Ness rolled his eyes. “I wouldn’t have ever gone anywhere if my room hadn’t been taken over by a dumbass who can’t balance a checkbook.”
They slogged uphill. Their mom had to stop often to catch her breath. In less than a mile, she was grimacing, rubbing her knee.
“Come on, Mom,” Shawn said. “Just a little further.”
“That all? Where’d you set up, Santa’s bunker?”
It took nearly two hours and multiple rests to reach the camp. By then their mom was sweating, red-faced and damp-haired. She took one look at the grounds and grimaced.
“I know,” Shawn said. “Its kind of rustic.”
“Rustic?” she said. “You got a tent and a hole. I’ve seen less rustic caves.”
“Beats dying, don’t it?”
“That depends how long I have to go until my next shower. Anyway, the three of us squeezed into that little tent, who’s to say I don’t get the flu from one of you?”
Shawn frowned. “Well, Ness practically made out with Mrs. Rogers’ dead body, so I’m pretty sure he’s immune.”
“I did not,” Ness said.
“I was in the hospital where they took Ness and the bodies and I’m fine, too.”
“And I’m you two’s mother,” she said. “So who says I’m not immune, too?”
Shawn spit. “It ain’t just the flu we got to worry about.”
She laughed and flapped her arms. “Oh, don’t start in on that again.”
“Well, come on. If this thing is that bad, you think they’ll let us come and go as we please? They’ll lock this town down like it shot a cop.”
Ness planted himself in one of the folding chairs. “Which raises the question of why we don’t just drive somewhere else.”
“Because we don’t have to!” Shawn stuck his hands on his hips and walked across the camp, back turned. “I know you think I’m some paranoid fool who can’t wait to start drinking my own moonshine and shooting the neighbors. Well, people are getting sick, aren’t they? They’re dying. You give me a week. If everything’s okay then, call me all the names you want and go on home. I’m willing to look like an idiot if it means keeping my family safe.”
Their mom lowered herself to the chair beside Ness. “A week, huh?”
“One lousy little week.” Shawn gave her a stare. “Look, Mom, when those police came by, did they look happy to you?”
She squinted into the pines. “They looked like they’d eaten month-old fish.”
“And they’ll probably wind up just as sick, too.” He scuffed fallen needles. “Just give me one week.”
He could have asked for much less. Three days later, helicopters blatted over the horizon. The squeak of tank treads pierced the valley as they rolled down the highway and commandeered the campus. The army had arrived.
* * *
“I’m going to move the latrine,” Ness said.
Shawn looked up from his twine and knife. “You think?”
“We’re going to be up here for a while, aren’t we?”
“Unless you’d rather get rounded up with the other cattle.” The day the army arrived, Ness had gone with Shawn to the fringe of trees a quarter mile above the trailer. Through the binoculars, they’d watched men in camouflage roust people from their homes and cart them off to the dorms, where they appeared to have set up their base of operations.
“Then I’d better move the latrine,” Ness said. “It looks rainy. Mornings are bad enough without waking up in a pile of your own crap.”
“Sage words,” Shawn said. “Let me know if you need a hand.”
Ness took a shovel and leather gloves and tromped downhill. The animosity between them had cooled since their mom had joined them. That was probably the only reason Shawn wasn’t ordering him to do more pushups right now, but after seeing his mom huff her way up the hill, Ness had taken to jogging up the mountain every morning before breakfast. Perhaps by taking the matter of his fitness into his own hands, he’d roughly stolen it away from Shawn.
He found what felt like a good spot—downhill, near enough that it was within easy shouting range in case of trouble—and started digging. Maybe he was imagining things, but it didn’t feel as exhausting as the first time he’d dug their bathroom. When he finished, he drank some water, took a short rest, and went to fill in the old latrine.
Later, Shawn led him and their mom around the camp’s perimeter, pointing out the alarms he’d strung between trees, twine and empty soup cans. A gunshot echoed from the hills below. Shawn cocked his head. Two more shots echoed and were answered by a thrum of automatic fire.
“That would be the army,” Shawn said. “That’s why we’re not lighting any fires.”
“What would they be shooting at?” Ness said.
“Oh, I don’t know. Whoever shot at them first?”
The mornings grew less bitterly cold. Ness no longer needed a coat on his jogs. Except for troop trucks, all traffic on the highway north of town stopped cold. Ness assumed the same was doubly true of the highway feeding the Washington border. One night they walked down the ridges all the way to the mall on the south end of town. Floodlights glared on the highway. Concrete blocks barricaded the road. Armed soldiers in surgical masks kicked back behind sandbags.
Ness prepared dinner the following night. He sprayed Cheez Whiz onto Ritz crackers, drawing a yellow line of cheese-product along the crackers’ circumference, then crossing it with an X to maximize cheese-product distribution. Shawn dug in without looking down.
“Say they got a pandemic down there,” his mom said. She brushed crumbs from her heavy breasts. “Where you think that pandemic came from?”
“China,” Shawn said.
Ness swallowed down his cracker. “How are you remotely sure it’s China?”
“They want to be the new superpower. Hell, maybe one of their birds did it on its own volition.”
“The radio says it’s all across the country,” their mom said. “Sounds like an attack to me.”
“What do you think?” Shawn said.
“I don’t know,” Ness said. “I don’t think we have enough data yet.”
“‘I don’t think we have enough data,’“ Shawn mocked. “We’re just talking over here, not trying to pass the bar exam.”
“If they began the attack here in Moscow, they picked a damn strange place to start.”
“Got to start somewhere, don’t you?”
Ness rolled his eyes. “Sure. New York. Moscow, Russia. If somebody was aiming there and hit there, I hope they got fired for incompetence.”
Gunshots filtered up from the valley a couple times a day. Shawn muttered something about putting together a more permanent residence. Without being asked, Ness hiked uphill and sawed off the biggest branches he could drag back to camp. Shawn leaned them between two pines, tying them together with twine, weaving smaller branches in to conceal the camp from anyone approaching downslope. Their food cache stayed strong—they hadn’t yet emptied one bag, and Shawn had three more buried in camp—but their bottled water started to dwindle. All the while, their mom sat in camp, radio perched in her lap. If the AM stations could be believed, the deaths had reached several thousand nationwide. The infected numbered in the tens of thousands. Growing by the day.
May approached. On a blustery, rainy spring morning, automatic gunfire crackled from the campus for thirty seconds without stop. Shawn grimaced and spat into the brush.
“That would be an execution.”
“Oh yeah?” Ness said. “Is that what your Spidey-Sense tells you?”
“My common sense tells me your whole squad doesn’t rattle off its whole clip in one burst. Not unless you got a lot of people lined up in one place.”
Ness shook his head. Another minute of gunfire followed in the next hour, and then the hour after that. With the sun sinking toward the low yellow hills of the Washington border, a thick plume of smoke spewed from campus.
Shawn spit again. “That would be the bodies.”
Ness watched the smoke until it reddened the sun above the hills. If Shawn was right, that meant there was no cure. They had advanced to containment—in its most desperate form.
Shawn waited until the following night, then took Ness and all the empty jugs they could carry down to the trailer. The neighbors’ doors had been spray-painted with red X’s. The lights were off across the entire park. Their door had been crossed out, too. Inside, the water ran cold and clear. They filled their jugs and loaded their packs and hustled back uphill. Despite the weight and the slope, Ness didn’t have to slow down until well within the safety of the trees.
“What you got there?” their mom said on their return. “Is that my shower in those backpacks?”
“Not exactly,” Shawn said.
“Next time you leave, if you don’t come back here with my shower, you better just stay gone.”
“Expecting to meet your future husband?” Ness said.
She shot him a look. “Not quite. I’d prefer not to meet any lice, either.”
Shawn muttered, but started working on one of the tarps the next day, poking holes in its middle, threading twine through the metal-reinforced grommets around its edges, and hanging the makeshift bag from a branch a hundred yards from the tent. Their mom rubbed her hands together and shooed them back to camp.
A minute later, she screamed. The boys bolted to their feet and ran.
“Keep away!” she hollered. “It’s just cold.”
She came back in a towel and a grin. Shawn groaned. Ness left to try it out for himself. The water was frigid and limp and he doubted he’d rinsed all the shampoo from his hair. He understood why old-timey people favored baths.
Days passed. Ness dragged more logs and branches into camp and Shawn added a second wall to the makeshift cabin growing beside the tent. Helicopters buzzed in and out of the valley. Shawn taught Ness to make snares. They were fine on food for now, but with no certainty their mom was immune to the disease that had wiped out the town (and, according to the radio, was well on its way to doing to the same to the nation), they couldn’t risk scavenging food from the houses below.
Running water ceased at the trailer. Shawn headed over the mountain for the stream on the other side. A couple days later, he dispatched Ness with a backpack of empty jugs. Ness climbed through the warm morning, cresting the ridge and swinging north, as per Shawn’s directions. The smell of pollen stirred with every step. The grass had gone verdant. Birds had returned to the heights, robins and sparrows and all kinds Ness didn’t recognize.
The stream carved a green channel down the mountains. Ness crouched to fill his jugs with the cold water. After, he followed it downstream to get a feel for the surrounding lands. The creek descended quickly, a lush green band through the piebald grass. He recognized the Rogers’ farm to his right, the fields patchy with wheat and weeds. The stream cut through the lands of another farm uphill and west of the Rogers’. The Shoremans’.
Ness dropped the jugs and sprinted back to camp without stopping.
“Where’s the water?” Shawn glanced up from two branches he was knotting together. “Carrying it in your hump?”
“Where’s Mom?”
“Showering away the last of our water.”
“No!” Ness rushed through the pines. Sweat clung to his skin. Shawn thrashed along behind him.
“What’s going on?”
“The water from the creek. It’s infected.”
“What? How?”
Ness skidded in the mulch. His mom stood beneath the shower, arms raised as she shampooed her hair, loose flesh hanging from her biceps. Pale flaps of skin slumped from her back and hips. She whirled, throwing her arms across her swaying breasts.
“What the hell’s the matter with you! Too blinded by all this white to see I’m damn well naked?”
Ness stopped short. He wanted to shove her out from under the water dribbling from the shower-bag, but he couldn’t bring himself to touch her naked body. “Get out, Mom! Get out of the water!”
Her anger shifted. “What’s going on?”
“The water’s infected,” he said. “That’s why it spread so fast—there wasn’t one infection point, there were hundreds. Thousands. Every faucet that stream feeds. There must be others, too. All around the world. Otherwise, it couldn’t have spread so fast. Maybe it was locked in the snows, and when they melted, it—”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Shawn said.
Their mom spat, then spat again. She wrapped up in a towel and scrubbed herself down with another. “He’s saying I may be in very deep shit.”
Shawn’s eyes darkened. “We don’t know that. We’re fine. You’re our mom. If we’re immune, you must be, too.”
Ness didn’t try to correct him. It would just make him angrier. Their mom shivered long after she was dry and dressed.
Two days later, she began to cough. The day after that, when she pulled back her hand after another coughing jag, blood gleamed under the late spring sun. She tried to laugh it off, but the gesture was hollow, frightened.
“Come over here,” Shawn said to Ness after she’d cleaned up. “I want to show you how snares work.”
“I caught a rabbit just yesterday,” Ness frowned.
“Yeah, despite all your best efforts to the contrary. Now get over here.”
Ness followed him down the slope. A couple hundred yards below camp, Shawn stopped cold and ran his hands down his face. “We got to go into town.”
“But the army’s there.”
“Exactly. They’re still there. They must have a cure. We need to sneak on down and steal it before Mom joins the bonfires.”
“So we can die, too? You’ve seen what they do to civilians.”
“Only if they catch you.” Shawn grinned savagely. “And the only thing they’ll catch from me is a bullet in the eye.”
The old ant-tickle crawled up Ness’ neck. “We don’t know they have a cure.”
“I won’t let her die! You’re smart. You’ll know where to find it and how to get to it. I need you, Ness. She’s the only mom we got.”
Ness shook his head, as if trying to shake loose the dozens of thoughts stirred by Shawn’s plea. He wanted to laugh at him, to strike him, to walk away, to thank him, to hug him. But he already knew his answer. In a situation like this, he had no capacity to say no.
Shawn’s grin was hard enough to cut stone. “You and me, bro. Let’s do this.”
Ness’ plan was simple. Shawn’s truck was still parked at the trailer, which was up a hill, which was itself hundreds of feet above the town. The road to the highway ran up, but the southbound back road that fringed Moscow was a gentle decline that lasted for nearly two miles—enough to take them nearly parallel to the college where the army was based. They could coast in neutral the whole way, engine off, then go on foot through the tightly-packed downtown, cutting between the bars and fast food joints until they reached the campus. From there, they would improvise. Quietly take a hostage and threaten him until they got the location of the cure.
It was far from perfect, but they knew the town well, and with the truck so near, they could flee back to the mountains at the first sign of fubar. Even so, if it had been anyone but their mom, up to and including Shawn, Ness would never have tried it.
They geared up. Shawn produced eyeblack and painted their faces as dark as the night. He took his pistol. Ness carried the shotgun. At the trailer, Shawn set the truck in neutral and let it slide from the driveway. Ness gave it a shove to start it down the hill and hopped back in the cab. Shawn blew through the stop sign and they coasted south past the darkened homes.
“This is just dumb enough to work,” he grinned.
They glided through the night. Ness had to get out and push twice more, but the truck coasted along, as silent as a bird on the wind.
Just before the intersection where the Baptist church sat across from the auto body, Shawn jammed on the brakes. A jeep blocked the road, lights off. Moonlight glint
ed from the machine gun on the platform on its top. Men in camo shouted to their right. The troops rushed toward the intersection, automatic rifles in hand.
“Oh shit.” Shawn reached for his pistol. “They’re gonna kill us. Just like they killed all the others.”
10
Tristan slammed the door and bolted it. “Who’s coming? Are you okay?”
Laura tried to stand and collapsed back to her knees. Blood dripped from her face to the foyer carpet. “The Empty Skulls. All of them. They’ll be here any second.”
“A gang? They did this to you?”
“They’ll do this to all of us.” Laura clenched her head in her hands and let out a half-second scream. Tristan flinched. Laura shook herself like a dog. “And then they’ll kill us. I never should have come here.”
“Did they see you?”
“I don’t know. I was running so hard.”
Tristan’s blood ran as cold as the lake in the hills under snowy skies. “Alden. Go to our parents’ bathroom. Lock the door and lie down in the bathtub.”
“The tub? Why?”
“Just do it!”
She ran up the stairs and fumbled open the safe. She took out the pistol and both spare clips. Alden had followed her. His face was pale and drawn. She jerked her free hand at the bathroom. “Go!”
He turned. She trampled back down the stairs. Laura rested on hands and knees in the foyer, blood sliding from the gash on her temple.
“Lie face down over there.” Tristan pointed to the patch of living room clearly visible from the front door. “Don’t move. Play dead.”
Laura swung up her head, gaping dumbly. A kick rattled the front door.
“Move!” Tristan stage-whispered. Another kick jarred the door. She scurried up the stairs and crouched behind the railing. She braced her arm, elbow down and locked in the position Alden claimed granted unbreakable strength to all his kung fu. Her arm shook like she were standing beside a passing train. Laura dragged herself from the foyer and flopped on the carpet.
The fifth kick burst the lock. The door banged against the wall. A man stumbled inside and grinned at Laura. He carried a pistol. With his other hand, he reached for his belt. Tristan’s whole body felt wooden, immobile. She couldn’t move her finger. Couldn’t pull the trigger. The bullet would destroy him, char his skin, smash his bones, dump his blood from his body. She couldn’t do it. Not to another living person.
The Last Days: Six Post-Apocalyptic Thrillers Page 115