She had wanted to save herself for her wedding night, a special gift for the man she wanted to spend the rest of her life with. Romantic nonsense! Several boys had broken up with her over it, but not Charlie. Charlie had gone along with her. He was both charmed and amused by her old-fashioned ideas, and hopelessly in love with her. And now this…!
He didn’t speak for a long time. His respirations had become very shallow.
“Charles?” she whispered.
Dread sank icy claws into her belly. She cupped his cheeks in her hands and raised his head.
He opened his eyes. They were milky, filmed over and weeping, but he smiled at her. “Remember… the fireworks…?” he breathed. “I said… I was going to marry you... and you laughed.” And then the life went out of him.
3. On the Road
They were driving to South Carolina, to an oceanfront hotel on Myrtle Beach. Her cousin Trisha, who worked at the hotel, had managed to reserve a room for them. It was on the ground floor, with a sliding glass door that opened directly on the pool. Beyond the pool: the beach, and beyond that the broad, gray, restless Atlantic. It couldn’t be any more perfect. Not on their budget, anyway. The room was free. A wedding gift from Trish.
They had been on the road for about three hours, were still picking the birdseed out of their hair. Rachel couldn’t believe that she was Mrs. Charlie Carlson now, that it was finally over, and her mother hadn’t shown her ass, as she had been morbidly certain the woman would do.
Rachel was exhausted but happy. She was so deliriously happy, in fact, that the day seemed almost unreal to her, like she had dreamed it all. It was a little frightening that she could love someone as much as she loved Charlie, but she wouldn’t have it any other way. She certainly didn’t want to NOT love Charlie with all her heart and soul, even though it was frightening to put her heart in someone else’s hands and trust them not to drop it.
They had stopped at a service station to fill up Charlie’s Impala. They were in some small Southern town whose name kept slipping her mind. Beauregard? Buford? It didn’t matter. The convenience store was called a Pack ‘N’ Tuck. She would remember that later, but only because it was such an odd name for a gas station. They didn’t have Pack ‘N’ Tucks where they were from. They had Hucks and Honeybees and Golden Gallons.
They were the only customers in the parking lot. A lone cashier bopped back and forth behind the lighted windows, cleaning or restocking the shelves or something. He looked like a puppet to her. Maybe he was listening to music while he worked, dancing around, singing softly to himself as he dusted. It was sort of funny.
In contrast to the happily bebopping store clerk, the city was charmless, the streets dark, the homes and businesses rundown and utilitarian. It was a very industrial-looking town, lots of factories and chain link fences, empty weedy lots and shuttered businesses. A dour, depressing place, but she paid little attention to it, only noting how sad and spent the community looked before turning her thoughts to happier things.
Rachel was sitting in the passenger seat, checking her makeup. Charles was filling the tank. They had changed out of their wedding clothes immediately after the reception, Rachel into khaki shorts and a button up blouse, Charlie into denim jeans and a vintage KISS tee-shirt. The canopy lights cast a strange green glow over the parking lot. A halo of fluttering insects surrounded the buzzing lights.
She finished retouching her makeup and put her compact in her purse. Her stomach was twisted into knots, but it was a good feeling, a feeling of excited anticipation. She was nervous about getting to the hotel because they were married now and she was finally going to give herself to him. No more excuses. She looked up at Charles in the side mirror, and he saw her looking and made a silly face, and then the car rocked as a woman in Daisy Dukes and a spaghetti strap tee-shirt leapt onto the trunk.
The woman was bleeding from her mouth, her blouse torn, and the first thing Rachel thought was that the woman had just been assaulted and had fled to them for help. Rachel began to fumble with her seatbelt, intended to get out of the car and help the woman, and that’s when a horde of howling lunatics came running into the gas station parking lot.
Charlie had spun around in surprise when the woman leapt onto the car, his hands coming up in a defensive posture, and then he got a good look at her and he took a startled step away from her. He didn’t see the rest of them, a mob of twenty or thirty men and women, until they had encircled him.
“Charlie!” Rachel screamed, tugging at her seatbelt. In her panic she couldn’t get the buckle unlatched. In hindsight, that had probably saved her life. It had probably saved both of them that night. If she had gotten out of the car, they would have been at her as well, and Charlie would have tried to rescue her instead of retreating from the horde of crazies.
She stabbed at the button in the buckle, jerking against the belt strapped across her shoulder. She screamed his name again: “Charlie! Charlie!”
They surrounded him, yelling and pawing at him. Charlie just pushed back at them at first, confused, then panic set in and he started throwing punches. He punched a heavyset guy in boxers square in the mouth, and the guy went down like a sack of potatoes. Another guy with straggly blond hair grabbed ahold of his shirt, leaned into his face with his mouth open, like he wanted to French kiss, and Charlie slugged the guy in the chin.
They grabbed at his clothes, pulled his hair, scratched his face. His vintage tee-shirt ripped at the neck and hung off one shoulder. It all happened in just a few seconds.
Charlie waded through them, trying to get to the car, his eyes narrowed to slits, his face red, and that’s when some crazy woman bit him on the shoulder.
It was a middle-aged woman with kinky orange hair streaked with white. Charles was pushing a teenaged boy out of his way, trying to get to the back door of the Impala, when she jumped on him from behind. Howling in triumph, she sank her teeth into the meaty part of his shoulder and started whipping her head back in forth.
He screamed, throwing his elbow back, and knocked her off. Finally, he got ahold of the door latch. He yanked the back door open, flung himself into the backseat, and the crazies slammed the door shut behind him. They pressed their faces to the window, hit the glass with their fists, leaving smears of blood and some gooey fluid.
“Charlie! Charlie, are you okay?” Rachel cried.
“Drive!” Charlie panted in the backseat. “Get us out of here, Raye, before they bust out the windows.”
Rachel finally got the seatbelt buckle unsnapped and slid behind the wheel. She started the engine and squealed away, tearing the hose from the gas pump. Several of the howling lunatics jumped in front of the car, but she plowed through them, knocking them out of the way like bowling pins.
As Charles lay in the backseat, trying to staunch his bleeding, she drove through a world that had plunged into nightmare.
There were people running wildly through the streets. Several blocks away, they passed a burning apartment building. They were hit twice by other vehicles driven by panicked survivors, yet somehow, through all of it, she managed to keep the car moving. She drove past a crowd of people eating a woman on the sidewalk. As they whooshed past the scene, several of the killers whipped around, their chins glittering with blood, and chased after the car like dogs. It was so surreal Rachel was sure she was dreaming. That she was lying in bed at home, and all of it, the wedding, the attack in the parking lot of the Pack ‘N’ Tuck and their flight through this dark, mad city, was just a nightmare, spawned perhaps by pre-wedding jitters.
I’m going to wake up any second now, she told herself. She even pinched herself on the arm, but she didn’t wake up.
And then they were out of town. Dark, wooded countryside rolled past.
“Charlie?” she asked again, her voice trembling. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” he panted. “I got the bleeding stopped. Turn the radio on.”
“What?”
“Turn the radio on,” he said. “There�
��s something crazy happening. We need to know what it is.”
Her hand shook as she reached for the knob. Rock music blared and she cranked the volume down.
“See if you can find a news report.”
Nodding, she turned the dial. Commercial. Commercial. Commercial. Then some country music. Then gospel. She finally located a station that seemed to be broadcasting the news.
“…speculation is that this is some unknown supervirus that has escaped from a government lab. Although public health officials are attempting to quarantine the infected, our sources tell us the outbreak, which they called the Phage, is highly transmissible, and that it has already spread beyond the United States.”
“Holy shit,” Charlie said.
“That can’t be right, can it?” Rachel said behind the wheel. “This isn’t real! It’s got to be some kind of joke or something! Like that War of the Worlds radio broadcast back in the Thirties.”
The radio reporter paused, rattling some papers around, then said in an audibly strained voice, “For those of you just tuning in, let us reiterate the facts as we currently know them to be. There appears to be some type of epidemic spreading rapidly through the population. This contagion, which some people are calling the Phage, or Virus Z, because of its bizarre symptoms, is highly contagious, with a very short incubation period. People infected with the Phage develop severe flu-like symptoms, sometimes within hours of exposure, after which they appear to die, or slip into some catatonic state, and then reanimate. Post reanimation, the victims of the Phage exhibit extremely aggressive, cannibalistic behavior. Authorities are urging people to stay in their homes. They are urging the uninfected to barricade their doors and windows and await further instructions. If you or someone you know shows signs of infection, you are urged to isolate that person, restrain them if possible, and have no physical contact with them…”
“How do you get infected?” Charlie said from the backseat, his voice suddenly tight with fear.
As if he were answering her husband directly, the reporter said, “We are unsure right now whether the contagion is airborne, but we do know that the virus is transmitted through bites and scratches and exposure to bodily fluids...”
“Ah, shit,” Charlie said, wiping at the bloody wound on his shoulder with his wadded up KISS tee-shirt.
“Oh, Charlie…” Raye whispered, looking at him in the rearview mirror. She wanted to cry. She did tear up, but she brushed the tears away because she had to concentrate on the road. There was an unusual amount traffic tonight, even at that late hour, even way out in the boonies, and everyone seemed to be driving in a really big hurry.
A few oncoming vehicles honked at them, as if warning them of danger ahead.
4. In the Country
They fled to the countryside, driving until the Impala was out of gas, and then they hoofed it. Not long after setting off from the car, both of them agreed: they were hopelessly lost.
It was dawn by then. In the field beside them, spider webs twinkled like jeweled necklaces. Each strand of webbing was beaded with dew, and in each tiny drop of dew was a gleaming sun. It was beautiful and macabre, those jeweled snares.
The fields they passed were mostly planted with cotton. The broad, flat fields of white reminded Rachel of snow, which only added to her ongoing sense of unreality. She felt like she was walking through the set of some Christmas TV special.
Charlie plodded along beside her, breathing heavily and sweating. She tried to take his hand once, but he jerked it away from her, saying he didn’t want to infect her.
“You might not be infected,” Rachel said. “We don’t know how easy the contagion’s transmitted.”
He only looked at her, giving her a don’t-bullshit-me look, lips smirked, one eyebrow cocked. That look had always made her laugh before, but she didn’t feel like laughing this morning. The last time she’d laughed had been the previous night, when he saw her watching him in the rear view mirror and made a funny face at her: tongue sticking out the side of his mouth, eyes crossed.
There wasn’t much traffic, not on these country roads. A couple farm trucks rumbled past, kicking up rooster tails of dust. They stuck their thumbs out each time, hoping to hitch a ride, but nobody had stopped for them, although a fat guy in a big red truck had honked at them angrily, waving for them to get out of the road.
They saw several farmhouses in the distance, actually walked up the driveway to one of them to ask for help, but a big, brutal-looking dog had chased them away, barking furiously. They tried a dilapidated mobile home after that, knocking on the flimsy aluminum door, but no one answered, although they thought they could hear a baby crying inside. They debated forcing the door, but Charlie was afraid someone would shoot them for trying to break in.
“They all have guns down here, Raye,” he said. “We’re in the South.”
They were from the South, too, just not so deep in the South.
“So what are we going to do?” Rachel asked. “Where are we going to go?”
“I don’t know,” Charlie had answered wheezily.
An hour after moving on from the trailer, a truck pulled over to give them a ride.
It was an old green Ford with big tires and a driver’s side door that didn’t match the color of the rest of the vehicle. Charlie and Rachel approached the driver as he rolled down the window and leaned his head out. He had a lean hard face with squinty gray eyes and a week’s worth of beard growth. An old baseball cap with an ear of corn and the word Dekalb embroidered on it was tipped back on his head.
“You kids need some help?” he asked, although he couldn’t have been more than three or four years older than Charlie. His teeth were brown and rotting, his lower lip distended with chewing tobacco.
“We sure do!” Charlie replied. “We ran out of gas a ways back. Thanks for giving us a ride.”
“Well, now, I ain’t decided whether or not I’m gonna give you a ride!” the fellow drawled, his voice going high-pitched.
There were two other men in the truck with him, their faces similar enough in appearance that they all could have been brothers or cousins—or, cue the Southerner jokes, both. They laughed, leaning forward to look at Rachel and her husband.
The driver squinted at them suspiciously. “How do I know you ain’t infected or something? You know what’s going on, don’tcha? You seen the news? There’s some kind of infection goin’ around. People’s going crazy and eatin’ each other. Folks are calling ‘em zombies, like in the horror movies.”
“Didn’t have to see the news,” Charlie said. “We got attacked last night when we stopped to fill up on gas. This was in a town called Buncombe. We barely got away.”
“Buncombe, huh? Never heard of it,” the redneck said. He suddenly narrowed his eyes. “Either o’ you get bit? That’s how it spreads, they say.”
“No,” Charlie answered, staring unflinchingly into the other man’s eyes. “A big mob of crazy people came running at us at the gas station, but there was another guy there filling up his tank. They got to him first, ripped the poor guy apart, but it bought us enough time to jump in the car and drive away.”
Charlie had changed out of his bloody pants when they abandoned their vehicle. “Don’t tell anyone that I’ve been bitten,” he had cautioned her, testing his arm and wincing at the pain. “No one will help us if they think I’m infected.” Rachel had dressed his wound with strips torn from another shirt. She checked his shoulder as Charlie answered the man, but the bandages weren’t visible.
“That’s pretty lucky,” the driver said. “Lucky for you, that is. Not so lucky for that other feller.”
His passengers cracked up again, nodding their heads stupidly and parroting the man. Not so lucky fer him! Nope! Nyuck nyuck!
“So, where you two headed?” the driver asked.
“Myrtle Beach. Or, we were before this happened. I don’t know where we’re going now. Back home I guess, if we can make it there.”
“We’re headed into to
wn to get some supplies. I heared from Brother Lark the virus ain’t got into Copperville yet—“
“Not yet, no,” the middle passenger said. “Just come from there a couple hours ago. Ain’t no deadheads running around yet.”
“Deadheads?” Rachel said, and the driver looked at her. His gray eyes dipped down to her breasts and then rose to her face. She crossed her arms in front of her chest. She didn’t want to do it—didn’t want to look intimidated—but she couldn’t help herself.
“Yeah, deadheads,” he said slowly, and then he grinned nastily at her, as if he’d said something sexual. “That’s what folks are calling ‘em. What they really are is zombies, just like in the movies. They’ll eat yer brains if you let ‘em get ahold of you. I seen it on Fox News last night. They’re saying it’s the Rapture, the dead rising up from their graves like it talks about in Revelations. I don’t think God has anything to do with what’s going on, though. A whole bunch of ‘em ate the Pope down there in South America. It was on the news. I thought it was kinda funny.”
His cousins (or whatever they were) laughed and nodded some more. Charlie grinned, though he didn’t look like he was much amused. Just humoring the guy.
“Well, you look healthy enough,” the driver finally said, shifting around in his seat. “Ain’t got room in front for the two of you, but you kids can ride in the back of the truck if you want. We’ll drop you off wherever you want after we get to Copperville. You’re on your own after that, though. It’s ever’ man for himself when folks start eating each other’s brains.”
“Thanks, I appreciate it,” Charlie said. He turned toward the tailgate, herding Rachel ahead of him protectively.
“You got any guns?” the driver asked, popping his head out of the window one more time.
“What? No. No guns,” Charlie said. “Why do you ask?”
“In case we run into some deadheads, dummy,” the driver said. “You gotta shoot ‘em in the brains to put ‘em down. That’s what they said on Fox News. Shoot ‘em in the brains or chop their heads off.”
'Til Death (The Fearlanders) Page 2