The Survivors (Book 1): Summer (10 page)

I added the box that contained the gun and its ammunition to the small pile of items I would take with me.
 The food in the car was more than I’d need; enough to feed me for a couple of weeks at least.  Still, I was in no condition to remove it so it would have to come with me.  Even if I didn’t eat it all, I could potentially use it to trade.

I paused for a moment and thought.
 I should take money as well.  To most survivors, cash was about as useless as monopoly money – our currency was essentials, like food, water and personal effects.  Still, there were a few people out there that clung to the old ways.  To most, the bags of fruit I carried were far more valuable than money, but knowing my luck I’d find the medicine I needed in the hands of the one person left who still wanted hard currency.

Most of the time, I didn’t bother to carry cash since it was basically just dead weight, but I did carry a few hundred dollar bills in case of emergencies.
 I fetched them out and stared at them, not entirely convinced that they would be enough for what I needed.  Life-saving supplies did not come cheap.

I closed my eyes, and thought back over the layout of the town.
 Suddenly, I realised that in my exploration of this very building, I hadn’t seen a safe.  There must have been one.  Someone paranoid enough to put four locked doors between himself and the outside world would not have left his cash sitting around in an unsecured lock box.

"
If I were a paranoid old man, where would I put the safe?"  I asked myself.  My head was spinning and it was getting hard to think, but verbalising my ideas seemed to help.  "The office would be the logical place, wouldn’t it?"

The reasoning made sense to me, so I decided that I would check on my way out.
 I wasn’t sure I would be able to make it back up the stairs again, so it was better to plan my movements carefully.  I repacked my bag, dumping out everything non-essential, and then triple-checked that each of my tools was in its proper place.

In my head, I went through a mental checklist like I’d done a thousand times before.
 I removed each item in order and examined it, then returned it to its pocket.  It was a ritual more than anything, and helped me ensure I always had everything I needed and never wasted weight on anything I didn’t.

Something small and soft poked my hand midway through my checks.
 I blinked and reached further into the pocket, then pulled out that little family of toy bunnies I had found the week before.  One by one I set them on my palm and stared at them.  In my head, they weren’t just bunnies; they were a representation of the family I’d lost so long ago.

The smallest one, in her tiny pink dress
– oh how she reminded me of my baby sister.  The bunnies had been there ten years ago, when we first passed through this little town.  Sitting together in their little dollhouse, waiting for the right person to come along and buy them.  Mum had left me in charge of Skylar while she stopped into the local grocery store for some more supplies, and Skye dragged me over to stare at the precious things on display in the antique store’s front window.

How clear her young voice was in my memory, full of wonder and delight.
 She begged me to buy her those bunnies, along with just about everything else in that store.  When I told her I couldn’t, she cried and cried as though her little heart would break – right up until Mum found us and gave her an ice cream treat instead.

I’d been here before.
 So, why couldn’t I remember the face of the cashier behind the counter?  That bothered me; the cashier was a human being, just like me, just like everyone else.  Did she die in that horrible hall along with all the others?  Or did she wander the earth restlessly, waiting for the end to come?

I closed my hand around the tiny, velvet-soft forms, and set them on the old wooden dresser as I rose.
 My tiny family, always perfect, always happy and never lost and all alone.  I would leave them here, where they were safe.  I took one last long look before I walked away, and shuffled awkwardly into the kitchen.

There, I added a couple of water bottles to my pack and slung it over my shoulders.
 That would have to do.  I couldn’t carry much more in my current condition, and it would be a stupid idea to try.

It took me a
while to get back down the stairs again, mostly because I ended up having to scoot down on my butt.  Ah, how that brought back memories of playing silly games with my little sister, though our games were never in life-or-death situations.  

Thinking of little Skylar made me so sad.
 Again, I wondered what had happened to her.  She’d been such a sweet little girl, so innocent, all fairies and princesses and unicorns at the tender age of eight.  I hoped her death had been quick and painless.  She didn’t deserve to suffer.  I couldn’t bear to think of her suffering.

I sighed, and resigned myself to never knowing for sure.

At the bottom of the stairs I hauled myself back to my feet with the aid of the door frame, and looked around the little office.  I saw no sign of a safe or anything that resembled one.  The room was so small that I should have seen it straight away, unless it was hidden somewhere.

…Hidden somewhere?

With a sudden flash of cognition, I remembered the painting on the wall, the one that I instinctively felt was out of place in the room.  I hobbled over to examine it more closely.  Sure enough, behind the painting was a recess in the wall.  Within it was a small safe.

To my relief, there was no combination or numerical pad, just a keyhole.
 That made life easy, since Benny’s keys were in my pocket.  I tried them, one after another, until one of them clicked.  The safe swung open.

"
Easiest burglary ever," I mumbled as I peered inside.  Hey, at least my sarcasm-bone was still intact.

There wasn’t a lot of cash in the safe, but there was some.
 The plastic notes were sticky but showed no sign of fading or decay.  The Reserve Bank made things to last, too.  I took the small stack of bills, probably about $500.00 in tens and twenties, and stowed it in my pack.  Some was better than none.  

It struck me as kind of funny how my
dad used to gripe at us kids about how money didn’t grow on trees.  It sure did now.  Everywhere you turned was free cash, and it was all worth a grand total of nothing.  You couldn’t even burn the stuff for warmth, since it was all made of plastic.

There was a box of coins in the safe as well, probably the float Benny used for his cash register, but the weight outweighed the value.
 You could find coins everywhere and they were only really useful if you had a vending machine and you were too lazy to pop the lock with a crowbar.

"
Well, that’s it," I told myself.  "No more excuses, time to go."

Man, I was not looking forward to this little adventure, but I had no choice.
 Go and maybe die horribly, or stay and definitely die horribly?  I had to go, for Mum’s sake, for Dad and little Skylar.  They wouldn’t want me dying of any kind of infection, not after I had been lucky enough to survive Ebola-X.  I was the only one left to carry on their memory and keep their bloodline alive. I was the only one left to remember how much they had been loved.

I shouldered my pack and hauled myself up straight, doing my best to ignore the renewed pain in my foot.
 I locked the door to the stairs, and then backed out of the office and locked that door as well.

Where’s Tigger?
 I wondered, peering about.  The last time I saw her was at dinner, so I hoped that I hadn’t locked her inside.  Then I spotted her, curled up fast asleep on the still-warm bonnet of my Hilux.  

Cheeky little bugger.

I Indulged myself in a weak smile as I locked the front door to the store, then hobbled over to shoo the kitten off.  She ignored me.  Losing patience, I went to pick her up and shift her myself, but she hissed and swatted at my hand.

"
Have it your way, kid."  I snatched back my hand before she could draw blood. "But you’re not going to like what happens next."  

I checked the cab again, then opened the door, threw my backpack into the rear and hauled myself in.
 The keys slipped into the ignition and the engine roared to life.

Hey, look at that.
 I’m a prophet.  

The kitten inflated like a hedgehog and practically levitated off the bonnet in a mad dash for the safety of the overgrowth.  I immediately felt guilty for giving her a scare, but reassured myself that I didn’t really have a choice.  I needed to go now and she was being stubborn.

I was also glad she was nowhere nearby when I awkwardly pulled the truck away from the curb and hit the road.
 It would have just about killed me if I ran the poor little fuzzy over.

I was such a sucker for cats.

The trip to Hamilton was unpleasantly long, but
uneventful.  

I’d never been much of a fan of travel
ling, but at least when I was driving I didn’t get car-sick.  Still, given a choice I would probably have just settled down in one place and stayed there forever, or at least until the supplies ran out.

I planned to do that in Ohaupo, but now I didn’t know what I was going to do.
 It was my hope that I would be able to return, but my gut was all twisted up with a sense of foreboding.  I chided myself with the fact that I was probably just worrying over nothing, like I usually did.  I’d always been that person who was over-prepared for every situation, the one who churned themselves into a tight little knot of anxiety thinking about everything that could possibly go wrong, even the ones that were completely unlikely.  Hopefully, this would be just another time when I got myself all worked up over nothing.

The road cut a swath across the broad, flat green land, dotted with cows and sheep that grazed on, oblivious to the loss of their farmers.
 Most domesticated animals flourished in the wake of the outbreak, their numbers unchecked.  New Zealand had no predators to speak of, or at least nothing that could have taken down a full grown cow.

I had heard on the news that a few lions were spotted near Wellington Zoo a few years back, but I doubted they would get this far north.
 And if they had, I imagined those cows out there would have been looking a hell of a lot more worried.

Right now, they seemed to be more bothered by the growl of my engine as I tore past their
busted fences and wild paddocks than any risk of predation.  Bovine heads came up as I passed, watching me with suspicion in their long-lashed eyes.  To them, I was a noisy, alien menace that disrupted their contented, cud-chewing world, and they were glad to see me gone.  

As the sun slipped below the horizon and plunged the world into darkness, I flipped on my headlights.
 This far from any kind of significant township, there was really no light aside from the stars.  Once, there had been street lamps lighting the way at regular intervals, but at some point in the past the wind had claimed their lives; they lay scattered along the roadsides like fallen supermodels after someone greased the runway.

I made a mental note.
 There would be a lot of good metal and wire that could be gathered from them, with the right tools and enough determination.  Maybe even light bulbs.  Light bulbs were more precious than gold. Living in the world after the fall of humanity meant being creative with the resources at hand.

I found myself absently wondering how strong the wind must have been to rip those street lamps out. There were still some standing in Ohaupo, so it seemed like a localised kind of destruction; perhaps a tornado
had ripped through here.  With no one around to fix things, once stuff fell over it just stayed where it landed.

It also occurred to me that with darkness falling, I should probably slow down.
 Goodness knows what would happen if one of those street lamps had fallen across the road and I hit it at high speed – or if a cow decided to sleep on the road.  It had probably been years since they last saw a car; they would have no idea they were supposed to stay off the road.  That could potentially get very messy, very fast.

I decided to err on the side of caution again, and eased the Hilux down to a more sedate pace.
 I flicked the headlights on to high beam and leaned forward over the wheel, focusing intently on the road ahead.  The asphalt was in terrible condition, with long cracks running in all directions; grass grew through the cracks, making it hard to tell where the tar seal ended and the verge began.  Debris of all kinds littered the way, and often I was forced to slow or swerve to avoid something that might damage the car.

A green-and-white sign flashed by: Cambridge exit, two kilometres.
 Right lane only.

There were lanes?
 I saw nothing.  The years had stripped away the road-markings, leaving it a simple ribbon of dark grey.  What were the old rules again?  Keep left?  Keep right?  It didn’t even matter anymore.  The chance of meeting someone else on this dark, deserted highway in the back end of nowhere was one in a million.  Maybe more.

Cambridge exit, one kilometre.

The signs were made of a reflective material that glowed like a neon sign in the beam of my headlights, even after ten years of wear.  Did I want that turn-off?  I didn’t think so, but I grabbed my GPS off the dashboard and consulted it anyway.  No, I needed to keep on going.  There was nothing in Cambridge I wanted right now.  The supplies I needed might have been there, but I didn’t have time to risk it.

I was headed straight for the biggest hospital in the area, the one located on the southern fringe of Hamilton city.
 I wanted to spend as little time as possible within the city itself, and since I was coming from the south that hospital was the one that made the most sense.

The dread in my gut turned my stomach like I’d eaten rotten eggs.

***

I had no idea what time it was when I hit the outskirts of the city, but I guessed it was almost midnight.
 The sun set later in the summertime and it had taken me far longer than I estimated to negotiate the overgrown roads.  Fatigue was starting to catch up to me, and I found myself struggling to keep my eyes open.

As I eased the Hilux into the city proper, I noticed that there were signs of devastation everywhere; the riots had hit this place hard.
 Road signs had been torn down or defaced, and the cracked white paint flashed by like old bones when my headlights caught them.

Real bones lit up as I passed by as well, some full skeletons still dressed in the clothes they died in, some just random limbs or skulls bleached bare by the scorching heat of the long summer days.
 Many people had died here, and not all of them from the sickness or there wouldn’t be so many bones left behind.  I wondered how many were suicides and how many were murders; how many innocent people died in the riots that the police were unable to contain?

I slowed to a crawl as I negotiated the city streets, scanning the shadows for any signs of life, death, or anything in between.
 I saw nothing, but I didn’t trust my own limited vision in the darkness.  The street lights in this part of the city appeared to be out, or the power grid was having a fit.  Aside from the occasional flash of a crumpled street sign when my lights grazed it and the distant glow from other parts of the city, it was too dark to make much sense of anything I saw.

It made me feel so exposed.
 If anyone was looking, they would see me long before I saw them unless they were stupid enough to walk right in front of the truck.

I checked my GPS, and found myself close to one of the old entrances to the hospital grounds, so I pulled over and stared into the darkness.
 I couldn’t see anything, so I fished my torch from its pocket and clicked it on, then shone it out the window at the roadside.  A high metal fence topped with spikes barred the gap between the footpath and the car park beyond.  There was no way I was getting past that in my current condition – at least, not without a blow torch.

I drove forward slowly, searching for a break in the fence or some kind of entrance that I stood a chance of negotiating.
 A few metres further on, I caught sight of something that looked a little like a guardhouse coming up on the right, so I inched the truck closer to get a better look.

Suddenly
, light flared up, blinding me momentarily.  I shielded my eyes with my hands, cursing softly beneath my breath.  When the initial glare faded and my vision adjusted, I found the area lit up nicely.  The street lamps were back on, along with spotlights around the car park and hospital grounds; I just happened to be unfortunate enough to have one of those spotlights pointed straight at me.

Just a blackout
, I concluded with relief.  Maybe things weren’t as bad as I thought.  With the lights on, the place seemed less scary all of a sudden.  I could even see light shining through a couple of the windows of the hospital itself.  Maybe things would be alright after all.

Yes, there were skeletons all over the place, but there were skeletons everywhere in this day and age.
 I could handle skeletons… in small doses.  I’d gotten used to them over the years.  Many people had chosen to die by their own hand rather than let nature take its course, and just as many died of the infection before it reached the point it would devour them whole.  Human remains were impossible to avoid.

They were still gross, though.

I took the time to look around my newly-lit world in more detail.  The grounds surrounding the hospital were a mess, littered with all manner of refuse – everything from old newspapers to the decomposed remains of human beings.  A banner flapped in the breeze amid a forest of road cones flung about like skittles; the plastic hazard tape that stretched between them was limp and faded with age.

Hey, road cones
– they might be useful someday.
 My mental inventory updated, but aside from sarcastic jokes and witch hunting, I was unable to imagine any real use for the things.  But, who knew?  Maybe something would come up.

A strong gust of wind caught the banner and pulled it straight for a moment, long enough for me to read the biohazard quarantine warning.
 The words were marred by brown-black stains that were most likely blood, or perhaps paint.  I suspected as much – the hospitals were the first places the infection broke out, for the obvious reasons.  Where else would you go when you were sick and terrified?  You went to hospital, hoping for salvation and a miracle, like you saw on all those TV medical dramas.

Unfortunately, there was no miracle for the infected.
 Most of those poor people had gone to hospital to die.

Of course, that fact also meant that the hospitals usually had the highest concentrations of undead loitering within.
 Although most of them used to be hospital staff and tried to be helpful, a zombie with a syringe was still a zombie with a syringe.  I would keep my taser close at hand.

As I turned into the car park, the fallen barrier arm crunched beneath my tyres; I wondered briefly what happened to it, but there was no way to be sure.
 Perhaps it had been  smashed in the riots, or torn down in the storms, but for whatever reason the arm that once held back unauthorised traffic now lay shattered on the ground.  The car park was edged with small, powerful spotlights that lit the area well enough for me to see, so I switched off my headlights and nudged the Hilux forward carefully.

A doorway loomed before me, its doors hanging open like a gaping, toothless maw.
 The hallway beyond was pitch black aside the distant flickering of a fluorescent light bulb well past its prime.  Deeper within, I could see a steadier glow, but this entrance was dark and foreboding.  I pulled the Hilux to a halt directly in front of the door and stared as far down the hallway as I could see.

Nothing moved as far as I could tell, but the flickering light bulb made it hard to be sure.
 I considered my options, pondering whether it was worth driving around looking for another entrance or whether I should go with what I had.

I decided to just roll with it and move as fast as possible.

I put the truck in park, and fetched my pack from the back seat.  From within, I drew out the box that contained my gun, feeling its unhappy weight in my hand.  I hated this thing, but it was a necessary evil.  With careful fingers, I slid out the magazine and checked the contents, then slid it back into place with a solid click.   I was ready.

Setting the gun on the dashboard, I checked the shadows one more time before I struggled my way out of the cab, my foot stiff and swollen.
 As I put my backpack on and slipped the gun into the pocket closest to my hand, I hoped that it wasn’t the first stage of infection setting in.

Another reason to move my ass
,
just in case.

I locked the truck and took the keys with me when I left it this time.
 The truck was my best means of a quick escape, so there was no way I was risking its security.  Even though I couldn’t see anyone, there might be any number of people watching from one of the dozens of dark windows all around me and I would never know.  Biding their time.  Watching, waiting.

Creepy.

Feeling horribly exposed, I moved as swiftly and carefully as I could to the entrance of the hospital, tolerating terrible pain in an effort to hide my limp.  Show no weakness, lest the wolves decide you’re dinner.  I turned and stared behind me, searching the deepest dark recesses all around, before finally turning to confront the terrible shadows within.

I drew my torch from one pocket and clicked it on, my other hand fumbling to fetch my gun as I stepped forward into the darkness.

And promptly tripped, almost falling on my face before I could even get inside.  That was a promising start.  

Nice one, Sandy
.

I swung the torch down and dropped a mental curse or two as I spotted an old black pushchair blocking the doorway at a level just below the line of my torch.
 It was rusted and dirty but small, so I gave it a gentle nudge with my shin to push it out of the way.  Its rusted wheels gave way and it tumbled sideways, scattering the tiny bones of its former occupant across the floor.