Defending Camp

17

Dan had walked through the night until the light had started to break. He’d been exhausted, and he knew he had barely put any distance between himself and his home.

He’d taken a brief nap, sleeping about one hour, hiding himself underneath a large bush.

He still hadn’t gotten out of the suburbs.

Dan took a drink of water. He wasn’t hungry. His stomach seemed to have shrunk down over the last few weeks, and his appetite along with it. He was running on adrenaline now, helping to keep his appetite at bay.

He’d need the food later. He had a long journey ahead of him.

His plan was to get out of the populated areas as quickly as possible. It seemed that if there was going to be trouble, it was going to be from people. He needed to get where there weren’t people.

Maybe not having a vehicle was going to work to his advantage. In the long run, at least. It would have been better to simply drive on out of the suburbs, leave the car somewhere, and continue from there on foot.

If he could just get far enough north, towards the highways, he knew he’d be able to stay behind the cover of the trees that lined Route 100 which ran north into Pennsylvania. After that, there weren’t as many towns, and there weren’t those long stretches of suburbs. At least that was how it looked on the map. It was a little hard to tell.

Looking at the map, the hunting grounds in Pennsylvania looked so close. Only mere inches away.

But in reality, it was days if not weeks of walking. Dan didn’t know how to judge how long it would take him.

One thing kept crossing Dan’s mind, and that was that there didn’t seem to be many people. Most of the houses looked abandoned.

What had happened to everyone?

Right after the EMP, most of his neighbors had fled the neighborhood, driving off in their fully-packed cars.

But where had they gone? Had they gotten stuck on the highway somewhere? Had they met some gruesome violent death at the hands of some unknown enemy?

Dan walked as quickly as he could, despite being horribly tired. His body kept telling him that he needed to sleep more, that it couldn’t go on. But Dan had a strong mind, and he knew that he could push himself. He knew he could take it. He wasn’t going to give himself any excuses.

Dwight Street was up ahead, a two-lane road that cut through the entire suburban area, running west to east. It was lined with businesses. There was a small section of local businesses, mom and pop pizza places, coffee houses, and record stores. The rest of the road had slowly, over the years, been converted into what was essentially a long strip mall.

Dan didn’t want to take out the map out in the open while he was walking. He knew he needed to keep his attention on his surroundings. At any moment, he half expected a door to burst open, or gunfire to erupt out of a window. Who knew what people’s state of mind right now was. They might be ready to shoot to kill on first sight. The fact that he was a kid probably didn’t matter. It wasn’t going to save him. Not with the way things were now.

Without taking out the map, Dan was fairly certain that the quickest path out of the suburbs would require that he head down Dwight for a few blocks. Train tracks ran alongside Dwight Street, and if he could get to them, he could use them as his own personal highway out of the area, allowing him to avoid walking by too many houses and businesses.

He’d be safer on the tracks.

The hard part was getting to them.

Because of the way they were set up, the only access point was the train station. The tracks were on ground that was higher than Dwight, and his only other option would be to try to get behind the business and scale the high wall that led to the tracks.

He knew he wouldn’t be able to do it.

But he’d have to head down Dwight Street.

Just a few blocks, he told himself.

But it was basically the center of the whole area. Commercially and socially. Before the EMP, Dwight was where all the traffic was. Both vehicular and foot traffic.

Dwight was where all the kids had hung out after school, going to burger joints and pizza places, hanging around sporting goods stores and bothering the staff at the coffee shops.

Dan took a deep breath when he got to the corner where Dwight Street intersected the road he was on.

He didn’t let himself pause. He walked swiftly, staying on the sidewalk. He kept his eyes moving, scanning the windows of the stores and restaurants, trying to see if there was any movement inside.

But there seemed to be nothing. The windows were dark, and they reflected the daylight back out, making it difficult to see inside them.

There were cars parked up and down Dwight Street. None were running.

Some of the car doors were open, as if the cars had been abandoned in haste.

Dan saw no one.

It was deathly silent, except for a chirping bird off in a tree somewhere.

Dan hadn’t gotten halfway down the first block before seeing the first body.

It was a woman, lying in the middle of the road. It looked as if she’d been running from something. She’d gotten halfway out of her car.

She lay face down, her long hair fanning out on the pavement. Her back was riddled with bullet holes and a pool of dried blood was beside her.

Dan became fixated with the body. He couldn’t look away for a few moments. It was just so horrible, so disturbing, so unlike anything he’d seen before the EMP, when the world had been well ordered, when people had followed the rules.

The farther down Dwight Street he got, the more chaotically the cars on the street were arranged. It looks as if there’d been some kind of traffic jam, and people had tried to turn their cars around. It also looked like some people had tried to ram their way through other cars, often unsuccessfully, by the looks of it.

There were more bodies the farther he got down the street. Bodies in all sorts of poses. Bodies lying on the ground. Bodies lying on the roofs of cars. Bodies tangled together, as if people had fought to the death. Bodies in multi-person piles, blood surrounding the tangle of limbs and torsos.

Dan was trying to keep it together. He’d never seen anything like this. Keep breathing, he told himself. Just keep breathing. It was something they’d taught them in health class, some kind of relaxation technique. Dan had laughed along with all the other students when the lesson had come up. He’d never taken it seriously. It’d seemed like some sort of joke.

But the memory came back to him now. It was the only thing he had. The only strategy he had for dealing with the horrors of what he was seeing.

So he breathed. Keeping it slow, he inhaled and exhaled like he normally did, trying to keep his attention on his breathing. In any other moment, he would have felt ridiculous. None of that mattered now.

It didn’t matter how he felt.

After a few breaths, Dan realized the breathing wasn’t going to help him. It had been a last resort.

The phrase, “it doesn’t matter how I feel,” kept repeating itself through his head, as if it was some music track on repeat.

It was true. It didn’t matter how he felt. It didn’t matter if he was freaking out. That was a normal way to react.

The only thing that mattered was that he get to the train station, get away from this place.

There was no sign of anyone alive.

At any moment, something bad could happen. Dan didn’t know what to expect. But he could feel the danger in the air.

Maybe it was only his imagination. He hoped it was.

Just when he’d been hoping nothing would happen, something happened. The sound of a vehicle came faintly from down the road. The vehicle wasn’t yet visible.

Dan acted quickly without thinking. He ducked into the alcove around one of the small local shops, his shoulder resting against the front door.

A sound off to his right. Metal on metal. Was the door being opened?

Dan turned to look just as the door swung open.

A shotgun greeted him, pointed right at his stomach.

A shadowy figure of a tall man. An adult, large and imposing there in the doorway.

“Dan?”

The voice was familiar.

The shotgun went down, pointed to the ground.

A strong hand grabbed his arm and yanked him inside.

Being pulled like that, Dan stumbled forward into the darkness of the store. He tripped over himself, and fell flat on his face, his nose hitting the ground hard.

Who’d pulled him inside? Dan couldn’t quite place the voice. His brain was overactive, overly anxious, and he wasn’t thinking clearly.

“Stay down,” said the man.

Dan tasted blood in his mouth. His nose was bleeding, and it hurt, but he stayed there on the ground, face down. Doing exactly what he was told.

Dan heard the lock on the door sliding into place. Metal on metal. It was the same sound he’d just heard, before being pulled inside.

“They’re coming again.”

Suddenly, Dan recognized the voice. It was Joey. Joey from the hardware store. He was an older guy. He had long grey hair in a ponytail, a withered face, and always wore a baseball cap. He had a reputation for always being in a bad mood. Dan knew he drank a lot. Sometimes when Dan had been heading home from the hardware store, he’d see Joey leaving the beer distributor next door with another case of Yuengling.

“Who’s coming?” said Dan, finally lifting himself up off the floor. He couldn’t take it anymore. He wanted to see what was happening.

“Get inside,” barked Joey. “In the back. Go.”

It sounded urgent. Dan got up quickly and rushed into the store. It was dark, except for thin rays of light that came in through one of the windows in the back. Dust was caught in the light, seemingly hanging in the air, making the place seem abandoned, completely disused.

Dan realized he was inside one of the local coffee shops, a place called Perky Times. Chairs and tables were scattered around in a disorganized pattern.

“Get behind the counter!” shouted Joey, coming running into the back from the entranceway, the shotgun hanging over his shoulder.

The vehicle sounds outside were louder, a deep rumbling that came reverberating through the abandoned café.

There wasn’t time to wipe the blood away from his nose. Dan got behind the counter, throwing his pack down beside him, before Joey did.

Joey was older, but he vaulted the counter easily, landing only inches away from Dan’s head.

“What’s going on?” said Dan in a whisper.

“Whatever you do, don’t move,” said Joey, his eyes seemingly fixed on a single point in the ceiling, lying flat on his back, the shotgun at his side, untouched.