All That I See - 02 (14 page)

When we were about two miles from the county line,
Sara pulled the van off to the side of the road, and put it into park.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“There’s a car coming our way.”

I looked out in f
ront of us. Far in the distance--
s
o far I had to squint to see it--
was movement.

“Damn, eagle eyes,” I said.

W
e watched
it moving closer and realized it wasn’t
just one, but multiple vehicles—a caravan. We scooted down in our seats to keep from being seen, but stayed up enough to just see over the dashboard.

“Is that our bus?” she said referring to the short, yellow school bus fourth back in the group.

“Probably,” I said.

There was no Hummer or armored truck in the lin
e
, but I
was still fairly sure
it was Wheeler’s group. There were eight vehicles in all, including one moto
r
cycle.

“What kind of
moron
rides a
bike
during a zombie infestation,” I said
.

They sped past, heading north. After they had all passed by, Sara watched them in her
side
mirror, careful not to move until they were out of sight.

“The motorcycle stopped,” she said.

I walked to the back of the cargo van so I
could look out the
rear
window.
The man was putting down the kickstand and dismounting the bike.

“What the hell is he doing?” I said, wondering out loud. “There’s nothing there. There’s no reason for him to stop.”

The last vehicle in the group, a green Jeep Cherokee, did a U-turn, staying in the northbound lanes and came back to join him. He waved to them. It looked like he might have been laughing, but he was too far away to tell for sure. The Jeep stopped. The man from the motorcycle and the driver of
the
Jeep said something to each other. Then the Jeep came back our direction and pulled up next to an abandoned vehicle
in the northbound lanes
. Two men got out, and started searching
it. The guy from the motorcycle pulled down his pants, squatted next to his motorcycle and—

“Eeew,” Sara said. “He couldn’t have held it one more mile? Now we’ve got to sit here and watch it.”

Then the men from the Jeep returned to their vehicle. The
y
stood by their open doors and yelled something to the man who was now standing with his pants around his ankles.

“I guess they came back so he wouldn’t be by himself,” I said.

Then the men from the Jeep pointed in our direction. The other man looked at our van and nodded.

“Shit,” I said. “I think they’re coming
here next. Sara, go now while they are out of their vehicles.”

“
Yeah,” she said, sitting up in her seat. “I think you’re right.”

The van was already idling. She put it into drive, and I was thrown against the back door when she stepped on the gas. The motorcycle and Jeep began to shrink into the distance, and all three men sprang into action. Within seconds, the Jeep was in pursuit, and the other man had pulled u
p his pants, straddled his bike
, and turn
ed
to chase us, too.

“I don’t think there is any way of losing them,” I said. “We’re the only people on the road.”

“Come get the rifle,” Sara said. One thing about Sara was that she always kept her head. No matter what kind of craziness was going on, she was always cool.

I moved to the front of the van and got
the AR-15 then returned to the rear of the vehicle.

“Remember,” she said. “We’ve got eight
bullets
left, and whatever you have in your pistol.”

The Jeep pulled up close behind us. I was starting to get the shakes. I hated having confrontations with healthy people.

“Don’t let them see you,” she said. “I have an idea.”

The motorcycle caught up, too, and pulled up behind the Jeep. It felt like the van was slowing down.

“What are you doing?!” I yelled.

“The rest of their group
isn’t
coming,” she said. “It’s just them.”

“Why are you slowing down?!”

She looked at me in the rearview mirror. All I could see were her eyes.

“I’m going to pull over.”

“Dammit, Sara, drive!”

“
You’re right; we’ll never lose them.”

She continued to drive
, but got
slower and slower. The Jeep pulled around and in front of us. Sara didn’t even pretend to try to run anymore. She slowed to a stop in the middle of the highway. She looked at me in the mirror again.

“There are three of them,” she said
softly. “You do what needs to be done while I distract them.”

Do what needs to be done!?

Sara took off her jacket
t
hen climbed out of the van.

Shit!

The guy from the motorcycle was too interested in the pretty girl
to check the back of the van. I could hear their muffled voices and laughter outside. I had to act quickly.

I opened the back door of the van as quietly as I could and climbed out onto the highway.
I looked aroun
d the left side of the van. The men from the Jeep
were on either side of
Sara
holding her while the guy from the motorcycle
tried to
remove her jeans. I took a deep breath, and stepped around, amazed at how clear my thinking was at that moment.

Motorcycle Man saw me and stepped away from her, raising his arms. The other two men both tried to use Sara as a shield.

“Shit, man, ever’thang is cool, y
a
know,” Motorcycle Man said.

A month before, I might have talked to him and tried to resolve it peacefully.  But now….

I pulled the trigger. It was as if someone punched him in the stomach. He double up and fell over. The other two men, seeing they had nothing to lose, went for their guns. Sara twisted out of the grasp of one and started jabbing at the face of the other with the van keys. After three quick stabs, she finally got what she was search
ing
for—his eye. The man shrieked and stumbled into the side of the van. The othe
r was leveling his pistol at me. I fired again. I didn’t aim--I was too jittery to aim—but somehow, I winged him.
He
twirled and went to one knee. Sara, level-headed as ever, caught him under the chin with the toe of her boot. He fell back, his pistol skidding away on the pavement.

Everything seemed to stop
for a few seconds. Sara looked down at the three men, her jeans gaping open and her shirt torn. She nodded at me then walked over and picked up the man’s pistol. He sat up, dazed and holding his shoulder. She put the muzzle of the gun against his head and
killed
him. She
executed
the
other two the same way. Then she looked up at me while the blue smoke
still snaked out of the end of the
gun.

“
Let’s drag them into th
e ditch,” she said.

I stared at her in disbelief. I had watched her kill the infected many times. I had seen her shoot at healthy men when forced to do so. This was different; these men were wounded and incapacitated. The way she had coldly executed them startled me.

“It had to be done,” she said, as if reading my thoughts. “They were bad men—unredeemable.” She buttoned her pants and tried to pull her shirt together. “Now, they’re burning in Hell, just like they deserve. Come help me.”

I went over to the man I’d shot in the stomach and grabbed his feet. Pain went through my injured arm from the strain.

“We need to get them off the road in case their friends come looking for them,” Sara said, attempting to pull one of the others. She wasn’t strong enough to move him.

“If the rest of their group stopped to check the liquor stores on the county line, they might have heard the gunshots,” I said, leaving the man in the ditch. I didn’t know how far the sound would travel, but we were around four
or five
miles from the county line by that time. I could see the convenient store ahead in the distance to our left.

Sara looked to the north and nodded. “We need to hurry.”

I grabbed the second guy, the one that took the key to the eye.

“That’s some nasty work you did on his face,” I said.

“My church offered a self-
defense class for women,” she said, still trying to move the last man. “They taught us how to do that.”

I got the second man to the edge of the shoulder then rolled him into the ditch with the other. When I returned, Sara had given up trying to pull the last man and was just standing there staring at him.

“Here, I’ll get him,” I said. “Push the bike off the road, if you can. We’ll take their Jeep with us.”

By the time I got the third man into the ditch, Sara was walking along beside the bike, leaning into the handlebars. She gave it a shove when she got to the edge. It wobbled for a short distance, tilted then fell over. Our handiwork wasn’t completely hidden, but it was concealed enough that it might be overlooked if driven past at a high speed.

“You drive the van, and I’ll take the Jeep,” I said. “If the infected have left the store up there, I’m going to pull in and get the maps and things from the Crown Vic. After that, we stop for no one.”

CHAPTER 16

The infected that we’d attracted to the convenient store were all milling around on the edge of the parking lot. Sara waited for me on the highway. I pulled in fast next to the car and retrieved the necessary items we’d left inside—maps, machete, and a bottle of water. The creatures fell all over themselves trying to get to me, but I was already leaving before they made it to the car.

I led the way in the Jeep, going as fast as the cluttered road would allow. I kept an eye on my mirror, too, but no one had followed us. I was pleased to see some supplies in the vehicle, including a shotgun and at least one box of shells in the backseat. My plan was to leave the Jeep somewhere in Clayfield as the first of our supply caches/escape vehicles.

Of course, we would not want to place all of our supply caches in vehicles, but all of the placed vehicles should have supplies. Betsy’s minivan, still parked next to the museum where Jen and I had left in weeks before, would be a good emergency escape vehicle. We would need to stock it with a few supplies, but it could stay where it was. I wanted to place the working, gassed-up vehicles so that we’d never have to run more than a couple of blocks to find one. There were cars and trucks everywhere, but when you’re running for your life, you want a place to go, and you want a sure thing waiting for you when you get there.

Strategically, I felt that my house on 17th Street and the Somerville’s house on Depot Street, would be good places to leave vehicles. The Somerville’s house had already been looted, and my house had likely been hit, too by that time. I doubted the looters would bother hitting them again, especially since the houses had been marked with the big white Xs on the doors. Plus, they both had a garage where the cars could be hidden and protected.

When we entered Clayfield, I headed
over to 17
th
Street
. I pulled up in front of the
of my
home and got out.

Sara let down her window, “Do you think
the Somervilles are
here?”

“No,” I said. I told her my plans.

She went into the back of the van then returned to the driver
’
s seat and passed a bottle of vodka and a flashlight through the window.

“Do it fast while no one is around,” she said.

I ran to the house and lifted the garage door then pulled the Jeep inside. I left a map, the vodka, and the flashlight in the front floorboard. I traded my .22 revolver for the shotgun and shells in the backseat. Then I grabbed the rest of the maps and the machete, shut the door, and climbed into the van with Sara.

“Okay,” I said, “Let’s drive out of town and try to find some seeds.”

“Oh yeah,” she said. “I almost forgot about that.”

“Well,” I snorted. “We’ve had a busy day so far.”

The van was older, snub-nosed, with the engine in the cab. The doghouse--the plastic and carpeted shell that covered the engine--had a lot of trash piled up on it. There was an old Styrofoam coffee cup in the left cup holder and several yellow invoice slips. On top of the slips, like a big paperweight, was the semi-automatic pistol Sara had used to kill the three men.

“Well, at least we were able to arm ourselves better,” I said, trying to find a silver lining in the horribly black cloud of what had happened several minutes before.