by Tim Yingling
He nodded.
“Do I have to worry about you right now?”
He shook his head.
“Then let’s find this food and get this over with.”
“Aren’t we going to the gas station?”
“There is no gas station, Tom. I said there was to see which one you wanted to go to first.”
“But why?”
I didn’t answer him just yet. I wanted in the house. The knob wouldn’t turn, so I reared back and kicked the door open. It didn’t take much. The only lock the door had was the manufactured lock. The frame splintered and popped off easily. I answered as I walked into the house.
“Because, I knew you were pissed at me, possibly to the point of wanting to kill me. So, I made up the story of seeing the gas station, an obvious place of food. Get it yet?”
“No, not really.”
I turned to him. “If you would have picked the place where the food was most likely to be found, I knew you would want me dead by sending me to a dangerous place. If you picked this place, then I knew you wanted to die.”
“And since I didn’t pick either one?”
I shrugged. “That meant you didn’t want me to die. You were conflicted, which meant that I needed to help you. Why didn’t you just say something when we were at Adam and Bev’s house?”
“Because they were good people. They don’t need to get into the shit we are in.”
I left it at that. We checked the house, coming up with a loaf of bread, some deli meat, and some cheese. We took none of it. The items had been sitting in the house for over a month. There was no way they were good.
The kitchen was a bust. The pantry, on the other hand, was a gold mine. Vienna Sausages, vegetables, and Spam all came in handy. Well, the first two did. I had no clue on what to do with Spam, even after living in Hawaii for four years.
We got enough items to sustain us for the night. The next thing we looked for was bedding. That was easy to find. We went to the second floor and found the linen closet in a matter of seconds. Tom took it upon himself to check the rest of the second floor. I wished he didn’t.
In the master bedroom laid a husband and wife. The husband was on the right side of the bed with the wife on the left. His left hand was intertwined with her right at their sides. The opposite hands for both laid across their bodies. Their foreheads touched. A sly smile surfaced at some time on the wife’s face. Tom searched the left side of the bed while I searched the right for what both of us thought would be there. The bottle of pills told the whole story. That was all Tom found on that side. I found something else that would come in handy a little further down the line. I slipped it into my pocket without Tom seeing.
Tom’s eyes asked me one question. One that I had to have an answer to. I didn’t know if it was going to be the right answer.
“We need to burn the house.”
Tom nodded. “Yeah. It would take too long to bury them.”
We wasted no time. It took us about twelve minutes to get the items we had back to the church. Rice did have questions for us, but we didn’t answer any of them. We told her to stay put, and no matter what, do not open the door to whatever you hear unless it was us. I took a few of our flammable items before Tom and I high tailed it back to the house.
It wasn’t too hard to set it ablaze. The house was made of wood. If it was one of the other houses along the road we were traveling on, then we would have been in a spot of trouble with the brick. We didn’t put any of the lighter fluid on the second floor; the first floor sufficed. After we set the lighter fluid, Tom went out back to the shed to find some gasoline. And it was a definite good thing he did.
Not only did he come back with the gas, but he was bringing a bag full of something. He gave me the bag then went about pouring the gas out to the road. I looked hesitantly into the bag. It was filled with canned goods. Mostly vegetables, but there was also some other things. Like some things we were going to be eating that night. It looked like enough to sustain the three of us for at least a week.
“I’m ready,” Tom yelled from the road.
I put the cans back into the bag I had taken out. The bottom of the bag almost busted out on me, but I managed to get my hands underneath it before that happened.
Once I reached Tom, he asked, “What happens if this reaches the wood line?”
I looked to the woods. They were a good hundred meters away. I know there was a chance of it happening, but the weather up to the last couple of days seemed to be wetter than usual. We just had to hope the fire wouldn’t go that far. Not to mention, I believed the fire would go straight up. There was not much of a wind going on. The little wind there was blew against our face.
I didn’t tell Tom any of this. All I said was, “We should be fine.”
He nodded, then lit the match in his hand. It dropped from his hand but seemed slower than usual. I watched it all the way to the ground. It took less than a second for the fire to start. The match bounced once off the ground, but there was no need for it. The entirety of the stick caught fire once the gas caught fire. My eyes followed the line of the blaze. It had to go through the grass and I came to realize that my suspensions about the wet grass were true. The fire didn’t go that far out from the line Tom had created. It hit the house fifteen seconds after the fire started. We could see the flames through the windows. I didn’t want to stick around to make sure the fire would continue to the second floor. I just imagined it would.
“I’m going back,” I said.
As I bent to pick up the grocery bag of canned goods Tom said, “I’ll catch up. There was a lot more food in the shed that I’m going to get.”
I only nodded and headed off. I believed he was lying, but I didn’t care. He was still going to come back; that’s what I cared about.
Some of you may look at what just transpired between the two of us as something that wouldn’t happen in real life. Then again, some of you may have never been in the military. Trust me when I say that. While in the military, it is better to put on a face than continuing to hold ill will toward someone. Tom may or may not still hate me. I don’t know. But he will fight with me; that much I do know. He knows there is strength in numbers. We may only have three, but that’s two more than he has.
I made it back to the church and gave the three knocks. It took Rice two minutes to get to the door. I figured, but didn’t ask, she was looking at the fire we set.
Before she could ask why we did it, I said, “It just needed to be done. We couldn’t bury the people inside, but we could give them a funeral.”
“I see,” she said. She let me walk pass but didn’t shut the door. “I also see some of the Horde members coming out of the woods.”
I turned to see what she was talking about. Sure enough, six were already out on the road heading toward the house. Another ten shambled out of the wood line within five seconds. The zombies were coming from the direction Stone was in. I hoped without hope that maybe they had found him and taken care of him.
That hope was quickly squashed. After I walked away from the door and told Rice to shut it, I heard the distinct sound of an assault rifle being fired. Then two more shots. After another ten seconds, a fourth shot was fired from farther away. No, Stone didn’t get caught by the sons-of-bitches. He managed to live to fight another day.
“Where’s Tom?” Rice asked as we moved to our canned dinner.
I took a Vienna sausage can and plucked them out with my fingers. With food in my mouth, I said, “There was more food back there. He’s getting it for us.”
Rice nodded. She was already sorting out the canned goods I brought with me.
I pointed to the rectory. “Any noise out of there?”
She turned to look at it. “No.”
“What about from below us?”
“No.”
“You think I’m making a mistake by not going out there to hunt Stone, aren’t you?”
She thought about this. After a minute of deep thought, she
said, “Yes I do. I think you need to get him off our backs before he comes in here, or wherever we are, with guns blazing. I know you don’t care for your life, but you have to care for our lives.”
“I do.”
“Then you need to go out and take care of Stone.”
I couldn’t answer her. It wasn’t because she had a point, which she did, but it was because Tom was the one to answer her.
“I told him that Stone wasn’t the one we need to worry about. Yes, he is dangerous, but he will wait until Sarge is alone. That won’t happen.” Tom stopped to get some food of his own after placing three backpacks on the floor. “Stone is not the problem. He wasn’t even the one who tortured me. I don’t know who the people are that tortured me, but Stone is actually the one who saved me.”
Rice looked from me to Tom and back to me. “I’m not going to leave you alone until we get to your family.”
“That won’t be necessary, Kate. When we break off, which we will, you will go to Pennsylvania while I go to Indiana. You don’t need to worry about me.”
“I still don’t like it.”
I looked at Tom. He wasn’t going to offer any help. “You don’t have to, but you will need to accept it.” I put my hand on her shoulder. Not the hand I was eating with. “I can handle Stone. He’s not who I’m worried about. These people who Tom was talking to while he got the food is who I’m worried about. I don’t know them, nor have I seen them following us. They are good at what they do.”
“You know I was talking to them and still didn’t do anything?” Tom asked.
I turned to him. “Yeah. Not to mention I was greatly outnumbered. Sure, I would have been able to take out some of them, but they would have gotten me. The fire we set saw to it that I wouldn’t be able to maneuver that easily.”
Tom stayed silent. Rice wept into her hands. As for me, I believed our talking for the night was over. Rice finished eating before lying down on one of the pews. Tom helped me barricade the two entrances to the church. Neither one were that well-guarded, but they would do for the time being. We found a piece of good, sturdy wood to put through the handles of the front door. The back door was a little harder to secure. The lock on it was broken. Tom was the one who came up with the idea of using some rope to tie around the knob and then secure on a water pipe in the stairwell. He went to sleep right after that. His rifle was by his side.
I stayed up a lot later than the two of them. There was one thing I wanted to do once they were fast asleep. I figured they were out like lights right off the bat, but I waited an hour just to be sure. I spent the hour walking the church, looking out the windows.
More zombies came out of the woods in that hour. I didn’t exactly count, but I would have to say the number was greater than a hundred. I knew exactly where they were going. They were like moths. But I still didn’t know what was attracting them. The fire killed them. Granted, there was a bright light in the dark sky, there wasn’t much of a smell that would attract them even if they could smell, and there was no noise that I knew of. That left me with the thought it was the light. They had to of known it was supposed to be dark out. The light at this hour was not something ordinary. And with that knowledge, it kind of scared me.
If they have cognitive thoughts like that, what else could they do? What else will they come up with? Will they become organized and fight back against nomads and, I am only assuming that there are these, colonies of humans?
These are questions that need to be answered. They just won’t be answered tonight.
Looking out the window, I did think I could answer one. They were marching together in a group toward the fire. Not exactly organized, but moving as a single unit. More or less.
I couldn’t see what happened to them after they hit the curve before the house. They may have just kept walking, or they could have walked into the fire and burned to death. I can tell you this right now: in the morning I will not go to check on that question. I could care less. They walked in the opposite direction we were heading.
And that was what I did for the hour after Tom and Rice fell asleep. I had to physically pull myself away from the windows. I was mesmerized by the zombies surrounding the church. I wanted to do one thing and one thing only before I laid down myself.
I pulled the square object out of my pocket. It was an old flip phone. One that looked like it was created over ten years ago. There wasn’t even a camera on it. I wasn’t expecting it to work, or even have minutes on it for me to make my call. It had been just over a month since the first attack happened. I don’t think the original owner would have paid his bill to keep the phone operational. All the same, I pushed the power button.
And the phone came to life.
It took a minute for the phone to fully power up, but when it did there was a full battery and full service. For the service, I know that didn’t mean the phone would call out, or even text. It just meant there was service in the area.
There was only one number I had memorized. The only number that mattered to me. Every other number I needed to call was programmed into my phone so I didn’t need to memorize them. But Hannah’s number was one that I wanted to know.
I plugged the numbers in as fast as I could and hit the send button. The phone dialed out. It rang once before going to voicemail. Her phone was dead. But she recorded a message for me. I didn’t even have to leave a message.
The message, with the sound of my wife’s voice, said, “Today is June 5th. You need to hurry. The town is in trouble.”
I pulled the phone away from my ear and looked it. After she was done talking it didn’t even offer me the chance to leave a message.
The town is in trouble? I have no idea what that means, but it can’t be good. I shouldn’t say that I have no idea. I knew Pilgrim would be in trouble. The urgency in her voice wasn’t helpful. She made it seem the town didn’t fall when the zombies first came, but now it was under attack. Well, half a month ago it was.
Now, more than ever, I have to get home as fast as I can. No more writing. Going to get some good sleep and then beat feet as best I can in the morning.
* * * *
Tuesday, 28 June 2016
Damascus, VA
488 Miles to Pilgrim, Indiana (182 Miles to Commerce, WV)
I’m actually writing this part ten days after my last journal entry, but I am naming the significant events on the day of. For instance, the events that happened on the 28th of June I am writing about here. There are events that happened between the 28th of June and the 4th of July (which is the day I am writing this one), but I want to break them down so as not to confuse you on what happened.
From the 25th to the 28th nothing extreme happened. That’s not to say that nothing happened. We did come into contact with other travelers. They had places to get to, just like we did. On occasion, we would join up with others if they were on the same path as us. But it never lasted.
There was one time I finally did what I wanted to do the day we met Adam and Beverly. We passed another golf course. This one was a simple par three course. One that I could get through in about an hour and a half if I played all eighteen holes. Instead, I only played the front nine. I wasn’t going to take up too much time.
Another time, this one right before we got back on Route 321 (we had to get off it in South Carolina to save some time) we decided to take a dip in a lake. This was in North Carolina. The lake we jumped in was refreshing from walking in the constant heat of the June sun. We wished for the weather to go back to the rainy season a month before, but we would take the swim.
All said, we only spent about an hour swimming and I only spent about forty-five minutes playing golf. Kate tried to take a couple of swings with some clubs we found in the clubhouse, but I told her to give up after the fifth swing. It wasn’t in a mean manner, it was just that we needed to get going. I didn’t have the time to teach her how to properly swing.
Tom started to loosen up. There were more than a couple of times he could have
taken off to find someplace to stay, but he didn’t. I believed it was because he knew he had a better chance with me than he did with whoever was pulling his strings. On the third night after we left the church (the day before the shit really hit the fan for us the first time) I asked him when he planned on leaving.
“I haven’t found any place that caught my eye,” he said to me.
We were staying in a hayloft in a barn off the side of the road. It wasn’t too bad. The loft wasn’t even that hot, surprisingly. It was as if when the sun started to go down, an internal cooler hit the loft. The dinner was the same as we have been having.
“I call bullshit on that one, Tom,” I said to him.
“Why?”
I looked to Kate. She lowered her head. She knew better than to get into this one.
“Because there were more than enough times with the people we came across for you to go off with. Even some of the people who pulled us into their houses and fed us. You could have stayed with them. They seemed to be pretty well protected, and you could have offered them more services than what they had. So what’s the deal? Why didn’t you stop when you had the chances?”
Tom looked to Kate to make sure she wouldn’t interrupt. She still wouldn’t.
“I was afraid to stop.”
“Why?”
“Do you really have to ask? You have been protecting me for the last year and a half. Even though you know I mean to turn on you eventually you still stick with me. That’s not going to change what will happen in the long run, but it just means that I want to stay with someone who I know will keep me alive.”
I didn’t need to say anything after that. Yes, I did know he would turn on me eventually. I did want to get him away from me before that happened, but I also wanted to keep him around to make sure he was going to survive. Kate wouldn’t turn on me even if she had a gun to her head. She owed me her life. I’m not trying to be conceded here, but she told me that several times during our walking.
The next day (which is the 28th) we started out like normal. Our walking was going faster. We did come across several people, all going in the opposite direction. I would look to Tom every time we passed somebody or talked to them. He would shake his head and keep heading north. I was beginning to believe he wasn’t staying with me because I have been protecting him, but because he was leading someone toward us. Why these people would wait so long to capture us is beyond me. If I had to guess, and I don’t think I would be that far off on this one, they were waiting for us to be dog ass tired to the point where we wouldn’t be able to fight back.