THE TRASHMAN (11 page)

“Are there several cabins there?”

“No, only one, but it’s huge, more like a lodge. The brochure stressed it as a corporate get-away. It has two levels. The bottom level is mostly built into a hillside and has four bedrooms and a den with a pool table. Upstairs has a formal dining room and living room, as well as four more bedrooms. Looking at the pictures, the kitchen seems to be equipped like a commercial restaurant.”

I thought about what she was describing. “If it’s a remote cabin what about water and electricity? I can’t see corporate types roughing it.”

“Well water and there’s a power house. I don’t know what that is exactly, but the brochure mentioned the infrastructure was monitored and maintained by staff housed nearby.”

“A cabin on a trout stream sounds interesting. Powerhouse probably has a diesel generator. I’d like to look at the brochure when we get back to Sam’s. God, I miss Google. I’d love to be able to get a satellite view of the area.”

Becky said, “I miss a lot of things. Are we leaving tomorrow? That’s what I told Missus Hawkins.”

“Yes we are.”

*****

That last evening at Sam’s place, Becky and I took the first guard shift. We sat in chairs on the front porch of his house, Becky with her target pistol and I with the twelve-gauge and a Beretta. His porch provided a good view of the driveway and a portion of the paved road it connected to. It was a moonless night, dark enough that anyone trespassing would have to get close before we’d see them.

Near midnight, almost at the end of our shift, Becky said she heard wheels rolling on gravel. A second later, I heard it. A vehicle was slowly creeping up the drive. The fact whoever it was did not use the headlights told me we weren’t getting normal visitors.

“Becky, take the safety off your pistol. Be ready for anything. I’m going to light them up with a flash light.”

I followed suit with the shotgun and the Beretta, taking them both off safe. I turned on Sam’s Bushnell flashlight and played the beam down the drive, centering it on the windshield of a pickup truck a hundred feet from the house.

I stood, holding the shotgun ready, and shouted, “Who’s there.”

The truck stopped. I kept the beam on it. We could see two people in the front seat and then a man in the bed stood holding a rifle. He leaned over the cab, using it to brace his elbows. I moved just in time to miss being hit by his bullet.

Startled by the sound of the weapon fired at me, I dropped the flashlight. I loosed a load of buckshot in the direction of the truck, scrambled for the flashlight, and pointed it back at the truck. I’d let go of the shotgun and fumbled for the Beretta tucked in my belt. Holding the flashlight on the cab of the truck and shooting without aiming, I knew it would be lucky if I hit anyone in the truck. Becky was already firing at the truck. The beam of the flash allowed her to zero in on the windshield. I saw the driver jerk from multiple hits.

A bullet whizzed past my head. “Shoot the man in the bed,” I shouted over the crack of her pistol.

The front door of the house slammed open and Sam stepped through and began firing an AR. Jerold followed him out. He immediately aimed at the truck, pulling the trigger of his pistol. I don’t know who hit him, but the man in the back of the truck dropped from sight.

I heard screams of agony from the vehicle but I kept the flashlight trained on the windshield and urged our shooters on.

Jerold emptied the magazine of his pistol and took the twelve-gauge I’d dropped, and put four loads of buck into the cab.

The screaming continued, but it wasn’t coming from the men in the cab. The windshield was blasted out. The light of the flashlight showed the two men slumped and bloody.

“Stop shooting,” I shouted.

Becky must have emptied her magazine. Jerold fired once more and stopped. Sam shot several more rounds from the rifle and then clicked on an empty chamber.

In the ensuing quiet, I heard a man crying out, “Oh God, it hurts.” He repeated the phrase over and over. As for us, we stood on the porch in stunned silence. Jerold was the first to speak.

“The men in the front look like they’re dead.”

“Yeah,” Sam said.

I went to Becky. “Are you alright?”

“I would be if he’d shut up,” she said, referring to the man we could hear repeating his statement to God.

I fished in my pocket for a magazine for the Berretta, Released the one in it, and slapped in the reload. “We need to finish him off,” I whispered. “Everybody reload and follow me. I’ll go to the truck. Stay behind me as backup.”

As I approached the truck, the man’s lament seemed weaker. There was a longer space between repetitions. When I reached the hood of the pickup, I played the beam inside the cab. The hail of bullets and buckshot had punctured the heads and upper torsos of the men, so much so that it was hard to recognize facial features. The injured man was definitely in the truck bed.

I squatted and duck walked to the side, rose fast to shine the beam and then squatted back down. In the brief moment of vision, I’d seen the man was holding his head with both hands. Bloody hands. I stood and played the light fully on him. As I did, I saw there was another occupant in the bed of the truck.

A blonde haired woman was bound and gagged. Gnawing and choking on the gag tied tight on her mouth, her eyes stared into the light of the flash.

I snapped my attention back to the injured man. Blood was oozing between the fingers clasped to his forehead just above his brows.

His eyes were closed to avoid the harsh light I shined on his face.

“Help me,” he begged. “Oh God it hurts.

Sam came to my side.

“Damn, there’s a woman in there. Shoot the bastard so we can get to her.”

I aimed at the man’s face but I couldn’t pull the trigger.

Becky was behind Sam. She pushed him aside, reached over the edge of the truck, and thrust her pistol toward the man. With the barrel almost touching him between his eyes, she pulled the trigger. His head jerked and he quivered, the heels of his feet thumping the metal bed. She leaned farther in and shot him in his temple and he stopped moving.

I stepped away from the truck fighting a war with my stomach, staggered a few feet more and lost the war, bent over and sprayed the ground with vomit.

While I was heaving, I heard Sam and Jerold arguing about the woman, and then Sam said, “Go to hell.” I stood and saw Sam scramble over the edge of the truck into the bed. A few seconds later, I heard coughing, and Sam shouted, “Oh Shit!”

He stood and leapt from the truck to the ground. “She coughed right in my face.”

Becky took the flashlight from my hand and shone it on Sam. His face was spotted with droplets of blood.

Jerold shouted for Becky to get away from Sam. Jerold was already putting distance from him.

Jerold said, “I told you to be careful. I told you I saw blood on her gag. I told you she was hacking.”

Lucy and Jessica came running down the graveled drive from the house. Even though Jerold shouted for her to stop, Lucy went directly to Sam. Jessica joined her brother. He pulled her, moving even farther from the rest of us.

“Don’t go near them,” he said. We need to get our stuff and go. The lady in the truck’s got the plague and she sprayed Sam with spit. Come on.”

The two J’s left us, Jerold urging his sister to move faster, and her questioning him about what happened. All the while, I could hear the woman in the truck sounding like she was trying to cough out her lungs.

Becky had moved away from Sam and Lucy. She said, “Jerold told Sam not to get near her, that he thought she was sick.”

“I heard him,” I answered and then spoke to Sam. “Jeez Sam, what do we do now?”

“Fuck. I don’t know. Maybe she’s choking from something else. Maybe they beat her up, busted her mouth or something.”

I heard the woman trying to speak between coughing fits. “Shut up. Listen. She’s saying something.”

We waited out another coughing spell and then she managed to gasp, “Sick” before relapsing.

“Oh, Sam,” Becky said.

Lucy turned from examining Sam in the dim light of the flash Becky was pointing at the ground. “What? What do you mean? What’s happened here?”

Becky shined the light on Sam’s face, and said, “The lady in the truck has the plague. She coughed in Sam’s face. See the blood? He’s been exposed. I was close to her, too, and I heard her hacking behind the gag. Maybe I breathed in the plague.”

It was too much for Lucy. She sagged and would have fallen to the ground if Sam hadn’t caught her. He bundled her into his arms and said, “I’m going to the house. You two deal with this.”

“This” I took to mean the dead people and the poor woman in the truck.

“What do we do?” I asked Becky.

“Ralph, the lady in the truck has the plague. I don’t know for sure if you or I were exposed, but it’s for sure we will be if we get near her.”

“So we just let her cough herself to death without doing anything for her?”

Becky moved close to whisper. “There’s nothing we can do for her. She’s going to die. The humane thing for us to do would be to shoot her, but I can’t do it and you couldn’t even shoot the man that shot at us.”

“So we leave her tied up in the truck.”

“We walk away. The way she’s gasping and choking she’ll be dead by morning.”

We walked away. It was the hardest and most disgusting thing I’d ever done in my life. We rounded up our weapons and went to Sam’s front porch.

I wasn’t sleepy at all and said, “Honey, I know all the ruckus has the children awake and scared. I’ll stay on watch. I don’t think Sam or Lucy will be up to it.”

I settled into a chair and watched her walk to the shop. Before beginning to reload the magazines, I glanced at my watch. Only fifteen minutes had elapsed from the time the truck drove up. Those few minutes had changed our course and I was damned if I knew what direction to take. I settled in for a long night with only the woman’s continuous coughing for company. When the sun came up, I was still wide awake.

Pacing the wooden floorboards, I saw Sam peek through the door glass and I moved away twenty feet as he opened the door and came out.

“Yeah, you need to keep your distance,” he said. “I really fucked up last night. The boy told me not to go near her. You reckon she’s dead?”

“She could be. I haven’t heard her coughing the last couple of hours. Jessica and Jerold left an hour after everything happened. Jessica told me that we needed to stop thinking like nice people and to start thinking like survivors. We’re going to miss those two. She gave me another warning. There’s a chance many of the nuclear power plants weren’t put into safe mode. Some could be in meltdown already. She said not to go near any of them. I hate to say it, but they were the two among us that may have a chance of living through this.”

“I should have listened to Jerold last night. I thought I was doing the Christian thing, but I exposed myself, and now my entire family to the plague.”

I shook my head. “Maybe not.”

“I felt her spit go into my mouth and my eyes. I’m infected. I carried Lucy into the house. Maybe I got some of the spit on her. God, I’m so stupid.”

“Christ Sam! What are we going to do?”

“I talked to Lucy. We’re staying here. It’s sort of like closing the barn door after the horses escaped, but I’m going to stay in the spare bedroom and she’ll put food by the door. The room has a door to the back patio. I can use the outhouse after you all are gone.”

“You want us to leave you?”

“Hell yes. What good would it do you to stay? Draw us a map to the cabin you’re headed to. If I’m still healthy two weeks from now, we’ll drive up and join you. No matter what, Lucy and the kids will. I just hope the hell I didn’t infect her when I carried her to the house. Last night all I did was fuck-up.”

“Like the J’s said, we’re too civilized for the times.”

“Get harder, Ralph, and get out of here. Go to the woods and take no chances. Hide and stay low. Kill anybody before they can harm you and yours. Wake Becky and the kids and leave today.”

So I did. Three hours later, we drove away, leaving disaster behind and taking pain with us.

We drove first to see Salvo. He’d heard the shooting. We told him the entire story and that there was a chance we were exposed to the plague. He reluctantly chose not to accompany us. He did say he would act on the same idea and seek a remote cabin to hole up in.

From there, it was only a short drive to the interstate 75. The highway wasn’t cluttered with abandoned vehicles, there were a few, but I knew the roads near the populous city of Atlanta would be a different story. I remembered the crowded streets and avenues during our initial escape. We’d had an early warning. The panic-fueled jams could have only gotten worse as more people realized the city was a death trap.

I planned to leave the highway at the city of Macon, and use back roads to bypass the huge metropolitan area. We had enough food and water for a few days. I decided we could resupply as we drove through areas that are more rural.

We stayed on the highway and bypassed the city of Tifton. From the elevated bridges that passed over major streets, we could see buildings burning in the downtown. When I lowered the windows of the Durango, we could hear gunfire in the distance.

My plan to stay on the interstate ended just north of Tifton. A tractor-trailer and several passenger vehicles had tangled on the bridge crossing over state highway 41. The big-rig blocked most of the three lanes. An SUV stacked with other mangled cars blocked the rest. I stopped a good distance from the wreckage, warned Jen and Will to stay put, and stepped from the vehicle. Becky joined me and we approached the accident. Parts of cars were scattered on the pavement.

The accident had happened some time ago and the smell of decaying bodies, while strong, was not gut wrenching. The door to the cab of the big rig was open and after carefully approaching it, we determined the driver was gone.

Now that we were closer, we could see the decayed bodies of people in the six vehicles involved in the collisions. We didn’t go near enough to really get a look. For all we knew, any of the vehicles could be ripe with the plague virus.