Everyone Dies in the End #71

Susan

It was dark, but not completely so. A sliver of moon, maybe as much as a quarter, hung high in the sky, and its light snuck between the fragmented clouds. And then there was also the truck.

She was careful. She wasn't sure, not really sure, why she was following the truck, but she was sure that she didn't want the people in it to know. She had been going to Philadelphia for no reason other than Arty and Todd had been going there. Continuing on the journey somehow connected her to them. Now, however, the vampire and his blonde accomplice had planted the seed of a reason in her head.

All her life she had been about doing good, healing, and loving. The cannibals had taken that away; perhaps she could never get it back. Nevertheless, the vampire had unknowingly placed an opportunity at her feet. Those men at the roadblock were gathering humans, penning humans, for what purpose she wasn’t entirely sure, but it could be for no good. She would unpen them. The thought felt right, and the pentagram on her cheek glowed sympathetically.

Ahead the truck's headlights flashed across an overturned school bus. Afraid she was getting too close, Susan pulled behind a Ford F150 pickup and let the Indian idle. The air stank. The stench of death interlaced with the prickly aroma of burned rubber. She counted to twenty and then rolled out from behind the F150. In the distance the truck’s headlights pierced the darkness, flickering off the vehicles lining the road. Distant enough to continue, she judged.

She accelerated gently, moving at not more than a human’s sprint, using the faint ambient light to guide her. The school bus, drifted by on the right. On the horizon a faint glow puzzled her. It wasn’t a bright, nor specific, light, but rather a general lightening of the horizon. Startled, she slowed, stopped, studied. She laughed as understanding came. It was a sight so common as to be unremarkable a mere three months ago, but now one so unusual as to make her initially wary. They were city lights. The city lights of Philadelphia, brightening the horizon’s sky. Once again she accelerated, headed toward Arty and Todd’s destination, determined to do what she could.

Zak

The pens to which Susan determinedly drove her Indian were not really pens. At least not what Zachary Dixon pictured when the word came to mind. He heard his guards mention them, gathered they were a large holding tank, and gathered wrong. The 8^th Precinct, located on the corner of 4^th and Ivy, in downtown Philadelphia, was the place. Or at least it was this place. Maybe there were more, Zak didn’t know. In fact, Zak didn’t know much, but he was learning quickly.

“We’re food.”

Zak studied the shaggy-haired, scraggly bearded man incredulously. He sat on the cot across from Zak in the small cell. The cell consisted of three walls, and a fourth of nothing but floor-to-ceiling bars that faced the hall. The pale green walls stood bare; a stainless steel sink protruded from the far end of the cell, across from it a toilet, a metal shield affording the user some privacy. Overhead fluorescent lights buzzed brightly. The air smelled of Clorox. Zak guessed the diners like their food clean. Zak had been in the cell for fifteen minutes, his cellmate—a pre-apocalypse lawyer named William—for a month.

“What do you mean? You’re trying to tell me these guys,” Zak gestured in the general direction of the broad, tiled corridor which the cell faced, “are cannibals?”

William pushed his dirty hair away from his face. “No, I’m afraid it’s much worse than that.” And then William explained.

After William finished, Zak said nothing for a long time, contemplating the predicament, working the solutions. There had to be a solution. He didn’t know of any other way to approach life. If you ran into a problem, you solved it. That didn’t mean you bulled your way through it, that wasn’t Zak’s style. Certainly, force was the solution, too often the solution for Zak’s tastes, but there were other ways to approach a dilemma.

“That’s unacceptable.”

William laughed. “No one is asking for our acceptance.”

Zak looked at William, the dirty hair, long beard. “No one, I mean no one, has tried to escape?”

“Do you know a way to melt between iron bars? Can you stop those guards’ bullets?”

           Zak pursed his lips. “No, but I know someone who just might.”