Earth's Survivors: box set

by Wendell Sweet

  “Somewhere south. It was back when this whole thing started. I rigged up a C.B. Just heard talk of a place in Alabama. People were gathering together. I think Alabama, maybe it isn't, but it was south... not on the coast. Really it was just a snatch of conversation. I got nothing better than that, but it sounded real. And I heard it more than once.” Adam scrubbed at his own beard.

  “You just Missed Mike and Candace. They met some people that swore there is a place somewhere in Kentucky that is just starting. They are the ones that left to see what is left of Alabama. We might find ourselves looking them up if they find there is something there,” Billy said.

  “Wish I had talked to them,” Adam said thoughtfully.

  “They knew no more than what Billy just told you. They only met the people for just a few hours somewhere in New York as they were on the way here. Another place that might or might not be real,” Beth added. “But it looks like we're all going in the same general direction.”

  Adam nodded as he fixed his eyes on Beth. “Okay. Well, I'm heading for it... and, well... fuck it, I got to come out with it because I don't want a mistake about it later; I don't follow. I'm just not built that way. I didn't do it in the old world, and I won't do it now. As long as that's clear, you're coming with me... I'm not coming with you.”

  “Harsh,” Mac said.

  “Maybe,” Adam agreed. “But we can't have a shit load of chiefs and no Indians. I don't mean I have the only say, I mean that I don't... Hell, I don't know a better way to say it. I can't sugar coat it. I don't follow. It doesn't mean I don't listen though, I do. It's that simple. I guess that means what it means.” He threw up his hands.

  “I don't need a leader,” Beth said. “I lead me, as long as that's straight.”

  “Do you?” Adam said.

  “Wow... Can you feel the love?” Billy said. Jamie cut her eyes over at him where she stood next to David. She rolled her eyes once she caught his, and then turned and looked up at David adoringly. Billy turned away from her, his eyes looking for Beth, but Beth had eyes only for the big man, Adam. Billy sighed, looked down at the ground, and then back up as the conversation picked up once more. He ignored Jamie. He deserved her anger, after all.

  Cammy laughed, put a hand to her mouth, and then took it away and laughed harder. A second later all of them were laughing.

  “Hey,” Billy said after a moment. “The two of you lead. Sounds workable to me, I don't have even a slight wish to lead. Not at all.”

  “Peace,” Mac said. “Along for the ride. As long as it's stable, you know?”

  Beth eyed Adam. “You and me then?”

  Adam nodded. “I can roll with that. First thing though, we need better weapons. If this thing is south, we don't know how far, and it could be dead by now. Not saying it ever even got off the ground. So we don't know how far we're going. We need good guns. How bad did you see it in L.A.?”

  “Oh, Christ,” Billy started. He handed Adam one of the machine pistols they had picked up.

  ~

  The morning turned to early afternoon before the four trucks pulled up out of the field together, followed the service roadway back onto route three and headed toward Clifton. Cammy studied a map as Adam drove.

  “It's hard to believe this is as far as we have traveled in over a month together,” she said as she studied the map.

  “We had no real direction,” Adam supplied. “It's not like we had decided on a place and headed toward it.” Adam watched the sides of the road. They were traveling along at less than twenty miles an hour, weaving down into the median and off onto the service roads that paralleled the highway when they had too.

  There were too many cars abandoned next to the road, in the road, even across the road, to be able to keep track of all of them at one time. A large mall came up on the right, and Adam slowed at the interchange to look it over. Billy's truck rolled up, the window dropped and Beth leaned out.

  “Looks okay,” she said, breaking the silence of the quiet afternoon.

  “Except it's quiet,” Adam agreed. “That's always been bad news.”

  Beth held up her machine pistol. “We need what we need.”

  Adam nodded. “Let's go then. We stay together though.”

  Beth nodded, Billy shifted back into drive and waited for Adam to pull away. He pulled in behind him and followed.

  There was a thick line of trees behind the shops that Adam didn't like. It seemed like the perfect place for someone to hide away. He drove slowly into the first Mall area, past the trees and into the second lot. The trees were not as thick up close, but he could still not see through them, and it bothered him. Anything, or anyone, could be hidden within them. He turned the truck, pointed it back toward the entrance road and shut it down.

  Billy, and then Mac, pulled down, turned around and stopped next to Adam's truck. They shut down too, and the ticking of cooling motors filled the silence of the parking lot. Adam looked around the lot but saw nothing that seemed out of place.

  Abandoned cars and trucks. The front doors to a discount store were shattered, the aluminum frames twisted, pushed open wide and pinned against the faux brick front with carts. Adam had left the windows up. He didn't like the idea of having to start the truck to roll them back up. It was better to roll them up before he shut down. He levered the door open, and stepped down to the pavement. Beside him, Billy, Beth, and Mac stepped out of their own vehicles. The doors chuffed closed, and the silence came back heavy.

  Adam scanned the parking lot, but saw nothing. He looked over at Beth. She shrugged and looked back over at the wood line Adam turned away and started toward the shattered front entrance. The others fell in behind him.

  ~

  “It's a bad place to try to defend,” Beth said.

  They were in the parking lot of a huge chain store, a few miles down the road from where they had started. They had found this place just a short time before. The front doors were propped open with piles of wooden pallets. It was late in the day, the light beginning to fade from the sky. It was the only real way to tell time any longer, watch the sky. There were just too many variations in the length of the days. It did seem as though the days were becoming more uniform as they passed though. The last several were somewhere close to twenty-eight hours.

  The trucks were loaded down with camping gear, ammunition and other necessities they had picked up at the other place. They had also picked up another truck for Beth and Scotty to drive.

  The stores on both sides of route three had been ransacked, but they had still found more than enough ammunition, guns and camping gear to suit their needs as they worked their way from store to store. Cammy had taken Adam's arm and lead him away from a display of canned beans in one of the stores they had gone through. “No,” she had said. Now they were deciding whether to move on or stay.

  Mac looked over the map. “There's a golf course, right?” He handed the map to Beth. Beth looked it over and nodded.

  “Okay, so it's huge... a few miles ahead,” he looked up from the map.

  “My problem with that is trees, areas where they can hide. I'd almost rather be in the middle of the highway or a cleared field... something like that,” Adam said.

  Beth nodded. “It has got to be overgrown, the golf course. Be great, perfect, if it wasn't. But it's been several months, and that grass has got to be higher than we stand. I say no. I can't see a way we could be safe.”

  “There's an overpass ahead,” Don offered.

  “I saw that, but it looks like a pedestrian overpass, that's not gonna work,” Adam said. “They could use it to drop right down on us if we stayed under it, and we'd have to be on foot if we stayed up top.”

  Beth traced a finger across the map. “Look. We need to get to 81... We decided that... 3 to 46... 46 to 80... 80 to 81...” She sighed and looked up.

  Adam laughed. “Yeah, and no way to tell what is what.”

  Beth nodded. “I think the map is pretty close to worthless.”

&nb
sp; Adam nodded this time. “It's just that there has been so much destruction. It might get better as we go,” he shrugged his shoulders, “It might get worse. But it's not too bad. I say keep the map. It may help on occasion. It's not bad to know where we might be, but we have to acknowledge that everything is torn up and there is no way to know if a particular route will be where it should be.” He looked at the map himself and then straightened up. “Okay, sun sets in the northeast now. A compass can not tell us that. Or if it can, I don't know how to do it. All I know is that the few times I have tried to use the compass, it points at different areas. Needle won't stay still. So,” he reached into his pocket and pulled out a small key chain compass.

  The key chain itself held several keys. Adam looked at the keys for a second as though he had never seen them, then watched the needle quiver and dip. “Well, anyway,” he said. “It's no good.” He drew back and rocketed the keys, compass and all into the sky. “Should have gotten that gone a long time ago. So, no good. But sun rises in the southwest, a little more to the south than the west. That gives us something to follow. If we stay to the right of the sun by a few degrees, we'll be okay. Even if we followed the sun itself, we'd be okay. That will bring us to 81 eventually. Of course, I'm not sure 81 will do us much good once, or if, we find it.”

  “How so?” Mac asked.

  “Because, Honey,” Iris said. “Remember?”

  “If I remembered, I wouldn't have asked,” Mac said. “Hey... I mean that in a not-being-an-asshole way,” he added.

  “Sounded like it,” Iris said dryly. “Well, there was a run toward the south. I remember seeing the interstate and the thruway clogged. People tried to leave the north. So I would bet that everything going to the south is packed solid.”

  Adam nodded. “Saw that,” he agreed.

  “Bad wrecks on the thruway.” Winston added. “I remember seeing huge wrecks on the way here... I think it was the thruway.”

  “So, a few degrees to the right of the sun as it travels. Or follow routes where we can. We have about fifty to sixty miles to get into Pennsylvania. I'm thinking about staying away from the cities. I'm thinking what could they, the gangs, want in the middle of nowhere? It seems we could be safe there.”

  “Probably,” Beth agreed. “But there's no way we'll make it today. And there is no way to account for individuals and what they might do, how they might act toward us.” She looked out of the parking lot at route three, which was hopelessly clogged and had only been getting worse as they drove it. She turned and looked back at the store behind them.

  “Listen, this will sound crazy, but if we drove right into the store, built a fire right outside the doors... a big one... burn all night... how could they get us?” Beth asked.

  “Leave early... get on the road. We might be able to make Pennsylvania tomorrow,” Mac agreed.

  “Not bad,” Billy agreed.

  “We'll need a lot of wood to burn,” Adam threw in.

  “More of those pallets. Every store has those out back,” Iris added. “Dead wood from the tree parks around here.”

  “Parking lot full of tires. Tires burn,” Winston added.

  “Let's get to it then,” Adam agreed.

  The front of the store was destroyed. They stayed together, walking aisle to aisle.

  The smell had hit all of them when they crossed the threshold into the store. There were dead there, where they did not know. They walked slowly through the huge building, silent, safeties off their rifles.

  At one end cap, Adam snatched a stack of flashlights and passed them around. A few seconds later they had stripped off the packaging, installed the batteries and, with a roll of duct tape, strapped the lights to their rifle barrels in the on position. Bright pools of light followed them as they made their way further into the store. Heavy gloves came next, and as they found the dead they loaded them onto flat carts meant to move stock, and rolled them out into the parking lot, dumping them beyond the trees.

  Adam stopped at the back of the store. A set of heavy steel doors lead into the back storage area. There was no one left in the store itself, but he didn't doubt that at times there had been. There was too much stuff for someone not to be coming back to get what they might need, and there was too little gone.

  He eased his pouch from his jacket pocket, snagged a paper, shook the tobacco out and rolled a cigarette with one hand. He popped the cigarette into his mouth and then they looked around near the back area, Adam ran a length of steel pipe into the door handles and jammed it into the floor at an angle, making sure the doors were temporarily secured. A pile of wooden pallets that was stacked against the concrete block wall caught Adam's eyes.

  “Give me a hand,” Adam said. All three of them joined in and the stack of pallets came down and was re-stacked on the carts in just a few minutes.

  “Lighter fluid... paint thinner... something flammable,” Adam said. Beth looked around, crossed to the steel shelving that ran along the back of the wall.

  “Starting fluid?” She asked.

  Adam nodded. He took a case of the starting fluid and added it to the pallets. Together they pushed the pallets out past the front doors and onto the wide concrete entrance way on either side of the doors. He pushed over the stacks onto the edge of the concrete, and the others followed suit. They hit the concrete with a loud clatter, and spilled down onto the blacktop. Adam and Billy took a few seconds to drag a few of the pallets back into the pile and then they both began to spray down the pile with the starting fluid and a couple of bottles of Charcoal fluid Beth had found. Mac returned with a few easily retrieved tires from the parking lot and threw those on the piles. Beth left with him for a second trip and they both lugged back several tires they added to the pallet piles on either side of the entrance way. Adam continued to spray down the toppled stack of pallets and tires until his can emptied. It tended to dry fast, so he had let it build up and soak into the wood in a few places, but Beth's charcoal fluid bottles had soaked into the wood well.

  He pulled a kitchen match from his pocket, popped it to life with his thumbnail, lit the cigarette he had rolled, and then tossed the match at the pile of pallets.

  The flare of flame lit up the blacktop and the front of the interior of the store. The wind carried the black smoke that rose into the air off to the opposite end of the parking lot. As the flames leapt, the wood began to snap and crack, throwing light and shadows in the late afternoon that seemed to take the edge off the gloomy skies and the feeling of the day.

  “Probably should go ahead and check that rear storage area just to be safe,” Beth said.

  Adam nodded.

  The light flooded into the storage area. After the darkness of the store interior, lit only by the flashlights, they had to blink to get their sight back. Beth pushed a stack of boxes over to prop one side of the door open, Adam matched it with a heavy steel push cart to block the other side open. The light and air swept into the back area.

  Beyond the doors, empty concrete loading docks ran the length of the rear of the building. Adam stepped out cautiously and looked around. Nothing as far as he could see. Beth stepped out behind him and looked too. A few seconds later, they were making their way back into the main store area.

  An hour later, as the sky began to darken, they had the stacks of pallets and tires burning strong. The five trucks were inside. The back doors to the loading docks were shut and locked once more.

  Several more piles of pallets were set up about ten feet apart in a half circle that closed in the front of the parking lot. Tires had been piled on top of the pallets, spares from cars and trucks in the parking lot. They had not tried to get them off the rims, just punched holes in them so they would not explode as they burned.

  Kerosene lanterns burned inside the store, casting their light. Beth finished pouring a can of kerosene she had liberated from an aisle in the store over the new piles, and Adam stepped forward and flicked a match at the first pile. It went up with a whoosh. He and Mac held stic
ks in the flames and then set the other piles ablaze one by one. Adam finished by lighting another of his cigarettes from the stick, and then tossed the stick into one of the piles to burn. He walked back to the building, sat down on a pile of pallets, leaned his back against the building and smoked as evening came down.

  ~

  They came through the roof...

  Adam was talking to Beth, leaned against the door frame, staring out at the night black parking lot, when the first noise came from the ceiling of the store behind them. There were four of them outside the vehicles talking or keeping watch on the parking lot. Adam and Beth, Mac and Billy. When the first came Billy spun around and fired up into the blackness of the high ceilings. The next shots came so fast that they could not hope to easily and quickly find them and pick them off. They scattered and sought shelter behind the trucks and aisles of merchandise as the battle for the store began.

  Beth raised her machine pistol straight up and began firing into the roof. The light from the lanterns didn't penetrate the darkness all the way to the ceiling, so there was no way to see how many there were or even where they were. She found herself wishing she still had the flashlight taped to the rifle barrel.

  Six darkened figures dropped from the ceiling and Adam had to wait for them to come at him so he could be sure of shooting them and not accidentally shooting into the trucks. Billy ran from truck to truck pounding on the doors and window glass, waking everyone up.

  Adam watched a few figures fall from the ceiling. They hadn't thought it out as well as they had supposed. The fall was too far, over thirty feet, and those who fell were unconscious from the fall when he arrived, or lying with broken limbs moaning or crying. He reversed the stock of his rifle and ran at a man in front of him he was lifting a pistol from his side. He clubbed him and then reversed the rifle and began firing back up through the ceiling again. Six more dropped from the darkness above, one right after the other dead or wounded from the gunfire, and now he could hear those left on the roof scrambling to get away, running toward the back of the store. He followed the noise with his rifle fire, and the others did the same.