He sighted in the kid, there was no way to even guess it’s age through the glow of the optics, took a deep breath and let half of it out. His training kicked in and he slowly squeezed the trigger. Not wanting to watch, but being unable to pull his eyes away, he saw the head jerk to the left as the round impacted its skull. The kid dropped silently in a heap and Brad felt his stomach lurch, wanting to get rid of the oatmeal he’d had for breakfast. Killing an adult had never bothered him much, but kids, that was different. Yes, he’d been unfortunate enough to have to target kids before, and he always felt the same afterwards. He knew he’d have to reevaluate his way of thinking if he was going to make it in this new world.
He cleared the area again and climbed back down from the cupola and made his way to his bedroom. Glancing at his watch, he saw that it was a little after five A.M.
“Five o’clock; the song didn’t specify A.M. or P.M.” he mumbled to himself, fished out a bottle of Jim Beam from the closet where he’d stashed a supply of goods in case he had to hole up in the room and poured himself a couple of fingers, downing it quickly, before pouring another. He didn’t think Julie would mind so much, as he put the bottle away. This wasn’t the time to be getting hammered.
Once he’d calmed down a bit, he donned his MARPAT, double checked his weapons, and eased his way out of the back door. He had to get rid of the body of the man he’d shot the night before, and it wouldn’t hurt to dispose of the one he’d just killed. Duck-walking his way behind the hedges, he worked his way down the front yard towards the first body. He was halfway there when he heard glass breaking from somewhere up the street and silently cursed himself for not waking Dean to sit in the cupola and watch for him.
After pausing for a few moments and hearing nothing else, he continued his way down the yard. Blood and brain matter were sprayed in the driveway behind the dead man, but Brad barely even noticed. He stooped down beside the body, grabbed it by the collar, and started dragging it back up the hill.
It was funny that in Hollywood, actors dragging a body never even broke out in a sweat. In real life, dragging a couple of hundred pounds of absolute dead weight would wear a person out in no time. He wished he’d planned for body disposal, but that part of the equation had never even been factored in. He’d always figured to leave the dead where they fell. A full on Zompoc, or zombie apocalypse, was something he’d always laughed at.
“Not so funny now, is it?” he muttered as he slowly dragged the dead man to the top of the driveway. He took a break and lit a cigarette. It was much harder than he’s thought it would be and he still had one more body to stash, a task he dreaded because of the smallness of it. His stomach grew queasy just thinking about it, so he flipped the cigarette into the yard, snatched up the body by the collar again, and dragged it to the rear of the yard.
Before they had bought the house someone, most likely the group of kids up the road, had conveniently made a path down the hill on the backside into the woods using bikes and four-wheelers. Convenient because it was a quick way into the woods behind the house. Apparently, no one but kids ever used the woods for anything, so he’d hiked it about once a week during warmer weather just to keep it from being overgrown.
He dropped the body at the start of the steep incline and nudged it with his foot. The dead guy rolled for half a turn and then stopped.
“Are you kidding me?” he hissed “Jesus.” He gave it a swift kick, wincing at the hollow sound it made and the body slowly gathered speed as it made its way some two hundred feet to the bottom, where it collided with an old oak. Brad sighed loudly. One job done. He worked his way behind Diane’s fence and underneath the barbed wire that marked the start of the old farmer’s pasture, staying in the brush as long as he could. The horses, having seen him before, paid him no attention as they searched for more threats.
Brad found the body and flipped it over, dreading the moment when he would have to look on the face of the dead child. Instead, there was something else.
“What the fuck?!” he said aloud and broke out his red lensed flashlight for a closer look. When it dawned on him what he was seeing, he breathed a sigh of relief; it was a little person, fully adult. Brad still hated that he’d had to pull the trigger, but at least it wasn’t on some child.
He once again dragged a body, this one lighter at least, to the edge of the path and shoved it on its way with his foot. He fished a cigarette out of his pocket and lit it, inhaling deeply as he sat on a log and considered things. If he’d already had to shoot several people on the dead-end street to nowhere, what the hell was his wife having to endure? And that was if she was able to defend herself and Donna. He hated uncertainty with a passion. He snuffed out his smoke and went back towards the pasture. He figured that since he was out anyway, might as well check on the old man and see if he was okay, maybe feed the horses while he was at it.
He stayed just inside the woods the entire way up the hill moving almost silently and hoping the entire time that he wouldn’t be spotted. Once, while he was with the Marines, he’s had to wrestle a guy into a straightjacket that had suddenly gone off his rocker and started running around screaming at nothing. They guy had been incredibly strong and he was just normal crazy, as Brad saw it. This virus had to be all of that and then some, because he figured the Marine, at least on some level, still valued his own life. These things, from what he’d observed, didn’t.
It took him almost half an hour to reach the old man’s house. Brad had only seen the man walking the fence line on rare occasions and had never learned his name, but everyone called him Farmer Brown. As he approached the barn, he moved slowly and quietly. It was eerie, nothing but the horses could be heard. He knew the old man had a couple of dogs, because they’d always accompanied him when he walked the fence line. They should have alerted, but nothing. He glanced inside the barn, half expecting to get an axe to the head, but aside from one horse it was deserted. He peeked around the barn at the house, a well-kept house that looked to be turn of the century. The last century, not the current one. The doors and windows were shut and he got a bad feeling about it. In this heat, with the power out, the windows should be open at the least. Unless the old guy had a backup power source, be he didn’t hear a generator and didn’t see any solar panels, to that seemed unlikely. He swallowed hard and called out, hoping he wouldn’t get shot.
“Hello, Mr. Farmer! It’s Brad from down the road! Are you all right?!” he yelled and listened for an answer. Nothing.
“Shit.” He muttered knowing he would have to try the door. He walked onto the porch making as much noise as he could, just in case. Nothing. He tried the door and found it unlocked.
“Double shit.” He muttered and slowly opened the door, fully aware the dogs could be inside. The smell of death hit him right away, so he knew what to expect as he pulled his shirt over his nose in an attempt to block some of the smell. He switched his flashlight on and gagged at the scene. Mrs. Farmer lie dead on the floor with an apparent shotgun blast to the face. Mr. Farmer sat on the couch with a hole through his chin and the top of his head sprayed across the ceiling. Both old man’s dogs were dead in the hall with knifes protruding from their bodies. Brad surveyed the scene for a moment before coming to having an idea.
“Granny here gets the virus and goes apeshit on the dogs with everything in the knife block, Farmer here, stumbles on the scene and has to put his wife down because now she’s not his wife anymore. He can’t take it because they’ve probably been married since Moses was a child and uses the shotgun on himself. Fuck, old guy. That had to have been the hardest thing you’ve ever done.” Brad said to the corpse. “That’s just sad on so many levels I don’t know where to start.”
Knowing that he’d have to come back and bury the Farmers, as he now thought of them, he headed out to the barn, checking it again, just in case a what used to be someone had crawled in, and finding not even the horse now, he climbed up into the loft and pitched three bales down. He thought about mucking out the
stalls, but figured the horses would be in more danger if they were put up, so he broke the bales open and scattered them around a little, and left. He made sure the door was securely open so that the horses could get out of the weather if they wanted to, and made his way back down the hill.
He stopped and squatted in the woods by Dean’s house for a couple of minutes, listening and looking for anything out of the ordinary. Not hearing or seeing anything or anyone, he crossed the small open area quickly to the woods on Diane’s side of the woods. From there he followed the path past where the dead guy had rolled to a stop earlier and made his way up to the back of the house. He was no sooner cleared the wood when the back door opened and Diane was motioning for him to hurry. He trotted over and into the house, securing the door quickly behind him.
“What’s up?” he asked.
“It’s Dean. He hasn’t woken yet. When I went in to check on him, he was burning up. Do you think it could be…?” She left the question open but he knew what she meant. Could he have the virus. He was about to say something when he heard something crash to the floor in the bedroom and he heard Dean moan.
Tanith
O’Fallon, MO
Tanith heard Nate call out and ran to the door, knowing that Walt, Tim, and Lexi would do the same. Pulling the pistol from the holster on her hip, she kept it pointed at the ground as she pushed the storm door out of her way. Looking around, she saw Walt walking up to Paul Wyckoff, their next-door neighbor, who was trying to break into Walt’s truck.
“Paul! Back away from the truck!” Walt yelled, bringing his own pistol to bear.
“No! I need this truck! I’ve got to get out of here!” Paul yelled back, oblivious to Walt’s pistol. Tanith quickly glanced around to make sure there wasn’t more of them and then refocused on what Paul was doing.
“Not going to happen! It’s my truck and we need it! Now back away before I shoot!” Walt warned.
“You’d shoot a guy over a truck? I thought we were friends and neighbors?” Paul said, stepping back from the truck a couple of paces. Tanith sent Tim to the back of the house to make sure they weren’t being distracted for some other purpose, and had Nate and Lexi watch the sides of the house.
“That’s about right. We stopped being friends when all of this happened. Family first.” Walt said, keeping the pistol trained on his neighbor and hoping the guy would just back down.
“Figures.” Paul sneered and swiftly reached behind his back. Before Tanith could scream out a warning, Walt has sent two rounds from his 1911 into the man’s chest. Paul dropped where he was and Walt drug the man back to his own yard. He was glad he didn’t have to face Susan, Paul’s wife, because she was out of town on business. The couple didn’t have any kids, so Walt knew the guy was just thinking of himself. He would have offered to bring Paul with them, but Paul had already shown his true colors by trying to steal the truck. He couldn’t be trusted. When he hurried back over to his yard he looked at Tanith.
“We’ve got to toss what we can in the truck right now and get the hell out of here.” He told her quietly.
“But the cops...” she started and he cut her off.
“There are no cops anymore. We’re on our own here. We’ve got to go before anyone else figures this out and the panic starts.” He told her and went in to get more stuff.
Fifteen minutes later they had picked up her father-in-law, Paul, who rode in the back with an AR with Tim, and Lexi and were headed down Highway K towards I-64. Tanith hated the thought of taking 64 because it took them through St. Louis, but Walt assured her that at the time of the morning when the EMPs went off, that traffic was normally light. At least he’d hoped he was right. If not, he wasn’t above using the four-wheel drive to make his way around obstacles. Sooner or later he was going to have to stop and trade places with his dad so that he could provide cover from the bed of the truck. His dad was a good shot, but he was prone to trying to reason with people, Walt wasn’t. At least, not in this situation.
As they drove past a Wal-Mart, Walt noted that there was a group of people already streaming in and out of the open doors and silently wished they’d left an hour earlier. That was his fault for not keeping things ready to go on a moment’s notice, but then he never figured anything would ever really happen. He was glad, however, that just because everything wasn’t nicely packaged, didn’t mean that he was totally unprepared.
After having to take the median a couple of times to avoid traffic snarls, they finally made it to I-64 and he took the exit to head east and brought the speed up to eighty. He wasn’t worried about cops at this point, he just wanted to be clear of St. Louis before the bad elements started setting up road blocks to steal from those walking. In every town and village there was always an element just waiting to prey on the weak and the unaware, he was neither. Still, rather than risk a shootout, he was counting on a little speed to get him away from St. Louis and into Illinois, where the farmland outnumbered towns. His plan was to put as many miles behind them as he could before he’d start needing fuel. That was going to be awhile because he’d installed a second tank under the rear of the bed, doubling his miles between refuels. He had done that when he’d occasionally have to go to Illinois for work and he hated filling up every day. Now it would hopefully be a saving feature.
Tanith was keeping a watchful eye out to her right, ready to start shooting if she had too. She wasn’t G.I. Jane, but she was very protective of her family and had no issues shooting if she had to. She noticed at one point a group of men attempting to break into a house by kicking the front door in. A boom just after they’d passed, let her know that the people in the home weren’t going to allow that, if they could.
Walt looked up in the rearview mirror as three or four bloodied men fell backwards onto the sidewalk and into the yard. He sighed, glad that wasn’t him, despite the fact that he’d had to deal with Paul. He looked over to Tanith and smiled.
“Scared?” he smiled at her.
“A little. You?” she asked.
“Shitless.” He smiled and concentrated on dodging cars and trucks left immobile from the EMPs. Walt was known as the calmest person on either side of the family. It was like he never got mad, rarely got upset, and never spoke out about anyone if he didn’t have to. That scared some people when they first met him because they weren’t sure if her was just a quiet guy or a serial killer, waiting to get out. He smiled at that thought because he always left them wondering. Less drama that way.
“Oh shit!” Tanith said, dragging Walt out of his daydreaming only to see a guy get out of his eighteen-wheeler and stand in their path waving a tire iron to get them to stop. Walt mashed on the accelerator to give the truck more speed, hoping the guy would get out of the way, when a rifle shot behind them startled him. The trucker dropped the tire iron and fell to the ground. Not wanting to take the time to find out what happened, he moved into the left lane, narrowly missing a dead car, and skirted around the body. After a couple of miles, he slowed the truck back to eighty to save the engine.
“Who shot?” he asked Lexi and she stuck her head in the sliding window as Walt repeated the question.
“Tim. He’s watching the front, Grandpa is watching behind us.” Lexi reported and Walt knew he’d have to have a discussion with the teen as soon as they stopped.
As they closed in on St. Louis, they could see widespread fires and black billowing smoke from many locations. Tanith didn’t care about what caused them, she only knew that it was going to get worse and she told Walt, who simply nodded in agreement, focusing on what was going on in front of them. He was concentrating on dodging dead vehicles that he hadn’t even noticed that they’d crossed the Mississippi River until it was ten minutes behind them.
Once they’d passed Scott Air Force Base, civilization began to thin out and Walt slowed the truck a little more. They passed a couple of strip malls off the interstate where they noticed that crowds seemed to be going wild, wrecking the places. At one point Nate pointed out a
car that was being assaulted by a mob intent on flipping it over. Nate said he could swear that he saw someone in the car.
“The quicker we’re away from people, the better.” Tanith said and Walt agreed. He needed to find a safe place for them to stop and come up with some kind of plan. Staying with the interstate was not going to work. He was leery about the backroads as well, knowing they usually held blind spots and choke points that could be used as kill zones. He wanted to dig through his old-school atlas and start tracing a route to keep them away from the bigger cities.
In between the small town of Damiansville and Okawville was nothing but farms and he hoped that the traffic would have been dead enough that they would be able to stop, switch drivers, and walk around some. It was normally about an eight-hour drive to Tanith’s dad’s house. She had a feeling that this trip was going to take a little longer than anticipated.
After five minutes of no stalled vehicles, Walt slowed the truck and stopped right in the middle of the road.
“Aren’t you going to at least pull over?” Tanith asked.
“Nope. No traffic.” He said, throwing the truck into park, but leaving the engine idling just in case they needed to make a fast getaway.
Three Days From Home Page 10