The Hole (4 page)

“Shit,” Elliot said.

“Maybe there’s a gun shop around here,” Evajean said, putting her hand on his arm.

He shrugged. “Could be. But what you want to bet it’s locked up? They don’t leave those places open with big glass windows for junkies to smash and steal handguns.”

“Do you want to not worry about it, then?” Evajean said, voice tinged with the faintest exasperation.

“We should have guns,” he said, looking back in the direction they’d come. “That’s why we came in here. We get back outside, let’s drive through town, see if there’s a store. If there isn’t, or if it’s locked up, we’ll keep our eyes out once we hit the freeway.”

“Small towns off the highway always have gun nuts,” Evajean said. Then, “This is Virginia, you know? We could search houses.”

Elliot shook his head. “I don’t want to do that. It doesn’t feel right.”

Evajean didn’t argue. “Take some of those bullets,” she said. “Might as well get as many as we can.”

Though all this, from the moment they’d pushed the heavy cart ponderously away from the dead woman to their disappointment about the guns, neither had spoke about what the crazy person had said before she’d died. Elliot knew they would, that it’d provide constant road conversation through this leg of their journey, but he’d been consciously avoiding it. He felt put off by his actions, thrown out of whack by the violence he’d found himself capable of. He imagined Callie watching him do it, what she’d have said with her father pounding away with a heavy hunk of metal on another human being until that person, once alive-even if mad-was thoroughly broken. She’d have screamed, first of all, and then run to Clarine and probably never have looked at her daddy with complete and unyielding love again.

Was Evajean feeling the same way? Was she as shocked by his actions as Elliot? He didn’t know and didn’t dare ask for fear that talking about it might force a confrontation and end with the two of them going separate ways, perhaps one to Colorado and the other to Montana. She’d said nothing and that could be a good sign. She’d been more interested in what the woman was trying to say than in how she was trying to say it through a brutalized and dying body.

“Dog food,” Evajean said.

“What?” He wasn’t really paying attention to anything outside of his own thoughts and the swing of the flashlight’s beam, and her declaration startled him.

“We can’t forget the dog food. That thing will never forgive us if we do.”

“Sure,” he said. “I think it’ll be up here on the right.” They were near the front of the store, heading past the empty check out lines toward the pharmacy. Pet supplies were around there, he thought, and was right.

The lack of noises from other store occupants since their fight had them both feeling a little more sure of themselves. They picked up their pace and soon had the cart mounded over as far as it’d go with Ace Bandages, bottles of peroxide and other disinfectants, random medical supplies, and two huge bags of Alpo dry dog food. Elliot found room in the cart to squeeze a plush dog bed, too, and stacked a couple packages of rawhide bones on top. It felt good to be taking care of something.

Outside, with the sun’s light cheering them up immensely, they loaded the truck, somehow making room for it all, and fed the dog. The puppy demolished its pile of food in seconds, consuming half of it and spreading the other half across the back seat. Evajean laughed and Elliot smiled, and they both decided that their next order of business, just as soon as the guns were taken care of, was the give the animal a name. Evajean said she had something in mind but told Elliot to think of his own before she gave away her idea. “I don’t want to prejudice you,” she said.

They pulled out of the parking lot, driving slowly once again, this time not because of obstacles but, rather, because the back of the truck looked like an overstuffed landfill and a tight turn or a good bump would have sent all their hard won supplies tumbling out into the street.

“There’s one!” Evajean shouted. “Back! Go back! You missed it.”

Elliot stopped the truck and looked out the back window. Sure enough, a few stores behind on the right was tiny sign that said “GUNS.” It hung in the front of a mom-and-pop sporting goods shop, right in the middle of a large-and unbarred-window.

“Huh,” Elliot said.

“No gun wanting crazies here,” Evajean said.

Smashing the window proved unnecessary, as someone had been kind enough to leave the front door propped open with a rusting coffee can. “Lucky,” Elliot said and Evajean smiled at him.

“It’s a good thing,” she said, “that not all of us are as gloom and doom as you.”

He shrugged. “The world works out in the end, I guess.”

Elliot pushed open the door and was relieved to see that the store was both tiny and, because of the huge window, well lit. If there was any danger inside, they’d be able to see it coming. “Gentlemen first,” he said and stepped inside.

The sign should have been bigger. The store owners, wherever they’d gone, clearly had a thing for firearms. The store had the requisite racks of jerseys, the cage of leather and rubber balls for various sports, and a kiosk packed with fishing poles and little bags of artificial bait, but the main attraction, which took up an entire wall and several shelves along the back, was a collection of guns significant enough to make Elliot feel rather uncomfortable. True, Virginia was a gun loving state, but these people probably adored the things more than their own children.

“What do think we need?” Evajean asked. “I don’t even know what some of this stuff is.”

Elliot shook his head. “Me too. But we should stick to shotguns like we said. Easy to shoot, and we don’t have to aim. If there’s another person like at the Wal-Mart, I don’t want to miss. I think what we want’s right back here.”

He climbed over the counter and opened a cabinet where shotguns were lined up in a long rack, triggers facing out and locked. “Look for the keys,” he told Evajean as he began pulling the guns out and inspecting them. “Maybe they’re by the register,” he said and pointed.

Evajean started rummaging around while Elliot tried to figure out what the difference was between the weapons he had arrayed out on the counter. Some were shorter, some longer, a couple with double barrels. One had a small clip curving out from in front of the trigger guard, but most just had slots along the top to load shells. He set the one with the clip to the side, knowing he should take it for the security of the extra ammo, but hoping they never ended up in a situation where more than a couple of shots were necessary.

He didn’t like the look of the double barrel monstrosity, sure it’d break the arm of whichever one of them was reckless enough to pull the trigger. After a couple minutes, during which Evajean opened drawers, swore, and closed them again, Elliot had it narrowed down to three, including the one with the clip. “Any luck on those keys?” he called over his shoulder.

“No,” she said, “none. Someone must’ve took them-like after they propped the door.”

Elliot looked at a trigger guard, at the loop of metal set deep into the two halves of the lock. “I don’t think we’ll be able to cut these off,” he said.

“I bet that’s the point,” she said, and bent down close to the cash register drawer. “In here, maybe? It’s locked-but I bet they’re in there.”

“Can we smash it? Pry it open?”

“We can try but it’s probably pretty tough to bust open.” She laughed. “I bet that’s the point, too.”

He leaned back against the case and looked at her. “You’ve been in a good mood,” he said.

“Yeah.” She paused. “Yeah, I guess I have. After that woman in the store and getting kind of a rush, it’s like I guess I feel like we’re actually doing this. We’re gonna find that thing and know what it is. And,” she added, “it’s been nice to think about something other than Henry.”

“Uh huh,” he said, realizing that he’d been thinking an awful lot about Clarine and Callie since they’d left. “Well,” he said quickly, “let’s see about that register.”

In the end, they took it with them, unbolting it from the counter top, and loading it into the truck, along the guns and a bit more ammo to supplement what they’d picked up from Wal-mart. If they figured out a way to open it and found the keys inside, they’d unlock the guns and be done with it. But if the keys weren’t in there-or the register proved particularly stubborn-they agreed to keep their eyes open once again for other places to find guns. That issue temporarily dealt with, they headed out of town toward I-70.

The puppy glanced at them sleepily when the truck started, then rolled over and closed its eyes. Elliot hoped it wasn’t sick.

“What do you think that thing was?” Evajean asked, as Elliot drove the truck at a good clip along the highway, always careful not to overdo it and spill their heaps of supplies.

“What thing?”

“That woman. The one who…” She fingered her ear. They’d patched it up as best they could, cleaning the wound with alcohol and Q-tips, and it looked like it’d heal up okay. Evajean was okay, too, and thankfully didn’t need to be concerned about the plague the woman had carried. It’d been figured out by authorities long ago that the disease couldn’t be spread by bodily fluids.

“I don’t know. She was infected, I guess.”

“But they don’t attack like that,” she said. “At least Henry didn’t.”

“One’s I saw didn’t either, but I don’t know, they did all kinds of other strange things.”

“You mean the babbling?” she said, and pantomimed the rapid mouth movements they’d both become so familiar with.

“That, but the eyes also. And the way she moved. It was like Clarine before I- I had to tie her to a chair at the end, did you know that?”

“No,” she said.

“I did. She kept trying to run off. I thought maybe she was so out of it by then, so far gone that maybe she was trying to find Callie, my daughter, and maybe she thought Callie was still alive. That’s what this woman was like.”

“Searching.”

“Not while she was hitting you, but yeah. At the end, yeah. When she was on the ground and talking to us-and dying-it was just like with Clarine,” he said, realizing he was talking fast but liking it. It felt good to get all this out, whatever it was he was trying to say, and to be talking about Clarine and Callie again.

“But why aren’t they all like that? Was Callie that way?”

“No,” he said. “She got sick the way most of them did. Quiet, talking under her breath.”

“And then she died.”

“Yeah.”

“That’s like it was with Henry,” she said.

They rode silently for half an hour after that, Elliot concentrating on the road and Evajean playing with the dog. She still hadn’t told him what name she had in mind for it and he still couldn’t think of one himself.

There weren’t many cars on the freeway. Most people, when faced with the prospect of widespread death, shied away from road trips, heading home instead to care for immediate family-or just to hole up in the house and hope the disaster somehow missed them. It’s exactly what Elliot had done. This meant that the long stretches of America between the centers of population were empty, vast stretches of grass and trees and farms, viewed from curves of road unclogged by the normal rush of transit. The scene was peace and so Elliot drove, letting his thoughts stumble around memories of his wife and child, the events of the last several months, and the sudden attack earlier in the day. He didn’t bother Evajean, figuring she was doing much the same as he, and they were comfortable.

The still air inside the truck was eventually broken by a quick conversation about how long they’d drive today and where they’d stop for the night. Elliot wanted to go late and keep going until the threat of sleep was too great. If that meant a night in the truck, they’d manage. Evajean couldn’t take over for him. She’d never learned to drive a stick and Elliot had insisted on getting one when he and Clarine had been out shopping for this truck. “I’m gonna drive something like that,” he’d said, “the least I can do is try to make it fun.”

* * *
 

Miles later, Elliot squinted his eyes and leaned forward over the steering wheel. “The fuck?” he said.

“Huh?” Evajean said. She’d fallen asleep, the dog on her lap, and so had missed the thinning of signs of civilization as they got closer to the increased upward slope of the Appalachians. She’s also missed what Elliot was looking at now: a group of five people, moving along the side of the road up ahead in an odd, shuffling jog, arms around each other’s shoulders like carolers lost from a Christmas party.

“Look,” Elliot said, pointing across the dash. “I think that’s more of them.”

Evajean sat up and peered through truck’s windshield, hand held over her eyes to blog the sun. The puppy stood up awkwardly and sneezed. “More zombies,” Evajean said.

Elliot blinked. He hadn’t thought of them as that before, but she was right. That’s exactly what these things on the road were, exactly what the crazy woman in Wal-Mart had been. Zombies. Maybe not walking dead but certainly mindless crazies.

“I think so,” he said. “I’m just going to drive past.”

“You mean instead of stop?”

“Yes.”

“Yeah,” she said. “I don’t think we should stop.”

So they didn’t and the tiny swarm turned their heads simultaneously to watch them as they drove by, all five chattering in their characteristic fashion.

“This is just strange,” Evajean said as the zombies disappeared from the rearview. “Why didn’t we see any of them before?”

“Don’t know,” he said.

A quarter of an hour later they saw more of them. Twenty or so, wandering in that weird gait, were in the left lane, heading in the same direction as Elliot and Evajean. These they passed as well, and the next batch, too, this time maybe fifty shambling and talking at nothing as they walked.

Soon, Elliot had to slow to avoid them. The road was thick with people, all of them clearly as mad as the Wal-Mart lady, sweeping out across the plane toward them in a great wave. It looked like the population of an entire town migrating through the Virginia countryside. The infected moved erratically, often walking into each other or tripping, but they all were alert and focused. Elliot and Evajean stared and Elliot slowed the truck like they were passing an accident.