered them, to feel okay about being alive.
Being in shape mattered more than it once did, I guessed. It was the apocalypse. All the shit we’d put the world through, pitting humanity against pretty much every other life form, had come back to literally bite us in the ass. I mentally laughed at that, but even in my mind the sound was acidic.
The situation was serious. A country with a population of 350 million and God knows what percent of that was now rabid, hungry creatures hell-bent on sadistic ‘fun’. Just finding a place to hole up and ride it out would be damn near impossible.
I began running scenarios through my head and none of them came out nice. Our best hope was finding some form of operating government. I agreed with AJ there, not just that it had to be all the way in Albuquerque. Something I’d always noticed about military men I’d befriended over the years—the bastards were reproductive. Maybe that had something to do with wanting offspring to carry on their name in case they died in the line of duty. Shit, I guess if that were true, police officers would bang like bunnies.
Even if there was a high population of kids on a base, hopefully the response to the outbreak was more rapid and professional. Maybe they’d even been able to lock up tight when hell broke loose. Jesus, I didn’t even have a fucking clue why all this was happening. If it was some sort of virus…I didn’t even want to think of the ramifications of this virus taking hold on military installations. What would be the fall back plan? No military, no martial law. No martial law, total anarchy and loss of control. Loss of control and adios America. The thought made me sick to my stomach. I prayed Laughlin was secure.
“AJ?”
“Yeah?” She only moved her head a fraction to see me slightly better from her periphery.
“Do you have any idea what’s going on? I mean, what started this?” I don’t know why I hadn’t asked her this from the minute I’d been lucid enough to realize she was a government employee.
“Mike and I ran into two CDC agents not long after the slaughter at the border. They were taking samples, had a small military unit watching their asses.” She took her left hand off the steering wheel and ran it up the length of her right arm, wrist to shoulder and then her fingers planted themselves around her neck, as if she was holding back the truth from coming out of her mouth. Then she spoke again. “They think…they think that it’s from a bad batch of routine vaccines. That we infected the kids.”
“But...” I struggled for words, “there are checks and safety systems in place to keep that from happening, right? How’s it possible that bad vaccines could have been shipped off to all corners of the damn world?”
“I don’t know, Juan.” Her fingers flexed around her neck. She was going to speak again, opening her mouth slightly, but a small voice from behind us interrupted.
“So that’s why Izzy got sick.” Marty’s voice was quiet, resigned. It sounded too old for such a little boy.
“Who?” AJ said, finally moving her hand away from her neck and back to the steering wheel.
“His little sister.” Sherry was awake now, wrapping both arms around him and giving him a small squeeze. “That’
s how it started for me. His mom brought them into the shop. Izzy had gotten some vaccines and wasn’t feeling well. Marty needed a new shirt after getting sick in the car.”
“Izzy went crazy. She…she started trying to hurt everyone. She…she bit mom’s nose and Sam…” Marty’s voice trailed off.
“It was bad,” Sherry finished for him. “Really bad.”
“God, sorry, Marty.” AJ’s voice was sincere, full of feeling. She knew what it was like to lose people. She knew what it did to a person.
“Vaccines,” I breathed out. “God help us.”
We all fell quiet then, only Marty breaking the silence with a soft “I wish Frank was here.”
After a while, I offered to drive again. This time, AJ took me up on my offer.
***
AJ
Somewhere prior to Del Rio I fell asleep.
When I woke up, I felt like I’d slept an eternity. Maybe to my brain I had. There hadn’t been much time for passing out in the time that I’d rescued my new companions. It had been go, go, go. No sleep for the weary. With Juan injured at the truck stop, Sherry and I had been operating a 24/7 security by ourselves and my sleep cycle was way off, before that there wasn’t anything remotely close to a night’s sleep. Mike and I had just been on the run.
God, I missed him. Mike was…he was one of those people that instantly put a person at ease. It didn’t matter who you were or where you came from, if he smiled at you, you let down your defenses. His wife once told me that she hadn’t stood a chance against his advances. One crooked, wide-mouthed grin from Mike and she’d fallen head over heels. I believed her.
Regardless how much sleep I still desperately needed, when the RV quit moving I sat up and looked at Juan, my body on high alert.
“What’s up?” Sleep fog still threatened at the corners of my mind, but I fought it back. There wasn’t time to give in to it.
“Well, no way we’re getting past that,” Juan said decisively, no exhaustion in his voice. He’d rested a lot at the truck stop whilst injured. But when you’re hurt, your body sucks up every bit of energy it can to heal. So extra sleep really isn’t extra at all.
I followed Juan’s pointer finger and looked through the busted front glass. The steady stream of warm wind that flowed through it had ceased with the RV’s lack of movement. I had to lean forward in my seat to see what he was pointing at clearly but it didn’t take much evaluation to see he wasn’t mistaken. No way through the inferno, Mr. Dante.
The 277 was totally blocked. A vast and purposeful cluster of parked cars was jammed into a temporary barricade. It was flanked by an array of military trucks and topped with barbed wire. If they were trying to stop the flow of traffic to the base then this was a damn good way to do it. If they’d tried to stop the plague, they’d failed miserably.
The whole area was littered with bodies, riddled with sun-baked bits of mangled flesh and shattered bones, shining like elephant ivory in the sun as if someone had come along and cleaned and polished them. There were also at least a dozen adult infected stumbling around aimlessly. I stared around at the carnage and finally saw what I was looking for. One child was visible, sitting on the hood of a Humvee, its small, pale body burnt red from over-exposure to the sun. His hair looked like it was black at one time, but now it hung in dried clumps, barely clinging to the scalp. A normal child, it couldn’t have been more than eight at time of infection, would have been dead from sun exposure by now, but this one sat rocking back and forth as if it was trying to figure out what to do next. As if it was… bored.
“Alright AJ, what’s the next move?” there wasn’t any emotion in Juan’s voice; he was just looking for instructions. I could tell it was bravado though. He was strong, but beneath the surface there was fear. Any sane person would be afraid now. God, I was afraid. I could taste it in my mouth, like sour candy burning my tongue.
“I don’t think there’s any way we can move all that out of the way, especially with that,” I pointed at the infected kid, making sure Juan saw it, “in the mix.” I reached behind me and grabbed the maps from where I’d fold them into the storage pouch behind the passenger’s seat. I ran my fingers across the lines. I was pretty familiar with the area, but I wanted to be sure before we started moving again. “We need to take Dr. Fermin Calderon Blvd. and then link up with Railway. That connects with 90 and backtracks to Laughlin.”
“Don’t you think the military would have that way blocked also,” Sherry said. I turned around so I could see her. She was looking at Marty, her hand resting loosely on the Taurus in her lap. That’s good, I thought, at least she is ready. I’d known when I first met her, after the shock of what had happened had worn off, that a strong woman resided inside of her. If she kept practicing with the gun, if she listened and learned, then she’d be every bit as effective as me.
I’m not modest. I worked hard to become one of the best in a male-dominated field. I appreciated other women who could hold their own.
“Maybe,” I responded. “But we’re still a good way from the base. They may have lost control of this checkpoint but it doesn’t mean the base was overrun. This could have been their first line of defense. They may have been able to hold the base. We just need to see. And be hopeful.”
“Agreed,” said Juan. “Out of the frying pan…”
“And into the fire,” Sherry finished for him.
There was a spark to the banter between them, a thread of what I’d thought I’d seen between them when I’d first saved them, but when Juan turned around and looked at Sherry, the thread severed, like the fates taking their scissors to someone’s life line. It made me feel really shitty that seeing that potential for love fizzle caused the thought to cross through my mind that Juan was unattached. I could appreciate his physical prowess as much as I wanted without a shred of guilt.
Well, maybe a little guilt.
“You still good to drive, Juan?” I looked out the windshield as I said it, rather than looking at him.
“Yeah, I’m fine,” Juan responded and I heard sadness in his voice. It was slight, barely there, but it existed. He was grieving whatever he and Sherry could have had. But it wasn’t the time or the place for love. It might never be the time and place again.
“Great, let’s lock and load. If the base is still viable, we need to make it there. If it’s a goner, then we’ll at least be back on 277 heading north.” I found the lobster-red infected kid again; he was standing now and staring in our direction. As I watched, he cocked his head to one side and leapt down from his perch on the vehicle. “Juan, start driving now.”
He must have heard the urgency in my voice because he started moving as soon as I’d finished speaking. The infected kid…the dead thing that looked like a kid. Shit, I had to come up with something to call them that didn’t have ‘kid’ in it. That just made it freaking worse, to constantly be reminded that the end of the world had come in the form of children. It gave new damn meaning to ‘out of the mouths of babes’. Although, in this situation, it was more flesh ‘into the mouth of babes’.
Mike had called them demons. He was really religious, thought this whole thing might be the coming of the Antichrist or something. I believed in God, took the bible as pretty much truth, but I couldn’t imagine this had anything to do with religion. Not when it was kids being sacrificed. No, this was our doing. Our science. Our FUBAR.
As Juan drove away, I got up and walked to the back of the RV, into the bedroom. I watched out the window. The infected kid was walking forward, still staring at us, but he wasn’t running. The more space that separated us, the less interested he became, eventually turning his attention to a nearby adult.
Before we were out of sight, I saw the kid ram his body into the adult’s legs, causing the larger infected to fall to the ground. He jumped atop then, straddling the adult counterpart and lifting one of its arms. Then it began to chew. My last vision of the infected child was him severing the arm from the shoulder and using it to beat on the ad
ult with furious, fast swings.
Del Rio was a ghost town, but they hadn’t gone down without a fight. Funeral pyres were still smoldering from where the bodies of both infected children and adults had been stacked and burned. Someone had survived, I thought, someone lived long enough to think of sanitation and disease and do what they could to mitigate it. Maybe they’re still alive. I told Juan to stop at the 277 business exchange prior to E. Gibbs Street. There was something about it, something that warranted a closer look. The RV idled, the engine rumbling.
This was where the last stand had been made. It looked like a scene from an old cowboy movie. Instead of wagons pulled into a circle, there were cars and trucks piled on top of one another. An abandoned telescopic reach forklift was off to the side, probably what was used to lift small cars onto larger ones. The whole thing had been built on a small bridge over the railroad and it gave the defenders both the high ground and only two directions to defend.
It was a good defensive ring and it looked like it had worked. At least for a while. Now it was abandoned, as haunting and ghostly as the rest of the town.
I stared at the area with a professional eye. Still, someone had known what they were doing. There were indications of fires and explosives around the perimeter which spoke of both Molotov cocktails and homemade grenades, maybe dynamite. You had to love Texans. It was a modern-day Siege of Bexar. Everyone always talked about the Alamo, but there were so many pivotal fights in the Texas Revolution.
After a while, I had Juan move down the ramp going the wrong direction and crossed over the railroad on an adjacent street. This took us to an intersection with E. Gibb and a right turn towards the Air Base. The survivors, and there were survivors because I could see them now, had built another defensive barricade just a couple hundred feet from the intersection. Even more thought had been put into this one. The survivors had used both cars and tractor trailers to build a solid wall. Like something out of a B-rated apocalypse movie, they had even used a Greyhound bus with sheet metal screwed to the side as a mobile gate.