Having done all that they could for Bart they kept driving north. Drew sticking to a nice steady fifty miles per hour to try and avoid having the wind blow the taped-up tarps off the windows. The inside of the truck was a complete junkyard at this point. On the plus side driving around in a wind tunnel kept the puke smell from building up too much inside the packed SUV. Having their dad hose down the inside of the Expedition with his stomach juices had been the icing on top of the stink cake they all had to eat a slice of.
Drew pointed out the welcome center they drove past to LeBron and Yue. He didn’t point it out to show that they were almost out of the state. The whole welcome center parking lot was packed with camouflage paint covered green war machines. The national guard must have made the welcome center into a base. More than likely it’d been a check point to keep people from getting into the state who were infected. That’d been the plan to stop the spread of the infection according to the news anyway.
It turned out the crawlerz didn’t have much use for interstates though. They came through the woods in packs at night ripping into the national guardsmen. It was guns and bullets in the dark against a supernaturally strong enemy with no capacity for mercy. An enemy who gave no quarter and had seemingly limitless reinforcements. Drew stared over at the camo covered graveyard before suddenly slowing down to cut across the median.
The welcome center had been turned into a vulture picked nightmare. There weren’t as many bodies as Drew had expected to see though. LeBron answered that unspoken question by mentioning that since soldiers tended to be in better physical shape than most people, they’d be more likely to survive the surge. As to why the soldiers hadn’t been able to kill more of the crawlerz when they attacked. That was anyone’s guess. Most likely they’d still been operating as if they were facing a conventional enemy. You can’t employ standard military tactics when faced with a nightmare and hope to survive.
The dead soldiers they did find helped replenish their ammunition and weapons supply greatly. They’d become way less squeamish about picking through the dead to gather supplies. The pickings were slim between the lack of dead soldiers and the fact that they evidently weren’t the first to have had this idea. The dead men had been lying in the hot Florida sun and rain for a long time. That didn’t help when trying to flip over a carcass to see what treasures the body may be hiding.
Finally convinced they’d found enough to have made the stop useful Drew acquiesced to Yue’s suggestion that they get the hell out of there. She wanted to hurry up and find a place to camp for the night. The next morning, she wanted to spend some time searching for somewhere to spend a few days. She wanted to make sure Bart had a nice place to rest while he recovered. She was beyond distressed by how pale and weak he’d gotten after the puking fiasco.
They crammed in the weapons and other supplies they’d looted off the dead warriors and set back off. Less than thirty minutes later they were cruising past the welcome to Georgia sign. They’d made it out of Florida. Now they just needed to figure out what came next.
Chapter 26: Orphaned Again
“That thing came out of nowhere. It had to be waiting. If that rat hadn’t popped out...” LeBron trailed off. If the rat hadn’t popped out and made Drew stumble back a few steps, they both knew what would‘ve happened. The crawler would’ve ripped Drew’s face off.
“How was it moving around during the day though?” Drew wondered out loud. It wasn’t like an exhaustive study had been performed on crawlerz in their natural habitat then published in scientific journals. Everything they knew about the crawlerz came from YouTube videos and the highly censored nightly news. The closest thing they had to a crawlerologist was LeBron. He’d been the one who’d really put in the hours watching all of the videos on all the obscure websites. On top of all the videos he’d taken the next step and actually read all the blogs and such that’d popped up before and after the government took control of the internet.
“It stopped moving when the light got in its face. It looked at the sun like it was hypnotized or something. There were plenty of theories that the infection caused massive hallucinations that disconnect the crawlerz from reality.” LeBron lectured.
“Ok professor. You’re saying that the crawlerz are just a bunch of people walking around tripping balls? They can’t come out in the light because it makes them go off the deep end? This whole apocalypse is just some kind of Grateful Dead afterparty gone wrong?” Drew asked sarcastically.
“Shut up both of you. We need to find somewhere to get dad in a real bed and we need to do it now. He’s scaring me.” Yue announced from the back. That shut both her brothers up. They immediately began checking the exit signs. The next exit had a big shopping plaza and a
