“As I said, you are quite lucky.” He pulled up a stool and began changing a bandage on the side of her head. “You fell off your motorcycle and slid into a ditch, and all you’ve got to show for it are a concussion, a broken arm, and some contusions and lacerations—what we call road rash.”
“My back is also killing me,” she said. “I tried to sit up and couldn’t do it.”
“Microfractures in a vertebra,” he explained. “It’ll heal. I can’t promise you there won’t be pain for quite a while, but it could’ve been a whole lot worse. Be grateful.”
“I am.”
She realized just how close she’d come to killing herself. What if the angle of the slide had taken her into the big pile of jagged debris? What if she had wound up with the motorcycle on top of her? What if, instead of sliding into a ditch, she’d gone down a hill, into a guardrail or wall?
“You have no idea what I’ve been through,” she said, as the doctor tossed her old bloody bandages in the trash. “I can’t believe it myself.”
“Actually, I heard some of the story,” he said. “Sounds like you might’ve made a rather heroic escape from some villainous people.”
“Wait.” She tried to sit up again, but her aching back refused to cooperate. “Who told you my story? How did I get here?”
Instead of answering, the doctor went to the door, opened it, and stuck his head through. He said something to someone on the other side, then he opened the door wide. Jodi saw people moving in the doorway, but she didn’t recognize them at first. Finally, faces swam into view: Shane, Beth, Owen, Kaylee, and others behind them. She even saw Ruby’s furry little face peering around the edge of the doorframe.
“Maybe just one at a time,” Dr. Yates said, as he gently pulled Shane into the room.
The others ignored the restriction and pressed in behind him. With a smile and shake of his head, the doctor relented as Beth’s family piled into the room. Kaylee ran to the examination table and flung her arms over Jodi’s belly.
“Kaylee, sweetheart, it’s so good to see you,” Jodi said, giving her an awkward hug with her right arm.
“I thought you were never coming back,” Kaylee said.
It felt like she hadn’t seen any of them in years. She almost couldn’t accept that they were in the same room. Emotion didn’t come at first, just a strange sense of disbelief. Kaylee was crying, Shane standing over her with tears in his eyes. Her mother sat on the edge of the table and grabbed her hand, gently patting it.
“How long has it been since this whole thing began?” she asked. “Since the event? It feels like it’s been years.”
“Nine days,” Shane said. He leaned over and kissed her forehead. “You have no idea how happy I am to see you awake again.”
Owen was there, too, discreetly wiping away tears. She tried to reach for him, but her right arm hurt too much.
“How long was I out?” she asked.
Dr. Yates came around to the other side of the examination table. “It’s early morning,” he said. “Sun is coming up. You were unconscious all night and part of the day before. We’re not sure when the accident happened.”
“Oh, my gosh,” Jodi said, closing her eyes. “How in the world did you find me?”
“It’s a long story,” Shane said.
Suddenly, Jodi wanted very much to be at her mother’s house. It had been her original destination, and she just wanted to get there. Only then would she feel like she had truly overcome all the awful things, and the horrible people, that had stood in her way.
“Doctor, can I go home now?” she asked. “I think I’ll recover a lot better there. Plus, I’ll sleep a lot better, and I could really use some sleep right now.”
“Let her come home,” Violet said, before the doctor could answer. She had squatted down to gently stroke Ruby’s flank. “We’ll take care of her.”
“Please, let Mommy come with us,” Kaylee added. “She was gone a long time. We missed her a lot.”
Dr. Yates chuckled. “Normally, I would say no, absolutely not. If anything, I should send you to the hospital for further examination. However, all the local hospitals are in such awful shape right now that you’ll be better off resting at home.” He reached out and grabbed Shane’s arm. “Now, listen, sir, you can’t leave her alone. You understand me? She needs someone keeping an eye on her at all times. Give her ibuprofen for the pain, but don’t leave her alone, even when she’s asleep.”
“Got it,” Shane replied.
“We won’t leave Mommy alone ever again,” Kaylee said.
Shane and Dr. Yates moved to another part of the room. Though the rest of her family quickly filled in the gaps, Jodi saw money changing hands. The doctor handed her husband a plastic bag containing some items which she assumed were medical supplies, and that reminded her of all the stuff they’d lost. She’d left most of their stolen supplies at the tent camp. In her desperate escape, it hadn’t occurred to her to search for her stuff. And, of course, she’d taken one of the trailers right into the ditch with her.
Somewhere out there is a whole lot of medical supplies just abandoned by the side of the road, she thought. Hopefully, someone comes along and finds it, so they can put it to good use.
Worse than that, her purse was back there somewhere with all her cards, a big stack of cash, and all sorts of personal items. She was tempted to go looking for it once she felt better. Her captors had probably taken the money and dumped the purse somewhere. She hated the idea of someone having all her personal information.
“I’ll stop by at some point and check on her,” Dr. Yates said. “Depends on my crazy schedule, of course, and you can always come and get me if she takes a turn for the worse. If I’m not around, leave a message with my wife at the house.”
Jodi struggled to sit up. When she couldn’t quite manage it, Owen helped her. Working together, his supporting arm around her shoulders, she finally did it, but sitting up made her dizzy. Her mother gave her a big hug, which was nice, though it tweaked her aching back. As soon as Beth stepped back, Jodi saw Dr. Yates approaching with a hypodermic needle.
“What’s that, Doc?” she asked.
“Something for the pain,” he said. “Just so you can get home without too much trouble.”
“I’m fine,” she said, easing away from him on the exam table. She wasn’t the biggest fan of needles and usually had to psych herself up when getting a shot.
“Now, honey,” Shane said. “Let’s not be stubborn. It’s for the best.”
Jodi relented, squeezing her eyes shut. “It’s been years since I got a shot. You can’t just spring it on me.”
She felt the doctor’s cold hands on her arm, and a moment later, the sting of the needle. She sucked in her breath, but it was more from anxiety than actual pain. A moment later he was done.
The medicine didn’t take effect right away, and walking out of the clinic proved challenging, even with Shane and Owen both helping her. Dr. Yates offered a wheelchair, but Jodi wanted to walk. She wouldn’t accept that she was broken. All the injuries were relatively minor, as far as she was concerned, and she was determined to get back to normal as soon as possible.
Both of the vehicles in the parking lot took her by surprise. An old hippie van parked beside some enormous 70s beast of a car. Where had they found these things? There were stories she would have to hear later, when she felt up to it. Shane and Owen brought her to the back seat of the LTD and helped her lie down inside. The seat was padded and soft, covered in some fine, though worn, cloth, and the inside of the car had a vague cheap cologne smell.
“This is quite a car,” she noted. “I’ve never seen anything quite like it.”
“Uncle Mike loves it,” Owen said.
“That doesn’t surprise me.”
When Shane closed the door, she tried to sit up, but it hurt too much. Resigned, she lay back down, marveling that she could almost completely stretch out on the seat. Beth climbed in behind the wheel, leaning back to get a
good look at her.
“You have no idea how great it is to finally have you with us,” Beth said, tears in her eyes.
“Thanks, Mom. It’s good to be home.”
A young man she didn’t recognize got into the passenger seat. He looked young, with an acne-speckled face and a bad haircut, but there was a hardness in his eyes—the hardness of a difficult life.
That one has been through some stuff, she thought.
Kaylee climbed into the back seat with her. At first, Jodi’s youngest tried to lie down with her on the seat, but Jodi made her sit up and put on her seat belt, drawing her legs up to make room for her. When Beth started the car, Jodi felt the trembling of the enormous engine moving through the car like the aftershocks of an earthquake.
“Mommy, we thought you were dead,” Kaylee said after a moment.
Beth gasped, but Jodi laughed.
“Oh, sweetheart, Mommy wasn’t dead, but she had a whole lot of trouble.” Jodi rubbed Kaylee’s back. “It was pretty scary.”
“Did you know we got captured by two bad guys?” Kaylee said. “Daddy and Corbin had to shoot them. I saw their dead bodies on the floor, and they had blood coming out of their mouths. They made holes in the roof, but they had holes in their bodies, too.”
“Kaylee, dear,” Beth said from the driver’s seat. “Can we talk about this when we get home? Let your mother rest, please.”
Jodi couldn’t imagine the stories they would share later, but whatever drug Dr. Yates had given her was kicking in. She felt a warm lethargy moving through her body, and she became quite sleepy. She turned and stared out the window, watching the city move past in a blur. Soon, she barely felt any discomfort at all. Pain had given way to a gentle floating sensation.
By the time they reached her mother’s neighborhood, she was practically dreaming. It seemed like only a few minutes had passed, but Kaylee was sound asleep beside her. As they pulled into the driveway, Jodi saw a strange woman with poofy hair standing in the front yard. Jodi stared at her, trying to figure out if she was a hallucination.
“Is she real?”
“That’s just Nora,” Beth said, shutting off the engine. “I’ll deal with her.”
“I knew she would be back,” Corbin muttered. “She’s wanting more food, of course. Handouts are as addictive to deadbeats as heroin. When you feed the craving, it just comes back twice as strong later.”
Someone opened Jodi’s door, and then hands were lifting her off the seat. She saw Shane and Owen moving in and out of a dreamy fog. Somehow, she was moving toward the porch, but she had no awareness of her own feet moving. The stranger, the one called Nora, smiled at her in passing.
She wants food, Jodi thought. Someone had said that, but she couldn’t remember who.
“Oh, we’ve got plenty of food,” Jodi said. “A whole basement full of food. Enough to feed people for years.”
Someone shushed her, and then she was inside the house. Had she said something wrong? If so, she couldn’t figure out what it was. She floated down a hallway and then somehow drifted down onto the softest mattress she’d ever felt in her life. Shane and Owen stood over her. Violet shifted at the edge of her vision. Somehow, they all looked happy and scared at the same time.
And then she was asleep.
17
Beth had given Owen a strange weeding tool with a small curved blade on the end. He’d never seen anything like it before, but he felt like it made a good weapon. When he went to dig up the first weed, he found it strangely satisfying to hack deep into the ground and rip up a big divot, containing far more than just the roots of the plant.
He shoved a bunch of the dirt back into the hole he’d created, then tossed the weed far into the distance. It splatted against the fence, hung there a moment, and fell. He attacked the next weed, an ugly knot of crabgrass that had risen up between two large pea plants, with equal vigor. When he heard the back door slide open, he barely paid attention, too busy taking his frustration out on plant life. He forced the blade deep under the roots and leveraged the weed out of the ground with enough force to send it flying in a spray of dirt.
“Whoa, make that crabgrass suffer for its many sins. That’ll show it.”
Uncle Mike walked up beside him, idly swirling the dregs of a water bottle. He still didn’t look well, but he’d apparently gotten enough of his strength back to walk around. He was wearing one of his father’s old t-shirts, and it was too big for him, hanging off bony shoulders like a curtain.
“What’s wrong, Owen?” he asked. “What did the weeds do to earn their punishment?”
“I’m just frustrated, I guess,” Owen replied, stabbing the earth beside the next clump of crabgrass.
With some effort, Mike squatted beside Owen, picking up a trowel from a nearby pile of gardening tools. “What’s to be frustrated about? Everyone’s finally home. Your mom is recovering. No one got killed. All things considered, I’d say we’ve been incredibly fortunate.”
“I don’t know,” Owen said. This time, he ripped the clump of crabgrass out of the ground with his hand and tossed it so hard it went sailing over the fence. He found it difficult to articulate the source of his frustration. He wasn’t even sure he fully understood it himself, so as he spoke about it, he was working it out for himself as much as explaining it to Mike. “I’m glad everyone made it home safe and sound. Of course, I am. It’s just…it’s just…” He jammed the tool into the ground and sat back.
“Still troubled by what happened?” Mike asked.
“Like I said, I’m frustrated,” Owen corrected. “I’m frustrated at how useless I was. I couldn’t do a darn thing to save my mom from those stupid weirdos. I just sat there and watched it happen. My grandma wouldn’t let me come with her to find the doctor. I had to stay home like a little kid, like I’m no older than Kaylee. I can’t shoot a gun or fight or do anything worthwhile.”
“You clocked that guy at Walmart pretty good,” Mike said.
“A lucky punch. He wasn’t expecting it,” Owen said. “What use have I been since then? That other kid in our house, the one who’s not even related to anyone, he’s the one they rely on. He helped free Grandma. From what Dad says, he dove down the hallway like some kind of action hero and shot one of the bad guys without even taking time to aim. I couldn’t have done that. If I’d been there, I probably would have been in the way.”
Mike regarded him for a moment, as if carefully weighing his response. Owen regretted saying anything. What if Uncle Mike felt sorry for him? That was just about the worst possible reaction.
“Okay, kid,” Mike said, finally, “so let me teach you how to handle a gun. Then you’ll at least have bit more confidence.”
“Really?”
“Sure. You’ll feel better about yourself if you know you can hold your own in a fight. Maybe next time it’ll be you diving down the hallway like an action hero. Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that, but you never know.”
“You never know,” Owen agreed. He stood up and helped Mike to his feet. Yes, he would feel better if he at least knew how to point, aim, and shoot one of the guns. Maybe the next time some creep tried to harm the family, he would have a chance to prove himself.
“Our options are the Glock, the AR-15, the shotgun, and whatever kind of handgun the sheriff is lugging around,” Mike said. “Let me try to gank one of them.”
“Gank?”
But Mike didn’t explain the slang term. He hurried back to the house as fast as his shaky legs would take him. Owen went back to weeding the garden, with a bit less of a personal vendetta this time. After a few minutes, his uncle returned wielding Shane’s Glock 17 and a box of 9mm ammo.
“Your dad didn’t put up as much of a fight as I thought he would,” Mike said. “He just told me not to shoot at the house. I think he was kidding.”
“What are we supposed to shoot at?” Owen asked.
“The weeds, of course,” Mike replied, with a laugh.
Owen was pretty sure he was jok
ing, but you never entirely knew with Uncle Mike. He shook his head.
“No, no, your grandma wouldn’t like us planting bullets in her garden,” Mike said, after a moment. “We’ll scrounge up some stuff from the garage and build a makeshift shooting range. You’d be surprised at the stuff Beth keeps in storage.”
“She won’t mind?” Owen said.
“Um, well…” Mike shrugged again. “Let’s say no and then find out the hard way. Mom doesn’t move that fast. We can get a few shots off before she stops us.”
Grandma’s garage proved to be a treasure trove of materials for constructing a shooting range. They found cinder blocks, sandbags, and paper targets in a box.
“What is Grandma doing with filled sandbags?” Owen asked. “She doesn’t live anywhere near the coast. I doubt flooding is ever a problem east of Macon.”
“Hurricane season, I imagine,” Mike replied, dragging one of the sandbags across the garage. “We do get rain pretty bad sometimes. It’s not like Florida, but you know Mom can’t ever be too careful. She’s prepared for all weather. Trust me, kid, sandbags aren’t the strangest thing she keeps on hand.”
They lugged a bunch of stuff out back and began setting up their shooting range. Beth had no neighbors behind her house. On the other side of the fence, there was a large overgrown field that went about fifty yards back to a dense line of trees. It seemed like the safest direction to fire the gun, so they set up targets along the fence. First, they made a stack of cinder blocks about three feet tall, then they piled on a few rows of sandbags. Finally, they taped paper targets along the front of the sandbags.
“I took a gun safety course to get my concealed carry license,” Mike said. “Now, I pass on all that ancient wisdom to you, nephew.”
He took a position near the back of the house and turned to face the target wall. Owen stepped up beside him. Since he’d grown up in a household without guns, Owen had never learned to be comfortable around them. Furthermore, he’d seen how quickly they could cause mayhem and death. When Mike tried to put the Glock in his hand, he flinched before grabbing.
Surviving The End (Book 2): Fallen World Page 15