by L. T. Ryan
Thirty feet separated Turk from the woman. He could take her out with any of his weapons if he wanted. He didn’t, though. He placed his rifle on the ground and slid the strap of his MP7 off his body. He clenched the gun tight. The woman took off. Turk sprinted toward her. By the time she heard him and turned, he’d reached her.
Turk pulled up, aimed the MP7 at her and said, “Don’t scream, don’t run, don’t even whisper. Keep your hands where I can see them.”
The woman breathed quickly and heavily. She bounced from foot to foot, but didn’t try take off.
“That a girl,” Turk said. “Now, I want you to ease down to your knees.”
She glanced over her shoulder.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” Turk said. “I just need to ask you a few questions. Now, I think that you’ll feel more comfortable answering those questions if I don’t have a gun pointed at your head. But to do that, I need to be sure that you aren’t going to try to hurt me or run away. Nod if you understand.”
She nodded.
“All right. Now go ahead and kneel down.”
She did.
“What’s your name?”
“You tell me yours,” she said.
“Fair enough.” He lowered his weapon. “I’m Turk.”
“Sarah.”
“What are you doing out here, Sarah?”
“I’ve been wandering for days. Ever since this, whatever it is, happened. A couple days ago, I found a group of men. Or, they found me, I guess. I’d been with them up until a little bit ago.”
“You left or you escaped?”
She said nothing.
“I’m not going to turn you in to them.”
“Escaped.”
“These men, did they capture a guy earlier. About your age. Black. Cocky, maybe.”
She nodded. “They told him they were going to kill him if he didn’t lead them to this bunker. He was bragging about it, that he could get them in there and they’d be underground with everything they needed.”
Turk took a deep breath, held it and exhaled through his nose. His brother had sold him out because he had done the same to Marcus.
“Oh my God,” she said. “You’re from there, aren’t you?”
“What else can you tell me?”
“They took him away and never came back. Everyone was on edge afterward. I heard talk of those things maybe on the prowl. I saw my chance then and took it and got away.”
“Why’ve you been hiding on one side of the tree and running toward the other?”
“What?”
“It looks like you’ve been hiding in plain view.”
She shook her head. “I’m lost.”
“You have a GPS.”
She held it up and shrugged. “I’m learning on the fly here.”
“Get up.”
“Why?”
“Just do it.”
She rose.
“Lift your shirt an inch and turn around.”
She did so without question.
Turk saw that she was unarmed. “Okay, good. Yes, I came from the bunker. That man you saw was my brother. They killed him. I’m out for revenge. That GPS, its left some kind of breadcrumb trail for you?”
“Uh, not sure. Here, take it.” She held her arm out.
Turk grabbed the GPS and panned out. As he studied the trail that she’d left, he said, “You know how to shoot?”
“Kinda.”
“How do you kinda know how to shoot?”
“Video games.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t be. Look, I’m gonna take you back to the bunker. You’ll be safe there. My family is there, a few others as well. We have plenty of space and supplies to last more than a few months. We also have a plan to get out of here. Unless you want to keep taking your chances out here, we should get moving.”
She studied him for a moment. He realized he likely appeared to be no more trustworthy than those men. He couldn’t help that. It was her choice. She could take it or leave it.
“Okay,” she said.
“Good,” Turk said, reaching behind his back for his Sig Sauer P226. He retrieved it from the holster and held it out for her. “Take this. I’ll show you how to—“
She stared wide-eyed to his right. Turk spun the gun in his hand and took a step back.
“Drop it,” a man said.
Turk’s cheeks burned. He’d been conned. The girl played innocent and led him into a trap. He knew it all along, too. She stuck to the wrong side of the trees so those guys could keep track of her, not because she had no idea what she was doing.
He glanced down at her. She stared at him with tears welling in her eyes. She looked more frightened than she had when he caught up to her. She mouthed the words, “Please do something.”
Perhaps he’d been wrong about her.
“I guess I should thank you for finding that bitch for us,” the man said. “But I think we’re just as excited to have you in custody. I guess I’ll make this simple, like I did for your brother. Take us to your bunker or die.”
Thirty-Nine
Barbara and Emma slept shoulder to shoulder. They looked peaceful. That would change when they woke up.
Addison kept quiet. She found it hard to do. It had been over a week since she had anyone she felt comfortable talking to. So, she waited while they slept, wondering at what point one of them would be allowed to leave the cell. She noted that the others down there looked like they hadn’t bathed in some time. This kept her from getting her hopes up.
The door at the end of the hall thumped open. The low murmur of voices fell silent. The soft thud of boots grew louder, then stopped somewhere in the middle.
“Last cell on your right,” a man said. “And don’t let no one know I let you down here.”
“Thank you,” a woman said.
Addison relaxed at the soft sound of a female voice. The woman walked toward the cell. Her steps were barely audible. Addison turned her head to the left and saw Jenny, a hood covering her head, kneel down on the other side of the bars.
“What are you doing here?” Addison asked.
“Do you want my help?” Jenny said.
“With what?”
“Getting out of here.”
Addison looked up at the faint glow coming from the ceiling. “What makes you so sure they’ll let me out? And don’t tell me you can convince Phil to do it. I saw how he talked to you. He barely tolerates you.”
Even in the dim lighting, Addison saw the woman’s eyes water over.
“I’m sorry,” Addison said.
Jenny wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. She glanced toward Emma and Barbara. “They asleep?”
Addison nodded.
“I’m not talking about going out there to be part of the community.”
“Then what are you talking about, Jenny?”
“You got away from here. Sure, you made a mistake, but other than that, you escaped. If you’d have known about the GPS, you’d have never been found.”
“Thanks for destroying my hope.”
Jenny shook her head. “Quit being a smartass and listen to me. I know this land, but I’m scared to go alone. There’s a man out there who owes me a favor and will look the other way for a few seconds.”
“Why would he do this for you?”
“Because I’ve done some things for him.”
“Such as?”
Jenny said nothing.
“You know what?” Addison said. “Don’t tell me. I think I figured it out.” She paused a beat. Pointing toward Emma and Barbara, she asked, “What about them?”
Jenny shook her head. “There’s going to be an ATV waiting. Four will be too many, I think.”
“You think?”
“I don’t know which one he’s going to supply us with.”
“You get him to give us one with four seats. They don’t belong here, Jenny. Someone stole them, like they did me. They’re being forced to
be here. You know how that feels, right?”
Jenny exhaled. Her hot breath hit Addison on the cheek. If the woman’s breath stunk, she couldn’t tell over the smell in the cells.
“Be ready to go tonight.”
“All of us,” Addison said.
“I can’t make any promises.”
“I’m not leaving without them.”
“Okay. We’ll make it work somehow. I need to finish making arrangements to get you out of here after dark, get the ATV placed, and the guard paid off.”
Addison nodded. She didn’t watch as Jenny rose and walked away. As far as she was concerned, the woman hadn’t even come to see her. The chances of Jenny’s plan happening were slim.
“Are we really getting out of here?” Emma asked softly.
Addison scooted across the floor and squeezed in between the girl and the cell bars. “I don’t know, Emma. She says she can, but I don’t know if she’s believable.”
“You don’t trust her?”
“I don’t know if I can, which is more than I can say for most everyone else. I know I can’t trust them. She tried to help me before I left. What happened after she did was odd, though. She said her dad, the guy that runs this camp, would listen to her. She said if I were friends with her, it would give me advantages. He came in and blasted her, though. Told me that I shouldn’t associate with her, and if I did no one would look at me for the better.”
“Maybe she needed a friend,” Emma said.
“Maybe,” Addison said.
“Or she thought the two of you could escape together. After all, that’s why she came down here, right?”
Addison nodded. “I think she’s been working on this since they came here. I can’t blame her, either. I wouldn’t want to be around her step-father.”
“So you’ll go then?”
“If she shows up, yeah.”
“What if it’s a trap?”
“What are they going to do to me?” Addison said. “I’m already locked up down here. They could kill me, I guess, but to be honest, I think that’d be doing me a favor at this point.”
“Don’t say that.”
Addison glanced at the girl. She reached for her hand and squeezed it. “I’m just thinking out loud. I didn’t mean it.”
Emma said nothing. The girl stared at the wall, unblinking.
“You’re coming with me,” Addison said.
A smile formed at the corners of the girl’s mouth.
“And whatever happens, happens. But we’ll be together. The three of us can handle anything.”
Addison hoped her words offered Emma more encouragement than they did for her. The future felt bleak no matter what they did. She decided that if she had to go down, she’d do it on her terms.
Her thoughts turned positive the more she thought about the situation. With four of them, their chances of survival increased. It wouldn’t be her alone, trying to figure out how to make it. Each of them could take a job, a specific task, and work it. They could create a camp if necessary. Hunt and gather food and supplies.
She figured she could navigate to that house again, though she quickly cast that idea aside. If she could find it, the men could too. That’d probably be one of the first places they looked. But if that place existed, other places would too. They could wait out the winter in one of them and then head south late spring.
By then, things will have changed, she thought.
The virus would be gone. Most people would be as well. Maybe even those who had turned into monsters.
And if they weren’t, who cared? Addison would rather take her chances with those things out there than live in a dirty, disgusting cell for the rest of her life.
Emma leaned forward and looked away. The girl’s long hair spilled across her legs. She made a few noises, waited a moment or two, and then leaned back. Turning to Addison, she said, “I don’t know if Barbara is strong enough for this.”
“Are any of us?” Addison said.
Emma shrugged. “I’m afraid she’ll do something to mess it up, though.”
“Listen, Emma, we’ll make her strong. Okay? We all support one another. There will be times when one of us is down, or hurt, or maybe just feels like we can’t go on another step. During those moments it’ll be up to the others in the group to pick that person up, physically, if necessary, and carry them forward. Once we do this, we are committed to one another forever. Till death do we part and all that jazz. I won’t give up on you, and you don’t give up on her. Got it?”
The tension drained from Emma’s face. She nodded and smiled for a second.
What an odd age, Addison thought. Ready to be independent and take on the world, yet still a child in some ways.
“Should we tell her?” Emma asked.
Addison leaned her head back, staring up at the hole in the ceiling again. Just once, she wished a breeze would blow down from it and clear out the foul stench that lingered. Every time she thought she had adjusted, it slammed into her like an eighteen-wheeler.
“I think it’ll be best that we don’t,” Addison said. “Your concern over her tells me that’s the best way to handle it. She’ll probably do best if it all happens in a moment or two. We’ll whisk her away. Before she knows it, we’ll be a mile from this place.”
Emma said nothing. She nodded a few times. The girl’s eyes closed and her breathing deepened.
Good idea, Addison thought. If only she could sleep too. From that point on, she determined that they wouldn’t say another word about the plan, even if it didn’t go down tonight.
And if it did, she hoped it wasn’t a trap. No matter what she said, life was worth living.
Forty
“Pull off the road here,” Sean said.
“What?” Derrick said, as if he’d been knocked out of a trance.
“Pull over.”
“Why?”
Sean took a deep breath to compose himself. Yelling at the guy wouldn’t do any good. “I’m thinking we should bypass the checkpoint.”
Derrick angled the truck onto the grass shoulder and brought it to a stop. He wiped the sweat from his brow. “We’d have to walk then. This truck is too big to get through the woods.”
“We can pull it in, though, can’t we?”
“I guess so.”
Sean grabbed the GPS off the dash and studied it. They were almost five miles from the camp and hiking through the woods, which meant roughly two and a half hours, maybe a bit longer if he took into account corrections to their path. He didn’t trust the GPS. What if someone somewhere else could monitor it? Surely, a truck heading through the woods would throw up a few flags.
“How far are we from this checkpoint?” Sean asked.
“‘Bout a mile.”
He pointed at the tangle of streets and cul-de-sacs between them and the checkpoint. “This is a neighborhood here.”
“Was,” Derrick said.
“What do you mean, ‘was’?”
“We torched it.”
“Why?”
“Infected crawled all over the place, man. Sick people that wouldn’t die. They took out five of our guys. Rest of us got out, got back to camp.”
“Then what?”
“Like I said, we torched it.”
Sean had a few ideas of how they went about it. He didn’t push for more information. What was done was done. Nothing he could do about it or for the innocent who were unable to make it out of the burning inferno. Maybe they were better off anyway.
“There used to be trails behind that neighborhood,” Sean said.
“They still there,” Derrick said.
“Okay, we’re gonna stay off-road until we get to those. That’ll keep us out of view of your guys. If I remember right, it shouldn’t be difficult to head from those trails into the woods. We’ll go deep enough to hide the truck and then take the rest on foot.”
Derrick turned at the waist. He extended his arm along the back of the seat. “Why do you want to avoid them? They’ll l
et me pass. Hell, we put a hat on you and they’ll probably think you’re supposed to be with me. Then we can just drive the rest of the way. No need to get more ticks on us than we deserve by hiking through those damn woods.”
Sean ran his hands through his sweat-soaked hair. “I know it seems that simple, Derrick, but it just isn’t. I don’t want any more bloodshed. We won’t get through the checkpoint that easily. Someone will die, and it won’t be me. It might be you. It’ll definitely be your friends. You don’t want that.”
“They ain’t my friends.”
“They’re the men you built this society with, though. You share a bond. Don’t break that by putting them in a position to die.”
“What makes you think you can take them out? Why’re you such a badass?”
Sean said nothing. He stared out across the grassy field and the woods behind it.
“Whatever,” Derrick said. “We’re going to the checkpoint.”
Before the man could shift the transmission into drive, Sean placed the barrel of his gun against Derrick’s head. “Don’t think I won’t pull the trigger, man. I know where I need to go now. I’m doing you a favor bringing you back. Yeah, maybe I’ll use you as a bargaining chip, but don’t for a minute think that I need to. I’m more than capable of doing this without you. If it means more people die, so be it. That’ll be on your hands, not mine.”
Derrick lifted his hands in the air. His face turned dark red from holding his breath. Sean imagined the guy’s bladder was ready to burst from fear. He’d probably never had a gun held to his head like that. It wasn’t a calming feeling.
“Now, get off the road and head toward those tracks.”
Five minutes later they bounced along the dirt path behind the houses. The air smelled of smoke. The smoldering ruins of the homes reminded Sean of the makeshift graveyard outside of the facility in Nigeria. No one would rise from these ashes, though.