He checked the weapons while we loaded food, Ivy standing lookout while Lana and I hauled canned goods and a cooler full of cheese, milk, deli meat, bottled water, and ice to the SUV. We hadn’t found a trailer, which was too bad, but we tied some of our water jugs to the roof rack too, just to give us more room for the guns, ammo, and cleaning kit, plus a couple sleeping bags, camping lantern, and stove, and other bits and bobs related to roughing it out-of-doors.
We’d be staying inside, of course, but eventually the electrical grid would fall and it was already late October. We were only going to be on the road for a couple more days, I hoped, but better safe than sorry.
Dan took the first driving shift, Ivy in the front seat, Owen belted in on Lana’s right so she could sit next to me. Owen had a tablet on his lap his father had found in the house, so he was happily watching a kid’s show with headphones on.
I watched the farmhouse fade into the distance and wondered again what had happened in the basement that Dan and Ivy didn’t want to talk about. I wondered if they’d had to kill the kid whose tablet Owen now held and if Dan had had to kill their parents, too. I imagined getting to Seattle to find the boys and my parents changed, being forced to drive a crowbar through Tucker’s eye or Jackson’s and had to force myself to think of something, anything else to get the unwanted visuals out of my head.
“I almost stabbed a cat today,” I whispered to Lana. “And by almost, I mean I waved a knife in its general direction as it ran from all of us.”
Her shoulders shook with her quiet chuckle. “I wondered what that scream was about. Stopped my heart.”
“Sorry.”
“Damn cat.”
“Exactly.” I threaded my fingers through hers and stared out at the fields rushing by, not knowing that I was searching for evidence of them until I saw one staggering through a waist-high field of dried, yellow stalks of corn. He was too far away for us to be able to hear what he called out, though I knew he was saying something. Or singing. God, how I hated it when they sang.
How had he gotten so far away from everyone else? Was he lonely? Did they feel fear? Despair? Pain?
In all the emergency broadcasts we’d heard, the officials had never talked about that. Never said anything about how all this happened, either, or what was causing it. They hadn’t said why neighbors and friends were attacking each other, why some of the crazies died and yet reanimated, why they sang to us, called to us, cried out for us.
Only, “Get inside. Lock your doors.”
I wanted more. We deserved more. “Turn on the radio?” I asked.
Dan pushed the knob, then Ivy leaned in to tune it, finding an AM band that was broadcasting. A woman was saying, “Every damn one of them had filmy eyes, Kaison. You can’t tell me that’s a symptom of some sort of super flu.”
“Can’t say damn on the air, Brit. And what else could it be? The dead can’t just walk around. It’s scientifically implausible.”
“Yeah well, tell that to my dead boyfriend who tried to bite me in the face.”
There was quite a bit of muttering, curse words flying. Dan glanced in the mirror to confirm, I figured, that his son was still wearing his new headphones.
“If you’re just tuning in,” the one called Brit said, “then listen up. We have some wisdom to pass onto you all. First things first, don’t let anyone who has been bitten anywhere near you. The bites get infected quick, like really quick, and the person bitten ends up dead. At least for a minute or so.”
“My nana died in fifteen seconds,” a new guy said, clearly not the man called Kaison. “I know because I timed it after my grandpa got bit. He took a while. We all thought he was dead. Probably why nana …”
The voice trailed off and Brit jumped in to cover the silence. “Bites are bad. As far as we can confirm, scratches don’t transmit whatever this is to the victim. It’s spread through sharing fluids. Saliva. Blood. Even, I’m assuming, sperm and vaginal secretions.”
There was a strange muffled noise and we heard, “You can’t say vaginal secretions on the radio.” That had definitely been the first guy, the one Brit had called Kaison.
“Oh, but I can say sperm? Screw off with your gender discrimination. Next you’ll be telling me all this is just a deep state conspiracy run by transgender operatives hoping to create a new world order.”
Someone, presumably Kaison, shouted something and someone else, maybe the anonymous dude whose nana died, clapped a hand over the first guy’s mouth. The muffled shouts faded, and I pictured Kaison being dragged out of the radio’s control room.
After another moment, Brit said, “Just don’t bone with anyone who’s been exposed to whatever is turning our fellow humans into killing machines. Okay? Stay safe, stay wrapped, and shoot to kill.”
Bumper sticker material if I’d ever heard it.
21
Then
The road trip so far had been uneventful. The few times we’d gotten slowed by a pile up we were able to drive around the stuck cars by easing the SUV into the ditch and back up onto the road. Twice we stopped at farmhouses we saw off the main road to look for gas and weapons. We scored big on gas, adding three more containers to the roof rack, and got an ax and a machete out of the stop. I wasn’t too sure about either one, since they would have to get really close for us to use them, but they were better than the butcher knife I’d tried to fend off the cat with, so I told
