With Trina out cold between us, I drove. I turned toward Georgia. There were two reasons. Gem had said Miami was a mess, and it was also a dead end. Without a boat you couldn’t get anywhere from south Florida – but I suppose hiding out in the Everglades wasn’t the worst of ideas. Who knows? Maybe the Seminole tribe had some ideas of how to deal with this crap.
The Center for Disease Control was on Clifton Road in Atlanta, and I knew exactly how to get there, even without the GPS. Plus, it was my stomping grounds, and the location of my house seemed like a benefit right about now.
Gem had been right about fire. The air was thick with smoke and the horizon glowed with the light of several of them burning all around us. Perhaps some people were trying to dispatch the zombies by burning down the buildings that contained them. I knew we needed more firepower to deal with this. At least I did. Gem’s gun was perfection.
“We need to get off at one of the downtown exits and hit a pawn shop,” I said. We’ll find some guns there, I’d imagine.”
“You really should think bigger,” Gem said, smiling at me. I couldn’t help but return it.
“Bigger?”
“Police station. Evidence locker. Big city. Lots of confiscated automatic weapons in evidence lockers.”
“What have you been up to since I last saw you?” I asked.
“This and that,” she said. “I’ve got some friends on the force, and the best guns and the best weed comes from the evidence lockers.”
“So we’re kind of counting on this epidemic having taken out these police stations so we can get in and get the weapons, right?”
Gem shrugged. “You should have seen Miami, Flex. I’m lucky to be here now. Uncle Rogelio was gone – gone. I should have killed him – I really should have, I loved that bastard, and I couldn’t. I had stayed overnight at his place, and when I woke up in the morning, he . . . it was . . .”
I put a hand over hers. “Later, Gem. You don’t need to go over it now. Let’s worry about staying alive first.”
We decided to stay on the semi-deserted side roads as much as possible, which wasn’t that difficult from Gainesville. I75, the main highway through Florida, was packed to the gills – all four lanes. I wasn’t keen on stopping the car at all, much less sitting in traffic. And I knew I’d need gas a couple of times before reaching home again. We’d have to look for either somewhere entirely unaffected by the zombie problem – as best we could judge, or a place where the devastation was complete and everybody was already dead. We clearly preferred the former.
Either way, I had zero intention of sitting on the freeway for days on end, as if a Category 5 hurricane was bearing down on the state and every soul was leaving. The satellites were still orbiting around the planet Earth, and Gem had brought her GPS with her, so it got us quite effectively off the main grid and onto State Route 24 to State Route 26, eventually dumping us out onto US-19, where we would hit Tallahassee. And with 181,000 people, there might be a decent cache of lethal street weapons in the main downtown police station.
But again, we were counting on some easy way in and out, and if it proved to be a mess, we would not risk little Trina. We’d make do with the guns we had to get us to Atlanta. The CDC seemed like a logical place to start.
Dead Hunger: The Flex Sheridan Chronicle Page 8