by Jay Smith
I admitted I didn’t. She shrugged like it wasn’t a big deal. I was horrified by her indifference and the implication that she’d given herself to men for that reason. She continued: “Jack, I thought, just wanted something he couldn’t have any other way. I admit I was prepared to fuck him if it meant I got my book. Turns out… he’s just weird. Still want to know?”
“Honestly, I’m just glad you’re okay.” But I wasn’t. Her expression told me that she knew I wasn’t. So I asked: “How weird is weird?”
She sighed. “He cut the leotard and tights off me while I pretended to be unconscious. He didn’t force me. I had a choice to leave at any time. The only problem was that the asshole cut me a few times by accident, which pissed me off no small amount, especially because he was cutting with one hand.” Molly waited to see if I understood what she meant by that. When I shuddered, she knew.
We talked a lot that afternoon and, over the hours, she had a few more drinks and the butterflies in my stomach quieted down once I agreed to share a blunt with her. After a few hits, the cheap whiskey cut the harsh burn in my throat and we both settled into a very mellow, relaxed experience. I discovered that we were more comfortable if she lay in my arms. “I can relax here,” she smiled as she beamed. I kissed her forehead and stroked her hair. I wanted to know more about her, so I took the direct approach. At some point, she took off her sweatshirt. She turned her back to me and I saw the cross-hatch of faded scars across her back. I traced them with my finger and she purred. It wasn’t the reaction I expected.
She leaned back against me, her head at my breast. “What have you been through, Molly?”
“Resurrection,” she sighed. “…from Cleveland.”
Molly fell asleep after telling me her story. It ended with her Bible in my hands and her request to be careful with it. Her story was hard to put it all together and I tried to put some order to in the next part. She wouldn’t talk about life before the eaters. “That world is dead,” she says. Under different circumstances, I would have taken notes or used my recorder, but that’s a little awkward for pillow talk. I had no idea. While I was on the road to HG World, Molly was running away from Cleveland and having a much worse time of it.”
Part 2
The Earth shook and daytime brightened in the western sky, giving way to red and orange pillars rising and churning into brown and black clouds. The tops of four mushroom clouds rose over Cleveland in the rear view mirror, towering over the storefronts and houses along Mayfield Road. Molly thought she might be five or ten miles from downtown, where the military had planned to set off “high-yield conventional explosives.” The flyer Molly shared with me was printed at the relocation station. It explained the plan to clear the last of the refugees from Cleveland and kick off the weapons at high noon in mid-town, at Burke Airport and the one of the highway interchanges ahead of an eater herd 20,000 strong moving toward the city.
Molly had been sleeping in the passenger seat next to a relative stranger at the wheel and with two other complete strangers. Between the four of them, they had the clothes on their back, a tank of gas and a week’s worth of survival supplies.
She had been stoned most of the time she spent in the Cleveland relocation center and barely remembers the meetings with military people who paired her up with the driver – a man Molly described as “bald, kind-eyed and nerdy, tall but not wide – like a #2 pencil.” His name was Blaine, but Molly wasn’t sure if it was his first or last name. He looked to be in his mid-40s, quiet and preoccupied like everyone else with the horrors he’d witnessed replaying in his mind. They were paired at random from among hundreds of survivors and told it was just a matter of time before Cleveland fell to the eaters.
Evacuation was imminent. They didn’t speak much, except to say they both wanted to go east – potentially to Baltimore where they’d heard the Navy was taking people out to safe zones out at sea. In reality, Molly didn’t care where they went. She had no one and nothing to keep her where she was.
When the evacuation alert sounded an hour later, Molly and Blaine were rushed through a quarter-mile long tunnel made of cargo trailers welded end to end making a bridge from their shelter to a high school football stadium where a few dozen cars were waiting. Blaine and Molly were ushered to a shiny black Ford Taurus where they were they noticed two additional passengers already in the back seat. Soldiers and civilian volunteers flagged Blaine into a line of cars heading out of the stadium and along a secured route out of Cleveland.
Despite clear, repeated warnings to keep calm and stay in formation, a few drivers tried to rush the gate. They were answered with 50-caliber rounds through their engine blocks from a platform high up in the bleachers. Molly counted three such incidents and a short delay as each car was rolled to one side of the road out. She said the passengers who survived were removed from the disabled cars and executed, presumably as an example to others trying to leave.
When I asked how she could cope with such a terrible and chaotic scene, Molly said she managed to score some anti-anxiety meds and some marijuana from a young PFC at the camp. She explained very candidly that the deal was – quote – “worth taking the full shot in the mouth.” The last sign Molly remembers was a large painted sign with American flags connected across the top pointing out East and West headings and the final message “May God bless and keep you.” Underneath that someone, probably a soldier, scribbled “…or kill you quick.”
The couple in back was married, but Molly couldn’t remember their names or much more about them. Except the screaming. The wife began screaming from the time she heard the first rumble of from burning downtown Cleveland and carried on through the sudden trio of pressure blasts overhead and the gusts of wind that followed, like a bad summer storm with blasts of heat, shaking their car, pelting it with splintered wood, siding and debris. Blaine tried to focus on the road, steering between fallen limbs and abandoned cars. The entire time, Molly kept low in her seat wrapped into a fetal ball. The car bounced and swerved, scraped against steel and over grassy areas before the winds began to die and the road began to smooth out again.
The wife would not let her husband hold her which might have had the much-needed effect of muffling her screams. They were at a point ten miles east town near Willoughby when Blaine lost his shit, stopped the car, and threatened to put both passengers out in the middle of the street. That was when Molly learned that Blaine was given a sidearm and ammunition along with the keys to a government surplus sedan.
Molly said the couple in back stayed pretty quiet after that and hinted that Blaine’s outburst should have been “the first sign” that she shouldn’t trust him.
Blaine continued east along the only open route he could find, which worked out well until they reached the town of Andover. Blaine and the husband got into an argument over whether or not to take a bridge over some lake leading into Pennsylvania. It was a mile-long straight shot into the Keystone state. Blaine didn’t like the look of National Guard units on the bank because they looked like they were getting ready to head east and into some “bad shit.” They could all see smoke rising from the east. Molly reported a number of small civilian boats drifting or listing, some smoking or even burning on the water. The argument was settled when the car was attacked by what Molly called a “flash mob .”
“It’s like, one minute Blaine and the other guy were arguing about which way to go and the next the eaters are like – right there. Nobody saw them coming. I just looked up and there’s a dozen of them right there and more coming from a boat storage yard. Before they could react, the National Guard started firing on them.
With window glass exploding and a cloud of dust rising from inside the car, Blaine floored the Taurus and steered them north along the lake shore, putting a lot of trees and houses between them, the eaters and gunfire. They were a quarter mile north before Molly had the nerve to straighten up in her seat, dust the broken glass and foam off her head. An instant after she noticed the red mist coating her arm
and smeared across her hand, she saw that their passengers in back were dead.
Through it all, Blaine kept them moving forward. His response when told about the passengers was “Good. They’re lucky. They’re with God now.” Turning east at the north shore of the lake, they entered Pennsylvania without a single obstacle. They carried the bodies with them as far as the Pennsylvania border. Molly described how Blaine pulled them out of the back, laid them in the grass along the road and returned to the car without a word. They had an uneventful time on the highway. As time and miles passed, however, Blaine started to change. Noticing the tension on his face and the exhaustion growing over him, Molly tried to lighten the mood with small talk. At one point he told her to stay quiet unless she had something useful to say.
They drove on eastward until the sun began to sink below the treetops behind them. Somewhere near Meadville, they found a motel situated behind a burned out Roadhouse and decided to stop for the night. They raided the motel office for keys, food from the diner and booze, and then blocked the door and window of their ground floor room by parking the car sideways across the front. If they had to leave in a hurry, they could open the motel door, slip into the open driver’s side window and drive off.
The power was out, but water still flowed, so they filled up their spare bottles and quietly loaded them into the car. Even though they had seen no eaters since entering Pennsylvania, the thought of another Flash Mob showing up forced them to keep the doors and windows sealed. The plan was to sleep a few hours and decide what to do when clearer and rested heads could prevail, so Molly slipped into one of the room’s double beds fully clothed except for shoes and tried her best. But Blaine was still edgy and wired, very agitated to the point he wouldn’t sit down and kept pacing the darkened room. Despite her unease about Blaine and his unstable condition, he had already made it clear that her advice was not welcome. So Molly tried to get some sleep.
After a while, Blaine began knocking into her bed… or a trash can… or table as he walked back toward the bathroom. He kept muttering to himself about where they were going next, what they could do. The third time he woke her, she snapped at him. “Sit the fuck down and be quiet. Once of us needs to be able to drive in the morning.” This shut Blaine up for a bit. He stopped pacing and took a seat in a chair by the front window. He kept peeking out through the heavy blinds, looking back toward Molly as if working out something to say back to her.
Sometime later, Molly woke up to Blaine coming into bed with her. By the time she was fully aware of him, he was up on top of her, naked, trying to pin her to the mattress. Instinctively, she brought her left arm up and clocked Blaine in the face, sending him off her and into the gap between beds. His head struck the night stand hard and he screamed – in Molly’s words – “like a little bitch.”
Molly tried to get up, but was tangled in the blankets long enough for Blaine to come at her again. She said, “He came back a second time and lost his god-damned mind completely, swinging wildly – swinging a belt in one hand and punching with the other. The man was spitting and shrieking…babbling, really.” One wild swing of the belt that caught her across the mouth, splitting open her bottom lip and stunning her long enough for Blaine to throw her back onto the bed, face down. Blaine straddled her at the waist attacked her again and again with the belt, unleashing a madman’s rant. He called her a whore and a sinner, a temptress of the faithful who needed to see the darkness before she saw the light…all kinds of bugfuck crazy shit people like that say.
At first, Molly lay there, drooling blood into the sheets as he his belt stung her through her sweatshirt. “I was lost,” she explained. “As tired as anyone could be tired. He’d beat me as hard as I could be beaten and part of me just wanted him to effin’ finish me. I had nowhere to go, no one to live for but myself and there I was…stuck in a box with…that thing. I was everything bad that ever happened to the guy. I was everyone who ever hurt him and, in the end…that’s who I became. Guilty, your honor. Wrap that belt around my neck and close it up until I’m dead. Then fuck my corpse or feed me to the eaters, I didn’t give a fuck.”
Recalling the moment, Molly had a weird smile and that distant look she gets when visiting those tough old neighborhoods of her memory. “Blaine said that no one would know that I died. No one would care. He asked why I’d lived when his wife and kids had to die. He was really getting himself ready to do it for real. He was psyching himself up to really kill me. And I thought, ‘waitaminute, jack! Why the hell did YOU make it here when everyone I ever gave a damn about isn’t here to see me die, too?’ Why should I die when a bag of shit like him gets to choose which of us gets another day, right?”
When Blaine grabbed the back of her head, intending to smother her in the linens, Molly pushed back and tried to kick him off the bed, but Blaine clamped down on the back of her neck and shoved her face deeper into the bedding. Without a hand to keep him steady, however, Molly was able to twist her body again and throw Blaine off balance. He rolled hard off the foot of the bed, ripping a clump of her hair out as he fell. Before he could get his balance and charge her again, Molly took the lamp off the night stand rammed the ceramic base into the bridge of Blaine’s nose. When that didn’t keep him down, she slammed the clock radio over his head. When he called her a whore and tried to pull himself up again, Molly grabbed the handle of the night stand drawer, pulled it out of the stand and brought it up, over her head and down on top of his.
Complimentary pens, menus, papers and a Holy Bible burst from the drawer like candy from a piñata and scattered across the room. If Blaine rose again, I imagine she would have brought the entire stand down on him.
Exhausted and in pain, Molly fell back against the headboard, trying to catch her breath and get hold of herself. Her back burned and she felt welts rising on the back of her arms where the belt bit into her skin. Blood flowed down from her neck into her sweatshirt. “My head,” she said, “felt like it was filling with water and swelling up, especially my lip and jaw. My right eye felt like someone had a fist jammed into it. But I had to get out of there. I couldn’t rest.”
She considered going for his keys and suddenly remembered the gun. She didn’t know where Blaine kept it, but was sure it was in the room, possibly within his reach. In a panic, Molly sprang forward toward the spot where Blaine landed. “I just wanted out. I hoped I’d killed him, but I just wanted time to get the keys, maybe the gun and to get down the road. I didn’t care about eaters, about anything. But I was too scared to think properly.” Molly went through Blaine’s front pockets and found nothing. As she started to roll him over to check the waist of his pants, Blaine kicked her hard in the stomach. She fell backwards and struck her head against the plaster wall.
Molly described it: “I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t think. I blacked out. When I could sense anything at all, it was pain; crushing…burning pain all over. I don’t know how long I was out, but it was enough for him to do what he wanted to me. I guess I should be happy he didn’t kill me. I kinda still wish he had. He stood over me for a while, pointing the gun at my head like he was trying to decide if he could actually pull the trigger. I couldn’t even make it to my side when I threw up, so I just kinda turned my head and coughed, choked… I guess he thought I’d die that way because he turned away, opened up the motel door, gave me a final, sneering look and drove off. He had propped the motel door wide open and took everything I owned…well, most everything. He left my sneakers. All the supplies… the only map…gone.”
The crawl across the room to close the motel door was harder than anything she’d been through to that point and worse than even most of the things to come after. It was seeing someone in the distance, a blurry, shambling form on the far side of the roadhouse, something probably drawn out by the sound of Blaine’s Taurus tearing out of the lot. On top of being exhausted, her arms and legs had swollen from the beating. Her mouth and cheek were fat with blood and her head rang. Every thought was a scream in her ringing ears
, but she dragged herself across the floor by her arms, using the beds and dressers…even chair legs to help her along. She lost sight of the thing in the distance, but kept going. Over her own wet wheezes and gasps, she could hear the cow-like moan of eaters on the scent; that hungry, almost desperate cry of the eater calling to others that something alive is near…food is near.
She recalled what it was like to watch an eater fall on and smother a small child – her own little brother - lay its dead weight across him and dig the naked bone of its fingers into warm, living flesh. Molly had seen how an eater could snap its jaw shut like a bear trap and tear away a mass of flesh and muscle. She’d seen such a gaping wound fill up with blood in time for the eater to dive back in and coat its face with it, all while its victim screamed in agony. She struggled harder, against the growing, screaming pain through her entire body and the simple, reasonable and even pleasant idea to simply give up and die already. Blurry sight guiding weak fingers, she managed to tip the metal trash can out and away from the door as shadows dimmed the first light of morning through the window beside the door. For a long moment, the door slowly fell back to its frame on its retracting hinge as footsteps scraped across the concrete steps outside. The door fell slowly, but gracefully into the frame, the lock engaging with a satisfying CLICK.