Chapter Six
Good Neighbors
Abby couldn't even guess how long she ran before she had to stop, gasping and staggering as jelly legs kept her moving down the road. Long after she'd gotten her breath back she kept moving and the only reason she knew Ryan and Chelsea were still with her was because she could hear them gasping and heaving just behind her.
Around them the trees were always rustling from the same breeze that made her sweat go cold on her skin.
They didn't talk. They didn't have to. All around them the little noises of the woods that never stopped kept them on edge, kept them moving as quietly as they could because who knew if any of those noises were actually one of the crazy feral people.
They heard the engine a long way off, long before they saw the headlights through the trees. Abby moved off the road, tense and waiting. It took ages. For a few long moments she was certain that it wasn't even going to pass them by until the truck – it was too big to be anything else – was suddenly whipping around the corner from the direction they'd come.
The headlights were blinding, making Abby have to squeeze her eyes shut even as she lifted her arms over her head and waved frantically, hoping that whoever it was would stop.
The headlights passed by and Abby was left blinking in the darkness, clenching her teeth. The truck stopped further down the road, engine slowing to a rough, uneven idle and one of the brake-lights was out.
Slowly, Abby started walking towards the stopped truck, the red glow from the back-end giving more light than they'd had for what seemed like hours. Ryan and Chelsea followed her.
The passenger's window rolled down as they walked up, smoke wafting out.
"Any of you get bit?" The voice was flat and a bit nasally, followed by a cough. Abby was mostly sure that it was a woman speaking, though she couldn't see into the cab of the truck to make sure.
"No. None of us." Abby answered quietly.
"Hop in the back – no room up here." The voice croaked and the window was already rolling back up.
Abby swallowed back any nervousness she felt and stepped up on the back tire to lever herself up into the bed of the truck. It was crowded with gas-cans and big, five-gallon jugs of water. Ryan and Chelsea were slower to get in, taking the time to move around to the tail-gate before climbing up. They weren't even seated properly before the truck was moving again.
It wasn't very long before the truck was leaving the highway, turning down a bumpy dirt-road. Abby stared back at the highway, keeping track of the turns they made so she'd be able to find her way back out. The sun was rising, the sky turning pinkish-orange over the trees.
The ride didn't last but a few minutes, the truck pulling to a stop just after a low-water crossing at the front of a driveway that was already crammed with three other cars. Just as soon as they pulled up the front door swung open and two kids came out. They were both brunettes and had that twin-like look, though the slight height difference made her think they were probably not twins. They were young, younger than Ryan and Chelsea and they didn't say anything as they came up to the tailgate and started unloading supplies from the bed of the truck.
The passenger's door swung open with a loud groan as Abby was climbing out of the bed and a tired-looking middle-aged woman slid out of the truck. She had that greyed, aged look that came from a hard-earned life. At a glance, Abby would have said she'd spent more than a few years waiting tables at a truck-stop diner. With the growing light, she could see into the cab and had a moment of confusion that there wasn't anyone in the driver's seat before she saw the US Mail sticker in the back window.
"Don't just stand there looking dumb. Truck's not gonna unload itself." The woman snapped brusquely, already heaving up one of the jugs of water over her shoulder and trekking into the house after the two kids that disappeared with their arms full.
Silently, Abby hauled up another of the five-gallon water jugs and wandered in through the front door, pressing against the wall of the narrow hallway as the two kids went rushing back out. The hallway opened up into a crowded living room where a frail old woman was sitting in a recliner and another three kids that looked like they belonged in preschool were gathered around a rickety table with coloring books and crayons. Through the window, Abby could see a couple of old men out behind the house fiddling with a roll of fencing.
"Put it just there." The old woman said, waving at a high tower of boxes and bags that took up a corner of the living room. There was another jug of water resting at the base of it, so she plopped hers down before heading back out to the truck.
Ryan and Chelsea passed her in the hallway, arms piled high with bags.
It went on like that for several long minutes until everything from the truck had been unloaded and stashed in the house. Finally, they were inside with the door bolted tight and Abby found herself leaning against the counter in a small, dirty kitchen and staring down the gruff woman that was obviously the one in charge.
"You got a name?" Abby demanded when the stare-down didn't seem to be drawing to a close.
"Sherry." The woman answered shortly, pushing herself up to sit on the counter-top and flicking the ashes from her cigarette into the sink.
"Abby." Abby fished her own smooshed pack of cigarettes out of her pocket, finding one that wasn't bent too bad. "Got a light?"
The woman tossed a book of matches at her and for a long moment they didn't do anything but puff on their cigarettes. Abby rolled her neck, bringing a hand up to try and knead away the tension that was starting to seed a headache. "You know any more about this clusterfuck than I do?"
Sherry snorted. "Girlie, I reckon there isn't anything more to know about this shit-storm other than what everyone knows. There's some bug going 'round that's making the dead come back with a nasty appetite. Don't reckon I need to know more than that."
"Not literally coming back from the dead, right?"
"Absolutely literally." Sherry shrugged half-heartedly at Abby's blank stare. "I won't pretend to understand it. Just saying what I've seen happening. Folks get bit, get a fever and die. Then they come back."
"They're obviously not dead then. They can't be." Abby argued, though she was already thinking about the man she had shot that hadn't gone down. "It's not – how can they be actually dead and still get back up."
"Beats me." Sherry was snuffing out her cigarette. "I'm just saying what's happening, not what's causing it. I ain't a scientist. All I know is you have to hit the brain if you want them to go down and stay down."
Abby frowned, thinking back on the two she had managed to drop with head-shots and shuddering at how close she'd had to get to accomplish that. "You know how many people are affected? How many are out there?"
Sherry shrugged and answered with a short, clipped, "Beats me."
One of the old men was hollering outside and Abby's heartrate jumped before she could recognize the belligerent, angry rhythm of the shouts. Sherry bustled out of the kitchen with a huff and a few seconds later she could hear the low, scathing tones of the other woman giving a scolding. Abby wandered out of the kitchen into the living room where Chelsea and Ryan were huddled together on the ratty couch, exhaustion overriding everything else as Ryan was dead asleep against his sister, the girl looking only a few steps away from the same. The three young children were out of sight, though she could hear the shrill voices and giggling coming from a room deeper in the house.
"Something on your mind?" The old lady was still sitting in the recliner, squinting up at her over the top of thick, rounded glasses as she looked up from the puzzle book she'd been intent on.
"How far out is Willow Springs from here?"
The lady scrunched her face in concentration and answered slowly, "About fifteen miles or so on the highway."
"Right." Abby muttered under her breath. She knew she could make that in a day, had gone further than that hiking with her sister and cousin on the rare weekends they had the time and extra money for gas to get away for a while. Of course, those trips never came after a night-long survival binge with rabid cannibals at every turn.
"It might be shorter to go through the woods, but I wouldn't know how you'd go about it that way." The woman continued. "You'd be doing some trespassing, though."
Abby didn't give a single damn about trespassing at this point, didn't give a damn about a lot of things that she was probably going to have to do in the future. She pulled the revolver out of the holster, releasing the cylinder to pull out the spent rounds. Three empty cases came out and she left the last two shots in place as she snapped the cylinder back into place. The old woman was watching her, frowning.
"You aren't going out there again, are you?"
"Have to." Abby said shortly, letting herself out the back door where the two men were still struggling with the roll of fencing. When she was outside, she could hear their bickering.
"You're holding it wrong, I'm telling you."
"You're unrolling it wrong, making it a whole lot harder than this has any business being."
"You ain't never built a proper fence before, ain't never kept anything but rabbits."
Abby snorted at the banter, catching the two men's attention. "The lady in there said there might be a shorter way to Willow than taking the highway. Could either of you tell me the best way to cut through the woods?"
They stared at her for a long second before they were both talking at once.
"You don't want to go out there –"
"It's not safe for a woman to go off by herself –"
Sherry's voice cut through suddenly, "You two leave her alone. It's obvious she has somewhere she has to be and if you think you're gonna talk a woman out of protecting her family, then the both you got no sense."
Sherry had just come from around the side of the house with a t-post driver, dropping it down in the dirt and yanking leather gloves off her hands as she turned her attention to Abby. "And if you're gonna just go charging off with nothing but that pea-shooter and whatever ammo you got left, then you've got no more sense than they do."
"Not like I have many options here." Abby snapped.
"True." Sherry patted her on the shoulder as she moved past to go back into the house. "But hang on a few minutes and I'll get you set for the road. Water, food – Ol' John here knows what way to send you off and I figure I can spare a pistol so you ain't going out there with nothing to defend yourself with. Ain't just getting eaten you have to worry about, hun. I reckon there's a lot of scared, desperate people out there."
"You don't have to do that." Abby said, tightness clenching her gut suddenly as she followed the woman back through the living room and to a cluttered, dark bedroom that was packed high with boxes. "You got enough to worry about here."
"I don't have to do nothing. Didn't have to go through my mail route and find people that needed safe-keeping, but here they are. The only way we're gonna get through this is by looking out for each other. Way I see it, this isn't just gonna go away overnight. It's gonna take some fixing. So we're gonna stick it out, stick together and wait for this mess to clear up."
Abby nodded. That was her plan exactly, to get home and figure out a way to get through whatever was happening. Sherry was moving boxes around, finally found what she was looking for because she was lifting up the cardboard flaps and dragging out a dusty backpack. "People always gave me shit about being a 'hoarder.' It's too bad they ain't around now for me to rub it in their face that it's been a blessing and not a curse like they seemed to think."
The bag was shoved at Abby and she watched as the woman burrowed further into the room into the crammed corner where the bed was. A shotgun was lying haphazardly across the top of another stack of boxes and Sherry tossed it onto the bed and started shuffling more boxes out of the way until she reached the bottom one.
"Here we go. Got a .45 here with a couple magazines and a full box of ammo." Sherry declared, pulling out a pistol stashed in a nylon holster and tossing it on the bed, following with the magazines and the box of rounds. "Should get you through okay."
"You don't need it?" Abby asked, already reaching for the gun and flipping up the snaps that kept it firmly in place in the holster, pulling out the gun to examine it and recoiling just as soon as she saw the logo. "This is a Kimber."
"You gonna turn your nose up at it?" Sherry laughed.
"No. It's – this is a really nice gun. It costs more than my car." Abby answered, reverently running her finger over the textured grip. "When you said you could throw me a spare, I was expecting a junker."
Sherry shrugged, smiling tightly. "Not gonna do much good sitting in a box. I've got my shotgun, John and Robert are rifle types. Cynthia don't have the hand strength to pull back a slide. Might as well go to someone that can use it. The price-tag don't really matter anymore, not when it's someone's life on the line."
Abby stared hard at the gun, swallowing hard over the lump forming in her throat. "I don't – I don't know what to say. Thank you."
"That's all you need to say." Sherry nodded towards the door. "You know where the water is, take a couple bottles. There's boxes of food – make sure you got enough to get you through. Make sure to see John before you go – he's lived here all his life, spent more time out in the woods than at home. He'll be able to set you in the right direction. You get to your family, make sure they're safe. That's all that matters."
Abby nodded, forcing a deep breath over the acid in her throat as she floundered to load ammo into the empty magazines, stashing the rest of the box in the gifted backpack. She slid one of the mags into place in the pistol, pulling back the slide to make sure there was a round in the chamber. She stashed the gun back in the holster, hesitating before looking back up at Sherry.
"You got a belt I can wear so I can carry this?"
The older woman nodded, going back to ruffling through boxes.
Within short order, Abby was packed up with three bottles of water, two bananas and a box of cereal bars. At Sherry's insistence, she'd eaten some eggs and toast and had downed a cup of ground-filled coffee that had to be made on the stove. She hadn't realized how much of her growing headache had been caused by hunger and dehydration until she'd downed the food and started chugging some water. After that, it only took a few minutes for the throbbing to recede into something low-key and manageable.
"…don't follow the first creek – that'll put you out back on the highway only a little ways down the road." John was explaining for the fourth time. Abby was patiently listening to the old man, more for the sake that he seemed to like the audience than because she needed the directions rehashed. She'd already written down the dirt roads she needed to follow to get out into the woods, knew the general lay of the land and the landmarks she needed to watch out for so she could cut through the national forest and save herself about six miles of walking.
From the sounds of it, it was going to be rough in the woods. Still, she didn't really have another option. The three cars in the driveway were busted, had been for a long time and as much as it might have tempted her before, Abby wasn't going to jack the only working vehicle Sherry had after the woman had been so helpful and hadn't even had to ask whether Abby planned on dumping Ryan and Chelsea on her. She was also purposefully ignoring any warring thoughts she was having about the kindness of these people to her when she had knowingly left a woman to be eaten alive only a few hours earlier.
It was still early when she slipped out of the house for the last time, Sherry seeing her out the door and handing her a slip of paper with directions scrawled out on it. "In case things out there are worse than you can handle. You and your family are welcome back here if you need."
Abby nodded, slipping the scrap of paper into her pocket and taking off down the road with a backwards wave and a slow, steady stride that would save her energy for when she really needed it.
AN: Thanks for reading. More up next week