“The plane will arrive around lunchtime,” Corrie said, “but I don’t know for how long it’s safe for that boat to bob on the surface of a lake.”
“Let’s see,” Jenny said. “The lighthouse is about two hundred and fifty miles north of here. If we leave at dawn, we’ll be there at lunchtime. Depending on the roads. What are they like?”
“We were shot at on the way here, so we’ll have to take a different route back,” Corrie said. “Although we were driving a police cruiser. Maybe they thought we were with Vevermee.”
“He can’t have tormented people that far from the city,” Olivia said. “Can he?”
“Depends how many people are in his gang,” Jenny said. “If we’re not on the road at dawn, we won’t make it. I don’t want to go north, miss the flight, and have to come back anywhere near this city.”
“We need a vehicle, and we need to find it now,” Corrie said. “And we need to leave now, heading north, or we forget the plane, head west, and make our own way up to Pine Dock.”
“West it is,” Olivia said. She gave a sigh and a shrug.
“There’s the police cruiser up at the cabin,” Pete said. “If we could get there, we could drive the rest of the way. Or some of us could.”
“The cabin would be a five-day walk for the kids,” Corrie said. “Maybe longer.”
“There must be plenty of vehicles we can steal,” Pete said.
“Of course,” Jenny said. “After the hospital burned down, people left. Some had already gone, of course. And after Vevermee started torching more buildings, more people fled. They stole the fuel from the gas stations and gas tanks, and Vevermee’s people have been taking what was left behind.”
“We need a quiet vehicle,” Pete said, slowly. “Something they won’t hear coming. Something like… yeah, an electric car. Two cars. Or an electric truck.”
“How would we charge it?” Olivia asked.
“You said you had a generator?” Pete asked. “And fuel?”
“Possibly,” Olivia said. “We don’t know if it’s undamaged by the fire, but the generator was kept in a shipping container they’d put outside, in the parking lot, so it might be okay.”
“And if we use the diesel to power a generator to charge up an electric truck, we can get away quietly,” Pete said, warming to the idea.
“A generator is still an engine,” Olivia said. “But I guess we could muffle it. And we’d only need to run it for a few minutes. Enough to charge the truck to get ten miles out of town. Then we could stop, charge it properly. That might work.”
“There’s a dealership on Michigan Street that sells electric cars,” Pete said.
“It’s too far from the carpet store,” Jenny said. “We’ll have to carry the generator to the truck.”
“Oh.” Pete’s bubble of enthusiasm deflated an inch. “The aerospace factory might have something.”
“Or they might not,” Jenny said. “And if they don’t, we’ll have to keep moving. A mile at dusk, another at dawn.”
Pete’s bubble burst.
“There were a couple of handcarts at the carpet store,” Olivia said. “Little flat trolleys the construction crew were using. We can get the generator onto one of those, and move it a bit, maybe half a mile. So where could we reach? The museum? No.”
“The railroad?” Jenny suggested.
“No, got it!” Pete said, nearly jumping with renewed enthusiasm. “The moving people. Oh, what’s their name? The people with the ads on all the benches.”
“You mean U-call, we carry?” Olivia asked. “They have electric trucks?”
“Yeah, remember last year?” Pete said. “They were doing that deal, hire an electric van, get it half price. You said that was still twice the price of using the work truck. These were vans, but there’d be enough room for us and a small generator.”
“And it’s close?” Corrie asked.
“LaSalle Park. Like, five blocks east of the carpet store.”
“Then we have a plan,” Jenny said. “Good. So, what do we need to do first?”
Chapter 19 - One Dream at a Time
South Bend, Indiana
“You really came all the way back for me,” Olivia said as they gathered their gear. “Who does that? In real life, I mean? In fiction, sure, all the time. But in history? Wow. I think it’s a first.”
“Yeah… um… well,” Pete stammered over the hard-to-find words. “I guess it’s the first zombie outbreak in history, that’s why.”
“Here’s hoping there won’t be a second,” Olivia said. She grinned. “Thank you, Pete.”
“Thank me when we’re on the plane. Better yet, thank me when we’re down in Australia grumbling about how hot it is.”
“No, I’ll thank you now, because no matter what happens, no matter, you risked everything, and you didn’t have to.”
“I… well…” he stammered, increasingly uncertain what to say. He knew precisely what he wanted to say, but the setting was wrong. “Just wait until you see Corrie’s cabin in the outback. You’ll change your mind then.”
“I won’t.” She picked up her pack. “Though I’ve had enough of cabins. It wasn’t anything like we imagined it would be, living in Nora’s old cabin. It took me one day chopping logs and hauling water to realise that it just isn’t the life for me. Maybe if I hadn’t been alone, it’d have been easier, but it’d be better still in a house with running water.”
“Tell me about it,” Pete said. “I think that’s got to be rule fifty-two.”
“You’re writing rules?”
“They’re not mine. Well, they sort of are. There was this guy down in Australia—”
“We’re ready,” Corrie said.
“I’ll tell you about it later,” Pete said.
Counting Rufus, four of them were going on the mission, leaving Jenny to watch the children. Pete took the lead, guessing at a route he only vaguely remembered, and that from the seat of his truck. Corrie and Olivia followed, with the dog padding back and forth, sometimes keeping pace with Olivia, sometimes darting ahead, sometimes falling back to bring up the rear.
Avoiding the roads, they kept to alleys, moving slowly so they could listen, slowing even more at each distant creak, crack, or crash. When Rufus froze, baring his teeth in a silent snarl, they all raised their weapons: rifles for Pete and Corrie, and a shotgun for Olivia. A clatter came from the road ahead, but the corrugated fencing on either side of the alley made it impossible to identify the cause of the commotion.
A figure staggered across the alley’s mouth. Pete almost breathed a sigh of relief when he saw it was a zombie. Dripping brown gore from the stump of its arm, with a kitchen knife embedded in its shoulder, another in its chest, it was obviously undead.
Pete let a hand fall from his rifle, reaching for the bayonet at his belt, but Olivia grabbed his arm. She shook her head as the zombie staggered on, passing the alley mouth and continuing along the sidewalk. The monstrous shadow hadn’t heard them. An invisible clock ticked in his head while they stood, listening, waiting for the undead creature to venture beyond hearing.
After what had to be at least two minutes, but which felt closer to two years, Rufus padded in front of them, stopping eight paces ahead. The dog turned and gave them a hurry-up look. The humans gave each other a what-else-are-we-waiting-for shrug, and followed the dog down the alley. At the road, they sprinted across and into an industrial parking lot, taking shelter behind a stalled eighteen-wheeler whose container doors had been ripped off. They now lay, chains still attached, ten feet away, while the cardboard boxes in the back had been slashed open.
“We lost too much time,” Pete whispered. “Next time, we should kill the zombie.”
“Not until we’ve left South Bend,” Olivia whispered back. “Vevermee burns the bodies of the dead, zombie and living alike. If we left a dead zombie, he’d know it was you, because he surely knows your truck didn’t drive here by itself.”
“Fair point.”
“The fuel cap’s been removed,” Corrie whispered. “They drained the tank.”
“Told you,” Olivia said. “Where next? We’re close, aren’t we?”
“I think it’s on the other side of that fence,” Pete said.
It was. And it was deserted. Like in the industrial lot next door, the vehicles’ fuel tanks had been drained. But the two electric vans were still parked on their stands, cables snaking to the boxy electrical outlet.
The keys were easy to find, in a prefab office decorated with health and safety signs. From the gaps in the fob-rack, five vehicles were missing.
“Here goes nothing,” Olivia said, opening the first van’s door and putting the key in the ignition. “Bingo. There’s some charge in the battery.” She spoke in a whisper, but it was still louder than the van’s quiet hum.
“How much?” Corrie asked.
“Forty-three miles,” Olivia said, pointing to the digital display. “I don’t know how accurate that is, but it’s more than enough to get us out of the city. How fast can these vans go, do you think?”
“Faster than a quad bike, not as fast as a police cruiser,” Corrie said. “But if we leave at dusk, then hide tonight, and set off again before dawn, they won’t find us. So we’ll leave tonight, one way or another. How far away is the generator?”
“Just a couple of blocks,” Pete said.
“Then I’ll get Jenny and the kids,” Corrie said. “You two see if the generator is intact. If it’s hard to move, we can give you a hand. If it’s a ruin, we’ll drive back to the cabin, or as close as we can get. A couple of us can walk from wherever we break down, get the police cruiser, drive it back to the van, and we can figure out the rest when we’re there.”
“Do you remember the way?” Olivia asked.
“No worries. A city is a lot harder to get lost in than the bush,” Corrie said. “And I’ll take Rufus. What do you say, sport? Will you lead me back to the kids?”
“That’s new,” Pete whispered, as he took in his old place of work.
“The zombie?” Olivia whispered back.
“The sign. That’s the worst bad-taste joke this planet’s ever heard.”
Across the wooden hoarding, made slightly illegible by blood, bullet holes, and the fire which had devastated the interior, had been painted: Claverton Construction. Rebuilding the World, One Dream At a Time.
“Really?” Olivia asked. “Ironic, yes, but why is it in bad taste? No, explain later. That zombie’s not moving.”
The zombie lurked in front of the quarter-collapsed doors, leaning forward, head bowed, shoulders curled, one hand dangling low, the other just a stump, dripping dark gore onto the ashes around its shoeless feet. The zombie wore the luminous-lime and bedazzled-brown uniform of the burger ranch franchise near the airport. But for the undead fry-slinger to still be wearing the clothes, the woman couldn’t have gone home after the outbreak. Had she hidden in the restaurant for a week, living on par-cooked beef patties and increasingly stale buns? Pete hoped not. He hoped she’d come from much further away. Even New York, though that was impossibly far. Anywhere but a few blocks away from the place he’d eaten many lunches, and far too many dinners.
The doors, giant wooden gates, had been painted to blend with the hoarding, and were wide enough for construction vehicles to enter. They hung loose, sagging inward, their upper hinges broken. Only the lower set now kept them upright, and only a long chain, partially visible through the foot-wide gap where the gates should have met, held them closed.
“I can’t see any others,” Olivia whispered. “But she’s not moving. We’ll have to kill her. No shooting.”
“No shooting? No worries,” Pete said. He drew the bayonet while Olivia withdrew a crowbar from her pack.
“Ready?” she asked.
“Never,” he said. “But yeah, let’s take it down.”
Running in an instinctive half crouch, he dashed across the road, with Olivia two arm’s lengths away. The zombie heard them, jerking its head to the left, twisting as it rose from its slumped crouch. Its arms rose. Its fingers twitched. Its stump waved, spraying flecks of gore towards them as its feet shot forward, seeming to leave its knees behind. The zombie staggered, falling forwards more than walking, lurching on towards Pete.
He tried to ignore the unblinking eyes, the mud-matted brown hair, the flag tattoo that ran up above the collar and which was now missing half the stars where the skin had been ripped away. He knew her. And he knew the flag was covering another tattoo, inked in haste two years and two boyfriends ago.
He raised the bayonet, ready to plunge it into her eye just as she tumbled. Olivia straightened, the crowbar having smashed through the zombie’s knees, raising the tool above her head, and slamming it down, once, on the creature’s skull.
“I’ll never get used to this,” she said, exhaling hard.
“Yeah, me neither.”
Leaving the zombie where it had fallen, they squelched through the ash and rainwater puddles, squeezed under the chain, and entered the ruins.
All his happy memories were dashed when he saw what had become of the place he’d wasted so many busy, and far more idle, hours with Olivia. The construction crew had torn out most of that with which he’d been familiar, and the fire had ruined what remained.
“What was it Mrs Mathers used to say about regret?” he asked.
“Which time?” Olivia asked, heading to the shipping container in the corner, now partially covered with fallen timbers. “She had a lot of sayings. Do you mean how you should keep your regrets for the grave, since they’ll be all you’ll have to keep you warm?”
“She said that?” Pete asked. “That’s pretty dark for her.”
“Yeah, she was a young goth in an old woman’s body,” Olivia said. “Is. She’s still alive.”
Pete grabbed a two-by-four and used it to lever clear a charred stack of four-by-eights. “I’ve been doing that, too. Assuming everyone’s dead. They’re not. You prove that.”
“We prove that,” she said.
The thin timbers of the collapsed hoarding, though charred, weren’t heavy. Dragging the last clear, Pete hauled the door open. “There are rags in here,” he said.
“Clothes,” Olivia said. “But really, they’re camouflage. It was Jenny’s idea,” she added, hauling the smoke-stained rags clear. From beneath, she pulled out a nylon zip-bag. “Here. Soap and detergent. We stashed it here. You see, we thought looters might come, but we didn’t think they’d search through our dirty laundry. We didn’t think they’d burn the place down, either. Who does that? Ah. Perfect.” She tore away the last of the blankets, revealing a small generator, sitting on a wooden pallet. “Looks okay, right?”
“It’s smaller than I was expecting,” Pete said. “But I guess we don’t need much power from it. How do we know if it still works?”
“By turning it on,” Olivia said. “But I don’t think we should do that here.”
“Agreed. Where’s the diesel?”
“Stashed over by the contractors’ portable john,” she said, “I’ll go fetch it if you get the hand-truck. It’s out in the lot, near the old delivery entrance.”
Ten minutes later, they had the small generator, and a far smaller container of diesel on the handcart, and next to the chained gate. Olivia tugged at the chain still holding the gate closed.
“We hung the key on that nail,” she said, pointing to an empty nail embedded in a pole close to the gate.
It took longer to find than it had to retrieve the handcart, diesel, and generator. Olivia paused before putting it into the lock.
“What is it?” Pete asked.
“I’m now worried the entire gate will collapse if I undo the chain,” she said. “Maybe push the generator back a—”
She stopped speaking, then raised a warning hand.
Outside, on the street, the high-pitched burr grew in volume, resolving into an approaching engine that came to a dead stop outside.
Pete hadn’t moved
, and Olivia hadn’t lowered her hand. Both remained frozen, looking out through the charred gaps in the fence.
A dirt bike had halted outside. The rider was alone and dressed like a cop. In his hands was a distinctly illegal machine pistol. But he didn’t have it raised. Slowly, the cop walked along the road, towards the charred ruins, though not towards the gate. The cop paused a few metres from the dead zombie, looked down, then up, around, turning slowly until his back was to the gate.
Olivia reached for her shotgun.
Pete shook his head, and held out his rifle while, with his free hand, he unbuttoned his holster.
Olivia frowned.
Pete nodded frantically, and mouthed, “Trust me.”
Olivia took the rifle.
Pete drew the pistol he’d taken from the assassin in the Australian diner. From the pouch intended for a spare magazine, he withdrew the assassin’s suppressor.
Olivia nodded, her jaw tightening as she understood. Slowly, not moving anything but her arms, she raised the rifle, aiming it as much at the wooden gate as the cop outside. As quietly as he could, Pete slowly screwed the suppressor onto the pistol.
Outside, the police officer was walking a curving arc, a few metres from the dead zombie. Pete understood why just as the cop froze and bent down. The man had been looking for recent footprints among the ash and mud, and he’d found them. He turned, this time half-raising the machine pistol as he looked at the gate.
Pete raised his arm, but couldn’t get a clear shot, not from where he stood. He was too far from the gate. Too far from the gaps in the wood. But if he moved, he’d certainly make some noise.
A sharp squawk came from the bike: the cop’s walkie-talkie. The officer turned towards it, and Pete stepped forward. Beneath his feet, wood creaked and charcoaled timber cracked. The cop turned as Pete pushed the gun-barrel forward, between two of the warped timbers. The cop must have seen Pete because he began raising his machine pistol, but Pete fired first. Six shots into chest and arms and face as the cop fell.
Olivia was already undoing the chain. Rifle raised, she ran onto the street.
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