The Apocalypse Fugitives

by Peter Meredith

  He gave Gunner his patented "Humm," of surprise. "Really? One second. Captain Grey? I'm guessing our little friend is out there. Is it going to be the roof she blows up?"

  Grey was silent for a moment, just long enough to add to Neil's bluff. "You know I can't tell you."

  "I'm hoping it's the roof this time," Neil said to Gunner with a glance upward. "It's quicker that way. Fire can be so…" He shuddered and then said, "I'm not going to dicker with you. One thousand rounds of ammo, six AR-15s, three-hundred cans of food and two gassed up trucks."

  Gunner opened his mouth to bargain and Neil stopped him with a raised finger. The smaller man called out, "Grey, commence firing in thirty seconds if I don't give you the ok."

  After barely a second Gunner whispered, "Fine. We'll take your demands."

  "Good," Neil replied, trying to sound like a cool customer when really he felt the pores of his body suddenly let go. Sweat made his shirt beneath his vest stick to his back. He also started to get the shakes but he hid that by putting his hands in his pockets. "Grey," he called. "Stay in place. The raiders and I will be in one of the rooms in front. You are to take only the following: one thousand rounds of ammo, six AR-15s, three-hundred cans of food and two gassed up trucks. And of course all the prisoners."

  Gunner's mouth came open to protest the fact that the prisoners hadn't been included in the final agreement, but he shut it in a display of defeat.

  Grey yelled out: "Affirmative."

  Neil didn't hear. Something had just dawned on him. "The girl that I came in here with, was…was she touched in any way?" he asked of the raider leader. He was afraid of the answer. If Sadie had been raped, he was pretty sure he would kill Gunner regardless of his promise. There was a new furious hate building in him that he didn't think he would be able to control.

  "No," Gunner replied. Neil gave him a sharp look. "I said, no. But…I am afraid she ain't part of this deal. By now the River King has her."

  "Grey, one second!" Neil thundered in a sudden wrath. He advanced on the much larger man. "She isn't here?"

  Gunner lifted his hands in peace. "Hey, I was just trying to protect her. You didn't want her raped, right? The thing is I can't guard a fine piece of ass like that for long, so I sent her on as soon as I found out who she was."

  Neil could feel the ferocity of his rage like a fire in him. It made him want to give up his negotiated victory and tear into Gunner. It was a feeling like he'd never had in his entire timid life. "Where can I find the River King?" Neil growled.

  Chapter 16

  Deanna Russell

  Southern Illinois

  The hell-ride had to end sometime. For Deanna it seemed like many hours if not days and days where the sun wouldn't rise and the stench of death stuck in her nostrils and lived on her tongue. Finally, Mindy had them pull over and the women clambered out of the trucks and huddled, again in a little bunch. They didn't look at each other, they looked out at the night where the bugs crreeeed! And the not too distant zombies moaned. The night was chill and damp with a newly forming dew coating the world and everything in it.

  Deanna stood holding herself a couple of feet away from the rest. It was as if there was a barrier up around her that kept the others at bay. The closer she edged in the more they sidestepped away. By doing their bidding and killing the wounded, she had become something of a pariah. Embarrassed, she hung her head and kept to herself.

  "We have to, uh to, uh ditch one of the trucks," Mindy said. She had grown weaker from blood loss and Kay had to hold her up or she would have fallen. "We need to get the gas out of this truck and put it into the other one. Anyone know how to do that?"

  When it came to mechanics the women were completely clueless. Of the twenty two young women left alive only three had ever changed a tire before and none had siphoned gas even a single time. They had been raised in an age of cell phones and Triple A auto where a tow-truck and a man with black grease under his nails was only a phone call away. And if it wasn't an emergency there had always been some other man around, a brother, a father, a boyfriend to do those dirty things, though in truth in the age of metrosexuals, men had been losing skills of a mechanical nature rapidly and at the time of the apocalypse a surprising number didn't even know how to check their engine oil level let alone how to change out the filter.

  Just then it hardly mattered, the women didn't have a hose to siphon with or any tools beyond a jack, tire iron, and can opener.

  "So, we're just going to leave the gas?" Jackie Broderick asked when no one said anything. She worked her flashlight over the large rectangular external tank and then pointed it into Mindy's face and asked, "Do we have a ladle? We could scoop the gas out from the top hole."

  In the light Mindy looked white and her eyes were dull, her lids droopy. "Get that light off of me," she cranked.

  "A ladle won't work," Joslyn said. "It's a stupid idea. That hole is too small."

  "And I don't think we even have a ladle," someone added.

  "Maybe there's a drain plug," Kay suggested. This got the women excited and they gathered closer and spoke in hushed tones as Jackie shone the light around the bottom of the tank.

  Deanna didn't partake in any of this. She went to check on Mindy and her wound, only Mindy didn't want her injured arm poked and prodded by an amateur. "There are too many germs out here. I'll get infected." Deanna went to turn away, but Mindy stopped her. "Dee…we need some stuff from the back of the other truck."

  She meant the "death truck", the one that held all the dead bodies and the memories of what Deanna had done. A shiver went down her that couldn't be completely hidden by the dark. "Look, Min, can you find someone else. I don't want to…"

  "Please," Mindy begged. She jerked her head at the other women. "They won't do it. We both know that. They'd rather starve or die of dehydration. There's food in there and guns and water. We need all that stuff." Next to her Kay wouldn't look up and the others that were close and who had heard, pretended to be very interested in the gas situation or the side of the truck or the tops of their shoes.

  "Ok," Deanna said after a moment of consideration. She didn't have the luxury of leaving behind food or water; she couldn't take chances with Emily inside of her. And she still needed shoes. The evil, rat-like hoarding sensation that had gripped her before had left her, but shoes were a necessity. "I'll need the flashlight again."

  Jackie gripped the light tightly and insisted that she needed it to help with the fuel transfer. Mindy shook her head wearily and shrugged at Deanna as if there was nothing she could do.

  She was wrong. There was something she could've done: she could have moved the first truck behind the second to light up both operations. It was a simple solution that should've been obvious to all of them, only the women were numb from their ordeal and on top of that they had been subject to months of mental conditioning to believe that they were nothing but stupid whores with no value beyond their ability to get a man off. It made them timid and uncertain; each always waiting for someone else, someone "smarter" to do their thinking for them.

  Somehow Bessy had been able to fight against the cruel mental torture, but she was dead and Mindy was only a shadow of her friend. Deanna, who was only slowly coming out of her year-long nightmare because of the natural imperative of childbirth, was possibly the most focused out of all them, but that wasn't saying much.

  She climbed up the back of the truck and ducked into the covered bed practically blind. It was probably for the better; without the light, the bodies were simply bodies. They weren't Rachel, Annie, or Karen Hasselback whom she had killed. Or poor Tina who had died with her tongue out, holding the hand of the only person who had ever truly loved her. Nor were the bodies those of Jenny Fine and Bambi who had died fighting while Deanna had only cowered.

  They were just bodies growing cold and stiff. Deanna had to pull a few of them aside to get at their pockets or roll them to get at the stores located beneath the benches. Once she accidentally put her hand insid
e one of the bodies. It was sticky wet and the meat of it had the feel of raw hamburger. The gorge rose like a backing toilet up her throat, but after breathing deeply Deanna held down the puke—she counted this as a personal triumph for her and tried to convince herself that she was toughening up. It made searching the remaining corpses slightly easier.

  The bodies held all sorts of treasures: gum and candy, bullets and batteries, cans of tuna; basically items of value they had stashed. Deanna took the choicest of items and the rest she put in a box which she dragged to the tailgate. Beneath the benches she found a few boxes of food and two five gallon jugs of water. These went to the tailgate as well. Next, she searched around beneath the bodies of Jenny and Bambi looking for the guns they had used. They were gone, probably having fallen out of the truck when they were shot.

  When everything else was done she went to each body and put the bottom of her foot up against their soles until she found a match in foot size. Gritting her teeth she tugged off the corpse's shoes and when she had laced them onto her own feet, ignoring the fact that they were still disgustingly warm inside, she went to the tailgate and called to Mindy.

  "This is all I found. There wasn't a whole lot of…" Deanna stopped in midsentence, her eyes growing large. Mindy and Kay were standing slightly apart from the other women who had managed to get the drain plug unscrewed and who were busy trying to capture as much fuel as they could. What caught Deanna's eye was the woman coming up behind Mindy.

  At first she thought it was just one of the girls coming back from tinkling in the bushes but this woman walked unsteadily and her hair looked as though it hadn't felt the touch of a brush in months and her shirt was torn all down the front, exposing the fact that one of her breasts had been chewed off.

  "Behind you!" Deanna cried, pointing.

  It was a zombie and its presence sent the women into hysterics. They ran for the first truck and climbed up into the bed or into the cab, scrambling over themselves in their fear. Since she was already high up and safe Deanna began waving her arms and shouting to draw the zombie to her. It worked and she found herself closer to a zombie than she'd ever been.

  "Kill it!" Joslyn yelled.

  Deanna's experience with killing zombies was a big fat zero. She knew you had to shoot them in the head, or burn them to ashes, or dismember them in some way, but she also knew there was a fine line between knowing how to do something and actually doing it.

  For her the apocalypse had started in slow motion. She was from Duluth, Minnesota which wasn't much more than an oversized town, and as it sat in the middle of nowhere they had more deaths from murder and starvation than from zombie attacks, at least at first. When the government closed the roads and the trucks stopped transporting food, the people of Duluth hunkered down and made what they had last or they went fishing out on Lake Superior or they hunted the forests for anything that moved. But then came the refugees, first out of Minneapolis and then Madison and then Milwaukee.

  They came in waves, sometimes by car clogging the roads, but more often by foot, sweeping every creature before them. What didn't move was eaten. Entire herds of cattle were butchered in their pastures and cooked on the spot. Fields of corns were stripped, potatoes were dug up, and soy beans were eaten raw. Each wave of refugees was more desperately hungry than the one before and the battles between the city-folk and the rural people grew bitter.

  The zombies came next and made everything that occurred before seem pleasant in comparison. The city of Duluth was overrun after three days of intense fighting. Most of the survivors fled north into Canada only to freeze to death as a cold front moved in a day later and dropped the temperature by thirty degrees and dumped eight inches of snow. Tens of thousands of refugees were caught out in the open and fewer than one in a hundred survived.

  Deanna hadn't gone with the others. She had erected a wall of fear about herself and could only hide in the basement of her parent's home nibbling the last of her food and wearing three outfits at a time in order to keep warm. Her food couldn't last and midway through December she crept out into the white world of Minnesota wearing her heaviest coat over her layered clothes and carrying a knapsack over her shoulder. With her food gone there wasn't much in the pack except some odds and ends: two lighters, a four-pack of D batteries, and a little med kit that wasn't much good unless she scraped a knee.

  Afraid of the cold as much as she was of starving to death, she went south, hoping in vain that the cold of winter had somehow killed the zombies or at least slowed them down. At five foot seven inches and weighing only one hundred pounds she was not physically ready to fight even a small zombie. She had no weapons except a hoe that she pulled out of the frozen ground; it was a hopeless weapon which she well knew. On the plus side she had above average intelligence, on the downside her knowledge base was dependent on the degree she received in business administration and that was pathetically useless for a person in her position.

  She knew nothing of survival: she couldn't hunt or fish. She couldn't tell a poisonous plant from a bean sprout, she couldn't sew or make flour from wheat or wrap a sprained ankle or tie knots beyond the basic granny. If she came across a dead animal she didn't know which parts were edible and which would make her sick. She didn't know anything about astronomy because it had seemed like a dull subject and thus she couldn't tell north from south five minutes after the sun set. She could make fire only if she had a lighter and even then it was a struggle. In short she didn't know anything of real importance that would keep her alive.

  Like a vagabond, she scrounged her way south to Eau Claire, Wisconsin collecting the left over refuse of a dead civilization: a can of soup she fished out of a drainage ditch, an old potato and three ears of corn the refugees had overlooked in a field, a bag of flour that she found in the backpack of a corpse. In Eau Claire a boy of about fifteen took everything she possessed. She was taller by three inches but regardless he beat her senseless and would've raped her as well, but her three pairs of pants thwarted him.

  He left her bleeding and weeping on the side of the road but she didn't hit rock bottom, not then. The very lowest ebb of her life came five minutes later when she realized what a mistake she had made in not just giving him everything he wanted. That realization, the idea that she should have let a foul, evil teenaged punk fuck her because it was better than being alone did a number on Deanna Russell.

  The summer before she had crowed to her friends after graduation that she was "The epitome of the modern American woman and the world had better watch out!"

  She had been all set to start working for a Fortune 500 company where she had planned on using her wiles and her beauty to work her way up the ranks. It was no stretch to think that after ten to twelve years she could expect to be clearing a six-figure salary—that had been her trajectory; then the world changed in a way Deanna wasn't prepared for. She was desperately lonely, afraid beyond anything she had ever experienced, and sure in the knowledge that she couldn't make it on her own.

  She found herself on the side of the road wishing a scrawny fifteen-year-old would come back. If he had she would've worked the buttons of her jeans herself if it meant he would stay with her. She hadn't realized just how jacked up she was until he left. The despair hit her like a truck and she went into a depression that crushed her self-worth.

  Two days later she hooked up with the next man she met and although he was brave and tough and was nice to her, she didn't mourn him for a second when the Colonel's men killed him. Instead she latched onto them offering the only thing she felt she had that anyone seemed to want.

  Her depression and her horrible view of herself had lasted until she forced herself to come to terms with her pregnancy four days before. It had been four days of slowly dawning realization that she could no longer be just a whore. She had to be something much, much greater: a mother. A mother had to be tough, brave, self sufficient and wise. The very idea was overwhelming and left her in a panic at times, however her biological imperative
was greater than her mental state and it began to pull her from the brink.

  There in the back of the truck with one foot up on the tailgate Deanna felt it stir within her. She pulled out the black pistol and shot the zombie in its open mouth.

  Chapter 17

  Deanna Russell

  Southern Illinois

  The gun bucked in Deanna's hand and a millisecond later the back of the zombie's head exploded outward in a black spray. The creature fell in mid-moan and didn't move again.

  "You killed it," Joslyn said. It sounded like an accusation.

  The women climbed down from the truck and gathered around the body like a gaggle of crows around fresh road kill. Jackie shone her light on the corpse long after morbid curiosity was satisfied; it was akin to the last few minutes of a snuff film with the camera lingering on the body. Just like Deanna none of them had been this close to a zombie before. Each had a tale similar to hers—there wasn't a one among them with the heart of a warrior, which made sense; the mindset of a warrior and a whore were on opposite poles.

  "That's enough, Jackie," Mindy said, in a whisper. Of course Jackie spun the light into Mindy's face. The woman blinked and put a hand up. "Jeez Jackie! Why do you always do that?"

  Jackie shrugged and pouted. In the light, Deanna had seen something and climbed down from the truck, saying, "Jackie, shine it on Mindy again. On her arm I mean...oh, Min, you're bleeding again, and it's bad." Under the light the blood was greasy looking but ran like water. The drops hit the road with a steady tapping that could be heard in the silence.

  "Sit her down," Melanie suggested.

  "No put her up in the truck," Veronica advised.