“Well, I think it's safe,” Jeremy proclaimed, exuding his usual high degree of confidence.
Ed chuckled. “I hope so. Either way, we have each other.”
Ed allowed the boys to drift off to sleep together. He planned to stay up for a few more hours, then wake Zach for guard duty. They always slept in rotation; danger lurked everywhere and knew no bedtime. For now he was content to sit with his two sons, to hold them close another day, and to fill their minds and their spirits with hope.
He had indeed happened upon a radio broadcast, that much was true, but it had only contained four words. Saint Louis...safe...haven. That could mean Saint Louis actually was safe. It could also be just as likely that hidden under the static between those words the message might have really been Saint Louis is not a safe haven. That particular message might have been a dire warning to all those considering entry.
Or it all could be a lie; a fib orchestrated to lure the unwitting into a trap. The police, the armed forces, even the government eventually crumbled once the infection went into full pandemic. It came on too strong, too fast, and there was no plan in place to deal with a threat of that magnitude. It was truly unprecedented. It made the Spanish Flu look like a common cold season.
Now, without any law of the land in place, men had become more horrible than Ed had ever thought possible. Their evil was truly limitless. He'd seen some of the worst things imaginable; his children had seen more than their fair share as well.
The truth was, there was no one left to save them. They were, in every sense of the phrase, completely on their own. Ed knew the reality was that they couldn't keep moving forever. Eventually their luck would run out. Eventually they'd be captured and killed by thieves, or they'd be killed by the hordes of rabid carriers that freely roamed the land now. Or, perhaps worse, Ed would be exposed, leaving his two children to fend for themselves in a world with no hope, no rules, and no allies.
Could he do what needed to be done then? The three bullets he kept in the clip in his front pocket, could he use those?
Sarah's luck had run out. Try as he had, he hadn't been able to save his wife. His harsh lesson was how powerless to change anything he really was. That knowledge haunted him each time he looked at his children. Was he just biding time, staving off the inevitable? He could only hope that they couldn't see his increasing doubt.
Ed Brady sat on the surface of a deserted highway, surrounded by ghosts of the past, holding the fragile future in his arms.
The city could mean salvation, or it could mean death.
Either way, it was their destiny.
CHAPTER 2
As she stood in the middle of the deserted highway, Trish Connor thought that the worst thing about the end of the world might very well be the winters. They were particularly harsh, as if the nightmare she woke up to each day wasn’t harsh enough already. At least when Tim had been alive it had been a little easier to bear; now she was in her second winter without him and it was the worst one yet.
Cold. So cold. Some nights she was sure she would freeze to death. She often thought that might actually be better. Each morning, however, she’d awaken to another day of relentless cold and raging hunger. She felt like the walking dead herself; an animated shell, empty on the inside.
Once, before everything went to hell, she’d been pretty. She thought maybe she still was, but it had been so long since she looked in a mirror she couldn’t know. Worse, she feared she might not recognize herself anymore. She already could see how thin her body was, and she knew her face had to look like that of a corpse. She didn’t have the courage to face all of that, at least not anymore.
If Tim had noticed all this he hadn’t let it show. Dead for more than a year now, his face was still bright and clear in her memory. He’d cared for her, protected her, and told her the sweet lies her heart so desperately needed to hear. But now she could no longer fool herself into believing, not even for a moment, that everything was going to be okay.
She wondered sometimes why she continued to trudge on, eking out a pathetic existence in a world overrun with the stuff of nightmares. Sometimes she sat in the freezing cold, just before nightfall, and stared at the barrel of the pistol she carried. She had eight bullets; it would take only one to make it all go away. Click, boom, gone; all in less than a second.
But Tim wouldn’t approve of that, not even from the Great Beyond. For her to give up now would be like spitting in his face. He had believed she was worth saving, and that life was still worth living. He died in defense of that belief, and for that she both loved and hated him.
She was seventeen when she met Tim in high school. She was only nineteen when he died. In the two years they spent together she felt they'd shared a lifetime. They had been through so much together that they had become as close as two people could be. Age played no role in this fact. Now she was twenty years old and completely alone in a living hell.
She would often sit in the cold, squeezing her fingers together, feeling the familiar thickness of Tim's class ring on her middle finger. He hadn't been able to give her a wedding ring, so he'd given her his class ring instead. Though too large to fit on her ring finger, it didn't matter. She made do. Nothing else in her possession could rival the importance of this ring.
Desperate and alone on a desolate highway, she now found herself hungry and cold, covered in filthy, scavenged clothing. She stared at the seemingly endless stretch of snow-covered road in front of her for a very long time, trying to ignore the stinging bite of the relentless wind. Here on the open road the wind seemed to never stop.
She once avoided the road, but the empty farmland had soon overgrown its boundaries and she was now too weak to fight her way through the thicket. On the highway grass grew only in the ever-widening cracks, not yet overtaking it. It would eventually claim the entire road, but for the time being it was passable.
Now the deep snow drifts made travel by anything other than the road impossible. Although there were thousands of abandoned cars on the road, she could easily maneuver around those. Many of the cars were still occupied by their owners; sad reminders of thousands of failed attempts to escape an inescapable fate. She rarely looked inside them anymore; they all held the same terrible thing.
Survivors had picked many of the bodies clean of their clothing and possessions, the birds had picked many more clean of their flesh. The rest just slowly decomposed in their cars, or on the highway itself. Trish had seen so many bodies she hardly noticed them anymore.
The truly dead were no longer her concern; the walking dead were what mattered now. Their bodies were alive, but their minds, their hearts, and their souls, those were long since dead and gone. They were no longer human, they were wild animals now. Vicious and relentless, they were absolutely mad with hunger and delirium.
Such was the way of the world now.
To her left an exit beckoned. Two hundred yards of pavement led to abandoned restaurants, truck stops, grocery stores, and then onto hundreds of deserted homes. Many had surely been picked over, raided, and plundered, but there weren't enough survivors to scavenge it all. There had to be scraps, something sustaining left behind three eternal years ago. It was risky because the infected could be anywhere, but it was better to die trying than to passively freeze to death on a road to nowhere.
And she was sure Tim would have agreed with that.
Nearly twenty minutes later Trish stood facing the door of a former Howard Johnson’s, peering intently into the darkness within. Snow drifted slowly and gently down from an apathetic sky, dusting her shoulders and blanketing the ground around her in a thick, white powder.
She saw no footsteps in the snow other than her own, so she felt she could reasonably assume she was alone. Whether or not there were carriers inside was impossible to tell. She decided she had little choice but to just step into the darkened building and take her chances.
The glass in the window set within the door was almost completely gone, and the door itself was un
locked. She slowly opened it, being careful not to cut herself on any broken glass. She wondered why she still cared. Habit, most likely. The door scraped along the floor, pushing trash and other debris along the way as it opened. By all appearances no one had been there for a very long time; she took that as another reassuring sign.
Once in she felt her way along the walls through the darkness, searching for a suitable place to curl up and wait out the seemingly endless night. She heard a scurrying from somewhere in the blinding dark and froze. Then she heard it again. Rats, she thought to herself. Compared to the carriers, rats were a mere nuisance now; a proverbial gnat buzzing around the ears. Still, she hated them.
She listened intently for the tell-tale signs of the infected; there was no breathing or growling, no shuffling of feet in the darkness. No dragging of paralyzed limbs, no maniacal screaming or delirious repetition of gibberish. No slurping of drool through rotten teeth. For now she was alone.
She continued her way through the room, feeling against the wall until she eventually bumped into a table. She dropped to the floor beneath the table, then scraped away enough debris to make something that loosely resembled a makeshift bed. She curled up in the fetal position, her back against the wall, and prepared to wait out the night there.
She again listened for signs she wasn’t alone; she heard nothing but the rats and the howl of the wind as it carelessly drafted in through broken windows. She hoped the rats weren't hungry; they'd been known to chew on people while sleeping. She squeezed her fingers together inside the tattered mitten on her left hand and felt the shape of Tim's ring; comforting and connecting, like a tether through an invisible doorway to the Great Beyond.
As she drifted off to sleep she asked two favors of a god she no longer believed in. First, she asked for vivid dreams of Tim; dreams where he held her and told her everything was going to be okay.
Then she asked that she never wake up again.
Sleep overtook her more quickly than she had expected. She never heard the three figures carefully open the building’s broken door, nor did she hear their footsteps as they made their way toward their sleeping prey.
CHAPTER 3
“Check that closet over there. Maybe there are some coats or some blankets,” Dave Porter said to his wife, Sandy, as they combed through an abandoned house two miles from the highway. She nodded. Their friend Jim was in the kitchen searching for any food or equally useful items that may have been left behind.
“Nothing,” Sandy replied.
“Dammit.” He turned to Jim. “Anything?”
“Nothing here either,” Jim replied. “The cupboards are bare, not even a bone for a dog.” He smiled, then dropped it when no one else returned it.
“We have to check the basement,” Dave said flatly. Jim and Sandy both looked at him apprehensively. “Look, I don’t want to either, but it’s our best chance.”
“Not after what we found at the last place,” Sandy said.
“I know, I know, but we have to. We didn’t get enough at the last house. You both know that. And whatever we find down there can’t hurt us. You saw the windows in this place; not a single one broken. The door was still locked for Christ’s sake. Nobody’s been in this place since the outbreak, not even the rats.”
“I don’t think I can handle seeing what I saw back there again,” Sandy confessed. Her lower lip trembled slightly. “They were just so small...” She trailed off, biting her lip.
“Jim and I will go. You stay up here. If the coast is clear we’ll call you down. We still have a couple more hours of daylight left, plenty of time to search the basement.”
Consternation washed over her face. “I don’t want to be up here by myself.”
Dave sighed. He tried to be patient, but it was often difficult. “I know, but you said you didn’t want to go down.”
“I don’t.”
Jim turned to Sandy and put his hand on her shoulder. “It’ll be alright, we’ll be right back up in a flash.”
Sandy nodded, but seemed less than convinced.
Dave pulled the hatchet he usually carried from his belt, then handed Sandy their only working gun. She took it.
“Don't shoot unless I tell you to,” he told her.
“I won't,” she replied.
Dave grabbed the flashlight they'd found during a prior house raid, and Jim held his ever-present hammer tightly in his hand as the two men walked toward the basement door. They reached the door and Dave turned the knob, slowly and carefully opening the door. It groaned and squeaked on its hinges as it gave way. They all listened intently for any audible signs of carriers seeking shelter within. They were met with reassuring silence. Dave knocked three times on the door; holding his hatchet tightly. Noises usually got the deadwalkers stirring. Despite the knocking they heard nothing from below.
He looked at Jim. “Let’s go.”
Dave placed one foot on the top step, testing his weight. It held. The steps were solid. He couldn’t be too careful; a broken ankle in this new world was a death sentence. He flipped on the flashlight. The batteries were low and the light was dim, but it would have to do. He took a deep breath as he and Jim proceeded down the steps.
There were no windows in the basement. The light from above illuminated the steps, but couldn't pierce far into the darkness below. The flashlight did little to help. He couldn't help but think it was more of a cellar than a basement. He paused halfway down the steps then listened for movement in the darkness below. He shone the flashlight back and forth quickly, scanning the basement for movement. There was none, so he deemed it safe enough to proceed.
He continued to descend into the darkened basement until his feet finally touched the concrete floor. Then he heard the steps creak as Jim brought up the rear. The basement was unfinished, but had wooden frames erected where walls had been planned. By the dim light of the flashlight those skeletal walls took on the sinister appearance of bars on a jail cell.
Dave made a right turn, choosing the direction at random. The light flashed across various objects; boxes, chairs, a workout bench, shelves, and more. It was all covered in dust, untouched for years. This was good. The basement smelled musty and dank, as if the air around them had absorbed the stagnant history of the past three years.
The pair entered into a small, unfinished room, framed in with the same partially finished walls. Jim stayed close behind in the darkness so as to not get separated. If there was one thing they had learned it was that staying together was critical to their survival.
Three years ago, when the infection quickly became a global pandemic, virtually all the survivors fled to the coasts like rats from a sinking ship. At the time, Dave and Sandy had been married for only a month. Living close to the eastern shoreline they had little distance to travel to make it to the coast and settle into what they thought would be only a temporary shelter.
Weeks became months, then months became years. The infected didn't die off as has been predicted. They adapted, learned to hunt, and the infection, although devastating psychologically, turned out not to be fatal. Some of them almost still seemed to possess at least some humanity, despite their behavior and appearance.
Dave had openly disagreed with their border town’s leadership. He was outspoken, even vehement. A folly of youth, in retrospect. That attitude and behavior had landed him few supporters within the town. Once they struck up a friendship with Jim, who was openly gay, things went bad very quickly. Before long they were framed for theft of town supplies. Punishment was severe: expulsion into the land outside the town’s fences: into the Badlands. Dave couldn’t prove it, but he felt the town council had found a convenient way to get rid of three of their problems in one fell swoop.
Once outside the town's fences the three outcasts found themselves wandering from one abandoned house to another, from grocery store to gas station, from truck stop to motel, all across an infected no man's land that had once been known as the Midwestern United States. If any form of governmen
t still existed it was absent from this dismal wasteland; the concept long ago forgotten, abandoned, or just dead. They survived for over a year on luck, teamwork, and determination.
Now two-thirds of that team stood in the basement of a long-abandoned house, searching for anything that could be used to buy them another day in hell. Dave kept the flashlight trained on the path in front of him. He raised the beam, then stopped.
In front of him, within the wooden skeleton of a room that would never be finished, an unknown tragedy had played out. Two corpses occupied the room; desiccated, frozen, slowly rotting, captured in the final scene of a macabre and horrible play. A woman, chained to the concrete wall, her head gone from the jaw up. The feeble beam cast by the flashlight showed dark stains on the wall behind her.
A flick of the beam caught sight of another corpse; a man, sitting in a rocking chair. His head was gone; only a jagged stump and a partial jawbone remained.
It didn't take long for Dave to understand what had happened; a husband carrying out a grim duty in the seclusion of a forgotten basement. She'd been infected; he hadn't. He'd ended her suffering, then he'd ended his own. Not a single person living knew this had even happened, this final act of bravery at the end of the world.
“Holy shit,” Jim said quietly from behind him as he gazed upon the gruesome scene.
“Yeah,” Dave replied.
“Dave?” Sandy called from the top of the steps. “Is everything okay down there?”
“We're fine,” Dave replied. “You?”
“I'm getting nervous up here by myself. What'd you find down there?”
After the horror they'd seen in the last house he wasn't sure if Sandy would be able to handle this too. “You might not want to see this.”
A pause. “Oh no, not again.”
Into the Badlands Page 2