Chapter Five

The Road Less Traveled

“However did you come by chainmail?” Dane asked.

“Knights of Yesterday,” Leon told him through a mouthful of sandwich. “Even the strongest zombie bite can barely dent it, so they took them out of Eastpointe Plaza and stored them in the armory.”

“Oh, I see.”

Dane fit himself into the ringed shirt and pulled his sweater down over top of it. He then wriggled his torso a bit, trying to get comfortable with the armor. Courtney saw that while he had his shirt off, it wasn’t just his face that was pale—it was his whole body. The poor guy probably saw less sunshine on that boat than she did while hiding out in her house.

The humvees pressed forward.

Occasionally a blue-skinned person would appear and stagger after the vehicles, but Vaughn would ignore them. However, at one point Courtney looked back at the second humvee and saw that Delmas Ridenour swerved an extra couple of feet so he could ram one with the bull bars. It sent the zombie careening into the overgrown vegetation off to the side of the road.

She stayed mostly quiet as lunchtime rolled around and sandwiches were passed out. She wasn’t hungry, so she chose to eat just one. Thankfully it was white bread and not wheat, as plain white bread was easiest to make and she still couldn’t stand the taste of wheat. But she knew that if her father were here to hand her another of his sandwiches made out of wheat bread, she would gladly gobble it down. She sort of wished she wouldn’t have given away those sandwiches he made before she was dragged aboard the deuce-and-a-half all those years ago.

Leon ate two and even Vaughn juggled one between his steering wheel hand and his gear-shifting hand, but Dr. Dane declined to have anything but another cup of coffee from the thermos.

He would glance out the windows once in a while to see the many houses that once had carefully manicured lawns, but were now reduced to nothing more than dilapidated shacks surrounded by lush jungles. There was foliage growing in the rain gutters and up through cracks in the pavement. Abandoned vehicles and corpses—both lying down and walking around—lined the hillsides. It was deadly quiet outside the humvees.

“It’s everywhere, isn’t it?” Dane commented. “In every nation on every continent.”

Leon finished the last bite of his sandwich and rolled down the window long enough to toss out the empty ziplock bag and discarded crusts. He then answered, “As far we know, we’re the last ones left.”

“Has there been any contact with Canada though?” Dane asked.

“There hasn’t been any contact with anybody until you showed up,” Courtney replied. “We sure didn’t think anyone else was alive out there.”

He showed her an uneasy smile and took another sip of coffee. He swallowed hard. “It’s just that I was on a ship while everything was happening on land,” he explained. “How did things get so out of control?”

“Governments, armies, militias, religions, human rights activists—they all had a hand in it,” Leon replied. “It’s hard to pinpoint a single cause.”

Dane nodded understandingly. He asked, “But couldn’t there be more places like Eastpointe? Walled-up towns with people like you?”

The eager expression on his face as he posed this question gave Courtney pause, but otherwise she didn’t give it a second thought. Later, however, she would wish she would have confronted him about his choice of words.

“There could be,” she told him. “But there’s no way of knowing.”

“Hmm.”

Courtney unscrewed the lid on a canteen of water and took several gulps. She handed it to Leon and he did the same, then he in turn handed it up to Vaughn.

“I heard some things about rescue stations,” Dane said. “Government and police-funded areas citizens could go to be safe.”

Courtney was almost tempted to laugh. Her experience at the Camp Rigero rescue station had been anything but safe.

Leon was the one to answer him. He said, “Most of the rescue stations got overrun from the inside out. Infected people were dying and then rising back up again.”

“It was like being stuck in a barrel with a bunch of piranhas,” Vaughn interjected, his tone implying first-hand knowledge. He peered in the rear-view mirror to eye Dr. Dane. “If we had been allowed to shoot the infected ones, all the uninfected ones might have gotten out of there alive. But no, our own humanity destroyed us.”

“Vaughn’s only quasi-human, Dr. Dane,” Leon hastily added. “If it were up to him, he would shoot anyone who even caught a scent of zombie.”

Vaughn laughed.

Courtney squinted her eyes and viewed the road up ahead. Houses were spaced closer and closer together now and the bouncing inside the humvee was softening as the tires found smoother asphalt. She opened the map and started comparing the landmarks to what she saw on the paper. After a moment she announced, “We should be coming up on Wakefield. Could be rough.”

“Time to change drivers?” Vaughn asked.

Leon nodded, then squawked his walkie-talkie and said, “We’re going to bring it to a stop and change drivers.”

After a moment the walkie-talkie squawked back, “Chinese fire drill style?”

“Nope. Just over the seat.”

The walkie-talkie replied, “Darn. I like Chinese fire drills.”

Vaughn slowly brought the humvee to a stop and pulled the emergency brake. He sat up and started maneuvering his tall body over the seat, his black hair spilling messily across the cushions.

Leon sat up and prepared to exchange places with him.

Courtney put a hand on his shoulder to stop him. She said, “I’ll drive.”

“You sure?”

She nodded.

He sat back down and Courtney climbed over the seat and sat down in front of the steering wheel. She dropped the emergency brake, shifted into first gear, let out the clutch, and the humvee pulled forward.

Wakefield was approaching.