Surviving The Evacuation | Life Goes On (Book 2): No More News

by Tayell, Frank

  Ten minutes later, they sat in Pete’s truck, in the dark, chewing on ration packs they’d originally found in the coffin-like crates in Lisa Kempton’s plane.

  “I think that some local came to the cabin,” Corrie finally said. “That’s who the bodies are. Someone from a nearby farm, maybe. You said this was somewhere your boss owned? Maybe she sold it.”

  “How’d my truck end up here then?”

  “Maybe Olivia left it here,” Corrie said. “She had the keys, yes? And the keys for your apartment? And she knew where the cabin was. So maybe that’s why she drove here. You said she had a roommate she was close to.”

  “Nicole, yeah. They’re good friends.”

  “Okay. So they loaded all their food into one car, drove to your place, went inside, took all your food, then the spare keys because they’d lost the originals or just wanted a spare set for safety. They brought both cars here, and found the place had already burned down. Those bodies, I bet they were locals, maybe a neighbour, someone keeping an eye on the place for your old boss.”

  “Yeah, I guess,” Pete said.

  “You’re sceptical, sure, I get it,” Corrie said. “But the key thing is that Olivia isn’t here. Her body isn’t here. If she was here before the fire, she left. If she came after, there was no reason for her to stay.”

  “And if she left, she drove,” Pete said, cheering as he spotted the faintest glimmer of hope. “Because my truck still works and there’s fuel in the tank. And there was crockery and cutlery in the ruin. I know Mrs Mathers had emptied the cabin.”

  “There, that’s proof, then,” Corrie said. “Proof that someone else came up here thinking a cabin in woodland would be remote and therefore safe. But it’s not that remote. Not really.”

  “I didn’t really think we’d find her here,” Pete said. “I mean, I did. I hoped I would. But… that was me thinking the way I did a couple of weeks ago. Now, the new me knows I might have come here, but I wouldn’t have stayed.”

  “No? Where would you have gone? Where would Olivia have gone?”

  “Florida,” Pete said. “That’s where Mrs Mathers was going to retire. She bought a house down there.”

  “Florida’s a long way,” Corrie said. “A seriously long way across an entire continent. You’d really go there?”

  “I dunno if I would, but Olivia might.”

  “They shot at a police car,” Corrie said. “This little finger on the mitten of Michigan isn’t like Canada. We can’t expect help from the people barricaded inside their hamlets, and we shouldn’t ask for it. The day after tomorrow, we should be back at the lighthouse because if you want to go to Florida, we should see if Canberra will arrange a plane. It’s too far to drive.”

  “No, I get it. And I don’t think she’d have gone to Florida. Nicole worked in a grocery store. She stole most of their shopping, so I bet she did that when the news broke. I bet she filled a shopping cart and then filled her car and went back to their apartment. And then they came here. I guess they left in Nicole’s car. Yeah, they wouldn’t have gone to Florida. Not from here. They’d have gone to Canada. Or they’d have found some abandoned house to hide in, but if they did, we won’t find it.”

  “That does sound like our kind of luck, us looking for her here, and she’s already up in Thunder Bay or somewhere,” Corrie said.

  “Maybe she left a note, though,” Pete said. “Not Olivia, but maybe Nicole did. Saying where she’d gone.”

  “In their apartment? Do you want to go look?”

  “Sure. And at Mrs Mathers’s old house. It’s on the way. Yeah, maybe Olivia would have gone there. It’s bigger than her apartment. If nothing else, we’ll see what the city is like. That’s what we’re really doing here, isn’t it? Finding out how bad America’s got in the last few days.” He looked towards the dark shadow of the bullet-riddled police cruiser. “And it’s looking pretty bad indeed.”

  1st March

  Chapter 17 - Other People’s Expectations

  Michigan & Indiana

  “Are you awake?” Corrie asked.

  “No,” Pete said. “But I’m not asleep, either.”

  Outside, rain pattered against the windscreen. At the edge of the droplets, a faint reflected glimmer offered the promise of an approaching dawn, albeit one which was grim and grey.

  “We could try to boil up some water,” Corrie said, opening her pack and rooting inside for a couple of the ration packs they’d brought with them. “Although I don’t know if I’ve got any coffee. What’s this? Mango and oat. That sounds like cereal.”

  Pete turned the blue and gold package over in his hands. “It’s not the same without a cartoon character on the packet. She must have been planning to market these to campers.”

  “Kempton? Probably,” Corrie said.

  “So was she trying to profit from the end of the world? Or only trying to fund her attempt to save it?”

  “Both,” Corrie said. “With her, there’s always more than one motive.”

  Pete took out his spoon, which was no longer clean, but was still far cleaner than his hands. Like everything that hadn’t come from the coffin-like containers, he’d picked it up in Nanaimo, along with a fork and knife, and a set for Corrie, taken from a break-room at the airport.

  “This isn’t camping, is it?” Pete said. “When Olivia and I talked about coming up here, that’s pretty much how we imagined it. Camping, but in a Hollywood kind of way.”

  “You mean, when you pictured it, you didn’t imagine the smell?”

  “And the birds were chirruping, the sun was always shining, the ground was a lot less like a swamp. Oh, and without the bodies, of course. Clean spoons, too.”

  “I know what you mean,” Corrie said. “I miss the outback. I miss my cabin. Never imagined I would. There were too many nights I thought of it as a prison, and I was serving a sentence for what I’d done. But it was a sentence in reverse. If I was being punished, everyone else was okay. And now…” She coughed. “Okay, no, we don’t have time for that. Are you ready to go?”

  “Let me find a tree first,” he said.

  Ten minutes later, with Corrie behind the wheel, they were driving south.

  “I miss the airfield,” Pete said, finally breaking the silence.

  “In Pine Dock?”

  “In Broken Hill. Or Liu’s house.”

  “Being inside, you mean?” she asked.

  “No. Somewhere with electricity. Yep, even your cabin. Somewhere you know that, even at the end of the day, you have somewhere with running water and power for a stove. Nope, this isn’t the outback. It’s colder, for one thing.”

  “It’s not electricity you miss,” she said. “You remember how Mick had those rules? They were for the city blokes, the scientists from overseas. Not people who lived in the outback. Because if you lived there, you knew to help one another. You might hate their living guts, but you’d give them a hand because it was, literally, life and death every single day.”

  “Sounds like that here, now, everywhere,” Pete said.

  “Except helping each other is the sensible thing to do. The rational thing. The only thing that, long term, will ensure anyone’s survival, but if you’ve only got one crate of beans left in the pantry and a gun on the table, are you going to give a stranger a can of beans or a bullet? That’s what you miss. What I miss. Normality was when helping someone else rarely imperilled yourself. I think that’s why people are hiding. They’re still hoping things will return to normal. Hoping someone else will fix this whole mess. Hoping it doesn’t get so bad they have to make the hardest choice.”

  “The people who shot at us weren’t hiding. I reckon they’ve accepted how things are. Or is it that they’ve decided, not accepted? They’ve decided things are as bad as they can imagine, not as good as they could be.”

  “Maybe. It’ll be a long time before help reaches here from Nanaimo,” Corrie said. “And longer before real help gets there from Canberra. For us, for the here and now, if peo
ple are staying inside until their supplies run out, then, in a day, or a week, or a month, things will get a whole lot worse. There’s something in the road.”

  Ahead, a bus lay on its side, and at a shallow angle so it nearly blocked both lanes. The rear window was a holey spider-web. The safety glass had mostly remained intact, but the fractured cobweb was nearly impossible to see through. From the twisted frames, jutting skyward, some of the side windows had been smashed by escaping passengers.

  “Hang on, stop,” Pete said. “There’s someone trying to get out. Someone trapped.”

  Corrie braked.

  The bus’s rear window shook. Collapsed, smashing to the roadway. Chunks of shattered glass skittered across the tarmac as a figure crawled out from the trashed vehicle. It was a miracle anyone had survived the crash. Wearing rags as blood-coated as its face. No. It was no miracle. And this was no survivor. Corrie realised the truth before Pete could open his mouth, slamming her foot on the gas and driving partially into the ditch, churning through mud to get beyond the bus, and to a road swarming with the moving, crawling dead.

  There were too many for them to have all been passengers. Too many with barely an unbroken limb among them. Unnaturally bent arms crooked upwards, beckoning with crushed hands, while fractured legs and crushed feet pushed at the road, tearing cloth and skin, leaving a bloody trail amid the frozen mud.

  Corrie weaved the truck through, and then over, the scores of twisting, pulsating bodies, powdering crushed bones, cracking skulls, and pulverising already broken limbs.

  “Yep,” she said, when they were finally back onto empty road again. “Yep, I’m changing my mind about one thing. I think that explains why we haven’t seen many people. Not on that road.”

  “And why everyone we did see is staying inside,” Pete said, tightening his grip on the rifle.

  “Now that is a roadblock,” Pete said, bringing the truck to a halt a safe distance from the cement and steel barriers ahead. When they’d finally reached roads with which he was more familiar, he’d taken the wheel.

  “An official roadblock, originally, anyway,” Corrie said. “Two police cruisers, a bus, some riot-fences, and concrete. And that bus is completely blocking the road. But… no, I can’t see any people. Where are we?”

  “Bertrand Road,” Pete said. “That’s Coop Road up on the right, just before the bus. Coop Road becomes Lilac Road when it crosses the state line, just down there.”

  “And Lilac Road is where your boss lived?” Corrie asked.

  “Yep,” Pete said. “I can’t see anyone at the roadblock, can you?”

  “They’re long gone,” Corrie said. “I’m guessing after someone torched that cop car.” The police cruiser was identifiable by the light-rack on the roof, but the twisted frame had buckled, letting the doors swing open, revealing the corpse inside. “Hope that body belonged to a zombie. Can you squeeze the truck through?”

  “I think so. Looks like the barricade is intended to stop people heading east, across the bridge, and over to Niles. Or was it to stop people coming the other way?”

  He restarted the engine and drove forward, weaving through the barricade.

  “Don’t slow,” Corrie said. “Keep driving. That’s the smell of death, of decay, I’m sure of it.”

  Pete needed no more prompting.

  “How far is it?” Corrie asked as they drove by one empty house, then another, moving slowly through the clusters of detached, set-back homes with mix-and-match designs that made them neither identical nor entirely unique. A porch from one was replicated on a house three doors down while its windows were replicated on a property nearly opposite.

  “It’s down here,” Pete said. “They bought the house about twenty years ago, I think.” He turned onto the side road leading to the small cluster of homes. “Just after they were built. Off-plan. It was the same time they set up the carpet store. It was a used-car lot before…” He trailed into silence as he stopped the truck.

  “That’s her house?” Corrie asked. “The one with the RV outside?”

  “That’s Mrs Mathers’s place,” Pete said. “I don’t think she owned an RV, though.”

  “Looks clear,” Corrie said, checking the mirrors, then twisting around to look behind. “Clear. But we should be quick.”

  Bringing their rifles with them, they climbed out of the car. His boots rang loudly on the ash-coated road. The frost was already melting, turning to dew, mixing with the soot from the wreck of the torched RV, creating a grey slurry drifting towards an already blocked drain. The RV was a large vehicle, but the fire had consumed it so completely, any more detailed description was impossible.

  “Body,” Corrie said, pointing towards the front of the vehicle.

  Glass from the shattered windows crunched beneath his feet. Each step more arduous than the last, Pete walked around the truck, relaxing a fraction as he saw the corpse. Singed, rather than burned, she had been a woman once, a zombie after, and now she was dead twice over, but it wasn’t Olivia.

  “Don’t know who she was,” he said.

  A gunshot shattered the silence. Pete spun. There was nothing to see, and nothing to hear. The street wasn’t just quiet, but artificially still. “I think we’re being watched,” he said.

  “I was just thinking the same thing,” Corrie said. “No way everyone’s left the city yet. Go check the house. I’ll turn the truck around. Shout if you hear anything.”

  “I won’t just shout, I’ll shoot,” Pete said as he ran up the path.

  The front door was locked, and without an inch of give when he gave it a shove. Not wanting to break a bone trying to break it down, he ran to the side gate, and into the once-pristine rear garden. In his mind, it still rang with the laughter from the Fourth of July barbecue, but the lawn was muddy, the beds filled with leaves, and an upturned dog-bowl sat on the back porch.

  The kitchen door was unlocked.

  “Hello?” he asked, barely louder than a whisper, uncertain he wanted a reply.

  Someone had lived here, going by the unwashed bowls by the sink. Next to them was a box of cereal. His heart jumped when he saw the cartoon elf. It was his favourite variety, but the box was empty.

  “Hello!” he tried again, louder this time, but still got no reply. With increasing swiftness, he went from empty room to empty room, until he was certain no one was there.

  “Anything?” Corrie asked, standing by the truck’s open door.

  “Nope,” he said. “No sign of Mrs Mathers or Olivia. Someone had stayed there. Someone with a dog. Maybe for a night or two. But there was no furniture except some folding chairs. I think Mrs Mathers had moved out. Maybe even sold the place. Before the outbreak, I mean.”

  “I think we should leave,” Corrie said. “I’m certain we’re being watched.”

  Pete got in the driver’s seat. “Olivia’s apartment,” he said.

  “I think so,” Corrie said. “And then… then I think we need to get out of this city. I’m not saying we’re giving up the search,” she added quickly. “But I haven’t heard a single other vehicle. A noisy engine will attract attention. So, her apartment, then we’ll leave the city, and then we’ll talk through our plans.”

  “Sure,” he said, knowing what decision they’d reach. He’d already reached it himself, and before he’d left Australia. It was beyond dumb searching for Olivia, but that wasn’t the sole purpose of the trip. It wasn’t even the main purpose, not anymore. They wanted to know what America was like. And now he knew.

  “That’s where she lived,” Pete said, stopping the truck fifty yards from the front entrance to the apartment block. The trio of upturned cars prevented him from driving nearer.

  “Nice place,” Corrie said.

  “Her apartment’s at the back,” Pete said. “She doesn’t have a river view.”

  “It’s still nice,” Corrie said.

  “Way better than my—” Pete began but stopped as his eyes caught movement in the rear view mirror. “We’ve got com
pany.”

  “People?” Corrie asked, spinning around.

  “Yes. No. Zombie. Only one.”

  “Hmm. Okay, we better get out. Bring the keys, we don’t want someone stealing the truck while we’re inside.”

  “You can stay here,” Pete said, climbing out. He picked up his rifle, but Corrie had already raised hers, taking aim at the zombie in the torn suit, half a burgundy tie, one brown loafer, and a jagged gash running the length of his face. On either side of the wound, skin peeled away in two nearly-neat sheets that flapped, one over his mouth, one over his eye, until Corrie’s bullet slammed into his forehead. The sound of the falling body seemed louder than the shot, but Pete knew the gunshot would carry across the town.

  “More will come, won’t they?” he said.

  “Zombies, or people, or both,” Corrie said, eyeing the windows around them. “You’ve got the keys? Then let’s go see if Olivia left a note.”

  Inside, the entrance lobby was damp, darkly forbidding, decorated with jagged glass from the already broken doors. The stairwell stank of sweat, fear, and urine.

  “It’s not right,” Pete said as they reached the landing, and walked along the dark, dank corridor. “It smells worse than a locker room. Worse than… well, anything I can think of. That’s it,” he added, pointing at an already broken-open door.

  “Careful and slow,” Corrie said, stepping in front of her brother, pushing the door open with her rifle.

  Inside, their nostrils were assaulted by a different smell. Stronger. Deeper. More pervasive. More permanent. And more familiar, though only over the last few days. In the middle of the floor, between the pushed-back sofa and pushed-aside TV, lay two bodies shrouded in bed-sheets.

  “Quick,” Corrie said, drawing her knife. “Check them. Pete? Pete?” Not waiting to ask a third time, she crossed to the nearest corpse, and cut away the sheet at the face. “Do you know her?”