Enduring Armageddon (26 page)

It was the least we could do for Jasper and Monica’s hospitality. They took us in when everyone was feeling low about yet another day of travel and we’d been able to recuperate. Jesse’s leg was fully healed and he proclaimed that with all the walking, restricted diet and stress, he was in better shape than when he graduated from his army basic training.

A surprise coming from our stay at Jasper’s was the friendship between Sam and Alejandro. They’d immediately taken to each other from the moment that Sam introduced herself to him. Rebecca thought that maybe it had something to do with their experiences since the apocalypse began. They were both damaged; one in body, the other in spirit. Sam did a good job of hiding the psychological damage that the gang rape had on her, but it was there and she’d sometimes lash out in anger at seemingly inconsequential occurrences.

The two of them had been thicker than thieves for a few days and Alejandro surprised everyone when he announced that he would be traveling with Sam when she left. On the evening before we planned to leave, I finally got the opportunity to talk to her alone.

“Hey, Sam, you got everything packed for tomorrow?” I asked.

“Yeah, I’ve torn apart my room a few times to make sure that I’m not forgetting anything,” she replied. “I don’t like all the traveling, but it’s a lot easier to move from place to place without unpacking your stuff—not that any of it was mine before we took off.” When we’d evacuated from Virden, Sam didn’t even have a backpack with her personal gear. Everything she currently owned had been procured during our journey.

“Hadn’t thought of it that way,” I said with a smile. I took a quick breath and said, “Look, it’s none of my business…”

She cut me off and said, “Then stay out of it.” She knew instantly what I was talking about.

I held up my hands to show her that I didn’t want a fight. “I just want you to know that we may run into trouble having Alejandro traveling with us.”

“Then we’ll go our own way. We don’t need you,” she retorted and crossed her arms over her chest.

I started to reply, but then stopped and thought about my way ahead from this point. It was easy to forget that she was still a teenager, learning to deal with her emotions and also had some baggage upstairs. “I didn’t mean that we didn’t want him to go with us. We do,” I said. “It’s just that other people won’t see him the way we do. They’ll see him and immediately think the same thing that we all did the first time we saw him.”

“The first time
you
saw him you mean. The first time I saw him, I saw a beautiful human being who was misunderstood by everyone.”

“Okay, you’re right,” I agreed. “I was shocked when I met him.” I leaned wearily against the hallway’s chair railing. Once again, as the leader of our group, I’d been nominated to deal with the hard problems and we’d had a lot of hard problems along the way. It made me feel so much older than I actually was.

“Sam, I need your help to keep us all safe. Jordyn and Jackson are counting on every member of this group to do that. The biggest thing is to remind him to cover his face while we’re out; you know how he forgets about things like that since he can’t feel the cold. If we can keep him covered up, we shouldn’t have any issues.” I sighed and said, “We all really like him, but we just need to be careful, that’s all.”

“Are you done, bossman?”

“I…Yeah. Look, once we get to west Texas and settle down, things will be better.”

“Maybe. Maybe not,” she said as she unfolded her arms and stormed off down the hallway.

“What the
fuck
am I supposed to do with her?” I muttered to myself as I walked towards my room.

“Talkin’ to yourself, Chuck?” Jasper asked.

“Oh geez, you scared me, Jasper!” I said with my hand over my racing heart. He was sitting in one of the wingback chairs in an alcove of the hallway. I was sure that he’d heard my entire conversation with Sam.

“I didn’t mean to eavesdrop, but I was sitting here doin’ a crossword when you started up your conversation with Samantha,” he said as a form of apology. “I’ll open this up the same way you opened up with her. This is none of my business…but you’ve gotta let the girl make her own way.”

“I’m trying to,” I replied. “But I also have the safety of six other people to worry about besides her and Alejandro.”

“That’s true, son, you do,” the old man replied. “But if you really do care about the two of them, then you’ve got to let them be who they are. Our world is pretty messed up right now and I wish that you’d change your mind about staying here with us. Since you won’t, you need to lean on the strengths of everyone in your group.

“That’s one of the hardest things about leadership,” he continued. “You’ve got to figure out how to do what’s right, but not alienate everyone around you while you’re doing it.”

“There’s no doubt that Alejandro could be a help out there,” I mused. “I’m just worried about what others are going to think. Hell, we would have killed him from a distance if we had the chance. He looks just like those other things and people probably won’t give him the benefit of the doubt.”

“Okay, I accept that. You’re right, but it’s not your choice to make.”

“Bullshit, Jasper. It is,” I countered. “If he’s traveling with us and someone decides to take a potshot at him, they could miss and hit one of the others. Or worse, they could just attack us all outright because we have a zombie in our group. We don’t know what we’ll face down the road.”

“You’ve got to try to see the good in other people son. I know it’s hard right now. This world that we live in is a crazy place. Alejandro can’t stay hidden for the rest of his life, that’s just not realistic. You were able to see past his looks and accepted him into your group. Others might as well.” He paused to let the words sink in and then said, “Your little group needs to stick together and trust one another.”

I considered his words for a moment. “You’re right. He’s one of us now… How the hell are we supposed to do this? Survive, I mean,” I said in frustration. “The world is full of crazies nowadays.”

“Trust that the Lord will see you through and remember that our time here on earth is fleeting,” he replied as calmly as I’d ever heard him talk.

I clapped him on the shoulder and said, “It’s easy for you to say that, Jasper, you’re not getting ready to go out there and try to make another three or four hundred miles on foot.”

“You’re right, I’m not. But you don’t have to either. It’s your call to leave and I’ll say it one more time before you go: You’re welcome to stay here.”

“I know. And I appreciate it, but you guys don’t have all that much food for…for forever. We’re going to make it below the snowline and try to scrape out a living down in Texas. You’re welcome to join
us
,” I said.

“We’ll just have to agree to disagree then, son. I think we’ve got enough to last us more than a year. After that, well, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”

I nodded my head in acquiescence. I’d gone over this with him time and again. His group was going to stay put and we were going to leave. I felt that they were nothing more than sitting ducks here in Oklahoma and that’s one reason why Jesse and I helped to build up that fence. I hoped they’d be alright, but I didn’t think they’d last very long once the people in the surrounding area ran out of food. Jasper may be sure that people in the region were good, God-fearing people, but when your choices are cannibalism or robbing the neighbor, it was clear as day what would happen.

We said our goodbyes the next morning. Our small group trudged west with heavy hearts because we knew that we’d never see our friends from Seminole, Oklahoma ever again.

The first few days of travel from Jasper’s hotel were spent bumbling along the narrow corridor of land between Oklahoma City and McAlester. Both of those cities had been bombed; OKC because of its population density and the air force base on the edge of the city, and McAlester because of the huge army ammunition plant there.

We didn’t have a way of determining what areas were extremely radioactive instead of just radioactive, so we tried to go directly between the middle of the two. Jesse wanted to swing completely around the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex to the south, but everyone else agreed with me that adding another hundred miles to our already long trip wasn’t worth the effort. That meant shooting south towards Ada, Oklahoma and then working our way southwest between DFW, which Alejandro confirmed had been nuked, and Wichita Falls.

We now knew that a lot of the military bases had been whacked, so we also had to assume that the Lawton, Oklahoma and Wichita Falls, Texas areas had been also because of the army and air force bases located there. Lawton was one of our original waypoints when we first started planning our route. We decided that our best route after Dallas would be to once again thread the needle between two fallout zones and eventually make our way towards southwestern Texas or New Mexico.

Once we crossed the Red River into Texas, there was a noticeable climate shift. The snow was still present, but it was only about ankle deep instead of the calf-deep variety that we’d become accustomed to. I couldn’t be sure, but I also thought that it wasn’t nearly as cold. The area to the south of the river was flat, but there was a lot of debris hidden in the snow and that caused all sorts of problems for us. My biggest fear was that someone would break a leg or step on some weird irradiated nail or something unforeseeable like that. If we had a true medical emergency, I didn’t know what we’d do, but we’d have to figure it out quickly.

It was rough going as we worked our way through the countryside just north of DFW. I’m not sure how much warning the people down here had, but the outbound roads from the city were littered with vehicles that no longer worked. The EMP must have wiped out the electronics on all the cars and their owners simply abandoned them. I wondered if the vehicles would always be on the road or if they’d eventually be taken apart for scrap by various types of scavengers.

The few people that we saw along our trip were from far away and they disappeared into the snowfields long before we ever reached where they’d been. There was a different vibe down here, that’s for sure. It was hard to explain, but it seemed like everything was simply paused, waiting for something to happen. I wondered what it was that made me feel this way.

On the ninth day after we left Jasper’s we were walking down the relatively vacant side of the road and topped a slight rise in the highway. On the reverse slope of the hill we ran into a camp spread out over both sides of the roadway. They’d used old vehicles to form a large perimeter and there were several dead zombies surrounding the camp. If anything else, it just confirmed my belief that they couldn’t climb since even a small child would have been able to make it up and over the barrier. I pulled up to consult with our group about how to bypass the area, but the people in the camp had already seen us.

There was a flurry of activity and I watched in amazement as one of the vehicles was put into neutral and manually pushed out of the way. Four riders on horseback galloped through the opening and up the rise to meet us. I cursed at our stupidity for foolishly silhouetting ourselves on the hill. There was nothing to do but unsling our weapons and have them accessible, while trying to remain unthreatening to these people.

The riders were at our location within moments. They wore heavy duster jackets and cowboy hats, with scarves over their faces and each carried a rifle across his lap. I was reminded of a hundred different westerns I’d seen over the years.

“What are you folks doin’ on the road?” one of them asked.

I stepped forward a half step and replied, “We’re making our way southwest to try to get below the snowline. Get somewhere warmer where we can try to grow some crops.”

“Good luck with that, buddy, the snow’s everywhere,” another of the riders answered.

“You some kind of farmer?” another rider snickered. “Ain’t got no use for farmers.”

“Yeah, well, it’s already much better here than it was where we came from so we’re hopeful that we’ll…”

I never even saw the rider kick his horse forward. The big beast’s chest slammed into my body and sent me spinning away. I heard shouting and saw a flurry of movement all around me but my head was spinning from the blow. I tried to get up on my hands and knees but was kicked in the side and I crumpled over. I tried to make sense of what was happening and started to pick my head up again. A shadow fell over me and I looked up in time to see the butt of a rifle come crashing down into my face.

* * *

I woke up colder than I could ever remember being and my body ached horribly. I tried to figure out where I was, but all I saw were brown cedar tree limbs and snow. I moved to lift my head and I was immediately forced down by small hands. Jordyn came into my line of sight with a finger over her mouth telling me to be quiet. I nodded my head and she moved back slightly.

“They took everyone but me and Jordyn, we got away,” Jackson whispered into my ear. “After dark, we went back to the road and found you. We pulled you into the trees.”

I had to physically push myself upright with my arms because the muscles in my stomach didn’t seem to work right. “How long have I been out?” I asked.

“It happened yesterday,” Jordyn replied, “when you were talking to them, several guys snuck up on us and attacked. They beat everyone up in the scuffle but we got away, lost our bags though.”

I thought about what she’d said for a moment. “How far away from the camp are we?” I asked.

“You can still see the lights from it. We couldn’t drag you that far, you’re too heavy,” Jackson answered.

I nodded slowly. Jeez, those guys worked me over good. I couldn’t see out of my right eye, which was the side that I remember getting hit on, and the plastic goggles of my mask were cracked on the left side. I felt my ribs gingerly and if they weren’t broken in a few places, then I’d be surprised. I pulled the mask off of my head and winced as the rubberized chin cup scraped against the side of my face. A gasp from the kids let me know that it was pretty bad.