The woman got in the car with no introduction, and slammed the door behind her. She just sat there and breathed. Janet was OK with that, and soon they were back up to a good fifty miles per hour.
The stranger caught her breath.
"Meghan," she said. "Thank you so much for stopping. You saved my life, no doubt about it. Wouldn't have made it to nightfall on my own. Who are you?"
"This is Gary up front, Diane next to you. I'm Janet," she said.
"Nice to meet you all. Meghan Duesquene. Meghan is fine."
"How'd you end up on the road?"
"Me and two guys, met up on Exodus, trying to get out of town. None of us had cars, but one of them knew an old lady who had turned and who kept the keys under the rug. We met up at his house, and boom, we were on the highway. Unfortunately, the old lady's 1991 Buick LeSabre was not really the car you'd want to escape a zombie horde with. It died, and then it was a foot race. That joke about not having to outrun the bear, only the other guy? Yeah. That."
Janet felt like she ought to console Meghan, but she found she didn't want to, so she didn't.
"What's your story?"
"Not much. I was in denial, waited way past time to get out of Peoria. I really had no idea it was this bad, not at all. I didn't even see my first zombie until yesterday."
"It wasn't that bad yesterday. It was like some threshold got crossed in the night, you know? Like, it went from a bad thunderstorm to a Category 5 tornado overnight. It hit critical mass in downtown two days ago, and it’s just been spreading into the suburbs like a wildfire. Least, that's what I gathered from Exodus."
"What's Exodus?"
Meghan seemed surprised she didn't know.
"It's an app for your phone... it lets people set up meeting points to escape, update everyone on local zombie conditions, all that. It's like zombie foursquare."
"Oh, wow, that sounds useful," Janet said. She hadn't particularly cared about smart phones before all this happened. She thought Exodus would be useful for about another day.
"It was useful. My problem was that I waited too long. I kept hoping my brother would show up, and I waited too long. Critical mass, and then blammo. Peoria was Cat 4."
"Cat 4?"
"Cat 4 is 'Don't ever fucking go there, but escape is barely possible.' Cat 5 is 'If you don't have a helicopter, you are toast.' Cat 1 is 'bring a gun and you'll be ok.' Which brings up a question... where are you guys headed?"
"Canton. I have family there."
Meghan popped out her iPhone and start swiping at it with her fingers.
"Two hours ago Canton was a Cat 2. When was the last time you called your family?"
"Yesterday. They said everything was mostly ok."
"Well, that's probably true... are they in the center or outskirts of Canton?"
"Not much more than half a mile of difference there."
"Cat 2 is ok. It's ok. My route calculator says we should stay on 65 until we can hit Monmouth, but it's your car."
"Route calculator?"
"Yeah, it plots the route with the least reported zombie activity. But Cat 2 isn't too bad. Usually you can still operate in that level of heat. I mean, people have been leaving their stores open and the gas pumps on and stuff. As long as they aren't right on you, you can usually resupply in a Cat 2. Maybe join up with a party or something too. Zombies are still in the minority in Canton. If you have family there... they wouldn't happen to be survivalist, we-bought-a-decommissioned-nuclear-silo and a hundred thousand rounds for our AR-15s type people would they?"
"No... I mean, not to that level. But they have plenty of guns and food, I can assure you of that."
"Well, that's a whole lot better than nothing. I realize I am an uninvited guest here, but, well, you know. The living need the living. If you cut me loose, even in a pretty safe zone, well, it won't end well, and one adult taking care of two kids? We need each other. What I lack in food and water I make up for in excessive firepower."
"Well, I'm tempted, but what’s your status?"
"Status?"
"Like, are you immune?"
"I got exposed a week ago to the Airborne. Not bitten. I would have turned if I was going to turn from the Airborne. So I'm not one hundred percent safe. How about you?"
"Well, yesterday was the first time I saw one. It bit me."
Her eyebrows shot up.
"First one and you got bit?"
"I knew her... it was stupid, I know. I know it was. But she was an old lady and she looked really sick and I was stupid. What can I say?"
"So you, and your kids all got exposed yesterday? How does the bite feel?"
"It hurts all the time. Very red."
Meghan nodded. "I still don't like these odds very much, but I don't see any better options for me. But Janet–you need me. A lot. In case... in case of certain events. You know."
Janet did know. And it made a lot of sense. She didn't want to put it on her family, not if Meghan was volunteering to do the coup de grace if it turned out to be necessary.
The kids were not stupid. They knew full well what Meghan was talking about, and she could see it in the way they withdrew and storm clouds appeared on their faces. They were running the odds, and realizing that something terrible was almost certainly going to happen in the next day or two.
The options:
All three of them die of the plague and turn into zombies. Most likely.
She dies and her kids live.
She dies and one of the kids dies too.
All of them live. A highly unlikely event... about one in ninety.
She refused to think about it. While she had learned her lesson about trying to avoid reality, she wasn't going to go overboard with it. If there was nothing she could do to prevent it, wasting time worrying about it was not something she could afford to do.
And anyway, she thought. Fuck the odds. What was going to happen was going to happen. The odds were just a way to make educated guesses, but in any particular case it was always just an educated guess. Fuck the odds. Fuck them right up their asses.
After a bit of minor bobbing and weaving they reached her aunt's house. It was dark and quiet. A few corpses, presumably zombies, were sprinkled at random around the property. They came to a stop quite a ways away. Janet was scared; if they were gone, she had no idea where they would be. Maybe they were dead. But after a moment the blinds moved and a hand gestured them closer. Her cell phone rang.
"Janet, is that you out front?" her aunt asked.
"Yes."
"For Christ's sake, why didn't you call us and let us know you were coming? We were so worried about you!" Aunt Tabitha said.
"Sorry, I'm really sorry. It's been a bad couple of days."
"Well, you're here, and that's the important thing. Now, that doesn't look like Calvin in the backseat."
"That's Meghan. She caught a ride with us."
"If she is dangerous, say that she's really nice. If she's ok, just say yes."
"Um... yes."
"Ok, pull the car around back." The call cut off. She took the Escape up to the back deck. Her Uncle Gerald and cousin Vinny were at the back deck with shotguns behind their backs. They helped unpack and hustled the kids and luggage into the house. Gerald hopped in to the car and drove it behind the barn, then jogged back into the house.
Inside, Gerald, Vinny, and her Aunt hugged the children and Janet. For a short while it was just a happy family reunion. But then they saw the washcloth duct taped to her arm.
"Is that a bite?" Tabitha asked. Gerald and Vinny shot dark looks at each other.
"Yes. I got bit yesterday morning."
"When did you guys see your first zombie?"
"Yesterday morning."
Her eyebrows shot up. "Well, you were doing really good up until yesterday, at least. I wouldn't have thought there was anybody in the country who had never even seen one even three days ago."
"You know Calvin. And I wasn't exactly dying to have to deal with this."
"Who is? And who is this?"
"Meghan Duesdquene." Meghan extended her hand. Tabitha took it. "Tabby MacKenzie."
"Nice to meet you."
"Same. When did you first meet a zombie?"
"About ten days ago. Close up. I can more or less guarantee I'm Airborne immune. Don't know about bites yet, thank God."
"Excellent. Well, me, Gerald, and Vinny here are Airborne immune too. Vinny, take the children down to basement and get them set up with those cots I have in the back, behind the TV's."
"Yes ma'am." Vinny ushered the kids off.
"Everyone sit down," Tabitha said. It took a minute before everyone was ensconced in the overstuffed recliners and sofas that Tabitha was famous for. Janet melted into the chair as she started to relax for the first time in days. Her calm was short lived.
"Janet, we're really glad you came, really glad. I think I see the situation, and I just wish you had come sooner. But then again, it hasn't been a picnic up here either so don't beat yourself up about getting here at the last minute. No guarantee anyone would have been better off if you had."
"I guess most people would think we've had it easy here in Canton. If that's even half true, we're in the Last Days, because Canton has had it real bad. We organized a militia in the early days, but it's hard to keep organized when everyone keeps dying on you in their sleep. For now the zombie problem isn’t that bad. But we had three thousand people in this town, now we're down to three hundred, scattered all about, mostly by family.
This is it, Janet. This is everyone except a few second cousins who are over at the Woodwards."
For Janet, Canton was associated with family holidays. Twenty or thirty family members would drive in from all around the state and have BBQ and drink crappy beer and chat. This had been the rite and tradition of her family for as long as she could remember. Decades. Maybe longer. This house had held them all, time and again, since she was a child and Reagan was in his first term.
The fact that her family had been reduced so cruelly hit her far worse than Calvin, or even her own likely impending doom.
It all came out in tears and she was just gone, sobbing for twenty minutes. When she came to she was ready to be embarrassed, but nobody did much besides hand her a box of Kleenex.
She realized they'd done the same thing recently. They'd been through the same or worse. In fact... Vinny had three kids of his own who were not here. She was embarrassed, if only of her own selfishness. She had both her kids, at least for now. She looked sorrowfully into Vinny's eyes, and he seemed to take that for what it was and he gently nodded.
"So...," Gerald said. "I take it Calvin..."
"He won't be coming. He's at work."
"He's working still? I mean, hell, I know it ought to be a busy time in the life insurance industry, but…"
"He's trapped at work. Literally. He can't get out. I haven't talked to him since last night."
"Have you tried?"
"No."
"Want me to call him?"
"No."
Tabitha, always the master of the awkward subject change, broke in. "You're aware of your situation?"
"If you mean the fact that it's ninety to one odds that all three of us will survive the plague, yes, Aunt Tabitha, I am aware of the situation."
"The best way we've found to deal with this is to quarantine you. In the basement. No offense, Meghan, but we're going to quarantine you too."
"None taken," Meghan said.
"We've built some quarantine bunks. I doubt you will like them too much, but we'll be locking you in at night. It's for your safety."
"I understand. It's a lot like what I did last night," Janet said.
"It minimizes the chances of an unfortunate accident."
"I get it. I accept it. You don't have to justify it."
"Good. So, I don't need to tell you to stay away from the windows. The power is out, so we don't have to worry about the lights too much. We want to make this place seem like one of the many boring abandoned houses in the area. Killing them just attracts more. At this rate we should have the power to cook dinner here in a bit. Better enjoy it while you can–we're going to be out of fresh food by the end of the week."
"Wait, I thought you said the power was out."
"Oh it is. But you remember when Uncle Bob went on that green kick and installed those solar panels on the roof? Well, that has been an absolute Godsend. But it’s been cloudy the last couple of days so it can take a good four or five hours to save up enough extra charge to power the stove enough to cook. The power goes to keeping the fridge going. Fresh food and hot meals help keep people's mood up."
Meghan seemed perked up by the idea of some home cooking.
"Tabitha, do I want to ask what happened with the rest?"
"Oh darling, I'm sure you can imagine. You don't need to know the exact details, and I don't think you want to. It's so heartbreaking I certainly couldn't bear to be the one to tell you." She turned away. "I think I'll be taking it all to my grave."