“For now, I’m going to focus on finding a car,” Pete said.
Chapter 15 - The Long Walk to Indiana
Michigan
“So that’s where the boats are,” Corrie said.
They’d only been walking for fifteen minutes, but they had found houses, and they had found boats. A lot of boats. Moored on the inland Lake Crystal. With barely a kilometre between Lake Crystal and Lake Michigan, it was no surprise someone had tried to drag a yacht across land. Tried and failed.
“Do you think other people managed to get a boat all the way to Lake Michigan?” Pete asked, walking slowly around the truly beached craft: a twenty-footer, which had left a red fibreglass stain on the asphalt.
“Probably,” Corrie said. “If they had proper towing gear. If they weren’t attacked. Must have been a zombie.”
“I hope she was a zombie,” Pete said.
The woman in torn dungarees and a ragged trench-coat had been shot and bludgeoned. Her corpse had been left in the middle of the road, next to the beached and road-ruined yacht.
“Let’s keep going,” Corrie said, keeping her distance from the boat and her rifle raised as they continued walking.
“I wonder where they went,” Pete said.
“Who?” Corrie asked.
“The people who dropped that yacht,” Pete said. “This place is remote. Those houses look empty. Summer homes, I guess, though they look too large, but maybe there’s a car in one of the garages.”
“No, we should keep going,” Corrie said. “I think we’re being watched.”
“You think there are people inside?” Pete asked.
“Someone killed that zombie,” Corrie said.
“They’ll have seen the plane,” Pete said. “Or heard it. Why aren’t they coming out to look?”
“Would you? That’s your answer. That’s where people are. They’re hiding. Waiting for the soldiers to turn up, or the radio to broadcast the outbreak is over. Contact with people means trouble of one sort or a worse kind. And they’re right. What help can we give them? We can’t get everyone onto the plane. Body. Ahead.”
Again, it was one of the undead. Hopefully.
The next vehicle they came to was a car, but it was a burned-out pyre. A snaking scorch mark, leading to a discarded fuel can, indicated how the blaze had begun. The blackened skeletons inside explained why. Two were in the backseat, one noticeably smaller than the other.
Corrie shook her head, said nothing, and kept walking.
Five minutes later, they came to another car, a Michigan state-police cruiser, and this one, at first glance, appeared mostly intact. Bullet holes riddled the trunk. Bags filled the backseat. A corpse occupied the front passenger seat. Slumped forward, though still clearly wearing a police uniform.
“The fuel cap’s on,” Corrie said. “The wheels look okay. The bullets might have hit something, but the only way to find out is to try the engine.”
“We’ll have to move that body first,” Pete said with weary resignation. “But I guess that’s better than—”
But even as he spoke, the dead police officer moved. Its shoulders shuddered. The bags shifted, then fell, tumbling aside as the zombie swiped and swatted at the windshield.
“At least we know why the car was abandoned,” Pete said. “He’s in uniform. Or it is. Or he was. Whichever, the driver must have ditched the car when the guy turned.”
“And if the car was abandoned,” Corrie said, “it worked a few days ago.”
The zombie-cop shuddered again, trying to turn and twist, hitting its hands against the doors.
“We need a car,” Corrie said. “You open the door. I’ll… I’ll do the rest.”
Pete nodded, took the crowbar from her, and walked over to the police cruiser as she unslung her rifle. He yanked the unlocked door open as the zombie surged sideways, straining against the seatbelt holding it fast. Pete stepped back while the zombie squirmed and thrashed.
“What are you waiting for?” Pete asked.
“I don’t want to get infected blood all over the driver’s seat,” Corrie said.
“Ah. Understood. Got it,” Pete said, drawing the bayonet that, like most of their gear, had been given to them by the Canadians. He swung forward, a lunging swipe that missed the seatbelt. A loose strap from his pack swung within a grasping hand’s reach of the zombie, who caught it and tugged. Off balance, Pete staggered sideways.
“I can’t get a clear shot!” Corrie said.
Pete twisted and turned, pulling against the tugging zombie, while slashing at the seatbelt. The blade sliced the zombie’s nose, fingers, the sweat-stained shirt, then, finally, the seatbelt. The zombie lurched forward, and Pete fell, the creature almost on top, its head by his knees. Pete rolled as the zombie snapped and twisted, turned and thrashed, rolling after him. A loud crack was followed by a deafening silence as Corrie’s bullet ended the police officer’s inhuman second existence.
“Are you okay?” Corrie asked.
“I guess,” Pete said. “Yeah, it didn’t bite me. I need more practice at this.”
“Here’s hoping we never get the chance,” Corrie said. “The keys are in the ignition. I guess we could put the towels down on the passenger seat.”
“I’d prefer sitting in the back,” Pete said. “There’s a couple of gas cans in the trunk. One’s… Wow. Empty and full of bullet holes. Lucky the car didn’t blow up. The other… Double-wow, it didn’t get hit. It’s nearly full.”
“Cool,” Corrie said, turning the key. The engine stuttered, before settling into a soft burr. “And this is a quarter full. Let’s fill her up. Next stop is the cabin, right? You said that was in Michigan?”
“About fifty miles from South Bend. North of Paw Paw, west of Kalamazoo.”
“Good. I think we should hurry.”
“Why?” he asked as he climbed in.
“I saw… I’m not sure,” she said as she put the car into gear. “A light. A reflection. Something moving. Northwest of the road.”
He turned to look, and, just before it was lost to sight, thought he saw a shadow that might be a person. Perhaps it was one of the former passengers of the car. Perhaps it was one of the undead. Perhaps it was both.
Avoiding the highway, they followed a curving Swiss-cheese road that was a gluey mix of crumbling asphalt and flooded potholes, but which abruptly turned to pristine blacktop outside a nearly finished, and utterly empty, new home.
“I think there’s someone there,” Pete said as they drove by. “Yeah, top floor, by the window.”
“We can stop on the way back,” Corrie said. “If we come back this way. But we’ve only got room in the back for three passengers. Four, max. And if we stop now, we might not make it back from South Bend in time for the flight.”
“Yeah, no, I don’t think they wanted company,” Pete said. “I don’t even know they were alive.”
One road led to another, all roughly leading south, sometimes bracketed by farmland, sometimes bordered by woodland. And in the houses, Pete was sure he saw shadows dance, curtains move, lights dim, and smoke billow. An increasing number of properties had boarded windows and barricaded drives.
“It’s weird,” he said. “Everyone’s staying behind closed doors.”
“It’s the smart thing to do,” Corrie said. “Avoid infection. Avoid trouble. And it means, when the tanks roll in, we’ll have people here who can work the farms.”
“Work the farms? I guess they’ll have to. Spring’s coming, isn’t it? It was the world’s largest food exporter.”
“Michigan? It can’t have been.”
“No, us. America. We were. There was a documentary I saw. Australia must have been a big exporter, too. Weren’t you saying there were cattle ranches the size of countries?”
“The size of a small country, sure,” she said. “And we… I mean, Australia, was a major exporter of wheat, too. Fresh fruit was speeding up the list.”
“I guess you’ve got to travel to get a handle
on how interconnected the world is,” Pete said. “When Olivia and I were talking about life after the end of the world— Okay, so it wasn’t a real discussion, and it was just as much about watching movies and… and yeah, it was so we had something to talk about. Anyway, we just assumed we’d have food, and that we were waiting for things to get better. But they wouldn’t get better on their own.”
“That’s what they said in Australia. Why they’re evacuating the towns and cities.”
“Yeah, but if Australia is no longer exporting, if America isn’t, then what’s it going to be like in the places that relied on that food?”
“Not good,” Corrie said. “In some places, things will get worse before they get better. And everywhere will change. But it will end. It will get better.”
“It’ll take years,” Pete said. “Longer than it took the world to get over World War Two, and it’ll be a lot different afterward. Yep, reality is not as much fun as fantasy.” He mulled that over as they drove by a house in which, this time, he was certain there were people, watching. “There’s a truck in front of that house. Two people. With rifles.”
“We’re not stopping,” Corrie said.
“And they’re not waving us down,” Pete said. “They’re not shooting, either. Just watching. Weird.” He turned in the seat to look until they’d disappeared beyond the horizon. “Yep, weird. Or maybe it’s not. We’re in a police car, I guess they were hoping we’d stop, bring them news or something.”
“People, ahead,” Corrie said.
It wasn’t just people, but a fortress.
A neat cluster of houses were divided by the road, surrounded by farmland, and now ringed by barbed wire. The wire stopped where the blacktop began, but the barricade continued in the form of a pair of eighteen-wheelers, parked side on with their rear tyres in the driveways of homes either side of the road.
“No way will we get through,” Corrie said, stopping the police cruiser some two hundred yards from the barricade.
On top of the nearest of the two juggernauts stood a sentry with a rifle, next to a chair on which she’d sat until she’d heard the car approach.
“Let’s see if she goes to wake up the welcoming committee,” Pete said as the sentry climbed down a ladder, and disappeared behind the juggernaut’s cab.
“Over there,” Corrie said. “The big house on the left. Eight people. No, ten. She must have radioed a warning from the truck’s cab.”
“Or they all heard our engine,” Pete said. “They’re well armed. Shall we go say hello?”
“More over to the left,” Corrie said. She adjusted the mirror. “There’s at least two behind us. I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”
Before Pete could agree, a bullet shattered the driver’s-side wing mirror.
“Very bad,” Corrie said, throwing the car into reverse. A bullet grazed the bodywork, and more hit the road as other guns opened fire.
“They’re shooting a cop car!” Pete said.
“Guess so,” Corrie said, reversing the car as fast as the engine would allow. “And I don’t care if they’re sorry when they see our corpses and realise what a mistake they’ve made.”
“No, I mean—” Pete began, but was jolted into silence as Corrie swerved the car hard right and drove onto a tractor’s track. “You’re leaving the road?”
“Look behind!” she said.
It was the pickup that had been parked outside the property to the north.
A chuntering roar lit up the road behind them, a brief burst barely a second long.
“Machine gun!” Corrie yelled.
But the sound didn’t come again. Pete swung in his seat. Behind, through the mud-strewn rear windshield, he could make out a pickup, and someone standing in the truck-bed, braced behind a fixed weapon.
“Tactical,” Pete said, as the car swung onto a road heading roughly back the way they’d come. “That’s what they call it, don’t they? In Africa and places, when they turn a pickup into an armoured car?”
“And I guess they want to save ammo now they’ve chased us off,” Corrie said. “But why were they shooting at cops?”
“Or are we heading into another ambush?” Pete said.
The track met another and she turned south. Another turning, and they met a wider, slightly better repaired road, bracketed by trees.
“I think we’re clear,” Corrie said. “No more stopping until we reach the cabin.”
“Agreed.”
Chapter 16 - Bodies in the Woods
Michigan
Finding the correct back road took three tries, but once they had, finding the turning was obvious. Recently broken branches formed a neat trail to the track, as if some large vehicle had torn a path through the overgrown bracken. As Corrie slowed, the headlights glittered off something metallic.
“Wait, stop!” Pete said.
Even before Corrie had killed the engine, Pete had opened the door and flung himself outside. Corrie followed, more slowly, grabbing her rifle before heading after her brother, into the woodland, up to a battered twelfth-hand pickup that was as much repairs as original bodywork.
“It’s my truck!” Pete said. He peered through the mud-splattered window before opening the door. “And those are my keys!”
“It must be Olivia,” Corrie said. “She must be here.”
“No, these are my keys. The spare set from my apartment. I gave her the proper set the night I said goodbye to her.”
“It must be one of your neighbours, then?” Corrie suggested. “Where’s the cabin?”
“Up there,” Pete said, pointing, then followed his own finger into the woods.
The track was obvious, as were the muddy footprints leading up to where the cabin had once been. A charred ruin stood in its place. Rain-dampened charcoal added an acidic tang to the air, while the settling mist added a muffling shroud to a scene of utter devastation. The roof had collapsed, as had the wall around the front door, while the southern wall leaned at a precarious angle. The small bathroom-annex was smoke-blackened but intact.
“Where did you keep your spare keys?” Corrie asked, breaking the sepulchral silence.
“In my apartment. But I left my truck at work. I gave Olivia my main set of keys.”
“So she’d have taken the truck home for you? Back to your apartment?”
“I guess,” he said.
“And a neighbour broke into your place, took your spare keys, and found your address book.”
“I don’t have an address book, except on my phone.”
“Then a scrap of paper where you’d scribbled the address down,” Corrie said. “Or did you tell one of your neighbours about this place?”
“I didn’t really know them,” Pete said. “And I don’t think I wrote it down anywhere.”
“Well, they found your spare keys, so I’m guessing you did,” she said. “And they came here, and they burned the place down. It must have been an accident.”
“I suppose,” he said.
She turned on her flashlight, and tracked it over the ruin. He’d left his, with his rifle, back in the car. “Stop,” he said. “There. Is that…?”
He ran towards the charred timbers, cutting across the light’s beam. “It’s a body,” he said.
She grabbed his arm even as he took another step closer. “Leave it, Pete.”
The corpse was partially buried beneath the charred timbers.
“It could be her,” he said, shaking himself free. The leaning wall creaked as he hauled at the singed wood covering the body. The charred timbers cracked as he hauled them off the corpse.
“That’s enough, Pete,” Corrie said. “There’s no way anyone could identify that body. She could be anyone.”
“It’s Olivia,” he said. “It could be anyone, yes. But here? With my truck parked there? It has to be her.”
“Actually, no,” Corrie said. “Look at her hand. That’s an engagement ring, and a wedding band. Pete, it’s not her.”
“Where? Are you s
ure? Oh. Okay. Yeah.”
Corrie grabbed his arm. “Back to the car,” she said. “Come on.”
“Why?”
“For one thing, because you left your rifle and flashlight there. For another, because there’s nothing else to be found here.”
“No, there is,” he said. “Shine your light there. No, to the left. There. That’s… that’s a body. A man.”
“Or a zombie,” Corrie said. “Do you know him?”
“Shot in the head, how could I tell?” he replied. “But no, I don’t think so.”
“Then let’s just go back to the car.”
“We have come this far. I can’t stop now,” he said. “I’ve got to search.”
“Then get your flashlight first,” she said.
After an hour, with darkness properly descended, he finally stopped. “Two bodies,” he said. “Just two bodies. And neither is hers.”
Back near the road, while he examined his truck, she shone her light over the police cruiser.
“Do you see these bullet holes?” Corrie said, shining her light on the police car. “Since that fortified hamlet, we were shot at twice.”
“They were hunting rifles, weren’t they?” Pete said. “That neat line, that has to be an automatic weapon. Probably that machine gun.”
“Right. Probably. But we were shot at twice more. Once from that weird one-storey place set back from the road that had the three-storey tower built where the garage should have been.”
“The viewing tower?” Pete said. “That’s what I thought it was. For bird watching or something.”
“Perfect for a sniper,” she said. “And the second time, it was that seemingly empty field. Must have been people who knew the area. They shot at a police cruiser. We weren’t stopping, and hadn’t even slowed, but they shot at us anyway. That’s not good. I don’t know what else it means, but from here, if your truck still works, we should drive that. But before we do anything, including working out what we do next, we should wash up as best we can, eat, then keep the lights off until dawn. That’s hours away, but that means plenty of time for some other vehicle to drive along that road. If they do, we don’t want them spotting a light. Not if, around here, they even shoot at cops.”
Surviving The Evacuation | Life Goes On (Book 2): No More News Page 12