by Jason Offutt
Four blocks later she eased the Subaru to a stop. “What the heck?”
The door release clicked as Andi pulled on it and stepped out of the car, one foot still on the floorboard, her right hand on the steering wheel. That’s as far as she was going out of this small mobile sanctuary. A great bloody lump lay in the road over a great, rust-red stain, not ten feet from a black H3 and an old red F-150, just across the street from a green-roofed fast food joint named King Kong, a big black gorilla on the sign screaming at a hamburger. “What happened here?” Andi’s brain suddenly registered what her eyes were seeing. A bear – a freaking bear – lay dead in the street. It was mostly hide and bones, nature and the great brown beast’s animal friends picked it clean, but Andi knew what killed it. She didn’t need the hundreds of shell casings scattered across the road to tell her it had been torn apart by automatic gunfire. The thing had been ripped to shreds. Andi didn’t wonder why a brown bear, maybe a grizzly, lay dead on the streets of Omaha, Nebraska. She knew. Some moron let it out of the zoo; and if some moron let out a bear, what else roamed the streets? Lions? Tigers? Gorillas? It would be just her luck to survive the zombie apocalypse and wind up in the damned Planet of the Apes. Andi slowly sank back into the car, shut the door and rolled up the window.
A makeshift military tent city stood in a parking lot of the zoo, surrounded by hundreds of cars from neighboring states. An RV and a group of Humvees sat on the far side of Tent City. Nothing moved here; it was as dead as Worlds of Fun. “Some survival shelter, guys.” A hollow feeling crept over her, as hollow as the pit that opened when Polo Man dropped off the Fence. What if there were no survivors anymore, anywhere? She hadn’t seen anyone since Muskogee. Andi pulled the car to a stop and stepped out, gripping her rifle tightly.
“Is anybody here?” she called toward Tent City. Only the sound of the breeze came back to her. “Hello?” The population of Omaha was once close to half a million people. Now it might just be Andi Bakowski. She stepped away from the still-running Subaru and ventured into the smattering of olive drab tents.
The pungent smell of death struck Andi like a punch in the face. The breeze that had smelled so sweet earlier in the day had blown the smell of death away from her as she approached the shelter. Great shelter, guys. Now that she walked amongst the tents, the smell threatened to bring up her stomach. Bodies in black bags lay stacked like boxes in a buy-in-bulk store. She wanted to cover her face with her arm and breathe in the deodorant she’d taken from a Walmart shelf, but Andi kept her weapon at her shoulder and walked on toward the Humvees. She wouldn’t let her guard down; she couldn’t.
A yellow piece of paper lay on the pavement; it stopped her cold. She knelt beside it. “Attention,” the laser-printed message read in big bold letters. “In the event of a biological attack or the introduction of a highly contagious disease affecting the public, the U.S. health system may take measures to prevent those people infected with or exposed to a disease or a disease-causing agent from infecting others. The federal government has jurisdiction over interstate and foreign quarantine and may use the military in enforcing quarantines.”
So, the military stepped in to put a stop to all this. Just like the Fence she patrolled in Oklahoma. From the looks of it, it didn’t work out well here. For the first time Andi wondered how her unit was doing. Guthrie was kind of a jerk, but she liked the guy. Guthrie was dead for all she knew. They all probably were, even Cotton. A pull of guilt yanked at her, but she shrugged it off. No regrets at the end of the world. Andi moved toward the ring of Humvees, her heart hammering, and stepped into a thing of nightmares.
A sea of civilian skeletons covered the asphalt; their clothes ripped as scavengers had slashed and clawed their way to the soft meat beyond. More shell casings littered the ground. Her knees gave way and dropped her to the ground; vomit splattered on the dusty pavement. These people were murdered. Murdered by someone like her. Andi’s stomach clenched and more MRE and Bud Light vomit danced across the pavement. What if I’d been assigned here? What if I’d gotten the order? But Andi knew what she’d do; she’d follow her superior’s commands, just like when she killed Polo Man. Tears welled in her eyes; the sound of the poor man’s final screams tore at her mind.
The caw from a crow came loud in the stillness of the late afternoon. Andi wiped the vomit from her mouth with the back of her hand and pulled herself up on the side of a Humvee. The crow sat on the roof of a vehicle, staring at her with dead black eyes. Andi had never thought of crows outside old cartoons, but now crows were things that came in great black clouds. They scared the heck out of her. It cocked its head and cawed again. Andi gave the black bird the finger, walked weak-legged back to the Subaru and collapsed in the front seat. “I gotta find someplace,” she said, lightly slapping the steering wheel with a hand, eyes never leaving the crow. “Someplace quiet.” She grabbed the steering wheel with both hands and looked out over Tent City with its body bags and its murder field. The crow stared back at her. Yeah, that quiet place wasn’t Omaha.
***
Andi turned west onto Interstate 80 because turning east would take her over the Missouri River; she’d driven across the Missouri River twice today and it didn’t do her any favors. She stopped the Subaru in the middle of the highway three miles from the massacre, her shaking knees made it hard to press on the brake. She turned the screwdriver in the ignition and the engine slid into silence. Andi just stared into the bright, blue day, the sun leaning toward the western horizon. It would get hot in the Subaru if Andi sat there long, the hot days of summer still ran like normal. At least something was still normal. She pulled a water bottle from the back seat and cracked the seal. The world had come to an end. It was over. Everything. Everything she grew up knowing to be true was just gone. She understood that, she just didn’t know if she could deal with it anymore. Not after what she’d seen. She opened a bag of Nacho Cheese Bugles, closing her eyes and deeply inhaling the smell of the processed yellow corn meal and ingredients she didn’t want to know about. The shelf life timer on Bugles was ticking, just like everything else. In a year, most packaged foods would be expired, in five, everything would be.
“Oh, shit.”
Something moved. Andi’s eyes shot toward it, the crunch of a mouthful of Bugles filled her ears. An animal jumped on the hood of a Buick Encore sitting probably forever in the passing lane. The animal crouched and sniffed the air. Andi stared at it. It was a monkey. A monkey in Omaha, Nebraska. Who would have imagined a monkey in Omaha, Nebraska? A crazy person. This is all in your head. “Shut up,” Andi whispered. The monkey leapt from the Encore onto the pavement and disappeared over the shoulder of the highway. The world wasn’t getting saner anytime soon.
I’m going to Colorado, ran through her head. She didn’t know where that thought came from. She’d never been to Colorado, but she liked the idea. I’m going to find a cabin in the mountains away from the monsters, away from the survivors, away from everything. A cabin close to a liquor store. A vision flashed through her head, a vision where she spent the next sixty years living off nature and taking naps – a lot. Andi started to turn the screwdriver in the ignition but another motion on the highway stopped her hand. It wasn’t a monkey. The glint of the sun off a windshield flashed in the afternoon. Andi sat and waited as a silver Toyota swung off Interstate 80 East, onto 42nd Street and turned north. Nobody in the car seemed to notice her; they all stared straight ahead, but she saw four people in the car. Oh, my. People. Real live people. I’m not alone.
She almost turned the screwdriver again, but as the Toyota drove out of sight on 42nd Street, another vehicle appeared on I-80 East, a red Chevrolet pickup. Seriously? Andi hadn’t seen a moving vehicle, or a person in the 449 miles from Muskogee, Oklahoma, to Omaha. These two had to be connected. Then why were they driving so far apart? Andi twisted the screwdriver and the car came to life. She whipped a wide U-turn and drove to the 42nd Street exit.
Andi found the red Chevy easily enough. The drive
r sat in the cab, parked behind a blue Dodge Caravan. A hospital surrounded by a tall chain-link fence was just beyond the truck; at about the distance the people in the Toyota probably wouldn’t notice the Chevy following them, if the hospital was their destination. Andi let the Subaru slowly coast to a stop on the roadside about fifty yards behind the Chevy and turned off the engine. What’s happening? The driver never noticed the Subaru because he was focused on the hospital. Andi pulled the binoculars to her face; the driver looked at the hospital through a pair of binoculars of his own. What? The man in the Chevy wasn’t with them, he was following them. Sneaky, sneaky Mr. Peeky.
The driver’s door to the Chevy crept open and he stepped out; Andi slumped low in her seat, but that wasn’t necessary. I could be tap dancing and he wouldn’t notice me. The driver was just a kid, about eighteen, just four years younger than Andi, but it seemed like twenty. He was dressed in khaki slacks, a white shirt and blue tie. What is this? Nineteen Eighty-five? He walked slowly, trying to be stealthy like something he saw on television. Andi didn’t see a weapon on the boy, but she wasn’t taking any chances. The Subaru door opened with a click too faint for Mr. Peeky to hear and Andi slid out, her weapon slung across her shoulder and the sidearm in her hand. She quietly shut the door and followed Mr. Peeky.
The stench of blood tickled Andi’s nose as she approached the hospital fence, a section lay inward. It had been pushed down. Bodies of monsters and soldiers – like me – littered the hospital parking lot, the pavement a sticky black pool. The boy walked through the mess like he didn’t notice the mangled bodies that lay at his feet, or the congealed blood sucking at the soles of his shoes. This isn’t right. He was headed for the Toyota and a thin red haired woman who stood at the door to the silver car, a rifle lay on the hood of the car. She didn’t see him; her eyes were on the hospital. Where’s everybody else? Dang it. Andi knew where they were. In the hospital, the main entrance to the Nebraska Medical Center a black, jagged hole. Oh, no. A murder of crows, their inky black wings glistening in the sunlight, covered the roof of the hospital and parking garage. Andi hoped that wasn’t a bad omen.
The abandoned military vehicles gave Andi cover as she went through the hole in the fence and skirted the gore; the taste of copper filled her mouth as she breathed. The boy was about ten feet from the woman when Andi rounded an M35 cargo truck and started toward the car. She couldn’t reach the boy to stop him from doing whateverintheheck he had planned. The boy didn’t have a gun; she was fairly certain of that; his hands swung empty as he walked and nothing bulged in his pants. Andi slid her sidearm into its holster and shouted, “Boy, am I ever glad to find you guys.”
The red-haired woman snapped around and screamed, the M27 suddenly in her white-knuckled grip and pointed at the dead center of the boy’s forehead.
July 29: Omaha, Nebraska
Chapter 10
The tart burn of stomach acid tickled the back of Jenna’s throat. Dear God, not now. Two people, two people she didn’t know, she didn’t even know them, had snuck up behind her. Jerks. One, a boy of eighteen or nineteen with a sickly molestache stood about ten feet away, the other a woman with a pistol on her belt and an Army rifle slung over her shoulder about fifteen feet behind that. The woman slowly raised her hands and smiled naturally, her teeth straight and white. The boy dressed like a Mormon missionary – no ‘Ensign Magazine’ for me today, thank you – stood with his arms at his side. A black stain slowly grew on the crotch of his pants.
“You assholes,” she screamed. “You scared the shit out of me.”
“Sorry about that,” the woman said, her voice calm and steady, the solid Midwest accent made her sound genuine. She didn’t move. She stood in place with her hands up, palms facing Jenna. She could have just shot me. “I didn’t mean to.” Her mouth slowly pulled back from a smile to a grin. “It’s just so hard to meet good people nowadays.”
“You’re goddamned right.” Jenna’s stomach lurched and she swallowed. No more puke, Jenna Mullins. Not right now. As much as her body threatened to double her over and spill what was left in her stomach onto the parking lot, she stood straight, her arms held the machine gun steady, right at the Missionary’s face. “Now where in the fuck are you from?”
The Missionary flinched, his head moved slowly in a nod. Words spilled from his mouth in a low mumble.
“What was that?” Jenna shouted, the M27 pressed hard into her shoulder.
“You’re saying bad words,” the Missionary boy said, his gaze never leaving the pavement. “Mother’s going to punish you.”
“Is your mother here?”
He shook his head and gripped his hands over his urine-soaked crotch.
“I’m not with him,” the woman said. “I came up from Oklahoma and followed signs to a survival shelter in–”
“Kansas City?” Jenna asked.
The woman nodded. “Yes. Worlds of Fun. It was abandoned, but a map pointed me up here.” She looked around then her eyes rested back on Jenna’s face. “Omaha’s not much of an upgrade.”
Jenna looked at the Missionary. “What about you?”
“Colorado,” he said in barely more than a whisper.
Oklahoma? Colorado? “So, you two aren’t together?” What are the chances of two random people finding me at the same time? Not very damned likely. Something’s not right here. Not right at all.
“No,” the woman said. “I saw both of your vehicles while I was parked on the interstate. I came up here looking for people. I didn’t want you to get away.”
Jenna nodded, memories of latching on to Craig in Harrisonville, Missouri, flooded her mind. It seemed like years. “I understand the feeling.”
“You’re waiting for someone? Someone in the hospital?” the woman asked.
Good lord, how long have they been in there? Just seconds? Minutes? Hours? “Three someones.”
The woman slowly lowered her hands to shoulder height. Jenna didn’t move. She seemed nice enough, or was it just because she was a woman?
“Do you mind if we wait here with you until they come out? I’m looking forward to having people in my life again. Conversations with the inside of my car are getting a little one-sided.”
Jenna decided right then she trusted the woman, but something was wrong with the Missionary. He was a mostly grown man, but looked like he still pulled wings off flies. “Sure,” she said, nodding her head toward the Missionary. “And you might want to help this guy find some dry pants.”
***
Trails of gore streaked the once sterilized white floors of the Nebraska Medical Center like the hospital had been invaded by enormous bloody slugs. Terry’s flashlight cut through the darkness as they walked by Admitting, the room behind the half windows in order, like staff had simply left for lunch. A coffee mug reading ‘Keep Calm and Call Batman’ sat next to a computer that would never hum with the power of electricity again. A violet sweater rested on the back of the chair, a Snickers bar stuck half out of the pocket. Terry moved toward the doorway, but Doug grabbed his arm.
“We’re looking for Corson, Terry,” he whispered. “Get in, get out.”
“But,” Terry whispered back. “It’s a Snickers.”
“We’ll hit the next convenience store and get you all the Snickers we can find. But we gotta go, now.”
Nikki pushed the switch of her flashlight with her thumb, the white beam merged with Terry’s, filling the hallway with light. Color-coded lines ran along the floor. Red went to cardiology, yellow to radiology, blue to x-ray, green to general surgery.
“What are we looking for, Doug?” Nikki asked, Doug’s arm around her shoulder, his shattered ankle a doctor in this hospital stuffed in a cast swung helplessly as she helped him walk. Doug tried to keep his weight on his one good leg and off of Nikki; he knew that might help keep them alive.
“Corson,” he said flatly. “The son of a bitch who sent us to the Community.”
“Got any idea where he is?”
Doug sh
ook his head. “We only saw him in the cafeteria. I sure as shit doubt he’s there.”
“If he’s still alive,” Nikki said, her voice barely a whisper.
“Yeah. If he’s still alive.”
The body of a nurse lay against the wall; an arm torn from his socket lay down the hall, most of the flesh gnawed from the humerus. Nikki threw a hand over her mouth and bit into her palm, the scream died in her throat. “Just keep moving,” Doug whispered. They continued down the hallway.
Doorways loomed at even intervals, the darkness beyond them like black painted on glass. Doug was thankful the sunlight couldn’t bleed into that darkness; he didn’t want to know what was there. Terry threw an arm in front of Nikki and Doug’s chests; they stopped. He pointed his light on a sign that hung from the ceiling.
“Cafeteria’s that way,” he said, pointing down a side hall. “We could try there.” The glow of the flashlights was aimed at the sign, but enough hit Terry’s face to show Doug he was grinning. “Last time we were there, they served beer.”
“Goddamnit, Terry,” Doug hissed. “Can’t you be serious for one minute? You’re not playing ‘Left 4 Dead’ here. This is fucking real.”
“Hey,” Terry started, but a sound, a scrape; the subtle scratch of a hard-sole shoe across tiles stopped him cold. “Boss?”
Doug swallowed and pulled the Beretta M9 from its holster. “Get ready.” He sucked in through his nostrils; the smell of rot mingled with disinfectant fought for control of the air. He blew his breath slowly from the tight circle of his mouth. “Light up that hallway on three.” Doug’s heart beat heavily in his chest. He knew if the front of his shirt was visible, he would see his heartbeat. “One.” Oh, shit. “Two.” Lord, let me see Jenna again. “Three.” Terry and Nikki swung their lights into the hallway, the lines on the floor indicating cardiology and the cardiology waiting room.