Carey came back to consciousness in fits and starts. One eye peeked open and looked out the window and saw the moon hanging behind a hazy curtain. She groaned and closed it and drifted back out again. After a handful of false starts, one eye and then the other opened and remained open. The outside world still had a glassy quality to it but that began to fade as she blinked.
"What the hell happened?" Carey asked as she experimentally turned her head and found that it was still attached, albeit painfully. Her head was pounding like the worst migraine she could imagine. She flinched and held it still and peered out of the corner of her eyes. She was in a car, one that she had apparently totaled. That wasn't going to do her insurance any good. "I'm going to have to pay that damn gecko more now. Great." The longer she sat, the more details of the previous day began to filter back in. "Never mind," she said, "I'm not paying that lizard a damn thing," as fragments of the wreck fell into place in her mind. She was both relieved and saddened as it all came back.
An indeterminate amount of time later, Carey was able to move enough to start working her way out of the wrecked car. Her hips felt like they were filled with broken glass as she swung her legs out and put her feet on the ground. She froze in place when she tried to sit up and pain whirled through her body, seconds away from either vomiting or passing out. The feeling finally passed and she was able to inch her way to standing. "Shit I hurt," she mumbled as she put her hands on the car's roof and waited for another round of nausea to pass.
Carey smelled gas. She turned her body instead of her head and saw that the back of the car was nearly turned inside out and red gas cans were strewn all around the wreck. She glanced down out of the bottom of her eyes and saw that she was standing in a puddle. "Well. This is not good news." She gingerly bent back into the car and slowly began pulling her few possessions out of the car. She was rather certain that she wasn't in any immediate danger of combusting but she didn't want to take any chances.
Carey slung her bag over one shoulder and carried the shotgun as she slowly trudged away from the car and back up the soft slope to the roadbed. She snapped her head up and around at the sound of an owl and her vision swam. She dropped to one knee and waited for it to pass. Deep, slow breaths and promises to not do that again were her mantra as she began to clear her head.
"Yeah, I'll go on and say it right now," she said to the empty road, "I'm hurt, pretty sure I have a concussion, but I dare any zombie to come out here right now and try me. I dare you." Carey waited with the shotgun at her hip but no shambling carcass took her up on her offer so she started putting one foot in front of the other. "Any other time you bitches would come out of the woodwork."
Carey vaguely remembered stumbling along the highway when she awoke the next morning. There was a supreme moment of disconnect as she tried to remember how she came to be sleeping on a rather uncomfortable wicker couch on a screened-in porch. She rubbed her eyes and was thankful that it didn't hurt as bad as it did the night before. It still hurt, but it was manageable. Barely.
"First order of business," she said as she stood up, "is to find some damn Tylenol." She stretched and worked out most of the kinks in her back. "Second order of business is to figure out where the hell I am." Carey let herself in with the butt of her shotgun and searched the house for some pain relievers. She saw a coffee maker sitting on the kitchen counter and gave it a glare.
"I'd give three of my toes for a working machine and some fresh roasted beans," she said as she walked past it. Carey opened the refrigerator in hopes of finding some sort of caffeine inside and smiled when she found two bottles of Diet Coke sitting on a shelf. "Not cold but it will do." Carey set one bottle on the counter and unscrewed the other. She took a swig and imagined she could feel the caffeine racing through her body and waking up her brain.
Carey discovered a treasure trove of pain relievers in an upstairs bathroom and chased four ibuprofens with her Coke. She spent the next hour or so lounging around and waiting for the medicine to kick in, paging through old magazines and a photo album she found sitting on a shelf. They finally started working and she was able to stand up and move around without feeling like she'd just been in a very one-sided fight with a young Mike Tyson.
The car she found in the garage was nowhere near as nice as the Charger, clearly a grocery-getter and kid taxi with nearly as many dents and dings as miles, but it started up right away. Carey put the Nissan into drive and pulled out into the street. "Okay, Carey, let's see if we can not wreck this car like you did the pretty one," she told herself and snorted. Carey goosed the accelerator and the car sped away.
If the clock on the car's dashboard was right, she'd been driving for about half an hour and, according to a road sign, was another hour's drive away from Cincinnati. Carey breasted a hill and started down the back slope when she saw a figure walking on the side of the road in the distance. She braked to almost a crawl and watched the form walk in slow, regular steps and decided that it wasn't a zombie. As she crept closer, Carey saw that it was a woman and she appeared to be carrying something. "A kid, maybe?" Carey said to herself.
She moved up beside the woman and lowered the passenger window. The woman was still staring straight ahead and so far either hadn't noticed her or was ignoring her. Not smart either way. "Hey?" she called out. "Hey, are you okay? Need a ride?"
The woman finally turned her head and looked at Carey. Shell-shock, Carey thought as she saw her eyes. They were wide open but as empty as they could be. "Oh...hello," the woman said softly.
"Hi," Carey replied, "I'm heading to Cincy, care for a lift? Is your kid okay?" Carey noticed the kid, a girl if she was right, was pale and the hair that poked out from under a bed sheet was dirty.
"She is...hurt. Sick. Has a fever."
Probably because it's already over ninety degrees and you have her wrapped up in a blanket, Carey thought to herself. "Well, I don't know where you're heading but I can take you at least as far as Cincinnati if you want."
"Yes. I would like that. We would like that. It would be nice."
Carey stopped the car and hit the button to unlock the doors. As the woman went to the rear door, Carey moved her shotgun from the passenger seat and put it along the base of her door on the floorboard, out of sight and the way but still in easy reach if they came upon anyone that needed to be shot.
"Thank you," the woman said, looking from the back seat as she laid her daughter across the faded fabric.
"You're welcome. I couldn't just drive past and leave you two alone out here." Carey's eyes drifted to the little girl, somewhere around five, maybe six at the most. Her breaths were shallow and her skin seemed even paler than it had moments before.
"Thank you. We have been walking for, I do not know what day it is. A day at least."
"Just sit back and enjoy the ride," Carey told her as the woman settled into the front seat and took a few seconds to fasten her seat belt. "I'm Carey, by the way."
"I'm Helen. My daughter Samantha is laying in the back."
"Pleased to meet you." Carey pulled away from the shoulder and concentrated on the road and the occasional weaving through abandoned vehicles. The further she drove, the more she couldn't help but think about her passenger.
Helen was around her age, maybe a handful of years older, but was wearing a dress that instantly reminded Carey of something her grandmother would have worn when Carey was still in the single digits. Frilly, high-collared, long sleeved, and completely out of place for someone trying to get around in an apocalyptic world in the summer. And an apron over it. An apron? Her voice was...stilted. Off. Old fashioned and stiff. Carey explained most of that away by the vacant look in the woman's eyes and what she must have been through. What did the Marines call it? Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder? Something like that.
"If you don't mind me asking," Carey said as the silence began to drift into uncomfortable territory, "what happened to your daughter? I'm not a nurse by any stretch of the imagination but I've raised twin boys and fought my way across half the country. I can try to help her if she needs it."
"Helen has a fever. We, she, must have caught something after we were attacked."
"She wasn't...she didn't get hurt by a zombie, did she?" Carey had just glanced in the rear view mirror and seen a small smudge of blood on the bed sheet. Her pulse quickened and her fingers tightened their grip on the steering wheel. She ignored the change in names, attributing it to stress.
"No, no. We escaped unhurt. She caught her leg on something, a nail, perhaps, as we were running through a cattle pasture. I wrapped it in a shirt."
"I have some pills in my little pack. Some antibiotics I picked up just for something like that. I think there's some aspirin in there, too. Might help knock down her fever."
"No thank you. I gave her some shortly before you stopped for us."
"Oh, okay then," Carey replied. She glanced over at Helen or Samantha or whatever her name might be. She had no supplies. No purse. No canteen. No food. And what kind of mother wouldn't want anything that could possibly aid her child? Even if she didn't take the pills right now, she could save them and save them for later.
Later. Because the further Carey drove, the surer she became that she would be parting ways with mother and daughter in Cincinnati. Something about the woman was incredibly disconcerting. It wasn't quite a case of the creeps, but the longer she sat there in near-silence and continued to stare blankly out the windshield, the closer it got. Carey glanced in the back seat when the little girl shifted.
"So how old is your daughter?" Carey asked, trying to draw the woman back from the verge of whatever breakdown she was teetering over.
"Samantha? She will be seven in just over a month," the woman said after a few seconds.
"That's a fun age. I think I liked my twins at that age the best."
"She is a very trying child."
"I can believe that. My boys were as headstrong as a mule when they were seven. I can't tell you how many times I wanted to pull my hair out."
"Yes." The woman returned to her empty staring.
Okay, Carey thought after the abrupt end to the conversation. The girl gave a hitching breath and seemed to finally settle into a relaxed sleep. Maybe she did give the girl some medicine after all and it just took a while to kick in. She shrugged and looked back to the road.
Carey drove on for another hour, the miles and repetitive scenery rolling past at a thirty mile per hour clip. She was mulling over ways to leave the pair in the city without resorting to telling the woman that she freaked Carey out. The girl was the sticking point in all her plans. Could she really leave an injured child in the care of someone that was obviously in the process of cracking up? Her stomach turned sour at the thought of it.
Cincinnati's skyline had just come into view when the girl began to move around again. Slowly at first, a skinny arm found its way out of the cover and worked to pull it off. Carey was about to tell her quiet passenger that her daughter seemed to be waking up when the sheet came off the girl's head and Carey screamed. The girl's skin had turned a mottled, ashen grey and Carey could see every vein, artery, and capillary under it with ease and her eyes had the unfocused gaze of the dead.
Carey slammed on the brakes as the little girl pulled herself from her shroud and tried to get to the front seat. The car slid sideways and Carey threw a desperate elbow to the girl's throat to knock her backwards in order to have enough time to stop the car and get out. The girl fell to the floorboard and was tangled up in her sheet just long enough for the car to come to a stop in a cloud of burnt rubber. She flung the door open and dove out, her trailing hand missing and then grasping the shotgun's strap as it went past.
Carey rolled across the ground, shotgun cradled to her chest. The girl was mostly out of the car by the time she got to her knees and Carey swore that the woman gave her a push to send her out into the dirt. The girl sprawled out but quickly picked herself up and advanced on Carey and was nearly upon her before she could get the gun raised.
Click. "Dammit," Carey swore as she rocked back out of the way of one of the girl's swipes. She butt stroked her in the head with the gun's stock and scrambled to her feet as the girl charged again. Carey flipped the safety off and pulled the trigger three times in rapid succession and the child fell apart, her thick and discolored blood pooling in the dirt and grass.
"What the fuck was that?" Carey asked hysterically as she wiped the gallon of sweat from her face.
"You killed my daughter," she heard and looked up from the body. At some point, Carey had no idea when, Helen or whoever had managed to get out of the car and was facing her across the roof. "You killed my daughter."
Carey stood up and glanced down to safe the weapon before it went off again in her shaking hands. When she looked up again, she saw that she was facing down the barrel of an overly large pistol. It was in her apron, her mind said just as the gun winked. Carey spun around and went five feet through the air when a sledgehammer blow hit her squarely in the chest. The shotgun flew from her hands as she crashed back to earth, half on and half off the pavement and everything went black.
"Oh...she killed you. She shot you," Carey heard when she woke up a short time later. It couldn't have been more than a few seconds as she saw the woman only beginning to kneel down to the mess that was her little girl. Every nerve in her body felt like it was on fire and it hurt to move her fingers. She tried to take a deep breath to steel herself to move but the pain was too much. She settled for a couple of short, shallow breaths and pulled her arms in to her sides, wincing the whole time.
Carey fumed as the realization that she'd been shot settled in. She snaked a hand under her chest and felt the tactical vest. She'd considered ditching it countless times over the last weeks but was glad she didn't when she felt the concave depression and the remains of the deformed bullet in the Kevlar. There was going to be one hell of a bruise, she knew, but she was alive.
Carey watched the woman croon over her dead zombie daughter while she tried to silently unzip the pockets on her vest. There it is, she said when her fingers felt the grip of the pistol she'd been given half a world ago. She slid it out and flicked the safety, determined to end this situation once and for all. One knee was pulled up and a hand put down and she pushed herself shakily to her feet. Carey stood watching the pair a few yards away from her.
"You...you should be dead. I shot you. Why are you not dead?" the woman said with the first emotion Carey had heard since they'd met.
"Ballistic plating, bitch," Carey said, tapping her chest.
"You killed my daughter."
"Yeah, I heard you the first time," Carey told her, already tired of that little mantra.
"Why did you kill my daughter?"
"Because you neglected to tell me that your daughter had been bitten by a zombie. That was kind of a major thing to mention."
"You killed my daughter," the woman repeated again and Carey rolled her eyes.
"Yes. I did. I killed your daughter because she was a fucking zombie and she tried to eat me. Did you miss that little bit of the action while you were staring off into space?" Carey was standing with both hands on the pistol but kept the barrel pointed at the ground between them for the time being.
"She is dead. You killed her." Her hands moved around in her lap, seeming to be attempting to find a way into her apron but having gotten lost along the way.
"I did. I think we've already established that fact. And I'll go ahead and give you a little heads-up: if you don't get your hands away from that hand cannon you've got stashed away in your grandma's apron, I'll put a bullet between your eyes." Carey raised the gun. "And if you say I killed your daughter one more time I'll do it, too."
The woman had just opened her mouth and snapped it shut. Carey began to think that maybe she had finally cracked through the woman's shock and reached the normal person underneath. Her eyes had lost some of the idiot glaze and her hands were still. Maybe there was a chance to get out of this situation without further bloodshed.
"Okay," Carey said, lowering the gun back to the ground, "Now here's the deal. I am going to get my other gun and walk back to my car and stand by the door. You are going to get up, with or without the body, and start walking that way and not look back until you hear the car roar off." Carey pointed back over her shoulder to the way they came. "If you don't do it just like that, I'll shoot you. I don't want to do it but I've done it before and I'll do it again. Sound good?" the woman didn't answer. "I'll take that as a yes," Carey said as she started to the gun, not taking her eyes off the woman.
She was just starting to bend down to grab the Benelli, pistol still trained, and was in the process of telling the woman to get her ass in gear when Carey saw her lunge. There were ten feet between Carey and the girl's body and the woman had crossed half of them in a split second. A frown crossed Carey's lips as she refined her aim and pulled the trigger and gave the woman a third eye. The body fell and Carey shook her head.
"What the hell is wrong with people?" she shouted out to the countryside. Carey grabbed the shotgun, all the while mumbling about the idiocy of people lucky enough to survive the zombie outbreak. "That's the second dumb shit I've had to shoot because they weren't smart enough to walk away." She shook her head again and walked back to the car.
After putting the shotgun back across the passenger seat, she unstrapped the vest and laid it on the hood. It took a few minutes of experimental prodding before she managed to pull the plating out of the front of the vest for a closer examination.
"I was saved by this?" she asked as she held up a piece of fragmented ceramic. She had been expecting steel, not a high-tech dinner plate. She turned it over in her hands and tried to imagine how it could stop a bullet. Having no idea, she shrugged and chalked it up to science. Carey repacked the plate, doubting that it could stop another shot but still feeling better for having it in front of her. "I'll have to keep an eye out for a replacement," she said as she put the vest back on and put the pistol back in the side pocket.
Carey sat in the seat for a few minutes before she could put the car in gear. A hand slipped under the vest and rubbed the spot directly under where the vest had stopped the bullet. She could feel a massive bruise already forming and was both tempted and afraid to look at it in the mirror. She already knew it was going to be big, probably purple and ugly as well. "I'll save that surprise for later," she said as she finally put the car into drive.
Carey drove into Cincinnati a short while later and was intent on crossing the river and putting all of the bad memories of Ohio behind her as soon as she could. After weaving her way through cars, she finally made it to the river front and swore as she stopped the car a half mile from the bridge.
"Fuck," she said and pounded the steering wheel in frustration. From her vantage point, Carey could plainly see that most of the bridge was currently sitting in the middle of the Ohio River. "Yeah, looks like you sure saved your fair city by blowing the bridge, huh?" she mocked as she got out of the car and looked behind her at the ruined city. "Yeah, you did."
Carey sat on the hood and pondered her next move. She could backtrack and try to find another bridge. There were more, she knew, but she didn't know where or how far away they were. She sighed as she briefly considered swimming across and then her features lightened as she thought about a boat. Her eyes scanned the riverbank but saw nothing.
"No way. There's a boat down there somewhere," she said as she slid off the hood. "Someone has to have a house on the river with a boat tied up to a little pier." Set, Carey gathered her gear and left the highway, making slow but steady progress down toward the river through a maze of side streets and alleys, doing her best to avoid the small groups of zombies she encountered and blasting her way through those she couldn't. She took a break after an hour to rehydrate and eat a pack of crackers.
As she sat and drank, Carey realized that her body was stiffening up and becoming incredibly sore. She groaned and pushed herself up from the bench and got moving again before she couldn't. While she was walking, she took a handful of painkillers and hoped they'd work quick enough and last long enough to let her keep going until she found a boat.
"Swimming is looking better all the time," Carey said as she passed another quarter mile with no luck, shaking her head as the sudden thought that there would have been a boat a few feet into her journey had she gone the other way crossed her mind. "Yeah, that's probably how it is. A thirty foot booze cruiser with a pilot wearing tight pants and muscle-bound bartenders wearing only bow ties. Right, Carey."
Carey finally found a boat after what seemed like an entire day's worth of searching. It was far from a yacht, being a raggedy old fishing boat with leaves plastered to the floor and an engine that looked at least as old as she was. She gave the engine a try and sighed with relief when it sputtered to life. She lowered her gear into the boat and sat down before untying the line and heading out into the water.
Northern Kentucky loomed in her view as she steered the boat across the river. Her arm ached and the closer she got, the surer she was that this was about as far as she'd be going today. Somewhere on the other side there was a nice couch with her name written on it and she couldn't get there fast enough.
Sorry guys...this took forever to get done. I'd sit down to write and get distracted by either the NBA or Stanley Cup playoffs just about every time. So much for my hopes of getting three chapters done before I go on vacation. There might be a short chapter before then but the next update probably won't happen until I get back at the beginning of July. Anyway, I'd like to take a second to thank all the reviewers for their words. I haven't written back in a chapter or two but I've read them. Thanks!