Chapter 10: Lone Wolves
After the excitement of the race to the cars, Andy couldn’t help but feel that the car ride was on the anticlimactic side. He had only had a car sparingly during 2010, and so had rarely had that tiny extra bit of security that comes from being able to travel several times as fast as any likely pursuer.
Nonetheless, as he drove, Andy fell back into his normal driving habits: knuckles tight on the steering wheel, eyes darting back and worth, always wary as he followed behind the Stones’ vehicle.
He spared the shortest of glances in his rearview, confirming that the other car in their little caravan was still in line, then turned his eyes back to the road before him. Seconds later, he did a double-take and looked in his rearview again, this time focusing his attention much closer — Stacy Crane, it seemed, had come apart just behind him.
She was silent, but the girl was sobbing in her seat as she looked out the window. Her arms were still crossed across her stomach, as though she were trying to prevent herself from vomiting, an action Andy remembered from the classroom. He could tell she was trying her hardest not to be noticed by her fellow passengers, and had been largely successful. Celia, too, was looking out the window, and Barry Lowensen could have been asleep as far as Andy could tell, though how that could be true in their current situation he couldn’t fathom. Neither of them had spared the slightest glance toward Stacy since they witnessed the young man’s death on campus, as far as Andy knew.
So it was with some hesitation that he observed Stacy’s tears. The girl was young, and he had seen her shed a few drops while they remained at Morgan College. At the same time, though, Stacy appeared to have been as well-prepared for the disastrous scenario as any of the students, with the possible exception of Simon Stone. She had held and fired her weapon confidently, and hadn’t seemed prone to the hysteria Andy had seen in his own daughter.
On the other hand, Andy knew, no one who hadn’t lived through it before could have truly been prepared to confront zombies. And she, more than anyone else in their little group, was alone, with no parents, friends or family around. She had known Celia for only a couple hours when the outbreak began.
Andy wanted to get the girl’s mind onto her loved ones — in a positive way, not a “could they be dead?” way — but he didn’t want to call her out for crying in the process.
“You got a family, Lowensen?” he asked at last, barely giving the teacher a glance as he did so.
The teacher’s head jerked up. He looked around for a moment, then caught Andy’s eye in the rearview. “Me?” he responded. “I…my father is still alive, as far as I know. And my brother. They live in Pennsylvania.”
“No wife? Kids?”
Lowensen almost giggled, then caught himself. “No, no, no. I haven’t had a girlfriend since 2010, in fact. Didn’t see fit to committing to someone who I might lose or have to shoot somewhere down the road if…you know, this.” He punctuated his sentence with a vague wave to the surroundings.
Andy shook his head. Barry Lowensen was not the first person he had heard espouse the single lifestyle in the past twenty years. In fact, there had been a whole section of the Out-There site dedicated to the “Lone Wolves,” as it were.
And the lifestyle itself didn’t make any more sense to him. It was one thing to, like he and Celia, withdraw from socialization — a wide social circle, he had long ago decided, was risky. But it was another altogether to withdraw from everybody. If everyone did that, what did it matter whether zombies came back or not? If every member of the population looked out only for themselves, eventually only corpses would remain, no matter the cause.
It was with some amusement that Andy realized that he was echoing the same argument his daughter made to him in favor of college less than a day earlier.
And it was the thought of college that sent Andy back into his incredulity regarding Lowensen’s choices. The man didn’t want to commit to someone, didn’t want to have anyone relying on him, but chose to be the director of a college full of relatively ignorant young adults? Andy felt his bile toward Lowensen rise all over again.
He quelled it, though, and tried to nonchalantly turn the conversation toward Stacy. “What about you, hon?” he asked. “What about your family?”
When Andy looked into the rearview this time, Stacy was looking back at him. Her rounded cheeks were still stained with tears, but there were no fresh ones falling anymore, and she had a knowing look on her face that told Andy that, not only had his nonchalance not worked, but she seemed to have known his angle from the beginning.
“My mom works in Stamford,” she said.
Andy nodded. He remembered her having mentioned that when they were at the emergency phones earlier. “And your father?” he said before thinking better of it.
Stacy shook her head. “Never knew him.”
This wasn’t uncommon for children Stacy’s age, Andy knew. In fact, Celia hadn’t even known her mother. Stacy’s mother might have been pregnant during 2010 and her father lost in the outbreak. And if not, Andy knew of countless “relationships” that had started in the aftermath of 2010 that lasted just long enough to leave one partner pregnant and both of them single. People were so happy simply to be alive that they convinced themselves of all sorts of “loves” that didn’t really exist. It had been unwise, he knew, to ask Stacy about a second parent. Two-parent households were even more of a rarity in 2030 than they had been early in 2010.
“Well, that’s good about your mom,” he said, trying to sound as light-hearted as he could manage. “If she’s in Stamford, working in government, she’s got to be as safe as just about anybody. Can’t imagine a safer place.”
Stacy nodded, but didn’t seem convinced. After a moment, Lowensen spoke again. “We were supposed to be safe, too,” he mumbled, just loud enough that everyone in the car heard him.
Andy’s eyes jerked back over to the teacher and he glared anew. Lowensen met his eyes for a moment, then looked to the floorboards. Stacy, meanwhile, turned her attention back to the scenery out the window.
“Honey,” Andy said, trying to repeat his soothing tone, “the people in charge of the government buildings surely knew what they were doing. They had protocols in place, guards, provisions, intelligent people, time to prepare. They weren’t controlled by a single ill-equipped leader.” He glared at Lowensen again. “Your mom couldn’t have asked for a better place to hole up this time around.”
Stacy nodded. “That’s what I’ve been praying,” she said.
“Good,” Andy said. “Prayer’s a good choice now. I’ve been doing the same. So has my daughter, I’m sure.” Andy glanced toward Celia, who shifted noncommittally.
By this time in the drive, the caravan had split off from their Wal-Mart-bound brethren and was on a small road heading west. Andy vaguely recalled seeing Camp Edwards on his way in on Highway 6, but they were now, out of an interest in safety, following some back roads he didn’t know at all well. He hoped Roger knew the way, because otherwise they were going to have to venture out to a more populated thoroughfare, and that notion worried Andy.
He followed the Stones’ vehicle around a bend in the road that was bordered on the right by a cranberry bog and on the left by the ocean. Just as they reached the straightaway, Andy noticed that Roger had hit his brakes, hard, and turned his gaze farther ahead of their vehicle, fearing the worst.
Andy saw no humans or ex-humans ahead. Instead, in the oncoming lane, he saw another caravan driving toward them. Whereas Andy’s group was three cars, twelve people, and essentially zero supplies, the train heading in the opposite direction had to have been a dozen vehicles long, and each one was the same greenish-brown hue of military-grade Humvees.
By this time, Roger had pulled his vehicle to a complete stop, and Andy and the car behind followed suit. Roger flipped the hazard lights on his car, presumably to signal to the convoy to stop for him, and Andy released his seat belt and opened his door to try to wave them down.
As he exited his car, he heard the lead Humvee blare its horn, though he couldn’t decipher the meaning of the honk — it could have been anything from “I see you” to “I will run you over” — but he continued to wave as the vehicles approached.
As best he could tell, though, the honk must have meant “We aren’t stopping for anybody,” because the lead Humvee blew past their pitiful caravan without so much as a wave from the driver. The subsequent Guard vehicles continued past just as quickly, as Andy continued to wave in astonishment.
But it was the last vehicle that really surprised him. It was the only one that slowed down, and Andy’s heart briefly leapt as the rear driver’s side window was rolled down. The car pulled to a stop alongside the SUV that was transporting the four trailing members of their little party. Andy started to approach the vehicle to thank them, ask them their plan, try to follow along, when he saw a man’s head appear in the window.
He was probably in his early 50s, round-faced, with a graying almost-beard that needed shaving. He had a scar on his left cheek that leapt his eye and continued up his forehead, and his dark eyes stared out at the SUV with an appraising look. He wore a helmet that barely managed to encompass his massive skull.
As Andy approached, he saw the large man’s weight shift, and suddenly an automatic weapon appeared in the window next to his face. Andy stopped cold and watched as several rounds were fired off. The first few hit the left-side tires of the SUV, disabling it, but then the man aimed the weapon higher and fired a few cursory shots into the doors and windows of the SUV.
“Get down!” Andy yelled as he turned and dove back into his own vehicle. Celia, Stacy and Lowensen all ducked as low as they could, and he heard the squeal of tires that indicated the Stones had peeled out to get away. Seconds later, Andy heard the Humvee kick into gear, and he spared a glance out his own window to ensure the coast was clear.
The last of the Guard vehicles was disappearing around that curve, and the 50-something man had rolled up his window. They were gone.
Andy reopened his car door and ran to the SUV behind them. The condition of the tires certainly meant the end of that vehicle’s usefulness, but Andy was more concerned about the car’s inhabitants. He wrenched the driver’s door open to survey the damage.
In the passenger seat, he saw the wife of the couple. She had taken a bullet to the shoulder and was sobbing. But more horribly, her husband was in the driver’s side seat with his head resting against the steering wheel. The blood streaming out of the hole in the side of the man’s head told Andy that the best thing he could say about the man at this point was that he wasn’t likely to ever reanimate.
Lowensen came up behind Andy and opened the back door. There, the two men saw a situation similar to the front seat: On the driver’s side, the young woman who was the couple’s daughter had taken a bullet to the chest and another to the head, and sat with her head against the headrest, never to move again. On the opposite side, the young man with the family sat, apparently unharmed.
“They… they… they shot us!” the woman in the front seat cried out as she clutched her shoulder.
Andy hurried to the opposite side of the car and opened the woman’s door, applying pressure to her shoulder as he did. “They did,” he confirmed, helping her from the vehicle. He wasn’t sure what they had to do, but he figured the best idea was to remove her from the sight of her deceased family as quickly as possible. In the distance, he saw as Roger negotiated the tight U-turn on the road ahead and returned to them. Meanwhile, Lowensen helped the nearly catatonic young man from the back of the vehicle, being sure to close all the doors behind them as he did.
“Why?!” she wailed.
“That doesn’t matter,” Andy said, herding the woman toward his own vehicle.
All of a sudden, she seemed to remember the family she had in the SUV and started to pull away from Andy. “Meredith?” she cried. “Philip? Meredith?!”
Andy refused to relinquish his grip on the woman, even as she turned and tried to lunge back to her family’s vehicle. She was not a small woman, short but heavy, and holding her in one place took most of Andy’s strength. She repeated her husband’s and daughter’s names several times before Andy finally managed to corral her, to navigate her away from the horrors in her car.
“They’re gone,” he said. “They’re gone. I’m sorry. They’re gone.”
By this time, the Stones’ vehicle had returned to their small group. Roger, Simon and the athletic-looking woman all exited the vehicle, while the woman’s son stayed secure in his seat in the back.
“Are they…?” Roger asked as he approached, but trailed off in response to Andy’s head shake.
“Bastards,” Lowensen said as he helped the young man take the teacher’s seat in the Ehrens’ Camry. “Goddamn cowards.”
“What do you mean?” the young man asked, the first words Andy heard him say.
“They didn’t think we were infected,” Lowensen said. “How could they? We were driving. We were waving. We were flashing lights. No, they knew what they were doing. They were killing the living. Fewer people out and about, fewer people available to become zombies or be food for zombies, less time the zombies can persist. They wanted to save themselves, and only themselves.”
Andy nodded along with the teacher. It seemed to him like that was exactly what had happened — the Guardsmen had decided that they were going to find safety, and if they had any say in it, they would be the only ones. Andy figured the rest of the group was lucky they had only targeted the rear vehicle.
“What do we do now?” the woman from the Stones’ vehicle asked.
Simon hadn’t looked at any of them directly since exiting his vehicle. Instead, his eyes were trained down the road, in the direction they had originally been driving. “We turn around,” he said matter-of-factly.
“We what?” the woman asked.
“Those guys were from Camp Edwards, right?” the young man said. “So there’s no point going on toward that. If they left, there must not have been much worth staying for. And if we’re not going to go to Camp Edwards, we’d continue this way, what, hoping to drive away from the zombies? Dad says that’s impossible.
“But the Camp Edwards guys are going that way,” he went on. “And that way is farther onto the Cape, meaning either they think they should head out to open sea or there’s something that way that they’re trying to get to. I’d bet it’s the second one.”
“So we should follow the guys who just tried to kill us?” the young man from the SUV asked, his eyes still wide. “Drive toward the guys with the big guns?”
“You’ll find,” Andy said, shaking his head and trying his best not to chuckle. Nothing about this was funny, per se, but he couldn’t help himself, “that there aren’t a lot of what you’ll think of as positive options in the world of the zombies. No, it’s a lot more of picking the option that is the least likely to lead to your death. If one option is 95% death and the other is 90%, then you have to pick the 90%. Even if the 90% scares you senseless. So I’d say young Simon is right — we don’t have a better option than to follow ‘the guys with the big guns.’”
Roger nodded his head, and even Barry seemed to agree with Andy.
Andy surveyed their situation. The SUV was clearly a lost cause. The young man was already seated inside Andy’s own vehicle. He still had his arm supporting the woman but, after a quick exchange of eye contact with Roger, passed her off to him. Once the woman was clear of Andy, he opened the trunk of his car and fished out a long-sleeved button-down shirt, fashioning it into a makeshift sling that the woman could use.
“What’s your name?” Andy asked as he tied the shirt around the woman’s shoulder. Despite the fact that she had clearly been alive through 2010, Andy got the strong feeling that this was her first real experience with the horrors of a zombie world. And, given her general shape and lack of any obvious athleticism, he didn’t think it likely she had been practicing for the zombies’
return. She was still staring at the SUV that housed the bodies of her husband and daughter, and so it took Andy repeating the query twice before she blinked and answered him.
“Carla,” she said. “My name is Carla.”
As Andy finished tying the homemade sling around the shoulder of the stranger who had just lost family, he couldn’t help but smile to himself — a smile he wiped from his face as soon as he realized it was there. History, he mused, was repeating itself, and he couldn’t help but think of his old zombie-fighting mate with the dead arm, Carl.
Once the woman’s arm was secured, Roger ushered her into his own car as Andy and Barry returned to the Camry.
“Turning around?” Celia asked, her first words since young Porter’s death.
“Turning around,” Andy confirmed as he negotiated the same tight turnaround Roger had done a few minutes earlier. “You pick the lesser of the evils. You stay alive. You turn around.”
Chapter 11: Sometimes i t’s Nice to Have a Car
The zombies hadn’t yet noticed Donnie and Michelle’s car, which Michelle counted as a blessing. She cut left, into the abandoned parking lot of an old Dunkin’ Donuts, and headed back in the direction they had come.
“What now?” Donnie asked, his voice raising in pitch.
“We knew we’d run into them,” Michelle said. “Eventually. We just have to find a new route.” They had passed a side road not a minute earlier that Michelle thought was a viable path east, and that was the road she steered toward now.
Donnie turned in his seat to look behind them, and Michelle gave a quick glance behind her as well. A few of the zombies had by now noticed the retreating car, and Michelle saw some give up on the bodies at their feet and turn to chase them.
“Sometimes it’s nice to have a car,” Michelle said, turning her attention forward.
She swung right, onto the side road, and hit the gas. The zombies chasing them weren’t likely to catch the car even at low speeds, but Michelle wasn’t taking chances.
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