Legion of Despair: Book Three in The Borrowed World Series (14 page)

“Best have you a drink of that before I pull out,” Lloyd said. “My driving don’t mix with drinking. You’ll spill it.”

Buddy took a sip. A smile spread across his lips. “Sweet nectar of the Gods,” he whispered. “That’s good shit. Takes me back.”

“Me too,” Lloyd said. “Me too.”

Chapter 10

Claypool Hill, VA

A weary Alice crouched behind a guardrail at the crowded intersection of Route 19 and Route 460. Since leaving Boyd’s, she’d walked forty miles in two exhausting days. Her feet throbbed with each step. They throbbed even worse when she stopped to rest and she could feel the blood pulsing in them as if they were about to explode. Over the last two hours, a sharp pain had emerged in the side of her knee and nearly took her breath at times, but she would not slow down. She limped on.

Her stomach did slow her down, though. Frequent intestinal cramps and diarrhea had plagued her for these two days. She knew it traced back to drinking ditch water. She tried to stay hydrated, but all food and liquid passed right through her. Though she was miserable, she had no time for it.

Her initial plan had been to walk out of the Bluefield area in the same manner as she entered it, keeping to the shoulder of the road, hiding when she approached other people, although she found that her experiences had changed her in ways she had not expected. That first night, she kept walking until she was out of the town of Bluefield and found a place to hole up on the side of the road. She awoke early and started walking immediately, eating on the road.

When she met her first group of travelers, she waited for the panic to well up within her and urge her into hiding. It never came. Instead, she drew her pistol and held it in her hand as she and the group passed each other. Whether it was the gun, her demeanor, or the look in her eyes she didn’t know, but the group did not speak to her. They looked at her, then averted their eyes, pausing all conversation until she passed.

Most did not even have weapons, or concealed them if they did. In more populated areas along the highway, where houses lined both sides of the road, some people had attempted to speak to her despite her icy demeanor. They appeared harmless, but she took no chances. She spoke to no one and carried her gun openly at all times now.

She had learned the value of casting a threatening presence into the world and making people shy from her path. She had a cousin, prone to violence and drunkenness, who had been such a man. Folks said of him that Heaven wouldn’t take him and the devil was too scared to let him into Hell. That was what Alice tried to be in her mind. A wraith so scarred and with a soul so blackened that a glimpse of her eyes froze the questions in the very mouth of the questioner and they let her pass without bother.

In a remote section near a golf course, a man on a motorized scooter offered her a ride. Had he not been drunk, he would have taken one look at her and kept moving, just as everyone else did. She considered his offer, as the ride would have knocked at least three hours’ walking from her trip, but she couldn’t make herself do it.

“Got this moped when I got my fourth DUI,” the man told her. “You don’t need a license and it gets fifty miles to a gallon. Who’s having the last laugh now?”

He sped off after she declined a second time with a pang of regret. What would she do if he sped off the highway toward some unknown destination? At forty-five miles per hour she couldn’t exactly jump off and she couldn’t kill him while he was driving or they’d wreck. She just couldn’t take the chance and put her fate in someone else’s hands. She could not end up caged in someone’s basement again, or worse.

She saw the roadblock at Claypool Hill from a good distance. She approached in cover and hid to observe it for a while. A few folks on bicycles and two men on horseback passed through the checkpoint. They weren’t delayed for long and there was no overt hostility from the men working the checkpoint. Even though it looked safe, she still opted to go around it.

She cut up into a subdivision of houses and gave the intersection a wide berth. Sticking to the paved road through the subdivision, she saw curtains move and folks watching from dim interiors. A man with a shotgun stood by a barbecue grill, tending a small fire. As she watched, he slung a long-tailed carcass onto the grill. It could only have been a cat. It reminded her that she’d not eaten since midday, but it would have to wait. She would not stop this close to her destination.

The subdivision road crossed the highway that went into the town of Richlands. That was not the direction that Alice needed to go so she crossed the road and entered a cemetery. It was late and the sun was setting, but the cemetery was more peaceful than gloomy. It was one of the few places she’d been recently that seemed completely unthreatening, even though it was becoming overgrown without daily mowing and maintenance. It was almost like a park.

At one point, she came upon a fresh grave with a plywood marker. There were roses scattered across the heaped mound of dirt. The date on the board, written with a black marker, indicated a date of death somewhere around the start of this whole event. She was glad to know that some rituals were intact. Someone had cared enough to bury this person in a proper cemetery with a marker and flowers.

Perhaps there was hope for the world after all.

At the edge of the cemetery, she cut across a vacant lot then down a steep hill to a grassy embankment where she crouched and slid down to a ditch. She was back alongside the highway now, safely past the roadblock. Her office was just a couple of miles ahead of her. It felt like years since she’d left on that work trip and gone to Richmond. A lot had happened since then.

There was no way she’d make it to the office before dark, but there was also no way she was spending another night on the road. She had a flashlight and some spare batteries. She’d just have to be careful and stay on her guard. She adjusted her pack, tightened the belt, and started walking briskly, taking the longest strides she could. The pain in her knee nearly brought tears to her eyes and she tried to distract herself by remembering personal stories about the landmarks along the way.

She passed the bowling alley where she’d once had a birthday party for her son. When she and her husband first met, they went on several dates there. A few minutes later, she caught sight of a cinderblock video store where she’d once worked part-time renting VHS movies. She tried to recall some of the movies that had been new releases when she’d worked there, and couldn’t recall a single one. She did remember that the best part of the job was that she could take home a movie or two every night for free if she wanted. That was a big deal to her then. People always wanted to hang out at her apartment because of the free movies.

Ten minutes later there was another building that had once been a gun store but now sat empty. Then a pawn shop, an ice cream shop, a camper store. She kept the challenge going in her head for as long as she could, but for the last two miles there were just cattle pastures on both sides of the road – no landmarks, no buildings, no associated memories. The only houses were set far back from the road. It was dark enough now that she could only see shapes. The road was easy enough to follow, its surface catching a little moonlight, so she walked without using her light. She carried it in her left hand, ready for use. In her right she carried the pistol and it was ready too.

Before she came to her office complex, she passed a large church. There was a steel building that the church used as a gym. People were gathered there in the parking lot. There was a fire going in a steel drum and several Coleman lanterns hanging around the entrance to the building. It looked like they were operating a shelter of some sort. Although she knew several folks who attended that church, she was by this point so alienated from the company of strangers that she could not see herself approaching them, even for a hot meal or a cot. Without her light, no one saw her and she passed in welcome obscurity.

Past the church, she turned left onto a street that ran between her office complex and the local community college. Beyond the college, there was also a National Guard armory. At the armory, she could see some outdoor fires going, with the vague shape of men standing around them. A dull glow came from the high windows of the armory building and she wondered if it might also be some sort of shelter. Again, she did not trust people enough to seek their company or assistance. She would go to her own building and see what she could find.

She first passed the darkened clinic buildings, their one-story profiles easily recognizable. From the way that reflecting firelight from the armory varied from window to window, she could tell that these buildings had been broken into and vandalized. She stopped and listened very carefully. In the distance, she could hear the voices of the armory men telling stories and laughing around the fire. From her buildings, she heard nothing.

Her office was in a two-story building. The upper stories were not accessible except by access controlled steel doors or an elevator. With no power, the elevator should have kept folks out of the upper stories. Once the power went out, the steel doors to the second floor would go into fail-secure mode and lock down and could only be opened at that point by using a key.

Alice passed her blue Honda Accord in the parking lot. It was less than two years old and was one of the nicer cars she’d ever owned. It was one of the few cars in the parking lot and she could guess by the reek of fuel that someone had either siphoned the gas from it or punctured the gas tank. She walked around the car and found the windows intact. It almost surprised her. She sadly noted that it did rest on four flat tires.

From the landscaping around the parking lot, she picked up a retaining wall stone about the size of a large brick. With both hands, she threw it through the driver’s window of her Honda. Concerned now that the noise might draw the wrong kind of attention, she used her flashlight and quickly located the large ring of keys in the center console. Because Human Resources sometimes required more than eight hours of work a day, she was often in the building late at night. She kept a key to every door she used because she’d been there during a power failure one night and had worried that she might become trapped in the building. The maintenance staff had assured her that she could not be, but she felt better having the keys anyway.

She figured that she might as well use the light now because the noise of the breaking car window would certainly have gotten the attention of anyone in the vicinity anyway. Shining it discreetly at her feet, Alice walked around the front of the building. Once there, she was shocked to see the destruction that awaited her. The glass entry doors had been shattered. Shining her light through them, she saw piles of furniture, scattered papers, and knew that the office had been trashed.

“Please let the upper floors be safe,” she whispered. “I can’t go any further tonight.”

She’d been in the building many times at night and it had never bothered her. In this wrecked state it felt different. The building felt like the scene of violence. It made her feel as if there were people in there waiting to spring on her and do violence to her, just as they’d done to the building. She found herself panicking.

Settle down
, she thought.
Get control of yourself.

She picked up her pace and walked through the hallways to the battered steel door that led to the stairwell. She pushed on it and found it solid. Battered or not, it had appeared to hold. She hoped the lock had not been beaten to the point that her key would not open it. She flipped through her chain of keys until she found the right one and slipped it inside. She turned it and her heart surged when the door unlocked.

Thank God.

She played her light around inside the stairwell and saw nothing out of the ordinary, stepped inside quickly, and the steel door locked behind her. Holding both the gun and light, she took the steps. She could see nothing that indicated anyone had been up this way since the building closed on the last day of business.

When the steps took a right turn, she shined her light around anxiously, heart racing. Still, she could see nothing alarming. In a moment she was at the top of the steps and facing another steel door just like the one she’d entered in the downstairs hallway. Since the fire code did not allow stairwell doors to lock from the inside, Alice did not need a key to exit the stairwell on the second floor. She felt a great apprehension, wondering if people could be up there waiting on her, ready to kill her for entering space they’d claimed as their own.

She turned the lock gently, hearing the click that sounded way too loud in the silence of the building. She pulled the door open slowly, her heart wrenching when the hinges groaned. She’d never noticed before that they made so much noise. She played the light into the hallway, hoping that no one would be standing there waiting on her like in some slasher movie. She knew that her heart would stop instantly. Thankfully, there was no one there, but what she saw made her freeze in her tracks.

On the wall directly across from her, someone had used a permanent marker to leave a message: JIM, RANDI, AND GARY MADE IT THIS FAR. THERE’S FOOD AND WATER IN OFFICE 17.

Alice’s knees weakened from relief and the onrush of emotions. She sagged against the wall, her head resting on the flat white paint. Not only had the others made it back, but there was food and water. She also had to think that, as much as she and Jim fought sometimes, he’d left this message for her, hoping she’d make it back.

Still not convinced she was alone, Alice made a complete circuit of the upper floor of the building, checking every office, every closet, every restroom, and every other place she could imagine someone fitting into. There was no one there. Except for the minor indications that someone had been here – most likely Jim, Randi, and Gary – things were as tidy as they always were.