by J. L. Bourne
I soaked bits of bandage with rubbing alcohol and cleaned my hands. The alcohol stung like a motherfucker; no other way to put it. I dug into the wound with the soaked bandage, routing out the pus and dirt and whatever else was in there. After cleaning them thoroughly and painfully, I filled the holes with antibiotic cream and wrapped both hands with clean, dry bandages. With that out of the way, I unlaced my boot for the first time, allowing my ankle to breathe. I cleaned it the same way I had cleaned my hands. This didn’t make medical sense, as there was no open wound on my ankle, but the cool, fast-evaporating alcohol felt good. Small spider veins were visible around the bone that jutted out on the inside of my leg where my foot met the ankle.
It was severely swollen, but after doing some mobility testing with my shaking hands, nothing seemed broken, although of course I couldn’t be sure. After cleaning it, I wrapped my ankle up tightly, fighting against my urge to take another painkiller, and slipped my boot back on. Unable to fully lace it up, I wrapped the laces around and tied them off loosely. I scraped up the drugstore haul into the front of my shirt, holding it like a bowl, and waded through the grass back to the rig.
Rounding the front, I could see one of the undead coming up the ramp to the rest area. Its hand pointed at me, and it quickened its pace to a trot. I again thanked Christ I wasn’t in an irradiated zone now; that thing could have been coming at me in a full-on sprint. I didn’t feel like fucking with this right now, but if I climbed up into the truck to rest, it would just bang and bang on the door until I took care of it. Reluctantly, I trampolined the haul out of the front of my shirt into the truck and went through the routine of fixing my bayonet again.
I just stood there next to the door, impatiently waiting for the biobot to close the distance so I could get high and go to sleep.
Please.
The horribly disfigured female corpse seemed to walk in slow motion. Its hair was gone in patches and its clothing was badly torn. The only shard of humanity that remained was the huge diamond rock it still wore on its left hand. The light reflected from the ring like a disco ball, and she finally came within striking distance of my bayonet. With zero motivation or patience, I simply held the blade up, letting the instinct-driven corpse walk right into its sharp carbon steel tip. My shoulder and upper torso did the rest. Not long after the thing thudded onto the asphalt, I was safely in the cab, swallowing painkillers.
• • •
The previous day melted into the next without any noticeable seam. I wasn’t yet well enough to drive out of my little rest area enclave, but I was running low on water. Skipping from one cloud to another every few hours was a battle, one that I kept losing.
I should only take a half pill next time—that’s what I told myself after taking the last one.
When the pain came back with a vengeance, I convinced myself I needed a full dose, only to make another broken promise even before the medicine hit my lips. My hands felt a little better, and I was able to grip my carbine without gritting my teeth in the process. My ankle still hurt pretty badly, but only between meds.
I recovered the GARMR from the back of the rig and activated it. I watched it wake up and then instantly lock onto my face, slewing its complex sensors to get the best angle. What I used to think was creepy I now strangely looked forward to seeing.
I limped over to the building being slowly overtaken by unchecked plant life and stood in front. A fountain was positioned in the middle between the restrooms, filled with black water and tadpoles. A smashed-out vending machine was near the main office. Nothing remained inside. I had no way of knowing for certain, but I thought this place had been closed to the public even long before the undead walked.
Armed with this new confidence, I went door-to-door, lightly knocking and checking the locks. The men’s room was shut down tight but the women’s restroom door and the main office door were only closed, not locked. After verifying the unlocked restroom was clear, I opened the office slowly, enduring a long, low creak like that in a horror movie. Inside the office were a desk, a candle, a chair, and a propane lantern. A Georgia road atlas lay open on the desk.
I closed the door on the GARMR and went in for a closer look. After ensuring I was alone, I pulled up the chair. It was dim, so I shook the small green propane tank attached to the lamp. Half full. I ignited the propane and watched as the egg-shaped mantles glowed to life. They had holes in them as if chewed on by some unseen moth, but they were serviceable and filled the room with a bright glow.
I heard the GARMR’s movement servos flex, causing me to shoot up from the desk, knocking the chair back against the wall as I bolted for the door. I opened it and jabbed the bayonet through.
The GARMR was only tracking a plastic shopping bag as it floated past the derelict fountain like a post-apocalyptic tumbleweed. I watched the unnatural white shape catch the breeze and expand on the wind, reminding me of the white-hot mantles that burned inside the office. With my heart rate spiked, sending blood to my extremities, my ankle again made me reach for my cargo pocket, but I resisted. I didn’t know how long my resolve would last, but it was a start.
Recovering the chair, I sat back down at the desk and examined the atlas. As it was covered in Sharpie notes, I could clearly see the current position indicated by the shape of a diamond.
The rest area.
There were notes written in small letters all around the page, and circles indicating places that the owner had checked and found something, or found wanting.
I traced the bold black letters and markings with a dirty index finger, absorbing every word as if I’d written it myself.
I looked south and west at the horizon and saw the great fireball. The radio said they’d do it and they sure as hell did. The sky lit up for a moment and it looked as if an ungodly sunrise flashed from unnatural direction. The ground shook under foot and after a few minutes the wind shifted and the owl in the tree outside ended his sonata. My dog is whimpering under the desk, licking my hand.
I followed the writings clockwise around the map where the owner had used the city callouts on the edge for scratch paper, never intending to visit them.
I’ve shot all game within a mile of the abandoned rest area and harvested the edible plant life to the point of local extinction. I’m out of food. Had to eat Roy to make it through the winter. Wasn’t an easy choice, but I did it like a man. My dad would have been proud. I . . . took him round back, and looked him in the eyes, and said I was sorry before putting him down. I used what I could and buried the rest after saying a few words.
I scooted the wooden chair back away from the desk and shined my flashlight under; was what I’d read inside the pages of a five-year-old edition of a Georgia road atlas reality or fiction? Spent .22 casings and Roy’s dog hair stuck in the grout lines of the office floor told me that the author had spent time here. I could almost see Roy curled up under the table, a loyal companion to a master who did what had to be done.
My gaunt frame tells me that I’ll die soon if I don’t eat. Ten miles through the fields to the Anderson farm. I wouldn’t make it one mile with those things out there. I saw one running on the road yesterday, leading a few slower ones north. It came from the direction of the flash, I just knew it. Just after the nukes, a congressman broadcasting on the AM band warned about radiation and what it did to these things. They’re out there.
I turned to the next page and was greeted with madness on paper.
Lizards, lichen, leather. Ate my shoes, ate my belt. Thinking of eating one of them, they are a plenty on the road just down the ramp. It’s getting close to that time, the flu? I don’t know, hunger is enough without it. Think I’ll lock myself in the men’s room, but not before I finish what I need to say. Fall is upon us all in the north. I used my last bit of caloric energy, a Hail Mary attempt for food inside abandoned cars. I still remember them in the beginning. Their hazard lights worked for days. One of them blinked and blinked, for nearly a week through the trees.
I found a case of water, but I had a whole closet full of that.
JUST NO GODDAMNED FOOD!!!
Unless you count the stick of Wrigley’s I’d rationed for three days.
I dream of Roy, but not in the way I should.
• • •
To me, this atlas felt cursed. It represented a true darkness and desperation, and was not to be read again. I closed it and tossed it across the table, hoping I’d never become the same kind of author. Become desperate, become small.
This was not a place I wanted to stay at for too long. It had been looted thoroughly by Roy’s master, the man with no name. The one who lay dead inside the locked men’s room.
I doused the propane lantern and left it on the desk near the atlas and departed the office for fear I’d be the one to take my place at the wooden desk with the GARMR curled underneath to keep me warm.
Opening the office door, I was greeted by the machine as it tirelessly stood watch.
The GARMR had seen better days since rolling off whatever experimental production line from which it had been born. Not even the fresh Krylon paint job I’d given it could hide its battle scars; I could see that its frame was dented, scratched, and shot from untold badland adventures with its former master. Still it functioned with the same boring reliability as a bicycle or calculator.
I could depend on it.
The GARMR would do what it was programmed to do, independent of self-preservation or petty emotions. It had already pulled me out of the shit back in Tallahassee and knee-checked undead that came for me before that. I patted its titanium head and hobbled back to the rig, away from the office that once housed Roy and his doomed master. The thought of breaking into the men’s room for a look didn’t even cross my mind.
Emptying my pack onto the bed in the back of the rig, I took stock of my stores, realizing that I was running out of food. I repacked my kit after setting aside a dehydrated meal. I’d already eaten everything heavy along the way, lightening my load down to the dried stores. Rain began to spatter the windshield up front, so I gathered up two empty plastic bottles and sat them outside under the roof of the rest area building where runoff was already starting to drip.
My hands were definitely healing. It still hurt to grab door handles or pull up my pants, but it was starting to become bearable to wash my hands.
After collecting enough water from the bottles outside, I poured some into my canteen cup and lit off the Sterno fuel, heating it to a near boil before adding the food. I didn’t have the luxury of boiling it for fifteen minutes to ensure the food was properly cooked. I’d run out of cooking fuel too fast if I did that.
Lasagna wasn’t supposed to be crunchy, but it was far better than eating my belt and shoes.
The sun disappeared below the trees. “What a horrible night to have a curse,” I said aloud. I looked outside my window and saw the GARMR folded into itself, dormant, just outside the door. It was my night-light.
I pulled the road atlas from the back of the seat and began to chart my way north, away from here. As my dirt-crusted fingernail traced a potential path, I came to the realization of what I was doing and placed the atlas back in the pocket on the back of the seat. I wasn’t ready to become Roy’s master.
The sun was gone, but some of its light still cast dark shadows over the rest area. Large pin oak trees loomed over the rig, providing shade in the day and a cavelike atmosphere at night.
Hearing the snap of a twig outside through the cracked window, I turned on my NOD and scanned both sides of the rig, seeing nothing. It wasn’t worth deploying the GARMR. It might get stuck or make too much noise and draw more in from the highway.
Checking my watch, I was still half an hour until my dosage time but snapped one of the pills in half, justifying that it would be fine taking a half dose a little early. My ankle hurt but didn’t throb constantly without medication anymore—a good sign. I was starting to heal. Excellent, because I needed to find more food, and an easy mark at that. I couldn’t go rappelling into a Walmart skylight in my condition. It had to be easy.
Painstakingly, I climbed into the front of the cab. I turned the rig’s electrical system on and rolled through the AM band. Nothing. I thought I could hear a British accent somewhere in the static, but it was probably my imagination. The mind sometimes heard what it wanted to hear. With a half-full stomach and painkillers coursing through my blood, I started to embrace the possibility of sleep.
• • •
At about 0500, I secured the GARMR and started the engine. I clumsily turned the rig around to get back on the highway the same way I had come in. The rest area exit was blocked off with construction barricades, and I didn’t want to hurt my ankle more while trying to move them out of the way. I crunched over a corpse that lay rotting in the road before turning a sharp right to get back on the highway.
As previously noted, the road was clear to Macon. I only had to stop the rig once to attach a cable and pull some wreckage apart to pass through. I wouldn’t take any chances with driving the rig on the grassy shoulder with how much rain has been falling. Getting stuck out there with a hurt leg was so much more than a death sentence.
Before leaving this morning, I took one pill from the codeine stash and intentionally put the rest in the GARMR’s saddlebags outside the truck. As I rolled out, I took half a pill. I wanted to take the other half too, but I was making my first attempt at reversing my pain med dependency. Approaching Macon, I nearly stopped the rig, limped out, and recovered the rest of the meds but forced myself to rein in those feelings. It didn’t hurt that bad. It didn’t hurt that bad. It doesn’t hurt that bad.
It was simple: If I left the truck to get the meds, I was addicted.
If I stayed behind the wheel and kept on mission, I wasn’t.
On the outskirts of Macon I turned off the road, following a sign:
ZERO MOUNTAIN COLD STORAGE 4 mi
The only reason for cold storage was preservation, and preservation meant food. Probably none of it was unspoiled, but food meant food trucks, which meant diesel. Goliath’s tanks needed a drink. Unlike a big-box grocery store, the masses of panicked people at the start of all this wouldn’t have rushed a place like Zero Mountain. Hopefully.
I cruised down the road, edging around a jackknifed rig and down a street cleverly named Zero Avenue. The opening to the facility was set into a hillside with trucks parked near rows of loading bays. I parked Goliath among the dozens of other rigs and shut off the engine. I climbed down, ignoring the urge to get to the meds in Checkers’ saddlebags.
Listening for any signs of undead, I got down on the ground and looked under and around the hundreds of tires belonging to the Zero Mountain trucks scattered about the parking lot. I picked up a piece of concrete and chucked it far into the group of trucks. It impacted metal with a loud bang and returned a few echoes back and forth between the hillside and me. I again got down to the ground, watching for any movement.
There. A pair of legs started a slow shuffle from behind the tractor toward the rear of the trailer. Then another rounded the hood of a red truck. Both figures moved to where they heard the noise.
These bastards had the uncanny ability to know where sound came from.
I painfully fixed my bayonet and met the first creature with its point. The second was dispatched in the same way. After double-checking the area, I walked around from truck to truck, tapping on tanks with my rifle. There was more than enough fuel to fill Goliath’s tanks. I went back, led the GARMR to the ground, and started the rig. I pulled in close to the trucks I’d identified as having fuel and began siphoning tank to tank until Goliath overflowed with diesel. I filled my spare fuel cans with as much as I could hold and stowed them away for a rainy day, which was any minute now, judging by the clouds gathering overhead.
Two trucks were backed up into the loading bays. I limped over to them with the GARMR in tow, clicking its feet on the cracked pavement. At the bays, I grabbed onto the rubber bumper, wincing a littl
e at the stiffness of my hands, and slowly climbed up onto the platform. I reconfigured my carbine with its silencer and flipped on the light to look through the crack between the truck and the bay opening. It was relatively high off the ground and a tight squeeze to get inside the bay. I could hear the thunder rumble and reverberate off the hillside.
I climbed back down and parked Goliath near the bays, careful not to smash the GARMR in the process. It seemed to have basic self-preservation programming: It moved out of my way when I backed into my spot. Now inside the loading bays, I was safe off the ground and I could get to Goliath by jumping from one truck to the other if I absolutely had to, although my ankle ached at the thought of it.
Two massive rolling shutter doors with chain pulleys separated the bays from the interior of Zero Mountain. After checking the immediate area for anything useful, I began to tug the chain, sending the metal doors up a few inches.
A hundred bony hands reached in unison through the opening at the bottom, gripping the door, pulling up with all the power left in their decaying muscles and tendons.
I couldn’t let go of the chain; the creatures were actually nearly bringing me off the ground. I held on to the rusted heavy-gauge chain, hanging by all my weight, and still they managed to pull me off the ground in a bid to raise the shutters and get to me.
I gave the chain one last pull before letting go and exploding out of the bay like a scared animal. I could hear the door roll upward behind me, so I hurried as fast as my ankle would allow for the box-shaped opening ahead. Pallet jacks and banding rolls crashed to the floor, giving chase to the warm body in flight. Squeezing through the opening, I had to go slow or risk hurting my foot in the descent. As my leg touched the ground outside, one of the creatures appeared through the bay opening. I covered my face as it fell toward me.