Race to Refuge (6 page)

His shoulders relaxed a bit and he delved into his small backpack again. He pulled out some thin wire that looked like picture hanging wire. “You could also use this,” he said, pointing to a pair of headphones next to me.

I grinned at him. “I guess it’s good they can be put to some use at some point. I have a feeling my iPod isn’t going to stay charged forever.”

Joshua smiled back as he reached again in his backpack. Next he pulled out what looked like two pieces of wood that branched out in a way that made them nest together. Apparently, one of them staked into the ground and the other to something else. I watched as he carefully scouted around the area near our car, looking for some sort of signs. Then he looked up at the various trees and foliage around us.

He motioned me to come over. I still felt a little silly in my work attire, checking out my snare trap location. Who’d have thought? I also felt remarkably unprepared. When was the last time I’d even gone camping? Middle school?

Joshua didn’t treat me as though I were silly, though. In a clear voice he pointed ahead of us. “Can you see the signs that small animals have come through here?”

I peered at the ground and cleared my voice. “I can see that it’s some sort of narrow trail. A well-worn animal path?”

He nodded. “Look over the hill here.”

When I walked up, I saw a small stream at the bottom of several hills. “Water source,” I said.

Joshua pointed at the ground. “We haven’t had rain recently, but if we had, you would be able to see tracks in the mud. Or maybe a nearby burrow. You can definitely see other signs.” He pointed to a pile of small droppings. “So we know this is a good location to put up a snare trap. Knowing a good spot is half the battle.”

He continued patiently showing me how to set up the basic trap, stopping from time to time to make sure I was following. And the weird thing was that I felt much safer in the exposed woods with this elderly homeless man than I’d felt at home with Brendan.

Chapter Eight

Ty

Ginny hung onto the passenger door of the minivan until her knuckles were white. I couldn’t blame her—she’d never even been in the car with me driving before. And I was driving pretty fast, hoping that we could get out of town before the roads got clogged up with people trying to escape.

The main road out was already jammed with cars. Some were emergency vehicles, some looked full of people. There were a lot of horns honking.

Ginny said in her quiet voice, “We could go that back way. Do you know the way? It’s how Mom takes me to skating practice when it’s rush hour.”

I’d been back there a couple of times, but didn’t really know the way. “Can you give me some directions?”

I heard Ginny draw in a deep breath and sit forward in her seat. I could tell she was funneling as much focus as she could into where she was. “Turn off at this light.”

Not that I stopped at the red light.

Soon we were on a curving, narrow back road with a lot less traffic. But I was still driving as fast as I could, right up to the time where we finally got to the edge of town. When we drove into the rural area north of town, I finally felt myself start to relax.

“Ty, where are we going?” asked Ginny softly.

“That’s something I’ve got to figure out,” I said. I tried to sound strong and confident as I said it, which was tough since my head was pounding and I felt totally lost. All I’d known was that I had to get Ginny and that we had to get out of the town. After that point, I really hadn’t put a plan together. “I’m going to drive a little farther out and then we’re going to sit in this locked car and I’m going to map out where we’re heading and what the short-term plan is.” It was to survive, but I sure wasn’t going to tell Ginny that.

We continued for a few more minutes and I could tell that Ginny had a million questions on her mind. Finally she asked in a hesitant voice, “Why is there so much stuff in the back of the car?”

I glanced over at her tight, pale face. “Ginny, something terrible is happening. Some kind of virus is making people sick and then those people are trying to hurt other people. The town is going to get taken over by those sick people, and if we stayed, we wouldn’t be able to survive. I threw a bunch of stuff in the car that I thought might help us if we were out in the country for a while.” Until I could figure out how to get us more food and water.

She took this in and then glanced back in the back of the van again. “So … food, camping equipment, water.”

“That’s right.” I was glad Ginny was taking this as well as she was.

“Toilet paper?” she asked in a worried voice.

I shook my head. “I was in a hurry.”

“Clothes?” Her voice was even more anxious.

Obviously, Ginny would have focused on different things.

“Ginny, I just didn’t have time. I wanted to throw stuff in the van and then pick you up from school.”

She was quiet again for a few minutes and there was a quiver in her voice this time. “My retainer? Did you remember my retainer?”

At first I felt this tired anger bubbling up. Then I took a deep breath. She was scared. She didn’t understand. She thought things were going to be the same. Or she hoped they were.

This time, instead of sounding strong and confident, I went with gentle. “Ginny, it doesn’t matter. Your retainer. It’s going to be okay.”

“But Mom is going to be so mad,” she said, eyes moist.

“Ginny, Mom didn’t make it.” My voice broke a little on the words, even though my voice had finished changing a while back.

“Dad?” she whispered.

I shook my head again. And this time I felt a prickle of tears behind my eyes, too.

“So it’s just you and me?” she asked quietly.

I nodded. “But Ginny, I’m going to do a good job taking care of you. I promise.”

“You’ve done a good job so far,” she whispered, her voice breaking a little. “You got me out of there. There were sick people heading to the school, weren’t there?”

“And we called to warn them,” I pointed out. But she knew and I knew that those kids and teachers could only stay in the school for so long before food ran out. The cafeteria didn’t exactly plan for an Armageddon when it ordered supplies.

I fished around in the center console until I found the iPod that Ginny had left in Mom’s car. “Here. It’s a lot to take in, right? Just listen to music for a few minutes while I sit here and think about what our next move is, okay?”

Ginny looked sad. “It’s going to run out of battery. And I didn’t have a charger in Mom’s car.”

“Enjoy it while you can. This has been a bad day, right? This is a good day to listen to it.”

She fished out her headphones from the backseat somewhere and reclined the passenger seat a little. She looked out the window while I took out a pen and some sticky notes from Mom’s glove box to figure things out.

Mom had gassed up the car recently, so that was good. But we were going to need gas, and sooner than later. The van wasn’t the perfect car to take because it did use up a lot of gasoline. But I didn’t exactly have a choice at the time. I wrote
gas
on the paper.

The food and water wasn’t going to last too long, either. I added them to the list. Although the water purification sticks were really going to help long-term. I could use some more of those. I put Ginny’s toilet paper on the list although that was a little more of a luxury item, considering. A better weapon than the ax, shovel, and baseball bat would be good, too.

But if I went to a big store like Walmart, would they know about what was going on in our town? How far had the news spread? I didn’t have money with me … not enough, anyway. If I just walked out with the stuff then security would probably stop me. And if the Walmart had already been deserted by panicking people, then there might be zombies around. Everybody knew you weren’t supposed to go to malls or places like Walmart in a zombie outbreak. At least on my game that was something you didn’t want to do.

I remembered that there was a sort of country store that was out a ways that Dad and I usually stopped by on our way out to go fishing or camping or whatever. Dad knew the guy who ran it because he’d been there for years. Maybe he could do us a favor and give us some supplies. If I explained what was going on and didn’t sound crazy while I was doing it. Wouldn’t he think my sister and I were running away? I decided it was my best bet, though. That was in a quiet enough place that if there
were
zombies there, there wouldn’t be too many of them running around. I’d been there enough, too, that I knew where it was. Sort of.

After that, though, where was I headed? I took responsibility for Ginny, but it would be great if I could hand that over to an adult family member instead. Then I thought about Nana. She lived in senior living even farther out of town. I remembered it was a secure place, too—they didn’t want their memory care residents to be able to get out so the place was really locked down. And locked down from the inside was a good thing in a zombie outbreak. I’m sure I could knock on the door and persuade somebody to let Ginny and me in—especially with Ginny being so small. They’d probably take pity on us and let us in.

They’d have probably more food on the site than the school would have and a lot less appetite for eating it. And beds to sleep in—maybe an extra room or two. It would be good to sleep hard and then make a better decision about our next move.

Ginny was looking at me with that anxious frown making a line between her eyebrows. I gave her a reassuring smile and she pulled out an earbud to listen to me. “I know what we’re going to do,” I said.

She relaxed a little, relieved. She didn’t even look like she wanted to
hear
the plan, she just wanted to know that I had one.

I started the car up again and sped down the road until we got to the country store. It looked just the same as always. There was one gas pump outside and the stone building had one of those decorative flags outside that said
open
. There was only one vehicle there, a pickup truck that probably belonged to the owner. I couldn’t remember the guy’s name and hoped that he would remember me better than I could remember him. If he could just let us have some of his store stock, we’d be in a much better situation. I could even tell him that the next time Dad came through, he’d be sure to reimburse him. Then his name came to me … Bo. It made me feel more at ease to know his name … like we really did have a connection with each other.

I pulled the car right up to the door and hesitated, thinking things through. Maybe I should leave the car running. But was the danger really that close here? How quickly was it spreading? Would leaving the car running make me look like I’m some sort of thief?

Ginny reached for the door handle and I put out a quick hand to stop her. “Hey, Ginny, just let me look around first and make sure the area is clear, okay? Then, if I make a signal, you can come in and help me get supplies.”

“You mean leave me in the car alone?” Ginny’s face was uneasy.

“Just until I make sure it’s safe for you to go inside,” I said calmly. But inside, my heart was beating so hard that I was worried she could hear it sitting next to me.

“Don’t you need to take a weapon or something in?” she asked, pointing to the bat. I guess she figured that the bat was there to defend us and that I wasn’t planning on any recreational apocalyptic playing.

I was surprised. Maybe Ginny was going to adapt better than I thought. “I would, but I’m worried it’s going to make me look like a thug. If I look like a thug, I don’t think Bo is going to be real motivated to give us free stock.” In the distance, I heard gunfire and hesitated again. We
were
out in the country. Was this just good old boys going hunting for deer? Or was it people defending themselves? “Ginny, listen to me. If I come out now and I’ve been attacked in some way—scratched, bitten, something like that—and I’m trying to get back into the car, you don’t let me in, okay?”

Ginny’s eyes were huge and her breath caught. “Ty, I don’t want to be by myself. What would I do?”

“You’d drive out of here. As fast as you felt safe doing.”

“I don’t know how to drive!” A red flush crept up her neck and along the side of her face.

“It’s easy.” I spent a few moments showing her the controls and the pedals. “I’m even going to leave the car running so that you don’t have to worry about starting it up.”

“I can’t even reach the pedals!” Ginny was definitely about to cry now, and that’s the last thing I wanted. And she
was
pretty short.

“Just sit on the edge of the seat and you’ll be able to reach them. Look, I’m going to pull the seat all the way up, just in case. I don’t think anything is going to happen. Really.” I gave her what I hoped was a confident smile as I heard more gunfire in the distance. Then I took a deep breath and got out of the car, motioning to Ginny to lock the door behind me.

Chapter Nine

Charlie

Mojo started relaxing again as soon as we got back on the highway. For me though, the highway was anything but relaxing as once again I was driving off the road half the time, trying to get around traffic jams and the wrecks causing them.

He also probably wouldn’t be too happy to know what my plans were. I wanted to stop by the huge sporting goods store on the way farther out of town. This place was one of those huge warehouse-style mega-stores … a sportsman’s paradise with all the hunting, fishing, and camping equipment you could possibly imagine. I could only hope that every able-bodied man in the city hadn’t gotten the same idea. I wanted to stock up on some things that could help Mojo and me in the long run: stuff like water purification, guns, things like that. Being self-sufficient was going to be important since stores would probably start getting looted and cleaned out soon. Or overrun with zombies. Besides, there was only so long that fresh foods would stay fresh.

Another thing I wanted to do was to get in touch with an old high school buddy of mine who was in the army. He was sharp as a tack but too lazy to ever really advance much in the ranks. Still, I was guessing that he could be a real font of information. Once I grabbed these supplies I wanted to find a place to stash them. Getting them out of the store wouldn’t be real easy as it was. I might have to make two or three trips on the motorcycle to dump things out and come back for more. But I didn’t want to give up the bike yet. It hardly used any gas and could zip around almost any obstacle in its way. And no zombie was going to catch Mojo and me on that thing. So the temporary plan was that I was going to get Mojo and me settled somewhere away from the city with camping supplies, and then I’d try to put a call out to my buddy and see if he could throw a little light on the situation.