I grabbed a couple extra pairs of wool socks and a parka for myself, but didn’t take too long gathering extra clothing, as I already had some good warm clothing in my pack. Luke grabbed a few pairs of ‘Long Johns,’ as he like to call thermal underwear, and at his insistence I packed a pair for myself as well. “You never know,” he said. “These Long Johns could save your life someday.”
After gathering our clothing, we went back to look at camping gear. This part of the store had been more thoroughly picked over, but I still hoped to find a tent that was light enough for one of us to carry. I didn’t relish the idea of sleeping exposed to the elements in the New England winter. While I looked for a tent, Luke went over to sporting goods, the next section over, to look for ammunition. I sent Sarah down the next aisle to look for some sleeping bags for the three of us. Her scream caught me completely off guard.
Tearing around the corner with my revolver in my hand, I almost collided with Sarah as she was backing up, still shrieking. Two people, kids about my age, were standing at the far end of the aisle, each holding a bow with an arrow nocked to the string. A quick glance told me that they were a boy and a girl. I shoved Sarah behind me and stepped forward, trying to appear much braver than I really felt, with the .38 raised.
“I was just trying to ask her name,” the boy said with a clipped accent, as he eyed my handgun warily.
“Perhaps we should ask you yours,” Luke’s voice came from around the end of the aisle, followed by the sound of the shotgun’s pump racking. “Drop the bows and we’ll have a friendly chat.”
A look of frustration crossed the boy’s face. He was clearly upset at having been outmaneuvered, but his arrow stayed unwaveringly trained on me. It was the girl, who shared the same proud features and blonde hair, who lowered her weapon and encouraged him to do the same. They un-nocked their arrows and placed them on the ground, before standing and looking at me defiantly. That’s how we met Ben and Brooke.
Ben and Brooke are twins. Not only that, they are British, having come to the United States to spend Christmas with their maternal grandparents. They sure picked the wrong year to take that holiday. Although they are not identical (how can they be, when one’s a guy and the other’s a girl?), they do look alike, and they also tend to think alike.
Fear and tension was running high there in Walmart, and that first meeting could have ended up very differently had the twins, especially Brooke, not been so level-headed. In the end, they took us back to their ‘lair,’ where they’d been holed up in the employee break room, and did their best to make us feel welcome. We shared a meal and spoke of our experiences. Their grandparents had succumbed to the Flu quickly and the twins had stayed in their home as long as they could before hunger had forced them to leave.
While they were realists, they were still hopeful that the rest of the world wouldn’t just let the ‘bloody’ Chinese get away with it and, at some point, they would be reunited with their parents. As soon as we mentioned travelling to the ‘haven’ though, they wanted in. Ben even had a solution to the walking problem: bicycles. Walmart had a huge range of bicycles.
“Do we have any idea where this safe haven is located?” asked Ben after we finished picking out bikes.
“Do you remember anything else, Sarah?” I asked, turning to her.
“Not really,” she replied. “Barbara just kept talking about the ‘dragon’ clue. She said we would look for it when we got to New Hampshire. That’s all I can remember ... wait! There was something about the dragon being on a white mountain!”
“Dragon on a white mountain? It sounds like something out of The Hobbit,” said Brooke.
“There’s a White Mountain National Forest in New Hampshire,” Luke said, looking at an atlas he had pulled from the rack in the book section of the store. “But it’s huge. It almost cuts the state in half. It would be like trying to find a needle in a haystack.”
“Well done, Luke, that’s a start ... unless someone has a better idea of where to go or what to do, I vote that we should head there. Maybe there’ll be other travelers. Surely we can’t be the only ones that heard the message,” I said, sounding more hopeful than I felt. “Neither of you happen to be good with Morse code, do you?” I asked, glancing back at the twins. They shook their heads.
“Alright then, let’s find some baskets for these bikes. That way we can carry more supplies. I think we should leave in the morning, head north.”
“It looks like we can avoid Woonsocket,” Luke said, after thumbing through the atlas to a map of Rhode Island. Woonsocket was the nearest ‘city’ and that term applied only loosely, although it was far larger than Fort Carter. He flipped to the Massachusetts page. “It doesn’t look like we’ll be able to skirt around Worcester as easily though.”
“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” I said. Worcester was a real city. With a little over two hundred thousand people, it was the second largest city in New England after Boston. We had sort of come to an unspoken agreement that big cities were to be avoided. That’s where we figured we’d be most likely to run into the Chinese military. “If we have to go through we will,” I shook my head. “But maybe something else will come up before we get there.”
“Sounds like a plan, man,” Luke said, closing the atlas. “I think I’ll hold onto this. It could come in handy.”
“We should grab another one, too,” Brooke said. “A backup never hurts.”
6
The sun rose the next morning to find us preparing to leave Walmart. We were all packed. Each of us had a full backpack and bike baskets loaded with supplies.
“Where is Luke?” Ben asked.
“I think he went to the bathroom,” Sarah replied. “Here he is.”
Luke emerged from one of the aisles holding up a box triumphantly. “Crossbow,” he said, and knelt on the floor. He began to rip open the cardboard packaging. At first, I thought it was a toy, but when he pulled out the camouflage patterned weapon I saw that it was indeed real, as were the short arrows, or bolts, or whatever they called them. He slung the crossbow over his shoulder and secured the Velcro belt of eight holstered arrows to his thigh.
“Where did you find that?” Ben asked. “I could do with one of those, too. The bows are too big and clumsy to take with us.”
“Sorry, this was the last one. It was tucked behind a counter. All the shelves were cleaned out, probably in the panic after the outbreak. Here, you can have this though.”
He handed Ben the shotgun. The English boy took it gingerly. “Don’t worry, the safety is on.”
I wasn’t sure about giving up a firearm for what was essentially a medieval weapon, but I could tell from the loving way he handled it that Luke wouldn’t be persuaded to give the crossbow up. We got started not long after.
A mile down Highway 102, it crossed the Quaker Highway which would lead us, after another half-mile or so, to the Providence-Worcester Turnpike. This would give us a fairly straight shot across the semi-rugged and forested southern Massachusetts countryside. It was cold and overcast as we left Walmart’s parking lot, weaving our bikes between the silent cars that littered the highway. It started to snow before we reached the turnpike.
“This could be some tough sleddin’, Boss,” Luke said, pedaling up beside me. “Bicycles can be hard to ride in the snow.”
“Nothing we can do about it now,” I replied. “If it gets too bad, we’ll find someplace to stop until it lets up.”
“What if it doesn’t let up ‘til Spring?” he asked. “It’s still January, after all.”
“Heck, I don’t know ... maybe we’ll come across a place with snowmobiles.”
The snow did let up before it started sticking to the road, but that conversation with Luke kept playing on my mind. Somehow, I was beginning to feel responsible, not only for myself, but for our entire ragtag little group. What if I led them astray? The thought nagged at me as we rode. It was 19 miles from where we got on the turnpike to the edge of Worcester, and we pl
anned on staying on the turnpike the entire way.
We had only been on the turnpike for three or so miles when Brooke’s keen eyesight caught something coming toward us. We had just passed an off ramp, so we turned our bikes around and hightailed it back. We sped down the ramp and hid our bikes in the bushes near the underpass.
From the bushes, we watched the turnpike, the others looking as apprehensive as I felt. Five minutes later, a bulldozer and two trucks came into view. They were moving slowly, the dozer making sure the breakdown lane was clear, pushing the occasional abandoned vehicle out of the way. Behind them rumbled four tanks. American tanks! I could see the flags, and with a surge of joy I started up from our hiding position, all ready to wave them down. Luke grabbed me by the sleeve and pulled me roughly to the ground.
“Dude,” he whispered harshly. “Look at the sentry!”
One of the tanks had its hatch open, and the soldier leaning out of it was clearly Asian. When I peered into the truck cabins I saw the same. Chinese soldiers. I nodded sheepishly, aware of just how close I had come to getting us all captured, or worse, killed.
“I bet the Chinese are commandeering any American military hardware they find,” Luke said.
We watched as the tanks continued past, followed by a few more trucks, and finally a single Jeep. A man with a pair of binoculars stood up in the back of the Jeep, looking around at the edges of the road. My breath caught as his gaze swept over us and, in my mind at least, seemed to linger just a bit too long. Finally, the man turned his attention to the other side of the turnpike and the Jeep moved on. I slowly breathed out.
“Holy crap, that was close,” Luke said.
“I wonder if there will be more of them using that motorway,” Ben wondered aloud, echoing the same thought that I had.
“Luke, does your map show a way to get to Worcester from here without taking the turnpike?” I asked, keeping my eyes on the road. We waited while he rummaged around for the atlas in his pack.
“Yeah,” he said finally. “But it’s going to be longer and take us through a lot of farmland and some small towns.”
“Longer we can definitely deal with if it helps us avoid patrols,” Brooke said.
“I’m hungry. Can we stop and eat something?” Sarah asked. Typical kid, I thought, food always at the top of their minds no matter what else was happening.
“Let’s get a bit further down this road away from the turnpike and we will,” I said, aware of my own stomach growling.
“Looks like we follow this road about half a mile and then turn left,” Luke said. “That looks like a good spot to stop for a rest and some grub.”
“Alright, let’s go,” I said.
It was just after noon and we were leaving the small town of North Uxbridge behind us when we first noticed we were being followed by dogs. It was, of course, Brooke who saw them. They followed us from a distance, a pack of mangy mutts and dogs of differing breeds, but all of them had a lean and hungry look. I saw at least one Alsatian and two other big dogs whose breed I couldn’t make out. They didn’t come close to us that afternoon, just followed behind, sniffing at our trail.
“They look terrible,” Sarah said when we stopped to rest a couple hours after we first noticed the dogs following us. “Who’s been taking care of them, you know, since the Flu killed all the grown-ups?”
“Probably no one,” Luke responded. “That’s probably why they are so skinny.”
“Maybe we should feed them,” Sarah said, a sadness creeping into her voice.
“We’ve barely got enough for ourselves, love,” Brooke said, putting a comforting hand on Sarah’s shoulder.
“Besides, if you feed a stray, it’ll follow you around forever,” Luke said. “At least that’s what my dad always said.”
“I hope they bugger off. I think they are creepy,” Ben said, mirroring my own feelings.
“Me, too,” I replied. Feeding them was the last thing I wanted to do. The thought of them being close to us terrified me in an irrational way. I had been bitten by my grandmother’s Collie when I was six and still had the scar from a puncture wound on my wrist. “We aren’t going near them, and tonight we are going to find a place with a door to sleep in.”
When we stopped for the night a couple of hours later it was just starting to get dark. We found a farmhouse with a large detached garage behind it. The house was locked up tight, but the garage door was wide open, so we wheeled our bicycles inside and pulled the large roller door down behind us.
A couple of dirty windows set above a workbench on one wall allowed the dying sunlight to filter in as we set out our bedding and ate a meal of beef jerky and potato chips. Once the sun set, it was pitch black in the garage. Both Ben and Brooke had thought to bring flashlights, but we had decided not to use them unless it was an emergency to save on our limited supply of batteries.
The dogs began howling and barking sometime in the middle of the night. We could hear them growling and scratching at the garage door and what sounded like a vicious fight ended in high pitched yelping.
None of us got much sleep after that. Sarah was curled up whimpering next to Brooke who was doing her best to comfort her, while Luke and I sat upright with our weapons close by, staring intently through the darkness toward the door and windows, respectively. Ben was ready with his flashlight should the sound of breaking glass or splintering wood be heard.
The sound of the dogs finally died down just as dawn was breaking. I heard one final sniff under the roller door and they seemed to disappear. Everybody but Luke and I fell into a fitful sleep.
“We should let them sleep a while,” Luke said. “We can get started again in a few hours.”
“Okay, everybody’s exhausted from yesterday’s ride and last night’s ... excitement,” I replied, stifling a yawn.
“You should sleep, too,” he said. “I can keep watch.”
“Are you sure?”
“No sweat, man. I picked up a few energy drinks before we left Walmart. If I feel myself crashing later, I’ll just slam one of them.”
“Alright, if you’re sure ...”
Lying down in my sleeping bag, I found myself not caring that it was laid out on a concrete floor. My eyes closed for what seemed like just a second and suddenly I was being shaken awake. I glanced around in bewilderment. Everybody else was already up and had their sleeping bags repacked. “What ...?”
“It’s about noon,” Luke said. “Time to rise and shine, sleepyhead.”
“Okay, okay,” I muttered, shaking my head, trying to clear the cobwebs in my mind. Sometimes I think a little sleep is worse than none. I got up and stretched. I was no longer quite as exhausted as I had been, but still felt like I’d been worked over by a burly man with a baseball bat. Muscles that I never knew I had were aching. I rolled up my sleeping bag and tied it before returning it to the basket on the front of my bike. “Any sign of the dogs?” I asked.
“Nope,” Luke replied. “When Ben woke up, I got him to watch my back while I went outside to take a whiz and have a look around. They must have found something better to do.”
“Well, then we should probably be heading out. We’ve already wasted too much daylight as it is.”
“I figure we got maybe five hours of light left,” Luke said. “We might be able to make it close to Worcester by nightfall.”
Luke was getting ready to pull up the door when we heard the first thrum of a helicopter in the distance. I motioned for him to leave it closed and he nodded in agreement. The chopper flew low over the house and garage we were in and, in truth, I was waiting for huge bullets to begin tearing the garage apart at any moment, but after what seemed like an eternity we could hear it moving off into the distance.
“Are they going to come back?” Sarah asked.
“I don’t know, but maybe we should wait a while before leaving. I don’t want them to catch us riding down the road if they fly back by here,” I said.
“If we wait too long, we won’t make it
very far before dark, man,” Luke said.
“Maybe we shouldn’t try,” I responded, thinking of my aching muscles. “Wait out the day here, spend another night and leave early in the morning.”
“As you Yanks would say, I’m down with that,” Ben said, massaging the back of his leg.
“Please, can we?” Sarah asked, her eyes brightening slightly for the first time since I had met her.
“Wouldn’t bother me,” Brooke chimed in.
“You’re the boss,” Luke said, shrugging. He pulled the sleeping bag off of his bicycle basket. “If we’re staying here though, I’m going to get some sleep. I’m bushed.”
“I’m not the boss.”
“It’s just a figure of speech, man,” Luke said, shrugging and unrolling his sleeping bag onto the floor. “I’ll take the watch tonight.”
“You do kind of take charge and be bossy, though,” Sarah said with a nod of her head. The way she said it didn’t make it sound like it was a bad thing.
It was cold in the garage and we spent most of the day huddled in our makeshift beds and talking quietly. We were out of the wind, which was a blessing, but a fire was out of the question. The windows didn‘t open and we didn’t dare open the door to let smoke out. Luke slept most of the afternoon, and toward late afternoon I also nodded off.
I awoke just before nightfall, when the dogs came back. We could hear them growling and snarling as they scratched at the garage door. That night we were more secure in the safety of our shelter and the rest of my group, including Luke, even managed to get to sleep despite the dogs yammering at the door.
I couldn’t, however, and was awake until well after midnight with the .38 in my hand, listening to the dogs. Luke awoke in those early hours and took my gun, telling me to sleep. I didn’t protest. I was pretty exhausted by then.
Once again the dogs were gone before first light. We had a quick breakfast of cold beans and were ready to go within a half-hour of the sun cresting the horizon. We hit the road, riding carefully to avoid patches of black ice. Sometime before midday it began snowing again, this time harder. When we stopped to have lunch in a clear spot under some trees, I worried that we would not be able to make it too much further on our bicycles.
The After Days Trilogy Page 6