With a heavy heart, Jake finally made his coveted swerve, then skidded to a stop. He and Grayson both jumped out and ran to the back of the truck to look.
The two passengers lay in a twisted tangle near the mangled bike. Tina had shot the front tire out.
The group jumped out of the truck, and they all ran back toward accident.
The driver still had one battered hand on the handlebars. Blood dripped out of his smashed helmet around tufts of blonde-hair, and his legs lay still, both at a horribly wrong angle. It was obvious he was dead. The face-shield was shattered, giving them a good look at his face. Ironically it didn’t have a scratch on it. Jake could see he was young. Mid-twenties, tops.
The vehicle they hit was a battered mess, too. A human-sized, bloody dent in the SUV was evidence that one of the riders had hit it and literally bounced off.
The other passenger lay in a contorted heap, three feet away.
No movement there either.
Jake gritted his teeth and scowled at Tucker. They should’ve never left Tullymore.
Tina glanced his way, a hard look on her face. “They wouldn’t give up, Jake. I waited. And they were warned. I didn’t pull the trigger until the passenger reached into his pocket. I had to shoot first. But I shot at the tire… not them. I hoped it would give them at least half a chance,” she babbled, obviously feeling distraught at the outcome.
Tarra nodded, agreeing with her friend. “That’s right. One more second and one or all of us could have eaten a bullet. There was nothing else we could do. They forced our hand,” she said angrily.
She jumped into action, running over to the mess, and turned the passenger over, grimacing at the blood seeping through the jeans and light jacket already. Taking a chance, she gently removed the helmet.
To their surprise, a blonde pony-tail plopped out the bottom, same color as the driver’s. The face revealed a young girl, also mid-twenties, and features nearly identical to the driver’s.
She was dead.
Tarra took a deep breath, her face changing from anger to sadness tinged with regret. No one wanted to see two lives so young lost, regardless of the situation. She reached into the young woman’s right pocket. Her face fell even further when all she pulled out was a large piece of paper.
She stared hard at it a moment, confused, and bit her lip. She looked up at Tina with tears in her eyes. “That’s why these damn fools wouldn’t back off,” she said in a shaky voice. She dropped her head for a moment, and then looked up at her friend. “Tina… you couldn’t have known.”
Slowly, Tarra held the paper up for the group to see.
Jake squinted at the paper, and then swallowed hard. He stepped over to Tina, putting his arm around her shoulders and squeezing. She turned and lay her head against his chest, and cried.
The paper said,
“Please Help! 2315 Parpham Drive. Need Doctor ASAP.”
Fifteen minutes later, Jake eased off the gas and slowly rolled into town. The motorcycle incident and the two young lives that had been lost had put them all into a state of subdued shock. But they had made it this far, so they couldn’t waste this trip now. Not if they had a chance of not losing one more kid—Sarah’s baby.
The shock doubled when they came into town seeing what could only be described as the aftermath of a natural disaster.
Only it wasn’t a natural disaster.
People had done this.
People had torn and destroyed their own town.
The area was mostly void of human activity now, but not long ago it hadn’t been. Every shop and store they passed had been looted, ransacked and pillaged. Graffiti had been painted all over the place. Trash cans were overturned. Windows and glass doors were shattered. Cars had been burned wherever they had stopped running, abandoned by their owners—probably after running out of fuel.
They drove by a pawn shop where a small group of men were too focused on breaking and entering to notice a working vehicle driving by. They were using crow bars to try to pry the steel cage off the front of the entrance.
Suddenly, it was opened. They slid up the cage and heaved a brick through the window of the door. Then, they used another brick to punch out the jagged glass.
Jake saw the store swallow up the men, like a big dark hole, as one by one they disappeared into it.
He was surprised to see the pawn shop had lasted that long without being looted. Pawn shops had guns and other tools that would be on every man’s wish-list about now. According to Grayson, you could never have too many guns. You could always use another.
Jake watched Grayson eyeballing the shop, and punched the gas a bit just to make a statement that they were not stopping there. It was too dangerous.
Grayson sighed. Jake ignored it.
There must’ve been someone guarding the store since the grid went down, for it to have remained intact so long. Wherever the guard or the owner was, their leaving was hella bad timing and they’d be coming back to a big surprise.
At least Jake hoped that was the case, and that it wasn’t a case of them having already ‘dispatched’ the owner or guard.
They passed a Gas and Food Mart that had a street sign impaled through the front window, still attached to the long metal pole. It read, “Dead End.” From what Jake had seen so far, this whole trip was becoming a dead end.
On the next block, they watched with disbelief as they passed a liquor store with all the windows broken out. All of the shelves that they could see were bare. In front of it, someone had rolled in a steel barrel that now had a fire blazing inside. A dozen men were gathered around it, all clutching a bottle, drunk as Cooter Brown. The men were too intoxicated to pay them any mind at all. Four women sat against the wall of the store, barely awake. Clothes torn and dirty, their hair all mussed, they looked like they’d been ridden hard and put up wet.
Jake and Grayson both shook their heads in disgust.
Putting aside the fact that they were all drunk, they were wasting valuable burn material, not to mention the liquor, which could be used for antiseptic and medicinal purposes later. It was also warm outside, so they didn’t need a fire for heat… yet. And they weren’t cooking over it either. They were just gathering around it to enjoy the flames and the buzz. Soon the losers would wish they’d saved whatever it was they were burning—and drinking.
Jake sped up, covering five more miles as they all looked around with wide, haunted eyes at this new reality. Finally locating the grocery store they’d planned on checking out, he pulled into it with disappointment. It too, looked deserted.
But looks can be deceiving, and the group would soon find out they didn’t have their eyes open wide enough.
26
Puck crept into the woods, trying not to make any noise. If the girls saw him, they’d just make him go back to bed. He wasn’t a baby, and he was tired of being treated like one. If they would all just really look at him, they would see he was bigger than almost anyone there, even GrayMan.
He was a man.
Just like GrayMan and Jake.
He stopped walking and listened. Someone was following him.
He whipped around. Suddenly, Ozzie came running through the brush, joyfully flopping his head around with his ball in his mouth, sounding like a herd of elephants.