Family Reunion "J" (13 page)

“Look Auddy, we don’t know what this means. This isn’t like the movies. As long as we can keep the wound from getting infected, he should be okay.” He said all this with conviction, but she could tell that he wasn’t so sure.

Danny had a few other scratches, but none of them had broken the skin. Auddy replayed all the stories she had ever seen or heard in which a zombie bit someone. The results were always the same, and those results were not good.

Doug continued to try to reassure her that these people weren’t zombies—they were just people who were sick and had gone crazy. He did a passable job sewing up the gash on Danny’s head once they got it to quit bleeding so much. Danny hadn’t come to during the whole thing, and that was probably a good thing.

Where Danny was short and athletic, Doug was tall and pudgy. Danny was cute, Doug was okay looking. He had curly brown hair and a scraggly beard. Auddy marveled at how Danny could be jealous of Doug. Doug didn’t even register as competition in her mind.

She sat there holding Danny’s hand as Doug told her what he knew about the current situation.

“The reports we saw on TV were that the vaccine was a great success. They touted the doctor who invented it as a great hero. The first week it was distributed, it seemed to be stopping the virus in its tracks.” Doug showed her a newspaper clipping from the previous Sunday’s paper. It showed the president and the Secretary of Health and Human Services standing under a banner proclaiming
WE WON.

Auddy was not into watching the news and hadn’t been following the whole flu epidemic closely. She worked, came home, watched her favorite shows, and hung out with Danny. They had been living together for only a week and were still adjusting to that. The world outside would still be there once they got their footing. Or so she had thought.

Doug said that his dad had been to a militia meeting on Thursday that seemed to have upset him. He came back to the store that afternoon and told Doug to close up shop three hours early. They sent the employees home and his dad sat him down and told him that the shit was about to hit the fan. That the vaccine was being pulled and that there were reports of people who had taken the stuff going nuts.

They put all the guns and ammunition in the safes and Doug took out the garbage. He came back in and went to check to make sure the video cameras were working and that there was enough space on the hard drive to capture the data for a few days. What he described next was hard to believe.

“Dad came to the door of the office and told me to lock the door and stay there until he told me it was safe to come out. He left for a minute and I watched him on the cameras. He went out and started the truck, then came back in, and then he started acting weird. The video doesn’t have sound but I could tell he was yelling at the cameras. I went and opened the door and he started screaming at me to get away, to go back inside the office and lock the door. So I did.”

He showed Auddy the video of his dad wandering the halls, becoming more and more violent and agitated. One camera was pointing at Charlie when he looked straight into it, his face contorted, his skin gray, his eyes clouded and wild. She looked away when Charlie’s jaw unhinged and he threw his head back in what must have been the shrieking she had come to know. She left the office and went back to Danny. She sat beside him, laid her head on his arm, and prayed.

The adrenaline dissipating made it more difficult to ignore the pain in her arm. She drove as far as she could away from the mouth of the tunnel before stopping. She barely got the kickstand down before rolling off the bike and onto the ground. Her first fear was whether the bite would cause her to turn into one of the crazies. The second but almost as important was whether her arm was broken. Harley-Davidson had thoughtfully provided cruise control for this tricked-out touring bike, but just holding on to the handlebars would be impossible with a broken arm.

It took an agonizing few minutes for her to work the leather jacket off. When she finally got a look at the arm, she almost fainted with relief. The leather jacket had stopped the crazy’s teeth from penetrating the skin, but the arm was already turning colors. Gingerly, she felt down the two bones in her forearm. It hurt like a bitch, but she couldn’t feel an obvious break. She dug through the saddlebag, finding the eight-hundred-milligram ibuprofen she threw in while packing. She took two and washed them down with water.

She managed to get the helmet off one-handed and used it as a headrest. She lay there wondering if she could make it. She
had
to make it. She had to get to Auddy. She kept waiting for the crazies to come running out of the tunnel. When they didn’t, it solidified her belief that they must only come outside at night.

After about thirty minutes, the ibuprofen eased the pain in her arm to a dull ache. She got up and sat on the motorcycle to see if she would be able to keep it upright. It hurt, but not so badly that she couldn’t ride. She hadn’t packed any other first-aid supplies other than the ibuprofen; an Ace bandage would’ve come in handy.

Jay shrugged the jacket back on and noticed that the arm had swollen quite a bit. She struggled to get the helmet’s chinstrap fastened and realized that the arm was going to slow her down significantly.
Oh well, nothing I can do about that right now.
She debated checking the northbound tunnel, but just as quickly ruled it out.
No more tunnels for this chick.

Once she got the bike rolling and the cruise control set at twenty-five miles an hour, she drove back to the Route 52 exit and followed it west. Eight miles later, she came to Bluefield, a town of about ten thousand. She drove the main drag until she spotted what she was looking for. An unassuming drugstore sat just off the road; there were a couple of cars parked in the lot.

Jay pulled in and got off the bike. The lights were not on and no one was visible. It didn’t look like it had been looted. There were things inside that she could use. She walked up and looked in the window. Nothing moved inside that she could see. She tried the door, which was locked. She knocked on the glass, first tentatively, then more insistently until she was banging the glass door, shaking it. Nothing! “Huh,” she said out loud. She walked around the building, hoping to find another door.

She found one. It was locked too, but above the door was an old-fashioned window. It swung on hinges hooked to the top of the window frame, and it was open. She rolled the nearby dumpster over to the door and pushed it up against the building. She stood on it and examined the window. The mechanism that opened and closed the window had two gears that connected to a bar of some kind that must accommodate someone being able to operate the window from the floor on the inside. She tried turning the gears with her fingers, but they were too tight. She gave a halfhearted tug on the window. The bar came off the gears, and the window swung freely.

She pulled herself up into the space and looked around. The room was dimly lit. The front windows provided enough light that she could see all the aisles in the front. What she couldn’t see was the pharmacy. Jay wiggled her way through the window. There was nothing to hold on to, so she let her body hang down toward the floor. At the end of the process, she was hanging by her toes. She tilted her head and saw that she was still a few feet from the floor. She held her hands up over her head and pulled her feet free. Instead of the graceful fall that she had pictured in her mind, her right arm couldn’t hold her and she landed on her head. The clumsy acrobatic move didn’t knock her out, but her right arm screamed in protest and her eyes had a hard time focusing. She scrambled to a sitting position with her back against the door and tried to catch her breath.

Jay sat there listening; the only thing she could hear was the pounding of her heart and her labored breathing. She felt for and found the Glock. Pulling it from its holster, she cradled it in her lap. The darkness closed in around the edge of her vision.
No! I cannot not pass out now.
She refocused and tried to slow her heart rate. After a few minutes, she slid across the floor to the front of the store. She found the aisle that she was looking for. Locating the Ace bandages, she stuffed one into her pocket.

What the hell, I’m here; might as well make this worth the trip.
She poked her head up over the pharmacist’s counter. There were no iffy smells, no blood splatter on the wall. She risked standing up and swung the Glock around looking for a target. Seeing nothing, she holstered the weapon, climbed up on the counter, and flipped her legs over the other side. Grabbing the garbage bag in the trash can, she dumped the Arby’s cup and wrapper out on the floor. Turning the bag inside out, she started looking for the “sin and lin” drugs. Anything ending in
-cin
or
-lin
was swept into the bag—ciprofloxacin, azithromycin, penicillin, amoxicillin. She moved over to where the painkillers were. Anything ending in
-done
went into the bag.

Rather than climb over the counter, she opted for the door leading back into the store proper. She went to the front door, flipped the lock, and stepped out into the afternoon heat. She didn’t look back as she sped away. A couple of oxycodone and a bottle of water and she felt like she could ride all night. She hummed as she throttled up the big bike:
I am a cowboy, on a steel horse I ride…

By the time she reached the summit of the mountain over the East River Tunnel, she was about out of gas. The motorcycle’s tank was fine; she’d filled up in Elkview. Her tank, on the other hand, was about empty. The ruins of the once-grand summit center, abandoned in the 1950s, would have to do for the night. It had partially burned at some point in the past. She managed to get the bike into a room that still had four walls and a door. She collapsed on the floor, exhausted. She cleaned her face using one of her few shirts, then leaned against the wall and fell asleep.

Her first thought was that she must be in hell. Every bone and muscle in her body ached. She dared to open her eyes. The sun filtered in from a large hole in the roof of the room she had chosen to crash in. She remembered her find from the day before and immediately sought out relief. It took her a few minutes, but she located the bag of drugs she had pulled from the pharmacy. She rustled around in it until she found what she was looking for. Jay gobbled down two more of the oxycodone pills and drained a bottle of water. She lay there until the drug did its thing, then forced herself to eat a bacon sandwich and a couple of bags of Ted’s chips. Before doing anything more, she dug back into the bag and found her toothbrush and paste. She might not be able to shower, but this was the next best thing. After vigorously brushing her teeth for several minutes, she rinsed her mouth and spat. Oh, hell yes.

She figured she’d only gone a hundred and fifty miles or so since leaving Elkview.
At this rate it will take me a week to get there.
The bike weighed a ton and a half, or so it seemed this morning. She pushed it out of her little room. The road waited.

When Auddy left the office and went back to sit with Danny, Doug thought about her, and whether she was buying his story. He replayed their conversation and came to the conclusion that she was.