This Dark Earth (10 page)

We walk through the house, checking doors and windows. I find a garage through a door off the kitchen. There’s a Honda Accord hybrid in there. An empty space for another car or truck. The stuff stored in the room—hunting boots and camouflage coats, weed-eaters and lawn-care utensils, gas cans, a gun case—makes me think a truck. In the corner is a bulky, tarp-covered object. Lucy appears in the doorway to the kitchen. In lighter times I might’ve joked about a truck parked next to a hybrid, but the expression on Lucy’s face doesn’t warrant jests.

“Go check the gun cabinet,” she murmurs. “I’ll see if I can find the keys for the car.”

I walk to the cabinet and open it. There are a variety of hunting rifles and shotguns. Two scoped bolt-action rifles, .270 and A-Bolt 30-06. A semiautomatic .22 rifle. The smell of the cabinet reminds me of my Peepaw, the smell of WD-40. A pump-action 12 gauge. In the cabinet below, I find a variety of hunting knives, ammunition for the guns, and a matte-black gun holster with a dull pistol in it. It’s heavy, and it feels dangerous even securely fastened in the holster.

I hear Lucy pad toward me.

“You find the keys?”

Raising her hand, she jingles a key ring.

“I hope you have a belt,” I tell her.

“Why?”

“Because there’s a new sheriff in town, and she needs a gun holster.”

“Don’t you want it?”

“No,” I say, shaking my head. “I’ve always been a miserable shot. I’ll take this.” I heft the shotgun. “I might be some help with it. And I’ve got my trusty hammer.”

She tries to smile and fails. She’s jonesing for her family, and I’m no help. But she takes the pistol, draws it from the holster, and checks the magazine.

“Nine millimeter.” Obviously, she has experience with guns. More than me, it looks like.

“Whatever happens, we’re gonna need some bags,” I say, watching her. She holds the pistol in her hand and stares at it like someone who’s picked up an interesting rock and thinks it might be worth something but isn’t sure. “You think you can find food or water or whatever we might need and bags we can pack it in?”

She turns again and goes back into the house. I’m a little worried about her. Yesterday she was like a superhero, but today she’s a little lost. Maybe she’s not a morning person.

There’s a camo bandolier for shotgun shells in the ammunition compartment, and I take it out and load it up and sling it across my chest. I feed the shells into the shotgun, work the action to put one in the chamber, and then feed a last one in. My fingers haven’t forgotten Peepaw’s lessons. It’s taken an atomic holocaust and zombies to make me start remembering my family. But I don’t want to think about Emily.

I put the shotgun within reach and then go to the
plastic shroud in the corner. I’ve got a sneaking suspicion what might be under it.

Pulling off the tarp, I’m greeted by the sight of a Honda 4x4 ATV with front and rear racks for hunting and cargo. The bright red plastic fenders and cover plates still shine new, and there’s only a bit of mud on the tires. The key is in the ignition.

I’m reminded of a tune, but I don’t have a head for music and even less of one for lyrics, so I can’t recall the song, but I start humming a happy little ditty anyway.

I check the gas tank, and it looks empty. I turn the key over one click. Nothing. Not even the whir of solenoid or sparks from the battery.

I’m shitty with guns, but I’m pretty good with things that scoot, so by the time Lucy returns with a duffel bag that looks stuffed with things, I’ve got the ignition plate off with a screwdriver from the toolbox I found and I’m ready to hot-wire the little red beast.

“Shouldn’t we check the car first?”

I blush. “I guess so. What about the electric magnetic—”

“Hmm. Electromagnetic pulse. Comes before big hydrogen fusion bombs. Knocks out . . . overloads really . . . modern electronics. The higher the altitude, the wider the effect. I guess whoever made the call to nuke us didn’t want to wipe out the nation’s electrical grid.”

“How do you know this stuff?”

“High school science nerd.”

I don’t even have to stretch my imagination to see it: Lucy, in glasses with an armful of books, making rockets and
dissecting piglets and running track with skinny knees and awkward glances at boys and—

I can’t get distracted thinking about a young Lucy, so I say, “Well, let’s check out the car.”

Lucy pulls the keys from her jeans and walks around to the driver’s door. She opens it and sits in the seat, but her legs hang out the door still.

She puts the key in the ignition and turns it over, one click, like the ATV. Nothing. She turns it over all the way. Dead.

“I can hot-wire the ATV. Bypass all the complicated electronics that are dead anyway. No problem. I used to have one.”

For once I can do something. She’s the superhero and I’m just her sidekick now, but that’s all right with me. As long as I’m breathing and not shambling.

A horrible thought strikes me.

“Do you become one of those things if you die of old age?”

Lucy blinks twice, thinking.

“Well, with luck we’ll find out, many, many years from now.”

I laugh, a weak sound.

“We’ve got to get dressed,” she says.

“I’m dressed now.”

“No. Here.” She throws the bag to the floor. “There’s a leather jacket in there that might fit you. Did you find any gloves or helmets?”

“No, but—”

“Armor. That zombie almost bit off your fingers.” She
shakes her head disapprovingly. “We’ve got to protect ourselves. I know it’s summer, but we’ll hydrate and put on a bunch of layers. If one of them bites, it—”

“It’s all over, isn’t it?”

“No. I don’t think so. I think we
all
might be carriers by now. Everyone’s infected, and many patients had it without bite wounds. There’s no way I couldn’t have been infected at the clinic, I breathed the air, I drank from water-fountains. I touched people.” She thought of the boy spasming on the floor, eating his own lips and fingers. “So . . . some folks suffer symptoms and die. Everybody else just turns at death. But yeah, if they get their hands on you, it’s pretty much over.”

“Except for the shambling.”

We search the garage. In a drawer of the worktable, I find a pair of grease-stained leather gloves.

“Allergies, most likely.” Lucy pulls a stack of white dust masks, for yard work, down from a peg on the wall. In an oversized drawer, I find a circular saw with a couple of sets of protective glasses.

I put on a pair and hand the other to Lucy. She hands me a white mask, like we were in Hong Kong for their monthly SARS epidemic. Actually, I wish I was in a SARS epidemic rather than this situation. Except for finding Lucy.

Watching her move, I think of Angelyne, my girl back in Alabama. But where Angie was blunt and busty and, if I’m being honest, somewhat brutish, like an unhewn block of wood, Lucy is lithe and graceful. Full of thought. I should probably feel bad about everything. But I don’t. I don’t want
Angelyne to shamble. But I don’t want to go back to her, either, and maybe that’s why I stayed a trucker and never settled down with her. I was always leaving, always finding somewhere else to go.

I put on the leather jacket. She rummages in the bag and pulls out something that looks like a child’s version of an Indiana Jones jacket. She pulls it on. I hand her the gloves.

“You don’t want them?”

“I need to be able to drive the ATV.”

She nods.

“I’ll get the four-wheeler in shape and ready to go if you’ll pack the other stuff. We need to be running before opening the garage door. Should we take these other guns?”

She thinks for a moment and then says, “No. They’ll just slow us down. If we had the car—”

“Right. Take what we need, nothing else.”

She turns to the door and then turns back.

“When you were going to kick me out of your semi, you said you had a daughter. Were you going to kick me out to save yourself or to try and get home to save her?”

I don’t know what to say. Everything that’s happened swims in my head, and I get images of Lucy sitting in the passenger seat of the semi and images of my daughter—images rising like fish to the top of a pond, broaching the surface, then submerging.

“I don’t—”

“Because I’m beginning to think I can’t really ask you to go with me. You need to go back up to the bathroom, close the door, and wait. Days, even a week or more. The
radiation—it’s going to give me cancer, surely. And you too, if you spend much more time out there.”

“My girlfriend is too far away for me to do any good. Back in Alabama. My daughter is eighteen and in the army reserve. She’s in Iraq. A half a world away.” I give a little half-hearted laugh. “You’re the only person I have right now.”

Lucy opens her mouth, and then a tear pearls and traces its way down her cheek.

“Oh.”

“There’s no way of knowing what’s going on with the rest of the world,” I say as calmly as I can, hoping the hitch in my voice goes unnoticed. “As far as I know, she’s safer there than we are here. She’s probably better armed and equipped.”

Lucy looks at me, and then away to the ATV, and then at the wall. She’s working up to something.

“You should stay. Stay in the safe room. You’ll be better off there. Leave in a few days, and you’ll have much better chances to survive the radiation.”

“What’s the fallout circle . . . uh . . . the circumference?”

“The radius. It depends. Many, many miles at the least.”

“But the wind usually blows west to east, right?”

She nods, looking at me. I can’t read her expression.

“So won’t my chances be better if I go upwind, out of the fallout range?”

She shakes her head, but I can see she’s thinking. “I don’t know. Leaving with me, we’re sure to get some fallout in our system.” She puts her hand to her waist, resting her palm on the pistol’s grip, truly like a sheriff. “But I’m going. I just
wanted you to know the risks . . . I can’t be . . . responsible if you—”

I stand and grab a red fuel tank nestled in the corner of the garage. It’s half full, two gallons’ worth of gas. A smaller can has the word
mixed
scrawled on it with what looks like a Sharpie. I can only assume what I’ve got is unmixed gas. I turn back to her as I’m filling the ATV. She’s still looking at me, and I still can’t read her expression.

I sigh. “How the hell are you going to get out of here without me, anyway? I’m a trucker. Being on the move’s in my blood. Do you know how to drive one of these things?”

“No. But—”

“Yeah, I’m sure you could figure it out. Forget that. I’ll drive. You navigate, and shoot.”

She draws a lungful of air, holds it, and then releases. She kneels and puts her hands to her face.

“You don’t—” She clenches her fists, opens them, then rubs them on her jeans and stands again. “You don’t know how much . . . how glad I am you said that. Thank you, Knock-Out.”

My cheeks burn, and I don’t know what to do with my hands.

“Shit. I got to move, I said. And we make a good team.”

She laughs, tossing back her head. Her neck is long and graceful, and I can see the pulse in the hollow of her throat.

“So let’s get going.”

I grab the shotgun and put it in the gun rack, strapping it down. I fasten the safety glasses to my face.

“Here.” She hands me a bandana, bright red, and I tie it
around my neck, bandit style. She has a large blue napkin and ties it around her neck. She pulls a couple of baseball caps from the wall and throws me one.

We stand, look at each other; we resemble gaudy banditos who’ve shopped at Walmart.

“Well, it’s not quite biohazard suits, but it’ll have to do.”

I pull the air filter over my nose and mouth and Lucy mirrors me. She slings the duffel bag onto the ATV’s rack and uses a bungee cord to strap it down. I take the screwdriver I stripped the ignition cover with and use it to jump the positive and negative wires, hot-wiring the ATV. It coughs, sputters, and dies. I repeat, this time cranking the throttle.

It catches and suddenly the ATV is roaring in the close confines of the garage. Lucy goes to the door and lifts it, sliding it back on its rollers. I turn the vehicle, pointing out, and wait until Lucy comes and hops on the back. She wraps her arms around my waist. Her touch is hot and stings some, and it takes me a second to realize it’s from the burns. For a moment, even through the mask and bandana, I can smell the kiwi scent of her. I’m flushed with her presence, and my heart begins to race.

“Get out your gun, Lucy. Here they come.” I don’t want to say it, but I have to. I’d rather she stay embracing me.

Three shamblers—a man, a woman, and a boy-toddler—are coming in from the road, down the gravel drive to the house. Weird, but they’re like an undead family. The kid is straggling to the side, walking on a leg that’s hideously crooked. The foot is twisted to the side, and the child is pushing off the stump. The father totters, a big spill of blood
down the front of his shirt and half his neck gone and large hunks of his shoulders. Momma looks almost whole except for where they chewed off her arm, her face otherwise untouched.

I kick the ATV into gear, and we’re moving, out of the garage and across the drive, toward this undead family. I angle for the kid, away from the parents.

Lucy lays her arm on my shoulder, gun out, and fires. Another atomic bomb explodes, this time right next to my face. I can’t hear the ATV anymore. The mother shambler wheels, tilts, and face-plants. The father turns and lurches toward us, but we’re already past.

When we hit the boy, he gets caught in the rack, one hand gripping painted metal. I crank the throttle, and there’s a lurch, the hand disappears, and the ATV jumps, like going over a speed bump.

Out and away from the family of walkers, we buzz down the road we ran in the dark, past the still smoking rubble of the house we first hid in. Not much left there. The sound of the ATV is loud, and grating, more due to what it might attract than for sheer volume.

A few dead mill around the husk of the Git-N-Go. The forests are still smoking along with the building. I bank the ATV toward the interstate, tires buzzing on asphalt. After Lucy’s over-the-shoulder gunshot, my hearing returns slowly. Lucy grips me around the middle, and even though the world is empty, I feel a great contentment suffusing me. For that short time, life doesn’t get any better.