They topped off the tank at a nearby convenience store. It was eerily deserted, but the pumps were still on, so they helped themselves. Matt hung up the nozzle and the two of them looked at one another. A lifetime of conditioning made the transaction feel incomplete without at least an attempt at payment.
“Should we check to see if there’s anyone inside?” Erica asked.
Matt hesitated. “If there is, you realize the chances are good that…” He swallowed, evidently unwilling to complete the sentence.
“Yeah. But we should at least look.”
He reached under his jacket and pulled out his pistol. Pulling the slide back slightly, he grunted in satisfaction before slipping it back into his shoulder holster. “All right. Let’s check.”
They entered the double glass doors and Matt immediately called out. “Anybody here?” After a few seconds of silence he tried again. “We just got some gas and need to pay you.” A few more seconds of silence and he turned to Erica.
She shrugged. “I guess nobody’s home.”
He nodded, then walked to the counter and looked behind it. A slight grunt, and he walked to the other side. Erica's breath caught as she watched, imagining a body on the floor back there. “What is it? What did you find?”
He looked at her, puzzled. “Nothing. Why?”
She closed her eyes in relief. “I just thought… never mind. What are you after back there?”
“I was checking to see if they had a pistol or something behind the counter. But no such luck.” He grabbed a handful of plastic bags and handed several of them to her. “Let’s gather up as much canned food as we can. We might need it later.”
“We can’t do that!”
“Why not?”
“It’s stealing!”
He raised an eyebrow. “This, from the woman who drove a brand new SUV off of a dealership last night?”
“That was different. Those…” What had they called them on the news? “…chucklers were chasing us. It was the only way to save our lives.”
Matt walked to the canned food shelf and held up a can of overpriced Dinty Moore. “Well this just might save our lives, too.” He grabbed several more cans and swept them into his bag. When he noticed she wasn’t doing the same, he stopped. “Look, Erica, you told me yourself that this craziness looks like it’s everywhere. And we saw first-hand what’s going on at least in this area. Right?”
She nodded reluctantly.
“So what are the chances that anyone is going to show up for work here and object to us taking this? And more importantly, what are the chances that we’ll make it to Alabama without any food?”
As wrong as it seemed on an emotional level, she couldn’t argue his logic. Reluctantly, she nodded and began loading her bags with anything she thought might come in handy. Most of it was food, but she also found shelves that contained lighters, first aid items, bandanas, and all sorts of other miscellany. The two of them gathered so much that it took them several trips to load it all in the SUV, and the back seat was piled high with white plastic shopping bags when they were finished.
Finally, well stocked for the trip, gas gauge firmly planted above the full line, and three extra gas cans full of gas strapped to the roof rack, they headed away from the ranch where Erica had grown up and toward Katy, the scene of last night’s insanity. They stuck to the main highway as they approached, and things went fine at first. But as they approached town, they began to notice smoke. They passed the first accident just before the Pin Oak Road overpass approaching the Interstate. A man jumped out from behind the wreck waving a baseball bat and slammed it on the Xterra’s hood. Erica screamed and pointed the pistol at him through the windshield. “Don’t shoot!” Matt yelled. He punched the gas, and they swept past the man before he could swing the bat again. Erica looked back and saw that he’d been joined by three others who were chasing after the SUV, laughing the whole time. The chucklers didn’t have a chance as Matt accelerated across the overpass.
“Why didn’t you want me to shoot him?”
“Because you were aiming through the windshield. We’re sorta going to need that.”
“Oh, yeah.” Erica realized she still had a lot to learn about shooting, and it looked like she was going to have to learn fast.
Once they hit the apex of the bridge, the two of them had a better vantage point. Erica’s jaw dropped as they saw the source of all the smoke. Off to the left was the mall where their nightmare had begun last night. This morning, it was a smoldering ruin. There were four fire engines sitting in the parking lot, but they were abandoned. People ran about in the streets, some laughing, some screaming, all fighting.
“Holy Christ on a crutch,” Matt muttered.
Erica simply nodded, figuring there wasn’t much more to say. Matt turned away from the mayhem and back to the road. There were hardly any cars to be seen. No. That wasn’t true. There were hardly any moving cars on the road. There were plenty of wrecked or stalled vehicles. They were numerous enough that Matt had to slow down so much that what would have ordinarily been a fifteen-minute drive turned into an hour of white-knuckle driving, winding through the obstacle course that was now I-10 near the mall.
“Should we get off the freeway?” Erica suggested.
Matt looked over the guardrail onto the frontage road. “Doesn’t look any better there.”
He was right. Cars and trucks dotted the feeder just as badly as on the freeway. Matt swerved around another abandoned car. Like so many of the others they had passed, it was by itself. There was no other vehicle, no real accident or collision. It had scraped into the side barrier and simply been abandoned.
They finally got to a fairly clear section of the freeway, and were actually beginning to make a little time when a truck on the outbound side caught Erica’s attention and she tugged on Matt’s sleeve. He followed her gaze and slowed down. The old pickup was the only other moving vehicle in sight at the moment. It was heading in the opposite direction, and slowed down as they approached. As it neared, Erica saw an old man in a cowboy hat behind the wheel watching them suspiciously. Finally, he must have seen what he was looking for. He stopped just before passing and stepped out of the truck on the abandoned freeway. He held a rifle in his right hand, but pointed it at the ground in a non-threatening manner. Matt stopped the Xterra and turned to Erica. “What do you think?”
“Looks like he wants to talk. And he’s not laughing.”
“And he’s coming from Houston. Maybe he can tell us what’s going on there.”
They got out, pistols pointed down, and walked to meet the old man at the center barrier. Matt spoke first. “You comin’ out from Houston?”
“Yeah. Everything’s gone crazy. People killin’ each other, settin’ fires. Half’a downtown’s burnin’, folks are…” He swallowed. “They’re laughin’ while they kill each other.” The old man shook his head. “I seen you headed that direction an’ I figured you might oughta know what you’re headin’ into. It ain’t no ordinary drive into town.”
Matt nodded. “Yeah, we saw a little bit of it here in Katy last night, too. Erica here,” he jabbed his thumb in her direction, “said she saw a news report last night that it was all over the country.”
The old man nodded. “Yeah, I seen that too.” He shifted the rifle to his left hand and stuck out his right. “Name’s Eddie.”
Matt shook first. “Matt.”
The old man’s hand was firm and calloused when he offered it to Erica. It reminded her of Uncle J’s hands. “I’m Erica. Where you headed?”
“Got a daughter and son-in-law just this side of San Antone. Got through to my daughter this mornin’ and she sounds okay for now. More than a little upset, of course, what with all this going on. Turns out her husband never came home from work last night, either. Figure I need to get out that way and make sure she stays all right. How about you folks?”
“I have a friend in Montgomery I’m trying to get to,” Erica said.
The old man
shook his head. “All the way to ‘Bama?” He whistled. “The way the roads are right now, that’s gonna be a hell of a trip.” He looked up the freeway in the direction they’d come from. “Friends of yours?”
Matt and Erica turned. A crowd of about half a dozen hooting and laughing chucklers banged on abandoned vehicles with pipes, bats, and various other clubs as they ran up the freeway.
“Definitely not,” Matt said. “You any good with that thing?” He indicated the rifle in Eddie’s hands.
The old man shook his head sheepishly. “Ain’t got no bullets. Just thought it might cause folks to hesitate before they try to pull anything.”
Matt ran to the back of the Xterra. “Wouldn’t be a 30.06 by any chance, would it?”
“Yeah.” Eddie looked nervously back up the freeway. “And if you got ammo back there, I do appreciate it, but if not, we need to get movin’ pretty quick here.
Matt pulled out one of the rifles and a box of ammo. Erica ran to the passenger door of the Xterra and pulled out Uncle Jimmy’s shotgun. When she got back, the chucklers were about a football field’s distance away. Matt took aim, but appeared to be waiting for a sure target, while Eddie hurriedly thumbed bullets into his rifle. Eddie brought his rifle up and sighted. “You ready?” he asked.
“Yeah. Guess that’s about close enough.” Matt fired a second before Eddie did, and two of the hooting attackers dropped. Two more salvos and the others were down.
The three of them were silent for a moment. Then the eerie sound of approaching laughter arose. They spun around, looking for the source, but couldn’t see any others. It sounded like it came from the other side of the Xterra so they walked around it. Matt and Eddie flanked Erica as they crept around the SUV. The laughter was coming from past the truck, past the concrete barrier at the edge of the freeway. Erica gasped as she peeked over the barrier. “Matt!”
Eddie whistled again. “Ho-lee shit!”
The frontage street below was crawling with chucklers. They were pouring out of buildings across the street and running toward the freeway from side streets. Luckily for them, Matt, Erica, and Eddie had stopped on a raised section of the freeway, separated from the frontage by a high retaining wall. The chucklers couldn’t scale it, but the sight of them trying was terrifying nevertheless. The sound of hundreds of people laughing and giggling was nails on the chalkboard of Erica’s mind. Then it got worse.
“Guys?” Matt pointed, and one of the chucklers was scrambling up the back of another. He reached up and got within inches of the lip of the concrete barrier at the side of the freeway before the chuckler below him fell, toppling both of them to be crushed beneath the feet of the others. But another had seen, and he scrambled up the back of another chuckler. Within seconds, others were trying, and some were getting their hands on the lip of the freeway embankment and beginning to pull themselves up.
They drew back, walking quickly back to their vehicles. “Time to go.” Matt handed Eddie the rest of the ammo for the rifle. “Hang on to this in case you run into any other problems.”
“Sure you can spare it?”
“I got a few more boxes in back.”
Eddie tipped his hat. “Well, I ain’t gonna turn it down then. Thanks.”
Matt nodded. “Not a problem. Good luck.”
“Back atcha.” Eddie sprinted for his pickup and pulled away.
Matt and Erica climbed back in their SUV and took off just as the first of the swarm scrambled onto the freeway. They easily outdistanced them, and Erica looked back to make sure Eddie got away. She saw his pickup just as it crested the overpass and disappeared from view. She turned back to face front. “Think he’ll make it?”
Matt shrugged. “He’s got a lot shorter trip than we do.”
She thought about that. “Think we’ll make it?”
He looked away, concentrating on the obstacle course before him. “Like the man said, it’s gonna be one hell of a trip.”
They crested another overpass, and Erica could see the eastern horizon blanketed by a thick cloud of black smoke. She knew the Houston skyline was hidden somewhere within that smoke. Yeah, a hell of a trip, indeed.
Chapter 67
Charles Griffe
Deep In The Belly
There wasn’t room for everyone in the elevator, and most of their number weren’t exactly in the best shape of their lives, so they had decided that most of their group would remain below in the relative safety of the mess section of Deck Two. Charlie, Tabby, Chris, and Shane would make the run to the bridge.
Charlie followed Chris to the elevator and watched as the man inserted a card key into a slot on the elevator panel. He noted that it wasn’t the same key he had been using to get them into the various cabins.
“Let me ask you something, Chris. Why haven’t we seen any help yet? I mean, this shit’s been going on for almost a week already. Shouldn’t the Navy or the Coast Guard or someone have already come to help us?”
“Yes, they should.”
“Well then why the hell haven’t—?”
“I don’t know. That’s been bothering me, too. There are so many damned safeguards built into this ship that you can’t fart without someone at the home office knowing about it. They usually know something’s wrong before we do.”
“Then, like I said, why—?”
“I don’t know why! Maybe they have. Maybe they already put a helicopter down on the helipad, but we were too busy hiding in the lower decks. Or maybe there’s one up there right now and they’re taking on passengers to go home. Hell, for all I know, there’s a whole damned fleet of helicopters shuttling people on and off the ship right now.
“You were just telling me about how long it takes to go from one deck to another. But despite all your complaining, I don’t think you really understand how big this ship actually is.
“The Bahama Queen is an eighteen-story luxury hotel nearly two hundred fifty feet tall, with a park and a boardwalk in the middle! Only instead of building it in Vegas or Atlantic City like any sensible person would do, we decided to strap engines on the damned thing and put it in the middle of the freaking ocean! And we’re so deep in the belly right now that anything could be happening on the upper decks and we have no way of knowing it.”
Charlie realized the man was right. “All right, sorry. So now what?”
Chris shrugged as the elevator door chimed and slid open. “Now we get to the bridge… and hope it’s in better shape than the engine control room.”
Chapter 68
Erica Chapman
The Road We Want
The mid-day sun filtered through a thickening smoke as they approached Houston proper. While they were technically already within the city limits, Houston was a wide-ranging metroplex that sprawled for miles in all directions. The downtown skyline wasn’t even a blip on the horizon yet, and already visibility was terrible. Between the wrecked and stalled cars on the freeway, the acrid smoke, and the occasional roving pack of chucklers that would see the SUV and pursue, it was turning into the most stressful drive of Erica’s life. So far, none of their pursuers had even come close to catching them, and once they gained enough distance, the chucklers seemed to lose interest and wander off. It was as if they couldn’t concentrate on anything beyond what was immediately in front of them. But Erica feared the freeway obstacle course might eventually slow them down to the point that we wouldn’t be able to keep ahead of them.
As she thought that through, she wondered aloud, “Why don’t they drive?”
“What?”
“The crazies, chucklers… whatever you want to call them. Why aren’t they driving anymore? I mean, they talk. They seem to be able to reason well enough that they can make jokes.” She wave at the abandoned cars. “All those things chasing us, and yet not a single one of them is still driving. Not one of them thinks to climb into one of the abandoned cars and turn a key?”
Matt appeared to stop and think about it, then shrugged. “Who knows? I’m just glad they
haven’t.”
“But there’s gotta be a reason. And maybe it’s important.”
“Maybe.” He swerved around a stalled pickup and eased between the tangled wreckage of a three car pileup on the right, and another apparently abandoned minivan on the left. Erica winced as they scraped along the side of the van, snapping off its side view mirror as they passed.
Erica kept her eyes open for movement as she spoke. “They were driving last night. Why not now?”
“Not for long, though.”
“What?”
“They didn’t drive for long. Every one of them that we saw driving ended up wrecking, remember? It was like they didn’t know what they were doing anymore.”
Erica recalled the insane expression on the face of the chuckler that raced past them just before he slammed into the SUV behind the mall. “Or they were more interested in smashing something.”
They gained speed as Matt cleared the tangled wreckage on the road and approached another clear area. “Maybe,” he conceded.
“But if you want to start worrying about why things are happening the way they are, maybe you should ask yourself why you and I aren’t crazy. Eddie too, for that matter.”
He had a point. Last night, she had feared it was a terrorist gas attack. The news had made it obvious that wasn’t likely. Something big had happened, and the news coverage made it look like it had happened everywhere.
For the next twenty minutes or so, the trip was like that. They wound their way slowly along the Interstate 10 obstacle course, making their way slowly toward downtown Houston. As the familiar skyline loomed before them, Erica started to get more nervous. She found herself looking up and to the right, watching the smoke that poured from various skyscrapers. “They seem to like fire.”
Chucklers (Book 1): Laughter is Contagious Page 31