Other than military vehicles Jason La Chance hadn’t seen anything or anyone in the past two and a half hours. He marched along through the dry scrubland, the heels of his shoes kicking up dust. He kept the road in sight but stayed well away from it. Whenever a vehicle approached he’d get down and lie flat hoping to blend in with the landscape.
He saw the contrails of a few jet aircraft on the distant horizon. He’d stopped and stared curiously at one that appeared to be diving straight down toward the earth. He told himself it was just an illusion caused by the curvature of the planet.
The occasional and familiar Doppler shift sound of military helicopters interrupted the almost total silence. When that happened Jason would hit the deck, curl his body into a tight ball and lay perfectly still, knowing from experience that these choppers were all equipped with infrared heat sensors and if one passed too closely his body heat would light up their dials. They might not pay much attention as long as the heat signature wasn’t in the shape of a human. None bothered with him.
He’d puked out the last of his stomach contents more than two hours ago. Now hunger was gnawing at him. He’d been waiting to get sick—really sick—but so far that hadn’t happened. A half dozen times or so he’d calculated the approximate time between when Tim and Tonya Dudley had left the diner in Burbank, Texas and when their car had crashed, setting this whole series of improbable events in motion. It couldn’t have been any more than an hour before their symptoms had shown up. Jason knew that it had been more than two hours since Tim’s exploding head had sent airborne spores into his lungs. So why wasn’t he sick? Why hadn’t he turned into a homicidal maniac?
Good question, he told himself as he stopped and shrugged off his pack. He sat down and took a swig of water from his canteen while munching uninterestedly on a granola bar. He’d kept Tim Dudley’s phone and now he pulled it from his pocket staring at it for a long moment before dialing 911. He got the same canned message as before. Again he dialed Fort Hood. Same shit. He knew the numbers of several military friends by heart, so he dialed a few of them. And kept getting the same message. He shut the phone off, deciding to save whatever battery life was left.
After resting for half an hour he got to his feet and continued on his way.
As dawn began to lighten the eastern sky he saw billows of smoke rising up on the horizon. He did not want to think about what was causing it. But once he reached the outskirts of Kardell he knew something had gone terribly wrong here. Most of the town was in ruin, buildings reduced to ash while some still smoldered.
The small main street was in chaos. Cars and trucks had crashed together leaving piles of twisted steel and shattered glass. Other vehicles sat abandoned and unscathed, some with doors still open, as if their occupants had left too fast to bother closing them.
There was a smoldering heap of something in the center of the street that reminded him of burning tires. When the wind brought the stench his way he shivered in revulsion, knowing they weren’t tires.
He did not see a living soul. The place seemed eerily devoid of life. Not even a dog or a cat moved amongst the devastation.
There were several blocks along the north side of the main drag that were unscathed by fire. This is where he went now, careful, ever watchful. Jason reached down and drew the combat knife from the sheath on his lower leg, fisted it, holding it close to his body. Nothing about this place felt right. There should be survivors. Again he looked over at the pile of burning bodies and a shimmer of premonition ran through him.
His head snapped back to the unscathed storefronts, his eyes scanning down their ranks. He saw a sign for a True Value hardware, and beside it a Rite Aid drug store. He stopped, stood very still staring, hoping for some sign of life but losing hope quickly. He moved forward a couple more careful steps.
The world was eerily quiet. Too quiet. Creepy quiet. Deciding to make a bold move he shouted, “Is anybody in there?”
A door on the front of the hardware store burst open, and to Jason’s amazement a girl who couldn’t have been more than thirteen or fourteen years old dressed in jeans and a t-shirt ran toward him brandishing a knife and screaming at the top of her lungs.
Jason easily caught her by the arm that held the knife, twisting it until she shrieked and dropped it.
She tried to bite him but Jason slapped her away, wondering briefly if she was one of the infected, but soon decided by the look in her eyes that she was probably just a scared kid. She twisted around and landed a good solid kick to his shins.
“Ouch!” he said. “Hold it! I’m not going to hurt you.”
“What are you doing here then?”
“I’m trying to find out what happened,” he said. “Where are all the people? Why is the town burning?”
The girl stopped struggling and stared at him, her face wet with tears and smudged with dirt. Her curly nimbus of strawberry blonde hair was spiked by a small but insistent wind.
Jason relaxed his hold on her wrist. She massaged it with her other hand, still staring suspiciously at him.
“You mean you don’t know?”
“No. I’m an ex-soldier from Fort Hood. I was hitching home when this car . . .” Jason hesitated. “Never mind,” he said. “Tell me what happened here.”
“Everyone went nuts last night,” the girl said. “They all started killing each other. My mother and her boyfriend beat each other to death.” The girl’s voice lurched to a halt as her throat worked. Tears streamed down her cheeks. “They came after me,” she said.
“Who came after you?”
“Fucking zombies. I ran and hid. When it was over they were all dead. Everyone! Killed each other like animals. Then…”
“Then what?”
“The ones that were left didn’t last long. Their heads swelled up and exploded and all these things came out and floated away.” Another sob escaped the girl as she fell forward, wrapping her arms around Jason, her body convulsing. Jason held her and let her cry, feeling her pain and anguish like a weight.
“My name’s Jason,” he said. “What’s yours?”
“Charlee.”
“Charlee?”
“It’s really Charlene but I hate being called that.”
“You gonna be okay, Charlee?”
Charlee continued to sob against him for another long moment. “I don’t know.”
“What happened to the bodies?” Jason asked, but he thought he knew.
Charlee stepped away from Jason, wiped her tears away with the back of her hand and cocked her thumb in the direction of the smoldering mass in the center of the street. “The Army came along. There were dozens—I don’t know—maybe hundreds of them. They were all wearing these strange-looking space suits. I hid and watched as they searched all the buildings and gathered up the bodies. They threw them in a pile and poured gasoline on them. Then they stood back and shot these flame guns at them. Some of the buildings caught fire and this guy said to forget about it. Said it didn’t matter.”
“Why didn’t they find you?” Jason asked.
“I’m sneaky. Have to be. My mother’s asshole boyfriend would never leave me alone. Always trying to get in my pants. So I learned creative ways to avoid him. I guess it paid off.”
Jason stepped back and, for the first time, really looked at Charlee. Beneath the dirt and the fear and the sadness and tears he could see that she was an exceptionally beautiful child. She was unusual looking with strange vivid green eyes and wild red hair, but beautiful nevertheless.
The sound of military helicopters shattered the silence.
“Come on, kiddo,” Jason said, taking the girl by the hand. “We’ve gotta move.”
“We can hide in the hardware store until they pass,” Charlee said. “They’ve been going over all morning but I think they’re done with this place. They were pretty sure everyone was dead.”
Inside the True Value Jason grabbed a shopping cart and went from aisle to aisle picking stuff up; coils of nylon rope, hatchets and axes, knives, a sho
vel, duct tape, tarps, a Coleman stove with extra cans of fuel, even a tent, anything he thought might be useful. Afterward he checked behind the counter and found a loaded twelve-gauge sawed-off shotgun. He went back to the ammo aisle and scooped up three cases of ammo, a mixture of slugs, buck and bird shot. He broke the glass case which held numerous firearms. This was Texas and guns were available most everywhere, even in the True Value. He grabbed two 9 mm automatic handguns with several boxes of ammo and a .223 semi-automatic assault rifle, not unlike the weapon he’d carried in the military. He took several empty clips and an entire case of ammo.
“What are we gonna do?” Charlee asked, looking at the weapons with suspicion.
“Borrow one of those vehicles out front and get out of here. But first we need to find a grocery store.”
“The big store burnt but there’s plenty of food and water at the Rite Aid and the convenience store at the end of town. What happens if one of those choppers spots a moving vehicle?”
Jason had certainly thought of that, but right now he believed it more important to put distance between them and whatever happened here. This area of Texas was mostly open country and they’d be easy to spot. But it was a chance they would have to take. Once they got further east toward Louisiana (if they made it that far) there’d be forests for cover. On the way they would hide out wherever they could. The trick was to avoid getting spotted from the air. Jason was well aware of the sort of damage a military helicopter can do to a moving vehicle, but right now he didn’t have a choice. He was willing to take the chance.
He explained all this to Charlee and she tended to agree. Jason discovered her to be a smart and self-sufficient kid with a decent head on her shoulders. He’d had worse traveling companions.
“You think we’ll find anyone else like us,” Charlee asked.
“I don’t know,” Jason replied. “There’s you and me, and the military guys. Must be more.”
“I sure hope so,” Charlee said.
“What we don’t know is how the army will react to civilians,” Jason said.
“What do you mean?”
“I think it’s too early to know what’s going on, or how widespread the contagion is, but I’m pretty sure they’re not taking anyone at face value. I wouldn’t be if I were in their shoes.”
For a moment Charlee’s face fell into a thoughtful frown. Then she gave her head a hesitant nod, as if she understood. But Jason could see that she didn’t really understand. Hell, he didn’t understand. How could he expect her to?
Jason chose a vehicle carefully from the many that were parked along the streets. In the end he picked a camo-painted late model 4X4 Ford extended cab pickup with good tires, a cap and low mileage. He and Charlee stocked it with everything they could think of for survival; tools, weapons, bedding and cooking utensils. They raided the Rite Aid and the local convenience store of food and medicine, filled coolers with ice and sandwich meat and fresh water and bread; clothing and personal hygiene items, candy and granola bars. Charlee filled a couple of bags with gum, Altoids and Tic-Tacs. As an afterthought she grabbed a couple of boxes of tampons, and embarrassingly tried to hide them from Jason. Jason averted his eyes, and Charlee said, “I’m not a kid anymore, you know.”
“I can see that,” Jason said.
Amazingly the power was still on (how much longer it would be was anybody’s guess) so they gassed up the truck, storing another fifty gallons of fuel in plastic jugs in the back. As an afterthought Jason grabbed a roadmap from the rack by the door.
He rested the sawed off shotgun on the seat between himself and Charlee and stashed a loaded nine millimeter with extra clips beneath the driver’s seat. Before leaving he asked Charlee if she knew how to use a weapon.
“Well, yeah,” she said a little defensively. “I’m from Texas.”
He handed her a second nine millimeter and a clip full of ammo and told her to show him. Charlee pointed the muzzle away from him and expertly installed the clip, jacking a round into the chamber. Then she slid the safety switch to on.
“Okay,” he said. “Stash that beneath your seat just in case.”
There was a GPS locater mounted to the pickup’s dash. Jason turned it on. In a few moments it had located their position showing a facsimile of their pickup truck sitting on Kardell’s Main Street.
“At least the satellites are still working,” Jason said. “This thing could come in handy. He then proceeded to enter his Maine address into the unit.”
As they drove out of town Charlee turned to Jason, and after a few thoughtful moments she said, “What about those other things? Those things all the people turned into? I know what zombies are and I’m telling you right now that’s exactly what they were. Do you think there are any of them still around?”
“The good and bad answer to that is they don’t last long,” Jason said. “I’ve got firsthand experience. One minute this guy was talking normally to me, in the next he’d turned into an animal, and then, a minute later his head exploded and he was toast.”
“Yeah, that’s what I saw too. But why is that good and bad?”
“It’s good,” Jason said, “because once they lose their heads they die, so they can’t hurt anyone else. Bad because they send out millions of those little spore things that infect most of the people who breathe them. Who knows how long those spores stay viable.”
Charlee sighed. “What about us?” she said. This time she didn’t bother looking at Jason. Instead she stared straight ahead at the road as the truck ate up the miles. “How long will it be before that happens to one of us?”
Jason remained thoughtful, his white-knuckled hands fisted around the wheel, his jaw firmly set. Finally he said, “I don’t know, kiddo. Seems to me if it was going to happen it would’ve happened by now.”
Charlee continued to stare straight ahead and did not reply as the pickup sped east toward the Louisiana state line.
CHAPTER 6
Somewhere in Mississippi, July 4th.
The day after the arrival.
Two hours after stopping for a late dinner near Mobile, Alabama Danielle Peterson exited the highway somewhere in Mississippi and pulled into a Days Inn Motor Court. Her adrenaline had been up all day and now she was beginning to crash.
She checked in, went to her room and fell into a deep and exhaustive slumber that was more akin to coma.
On the very peripheral of her sleeping mind she detected some sort of uproar. It was distant and indistinct, not too bothersome, so she ignored it and fell back to sleep. She woke sometime later to urgent pounding on her door.
Danielle got out of bed, slipped on her bath robe and went to the door. “What is it?” she called through the door.
“You have to get out of here now!” a man said from the other side, his voice filled with panic.
“Why?”
“Because everyone’s going crazy and killing each other.” The voice was followed by a howl of fear and running feet slapping on the corridor floor.
“Danielle turned and put her back against the door. Her heart and her breathing were both up. Hadn’t she known something was going to happen? Didn’t she know from the time she found the object in her grandfather’s cupboard and she’d made a whole series of insane decisions about her future that her life would never be the same again?
But this (whatever this was) “everyone’s going crazy and killing each other,” was the last thing she’d expected.
Move, girl! An urgent voice inside her insisted. You don’t have much time. Every moment is precious.
She hastily dressed and threw everything back into her bag. The object was in her pocket so she reached in and unfolded the cloth and cupped it in her palm. Crazy images raged through her mind on fast forward. People fighting and heads exploding and so much more that she was immediately on sensory overload. Realizing how ridiculous this all was and that the object wasn’t going to show her anything concrete she quickly wrapped it up and stuffed it back in her pocket.
> Outside, the place was in turmoil. People with tattered clothing covered in blood roamed the parking lot looking dazed and confused. Several who looked dead were lying on the tarmac with limbs askew. One woman didn’t seem to have a head. Two fighting men were rolling together on the ground. One was screaming in terror and the other was growling like an animal. Over on the highway Danielle heard the sirens of several emergency vehicles, and closer in, vehicles colliding with terrible sounding impacts. In the distance, columns of smoke rose into the air.
All around her there was turmoil, people crying out in rage and terror, some fighting. A man staggered toward her with his arms outstretched. As he drew closer Danielle noticed a curious thing: his eyes were blood red and swollen. Danielle backed away. But when the man suddenly picked up his pace and made a grab for her his head exploded like it contained a bomb. Danielle screamed. The headless corpse fell twitching to the ground as millions of small spore-like things floated around her before being swept away like smoke on the wind. Now more fascinated than frightened, her scientific, medical, analytical mind kicking in, Danielle’s immediate reaction was to find something to capture some of the spores in. A jar or a plastic bag. But the sight of several people brawling and another group lurching her way dissuaded her. Besides, she knew all about retro viruses, and pretty much figured if she breathed any of the spores she would turn into one of them. Probably already have breathed some, this irrationally calm little voice told her. She had her car key in hand, thumbed down on the button and heard the small chirp as the doors unlocked. Just four more steps and she was in the car with the doors locked. She backed out of her parking space as several groups of people moved toward her. There seemed to be a herd mentality associated with whatever these people had become, as if they were no longer acting as individuals but through some common intelligence. Although intelligence seemed a very strong word for what Danielle was witnessing here.
Song of Ariel: A Blue Light Thriller (Book 2) (Blue Light Series) Page 9