by Lukens, Mark
The fire was still burning in the restaurant beyond the trees, and the red glow in the sky provided a little light for Luke to see the fields as they stretched out to the trees. He caught a flash of movement near the trees. In the flickering light from the fire, the trees seemed to shift and move, but then Luke realized that it wasn’t just an illusion—there were dozens of rippers running toward them, running toward the headlights of their van.
Luke skidded to a stop on the grass five feet away from Emma and Ray. Josh didn’t even wait until the van was stopped all the way before opening his door. He jumped out and hurried into the splash of lights from the van, grabbing Emma. “I got you,” he told her, helping her to the side door of the van.
Luke aimed his pistol out through the driver’s window, resting his arm on the top of the door. He shot at the approaching rippers, knocking three of them down. There were screams and yells coming from the advancing rippers, but there were sounds from inside the building, too. When Luke looked back he saw that Ray was at the schoolhouse window, trying to pull Mike out, like Mike was stuck on something.
But Mike wasn’t stuck on something, Luke could see that now. Someone was holding Mike’s legs, trying to pull him back inside the classroom.
Rippers.
Before Luke could even open his driver’s door to help, Josh was beside Ray. He aimed Luke’s spare gun in the window and fired three times.
Please don’t hit the kid.
Ray pulled one last time and Mike was free, flying out through the window and into his father. Both of them collapsed to the ground.
Another ripper was at the window and Josh fired two more times as Ray grabbed Mike up from the ground and they started running towards the van. Josh grabbed the backpacks and the two weapons into his arms; he was the last one heading back to the van.
“Hurry!” Luke yelled as he shot six more times out through the driver’s window, picking off the rippers one by one, his gun spitting bullets out into the cold night air. But he couldn’t get all of them.
Ray and Mike were inside the van. Josh threw the backpacks and weapons inside, but there were two more backpacks next to the building.
“No, Josh,” Ray screamed at him.
But Josh was running across the grass to the building.
Two more rippers were crawling out through the window that Mike had just come out of, landing on the ground.
Luke shot two more rippers racing across the field towards them, but he was going to be out of bullets soon, and there were dozens more rippers coming. The van was still in park and Luke revved the engine.
Josh was back with the packs, and two rippers were on his tail. He jumped in through the side door. Luke figured one of those packs had been Josh’s pack with his precious pain pills inside. Josh slid the side door closed as Luke jammed the shifter into reverse and stomped down on the gas pedal. The back tires spun for just a second on the grass and then grabbed traction, reversing away from the collecting mob of rippers coming their way.
Luke let off the gas and spun the steering wheel, the van sliding around easily on the grass until they were pointing back the way they had just come from. He jammed his foot down on the gas pedal again and the van lurched forward, the engine screaming with power.
Something thudded against the walls of the van: rocks, sticks, fists, feet.
Luke turned off the headlights for a moment. He knew he couldn’t keep the lights off too long, but he also knew he had at least four hundred yards of field in front of them with nothing in their way except the building to their left now. At least they would be a dark target for a few seconds. Hopefully none of the rocks would smash their windows in.
The van picked up speed, and it felt like they were going even faster in the near-perfect darkness. The glow from the fire in the restaurant beyond the trees provided the barest of light for Luke to see.
“Are you okay?” Ray asked Mike in the back seat. “Did they get you? Did they bite you?”
“No,” Mike answered, but he didn’t seem too sure of his own answer yet, still in shock.
Luke flipped the headlights on, washing the grass in light. At least there weren’t any rippers right in front of them—they all seemed to be behind them now. But Luke was more worried about the Dark Angels right now. If they were close by, they would have seen the van’s headlights, heard its engine, heard the rippers’ screams and yells, heard Josh’s gunshots. If one of those military vehicles started chasing them, Luke wasn’t so sure they could outrun it in this old van.
After they were past the building and out onto the street, Luke turned right, heading back the way he and Josh had come from. He didn’t really know where he was going, but they hadn’t seen any Dark Angels on their way back to the school, so this seemed like the best bet for right now.
Ray was still checking on Mike and Emma, making sure they weren’t hurt.
“We got all of the backpacks,” Josh announced.
Luke was sure Josh was relieved about that.
“Ray got an M-16,” Josh said, then turned to Ray. “How’d you get an M-16?”
“A Dark Angel got into the classroom,” Ray told him.
“My dad hit him in the head with the shotgun,” Mike said. He sounded a little excited, like his shock was beginning to wear off now.
“You killed him?” Josh asked.
“No,” Ray answered. “Paralyzed him.”
“Nice,” Josh said with a smile.
“I didn’t mean to,” Ray snapped. “He was just lying there on the floor. He wanted me to kill him, but I couldn’t.”
Luke turned left onto another street, climbing the steep hills at the outskirts of the town, driving deeper into the woods. There was a thermometer and a compass on a little display near the ceiling of the van in the middle of the windshield: it was thirty-nine degrees and they were heading northwest right now.
“The rippers got in the classroom,” Ray said. “Thank God you guys came when you did.”
“Well, we had a little trouble finding a vehicle,” Josh said. “We had to charge the battery up in this van before we could even drive it.” He moved up into the passenger seat and sat down.
Luke glanced at Josh—he was jumpy and jittery, still buzzing from the pain pills. The cloths he had tied around his right arm were wet with blood again.
“There’s a lot of junk back here,” Ray said, moving stuff around.
“You should have seen the guy’s house,” Josh told him.
Ray moved up closer to the front of the van, right between their seats. Emma and Mike were on the bench seat in back, among the pile of backpacks. Mike leaned on Emma and she held him around his shoulders. He was quiet for a moment.
“Where are you going?” Ray asked.
Luke shrugged. “I don’t know. Just trying to get as far away from that town as possible. Why? You got somewhere in mind?”
“The cabin,” Josh said.
Luke remembered Ray telling him about the cabin when they were in the classroom a few hours ago, but it felt like a lifetime ago. “You’re sure about this cabin?”
“A guy I worked with told me about his cabin. I worked with him. I can trust him. Just keep heading west for now, but try to veer south when you can. I’ve got a map I can check, but we need to look for some street signs so I can figure out exactly where we are.” Ray flipped his notebook to a new page and got his pen and flashlight ready to jot down street names as they passed them.
Luke didn’t think Ray had sounded too convincing when he’d said that he trusted his friend from work, but he wasn’t going to say anything about it. At least this cabin was somewhere to head to.
PART THREE
CHAPTER 37
Ray
It was just after dawn when they finally pulled the van off the dirt road they’d been traveling for the last hour. They parked in a small clearing in the woods, backing the van in as far as they could from the road. They had only stopped once during the night to find some gas, siphoning some ou
t of a Toyota, using a rubber hose they found in the back of the van. They also filled up a spare gas can and brought that with them.
The morning light filtered down through the trees. The world was waking up: birds chirped in the trees, squirrels and chipmunks scurried along tree branches and through the brush.
Mike and Emma had been sleeping for the last few hours. Josh had gotten a little sleep. Ray sat in the passenger seat to help keep watch and help keep Luke awake.
When they sped away from the town of Heaven last night, they had driven in the direction they needed to go, but their main concern had just been getting away as fast as they could. Now that they were parked for a little while, Ray had a chance to really study the map he had redrawn from Doug’s map in his small leather-bound notebook. He compared Doug’s map to the state map of West Virginia, the map folded down to a large square just a little bigger than the notebook. He had a pen, and he had marked the most probable areas where this dirt road that led to Doug’s cabin (which wasn’t on any of the state or area maps of West Virginia) might be. The problem right now was that they were still pretty far away from any of the possible areas where Doug’s cabin might be, and with trial and error, and backtracking, it might take all day to find the right dirt road. Luke had reminded them that they had a little more than half a tank of gas in the van right now, along with the five-gallon can for an emergency. They were so far out in the woods now that they weren’t coming across too many homesteads, much less vehicles to siphon gas from.
While Ray studied the map in the passenger seat with the door open, the others took the opportunity to get out of the van and stretch, walking around. Ray refolded the map to an even smaller square. He had an idea of where to start their search for the dirt road.
“Why don’t you come and eat, Ray?” Emma said from a fallen tree where she was sitting next to Mike. Josh sat on the other side of her, cradling his injured arm. Luke was pulling cans of food and bottles of water out of the backpacks, handing them out.
Ray put the maps down. He was hungry and needed to eat.
*
As they ate, Luke checked his guns, making sure all the magazines were full. Then he checked the M-16 Ray had gotten from the Dark Angel; he told them that the magazine for the M-16 was still half full.
As Ray spooned beans from a can, he watched Luke—the man seemed restless, nervous. Luke got up from the fallen tree and walked to the back of the van. He opened the doors and studied the piles of junk for just a moment before he started pulling stuff out and tossing the junk into the woods.
“What are you doing?” Ray asked him.
“Just cleaning up the van a little,” Luke answered without looking back at him.
Mike got to his feet and looked at Ray. “Should I go help?”
Ray nodded. “If you want to.”
Mike ran over to Luke and waited as Luke handed him boxes, bags, and other pieces of garbage from the van. Mike seemed happy to be doing something—maybe he was just as restless as Luke was.
“That’s littering,” Josh called out to Mike with a smile. He was still sitting right beside Emma on the large fallen tree.
“I don’t think it matters much now,” Luke answered back.
“Just kidding, man. Trying to lighten the mood a little.”
“Why don’t you help get some of this stuff out of the van so everyone can have a little more room?” Luke suggested.
Josh sighed and got up from the tree, walking to the van.
Ray moved closer to Emma on the fallen tree, taking Josh’s spot.
“It feels like it’s warming up a little out here,” Emma said, tilting her face up towards the sunlight through the trees.
“It will be freezing soon enough,” Ray said and then instantly regretted it; he didn’t want every one of his responses to be negative, but he couldn’t help it—that’s how he felt these days.
“You’ve got our route figured out?” Emma asked, changing the conversation and still keeping it light. If Ray’s comment had bothered her, she wasn’t showing it.
“I think so. It’s the best I can do for now. It helped that we wrote down a lot of the street names as we drove last night. It kind of gave me a picture of the path we had taken from the town and to where we are now.”
Emma smiled. “You seem to be in your element when you’re organizing things and analyzing them, trying to figure everything out.”
Ray nodded. He’d always been analytical, craving order in his life. It seemed to bother some people, but he couldn’t ever see what was wrong with it.
“I bet you have a backup plan,” she said in a lower voice. “And a backup plan for that one.” She smiled to show that she was just teasing him.
He smiled back at her even though she couldn’t see it, but maybe she could hear it in his voice. “Yes. That’s what my wife used to say.”
They were quiet for a moment, and Ray felt like he had killed their banter with memories of his wife, but then Emma whispered to him. “I’m a little worried about Josh’s arm.”
Ray looked over at the van. It was shaking as Josh moved around inside, gathering up anything he felt wasn’t useful and tossing it out onto the grass. “Yeah, me too.”
“I think his wound might be getting infected.”
Ray wondered why Emma thought that. He wondered if she could somehow smell the infection, smell Josh’s flesh beginning to rot. He’d heard that blind people’s other senses were stronger to make up for their lack of sight, but he wasn’t sure if that was just a myth or not. But he didn’t ask her; instead he said: “It’s probably going to need to be stitched up. And if it’s infected, it’s going to hurt like hell.”
Emma nodded in agreement.
“We’ll be okay when we get to the cabin,” Ray told her. “There will be medicine there. Antibiotics. A first-aid kit. Everything we need.” He wasn’t sure about all that, but he wanted to say something positive for once, but secretly he wondered if Doug would have antibiotics stored in the cabin.
Luke and Mike walked up to them.
“Finished?” Ray asked.
Luke nodded and glanced back at the van. “Josh can handle the rest.” He looked back at Ray. “This cabin we’re going to, how do you know it isn’t ransacked already? Cleaned out.”
Mike looked instantly concerned as he watched Luke, then he looked at Ray for an answer.
Ray just shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“Just about every place we’ve come across has been picked over either by rippers, Dark Angels, or survivors,” Luke said.
“Yeah,” Ray agreed. “But those places were right off the main roads. This cabin is stuck somewhere way back in these woods, way down a dirt trail.”
“Yeah, okay,” Luke said, but he didn’t look too confident about it. He looked over at the pile of junk he and Mike had amassed near the edge of the woods. “I got rid of a lot of stuff. Not much of anything useful back there in the van.”
“Good,” Ray said. “We should probably get back on the road. I don’t know how long it’s going to take to find this dirt road to the cabin.”
Moments later they were all back inside the van. Ray offered to drive for a few hours so Luke could get some sleep in the passenger seat. Josh sat in the chair right behind the driver’s seat, and Mike and Emma sat in the bench seat in the back. Even with their backpacks, there was a lot more room in the van now.
Ray started the van, put it in drive, and pulled out onto the road.
CHAPTER 38
Josh
It took most of the day to finally find the right dirt road that led to Doug’s cabin. The mountains and valleys seemed to go on forever, the trees stretching out to infinity. They were lost in a beautiful but forbidding wilderness. The woods were thinner; many of the trees had lost much of their leaves, creating a carpet of decaying vegetation all over the forest floor. The air was getting colder, snow flurries swirling by early afternoon.
Luke warned a few times that they were getting pretty
low on gas as they tried the next dirt road, backtracked, and then tried another one, the van rocking and bumping along rutted roads, the dirt beginning to harden like concrete from the cold weather over the last few weeks.
But there was one good thing about the endless woods and mountains—there were no rippers around, very few homesteads, and no sign of the Dark Angels anywhere.
Josh’s buzz from the pain pills had worn off that morning, and he was really beginning to feel the pain in his arm, a hot and burning sensation, a throbbing that had to mean that the wound was getting infected. Maybe there would be antibiotics at the cabin they were going to, but right now all Josh could think about was dulling the pain.
Those pills are stuffed down in your sock. It would be so easy for you to get them. It was the voice of the pill imp whispering in Josh’s ear again, floating right behind his left shoulder.
Ray was still driving as Luke nodded off here and there, but the traveling was slow because Ray had to stop often to consult his notebook and the maps he had. Josh thought Ray might ask him to help navigate, but he didn’t.
Josh jiggled his foot as he sat in the chair, cradling his right arm, flexing his fingers of that hand. His fingers were cold, and they looked a little darker than the fingers on his other hand. Or was that his imagination? He compared fingers from both hands, the color and the size. He hoped he wasn’t getting blood poisoning. What was he supposed to do if that happened?
He didn’t want to think about that.
His thoughts were back on his pain pills. Ray was concentrating on the road. Luke was napping again. Mike and Emma were in the bench seat behind him. He’d already brought his backpack up with him when he had helped clean out the van earlier; it was right on the floor in front of him now. He looked down at his feet, studying them. His pills were still stuffed down in his left sock. All he had to do was pull the bottle out and slip one pill into his hand. Even one pill would help take the edge off the pain.