Race to Refuge

Chapter Eight: Ty

This time, instead of sounding strong and confident, I went with gentle. "Ginny, it doesn't matter. Your retainer. It's going to be okay."

"But Mom is going to be so mad," she said, eyes moist.

"Ginny, Mom didn't make it." My voice broke a little on the words, even though my voice had finished changing a while back.

"Dad?" she whispered.

I shook my head again. And this time I felt a prickle of tears behind my eyes, too.

"So it's just you and me?" she asked quietly.

I nodded. "But Ginny, I'm going to do a good job taking care of you. I promise."

"You've done a good job so far," she whispered, her voice breaking a little. "You got me out of there. There were sick people heading to the school, weren't there?"

"And we called to warn them," I pointed out. But she knew and I knew that those kids and teachers could only stay in the school for so long before food ran out. The cafeteria didn't exactly plan for an Armageddon when it ordered supplies.

I fished around in the center console until I found the iPod that Ginny had left in Mom's car. "Here. It's a lot to take in, right? Just listen to music for a few minutes while I sit here and think about what our next move is, okay?"

Ginny looked sad. "It's going to run out of battery. And I didn't have a charger in Mom's car."

"Enjoy it while you can. This has been a bad day, right? This is a good day to listen to it."

She fished out her headphones from the backseat somewhere and reclined the passenger seat a little. She looked out the window while I took out a pen and some sticky notes from Mom's glove box to figure things out.

Mom had gassed up the car recently, so that was good. But we were going to need gas, and sooner than later. The van wasn't the perfect car to take because it did use up a lot of gasoline. But I didn't exactly have a choice at the time. I wrote gas on the paper.

The food and water wasn't going to last too long, either. I added them to the list. Although the water purification sticks were really going to help long-term. I could use some more of those. I put Ginny's toilet paper on the list although that was a little more of a luxury item, considering. A better weapon than the ax, shovel, and baseball bat would be good, too.

But if I went to a big store like Walmart, would they know about what was going on in our town? How far had the news spread? I didn't have money with me ... not enough, anyway. If I just walked out with the stuff then security would probably stop me. And if the Walmart had already been deserted by panicking people, then there might be zombies around. Everybody knew you weren't supposed to go to malls or places like Walmart in a zombie outbreak. At least on my game that was something you didn't want to do.

I remembered that there was a sort of country store that was out a ways that Dad and I usually stopped by on our way out to go fishing or camping or whatever. Dad knew the guy who ran it because he'd been there for years. Maybe he could do us a favor and give us some supplies. If I explained what was going on and didn't sound crazy while I was doing it. Wouldn't he think my sister and I were running away? I decided it was my best bet, though. That was in a quiet enough place that if there were zombies there, there wouldn't be too many of them running around. I'd been there enough, too, that I knew where it was. Sort of.

After that, though, where was I headed? I took responsibility for Ginny, but it would be great if I could hand that over to an adult family member instead. Then I thought about Nana. She lived in senior living even farther out of town. I remembered it was a secure place, too—they didn't want their memory care residents to be able to get out so the place was really locked down. And locked down from the inside was a good thing in a zombie outbreak. I'm sure I could knock on the door and persuade somebody to let Ginny and me in—especially with Ginny being so small. They'd probably take pity on us and let us in.

They'd have probably more food on the site than the school would have and a lot less appetite for eating it. And beds to sleep in—maybe an extra room or two. It would be good to sleep hard and then make a better decision about our next move.

Ginny was looking at me with that anxious frown making a line between her eyebrows. I gave her a reassuring smile and she pulled out an earbud to listen to me. "I know what we're going to do," I said.

She relaxed a little, relieved. She didn't even look like she wanted to hear the plan, she just wanted to know that I had one.

I started the car up again and sped down the road until we got to the country store. It looked just the same as always. There was one gas pump outside and the stone building had one of those decorative flags outside that said open. There was only one vehicle there, a pickup truck that probably belonged to the owner. I couldn't remember the guy's name and hoped that he would remember me better than I could remember him. If he could just let us have some of his store stock, we'd be in a much better situation. I could even tell him that the next time Dad came through, he'd be sure to reimburse him. Then his name came to me ... Bo. It made me feel more at ease to know his name ... like we really did have a connection with each other.

I pulled the car right up to the door and hesitated, thinking things through. Maybe I should leave the car running. But was the danger really that close here? How quickly was it spreading? Would leaving the car running make me look like I'm some sort of thief?

Ginny reached for the door handle and I put out a quick hand to stop her. "Hey, Ginny, just let me look around first and make sure the area is clear, okay? Then, if I make a signal, you can come in and help me get supplies."

"You mean leave me in the car alone?" Ginny's face was uneasy.

"Just until I make sure it's safe for you to go inside," I said calmly. But inside, my heart was beating so hard that I was worried she could hear it sitting next to me.

"Don't you need to take a weapon or something in?" she asked, pointing to the bat. I guess she figured that the bat was there to defend us and that I wasn't planning on any recreational apocalyptic playing.

I was surprised. Maybe Ginny was going to adapt better than I thought. "I would, but I'm worried it's going to make me look like a thug. If I look like a thug, I don't think Bo is going to be real motivated to give us free stock." In the distance, I heard gunfire and hesitated again. We were out in the country. Was this just good old boys going hunting for deer? Or was it people defending themselves? "Ginny, listen to me. If I come out now and I've been attacked in some way—scratched, bitten, something like that—and I'm trying to get back into the car, you don't let me in, okay?"

Ginny's eyes were huge and her breath caught. "Ty, I don't want to be by myself. What would I do?"

"You'd drive out of here. As fast as you felt safe doing."

"I don't know how to drive!" A red flush crept up her neck and along the side of her face.

"It's easy." I spent a few moments showing her the controls and the pedals. "I'm even going to leave the car running so that you don't have to worry about starting it up."

"I can't even reach the pedals!" Ginny was definitely about to cry now, and that's the last thing I wanted. And she was pretty short.

"Just sit on the edge of the seat and you'll be able to reach them. Look, I'm going to pull the seat all the way up, just in case. I don't think anything is going to happen. Really." I gave her what I hoped was a confident smile as I heard more gunfire in the distance. Then I took a deep breath and got out of the car, motioning to Ginny to lock the door behind me. 

"Race to Refuge" under pen name Liz Craig is available now on Amazon (at http://amzn.to/1SCKnHa ) , Nook, Kobo, CreateSpace, and other major retailers. I'll post a chapter each week, but if you can't wait, please visit one of the listed retailers for the completed book. Follow me on Twitter (elizabethscraig), sign up for my newsletter for a free ebook at http://eepurl.com/kCy5j , or visit my website at Elizabethspanncraig.com for more information. Hope you'll enjoy the book.