Things were bad all over. As the visions of violencedanced across the screen, Dustin couldn't help but feel the nervousness buildin his body. It started in his chest, and five minutes after he had first feltit, his body was trembling with tension. Just then Suzy woke up.
She sat up, her hair in a tangled mess, rubbing her eyesand yawning. Then she slowly laid back down on the couch and said, "I washoping it was all just a dream."
Dustin didn't know what to say, so he just remainedquiet.
"He was a nice guy, you know."
"Who?"
"My brother, the man in the car." Suzy lookedoff into the distance. Dustin tried to ascertain if she was merely sad orsuffering from some sort of mental breakdown. "Pete was always a good guy.Last night, he called me up and said that he wasn't feeling so well. He hadgotten into some sort of bar fight with a man. The man bit him, but he didn'tthink anything of it. I was taking him to the hospital when we got into theaccident."
Dustin watched as realization dawned on her face."The other driver. Did they..."
He interrupted her with a negative shake of his head. Sheburied her face in his sofa/bed, and sobbed softly. Dustin began gathering histhings, unable to comfort the woman. How do you comfort someone who hadinadvertently killed someone when their brother had turned into a monster?Someone else might have the words for that, but not him.
"Listen. We have to go. The city is waking up.Things are bad."
Suzy, her head still buried in the couch, said, "Howbad?"
Dustin took a deep breath. "It's not just happeninghere. It's happening all over. The best thing we can do is to get away fromhere, get away from people as much as we can."
Suzy didn't offer any argument, so he continued to packsome things into his lone suitcase. "Do you have any family here? Besidesyour brother?" He felt like an ass mentioning him so soon, so he stuffedan extra pair of socks into the suitcase angrily.
"No, my parents retired to Florida last year. I wasgoing to move down there, but I finally got hired as a teacher here. We wereplanning to take a vacation this August, but well... I guess that's all just apipedream now."
Dustin pulled open the bottom drawer of his dresser andpulled out a few T-shirts, mostly old, faded T-shirts with band names printedacross them, most of them black. After plopping four of them in the suitcase,he threw in a couple pairs of jeans and some underwear. He would give anythingfor a gun, and he almost felt like an idiot for being so anti-gun for most ofhis adult life. This was the reason the 2nd Amendment existed. Instead, hewalked over to the closet and pulled out an old aluminum bat with the words"Easton" emblazoned across the barrel in red lettering.
"Even if you had the money, they've shut down allair traffic to try and prevent the spread of whatever this is. I heard it onthe news." It was as if Suzy had just realized that there was a TV on inthe room. She finally pulled her head out of the couch long enough to watch.Then she slowly sat up, sucked into the vortex of carnage that careened acrossthe screen.
Dustin closed his suitcase and rested the baseball bat ontop of it. Then he walked to the kitchen and began stuffing canned goods intopaper bags. He was never so happy that he always had a pantry stocked withsoup. It wasn't a lot, but it was enough to keep them from starving for acouple of weeks.
He walked out of his tiny kitchen and into the main roomof his studio apartment to find Suzy staring at the TV, her mouth wide open andpanic etched on her face. He placed the bags of food on the ground next to hissuitcase and then walked over to Suzy. He placed his hands on her upper arms,and stared her directly in the face to make sure he had her attention.
"We have to go. We have to get out of thecity."
Suzy shook her head in disbelief. "We can't go outthere. People are dying. We'll be murdered."
Dustin shook his head and tried to speak as clearly as hecould. "We have to leave. If we wait here, there will be more of thosethings. It's going to get a hell of a lot worse before it gets better. If wesit here and wait, we may not make it out alive. I'm going. With or withoutyou. I've got an old car, not much to look at, but it runs just fine. I'm readyto go. You can stay here or you can come with me, but you've got to make upyour mind. Make it up right now. If we stick together, there's a chance. If youwant to stay here, you're welcome to it, but in 30 seconds, I'm walking rightout that door and you're on your own."
She sat there thinking about it. Dustin wanted to slapher across the face to make her see reason, but that's not the type of guy hewas. When it had been well over thirty seconds and she still hadn't saidanything, he walked over to the floor, and picked up his baseball bat in onehand and his suitcase in the other. She just sat there. He'd just have to makeanother trip to get the food.
His front door opened out onto the second floor of acourtyard. He looked left and then right, not trusting the quiet of his generalvicinity. He bounded down the rickety iron staircase, in a hurry to be done andaway before the highways became clogged. He walked briskly, looking all abouthim, the hair on the back of his neck standing up. He had a white-knuckle gripon his baseball bat.
He approached the back of his primer gray VolkswagenBeetle knockoff. Made in Mexico, the car was an aging antiquity that suited hissensibilities just fine. Living in the city, Dustin had never had much use forit. The most he ever did with the car was hop inside,
