Family Reunion "J" (20 page)

A beam of sunlight slipped between the slats of the window blind and streaked across the room. The spot of light it created slowly crawled down the headboard until it landed on the closed eyes of Jay Brant.

Jay hovered in that place between sleep and conscious thought. She was glad it was Saturday, no rush to get to work. Then reality came flooding back to her. It wasn’t Saturday, and work was no longer an issue. She moved her head to avoid the blinding light shining in her eyes. Her room was quiet; she heard no sounds coming from the adjoining hallway or the kitchen she knew was across from her.

“Hey Martha, you out there?”

There was no response. Jay pulled the covers back, then slowly and painfully turned and put her feet on the floor. The cool tile under her feet felt good and she just sat there for a minute, listening. The small group of people that rescued her hadn’t left her alone up to this point, and the silence was a little unnerving. She grasped the foot of the bed with her left hand and used her right as a counterbalance. It worked well for that as the cast felt heavy. She felt the breeze on her derriere as her gown fell open.
Oh well, nothing I can do about that for now,
she thought. She balanced herself against the wall as she moved across the room toward the bathroom. The toilets in the place still worked if you poured water into the tank, which Martha had done whenever she emptied Jay’s bedpan. This was the first time she had gotten out of bed since the accident. Every step she took, she felt a new pain in a different spot of her anatomy. When she put her weight against the wall for balance with her left arm, she felt it all the way across her back as muscles battered in the wreck screamed in protest. When she took a step, the muscles in her right leg threatened to spasm. Her ass hurt, her back hurt, her head hurt, everything hurt.

She didn’t want to take any more of the painkillers, afraid that she wouldn’t be able to travel under their magical spell. She half wondered if that isn’t why she wrecked the bike to begin with, as high as she was. It was surprising she hadn’t crashed before the last stunt she had pulled on it.

The thought of the bike made her sad. “Totaled” was how Sheriff Andy had described it. Later, Donnie, the guy that had found her, had come by to check on her and told her that on a scale of one to ten, one being minimal damage and ten being scrap metal, her bike was about an eight. “You might be able to rebuild it,” he had said, “if you had a shop, the parts, and about six months of spare time. I was able to save your rifle though.”

This meant that Jay would have to find an alternate method of travel. Donnie told her he would see about finding her a four-wheel-drive truck. That was last night. “Hey guys, anyone around?” she called out again. Still no response.

She went into the bathroom and took care of business. She flushed the toilet; refilling the tank would have to wait for one of her new friends. There was no way she could lift the five-gallon bucket of water that sat next to it. She contemplated going to look around to find someone, but just the idea made her extremely tired. Maybe after a little nap.

She made her way back to the bed, and with more effort than it should take, she got back in it. It took her a few minutes just to get her breathing back to normal.
Crap, I feel like shit.
She rested her head on the pillow and drifted back to sleep.

She woke up hungry and sweaty. The room felt like a sauna.

“Hey, Martha, could you open a window in here? I’m roasting.”

She lifted her head off the pillow, expecting to see the pleasantly plump Martha waddling toward her with that ever-present smile, but what greeted her now was an empty doorway.

“Martha? Donnie? Anybody?”

Jay was beginning to worry. Something wasn’t right. Martha had doted over her like a mother hen from the moment she’d gotten here. She listened intently, trying to hear any sound that might ease her mind. A fly bounced on the window, its buzzing stopping every time it hit. That was the only sound.

She went through the agonizing process of getting out of bed again and decided to put on some panties.
Can’t be wandering around in the apocalypse with my ass hanging out of this hospital gown.
She found some clothes in the closet; apparently, her pants did not survive the wreck. She got the pants left for her on. They were a bit baggy and too short for her long legs, but they would do. They saved her jacket, although there was a nice road burn on one shoulder. She would have to carry it; she couldn’t get it over the cast and wasn’t going to leave it. Her boots were there, a new shirt, no bra, and most importantly, her Glock and AR15. It took her quite some time to get dressed, and by the time she finished she had sweated through the shirt. She took it back off, as there were a couple to choose from. Both were neutral colors, so it had been a toss-up to begin with. Tying the laces on her boots was the hardest part of the whole exercise. Finally dressed, she stood and made her way out of the room.

She knew when she finally found Martha that she would get an earful. She could see her wagging her finger, telling her to get back in the bed. For whatever reason, the image brought a tear to Jay’s eye.

Get it together Jay. You can’t be stumbling around crying and hope to survive.

She went to the kitchen and wasn’t surprised to find it empty. She would have heard any activity in here from her room. Her hunger made her tummy do a low-yield growl as her nose homed in on some kind of food. She opened a cooler that sat on the floor inside the door. Inside was sandwich stuff, bread, peanut butter, honey, pickles, and some apples. She opened the pickles and crunched one in her teeth, holding it there like a cigar while she opened the peanut butter. She took another bite of the pickle, then dipped it into the peanut butter.
Yum, that’s not bad at all.
She looked around and found a butcher knife lying on the counter. She got out another pickle and sliced it down the middle, slathered some peanut butter on some bread, stuck the pickle halves on that, and slapped on another slice of bread. Then she spied some mustard.
Why not?
She partially disassembled her creation and squirted some mustard on it. She took a big bite and savored the flavor as she chewed.

Carrying her sandwich in one hand, she searched the building. Looking for any sign of her new friends, she polished off the sandwich and drank a bottle of water as she searched. She went back to the kitchen and made another sandwich. This time she tried peanut butter and honey, kind of a dessert sandwich. She decided she liked the pickles and mustard paired with the peanut butter better.
Maybe they ditched me
she thought, sitting in the kitchen.

She found her bug-out bag and the fancy Gucci ammunition bag by the side door out of the kitchen. She stuffed her jacket into the bug-out bag and left them both there for the time being. She needed to do some recon of the area and figure out where everyone had gone.

The heat made it feel like she would have to swim through the air to get anywhere. The humidity was as close to one hundred percent as it could be without actually being rain. There were a few cars in the parking lot of Airy Haven. Most now had a thin layer of dust on them from sitting unmoved since this began. There was one, though, that looked cleaner than the others, a fancy 4x4 SUV.

She walked up to it and tried the door. Locked up tight. “Shit,” she said out loud.
I wish you were here to scold me, Martha Washington. Where the hell did you get off to?
She stood there with her hands on her hips, looking around. Just on the off chance, she began searching the SUV for a hidden key keeper. She felt inside the wheel wells, then under the bumpers. She was about to give up when she saw the keys sitting on top of the tire.
How in the hell did I miss that?
She pushed the unlock button on the key and opened the door. The black leather interior sent a shockwave of heat into her face. She awkwardly reached in with her only good appendage and fumbled around getting the key into the ignition, burning her arm on the searing-hot steering wheel. “Damn it!” she barked. By the time she’d gotten the thing started and the air conditioning blowing she was again soaked to the skin. She double-checked to make sure the doors were unlocked and even went as far as to roll down the driver’s window half way. She could just picture herself standing there looking in the window at the keys in the ignition as the running vehicle mocked her. “Not going to happen today my friend.”
I should probably quit talking to inanimate objects, might be getting a little crazy.

She went back in the kitchen and retrieved her gear. She planned to come back here, but one never knew; better safe than sorry. She took her stuff out to the SUV and then went back and got the cooler of food and water. She had to drag it out to the truck, then had to unload all its contents before it was light enough for her to lift into the back. All this took some time, and when she finally sat behind the wheel she was exhausted. She knew she was nowhere near one-hundred percent physically, but there was no answer for that. She couldn’t just sit around hoping things would work out.

The air conditioning felt wonderful as it blew the mercifully cool air over her sweaty body. She drove through town slowly, looking down every street and alley for the sheriff, Martha, and their crew. It wasn’t a large city and the search lasted a couple of hours at best. With absolutely no sign of them anywhere, Jay decided it was time to head to Surfside. She left town and headed west, away from Winston-Salem. She would stick to the back roads and go far enough west to skirt the major metropolitan area.

The black smoke rose in billowing clouds, embers intermingling with the smoke and flitting about like red-eyed bats. Auddy could feel the intense heat generated by the pyre she had set. Two distinct lines ran down her face through the black soot smudges where her tears had coursed until they’d run dry. The past twelve hours were a blur; she hadn’t decided to burn down the condo until the sun came up. She concluded that she couldn’t stay here any longer. It was time to head home, back to her family in West Virginia.
If they’re still alive,
she thought glumly.

She spent a good part of the morning loading the pickup truck with everything she thought she would need. She tied the generator to a tree with the extension cord, then drove the truck out from under it; she wouldn’t need it. She kept the gas cans and cut a length of hose from the neighbor’s front spigot to use as a syphon. She took all the weapons and put them in the cab of the truck with the ammunition. She used the same method for lowering the supplies that Danny had used to bring them up. At the beginning, the rope got away from her and she lost a couple of the water coolers. Then she remembered what her dad had shown her. If you wrapped the rope around something a couple of times you could regulate how quickly it dropped without having to support the entire weight. It took her all morning to get it done, but in the end, she had all her stuff in the truck. She used one can of gas to soak the first floor. Rather than break into the boarded-up entrance, she poured it down the hole that Danny had made in the bathroom floor. Of course, not all the gas went down the hole and she nearly went up in flames with the condo, but she didn’t and made it out alive. A bit scorched, but alive.

She turned away from the fire and got into the pickup. She stalled it twice before she successfully, if somewhat spastically, drove away. Reaching the King’s Highway, she drove south instead of north, then turned west to intercept Highway 31. She decided to go to her parent’s condo in Surfside Beach before beginning her trek to West Virginia. Two reasons prompted the visit. The first was that her parents didn’t know she had moved to Danny’s place, so if they came looking for her, that is where they would go. The second was that she wanted to check on Jimmy.

Shortly after her parents purchased the condo, they all met Jimmy. He lived in the same building and befriended the new neighbors. When Auddy moved into the condo, Jimmy became her touchstone. He made dinner for her every now and then, and gave her someone to call if something came up that she needed help with, which he was happy to do.