College Road Trip (Z-Fic Novella Honorable Mention) [COMPLETE]

CHAPTER 8: SKIPPING TOWN

It was hard, carrying everything we had collected, including the pizza pan and broken sword, back down the street-- or, rather, it would have been, had Lynette not found one of those giant gray carts that high school bands use to cart around speakers and equipment. The plastic was cracked and stained with a thousand things I didn't want to think about, but it was sturdy enough for me to load everything onto and pull down the street. I had to pull it because Lynette swore that she was going to protect me by whacking anything and everything with her crowbar (because that worked so well last time).

Peter and Lewis were sitting outside the car dealership, looking just as ragged as I felt. Lewis was leaning against the bed of a blue truck, sipping from a can of off-brand ginger ale. Peter was sitting criss-cross-applesauce on the ground, cradling his arm and an identical can. Everything the two of them had gathered-- some clothes, blankets, a chainsaw, basically everything we could have needed, and everything from the trunk and back seat of Peter's car-- was in the bed of the truck.

Lewis stood up straight as soon as we got close to the truck. He set the can on the ground by the truck's back left tire, then met up with us to start taking things off of the cart.

Lynette narrowed her eyes in concern at him. "What happened to you two?"

"Uh... I fell down a flight of stairs and Pete..." With his arms sagging under the weight of a case of water and something much worse, Lewis looked back at Peter.

"What happened to Pete?" I asked, after a full beat of silence. (It wasn't actually silence. I could hear the cart's wheels rolling and catching on the cracks and weeds in the sidewalk, and there was something moaning off in the distance.)

Lewis looked at me, then back at Peter, then back at me. "I, uh--I think he should be the one to tell you, but--"

Lynette's eyes went wide and she stopped in her tracks; I couldn't keep the cart from hitting the back-side of her legs. With worried, flared nostrils, she asked, "He got bit, didn't he? He got bit."

Lewis nodded quickly, urgently. There was something there, like fear or the knowledge of his friend's mortality and impending doom.

"Shit!" Lynette moved her head with the word, sending her two braids flying then yelled, again, "Shit!"

Of course, Peter was able to hear it. We were close enough and Lynette was loud enough that I'm sure it was immediately evident that we were talking about him. "What the hell, Lewis? You told them?"

Lewis nodded.

Scowling, Peter knocked his can to the ground. A few jewel-like drops of ginger ale spilled out and sizzled on the worn, rocky asphalt. "I told you not to."

"We looked it up and it doesn't seem good," Lewis blurted. "Getting bitten is worse than getting the sit in your mouth. The infection can go a lot faster."

"We don't know that I'm infected."

"It's likely."

"Yeah, but we don't know."

"But it's likely!"

"What are we supposed to do, then?" Lynette worried the hem of her shirt in her hands between her fingers, twisting the fabric and cutting off her circulation. "We can't just--"

"I'm the only one who brought a license," he said. "I'm the only one who can legally drive here. If I turn, you're just going to have to kill me. That's the only--"

"No, Peter," I interrupted. "This is ridiculous! None of this was happening this morning and now--"

"Let's just stop talking about it," Lynette suggested. "Let's just load up our shit in the truck and get going, and we can cross that bridge when we get to it. Okay? Okay."

My curiosity was getting the best of me and I couldn't stop myself from asking, "How, exactly, did it happen?"

Peter didn't answer; moments later, Lewis did. "We were taking stuff out of the car, and we took a break. I was texting-- well, you know who I was texting, and Peter was drinking one of the ginger ales we took from the vending machine at the car dealership? And we got attacked. While we were trying to kill it, it managed to bite him."

We loaded the truck in near-silence. This revelation about Peter was a serious dampener on the mood. In a way, it made this whole situation a thousand times more real and serious. How was I supposed to smile my way through this and pretend I was in some sort of fun little zombie apocalypse novella when one of my only friends was going to die, probably by the end of the day? And how selfish was it, to think of myself when Peter was the one infected?

It was nearing evening when we set out, with nothing on our lips except plans of where to go next and sincere regret. There were no jokes here, no little quips, no musings from Lewis. It was a somber time.

"We need to find somewhere to stop for the night," Lynette decided. She was sitting in the back seat with her seatbelt off. She was next to Lewis and was trying to wrap up a wound on his left leg. She had to cut off the top of his tube sock, which was caked in blood and obstructing it.

My arms were still bleeding, but I was up next, so it wasn't like she was neglecting me. I lifted my half-full can of lukewarm ginger ale to my mouth. "Do we want to camp, or...?"

"I think we should go somewhere with walls. More protection, you know?"

"We'll have to actually find somewhere, then." Peter nodded gently. "I'll be on the lookout."

"I know this probably isn't the time--" Lewis winced as Lynette started to clean one of his other wounds, the continued, "But can we turn on the radio? I can't stand the silence, and... I... I don't know. It was stupid. I'm sorry."

"No, you're fine." Without looking at what he was doing (his eyes were still on the road), Peter reached out to turn on the radio. He pressed the seek button. The radio cycled through staticky station after staticky station, only intercut with small bursts of urgent-sounding talk radio and PSAs. It was all snippets of speech-- "If you're close to Salt Lake City" and "Yeah, so my mom has already gotten turned"-- and nothing but static between them. Eventually, we came to one Christian rock station that was still somehow playing through all of this. It was better than nothing, so nobody turned it off.

Eventually, Lynette slapped Lewis's knee. "All right. Kurtis's turn. You get back here."

Lewis and I switched places in a weird sort of climbing-and-contortion combination. It was an odd sensation, but it was over quickly and caused us both minimal pain, especially given the size of the gap between the passenger's seat and Peter's.

As we drove down a deserted desert road toward another ghost town while listening to listen to Christian rock and trying not to cry, scream, or otherwise break, we tried to make things seem as normal as possible. Was there such thing as normal, though, when you were entering the end of the world?