Population density and all.
When the old man was right, he was right.
And he was often right.
‘Going faster won’t help.’
She took her foot completely off the accelerator and coasted. She was still going faster down the pavement than the vehicle’s headlights could illuminate – a risk for sure - but no one else was on the roads.
Not these roads.
Not outside the safe zone.
Not after dark.
Way out here, the only thing she could hit was perhaps a small family of rabbits, or a coyote hunting by moonlight, possibly even an antelope…or maybe a small child.
A small child!
Hope screamed at the top of her lungs as she slammed on her brakes, the car lurching to a stop. She hit it for sure.
Was it alive or undead?
It?
Was she really using the pronoun it to describe someone’s child?
Had it come to that?
Had she come to that?
And did it really matter if ‘it’ was alive or undead?
More than anyone, Hope knew all too well where the world was heading. She just did the kid a favor. The child was free now.
But what if it wasn’t dead?
FUCK! Using ‘it’ again.
Tears of frustration began rolling down her face. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. She was prepared. She was hardened.
‘Not hard enough!’
This time, instead of the comfort of her Cooper, it was her brother Che’s voice.
Hope began to cry.
She cried first for her family. She was privy to some things in the early days because of her position in Homeland Security, and she knew enough to know how it must have ended for them. She couldn’t be sure, no one really could, but they were in the city and not very many people in the city made it out.
Mostly though, she cried for herself.
She cried for the child she was carrying inside of her.
A child that was definitely not part of the plan.
Hope let out a loud scream of frustration.
How could she be so stupid?
Another scream.
Life was so unfair!
‘If life was fair, there would be no wheelchairs.’
Cooper’s voice brought her back. He hated wheelchairs. Amelia ended up in one after the accident.
Hope found some old fast food napkins in the glove box and wiped the tears from her face. It was getting dark, and she needed to seek shelter. What was she going to do though, just knock at a stranger’s door? Would that even work? These weren’t times to be letting strangers into your house.
Most strangers these days had guns. Those that didn’t have guns, wanted them. Perhaps if she was in uniform she could talk her way into someone’s house. But she didn’t even have time to put on a jacket…
She was lucky she had time to grab the gold…
Che would never let her hear the end of it if she had forgotten the gold. Hope looked down and was reassured by the presence of the small blue canvas bank bag in the cup-holder.
Hope took a deep breath and evaluated her situation.
She was lost.
At night!
Hope closed her eyes and took another deep breath.
‘In the dark they’re nice and slow…’
At least she had that going for her. They were slower at night. If she did run out of fuel before she made it to the farm, at least she stood a decent chance. During the day, well, that’s a different story. They sped up during the day. And some of those things were fast. Really fast.
Technically, they were not cold-blooded. She had read that much in the daily briefings before they stopped coming. Cold-blooded was the term that was used in some of the earlier television news reports to explain it, and it just sort of stuck.
Was that really a train whistle? Of course it was.
The Air Force.
Thank you Governor John Evans!
In 1867, Governor John Evans, together with other local business leaders, incorporated the Denver Pacific Railway and Telegraph Company to connect a struggling Denver economy to the booming city of Cheyenne to the north. The line followed the South Platte River from lower downtown Denver to Greeley, then north to Cheyenne. Cooper had told her that story probably a million times when she was little. Every time they crossed the tracks, he would ask he if she knew the story of Governor John Evans. The lines were being used now by the Air Force to move fuel to F.E. Warren Air Force Base from the National Guard fuel depots at Denver International Airports. Cheyenne was still a safe zone.
More importantly, the farm was not far from the tracks.
That, too, was part of plan.
How could she be so stupid?
Calm down.
Train tracks rarely move. Buildings, streets, even entire towns rise and fall with the fortunes and with time. But train tracks rarely move. And even when the physical tracks do move, the scars left on the landscape by the track foundation is unmistakable. Even the blindest of the blind could follow them home. Or anyone lost.
Thanks Cooper.
Hope watched the train roll by in the distance. It was reassuring for her to see another living being this far out. She reached down and put her finger on the switch.
What could it hurt? And the conductor of the train might like some reassurance that on his journey into the darkness that he too was not alone.
Hope flipped the switch.
The light-bar on top of the Tahoe erupted a pool of red and blue light, punctuated by brilliant white strobes that seemed random in their application, but actually were pulsing to a very calculated beat that traffic lights could detect in order to adjust their signals accordingly to help speed the vehicle’s response through traffic.
Hope flipped another switch, and a loud, wailing siren filled the night air.
The lights in the cab of the train engine came on, and the conductor opened his window, waving his arm in greeting. The train’s whistle let out a massive blast. Then another.
It would have been a surreal sight on a normal night, a United States Marshal Service transport vehicle and a fuel train, each blaring their respective greetings into the night, but on a night like this, somehow it just seemed normal to both of them.
She used to find the sound of train whistles annoying. Always waking her up from her sleep at the farm; now though, it was a comfort that she allowed herself to fully soak in. She could feel the sound waves in the crisp spring air.
Movement!
Hope pulled her arm inside quickly and rolled up the window, hitting both the light and siren switches and dousing the Tahoe, herself, and whatever just moved out there back into darkness and silence.
The train rumbled by…
Hope squeezed her eyes shut and slowly counted.
One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi, four Mississippi.
Her eyes needed time to adjust back to the darkness.
How could she be so stupid?
Hope opened her eyes, but she could still see nothing. Nothing but darkness, nothing but the stars, nothing at all…
Wait!
Hope adjusted her rear view mirror.
The kid she hit was nowhere to be seen. The smear on the road was there, but it wasn’t.
Calling the kid ‘it’ didn’t bother her anymore.
Hope turned her headlights on and put the Tahoe in gear. As she made a wide turn on the road, her lights illuminated the now-turned thing. The small boy, skin peeled back from his face from his encounter with the pavement, was slowly wobbling back and forth while trying to take his first steps. It reminded Hope of a baby deer she had once come across on a hike.
No it didn’t, it reminded her of her cousin Tommy.
Looked exactly like him, but Tommy was seventeen now; this kid was maybe ten. Hope turned the wheel to avoid hitting him. She could have hit him, but somehow she didn’t think that was really fair. Besides, what damage
could one more of those things do anyway?
‘Don’t play in the road!’ This time it wasn’t Coopers voice she heard, it was her mother’s.
She started to laugh as she remembered the countless times her mother warned her against playing in the street. Her mother was right after all.
She wondered what a kid was doing out here all alone. This wasn’t exactly the middle of nowhere, but it certainly was the road to it.
The low fuel light came on and brought her back into focus.
Not a problem.
The river was just ahead, and she now knew exactly where she was.
Hope still had plenty of fuel when she turned into the long driveway that led up to the farm. The lights were on. No surprise there. Most of the grid had been down for a few days, but Cooper had the farm on solar before solar was cool. She could not remember a time that they had ever been without power.
A large, partial-spherical plastic greenhouse came into view as she pulled the Tahoe into her ‘designated spot’ in front of the orchard. She parked in plain sight, but out of the way, because the bus was gone, so that meant someone was out and about. She also knew that Che would complain about where she parked, out in the open and all, but secrecy was for before all of this, certainly not now.
And then it dawned on her.
It was only Tuesday.
She wasn’t late at all.
She was one day early.
Not part of the plan, but better to be early than late. Now Che won’t ever know she got lost because she will be here waiting for him when he arrives. Hope began walking to the farmhouse then froze in her tracks.
Movement by the barn! It was not supposed to be like this. Hope quickened her pace and almost ran up the stairs, tossing open the screen door and quickly reaching for the doorknob.
The front door was locked. Strange.
“Cooper!”
Hope began to knock with some enthusiasm as her mind started racing.
One day early, what difference could it make?
What difference could it make?
“Cooper!”
Something was behind her in the darkness.
Hope turned to check her back just as the front door swung open.
A rush of warm air from inside the house and an onslaught of memories from childhood, high school, college, the police academy, the war…it was almost as if her entire life was flashing before her eyes.
Last thought.
The baby, what about the baby?
Whiteness; then nothing.
Hope was dead.
Two hundred years ago…
Thursday
It was a dark, thunderous night in April, and the clock was striking thirteen. The hands of the clock were stuck at 11:55 by some unseen warp in the clock face, but time, unable to stand still, continued ticking endlessly away as the bells cried out into the spring night that something was overdue.
*William was watching out the landing window with great interest. His binoculars focused on the scene unfolding only a short distance before him. He had expected dumping the body outside to attract a few of the creatures, but not this many, not this fast, and especially not so many children. Not all the way out here. Where were all the children coming from?
William watched with more than mild interest at their behavior. It wasn’t his job to analyze them, but it was his part of his job to stay alive, and the more he knew, the easier that might be. They were all feeding side by side right now; the adults and the children, the males and females, but it was still early. There was still plenty of food. He knew from past experiences that once they stripped all the meat off the bones, well, then things could get a bit nasty.
Contrary to the popular films of the time, the creatures did not go for the brains; at least not at first. The guts and lower intestines were where they liked to start.
William privately liked to call them ‘shit-eaters’; but that was easy for an orphan like him.
'Shit-eaters' never really caught on with the general populace. With Joe Public, there were ‘walkers’ and ‘runners.’
He had used the phrase once at work, and he could tell by the reaction from his co-workers that it was still a bit too early in the timeline. For someone not battle-hardened to the world, he supposed it would be easier to call recently deceased Grandma a ‘walker’ even if she was a shit-eater.
At any rate, whatever you called them, at least the walkers were easy to deal with. Nice and slow, just lop their heads off. Headshots didn’t seem to work at all, another thing the movies always got wrong, but taking the head off a walker completely ended it plain and simple. The runners, however, were a little more complicated.
The runners were fast. Not superhuman fast, but fast. Faster than you want something chasing you, that’s for sure. Those you could take down with a headshot, and they would stay down…but not for long. In hours, or in some cases minutes, they would rise again as walkers. But a headshot would usually buy you enough time to get away.
Quite frankly, no one understood why there was a difference between walkers and runners, but there were multiple un-official theories. William had his own, too.
William turned from the window. He had had enough watching them. It didn't take the kids long to strip the meat off that girl. He wondered for a moment what she tasted like.
William was spotless and well groomed. His morning shower and shaving ritual was something he had grown to look forward to over the years, and his appearance was something that he took much pride in. Even now. Even with everything going on, William still strived to be professional.
Professional.
But that had not always been the case. When William was younger, he often let his emotions interfere with his better judgment. But as William was fond of saying, that was then, and this is now. People grow, people change. At least some people do.
Rarely did he let his personal emotions come into play anymore. It was just a job, and he had resolved to try and not get involved on a personal level. Which was sometimes a lot harder than it sounds when every day you made decisions on who got to live, and who had to die.
Today was one of those days.
It already had been, several times already, and the night was still young.
William checked his pocket watch and then picked up his radio.
“Echo Three to Echo Seven, do you copy?”
Nothing but static.
“Echo Three to Echo Seven, do you copy?”
William knew he would get no response. He didn’t even have a partner out there in the dark anyway. But talking to one, even fictional, made him feel just a bit better and helped pass the time.
He set the radio down and picked up another apple from the bowl. At least the house was well stocked with food. If he had to, he could hole up here for quite some time and be ok. But that would not be necessary. This was a simple assignment, and he wouldn’t be here long. Not long at all. He expected Dr. Cooper to return home within the hour. Then they could leave.
There was just enough time for one last security sweep of the house. Dr. Cooper had done a decent job securing the house for someone who was not trained to do so. Every door and window except the front door was boarded up, and the front door was thick oak, and a hammer and nails lie nearby. Obviously Dr. Cooper planned to secure that entrance as soon as he returned. That would not be needed now. Altogether, it was not a bad job for an old man. Still, another check of the perimeter would not hurt anything.
William was taking a large bite out of his apple and heading down the foyer stairs when he stopped mid-stride. Peripheral vision is a funny thing sometimes. Walk by something a hundred times and never notice. Walk by one more time and, well…
There he was.
Son of a bitch.
William froze in his tracks and simply stared at the photo for a few moments. It was a face he hadn’t seen for some time. Could it really be him? Could he really be sure? William reached out and took the photo off the wall to examine it clo
ser. It wasn’t long before his eyes confirmed what his gut already knew to be true.
The nausea started to build up in his stomach. He could fight it back.
The memories were another story. The memories, he could do nothing about. The memories, which had haunted him off and on over the years on countless sleepless nights, began to flood back inside his head, building pressure until he felt like his head was going to explode.
The distinctive sound of helicopter rotors approaching from the south, and for a moment he hoped it was real, but he knew it was happening in his head, and there was nothing he could do.
He was going back to Vietnam that night, whether he liked it or not.
It was a dark and stormy night;
*Mary loved spring storms. She loved the lightning, and she especially loved the thunder. It was a perfect night. She would time it with a thunder-clap, and her neighbors would never know a thing. Not that they would even care, they had their own problems to deal with, but Mary was considerate of others, and would continue being so until the very end.
Up until recently, Mary had considered herself one of the lucky ones. She was smart, had her duct tape and plastic sheeting long before the Emergency Broadcast Service announced that there was some sort of biological terrorist attack happening. While her neighbors wasted precious time running off to the store to find what was needed, she had managed to seal herself completely from the outside world. Many of her neighbors never came back. Those that did came back empty handed.
She had considered herself lucky.
Until the fever.
It was just the flu, she kept telling herself, nothing to worry about. But now she was worried. This morning she coughed up blood. She was infected, and she knew it. She wondered how long she had left. It didn’t help that almost every video clip she had seen on the Internet was different. Which made sense, since every person’s immune system would fight differently. But every clip always ended the same way, and so far she had lasted longer than most, but there was no sense putting it off any longer.
Mary picked up the revolver from the bedside table. A Smith and Wesson 357. It had been her father’s service revolver, and she had had it ever since his funeral. He was buried in uniform, and Mary had slipped it from his holster and put it in her purse in the final moments before the coffin lid was closed. She thought her father would consider it a waste to be buried with his weapon, and so she had asked her stepmother for it, but she had said no.
Genesis Page 2