Day One (Book 3): Alone

by Michael McDonald

  He saw them and quickly looked around for something to use to defend himself. There wasn’t much to choose from. “Are you going to sit there and watch them kill me, or do you think you could offer some help?”

  “You held a gun to my head and threatened to kill me, so why should I help you?” I asked. “In all actuality, I should sit here and watch them rip you apart, shoot them when they are done with you, then drive away.”

  “Jesus, Christ! The damn gun wasn’t even loaded!” He shouted, the anger was coming on full speed now. “How many damn times do I have to tell you that before you understand that? I don’t even know shit about guns to begin with!” He offered in return.

  “And robbing a store with an unloaded gun will still get you an armed robbery charge and a trip up the river, sport.” I said sarcastically.

  “If you’re not going to help me in anyway, could you at least shut up so I can focus here?” He asked, looking at me as though I had just kicked his puppy.

  I offered both hands for him to see and sat there watching him wonder what his next move would be as the three new undead closed the gap. I figured he had enough left in him to handle at least one of them before the other two took him to the ground, so I settled in to see if I’d be right.

  The three undead attacked at the same time and the Kid was able to get one of them off balance, wasted a bit too much time in the process and the other two took him to the ground. It was over for him and all he could do was the one thing anyone of us would have done. He screamed while trying to keep the gnashing teeth from sinking into his soft flesh.

  Two silenced rounds put both undead into permanent night, night. I exited the pickup and finished the last one, as well as two others that the Kid had managed to knock down and get them caught up, so they couldn’t stand.

  He pushed them off and slowly got to his feet, not sure if I was about to shoot him or let him go again. Movement caught his eyes and he looked to see several more coming from behind the store.

  “Here’s how this is going to go. I’m going to ask you a question and you are going to answer it, and at any time I feel you are bullshitting me, I’ll shoot you in the leg and leave you here… for them.” I said in a stern tone. “Are we crystal clear on that?”

  He simply nodded as he brushed the dirt from his pants.

  “What were you going to do with the truck?” I asked, although I continued before he could answer. “Ride around until it ran out of gas and then murder someone else for theirs?” I asked, holding the rifle in a manner that let him know I could kill him before he even attempted to rush me. Just in case that stupid idea worked its way into his pea brain.

  “No!” He exclaimed. “We heard a broadcast on the radio yesterday saying there was a town that was safe and anyone who wanted to go there could. They said they had food, shelter, and more than a hundred soldiers to protect us,” he explained, keeping a vigilant eye on the still approaching dead. “They’re getting pretty close, mister. Do you think you can hurry this up?”

  I answered by turning and gunning one of them down. With my attention fully on him, I asked. “That’s one less to worry about,” I stated. “Now, about this supposed broadcast. What town and where?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know we only caught the last few minutes of it. The car we had ran out of gas not long after that, and the battery died a few hours later as we waited to hear the broadcast again. It never happened.”

  My suspicions of his tale were starting to make me wonder if he was telling me the truth or simply stalling while more of his friends moved closer, hidden by the rainy darkness. An ambush was something that could easily happen and we were in the perfect location if one were to unfold. Apparently he could see the odd look in my eyes and put both hands in the air. I guess it was his way of letting me know he wasn’t going to try anything stupid. Good for him.

  “How convenient is that?” I said.

  He looked hard at me. “It’s true, mister, and had you not ventilated her head, she’d have backed me up,” he spoke quickly.

  “If you don’t know the name of the town, then how did you plan on using my truck to get there? I mean that sounds a little sketchy, don’t you think? You even said yourself that you waited around for the broadcast, but never heard it again. I’d be willing to bet that if it were a real broadcast, then they would have played it more than once.” I said.

  “The broadcast said once you were on the interstate to head west, you’d see the signs,” he said pointing toward the interstate behind us. I didn’t take my eyes off of him.

  “There’s a sign a few hundred yards up with directions on it. We saw it a few hours ago and that’s why we came here, to get some food and not long after that you showed up. We thought your truck would be perfect, as we could load up as much of the shit in that store and take with us, that way they’d welcome us in for sure.” His words were still up in the air. “Besides, it beats where we were.”

  “And where was that?’ I asked.

  “A local place around here that I’d rather not go back to empty-handed,” he replied.

  I wanted to believe what he said was true. I wanted to believe it more than he did and head there this very instant, but like I had found out for myself in the past week, that there was no safe places anymore. It was all an illusion used by those that wanted nothing more than to take what wasn’t there’s and put you in the ground, and what better way to ensure you would reach a wide spread audience than to use a radio station to increase your victims. If the broadcast had really taken place that is. And that’s a might big if to begin with.

  I’m not saying that a few good people could put together a community and build walls around it to keep the undead out, but that would take a lot of cooperation. And cooperation between survivors was never and easy task to achieve. There were always one or two bad apples in the bunch that would do whatever they could to sabotage what the others were putting together. It was simply because those few bad apples had to be in charge or everything was stupid and wouldn’t work. It was people like that who ruined it for the rest of us and I despised them with a passion. There was also the virus or disease, whatever the hell this thing was. No one in their right mind he didn’t understand what was going on or how to spot the early symptoms of this would allow anyone to just enter into their perfect little town with no questions asked. I might have been dumb to some degree, but I sure as hell wasn’t stupid. There’s no way in hell these people were real and if they were, then going there would be no different than going to the high school where I had just recently escaped from.

  “What place?” I asked him.

  He shrugged his shoulders to me. “It really doesn’t matter now.”

  “There is no safety, kid. All of that shit went to hell when the rest of the world did,” I told him in an unfriendly tone.

  “But I heard it! I heard the damn broadcast with my own two ears,” he argued.

  “No, what you heard was a group of people hoping for easy and unsuspecting targets looking for any way out of the hell they are currently in. People taking full advantage of other’s with no intentions of helping them,” I told him. “You go there; they rob you, kill you, and bury you in a shallow grave… that’s the truth.”

  His expression changed and he looked hard at me. “What bad thing happened to make you this way, because you don’t strike me as a bad guy?”

  It was none of his business what had or had not happened to me. I was the way I was because of the Young Woman, because of Smith, and Officer Morris. I was this way because I had lost my family and the will to continue forward, yet here I was still pressing onward even though I really had no reason to do so. I could try and hide from the fact that my son was dead all I wanted to, but eventually I’d figure that out. Johnny and Kember were gone and I had a long way to go to get back to them, if they were even there. I had no idea if they had made it back to the military base, as they could have ran out of fuel on the way and had to put the bird down els
ewhere, and then there was the possibility that they could have crashed, as the bird did take fire when they were leaving the school complex. I was this way because I was sick and tired of people taking advantage of others. The false pretenses they put forth to draw the innocent in and kill them. I was this way because I was tired of whom I had been… and I wasn’t going to be that person anymore. That person was dead. He died with his family that night not too long ago.

  “Why didn’t you kill me earlier?” Darren asked me.

  “Why didn’t you?” I rebutted.

  “I told you already. The gun wasn’t loaded, but yours was, so why didn’t you finish me off like you did her?”

  I changed the subject abruptly. “Do you miss her?”

  Darren looked over his shoulder at her body, and then to me. “I would like to say that I did, I guess so I sound human, but those moments leading up to her getting shot you made a pretty valid point.”

  “Did I?”

  “She would have run across some other people before too long and had me killed. I was just the first guy she happened upon that wasn’t mean to her, or so she said.”

  “It’s not easy out here all alone, kid.”

  “I was just her partner that got his hands dirty so she wouldn’t have too. A modern day Bonnie and Clyde, just minus me being a stone cold killer,” he said. “So I guess it’s better this way.”

  I noticed in his speech that he had failed to answer my question. I could tell by the tone in his voice that he was more than aware she was using him, but at least he had someone to face the world with. He may even have had feelings for her, which he knew would go nowhere. I felt sorry for the Kid in some ways, when all he wanted was to be needed by someone and the only person he runs across is the one person that was far more likely to cause him harm than the undead.

  “Why do you have a gun if you aren’t going to keep it loaded?” I asked him.

  “I do keep it loaded, but when she saw you pull in and she told me we could get your truck, I kind of figured I’d be the one tasked with shooting you if you didn’t do what she said,” he responded, the sincerity in his tone was unmistakable. “So I took the bullets out and put them in my pocket. Like I said earlier, I don’t like guns and the last thing I needed was to accidently shoot someone.”

  “So I’d be correct to say you’ve never killed anyone before, huh?”

  “Look, it’s not that I can’t, I’m sure if push came to shove I could do it, but just because I haven’t doesn’t mean I’m not worth anything,” he said irritated.

  “It was just a question, kid. I wasn’t trying to judge you,” I told him.

  “And my name is not kid, it’s Darren.”

  I looked at him with a half-smile. “My name is Brandon, kid, nice to meet you.” Now I was just being a dick because I could.

  There was a few awkward moments of silence unwittingly broken by Darren’s voice. “So, what now?” He asked.

  “You can stay here and fight all of them that show up or you can load up with me and see what’s in store as the sun comes up. It’s your choice.” I told him.

  He moved to the same side of the pickup as me and rested his arms on the bed rail. “I’m not trying to screw anything up here, but how can you give me a choice to go with you when I held a gun to your head while a crazy bitch was screaming at you, telling me to shoot you, all before she shot at you, and then you popped her?” His words lingered a few seconds. “By the way, how are you still standing after she shot you? I know she hit you, I saw you jerk from the bullet impact.”

  “You’re sixteen, Darren. I don’t see anyone else out here offering to help keep you alive and give you at least a fighting chance. I might be a bastard to some, but I still have a heart, for whatever reason,” I told him, still paying close attention to our surroundings, just in case. I faced him and tapped the bullet proof vest I had on. “Her bullet luckily hit this instead of somewhere else,” I added.

  “I’d rather not stay here alone.”

  “Like I said, that’s your choice. Not mine.” I told him and got in the pickup. Darren walked around to the passenger side and entered, shutting the door. His eyes migrated to the Woman he had been intimate with several times in the past few days, reeling at why he could not bring himself to feel sorry that she was dead. At first he had been traumatized by the experience, although the further he dove into the thought the more he began to realize that it wasn’t so much of her getting shot that had bothered him, like he first thought. He was more concerned about being shot himself, yet he had transferred the feeling on to her.

  He looked at me with a question forming. “How is it that you can just shoot her down and have no remorse?”

  I took a moment and looked hard at him. If this kid was ever going to make it past this night, he needed to understand how things were. He needed to know the society that we had all grown accustom to was no more. There were no laws anymore, no government at either the federal or state level, no police to chase the bad guys down and lock them up. There was no one to help. No one. If you were going to survive, then you had to become worse than those that planned to do you harm. You couldn’t show mercy and you sure as hell couldn’t expect it from anyone. Your life was in your hands and you’d either fight like hell to keep it or bow down and allow those vermin to take it… there was no in-between.

  You were the hunter or the hunted.

  “I don’t have to remind you that the world is no longer as it once was. I’m sure you are more than aware of that,” I said and Darren nodded. I took my time in thought to make sure I chose the best words to describe what I was trying to tell him, as the last thing I wanted was for him to think I was some monster, although with me knowing very little about him maybe for him to see me in the light was best until I could be certain he wasn’t going to stab me in the back, literally, if ever he got the chance.

  “There’s no one left to protect the innocent. No police, of any kind, and what little military remains is no more concerned about you or your safety than those things out there are. We are all be hunted by the same predator, so we can either become the prey and be torn apart by them or robbed and killed by people like her,” I said as I started the truck. “To put it bluntly. You either kill or be killed, it’s that simple.”

  We pulled out onto the highway, yet instead of going back across the overpass and entering the interstate to look for his illusive place of safety, we turned the opposite direction to which he quickly made a remark.

  “Where are you going? The interstate is back that way along with that town.”

  “There is no town, nor is there any safety. You keep moving and you stay alive. You stop and you die,” I said driving the truck back into town.

  “But what if you’re wrong? What if this place really does exist and we don’t even try to see if it’s there or not? You could be killing both of us right now, right here with these choices.” his words stammered quickly from his mouth.

  “Have you ever heard that statement that says if it’s too good to be true than usually it is?” I asked him.

  “Of course I have.”

  “Then why can’t you just accept that?” I asked him. “How hard is it for you to realize that what you and I used to know is gone, not just for a day or even a week, but gone for good and it’s never coming back.” I said. “The life you were leading up until this shit started is dead and gone, not to mention everyone you have ever known is probably dead as well. Stop living in the past and create your own future… if you’re not going to chance, then you’re destined to repeat this shit in a vicious cycle until it kills you.”

  He was agitated at me; I could sense that much as he sat there with his arms folded in front of him watching the road. He reminded me of myself when I was a little boy and couldn’t get a toy at the supermarket, so all the way home I would sit there quietly sulking to myself until we got home. I somehow thought in the back of my young mind that if I was quiet enough and ignored my mom, she would change he
r mind and take me back for that toy. It never happened, not once.

  “I know it may not look this way right now, but I am trying to save your life and give you a shot at another day,” I told him.

  He remained quiet and wouldn’t even look at me.

  I turned down the road that I had taken earlier heading toward my son’s grandparents’ house when I should have been hitting the interstate and doing my best to get us both back to the military base. Kember and Johnny would have made it back quite a while ago, if they hadn’t had any problems and that was what worried me the most. Something in my gut was telling me, screaming to me, that things had not gone as planned. It was a feeling I hated, yet no matter how hard I tried could not shake. It was attached to me like a conjoined twin.

  I lit a cigarette and turned the radio on. “What station did you hear that broadcast on?” I asked Darren, who leaned forward and put it on the correct station. There was nothing there but silence, pure unadulterated silence. I left the volume up as we drove in hopes that the so called broadcast, if it even existed, would play again. Only the sound of the rushing wind entertained us as the blueish smoke rose from my cigarette, hit the incoming wind and was disturbed in a violent wake vortex before being sucked out the window and into oblivion.

  What if this is all a bunch of bullshit? We’ve heard nothing on the radio this entire time, other than regular music before the remote systems failed and the music stopped altogether. My mind reminded me and I caught myself checking Darren out through my peripheral vision, as if at any moment he would try something. I’d never patted him down before letting him into the pickup, which meant he could easily have another weapon on him, and this time it could be loaded.

  “Did you know she was armed?” I asked Darren.

  “What?” He responded to my question.

  “The woman with you, back there. Did you know that she was armed with that small gun?” I asked in further detail this time around.

  He looked at me visibly irritated and hesitated long enough for me to trust him even less than I already did. “I had a feeling she might be, although I never actually saw her with the thirty-eight though.”