Race to Refuge

by Craig, Liz

  Ginny’s voice shook. “I don’t know. I can try.”

  I backed slowly down the stairs, glancing behind me with each stair I took. “Remember the car is still turned on. So you need to grab the gear stick and move it to D for drive and then push real lightly on the accelerator and barely turn the steering wheel. The brake is next to the accelerator. When you’re done, you need to move the gear stick back to P for park.”

  I knew Ginny would be frantically trying to remember it all. “Okay, Ty.” There was a tremor to her voice, but she sounded determined, too.

  I eased away from the staircase and backed toward the large field with Bo stumbling toward me. “Tell you what, why not get started now while I’m here. First, close that car door and crack the window just enough so you can hear me over the motor.”

  Ginny gently shut the car door so as not to attract attention to herself. Bo still eyed me hungrily. She rolled the window down a little ways and I slowly walked her through putting the car in gear with her foot on the brake (that part was important and I’d forgotten to tell her the first time). I sagged with relief as Ginny eased the car forward.

  “That’s right, just coast,” I said louder since now I was at the field and Ginny was driving away. “Then drive to the back of the store and push slowly on the brake and put the car back in park.”

  Once Ginny had coasted around to the back of the store and I didn’t hear any crashing sounds, I kept focused on Bo and his arms reaching toward me. He didn’t look as badly decomposed as you’d think a dead body would look. Maybe he’d just recently gotten infected. That didn’t make me feel any better since it meant that maybe other zombies were still hanging around.

  Bo lunged at me every now and then so I held the bat in front of me like a lion tamer holding a chair. We continued slowly like this as I backed out across the field until the country store was in the distance. I was conserving my energy for the big sprint.

  When I felt like I’d have a strong head start, I bolted toward the country store, running as fast as I could. Bo gave a surprised grunt and started lumbering after me. Panting hard, I glanced back over my shoulder. There was no way on earth that he was going to catch up with me. But that wasn’t really what I’d been worried about all along—I really was worried that he’d finally reach me when I was loading up the car with all the stuff from his store. Although I guess it wasn’t really Bo’s store anymore, since it wasn’t really Bo anymore.

  I stumbled up the stairs of the store, looking for a way to lock the door behind me. Bo didn’t have a bolt lock, I realized, feeling frantic. Where would he have put his keys for the deadlock? I looked around me, head swinging from side to side. Did he have them on him? My stomach had a sinking sensation.

  Finally, I spotted them near the cash register and partially covered by a magazine called Country Living. He must have been reading it before he was attacked. I swiped the keys and, hands shaking, locked the deadbolt. I glanced out the window and saw that Bo was about halfway across the distance to the store.

  I ran in the storeroom, yanked out some boxes, and started pulling things off the shelves. I skipped the kitschy country stuff and went right for the weapons, which were locked up behind the cash register. And yes, the key was on the same keyring. I grabbed a tomahawk (although I wasn’t excited about the idea of getting that close to a zombie), another sleeping bag and tent, a bunch of seeds of different kinds (and here I didn’t really know what I was doing, so I hoped the sheer volume would make up for any errors), lighters, a hand-crank flashlight/radio combo, gas cans, and even Ginny’s toilet paper for being such a good sport. I was heading out when I spotted something I didn’t recognize and I spared half a second reading the label. When I saw what it was, I smiled and threw it in the box. The only thing I didn’t see was water or water purification and that was really our biggest need. I craned my neck, searching high and low, feeling my heart thud in my chest. Finally, I gave up. Bo had returned to the front porch and the sounds of him pounding on the door made my blood run cold.

  I didn’t even know where the back door was, but I figured there had to be one, right? I hefted the box, shifting it slightly to make it easier to carry. Then I hurried to the back of the store. I saw the storeroom I’d gotten the boxes from, a small restroom, and then I did see another door that looked like it might go outside. I tried it … and an alarm went off. I guess Bo had it tied to the alarm system to prevent shoplifting. My heart jumped into my throat.

  I stumbled outside with the box and Ginny was there in the car, face white, eyes huge. I heard the car doors unlock and I ran to the van. Glancing to the side, I saw him at the same moment that Ginny screamed my name. Bo was already around the side of the store, growling fiercely. I was almost to the car when I tripped over a root and went sprawling. A sick feeling came over me as I scrambled up and tried to stuff everything back in the box. “Ginny, lock the car doors!” I yelled.

  Bo was almost on me when I heard the car engine rev into life. Ginny must have laid a foot on the accelerator powerfully hard, struck Bo full-on, and he smashed into the wall of the store. He was only stunned, which just went to show how un-human he had become. I focused on the box and my feet this time, taking advantage of Bo’s efforts to regroup, and shoved the box in the car. Ginny scooted over into the passenger seat and I jumped in the driver’s seat again and we took off.

  We rode in silence for a long while as I headed in the direction of our Nana’s retirement home. Finally, I hazarded a look at Ginny, scared to see the damage that whole incident had done. But she looked stronger than I thought. There were tears on her cheeks, but her jaw was set in a determined way that I’d seen before. “Thanks, Ginny. I couldn’t have driven any better back there than you did. You saved my life.”

  She gave a choking laugh. “I was paying you back for saving mine at the school.” After a few quiet minutes, she asked in a hesitant voice, “Ty? Was Bo nice? I mean, when he was alive?”

  That’s when I heard the guilt in her voice. This gave me a feeling of relief. I could deal with guilt. I knew how to handle that. If she’d shown signs of some kind of PTSD or something, that’s what I wouldn’t have known how to handle. “Bo seemed great—when he was alive. But he’s not even a person anymore, Ginny, and we had nothing to do with that. You didn’t even really hurt him…did you see that?”

  She swung her head around to look at me in surprise. “I didn’t hurt him? I mean … I didn’t see what happened. I couldn’t look at him after I hit him with the car. I just figured that I’d killed him. I should have killed him, hitting him that hard.”

  “You only stunned him. He was just sitting there against the back wall of the store trying to get what remained of his brain together to have another go at me. And you kept that from happening,” I said firmly.

  I knew then that Ginny had grown up a lot since I picked her up at the middle school. And I wasn’t sure it was totally a good thing. I wanted to get her over to Nana for better parenting than I could provide.

  Hoping to get a smile on her face again, I said, “Hey. I got you some toilet paper.”

  She gave me a sideways look and her eyes twinkled briefly.

  Then I remembered the other thing I’d shoved into the box on the way out. “And take a look in the box. There’s one other thing in there that I thought you might like. Bo actually had some pretty cool things in there.

  Because I’d had to shove things back in the box when I’d fallen, everything was sort of jumbled around and dusty from that red clay that’s everywhere in North Carolina. She rummaged around for a minute and pulled out the one thing that she didn’t really recognize. Then her face lit up. “A solar-powered iPod charger?” She gave me a huge hug.

  If something as small as listening to music could bring down her stress level and make her a kid again? I was glad I swiped it.

  Chapter Twelve

  Charlie

  It wasn’t long before carrying a huge pack of looted goods made my back ache. That, and
the odd position I was riding the bike in to ensure Mojo was securely on.

  Fortunately, I knew a spot that I could temporarily stash the stuff and feel, with any luck, at least a little safe. It was farther from the city, out in a wooded area. It was acres of private property where the family of a friend of a friend of a friend allowed me to hunt some years ago. As I recalled, the area was fairly remote, had a steam running prominently through it, and wasn’t close to any large towns, although there were a few nearby houses. The middle of nowhere.

  Long term, I sure didn’t want to spend the rest of my life hanging out at a primitive campsite with Mojo. I was formulating a not-very-concrete plan that involved Mojo and me driving to another remote location. That one was in Virginia, near the North Carolina border. In fact, it might be that it was in North Carolina, near the Virginia border. I had a good buddy from school who moved there. I’d visited him every couple of years or so. The house was in an unincorporated town. I figured that meant that there wouldn’t be a whole lot of undead wandering around and that I could handle the few undead that were wandering around.

  Right now, I was just focused on getting completely away from the city and off the interstate. The interstate was still fairly free of heavy traffic and realizing this meant most people hadn’t made it out of town tugged at my heart.

  I left the interstate and exited onto a secondary highway where there were no cars at all. I drove on that for a while until we came up on the area where I’d been hunting before. I slowed the bike down and then took it off the highway so it wouldn’t be seen. Mojo hopped off before I did, since the ride had gotten too bumpy for him and I was going so slow. I stashed the bike in a clump of bushes and snapped my fingers softly to Mojo who bounded behind me as we set off into the woods. Getting the heavy pack off my middle aged back was priority number one.

  We trudged deep into the woods until we reached an area near a stream with some flat ground. I took the duffel bag off my back and slung it down with relief. I sat down with my back against a tree and noticed one of my hands was shaking. Typical. I get a case of nerves after I’ve escaped from the zombie apocalypse. Mojo lay against my leg and immediately fell into a heavy sleep. I envied him his ability to just conk out like that. Sleep was probably going to be elusive for me that night.

  I fished my cell phone from my pocket, relieved to see the thing still had some charge left. I wasn’t sure how great my reception was going to be, and was surprised to find it wasn’t too bad. There must have been a cell tower somewhere nearby. I scrolled through my contact list to find the name of my Army buddy. More than anything, I was desperate to find out more about what was going on. I was a nightly news junkie and I always read the paper. I listened to network news. I had CNN on my phone. CNN’s website was already down, which was kind of disturbing. Maybe it was just overloaded with traffic?

  If there wasn’t any official news available, I was willing to get my news straight from a reliable source. I dialed Steve and prayed he’d answer. I thought I might go crazy not knowing the big picture of the epidemic.

  I felt a wave of relief when Steve picked right up. “Charlie?” he asked with some surprise. “You okay out there? You …made it out of town?”

  My stomach flipped. “Yeah, I made it to a safe place in the woods. Safe right now, anyway. Why? Is Raleigh especially bad?” I knew Raleigh was bad. I knew it when I saw how light the traffic on the interstate was.

  “Yeah. Yeah, it is. Good to hear your voice, man. I thought you were a goner, for sure.” There was shouting in the background.

  I said, “Hey, I know this isn’t a good time to talk.”

  Steve snorted. “There ain’t gonna be a good time to talk. Besides, the infrastructure is probably going to take a hit soon and this might be our only chance. Figure you’re trying to get some inside information, right? I wish I had it. I can tell you that we do not have this thing, this plague, under any kind of control.”

  My heart sank. “So you haven’t been able to cut off and quarantine Raleigh?”

  “Raleigh?” Steve’s voice was sad. “Dude, it’s all over the place. All over the US, anyway. And sure to soon be around the world since people are trying to escape by flying out and then they’re turning as soon as the plane goes up. There doesn’t seem to be much intel on what this epidemic is and they’d like to put a label on it, since zombies don’t sound scientific, you know?”

  “I know,” I said absently. I couldn’t get over how fast this was spreading and over different places all at once.

  “It’s basically some sort of plague that’s highly contagious. Most of the time the victims turn immediately, but sometimes it takes a few hours. Nobody knows why. And the ones that don’t turn immediately are a real problem because they end up becoming part of an uninfected group, turning, and then attacking the uninfected. In our briefing, the brass was saying maybe some sort of disease that’s been dormant for a millennium or two and has reawakened. And it’s just like the zombie movies you’ve seen … shoot ‘em in the chest and they just keep coming like a bad horror flick. But if you shoot them in the head? You got ‘em.”

  Good to know. Although I was hoping I could hide out and avoid the whole head shot thing entirely.

  “What’s the official response been like?” I asked.

  “Lousy,” said Steve. “The local authorities were all slow to respond today. Overwhelmed. Clueless. Some cities are trying to solve the problem by setting up checkpoints to keep citizens in their towns. This hasn’t exactly go over well with uninfected people who are trying to escape. So lots of stories of the police losing it today and gunning down desperate people. The citizens who were forced to stay in the towns felt like sitting ducks. Naturally, this created a panic. People stampeded other people trying to get out. Really awful stuff.” His voice was heavy.

  “When did the National Guard and the military get called in?” I asked.

  “There was delay with that, too. The municipalities were just so shocked by the whole thing that they didn’t take the next logical step of immediately calling in the big guns. They should have done that at eight o’clock this morning. Although I’m not sure that we’re all that much help. We’re too late for containment (which just goes to show how fast this thing is spreading), but we’re trying to create safe areas, some camps where it is safe. We could quarantine people trying to come in to make sure they’re not infected and then we allow those people in.”

  I said, “Any hope for some kind of immunity or vaccine or something?”

  “Nada. And even though it’s early, it’s such an epidemic that something needs to be developed like yesterday. I guess somebody in a lab somewhere is working on something, but who knows how long that’ll take. Hold on.” He spent a couple of minutes listening to someone and then barked out orders to another group. “Sorry. Okay, I’m back. But listen, I probably gotta go.”

  “Just one thing. Is there anywhere I should be heading? Anywhere good to go? Anywhere safe?” I asked.

  He sighed. “Knowing you? I’d say head out to the woods and either lay low there for a while or else go somewhere out in the country to a well-fortified house. ‘Cause I don’t see you meekly hanging around in some camp for rationed food, supplies, and stuff. That would drive you nuts.” He broke away to speak to someone again and when he returned to the call, his voice was grim again. “Take care, Charlie. Watch your back.” He clicked off.

  It sounded worse than I’d hoped. I’d hoped to hear that the epidemic was moving slower. I knew it wasn’t, though. Not after that patient turned on me in the ambulance. No, it was spreading fast and it sounded like the authorities today had been slow to contain it. By the time they did try to contain it, it was already too late. Now I knew there really wouldn’t be a safe spot anywhere. I needed to watch my back in the woods, in rural communities, and anywhere else that Mojo and I went.

  My stomach growled and I raised my eyebrows in surprise. Had I been so wrapped up that I hadn’t realized how hungry I
was? That wasn’t like me. When was the last time that I ate? When had Mojo last eaten? The German shepherd opened his eyes and watched me as I rummaged around in the duffel bag. It had been a while since either of us had eaten a meal. I pulled out food from the backpack and offered it to Mojo first. I shook my head in amazement as the dog waited for me to eat first. Like he wanted to make sure that I had something to eat, myself, before he ate what I’d given him. You couldn’t beat a dog for loyalty.

  After Mojo and I had eaten, exhaustion hit me like a Mack truck. Between first-day-at-work nerves, unexpectedly encountering the zombie apocalypse, and a busy day of looting, I couldn’t be tireder. I hesitated. Was it even worth putting the tent up tonight? Trying to figure out new equipment as the sun was rapidly setting? I felt like I was tired enough to crash out in the open on a tarp, so that’s all I pulled out of the duffel.

  Once I curled up on the tarp near a clump of bushes to keep me from feeling so exposed, Mojo loped over and lay down at my feet: head up and a watchful expression on his face. I realized that while I was sleeping, Mojo was planning on keeping a lookout. I fell asleep with a faint smile on my lips.

  Hours later, I woke to growling and sat straight up, heart pounding. For a second, there in the pitch dark, I wasn’t sure where I was. Then I remembered and was even more on edge. Mojo’s fur stood on end and he emitted a low warning growl as he trained his eyes into the dark distance. There was no moonlight and it couldn’t have been darker.

  I fervently hoped it was a deer or an opossum or maybe an owl that was worrying Mojo. The dog wasn’t used to being outside—he always slept with me at home. Or, at least, he’s slept with me since my divorce. My ex-wife wasn’t too enamored with sharing a bed with Mojo. Or, actually, with me for that matter.

  Although I hoped it was an animal, I felt an overwhelming gut feeling that it wasn’t. I didn’t think Mojo would be concerned about an animal unless it came right up to us. Mojo was too smart for that. I think he was trying to warn me about something else.