“Jesus, I thought he’d killed you,” Charlotte said, her breath coming in shallow gasps, her eyes never leaving Eddie.
“Another half second,” Rachel said, “and he would have.”
Will began to cry, and she pulled his face down into her shoulder. His whole body quivered and shook as the sobs burst forth, as the reality of it all set in, as he experienced his own personal apocalypse. Rachel hugged him tightly.
“We have to go,” Rachel said. “Right now.”
Charlotte nodded.
“I can get some supplies from my place,” Charlotte said.
“No. Too risky. You can take Eddie’s bag,” she said.
Charlotte’s eyebrows rocked upward.
Rachel motioned toward her son and Charlotte nodded in understanding.
Perhaps sensing they were talking about him, Will simply latched onto her even more tightly, squeezing her chest so hard she could barely draw a breath. As he hung on her, she hurried to the bedroom to collect the go-bags. As she worked, a knock at the door, the third in the last half hour, froze her.
On her way to the door, she passed Eddie, whose body lay in an ever-widening pool of blood. He appeared to still be alive, but he wouldn’t be for much longer. His breathing was slow and shallow, and blood trickled from the corners of his mouth. His eyes were closed, and he didn’t make a sound. She found herself hoping he was unconscious, that he wasn’t in any pain. As the life drained out of his body, she wondered how it had all come to this.
No map for this.
No one to look to for help.
Making it up as they went along.
“Who is it?” Rachel whispered as Charlotte pressed her eye to the peephole.
“It’s Harry.”
She couldn’t stall, she couldn’t hesitate, or he’d know something was up. She took a deep breath. Her eyes felt a bit puffy, but there wasn’t anything she could do about that now. Maybe it would be smarter to ignore the knock, but on the other hand, that might have drawn even greater suspicion.
“Go hide,” she whispered.
“Coming,” she called out when Charlotte was safely hidden.
She opened the door halfway, the distance she would normally open it. Eddie’s body was behind the sofa, out of view. Harry’s face was set tight, his lips pressed together.
“You heard the shots, right?”
“Yes,” she said in as worried a tone as she could muster. “Any idea where they came from?”
Will toddled up behind her, his face blank, his eyes wide open.
“Scared the little guy something fierce, that’s for sure.”
“Sounded like they came from this direction.”
“They were pretty loud,” she said. “Maybe from the cafeteria?”
Harry craned his head, peeking around Rachel for a look inside the house. Again, she made no move to block his view. As long as he didn’t go behind the couch, he could look at anything he wanted.
“Eddie here?”
“No,” she said, tossing a little contempt in for good measure. “I don’t know where he is.”
“He hasn’t been here to talk to you?”
She shook her head.
“We’ve been having some problems. Taking a little break.”
“Sorry to hear it,” he said, continuing to scan the trailer’s dim interior.
She could see him working it out in his head, trying to guess how much she knew. There was an opening here for her, so she ran with it, try and make him so uncomfortable he wouldn’t want to stick around.
“You know, I don’t talk about this much, but I’ve been keeping it to myself. I don’t know why he is the way he is.”
Rachel paused and placed a hand on Harry’s arm.
“You’ve always been good to us,” she said. “And he ignores us.”
His eyes cut downward and his cheeks colored red.
Harry started backing away from the door, uncomfortable as he had always been with the baring of emotions. The last thing he’d want would be to become involved in a domestic situation.
“OK, honey, if you hear anything else, let me know,” he said.
“Will do.”
“The three of us need to have a talk anyway,” Harry said.
“About what?”
He scratched his stubbly cheek.
“About the future.”
Silence wedged in between them.
“I may poke around the backyard, if you don’t mind.”
“Of course,” she said.
He reached out and tousled Will’s hair.
“It’ll be OK, buddy,” he said. “Me and your mom will keep you safe.”
He turned and lumbered back down the trailer steps. He nodded toward Charlotte, who returned the gesture. When he was gone, Charlotte held up her hand and twirled her index finger quickly.
It was time to go.
She turned and surveyed the familiar landscape of her living room one last time. She didn’t know what lay ahead, but she knew one thing – this was the last time she would ever see this place. It was the only home Will had ever known, and it was about to become a memory.
Her arms ached as Will clung to her like a tick. He had stopped crying, which was good, but he had gone completely catatonic, which was bad. After grabbing the two go-bags, she hustled down the steps and started for the main gate.
They had one chance at this. She kept her head down, her body hot. She didn’t know if it was guilt, shame or betrayal coursing through her. She was sorry they had run out of food, and she was sorry the world was the way it was. Then Will whimpered, the noise barely audible, and she pulled him tight against her body.
“We’ll hide out somewhere today,” Rachel said. “Then we’ll make camp, get a good night’s sleep and deal with tomorrow, well, tomorrow.”
“Works for me.”
Rachel watched her friend.
“Sorry you got caught up in all this,” she said.
Charlotte was shaking her head before Rachel was even done speaking.
“Fuck that,” she said. “That was done the second Eddie made that deal.”
“Just like Thelma & Louise, the two of us, eh?”
“Who are Thelma and Louise?” Charlotte asked without the barest hint of sarcasm.
“Forget it.”
They began walking, toward the perimeter, past the main gate, and out into the world beyond.
14
They spent that first night in a nice neighborhood in the western suburbs of Omaha, in a big brick colonial sitting at the top of a hill sloping gently toward the street. Sunset had been about an hour away when they found the place, which gave them time to run a bit of reconnaissance, make sure the neighborhood was deserted. It was cold and cloudy, and the air smelled of rain. She’d never been to this part of Omaha before, and even though it looked like any other neighborhood in any other city in America, it felt alien, unfamiliar.
The house was set back about fifty yards from the road. A jungle of waist-high grassy bushes choking what had once been a front yard swayed in the afternoon breeze. The structure appeared to be in reasonably good shape, but the exterior walls bore a greenish tint from the mildew that had had years to do its work. A few of the windows were still intact, but most had blown out, victims of rain and wind and general inattention. An old Range Rover sat in the driveway, but the weeds had grown up around it, crept through the undercarriage and into the wheel wells, into the engine block, a chlorophyll-fueled monster enveloping its victim. The exterior was badly rusted and lacquered with bird droppings.
Rachel checked on Will. He stood vacantly, his eyes were open wide, but they didn’t seem particularly focused on anything. Not only had she been unable to protect him from the horrors of this world, but this time she’d brought them all the way to his bedroom door. Certainly, in the old world, seeing your father killed in front of you would be worth years of therapy. But that was in the old world; she didn’t have that luxury here. She would simply have to hope she h
ad put enough rebar in him, a steely core that would strengthen the man growing around it.
“I’ll have a look around,” Charlotte said, checking the clip on her gun.
Rachel nodded. She lit a cigarette, a habit Will detested, but she didn’t think he would mind right now. She paced around the car, stretching out her back, the muscles tight from the time spent on the road. By now, the others would know Eddie was dead, almost certainly by her hand. They would panic at the ruin she had brought them by scuttling the deal. The cigarette was down to the nub by the time Charlotte completed her sweep of the house. Rachel dropped it to the ground and stamped it out with her boot.
“Place looks clear,” she said.
“You know of anyone else with gas back home?”
Charlotte scrunched up her face as she considered the question.
“Harry, probably. He always liked to be one step ahead of everyone.”
“Yeah. I agree,” she said.
Charlotte tapped her lips with two fingers; Rachel handed over a cigarette.
“What now?” Charlotte asked after taking a long drag.
Rachel took a deep breath.
“Beats me.”
They went inside, Charlotte first, Rachel and Will trailing behind. The house was empty, had been for some time, that much was obvious. A thick layer of dust covered the hardwood floor before them, pristine, virginal, like a fresh blanket of snow. A smell of decay hung in the house, but it was not entirely unpleasant, the smell of a used bookstore perhaps, the pages within aging and browning and exhaling their fine woody, nutty breath. The walls bore a layer of green mildew. A heavy gloom filled the house, the dying light of the day filtering in through curtains that had become brittle after years of exposure. When Charlotte went to open the curtains covering one window, they simply disintegrated in her hands. It was cold, of course, but the structure provided some relief from the chillier temperatures outside.
There was a small sitting room to the right, a couch, and a flat screen television mounted on the wall. A bookcase stood in the corner, stuffed with dozens of paperbacks, damp and swollen from years of exposure to the elements. Rachel set Will down on the couch and examined the bookcase, sliding her thumb across the books’ cracked spines. Always a reader in her youth, she’d come to almost worship books in the years since the pandemic, Books held a talismanic spell over her, a doorway to other worlds where this terrible plague had never happened. She immersed herself in every kind of fiction, the classics, romance, mystery, chick lit, even a post-apocalyptic story now and again, which was a particularly weird experience, like looking at yourself in one of those haunted funhouse mirrors.
But her favorites were the mysteries, especially the ones set in the big cities, stories of Los Angeles or New York or Chicago, giant megalopolises pulsing with life, people crowded into streets and tenements and office towers slipping and sliding around each other. She liked the idea of crowded places because there were so few of them anymore. She hoped storytelling lived on, in the little pockets of humanity out there, but it made her sad to think there were no children to read bedtime stories to. It was all these books, the ones here, and the ones back at the trailer and sitting unread in all the homes and libraries and bookstores of the world, together that told their story.
A quick sweep of the first floor was uneventful.
“I’ll check upstairs,” Charlotte said.
“I’ll come with you.”
“You stay with Will.”
“Be careful,” Rachel said.
Charlotte patted her gun and smiled.
“Always.”
She knelt next to Will, who had curled up in a ball on the couch.
“Buddy, I’m going to look for some food.”
He blinked once.
Charlotte’s footsteps upstairs echoed through the empty house as Rachel made her way to the big galley kitchen. It was a time capsule, a frozen moment, two glasses and a coffee mug still sitting on the counter. Next to the mug was a bottle of cough syrup, half full, but its contents long petrified into a thick purple rock. Droppings here and there, little gifts from the animals that had found this place over the years. As she surveyed the kitchen, a huge crash startled her.
“Sorry!” Charlotte called out. “Stepped on some rotted flooring.”
“You OK?”
“Fine.”
Rachel exhaled.
She went for the pantry first, which was mostly empty but gave up a few treasures. Two cans of tuna and one can of vegetable barley soup. After checking them for rust or bulges that might signify the presence of botulism, she tucked them into her pack. This would do quite nicely for tonight, but the mostly barren pantry served as a reminder that the bill would be coming due very soon.
She checked the freezer next, not for food, but because people often stored batteries and cigarettes in them, both of which would be useful, if not for themselves, then for barter. But this freezer contained nothing but spoiled, vacuum-sealed food. Any stench of spoilage had long since faded. As she finished the sweep of the kitchen, she heard Charlotte coming back down the steps.
“All clear,” Charlotte said. “The upstairs is in bad shape, though. A lot of rot from the rain. A few holes in the roof. Another year or two, this place is going to come down.”
“What else is new?” she said.
Charlotte shrugged her reluctant agreement.
“It’ll work for now,” Rachel said. “We’ll hunker down here for a bit until we can figure out the next step. There are other communities out there, maybe we can hook on somewhere.”
“What about Will?” Charlotte asked.
“One thing at a time.”
#
Their sleeping bags were arranged in a triangle around the remains of the previous night’s blaze they’d built in the huge fireplace. Rachel lay awake, staring at the moon through the living room window. The thick layer of grime and dust on both sides distorted her view; the moon looked bloated and dingy, a dirty lightbulb in a cold and dark dungeon. It was quiet, quieter than anything than she could remember in her life. Back at Evergreen, there had always been glimmers of life wafting across the compound, popping like popcorn kernels, people coming and going, coughs, sneezes, laughs, even the throes of passion. Here though, there was simply nothing, a photo negative of existence.
Rachel spent part of the evening tending to Will, trying to get him to choke down a little bit of dinner. After he took in a few bites, she tucked him in on the couch and waited for him to fall back asleep. Probably for the best. A bit of self-preservation. A chance to reboot the hard drive. While he slept, Rachel scoured the house for supplies. She found a map of the plains states, a .38-caliber revolver, some empty bottles and jars to store drinking water, which they set outside in the off chance it rained.
When they were done, she lay down next to Will, but she couldn’t sleep. Ironic how nighttime forced you to face your issues head on. Darkness had a unique way of shining a bright light on the biggest problem you had. All around her, darkness gripped the land hard, but she felt like she was sitting in a chair, smoking a cigarette, a bright light blinding her vision.
They were in real trouble now. She and Charlotte were out in the wild for the first time in years, her son for the first time ever. Fresh water they could find in the numerous streams and rivers dotting the plains, but food was going to be a real issue. No matter which way you sliced it, haha no pun intended, they could be in for some rough seas ahead. They would be living a life stripped to its barest form, a life of simply surviving. The good life was over, and the idea that living on canned goods in a trailer in the middle of a post-apocalyptic Nebraska had been the good life was really saying something.
But there had to be a future somehow, somewhere. They wouldn’t be able to stay in Omaha for long. Eventually, Harry and the others would find her. No, they needed to expand the map, think bigger, think wider. There wasn’t much to the west until you got to Denver, more than five hundred miles across empty
plains. They were better off moving south toward Kansas City or east toward the larger cities in the Midwest, Detroit, Chicago, or Indianapolis. She’d learned from her visits to Market that most of the communities had popped up around the big municipal areas, which were serviced by the big water towers. Rumor had it that some had rebooted enough electrical power to pump water out of the Great Lakes.
She got up at first light and checked on the others. Will was sleeping deeply in the small sitting room; his hair was matted down on his forehead and his cheeks had pinked up in the humidity. She let him be. Another morning. Another day closer to the end of the journey, whatever that journey was, and whatever that end would entail. She had no idea how many days stood in between her and the end of this transition period, but there was one less than there had been yesterday.
Rachel went outside to relieve herself behind a bush. Her mouth tasted like a raccoon had died in it. What she wouldn’t have given for a trip to the dentist. They’d been able to maintain some minimum threshold of dental hygiene over the years, but none of them would be starring in a toothpaste commercial anytime soon.
A long, low rumble of thunder broke the morning silence. In the quiet of the western plains, it was deep and guttural, reaching inside Rachel and rattling her core. To the west, a low ridge of clouds.
Will was stirring when she got back inside; he sat up and stretched, his eyelids at half-mast.
“I’m hungry,” he said.
There it was again. That swirl of helplessness and guilt rising inside her like a balloon. He didn’t mean anything by it, there was nothing accusatory about it. It was a statement of fact, of instinct, from an eleven-year-old boy who wasn’t getting nearly enough to eat.
“Working on it, bud.”
She drifted into the kitchen, where she found Charlotte cleaning her gun. The skin under her eyes, themselves spider-webbed with red veins, was puffy and dark.
“This weather, huh?” Rachel said.
The Immune Box Set [Books 1-5] Page 67