World of Ashes II (25 page)
The closest thing Daniel found to a weapon in the duffle was a standard issue Gerber Multitool. Though invaluable in the world he lived in now, it was little more than a pair of pliers married to a Swiss Army Knife and would be useless against anything but a field mouse. A kitchen knife sufficed for now, and Daniel began moving silently through the rest of the doublewide to clear it of dangers. He noticed immediately that it didn’t look lived in at all. The dishes were all put away, the furniture had a light layer of dust and nothing but the refrigerator really smelled that bad, except maybe the carpet he’d first fallen on. That was pretty gross too. A set of keys were on a coffee table and Daniel looked through a curtain into the front yard. Sure enough there was a dark red, mid 1980’s Ford pickup. He’d take a look at the truck when the rain let up, for now the search focused on securing the house again and finding a better weapon. Whoever had lived there, and it seemed to be an older couple or maybe even just an elderly man, wasn’t much of a hunter. They weren’t however, stupid and a pair of shotguns and a Ruger .22 match pistol were in the master bedroom’s closet.
Almost casually, Daniel seated himself at the kitchen table and began cleaning and loading the guns while he snacked on some potted meat product and crackers. He never thought he’d be so happy to find the meat byproduct-paste in a can, but right now he couldn’t imagine how anything could ever have tasted better. What with the crashing and the vomiting and the running he’d worked up quite an appetite, and not one he’d want to waste on finely cooked food he wouldn’t taste until he burped later. Right now he just needed a calorie binge, and what better than wheat crackers and the fatty parts of animals unfit for sale elsewhere?
Feeling remarkably safe, probably falsely so, Daniel laid down on the couch and cuddled with the 12gage, the other two guns he dummy corded to himself with some shoe laces in case an intruder snuck up on him. He was asleep almost immediately and didn’t come to again until late at night. The rain hadn’t stopped, which didn’t bother him one bit. He took the time to make more of a meal, though it was difficult with no fresh ingredients to work with. Instant orange juice, some vodka, canned chili and more crackers, all made with nothing but the moonlight and the minimum of cursing.
He slept again, but not for long because dawn was not far away now. When the first light broke through and he could see clear sky, Daniel quickly penned a thank you note and stuck it to the refrigerator. If these people were still alive they should know that by abandoning their home they’d inadvertently saved his life. And what’s the worst that could really happen? They don’t come back and the next refugee sees an example set by the previous, or the place burns down and nobody ever sees it. Whatever, his conscience was clear.
In the movies the car the hero’s find outside the farm house where something horrible has happened is usually in one of two states: (1) It doesn’t work and that’s why the _______ kills and/or eats them before they can fix it. It’s usually a muscle car in otherwise pristine condition, and for some reason never a hybrid with low batteries. (B) It works fine, but the ________ is either already inside it, or is about to chase/wreck them and kill and/or eat them. In this case Daniel found two things that weren’t necessarily related. First, the occupants of the house hadn’t just abandoned the place. They’d been robbed by looters and the whole mess of them on both sides had shot each other to death in some kind of fucked up shootout in the driveway. The last to die had been an old man, mostly given away by the trucker’s hat and Jesus Saves belt buckle sinking into his carcass. On top of his chest, just out of his sleeve pocket was a set of keys. Daniel had found keys inside, but it was more likely these were the right ones for the truck. He could spend all day shoving the wrong keys into the ignition, so he carefully reached out and snagged the Chevy keychain, even though the truck was a Ford.
Wordlessly, Daniel poked around the bodies for whatever guns they’d left behind, but those were as rusted and useless as the corpses were decayed and dead. In this area the population must have been so thin nothing but the standard scavengers had touched the dead, zombies didn’t seem to have known there was a free buffet in this neck of the woods, and maybe never would. The Ford stuttered and struggled to start, but finally did with a very loud squealing belt and a couple exhaust backfires when the aging fuel began to run again. The pipes plumed black soot all over the bodies behind his truck, which wasn’t really of any consequence until Daniel had to force the stick out of neutral and into reverse because for some reason he couldn’t put it into drive the first time. The truck lurched backwards and probably crushed the poor man who’d owned it, but that apparently freed up the gears and Daniel was able to head steadily down the overgrown driveway toward the road he’d come from. The truck blew a tire almost immediately upon hitting the pavement and unfortunately there was no spare. Daniel wouldn’t be driving this truck back to Wyoming, that was for sure, but it would still work long enough to get somewhere. Anywhere but here.
Continuing barely a mile to the left again, the trees broke for a power line cut. It was the same one the wreckage had been tangled in because the full scope of the disaster came into view through the valley. The plane was in three pieces, the tail loosely attached to the main cargo area, and of course the dislodged nosecone at an angle off to one side. What shocked Daniel more than anything wasn’t the broken plane and swath of destroyed buildings and trees behind it, but that he could clearly see survivors collecting supplies, burying bodies and setting up a defense perimeter against zombies. Elated and feeling a little bit stupid for not considering he might not have been the only survivor, Daniel drove down an overgrown gravel service road the power company used until he came across the first person in the group of maybe twenty.
Daniel jumped out of the truck and asked the obvious, “How did you guys make it too?”
The woman, an older lady but not yet in her middle age, looked at Daniel as if he had grown a dick out of his forehead. “What are you talking about? And who the fuck are you? How did you get here?” She raised a double barrel shotgun and instantly Daniel felt really, really stupid. Much more than before.
Keeping his hands in view and nodding toward the destroyed plane, Daniel said the first thing that came to mind. “Is this how the Aliens at Roswell felt when their plane crashed?”
“Jesus H Christ. You were
on
that?” The woman started to lower the gun, but just barely. “There’s four other survivors. Not from this plane, but we have them back at our place.”
“What?” Daniel wanted to get back in the truck, but right then the engine quit anyway. Fuck. “What do you mean not from
this
plane? Were there other planes? What the fuck happened here?”
“We thought you guys might shed some light on that.” The woman raised her hand and shouted for a man in her group to meet Daniel. “This boy was on that plane.”
“Bullshit.”
“I wish.” Daniel suddenly felt weak and tried to sit down, but more collapsed than anything. “How am I the only one? There were easily two hundred people...”
“You might not be. There’s tracks leading away from the plane to the South, but the rain washed most of it away. Where were you this whole time? Why didn’t you stay near the plane, Soldier?”
Daniel looked up, the man’s head was obscured by the glare of the sun. “Who are you?”
“No, who are you?”
“Private First Class Daniel Sawyer, Wyoming Army National Guard. I was just hitching a ride home…”
“My name is Lieutenant Gary Pitman, I’m the law around here.”
“Where’s here?”
“Well, if you came from Oz, then Karma would suggest here is Kansas. It’s also literally Kansas, so you’re maybe twelve miles East of Turtle Creek Lake and the city of Manhattan.” Officer Pitman pointed to what Daniel assumed was the direction of the lake he hadn’t seen. That would have been in the direction of left instead of right.
“Who attacked us?”
The woman and the cop tilted their heads to one side, helping Daniel to stand up while they considered their answers. “It was Texas, son. Don’t you know, you and them’s at war. Have been for months now. Every night you can see planes droppin’ from the sky on both sides, yesterday was worse than most days though. Seems the US was sending a big fleet ‘ah planes to convoy from wherever…”
“Cuba.” Daniel put his hands on his head, pacing back and forth to try and make sense of all this. “We started out at Gitmo. I didn’t even know there were other planes with us. I remember the pilot took evasive, tried to dodge someone’s radar.” Daniel was confused. “I don’t understand, why would Texas shoot down a friendly plane!?”
Officer Pitman stared Daniel down. “Where the fuck have you bee, son?”
“Under a Goddamn
rock
!” Daniel threw a bit of a fit. “There are motherfucking zombies trying
eat
us and we’re shooting at each other? What kind of motherfucking fucked up bullshit is this!? Who the hell do they think they are!?”
“Now calm down, son.” Pitman was being overly cautious now, “I’m guessing you don’t know, but the US ain’t what it used to be. It’s damned near every state for itself now, and Kansas don’t want nothin’ to do with what that high an’ mighty sonofabitch holed up in Cheyenne Mountain, or that demented reefer smokin’ hippy they got down in Texas. We just about got our zombie problem in check, we don’t need the rest of it rainin’ down on us too.”
Daniel realized he was in the company of morons. “Look, I’ll try to keep it short and sweet, I was flying over the Atlantic when the virus hit DC, which was where I was supposed to land. I survived in Virginia for a bit, then got evacuated to Florida, then that fell apart and I got evacuated again to a Navy ship in the Gulf of Mexico, then Gitmo, and now…” Daniel turned and gestured at the field of destruction on the open Kansas plains. “Fucking Christ what is wrong with you people…”
“Either way, son… We’re gonna have to ask you to come with us.” Officer Pitman pointed toward a patrol car on the other side of a windbreak of trees. “Like I said, we’re not in this fight. You’ll be returned to you side at the next POW swap in Topeka.”
Daniel stayed silent the entire ride back to Manhattan, Kansas. They were nice enough not to handcuff him, and he got to ride in the front seat. Lt. Pitman had to make several stops to euthanize stray zombies, but those were relatively few compared to the number of miles traveled. Most of the zombies, Pitman explained, were from a FEMA camp outside Kansas City that fell early on. The survivors fled west and the zombies followed by the hundreds of thousands. The Kansas Militia, having replaced the mass numbers of the Kansas Nation Guard conscripted away from them by the Federal Government’s declaration of Martial Law, had stood its ground and kept several large areas of Kansas close to zombie free. It was at a price, though, a great deal of the American farmland was now basically a minefield of random pockets of infection. It was still too early in this multisided war to reclaim what had once been generationally cultivated land. People by the millions were going to starve without this land.
Like the rest of Kansas, the town of Manhattan wasn’t a tall one. The closest identifiable geographic feature was a dam that still wasn’t strikingly higher than any of the other features. A building that had once been a warehouse of some kind now functioned as the POW detainment area for both “sides” of the conflict. Daniel didn’t get to see the in-processing line for Texan prisoners, but he imagined it was as invasive and rude as the one he got once Officer Pitman was out of sight. A fat, grumpy old man who’d probably worked for the TSA made Daniel strip, shower while being watched, and gave him a medical workup not unlike what Wendy had done in West Virginia.
After being probed for almost an hour Daniel was released into a double sided open floor with cots on either side. There was a double line of chain liked fencing with razor wire on top separating his group from the Texans. Daniel saw immediately it wasn’t like a prison, nobody on either side was in any condition to be hostile toward the other or their captures, though no one was being friendly across the lines either. Only three Texans were caged right now, but the Federals had dozens, most in casts or heavy bandages. Nurses were attending to some of them under the watchful eyes of the guards, but for most in this building the notion of fighting back was rather futile. They all just wanted to go home.
“Hey, you were on that flight from Cuba with me, right?” One of the Federal Soldiers stood up and limped over to Daniel. It was the MP who’d been watching Kuzma/Petrov. “We looked for survivors before the rain, we thought everyone was dead.”
“Who’s we?” Daniel asked.
“Me, and a few other guys from my row of seats. When the plane stopped our whole row was okay. It was freaky. But then everyone behind and in front of us…” He trailed off. “I fucked my ankle up, Kansans found me. I think the other guys managed to keep going North though. They aren’t here at any rate.”