The fire mattered very little to her. Her stomach was a butterfly-filled mess as she thought about the bounty hunter and the crazy mayor and the fact the two had to have found each other by now. How long would it take for the mayor to let drop the two words that would have the hunter racing back? The two words being: Sarah Rivers.
If it hadn’t happened already it was likely only minutes away. Despite being fully aware of this, Sarah didn’t go running off. What she needed more than anything was her knife. With it she could free herself and make a proper get away—that is if one considered stumbling around the zombie-plagued country side armed with only six inches of steel a proper get away. There was only one problem with the plan: her knife was nowhere to be seen or felt.
“Where the hell is it,” she asked, sensing her desperation grow with every useless second she spent kicking about in the grass. She went back and forth, letting precious seconds speed by as she searched. The backpack chaffed her neck and made it hard to see but she persevered. It should have been easy to find, after all, the hunter had casually tossed it straight out the window.
Sarah craned her head back to see if she was in the right spot. She was. The tower stood tall almost right above her. To see if the knife was on the steep angled roof she took a couple of steps back. It wasn’t. More seconds drifted by as she scanned the gutter, looking for the telltale glint of metal. It wasn’t there either, as far as she could tell.
She dropped her head, wondering how much time she had left and as she did a slight movement from far in her periphery caught her eye. It had been nothing more than a flicker of green, a breeze shaking a tree, a phantom of her imagination, a bounty hunter stealing behind the municipal building...
Had it been the hunter? Had he spotted her staring up at the building with her mouth hanging open like an idiot? From his point of view she probably looked no better than a zombie. Maybe she had looked like nothing more than a zombie! With the stupid pack around her neck and her body draped in filthy rags, she certainly didn’t feel very much like a human. And who, but a zombie, would spend their time gaping at a building?
If that had been him, and he had been fooled, it meant Sarah only had a minute or two to get away. Her first impulse was to make a dash for the forests that edged in close to the town but she squashed the idea. The trees were hundreds of yards away and the clock tower afforded a great view of the entire town. He would see her and the hunt would last only minutes.
Since she couldn’t run she had to hide. The most logical place to hide was exactly where no would want to: a building on fire. The Kinkos was out of the question, it wouldn’t be anything but rubble soon. The same was true of the next couple of store fronts which were beginning to brew up in a fierce way, however the fourth only seemed to be venting smoke from its second floor windows while the main floor look fully intact. It was, she hoped, perfect: close enough to the fire to be considered a crazy place to hide, but not so close as to get incinerated.
A voice in her head warned: Is this what Jillybean would do?
The voice made Sarah’s teeth grind together. Who knew what Jillybean would do? Sarah didn’t and she couldn’t spare even a second to consider it. She headed for the stores across the street, though not in a rush. Not only did she have the hunter to fool, there was a line of zombies that she would have to cross as well. Most were standing in the middle of the street, still captivated by the fire. They didn’t seem to see her even when she moaned her way right through them.
That was more than fine with her; she had never felt more vulnerable than at that moment. However, the feeling grew when she had to turn to get the shop’s door open; first she accidentally dropped the axe which clanged onto the sidewalk and then a shard of light shot into her eye from the direction of the tower.
It was her assumption that the hunter had the rifle she had left up there pressed to his cheek and was glassing the street and the buildings, searching for her. If she was in his crosshairs she would die, it was as simple as that. If not then she might escape without being seen at all. The image produced by the scope was wonderfully sharp, but also extremely narrow, meaning if she could get inside quickly he might not see her.
She entered the shop by the quickest way possible: she turned the doorknob with her bound hands and fell in backwards. Once inside she kicked the door shut and tried look around through a gathering smoke.
A sign above the counter read: Earl’s House of Vacuums. It was a sad, lonely looking establishment, as if even in its heyday the bell above the door hadn’t rung more than once or twice a week. There was even a TV on the counter with a canted chair in front, where Earl no doubt had sat with his feet propped up watching Wheel Of Fortune while waiting for his next customer.
How a shop like this made it, Sarah didn’t know. America, whether for good or for bad, had become a nation that understood and embraced the concept of temporary. People didn’t hold onto their jobs for thirty years anymore, they didn’t stay in the same home their whole lives as their parents had. Half the time they didn’t even keep the same spouse for more than a few years. Before the apocalypse it was understood that things did not last, and that included vacuums.
A broken belt was about the limit most people would accept in way of repairs. Anything more meant a trip to Sears or Walmart for a new one.
Yet, somehow, Earl’s had been in business right up to the eve of the Apocalypse. Though it wouldn’t last much longer. Already the room had filled with smoke and the temperature was such that Sarah’s pores had blossomed sweat the second the door had closed. Her eyes stung and she could barely open them even into a squint. She tried to cough, but she choked instead—beneath the super-heated air there were nasty fumes that she feared would kill her if she stayed there any longer. Clearly, Earl’s was not the perfect place to hide from the bounty hunter.
She had to get out of there, but with the hunter possibly up in the tower, leaving by the front door was a gamble she didn’t want to attempt. Instead she stumped forward on her knees towards a door that led to a rear area. Here the smoke roiled angrily and was so thick that she couldn’t see the ceiling seven feet above her head and the sound of the nearby inferno was a roar that blotted out her thoughts.
What was worse was the temperature in the room. It seemed to slap her in the face. Even on her knees it had her head spinning. Her body rebelled against the intensity of the heat, it was as if her lungs and throat had shrunk and, when she fought to suck air in, it felt like she was breathing through a very long straw. Each breath was an ordeal.
Still she was without options and she persevered despite the pain. When she reached the back room, she saw it was where Earl had fixed the few vacuums that came his way—it was sparse in its tools and more so in its inventory of broken machines. There was little to it and even if she had wanted to hide in the room, which was out of the question because of the fantastic heat, there was nowhere she could take cover.
This meant pushing on. Twenty-five feet from her she could see the lower half of another door. It had to lead out. If it didn’t, she knew she would die. The wall to her right had begun shimmering in the past few seconds. It scared her badly, more than the smoke and the heat. She watched it as she plodded forward on her knees. She watched as the paint first turned liquid and ran down the wall. What remain bubbled and swelled; when these popped they did so with little gouts of flames. The wall was simply evaporating from the intense heat on the other side.
She tried to go faster as the wall began to crumble and the colors of flying orange and hideous black swept the entire room, but the air was no longer breathable. Her lungs shriveled and her throat was raw sandpaper and try as she might, the hellish air wouldn’t pass. Seven feet from the rear exit she lost consciousness and fell flat on her face.
Sarah would've died right there, except that at almost the same time a wall came down in the adjacent store, collapsing the roof. This took out the wall that had been burning twenty feet from Sarah, which fell away from her with
a great crash. Now, the smoke and flame that had been trapped shot upward, billowing into the late afternoon air adding to the tower of smoke that was already a mile high.
A hot wind—what would have been unpleasant on any other day—rushed in and breathed Sarah back to life. Barely.
The first thing she noticed was that half of her body, the side facing the fire, was so hot it couldn’t be described, while the other side in comparison, was like the dark side of the moon. She rolled on her side, putting her back to the flames. This brought one second of relief and then it felt like her back was being peeled by searing whips.
A great part of her wanted to give up and die, however the lash of pain and heat forced her on. Standing seemed beyond her. Even kneeling was too much just then and so she undulated like an inch worm on its side to the door. There, she did her best to kick it open, stomping at the knob until she felt death closing in on her once more.
She would have to stand up where the heat doubled and the fumes were poison; standing was the only way out of the inferno that was quickly engulfing Earl’s House of Vacuums. From her back, she rolled to her side and then, as if she had become used to moving with her hands tied behind her back, she went to her knees and then to a standing position in one fluid motion. Immediately, she swooned and fell face first into the door, held up simply because her knees had locked instead of buckling. The heat sapped her of every ounce of energy she possessed, while at the same time the smoke and the fumes made her so light-headed that her thoughts seemed to be coming to her from a tin can with a string attached. The string was very long and, the sound of her inner voice a tinny, weak thing.
Each thought oozed up from her mind as if it were bubbling up through thick molasses.
Turn around.
“Ok,” she mumbled, twisting against the door, feeling like skewered meat over a fire.
Grab the door knob.
There was no speaking now. The fire had baked every drop of moisture from her mouth. Her tongue felt swollen and scratchy, like a hot sock balled in between her cheeks. Her lips had begun to crack and peel. Fighting to stay conscious, she turned the knob; nothing happened.
She was beyond the ability to panic or feel fear in any capacity; all she knew was pain. The door was locked or broken or she had forgotten how to work it or her hands...
Try the other way. Turn it the other way.
Compared to the great roar of the fire, the inner voice was the smallest sound in the universe and yet it could not be denied, no matter how much she wanted to let her knees come undone and fall to the side and be done with the pain.
In some fashion, the inner voice was connected to her hands. Sarah turned the knob the other way and the door swung out, opening onto an alley where a number of zombies stood watching the fire. They glanced at her but she didn’t see them and even if she had she wouldn’t have cared. In the few seconds of consciousness left to her she saw and understood only one thing: water.
Next to one of the zombies was a puddle left over from the previous day’s rain. It was deep black with a blue-green oily sheen floating on top. Nothing had ever looked so inviting. She staggered to it, sagged to her knees and collapsed into it face first.
Sarah was unconscious in six inches of water and again she might have died if not for the strangest of fates. The zombie she had stumbled past saw her as a wild looking apparition; black with soot and grime, short hair smoldering from the heat and going in every direction, her body torqued with her hands behind her back and a bag across her neck, and yet something in her demeanor made the zombie curious as to her humanity.
With a growl it yanked her over and stood staring as water ran down her face, carving bizarre streaks through the mud and muck plastered to her soft skin. Had she moaned or spluttered or done anything other than just lie there as still as death, it would’ve attacked. But she did not and, after a moment, the zombie’s natural inclination to destroy anything human faded back into what was left of its mind.
She went ignored until the sun dipped and the fire grew less and the moon strode to the middle of the heavens and lit her body with its pale light. Then she was shaken into a state that was close to consciousness. Even when water was splashed onto her face, the night was nothing but shadows in her mind.
Hands gripped her and she was flung across a broad shoulder. Then she remembered nothing more until sometime later water was again splashed into her face. It was clean and cold and she drank it even as she blinked trying to make sense of the world. Her first sense was of pain. The greatest was in her hands and shoulders, but there was also pain in her jaw as she drank and in her right eye as she tried to blink and see where she was.
She guessed she was in the basement of a home. It was hard to tell because the flickering candlelight created more shadow than understanding, and because the man she knew as the mayor of Easton stood directly in front of her blocking most of her view.
“You’re a liar and a fake and you’re not the queen of England,” he said, when her blue eyes began to flutter. “I know! I know the truth about who you really are and what your mission is. He told me.” When he spoke he would blink very hard, closing his eyes for most of a second and squeezing them tight before popping them open again.
“Who? Who told you?” she asked in a whisper. It hurt to talk. She was so thirsty that her lips and her throat crackled like dry leaves.
The mayor pointed away from himself toward a wall. The gesture was meaningless to Sarah and she shook her head. “The man from the government. The real government. He told me what you are, Sarah Rivers. He told me you are a spy!” He practically spat out the word, making a face of disgust as he did.
Again Sarah shook her head and after trying to coax the smallest amount of saliva into her mouth she asked, “The man in camouflage? Is he here?”
“No. He’s left to hunt down the others spies. That’s right, he knows what you are. He knows about the Shadow Government. He knows and now I know. I knew things weren’t right. I knew the people had changed. I didn’t always know. No, I didn’t. He showed me the truth! Truth and lies! And now I can show him that I belong on the right side. I just have to call him.”
“How?”
“Not by phone!” he cried in sudden anguish. “That uses beams. It’s how it all started with satellites and cell phones and high frequency beams. We can’t use those. He told me about what you did to them, how you sent coded messages. No, we can’t use them. But I can use a CB. He gave me a CB. He told me to call if I found you and I did. He also said to be careful. You’re the decoy. He said you tricked him so the other spies could slip around west. He knows and I knows.”
Chapter 20
Jillybean
Pinedale, Maryland
“I think west is the only way,” Neil said. His map was out, laid flat on the hood of a little red car. Though the car was little compared to the adults, it was still too tall for Jillybean to see what Neil was pointing at. “We should make for Hagerstown and then go south on I81.”
Maps, especially road maps with all their squiggly lines, didn’t interest Jillybean much and, since she was serving real tea in real tea cups at a real tea party, she was exceptionally disinterested. The ramble house they had spent the night in had provided a dusty can of Lipton’s Iced Tea, and one of the many, many cars they had emptied of gas had two bags of months-old groceries in the back seat. Among the remains of long-rotten vegetables were some odds and ends: canned goods, pasta, spaghetti sauce and a package of Nutter-Butters.
Strictly speaking, store-bought, peanut butter flavored cookies were not acceptable tea party fare, with the sole exception being apocalyptic tea parties in which the rules were generally relaxed. Sadie, who didn’t seem all that excited about the map either, nibbled at her cookies, sipped her tea, and sighed in weariness.
“Why do we want to go west?” she asked. “Just because the colonel’s men walked off eastward? I’m sure they have cars. They could be anywhere.”
“But you not
think of trap,” Nico said. He also held a cup of tea—Jillybean wouldn’t be a proper hostess if she left him out just because he guzzled his tea more as an afterthought instead of taking proper sips with his pinky up as manners dictated. “It was most like the other bounty hunter who set spikes in our path. If he is in east then we go west as Neil says.”
“Just not today,” Sadie said. They had spent the second half of the day knocking holes in gas tanks, collecting almost forty gallons. After that, Nico, who was sound in his mechanics, worked elbow-deep in the guts of a dark blue Explorer getting it ready to travel.
“There’s still a few hours of daylight left,” Neil said. “We could probably get fifty miles further if we left right away.”
“You don’t understand,” Sadie replied with another heavy sigh. “I’m beat.”
“Maybe you could take a nap on the way,” Neil suggested. Unlike Nico, he raised his teacup to the hostess before taking a modest drink.
Jillybean nodded in return, but quickly looked to Sadie to see what her reaction would be to Neil’s deceptive remarks. Sadie wouldn’t be able to sleep in the SUV unless they were very lucky.
First, there were the ever-present zombies; running over one was dreadful and waking up to see their black blood smeared across the windshield was the stuff that made nightmares. Then there would be the constant fear of the bounty hunter and the colonel’s men coming after them. All day they had moved about like furtive squirrels. This was a natural state for Jillybean, but it had left the rest of them frazzled.
With a bit of a grimace, Sadie shook her head at Neil’s idea. She then jutted her chin toward the smoke in the north-west sky. It had been a devil’s cloud of billowing black the day before; now it was a haze of grey-brown on the horizon.
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