The Breadwinner Trilogy (Book 1): The Breadwinner (10 page)

“What?”  Isaac called out behind her.

“Nothing.”  They stood before the door, neither one wanting to admit to the other that they were nervous about leaving the building.  Veronica clutched the kitchen knife tightly in her right hand.  She looked at her brother with his solemn face, white knuckles around the rifle held in both hands, she knew he was scared as shitless as she was, but now was not the time to show it.  She just hoped he could, and would, use that rifle if he needed to.

She looked up from the rifle in Isaac’s hand and felt like a light had turned on; Veronica remembered the gun the armless man had dropped.  Before he lost his arms.  “There’s a gun on the street, I need to get it.”

“How do you know?  Where do you see it?”  Isaac was confused, he strained to see what his sister was squinting at.

“I can’t see it from here, but I know it’s there.  I saw a man drop it.”

“Is it even loaded?  Is it worth looking for?”  Isaac’s voice was shaky.

“I don’t know.  But it will be worth more to us than to the ground, no?”  She looked at her brother and swallowed hard, expecting him to argue with her about it.

“Ok.  But we need to be fast.  Do you know exactly where he dropped it?”

She nodded quickly.  “Yes.”

He looked away from her and back out the frosted window of the door, “On three then.”  He quietly whispered his count and they exited the door of their apartment building for the last time.

The familiar sound and smell from the balcony was back but this time much louder and stronger.  Veronica was out and into the street before Isaac knew what was even going on.  She swooped down in one motion, plucked something from the ground and was running back toward him again.  She was saying something but he couldn’t make out what it was over all the noise.  Something caught his eye a few yards behind her and he realized by the time Veronica had nearly passed him at full speed that she was yelling at him to run.

Three figures noisily chased after them.  His sister was in much better shape than he was considering she still participated in sports, but he was completely capable of keeping up.  They ran three blocks west
of their home and another four blocks north before they came across a bus lying on its side.  The bus had been on fire and bodies lie charred inside.  Isaac noticed some of them not entirely dead and were trying desperately to get out of the bus and chase their next meal.  “Right!”  Veronica yelled and turned a sharp corner.  Isaac glanced over his shoulder briefly as he followed his sister and caught sight of the eaters chasing him.  Two teenage boys, about his age, and a man who once probably could have been his grandfather. One of the teenagers was missing an arm and the other’s face was badly mauled.  The older man had no shirt on and deep gashes decorated his chest.

“Fuck me, when do they give up?!”  Isaac called out to his sister.  He felt the familiar burning in his chest from being winded but knew he needed to keep pushing.

“They don’t!”  Veronica called back.  They ran up two more blocks and came across a whole other type of mess they hadn’t seen before. 

A crowd of about 20 lined the street before them and a man in medical scrubs stood on top of a truck that had plowed into two other cars, firing a gun into the eaters that had gathered around him.  The man hadn’t seen the siblings yet and Veronica thought quickly.  She sidestepped to the left behind a line of parked delivery vans in front of a huge Florist’s Shop with busted out windows.  The four vans gave them the cover they needed to get by the man unnoticed and at the last minute Veronica threw herself to ground and rolled under the fifth and final van in the row.  Isaac immediately followed suit and lay still on the ground beside his sister.  His chest heaved and he was badly out of breath.  The three eaters that had been chasing them weren’t fast enough to see where they had gone and turned their attention to the man standing on the truck.  Isaac hadn’t realized what Veronica had done until that very moment.  His sister had saved their lives, lying under a van, out of breath, listening to a man scream at a crowd of hungry dead people.

“This can get very bad for us.”  His sister said, completely unconcerned with the dead hearing her over the sounds of their own wails and growls coupled with gunshots from the frantic man.  “Roll back out the way we came, go back down past the vans and into the florist’s.  They’ve gotta have a back door and we need to head back west.”

“Sounds like a plan.”  Isaac rolled from under the van, somehow more calm, and looked around, no sign of danger on their side of the vans and Veronica came rolling out seconds later.  They sprinted off back toward the flower shop and carefully entered through the smashed storefront window.  “Careful, we don’t know who’s in here.”  He whispered and slowed his pace, raising  the rifle he hoped he would never have to use.  Veronica carefully scanned the darkened shop.  Dusk was falling on them fast.  They found the office of the shop that also contained the back door they had hoped for.  “Close this door, I need something to drink before we leave.”  Isaac set his pack down on the desk as Veronica closed and locked the office door.

She didn’t want to say anything to him for fear of jinxing themselves.  So far their luck, if that’s what you could even call it, was in order and all they needed to do was keep running. 

Isaac finished drinking from the bottle and offered it to Veronica.  She took it from him and sipped delicately and handed it back to him.  He tightened the cap back on the bottle and looked around the office for anything useful.  “Do you think we should stay here tonight?  None of those things saw us slip in here.”

Veronica shook her head, “That man won’t last long.  He’ll either kill himself or they’ll get to him.  We need to keep moving while they’re distracted otherwise we’ll have a lot more than bad memories to run from.”  She regretted sounding so cold, but it was the truth.

“Do you feel bad?”  Isaac couldn’t help but ask her what she thought about using the man as a decoy as he placed the water back into its place and closed his pack back up.

“No.  Him or us.  That’s what it was.  I made a decision.”  She stared at the exit door.  “Let’s get going.”

Isaac didn’t respond, he just followed his sister silently out the door.  The back door of the florist led to a very narrow and very empty alley way.  “Head back left, make a right when we get to the street.”  He followed Veronica’s direction just because he simply knew he would be lost without her.  Geographically speaking, he would probably have been fine, but he very much so needed his sister right now.  More so than he had ever needed another person.

When they got back onto the street Veronica began running again.  Isaac followed; glancing behind him and saw no one was in pursuit.  He was relieved and knew they were running because she wanted to, not because they had to.  Another sixteen blocks and the streets were almost pitch black.  Their surroundings were getting quieter as they moved away from the city’s center.  Screams were heard every now and again, gun shots here and there, and the alarms were still going off, but he could now hear the sound of his own feet slamming down on the pavement, which made him a little nervous.  They were moving at a comfortable jog and were much more alert at this pace.  The pair had probably run about 6 miles, very strategically, from their former home.  They reached a pizza place they had frequented right on the edge of the city that wasn’t too far from the highway.  Veronica decided it was as good a place as any to take a rest.  “No, not inside.”  Veronica had said when he started toward the door.  “I want to be able to see.  We need to be able to run again if we have to.”  She sat down with her back against a Lincoln Navigator parked out front. 

Isaac pulled on the door anyway.  “It’s locked.”  He sat down on the window ledge and set his pack down.  He took a couple of deep breaths in and out, his calves burned and his feet ached.  He knew he would feel like total shit the next day and wondered how long and how far they would have to run?  Where were they even going?  He wanted to ask Veronica how she felt but knew she wouldn’t be honest with him.  He was frustrated and upset, and he had no idea how he was supposed to be behaving.  “What are we doing V?”  He asked her in a hushed voice.

“We’re getting out of the city.  That’s the plan, I’m sticking with the plan.”  She nervously studied their surroundings as she answered, craning her neck to peer down the street in the direction from which they came.

“Actually, we don’t have a plan.”  He rested his elbows on his knees and leaned forward, his remark getting his sister’s attention.  “Running isn’t a plan.  What do you want to do?  Run all night?  Run into the next day?  Run until we’re so exhausted that if we’re ambushed by a group of those things that we have no energy left to protect ourselves?  Just run, run, run?”

Veronica didn’t want to admit that he was right, it wasn’t in her nature to agree with her brother.  “No, Isaac.  The plan is getting out of the city, at whatever cost.”  Her irritation was showing in her voice.  “We stop when it’s safe to stop, farther away from the city, in case we need to start running again.”  She could feel her face getting hot, embarrassed that she in fact did not have a plan and simply wanted to put as much space between her and the apartment as possible.  “And besides, protect ourselves?  It’s not like we’ve had to do much in the way of protecting ourselves so far, I think running has worked out for us, wouldn’t you agree?”

Isaac sat silent for a moment, staring at faint cracks in the sidewalk.  They didn’t always get along, he didn’t expect them to all of a sudden bond over tragedy, but he didn’t think it was the time to behave worse than they normally did.  He rubbed the back of his neck and adjusted the collar on his faded green polo as he sat up.  He knew his sister did not have a plan, that the two of them were just doing what they needed to get out of this hell hole, but his feet continued to throb and he had a plan for the remainder of the evening; and it did not include any more running.  “Well so then things don’t exactly change all that much huh?  If there are any other people out there, I guess they’re all just probably runnin’ from their problems too.  Just like any old day of the week.”

“If that’s how you want to see it, then good for you.  I’m glad you’ve got it figured out.” 

“Yeah, just be a bitch V.  It looks good on ya.”

The two had obviously not noticed that the volume of their voices had increased and the bitter air between them had temporarily lightened the seriousness of the situation.  Veronica was about to fire back an insult at her brother before he could utter another sarcastic complaint but she suddenly froze in horror and put her hand up to shut Isaac up.  She strained her ears and Isaac jumped up from the ledge, looking around.  It was extremely hard to see but they could both clearly hear it now, a frantic set of fast moving steps and the familiar growl of an eater.  “Shit, shit, shit.”  Isaac chanted and snatched up the rifle. 

Before either of them could determine which direction the eater was coming from it appeared faster than anything Veronica had ever seen and was on her brother in an instant.  The two went crashing through the storefront of the pizzeria, smashing the table that once sat directly in front of the window and landed in a struggle on the pizzeria floor. 

“Isaac!”  She hadn’t meant to yell out but couldn’t help herself.  She had been caught off guard, wrapped up in their bickering and in her own selfish thoughts.  She was responsible for this.  She didn’t plan for this. 

She leapt through the window but as soon as she got in she was thrown off to the side like a ragdoll.  She felt strong arms holding her back against the wall as she watched a man of at least 6 and a half feet tall grab the eater off of Isaac’s body and bring its head down fast, impaling it onto one of the remaining panes of glass left in the large window frame.  Veronica’s heart was caught in her throat and her thoughts raced.  Who is this man?  Is Isaac alive?  Who is grabbing me?!  Nobody moved.  Nobody said a word.

Isaac groaned on the floor and the large man offered a hand to help him up.  “But I gotta warn ya pal,” the tall man said, “you make any sudden moves and I’ll have a bullet in ya faster than you can cry mama.”

Veronica felt the arms holding her ease up and she backed away from whoever it was.  Isaac moved to his sister’s side and saw in her eyes she was startled, but fine.  She promised herself she would apologize to him later, when she knew they were safe. 

A third person appeared with a lantern and raised it, revealing the room.  There in the ruins of a once busy pizza parlor stood the tall man who saved Isaac, a very petite woman and a second man who was at least a foot shorter than the other; all of them armed, all of them staring at Veronica and Isaac.

The woman’s eyes grew wide and she took her hand off her weapon.  “They are kids.”

The tall man smiled and lit a cigarette.  “Welcome to Pisano’s Pizzeria.”  He said in a very bad impression of an Italian accent as he exhaled the smoke toward the ceiling.  “One of you better know how to fix the window that you just made your grand entrance through.”  

Veronica and Isaac looked at each other nervously, not knowing how to respond, not knowing if they had just landed themselves in a bad situation.

The tall man snickered, “Ah, lighten up, I’m messin’ with ya.”  He took another drag off his cigarette, “but I suggest we get a move on closin’ her up before more of those assholes show up lookin’ for dinner.”

VII

The newly assembled group cast introductions to the side in order to cover the gaping hole in the storefront.  The stocky man disappeared into the back and came back with a stack of cardboard nearly as tall as he was.  “It’s all we’ve got, they’re too stupid to realize they can get through it.”  The man spoke with a Spanish accent and despite his size, moved around faster than all of them.  It wasn’t until Veronica had grabbed a piece of the large cardboard that she realized they were unassembled pizza boxes.  She handed them to the tall man beside her and he attached them to the wall with duct tape.  She couldn’t help but smirk at the duct tape.  Her father always kept a roll around, he said it was the only tool a ‘Southern Engineer’ needed.