Tracking Blood: Episode 16

An apocalyptic serial

Table of Contents

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Will needed to get home.

He and Stan had spent the night on opposite sides of the floor, neither of them speaking a word to each other. Will had nothing to say to his brother that didn’t end in shouting and punching, which was a problem if they wanted to avoid being detected by the things that were running around outside murdering what few citizens were left.

Lying on the cold floor, he couldn’t think of anything but Tanya and Ryan. How he’d left them alone. How he’d put them in danger. Sometime around three in the morning he’d finally fallen asleep, though a few times he woke up from the sounds of death nearby. At one point, he got on the old computer and sent Tanya an email telling her to stay inside and wait for him. There was no way of knowing if she would ever get it, but he had to try. It felt like throwing a message in a bottle out to sea.

He kicked Stan’s foot to wake him up. “What, what is it?” Stan mumbled, half-panicked. The scrape on his forehead had scabbed over.

“Time to go.”

Stan rubbed his eyes. “Where?”

“Home.”

Stan put up a bit of a fight, but their limited food and water supplies eventually won him over. They combed the hardware store for things they could use, filling a duffel bag with the remaining food and a few tools that might come in handy, including a street map of the Northeast United States.

There was no first aid to be found. Behind the counter was plenty of ammo, but no guns. However, they carried the right caliber for the hunting rifle that sat outside in Will’s overturned truck. He packed some of it in the bag, then added an assortment of other ammo in case they came across any more guns in their travels.

From a glass case on the side of the counter, near the dead body, Stan took a hunting knife. “What do you think you’re doing?” Will asked.

“Trying not to die,” Stan replied flatly.

“You’re still under my custody, you can’t have a weapon.”

Stan stared back at him. “I can’t tell if you’re serious or not.”

“That means I am.”

Stan pointed to the window. “One of those infected people could attack me. I won’t be able to defend myself.”

“Your job is to run when I say run and stop when I say stop. The rest I’ll take care of.”

Stan scoffed. “You’re still the most stubborn person I’ve ever met, you know that?”

“And you’re the most self-centered. Mom did a great job, huh?” Will zipped up the duffel bag and threw it over his shoulder.

Outside, the street was quiet. Either the infected were asleep, or they’d killed everyone they could find and wandered out of town. They decided it was a chance they had to take. Waiting would only give the infected time to come back.

Will kept lookout as his brother climbed through the truck’s broken windshield. Stan found the backpack with his laptop right away, but it took longer for him to locate the rifle. “Hurry,” Will called out. He’d spotted something a few blocks away that might be trouble.

“I can’t find it,” Stan hissed through the open windshield.

“It’s a big gun, how can you miss it?”

“I don’t know.” There was a long pause, then Stan said, “Shit.” He reappeared, holding two halves of a broken rifle. The wood had snapped just under the trigger. The gun was unusable.

“Leave it,” Will said, annoyed. Stan climbed back out with his precious backpack in tow. They snuck away and searched for a salvageable ride in the eerily quiet town.

Only a few cars left on the snowy street, and all of them locked. They avoided pulling on handles in case they set off a car alarm. A blaring sound like that could bring every infected within half a mile. It would only take one wrong move to be the end of them.

Will scanned the horizon. “It’s only a about a mile or two to the nearest houses. One of them has to have a car.”

“On foot? We’ll freeze.”

“It’s not that cold.”

“It’s cold enough to be dangerous,” Stan argued.

“You think so?”

“I do. I think it’s a bad idea.”

“Then I have to apologize,” Will said.

“For what?”

“At some point, I must have given you the impression that I wanted your opinion.”

Stan frowned. “I liked you better before you discovered sarcasm,” he said.

“No, you didn’t,” Will replied

They walked south on the main strip, staying close to the storefronts, but soon they found the only way out of town was blocked. A group of infected had jammed up the small creek bridge. They were trying to claw their way inside a snow plow to reach someone trapped inside.

“Should we help him?” Stan asked.

“We can’t.”

“Maybe we can go around. Over to the left there, if we’re quiet enough-”

“The creek is in the way. It’s too risky to cross the ice this late in the season.”

They turned around and walked back. Will figured if they went north, they could find a way to swing back around and take the long way to D.C. He didn’t care how long the road was, so long as it pointed home.

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Donegan was getting worse. The speed at which the complete breakdown of the charming, halfway decent-looking man was occurring would have been fascinating to watch, if it wasn’t so awful. Even the color of his face seemed to be changing- the eyes especially.

“You’re gonna have to do me in,” Donegan said to Tanya. His voice was ragged, his throat dry.

She shook her head. “I can’t do that.”

“Come on now, lass, you have the easy part. You just have to pull the trigger. I’m the one who has to do all the dying.”

Watching the man cling desperately to his life was hard on Tanya. They’d been hiding in Donegan’s apartment for close to twelve hours now, yet she had gotten no closer to the man than the bedroom doorway. She’d be no good to Ryan if she got sick and died. In fact, she’d be a danger to him. The thought of her turning on Ryan, being responsible for his death, was enough to make her nauseous.

“What you’re asking-”

“You have to do for the boy,” he finished. She looked out at Ryan on the living room couch. He was still asleep, curled up in a tight ball against a folded pillow. “Let me out of these bloody handcuffs,” Donegan said.

“What?”

“Let me out or I’ll fucking kill you,” he hissed. After a moment, he caught himself. “I-I’m sorry, that’s- I didn’t mean to say that.” He looked tired. Ashamed. Tanya felt sorry for him.

“If I did it,” she said, “should I use a pillow? You know, to make it quiet?”

He smiled weakly. “You can if you like, but only to keep the mess off you. That silencer business is just for the movies.”

“Okay, just … just give me a minute,” she said. Donegan looked down at his feet. He was biting his tongue, holding in another outburst.

Tanya left the bedroom and went to the small kitchen. The two guns Donegan had given her were on the counter. One was a shotgun, way too big and loud for what had to be done. The other was a revolver. She picked it up, feeling the weight of it in her hand. She’d held guns before, at the shooting range on the occasions Will took her to practice.

Feeling eyes on her, she looked up. Ryan was watching her from the couch.

“He asked me to …” She couldn’t finish the sentence. Not to her son’s face. Ryan nodded. He looked scared, but he understood. “Don’t watch,” she said.

“I don’t want to.”

She came back to the bedroom to find Donegan rocking back and forth on the bed, struggling against the handcuffs. “Let me go,” he growled. There was so much hatred in his voice, and the words were off, as if he was losing the memory of how to speak. His eyes were almost fully stained red now. “Let me go, you bitch.”

She felt the sting of tears in her eyes. “Please, Donegan.”

“Let me go,” he repeated, except this time he sounded like himself. It made the words take on a whole new meaning. End the pain. Let me go.

She raised the shaking gun until his face was in the sights, his red eyes boring holes into her. He lurched forward, yanking on the handcuffs so hard he tore the skin from his wrist. He did it again, and again, sloughing off his flesh like a pink glove.

“Let me go!” he screamed, his voice like the cries of a trapped animal.

Tanya took a breath and let go.

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Will was pissed. After discovering that both directions out of town were blocked, they had fallen back to the hardware store to figure out what to do next. He realized they needed a plan if they were going to make it out alive. He needed to be tactical, the two of them working as a team instead of two individuals who could barely tolerate each other.

In other words, he needed to ask his brother for help.

“What if they’re not home?” Stanley asked. “How will you find them?”

“I found you.”

“That’s different.”

“Not really,” Will said. “This is what I do. Trust me, I’ll find them.”

Stan sighed. “I’ll help you get back to D.C., but then I’m gone. I mean it. You let me go.”

Will thought about it for a moment. “At this point, the police have more important things to deal with.”

“It’s not them I’m worried about. At some point, if we’re lucky, all this will be cleaned up. But I know you, you won’t let it go. So if I help you, you let me go, and you leave me alone.”

Will nodded. “It’s all about you, Stan. Just like always.”

“Okay. First, we need my van,” Stan said.

Will looked over at him. “You’re insane.”

“I have supplies in my van- food, sleeping bags- and there’s even more in the bunker. We need those things to travel, and depending on what condition Tanya and Ryan are in when we find them-”

“Stop talking.”

“-there’s first aid.”

Will thought about it for a bit. “Shit,” he concluded.

“I saw some boots and hand warmers in that second aisle,” Stan said. “I think we’re going to need them.”

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