“Where is she bleeding?!” he shouted behind him, presumably to Jared.
There was a flurry of motion.
She shifted her head and saw Jared leaning heavily on Fletch. She realized there was something wrong with him. He didn’t look good.
“What happened to him?” she asked.
Bradley ignored her. “Where are you bleeding?” he asked her.
“This…isn’t my blood,” she said, seeing Grace’s tortured, bleeding face…her severed legs.
He looked like he didn’t believe her. Perhaps she looked as nearly dead as she felt.
They reached a shaded place that she didn’t recognize. In fact, none of it looked familiar, except for the white fence. It was still in place, incongruous with the destruction around them. She saw the SUV where they had left it, but the pavement underneath was not where they had left it.
The earthquake. It had been a bad one. Really bad. She realized that now.
“Jared?” she questioned as Fletch helped him sit next to her and Albert in the shade.
“I’m fine. Just tired,” he answered.
“He has a concussion, a pretty bad one,” Fletch told her, exasperated at Jared’s attitude. She understood that.
Albert was looking warily at Stewart. She looked around more closely and realized they were sitting in among a smattering of dead muties.
“What happened to them?”
“Dawn came, and those didn’t leave. So, I destroyed them,” Stewart said.
They all raised their eyebrows and looked at the corpses. There were more than she could count on two hands. Stewart had killed them.
By himself.
It was a jarring thought.
Stewart snapped his head around toward the pile of wreckage. “The last one is gone.”
She frowned and looked to Bradley, who had paused while checking her over. His eyes saddened and he shook his head a little. She got it then.
“Uh, pardon me…but what are you?” Albert asked Stew, scooting closer to Bradley’s legs.
“He’s my best friend,” Bradley answered for him. “He turned one night a while back. Then turned into…uh…one of those. He’s different though.”
“Yeah, I noticed.” Albert looked older and frailer in the harsh daylight. Anna realized they didn’t have a wheelchair for him. He would have to be carried everywhere that they couldn’t drive, which reminded her—
“Hey, where’s my truck?!” Jared said, leaning forward and looking off to the place Anna thought they had parked it.
Under the collapsed portico— which she only recognized because of the faded green shingles— was a giant hole in the ground. Well, damn.
“Motherfucker! That’s my truck!” Jared shouted. “It’s in the fucking ground!”
“All of our gas!” she remembered aloud.
“Gone,” Bradley said. “Our supplies that we took in…it’s all gone.”
Her heart dropped. She had forgotten their supplies. Their food, ammo, weapons…even their fresh water. All gone.
“Harry is going to be pissed about the fifty cal,” Fletch said and Jared groaned, head in his hands.
“Damn it!”
“We’ve got to go back,” Anna said. “We’ve got to check on our people and resupply. Get Albert somewhere safe.”
“Hope there wasn’t any of that asbestos in that building,” Albert said with a wheezing little cough.
“Mesothelioma is the least of our worries right now, old timer,” Fletch said with a small smile.
“S’pose you might be right.”
Jared sighed and rubbed his eyes. She watched his knuckles turn white as he made fists.
She understood. She did.
There was no help for it though. They couldn’t continue on, not now.
“How far away is your home?” Albert asked, still stealing surreptitious glances at Stewart.
“About one hundred and fifty miles, give or take twenty?” Jared questioned, looking to Anna. She nodded.
“We’ll need to find some gas for the SUV, and some food and water for us,” Fletch said, looking around.
She realized it wouldn’t be easy. Everything around them was destroyed, buried under rubble. Water sources could be contaminated. It was going to be hard.
“What if the roads are impassible?” she asked.
Bradley and Jared shared an inscrutable glance. Bradley put his hands on his hips and Jared looked at the ground rubbing his head. He needed to rest.
“We’ll go as far as we can on the roads. After that…” Jared trailed off.
“After that we travel on foot,” Bradley said.
Anna looked nervously at Albert. She saw him look off to side, surveying the damage of the little crossroads.
“It gets to that, you find me a house that ain’t too bad and I’ll make the best of it,” he said.
“We aren’t leaving you,” she said.
There was silence for a moment. There was a light wind, infinitesimally cooler than yesterday’s breeze.
It was beginning to feel like fall. It used to be one of her favorite seasons.
“Anna’s right. We won’t leave you behind,” Bradley said.
She looked to Jared, but he didn’t say anything. He sat next to her, and she shifted him so that his head was lying in her lap. He needed a nap. They all needed a little rest, but it was dangerous to stay here out in the open. They would have to find somewhere else.
“We need to move,” Fletch said apologetically, echoing her thoughts.
She sighed and Jared lifted his head. He was pale and had dark circles under his eyes. She realized that she probably looked worse than he did.
She started to shake when she remembered Grace. She was wearing Grace’s blood. Grace’s face flashed in front of her face, obscuring the parking lot and she flinched.She wanted to throw up.
She stood and limped around, breathing deeply in through her nose and out through her mouth. She was trying desperately to maintain some semblance of calm for the others. Her heart skipped painfully, belatedly dumping adrenaline that she didn’t need or want right now.
She heard Albert murmuring to the men in the background, but she couldn’t focus on it. Her thoughts became overwhelming, and she just couldn’t stop seeing Grace. A graphic pictorial litany of Grace.
She paced and saw Grace as they had first seen her. Careworn and tired, but alive. Happy to have been found by someone.
Grace after she had been struck down by steel and concrete. Still alive, coherent, grasping hands, eyes full of blood.
Grace as the blood ran sluggishly from her eyes, nose, and mouth. Panting in the dark.
Grace’s corpse. Beyond suffering, beyond caring. Stiff, cold hands that she had to pry off of her own. Dead, red eyes that fixed on her. Eyes that she had felt on her even after the light had gone out, after she had stopped responding, stopped breathing.
Grace’s blood, coating her arms and chest as it ran from her severed lower half.
A hand grasped her shoulder and she whirled, pulling her knife automatically. Her wide eyes struggled to see the man standing before her and not Grace’s dead face superimposed on top. She was gasping for breath, and she realized it was Bradley. Just Bradley.
She lowered the knife and he looked at her sadly.
“Sorry,” she whispered.
Her face crumpled and she whirled back around, almost losing her balance, so he wouldn’t see it.
He rested a hand uncertainly on her upper back and she knew he felt her shaking, knew she was crying. It galled her to cry in front of him, in front of anyone. She hated having her weakness on display. Hated it.
But she couldn’t keep the tears from falling. They had a mind of their own and there was nothing on Earth that could stop them from trailing down her bloody cheeks.
“It gets better. In time. It gets better. Trust me,” he said.
She nodded silently and she felt arms gather her up.
Jared.
She gra
sped his collar with both hands and buried her face in his shoulder. She felt the lightest brush of Bradley’s lips against what she suspected was the only clean place on her forehead. He brushed a hand down the back of her head and walked back over to Fletch and Albert.
Jared smelled of sweat, and dirt, and blood…but he also smelled like himself, and it comforted her like no words could. She sniffed back the next round of tears that threatened to fall and used the back of her hand to wipe her cheeks. She grimaced at the red smear it left on her hand.
“We need to go,” she said, and he murmured in agreement.
“It’ll be okay. We’ll be okay,” he said.
She finally looked up at him. He looked like he’d aged ten years overnight and she felt like she’d aged a hundred.
The world didn’t stop throwing shit their way just because of a little global catastrophe. Natural disasters, nuclear bombs, war, disease, injury…it was all still here. Always would be. In some ways it was exactly the same as it always had been, just a little harder now.
It was how they dealt with it going forward that would determine their futures. Random chance could get them, sure, but she was going to make damned sure that she did everything she could to protect her people from random chance trying to kick their asses.
“Let’s go. We’ve got places to go and people to see,” Jared said with the barest hint of his usual humor.
“And things to do when we get there,” she finished for him, through a somewhat stuffy nose.
“Now you’re getting it, Sweet Corn.”
She glared at him, and she was quite sure the effect was ruined by her cry face. She wasn’t a pretty crier.
They piled into the canted SUV with their meager supplies and the kind of optimism that comes from living through one disaster after another and knowing that today they were alive.
Today they were still here, fighting.
Today they had another chance to live.
She wasn’t going to take it for granted.
Epilogue
The cracked and crumbled parking lot of Spring Creek Long Term Care lay still and quiet under the sun. The breeze blew a little, and the birds started to chirp again in the trees that had been left standing. Ants continued their marches across the devastated landscape, forming their defensive lines against other ant colonies.
Nearby, the corpses of the defiled, mutated beings lay. Their skin, once a gleaming miasma of colors and textures, lay in a gray repose on the old concrete.
Their faces were alien under the harsh sunlight. Limbs lay scattered like detritus across the lot. Arms, legs, torsos…none rested near their matching body parts.
Stewart had done a thorough job, but…
They didn’t decompose.
They didn’t blacken.
On top of a fissure, a leg rested. Its inhuman foot home to clawed protrusions of a nature not likely seen before. One of these protrusions…toes…twitched infinitesimally.
Close by, a severed, clawed hand waved its blackened fingernail topped fingers experimentally.
Inside…
…cells multiplied with terrifying rapidity.
Thank you for reading Book Two of The Salvation Plague Series!
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Series in Order:
The Turning, Book One
The Mutation, Book Two
The Replication, Book Three (in progress)
The Salvation Plague | Book 2 | The Mutation Page 23