Safety (One Eighteen: Migration Book 1)

by Christopher Wiig

  I held on tight with my good hand until the momentum started to pull it in a direction it didn't want to go. Then I let go, tucked in, and prayed.

  Then I landed.

  I lucked out, and didn't go into the snow head first. It was like falling into concrete at first, frozen and solid. But as I landed, the layer of frozen ice cracked, cushioning my landing.

  I rolled down and through the snow, ending up on my back, panting. I frantically took stock of my limbs. Everything was in good order.

  Two lives gone.

  I felt them before I could see them. The Dead Things. I know that sounds strange, but honestly I could just sense them. A kind of unconscious deduction, probably. A sound on the wind, the smell of decay, but I knew they were out there.

  I felt them moving in to investigate the commotion. Franks was looking down over the wall and I put my finger to my lips quickly, throwing my coat over myself in the snow and being very quiet. Franks had the AK ready in the tower but one burst from that and the town would come running.

  He'd be caught.

  Half frozen, the Dead Things moved slowly, trudging through the snow toward where I'd fallen. But they were slow. I'd rolled several feet from where I'd landed, and they moved in on where I'd been, not where I was.

  There were two of them, clad in rotting rags. Summer clothes. Old ones. They were sickening, frost bitten and decaying, hair matted with dirt and blood. Neither had eyes, the empty sockets filled with snow and bits of pink.

  I gripped the J-Frame tightly in my good hand and prayed I wouldn't have to use it. It would give me away to the Deputies, and call in more of them.

  I needed to stay quiet.

  The closer they got the more the stench of the ghouls started to invade my senses. Rancid meat and garbage. They found my landing spot and knelt over it, clawing in the snow.

  Thankfully, I wasn't there anymore. I held my breath. I tried not to shiver. Above me Franks aimed the AK, but it was dark, and I was close to the wall. I raised my pistol slowly.

  Then to the left of me the snow exploded. A fat, healthy jack-rabbit burst from the drifts and tore off towards the woods. The Dead Things spun and groped after it.

  They fell over each other, got up, and staggered off again in the rabbit's direction. I just tried to stay quiet and thanked Christ they hadn't noticed me.

  The hare zigzagged in the snow, and though the Dead Things gave chase, I knew they didn't have a chance to catch it. The Dead Things were half ice, and months old.

  I crossed myself with the revolver and prayed that fucking bunny would live forever.

  Three lives gone.

  I staggered to my feet. Quietly, I checked myself out as best I could. Sore, but basically OK.

  Well, not the hand.

  Turning towards the wall, I saluted Franks. He crossed his fingers for me, then was gone and I was on my own. I waited for a while, to be sure no one was coming, but there was no sound save for the now distant corpses.

  I was out.

  I pulled out my compass and with a quick burst of light from my flashlight, I got my bearings. I had a general idea of where to go from the town map in the Civics building. South-south-east to Mill Creek Road. From there, a straight shot to Em's.

  I followed Mill Creek Road as best I could, watching for the road signs that sprouted out of the snow like gravestones. I stayed as quiet as was possible in the calf-deep snow.

  The two mile stroll should have taken an hour, but I followed Franks' advice and took my time, stopping to look and listen. I walked carefully, afraid of slipping into a ditch or rolling an ankle.

  Mobility = life.

  The Dead Things were out there. I could hear them; half frozen, staggering through the snow looking for a meal. But I was slow, and I was quiet. Maybe not Willie Fetch quiet... but quiet enough to hide from rotten eardrums in a whistling wind.

  Tracks were everywhere, and it was interesting to note the difference between the Dead Things and my own tracks.

  The tracks of the dead ones wandered. They drag their limbs, and seem to fall over a lot. The winter's killing them... or at least it's killing their mobility.

  Mobility may not be life for them, but it certainly makes them more dangerous. Working flesh was not meant to be frozen, unfrozen and refrozen.

  I shuffled my feet a lot and made deep tracks in the snow, leaving behind a path that I could follow home. My own version of a trail of breadcrumbs.

  The dark was incredible, and I only dared to use my flashlight in short bursts to get my bearings or read signs.

  I could see every star in the sky. The light pollution I'd become so used to in the old days was gone. Planets and stars and constellations were all just... there. The way they must have been for the Greeks or Mayans. Not two or three or ten but billions of them. Reminding me just how unimportant I was in the grand scheme of things.

  I spent a half hour just watching a passing meteor shower as it filled the sky with twinkling jets of light, and for the first time since I'd come to Greenly, and maybe for the first time ever, I felt free.

  Truly free. No obligations. No relationship. No career. No credit cards or mortgage due. No deadlines, no Jones' to keep up with.

  No worries about having the right car, or the right clothes. No worries about getting my papers published in the right journals. Nothing but me and a gun and a thousand miles of nothing I could trek off into. In the pain and the cold and the dark I felt like I was alive for the first time.

  It was amazing.

  I considered just heading off into the sunset. Goodbye and good luck, Greenly... no hard feelings. My parents were dead. The business didn't mean much to me. My ties to Greenly the town were gone.

  Why not just leave Horace, and Sarah, and Fetch and the Valentine Brothers to their own karma? Why risk my neck and be rewarded for having done so by returning to that prison of a town?

  I wish it were for magnanimous reasons that I decided against it, because I'd really like to see myself as a good man. But it wasn't the friendships that kept me at my task, (though I do like some of my neighbors quite a lot.) It was the bodies themselves.

  It's warm to the south. Those Dead Things won't be slow. They won't be frozen. There will be more of them and they'll be in better condition.

  I needed more guns, more cars. More eyes to watch my back. I needed skills that I didn't have.

  And I needed people to talk to. No matter how detached I find myself becoming, I need people. I like them too, (the right ones) but I need them.

  I don't think I like the idea of being all alone.

  I reached Em's place just as the sun was sliding up over the horizon and was immediately struck by how warm it was. Maybe not a thaw, maybe not just yet. But soon.

  Even if it didn't stick, one good thaw could get us out of Greenly. A few hundred miles south and we might drive right into an early spring. All we need is a little luck.

  I kinda laugh at that now, laying on a bathroom floor with that... thing... out there battering at the door, my hand rotting in my lap.

  Luck, I ain't got.

  But I do have the Lyrica (Emmett's medicine.) I found it hidden in the garage right where Em said he'd stashed it before the Deputies came and brought him in to town (and proceeded to go on a shopping spree through his house.)

  The kids had given Em's garage a good once over, and they'd taken most everything worth taking. They hadn't been completely stingy though, since they'd left a few dozen cigarette butts and assorted empty beer bottles in trade.

  I filled my pack with an assortment of random tools. I'm not really a gear head, but I wasn't doing it to find things that would be useful in our expedition. Those things were already in Greenly, I just had to find them and buy them.

  I just figured Em might like to have them, the same way I collect electronics. To remind him of who he used to be. At that point I wasn't really scavenging so much as bringing back keepsakes. But I did find something.

  As I was moving a stack
of old tires, something caught my eye that jump-started my brain. I was frozen in place as the gears in my mind whirled into motion, and I realized what I'd seen that had been so important that night I saw Fetch and Sarah.

  I'd misidentified something critical.

  It wasn't a watering can in Fetch's hand the night I gave in to Sarah. It was a god damned GAS can.

  I was looking right at it's twin brother, rusted and covered with spiderwebs in the corner. And from the easy way he had carried it, an empty gas can.

  I was staring at it, trying to put together the pieces of a puzzle too intricate for my dope addled mind when I realized I wa

  Chapter 8:

  The Long Crawl

  “Everybody knows that it's now or never...

  everybody knows that it's me or you.

  Everybody knows that you live forever,

  when you done a line or two.”

  Leonard Cohen, Everybody Knows

  [File Notes:]

  The preliminary autopsies are coming back on the AO's from yesterday's counterattack at Checkpoint Delta, and the results are incredibly interesting... though not encouraging.

  The time of death on most of them was approximately the same, within the same hour possibly, inside the same day, almost certainly. These are some of the freshest AO's we've seen... at least in a group this size... since nearly August.

  That means it's likely that a large group was attempting to get to Galveston and

  [Long pause]

  well... they didn't make it.

  We're also finding a large number of tattoos, which to me says more than half of these were Transmission Affected. The "White Queen" image is as popular always, though many of the fresher tattoos also contain the image of a strong young man with sad eyes.

  When I say fresh, I mean scabbed-over fresh. We had to scrape the area to even see the images, and this is especially curious because, frankly, I've seen a lot of TA tattoo's and I can't think of any of them where a masculine image takes precedence over the "White Queen."

  Forgive my Lewis Carol references, I'm not sure what else to call her. I suspect she's so popular because she's an almost... nurturing image (and the world has become anything but.) Like a mother Gaia to put faith in after the old deities failed or failed to act.

  My best guess at this time is that a large group of TAs hit a large group of survivors trying to get through Houston and the fight did not go well for either side. At least some portion of the TAs must have been fighting amongst themselves, because the cause of death on the majority of the corpses we examined was trauma, not gunshots.

  While all of the bodies were gunshot, the pattern we're seeing is all government issued rounds. They were shot as AOs, but they died from

  [Long pause]

  trauma.

  I hadn't considered it until now, but the whole story may be living untold all around us, not to mention beneath my fingertips. Whatever killed these particular AO's, it probably happened at or around the time of the delivery of the journal.

  I need to track down a list of the most recent survivors, along with their assigned housing, and work details. No matter how bad the slaughter may have been, someone survived. Someone always survives.

  February 21st, 2008

  I didn't listen to Franks. That bullet should have been for me. Instead it's lodged in the stomach of that... thing. The Goblin. A hideous thing that used to be a man.

  It's not a man anymore.

  I didn't know I'd killed it until I woke up in the light. That I'd killed him once, actually, because I almost had to kill him twice.

  God damn, it's good to be alive. I just wish I hadn't had to kill Thomas. I feel worse about that than killing the Goblin. He didn't deserve it.

  I guess neither of them did.

  When the Goblin hit the door the final time, it exploded inwards, knocking the flashlight out of my hands and leaving me in the dark with him.

  He came at me, screaming "They live in the walls!" crawling like an insect across the floor in the black. I remember raising the gun. I remember the flash and the gunshot from the J-Frame.

  That's about it.

  He was so fast his momentum threw him into me even after being shot, and I... I must have hit my head on the tub. The floor (and my pants) were covered with his blood, so I knew I must have hit him.

  He must have turned into a Dead Thing, but he didn't finish me off. Maybe he couldn't tell I was alive, knocked out like that. Maybe he was still alive when he left. I think he was, at least for a little while.

  I'm glad he didn't suffer too long, he'd had too much of that already.

  I awoke to find a trail of blood leading out the bathroom door. I didn't want to follow it, but I needed to get back to my knapsack. I needed my ammunition since I had no idea who or what might have heard last night's commotion.

  I'd lost it in the bedroom, wrestling with that thing. Man devolved. But I had Thomas now. He followed me from the bathroom, so I wasn't alone. I have problems trusting people, but I took to Thomas right away because he

  I'm skipping ahead. Sorry about that. Shooting a man in lukewarm blood makes me skip around. I left off talking about the garage.

  I should have left when I found Em's meds in the garage, but being the practical trader I was I didn't want to leave before giving Em's house a good once over.

  A delivery fee seemed only fair, since I was risking my neck for him, and I figured I might find a few sentimentals he'd appreciate while I was inside at the same time. I was here now and I might not get a chance to come back so it seemed sensible.

  Now I know at least I was right in that. I am never coming back here. The way Emmett just wants to forget about his phantom pain, I never want to revisit the tragedies of his house. But that was when Thomas and the Goblin were still alive, and I didn't know about the little girl called Sadie.

  I should have walked with the medicine, and I even remember specifically thinking something along the lines of “quit while you're way ahead.” I even asked myself “Jonas, what good could possibly come of this?” a phrase my father was fond of saying when I was behaving impulsively. I couldn't think of one thing that would make the risk worthwhile.

  It was time for Jonas Waight to quit while he was ahead.

  So naturally I headed into the house, making sure to lock the door and chain it behind me, (just in case any Dead Things tried to follow me in.) I wandered through the house grabbing photos and books as quickly as I could.

  I didn't want to spend too much time in a strange house; even if I was going to make a stupid decision I wanted to make it the smart way.

  Em wasn't a serious reader, but I was in no position to complain. A few magazines, a lot of literature on cars. Some Elmore Leonard westerns. A lot of books on sports and Blackjack. You can tell a lot about a person by what they read. Emmett was a fellow who liked to know how things worked, and it showed in his Library.

  We were running short of fresh reading material in Greenly and frankly I'd read “Hop on Pop” if someone gave me a copy, so this was not a bad haul. Anything Emmett didn't want could go to Luke and Margaret and if we were going to leave we might as well have more information than less.

  So I took my time. I wasn't worried about running into any corpses, since Em lived alone. But I should have remembered that the Dead Things are often the least of our problems, even if they're foremost in our minds. Something with no brain that wants to kill you is bad. Something with a reason to kill and the reasoning to figure out how to do it is worse.

  A fact that would have been obvious had I not been taking painkillers all day. They make me overconfident, absent minded, and lazy. None of those are good things in this new world.

  Still, the lack of appropriate fear allowed me to do a respectable search of the main floor. The Deputies had given the place a pretty good looting last autumn, but I found a few things they hadn't, including a can opener. Good can openers are always in demand, so I threw it into my bag and considered my t
rip worth while.

  It was in the kitchen that I first saw the Goblin, but at the time I didn't realize what I'd seen. It was just out of the corner of my eye; a flash of movement as it scrambled through the living room on all fours. Not like a dog, but like a lizard. Contorted and strange.

  Fast.

  I aimed my revolver and fired off a shot in panic, but when my ears stopped ringing it was gone and I wasn't entirely sure it had ever even been there in the first place. I stood there quietly, just listening for a while, but there was nothing.

  Absolute quiet.

  No sound, no smells, no sense of another presence, living or otherwise. Nowhere for such a man to come from and no where he could have gone to. My adrenaline was high, sure, but what I saw could have been anything.

  Between the pills and the mental strain I've been under, I second guessed myself. A delusion. The most rational answer.

  Surely I hadn't seen what I thought I saw. If a man could crawl like that, he could certainly walk. If he could walk, he wouldn't crawl like that. The behavior was stupid and irrational, so what I'd seen was a hallucination.

  The Goblin was a Gordian knot to my mind and I cut it in two with Occam's Razor. What I saw didn't make sense, so I assumed I didn't see it.

  The adrenaline should have stayed in my system, keeping me sharp, but the God-damned pills pushed it away. It's hard to feel scared when the rest of you feels basically good. Soon my heart slowed and I lowered my gun.

  I dismissed it... (him?)

  Just a delusion.

  I wish I hadn't but I stick by the decision. I've run the grimy, acrobatic scramble of the filthy Goblin through my mind over and over again and I barely believe it even while smelling it's blood on my shirt.