Red Death: A Post Apocalyptic Thriller

by Robinson, D. L.

  He didn’t go back up to the front door of the house, instead he went around to the covered door of the garage. With the turn of a latch on the garage door and a yank upward, he exposed a fully furnished mechanic’s shop, complete with a car raising piston on one side. It was non-electric, powered by a foot crank near the ground. On the other side of the garage, nestled into a corner, was a massive workbench surrounded by shelves and cabinets on every side.

  “Well, Meg, you uh, know what you did? Run over a piece of glass? Something else?”

  “No idea.”

  Jim walked over to a tool cabinet on the far edge of the garage. He opened a door on the cabinet to reveal several columns of drawers inside. He pulled one of the drawers halfway out, thumbing through tools and nails lying loose inside. He found what he was looking for and pulled it out, a long slender bar of metal with a curved sharp edge.

  He took the bike from Meg and flipped it over, letting it rest on its seat and handlebars. “Where you coming from? The city?”

  Meg nodded, “Yeah, I’m uh…not supposed to talk about it.”

  Jim laughed. “Manny’s a funny guy.” He unlatched the bar that held the front wheel in place and unscrewed it from the bike. When it was loose, he pulled the whole thing off and set it on the ground. “Mayor Greenwood says we need to start asking questions, but Manny disagrees. He ran against him last year, lost by a landslide. Manny thinks that if we just sit and wait, everything will just blow over. Thing is, it’s already blown over. Came from the south, went north, and it’ll blow back over again and again and again.”

  “How do you know?”

  Jim gave a small chuckle. “Cause we’re still here.”

  He grabbed the detached wheel with one hand and held his curved tool with the other. He used it to dig the inner tube of the tire out from under the wheel.

  “There’s your problem,” he said.

  “What?”

  “You’ve got a chunk of gravel stuck inside here. Probably been there for a while. Tore a hole in your tube. How long does the tire usually last, before it goes flat?”

  “I wouldn’t know. It’s my roommate’s bike.”

  “Oh, okay.” He didn’t ask where her roommate was. “I don’t have what you need, but I bet somebody around town has a tube that’ll work for your wheel size. It’s getting late, you hungry?”

  “No, I-uh-“

  “Come on.” He smiled reassuringly. “You look pretty hungry. I’ll cook up some supper, no worries.”

  “Sure. Okay.”

  They entered the house through a door in the back of the garage. The interior of the house took Meg a little aback. It was clean and well furnished. A single hallway was adorned with a dozen family pictures, some of individuals standing for school portraits, a few older black and white photographs hung in expensive frames, and others showed a group of three: a skinny mom, grizzly haired dad, and little freckled kid with bright blue eyes. The hallway led to a kitchen and living room put into one, the backdoor was half a step steps from the dining table, a circular piece of furniture carved from a single piece of redwood.

  “Coffee?” He opened up a cupboard and pulled out two mugs, setting them on the counter. Meg nodded, took a seat at the table.

  “Parent’s house,” he explained. “Left me enough to pay the taxes off and keep the business running.”

  “It’s nice.”

  “Thanks.” He reached down to a low cupboard and pulled out a saucepan and a boiler. “You like spaghetti?” She shrugged, nodded.

  He began to work on the meal, filling pans with water, getting tomato mix ready from the pantry. Meg sat still, her shoulders slouched, and no words passed between them for several minutes. She realized there was something caught in that room with them, a tenseness that neither would face. She wondered just how much he knew about everything that was happening.

  “So…where you planning on sleeping tonight?” he asked.

  “Sorry?”

  “You’re not planning on leaving before it gets dark? There’s maybe two hours of sunlight left. I’m not gonna find a tube for you that fast. People in town are probably already shutting themselves in.”

  She hadn’t considered it, “I uh-“

  “If you want, you can stay here,” he said quickly. “My parent’s room is still set up.”

  “Yeah, okay,” she said, regretting the words as soon as they came out. The offer had caught her off guard. Up to that moment, Meg had forgotten who and where she was. She’d gotten caught up in the rest of it. She wasn’t as safe as she felt, here with this stranger, and she shouldn’t, of all things, go to sleep in his house, in the middle of nowhere, in a nowhere town. But what other choice did she have?

  His head bobbed slightly as he poured a handful of dry spaghetti noodles into the pot. He turned back, gave her a quick smile, and went back to the dinner.

  ***

  They ate together at the kitchen table, and the words between them started slow, but picked up as time progressed. By the end of the meal, Meg felt a little reassured. She learned a few things about Jim, the first being he was younger than he looked, twenty-one, going on twenty-two. He’d gotten an Associate’s degree at Willow Community College, majoring in auto-mechanics. He didn’t look surprised when Meg told him she was a sophomore undergrad. She probably looked the part.

  “I almost went to university, but I backed out,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “Just didn’t want to go in the end. Wouldn’t have been right for me. I’m a picture-oriented person. Can’t get ideas very easily from books, but show me a cross section of a 68-Mustang’s engine, and I can take that thing apart, put it back together too. Not bragging, just the way my mind works.”

  The sun was far under the horizon when they cleared away the dishes and prepared for the night ahead. She was still uncomfortable to a degree with the prospect of sleeping in his house. It felt like an unnecessarily dangerous thing to do.

  Meg grabbed her pack that she’d left with her bike in the garage. When she returned, Jim was waiting in the hallway.

  “Parent’s room is on the right. If anything happens in the night, meet me in the hallway and we’ll go to the garage.”

  “Why there?”

  “It’d be safest if it comes again. Sturdiest part of the house, no windows. The whole thing held up last time, but the garage will be the last thing to fall, if it comes to that. Here, I’ve got something for you.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a large padlock, its key stuck out of the lock’s keyhole.

  “What’s it for?”

  “It’ll fit over the latch on the inside of my parent’s door.” She gave him a confused look. “It’s okay! Really, take it. I get it, okay? If I were you, I’d want one over my door.”

  “Uh, thanks.” She took it, and despite the fact that in many ways the gesture was kinda creepy, giving her a lock for her door when he was the only other person in the house, she was thankful. He nodded and disappeared behind his bedroom door. She closed hers. The lock fit over the door like a glove. Meg went to sleep. When she woke the next day, the lock was untouched.

  ***

  Jim greeted her in the kitchen. Something good smelling was frying on the stove. A jug of orange juice sat on the counter. “Sleep fine?” he asked.

  “Yep,” Meg gave him a tired smile. He returned it, flipped a pancake onto a plate, and then poured another batch into the pan. Meg poured a cup of orange juice for herself. She took a drink. The cold liquid ran down her dry throat, awakening the core of her body as it trickled down to her stomach. She had actually slept rather well. The previous day had been a long one.

  “I was kinda thinking it’d come again in the night, but nothing happened…so maybe that means I’m wrong and it’s over. When’d all this start again?”

  “Two days ago,” Meg answered.

  “A week then, maybe two, before we’re taken care of. Air force jet passed by about an hour ago, woke me up. They’ve been moving around a
lot. Here,” he passed her a plate, started to scoop bacon, eggs, and pancakes onto her dish. “I’ve been thinking. A bike’s a good choice of travel right now, better than a car. You can weave through blocks on the road, better than a motorcycle, because it doesn’t need gas.”

  “Slow though.”

  He nodded, “You headed north? Can I ask where?”

  She nodded. “Kansas. Home for me.”

  “Oh. I’ve got some chores to do today, then I’ll head to town and get your bike fixed. It might take a while.”

  “You want some help?”

  “Uh, sure, if you’re up to it. I’ve gotta put some things away, fix the generator out back, clean some stuff up.”

  “Yeah, anything,” Meg said. “Least I can do.”

  They started the chores. Jim guided her to the backyard, opened a toolshed out back, reached inside, and pulled out a flimsy rake. Meg gave the yard a glance. Ash leaves littered the ground, and the red trees surrounding Jim’s house weren’t even through shedding their autumn leaves. “They say trees are a commodity in Texas. You got trees in Kansas?”

  “Saw one once,” she joked. “They built a museum round it.” He handed her the tool with a laugh. She grudgingly started her work, a smile on her face all the same.

  While she raked, he started dissecting a generator that stood against the side of the house. She watched him in glances as she worked, stealing looks up from the steadily growing pile of leaves. The work he did didn’t look very interesting. He dismantled a million parts and laid them out in groups on the gravel, circular shaped chunks of metal in one pile, large coolant rivets in another. He was interesting, the meticulousness in which he went about disassembling the machine. She somehow understood his process just by watching him work. He considered all the parts of the generator, not as individual items, but as fractions of a complete set, organs in a body. In doing so, he had a complete image of the machine in front of him, just by looking at the laid out pieces.

  They stopped for a break around midday, the generator halfway reassembled, a large mound of leaves piled in the middle of the yard. Jim went inside and brought out a pair of cups and a pitcher of water.

  “Hey, can I ask you something about Manny?” Meg asked, taking a sip from her glass.

  “Yea, what about him?”

  “Is he uh-I dunno how to say it. Is he…weird?”

  “Why you think that?”

  “He…knew something about me that I didn’t tell him.”

  “What did he know?” Her face reddened. “Never mind. Uh-Manny. Let’s see…no, can’t say that he is.”

  Are you weird? She thought. You knew that I was scared last night. You gave me a lock for my door.

  Jim stood up and spoke, his voice quieter than usual. “I’m gonna head into town, get the tube for your bike. I’ll be back in an hour.” She nodded, and he left.

  The house was quiet while Jim was gone. Meg sat inside at the kitchen table, nursing a cup of water, and staring out the window for a time, watching white clouds pass through blue sky. Things seemed normal, but she didn’t trust the calm. Things couldn’t be normal, not after Dallas. She rearranged the contents of her backpack, pulling out her most valuable possession, the carving knife she’d taken from her dorm kitchen. She played with it for a bit, swinging it back and forth in her right hand, getting used to the weight and feel of the blade. Jim returned an hour and a half later.

  “I’ve got the tubes,” he said, strolling in from the kitchen. “Got them from a buddy in town. It cost me a little. He gets to keep a set of Allen wrenches I let him borrow a while back. Your bike’s gonna be good to go in a few minutes, shouldn’t take too long to fix up. You’ll probably want to wait until tomorrow to leave though. It’s getting late.”

  ***

  Meg prepared for a second night in Jim’s house. She asked him if he’d be okay with letting her try making dinner that night. The spaghetti had been okay, but Meg thought she could do better. He agreed, and Meg started to go through his pantry looking for ingredients.

  “Don’t open any canned stuff. Baggies and boxes are okay. I wanna save anything that’s non-perishable.”

  For dinner, they had pesto ravioli with ground beef thrown in, seasoned with a few extra ingredients, and some frozen French fries Meg had found in the back of the freezer. Despite her opinion of her ability as a cook, the fries were the best part of the meal. After dinner, once the dishes were washed, Jim started to move a few things from the house to the garage. Crates of food came first, then boxes of tools he had lying around, loose car parts and the like.

  He moved to the backyard and worked at finishing the repairs to his generator. Meg saw a single crate full of canned food forgotten under the table. She picked it up in both hands and called to Jim. “To the garage?” she asked. He didn’t answer. He had stopped his work. He was looking straight up at the sky.

  “Drop it,” he said. “Get inside.”

  They went into the house. Meg had just enough time to grab her pack from the hallway floor before Jim pushed her through the doorway and into the garage. Once they were both inside, he started to pick up crates, stacking them against the inner door. Meg watched. She backed away from him and the doorway, toward the center of the garage.

  The sound started, and it took Meg right back to Dallas. She felt woozy as the sound grew. She sat down on the greasy floor before her legs could buckle, and the sound grew. She started to cry. Jim continued to barricade the openings to their shelter.

  The roar of the storm never relented, but it was far from its peak. Meg knew that from experience. It would grow in volume until the roar became a scream, and the buildings would start to shake, but never the ground. The ground never shook.

  Is it the same one as last time? Meg wondered. No, it can’t be. It moved north.

  She had believed for a little while that it’d been a one time deal, an accident.

  Jim had done all he could do for the doorway. He reached up, pulling the chord on a single naked light bulb that hung from the ceiling, giving them a little light in the darkness. Eerie shadows deepened and shallowed on either side as the bulb swung back and forth. Jim sat next to Meg on the ground. She looked up and saw that he was crying too.

  ***

  The crescendo of the danger grew. In about ten minutes, it would be overhead, and it would be hours before the storm fully passed, before they’d know if they were safe or gone.

  Neither spoke over the storm’s crescendo. Its noise hung in the air, steadily growing.

  When she felt like the only thing she could do was speak, she did, yelling over the blanketing noise from outside. “How did you know that I was scared of you, that I didn’t want to sleep in your house?” Meg asked.

  “Dunno.” Jim said, “Same way you know about your brother.” Her eyes widened at that. “Yea, I know about that. I get these thoughts now. They came with the first attack, and you do too, right? After people started dying? I think that’s a big part of it. Maybe…” He hesitated.

  “What?”

  “Never mind.”

  The storm dug in, threatening to overtake the entire house, turn it upside down, crush them under the weight of the garage. Outside, the things scrambled and scraped against the wood, tearing trees, breaking windows, destroying the world. Jim shifted to wake his butt, which had fallen asleep on the cement floor. “Meg,” he said, “you should tell me about Dallas.”

  She cried again, and wiped the tears away. Jim crawled over to her side and put a hand on her waist, slid his palm across her back, holding her gently, reassuringly. She leaned against him. “I’m scared,” she said.

  “Me too.” The storm shook the house in a rhythm of deep thrums and beats. It was like a tide coming in, the wave of a tsunami spilling out over a coastline.

  Outside, the storm reached its peak. The noise was louder than anything possible, but Meg didn’t have to raise her voice. Jim heard every word.

   The Swarm is available from Amazon here