Besides, I didn’t think we could actually count on any of the inhabitants protecting us. If they were still alive, chances were good that they were intent on one thing, and one thing only: Protecting themselves.
We wouldn’t be able to count on them. One threat from Sally and they’d probably hand us over, and then thank her for taking us off their hands.
So ahead we had to go. The mall, and then another town.
And Somersville itself? It was a large town about fifty miles or so from here. Not close enough to walk to, but close enough to drive to pretty easily. It was probably where the CEO had worked, and it had always been more… thriving than Ashland.
If we were going to find anyone within this area, I thought it would be there. And that was about as far as my planning went.
We ran into the darkness, both of us silent, both of us no doubt thinking the same thing: that our backs were completely exposed to the thugs who might be chasing us, and that we needed to get to a place where we could find some safety. Some protection.
We had a goal, now. I just hoped we could achieve it without getting killed.
Chapter 16
It took us about ten minutes to get far enough away from the house we’d been staying in to think that we were safe on the road again. Given the fact that it was the middle of the night, and Sally had theoretically been asleep during our escape, and further, that Bruce had been unconscious, we were guessing that nothing would happen there until Jameson got around to finding Bruce. If Jameson even got around to that. If he even noticed that Bruce was missing.
I had my doubts about how much the kid actually used his brain.
“You know their patrol routes,” I said, lengthening my stride to keep up with Will. “How long will it take for Jameson’s assignment to take him to the gate?”
“I don’t know the routes,” Will corrected me. “I mean I sort of do, but I’m also just guessing. I knew the routes they might have taken yesterday. But I wasn’t… let’s just say, I wasn’t trusted with much information once Jameson caught us in the kitchen together. I was pulled off outside duty and everyone was keeping a pretty close eye on me.”
“But you made it sound like you knew for a fact where they’d be and how long they’d be there,” I noted, my trust in him dropping half a notch.
Because we’d just been through a life-threatening adventure based on his knowledge of those routes.
If he didn’t have said knowledge, then he really should have let me know. I would have done more to go in there with a Plan B. I wouldn’t have been so surprised when Bruce showed up unexpectedly.
He shrugged uncomfortably.
“I didn’t know them, exactly. But there’s only so much you can do when you’re walking the perimeter. I figured I could give it a pretty good guess. But I guess they must have changed some things. Sally never trusted me as much as the others.”
“And that must have gotten a lot worse once she caught you in my room,” I guessed.
He nodded and chuckled.
“She knew we were doing something we shouldn’t be, and the choices were either fooling around or making a plan to get out of the house. I managed to convince her that it was the former rather than the latter, and that was the only thing that saved my life—and yours. Sorry if your, uh, reputation got a little tarnished.”
I pressed my lips together—but not because I was angry. Sally’s opinion of my reputation was not high on my list of priorities right now.
Living was.
And if he’d bought us some extra time with his story, then that was fine with me.
“Somehow I’m guessing that you made the right decision, there,” I answered.
Then, I brought the conversation back around to what we needed to be talking about.
“So essentially, you’re telling me that you don’t know when or if Jameson might happen upon Bruce or when he might wake Sally up and tell her something’s gone wrong. You don’t know whether Sally will wake up and walk the perimeter herself—or check my room to make sure I’m still in there. And that means we have no idea when they might be coming after us.”
“Yeah. You're right,” he agreed.
I noticed that he didn’t argue with me about the fact that they would. We might not have anything they actually needed, but we’d slipped right out of their clutches, and Sally didn’t strike me as the sort of person who would let that go easily.
Hell, I was betting Bruce would wake up with an awful headache… and a driving, insane need to find us and repay us for what we’d done to him.
I still didn’t know what they’d wanted me for. But I was guessing it hadn’t changed. And if it had been enough to hold me before, it might be enough to come after me for now that I’d escaped.
Still, I thought we had at least half an hour’s jump on them. And it wasn’t like they had a vehicle or anything like that. They’d be on foot, too—which meant we had a fair shot at outrunning them.
We turned the corner to get onto the main street and walked for a few minutes in silence. Then we hit a patch of town again, and things got… creepy.
This area of town wasn’t as busy as the area I’d come into when I'd first arrived after escaping the bunker, but there’d been enough people out and about when the attack had happened that the street was still littered with bodies. It was dark enough that I didn’t have to see their faces, thank God, but I could still see their shapes outlined in the moonlight, dozens of them in the street and dozens more on the sidewalk—both adults and children—each of them lying in a pose that indicated how they had died.
Their muscles seizing up, their bodies spasming uncontrollably as their hearts and lungs worked (and failed) to try to keep them alive.
If I could have seen their faces, I knew what I would have beheld there, too: the grimaces of people who had died in extreme pain—and absolute horror and confusion. No one had been expecting something like this, and so they hadn’t been prepared.
Not even a little bit.
Not that you could really prepare for something like that. No matter how much you knew something was coming, you were never really ready for the reality of it. Especially when that reality included a death so horrific.
“How did you even hook up with Sally and the rest, anyhow?” I asked as I stepped over a body, trying to keep my mind on anything other than the carnage around us and my role in it.
“Short version?” he asked, sounding just as choked up as I felt. “I grew up in foster homes, where I wasn’t treated nicely. When my mom finally got me back, it took me about three days to realize that she was just as bad as the fosters. Worse, actually, because she was my actual mother, and she’d not only given me up, but then fought to get me back—only to disappear for days on end on benders. I ran away from her when I was fourteen, and never looked back. The only thing I took with me was what my last foster dad had taught me: how to pick locks. He’d been doing it so he could steal booze from the local liquor store. I left, knowing that I was going to use it for something a whole lot better.”
“Like becoming a thief?"
I’d grown up partially in foster homes, too, and my childhood hadn’t been a picnic, either. I could understand where he was coming from.
Right down to having ended up in a life of crime after I left them.
He snorted. “Well, yeah. But I knew right from the start that I was going to do it the right way.”
I made a face at that, though I knew he couldn’t see me, and asked the obvious question.
“There’s a right way to be a thief?”
Yes, I see the irony. You don’t have to tell me.
“Of course. I only picked locks or opened safes for missions aiming to steal from multi-billion-dollar conglomerates or CEOS who didn’t treat their people—or the environment—right. Companies who were doing bad things. People who deserved a little bit of payback. People who had all that money and hadn’t really earned it, or didn’t deserve it. And in the meantime, I was making
a pretty cushy paycheck doing it.”
Well, that was one way to justify it, I thought, nodding. Then again, I wasn’t sure I was one to talk. After all, hadn’t I been following the same sort of moral code with my don’t-hurt-people-physically rules?
Okay, maybe mine hadn’t been as honorable as his. But I got where he was coming from.
“And that led to Sally and company hiring you to take on that CEO's safe,” I guessed. “But… was he actually a bad guy?”
“His company was, and that was all they told me about,” he answered, turning left down the next street and counting on me to follow him.
His confidence about where we were going made me think that he must have been from this town—or at least lived here at some point. He was way too familiar with the streets, and he hadn’t been out of the CEO's safe room for long enough to have spent much time exploring.
And that thought was strange, in and of itself. Because if he was from here, it would have meant that we'd lived in the same general area in the Before. Hell, it probably meant we knew some of the same people. Yeah, he’d been a physical thief and I’d specialized in online stuff, but crooks were crooks.
They tended to run in the same crowds.
“So, his company was bad and they sold you on thinking that it meant he was bad, too,” I said. “And then when you saw what they did to him…”
“I saw the stuff in his house, the pictures of his family, and I started thinking he wasn’t as bad as they claimed,” he said quietly. “When he showed up, I took one look at him and realized that he couldn’t be the bad guy. He was so wholesome, so nerdy. So confused about what was going on—and so freaked out about what he must have known was coming.
"I immediately started second-guessing them. Then they shot him and I realized that they were the bad guys. But I was already locked in the safe room with them, and it wasn’t like I could get away from them there. I couldn’t exactly break the seal on the door and rush out into the world. I had no idea what had happened out there, or what they’d do if I tried to get out, so I kept my mouth shut and stayed put. I’ve been doing whatever it took to keep my mouth shut since then. Doing whatever it took to get myself into a position to get away from them. And then you showed up and gave me exactly the ally I needed.”
“Glad I could help,” I said wryly. “You know, I never learned to pick locks. I always meant to, but it turned out my talent was more for electronic stuff. The internet. The Dark Web. Firewalls.”
“Aah, a hacker,” he noted. “Well, lockpicking should come naturally to you, then. You locate the way in, figure out how to take advantage of it, and then do it. Just like hacking.”
“Just like hacking,” I agreed, smiling at the oversimplification. “And yet I’ve never been able to master it.”
“I’ll teach you,” he said, and I could hear him smiling back at me in the darkness. “Just as soon as we get to the mall.”
“As soon as we get to the mall,” I said, parroting him again.
Only this time, I wasn’t doing it as a joke. Because I had suddenly remembered that there were going to be people after us soon—and that those people had weapons, while we didn’t.
We needed to find a way to stay ahead of them, or I was never going to be able to take advantage of that promise about lockpicking lessons.
Chapter 17
The sun was starting to peek over the horizon by the time we made it down the freeway—littered with cars and bodies, just as the town had been—and into the mall’s parking lot. And here, we found the exact same scene. The parking lot was completely packed, like the mall was currently open for business or something.
Only, the people who owned those cars were never going to go on a shopping spree again. Here, in the more open setting of a parking lot, where there were no buildings to shield them, the bodies had been… well, ‘cooking’ was the only verb I could think of… for a week now, and man, were they ripe. The stench of death was like a fog over the place, and I gagged at not only the scent but also the things I was being forced to look at.
Will and I glanced at each other, cringing, and then rushed across the parking lot, our shirts up over our mouths and noses, in an unspoken agreement about getting through it—and through this current chore—as quickly as possible. We needed to get into the mall, get supplies, and get out again as quickly as possible.
Because the mall was, as I’d observed, the easiest and most obvious place for us to have come. Which made it the easiest and most obvious place for Sally and her goons to search.
We both wanted to be long gone before they showed up. And we wanted to have enough food and water that we didn’t have to make any other stop before we got to a place where we thought we could find safety.
I also didn’t want to spend more time here than we had to. The dead bodies were creeping me out and the smell was making me feel as if I was going to throw up. Soon. The carnage was also a constant reminder that what I’d thought I had known about life was completely moot, and that the world as we’d known it…
Well, I didn’t think it was an exaggeration to say that it was never going to exist again.
Give me the wide open freeway, free of bodies (well, at least they were locked in the car wrecks), and I’d be happier. Get us back on the road as quickly as possible, and I’d be ecstatic.
Once we got to the mall, though, we found it—weirdly—locked.
“Who the hell took the time to lock the doors of the mall during a biochemical weapon attack?” I asked, shoving at doors that should have slid right open.
Yeah, it made sense that the electricity wasn’t working anymore. That was fine. But the doors still should have opened with manual pressure. And it had been the middle of the day when the attack happened. The mall shouldn’t have been locked up for the night or anything like that.
“Someone who probably thought they were saving everyone inside,” Will observed, frowning.
“Which was pretty stupid, considering these things aren’t exactly airtight,” I responded, kicking at the door in front of me.
“They were desperate,” he observed. “It probably didn’t even cross their minds. Let’s find another set and try them. Maybe the person only locked one set of doors.”
We jogged along the sidewalk toward the next big box store, our shirts back up over our faces again. I worked hard not to look to my left, to where the parking lot was. I’d seen enough of that already to scar me for the rest of my life. I didn’t want to have to look at it again.
I was also very carefully not considering what it was going to look like in the mall. Whether it was going to be worse in there than it was out here. In a building that had been sealed until we got in there.
The next set of doors was locked too, though, and the next, and then next. If someone had been running around locking doors, then they’d certainly done a thorough job of it—and that made me wonder even more what they’d been thinking. How had they had time for this? How had they been thinking about doing this when they must have been able to see the people dying right outside the doors?
I was just starting to wonder whether we had made a huge mistake coming here at all when I remembered something really important.
“Why the hell are we running from door to door when you’re capable of picking freaking locks?” I asked, freezing in my tracks.
I looked from Will down to the lock in front of us, and then glanced back up at him.
“Get out your magic lockpicking tools, lockpicker, and get to work.”
He looked at me for a long moment, his mouth opening and closing as he seemed to consider one response and then another, and then finally shook his head.
“I never even thought of it,” he said, fishing through his pockets. He brought out a tiny case, flipped it open, and dropped immediately to his knees. “Must be the smell getting to me.”
“Must be,” I answered wryly, leaning over his shoulder to watch him.
I’d never seen lockpicking tools before
, and at first they looked like nothing more than those things a dentist sticks you with when you have your mouth open and you’re at their mercy. There were a number of rods and pointy things in the case, each of them slim and brightly silver in the early sunlight. There were also some flat bits, and one crooked piece that looked like it had been straight once and had then been jammed into a keyhole and broken.
Honestly, I couldn’t make heads or tails of them. But Will bent down further and glanced into the lock on the door—one of those industrial round things—then started rifling quickly through his case. He picked up a flat instrument, and then one of the straight pointy ones, and went quickly to work, sticking one and then the other into the opening on the lock. He fiddled around for several moments, then hummed a bit, took out the pointy instrument, and reached for the crooked, broken-looking one.
One turn with it in the lock and I heard a click.
Will straightened and gave me a boyishly triumphant look, a proud smile creeping onto his lips.
“Done,” he said shortly. “It wasn’t actually a complicated lock. The mechanism—”
I put up a quick hand to stop him.
“Not interested,” I said bluntly. “No offense, I’m sure you’re really good and all that, but now is not the time. We’re standing in a parking lot full of dead people with a couple of mentally deranged crooks after us. We have no idea when they might get here. How about you teach me about picking locks later. Let’s get in there, figure out how much we can carry, and get back out again.”
With a nod, Will stood up and shoved the case back into his pocket.
I was going to ask him why he even had it with him—it didn’t seem like the kind of thing you would take everywhere with you—but then I realized that maybe it was the sort of thing that you always kept on your person. I mean, you never knew when you might have to pick a lock. Our current situation was the prime example of that. It also had to be pretty specialized, like any set of tools. Maybe he had a set that he’d paid a lot for, or had designed specifically to his hands.
Survival of The Fittest | Book 2 | Shallow Graves Page 8