by Adair, Bobby
“You think you’ll turn into one of them?”
He shrugged. “Maybe. I don’t know. The longer I go without being a White, the more I’m sure I won’t turn into a knucklehead cannibal. What I don’t know is if I’ll turn, and not even know it.”
We walked a bit more before I admitted, “That worries me, too.”
“Dude.” Murphy pointed toward a house a short way off the road.
“What?”
“See that F-350 parked in that carport over there?”
“What about it?” I asked.
“I’m tired of walking. Let’s go see if we can get it started.”
Chapter 43
Murphy drove the truck into a convenience store parking lot.
I asked, “Do you think this is a good idea?”
With a big helping of false confidence, he said, “It’s my idea.”
“Yeah but…” I decided not to push it.
Murphy laughed.
“Whatever.”
Murphy stopped the truck, swung his door open, and jumped out, raising his rifle to his shoulder and pointing it at the convenience store’s interior.
I left my door open as I got out, figuring that if we needed to leave in a hurry, the seconds I’d save in reopening it might make a difference.
With my machete ready to do its gruesome business, I walked to the front of the store and stepped through one of the wall-sized broken windows, looking for anything that might be alive inside.
Murphy stepped through the window, panning back and forth with his rifle.
I hollered, “Anybody home?”
An animal scampered through debris at the back of the store.
We waited for the sound to stop. Again, I called, “Anybody home?”
Nobody.
Murphy walked toward the cash register.
I went to the end of a long shelving unit to search the other end of the store.
“If you see any of that purple Gatorade,” Murphy reminded me.
“Yeah, I know.” I shuffled through the broken glass, empty plastic bottles, wrappers, and aluminum cans, ripped rather than popped open. I turned over large pieces of cardboard packages, looking for anything intact. “Looks like plenty of little critters have been in here eating whatever the Whites didn’t take.”
I peeked over a tall shelf to get a view of the refrigerator cases and got a nose full of a smell that I’d caught lingering in the air the moment I stepped past the broken glass. The floor was layered with the remains of people who were mostly intact skeletons in shredded clothing, with lumps of rotting flesh.
I counted skulls, nudging away debris to get a view of any piece of bone that might have been a living person’s cranium.
Four. No. Five. A couple were kids.
The two kid-sized skulls were sitting near one another under a spinning display rack, cockeyed at the ends of their spinal columns. I leaned closer and wished I hadn’t. Each skull had a small perfectly round hole on one side and a missing chunk on the other.
Kicking around in the debris revealed a revolver, partially shiny, partially rusty, resting in what was left of a big skeleton’s hand.
Quitters.
I stopped and stared some more. I felt like an asshole. Could I label what I assumed was a family? Maybe some of them were infected? Maybe they were all normal, but trapped in the store. Maybe the father or mother, whichever one held the gun, had given their children a merciful death.
But the family hadn’t been fed on by the infected. If so, the skeletons wouldn’t have been relatively intact. The bones would have been scattered. That’s just the way it was with the infected. No, these people had been eaten by rats or other small animals. The parents’ choice to take the easy way out had been a hasty and wrong decision.
I shook my head again and stood up. No need to dwell on the evidence of despair. That lay damn near anywhere I looked in my decaying world. Nothing good came from thinking about the past.
I looked over at Murphy’s end of the store. “Anything over there?”
Murphy waved some piece of something in the air. It clearly wasn’t food, a ticket, or anything recognizable.
“Whatever,” I muttered. “I’m going to look in the fridge.”
“Be careful.”
“Yes, Mom.” Looking back through the broken windows, I said, “Keep an eye outside while I’m in the fridge. I won’t be able to hear anything.”
“You got it, Boss.”
I glanced up and down at the empty, white wire shelves behind all of the glass refrigerator doors and had an optimistic moment. Perhaps the fridge had stayed closed up after the shelves had been ransacked. I swung one of the refrigerator case doors open and got a nose full of wet stink. I shouldn’t have been surprised. Nasty smells lurked everywhere.
I pushed on the white wire shelves in front of me. They rattled and resisted, but one by one, each fell back into the fridge.
Murphy called, “It would be less noisy if you went into the back and found the door.”
Already committed to my choice to do it the hard way, I said, “Is there anyone outside?”
“Not that I can see.”
Muttering again, I said, "Then it doesn't matter." I knocked the last shelf into the refrigerator unit and stepped through. The glass door swung to a close, and I saw dimly lit stacks of inventory against the back wall. “Son of a bitch.”
Three stacks of milk crates contained cartons, many of which were leaking. Some had exploded, probably due to gases created when the contents rotted in the late summer heat. Now they were growing greenish-brown slime mold all over the cases and down to the floor, where they puddled around a clogged floor drain. Worse, the surface squirmed, alive with maggots.
I squished through the slick dairy remnants on my way to get a closer look at what lay further along the back wall.
Luck!
Bottled and canned beer. Gatorade. Every kind of soft drink I could name, as well as fruit juices and energy drinks.
The Gatorade cases were stacked five high, each with a variety of unnaturally colored liquid in unnecessarily shapely bottles. The case on top had some of the weird purple ones that Murphy liked. I laid my machete across the top case and picked it up, feeling as I did, an intense vulnerability.
I’d disarmed myself.
I looked through the glass doors on the retail side of the refrigerator case and over the metal display shelves. Murphy was in the convenience store’s parking lot, standing near the truck, hands on his weapon, scanning slowly across the horizon.
I looked at the thick, insulated back door of the walk-in cooler. No doubt a stockroom lay on the other side, a room I hadn’t yet checked out. To walk into that room with two handfuls of Gatorade, rather than a ready machete, would be a mistake.
I hefted the case of drinks onto one of the wire shelves in the refrigerator, took my machete, and climbed out of the cooler the way I’d come in. From that side, I again picked up my case of Gatorade and hauled it outside.
“Purple?” Murphy asked looking back at me.
I nodded. “Fierce Grape. Nothing up the road?”
“Just us.” Murphy came over to me, cut the plastic wrapping on the case and pulled out a bottle of his favorite color.
I huffed and heaved the case into the truck’s cab.
Murphy unscrewed the cap and guzzled half the bottle down. “It’s better cold.”
Luxuries from a time gone by. I nodded and helped myself to a bottle of the neon green. I like the classics. “There’s plenty more of this in the cooler. Nobody ransacked that part of the store yet.”
“Any solid food?” Murphy asked.
“Some rotten sandwiches wrapped in plastic in the fridge. I didn’t check the stockroom. Did you find anything good behind the counter?”
Murphy reached into his pocket and half-pulled out a handful of brightly colored disposable lighters. He then reached into the truck’s cab and pulled out a roll of shiny lottery tickets. He showed them to
me with a big grin.
“What the fuck is that?”
“Scratch-offs.”
“Yeah, I can see that. Why do we need them?” I took another gulp of my Gatorade.
“Pick one.”
“What?”
“Pick one.”
“Why?”
“Man,” said Murphy. “Humor me. Just pick one.”
“Just take the first one on the roll.” I turned away and looked up and down the road.
“Don’t ruin my fun. Seriously. Pick one.”
I sighed loudly, turned and looked at the roll of tickets strung from Murphy’s hand down across an empty parking space. “Any ticket?”
“Any ticket,” Murphy confirmed.
I pointed to one, and then knelt down and put my finger on it. “This one?”
Murphy chuckled and pulled the tickets up into his hand. “This one?” he confirmed.
What the fuck did I care? I nodded, took another drink, and gazed up and down the road. “It always makes me nervous when I don’t see any Whites. It’s like I know they’re out there. When I can’t see them, I think they’re sneaking up on me.”
“We’ll see plenty soon enough.” Murphy tore the ticket away and let the rest of the roll drop to the ground. “You got a quarter?”
I laughed. “I can’t remember the last time I touched actual money.”
"You never know." Murphy took a magazine out of his vest, removed one bullet, and set the magazine on the hood of the truck. He started scratching the lottery ticket with the brass edge of the cartridge.
“What are you doing?”
“Just checking.”
“Checking what?” I asked. “You know you can’t redeem those things, right?” I looked around, as though showing Murphy for the first time that the world had changed.
Murphy laughed loudly enough that I felt the need to crouch as I looked around again. If any Whites happened to be napping nearby, they’d be awake now. “What’s so funny?”
Still laughing, Murphy said, “Nothing.” He stuffed the ticket into one of his pockets.
“What?” I asked. “Was it a winner?”
“Not saying.”
“What do you mean you’re not saying?” I was getting perturbed. “Why’d you have me pick a ticket and then scratch it off?”
“Just checking to see if you’re as lucky as I thought you were.”
I shook my head and turned to go back inside the convenience store. “I’m going to get a few more cases. I’ll check the stockroom, too, and see if I can find any potato chips or something. You,” I shook my head to emphasize my disappointment. “You just keep amusing yourself.”
When I was halfway to the back of the store, Murphy called, "Do you want to know if you won?"
“No,”
“C’mon man. You’ve got to be curious.”
With no conviction, I said, “Fine. Did I pick a winner?”
Murphy laughed again. “I’m not sayin’.”
“Jesus Christ.”
Chapter 44
I drove. Murphy rode shotgun for literally the very reason that term was invented in the first place—to keep the naughty people away from civilized traveling folks inside.
“Keep us going north,” I told him. He was the navigator, too.
Murphy looked around before laying his weapon across his lap. He unfolded the map. “How far north do you want to go before we head west to find them?”
“I don’t want to run into them from the side.” I scanned the field on both sides of the road while trying to keep my speed up. I didn’t believe the horde would move more than twenty miles in a day. A guess. With trying to keep themselves fed along the way, and with the Smart Ones probably knowing that driving the horde at too quick a pace would increase their mortality rate, they might move only five or ten miles in a day. Either way, when we came upon them, I wanted to approach from the northwest, on the off chance that if we had to run away, and if they chased, we’d all be moving in the direction I wanted them to go.
As it was, with the Whites last seen heading north, the next population center they came to—or former population center—would be Waco. They’d pass twenty or thirty miles to the east of Fort Hood.
“Again,” Murphy asked, “how far?”
“Let’s shoot for twenty or thirty miles,” I said. “Then we’ll cut west as much as we can, and see if we can pick up some sign of them.”
Murphy laughed. “I don’t think finding a sign of them will be the problem. What worries me is that we’ll round a curve in the road or come over some hill and see the whole damn horde in front of us.”
“Yeah.” I smiled. “That would be our luck. You know, we could do the same things our buddies in the silos did and find a water tower to climb. We’d get a pretty good view of at least five miles around, maybe ten.”
“The horde would be hard to miss,” said Murphy, “even at that distance.”
I slowed the pickup and drove through a ditch to avoid several burned-out cars in the road. “That would keep us from getting surprised by a mob too big for us to handle.”
"Stop at the top of this next hill," said Murphy. "If you don't see any Whites around. I'll climb on top of the cab and see if I can spot a water tower for us to climb.”
Chapter 45
I had to run over a trio of infected who were loping down the middle of the road. I don't know where they were going. I don't know why they didn't make any effort to get out of the way. They were a short distance down the road from a radio tower we were headed toward and they were jogging in that direction.
Better to exterminate them with the truck than to be surprised by them later.
Why not? The truck had the heavy steel brush guard and I didn’t think I was going fast enough to damage anything important.
When I drove the truck over the crest of a hill we found a radio tower standing next to a small, square building with a flat roof and concrete walls. A bundle of black cables ran out of the building and up the side of the tower. Around the building stood a chain link fence at a distance of about fifty feet on all four sides.
With no Whites around that we could see, I backed the truck into the fence and knocked it flat, quickly solving the problem of how we were going to get through it. I didn’t drive back so far that the pickup’s tires rolled onto the barbed wire that topped the fence, or any of the chain link fencing. I didn’t need a flat.
Murphy and I got out and walked around to give the tower a good look.
“How tall do you think it is?” he asked.
Looking from the base up the red and white painted framework reaching into the sky, I said, “Tall enough. I’ll either see the naked horde from up there or I’ll see the next water tower or silo that we’ll need to climb.”
"And if there are Whites on the way?" Murphy asked. "We've been lucky so far this morning, and that's starting to worry me."
“We’ll deal with them, like we always do.” Seeing that the ladder into the tower was blocked with a locked fence attached to the rungs, I walked around the small building with Murphy following behind. He was scanning across the tan-colored fields all around us. I was looking for a way to get onto the flat roof. Three runs of metal conduit attached to a wall and running from ground to roof turned out to be my path.
Without a word of what I was going to do, I wrapped my fingers around one of the pipes and used it for a ladder to pull myself onto the roof. It took only a few seconds. Looking down at Murphy, I asked, “How’s your hand?”
He flexed as he looked at his palm. “Still a little swollen, but I can use it just fine.”
“Can you make it up here?”
Murphy rolled his eyes, grabbed onto the conduits, and climbed to the roof beside me.
“You keep an eye out around us,” I told him. “I’ll go up.”
Murphy opened his mouth to protest, but we both knew it would be safer for me to go up than him.
“If you see any Whites,” I told him, “Shoot
‘em.”
"And if a bunch comes this way?"
I laughed. “I’ll see them a long time before you do.”
“Yeah,” said Murphy. “I suppose so.”
“Keep an eye on me as I’m going up,” I said. “I’ll take it slow and check for Whites in all directions. If I see any, I’ll point out the direction and call down how many.”
“And when you get too high to hear?”
“Won’t matter,” I told him. “If I’m so high that you can’t hear me, then the Whites I see will be so far away they won’t be able to get here before I get down.”
“Unless they’re close by,” Murphy argued.
“You’re not thinking, dude,” I told him. “For any that are close by, I’ll have told you about those before I get very high. Cool?”
Murphy pursed his lips and raised his rifle to his shoulder to scan the surrounding fields using the scope. “One more thing.”
“What’s that?”
“If I see any Whites, how ‘bout I just lay down so they don’t see me?” He grinned.
I rolled my eyes, climbed through the tower’s framework, got onto the ladder, and started up.
I don’t know how high up I was when I stopped and looked around. Maybe twenty feet, high enough to see the area around us, but not high enough to see much of anything Murphy and I hadn’t already seen from the roof of the little building below.
“Anything?” Murphy called.
“Nope.”
Up.
At fifty feet, I glanced around again. Nothing jumped out, so I pushed on.
The wind felt stronger and colder the higher I went. The horizon spread out farther in all directions.
With no intuition for height, and no way to know how far up the tower I’d gone, I slowed my ascent. I might have been a hundred feet or two hundred feet off the ground. The section of ladder stretching into the sky above could have been as long as the one below. As I stepped from rung to rung, looking up and down, I saw no difference. Maybe I was halfway up. Maybe it was impossible to tell from my perspective. Either way, I was high enough that the wind seemed to be blowing twice as hard as it did down on the ground. The guy-wires that Christmas treed down from the tower at different heights in different directions vibrated with Star Wars laser sounds that changed pitch with the speed of the wind. Despite all those guy-wires, the tower swayed enough to make me worry it might fall over or break somewhere along its length.