“We’re fine. Thank you.” She replied simply.
“Yes, you are. Love me a woman who can handle a big gun like that.” The man said continuing to smile down at her. He went from a basically normal guy in a big truck to a super creepy guy in a big truck with that lecherous grin and statement. Drew and LeBron emerged from around the truck with their weapons in hand. Based on the look on their faces they’d both heard the creeps attempt at a pickup line.
“You guys need something?” Drew asked. He gestured for Yue to get back in her seat. He was hoping getting her out of the way would get these losers moving along.
“What you got?” The creepy dude asked.
“Nothing. I guess we’re good here. Good luck.” Drew said and started getting back in his own seat. LeBron began to walk around to his side to get in. Creepy dude smiled and waved as the big wheeled truck took off down the road. Looking in the direction the truck had come from LeBron saw a few vaguely humanoid figures in the distance coming their way fast. He mentioned that to Drew, and they got moving out of there fast.
“I wanted to ask him if those big tires actually helped with keeping the infected off them.” Yue said.
“I’m sure he’d have been happy to give you a ride.” LeBron teased.
“You guys need to work on avoiding people. The sick people we can dodge all right. It’s the healthy ones you have to worry about. There are going to be a lot of evil people trying to take advantage of the situation. With the infected you know where you stand. They want to throw you on the ground to rip your throat out. Boys like creep boy back there will smile at you the whole time their friend is sneaking around to stab you in the back.” Bart said. It was the most he’d said all day.
“Thanks for the lecture dad.” Drew said. The same way he’d said it so many times back in the old days when Bart had told him to focus on his schoolwork instead of just the athletic field. The tone immediately made them all nostalgic for the good old days.
“Lectures are how you learn without having to have your heart ripped out. Would you rather have somebody who’d been there and done that help you avoid issues, or do you want to risk your lives figuring it out yourselves for the first time?” Bart asked before succumbing to a coughing fit. Yue didn’t like how pale her dad was. He was also burning up with a fever. She poured some non-flavored water on a t-shirt and handed it to him to put over his head. LeBron and Drew were both looking on with concern. Bart stopped coughing long enough to tell Drew to get them moving.
Based on how the day had gone they absolutely needed to make sure they got past Gainesville and found a secure place to spend the night before darkness fell.
Chapter 24: Go Gators!
It started to rain. No big surprise there since it was the afternoon in Florida. It reduced how far the sounds of their engine would travel which was good. It was going to make the road super slippery which was bad. Especially when you were trying to make an oversized SUV swerve around accidents and attackers at a high rate of speed. Stuck in between two cities they couldn’t really just stay where they were. The place would be literally crawling with crawlerz once the sun went down.
LeBron had a theory that Gainesville might not be so bad anyway. The entire city existed basically because the University of Florida was there. In the month leading up to the final breakdown of civilization the college experience had gone through multiple iterations. A lot of campuses had remained open either to try to maintain a sense of normalcy or because closing down meant sending their international students back home to countries devastated by the disease. As the disease approached more and more colleges buckled down since pretty soon sending their students anywhere was a death sentence.
The results had pretty much been the same everywhere. Students who were sent home at least got to see their families again before being killed or turned. In Florida the colleges were used to treating every emergency like a hurricane. That meant bust out the emergency shelter rules and try to make everyone comfortable. Thanks to dealing with a couple of other pandemics in the recent past they also had plans in place for those. None of those plans covered the aggressive nature of the spread of this ancient disease though.
“I’m thinking zombie cheerleaders.” Drew announced from the front seat.
“When aren’t you thinking about cheerleaders?” Yue asked with a smirk.
“We wish they were zombies. Zombies are slow.” LeBron said.
“Depends on which movie you’re talking about. There’s fast ones, slow ones and every other kind you can imagine.” Drew responded.
“My point is that if these things were slower, they’d be so much easier to survive. I don’t even understand how people lose to slow zombies. I mean just walk away briskly.” LeBron argued.
“I’m not sitting here for this right now. We need to focus on getting through Gainesville.” Yue interrupted. She’d once watched bemused as Drew and LeBron almost got into a fist fight over which Marvel character was the strongest. The two of them could argue hypotheticals with the single mindedness and passion of a two-year-old who sees a toy they want at Target.
“Please listen to your sister!”
