“Ach, mein Gott!” Klaus screamed hysterically. “They’re going to kill us!”
Jonah slammed his foot on the brakes and threw his arm out the window, waving it manically at the two men. “Lads, lads, yer all right!” he yelled. “We’re only looking for directions!”
The two men looked at each other, then cautiously approached the car from either side. A moment later, Jonah stared down the barrel of a rifle.
“Mister, that wasn’t a smart thing to do,” growled a man with bulging biceps and three days’ worth of growth on his face. “You looking to get yourself killed?”
“Sorry, didn’t mean that,” Jonah said sheepishly. “I was only looking to give yis a quick beep. Something’s wrong with the bleedin’ horn, so there is.”
The man chuckled. “Say, is that an Irish accent?” he asked, lowering his rifle.
Jonah nodded.
The man broke out into a big smile. “Well how about that? My great great granddaddy was from Skibereen, County Cork. You ever hear of the place?” He squatted beside the window, staring in at Jonah.
“Been there many a time. For the fishing mainly,” Jonah replied. He’d been in similar conversations like this before. The Yanks loved a natter about the old sod. This was the first one since the end of the world though. It felt a little surreal.
The man scratched his chin. “Well, I’ll be damned. I take it you were on vacation when vPox went down?”
“Yeah, I was taking the missus on holliers,” Jonah replied. “I tell yeh, it’s been bleedin’ brutal.”
The man frowned. “Holliers? What the hell’s that?”
“Eh, a holiday, bud. You know, Waterworld, Disney, that sort of thing.”
“A vacation? Got you. I’m sure sorry you got caught up in all this. Not what you were expecting when you got here, right?”
Jonah stared at the man. That was putting it mildly. At that moment, his companion walked around the front of the car and came over to the window. He wore a light jacket, camo pants, and a dark blue baseball cap that had a bunch of letters on it that from his angle, Jonah couldn’t quite make out.
“Irish, huh?” he said, staring in through the window. He looked over at Klaus. “How about you? You Irish too?”
Klaus shook his head. “No. I’m from Dusseldorf.”
The man looked disappointed, like he’d missed out on having his very own Irish buddy. It was time to move the conversation along.
“Listen, lads,” Jonah said. “The reason we stopped yis is we’re looking to find a gun store. Yesterday me and the missus got into a spot of bother. Things are getting dangerous here.” He pointed at the men’s rifles. “Don’t suppose you know where we can find a couple of them, do yeh?” Then he pointed at the handguns they wore by their waists. “And maybe some of those jobbies too?”
The two men looked at each other and broke out into broad grins. The man whose great great granddaddy hailed from Skibereen said to Jonah, “Oh, I think we can help you out there, all right.”
***
Twenty minutes later, Jonah pulled into a small strip mall off the Osceola Parkway and slotted the Taurus into a parking spot outside a single story building on the corner. In big red letters, on a garish yellow awning, it said: GUNS. He smiled to himself. That’s what he was talking about.
In the back seat were Bill O’Shea and Darren Parker, who had brought them there. Turned out it was where the two men had gotten their own weapons only thirty minutes earlier. They had just returned from the gun store, parked their car, and were heading back to their hotel when Jonah stopped them.
The two were from Philadelphia. They’d come to Orlando as part of a group of fourteen on a fishing trip, and had been the only two to survive. Stocked up with weapons, ammo, and food, they were just about to head back to Philadelphia. Jonah was grateful the two friends were prepared to delay their trip in order to help him and Klaus out.
Bill was in construction, not the military, and his friend Darren was a fireman. Both had extensive weapons training, however, a relief to Jonah. They would be able to help match the right ammunition to the right gun, something he had been a little worried about.
A set of steel shutters covered both the store entrance and the windows to either side. Getting out of the car, Bill and Darren led the two around the corner where, amid a pile of rubble, was a gaping hole in the sidewall. Parked next to it was a John Deere front loader, its bucket lowered parallel to the ground.
Bill grinned at them. “Like I said, I’m in construction.”
Inside the store, he asked Jonah, “You any idea what you’re looking for exactly?”
Jonah pulled out a neatly folded sheet of paper from his back pocket. “Let’s see now…” he said, opening it up. “I’m looking for a nine mil or a .45. Something easy to handle. I’ll also need an AR-15 rifle of some description. I want one chambered for 5.56 NATO rounds with preferably a thirty round magazine. If there’s any hunting rifles, I’ll take one of them too. A Remington 700 would be nifty.”
Bill looked at him approvingly. “I see you’re a man who knows his weapons. That’s going to improve your chances of survival dramatically.”
“Eh, not exactly,” Jonah said sheepishly. “The missus put the list together. She’s been reading a lot of that post-apocalyptic fiction lately.”
Bill looked impressed. “She must be some lady.”
“Oh, that she is. Now regarding the pistol. I’m looking for a Glock, or a…a Sick Sewer,” Jonah continued, scrunching his face up at Colleen’s handwritten notes.
“A Sig Sauer,” Darren corrected him. “I think that’s what your missus is referring to.”
“Yeh, that’s it.” Jonah tutted. “For such a smart girl, Colleen’s writing is woeful. It’s like the bleedin’ cat wrote this.”
The two Americans began searching the store for the required weapons, Jonah and Klaus in tow. Pulling out a pistol from a smashed display case, Bill handed it to Jonah. “I recommend something like this, a Glock 21. It’s chambered in .45 ACP and got a helluva punch. Trust me, whatever you hit is going to stop dead in its tracks.”
Jonah took the weapon, inspecting it.
“Nice thing is,” Bill explained, “it’s real easy to handle. See? There’s no safety you need to fuck around with.”
Jonah frowned. “No safety? Are yeh having me on?” Looking to either side of the pistol frame, a puzzled expression came over his face.
Bill laughed. “Glocks don’t have manual thumb safeties like traditional pistols; they use a trigger safety instead. When we’re done here, we’ll go outside and do some target practice. I’ll show you a suitable firing stance for both a handgun and a rifle. Also how to load your weapons correctly. How does that sound?”
“Magic!” Jonah exclaimed giddily, waving the Glock about like an excited schoolboy. “I tell yeh, I’m gagging to fire off this baby.”
Bill gently pushed Jonah’s arm to one side. “Easy there, fellah. First thing we better teach you is gun safety. We don’t want the wrong people getting hurt, now do we?”
CHAPTER 13
Sitting behind the wheel of his brand new Toyota Tacoma, Cody drove west out of Knoxville on I-40. His Kimber 1911 was on his lap, the butt of the Ruger SR jammed into the passenger foot space, its muzzle facing away from him. Hitched to the back of the pickup, he towed an eighteen-foot travel trailer. His new home.
He passed the sign for the Holiday Inn and got into the right lane, then took the next exit ramp. A mile farther, he reached North Cedar Bluff junction and slowed to a stop. Pete pulled up behind him in the exact same model pickup, only Pete’s Taco was blue, not desert tan like Cody’s. Bringing up the rear, Walter drew up in a more upmarket white Tundra. It had been the last one left at the Toyota showroom, and Cody and Pete had both insisted he take it.
Cody swung left onto Cedar Bluff and drove under the I-40 underpass. After two hundred yards, he took a left onto North Peters Road and headed for the Guardian Armory. It was the rendezv
ous point he’d agreed with Chris the other day. It seemed as good a place as any, and was a chance for both groups to pick up more weapons and ammunition. Walter in particular needed to rearm, seeing as Mason had disarmed him at the gas station.
When they’d gotten home the previous evening, Walter had grilled him further on Chris. Cody told him what little he knew about him in such a short space of time.
He’d met him and his group at Dick’s Sporting store, not far from the armory where, just like him, they’d been stocking up on camping supplies. Chris was in his late thirties. About five ten, muscular, with short blond hair, he’d told Cody that he’d been a senior executive at the movie theater chain, the Regal Entertainment Group, the only Knoxville-based company listed in the Fortune 1000. He had that vibe about him. Perhaps a little overbearing, he was supremely fit, with a confident demeanor. A typical alpha male. But he had integrity, and was not a thug like Mason, Cody reassured Walter again.
“I guess we’ll see,” Walter said when Cody finished. “It would be nice to find some like-minded people. With a bigger community, I can work on projects that are just not worth doing if there’s only the three of us.”
“Such as?”
“Such as building a settlement with proper infrastructure. Running water, electricity, plumbing, stuff like that.”
Pete frowned. “That’s pretty ambitious, Walter. What sort of power do you propose to use? Solar?”
“Maybe, though personally I prefer hydro. Build a settlement near a river and you can rig up a simple hydraulic pump too. Then not only do you have power, you got running water.”
“You know how to do all that?” Cody asked.
“Sure, it’s simple. For electricity, you just need to feed a pipe off the river and put a small turbine in it. It’ll give you enough juice to run the house lights, charge batteries, stuff like that. Building a pump is straightforward enough.”
“Great, Chris is going to love that.” Cody hesitated a moment. “To be honest, he’s picky about who he allows into his group. When he learned I was with two other people, he didn’t seem too happy.” Cody smiled at Walter. “He perked up when I told him you were a genius though.”
They reached the Guardian Armory. Cody pulled into the large parking lot off Seven Oaks Drive and came to a stop about a hundred feet away from it. The gun shop was next to a karate dojo and a self-defense store. Like the previous day, it occurred to him how useless either martial arts or guns had been in protecting people against a deadly virus. For the survivors however, self-defense was becoming increasingly more necessary. Their encounter with Mason’s gang the previous day had made that very clear.
Walter and Pete drew up to either side of him. Cody jumped out of the Tacoma and strolled across the lot to where Chris and his people sat on the steps outside the gun store. Twenty feet away was a line of four vehicles, a variety of different types of RVs. With eight in their group, they obviously planned on sharing accommodation. Cody was sure there was a reason for it. Perhaps Chris felt it was safer, or that it led to greater community spirit, or perhaps both.
Chris rose to his feet as Cody approached, and they shook hands. He looked over Cody’s shoulder to where the three pickups sat parked. “Aren’t your friends coming over?” he asked with a frown.
After his experience with Mason the other night, Walter wasn’t taking any chances. He wanted to meet Chris away from everyone else first, rather than to walk up to a larger, well-armed group. The arrangement was that Cody would ask Chris to come over and meet Walter. Cody was a little dubious of the plan, in particular about how Chris might react. One way or the other, he was about to find out.
“Do you mind coming over to meet Walter by yourself?” he asked. “We ran into a little trouble yesterday. It’s made him kind of cautious.”
Chris looked at him curiously. “What kind of trouble?”
“The kind that leaves you with a bullet in your leg.”
Chris stared over at Walter, who had gotten out of his pickup. He leaned against the hood and was looking in their direction. “Sure, I can do that,” Chris said after a moment of evaluation. He turned to a man named Eddy who Cody had met the previous day as well. Chris’s second in command, as far as he could tell. “Eddy, you guys stay here. I’m going over to introduce myself to Cody’s friends.”
A scowl came over Eddy’s face. “Chris, they’re joining us, not the other way around. They should get their asses over here and quit pansying around.”
“I’ll stay behind with Eddy and let you two talk if you like,” Cody volunteered, anxious not to let doubt or suspicion enter what should be a friendly meeting between like-minded survivors.
Chris put his arm around Cody’s shoulder. “It’s okay, Ed. I trust Cody. Come on. Let’s go.”
The two walked across the lot and headed over to Walter. “Looks like you got yourselves some nice accommodation,” Chris commented as they got closer.
Earlier that morning at the Tennessee RV Supercenter outside Knoxville, the three had picked out their travel trailers. On Walter’s instructions, they’d selected lightweight, easy to tow vehicles. They needed to stay mobile. A forty-foot model, like the one Pete had first chosen, with every imaginable luxury inside, wasn’t going to cut it tearing down a forest track at fifty miles an hour with a bunch of bloodthirsty bandits on their tails.
Reluctantly, Pete had downscaled to a less fancy model, a nineteen-foot Venture Sonic Lite. Cody chose a KZ Sportsmen Classic, while Walter picked out a Forest River Micro Lite. Pleased with their “purchases”, they’d hitched them up to their trucks and driven back to Knoxville.
Chris strode ahead of Cody to Walter’s pickup, his hand extended. Walter pushed himself off the bonnet and stuck out his hand out as well.
“Hey, Walter, I’m Chris. Shit, Cody wasn’t kidding,” he said, staring down at the bandage wrapped around Walter’s calf, where he’d cut away the lower portion of the trouser leg. “You in pain, buddy?”
“Nah, it’s only a superficial wound. It’ll heal soon.” He looked down at the pistol holstered on Chris’s right hip. “Got yourself a nice handgun there. Looks like a Steyr. Would I be right?”
Chris looked impressed. “You know your guns. Yep, it’s a Steyr M9-A1. I legally own it. Got the paperwork to prove it too.”
Walter smiled. “A guy named Mason currently has my legally-owned handgun. He’s not exactly the nicest guy in the world.”
“That the guy who shot you?”
Walter nodded. “He’s the leader of a gang in east Knoxville. Soon there’ll be more and more groups like his, safety in numbers and all that. Human nature dictates that not all of them will be nice people.”
Chris pointed back across the lot. “I got a group of my own right here. Haven’t known any of them long, but they’re good people. I feel comfortable taking them into the hills with me. If you want to ride in our convoy, you guys are welcome to join us. Seeing as we just met, it’s probably best you remain separate from our group for the moment, but there’s no reason why we can’t all ride out together, even set up camp next to one another.”
Walter’s shoulders relaxed. It appeared Chris’s energy and enthusiasm had disarmed him, along with the fact Chris wasn’t trying to railroad him into his gang. “That’s kind of you to offer. I think we’ll take you up on it. Where do you plan on heading exactly?”
“We’re driving down to Lake Ocoee, it’s part of the Cohutta Wilderness Area. There’s a place called Wasson Lodge on the southwest shore. I took my wife and children there several times. The lake is full of fish, and there’s deer and wild boar in the forest. It’s about as perfect a spot as you could imagine.”
Walter winked at Cody. “How about that? Just so happens we were heading in that direction too. It would be kind of dumb if we didn’t all head off there together, wouldn’t it?”
CHAPTER 14
Standing next to a small field outside the town of Benton, Tennessee, Sheriff John Rollins leaned against the do
or of his Dodge Charger watching a bulldozer shovel the last of the earth into a recently excavated pit. The huge pit constituted a mass grave of over a thousand people. Also scattered around the field were smaller individual graves where Benton’s survivors had buried family members, erecting simple wooden crosses to mark them.
One week ago, the tiny agricultural town in Polk County, located along the northwestern fringe of the Cohutta Wilderness Area, had a population of approximately fourteen hundred people. Today, the count stood at thirty-seven. Seventeen men, fifteen women, and five children, with another four hundred unaccounted for, presumed to have left Benton in search of medical treatment in the nearby cities of Cleveland and Chattanooga.
For the past two days, Rollins and a team of volunteers had been clearing out houses one street at a time, loading the corpses into the back of a tarpaulin truck and hauling them up to the gravesite.
Though perhaps a fruitless act, it signified compassion for those who had died, part of what it meant to be human. At that moment, Rollins didn’t feel particularly human. Perhaps the sight of the huge pile of bodies with their grotesque blistered faces had something to do with that, or the fact that in one of the marked graves lay his thirty-two-year-old pregnant wife and two-year old daughter.
Driving south down Route 411, Rollins spotted a familiar dark blue Nissan Titan approaching. It belonged to Chief Deputy Ned Granger, only appointed by Rollins two days ago. The previous week, Rollins had been chief deputy himself. As the only surviving member of the Polk County Sheriff’s department, he’d been quickly elected sheriff by Benton’s surviving townsfolk. Just thirty-seven years old, under normal circumstances Rollins was too young to become a sheriff. These weren’t normal circumstances.
Granger pulled up behind him and got out of the pickup. Walking over, he gazed out into the field. “That’s a sight I never want to see again,” he said grimly. Earlier that day, he had been among those disposing of the bodies.
No Direction Home (Book 1): No Direction Home Page 7