DeAndre turned to Jacob, “Do you think Stanley squealed?”
Jacob shook his head, “I don’t know, man. But if I find out he did, he’ll find my hands wrapped around his scrawny little neck.” He began cursing under his breath.
We sat there in the morning sun, waiting. They took their own sweet time. After a few minutes, the second man came out of the car to consult with the first. I craned my neck and could just see Luke’s large eyes peeping through the window, looking at us in fright. I felt my heart well up in my chest and fought to keep the unshed tears in my eyes from falling.
Suddenly, I heard the very distinctive sound of a zombie growl. It was faint and low, but definitively there. I glanced up at the government men and woman. They were still deep in heated discussion. I looked over at the others, and they looked at me with knowing eyes.
Our guns were still in the van, but I had my huge Bowie knife strapped to my side, and Risa had her knife, too. We were not completely unarmed, but the situation was highly troubling, especially with these nimrods arguing among themselves, completely oblivious to their surroundings and the coming danger.
“When the zombies come, I’m going to jump into the van as fast as I can and get our shotguns,” I whispered to Jacob and DeAndre beside me. I turned to my right and repeated the whisper to Risa, Caitlyn and Jonathan. They all nodded. And we waited.
It didn’t take long.
The faint growls abruptly became very loud growls. It sounded like at least three, maybe four of them were coming. They must have heard all the commotion and smelled us. The government people finally stopped talking.
“What’s that?” the woman said.
The men just looked around; one of them went to the other side of the van to check what was there.
I rolled my eyes. These wonderful representatives of our federal government had obviously never seen or heard a zombie up close and personal. I guess they’d been kept all sheltered and what not. Didn’t mingle in the trenches like regular folks. Well, they were about to get the surprise of their lives.
The growling became nearly deafening.
They must be very close
, I thought. Sure enough, as if on cue, there was a horrible scream from the other side of the van.
“One down, two to go,” Caitlyn mumbled.
At the sound of their partner’s cries, the other two ran around to the other side of the van, completely ignoring us. We immediately jumped up, as a unit (I was so proud of my family!) and turned and opened the doors of the van. In less than 30 seconds, we were all armed to the teeth and running for the zombies.
Coming around the side of the van, we saw four of the creatures, and the government people fighting them. The one man who’d gone around to this side first was on the ground, and two zombies were at him. He was a
goner;
blood spurted out his neck in a high arc about 3 feet tall. The other two were trying to fight back, but with little success.
Suddenly, the woman let out a shriek that split my ears. The zombie she’d been fighting had grabbed her and was biting down on the side of her head. Jacob walked over and kicked the zombie hard in the shoulder. It let go with its mouth, kept hold of the woman’s shoulders, and turned its head to growl at us. Jacob lowered the muzzle of his shotgun and pulled the trigger: POP!
The zombie fell back, its head mostly gone. Zombie brains and black goo sprayed across the woman’s face as she dropped to the ground, moaning and holding her head.
The other man was fighting valiantly, and probably would have gotten the upper hand if he hadn’t stumbled and backed against one of the two zombies that were feasting on his male colleague. The zombie roared in displeasure and reared up. Turning sideways, and moving very fast, it swung around to face the fighting man and jumped onto him. The three fell to the ground, the man’s screaming muffled by the two zombies on top of him.
We looked at the first man, he was dying. There wasn’t anything we could do for him, he was not only bleeding at the neck - from which the arc of blood shooting out had gone down considerably along with his blood pressure - but his belly had been clawed open. Guts lay everywhere.
“Oh, gross,” said Risa.
The man moved feebly for a few more seconds, and then lay still. A growing puddle of dark red blood saturated the grass under him. The zombie at his belly growled and slurped in pleasure.
“Okay, that’s enough,” I said as I walked up to it and put my shotgun muzzle to its head. It was so engrossed in its meal it didn’t even react to my presence. I pulled the trigger: POP! The shot echoed down the street, and the zombie just fell over across the dead man.
Next to him, his partner was no longer fighting back. The two zombies had definitely gotten the better of this poor clueless sap, and if he wasn’t dead already, he soon would be. DeAndre and Caitlyn took out the third and fourth zombies, and then it was over. Except…
“Ohhhh….” groaned the woman.
“Oh, man,” I said, walking over to her. She lay in the grass, her scalp laid open and her skull showing in places. Her face was white with red splotches from the ordeal.
“Help me…” she said weakly.
“There’s nothing we can do. You’ve been bitten. You’re infected,” Jacob said to her as he looked down at her dying form.
“Please…” the woman begged in a whisper.
Caitlyn knelt down beside her. “Listen to me, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, but you’re as good as dead. You’ve been infected. Some time, in a few hours, a day, or even as much as a week, you’re going to turn,” Caitlyn spoke softly, but pulled no punches. It wasn’t our way. You had to know how it is, when you live in a zombie filled world. Sugar coating bad news did nobody any good.
“Oh, God…” she moaned, blinking back tears.
Jacob kneeled down on her other side. “Why were you people after us?” he asked.
The woman just shook her head.
“Please, tell us. We have a right to know,” Caitlyn said. “We’re good people. That little boy you tried to kidnap is a sweet little guy. He deserves to know, too.”
Swallowing, the woman whispered, “I guess it wouldn’t hurt to tell you. We’re from the CDC.”
“Stanley.” Jake swore under his breath.
“No, you don’t understand,” the woman continued. “We picked Stanley up last night, and he refused to debrief us. We interrogated him, tortured him. He held fast. He’s in hospital now, recovering from the interrogation.”
“We were watching both northbound and southbound lanes for you. We just got lucky, seeing you like that. We weren’t even sure what vehicle you’d be in. When we pulled you over, it was just plain luck that you were the ones we’d been looking for,” she gasped, and then continued, “You’re the tenth vehicle we’d followed, pulled over and checked today. We’d been waiting and watching for more than eight hours, since just past midnight.” She fell back in exhaustion.
I turned and walked away. I had to or I knew I would do her a violence. Walking to the black car, I got Luke out and we came walking back, hand in hand. The woman was talking again, this time to DeAndre and Jake.
“Please, help me. Don’t just leave me like this,” she whispered.
“If we call your buddies on that radio you’ve got in your car, they’ll know where we are, they’ll just follow us again,” I said.
“They’d just kill me, that’s what they do to all infected personnel,” she whispered.
“So, we can’t do anything for you, really,” said Caitlyn.
“You can help me by finishing me,” she said. “I don’t want to become one of those monsters that killed my partners.” She moaned and began to cry softly.
“Oh, for…” I said, then looked at the men. “Do whatever you feel is right, I’m taking Luke into the van.”
“Mama, I have to go pee,” Luke said.
I walked down the sidewalk with him, about ten yards. My shotgun was in its holster on my back, so I was ready for anything, although the morning had returned to being quiet. I helped him with his fly, and he relieved himself there against a tree. Snapping
him
up afterward, I gave him a
hug. I loved him so fiercely, my little boy. As I hugged Luke, the morning air was cut by the sound of Jacob’s shotgun: POP! I looked back, and he was walking away from the now dead woman.
Chapter
Seventeen
Without much talk, we all got back in the van. I got back into the driver’s
seat;
I felt I still wanted to drive. Turning the key in the ignition, I took one last look at the CDC people, laid out there beside the now-motionless zombies that had killed them. Shaking my head in wonderment that these people had not been trained better, I turned the van in a slow U-turn and made my way back to the freeway.
As I pulled back onto the I-29 north and brought the van up to cruising speed, I felt a strong urgency to get to Sanctuary. Winnipeg was just a few hours north of us, but between here and safety lay the border. Getting across wasn’t going to be easy. I had zero clever ideas for getting through it, and everyone else seemed at a loss as well.
Unless…
“Jake, let me see that note Paddy gave you, the one he crumpled in your hand right before we left Tennessee,” I said.
“Oh, that’s right,” Jacob said. “I just stuffed it in my pocket and forgot about it.” He fished out the crumpled paper and handed it to me. “I didn’t think it would be relevant until we got to Winnipeg.”
I took the note from him. It was a crumpled-up wad. Looking up, I saw just miles and miles of deserted freeway. I guess No one was out and about on this desolate stretch of highway. It was now late morning, nearly noon in fact.
“I’m going to pull over for a few minutes, keep a lookout, okay?” I said. Jacob nodded.
Pulling over and settling the van on a flat stretch of shoulder, I pulled the brake and shut off the engine. I looked all around outside. Nothing made me nervous, so I felt we were okay. I had learned to trust my sixth sense - it had saved my hide on numerous occasions.
I unbuckled my seat belt, arched my back and stretched my arms out. Stifling a yawn, I reached for a water bottle. I unscrewed the top and drank deeply.
“You going to be okay to drive, Alyssa?” asked Jake. “I can take over if you want.”
Smiling at him, I said, “No, I’m fine. No worries.”
I carefully opened up Paddy’s crumpled note. It was damp and creased in a dozen places from Jacob’s pocket. I finally got it open and laid it out to study it.
“Hmmm,” I said, examining the paper closely, my nose just inches from the crimped words. Paddy’s handwriting wasn’t the best, what with his arthritis and his habit of writing small and slanted letters. But I found what I was looking for. “Aha!”
“What is it?” Jacob asked.
“He not only wrote the location of Sanctuary, but he wrote the names and numbers of people in Winnipeg who can help us. Three of them. Thank you, Paddy!” I said a prayer of thanks for such a good friend.
“I’m going to call and ask for help,” I said. “Maybe they have a way of getting people across the border.”
We decided to have lunch here by the side of the road while I tried to make contact with Sanctuary help. Caitlyn and DeAndre passed out the sandwiches Julie had packed us. We found out she’d put in quite a bit of food, and we were all munching before too long.
“Bacon!” Risa said, biting down on a sandwich thick with maple-cured bacon. My stomach growled, and I took several bites of my own bacon sandwich before I called.
The first number turned out to be disconnected.
I hit pay dirt on the second call.
I talked with a man first and then a woman, and then handed the phone to Jacob. After only a few minutes of talking to them, he hung up, an unreadable expression on his face.
“Well, what’s the word?” I asked.
“The word is…” he stopped. Took a deep breath, then continued. “The word is go. They’re going to help us.”
The whole van let out a huge WOOT!!!
I looked back at Jacob; he was smiling at our exuberance, but he also looked pensive.
“What’s the other shoe?” I asked.
“They’re going to look into things, try and get us a contact on this side of the border, then call me back,” he said. “In other words, we still don’t know how we’re going to get across.”
“Oh,” I said.
“He did say Paddy had called them yesterday to let them know about us. Apparently Paddy told them all about us and explained why it was very important to help us,” Jacob said. “Gave us a very glowing and heartfelt recommendation. The guy was very happy to hear from us, told me he’d been a bit worried when we hadn’t called earlier.”
“You were looking for ME!” crowed Luke, hands in the air and huge grin on his face.
Laughing, I went and gave him a big kiss, and he collapsed into giggles. We all started to talk about going into Canada.
“Maybe they’ll have disguises for us,” Risa said.
“Secret identities? Fake passports?” Caitlyn said.
“A secret night flight over the border?” DeAndre said.
“In a hot air balloon!” said Jonathan.
“Maybe they’ll somehow pay off the border officials?” I said.
“Or smuggle us across in the back of a truck?” Jacob said.
“With a secret compartment!” said Jonathan.
All of a sudden, the cell phone rang. We all fell silent as Jake answered it and talked for about 3 minutes with the other party. Actually, Jake was mostly
listening;
the other person was doing nearly all the talking. Finally…
“Thank you. We’ll be there,” Jacob said, then ended the call. He sat there lost in thought for a few minutes as we watched him. Then he looked up at us.
“They’re going to smuggle us in an underground tunnel they’ve dug,” he said. “We’re to meet the contact in two hours at a designated place in a town a couple miles south of the border called Pembina. He said we would only be able to bring what we could carry, and that we’d have to walk about three miles.”
“No problem, we already travel very light,” I said. A long time ago, we’d all learned to live knowing we might have to wake up and run in the middle of the night. We each carried our weapons in holsters, and we each had one hiker’s backpack – we carried all our belongings that way. Clothes, money, documents, extra shoes, the children’s books and toys, all of it. We’d learn the hard way not to accumulate too much stuff. Several times, we’d had to leave behind belongings, before we learned how to travel light.
I looked back at Jonathan. “Do you have everything in one backpack?” He nodded solemnly. “Good.” I turned to Risa. “Everything packed?” I asked her.
“Always, Alyssa, just like you taught me,” she said. I nodded.
Even Luke had a little backpack where he kept a book and a toy. It weighed nearly nothing, but he felt proud to be like his mommy and daddy.
“I think we’re all ready, Alyssa,” DeAndre said ten minutes later.
“We’re going to have to ditch the van. Maybe they can sell it. It’ll help pay back a bit of what they’ll be giving us,” Jake said.
I nodded.
“Okay, what’s the place we’re supposed to meet the contact?” I asked him.
“It’s a place called ‘The Corner Bar & Grill’ at 113 West Stutsman Street in Pembina,” Jacob said. “I think it’s just up the freeway, maybe a dozen miles or so. It’s just a few miles south of the border.”
“Can we go early?” I asked.
“I think so. He just said to park in the back and to leave our stuff in the van for now, and to take to rear booth in the northwest corner,” said Jake.
“Okay then,” I said, excitement growing. “Let’s do this.”
Another cheer rose from behind me, and I smiled as I started up the van again and pulled back onto the freeway. Jake had been right: I hadn’t gone 15 miles when I came to signs indicating the small town of Pembina, as well as the border a few miles further. Pembina had only one exit, in the middle of farmland. Rural America. We would have to say goodbye, for now. Probably forever, unless they stopped chasing us. And found a cure to the plague. And handled themselves better in hand-to-zombie combat.
Taking the exit for West Stutsman, I turned east and drove the half mile [seven blocks] to the restaurant. Pulling into the parking lot and driving slowly to the back, I scanned the area with an eagle eye. So did Jacob, Caitlyn and DeAndre. We needed this to go smoothly. Zombies need not apply to this afternoon of our lives.
Once we had parked, the excitement level in the van rose by ten degrees. This was it. We were going to find someone who would help us cross the border! Risa was practically hopping on her
toes, and Caitlyn was grinning broadly from ear to ear. We all smiled a lot as we disembarked from the van and made our way through the parking lot to the front door of the restaurant.
“We’re about a half an hour early,” Jacob said, taking my hand. “Since we already ate, maybe we can get some dessert or something, to celebrate.”
I smiled and nodded. I was so excited with anticipation I couldn’t speak; I just walked hand in hand with Jake and smiled. On my other side, Luke walked very close to me, both hands holding on to mine. He was still freaked out by last night’s upsetting scene and wanted to stay by me.
We entered the restaurant and were seated at once. The place only had a few other people in it, and the only booth that would fit the seven of us was the back booth we’d been told to take. Settling in to the well-padded cushions, we all took up the menus and studied them, relaxing while we did.
We all felt exhausted after the morning’s excitement, not to mention the previous night’s, so we settled in and ordered coffee, hot cocoa for Luke, and pie. I had hot Dutch apple pie a-la-mode with caramel sauce, and after the first bite I closed my eyes in ecstasy. That mouth full of heaven might have been the last wonderful experience I’d have in a long while, so I savored every bite. We all really enjoyed our pie. Luke eyed the chocolate silk pie that was placed before him and, grabbing up his fork, dug
in li
ke there was no tomorrow. Leave it to small-town America to serve us the best pie in the universe.