by Matt Handle
Lynch looked incredulously at Sawyer. “You expect me to walk across a mile of metal wreckage on a broken balance beam of cement?”
Sawyer pulled himself up onto the yellow painted cement median, looked down at the priest and smiled as he kneeled down to offer the older man a boost. “Have a little faith, Father.”
Lynch took Sawyer’s hand and allowed the bigger man to lift him up until his feet were planted firmly on the 12-inch wide beam that rose 42 inches off the highway. A wave of dizziness threatened to drop him before he’d taken a single step, but he closed his eyes and steadied himself a moment until he could stand beside Sawyer without wobbling.
“I hope you don’t expect me to laugh at that one,” Lynch stated irritably.
Sawyer grinned as he helped Angel up next. “You wanna complain too?” he asked her after she’d taken her place atop the median. She straightened her skimpy top and then looked him in the eyes.
“I used to do table dances in six inch stilettos,” she replied. “This is nothing.”
Sawyer shrugged and then started walking along the narrow beam, Angel behind him, and Lynch in the rear.
“Keep your eyes sharp and your gun handy,” he said over his shoulder. “No telling what’s out here in all this mess.”
The first thirty minutes were quiet, but they were already taking a toll on Lynch. He’d almost fallen off twice already and he looked as white as a sheet, mumbling to himself as he tried to keep up with his two younger companions. The third time he slipped, he let out a loud grunt before he regained his footing.
“You okay back there?” Sawyer asked him.
Father Lynch’s eyes had been glued to his feet, carefully watching every step, but he glanced up to meet Sawyer’s gaze.
“I’ll manage,” he said quietly. “Just keep moving.”
Sawyer didn’t like the look of the old man, wan and frail. Still, he didn’t have much of a choice but to follow Lynch’s suggestion. Wrecked cars, trucks, and tractor-trailers were still piled all over the highway, leaving the median to act like a sort of tightrope amidst the jagged peaks of crushed metal and overturned metal carcasses. Occasionally, they’d see a dead body in the ruins, splayed out on the exterior of a car or broken inside one. Most had been exposed to the elements long enough that they were more skeleton than meat, but Angel still averted her eyes and Lynch said a quick prayer for every corpse they passed.
Eventually, they came to a spot where the median was blocked too. A big rig had crashed into it, the trailer skidding across two lanes of pavement before flipping over the cement boundary and coming to rest on top of it, both the trailer and the semi lying on their sides like so much road kill. The undercarriage of the truck faced them, several of the tires now ripped loose from their wheels, and one of the axles snapped like a twig.
The trio stopped a few feet short of the wreck, giving Lynch a chance to catch his breath.
“So now what?” Angel asked.
Sawyer lowered himself into a seated position and nodded to both Angel and Lynch to do the same. “Now we take a break,” Sawyer responded.
“There’s no way Father Lynch can make it over that wreck,” Angel said as she sat down cross-legged on the median and stared at the blockade. “I’m not even sure if I could.”
The priest sat down carefully, tucking his robe as he let his legs dangle over the side of the cement beam. “I can do all things through him who strengthens me,” he said quietly, his eyes closed and his hands clasped in supplication.
“That may be,” Sawyer grumbled, “But I’m with Angel on this one. We’re gonna to have to go around.”
Sawyer glanced to his left and then to his right, checking out the broken geography of the surrounding wreckage. Deciding that the right looked slightly more promising, he stepped off the median and onto the rooftop of the foreign sedan that was mashed up against the cement. Making his way across the car, down the cracked windshield and over the hood, he then made a short leap into the bed of the next vehicle in front of it, a crumpled late 90s pickup truck.
He looked back at Angel and Lynch who were now standing on the median watching him. “So far, so good,” he said. “Come on. Let’s see if we can work our way around the trailer up ahead.”
Angel had little trouble catching up with Sawyer. However, Lynch banged a shin against the pickup when he made the leap, ending up sprawled out face first in the truck bed. As the old man got back to his feet, his companions saw that his nose had begun to bleed.
“Are you okay?” Angel asked. She stepped toward him in concern, but he waved her away, brushing at the blood with his sleeve.
“Fine, fine,” he stated. “Without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness of sins.”
Angel looked at him inquisitively. “What is that supposed to mean?” she asked.
“It means let’s keep going,” Lynch snapped. The old man stepped past her, ignoring the scowl she aimed at his back as he came up to stand at Sawyer’s side.
“You sure you’re okay?” Sawyer asked quietly.
Lynch gave him a brief nod, but didn’t say a word.
Sawyer climbed atop the cab of the truck and helped Lynch and Angel follow before he stepped down onto the hood and across to the next vehicle.
Half a dozen more wrecked cars and fifteen minutes later, the trio was on the other side of the overturned trailer and back on the median. All three were sweating profusely and Lynch had blood caked in his nostrils and mustache, but they’d passed the worst of the massive pile-up and fifty yards later, they were finally able to climb down and walk along the highway.
Their shadows glided over the shiny metallic wasteland like wraiths as they made their way north, weaving in and out of the wreckage. They had to use the median again when they came upon another pile-up around a toll booth, but by lunchtime, Sawyer figured they’d covered half the distance to SOUTHCOM.
He was actually beginning to relax a little, settling into the rhythm of the hike as Angel and Lynch trudged behind him when danger struck. Angel’s screech jolted Sawyer out of his complacency. One of the Afflicted, pale-skinned with stringy black hair and a ragged hole where its left ear had once been had leapt out of the bushes along the side of the road and was almost upon her. Sawyer instinctively pulled his pistol and turned it on the creature, pulling the trigger a split second later. The bullet went right through the bridge of the monster’s nose, splattering blood and brains all over the pavement as it exited the backside of the thing’s skull.
Angel let out a terrified sob as the corpse flopped to the ground no more than four feet away from where she stood. Lynch glanced down at the bloody mess and then back up at Sawyer.
“Nice shot,” the old man said in admiration.
Sawyer looked at both Angel and Lynch with an arched eyebrow as he slipped his gun back into his waistband.
“Both of you better pull your own guns next time or you might not be so lucky,” he scolded. “They don’t do you any good stuck in their holsters.”
“It was so quick…” Angel began.
Sawyer nodded. “You won’t have time to think,” he stated. “They’re hungry and they’re desperate. The second you sense something coming, you draw and you fire. Got it?”
Angel nodded back in wide-eyed compliance.
Sawyer looked to Lynch for the same, but got a wry smile instead.
“His will be done,” Lynch said before a coughing fit took him. He bent over, spitting out a wad of bloody phlegm.
“I’m starting to worry about you, Padre,” Sawyer said with real concern.
“I’ll keep putting one foot in front of the other as long as the Lord allows,” Lynch replied. “None of us can ask for more.”
“If one of us turns…” Angel asked timidly. “Would you hesitate or just kill us like you did that thing?”
Sawyer smiled grimly. “You killed your boyfriend, didn’t you?” he asked.
Angel nodded.
“Once you’re infected, you’re no l
onger human,” Sawyer explained. “Not even a trace. You either learn to kill the Afflicted on sight or you’re going to be their dinner. I’ve seen a pack of them gnaw a grown man down to bones and gristle in less than 10 minutes. They may still look vaguely human, but these things are wild animals. Hyenas or jackals wearing people suits.” Sawyer looked Angel in the eyes. “We’ve both been bitten and we’ve both been lucky. At some point, luck runs out.”
Angel and Lynch listened in silence. When Sawyer was done, he turned his back and started walking again. They followed without a word.
Half a mile later, Lynch went face first after tripping over a rear bumper that had been knocked off the Nissan that was now crumpled between a wrecked delivery van and the remains of a VW Bug. The old man had been slowing down ever since their first step off the median and he took the fall hard, tearing his robe and skinning up his hands as he tried to cushion the impact of the pavement. Only partially successful, he still managed to get his nose bleeding again and added a fat lip to go with it.
Sawyer stopped in his tracks and then jogged the half dozen steps back to where Lynch still lay on the ground. Angel stood a few feet away. Lynch managed to pull himself into a seated position and looked at Sawyer with a bleary gaze.
“I don’t think I can go any further,” he said softly. “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak. You’ll have to leave me behind.”
Sawyer shook his head and kneeled down in front of the old man so that he could look him in the eye.
He said, “Not going to happen, Father. A day ago, I would have been more than happy to go my own way. But we made a pact. Once you’re part of a unit, you stick together. We don’t leave men,” Sawyer glanced briefly over his shoulder at Angel, “or women behind.”
Sawyer stood back up and looked out over the highway and wreckage. A green traffic sign advertised an exit just half a mile up the road. According to the sign, food, fuel, and lodging were all available to those in need.
“Give me another half a mile and I’ll get you a bed and some rest,” Sawyer told him. “There’s an exit ramp up ahead where we can find a hotel for the night.”
“I’m just slowing you down,” Lynch argued.
“I’d rather you slowed me down inside four defensible walls than out here in the open,” Sawyer replied as he offered the priest a hand. “Come on, get up.”
Lynch grasped Sawyer’s outstretched hand and grimly allowed the bigger man to help him to his feet.
Angel stepped close to Lynch’s side and put an arm around him. “Let me help. You can lean on me for support if you need to.”
The priest gave her a thankful nod, but didn’t say a word as they set off for the exit. By the time they crested the hill at the top of the ramp, it was late afternoon and all three of them were anxious for a chance to eat, drink some water, and catch their breath.
Sawyer motioned toward a run-down motel that was a block down the road on their right. From the outside, it looked like it hadn’t been remodeled since the early 80s. Dingy white paint and art deco curves were fronted by a few palm trees that were probably supposed to suggest a tropical flavor. A few cars were still rusting in the cracked and weedy parking lot and the pink neon sign that depicted a diving beauty going over the vertical letters MOTEL flickered with life, only the last letter burnt out like so much of the rest of the world.
“If the sign still works, they might have power inside too,” Sawyer suggested.
“Makes sense,” Angel agreed.
Lynch didn’t comment, but let himself be led in that direction as they started past the abandoned gas stations and the McDonalds that stood in between them and their destination for the night. The back of an SUV stuck out of the plate glass window at the front of the Mickey D’s where it had crashed Kamikaze style at some point in the recent past, another remnant of the plague no doubt. A bumper sticker on the SUV cheerily reminded Sawyer and his friends to Wag More and Bark Less. Sawyer was tempted to put a bullet in the gas tank, but figured the chance of the resulting explosion attracting a klatch of Afflicted, maybe even the former driver of the Wagmobile, was too great to risk it.
When they reached the front door of the motel, they found it closed but unlocked. Sawyer entered first and after verifying that it seemed clear, Angel and Lynch followed. The power was indeed still on, although only one of the fluorescent bulbs in the small lobby’s ceiling still worked. Still, it provided sufficient light for Sawyer to find a small corkboard decorated with room keys behind the check-in counter.
He lifted one off its hook and raised it high enough for Angel and Lynch to see what he had in his hand.
“Good thing the place is a dive,” he noted. “If they’d bothered updating security since the days of Miami Vice, they’d have computerized swipe cards and we’d be SOL.”
Lynch merely sniffled, but Sawyer was pleased to see that his joke actually brought a brief smile to Angel’s face. He couldn’t help but notice that it made her even prettier.
Don’t even think about it, he thought to himself. Losing focus is what gets people killed.
Instead of voicing this little bit of wisdom, he offered his companions a look of confidence and said, “Let’s go find our room.”
Chapter 3
As they wandered down one of the motel’s narrow hallways full of peeling wallpaper and tattered orange carpet, Sawyer explained that they were going to share a room so that he could help protect them in case any of the Afflicted came sniffing around while they were asleep. He planned to do a sweep of the place before they settled in for the night, but you couldn’t be too careful.
He had chosen a room on the top floor of the two-story building in order to further improve their chances against attack. The only ways in or out of their room were the front door and the curtained window that overlooked the parking lot below. The window glass was cheap shit, but unless the beasties had learned how to fly, he figured the door was the only real concern. It had a decent deadbolt on it which would at least give him enough time to wake up and aim his guns if they came banging on it looking for fresh meat.
Once Lynch was laying comfortably on one of the two full-sized beds in their room, Sawyer and Angel locked him in and left to scout out of the rest of the building. Sawyer didn’t like leaving the old man alone, but they’d left him with a bottle of water, some beef jerky, and a pistol with a full clip. He seemed safer locked inside than wandering the halls with the two of them.
“You think he’s alright?” Angel asked him as they began checking each door along the hall.
Sawyer shrugged. “I think he looks like day-old dog crap, but he’s made it this far. What do I know?”
He checked the next door on the right and then turned to look back at Angel.
“I had a pretty good set-up back at my trailer park,” he said. “Security fence, a decent amount of food, a private bathroom… if you’d told me a week ago that I’d leave it behind to chaperone a decrepit old priest and an ex-stripper in a rundown motel along the highway, I’d have said you were nuts. He’s the one that convinced me.”
Angel tried the knob on the next door to the left and then moved on.
“Is that the way you think of me?” she asked with a touch of disappointment. “An ex-stripper?”
Sawyer shook his head. “I don’t think any of us are what we used to be anymore,” he told her. “But I never was very good at talking to pretty girls, so maybe some things do stay the same.”
Angel smiled at the awkward compliment, but the moment was cut short seconds later as she came to the next door on her side of the hallway. The door was smeared with blood and open by about two inches. She looked back at Sawyer and he motioned for her to step aside.
Holding his gun in front of him, Sawyer nudged the door open and let his eyes adjust to the darkness inside. The reek of decomposition assailed his senses, making him gag. Once he was able to swallow it down, he made out the outline of the heavy curtains and the end of the bed in front of them. He too
k two steps across the threshold and surveyed the rest of the room. The place was in shambles. The mattress and bedding were torn to pieces, the reading chair turned upside down in the corner, and the large dresser and mirror were splattered in dried blood and what looked like crusted-over shit.
Sawyer flipped on the wall switch, illuminating the room via the overhead light. Beneath the mess, the mirror was shattered. The cause of the breakage, and the stink, lay sprawled on the floor between the curtains and the other side of the bed. An Afflicted corpse lay rotting on the carpet, its forehead a mass of deep cuts and dark bruises, its hair matted in blood.
Sawyer kneeled close to the feet of the corpse and nudged one of its legs with his pistol. Nothing moved. He got back up and looked at Angel where she stood in the open doorframe holding a hand over her mouth and nose to mask the smell.
“Stupid thing bashed its own head in on the mirror,” he said. “Probably didn’t understand what it was.”
“Or maybe it just didn’t like what it saw,” she whispered in horror.
Sawyer walked back across the room and ushered Angel away from the doorway before he stepped into the hall and closed the door behind him.
“The dead ones aren’t our problem,” he told her. “Let’s keep moving.”
The rest of the rooms were either locked or empty. It took the pair another 40 minutes to check before they finally reached the vending and laundry room at the back of the motel. Bright golden light played across the machines in strange patterns as the sun began to set outside, its rays reflecting off the rainwater-filled outdoor pool and then shining through the windows.
Sawyer walked up to a soda machine standing along the wall and looked over the unlit pictures of various soft drinks that were depicted on its front. Like just about everything else in the world these days, the machine was powerless. The plug that no doubt led from it to the wall was as useless as the black-screened televisions that were perched in the upper corners of the room. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d watched a TV program or felt the icy-cold sweetness of a Coke hit the back of his throat. He looked over at Angel and nodded his head toward the machine.