Day 15
I woke early, just as the sun was coming up, I looked over to the other bed, it had not been slept in. OMT was nowhere to be seen but I couldn’t believe he would just leave me here. I jumped out of bed and grabbed my pack and my rifle. I stepped outside to find that the room next to ours was open; in fact the whole door was missing. I hesitated then peeked around the door jamb into the room. There was OMT, he had put the missing door on one of the beds, on the door was our Z. He was cutting it to pieces; I gagged choked down bile from my empty stomach. The smell was incredible, like raw chicken left marinating in shit for a few months in a Tupperware container in the back of your great aunt’s Volvo.
OMT had a cell phone and was taking pictures of the thing.
“Hey John.” he said quietly. “I’m almost done here.”
I couldn’t stand it but a morbid curiosity was over whelming me so I sidled into the room.
“Oh my God” I gasped.
“Yeah, pretty rank isn’t it?” he said.
He waved me closer and told me to look at what he was pointing at. The creature was on its stomach, he had sliced it open from the top of the head and half way down its back. Some of the skin he had peeled away in other places it looked like he had actually pried the shell like plates off of it.
“You see this?”
He was pointing with his knife to a slimy white thing that was covering the spine.
“Yeah, what is it?” I countered.
“What is it? No idea, but whatever it is, it should not be here.”
He proceeded to point out that it had 4 larger tentacles or branches that extended up into the skull as well dozens more that had worked their way in to any possible aperture in the spinal column itself. He said it looked like the thing had wired itself into the body of the host. The host he had said, he meant the person it had infected.
He turned the head to one side and showed me that the teeth were more numerous than should be possible but I had already seen some early versions of that, he had been unconscious when Blue had shown them to us. He reached into its mouth with the blade of his knife and pressed on something inside, yellowish fluid oozed through the tips of the teeth.
“Venom, I think” he said, “but I have no idea what kind.”
He then pried one of the armor plates away to show me how the skin had become what he called ‘
connecting tissue
’ and that some of the bones were being absorbed or dissolved he was didn’t know which and that he didn’t know why some were but others were not. Then lifting the things arm by the wrist he said
“Check this out.”
He pressed with his thumb just below the elbow, a seam of skin opened up that went from there almost all the way to the wrist. A black, shiny spike slipped out of the seam and he pried it the rest of the way out with his knife. It was hinged at the wrist, it was thin and sharp and deadly.
“There is one on the other wrist too.” he said. “Built in fighting knives.”
When he let it go it snapped back beneath the oily black armored skin.
“They might be poisonous too, I don’t know.”
He stepped back and put his hands on his hips as he looked at it he said
“But not all the news is bad though.”
I looked at him quizzically then asked
“Oh really? Just what is the good news then?”
He smiled and taped at the armored skull,
“It really isn’t much tougher than bone, and the only exception is that the angles make deflections more likely. With our new, heavier, more powerful guns we should be able to still take them out.”
I crossed my arms over my chest and said
“Oh goodie.”
He laughed quietly then said
“Their hips are a mess, it was like they couldn’t figure out how to change them to work without giving up our easy ability to stand upright.”
He then rolled it over onto its back and said
“They won’t be having babies anytime soon.”
He pointed out that their sex organs were gone.
“I can’t even tell if this one had been a female or a young adult male.”
He took one last picture then said
“They still have to eat, drink, and poop; I don’t know how we can make use of this but who knows?”
I shook my head and gagged again as I turned and stepped out of the room and leaned against our Humvee. He followed me out and taking a bottle of rubbing alcohol from our med kit he pulled off a pair of pale blue rubber gloves he was wearing, then he scrubbed his hands. I waited and when he finished I asked
“Where did you get the cell phone”?
He jerked a thumb back towards the main office,
“It was in there along with a charger that hooks into a cigarette lighter.”
I didn’t ask if it was in a drawer or on one of the bodies.
We didn’t waste much more time and we left the thing where it lay and we got back on the road. OMT said that he had checked the yellow pages in the room, they were a few years old but with any luck there was still a farm implement and supply place about 20 miles from us. I mixed some orange drink powder in two of our bottled waters; we also each had a power bar. That was our breakfast. I was glad to be moving, I had the window vent open and let the air wash the stink from us, well to be honest, mostly from him.
About a half hour or so later we pulled into the parking lot of ‘
General Hood’s Railroad Salvage and Emporium
’. The place seemed empty, at least there were no cars in the lot, and no delivery trucks either for that matter. Across from the entrance were huge galvanized steel tanks, OMT said they were watering tanks from cows and such. Beyond the tanks were sample sheds and small out house building that they sold and offered on site construction for a slight extra fee. Beyond those at the far end of the lot were various horse trailers. We pulled up and parked in front of the doors. OMT sighed as he got out and he pulled the charging handle on his Thompson. I did the same and got out to stand next to him.
“Well, let’s see if anyone is home.”
He had a smile on his face but I could tell the old man was tired. We walked up to the doors and they were chained, but not for long, OMT produced a length of chain of his own and with the Humvee we pulled the doors off the building.
The air inside was stale but it did not have the smell of death, the smell I was growing far too confident in recognizing. We stayed together and did a perimeter sweep. To be honest the place was amazing, they had barbed wire and blue jeans, seed and hay, and tools. Lots and lots of tools of all types, lawn and garden, construction and a bunch of things I had no idea what they possibly could be fore. I showed one to him and he laughed telling me it was a ‘
hog ringer
’, sure I thought, why wouldn’t it be? He looked at me and said
“Come on John, I have an idea”. We proceeded to drive the Humvee to the end of the parking lot; once there and with some creative chain work we were able to hitch the second largest horse trailer to the back of our vehicle. It had doors on the side as well as the back and it had three axles all grouped side by each nearly all the back by the rear doors. When I asked why not the bigger one he said we needed a ball hitch and the other was a 5
th
-wheel, I honestly didn’t know what he was talking about but
oh well
. We pulled the trailer to the building so the side entrance to the horse trailer was in front of the wide open doors. We started in filling our shopping lists.
“Don’t take anything not on the list” he said, “it’s going to be a tight fit if we find everything.”
I agreed but suggested that if we find something really good we should leave it off to the side by the door so that we could fill every possible space with them. He smiled and told me that it was a good idea.
Duh
.
OMT said we worked like Trojans, but I knew what a Trojan was so I thought that was a strange thing to say but I let it go. Around noon we stopped and drank plenty of water and ate more MREs. I got pot roast, when I looked over at his I saw ‘
chili con carne’
. I muttered
“Should have known.”
He asked me “what?”
I said that it was nothing. For some reason this struck me as hilarious and I laughed, pretty soon we were both laughing and he kept asking “What?” which only made me laugh all the more.
After lunch it was back to work, the excitement was long gone and now it turned into long back breaking work. We packed and sorted and carried all afternoon until we had filled the trailer so much that the side door was no longer any use and we switched to the rear ones. We actually were doing pretty well but it became obvious that we were not going to finish that night so I suggested that we stop around 7pm, get some chow (which was OMT’s preferred way to describe food, but I have no idea why) and then set up a watch and finish in the morning. We could be back on the road by noon and home by late that afternoon. He agreed and much to my surprise he was more than ready to quit by 7. We ate more MREs, I had more juice and he had coffee but it didn’t work on him because he was asleep pretty quickly, so quickly that I had to take the coffee from his hand so he didn’t burn himself.
I climbed to the roof of the Humvee and sat cross legged, keeping watch. It was my turn after all and I was determined to stay awake until relieved. To my surprise I made it, OMT took over for me sometime around 4am, but I was so exhausted I just crawled inside the Humvee and crashed. I dreamed of my Mom that night, she was dead but she was still moving, crawling to be with me. Boney hands scrapping the floor,
‘
Hey Johnny, want me to kill her for you?
’
Dream OMT taunted as he stood astride her a huge revolver in his hands. ‘No!’ I screamed, and he said
‘
Suit yourself Johnny’
As he held his hands up in mock surrender and laughed. My Mom crawled closer and I backed away, she was leaving a trail of gore behind her, her entrails acting like paint brushes on rough concrete.
‘
Johnny, come kiss mommy
.’ she said as chunks of bloody flesh fell from her mouth. I woke screaming, the sun bright in my eyes.
Day 16
I heard Old Man Tucker’s voice he was calling out to me; I sat up in the back seat of the Humvee and saw him heading towards me. I shook my head to clear it, I was still breathing hard when he got to me
“John! Are you alright?”
His eyes, normally small and so dark they looked like little more than black marbles had turned to mere slits. His bushy eyebrows framing them and giving him a wild, unpredictable look. He opened the door and reached in, placing his hand on my shoulder, “John?” he asked again. I jerked my shoulder away not wanting him to touch me,
“I’m FINE!” I barked then added in a little calmer voice “I was dreaming is all.”
He stood erect and nodded,
“It. happens to all of us now and then.”
When I didn’t answer he added
“John, come on and get something to eat and drink. You will feel better.”
He stepped back to give me room so I climbed out of the Humvee and I suddenly found that I didn’t want to make eye contact with him. I knew it happened to everyone, he didn’t have to say that, I didn’t want him to say anything like that to me; ever.
He had let me sleep late so I wolfed down a MRE and helped him pack as many things into the trailer as possible. He was loading rubber hoses, lots of them, shoving them in where ever he could find space.
“What are these far?” I asked.
He shrugged, “Dunno, waterin gardens maybe, just they would be hard to make and they aren’t that heavy so...” he let his voice trail away.
I did as he did, when the shelf was empty of garden hoses we looked around one last time. As we were leaving I saw some of those farmer jeans, you know bib overalls. I looked through the pile and took a couple pair of the largest size; I followed him to the Humvee after I took one last look in the store. I slid in next to him as he started the engine. I tossed the overalls into his lap and said
“Here you go Old McDonald, if you are going to play farmer you should look the part.”
He laughed as he picked them up,
“You know, I think I’ll look pretty good in these.” he said. Why did he always laugh when I was trying to hurt him? I hate that.
We pulled out of the lot, the Humvee not really having any difficulty with the overloaded horse trailer. From his jacket OMT produced a sheaf of papers, our lists, and handed them to me. We spent nearly two hours going over them, trying to remember what we had loaded and what we had not found. Making additions when necessary and notes where we exceeded our quantity or if we were still short. I was surprised when he told me that he had loaded the entire contents of a seed display rack, including dozens of packages of ‘heirloom’ seeds albeit that most of those were tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, and pumpkins. I asked him why heirlooms were special and he explained that those seeds had not been modified by seed companies so that any fruit they produced would have seeds able to be planted successfully.