Shore Haven (Short Story 3): Nowhere Read online

  Except try to call the police and department of human resources as soon as I pulled out of her driveway. I didn’t get anyone at either place.

  All through my short drive home, I cursed myself for letting Kim and Wayne take the kids. I don’t know what I could have done to stop them. The twins were theirs, after all. Yeah, Kim was acting a bit crazy, but an outsider would have seen a mother protecting her children from a potential kidnapper. The authorities would have probably seen the situation the same way had I been able to contact them. I felt that I should have been able to do something, though.

  3.

  “Son-of-a…” I screamed and slammed on my brakes. I was so caught up in my thoughts over Kim and trying to call someone who could check on the kids that I wasn’t paying attention to the road.

  There’s a reason they tell you not to be on your phone while driving, Tera, I mentally chided myself.

  “Fuck,” I said, trying to catch my breath.

  The route from my house to Kim’s was short. Three minutes, tops. We lived on opposite ends of the same neighborhood, so I didn’t have to pull onto any major roads. I’d driven it so many times, that I could do it in my sleep. That wasn’t a good thing. When something becomes too habitual, autopilot kicks in, you stop paying attention, and accidents happen.

  Accidents like nearly squishing the six-year-old that had run out in front of your car.

  I threw my phone into the passenger seat, put my hand to my chest as if that would slow my heart, and tried to steady my breathing.

  The kid merely stared at me. He didn’t scream. He didn’t cry. He didn’t move.

  My left hand instinctively went to the door handle when I thought I was under enough control to walk while my right reached to turn off my car, but my brain screamed for them both to stop. Something wasn’t right with the situation.

  Something wasn’t right with the kid.

  I forced my attention entirely on the child and nothing else. That’s when I noticed his eyes were milky, red juice stained his mouth and the front of his shirt, and he held something in his hands that wasn’t a toy.

  The two of us continued to stare at each other. Both trying to figure out what the other was. After a long moment, the boy cocked his head to the side as if listening for something. I inched my window down to see if I could hear what he had. The morning was silent, at first, and then a scream broke the quiet. I quickly rolled up my window and looked back at the boy. He looked at me for a brief second before taking off in the direction the scream had come from, dragging an adult male leg behind him.

  I nearly threw up in my lap.

  That hadn’t been red juice on his mouth. I knew it hadn’t been but hadn’t wanted to believe.

  The stories from Liberty were true.

  “My God,” I screamed.

  My thoughts turned to my son as I calmed. Jeremiah was out in the world somewhere with people turning into those creatures. Sure, he was with his father, who loved him as much as I did and who would do anything to keep him safe, but I needed to be with him as well. I needed to know he was alive.

  Carl lived twenty minutes away in Bridgeton, so Jeremiah could continue to go to the same school he always had, and he could see either of us whenever he wanted, or we could get to him quickly enough if an emergency arose.

  I hadn’t spoken to my son since the night before, but all through the short drive to his father’s house, I alternated between calling his cell phone and his dad’s. Only on rare occasions did the call go through, but when it did, it just rang.

  Jeremiah had sounded fine during our conversation. He said his dad was doing well also. Neither was sick or even hinted at getting sick. He did say that Bridgeton was talking about quarantine, but Jeremiah wasn’t sure what that would entail, and his dad didn’t think things would get that bad, so I hadn’t panicked and demanded he come home.

  Many of the state’s elite lived in Bridgeton, so in a disaster, the town was one of the first to receive aid, military help, or be evacuated. Therefore, the area did go on lockdown often for no real reason, though.

  “Surely, the military wouldn’t keep me away from my own son,” I said, as I came upon the exit to Bridgeton.

  Who was I kidding? Of course, they would. If the officials had quarantined the city, no one would be getting in or out.

  When I turned off the exit, I didn’t run into a roadblock. I drove slowly across the town border, waiting to see lights flashing in a signal for me to stop, but I saw nothing.

  I looked at the clock on my dashboard. My time at Kim’s hadn’t taken long, though it felt like a lifetime ago, so it was only midday. Someone should’ve been on the road inside the city, but Bridgeton was as quiet as Littleton was. Everywhere seemed to be too quiet. I thought apocalypses were supposed to be loud: full of gunshots, screaming, sirens, and that sort of thing.

  Our towns were small, and that might explain the quiet, but still, I should have seen police patrolling, ambulances carrying bodies, something. I’m sure if I looked harder in windows and storefronts, I would’ve seen the horror that lay beyond the stillness, but I focused on getting to my son.

  I knew the second I pulled onto Carl’s street that my ex-husband and son weren’t home. Carl’s vehicle wasn’t in the driveway. I swore loudly. I highly doubted that Carl had taken Jeremiah to school and then gone to work. I remembered Jeremiah specifically telling me that school was out today and probably tomorrow due to the bug.

  “Carl could’ve gone into work though,” I told myself.

  I didn’t believe he would have left our son home alone with what was going on, but it was possible. For all his faults as a husband, Carl was a great dad, so I couldn’t see it happening, but at that moment, I prayed for it to be so.

  I pulled into the drive, half-expecting Jeremiah to come running out the front door. Of course, he didn’t.

  I exited slowly and approached the front door wishing I had a weapon. I didn’t think I could kill my son, but I knew I could anyone who might be hurting him. Getting a gun or some sort of weapon was next on my list.

  I didn’t knock. I went immediately for the doorknob. It didn’t turn. I didn’t have a key to Carl’s house. I should’ve asked for one, but until that moment, I’d never needed it.

  I listened at the door for a few seconds, and when I didn’t hear movement, I turned and went around to the side door via the open carport. That door was unlocked.

  Once I was inside the house, I wanted to scream my son’s name, but I refrained. I hadn’t seen a single soul since turning onto the highway, and I wasn’t going to take the chance of bringing a horde of those creatures down on me when I hoped I was mere seconds from finding my child.

  A quick sweep of the house told me it was empty. A missing duffle bag and some favorite items of clothing from Jeremiah’s room suggested that they’d left. Carl and I had been divorced for nearly five years, so I didn’t know him well enough anymore to know if anything was missing from his room, but I was sure it was.

  I flipped on their television to see if the news anchor could give me a clue as to where the two might have gone, but all I got was static. My phone couldn’t get reception to make calls or connect to the internet. It was as if I was standing in a dead zone. We had more of those areas than we liked in our new world, but rarely inside the city limits.

  The lack of a signal explained why Jeremiah hadn’t called to tell me they were leaving.

  No dirty dishes in the sink suggested that they might have left in the night. That scared me. The knife rack on the counter housed several sharp knives, and I grabbed one. I didn’t think Carl owned a gun, and if he did, I wouldn’t know where he kept it, so the knife would have to do for protection for the time being.

  I searched through the house one last time in case I missed something in my first hasty go round, and I had. On Jeremiah’s desk was a note to me, telling me that the police had shown up at their door and ordered them to evacuate to the nearest school. I snatched the letter with
the address and directions to the school on it and rushed out of the house.

  I didn’t pay attention to my surroundings as I ran to my car. I got lucky that nothing jumped out at me, but I had to be more cautious in the future.

  The school was five minutes away. My heart exploded with joy at the sight of the cars parked in the lots surrounding the building. The elation died quickly when I realized that I didn’t see a soul moving around inside or outside of it. If the police or military were guarding it, then there should have been patrols and armored personnel stopping me from pulling into the first available space and rushing to the main double doors.

  The only thing that greeted me was the smell of death when I pushed opened the glass door. It hit me like a physical blow, knocking me back a few steps and causing me to dry heave.

  Horror rushed over me when I could breathe again. There were dead bodies inside the school. By the looks of the cars in the lot, most of the town was at the school. From the smell seeping through the crack in the door, there were dead bodies in there.

  Jeremiah couldn’t be one of them. He just couldn’t be.

  I took off my shirt and wrapped it around my nose and mouth just tight enough to block the smell.

  I entered the building. All of the rooms except the gym and cafeteria were empty. They’d been full of people recently, but no one alive remained.

  Bodies lined nearly every inch of available space in the gym and cafeteria. From the condition most of them were in, I could tell that a horrific battle had gone down at the school. The majority of the bodies were mutilated to the point that with many, I wasn’t sure if they were male or female or if they had ever been human. I couldn’t say for a fact that my Jeremiah wasn’t one of them, but after searching each body twice, I felt comfortable in believing he and Carl weren’t one of the dead.

  In the principal’s office, I found notes on the evacuation. The school was supposed to hold most of the town for two days before the military was to take the residents to a base called Fort Hamner about two hours south of Bridgeton. Despite their careful screening, though, the sick had made it into the school. They had to quickly turn around and load the healthy onto the school buses and send them to the base.

  I grabbed all the paperwork I could, not thinking about the next person that might come along looking for family and would need to know where to look next. Jeremiah was the only thing my brain could focus on at that moment.

  4.

  A gas station about a block and a half from the school was open, and the owner was surprisingly not price gouging. The man was standing at the door behind a sign that read: Credit Card Only. Lobby Closed. I understood the meaning. He’d left the pumps on, and if you had a card and the reader worked, you could get gas, but that was as far as he was going to help anyone. The arsenal of weapons I could see through the glass were deterrents to looters or anyone in the mood to argue.

  My luck held, and the reader worked. I filled my tank and the two-gallon container I had in the back of my vehicle for my lawnmower. Once I’d finished, I pulled around to the front door again and got out. The owner stiffened and showed me his gun. I nodded to let him know I saw it. I then held up a wad of cash that I’d already pulled from my wallet and pointed at one of his guns.

  He shook his head without bothering to look at where I was pointing.

  I spread out the bills so that he could see that I wasn’t holding a bunch of ones, but he still shook his head. I mouthed “okay” before returning to my car. My knife would have to do. I couldn’t begrudge the man. For all I knew, he had a family tucked somewhere in the back of the store he was protecting.

  I need to find more weapons soon though, I thought, as I passed two of the turned stumbling into the parking lot of the gas station.

  I’d made it no more than a few seconds down the road when I heard two gunshots from the direction of the gas station. At that moment, I, oddly enough, remembered that I needed a map. There was no way I was turning around and asking the man for one. With no other shots fired, I was sure he’d made them count, but I wasn’t taking the chance that the creatures had overrun his store. There would be other gas stations.

  About twenty minutes into my drive, I pulled into another station. I was close to entering the next state. I wanted to see if they had an updated map of the area. The station was empty, but it looked like a war zone. I’d passed stalled cars, stumbling zombies, a firefight or two, but nothing that looked like what might have gone down at that station.

  All the glass was missing from the storefront. Blood and about six bodies littered the ground. I thought about going to a different one, but my logic stated that whatever happened there was probably over. If I continued, I might end up in the middle of a fight.

  I parked between the building and a reeking dumpster. I pulled my knife and pocketed my cash. My purse, I tucked under the seat. I didn’t lock the door when I got out. I wanted to get back into it quickly if I needed to.

  I scanned the area for a turned or a human, but I appeared to be alone. Glass crunched under my feet. A few times, I nearly slipped in puddles of blood.

  I stepped through the window frame and into the store the first chance I got. I didn’t call out to anyone, but I was sure no one was there. On a spinning cart hung a reusable, cloth bag. I snatched it and began filling it with snacks, drinks, and maps of states and towns I thought I might travel through.

  I didn’t have a plan for what I needed to do after I found or didn’t find Jeremiah and Carl, so I hadn’t stopped by my house to get clothes or supplies for a possible road trip.

  When no one stopped me from carrying the stuff to my car, I returned to the store and filled another bag, then returned twice more, each time filling a bag and grabbing cases of water. I slipped some cash under the register, but I had a feeling that money wouldn’t mean anything for a long time.

  Safely back in my car, I pulled out one of the maps and the notes from the school. The base wasn’t far; another two hour’s drive, but I wasn’t familiar with the area. I knew I’d have to cross two bridges to get there, and the land between the two was wide-open country. I prayed that meant little to no zombies or traffic.

  An explosion shook the abnormal mid-afternoon quiet, reminding me that I’d been lucky up until then and that if I wanted to remain so, I should get back on the road.

  I crossed the first bridge some forty-five minutes later. I’d taken a few detours due to pile-ups and all-out brawls between live people and the undead, of which I’d refused to get in the middle. The bridge hadn’t been easy to cross. Cars lined it on both the north and southbound lanes, but none of them had drivers. I nudged a few out of my way, slipped between some, and drove along the median in places just to get across.

  A few of the vehicles were there because another one had hit them or they’d hit the guardrail, but others were just sitting there. I assumed their occupants had gotten out to assist the wrecks or to maybe help one of their passengers, but either way, the sight of them just sitting there creeped me out.

  For a short distance, after I crossed the bridge, the highway on the other side looked the same, but eventually, the road all but emptied. Every so often I’d come across another live being, but the person didn’t stay on the highway long.

  Once, I was sure I watched a driver turn. I didn’t pull over to check. That probably made me a bad human being, but my son needed a live mother, not a dead one. I was following behind the S.U.V. about three car lengths for ten minutes. I watched the person swerve a few times, but for the most part, he/she stayed in his/her lane and drove normally. I could see him/her wipe his/her head often, and sometimes the person would slump in the seat as if he/she had fallen asleep, but then he/she would jerk upright.

  Out of nowhere, I watched the person’s head fall onto his/her shoulder, and the vehicle started to slow down. Almost a second later, the body began jerking, and the vehicle spun off the road. I floored my car, getting as far away from him/her as I could.

 
I did my best to ignore the pillars of smoke I saw in the distance, the screams and gunshots I heard, and the figures that moved in my peripheral vision as I drove. I tried not to think about the sickness or what my son was going through at any given moment. I wondered why I wasn’t sick. I’d hugged Kim yesterday morning when she’d dropped off the kids. I think she even kissed them each on the forehead before she left, and neither of them had shown any signs of getting sick.

  I shook my head to stop thinking about them.

  My limited research hadn’t said what the sickness was or exactly how a person contracted it. There was a great deal of speculation but nothing definitive. No one knew how the virus was even possible, either. Yeah, people died of the flu, pneumonia, and the like, but they didn’t come back, or if they did, it was to who they were not something out of a nightmare.

  I tried distracting myself from my thoughts, but everything brought me back to that line of thinking. Wondering what my parents were doing made me worried that they were sick and had turned. The same applied to anyone I’d ever known. The only thing productive I did was wonder where I could take my son that he would be safe from the virus.

  We knew plenty of people with underground bunkers. We actually had one, but we’d only used it as a storm shelter for the last ten years, so it wouldn’t work as a sustainable place to wait out the apocalypse. Plus, I figured our chances of making it home anytime soon were slim. Once the zombie apocalypse got fully underway, it would probably be months before travel would be safe.

  Or possible, I thought, as I came to a stop at the entrance to where a bridge used to be.