Sticker Price
21 Oct
1200
As my eyes gained focus on the light reflecting off the dusty showroom floor, I saw Saien lying belly down on his drag bag with his rifle scanning the area in front of the dealership. It would be absurd to attempt a head shot through the thick glass, so I wrote this off as him just making sure that things were kosher in the area. The man remained alive, despite traveling hundreds of miles through an apocalyptic wasteland to where he is today. I’m not qualified to question his methods, and even if I were, I am too jaded to care.
I cleared my throat to get Saien’s attention. It took him a few seconds, and then he whispered over his shoulder, asking, “What do you want, Kilroy?”
I didn’t want to argue that Kilroy was not my name, nor did I wish to give Saien an American history lesson, which would be about as valuable as a lesson on the Mayan civilization.
I said, “Saien, we need to clear the garage area and scavenge some wire so that we can reliably wire the wagon for the journey.”
Saien looked at me as if I were an idiot and asked, “Why do we not charge the battery and treat the fuel on one of the new vehicles on the lot?”
Fighting off embarrassment, I had to admit that his suggestion made more sense than spending an entire day wiring an old wagon. Using a factory ignition method would be more reliable, and using a new vehicle could save us a potential breakdown in no-man’s-land.
Despite what he said, we would still need to charge the battery on the vehicle that we would liberate from the dealership. There was a selection of hybrid vehicles on the lot but they were mostly smaller in size.
“Another question, Kilroy: Why do you write in that book? What is so important that I see your nose buried in it when we stop? You are going to die writing in that, you know.”
I wasn’t sure how to answer. I just told him, “It helps.” I think he understood what that meant.
Saien and I debated about vehicles and decided that although the hybrid vehicle would save us from scavenging gas by the order of half, we would need an SUV with a towing package and tow chain to get around all the cars and debris blocking our way from here to our destination. During our discussion I noticed that the sleeping rug that he had rolled and attached to his pack was very ornate. It appeared to be an oriental carpet. I didn’t know Saien, so my first assumption was that he was Muslim and this was his prayer carpet. He has seemed troubled since the action died down and I could see conflict in his eyes.
I suggested that we pick out a vehicle so that we could start the charging/fueling process, and he agreed. Before finding our ride we decided to check out the garage and maintenance office area of the dealership for any threats that might lurk there. Saien put a fresh mag in the MP5, and I was at the ready as we opened the door. Nothing was out there but the apocalyptic silence that still tortured my nerves. The back end of the dealership was fenced off with chain-link. Saien and I walked around the perimeter and saw nothing outside the maintenance area but the corpse of a canine that hadn’t been able to get out of the fenced area to keep himself alive. For some reason this caused me more grief than I had felt for some time. I imagined the poor animal thirsty and unable to eat or drink and just dying on the ground in misery.
With this on my mind I didn’t notice the creature approaching on the other side of the fence. The screeching sound of the creature’s reaction broke me from my thoughts, and I instinctively raised my weapon and put the red dot on the thing’s forehead. Of course, there was no reaction from the creature, and it just advanced into the fence, striking it and falling straight back to the ground. I lowered my weapon, let it hang down on my sling and asked Saien to pop the creature with the MP5 to avoid the noise that my M-4 would create. Right before he carried out my request, I told him to wait. I wanted some more practice with my Glock. I attached the suppressor and gave the creature two to the chest and one to the head, Mozambique style. There was no particular reason I wasted the first two rounds; I just felt I needed the practice. One of the rounds that I aimed at the creature’s chest damaged the fence but still had enough energy to penetrate the creature’s ribs.
I kept my carbine slung and walked the perimeter with the pistol at the ready. There were no other creatures in the immediate area. I did look farther down the field adjacent to the dealership with my binocs. I saw two of the creatures, but they were walking away from my position. If we practice vigilant noise discipline we should be fine—unless we get swarmed like before.
The door leading to the administration portion of the garage building was locked. Saien and I both peeked through the window and stayed there making sure nothing was moving about. My head was planted to the window so long that the glass fogged over, making standing there useless. If there was anything in there it was not moving or was really dead. Saien pulled a small rectangular leather zipper case from his pack and out came a lockpick and tension wrench. Through his clenched teeth, holding another shaped lockpick rake, he asked me to cover him while he worked. Within a few seconds he had the door unlocked and his gear put away. We readied our arms and went inside. I called out quietly, asking if anyone was inside. Of course, I knew that no living thing would be here, but if there was a functioning dead thing inside it would no doubt react to my voice, giving away its own location.
Dust, mold, and a corkboard were the main showpieces of the office. On the corkboard were handwritten notes and messages dated the first week in January. One of the handwritten notes stated, “The End Is Here” and “The time to repent has come and gone.” There were internet printouts of the major headlines broadcast when the world started to crumble. They ranged from, “How Will the Dead Affect the Economy?” to “If Anyone Is Left, This Is It.”
The latter article, printed from the Wall Street Journal home-page, I saw fit to read, and I attach it here:
If Anyone Is Left, This Is It
Hello everyone, I’m . . . well, who cares who I am . . . with the Wall Street Journal. I’m not a columnist or a writer or a newsman of any kind. I’m the Wall Street Journal system administrator. Our generators are at 37 percent fuel capacity and I feel that if I do not get this out the story will never be told. We lost power in the New York metropolitan area early on in the epidemic. Our grid is so fragile it’s a wonder it was working before this happened but I must digress.
Why am I still here? Great question. I was told by corporate that the situation was under control in the building and that I would be receiving a nice promotion for tending the server farms and network issues during the crisis. My family would be taken care of and the company was sending armed security personnel to my home to assist. By the time I figured out that no one was really in control, it was too late to leave.
My family is no doubt dead, as is the rest of the city. I’m safely locked in the server farm here and I can honestly say that I’m very happy that we have thick steel doors as a server physical security precaution, because they would be destroyed by now if they were anything but thick steel. I’m slowly going mad because of their methodical (debatable) and relentless pounding. I ran out of water yesterday and had to bring one of my water-cooled servers down so that I could scavenge the water from the coolant tubes. They hold exactly 1.25 gallons of closed-circuit H2O. It tasted bad but has kept me alive. I’m currently devising a way to evaporate my urine using the generator heat to create water for drinking. With one of the telephoto lenses and a digital camera that I acquired before I locked myself in here, I can see through my window down into the streets of New Zoo York.
I have spotted nothing living down there in a week. The last living thing I saw down there was a police officer running. I snapped a picture of him with my camera as a souvenir of the last living thing in the streets of New York City.
On the overseas news wire I am reading interpreted stories of Europe being actually worse off than the United States, if you can believe that is possible. The U.K. is no different. Apparently their decision to disarm their citizens decades ago did not pay dividends when the anomaly occurred. Of course I am compelled to be unbiased and apolitical in my writing here, but I would love the feel of a rifle in my hands at this very moment. If any of you reading this are safe anywhere with your weapons and prepared, I envy you. I do not think I’ll make it from this ivory tower. There are dozens of floors below me that I’d have to traverse before reaching the street, and for what? The second I hit the street I’d have to start running, but to where?
Did the government information czars cover up any news? Hell, yes, they did. I am an eyewitness to that. We had gag orders as early as January 3 not to report on the anomaly overseas or the situation on the Eastern Seaboard. We had our own “man in black” here in the building personally screening every piece of news that went out with his black Sharpie marker cutting up the First Amendment as if it were a Scrabble rule.
That’s old news, and the average family sitting at home knew the writing on the wall. You can censor the news but you can’t effectively censor the internet. Video and social websites were buzzing with mobile phone footage and photos of the real story. I have archived as much of it as possible on server NYT2 located off-site at our mirror server farm in Wichita, Kansas. That server is solid-state and should protect the data long after the lights go out in the Midwest. There were pictures taken that still jump out at me. I remember America complaining about gas prices before all this. One cell phone image of a gas station sign I saw had gas sitting at twelve dollars per gallon. A week later reports of it going for a hundred dollars per gallon were rumored. A woman sitting in a news van in Chicago uploaded her last days to the net via her phone. She was surrounded and overrun and one of the windows to the van was smashed and three of those things were stuck in the window trying to get in. They were eating the driver as the reporter cried and said her last words before opening the back door and jumping into the crowd in an attempt to escape.
I am all that is left alive on my floor. There is no way down and no escape. Good luck to all of you out there. If any of you see this and are in the area, please stop by for a visit and end it.
Staying alive,
G.R., System Administrator,
Wall Street Journal IT Department.
Saien and I checked every nook of the maintenance office area and moved on to the maintenance bays. After checking the maintenance bays and scavenging some small items that were light and could be of use, we made for the dealership’s key locker to pick out our next ride. After assessing the pros and cons of the various vehicles, Saien and I decided on an extended cab diesel pick-up truck. It was new-looking and seemed in decent working order, other than the tire on the right front being a little low. The compressor in the garage obviously wouldn’t work without electricity, so we will have to find one of those cheap car lighter compressors at some point along the way or we’ll have to jack the truck and use a bicycle pump.
Amazingly, there are no jumper cables anywhere in the area and even if there were, jumping another vehicle would be too decibel-costly. Saien stood watch as I pulled the battery on the Ford and set up a charging station. I wanted to siphon the gas from the wagon but it would have no use on the diesel. Looks like we may be stuck here for at least a day while this battery charges in the sun. I placed the solar charger on top of the truck and put one of my dirty pairs of skivvies underneath to tilt it south. After a full, uninterrupted charge the battery should be suitable to start. I really wish I had access and skill to weld some bullshit over the windshield Mad Max style so that Saien and I could have something durable for our trip and something we could shoot out of without worrying too much. I continued to check the vehicle over where I could. The oil seemed fine and at the proper level and the key from the key box fit the ignition with no problem. The spare underneath the truck bed was full-sized and was full of air. I kept checking my watch. I didn’t want to miss any possible communications during the satellite phone window today. Since the solar charger is being used for the truck battery, I’m forced to keep the SATphone turned off to conserve the battery until the window.
An air of strangeness surrounds Remote Six. Nothing checks out in my head. The odd gas treatment, the Reaper beacon technology and the remarkable solar panel that seemed to charge batteries faster than my commercially bought home panels ever could.
The sticker price on the truck was $44,995. The sticker also stated that this rig got 17mpg on the highway. The owner’s manual said the tank would hold 26.2 gallons of diesel fuel. Using mental math, I calculated that that was over four hundred miles per tank. Hotel 23 was over two hundred miles from here. A full tank of diesel would get me home.
I studied the owner’s manual, specifically on the tire change. Sometimes manufacturers used some ignorant proprietary means of loosening the spare tire or something else. Sure enough, this truck required the owner to assemble some device to crank the tire from the bed frame through the back end of the truck. I saw no value in this and knew that it could mean that we would be in for some trouble if we had to pull a NASCAR pit stop on a road somewhere. I detached the spare and threw it in the bed of the truck, as there was plenty of room. I also took some time to verify the jack lift points. I found a towing chain in the garage and threw that in the back end of the truck to make it easier to clear roadblocks. I also spotted a coffee can full of old spark plugs and asked Saien to gather as much of the ceramic from the plugs as he could and to try to keep the pieces as large as possible. The ceramic pieces could prove useful later for a little B&E.
In a fleeting thought, I disconnected the charged battery from the wagon and took it over to the truck. They were not the same model battery, but I thought I’d give it a try anyway. Saien was using vise grips to crush the ceramic from the old spark plugs while I tried my science experiment. Before I got too involved in this, I walked the perimeter once more to ensure that we were not in any immediate danger of being overrun. Back at the truck I set the wagon’s battery in the spot where the dead battery was. I haphazardly connected the vehicle wires to the battery and went to the driver’s side to see what I could see. I flipped the ignition to power the dash so that I could see the fuel level. I was very lucky to see nearly a full tank in the truck. Diesel was not as refined as gasoline, meaning a longer shelf life, so I decided to see if I could get the truck started without fuel treatment.
I told Saien what I intended to do so that we could discuss the pros and cons of starting up a vehicle out here and possibly drawing attention. It was around eleven when we loaded up the back of the truck to attempt to start it up. Our thinking was that if no undead came to the noise, we’d stay a little longer to make sure our gear was packed properly and that everything else was in order.
I keyed the ignition and the truck sputtered for about five seconds before turning over. I then had a thought about the battery. With gloves, I reconnected the factory-new battery to the truck while it ran so that the alternator could do its job instead of the panels. The vehicle alternator would charge the dead battery much faster than the sun, no matter how efficient the panel.
After reconnecting the truck battery and quietly shutting the hood, I walked the perimeter once more. I saw no sign of activity in any direction around the car dealership. Checking my maps, I estimated about 230 miles or so until we’d reach H23. We should be in radio contact before that time, depending on the transmitter we used. John would be monitoring the aviation distress frequency, so that would be the best way of reaching H23 at the soonest possible time. The trouble would be finding a serviceable VHF radio to make the transmission. It would take about thirty to forty-five minutes to get a decent charge on the battery, so I thought I’d double it to at least an hour to make sure. I opened the door and took in the new-car smell that still lingered despite months of abandonment. Flipping on the heater, I enjoyed the feel of artificial warmth flowing over my hand. It had been a while. With our gear stored in the back, it would be possible to catch some sleep in this vehicle if we picked good spots to hide during the night. On another truck we discovered a bed cover that could easily be transferred to this truck. That seemed useful to keep our gear dry and any undead stowaways out of the back. The next order of business was to take the bulbs out of the taillights and remove all the reflectors from the truck. The only lights I wanted were the headlights if I needed them. The undead were not the only enemy. I covered all the exposed areas with duct tape to avoid any chance of an electrical short. The truck would never be road-ready without a professional welder’s help, but it would have to do for our trip. I flipped on the radio and scanned both AM and FM bands.
Nothing.
Nothing to mark the existence of what once was a bustling medium of information flow.
Consulting the overhead maps, Saien and I plotted our next leg southwest. We are not far from Carthage, maybe fifteen miles. It looks like we need to keep it that way. We would need to head down Highway 79 and veer south to intercept 59. The priority will be to stay on county roads as much as possible and dip into larger roads only when necessary. When I estimated 230 miles, it was a straight-line estimate. Looking at the road schematics overlaid on the imagery, I saw that this could add some time and distance to the trip. We must also consider that we will not be able to maintain the speed limits of a year ago with all the debris and other dangers that lay waiting for us along the way. My cousin James hit a buck in his truck a couple of years ago, totaling the vehicle. That deer couldn’t have weighed more than 150 pounds. Hitting a two-hundred-pound corpse could end our day quickly. Corpses do not try to get out of your way. They are like bugs to a zapper. They don’t care what is between them and the light, they just go.
With the imagery I had received from the drop was a transparent sheet of plastic with two oblong orange circles, another asymmetrical orange shape and a radiation symbol in the bottom right corner. I then realized the purpose. I put the transparent sheet over the map of the region and it showed the fallout areas covering Dallas, San Antonio and New Orleans. The Dallas and San Antonio areas showed extensive damage, but the New Orleans fallout areas indicated a decimated area covering southeastern Louisiana, southern Mississippi, part of southern Alabama and the tip of the Florida Panhandle. After a minute of my jaw hanging slack Saien asked what was wrong. I told him I had friends in all these areas and that I was taken aback to see proof that they were most likely dead. He said he was sorry for my loss and took the overlay from the map, prompting me to move on with the planning. I was confident we could make the outskirts of Carthage in a day if we worked together.
As we sat there discussing our plan, I kept catching Saien glancing down at my rifle. I knew that he wanted to know how I caused the explosion from the day we met as well as the explosion on the advancing undead when we were getting the wagon running. I finally broke down and told him a sanitized version of what I knew. I told him that the drop was from the government and that I had been in previous contact with what was left of them. I explained to him that there was a Reaper UCAV orbiting overhead watching our every move and waiting for me to lase my target with the device mounted to my rifle. I saw no reason to inform him of the beacon device or the fail-safe associated countermeasure.
I showed him the iridium phone and told him that the only time it would be usable would be between the hours of 1200 and 1400 due to the degraded satellite orbit. He asked me who was on the other end, and I informed him that it was always a mechanical-sounding recording with a text situation report (SITREP) and that he knew as much as I did on that subject. I told him that I was headed to a place in the vicinity of Nada, Texas, and that he was welcome to help me get there if he so desired. As San Antonio had been destroyed and that had been his original destination, his silence told me that he had no other place to go. It being late October, we decided to build a fire in the maintenance courtyard for warmth. The October chill was definitely in the air, and last night I was very uncomfortable as I tried to get my few hours of sleep.
Before all of this I loved my eight hours of rest per night. Now I am lucky if I get five hours. I only take what I need as the thought of sleeping away what little life I have left disturbs me. The SATphone is on and I’m just waiting for the call.
2100
A message arrived today at 1350 instructing me to proceed to the next drop point marked on the chart, southwest of my current position, and that the drop will occur tomorrow at 1500 hrs. No mention of Saien or anything else in the message. I checked the chart and circled the next point along our path southwest with the letter S designating the location. The imagery I had in my hands indicated that the area was over a small airport. The drop was located east of Carthage just off highway 79. We have made preparations to leave in the A.M. to increase our chances of finding the drop point. I am not sure how I am expected to pinpoint and navigate to the area on the map with so little detail about exact area/coordinates at which the drop is to occur.
A few hours ago Saien and I decided that we should start a fire to fend off the late October cold. I gathered firewood from outside the fence just as the sun began to set. We stacked the wood and Saien tore a page from a book he was carrying in his pack. I noticed the title, Milestones. The cover was simple, and it appeared that this was not the first page he had torn from the book to make fire. The book looked as if it was missing about half of the original pages. We cooked some of the last remaining heavy foods and filled our stomachs for the long day ahead tomorrow.
“There you go again, writing in your book.”
“At least I’m not tearing pages out of it.”
“Goodnight, Kilroy.”
“Same to you, Saien . . . one eye open, man.”
“Both eyes, my friend.”