The picture was obvious, but to make it clear, there was a note on the coffee table. It was hard to read in the dim light, but jist of it was that Fred and Melissa had lived their whole life in this house and “No zombies” or government evacuation was going to drive them from their home. That was until a zombie bit Melissa. Things changed fast and Fred took care of business.
This was just more evidence that our world was swirling big drain. I was just wondering who was going to flush the rest of us?
I wadded up the note and tossed it on the floor as I walked out of the room. I was out the front door a few seconds later hoping the fresh air would rejuvenate me, but instead it left me feeling wrung out and sweaty.
“Let’s use the house across the street,” I said.
“What’s wrong?” Joni asked. “You’re as white a sheet.”
“It’s nothing.”
She came up to me and put a hand on my arm, “It doesn’t look like nothing.”
“It’s a bad scene,” I said wanting to pull away, but liking the feeling if her touch. “We’d be better off across the street.”
Avoidance had been a lifelong habit for me, but I did what I hadn’t done in quite a few days and looked her in the eyes. What was there on the night we had kissed was there now, but with her husband back, there was nothing to do about it. So, it was a useless exercise to consider what could have been. We were where we were and it was what it was. The writing was on the wall and there was no future there and only a brief past.
As gently as I could, I reached up and pulled her hand off my arm. As it fell away, I could see her look down and thought I saw her wince.
“Come on, mom,” Jessica said tugging at her mom. “I really have to go.”
And with that, the moment was gone. We ushered the group across the street. As we went Dave shouted for us to look for anything good inside because he was hungry. The entry and time inside this new house went without incident. Those who had business to take care of, took care of it. We did grab some canned goods and found some bottled water.
We were loading up our people and cargo when a slight whomping noise sounded in the far off distance. When I looked up, I could see a flash on the southern horizon. It glowed like the sun at noon for about fifteen seconds, then darkened like a candle going out.
“Was that what I thought it was? Jane asked.
“What are you thinking it was?” Jay asked.
Jane looked at him with her head tilted and her hands on her hips and said, “Jay, sometimes I think you’ve smoked every brain cell out of your head.”
I turned my attention back to south, watching for any other flashes. A few seconds later another flash occurred. This one seemed more intense and closer, rising in a ghostly yellow and orange glow. An icy knot formed in my gut.
Robbie rushed up me, holding his small portable radio out to me, and said, “All the signals just went off the air.”
“Shhhh,” I said quietly, “We don’t want to scare the kids.”
“Shit, this is serious Grant,” he said, looking like a kid himself. “You saw the flashes. I saw the flashes. We both know what they were.”
“What were they?” Jay said, a perplexed expression on his face.
Jane turned to him and punched him on the arm and said, “I’m cutting you off.”
“Owwww,” Jay said massaging his arm.
Jane leaned in close to his ear and whispered something that I couldn’t make out.
Jay’s eyes widened and he said, “Nukes!”
Jane punched him again, but this time a lot harder.
Jay cried out again, but didn’t say anything else.
“Robbie, there’s nothing that hasn’t been serious about any of what’s happened to us. This complicates matters, but we still need to do what we can to survive.”
When we left the Alamo and I was interviewed by a reporter about our “heroic” escape from the Alamo. I had half-jokingly said, “Forget the Alamo.” (I really said a different “F” word, but the media softened it later -- against my wishes.) With these far off flashes, I was beginning to think we might being saying ‘Forget America’ soon. Maybe ‘Forget the World.’
Some famous Danish philosopher (I forgot his name) a couple centuries ago coined the term ‘existential angst.’ It was meant to encompass our deep-seated human dread or despair. All I can say, that at the moment, I wasn’t using any fancy philosophical terms; I was scared shitless and feeling an overwhelming hopelessness start to work at me on the edges.
They say the waiting is the hardest part. I stood there pausing for the next flash, hoping it wouldn’t happen or, if it did, it would be further away, but deep down expecting it drop right down in front of us. Call me a pessimist if you want. If recent past experience was educational, I was learning the hard way.
There was no third flash, but I thought I felt a warm rush of air from the south pass through the trees, rustling the parched leaves, and swooping past us, leaving my mouth with a dry feeling. The wind could have been my imagination, but flashes meant that it was time to get back on the road.
“Let’s mount up, folks,” I yelled.
That command was greeted with groans and some swearing, but those that knew what the flashes were did not hesitate and the others thankfully followed.
For the first time since I’d been around her, Joni let me drive. It seemed to be a milestone for us, but she was exhausted, so I got behind the wheel. She was asleep before we were out of the town. She stayed awake to watch re-learn how to drive a big rig.
It took a few minutes for me to get used to driving the big rig, but I kept it on road and the gears intact after only grinding them a few times. Even in her sleep, Joni groaned each time the transmission roared in protest.
The in-town driving was the test and I only had to a few abandoned cars to avoid to prove myself worthy of being able to drive. To my credit, I only scraped against one of them. That is if you call knocking the car into someone’s front yard ‘scraping.’
The town was deserted with not a soul around as we cruised through town on our way east. At least not a live soul. Just as I was about to hit the city limits on the east side of the town, the unmistakable shambling form of a zombie wandered onto the road. Attracted by the headlights, it headed for us, doing the zombie shuffle down the center of the road.
I took no evasive maneuvers and I took it head on.
In a contest of a forty thousand pound truck versus a two hundred pound undead body, the clear winner is the truck. It was not even close. The impact was barely an impact, but the body still exploded like a sausage left in a microwave too long.
Robbie winced a little though, then gagged a little as I used the windshield wipers to remove some of the gore. I didn’t hold it against him.
About an hour outside of town, Joni slumped against me and let out a contented sigh. It felt too familiar and too nice.
Robbie noticed it and looked our way out of the corner of his eye. I tried not to pay attention to the fact that he noticed, but he kept looking my way. We drove for another fifteen minutes and he finally worked up the courage to speak. I knew the question was coming.
“What’s up with you two?” he asked is a whisper.
“Nothing,” I said, keeping my eyes on the road.
It only took another five minutes for him to get back the courage again. “It doesn’t look that way to me.”
“Look what way?”
“You guys are into each other.”
“Okay, listen,” I said, maintaining my focus straight ahead while keeping my voice down. “We went through a lot together in those first few days. Things like that bring out strong emotions. Emotions get mixed up. We had a night. Well, really only a few minutes.”
The sound of the tires on the road filled the next few minutes of silence. I could tell he was holding back his next question, but it was coming.
I preempted it and said, “Then her husband came back into the picture and that was it.”
The storm hit about an hour later.
The driving only got worse as we made our way across North Carolina. At times the truck would sway from the force of the winds. A driving rain battered us so fiercely, it was a wonder we stayed on the road at all. The storm finally got so intense that Joni woke up and demanded that she take back over at the wheel. I didn’t fight her because I was near collapse. I couldn’t remember the last time I had slept, but despite the crushing fatigue, I wasn’t able to go to sleep because either the flash of lightening or a crack of thunder would wake me up.
“Check the radio again,” I told Robbie.
“There’s been nothing but static since they they dropped the bombs,” he replied.
“Maybe we’re far enough north that we’re going to get some reception.”
He flicked on the truck’s radio and started tuning through the static as Joni white knuckled our way through the storm. I could tell through his body language that he was about to turn it off when the hint of a transmission came through. It was indistinct and unintelligible at first, but as we drove east, we could make out words, but these words brought us no comfort. The first word we heard we could clearly make out was, “Hurricane.” This was followed with the words “Category 4.”
It wasn’t bad enough that we were running away from the zombie apocalypse and nuclear strikes. We had to have a hurricane to make life even more interesting.
There was no turning back and I wanted to turn off the radio because it was blurting out nothing but more bad news. But they say information is power. (Sometimes, I think information is sort of scary.) So, we kept the radio on and the good news just kept coming as the announcers reported that despite the limited nuclear strikes, the spread of the virus and the undead seemed to be expanding.
“What does all this mean?” Robbie asked as he fidgeted with his hands.
“Nothing good,” I said.
“So, what’s the plan then?” Joni asked.
“Onward and forward, I guess,” was the best I could come up with.
We forged ahead passing abandoned cars of people who had more sense than us and got off the road. We saw a few people still huddled in their cars, riding the storm out.
We were dry in the cab, but I imagined that the people in the trailer were getting soaked as the rain lashed at the truck from all sides. I played with the idea of having Joni pull over and possibly looking for an alternate mode of transport, but the truck was taking everything the storm was kicking out, so I decided to stick with the ‘horse that brought me,’ as they say.
The radio broadcasts cut out again, so we were flying blind for another hour as the rain pelted us so hard that it sounded like hail pinging off the truck. The windshield wipers barely kept up with the pounding rain and our visibility was next to nothing. Joni, to her credit, kept us on the road and moving forward. Still, I could see the tremor’s in her arm muscles as she fought to keep the truck under control. To make matters worse, I could see the needle on gas gauge getting closer and closer to the big red ‘E.”
Despite the frightful danger of the storm, the rain pounding relentlessly against the windshield was almost hypnotic, lulling me into a lesser state of consciousness. In this state, I ruminated about all we had been through. I revisited the faces of those we had lost along the way. Chuck had given his life to save us. Carla had walked off into the night, half insane from grief and anger. Mo had been sacrificed to the crazy cult who worshipped Satan and the undead. Those were just the most recent ones. Sammy’s loss on our final run out of Texas had been devastating. Before that I had had to kill one of our own because he had lost it and shot another one of our party. This partial list didn’t include the man I had to shoot because had been bitten by a zombie.
The body count was daunting and a few had died because I hadn’t made better decisions or had made outright mistakes. I knew that everyone around me would comfort me, saying that I had done the best I could, but that was little solace because those faces and those decisions haunted me like phantoms in the night. Doubts and questions swirled in my mind, making me question our current course. Would this end in the same disastrous way all my past decisions had? Would this trip into a hurricane and onto an island get us all killed?
These and other questions could only be answered by reading my autobiography available wherever fine books are sold, scheduled to be out only if I survived.
There was no use questioning why. We went on, doing the best we could and getting by, and this, by the grace of God, was how we survived. Or, at least, the ones I didn’t get killed.
Something boney nudged me in the side and I jerked awake, disoriented and ready for a fight.
“Hold up, big fella,” Joni said, a sly smile on her face.
It came back to me fast. We were traveling north to the coast. Zombies swarmed the planet like ants, nuclear bombs were dropping to the south of us like rain, and a category 4 hurricane was trying to sweep us off the road like we were in a toy truck. My semi-sleep was a lot better than reality, by a wide margin.
“Where are we?” I asked, my voice still thick with sleep.
“Wilmington’s over there,” Robbie said, pointing with his thumb over his shoulder to the east of where we were. “I think it burned.”
Despite the storm, a thick, dark smoke cloud hung over the ground in that direction. I thought I saw the flicker of flames when I peered into the distance, but decided not to inspect it any further. I had a lot of fond memories of driving down to Wilmington from our place on Hatteras Island as a teen. There were the battleships and the all the coastal businesses and tourist attractions. I would imagine that all of them were gone now just like about everything else in my past. Sleep was looking even more attractive when I thought about it.
“We’ve seen a lot of that,” I said, and we had, up close and personal.
“Robbie’s guided me around the worst of the traffic jams while you were asleep,” Joni said. “There were some pretty horrific pile ups at the border. It reminded me of getting out of Texas.”
That sent a shiver up my spine.
She added, “I think we have enough gas to make it, but we could be on fumes by the time we get there.”
“How about undead?” I asked.
“A handful, at most,” Robbie said.
“And the living?”
“We’ve seen a lot of cars heading inland, but I think most people got out before the storm hit.”
“So, we’re moving against the tide?”
“It looks that way,” he said as he rubbed his face. “I think most people are heading north or west.” There were deep dark circles under his eyes. While Joni and I had dozed, I don’t think he was able to. He was just wound too tight for that.
“We’re going to have to head north of the island and come in via 264,” I said as I studied the map, getting reacquainted with the area after not being there in over five years. 264 was a major highway artery that lead onto the Outer Banks. During heavy tourist season, it was usually crammed with cars. I doubted whether the tourist season would be all that thriving this year.
“Are you sure this place is even going to be there?” Robbie asked. “I mean, after the hurricane and everything.”
“It was built by my great grandfather and it was built to last,” I said. “It’s withstood everything that nature has thrown at it and then some. Hell, it even withstood me as a kid and I was a force to be reckoned with.” More memories flowed in, taking me back to all the family vacations there, fishing with my dad and playing with my cousins. I loved the sight of the ocean every morning, just out there and going on forever and ever. The sounds of the surf coming in was one of the most relaxing things I could think of as we drove along. I only hoped I got to hear it again.
We drove in silence for the ne
xt few miles and only saw a few people out driving. Most were moving inland while we made our way to the shore. The most disturbing thing was that there were no police or military presence in the area at all. It seemed that we were on our own along with the other poor saps deciding to stay put.
I kept one eye on the road and the other on the gas gauge as the needle dipped lower and lower with each mile. I hoped and prayed we would make it to the island. The rain had cut back from torrential to driving, but it still wouldn’t be pleasant to be out in it.
We got a break and the highway leading to the Outer Banks wasn’t too clogged with cars. Although, Joni had to slow down considerably to weave our way in between the few abandoned cars we came upon. Only once did she had to use the big truck like a battering ram to muscle our way through a tangle of cars.
She made a wide arcing turn just as we made our way onto the highway next to the shoreline. The highway paralleled the beach and even in the rain, I could make out the long thin line of the Outer Banks running just two miles off the shore.
The Outer Banks were a long thin line of islands that sat just off the shore of North Carolina and stretched upward to barely touch the Virginia shore. It was made up of five main islands strung together with long thin strips of two lane road for nearly two hundred miles. Much of it was uninhabitable, but where there was a will there was a way and people had made little communities out on the islands over the years, making a life of it.
But the whole name of the game on the Barrier Islands was tourism. Developers had made the most of the places wide enough to get beach houses on and planted them the way a farmer plants seed, only these growths never died or withered. Unless a hurricane came along to knock them down. Those powerful hurricanes came in once a decade. I didn’t keep track of them, but I was guessing we were due.
On the islands, when the weather was with you, it was like a little paradise, only you were sharing it with a crap-ton of other tourists. When the weather was against, though, it could be a damn scary place. In my years of vacationing there with my family, I only experienced one powerful hurricane and it left an indelible memory. Even my grandfather, who spent a lot of time on the island, was nervous, but we rode it out unscathed and let the terrible storm become a distant memory lost in all the fun times we had there. Somehow I felt that the good times were at an end, but maybe I was just being optimistic and the good times had really ended when that first zombie came on the scene just a few months ago.
Forget The Zombies (Book 3): Forget America Page 14