Barren Fields (17 page)

Carl falls back onto the deck grasping his arm, with blood running out between his fingers.

The second larger boat begins turning away before it is close enough to be a danger of crashing into them, but it is still close enough to be a threat if anyone on that boat chooses to shoot. Keith and the others begin firing at it before it is able to come about. More armed men are on board, and they shoot back at the sailboat as they attempt to make their escape. Like the men in the first vessel, they are all firing handguns and don’t have the aim or distance accuracy that rifles do. Of the seven men that were on the second boat, only one is still standing as it speeds away, but he too leans over and then falls before he is out of shooting distance.

Carl is sitting at the doorway to the cabin still holding his bleeding arm, and Ellen is sitting next to him in tears.

“George, can you fix him up?” Keith asks. “Ellen, you need to get us underway. Ellen!” he yells. “There might be more of those men out here. All of those abandoned and burning ships are probably caused by thieves. We need to get underway.”

Ellen walks to the wheel and starts calling out orders to Keith. Frank and Thomas reload while scanning the coast for more approaching threats.

“You’re lucky they only hit your arm,” George tells Carl as he opens the first aid kit to treat the superficial wound.

“I didn’t think it would be so bad. How can people do that to each other? How could you shoot those men and be so calm?”

With those words reminding him of what he just did, George’s hands begin to shake. He has trouble putting the bandage on Carl’s arm, and his face blanches white. None of the men had to fire on another person before today. They had their guns and watched a lot of horrible things happen, but throughout their escape from New Orleans and the trip across Mexico, it was always someone else that pulled the trigger. Usually Senior Maldonado’s men.

Frank and Keith are having the same reaction to the encounter. Keith is kneeling with his head against the mast and looks as pale as George. Frank is vomiting over the side.

Thomas seems to be doing a little better, but his face is etched with fear and he looks like he is trying to fold his rifle in half the way his white knuckled hands are gripping it.

“That’s the first time I shot anyone,” George is finally able to mutter quietly to Carl.

Chapter 14

Stranded

Grants Pass, Oregon.

Present Day
.

The roads are still such a depressing reminder of how fast this disease hit. Almost every disaster movie I remember had images of roads and freeways jammed with cars from people trying to escape whatever calamity was being portrayed. None of our roads are packed with abandoned vehicles. There
are
accidents here and there, and the occasional one car wreck caused by recently infected drivers, all while trying to make a hasty escape to nowhere. But there are no telltale signs that a mass exodus occurred or was ever attempted.

“There’s a runner,” Simone calls out, probably pointing out the direction in the dark cab.

I keep the truck at a steady speed of thirty miles per hour hoping that I will be able to stop or maneuver enough to avoid getting in a wreck by hitting one of the infected.

“There’s another on this side,” I say. “A half mile more and we’ll be at the ramp to Redwood Highway.”

“There’s two more!” Simone says a bit too loudly, expressing her building fear.

“I see them too. It looks like they are starting to close in on us.”

“Eddie!” Simone screams as a softball sized rock appears in the light of the headlights before it smashes the windshield right in front of her. I hit the brakes and bring us to a stop, not reversing the truck right away, because I don’t want to hit Timothy’s truck coming up behind us.

“Tim, back up. Get out of here!” I yell into our radio when a branch hits our trucks windshield this time. I start spinning the truck around in reverse and hit one of the infected that was coming up behind us. Tim’s truck is disappearing down I-5, backing up the way I should have done. Spinning our truck around lost us the few seconds I didn’t know we still had. At least seven infected run past our headlights between Tim’s retreating truck and our own, more of them are staying in between our trucks.

“Simone, hang on. I have to try and ram our way through!” I yell and stomp down on the pedal wishing my pressure on it could make us fly.

I don’t have enough distance to get a decent speed up to plow through and make it to safety. Our first two impacts are enough to destroy the trucks front end, so I have to turn the wheel hard left to head off of I-5 before the engine dies. I keep my foot on the gas and bounce us down the hill in the direction of a former UPS package delivery center that is somewhere ahead of us in the dark.

“Eddie, I can’t see a thing!” Simone yells right before we plow over another small grassy median and mostly miss the back end of a semi-truck trailer. The trailer’s edge caves in the corner of the cab over my head and knocks the previously shattered windshield into our laps. We finally come to a rough stop when the truck rolls into the side of the UPS building.

Simone is able to jump right out with her flashlight and gun and starts shooting at the approaching runners. After vainly trying to open my jammed door, I turn to head out the passenger side.

While she is climbing into the truck bed in an attempt to reach safety, I struggle over the seat cutting my hands and arms on the glass fragments. I take one step out of the door just in time to be slammed back into the truck by a runner. The wind is knocked out of me, and I struggle to regain the ability to breathe while looking up to see Simone standing on top the truck’s cab. I still can’t breathe normally and feel a familiar sensation on my right shoulder as the runner that hit me takes a bite. I fumble in my attempt to get my gun free of its holster since this asshole or bitch is holding on to my gun hand. Simone shoots another runner as it approaches me and while dead, its continued momentum causes it to hit me and the leach trying to eat me, pushing me back into the cab. I almost drop my gun.

I finally switch the gun to my left hand and bring it up to the zombie’s head, blowing it open, and freeing me to try and climb to where Simone is. I have no luck even getting into the truck bed. Every time I grab onto the side of the truck to boost myself in, a new body appears from out of the darkness. Lucky for us there are no vision enhancements for these things. They are as blind as I am right now and are simply following the direction the truck took off the interstate and the noise it made when it crashed several times. The bodies of the infected keep bouncing off the truck and running into the building, unable to stop when they finally see an object in their way.

“Eddie, you need to grab the shotguns. I can’t reach the roof without your help.”

I shoot three more infected that make it to my side of the truck from the freeway and another that nearly grabs me, but its full run velocity takes it right past me and it smacks into the corner of the truck’s open door, either killing it, or knocking it out. I don’t bother to ask if it’s okay. I just shoot it in the head before reaching in and grabbing our two shotguns off the truck’s back window. Simone shoots another runner that is close to getting me and several more rounds at an unknown number of infected trying to climb onto the truck to get at her.

“Here! Grab it!” I yell, reaching up with my aching right arm to hand her one of the weapons that will hopefully save our lives tonight. If there was a God, there would certainly be a place in Heaven for the Creator of these beautiful pieces of machinery we are holding in our hands. Kel-Tec’s KSG’s are wondrous short bodied beast shotguns. Each holds fourteen rounds of 12 gauge ammo, and they are a definite comfort to be using at a time like this.

I pump a round into the chamber, pull the trigger, and watch an approaching infected get picked up and knocked back about three feet. After two more thunderous roars from my shotgun I am able to climb into the bed of the truck.

Simone is able to light a flare and throw it out into the parking lot away from us.

The light will allow the infected to see us, but they will hopefully be attracted to the flare long enough for us to climb onto the roof of this building. She is just a few inches too short to make the jump and reach the roof’s edge on her own. After she tosses her gun up there, I boost her up so she can begin her climb. Turning around, I see one infected that didn’t get attracted to the flare that is climbing into the truck bed. I don’t want to shoot it and redirect the attention of all the others back to me, so I let it scramble up, and then I kick it in the chest, knocking it back out of the bed.

Simone is hanging back over the side to grab for me, but I hand her my gun instead and tell her to back away. I jump up and have my arms up to my elbows over the edge. I try to pull myself up when I feel something hitting my right leg and am sure I’m about to be pulled back down. Managing to scramble my way onto the roof, I see the thing hitting my leg was my thigh holster that came loose.

“I’ve been bitten again, Simone. My right shoulder. I need you to look at it,” I say while stripping off my shirt.

“I didn’t grab the first-aid bag out of the truck!” she says frustrated and out of breath while looking over the side of the building at the congregating infected below.

“And I didn’t grab the radio. So we don’t know if Timothy made it out of here, and they won’t know we’re alive.”

“Wait, look out there,” she says pointing up the interstate from where we came.

Out in the distance someone is blinking their flashlight in a Morse code signal saying
RESPOND
. Our flashlight is down in the truck as well, but I do have a lighter in one of my pants pockets. I grab my bloody shirt, light it on fire and wave it over my head hoping they will see it. After a few waves the flashlight blinking stops, and we wait for the next message. About a minute later we decipher
SEE YOU ALIVE. HOME NOW. BACK MORNING
. And so starts our impromptu vacation under a beautiful starry sky.

   “We shouldn’t have both come,” I tell Simone. “I should have driven slower. I knew it was going to be bad here.”

“But we didn’t know how bad it would be, and you couldn’t have stopped me from coming to get my daughter if you tried,” she says forcefully. “Donald and Karen always take great care of them when we are away, not to mention how good Samantha and Conner are. Everyone wants to be around Gabriel. Sometimes I have to literally peel him out of people’s arms because they want to keep holding him. It isn’t easy for me to think about it or say this as their mother, but I know they will be taken care of by everyone in our group if something happens to us.”

I remain silent, and she asks the exact thing I am thinking about, “Do you think Hannah is okay?”

“I hope so,” is all I reply quietly before a crash below us reminds me that our immediate situation isn’t over or necessarily safe.

“Check your pockets for anything we can use,” I say while starting to dig through my own. I usually wear cargo pants since I’m paranoid, and the extra pockets let me carry items that only a paranoid person would bother weighing themselves down with. In these pants I happen to have a small shotgun shell shaped flashlight, and the battery is still good.

“I wish I knew about this earlier.” I have an unnecessary compass, a pen, a highlighter, a few loose bandages, a handful of nails, and a box cutter along with a few gun magazines and some loose 12 gauge ammo. Simone only has empty gun magazines.

“I’ll walk around the edge of the roof and see if there is any other place these things can get up here besides the truck’s cab.”

It just so happens that the spot where our truck crashed has a higher roof level than the rest of the building. If there were any vehicles parked close by, it would have made an easy access for the infected to get to us. There is nothing around us, however, and our truck provides the only access to the roof. Getting up here was difficult enough for us to accomplish that we have little to fear from the infected being able to make it up.

“We should be safe, but obviously, I don’t think both of us should sleep at the same—”

My sentence is cut off by two echoing gunshots coming from deeper in Grants Pass. I shine the light at Simone and see her face register the possibility as well.

“It could just be some random stranger trying to survive,” I say, playing Devil’s advocate.

Simone gives me a look and shakes her head. “And how many people that have lived this long would be attracting the attention of the infected back to them after we probably pulled half of the city toward us with our shooting?”

“Good point, I agree.”

I point my shotgun in the air and shoot, pump, shoot, two shots just like we heard. Two more distant shots reach our ears, and we know the shots were meant for us. Most likely one or more of our people alive in the city that heard our little gun battle and decided to let us know they were all right once the noise died down.

Simone throws her arms up around me for a hug and manages to scrape the bite on my shoulder, reminding me that it is there.

“We need to get your wound cleaned up, Eddie. Get on your hands and knees.”

“Getting kind of kinky on me?” I say with a chuckle. “Can’t I just sit down?”

“You can sit upright or bent over, but I don’t have any water or peroxide with me.”

Not knowing where she is going with her directions, I can only shake my head in the darkness and wonder if men will ever understand what women are thinking or talking about.

“Clue me in, Simone. What’s the point then?”

“I have to pee on it,” she says flatly, but I can tell she is holding back a giggle. She waits just a moment, probably to contain the laughter that is ready to erupt, and continues, “I’ll have to pee on it and rub it while I’m peeing to clean it out. You can sit instead of getting on all fours, but I doubt you want that running down your back.”

“Wow, we haven’t done anything like this since we were younger,” I say while kneeling down and bending over. Simone kisses me on the cheek, and then proceeds to clean my wound.