The Apocalypse Fugitives

by Peter Meredith

  Before he turned to the road ahead, he also spent a moment looking at the body. They had been on the road for two days and there was only one reason they hadn't stopped to bury Sarah: Neil wasn't ready to let her go.

  "We should pull over," Grey said, gently. "I think it's time."

  "Not yet," Neil replied, forcefully. "There's a lake coming up. Lewis Smith Lake. There was a sign we passed. It's only another ten minutes or so. Then we'll stop and do...that. She'll like it there, I think, and you will too, Jillybean. All around the lake is a wildlife refuge. We can make camp there. Wouldn't that be nice?"

  Making camp with a dead body? As much as Jilly liked animals, and she did so very much, the idea of sleeping with a dead body nearby gave her the willies. But she was too tired and mentally drained to argue. They all were. The four of them were running on fumes, and in Neil's case, grief. His wife was dead. That first day he had cried on and off for hours. It had been a strange, silent cry. The tears would just start to trickle out of him, go for a time and then simply dry up. Then the group had stopped for the night and he hadn't cried since.

  "I guess that would be nice," said Jillybean. The idea of seeing animals was nice, however the dream was still on her mind, haunting her, making her feel scared in her belly. And a little cranky as well. She poked Ipes in his empty head to wake him.

  Huh? Are we there yet?

  Jillybean shook her head. "Not yet, bozo. I think the fluff between your ears is getting thicker. You were supposed to wake me up if I had the bad dream again and you didn't, so that makes it all your fault that I did."

  All my fault? Really? Here's what I think: I did you a favor. Sometimes the dreams have to come, Jilly. That's what your dad would have said. Let them come and then let them go.

  "That sounds like an excuse for being lazy and not staying awake," she replied, testily. "You wanna know why? Because you don't know what my daddy would have said. He would've..."

  Neil cleared his throat and slowed the car. Jillybean got a weird chill—had she been too loud? Did they think she was going crazy again? Were they going to kick her out of the car? If so, where would she go? Who would take care of her?

  "Look, Jillybean, over at that big rock." Neil pointed and at first all she saw was a pretty doe. It was a white-tailed deer with gorgeous spots and giant brown eyes.

  "Two fawns," Captain Grey remarked, "that's not good. They'll be hard for her to take care of. We should consider..." He started reaching for his M4.

  Neil stopped him. "We'll let nature take care of nature."

  Jillybean had no idea what they were talking about until something moved near the rock. "A baby deer," she whispered, in awe.

  The fawn jumped, its legs bucking it spastically into a patch of sunlight. Then a second fawn started testing its legs as well and Jillybean's excitement reached epic levels. It felt like her heart was going to swell so big that it would burst inside her; just like that, her paranoia and guilt and grief vanished.

  The fawns were tiny, only days old. They wobbled on their stick-thin legs after every leap, but that didn't stop them from gamboling about without a care in the world.

  We should stay here, Ipes said. It was a great idea.

  "We should stay here," she said.

  Captain Grey, who was eyeing the deer hungrily, agreed. "We probably should. We can rest up, at least for a few days. Crossing the Mississippi is going to be a bitch and the lands beyond it are about as wild as they come."

  "Let's just get to this lake and then see what we have strength left for," Neil said.

  Jillybean was sad to leave the fawns, however just the sight of the lake was rejuvenating to her soul. Its waters looked cool and the forested hills all around were quiet and peaceful. According to another sign, the lake had been made by the damning up of the Black Warrior River and now its waters stretched like a three-fingered hand over thirty two square miles of central Alabama. It was home to a variety of wildlife: black bears, deer, badgers, and beavers. She couldn't wait to see them all.

  It was also home to humans and as the Humvee slipped up the dirt road it was seen by watchful eyes.

  Chapter 3

  Michael Gates

  Lewis Smith Lake, Alabama

  The air in the clearing was already nearing ninety degrees. It hummed with insects, flies and mosquitoes mostly, and smelled sweetly of honeysuckles. Michael could remember a time long ago when he liked the smell of honeysuckles; now they were cloying and added to the lethargy that pervaded the camp. It was hot for May, giving everyone a taste of what was to come when the July heat swept over them.

  From long experience, Michael knew that an Alabama summer day could turn the hardiest worker into a dull sluggard. Although it was just after one in the afternoon, the other twenty two people in the camp were drowsing; when they slapped at mosquitoes, it was without any real hope of killing them.

  "I miss my air-conditioner," Marybeth Gates moaned. She had long, brown hair that was as thick now as it had been twenty years before when she and Michael first started dating. With practiced hands she wrapped it in a quick bun to get it off her neck. Most of the fourteen girls and women in the group wore their hair long. Michael reasoned none wanted to attempt cutting it themselves and hoped that chance would send them a stylist.

  Their daughter, Anne, who was the spitting image of Marybeth, tilted her chin to stare at the sun straight up above. "I miss my bed. And my house."

  As if permission had been granted, the complainers in the group took this moment to add their two cents: It was too hot, there were too many bugs, the water tasted like dirt, their portions of food were too small…

  Marybeth gave her husband a look of apology for starting the bitch-fest. "It was going to happen, one way or the other," he whispered to her.

  They didn't have much to be happy about and Michael might have been the least happy of them all. He'd been chosen to lead the group months before when the whole thing started and it had not gone well.

  Before the apocalypse he had always been a news junkie; he read everything he could get his hands on and right before the shit hit the fan he had pieced together enough items to freak out over: reports out of Russia and the Ukraine concerning strange cases of encephalitis and leprosy, from Turkey and Greece there was talk of a new flesh-eating bacterium, the details of which were extremely sketchy. Albania had officially closed the Rinas airport to inbound traffic—without a reason offered, and then, unexpectedly, news out of Egypt completely ceased. The fallout from Arab Spring was being blamed and there was talk of a coup, yet no one knew what the real truth was. Egypt had sealed itself up. Reporters, tourists, and embassy officials were all kicked out.

  Separately these events were worrisome. Taken as a whole they were downright terrifying. When the "Cannibal Cruise" docked in Florida and the response included military personnel and a media blackout, Michael went into action. That day he drove two hours to the Sam's Club in Montgomery. There was one in Birmingham, not twenty minutes from his house, but he didn't want to be seen there just in case he was wrong.

  Michael found out he wasn't the only one who had begun to see a pattern. The store in Montgomery was crowded and that thread of fear in him grew tendrils at the sight of so many people there in the middle of the week. The other shoppers seemed outwardly calm. They smiled and nodded to each other as proper Alabamians did, however Michael felt there was an undercurrent running through the crowd. It was an unspoken but unanimous message of anxiety. These people weren't ready to riot just yet, but it wasn't all that far off either; they had read the writing on the wall just as he had.

  As fast as he could, Michael filled a cart and like almost everyone else, he bought only canned goods, water, and toilet paper. He paid and left the store with his mind brimming with questions: Am I just being paranoid? What about all those other people in the store? Were they just paranoid as well? And what the hell was Marybeth going to say when she saw all this stuff?

  He had planned to get into his Jeep
Cherokee and go home to face the music, but as he unloaded his purchases he watched in amazement as car after car circled the parking lot, searching for spots. There were so many of them that he had to wonder how much inventory would be left in the store by the next day?

  His fear was shading into panic and once his cart was empty he turned back to the store, reasoning to himself: "If nothing happens, if I am just being paranoid I can just return all of it." This time he worked a train of two carts, while all around him the edge of his fellow Alabamians grew edgier.

  The next day the price of gas was up another twenty five cents and the price of gold jumped by thirty dollars an ounce, and that was the good news. In Venice, Italy there was a riot so large that army troops had to be called in. Libyan ports were militarized and temporarily closed. Swine flu was announced in Barcelona, Spain. H1N1 broke out in Gibraltar. Three hundred rabies cases overwhelmed the five tiny hospitals on the Canary Islands.

  Michael sat at his computer thinking: rabies, my ass. At that point, he phoned his three younger brothers to tell them what he feared and each called him either a pussy or paranoid or both, and they all laughed at him. They were good natured about it, but they didn't listen.

  That didn't deter Michael Gates. He checked the status of all his accounts: savings, checking, IRAs; even his credit cards. Together he and Marybeth had access to just north of $12,000 in liquid spending money and during the next week he fought with her endlessly and spent every penny.

  Marybeth screamed and nagged and threw things and, after three days, moved out in a great theatrical outburst. Michael didn't blame her, he felt crazier every day. By the end of the week she was back, looking sick with worry— American cities were being quarantined. Just like that the country went through what could only be described as a convulsion. Super markets emptied in hours and gas lines stretched for miles. Airports were closed and interstate travel was restricted to only military vehicles. Civilians were basically told to hunker down indoors.

  From that moment on, Michael's family looked to him for ideas and leadership. Fearing that the army wouldn't be able to stop the zombies, he invited his entire family to live with him. It made the most sense: his was the largest house, he literally had tons of food and what he thought was plenty of guns and ammo. They moved in just before things got hairy in northern Alabama.

  Then he had to deal with fourteen people under one roof.

  Shawn and Clara, with their three children: Amy, age 16, Rachel 14, and Joseph age 10 showed up in the morning of October 16th. Marybeth had them all ready to go, bunks, towels, toiletries. Paul and Liz and their son John who was 17, arrived just as the sun was setting and hurried inside as if the night held the zombie virus in its shadows. William came alone. His ex and their kids had left for Houston three days before, driving by back roads to avoid army checkpoints.

  Michael had his family together, but pretty much from then on, his leadership seemed to fail him at every turn. The first test he failed happened on the 29th when the army pulled back to the outskirts of Birmingham and suddenly the ban on traveling was lifted and they were encouraged to flee. The problem was that no one, including the army, knew where they should go.

  Michael sent his brother, Shawn out to talk to someone in charge. "They're pretty vague where we'll end up," Shawn informed the family when he returned. "They said Texas and California are madhouses, and that the quarantine zones on the East coast go from Miami up to Boston. 'Try Canada,' one of them said."

  "Was it a joke?" Marybeth had asked. Shawn shrugged.

  "I guess we should take a vote," Michael said. "Do we stay or go?"

  Shawn's wife, Clara was quick to vote for running away. "You know the rumors, Michael, same as us. Jesus Christ! We're talking about zombies. They can't be killed…I can't even believe this is a question; of course we should run."

  Shawn wouldn't look at Clara as he voted to stay. "Who says they can't be killed? The army wouldn't be fighting them if they couldn't be killed. I say we stay. After all, we just spent the last week fortifying this place."

  Paul and Liz split the same way. Paul saying: "There's probably nothing in the middle of the country that's any safer than this."

  Liz shot back: "If we left we would at least be with the army. They'd protect us."

  William said he'd go with whatever the majority wanted. Michael had smiled thinly at that because he'd been about to say the same thing only now he couldn't. It would mean putting the decision to stay or go squarely on Marybeth's shoulders. "I think we should stay," he told them. "The army doesn't look like they can protect themselves let alone us. I say we hunker down and hope the worst of it washes over us."

  That decision haunted Michael now.

  Since then it had been one horrible moment after another. First it was the flood of zombies that kept them pinned inside, huddled in fear for days on end. Then it was the reality that their food stocks wouldn't last. The number of people in the house had swollen to twenty as neighborhood stragglers came out of the woodwork begging for help— Marybeth, always the proper Christian, refused to turn them away.

  Then it was the slow attrition: Shawn and Clara's second daughter, Rachel was attacked and dragged down only feet from the safety of the home. She was rescued but ended up turning into a zombie that night and had to be taken out and shot. Their neighbor from across the street, Jason Werner was trapped in a car by a small horde and died of dehydration after three days of waiting for them to leave. Mrs. Stowe from down the block had a minor heart attack that triggered a stroke. She went into a coma that lasted thirteen days. They were clueless as how to help her, and she ended up slowly starving to death.

  Another neighbor, Randy Gilliard simply vanished. He was in his bed when everyone went to sleep but in the morning he was gone without having taken a single thing. It was unnerving, especially since there had been always someone on guard.

  The attrition was counter-balanced when they were inundated with refugees from the Guntersville refugee camp. In mid-February it was overrun by what was rumored to be a million zombies. People fled in every direction and Michael took in as many of them as he dared.

  When the raiders first showed up in March, Michael had forty five people crammed under his roof. At night, mattresses literally carpeted the floors. During the day they were stacked in corners that reached to the ceiling. When the zombie threat slacked off during the spring rains, the group grew complacent and their vigilance waned.

  The raiders swept down on them like a band of berserkers. A work party of eight people was ambushed as they went to fetch water; among those who never returned were Michael's sister-in-law, Liz and his niece, Amy. Clara had been captured but managed to escape. She came back with haunted eyes and wouldn't talk about what had happened.

  Michael restricted movement and everyone went about armed with whatever weapons they could scrounge, but it hardly mattered. The raiders were too numerous and had much better weapons. They returned again and again, picking off stragglers or small groups.

  Things were bleak and unfortunately everyone looked to Michael for an answer. In the dark of a single night the group picked up everything they had and moved to the other side of the city; within two days they were found again and another five people disappeared in one raid and four more three days later.

  They decided to leave the state altogether and Michael hoped that by doing it with one quick, unexpected rush, they'd have their best chance. Their plan was to head northwest and pray that they would be able to find a new place to start over.

  It did not go well. They had gone barely thirty miles before they ran into a scouting party of raiders and suddenly bullets were flying everywhere. Michael's group was in a line of six trucks. The first one slewed off the road; the second, driven by his brother, Paul tried to turn around in the middle of the highway while machinegun bullets ripped into his vehicle.

  "Keep going!" Michael cried, waving everyone on through the ambush site. He had been in the third truck and, knowi
ng that it was suicide to stop in the middle of a kill zone, he shot past his brother. It was the last time he saw Paul.

  From an outside point of view it was miraculous that they lost just the one truck, but Michael only saw failure. He was the one who had made the plan. He had decided who would be driving in what truck and in what order, and it was he who had failed to provide a contingency plan in case of an ambush.

  He ordered them to change course and the remaining five trucks turned northeast and went as far as they could. Two of the trucks had lost most of their gas from fuel leaks and another had a hole in its radiator and was running clouds of white smoke from beneath its hood. They made it to the edge of Lewis Smith Lake and could go no further.

  They had been there for three weeks and in that time they had been hounded and hunted by the raiders, but so far their camouflage had kept them safe.

  Suddenly, that didn't seem to be the case anymore.

  Shawn Gates, his face red as a candied apple, burst into the clearing and made straight for his brother. "They're back," he said, his voice low and angry. Everyone stopped what they were doing. "Those shit-fucks are scouting down by Smith Road." Shawn was practically seething and Michael felt a momentary stab of jealousy. Shawn was lucky he had his anger. The only real emotion Michael could gin up and hold onto was the anchor-like weight of fear that accompanied poor leadership.

  All eyes shifted from Shawn and bored in on Michael. What thoughts were going on behind all those eyes? Were they asking themselves how was Michael going to screw up this time? Or worse, was it: Who would die this time?

  "How many are there?" he asked.

  "Not many, just three or four," Shawn replied. "But only one is heading this way. I left Cody to keep an eye on him." Marybeth's mouth came open and Shawn put out a hand to her. "He'll be ok. He's in a good hiding spot and he knows better than to do anything but observe."