by Jason Offutt
He pushed the Silverado up to 60 mph on I-80. He knew the bad people in the silver car were going that fast or more and he had to catch them. Wherever they went, Donnie would follow; they had to stop sometime, he would get them and bring them home to Mother. A grin tugged at the corners of his mouth. At least the Vanessa Hagen-looking girl, but Donnie wanted to play with her first.
It was a long way to Omaha. Mother and Daddy took him on vacation there once, to the Henry Doorly Zoo and a baseball game. Donnie didn’t remember much, except the drive was long. Long, long, long. He pushed the accelerator a little harder, the Silverado moved to 65 mph. There were vehicles on the road, but not many and they weren’t moving. Occasionally he’d see a good person in the cab of one, pawing at the window. Donnie would smile and wave back, but he didn’t slow down; he couldn’t slow down. Mother was hungry.
Outside Elm Creek, Nebraska, Donnie forgot about Mother. Bloody, mangled bodies of good people lay strewn across the highway, a red smear that stretched a quarter mile marked with the fat tracks of a big truck and the skinny tracks of something small. The silver car. Tears ran from his eyes as he slowed the truck to a crawl, those poor, poor people, torn apart by those gunkies in the silver car. He didn’t know who drove the truck, but he suspected it was someone from the silver car – the man with two legs. It had to be – but he would take care of all of them, all of them. Donnie wiped the dripping snot away with the sleeve of his shirt and mashed at his tears with the palm of his right hand, the left one guiding the pickup through the gore. Large, fat crows looked up at the Silverado as it rumbled by, but only until they understood it wasn’t a threat, then they returned to pecking and tearing meat from the rotting corpses. Eleven miles later Donnie found the smoldering Fleming Foods truck and he smiled. They were all back in one car; they’d be much easier to catch.
***
The nurses at Sisters of St. Francis were mean, what Daddy would call “total bitches” if Mother weren’t around, which wasn’t often. It seemed like Mother was always around, watching, listening and she didn’t like Daddy to say bad words.
“Would you like to tell us why you’re here, Mr. Barnett,” Nurse Karen said like Donnie was an idiot. Which I’m so not.
Donnie sat on a white plastic chair placed in a circle with six other teenagers in the same hospital-issue pajamas and slippers. No belts or shoestrings here at St. Francis. Nope, nope, nope. “No,” he said, staring at his feet. They seemed small and far away.
“Now, Mr. Barnett.” Nurse Karen turned to face him. Nick Cordray, the boy who liked to burn things, made faces behind her back. “You’re here to get better. You can’t get better unless we talk about what happened.” She motioned around the circle. “You have nothing to be afraid of. We’re all friends here.”
“No we’re not,” Kelli Patterson, the bleeder said. Kelli sat slumped in her chair, arms scarred with even horizontal lines were crossed over her chest.
Nurse Karen frowned and made a mark on the clipboard she carried everywhere, then looked back at Donnie and smiled. Her smile was even and white, not bent and seedy like that wicked Strangerboy. Marc Taylor. He found that was the Strangerboy’s name when the police in a clean black and white car with flashing blue and red lights pulled up to Jimmy’s Old Country Pizzeria and took Donnie away.
“Now, Mr. Barnett, why are you here?”
Donnie’s eyes went around the room. Nick, Kelli, Tommy Caruthers who got his sister pregnant and Rachel Abbott who got excited in group therapy when she talked about what she liked to do with cats. They all looked at something else, the floor, the ceiling, the barred windows, anything but Donnie. Nurse Karen cleared her throat.
“I didn’t do anything wrong,” Donnie said. “That wicked Taylor boy tried to stick his—” Don’t say it. Don’t say it. Don’t say it. Mother will be mad.
“His what, Mr. Barnett?”
Donnie shifted on the hard plastic seat and looked flatly at Nurse Karen. Put it in your mouth. You know you wanna. “He tried to stick his wiener in my mouth.” Kelli barked a laugh. Donnie ignored her. “I pushed him away and he fell down the stairs, boom, boom, boom.”
The room grew quiet.
“You do know he died, don’t you?” Nurse Karen asked.
Yep. Dead. Dead as a cat with a rat. “Yes.”
“How does that make you feel?”
Feel? Donnie sat back in the chair and looked at the ceiling. He’d never thought about how it made him feel. How did he feel? “Happy,” he said. “He was a wicked boy and I made him not wicked anymore.”
Rachel started to clap. Donnie’s pills were a different color after that.
***
Something moved in the distance. It wasn’t one of the good people, or one of the bad people, it was a vehicle, gliding smoothly from lane to lane to avoid a Casey’s General Store tractor-trailer stopped dead on the north side of the highway. Donnie smiled. It was the bad people in the silver car; it had to be. He pushed the Silverado up to 70, the feel of the truck nearly out of control, like riding a bike down a steep hill. He took his foot off the accelerator and the truck slowed back to 55. He didn’t want them to see him; he wanted to surprise them and he didn’t want to crash. Surprise them. Yes. Maybe get one of them alone, especially the Vanessa Hagen woman. Get them alone and tie them up for the trip back to Mother, or use the kitchen knife if they didn’t want to go. The crotch of Donnie’s pants grew tight as he thought of sneaking up on the man with one foot, maybe while he sat in front of the camp stove. He’d plunge the big kitchen knife into his neck and paint the night with blood. Then the Vanessa Hagen woman, with her curly red hair, would want to come with Donnie because Donnie could walk. A wave of warmth rushed over him and he pushed his erect penis to the left side as he kept driving. Yes, that’s exactly what would happen.
He eased the truck back to 65 when the movement ahead of him on I-80 disappeared. Donnie didn’t want to spook the Bad people, but he couldn’t lose them. As the city of Omaha grew thick with buildings, the silver car, he was certain of that now, pulled off the highway. Donnie slowed the truck to a crawl and watched the car full of bad people drive north on 42nd Street. The sign said so. They were going somewhere. Somewhere special. Donnie knew that; why else would they have turned off the highway. Was it someone’s house? Was it someplace with ice cream? He hoped for ice cream. He hadn’t eaten ice cream since the stupid electric company stopped giving his house electricity; his Neapolitan melted into a chocolate, vanilla, strawberry mix of goo. He’d had to eat the last of it like ice cream soup. Donnie drove a little faster, turned onto 42nd Street and followed the bad people into the tree-lined streets of Omaha.
The silver car stopped at a hospital. Donnie hated hospitals, but this wasn’t Sisters of St. Francis. Could it be worse? He stopped the Silverado behind a blue Dodge Caravan and watched the bad people through Daddy’s binoculars. The silver car sat in front of a broken gate lined with Army trucks; Army men and good people lay strewn across the pavement. What is this awful place? Donnie winced as the silver car drove through the ruined gate and over the corpses of the good people. He choked back a scream. Monsters. Those bad people are monsters. Crows lined the dead electric wires that ran to the hospital and sat on the emergency room awning, just watching. The car stopped and the Vanessa Hagen woman leaned out the back passenger door and vomited. Yes. Donnie knew she wasn’t like the others. He just knew it. She was a good person, well, a good enough person. He was going to enjoy taking her.
The man with both legs, the man with one leg and the black-haired girl picked up Army rifles and walked toward the smashed front door of the hospital, leaving the Vanessa Hagen woman alone. Alone with the crows. Donnie smiled and put down the binoculars. The knife sat quietly in the passenger seat. Donnie didn’t know why, but he kind of expected it to talk to him. He wrapped his fingers around the wooden handle and picked it up. It felt good there, natural. The driver’s door of the Silverado opened with a click and Donnie stepped onto the pavemen
t. The Vanessa Hagen woman was going to be his, today.
July 29: Kansas City, Missouri
Chapter 9
Hand-painted signs reading “Survival Shelter” pointed Andi off Interstate 435 toward the Parvin Road exit and to 48th Street. She didn’t take the exit. There was a survival shelter there; that was part of Cotton’s first briefing. “There’s a safe zone set up at an amusement park in Kansas City, Missouri. The high security fence and large area of the park make it easy to defend and it can hold many thousands of people,” he’d barked, all the fresh-faced recruits’ muscles frozen at attention. “A message directing survivors to the shelter is being broadcast on all Kansas City radio stations. If you find any survivors on your patrol, direct them there.” Andi started looking for the radio broadcast the moment she pulled out of the Walmart parking lot and found only static. Something had gone wrong. She’d only been in the Army two months, but she’d learned a few things in those two months. One of those was surveillance. She kept driving.
Worlds of Fun sat north of the Missouri River amongst the bluffs. Andi drove with the window down, the wind clear of pollution; she smiled as she sniffed the air. It smelled sweet. Giant steel-framed roller coasters broke the horizon and pointed toward the sky as Andi crossed the river, the Mamba and the Patriot roller coasters dead and quiet. A herd of about twelve whitetail deer, just like the one Big Andy taught her to hunt, stood at the shoulder of Interstate 435, grazing on the tall grass. Andi slowed the Outback and crawled by them; they didn’t move. We got rid of the wolves and the mountain lions and the bears. Deer may one day rule the plains. “You’re too trusting, Bambi,” Andi said. The words came out softly. “It may be your time next.”
She crept past the sleek, beautiful animals and accelerated again. Yep, Big Andy trained her how to take these beasts down, how to gut them, how to skin them and how to butcher them. She didn’t need the deer yet, she had food for weeks, but when she got hungry, she knew she wouldn’t starve.
A few miles down the road, Andi eased the Subaru to a stop between a massive green, yellow, blue and red water tower and the amusement park. From the quiet highway Andi could see the entire park, from the Scandinavia section to Americana to the Orient and the parking lots, mostly empty but one jammed with cars. She opened the door of the Outback and climbed onto the car, sitting crisscross applesauce on the hood, looking through Army-issued binoculars for any movement. Nothing stirred inside the park, except the slight breeze that caused a ripple in the trees that covered the bluff. Where are the survivors? She swung the binoculars to the parking lot. Nothi– Wait. Something moved behind a Thor Motor Coach. Or did it? Andi waited, but the motion didn’t reappear. A dog? A deer? A monster. A thing that was once a man lurched around the front of the RV and stopped, apparently perplexed by a pickup parked sideways in front of the Motor Coach. One monster, one lone monster had appeared in her sweep of the park. There had to be bodies somewhere, alive, dead, or dead and still walking around, but Andi couldn’t find them from the highway.
The binoculars froze on a piece of paper attached to the park’s fence, but she couldn’t make it out. Dang it. This was a survival shelter. There might not be any survivors, but a survivor left a note and if somebody thought that note was important enough to write in a world infested with death, Andi was sure as heck going to read it. Polo Man never got to write a note. She slipped back into the Subaru, turned the car around and took the Parvin Road exit toward the park.
***
Dust covered the windshields of the vehicles parked in the lots. They’ve been here a while. Andi could make out an occasional body slumped in a seat as she moved through the maze of cars, SUVs and motor homes on her way to the front gate; the monster she’d spotted from the highway wandered on the opposite side of the lot. Nothing moved in the vehicles; the interiors of many windows were blasted with yellow spores. Oh, these poor people. They died in a bloody mess as a fist of fungus burst from their chests. Andi turned her hips to squeeze between a green Ford Explorer and a yellow Chevy Camaro. If there’s anything Andi noticed at the end of the world, it’s that people stopped giving a shit about the rules, like parking within the marked lines and thou shall not kill. “Shoot them in the head.” Damn it, Cotton. The driver of the Camaro’s head hung back over the seat, its drying flesh pulled from its face. Andi turned away from the corpse in the bitchin’ Camaro and walked on.
Vehicles pointed toward the front gate forming a wedge so tight Andi climbed onto the trunk of a car and walked the rest of the way across hoods, her new tennis shoes squeaked softly as she jumped hood to trunk, hood to trunk. The lone monster Andi had spotted from the highway growled to her left. It had found a way to come closer, but the shambling, white-eyed thing was behind too many cars for Andi to worry about it. Just in case, she’d put a full clip in her sidearm before she stepped out of the Subaru; Andi was taking no chances. She jumped off the hood of a Ford Taurus and landed with a slap on the cracked, gray asphalt about ten feet from the front gate.
Oh, no. The paper lashed to the fence with zip ties wasn’t a note, it was a laminated map, the mark of a black Sharpie circled Omaha, with a line tracing I-435 to I-29, “Shelter Here!!!” written in a woman’s handwriting. What now? The Army had told her this was a secure shelter, a place where people could get food and medicine and hope behind a 235-acre perimeter of chain-link fence. Cotton didn’t say anything about a shelter in Nebraska, but plans must have changed. What now, right? Andi knew what now. She knew her day wasn’t getting any better.
Andi raised her face to the sky and shouted, “Hello. Is anybody here?” The words loud in the quiet afternoon. “Is this still a shelter?” The monster’s growl grew louder. “My name is Andi and I’m here to join you. Somebody please talk to me.” Nothing stirred. Whoever had been here had abandoned this place, this place with the secure fences. What happened? “Dang it,” she whispered.
Omaha was just north of Kansas City, two hours tops. Andi mounted the Taurus and sat on the roof, the drooling human creature now only twenty feet away stuck between a Ford F-150 and a PT Cruiser. She could pick that thing off with her sidearm easily, but she fished a warm Bud Light from a belt pouch instead. The crack of the can sprayed the ‘Merica T-shirt with foam. Andi didn’t know the time, but she was pretty sure it was still morning. She never drank much alcohol, even at college, but what the heck? It didn’t matter anymore. “What are you?” she called to the monster, the thing’s rotting face angry, or maybe just hungry. Hungry for what? What purpose? These things are dead. Why do they need to eat?
What information she didn’t get from news reports before the world got wonky, Andi got from the Army. It all started with the Southeast Asian fungus Ophiocordyceps unilateralis and ended with people. The ants, the fungus. Infection travelled. What about you?
“Where are you going?” she shouted at the thing that had once been a thirty-something semi-professional. Andi could tell that by the coal black hair, khaki Dockers and blue Oxford shirt; the thing’s red tie hung like a tongue, wagging as it shuffled between cars. A black glasses case jutted slightly above his breast pocket, although the creature’s glasses were long gone. Did that affect his vision? Andi wondered, but she didn’t know how they saw through the milky film that covered the eyes of the old ones anyway and this thing must have turned early during the outbreak, popping Ophiocordon for depression, or the massive orgasmic boner it gave him. Handy side effect. It shambled when it walked and the white of its cheekbones showed through the rotting flesh of its face. The monster snarled, those white eyes staring straight at Andi. Earlier victims are fast, with clear eyes. Maybe you can only stay dead-alive so long before the ol’ body goes to pot. This thing’s body might break down before it gets where it’s going.
Is the fungus telling it to go somewhere? “Come on,” she called. “Where are you going?” It wedged itself tight between the Explorer and Camaro Andi had shimmied through, reaching toward her even though she was cars away. Then it did something And
i didn’t know was possible; it screamed at her. Andi stood and dropped the half-full can of beer. “Well, I know where I’m headed,” she said, her voice dropping to no more than a whisper. “I guess I’m going to Nebraska.”
The hood of a red Hyundai crunched as Andi stepped onto it on her way back to the Subaru, leaving the once-human businessman wedged between the two cars forever.
***
Two hours later, a homemade sign, a 4x5 sheet of plywood staked into the shoulder at the end of a bridge that spanned the Missouri River and brought Andi into Omaha, read “Survival Shelter Ahead.” Another sign followed and another and another. A large red, spray painted arrow directed Andi up an exit ramp to Thirteenth Street, a billboard advertising the Henry Doorly Zoo rose from the off ramp. “Well, folks, I’m here,” she said, pulling off the interstate and onto the Thirteenth Street exit that curved up to an overpass. Another sign directed her south. A dark, empty McDonald’s, the marquee advertising “McRib Limited Time,” sat across the street to the north. What she wouldn’t give for a McRib, or even a greasy McDouble about now. If McDonald’s has stopped making greasy things between white buns, the world really has come to an end.
Andi turned away from the golden arches and followed the arrows south across the overpass, the four-lane highway stretched quietly to the horizon, a few cars and two semis sat still. Trees and long berms of tall grass lined Thirteenth Street as she approached the zoo, a great dome peeked over the trees. Something was off here. A prickle of worry danced at the back of Andi’s newly-blackened head, her hair cut short with Walmart scissors in the mirror of the Subaru and dyed in the water of a creek somewhere north of Fort Scott. There was no good place to sit and study the area she was being drawn to, she didn’t like that. Anything could be waiting for her at the end of the hastily made road markers. Anything.