Here We Stand (Book 2): Divided (Surviving The Evacuation) (15 page)

“Escape. You have to get out of here,” he told himself. Pausing only to grab the rifle from the dead guard and take the ammunition from his webbing, he ran back to the truck. It started, though with a rattle. He drove away.

Chapter 14 - Outrunning Death

Location Unknown

He had to get away. The speedometer hit twenty. Thirty. He had to get away. The truck bounced over ruts, slewed through puddles, and churned up mud. Forty. Fifty. He had no destination in mind, just a need to outrun the lethal particles that, even now, were settling back to ground around the impact site. Fifty-five miles an hour, and the track widened, the trees thinned. He could see the edge of a pasture ahead, and beyond it the silent chimneys of something industrial. Was it the place where he’d been held prisoner? No. There were twelve stacks clustered in two groups, each with red and blue stripes painted near the top. Sixty, but no speed could be fast enough. Sixty-five. The wheels hit mud. The vehicle spun, tipped, and he thought it was going to roll. It didn’t, but he eased off on the gas.

Addison. He should have searched his corpse. There might have been a clue as to the location of the mine. Perhaps an explanation as to how the outbreak began. He doubted that. The man knew nothing. What Tom really wanted was an explanation as to why Addison, a man he’d thought of as brusque but decent, opinionated but well-meaning, arrogant but dutiful, had turned on his friend and his nation.

“You’re not going to find it. Not now, not ever. Some questions don’t get answered.” But as he said the words, he realized the truth lay in the man’s actions. It was power, pure and simple. The same force that had driven Farley until fear of imminent death had made him recant. No more explanation than that was needed. And he realized how true that was. A smile formed on his lips. It wasn’t an expression of joy, but of satisfaction. The cabal was dead. The conspiracy was destroyed. From the moment Farley had washed his hands of it, they’d acted in desperation and haste. Addison had been recruited to take the blame. When he’d realized that he was destined to be the fall guy, he’d hatched his own plans. It was over.

“Addison’s dead.” He hunched over the wheel, focusing on the track, turning his head this way and that as he tried to dispel the image of the man’s corpse. The conspiracy was far from the most important thing in his world. The shockwave that had knocked him from his feet hadn’t accompanied a flash, and he’d seen no other mushroom cloud. Perhaps it was an earthquake, or a secondary explosion, or the result of conventional ordnance.

“Or it could have been an asteroid. You don’t know. You can’t guess.” The real question, then, was what the target was. The facility where he’d been held captive? He wasn’t sure. That mushroom cloud might have been squatting over it. Without knowing how fast they’d been driving, he couldn’t be sure. He couldn’t even be sure how long it was after they’d left the prison before the bomb fell. What other target could there be? And then, that second explosion could have been the mine being destroyed. It had to be. His smile grew, but only until he remembered that Max was dead, and though the cabal hadn’t won, the mushroom cloud meant the whole world had lost.

A deer ran across the track. Blood ran down its flanks from an arrow protruding out of its haunch. He swerved and stopped, watching it bound away into the trees. An arrow meant a hunter. He opened the door.

“Hello!” he called. Someone was in the woods. Someone trying to fill the pot for a desperate family.

“Hello!” he called again. There was no answer. He wanted to search for them, but knew he couldn’t. There wasn’t time. “No. No time for sorrow. No time for regret.”

Yet it took a real effort to drive away. He kept his eyes open, hoping against hope he might see a figure run out onto the track. When it met a two-lane road, and he’d seen no one, he abandoned that hope.

A mile after he joined the road, he finally saw people. A group stood by a stalled car. One of them raised her arms in a wave.

“No uniforms,” he said, slowing. After all he’d been through, he knew it could still be dangerous, but he didn’t care. Another was waving now. People. It was like cold water on a hot day. Then the others raised their arms, and he realized they weren’t waving. They were undead. The zombies lurched out into the road, staggering toward him. Frustrated anger bubbled over as he slammed his foot on the gas, driving straight at the creatures. At the last minute, he swerved, clipping the grasping hand of the nearest zombie. It went spinning, but he didn’t look back to see it fall. Eyes fixed on the road ahead, he drove.

Zombies. Nuclear war. A conspiracy that had destroyed any chance of a recovery. It was all too much to take in.

“So break it down,” he said, speaking out loud to push despair away. “There was one cloud. There might be more, there might not. It might just have been the cabal that was targeted. No. Forget the guesses. Focus on what you know.”

What did he know? He’d tried to stop the world tearing itself apart and had given little thought to what would happen next. The mushroom cloud was formed of radioactive debris dragged up from the impact site. The length of time it took for it to settle depended on weather and wind, but if you couldn’t escape the fallout, you should shelter for at least three days.

“Fallout.” He brought the truck to a screeching halt. He had to get upwind of the cloud. He’d been driving away from it, but had he been traveling in the wrong direction?

He looked for trees, but the only ones he could see were bare of leaves. He stepped outside, turning his face this way and that, trying to feel the wind. He ran to the roadside and tugged out a handful of grass. When he threw it in the air, it scattered in every direction. He grabbed another clod, a third, a fourth, ripping the grass from the ground until his hands were covered in dirt. A sob escaped his lips, echoed by a rasping sigh from the other side of the road. A zombie limped across the asphalt. One foot still wore an expensive hiking boot, the other trailed a sodden sock. He pulled the .45 from his pocket. Aimed. Fired. The zombie crumpled.

“Stop. Think. Smoke. Wind. Fire, that’s it. Matches. I need matches.”

The vehicle had been stripped of almost anything of use, but in a half-empty toolbox he found two road flares. He sparked one, threw it out into the middle of the road, and watched the smoke billow up and then toward him. The bottom dropped out of his world. The smoke changed direction, drifting back the way he’d come. He watched it, not even daring to breathe, expecting it to change direction again. It didn’t.

Minutes passed.

“Take it,” he finally said. “It’s the only reassurance you’re going to get.” What he needed was a Geiger counter. What he needed was to get somewhere safe. He didn’t know where that was, except it wasn’t here on this lonely road. He got back in the truck and started the engine.

“Three quarters of a tank,” he said. “Okay. Good. So where to?” He stopped himself from answering the question, at least aloud. Talking to himself was one thing, questioning himself was something else.

“Start with where you are.”

It took five miles before he was sure he was heading north.

“And in an electronics-free truck retrofitted to survive an EMP.” He found he was laughing again, and knew it was hysteria, but he didn’t try to stop. He’d survived. He’d been barely twelve hours ahead of Powell in New York, but he’d escaped. He’d been captured by Addison and escaped again. He’d escaped being framed for murder, being trapped by the undead, and now he’d escaped a nuclear bomb. If there was a winner in this horrific apocalypse, it was him. The laughter abruptly died as he realized that there wouldn’t be just one bomb. There could be another just a few miles ahead. There could be thousands, and nowhere on the planet would be safe.

“And there’s nothing you can do about it. You’re alive. Alive and free. Free.” He repeated the word. It was true. Ever since he’d watched his family home burn to the ground, he’d been on the run, living in the shadows. Now his life, however much of it was left, was finally his own.

Chapter 15 - Unlucky Survivor

New York & Vermont

After five more miles, he saw a sign for the interstate, and it was wrong. It was for the I-87. He was in northern New York, not far from the border with Vermont. He’d thought he’d been held captive somewhere near Dr Ayers’s home and the motel where he’d confronted Powell.

“The sign’s right. You’re wrong. Live with it.” Certainly there was no mistaking the next sign pointing to Plattsburgh and the Canadian border. That brought him to the question of where he was heading. There was only one answer to that. East to his cottage. There were no military installations near the village of Crossfields Landing, and no other obvious targets. Get to the cottage, get to the boat, get out to sea. Could he get to Maine? The fuel gauge read three-quarters full. He let himself breathe out with relief. He might make it.

Avoiding the interstate, he stayed on the smaller county road. He wasn’t the only one. Cars, trucks, vans, even a limo, were parked, abandoned, or had crashed. As he passed, he kept the speed low, his eyes watching for movement, for people stranded by an EMP, or simply lack of fuel. He was more than willing to give someone a ride. He was eager, not just for company, but to know that he wasn’t the last person alive. But the few shambling figures he saw wore the ravaged features of the undead.

The stalled traffic grew worse, lining both sides of the road, reducing it to one lane, then to less than that. Metal scraped against the side of the truck as he forced his way past one car after another. The shambling figures drew closer as he was forced to slow. Hands and fists beat against the bodywork, and the road ahead filled with those twisted mockeries of humanity. Finally, he was forced to give up, reverse, and go back.

It took another half hour before he was on a clear road, heading toward the Lake Champlain Bridge and the border with Vermont. Frustration added to growing uncertainty of what he would find at journey’s end. His only comfort was the fuel gauge.

“Three quarters of a tank. Should be enough.” Something was wrong. “Three quarters?”

After he’d crossed the bridge and entered Vermont, he was sure. The needle on the fuel gauge was stuck.

The truck ground to a halt twenty minutes later. There were no cars in sight, no buildings, or even a distant trace of smoke from a welcoming fire. A light dusting of snow covered the ground. It was barely deeper than a heavy frost, but it hadn’t melted. All he had for protection was the cheap suit Addison had provided. It didn’t take him long to make an inventory of everything else in the truck. One road flare, the .45, the rifle, a half-filled canteen, and two candy bars that only brought on a sudden wave of hunger. He ate them both and didn’t feel satisfied. He wasn’t going to survive a night outside, though from the position of the sun, that was still some hours off.

“No point putting it off.”

Yet he hesitated. He knew he couldn’t linger, but he felt he was missing something.

In the bag in which he’d found the .45 was a cheap paperback. He stared at the front cover on which a cowboy rode across purple sage toward a distant homestead. He wondered at the nature of the assassin who’d thought it as much a necessity as the gun, before tearing out the blank page from the back. He wrote a short note:

“This vehicle might be contaminated by radioactive particles. It was close to the location where a bomb was dropped. It was south of here. I’m not sure where.”

He hesitated, uncertain why he was leaving a message, and finally decided that it wasn’t for anyone who might come this way, but for himself.

“It survived the EMP, so if you have a Geiger counter to check it’s safe, and fuel to put in the tank, it should work. Good luck. Stay safe.” After another, brief hesitation, he signed it
Sholto
.

It was a name he rarely used, a pseudonym that was more of a private joke than a secret identity. More thought had gone into its selection than the name he most commonly used. Tom Clemens had been chosen simply because he’d read a lot of Mark Twain during his first few years in America. Sholto was different. Within it was a message the recipient had failed to understand. Now, here, it became something else.

“A new name, for a new world, for however long I survive in it.”

He left the note on the passenger seat and opened the door. The cold hit him like a wall. It almost made him retreat back inside. He slung the rifle, slammed the door closed, thrust his hands into his pocket, and forced himself to walk.

His head bowed forward as the residual warmth ebbed from his body. After what felt like an age, he finally allowed himself to look around. The truck was still in view. He’d only managed a few hundred yards. Forcing one foot in front of the other, he trudged on.

As it often had during his captivity, his mind turned to Britain. Had it survived the bombs? Had London? Had Bill? There was no way to answer that. Instead, he flicked his eyes left and right, looking for buildings, for cars, for anywhere that might offer shelter. Occasionally he heard noises that might have been nothing, or which might have been the undead, but he saw none. Nor did he see any cars, abandoned or moving. At first he thought that was strange, then he wondered if he was already dead, walking some twilight path in the realm between life and death. His numb brain toyed with the idea until the empty fields became a desert; the cracks on the road became carved intentions.

“Remote,” he growled, realizing he was slowly freezing to death. The rest of the words wouldn’t form, but that was the real answer. This was a place people from the cities would have fled to, not one from which the locals would escape. He knew that might be wrong, but he had to focus on reality, lest his fantasy became true.

The sun was lost behind a thick bank of dark blue clouds, so he wasn’t sure how close it was to nightfall when he saw the farmhouse. The building wasn’t immediately ahead of him, but just visible beyond an unplowed field. Behind it were other rooftops, but he couldn’t tell if they were barns and outbuildings, or the beginnings of a town. There was no smoke, no lights, no sound other than his stuttering breath. The temperature was plummeting. He had to take shelter, and trust to the kindness of strangers. Even as he thought the words, his hand came out of his pocket to tug on the rifle’s strap. The cold wind biting into cracked skin made him aware of the gesture, and of what his instinct was telling him. Trust wasn’t the right word. Hope for kindness. Expect the opposite.

The field’s uneven ground slowed him. His feet felt like leaden weights. Before he was halfway across, he knew he wouldn’t be able to pick up his pace. The farmhouse was where he would stop regardless of what he found there. Three-quarters of the way across the field, he heard an irregular banging. Someone fixing the fence that seemed to get no closer? He couldn’t see anyone, and, of course, no one would bother with routine chores at times like these. Chopping wood? Perhaps, but the sound didn’t seem right.

He reached the low fence separating the yard from the fields. The sound was still there, but there was no sign of people. He opened his mouth to shout a greeting, but all that came out was a shallow plume of vapor. It took him three tries to climb the fence, and he almost lost his footing as he clambered over. The sound was louder, and he recognized what it was, and realized he should have known long before. With frozen fingers he fumbled the rifle off his shoulder. His vision blurred as he raised the weapon, scanning for the zombies he knew were nearby. Dreading the coming confrontation, he crossed the yard, nearly slipping on the icy concrete. The sound grew louder. He turned the corner and saw them. Six zombies beat their fists against the door and walls at the front of the house. He watched, his brain slow to process the scene. Their hands left dirty stains against the winter-worn paint as they tried to reach through the walls. Were they farmers? Locals? They were dressed casually, but only one wore a jacket. The others were in shirtsleeves. On the arm of the nearest, a bloody bandage unraveled with each downward swing. Frozen neurons sparked. The zombies were trying to get into the house. There were people inside.

“Hoy!” he croaked. It was barely a word, and it came out weak, inaudible against the undead’s pummeling racket. Rage blossomed, sending a last reserve of furious heat through his numb limbs.

“Hey! Hey you!” It was barely loud enough to carry across the yard, but it was loud enough. The bandaged zombie turned its head.

“Yeah,” he murmured. “That’s right.” He aimed. Fired. The shot missed, but the sound carried. Almost as one, the other five turned away from the house, and toward him.

He fired again. The bandaged zombie fell backward as its brains sprayed over the creatures behind. The zombie in the quilted jacket stumbled into the body, falling to the ground, but that still left four, and they moved as if they were heedless of the cold. He shifted aim.

“Haven’t you heard?” He fired. A zombie fell. “The cabal’s dead. It’s over. You can stop.”

But they didn’t stop. The three creatures staggered closer. Tom tried to take a step backward, but his legs wouldn’t move. He fired. A zombie in a red flannel shirt collapsed. He shifted aim, fired, missed. He could see mud and blood and worse clotted inside those gaping maws. He fired, not aiming now, just emptying the magazine into the hideous creatures. More by luck than aim, one of the shots slammed into the brain before the rifle clicked empty. He dropped the weapon, fumbling for the .45, but his fingers wouldn’t work. He couldn’t get it free.

“Down!” a voice called. “Drop. Get down!”

He let himself collapse. It wasn’t hard. There was a booming roar. The zombie fell. Tom rolled across the icy yard away from the creature. He pushed himself to his knees. An old woman stood in the doorway to the house, a shotgun in her arms.

“You okay?” she called.

Tom forced himself up. “Yeah. Yeah, I think so.”

“You’re alive. I didn’t think any—”

Before Tom could warn her, before he could draw his pistol, the zombie in the quilted jacket reared up from the ground and clamped its mouth on her leg. The woman screamed, firing the shotgun at point blank range. The slug took the zombie in the back, but the creature didn’t stop. Tom stumbled over to her and dragged the zombie off. Its left arm was limp, its legs didn’t work, but its right hand reached for him. He dragged the pistol out and fired into its skull.

“She killed me,” the woman said, staring at her bloody leg. “Louise killed me.”

“Inside,” Tom said, pushing the woman back through the open door. The warmth of the interior was like a blow.

“She killed me,” the woman said again.

“Bleach,” Tom said, leaning against the wall. “Clean the wound.” The words came out stilted.

“There’s no point,” the woman said, limping away from him, down a short hallway, and into the kitchen. It was lit by the flickering glow of a wood-burning stove and candles that gave off a heady floral scent. The windows were covered with thick blankets.

Tom dropped the .45 on the countertop and pulled himself over to the sink. He opened the cupboard underneath and found a bottle of disinfectant.

“It won’t work,” the woman said. “We tried it on Fred.”

“We’ve got to try,” Tom said. He pushed himself back to his feet, and saw stars. He had to grab the counter just to keep his feet. “Got to try,” he said again.

The woman gasped as he doused the wound with the bleach, but she didn’t protest. There had to be something else he could do, something more scientific, but his strength was now completely gone. Dropping the bottle, he collapsed into a chair, next to the woman.

“You should get your gun,” the woman said, gesturing to the counter, eight feet away. “I’m going to turn. It always happens.”

Tom nodded, but didn’t move. The woman stood, limped over to the pistol, and put on the kitchen table, next to his hand.

“Where did you come from?” she asked.

“South,” he said. “Pennsylvania. I saw a mushroom cloud. Felt the shockwave of another bomb. Or I thought it was Pennsylvania. It might have been New York. I’m not sure.”

“Nuclear bombs?” The woman limped over to the stove and moved a kettle onto the plate. She sat down again. “The power went out this morning. Fred said they’d try using bombs on the zombies. I said it was madness.”

“I don’t think they were using it on the zombies,” Tom said. Though, of course, he had no way of knowing that. Perhaps someone had. “I guess it doesn’t really matter. You didn’t see any mushroom clouds here. No bright lights?”

“Nope. Just the power going out.”

She looked down at her leg. Tom did the same. Something in her words slowly fed a thought that blossomed into a question. “You’re on the electrical grid, here?” he asked.

“Fred’s place is,” she said. “That’s five miles west of here. I’ve got a generator. Took all the fuel to his place. All the food, too. Abigail Benford,” she said. “My name. What’s yours?”

“Tom Clemens,” he replied automatically. “Except it’s not. My mother called me Thaddeus.”

“Oh yes? And what do your friends call you?” she asked.

That was a hard question to answer. “I don’t know if I have any left,” he said. “But if I do, I guess he’d call me Sholto.”

“That’s worse than Thaddeus,” she said. Her eyes went back to her leg, and then to a clock on the wall. It had stopped. “Took Fred an hour to turn. Took Louise only a minute.”