I considered telling them to watch out for zombies, but the rising sun showed nothing around. Mountains were off in the distance, but the land around the highway was still fairly flat, with green shrubbery dotting it. Other than sparse vegetation, there was nothing.
We had traveled through a small town about an hour before, but it looked just as deserted as this. Zombies tended to only be a problem when there was an actual population, not a forgotten stretch of highway.
“Oh, I see. ” Blue nodded. “We’re out of gas. ”
“What do you mean we’re out of gas?” I glared at Lazlo.
“Oh,” Lazlo said as understanding hit him. “I didn’t even notice. ”
“You didn’t notice?” I shouted incredulously, but he looked more exasperated than ashamed. “You’re a fricking idiot!”
I threw open the door and got out. Sitting there pissed me off too much, so I paced next to the car. My mind raced. Losing the vehicle would slow us down so much, and we’d be way more exposed to injury or death. All because Lazlo didn’t think to pay attention to the damn gas gauge.
“Maybe we can figure something out. ” Blue got out of the car. He ran a hand through his sandy hair and looked around.
“Remy. ” Lazlo had gotten out and walked around the front of the SUV. Based on his stupid sad expression, I suspected he got out to calm me down. “I’m sorry. I just didn’t think about it. ”
“That’s right!” I reeled on him. “You never think! I have no idea how you ever survived this long!”
“Look, I’m sorry!” Lazlo looked hurt, but I didn’t care. “I haven’t driven a car in like a year, and the little red gas gauge light never went off. ”
“Seriously?” I gaped at him. “God, Lazlo! I don’t care if you’d never driven a car ever! You should be able to tell when we’re running out of gas!”
“I’m an idiot! I screwed up!” Lazlo yelled back. “What do you want me to do about it?”
“I want you to-” I didn’t know what I wanted but I was so pissed, I couldn’t stand it. I pushed him, hard. He’d been standing close to the SUV, and he slammed back into it.
“Remy!” Blue took a step towards us.
I wanted to punch Lazlo, or punch anything really, but I just shook my head and took a step back.
“Maybe we should all calm down,” Lia said, sliding out of the car, but she really just meant me, since everyone else was irritatingly calm. “We can all eat and stretch our legs. ”
“Stretch our legs?” I scoffed. “We’re gonna be walking for the next thousand miles!”
“Remy, we’ll find another town. ” Blue looked at me, as if he could stare me into being reasonable. “We’ll figure something out. It’s not that bad. ”
“I am really sorry,” Lazlo repeated, rubbing his shoulder. I had pushed him back into the car pretty hard, but he deserved it.
I nodded but didn’t say anything. I was too deflated to argue anymore, and it wouldn’t make the situation any better. Nothing I did seemed to make anything better.
Lia went around to the back of the SUV to see if she could find something to make for breakfast, and Lazlo went to help her. Ripley jumped out and stood in the middle of the road, sniffing the air and looking confused.
For breakfast we had SPAM and olives because they were heavier to carry, and we needed to lighten our loads. Things like beef jerky traveled easier. I didn’t eat much of anything, settling for warm water and pacing. Lia made everyone say grace before they ate, but I mumbled through it
Afterwards, I climbed in the back of the SUV and went through our stuff. Harlow helped sift through her clothes, and I picked out the bare essentials everyone could carry. This meant I’d have to leave behind the shotgun I’d stolen from Korech.
I hated leaving behind weapons, but we didn’t have any bullets for it, and we might never find any. We only had two guns, so I gave the handgun to Blue and kept the semi-automatic for myself.
With our bags packed as concisely as possible, I grudgingly said goodbye to the vehicle. We started down the road, going north. I downsized back to my overflowing messenger bag with the gun hooked to it, and everyone else had done roughly the same.
Harlow’s mood had strangely lightened since we started the long trek down the highway, and she and Lia had a banter that I found mildly irritating. They talked cheerfully about everything they saw on the side of the road and plunged into an intense game of “I Spy. ”
“I spy with my little eye…. ” Lia chewed her lip, thinking of something good, which would inevitably be a tree or a stone or some other piece of vegetation, since there had been nothing of interest to look at for miles. “Something… green. ”
“Um. . . ” Harlow looked around, and I’m not sure if she was pretending to debate to build suspense, or she was actually that clueless.
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“It’s a bush. ” Lazlo broke his silence. He’d shut up since I pushed him earlier, but the game had gotten to be too much for him. “It’s always a bush. ”
I suspected Blue had tolerated their game because he had more patience than the rest of us, and I didn’t say anything because it would be more of a headache arguing with them.
“But there’s different bushes,” Harlow said indignantly, glaring at Lazlo, but Lia lowered her head. “She was talking about a specific one. ”
“Ooh, the intensity of it all!” Lazlo waved his hands in mock excitement. “We may never know the exact bush Lia saw on our 300 mile walk!”
“Well, what else are we supposed to do?” Harlow snapped. “And it’s your fault we’re all out here walking anyway!”
“Why don’t you try playing another game?” Blue suggested before Harlow and Lazlo got into it more.
“When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things,” Vega said. She looked straight ahead, talking to no one in particular.
All of Harlow and Lia’s musings had been interspliced with random declarations from Vega. She spoke rarely, but when she did, it was almost entirely in Bible verse. The verses she said had little connection with the conversation at hand, but none of us chose to address that.
While back at Korech’s ranch, I had felt some kind of kindred spirit with Vega, but the more time I spent with her, the more I found her kind of off-putting.
Lia could be annoying in her own right, since she was older than me but behaved more like Harlow, but Vega was just… weird. She held her head high, always looking ahead, reminding me of the old films I’d seen of Nazi’s marching.
“So… was that your suggestion for a game?” Lazlo asked Vega, giving her a sidelong glance.
“It means that we have a task at hand, and we need to work to achieve it before we can play,” Vega replied, her voice emotionless.
Lazlo exchanged a look with me, but I just shrugged. What did you say to that?
“We don’t have a task at hand,” Harlow scowled. “We’re just walking. We can walk and talk at the same time. ”
Vega didn’t respond to her, so nobody said anything. Harlow tried to introduce another game, but Vega had shamed Lia, and she wouldn’t play.
After a while, Harlow started to slow down. She lagged the entire time, with her and Lia following more to the back, but she was falling farther and farther behind.
“I’m tired!” Harlow had to shout to be heard since Vega and I were so far ahead of her. “Can’t we like take a break or something?”
“Just a little bit longer,” I said.
The sun was right above us, so it had to be close to noon, but if I were on my own, I’d walk without stopping at all. It was incredibly frustrating never knowing what time it was, and I wanted to make it somewhere “safe” by sundown.
“But I’m hungry. And I have to pee,” Harlow persisted.
I turned to face her and walked backwards, meaning to encourage her to keep moving. She ha
d already taken her messenger bag from her shoulder, dragging it behind her.
“Fine,” I sighed. “Let’s do a quick lunch. ”
“Thank you!” Harlow immediately plopped onto the road.
Vega turned to me, and without any tone to indicate her approval or disapproval, she said, “The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and keep it. ”
“Okay. ” I matched her blank tone. “We are going to have lunch now. So… we can work better. ” I didn’t know what she was trying to get at, and I didn’t really want to offend her.
“Okay,” Vega nodded. “I’m going to go to the bathroom. ”
“All right. Excellent. ”
I watched her as she walked off the road to do her business behind a few bushes, purposely giving a wide berth to the area where Ripley had lay down to nap. Ripley had been following us closely, but spent most of the time walking in the grass. I guessed that was easier on her feet than the hot asphalt.
“Are you eating, Remy?” Lia asked.
She had already squatted down on the road to go through her bag, next to where Harlow sat. Blue and Lazlo wandered back over to them, and Blue slipped off his oversized backpack. He stretched and rolled his shoulders, and I was eager to ditch my bag and do the same. My shoulder and back were killing me.
“Maybe just a beef jerky,” I said.
My stomach complained, wanting more food, but it was hard to walk on a full stomach. Besides that, we were dividing the food among six people. I needed to conserve as much as possible.
I dropped my bag onto the road with a thud and pulled out warm bottled water. Lazlo tossed me a beef jerky when I got closer to where they sat in a circle, but I didn’t sit down myself. It would just be harder to get up. My feet throbbed, and my legs ached, but I knew we had to keep pushing through it.
“So what’s up with her?” I asked Lia, nodding in Vega’s direction, where she had finished peeing and moved on to praying.
“That’s just how she is,” Lia shrugged. “She was always different, even for us. ” She opened a can of tuna with a can opener Blue had smartly taken, and gave it to Harlow.
“I’m so glad she decided to come with us,” Harlow muttered, eating the tuna out of the can with her fingers. Sanitation wasn’t much of an option anymore.
When Vega came back towards us, Lia excused herself to go to the bathroom. Lazlo sat on his messenger bag, using it as a chair. Taking a big bite of his beef jerky, he eyed up Vega.
“You hungry?” Blue asked her, nodding at the food Lia had taken out.
“I won’t eat until sun down,” Vega said, like that meant anything. “But I will take some water. ” Blue handed her a bottle, and she took a long drink.
“So… Vega,” Lazlo looked at up at her, forcing a friendly smile and squinting in the sunlight. “That’s a fun name. Were you named after Vegas?”
“Vega means ‘light. ’” She stared at him so hard, I half-expected him to burst into flames. “‘I am the light, the truth, and the way. ’”
Lazlo rubbed the back of his neck, growing uncomfortable, and even Blue looked away. Harlow alone remained unabashed and stared up at Vega curiously.
“So… you’re saying that you’re the Messiah?” Harlow asked, voicing the conclusion we had all just come to.
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“Maybe we should get going,” I interrupted before Vega could answer. I didn’t want to know what she did or didn’t believe. Indulging people in their delusions never helped things.
“‘For as the lightning comes from the east and flashes to the west, so also will the coming of the Son of Man be,’” Vega said, turning her attention down to Harlow.
“I don’t know what that means,” Harlow replied, still bravely meeting Vega’s gaze. “You say things all the time, and I don’t know what any of it means. ”
“It is the end of days,” Vega said.
“Well, obviously,” Lazlo laughed dryly, but he stopped short when Vega glared at him.
“‘I looked, and there before me was a pale horse! Its rider was named Death, and Hades was following close behind him. They were given power over a fourth of the earth to kill by sword, famine and plague, and by the wild beasts of the earth. ’” Vega wasn’t speaking to us so much as preaching by then.
“Everything you see around us, that is the fourth horseman. ” Vega gestured broadly to the barren landscape, knowing somewhere out there were legions of zombies.
“So what happens next?” Harlow asked, and I couldn’t tell if she believed anything Vega was saying, or if she was just asking questions to kill time.
“‘There was a great earthquake. The sun turned black like sackcloth made of goat hair, the whole moon turned blood red, and the stars in the sky fell to earth,” Vega continued.
“We need to go,” I said, more forcefully than I had before. “We need to get somewhere before sundown. So, let’s pack up and get out of here. ”
“But I’m still tired!” Harlow protested, and that’s probably why she had been engaging Vega. The longer they talked, the longer she went without walking.
“What’s going on?” Lia asked, returning from her bathroom break.
“We’re leaving. ”
I tossed my beef jerky wrapper on the side of the road, since littering didn’t seem like that much of a problem when most of the world’s population was dead. I slung my bag over my shoulder again, carefully wedging the gun behind me.
“Can’t we wait just a little bit longer?” Harlow begged as everyone packed up
“Five more minutes won’t make your feet feel better,” I said. “And I told you to stop wearing those stupid shoes. ” I nodded down to her oversized combat boots.
“They protect my feet. ” Harlow admired them lovingly.
“By destroying them?” I scoffed
“Come on. ” Lazlo held his hand out to her. He had already gotten to his feet and put his bag over his shoulder. “I’ll give you a piggy back ride, since it’s my fault we’re walking anyway. ”
Harlow looked at his hand, almost too excited to trust him, then tentatively, she put her hand in his and let him help her up.
I watched skeptically as he hoisted her onto his back. Lazlo was muscular, but he wasn’t a big guy. Admittedly, Harlow couldn’t weigh more than a hundred pounds, if that.
With a surprising level of ease, he lifted her onto his back, and she wrapped her arms around his neck. I hadn’t seen her look quite that happy ever before, and I doubted I would again.
Harlow was too content to say anything, so she lapsed into silence as we walked. Ripley stayed behind, napping in the brush, but she’d catch up eventually. She always did.
I was afraid that Vega would continue with her sermon, so I tried to make small talk. Unfortunately, I wasn’t very good at it, but Lia picked up my slack. She talked amicably with Blue and Lazlo about everything under the sun, and that was okay with me.
The flat landscape gave way to soft hills, and the desert was getting increasingly greener. It was still early in the afternoon when we found a small brown A-frame sitting right off the road. We could see a few more houses in the distance, meaning that we were probably getting close to a town.
I didn’t really want to camp here, since it was still too early to stop for the day, but it might have supplies we could use. We didn’t know what was inside, so I suggested that Lazlo and the girls wait outside while Blue and I went inside to raid the place.
Harlow didn’t care what we did as long as she didn’t have to walk anymore, and she plopped on the front lawn the instant we stopped. Vega went a few feet away to kneel and pray, while Lazlo and Lia stayed close by the house, keeping an eye out for roving zombies.
The smell hit me the instant I pushed open the front door. The stench inside the house had become too familiar – rotting food and death. Blood splattered the walls, and a human arm lay on the floor in
the front room. The arm looked like it had been there a while, and I couldn’t hear any zombie groans.
I went into the house further, and that’s when things got weird.
At first, the place seemed trashed in the way everything did after zombies tore through it. But then I got the impression it was more than random ransacking. In the kitchen, all the cupboards had been opened, so only perishables were left.
A raccoon lay dead under the table, but it hadn’t been mauled by zombies. It’d taken a bullet to the head, and not that long ago, based on the total lack of maggots.
“People were here,” Blue said.
“Pretty recently too,” I nodded.
“That’s a good thing… right?”
“I don’t know,” I shrugged. I looked out the window, where Lia laughed at something and Harlow plucked at a flower in the overgrown lawn. “This place has been gutted, though. We should move on. ”
“We’re not that far from a town anyway,” Blue said. He moved towards the door, but I stayed put, surveying the carnage. “What?”
“Nothing,” I lied.
Something about the state of the house gave me a bad vibe, but I couldn’t place it. Zombies had trashed it, and other survivors had gotten supplies. That wasn’t any different from what we did.
They had killed a raccoon, but that wasn’t that big of a deal. It’s not what I would’ve done, but I didn’t always make the best decisions.
“We might be getting close to the quarantine. ” Blue tried to alleviate my anxiety. “Maybe soldiers were here. ”
“Maybe,” I said, but I didn’t think so, at least not the part about soldiers doing this. “Come on. Let’s go. ”
We went to the front door, and I stopped short. When we had come in, we hadn’t looked at the back of the door, but I did now. Someone had scrawled Helter Skelter across it, using thick, poisonous zombie blood as ink.
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A chill ran down my spine. I didn’t understand the message, but someone thought it was a good idea to play with infected blood. That was never good.
“What the hell does that mean?” I asked.
“It’s a song by the Beatles. ” Blue paled. “And in the Charles Manson murders, after they brutally murdered people, they wrote ‘Helter Skelter’ on the refrigerator in blood. ”
“Somebody’s emulating Charles Manson?” I asked as the knot tightened in my stomach.
“No,” Blue said unconvincingly. “They probably did it as a joke. ”
“Real funny. ”
Blue didn’t want to stand around and talk about it anymore, and I followed him outside. Lazlo asked how it went, and I told him the house was empty. Blue and I failed to mention the note on the door or anything about people being here already. There was no point in freaking them out.
Lazlo stopped carrying Harlow, but she didn’t seem to mind. The clustering houses of a town was up ahead, and she perked up at the sight of them. Her pace quickened so much, I had to tell her to slow down. I didn’t want anybody in front of me, not when I didn’t know what lie ahead.
Before we even reached the city limits, we could see it was in shambles. Garbage was everywhere, the lighter things blowing around in the wind. It smelled rank, like rotten banana peels and sour milk.