“Probably survivors like us,” I said. “We used to do the same thing, remember, when we were looking for food?”
“Yes.”
We pushed through the exit.
Right outside, one of them leaning on our motorcycle, were the two men. They both had military rifles. One of them said “Damn,
we were wondering how long you were gonna stay up there.”
The other one laughed and asked “Now, what do you have in that cooler?”
They both looked to be in their early twenties, maybe still in their late teens.
One was named Doug. He did most of the talking.
“We’re going to Texarkana – to the Army depot,” he told us as he raked through our cooler. He unrolled some of the steak from the plastic, gave a piece to his buddy, and then took a large bite of it himself. He talked as he chewed. “We’re going over the split, but I don’t think they’ll be too happy to see us come back there.” He uncapped one of the bottles of water and took a large swig. Most of
the water went down his stubbly chin. He nodded to us. “We’re going to need you two to help us cross.”
I didn’t say anything. Neither did Mindy. It was best to stay silent in situations like these we had learned.
“We don’t want to hurt you, but we will if we have to. You’re going to be our hostages.”
As he talked, again my mind raced back to Mits – as well as Johnny when he had talked to us at his roadblock. We were again in a similar situation. Trying to win some of their sympathy, I said, “Please, my wife is pregnant.”
He stopped chewing for a second. “So?”
“So, could you please leave us alone?” Mindy said. “We haven’t done anything to
you.”
“Ma'am,” Doug said politely, “Please shut the fuck up.”
Doug took another drink. As the bottle was tilted up, I quickly body-tackled him. He dropped his rifle. We both went down to the ground. He was a strong kid. In a second, he had me pinned to the ground with his knees. He laughed, barely out of breath. “Guess you didn’t know I was the top of my wrestling league in high school.” He reached back as he grabbed his rifle. He pointed it at my face. “One more move like that and your wife there will be a single mother.”
Mindy was being held by the other guy. Her arms were pinned back.
“C’mon man,” I said. “What do you want from us?”
“Just to cross,” he said, arms outstretched. “Nothing el
se...well, some of your food. If we get across, then we’ll let ya go.”
“What is it, a b
ridge?” I asked. “Why can’t you just go around it, like walk through a field or swim across a river - or something – to get passed the bridge?”
Slowly he got off of me. He stood looking at me, lying on the ground,
then he offered me a hand to get up. I took it. “Listen,” he said “we don’t mean any harm to you people, but for some reason I don’t think you two get it.”
The other guy let Mindy go. She came over to me. “What don’t we get?” she asked.
Doug said “The split. You don’t know what it is.”
We both shook our heads. Other than what the stranger had told us back in Dallas, we had no clue.
Doug said “The earth has split in half. That’s what the split is. It’s like a huge chunk of the earth has broken loose from the planet. They say that this part we’re on is sinking. They’re evacuating people from this part. There are helicopters all along the split flying people to the safe side.”
Mindy was holding me tight. She asked “How long until this part sinks?”
The other guy said “It already is. Some of the guys in charge have said that anyone left alive on this part are going to die soon.”
Doug continued “This section is going to break free from the rest of the earth. It’s going to be slowly pushed out of the rest of the
earth’s gravity. It will be lost to space.”
Mindy and I were looking at him, unbelieving. Back at the casino, we never would have thought that such a thing could be happening.
“Listen,” he continued. “I’m sorry for the way this has happened. Let me apologize. I never meant any harm.”
“It’s ok,” I said. “There is plenty of food in the cooler.”
“I’m Doug Owens,” he said. “Private First Class Owens. My friend here is Private Gary Hollis. We’re AWOL from the army.”
“AWOL?”
I asked. “Why did you leave?”
“We wanted to find our families. Mine is from Cooper, Texas. We went back there to find them, but the town is gone – I mean,
literally gone. A large section of the city has crumbled down into the split. The other half was crushed by other parts of the earth caving in around it. Where my house was…it’s not even there anymore. If it was, the house would be floating in midair. I don’t know what happened to my family.”
“I was from Sulphur Springs,” Gary said. “It’s on
the other side of the split. That’s where we’re heading now. We were hoping you’d help us get there – but we didn’t know how to approach you honestly. It was Doug’s idea to do the hostage thing.”
Doug said “Since we went AWOL – let’s see, five weeks ago – we know the army’s been looking for us. Th
ey sent some guys to find us. I know we’re being tracked, but we need to get across. We’ve been up and down the split from Texarkana all the way down to Greenville. There’s no way across. Do you think you two can help us?”
I looked at Mindy. Her face was emotionless. I couldn’t tell if she wanted to help or not. Personally, I didn’t know what to think. In the back of my mind I still couldn’t help but to think that this was probably just another one of Washburn’s ploys. I said “Let me talk this over with my wife.”
Doug said “Alright.”
I took Mindy by the hand and led her over to the exit door of the hotel. We didn’t go inside. I asked her “What do you think?”
“I think we need to see this split. I’d be more willing to believe their story if I saw it with my own eyes.”
She was right.
I looked back to the other guys. “How far is it to Texarkana?”
“Around 90 miles or so, why?”
“We want to see the split. When we see it, then we’ll help you across.”
“We could head back south here,” Doug said. “It’s about 20 miles back down to Cooper.”
“What are you driving?” I asked.
“We have a jeep on the outskirts of town. We didn’t like to drive into town before we knew it was clear. We saw you two looking down on us when we were siphoning fuel a little while ago.”
Mindy asked “Have you seen any zombies?”
Gary said “No ma’am, they are all walking to the split in the northeast.”
“Northeast Texas?” she asked.
“No, the northeast part of the United States, like up near Utah, Idaho, places like that.”
“Why? What’s making them go there?” I asked.
“We have no idea,” Doug said. “It might have come from some nukes that went off up there.”
“Nukes?” I asked. “Are we at war?” I didn’t want to tell them we were from there. I mean, on one hand I trusted these guys. On the other, I didn’t. They had planned to use us as
hostages
. I couldn’t exactly just forget what had happened between us, but for the moment, they seemed trustworthy enough.
“We weren’t. But we are now.” Doug said.
Mindy asked “Who are we at war against?”
Gary said “Zombies.”
As we drove south to Cooper, Mindy and I talked about telling them about the guy near Fort Worth. He had said t
here was a crossing point there, but we were hesitant because we weren’t sure if these guys were actually all on the same team. Maybe they were working together to try and trap us.
When we came upon Cooper, Mindy’s grip around my waist grew stronger.
The first thing I saw was the town’s white water tower. It was leaning to the south against the other wall of the split. The split went up about 300 yards. Spilling over the edge was thousands of gallons of water. It was falling onto the top of the water tower, splashing down its sides. Roots, telephone wires, underground cabling, pipelines, anything that had been underground was now sticking out the side of the split. I could see the different layers of sediment in the deep dirt.
As I looked east and west, there were more roots and pipes sticking out of the huge wall. It seemed surreal. The wall went as far as the eye could see in both directions. In places, there was steam rising or water falling over the edges. Broken pieces of highway hung over the edge. Buildings and hous
es were teetering on the edges.
The roaring of the falling water was deafening as it came over the side.
“That’s Cooper Lake draining out,” Doug shouted. “I used to swim in there as a kid.”
“Holy fuck,” I whispered. “This is unreal.”
I needed to look over the edge. I had to see it. I walked closer but then was grabbed roughly from behind by Doug. “You’ll fall man!” he shouted. “The edges are very weak and unstable.”
Just to prove his point, a little to our west a huge tree teetered and fell over into the split. More eart
h and rock caved in with it. “We should step back” he hollered.
“The only way up to the other side of the split is in a helicopter,” Doug said as we walked further away from the split. “As far as Gary and I know, the only ones are in Texarkana.”
I looked at Mindy and she nodded to me, saying it was ok to tell them. “There was a guy in Dallas” I said “who told us this same story about the split. We didn’t believe him. We thought he was high or something. He told us there was a way across south of Fort Worth in some town near there – I forget the name now.”
Doug and Gary perked up. “Do they have helicopters?”
“Don’t know,” I said. “He didn’t go into details. He just said it was safe.”
“Let’s go there, then,” Doug said. “We can avoid Texarkana totally.”
We backtracked to Denton where we headed south. Again we had to zigzag through overturned vehicles, destroyed bridges and angled concrete. It was a rough ride. By the time night fell we had only gone 17 miles south of Denton to a small destroyed suburb of Fort Worth called Haslet.
We built a small fire. Each of us ate one unwrapped p
lastic wrap of stripped steak.
“Where did you manage to find steak in all of this?” Doug asked.
“In a walk-in cooler in a casino,” I said, a laugh escaping me.
“The
hell were you doing in a casino? Gambling?”
“Scavenging,” I said.
“Looking anywhere for food.”
“I hear ya there. We had a bitch of a time finding anything. So much shit has been looted its nuts.”
I nodded. Mindy was sitting next to me, her head on my shoulder.
Gary was looking at us both. “You’re lucky to have survived together,” he said, “being married n all.”
“We met because of this,” Mindy said. “We didn’t know each other before.”
“You’re married though, right?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said. “We got married by another man we met – he was a preacher.”
“He didn’t make it,” Mindy said quietly.
No one said anything for a while. We watched the fire, listened to the popping of the wood as it burned. We all got lost in our own thoughts – of families gone, loved ones dead.
Finally we all turned in. Mindy and I slept together in a sleeping bag. The guys slept on the ground.
The next day we continued on our diffi
cult trek southward. We tried to stay on the main highway but in so many places the concrete was tilted at such an angle it made getting past it nearly impossible. We took side roads or anywhere the ground looked flat enough to drive over - anything to get further south. It seemed like the split was millions of miles away. The day dragged on and on.
Clouds started coming in around noon. By the time it started getting dark, a steady rain was falling. It made traveling even more difficult. Several times, the jeep got stuck in some mud along the side of the road. One time we nearly ditched it, but after some strong cussing, Doug finally managed to work it out of the muddy ruts.
We finally found the split as we came into the town of Alvarado. There were spotlights shining down from the other side of the split. The rain was pouring down through the lights.
“They have electricity,” Mindy said qui
etly.
“Hey! Down here!” Doug yelled.
No one looked down to us from the other side.
“They’re probably all asleep,” I said. “It’s late. Let’s just wait til morning to cross.”
“Fuck that, I wanna get out of this rain,” Doug said.
“We all do, man,” I said. We looked for any kind of shelter. There was a destroyed overpass a few hundred yards behind us. One side of the overpass did offer us some cover
for the night. We slept in our wet clothes. I don’t think any of us really slept that well at all.