by David Rogers
“Thank you.” Milo said, and his relief was so obvious it was almost embarrassing.
“Where’s your gear?” Austin asked.
“Just this.” Milo said, turning and lifting one of the middle seats up to reveal a small storage compartment. He pulled out a backpack that looked to hold less than even Jessica’s did, and she was packing pretty light as it was. Other than a little extra water and food, she was only carrying backup ammo, an oversized poncho that would double as a blanket or pillow, single change of clothes, extra socks, and a jacket in hers.
“Just the one pistol?” Austin asked, eyeing the holster on Milo’s belt.
“Yeah. I mean, we—”
“We’re not planning on doing a lot of fighting.” Jessica said. Austin looked at her, and she just shrugged. “I hope you at least brought bullets though.”
“Oh sure. In here.” Milo said, unzipping the bag and rummaging inside. He displayed a sealed box of rounds. “This is enough, right?”
“Oh brother.” Jessica thought. Between the two of them, she and Austin had hundreds of rounds for their various firearms; and she wouldn’t be at all surprised if he’d decided to shoulder even more than he normally carried when he was away from the house. Milo’s box only held thirty rounds; which meant he was basically heading off with less than fifty shots.
“How many mags for that?” Austin asked.
“Three.”
“Well, like she said, we’re not planning on doing much fighting.” Austin said, his voice painfully neutral in its lack of inflection. “You know how to shoot?”
“I didn’t, before I mean.” Milo said. “But I’ve shot a little since, you know. I know the basics.”
“Don’t take this personally, but you’re not inspiring me with a lot of confidence.” Austin said. “So here’s the thing. You never put your finger on the trigger unless you’re aimed, and you never — never — point the gun at anything except the ground or a zombie. If you point it at either of us, for any reason, that’s bad. We don’t help bad guys. Am I being clear?”
“I get it. I mean, yeah.” Milo said hastily. “I know the basics. Treat it like it’s going to go off all the time. It’s a gun. It’s dangerous.” He seemed eager to assure the much larger man that they were on the same side, and Austin could be imposing even when he was trying hard to act friendly and calm. Right now, Austin was just a tall slab of serious, and even Jessica blinked a little at it.
“Just so we’re clear. It’s not like there’s doctors any of us can look up if someone takes a bullet.”
“We’re clear. Don’t worry.”
“Okay.” Austin said levelly.
“Should, uh, should we get going?”
“Yeah.” Jessica said. “No sense standing around.” She turned and started walking up the stairs to the house across the street from hers.
“What about the boat?”
“Too slow.” Austin said. Jessica glanced back as she got to the house’s front deck, just in time to see him flip the boat over so it was upside down.
“But—”
“You guys are about fifteen miles out, from your place to here, right?”
“I think so—”
“How long did it take you to row over here?”
“A few hours.” Milo said.
“We’re about thirty miles from Belle Glade, even cutting straight across the lake.” Austin told him. “If you want to get any actual looking done, we can’t spend all day rowing across the lake. We’ll take bikes.”
Jessica opened the door. In the empty house’s front room were ‘parked’ ten bicycles she and Austin had collected during their scavenging runs, for the same reasons they’d tried to front load as much heavy lifting with their scavenging as they could, and stocked up on stabilized gas that could probably stay viable until this time next year. Because all the supply chains had ground to a halt along with everything else as the zombies shattered society and ripped the old world back to scattered survivors groping around in the remains to eke out whatever life they could.
Walking was always an option, but Florida was notoriously flat. Back home, in Georgia, she’d always done most of her fitness stuff in gyms, and not just because air conditioning made exercising easier. Hills make everything harder. Here, with grades rarely more than a couple of degrees, bicycles were the obvious choice for any sort of travel in the absence of working motors.
Aside from the pair of kid-sized bikes they’d made sure to collect for Candice, just in case, most of them were rugged mountain bicycles, save a pair of straight ten-speeds. Even though one of the “ten-speeds” actually had something like twenty or so, but Jessica thought of geared bicycles as “ten-speeds” because that’s what they’d always been when she was younger and they were coming on the market. Each one had a tire repair kit attached to the lower support where a dedicated cyclist would’ve slotted a water bottle before zombies made their appearance, and two of them had saddlebags she and Austin had rigged up to provide some storage space beyond what either of them — even Austin — could cram into and carry in a backpack.
Jessica left the saddlebag adorned bikes alone, they weren’t needed this time, and rolled one of the others out onto the porch. Austin had gotten Milo moving, the two of them coming up the stairs, so she left the bike there and went back for another. A minute later the three of them were on the ground, in the seats and pedaling south away from the stilt house. She purposefully didn’t look back.
“Just two days. Everything’s going to be fine.” she told herself as she cycled away from the best safety she’d known since the world got hungry.
* * * * *
The chain severed with a ringing and solid sounding twang-thunk, undercut by a grunt of effort from Austin as he compressed the short handled bolt-cutters with sheer effort. “That’s got it.” he said after drawing a breath to replace what he’d just breathed out breaking the chain.
Jessica tugged the chain to free it from the fence, then pushed the gate open. It scraped back against the faded pavement with a screech, leaving the way south open. The immediate area around the stilt house where she and Candice and Austin had settled into was mostly swamp or pseudo-swamp, with a lot of vegetation that included both copious amounts of ground cover as well as the usual mix of Florida trees. Namely palms, cypress, and willows.
But most of the surrounding terrain, whatever hadn’t been turned into a town or paved for traffic, tended toward farmland. Jessica had no idea what had been grown in the seemingly endless acres of cultivation — probably sugar she’d guess, or maybe rice — but four months on from the apocalypse they were all overgrown and turning wild. The good thing about the fields though was they had all been modern farming operations, which meant they were always accessible to the machinery that had replaced hundreds of field hands in tending to the crops.
This turned the ‘countryside’, such as it was, into a fairly regular pattern of paths and roads. Even the worst of them were gravel-packed dirt, and most were actually paved, even poorly. A number of the gates were down for one reason or another, some with vehicles wrecked at or near them, sometimes even with fencing or posts wrapped around them or strewn nearby. More had been cut on previous trips by herself and Austin, or other unknown survivors, but it still wasn’t too uncommon for them to have to stop to break one open to continue.
Traveling through the fields was a little nerve wracking sometimes, when the path would narrow down from a more reassuring two-lane width, bringing the rising and increasingly untamed vegetation on either side closer. But it was still a lot safer than following the main roads, that darted directly from town to town. Those towns still hosted zombies. Jessica and Austin both agreed dodging through the towns was more dangerous than risking some random horror wandering by a farm path that might happen to notice and lunge out at them at just the right time to make contact as the trio of bicycles rolled past.
“Are you sure you know where we are?” Milo asked as Austin stuck the bolt cutters
back into their loop on his equipment harness.
“Pretty sure, yeah.” Austin answered calmly, straddling his bike.
“But it all looks the same.”
“Could I call in a danger close air strike on us safely, no. But we’re not going to end up in Key West or something either.”
“He knows how to navigate.” Jessica assured Milo. Again. Truth be told, she was more or less lost without a road or sign markers to match up against the map, but even then she was less nervous about it than the Houseboater. And she trusted Austin; implicitly.
“Alright.” Milo said, glancing around at the vegetation. “Sorry.”
“We’re making good time.” Austin said, catching Jessica’s eye to cue her before he started pedaling. She followed suit, leaving Milo to bring up the rear. “Another mile and a half and we’ll turn east. We should have a straight shot all the way over to Belle Glade.”
“What if we’re off?”
“Off?” Austin asked as they pedaled along.
“Too far south. If we’ve gone too far?”
“We’ll hit US-27, and even if I’m miles off we just follow that north. It goes right into South Bay, which is about a mile from Belle Glade. Relax.”
“Sorry.” Milo said again. “I’m trying.”
They pedaled on, sliding up through the gears until they were cruising along faster than Jessica knew she could ever manage to run, no matter how many zombies might be chasing her. The bikes had been her suggestion when Austin had reminded her gas wasn’t going to stay good much longer, but even she’d been surprised by how quickly pedaling could cover terrain; especially flat terrain. And at how much easier it was than trudging along on foot.
The day was mild, maybe the low 70s in direct sun, with the usual light breeze gusting across the land. The sun was still angled, not overhead, making it about mid-morning. Everything was as quiet as ever, which — save for the actual zombies — was what Jessica always found the eeriest about the post-apocalypse. Except for the zombies of course. But when things were safe, they just got … quiet.
Before, nothing was ever quiet. Especially in Lawrenceville or even Dalton, the Atlanta suburbs she’d lived and grown up in. But she’d occasionally been away from the cities over the years, for one reason or another. There’d always been noise, however faint; like a background hum of civilization No matter how far out she’d been.
In the cities it was the constant thrum of tires and hum of engines as cars and trucks and other vehicles plied the streets. Airplanes overhead. The steady buzz of air conditioners and electrical transformers. Faint voices sometimes. All of it adding up to the reality of a society that packed more than three hundred million people between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.
All of that was gone now. Just … gone. Like the people. The bulk of what background noise there was now was insects and animals, and during the day most of that tended to die down too. It was nighttime when the crickets raised their chirps, sunrise or sunset when the birds tended to do most of their squawking. All that was really left most of the time was wind, plain old natural wind.
It rustled across the fields, rubbing leaves and thin branches and stalks together. Trees gently creaked and groaned in tune with it sometimes, but mostly it was just the faint rush of air and shush of vegetation spilling out across the landscape.
Once upon a time, Jessica would have found it soothing, peaceful. Now she just took it as one more sign of how far things had disintegrated. Humans made noise. They impacted the world, going back to the earliest days of history. For hundreds of years a lot of that impact had been machines, which were now silent. So many had died, or converted into monsters, that anyone left was reduced to what she and Candice and Austin were doing; subsistence living.
The only good thing about all of it was the collapse of all the supply chains meant there were no more storekeepers asking “cash or credit” when she or Austin chanced a trip into some store or another. No homeowners frantically calling the police or waving guns when the two of them would break down the door to a house intending to rummage through it for supplies.
So many dead.
“Alright, let’s make our turn.” Austin said, shaking Jessica out of her ruminations. She saw him pull his compass out and flick it open with his thumb. Dutifully she curved her bike to the left after him as he turned onto the next crossroad. Austin studied the compass for a moment, then snapped it closed. “Love checkerboard streets. Straight east. No curves, so no matter what path we’re actually on it’ll take us right across.”
“And it’s easier than riding cross-country.” Jessica said.
“That too.” he grinned.
Jessica smiled back, and looked around again. She’d never been this far south, ever; not just during the apocalypse. In fact, she was pretty sure Austin hadn’t either. Even when he went out alone, he stuck to the area in and around the house. There was still plenty of scavenging to be had up there. And, as she’d certainly learned the first time they did a run on the bikes, pedaling along with stuff to stock into the house was definitely a lot harder than simply worrying about whether they’d loaded too much into the back of the truck.
“Maybe we should’ve spent more time down here.” she mused idly as she rode. “And left the towns closer in for now.”
“Maybe things will stay this quiet.” Milo said abruptly.
“What?” Jessica said, turning her head. He’d pushed up a little, and was cycling more next to her than behind.
“We haven’t seen a lot of zombies.”
“We’re basically in the sticks.” Austin said.
“Fields.” Jessica said. “Light swamps maybe.”
“Same difference.” he said with an audible chuckle. “The non-towns. Definitely not the cities along both coasts.”
“So you don’t think …” Milo said resignedly.
“I’ve only looked at the maps, and had some word of mouth here and there, mostly from Byron. But Belle Glade looks big enough to have fueled a good number of zombies when it all came apart.” Austin said with a shrug. “And it’s closer to the coast, to Palm Beach and all that over there.”
“Plus the evacuations and stuff that went on toward the end.” Jessica said.
“And that.” Austin agreed. “Also, if Belle Glade isn’t overrun, it begs the question what could’ve tripped Byron’s group up.”
“Yeah.” Milo said.
“We’re going.” Austin said. “We’ll have a look.”
“Carefully.” Jessica said.
“Carefully.” Austin said with a nod, then he glanced back and made eye contact with her and nodded again. “Very carefully. We’ll see what’s happening there and make some decisions.”
“So … we’re sort of hoping for a lot of zombies when we get there?” Milo asked.
“I wouldn’t say hoping, but if we get there and it’s deserted … it might not be the best sign if we’re hoping to find Byron.”
Milo was silent for a long moment, with only the faintly metallic echo of the wheels turning on their axles, of tires rolling across the vehicle track separating two overgrown fields, and the rush of breeze and the speed of their passage shushing softly past their ears, to fill the aural space. Then he sighed, loudly. “I just hope we find them.”
“We’ll have a look. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”
“A step at a time. Next step will be getting there and seeing how it looks. Then we’ll figure out the next one.” Jessica said.
Milo nodded slowly, and they pedaled on. The road stretched on, as straight as what Jessica remembered of the map promised it would, until about ten minutes later when she realized she was catching up with Austin. He’d stopped pedaling, and his head was up and focused toward something ahead. She coasted along to avoid passing him and shaded her eyes with one hand, searching visually. After a moment she thought she saw what had caused him to momentarily still his legs.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“I was just
wondering that myself.” he said. “Hold up, let’s stop a moment.”
He squeezed the brakes, and put his feet down as the bike came to a halt. Jessica stopped back a couple of feet behind him and automatically looked around as he lifted the binoculars he’d left draped around his neck. The surrounding fields were the same, but she kept her head turning to look for anything that might lurch out of the vegetation to try and snack on them. Milo joined Austin ahead of her, standing up on one pedal to gain a few extra inches of height to try and look where he trained the lenses.
“That’s a new one.” Austin said after several seconds.
“What?” Milo asked.
“If I didn’t know better, and I don’t think I do, I’d say there’s a group up there that’s decided to set themselves up a little Mad Max camp.”
“What kind of camp?” Jessica asked, unable to help her pulse from quickening a little. It wasn’t the Mad Max reference; she was still wary of people. She couldn’t help it. So much desperation in the aftermath of the apocalypse had left her cautious of what that desperation could drive people, even good people, into. And the only thing in their way was whatever resolve, luck, and preparation whoever they targeted had to muster against them.
“Well, I count four tractor-trailers.” Austin said, still looking through the binoculars. “Looks like they’ve parked them into a box pattern and converted them into a holdout. There’s some cleared area around them, and I think they’ve laid in a stake field to cover all the approaches.”
“Stakes?”
“Yeah, not a bad idea. Zombies aren’t any good at avoiding obstacles, and even people are going to have a hard time picking their way through them. Especially if they come under fire trying to do it.”
“How close to the road are they?” Jessica asked, as a hedge against wanting to pull her map out and check to try and pick out a good detour.
“Pretty close.” Austin said. “Just off it enough to leave it clear, but they’d definitely see anyone passing by.”
She gave up, but decided to ask rather than unfold her map. “Should we go around?”