Odyssey

by Michael Stephen Fuchs

  “Your wife, Ellie, must have known what she signed up for.”

  Homer said, “Of course she did. But it didn’t change the reality of it. She never said so, but I know in my heart if God had asked her to sum up me, and our marriage, she could have done it in just four words.”

  Sarah just held his gaze and waited for it.

  “He was never there.”

  Sarah figured he didn’t just mean the wars before the end of the world. He also meant these last two years. That was what haunted him. That he hadn’t been there.

  Homer exhaled, seeming to come back from the bad places. “She was a SEAL wife. They had an amazing support network. And she had ways of keeping herself together. Of coping.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well, her journal, for one thing. She used to joke that she was married to it. She definitely spent more face-time with that thing than with me.”

  “What, like a morning journal? Notebook?”

  “Morning and night. But on her phone. She had an app for it.”

  Sarah nodded. “A lot of people swear by journaling.”

  “She tried to get me into it. I’d sometimes scribble a few lines while deployed, when there was time. Really just to share it with her, so she could have some idea what it was like. And to feel, in a small way, that we were together.”

  Sarah went to squeeze his arm – but got the electronic device instead. She said, “Speaking of apps. Don’t suppose I can find you with this set-up?”

  “No,” Homer said, evenly. “But I’ll always find you.”

  * * *

  As Sarah started the engine and got them rolling again, she paused to take a long breath of the cold night air, realizing it was the first time she’d relaxed since the fight at the tree. As they drove away, she could still feel the pressure on the inside of her chest – where her heart had been pounding against it.

  She definitely had a sense of herself as being cool and unflappable, good in a crisis. But this man… she looked across at Homer in the dark as the rumbling turned to a soothing hum beneath their tires. “Hey. I, uh, I can’t believe how cool you were back there. Just by the way.”

  Homer merely nodded.

  “Is that a SEAL thing? From your training?”

  “The training is a good start,” he said. “But it’s more the operational experience. Even the most realistic training can never simulate combat – what it’s like to be in lethal peril, the mayhem of it. But the training does select for it – people with the innate ability to deal with chaos, wherever that ability comes from. Some think you’re born with it, others that it can be taught. Either way, SEAL commanders are ultimately trying to find people who realize that all stress is self-induced. Even when IEDs are going off and tracers flashing by your ear and people trying to kill you.”

  Sarah sighed. “I feel like I didn’t react quickly enough.”

  Homer shrugged. “Everyone hesitates – gets afraid, screws up, sometimes badly. Often with tragic consequences. The question is: after it happens, can you put down that bag of bricks and forget about it? Or are you going to carry it around, and let it ruin the rest of your day?”

  Sarah breathed quietly and shook her head in the dark. She had no idea if this was a general principle Homer was relating – or if he had designed it just for her. To help her put down her own gigantic bag of bricks, namely the deaths of her family, and somehow move on.

  “Attitude is the key,” Homer said, finally.

  “To what – surviving? Completing your missions?”

  “To everything.”

  Five-Layer Shit Burrito

  “It’s time,” Sarah said.

  Homer guessed her meaning, that their first fueling stop was coming up. He leaned over and took a look at the illuminated fuel gauge glowing in the dash. “We’ve still got over a quarter of a tank.”

  They had now completed their jog on the southbound state route, skirted safely around both Ann Arbor and Toledo on two different bypasses, and were finally back on the interstate, 90 East. But they’d only been on the road two and half hours total, and with their two nearly lethal stops and the slow-downs, had covered little more than 250 miles.

  “Yeah, we’ve got a quarter-tank,” Sarah said. “But no, we can’t keep going. Aside from the fact that it’s not a sufficient margin of safety – right now is actually the first time I’ve let it get below three-quarters full – it’s not just the fuel. You hear that ticking?”

  Homer listened under the wind noise. “The timing belt.”

  “Yep. And, not to be too dramatic or self-pitying about it, but my son didn’t die for nothing, trying to scavenge a new one in town. This one’s been on its way out for a while. And we don’t want to sit back and let that drama play out.”

  “No,” Homer agreed. He considered suggesting the pick-up-a-new-vehicle plan again – there was some level of mechanical failure that would make this one more trouble than it was worth. And the wind was still kicking their asses. But all Sarah’s earlier points about the advantages of this one were as valid as before. “Okay. What’s the plan?”

  Sarah nodded up the highway. “Next exit. There are not only gas stations, but also an Autozone. Saw it on the last set of services and amenities signs.”

  Homer figured that must have been in the two seconds it had flashed by in their headlights.

  She said, “And we can take care of both at once.”

  But Homer frowned. “Longer stops are more dangerous.” She didn’t respond, so he elaborated. “If we make any noise, we’ll still be around later – when the locals turn up.”

  “True enough. But more stops are also riskier. It’s just different risk.” She gestured at the countryside flanking the highway. “And visibility around here is good. Wide open, not too built up. If we’re lucky, both stops will be right off the exit.”

  Homer sighed, starting to come around to her view.

  “There’s also a Taco Bell,” she said.

  “Okay,” Homer said. “You win. I do like Taco Bell. Guilty pleasure.”

  “Ha. Not sure I’m gonna trust a Beefy Five-Layer Burrito that’s been sitting around for two years. But good luck to you.”

  “I actually like the Veggie Power Burrito.”

  “Freak.”

  Homer laughed as Sarah killed the lights, decelerated, and angled them down another midnight-black offramp.

  And once again into the unknown.

  * * *

  “Okay,” he whispered. “Bring it in.”

  “Roger,” she answered in his ear. “Coming to you.”

  Homer had agreed to Sarah’s overall plan, but had put his foot down at just driving up to the gas station and ringing the bell for full service. Instead, he had her stop at the junction of offramp and road, then hopped out and patrolled in 200 meters on foot. It was a BP, and looked like it had been nice back before the end of the world. The logo on their sign, visible from the highway, was still a jaunty green.

  Then again, he thought, everything’s green in the NVGs…

  But, most importantly, the pumps and area under the canopy, as well as the interior of the shop, and the whole vicinity as far as he could see, appeared deserted. Homer didn’t go inside to clear the structure properly. But the front doors were closed, and the glass in front intact, which ought to be good enough. With a little luck, they’d be in and out in minutes.

  Though, come to put it like that, Homer thought…

  Luck had not been a major hallmark of his operations lately. He heard the truck before he saw it, turning and giving Sarah the briefest flash of a red combat light, guiding her in toward the hatch over the underground tanks, which he’d already located.

  Not only were they not going to get their oil checked or windshield wiped, but even normal self-service gas pumping was out. With no electricity to power them, the pumps were just post-Apocalyptic set-dressing now. But as the truck rolled to a stop behind Homer’s outward-facing palm, he could see Sarah climbing in back
– and emerging with the fuel pump they’d pulled from the underground supply cache.

  And now he saw it had a hand-cranked pump.

  Nice, Homer thought. This woman definitely thought ahead. And maybe this wasn’t going to suck after all – or, more to the point, he wasn’t going to have to suck.

  Moving slowly and carefully, he recited their old mantra, “slow is smooth, smooth is fast” – but in what was probably the original Latin, festina lente, literally “make haste slowly.”

  But even better than smooth, he thought, slow is also quiet…

  He eased the iron lid off the underground enclosure and slid it across the blacktop. When there was two feet of opening, he took one end of the hose from Sarah and slithered down inside, drawing his side arm as he did. He didn’t expect to find anyone or anything down there. But, as Ali often reminded him, it was always the ones you didn’t see coming that got you. Pretty much by definition.

  He was right about it being empty.

  The trick he’d missed was how to open up the tank. But when he circled back to the opening, Sarah was already handing him down an adjustable wrench. He made a mental note to hug her later. For now, he silently took the tool and got the top valve to the bulbous diesel tank open. He then risked a little more red light to peer inside. The tank was over half full. That was the good news. The bad news was it looked, and smelled, like a scummy pond.

  That wasn’t so good.

  He pulled out his knife, leaned in, and gave it a stir. The covering of slime was only a skein – maybe an eighth of an inch. That was better. He took the end of the hose, shoved it a good two feet below the surface of the liquid, holstered his weapon, and pulled himself back up and out.

  Up top, Sarah already had the other end in the tank of the Ford, and had taken a position at the little hand pump in the middle of the two sections. But seeing him return, she went over and pressed her mouth to his ear.

  “How does it look? The fuel?”

  Homer breathed his response, a barely audible whisper. “There’s a thin layer of scum on top. But it’s fine below.”

  Sarah just shook her head, then went back to the truck.

  Dammit, Homer thought. More time on target was bad, and any noise would be worse. He realized her caution about keeping the vehicle operational was starting to come into conflict with his about security at the target site. But they sure as hell couldn’t argue about it. So Homer just let her get on with it, taking up a security position 15 feet away.

  Still nothing moving out there, as far as he could see.

  She came back with what looked like a small disc of plastic, a circular filter Homer figured, and started disassembling the fuel pump – or, at any rate, unscrewing the hose from one end, inserting the filter, and getting the hose attached again. But it wasn’t happening all that quickly, and from her movements Homer got the impression either the parts fit imperfectly, or she was just having trouble manipulating them in the dark.

  He stifled the urge to go over and help, instead facing out and keeping his weapon up and head on a swivel. He had no idea what the flow rate of that tiny pump was in the first place – only that it wouldn’t be improved by having to filter the fuel as it pumped – so he had no idea how long their refueling operation was going to take. So he just settled his nerves, mustered his patience, and tuned into the night – making the flat, deserted, dead world around them his domain.

  He did his job, and let Sarah do hers.

  * * *

  “Fuck.”

  Sarah actually put her hand to her mouth, aghast that she’d spoken out loud. But her curse had been relatively quiet. What hadn’t been was what caused it: as she leaned into the last hard turn of the final casing screw on the fuel pump, not wanting to have diesel leaking out all over the ground, the screwdriver squirted out of her grasp.

  And clattered onto the blacktop.

  She looked up and saw Homer hadn’t reacted; he was still facing away, silent, vigilant. He would surely know what had happened from the sound – and obviously trusted her to deal with it, while focusing on his own tasks.

  But then he did turn around, fast—

  At the deep sound of crunching glass behind them. Sarah spun on her heels and tried to make out what the hell that was in the malign darkness. It had clearly come from the direction of the shop, the gas station building itself – and when it crunched again, louder, and the fine lines of spiderwebbed glass reflected minutely in the starlight, she worked it out.

  Something in there… was trying to get out.

  She left the screwdriver where it lay on the ground.

  And she got busy pumping.

  * * *

  Homer took a breath as he advanced smoothly past her, rifle up and trained unwaveringly on the glass front of the building. With his night-vision, he didn’t have to intuit what was causing the spiderwebbing of the glass.

  He could see it perfectly.

  It was the guy who should have been pulling their dipstick and scraping their windshield – the gas station attendant. And he was definitely on the job now.

  But his new job in the afterlife was eating people.

  Homer closed half the distance to the building, then spun to check on both Sarah and the sector behind them. Still clear. Spinning to face forward again, still he took no action.

  This guy might bash through the glass, eventually, or he might not. Either way, for the moment he was safely contained. On the downside, he was making noise, which was a problem. But the first rule of problems was not to turn little ones into big ones. The smacking on the glass was audible, but this guy’s moaning, which Homer could imagine from the way his bloody tongue licked the glass, wasn’t. And it was moans – that frenzied noise the dead made in the presence of prey – that were the most reliable magnet for more dead.

  And then Homer quickly figured out where those moans actually were audible: inside the building. Whatever poor souls had died in the bathroom there – or, almost as bad, wandered in at some point during in their half-shade afterlives – now emerged, moving across the store and looking energized.

  Now Homer acted.

  He started putting precision chin-point headshots into one, two, three ambulatory corpses clambering their way toward the front windows. One guy banging on the plate glass represented a certain amount of noise, and progress in breaking it down.

  Four would be four times as much.

  No, it was better to end both the noise and the break-out risk, while they were still contained. He started shooting to do so, at the same time hitting his radio, speaking calmly and quietly. “Hey, Sarah, we may need to call this one. To abort.” When she didn’t respond, he added, “How copy?”

  “I hear you. But I’ve finally got the fuel flowing, and we’ll have a full tank in just a couple of minutes.”

  Homer once again resisted the temptation to argue with her. Instead, he finished dropping the four inside through the glass, then did another 360, finally focusing back in on the building – where he saw new movement out at its edge, a previously unknown stumbling dead guy coming around the side of the structure. He dropped that one, taking two shots to do so. When he pivoted back to the building front, he clocked more movement blurring at him from inside. Definitely fast ones. Before he could take a shot, two bodies smashed into the glass.

  It held – for now.

  Homer spun again, all the way around, then started stepping carefully but quickly backward toward Sarah and the truck.

  “Time to go,” he said.

  “One minute,” she answered in his ear.

  Dammit. Woman.

  * * *

  Sarah couldn’t see what was happening inside and around the building. She was just focusing on working the hand-pump as fast as she could. She intended to finish the fueling job, despite the resistance created by the filter.

  And despite Homer’s concerns.

  For one thing, they had a good pumping set-up here, with a whole bunch of viable diesel. And for an
other, she really didn’t want to stop again any sooner than they had to. Also, as far as she could tell, Homer had this – and the dead were still sealed up inside the building.

  Until suddenly they weren’t.

  A massive crash and hiss sounded, the entire glass front of the structure collapsing at once.

  Ah, shit.

  Homer’s shadow loomed out of the dark, grabbing her elbow. “Come on – now.”

  “Check,” she said, shakily. But instead of getting in the truck, she started gathering up both ends of the hose.

  “Sarah! We’re going.”

  “I know,” she said, coiling up two lengths, then screwing on the fuel cap. “But we’re still going to nee—”

  What sounded next wasn’t a crash, but a shuddering boom, like an earthquake, or a building collapse – which was exactly what it was, though she couldn’t work it out in the dark.

  * * *

  Homer saw it perfectly.

  The building front, weakened by two years of post-Apocalypse, did not survive the destruction of its plate-glass front. With that gone, the whole building front came down – and, unfortunately, it was attached to the canopy running over the top of the fueling pumps, which also came down in a rolling collapse. This at least had the effect of either crushing or just blocking the advancing dead inside.

  A less happy effect was that the noise of the collapse must have been audible in the next county, and would quickly start drawing all the dead from across this one. Within about two seconds, Homer could feel as much as hear a wide-ranging and distant, but then again not all that distant, chorus of moans rise up from the countryside around them, punctuated by the odd hiss and shriek.

  He threw his rifle in the passenger side of the cab, followed by his body, and slammed the door shut, as Sarah gunned the engine and spun the tires. Looking back out the missing rear window, he could see the canopy had missed them by about eight feet. A near miss, and a narrow escape – and also perhaps another omen. No one liked the sky coming down on their heads.