George’s smile faltered when he glanced at Jason. The boy was trying his hardest to look disinterested in the conversation as he picked at the food remaining on his plate.
Jason had always been hard for George to read. From the time they were thrust together in the high school gymnasium alongside hundreds of other refugees, to their endless days stuck inside the church, the kid had shared little about himself. Their isolation had nearly driven George mad as he thought about and prayed for his family constantly. Jason, on the other hand, remained stoic and distant and didn’t seem to mind that they were trapped. All George knew about him was that he had lost his mother, a single parent, during the first few days of the plague. That was it. The rest of Jason’s story remained a mystery. That seemed to be the way the kid liked it.
The quartet fell into silence, the burning question of the moment answered. They sat back and relaxed, enjoying the sound of the slight breeze whispering through the trees and the crickets off in the distance.
After a while, Jeff sat up in his chair and clapped his hands together. Everyone looked at him.
“Well, enough of this lounging around and doing nothing crap. Let’s see if we can find a deck of cards or a board game in this mausoleum and have some fun.”
Megan grinned and went into the house. A few minutes later, she was back with a stack of games she had found in a closet. They decided on Monopoly, and for the next hour or so, until the sun started dipping down in the west, they rolled the dice and laughed with one other.
* * *
They moved a couple of sofas from the family room in front of the French doors at the back of the house and stacked the dining room table and chairs in front of the main entrance. They knew that neither of the makeshift barriers would hold up if they came under assault, but they would decide in the morning whether they should make the defenses more permanent or just move on.
They climbed the steps to the bedrooms, Megan fretting about Jeff’s head injuries, fearing he had a concussion. He laughed it off, but she insisted that it wasn’t safe for him to fall asleep if that was the case. Exhausted, he was prepared to argue with her until George stepped in and offered to stay up with Jeff. They would stand watch from up in one of the bedrooms. When he winked at Jeff as Megan was looking elsewhere, Jeff agreed quickly and the matter was settled.
The two men took the rifles and chose a bedroom with a view of the front lawn. They scrounged up a card table and chairs and settled in for a moonlit game.
“I’m okay, George, really,” Jeff said.
George nodded. “I know.” He smiled as he looked over at the other man. “I saw plenty of concussions back in my football days, and you don’t have any of the symptoms.”
He leaned forward and gave Jeff a conspiratorial look. “But like you said, Megan is going to do whatever she wants, and there’s not much you can do to stop her.”
He winked and a grin cracked Jeff’s face.
“You got that right,” he agreed, snorting with laughter.
“So I figured we would play some cards, shoot the bull, and then take turns sleeping.”
Jeff nodded. “Setting up watch ain’t such a bad idea anyway.”
George just smiled and shuffled the deck.
Throughout the evening they chatted about their lives. George was happy to talk about his wife, Helen, and two daughters, Roxanne, who was twelve, and Debra, eight. They had lived in Wildwood, a suburb of Dayton, for the last ten years, ever since George had gone back to college to get a degree after being laid off by Ford. He was a programmer and worked on special projects all over the region.
“I was on a short one in Gallatin, only about three days’ worth of work, when they began quarantining the area.” He shook his head in frustration. “It was an intense project: sixteen-hour days so they can get you out of there quick. So I stayed in a hotel even though I was less than an hour from home…” He trailed off as he stared out the window at nothing.
After a few seconds of silence, George realized he had stopped talking and looked down at his cards again. “Anyway, I got hijacked by Guardsmen out of my hotel room and tossed into that pit.” His lips puckered with distaste. “They packed us like sardines in that gym, and when they ran out of space there, they started cramming more people into the other schools.
“I tried to keep in touch with Helen, but cell phone coverage was for shit and then died altogether.”
Jeff nodded, recalling a conversation with his sister that had blinked out. It was just as she was telling him about some island off the coast of Washington state, where she lived, where she and her husband were going to try to wait things out.
“The last time we spoke was when she agreed they would stay in the house. We have plenty of food and water in the basement.” George looked at Jeff and smiled ruefully. “I like shopping in bulk at Sam’s.” Jeff returned the smile and nodded. The far-off look came back into George’s eyes. “So we agreed they would stay there. Cover the windows, put some boards over the doors, and wait for me to get back.”
“So…what happened at the gym?” Jeff gently nudged George to continue.
“It was a massacre.”
George relayed his story in short, choppy sentences. He had met Jason and a young married couple in the high school gym, and they had clung to each other as everyone around them started going crazy. Rumors were rampant about what was happening in local cities like Cincinnati and Dayton and how everything was falling apart. It was falling apart inside the gym as well, and it took everything the soldiers had to keep everyone under control. Stories abounded of death squads shooting everyone on sight out on the streets and dump trucks stacked to capacity with bodies slated for huge burial pits. Everyone was on edge, and it did not help that the gunfire they heard outside was getting more constant as the days went on.
One night, the gunfire never stopped. A young lieutenant came into the gym and pleaded with everyone to remain calm, telling them that the situation was under control. Not long after his speech, the lieutenant and the rest of the soldiers were rushed by several hundred occupants of the gym, who had grown tired of hearing the same reassurances day in and day out. As the soldiers and citizens fought and George could hear the cries of the infected out on the streets, he knew it was time to flee.
He grabbed his partners: Al and Jennifer, the married couple, and Jason, who had grown particularly attached to Jennifer during their time imprisoned there. As most of the refugees ran out onto the streets, the foursome moved deeper into the high school. The plan was to get to the back parking lot, away from the soldiers and the infected attackers on the street. Other refugees followed their path, but they lost track of everyone else as they roamed the halls of the darkened building. Shots rang out and echoed down the locker-lined hallways. George had no idea if it was soldiers firing on the refugees or if the infected had already breached the high school, but he had no intention of sticking around to find out.
They finally found their way to the parking lot, and that was when they realized they were in as much trouble as the people on the other side of the building.
There were hundreds of plague victims coming through the woods toward the school. They were already in the parking lot, and some of the other refugees had made it there before George’s quartet. The survivors were struggling to get into the cars crammed in the lot, but some were already screaming and being pulled to the ground, swarmed by the ghouls.
“We started running. I’m not quite sure what happened…it gets kind of fuzzy. I just remember seeing those infected people and wondering how they could still be standing. Their guts were hanging out, and their arms and legs were missing. I don’t really understand it.”