The Survivors (Book 2): Autumn

by Dreyer, V. L.

  I guess everyone likes to feel wanted and needed. It’s human nature. Even after everything that had happened to me, I was still no different at the core.

  Chapter Twelve

  It was early afternoon by the time we were ready to depart. Rather than wait for the next morning, we decided to set off immediately and make the most of the hours we had left until sunset. The days were still long at this time of the year, so I estimated we could probably get as far as Te Awamutu before dark.

  Skylar, the doctor, and Maddy stood together in a huddle by the door while Michael and I loaded our backpacks into the rear cab of the Hilux. Once we were done, the doctor came over to give us the medicine, and Skylar brought a bottle of something she’d found in our stores.

  “I don’t know what this is, but I think it’s alcohol.” She peered at the label and read it out slowly. “Rum… rum? Is that booze?”

  “Yes.” I laughed as I took the bottle from her, and wrapped it up in my spare clothing to keep it safe. “Well done, your reading is getting much better.”

  “Thanks.” Skye beamed proudly, and then she enveloped me in a hug that lingered just a little longer than it should. “Take care of yourself, sis.”

  “I will. We’ll be back before you know it.” I hugged her back, understanding without words that she was worried about us and trying very hard not to show it. I felt the same way, so I held her tight for a minute, then hugged Maddy and the doctor as well.

  They waved to us as we headed away from the motel, and I found myself wondering if we’d ever see them again. I felt guilty for lying to my sister when I had told her the reasons I wanted her to stay. While every word I’d said had been true, I’d lied to her by omission. I had failed to tell her the biggest reason I didn’t want her along was because I feared that we were walking into a trap. I couldn’t stop Michael from coming if I tied him up to the nearest lamppost, but at least if I died then I would die knowing I’d kept my baby sister safe. There would be someone left to carry on my family line, and there would be someone left to remember me.

  I took the wheel for the first leg of the journey, since I’d come along the southern road on foot not that long ago. Our plan was to take the same route for a while, then swing east at Te Awamutu. With any luck, that would keep us well clear of the dangerous gang territory further south.

  For over a year, I’d used Te Awamutu as a refuge from those gangs. At some point before my arrival, a localized earthquake had devastated the little city, and reduced its buildings to hazardous piles of rubble, shards of glass and twisted steel. Most of the water sources were tainted, and there was little to interest the other survivors when easier sources of sustenance were just a few days away. I was no ordinary survivor.

  When I had arrived in that little town, I’d felt just like one of those shattered buildings. I had just escaped from captivity, after being tormented, tortured, and brutally raped over the course of days, maybe even weeks. I had been so wrapped up in my own misery that I’d lost track of the time.

  I had limped into that town a broken woman, my clothing in tatters, my hair matted, and my body covered in filth and blood. Most of the blood was mine, but some of it had belonged to the man I’d killed to escape.

  My survival had been a matter of sheer luck. The man with the tattooed face, Lee, had left camp with most of his friends, leaving just one man behind to guard me. They’d thought I was too far gone to fight back. I remembered that the guard had been drunk. He’d tried to force himself on me again, but had fallen asleep before he could get it up. I remember the rank stench of his breath as he snored in my face, as clear as day.

  They had underestimated my desire to live, and it cost that man his life. I knew where they’d tossed my belongings when they caught me, and the drunk had loosened my bonds when he’d decided to use me. I found my bag, and in it was my gun. The drunk had stirred awake just long enough to see his own death coming. I shot him right between the eyes, with no hesitation and no mercy. God knows they hadn’t shown me any.

  Then I took my things and I ran, as far and as fast as I could. I ran for days, until my water ran out and my feet were so blistered I could barely walk. But I was clever enough to cover my tracks, and when I reached Te Awamutu I knew I’d found somewhere I could hide. I’d searched carefully amongst the ruins until I found one water source that was still clean. I made my home near it, inside an old shipping container.

  Living in the ruins of Te Awamutu had been a humbling and depressing experience, one that reminded me of the destruction of the beautiful city of Christchurch in similar circumstances, almost a decade earlier. Except back then, there had been people. People to recover and rebuild. Te Awamutu had been a ghost town. There was no one there to care for her, or return her to the way she had been.

  It was an appropriate place for the shattered soul I had been to cower and lick her wounds. Now, I was going to return, with the man I loved at my side. I had mixed feelings about returning to that place in my life.

  “You’re scowling,” Michael commented softly. I glanced at him, and discovered that he was watching me. He was relaxing in the passenger seat with one arm resting on the edge of the open window, content to let me negotiate the uneven roads in peace. At least, he had been. Now after many long minutes of silence, he was studying me. I suddenly felt uncomfortable.

  “I’m just… focused.” I tried to brush it away rather than have to explain, but Michael wasn’t having any of it.

  “No, you’re not. I know that face.” He absently brushed away an insect that had buzzed inside the cab, and then gave me a faint smile. “Tell me what’s bothering you.”

  My shoulders slumped; I was so transparent, I couldn’t even get away with harmless white lies. “It’s just… I lived down this way for a while, before I came north. It wasn’t a good time of my life. I’m not ready to talk about it yet. I’m sorry, Michael.”

  I gave him an imploring look, a look that silently said ‘if you love me, you’ll leave it at that’. Apparently, he did love me. He gave me a long, hard stare, then he just nodded and went back to watching the scenery roll by.

  The road directly south of Ohaupo was familiar to me; I’d walked this way once, and then driven around the area a few times to reach the outlying farms. The roads were fractured and overgrown but not blocked, so we made good time to start with. As we left the township, the narrow rural roads widened into a thick strip of dusky grey that wound off into the horizon, the road markings worn away by time and the weather.

  Land that had once been all picturesque little farmsteads set amongst tidy green fields had grown into wild, overgrown pastures interspersed with destroyed buildings, fallen fences and the occasional patch of young native bush. Nature’s reclamation process was brutal and unforgiving, but it was beautiful in its own way.

  I kept our place slow but steady as the road surface grew gradually more erratic. A flash of water through the trees to our left drew our eye momentarily, marking the passing of another lake. Michael shifted the map around and identified it, to keep track of our progress.

  A few minutes later, we came across an overturned milk tanker blocking the road, its contents long since evaporated away. I’d walked around it on the way north so I knew that it was coming and had planned my route in advance. When we reached it, I nudged the Hilux far to the left and eased it gently around the wreck. One tyre clipped the ditch on the side of the road and spun for a moment in the gravel, then it caught and we were off again.

  Eventually, the road began to narrow, turning into a slender ribbon of cracked asphalt. The bush flanking the road grew thicker and thicker, but it was still young and wasn’t tall enough to block out the sun yet. The roots were well on their way to destroying the road itself, though. Grass already peeked up through the cracks. In another ten or twenty years, there would be nothing left of this old highway.

  “The storm really made a mess here,” Michael murmured thoughtfully, staring out the window. I made a sound of agreemen
t, but I had to keep my attention focused on the road to avoid the very debris that he was talking about. When I had walked northwards, it’d only been a mild inconvenience, but now there were large branches and mounds of leaves scattered all across the road. Our tyres ground over something that I failed to spot in time and made the entire vehicle shudder, but I had chosen the Hilux for a reason. I gunned the powerful engine until I felt us clear the obstruction, and then we were back on our way.

  The road began a long, slow curve to the left and the trees began to thin. A few minutes later, they trailed off into an assortment of low, scrubby bushes that allowed us to see the first signs of the devastation. I glanced at Michael, and caught him staring in mute fascination at a low farmhouse to the left of the road. The tremors had hit it with enough force that the little homestead had collapsed like a house of cards.

  Suddenly, the truck hit a deep rut in the road. Beside me, Michael grunted in surprise and grabbed the dashboard to keep himself from being flung out of his seat.

  “Put your seatbelt on, honey,” I warned him. “It’s only gets worse from here.”

  “What happened to this place?” he asked, hurrying to obey my instruction. I belted up as well, then gently nudged the truck forward. Again, we grated over deep furrows in the roadway. The entire truck bounced and shook. Michael leaned out the window and stared at the ground, and I heard his sharp intake of breath.

  I knew what he was seeing, I’d walked over it on my way north. The road had ended up rippled like the surface of a pond that had been snap-frozen in the middle of a windy day. In some places, the pressure had been too much for the old tar seal to bear, and it had left behind jagged ridges and ruts. The truck struggled to get over some of them, even with its four-wheel drive.

  “Earthquakes. Brace yourself,” I explained, and took my own advice as we went over a particularly rough ridge. Beside me, I heard Michael yelp. I shot a worried glance at him as we cleared the lip. He was clinging on with both hands now, a look that was equal parts nervousness and steely determination on his face. “There was at least one big one, possibly more than one, and a bunch of aftershocks I’m betting.”

  “Jesus. And you lived down here?”

  “Yep,” I winked at him, then turned my attention back to the road. “Keep holding on. It’s only just begun.”

  ***

  By the time we reached the outskirts of Te Awamutu, we’d found a whole new meaning for that old saying about five miles of bad road. The Hilux was making even more unhappy noises than usual, and we were in no better condition. The tension of having to brace ourselves for hours against the constant juddering, the sudden drops and peaks, and the occasional ominous screeches was stressful in the extreme.

  We passed from farmland into the rural equivalent of suburbia, but the devastation was so wholesale that it was painful to look at. Nothing had been left standing. What the earthquake had failed to flatten had been razed by fire in the aftermath of the quakes, or by storms over the subsequent years.

  The frame of a gutted house stood stark against the setting sun, like the carcass of a long-dead monster, its bones blackened by the raging flames of yesteryear. The fire had burned out of control and spread death through the forest for kilometres to the east. Even years later, it hadn’t fully recovered. Only a few sprouts of grass and a couple of saplings had managed to sprout from the barren earth. That would be our highway.

  “We’re going off-road,” I warned Michael. I felt him tense up beside me as I eased the wheel to the left and took us down off the edge of the roadway. The wheels crunched as we rolled across the ashen wasteland and slowly headed towards the east. Strangely, it was a smoother ride across the sooty ground than over the broken asphalt, and most of the small obstructions were so badly burnt that they dissolved beneath the Hilux’s tyres.

  “Didn’t you say that she said to stick to the road?” Michael protested. I shook my head.

  “Impossible. They obviously haven’t been here since before the quake,” I explained, leaning high in the driver’s seat to eyeball the uneven ground before us. “You think it’s bad here? You haven’t seen anything like the centre of town. If we cut across here, we should hit one of the back roads soon, and we’ll use them to skirt around the edge of town.”

  “Planning to get us killed already?” he teased, obviously trying to relieve the tension. I gave him a smile as a reward, even if I didn’t really feel it. This place was full of memories, and none of them were good.

  The ground was spongy with decayed plant matter, but it held out beneath the truck’s weight. By the time the sun started to set in earnest, we’d cleared the other side and found a narrow, winding back-country road, one that was little more than a single-lane track. The bush started to get thicker again, to the point where it covered our path with long shadows that made it difficult to see.

  There was a low, deep crunch when the asphalt ended, and we found ourselves on a gravel road barely visible through the long grass. In front of us, the trail climbed up a gentle hill, and at the top I could see a clearing. I gently touched the accelerator to ease us up the incline, wary of damaging the truck on something I couldn’t see.

  As if reading my mind, we hit something with a heavy clunk. I froze for a second, then leaned out the window to check what it was. An old electric fence – electric no more – lay crushed beneath our wheels.

  “Oops.” I gave Michael a sheepish grin.

  He laughed and patted my knee reassuringly. “Oh well, too late now. Keep going.”

  I nodded and put my foot down again. We cleared the obstruction and climbed the rise slowly. Although it was only a slight incline, the view as we came over the crest was stunning. The hill was just high enough for us to see the landscape for miles in all directions, and it gave us a commanding view of the land we had yet to traverse.

  “This seems like a good place to stop for the night,” Michael suggested, pointing ahead of us. “In there?”

  At the crest of the hill, our path branched off towards a high metal fence that still stood proudly, guarding a large house that had been turned to kindling in one of the quakes. I saw what attracted him immediately. It was a defensible position that we would be able to fortify easily. I nodded and eased the truck closer.

  With his gun at the ready, Michael hopped out of the passenger seat and moved to the gate, scanning the area for anything remotely hostile. Once he was done, he turned and gave me a thumbs-up, then he opened the gate so that I could drive through. Once we were safely inside the ring of high metal fencing, he shut the gate and I backed the Hilux up until its tail rested against it, effectively preventing anyone – or anything – from entering without permission.

  I put the truck in park, killed the engine, and climbed out to join him with my shotgun at the ready. Between the two of us, we stalked the interior of the compound, guarding one another’s backs as we circled the old house to ensure nothing was hiding behind it. Everything seemed safe from a distance, but neither of us were willing to take chances with the life of the person we loved; we’d only just found one another, and I certainly had no intention of putting that love in jeopardy.

  The long grass hid few secrets from our watchful eyes. The only things that stirred were the birds in the trees, singing and fluttering from branch to branch as they put themselves to bed. I agreed with that notion; after a long day of travel, I was ready to rest. Although the bare earth might have been softer, Michael and I unrolled our sleeping bags side by side on the cracked concrete of the old homestead’s driveway, because it felt safer than sleeping in the long grass.

  “We could sleep in the back of the truck, if you want. It’d probably be more comfortable,” I suggested as we sat down on our sleeping bags, and began setting up the gear to cook our dinner. The little gas cooker felt like such a luxury when resources were running low, and there were so few people around capable of making things to replace them. We’d found it in a cache before we left Hamilton. If it hadn’t been for that
, then we would have had to gather dry wood and build a fire the old fashioned way.

  “Nah.” Michael shook his head. “I think it’ll be more comfortable out here. I’ve always enjoyed the thought of sleeping beneath the stars.”

  “I think you’ve been living in a bunker for too long, honey,” I told him with amusement.

  He gave me one of his quirky smiles and shrugged. “Maybe. I used to like camping in the old days, too.”

  “I guess it’s all fun and games when your life doesn’t depend on it,” I answered, thinking back to my own childhood. I’d felt the same way. To distract myself, I rooted around in my backpack and fished out the food I had planned for our dinner. In addition to a few other things, I pulled out that old can of mushroom soup that I’d scavenged so many weeks ago. I still hadn’t worked up the courage to open it and find out if was edible, but tonight was the night. If it was still good, then it seemed appropriate to share it with someone that I loved.

  “Hey, I remember this stuff.” Michael reached over and took the can from my hands, turning it over to examine the familiar branding on the label. “Where in the world did you find that?”

  “In someone’s larder,” I answered, leaning over to take it back. “I’ve been hanging on to it for a while. You up for a gamble, honey?”

  He gave me a smile and leaned over to brush a strand of hair off my cheek. “I took a gamble on you, didn’t I?”

  “You have a point. Okay, cross your fingers – and hold your breath.” I took my own advice as I reached for the pop-tag that opened the tin; I knew as well as anyone that when canned soups decided to go rancid, they did so in a spectacular fashion. After weeks of anticipation, I was almost afraid to end the wait, but it was time. I squeezed my eyes shut as I thumbed open the tag. There was a creak as the lid rolled back and then… nothing.