“Because of you? This all happened because I brought her back here. If I would have kept her away she might still be with me.” He knew that wasn't exactly true. Hayes had been looking for them the whole time. It was bound to happen sooner or later. He had a lot of resources apparently. But he wasn't going to let her take the blame for the end result. It was bad luck, as Dad said.
She was about to argue, but Liam moved on. “We can't worry about what's happened. We have to worry about what's next. Where do we even start looking for her? How can we rescue her? Is it even possible?”
Victoria sat back in her chair, thinking. The soft light from the moon made her bruises and abrasions disappear. Even her swollen lip was difficult to see. He was happy to be in her presence again, despite all the destruction it had brought. He was happy Victoria wanted to find Grandma too. It would be so easy to write her off as a loss and instead tackle the not inconsequential matter of survival day-to-day.
“You're always talking about the end-of-the-world books you loved to read. Did any of them give any clues on how we can get through this? Do you and I storm the city ourselves to rescue her, like they do in the movies?” She laughed.
He was put on the spot. He was always drawing parallels to the stories he'd read. Books about zombies were all over the place in subject matter, and of varying usefulness to the real life zombie apocalypse as he'd found out many times. Fictional stories always had clues. That was the big difference from reality. When it mattered in his own ongoing life saga, he saw no such convenient clues.
He felt in his pockets, thinking he was overlooking something. His pocketknife was in one, and the family picture given to him by Colonel McMurphy was in the other. He pulled it out and thought about the man he watched shoot himself in the head back at Elk Meadow—after he was bitten by a zombie test subject. In the dim light he could only see the outline of the man's wife and teenaged son. He had asked Liam to find them and tell them he loved them. It was his final request. Liam felt a lump in his throat as he relived those last moments. He turned the photograph over to see the address on the back. It was some town in Colorado.
Some clue!
He didn't think it likely they'd be going to Colorado anytime soon. Although...
“Didn't you say you are from Colorado?”
“Uh huh. Denver. Why?”
“The colonel. He gave me this picture of his family and said if I should ever be in their neighborhood, I should stop in and give them his last words. But the address is in Colorado. Some place called Grand Junction.”
“I see the city name all the time on the interstate signs driving around Denver, but I've never actually been there that I know.”
“It doesn't matter. We aren't going out-of-state anytime soon. We'd never make it.” Liam recognized he was in delicate territory now. He didn't want to discount ever going to Colorado. Her parents were there. But clue or no clue, there was no way to safely cross 1,000 miles of the unknown. Certainly not for a flimsy clue. Not even for her parents.
Uh oh. Bad Liam!
He realized the irony pouring off his declaration. He'd travel any distance to find his own parents, but hers, not so much. At least, he was afraid that was how he sounded to her.
Victoria made a sound Liam couldn't interpret.
“I didn't mean anything by it. Someday we'll try to get there after this is over. I'd like to meet your parents.” He tried to be cheery, and she even reached over and touched him on the arm, but he knew it was perilous to hope anyone could survive whatever this was. The end of the world. The Zombie Apocalypse. End Times. Take your pick. “Let's focus on one rescue at a time. Grandma first because we owe her. Then let's talk about getting you home to your parents. Deal?”
She was silent for a long time. He tried to play it cool. Did he say the wrong thing? The right thing? He chanced a look in her direction. She was silently crying.
He stood up, then drew her out of her chair. They held each other in the soft ambiance of moonlight.
Later they slept the sleep of the dead.
5
The night wore on. Hunkered down as they were, they only had a couple encounters with interloper zombies. Liam's spears were put to good, silent use. As the sun started coming up, the group came together to discuss the day.
Liam could tell they'd all been thinking about what came next.
Phil made the case they should try to get further out into the countryside. Find an abandoned farm or piece of land where they could regroup and ride out the worst. Melissa wanted to scout out from Liam's ruined neighborhood to find like-minded souls to join their group. She argued the bigger the group, the better chance they had to survive. Liam's parents had agreed they wanted to find Marty, but they had no suggestions on where to even begin. It left Liam and Victoria to answer that question.
“Victoria and I feel responsible for Grandma getting captured and taken away. I know what you'll say—that it wasn't our fault—but nothing can change our minds short of having her back with us. We've been trying to put our heads together to think of where she might have been taken but we're very short on clues. What I do know is this: I gave Grandma my phone just before she left on that helicopter. My hope is that somehow we can get a text through to her and—God willing—she'll figure out how to use my phone to send a message back telling us where she is.”
Everyone seemed to perk up at Liam's revelation.
“There are a lot of assumptions, but if we can find out where she is we still have to figure out what we can do to get her out. We aren't exactly a crack commando squad.” He looked around, thinking of the calamity they had just survived, and knew he could have been tossed in with worse survivors. In fact he'd spent some time with a group of twenty or so eighty-somethings. They were probably all dead by now.
“So Victoria came up with a short-term plan, a type of triage she called it, whereby we'll go back to the Boy Scout camp I left the other day, and use that as our base camp for future efforts. At least we know we'll have friends there, and we'll have a secure base from which to operate. Once there, maybe we'll be inspired to pick up clues to find Grandma.”
He looked at Melissa. “They're going to need help with security, that much I can promise you. Also, I told them if I ever returned I would bring back weapons to help them fight off zombies and other threats. That might be the price of our admission.”
He turned to Phil. “The other thing they're lacking over there is food. There are thousands of people and lots of water, but no food. If we can provide them some opportunities to get food—say from abandoned farms—it might further reinforce our value to them.”
One thread was consistent through almost all the books he'd read on zombies. If you couldn't contribute to whatever survival group you happened to end up with, you were no good to anyone. Doctors would be near the top in terms of value. Soldiers would be important. Insurance salesmen or data entry clerks with no other skills would soon find themselves hungry. The wild card was pretty women. Many books placed high value on pretty women no matter what other skills they had. He knew deep down what that meant. As he looked at Victoria, Mel, and even his mother he felt an involuntary shiver at what awaited them if he and the other men failed. It was why he was adamant they go right to the camp.
He intended to present his group as being a valuable addition to the Boy Scout leaders. He knew Mr. Lee would have no problems accepting him. It was selfish to say, but he needed a good solid base so he could dedicate his time to solving the mystery of where Grandma had been taken. He couldn't do that if he was running around hiding from zombies, trading bullets with criminals, or zigging and zagging to avoid falling Air Force bombs.
There really wasn't much argument from the core family and friends. Old man Paul was adamant he wasn't leaving his home, even if it was lying flat. He insisted he still owned the land and was going to protect it until his dying breath. To Liam it seemed foolhardy, but his older companions seemed to admire his dedication. A few other neighbors
came and went, none of them eager to move on to parts unknown based on the word of a kid.
Liam was used to it. He often thought he could be Jesus himself, citing his own scripture and working miracles, and someone in the crowd would criticize his age. But his reasoning was sound in this instance. There was nowhere else to anyone's knowledge that had been picking up the pieces and providing some hope. Most people were content to salvage from the dying world, or take from those left alive. Neither of those activities had any long-term prospects. Maybe it was too early to talk about rebuilding, but certainly now was the time to organize the people who would eventually do the heavy lifting of repairing the world.
Liam's dad summed up their mission plan. “So all we have to do is get our guns and ammo, walk through the back roads of the county, and then knock on the door of the Boy Scout camp to see if they'll let us in? That sound about right?”
Liam nodded.
His dad finished with words he'd almost forgotten. It was something he said often when he was letting Liam practice driving this past spring.
“Liam, you're driving!”
Let the exodus begin.
Chapter 2: Apocalypse Pyramid
As much as they wanted to rush out and get to the Scout camp, they had to find suitable transportation for everything they had to carry. Finding a working car on Liam's street was impossible. There were no salvageable vehicles of any kind left in the wreckage. It was unlikely they could find a car by going to other neighborhoods either. Scavengers looking for gas had taken care of most cars abandoned on the roads—their open gas caps hung out like dry tea bags—and anyone still holding on to a working car would protect it with their lives. No one felt like assaulting neighbors to steal their ride.
They decided to use Liam's remaining bike and trailer as a type of pack mule to carry a good portion of the guns, ammo, and other goodies. Liam was disappointed to see his dad had only saved one big bag of rice. He knew he had many more in the basement.
“Yeah, sucks about the rice, but I only had the time and energy to bury one of them. If I had access to a tractor I might have been able to get them all. It certainly would have helped our situation to have a nearly limitless supply of food.”
Melissa seemed impressed. “What were you saving all that food for? If you don't mind me asking.”
“Not at all. Well, it all started with Mormons. You wouldn't know it by looking at them, but one of their church's guidelines is to always be prepared for the end of the world—true story! Their church instructs them to have at least one year of food per person per household, and even has recommendations on what you need in terms of the food itself. I think they call it an Apocalypse Pyramid. The foundation for the whole thing was dried rice. For the three of us, I probably had 1,200 pounds of rice stored in my basement and garage. Most of it was in 30 or so airtight five gallon buckets, but this last bag was a recent purchase and I didn't have time to put it in the proper bins yet. Since I knew it was fresh, I grabbed this one.”
“So you figured the end of the world would come and you and your family would ride out the storm on top of your Apocalypse Pyramid and everything would turn out fine?”
Liam knew his dad was serious about preparing for any emergency, but he had never come out and said specifically what his plans were. Looking around the wreckage of his neighborhood, and comparing it with the rest of the world he'd seen in his travels, he judged it was unlikely anyone could survive sitting alone in their basement.
“Well, I admit I seriously underestimated the swath of destruction generated by a worldwide collapse due to a plague. I thought maybe we'd have an EMP or terrorist attack in America. It would be bad, but eventually things would get back to normal because the rest of the world would be there to help. But this,” he waved his arm at his street, “this plague is everywhere. Every street in the whole world probably has zombies pounding down doors. I've seen fires. Looting. Vandalism. It's everywhere. My preparations were never going to be enough for something like this. Maybe if I'd built a castle in the middle of nowhere and invited a small city's worth of people to help me defend it...”
He seemed to stare off into space for a few moments.
“...but I made a mistake. And I made it worse by breaking up my family at the worst possible time.”
Phil, being a policeman, had made preparations too. Liam watched him grab big duffel bags of supplies before they fled his house. Was he also a closet survivalist?
“Phil, you seemed pretty prepared when we were at your house. Was your basement loaded with rice too?”
He started with a laugh. “No, I wasn't as prepared as your dad. My concern was keeping the peace in my neighborhood in the face of urban unrest. Have a shotgun and an AR-15 over my shoulder and man a roadblock to check who came up my street, that sort of thing. In my wildest imagination, I never envisioned a worldwide collapse, an EMP, or a devastating plague. We didn't even deal with those in our training scenarios. Mostly we trained for toxic spills on the highway, riots of shoppers on Black Fridays, and laying down spike strips to stop a high-speed car chase. My bags of goodies won't do anything to keep us fed.”
And that was going to be the problem of the world. Getting fed. One half of the population was trying to eat the other, and the other half was dodging those biters to find food of their own. And no one was being charitable when finding a can of Spaghetti-O’s was an extra few days of life.
It would only get worse. Liam's wide reading of end-of-world books said all roads lead to cannibalism. Not the dead eating the living...he wasn't sure if that was really cannibalism. Instead, the living eating the dead would proliferate as other food sources dried up. There was no way around that dark destination if society couldn't hold itself together.
Rather than continue down that line of thinking, he brought himself to the present to help the final loading of their “vehicles” for their trip.
They found a serviceable wheelbarrow and tossed the bag of rice in that. Between the bike and the wheelbarrow and everyone's backs, they were able to get all the important stuff. Not nearly enough once it was consolidated into the small caravan.
“It felt like we had more than what we have here.”
“Don't look so beat down, Liam. The most important resource you will ever have is the one on your shoulders. We can scavenge food, eventually we can grow it. The weapons are important so we don't get robbed, or overrun by the undead, but even guns aren't the end-all of survival. Your work with the spears illustrates that perfectly.”
Dad always knows just what to say.
2
They departed as the sun went down on the ninth day since the sirens. At the bottom of their street, close to where his friend Drew was last seen alive, Liam stopped to say a few words.
“Goodbye, Drew. Thank you for getting my Grandma safely to my street. You kept your promise to do that for me. Your parents would be very proud of you. I'm sure you're with them now—they can tell you themselves.” He gave a weak chuckle, but couldn't say anything else.
His mom stepped up. She'd been unusually quiet of late. Liam noticed right away, but attributed it to all the excitement she'd seen the last few days.
“Dear Drew. I can't thank you enough for helping my Liam get home, along with his grandma. You were the answer to my prayers of the past week. I've never wanted to see anyone so much in my whole life, and you brought him to me. I'm so sorry you couldn't join us in this celebration. We will never forget your name and what you did for us. Rest in peace now.”
“Amen,” they all said in unison.
The group left the neighborhood for the sparsely populated county road. Liam and Victoria were on each side of the bicycle as it pulled the heavy bike trailer. Each held one side of the handlebar to propel it forward. The bike itself was loaded down with guns hanging off each side. There was no way to ride it anymore, but it was perfect for this task. They were able to wrap the guns in some old carpeting so it wasn't obvious what they were. No use making
it easy for potential brigands to select them. They were playing the part of dirty carpet salesmen.
Liam's mother pushed the wheelbarrow. She wasn't a physically strong woman, but she was in good shape—she, like her husband and son, was a runner—and she preferred to push it rather than be part of the security detail. She said she wanted to leave that to the professionals.
Liam's dad and Melissa walked about fifty yards in front of the cargo haulers. She was in the lead, and Jerry was about ten yards behind her. Their function was to keep watch for possible problems ahead and prevent the rest of the team from getting ambushed. Melissa had a curious knack for whistling like a bird, which they agreed would be the sign to halt. Once it got dark, it would practically be their only safe method of communication.
Phil was the final piece of the parade. He had a black duffel slung over his shoulder. He was about twenty-five yards behind the cargo, and kept watch for surprises from behind.
They followed the same route Liam had traveled the previous morning. He ran into so few problems they all agreed that was the right path for the return trip.
Liam wanted to chat with Victoria to see if she was doing OK, but he didn't want to risk the operation with distracting gabbing.
I'm learning patience. Grandma would be so proud!
They were on the road for less than an hour when the first curveball appeared. Someone had spray painted white words on the dark street surface. They weren't there on his previous passage. The letters were huge and the words consumed the entire two-lane road from one side to the other.
“WARNING. LOOTERS SHOT. SNIPERS AHEAD. HIGH RISK. REPENT! CHURCH OF OWENS.”
Liam remembered the name Owens. Those were the guys he'd met on his last trip who went to his high school. He knew their house was coming up, but in the dark he had a hard time judging distances. A mile ahead? He recalled it was on a long straightaway. Perfect for a sniper. And those good ol' boys looked like avid hunters.
Since The Sirens Box Set | Books 1-7 Page 58