Time Clock Hero (15 page)

When Phoenix led the tiny group out of the thick, brown, woody area a few miles west of the NPD building, he was suddenly afraid when he heard the sounds of a vehicle coming up the road from his left.  Twelve o’clock.  The sun was blazing through the branches, branches which had begun to leaf out significantly, and the sky was a cold, clear blue.  He turned to his left and saw the car approaching, slowing down as it neared a small group of infected standing in the middle of the road.

At first Phoenix thought it was somebody fleeing from nowhere to nowhere, maybe a car with the family packed into it, or maybe a bunch of kids loving every minute of the crisis.  But the car stopped.  Four large women climbed out of the small Toyota with pistols in their hands.  They took aim and shot every last single infected person standing in the road.  Then they bent over the dead, tugged on their hands, flipped them over, and rummaged through their pockets.  As they drove away, weaving in between abandoned cars, Phoenix heard a noise.  He looked down and saw an infected person, a young woman, struggling out of the ditch in front of him.  Her hands were muddy as they clawed at the ground.

“Did they just take those dead people’s jewelry?”  Alaia asked, coming up beside Phoenix with her shotgun ready.

“If it’s free these days, why would anyone want it?”  He said carelessly.

“So, that’s why you didn’t sleep with me last night?  You think I’m free and so you don’t want me?”

Phoenix looked up at the sky and took a breath of the cool, clear air.  Then he pulled Alaia against him tightly, pleasantly surprising her, and his lips brushed up against her ear and she froze.  “You’re gold to me – but I need to earn you.”  He released her, letting his hand slip gently away from her waist while she quickly put her hand on his, and he stepped away. 

Alaia smiled.  Then she whispered, “But don’t wear yourself out digging too long, okay?”

“Go back and bring Carl and Darkeem up, but do it quietly.”

“I got it,” Alaia said, and she hurried away through the brush.

The infected person, covered in wet, black mud, her hair hanging in her face like she hadn’t combed it in over a year, dragged herself out of the water-filled ditch and came for Phoenix.  He pulled out his combat knife and dispatched her quickly with a blow to the head before the others came back.  He kept her from falling to the ground, catching her small, thin frame in his left arm, and he lowered her into the grass, letting her slip quietly back into the ditch.

He wondered if people like the one he’d just killed – if they were really still people – could be cured.  And he felt a sense of joy when he thought about Mr. Krystal’s words earlier, that Dr. Carson was safe in his lab, and that he did have a cure for the Psyke Virus.  If he did have a cure, then this girl he’d just laid to rest would’ve lived.  But maybe not.

“We’re all here,” Alaia said.  “What’s the plan for crossing this highway?  I sure don’t want anybody but you digging my gold.”

“Well, in other circumstances, we’d hop into a car and take this road to I-65, head south to Franklin, and head over to Carson Research Labs.  But things have changed.  The last thing I’m going to do is drive through this mess and be seen.”

“I don’t want to burst your bubble, Phoenix,” Carl said.  “But there’s half a neighborhood coming over from the other side of the road.”

Everyone slipped to the ground.   Alaia looked behind her to make sure Darkeem was still there and, when she turned around, she said, “This ain’t happening.”

“And there’s something else,” Carl said.  “This is where I head south, if it’s all the same to you, which I know it isn’t.  My brother’s got a place in Shelbyville near the Duck River.  He’s waiting for me.”

Phoenix didn’t argue, though Alaia looked pretty shook up; and she looked at Carl with pleading eyes. 

“Look,” Phoenix said. “We owe you for what you did back there.  But we’ll never see each other again.  So I guess this is it.”

Carl and Phoenix shook hands, he said goodbye to Alaia and Darkeem, and he slipped away to the left, disappearing into the brush like a fox.  He’d probably follow the road south, staying just a stone’s throw away from it on the eastern side.

“When the going gets tough, the tough get out of town,” Alaia said.

“Sounds like me for most of my life.  I like to keep things easy.”

“That’s a lie, Mr. I gotta keep digging!”  Alaia said with a smile.  “Okay, cowboy – what next?  Do we wait until this mess walks out of here?  Or do we go towards that big old shopping center there on the right?”

“Let’s give them a bit,” Phoenix said.  “But let’s keep it down.”

Alaia and Phoenix looked across the road and tried to count the number of infected, and each time they did, they came up with between eighty and ninety people.  The crowd got worse the longer they waited; and Alaia, who’d already checked the road over on the right near an intersection, didn’t have a glowing report about that direction either.

Just as they started to move, a heavy thump, like the explosion of a grenade, broke the silence.  It came from far away and to the left.

“Way to go, Carl,” Phoenix whispered.  He looked at Alaia and Darkeem and smiled.

“Look at that,” Alaia said.

All of the infected, every last one of them, turned south.  Their bodies seemed to come to life in a way Phoenix hadn’t thought possible.  They moved quickly in the direction of the sound, some staggering and some running, but all trying to get through the tangle of trucks and cars scattered across the road. 

Phoenix motioned for Alaia and Darkeem to get up, and he led them through the brush, across the ditch, and into the wooded lot on the other side of the road.  Two Psykotics lay in the ditch on the other side, mired in mud and barbed wire, their faces caked in mud and dried blood.  Alaia waved Phoenix forward, content to let the two slithering corpses slither indefinitely, and they hurried on through the woodlands, picking their way through trailing vines and reaching branches.  The way forward was strenuous, and by the end of the day, they’d gone through all of the Kellogg’s bars and the water.  All that Alaia had left was trail mix – but that was good enough.

Just before dark, Darkeem spotted a funeral home situated on a hill, set back off the road in a stand of tall oaks and cedars, just across from an apartment complex.  With little energy remaining in their tired bodies, they stopped, took deep breaths, and pushed on and upward through the trees.  When they reached the top, they stopped and caught their breaths.  The parking lot looked empty except for three cars, all of which were parked up near the entrance.

Alaia started forward from the cedar thicket, with Darkeem at her side.  Phoenix stopped them and pulled them back. 

“What color was that Toyota we saw a while back?”  Phoenix asked.

Alaia considered the question for a moment.  “You mean the Corolla?  The car with all the fat girls?  Wasn’t it red?”

“That’s what I’m asking you.”

Darkeem tugged on Alaia’s shirt.  “Mom, I think there’s someone here.”

“You see someone?” Phoenix asked, as he knelt down on the ground and reached for his pistol.

“Over there, to the left – in that field,” Darkeem said.

Before they could assess the threat to their left, they froze, suddenly shaken by a scuffling noise coming up behind them from the woods.  The sound of feet on dry leaves they heard, and the snapping of small twigs.  Phoenix, Alaia, and Darkeem all turned around at the same time.  Five or six infected, with their eyes wide, staring straight in their direction, struggled towards them.  The thick growth hindered them.  Which group of Psykotics would reach them first was a toss-up.

“Ten on the left, six behind us,” Alaia said.

Phoenix handed her the Glock with the silencer and an extra clip.  “Maybe this is a blessing – you know – all these infected.”

“A blessing?”

“These guys can be our warning bells in case anybody healthy comes up here tonight.”

“And what if they get inside the funeral home?”

Phoenix ignored Alaia’s last question.  “Up and at ‘em.” 

Their sprint from the bushes, something with the umph of a double espresso late at night on an empty stomach, took its fuel from pure, cold fear.  How long that fuel would be available, Phoenix dared not ask.  But he hoped it continued blowing through his injectors, banging on his pistons, until well after he had led Alaia and Darkeem through the side door of the funeral home.

They left the cover of the forest, now a darker shade of black behind them, running towards the front side of the funeral home.  Then they cut left, heading for the cars parked by the side door.  At least the cars would be between them and the herd of infected making their way towards them from the left.  The obstacles might give Phoenix a bit more time to get the door to the funeral home opened.

As they ran, Phoenix wished the infected persons heading for him would die, all on their own, from something painful, like a moderately immobilizing stroke.  Then he wished they had never been born and, because they had been born, he thought of how nice it would have been if, sometime in the past, they’d all gotten drunk and stepped off a busy curb in downtown Nashville during rush hour.  But none of that was good enough. 

When Phoenix, Alaia, and Darkeem reached the cars, Phoenix took the Glock from Alaia, said something highly inappropriate, and killed an old wrinkled guy who was already missing one arm.  He handed the pistol back to Alaia, the acrid smoke drifting up lazily from the silencer.

“I got this,” Alaia said, as she raised it.

Phoenix grabbed the lever on the door to test its strength, and it turned in his hands.  “We’re in,” he said, swinging the door open wildly.  He looked in, stepped backwards a step, and slowly raised his hands.  Alaia and Darkeem saw the same thing Phoenix saw.  Four overweight women with bad hair and no makeup, standing in the doorway, aiming equally bad chrome revolvers in their direction.

“If it’s all the same to you,” Alaia said, “I’d prefer to not drop this fine gun down onto the ground.”

“And we’re ready to pay for the night, too,” Phoenix said.  “My class ring.  It’s fourteen karat gold with a quarter karat diamond – it’s got to be worth well over fifteen hundred dollars!”

The women lowered their weapons and moved away from the door.  Phoenix closed his eyes for a split second, thanking heaven.  There was nowhere left to go, not tonight, and he wasn’t about to let Alaia and Darkeem spend the night outside on a cold March evening with those things wandering around out there.

“We thought you were the black guys,” one woman said.  She tilted her head forward and saw Darkeem, who was much darker than his mother, and who was unmistakably of African descent.  “Not that we have a problem with black guys, like you.  I’m talking about the guys in the black suits.  We call ‘em black guys.”

It was the moaning of the infected that settled the matter, the gurgling, deep-gut tremors that sounded more like oral flatulence than anything else.  For a moment, the women just stood in the doorway, letting their new guests stand on the doorstep.  Maybe they needed to size up the new visitors, thinking they didn’t conform to the dress codes of neighbors they’d once known, neighbors who’d never worn military-style clothing nor who carried such huge weapons. 

One of the women, a large black woman with an even larger afro and a southern accent reminiscent of the New Orleans bayou culture, smiled at Phoenix.  “We can’t leave these people standing out here on the step, now can we?”  She put her weapon away and reached out and grabbed Phoenix’s hand and dragged him across the threshold.  She held onto his hand a little longer than he liked, squeezing it gently while she led him away from the door.  She had gleaming white teeth and a pleasant enough face, if pleasant enough was all you could get; and she reminded him of the woman at his usual morning’s McDonald’s drive-through window who, wearing her shirt unbuttoned at the top, always leaned out of the window too far, spilling his coffee and spilling out of her shirt at the same time.  When he’d drive away, he’d look at his purchase; and he’d see that she’d done it again.  On the side of his coffee cup was her phone number.  Or were those numbers her measurements?

Alaia stepped inside rather quickly, pulling the door to and making sure the panic bar latch snapped tightly into place.  She looked at Ms. New Orleans in her expansive yellow tent dress, and then smiled at Phoenix as he tried to release his hand from hers.  She walked over to him and said, “Honey, darling, can you take me and your son to the restroom, please?”  She leaned forward and kissed him on the lips, long and hard, and then she pulled away.  “And I would like to thank all of you for letting us in – but all we need is one night, if that’s okay.”

Ms. New Orleans let go of Phoenix’s hand and smiled, looking around at the other women.  “Well, there ain’t no reason we all can’t share, right?”  She looked at Phoenix again.

“Yes, we can,” Phoenix said with an awkward grin.

“Now, you can come with me to the kitchen and sit down to an industrial-sized can of Hormel’s Chili and plate full of hot water corn bread,” Ms. New Orleans said.  “And if you sit by me, you can have an extra dollop of stew.  How’s that?”

Phoenix smiled a crooked, half-hearted smile, and then he looked at Alaia, scratching his head.  Alaia raised her eyebrows and smiled flatly.