by A. R. Wise
The smoke blinded me, but I did my best to steer us straight. I didn’t do a good job, and after only a minute of driving we smashed into something. I tried to turn the wheel, but it didn’t do any good, and the smoke was getting too thick to breathe.
I had no choice but to abandon the Jeep. I took what weapons I could find, including the M-16 and the bag that contained the screamers that Abe had made for us. The Jeep had run into the cars that lined my side of the highway, and the once grey smoke had turned dark black as it billowed up from under the hood.
The former silence was now buzzing with a distant ring, but I still couldn’t hear myself as I tried to scream Ben’s name. I ran around the back of the Jeep and took a moment to look out at the horde we’d escaped. There were still plenty of them moving, and they were headed our way.
I opened Ben’s door, and was greeted with a plume of smoke. Heat hit me as I leaned in, and I knew there was a fire in the engine. Before long this Jeep would be immolated, and Ben with it if I didn’t get him out.
I was planning on dragging him out, but I felt his hand touch my side. I looked down at his face and saw him smiling up at me. I screamed at him, although my words were lost to both of us. The side of his face was cut in several places, and his red blood was mixing with the black goo that had smeared him when the zombies exploded beside us.
He didn’t seem to comprehend our dire situation, so I slapped the cheek that wasn’t already bleeding. I grabbed his collar and pulled at him, finally getting him to move on his own. To his credit, he still had his rifle as he stumbled out of the Jeep. Orange flames began to lick up from the front of the vehicle, coloring the smoke with their intensity. Ben was still in a daze, and I grabbed his arm to pull him out onto the road, away from the fire as the horde behind us gave chase.
Most of our ammunition and all of our supplies were about to be lost. All I had left was the bag of screamers, which gave me an idea. I stopped Ben, and forced him to look at me as I held up a finger.
“Wait here,” I said slowly, although I was certain he was at least as deaf as I was.
He did as I asked, and I think his senses were coming back. He focused on the horde coming our way, and pointed his rifle out at them, but was smart enough to conserve bullets.
I ran back over to the Jeep, which was quickly catching fire, and then started to toss screamers onto the hood. I threw a liberal amount of them out, but saved the bag and a handful more of the useful fireworks. I watched as they started to ignite, and could even hear their shrill cries, although they only came to me as distant hums.
We would use the cover of the thick smoke to escape, and hope that the screamers did their job by attracting the zombies to the Jeep instead of us. That still left us wounded, low on ammunition, and stranded in the center of a zombie infested city, but at least we were alive.
Ben and I staggered away from the flames, walking down the highway in search of an escape that didn’t seem likely. We were a couple hundred yards away when the flames in the Jeep finally ignited the pipe bombs I’d left in it. The blast shook the road, and we both looked back to see that the horde had been destroyed by my desperate trap.
However, neither of us felt any sense of safety.
26 – A Good Team
Ben Watanabe
Annie and I limped along the highway, beaten and dazed, until we reached an exit ramp. I’d been deafened by the blast from Annie’s bomb, and the entire left side of my head burned and ached, as if I were standing beside a fire.
The ringing I could hear was getting louder, but only in my right ear. If I gained back any hearing at all after sitting so close to a blast like that, I’d consider myself lucky. My blood dripped down to the pavement, leaving a trail that I knew the Greys would eventually sniff out. I rested my arm up over my head, and pressed my sleeve against my numerous wounds.
Annie was soaked in blood, but none of it was her own. The liquid that dripped away from her was the black, viscous blood of the Greys that had exploded into the side of the Jeep. But there was something about her that didn’t look right. She was walking ahead of me, clearing a corner, when I finally realized that a large chunk of her hair was missing.
She was communicating through hand signals with me, and I wasn’t sure if she’d been similarly deafened or was just doing it for my benefit. I hoped that she could hear, otherwise we were in even more danger than I’d already expected. Listening for the groans of the dead was one of the best ways to detect them. Relying only on sight was a sure way of getting ambushed.
The city hadn’t been looted as extensively as the suburbs. The entire area had certainly seen better days, but the suburbs had been picked clean by looters through the past twenty years. This area had been largely avoided, and I could see that there were several buildings still intact, which might be our saving grace.
Annie seemed to have a plan, and I followed dutifully behind, simply happy to still be alive. The events that led to us getting out from under that bridge were a mystery to me. I remembered her lighting the fuse on the bomb, but how she’d known to light it and toss it out of the window so quickly was a mystery that I’d have to ask her about some day.
We were moving down a street that ran along a diagonal path compared to the rest of the streets, and Annie kept us near the buildings, away from the road. We both knew that we were sitting ducks here, and that every minute we spent out in the open was a minute longer that the horde hiding here would have to see us. Night was fast approaching, and we needed to get somewhere safe as soon as possible.
An apartment building was beside us, and Annie started to try and open the doors to the three-story complex. I noticed that the doors bore the symbols that the military had painted on them at the onset of the apocalypse. The first few doors that she tried were locked, but then we came upon one that was partially open. Someone had broken in here years earlier. This wasn’t a good place to try and hide, since it had more than likely already been looted and could be housing zombies for all we knew, but we didn’t have much of a choice.
She motioned for me to follow her inside, and then clicked on the light that was attached to her rifle’s barrel. We walked carefully into the dark, carpeted hall, and the signs of death were all around us. The walls bore scratches that ran their length and the floor was browned with old, dried blood, revealing that an awful battle had been fought here. The hall was thin, and a staircase rose on our right. Annie was smart not to trust going up, and we stuck to the main floor to start our search. Far too many survivors met their end by heading upstairs in a building like this before clearing the bottom floor. Once you’re chased up, there’s usually no way back down again.
The ringing in my right ear was getting progressively louder, but the left was still offering only a faint murmur. It was becoming clear to me that I’d become at least partially deaf. Annie said something that was lost to me, but at least it meant she could hear. I was thankful for that.
I tapped her shoulder and then pointed at my ear as I shook my head. I mouthed, ‘I can’t hear.’ She nodded in understanding and then pointed at a nearby door to our left. She let her rifle droop by its strap and set two fingers over the palm of her other hand and made them move back and forth. I realized she was motioning to me that a Grey was walking around in the room to our left. She took her knife off her belt, and I realized she was planning on trying to quietly kill whatever was in there.
I wanted to stop her and offer to clear the room myself, but she moved too fast. She opened the door and then stepped back, allowing the occupant to come to her instead of charging blindly into a room that might be filled with Greys. This was a girl that had lived the majority of her life surviving in a world that wanted her dead. She knew how to use her surroundings to her benefit, and where other inexperienced survivors might’ve tried to run into the room and catch the creature by surprise, Annie recognized that she could gain the advantage by limiting the space her enemies could get to her from.
When the zom
bie did appear, Annie was quick to silence it. The Grey was short and spindly, appearing to have been an older woman when she turned. Annie slammed her knife down into the top of the woman’s head and let the zombie fall. She didn’t try to retract the blade, but instead stood sentry at the door. She held her rifle and shined the light inside, waiting for something to come out at us.
I kept an eye on the exit, convinced that a horde was about to come charging in at us at any minute. Daylight was growing scarce, and the street outside was getting darker every second.
Annie retrieved her knife and then took my arm to pull me into the apartment. She pushed the body of the Grey out into the hall and then closed the door. To my shock, I heard the door click as she locked it.
“Annie,” I said more for my benefit than hers.
She pinched me and then put her finger to her lips, shushing me. She tried to say something, but she was speaking too quietly for me to hear. I tapped my ear and shook my head, to which she nodded in sympathetic understanding.
The apartment we’d broken into smelled stale except for the lingering stench of the Grey that had been trapped here. Our side of the door was covered in thousands of scratches near the edge, and I knew that the woman Annie killed had been here for several years. The Red world could often be confounding like this. How a Grey had become trapped in this apartment was a mystery. The Greys hadn’t reached this area for years after the initial outbreak, so that woman wasn’t the original occupant of this space. Perhaps someone else had trapped her in here, closing the door and dooming her to this space like a corpse in a tomb.
This looked like a college student’s apartment. There was sparse furniture, and college football flags on the wall. A dartboard had been pulled off its hook, and was lying amid a stack of red, plastic cups piled in the corner. The front door opened to the living room, but I could see nearly every room from this vantage. There was a tiny dining area to my right, with only a card table and foldout chairs set in it. Beside that was the kitchen, and dishes were still piled up in the sink, two decades worth of rot having long since turned black. The living room was to the left, where a couch was set in front of an obscenely large television and two towering speakers. Compact discs littered the floor beneath the television along with what I recognized as a video game console.
There was a hallway in front of us with three doors, two on the right and one on the left. Annie moved in that direction, and checked the first door on the right to discover a linen closet. The next room was a bathroom, and the other the bedroom, but she seemed confident that the apartment was clear when she returned.
We moved the couch in front of the door, and in the process the ringing in my ear started to fade. It was replaced with a deep, pulsing sound that I recognized as my own heartbeat.
“Ben,” said Annie, and I actually heard her.
I nodded instead of responding, still worried that my voice would be louder than intended.
“You can hear?”
I wavered my hand in response, letting her know that it was touch and go.
She came over to stand beside me and said, “There’s more outside.” She pointed towards the glass patio door that looked out onto the street we’d just escaped. “Keep an eye on the door. I’m going to see if I can find anything to help clean us up some.”
She pushed me down to the couch, forcing me to do as she instructed as she set about searching the apartment for anything that could be useful. I kept my rifle pointed at the patio door just past the living room, and the pain on the left side of my face was getting more intense every second. The adrenaline was wearing off, and my injuries were taking the opportunity to announce themselves.
Annie returned with a case of Coors Light and some towels. She shrugged and said, “It was all I could find. Turn and look the other way so I can see your…” I did as she asked and she cringed when she saw the side of my face.
“Is it bad?” I asked.
“It’s not good.” She sounded further away as she spoke into my deafened ear. “But you’ll live.”
“That’s more than I expected after what we just went through.”
“Does it hurt?”
“Yeah,” I said, not bothering to try and act tough.
“Looks like some metal got stuck in your cheek. I’m going to have to pull it out.”
“Go for it,” I said.
“Want a beer?” she asked, but I refused.
“Save it. I had enough to drink last night.”
She started to pull shrapnel from my cheek, and I did my best not to wince too much. She poured a can of beer into one of the towels and used it to clean my wound. There wasn’t enough alcohol in the beer to cause the wounds to sting any more than they already did, which made me wonder how sterile it could possibly be. We didn’t have much choice other than to use it though. I think the apartment’s former occupant probably lived on a steady diet of this stuff.
“We got ourselves in a hell of a mess this time,” I said as she continued to clean my wounds.
“I’m sorry,” said Annie. “It was so stupid of me to try and go through the city.”
“That wasn’t just your decision,” I said. “It was mine too.”
“I pushed you into it,” said Annie. “It was a dumb idea, and it nearly got us killed.”
“Hey, Annie, stop it. Stop blaming yourself like that. We made a decision, and it didn’t work out. Now we’ll pick up the pieces and do the best we can. If you go around blaming yourself for everything that goes wrong, you’ll end up tearing yourself apart. You’re a pretty incredible woman, Miss Conrad, stop trying to convince yourself otherwise.”
She considered what I’d said, and then nodded in agreement. She gave me a weak grin that eventually turned into an actual smile before she said, “I’ll give it a shot. But we still need to find a way out of the city.”
“Yeah, that’s going to be a bit of a challenge. Any ideas?”
Annie raised her brow and sighed before she said, “Believe it or not, I think the highway’s still our best bet. If Jerald’s men went that way, then at least we know it’s clear enough to drive through. Maybe by morning the horde will have moved back out into the city. And Billy’s map was in the Jeep. We’re not going to have much luck trying to navigate the roads without that. The highway’s a straight shot to where we need to go.”
“I agree.”
She seemed pleased that I agreed so readily, but then said, “The trick is going to be finding a vehicle that still runs and enough gas to get us out of here.”
“That might be easier than you think,” I said as I took the towel from her to hold against my face. “This area’s not nearly as looted as I would’ve thought. I bet we can find a car dealership around here somewhere.”
“A car dealership?” asked Annie. “But those cars have been sitting in a lot in bad weather for twenty years.”
“Not the ones they keep inside on the showroom. Those are usually in perfect condition, and dealerships have gas pumps in them. Most of the stations were drained years ago, but raiders never bother draining the tanks at dealerships. The best cars I’ve ever found came from dealership floors.”
“Well all right then, Mr. Survivor, I’ll take your word for it. Meanwhile, I’m going to see if I can’t find some clothes for us to wear. I’m sick of smelling like a corpse.”
She got up to leave, but I grabbed her arm and pulled her back towards me. I kissed her, and then said, “We make a good team.”
“Don’t be so sure,” said Annie. “We’re not out of the woods yet.”
PART SIX – The Coming Storm
27 – Happily Ever After
Laura Conrad
“It could be stress that’s aggravating it,” said Clyde as he sat beside me. I was on a bed in my room, with Zack sitting in a chair that he’d pulled up beside me. Clyde had been doting over me, although he had plenty of other things to worry about. Jill was out of commission, laid up in another room as she dealt with what Clyde though
t was a series of intense Braxton Hicks contractions. The other members of our group that had any medicinal aptitude had already left to join the team that was setting up New Vineyard. The only people left behind at the Rehab center were the members of the Rollers that were planning on attacking the military base at the airport, depending on Annie’s report in a few days.
“I’ll be fine,” I lied. My gut was churning, but instead of it causing just nausea like usual, this time I’d been doubled over in pain when Zack found me.
“You need to take it easy,” said Zack, and I laughed in response. He scowled and said, “I’m serious, Laura. You’re going to kill yourself if you keep trying to fight me on this.”
“The best thing for you now would be to rest,” said Clyde.
Zack was quick to say, “And that’s exactly what you’re going to get.”
“They need me at New Vineyard,” I said and was immediately rebuffed.
“Nope,” said Zack. “They’ll do fine on their own. All they’ve got headed out that way now are supplies.”
“Don’t fight me on this,” I said as I pushed myself up on my elbows. I felt weak and weary, but was determined not to show it. “I’ve been dealing with this…” I motioned at my stomach, but was unwilling to call it cancer. That word has a way of sucking the life out of me.
Clyde said it for me, “Cancer.”
“Whatever the fuck it is,” I said with a grimace. “I’ve been dealing with it for a long time now. It comes and goes. In half an hour I’ll be back to normal. The worst thing I can do is let everyone think I’m dying. They need a leader, not an old, sick, dying woman.”
Both of them had frowns as I sat up and set my feet on the floor.
“Don’t look at me like that,” I said. “Zack, if you really want to help, then drive me to New Vineyard. I’ll get some sleep on the road.” I knew that both of them wanted to argue with me, so I shot them down before they started. “I’ve been fighting for almost twenty goddamn years to set up a place where my friends and family could be safe. There’s no fucking way I’m going to lay here and waste away while that dream comes true. Please don’t fight me on this.”