by Maxey, Phil
“We need to get to Jefferson City. So we’re just driving through. Can you put the knife down?”
She lowered it a little. “Why you want to get to Jefferson?”
He could have lied but thought better of it. “There’s a place. Its got a vaccine. Stops people from changing…”
His eyes caught hers and her hand holding the knife fell to her side. “Shit… you’re serious,” she said.
*****
10: 09 a.m. Highway 70, eastern outskirts of Topeka.
Jess looked at a sign that was leaned to one side, as they moved passed it.
‘Thank you for visiting Topeka! Come back soon!’
She was driving, giving Meg some much needed sleep and felt stronger than she had for a while. She avoided looking at her right hand, which she was sure felt heavier than before, and hoped no one else noticed how different it looked. Or maybe they had and didn’t want to mention her ‘deformity.’ Either way, she was alive.
Not like your son and husband…
It was the first time she had allowed the thought to fully form, but she still immediately dismissed the notion as insane. There was no way she was getting through this without her family. Her husband and son were out there, she… just did not know where. The Kellers would survive this plague.
A green sign flashed by, mentioning Kansas City was only some thirty miles away, but before that was another small city called ‘Lawrence.’ She had already checked the roadmap and the highway continued to cut through the center of Kansas City. If the road was clear, she would risk it. She now had maybe another day before the change would try to claim her again, but her daughter and Meg didn’t have that luxury. Something occurred to her and she looked in the rear mirror. “After I came home yesterday, when did you eat the chocolates in the bag?”
Sam looked down briefly. “Umm… pretty soon, I stole some. Tasted awful. Didn’t have anymore.”
Jess nodded. “Okay.”
She only has another hour at most.
“Why?”
“Oh, no reason.”
“Don’t do that. Tell me. Why? You think I’m going to change soon, don’t you?”
“You’re not going to change, Sam. And we’re not far from Amos’s home.”
“You don’t know that! I saw what you did. You were going to jump out when the change started.” Her eyes locked with her mother’s. “If I start to change, you have to let me—”
Jess shook her head. “Nope. No. You’re not going to change, so this discussion is pointless.”
Sam frowned, looking away and folding her arms.
Jess caught the boy looking at her and returned her view fully to the road ahead. Somehow it was easier to lie to her daughter, even when it was obviously not true. But the boy… he reminded her of Josh, and she couldn’t lie to him.
As she focused again on the highway, she could feel his eyes on the back of her head. He was judging her. He knew she had let her own little boy die… and her husband… he—
“I’ve been thinking about that…” said Meg.
Jess let out a breath she didn’t realize she was holding and glanced at the older woman as a parking lot full of semi-trucks passed by. “Oh, you’re awake. Thinking about what?”
“I think I was the last one to have the vaccine… in that chocolate you gave me… so that would mean the change will come to me last, and…well, I should know the destination. Your friend’s place, just in case… we don’t all make it.”
Jess had been looking at her while she was talking and almost forgot to look back to the road. “Oh, umm… yeah, that’s a good point.”
Stall Jess, Stall… think of something…
“So where is it? What’s the address?”
“But there is no need for anyone to know where it is right now, because no one else is going to change.” Her eyes drifted briefly across her hand, then looked away.
An awkward pause settled inside the car.
“You don’t know where it is, do you? Your friend’s home?”
Jess scrunched her face. “Of course I know where it is. It’s a few miles outside Jefferson City…”
Meg sighed, looking back to the highway. “Well… shit.”
“Look. He told me where it was and showed me some pictures. I can’t remember the address, but I’m sure once we get to the area, I’ll recognize something…”
“Of course you don’t know where it is!” said Sam, looking out the side window. “Why would I expect you to know where it was! That would be too easy!”
Jess shook her head then continued. It was too much. Half of her family had died and now what was left was probably going to die as well.
I should have jumped out… then Sam could have taken—
“Jess!”
Meg’s voice was distant and Jess saw herself driving off the road, crashing through a fence as if she was floating above the car, watching it all happen.
The sedan skidded to a halt, sliding sideways slightly. Jess blinked, her foot was on the brake and ahead was a sturdy looking trunk they were seconds from hitting. The only noise in the car was Tye crying.
“I think I should drive,” said Meg.
Jess nodded.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
10: 15 a.m. Highway 70, eastern outskirts of Topeka.
A sign flashed past Landon. He vaguely caught that it talked about leaving the city. For the past thirty minutes the girl in the back, who had straggly red shoulder length hair and freckles, sat silent. She hadn’t asked about them and they hadn’t asked about her. Landon wasn’t particularly comfortable with a stranger who was friends with the two that took their car, being just a few feet behind his head, but he was out of options. He needed to get to Jefferson City. No time for arguments. Just driving.
“What’s it name?” said the girl to Josh.
He briefly looked down at the dog. “It’s just dog…”
She scoffed. “You can’t call him just ‘dog.’ He has to have a name.”
“How about you tell us your name?” said Landon.
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
“Just be easier if we knew what we were all called. I’m Landon. This is my son, Josh…” He heard her sigh.
“Tracey.”
He wasn’t sure that was her real name, but it was something. “So, Jay’s your boyfriend?”
There was another hesitation before she answered. “Er… yeah. Clint’s his pa.”
“I’m sorry they left you Tracey.”
“Yeah, well. I wish I could say it was a big surprise, but…”
“Donnie…” said Josh, looking at the silver disc on the dog’s collar, who promptly sat up, his tail wagging.
“Means, ready for battle,” said Tracey.
“How you know that?” said Landon.
“I know all kinds of useless stuff. It’s a family curse. My grandmother was the same. People thought she was touched in the head, but she was like, really intelligent. Folks say I’m like her. Dunno.” She leaned forward between the seats, making Landon lean to his left slightly. “No, no, you can’t stay on this road, it takes you to where the monsters are.”
“It’s the quickest route to Jefferson,” said Landon.
She looked at him. “It’s the quickest route to get dead. Take the next exit. We need to get on the ten. Takes us south around Lawrence, then we keep on the small roads south of Kansas City. It adds maybe, another twenty minutes to the journey, but yeah, like I said, less certain death…”
Landon glanced at her. He was pretty good at reading people and he hadn’t believed much of what she had told them so far, but this, she was being honest about. The problem was would Jess have taken the more direct route? “Okay…” He steered them into the other lane and took the exit slope down, hoping his wife would have avoided the big city as well.
*****
10: 20 a.m. Highway 70, western outskirts of Kansas City.
Sam lifted in her seat slightly to see over the bridge�
��s barrier, to the river below. The brown-green waters had a silvery shine to them due to patches of ice on their surface. She had never been one for outdoor pursuits but as they drove towards the city, she would have given anything to be down there, on the banks, watching her father fish, while Josh squirmed at the bait and her mother explained that in every acre of land there could be a million earthworms, or another crazy fact. No doubt she would have been complaining about the lack of cell service and the flies.
The idea that she could change at any moment, becoming one of the things, left her indifferent. Which she didn’t understand. Perhaps it was the grief of losing her brother and father, something her mother obviously hadn’t accepted. Or maybe she just didn’t care anymore. Why care when your fate is decided for you? There was no fighting what had crept its way out of Denver, and crawled across the nation, ending life… or rather altering it. They had only lived this long due to sheer luck. What happened in the motorhome was real life, not the fantasy they had been—
“Do you want to play cards?” said Tye to her.
She looked at him as if he had just insulted her and he looked down. “Umm… you have cards?”
He pulled them from his jacket pocket. “I think there are some missing. I just grabbed a bunch when the monsters came.”
“Sure. Deal.”
A smile came to his face, which for a moment made her want to do the same, but then she realized her own brother was gone. She turned away. “No. I don’t want to play.”
Meg sighed. She had been listening while paying attention to the highway, which was devoid of vehicles. Beyond were beige flat fields, with some white farm buildings even further away, but the lack of cars or trucks made her uneasy. She couldn’t shake the feeling that they were the only people left alive, and were surrounded by a sea of unnatural things. Things that used to be people, but were now hideously deformed… worse, the people had been molded together into something else. She had seen enough of the things to know that the virus had the ability to break down the living to their basic elements and recreate them as monsters. And these things only had one intent, to find the remaining people and do the same to them.
Need to find a gun and ammo in the city. Must be some places we can quickly stop.
She knew she had longer before the change came for her, longer than Sam or the boy if he wasn’t immune. She needed to use that to at least find some weapons. But convincing the woman to her right would be difficult. Her daughter was running out of time.
Jess looked at the mundane landscape. It reminded her of the moon, but worse. The lunar surface didn’t have mutated people roaming across it…
She kept starting to remember Landon or Josh and immediately stopped it from happening. For soon afterwards came the pain, and there was no time for that. Sam was alive. Sam needed the vaccine. She was going to move heaven and earth to make that happen. It was that simple.
“There’s a pickup behind us,” said Meg, looking in the rear mirror. “Thank God. I thought we were the only ones. It’s speeding up.”
“Don’t slow,” said Jess. “We need to get to Jefferson!”
Meg looked at her. “Look, I get it. We need to get the—”
“I don’t think you do get it!”
Meg eased up on the gas.
“What are you doing?”
“We need to talk to them! They might have news about what’s happening!”
The sedan skidded to a halt on the side of the highway. The old beat up pickup did the same about ten feet behind.
“It’s two men,” said Sam, looking out the rear window. “Old and younger. They seem to be laughing about something.”
Meg pushed her door open, making a point to take the keys with her. “Two minutes and we’re back on the road. That’s all I ask.” She didn’t bother waiting for a reply from Jess and got out. The older of the pickup’s occupants wound his window down, and she walked up to it. “Howdy,” she said, giving a little wave. “You’re the first people we’ve seen out here.”
“Yeah, same for us,” he said. The other man just smiled.
“Have you come across any of the things?”
“Nah, pretty quiet out here. Heard radio reports that there are some in the city.. So it’s just you, the other woman and the girl?”
Meg looked back at the sedan. Tye was too short to be seen. “Er, and a boy. We found him alone. Parents probably dead.”
“Lot of that going around.”
The passenger’s door opened, the tall, bearded man getting out. “Think I’ll pay my respects to your friends, there.”
“Umm, okay.” She looked back to the old man and the barrel of the revolver pointing directly at her chest. He produced a toothless grin.
“Don’t fret. He just want to see if you got anything we want. Then we’ll be—”
Meg lunged for the gun, taking the old man completely by surprise, while throwing the car keys towards the Sedan. “Jess! Drive!”
In the sedan, Jess hadn’t even been watching in the rear mirror. Her mind was a daze of disconnected memories. Snippets of history with her husband and child that played out on a constant loop, whether she wanted them too or not.
“Mom!” screamed Sam, just as a boom rang out from behind their car.
Jess swung around to her left to look through the rear window, when she felt a presence to her right. A man lunged for the handle, trying to pull the locked door open. He then looked across the hood and ran around the front and picked something up. With a smile, he dangled the keys from his fingers so everyone inside could see, then walked to the driver’s side. Jess slid across the seats, grabbing the handle as he unlocked the door and pulled from the other side without any success.
Swearing he stood back. “Open the fucking door! Or your friend is gonna get shot!” He nodded to the other car.
Jess turned around. Meg was standing with her hands up, a man behind her, pointing a gun at the side of her head.
“What are we going to do!” said Sam.
“Everyone stay calm,” said Jess. She looked at the man through the door window. “We got stuff! You can have it! But please let my friend go!”
“I’m only going to say it one more time, girly. Open the fucking door and get out, or my pa is going to put a hole in your friend’s head!”
“Fine!” She glanced back to her daughter and Tye. “Stay close to me when we get out. These are mean men. Just do what they say.”
Jess released her hand from the handle and the man immediately pulled it open. She got out, as did Sam and Tye, the latter two moving close to Jess, and all three backed away from the car and the man.
He ducked inside, pulling out a backpack full of candy. “Hey found some sweets!” he said with a smile to the older man.
“Take all of it,” said Jess. “Take what you want. Just let us go on our way.”
The man dropped the pack with a sneer and walked to just inches from her. “I’ll take… anything… I want…”
“We ain’t got time for that shit,” said the older man pushing the pickup’s door closed while keeping the gun fixed on Meg. “Just our luck to steal a piece of old shit pickup, that breaks as soon as we take it. That guy and his kid wouldn’t have got—”
The old man’s words almost slipped past Jess, until a voice at the back of her mind shouted for her to pay them attention. “Guy? Kid?”
“What do you care?” said the old man.
“Please, who were they?”
“Some cop guy and—”
A concoction of emotion hit Jess, so tangled with fear, doubt and hope that she almost collapsed.
The bearded man looked at the woman and girl who were crying. “Stop your blabbing!” He pulled his fist back, aiming it at Sam’s head and brought it down hard, but it wasn’t the girl’s skull that it impacted with, but Jess’s hand. He looked at the woman with bemusement, as did everyone else then thrust his hand out towards her neck, but she caught that as well, and before the idea that he was bein
g held by someone far stronger than him fully lodged in his mind, she swung him around and placed her hand and arm around his neck, making him crouch back slightly due to his height.
“Let her go!” she shouted to the older man, who was holding Meg tight to him, the gun leaving a mark on her check.
“You dumb ass, Jay! Letting a woman take you like that!”
Jay struggled, but the woman’s grip was like a vice with no give.
She tightened her arm around him. “I’ll break his neck! Let her go! Then put the gun on the ground and get back in your shitty pickup!”
Anger and frustration flowed across the old man’s face. “Go on, get!” He pushed Meg forward, but rather than walking away, she calmly turned, holding her hand out.
“Gun?”
“She’s strangling me, pa!”
The old man’s faced tightened in rage and he handed Meg the pistol.
She pointed it back at him. “Let him go, Jess.”
Jess pulled the keys from his hand then released her grip and he sprung forward, whirling around at the same time. “I’ll fucking end you!. If I see you…” He noticed Meg now pointing the gun at him.
“You were told to leave,” she said.
He shook his head and with Clint, started to walk back to the pickup, but Jess ran forward. “Wait. What did you do with the guy and his son?”
“We just left them on the road!” said Clint. “Didn’t harm a hair on their heads!”
Jess took a step forward, making Jay do the opposite in the other direction, almost falling over his feet. “How long ago!” she screamed.
“I dunno. Maybe an hour?” said the younger man.
She looked at Meg with desperation. “We have to go back!”
“What about getting to the vaccine?”
“What you talking about, a vaccine?” said Clint.
Jess looked down in thought. “Someone should go and see if they can get it.”
“Well, that has to be you darling,” said Meg. “You’re the only person who has any idea of where it is.”