She seconded that.
“I closed the door just as they reached me. I was that close to being torn to pieces… After a couple of tries I got the truck started and struck the car in front of me. I didn’t know how I did it, but I found myself waking up with an airbag in my face and zombies pounding on all sides. Luckily the truck was still running.
“I backed the truck off of the car, swung it around the islands… The only way I could think of getting to you was to pull the truck up alongside our car. But I wanted to make sure I had everything cleared long enough to get you in here. That’s why I backed the truck as far back as Pratt Street, to get a good head start.”
A frown formed on his face. He suddenly looked away, remembering.
Eva opened her mouth to ask what was wrong when he spoke. “When I, you know, drove up to get you?”
Again, as he had done when describing his violent encounter with the maniac, Drew used discretion to cover the true horrors of his experience and actions. Although they were actions born out of necessity, his choice of words (“when I drove up to get you” instead of “when I plowed through them”) was very telling of a man in quiet battle with his conscience.
“Yes,” she said, “go on.”
“I think...there were...children in the crowd.”
There was no thinking about it. Eva knew for sure that at least one child had been amongst the crowd, the little blonde boy who earlier had been so riveted by Eva. She couldn’t recall if the girls she assumed were his sisters had managed to get out of the car too. Eva didn’t think her husband needed the extra baggage of child casualties.
No,” she lied. “No children.”
“But I thought-”
“No. I remember there being women, petite women. You mistook them for children. That’s all.”
He stared at her hopefully.
Wanting desperately to believe her, he simply nodded and left it at that. Eva recalled what he said just a few minutes earlier. ‘From that point on I didn’t care what it took to stay alive,’ he had declared. ‘I’d do anything to save myself and to save you. Anything to anyone.’
So would I, she decided. So would I.
7
Stars peppered the sky from horizon to horizon. To the left of the driver-side loomed dense woodland as black as pitch. Absent was the song of nocturnal insects and animals. In its place hung a preternatural silence as absolute and heavy as the inside of a tomb. Soft, orange fireglow reaching ominously over the hilltops and the streetlights dotted the foothills across the scrubland.
Eva broke the silence. “Drew?”
“Hmh?”
“I need power. Can you start the engine?”
Drew hesitated, and then obediently turned the key. The dashboard lights once again flickered grudgingly on and the alarm pinged a couple of notes.
Eva turned on the radio and what should have been numbers showed up instead as - surprise, surprise - flickering random dots and dashes. Eva played with the volume a little and white noise came out of the speakers. When she pulled her hand away, the digital numbers came together to form 93.5 FM. The hiss of white noise stayed unchanged.
She waited for Drew to say something. He only shrugged, So?
“This is WRVE,” she said.
“Okay,” he said blankly.
“My favorite soft-rock station. I listen to it all the time in the car. We should be hearing music now. If not music then at least voices, or the Emergency Broadcast System… Something! But there’s nothing. Just fuzz.”
“You could be interfering-”
“No. It’s not that. If I keep my hand away from the dial like now, we should be getting something, like before when we got news about the anomaly. That was after we were exposed to whatever it was from the MRI.”
“So what do you think it means?” he asked.
“I’m not sure I really want to say it.”
She turned to another station. More hissing. Another station. Hiss.
“See? We should be picking up at least one station.”
Drew tried his hand at the tuner, pulling his hand away following each turn, and allowed seconds to listen. The results were the same: the hiss of white noise.
“We’re actually locking onto stations,” she said. “The problem is no one is left to cover the airwaves.”
“We’re alone,” he said.
Eva sighed. She felt a stab of grief for everyone who was gone: her mother, cousins, aunts, uncles, friends, and Candace, with whom she would never have the chance to make amends.
“Are you okay?” he asked not knowing what else to say, but wanting to say something.
“I’m fine,” she said, but her heavy breaths said otherwise. She closed her eyes, pinched the bridge of her nose as if in the throes of a headache. “I just need a minute, that’s all.”
“Sure.” Drew turned off the radio and powered down the truck. As if he read her mind he said, “should we try calling someone, your parents, or my mom, maybe?”
“I don’t have my phone,” she said. “I left it in the other car.”
“We can try mine,” he said producing his smartphone from the back pocket of his jeans. He pushed a top button to turn on the phone but nothing happened.
“We should try what you tried with your phone,” he said. “Use an extension. Can you check in back for a crowbar?”
Eva turned, leaned toward the back seats. Only the largest pickup trucks, like this F-150, came with back seats, but even those were not very spacious.
She searched around in the darkness until she came upon something metallic, the ambient light barely reflecting off its long, tubular surface. She reached over and ran her fingers delicately over its smooth, cold surface, gazing in a kind of hypnotic fascination. She knew at once what it was. She recalled glimpsing it through her rearview mirror, not wanting to believe what her eyes were telling her; its long barrel cradled in the maniac’s hands. It was the very rifle the maniac had used to fire upon the Acura and had blown out one of its rear taillights.
Drew craned back to have a look and recoiled. “Shit!”
“It was lying on the floor,” she said.
“Jesus!”
“Have you ever held one of these before?”
Drew shook his head - no, of course not!
“We should probably teach ourselves how to use it,” she suggested.
He nodded then added, “But we should use something else to make the call.”
“We don’t have anything else,” she said.
“Not in the truck we don’t.” He opened the door. “I’ll check the cab for something.”
She lifted the rifle, held it for a brief moment over the seats and felt the full weight of the weapon in her hands. It was both frightening and exhilarating. Handling the gun as if it was a ticking time bomb, Eva brought it to the front making sure the barrel always pointed toward the back seats. She examined the stock and loading chamber.
Drew climbed out of the truck. Dashboard lights flashed along with that annoying chiming of the alarm.
“Close the door, please,” she almost shouted.
“Sorry.” He closed the door.
As he strode to the tailgate, Eva carefully placed the rifle across the back seats and settled back and waited.
Feeling anxious, partly due to the rifle and partly due to her husband leaving her alone, Eva fidgeted with her clothes, and then leaned forward to see what was in the glove compartment. She opened it.
What she saw should have given her a start, but having already seen the rifle, she only blinked.
Among the many scraps of paper, including old receipts and gum wrappers, ballpoint pens with missing caps, and crumpled cigarette boxes, sat two cartons of twenty five-count, twelve-gauge rifle shells.
“Hello.”
One box still had its shrink-wrap untouched; the other box had its top flap torn half open.
Eva bet that one of its bullets found its way to the taillight of the Acura, and that another bull
et, which was probably chambered in the shotgun, was meant for one of them.
About to close the glove compartment, she paused noticing a square object stuffed in the back corner. Pushing the litter aside and reaching in, she pulled out a pair of binoculars. Nice to take to a concert when you’re sitting in a back row, not so nice when you use them to stalk human prey. She tossed the binocs back where she found them, reeling with disgust.
She closed the glove compartment.
8
Before he decided to lower the truck’s tailgate, Drew pondered the mysteries of what might lay inside. Human trophies crossed his mind, like game collected in hunts. The hardtop covering the flatbed was not cheap like vinyl covers, but made of solid fiberglass; the sick fuck spared no expense for his terror-on-wheels. Better to hide the bodies, Drew supposed, and the smell. The hardtop cover actually turned out be an advantage for the Fairwoods. It kept zombies from falling into the truck bed.
A few more seconds of deliberation and Drew decided what the fuck. If there were bodies in there, so be it. It might have been a big deal in the old world, but not anymore. For the past three hours or so he had been relentlessly bombarded by death and destruction, and will likely go on for an indeterminate amount of time, possibly the rest of his life. What were a few more corpses to him?
Even before the Apocalypse, death had clung to his mind like a dark companion. Since his father’s death from cancer, Drew often pictured himself dead like his father, lying under packed earth in a cold, dark coffin, while the world above, the world of the living, moved on. He had decided he wanted to be cremated.
Times have definitely changed. What would become of his body no longer mattered, as long as it’s not one of them, one of those mindless things. A zombie.
He pushed the lock latch on the underside of the hardtop cover and flipped the panel back. The bed was empty. He lowered the tailgate, found the lid hiding the spare, opened it. Atop the spare lay an X shaped tire iron. He picked it up and closed the hardtop cover.
As he headed back to the cab he became aware of the unusual silence. It permeated the air like a toxic cloud. It felt like a thousands eyes were on him. He looked over his shoulder, saw nothing but dark woods.
He opened the driver side door and leaned in. The keys dangled from the ignition slot.
“I got this.” He showed her the tire iron.
“Okay. It’s shorter than what I used, but I think it should work.”
He moved away from the seat cushion allowing her to place his phone on it. Stepping back he extended the tire iron over the phone pressing the HOME button.
The phone came on and lit up.
Drew sent a voice command to dial Eva’s mother. The phone instantly returned with a NO SIGNAL message. He tried again and got the same message.
“Well,” he said dismally. “That’s that.” He picked up the phone meaning to slip it back into his pocket. She stopped him. “Wait a minute! Isn’t this the strip where the psycho guy in the red cap chased us?”
“Yes.”
“And didn’t we try calling nine-one-one on this road but wasn’t able to get through?”
“It’s why I think the psycho chose it as his hunting ground, yes.”
“Well, maybe we’re in that dead zone.”
He gave her a doubtful look.
“What?” she asked.
“We’re closer to town here than where we were before. We should be getting a signal.”
“You don’t know that for sure.”
“No. I guess I don’t.”
“So why don’t we try again when we get off the road. I don’t plan on staying here forever.”
“Okay,” he said putting the phone back into his back pocket. “We’ll do that. But I want to ask you something.”
“What?”
“Had anyone called us to see if we’re okay? I didn’t see any messages when the phone came on.”
“No,” she whispered. “No messages.”
Staring out the window, her eyes began to well up.
He wanted to console her but didn’t know how, so he left Eva to her own thoughts. He pushed the tire iron under the driver-side seat and climbed in. He breathed in the cool night air. “I don’t know if I’m killing myself by doing this, but the air feels good.”
She nodded.
He added, “Almost as if everything was okay.”
“Except for the quiet. Have you noticed that?”
“Yes.”
“What do you think happened to all the insects? Will they ever come back?”
“I don’t know,” he said shaking his head.
“You should shut the door,” she said indicating the dome light. “We don’t want to attract unwanted attention.”
He closed the door.
9
“I have to pee.”
She had a wide-eyed look of guilt on her face, cute, like a child caught with her hand in a cookie jar before supper.
“Okay,” he muttered nervously not liking her being outside alone.
Those were the first words spoken in ten minutes. It occurred to Drew they might be the only two people left in the world if not the universe who can still speak at all, and when they go, so too would spoken language.
Forever.
Whatever recorded language stored in print or electronically would fall victim to natural erosion within just a few centuries after that. Drew and Eva Fairwood were at the end of 200,000 thousand years of humanity’s history.
“What?” she said, head cocked.
“Nothing.”
Eva looked across the service road at the brush along the shoulder of the road, saw where she wanted to go and opened the door. She started to get out. “Wait,” Drew said, stopping her.
He reached into the back seat and came up with the rifle.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m coming with you,” he said.
“What? No!”
“I want to. It’ll make me feel better.”
“Drew, I know you want to protect me and I appreciate that, but since you have no prior experience at using one of those, I suggest you put it back and let me do my business alone. We could practice using it tomorrow, but for now I won’t be comfortable knowing that you’re standing near me holding that cannon...I won’t be able to go!” She added, “And besides, it might not even be loaded.”
“Well, let’s see if he has any.”
“No. Just put it back.”
He lowered the rifle. She said, “I’ll leave the door open. Just keep an eye out for them.”
“What if I spot one while you’re, you know...”
“Then I’ll piss on them.”
Although that made him chuckle, he was uncomfortable with her decision to go alone. But, he respected her wishes and placed the rifle on the back seats. She hopped out of the truck.
Her legs felt weak and wobbly from sitting so long. She leaned against the side of the truck. She closed her eyes and tilted her head back enjoying the breeze. She could have fallen asleep right there on the road if not for the inconvenience of fearing for her life.
There was a knock on the windshield. She turned and saw Drew throwing up his hands gesturing what’s taking you so long?
“Okay,” she said, annoyed, and pushed away from the pickup truck.
She strode across the service road. She stopped, surveyed the bottom of the ditch and after some time staring into the darkness, she had a change of plan.
She decided to squat right there at the edge of the roadside. She turned gesturing for him to turn around - no peeking! His silhouette waved back and turned away.
Eva unzipped her pants and did her business. Suddenly, as she stood up ready to leave, she was struck by a flood of emotion and began to weep.
As she wiped her tears away, Eva winced from the sting of her facial burns.
On her way back to the pickup truck, she heard a sound. It was the sound of feet dragging in the undergrowth and it was coming from somewhere
in the forest.
She froze, listened for more sounds.
The footfalls drew nearer.
She steeled herself to run, her legs no longer aching. The truck sat a good twenty feet away from her.
A deer stepped out of the gloom, clumsily finishing its descent down the slope and clambered up onto the shoulder of the road. As it crossed in front of Eva, she noticed something wrong with its gait. It moved on shaky legs, swaying like a drunkard. It was an obvious sign of neurological damage, similar in appearance to mad cow’s disease, though it was no virus that afflicted this animal. Eva remained still until the deer passed. Even for such a docile creature, you can never be too sure what they’ll do if provoked, not in this new world.
The deer stumbled down the roadside ditch, hitting the bottom with a padded thud. There was a violent thrashing and then the animal reappearing on the other side and vanished in the scrub, where it was likely to die.
“Eva?”
She looked past the open passenger door at the silhouette behind the wheel.
“You okay?” asked the silhouette.
“Yes. I’m okay.”
As Eva climbed back into the truck Drew said, “Were you crying?”
She fell back against the seat. “No,” she said, head turned down. “I’m fine.”
He was about to say something else but wisely kept his peace.
She assured him once again she was fine. “I had a little thing out there, that’s all. But it’s over now.”
“Ok.”
“I wasn’t expecting it,” she said. “It just hit me. I was minding my own business and then, for whatever reason, it just popped in my mind about what you said, about everybody being gone, and it made me think about my family, my...” she shook her fists, “the people I’ve gotten to know personally, friends, colleagues, my career, my life. Gone. All gone! It hit me like a truck, and I couldn’t hold back.”
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