World of Ashes (4 page)

             
"Wildwood."

             
She took a step back and looked at the tarp in the bed of the truck. "What's in the truck?"

             
"Oh, you know, letters from home, a couple hookers I chloroformed, a box of duct tape, some Skittles in case we get hungry… oh, and the full second season of
Scrubs
in HD. It’s the best show no one’s going to be left alive to watch. We're heading for his place." Ethan said with a wide eyed smile, putting his arm around Keith’s shoulders.             

“I don’t know this
psychopath.” Keith tried, but to no avail.

             
"You two meet in the Army or something?" She said with a sly smile. Ethan shared the smile as Keith realized it was a gay joke.

Keith shoved Ethan off of him and a
fter a good laugh he pointed down the road. "So what's it gonna take to get you to let us on through, Ma’am?”

             
The woman eyed the inventory in the truck. "Got any anti-tank weapons?" She asked, knowing full well they did. Ethan had found it under a bunk at the Gray Summit TCP and was planning to use it to blow up the first Army truck that tried to stop him from getting to his family.

             
They had to let go of the AT4 Ethan was so proud of, but they were allowed passage through Twin Bridges after that. Maybe the woman would just enjoy splattering a few zombies with it, or maybe she and the equally buff looking woman in the tent would use it as a sex toy. It didn’t really matter either way, Ethan’s mind was wandering now that the adrenaline was wearing off.

The road ahead
promised two more towns and more roadblocks still. At this point the hope was those would be abandoned too. "She might have been cute twenty years ago." Keith finally broke the silence. They weren’t listening to the truck’s radio. Nothing was being broadcast, and the previous owner’s CD collection consisted entirely of Conway Twitty. The silence was annoying, but preferable to Country Western from the 1970’s. The next best thing was to sing to each other, and that wasn’t going to happen all gay jokes aside.

             
"We can go back if you want her number." Ethan offered. "That butch chick with the rambo headband and tattoos in the tent behind her might take offense to that though, so tread carefully my friend.”

             
"What if we run into a
real
roadblock and they want to know where we got the guns? I’ve heard about some deserters who’ve been shot. What’s to say they don’t just do that and save the paperwork?”

             
"There's always traffic backed up at roadblocks. We'll see it coming and go around." Ethan looked over at Keith, changing the subject. "Do you think any of the infected can reason to do something like that? Strategize and work together?”

             
"I don't know. When they're raging they don't care about much but hurting themselves or you, but they’ve been known to open complex door handles in pursuit of prey. We usually euthanized them, the order to start shooting the Infected came down a few months ago, I’m sure you know. I haven’t been privy to any clinical studies beyond the Rage Phase, I’m sad to say. For all I know they just break the doors open by sheer force, or they could remember absolutely everything until the moment of death.”

             
"That's a really pretty word for shooting them in the head, ‘
euthanize
.’" Ethan was still not quite over Keller’s death, and the seemingly selfless action that had ended his life weighed against the illogical actions the infected were prone to. Keith was very likely not a believer in Karma, or at least Murphy’s Law, two philosophies Ethan found were almost inseparable.

             
"You're not a believer anymore either, are ya? In the mission I mean." Keith said with a smile, taking Ethan by surprise with the first part. "I'll bet you got
Drafted
. A prior service Soldier who didn't want to come back. No wonder you weren't all that upset when your unit pulled out."

             
"That is a surprisingly complete summary of my predicament." Ethan had to hand it to his new friend. “How did you get here?”

             
"I was stationed at Fort Polk. What a blight on civilization that place is/was. There was a call for volunteers to help at Fort Lewis, Washington. I volunteered just to escape Polk and got diverted to Scott AFB en route, then trucked to Fort Leonard Wood. We all just kinda trickled to smaller assignments from there, I guess. My orders were so fluid at one point I just started bumming around with whatever unit I wanted until I landed myself at Antire Hill." A few burned out cars on the hill ahead forced them to slow. They were just outside of Ethan’s hometown of Sullivan and parked just below the horizon of the next hill so they could scout ahead. The highways were as empty as the rumored Ghost Cities of China, an image Ethan had never seen before.             

"I don't see any movement. Let's just get going."

              "I don't know about you, but I'm still waiting for Marines in the bushes to jump out and take us to the stockade or shoot us. Call me paranoid.”

             
"Dude, the Marines are retreating too." Keith put the binoculars down. "Nobody's going to ambush us."

             
Keith was wrong. They were ambushed at the bottom of the hill by snipers in the woods, their high powered rounds plowing through the engine block like the massive vehicle was made of little more than a paper. The truck lurched to a stop and they bailed out before the attacker could reload. It killed Ethan to be so close yet so far away, but they had to lay in a ditch until dark after hearing the snipers shoot several more times nearby. Neither saw the shooters, but stayed frosty with rifles at the ready. In the twilight when whoever those idiots were had either moved on or been eaten, they unloaded as many weapons as they could and stashed the rest of it in a trailer at a construction site.

MODOT had
been repairing a section of bridge over a creek due to a recent mild tremor from the New Madrid Fault Line. The quake had damaged many of the roads and bridges in the tri-state area, but had set Missouri up with a lot of FEMA equipment that had been instrumental in delaying the spread of the infection in the early days.

Night
came just as they reached the outskirts of Sullivan, only then had they been certain no one was following them. Keith broke into an ATV store and stole the keys to what amounted to an off-road golf cart. They stashed more guns in the storage shed to the dealership before heading out to explore the town and hopefully reach Ethan’s home. From there they’d rescue his family… then what? Tough it out in his parent’s loft like they were hiding from the Nazis? That was actually not a bad idea.

What the
y found in the town was far from what either had expected. About half the citizens were still there, some in the process of looting the last bits of food and supplies from the Wal*Mart, and others looting the hardware stores. People were even taking the last bit of foodstuffs from the roadside restaurants, something Ethan hadn’t actually considered.

A lifetime supply of Jumbo Mac’s did appeal to him in a macabre
sort of way. The journal entry he could write would say,
Day One Hundred and Seventy. Made fort out of MacChickens in living room. Used MacPoppers as people… Ate most of my citizens. Not a very good overlord and despot after all.
Welcome to the demented mind of Ethan Cally, sometimes science fiction writer and a grand master in the art of sarcasm.

             
Everyone in town was packing a gun, too. There were pickups in parking lots with extremely well armed children guarding them while their parents looted. It was semi-organized chaos really, but no one was shooting at each other. “An Armed Society is a Polite Society.” Ethan muttered. He and Keith walked up to a truck with children who seemed more interested in barter than looting. "Who's in charge around here?" Ethan asked, eyeing a hunting scope on the tailgate. None of the items had price tags in dollars, but there were small flash cards with items listed on them in purple and red marker that they would be willing to trade for.

             
"Like we know." A little girl with an overdramatized southern accent said. She was kind of fat and filled her father's old Air Force uniform well, if she’d been six inches taller of course. "Everyone's takin' what they can, we got to keep an entire police cruiser from the Highway Patrol yesterday. Daddy says they have better engines than our cars, and that we should keep it because the cop inside was
infected
and he wasn’t gonna need it anymore." She hissed the last word for extra effect.

             
Keith smiled, even with the world ending children could still be cute in the most macabre ways. "So there's no sheriff or police?"

             
"My daddy is a cop, but he says all them other chicken shit motherfuckers left with the Army so they can eat shit and rot in
hell
." All three kids made the sign of the cross on their hearts.

             
"Nice touch, Children of the Corn. Do you know where your daddy is?"

             
"I'm right here." They both turned to face a rather plump man holding an M1 Garand menacingly enough. "Who're you?"

             
"I'm Ethan, he's Keith." Ethan let his rifle hang on its sling. Keith similarly relaxed to try and ease the man's stress a little. "We're looking for family around here."

             
"You stand an okay chance of finding them." The chubby cop relaxed his grip on his rifle. "Most people left along with the Army, though. Last soldiers we saw were gone by midnight last night." The officer eyed them suspiciously, "Those are some nice guns you got. Look kinda Government Issued if you ask me. Your haircut too." He pointed at Keith, “You friend there looks like a dirty hippy.”

             
“Thank you.” Ethan smiled. “I like to think my inner self shines through when no one makes me shave at 0500.”

             
"Where are you going with this?" Keith didn't like the direction the conversation was taking. The guy was still wearing a royal blue polo that read POLICE over his heart, and a work belt loaded for riot control.

             
"You misunderstand me," The officer smiled. "I've been hoping there'd be some Soldiers or Marines out there who weren't stupid enough to get infected, that some of you guys would wind up here. Most of the officers from my department got caught up in the Army pullout. There's only three of us and a retired sheriff from Branson. We could use some help keeping the other towns away from us.”

             
"Is there some kind of government here?" Ethan asked.

             
"Not really. You can only be in charge of what you can patrol, and that would be just three cops right now to cover a lot of hostile area. If you two are who I think you are, we could use you."

“
Is there a meeting place?”

             
"We’re meeting tonight at seven at the Police Station. You two gonna be there?"

             
"We hope so." Ethan said before they turned to go back to their golf cart on steroids.

             
"Hey, GI Ginger, I'll trade you this here drum magazine for that there bear mace you’re packin’." One of the kids on the truck offered to Keith. His father smiled proudly, watching his children sell like they were an auctioneer.

             
Ethan looked down at Keith's belt. "Where the hell did you get bear mace?" Keith ignored Ethan and made the trade. They drove away after that, Keith happily loading the drum magazine with 5.56mm rounds. The trip wound through the older part of town on the East side of the tracks that paralleled Main Street. A dozen people on the roads were just wandering around in the middle of the dark, shock and disbelief disconnecting them from their new reality. One man even walked along the road with his cell phone out, looking for a signal that may never appear again. Wal*Mart had still been lit when they left, though the lights being on hadn’t stopped anyone from looting it of course. The streets were a lot scarier than Ethan remembered as a boy. He turned off the side-by-side’s lights as they swerved down a back road, suspicious someone might be following them. During Sullivan’s height, when the Railroads were everywhere, the housing had boomed to create several large subdivisions. Ethan drove through these randomly to throw off an imaginary tail before turning the corner at the firehouse across the tracks on Main Street and off into the wilderness of one of the back roads.

I
n the countryside river bottoms between miles upon miles of identical trees and farms, the road stretch into oblivion. Keith was completely unprepared when Ethan swerved onto a gravel road with a single level house at the end. His soda toppled out onto the grass, along with several loose rounds. After an insufferable amount of time on the dark, nondescript patchwork of gray and black county roads, they were finally home. Ethan leapt from the vehicle before it had completely stopped and ran into the house before Keith could even gather that they were at his friend’s house.