"Isn't it obvious? We need a vehicle," she said sheepishly. "I thought I could hot-wire something. I see it in movies all the time...green wire goes to red wire...or red goes to yellow...or something like that. Turns out, it's a little harder than they let on. I have no idea what I'm doing. I just didn't want to sit around doing nothing."
"I see," Jeremy remarked. "But...wouldn't it be easier to just find some keys? This is a dealership...they've got to be somewhere."
"I'm a little shy about going into an enclosed space after...well, you know."
"Yeah."
"Do you want to talk about it?" Jeremy was impressed by the genuine concern in her voice. Nobody had ever shown him that sort of worry before, and certainly not an attractive girl. “I mean...I saw her there, you know.”
"I...no," Jeremy cast his gaze at the ground between his feet. "Soon, maybe. I just need some time to sort out what's going on."
"Don't take too long," she said with a suddenly wistful smile. "At the rate things are going, you won't have anyone to talk to soon. Or I won't have anyone to listen to, depending on how things work out."
Not wanting to acknowledge the truth of what she said, Jeremy strode over to a large picture window in the front of the dealership. He cupped his hands on either side of his head and gazed inside, trying to see exactly where the keys might be stored. A small metal box mounted behind the receptionist's desk caught his eye, and he stepped back. He closed his eyes and stretched his hands toward the box, trying to summon the energy that he had been unable to summon back in the grocery store. This time was more successful, and the small metal box rattled and shook on its wall mount, then tore itself away from the anchors that held it in place and flew towards Jeremy. It shattered the plate glass window and sailed on through, bouncing to a stop at his feet.
"Subtle," Tanya called out to him. Jeremy shrugged his shoulders with an impish grin. "Next time, did you want to just use a grenade? That might be a little quieter."
Making a show of waving his hands to dismiss the criticism, he bent down and picked up the first key that had fallen out of the box. There was no obvious label or indication of what vehicle the key was for, but a small red panic button on the edge of the key brought a smile to his face. He pushed the button.
A whooping, honking alarm sounded only a few cars down from the SUV where Tanya sat, having given up on her attempts to hot-wire the vehicle. She jumped out of the seat with a surprised yelp.
"What was that?" She couldn't quite control the volume of her voice.
"Our ride," he said, gesturing towards a bright green sports car and silencing its alarm with another push of the panic button.
"Green doesn't seem like your colour," Tanya said, gently nudging Jeremy's arm. Her gentle nudge nearly knocked him off his feet, but he recovered quickly enough that she didn't notice.
"Any port in a storm," he said. He slipped into the driver's seat and began fiddling with knobs and dials.
"It's not that I want to interrupt your careful adjustment of your mirrors," Tanya said, "but I think you should keep two words in mind: zombie invasion. Maybe we should be focusing more on getting out of here, and less on whether your mirrors are perfect, or the climate control is set to your specifications?"
"You're the boss," Jeremy said with a sheepish smile. A nagging part of his conscience tried to tell him that it was wrong to be smiling and joking when he had just witnessed the death of many of the people he had been closest to, but he found himself oddly drawn to Tanya. Although he'd never been particularly inclined to spend time with her before all of the strange and incredible events of the past few days, he had already found himself accepting that the two of them would be spending a great deal of time together - in all likelihood, the rest of their lives, however short they might turn out to be. The idea wasn't quite as frightening as he would have once thought, and while he had spent most of his young adult life trying to summon up the courage to even talk to a member of the opposite sex, she seemed easier to talk to than anyone had been before.
Finally convinced to stop fiddling with the luxury vehicle's extensive control system, Jeremy turned the key in the ignition and the car roared to life. He felt a brief moment of dismay as he realized that the vehicle had a manual transmission, which he hadn't handled since their single driver's education class which covered that material. He mentally coached himself through the process before touching anything. Clutch first, then gas, then shift, he thought, then release the clutch, and you're golden. He did exactly this, and the car lurched forward with a powerful growl...and promptly stalled. After clearing his throat in embarrassment, Jeremy amended his mental procedure. Parking brake first, then clutch, then gas, then shift.
The sports car growled powerfully again, and this time when it lurched forward, it didn't stop or stall. It roared out of the parking lot and onto the road with more force than he had ever experienced from a car, and Jeremy fought to maintain his grip on the steering wheel as they sailed down the road towards the highway.
Chapter 5
Day 4 - 14:45:00 CST
Stoughton, Saskatchewan, Canada
The drive down the northbound highway was quiet, almost peaceful. They had been driving for nearly an hour when a roadside sign alerted them of their approach to the town of Stoughton. Although he had only driven through the small town a handful of times, Jeremy was familiar enough with the approach and getting comfortable enough driving the manual transmission sports car that he gently slowed down as the neared the edge of town. Highway travel had been difficult, though not impossible - abandoned vehicles left in the middle of the road had slowed their progress, although the absence of occupants troubled them more than the delays. As a matter of conscience, Tanya had forced - or perhaps more accurately, strongly encouraged - that they stop at the various farm houses close to the highway in search of survivors. There were none, although there also appeared to be no undead or even bodily remains left in their wake. In all, they had made six separate stops at six separate farms, none of which had an occupant in sight - not only were the humans utterly absent, so was all wildlife, and livestock, and pets. It was as if all life had simply been scoured from the face of the Earth while they had been fighting for their lives in Estevan. Most of the drive had been in uncomfortable silence, broken only by suggestions about buildings to check, routes to take, and observations about how quiet things were. The small town that they approached looked no more heavily populated than any of the abandoned homes which they had inspected on their drive; small squat buildings lined the road, the only sign that civilization had once flourished there.
"I've never been to Stoughton before," Tanya remarked as matter-of-factly as if she were on any other road trip and not fleeing a horde of undead attackers who had slaughtered nearly everyone they had ever known.
"You haven't missed much," Jeremy said. He slowed down even further as the vehicle entered the town limits. He scanned the houses and small, squat commercial buildings searching for any sign of life. "It's mostly a drive-through community. Not much to see or anything worth stopping for."
"Do you think anyone is left here?" Tanya noticed how intently he was scanning their surroundings. Jeremy turned left at the town's only major intersection, heading towards the northwestern highway that would take them to their destination. As he rounded the corner, the car rolled to a stop.
"It seems likely," he said as he stared out the windshield. A barricade had been erected in the middle of the street; 15-gallon drums flanked either side of the barricade, filled with wood blazing dangerously. The barricade was a hasty amalgamation of a construction barricade, several cars, and random pieces of lumber. Despite this structure, there was no sign of life anywhere to be seen. "I don't see anyone, but we need to get around this thing. Think we can manage to clear a path together?"
“Between my strength and your telekinesis," Tanya said, "I have no doubts that we can get that flimsy thing out of our way. Hopefully we can find whoever put it up, too. Ther
e’s not much room in here for passengers, but I’m sure we could appropriate another vehicle."
“Listen to you,” Jeremy said, nudging her gently. “Appropriate another vehicle...talking about stealing someone’s car like it’s just part of the daily routine.”
“Perspective is a tricky thing,” she said, blushing slightly. “And I don’t think of it as theft - the original owners are long dead, so it’s not like they’re being hurt by us using them.”
Jeremy put the car in park and the pair stepped out of their vehicle. Jeremy stepped up to the barricade and examined it closely, running his fingers absent-mindedly over one of the pieces of lumber that criss-crossed the haphazard structure. His careful analysis was interrupted by the now-familiar cracking boom of a gunshot, and a large chunk of the lumber his hand rested on exploded in a small hail of splinters. Both Tanya and Jeremy instinctively dropped to a crouch and looked around to find the source of the gunfire.
"Don't you be thinking about moving," a voice called out from the distance. Jeremy squinted to make out the indistinct form of a man perched atop a nearby building, holding a large rifle in his hands. Thoughts of how to disarm the newcomer were in vain, however, as a pair of rough-looking men stepped out from either side of the barricade. They both carried rifles of their own, and had them levelled at Jeremy and Tanya.
"Are you stupid?" Jeremy's voice was bitter and brave. Having already faced down an army of the undead, he wasn't nearly as frightened of the situation as he knew he probably should be. "Do we look like we're the real threat? Have you seen any goddamned zombies driving vehicles? Get the hell out of our way, and we'll leave you backwoods drunken rednecks here to cornhole each other in peace."
While Jeremy ranted angrily, the face of the nearest man flushed redder and redder and his face screwed up in anger. His dirt-stained index finger slid across the trigger and squeezed. A thunderous shot rang out, punctuating the end of Jeremy's outburst. He felt a ripping, tearing pain shoot through his right arm, followed by cold and numbness.
"Shut your goddamned mouth," the man spat. "This is our town, and you do what we tell you to. And we're going to have us some fun," he licked his lips and winked at Tanya. She shuddered, but was too frightened to move as both men lifted their guns up and slammed the butt of the rifles into Jeremy and Tanya's heads. They fell and lost consciousness.
***
When Jeremy awoke, it was in a dimly lit, filthy room. Judging by the beer and liquor advertisements plastered to the walls, the tables scattered everywhere, and the neon signs flickering quietly along the walls, it had once been a bar. He tried to move, and was greeted with shooting pain from the wound on his shoulder for the effort. He struggled a little more carefully, and quickly realized that he was sitting in an uncomfortable wooden chair, his arms secured behind him with heavily knotted rope. Tanya was in a similar predicament a few feet away, having apparently regained consciousness at around the same time as him, and a woman they had never seen before was tied to another chair near the bar's front window. She was a First Nations woman, who Jeremy guessed to be in her mid 30s, and who would have been attractive if not for the fact that her face was bruised and bloodied, and she didn't move a muscle as she stared into the street beyond. Jeremy watched her stare, and noticed a thin glazing of frost expanding and contracting along the bottom of the window near where she sat with each breath she took. He dismissed this as a trick of his imagination.
"Tanya," he croaked. His voice rasped and sputtered and he fought through the aching pain from his arm to form coherent words. "Are you OK?"
"I...I guess so." She didn't sound much better than he did. "My head hurts. Are you OK? You're bleeding."
"I think it's mostly stopped," he said as he glanced down at his wound. "Probably looks worse than it really is."
"Can you move?"
"I don't think so. It hurts when I try. They did a good job of tying me up - I can't budge my hands at all, and I can't focus enough to try anything else. Can't you just...you know...tear your ropes apart?"
"No," she burst into quiet sobbing. "I'm scared, Jeremy. I don't want to die here, not like this."
"We aren't going to kill you, little lady," the voice from the door sounded like the man who had shot Jeremy earlier. Jeremy saw that while he was talking with Tanya, their captors had stepped inside the front door of the bar. They swaggered in, each holding their rifle in one hand and a bottle of liquor in the other. The unknown woman by the window kept her gaze fixed on the street beyond, as if trying to block out their very presence. The man who had shot Jeremy stepped in front of Tanya, a wide grin on his face. "We won't get to have any fun if we just kill you."
He dropped the bottle of gin that he'd been carrying to the floor, and tossed his rifle aside on a nearby table, then reached down and began unbuckling his belt. The lascivious grin on his face grew so wide it seemed like it might split his head in two.
Realizing what was about to happen, Tanya seemed to go into a catatonic shock. She trembled and tears poured freely from her eyes, but she didn't dare move. Jeremy wanted to yell at her, to scream that she needed to fight back, that her tremendous strength was more than enough to crush the scum who was doing this to her. He opened his mouth, but couldn't speak. His rage overwhelmed him, his pulse thumped loudly in his ears, and the pain in his arm vanished, replaced instead by a more powerful pain in his head than he had ever felt before - a pain worse than he had felt even the first times that his telekinetic power had been unleashed. He squeezed his eyes shut, trying to block out the pain that made it feel like his head was going to burst, and he growled. It was no mere growl of pain or fear, but a guttural, feral growl, the sort of thing you would expect to hear from a wounded animal backed into a corner. His eyes flew open, revealing orbs of empty blackness. Where he had once felt like a man with appendages that could reach out of his body, he now felt his consciousness occupying the entire room. That consciousness was a part of his body, a part of his mind, a part of the chairs and tables and the very air itself. He willed the bonds holding him down to be gone, and they dissolved into a fine, airy puff of black soot. He didn’t stand up so much as release his physical form, reappearing in front of the chair standing tall, the wound in his arm suddenly gone. Now the grin was now on his face instead of their captor's. The man who was about to open his pants and assault Tanya whirled and reached for his gun, while his companions raised theirs at Jeremy and fired. He felt the bullets in the air, flying towards him, and they too fell prey to his mental might, dissolving into airy puffs of smoke that dissipated long before they reached him. Likewise, the bonds that held both Tanya and the unknown woman fell apart, torn to tiny shreds by an incredible force. Tanya sat still, still virtually catatonic, but the other woman rose to her feet, turning her eyes to their captors with murderous intent. She raised her hands towards the pair of men nearest to her, and a gentle blue pulse burst out of them and enveloped the men. They screamed in agony, but their screams faded first to garbled cries, then to silence as their bodies twisted, contorted, and froze in place. Their skin turned blue, and a sheen of frost covered their bodies; small icicles dangled from their extremities. They stood as perfect icy statues for only a fraction of a second before large cracks appeared over their entire bodies, spreading with incredible speed until the bodies tore themselves apart, collapsing in a small pile of frozen rubble. The final remaining man in the room, the one who had shot Jeremy and stood still beside Tanya, was slowly reaching for his rifle on the nearby table. Jeremy turned his attention from their new apparent ally, and turned it towards the man. He inhaled deeply, and all of the tables and chairs in the room floated into the air six inches off the ground.
"Don't kill me, man," their former captor's face was pale, and he trembled as he spoke. He kept gradually reaching for his gun, but the table it rested upon floated in the air just out of his reach.
"After all you've done, you have the guts - the sheer unmitigated gall - to beg for your life?" Jeremy was incredulo
us. He watched the man reaching for the gun, moving slowly, as if he believed that his visibility was dependent upon his speed. "Go ahead, take it," Jeremy urged. Incredulous, the man stepped forward and grasped the weapon. As his fingers slipped around the the stock of the rifle, Jeremy focused on the weapon, applying force from within the weapon in a twisting motion that tore it to pieces; the weapon shattered outwards, embedding large pieces of wood and twisted metal in their would-be assailant's hand and arm.
"Weapons," Jeremy said with a grim smile as he twisted the air around the injured man to lift him into the air, "are useless. You are useless. You had the choice of helping your fellow man in our time of need; you chose to attack us, and would have tortured and eventually killed us if you'd had the choice."
"Please don't do this," Tanya's voice was weak and shaky. "Nobody else needs to die."
"Yes he does," the other woman in the room's voice was raspy and broken. "He did horrible things. He can't live."
"Shut your mouth, woman!" Between blubbering howls of pain from his injury, their former captor lashed out verbally at her. "Please, let me go."
Jeremy stepped aside, motioning for the other woman in the room to step forward.
"He hasn't done anything to me but give me a headache," Jeremy said. "Obviously, he has done worse to you. You can do with him whatever you choose - his fate is entirely in your hands."
The woman staggered forward to stand in front of the floating man, who writhed and struggled in a vain attempt to back away. As she stepped in front of him, Jeremy noticed thin blue patterns tattooed on the dark skin of her neck, barely visible above the neck of her shirt. They were obviously homemade and amateurish, not a sign of a woman who had led a privileged life. She picked up a broken shard of glass from the shattered whisky bottle that the man had dropped. Holding it up to the light, she studied it carefully, then gazed at the helpless man, then back at the shard of glass again. When she struck out, it was with a speed and strength that took Jeremy by surprise. She let loose a powerful scream from the very depths of her lungs as the sharp shard tore through skin and muscle, tendons and veins to embed itself in his neck. The man gurgled briefly, then stopped moving. A thick splatter of blood drops shot out from the wound, coating the woman in viscous red fluid. An errant drop struck Jeremy's lips, and the coppery taste of blood flooded his mouth. His consciousness snapped back into his body and all of the floating furniture and the floating body dropped to the floor. Jeremy stumbled backwards, suddenly feeling very small now that his consciousness no longer filled the room. Tanya, having snapped out of her near-trance at the sight of the unknown woman killing their former captor, leaped forward and grabbed him, carefully supporting his weight in her arms. He relaxed, and took a moment longer than absolutely necessary to regain his balance. As he rose to his feet, his eyes met Tanya's and they smiled.
The Dead Rise Page 9