All Gone

Florida coast crossed her mind on more than one occasion, but she knew what would be waiting for her there. She didn’t even consider finding another rescue station like Camp Rigero since she was certain soldiers were the same pretty much everywhere. So, since all bad things that had happened so far had happened to the south, and—knowing no other way to go—she headed north.

She killed her first zombie that very day.

Just like all the vehicles in the garage at Camp Rigero, the gas-powered humvee she took had several cans of fuel mounted along the sides. She waited until she was on a long, flat, open stretch of road before she stopped and got out. She fed gasoline into the tank one can after another until it started spitting back at her. When she opened the door to climb back inside, she heard something rustling in the weeds on the side of the road.

She stood and watched it for a while, the pitiful thing, as it struggled towards her on the bloody stumps where its knees and elbows used to be. It was covered in dirt and left a trail of coagulated blood in its wake. Whether it had been male or female, she couldn’t tell.

She watched it a little longer.

It took nearly an entire minute just to cross the first lane.

Though she would never admit why, she allowed it to crawl all the way up to her. It could open and close its mouth well enough, but it couldn’t angle its head in a way to bite her leg that didn’t send its deformed body off balance. Even if it could have bitten her, the wetsuit she was wearing wouldn’t have given it anything to sink its teeth into. Its teeth could only slide up and down on the slick trylar.

She quietly pulled the silenced Socom from the holster, whispered, “I guess it won’t be you,” and put a bullet in the creature’s brain. There was a zip sound when the gun fired and a thud sound when the creature’s body all at once fell to the pavement.

It was the first of many zombies that she would put down for good—but for hours after her first one, she wondered if she would start to feel guilt over killing something that was already dead.

But she felt nothing. Nothing at all.

Maybe she wasn’t even capable of feeling anything just then.

She kept driving. She stuck to interstates that stayed well away from big cities. Also, since the ocean was the only thing that ever seemed to stay the same, she stuck close to the coastline. In some places fire was raging uncontrollably. In other places the roads were so jammed with abandoned vehicles that she had to drive into the median to get around them. Everywhere she went, however, all was dark and all was dead.

Stopping for personal needs wasn’t too difficult; she simply found an isolated spot and got out of the humvee long enough to do whatever she had to do. But finding a place to wash up was something of a challenge, as clean, out-of-the-way creeks were hard to come by. The powdered soap and small packets of men’s shampoo provided in each ration didn’t help much either. She eventually sacrificed cleanliness for a safer state of mind, since constantly looking over her shoulder while she bathed wasn’t doing her nerves any favors.

She always stopped to sleep in places she thought were safer than others. These included more desolate stretches of road where houses were few and far between, which meant the former residents of those houses wouldn’t be wandering anywhere close by. Still, she would make certain every door in the humvee was locked up tight before she curled up in the back and nodded off. Sometimes an occasional dead person would find its way to her and come pounding on the side of the vehicle, and at first she would always roll down a window and shoot the creature in the head. Later though, when she realized the windows in the humvee were truly shatterproof, she would just cover her ears and sleep through the siege. When she woke she would simply start the engine and drive away, sometimes running over the creature that had been trying to get her.

Making a straight line up the coast, into South Carolina she went, then North Carolina, through Virginia and Maryland into Delaware, barely missing Pennsylvania, through New Jersey and New York, into Connecticut, and finally entering Rhode Island. She didn’t know how far she would end up going—maybe even into Canada provided she could find a working gasoline pump somewhere—or maybe even so far that she could wave at Santa, Frosty, and Rudolph.

Eventually she lost track of how many days had passed since leaving Camp Rigero.

Halfway through Rhode Island, however, signs of real life were becoming apparent. It started with very colorful graffiti scribbled on a bright white billboard:

LOOK HERE>More survivors ahead. Keep going.

She slammed the brake and stopped the humvee and there she sat for the longest time, staring up at the message.

She knew her will was deteriorating and eventually she would stop caring—maybe even intentionally neglect to lock up the humvee some day before nodding off. Besides that, she was starving. There had only been one box of sixteen rations stored in the back of the humvee and those were gone. She hadn’t eaten in at least three days. On top of all that, the fuel strapped to the sides was almost gone as well. She didn’t know anything about pumps and the like. She didn’t know if she could even find a working gas pump, let alone be able to operate it and fight off any undead opposition at the same time.

She knew that if she wanted to stay alive, she couldn’t stay alone.

Then again, how old was the graffiti? Was the person who wrote the message still alive? If so, exactly how many other survivors were there? Was it just another rescue station like Camp Rigero, full of the same obnoxious soldiers who would eventually turn to barbarism and rape? Could she just stay long enough to eat, sleep, and refuel? Would they even allow her to leave if she didn’t like it there?

There were just too many questions and no easy answers. It was too much for a girl of seventeen to try to think about.

The worst that could happen, she reasoned, was that she would die. Furthermore, she knew she was definitely done for if she stayed alone. If there were any other survivors up ahead, she could check them out from afar and if she met them and if they tried to do anything bad to her, she would shoot as many as she could before shooting herself.

So, either way, the worst that could happen was that she would die. That was the best answer she could come up with.

So she put the humvee back in gear and kept going.

Roughly every five miles or so someone had written another message in one bright color or another and each one seemed to answer an unspoken question. Whoever it was that wrote them somehow had in mind the kind of person who would be reading them.

The first one read: We have high walls here.

The second: STILL ALIVE and looking good.

The third message was so long that some of the letters at the end were scrunched together and running off the side of the billboard: IF YOU ARE NOT NICE, GO AWAY YOU WON’T BE TOLERATED

(Below that someone added: THAT MEANS NO DIRTBAGS ALLOWED.)

And finally, the last one read: Turn at Matunuck Exit. Follow Road.