The trucks' tanks were full, but there was no guarantee that we would get more gas along the way, especially given our strategy of travelling on back roads and farm roads. We needed to get to the Ohio River using traditional maps, since the demarcations could no longer be trusted, and some no longer existed. Obviously you already know all these stuff from your geography class, but it doesn't hurt to remember. The Ohio River is huge! It rises exactly in the center of Pittsburgh, at the junction of two rivers, and continues to define the borders of the state of Ohio with the states of West Virginia and Kentucky. The river still defines part of Kentucky's border with Indiana and Illinois. The Ohio River ends up emptying its waters into the also huge Mississippi River. Along the course of the Ohio River are found cities of all sizes, from small villages to Louisville. I tell you this just so you get an idea of how much trouble Mike got us into. He wanted to find a fucking village on the Ohio River that was supposedly turned by the US military into a secure, fenced, and reliable base, destined to be one of the points where the new humanity would be reborn. I think the rumors from Canada that Uncle Carlos followed were more reliable and logic than the rumors that Mike pursued.
We embarked on Mike's madness for pure lack of choice. Imagine having to go practically to Pittsburgh and go down the roads following the river along the West Virginia side to the Kentucky border. It couldn't work out, but we needed to find a safe place. It doesn't matter which place, since returning to Lima didn't seem to be an option considered by anyone else. The first leg of our trip was uneventful. The landscape was bucolic, with farms where most seemed to be abandoned. When we saw a gas station, we'd stop to see if there was anything left to put in the car's tanks and we'd go into little shops to sift through what hadn't been looted.
Most of the time, we saw zombies slower than the ones we got used to in the lake, in an advanced stage of decomposition. We cleaned up the critters' place with a certain amount of work, so we explored what was possible. Nothing that was very fruitful: bags of candy, a roll or two of toilet paper, a box of tampons, some aspirin and stomach antacids that were left behind, pieces of clothing, 15 liters of gasoline, toys and lots and lots of Chinese goods of various natures. You know something about apocalypses? Nobody thinks about stealing cell phones! I took a latest generation iphone, very expensive, and it became a useless device. Mike made sure to grab some cables, batteries and electronics in hopes of using them at some point. We got some backpacks of questionable quality, but we couldn't be too picky. My greatest joy was finding new toothbrushes, some soap, a toothpaste from a brand I didn't even like, but so what? I was tired of sanitising my mouth with charcoal.
Brittany was delighted with kittens that were surviving in one of the small stores we scoured. I had to convince her to leave them behind as they were surviving just fine without us. If we weren't able to guarantee food for ourselves, imagine still having the responsibility for an animal? What we did good for these kittens was to open some packets of cat's food, put it in a plastic bowl and leave it there.
We found many abandoned cars along the road, we saw zombies of all kinds, but we didn't see reapers or human beings. We bypassed the places where we knew there were people, it was true, and we also bypassed all the big and medium-sized cities. Still, it was frightening not to see another soul on the road for hours.
Late in the afternoon, already at a critical time, Burt signaled us to enter an apparently abandoned village. We urgently needed shelter, as we already knew that the night belonged to the reapers. The place was a little off the main highway into Pittsburgh and isolated. It had an old appearance, like one of those ghost towns, with a large church and a few houses and small businesses on the outskirts. I believe that village should not have more than 500 people. Some stray dogs were roaming around. They watched us curiously, but we kept our distance: we didn't mess with each other. We parked the car in front of the church, but we changed our minds as soon as we noticed the rotten smell coming from inside it.
"This is not a congregation of our church." Father Hugo explained, already putting a cloth on his face to explore inside. He decided to break a window instead of forcing the door. He looked into the church for a minute and it seemed to solve the riddle. "Collective suicide." He said. "Perhaps the entire village."
"Should we burn the church, Father?" Burt asked.
"Only if we wanted to stay here." He pointed to the sky. "It's going to be dark, Burt. We have no more time."
The place looked like a dump. We chose a decent-looking house a little further away from the stench of the church. I believe it was the best among the others that looked like horror movie sets, unpainted, with dry trees (okay, it was because of autumn) and crows. I never bothered with crows, except when they seemed to set the scene for an Edgar Allan Poe story.
Burt handed Daniel and Mike a rifle. I had my revolver that I didn't share with anyone, so I helped search the house. Burt and Daniel searched the second floor, while Mike and I explored the first floor. There was nothing interesting about that house. From the photograph, it appeared to have belonged to a family of a couple with six children. Well, it makes sense in a place like this whose only distraction seemed to be fucking and having babies by the grace of the lord. When I opened one of the doors and focused the flashlight, I saw someone curled up in a fetal position in the corner of the room. It was a naked person. Rather, it was a child of about 10 years old.
The situation happened very fast. I heard shots coming from the upper floor, and suddenly this person got up and ran towards me, as if it wanted to swallow me. I got scared and first kicked it. The child fell and got up with impressive speed. Meanwhile, the gunfire continued upstairs. I fired the child too, five times, I hit four, but it was enough for this child to fall at my feet. I was shaking so hard, Mike reached beside me and pulled me back, away from that… reaper. It was the first time I killed one, I spent five bullets to do so, I hit four and none of them went where they should: the head.
"Are you okay, Santana?" Burt asked. He was worried.
"Yeah, that… that reaper just scared the shit out of me."
"There were three of them upstairs." Daniel reported. "Devilish creatures."
"They are human beings." Burt corrected.
"They were human beings." Daniel scored. "Not anymore, pal. They are something else now."
"It's reapers!" Mike synthesized.
"They're corpses now." I concluded.
When Mike poked the reaper girl with the butt of the rifle, it was unbelievable, but she was still moving and snarling. Burt and Daniel grabbed gloves and pulled the four reapers out of the house. They dumped the bodies across the street and shot the little girl in the head.
"The house is clean!" Burt decreed. "We need to get in and lock the doors and windows ASAP."
Everyone entered immediately and soon we were locking all the exit doors of the house and windows. We began to hear hideous screams and grunts coming from outside. Yes, it was very scary, and I finally got a sense of why we found Burt, Hugo and Daniel inside a completely locked apartment on our old island. Mike used cables to reinforce the lock on the ground floor windows, and the house's exit doors were barricaded with furniture.
"They react to noise." Daniel explained speaking softly. "When we were silent, reapers didn't try to get into the house. I think they have bad eyesight, but very high hearing sensitivity. It definitely has the memory of an aquarium golden fish."
With so many people in the house, it wasn't possible to be very quiet, but we tried. We hear reapers knocking outside. They'd test the windows and the doors, and we'd be pushing hard to keep those damn windows closed. It was hours of horror. Imagine resisting an invasion, and imagine doing all of that in the dark. I don't know how much time has passed, but to me it felt like an eternity. When it finally stopped, I still spent minutes holding the window. My body ached terribly from the position and strength, but I just couldn't move for fear that if I stop holding on, a horde of reapers would come in and kill us all.
It was Brittany who grabbed my wrist. Silently, she pulled me away from that window and led me over to the couch that was blocking the door. My girlfriend sat me on her lap and that's when I managed to doze off.
...
The impression I had was that I woke up five minutes after I started to doze off. I realized that the day had dawned by the rays of the sun that entered the cracks in the house. I felt a fear from my bones when Burt, Daniel and Father Hugo opened a window to let the light in. They showed us that there were no more signs of danger and we decided to open the other windows.
"They sleep during the day, like vampires." Daniel explained. "The light irritates them and the sun apparently hurts their skin. The only danger we're going to have to deal at daylight is the zombies... or other humans."
With the windows open, we decided to take advantage and look for what was in that house. The running water still worked, which was a good sign. We took the opportunity to shower, and it was a joy to use scented soap after months. I threw away my T-shirt which was dirty, worn and frankly smelled terrible. It was an amazing feeling to wear new and fresh clothes. Then I brushed my teeth with toothpaste! Ah, the freshness... it was indescribable.
Everyone was in renewed spirits after a shower and in new clothes, even if the water was cold as fuck. We decided to probe the house. There was no way to tell if the reaper girl was one of the children of the family that lived there. Reapers are kind of disfigured for some reason. What we did realized was that the longer they were reapers, the more disfigured they became. The house did have resources. We found a rifle and a pistol, some ammo, some canned food, salt, some sugar, prepackaged biscuits, pickles and jam. The rest of the food was spoiled and rotten, and we didn't even dare open the fridge. Carole, Brittany and Joe helped distribute the day's meal. Half canned sardines and corn, one pickle each, half a cup of powdered soup, and some mints. It was rationed food, but at least it was something a lot better than the half cup of crushed dry corn I've had for the last week.
"If we found food and a gun in this house, we might find more in others in the neighborhood." Blaine speculated.
"We have enough food for two weeks or so. That is if we eat that amount every day, and a couple of cookies each for dinner." Brittany explained.
"We can fish or hunt." Burt added.
"I think it's worth to check the other houses out." Finn opined.
"But there are reapers in this village." Quinn said fearfully.
"We have time to search more houses." Daniel said. "We have no option but to search."
"We need to start going down the river now." Mike disagreed.
"If this base exists, it won't disappear overnight. We found a place with provisions and need to explore for our own survival." Daniel argued and I agreed with him. I was in no hurry to go out looking for a military base on the Ohio River without knowing what other kinds of dangers we might encounter along the way. Here, at least, we already knew that there was a church with dozens of corpses and reapers hidden inside the houses. But there was also food!
When we left the house, we saw that the bodies of the reapers we killed the day before were gone. I didn't understand the specifics of the reapers, but since everyone got shot in the head, they didn't turn into zombies. So we speculated that it could be a case of cannibalism, that reapers could feed on freshly killed bodies. We saw that our things in the truck bed were not even searched or moved, a sign that these creatures didn't have the slightest interest in them.
Burt, Daniel, Mike and Finn did house cleaning. I had my revolver, Rachel had a pistol, but we stayed outside, in standby position. I didn't mind being on the "second team" in that situation. They entered the first house, and left it immediately. They made a "many" sign with their hands, then barred the door. That house was out of reach because of the amount of reapers that were there. But they checked the third and fourth house, which only had two reapers. So we cleaned them up.
We found some more canned goods, grains, salt, peppers, seeds, medicine, and two large bags of dog's food, a rifle, cleaning and hygiene materials, batteries, flashlights, a few liters of gasoline and diesel, bottles of drinks, and even a small battery-operated radio. We took everything that was useful to us. While the men searched the second house of the day, Rachel and I grabbed the bags of rations and spread them out on the asphalt. It didn't take long and soon seven dogs came to compete for the pile of food, which should be enough for them for a few days. Rachel and I were proud to have helped these creatures that should have lived in that village with their owners months ago.
We chose the house that didn't have a reaper to spend that night for two reasons: it was one-story, it didn't smell so bad, and it was easier to lock. We locked all the doors and windows, and Carole laid out some candles so we weren't completely dark that night and still spared the flashlights' batteries. But before barricading the main door, Burt and Daniel took two bottles of liquor, made a kind of Molotov cocktail and threw the bottles inside the house that was full of reapers. They ran into ours, and as soon as they entered, we locked the door and barred it. From one of the cracks in the window we saw the house on fire, and it was beautiful.
Carole, Brittany, and Joe served us a feast for dinner: tuna, peas, and cream crackers with a little jam. We still hear some knocking on the house from outside, but nothing like last night. It was certain that we had reduced the population of reapers in that village.
...
The next day, we got into the trucks and headed back to try to follow the Ohio River's course. We avoid Pittsburgh suburb and start a few kilometers later. We had to get on a railway, cross a small bridge over a tributary of the river and we took the main highway. We didn't go even two kilometers when we saw the apparently military barrier. Remember when we heard information that the military had taken over the hydroelectric plants and deactivated the nuclear power plants?
Mike was excited, but I was apprehensive. There was no more state, government, communication system, financial and banking system. There was barely electricity and running water. If there were none of these structures, then there was no army either. It was a logical relationship. Three men dressed in uniforms stopped us. They held rifles in such a way that you could see that these guys had poise and training. But the clothes weren't so neat anymore and, as I said: no government, no army. Those guys might have been in the military someday, but here they were just ordinary people who had military weapons. Whether they were good or bad, we didn't know and it was too late to back down. Burt got out of the truck, held up his hands, and went to talk to the three men. I couldn't hear what they were talking about, but I, on instinct, took my revolver off my leg and put it wrapped in dirty clothes in my backpack.
"What are you doing?" Brittany frowned.
"There is no army anymore." I said.
"What are you saying?" Finn snapped. "Obviously there is still an army."
"There's nothing left, airhead. They are not the army. They own this region. That's it."
Burt came back to us with two of the military men, and we gathered around them.
"Mike was right. There are villages administered by the American army. This is one of them. But it only stays here in the professional part of the hydroelectric plant of interest. They are forwarding the remainder to a colony close by on the Virginia side."
"What kind of professionals are you interested in?" Daniel asked.
"Doctors first, and engineers to work at the plant." The first soldier answered.
"What you guys can do?" The second soldier asked the rest.
"Daniel is a veterinarian. Finn and I are mechanics. Blaine and Samuel are fishermen. My wife is an administrator. All the other boys and girls are quick learners. It's a matter of giving them a chance."
"And you?" The soldier pointed to Father Hugo.
"I am a priest."
"Okay, I'll direct you to the colonel. He will decide who stays here and who goes to the colonies."
The first thing I noticed after we passed the barrier was that from the top we could see the village, and it was completely surrounded. You could see people working on building a wall. The name of that place was Stratton, and it existed prior to the apocalypse precisely because of the power plant. Another thing I noticed was that the village was small, with few houses, and I saw the reason why those soldiers handpicked who stayed and who left. The second thing I noticed: they had electricity.
We parked in front of a power plant building, where there seemed to be a mining company in front of it. There were more soldiers there, including women. They searched what we had in our cars, they did a quick search of us, looked inside our backpacks, and divided us into two rooms: men in one and women in the other. They made us strip, inspected our bodies and looked for bites and scratches. Superficial scrapes and bruises aside, our bodies were clean. I could hear one soldier commenting to another that we were the cleanest walkers they'd seen in weeks. That's because she didn't see us before the shower and soaps. After such inspection, soldier women interviewed us individually. Nothing too deep. When I sat at the table with one of them, I answered the basics about myself.
"Name?"
"Santana Lopez."
"Age?"
"19."
"Profession?"
"I didn't even finish high school."
"Skills?"
"I was a cheerleader, so I'm very agile. I know how to shoot, my father was a doctor and he taught me the basics of medicine, with suturing, first aid, that kind of thing. Six months of the apocalypse taught me a lot about survival."
"Okay, thank you very much. Next."
I left the room and Brittany was next, then Quinn, Tina, Carole and Rachel last. The speed of the interviews really bothered me. It was as if the soldier wasn't really interested in us and had already sealed our fate before we even opened our mouths. I realised that everyone was "interviewed" very quickly, with the exception of Quinn, who took, I thought, about three minutes longer. We were reunited with the men again and we waited an hour under the watchful eyes of soldiers armed to the teeth about our destinations.
"I am not liking this." I confided in Quinn and Brittany. "This is wrong. Are they going to keep the people they want and the rest are going to be sent to a colony? This is all kind of weird."
"We are already here. Trap or not, we've already fallen for it." Quinn resigned.
I looked at Mike. He was hopeful, I could feel it. He was hugging Tina and he had that look that everything would be okay, whereas I was pretty pessimistic about it. One of the soldiers arrived with a paper in hand.
"Listen well. These are the people who will stay here with us, working at the plant and in our village. The rest will be forwarded to our colony. Please join us Daniel Larson, Burt Hummel and Quinn Fabray. The remainder will be forwarded to the colony. You can take your things and follow us."
Daniel and Quinn came to stand beside the soldier who had summoned them, but Burt crossed his arms.
"I'm sorry, but without my wife and son, I can't stay." Burt spoke up.
"Fine, you can go to the colonies with them." The soldier sneered.
Daniel stayed firm at the soldier's side, but I saw that Quinn hesitated. She looked at us, and returned to our group.
"Sorry, without my family, it won't work." Quinn said to my complete surprise.
"All good. You can grab your backpacks and get in the truck." The soldier was totally indifferent to our decision.
"What about our stuff, our trucks?" Burt, as our leader, protested.
"Don't worry, you'll have what you need in the colonies."
Daniel stayed. Well, he was never really one of us. The soldiers kept all the food we could gather, all cleaning and hygiene materials, weapons, ammunition, everything except the clothes in our backpacks. I don't know what was the miracle of my revolver not being captured. Maybe it was because my jeans, in which I had wrapped my revolver, were really smelly and dirty with mud. Because all our weapons were gathered and displayed in our trucks, including the knives, they saw no reason to check further our stuffs. Under the threat of a rifle, we climbed onto a military truck. I confess I had a chill down my spine, because it felt too bad.
Two armed soldiers accompanied us back to the road. We left on the same road we arrived on, but now we were heading towards Pittsburgh. I thought it was all very strange, so I grabbed my revolver and handed it to Rachel. Everyone saw what I was doing, and no one said a word.
Rachel was the best shot among us, and if I were to bet my survival it would be on her skill. She was crap at self-defense and hand-to-hand fighting, but she shot like nobody's business. I could screw up under pressure, Rachel wouldn't.
"You only have five bullets." I whispered in Rachel's ear. "Do what you have to do."
The truck stopped on the highway, just beyond the point where we entered the main road using the railroad. I was afraid, because I quickly understood one thing: there was no colony.
"Why did we stop here?" Burt questioned the soldiers.
"It's just standard procedure. Please come down!" The soldiers said, pointing their rifles at us.
I was the first one down because I was on the edge and I was followed by Rachel, Brittany and the others. The soldiers cornered us to the side of the road, where there was a ravine. I looked down and saw bodies... lots of them. I quickly realised that the colony they were referring to could only be in paradise, or in whatever afterlife dimension there may be. I saw Burt protesting hugging Carole, I saw Father Hugo praying, I saw Finn and Mike trying to react but being restrained by the powerful rifles.
"Rachel..." I said already tearful. She didn't say anything and didn't give me any sign.
They cornered us of the road, where there was the ravine that was, in fact, an open ditch, they pointed their guns.
"Father, if you want to pray for these souls, the time is now." One of the soldiers said.
But the one who shot first was Rachel, accurate, right in the forehead of one of them. The other soldier opened fire, but Rachel shot him too. It was two bullets and that was it. The second soldier went down like one of those scenes where the finger goes stiff on the trigger. Some of us threw ourselves to the ground, others ran. But the shots ended. The first thing I did was check if I was alive. Apparently yes. Then I looked for Brittany. My girlfriend was clinging to Sam, and she seemed to be fine. Rachel was immediately at my side and, like me, she had thrown herself to the ground.
"Rach?"
"I am fine." She said nervously.
I didn't correctly understand Rachel's nervousness at that moment. I thought she was just a little shaken up by the near-death situation. But it was something much deeper. I remember being shaken when I saw a zombie for the first time and also when I killed my first one while still on the island, or when I killed that reaper girl. That made a deep impression in my mind and soul. Rachel had just taken a human life. It was the moral code that was imprinted in our souls and that should not be violated: "thou shalt not kill". I didn't understand it at the time and all I had going for it was survival instinct. I helped her up and that was it.
Mike ran and grabbed one of the rifles. Finn took the other. The soldier who was shot twice was still alive, dying. Honestly, let him agonize for many hours. But not all of us escaped unscathed. Quinn screamed for help. We realized that Father Hugo was hit and was dying. Joe was shot as well, and he did so because he got ahead of Quinn, but Joe's case didn't seem to be deadly as he was clutching his left shoulder and his hand was bloody.
Father Hugo didn't last long. He couldn't even say the last words. Because he was the closest person to the second soldier, who fell shooting aimlessly, he ended up being hit and, in a way, served as an involuntary shield for the rest of us. The guy managed to survive reapers on an island, but he didn't survive an ambush carried out by supposed soldiers who slaughtered anyone and everyone who approached and was not of interest. He died on the asphalt spitting blood. I felt the loss of Father Hugo. He was very good to Abuelita and responsible for getting her to talk to me again. For that, I would be forever grateful to him.
"I wanted to have a proper funeral for Hugo, but we don't have time." Burt rushed us.
"Where are we going?" Mike asked, and it was the question for all of us.
"Away from here." Burt answered.
"My uncle went to Canada." I said.
"I'm sure Carlos had a good plan, Santana, but we're not going to get very far with that tank of gas." Burt showed us the gauge on the fuel tank and it was a little more than the reserve. Guess they didn't need to fill up trucks to butcher people.
We had nowhere to go, we lost all our provisions. We had two rifles, one of which had very little ammunition, and my revolver with two bullets left. We didn't have maps, but we knew that up ahead on that highway we would find Pittsburgh, which was a bad sign. To our right was West Virginia. To our left was old Ohio. There was no bridge to the right at that point, but there were back roads to the left. Burt took the wheel, with Carole in the cockpit. The rest of us climbed back into the bed of the truck. We decided to head back to the village we'd been in because we knew the way and because Joe needed some attention other than putting pressure on the wound with cloths in hopes of stopping the bleeding. Besides, it was already mid-afternoon.
It was a race against time and Burt wasn't very gentle around the corners, but we made it back to the village we were in with some daylight. We parked the army truck in front of the one-story house where we stayed. Burt and Mike did a quick inspection to see if any reapers or zombies had gotten in there, but everything was clear. We put Joe on a bed and Quinn stayed with him the whole time. We locked the house. We already knew that all we would find there was running water because we cleaned it ourselves, and that's what we did: we drank tap water and used the bathroom. There were still reapers in that shitty village, and they heard the noises coming from inside that house. It was a shitty night.