by Adair, Bobby
I nodded.
Another bitter laugh that verged on tears. “That’s not the kind of problem I ever thought I’d have to solve.”
I shook my head, thinking back to Freitag’s friend with no hands who we went to dispose of downriver.
“I couldn’t keep them in the house,” Molly said. “I couldn’t bury them. We’ve only got a few inches of soil in our backyard, and then it’s just limestone. I wrapped them in layers of garbage bags and duct tape. I didn’t know what else to do. I left them by the back fence under some blankets. I took some rocks that bordered the garden and put them on the blankets to keep them from blowing away.”
Given the constraints, that seemed like a pretty good solution to me.
“A week or so later, they disappeared.”
At first that surprised me, until I realized the bodies had probably been dragged off by hungry Whites. “Was the fence knocked down?”
Molly nodded. “For a while it was only me and Sara. We did okay, considering. We were getting low on food, and I knew I needed to go see what I could find in the neighbors’ houses. I didn’t know whether it was more dangerous to leave her at home or bring her with me. But she was too frightened to stay by herself. She convinced me, and I brought her along. I told myself I had plenty of ammunition, and we’d be okay.” Molly shook her head again as she relived her choices. “We weren’t. It happened next door at the Buckley’s house.”
Molly took another moment to collect herself, and I waited patiently while she did.
“The front door was locked, and I didn’t think I could break it in.”
I looked Molly up and down. She weighed all of a hundred and ten pounds. She was probably right.
“We went around to the back yard. I opened the gate. I was so stupid. I should have checked first if anything was back there. They were. They rushed out at us, three of them, like they’d been waiting there for us all along.”
“Some of them can be pretty efficient predators,” I said. “They may have heard you coming and chose to be quiet and wait, hoping you’d open the gate and come in.”
Molly shrugged. “It all happened so fast. I had the gun in my hand, and I was shooting even as I was falling. The infected were clawing and snapping. I killed the one that came down on top of me, and while I was laying there with that thing bleeding on me, I shot the other two who were attacking Sara. But—” Molly buried her face in her hands and sobbed loudly.
I wrapped my arms around her and lied to her that it was okay. Everything was okay.
It took a long while for Molly to cry herself out. When she did, she stood up straight and looked at me with red eyes. “I shot her. I shot Sara. I guess when I was falling. The bullet hit her in the neck. It went straight through. She was bleeding badly, so badly. I knew she was going to die, but I put my hand over her throat and I tried to stop the bleeding.” Molly shrugged as if to ask what else she could have done. “Sara looked at me. She didn’t scream or cry. She just tried to breathe. She didn’t move. That’s when I heard the infected screaming. They were close and coming.”
“Whites.” I muttered.
Molly nodded. “I checked my revolver. I only had one bullet left. There were four or five coming, maybe more.” Molly closed her eyes and put her hand over them as she turned away. In a hoarse whisper she said, “I put the last bullet in Sara’s head, and I ran.” More sobs followed.
When the sobs came to a stop I said, “It wasn’t your fault. What you did for Sara might be the bravest thing I’ve heard. I don’t know if I could have done it.”
Molly looked back at me and nodded as her lip quivered. “I feel like a coward. I keep telling myself I should have stayed with her or maybe used the bullet on myself.”
I looked at the house. “That’s why you weren’t beat up when they raped you.”
Molly nodded, and after gulping another breath she said, “I thought I deserved what those men were doing to me, for what I let happen to my kids. I let them do—” she cried some more.
“The world is a fucked up place now,” I told her after a bit.
Molly looked back at the house and laughed bitterly.
I shook my head and pointed at the house. “You lived through that and all the other stuff. You’re strong.”
“Aren’t you just the Mr. Positive Dr. Phil?”
“I’m just trying to make it through the day,” I told her.
Chapter 39
Carrying some kind of tan-colored goggle things in one hand and his M4 in the other, Murphy walked across the driveway to where Molly and I were just finishing up by the Humvee. “What’s the plan, Batman?” he said, grinning.
I looked into the Humvee. “We’ve got about as much stuff in here as we’re going to get.”
“You got all the fifty cal ammo?” Murphy asked.
I nodded. “Eleven cans. All I could find.”
Murphy looked back at the house. “There’s a lot of shit in there.”
I shrugged. That was plainly true.
“You guys are just going to leave, then?” Molly asked.
“We are loading up the Humvee.” I pointed to the stuff piled in the back of our truck. “What exactly are you asking?”
Molly crinkled her brow. “Things are happening pretty fast. I haven’t thought about it.”
Murphy looked at me, “Before you go all Null Spot, dude, these chicks got everything they need here. Maybe enough food for—I don’t know—four or five months, and more guns and ammo than they’re likely to need. Shit like this.” He held up the goggle things.
I looked at them, but didn’t have a guess what they were.
“Night vision goggles,” he said.
“No shit.” That pleased me greatly. “They don’t look like what I’ve seen on TV.”
Murphy shook his head. “There are lots of different kinds.”
I reached out, and Murphy handed me the goggles. I started to examine them. “Do they work?”
“Yep.”
“Do they take batteries?” I asked.
“Yep.”
“And the batteries are still good?”
“These still work.”
As I slipped them over my head, I asked, “How many sets of these did you find?”
“Just the one so far,” he said.
Molly pointed toward one end of the house. “There are seven more inside.”
“Seven?” I asked. “How do you know that?”
Molly looked down at her feet. “They didn’t always have me locked up. I earned their trust at least a little bit. The goggles are in the rec room in that pile of stuff behind the pool table.”
Shaking his head and shrugging, Murphy said, “I didn’t really go through that stuff.”
Molly looked at me and went into sales mode. “I saw most of what they brought in. I think I know what they’ve got.”
“Had,” I corrected. “It’s your stuff now.”
“Or our stuff,” she suggested.
I looked at Murphy with the silent question on my face. What do we do about the girls?
Ignoring Molly, he said, “Man, you know what we got to do.”
“I can help,” she said. “We can all help.”
“This isn’t your fight,” I told Molly.
She replied, “Let’s team up. We’ll all be better off together than alone. You can see that, right?”
Shaking my head, I said, “Not necessarily.”
“Are you guys alone?” Molly asked.
“No,” I admitted. “It’s complicated.” I spent a while explaining the situation to Molly, not the history—I glossed over a few quick points—but mostly I told her about our plan to rescue Steph and get out of town. With a nod from Murphy, permission I guess, I told her we were planning to head west, far from all the danger of the Whites in the cities.
When I was done, Molly pointed at a freestanding garage that Murphy and I hadn’t checked when we cleared the house of threats. “There’s a trailer in that garage. It’s go
t a Porsche in it. I think the guy used it for racing or something and he towed it to the races with the car inside.”
“Wait,” I asked, “That’s why that garage was so big?”
Molly said, “The guy that lived here before the infection hit, he was that guy you killed on the bed—”
“You knew him before?” Murphy asked.
“Yes,” Molly answered. “Not well, but he had parties at his house for the neighbors. He’s got some old cars and things in there.”
“A trailer.” Murphy stroked his chin. He looked at me. He looked over at the garage. “Let’s go check it out.”
I glanced up at the front gate. To Molly, I asked, “How are those other girls doing? Can one or two of them keep an eye on things out here for a bit? I hate not having somebody on watch.”
“Considering what they’ve been through, Zed, they’re fine.”
“Okay,” I said, “I just didn’t know—” I groped for the right words.
Molly said, “We’re not fragile. If we were, none of us would have made it this long.”
Chapter 40
It was as much a showroom as a garage. The guy owned seven cars, all old, all expensive, arrayed for display across a gleaming epoxy-coated floor. The walls were hung with neon signs and old metal car product signs. A row of red toolboxes lined one section of wall, filled with more tools than I’d ever need, likely more than I could identify.
The trailer, parked along one wall just inside one of the garage doors, was fully enclosed. Inside, the front eight feet were set up as a small overnight camper. The back held tool boxes, racks for tires, and a Porsche painted in red, white, and blue racing stripes and numbers. Inside was also mounted a fuel tank for storing a few hundred gallons of custom race fuel for the Porsche.
“If we ditch the Porsche,” I said, as though that was a decision we’d have to spend some time thinking about, “there’s a ton of room. We could haul off most—if not all—of the food and weapons these guys collected.”
Nodding, Murphy said, “And we’ll be set when we get to Balmorhea.”
“That’s what I’m thinking.”
Murphy walked around the front of the trailer. “We just need to figure out how to make the trailer hitch work with the one on the back of the Humvee.”
Pointing around the room, I said, “I think there are enough tools here that we can make anything work.”
Murphy looked at the tool cabinets and nodded.
I looked at Molly. “You talk to the girls and make sure they’re on board. If so, we need to get to work.” To Murphy I said, “In the three Humvees we’ll have room for twelve, but we’ll have fourteen people. What do you think?”
“Instead of hooking the trailer up to a Humvee,” said Molly, “why not use that crew cab F-350 to haul it, then you’ve got room for at least five comfortably, and more if you need to squeeze them in.”
Shaking my head, I said, “Won’t work. The Whites go nuts when they see a running vehicle. They’ll break right through those windows and kill everyone inside.”
Molly said, “I’ll bet there’s a welding rig in here. We could cut some metal out of the fence and weld it across the windows or something. That’ll protect everyone inside.”
“And over the grill,” Murphy added. “That’ll protect the radiator when you have to run some over. And you will have to run some over.”
“That could work,” I agreed. “That’ll give us enough room for everyone.”
Chapter 41
While Murphy spent the afternoon in a shaded spot on the roof keeping an eye on our perimeter, two of the girls—one who’d had some experience welding—went to work with an acetylene torch cutting sections of fence and welding them over the grill and windows on the Ford pickup. Aesthetically, it was hideous. But it was functional. Molly, me, and the other girl spent the afternoon loading the trailer with every weapon, every bit of food, and all the ammunition we could find in the house.
Though the trailer already had tool cabinets built in, we loaded other tools we thought might be of use. After that, we siphoned the diesel out of the tanks of cars in the collection across the front yard and in the cul-de-sac. In doing so, we topped off the tanks of all three Humvees and the pickup. With no need for the high-octane gasoline stored in the trailer for racing the Porsche, we dumped it and put the rest of our diesel there.
It was after midnight when Molly and I climbed the ladder at the back of the house to get onto the roof. Murphy, by that time, had a lawn chair set up on the roof, though he wasn’t sitting in it. He was looking through his night vision goggles and scanning along the fence line. As we approached, he asked, “We ready?”
“Yeah,” I answered.
He flipped up his goggles and asked, “What’s the plan?”
I pointed out at the Humvee with the fifty-caliber machine gun mounted on the roof. “We head out in the dark. I’ll drive that one. Murphy, you’ll be up on the roof with the fifty. Molly will be right behind us with the trailer. We’ll put one of the girls—”
“Marissa,” Molly cut in, reminding me of her name.
“Yeah, Marissa,” I said. “Each of the other two girls will follow in the last two Humvees. We’ll take it slow and stay tight.”
Nodding, Murphy said, “Yeah, that should work.”
“We shouldn’t get too many Whites out after us,” I said. “If we do, we’ll run down what we can. If we get in trouble, we’ll speed up or shred ‘em with the fifty.”
“We’ve got plenty of ammo for it,” Murphy confirmed.
“And you’ll never guess what we found,” I said, grinning.
“What?”
“A grenade launcher.”
“What?” Murphy asked. “Like an RPG or something?”
Shaking my head I said, “Like some kind of thing with a magazine on the side. It looks kind of like the machine gun but with a barrel this big.” I held my hand up and made a big circle with my fingers.
“Probably an MK19.”
“So it is a grenade launcher?” I asked.
Murphy grinned. “It’s like a big grenade machine gun. I think one of the Humvees has a mount for an MK19.”
Smiling, I looked at Molly. She smiled wickedly in return. She was probably thinking of slaughtering the infected. I was thinking of slaughtering Jay and his thugs.
“When are we heading out, then?” Murphy asked.
“We’re ready to go now,” I answered. “We can go back to the boathouse tonight, get everyone fed, then spend tomorrow afternoon getting ready. Tomorrow night we should be able to get the girls from Jay.”
Nodding, Murphy said, “Then we bail out of town?”
“That’s the plan.”
Chapter 42
My experience in the post-apocalyptic world put me in a state of mind such that I was always surprised when things went as planned. And so I was surprised when our little convoy drove an hour without incident to a residential street that ran along the side of a hill, above the cove where our friends were hiding in the boathouse.
Without seeing a single White after we parked, we offloaded some food and enough weapons for our task. The rest of the night and the next day we spent planning, preparing, and of course, getting some sleep. At least that’s what Murphy and I needed most. The others in the boathouse, having spent their time being worried, bored, and hungry, had plenty of time to rest while waiting for us to return.
I’d tried to convince the others that I could rescue the girls all on my own. All I needed was a pair of night vision goggles, my machete, and a dark night. My plan was to swim out to the island, silent and invisible. I’d sneak around until I found Jay sleeping in his hut, dispatch him with a few brutal machete hacks, and maybe whack a few more of his fucktards. I’d then find Steph, Amy, and Megan, pilfer a boat, and get out of Dodge.
To me, it was that simple. But nobody liked my cowboy plan. They thought I might murder one too many innocents as I crept ninja-style around the island.
D
alhover and Gretchen had other ideas. They thought they could intimidate Jay with our newly gained superior firepower. They’d blow up or sink a few boats and threaten to sink the rest. Jay would read the writing on the wall and give over his hostages. The thing they just didn’t understand nor accept when I argued the point was that Jay was crazy. Gretchen had dealt with him, recognized his oddities, but couldn’t accept that he’d act more irrationally than he already had.
As for me, I’d seen enough crazy in the eyes of irrational people to know it when I saw it in Jay. So, while Dalhover was finding a way to secure the fifty-caliber machine gun on the bow deck of the cabin cruiser, Murphy had put the MK19 grenade launcher on its tripod on the pontoon boat. I’d insisted, to the point of leaving the group, that I was swimming out to the island. They’d all finally agreed to let me go on with what they saw as my heroic stupidity. I was the backup plan in case Jay went nuts.
The hard part in all of it was going to come when choosing who to kill. I knew there were good people on that island, frightened and following Jay’s lead just because he exuded those two most important of leadership characteristics: passion and certainty. Too bad people readily accepted that combination as a valid replacement for competence. History is littered with the fallen empires of kings, dictators, and fools who were passionate, certain, and wrong.
By the time night fell that next day, we were ready. What’s more, we couldn’t have asked for a better night—well, maybe not much better. Only a sliver of a moon shed light on the lake, but only when it could find a gap in the clouds. The near blackness of the night significantly enhanced the advantage of our night vision.
I looked down at a newly acquired watch on my wrist and looked out the Humvee’s window to get my bearings. Using night vision goggles, Rachel drove the Humvee slowly enough to be careful, and quickly enough that no White could follow our sound through the darkness. We’d crossed over the dam and driven up Ranch Road 620 until we made a left on Bullick Hollow Road and were roughly following the shore of the lake on a narrow, winding asphalt road through a dense forest.