by B. T. Wright
Jake’s stomach dropped.
Jess whirled around in her seat. “What the hell is he talking about?”
Jake didn’t take his eyes off Tyler’s in the mirror.
Jess turned to Tyler. “What the hell are you talking about, Tyler?”
Tyler looked over at her, then back to Jake in the mirror, then back to Jess. “Nothing. I didn’t mean anything by it. I’m just running my mouth.”
Jess looked at Jake. “That what he’s doing, Jake? Just trying to piss you off?”
Jake didn’t respond.
She looked over at Tyler. “Well, is it? You just trying to get back at Jake, Ty? Next time why don’t you consider someone else’s feelings other than your own.”
Finally she looked back at Jake. “If you’ve got something to say, say it. I don’t need the only fucking people I have left in the world lying to me. Not while we’re all trying so hard not to die.”
“I’m sorry, Jess,” Tyler spoke up. “It was an asshole thing to say, and it didn’t mean anything. Okay?”
Jess faced forward and didn’t say another word.
“Sorry, Jake,” Tyler said.
Jake didn’t feel like accepting the apology, and he didn’t feel like talking either. So he didn’t.
They had already driven through Ashland, the town where they’d all grown up. They had already turned onto I-64 and crossed over into West Virginia. Jake pulled the small Moleskin notebook the professor had given him from his go bag. Inside was the map with the highlighted directions they’d plotted in case the Greenup County dam happened to be the dam that stopped their river run. They were going to be on I-64 for quite some time, especially as slow as they were being forced to drive in order to dodge all of the abandoned vehicles in the road.
They had been lucky not to have run into any complete blockages on the drive. There were a few tight spots going through Ashland, but nothing their Chevy Tahoe didn’t handle with ease. Jake was still stinging from Tyler’s comment. It just wasn’t something a friend should say. Jake could tell how scared and how stressed Tyler was, but that was no excuse to lash out like he had. Especially with Jess in the car. He didn’t want to have to tell Jess about the night with Emily yet. He just wasn’t ready to hurt her like he knew that revelation would. There had been enough pain going around lately, and the last thing he wanted to do was pile on. But he was going to have to tell her what happened. Jake’s father died young, but he had been around long enough to teach Jake that when a man makes a mistake, he owns up to it and pays the consequences. Better than living the life of a liar. No life is worse than that. Of course if his dad had been around to see what life was like after the invasion, he might have worded that lesson a little differently.
The next few hours were more of the same. At times they were able to drive fairly fast, as the abandoned cars would clear up, then some moments were like driving through a maze. Tyler was doing a good job navigating the obstacles, and TW was keeping up behind them. TW also radioed that Mark seemed to be doing fine. He was in some pain, but the bite wasn’t turning him into an alien. Silver linings, Jake thought.
Jess and Amy had slept most of the way, and Jake hadn’t said a word to Tyler. Instead, he pulled a different Moleskin notebook from his bag and began writing in it. He used to write a lot when he was growing up. Before his parents died he’d mostly played around with fiction. He would sit in his room and write short stories, poems, and sometimes the occasional song—only the words, not the musical accompaniment. After his mom and dad died, his writing became darker. Stories of anguish and heartache as opposed to the adventurous tales of the past dominated his efforts. Since the pandemic, it had been somewhat cathartic for him to pull out the pad and pen and drift off into another world. He had written a few poems, but mostly it was his account of all that had been happening around them. He wasn’t doing it to document this terrible time in human history, more so to help make sense of it. It had yet to work.
As they drove along I-64—they had just passed a sign to exit for the city of Covington, Virginia––Jake stopped writing. The sun was plummeting fast behind the surrounding mountains. If he’d been on that drive at any other time in his life he would have been thinking about the beauty that surround the road they were traveling. Instead, he could only continue to worry what might await around the next bend. Jake had never heard of Covington, Virginia, but the Attractions sign showing that there was an historic downtown to visit, and even a place called Falling Spring Falls, made him wish they were on this road trip for entirely different reasons. A pleasure trip instead of one of survival. It was only a brief respite from his current writing, but it was nice to take a breath.
He put his pen back to paper and continued sketching out a plan for moving forward. A half hour more passed, and his thoughts turned to how they could fight back against the aliens rather than just how to survive them. Jake was trying to think long term. Once they made it to Mount Weather, the only logical next step in his mind was to fight back. He wasn’t the type to just roll over and die, but if there wasn’t a lot of the military left, the prospect of getting earth back from billions of black-eyed invaders seemed dismal. It was a constant battle in his head to fight thoughts of that nature. His main hope moving forward was that Emily and whoever else was at the facility with her had made some strides the last few days in studying the infected. He needed to talk to her—to see if his brother had made it there yet, and to tell them about what was happening with Amy. Maybe Emily could help him figure out how to leverage Amy’s abilities to gain advantage over the aliens. Either way, he wasn’t going to solve anything in that SUV, and he knew it. So he placed the notebook back in his bag, just before Tyler laid on the brakes.
“Ho . . . ly . . . shit.” Tyler said.
Jake leaned forward in between the front seats. Their worst fear from even before they started their journey was staring him right in the face. It was the entire reason he wanted so badly to stick to the river. The road stretched in front of them, visible for a least a mile, just before it wound to the right up a mountain. And every single lane, and the entire median in between, was packed full of cars, going nowhere, which was now exactly what they were doing.
Tyler was forced to stop the SUV when they came to the beginning of the end of their journey on I-64.
There was no way around it—the road was completely impassible.
20
Jess had woken from sleep when she felt the brakes and heard Tyler gasp. “What’s going on? Where are we?”
“Stuck in the middle of nowhere, with no place to go,” Tyler answered.
Jake picked up his AR-15 and exited the Tahoe. He left the door open so Amy could see what was going on. Jess and Tyler exited with him, and he heard the guys getting out of the SUV behind him. He placed his gun’s strap over his head, grabbed the luggage rack atop the Tahoe, and pulled himself up. The cut from the axe earlier stung his side from the stretch.
“See anything?” Tyler said.
Jake watched as he fidgeted his leg.
“Go ahead and take a piss if you need to,” Jake said. Then he took a long look in front of him. The golden light was bright enough to see that there was no end in sight of the bumper-to-bumper vehicles. He did a 360 spin, taking in the mountains around him on all sides. “No. Nothing but cars and trees.”
“What are we going to do now?” Tyler’s voice went up an octave. His leg was still shaking.
“We’ll have to walk.”
“Walk?” Jess said, looking up at him. Bryan, TW, and Mark walked up beside her.
“How’s the arm?” Jake said to Mark.
Mark was the quintessential country boy. He looked strong and stocky under his John Deer T-shirt, and his face underneath the Miller Lite hat seemed young to Jake. They hadn’t had the conversation, but he couldn’t have been a day over twenty-one.
Mark shrugged his shoulders. “I’ll live.”
“What do you think?” Bryan asked Jake.
“I think it’s going to be dark soon and we need to find a safe place to crash for the night.”
“Shit,” Tyler said, walking off the tension in circles.
“Any ideas?” TW asked.
“I looked at our map notes a second ago. Lexington, Virginia isn’t far. But we can’t get there on foot before nightfall.”
Tyler walked up to the Tahoe. “What if we walk up to the top of the hill there and the cars aren’t blocked anymore? Then we can drive on out of here.”
Jake thought about it for a minute.
“I saw a sign for a motel just about a half hour back,” Mark said.
“I saw that,” Jake said.
“No way,” Tyler said. “We can’t stay out here in the middle of nowhere. Not when the aliens could be anywhere.”
“We might have to.”
“So I guess it makes no sense to even try what I said?”
“It does, Ty, I just don’t think it’s smart.” Jake turned and looked off into the valley that stretched to their right. “I’d say we have about an hour of daylight left. Maybe less here in the mountains. If we walk up to the bend there—about a mile, mile and a half—and there’s nothing but more cars, we won’t be able to find a safe place for shelter. It’ll be dark by the time we walk back this way.”
Tyler walked away from everyone.
“He’s right,” Jess said. “I don’t want to stay out here either, but I for damn sure don’t want to be caught out in the open on this road when it’s dark.”
Jake strained his eyes down the valley. He couldn’t be certain, but it looked as though there was a small sliver of white amongst all the green trees.
“See something?” Bryan said.
“Maybe.” Jake pulled his rifle up and put his eye behind the scope. He could just make out a dormer on the right side of the white thing he’d seen. “Looks like a house.”
“Nope.” Tyler stomped back over to the group. “No fucking way. I’m not trekking through that valley to some abandoned house. And then what? Try to sleep there? Hmm-mm. Nope. I’ll stay right here in the car.”
“Seems smarter to me than going back to the motel,” Bryan said. “Might be more infected population back that way.”
“Seriously? Am I the only one that thinks staying out here is crazy?”
“No, Ty,” Jake answered. “We all know it’s crazy. But you seem to be the only one that thinks we have a choice.”
Jake hopped down from the roof.
“I’m not going in those woods. I’ll stay right here in the truck.”
“Suit yourself,” Jake said, then popped open the back gate. “But it’s going to get awfully lonely out here by yourself.”
Tyler didn’t answer. Jake tugged open a couple of the grocery bags in the back. “Let’s eat now,” he said to the group. “It will be less we have to leave behind, and less we have to carry.”
The group gathered around, and Jake passed them some bread and some lunch meat he’d found. TW opened a can of beans with his knife, and Mark opened a bag of barbecue chips someone managed to pack along. Jake looked around and was happy with the group of people that had come along. He was sad that they had already lost a couple men, but overall it could have been so much worse.
Tyler had finally come over and started to eat with the rest of them. Even though he’d said what he said in front of Jess earlier, Jake loved the pudgy bastard. When he looked over at Jess, he could see the storm behind her eyes. He knew it wasn’t because they had to abandon the SUV to walk—it was because of Tyler’s words. Jess was about the most easygoing woman in the world, but there was one thing she hated more than anything: a liar. Jake and Jess had been together long enough for her to know what his silence meant earlier when she asked him what Tyler meant. That silence, to her, was as good as a lie. It was eating away at Jake as he chewed on his ham sandwich. He was going to have to talk to her about it before the night was over. Sleep was difficult enough at that stage, but it would never come at all if he didn’t unload his conscience. More importantly, he wanted to unload hers. He always thought that trouble with the one you love most was the most unbearable burden in life, and Jake didn’t want to be the cause of that for her any longer. She deserved better.
Everyone finished eating, and all of them changed their clothes. Jess checked Jake’s cut before he put on a fresh V-neck T-shirt she had grabbed for him in the clothing aisle of the store. Then she handed Amy a can of Coke. Amy smiled, and Jake couldn’t help but smile with her as she took a big gulp. They all packed up as many of the essentials as they could, stuffing things in backpacks and anywhere else they could. Jake hated leaving behind most of the water, but there was no choice. They would have to ration until they came across a gas station or grocery store that still had some bottles.
Everyone gathered around Jake—ready to go. Jake strapped on his go bag and looked back at Tyler. “Still staying in the Tahoe tonight?”
“No, Jake. I’m not. Can we just get going before it gets dark? I really don’t want to enter the haunted house in the hills without some light.”
Amy spun around and looked up at Tyler. “You think it’s haunted?”
“Don’t listen to him, Amy,” Jess smiled. “He’s always been a big pussy.”
Everyone laughed at Tyler’s expense.
Tyler snapped back. “Oh, yeah, because ghosts are scarier than the aliens that are following us, right?”
TW scoffed. “Don’t you know when to just shut your mouth, son?”
Tyler put his hands on his hips. “Oh, so now stating the obvious makes me an asshole? Maybe I should just stay in the truck.”
TW stepped forward. “Maybe you should.”
They glared at each other, but Tyler didn’t back down.
Jake looked at the two of them, then glanced up at the sky. Darkness was closing in. “Okay, that’s enough. No one is staying behind. The house won’t be haunted. And the aliens are nowhere near us.”
That last sentence being about aliens didn’t give anyone any confidence about the night ahead. How could it when they had literally watched as everything around them turn into a living hell?
21
Darkness began to creep in all around them. The trees had mostly shaded the last of the golden light once Jake and everyone had stepped off the road. The hill down into the valley was steep, and few of them had lost their balance and fallen, but no one had been hurt. Amy was doing a better job than most of them at navigating the terrain—she said it was due to the years she’d spent in the woods behind her grandparents’ farm. Tyler had the toughest time. Being front-heavy as he was, his belly pulled him forward down the hill. After Jake offered the advice of leaning back a little farther on his heels, things had gotten a little easier for him.
A few of them still had some battery left on their phones, so they were the ones leading the group with their flashlights. Jake had taken point because he had an actual flashlight. The dense foliage encapsulated them, and the sound they made as they moved through fallen leafage seemed to echo through the hills. Every step made Jake nervous, and he wasn’t a nervous man. The snapping of tree branches and their feet rustling the fallen leaves sounded like symbols crashing to him.
There were other worries on Jake’s mind as well. He could no longer look at Amy without thinking of her as a beacon for the aliens. They knew nothing about the aliens’ capabilities, so his fears had continued to grow after she made contact with all of them down by the river. It was terrifying to think that all of the aliens could see where she was all the time because of it. Like a window into her mind had been left open. Though the aliens had moved in on them at the grocery store, since then, there had been no other reason to believe they could see their every move. Unless of course they were waiting until Jake and crew were vulnerable. But weren’t they always easy targets? There were only seven of them now. If the aliens knew enough about where Amy was at all times, they could have just clogged the road earlier and stopped them. The numbers were so mas
sively in the aliens’ favor that a fight wouldn’t last long.
Jake’s fears on that subject subsided a bit as he thought it out. He felt better about the aliens not knowing exactly where Amy was, because he did believe they would already have tried to stop them if they did. So, then it was on to the next concern. They weren’t but a couple hundred yards from the house in the woods. What would be waiting inside? A survivor that will fight to the death to save his property? People that live rurally didn’t take too kindly to strangers wandering around. Would the people that lived there be aliens at that point? If so, how many would there be? And if they had to shoot them, would they attract more aliens that could be nearby?
Just as in a combat situation, every step was a new concern. Jake had ventured with his men into many similar situations where they had to enter foreign territory in the Army and as a Delta operator, with no real idea of what awaited them. He would handle this in the same manner by securing the perimeter, then secure the house one room at a time. It was a blessing to have Bryan there with him. Jake felt as if he could clear the house on his own, but having someone with military experience watching his back would make things much less nerve-racking.
Jake heard someone move up next to him. He turned and saw that it was Bryan.
“You and me secure the house first? Then bring them up once it’s safe?”
Bryan had been having the same internal conversation.
“That was my thought,” Jake said. “Gunfire is a last resort.”
“Copy.”
Jake stopped and let everyone catch up to him and Bryan. All of them gathered around. With no one walking, the woods were still, and the silence was total.
Jake spoke softly. “Bryan and I are going to secure the house and make sure it’s safe. The rest of you stay right here. Form a circle and face outward, that way you’ll have a 360 degree view. We won’t be long. Either Bryan or I will come back down and walk you up.”