Earth's Survivors: box set

by Wendell Sweet

  As they left the truck and began to walk across the asphalt, Beth suddenly stopped short. When she did, Billy automatically raised his rifle.

  “What?” he asked in a near whisper.

  Instead of answering she pointed with the machine pistol, she had also raised, toward one of the vehicles in front of the store. Billy hadn't noticed when they had exited the truck, but the low rumble of the trucks idle suddenly came to him in the clear morning air. Stupid! I should have been paying attention. Before he could take the thought any further, a tall gray-haired, older man stepped from the store, and, after seeing them frozen in position in the parking lot, quickly ducked back inside.

  NINE

  March 23rd

  Conner and Katie

  Conner awoke with Katie curled into him. He lay quietly for a few minutes listening to the silence in the factory, holding her loosely, listening to her quiet, slow breathing. He closed his arms around her and pulled her closer to him, stroking her hair lightly, feeling the warm press of her body against his own. She mumbled in her sleep, pressed her face more deeply into his chest and quieted back into sleep once more. Conner lay still, content to hold her, feel her body against his own. He was in no hurry to get up and get the day started. It could get started on its own, he told himself.

  He glanced at the hanging collection of tarps and blankets. No light seeped around the edges, so it was not sunrise yet. There was no rush.

  He had only spent a few short minutes with her the night before when they had come in. She had spent most of that time talking to Allison. He had finally left the two of them alone. It seemed to be what Allison needed. He had gone back outside where Jake, Aaron, James and Amy were keeping watch.

  “She okay?” Amy had asked. Conner had told her she seemed to be and that she was talking to Allison right then. It was clear to Conner that Amy wished she were inside talking to Katie and Allison, so Conner had told her to go, that he’d be happy to stand watch for awhile.

  Awhile turned into a four hour shift with Aaron, Jake and Dustin. James had gone back in shortly after Conner had come out. They had talked on and off through the hours, but most of the time they spent looking around themselves at the darkness, even watching the cliffs above them that led up to a large, paved parking area at the back of the public square.

  Twice in the distance they had heard a motor running, but it had faded in and out so quickly that they couldn’t place the direction it had come from. Aaron thought it had come from someplace out State Street. Dustin was sure it came from Washington Street which ran out of the opposite side of the square from where they were. Once they had heard voices raised in anger, or distress, it was hard to tell, but nothing came near them during the night.

  He had finished the four hour shift, and when he had come back in Katie had been asleep. She had awakened briefly when he had crawled in beside her, told him she loved him and then fallen back asleep with her head resting against the rise of his chest just as she was now. He had lain awake then for a long time, just holding her, stroking her hair, unwilling to fall asleep. Now he was unwilling to get up and start the day. It was the same thing. The same feeling of the night before, an overwhelming need to hold her, to let the day go wherever it might go on its own.

  As he lay holding her, he realized the factory wasn’t silent after all. It was quiet though. Small noises from the other people as they slept: the rustle of blankets, soft breathing, the quiet sounds of someone getting up and moving around, softer sounds, sounds he couldn’t quite identify. They were comforting sounds. He was completely content to stay right where he was and listen to them.

  There was a little light from the fire, really only small curls of flame casting just enough light to make out the contours of the walls and the other sleepers.

  Sometimes, like this, he could feel the weight of responsibility on his shoulders like some impossibly heavy load, something he could not ever hope to bear, and he felt like an impostor. He was no leader. He had no idea why anyone would want to make him one or listen to anything he had to say, but they did. And not only did they listen, they were prepared to follow too. And he had no more idea than anyone else where they should go, what the future held. None at all.

  No idea if there would be other people, a place to live, food, more crazies like they had run into here. He felt as if he knew absolutely nothing at all, yet here he was responsible for fourteen people. Fourteen people! The number alone made him feel panic. And what if what some of the others thought was true? What if they did pick up others along the way? What then? Could he be responsible for fifteen? Twenty? Thirty? Where would it end? And what would they think if they knew he was not as calm, cool and collected as everyone else thought he was?

  Katie moved, one hand tracing along his side. Her body pressing more firmly against him. He felt her lips against his ear as she whispered to him.

  “Make love to me.”

  Jake and James had both made jokes about learning to make love in near silence. He pushed the thoughts out of his head, lowered his mouth on Katie’s own and pulled her closer to him. Katie pulled him over on to her, he quit worrying and lost himself in the moment.

  Route 40: The Southwestern Desert

  Day Two

  Sammy Black

  The sweat trickled across his eyelid and then slipped into the eye as it opened, stinging. He squeezed his eyes shut and felt the pain flare slightly in his leg as he moved it in his reaction. He kept his eyes closed, trying to remember. It came to him after a brief second. He was in the truck. Wrecked... Night was coming... He opened his eyes slowly, ignoring the stinging from the salty sweat.

  No... The sun was low, in the wrong place... Morning, he decided. Somehow... Somehow he had slept the night through. It was gone. Morning was here. He remembered why he had slipped away, moving the leg. He looked down at it now. It was much worse. Swollen, pushed hard against the dashboard, black and purple where he could see the skin through the shredded and ripped cloth of the pants. He could feel the metal lip of the dash embedded into the long bone of his thigh like a hatchet, he thought.

  His leg stank, he stank, like urine and spoiled meat. Maybe he had been out for days. He had no way to know, just laying here rotting in the heat. It was morbid, but he couldn't get the mental picture out of his head once he had thought it into being.

  He closed his eyes and took several deep breaths. It did seem to help clear his head, but a low buzz came right back, if it had ever been there. He wasn't sure. Maybe it had, but it settled in as though it belonged there. He remembered the gun. The gun he had reached for that had started it all and he felt the cool metal under his right hand. He curled his fingers around it, they were stiff, unwilling. He looked down at his hand. Scraped skin, dead and black clung to his fingers. The bone showed through in places. Black blood flaked off the fingers as he forced them to close around the grip.

  ~

  The wolf was fifty yards away, hidden in a slight dip in the desert, an arroyo that cut through the hard pan, dry now, but it could change in an instant out here. The bare rock that lay against his belly cool, an escape from the heat. Nevertheless, he panted. Already his body was overheated in the desert morning.

  He had smelled the man a few hours before light and followed the scent. He knew the scent of man. It had always meant fear, flight, but lately it often meant food, sustenance. He wondered, as he lay, which one this would be.

  It was quiet in those hours before sunrise, still he had been afraid to follow it to its source. He had heard it breathing... Whatever this man was, he was not yet dead. The wolf could wait. Waiting was something he understood.

  The roar took him by surprise and he whined deeply in his throat, flattening himself against the cool stone. Crying in his fear, but time slipped by and the noise did not come again. He waited, listening, watching the sun lift further into the pale blue of the sky, but he heard nothing more. He lifted his head from the ground, stood on gaunt legs, and howled into the quiet of the morn
ing. He sank back to the cool rock and waited. Nothing answered him. A few minutes later he raised from the rock and made his way up onto the highway.

  New York: Old Towne

  Conner and Katie

  When he awakened again it was much later, Katie was gone, the smell of coffee was on the air and hunger was gnawing at his belly. A dull gray light was seeping around the edges of the tarps and blankets that hung over the entryway.

  He lay for a few minutes thinking about how much he loved Katie, wondering how funny it was that he had lost so much yet gained so much, something he had never had and had been in no hurry to go out and find. He wondered how he had ever managed to live his life without her in it. He wondered over how deep his love was in such a short period. It seemed like it was just yesterday when he had first met her. He had remembered how he had never really found tattoos attractive on a woman, but she had this tribal thing that started on her left hand, wrapped around that wrist and then sleeved her arm, disappearing under her shirt sleeve. It was one of the first things he had noticed, and when she had been reaching for something he had seen another piece of the same work that came down across her flat stomach and slipped below the waist band of her jeans. While he had been wondering if it was a second piece or part of the same piece, she had caught him looking. Her eyes had settled on his own and the next thing he knew he was thinking about her in an entirely different way. Thinking about making love to her, about being with her. Thinking that could never happen, Jake was obviously interested. And then she had walked over and changed his entire life.

  He couldn’t be without her now. The man he was becoming had a lot to do with her, probably would have never existed without her, and he had never even known she existed, never even known that love could be like that. The entire world was destroyed, but he had found himself. And she loved him too. He could feel it, see it. It was every bit as strong as what he felt for her. Not clingy, just real. Total.

  “Hey,” Katie said. His eyes had slipped closed; he opened them to see her standing over him, a cup of coffee in one hand.

  “Coffee,” He said.

  “Good,” she said. “It’s alive. Were you going to sleep the day away?” She handed him the coffee carefully as he sat up.

  “Something wore me out,” He grinned. “You okay?”

  “More than okay,” She answered. She leaned over and kissed him.

  ~

  The snow had finally stopped falling sometime after Conner had come off shift. A blanket of wet, slushy snow covered the ground outside the factory. Conner examined the truck that had been left from the night before. It was a new sport utility, but someone had put more than a little work into it: a lift kit, larger tires, brush guards. It had much more ground clearance than any of their trucks.

  “This looks as though it could go anywhere,” Conner said.

  James and Jake were going over it.

  “It could, nearly. And whoever did it did a good job. They must have a garage somewhere with a pit. And they had to have done it all with standard stuff too, no air tools,” James said. He looked and sounded impressed.

  “Changing suspension parts without air tools?” Conner asked.

  “Not hard,” James said. “Also, it’s a new vehicle. The nuts and bolts aren’t rusted on yet. A couple of years up here and they would be a lot harder to turn, but now? No big deal. That’s what they make breaker bars and three quarter inch socket sets for,” he finished.

  “You know,” Jake said, “If we did this to a couple of our trucks, we wouldn’t have to worry about leaving them if we got stuck, or drove a rock through an oil pan. Those things wouldn’t happen.”

  “We could drive around almost anything,” James added.

  Conner nodded. “Yeah, but how long does something like this take to do?”

  James was staring at the factory. “You know. Even lifted, these trucks could fit right in there,” he said.

  “What?” Conner asked.

  “What?” James asked at the same time. He and Conner laughed.

  “I asked how long it would take to do this to our vehicles,” Conner said.

  “Oh, well, Jake’s a good mechanic too, so there are two of us, maybe a few other pairs of hands that have some skill attached to them. We could do one a day, easy,” He said.

  “So would that set your mind at rest that they wouldn’t bog us down or get stuck on us?” Conner asked.

  James nodded. “All we need is parts and tools. See?” he squatted, motioned Conner down, and pointed at the rear suspension. “The back lifts are mainly blocks… Re-arched springs… Swap out the shocks for larger, longer travel units… New U bolts…”

  “James… you lost me, Man," Conner said.

  James grinned. “The answer is yes. It would set my mind at ease. It would allow us to go virtually anywhere. And it wouldn’t be tough to do the work at all. We could get all the parts today. Want to do all of them?”

  “Probably should, shouldn’t we?” Conner asked.

  James nodded.

  ~

  They spent the rest of the morning and the afternoon picking up the parts that James and Jake needed and working off Jan’s master list at the same time. The strip malls out Washington Street, and the auto garages at the dealerships, had everything they needed. They left the other pickup trucks behind and took three nearly identical G.M.C. pickups they had found on one of the lots. James felt it would be easier to have three identical trucks to work on. Once they worked out what to do on the first truck, the next two would be easy. On top of that, the three Suburban’s were Chevy products, General Motors. G.M.C. was also General Motors and James felt that would be the best way to proceed. The same motors, transmissions and nearly all the other parts too. The trucks could swap a lot of their parts. It made good sense. They could carry spare parts that would fit any of the trucks.

  They took three trucks wherever they went: One truck with three people in it waited outside while the people from the other two trucks went in to fill the lists. The ones in the first truck kept the clip rifles at the ready. They encountered no problems.

  Just before evening they called it a day and headed back to the factory. There were three on guard duty there too with the remaining clip rifle. They spent some time clearing the entire area near the front entrance of the factory so that the following morning James and Jake could begin working on the trucks.

  Dustin was impressed with the size of the tires they were going to fit to the trucks. James promised to show him how they would fit the tires to the new rims without a tire machine.

  “I grew up on a farm,” James had told him. “We did it all the time. In fact, I didn’t realize there was a machine to do that until I was out of my teens and living off the farm,” he’d said.

  “No,” Dustin had said. “You’re kidding?”

  “Nope, I’m not,” James had told him.

  Jan spent the evening checking off items from her master lists, and making new lists for the next day.

  By evening all but the snow in the corners and cracks that the sun couldn’t reach was gone, melted. The night was clear and the stars shone brightly; diamond chips in the inky blackness.

  ~

  “It bothers me more than a little that they haven’t come back,” Conner said to Katie, Nell and Aaron. The four of them had the watch up to midnight.

  “I can see that. It bothers me also,” Aaron said.

  “Maybe they’re scared,” Nell added.

  “I would’ve said no, that they don’t seem like the type that could be frightened off, but if they’re with the other two, then they’ve told them how Sin was shot down. The one that came here got a lesson I’m sure he won’t soon forget. They know we’re not bluffing. And I’m sure they’re afraid of what Allison might say. She did too. She had a lot to say, if only to Amy and me. So I imagine they’re scared to death, but I don’t think that will hold them forever. Maybe for a while. Maybe long enough for us to be gone by the time they decide to come at u
s... Retaliate,” Katie finished.

  “I hope that’s true, Babe,” Conner said. “I really do.”

  “Yeah. That would be good,” Aaron agreed.

  Nell was looking at Katie. She caught her eye. “Bad?” She asked.

  “Yeah,” Katie said. “Bad.”

  “Fuckers. They better not come back, “Nell said.

  March 25th

  Kentucky: Billy and Beth

  The sight of the man broke the paralysis that had held them, and they both quickly took cover behind an old station wagon parked in the lot. Billy continued to mentally berate himself for not hearing the sound of the running truck when he had gotten out of the Suburban. Stupid-Stupid-Stupid, he thought as he dropped to the ground and tried to crawl under the old car.

  He couldn't get all the way under it, but he did get under it far enough to be able to look into the open doorway of the sporting goods store. What he could see of it was empty, but he could not see far enough into the gloom of the interior to see whether there was just the old man, or others waiting with him in the shadowy store.

  “Hey!” a young sounding male voice called from within the store. “Don't shoot, okay? We don't want any trouble with you.”

  The voice let Billy and Beth know that there were at least two people in the store, and a few seconds later, they could hear the soft weeping of a woman coming from the store as well.

  “We don't want trouble either,” Billy called.

  From under the car he could see a jeans-clad pair of legs separate from the shadows, and cautiously walk toward the open doorway. “What do you think, Beth,” Billy whispered, “you believe 'em?”

  “Only one way to find out,” she replied, as she backed out from under the car and slowly stood.