The Dead Are Sleeping

by Paul Westwood

  We spent the rest of the morning dipping and slowly filling the gas can. Each time it was filled, I took it to the truck and put the fuel into truck’s tank. During this time I noticed that no one was around. I kept expecting one of those creatures to show up, but it remained quiet. What was keeping their attention? After a while, like a bad dream, I began to forget about them.

  “I think that’s the last of it,” Sarah said after pulling the cup up from the last storage tank.

  “We got maybe twelve gallons there,” I said. “It’s pretty dirty but the fuel filter should be able to handle it.”

  “I’m getting pretty hungry, Tom.”

  We both smelled of gasoline. It wasn’t very pleasant. I said, “I’ll go put this last bit into the truck and then we’ll try to clean up. After that we’ll have some lunch and hit the road, ok?”

  She looked up at me, and gave me a bright smile that showed the whites of her teeth. “Thanks for letting me help out, Tom. I really want to do my part.”

  “Don’t worry, you are. Now put that last cup of gas into the can and I’ll go fill the truck.”

  Soon I was tipping the gas can upward, letting the very last drops into the tank. The shotgun was propped against the fender. Sarah was next to me, waiting impatiently. Out of the corner of my eye I saw something move. I dropped the gas can, letting it hit the ground. A voice stopped me before I could grab the gun.

  “Don’t move, mister,” a gravelly male voice spat out. “I’ve got my rifle pointed right at you.”

  I put my hands up and slowly turned around. I found myself looking at a rather short man with a very long rifle. It was one of those fancy things that looked scarier than it was; black high impact plastic and a large scope. The butt of the gun was resting against his hip as if he was bracing himself for shooting a cannon. He had shaggy hair that touched his slouched shoulders, a patchy beard, gray eyes, a black t-shirt with a long-departed rock band logo, and blue jeans that were more holes than denim. He didn’t look particularly sure of himself, constantly licking his lips.

  Standing next to him was a woman who was considerably more handsome. She was of medium height, long black hair, and a skin tone that said Latino. She was wearing a black skirt that went to the knees, a scruffy white shirt with an embroidered flower design, and was carrying a red leather purse. Her hands – the fingers were busy with silver rings – were empty. Her brown eyes betrayed how scared she was.

  I could hear Sarah breathing hard. She reached instinctively for my hand, which I took.

  “What do you want?” I asked, trying to keep the fear out of my voice. I also kept my eye on the barrel of that rifle. The way he was handling it, he didn’t look to be very familiar with guns. If necessary I thought I could dodge being shot, and get in close enough to sock this fellow in the eye.

  “I want your truck,” he said. “Nothing personal, but my girlfriend and I aim to get out of here.”

  “That’s not happening,” I said as I eyed the shotgun leaning close by my knee.

  “Allison, go get that gun,” he said to the woman.

  She looked hesitantly over at her partner and then walked cautiously toward us, keeping her focus on me. When she got closer, I could how scared she was. She was either frightened of me, or, more likely, scared of this man. Perhaps I could use this to my advantage. The woman named Allison reached over to grab the shotgun. I waited until she had picked it up and then turned to join her partner. I dropped Sarah’s hand. I took the chance that this man wouldn’t shoot his girlfriend, and gave the woman a hard shove in the back. She went sprawling into him. At the same time I pushed Sarah off to the side with one arm and then headed straight for the man.

  He hadn’t fallen but was busy trying to draw a bead on me while pushing his girlfriend to the side. He had bad trigger control. The gun fired, the bullet going somewhere high in the sky. Before he had a chance to fire again, I had the barrel in my hands. I twisted hard. There was an audible crunch of cartilage, along with an accompanying scream as his finger was yanked free of the trigger guard. He fell to his knees, gripping his right hand. His face looked up at me. The eyes were filled with tears.

  “I think you broke my finger,” he whined.

  I was angry. Having a gun pointed at you did that. I gave him a kick in the head, hard enough that he went over on his side. His head cracked on the pavement and he was dazed, unable to do anything. I angrily grabbed the shotgun from Allison, who was also on the ground. She looked a little mussed up but nothing a few band-aids on the knee couldn’t fix. She didn’t say anything but instead slowly blinked at me. She was in shock. Turning my attention to Sarah, I saw that she was okay; just giving me an evil eye for the skinned palms I had given her when she had fallen.

  “Get in the truck,” I told her, my voice low.

  Without speaking Sarah went to the passenger side and got inside.

  I began to edge backward toward the truck, the rifle slung over my shoulder, and the shotgun at the ready. “We’re leaving now,” I said. “Don’t try anything.”

  Allison was standing now, her expression overcome with panic. “No!” she exclaimed. “Don’t leave me here with him!”

  “What?”

  She explained, “No matter what he says, he’s not my boyfriend. His name is Joel. I met him only four days ago. We’re just survivors from the town of Speer. I can’t stand to be around him any longer.”

  I nodded toward the truck. “Get in the seat behind Sarah. Push some of the supplies out of the way.”

  “Thank you,” Allison said, breathing out a sigh of relief. She went around me, and got into the extended cab portion of the truck.

  After putting the gas cap on and stowing the gas, I went to get into the driver’s side. But the man named Joel called out before I could shut the door.

  He was sitting up now. “What about me?” he managed to ask, the sound of his petulant voice gripped with panic.

  “I don’t give a shit what you do,” I replied. I shut the door and started the engine up. I began to pull forward, steering the truck toward the road.

  Joel ran up and began shouting at me, his voice barely distinct over the rumble of the engine. Ignoring him, I began to pull away.

  “Stop,” I heard Allison say.

  “Please do,” Sara joined in. “We can’t leave him here to die.”

  Against my better judgment I stopped the truck.

  October 23rd - Afternoon

  “My name is Tom,” I said as I drove. “I’m from Michigan. Sarah here is from Washington, DC. What’s your story?” I looked in the rearview mirror and saw that both Joel and Allison were paying attention. I had all the guns up front with me, the pistols still unknown to them. I didn’t trust either one of them; especially Joel, who was nursing his bruised cheek where my foot had met his head. He was also holding his right hand at an awkward angle. Allison was shoved in the corner of the backseat, putting as much space as she could from her companion. It looked as if she was having second thoughts for having let him come with us. I knew I was.

  “I’m Joel White. I was the manager at an oil change place.” He didn’t seem to be proud of this fact.

  “Allison Juarez. I worked as bank teller.” She kept her voice neutral and careful.

  “Can you tell me what the hell happened here? I mean we’ve been travelling. I haven’t run into any of these creatures until I came here.” I wasn’t about to tell them about my earlier experience near my house since that was an unknown.

  “You mean the vampires?” Allison said.

  “Vampires? Why do you call them that?” I asked, wondering if the world had gotten even crazier.

  “Because they only come out at night,” Joel answered. “And they like to drink blood. At least that’s what I saw.”

  “Vampires,” I stated out loud as I thought of everything I knew about these mythical creatures of the night. “Are they afraid of garlic and can they only be killed with a stake in the heart?”

  “I don�
�t think so,” Allison said.

  Joel added, “Yeah, it’s just a name, mister. This ain’t no Dracula from the grave bullshit. They’ll die if you shoot them in the head, and will eventually bleed out if you shoot them in the belly. I’ve killed enough of those bastards to know that."

  Sarah let out a nervous laugh. She seemed to be upset by some of the raw language choices.

  I said, “Tell me what happened in town. When I drove in I saw a few burned out cars, dead bodies, and shell casings.”

  Allison, thankfully, took over the narrative. Her voice was soft. “I’m sure it was the same for you. All those people dying. I lost my husband, my little boy, my two brothers, and my mother.” She began to choke up but the grief that we all carried was becoming an everyday burden. “Most of the town was dead. In the end there were only twenty-six of us left alive. Like you, we scavenged for canned food, while stockpiling up gasoline and ammunition. We weren’t expecting any kind of trouble – at least nothing like this – but were more worried about some roaming gang coming along and trying to take everything we had worked so hard to collect. We – even Joel here – had the idea of rebuilding Speer into something new. There was a man named Russell who had this grand vision of the future. He was our leader.”

  “He was a righteous prick,” Joel commented.

  Allison ignored this and continued. “We were going to go back to farming - growing crops. Soon we would have been self-sufficient. We wouldn’t need canned food after a few years. Families could be raised, homes rebuilt, and a new, better civilization built from the ashes of this one.”

  “It sounds like a nice idea,” I said. I looked down at the gas gauge and saw that we had enough to last for a good while. What happened after that would have to depend on fate. I was also heading more southwest now, trying to zigzag toward New Orleans. I would tell these two of my plan at a later time.

  “It was,” Allison continued. “We started by going house to house in groups, collecting whatever food and weapons we could find. There was also a burial detail, moving any found dead bodies to be burned in a pit that had been dug in the middle of town. It started off well until the vampires came.” Her voice trailed off.

  After a moment of silence, Joel took over the story. “I was in one of apartments that had been picked out for a group of us to sleep in. We had taken the entire building to hole up in. With two guards at the entrance it seemed safe enough. I was woken in the middle of the night by a terrible scream coming down from the lobby. And then there were three gunshots. I thought we were being attacked so I rushed down with my gun - the very same rifle that you took away from me. I was the first one to make it there. One of those creatures – a vampire, as we eventually called them – was on top of Mike, gnawing at his throat. The other guard, I forgot his name, was dead too. There were two vampires on top of him, busy fighting over the poor man’s body. At the time I thought those things were people – just crazy cannibals.

  “A bunch of our people rushed in to help. We opened fire on the creatures and mowed down the lot of them. It seemed to take a lot of bullets to put them down, but no one really thought it was out of the ordinary until later. By then it was too late. The next night we were hit again, but this time we had more guards. We only lost one man, who, once again, was killed by a bite to the neck. It was decided by Russell, that we should all move to a new location, something easier to enforce. So we found a small warehouse, barricaded the cargo doors and welded them shut. That only left two locked entrances with steel doors, which we lit up with spotlights run off of a generator. That next night was quiet. We thought the trouble had passed and the cannibals had moved on.”

  “But that didn’t turn out to be true,” Allison said, pulling herself out of silence. “We found where some of them were hiding. The next day I was working on one of the scavenging teams. We were working through a big Victorian house in an older part of the city. There wasn’t anything very valuable there. I went down to the basement with another woman, named Beth. It was pitch black down there so we had to use flashlights. There was a room with a heavy door. It would have been a good place to store food – cool and out of the sunlight. I opened the door.

  She paused and gave a slight shudder before continuing. “Lying on the floor were dozens of those creatures, crammed into the room so there wasn’t a square inch left. They were sleeping like the dead. Not one of the vampires noticed that Beth and I were there. That’s when I noticed that I recognized one of them. It was the bank manager, Nancy, who was my friend. Beth and I didn’t take any chances. We ran out there, but some others came with gasoline and burned out the whole lot out of the room. That, of course, started the whole building on fire. And that, we thought was the end of the problem.”

  “But it wasn’t?”

  In the rearview mirror I could see Allison frown with a memory. “Of course not. The vampires were everywhere, and only grew stronger in numbers with every passing day. Instead of spending our time preparing to farm, we were going house to house, looking for any signs of them. Wherever they were, that building was set on fire. Our new residence was under attack every night. In order to keep them away we tried to draw them out at night – they seem to be attracted to sound and light– by shooting guns into the air and setting up barricades in the streets. There we would massacre them by the hundreds. Russell even had the idea of hanging up a few of the bodies in the park, to acts as some sort of warning. It was an insane idea and didn’t change a thing. As the days went by we quickly burned through our ammunition and even our people. Russell died. Soon there were only five of us left.” She gave Joel a sneering look of disdain. “Any sense of group was lost. We decided to split apart and head our separate ways. Joel here followed me.”

  “I didn’t think it right for a woman to be out here all alone,” he explained. “And I’ve always taken a fancy to Allison here. She’s really pretty, ain’t she?”

  “Yeah,” I replied, fighting the urge to stop the truck and punch him in the nose.

  He said, “The two of us paired together and started heading out into the country. We were in an old Ford truck that had seen better days. It broke down only a few miles out of town, so we had to hole up in a house. There are fewer vampires out here in the country, but a whole lot less food too. We stayed out of sight and didn’t run into any trouble. This morning we set out on foot, looking for a car. I saw you gassing up this here truck. And – this was a mistake, mind you – decided to take it for my own. I just wanted to apologize for being so rash. But we were scared, mister, real scared. You can’t think straight when your mind isn’t right. I wasn’t going to hurt you.”

  “Luckily for you that you didn’t try so hard,” I said sarcastically. I looked over to Sarah and give her a wink. She grinned at me in return.

  “Where are we going?” Allison asked.

  “It took you long enough to ask that,” I replied. “We’re heading south right now, trying to get to New Orleans.”

  “New Orleans?” Joel said. “What in the hell is down there?”

  “Probably a whole bunch of trouble. You see Sarah’s father worked for a spy agency in DC. He had information that the research facility down there was aware of this virus before it started killing people. I plan to go down there and find out if that is the truth.”

  “Where is this girl’s father?” Allison asked.

  “He’s dead,” Sarah said without emotion.

  There was a silence in the cab of the truck. No one spoke for a few seconds. I could tell my idea wasn’t selling well with these strangers.

  “Why in the hell would you want to go down there?” Joel repeated himself.

  I shrugged my shoulders. “I can’t think of anything better to do, can you? I mean we can stay here, find some house to hide in, and hope these vampires don’t want to stop by for a bite of dinner. That’s not the kind of life I want, hiding at night and slowly starving to death as we run out of food.”

  “It beats getting killed,” he retorted. �
��We’ll also run out of food or gas before we get there.”

  “Maybe it we will, but if there is just the slightest chance that there is some way of stopping these vampires, or if there is even a cure, then it will be worth it. And if there isn’t, well maybe I can personally choke the life out of the person who didn’t warn the rest of us. If you don’t want to go, I’ll gladly drop you off on the side of the road.”

  “I’m going with you,” Allison stated.

  “Of course I’m staying with you,” Sarah added, even though I knew she wouldn’t leave my side.

  “Well hell!” Joel spat out. “I suppose I’ve got nothing better to do. It’ll be the death of all of us, but it beats sitting around and being by myself. We will have to stick together if we want to survive.”

  October 24th - Morning

  We spent the night in a little rural used car lot that was near the highway and just outside of a town. I raided the office for the keys. Sarah and I took a SUV, while Joel and Allison split up, each selecting a sedan. The battery in our vehicle was dead so the locks had to be manually closed. Sarah took the back bench while I stretched out in the front seat, wishing for a good hotel bed. Even though I was exhausted I was too keyed up to fall asleep right away. I was worried that Joel was going to try something, possibly stealing the truck or physically harming me. With that in mind I kept the guns with me, along with the keys to my truck. Sleep finally did come, even though I tried to fight against it.

  When I woke up, I found that my door was open. I rolled out, holding the shotgun in the crook of my arm.

  Sarah, Joel, and Allison were at the hood of a nearby car, huddled together and talking together in low tones.

  “Good morning,” I said warily. “What’s this little meeting about?”

  “You,” Sarah said. “You’re taking on too many responsibilities. You’re doing all of the driving and are also the only one with access to the guns. If one of those vampires took you out, the rest of us would be dead too.”