One of the survival techniques my father had drilled into me over the years was how to shoot an azimuth. That’s when you determine the line between you and an object in the landscape you want to reach—in my case, the drugstore on Route 1—using a topographical map and a compass. I was twelve years old the first time he taught me, and I’ll never forget it.
That was before the Outbreak, so I never actually thought I’d use it. But my father had been adamant and made me practice every weekend for a whole summer, and then again the summer after that. Either he wanted me to join Special Forces, or he knew the world was doomed. I became as familiar with a compass as the jocks in my school had been with throwing a baseball. Not that it got me any attention from girls, unfortunately.
I became so good with it that on a camping trip near the mountains one summer, my father decided to give me the ultimate test.
“When I did this in the army,” he said, passing me a nav kit, “we called it ‘the Star.’”
The wonder in his voice made it seem like a mythical test originally given to a Greek hero. I went along without complaint, eager to please, not even asking for details.
He took off alone at dawn the following morning and set up a tent somewhere in the forest. When he returned hours later, he marked the tent’s location on my map and made me walk to it alone, through miles of wooded terrain, counting every step to gauge the distance according to my measurements on paper.
I had failed that time, and I failed this time, too. I got lost.
After shooting a couple more azimuths to get myself on track, I made it through the forest and onto a road I recognized. What should have taken two hours ended up taking four. Stinging pain on the pads of my feet told me I’d have blisters pretty soon, despite my three layers of socks. I cursed myself for not having broken in my boots sooner. Rookie mistake.
Plenty of time, I kept telling myself. I have plenty of time.
Unless the pharmacy is empty.
A quick dinner of canned peaches and a PowerBar silenced my churning stomach. I followed a familiar road for the next hour, using my binoculars to see ahead. It was a desperate shortcut, but I needed to make up for lost time. I would have been amazed if raiders had set up a trap in such a quiet area. Nothing I had seen so far indicated those evil bastards even came up this way.
I arrived into town five and a half hours into my journey, at around six thirty. Thankfully, it was early spring, which meant the daylight would keep for another hour. Darkness in a land full of mindless, deliriously hungry cannibals was a scary thing. Scarier still was the knowledge that I would have to make camp at some point. There was no way I would try and brave the darkness.
Plenty of time. I’ve got plenty of time.
“Finally,” I said, looking into my binoculars at a sight I hadn’t laid eyes on in three years.
The commercial part of Peltham Park, located along Route 1, had once been a bustling strip of outlet malls, restaurants, and banks. Not the sort of gaudy and colorful McDonald’s-and-KFC-infested mess you might find closer to Boston, but a neat arrangement of New England-style buildings that held mid-sized supermarkets, lobster joints, and the occasional Home Depot. Even the sprawling outlet malls had tasteful facades that complemented the flavor of the town.
Now, however, it was a cluster of dilapidated shells riddled with broken windows and crude graffiti, the parking lots empty except for the trash. The graffiti is what bothered me most. With the rest of mankind facing a grim and bloody fate, the thought of a bunch of assholes spray-painting the walls of my town was enough to make my trigger finger restless.
The closer I got, the more unsettled I became. I had expected this kind of desolation—broken windows and all—but not the spray-painted messages. Some of them said things like “WE DESERVED IT” and “GOD FUCKED US FINALLY.” Worthless, defeatist crap.
I also didn’t expect the naked body, now little more than a skeleton, hanging from a streetlamp near the intersection, or the charred remains of a dentist’s office someone had obviously torched. It made the prospect of finding medication at the town pharmacy feel like the naïve fantasy of a kid who still believes in treasure maps.
But at least I wasn’t sitting home doing nothing, just watching my father die like I did with Mom.
I came to the parking lot of an outlet mall shaped like an L. There had been six stores here once. Now there were only six ruined facades guarding empty spaces. If I was going to set up camp somewhere for the night, probably one of those buildings would be best. But with a steely gray light still in the sky, and the pharmacy so close, I pressed forward, keeping south in the hope of making up for lost time.
Some of the buildings I passed triggered memories so pleasant I knew savoring them would only hurt afterward. One of them was Tommy’s Bike Shack. In my early teens, I had been obsessed with bicycles. I would go to Tommy’s every weekend to top off the air in my tires and listen to the repair guys talk about gear and upcoming biking trips. My best friends at the time, Tom Brand and Mike Culliver, would ride there on the weekends to meet me, and together the three of us would take off to parts as yet unexplored, where we could lay down our special brand of harmless mischief (mostly petty vandalism and drinking booze stolen from our parents’ liquor cabinets).
I snuck around the building. A quick glance through a back window told me there wasn’t much inside. I saw what looked like bicycle chains, two or three, spilled across the floor, and other supplies I didn’t need.
Twenty minutes later, I passed the back deck of a small restaurant—The Brass Lantern—where I had bussed tables my freshman year of high school. The former restaurant was falling apart, but I stopped for a moment to visualize its quaint appearance back when I had been a fifteen-year-old kid making five bucks an hour, plus ten percent of the tips earned by the waitresses. One of them, a stooped old lady named Hilda, had once tried to explain the rules of Bridge to me on an unusually slow Saturday night. Half-listening, I had devoted most of my attention to one of the other waitresses—Joanna Rushforth—and what she must have looked like without clothes.
I still wonder, though I’m sure Joanna is dead.
A group of them had gathered in the parking lot of a Citizens’ Bank.
By then, I had seen enough infected—usually of the lone-wolf variety—from the roof of my house that I was able to ignore the group for a moment and study the area around them. I noticed several things, like how the drive-up ATM machine had been utterly destroyed, and how the bank’s front door no longer existed. So far, it seemed all the buildings along Route 1 had either been looted, destroyed by infected, or both. This didn’t bode well for my mission.
The group was mostly made up of men, but there were a few women with ragged hair that hung past their shoulders in filthy strips. I counted twelve altogether. They shuffled around with their heads lolling to one side. Now and then, one would trip and fall, or bump into another, inciting a groan of protest. A couple of the more gray-skinned ones, clearly in the late stages of infection, had gone blind and swung their arms around as if swatting at imaginary wasps.
They looked harmless, but I knew the truth. Groups were dangerous and to be avoided at all times. If the wind turned, and they caught a whiff of my scent, I’d end up in a really unfortunate situation.
I was about to get going when the dull roar of an engine rose nearby. I tightened my grip on the Glock and listened. The infected also heard the noise—no surprise there, considering how loud the damned thing was—and tilted their heads like dogs. A bunch snarled and bared their teeth. A few of the stronger ones fell into attack postures, ready to pounce on any healthy human that entered their field of vision.
The vehicle appeared, and I was stunned by what I saw. It was a muddy Jeep Wrangler with four men inside. It tore into the parking lot as if on a mission to attract the most infected possible.
The driver was a skinny guy with the wild appearance of a mountain man. Next to him, another guy stood in the passenger seat. He le
aned against the open frame, wearing a red bandanna that was now almost pink with age. The Jeep came to a sudden stop. Bandanna aimed an automatic rifle at the infected but didn’t shoot as they shuffled toward the vehicle. He was waiting.
There were two other men in the Jeep. In the back seat, a thickset guy with oiled, wavy black hair and a bushy black beard held a pistol to the temple of a more muscular man seated next to him. The muscular guy had a shaved head and looked like an ex-convict. He also looked terrified.
I watched with growing alarm as the man with the black beard stood up suddenly, lifted the ex-con-looking guy, and tossed him out of the Jeep.
He screamed as the infected tore into him. The two men in the front of the Jeep smiled at the carnage, the driver even chewing gum as he watched. The one in the back seat just stared in admiration at his own work.
I recognized him—the guy with the bushy black beard who had performed the execution.
Still standing, he rested his bearish, tattooed forearms on the Jeep’s frame. He had a neck tattoo that revealed itself as he craned his neck to say something to the driver. With a nod, the driver blew out his gum and sent it into the frenzied pack. He cut the wheel, floored the gas pedal, and left behind a cloud of dust as he tore out of the parking lot.
It was the neck tattoo that triggered my memory of him. An unusual design, it was a rendering of black roses attached to a thorny stem—except the stem was made of barbed wire. Realistic shading on the skin made the wire appear to dig into it. The design was wicked; tall enough to run along the underside of his chin, it bloomed black roses along its entire length, at least a dozen of them.
And here’s your change, good sir, the man had said to me—not quite a British accent, but more the voice of a man with more personality than he can contain.
He had been a cashier at the Exxon station just down the street. Before the Outbreak, I used to pass the store on my drive home from soccer practice and sometimes swing in to buy an energy drink if I had to pull an all-nighter for school.
He had been a talkative guy back then. More than once, he had informed me that too many Red Bulls could screw up my kidneys. We got on a first-name basis, though I forget his name now after so many years. I used to wonder about his black-rose-and-barbed-wire tattoo, and whether or not he was one of those ex-cons working a shitty hourly job as a way to reintegrate with society. He just had one of those looks that said “prison.”
After what I had just seen in the Citizens’ Bank parking lot, I was probably right about the prison thing. I put away the binoculars and readied myself for the next leg of my journey. Hopefully I would never cross paths with the guy again.
Or his neck tattoo might end up being the last thing I’d ever see.
CHAPTER 4
What follows is a true account of my three days and two nights in Peltham Park.
For those interested in how I survived after a half dozen others had to die, go ahead and continue reading. Maybe you’re a historian or social scientist fascinated with what we now call the “Hunger Virus” era. Or you’ve grown up sheltered and crave a sense of adventure you can only get from books.
There’s also the possibility that no one will read my story, and putting down these words is just my way of trying to cleanse my mind of the nightmares that wake me up each night—the ones where I’m covered in sweat, raking in each breath, and thinking there’s blood all over my hands.
Blood of my father that I could have sworn I washed off years ago.
In my memory of that time, I’m just a scared twenty-year-old kid whose entire life is about to change in ways he never imagined—and it begins with a mistake I make the very first night.
* * *
It’s time to rest, even though I could go further.
Night has fallen and the buildings of Peltham Park are black against a purple, glittering sky. There isn’t a single light anywhere except the millions of stars above. Empty shells of old cars squat in the dark, dimly reflecting the cosmic glare, each one a sad reminder of movement, destinations, progress. In the distance, a wolf emits a lonesome howl that makes me think of the wilderness that was here when the first settlers arrived.
With the entire town abandoned, it’s easy to waste thought energy on this kind of nonsense.
I’ve reached my destination, the SuperMart on Route 1 where my mother had once picked up her medication. Crouched behind the building, which is part of a connected row of stores, I’m thinking this is the end of the line for now. I can’t go any farther, not without daylight. Dawn is maybe eight hours away.
Plenty of time, I tell myself.
The time, though, my inner voice sounds like it’s mocking me.
A nearby Dumpster tipped onto its side should serve pretty well as a shelter for the night. It lies with its opening facing a concrete divider. I manage to quietly move it a few inches so the lid can rest on the barrier, forming a roof of sorts. I rotate the Dumpster with one corner touching the concrete wall, leaving only one narrow opening to serve as an entrance; then I crawl in and spread my sleeping mat so my head will lie opposite the opening. That way, if one of them reaches inside, it’ll grab my boot before any other part of me. It smells god-awful in here, though I can tell the years have removed the worst of it.
I keep the pistol close to me, along with the tube attached to my Camelbak, in case I wake up and need to have a drink. I also keep an empty plastic bottle nearby in case I have to urinate in the middle of the night.
I close my eyes and listen to the sound of the wind as it carries the moans of infected moving along Route 1.
I dream about my mother.
Several times during the night I wake up in that foul-smelling darkness thinking I’m back in the house with her and Dad. I have trouble remembering the dreams that wake me, but I know they’re the same ones that have haunted me since she died. Dark dreams in which my mother sits across from me in various unlit rooms of our house, and though neither of us moves or speaks, I can tell she is slowly losing her mind. I know by the way she stares at me through black eyes like holes in her skull.
For almost two years after the Outbreak, Mom and Dad were the only two people in my life—not just the only two I loved, but the only people I had any contact with whatsoever. Despite this closeness, my father and I didn’t know about Mom’s addiction until it was too late.
Painkillers. They had been her drug of choice, her way of finding peace. I remember seeing her sprawled on the couch most days, wearing her pajamas and staring at nothing. She kept the source of her daily stupors hidden from us. We thought she was depressed, but then again, my father and I were spending twelve hours a day training and fortifying the house. We were shocked when we found out the truth.
On rare good days, when she was lucid and in a bouncy mood, Mom would don her apron and cook for us. We ate using the fine silver, the white, precious china, and the crystal glasses. If something broke, we laughed about it. When we felt like splurging, we would dip into our stock of batteries and run the portable stereo. My dad and I would swing my mother around the living room to the music of Ray Charles and other Fifties greats. Or we would listen to Frank Sinatra and reminisce. Eric Clapton was too much for Mom and always made her cry.
The day she began to turn was one of the worst of my entire life. It was my father’s paranoia that saved his life and mine.
“Where were you?” he asked my mother.
Mom had just come in through the emergency hatch we had built in the back of the house, the one that couldn’t be opened from the outside. She’d had to knock to be allowed back in. We hadn’t even seen her leave.
“I went next door,” she said, slurring her speech. “It’s no big deal, hon.”
My father checked her pockets and found the painkillers. The prescription had been made out to one of our neighbors.
“They were dead,” my mother said. “In bed. Dead in bed. He shot her and then himself. Shot her and then himself. Dead in bed.”
She had w
alked there and back wearing no shoes, which supported my theory that she had already begun to lose her mind even before catching the virus. There was dried blood on her feet.
“Honey,” my father said. “Sweetheart. What did you step on? Are you cut? Tell me where the blood came from, Jessica.”
My mother smiled and said in a girlish voice, “Stepped on a bedbug. Dead in bed.”
I had never seen my father cry until that moment. Tears streamed down his face as he ordered me to my room.
We locked her in my parents’ bedroom, where we could only see her by looking through the keyhole. The room was always dark, even in the day. More often than not, she was little more than a silhouette in the lines of sunlight slicing through the boarded windows.
Sometimes Mom just sat there and pulled out her hair. Other times, she would snarl and tear at the mattress, or jostle the backboard like she was trying to pull it out.
I don’t know why I watched. One morning, I found her only inches away from the keyhole, one eye narrowed as she tried to see me through it. Her face was covered in red slashes, most of her hair already missing.
“Kip,” she said in a harsh whisper. “Is that you? Did you put the trash out?”
My father used his Desert Eagle. He waited until she was in a state of fitful sleep. By that point, she rarely slept soundly, if at all. He opened the door, walked in, and closed it shut behind him. I sat at the piano, running my fingers over the keys without pressing them, listening and waiting for it to be over.
He took an enormous risk in leaving the house to bury her. I spent that whole day waiting for him, convinced he wasn’t coming back. When he finally did, we made dinner, then spent the evening talking about the things we loved most about her. We cried and talked for hours, then agreed not to speak of her again. She was in the past, like the rest of the world we had once known. Survivors didn’t live in the past.
And just like that, we moved on.
Outbreak: A Survival Thriller Page 2