'Til Death (The Fearlanders)

by Joseph Duncan

  “No, no weapons,” Charlie said again, looking worried for the first time. There was a gun rack in the back window of the Ford, three hunting rifles suspended in its braces.

  “That’s too bad,” the driver said. He leaned his head out the window and spat. Charlie stepped back so the tobacco juice didn’t splatter his shoes. “Well, we ain’t got no firearms to spare, if that’s what you’re wondering. You’ll just have to make do without, I guess. Live by your wits, as the sayin’ goes.”

  “Yeah, that’s fine,” Charlie said. “We’ll figure something out.”

  “All right. Well, hop in. Time to get this show on the road. We need to get those supplies before the whole town gets picked over. There’s looting ever’where, Brother Lark said.”

  “Yep, lootin’ ever’where,” Brother Lark agreed. “Seen it on Fox News.”

  “Yep, Fox News.”

  While Brother Weirdo drummed his hands on the steering wheel, watching them in the driver’s side mirror, Charlie and Rachel walked to the end of the truck. Charlie lowered the tailgate and helped Rachel in, then climbed up himself and pulled the tailgate shut.

  “You ready?” the redneck called out to them.

  “Let’s go,” Charlie said, and they took off with a lurch.

  5. In the Woods

  The back of the truck was littered with an odd assortment of things: empty beer cans, an axe, a chainsaw, a rusty chain. There was fishing equipment and a sun-bleached little girl’s doll, one eye closed as if she were winking. Straw and wood chips were scattered around the truck bed. As they flew down the road through the hilly wooded landscape, the wind lifted up the straw and wood dust and spun it around them in a blinding vortex.

  Rachel sat with her back against the cab of the truck. She kept her head down and her eyes squeezed shut against the whirling chaff. Charlie sat on the tire well, staring ahead with squinted eyes, his shirt flapping against his torso, his black hair flapping against his skull. After a few minutes he shifted over beside her. He inclined his head.

  “Do not turn and look into the cab of the truck,” he whispered in her ear.

  “What? What’s wrong?” Rachel asked, but she did as she was told. She stared down at her sneakers.

  “When I say run,” Charlie said, taking her hand in his, “I want you to jump over the side of the truck and run with me. Run as fast as you can, and do not stop, no matter what you hear, no matter what anyone says. Even if something happens to me.”

  “Okay,” she said, and a quaver had come into her voice. She knew by his tone that they were in trouble. Bad trouble.

  “They are not going into town for supplies,” Charlie said. “They might have been going to town before, but they seem to have changed their plans. The bastards.”

  “How do you know they’re not still going to town?”

  “Because usually the land gets flatter and more open the closer you get to town. We’re just going deeper into the woods. The forest’s getting thicker.”

  “Where do you think they’re taking us?” Rachel asked, looking at him from the corner of her eyes.

  “I don’t know,” Charlie said, “but it’s not town. We’re driving deeper into the country. Into the backwoods. They’re planning to do something to us.” He didn’t describe what he thought they were planning to do to them, but he didn’t need to.

  “Oh, God,” Rachel murmured, and she prayed, the words rushing quick and bright with panic through her mind. Please, God, help us get out of this! Please, watch over us, in Jesus’ name I pray!

  As she prayed, all those episodes of Dateline she used to watch with her mother spooled through her head. She thought of those unlucky young couples so often featured on the show-- kidnapped, taken out into the wilderness, the boyfriends murdered, the girls raped and brutalized, their torments always so beautifully narrated by correspondent Keith Morrison, whose buttery tenor made poetry of murder. Who would ever miss them in all the chaos that was going on? And that’s probably what their abductors were thinking.

  “Damn it!” Charlie cursed softly. “I had a bad feeling about them. I should have listened to my instincts!”

  “Charlie…”

  And then they had a stroke of luck. The only one they’d had since they fled from the gas station in Buncombe. Another truck came along, and the road was so narrow the good old boys in the green Ford had to pull over to the side of the road so the two vehicles could squeeze past one another. Even luckier, the driver in the other truck, a heavyset gray-headed fellow in a baseball cap and bib overalls, knew their kidnappers and leaned out the window to gab at them.

  “Now!” Charlie said, and he jumped to his feet. He leapt over the side of the truck and reached up for her. Rachel scrambled after him, and they scurried across the road in front of the idling Chevrolet.

  Rachel saw the old man in the Chevrolet react to their sudden appearance—his body jerked, and he scowled as they raced across the road—and then the forest enveloped her, and she was running downhill as fast as she could.

  The ground sloped precipitously. She slipped and fell several times on the loose, rocky soil, but Charlie was there every time to scoop her up and propel her onwards. “Hurry!” he panted. “Don’t stop!” and she hurried and didn’t stop.

  It was primary forest, thick and treacherous. It whipped her face and bare legs with its leafy limbs, gouged her flesh with sharp-pointed branches, but she did not stop. Any moment she expected to hear the Weirdo Brothers chasing after them, hooping and hollering like a pack of wild animals. Any moment she expected to hear shots ring out, but there were no sounds in the forest apart from the whoosh of their breathing and the crunch of their passage through the nearly impenetrable woodland.

  Finally, the ground leveled out. The forest thinned. Charlie said they could slow down. Clutching the painful stitch in her side, Rachel followed her husband through secondary forest growth.

  “Do you think… they followed us?” she gasped.

  “I don’t know,” Charlie answered, breathing raggedly himself. “I don’t think they did… We got lucky… They probably didn’t know what to do… with Slim Pickens there watching.”

  That’s what she believed. The old codger in the brown Chevrolet had probably saved their lives. Pushing her sweaty hair from her face, Rachel asked, “Do you think we can stop… and rest for a minute?”

  Looking into the woods behind them, Charlie listened intently for a moment, then nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, let’s sit down and rest.”

  After they had caught their breath, they rose. Charlie got up first and held a hand out to her. He had forgotten about infecting her. She took his hand anyway, and he hefted her to her feet. She was shocked how hot his hand was.

  “You don’t look good,” Rachel said.

  “Thanks,” he said sarcastically.

  “No, really. We need to get you to a hospital,” she said.

  He gestured at the forest around them. “We need to worry about getting out of these woods. That’s our immediate concern. People get lost and die in the woods. It happens all the time. It may seem like we’re safe now, but we’re not. Not until we’re back in civilization.”

  She nodded. Fear twisted in her guts like a worm, but as the past twenty-four hours had been one long funhouse ride, she didn’t pay too much attention to it.

  “Which way?” she asked.

  “Let’s keep going south,” Charlie answered. “The forest looks thinner that way.” He started off, back slouched, moving his feet heavily. Trudging was the word for it. He was exhausted, sick. She was the only reason he was pushing on, she knew, but she was happy to be the carrot that kept him pulling the cart.

  She followed.

  It took them the better part of the morning to cross the woods. On the far side of it was a marshy lowland. Charlie called it a soggy bottom, which made Rachel laugh tiredly, but it was no laughing matter. Insects swarmed them, and the ground was muddy and tried to suck their shoes off. Charlie picked up a fall
en limb and began to poke it into the ground ahead of them. Rachel asked him why he was doing that and he said, “So we don’t step in quicksand.” That frightened her, and she stayed close to him, afraid to move forward until he had made sure the way was safe.

  “Do you think there’s really quicksand in here?” she asked, waving at the mosquitos whirring around her head.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Just try to stay out of the water. Only walk where you can see the ground.”

  “Okay.”

  Just twenty-four hours ago, they were preparing to get wed. She was in the back room of the little country church that was hosting their nuptials, dressed all in white as her mother and her aunts and her cousins took turns smoking outside and fussing over her dress and makeup and hair. The little church was too warm, and she remembered how upset she was about that. One of the deacons was trying to get the air conditioning running, and she was almost in tears about it. “The icing of my cake is going to melt!” she had cried, and her mother said sternly, “Quit that blubbering right now, Rachel Anne Mathews! Your makeup is going to run!” Oh, how silly that seemed to her now! How petty! To cry because the temperature of the church was a little high. It had seemed like a disaster at the time. Now she was worried whether or not her mother and father were still alive.

  “I’m going to try Mom again,” she said, digging her cell phone out of her pocket. She had locked her purse in the trunk of the Impala but had brought her phone. She had been trying to call her mother all morning, but the line was always busy. An automated message said it was due to an “unusually large volume of calls”, and then made some weird beeping and blooping sounds.

  “You need to save the battery,” Charlie said.

  Ignoring him, Rachel flipped the phone open.

  “No signal,” she sighed. She closed the phone and stuffed it back in the front pocket of her pants.

  “Of course,” Charlie said. “There’s not going to be any towers out here. Try it when we get out of this swamp.”

  “Okay.”

  The terrain finally rose up and grew firmer. They abandoned the marsh for a broad open field. The sun was directly overhead by then. The forest canopy had given way to high pale blue sky and wispy clouds. Rachel turned her face to the sun like a flower, smiling as its warmth tightened her skin. Sprawling out ahead of them were acres of grass swaying gently in the breeze.

  “Thank you, Jesus!” Rachel exclaimed, and Charlie pointed into the distance.

  “Look, honey!” he grinned. “A house!”

  6. In the Yard

  It was a two-story white farmhouse with a green roof and gables. It perched upon a distant green hill, its bay window flashing in the sun. There was a big tree in the front yard, and a barn in the back. Though they could not see the highway, they could see the gravel driveway that wound up the hill to the house. There did not seem to be any activity around the house, and there were no vehicles parked out front, but the yard and the surrounding hills were neatly mown.

  “Come on,” Charlie said, and he started for the house.

  Rachel followed, reenergized by her relief. “I hope someone’s home,” she said. “Maybe they can drive us to the hospital so you can get looked at.”

  “I hope so,” Charlie said.

  Walking through the flower-speckled field restored her optimism. It wouldn’t last long, but for the moment she was hopeful. They would get Charlie to the hospital, and the doctors would cure him, and the contagion, whatever it was, would be neutralized, and life would go back to the way it was. She was still going to get her Happily Ever After.

  They crossed one last narrow strip of woods, and then they were at the road-- no highway, just another gravel lane.

  “Try your mom again,” Charlie said.

  Rachel took her phone out of her pocket, thinking, This time it’ll go through. This time I’ll get her, and she’ll say she and Dad are all right, and where are you, Rachel, are you somewhere safe? Come home, honey! As soon as you can! She would have that scolding tone in her voice, that one that always made Rachel feel like everything was her fault, but this time she wouldn’t let it get under her skin. This time she would just be relieved her mom and dad were all right.

  She pulled up her contact list, selected MOM and put the phone to her ear.

  After a couple seconds, the phone blooped and a friendly robot voice said, “I’m sorry. Due to an unusually large volume of calls, your request cannot be completed at this time. Please try again later.” The phone bleeped and blooped and then went silent. It was a strange listening silence, like someone was sitting in a dark room at the other end of the line, waiting for her to speak. Chilled, Rachel clicked the END button.

  “No?” Charlie asked.

  “Recording again. Please try again later.”

  “Try my mom,” he suggested, and she tried, and got the same message.

  “How bad do you think it is?” Rachel asked, stuffing the phone back in her pocket. “Do you think it’s everywhere, like the creep in the Ford said?”

  Charlie shrugged. How could he know?

  “I hope my Mom and Dad are all right,” she said in a low voice.

  Charlie had been leaning against a post, gathering his strength. He pushed away from it and nodded toward the farmhouse at the top of the hill. “Let’s go see if those people are home,” he said. She could tell by his expression that he was worried about his own parents, and she felt selfish.

  “I’m sure they’re all right,” Rachel said as she followed him across the road to the foot of the driveway. A mailbox stood there beside a hedge of wild roses. Painted on the side of the mailbox in flowery script was The Frobishers.

  “I hope they don’t have dogs,” Rachel said nervously.

  “They all have dogs here in the South,” Charlie said. “Guns, dogs and God.” He was having a bit of a piss with her, as the English were wont to say, but he was so sick and exhausted it just sounded mean.

  Rachel followed him up the driveway, alert for any barking.

  It was a long hot walk, and it was all uphill. By the time they got to the yard, Rachel was sweating profusely. “Should we call out?” she asked. “Let them know someone’s here? We don’t want to scare anyone.”

  Charlie responded by shushing here.

  She saw it, too, then.

  The front door was open.

  Rachel moved closer to Charlie. “That’s not good, is it?” she whispered, eyeballing the open door. “Should we leave?”

  Charlie waved for her to be quiet, looking annoyed. He crossed the front yard and climbed the porch steps, moving as stealthily as possible. The porch spanned the entire length of the house. There was an old-fashioned porch swing, a nice set of rattan furniture, and several large ferns hanging from the soffit. The front door of the house stood open. The screen door lay flat on the porch, ripped off its hinges. The interior of the home was dark and silent.

  Charlie eased across the porch, leaned through the doorway. He pulled his head back out and gave her a look she’d never seen before: face long, eyes wide, lips pressed tightly together.

  “What is it?” she whispered. She was trembling all over.

  “Blood,” he whispered.

  “Blood?” she squeaked.

  “On the floor. A puddle of it. And footprints. Come on, let’s get out of here.”

  He started to lead them away, and that’s when Old Man Frobisher walked around the side of the house.

  7. The Frobishers

  He was a big man, dressed in bloody bib overalls, fat but not flabby, with a barrel-shaped torso and thick sturdy legs. He walked haltingly in the driveway, the gravel crunching under his bare feet, sweeping his arms around his body like he was blind or dreaming of swimming.

  At the sight of him, Rachel drew a breath to scream, but Charlie was fast. He clamped a hand over her mouth before she could give voice to her surprise.

  Frobisher didn’t see them. His back was to them. He shuffled forward a few more steps,
moaning softly, then paused and started to turn.

  By the time he turned around, Charlie had retreated into the house. He pulled Rachel in with him, and shut the door on the infected farmer. They crouched in the foyer floor, hiding from the man, as the zombie’s milky eyes rolled right to left, taking in the front of the house.

  The thing in the driveway did not know that the front door had been closed. He did not know anything but pain and hunger. After a minute or two, he groaned and turned away. A robin scolded him from a nearby tree, and the farmer growled and tottered in that direction.

  “What is wrong with everyone?” Rachel whispered. She was crying a little, but let the tears fall where they may. “What kind of disease is it? It’s like they’ve been lobotomized something.”

  “It’s like that creep in the truck said,” Charlie answered. “It’s some kind of zombie virus, like in the horror movies.”

  Rachel shook her head. “No! That can’t be true. This can’t really be happening. It’s too crazy!”

  “It can and it is,” Charlie said grimly. “There’s no use trying to deny it.”

  She saw how sick he was then, how exhausted and frightened, and she felt guilty for her outburst, for her weakness, for leaning on him so hard today when he should have been leaning on her. “You’re right. I know you’re right,” she said. She reached out to him. “Are you okay, Charlie? You’re so pale. Is there anything I can do for you?”

  He shook his head, smiling at her affectionately. “We need to check out the house,” he said. “Make sure there’s no one in here with us. No crazies, I mean. We might have to hide out here. I’m not sure how much further I can go. Not today.”

  Rachel looked over her shoulder, an anxious expression on her face. She did not relish the thought of exploring the house. It was too dark. Too quiet. But Charlie was right, as usual. They needed to find out if there were any sick people in there with them.