The Systemic Series - Box Set

by K. W. Callahan

  Bill nodded. “Well, good luck to you. Can’t say I’d want to pick up and go somewhere else though.”

  “We didn’t have any desire to leave our last spot,” I agreed. “But sometimes those kinds of things get forced upon you.” I pulled a small bottle from my pocket and handed it to him. “The rest of your little girl’s medication,” I said.

  “Thanks,” he said, taking it. “I can’t tell you what this means to me,” he paused looking back to the old man who sat watching us from the truck, “to us,” he added.

  “I’m glad we could help,” I smiled.

  “Sure you won’t stick around? We could use some good people ‘round here. Spring will be coming on soon. There will be plenty of work hunting, fishing, crops to plant.”

  I had to admit that the offer was tempting, but the vision of those bodies in the freezer flashed through my mind. Bill seemed nice enough, but I don’t know how to explain it. Something just didn’t sit right with me in this place, and I wanted to get moving again. I considered asking him about the bodies, but I didn’t want to unearth anything that Bill might be reluctant to discuss. If he thought we were holding him responsible for the death of those people, he might become defensive or worse, and I didn’t want more problems if we could avoid them, so I just let the subject go.

  “No thanks,” I said. “We need some warmer weather. We’ve been stuck in the cold for too long and the further south we can get, the better.”

  “Well, good luck to you,” he stuck his hand out. “Be careful out there.”

  “Will do,” I said, shaking his hand. “You do the same.”

  He nodded, pocketed the medicine, and turned quietly to walk back to his truck.

  Ray joined me outside and we watched Bill and his pickup drive away and disappear around the side of the motel.

  “He left fuel?” Ray asked.

  “Ten gallons,” I said. “Won’t get us too far…somewhere inside Georgia maybe?”

  “Better than nothing,” Ray said.

  “Come on; let’s get it into the vehicles. I’d like to leave tonight if at all possible.”

  “Still thinking about Florida?” Ray asked.

  “It’s something to shoot for,” I shrugged. “If a better option presents itself in Georgia, I certainly wouldn’t be opposed to it; but for now, I think Florida’s a good target.”

  I left Bill’s motel with a bit more faith in mankind, but still with a lingering pit in my stomach about the future and just how the flu had changed, and would continue to change, people and our interactions with one another. I began to realize that society as we once knew it was gone and would likely never return, at least not in my lifetime – maybe, hopefully in Jason’s. A cleansing of mankind had taken place, and now that it had happened, I could only dream of how easy we all once had it.

  CHAPTER 8

  Will’s mini-van ran out of fuel later that night about two hours after we crossed the Georgia state line and had briefly linked up with the highway again. I was hoping to use the route to locate some abandoned vehicles with potential for fuel. We siphoned just enough gas out of our own tank to get the vehicle running again, and then we put it into neutral and towed it behind our SUV until we came to the next exit.

  I drove as though I had an egg under the accelerator, gingerly pressing the gas pedal with the ball of my foot, allowing our SUV to coast downhill whenever possible, and only touching the gas again when we slowed to around 20 miles an hour. It was slow going, but I was doing everything I knew to maximize our fuel efficiency. Towing a mini-van full of people and supplies certainly wasn’t doing much to help us though.

  Dawn was just staring to break as we rolled slowly down an exit ramp and onto a rather barren county road, the sides of which were populated with wispy pine trees and scrub brush. I looked for a secluded spot for us to pull off and make camp. I found it about a quarter mile down the road. A short, rutted dirt path led from the state road’s pavement to a dilapidated wooden shed with a rusted tin roof. The perimeter of the structure was surrounded by pine trees. Behind it though was an open field. The shed – upon closer inspection – was actually more of a small barn that I guessed was once used to house farm equipment or animals or some combination thereof. Boards in its walls were missing in spots, and there were holes in the roof, but at one side there was a large sliding door.

  We rolled to a stop in front of the structure and got out. After a brief inspection, Ray and I managed to push the door open far enough to drive both vehicles inside, one behind the other. We then slid the large door closed behind us to conceal our presence.

  It certainly wasn’t Aaron Coughlin’s castle, but it was shelter nonetheless. And it’s where we spent the next week.

  It wasn’t that we wanted to stay, but considering our fuel situation, we had very little choice. In our exploration of the area surrounding our new barn home, we found a small creek that ran through the field about a quarter mile away. It provided us with water but little else. It still wasn’t warm enough for much in the way of amphibian life, and the creek was too small for fish. This meant that over the course of the week, our food supply rapidly dwindled.

  Amazingly, during our eventual search of the barn, we found an old canvas pack up in the loft area hanging from a hook on one of the barn’s support beams. Inside the pack, we were excited to find an old horse blanket and a couple cans of baked beans. The expiration date on the beans was May of 1993. Our excitement at the find was quickly tempered though as upon opening the cans all we found inside was a crusty, black, un-edible substance that we guessed must once have been the beans, although you’d never know by the looks of it.

  But even the hunger pangs we experienced by cutting back our regular meals from three a day to two, and finally to one as the week drew to a close and as our meat supply dropped to just a couple pounds, were not the worst of it.

  The sleeping situation we encountered in the barn was almost intolerable. Due to the cold night temperatures, we were forced largely to sleep inside the vehicles. We still had one tent that was intact enough to erect inside the barn and inside which Will and his family slept. Sleeping on the ground though quickly had them realizing that there was a severe mouse infestation in the barn that irritated them to no end.

  The only ones happy with the mouse situation were Paul and Cashmere who quickly took over as the group’s mouse hunters. They’d spend their days on the prowl, stalking their prey around the barn, our little lioness Cashmere with her claws and teeth, Paul with a pocket knife his father had given him. Every so often we’d hear a little squeal – either from an injured mouse, a prowling Cashmere, a delighted Paul, or sometimes a combination of the three – as a rodent was caught. Paul kept a tally of their kills on one of the barn walls where he’d tack up mouse tails to keep track. He had 14 by the end of the week. His mother would glare at him each time he’d affix a fresh tail to the wall, but she vehemently despised mice, so even she kept her beast-loving mouth shut. Cashmere kept her tally far more discretely, only showing her trophies by way of the weight she’d rapidly put on during our time at the barn. Poor little Paul’s hands bore the scars of Cashmere’s voracity as he’d attempt to remove a trophy tail before she devoured their catch, Cashmere often getting a swift swat of her claw or nip of her fang into his hand in the process.

  The rest of us were stuck either sleeping inside the vehicle cargo areas or reclined in the front seats, which is where I usually found myself.

  It was terrible.

  It was smelly, noisy, and uncomfortable even for those who could lay flat. Sleep was broken if it came at all. People would cough, sneeze, yawn, breath loudly, talk in their sleep, moan, rustle, wiggle, jiggle, fidget, and fart.

  Claire would typically have to get up several times a night to check her blood sugar levels. Even slight noises like the clicking sound of her blood tester as she pricked a finger was something that grew increasingly annoying as deep slumber became scarce.

  At night, flashlights c
onstantly flicked on and off as people got up to use the bathroom or get a drink of water. And flashlights, as well as the batteries that powered them, were becoming an increasingly valuable commodity. We’d had more such items than we’d needed when we’d arrived to the castle, and we’d found plenty more scattered throughout the Coughlins’ gargantuan home. Over time though, some flashlights had been dropped by children or careless adults, the batteries had died in others, and some just died from overuse. And now, without candles, and with no generator to power electric lights at night, we tended to use flashlights more than we’d expected. Anyone going outside the perimeter cast by our campfire’s light typically needed a flashlight to see. And now we were down to just a few to share between us. We had a couple more that required D-size batteries, but we were out of those.

  Between the hunger, sleep deprivation, lack of bathing, the cold, the mice, and everything else, it was just too much. The whole situation was a mess, and by the end of the week we were all about ready to murder one another. I realized that we had to find a better location, and soon.

  I began to contemplate a move on foot. I figured it’d be better than rotting away in the shithole of a barn. At least it’d give us a chance.

  By looking at the map, it appeared that we had a good fifteen miles before we’d hit the next urban area. I wasn’t sure if it’d be better to travel along the highway in the event we came across a vehicle with fuel in it or if we should try to navigate our way through the less-populated areas so we could travel unnoticed.

  On our sixth day at the barn, Ray and I decided to hike out to the highway to see what the situation was. I left Claire and the others the task of searching the barn and surrounding area to see if they could come up with enough materials to make a stretcher for Emily and crutches for Will. Emily’s skin was finally starting the long healing process, but it was also starting to dry and crack in places around her burns which meant that it was extremely sensitive to movement or touch. Therefore, we’d need something to carry her on if we decided to move on foot.

  My hope was that Ray and I could find some fuel somewhere along the highway either by way of an abandoned car, or if we walked far enough, inside a garage somewhere. Even if we could just find a full two-gallon tank someone had in their garage for lawn equipment, it might be enough to get us to our next stop. And once there, we could hopefully scavenge or barter for more.

  We reached the highway’s on-ramp at about noon. The sky was a brilliant bright blue, but it was chilly out. Ray and I talked as we walked up the on-ramp.

  “It’s weird, isn’t it?” said Ray.

  “What’s that?” I asked, thinking that just about everything we did these days was kind of weird compared to our former lives.

  “Walking up a highway on-ramp,” he said. “I don’t think I’ve ever done it before. Driven up enough up them, but I don’t think I’ve ever walked up one.”

  I thought about it for a minute, “Yeah, I don’t think I have either,” I said at last. “It is kind of strange. Something you never really expect to do.”

  “Like living through a pandemic that appears to have wiped out most of mankind?” he snorted.

  “That too,” I nodded.

  “What do you think will happen?” Ray asked.

  “With what?”

  “The country. Do you think it’ll rebuild itself like it used to be or will it just become a bunch of little communities like Tipton…little clusters of people with some sort of leader or elected official running things.”

  I shrugged. “I have no idea. I don’t even know what the rest of the country is like. I mean, is it as bad out west as it is here? I mean, I guess I’d assume so, but maybe there were larger population pockets that remained relatively untouched. You know, like more isolated small or even mid-sized towns or cities. If so, they might be able to drive the recovery. If not, well…if it’s all like this…” I gestured around us at the empty highway we were approaching, “…then I guess we…the country, might be shit out of luck.”

  “Do you think that’s a bad thing?” Ray asked.

  “How do you mean?” I frowned, looking over at him as we walked.

  “Well, obviously you’d kind of been planning for this sort of scenario when you lived back in Chicago, so you probably at least thought a little bit about it happening. And I know the prepper mentality. Preppers like to be proved right; otherwise their preparations are all for naught. So are you happy you were proved right or disappointed? Do you even want the country back the way it was?”

  I took a deep breath, thinking about it. “Well, I guess it’s kind of like…”

  Ray interrupted, stopping us with a raised hand, “Shhh…you hear that?”

  I paused, straining to listen; then I looked over at him, squinting. “Car engine?”

  He nodded, frowning, “Yeah. Sounds like it’s coming up the highway from the south. Come on, let’s get out of sight.”

  He led us off the on-ramp and down into the weeds that lined its side.

  The engine noise grew louder, becoming a sort of rumble as it approached.

  “Sounds like their going pretty fast,” Ray said. We moved through the weeds toward the edge of where the ramp met the highway. “Let’s see what’s going on.”

  From our vantage point atop the small hill the on-ramp created, we could see out over the highway’s two south-bound lanes, then out across a gently sloping median that spanned about 50 yards and over to the north-bound lanes. I estimated our line of sight to be between two and three miles. Maybe about a mile from us, a pickup truck was traveling at what I can only describe as an idiotic rate of speed. I mean, they were flying. I guess with no other traffic on the road and there no longer being any threat of speeding tickets, these guys figured they could go as fast as they wanted.

  While their speed may have paid off in travel expediency, it didn’t pay off in effectiveness at arriving to their destination. About a half mile from where we stood watching, a huge buck suddenly bounded out from the woods on our side of the highway. It ran across the two south-bound lanes, cleared the median and dividing guardrails in four giant leaps, and landed right in the path of the speeding pickup. I don’t think they even saw him coming. They sure didn’t act like they did. The buck seemed to sense the impending danger at the last second and gave a final leap, but it was too late. The truck blasted into him at full speed, its fender catching him in mid-leap, clipping his hind quarters and legs and sending his body, antlers first, through the windshield. The pickup swerved, its tires jerking left; then it slid sideways, its right side tires digging hard into the pavement then bending under the weight the chasse was putting upon them before buckling under the pressure. The truck rolled not once, not twice, but five times…at least that’s what I was able to count as I stood their watching in awe.

  On the first roll, the deer was flung clear, landing in a lifeless heap beside the highway. On the third roll, one of the passengers was throw out onto the highway in front of the rolling truck. On the fourth roll that passenger disappeared beneath the vehicle as it continued its forward rolls. And on the fifth and final roll, the truck came to a stop, upright, smoking, and thoroughly demolished.

  Ray and I looked at each other in stunned disbelief.

  “Ho-ly shit,” I said slowly.

  “That was fucking nuts,” Ray said, mouth agape.

  “Come on,” I said. “There might be survivors.” I felt somewhat foolish for saying it after what we’d just witnessed, but we had to try.

  Reaching the scene though, it quickly became apparent that there were definitely no survivors. The man who’d been tossed from the vehicle had been squashed under it as it had rolled. His remnants were kind of a pulpy mass of blood, flesh, and tattered clothing on the highway. The only other occupant of the pickup, the driver, had been impaled through his chest and face by deer antlers.

  It was a nasty scene to say the least.

  The deer came out of it looking the best. It didn’t take me an
d Ray long to reach the same conclusion…gas and dinner.

  It may have been a crude reaction to a tragic accident, but these days, it was a necessary one.

  “Let’s hustle back to camp and get the siphoning equipment,” I told Ray. “We’ve got enough gas to get over here in the SUV. We’ll just throw the buck in the back, siphon as much gas as we can and get the hell out of here. They might have buddies who’ll be out looking for them and I don’t want to have them catch us here stealing from the crash scene. I don’t think it’d look too good.”

  We ran back to the barn as fast as we could. The whole time I was praying that the truck didn’t explode and consume the fuel or that someone didn’t stop ahead of us and take what we wanted.

  Thankfully, neither happened.

  We brought Joanna and Claire back with us to help load the buck. He was a heavy sucker and we had to quickly saw off the head and legs and gut him right there on the spot. We put plastic down inside the cargo area and got him loaded inside the back of the SUV in about ten minutes. Then Ray and Joanna siphoned close to six gallons of gas from the pickup while Claire and I made a search of the truck’s interior. There wasn’t much to be found, but we took a rack-mounted rifle, a half box of ammo from the glove compartment, along with some beef jerky sticks, a couple candy bars, and a plastic container full of some sort of stew that amazingly had remained closed during the colossal crash. I wrapped them all up in the Confederate flag that hung draped in the back of the pickup’s cab behind the rifle rack.

  We were back at the barn in about 20 minutes flat, and while I felt bad about what we’d witnessed, I was thankful nonetheless. We had enough meat to last us for another couple weeks, we had enough fuel to hopefully get us to our next stop, and we’d picked up another weapon and ammunition.

  The group was excited with our finds – all but Sharron at least, who of course felt sorry for the deer. I placated her with the explanation that it had died a quick death. The stew we’d taken from the truck appeared to be vegetable, so I gave that, along with the candy bars, to Sharron. She was thankful for the food, but I could tell the story of the deer’s death had dampened her spirits. I couldn’t concern myself with such things though. I had a family to feed and a plan to finalize. We’d be leaving soon, and I wanted to get the rest of the deer butchered and packaged, prepare a hearty dinner, and then spend some time deciding exactly where we were headed next as well as plan our route for getting there.