Into the Badlands (2 page)

They sat on a folded blanket, placed atop a sheet of plastic in order to keep the snow melt from soaking their clothing. Another simple truth in these cruel winters: get wet, and death wasn't far behind. They covered themselves with an unzipped sleeping bag, huddling closely together between the cars, Ed's back supported by a rotten, flattened tire. Jeremy's head rested on Ed's shoulder; Zach sat leaning against his father's chest.

They sat this way for a very long time, not speaking. They'd had close calls before, but they were all still shaken by what had happened at the sporting goods store only hours before. They were lucky, Ed knew that, and he wondered how long they could carry on until their luck ran out. He wondered if it wasn't a question of
if
the virus or the carriers would catch up to them, but
when
. It was the question he asked himself often, more often than he was comfortable with.

After some time Jeremy spoke. “Daddy, do you think Mommy is watching us right now?” It was a question he'd asked before.

Ed didn't have an answer. He wanted to always tell the boys the truth; they deserved that much. Sometimes, particularly when the truth was harsh, it was a difficult thing to do.

“I don't know, buddy. I hope so.”

“Do you think she knows we're okay?”

“If she's watching us then yeah, I think she does.”

Jeremy paused for a moment, thinking. “Good.”

“I miss her,” Zach added.

“I do too. We all do,” Ed replied.

“I think she'd be proud of us,” Zach said. “Really proud.”

Ed smiled. “Yeah, she would, wouldn't she? She really would.” That time telling the truth was easy.

The fire crackled as it ruthlessly consumed the deadwood they'd gathered. Smoke blew haphazardly into the air as small embers traveled on upward drafts, burning out after a few feet. Occasionally the burning wood cracked so loudly they looked to the woods for intruders. Thankfully there were none.

More silence followed. Ed and the boys watched the hypnotic dance of the flames upon the wood. He pulled them closer. Despite the cold and the wind they were reasonably warm.

“Tell us again about the city by the river,” Zach asked.

The city was what kept them all going. It was their religion now. It had also become a common bedtime story. They asked about it periodically, and never tired of hearing the same thing again and again.

Ed began. “I went there once, a few years before the infection broke. It was a nice city, built right on the river. Near the edge of the river was a giant steel arch, over six hundred feet tall.”

“Did you climb it?” Jeremy asked.

“No doofus, you can't climb the Arch,” Zach corrected.

Ed continued. “No buddy, I didn't climb it. I didn't even go in it. But, when I last saw it, the sun was setting and it lit up like a giant orange candle.”

Zach paused, then spoke. “Do you think anybody lives in the city anymore? Do you think what you heard was true?”

Ed thought for a moment. They always asked the same thing. “I don't know, maybe. I hope so. You know how the cities got overrun so fast. Everybody ran to the coasts to get away. There might not be anybody there...or it could be full of carriers.”

“But the message you heard,” Zach continued, “it said St. Louis was a safe haven.”

“But that was a while ago. And the message was spotty; the reception was bad and there was lots of static. It's hard to say for sure.”

“Well, I think it's safe,” Jeremy proclaimed, exuding his usual high degree of confidence.

Ed chuckled. “I hope so. Either way, we have each other.”

Ed allowed the boys to drift off to sleep together. He planned to stay up for a few more hours, then wake Zach for guard duty. They always slept in rotation; danger lurked everywhere and knew no bedtime. For now he was content to sit with his two sons, to hold them close another day, and to fill their minds and their spirits with hope.

He had indeed happened upon a radio broadcast, that much was true, but it had only contained four words.
Saint Louis...safe...haven.
That
could
mean Saint Louis actually was safe. It could also be just as likely that hidden under the static between those words the message might have really been Saint Louis is
not
a safe haven. That particular message might have been a dire warning to all those considering entry.

Or it all could be a lie; a fib orchestrated to lure the unwitting into a trap. The police, the armed forces, even the government eventually crumbled once the infection went into full pandemic. It came on too strong, too fast, and there was no plan in place to deal with a threat of that magnitude. It was truly unprecedented. It made the Spanish Flu look like a common cold season.

Now, without any law of the land in place, men had become more horrible than Ed had ever thought possible. Their evil was truly limitless. He'd seen some of the worst things imaginable; his children had seen more than their fair share as well.

The truth was, there was no one left to save them. They were, in every sense of the phrase, completely on their own. Ed knew the reality was that they couldn't keep moving forever. Eventually their luck would run out. Eventually they'd be captured and killed by thieves, or they'd be killed by the hordes of rabid carriers that freely roamed the land now. Or, perhaps worse, Ed would be exposed, leaving his two children to fend for themselves in a world with no hope, no rules, and no allies.

Could he do what needed to be done then? The three bullets he kept in the clip in his front pocket, could he use those?

Sarah's luck had run out. Try as he had, he hadn't been able to save his wife. His harsh lesson was how powerless to change anything he really was. That knowledge haunted him each time he looked at his children. Was he just biding time, staving off the inevitable? He could only hope that they couldn't see his increasing doubt.

Ed Brady sat on the surface of a deserted highway, surrounded by ghosts of the past, holding the fragile future in his arms.

The city could mean salvation, or it could mean death.

Either way, it was their destiny.

CHAPTER 2

As she stood in the middle of the deserted highway, Trish Connor thought that the worst thing about the end of the world might very well be the winters. They were particularly harsh, as if the nightmare she woke up to each day wasn’t harsh enough already. At least when Tim had been alive it had been a little easier to bear; now she was in her second winter without him and it was the worst one yet.

Cold. So cold. Some nights she was sure she would freeze to death. She often thought that might actually be better. Each morning, however, she’d awaken to another day of relentless cold and raging hunger. She felt like the walking dead herself; an animated shell, empty on the inside.

Once, before everything went to hell, she’d been pretty. She thought maybe she still was, but it had been so long since she looked in a mirror she couldn’t know. Worse, she feared she might not recognize herself anymore. She already could see how thin her body was, and she knew her face had to look like that of a corpse. She didn’t have the courage to face all of that, at least not anymore.

If Tim had noticed all this he hadn’t let it show. Dead for more than a year now, his face was still bright and clear in her memory. He’d cared for her, protected her, and told her the sweet lies her heart so desperately needed to hear. But now she could no longer fool herself into believing, not even for a moment, that everything was going to be okay.

She wondered sometimes why she continued to trudge on, eking out a pathetic existence in a world overrun with the stuff of nightmares. Sometimes she sat in the freezing cold, just before nightfall, and stared at the barrel of the pistol she carried. She had eight bullets; it would take only one to make it all go away. Click, boom, gone; all in less than a second.

But Tim wouldn’t approve of that, not even from the Great Beyond. For her to give up now would be like spitting in his face. He had believed she was worth saving, and that life was still worth living. He died in defense of that belief, and for that she both loved and hated him.

She was seventeen when she met Tim in high school. She was only nineteen when he died. In the two years they spent together she felt they'd shared a lifetime. They had been through so much together that they had become as close as two people could be. Age played no role in this fact. Now she was twenty years old and completely alone in a living hell.

She would often sit in the cold, squeezing her fingers together, feeling the familiar thickness of Tim's class ring on her middle finger. He hadn't been able to give her a wedding ring, so he'd given her his class ring instead. Though too large to fit on her ring finger, it didn't matter. She made do. Nothing else in her possession could rival the importance of this ring.

Desperate and alone on a desolate highway, she now found herself hungry and cold, covered in filthy, scavenged clothing. She stared at the seemingly endless stretch of snow-covered road in front of her for a very long time, trying to ignore the stinging bite of the relentless wind. Here on the open road the wind seemed to never stop.

She once avoided the road, but the empty farmland had soon overgrown its boundaries and she was now too weak to fight her way through the thicket. On the highway grass grew only in the ever-widening cracks, not yet overtaking it. It would eventually claim the entire road, but for the time being it was passable.

Now the deep snow drifts made travel by anything other than the road impossible. Although there were thousands of abandoned cars on the road, she could easily maneuver around those. Many of the cars were still occupied by their owners; sad reminders of thousands of failed attempts to escape an inescapable fate. She rarely looked inside them anymore; they all held the same terrible thing.

Survivors had picked many of the bodies clean of their clothing and possessions, the birds had picked many more clean of their flesh. The rest just slowly decomposed in their cars, or on the highway itself. Trish had seen so many bodies she hardly noticed them anymore.

The truly dead were no longer her concern; the walking dead were what mattered now. Their bodies were alive, but their minds, their hearts, and their souls, those were long since dead and gone. They were no longer human, they were wild animals now. Vicious and relentless, they were absolutely mad with hunger and delirium.

Such was the way of the world now.

To her left an exit beckoned. Two hundred yards of pavement led to abandoned restaurants, truck stops, grocery stores, and then onto hundreds of deserted homes. Many had surely been picked over, raided, and plundered, but there weren't enough survivors to scavenge it all. There had to be scraps, something sustaining left behind three eternal years ago. It was risky because the infected could be anywhere, but it was better to die trying than to passively freeze to death on a road to nowhere.

And she was sure Tim would have agreed with that.

Nearly twenty minutes later Trish stood facing the door of a former Howard Johnson’s, peering intently into the darkness within. Snow drifted slowly and gently down from an apathetic sky, dusting her shoulders and blanketing the ground around her in a thick, white powder.

She saw no footsteps in the snow other than her own, so she felt she could reasonably assume she was alone. Whether or not there were carriers inside was impossible to tell. She decided she had little choice but to just step into the darkened building and take her chances.

The glass in the window set within the door was almost completely gone, and the door itself was unlocked. She slowly opened it, being careful not to cut herself on any broken glass. She wondered why she still cared. Habit, most likely. The door scraped along the floor, pushing trash and other debris along the way as it opened. By all appearances no one had been there for a very long time; she took that as another reassuring sign.

Once in she felt her way along the walls through the darkness, searching for a suitable place to curl up and wait out the seemingly endless night. She heard a scurrying from somewhere in the blinding dark and froze. Then she heard it again.
Rats
, she thought to herself. Compared to the carriers, rats were a mere nuisance now; a proverbial gnat buzzing around the ears. Still, she hated them.

She listened intently for the tell-tale signs of the infected; there was no breathing or growling, no shuffling of feet in the darkness. No dragging of paralyzed limbs, no maniacal screaming or delirious repetition of gibberish. No slurping of drool through rotten teeth. For now she was alone.

She continued her way through the room, feeling against the wall until she eventually bumped into a table. She dropped to the floor beneath the table, then scraped away enough debris to make something that loosely resembled a makeshift bed. She curled up in the fetal position, her back against the wall, and prepared to wait out the night there.

She again listened for signs she wasn’t alone; she heard nothing but the rats and the howl of the wind as it carelessly drafted in through broken windows. She hoped the rats weren't hungry; they'd been known to chew on people while sleeping. She squeezed her fingers together inside the tattered mitten on her left hand and felt the shape of Tim's ring; comforting and connecting, like a tether through an invisible doorway to the Great Beyond.

As she drifted off to sleep she asked two favors of a god she no longer believed in. First, she asked for vivid dreams of Tim; dreams where he held her and told her everything was going to be okay.

Then she asked that she never wake up again.

Sleep overtook her more quickly than she had expected. She never heard the three figures carefully open the building’s broken door, nor did she hear their footsteps as they made their way toward their sleeping prey.