Authors: Jeremy Laszlo
“Let’s get out of here,” I tell Greg and he nods to me.
I’m not sure how long we’ve been driving, but as the hours pass, I think that we’ve reached Georgia. The fact that we’re leaving Florida behind makes me sad. I can’t help but think about Devon and Katrina. I wonder what they’re going to do now that it’s just the two of them having to keep up all the tasks and jobs with the beach house. Skye won’t be much for conversation, but she’s definitely going to pull her own weight. She’s always been strong like that. I’m going to miss her the most. She’s been our friend and companion through so much. I hope that whatever end she meets, it’s a good one. As the sun sets and Greg turns on the headlights, I feel like the sun is setting on our past year of safety and quiet. We’re heading into dark waters now. We’re driving into the abyss.
I spot a soiled sign saying that we’re approaching a town named Tifton. I feel a jump in my heart at a familiar sight. Over the name Tifton is a symbol that is identical to the one that my father drew on his maps. It’s a big, black cross painted over the sign. The sight of it makes me rethink my theory on it being the marker for those he knew that died along the way. It has to be a sign of sanctuary or a way of marking the maps to show friendly places. Some towns have X’s over them and Gainesville and Atlanta have these distinct black crosses. I allow myself the chance to smile, to feel hope kindling inside of my heart at the sight of it. We’re definitely someplace safe now and I slouch in my seat. It has to mean that the town is abandoned or free of killers. The cross is a religious symbol. It has to mean that we’ve found a refuge. A sanctuary.
“It’s so loud back here,” Noah complains as we all huddle into the back of the truck. “My ears have been ringing for like hours now.”
“No cushions whatsoever,” Lexi groans, sprawled out across one of the benches. “Your ass rattles to the bottom of everything. Doesn’t matter what you’re sitting on.”
“That’s a little much,” Henry says, trying to wedge his way back into the group. Lexi shoots him an angry glare. He looks back at his hands, pretending that he’s done talking and that was his plan all along. The ride for the day hasn’t made me hate Henry any more than I already do, so I suppose that is something. Maybe one day I’ll learn to hate him even less.
“Anyone hungry?” I ask, just to make sure. I feel like there’s a ton of sand sitting in my stomach and I’ve been fighting the urge to throw up the entire ride north. I look at Greg, who is snacking on a box of crackers the entire time. The man has more of an appetite now than he’s actually got food to eat. I look at him through the soft glow of the lantern, wondering if he’s aware of how gluttonous that seems under the current circumstances. No one makes a move other than Greg for food and I get the feeling that we’re all still stuffed.
“I’m exhausted,” Lexi says finally.
“Me too,” Noah yawns.
“Well, I think that everyone should try and fit into the cab of the truck, that way it’s easier if we need to make a hasty escape. I don’t want to have to get everyone out of the back and into the front in case of an emergency,” I say, taking up the leader role again. I’m still shaken up by the idea that wandering flesh-eaters are out there and there’s no telling what might lurk in the night. I shiver at the thought of it. This is our first night out in the wilderness. It makes me uncomfortable.
“I call the cab,” Lexi says, now yawning thanks to Noah.
“Me too,” Noah groans.
“I’ll take first watch,” I chime in.
“I’ll take the second watch,” Greg says bluntly. “Henry, you can be in the cab too.”
“You have to drive tomorrow,” I remind Greg firmly.
“No I don’t,” Greg smiles at the sound of my discomfort. “We have five people in our group who know how to drive. I’m sure Henry can be trusted behind the wheel tomorrow.”
“What? Hell no, you all get the back tomorrow,” Noah says with another yawn as he stands up and stretches. He makes hand gestures that he’s driving and I shake my head at him. “We get to sit up there in luxury.”
“Yeah, it’s real luxurious, pal,” Henry chuckles. “Alright, I’m hitting it. I’m exhausted.”
I watch as Henry, Noah, and Lexi all clamber out of the back of the truck, stumbling toward the front while Greg and I are left in the blue glow of the military grade lantern. I reach over and shut it off. The light will give us away if we keep it on in the night and in the darkness, I can barely make out the silhouette of Greg’s face. There isn’t a moon in the sky yet and there are no stars. It is a world of haunted, inky blackness and the whole situation makes my skin crawl. There’s nothing but the sound of howling wind and dust slithering across the parched earth.
“You okay?” Greg asks me.
I’m not sure how to answer it. How is anyone supposed to answer that kind of a question now? I think the true horror of this world is the simple fact that ‘okay’ has an entirely different meaning than it used to. Okay was the day where I went to class, came home to take a nap, hit the gym, got a late night bite with some friends, and called it a night after some homework. That’s okay, or it was what I used to define as okay. Now, I think the fact that I have food, that I’m with people I love and care about, and that I’m still alive definitely qualifies everything as okay. I don’t like that surviving is now the standard for being okay. Heck, we’ve got food so I think that qualifies us as better than okay. From the look of my father, the ability to have food is probably going to change as we continue on.
“I’m great,” I say to him, “all things considered.”
“Lexi and Noah seem to be doing better,” Greg says after a moment of tense silence, looking at the window that peeks into the cab. I’m not sure why he cares, but he’s got a point. This was one of the few nights where we didn’t have to listen to them fighting before they went to bed. “I guess that’s something,” he adds with a soft chuckle, more like a quiet guffaw.
“You should get some sleep,” I tell him softly, feeling for the hunting rifle that Henry brought. I feel my fingers on the varnished, glossy wooden stock and my fingers now reach to hold it properly. I know that Greg can’t see me. What little light there is isn’t shining on me, it’s washing over his dark features. I grip the rifle and look out the opening at the black mountains, everything differing shades of darkness.
“I’ll keep watch with you,” Greg offers.
“No,” I say to him firmly. “You have second watch. I need you to be rested for that.”
“Babe, come on,” Greg offers. “We could have some alone time, just the two of us.”
Alone time. There’s no such thing as alone time now. Every time we’re not with anyone else, it’s alone time. This entire world has dwindled to a handful of survivors and that’s about as alone as anyone can get. I don’t want to just be alone with him. I want to get to Dayton. I want to figure out what this thorn in my mind is all about and then we can tend to our relationship. Right now, being in love and having Greg next to me is a strong second place behind figuring out what’s so incredibly important in Dayton. I stand up and head for the back of the truck.
“Babe, seriously?” Greg says in a frustrated tone.
“Get some sleep,” I tell him kindly, not wanting to make him worry. “I’ll wake you up in a few hours.”
“Fine,” he grumbles, defeated in his hopes of copping a feel tonight.
My feet hit the dust and I’m continually surprised by how hard the earth is. Everything feels like it was made out of concrete here. There’s this crusty layer and then a small amount of dust before hitting the stone-like sublevel. At the beach house, everything was sand, just like it had always been. The long grasses had all withered away, but the sand still remained. There was comfort in that, but now it’s just the barren wasteland that I never dreamed of existing. I look at it with such disgust and such disappointment. How did we let it all come to this? How did everyone in the world not stop and try to figure this all out? Wouldn’t that have been the utmost priority?
I make quiet circles around the truck. We’ve pulled off the road to a house that has been burnt to the ground. The devastation to the house appears to have happened a long time ago, leaving just a few structural beams remaining. They stand like charred, blackened spikes spearing up out of the darkened foundation. There’s a massive tree in the yard, or what would have been a yard. The tree reaches up from a thick trunk toward the sky with the branches extending outward like fingers, clawing at the sky like talons. It’s almost as if the earth is reaching up toward the heavens, trying to grab God’s hand. But God never reached back. God never helped the tree. The earth withered and it died. I make my passes around the truck, making sure that I’m far away so the crunch of my footsteps don’t bother anyone and that I’m not walking too close to the truck.
When the moon rises, the distant mountains look like they’ve been lit on fire. At first, I thought that there was a wildfire or something strange happening on the far side of the mountains. A golden, fiery glow was swelling before I saw the first sliver of the pale moon, still keeping its vigil long after earth has died. I watch it rise into the air and smile at the familiarity of it. It’s the same moon that was there when I was a child, only now it has a perpetual orange tint to it from all of the smoke and dust in the air. I am surprised at how smoky everything is here. Maybe that’s just the world when you hit inland. In Florida, we had the ocean to puke up a rotten fishy smell, rather than the belching smoke stench.
I notice that the truck is moving on one of my passes, probably two hours into the watch. I look at it shaking softly and I can’t help but wonder if Lexi is having a night terror. I know that she used to get them badly when we were children, but not recently. She was always a violent sleeper. Her ex-boyfriends always used to comment on that conspiratorially to me at parties. “Hey, did you ever notice how your sister sort of thrashes in her sleep? She’s giving me bruises.” Then they’d show me their bruises and I’d laugh at them. As I slowly walk toward the truck, I wonder how Noah and Henry are doing, holding up to that. I would find it absolutely annoying and smack her. I remember when she’d have night terrors in the middle of the night, I’d grab my pillow and smack her in the face with it before our father burst into the room, wrapping her up as she cried and sobbed about the bad nightmare she was having. My father was always far more tolerant with Lexi than I was. Sleep was abundantly valuable to me as a child.
As I approach the truck, I look at the moon, seeing that my shadow is stretching out behind me. Good, I don’t want my shadow on the window, freaking everyone out if they’re awake. I pause for a moment before I look in through the window. Noah and Lexi could be having sex. It’s not uncommon for us lonely survivors to express ourselves physically with one another. When there’s nothing to do for vast amounts of time, having sex usually tends to help pass the time. I’m not sure I want to peek in through the window and see Noah sticking it to my sister while Henry snores softly next to them. I shudder at the thought of it, but decide that it’s worth a look anyways.
Pushing myself up over on the step, I grab the grip bar next to the door and haul myself up to look in through the passenger’s window. Looking in through the dust-caked window, I expect to see Lexi and Noah having sex or at least Lexi thrashing around, but what I find is worse. Staring in through the window I feel the blood pounding through my veins, freezing into shards of glass as I catch my breath in my throat and my face twists to a grimace.
I watch as Noah sleeps peacefully behind the wheel, his head leaning up against the window, oblivious to what’s happening right next to him. As he sleeps peacefully, Lexi’s head is leaning on his shoulder as she’s slanted over diagonally while Henry is right in front of me. Henry is the only one awake right now and I watch as he lifts up my sister’s sweatpants, looking at her with his hand down his pants, jerking off to the sight of my sister’s vagina. I feel repulsed. I feel like there are ants crawling all over my skin. I want to scream. I want to cry out and throw up. I look at him, defiling my sister and all I want to do is freak out and end him. I want to end him. He needs to be put down.
Red flashes over my eyes and all I can think of is the scarlet blood leaking out of my father’s stomach as he lies out on the dining room table. I can see the color draining from his cheeks and the life from his eyes. I remember hearing the bullet rip through the air and wincing at the sound of it. I look at the back of Henry’s head as he’s pleasuring himself to the sight of my sister while he peeks under her pants, and I picture his eye, staring through a hole in the wall at Greg and me making love to each other. I picture him stroking himself while I moan and gasp in absolute, unfathomable pleasure. My lips twist into a snarl and I feel my fingers wrapping around the handle and pulling it open, ripping the door wide open.
Henry slips and lets out a small cry as he catches himself before falling back. The elastic band of my sister’s sweatpants snap against her waist as Henry loses his grip and tries to stabilize himself. Lexi flinches awake, but I could care less about her. I wrap my fingers around Henry’s collar and hurl him out of the cab of the truck. He lands on his upper back with a loud smack, and dust plumes shoot up all around his face as he rolls over his head and lies flat on his stomach in the dirt, coughing and choking against the dust. I lift my boot and bring it down on his head in a quick kick, my heel grinding against his scalp. I feel Greg’s hands on my shoulders, pulling me away as I scream at him. I don’t shout any words, I just scream, loud and full of fury at him.
“You son of a bitch!” Noah shouts, charging around the front of the truck, and dives onto Henry, pummeling him as hard as he can. I look at Noah, a scrawny gamer trying to beat the life out of a grown man.
“What happened?” Greg shouts as I try to get away from him, refusing to let Noah have all the fun at beating that little turd to death. “Val, talk to me, damn it!”
“He was pulling open my pants,” Lexi shrieks from the cab, “and he was masturbating to me. The fucker was jerking off to me.”
“Are you serious?” Greg’s grip loosens and I look over my shoulder at him. Even in the pale light of the orange moon, I can see the features on Greg’s face twisting and contorting into an unbridled mask of rage and hatred. “That fucker’s dead. He’s so fucking dead.”
Greg gives Noah a shove off of Henry and clamps his strong hands down on Henry’s shoulders, hoisting him up and throwing him at the side of the truck. The thud of Henry’s skull smacking against the metal side of the truck is sickening and satisfying. I watch as he slides down into the dirt, groaning and choking, grumbling as he tries to plead for his life. Grabbing his shoulder and spinning him around, Greg punches Henry again and again in the face, breaking his nose like a twig and letting the blood flow, covering his entire face. Greg’s face is twisted into a snarling mask of wrath. He lets out a sharp scream, probably breaking his hand, and pulls away from Henry’s bloody, beaten face. Henry slumps into the dust and shivers in shock and suffering agony.
Lifting up his hand, I can see that it’s completely painted in Henry’s blood, but it’s also got something sticking out of one of his knuckles. I flinch at the sight of it. It’s one of Henry’s teeth. He flinches and waves his hand as I look at what’s left of Henry. While Greg backs away, I stare at his ruined face before it slumps forward. That’s when Noah starts kicking him.