Don't Call Me Ishmael Read online

  “Who’s that?” Sam asked.

  “The Blues, I suspect.”

  “You’re not planning to ram them, are you?” he asked, grabbing onto the ‘oh, shit!’ handle again as we quickly approached the oncoming traffic in a high-speed game of chicken.

  “Nope,” I replied as the distance rapidly decreased. Sam braced for the imminent collision, but we reached the end of the concrete divider, and I spun the wheel to the right. I had a momentary view—nothing more than a flash—of the car that went through the space our truck had just occupied. The driver’s hands were on the steering wheel, his arms locked for the crash. His eyes were huge…but so was the pistol the passenger was holding to the driver’s head.

  Our truck slid through the grass, threatening to roll, and I straightened it out to control the slide, but then jerked it back to the left to avoid one of the Blues’ vehicles that had lost control and was rolling through the median. I spun the wheel back to the right as the car came back under control and drove up onto the westbound travel lane.

  “Go! Go! Go!” Sam yelled as the front window spiderwebbed.

  My senses broadened—they had been completely focused on keeping the car from rolling—and I heard the guns—several of them—firing. I floored it again. The wheels spun but finally caught, and we were off again, headed back toward the barricade, but now we were in the opposite lanes of travel.

  “Is this a good idea?” Sam asked, motioning to the lane we were in.

  “Want to go back and ask the Blues if they’d mind if we changed lanes?”

  “No!” Sam yelled as a bullet hit the cab. “Drive! Faster!”

  My foot was already on the floor, so there wasn’t much else I could do. I checked the mirrors—there were Blue vehicles chasing us in both the eastbound and westbound lanes. The ones on the other side of the concrete divider were a little closer as they hadn’t had to slide through the median, and a couple of the sportier cars were catching up to us in our lanes. Sam and I both flinched as another round hit the cab.

  “Here!” I yelled, handing Sam one of my pistols.

  “What am I supposed to do with this?”

  “Shoot them!” I exclaimed, motioning toward the cars coming up behind us.

  “I can’t hit them with this!”

  “No, but maybe you can make them keep their damn heads down!”

  He stuck his head and shoulders out of the window—no small feat at the speed we were going—and fired off several rounds.

  The people at the barricade began firing at us as we approached, although they split their fire between us and the Blue vehicles on the other side of the concrete divider.

  “Get in!” I yelled.

  Sam fired two more shots.

  “Get in, dammit!” I yelled, but Sam just fired again.

  Realizing he couldn’t hear me, I reached over with my right hand, grabbed his belt, and pulled him back toward me.

  After a moment, he pulled himself back in. “What?” he exclaimed. “I had it!”

  I pointed in front of us.

  “Oh, shit!” he yelled. The people at the barricade had called in reinforcements—and I could see more coming—and at least five people were now firing from behind the barricade on both sides of the divider.

  Sam grabbed the handle again as I showed no signs of stopping.

  “You can’t run into them!” he yelled. “The kids in the back!”

  At least he was thinking again. He’d been too scared to realize it the first time it had looked like we were going to crash.

  “I know,” I said with a growl.

  The barricade approached with a ludicrous rate of closure, and I could see several of the people behind the barricade break for the sides as they realized we—along with several of the Blues—had no intention of stopping.

  That proved to be the undoing of one of them as I swerved to the left off the surface of the road to avoid the barricade. I hit him with the right front fender at about 85 miles an hour, catapulting him through the air. I caught a flash of him flying through the air, then he was gone, and all my focus was on regaining control of the truck again as we raced down the embankment.

  One of the cars following us lost control and rolled, taking out a second Blue vehicle. I swerved to miss a light pole in the center of the embankment and fishtailed back and forth as I over-compensated. The car behind me didn’t see it and slammed into it at about 70 miles an hour. The pole snapped down on impact, crushing the roof onto the driver. That car was out of the chase.

  I had just gotten the vehicle under control when we hit the railroad tracks. Slightly raised, the truck hit them and leaped into the air. I don’t know if we actually got airborne, but the truck got awfully light on its suspension before crashing back down on the other side.

  By now the truck had slowed to 35 mph, and I easily avoided the large shrubbery in our path and jumped onto the concrete of the cloverleaf, pouring on the speed again as we approached Highway 49.

  “Shit!” I yelled as I stood on the brakes; the highway had a raised concrete curb. “Hold on!”

  I squared up the steering and tried to hit it as straight-on as I could. We were only going about 20 when we hit, and the truck scaled the obstacle easily as a bullet whined off the road just to the side of me.

  I jumped the truck back down on the other side, crossed a small strip of grass, and then was accelerating up the cloverleaf on the other side. I crossed over to the off ramp—just in time to make it onto the bridge over the river it crossed—and continued toward I-10. As I expected, there was another barricade on this side of Highway 49, just past where the off ramp joined back in, and I swerved off the concrete to go around it. There was only one person left at it, either a young man or an older boy, who did nothing but stare open-mouthed at us as we roared past. I gave him a small salute when I saw him look at me.

  We hit I-10 again, and I floored it once we were stabilized.

  “Is everyone all right in the back?” I asked.

  “We’re good!” George yelled. “Scared as shit and our bruise collection is growing, but we’re all still here.”

  “That turned out okay,” I said. I turned to look at Sam and was just in time to see his head snap forward as the bullet hit him.

  “Fuck!” I screamed at the world in general. As Sam slumped forward, I saw the lead Blue car, paralleling us on the other side of the concrete divider. The driver was sitting as far back as he could so his passenger could shoot at us.

  I slammed on the brakes, and the car shot in front of us. Not seeing anyone in our lane behind us, I came to a complete stop and jumped out of the car. I drew my other pistol as the other car did a three-point turn and came back toward us, and fired three aimed shots at the driver.

  The car went out of control after the third and crashed into the concrete divider, where it scraped its way to a stop. The passenger crawled halfway out the window and pointed his pistol at me, but I fired again and his head snapped back as the bullet hit him in the temple. I strode toward the car, hoping he’d move again, but he didn’t flinch. I got to the car and shot him again in the back of the head anyway. Just because. I hadn’t known Sam that long, but I’d kind of grown to like him. He was the only friend I had—that I knew of, at least—and now he was gone.

  Dammit.

  Good friends are hard to keep in this Fallen World.

  * * * * *

  Chapter Eight

  “You might want to hurry with that,” George said as I went through the Blues’ car, claiming the weapons, ammo, and anything else that looked valuable as a spoil of war.

  I was still pissed off at the man who had shot Sam, and, while I heard him, I didn’t really hear him.

  “I said, you might want to hurry!” George said again. His voice rose a bit this time, and it was enough to break into my consciousness. “Fred!”

  “What?” I yelled back, exasperated, as I looked up from the back seat of the car.

  George pointed back in the directi
on of the roadblock, and I sighed. Two more cars were racing toward us, with a third one a little further behind them. Didn’t these guys ever give up?

  A feeling of rage came over me, and I had an out-of-body experience as I watched myself jump onto the trunk of the car. The driver of the first car immediately changed direction to aim for me, with the second car a little further back and in the outside lane.

  I stood on the back deck of the car and waited as they sped closer. The passenger leaned out the window with a pistol and fired at me several times. I heard one go past and changed my aim from the driver to the passenger. One shot through the head, and he dropped, limp, to hang from the window. The driver looked over at the passenger—he was close enough to see now—and I shot him once through the front windshield.

  The driver had already committed to ramming the car I was standing on—apparently, he’d never been in a car wreck and didn’t know how violent they were—and I jumped to the concrete divider as the two cars slammed together, balancing gracefully on the six inch ledge.

  A man leaned out the back window of the second car as it approached at high speed. He had an automatic rifle, and he began spraying it in my general direction. “Get down!” I yelled to the kids, who were trying to see what was going on, then I aimed and fired. It took me two shots, but I blew out the tire closest to me, and the driver swerved slightly to sideswipe the tangled mass of cars. The man in the back was ripped violently from the window, as was the corpse hanging from the earlier wrecked car, in a spray of blood and body parts.

  I dropped the magazine and slammed in a new one as the car slid to a stop. The third car arrived at the same time, going into a skid as the driver locked up the brakes. It screeched to a stop and four men burst from it, with two more coming from the second car on the left.

  I did a somersault as I flipped from the concrete divider, and I landed in a crouch on the asphalt of I-10. I looked back and forth between the groups as I pulled out one of the pistols I had recovered from the earlier car and began firing both weapons.

  The men on the left were closer and each of my eyes looked down a set of sights as a pistol locked onto both of them. The first man got a shot off before a round from the gun in my left hand hit him in the chest; the man on the right took two hits before he could get off a round. Both men collapsed.

  A round went past my head from behind me, and I dove to the side, taking the asphalt impact on my left shoulder. Pain blossomed like the fires of a sunburst as I opened up my earlier wound. I put it aside and rolled to find the four men from the third car firing at me. A piece of asphalt from a near miss tore open my cheek, then my pistols were in-line. Both fired, and two of the men shooting at me dropped. A bullet grazed my ass as I switched targets, but then I fired again, and the two remaining men dropped.

  Two of the men were still moving feebly so I climbed to my feet, limped over, and shot each of the men in the head. As I looked at the last man, I came to my senses again. The first thing I noticed was that I hurt. A lot. From everywhere.

  The pistols fell from my senseless hands, and I stared at my last victim. Psychopath? Yeah, it sure seemed like it. An athletic one, I realized—I had no idea I could do a flip in the air, nor that I’d ever want to—but psychopath? Yeah, pretty much. Some of the men had been obviously dead, but I’d shot them again in the head, anyway.

  After some time—I didn’t know how much—George came over to stand next to me. He looked down at the man I was staring at.

  “You’re not waiting for him to get back up, are you?” he asked. “I think he’s pretty well and truly dead.”

  “Looks like it,” I agreed, not knowing what I was supposed to do next.

  “You’re bleeding,” George noted.

  I looked down. I had a lot of blood on me. I couldn’t be sure, but most of it seemed to be mine, except for the spray pattern from when Sam got hit.

  “Yep.”

  “I’ve got a first aid kit. Want me to patch some of that up?”

  “Probably be helpful,” I acknowledged.

  “I’ll be right back.”

  He came back and made me take off my shirt, then cleaned and patched me up the best he could. He was also going to put some antibiotic on my ass, but I figured I could do that myself. It wasn’t much more than a scratch, thankfully, and I didn’t particularly want to drop my pants in the middle of I-10.

  He handed me a new shirt. “So, what do we do now? I took dad’s body down the slope so the kids didn’t have to see it, but I don’t have a shovel or anything to bury it with.”

  “We don’t have time to bury it,” I replied. His mouth dropped open, so I added, “The folks at the road block had to hear all the shooting, and sooner or later they’re going to get organized and come find out what happened. If nothing else, they’ll come looking to see what they can salvage.”

  “I can help hold them off,” he offered. “I know how to shoot…not as well as you, maybe, but I can shoot.”

  “When they come, they’re going to come in a big group. We’ll need to be gone. I killed these idiots, but if there are enough of them, they’re going to win in the end.”

  “So, what do we do?”

  “Do you know where Sam’s brother lives in Pensacola?”

  “Yeah, he’s on Perdido Key. I live there too—he’s down the island a ways from me, but I know where to go.”

  “Then that’s where we will head. We can’t go back, and I don’t know of anywhere else we can go to figure out what we need to do next. See what you can scavenge from the guys I killed while I finish patching myself up, and we’ll get going.”

  I walked over to stand behind one of the Blues’ cars so the kids wouldn’t see me with my pants down and put some antibiotic cream on my last bullet wound. With the pain from my other wounds, I barely noticed this one, but I didn’t want it to get infected. I had no idea where the nearest functional hospital was, but I doubted I particularly wanted to go there.

  I was just finishing up when I heard one of the kids. “Dad? Mr. Fred?” the voice asked from the direction of our truck.

  “Yeah?” George asked, more used to answering questions from his boy. It took me a second to realize the boy also meant me. I didn’t know what my name was, but I was pretty sure it wasn’t Fred. But then again, nothing that anyone had called me felt right.

  “There’s a group of cars coming, Daddy,” the boy said. I could see him now; it was the older one. He was standing on the bed of the truck. George must have put him on lookout duty. That made a lot of good sense; I wished I’d thought of it.

  I shook my head, trying to clear it. I knew I needed to focus more, but it somehow seemed like part of me was missing. I knew some things, but others were missing. And then I’d do something like kill a bunch of people without even trying. That was the part that freaked me out the most. How could I kill like that and not remember?

  I filed it away for later and looked down the road. The boy was right; there was a big convoy of cars coming. Unlike the Blues, though, they were being cautious. They probably didn’t know what we were doing when we broke through their barricade—they may not have even known there were two groups that ripped through their forces, but they knew a big fight had occurred, and they wanted to make sure they could get out of whatever they got into.

  In other words, they were smart. I didn’t want to take this group on.

  “We gotta go, George,” I yelled. “Grab what you can.”

  I pulled my pants up, did a quick search of the car, and hobbled over to the concrete barrier. I gingerly made my way across it and back to the truck. The convoy was still about half a mile away and appeared to be in no hurry to come roaring in on us. They were probably trying to figure out how many of us were left; when they realized there were only a couple of adults, they’d probably charge us. I wanted to be gone before that happened.

  “Want me to drive so you don’t have to sit?” George asked.

  “No, you stay with the kids in the back,�
�� I replied. One of the things I realized I was missing was a good sense of compassion. While I could recognize—clinically—the kids would probably be scared and need comforting, I also knew I wasn’t the person to give it to them. George could sit with them and handle it.

  When everyone was settled in the back, I started the motor and drove off. I could see the convoy of cars accelerate once we left. They stopped at the battle site and got out of their cars, while I drove off at 50 miles an hour. I don’t think we left them much of value, but they were welcome to whatever was there as long as they didn’t follow after us. They didn’t seem to be in any sort of hurry to catch us, so I imagined they’d go back to their barricade once they searched the remaining cars. I was happy to leave both them and the Blues behind.

  You take what you can get in this Fallen World.

  * * * * *

  Chapter Nine

  We made it past Biloxi and Pascagoula without any problems. George thought that there used to be a naval shipyard at Pascagoula, which would probably have made it a target during the war. If so, the city probably ate a nuke or two. I-10 was five miles north of the city and its shipyards; I didn’t figure I needed to go any closer, just in case, and hurried past it.

  It was starting to get dark as we approached the Alabama state line, and I figured we needed to find some shelter for the night. Highway 90 ran parallel to the interstate, just beyond a small cleared strip, and I decided to get off the main road. I went across the cleared area, knocked down a small fence, and continued east on Highway 90. About 0.3 miles later, we came to an abandoned restaurant. It looked like crap, and the ceiling had collapsed in the kitchen, but the dining room still had a roof so we took our sleeping bags—I got Sam’s—and made camp as best we could. George and I pushed some of the booths together. There would probably be an army of roaches that would come visit us once it got dark; I didn’t want to sleep on the ground with the entire insect population of Alabama.