DUSK 2
Clouds had formed in the sky and turned grey. Rain drops began to trickle one by one, but soon grew to a steady downpour. Such weather reduced visibility, but it was ideal for wandering outside in small numbers because most of the ghouls were inside due to an inherited instinctual urge to stay dry.
As Sam drove the jeep through the ruins of a shopping district, he kept alert not only for undead or wreckage that could block their path, but to make sure they weren’t followed. Sam did not want to give away the position of the other survivors, but he was more worried that an unseen enemy would know they went out of the way to store something. The spies would investigate, and that was the last thing Sam wanted.
People were willing to go through any lengths to get the cure. A sane person would want it to maintain security inside of his base, but this was an insane world filled with psychotic cultists, walking corpses, and God only knew whatever else. For all Sam knew, his people were the only sane ones left on the planet. The rest might be renegades who reveled in the carnage – the ability to commit any atrocity without any repercussions – and would go through any lengths to keep it alive. Surely people like that would want to destroy the cure for it represented an end to the chaos and death. No matter how little or how late.
No matter their motives, the cure could be used as a bargaining chip in a bad situation, but Sam did not want it to come to that. Good men – Sam’s men, had died to bring that cure back and he wasn’t going to let it slip away without a fight. It was best if no body knew about it for the time being.
To maintain this status, Sam’s orders were radio silence. Sam and Catherine were in a jeep, Helen and Jack were in the Mustang. Judging by the way they had been batting eyes with each other since they met, Sam figured the two kids would want a little time alone.
Sam turned off the road and onto an onramp to enter the highway.
“We’re lucky all of the highways aren’t jammed solid,” Sam said.
When the dead began to walk, there had been a lot of hustle to get out of the city, or get to family. Most of the blocked roads were in urban areas, where the zombie infestation had been the worst. There had been road crews who successfully cleared out congestion in the last days of society, but the lack of abandoned vehicles on the highways was more because the ghouls did not instinctively go there on foot. Because of this most people eventually made it where they wanted to go or were stopped and killed in business districts or neighborhoods.
“Yeah,” Catherine said.
Through most of the ride, she had silently gazed out of the window leaving Sam to drive and navigate. Catherine had a lot to think about. Ever since her husband died, she had taken the position of leader, which left no time for mourning. She had the lives of over a hundred people in her hands and she did not feel worthy of the job. Sam knew the feeling quite well. He’d often wished that the people never noticed him or cared about what he thought. He’d often wished some other schmoe would take the job, but he’d always pulled through.
Sam knew Catherine would make it too. She was a tough woman, who took after her husband.
Sam merged onto the highway, and accelerated to fifty-five miles an hour. The Mustang followed.
Sam did not spot another vehicle trailing behind, but he did not want to travel where a tail could hide. The highway was open enough that Sam could see for miles behind, yet not easily visible from most of the roads and surrounding developments.
Sam maintained his speed, though he could have driven ninety because he did not want to plow into any unexpected wreckage at the wrong end of a curve or top of a hill.
Both prudence and paranoia seemed wise.
“I can’t believe he’s dead,” Catherine said.
She was talking about her husband.
Since she had not had the time to mourn, she took the opportunity now while Sam was in charge. He was probably the only person to whom she could feel comfortable revealing her vulnerability.
Sam watched the road.
“He was one hell of a guy,” Sam said. “He’s saved my life a couple of times.”
“He always did see something in you,” Catherine said. “From the beginning he saw your potential.”
In truth, Sam did not see what he had ever done that nobody else could have. He wasn’t even that good at mediocrity. The mess on their last mission had been his. Six men had died because of him, but Sam kept his mouth shut because he did not want to sully the memory or the moment. In Catherine’s eyes Robert Thorn could have done no wrong and he spoke gospel.
“I don’t know how much longer I could have held myself together,” Catherine said.
“You’ve been doing a good job.”
“So I’ve heard.”
“Listen,” Sam said. “You’ve gotten these people through hell. They’re still in tact, and I still see hope when I look in their eyes. I couldn’t have done a better job.”
“I just don’t know what comes next.”
“We talk to the others and come up with something. We can’t return home for a while, but we might be able to evacuate to a more remote location.”
Sam was confident that nobody was following them but Jack and Helen, but he checked the rear view mirror anyway.
They were alone.
Catherine fell into her thoughts and stared out of the window again. Sam hoped she was up for the next step.
*
“Any idea where Sam’s taking us?” Helen asked.
The Mustang tailed Sam’s jeep from two car lengths back and one lane to the left. They were traveling at fifty-five miles an hour, but Helen looked like she wanted to drive twice that speed.
Jack fought his own urge to put his hand on the girl’s leg. He had felt like they were getting closer, but he didn’t want to jump the gun. Not now. She would think he was some sort of a ghoul, no better than the walking dead who took cover from the storm.
If anything favorable was going to happen, Jack was going to have to bide his time.
“Not a clue,” Jack responded.
“Have you ever been this way before?”
“Nope.”
Helen smiled.
“Jack, I’m sorry about…”
“We’ll get through it,” Jack said. “We’re a tough bunch. Besides, you’re one of us now. When the gates were attacked, you lost your home too.”
“Even though I never got a chance to see it,” Helen said. There was sorrow in her voice.
“You’ll get your chance,” Jack said.
Helen took her right hand off of the gear shift and brushed a strand of hair out of here eye. When she lowered her hand again, Helen missed the gear shift and let her palm settle on Jack’s knee.
“You make it sound so easy,” she said.
“I’m an optimist.”
Helen sighed.
“I hope you’re right,” she said.
Jack had no idea how hard this had to be for the girl. For eleven years she had not been around anyone she could trust. She had been robbed of her childhood, and lived among people she had longed to destroy. A friendly environment was going to be one hell of an adjustment, but jack knew Helen would manage. She was a strong girl, and Jack liked her all the more for it.
Given time, he knew he could get to more than liking her.
Jack glanced out of his window then looked ahead.
Rain poured all around the Mustang and bounced off of the windshield. In ten minutes the weather had progressed from cloudy to a drizzle, and was now a heavy downpour. The windshield wipers were set on high but the lights were turned off. They wanted to be invisible incase someone was watching.
Jack wondered if Helen or Sam could spot a tail through the wet curtain outside.
At least it kept the flesh eaters inside.
Helen cut the Mustang’s speed.
“They’re slowing down,” Helen said. “I think we’re getting off of the highway.”
As she predicted the Jeep took the next exit. Helen and Jack followed.
As the two cars rolled down the curved off ramp, Jack peered out of the window at an abandoned factory in the distance. At one time smoke had spewed out of the spout, like an eruption of a metallic volcano. Now it lay dormant in the wake of years of neglect.
The highway they approached was sparsely populated by the ruins small businesses. On one side of the street there was a single shop, a hundred yards down the road on the other side, there was a row of three. There were auto body shops, motor repair shops, an adult book store, two liquor stores, and a gas station in sight. The gas station had been ransacked. The windows were shattered and there was an overturned car not far from the pumps. The rest of the shops were more or less in tact.
There were one or two cars parked in a few of the lots. Most of their windows had been shattered, and it was a safe assumption that their gas tanks had been sucked dry. Aside from the dead vehicles, the streets were deserted.
The jeep and Mustang rolled down the street at a safe forty-five miles an hour and the rain still poured.
They rolled along the abandoned highway for ten more minutes, then Sam took a left turn and Helen followed.
The back road they turned on to was void of businesses for as far as Jack could see, which was not far because of the density of the trees on both sides, and the curves. Every so often they would run through an intersection.
After a while, the trees were replaced by farm land. They passed the ruins of a produce stand, and a flower shop. After that, there were more trees.
Five minutes later, they passed the ruins of a church. The doors and windows had all been boarded up, so the stained glass windows were invisible from the outside world. Because there was no longer a groundskeeper, the grass had grown out of control. Behind the church, tombstones were still visible through the brush.
A chill crawled up Jack’s spine and he shuddered.
They passed the graveyard, and five minutes later, Sam made a right turn on to another back road. They turned left at the first intersection, which led into a neighborhood. The lawns were each an eighth of an acre and suffered from twenty years of neglect. Most of the two story houses were still standing, but Jack did not want to step on any of the wooden porches. The paint had weathered off of the white picket fences, and may of the mail boxes had collapsed.
Sam moved halfway down the main street and parked the jeep in front of one of the lawns. Helen pulled beside him.
“Roll down your window,” Helen instructed Jack.
As Jack lowered his window, Sam did the same.
“Pull into the driveway,” Sam said.
Jack didn’t like this.
As Helen pulled on to the crumbling pavement of the two car driveway, Jack rolled up his window.
“I don’t like this. There could be as many as five zombies in every house,” Jack said.
“If they’d noticed us, they’d be outside by now,” Helen said. “Relax, this is the last place anyone will search.”
When she was half way in the driveway, Helen stopped the car, shifted into park, and cut the engine.
When they got out of the car, Sam and Catherine were already standing in the lawn. The blonde woman’s hair was already matted to her skull and jacket, and was dripping. After seeing Jack and Helen get out of the car, she looked back to the other houses.
Sam made his way over to the Mustang. He looked to his left and right, making sure none of the doors swung opened and that no mutilated bodies emerged from any of the opened doorways.
Catherine backed towards them, and turned around when she was five steps away, still wearily looking over her shoulder. The woman wasn’t used to being out in the open, and Jack wondered why they didn’t just take Frank. He’d been on countless missions with both Sam and Jack.
Sam walked in front of the Mustang and tried to open the garage door from the outside. The door was locked from the outside.
“Okay,” Sam said, “we’re going to need stealth if we’re going to pull this off.”
He pointed at Jack.
“You’re coming inside with me. Helen, Catherine, keep and eye on the other houses. If you see any sign of trouble, I want you to have those vehicles moving. If there’s anything major, honk you horns, and we’ll abort but don’t get trapped.”
Both cars were still running incase they needed to make a quick getaway.
The other three nodded, and Sam patted Jack’s shoulder. He followed his superior to the front door, and Helen and Catherine stood outside watching.
All of the front windows were broken and the door was slightly ajar. The house had been hit long ago by either raiders or the undead.
When the door swung open, Sam turned to Jack and said, “if we see anything we club ‘em quietly. I don’t want to wake the neighbors. Got it?”
“Yes sir,” Jack said.
The interior of the house was dark, and most of the paint had faded into an unsanitary looking yellow. In places, blood streaked the walls as if one of the undead had been marking it’s territory with its wounds. Jack sometimes wondered what they did behind closed doors. Did they sleep? Did they wander around aimlessly? Did they try to accomplish tasks they would have done in their daily lives?
Sam stepped through the threshold, and moved across the living room, with his rifle aimed inside. He looked around, then waved his hand, motioning for Jack to step inside.
Jack raised his rifle, and followed his superior inside.
“Stay frosty,” Sam said in a low voice. “There might be someone home.”
Sam moved through another doorway and entered the runs of a kitchen. From the looks of it, someone was getting ready to cook dinner before they were attacked. Among a clutter of pots and pans on the counter and floor, twenty-two year old pasta was scattered about. In the corner of the room, the skeletal remains of a corpse lay in a fetal position, clutching a knife. It’s final expression of terror forever hidden and screams eternally silent when the head had been torn away from the body.
Flies still buzzed around the corpse, and the smell assaulted Jack’s senses, but it did not overwhelm him. The smell of death saturated every thing in Jack’s world, and was hardly notable. Such was the way of the world.
“Come on,” Sam said.
Jack followed him into the next room.
Once through the threshold, Sam walked past a washer and dryer. There were no dead bodies and the room was relatively clean. When Sam reached the door, he tried the handle.
“It’s locked,” Sam said, “keep an eye on the door.”
*
After watching the two men walk into the house, Catherine disregarded common sense which told her to sit in the jeep, and made her way to the other car where Helen stood watch.
With her rifle hanging over her shoulder the girl calmly watched the other houses, letting her eyes wander from door to door and back, making sure there was no movement. She had been in this type of situation before, and knew exactly what to expect. Helen did not seem scared at all, but ready for anything that might come.
Before her home had been attacked, Catherine had not done anything like this since the dead first started to walk. She had been fourteen at the time, and still very much a child.
The very night before the first reports of the flesh eaters, Catherine had snuck out of the house to meet with Mark Conner. He was sixteen, and had a car. Catherine had been looking forward to a night of just riding around the town, able to get away from the house and go anywhere her ride would go. True freedom.
At eleven-thirty, Catherine had climbed through her bedroom window, and met Mike at the end of the street so her parents wouldn’t see. She giggled as she got into the car, and they went to see a movie. Catherine could not remember which one. After the movie ended, they ate dinner at one of those drive through restaurants, and after that, Catherine had lost her virginity.
Catherine had returned home at three in the morning only to find her parents waiting in her bedroom for her. After a shouting match which lasted well over an hour, Catherine was grounded. She was only allowed to leave the house for school.
Less than three days later her parents were dead.
Catherine had stayed alive by hiding upstairs, under the bed. For the most part the zombies had stayed out of the house, and when her family had been killed, there was nothing left to return from the other side of death, so she was truly alone in the house. Every once in a while, during the day, she would hear movement downstairs, but she did not dare to leave her hiding place without the cover of darkness, when the zombies were inside and she was not in plain sight.
During the weeks she spent in hiding, Catherine hardly ate and only left her bedroom to use the bathroom where she did not run the water. Several times she had lost hope and was tempted to walk down stair and open the door to the inevitable, but she never did.
She never opened the door until she heard gunshots outside.
Outside, a not quite military unit was battling the hordes of what had once been her friends and neighbors, but now wanted Catherine for lunch. The group was armed with military rifles, but only some of them wore fatigues. Some were dressed in street clothes, and there was a black man wearing a police uniform, who she would later know as Sam.
Robert was the one leading the attack, and Catherine had been surprised to learn that he was not a member of the National Guard, Army, or police, but a former journalist. Most of his troops had only been soldiers since the dead began walking and they were looking to recruit anyone who would join them.
Robert and Sam had recently joined the band of survivors when the attack commenced, but the other troops looked up to them with a respect which was damn close to reverence. The people were looking for leadership and that’s just what Rob and Sam had, whether they thought so or not.
One of the other members of the assault, who had been a soldier for four years previous and had seen his share or action before most of the other troops had fired a gun for the first time. His name was Ken Smith, and a few years later his wife would give birth to a boy named Jack.
As soon as Catherine had seen the convoy, she ran outside and started shouting. Most of the ghouls outside had been gunned down, and the ones remaining were more attracted to the convoy moving through the street than the girl outside.
When the convoy noticed her, two men ran to her while others gave them cover fire. One of the men shouldered his rifle and carried Catherine to the vehicles while the other soldier watched his back.
Most of the troops who had been involved in Catherine’s rescue were long dead, and now her husband was among them. She decided not to dwell on it any longer.
“Hi,” Catherine said. “You don’t mind if I stand over here do you?”
“No,” the girl said. “Just keep your eyes peeled. If there’s trouble you should have enough time to get back to your jeep.”
Helen didn’t even look at her. The girl was absorbed in her surroundings and ready to move when she had to.
“This kind of reminds me of my old neighborhood,” Catherine said. “Mine wasn’t quite as nice though.”
“I’ve never really been in an area like this. We’ve either stayed in urban or unpopulated areas.”
“I haven’t been in a neighborhood like this in over twenty years.”
“Before they retreated to the mountains, my parents lived in a neighborhood like this. They used to show me pictures and tell me stories, but it was so long ago,” Helen took a deep breath. “I don’t have any of the pictures any more.” She did not look like she wanted to talk any more. “We’d better keep our eyes opened.”
“Hey,” Catherine shouldered her rifle and put a hand on Helen’s shoulder. “we’ve all lost someone.”
The garage door opened, and Catherine jumped and aimed her rifle. Helen remained calm.
“Easy there!” Sam said.
“Sorry,” Catherine said.
“Can you pull the Jeep next to the driveway?” Sam asked.
Catherine ran back to the jeep and eased it into the driveway as Sam instructed. As she did, Helen drove the Mustang into the garage, and Jack watched the streets.
Sam closed the garage door and walked to the driver’s side of the jeep. He leaned in and said, “I’ll drive from here.”
Catherine climbed over to the passenger’s side, and as Sam got in, Jack and Helen jumped in the back.