The Dark Trilogy (87 page)

Bobby’s howled curses were barely audible over the caterwauls of the deceased as Carol wept silent tears next to Fred. Despite the din, all Fred could hear was the pounding of his heart as he was forced to slalom around another clot of bodies in front of him.

The Acura suffered a few more dents and dings before Fred managed to plow through the tall hedges lining the edge of their subdivision. As a mailman, he was familiar with most of the back roads in the area, and was able to navigate the SUV to an area not clogged with the wrecks choking the major roadways. Despite his desire to head straight for Hillsboro and Teddy’s place, he knew that wasn’t feasible. His knowledge of the local area gave Fred only a bit of an edge, which diminished as they left Lawrence Park. The GPS in the Acura was on the fritz, so their path became more convoluted the farther they got from home. Fred waited patiently for Carol to say something to him, to offer him some sort of guidance, but she sat in stony silence on the trip, leaving the decision making up to him.

After an hour or so, thoughts of getting to Teddy’s place took a back seat to survival. The world had been wrecked, and Fred was beginning to doubt their ability to make it to Hillsboro easily—or even at all.

The journey that first day consisted of a series of misguided attempts to stop and collect food and water, along with a failed effort at seeing if there was any gas left in the pumps at a convenience store several miles from their house. The undead were everywhere, and every time they stopped the Acura and stepped outside, it only took mere minutes before the surviving members of the Harrington family were forced to rush back into the SUV.

Initially, Fred believed the news reports that stated that most of the infected were confined to certain areas of the city, while outlying suburbs and rural areas were relatively safe. No such luck. There were ghouls as far as the eye could see, in every direction. Many hadn’t stirred since the last of the living had either departed or died days and weeks earlier, but when the sound of the Acura’s engine roared through the area, they woke out of whatever stupor claimed them in the absence of prey, and swarmed the vehicle. It made for some messy getaways.

They somehow managed to find a place to hide outside of Gallatin, deep into the night. They sat in the SUV for several hours, buried in a stand of trees with the engine turned off. They had been forced to leave the Acura where it was parked as they hoofed it to an abandoned house a hundred yards away. They spent the next day silently fortifying the house the best they could, dismantling furniture and using it to barricade the doors and windows. The only door that wasn’t blocked off was the one off the back porch, through which Fred and Bobby would sneak out to go hunting over the course of the following week.

That was when Bobby taught his father how to use Charlie’s rifle. Hunting was a challenge, but they managed to scare up some game. It seemed that most of the wild animals were still plentiful, despite the fact that domesticated animals had been slaughtered just like the human population. They saw more than one dead cow, its bones picked clean by the combination of the ravenous undead and the scavengers that devoured whatever the monsters left behind.

Unfortunately, with every shot of the rifles, the infected became more clued in to their position, and the creatures tracked the father and son to their location within minutes. They had to travel farther afield on each trip, away from the house they had commandeered, to make sure that they didn’t bring any stiffs back home with them. Even with a thorough effort to ensure that the surrounding area was corpse-free, it was only a matter of minutes before the first trickle of rotters would appear off in the distance after a trigger was pulled. It was even worse when they got a kill. The scent of fresh blood was like a magnet that pulled and compelled the monsters.

Despite all their precautions, it was after one of their failed hunting trips that they returned to the house to find the windows smashed and the back door wide open. Rushing inside, they discovered that Carol had killed eleven ghouls with her small handgun. It had taken sixteen shots to take them down, which meant she had been forced to reload the semiautomatic in the middle of the fight. During the battle, she had been bitten, but even after having her arm gnawed, she managed to continue fighting the rest of the pack off. She let the one that had latched onto her arm clamp down tight while she fired the gun with her other hand, shooting the three other stiffs surrounding her. Even then, she didn’t shoot the one on her arm. Instead, she slammed the butt of the handgun down onto its skull until she heard the bone crack, firing at several other stiffs between each downward strike. Finally, when she was out of immediate danger and the one that had bitten her lay twitching on the floor, she put a bullet in its head.

Carol Harrington was a tough woman. Her husband would be the first to tell anyone that. It was forty hours of labor with no painkillers for the birth of Charlie and then a C-section with Bobby. Never a complaint in either instance, and she was up and moving around the next day like nothing had happened. Any pain she had was suffered in silence. This time was no exception. After all the ghouls were dead, she wrapped her arm in a bed sheet and waited for her son and husband to return to the house. Once they did, she was the one who insisted they leave right away, without any time for her to rest from the assault. Carol was nothing if not practical. They had to find another hiding place before more of the infected found them.

“Get off your asses, quit whining about me, and head for the Acura!” It was as simple as that. She made the pronouncement, and there was no questioning her on it.

They drove the SUV until it ran out of gas, which unfortunately didn’t take long. After that, they walked for two hours, moving with as much stealth as they could manage. Carol, who refused any assistance, stood tall and kept walking until they found the old farmhouse with the grain silo next to it. It was surrounded by several large, barren fields, and much like their previous hiding place, it had been abandoned weeks before. Given their ability to see what was coming at them for nearly a mile in every direction, they knew it was their safest bet.

Carol died a day later. She was strong, but like every other human being who had been infected, she couldn’t resist the virus’s deadly pull.

Less than thirty minutes after her demise, she sat up in the bed on which Fred and Bobby had laid her on in the farmhouse. The first thing she did after opening her rheumy eyes was to hiss at her husband. Fred, who had wrapped the rifle in a towel to muffle the sound, waited until the very last second before putting a bullet through Carol’s head.

They buried her an hour later, putting up a makeshift cross to mark her grave.

Fred and Bobby spent the next week or so at the farmhouse, living in silence, rarely speaking to one another. They saw more and more of the dead creeping around off in the distance, but none ventured too close. Even so, it was getting worse every day. There would be long stretches of time where they would see nothing, but then they’d spot a pack of twenty or thirty of the diseased vermin roaming near the property. At the same time, they wanted to preserve their dwindling ammunition for hunting, so they had to continue keeping their heads down. Bobby found a bike out in the shed, but didn’t bother riding it anywhere. It was too dangerous a risk.

It was on one of those drab, muggy summer days that seemed endless when they heard a noise that had become almost alien to them: the sound of a car engine rolling down the road that ran next to the property. Even off in the distance, the engine was clear as a bell. There were no other sounds to interfere with it—no other cars, no people, no machines … nothing. There hadn’t been anything but the moans of the dead and chirping of birds for as long as they could remember.

The two of them watched as the blue Honda stopped in front of the huge property. At that point, it was just some faraway dot. It wasn’t until it turned up the road, moving closer, that Fred came up with a hasty plan that would help him and Bobby escape the farmhouse and make one last attempt to get to Hillsboro and Teddy, if he was still alive.

Bobby had been hesitant about trying to hijack the van and wanted to see if they could just talk to the people to see if they might be able to hitch a ride with them. Fred steamrolled that idea without a moment’s hesitation. He was a changed man, no longer afraid to assert himself. The death of his older boy and his wife of twenty-three years had done that to him.

He reminded Bobby that the few people they’d seen since they escaped from their house in Lawrence Park had been none too friendly to them. If his family hadn’t been armed, Fred knew, there was no way they would have made it this far. They would be dead on the side of some road, left as bait for the rotters as their fellow survivors picked over their meager belongings. People were desperate, crazed, and none seemed to be in the mood for small talk or hospitality these days.

After a few seconds of heated discussion, Bobby gave in and reluctantly nodded his acquiescence. Fred moved into position behind the shed and told Bobby to wait at the door. They would be ready for the people in the van, no matter how dangerous they were and how well armed they might be.

Despite the argument, and despite the lack of communication between the father and son, the two had grown much closer after Carol’s death. Before, their relationship had been okay—as good as could be expected between a rebellious teenager and his dad, but their level of trust and appreciation for one another had grown dramatically in the past few days. Despite the cloud of despair hanging over them, they knew that they could count on one another for anything.

Charlie had been a great older brother. He liked to heap abuse on his kid brother when they were younger, with wedgies and Indian burns being his favorite form of torture. But as they got older, they had learned to watch out for one another, to watch each other’s backs. Somehow, after Charlie died, Bobby managed to stay strong, despite losing his best friend. He had clung to his mother, knowing deep down that he was her favorite, whereas Dad had favored Charlie. So when she died, it felt like his guts had been ripped out.

It had been the same for Fred. Somehow, out of their combined pain and anguish, they were able to form a new bond. Part of it had come from the last conversation Bobby had with his mother before she passed. When they arrived at the farmhouse, Carol sat her son down next to her. She looked him straight in the eye and told him that it was his job to watch out for his father now. They were each other’s responsibility, and no one else was going to take care of them if they didn’t take care of each other. The entire world was out to get them, and they had to stick together if they were going to make it out of this alive. She made the boy swear to her that he would take watch Fred’s back. Bobby had, and when he did, he meant every word of it.

Bobby didn’t realize it, but moments after he said his last goodbye to his mother and rushed from the room to weep silently in the shed, Carol had the same conversation with her husband. And Fred made the same promise to her that his son had.

They would stick together until the bitter end.

Michael, Frank, and Cindy

He knew being with her was all wrong. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Everything up to this point in his life had been regimented and controlled, structured to allow for the greatest amount of success. Even when civilization crumbled, he had adapted and maintained control over the situation. Now he was the leader of a small but growing tribe of people. The bloody lines on the map at which he looked every day spoke of his triumphs: where he had come from (where they all had come from) and where they were heading. They would continue eastward, away from large population centers, and find even more people to join them. His power would grow as more people relied on him and trusted his leadership. It was all working out as planned.

But all those visions, all those dreams, had been disrupted. He still wanted the power, but there were other, darker things crossing his mind these days. They hadn’t been there before. They had been planted there recently.

Perhaps that was an excuse. Maybe they had always been there, and it took the right person—or more accurately, the wrong person—to dredge them up. So maybe if that person were out of the picture, all those dark, hideous desires inside his head would disappear along with her.

Either way, he was sure that Cindy had to go.

***

Michael had been groomed for greatness by his parents from early on in life. Private boarding schools, Princeton, and then Michigan for his MBA. Business first, then politics. There had been a stint in a corporate training program for Proctor and Gamble. That was after they had wooed him and offered him the best compensation package amongst a slew of elite employers. There were several rapid promotions leading to the executive level. He was the youngest vice president in the company and was expected to go much further with them … if he chose to stay. The plan was to build relationships with various lobbyists, business leaders, and politicians, working those connections to his advantage. His father was highly respected, and not only in Connecticut, where Michael had grown up. He had politicians from all across the country in his back pocket. Between his own burgeoning relationships and those of his father, Michael would be ready to run for office either in Connecticut or Ohio shortly after turning thirty. From there, the sky was the limit.

He was to marry first, of course. He’d dated a few respectable girls in Cincinnati, but they were of the disposable variety. Most were young and attractive, but interspersed with them were a few women of more … experience, who had helped him along his career path at P & G and with his political ambitions. But he was from old money, and the expectations were that he would marry old money. There just was not enough of it in Cincinnati for his or his father’s liking. So he had been shuttling back and forth between Cincinnati and New York on weekends for the past few months so he could court Ms. Penelope Warden. Her father was a business associate of Michael’s father. More importantly, Penelope’s family had political connections that ran up and down the east coast, and it certainly didn’t hurt that, as an only child, she was due to inherit substantial holdings in several Fortune 500 companies when dear old dad kicked the bucket.