Authors: Jeremy Laszlo
I look forward at Greg who is using his injured, numb right foot to drive awkwardly on the roads that I’m feeding to him. “Are you alright to drive?” I ask him, concerned that he’s going to slip or crash us into something and we’ll all end up dead. He looks over his shoulder at me and smiles sweetly at me. I’m not sure why, but I’m too tired to ask.
“You’re always looking out for me,” he says, letting me know anyways. I smile at that. Someone has to take care of him. “I’m fine. It’s like driving with a wooden leg. I’m getting the hang of it.” I think that sounds absolutely terrifying, but so long as he’s good with it and can manage, I’m going to put it out of my mind.
I look over at Lexi who is grabbing Charlie and pulling him out of his little homemade basinet and cradling him gently against her. He’s hungry and starting to wake up again. I’m surprised at how much he’s eating. He’s going to have a growth spurt soon if he keeps eating like this. I smile at the thought of little Charlie alive at wherever Jason’s Fortress of Solitude is, growing up in the safety of the protection he can hopefully provide. All of it will be worth it if we can just get Charlie somewhere safe. All that matters is Charlie.
Chapter Eight
I’m surprised to wake up at all. I don’t remember falling asleep, but it must have happened when I was leaning my head on Lexi while she fed Charlie. When I wake, I’m startled out of my sleep, bolting upright with my eyes ripping open instantly, filled with terror and confusion. When the pain hits me, it’s like a train plowing into my stomach and I immediately cry out, screaming with unbridled agony while I look out the window. Charlie starts to cry as everything comes flooding back to me. I remember it. I remember all of it. I remember getting stabbed in the abdomen, I remember the zombies, the hunt for Jason’s safe haven, and I remember most of all that I’m dying. I don’t relish the thought, but that’s how it is. I should have died in my sleep, but I didn’t. I’m here. I’m alive.
I look over at Charlie who is looking at Lexi with big, sad eyes, unhappy to be awake. He’s too young to actually cry with tears and I’m grateful for it or I might have made him genuinely cry just now. I shouldn’t have been so stupid. I should have been more cautious with myself. The fact that I’m in pain, that I’m dying, isn’t excuse enough to have been so startled by nothing. I shouldn’t be sleeping, it could kill me.
“Sorry,” I mutter, feeling like I’ve been thrown down a cliff. Everything aches and hurts, from my back to my shoulders to my stomach. I just want to be submerged into a giant bath tub and be left there for a really long time.
Rolling my head to the side, I look out the window at the incredibly open spaces that surround the city. I couldn’t have been asleep for long, maybe a half an hour. There’s really no way of telling. I’m scared to even close my eyes. What if I don’t wake up next time? What if I just close my eyes and drift off to sleep and I never get that chance to see the world that my father had promised? I don’t want to die without a greater sense of hope than the miserable, clinging to life kind of hope that I have right now. I want to aspire to more than that before my death. But I need proof. I need to see.
We’re officially in rural territory. There are no houses, no businesses, no wasted parks, or churches out here. Most of all, I notice that there are no cars in the middle of the road or along the side, or tucked away in old ditches somewhere. Out here, there’s nothing to hinder us or make us swerve to avoid them. Every now and again, I’ll see the ruins of some old, great tree that fell victim to all of this, stripped of its gown of emerald leaves and left bare and harsh in the naked light of the day. I remember when green was such a vibrant, constant color. It was the color we saw everywhere the most. You couldn’t escape plants. Now, I don’t think I’ve seen green outside of a car’s color or a building’s faded paint in a long time. It’s always faded, a hint of the vibrant green it once was. There are no more bold, verdant emeralds, jades, olives, or limes in the world. It’s all just brown and gray. It’s miserable—unbearable.
It’s nice not to have the fingerprints of humanity around, though. It’s depressing looking at the world that once was, seeing what we could have had if everything hadn’t just gone to hell. It’s nice to have a break from that. To get away from the ruins and the chaos, the lingering shadows of all that has happened. I don’t miss it. I don’t think I’ll ever miss it. We have to move on, not just the four of us, but humanity as a people. We have to look past the things that were and stop trying to scramble together something that might mirror our past. We need radical solutions and I hope that Jason has figured out a radical new path for us to walk that doesn’t involve cannibalism or insane god worship.
In the distance, a flash of light warns me that there’s yet another storm on the horizon. The sight of it makes me cringe. I’m sick of storms. The clouds swell up while we suffer the fate of the cannibals and the monsters running amok and then we deal with the deluge, watching the world change before our eyes.
I watch another bolt of lightning ripping across the sky and I wonder how all of this is going to resolve itself. Jason is supposed to have all of the answers. He’s supposed to have a plan that we can all get behind and we can rally to support. I can’t imagine that there’s anything that anyone can do to put a stop to this or turn the tables for the better. Out there is a world that will never go back to what it was, from where I’m standing, but Jason apparently isn’t so negative. I’m interested in meeting him.
“Where are we?” I ask after Charlie is quieted and happy again. Maybe not happy, but he looks content to me.
“Close to where the X is on the map,” Greg answers, looking at the phonebook. I don’t know how he got a hold of it, but I must have really been out of it. He probably pulled it from my hands while I was sleeping. I look out the window at the open, flat land that had once been covered in produce and lush plant life. There’s nothing that would make this place look like it’s beautiful or worthwhile. I look at a tractor stuck in the middle of one of the fields where the mud has started to consume it, hardening around the tractor. It’s something strange to see, a machine that tills the earth, mastering it, and now it’s being sucked back into the earth. I don’t know if that’s ironic, but it feels like it.
I hope he’s right. I don’t want to keep driving around for much longer. I want to be there, to finally put everything down and call it good. I want to have the chance to see everything that’s to behold with Jason and all the wonders that he can offer the world before I die. I’m sticking around for this and I’m not willing to endure all this pain and all this suffering just to have myself die in the wilderness, looking for a beacon in the darkness. We’re so close, so why can’t we find it?
I suppose that I should be looking for hummers or tanks, maybe even helicopters flying around, patrolling to make sure that any dangers coming their way are gone or kept at bay. Whatever this place is, it has to have military support. You’d expect to see watchtowers and spotlights, the kind of stuff that would make you feel like a sniper’s watching you at all times. I don’t know, maybe it’s a bunker hidden away out in some field for all I know. It might just be under a mound of dirt, a door in the side of a hill, and that’ll be where humanity’s salvation is hidden away. It seems like there would be some sort of special indication that the future was hidden out here in a farm stretch. I don’t know. I’m not an expert in these things. Maybe it’s just going to be a house. I suppose that it doesn’t matter really. We just have to find it.
Perhaps it’s not going to be a military presence though. Maybe it’s going to just be a sign of civilization, of control or authority out here in the lawless expanses of the dead world. I look for signs of people, signs of society where there was nothing before. It would make sense to try and rebuild, and out here in the open stretches it would be easy to defend yourself with nothing but endless expanses to give away enemy movements. They’re also close to Dayton, which could supply them with everything they would need to build a new society after all the old one has crumbled. It would nice to see such an endeavor.
And yet, there is nothing. All around us, there is nothing but the swirling dust that is beginning to pick up with the growing wind that vanguards the storm on the horizon. We see a few houses in the distance, a couple of sagging or partially collapsed barns, but nothing that would give us any indication that the salvation of the world is out here. It’s depressing, but then again, everything out there these days is depressing. The whole world is spiraling down into a dark, dark hole.
Looking away from the window, I glance down at my shirt that’s coated with dried blood. It smells like rust and it no longer makes me sick, none of it does. I’m used to all of it and now that I’m part of the walking dead, it just seems like I should smell the part. At least I don’t smell like decay, yet. I’m sure those days will be coming soon enough. I won’t relish those days like I do now when all I have to smell is rusty, dried blood.
Lifting the shirt, I see that my bandage is thoroughly soaked, but the good thing is that I was expecting black stains, but they’re perfectly red still. It’s a good sign, for now. If we get to Jason and he has a medical staff and a well-stocked operating room, I really might be able to survive this. I’m not holding out much hope, but it’s definitely a distinct possibility. Surviving this would be nice, but I’m not sure that it’s going to be possible. The truth is, there’s no way that they’re going to have a surgeon and a fully stocked operating room. They’re going to have a nurse or a veterinarian, like me, who knows how to sew up wounds and that’ll be it. I doubt there are any trauma surgeons left in the world and the coincidence of him having one is too much. I’m going to die, but looking at my bandages, I’m not going to die terribly soon. I suppose that’s a bit of a relief.
“It has to be around here,” Greg says with an adamant voice. I look at him, still driving and can’t help but pick up the last little bit that he angrily and doubtfully tacks onto his statement with a grumbling voice, “If your dad knew what he was doing.” I don’t blame him. There’s nothing out here and from all of this, I can’t help but feel like we’ve been led astray out in the middle of nowhere on a wild goose chase.
The truck slows, coming to a near unbearable crawl as we drive down the nearly completely consumed street. The power lines and the leaning fence posts are all that tell us that we’re even on a road right now. As the truck slowly crawls we look at the few crumbling, dusty farmhouses, waiting for something to pop out at us. I don’t know what any of us are expecting, a billboard or a glowing neon sign, but none of us are seeing anything that we want to. We want there to be some sort of definitive sight and right now, we have nothing.
After several miles, Greg slams on the brakes and slams his hands on the steering wheel. I can feel his anger wafting off of him and I don’t blame him for it. Honestly, I’ve looked at all the vast stretches of nothingness to the north and wondered what the heck my father was even doing out here. There’s nothing out here and it’s too far away from the main interstate to give him any purpose for being here. Was he just wandering out in the middle of the world’s largest open stretch of land and happened across the world’s salvation like a mirage that proved to be worthwhile? None of it makes sense and as I look the few structures that are out here, none of them call to me. I wouldn’t have come this far north for this if I’d known. There’s nothing out here. What could he have been thinking?
“That’s it,” Greg says in a weak mutter, looking out at everything after his immediate flash fire of anger has receded for the moment. He stares out the windshield at the flashing lightning on the horizon, no doubt striking the last pieces of burnable material on the face of the earth to burn humanity’s last strongholds down. Why is the world like this? So full of disappointment and doom? Why would any of us survive just to endure this unending nightmare? Wouldn’t it just be better if we all died?
“It has to be back there,” Lexi says with a determined voice that makes me wonder just how naïve she is. I think that Greg is right. My father probably just marked the map hastily and didn’t measure out exactly where Jason’s place was supposed to be. For all we know, it could be anywhere in a hundred mile radius of ‘north of Dayton’ and we’re in the wrong spot. “Turn the truck around, we have to go back and see if we missed something.”
“Like what?” Greg snaps at her. “You saw everything I saw. There’s nothing out there but fields and a bunch of crappy old barns. There’s nothing out there.”
“So what? You want to walk around shouting for Jason to see if he comes running?” Lexi glares at him with eyes so full of fire that I’m afraid that we’re all going to explode in a few seconds. “Turn the truck around and let’s have another look.”
Silently and begrudgingly, Greg turns the truck around and heads back down the road we just traversed and I can feel anger radiating off of both of them. The tension is electric in this truck and I want out of it. It’s suffocating. I wonder if Charlie can feel it. But as we’re driving, I wonder if Jason is even still here.
My father was a careful, meticulous man. I doubt that he would haphazardly plant an X on the map and suggest that we follow it. He would want accuracy and precision in such a mark. He had to have known that he might not make it to us or that his wounds might be the end of him. After all, he had his fair share of them before Henry put that final bullet through him. I saw all the injuries that he sustained on his way to us and he at one point had to have sat down and realized that he might not make it. Why else would he have marked the map in the first place? If he knew that he was going to be with us on the journey back, he wouldn’t need to mark the map. He would remember it all on his own. So of course the X is accurate. Jason’s place has to be around here somewhere and I’m not ready to give up just yet.
But, that doesn’t mean that Jason will be there. Who knows when my father ran into Jason and who knows how long it’s been since they both crossed paths and my father told him he’d be back with his two daughters? Jason’s circumstances probably drastically changed over that period of time and his operation might have been put in jeopardy by the ever-changing climate outside his door. Maybe he was forced to find a new sanctuary for one of a myriad of needs, or maybe he had a new opportunity to expand and made the exodus to his new home. No matter what his reasons were, he’s probably gone by now. He’s probably somewhere else and we’re just following his trail. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t still find him. The best way to track him down is to find where he was. He would have left something to warn my father if they were good enough friends that my father wanted to return to him. Maybe there’s a note or a map at his old base of operations telling my father where to go. If we could find that, then we could track him down. It’s a start.