Dead Wrangler (5 page)

CHAPTER TEN

Shotgun Divorce

She woke up. It was night time. The kids were playing a video game. They looked up at her.

"Macaroni and cheese!" They shouted.

She groaned and got up. Goddamn, her arm hurt.

So, she thought. Calvin got ripped off.

"Hey Gary, did you guys fall asleep too?"

"Oh no, we had to stay up to make sure nobody else tried to break in."

She nodded. Sugar pills. Calvin paid God knows what for sugar pills. She had passed out from the adrenaline dump.

She started to make macaroni and cheese. She dialed Calvin. He picked up after a few rings.

"You didn't do it?" He sounded sad.

"I did. Those pills were worthless."

"David traded them to me for our antique silverware, then took off for the hills. He said his brother was a chemist..."

Neither one of them seemed to be able to think of anything to say.

"Does the arm hurt?" He asked.

"Like a motherfucker," she said.

"That's a good sign. Your odds of being immune go up twenty percent if the victim retains feeling in the wound."

She didn't have much to say to that. In fact, she didn't have much to say at all.

"You still trapped?"

"Worse than ever. They just keep coming. None of them are getting in, but we just can't get out."

She didn't have the energy or interest to ask who he was with.

"Take care," she said.

"Love you," he said.

She hung up.

When she had closed her eyes earlier that day, she thought she was going to die. With that, it seemed like her attachment to her old life had died too. She was born again.

Till death do us part, she thought. Now her only concern was the children. She had to protect them. After she made the mac and cheese.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Exodus

Meghan's iPhone burred. The bright red of an
Exodus update appeared. She slid the phone off the bed-stand and read it.

Peoria Update: Classification Now Level 2; use extreme caution. Downtown area esp. dangerous.

She unlocked the phone. The updates were fast and furious. Red dots appeared all around her; sightings from validated Exodus users. There was a furious red cluster in the neighborhood only a few miles away. She peered out the window. Trevor was still gone. She hadn't heard from him in days. He was supposed to be back two days ago. Worry ate at her. Trevor was her only sibling and about the only family member whose name she could remember. He would have been back by now, or at least called if something were wrong. She had told herself last night that if he wasn't back this morning that she would hook up with a group on Exodus and get out of Peoria. That growing ball of red wasn't growing as fast as it used to, but it wasn't because it wasn't growing anymore. That just meant there was no one around to report it. They were dead or fled. She was going to have to pick one of those groups today, she knew it.

She was pathetically unprepared. Her survival supplies amounted to ten cans of a variety of Campbell soups, a .38 revolver with twenty rounds, and her running gear. She had a lot of running gear; water bottle belts, breathable shorts and shirts, and some very nice shoes. But running was more of a last ditch thing.

She put off hitting the "Find an Escape Party" button in the Exodus app and ate some Grape Nuts as slowly as she could.

Trevor was six years older than her, a decrepit thirty-one. He had been in the army for a while, and now drove trucks. He'd been in Mississippi on a normal run when all this had started. At first he had kept on the road, when it was still possible to think it was some sort of media hysteria or isolated incidents. Then one day he had called.

"Meghan, you know this shit everyone is talking about?"

"Yeah, War of the Worlds part two."

"No, no its not. I saw it today. It's real. Totally real."
"What happened?" she asked.

"The car in front of me. Just going along, no big deal. All of a sudden this dude jumps up from the back seat and just tears into the woman driving the car. I mean, just biting her neck. She swerves off the road and goes right into the ditch at 80 MPH. Airbags and all that. I stop to try to help. Call 911 and go over. The fucking guy, he's still eating on her. I mean just eating. Until he sees me. Then he starts trying to crawl after me. Both arms are just shattered, they're moving around like dead snakes. But he pulls himself out of the car and tries to stand up. His legs are busted up, femur popping out, but he keeps trying to walk on them, moaning and screaming at me. He just wouldn't stop. I went back in my truck until a cop showed up. The cop takes one look at the guy and puts one bullet in his head. He comes over and pulls the gun on me and orders me out of the truck. He makes me strip naked. Then he says "These fucking assholes are just spreading it everywhere. Don't they know there's no point in running?" Then he asks me how close I got to the dead guy. I say about five feet. He gets a look on his face and says 'Make sure your life insurance premiums are paid up.' Then he goes over to the lady, shoots her in the head, and then gets some gas out of the back of his truck and sets both of them on fire! What the fuck is that? But anyway, it's real! No bullshit. It's all real! Before he left the cop came over and said I should try to stay away from people as much as I could. What does that mean?"

She had never heard Trevor panic before. She never imagined he could panic. He was always so stoic, and he had seen and done things that she didn't even want to imagine when he was in the army. She felt panic like humidity after a summer rainstorm. She just kept asking when he would get home. He said it would be tomorrow. That was two days ago. She hadn't been able to eat for all the worry. He had never called again.

Now she understood why the cop had said that about the life insurance. Unless he was immune, he was most likely infected. Even if nothing else happened, he was probably dead from the infection. Where was he? God wouldn't let a man like Trevor just die in his sleep like that, and then wake up to be a monster, would He?

Trevor had to be coming. Maybe his cell phone was dead. But every day she looked at the map of how he had to be coming, and each day it looked worse, until it stopped getting worse. But that was when you knew it was bad; that was when the place had gone dark.

Peoria was going dark. It was going dark fast. She needed to go, but she needed to stay. She imagined that even if he was a zombie now, he'd make his way to this house. He'd promised, after all. And then she could put him out of his misery, and then herself.

But he didn't come, and the hours ticked away. Finally it was noon. She unlocked her phone.  New York was officially declared dead. The President was at an undisclosed location. Japan was dying by the hundreds of thousands an hour. She went to the "Find a Party" section.

Three parties were available in her area. One party of thirty filled up before she even had time to read the information. She sighed and clicked the second.

"THREE ALPHAS. WE"RE BUFF GOOD LOOKING DOODS GOT PLENTY OF GUNS AND FOOD> LOOKING FOR SOME PRIME WOMEN (NOBODY OVER 30 PLZ). FATTIES WILL BE SHOT. NONMONAG, MUST BE PREPARED TO REPOPULATE IMMEDIATELY.

She didn't read the rest. She went to the third group.

LF people who will watch each other’s back and help each other get out of this hellhole. Only rule: don't be an ALPHA. Destination: rural Canada.

One slot left. The meet up spot was only three miles away. She had an hour to get there. She didn't have a car. Tears in her eyes, she hit the join button. She left a note on the table explaining what she did in case Trevor came back, then switched into her running gear. She stuffed the gun in her waistband and put as many cans of soup as she could in her Camelbak, which was full of water. She had to leave most of the soup. She shot the lock on the door and stepped outside for the first time in two days. She immediately saw her second zombie ever. It was the weird old guy whom she guessed had died last Thursday, since he was still wearing his Thursday polka dot dress. He lunged for her, only a yard away. She started running fast, and before she knew it he was out of sight behind her. She had even picked the right direction. She had thirty minutes and two miles to go. This was going to be easy, she thought, and dropped her pace a little bit. She'd been redlining; she'd done the first mile in five minutes.

She arrived ten minutes early. It was a nice old house. It looked empty. As soon as she appeared the door cracked open and a hand gestured her inside.

She went in without hesitation. It seemed like a nice hand. A hand that seemed more scared of her than she was of it.

The hand was attached to a morbidly obese kid. He couldn't be more than eighteen. He was in black military fatigues and was covered in guns.

"I'm Chester. Foxxcub, I presume?" He extended a sweaty hand. "Yeah, my real name is Meghan," she said.

"Dragonfire is upstairs. I mean, Virgil is upstairs."

"Do you know each other?"

"Sort of. We're in, well, I guess we were in, the same guild."

"Guild? Like World of Warcraft?"

"Well, technically Everquest 2. But yeah, for our purposes pretty much the same thing."

Meghan's eyebrows arched a little bit. She didn't have anything in particular against nerds. But she could think of a long list of people she'd rather fight zombies with than Walter Mitty and a guy named Dragonfire. On the other hand, Chester was almost too well armed. She couldn't name them all, but one was an AK-47. The rest looked like the kind of weapons gun control advocates liked to talk about. He saw her checking out the guns and he took the AK-47 off his chest and handed it to her. "It's yours, Meghan. I've got too many." He dug around his many pockets and pulled out two long clips. Let me show you how it works."

He gave her a quick lesson in the gun.

"It's designed so that illiterate Russian peasants could figure it out. So, well... I didn't mean to compare you to an illiterate peasant, I just mean, you know, it's simple."

"I got it. No offense taken," Meghan replied. His anxiety was almost cute.

Virgil/Dragonfire came down. He was thirty-five, had a bit of a gut, but had the hands of someone who did hard work for a living. She was relieved. She was afraid he'd be another nerd stereotype. He looked her up and down and seemed pleased in a non-creepy way.

"I take it being part of those meatheads’ harem wasn't appealing," Virgil said. "I know we don't look like much, but I hope that what we lack in the traditional manly virtues we can make up for with basic human decency. Also, lots of guns."

She nodded, bemused. "I'm Meghan."
"I was listening. I'm Virgil, but you already knew that. This is the house of Jamie Porto. She died last week of natural causes. I know because I was her gardener. Heart attack I guess. She didn't come back. I don't own a car, and Chester is driving a 1990 Ford Tempo. We decided it would be foolhardy to attempt a road trip with it under current conditions. This was the only vehicle I was aware of in reasonable condition. It's a bit old but it was well maintained and has few miles. I'm guessing from your mode of transportation that you also don't have a reliable vehicle."

"No, I just used the bus and a bike."

"Why didn't you ride the bike?"

"Well, there was a zombie just outside my door, but also it didn't occur to me. It was only three miles."

"You ran three miles in under forty-five minutes?"

"Well, it was more like twenty-five minutes, but I was trying to keep from getting tired." She responded. She took the idea that it had taken her forty-five minutes to run three miles to be an insult. In her world a fifteen minute mile meant you were walking. An eight minute mile wouldn't even get you in the top fifty of a half marathon. But to them she might as well have said she had won a gold medal in the Olympic marathon and then did the Ironman triathlon the day after. Chester almost fainted at the thought.

"What kind of car is it?" She asked, before they had recovered from the thought of her running all that way.

"A 98 Buick LeSabre."

"So, we could fit five people in there? Why'd you cap the group out at three?"

"Well, uh, actually, I kinda goofed a little. I didn't count Virgil here when I signed up, so someone else is supposed to come."

"Oh, ok."

"They are late though. Now five minutes late."

"We should give them some time, don't you think?"

"Not really. Unlike you they signed up three hours ago. They should be here by now."

"Do you think a zombie?"

"Well that is always a distinct possibility. Maybe they changed their mind. Maybe they turned into one of them. Maybe they found another group on the way. Maybe they got depressed and killed themselves. Who knows. They aren't here, that's the main thing. I start to get worried about what they might drag with them if it's taking them so long."

"Fair enough. Can't you message them over Exodus and see if they can talk?" Chester sighed and got his phone out. He typed a message. A minute later his phone bonged as the reply came in.

"WNT TO ALPHAS. THEY R ASSHOLES. TRAPPED AT THE GNC AT STARBOROUGH CENTER. PLZ HELP."

Meghan turned away from the plea for help. That GNC was half a mile away.

Chester sputtered. "Why in the hell did they go to a GNC?"

"Probably wanted to stock up on Muscle Milk," Virgil said.

"Well, I guess we should help, right?" Chester asked Virgil.

Meghan turned back to them. "No we shouldn't. That GNC is only a few minutes from here. If they are trapped that means there's a ton of zombies there. We can't help 4 or 5 people, we have space for one. And if they are that close, it means we need to get the fuck out of here now."

Virgil looked at Chester and nodded. "She's right. I doubt the bros will let us save that one chick who asked us real nice if we can't save them too. That's even if we can save any of them, which is hardly an established proposition."

"But, she wouldn't ask if she thought we couldn't do it."

Meghan grimaced. "Of course she would, Chester. She's scared. Who wouldn't ask for help in her place?"

Chester looked defeated.

"C'mon Chester. Be real here. I know you love the idea of being a paladin, but she placed her bet. It's too bad she picked the wrong people, but getting wasted for a woman you never met before won't save anyone."

"I just... I just don't want to be a coward again, you know. I want to stay human. I want to help people."

Meghan almost broke into tears. That was how she felt when she'd left her house and any hope of seeing Trevor again behind.

"Chester, sometimes you just have to save what you can. We need you here, and you need us. Will you help us?" she asked.

Chester looked at her. Perhaps he misread her watery eyes as fear that he would leave her alone. How could he know that he had hit such a raw nerve? But he stiffened up and realized what he had to do.

"Ok, we're mostly packed. We just need to fill up whatever we can with water and then go," she said. She helped fill up a whole giant cooler in the bathtub, topped off her hydration pack, and anything else they could seal up. The car was jammed full of food and water. Her idea of taking five people was wrong. She had to cram herself into the back seat, a seat she volunteered for because the men were way too big to fit.