She scanned the woods. Route 625 ran through dense woods but the last six months without road crews cutting back the weeds had resulted in a riot of growth. Weeds, creeper vines, kudzu, and tall grasses grew all the way to the edge of the blacktop, and sprouted up in every crack. If things didn’t turn around then this road would vanish completely in ten years. Mother Nature was a hungry and relentless bitch, she knew. Then she wondered if that would be a good thing or bad. Ever since the fucking brain trust in the military dropped all those nukes, which in turned hit everything with electromagnetic pulses, none of the vehicles worked. The fleet of busses she’d taken out of Stebbins were dead. One here, and the others God knew where. They’d been separated during a bad, bad night long ago. A storm raged throughout this part of the state, and the bombs—nuclear and fuel-air had chased tens of thousands of people into their path. The drivers of the other busses had panicked as rivers of people and zombies swept toward them. Some of them took side roads, some just disappeared…and then all the engines died as the EMPs played their dirty backstabbing trick.
The zombies were gone now and the road was clear. The woods were still, too. If it wasn’t for all the rotting corpses it would be a pretty day in the country, she thought. Blue sky, sunshine, a few puffy white clouds.
Appomattox was twenty miles from here. She could make it in less than six hours. Dez was leaned down to rawhide and whipcord. She could haul ass and even dumb as he was, Biel could defend a closed bus for a day. There were smart kids on that bus, and they’d learned how to be quiet. Could she risk leaving them for half a day? That had been her plan, to button up the bus and head out alone, find some buff young guardsmen and get them to come back with lots of balls and bullets to rescue the kids and save the day.
“Shit,” she said.
Biel came and stood next to her. “What do we do now?”
Dez sighed. It was noon or a little after. Lots of daylight left. She could make it to the rescue station long before dark.
But why bother?
Why frigging bother?
“Dez…?” prodded Biel.
She wanted to slap him. Not because he was speaking out of turn—he wasn’t, it was a reasonable question—but because it might make her feel better.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“We have to do something.”
“Let me think,” she said quietly.
But before she could come up with anything resembling a plan there was a sound off to her left. She and Biel turned. It was there, deep in the woods, still hidden by the tall weeds.
Even unseen, though, they knew what it was. They heard it. The crashing of heavy bodies moving clumsily through the overgrown foliage, and the moans.
Those terrible moans, lifted from a dozen dead throats.
No…more than that.
Dozens.
Or…hundreds.
Dez closed her eyes. If the kids weren’t in the bus, if they didn’t need her, there were ways to shut off those sounds. Rush into them and tear down as many as she could before there was nothing left of her. Or ride a bullet into the big black.
There were always doorways out.
Staying alive had fewer options. Even when there was no real hope left.
Dez Fox opened her eyes, turned, and gave Biel a shove toward the bus. “Go,” she said. He did. She followed.
And the dead came.
~5~
Rachael Elle
Night.
Rachael found a sheltered spot with good concealment that also allowed her good lines of sight and escape. She strung trip wires, caught and cleaned a young rabbit, found water from a stream, and built a fire. The woods were filled with sounds, which she took as a good sign. Silence meant danger.
But night meant waiting. Night meant another day away from Brett during which something could have happened, another day their group could have been attacked, another night that the world would fall further into chaos. The longer this trip took, the more she was beginning to lose hope, though she wouldn’t voice it to herself out loud. She hadn’t seen any signs of survivors after leaving the hospital, and now she was somewhere in the middle of Nowhere, Virginia, though exactly how far through the state she wasn’t sure. The map she’d found in a rest stop was confusing to read, and she was used to navsystems and Google maps. Reading old-fashioned paper maps was never a skill she’d thought she’d need to learn.
She would keep following 95 all the way to North Carolina, and then she’d turn back, find a different route home, and try to see whom she could find.
Alone during the long hours of darkness, trying to keep her mind from pulling her down into negativity, her thoughts drifted to the past. To her family.
“We’re… your aunt and I….we’re headed south… North Carolina.”
That fractured message, distorted by failing phone signals, was the last thing Rachael had heard from her mom. Rachael had tried to call her the day the world went to hell, and after the third try had managed to get through. But the connection was bad and the call got dropped quickly.
Rachael had been left with a dead line and “I love you, Mom,” left on her lips. It had been six months since her phone battery had died. Everyone else had ditched their phones. They were useless now. Rachael hadn’t been able to give hers up. She kept holding onto the hope that they’d find somewhere with power, that the towers would work again. It was silly and pointless, but her phone was her lifeline in the world before, and here in the world after she wouldn’t leave it.
Rachael played with her iPhone absentmindedly, flipping it over between her hands as she stared into the small fire she’d built. The last birds dove through the air, reveling in the early spring. It was still just cold enough that she needed to wrap herself in the wool and fur cloak she’d found in one of the rooms in the Avengers Tower, and days of exhaustion from walking and uneasy sleep were adding up, weighing her lids. She needed to find somewhere to sleep; somewhere with doors that locked, but that sounded like it required more effort than she wanted to give that moment. So instead she closed her eyes, just for a moment, wishing she had a shot of espresso or a five-hour energy. She was going to make sure she grabbed those the next time she saw any.
She conjured images of her mother in her mind. The ache was immense and even all this time hadn’t dulled the pain. She tried not to cry in front of Brett or the others, but now…alone, out here where no one could see…the tears came in a flood. Sobs broke in her chest with the intensity of bare-knuckle punches. She caved forward with her face in her hands and wept for all that she had lost.
She missed the change in the woods. She did not hear the birds fall silent. Rachael was unaware of anything until the dead weight that slammed into her from behind and the pinch of teeth on her arm.
~6~
The Ranger and the Dog
The ranger left the dead behind and ran up the road, following the baying of his dog. Baskerville could sound a lot like a wolf when he wanted to. The hound was mostly silent in the heat of a fight, but when the killing was done he liked to tell the world. It was the dog’s only bad habit, but in a world of the savage dead and even more savage living, it was a habit that the ranger was trying very hard to break.
He climbed up the steep slope of the highway and plunged down the other side, but slowed to a quick walk within a hundred yards of the crest. What was left of Joey littered the center of the road. Baskerville could act like a puppy and sometimes like a clumsy goof, but not in combat. Like the ranger himself, there was a switch that doused all interior light and left only something dark and predatory. Something more savage than the dead. Not cruel, but thorough in its desire to destroy. In that way Baskerville was very much like both of his grandparents—a combat white shepherd and a fierce but strange Irish wolfhound. The shepherd—whose name had been Ghost—had walked through the valley of the shadow with the ranger on countless missions. Back when the ranger had been a captain in a covert special ops group called the Department of Mi
litary Sciences. The wolfhound, Banshee, had been bred by a group of women called Arklight, and they had bred some bizarre qualities into the dog. The pups of Ghost and Banshee had each been powerful and individual, and each of them had gone into combat, too. Baskerville was still young, but all of the intelligence, instinct and ferocity of his forebears was fully alive in him.
As alive as Joey was dead.
The ranger flicked a quick look at the corpse, noting the type of damage Baskerville had done, looking for what he called ‘recreational’ damage as opposed to wounds inflicted to win the fight. There was definitely some of that. Baskerville sometimes went too far, dismembering a kill even if it wasn’t food. It was something the ranger would have to work on, and for a couple of reasons. First and foremost, he wanted the dog to be a soldier and not a monster. And, second, he needed to trust the animal. He knew from dealing with his own personal damage and inner demons that the killer within needed to be kept on a leash.
Baskerville stood on the shoulder of the road, body pointed toward the woods, head turned to watch the ranger approach. The hound did not wag his tail or romp around. He stood like a statue, eyes fixed, mouth smeared with fresh blood.
“Where?” asked the ranger.
The dog turned and looked off into the forest and then back at the ranger.
“Find,” said the man. “My pace.”
The dog whuffed once, very softly. He always did that, a habit from his grandfather. Ghost had been able to understand a huge number of verbal commands and always seemed to answer with that whuff. A strange and wonderful animal, and Baskerville had all of his best qualities. And some of his grandmother’s more dangerous and enigmatic traits. A weird dog for a weird world, mused the ranger.
The dog began to move, but then the ranger said, “Wait.”
He knelt beside the animal, tore off a thick handful of grass and used it to wipe most of the blood away from the animal’s muzzle and fur. Baskerville endured it with all of the bad grace of a child getting chocolate wiped from his face. He even contrived to roll his eyes with exasperation.
“Stop it,” complained the ranger. “You want to scare that kid even more than she is?”
He finished and stood, then clicked his tongue once. Baskerville moved off immediately. The ranger looked up and down the road once more and then followed.
~7~
Rachael Elle
Rachael was stunned for a moment as she hit the ground hard, but she reacted as adrenaline surged, using her legs to push the Orc off, twisting her arm out of its teeth.
It struggled to its feet, but she was faster, rolling over her shoulder into a crouch, dragging her dagger and holding it ready. She lunged forward, swinging her arm down to try to drive the knife through the Orc’s skull, but her sharp metal blade bounced off, slicing through rotting skin but not penetrating the thick bone. Crying out in frustration as the Orc reached out for her with ragged nails, not phased by her attack, Rachael struggled to push it back, this time driving the dagger down hard through the softer bone at the top of the skull.
As it slumped to the ground so did she, hands shaking from adrenaline. Then she sat up, her hands running over her arm with feverish intensity to make sure that her leather bracer had held. The teeth marks were indented in the thick leather, but nothing broke through and she almost wept with relief.
But she couldn’t sit long. One Orc meant more were close behind. She’d learned early on that Orcs seemed to find each other, traveling in hordes, a wave of disease and death washing over the world.
Using her boot to shovel dirt over the fire, Rachael tugged her bags back over her shoulders then buckled her knives and swords back on. She took a moment to stare down at the Orc, the rotted skin peeling back from the mouth and forehead, unseeing eyes staring past her face into the unknown. It didn’t feel real. It still felt like a video game, like she was in a very realistic virtual reality, that when it got to be too much she could press start and go back to reality.
Her cellphone had fallen into the dirt and she picked it up gently, brushing the dust from the screen and tucking it into a pocket on her bag. One day she’d leave the phone behind. One day she’d give up her hope to return to the world before.
Today was not that day.
Back on the road, Rachael tugged her bag up over her shoulders, eyes casting around as she tried to find a sign for where she was, what direction to head in. Some of the signs on I95 had suffered significant damage, and she constantly had to compare her old paper map with fallen signs and old landmarks.
Rachael had driven this road a couple of times over the years, on family road trips or trips with her friends. Things looked so different from car windows, like a movie. Rachael passed a rest stop, a flicker of a memory from long ago, a kid from a different life peering out the dark car windows over her Gameboy. There was trash scattered around here now, fallen fences and abandoned cars. It looked so different, like something she recognized but also unrecognizable. Like that feeling you get in a dream when you know something but it’s not exact.
There were a handful of Orcs wandering around, and Rachael cleared them quickly, her sword a blur as it hissed through the air, bodies slumping to the ground.
Inside the rest stop there was nothing standing, though bodies of fallen dead scattered around in heaps. Stepping around them carefully, Rachael grabbed a few bags of chips and some candy from the store, tucking a few five-hour energies into her pack.
Turning to leave, she noticed something written on the wall of the information center. It was hard to see, though it looked like it had been purposely wiped off and distorted. Half of a map taped to the sign was ripped, a few pieces lying around the floor. But it looked like the start of a circle, or some sort of writing on the map. Maybe that’s where there were survivors? Could the information center be the place that someone had posted directions to a safe zone?
Squinting at the wall, the smudged out letters, she could make part of the words. Appoma- Ri-er Re- Stati-.
Picking up the few pieces of map papers she could find, Rachael pieced them together carefully on the table. Some of the crucial pieces were missing, but she could tell a general direction. Somewhere off the next exit there seemed to be something. She could see the edges of a circle drawn on the map, though what city or landmark they identified was lost. But maybe there would be more signs as she headed that way.
She pulled out her map and scoured it for anything that might contain the words written on the wall. The font was so small it was hard to read, and she pulled the map as close to her face as possible as she looked for anything, any hints at all.
Finally something caught her eyes. Appomattox River Rescue Station. That had to be it! It was in about the same place that the shredded map had indicated something. Copying as much of the information onto the new map as she could, she tucked that into a pouch at her waist, heading back onto the road and looking for a sign of an exit.
She wasn’t sure how long that information had been there. She had no proof that it was actually legitimate, but for now she had nothing else to go on. This was the first sign of possible life, first hint of a location of people, and she was going to take it and hope for the best.
Turning off the next exit, avoiding the pileups of cars and bodies cautiously, she turned her eyes to the horizon. There was, at least, a chance—a chance of survivors, a chance there would be someone out there.
She just hoped she wasn’t too late.
~8~
Dez Fox
It took half an hour for the swarm of dead to pass by. It felt like ten hours. Biel huddled down with the kids, both giving and taking comfort, while Dez crouched by the front of the bus and peered out through a peephole. Some of the dead came down the road from the direction of the rescue station. More soldiers, but also quite a few ordinary folk. Farmers and people dressed in whatever clothes they wore when they died. There was no uniformity to what the citizens wore either, nor was there any particular variety. In movies a
bout the end of the world there were usually people dressed as clowns, as nuns, as bakers, as convenience store clerks. Like that. Each different so that the filmmakers could make some kind of statement. Not here. These zombies were just people. Unique in that they had each been an individual with a life, a future, a past, an identity, but turned homogenous in death. They were all hungry, all torn, all ragged, all beginning to rot, all undead.
And all of them would have battered their way through the cracked windows of the old school bus if they knew what was inside. From the oldest to the youngest, the strongest to the weakest, they would become an attacking army. Only the rotting flesh of their own kind made them pass by without pausing, without noticing, without knowing.
These thoughts shambled through Dez’s mind with the same slow, deliberate gait as the zombies. She had never been the top student in her class, except in the Army and the police academy. In school she’d been a C student cruising the edges of frequent suspension and likely expulsion. But that did not mean she was not a thinker. The long hours of the nights since the fall of man had given her so much time to brood and ponder that she now considered herself a philosopher on the nature and specifics of the apocalypse. A new field of study and one in which she could hold her own as an expert against anyone.
That thought, though, made her immediately think of Billy Trout. He’d broken the story of the rogue bioweapon that had caused all this. His live broadcasts, placed on YouTube and blasted through social media, had focused the eyes of the world on Stebbins County. His pleas for mercy had kept the town from being thoroughly sterilized, including the school where the last of the living had been hiding. And, afterward, when the convoy of busses had set out, he stopped several times each day to give updates on the fall.