by J. B. Beatty
“Ohh,” I say slowly, as the truth dawns on me. “So they not only eat raw humans…”
“They love Taco Bell.” She scans the road with a murderous look in her eyes. “This is war.”
10)We turn around and head back into farm country, avoiding the rest of Williamston.
“What do you think about taking the freeway?” I say. “Might be faster.”
“Faster don’t mean anything,” she answers, “when you don’t know where you’re going. Plus, that freeway runs straight into Lansing. And that town is going to be crawling with sickoes.”
And therein lies the problem. In movies and books, the road trip always leads somewhere. It leads to some paradise or safe zone or government installation where the military will protect us.
We have no idea where we’re trying to go. We only know we want to get away.
11)We pass a herd of cows that are grouped in a tight circle. Some are huffing and stomping aggressively. Four dead humans lay nearby.
12)Right now, we’re just driving west, because east would take us toward Detroit and the endless sprawl of city that surrounds it. More buildings means more people, which just means more zombies.
Our road goes past farms and farmhouses. Plenty of supplies if we need them, but right now we’re well-stocked. The visibility is good, so no hordes are going to sneak up on us. When we do hit a forested stretch, we speed up a bit and it doesn’t take us long to come out on the other side.
On one such stretch, the road curves into the forest and goes down a hill to run along a creek. Then it turns toward a bridge.
“Wait a second,” mutters Maggie.
Ahead, men have rifles pointed at us. She throws the truck into reverse and says “Shit,” when she looks behind. “They’ve got us surrounded.”
10→THAT HOPELESS, SALLOW TRIBE WHICH NO WINE OF THIS WORLD WILL EVER WARM
“S
tep out of the truck,” comes a voice. “Nice and easy.”
Maggie slowly starts reaching for her AK. “No,” I whisper. “There are too many.”
“Fuck,” she mutters.
“Get those hands where we can see them, please.”
I raise my hands, and Maggie’s go to the top of the steering wheel.
“Now step out of the car.” I look to her and she nods. I open my door and step out, hands up. The men all seem nervous—they step back. It looks like they’ve all been outfitted by Cabela’s, except that on their faces they’re all wearing surgical masks. And they’re all older men, grey hair or no hair.
“What the hell do you want?” challenges Maggie.
There is no response.
“Are you bandits? Is that it? Do you want our food?”
Finally, the one who talked before—he’s wearing a Ducks Unlimited sweatshirt--says, “We’re not bandits. We’ve just got a public health emergency. You two have to go into quarantine.”
“What are you talking about?! We’re not sick. Just let us go,” she says. “We’ll go far away.”
“No ma’am,” he says, eyes affixed to her chest. “You’re going to stay here until we get the go-ahead from HQ. Ron and Joe,” he says, “Take them to the barn.”
Two of the men step forward and the lead one motions with the barrel of his rifle. “That way,” he says. “Up the road.”
I look to Maggie and she stands there, furiously shifting her weight from one leg to another as if she’s readying for a prize fight. Then she meets my eyes and exhales, shaking her head. We start walking slowly, coming side-by-side as we get around the front of the truck. Ron and Joe follow us a few steps back.
“What about our stuff?” shouts Maggie.
The leader, Ducks Unlimited, says, “It’s safe.” Then, “Ken, spray down the steering wheel and the cab. Then drive it where the other one is. The rest of you, back in position. Hurry it up, Ron.”
So there we are, being marched down a country road at gunpoint by otherwise healthy humans during our first zombie apocalypse. All because we wanted to play it safe and stick to country roads.
“I’m pretty sure this is illegal,” says Maggie over her shoulder. “This is kidnapping.”
“No, it’s not,” says the one behind her. “We’re the law.”
“That is definitely not a cop uniform you’re wearing.”
“We’ve been deputized. And Jerry’s an official county deputy.”
“It’s still not legal.”
“Ma’am,” he responds, “It’s an official public health emergency. Everything’s legal.”
At the top of the hill we see where the road emerges from the woods into more farm country. There’s a homestead nearby where they seem to be pointing us. The farmhouse is large and white, with a porch that runs its length. There’s even a porch swing that would seem welcoming if I hadn’t first spotted four hastily dug graves in the front yard.
“Over there!” the man behind me yells, and I swivel my head away from the house to see where he is pointing. It’s a large red metal-sided shed with a guard standing between the garage door and a side door. I’m not positive, but I’m starting to think it’s our new home.
The guard unlocks the door and gestures for us to go into the darkness.
“Wait a second,” I say. “What is this?”
“Quarantine,” the guard says. “Get in.”
“Fuck we will,” says Maggie, who is seething and looking about for escapes or weapons.
“If you think it’s a mistake, Jerry will be by later to talk with you. But we got to do this for everyone’s safety. You’re the age that carries the flu. Now please go in and take it easy for a while.”
I tentatively step forward. Maggie is pushed forward by the barrel of a gun. Soon we are inside and for the most part blind. The door shuts behind us, and I hear them prop a board in the brackets on either side to keep it shut. The only light comes through the small window in the door and the cracks around the garage door and up near the roof. We can’t see a darn thing inside, so I just wait for my eyes to adjust.
“This is not cool,” says Maggie fiercely. “We’ve got to get out of here. And kill these fuckers.”
“You know,” I respond, trying to sound like the voice of reason. “They’re not being entirely ridiculous. We do have some sort of major epidemic going on. They’re trying to get on top of it in a civilized way. Though it might be misguided, a quarantine is not actually crazy.”
“Shut the fuck up,” she says in an almost pleasant voice.
“No, really, I’m just saying, I’m not sure we’d do anything different in their position. Once this Jerry comes we can probably talk our way out.”
“I don’t have that kind of time.”
“What, we have plans to be somewhere?”
Maggie doesn’t respond. Instead, she starts walking deeper into the barn. Suddenly she shrieks, “What the hell??!” I run to her side.
Barely visible in the back corner, crouching behind a lawn tractor, is what appears to be a human being. Maggie takes a step back, looking for a weapon.
“Sorry, man,” the guy says, rising to his feet. “Didn’t mean to scare you all, you know. My name’s Justin. Justin Rodgers.” He steps forward with his hand outstretched. Maggie takes another step back. It’s an awkward moment, my specialty, so I carefully step forward and take his hand.
He has a strong grip but he lets go quickly. Up close, he’s African-American. He’s probably African-American from far away too. Taller than me, and he seems a hell of a lot more fit.
“Welcome to the holding pen,” he says.
“How long have you been here?” I ask.
“Maybe an hour before you. I was just high-tailing it away from Detroit and I thought it would be safer to take a country road.”
“Yeah, we’re geniuses too,” says Maggie, coming closer to size Justin up. “What do you think about what’s going on here?”
“I think your friend has it right.” He looks to me.
“Arvy,” I tell him.
“Arby?”
“Arvy.”
“Arvy?” he tilts his head.
“Yeah.” I’m starting to feel defensive. “It was my grandfather’s name.”
“That’s cool,” he says in a consoling way that doesn’t really help much. “And you?”
“Maggie.”
“Good to meet you both. Like he said, these old guys are just doing the best they can with what they have. I think they’re going to quarantine everyone that they catch in our age range that they think might be a possible carrier.”
“What does this have to do with how old we are?” she says.
“I don’t know what you’ve seen,” Justin responds, “but all the infected that I have seen have been adults. I haven’t seen any little kids acting like zombies, and I haven’t seen any old people with it. It’s just teenagers, I would say, on up to people in their 40s or 50s.”
“And everyone else is healthy,” I say.
“If they can keep their asses alive,” says Justin. “There’s some hungry zombies out there.”
“Is it this damn flu?”
“It’s got to be. It’s an epidemic flu, way faster moving than normal. And it turns people into…
“Freaking crazy cannibals,” I offer.
“I was going to go with something like ‘victims of severe neurological dysfunction.’ It basically takes away a large part of their thought process and puts them at some sort of base level that’s vicious and animalistic.”
“Are you a doctor or something?” asks Maggie, sitting down in the seat of the lawn tractor.
“Or something,” he says. “I’m a nurse. Not any sort of expert. I used to work for the county health department, so I had a seminar in epidemiology once. I know a little bit. Probably forgot a lot more.”
“Are we carriers?” I ask.
“I don’t think so. I think for whatever reason, we either just haven’t gotten it yet, or we’re somehow immune. I mean, it doesn’t matter what the epidemic is, nothing kills everything. Maybe we’re just lucky.”
“Hmmm. ‘Lucky’ just doesn’t go with my whole family dying yesterday.”
“I hear ya. I don’t even know how my Ma is. I’ve been calling non-stop and she won’t pick up. I was at work yesterday when it all hit. I was working a double, and so I just stayed over when the shift changed at 6—I work at a nursing home on Grand, Downtown. Well, a couple folks who came in for the evening shift came in sick. They tried to call in but Tammy insisted they had to come in because we were short-staffed. We’re always short-staffed. It’s what we do. And then they come in and they look like hell. They were good for nothing. We start taking care of them in addition to our residents, and more and more nurses and CNAs kept getting sick. Barfing, getting delirious, everything.
“Then, man, I wish I could unsee things. I’m trying to do my rounds and all hell is breaking loose. Like every fricken’ call light in the place is blinking on and people are yelling for help. I go into a room—Mrs. Watkins, she’s crazy old white lady with dementia, but she can be sweet—and Sherri, one of the CNAs, is on top of her ripping her to shreds. Eating her. I push Sherri off her and she comes after me like an animal. It was just bare hands fighting and I’m not much of a fighter. I started clubbing her with an IV stand and finally it broke and I had to stab her with it like a spear.
“I was just completely devastated. I sunk to the ground and had my back to the door expecting help to come. Only ain’t no one coming. No one. Every damn employee had turned crazy, and they were killing all of the patients.” Justin puts his head in his hands and slumps to the ground.
“I wanted to save people,” he says slowly. “I couldn’t get anyone out of there. They’re all trapped in their beds. And I call 911 and nothing happening there. I got up and looked out the window and I see some of these animals running down the street, they’re attacking all sorts of people. And cars are racing past like… like I don’t know. I saw one guy just plow over a group of people and keep going.”
Maggie, after treating Justin like he was suspicious, is starting to warm to him. She reaches out and touches his arm and says, “So what did you do?”
He sniffles—he had been crying—and says, “Nothing. I pushed Mrs. Watkins’ bed against the door and I locked the wheels. I shut the curtains. I got on my phone and kept trying 911. I kept trying to call my mom. I kept trying to call my friends. No one picks up anymore. I spent the night in that room, listening to people die. I spent the night in that room with two dead women. I spent the night wondering if the world had ended.”
11→EVERY MOTHER’S SON OF YE
“S
oon as the sun started coming up, I opened up that window, took out the screen. Things had quieted down. I climbed out of the window and snuck to the parking lot. I was so lucky I had my keys on me instead of in my locker. I didn’t know what would be waiting for me down that hallway. Our doors automatically lock and you need a code to get out, because a lot of our patients have Alzheimer’s and we can’t have ‘em wandering out. But with all the doors locked, that meant these nutjobs probably couldn’t get out either. I don’t know if they sleep or what—they were quiet, but damned if I was going to try to get down that hallway.
“Outside, like I said, it was quiet. I kind of tippy-toed most of the way to the parking lot. Then some guy on the ground—I thought he was dead—raises his head and starts kind of growling. He got up and starts running after me, so I dash to my car. Got in just in time. If it was a key lock I would have been dead. When I hit the gas he was holding on to my door handle. He didn’t last long there.
“I tried getting to Ma’s place. She lives in senior housing out on the northwest side. The streets were dicey, though. The groups of infected that I ran into kept getting bigger and more aggressive. They’d chase—I mean, obviously a car is faster, but a lot of roads were blocked by abandoned cars. Wouldn’t take much to get trapped between a pack of infected and some stalled cars. So I had to be very careful and think about five moves ahead. Finally, I get out there to where I can see the building. It’s a two-story brick place, and her apartment is upstairs. But like a lot of other places, it was on fire.
“Upstairs was in flames. Her room, too. And infected were everywhere.”
“What did you do?” I ask.
“Self-preservation. I guess I’m no hero. I mean, in my line, you see a lot of death anyway. Either Ma died in the fire, or she died a much worse way, or she got saved. And if she got saved—and I pray she did—I don’t know where she could be, because that neighborhood was like World War III. So I got to pray she got saved, but I got to save my own ass. That’s what she’d want. I just raced west. Away from the city. I stuck to bigger roads—even got on the freeways, because it was the smaller roads there that seemed to have more cars blocking them, and the chances of getting trapped were worse on a small, tight road.
“Finally, I got out of the city to where things were spread out a little more in the suburbs. Grabbed food in a gas station and I hit up a few pharmacies.”
“Why pharmacies?” asked Maggie.
Justin stays silent for a few moments and then says, “In this world, money won’t mean much. Drugs will serve as currency.”
“Ohhkay,” I say.
“These old crackers were the first ‘normal’ people I ran into. I tried bribing my way out of it. Told them I had Viagra.”
“Brilliant,” I say. “Of course, you’re here, so I’m guessing it didn’t work.”
“Does everyone call you Sherlock, or is that just going to be me?” says Maggie.
“Well, we’ve got to get out of here someway,” I say. “Anyone have a plan?”
“Now that you mention it,” says Justin, his voice dropping to a whisper, “when you two came in, I was working on a project. The floor back in this corner is crumbling. It’s old and they didn’t lay the concrete too thick. I found a crowbar and I’ve been making some progress, but we’ve got to keep it quiet.”
“You’
re digging a tunnel out?” asks Maggie.
“I don’t know if I’d call it a tunnel, it’s just a hole. But I think it will work. I could use some help. And I think we’d have to wait till dark until we pop out.”
Just then a loud pounding on the door jolted all of us.
“This is deputy sheriff Miller. How are you all in there?”
Both Maggie and Justin look at me. I give them the universal WTF look. “Uh, fine,” I say to the man.
Then they give me the WTF look.
“Actually, when can we leave? This really isn’t going to work for us. We’ve got people to meet, you know… places to go.”
“Well, now,” begins the deputy, “you’re in quarantine because you’re carriers of this disease that’s killing so many people. You know I just can’t let you out.”
“Uh, then what exactly are your plans for us?”
“We’re waiting to hear from HQ what the SOP is going to be in cases like this.”
“What do you mean by HQ? Where is that?”
“That, son, would be the sheriff’s office over in Mason. We’re waiting to hear from them. We keep calling, but we’re not getting a response yet.”
Maggie steps toward the door. “Dude,” she says. “You know why you’re not getting a response, right? You know the sheriff’s probably eating his kids right now?”
“Now, young lady, there’s no call for that kind of craven imagery,” responds Miller, starting to sound a bit angry. “What I’m simply saying to you is that we need to follow a protocol. I pledged an oath when I took this badge, and I intend to follow the rules for the safety of our community.”
“Can we discuss food?” I say. “Water? That sort of stuff?”
“Now, yeah, yeah. That would be reasonable. We could discuss that, son.”