Odyssey

by Michael Stephen Fuchs

  And the rubble wasn’t the scariest thing back there.

  Timing

  “Looks like we’re just putting on another free dead-guy festival.”

  “What?” Homer asked.

  “Never mind. Old joke.“

  Any desire Homer might have had to have that joke explained to him evaporated, when he realized Sarah was accelerating right past the highway onramp.

  “You missed the exit,” he said. “Turn it around.”

  “Not getting on the highway,” she said. “Next stop Autozone.”

  Homer took a breath, taking care not to react emotionally, but instead pausing for a beat to rationally formulate his numerous objections to her extremely dubious course of action, all of them compelling. But Sarah didn’t give him the chance.

  “Hear that?” she said. “It’s not just the belt ticking now – there are also small engine misfires. That’ll be the last throes of the timing belt, and we’re out of time to replace it. We need to do it while we can.”

  Homer had one more objection – that the misfires might be caused by the dodgy diesel, though he knew a shot timing belt could be the cause as well.

  “It’ll be okay,” Sarah said. “I’ll be inside thirty seconds.”

  Homer shook his head in the dark. Once again, instead of arguing, he remembered Sarah had been surviving in the middle of this dead and overrun continent for two years.

  Always trust the man on the ground.

  He steeled himself to try to trust that she knew what she was doing, at least a little longer. He twisted and took another look out back. Whatever undead militia they had mobilized with the collapsing gas station, it was no longer visible behind them. And if the auto-parts store was a fair distance away, and if they were truly in and out fast, they might be okay.

  “Okay,” he said. “But if I don’t like the look of it, we abort.”

  Sarah just drove, gripping the wheel.

  * * *

  “Not a huge fan,” Homer whispered.

  “What do you see? Is there movement?”

  Once again, they were parked up a short distance from the target site, this time a secondary target site – and, once again, only Homer could see anything that far in the dark.

  “No. But the glass front is already half broken out.”

  “The intact glass didn’t help us last time.”

  Once again, Homer just swallowed his annoyance.

  “I’ll take us in closer,” Sarah said, rolling them forward before he could answer, much less stop her. “If we see anything moving inside, we’ll wave off.”

  She took them to the center of the parking lot out front, 30 feet from the doors. Nothing seemed to wake up inside, and Homer’s scans of the interior revealed nothing. But he was reminded of the limitations of NVGs, namely tunnel vision, when he felt something tug on his belt, then heard and felt the truck door open and close. Before he could react, Sarah was out on the ground, leaning back in the window.

  “Need to borrow this,” she whispered, holding up his tactical light, one with white and red LEDs. “Back before you know it.”

  Homer put his hand on the door. “I’ll come with you.”

  “Nope. We’re dead without this vehicle. Stay put. I’ll be fine.”

  And then she was gone.

  As he watched her slip through a half-missing section of plate-glass window and disappear inside, Homer reminded himself that, while she hadn’t done more scavenging than him, she’d done more of this type of it, and a lot more on this continent.

  Maybe this was the winning plan.

  He exhaled again and shifted across to the driver’s seat. Though he never gave it much thought, he knew he had a reputation in Alpha as the most unflappable, ego-free, and mainly patient operator on the team, or perhaps any team. But he wasn’t a saint – nothing like it, as he was the first to point out. What passed for effortless grace really took years of effort, work which never ended. And Sarah was seriously testing his good nature, causing him to have to work on both his patience and his tolerance – an exercise he made into a virtue, pretty much out of necessity.

  He sighed out loud. Maybe that’s what God wanted for him.

  But, at the same time, he was also having to work hard not to question whether Sarah’s offer to make this journey with him was the blessing it had first seemed. He had little doubt she was a good person, with good intentions, and with skills and local knowledge that could perhaps keep them both alive.

  He was just starting to worry she’d get them both killed first.

  But, in the end, it didn’t really matter. Not now.

  With another deep breath, searching for serenity and grace, Homer rested his rifle on the dashboard, barrel sticking out the absence of windshield. And he settled his mind by remembering one final fact: they were committed now.

  And they were in it together – perhaps to the bitter end.

  * * *

  Sarah quickly had cause to regret her promise to be inside only thirty seconds. It was immediately obvious the store had been ransacked, either by people looking for auto parts, or else just the living bashing around fighting the dead. Or maybe the living fighting the living, no way to tell. And while it hadn’t been cleared out, neither was it anything like fully stocked.

  And it sure as hell wasn’t organized.

  Which also made it nothing like easy or safe to move around in. She had already torn the sleeve of her jacket on the edge of the broken glass she ducked under on her way in. Now, she had Homer’s red-lensed light in her left hand, crossed at the wrist – not with her handgun, but the sheath knife from her belt. This was for the same reason she’d left her rifle in the truck. Neither of her firearms were suppressed.

  Which made them almost more dangerous on her than off.

  She panned the red light across the cash registers and the front counter, on top of which she could see long dark stains or smears – ones that might have been blood, or might have been that viscous black gunk the dead had instead of blood. In the near dark, and the blood-red light, the two were indistinguishable. Really, she just wanted to be sure there was nothing lurking behind the counter.

  There wasn’t. Only debris. And an overturned register.

  She moved through the swinging security barrier, which had been half broken off, to the ends of the aisles. Store displays had been overturned, as had some of the tall shelving units that made up the aisles themselves. Everywhere, impenetrable pools of blackness lurked – that ambient moon- and starlight outside didn’t make it inside the building, broken glass or no. The red light allowed her to move around, but its dim glow turned night not into day, but into sea bottom.

  Or maybe some very deep level of hell.

  Luckily, no one had gone so apeshit as to leap up and take out the hanging signs above the aisles, so she was able to read them and find the one she needed – but then found it blocked by an overturned section of shelving, along with its contents. She decided she wasn’t real keen on climbing over and through. But just as she moved to detour around, something crunched – and when she put the light back on the blockage, the boxes shifted.

  Sarah’s adrenaline spiked like she’d just got injected with a syringeful, but she steeled herself and padded forward. As she leaned in and peered through the collapse, she could see there was a body trapped underneath. And it was definitely moving.

  Ah, shit.

  But she could also see the not-quite-dead body looked good and trapped. If it could have gotten free before now, she figured, it would have. And she was happy to leave it alone if it left her alone. But then, as she started to withdraw, a muted moan issued from underneath the crap, which also shifted again. And once the moaning started, just as she feared, it didn’t sound like stopping.

  Double shit.

  She leaned back in, shifting the knife into an overhand grip, while gingerly lifting away a jug of transmission fluid, slowly exposing the mottled dead flesh of the thing’s forehead…

  “Sa
rah.”

  She jumped six inches as the voice spoke from her belt.

  * * *

  “Go ahead.”

  Her voice was modulated at a high pitch, suggesting fear.

  Heck, Homer thought. I’d be spooked in there, too.

  He pressed his PTT button again. “Hey, you need to hurry it up. We’re on a clock now – and we need to be on the move again in two to three minutes. How copy?”

  “All received. Almost there. Stand by.”

  Homer didn’t jump back in her ear, or take up any more space in her head. Instead he got busy shutting up and staring into the rearview mirror – in which he could see the distant, but then again not all that distant, line of trudging figures drifting up the road. They were following in the wake the truck had left, from the direction of the gas station.

  He and Sarah were being pursued.

  So far it was a slow-motion pursuit. But it was just as Homer had feared. They’d made a terrible ruckus – and now they were still hanging around for the after-party. The ETA of this incoming herd could be measured with some precision because it was just a plodding line of the slow ones.

  But he knew that if that changed, it would change fast.

  And so would their survivable time on target.

  * * *

  After wiping her blade clean with a couple of Autozone circulars, all of them shouting “HOLIDAY SAVINGS!” from where they lay scattered on the floor, Sarah switched the grip back to underhand, and continued her detour, all the way down the next aisle over, and back up the right one.

  Enjoying the return of silence – the absence of moaning.

  She soon found the section of shelving she needed, stacked with boxes of timing belts. And she instantly regretted that it was a timing belt she needed – an engine part that often failed with little notice, at intervals impossible to predict, and without which the engine absolutely wouldn’t work.

  This made it a hot-ticket item in the ZA.

  And she clearly wasn’t the first to come here looking for one.

  Also, whoever had come in before her clearly hadn’t given much of a shit about whoever might come after. The section was nothing like full, but the boxes left were scattered to hell and back, half on the shelves, half on the cold and cluttered tile floor. She took another look around her, up and down the aisle, and through the shelves to either side.

  And she got on her knees and got to work rummaging.

  As she checked box after box, she took care to take another look around her every twenty seconds or so. On what felt like the fiftieth box she checked, she found the one they needed. It was a whole timing set, but she didn’t give a damn. Squatting with it on the floor, squinting to double-check the specs in the red light, she opened it up and pulled out the belt. Yeah, it looked right.

  And then she heard another crunch – this one like a footstep.

  She was pretty sure it came from the next aisle over, so she didn’t panic – instead jamming the belt in her pocket, gripping her knife and light, and slowly and quietly rising out of her crouch. But before she could straighten up, never mind shine her light through the shelving, she heard another sound – one she instantly recognized as the international auditory sign for:

  Do not fucking move.

  It was the racking of a shotgun slide, probably a twelve-gauge.

  Sarah raised her hands out to either side, very slowly.

  * * *

  The trouble with Zulus, Homer thought, leaning out of the truck, supporting his weapon on the roof and taking aim, is they’ve so often got Romeos for swim buddies…

  He took two whisper-quiet shots, which dropped two runners who had broken away from the approaching herd. The good news was it was only two, and he made both shots on the first attempt. The bad news was those were two more rifle rounds he was never going to get back.

  The really bad news was there’d be more – sooner or later.

  He turned to check the building front again. Still no movement inside – and also no Sarah, emerging with their auto part. He hit his radio. “Sarah. Seriously out of time now. Hate to be a broken record – but we need to go. How copy?”

  She evidently didn’t copy.

  Because she didn’t respond – at all.

  Crap. Again.

  * * *

  Sarah figured it was her imagination, as she couldn’t actually see the three-quarter-inch muzzle gaping at her face through the shelves, not least since her light was still pointed at the ground.

  She could more feel it.

  But it wasn’t her imagination when she felt a hand at her waist removing her radio, which Homer’s voice had just come out of. So whoever the hell these guys were, there were two of them.

  And then a light clicked on, right in her face. It was either attached to the shotgun, or just held parallel to it by its owner. And when she looked away from the pain in her eyes, she saw the radio thief. It was a boy, maybe ten years old, feral-looking, backing away down the aisle, toward the rear of the store.

  “Move and you’re dead.”

  Whoever held the shotgun was a fully grown man. And he didn’t sound like a nice one. The light, and presumably the shotgun, stayed trained directly on her face, through the ransacked shelves, as the man circled around and came down her aisle, from the front of the store, which was the closer end. Now she was trapped between the two, man and boy.

  Almost involuntarily, her hand touched the Glock on her belt. But the light instantly moved there – causing Sarah’s hand to freeze, and also providing her first dim look at her assailant. He was equally big and big-bellied, and didn’t smell terrific. But not a lot of people did these days. And he had his own handheld radio, which he brought up to his mouth with his left hand. The light was in fact affixed to the shotgun.

  “Luther. Hey. It’s me.” The radio squelched faintly as he released its talk bar. “Luther, come in, man.” Another long, tense silence, until finally:

  “What is it?” Whoever Luther was, he didn’t sound delighted to hear from this guy.

  “Hey. I’m at the Autozone.”

  “And?”

  Whatever this guy had to say about that, Luther was going to be kept in suspense. Because in that instant a wailing, clanging, hell-raising alarm sounded, beating at Sarah’s head in waves, filling the store around them.

  Shit moved fast after that.

  * * *

  Crap, Homer repeated. Didn’t see that one coming.

  While he’d been dividing his attention between the advancing mob to their six, and stealing glances over his shoulder at the broken-glass gap to their front, the one Sarah still wasn’t climbing through, someone had simply pushed right out the front door, which may have been locked, but sure wasn’t bolted.

  And which, somehow, proved to still be alarmed.

  Uninterruptible power supplies seemed like such a good idea back in the day…

  How the one attached to this alarm system still had power in it was anyone’s guess. Then again it didn’t have much – by the time Homer sighted in on the figure who set it off, ID’d it as a Zulu, and dropped it, the alarm had stopped again, after falling in pitch like the audio on a dying film projector.

  But the damage had been done. Again.

  No more dead came out of the building, but the tide from up the street, already nearly there, picked up the pace in response to the noise, and Homer could see more distant movement on their flanks. This was about to be a popular location.

  And they couldn’t stay in it.

  He dropped back inside the truck, hit the radio to update Sarah, turned over the engine – and blasted off, accelerating around the left side of the Autozone on a narrow service road that disappeared between the building and a steep berm to around back, where there’d be a rear delivery entrance.

  Or so Homer really, really hoped.

  * * *

  Sarah was pretty sure she had to act, and fast.

  But while distractions work great in the movies for jumpi
ng a guy with a gun, in reality a twelve-gauge in your face made it a lot harder to take action than you’d think.

  Instead, she froze.

  But the light in her face panned away, presumably the guy looking for the source of the noise. But then the alarm ended – not as suddenly as it started, but pretty suddenly.

  And then the light went straight into the floor.

  It went into the floor because the barrel it was attached to went into the floor – which was because the man holding it had just been tackled from behind. Which was also a good thing, because the shotgun discharged as he hit the ground, and Sarah felt an instant stinging pain in her toes – which she’d figure out later was buckshot pellets skittering across the floor and smacking the steel toes of her boots. All she knew in this moment was that when she brought her own light up and pointed it forward, there wasn’t one body on the ground, blocking her path to the front door.

  There were two.

  They scrabbled and writhed and made horrifying noises, one grunting and cursing, the other hissing and moaning.

  Give the dead their due, she thought. They don’t freeze.

  “Sarah – the front entrance is closed out…”

  She spun and pointed the light back down the aisle. This was Homer’s voice, coming out of the radio – which was still in the hand of the boy, also frozen, like a small deer in Sarah’s blood-red headlight. Looking over her shoulder, one eye on the living-vs-dead wrestling match back there, she switched the light into its white mode – because enough with this miserable fucking red gloom she couldn’t see in. Then she looked back up, prompted by the sound of Homer’s voice, receding.

  “…Will meet you out back with the vehicle, how copy?”

  His voice receded because the boy was disappearing into the gloom, and around the corner, with the damned radio. Still half-frozen, fighting hyperventilation, Sarah finally got her body moving, legs shaking with adrenaline, and hoofed it toward the back of the store. When she got there, the boy was gone.

  But those horrifying noises chased her all the way.

  Operator AF

  Sarah didn’t pop up in Homer’s ear to agree to, or even acknowledge, his change of plan. That wasn’t good.