Lokistar568: I have no interest in doing another Friday the Loudteenth story.
A faded wooden sign hung over the door, white lettering on a green background: TRANS-APPALACHIAN MUSEUM. Canned rocking chairs flanked one side, while a totem pole stood on the other, strange and grotesque faces frozen in pained smiles. A body was sprawled before one of the chairs, a gun clutched loosely in one curled hand.
Inside, a narrow set of stairs led to the second floor, and a parlor opened off to the right, glass display cases pushed against florial papered walls. Tables loaded with papers, radio equipment, and supplies occupied the middle of the room - a makeshift military command center in the last days, it seemed. Lynn clicked on a flashlight and carved thick shadows, dust motes dancing in the beam like pagan worshippers around a fire. Framed black and white photos on the walls, another display case filled with arrowheads and minie balls left over from the Civil War.
Past the stairway, a long hall led to the back of the house - Lynn pointed the flashlight and caught a glimpse of linoleum floor and countertop. She drew her Desert Eagle and crossed her wrists, aligning the beam and the gun. "We'll check in there first," she whispered and nodded toward the parlor. Next to her, Lincoln clutched the M-16, the under barrel flashlight attachment on. Normally, they would split up to clear a building, something they had done countless times in the past, but right now, Lynn didn't want him by himself. She wanted to be with him...just in case.
In the parlor, Victorian style furniture hunkered against the darkness, and a stone fireplace teemed with gloom. At the table, she bent and studied a giant map of the area: Red lines had been drawn through several roads, denoting roadblocks, she assumed. She scanned it until she found Route 25, a long, twisting zig-zag worming through a patch of green.
Nothing.
Next, they checked the kitchen: Gloomy sunlight streamed through the window over the sink, revealing stacks of unwashed dishes, empty cans and boxes on the counter, and a gun sitting next to the fridge, from which wafted the stench of rotting food. Boxes of MREs lined one wall, and Lincoln went over to them. "More chili, taco, pot roast...we can have a regular Thanksgiving feast with all this." He kicked one of the boxes and turned.
What do we have to be thankful for? Lynn thought bitterly. Virtually everyone in their family was dead, the world they knew was gone, and every second of every day was a constant fight for survival.
And you know what?
It might all be for nothing; they might get to Washington only to find more of the same - death, destruction, and desolation, the three Ds that characterized the new world, or at least what they'd seen of it.
Lynn sighed. Don't do this.
Once you let hopelessness in, it took root and spread like cancer, and what does cancer do? It kills you, that's what. Her coach back in Royal Woods used to say if you don't have hope, you have nothing. How can you play your best if you're stuck in a defeatist mindset? You can't. She knew that as surely as she knew her own name, but when everything around you dies, keeping hope is like trying to keep a tiny flame alive against a cold, needling wind.
Lisa was right - she had to be. The government wouldn't let itself collapse, politicians wouldn't let themselves and their families die. There were bunkers, she knew that even before Lisa brought it up, and there would be people in them, order, sanity, safety.
There had to be.
After clearing the first floor, they moved onto the second, Lynn taking the lead and wishing she could take the rear too so that Lincoln was protected on all sides. Four doors opened off the hall, one to a bathroom, one to an office, and two to storerooms heaped with boxes and empty display cases like the ones downstairs. "I think we're good," Lynn said, releasing a pent-up breath she didn't even know she was holding. Lincoln relaxed and held the rifle up so that the barrel was pointing at the ceiling. Thunder rumbled and rain sluiced down a window at the end of the hall through which pale, muted light fell. "We'll set up in the parlor," she said. She liked camping near the exit in case they needed to make a quick getaway. She didn't think they'd encounter any trouble, though - the mountains seemed relatively free of the dead.
You never knew, though.
They turned and started to leave, but froze when something thumped against the ceiling. Lincoln jerked the M-16 up, and the light revealed a square hatchway to the attic, a cord rope swinging back and forth like a pendulum.
Thump!
The cord swung faster.
Something was up there.
Lynn swallowed hard, her heart beginning to race. Her grip on the gun tightened; she exchanged a worried look with Lincoln, then they both turned their attention to the cord. It could have been nothing more than a raccoon - animals were already moving into buildings and towns in the absence of human life, and in another few years, nature itself would follow, plants and vegetation overgrowing highways and skyscrapers.
Thump-thump-thump.
If it was a raccoon, it was a big one.
And it was coming closer, its footfalls tracking across the ceiling like the hoofbeats of one of the four horsemen. Lynn pursed her lips in thought. If it was a ghoul, all they'd have to do was lower the stars and it would come to them. If it was an animal, it probably wouldn't.
Clicking off her light, Lynn shoved it into the waistband of her jeans; Lincoln trained his beam on the door, the gun steady in his hands. Gripping the Desert Eagle, her index finger caressing the trigger, she reached up, caught the cord, and yanked - the hatch came down and a rickety folding ladder unfurled like a red carpet to hell. She jumped back and brought the pistol up, holding her breath so that her aim would be even: Light bathed a section of attic wall, bare boards and fuzzy pink insulation. The thumping drew closer, and a shadow flickered, shapeless at first then slowly morphing into a human silhouette. With it came the sickly stench of decomposition that Lynn had grown so accustomed to over the past two months. Her nostrils pinched and one corner of her mouth turned up in a sneer of disgust.
With a low, hissing moan, the thing appeared, and Lynn's heart sank. A little girl, three feet tall and clad in a dirty pink dress, tangled blonde hair dirty and matted, Her skin was black, blue, and beginning to slip from her bones in sagging folds. Her eyes were milky white with death, her lips twisted in unholy hunger. She looked like Lola.
She was Lola.
Lynn's blood turned to ice and her muscles locked up. Her mind went back to Lola and Lana dying together in bed, holding each other and crying while Lisa tried desperately to develop an antidote...then destroyed her lab in fury when she couldn't. Lola came back while Lynn and Lincoln were moving her to the basement, and her eyes were the same - the low, rattling hiss issuing from her throat identical.
"Lynn!" Lincoln cried.
She came back to herself and realized in a flash that the little girl was moving forward, tumbling over the edge and dropping, arms out and mouth open, flying at her like a giant, skin-hungry bat. For a moment, the world slowed to a crawl...then exploded when Lincoln crashed into her and tackled her against the wall, the M-16 clattering to the floor and the beam shaking crazily. The girl slammed into Lincoln's shoulder, knocking him aside and upsetting his balance; he fell and landed on his side, the zombie on top, reaching, hissing in undead excitement. Reacting quickly, he shot out his fist and cracked her in the side of the head while shoving her away with the other. She fell back against the wall and started to get back to her feet. Trembling, Lynn could only watch as Lincoln shot up, pulled the Glock from his side, and shot her in the head, the report like cannon fire in the silence. Blood and bits of rotting brain splattered the wall, and she fell limply back in a sitting position, then slumped to one side, leaving a greasy black smear across the paper.
Lincoln, panting and shaking, turned to her, and when she saw the accusation in his eyes (you almost got me killed), she broke down crying. She choked. She choked bad. She opened her mouth to tell him how sorry she was, but she cried even harder.
For a moment, Lincoln stared at her, then his features softened and he went over, dropping to one knee and laying a tentative hand on her shoulder. "Hey," he said softly, his voice halting and awkward,"i-it's okay. I'm fine."
No thanks to her - he almost died because she locked up...just like she did when Leni lay dying, just like she did when she left Lucy and Luna to die...her own sisters.
She wept even harder, and Lincoln took her in his arms, pressing her face to his chest and rubbing a comforting circle between her shoulder blades. "I'm sorry, Linc," she finally managed in a broken whisper.
"It's fine," he insisted, but it wasn't: She had a lapse of strength, and in this world, weakness, no matter how brief, is fatal...for you and the people you love.
She sniffed and reasserted control of her nerves. She couldn't be weak. She had to be strong. Lincoln needed her. Luan needed her. "I'm sorry," she repeated, her voice calmer, more steady. She pulled away from him and got to her feet. "It won't happen again," she vowed, then looked at the dead girl. "We should check for others."
She went first, climbing the ladder and scanning the darkened attic with the beam of her flashlight. When she didn't see anything, she went up and Lincoln followed.
There was indeed another one, a man; they found him nestled in a corner behind a large box, the kind refrigerators came in. He was so decomposed that when Lynn walked up, all he could do was turn his head and reach impotantly out, skin hanging from his arms in blackened tatters. Lynn shoved the gun into its holster and pulled out the knife - using a knife required more mental strength, and after what happened in the hallway, she needed to prove, to Lincoln and to herself, that she could be strong. Gritting her teeth, she brought it up and then down in the center of his head. His feeble thrashing ceased, and the unholy life ran out of him. She yanked the blade out and wiped it on her jeans, then turned to Lincoln, who had walked up while she was busy. She still couldn't bring herself to look him in the eye. "Anything else?"
"No."
She nodded. "Good. Let's go get Luan."
They huddled in the parlor after tacking thick blankets over all the first story windows. Lynn wedged a chair under the handle of the front door and had Lincoln help her move the fridge in front of the back. She still didn't feel entirely safe, but then again, she never did, and hadn't in so long that she could barely remember what it felt like. When she sat down, she tried to recall it, something she didn't do very often, it, and her whole life before the dead began to walk was blurry and indistinct, like a shape seen through dense fog. Her teams, her friends, her everything might as well have been someone else's, belonging not to her but to a girl in a once-seen Nick at Nite rerun.
The visions of each one of her sisters dying, though, nearly a half dozen of them on her watch, were crystal clear, however, and as she sat with her back against the wall, her face cast in the flickering glow of a Coleman lantern, she drew a weary sigh and looked at her siblings: Lincoln across the room in a pose similar to hers, an MRE open on his lap, and Luan, sitting amidst a heap of sleeping bags and paging through a book she found called A Pictorial History of the West Virginia Panhandle. She was more animated after her nap, and even ate a little, for which Lynn found herself so grateful she felt like crying.
I'm so emotional today. I must be about to start my period.
Heh. Funny how nature doesn't stop. Human beings do, civilizations do, but not Mother Earth. Such a routine, natural function, the lining of the uterus shedding to facilitate impregnation, but under the circumstances, strange and sad too. Her body didn't know the world had ended, that the likelihood of her ever settling down and having children was so small it might as well not even exist. It just kept doing its thing, cycling like the sun and the moon in anticipation of one day being fertilized. Luna's body did the same thing, even as she was ripped apart by the living dead...dumbly plodding on with single-minded determination. Lucy's body didn't even have a chance to start.
Hot, stinging tears filled her eyes, and she bowed her head so that no one would see.
It was her fault - especially Lucy, Luna, Leni, and Lisa. She was in charge when they fell, she stood up and started giving orders, she took the reigns and the responsibility that went with them because that's who she was: Lynn Loud Jr. She grabbed the bull by the horns every single day of her life, and when someone needed to step in and steer the ship, she was right there. She didn't know the enormity of her decision, though, didn't know that everything fell squarely to her. And because of it, four of her sisters were dead, and her last remaining family would probably die too.
I imagine Washington will be filled with the undead, Lisa said once, getting in will present a problem. We'd do well to establish a base camp and send two or three in, as a smaller group can move and react much quicker. Once they've found help, they can send for the rest of us.
She looked at Lincoln - he shoved a cracker into his mouth and chewed. His eyes were hard, his face somehow rougher. She'd leaned on him since the beginning, and she was confident that if she could keep it together and have his back, he'd make it through. Luan, on the other hand...she worried Lynn. And even Lincoln...she trusted him, but what good is that when you're in an unfamiliar city surrounded by millions of those things? He was fast, he was strong, and he was smart, but even the best of the best can be easily overwhelmed.
Should they even risk it?
The thought struck her like a bullet from the dark, and she stiffened a little.
They could wait...find somewhere, maybe even here...and give it a few months, maybe even until next spring, once the snow thawed. Lisa did say that given the rate of decomposition, the dead would cease to be a significant threat within eight months to a year.
The thing was: They were a threat, as Lynn had learned again and again. One wrong move out here, and you were dead. In this house, they would be in constant danger. No, they had to get to Washington - it was safe there. There were people and food and doctors and society. They could start over, just the three of them, and maybe, outside of the nightmares, they could forget what happened. She and Luan could find husbands, and Linc a wife, and they could have lots of kids and devote every thought, every emotion, and every moment to them, and not to the dark, distant memory of death along the highway.
Lynn liked that idea very much. They could make it, even if it was just her and Linc - they could set Luan up in an attic somewhere, go in themselves, then send help back. Or at the very least scout a safe passage.
Presently, Lincoln finished eating and got to his feet, then scooped the empty package off the floor and carried it into the kitchen. When he came back, he went over to the table, grabbed the map, then walked over to her and sat with a sigh. She sat up straighter and laid a protective hand on his leg. I'm so sorry and I promise I won't let anything bad happen to you. He spread it as far as it would go and laid it across their laps: Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, and West Virginia stared up at them, a body served by a thousand highways like arteries. And like too many arteries from before the plague, many of them were clogged.
He found Sugar Grove and traced a finger along the squiggly line representing Route 25. Lynn leaned over his shoulder and watched, his smell filling her nostrils, not pleasant but not entirely unpleasant either. Warm, comforting, safe. "We'll come out downwind of Harrisonburg," he said and tapped a spot between Harrisonburg and Staunton. "We can take Route 12 across, then Route 17 north." He pushed his finger across the center of Virginia then angled it up in a steep, sweeping arc, his nail brushing over town names that meant nothing to Lynn, but probably did to someone else: Fredericksburg, Stafford, Summerduck, Bealeton, Opal, Warrenton. Washington was a heart to which all the arteries fed, a tangled confusion of state routes, local roads, and five different interstates. It looked so big…
And dangerous.
Both of them started when Luan sat on Lincoln's other side. She leaned over and studied the map, her brow creasing in concentration, then looked up at Lincoln. "How much farther?" she asked.
"'Bout a hundred fifty miles," he said. "Depending on how bad the roads on, we can be there by the end of the week." He scanned the layout and frowned. "We can't take any of the main roads, those'll be be blocked for sure. Once we get close, all of them might be impassable, in which case we might to have to go on foot."
An arrow of dread shot through Lynn's heart. The topic had come up before, but she pushed it away to deal with later...now later was uncomfortably close. On foot, they were exposed and vulnerable; on foot they could be all too easily caught and ripped apart.
Fear rippled across Luan's face, but she didn't say anything. Lincoln looked up from the map then back, a thoughtful expression on his face. "Actually, we might be better off coming in from the north." He pointed at the northwest portion of the city. "It's not as built up. In the south you have Alexandria, Fairfax, and Manassas, which are all pretty big on their own. This looks like the path of least resistance. Still not exactly rural, but more manageable."
Lynn examined the map and nodded. He was right, there were more bigger communities outlying Washington to the south than to the north. There was Bethesda, which looked fairly large, but there was a good ten miles between them; Fairfax bled into Alexandria and Alexandria bled into Washington, forming a seething mass of streets, alleys, and dark corners that potentially harbored danger.
She was a little surprised that Lisa never thought of that. Then again, back home she and her sisters called Lincoln 'the man with a plan' because he was always thinking ahead. That seemed so impossibly long ago now, a blip on the other side of a gaping chasm of time. Looking at him now, it was hard to believe that he was the same boy. Heh. Boy. That word no longer even applied to him - he was a man in all but years alone. His face was thinner and more rugged, his arms more defined from months of manual labor, his eyes no longer glinting with boyish light but flat, jaded. His voice was deeper, too, a symptom of that peculiar thing called puberty, but Lynn imagined the life they'd lead over the last two months had at least a little to do with it, his body rushing the process because, in a way, it knew he needed to grow up fast.
That, like many other things, struck Lynn as so unfair it hurt. He should be playing his dumb video games and holding hands with Ronnie Anne Santiago, but here he was, after the end of the world, a man before his time, his parents dead, most of his sisters dead, his friends dead, fighting in a war with no name and struggling just to stay alive. Lynn's arm twitched with the urge to wrap themselves around him and hold him close, to be everything that she could possibly be for him, and for Luan, and maybe they could be everything they could for her.
"Makes sense," she said now, then: "When we get there, where do we go?"
Lisa answered that question before they left Royal Woods, but she wanted Lincoln's opinion - and if it was different, she would accept it no questions asked.
"The White House," he said, echoing their little sister. There is a bunker beneath the presidential domicile, and the building itself is most likely still operative in some capacity. During the last days, there were reports of soldiers deserting their posts (and being executed if caught), and Lisa hypothesized that the military had ceased to exist except close to the president and his cabinet.
"The White House it is," she said.
Afternoon dragged into evening, and dusk fell across the land like a thick blanket. The rain let up just before nightfall, and the western sky blazed orange as darkness swept through the forest. Lynn lit three lanterns and positioned them around the parlor, then sat at the table before the radio: It was big, boxy, and green with more knobs, dials, face plates, and buttons than she knew what to do with. She found one marked POWER and turned it, a loud, abrasive hiss flowing from the speaker. She tuned it, but heard nothing up and down the band but the same white noise that she heard on the CB.
If you don't have hope, though, you have nothing at all. She dragged the handset over, depressed the button, and leaned hesitantly into the microphone. "I-Is anyone out there?" Luan, picking at an MRE with a grimace of distaste, looked up. Lincoln, half standing with his butt perched on the edge of an end table, lifted his brows and glanced back to the atlas in his hands. He'd been studying it for nearly an hour now, memorizing every town, road, trail, and tree between here and Capron Bridge - planning routes, alternate routes, emergency routes: If anything went wrong on the way, he wanted to know exactly where to go and what to do.
"It's useless," he said.
Lynn let go of the button and listened for a reply, but the static was alone. She moved the dial down the band and tried again. "If anyone can hear me, please answer." She let go and listened.
Nothing.
"This thing's powerful enough to reach Washington, right?" she asked Lincoln.
He glanced up and furrowed his brow in thought. "It should be," he said. "I doubt there's much radio traffic, though."
She nodded. True. There were multiple bunkers, though; there had to be a line of communications between them.
Unless everyone was dead.
A pang of anxiety rippled through her chest, and she swallowed. An image flashed across her mind: A bunker teeming with the living dead, shuffling endlessly back and forth, bumping dumbly into the walls and each other, trapped inside by the airlock doors and thick blast-proof ramparts that once protected them. No, not a bunker, a crypt. On a desk, she saw a radio and heard her voice, watched in horror as one of the things went over, picked up the handset, and replied. Come here, little girl; we're all sooo hungry.
She shook her head and the terrible vision dissipated like smoke. There was probably another reason why no one answered. Maybe lines were down somewhere - you have to maintain channels of communication, right? They were like...like pipelines, a vast network with a thousand different moving parts that require constant care and supervision.
Like the power grid. Once the technicians left their posts, it was literally only a matter of hours before it started breaking down. Were the airwaves the same? She didn't know, but she figured they must be.
Sighing, she pushed the handset away and sat back in the chair, her eyes restlessly scanning the room. Firelight bathed the walls faded orange, confining shadows to nooks and corners, where they awaited their inevitable return to dominance.
Later, she got up, grabbed an MRE from one of the boxes in the kitchen, then sat against the wall and ate slowly, the food bland and tasteless but the act of eating, of being preoccupied soothing. It gave her purpose, and the longer she did it, the longer she wasn't stewing in self-doubt. When she was finished, she took a flashlight and went off to explore, starting with the display cases in the parlor then moving onto the one in the hall. Junk. Knives, beads, pieces of history that might mean something to someone but not to her. In the kitchen, she rummaged aimlessly for anything they could take with them. She found rows and rows of canned food in a pantry, and she took a bunch out, sitting them on the table.
"What are you doing?"
She started and dropped a can of beets to the floor; it rolled away and bumped into the baseboard. Lincoln stood in the threshold, arms crossed casually. "Collecting food," she said, then went over and picked the beets up.
"We have plenty of food," Lincoln said.
"We don't have -" she looked at the cans and read one of the labels - "mixed fruit in sauce."
Lincoln opened his mouth to speak, but tilted his head to one side in acquiescence instead. "Can't argue there." He came in and snatched a can from the table, his eyebrows lifting. "Beef stew. Better than that MRE crap."
Lynn snorted. "I thought you liked those," she said playfully. She was at the pantry now, lifting up on her tippy toes to reach a big metal can with PUDDING across the front, her mouth already watering at the promise of sweet, chocolatey goodness.
"I do," he said, "better than nothing."
Her fingertips brushed the sides of the can, and she plastered her tongue to her upper lip in determination. When she got it, she turned and sat it on the table with a big grin. "I got something much better than beef stew." She patted it like a favorite pet, and Lincoln cocked his head to the side to read it. His eyes widened, and for the briefest of moments, that boyish, carefree twinkle was back.
In the parlor, she, Lincoln, and Luan ate bowls of pudding and talked - at one point they even laughed. If you took a step back and squinted, it was almost like old times.
Almost.