I whistled up for Rebecca, who opened the small window overlooking the production floor. She stuck her head out and I whispered, “I’m fine. We had a slaver break in, but I took care of him. I’m going to stay down here and keep an eye on things.” There was no sense in upsetting her even more than she already was, so I chose to keep the sex of our intruder a secret.
She nodded and blew me a kiss before closing the window and settling down for the rest of the night. I secured the door as best as I could, then pulled up a chair and settled in for a long night of guard duty.
* * *
The dim light that filtered in the warehouse’s windows the next morning woke me from my fitful slumber. As I rose and stretched out the kinks in my back, I felt my age like I’d never believed possible. I had aches in my knees and hands and there was the constant feeling that I had indigestion or something. At least I hoped it was my thirty-five years creeping up on me and not cancer or something else.
A quick check of the scene told me everything I’d suspected the night before. The woman had probably been intent on murdering Jesse and I in our sleep, then kidnapping the women to sell as slaves. I’d missed it last night, but she had several zip ties stuffed in her boot to make quick, quiet handcuffs and a few rags stuffed in her shirt, which I assumed were for gags.
I dragged her already-stiff body through the doorway that the second slaver had taken and then around the corner out of sight. I don’t know why I bothered taking her that far, the snow where I’d pulled her across was covered in congealed blood and could easily be seen from the road if anyone was searching.
People knew we were here and that meant it was time for us to go, which was fine with me. I wanted to go farther south than we currently were anyway, but I had hoped for a few more days to allow more recovery time for Jesse. I also wasn’t thrilled about being the only driver that we had. Rebecca and Trisha just weren’t reliable enough to drive the truck with the road conditions the way they were. Hell, half the time, we were interpreting where the road might be since they were all completely covered in snow.
At the pace we were going, we were a couple of days out from needing to make a choice whether to risk driving through the mountains of Arkansas or sweeping further west through the plains before heading south. I decided that figuring out our route was the first thing we needed to do this morning. We’d leave right after breakfast. I stared at the small footprints of the escaped slaver for a moment longer and then went back inside.
I was surprised by the activity on the warehouse floor when I went in. Jesse limped between the truck and the foot of the stairs carrying the supplies that Trisha and Sam brought down from the offices above while Rebecca was cooking our breakfast over an office trash can fire. I couldn’t quite make out what our meal would be since my mask hid the smell. I pulled the door as tight as I could, then removed my mask and attached it to my belt loop. Fried spam and canned green beans. We were truly blessed to have come from Virden, I thought as I remembered the weird meat that the slaver had in her pocket.
“I figured it was time to go after our visit last night,” Jesse said.
“Yeah, I thought the same thing,” I replied. “Let’s get everything loaded and then we need to discuss our route.”
“Okay, sounds good.” He placed a meaty palm across my chest when I walked by. Even injured, the dude could mop the floor with me. “Next time, don’t be such a hero. Come get me and we can work together.”
“I gotcha, man. I know I should have, but I wasn’t sure about your leg,” I answered truthfully.
“It’s getting better, just a bunch of annoying little holes. How the hell did you hear anything? We slept right through it,” he indicated Trisha and Sam.
“Rebecca heard the glass we’d leaned against the door break. I was asleep and she woke me up, otherwise…” I let the unfinished sentence hang in the air for a moment.
“Otherwise, you two would be dead and we’d be in a cage somewhere, or worse,” Trisha stated.
“Slavers, huh?” Jesse asked.
“Yeah, the one I killed had zip ties and gags on her and…” I stopped as Jesse cut me off.
“Her? You mean we were being attacked by a woman?” he asked
“Yeah, I killed her before I realized that she wasn’t a man. Anyway, her companion got scared when he saw me kill her and took off. I ran after him, but he got away in an old pick-up truck.”
“Get anything useful off the body?” he asked.
I gestured towards the old gas mask. “She was wearing that and had a trench coat that will help in the rain or snow, but not much else. No guns or anything.”
“Smart. Didn’t want to injure her profit.”
“Yeah, well now the bitch is dead,” Trisha said. “Rebecca is almost done with breakfast. Let’s finish loading up and eat. I don’t want to be here when her husband or kid comes back with a mob and decides to burn the place down.”
That sobered us up pretty quickly and we finished loading the truck. Breakfast went down wonderfully and we all thanked Rebecca profusely for her ability to turn just about any canned item into a delicacy with some spices and kitchen know-how. Jesse and I opened the huge Road Atlas on the hood of the truck while the girls stowed the cooking gear.
“We need to decide if we want to go south through the mountains or west through the plains,” I stated. “We’ve got a few days to decide, but by the Joplin area,” I indicated a point near the southwest corner of Missouri, “we need to figure it out.”
“What’s the benefit of going south into Arkansas?” Jesse asked.
“Well, presumably, we’d get to warmer temperatures more quickly.”
“I don’t think so,” he countered and then flipped to the large blown-up map of Arkansas. “Look, the map shows that the roads south do all sorts of switchbacks as they go high up into the mountains and then back down. All those turns would have been dangerous even when there were road crews clearing them. I’d bet they’re catastrophic now. Hell, we almost wrecked coming down that huge hill outside of Jefferson City.”
“And there are lots and lots of choke points for ambushes,” I added.
“Yeah, fuck. I didn’t even think of that. How the hell did you, a guy who used to crunch numbers and drink lattes all day, think of that before I did?” Jesse said with a friendly punch to the shoulder.
“I had all night to think about it,” I reminded him.
“Good point. Anyway, those mountains are obviously treacherous, but beyond that we quickly move into the swamplands of Louisiana. Maybe that’s a good thing, help keep others out.”
“We don’t know if those swamps are going to be frozen or not, so we can’t count on that,” I said as I absentmindedly tapped my finger on the map. “My vote is to go southwest into Oklahoma, through Texas and then try to put down some type of roots in the New Mexico or Arizona area.”
“Not a lot of food-growing ability in the desert. What about going southwest as far as this town, Lawton, then head south into Texas?” he asked pointing to a small city near the Oklahoma/Texas border. “The topo map still shows fertile soil that far west. Right around there is when it begins to change to the more arid conditions out west, so we might be able to scratch out our survival along the perimeter of that area.”
I poured over the map quietly for a few minutes and said, “Okay, let’s do it. I’m not sure if the Springfield here in Missouri was a big enough target to get hit with a nuke, but I want to avoid all towns named ‘Springfield’ from here on out!”
“Agreed,” Jesse said and we all piled into the truck to begin another long stretch of driving.
* * *
We made it all the way to the western side of Tulsa, Oklahoma before the truck ran out of gas. Six days ago, we left the boat manufacturing plant to travel farther southwest in an attempt to move to a warmer locale. We weren’t the only ones making the trip either. At times the road was so choked with travelers that we had to slow almost to a stop before they finally m
oved to the side and we could slip by. At first it seemed like a lot of people had the same idea that we did about moving south, but then we realized that a lot were also moving north or west, even east. There was no rhyme or reason to the plans of the refugees that we talked to, other than it was bad where they were coming from and they had a plan to go somewhere safer. That didn’t bode well for what lay ahead of us.
The trip had gotten hairy a few times as people attempted to grab onto our truck and we’d had to convince them of the error of their ways. Once, someone that we shoved off the truck shot out the back window after he got up from the snow. By the way everyone started running it became obvious that southwest Missouri was no stranger to the violence that had plagued Illinois.
As it turned out, Springfield, Missouri was one of the cities to get nuked. That made me wonder what the cut-off criteria for the expenditure of nuclear weapons were. The Atlas said that the city had a population of about 250,000 people, but that hardly seemed like some country would waste a nuclear missile on such a small target, unless the enemies of the former United States had so many bombs that they didn’t care about using them indiscriminately. I knew that I’d never know, but that made me reevaluate our route. Originally, we’d planned on following Interstate 44 all the way to Lawton, then turning south. But if Springfield was a target, then certainly Tulsa and Oklahoma City were both glowing.
It turns out that I was right about Tulsa. We were still thirty miles away when we started seeing the effects of the fires and blast overpressure. We took a wide arc around the city and our truck attracted several sick creatures, but we made it through without needing to fight any of them. I was hesitant about doing that at first since it would just leave more of them around for the next group traveling through, but Jesse helped me see the wisdom of simply bypassing them.
We tried to get fuel at several different points, but most of the cars we came across in Oklahoma were bone-dry empty. The large 250 gallon external fuel tank had kept us going for a long time while we traveled at less than twenty miles per hour, but it finally gave up on us. I knew it would happen sooner or later but I’d hoped to make it to our waypoint of Lawton before we had to ditch it. We set about preparing our gear for the arduous journey ahead.
Jesse ripped out the pages of the Atlas that seemed to make the most sense and left the rest of it. We loaded so much food and ammunition into our backpacks that I was worried about falling and being stuck on my back like a turtle. We left most of the canned goods because they were simply too heavy to carry, but we spent about two hours cutting open complete packages of the military rations that Allan had packed in the truck and stuffing them into the giant hiker’s backpacks that we’d taken from Virden. The prepackaged meals took up too much space when they were completely sealed because all of the cardboard packaging and air trapped inside the bags, but once you cut all that away to only the foodstuffs, then they were manageable.
I took stock of all the empty packages lying on the floorboard of the truck. If we conserved our food, we should have enough for a little over a month. I did some more mental calculations and decided that if we could cover twenty miles a day, our current stock of food could feasibly get us to our projected destination. I took a sidelong glance at Jesse’s leg and revised my estimate to fifteen miles a day.
He was able to move around a lot more than he could a week ago, but he still had a limp. He’d been lucky that he only got about twenty-five pellets from more than thirty yards away. Any closer and it probably would have torn his leg completely apart. We’d used the broom method again to make him a crutch before we left the warehouse, but so far, he’d refused to use it. I noticed that he’d attached it to the back of his backpack.
I was sad as I patted the truck’s hood in farewell. Two weeks of almost constant contact with the vehicle since we left Virden had caused me to be a little nostalgic towards it. On our travel south, we had heat and protection from the things outside the cab of the truck. Now we were just a part of the masses moving along the old interstate system on foot.
* * *
I set my leading foot and pulled the trail one from the knee-deep snow. Over and over again I repeated the process as I broke through the snow for our expanded group. Somehow we’d picked up a pair of children along the way. Jordyn was fifteen and her brother Jackson was thirteen. They’d been in the house we used for shelter three nights ago, but neither knew where their parents were or what had happened to them.
The children’s memories were sketchy about the events, but apparently they’d been traveling south to escape the cold when they were attacked by zombies. The best we could piece together was that the father had died defending them and the mother hid them in the house before attempting to draw the creatures away. That was two or three nights before we showed up and they were practically starving. We fed them and against my wishes, the girls decided we were taking the two of them under our wing and bringing them with us. I’d argued that their parents died trying to protect them and we could meet the same fate, but the icy cold glare I’d gotten from Rebecca was the same look that she would have given one of her students. I knew that this debate was closed; it was time for me to just shut up and color.
I wasn’t particularly happy that we’d taken on the responsibility for the children’s safety, but the two seemed to have accepted their parent’s fate and I got the feeling that they were pretty good kids. I hadn’t spent too much time with them yet, but they both seemed to be fairly smart and I hoped that we’d be able to help keep them safe from the dangers of the world we found ourselves in. They’d managed to stay alive this long, so maybe there was hope for them.
So here we were, the seven of us moving slowly in a line through a blowing snow storm. Actually, I didn’t think it was currently snowing, but the wind was blowing the particles around so much that it seemed like it was. I led the way, followed by Trisha. The two of us acted as the plows for the children, followed by Rebecca and Jesse brought up the rear. My aching feet and legs longed for the easy days of riding a bicycle from outside of Chicago to Virden. I laughed when I remembered how hard I thought that trip had been at the time. We’d actually tried to use a bike that we found a few towns back to carry our supplies, but it was next to useless in the deep snow.
The blowing snow made it nearly impossible to tell if we were the only ones walking this direction or if hundreds more were only a little ways ahead of us. That was a scary thought because the scavengers and zombies could literally be on top of us before we even realized what was happening. A glance behind the group showed that our little path was already beginning to fill in with snow and the evidence of our passing would be completely covered up soon.
The cold seemed to find its way through every possible gap in the layers of our clothing. I was extremely cold, but I didn’t dare say anything if the kids and our injured guy weren’t complaining. The children didn’t have gas masks like we did and our extra mask was too big for either of them, so we wrapped their faces in several old scarves that we discovered in the home we found them in. In fact, that was probably better for them because the rubber from the mask seemed to transfer the cold directly to my core.
One foot forward, focus on the next step. Keep going. The cold is already less than it was up north. There’s going to be a shelter for the night in only a couple of hours. Keep an eye off to the wood line. Listen for sounds other than the struggle of the group. My mind repeated small little phrases like this over and over while we trudged along wearily eating up the miles.
We’d need to start looking for uninhabited shelter in about an hour. Otherwise, we could end up walking after dark and we really didn’t want to do that. Although the sky was clouded over with ash- and soil-laden clouds, the days were noticeably warmer than the nights. Plus, things tended to emerge from wherever they hid or rested during the day.
We turned a bend in the road and up ahead I saw a large hotel sitting beside the road with dark smoke billowing from a chimney. It resembl
ed a mountain ski lodge that I’d visited in Utah one winter during college. From what I could tell, the entire building was designed to look like a giant log cabin. Newly painted signs beside the road announced that the hotel was “OPEN FOR TRAVELERS” and “SMALL FEE FOR SHELTER FROM THE WEATHER”.
I held up my hand in the gesture instructing the group to stop that Jesse had taught me. I turned around and trudged back towards the others. We huddled in a small group and I told them what I’d seen just up ahead.
“There’s a hotel up around the bend with signs advertising rooms for rent,” I said. Rebecca’s eyes squinted through the goggles of her mask as she smiled and I knew which way her vote would go.
“How much do they want for a room?” Trisha asked absentmindedly.
“We don’t have anything of value to pay for one,” Jesse replied.
“Oh, yeah,” she answered with her head held low.
I glanced at the darkening sky and said, “Should we go in and see if there’s something we can trade for a room?”
“Maybe only one of us should go,” Jesse suggested. “The rest can stay hidden.”
I regarded the composition of our group. We had an injured black guy, two attractive women, a smart-aleck teenage girl and two kids. Maybe I was remembering how things used to be and stereotyping people, but I didn’t think our group’s diverse dynamic would sell well in central Oklahoma. “I’ll go,” I replied.
Jesse nodded in understanding and ushered everyone off the road into the trees. “Alright, brother. I’ll be right here waiting for you,” he said. I shook his hand and dropped my backpack beside him, then started back towards the hotel.
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