Born In The Apocalypse (18 page)

Chapter 41

I caught up to Trey, and he gave me a look before he started up a road.

“You and your girlfriend have a good chat?” Trey asked.

“Don’t be a jerk,” I said, irritated by his tone.

“Just don’t want you to forget your mission here,” Trey replied.

“I lost my family to Trippers, too,” I said. “And this guy opened
my
gate first.”

Trey stopped and looked at me hard. “You saying you got dibs?”

I returned his look. “I’m saying I’m here to help you, but you ain’t the only one who’s suffered in this world.”

Trey looked at me for a long time, and for a moment I thought he was going to take a swing at me. I was ready for it, and shifted my feet ever so slightly. Trey must have remembered that we were here for the same reason, and he visibly relaxed.

“Sorry, man. I just want this over with,” Trey said quietly, returning to the trail.

“No problem. I loved your little sister, too,” I said. I did, too. She always had a smile for me and treated me like I was just another big brother to play with.  I wanted revenge for her nearly as much as Trey.

We followed the trail into the subdivision, and I kept an eye on the sun. It was well into the afternoon, and we were going to have to find a place to spend the night.

The homes in this area were much smaller than the ones we had seen on the other side of the trail. They were much smaller than my own home and Trey’s. They were packed pretty closely together, and as we walked I could see that this area had been hit pretty hard. Home after home looked like it had been broken into, and in some places we could see black marks of old blood, and in a few homes we could see the remains of some of the former occupants as they lay upon the floors and stairs. A lot of the bones we saw were broken.

The trail led right up the street, never straying from a straight line. He was headed north, and as we stayed on the path I kept thinking about what Kim had said. If things were going to get worse the further north, we got then we were sending ourselves into the teeth of trouble. I wondered if I should get my gun out of my pack when Trey pointed ahead.

“Is that a person?” Trey asked.

I squinted to try and see over the glare of the sun on the snow. There seemed to be a person walking ahead of us, but he was moving slow and weaving slightly from side to side. His walk was like that of a Tripper, but after years of watching these things, you got a sense as to how they moved and were able to tell one at a distance. This one was pretty close to walking like a Tripper, but he straightened out too many times to fully convince me.

“Not sure,” I said. “One way to find out.” I figured he was about a hundred yards ahead of us, and it was going to stretch the limit of my bow, but I was willing to lose an arrow at this point.

I pulled the string back to my cheek and raised the arrow up to nearly a forty-five-degree angle. “Be ready. If it’s a Tripper, he’ll stop at the arrow. If it’s our guy, he’ll probably run.”

“Let ‘er rip,” said Trey, unslinging his crossbow.

I fired the arrow, and it sailed up into the air. I watched its flight and tried to figure out where it was going to land. The wind gave it a push to the right, and it streaked for the ground. The shaft landed upright in the snow about ten feet in front of the walker. If he had been a little faster, the arrow would have hit him in the head, and it would have been the most amazing shot I had ever tried up to that moment.

The person ahead of us stopped and looked at the arrow. He turned around and looked back at us, and even at that distance I could feel his scrutiny. He turned away from us and started away, walking a little faster than he had been before.

“That’s alive. He’s our guy!” Trey pointed to the footprints that led to the man, and they were the same as the ones we had been following. “Come on!”

Trey started to run, and I had no choice but to keep up. I pulled an arrow out of my quiver and in my haste to nock it I dropped in the snow. As I bent down to pick it up, I got a very good look at the tracks we had been following. The left foot was fine, no problem there. But as I took a long, good look at the right foot, I saw a dark stain on the outside of the print. I looked at the next couple of prints and a few of the ones behind us and I saw the same thing.

Years of tracking animals in the woods led to one unmistakable conclusion: the man we were chasing was bleeding, and had been for a long time. How he was still able to keep going was a mystery.

“Josh! Move your ass!” Trey yelled at me.

“Right behind you!” I said. I didn’t have time to talk about what I had seen, although I had a sneaking suspicion Trey already knew what was in those tracks.

We ran towards our quarry, and as we approached, the man began to stumble more. The exertion was wearing him out, and he was having a hard time staying on his feet. Still, he kept up the chase, and we were deep into another subdivision when he finally fell down.

Trey and I spread out and both of us had our arrows aimed at him. He was lying on his side in the snow, and his breathing was shallow and labored. As we got closer, I could see he was a man about my dad’s age, wearing all black clothing. His hair was matted and damp, and his face was flushed, like he had been running for a lot longer than we had seen.

“Hey! Hey you!” Trey yelled. He got close to the man and pushed him over on his back. The man rolled, and his eyes opened. He looked around and then closed his eyes again.

I looked at him and saw there was a darker stain down on his side. Using the tip of my bow, I pulled his jacket away and saw the wound from one of my arrows bleeding from under his rib cage. I guess I had hit him harder than I thought.

“Guess you won’t be opening any more gates, huh? Guess you won’t be letting any more little girls die, huh?” Trey was in the man’s face, shouting and crying at the same time.

“Trey. Trey!” I yelled. I pulled him up and pushed him away. “He’s done! Leave him be.”

Trey raised his crossbow and was about to shoot at the man when I stepped in front of him.

“He’s done, Trey. He’s finished.” I pointed at the man on the ground. “I killed him when I put that arrow in him.”

Trey’s eyes cleared, and he took a good look at the man on the ground.

“Yeah, you’re right.” Trey looked away. “I saw the blood on his trail when we crossed into this area. I figured we would have run him to ground before now.”

“Nice of you to tell me,” I said.

“
Let them out
.”

Trey looked at me. “What did you say?”

“I didn’t say anything,” I said.

We both looked down at the man on the ground.

His head moved back and forth, and his eyes glazed over as they stared up at the sky. He blinked slowly and spoke again, softly.

“
Let them out. Open the gates. Let them out. Lights. So many lights,
” he whispered

Trey snorted. “Dude’s delirious. He’s thinking about all the gates he’s opened and people he’s killed.”

“
Open the gates. Lights. So many lights.
”

I shook my head. “What lights?” I wondered.

“Not our problem. We gonna finish him?” Trey asked.

I looked down. “Not really. He’ll be dead soon anyway, and we owe him for Trish. At least we know he’s finished killing anyone else,” I said.

Trey nodded. “I want to see him dead. I have to tell my dad I saw him dead.”

The man below us whispered a few more things in his delirium, and after about twenty more minutes, passed away. His last breath was a long exhale, and we waited for a few more minutes before we were sure. Even so, Trey took out his knife and stabbed the man in the throat. If he had any life left in him, it was gone now. I didn’t try to stop Trey. He needed that for his sister.

“Well, that’s that,” Trey said, wiping off his knife. He looked at the sky. “We ain’t going to see home before dark; we’d better get to some place safe.”

“Well, let’s pick a place and set up for the night,” Trey said.

He started walking off to the north, and I fell in behind. I couldn’t help but think about what the man had said. I had a gut feeling he wasn’t talking about fence gates, but something else. And what was he talking about lights? That made no sense at all.

We were all alone out here, and there hadn’t been lights for years. That just didn’t make any sense.

Chapter 41

“Do you think they saw us?”

“I have no idea. We’ll know soon enough.”

“Where did they all come from?”

“Just were there. We were in the middle of a big bunch of houses.”

“How many arrows do you have left?”

I ran a hand over my quiver. “Twelve,” I said. “Don’t have the time to make more, and I doubt there’s any archery stores around here.”

Trey looked at his pack. “I have four. Dammit!”

“Shh!” I said. I raised my head up slightly to try and see if the Trippers that had chased us here had heard us. I looked out the window quickly and reported back to Trey.

“They’re still out there, but they aren’t leaving the house we ran through,” I said.

Trey and I had chased a man for about five miles through three subdivisions full of homes. The man had opened my gate, and had opened Trey’s. I managed to catch the man in the act and had put an arrow in him, which eventually had killed him. But not before Trey’s little sister had been killed by Trippers who had gotten into their yard. We followed a blood trail and saw it through to the end, but we didn’t get out fast enough, and had found our way back cut off by a large group of infected.

They had chased us another mile north, and we finally slowed them down by shooting several of them, but they got reinforcements that renewed the pursuit and we were forced to run again. Night was coming fast, and if we stayed where we were, we were going to be killed. Trippers came out in force at night; no one ever really knew why. Maybe the darkness felt better on their eyes, who knew? But an unsecured house was a death trap, and we both knew people who had died when a Tripper horde descended upon the unwary.

“You ready?” Trey asked.

“Now or never,” I said. I hefted the plates I had taken from the kitchen of the house we were hiding in and readied one in my hand.

“Go!” Trey said, running out the back door. He had two plates of his own, and as we left, he through them through the left window by the door. I threw mine through the right windows, and we slipped through the narrow opening between the houses on the other side of the backyards. We cut north again, and ran like there was no tomorrow. If we got caught, there wouldn’t be.

The breaking glass and plates caused a bit of an uproar, and we could hear the angry growls and wheezes as the Tripper horde descended on the house we had just evacuated. They would spend a few minutes poking around the place, but hopefully that would buy us just enough of a window to get the hell out of there.

Trey ran north, as our path to the south and home was blocked. The plan might have been to go north, then east, then cut back south to get home, but for right now I wasn’t thinking that far ahead. Dad always said you need to think of the immediate future that was going to happen, not the future you wished would happen.

“Come on, this way!” Trey said. He ran up a long road that had a lot of large houses on one side of the street, and smaller homes on the other. The strange thing was every house facing the road had a fence blocking the yard. But for us, it was a free passageway that promised not to have any Trippers on it.

“Hang on,” I said, stopping to catch my breath. We had been running flat out for about ten minutes, and I was getting out of breath. The air was still very cold, and trying to breathe it took almost as much energy as running.

I had stopped near a brick building that was near the side of the road. A playground with its plastic slides and swings looked like it was as ready for as good a time now as it had been in the past. In the distance, a large brick building stood in an open area surrounded by houses.

“Wonder what that was for,” I said, sipping on a little water from my canteen.

“Housing Trippers,” Trey said, shielding his eyes against the setting sun to look over the building. “There’s about forty coming out of the building now. Looks like they might have heard our little distraction.”

“Moving on,” I said. I put away my canteen and followed Trey.

We were two small targets running against the dying light, hoping we could find some shelter to keep us alive for another day. If Trippers got in front of us, we’d have to take our chances in another house, but as we knew, hiding from the infected rarely worked. It was like they instinctively knew where you were hiding.

A crossroads greeted us when we ran out of buildings, and Trey and I stood there for a moment trying to figure out what to do.

“North?” Trey asked.

I shook my head. “Kim said North got worse the farther we travelled. We’d better go East,” I said. “If we head east for a bit, find a place to stay, we could head south, get around these Trippers, and get home.”

“Closest thing I’ve heard to a plan all day.”

Trey started out at a slow jog, and I followed. We used this jog before when we were running down a deer. After a while, the deer would just give up because it couldn’t run anymore.

We ran east, passing several tall buildings. They looked like single story houses stacked on top of each other with all the garages on the first floor. I’d never seen anything like it, and it was fascinating to look at while we ran.

The road opened up, and to the north I could see a huge road. There were six lanes, and it stretched my imagination to try and see all the cars that could fill that highway. I knew those roads once led to the rest of the country, but the wall stopped them at the state line.

“Hey, what’s that?” Trey asked.

I looked at what he was pointing at, and it appeared to be a huge building of some kind. The walls were a faded red, and next to it was another huge building. It went on for a while, and behind it was another building. This one was a square with a large blue front that stuck up at an angle. It didn’t serve any purpose I could think of.

“Looks like it might have been one of those shopping centers Mom talked about. Lots of stores and things to buy,” I said, stepping around a large branch that had fallen on the road.

“Worth checking out?” Trey asked.

“Doubt there’s anything left, and we need to find a place for the night,” I said. “We have an hour at most before we’re up to our necks in Trippers.”

Most of the time Trippers stayed indoors or under some sort of cover during the day. It took some strange event to rouse them to wander on their own. At night, however, they came out in force, and that was when anyone not infected had better find a place to hide or get behind some sturdy walls.

“Well, let’s follow the road that’s in front of it, and we can check it out from there,” Trey said.

I could tell Trey really wanted to look into the stores, and I couldn’t blame him. The only way we got anything new in this world was to either make it, find it, or trade for it. I had hit the jackpot with my Colt, although it cost me my father. If I could trade it back for him, I’d do it in a heartbeat.

“We can look, but we really need to get to some shelter,” I said.

Trey led us down the road, and at the next intersection he turned north. This took us up a small hill, and we found ourselves looking out over a long stretch of that big road I saw earlier. 

“There’s something you could use,” Trey said, pointing across the way.

“Doubt there’s anything left in there, but I wouldn’t mind a look,” I said. Trey had pointed to a sporting goods store, and I would have liked to see if there were any arrows in there. I could make my own, and I had a lot back home; neither situation helped me right now.

“Nice view up here,” Trey said.

“It was,” I replied, pointing south. I whipped an arrow out of my quiver and nocked it, bringing the string back to my cheek. I barely aimed before I let it go, sending it into the head of the Tripper who came out of the ditch.

It was a decent shot, but it was a wasted effort, since five more came out of the ditch as well.

“Jesus! Run!” Trey yelled.