Roper shook her head. “Sir, I’m sure you want to do what’s right for your family, but—”
“Jesus, our Lord and Savior has protected us this far. We are resting in the safe bosom of Christ Jesus.”
Rolling her eyes, Roper stepped away from the door. “Jesus can’t help you, sir, but my advice might.”
“We are but walking through the Valley of Death and we fear no evil because Lord Jesus is with us,” he countered.
“Well then, I hope he can keep ya’ll from being eaten. Good luck and good night.”
On her way back across the street, Roper stopped and watched as four undead hobbled down the street about a hundred yards away. She knew where they were going and hesitated for one moment before continuing back to the firehouse.
“Well?” Dallas asked.
“Eaters are coming. They’re toast.”
“Why do you say that?”
“They expect Jesus to protect them.”
“No.”
“Yes. And now there are four coming down the road.”
“We ought to dispatch them,” Dallas said.
“You do what you want, Dallas, but those are the kind of people who have prevented us from marrying, adopting kids, and serving our country. Fuck that. If they think Jesus can save them from this, why don’t we all just watch and see.”
Dallas turned to Butcher, who shook her head. “I’m with Roper on this one. Don’t be a fool over someone who would never offer you a hand if you fell in a hole.”
Cassidy took one long stride toward Dallas. “I’ll go with you.”
“Thank you.” Heading for the back door, Dallas was almost through it when Roper grabbed her by the back of her shirt and hauled her back in, slamming the door after her.
Einstein and Safety quickly pushed a huge toolbox in front of the back door.
“What in the hell—”
“Look!”
Dallas gazed out the window as forty or fifty man eaters surrounded the camper, banging on it, pushing it, rocking it.
“I told you they were toast.”
“Roper, we have to help them.”
“Why don’t they just drive away?” Cassidy asked.
“He put blocks under the wheels. Those people are going to die in there.”
“Not if I can help it.” Dallas turned, but Safety stood in front of the door. “No you ain’t. We made a deal, Dallas—a pact—and that was to stay together. You can’t help everyone, you know?”
Tears came to Dallas’s eyes as she slowly nodded. “They’re just children. They don’t deserve—”
Suddenly, a piercing scream filled the air and all six stood at the garage door and peered through the windows looking out at the camper. Standing on top of the camper was the little fat boy, waving his hands over his head. “Help us! Help!”
Dallas’s eyes implored Roper and the others, none of whom acquiesced.
“What on earth are they thinking, letting that kid out?”
“I know,” Einstein said. “He’s bait. They need to get those blocks out so they can get out of here and there’s only one way to—”
The kid took a running start and leapt like a triple jumper through the air. Chubby arms and legs churning, he landed about five feet behind the group, and tumbled two or three times before jumping up, grabbing his ankle, and falling back down.
The diversion worked. The horde slowly turned toward him.
“Get up, kid. Get up. Get up.”
“Ah man, he’s fucked.”
Suddenly, the camper door flew open and the father cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled, “Run Skoubo! Run!”
Skoubo took one look at the advancing horde and hobbled over to the firehouse, where six sad faces stared out. “Help me,” he begged. “Let me in!”
“Sweet Jesus,” Butcher said softly, turning away.
When the door failed to open, Skoubo limped toward the schoolyard near the firehouse, where he made his last mistake. As he scrambled to get up and over the cyclone fence, his bad ankle collapsed and he lost footing. Hanging there with one toe hold, he tried hoisting himself up and over, but it was too late. The man eaters pulled him to the ground, where they tore him apart, devouring any visible piece of flesh and gutting him like a fish. He was dead and half eaten in under ten minutes.
“Ah man,” Roper said, covering her eyes. “Poor kid.”
“Hey, people, it’s not our fault. Like Einstein said, they sacrificed him. We did what needed to be done, but we sure as shit weren’t opening this door for them.”
“I’m sure glad we have the Beast.” Cassidy said quietly.
“I agree,” Butcher said, caressing the vehicle like an animal. “She’ll get us to where we want to go.”
“Now that the freeways are free and clear, it’ll be a much faster trip.”
“Okay everyone, grab something to eat, but stay in here. We don’t need those things knowing we’re in here.”
When everyone had eaten an assortment of canned goods and freeze-dried fruit, Einstein pulled out some cards and played poker with Safety and Cassidy. Roper, Dallas, and Butcher huddled together in the cab of the Beast, going over the control panel once more.
“Either of you notice Einstein checking Cassidy out?”
Dallas shoved Roper. “Get out.”
“Look, love, Safety wasn’t kidding around about repopulating.”
Butcher shook her head “I think you both have cabin fever. Now look, we need to bust a move through New Mexico. Rest and refuel, then we need to book through Southern Texas. With any luck, we’ll be in Louisiana day after tomorrow.”
“Day after tomorrow? God, that would be great.”
“If we put our heads down and get to going, we can move ahead with our master plan of finding a safe place to restart our lives.”
Roper and Dallas looked at each other for the first time with hope in their eyes.
“Restart our lives. That sounds…”
“Impossible?”
Dallas smiled. “Wonderful.”
****
They were up and on the road by sun up. By noon, they had shared intel with five other groups, all of whom were headed east…to Maine.
“They’re thinking there’s a safe house or a safe haven for survivors, just like Luke had said.”
“And there isn’t?”
Einstein shrugged. “Who knows? But you can’t trust a government that’s done what ours has done, can you? Look, if Luke thought Maine was where we should have gone, why didn’t he say so? Why the bayou?”
No one needed to answer. They had already culled information from the road that indicated the country had lost the battle. California was just the beginning. The border states initially saw military along the border. Then, people were told to evacuate their states and go eastward just before bombs were dropped that seemed to kill any zombies close enough to be affected.
The notion that whole states were requested to evacuate seemed preposterous, but after seeing what happened in California, they all realized the government was herding the healthy to run the gauntlet from their infected areas through more infected areas and to the Promised Land…wherever that was. Some people had heard it was in New England, others were headed to the Capitol.
The group within the Beast voted to disregard anything coming from the government. Even when they had tried to share what had transpired in California, people refused to believe it. Denial is a strong drug and many of the people they came across were addicts.
Some people didn’t even believe those infected were undead. They’d heard stories about people tying infected loved ones to their beds while they waited for the government to develop a cure.
You can’t cure the dead.
You also can’t fix stupid, and there were plenty of those as well.
The group had also decided not to join the caravans of people who had begun grouping along the way. There were some inherent dangers with traveling with larger groups. Food was one issue, w
eapons another, and they were unwilling to give up access to the Fuchs. Some of the caravans they’d chatted with were run by one or more men who were more dictatorial than the six were comfortable with.
Of course, everyone invited the group to join them, wanting well-armed and well-armored individuals for defense, but no one wanted to join another group. It was pretty clear they were all in it for the duration.
Dallas spoke individually with everyone to let each know they each had the freedom to go or stay and not to worry about hurt feelings or anything else. Everyone was a free agent, but not one of them wavered in their commitment to the group or to their intended destination.
This did not surprise Dallas at all.
They had become a family and decided they would sink or swim together. The idea of joining didn’t interest anyone, though plenty of men dressing in paramilitary garb eyed the Fuchs like a naked woman. So instead, they politely declined and continued moving south.
While they weren’t the only ones moving south, when the freeways diverged, the number of people caravanning around them dropped dramatically.
Everyone had heard that the Mexican border had earned the label ‘The Kill Zone.’ Helicopters, planes, Jeeps, men on horseback, in dune buggies, and on foot gave people one chance to turn around. If they didn’t, they were killed then and there. Horror stories of dead vehicles all around the border filtered up to the eastward survivors. The Mexican government had called on their neighbors to the south for aid and got it. The border had never been so secure—only moving in the opposite direction.
South was sure death.
So, east was where most people believed safety lay, but that was a treacherous journey into the unknown—a journey Dallas’s people did not want to make. There was something comforting about the idea of hiding out in the depths of the bayou. Hard to find by water, easy to hide from choppers, they all agreed it was the best plan while the government and military sorted it all out.
And it needed to be sorted.
The hardest part was not knowing.
Had they contained this in the United States or had the infected managed to get outside the borders? And what was the rest of the world doing to help? Or was it? So many unanswered questions. Their small group understood there would be no answers. Survival depended on trusting only those sitting in the belly of the Beast.
“This is worse than I thought it would be,” Roper murmured as Butcher deftly maneuvered the Beast through the cars littering the Texas freeways. Dead bodies were everywhere. They couldn’t look in any direction without seeing dead, as well as undead corpses scattered about.
“Well, when you consider it’s the state with the most guns, you’re bound to have more deaths. It’s probably easier to get trigger happy during an epidemic and there isn’t anyone more trigger happy than a Texan.”
Butcher’s words proved to be prophetic, as they would soon find themselves shot at seven times throughout the course of the day.
“Don’t take it personally, Dallas. They either want what we have or are afraid of what we have. It’s typical war mentality.”
“I find it interesting that so few of the license plates are from Texas,” Cassidy said, looking up from the book she was reading.
“Not me. These people will fight to the death for their property and their homes. They aren’t going anywhere.”
“That’s an interesting thought. What will happen to all the property people once owned?”
“You mean, after the government takes its share?”
“Yeah.”
“We get it, I suppose. If we live through it all.”
Cassidy lowered her book. “Will we?”
Roper nodded. “That’s the plan. We just can’t expect this thing to turn around overnight. We need to get to the bayou and plan on hunkering down for six or seven months, like Luke said. Start a new life where those things can’t get us.”
“What the government will have to do is set up a huge quarantine facility—maybe more than one—and then, one by one, allow the survivors into the safe zone in New England while they continue to bomb the remaining cities and to re-secure the country. That is, of course, as long as this thing was contained in the U.S.”
“That doesn’t seem possible. Not with two of the longest borders in the world.”
“Maybe not, but you heard those Oregonians say the French, Germans, Italians, and so on had sent thousands of troops to help defend the borders. If this remains contained, then our military will have its hands full eradicating the man eaters. The only good thing…” Einstein stopped, puzzling out something in his head. “Oh wow. I never thought of that.”
“What?”
“Well…you know how Butcher explained their horde mentality and how they act like white blood cells? Maybe that was part of the terrorist’s retrieval and clean up plan. If the undead migrate to each other—”
“Then the military can wipe out more at one time.”
Einstein waited to see who would be the first to get it. It surprised him that it was Roper.
“Wait. If that is true and our military has the means to kill them—” she couldn’t finish her sentence, so Einstein did for her.
“That means our own government is responsible for this epidemic.”
The interior of the Fuchs went silent as everyone wrestled with the notion that the American government was responsible for the outbreak.
“Oh hell no,” Safety piped in. “You’re saying our own government caused this?”
Einstein shook his head. “No. I don’t think they caused the epidemic, but I think they knew about the virus.”
“Roper, remember how quickly those military choppers arrived on the bridge? It’s like they knew they needed to cut the city off from everyone else. There had been no time for our military or our government to even know what they were facing, yet they immediately rendered San Francisco into an island and began killing civilians.”
Roper nodded. “I never really gave it that much thought, but yeah, those choppers were there almost instantaneously and they immediately started killing survivors.”
The Fuchs went silent again.
“So, what does this mean?”
All eyes were back on Einstein, who shrugged. “Obviously, something went awry and this got well out of their hands. I don’t think we attacked ourselves, but something happened. Now, they’re cleaning up their mess using whatever biochemical warfare they have at their disposal.”
They all waited for more.
“Which is why I wouldn’t trust anything coming from our government or the military at all. At. All.” Einstein pulled a small notepad from his back pocket. “Luke gave this to me before he left. It has all his notes and ideas about what he thought was going on. Said he thought I would know when the time was right to share it.” He consulted the notepad. “While he’s just barely off-track for parts of it, one thing he was right about: There are only two places that can be considered safe—underground and on the water.”
“The compound,” Cassidy murmured. “So that crazy bastard was right all along.”
Einstein nodded as he handed the notebook to Roper. “It took me a few days to decode his writing, and when I did, I realized Luke had the same thoughts about this attack that I’ve been having.”
Roper flipped through the book before handing it to Butcher. “You’ve put a lot of thought into it, haven’t you?”
Einstein frowned in thought. “Too many pieces didn’t fall into place. At first, we were too busy trying to stay alive, but as time wore on I realized we were facing a three-front war: Zombies, outlaws, and the military. Think about it. At first, they were pretending to give vaccines which actually killed people. Then they began collecting and experimenting on us. Does that sound like a government we can trust? Does it sound like a government that is protecting us? They had an antidote they tried and it failed.”
“But containment—”
“Is necessary, yes, but what they were going to do to
Safety and Roper? That smacked of Nazism in its extremist form, don’t you think? Experimenting on the living is ghastly and ghoulish.”
“And now, survivors are being told to head east…for what purpose?”
“Well, on the back of the Nazism, I think we can safely assume there will be camps called safe zones, which will be nothing more than quarantine areas. You know, we have no idea what the true extent of the epidemic is. We only know what we’ve seen, and we’d be foolish to believe anything other than what we know for certain.”
“This hurts my head,” Cassidy said. “I’m with Safety, hon. This theory of yours is a stretch.”
Einstein turned to her. “It is? If we had honestly suffered a terrorist attack, where are our allies? Have any of us seen one British plane? One French soldier? Think about it.”
“The intel says they are guarding the borders with—” Dallas paused, her lightbulbs popping. “With the rest of the world.”
“Exactly! No one is helping us stay alive. They are, however, making sure we stay contained.” Einstein leaned back. “Knowing any of this means nothing to us unless we intend on following the survivors east, and that, I’m not willing to do. Whatever is there, believe me, isn’t a safe zone.”
They rode for nearly four more hours in complete silence. The road became easier to travel the further south they went, but Butcher was careful not to go near the Kill Zone of the border.
As they drove through desolate countryside filled with thinning cows and mangy dog packs of once domesticated pets, Roper noted there were fewer and fewer isolated eaters; that they did, in fact, roam in packs that became swarms, that became hordes. More than once, Butcher plowed right through a horde, knocking back some, running over others. As she was just getting ready to pull over to let Dallas drive, she spotted a roadblock ahead.
“Roadblock ahead.”
“What the fuck?”
Butcher looked over at Roper, who already had her hand on the joystick. The mechanized buzz of the turret as she swung the forty toward the roadblock filled the Beast.
Dallas grabbed the microphone and waited.
“We can ram their cars. Blast them to smithereens, or see what they want.”
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