We reached the crest at Stevens Pass and wound our way down the eastern side. Eventually arriving at the junction of Route 2 and Route 97, I flashed my lights at Andrew. He pulled over and we all got out to stretch our legs and say goodbye to our new friend.
“Well, Andrew, it was a pleasure, but this is where we split up,” I said.
“I hope you find your family okay,” he said, and reached out to shake my hand.
“Just a minute, Andrew… Max, Lisa, can I talk to you guys for a minute?” We walked to the back of my truck; Max was already shaking his head.
“I know what you’re thinking and the answer is no!”
“Why not? We have more of everything than we need, and this kid is unarmed with no supplies to speak of.”
Max put his hands on his hips. He took in a deep breath, and let it out. “You are one softhearted and softheaded SOB, you know that? All right, but take it easy; we don’t have
that
much.”
I smiled and Lisa added her two cents. “It’s the right thing to do, Dad.”
I retrieved one of the M4s from the case and several full mags. “Lisa, grab some of those MREs and some water.”
We went back to Andrew’s car where he was leaning against the hood. “Andrew, we talked and we want you to take this.” I held out the M4.
He reached out and took it. “I would be stupid to say no to this offer, so I won’t.” He threw a bear hug on me. “Thanks, Ryan, Max, Lisa, you guys probably just saved my life.”
He released his grip and Lisa gave him the MREs and water. She received the same bear hug in return. He let her go and turned toward Max. Max quickly held out his hand. “Don’t you go hugging on me, kid!” he said, unable to hide a smile. Andrew shook his hand enthusiastically.
“You know how to use that thing?” Max said, pointing at the M4.
“Yes sir, I do, and thanks again.”
“Don’t thank me, thank my softheaded brother over there, and ah, be careful, kid.”
Andrew got in his car after giving Lisa and me another quick hug and pulled out on 97 South.
“I hope he finds his family,” Lisa said with wet eyes.
“Come on you two do-gooders, before you find someone else to give our shit to,” Max said gruffly as he headed for his truck. I could have sworn I saw him wipe his eyes, maybe not. It was funny, we had only met this kid earlier today, but somehow, just the thought of him out there by himself made me feel like I lost someone. Probably the fact that my son was out there somewhere, I hoped, trying to survive without me. Four hours later, we pulled up to my sister’s house where we found a lot more hugs.
Carla woke up with a bit of a headache. She looked at her watch—6:23? She was confused, not sure if it was evening or dawn. She got up and stumbled a little. Steadying herself by putting a hand on the wall, she made her way to the kitchen. There was no sign of Conner or Lauren. Light spilled in through the window blinds.
Wow, I must have slept through the night,
she thought.
She made her way to Conner’s room and quietly opened his door a crack; his bed was a mess, but he wasn’t in it. She went by the laundry room on her way to the living room and saw the washer pushed up against the door. Her heart rate increased as fear seeped into her mind. She turned the corner into the living room and found Conner slumped in a chair that was pushed up against the couch with several other pieces of furniture, all in front of the door. She shook his shoulder and he scrambled to his feet, grabbing a rifle, which until then Carla hadn’t noticed.
The look on his face was one of terror and shame. “Oh my god, I fell asleep!”
Carla, confused, asked, “Why are you sleeping here, what happened?”
He just kept repeating himself. “I fell asleep, oh my god, I fell asleep! Where is Lauren?”
That got Carla moving. She headed back to the hallway to look for Lauren.
“Lauren!” she yelled. “Lauren!”
Then she heard Lauren’s response from the laundry room. “Yeah, I’m in here,” she said weakly.
Carla ran down the hall and skidded to a stop. “Are you okay?”
Lauren was sitting on the floor with a pistol in her lap. “Yeah, I’m okay, I feel horrible though.”
Carla helped her up and they went back into the living room, where Conner was hurriedly pulling furniture from the barricade.
“Conner! Stop and talk to me!” Carla barked at him.
He looked at her as if it were the first time he’d ever seen her. “Mom?”
Conner folded in on himself, fell to the floor, and curled into a fetal position. “I killed my friend, I killed Sam; I killed my friend.”
It was clear that he was in shock and that it was escalating into a dangerous mental breakdown. Carla went into the kitchen, grabbed a pitcher of water from the refrigerator, and threw it on him. She didn’t know if it was the right thing to do, but she had to try to break the pattern he was in. She got down next to him and embraced him.
“It’s okay, it’s okay,” she repeated, over and over, holding him tight. Slowly, he started to calm down. He came out of the fetal position and clung to his mother, crying and mumbling.
After twenty minutes of this, Conner seemed to be breathing normally again and had passed out. Carla dried him off, and Lauren put a pillow under his head and covered him with a blanket.
Carla took two extra-strength ibuprofen and made some coffee. She decided to let Conner sleep while she and Lauren talked about what happened.
“So, what happened after I went down last night?”
Lauren sat staring into her cup of coffee. “I went to lie down as well, but I woke up to the sound of Conner yelling. I got up and went to see what was going on. It was dark and Conner was out back by the garage. When I got there, he wasn’t yelling anymore; he was standing over someone with a baseball bat. I called out to him and he screamed at me to get back in the house. The way he said it scared the crap out of me, and I came back in. I was looking out the window, trying to see what was going on, but I only caught bits and pieces. I heard a loud shrieking sound, something like the mountain lions we used to hear when Dad took us on backpacking trips, ya ’know?”
Carla nodded and motioned for Lauren to continue. “I saw Conner go into the garage and I heard more of those screams. It seemed like hours but I’m sure it wasn’t but a few minutes. Conner came back out carrying some stuff. He came back to the house and was acting weird. He shoved this pistol into my hands and told me to guard the back door and to shoot anyone who came in. Then he tore the hoses off the washer and we pushed it in front of the door. He told me to stay there and I heard him out in the living room moving furniture around. I kept asking him what was going on, but he just turned off all the lights and told me to be quiet. We heard more of them out there through the night, but they didn’t try my door, and eventually I fell asleep.”
Carla put two and two together as she listened to Lauren. Conner said that he’d killed Sam. Sam must have turned into one of those things and attacked Conner last night. She hoped that the thing with Steve was an isolated instance, but between what they heard on the news, and what they experienced themselves, it appeared that this was happening everywhere.
Carla asked Lauren to write down everything she could think of about the virus, the vaccine, and the people who had turned. Then Carla sat down and also wrote out her thoughts on a pad of paper. It always helped her to write things down. She listed who, what, when, where, and why. This tried-and-true investigative process allowed her to see the big picture. She listed all her immediate family members under the “who” column. Then she listed what she knew about them, when she’d last heard from them, and where they were at that time. The why was obvious.
They had been writing for about an hour when Conner stirred. He didn’t seem to be as agitated as he was earlier, but he was clearly troubled.
“Hey, Conner, you okay?” Carla asked.
He sat up and rubbed his face. “Only if everything that I remember was just a terrible nightmare. It wasn’t, was it?”
Carla shook her head sadly. “Come on and sit with us. I’ll make some breakfast and we can talk about it.”
While Carla made scrambled eggs, toast, and a fresh pot of coffee, Lauren told Conner what she’d told their mother while he slept. They ate their eggs and drank their coffee without much conversation after that. Lauren cleaned up the dishes and wiped the table off, and they both looked at Conner.
“So, can you fill in the blanks of what Lauren told me?” Conner began to recount the previous day’s events.
“It all started shortly after it got dark. I was worried that Sam wasn’t home yet, but I figured they had asked him to work over. I was playing
Call of Duty
when I thought I heard something out by the garage. Thinking it might be Sam, I hurried out the back to tell him you were here. When I got out there, there was no one around. I can’t explain why, but I got a really bad feeling, so I went in the house and grabbed my softball bat. I went back outside and yelled for Sam, thinking he was in the garage. He didn’t answer, but I heard a shrieking sound from out front. It sounded like a wounded animal, but I knew it wasn’t.
The back porch light was on and I could see down the driveway a few feet, but not really well. Then I heard what sounded like bare feet slapping the pavement, and Sam came running up the driveway. He was covered in blood, and I thought he’d been in a car accident or something and I started toward him. That’s when he attacked me. I was lucky; I managed to fend him off with the bat. I was closer to the garage than the house so I went in there. Sam must have left the door up when he left this morning and I was thinking about the weapons he had in there. The motion light in the garage lit up and I saw several more people running up the driveway. I ran to the back of the garage and hit the door button and it started to close. It almost made it, but one of them set off the safety thingy and it started opening again. I hit the button again and ran for the back door. I made it out and heard the garage door close, but then I saw Sam standing there. He screamed at me, making that awful sound, and ran right at me. I didn’t have any choice, Mom.” He started weeping again. “I had to do it, or he would have bitten me. I swear, Mom, I didn’t want to, but I killed him.”
Carla had moved around the table and was rubbing his shoulders. “Conner, you had no choice. We saw the same thing happen to Steve, and it was horrible. I don’t think there is anything else you could have done, really.”
Conner nodded. “I guess that must have been when Lauren saw me and came out. I was pretty pissed off at that point and yelled at her to go back inside. I knew there were a couple of them still in the garage and I went in there and bashed the crap out of them. It was stupid, but I blamed them for Sam and I just went nuts. I grabbed this rifle and a pistol and headed back for the house. We barricaded the doors, turned out the lights, and waited. I heard them on and off all night; guess I fell asleep at some point. Lucky we didn’t end up like Sam.”
“I don’t think that’s the way it works,” Carla said.
They all sat at the table, their notes spread out in front of them. “I spent a couple of hours trying to make sense of this. God knows it doesn’t make any, but I think we can make some decisions based on what I have here. The one thing that sticks out to me is that these are not zombies, even though they are cannibalistic. They are just really sick people. Another thing is, they don’t come out during the day. Lauren and I only saw them at night on our way here, and then last night they didn’t show up until after dark. Based on what we have seen, I would say there is a good chance that they are nocturnal. The other thing that’s bothering me is that the news we have suggests that the vaccine is what caused these people to change. We don’t know that for a fact, but we haven’t had the vaccine and none of us have changed. Either way, we need to monitor the way we are feeling and let each other know if something is going on with us physically. This morning I woke with a headache and was dizzy, but since then I’ve felt fine. How about you guys? Anything physical going on with you? Headache, stomachache, diarrhea?”
They both said they were fine. “It doesn’t mean we aren’t changing, so we have to be careful regardless. If any of us do change, the others will have to be willing to… you know.”
Conner stood. “I will not do to you what I did to Sam. I can’t.”
Lauren nodded her head in agreement. “Me either, Mom.”
Carla knew she would be unable to put down either of her kids and realized they felt the same. “Okay, but if it does happen, we have to at least be willing to leave the one that changes, agreed?” They both nodded.
“After looking at all our options, I think we should head back home today. We’ll take all the supplies and weapons that Sam has here. We need to set up a rig to siphon gas. Conner, can you find that for me?”
“Sure, Mom,” Conner answered, “but I think we also need to take two vehicles, in case one breaks down.”
“That’s a good idea; we’ll look for one when we leave here. Anything else I haven’t thought of?” Neither Lauren nor Conner could think of anything, so they went to work getting everything packed into the Rover.
They left the house at noon. Carla thought she’d steeled herself for what she would see upon leaving Conner’s house, but the utter desolation made it hard to breathe. The streets were empty: no people, no animals, nothing but abandoned vehicles and loose papers floating across the road like ghosts. Their first priority was to find a suitable second vehicle. Conner suggested a 4×4 truck, but so far, they hadn’t seen one that fit the bill.
Mount Hood stood off to their left as they got onto the interstate heading south. “I have seen that every day for the last four years. It looks exactly the same as before, but now it makes me feel small,” Conner said, gazing at the beautiful snow-covered peak.
Conner looked just like Carla’s grandfather Brant, who in turn bore a resemblance to Clark Gable. Conner was 6’4” with broad shoulders, dark hair, brown eyes, and a well-groomed moustache. He’d been studying for work in Christian ministry, and like the rest of the Wilfords, he was devoted to serving God by serving those around him.
“How could this fit into God’s plan?” he asked no one in particular. “Why would God allow this to happen?”
Carla spoke up without any hesitation. “I don’t know, but I have a feeling that this has more to do with decisions made by men than divine intervention.”
“Huh.” For all his education, it was the only thing he could say at the time. Two days ago, he could have spent hours discussing the theological reasons for the fall of civilization. It was no longer a hypothetical thesis up for debate, but a cold hard reality.
It was slow going. There was no traffic, but there were wrecked vehicles every so often, abandoned—or worse, with bodies strewn about them. They came across several vehicles they could have taken, but they made one excuse after another to forgo splitting up.
As they came over a rise, they saw something they didn’t expect. There was a car in the distance, heading north toward them.
“What should we do?” Conner said as he double-checked the AR15 that he’d taken from Sam’s cache.
Carla had no illusions as to how dangerous other survivors could be, but there were no other vehicles in sight and the car was moving, not waiting in ambush. She flicked her lights a few times at the oncoming car and slowed.
“Be ready to shoot, but keep the rifle out of sight unless they do something stupid,” she said.
“I am going to try and talk to them, but I will hit the gas at the first sign of trouble. You two be ready to duck, got it?”
“Yes ma’am,” they replied in unison.
Carla rolled her window down and came to a stop a hundred yards before the other vehicle reached them. She raised a hand out the window in a way that made it obvious that she wanted to talk. They could now see two people in the approaching car—a man and a woman. They stopped down the road a little way; they looked like they were arguing. Finally, they slowly moved closer and the man rolled down his window.