by D. Gideon
Marco had carried Faye into the living room and laid her on the couch. I’d laid Chester next to her and put her arm around him, and then covered them both with a handmade quilt I’d found upstairs on her bed. We dragged the bodies of the thugs into the back yard, so their mere presence wouldn’t soil her beloved home.
While I packed Faye’s small bit of food into the bike trailer, Marco did a full, fast-paced raid on the house. By 10:30 we had set out for the highway with him pulling the trailer, certain that Corey and Mel couldn’t be more than a mile in front of us. We planned on catching up to them, if not on the road, then at one of the places I’d marked on the maps. Having not planned any stops, we’d have to wing it, and hope the group was back together before daylight.
The walk through the rest of Cambridge was nearly uneventful. It was still before midnight, and groups were busy looting and setting fire to the buildings they’d missed during the day. We walked down the center of the highway, keeping away from the sidewalks and the stores on both sides. I counted four cars, total, that whizzed past us in the red-tinted dark. I didn’t see any police cars at all.
While we were passing Wal-Mart, a large group of teenagers started across the road, then stopped when they caught sight of us. Some of them talked low to the others, and they spread out.
“Don’t even think about it. This shotgun’s already taken one head off tonight. Won’t hurt it to take another,” I said, shouldering the Weatherby. I prayed I didn’t have to fire it. Not because I cared about hurting anyone, but because the pain would probably make me drop it. My right shoulder definitely wouldn’t be able to fire it a second time. The only reason I was able to lift and shoulder it at all was because the pain pill had finally kicked in. It would have been better for Marco to be carrying it, but he refused to let me pull the trailer as hurt as I was. He’d refilled the shotgun’s magazine with shells he’d taken from Woody’s pockets and had handed it to me, and apparently that was all he was going to allow me to carry. At least I didn’t have to worry about racking it; it was a really nice semi-auto. Woody’s father had likely paid at least a grand for it.
Marco stopped beside me, calmly set the trailer hitch down, and pulled the Glock he’d taken from the other man at Faye’s house. He aimed it at the teen standing closest to us.
“I’d listen to the lady,” he said. “She hasn’t had a good night. Or a good day, for that matter. Best not to piss her off.”
Between us, King growled, low and deep, baring his teeth.
The group cleared the road in a hurry.
We had walked as fast as we could until about 1:30 in the morning, trying to catch Corey and Mel. Now we were sitting just off of the road next to a small creek, drinking water and eating Faye’s homemade buns.
“How are you feeling?” Marco asked.
I snorted. “I’m feeling no pain. That pill did the trick.” I drained the last of my bottle of water and tossed the empty plastic into the trailer. I looked over at King, who had drank his fill from the creek and now was laying in it. “I wish I had my pack. There was a mini Sawyer water filter in it. I could have refilled our bottles from this creek.”
“I brought Faye’s percolator,” Marco said. “We could make a fire and boil some water.”
I shook my head. “I don’t want to wait. We need to catch up to them. We’ve already been sitting too long.”
“We’ve been walking for three hours, Ripley. We need to rest. You need to rest. Just because you can’t feel any pain doesn’t mean your body is fine.”
“No, we need to push it as hard as we can while I don’t feel pain. Because once I do, I probably won’t be able to freaking move for days.”
“The harder you push, the more damage you’ll do,” he said. “With that pain pill, you could strain a muscle and not know it.”
“Hurry up and finish eating,” I said.
He sighed, seeming to give up, but didn’t make any effort to eat his rolls faster. Snapping my fingers as I remembered something, I pulled out my flashlight and dug around in the trailer’s little tent-like structure, coming back out with a tiny jar.
“What’s that?” Marco said. “I didn’t put that in there.”
“I did,” I said, holding up what had once been a relish jar. “I found a bottle of plain bleach over Faye’s washer. It was too heavy to bring the whole thing, so I put some in this.” I set it down and grabbed a couple of empty water bottles. There had only been eight left; we’d gone through nearly all of them already.
I pulled a sock from my borrowed pack and slipped it over one bottle’s opening, so no debris or sediment could get in when I pushed it under the water to fill. Then I made trips back and forth to the creek, repeating the process until I had them all full and lined up on a rock.
“Hold this so I can see what I’m doing,” I said, tossing Marco my flashlight. He scooted over and aimed the light onto the bottles.
I knew the ratio to make safe drinking water was eight drops of bleach to a gallon; that was easy to memorize because a gallon weighs eight pounds. From there, I could just reduce the amount like a cooking recipe. Four drops to a half-gallon, two drops to a quart. These sixteen-ounce bottles were half a quart, so they’d only need one drop. Opening the relish jar, I dipped my finger in and pulled it out, holding it over an open bottle. When I saw one fat drop fall into the bottle, I moved my hand away. I repeated it with each one. Re-capping all the bottles, I sat back with one in each hand and started shaking them to distribute the bleach.
“In about half an hour, these will be ready to drink,” I said. “See? No need to wait for fire and cooling water.”
Marco pulled the wet sock off of the rock and wrung it out. “Clever,” he said. “But it still won’t convince me that we don’t need to rest.” He draped the sock over the trailer’s hitch to dry out.
“The longer we sit here, the further ahead of us they’re getting,” I said. “With what we’ve seen today, every hour we’re not together is more dangerous than the last. And they don’t have guns.”
“We could have already passed them, Ripley,” he said. He held a hand up to stop me from protesting. “I don’t mean walking right by them without recognizing them. Obviously we haven’t done that. I mean perhaps they stopped to rest, and we walked by them without seeing them, because they were hiding.”
I considered it. In three hours, we’d passed a number of people going in both directions. We’d seen some people sitting on the side of the road, and I’d thought of how vulnerable they were. Corey would have had the same idea, and would have gotten off of the road to rest, like we were doing now. Out of sight from the road, but where we could still see who was passing by.
“I wish we’d thought of Josh’s idea to use lumber markers on the trees and signs,” I said, scratching at the Band-Aids on my shoulder. Thinking of Josh reminded me of the call sign he’d written on my arm. I turned my arm over and shone the flashlight on it…it wasn’t even legible anymore. I wish I had taken the time to write it down on paper. There were so many things I wished for; on the top of the list was a car.
I looked at Marco, leaning on his side to one elbow and picking at his last roll. What he’d said in the last few minutes was the most he’d spoken since we left Faye’s house. He’d barely even looked at me—that I had noticed, anyway—and I suspected it wasn’t just the grief.
“How are you feeling?” I asked.
He sighed. “I’m tired, Ripley. I haven’t slept since we left the hotel.”
“What? Why didn’t you sleep in the truck, while we were waiting for dark?”
He looked up at me through the hair falling over his eye, and his flat expression said enough. He had just killed someone right in front of us. He probably couldn’t have slept then any more than I felt I could now.
“Right,” I said softly, shaking my head. “Never mind.”
I knew I needed to talk to him about that; about all of this. But as I watched him pull another small piece off of the roll and
slowly put it to his mouth, I rationalized that he needed sleep more than a validation message from me. Maybe I was putting it off for my own benefit, but it was as good a justification as any.
“You’re probably right. We probably passed them while they were taking a break. So…you stretch out and get some sleep, and I’ll watch the road,” I said.
His eyebrows went up. “Are you sure?”
I nodded. “I’m still too wired to sleep anyway. Leave me your pistol and mags; I’ll see if I can divvy up the ammo. Then I’ll…I don’t know. I’ll find something to do for a few hours.”
He slowly got to his feet, putting the rest of his roll in his mouth. He pulled the Glock from his waistband, set it on the rock I’d put the water bottles on, then added the magazines to it. Turning to the trailer, he dug around in it and came out with a tarp. Unfolding it until it was a long strip, he laid it out on the ground and settled himself onto it. I got up, pulled the Skellington pack out of the trailer, and tossed it at him. He caught it and gave me a questioning look.
“Mostly clothes in that one,” I said. “Use it for a pillow.”
He tucked it under his head, and I turned to find a comfortable position where I could watch the road between the trees. King stood up, shook himself off, and wandered off into the brush. A car zoomed by, and I looked away so its headlights wouldn’t ruin my night vision. Its engine faded off into the distance, and when it was gone I realized I could already hear Marco’s deep, even breaths. He’d fallen asleep that quickly. I’d been setting our pace, pushing for speed, and all the while he’d probably been about dead on his feet. But he hadn’t said a word; not one complaint.
I turned and looked over at him, laying on his side with his fillet knife sticking out from under the pack. His shoes had his socks laid out over them to air out. His bare feet were under the trailer, ankles just barely clearing the aluminum frame. I frowned at the scene for a minute, wondering why he’d do that when there was plenty of room on the ground. It would mean he’d have to stay in that position, not being able to move and get comfortable…
Understanding hit me. His feet were blocking the wheel. I wouldn’t be able to move the trailer without waking him.
He didn’t trust me not to take off and leave him here alone.
That hurt worse than his silence.
Chapter 24
Wednesday, September 5th
Mardela Springs, Maryland
Marco had taken to carrying the monocular, and whenever we could see buildings or an overpass in the distance, he’d check it as we were walking closer. People would hide beneath overpasses, he said, and trap travelers there. Luckily we hadn’t run into anything like that so far. We needed advanced warning of this, as the thick trees and underbrush lining the sides of the highway forced us to walk in the open, on the shoulder of the highway. With us being so exposed, it would be easy for people to see us coming. The shotgun was tucked into the trailer in case a cop passed us in the daylight. Maryland wasn’t keen on open-carrying any firearm to begin with; now that there was a state of emergency I worried that any visible guns would be confiscated.
We were getting close to a large, country-looking store with a full-length covered porch that proclaimed to sell Amish-made goods. The grass around the parking lot was covered with small storage buildings, gazebos, and heavy-duty wooden swing sets. A sign out front promised homemade candles and gifts inside. I’d driven by it going back and forth to the University at least a dozen times and had always thought that it would be cool to stop in there some time to look for Christmas gifts, but had forgotten it less than five minutes later each time.
The wide highway was barren, and the heat coming off of it was vicious. We hadn’t seen a car moving all day. Every mile or so we’d come across one parked on the shoulder or even in the grassy median, and I’d taken to looking in the windows for anything useful. Some of them had already been broken into; they must’ve had something in plain view that had been enticing.
Marco had moved us over to the far shoulder of the westbound lane, to put as much distance between us and the Amish market as possible. He hadn’t seen anyone moving around outside any of the times he’d looked at it through the monocular, but the sheer number of small buildings and how close some of them were to the road made him wary.
As we started to pass the first few storage buildings, we could hear muffled shouting. King perked up and Marco started walking faster, looking towards the trees for somewhere we could hide. There was nothing but thick brambles. I heard a woman’s frightened screaming.
“It’s not our problem, Ripley,” Marco said, taking my elbow to move me along faster. “We can’t save them all. Our priority is getting you home.”
“If whoever is in there terrorizing that girl is moving easteast, it could end up being our problem,” I said, but kept walking. There’d be no reason for people to move east. Not too far from here, they’d run into the Atlantic Ocean. The target-rich path would be to head west.
As we drew nearly even with the store’s entrance, the front door opened. A girl burst through the opening, spinning and grabbing the handle to pull it shut behind her. She was babbling in fear, and leaned all of her slight weight against the handle, bracing her feet to keep it shut. On the other side of the door, someone was screaming in rage, trying to pull the door open.
I stopped walking.
“Ripley,” Marco warned, but I shushed him with a slight wave of my hand.
The girl was almost painfully thin. It was easy to tell with a length of purple fabric wrapped around her waist, fluttering at the top of her thighs. A man’s heavy white button-down overshirt with grey sleeves flapped with her movements; it must have been open in the front. The sleeves were rolled up to her elbows, and her arms were as thin as toothpicks. She was barefoot, and her hair, falling just below her shoulders, was stringy and soaked in sweat. The door bucked under her hands, and with a startled yelp she yanked it closed again. It bucked open again, and this time a thick arm shot out, grabbing for her. Screaming for someone to help her, she tried to pull the door closed against the arm, causing whoever was on the other side to bellow in pain. A large hand grasped at the air, trying to find something to hold on to. It found the top of her head and grabbed a large handful of her hair. The girl screamed again and tried to turn around to run, but the hand held her hair firmly. The man’s shirt flapped open as the girl strained and arched her back, exposing a long-stemmed rose tattooed between her breasts. The bit of purple fabric tied around her waist gaped open with her struggles, showing another tattoo of a stalking tiger on the inside of her upper thigh, crossing up to where her panties should have been. She was yanked back inside and the door closed with a slam.
I stood frozen as her screams intensified.
“Ripley, listen to me,” Marco said, his hand tight on my elbow. “We’re not going over there. That had all the classic signs of being bait. There’s been no movement there the entire time we’ve been getting close. The screaming and yelling didn’t start up until we were in front of the property; as quiet as it is out here we’d have heard it hundreds of feet back. It’s a trap.”
“Yeah, she put on a good show, didn’t she? Made sure to leave nothing to the imagination,” I said, glancing down to make sure the outline of my pistol wasn’t showing through my shirt. I was glad that the shotgun was out of sight now; if we were being watched through the store’s windows I didn’t want them to know we were armed. “But I knew it was a trap the second she stepped onto the porch.”
Marco blinked. “How did you know?”
I turned my back to the store, stomped my foot and pointed behind me as if I was arguing with Marco about helping the girl.
“To get that particular shirt by Christmas in that particular size, extra-long for Corey, I had to order it last year when I was home for Thanksgiving,” I said. “And that purple thing around her waist? That was Mel’s hundred-dollar scarf she got from India. The one she was wearing when she was your ‘wife’.�
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From inside the store, we could still hear the girl yelling for help.
Marco’s eyes tightened, and he looked over my shoulder to the store. He shook his head and let go of me, crossing his arms.
“I should have noticed the scarf,” he said.
“Well, there were certainly other things to catch your attention.”
His grimace said he’d been paying attention to exactly those things. “We’re just acting like we’re fighting, yes?”
“Yep.”
“You want to go in there, don’t you?”
“Yep. Mel and Corey could be in there. If they aren’t, their stuff is, and they’re going to need that.”
He scanned the highway ahead of us, then looked back to the store. “There’s another road behind the store, but even if we can cross over to it further up and come back that way, it’s going to be hard sneaking up on the place in full daylight,” he said.
“Then I should just go straight up to the front door now,” I said. “They don’t know I’m armed, and with me being a woman, they might let their guard down.”
Marco thought for a minute. “If they were armed, they’d likely have shot us and just come out to collect their prize. But maybe they’re conserving ammo. And even if they don’t have guns, they could have knives, or bats—Melanie had my bat. They’ve probably got it now.”
“We have to do it, Marco. We have to see if Corey and Mel are in there. You must know how to do this. Tell me what to do.”
He thought for a minute, considering. “It will be dangerous,” he warned. “I can’t stay this far away and still get to you in time to help. We’ll need to go over together, and I’ll stay in the parking lot with King while you go up to the door. You’re confident with that pistol?”