by Dixon, Chuck
Doe ran for the truck with Mercy leading the way. They did a three-point turn around the base of the cul-de-sac, striking the old lady with a front fender on their way around. She went down under the wheel. The truck bucked twice going over her. Mercy looked at the side view mirror, watching the old lady rise to her feet, the backs of her hands brushing the street, her body bent double with a broken spine.
“I don’t think that lady’s husband is ever coming home,” Doe said.
“What?” Mercy said.
“Nothing,” Doe said and gunned the truck back toward the gates.
3
They arranged by texting to rendezvous at a nearby high school parking lot. Not a place they’d usually meet up, but the strip malls and big-box lots were sheer pandemonium. The cops were too busy everywhere else to hassle them about where they parked. Mom brought back Chinese, and they ate inside the Coachman.
“I got you those spring rolls you like,” Mom said, calling from the kitchenette to Mercy locked in the bathroom.
No answer. The sound of the shower running. “You hear me? Spring rolls,” Mom said, knocking.
“Not hungry!”
“They’re here if you want them. And go easy on the water. We only got what’s in the tank.”
“Target was a goddamn madhouse,” Mom said. She spooned lo mien onto a plate and offered it to Raquel.
“People just going crazy. Cussing and screaming. They were loading carts with anything they could find,” Raquel said, spraying a healthy splash of Tabasco on the noodles.
“How’d you make out?” Bill Tom asked, always concerned with the bottom line. His breath was heavy with booze from his afternoon tour of Harrow’s taprooms.
“Like bandits. Returned a microwave and a room air conditioner. Five hundred and twenty-five cash.” Mom smiled, the Marlboro in her lips tilting up in salute.
By “returned,” she meant that she and Raquel took the appliances from the shelf and rolled them to the service desk and claimed they’d lost their receipt. On a normal day, they’d have to play out a little drama to get cash in return. If the employee was a man, then Raquel would do her Lolita act. If it was a female, Mom would act ill and excuse herself to the ladies' room, leaving Raquel to tell a tale about her mother having “the cancer.”
On this day, the young guy at the service desk wasn’t into enforcing store policy. He handed over the cash once Mom signed a phony name and address to a return slip. A near-riot was building in the packed store. The counter guy just wanted to get to the end of his shift, strip off his red polo, and get the hell out of there.
“What in the hell is going on?” Uncle Fuller said, stirring a cup of coffee at the RV’s drop-down table.
“TV at the bar said it’s some kind of outbreak,” Bill Tom said.
“You make any money at that bar, Bill Tom?” Mom said.
“A few bucks making change. Didn’t pay for my drinks either,” he said, immune to the accusation. “It’s some kind of contagious disease. Miami. New Jersey. San Francisco. Chicago. Started a week ago. Maybe before that. The TV didn’t really seem to know jack shit. Just a lot of talk.”
“You see anything, Doe?” Uncle Fuller said to Doe sitting alone in the door well nursing a Miller and a cigarette.
“This ain’t nothing like what they said on TV,” Doe said without turning.
“You know something we don’t?” Bill Tom said, sneering.
“I know this ain’t some bird flu or like that. You saw those government trucks. When’s the last time they blocked an interstate there wasn’t a storm or something?” Doe said.
“Maybe an accident,” Fuller offered.
“Bullshit. And those police wearing masks and armed like it’s Nine-Eleven?”
“Just a panic. People getting worked up over nothing,” Bill Tom said.
“Panics are good for us. People are less cautious, looking for help. There’s angles here we need to look at,” Mom said, accenting her words with a stream of blue smoke blown to the ceiling.
“This ain’t anything we can make cash on. People ain’t gonna hand us deposits to fix their roofs or replace their windows. It ain’t that kind of thing at all,” Doe said and dropped his spent Marlboro into his empty and threw the can into the lot.
“Tell them, Doe,” Mercy said.
All but Doe turned to Mercy standing in the bathroom door in a robe of Uncle Fuller’s that reached her ankles, her hair damp and stringy.
“Tell us what?” Mom said.
“Doesn’t matter now,” Doe said and took a pull.
“Doe killed a guy. I helped him,” Mercy said.
The family stopped eating to stare at Mercy, then at Doe and back to Mercy, looking to her in a silent request for more.
“He can tell you.” She nodded.
The family turned to Doe, waiting for him to set the beer can down on the carpet.
“Didn’t kill anybody. That guy was already dead.”
“How’d you know that?” Mom said, voice low.
“Live people bleed. This guy didn’t bleed. And this ain’t no disease. And we ain’t going to find a way to make money off it.” Doe stood, banged the door open, and walked out into the dark, shoulders hunched to hotbox a fresh butt.
4
In a normal season, when they headed north out of the Carolinas in the spring, they’d find a campground where they could park the RV. If they couldn’t find a campground near the town they were working they’d stay at a Motel 6 or something like it. Any place that took cash. And cash was all any savvy campsite or motel manager would take from travelers like them.
This was no normal season.
Mercy used an app on her smartphone to find them a trailer park that was advertising vacancies. Established parks didn’t cater to tourists and wouldn’t provide hook-ups short term. And they damn sure didn’t like travelers and would use some bullshit excuse to refuse them a pad.
Only it was a seller’s market in the first days of the panic. Long-term residents were taking off in droves, pulling RVs and trailers off their pads and heading for high ground away from population centers. If it had wheels, it was getting the hell out.
The Sleepy Hollow was an extensive one-hundred-site trailer park that called itself “The Happy Home of Contented Living.” Long established, with tree-lined lanes between neat rows of camp trailers, residence trailers, travel buses, and RVs. No way in hell the Coachman would make it past the manager’s trailer on any other day. But today the manager—“call me Phil”—was happy to take cash for a month’s rent and full hook-up in advance.
They had the cash after melting down every credit card they had, under dozens of names, taking the max withdrawal from any ATM they could find that still had any money left.
Uncle Fuller pulled onto a pad along the fence at the back of Sleepy Hollow. The pickup and minivan parked between the Coachman and the cyclone fence that separated the RV park from the grounds of a county water treatment plant.
Doe hooked up the water and electric and dumped the waste tank. Bill Tom, as always, took care of what concerned him most and connected the TV cable.
Mom, Mercy, and Raquel left the men behind to watch the television in the Coachman. They were low on food and other stuff they’d need to wait it out in the park. The girls took the minivan to scout for whatever goods were left to buy.
The only traffic on the back roads were locals, and there weren’t many of them on the move. They passed some kids on ATVs. One of them had a shotgun secured across the handlebars. The county roads were jammed with evacuation traffic, cops, and military.
“Everybody’s holing up or getting out,” Mom said. Mercy navigated for her with the Garmin. As usual, Raquel was in the back seat absorbed in a movie.
“Where are they running to? Can’t run from a disease. All they’re doing is taking it with them,” Mercy said after directing her mother to hook a left at the upcoming T intersection.
“That’s why we’re sticking, waiting it out. Waiting and prayin
g for it to pass over us.”
“You think God’s going to help us past this?”
“You’re goddamn right, honey. This isn’t a normal thing. This isn’t an illness. Not only an illness, anyway. It’s a judgment,” Mom said and lit a fresh cigarette with the dash lighter.
From the woods to one side of the road, they heard gunfire. Shotguns.
They came out on a two-lane marked Old County Line Road. They followed it to a sad little strip mall anchored by a Tiger Market. Most of the stores had been abandoned a long time ago. Whitewashed windows. For Lease signs on the entrance doors. Some were more recently left behind. A Mega-Cuts, a coin laundry. A standalone Arby’s was set apart near the road, the windows smashed in and the exterior scorched at the rear.
The supermarket looked lonely. The glass of the doors and windows busted in. A mess of paper and plastic trash rattled over the lot on the wind. Shopping carts were everywhere. There were no cars in sight. Not even any that could be for store employees.
“Think there’s anything left?” Mercy said.
“Probably stripped to the walls. We’ll look anyway,” Mom said. She pulled up in front of the entrance.
“Do I have to go in?” Raquel whined.
“Yes,” Mom said and reached back to pluck the earbuds from her little girl’s lobes.
The Tiger Market was mostly empty. The aisles were choked with abandoned carts and busted open cardboard cases. No bottled water, soda, or beer. Toilet paper was gone. The only joy was in the produce and frozen food sections. They filled two carts with bags of fresh apples, carrots, onions, and potatoes; anything that was still good and would keep a while. The store’s air was off, and the place was beginning to stink with rancid vegetation.
Bags of frozen vegetables and fruit along with chicken nuggets and burger patties; stuff they could eat over the next few days.
Raquel pushed a cart toward the pharmacy to look for soaps and shampoos. She let out a squeal that had Mom and Mercy running to find her standing rigid and wide-eyed at the pharmacy counter.
It was the aftermath of a massacre. A large man lay mostly headless against the front of the vitamin display. He wore some kind of running suit with a football team’s logo on the chest. He was already swelling up in a gummy pool of dark blood. Flies and ants swarmed over him like a second skin. On the tiles near him, a second man lay still, slumped forward on bent knees with his ass in the air. Jeans and a wife-beater and yellow work boots. His head was also a ruin, the skull crushed and the contents caked where they oozed out through his mouth and ears.
The steel security gate was partly pulled down before the pharmacy counter. There were bullet holes punched in it. The walls by the window were peppered with buckshot. Among the pills and prescription bottles on the floor were spent brass shell casings and empty plastic shotgun cartridges.
A pump shotgun lay near the wifebeater’s still hand. “They fought over the drugs,” Mom said.
Raquel turned away and vomited loud and long, spewing all over a blood pressure chair in a corner.
Mercy stepped gingerly to the counter, avoiding fly-blown heaps and spatters on the tiles. She leaned in low to see more carnage behind the counter. A woman in a light blue pharmacist’s smock sat against a wall of cubbies that held bagged prescriptions. A dark hole was scorched in her chest. Her mouth lay agape. On the floor at her feet lay a shirtless man in cut-offs and sandals. He was belly down on a heap of his own insides spilled out over the carpeting. Ropes of intestines, black with insects, were splayed through the mess of scattered pills and bottles.
Mercy lifted her eyes at a wet sound.
The woman in the smock, the name “Theresa” stitched above the breast pocket, was rising unsteadily from where she sat. Her unblinking eyes, dry as stones set in the sun, fixed on Mercy.
Mercy stumbled back, striking her head on the bottom of the security gate, and slipped on the gooey puddle that had flowed from the wife-beater. She fell back on her ass. Theresa’s head and upper body burst from under the security gate, hands grasping and clawing the air. The eyes in the expressionless face found Mercy on the floor below. The mouth worked, snapping at empty air.
Hands slipping on the goo-slick tiles, Mercy back-crawled away from the fingers stabbing out for the leg of her jeans. The woman in the smock wriggled violently to free herself from the gap between the countertop and the steel gate.
Mercy’s hand found the stock of the shotgun. The woman tumbled over the counter, falling hard to the floor. Rising to a sitting position, Mercy leveled the shotgun with a loose grip. The woman was on hands and knees scrabbling through the litter of bottles and cartons, mouth agape with yellow teeth, eyes wide and pale as twin moons.
The shotgun’s boom filled the confined space. A load of buck ripped the woman’s arm clean off at the shoulder, leaving a bloodless wound speckled white with fragmented bone.
One pillar of support shot away, the woman collapsed face first only to lever herself up once again into an awkward crawl. Mercy was to her feet and pumping a new round just like a onetime boyfriend down in Tarboro had shown her. The green plastic empty spun away on a puff of smoke. She aimed with more purpose down at the head of the woman belly-flopping in her direction, fingers inches from the toe of her sneaker.
The shotgun punched painfully into Mercy’s shoulder. The woman’s head turned into a brown mist. The rind of the skull flew in all directions, propelled by an explosion of greasy brain soup.
Mercy jacked a new round home. An empty red plastic shell flickered away over her shoulder. It was a pumpkin ball, a lead slug the size of the end of her thumb. It turned the dead pharmacist’s head to mush.
Lungs heaving, Mercy looked up to see her mother and little sister transfixed, arms locked around each other and eyes wide on Mercy as if seeing her for the first time.
“Told you this isn’t bird flu. This bitch was dead. A monster. Just like the one Doe and me killed.” Mercy heaved.
“Honey ...” Mom said in a whisper. Raquel stood with her jaw slack, not even noticing the dab of puke still on her chin.
“We need to get back to Uncle Fuller. Figure this shit out,” Mercy said. She was crouched and going through the jeans pockets of the wife-beater and came up with a half dozen more twelve-gauge rounds.
“Be careful there, honey,” her mother cautioned her like Mercy was climbing a tree or driving for the first time.
“They’re okay if they have no heads,” Mercy said, standing. She shooed her mom and sister out of the aisle and followed, only pausing long enough to take a few boxes of surgical masks and vinyl gloves from a shelf.
They were all shaken but still had an errand to run and no desire to come back. Together they loaded the cargo area of the minivan with the cartloads from the market. Mercy took the wheel and pulled up before the salon and the coin laundry. She busted out the glass of first one door and then another and led the way into each with Mom and Raquel following.
The hunch paid off. From the salon’s storeroom, they took a whole case of toilet paper and another of paper towels. Also some cleaning products, shampoos, and a .32 revolver Raquel found in the drawer under the register.
The laundromat was an even richer find with case lots of soda, candy, and chips in a locked back room. All fodder for the vending machines in the waiting area. One of the driers was full of clean bath towels. They folded them and took them along too.
All was accomplished without a conversation of any kind. They scavenged and loaded the mini without speaking. Their eyes moved on swivels, watching for any movement, listening for any sounds.
It remained that way for most of the drive back to the Sleepy Hollow. Raquel did not even replace her earbuds. She sat looking out the window, fingers polishing the steel of the found revolver as though they had a will of their own.
“Like I said,” Mom spoke up after a while.
“What’s that?” Mercy said.
“This is a judgment.”
5
&nb
sp; Bill Tom surfed the cable channels until the others begged him to turn the TV off.
They watched hours of confused newsreaders repeating the same list of warnings and directives over and over between the same footage of riots and insurrection and commercials for cereal and deodorant.
There were government officials making vague statements that were meant to reassure but failed. Panel shows presented blame-seekers arguing about the causes and solutions. Most regular broadcasting was either pre-empted by static graphics promising to return or replaced with recorded segments reviewing the steps to take if viewers came in contact with anyone who was infected or became infected themselves through bites, scratches, or prolonged exposure to any bodily fluids from infected individuals. Stay in your house. Boil your water. Stay off the phone. Don’t answer the door to strangers unless they are uniformed law enforcement or military.
They all watched except for Mom and Raquel.
Mom locked herself in the bedroom at the rear. Mercy listened at the folding door and could hear her mother muttering softly in a cadence she recognized as prayer.
Raquel had been in the bathroom for hours, the shower running until water pooled under the door. No one told her to shut it off.
Doe snapped the remote from Bill Tom’s hand and clicked the TV dark. Bill Tom made a move like he was going to do something about it. The look in Doe’s eyes put him back down on his ass.
“That’s some scary shit,” Fuller said.
“That shit, old man? That’s bullshit right there,” Bill Tom said and popped a Miller.
“What’s that? TV says people are going crazy. Biting each other. Maybe eating each other. You heard what Doe said. What the girls told us,” Fuller said.
“You mean monsters and all that? No such thing. Movie stuff,” Bill Tom said with a pfft sound from his fluttering lips.
“Me and Doe saw it. Mom saw it. Raquel saw it. Are we liars, Bill Tom?” Mercy said.
“I don’t know what you think you saw. There’s some kind of disease, okay? It’s making people crazy like rabies makes a dog or a coon crazy. That’s all it is,” Bill Tom said and took a long pull of Miller.