Paths

by David DeSimone

  “And you don’t think it’s going to happen to us?”

  He shook his head no. “I think we would have already felt it by now.”

  She countered with a “Yeah, but…”

  He hated yeah-buts.

  “maybe the force field around us-”

  “Electromagnetic-”

  “whatever, maybe this field is only delaying the inevitable.”

  “I Maybe think that’s what’s happening. I think we were protected through and through.”

  “How do you know?”

  Because, he thought, we were spared for a reason. Those words almost rolled out of his mouth but didn’t. For the first time he was admitting to himself the possibility of, what, divine interaction?

  His internal dialog continued:

  Ridiculous.

  Absurd.

  But was it?

  Absolutely.

  Then why did you of think it? Why did you almost blurt it out?

  Groping for an answer, his face turning as red as his wife’s sunburnt face, “Um…I just do.”

  He added, “Anyway, there’s no point worrying about it. Just be glad we’re okay now, and take one day at a time. That’s all I can say.”

  He buckled up. “Should we do this?” he said.

  “What?”

  “Find somewhere we can get food, medicine, in a not so populated area.”

  She was reluctant to leave, just getting used to the quiet calm. Though now that he had mentioned food...

  Her stomach growled.

  Also, his cuts needed attention.

  Her face could use some aloe cream, as well. Parts of it itched. Formerly an indication of healing, she wasn’t so sure anymore. She had grown nervous to touch her face fearing that once she started she wouldn’t stop until her fingers scraped bone.

  She reached back, pulled her seatbelt forward and fastened herself in with a click.

  “Let’s go.”

  He started the truck. It took a few turns but it kicked in.

  “Wait!” she said undoing her seat belt.

  Drew took his hand off the shift lever.

  She reached behind and raised the rifle, pointing the tip away from where it could do serious harm. Eva opened the glove box and showed Drew a box of shells.

  Stunned, his eyes shot wide open.

  “We should learn how to use this,” she said.

  “So you knew bullets were in there?”

  “I did.”

  “How long?”

  “What difference does it make?”

  Before he could answer, she said, “Roll down the window.”

  He did.

  She took the rifle and pointed the barrel out the window, examined the loading chamber, turning the stock this way and that.

  “I think we can manage this. Not so scary after having it for a while.”

  “What, one day?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  He did. Amid so much violence and chaos, an hour felt like a month.

  You didn’t have to be genius to know how to load a rifle, just careful. Theirs was a bolt-action rifle with a scope.

  Gingerly, Eva pulled a metal knob - the bolt - down and back releasing a component known as a breech.

  Drew observed from an appreciable distance, back pressing against the driver-side door.

  With the chamber exposed, she was able to look inside, saw a round already loaded. From the box she procured a single round and slipped it into the chamber. It would not go in. Eva studied the chamber more carefully, looking for a space she might have missed, found none. Then turned the rifle to the underside of the stock. She noticed a metal lever of some kind. She gave it a tug. The lever snapped open.

  Inside she discovered more rounds arranged like sardines packed tightly in a can. Here’s where the bullets go in.

  Delicately, Eva slipped the round inside, pushing with her forefinger until it locked in place with a satisfying snap.

  She closed and clipped the metal lever back in place, turned the rifle over, closed the breech - locked and loaded.

  How to Load a Bolt-Action Rifle 101 took about 15 minutes to learn. Whether that was above or below benchmark standards didn’t matter. She taught herself how to do it, and would not forget.

  “Now all we need is practice,” Eva said with a perky smile.

  Unnerved that she took so quickly to the weapon, he said, “I take back every negative thing I have ever said to you.”

  She mustered a small laugh.

  7

  Future confrontations were inevitable. Knowing this seemed to diminish dread rather than intensify it. In its place was a sense of necessity driven by basic survival needs:

  To kill out of self-defense when necessary.

  To find food and water when necessary.

  To kill for food when necessary.

  Find shelter, medicine, and clothing when necessary.

  Check. This would be their new mantra.

  In order to necessitate these and other requirements, the Fairwoods had to somehow flick the compassion switch inside their hearts to OFF. Drew believed the last eighteen hours have conditioned him to be able to do this. And he had little doubt Eva could do it too, since her impressive demonstration with handling a crowbar and a rifle. In fact, the rifle gave her one up on him.

  Exit 5A, the turnoff onto Warwick, was coming up. Being in no hurry to confront zombies, Drew had the truck coasting at a steady 35 mph.

  The window was back up, the rifle resting once more in the back seat.

  “Where do you think they were heading?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “It was incredible. You should have seen it.”

  “Tell me.”

  “It was like a mass migration or something. Like they were being led somewhere.”

  “Or the blind leading the blind,” he suggested.

  “What - are you saying they had no purpose? That they were just wandering?”

  “Their minds are gone, except for the most primitive functioning. We’ve already found that out the hard way. So how can they have purpose? I think it’s just herd behavior. A reflex. One sees another moving in a direction, one follows.”

  “Monkey see, monkey do?”

  “Right,” he said.

  “And it catches on, like a domino effect.”

  “Yes. No purpose. Just instinct.”

  “Well, they have to end up somewhere,” she said.

  He shrugged. “As long as they’re far away from us, I don’t care where they go.”

  “Which brings up a good point,” she said.

  He gave her a puzzled look.

  “Where are we going? Any ideas?”

  “I’m still thinking,” he replied.

  Two miles to go.

  They were ready - or as ready as they’ll ever be.

  One mile.

  Five hundred feet. The Exit 5A reminder sign passed over their heads.

  “Should I put on the directional?” He said with a smirk.

  8

  With the truck curving and cresting up the turnoff ramp, the trees on either side gave way to another main street. It was familiar site. They had taken this road yesterday en route to the hospital where Eva had her MRI.

  They reached the intersection, braked. Drew surveyed Main Street in both directions.

  Empty.

  Save for a compact car, upturned, smoldering alongside the curb, a lifeless arm jutting out of the collapsed driver-side window, brown smoke, now almost a misty vapor, swirling into the sky, all was quiet.

  What was once a busy throughway was now a ghost town.

  He turned the wheel to the right, and pointed the truck due west. He brought the truck down Main Street to a crawl.

  It would be a tour from hell. Drew could almost hear distorted carnival music playing maddeningly loud over the entire town with Satan himself as D.J.

  9

  More smoke rose thinly into the air.

>   More crumpled cars littered Main Street.

  People who had survived collisions did not escape the great turning. Strapped inside for almost a day thrashing about, their strength had since gone out, efforts reduced to feeble pats against the windshields, screams and growls became weak, throaty utterances.

  Approaching the intersection of Main and Banks Street, small fires licked the sides of a building.

  A van had plowed through the display window of a boutique-clothing store and now sat crookedly half-in, half-out covered in a heap of glass. Spring wardrobes lay twisted and gnarled across its tires.

  The scene was disastrous but eerily deserted, like a movie set that had wrapped for the day.

  “I don’t like this,” Eva said.

  Eyes alert, hands slick on the wheel, Drew weaved the truck slowly through wreckage and bodies.

  Her mounting dread was catchy. He was feeling jittery. Another word from her and he might shout. Not out of anger, but simply because his nerves were on edge.

  “Do you think we should turn around, take our chances on Ninety-Five instead?” she asked.

  Shaking his head, “Ninety-Five’s going to be clogged,” he said. “We won’t get past a hundred feet.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “No, I’m not. But judging by how bad this looks, I don’t think we should take that risk.”

  Eva was satisfied.

  “Let’s try for Route Seven,” he suggested. “The traffic is normally light, so I’m hoping there won’t be much left on the road. We can take it north toward the mountains.”

  “Okay.”

  “What about the scrapes on your neck?” she asked.

  “What about them?”

  “They don’t look so good. We’ve got to find a place that has antibiotics.”

  “We’ll find a place.”

  “I hope s-”

  Her mouth suddenly went slack.

  Shock swept over Drew’s face, as well: A corpse sitting against the left front wheel of a green SUV. His clothing: denim jeans, brown workman’s boots and corduroy jacket for big and tall - and a wide, sturdy frame identified the corpse as a man. You might think he was enjoying a little time under the sun, catching a few rays, relaxing, having a beer, if not for the flesh on his head being mostly torn off. A red, smiling skull and eyeballs tilted to one side. The soft tissue - skin, fat, muscle and hair - that identified him as Stan or Joe or Bill, or whomever, now lay in a shredded gelatinous heap on his lap. Blood drenched his shirt and pooled under the seat of his pants. He had scraped and scratched at his own flesh before succumbing to blood loss.

  A closer look showed he wasn’t dead. His eyes rolled toward the pickup and tracked it as it drove past. The mutilated man raised his arms, tried to lift his head as well, but no longer had connective tissue to make that happen. His eyes rolled toward the sky, as if this might help lift his head. He tried to scream at the truck, but the effort only made him shake, causing some of the chunky pile on his lap to roll off. Eventually, he rolled to his side, the rest of the pile that was once his head and face covering spilled over with a wet splat.

  Now he was a corpse.

  Gruesome as it was, Drew did not panic. The Ford pickup continued past Banks Street at a cautiously slow pace.

  Main Street looked like the aftermath of a death squad massacre. So many bodies of men, women, and children, all exhibiting signs of self-mutilation, either dead or dying, scattered across the thoroughfare made hope of clear passage for the truck impossible.

  Though always on alert for a surprise attack, sleep and a morning of relative calm had reset him. Gone for the moment was the benefit of adrenaline to push him through necessary violence. To compensate for this, Drew tried to focus on numbing his emotions, imagining the bodies as nothing more than objects, no different than the twisted metal and shattered glass littering the streets.

  They were dead after all. And if not, they would be soon.

  Eva held her gaze on her feet, a hand shielding her eyes from the sights ahead, trying her own brand of numbing.

  A thud gave Drew and Eva a start. They turned toward the driver-side window and Drew brought the truck to a full stop.

  He surveyed the wasteland that used to be downtown Warwick. As he did, a young male zombie, twenty-ish, had sidled up to the door from somewhere behind, slapping the window with a bloodstained hand. Thin with short red hair and a full, well-trimmed beard, he might have fit into the hipster crowd that began to flourish in the area before the world ended. Now, with so much raw tissue hanging off his exposed ribcage and skull, the only scene fitting for him was an Emergency Room, or a triage tent.

  Drew took his foot off the brake.

  Hipster man followed after. He was impressively fast, keeping up with the truck for several feet, requiring Drew to punch the gas, not caring of the bodies he was running over.

  As the truck bounced heavily over the dead, Eva cried in revulsion.

  She tucked her legs to her chest, her arms wrapping tightly around her shins. There she continued to cry in horror, disgust and pity.

  The young hipster zombie fell back at last.

  “We’re almost through, Eva!” he shouted. “The road’s clearer up ahead!”

  He added, “Hang on! We’re almost there!”

  He sighed then whispered, “Almost there.”

  A single bead of sweat clung to the tip of his nose. Another bounce of the truck and it let go.

  “Can’t you go faster!” she cried.

  “No. It’s sliding around too much already!”

  To her left a pot-bellied zombie staggered out of a convenience store. Eva turned to watch him.

  One fisted hand outstretched, while the other tearing off a piece of dangling flesh from his cheek.

  His fist came open and something plump and coated with slimy fluid fell out. Where the zipper of his trousers had been was now a gushing red hole. Eva’s stomach hitched triggering a gag reflex. Acrid bile shot up to the back of her tongue. She swallowed it back down.

  More zombies began appearing from storefronts and car wrecks, every one of them tearing away flesh from bone.

  A voice called to her, distant, as though from a long tunnel.

  “Eva!”

  She turned her horror stricken eyes to him.

  “Don’t look at them!” Drew said. “Cover your eyes. Okay?”

  “Okay,” she said and closed her eyes.

  10

  By the time they finally reached the clearing at the end of Main Street, the gray Ford pickup had become a red Ford pickup. Blood had spattered across the grille and quarter panels on both sides in brisk red streaks of varying thickness; its chrome-plated wheels caked with fresh gore. The truck had been turned into a gristly abstract painting.

  Call it Study in Blood and Gore, no. 1.

  Eva reached into the back seats and brought up the rifle, came upon a tiny switch behind the trigger with two options identified by the letters, S for Safe and F for Firable.

  She moved the switch to F.

  “Eva-”

  “Yes?”

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’ll tell you when I find out myself.”

  “Not funny.”

  She jabbed an impatient finger for him to keep his eyes on the road.

  She studied the rifle with a mix of excitement, fear and fascination. Here was an instrument that could be either protector or destroyer, depending on the side of the barrel you faced, or on the soul that bears the weapon. It was an incredible responsibility.

  “Well?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” Eva whispered. “We’re good to go.”

  11

  The small town gave way to suburban sprawl. Quaint wood and brick shops became deep-set chain store, restaurants, car dealerships, Lego block office buildings, and a gas station.

  More pileups lined either side of the road creating a zigzag of smoldering destruction, but unlike Downtown Warwick, fewer corpses littered the streets. In this
part of town, it was parking lots that bore the heaviest concentration of the dead and dying.

  Although peril still loomed outside the truck’s cabin, the zombies seemed to be weakening.

  As the Ford snaked through the wreckage like serum coursing through the veins of a diseased body, the dead lay scattered across the grade. This was becoming the norm while the living grew more and more scarce.

  Cresting a rise, a couple of zombies stepped into the truck’s path.

  Drew didn’t hesitate.

  He did the opposite. He stomped down on the gas pedal knocking any remaining life out of the zombies without batting an eye. Eva had her gun. Drew had his truck.

  Along the shoulders of the street the zombies stood screaming, tearing handfuls of clothing and flesh. Without as many corpses lying around, Drew was able to drive the Ford at a faster clip. Numb and expressionless, Eva clutched the rifle like a soldier at attention until a slightly overweight, middle-aged woman lumbered into the street.

  As the truck rolled closer, the woman stopped near Eva’s window, and pulled her exposed breasts apart - muscle, tendons, networks of veins and arteries, pulsing and throbbing. Turning herself inside out, the woman made the mysteries of the inner workings of a living, breathing body available for all to see.

  Eva did not appreciate the favor. Her screams shook the cab, making Drew’s eardrums ring. She went limp for a moment almost fainting. Had it not been for the seatbelt Eva would have cracked her head on the dashboard.

  12

  They seemed to come out of every crack in the earth, rising, spilling onto the street, trailing after the truck, falling dead.

  A man who might have once had olive complexion before turning ashen stumbled on the shoulder of the road and fell to his knees, his brown UPS uniform stained with dirt and blood. He was bearing a package for delivery requiring both hands to hold it. Upon closer inspection Drew realized what the package was. The parcel delivery was the delivery guy’s own guts. Unable to deliver his package by hand, the UPS guy threw it at the truck, striking the driver-side door with a juicy, heavy splat.