Authors: Jeremy Laszlo
I can hear heavy footsteps moving as quickly as they can from the back of the truck, rushing across the street and putting as much distance as they possibly can between themselves and the truck. I peek out the hole in the driver’s side door and I can see the shadowy figures vanishing down the street, kicking up a trail of dust with each hurried step they take before they round the corner and vanish, barely escaping the brawl as a final shot rings out. There’s a loud pop, almost a boom, that startles me, but all I can do is stare at the corner of the building where the other two escaped. I pray that they’ve given up. I let out a slow, staggered breath. They’re gone.
Chapter Five
I have no clue what’s just happened on the passenger’s side of the truck. From what it sounds like, there’s been a massacre. My heart rate is shooting through the roof and the pounding is enough to keep me on the floorboards of the truck. My shaking hand steadies as I grip the Sig, waiting for the door to swing open again and whoever is left out there to come and finish us off. I heard three people die and I saw two run away. That means there’s another wildcard out there somewhere and I’m not brave enough to go looking for him just yet.
There’s a whimper from Lexi’s chest as my nephew slowly stops wailing and shrieking in the silent aftermath of the madness. I glance over my shoulder, listening to his heavy breathing as I search for any sign of the third survivor. Beyond the hole, there is nothing but pale light scattering across the ground as the sun pushes past dawn and climbs higher and higher into the sky. I feel a slight amount of increased terror as I listen for anything that might give away the location of the final fanatic, lurking among the carnage of the brief and bloody battle. I listen to my nephew’s renewed fury as he lets out a sharp wail of anger and frustration. It feels like he’s almost through the glass orb of sanity that has replaced my brain. I resist the urge to scream and make a run for it, my instincts driving me to do something for the baby to make it happy, knowing full well that it isn’t possible, or even my job.
Turning my gaze from the tiny peephole, I look at Lexi, who is fumbling helplessly to try and get her son to settle down. I look at her and feel an overwhelming amount of mercy and sympathy crashing into me as I do so. She’s struggling to grapple with the whole process of being a new mother, and I’m over here freaking out because my nephew’s cries are getting under my skin. I close my eyes and take a deep breath. I have to have faith in Noah and Greg. They are out there. They’ll deal with the remaining survivor, wherever he is.
But what if the other two come back? I wonder in sheer terror as I look at Lexi, barely seeing her and focusing beyond her at the problems that are now showering down upon me. What if they come back and they kill all of us? I try to remain positive, telling myself that Greg and Noah are out there and we’re all going to be fine. We just have to wait a few more minutes and Greg will open that door and I’ll feel a wave of relief wash over me as well. But there was a lot of gunfire exchanged. What if one of the bullets hit Greg? What if he’s bleeding out in his hiding spot because I’m too much of a coward to get up and out of the truck to go see if he’s okay? I shake it off. No. I can’t think like that.
“Lexi,” I hiss to her on the other side of the truck. “Wrap him up. He wants to be snuggled and held tightly. He’s used to being inside of you. He needs to feel that safety and warmth.”
Silently, Lexi tries as hard as she can to wrap her son as tightly as the Flash sweatshirt will allow. I watch her, nodding to myself that she’s doing exactly what I would do in the situation. Without my having to say a word, she softly bounces him in her arms as his eyes immediately snap closed and I let out a silent, sigh of relief before checking out the peek hole for a glimpse of that sneaky survivor. Of course, there’s the possibility that I didn’t see six people. Maybe there were five people out there all along and I just miscounted. That’s totally a possibility.
“Val?” I hear a voice shout and I feel my heart’s slightly slowing pace immediately pick up, and the pounding is strong enough that I’m certain that Lexi can hear it on the other side of the cab. “Lexi? Val? Are you two alright?” Greg’s voice shouts as clear as a bell through the air and I feel like my heart is a bird trying to rip out of my ribcage so that it can fly away. I smile and watch as Lexi turns around and shoots me an excited smile as well.
“Greg? We’re still in here,” I shout to him, trying not to be so loud that I alert the other two survivors to how many of us there are and where exactly we’re at.
I can hear his footsteps, heavy, delirious footsteps rushing from the sidewalk and across the street to get to us. He launches up onto the foot rest on the side of the truck and grabs the handlebar. The shadow of his head is cast across the dirty, murky window before I hear his fingers on the handle. The door swings open and bright, sickly light pours in and all of Greg is a shadow. I know that it’s him. His silhouette couldn’t hide from me even if he tried his hardest. In fact, everything from his height to the way that he carries his weight is evidence that this is the man that I know and love.
“You two okay?” he asks us in a heavy voice. He’s trying to catch his breath.
“We’re good,” Lexi shrugs and looks over her shoulder at me. “Thinking about opening a bed and breakfast, how about you, Val? I’m looking for a partner.”
“Prime location,” I joke.
“Okay, fine,” Greg shakes his head. “Get out of there. We need to move before they come back. Do you have any idea where they went?”
“Two went back to the intersection,” I report to him, wondering where they might have gone from there. I grip the steering wheel and hoist myself up onto the seat, looking out the window and jutting a finger where they’d vanished. “They took a right and they vanished.”
“Okay,” Greg nods.
“But there’s one more out there, I think,” I say while he helps Lexi out of the passenger’s side.
“There was seven?” he asks me as he waits for me to slide across the bench to where he’s holding out a hand to help me down. I take his hand and slip out into the sunlight, feeling the dry warmth in the air that bitterly fights for supremacy against the stagnant cold of the night. “I thought there were just the six of them.”
“There was six,” I say to him. “I counted three got shot.”
“Oh no, babe,” Greg says to me before pointing a finger over to where Noah is towering over a writhing, squirming fanatic who is bleeding from the mouth as he grips his side. He’s leaning against a mailbox, which I think is weird. Who sends that much mail anymore that it warrants so many mailboxes in this town? It’s like this town froze and died off a long time before the whole End of the World scenario was unleashed upon all of us. I look at the man with a dusty face and a bandana hanging around his neck. He’s not going to make it.
I take a step forward and feel something under my boot. I look down to see the dead man that lost his face in front of me, the first casualty of this entire encounter. I look at the man’s destroyed face, the only thing that I recognize is his nose dangling from a tiny shred of skin and his slack jaw. There are teeth all around his head like a broken strand of pearls. I cringe and step away from him as the rest of us approach the coughing fanatic.
He’s been shot in the stomach by a high-powered hunting rifle. He’ll be lucky if he lasts the next few minutes. His blood-soaked hand tries to cover the gaping wound in his stomach as he looks past all of us, gazing into the ether, as if he can see the afterlife dangling right in front of his eyes. I walk toward him and look at him while his head sways.
“How many more are there of you?” Noah jabs the barrel of Henry’s hunting rifle into the man’s cheek. The man bats his eyes at the sudden assault upon his face, but he simply turns his head and looks away from Noah. “How many more are there of you back at Tifton? Are there others coming?”
The man barely holding onto life is number four, the man I’d been afraid of since I saw the two true survivors rounding the corner and vanishing down the street. I look at this man and take in every detail that I can from him. His face is covered in ash and dust, making it hard to pick up on a lot of features at first, but I notice his fat, crooked nose, his squinty eyes, and his beefy brow. He’s one of the few people that I’ve seen outside of the four I’m with for the past year. It’s like looking at an alien. His hair hangs in tangles in front of his face and I see that he’s whispering something, some sort of final prayer as the light fades from his eyes.
“Come on,” Greg says to Noah. “Let’s get inside before they come back.”
I turn around and see the dead woman that I’d listened to putting up her last stand in the back of the truck. She’s dangling over the tailgate, an enormous hole nearly severing her head from her neck. There’s a pool of blood on the ground just beneath where her dangling head is tilted at an unnatural angle. She died fighting, I’ll give her that. My eyes shift from her dead body over to the white truck where it is sitting in the street, tilting forward. I furrow my brow and inspect the vehicle, finding the cause rather quickly. The front passenger tire has been deflated, murdered in the insanity that took place in the firefight. I guess that explains the loud pop or boom that startled me there at the end. Noah must have been trying to finish off the dying fanatic who is now passing into the afterlife, or whatever is waiting for a demented soul like his.
“I think he’s dead,” Lexi says softly, staring at the wounded zealot whose head is now hanging limp and lifeless. I look over at him, waiting to see if his chest rises or falls. After thirty seconds, I come to the same conclusion that my sister has so astutely discovered. He’s dead as the mailbox he’s leaning up against.
“What do we do now?” I ask somberly, completely unsure of where we are or what we need to do. I know that they all look to me to be the leader, but I’m a fish out of water now. It’s official and all the votes have been tallied up. I look at Greg, hoping that he has an answer.
“We need to fix the truck,” Greg says with a disappointed tone in his voice. I know exactly how he feels. Marko screams in the depths of my mind, crying out as those things rip off his face in our last vain attempt to fix this giant hunk of metal. I look at it, sitting silently, taunting and mocking all of us. No one here has a clue how to fix cars, but somehow we need to figure out how to fix the gas tank—if that’s all that’s broken with it. How are we even supposed to do that? It’s not like there are any trucks sitting around with gas tanks that we can just pluck off and switch out. God only knows how heavy those things are. Besides, we didn’t bring Marko’s tools with us when we came. What were we thinking? Why wouldn’t we bring Marko’s tools with us? Sure, we’ll probably be able to scrounge up some tools to try and get the trick done, but again, no one here knows anything about cars, except that they go vroom and take you from point A to point B.
“And how exactly do we do that?” Lexi asks, rocking my nephew softly.
“I have no clue,” Greg shakes his head. “I think they shot out the gas tank, so we’d need to patch it up or fix it somehow.”
“Again, how, exactly?” Lexi asks, not making things easy for him. I can see that Greg is getting frustrated. His cheeks flush with a rosy red color that make him look like he’s blushing. I can see the lightning crackling behind his eyes as he looks at the truck with a deep sense of hatred and annoyance, not just with it, but with everyone around him. Lifting my hand, I reach out and place it on his elbow. He silently looks at me and we exchange a look. His eyes are filled with tears, glistening in the pale, deathly light of the world around him.
“We’ll find something,” I tell all of them.
“Yeah,” Greg nods and shoots a glance over to Lexi, holding my nephew while she watches him with loving adoration. Greg looks at the baby in her arms and then glances back at the truck, almost as if he’s ashamed of looking at the baby, like it’s distracting him from where he needs to be focused. “But there’s nothing we can do right now,” he says. “We’re running on fumes. We need to hole up somewhere, keep an eye on the truck, and wait to see if those other two cowards show up to try and scavenge our supplies.”
“So what exactly do you suggest?” Lexi looks around.
“We should use the truck as bait,” Greg says calmly. “We can hole up in that town house and keep an eye on it, stay out of sight, and figure out what we’re going to do.” Greg looks up at the sun and I see the glitter of a sweat drop on his brow. “It’s getting hot. This whole planet has turned into a giant desert. We should try to keep moving at night.”
“Greg versus the wild,” Noah announces bitterly. “I’d pay to watch that show.”
“Can it,” Greg growls angrily. He reaches down and checks the machine gun slung over the faceless fanatic at the base of the truck. Figuring out how to withdraw the magazine, he sees that it’s full and slings it over his shoulder. The rest of us fan out while Noah keeps his rifle pointed at the intersection, waiting for our unwanted friends to return and try to take us by surprise. I’m sure if they were coming from anywhere, they’d pick one of the 359 other degrees around us to attack from, but I keep that to myself.
Pretty much all of the weapons are nearly empty. We take everything we’re going to need for ourselves from the dead. They’re not going to have a need for any of it now, and I don’t want the fanatics returning and claiming any of their gear. I feel the weight of the stress and exhaustion of the past fleeting hours hanging over me like a millstone. My mouth twists into a yawn as I watch Greg grabbing a handful of the woman’s shirt and pulling her over the tailgate. She hits the ground with a meaty splat and thump that makes me think of a pig’s carcass at a butcher shop. Her eyes are barely opened and I try to avoid looking at them, but I can’t help it.
Greg vanishes inside of the truck and returns with one of our bags. I watch him unzip the bag and look inside of it, checking to make sure that he has everything that we’re going to need. As he hands the bag to me, I take it happily and sling it over my shoulder, feeling the weight of it pressing against my back. Looking back at the truck as he passes me, I feel sad that we’re leaving our mechanical slow poke behind as bait for the fanatics to come back for. I walk behind Greg as we pick up Lexi and head for the town house. As for Noah, he’s too busy focusing on the intersection to bother with us. I almost want to remind him that he’s using Henry’s hunting rifle, but I decide not to. No reason to bring up that rotting piece of shit.