No Direction Home (Book 1): No Direction Home Read online

  Cody stared at him. “What makes you say that?”

  “Nothing like a disaster to turn man back to his natural state,” Walter replied. “That’s when he becomes an animal. A smart one, but an animal all the same.” He glanced at both of them. “You seen any sign of the gangs yet?”

  Cody shook my head. “Nope. I haven’t been out much though.”

  “Yeah, I’ve seen them,” Pete said. “There’s one around my way already. A group of about seven or eight. Men mainly, though the leader’s already got himself a girl.” He hesitated a moment. “To be honest, I’m thinking I might join them. Safety in numbers, they say. How about you, Walter? You want I put in a word for you? You too, kid?” he said, turning to Cody.

  Cody looked at Walter, waiting for him to respond. Walter shook his head. “Not my style, though I appreciate you asking. There is safety in numbers, I grant you, but for that, usually you got to give up the freedom to think for yourself. Gangs run top down, just like the Army. After taking orders for seventeen years, I swore I’d never do it again.”

  Pete looked disappointed. “I’m not even sure they’ll let me join. Not much need for bookkeepers these days. So what’s your plan, Walter? You going to keep on living here by yourself?”

  “Nope, I plan on leaving the city. Soon as I stock up on everything I need, I’m heading for the hills. I’ll hunt and fish, then in a month or so I’ll come down and see how things have panned out.”

  “Wish I knew how to hunt and fish,” Pete said wistfully. “I’m not cut out for that sort of thing. To be honest, I’ve never even tried. Been a pen pusher my whole life.”

  “It’s never too late to learn.” Walter turned to Cody. “How about you, kid? You ready for what’s coming next?”

  “I guess so. My dad taught me how to handle weapons. He lived in Greenville, South Carolina, and used to take me into the Chattahoochee forest regularly. Did plenty of hunting and fishing there. Last time was eight years ago though.”

  “Don’t worry. You’ll get into the swing of it again.” Walter stared at him. “What happened to your father? Did the pox take him away?”

  “No. He died six years ago.” Cody hesitated a moment. “Things ended up kind of badly for him.”

  Walter looked at him sympathetically. “Happened too often to those who served our country. We came back with experiences no one here ever had to deal with. A head full of stuff that don’t just disappear like that,” he said, snapping his fingers. “Everyone back home expected it to, though. That was the thing.”

  Cody nodded. “That’s exactly what happened to my dad. Mom didn’t understand him anymore when he got home. They split up a couple of years later. Then things just got worse…”

  There was more to the story, but he didn’t feel like talking about it. In fact, he was surprised he’d said that much. He hadn’t told Joe about what happened until he’d known him for over a year. Even then, it took a night of hard drinking for it to all come out.

  “Being a soldier takes its toll on families. I know all about that too,” Walter said quietly. “Well guys, you two seem like decent sorts. You’re both welcome to come with me when I leave town.” He smiled wryly. “Everyone needs a little companionship to stop them going batshit crazy in the boonies.”

  Cody’s eyes lit up. “I’ll come. I’d like that. There’s nothing to keep me here anymore.”

  “How about you, Pete?” Walter asked. “You good for that too? Don’t worry, I’ll teach you how to hunt deer in no time at all.”

  Pete looked doubtful. “Maybe. I’m not sure if I can hack it in the forest.”

  “Think about it. I won’t be going for a couple more days.”

  The three talked some more, then a while later called it a night, arranging to meet the next day around 4 p.m. Walter lived close by on Cherry Street, a couple of miles west of the zoo. Pete lived somewhere north of the I-640 loop.

  “I don’t want to seem inhospitable not inviting you to my home,” Walter told the two as they were leaving. “It’s just I need to spend some time alone in the house before I go. Say a proper goodbye to my wife and daughter. I hope you both understand.”

  Cody and Pete had no problem with that. After shaking hands, they all got into their vehicles and left.

  Driving home, Cody felt a sense of relief. He was no longer alone in the world. He’d found a friend in Walter, and would leave the city with him once the two had stocked up on supplies. Perhaps Pete would come with them too.

  Walter had given him the address of a gun shop to go to the following day. Without the Internet, it would save a lot of driving around. He’d advised Cody to stock up on ammunition for the Kimber, also to pick out a semi-automatic rifle, saying an AR-15 style rifle was best. He was to get plenty of ammo for that too.

  Arriving home, Cody felt grateful for one other thing. That he’d buried Joe and Chrissie that afternoon. It would have been hard to return to the house if he hadn’t.

  CHAPTER 5

  In the park close to the Sun Ray Hotel, Jonah Murphy wiped the sweat from his brow. It was midday, the sun scorching, and he felt hot and sticky. His freckled Irish skin was unused to this type of heat, and he felt like a lobster chucked into a pot of boiling water. Still, he was alive and kicking. He and Colleen had survived vPox while a vast amount of the population had not. How many had died exactly, no one was sure.

  He took a swig from his tepid can of beer. The electricity had gone off in the hotel that morning, and in the sweltering heat nothing stayed cold for long.

  “Yer right, love,” he said, turning to Colleen, sitting on the park bench beside him. “Look at us. We really are a couple of statistical anomalies, aren’t we?”

  Colleen took a sip from her Diet Coke. “I still can’t believe it,” she said, shaking her head. “It all happened so fast.”

  The speed of the deadly infection had been incredible. Over the past two days, everywhere the couple had gone there had been people collapsing on the streets, crawling along the sidewalks, retching into trashcans. Horrific pus-filled lumps covered their arms and legs. Their faces became hideously disfigured and blood dripped out of their ears, their noses, even their eyes. Jonah had seen a few zombie movies in his time—it was on that kind of scale. vPox didn’t leave any good-looking corpses behind, that was for sure.

  Unlike zombies, however, the infected didn’t cause any trouble and most died in their homes. After coming down with the initial symptoms, within hours they crawled into their beds, never to rise from them again.

  The Sun Ray lay quiet. Since the outbreak, some Americans tourists not yet too weak, had elected to drive back to their homes. Trapped foreigners such as Jonah and Colleen had stayed on, along with the dead and the dying. A middle-aged American woman had remained too. She’d arrived with her husband and two children, but had been the only one to survive. There was also a German man whose wife had died. Both had looked shell-shocked when Jonah spoke briefly to them that morning.

  “What I can’t understand is how anyone survived,” Jonah said. “I mean…why us?”

  “The most plausible theory I saw on the blogs is that some of us have natural immunity to the disease dating back to the Middle Ages when the Bubonic plague ravaged across Europe.”

  Jonah stared at Colleen blankly. “Yeh what?”

  “A mutation of one of our genes. CCR5 to be specific. Apparently there’s a high concentration of the mutation among Eurasians. It may provide resistance to smallpox, including this weaponized variant of it.”

  Jonah digested all this. “So we’re mutants, that it? Does that mean we got special powers too?”

  “Jonah, shut up,” Colleen snapped. “What are we going to do? How are we going to get home?” she asked, a look of desperation on her face.

  Jonah shook his head. “I don’t know, love. If I knew how to fly a plane, I’d take yeh home in a 747. Seeing as I can’t, it looks like we’re stuck here.”

  Colleen’s lower lip trembled. “I’m so worried a
bout Mam and the rest of the family. I-I just hope everything is all right back home, that it’s not like here.”

  The last thing the couple heard before the Internet packed it in was that Ireland had closed its borders, canceling all international flights and ferries. Jonah prayed that the government had reacted in time. Dublin was a busy European city. People traveled to the country from all over the world, including several daily US flights. It only took one infected person to arrive and Ireland would suffer the same fate as America.

  “She’ll be fine. So will the rest of your family. Mine too,” he said comfortingly. While they didn’t have any children of their own yet, both he and his wife came from large families.

  Colleen caught hold of her emotions. “Jonah, we need to start making plans. We can’t stay in the hotel forever. We need to move soon.”

  Jonah nodded. “The bodies, right? With the aircon off, they’re going to start stinking.”

  “It’s not just that. Once the food disappears from the supermarket shelves, there’ll be no way to survive here in the city.”

  Jonah hadn’t thought of that. “What about the government? Don’t tell me they won’t do anything. Maybe we should just wait until they arrive.”

  Colleen snorted. “What’s left of the government is in an underground bunker right now. They’re not helping anyone. Anyway, what do you expect them to do? Fly down and help out stranded tourists in Florida? Even if there is anything left of FEMA, they’ll only throw us into a camp. Rations will be scarce, and pretty soon the gangs will take what little we’re given.”

  Jonah stared at her suspiciously. “Who told you that? Dr. Arthur bleedin’ Bradley?”

  He knew Colleen’s reasoning came from those crazy books she read. Still, he had to admit, most of the points she’d made had all been realized so far. It looked like the government had kept this thing under cover as long as they could, preventing panic from spreading while they took care of themselves. Maybe the books weren’t as crazy as he’d thought.

  Colleen sighed. “No, Jonah. In this case, Franklin bleedin’ Horton.”

  “Yeah? And who’s he when he’s at home?”

  “He’s a prepper. He knows his stuff. Says we got to figure this out on our own. We got to stock up on food, water, medicine. And guns. Who knows how people are going to behave from here on in?”

  “Then what? Head for the hills and put on funny accents?”

  Colleen stared at him. “Why on Earth would we put on funny accents?”

  “You know, to blend in with the hillbillies. ‘Course, as far as everyone here’s concerned, we already got funny accents.”

  Colleen smiled weakly. “That’s true. God knows what they’ll think of us.”

  “I’ll see if I can snag a banjo somewhere,” Jonah mused. “I’m great on the ‘ol guitar, I should pick it up quick enough. Maybe try me hand at the claw hammer style, like that Ralph Stanley geezer.”

  Colleen had put on a serious face again. “Let’s walk back up to the supermarket and stock up on more food. We’ll load up two trolleys and wheel them back to the hotel. This time we need to get the basics too…salt, sugar, cooking oil. Stuff like that.”

  With no restaurants open, the couple had been making trips to the Publix supermarket at the top of the Kirkham Road. It was a fifteen minute walk away.

  “All right. Then what?”

  Colleen hesitated, and Jonah could see her mind whirring busily. “Tonight I’ll make a list of everything we need to get. Top priority is guns, medicine, camping supplies, hunting and fishing gear, and proper outdoor clothes.”

  Jonah’s ears pricked up. “Did you say fishing gear?”

  Colleen nodded. “Supermarket food won’t last forever. Pretty soon, we’ll need to find it ourselves.”

  There was a determined gleam in Jonah’s eye. “I’ll take care of the fishing and camping gear. I’ve been on enough fishing trips in me life to know what to bring. You figure out the medicine and the weapons. You’ve read enough of them prepper bukes to know what to get. I’m from Ireland, what do I know about guns? I’m not a bleedin’ bank robber.” He cracked a smile. “Though I can’t say I didn’t think about becoming one back when I didn’t have a pot to piss in.”

  Colleen frowned. “Jonah…really?”

  “Before I met you, love,” Jonah added hastily. “Anyway, I blew the idea off. It’s a mug’s game. Anyone I know that tried it ended up dead or doing a stretch in The Joy.”

  Mountjoy, “The Joy,” was Dublin’s main prison. Due to his upbringing, Jonah had many acquaintances that had done time there.

  “Never fancied doing a stretch there. It’s not the free bed or the free food I object to, it’s the free sex.”

  When he saw his constant joking wasn’t going to cheer his wife up, he drained his beer and stood up. “All right love, let’s get cracking. With your brains and my brawn, maybe we’ll get through this thing after all.”

  CHAPTER 6

  Ralph “The Face” Chambers rode down Interstate 75, taking an S-bend at ninety miles an hour. Ahead of him, the highway lay empty. Zero traffic. Normally at this hour, Atlanta’s Downtown Connector was chock-a-bloc, one of the most congested highways in the United States. Not anymore. That was just fine with Ralph.

  He rode a brand new Harley CVO Breakout, a semi-automatic rifle strapped across his back. A week ago, the Harley had a price tag of twenty-five thousand dollars. That morning he’d picked it up for nothing. Breaking into the showroom on Thornton Road, he’d selected his machine of choice. Shortly after that, he figured out where management kept the keys.

  Next stop had been a gun store, where he’d seized a Bushmaster AR 15, picking up plenty of ammunition for it too, along with a bunch of nine millimeter rounds for his newly-acquired Glock 17 that he wore holstered cross-draw on his left. Tucked into a waistband holster behind the small of his back was a Sig Sauer P225, a popular single-stack concealed carry weapon that packed a punch. His just in case weapon.

  Fifty yards behind on his Dyna Street Glide rode Clete Marsden, a pasty-faced Tennessean with a pudding bowl haircut, goatee, and buck teeth, a fellow inmate at the Atlanta Detention Center where Ralph had been awaiting trial for armed robbery.

  In Ralph’s view, Clete was dumber than a bucketful of rocks. If he was anything to go by, vPox wasn’t too picky about who it let live, but as one of only four surviving cons to be released from the facility that morning, he’d allowed Clete to tag along with him. Besides, he owed him an old favor. Ralph was loyal like that.

  By the time of his release, he had a pretty good idea of what to expect in the outside world. First, there had been the rumors coming from the fresh meat arriving at the joint. Something about a virus, one even worse than Ebola, raging across the nation.

  Then there came vague stuff about it on TV, which he’d watched in the common area of the prison facility. Information was sketchy, and what he heard, he didn’t believe. Ralph didn’t trust the news anchors on mainstream media. They were simply a bunch of puppets paid to say whatever some rich asshole told them to. Red or blue, it didn’t matter. Even an armed robber like Ralph, with only a high school education, and not much of one at that, knew the game was rigged.

  Finally, after a few days, another person Ralph didn’t trust much either, the president, came on TV and made the announcement that a deadly virus had hit the nation. From where it originated, nobody knew, but it was the most deadly infection known to mankind, and unlike Ebola, it was airborne, which meant it didn’t require human contact to be passed on.

  The president went on to explain the precautions citizens needed to take so that they didn’t become infected. Precautions that, as an inmate at a correctional facility, Ralph knew he wouldn’t have a whole lot of control over.

  “Damn, sounds like one big clusterfuck,” Jim Demerson, his cellmate, had said, slouched on the chair beside him, a worried look on his face.

  “How long before it hits here? That’s the question on my mind,” Ralp
h replied. “With a bit of luck, it’ll hit the COs all at once and we’ll just walk right out of the joint.”

  Demerson chuckled. “Wouldn’t that be sweet? Matter of fact, I’d laugh my damn head off.”

  Turned out, Demerson didn’t laugh his head off, though not long after, most of it spilled out through his ears, his mouth, his nose, and his eyes. At the same time, large pustules broke out over his entire body. It wasn’t a pretty sight and Ralph did his best to stay away from him. In a six by eight cell, that wasn’t nearly far enough. Trouble was, Demerson wasn’t going anywhere. The infirmary was full and they weren’t taking any more patients.

  Thankfully, as far as Ralph was concerned, Demerson croaked two days later. After banging on his cell door for an hour, two correctional officers dressed in HazMat suits came and stuffed Demerson into a body bag while a third stood by the doorway with a Glock leveled at Ralph.

  The COs weren’t taking any chances. It was the first time Ralph had ever seen a prison guard show up at a cell armed like that. That wasn’t standard procedure.

  “Hey! What about me?” Ralph yelled as a zipped up Demerson got dragged out of the cell. “Damn it, let me out of this cage! You fuckers ain’t even feeding us properly anymore!”

  While the whole facility had been in lockdown, Ralph had only been getting one meal a day, shoved in through the bean slot. It was an indication of how bad things were out there.

  One of the COs shook his head. “Until the warden says different, you’re staying right here, Chambers.”

  “Yeah? When was the last time he said that to your face?” Ralph asked.

  There was no reply.

  “He’s probably dead already, you dumb fuck!” Ralph screamed as the cell door slammed closed.

  For the next while, Ralph checked himself for signs of lesions constantly, certain he was next to become infected. It never happened, though after forty-eight hours with no food served to him, he became convinced he would die from starvation.