Erin, Paul's wife, ultimately helped Mrs. Devereaux off the truck. "You could have done better, my dear," Mrs. Devereaux said to her.
"You're welcome," Erin replied exasperatedly.
Joann, then Jodi, the young mother with three kids, came next. April, whose last amorous affair ended in the death of her latest fling, only came out when she was absolutely sure no one was getting eaten. April hadn't slept well in days; her eyes looked like she had already ended up as the trailer trash she was destined to become, and her abusive husband with the wife beater t-shirt had once again shown her the business end of his knuckles.
Alex couldn't help but feel that he was on the end of a practical joke gone completely awry. He had willingly left a trained Marine, his two crack shot sons, the largest man he had ever seen in his life and a boy who might have a direct connection to Dios, for this rag tag group. He shook his head. He had to go back, this was a death sentence. Marta would have to listen to him and she may have, if what happened next never transpired. The next few moments, ultimately made him forget to even bring it up.
Alex rounded the truck to find Jodi and her three kids, Eddy who was 8, his younger sister Renee 4 and their infant sister Penelope, but something wasn't quite right. Her kids were up against the truck and she was a few feet away sobbing uncontrollably. The revelation struck Alex immediately but still ultimately too late. It was a firing squad, composed of a deranged mother and her unsuspecting children. She had grabbed a pistol from the small arsenal they possessed in the trailer and was waving it around violently.
"God has forsaken us," she said to Alex.
"Wait Jodi there's still…"
"Hope?" she laughed. "Not for us. We're dead already. We just haven't realized our true potential yet. I will not allow my children to become those demons," she said, referring to the zombies.
Alex wondered if that was what they truly were. "Jodi, don't do this. They're your children. For the love of God..."
"You don't understand, Alex, I'm doing it FOR the love of God."
Paul rounded the corner to see what was happening. "Holy shit!"
Her eyes barely glanced over towards him. Her attention swung back to her children, who were becoming increasingly distraught over the amount of emotions being issued forth, even if they didn't understand what was truly happening.
"Mom, I'm scared," Jodi's oldest son Eddy said. "Can we come with you?" he said, referring to bridging the physical gap between them now.
"Oh honey, we are all gonna be going together," she said, referring to something much vaster and catastrophic.
"Jodi wait!" Alex shouted, fearful that the conclusion to this macabre scene was rapidly approaching.
"Don't you dare come any closer!" she yelled shrilly.
By now all of the occupants of the truck were behind Paul watching in grisly fascination. Even Mrs. Devereaux, who always found a way to interject the wrong word at the wrong moment, was silent.
Erin came to the forefront. "Jodi, those are your children and you're scaring them." By now all three of the children were crying inconsolably.
"This is for their own good, Erin," Jodi said clearly.
"What is for their own good?" Erin asked with alarm in her voice.
Jodi never answered directly, she let the roar of her gun finish her statement. Alex didn't know whether to turn and run away or run forward to stop the travesty as it was taking place. One second a gurgling crying rotund bundle of joy disintegrated into a burst form of human parts and down feathers as the sleeping bag he was swaddled in ruptured. Jodi's gun did not stop as she swung it slightly to the left and drove a bullet into the awaiting mouth of her daughter. The look of betrayal was immediately wiped clean from Renee's face as the back of her head erupted onto the trailer bed. The gun roared again as Eddy ducked under the truck, the bullet coming dangerously close to his leg.
It was April that reacted the quickest, knocking Jodi off of her feet. The gun went off one more time. April rolled over covered in blood, none of which was hers. Jodi lay still, a fatal wound pumping out her life, one heartbeat at a time.
Her eyes shifted over to April's. "Do you smell rotten eggs?" and said no more.
"Brimstone," Mrs. Devereaux said, her eyes as large as saucers.
Eddy had buried himself deep into Joann's midriff. They were both shaking.
Paul's face nearly matched the color of the snow. "Do we bury them? Do we have shovels?" Then he threw up.
"We will place them in the snow and say a prayer. It is the best we can offer them right now," Alex said.
Paul managed to nod in agreement, even with his head between his legs. Alex held it in as he dragged Jodi over to the embankment and still held a tight grip as he picked up the small girl. It was when he got to the infant that all his composure ran in floods out of his system. He fell to his knees as he placed the remains of the infant boy in the snow bank. "God, I don't understand!" he shouted. "Why would you save them, for this!" His shoulders quaked. Paul gently helped him up.
It was long moments before any of them could speak. It was finally Paul that managed. "God, I know that I have my doubts about your existence but if you are there, please allow these two children to enter into Heaven's Gate and show your mercy unto their mother. She thought she was doing what was right. Amen." He wouldn't swear that his prayers were answered, but he felt better for saying it.
Marta was sitting in the passenger seat when Alex finally got in. She kept her gaze straight ahead and did not even acknowledge his presence.
'Three hours in,' Alex thought, 'and we've already lost three people and my wife is on the verge of a nervous breakdown.' The red stain of death faded in his rearview mirror as he put the truck into gear and sped down south and away from this tragedy. All thoughts of Mike were pushed far back into the linings of his brain. It would be far too late to turn around by the time that thought came up again.
That first night they stayed in an old gas station. The glass building was not what Alex would consider an optimum place to hole up, but fueling the truck's tanks with a hand pump had taken almost an hour and he was exhausted. Eddy, and April for that matter, cried for most of the night. This was one of the old school service facilities that hadn't yet figured out that the real money lay in selling tacquitos and slushees. This place smelled stale, like old motor oil and sweat. The Slim Jim beef snacks display looked long empty.
It was cold and the few emergency blankets on the shelves would have a hard time keeping a cat warm. At a time when the travelers should have been huddling for warmth, they were all lost in their own thoughts. Each of them marked out their individual nooks, putting as much distance as they could between themselves. Alex offered to take first watch. Mrs. Devereaux, who had never taken a watch before, told him that he looked exhausted and that she was willing to do it.
Alex couldn't help himself and he didn't mean to be as harsh in his thoughts as he was, but it came out all the same. 'Bitch has a soul.'
Mrs. Devereaux knew that not many people liked her, and to be quite honest that was alright with her because she wanted very little to do with humanity. Her bastard husband had become a cliché, having run off with his twenty-something secretary. 'I knew he was full of shit when he said that Viagra prescription was for us,' she thought bitterly. The last time they had sex, George Senior had been in office. Not only had her husband run off, he had managed to hide all their assets beforehand. She had barely been able to scrape together enough to buy the run-down little town home in Little Turtle. She wouldn't be eating cat food anytime soon but her days of caviar and pearls were long over.
She had never been able to reconcile to the fact that she was now living in the type of housing that her servants had. This wasn't her station; she was above this. She had grabbed as many of her possessions out of her mansion as she could before the sheriff threw her out. Her townhome was crammed full of mink stoles, rare paintings, statues of varying sizes and antique furniture. If she had sold half, she would have wa
nted for nothing but she had already lost so much she could not fathom parting with any more.
Mrs. Devereaux had no time for religion. Much like Karl Marx, she felt it was the opiate of the masses. It was for the poor fools who had nothing in this lifetime and could only hope for the promise of a better afterlife. She knew better. There was only now. Take what was needed now. There is no judgment at the end. Your actions are not balanced and weighed. You have one run through. This wasn't practice for a higher purpose. She had lived her entire life under that premise. She knew others thought her a bitch and worse. She really did not care. More times than not she got what she wanted; it did not matter who got upset. It was dominion over others, that was how the animal world was set up. You ran the machine or the machine ran you, and she much preferred the role of decision maker. That, of course was up until today when she had witnessed a young mother murder two out of her three children. The burnt egg smell could only refer to sulphur, and sulphur meant brimstone. Everything she believed had immediately come into question. Were there now consequences for one's actions? Was this a new development or had it always been like this?
"Should have stayed with Michael," she cackled softly. "He might be a prickly S.O.B. but he'd keep me alive a lot longer than these buffoons." That was her last thought before she fell asleep, her head pressed up against the cold glass.
The sunshine was diffused through the grime streaked windows and was further hindered by the bodies that pressed against the outside windows. Mrs. Devereaux let out an involuntary scream as she opened her eyes only to be facing an opaque, rheumy puss leaking eye. Alex was the first to react, Paul was close behind him.
Alex scrambled out of his foil blanket. Ten to fifteen zombies were in a small cluster around the spot Mrs. Devereaux had previously been occupying. "Oh mi madre," he said worriedly.
"Whoa, shit," Paul said, no more alarmed than if someone had burnt his English muffin.
They had learned their lesson in Vona. The truck was parked right up against the store. Anything wider than 5 inches was going to have a hell of a time getting through. With so few travelers now, fitting them all in the cab for emergency purposes would not be a problem. Eddy began to scream uncontrollably, either from waking and realizing his family was no more or because zombies were at the window. The noise seemed to agitate the zombies, who began to bounce again and again off of the windows. The small store began to vibrate from the effect.
"We should go," Erin said to Paul.
"You're right, this frozen indecision is going to get us killed," Paul replied.
"What?" Alex asked him.
"This shit. We're sitting here watching zombies trying to break in and we might as well be sitting on our hands. Mike would have someone posted to watch them while the rest of us grabbed anything that was useful and we made our hasty escape. Mike would have stopped yesterday from happening."
Marta made the sign of the trinity on her chest.
"You can't know that, Paul," Alex said defensively.
"What were we thinking?" Paul replied, a look of frustration etched across his face.
"We were thinking we wanted to get to our families as much as he wanted to get to his own. We still do."
"Will we?" Joann asked.
A spider thin crack developed in the pane of glass directly opposite them. "I think maybe we should discuss this later, Alex said hurriedly. "Everyone in the truck."
The service station was now in the hands of the zombies. The small loss should have meant nothing to Alex but it rankled him all the same. He wanted to draw a line in the sand but the tide had already shifted and the beach was covered.
They drove for a couple of miles with the nine of them in the front and the sleeping quarters. Even Mrs. Devereaux somehow found this tangle of humanity comforting. The cold of the night was quickly replaced with the heat of the living.
"I've been thinking," Alex said. "Maybe it's time we found something a little smaller to drive. Something a little easier on the kidneys, something we can all take turns driving."
"Yeah, I won't miss sitting in the back bouncing around like a super ball," Erin added.
"I wish I had a super ball," Eddy sniffed.
Erin hugged him tight. "I'll get you one the next time we stop."
"Will we still be together?" Eddy asked.
Alex hadn't thought about it much but the kid's question made sense. They would be splitting up again in the next couple of days.
"Are we still planning on once again halving our numbers?" Mrs. Devereaux asked incredulously.
"That's been the plan all along. I don't see why we should change it now," Paul answered her.
"What of myself, Joann, April and Eddy?" she asked.
"You can choose who to stay with, or obviously you can keep going on."
Mrs. Devereaux looked over dubiously at Paul. "Just how long do you think any of us would survive on our own?"
Paul had reached his limit. His stress meter had always ridden a little higher than the national average and these extraordinary circumstances certainly had not helped matters. He red-lined. "You know what!? I've been making mistakes since this all started. Mike told me that if there was ever a national emergency, I was supposed to get Erin and Rebel and get to his house as fast as I could. Well what did I do? I got my family trapped in our attic. I got our dog killed. I damn near killed Mike's son when they came to rescue us, and what does Mike do for me? He saves Erin and me. He gives us a relatively safe place to stay and makes sure we have food to eat. Then when everything goes to hell, what does he do? He saves us all, all of us! Then what do we do? We leave him. We leave the most capable person who could get us through all of this. I watched a woman damn near kill her entire family yesterday. Now I'm not saying Mike could have prevented it. That woman had lost hope, hope that there was a better future for her children. But Mike brings us that hope. Maybe she would have felt that hope long enough at least to push on to the next day and the next. Let's not forget last night. Mrs. Devereaux takes first watch and nobody thought to relieve her. We were lucky it was only a dozen zombies, what happens next time?"
"Eliza is following him though," April said meekly. "Or at least his son."
"That's really the reason we all left, isn't it," he said, stating a fact. "We were afraid, we were cowards. We took what we thought was going to be the easier path."
"Now see here," Mrs. Devereaux started. "We are not cowards because we want to survive."
"You would think that." Paul shot back. Mrs. Devereaux was more stung by the words than she thought she would be. "It's Mike's hour of need and we abandoned him. I can guarantee he would not have done that to anyone of us, including you, Mrs. Devereaux. I consider him my brother and I walked away." Erin hugged him tightly but he gently pushed her away. He felt disgusted with himself.
"It's too late to turn around now Paul," Alex said practically.
"Survival is a powerful motivator," Joann told the group.
"Yes, but did we increase or decrease our odds when we left?" Paul asked.
The group drove on another fifteen minutes in utter silence before Alex started to gently apply the brakes.
Paul saw a white panel van up ahead on the side of the road. Alex pulled up alongside it. Paul hopped down from the truck and quickly realized his mistake. The van was still running. Paul put one foot on the running board, prepared to regain the safety of the cab if things went wrong.
"Stop right there, mister!" a voice shouted from the tree line.
Paul could almost feel the steel sights of a rifle press against the small of his back. Paul turned back around with his hands in the air.
"Put your arms down. I didn't say this was a stick up. Don't go reaching for anything though, this thing's liable to go off."
"What's going on?" April asked, unrolling the window.
A whistle of approval issued once again from the tree line. "Whoowee, you're traveling in some fine company," the disembodied voice shouted. The truck window im
mediately rolled up. "I haven't seen a live woman in weeks! Although some of the dead ones have been alright, bad manners though, always wanting to eat before dinner." A loud laugh ensued. "What are you doing in these parts? You weren't planning on taking my ride where you, because rudeness can get you killed."
Alex came around the front of the truck, rifle in hand.
"Not sure who invited you to the party," came the voice. "You're completely overdressed. Now put down the party favor before someone gets hurt."
"I'd rather not," Alex answered back shakily.
"Now I understand your hesitation, I really do, especially in these times. Nary a person you can trust, least of all some crazy bastard hiding in the woods. Seeing as I have a fully automatic machine pistol in my possession and that looks like a bolt action 30-30, I figure I can get off a good hundred or so rounds before you can do two. You don't really know where I am and you two are as clear as cable TV, so what say we start over?"
Alex laid his rifle on the ground and proceeded to put his hands over his head.
The laughing ensued. "Now like I told your friend. This isn't a stick up. I just want to make sure nobody gets hurt, 'specially me, if you get my meaning. Now first things first, is that girl you have with you of a legal age?"
"What?" Alex asked confused.
"The one that looked out the window, is she of an age to be legally wooed?"
"What?" Alex again. "What the hell is wooed?"
"Do I have to spell it out to you man! Some considered me a very dapper chap until of course they tried to eat all my vitals."
"This guy is nuts," Paul whispered to Alex.
"Yeah, and he has a directional microphone," came the voice from the woods.
"Wonderful," Paul sighed.
"I know, isn't it? Now seeing as it appears that you two wanted to pilfer my ride and that I am basically the law unto myself, I have two options."
There was a long pause.
"Umm, this is where you two are supposed to ask what the options are."