by Lukens, Mark
“Let’s go!” Ray yelled from the open driver’s door.
Josh helped Emma as Mike crawled into the back and over the back seat. Josh closed the back hatch as Luke hobbled to the passenger door. Josh slid the side door open and helped Emma inside, practically shoving her in, but she was doing well enough on her own. Josh got in and slid the door shut as Ray shifted the van into drive and stomped on the gas. Josh just got down into the seat as the van lurched forward, driving down into a ditch that separated the car lot from the road.
The ditch was deeper than it looked, and for just a moment the van got hung up as it tried to climb the other side up onto the road, tires spinning in the icy grass.
Rocks pelted the truck, one of them cracking the windshield. Rippers were running out from the woods onto the road, roaring with rage.
Ray punched the gas, the motor revving. Clumps of frozen dirt clattered against the undercarriage of the van as the back tires kept spinning.
“Get us out of here,” Luke growled.
“I’m trying,” Ray said,
More rocks bounced off the front of the van, the first wave of the rippers’ attack. But the second wave was coming, only seconds away.
Suddenly the van drove up out of the ditch, the motor revving even harder, the van sliding on the wet road. Ray turned on the headlights, illuminating the wall of rippers coming toward them, more of them rushing out from the trees down the street. He turned the steering wheel sharply to the right but kept his foot down on the gas pedal, the rear of the van still sliding.
Emma grabbed on to Josh. Mike was in the back, his hands cupped over the back of the seat, holding on as best he could.
Ray struck one of the rippers, knocking him out of the way, the stick he’d been carrying bouncing off of the van’s hood. More rippers jumped in front of the van as it sped up, trying to bog it down, but Ray kept the gas pedal down, mowing them down, their faces a blur, their hair flying, clothes whipping past the headlights, all of it happening so fast.
They were driving faster as more rocks pummeled the side of the van, rippers at the edge of the woods throwing more of them. One rock shattered the rear window.
“You okay, Mike?” Josh asked, turning around to the back.
Mike was hunched down, his hands protecting his head. “Yeah,” he said. “I’m okay.”
Why can’t we keep a rear window in any vehicle we drive? Josh asked himself. He held on to Emma, her hands clutching at him as they drove faster down the street, speeding away from the mob of rippers.
CHAPTER 44
Ray
Ray assessed the damage to the van as he drove farther away from the horde of rippers that had come from the woods across the street from the used car lot. One of the headlights was busted, but the other one was still working; none of the tires seemed to be flat, the engine seemed okay, the temperature readings still good. Everything seemed to be okay. They had a little over half a tank of gas and only one window had been shattered. More importantly Mike was okay in the back. They were all alive and okay, except for Luke—he was still bleeding pretty bad, holding onto his leg and clenching his teeth.
“We need to find somewhere to stop,” Emma said from the back seat. “You need to look at Luke’s leg.”
Ray didn’t respond. He knew they needed to stop; he was trying to spot a place in the darkness while also keeping an eye on the road ahead of them that was illuminated only by their one headlight.
“Mike, Josh,” Ray said. “Help me look for a place.”
Anywhere they went rippers would hear them if they were close by, they would see the headlight of their van like a lighthouse in the darkness, a beacon calling them forth.
“You check that side of the road, buddy,” Josh told Mike. “I’ll check this side.”
Mike didn’t answer. Maybe he had nodded at Josh.
Can’t hear your head rattle, Ray thought. What a weird thought, a phrase he’d never used before. Maybe Emma had said it once, but he couldn’t remember when.
He glanced at Luke in the passenger seat. His eyes were closed. Maybe he was just resting. Hopefully he hadn’t passed out yet.
“What about that place?” Mike said.
Ray slowed down a little. “Where?”
“Back that way. I think it was a house.”
A building might be safer than a house, but Ray figured a house was better than a trailer. And there wasn’t much on this lonely road—they couldn’t be too choosey right now. Anything was better than staying somewhere in the van out in the open.
They were going to have to try the house Mike had seen. Luke needed some kind of medical attention soon. They had driven several miles, almost ten. Was it far enough away from the horde of rippers back at the car lot? Would the rippers eventually catch up to them by morning if they kept on the move through the night? Would the group be that purposeful?
Maybe they would just stay a few hours in the house, until an hour before dawn, enough time to look at Luke’s leg, eat and drink a little, reload their weapons, rest a bit, and then get back on the road.
Ray came to a stop and then turned the van around, driving back down the road slowly, his headlight off now. He saw the driveway meeting the street, a knocked-over mailbox lying in the brown weeds, dusted with a light layer of snow. Maybe this house had been abandoned long before the Collapse. He could only hope so.
He pulled into the driveway, the tires crunching slowly over dirt and gravel. He stopped a few feet down the driveway and rolled down his window, listening for a moment. The van’s motor was a lot quieter than the Jeep’s had been. He stared out through the cracked windshield at the shape of the house in the distance, the roof a sharp black triangle above the tree tops to the right of the driveway. There were no lights on in the house, no sounds coming from it.
And there were no sounds of rippers. No calls or screeches in the distance, just the slight rustle of dry, frozen brush as the wind sliced through them.
Ray shifted into drive again, letting the van creep forward. He kept the headlight off and kept his window rolled down. The heat blasted from the dashboard vents. He could just make out the driveway and withered vegetation at the edges of it in the moonlight. There was some kind of field of dormant grasses and weeds to the right, maybe part of a front yard at some point in the past. Brush and a few trees were to the left, the woods denser only a few hundred yards away.
It was taking a while to get down the long driveway to the house, but Ray let the van idle down the dirt drive, up and down slight rises and dips in the land, a slow curve to the driveway, rounding back to the house, which was at least one hundred and fifty yards off of the small country road they’d been driving. It was amazing that Mike had even spotted the home. They might have driven another five or ten miles before seeing another building. He needed to tell Mike that he’d done a good job; he needed to remember to do that.
Ray didn’t know how bad Luke’s injuries were: he could be losing a lot of blood, or it could get infected like Josh’s arm had. They had probably come close to cutting Josh’s arm off. If Josh hadn’t found the hidden bunker behind the basement wall at Doug’s cabin with the stock of antibiotics and other medical supplies, it might have come to that to save his life.
Did they still have antibiotics in one of the packs in the back of the van? God, he hoped so. He wasn’t sure which pack the medical supplies had been in, if they still had that pack or if it was back at the gas station, still buried somewhere in the snow. He had packed the bags while waiting down in the bunker, but that seemed like a million years ago, and he couldn’t remember which bag he had put which supplies in.
If the worst was coming, if Luke was going to become incapacitated, or even worse, dead, then Ray was going to need Mike to assume more of a role with them. He’d been too soft with Mike so far, too protective of him. But he couldn’t help wanting to protect him, wanting to shield him from these horrors as much as possible. Luke had done the right thing showing Mike some of his MMA
moves, teaching him a little about the guns. Josh was also right about wanting to teach Mike how to drive. Ray thought if something happened to him, or the rest of them, and if Mike was on his own, the worst thing would be for him not to be prepared, to not have knowledge of these basic skills that were so important now. Just thinking about it brought on a wave of panic, the thought of Mike alone and unprepared.
Ray tried to shake off those thoughts, forcing himself to concentrate on the house they were slowly approaching, the deeper shadows of the trees and the house swallowing them up.
Luke was still passed out, so if there were rippers around he wasn’t going to be able to pick them off like usual; it would be up to him and Josh.
Ray parked the van next to the house, hiding in the shadows the house painted along the ground in the moonlight. He had turned the van around so that it was pointed back at the driveway, ready for a quick escape if they needed it.
“We home yet?” Luke mumbled.
Ray stared at Luke in the darkness; there was just enough moonlight shining down through the clearing clouds for Ray to see him crack a smile.
“You’re awake?”
“Just resting a minute,” he answered.
“Don’t drift off right now,” Ray said. “You need to stay awake. We’re at a house Mike saw from the road. Josh and I are going in there to check it out. And I need you awake out here for a few more minutes.”
Luke didn’t answer, but he nodded.
Ray looked at Josh in the back seat. “I might need some of your B & E skills.”
“What’s B & E?” Mike asked.
“Bacon and eggs,” Josh said.
“Come on,” Mike said.
“Your dad wants me to help him gain access to an abode,” Josh said.
Mike nodded like he understood.
“I’ll watch over them,” Luke said, sitting up a little straighter in the passenger seat, wincing as he moved. He had his gun in his gloved hand, resting it on his lap.
“Okay,” Ray said. “We’ll be back as fast as we can. Keys are in the ignition if you need them.”
Luke nodded, breathing heavily, his eyes half-closed.
Ray opened the door as quietly as he could, stepping out and shutting the door softly, pushing his bodyweight against it until he heard it click. The interior lights had come on when he’d opened the door, but maybe the part of the house and the trees around it hid the light from the road.
He met Josh at the other side of the van. “You ready?”
Josh nodded. “Let’s see what we’ve got in there.”
They crept to the house. It looked dilapidated, ready to fall apart. Maybe it had been abandoned for a while now. Déjà vu washed over Ray as they approached the door hidden in the shadows of the front porch; this place reminded him of the house they had stayed the night in not so long after meeting Josh, when Josh had picked the lock on the door with a screwdriver in less than thirty seconds. He’d told Emma that night what Josh had done, that Josh obviously had a criminal past. But she’d said that they needed him, that they all needed each other, that they were all meant to be together.
Maybe she was right. Maybe they needed to be together. And that meant that they had to save Luke. They needed him.
Josh checked the doorknob on the front door, twisting it, then letting it go. He looked back at Ray, whispering: “It’s unlocked.”
Two unlocked doors in one day? Maybe their luck was finally changing.
Ray pulled his flashlight out of his jacket pocket, turning it on but covering most of the end of it with his hand. Josh was right beside him with the shotgun in his hands.
When they were inside the house, Ray shut the door. He took his hand off the flashlight, sweeping the beam of light around the living room. There was very little furniture, and a lot of trash and old wood along the floors. One wall was torn apart, but the floor looked pretty solid. The place had been abandoned for a while, just like Ray had suspected.
“You want to check the rest of the house?” Josh whispered.
“I think it’s clear,” Ray answered. “We need to get Luke in here quick.”
Josh nodded in agreement.
They had walked through the living room toward darker areas of the kitchen and another room that had probably been a family room or a dining room. A set of stairs off to the right ascended up into the air, disappearing in the darkness. Ray and Josh turned around, about to head for the front door at the far end of the room.
A clicking noise stopped them in their tracks, the unmistakable sound of a handgun being cocked.
“Don’t move a muscle,” a man said from behind them.
CHAPTER 45
Ray
Ray froze. He still had his flashlight in his hand, the beam aimed down at the floor. Josh stood right beside him with his shotgun in one hand. They were both facing toward the door that led back out to the front porch.
“I’ve got a gun pointed at you,” the man said from somewhere behind them.
Ray imagined the two of them were lit up like a streetlamp with his flashlight on while the man had stayed hidden somewhere in the darkness. They had been careless, not bothering to search the rest of the house, in too much of a hurry to get Luke inside. And now they had paid the price.
“We didn’t know anyone was here,” Ray said. “We were just looking for a place to stay the night. Just for a few hours.”
“How many of you are there?” the man asked. “I heard you talking about someone named Luke.”
Ray thought the man sounded older, but he couldn’t pinpoint the man’s age. He had a deep voice with a slight southern twang, more west in it than Deep South. But it was the calmness in the man’s voice that worried Ray—the man obviously knew how to handle himself.
“Luke’s hurt,” Ray said, still not moving at all. “He was stabbed by a ripper.”
“Stabbed where?”
“In his leg.”
“Thigh or calf?”
Ray wasn’t sure.
“Calf, I think,” Josh said. “I’m pretty sure it was his calf.”
“How long ago?”
“Maybe . . . half an hour ago. Maybe forty minutes.”
“Is he conscious?”
“He was,” Ray said. “He’s out in our van. We’ve got a few medical supplies with us. We just need to clean his wound and wrap it. Then we could move on and be out of your way.”
“You Dark Angels?”
“No,” Ray said, practically spitting the word out. “No. Not at all. We’ve got two others with us. My son, he’s almost twelve years old. And Emma. She’s blind.”
“You’ve got a blind woman with you?” The first sound of emotion in the man’s voice: amused curiosity.
“Yes,” Ray said. “We went to see if she was okay at the beginning of the Collapse. My neighbor asked me to check on her. Emma’s her . . . was her daughter. She’s been with us ever since.” Ray thought of being in Emma’s condo with his wife and daughter, where his wife died and his daughter had turned into a ripper.
The man said nothing.
Ray could feel the tension easing just a bit from the man. “Look, sir. If we could just stay a few minutes. We’ll set our guns down by the door. You can keep your gun on us the whole time.”
The man seemed to be thinking it over.
“We’ve got food we could share,” Ray offered. “And some water. We’re not Dark Angels. We wouldn’t be traveling with a kid and a blind woman if we were.”
“Where are you headed?” the man asked. He sounded like he was a little closer.
Ray almost said Avalon, but he stopped himself. He didn’t want to explain all of that. “South.”
“I was heading west. Lot of Dark Angels to the south.”
“Warmer weather,” Ray said.
“Okay. Set your guns over there by that wall. One of you stays here with me while the other one gets Luke and the other two. I don’t care which one it is.”
“Thank you,” Ray said.
> “Bring some of that food and water with you when you come back.”
Ray walked toward the wall that separated the kitchen from the living room and set his handgun down on the floor, pushing it away with his foot. He went back to Josh who walked over to set his shotgun down on the floor next to Ray’s gun.
“Back over here,” the man said.
Josh came back to Ray, standing next to him, both of them still facing the front door across the room.
“Okay,” the man said. “One of you goes. One of you stays in here with me.”
“I’ll stay,” Josh said.
Ray nodded. “Okay. Josh will stay here with you, and I’ll be right back in with the rest of us. And the food and water.”
Josh looked at Ray, his face just visible in the light from Ray’s flashlight aimed at the floor. Ray saw the unease in Josh’s eyes, the fear that he was going to be left behind if Ray decided to make a run for it.
Ray turned off his flashlight when he got to the front door. He opened the door and slipped outside onto the front porch. It was a relief not to have a gun aimed at his back anymore. He hurried down the porch steps to the van, hurrying to the passenger side.
Luke’s window was rolled down. He watched as Ray approached.
“It’s okay in there,” Ray lied. “Let’s get in the house. We need to move quick. Mike, grab some of those packs in the back. No guns right now, just the packs.”
Luke’s eyes widened a bit. No guns?
“We’ll come back out for the guns and ammo box,” Ray said. “We need to look at your leg first.”
Mike was out the side door of the van, handing one of the packs to Ray.
“Where’s Josh?” Luke asked as he opened the passenger door and got out, wincing in pain but still keeping his gun in his hand. “How come he didn’t come back to help us with the packs?”
Ray glanced at the house behind them, just a dark monolith in the night, so dark and quiet. Their whispers seemed to carry. He tried to think of a lie, a reason Josh would have remained in the house instead of helping Emma. He couldn’t tell Luke the truth; even in Luke’s condition he might go in with his gun blazing.