Apocalypse Alone

by David Rogers

Jessica just, just, stopped herself from pointing out that death would explain the absence as well. Instead she just allowed herself a small shrug. “If they’re trapped in town by a horde of zombies … that’s not something we can help them with.”

  “Depends on how big the horde is.”

  “Austin!” she said, unable to hold back. “We talked about this.”

  “About what?” Milo asked quickly.

  “Milo, look—” Jessica began, then sighed. “There’s only three of us. And you’re new, no offense. Three people, even with guns, can’t take on a horde that has four trapped.”

  “What if we start, and they come out and help, and then it’ll be seven?”

  “If they were trapped and couldn’t get out, what makes you think we won’t get trapped or worse if we go bumbling around in there looking for them?”

  “The town’s not that big.” Austin said calmly.

  “It’s big enough.” she insisted. “What are we going to do, run around shouting their names and hope they hear us?”

  “We’ve got one more day. We can try to work in a little, and maybe we’ll catch a break.”

  Jessica held her tongue, forcing herself to count to ten. Milo stepped into the silence when she was just reaching three. “What about the people we saw yesterday.”

  As far as Jessica was concerned, that was the wrong thing to bring up. But she continued counting, waiting for her spark of snappish irritation — and anxious fear — to subside some.

  “Them, yeah, them I still can’t figure.” Austin admitted. “But unless they’re hostile, it doesn’t really change things that much.”

  “They were pulling hundreds of zombies into town.” Jessica said, abandoning her count at eight. “How does that not change things?”

  “We still need to investigate anything we can safely, wherever we can get to without being cornered.”

  “If zombies are being pulled into town, like we saw, then that means there could be more than just a ‘mere’ horde hidden on the streets.” Jessica said, using her fingers to mark how silly she found the word. “I don’t want to walk into another Ocala.”

  “Neither do I.” he said.

  “You guys were in Ocala?” Milo asked.

  “Yes.” Jessica said shortly. “And we came pretty close to being killed.”

  “We got out okay.” Austin pointed out.

  “You promised me no heroics.”

  “No heroics. I promise, I promise.” he said, looking at her.

  Jessica met his gaze and held it. As she tried to impart how much she didn’t like everything about this, she found herself — inevitably — falling into the trust in him that made her so fond.

  “No heroics.” Austin repeated. “We’ll have a look, ease in as best we can. If it starts getting close, we’ll pull back. Shoot our way out if it’s headed that way. We can handle that much.”

  “If we have to shoot our way out, that’s it.” Jessica said firmly. “If we go in, and have to shoot our way clear before we get overrun, then we’re done. I mean it. We can’t fight a horde, and even if we wanted to we didn’t bring enough people or bullets to do it with. And if we start shooting, it’s going to pull zombies in from everywhere. So if we pull out with guns blazing, that’s it and we’re off home.”

  Austin nodded, and his eyes told her he meant it. Milo, glancing between the two of them, spoke in a frustrated voice. “What happens then?”

  “We said two days, and we’d try.” Austin said when Jessica stayed silent. “This is the second day, and we’re going to try. But she’s right, and we already told you; clearing out the town wasn’t part of the deal.”

  “But if they’re in there—”

  “Then someone else can come up with a rescue plan.” Jessica said levelly. “And maybe, maybe, Austin and I would even help with it. But to take on every zombie in Belle Glade, it’s going to take a hell of a lot more people than just the three of us. Why do you think everyone that’s left is spending all their time avoiding them instead of going Arnold Schwarzenegger and taking back the land?

  “They’re dangerous Milo. And the more of them there are, the worse they get. They ended the world for Christ’s sake. This isn’t a game.”

  “Okay, okay, okay.” the Houseboater said hastily, holding up his hands defensively. “I’m, I mean, I’m not ready to join the anti-zombie army either. But Byron, and the others, if they’re in there, and there’s all those zombies …”

  “Then they’re on their own.” Jessica said firmly. “It sucks, and it’s not right, but that’s just the way it’ll be. Three people cannot save the world, much less one town, or none of us would be in this situation. You wouldn’t be hiding on the lake and we wouldn’t be living halfway to the middle of nowhere, and none of us would be spending every day praying that’s not the day the zombies come knocking for dinner.”

  “The water’s ready.” Austin said, pulling on his gloves. He lifted one of the simmering cups off the soda can stove. “Let’s have some coffee, finish breakfast, and we’ll just go see what happens. A step at a time.”

  Milo frowned as Jessica nodded, but he finally nodded too. “A step at a time.”

  * * * * *

  “Here looks good.”

  Jessica braked, then stopped as Austin brought his bike to a halt. She looked around, then back at the trailer home he’d apparently selected. “Why here?”

  “Because we’ve done some ducking and weaving, and it looks thicker to the south.” Austin said as he stepped off the bike and lifted it in one hand. “If we go on foot, we’ll have more mobility to use the buildings, the terrain, to break contact from local packs.”

  Frowning, she watched as he put the mountain bicycle behind the thick hedges that had been cultivated to grow against the sides of the trailer. He turned to her expectantly, and she reluctantly stepped off her bike. “No heroics.” she muttered as he picked it up and lifted it behind the hedges.

  “We can get through that way, can’t we?” Milo asked as he stopped a few feet from Jessica. She turned to see him looking south, at the broad field that stretched south several blocks right through the more or less middle of the northern part of the city. It was overgrown, but only the parts of it that were green. Most was packed dirt and gravel that hadn’t yet been overtaken by the unchecked Florida vegetation. There were industrial looking buildings and scrap yards, and some sort of parking lot for semi-trucks, bordering it on either side.

  And only maybe a couple dozen zombies clearly visible ambling around on it.

  “We’ll have some good sightlines all the way down to Canal Street.” Austin said as he settled Jessica’s bike next to his, then batted at the branches of the hedge a little to further hide the bikes. “Looks pretty good to me.”

  “Cool.”

  “Not cool.” Jessica thought, but she said nothing as Milo surrendered his bike to Austin, who hid it like the other two.

  “Okay, Jessica, you take point and wind us a path through with Milo backing you up.” Austin said. He flicked his hand up at her briefly when he saw her start to react. “I’ll cover the sides and rear, make sure we’re not getting collapsed into a pocket. That’s the biggest problem, right?”

  “Right.” she admitted. She took the shotgun off her shoulder, adjusting it into the patrol sling that Austin had taught her; so it was still slung, but in front of her, and such that she could bring it to bear as quickly as simply lifting and aiming would allow. “Okay, south it is.”

  “Milo, remember, you don’t point the gun at her.” Austin said as Milo drew his pistol. “Ever. Guns go off sometimes.”

  “Yes. I got it.” Milo said, bobbing his head. He was holding the gun pointed next to his feet again.

  “And don’t fire unless there’s no choice, or either of us do.”

  Milo nodded again. Jessica turned and headed across the road bordering the northern edge of the long rectangular field that stretched south. She stepped through the ditch on the side of the road carefu
lly. Turning an ankle would be a bad thing right now and she’d definitely had her fill of leg injuries during the apocalypse, and climbed up the far side into the field.

  Parts of it definitely looked like a little bit of farming had been sited there, but most of it looked very industrial. Jessica didn’t have the slightest clue, or really cared, what the buildings on the edges had been for but she guessed the large number of trucks meant it was something involving transportation that supported the farms. Not just this field’s either; probably something that had fanned the vehicles out across the area. There was also a set of railroad tracks running right through the middle, but no station. Curious, but only as irrelevant trivia.

  What she did care about were the zombies. This part, the field, didn’t worry her too much. She’d dodged zombies before, and not just yesterday. When there was space to weave and zigzag without coming close to them, it was really just a matter of creating her own Family Circus Sunday cartoon, but with teeth and no eraser. The trick would come later, when they got across the field.

  Canal Street dipped diagonally across the city, the street dropping further south as it went east. Here, more or less on the middle longitude of the town’s layout, the end of the field would put them at Canal and right on the edge of what even the pickiest map reader would have to call downtown. Or, at least, whatever passed for downtown in Belle Glade. But the buildings were clustered thicker down there, and the map indicated most of them looked like it was a commercial area rather than the somewhat more open pattern residential blocks would have.

  The zombies could close in on them better when they got there. Jessica led a back and forth path across the field, walking steadily without hurrying, as she avoided the nearest zombies and continued in the direction of danger.

  “This was a bad idea.” she thought as she neared the end of the field. “I don’t care how useful friendly neighbors can be.” But she kept her peace, and not just because unnecessary conversation would alert still more zombies to the nearby presence of human happy meals. She’d said her say several times, and while she would have preferred to take a pass on this whole episode, she trusted Austin. She’d learned a lot from him, and she trusted him as much as she did his love for her.

  He was formidable. And determined to help as much as was safe. If it got hairy, however eager he was to find Byron and that happy ending Milo was clinging to, she trusted Austin would recognize it even before she did. And would find a way out of it. All she had to do was keep walking, and keep her head.

  Canal Street had widened here, the two divided halves split by the river or canal or whatever the city fathers of Belle Glade had called it. It was a body of water at least twelve or fifteen feet across, between the paired double lanes of the diagonal street. Staying with the railroad tracks became relevant though, because a little bridge just broad enough to carry them across from one side to the other, was right there where she was coming out.

  The zombies were thickening up some too, but it was still passable. There was still room to pick through them simply by walking. Though she knew without turning that even already her trio had picked up a pack of trailers. That stream of following zombies would only build, as she and the others continued and more of the hungry bastards swung in to join the chase.

  A zombie was on the bridge, which caused Jessica several moments of consideration as she approached. The easiest thing would be to wait and let it stagger clear, trying to come after them, then circle around it and cross. But there was too much press to have time for that. She could shoot it, but she and Austin both agreed the guns were a last resort. If it were absolutely necessary, she could shove or otherwise knock the thing off the bridge, but there was a reason she wasn’t carrying any non-firearm weapons. Learning guns was one thing; learning how to fight with feet and fists and sticks was something else.

  Fortunately, she had options.

  “Austin?”

  “Got it.” he said. She kept walking, and a few moments later he jogged past her unlimbering his baseball bat. He slowed to a steady walk as he reached the bridge at an angle, then went out across the ties between the tracks at the zombie. It had noticed the warm meat coming at it, and staggered around to face Austin as the big man closed. With a single one-handed swing, Austin gave the zombie a heavy hit in the shoulder from well out of the creature’s reach.

  Zombies could barely walk even in the best of situations, and a bridge only a few feet wide, with uneven footing, wasn’t one of these. Hands still outstretched toward the meal it was now denied, the zombie toppled over and hit the water with a splash. Austin didn’t even watch it fall, he just finished crossing and trotted straight at another one that was within ten feet of the bridge’s far side.

  As he smacked that one too, knocking it sprawling in a direction where it would take longer to rise than they would need to clear the bridge, Jessica led Milo across and stopped for just a moment to take a long look around. Zombies to either side, more of them visible along either stretch of Canal Street than there were ahead. On the west side of the railroad tracks she saw a lot of fairly closely grouped little houses. Some of them were actual shacks. The other side had commercial buildings of some sort or another.

  “Let’s try the good side of the tracks.” Austin said as he put the bat back in the sheath on his pack.

  Jessica made a face. “That’s mean.”

  “Zombies are the ultimate levelers. We’re all just survivors now. And all those houses give the bastards more things to hide behind, come out at us as we get closer. I’ll bet if Byron came this way, he’d have cut east unless there were more zombies that way than in the houses.”

  “Alright, how much further south?” she asked as she started walking again.

  “Couple of blocks, and maybe shade east some more. Terrain willing.”

  “Right.” she nodded, heading for the first building just east of the tracks. It was one of several, she saw as she approached the corner on a wide circle so she didn’t walk face first into a zombie on the other side. The first ‘alley’, the space separating the buildings from one another, had two zombies in it; but the next one offered a straight shot into the street beyond.

  Her feet back on the pavement there, she saw more zombies but the numbers were still low enough to be passable. Not pleasant, a little tighter still, but doable without heroics. She gritted her teeth and headed south again, still curving and side stepping away from the zombies as they noticed and tried to close. A few of them got a little closer than she’d hoped, and she heard Austin hitting one every now and again behind her, but she kept going without incident.

  A couple of blocks in, she saw the numbers ahead, further south, were getting dangerous. Not threatening, but an actual threat. Not even Austin would be able to promise to clear a path through without resorting to gunfire. Dozens was now hundreds, and she turned east like he’d indicated. Less than a block in she saw something that wasn’t just a zombie or body.

  “Hey.” Milo said eagerly.

  It was a lot of zombie corpses, dead-dead ones lying sprawled on the ground with the requisite head trauma that ended their hunger, and shell casings besides. Someone’d had another stand-and-fight against the zombies here. She glanced over the scene with as much attention as she dared spare from her main task of avoiding the active zombies here, and decided it hadn’t been a quick running engagement.

  Too many shell casings, too many bodies. At least forty, maybe fifty, at a minimum. Even four Austins would take more than a few seconds to pump that many rounds into a pack, even allowing for how zombies never dodged or ducked or took cover or did anything except surge forward eager to eat. Most of the bodies were also clumped up in a thick arc, having fallen into a pile that covered most of the road and stretched forward a number of feet. But there were others on the sides, and opposite, that arc of corpses.

  “Is that a—” Milo said, and she heard him take two fast steps that almost sounded like he was stretching into a run before stopping dead w
ith slaps of his shoe soles against the pavement.

  “Where?” Austin asked.

  “Under that one, there,” Milo said, “is that a rifle? Looks like an AK.”

  “So?” Jessica asked as she curved away from the intersection where the standoff had happened.

  “Byron carried an AK.”

  “There’s a lot of AK-47s floating around.” Austin said. “Jessica, I’m taking point for a minute.”

  “Go ahead.” she said, continuing to walk, to stay in motion and curve and stay clear of the zombies in the area. He trotted past her and headed right for the building on the northeast corner of the intersection. “Breaking off from our pack?” she guessed.

  “Yeah.” he said as he hefted the baseball bat again.

  “But the AK …” Milo protested.

  “Did Byron have his name carved in it or something?”

  “Well no, not that I know of, but—”

  “Then it’s just a rifle, and it’s either his and he was here, or it was someone else’s.” Austin said before he smashed in the front window of the insurance office. “Retrieving it is dangerous, and won’t tell us anything else we don’t already know.” he added as he scraped at the frame of the window to clear out stray glass fragments and looked inside the room beyond.

  He turned to Jessica expectantly, sticking the bat behind him in the sleeve on his pack, but Jessica was already double checking that she had the shotgun’s safety on. She did, hadn’t taken it off yet, but he was the one who’d taught her. Anytime it occurred to you to check, and most anytime it didn’t, you checked. The safety was on, and she held the shotgun in one hand to prevent it from flopping around on the sling for what she knew was coming.

  Austin reached for her as she joined him. She gave one look at the edges of the window frame, then focused her full attention on the room inside. His hands gripped her at the waist, lifting her up easily so she could poke her legs through the opening. Alighting on the far side, she brought the shotgun up to her shoulder and took a very carefully look around the room with her thumb resting on the safety.