The Apocalypse Fugitives

by Peter Meredith

  Half the women were advancing on Mindy to help but stopped when Joslyn spoke. "What's that smell? That smells like...Oh shit, the gas! You idiots forgot the gas. It's leaking all over the place."

  Jackie used her flashlight to show everyone just how right Joslyn was. When the zombie had showed up they had forgotten to screw in the drain plug and now the diesel was flowing in a steady trickle from the tank, turning the road dark. All the women rushed to the truck, except Deanna, Mindy, and Kay.

  Mindy's eyes were heavy and her cheeks slack. "Save the gas," she said.

  "They are," Deanna told her.

  "Lay me down," Mindy asked. "I'm getting tired."

  Kay began to lay her down right there in the road but Deanna stopped her. "Let's put her in the truck while she still has strength." Mindy was little help in climbing into the cab, and once she was sitting, she recovered somewhat. The three watched as half the women stood around gawking and whispering to themselves while the other half shuttled back and forth using cups and water bottles to transport the diesel from the "death" truck to the "good" truck.

  "There has to be a better way," Mindy said.

  "Yeah," agreed Deanna. No one came up with a better method and too much of the diesel was lost in spills and accidents. When the job was done, the women began to pile in the truck. Deanna watched until the last woman had climbed aboard before realizing they couldn't go just yet. "We can't leave the other truck just sitting there in the middle of the highway."

  The women cursed and bitched as they climbed back down. Melanie went to the driver's seat and put the truck in neutral, while everyone else took up positions around the back and began to push. They had stopped where the land was annoying level and it was twenty minutes of hard work to get the truck off the side of the road and deep enough into the surrounding forest for it to be hidden from sight.

  When they came back to the remaining truck, Kay pointed to the dead zombie. "We should move that, too." All eyes went to Deanna.

  "Fine," she said, knowing that it was going to be a waste of time arguing with them. They would just vote her the shit-job anyway she figured. The zombie was much lighter than she expected. She grabbed it by the hem of its skirt and dragged it off the side of the road and into the tall weeds. She didn't bother going very deep. When she was done, she wiped her hands in the damp grass and climbed into the truck to sit next to Mindy in the front seat.

  "Where to?" Kay asked, putting the big five-ton truck in motion.

  Mindy's answer stunned both Deanna and Kay. "I don't know," she said. "Bessy didn't know either. She only said that we would find somewhere that's safe eventually."

  "Eventually? And you have no ideas?" Kay demanded, angrily. "Then which way should I go? I don't think we're going to find a sign that says Safe Land, No Rapists allowed!" Her foot had come off the gas and they began to slow rapidly.

  "Keep going," Deanna ordered. "Stopping won't help us and going back would be suicide. Really, it doesn't matter where we go as long as we stick together. We can be strong if we stick together."

  "Once Bessy told me about a rumor out east," Mindy said. "She heard that women are being captured and sold as sex slaves in New York. It's some Russian mob guy."

  Kay cursed under her breath. "Shit. That narrows where we're going down to anywhere but east. That's so helpful."

  "Stop being a pain in the butt," Deanna said. "We can't go east; that's fine. And we can't go back north because we'll run into the Colonel's men. I'm sure they're searching for us. So we go south, probably for a few days. Then we'll figure something out."

  The truck rumbled south for an hour before the three in the front heard the women in the back begin to bang on the metal cab wall. They pulled over quickly and Deanna got out with the black pistol drawn and her heart going like crazy. "What's wrong?" she asked of the anxious faces staring down at her from the bed.

  "We all got use the bathroom," Melanie explained.

  Other than frequent bathroom breaks and eleven detours around traffic clogged roads they went south steadily all night until the rising sun cut an edge between earth and sky. By then they were sixty miles south of St Louis and running on fumes. The gas gauge had been pointing to empty for fifteen nervous minutes and Kay was beginning to get anxious.

  "Wake up Mindy," she suggested to Deanna. "She'll know what to do."

  Mindy was prodded into a semi-conscious state and couldn't focus past the end of her nose. "I don't think she knows anymore that we do," Deanna said. "I guess we should pull over and start checking gas stations."

  Kay looked shocked at the idea. "In the light? Where everyone can see us? No way. That's gotta be the dumbest thing I ever heard."

  "Then what?"

  "I don't know, that's why I want to talk to Mindy. She'd know what to do."

  Deanna glanced over at the gauge once again. "Shit," she cursed and then began to shake Mindy again but without success. "It's not working, Kay. We need to, uh...we need to hide. Pull over and we'll find a place to hide the truck."

  Kay's ability driving such a monster vehicle was limited and that meant they weren't able to access the narrower streets without her sideswiping every other car parked on the road. They ended up pulling into a church parking lot. No one but Kay was happy with the choice.

  "Where are we supposed to sleep?"

  "There aren't any beds in there."

  "Are we supposed to sleep on the pews?"

  "What if there are zombies in there?"

  Everyone look at Deanna. "What? You want me to go in and check? No. I'm not going to do it."

  "You're the one with the gun," Joslyn said.

  Deanna pointed at a sweet young woman, with honey-colored hair and a quick smile. "Carolyn has a gun, too. Hers is a shotgun. It's bigger and better than mine. Make her go."

  Carolyn's smile was nowhere to be seen. "I'm not really all that good at shooting it. It hurts my shoulder. You can have it, Dee. I don't want it." She held out the gun. It was a hunting gun, fall-colored with leaf patterns all up its stock and barrel. Deanna's father had one just like it. When the apocalypse hit, he had carried it around with him, mostly for protection, though it hadn't done him much good. He had gone off on a hunt just before Thanksgiving and never came back. This was before the first wave of zombies came through Duluth so Deanna figured he'd been murdered for the gun.

  The memory made her hesitate, but only for a second. The shotgun was bigger and badder than her pistol and it made sense to be armed with the best. She took it from Carolyn and then held out her other hand. "I'll need all the bullets, too."

  "They're called shells," Joslyn said, with a little grunting snort. "Everyone knows that."

  "Fine. I'll need all the shells then." Carolyn handed over eighteen in a rattling box. Dee stuffed them in her cargo pocket and then looked over the weapon, noting the safe and the ejection port. She pulled back on a stubby handle to see what would happen. A shell popped out and rolled around on the asphalt.

  "You put one in there," Carolyn said, pointing to the port. "And then press the button."

  Deanna reinserted the shell and pressed the carrier release. The bolt jumped forward and she assumed it was ready to shoot. "You can only shoot it once?"

  Carolyn shrugged. "I think so."

  That didn't seem right. Deanna turned the weapon over and saw a spot on the bottom of the bolt where the metal wasn't seamlessly aligned. She pressed it and the metal eased back as if on a spring. She dug out another shell and was in the process of loading it into the bottom port when Joslyn made a noise.

  "We don't have all day," she said.

  "You have as long as it takes and also, I'm not going in there," Deanna said. "Not by myself."

  "We could vote. We could make you go," Veronica put in.

  Deanna paused with a shell halfway in the bottom port. She grunted and slipped it in. A third was very close to fitting, but no matter how hard she pressed it wouldn't go. She stuck it back in her pocket and said, "You probably should
've done that before you gave me another gun."

  "Is that a threat?" Joslyn demanded. "Someone wake up Mindy. She needs to hear this."

  "No one goes near Mindy," Deanna said, swinging the shotgun in a wide arc. It was a fearsome weapon; with its massive bore it looked like a cannon. The women backed away. "You don't need Mindy to do your thinking for you and you don't need me to do all the shit jobs for you either. You guys aren't whores anymore, so stop acting like whores."

  "What do you know about anything?" Joslyn asked. "You act like you're better than us, but not only were you a whore just like us, you weren't even a good whore. Everyone knows you were one step away from gang-bang duty." She was trying to be venomous, but it failed.

  "And we need to stop being so catty," Deanna added. "I wasn't a good whore because I'm not a whore and I never was one. I was simply afraid, just like all of you. That's the truth. We were whores because we were afraid. We were afraid we couldn't make it on our own. We were afraid to die. We were afraid that there were worse places than The Island and we were afraid that there were worse people out there. We have to stop being afraid of everything."

  Veronica crossed her arms over her large chest, and said, "You tell us not to be afraid but you have two guns and you won't go in there. Why don't you put your money where your mouth is and show us how it's done."

  "Fine," Deanna answered, shooting a glare at her. "I'll go. It's just an empty building."

  The sun was barely up and Deanna's shadow was stretched long in front of her. She went to the church, pausing only to look down at the shotgun, turning off the safety switch. Suddenly, the gun seemed electric. She held it gingerly, careful to keep her finger well away from the trigger…just in case.

  The church wasn't elaborate. It was a long rectangle with a sharp angled roof and a steeple sitting above the belfry. Doubled doors marked the entrance; they were shut, but not locked.

  "There's nothing in there," she whispered to herself as she reached out a shaking hand to the door knob. It was an awkward move as she tried to simultaneously keep the shotgun pointed forward.

  From behind her, the weak morning sun lit up the church in hues of grey. The building seemed extraordinarily dusty and dim as though she was looking on a church she had dug out of the Egyptian desert. It was almost perfectly quiet and almost perfectly lifeless; she could hear a soft moan, a sound she instantly recognized; it was the undead.

  Deanna could have turned around and walked away, only she worried how that would be received by the other women. They would call her names; coward or chicken shit, but that didn't bother her so much because she knew none of them would dare go in. Her worry was that if she ran away it would cement in all their minds that they were ruled by fear.

  "Besides, it's only one zombie," she told herself to ease the terror crawling in her belly. Once inside she discovered something almost as bad as zombies. Someone had vandalized the church, destroying whatever could be destroyed and desecrating what couldn't with crude drawings, fire, and, judging by the smell, feces. She was once again on the verge of throwing up.

  Taking deep breaths through her mouth, she eased down the main aisle, stepping over hymnals and bibles and broken hunks of pew, all the while with the shotgun raised and ready. By the time she got to the altar the gun's weight was too much. She lowered it and shook out her right arm and then nearly screamed.

  There was a child on the altar.

  It was someone's infernal sacrifice. There were only bones and rags of flesh left of it. In the carnage was a rusting dagger, while on the floor beside the altar were a skirt and a little pair of shoes.

  Deanna turned away and began panting, again fighting the desire to puke. "Oh, fuck," she whined as she realized she wasn't going to make it. She knew she would vomit and she knew that the sound would alert the zombie and that if it caught her while she was on her knees puking her guts out she was done for.

  There were only two choices left to her, run or attack before she began to hurl. She couldn't run. A short hall led off the church near the altar and the first door in that hall stood partially open. Deanna gritted her teeth, rushed to it and kicked it open.

  There was her zombie. It had been a priest and was once a jovial man with a large belly and thick jowls who had in his past life never turned down an opportunity for a home cooked meal from a parishioner or from anyone for that matter. Now his jowls hung in ribbons down the front of his soiled frock and his once soft hands were grey and ended in yellowed talons.

  He charged Deanna who screamed and fired the shotgun without aiming. The force of the twelve gauge's discharge spun her around to the right while the zombie-priest spun the opposite way having been hit mainly in the left shoulder.

  Her grip on the gun, which had been over-tight as she had walked up the aisle, had turned weak and the gun kicked with such brutal power that her fingers went numb. The shotgun dropped to the carpet. The whole event was such a shock that it was a full second before she bent to pick it up. The injured zombie recovered quicker and bum rushed her faster than she thought possible.

  She only had time to grab the gun before she began backpedaling, trying to buy herself time to figure out how to make the gun shoot again. Her knowledge of guns was so limited that she thought all shotguns were of the pump action variety—but there was no way to pump it. The undercarriage was solid wood.

  She had only seconds to figure it out and those seconds ticked by uselessly. The zombie-priest closed so fast that she was forced to drop the bulky shotgun and dodge away from the thing. She went to her left and too late saw it was the wrong way. Two more zombies had come from the room and a third was coming up the main aisle. Where that one had come from, she had no idea.

  Deanna only knew that she had managed to trap herself and that her only hope lay in the other women outside. The same women who had panicked at the sight of a single zombie.

  Chapter 18

  Jillybean

  Lewis Smith Lake, Alabama

  "You wanna go do something else?" Jillybean asked. She was sitting in a tree swinging her left leg as fast as she could make it go. This had the effect of torqueing her body around. To compensate she was jerking her right shoulder forward with every other kick.

  On a lower branch, ten-year-old Joseph Gates was swinging both his legs and biting the inside of his cheek. Every few minutes he would pause and spit between his legs. "Like what?"

  "I dunno, hide and go seek?"

  "No, I can't. I have to see what going to happen to my mom." He picked off a leafy stem and began stripping it of bark in long, thin sheets.

  Jillybean grabbed a little branch of her own and copied him, finding the motion oddly soothing—it didn't stop her leg swing however, which Ipes noted. What's with the leg? You got ants in your pants?

  "No," she said, under her breath. She stopped her leg but then began rocking from her butt up to her neck. To Joseph she said, "Nothing's gonna happen to your mom. Look at Captain Grey. You see how his eyes are squinty like that? That's what means don't mess with him and he already said no one was going to be executed. So she won't be. It's as simple as that."

  "But he's not the leader," Joseph shot back. "And that means he can't just order everyone about."

  Fred Trigg had said exactly the same thing only a minute before, causing the clearing to erupt in whispers. It was only now calming. "We've already voted on it and the majority has ruled," Trigg said concerning the execution of Clara Gates.

  Grey's lip curled but Neil held up a hand. He stood, pulled down on the hem of his sweater vest, and cleared his throat; Jillybean knew this meant he was going to give an important sounding speech of some sort. "Death cannot be decided by fifty-one percent of the vote, otherwise nobody would be safe from the tyranny of the majority," Neil said, walking back and forth in a short line. "Nor should a super-majority be able to force an execution as it would cause schisms in the group and weaken it. Death is too great a punishment for anything but a unanimous vote."

 
Trigg scoffed, "Then no one will ever be executed!"

  Neil ceased his pacing and looked evenly at him, saying, "In my opinion that would be a good thing." Trigg began to bluster but Neil snapped his fingers angrily; a very odd thing for the normally timid man. "That does not mean all punishments should be determined in the same manner. Nor does it mean people can't abstain from voting if they feel their conscious dictates it."

  "See?" Jillybean said, her leg swinging again. "Your mom's gonna be fine. I think we should do something. The grode-ups will talk all night about all this."

  You sure seem extremely interested in doing something with this boy, Ipes noted.

  Her leg began zipping through the air faster. "I don't!" she said defensively. "He just seems lonely."

  "Are you talking to your zebra?" Joseph asked, giving her a quick look.

  Trigg saved her from an embarrassing answer by crying out, "You're not even part of this group!"

  "Maybe they should be," Michael Gates said. "We're not an exclusive club. We let you join, Fred."

  "Hold on, these should be two separate issues," Fred countered. "We should finish our first order of business first. Everyone in my group who thinks the previous ruling of death should stand, raise your hands."

  Joseph made a fearful, whiney noise in his throat and Jillybean hopped off her branch and climbed down next to him as the adults began looking around at each other. There were a lot of grownups. Counting the prisoners that she and Captain Grey rescued, there were forty adults and one baby in the clearing.

  Jillybean touched Joseph's arm lightly. "It'll be ok. My grode-ups won't let them kill your mom. Trust me."

  "Before you vote may I suggest an alternative punishment?" Neil asked.

  "Uh-oh," Jilly said.

  My guess is they're not going to put her in time out, Ipes remarked out of the side of his mouth.

  Neil cleared his throat once more. "I think we can all agree that what Mrs. Gates did is unforgivable and yet she was forced into committing her crime under duress, something that should modify her punishment. As an alternative and more humane punishment I would suggest that she be expelled from the group."