End Days Super Boxset (91 page)

John Elliot ran from Greg’s neighborhood as if bloodhounds were on his trail. He had always been fast on his feet, which was one of the main reasons the men and women of Worthington Pines, a distant gated community, had chosen him as their scout. After seeing no sign of anyone running after him, John slowed to a walking pace and continued the five-mile walk back home. His community was full of people who proudly defied the government order to report to a quarantine station. They stayed in their homes, hoping and waiting for the crisis to be over, just as Greg was doing, only they hadn’t prepared and were running out of the basics.

Worthington Pines had banded together to survive but found themselves alone, without power and running water and with a dwindling food supply. Something had to be done. Some thirty-five families in all tried to come up with a solution. When it was suggested that they report to the quarantine stations as mandated by the state, fears of Ebola eliminated any such idea. But they would still have to do something. They had to venture out, but they couldn’t go as a group and draw the unwanted attention from the government and their enforcers.

They needed someone to scout the area and find others who might assist them. Someone to check the stores and other locations where they could get supplies. John, one of the resident bachelors of the community, agreed to take on the task. Taking a vehicle was considered too risky, lest he be exposed, so the journey would have to be taken on foot. John selflessly agreed to do it and became something of a hero to the community.

Greg’s neighborhood was the farthest John had ventured yet, and while on his journey, he saw incredibly unspeakable things that he knew would stay with him. He came across a body on the road of someone who looked like a vagrant. The man was lying face down in the pavement, and blood had seeped through his tattered clothing—from open sores. John could only see the scraggly hair on the man’s head and the bloody pool of vomit he was lying in. He had all the indications of an infected person, and John kept his distance. He pressed the surgical mask against his nose and mouth.

The vagrant wasn’t the only person in his path. There was a car that had crashed into a street light. The driver, a young man, had gone through the windshield and was lying on the grass. The female passenger was hunched over the dashboard, with blackish-red open sores that had long crusted over.

Her body looked as if her internal organs had burst out. Keeping a careful distance, John peered into the open car as a swarm of flies buzzed around her bloated corpse.

John felt a chill and kept moving. He tried to stay low, keeping to back roads and walking along the sides of neighborhood streets, searching for signs of life. There had to be someone somewhere who had stayed behind, like the people of Worthington Pines had.

It was stunning to not see a car on the road, as if he were walking on a deserted movie set. Walking among dead bodies in the open was a considerable risk, and for this reason, he wore his surgical mask, long-sleeved shirt, pants, and gloves. If other people were going to risk any kind of journey outside their gated community, they would need
real
protective gear.

He walked past several homes that appeared to be vacated. A moving vehicle was not to be seen anywhere; another street, another body. It soon became routine as the noxious smell of death, both potent and unsettling, filled the air.

How on earth could bodies simply have been left in open view?
It confounded John and made him worry for his own safety as well. He was witnessing the impossible.

The nearest grocery store was closed with a sign that said, “Closed until further notice” on one glass panel and a hand-drawn note on the other that said, “We have nothing left. Store is empty.” The store itself was protected with a long, rolling gate, which was locked in the middle. He wandered to a gas station across the street. It was closed as well. John figured that most people had either gone into the city or the assigned quarantine facilities. Worthington Pines, however, was on the far outskirts of the city, and the neighborhoods he ventured into didn’t bring him much hope.

As he came to Greg’s street, Antelope Drive, he saw more of the same: empty houses and lack of activity. A plane flew overhead, and John looked into the sky, wondering how anyone could just fly over such suffering and death. He wanted to shoot a flare into the sky or assemble the trashcans on the curb of the street into an SOS message—anything that would get the attention of the plane so that it would land on the street and take him away. But the plane continued to fly across the blue sky, leaving a smoke trail in its wake.

After hours of traveling on foot, he had become bolder in his techniques. He began going up to houses and looking in the windows, sometimes even knocking on doors. He was growing desperate; as desperate as the community that had sent him venturing out into the great unknown. He was less afraid, but he also realized that frightened people hiding in their homes did irrational things, like shoot men who walked on their property.

Reality was not lost on him, but he trudged on with determination down the asphalt pavement of the neighborhood of nice-looking homes and barren lawns, now mostly patches of grass and dirt. Some lawns were nicer than others, but the arid climate and lack of water made them impossible to maintain. Lawn care was no longer a priority as well.

He approached a cul-de-sac at the end of the road, and it appeared that the homes there had already been pillaged. There were open doors and smashed windows in every house on the circle except for one. The home on the farthest corner had plywood panels boarding up the windows. The sight of the house piqued his curiosity, and he approached the yard with caution. Something about the place seemed different; it was the only house on the cul-de-sac that hadn’t been broken into. There was a sign near the front door that said “Beware of Dog” and another one that said “Owner is Armed and Dangerous.”

This person means business
, he thought.

Instead of directly approaching the front door and knocking, he decided to take a step back and investigate. There were obviously people inside the home, or so he believed. He trailed back to the house across the street, went inside through the open door, and looked around.

There was no food in the house other than some stale crackers and a bag of flour in the pantry. He took them anyway and watched the boarded-up house from inside. An hour passed, and there was no movement on the street. No one walked out, and the one window in the front without plywood boarded over it had a thick black curtain concealing any activity going on inside. John knew—come nightfall—that he would have to go closer and investigate.

He sat in the empty house until sundown, looking through a photo scrapbook sitting on the living room table. The pictures showed an old married couple who looked to be in their sixties on vacation in Hawaii. They wore tropical clothes, their skin red from the sun, and were smiling and laughing in every photo. John wondered where they were now, or if they were even still alive. He closed the scrapbook, set it back on the table, and left the house, carefully approaching the neighboring driveway.

He walked carefully and quietly while looking to see if anyone was watching through the window in the front. At any moment, he was prepared for someone to open the front door and charge after him. His body burned with anxiety the moment his shoes stepped onto the driveway. There was a big white van parked next to a blue two-door Volvo. His instincts led him to the garage door. He pressed his head against the glossy brown paint listened.

There was barely audible sound coming from behind the door. He could hear a man’s voice followed by a woman’s and felt a jolt of excitement and anticipation. Then he heard laughter. There were indeed people in there, and they sounded friendly enough, but John wasn’t going to take any chances.

Why were they in the garage?
he wondered.

He listened, trying to make out their conversation, but it was too difficult to decipher. Then he heard what sounded like someone getting up and leaving the room. Panic seized him, and John quickly walked back to the driveway and past the front of the house, unsure of what to do. Maybe he could talk to the people, reason with them, and ask for assistance. He wasn’t ready for that step yet, and he ran back to the house of the old couple, where stale crackers awaited him.

He had a good vantage point of the mysterious home from the living room and repeatedly looked out. It was nighttime, and John thought about the unexpectedly long time he had been away from Worthington Pines. They were probably getting worried about him and losing hope. Part of him felt good making them worried, as he had never felt so important to so many people before. But he took his role seriously, and for that reason he’d gather all he could from the house across the way before heading back to the community. In the meantime, he would squat.

He searched the rooms of the house, finding nothing of use. There were women’s clothes and men’s shirts in the closet, and knick-knacks and souvenirs from around the country rested neatly on shelves. The owners must have liked to travel. Perhaps they were on vacation. If that was the case, they were extremely fortunate to have avoided what was happening at home.

John tore through one of their closets of junk and came across an item of incredible use: an old pair of binoculars. He immediately went back to the living room, pulled a stool up to the front window, and sat down. He held the binoculars up and watched the house, seeing nothing but darkness. The street lights weren’t working, and there wasn’t a single light on in any of the homes, outside or inside. Just as he was about to call it a night, he saw something move in the window of Greg’s house.

The figure of a woman opened the curtains and looked out. John ducked to the side, fearing that she had seen him, but when he looked again through the binoculars, he could see that she was still standing there, just looking out.

“Of course she can’t see you,” John said to himself. She eventually moved away from the window, leaving the curtain open.

He slept on the couch in the living room and felt rested in the morning. His dreams had been startling, and he was still shaken. The dreams were filled with images of death and disease, obviously related to the things he had seen. In the one he recalled most vividly, however, he got away. A helicopter came down and rescued him, and he escaped Carson City after being chased by hordes of infected Ebola patients. When he awoke, however, he was still in the house of the old couple, and he had a long walk back to Worthington Pines. It was time to investigate one last time.

He approached the boarded house again, moving quickly but with stealth up the driveway. The window curtain was still open, and it was early enough in the morning that John hoped no one in the house was awake. He crept along the garage and looked out to the side. To his right was a cement walkway leading to the front door. Next to the front door was a boarded-up window, and the exposed window was next to it. He carefully moved along, close to the house in slow and steady steps until he reached the window into the mystery home.

John cupped his hands and peered inside. It looked like any normal living room. There was a couch, bookshelf, coffee table, and lamp. A kerosene lamp on the hardwood floor caught his eye. The people inside seemed to be waiting the disease out, just like the people of his community were doing. He squinted to see any other items of use when suddenly a man walked into the room and looked right at him. Their eyes met, and John could feel his heart stop and his legs lock. He had been exposed. The man stood frozen for a moment then vanished down the hall.

“Shit!” John said out loud. He backed away from the window just as he saw the man reenter the room brandishing a rifle. John ran alongside the house as fast as his legs could possibly take him and ventured out into the road and back down the street without looking back.

***

The gates of Worthington Pines were closed, as they had been some time now. Beyond the steel bars that separated the struggling community from the outside world were homes that had become more like prison cells than anything else. The people had joined together to both defy the government quarantine mandate and survive the Ebola outbreak.

For many, it seemed the responsible thing to do. The president of the Home Owner’s Association, Ed Tillman, floated the idea to the other residents after the travel ban had been put into place. Not everyone was on board, and a few families packed up their cars and left, dutifully reporting to the nearest quarantine station.

Those who stayed were determined to get through the crisis without aid or assistance from the government, and as long as they kept strangers from getting inside, there would be no chance of infection. They agreed to never leave the community unless authorized, and if they did leave without approval, they would not be allowed back in. This was all put into writing—a contract produced by Ed Tillman, who was also a certified notary—and the residents signed it.

The community united to make sure there was enough food and supplies for everyone, and all of their resources were pulled together and properly distributed by the Home Owner’s Association, which acted as a sort of elected body in place of an actual government. The transition wasn’t hard, given that the HOA already operated with authority, and had long before Ebola was on anyone’s mind.

After the first month of cutting themselves off from the world, the plan seemed manageable. Not going to work was a hard adjustment for the adults to make, but most of the kids were delighted not to have to go to school. It was like summer vacation for them. But then the power went out, the water stopped running, and food and supplies were being stolen in the late hours of the night by unknown thieves.