Tracking Blood: Episode 9
An apocalyptic serial
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Stanley felt the fingers around his neck. They were squeezing in tight, cutting off his air. He groped in the darkness until he found his phone next to him on the cold, nylon ground. He unlocked it and held it out like a torch.
The screen just barely lit up the supplies piled up on all sides. He was in his van. As he caught his breath, he remembered setting up the sleeping bag in the back and lying down to sleep.
The fingers. The suffocating. It was a dream. A nightmare.
It only should have been a five or six-hour drive from D.C. to the cabin, but he’d stopped more times than he could count. He needed to log in and see what was happening in the world. The radio had been alive with rising reports of contagion and violence, but he didn’t trust the news media’s coverage of the weather, let alone something as important as this. All the stress and the lack of sleep from the last few days had caught up with him. The third time he nodded off, he pulled over into a parking lot to get some sleep. He was no use to anyone dead, wrapped around a tree and bleeding out.
The air was frigid. It was so cold he could see his breath in the light of his phone. He got up and moved to the front, where he found he couldn’t see out of the windshield. The side windows were blocked, too. As he approached, he discovered that snow had covered them—something the news had not predicted.
“Can’t trust anyone,” he croaked.
A few hours later, he sat in the corner booth at a tiny diner he’d been to a few times before. Outside, the snow continued to cover the ground in a blanket of white. It fell in clumps with hardly any wind to move it around. Back in Washington D.C., April brought rising temperatures up into the seventies, and it almost never snowed. Pennsylvania was a different beast altogether. Snow was still a normal occurrence during the month, usually light, but sometimes more. Some of the largest snowfalls ever recorded in Pennsylvania had occurred during the month of April.
Stanley adjusted the backpack next to him on the seat, pressing it against his side. He wasn’t letting his laptop out of his sight anytime soon, and possibly ever again. A dark-haired waitress came up to his table as he attempted to focus on something other than the newspaper someone had left on the next table. Zombie Apocalypse Grips Denver, the headline read.
“Hey. You’re Steve, right?”
He looked up at her, barely containing his panic. “Uh, no.”
She laughed softly, hazel eyes twinkling. “Yeah, you are. I remember you.”
“You must be confusing me with someone else,” he assured her.
“No, it’s you. You made a pass at me if I remember right.”
He glanced at her name tag. Elaine. “That doesn’t even sound like me,” he lied, remembering her very well.
“Don’t worry, I’m used to much creepier guys trying to get my number. We get lots of folks from the city through here. For some reason they think us country girls are like fish in a barrel.”
What an idiot he’d been, frequenting the same place more than once, making an impression on the locals. He was supposed to be invisible, untraceable, unreachable. Instead, he’d been thinking with something other than his brain the last time he came through.
“I’m sorry, but I have to go,” he said, gathering up his laptop as she watched him with a confused expression. He started to leave, got halfway to the door, turned around and came back to throw a few twenties on the table.
“That’s way too much,” Elaine said.
“Sorry. How much was it?”
She smiled. “You didn’t order anything.”
“Sorry. Keep it. Sorry,” he said and hurried out the door, cursing under his breath the entire way.
The truck sped up I-270 with a full tank of gas, traveling the speed limit and not a bit more. There was no reason to stop and no use risking a ticket. Will wanted to get this job over with quickly and safely.
The I-270 left the city and became the I-70, weaving through rural country. Some time after he crossed the Pennsylvania border, where a simple, blue sign welcomed him to the state of independence, the I-70 gave way to the I-76, where it had apparently been snowing a while. Then the I-99. Then the I-80. Small town after small town formed and fell away, bordered on all sides by farmland.
Will didn’t stop once. He didn’t speak to anyone or even listen to the radio. He drove in silence, focused on the road ahead.
Once he hit the 36, where the snowstorm was really in full swing, he started asking around at every rest stop he came across. Even though he knew his brother wasn’t a fan of them- too many cameras for starters- there was always the chance someone had spotted him. A few small leads sent him up Route 62. He spoke to at least three people who thought they’d seen a poorly kept green van heading in that direction, one of which he actually believed. It was enough to reassure him he was on the right trail- a trail that was becoming snowier by the minute.
Route 62 was where he started to get road crazy. For the first time on the journey, he turned on the radio.
“Governor Matthews has declared a state of emergency,” the reporter said. “He has called for evacuations in the following-”
Will turned the radio off. That was enough of that.
Hearing the news report made him think of Tanya. She’d been nervous about him going away with the mystery virus spreading through Denver. He told her not to worry, that it was impossible for the outbreak to reach them, which he knew wasn’t true. It was possible for the illness to reach D.C., just highly unlikely, especially by the time he got back home.
The night before, after nailing down the first solid clues to where Stan was heading, he’d made the tough decision to wait until morning to leave. The day had gotten away from him, and wherever Stan was going, he was planning to stay put there for a while.
He’d gotten a late start in the morning when his phone alarm didn’t go off, because he hadn’t set it properly. He always kicked himself when that happened, but at least it gave him a chance to eat with his family before he headed out. It made it easier for him to go without seeing them for a little while.
Plus, it was Tanya’s turn to make breakfast.
Ryan had stared at a movie trailer on his phone while he waited for the food to be served. He was already wearing the hoodie he wore out of the house. “No phones at the table,” Will said as he sat. Ryan glanced up at him over the phone. Sensing a losing battle, he put it down. “Thank you,” Will said.
“When you get back, can you take me to see the new Predator movie?”
Will took a sip of coffee. “I didn’t know they made those anymore.”
“A few, yeah.”
“You know I don’t really enjoy those. None of your friends want to go with you? Maybe someone who would appreciate it more?”
Ryan nodded. “Yeah, I guess.”
Tanya shook her head at Will from the stove. He shrugged, not understanding what she meant.
After Ryan left for the school bus, Tanya gathered the plates. “Oh, sweet, naïve husband. I was joking at first, but you are a bit dense, aren’t you?”
Will’s eyes widened. “What did I do?”
“Of course his friends will go with him to see the movie. Teenage boys will see any stupid movie you put in front of their faces. That’s not the point.”
Will thought for a moment. “He wants to go with me.”
“Bingo.”
“But I hate horror movies.”
She motioned to the chair Ryan had sat in. “And he hates eggs, but sometimes we make sacrifices to spend time with people we care about.”
Will was quiet again. “I see,” he said.
She gave him a kiss. “Good luck today, mighty oak.”
Driving now, Will smiled at the memory of her kiss. After a white farmhouse, and just before a small bridge, he turned right onto the next road. He double-checked the name on the GPS.
Route 666.
“You’ve got to be kidding,” he mumbled.
There wasn’t much to stop for on Route 666 other than a scattering of houses and a diner or two. He could only hope that his brother eventually needed to use a restroom or grab some coffee at one of them.
In the first diner, no one was of any help. They barely looked at the picture he showed them on his phone, and they answered his questions in monosyllabic responses at best.
In the second diner, the manager gave him much the same response, but then he added: “We have one girl who just got off a double shift. If he was here today, she might have helped him.”
“It’s worth a shot,” Will replied. He waited while the manager fetched her, watching the snow through the front windows. He nearly left after a few minutes, but eventually the girl came out from the back.
“Sorry,” she said, “I was just changing.” Sure enough, her coffee-stained uniform was in her hands.
The name tag on it read Elaine.
Stanley reached the cabin just before sunset. The deepening snow had made the drive up the private road a rough one, fishtailing his rear tires more than once. There had to be at least three inches of accumulation on the unplowed road already. If it wasn’t for the van and the extra weight he was hauling in the back, he might not have made it up the final incline and onto the property.
He pulled up in front of the cabin and turned off the van, taking a second to check it out from a distance. He was proud of the place, even if it did border on being a shack. It had taken a few side-jobs and way too much eating out of a can to afford it, but it was his to call his own. Or, technically, Steve Agudo’s.
After a quick perimeter check, he unlocked the front door and looked around inside. The lamp turned on, which meant the electricity was still working. So far, so good. He checked the tripwires to see if anyone had been snooping around, but was happy to find they were all intact. He stomped on the floor for good measure.
Everything was exactly as he’d left it. He turned on the two floor heaters and headed back outside to unpack the van. On his fifth or sixth trip back, however, he caught some movement in the tree line.
Stanley stopped what he was doing and focused on the trees. The contrast of the snow helped him see the movement between their trunks, but the failing sunlight took whatever the snow added away. He held his breath and strained to see.
There. A man in the woods. Stanley could make out the outline of a big guy in a heavy coat and hat. The man trudged through the snow some two-hundred feet from where the cabin stood. He had something in his hands, a long branch or a plank of wood or-
A rifle.
It was obvious now the man was a hunter, from the gun to the clothes to the way he stalked through the trees. Hunters were a common sight out in the woods. Stanley had put aside his feelings on killing animals once he’d seen how they did it humanely, and always ate what they took. There was just one problem with the scenario.
It wasn’t hunting season.
He left the rest of the supplies in the van. There was enough food and water inside to last awhile, plus his laptop and any other electronics that shouldn’t spend the night in the freezing cold. After he’d shut and locked the door behind him, Stanley switched on the door stopper alarm and placed it just behind the door. If anyone tried to get in, its 120 decibel alarm would have something to say about it.
He hurried over to the window that faced where he’d seen the hunter and peeled back the corner of the privacy film. The man was gone, off into the snowy woods. There was a good possibility the man was just hunting out of season. It certainly happened, especially in the more remote parts of the forest, but Stanley didn’t want to risk dismissing a man with a gun.
Stanley turned back to the center of the room. He had a lot of work ahead of him.
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