by Joshua Guess
Apocalyptica
Part Two
Ran: Book One
Joshua Guess
©2016 Joshua Guess
All rights reserved
An important note for the reader:
This eBook is the first part of a serialized novel. It is not itself a complete book, though I did my absolute best to make it a complete story. I’m putting this warning here because this is my first attempt at releasing a serialized novel in this way, and inevitably someone will purchase it thinking it’s full-length and get upset when they see it isn’t. I’m not casting blame, as I have done that exact thing myself more than once. Just wanted to give everyone who picks up Apocalyptica fair warning.
Also by Joshua Guess
Living With the Dead
With Spring Comes The Fall
The Bitter Seasons
Year One (With Spring Comes The Fall, The Bitter Seasons, bonus material)
The Hungry Land
The Wild Country
This New Disease
American Recovery
Ever After
The Fall
Victim Zero
Dead Will Rise
War of the Living
Genesis Game
The Next Chronicle
Next
Damage
Ran
Apocalyptica (Serialized into multiple parts)
Misc
Beautiful (An Urban Fantasy)(Novel)
Soldier Lost (Short Story)
Dog Dreams In Color (Short Story)
With James Cook
The Passenger (Surviving The Dead)
8
In the movies, searching for people usually comes in the form of an exciting montage or a beautifully dramatic journey through questionably constructed buildings. In real life it’s incredibly boring. Admittedly our experience was different given the inclusion of zombies, but still. Mostly boring.
We took the Jeep. I hauled out the small flatbed trailer I kept in the back yard and hooked it up. Jem eyed me when I handed him a backpack. Then he looked through it.
“Why do we need all this stuff?” he asked, pawing around in the carefully packed food, water, and spare clothes. The clothes I was especially proud of having on hand, since he couldn’t wear any of my stuff. Granted, it was just a few t-shirts I’d picked up in a package deal at a flea market, along with a pair of fleece pajama bottoms, but that I had anything at all was kind of amazing. I ask you, who could resist buying that stuff for just a dollar? No one, that’s who.
“These shirts are neon orange,” Jem noted. “The bottoms are...”
“Camouflage,” I finished super helpfully. “The guy selling them called it a ‘hunter’s combo’ deal. We’ll pick you up some other clothes out there.”
“I still don’t get why we need this,” he said, waving a hand at the bag.
I shrugged. “Hoping we don’t need it, but I’d much rather have something to eat, drink, and change into should we get stuck away from here and find ourselves hungry, thirsty, and covered in blood.”
Jem stared at me for a long few seconds. “Most women don’t pack with concerns about starving or being showered in blood.”
“Most men don’t hesitate to stereotype women into broad categories of acceptable and unacceptable behavior, but you don’t hear me complaining,” I said.
Jem did the wise thing and said nothing.
I’d spent the planning stages of the trip multitasking, which by my definition meant doing most of the work while explaining to Jem why and what I was doing. He was a smart guy and understood immediately once I nudged him in the right direction, but he was still having a hard time dealing with the change in context. Jem Kurtz operated in a world based on order in many variations, and all those kinds of order were now pretty fucked.
I let myself get into a flow of running babble as I checked guns and filled magazines. I reminded myself, when it got a little annoying, that most people don’t have the sort of childhood that prepares them for the end times. Oh, sure, a lot of people out there liked to go on about the apocalypse, but that was usually used as a political hammer or a fund-raising tool. I hadn’t seen any horsemen trotting around, though I graciously stipulate that it’s a big planet and they probably have more important places to be than rural Indiana.
The Jeep handled most of the junk on the back roads with ease. There wasn’t a lot of it this far into the county, but the occasional spray of random household objects at intersections spoke of families—or possibly looters—taking trucks full of hastily-packed belongings through corners at speed.
Wallace itself was a different story.
Our town is pretty small. Not Mayberry small, but definitely still not large enough to require, say, more than one McDonald’s. Or more than three Starbucks. Honestly, I think we could have got away with two Starbucks. Having access to espresso in its infinite configurations within a triangle stretching no more than four miles on a given side seemed almost like too much civilization.
Where was I? Oh, yeah. Small town.
First-world community dwellings in the form of towns and cities all follow a similar growth pattern. You have the old, central element that is either—or sometimes both—composed of ancient buildings deemed historically necessary, or the largest, newest structures imaginable. Wallace had both. The absolute center of town was a strip of restored brick buildings with a road a hundred and fifty yards long between them. No cars were allowed on St. Agatha Street, commonly called Agatha Square or just Agatha, which turned it into a pleasant shopping center and thoroughfare.
Fact: Hector’s, a barbecue place housed in Agatha, was the five-time reigning state champion for ‘best barbecue’ at the state fair. It was a title well earned.
Growing in a ring outside this quaint setup were the hallmarks of the modern age. Office buildings, a parking structure, the library, and plenty of other concrete blocks posing as modern architecture. A curious feature of Wallace was the change in its population; on a given weekday, it increased by half. This was thanks to the assorted state government facilities housed around town. Small towns have cheap rents, and even rural parts of states need a central location from which to manage a given area.
From that hard nugget of commercial real estate sprang—sprung—grew the suburbs. Not the way you’re thinking. Not like Chicago or Atlanta, where entire towns are suburbs of the giant-ass city in question. No, I mean the quiet spreads of housing tracts whose reasonably large yards fit on geometrically perfect streets all loosely interconnected by county roads and a similar position on the overall socioeconomic spectrum.
A lot of people describe cities as organisms, usually like cells. I like to think of them in less complex terms.
The town of Wallace and the surrounding Louis County were like a boob.
Hear me out.
The center of the city, in terms of size, is the nipple. It’s the prominent, obvious part everyone pays the most attention to. Around that is the areola, the band of less interesting but still notably different material marking the buffer zone between the nipple and the rest of the boob in this metaphor.
Then there’s the county, the suburbs, all of that. That’s just the skin making up the majority of the boob.
Wait, what size are we talking about here? Uh. Pervert. This is just a visualization. Don’t be creepy.
The point is that the concentration of human beings in Wallace and the directly proportional volume of debris were both predictable variables. The closer to the center, the more dense it was going to be.
Except I didn’t think about the obvious. People’s homes were on the outside circle, the largest circle. When you’re terrified of losing your family, your dog, or maybe
just your stuff, you get home. Damn the consequences.
It looked like someone took the level of crazy in Wallace and overrode the safeties to crank it up to eleven.
“Why didn’t we see this yesterday?” I said, leaning against the steering wheel as I gaped at a three-way intersection packed with stopped cars. Some were wrecked, many others trapped by those wrecks. Every one of them had been ransacked, clothes and supplies strewn about in every direction. Many dead bodies sat inside vehicles, blood splashed inside and out.
Jem studied the scene. “If I had to guess, I’d say most of them were either at home or got there fast when all the craziness started. Not hard to imagine a lot of people hunkering down and hoping things got better, then making a run for it when they didn’t.”
I steeled myself against a rising flood of anger and bitter sadness. Jem just looked pissed off.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
He glanced at me sharply. “For what?”
I nodded at the vista of broken lives in front of us. “I made you take me home. If I hadn’t, you might have been out here to help some of these people.”
Jem chewed on that for a second, then shook his head. “You didn’t make me do anything, Ran. I chose to help the person I actually could help. Look at that out there. Part of my job is—was—knowing how to see the limits to what I could do. Yesterday I agreed with you. Today the world is a much different place.”
We drove methodically, slowly. Jem mapped out a number of routes using an actual map from my glove box. The problem we faced was the spread of locations where his friends lived. Of the five or six people we were going after, only two had homes on the outer edges of Wallace. The others lived in various apartments between here and there, one of which sat on the top floor of a building in Agatha Square itself.
The Jeep had a bench seat in the back capable of holding three people. I’d given Jem a host of reasons why taking one vehicle was a safer bet, and pointed out that several people could squeeze into the cargo space behind the bench. Both of us knew the likelihood of finding everyone on his list alive was vanishingly small.
Even if the trip netted us zero survivors, it would be worth it if we could snag enough supplies. I had food at my house, but things were going to get worse soon. Sure, the power was still on, but there were signs things in the wider world had taken bad turns. Fewer channels were airing anything at all, none of them regular programming. Blackouts were rampant, and I think Wallace and the counties nearby got off easy because of the nuclear plant we used for power. That wouldn’t last.
Farms were surely producing food, but the complex system of arteries feeding the rest of the country their product was effectively gone. The roads existed, but chaos and death made the organized transport of goods almost impossible.
So while we were absolutely going to help people if we could, it wouldn’t be at the expense of leaving behind stuff we’d need to survive.
It took fifteen minutes to find a road into town not saturated with too many bodies and cars to drive through. In a stroke of luck it happened to intersect a road near our first stop, only a handful of blocks south.
“I’ll tell you when to turn,” Jem said as we made our way through the neighborhood.
I nodded. “Who is it we’re going after?”
“Carla Wilson,” Jem said. “She lives in a big double lot on Van Santen street.”
The name tickled something in my head. When making the list he’d only mentioned first names. “Why does that sound familiar?”
“She’s the county attorney,” Jem said. “Also an avid Diablo 3 player, if that helps.”
A light went on in my head. Like many small-town officials, she also had a day job. I’d seen ads for her law office before. She must have gotten her fix for serious legal work from handling government cases, because she mostly advertised for divorces and low-cost business stuff like incorporating. I had actually considered using her when I made my business into a corporation.
I was more stoked by the idea that she was a gamer.
There were a few more twists and turns than I’d have liked in getting to Carla’s house, but in the end we managed. It was a two-story affair painted in a pale blue. It had a big picture window in the front, but luckily the first floor was raised up four feet off the ground, making breaking in through windows problematic at best.
The foundation had windows, barred with stout iron mesh, and I caught a flicker of movement inside when we stepped out of the Jeep. I pushed my door closed gently. Jem, on the other hand, pushed his shut like a normal person who didn’t live under threat of being eaten alive.
In the unnaturally silent morning around us, the sound was as loud and echoing as a gunshot. I turned a glare toward Jem that four out of five boyfriends agree could melt the paint off a battleship.
“Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t think.”
Rapid footsteps thumped inside Carla’s house followed by a series of clicks from the front door as locks were thrown.
The face revealed by the sunlight streaming in was not the carefully-posed image from the ads. This woman was devoid of even a particle of makeup, had dark hollows beneath her eyes, and wore what looked to a bloodstained set of sweats.
She said nothing, only waving her arm frantically for us to come inside. The movement sent her messy ponytail bobbing, and I didn’t need to be asked twice. I hauled ass.
Jem was right behind me, but I could hear the approaching crowd of zombies even over his heavy footfalls.
9
The door slammed behind us. A few seconds later the sweet, gentle tones of slavering hordes of raving cannibals could be heard outside. I was alarmed. From his expression, Jem was also—very reasonably—alarmed. Carla just sighed with the long-suffering resignation of a woman who has Seen Some Shit and is no longer impressed by it.
“That was not my fault,” Jem said. “They had to have been coming before I shut that door.”
I grimaced. “Yeah, that’s probably on me. I should have thought of the sound of the Jeep attracting attention.”
“You guys want some Kool-Aid?” Carla asked, shuffling through an open door to the basement.
I glanced at Jem, asking the question without saying a word. Is this normal? Does this woman seem like her usual self, or at least close enough given what the world is doing right now? Or are we about to walk down these steps and have our heads cut off and our bodies turned into jerky?
Jem’s answering expression was a shrug. Thanks, Jem.
The basement wasn’t what I expected. Solely from an architectural point of view, it was unique. My guess was that the modern house above had been built on a refurbished and much older foundation. The ceilings were low enough that Jem had to duck pipes in a couple places. The floor was bare concrete, relatively new, but the walls were patched fieldstone.
The big ass steel door set in the far wall was definitely new. Like, really new. The stone around it was cut where the door had been added, the exposed inner stone still unstained by the air.
I took in the facts.
Woman living alone with a front door strong enough to stop the beating arms of violent attackers. She had paid an undoubtedly large sum of money to have a panic room installed in her basement, unless I missed my guess. She had none of the markers of someone on the edge of losing her grip. The rush of chemicals in her brain causing fear and panic were familiar friends. In short, my first guess was right. She had seen some shit.
Fact: women who have witnessed the remarkable, especially the remarkably terrible, can smell their own.
Jem gently reached out and touched Carla’s shoulder with the tips of his fingers. “You okay?”
She glanced back, one hand on the metal door. “All things considered, sure. Come on in.”
The door opened silent and easy, revealing a room five feet deep and twice that wide. There was a small bed and table where two pistols sat, one in a holster.
A pitcher of Kool-Aid rested on a built-in counter alo
ngside a hotplate. Carla grabbed a pair of red plastic cups from a stack and wiggled them at us. “So? Can I tempt you?”
I glanced at the pitcher. “What flavor?”
“Red,” Carla said.
I raised my hands in surrender. “Red me up, then.”
Jem was looking around the small room with an annoyed expression. “Does every woman I know or meet have a secret underground room? Did I miss out on a trend?”
Carla looked at me curiously.
“Sex dungeon,” I said. “Jem was very impressed.”
“No! No, do not tell her that, she’ll believe you.”
Carla frowned thoughtfully. “Yeah, I kind of suspected Jem had a little freak in him.”
“Jesus Christ,” Jem said. I was delighted to note his neck turning pink with a blush.
I took the proffered chalice of sugary fruit drink and sipped. “So, Carla, I’m Ran. Nice to meet you.” I put out a hand.
Carla shook it. “Likewise, especially if you came to get me out of here. My car was trashed ten minutes after I got home and I’ve been staying in the panic room most of the time, or close to it. I wasn’t really prepared to be stuck here.”
“Did you have this put in?” I asked absently as I noticed the uneven lay of the floor and the overall shoddiness of the room.
“Not exactly,” Carla said. “The house already had this little space. Part of a bomb shelter in the back yard. Knew that when I bought the place, but didn’t know it was about to collapse my foundation. So I had it filled in except for this part, which I had reinforced and made into my little getaway here.”
“Crazy ex?” I asked.
Carla shook her head. “I lived in Chicago until a few years ago. Have your house broken into enough times and you develop a healthy paranoia.”
“See?” I said to Jem. “Some people agree that paranoia can be healthy.”
“Yeah, that’s great,” he said. “How are we going to get out of here? Will those things go away?”