by Chase McCown
“We’ll all be safer if we stick together. What do you say, Howard?” asked Susan.
“Well, I sure wouldn’t turn down the company, if you two are sure.”
Charlie remained silent, staring off into the distance.
“He’ll warm up to the idea,” she assured him.
Howard nodded. “Shall we?”
“Come on, Charlie,” Susan nudged.
“I’m coming.”
Charlie trudged toward the others, and the three began their journey anew.
Chapter 13
May 5th, 2025. Northern California.
The next day, Howard, Susan, and Charlie passed through a rural countryside in northern California. They had decided to take a break from their constant travel on the interstates, believing that out in the country, they would be much less likely to run into the infected.
The silence and tranquility of the countryside stood in stark contrast to the frantic pace of the cities. Rolling hills sloped gently across the terrain, and tall, thick grass swayed like the ebb and flow of the ocean.
As they walked up a particularly steep hill, they came to a great metal fence. It went as far as the three could see and was topped with barbed wire.
“Well, we’re not climbing over that,” Charlie noted, examining the barbed wire.
“Sure we are,” Howard said. He took off the jacket he had been wearing and tossed it onto the wiring atop the fence and began to climb. He used the jacket to avoid getting caught on the barbs and vaulted to the other side of the fence.
He stood to his feet and dusted himself off, just in time to see a great hulking bull emerge from inside an open barn.
The bull’s hooves pounded against the dry earth, and it shook its head in anger, preparing for a charge.
Howard looked to his right and saw the stable door that had been left open. He sprinted toward the stable as quickly as he could, but he could hear the bull closing in on him.
He was almost there, just a few more yards, but the bull was close now. He grabbed the door to the stable and slammed it shut. The bull stopped short of the door, shook itself off triumphantly, and trotted back along the left side of the fence, watching Charlie and Susan closely.
“Are you okay?” Susan shouted.
“Yeah, I’m fine. How do things look out there?” Howard asked.
“Well, I hate to tell you this, but that door you went in latched shut. The bull’s still out here. Is there another way out?” Susan asked.
“There’s a back door. Let me see if I can get it open,” Howard said.
There was a long pause, and Susan began to wonder aloud to Charlie if he had made it out.
“It’s locked from the outside. I can’t open it,” Howard yelled.
“It looks like if we can get to the stable and go through the farmer’s house, we should be in the fenced-in yard. The stable isn’t too far from there. Hang in there—we’ll see if we can get into the house.”
“Alright. Be careful. Watch out for that bull,” Howard warned.
Susan and Charlie followed the fence until they got to the front of the large farmhouse.
“The door’s locked,” Charlie said.
“This window’s unlocked.” Susan lifted the window up and crawled inside.
Charlie entered after Susan, and what the two noticed first was how jarringly dark it was. Both stood for a few moments, waiting for their eyes to adjust. As Susan’s vision returned, she saw a figure in front of her—a vague outline she couldn’t quite discern. She thought at first it had the shape of a person, but as her eyes continued to adjust, she saw a man. His eyes were filled with terror, his lips were parted, and his skin was pale. A pitchfork had been plunged into the man’s chest, and blood had colored the white tee shirt he wore a crimson red. The pitchfork had pinned him to the wall, and his hands were tightly clutched around the instrument of his demise. Susan backed away and frowned in dismay.
Charlie looked visibly ill. His face was a sickly green, and he covered his mouth in disgust.
“What did you do to deserve this?” Susan asked. “What could you possibly have done?”
She shook her head and went around the corpse, further into the house. Charlie followed closely behind, eager to get away from the body.
After passing through many hallways and checking several rooms, Susan and Charlie came to the back door. Susan opened the door cautiously and peeked out. She saw no sign of the bull and gestured for Charlie to follow her.
It was a tense few minutes as the two crept as quietly as they could toward the back door of the stables. Susan spotted the bull resting nearby in the midday sun. She guessed it couldn’t be farther than sixty feet away.
She approached the back door, but Charlie stood motionless, poised to run the moment the bull made a move.
Susan knocked on the door, and a few moments later, a knock answered in return.
“Are you okay, Howard?” Susan asked.
“Yeah, I’m fine. I’m glad you guys are okay. Can you unlock the door from that side?”
“I think so. One second.”
She lifted a large wooden plank, and the door swung open. Howard thanked Susan and Charlie for their help, and the three headed to the farmhouse so that they could continue their journey.
“I was worried I’d never get out of there,” Howard said.
Upon hearing Howard’s voice, the bull raised its head. The ground began to rumble with the sounds of the charging bull, and it snorted in anger at their intrusion into its territory.
“Watch out!” Charlie shouted.
The three took off in a mad sprint toward the farmhouse. The bull ran much faster than they could, but the farmhouse was only seconds away.
Susan and Charlie leaped through the open door. Howard rushed in behind them and slammed the door.
The house shook with what seemed like the force of an earthquake as the bull slammed into the closed door. Then, it snorted in disdain and trotted off to lay back in the sun.
Howard sighed in relief. “Whew, that was close.”
Chapter 14
May 5th, 2025. Northern California.
“Where’s the interstate?” Howard asked.
“I think it’s to the west,” Susan said. “Wait, is that— Are you bleeding, Howard?”
“What?” Howard asked, looking down at his leg, where his blue jeans had been stained red with blood.
He rolled his pant leg up, revealing a thick cut along his calf muscle. “Huh,” he said, “I guess I cut myself on the fence.”
Susan leaned in to get a closer look at the wound. “That might need stitches, and we definitely need to clean it so it doesn’t get infected.”
“I wonder if they have supplies in there.” Howard motioned to the farmhouse.
“Probably,” Susan said, “we should go back inside and have a look.”
“Yeah, well, I’m staying out here. I don’t want to see that body again,” Charlie said.
“I understand. Keep a lookout,” Susan ordered, “and tell us if you see any bandits or infected or anything like that.”
“Alright,” Charlie answered.
Upon reentering the house, Howard and Susan split up to look for medical supplies.
Howard decided to check the kitchen. It was obvious someone had ransacked the room. Flour and cereal littered the floor, and there was broken glass on the floor from a shattered window.
“Man, this room’s a mess,” he said. “Well, here’s something.”
He picked up a towel from the floor. He could wrap it around his wound to stop the bleeding.
Meanwhile, Susan was in the bathroom looking for peroxide. If she was lucky, she might even find a needle and thread to stitch Howard’s wound shut.
The bathroom was pretty unremarkable. There was a broken mirror above the sink, a toilet, and a shower. The size of the room was more like a closet than a bathroom, with perhaps five feet on either side of her and a ceiling height of only about five and a half feet.
She could just barely stand up.
Susan checked behind the bathroom mirror, but while she found a bottle of pain medicine, she couldn’t find anything to clean the wound with. Mostly, there were only old tubes of toothpaste and cans of shaving cream.
She decided to check underneath the sink and immediately came across a bottle of peroxide.
“Perfect!”
There wasn’t anything to close the wound up with, though.
Howard went into one of the bedrooms in the house. Whoever had ransacked the kitchen hadn’t touched this room, for whatever reason, as nothing in the room looked out of place. The sheets on the bed were neatly folded, the dresser was stocked with neatly folded clothes, and a half-finished scarf was placed carefully across the bed with a crochet hook still stuck in it.
He spotted a wicker basket sitting beside the bed that piqued his interest. Spools of wool had been partially knitted into a scarf, and a pincushion sat atop the spools of thread. He took a sewing needle from the pincushion, but he left the wool because he didn’t think it would be fit to stitch a wound.
Susan ran into Howard in a hallway while the two were looking through the house.
“Hey, Susan, what do you have so far?”
“Just some peroxide,” she said. “What about you?”
“I found a towel and a sewing needle, but I didn’t think the wool I found would do much good to stitch the wound.”
“I’ll go see if I can find some fishing line. If you want, you can go outside with Charlie. I’ll meet you there.”
“Alright. Be careful,” Howard said.
Howard went outside and sat beside Charlie, and in a few minutes, Susan emerged with some fishing line.
“Alright. This is going to burn.”
She poured peroxide over the wound, and Howard grimaced in pain. She threaded the sewing needle with the fishing line and carefully stitched up the wound. After she was finished, she wrapped it up with the towel.
“God is good,” said Howard. “I’m glad we were able to find everything to clean the wound okay.”
“God is good? How can you say that at a time like this?” Charlie asked.
“Why shouldn’t I?” Howard asked. “We’re all safe, aren’t we?”
“And how long will that last? Look around! Everyone’s gone! Even if we all survive, what will we come back to? Nothing!” Charlie bellowed.
“You have to have hope, Charlie,” Howard said.
“Why? What good would that do? What should I hope for, Howard?”
“Charlie, God’s going to see us through this. You just have to have a little faith.”
“Faith? God?” Charlie asked, enraged. “Why is he doing this to us? To you? You’re a Christian, aren’t you? Why would he let you get hurt? One of his own fairy tale children?”
“He hasn’t, so far,” Howard pointed out.
Charlie couldn’t answer. A burning feeling rose in his throat, a white-hot anger that kept him from even speaking for a time.
“Maybe God wanted to get your attention, Charlie. Maybe this was the best way he knew how. He loves you, Charlie.”
“Loves me? Life is about the survival of the fittest. The world isn’t going to stop if you aren’t fast enough or strong enough to keep up, and I don’t have the time or the energy to waste on chasing a fairy tale like hope.”
Howard frowned. A deep sadness overtook him as pity welled up inside. “I’m sorry, Charlie, for whatever made you feel that way.”
“Yeah, well, so am I,” he replied.
“But, you know, I hope—I pray—you find a reason to hope someday.”
Charlie didn’t understand Howard’s motivations. Part of him was cynical about the whole thing. Why should Howard care what happened to him? What was his motivation? He had to be after something. Everyone was after something.
And why did Howard bother with hope? What could he possibly have to hope for? They were all going to die anyway—none of them would make it through this. Yet Howard seemed genuinely hopeful. Charlie couldn’t decide if it was naivety, foolishness, or stupidity, but it seemed to keep Howard going, whatever it was.
Chapter 15
May 5th, 2025. Redding, California.
Jacob was driving north toward Oregon. He had some family in Salem that he hoped would still be okay.
Suddenly, his car sputtered and gagged. The needle was below the E, but he was almost to the gas station. He just needed to make it a bit further.
“Come on, come on. Don’t quit on me. Please, just a little while longer. The station’s right there, I can see it. Please, please, please!”
It was no use. The car finally ground to a halt only a short distance from the gas station.
He cursed aloud and slammed his fist into the steering wheel in frustration, inadvertently honking the horn.
“Oh no...”
Several nearby infected, who had up to this point paid him no mind, immediately spun around to investigate the sound.
They began to approach the car, and as more and more appeared, it became apparent that he needed to act fast or he would be trapped.
Jacob searched around his car for anything he could use to defend himself.
“There has to be something here somewhere.”
He searched through the car, but the most dangerous thing he found was an air freshener.
Just before he gave up hope, he found something in a compartment in the back floorboard of the car.
“A tire iron! Now we’re getting somewhere!”
With the tire iron in hand, he eyed the nearby gas station. It was about fifty yards away, and Jacob contemplated how he would get to it.
Infected were now surrounding the car on all sides. They had begun clawing at the car doors, tugging on the locked handles, and banging on the glass. The glass was beginning to crack, and Jacob knew it would not last much longer if subjected to this continuous punishment.
His mind raced to come up with an escape plan, but he couldn’t imagine one that didn’t end with him being torn limb from limb.
As he tried to decide what to do next, the back window shattered, and the hand of an infected clawed at him, sending glass flying into the car.
Time’s up! Jacob thought as he put his hand on the horn.
He tightened his grasp on the tire iron and honked the horn in one long blast, hoping to startle the infected. Those toward the front of the car covered their ears with their hands and shouted in fury.
He flung the door open, slamming it into one of them. That one crashed into another, leaving a small opening.
Jacob sprinted through the gap and raced toward the gas station. By the time the infected had gathered their wits about them, he was already several yards away.
Jacob was fast, but the infected were faster.
Much, much faster.
The lead he had started with was closing quickly. He needed to slow the beasts down, or he would never reach the station.
Jacob was coming up on a wrecked pickup truck that had crashed into a power line. The hood of the truck was bent in, and the power line was tilted away from the vehicle by the force of the collision. The lines were draped over the top of the pickup, which made Jacob thankful that the grid was down.
One detail gave him pause. The window on the driver’s side of the pickup truck was open.
If Jacob reacted quickly enough, and with a little luck, he could leap into the car through the open window. If successful, he would be able to open the opposite door and run out the other side, buying him valuable seconds.
Jacob tumbled clumsily through the window, having to pause a second afterward to get his bearings. He scrambled to open the opposite door and sprinted out to continue his escape, peeking back only momentarily to see the effectiveness of the maneuver.
To his dismay, the infected surged over the truck, through the truck, and around the truck all at once. They displayed an inhuman dexterity that even the most gifted athlete could never match.
By now, h
e was only ten yards away from the door to the gas station, but the infected were closing in on him quickly.
Suddenly, he felt a hand grab his shoulder.
In a moment of pure instinct, he spun around with the tire iron, and it met an infected’s skull with a horrible thwack.
The infected tumbled backward, brain matter left exposed and skull shattered by the blow.
Jacob was struck dumb by the grisly scene. He hadn’t before seen the results such dramatic violence. Though it was horrible to behold, he could not bring himself to look away.
The remaining infected had not slowed down, however, and Jacob was soon forced back to reality by their feral howls.
He reached the door of the station moments later and tugged at the handle with all his might.
It was no use. The door was locked.
“Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me!” Jacob exclaimed in desperation.
He attempted a quick dash to the back of the building, but before he could move, the other four infected were upon him.
At last, it seemed that his luck had run out.
*
Howard, Charlie, and Susan walked at a steady pace along the on-ramp of the highway, hoping to find somewhere they could gather some supplies.
“Hey, look, there’s a gas station up ahead! We can look for supplies there,” Susan said.
“Hold on. There are some people up there. Do you have a pair of binoculars on you, Susan?” Howard asked.
“I think so. Hold on a second,” Susan replied.
She rummaged through her backpack and produced a pair of binoculars, which she handed to Howard.
“Here you go.”
Howard took the binoculars from her and squinted through them at the distant gas station.
“It looks like there are five creeps chasing a survivor to the station. They’re gaining on him fast.”
“What are we waiting for then? We’ve got to help him!” Susan shouted, leading the charge with Howard close behind.
“Woah, aren’t we going to at least talk about this?” Charlie asked.
Susan ignored him and kept running.
“I guess not,” Charlie moaned, speeding up to catch up to the others.