Chapter 23
The grass was still wet come morning. There were birds outside chirping and small insects of every sort were out in droves. It hadn’t been very long since the east coast's evacuation, but already Mother Nature was making her first move to reclaim the land. There were a surprising number of house cats outside, hunting small rodents. Packs of dogs were coming together as well, now that their owners were dead and gone. They tore through the trash looking for any scrap they could find. Some of the smaller dogs, like pugs and chihuahuas, were not equipped for this new lifestyle. Their homes became their cages. Soon they would ransack the food inside until they ran out and were forced into starvation. At the current moment they were still finishing what was left of their dog food.
Sarah was jolted into the waking world by the freezing cold. She was so cold that she was shivering.
“Tim,” she said, pulling the blanket higher onto herself and her brother.
She put her hand on his shoulder. He felt like ice. It was shocking how cold he was.
“Tim, wake up.” She gave him a shake.
Tim didn’t respond.
Sarah pulled back the covers. There was a bright red sunburn where the morning light, dimmed by the window curtain, touched his arm. The rest of him was so pale; it looked almost as if he was covered in powder. The small acne bumps he usually had on his chin were gone along with any other blemish that might have been there.
Sarah placed one thumb on his upper lip and added pressure. When his lip lifted, it revealed a long fang in the place of his incisor.
“No,” she whispered, falling away from him.
As she fell back, the blanket adjusted, blocking what little light was touching him.
She kept scooting backwards until she was against the wall.
She was beginning to shake for more reasons than the cold. As she watched, she realized her brother wasn’t breathing. He was dead.
“No,” she repeated a little louder.
She could feel her face beginning to flush and her vision was going murky. First her parents and now her only brother. He was right there in front of her and yet he wasn’t. He was gone.
“Timmy no…” the words came out as a sob. “Please, don’t leave me alone.”
She curled her knees to her chest and held them, rocking herself as she stared at her brother.
Some of his dark hair had fallen into his face. He looked regal and more mature. In death he took on the appearance of a man more than he ever did in life.
Sarah continued to sit there with her arms wrapped around her knees. The blanket covered Tim’s body, he almost looked as though he could be sleeping.
Sarah was on the verge of hysteria. Every single part of her life was being ripped away and there was nothing she could do to stop it. No one should suffer such a cruel punishment.
What have I done to deserve this?
Even as she thought about it, she still couldn’t believe it was happening.
Sarah leaned forward and grabbed a fist full of the blanket. “Forgive me, but I know this is what you would want me to do.”
She yanked the blanket away, letting the sun fall across his body.
For a moment her brother was alive again. His eyes opened wide and his mouth fell agape, then he arched his back and let out a deafening scream.
He was only like this for a moment, and then he spontaneously combusted. Flames roared off his body as if his body had been soaked in gasoline and someone struck a match.
Sarah shielded her eyes, recoiling from the heat of it.
Her brother fell back: motionless, nothing more than a corpse in the flame. The fire soon began to die, but not before spreading to the coffee table, and then the couch. Sarah took in a lungful of smoke and began to cough. Her mom’s drapes went up in flames.
The windowsill caught next, followed by a picture on the wall.
Her entire family stared out at her from the portrait as their faces began to bubble.
Sarah got up and stumbled to the front door. She had to head in the direction of the kitchen first, to get around the flames.
Her eyes watered as the smoke completely saturated the room. She was choking on it.
Sarah thought she might pass out. She had to lean against the wall just to know she was going in the right direction.
There was less smoke near the front entrance of the house. She was able to see the door and get it open.
As soon as the fresh air struck her, she took a deep breath. It was like drowning and suddenly breaking the surface of the water.
The living room window glowed orange as she made her way down the steps.
Sarah felt nothing. She thought nothing. She simply put one foot in front of the other and repeated.
She passed her neighbors
’
house. Their cat watched her from the front steps before it went back to licking its paws.
There was an abandoned car parked half on the sidewalk, half in the street. She sidestepped it.
By the time she reached the end of her street the fire at her house was raging.
Sarah didn’t look back; she turned down the next road and continued on.
Her plan, if that’s what you would call it, was to keep walking. She would walk until her shoes fell apart, until her legs gave out. She would walk until hunger overtook her or maybe the night. She would walk until she died.
Her arms hung limp at her sides. Her steps were little more than shuffles. Here face was blank. Her eyes held a look of haunted emptiness. She saw only the road directly in front of her. Time no longer held significance.
It might have been four hours before she even realized her phone was in her hand.
How had it gotten there? Had she grabbed it out of instinct on the way out the door?
She couldn’t remember.
The thought was there for only a moment, before she dropped her phone into her pocket and forgot about it.
It wasn’t much longer after that when she heard the noise of an engine. It didn’t sound much like a car to her. She couldn’t say whether or not it was, because she didn’t really know those kinds of things. At that moment she didn’t really care.
As it turned out, the vehicle was a fancy black dirt bike looking thing. She knew what dirt bikes looked like and this one seemed close; only it had a little extra frame to it.
The guy riding the bike was in blue jeans and a T-shirt with bright yellow work boots on.
He pulled up next to her on the bike and took off his helmet. He had medium length blond hair and a questioning look on his face.
Sarah saw none of this however because she was still staring at the ground in front of her. She kept walking and the bike was soon left behind.
“Hey, are you alright?” asked the boy.
Sarah showed no sign that she had heard him and continued on.
The boy was soon walking at her side. “You don’t look so good. Maybe you should take a drink of my water.”
He held something up, maybe it was a water bottle, she didn’t look.
“Okay, well can you talk?”
He was at her side for another thirty seconds, presumably waiting for an answer, before turning back and leaving her. The whole time Sarah continued to do what she had been doing.
A few moments later he was back at her side, this time pushing his motorcycle.
“It’s been really bad these past couple of weeks,” he said. “I know, but trust me it will get better.”
There was a crack in the pavement. Sarah studied it for a moment before continuing onward. When it was gone she went back to looking ahead.
“Life is worth living. Whatever happened to you, I can promise it isn’t the end.”
Sarah felt a hand grab her arm and realized, for the first time, that someone was there. She was startled as she looked into the eyes of the guy who had grabbed her.
“I’m heading out of the evacuation zone. Maybe you should come with me.”
She was completely oblivious as to how she had gotten where she was. She didn’t recognize any of the houses around her, or the guy for that matter.
“It’s not safe to be by yourself.” He patted the seat of his bike. “Hop on and I’ll get you out of here.”
Sarah shrugged, she really didn’t care either way. She walked to the back of the bike and the guy handed her his helmet.
“We’ve gotten a late start,” he said as he turned on the bike. “I don’t know if we can make it all the way tonight or not.”
She got on behind him and he began to pull away. Inside the helmet her face was still blank as she continued to stare at the road twenty feet ahead.
Chapter 24
The giant hardware store was completely abandoned and the front doors were sealed shut. There were only two cars in the parking lot, making the scattered grocery carts look out of place. The blacktop itself was only a year old, along with the building. Both looked fresh yet eerily empty. The parking spaces looked new too, their lines were still a bright white, as if they had recently been painted
Joe stood outside, staring up at the large warehouse of a building. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky and the temperature was already beginning to rise. He was pretty sure it would hit ninety before noon.
His shirt was already beginning to stick to his back. He couldn’t wait to be done with this errand so he could climb back into the air conditioned truck.
The massive store stretched on in either direction. Its size was matched only by the Good-Mart retail store at the other end of the parking lot.
On a normal day the parking lot would have been a sea of cars, instead of smoldering pavement.
The automatic sliding doors didn’t open when Joe walked up to them. He pressed his hands against the glass and peered inside. It was dark and heavy shadows hung over the aisles.
Joe took a step back and contemplated what he was going to do.
It just so happened that this was the only hardware store in the area. He needed to find some materials so he could get back to the house. It was already going to take them too long to fortify it. He didn’t need to be driving all over town.
He could break in, but it wouldn’t help anyone if he wound up in jail. Then again who was around to arrest him?
The last thought was what drove him to action.
There was a stack of eighty-pound cement bags piled up on a pallet to his left. Joe grabbed one and hefted it at the glass door.
The glass was no match for the cement and shattered into a thousand little pieces.
Joe stepped inside. He went to the nearest cash register and grabbed a flashlight he saw hanging on a shelf and used his pocket knife to free it from the plastic packaging. He unscrewed the handle and dropped a couple batteries in, only halting his restless eyes from roving the near darkness when absolutely necessary. When the batteries were in he switched it on and got to work. His first order of business was locating a flatbed shopping cart.
He did all of this without going more than twenty feet away from the front door where there was still plenty of light.
Once he had the flatbed cart, it was time to find what he needed.
The looming aisles stretched into the darkness like endless caves. As Joe chose a direction, he knew he was going to have to find materials by memory.
His footsteps echoed throughout the building. The shelving units towered over him. Joe could feel the weight of his 9mm pistol on his hip. He didn’t know how well the gun would do against a vampire, but if one came he was going to find out.
The darkness surrounded him. It made him feel blind.
There were so many little places for a vampire to hide. He knew that at any moment he could be ambushed from the left or right with little warning. If such an attack were to happen, the flashlight would be of little use. It simply couldn’t cover that much area.
It might have been a good plan to find the power switch if he had any clue where it was. He decided against it, justifying his logic with the fact that in the time it would take him to locate the switch, he could find all his supplies and already be on his way out the door.
It only grew darker the farther he went from the front doors. It didn’t take long before his flashlight was the only light source at all.
Everything looked cold and gray under the illumination of the flashlight. The spectrum of it revealed everything through a small circle of light. Because of this, the Plywood and particle boards on either side of the isle were only partly visible to Joe at any time.
He was nearing the back wall when the flashlight fell upon what he was looking for. He grabbed the bundle of wooden stakes and wheeled the cart back around.
He could see the light coming through the front door. It looked like a tiny square, no bigger than a dime, yet the light was too bright to see past.
As he started walking towards it, it didn’t seem to grow. It felt as though he would never reach it, as if he could keep walking and the darkness would never end. It was an idea that Joe didn’t really want to think about. It did nothing to help as he continued his shopping.
He started back towards the plywood doing his best to focus through the darkness. After he had gone a little ways he took a tight turn and the cart caught on the corner of an aisle. The force of it caused a couple of shovels to fall from their rack and clang to the ground. The noise echoed up and down the store.
Joe pulled back and corrected his path. He made sure to put the shovels back before moving on. The store’s management would already have a big enough mess to clean up when all of this was over. Joe didn’t want to make it any worse for them by leaving such clutter when it was so easy for him to clean it up.
When he got to the lumber aisle he set the flashlight on a shelf so it was overlooking him like a spotlight. It was a thin veil, but it allowed him to see what he was doing. It also freed up both of his hands so he could work.
Each sheet of plywood banged as he set them onto the cart.
If there was anyone else in the warehouse that had yet to hear him, surely they did now.
To Joe, the sheets were light. He tossed five or six into the cart with little effort. He went two at a time and had them loaded up in under a minute.
Now that he had all the wood he would need, Joe grabbed the flashlight and continued his search through the sea of blackness. It was beginning to get disorienting. With every aisle he passed, unease grew in the pit of his stomach. In the dark everything looked the same, and the wheels on the cart were squeaking as he pushed it along. He hadn’t noticed the squeaking at first, but now it was beginning to bather him. It wasn’t much, but now that he thought about it, in the store’s current state it could be heard from end to end. He supposed he didn’t have to worry about how loud his footsteps were by comparison.
On nearly the opposite side of the building there was a set of construction spotlights. Joe knew right where they were and used the back aisle to get there.
He scooped up one set and placed them on the cart and was reaching for a second when he heard a noise. It sounded like a broomstick falling over. It came from a few aisles away.
The 9mm was out of its holster and cocked in his hand in an instant. He held the flashlight against the gun, lighting up the area of the noise.
A puff of dust floated in front of the light and there was only blackness beyond that. He strained to see as far as possible and still couldn’t make out anything.
Joe waited, giving it a few seconds. There was no movement.
When nothing came of the noise, he scooped up the second spotlight and headed for the front of the store.
He felt as if the darkness were caving in on him. His body was poised, ready to fight. The hairs stood up on his arms as he wheeled his way towards the light. His neck prickled with anticipation, and the daunting and highly possible reality, that he was being watched. He hurried his pace, putting his strong arms to use as he pushed the cart onwards. He knew any step could be his last.
He pushed the cart as fast as he dared. He wanted to get the hell out, but he also didn’t want to run into another aisle on accident.
As he got closer to the light he was able to relax and let his hand fall away from the pistol. As he neared the front door, he realized an unease of the unknown, of the darkness, was making him irrational.
Hell of a shopping trip,
he thought.
He found a pen and paper at one of the cash registers and left his information. He also left enough cash to pay for everything he stole along with an explanation of why he had broken in through the front door.
He felt more than a little stupid leaving money, but figured it was the right thing to do. If things didn’t improve he wouldn’t have any use for the money anyways, if they did, well then the store was going to need all the money it could get.
With that done, he took his cart and headed out to the truck.
The drive home was the same as the drive in. There wasn't another car on the road and every stoplight was out. Joe sped right through the lights with no worry of being hit. The only time he even slowed down was when he was passing the Baptist church on Saw Mill Road.
As he passed the church an idea struck him. He slammed on his brakes and threw the truck in reverse.
As he was glancing over his shoulder to steer, he spotted an empty milk jug in the truck bed. It would work perfect.
He found the doors to the church unlocked and the inside was empty, something he was getting far too used to.
There was a small room at the entrance with another set of double doors that separated it from the rest of the church. Through the windows in the second pair of doors Joe could see a tall cathedral ceiling overtop rows of wooden pews. A large gray cross was hung on the wall at the far end of the room. It overshadowed an altar that was draped in purple cloth.
In comparison, the small entrance room was cramped. A large, square, holy water stoup took up most of the floor space. The stoup was what Joe had come for.
Joe took the gallon jug and dunked it in. When the jug was full he left to continue on his way.
When he got home, Keith was waiting for him. The guy was sitting on the porch polishing a vicious looking sniper rifle. It was thick and black with grooves running down its length, a Barrett fifty caliber.
“You didn’t hit traffic either I take it?” asked Keith.
“No.”
“This is crazy, it’s like a ghost town out there.”
Joe dropped his tailgate, revealing his payload. The plywood was stacked a few inches high with the spotlights sitting closer to the cab.
Keith set his sniper rifle on the blanket to his side and got up to help. They took the wood and leaned it against the living room wall. When they had it all, Joe went out to the barn to get some nails and a hammer. They were soon boarding up every window in the house on both sides of the glass.
It wouldn’t make for the most secure defensive position, but it was a start.
They boarded up every window entirely except the main window in the front. For that they removed the glass first and then boarded it up, leaving a three inch opening along the bottom for Keith’s sniper rifle. The railing of the porch was preventing him from having a full field of vision. It took a little convincing, but eventually he got Joe to tear the railing down.
“Hell of a mess,” Joe said, gesturing at the debris scattered in front of his deck. He was carrying the bundle of stakes and the gallon of holy water inside.
“What the hell is that?” asked Keith, glancing away from his scope. He had pulled the coffee table against the window to give them something to rest their guns on.
Joe lifted the jug of holy water. “I stopped at the church. Figured as long as we’re fighting vampires it wouldn’t hurt to have a little religion on our side.”
“Not me,” said Keith. “I only have one religion, the church of the fifty cal.”
“Hell of a choice by the way,” said Joe.
By the time everything was done it was beginning to get dark. Joe had been saving a couple of steaks in his freezer for a special occasion. Considering they might not make it to the morning, he figured it wouldn’t hurt if he grilled them that evening.