by Bobby Adair
Dalhover took the ammo can and said, “There’s enough food and water back there to keep you for a week.”
I knew Dalhover kept all the vehicles topped off and stocked, ready for immediate bugout. Still, I gave the supplies in the back a quick glance. “We’ll be back in a few hours.”
“Nothing ever goes as planned,” said Dalhover. “You should be patient about this.”
“I can’t,” I told him. “You saw her.” I still couldn’t believe this had happened before and nobody—not even Steph—saw fit to let me know. Was I that much of a loose cannon? Could I not be trusted with the information? “Was it this bad last time?”
“No,” admitted Dalhover. “This is worse.”
“Then I have to go. You know that.”
Dalhover stepped back to let me climb out of the Humvee. He pointed back inside. “We’ve got that GoPro mounted on the dash.”
I nodded.
“Record as much as you can,” he told me.
I agreed. We’d taken to using salvaged GoPro cameras on anything we could mount one to every time we left the compound. The videos helped us recon new areas when we reviewed them afterwards, and they helped us keep track of changes to our environment. It was good to know which roads were degrading over time and which were blocked by rusting cars. In fact, if anything in the environment moved, it was good to be able to spot it ahead of time, because moving things implied the presence of people—infected or otherwise—and people of any kind could be dangerous.
Having situated himself in the driver’s seat, Murphy called, “Ready when you are, bud.”
“No.” Unexpectedly, Grace was at the driver’s side door, swinging it open. She told Murphy, “You get in the back. I’ll drive.”
“What?” Murphy wasn’t moving.
“You have the most experience on the .50,” she explained. Casting a stern look in my direction, she said, “If we get into a situation where we need to open up with that gun, it should be Murphy doing the shooting.”
“She’s got a point,” Dalhover admitted.
I was still looking at Grace and shaking my head. “You don’t need to risk coming along.”
She laughed at the absurdity of my assertion. “I’m not getting out of the Humvee. I’m not risking anything.”
“Like Dalhover said,” I argued, “nothing goes as planned.”
Grace pulled Murphy’s arm to coax him out of the driver’s seat, and as he climbed out, Jazz came up, geared up and ready to fight. Without a word, she climbed into the passenger side seat.
Murphy started to say something about her coming, but she shot him a hard look that told him he had no right to argue.
Ten minutes later, before anyone in the Balmorhea compound had started preparing breakfast, the Humvee was rolling up Highway 17 toward I-10. Fifty miles further lay Fort Stockton.
Chapter 5
With my arm hanging out the window, feeling the bite of the cold wind, I watched the morning desert grind past. Just south of the highway, sitting on the other side of a barbed-wire fence, an uncaring coyote watched our Humvee roll by. Farther south, squatting on the pale desert floor, the dark mounds of the Davis Mountains separated earth from sky. Hell from heaven.
My thoughts ran to dark places as my emotions twisted themselves into knots.
Murphy, to his credit, let me alone to stew in my ruminations. He sensed I needed it.
Outside of an Epipen, I didn’t know what I needed. Then again, I wasn’t a doctor. My layman’s knowledge of what that magic syringe could do could have been all wrong. With Steph struggling to hold onto her life, I knew I had to do something. Do.
Grace pushed the Humvee into the wind blowing out of the east, keeping us cruising at 40, the max safe speed, or so we’d all decided in a group meeting some time back. Because even on flat Highway 10, running in a straight line for miles at a time, hazards and assholes had a way of jumping out and fucking up your day when you weren’t expecting it. A slower speed gave us time to react—a chance to live through an incident with our lives and vehicles intact.
Both were precious.
As much as I wanted to demand that Grace mash the pedal to the floor and wind out the Humvee’s engine at 70, I couldn’t risk the lives of my friends more than I already had when I’d accepted their help with my impromptu expedition to Fort Stockton.
In the passenger side of the front, Jazz had the map unfolded, examining it for hazards marked there by Javendra. Maintaining the maps was one of his roles. Everybody in our little community had their duties.
The master versions of our maps hung on the wall in our command post—the CP. Javendra used the recon video from the GoPro cameras and info we each provided after each excursion to update the master maps. He then translated that information to the maps we kept stored in every vehicle. Dalhover was pedantic about keeping every vehicle in a state of readiness and Javendra maintained the maps with all the anal-retentive devotion that Dalhover demanded.
Highlighted on each map were the roads deemed safe, roads we’d travelled in the past. Navigable dirt roads were marked and color-coded with a highlighter to classify them as to how smooth and drivable they were. Any road not marked was one none of us had yet driven.
Concentrations of Whites were marked as well. Tiny Fort Davis, thirty miles south of Balmorhea was highlighted in green. It was inexplicably deserted. Not a living normal human. That wasn’t unexpected for a town that small, given the infection and eventual mortality rates. Yet no Whites lived there either. Even the bodies were all gone. The remains of barricades still stood on the two-lane highway. Brass casings littered the ground, slowly oxidizing in the weather, testaments to the townsfolk’s desire to keep their little mountain hamlet buttoned up.
The virus had come, hard and fast. At least that was my guess. The houses appeared to have been abandoned in an instant. Hardly any held the body of an occupant. Neither was there much evidence of violence in town, although there was a spot on the courthouse lawn blackened by a bonfire and sprinkled with shards of crisped bone. Probably the final resting place of many of the town’s dead, probably a key factor in the town’s plan to control the spread of the virus among them. A failed plan. Of course.
No bodies or bones lay on the streets, though the shreds of clothing lay blown along the sidewalks, in trees, and wrapped around stop sign poles. Proof the dead had been dragged off by scavengers of the two-legged or four-legged variety.
Grace looked back at me from the front seat and broke the silence. “It all started awhile back with that scorpion sting.”
I looked up, recalling instantly the event she referred to. Me, Steph, and some others had been in the main barn, readying the tractor to plow up the cornfield before the spring planting. A scorpion, one of those little brown ones, had been making its home inside a leather work glove Steph had slipped her hand inside. Odd, because we were all used to squashing the fingers of gloves and listening for the occasional crunch, but this time she forgot.
As scorpions do, it stung her immediately.
At the time, Steph had never had an allergic reaction to a bug bite, so she didn’t freak out. She cursed, like anybody would. The rest of us laughed because those little brown scorpions were an annoyance more than anything and weren’t much to fear. Their stings felt like bee stings, nothing more. But Steph’s hand swelled so fast it shut us all up. She grew pale and faint, and we knew she was in trouble.
We rushed her back to the stockade, and followed her instructions as a rash reddened her skin. The treatment amounted mostly to making sure she swallowed a half-dozen Benadryl capsules over the next twenty-four hours and slathering her hand with cortisone cream.
Javendra’s and Steph’s combined medical opinion was that there was something unique in the scorpion’s venom that Steph was allergic to. It was her first scorpion sting, so the allergy had never been discovered. The explanation made perfect sense to everyone.
After a few days, her finger had swelled and turned red,
the skin cracked and peeled, and she recovered completely. Afterwards, she was always careful about checking for the nasty little bastards before she put her feet in her shoes or before she reached inside of something she was unable to see into. And she always carried a few Benadryl capsules in her pocket. The scorpions weren’t a big problem for her. They were around, but Balmorhea wasn’t swarming with them. Anyone might see one once every three or four weeks.
“Could the poison still be in her body?” I asked.
“No,” answered Grace. “Steph told me she thought her reaction then was something else. Not just an allergic reaction.”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“Back in August,” Grace told me. “When you and Murphy got stuck up in Pecos.”
“Yeah.” I knew when she was talking about.
“After all the corn dried out in the field,” said Grace, “we were bringing it in, and she was stung by a bee.”
I looked over at Murphy. He shrugged. Nobody had mentioned it to him either. “What happened?”
“Anaphylactic shock,” answered Grace.
“Like this morning?” Anger slipped through, laced among my words. Anger at who? I didn’t know.
“Not like today,” said Grace. “It wasn’t this bad.”
“And she recovered,” I said. “Why didn’t she tell me? Why didn’t anyone?”
“She didn’t want to worry you for nothing.”
“Nothing?” I gritted my teeth and turned my attention to the barren hills off to the south. “Why didn’t she tell us she was allergic to bee stings?”
“She wasn’t,” said Grace. “That scorpion was the first to ever sting her, but she’s been stung by bees and wasps before.” Grace glanced back at me. “Who hasn’t?”
“People who never go outside,” muttered Jazz without looking up from her map.
“What did Steph say about it?” I asked. “Did she develop the allergy late in life? Is that a thing?”
“She didn’t have a way to explain it,” said Grace. “But she was worried. She didn’t say as much, yet I saw it in her eyes. She thought her reaction to the stings might have been caused by something else.”
“She didn’t say what?”
“I asked, but she said none of it made sense to her.”
“What about Javendra,” I persisted, “did he have any thoughts on it?”
Grace shook her head.
“So this morning,” I asked, “was it another scorpion?”
“No. Fire ants,” answered Grace. “That’s what she told me. She said she was walking across the courtyard to take her watch at 2:00 am and kicked an ant mound on the ground she didn’t see. She was stung three or four times, and said before she reached the ladder she already knew something was wrong. She swallowed the two Benadryls in her pocket, and passed out.”
I wanted to punch something.
“Rick was on watch, saw it all happen, and alerted us right away. She didn’t lay out there in the dark or anything.”
“Fire ants?” I asked. “Was she sure?”
Grace nodded.
“I found the mound,” said Jazz. “I obliterated it with Amdro.”
“Dalhover had somebody treat the entire compound before you and Murphy got back this morning,” added Grace.
“How can she be allergic to fire ants?” I asked. “Who lives in Texas and doesn’t get bit by a fire ant? How could she not know?”
“That’s just it,” said Grace. “She’s been bitten countless times, just like anybody else. This shouldn’t have happened.”
Only it did. I said, “This is only the third incident, and now she’s—” I couldn’t bring myself to follow the thought to its conclusion.
Murphy put a strong hand on my shoulder, though he didn’t have any words to add.
“Something is wrong,” I said. “This can’t be just an allergy.”
Grace nodded. “We don’t have a doctor to figure it out.”
“Might not matter if we did,” said Jazz. “I’m not trying to be Debbie Downer, but I’ve never heard of anything like this before.” She looked at Murphy and Grace.
Grace scowled at her.
Unfortunately, I was in agreement with Jazz. I was no doctor but I could see whatever was going on with Steph, it was a ticking time bomb, and if we didn’t figure out how to cure or mitigate it, it would kill her.
Chapter 6
Jazz had us heading east on West Gomez Road, a roughly paved path through the oil patch north of Fort Stockton.
“Will there be a sign when we hit 18?” asked Grace.
Jazz took another look at the map. “No. Yes. Doesn’t matter. The road tees into Highway 18. Go right when we get there and it’s three or four miles into Stockton.” She glanced around the cab like maybe she was making sure we were all satisfied with the circuitous route.
I was, but my mind was on other things.
Murphy slipped down through the roof to take his position back in his seat as he stowed the binoculars.
“Anything?” asked Grace.
Shaking his head, he said, “Roadrunners. Rabbits. Tumbleweeds.”
“How do we want to do this?” Grace was addressing us all.
“We don’t know where anything is,” said Murphy, though we all knew that already. “I say we take the two main roads across town, north to south, then east to west. If there’s a pharmacy, it’ll be on one of those two roads.”
“East-west is our best bet.” Jazz held the map up to show us in the backseat. “See how 10 skirts around on the north side of town?” She dragged her finger across the map on a straight line connecting I-10 east to I-10 on the west side of town. “I think that road across there is the main road through town.” She pointed out Highway 18. “We’ll be coming in this way.”
Murphy reached up to steady the flapping map and nodded. “If there’s a pharmacy—”
“There’s a pharmacy,” I corrected. There had to be a one.
“The pharmacy,” Murphy emphasized, will be on that road. He smiled at Jazz. “So we blaze straight into town until we hit that road and then turn. Left or right?”
“It’s a coin toss.” Jazz turned forward in her seat and started to refold the map.
“Doesn’t matter,” I told them, trying to convince myself that if Steph had made it this long, then another twenty minutes wouldn’t matter. “The town can’t more be than three miles across. How long will it take us to drive up and down the major roads?”
Nobody had an answer. Because my question didn’t need an answer. It was our plan.
“If we come across a hotel or something,” said Murphy, “and if we’re not swimming in Whites yet, maybe we can stop and see if there’s a phone book or something.”
Jazz looked back at him, not immediately understanding.
“Addresses,” said Murphy. “We can use it when we get back to Bal to mark all the important places in town on the map.”
“Duh.” Jazz smacked her forehead with her palm.
“Besides crisscrossing town and drawing out every White with two feet and a set of teeth,” asked Grace, “how are we going to do this once we find the drugstore?”
I’d been dwelling on just that point since we saw the first highway sign for Fort Stockton back when we were still heading east on 10.
Murphy glanced over at me. “We don’t have time to spend all day being sneaky about it.”
Taking the urgency of Steph’s condition off the table, that would have been the way to handle it—park the Humvee next to a pumpjack a few miles out of town, and let me and Murphy hike in naked to spend a day scouting around.
Despite the chill in the air, I started to pull off my gear, intending to strip down naked. “Once we find a place, Grace, if you’ll pull around back or somewhere out of sight for a sec’, I’ll hop out, and then you speed off.”
“Not a fan,” said Grace.
“I’ll run inside,” I explained, “find what we need, and be back out before you know it. Then
you can pick me up on another pass through.”
“Only about a hundred things can go wrong with that,” replied Murphy.
“I’ve done it a hundred times before,” I argued.
“Then you had time to do it right,” he told me. “Not in a rush, like this.”
“You don’t know,” added Jazz. “There might be survivors holed up inside who’ll shoot you on sight. There—”
“There won’t be,” I countered.
“Probably not,” she admitted, “but you can’t know that.”
“I’ll take the risk.”
Murphy growled a sigh and started to remove his gear. “I’m going with you.”
“Like hell you are,” shouted Grace. “Murphy, you’re the only one in the truck with any real experience on that .50. We talked about this before we left. We’ve got one box of ammo and we’re probably driving into a hornet’s nest of Whites.” The Humvee skidded to a stop at the T-intersection with Highway 18. Grace turned in her seat to look at all of us and to settle her motherly eyes on me. “I don’t like you when you put your stupid side in charge.”
I liked Grace, I liked her a lot, but when she condescended from her pedestal of maturity, it pissed me right the fuck off. I bit back a sharp comeback and spun right into thinking up another.
“Hey.” Murphy put a hand on my arm. “Be cool, dude. We’re all worried about Steph. You know that, right? Man, we all love her. We’re family.”
I nodded. I did know that.
“Grace doesn’t want you to get yourself killed,” he said. “I mean, how’s Steph gonna take that when she comes out of her ‘phylactic shock thing, or whatever, and has to go to your funeral.”
I glared at Murphy. “You know me.” I gripped the handle of my machete. “You don’t have to worry about me.”
Murphy busted out in a loud belly laugh.
It hurt, because it punched my ego right in its soft spot—the honest part.
Jazz dramatized a teenager sigh. “I’ll go with him.”
Murphy’s laugh came to an abrupt halt. “No.”
Jazz turned a pair of cold eyes on Murphy. “We talked about this. I won’t be your pet. You can’t be my protector.” Her eyes turned soft, even loving. She reached a hand over and grabbed one of Murphy’s big mitts. She put on a frail smile, and a whole conversation passed silently between them. She turned to me. “I can’t tell you how much this hurts me to say it, but you’re the expert in this kind of shit. Do we go in doing your naked thing, or do we keep our jeans on our asses and weapons in our hands?”