Enduring Armageddon (20 page)

The scavenger was already about a third of the way up the stairs but he was looking up towards the offices and the lenses on his mask would obstruct his periphery vision. I took a silent gulp of air, wiped my sweaty palm across my trousers and slipped the tomahawk’s leather strap over my wrist so I wouldn’t drop it if there was a struggle. This was it. Time to put up or shut up, as they used to say.

I leapt from the shadows and rushed the few feet to the stairs. The metal steps rattled horribly as I bounded them two at a time. The scavenger whirled around, but it was too late, I brought the spiked side of my weapon down right between his neck and shoulder blade.

He let out a muffled scream from behind the mask as I wrenched the tip of the blade from his body. He weakly tried to slice me with the large kitchen knife he held, but the fight was already coming to an end as his lifeblood gushed freely from the wound in his neck. I smashed the axe into his forehead and he crumpled like an empty sack.

I heard booted feet running away from the shadows of the production floor back towards the smaller door. I sprinted towards the exit as fast as I could while dodging the half-constructed boats. The doorway opened and then slammed shut. I reached it a few seconds later, my weapon held high again. I eased the door open, wary of being hit from the side. It was pointless. In the distance I saw a smaller person working their way through the knee-deep snow. I watched as they slid through the still-locked gate and jumped into the driver’s seat of an old truck with large dog cages in the back.
Slavers
.

I returned to where I’d killed the man and made sure to finish the job before I explored the scavenger’s body for useful items. I was temporarily taken aback after I removed his gas mask and discovered that my attacker was a female. I recovered quickly and continued taking inventory. Her gas mask would definitely come in handy as a back-up in case one of ours got lost or broken. I pulled off the heavy trench coat and grabbed her knife but the boots were too small for me, maybe one of the girls could use them, or we could trade them for something down the road. She had a few scraps of questionable meat, a couple of worthless American dollars and an ash-smudged photo of some girl.

I assumed the girl in the photo was the same one I’d watched run like hell across the manufacturer’s parking lot. I started to pray that she would be able to make something of herself other than a whore or a meal for a zombie and then I remembered that the two of them were intent on killing or taking us hostage so I discontinued the prayer and instead spat out a curse for our current world.

Maybe we should have had more praying and less cursing before the apocalypse and we wouldn’t be in this predicament, but the time for wishing was over. It was kill or be killed and I stood by my “shoot first, ask questions later” stance. According to the new unofficial laws of the land, no one who was up to any good left the safety of their shelter at night.

I whistled up for Rebecca, who opened the small window overlooking the production floor. She stuck her head out and I whispered, “I’m fine. We had a slaver break in, but I took care of
him
. I’m going to stay down here and keep an eye on things.” There was no sense in upsetting her even more than she already was, so I chose to keep the sex of our intruder a secret.

She nodded and blew me a kiss before closing the window and settling down for the rest of the night. I secured the door as best as I could, then pulled up a chair and settled in for a long night of guard duty.

* * *

The dim light that filtered in the warehouse’s windows the next morning woke me from my fitful slumber. As I rose and stretched out the kinks in my back, I felt my age like I’d never believed possible. I had aches in my knees and hands and there was the constant feeling that I had indigestion or something. At least I hoped it was my thirty-five years creeping up on me and not cancer or something else.

A quick check of the scene told me everything I’d suspected the night before. The woman had probably been intent on murdering Jesse and I in our sleep, then kidnapping the women to sell as slaves. I’d missed it last night, but she had several zip ties stuffed in her boot to make quick, quiet handcuffs and a few rags stuffed in her shirt, which I assumed were for gags.

I dragged her already-stiff body through the doorway that the second slaver had taken and then around the corner out of sight. I don’t know why I bothered taking her that far, the snow where I’d pulled her across was covered in congealed blood and could easily be seen from the road if anyone was searching.

People knew we were here and that meant it was time for us to go, which was fine with me. I wanted to go farther south than we currently were anyway, but I had hoped for a few more days to allow more recovery time for Jesse. I also wasn’t thrilled about being the only driver that we had. Rebecca and Trisha just weren’t reliable enough to drive the truck with the road conditions the way they were. Hell, half the time, we were interpreting where the road
might
be since they were all completely covered in snow.

At the pace we were going, we were a couple of days out from needing to make a choice whether to risk driving through the mountains of Arkansas or sweeping further west through the plains before heading south. I decided that figuring out our route was the first thing we needed to do this morning. We’d leave right after breakfast. I stared at the small footprints of the escaped slaver for a moment longer and then went back inside.

I was surprised by the activity on the warehouse floor when I went in. Jesse limped between the truck and the foot of the stairs carrying the supplies that Trisha and Sam brought down from the offices above while Rebecca was cooking our breakfast over an office trash can fire. I couldn’t quite make out what our meal would be since my mask hid the smell. I pulled the door as tight as I could, then removed my mask and attached it to my belt loop. Fried spam and canned green beans. We were truly blessed to have come from Virden, I thought as I remembered the weird meat that the slaver had in her pocket.

“I figured it was time to go after our visit last night,” Jesse said.

“Yeah, I thought the same thing,” I replied. “Let’s get everything loaded and then we need to discuss our route.”

“Okay, sounds good.” He placed a meaty palm across my chest when I walked by. Even injured, the dude could mop the floor with me. “Next time, don’t be such a hero. Come get me and we can work together.”

“I gotcha, man. I know I should have, but I wasn’t sure about your leg,” I answered truthfully.

“It’s getting better, just a bunch of annoying little holes. How the hell did you hear anything? We slept right through it,” he indicated Trisha and Sam.

“Rebecca heard the glass we’d leaned against the door break. I was asleep and she woke me up, otherwise…” I let the unfinished sentence hang in the air for a moment.

“Otherwise, you two would be dead and we’d be in a cage somewhere, or worse,” Trisha stated.

“Slavers, huh?” Jesse asked.

“Yeah, the one I killed had zip ties and gags on her and…” I stopped as Jesse cut me off.

“Her? You mean we were being attacked by a woman?” he asked

“Yeah, I killed her before I realized that she wasn’t a man. Anyway, her companion got scared when he saw me kill her and took off. I ran after him, but he got away in an old pick-up truck.”

“Get anything useful off the body?” he asked.

I gestured towards the old gas mask. “She was wearing that and had a trench coat that will help in the rain or snow, but not much else. No guns or anything.”

“Smart. Didn’t want to injure her profit.”

“Yeah, well now the bitch is dead,” Trisha said. “Rebecca is almost done with breakfast. Let’s finish loading up and eat. I don’t want to be here when her husband or kid comes back with a mob and decides to burn the place down.”

That sobered us up pretty quickly and we finished loading the truck. Breakfast went down wonderfully and we all thanked Rebecca profusely for her ability to turn just about any canned item into a delicacy with some spices and kitchen know-how. Jesse and I opened the huge
Road Atlas
on the hood of the truck while the girls stowed the cooking gear.

“We need to decide if we want to go south through the mountains or west through the plains,” I stated. “We’ve got a few days to decide, but by the Joplin area,” I indicated a point near the southwest corner of Missouri, “we need to figure it out.”

“What’s the benefit of going south into Arkansas?” Jesse asked.

“Well, presumably, we’d get to warmer temperatures more quickly.”

“I don’t think so,” he countered and then flipped to the large blown-up map of Arkansas. “Look, the map shows that the roads south do all sorts of switchbacks as they go high up into the mountains and then back down. All those turns would have been dangerous even when there were road crews clearing them. I’d bet they’re catastrophic now. Hell, we almost wrecked coming down that huge hill outside of Jefferson City.”

“And there are lots and lots of choke points for ambushes,” I added.

“Yeah, fuck. I didn’t even think of that. How the hell did you, a guy who used to crunch numbers and drink lattes all day, think of that before I did?” Jesse said with a friendly punch to the shoulder.

“I had all night to think about it,” I reminded him.

“Good point. Anyway, those mountains are obviously treacherous, but beyond that we quickly move into the swamplands of Louisiana. Maybe that’s a good thing, help keep others out.”

“We don’t know if those swamps are going to be frozen or not, so we can’t count on that,” I said as I absentmindedly tapped my finger on the map. “My vote is to go southwest into Oklahoma, through Texas and then try to put down some type of roots in the New Mexico or Arizona area.”

“Not a lot of food-growing ability in the desert. What about going southwest as far as this town, Lawton, then head south into Texas?” he asked pointing to a small city near the Oklahoma/Texas border. “The topo map still shows fertile soil that far west. Right around there is when it begins to change to the more arid conditions out west, so we might be able to scratch out our survival along the perimeter of that area.”

I poured over the map quietly for a few minutes and said, “Okay, let’s do it. I’m not sure if the Springfield here in Missouri was a big enough target to get hit with a nuke, but I want to avoid all towns named ‘Springfield’ from here on out!”

“Agreed,” Jesse said and we all piled into the truck to begin another long stretch of driving.

* * *

We made it all the way to the western side of Tulsa, Oklahoma before the truck ran out of gas. Six days ago, we left the boat manufacturing plant to travel farther southwest in an attempt to move to a warmer locale. We weren’t the only ones making the trip either. At times the road was so choked with travelers that we had to slow almost to a stop before they finally moved to the side and we could slip by. At first it seemed like a lot of people had the same idea that we did about moving south, but then we realized that a lot were also moving north or west, even east. There was no rhyme or reason to the plans of the refugees that we talked to, other than it was bad where they were coming from and they had a plan to go somewhere safer. That didn’t bode well for what lay ahead of us.

The trip had gotten hairy a few times as people attempted to grab onto our truck and we’d had to convince them of the error of their ways. Once, someone that we shoved off the truck shot out the back window after he got up from the snow. By the way everyone started running it became obvious that southwest Missouri was no stranger to the violence that had plagued Illinois.

As it turned out, Springfield, Missouri was one of the cities to get nuked. That made me wonder what the cut-off criteria for the expenditure of nuclear weapons were. The
Atlas
said that the city had a population of about 250,000 people, but that hardly seemed like some country would waste a nuclear missile on such a small target, unless the enemies of the former United States had so many bombs that they didn’t care about using them indiscriminately. I knew that I’d never know, but that made me reevaluate our route. Originally, we’d planned on following Interstate 44 all the way to Lawton, then turning south. But if Springfield was a target, then certainly Tulsa and Oklahoma City were both glowing.

It turns out that I was right about Tulsa. We were still thirty miles away when we started seeing the effects of the fires and blast overpressure. We took a wide arc around the city and our truck attracted several sick creatures, but we made it through without needing to fight any of them. I was hesitant about doing that at first since it would just leave more of them around for the next group traveling through, but Jesse helped me see the wisdom of simply bypassing them.

We tried to get fuel at several different points, but most of the cars we came across in Oklahoma were bone-dry empty. The large 250 gallon external fuel tank had kept us going for a long time while we traveled at less than twenty miles per hour, but it finally gave up on us. I knew it would happen sooner or later but I’d hoped to make it to our waypoint of Lawton before we had to ditch it. We set about preparing our gear for the arduous journey ahead.

Jesse ripped out the pages of the
Atlas
that seemed to make the most sense and left the rest of it. We loaded so much food and ammunition into our backpacks that I was worried about falling and being stuck on my back like a turtle. We left most of the canned goods because they were simply too heavy to carry, but we spent about two hours cutting open complete packages of the military rations that Allan had packed in the truck and stuffing them into the giant hiker’s backpacks that we’d taken from Virden. The prepackaged meals took up too much space when they were completely sealed because all of the cardboard packaging and air trapped inside the bags, but once you cut all that away to only the foodstuffs, then they were manageable.

I took stock of all the empty packages lying on the floorboard of the truck. If we conserved our food, we should have enough for a little over a month. I did some more mental calculations and decided that if we could cover twenty miles a day, our current stock of food could feasibly get us to our projected destination. I took a sidelong glance at Jesse’s leg and revised my estimate to fifteen miles a day.