The Apocalypse Fugitives

by Peter Meredith

  You didn't have it the night before, either.

  "Maybe I was too tired to dream," she reasoned. On tip toes she left Deanna who seemed nothing more than a mound beneath the covers and went to look for the bathroom only to find Captain Grey searching the kitchen. He shook his head at her, meaning the place was bare. She had guessed it would be. They were only a mile and a half from Cape Girardeau and the River King's thousand subjects. It was a given they had picked through every suburb by now.

  When she got back from the bathroom, she started to search in all the "unusual" spots where food was sometimes found: in office desks, at the bottom of sock drawers, etc, Grey stopped her. "Could you go wake up Deanna for me?"

  She agreed but wondered why he didn't just bark at her to "get her lazy butt up" like he would anyone else. Deanna didn't come awake with any of the pep that Jillybean had displayed. She pulled back the covers looking pale and sick. "You ok?" Jilly asked.

  "I need a bucket," she said, groping to her feet unsteadily. She settled for a trash can and heaved up watery looking vomit, making an awful racket.

  "She's sick," Jillybean told Grey, unnecessarily. He had sprung into the bedroom looking ready to do battle at the first ugly sound.

  "It's just something I ate," Deanna said, wiping her face on a soft green dress that had sat undisturbed, hanging from the back of the bedroom closet for the last eight months. "Or maybe I swallowed some of the river water...wait! The river with all those zombies, do you think it's toxic?"

  "Probably," Grey said. "You are throwing up after all."

  "Right. But what about turning into a zombie? Could the water make you one?"

  He came down to her level and looked into her eyes, then touched her cheek with the back of his hand. "You look fine, zombie free fine that is, but you are a little pale."

  "Then I'll be good," she said, standing abruptly and heading for the bathroom.

  Grey scowled at her back. "We leave in ten minutes."

  She was ready in nine which did little to cheer Captain Grey up. He was moody for the rest of the morning with his mood growing darker with every wasted hour they spent scavenging their way south. After five miles he stood glaring at the Mississippi that lay flat and black a half mile away. Just to his right, sitting on a trailer was a fancy looking racing boat that must have been very fast judging by the tremendous motor on the back of it.

  Grey barely gave it a glance before moving on. One look was all it took to see why: more holes. Every boat they had come across sported gaping holes that had been purposely smashed in their hulls.

  Deanna, who hadn't stopped to look at the racing boat, pointed further down the road, "There's a what-you call-it, a boat store. Western Marine and Supplies. We should check it out."

  "Does it matter?" Grey asked. He came to stand next to her, looking at the store with obvious disappointment. "This is a waste of time. We have to go further south. The River King's bread and butter depends on there not being anyway to cross the river except by way of his bridge. Or by..." He bit off his words, trying not to look disgusted.

  "Or by swimming?" Deanna challenged. "Me and Jillybean can't swim that far. It's a fact and you need to get over it."

  "The grode-ups are fighting," Jillybean whispered to Ipes.

  Now it's my turn to say: no duh! You should try helping them.

  "How?" Jillybean asked, easing away from Captain Grey, who was turning red with fury.

  "What's your problem with me?" he demanded. "If it's because of those idiots from The Island then you're way out of bounds lumping every man who ever wore a uniform together."

  Deanna looked ready to explode and Ipes hissed, Try figuring out a way to cross the river. Just do it quick, before any zombies hear them.

  "You want me to figure out a way to cross? Without a boat and without swimming?" After a pause she said, "Ok, that shouldn't be too tough. Hey, Mister Captain Grey, Sir? I'm gonna go up to the boat selling place while you guys talk."

  "You're wasting your time," he said.

  "You don't know that," Deanna said, heading after the little girl. "Maybe they have stuff to repair boats in there."

  Reluctantly Grey followed. "I'm sure they do, but repairing a boat takes hours if not days. It would be quicker just to keep walking."

  Jillybean, who had no intention of repairing a boat, went to the store, moving cautiously as she neared on the off chance there were zombies lurking near. As there were none in view she opened the door and stood gaping at a great mess. The River King's men had demolished the place. Boating paraphernalia lay everywhere.

  Gingerly, she stepped over an anchor and picked up a sheet of sail cloth. She let it run through her fingers saying, "Hmmm," as it did.

  "It would have been easier to have torched the building," Grey said poking his head in and looking disgustedly at the mess. "Ok Jillybean, you've had your look, let's go."

  "Don't rush her," bit Deanna.

  Grey's hands clenched into fists and his jaw muscles worked into knots so that he seemed to choke on the words, "Do you expect her to build a sailboat out of all this crap?"

  "No but maybe she could fix one of the boats out front."

  "We don't need a boat," Jillybean said. "We'll dress as monsters and float across the river with these." She held up a life vest; she then went to an electric motor that was lying on the ground and pointed at it. "That can push us. So I guess we don't even have to swim even though I was really a pretty good swimmer. Did I ever tell you I was a tadpole, Miss Deanna? That's what means I went to swim lessons at the Holly pool back home."

  "No you never did tell me," Deanna said sweetly, turning her smile towards Grey with an I told you so look.

  His face went tight in anger for all of a second before he laughed. "The solution was practically staring us right in the face! Alright, find a life preserver that fits under your zombie outfit, get yourselves all covered in mud, and let's go."

  Deanna made a noise of exasperation before saying, "I think he meant: thank you Jillybean that was very smart."

  "Yeah," Grey said. "That's what I meant."

  Chapter 31

  Captain Grey

  Fort Campbell, Kentucky

  Once Grey figured out how to get the electric motor working and positioned correctly, the trip across the Mississippi was uneventful. The motor had been designed to fit on the back of a boat and extend downward into the water. It was awkwardly long and more potent than he had expected, making holding it with just his hands impossible as had first he'd hoped.

  He refused to even look in Jillybean's direction as he puzzled over how he was going to use it to get them across. The obvious solution, strapping it to his back seemed...silly. After much trial and error, he broke up a little row boat, clamped the engine to the back end, put some life preservers around it, and wrapped all of it in duct tape. It was artless and ugly.

  Jillybean gave it a single puzzling glance and then pretended the weather was of great interest while Deanna only smiled infuriatingly.

  "It's supposed to look like river trash," Grey said.

  "Oh it does," Deanna remarked.

  Ugly or not it was light, it floated, and it purred them along to the other side of the river in minutes. Steering was its only issue: they could go straight ahead and no other direction without a great deal of splashing of arms and with the river so congested, they ran into a number of slimy, grey/green zombies. These would wallow like a person drowning in slow motion and twice Deanna almost got them killed by whimpering when they would jar up against her.

  He didn't blame her or chastise her. Both would've been pointless and besides, he understood. The river zombies were disgusting beyond even their land based relatives. Their skin was wrinkled like a brain and slimy from month's worth of algae growth, and they stank. Somehow they managed to combine the stench of rotting flesh and rotting fish.

  By the time they made it to the other side Jillybean was a shade of green and Deanna ended up vomiting for the second time th
at day. She collapsed in the shallows and Grey had to drag her up onto the muddy shore to keep her from being swarmed by the river zombies.

  "It's got to be the water," she said when she was done retching. Grey didn't think twice about it. His mind was on the next steps he had to take: securing a vehicle, finding gas for it, and making it to Fort Campbell.

  Being so close to a settlement meant that finding gas was the most difficult of the three. For two hours he went from car to car, knocking holes in tanks until he had scrounged only enough to get them the sixty miles needed. They left right away in a Chevy Malibu, the car of choice during an apocalypse when there weren't any other choices.

  Deanna sat in the front, still weak from throwing up, while in the back Jillybean sat up straight in her seat searching out the window.

  "What are you looking for?" Grey asked.

  "I'll know it when I see it," she answered. Shortly after, she pointed across the road at a strip mall. "There. We need to stop. That says RadioShack and that's what means a place to buy radios. That's how I'm going to talk to Sadie."

  This was fine with Grey, he had a shopping list of his own.

  Unlike the taxidermist shop next door which was in pristine condition, looters had gone through the RadioShack and had left it in shambles. Still there was plenty to pick through: wires of all gauges, fuses, switches, soldering torches, a bunch of now useless man-toys, and a few two-way radios. Grey filled his basket to overflowing with items he would need to blow up a bridge.

  Jillybean clipped a two-way to each side of her hips so that she resembled a tiny gun fighter; she pocketed extra batteries and then began playing with a remote control car, driving it up and down over the piles of merchandise. "This is so cool," she said. Deanna stood at the door, looking pensively at a zombie that had come wandering up, attracted by the sounds of the Malibu.

  "There's one of them out there," she pointed out.

  "Oh, I'll take care of it," Jillybean said, eagerly. Wearing a grin on her face, she picked up the remote control car and set it just outside. The shoe-box sized car went zipping across the parking lot bouncing on the uneven pavement until it sped right up to the zombie's feet. The creature stared at it, but before its torpid mind could grasp exactly what it was, Jillybean backed it up and then drove it in circles around it. The creature tried to follow the car with its eyes and ended up going round and round.

  Jillybean snorted with laughter. Grey only grunted, "How does that help?"

  "You'll see," she said, as she sent the car shooting to the far end of the parking lot. The zombie followed. "Now we can go get into the car without having to risk getting bitten."

  "Sounds good to me," Grey said. They went to the Malibu where upon Jillybean worked the controls and zoomed the car back; she scooped it up like it was a family pet.

  "Girl power," Deanna said from the front seat, turning to give her a 'high-five'.

  "Looked more like brain power," Grey remarked. He was about to go on except Deanna's sudden frosty look stopped his lips. She's been abused by soldiers, he reason, silently. Give her time.

  But time to do what, exactly? Time to "get over" being forced into prostitution? Or was it time for her to like him that he was looking for? And since when did he care if anyone liked him? The answer to that was Missy Halloran in the tenth grade, and that was too long ago to even matter.

  He snuck a look at Deanna from the corner of her eye: straight blond hair, clear blue eyes, a tall nose but a nice one except when she was looking down it at him. Her skin was naturally clear and smooth and her form slim but still proportioned as a woman should be. Simply she had model good looks and it was no wonder that he felt something stir within him every time she looked his way—without the frown that is.

  "What?" she asked, catching his eyes on her.

  "You still look pale from earlier. We should find you some fresh water."

  "And some food," Jillybean said. "I'm starving and so is Ipes, though he's always starving. Mainly he starving for cookies but he also likes cake with chocolate frosting. I miss frosting."

  Any delay bothered the time-conscious captain, but food and water were a necessity. Water was everywhere along their path in the form of ponds and streams; it only had to be boiled first. Food was more difficult. They took a pit stop in the small village of Benton, Kentucky, going in and out of silent homes without success, unless Jillybean finding a replacement backpack, pink with fist-sized ladybugs on it, was counted as a success.

  They were forced to go on with empty stomachs. Even grey's rumbled as he said, "Fort Campbell isn't much further. You never know what we'll find."

  What they found was a blow to Captain Grey's heart. The term "fort" suggests a hardened structure designed for defense, however the word was only a throwback to times long gone. Fort Campbell had been guarded by only a fence which had collapse under the weight of thousands of zombies in October of the previous year.

  The base had been overrun and the men of the 101st Screaming Eagles had died to a man. Most were eaten alive while a few committed suicide. Grey wished more of them had put a bullet in their own brains, for his sake and for theirs. The grounds were crawling with undead soldiers in shredded uniforms going here and there, mindlessly, while scattered all around lay heaps of smoldering bones.

  "The monsters, Mister Captain Grey, Sir," Jillybean warned, causing Grey to jerk. He'd been revisiting some of the desperate stands he'd been a part of in the last year and had been staring off into space. "They're coming," she added.

  "Good," he replied. At Deanna's look of incredulity he explained, "See all those dead bodies? Not the zombie ones, but the others. It's where we'll find food if there's any to be found. Soldiers have a habit of hoarding if they think their supply situation isn't good."

  Grey beeped the Malibu's horn to entice all the zombies within sight to charge them. When a full two hundred of them were flocking at them, he calmly put the car in gear and sped around them, expertly steering through the gaps, aiming across the once manicured green lawns toward a spot where the fence had been torn full away.

  Once onto the base he stopped at the first little clump of corpses. "Food, ammo, a few guns. That's what we're after." He then jumped out and began digging through the remains of one soldier. After eight months of exposure there wasn't much to him: bones, the soft wet remains of flesh and organs, a strange pelt of hair atop a grinning skull. Grey ignored all that, going for the pockets of its BDUs.

  "I can't," Deanna said. She knelt next to a corpse, her breath hitching in her throat, her face white as alabaster. "It's too gross."

  "You need to toughen up," Grey growled at her. "Or go back to being…I mean…" He choked off what had been close to being a wildly inappropriate statement. "I mean this is how we live now. There's no room for weakness anymore."

  "It's not that," she replied. "It's just that I'm…never mind. I'll go keep them off of you." Without waiting for his ok, she went to the Malibu and drove it back toward the fence to where the zombies were hurrying up. She swung the car hard to the right and revved past them; the zombies turned like starlings.

  "I guess that'll do also," Grey whispered under his breath before bending his head back to the grizzly work at hand. The corpse gave up a full thirty round magazine and a packet of jelly from an MRE. The next had two full MREs but no bullets. Of the eight corpses he searched each gave him something to use. Combined with what Jillybean found they had eighty rounds of ammo, another M4 and food enough for a few days.

  "This place is a gold mine," Jillybean said. "Once we free Neil and them we should come back."

  "Uh-huh," Grey murmured. If they managed to free anyone, Grey actually hoped to be on the other side of the river.

  The pair waved Deanna back. She seemed much improved when she pulled up. "Where to next," she asked as they dumped their discoveries in the back and got in.

  "We have to find the munitions bunkers," Grey said.

  "I think we should eat," Jillybean said. After a gl
ance at her hands she added, "Ipes says we should wash our hands first. I think he's right."

  "When is he not?" Grey asked, and then immediately wished he hadn't as the little girl went down a long list of the times Ipes' had been wrong. This list was frequently interrupted as the zebra supposedly argued different points. The captain sighed wearily and pointed forward. "There's a pond a little ways down on the left."

  "You were stationed here?" Deanna asked.

  "No. I did air assault training here about eight years ago. Air assault is…you ever see people fast-rope out of helicopters? Well that's basically it, at least in practice."

  She didn't ask a follow up question and he didn't expound. To Grey's complete lack of surprise, Jillybean looked like she had a question, but Grey preempted her. "There's the pond. We'll clean up, eat and go. I want to get back to Cape Girardeau before dark. That means no unnecessary chit chat."

  "You sure do like to give orders," Deanna said, turning off the road.

  "That's because he's a captain," Jillybean said. "Even if he doesn't have a boat. Which I think is all silly. Every captain should have a boat or at least…" She stopped as she caught him glaring at her. "Right. No chit chat."

  They ate out in the open sitting on the shores of the pond where a few ducks lazed. Lunch, was a mishmash of the usual MRE fare: for the most part everything tasted like nothing. As all old campaigners did, Jillybean traded for her favorites, getting the best of her deals because neither Grey nor Deanna was all that interested in the food.

  Deanna professed not to like any of it, but she lingered over the crackers and looked better after she got them down. "Now if we just don't run across anymore really nasty looking zombies, I should be good for a while." Grey laughed, thinking it was a joke: the place was crawling with nasty zombies.

  When they were finished, and after Grey gave in to Jillybean who wanted to feed the ducks, just a little, they climbed back into the Malibu and went in search of the bunkers he knew were somewhere near the airfields.