Running with the Horde Read online

  I stopped in front of her. I couldn’t just leave her there, she was just a little kid. I set my stuff down and dragged her into the waiting room. She didn’t respond to any of my questions and would not stop singing. Like Rita, she was burning with fever, almost too hot to touch.

  There was no one around who wasn’t acting like they were high, sick and crazy all at the same time. I was in desperate conflict with myself with deep qualms about just leaving a little girl on a dirty hospital floor but there wasn’t anywhere to put her and hell, it wasn’t like she was the only kid in there.

  I thought about carrying her to a room with a bed in it but there was no way I was going back inside the ICU, I had some serious paranoid thoughts brewing in my head. If I went back in there, I was certain I would never make it back out again.

  So I made an executive decision. I looked around the room until I spotted a favorable candidate. He was a young man probably somewhere in his early twenties. He was out cold, sprawled in a chair, one of many arranged in a row surrounding the entire waiting room. His head was resting against the glass of the window behind him.

  Stepping gingerly over people on the lying on ground, I made my way over to him with the little girl in my arms. I set her down on the floor and tried to wake him as politely as I could.

  He wouldn’t wake up even as I got ruder about it. I wondered if he was dead. I couldn’t tell for sure, my medical training was limited to what I’d learned from watching television dramas.

  I grew tired of waiting so I gently pulled him from the chair and laid him out on the floor. It seemed like it would be fine, maybe even more comfortable for him in the long run.

  I retrieved the girl and placed her in the chair. She entertained me with song during this process. When my further attempts to talk to her proved useless I decided I had done my civic duty towards her and she would have to be happy with the chair arrangement.

  As I walked away I heard her switch from singing to growling. When I looked back I swear she was trying to bite the arm of the lady seated next to her. That was enough for me, I picked up my bags and ran out the door.

  Chapter 3

  “A Stroll through Town”

  The dash outside the hospital left me breathless and sore though I only ran about twenty yards. My body was reminding me that I’d been bedridden for two months.

  Only when I heard the doors close behind me did I remember I had no ride, no shoes and no underpants on.

  My exit strategy was poor but there was no way I was going back inside the hospital, not for all the money in the world. I tore open the bag with my wallet and phone in it.

  The wallet went into the front pocket of my scrubs, the phone I tried to use but it was both broken and dead. I threw it in a nearby trashcan with a disgusted sigh and sat down on a bench near a giant security guard who was snoring loudly on the ground behind it.

  As I sat there I thought about that night and how I’d gotten to the hospital. It was most likely that my father had brought me, being that his place was the last place I remember being. But why take me all the way to the emergency room and not make sure I made it inside? It didn’t really make sense, even for him. He was a crazy asshole most of the time but he had never actually followed through on any of his death threats.

  Another alternative was that maybe, in spite all of the evidence to the contrary, I had driven my car from his parking garage to the hospital. If so, maybe my keys were in my pocket!

  The brief exhilaration I felt at the prospect of my car was quickly tempered by the smell that wafted out of my clothes. I held my nose and looked through the pockets anyway. There were no keys inside. The bag of stinky clothes joined my phone in the overflowing trashcan.

  I had no keys but my car wasn’t in the parking lot anyway. This made sense, even if I had driven it to the hospital, it had been two months, I am sure they would’ve long since towed it.

  So I had no vehicle, no keys, no ride, no phone, no shoes and still no underpants on. This was shaping up to be a great day.

  The hospital was a little over two miles from my house and it appeared my only option to get home was to get there the old fashioned way. I could’ve gone back inside the hospital to try a phone but as I’ve stated already, that wasn’t going to happen. So I set out walking east on Osborne Road at a slow pace. This was all I could muster in my weakened condition wearing only hospital booties on my feet.

  The world around me was busy on that early afternoon in the hot July sun. Not regular busy but bizarro busy. The kind of busy one might expect to see just after a catastrophic global economic crash or in the hours following the beginning of World War 3. I saw more sick people, they were scattered around the sidewalks and lawns, acting just as crazy as the folks in the hospital.

  There were a lot of people who didn’t appear sick as well as I strolled through the neighborhoods. These people were busy boarding up the doors and windows in their homes. Others were packing cars and trucks with everything they could carry.

  The streets were bumper to bumper with vehicles crawling at a snail’s pace. Tempers were high and patience was at a premium, the air was an angry jumble of shrill horns and raised voices with the occasional fender bender mixed in for extra spice.

  A minivan I shadowed for three blocks idled to a stop at an intersection I was crossing. It was so laden down with people and crap that its undercarriage was scraping the ground.

  A little boy had plastered his hands and face to the rear window, he waved at me as the van slowly rolled away spouting angry black exhaust from its tailpipe. I gave him a weak wave in return before I suddenly started crying.

  For some reason he seemed to represent normal and normal had just left me behind. Turns out I was premature on that farewell as I caught the same minivan again at the end of the next block. This time I didn’t look at the boy but could still feel him staring at me.

  After a half mile I turned south on Central Avenue, with the booties starting to rub my feet raw. I ended up taking them off and just going barefoot.

  As I desperately tried to avoid stepping on anything sharp, I noticed a definite military presence on the road. When I say noticed, what I mean is that I was nearly run over by a caravan of olive-green military transport vehicles loaded with men in fatigues carrying assault rifles.

  They flew by me at a serious clip, driving on the shoulder of the highway to get around the regular traffic. I actually had to dive into the ditch to avoid death or serious bodily harm.

  They didn’t stop to check on me, they didn’t even honk. I managed to scream a weak “hey” at them but I’m not sure they heard me as they sped by. I briefly considered my middle finger but thought better of it. One should never taunt a group of armed angry men, it’s just bad business.

  As I climbed out of the ditch and tried to brush the dirt from my scrubs, I thought about the troops I’d just seen. I had always known conceptually that there were military people stationed in Minnesota. I had just never actually seen them around doing military stuff. I figured they were the National Guard or something but I was really only guessing.

  I had driven by Fort Snelling on my way to the airport several times but I had never had reason to give it much thought. It was just a historic place where my grandfather was buried. Now it seemed like the Pentagon in my mind. If they were active in a city like Friendly, of all places, things must be very bad indeed.

  On the corner of 73rd and Central there was a gas station. It was the kind of place an average person generally doesn’t visit unless there are no alternatives. This isn’t usually a conscious decision with these types of places. People drive by them all the time but just don’t really notice them. It had one of those generic names these places have like; Drive up Gas Place for Less! Or Super United American Vacation Gas!

  This particular place wasn’t having a good day. I stood in shocked silence on the corner with a handful of gawkers as it was being aggressively looted. There had to be thirty people on the property and i
n the store just running out with armloads of stuff and stealing gas.

  The owner, he was too emotionally involved to be anything else, was shouting at the top of his lungs for them to stop or for someone to help him. He tried physically stopping a few people himself but that didn’t work out. Nobody did help him, including me. If I had been closer I may have advised him to cut his losses and run for it. Sometimes the odds just aren’t in a person’s favor.

  The owner was on his knees wailing as people smashed the glass storefront behind him. I could see his face was covered in blood. Instead of rushing to his aid, I took it as my cue to leave and resumed my journey home.

  I often see that man now through the window of my memory. He is sitting on the hot pavement rocking back and forth as tendrils of smoke from a fire in the store curl up around him. It’s the picture that pops into my mind from time to time when I start thinking I am a decent person. That vivid scene reminds me that I’m not.

  The walk home wasn’t entirely chaotic. The giant car dealership was shut down and abandoned but otherwise seemed no worse for the wear. Of course, at some point during my coma it had been fenced in and ringed with barbed wire, which always helps.

  There were also a number of mom and pop places along the way in little micro malls. They seemed fine but then they sold things like bait and offered doll repair, specialties which probably didn’t rank as high on a looter’s wish list as food and gas.

  The big brand gas station I passed was very crowded but still in operation. Gas was selling at over 12 dollars a gallon. If anyone deserved a little looting it was that place but that would’ve been difficult, they had some of those armed men in fatigues keeping things orderly.

  At Mississippi Street I decided to head east and walk up some of the side streets for my last mile home. My decision to avoid walking any further down Central Avenue was due largely to the giant plumes of smoke I could see billowing on the horizon. There was a complex of strip malls up ahead. I had to assume they were burning and I didn’t want to see that.

  Things were busy but far less tumultuous as I walked deeper into the neighborhood. It was more like the area around the hospital, lots of barricading and lots of leaving going on.

  …

  New Brightown, the city that works for you!

  I felt relief roll through me as I read the sign that separated Friendly from New Brightown. This had been my quiet little neighborhood since two years after I finished college and got a job as a project manager up the road at a company that made pacemakers.

  Both my job and my house irritated the hell out of my father who was a big-city guy with serious control issues were it concerned his only child.

  He also harbored a peculiar hatred for the northern suburbs of Minneapolis. He didn’t talk to me for an entire year after I moved out of his place and bought my house. Rankling my dad and wanting some space for myself were my main drivers for doing it in the first place so I wasn’t the least bit sad during our temporary estrangement.

  At long last I made it to the head of my precious little cul-de-sac; it was all I could do not to sprint the half a block to my house. For a moment I could only think of my bed. In that moment all was right in the world.

  Chapter 4

  “Homecoming”

  Serendipity Lane was my little slice of suburban heaven. I lived in a blue two-story house with a big front porch and an attached garage.

  It was one of the bigger houses on the block and kind of stood out. I had no business owning it. The place was way bigger than anything a single man would ever need. Half of the rooms weren’t even furnished. But I bought it at a steal when real-estate was in the toilet. The guy that built it had grown-up kids and a wife who wanted to see Arizona on a permanent basis. He just wanted out and I was in the right place at the right time.

  A good half of my neighbors were out and busy with some form of post-apocalyptic preparation. My walk home had dulled me to the strangeness of these endeavors. The other houses seemed dark and vacant like the owners had already left.

  I didn’t know my neighbors very well or at all in most cases, I was kind of anti-social that way. But the folks that were out stopped what they were doing to ogle me as I made my way up the block to my house. That made things seem normal so it was kind of comforting. I looked like an escaped mental patient so people should have been staring at me.

  It wasn’t my first walk of shame but it was my most memorable. I waved at a few people I knew very casually but they didn’t wave back, this didn’t surprise me but I still felt bad. When I saw the condition of my lawn I figured out why I was receiving such a cold reception, it hadn’t been cut in several weeks of prime summer growing season.

  I had a small rainforest on my hands. They must have thought I was a deadbeat or just dead altogether. Seeing me march up the lane barefoot and wearing dirty hospital scrubs must have been alarming to say the least, especially in light of what was going on in the world. Still in traditional Minnesota niceness, nobody said anything to me. That duty would be the responsibility of my immediate neighbors. There was an informal process for these types of neighborly concerns.

  I made it past the tangle of my yard to my driveway which was almost hidden from view until you walked up to it. My neighbor on the right came trudging through my yard, making a large crow very angry in the process. His name started with a d I think, Don or Dave, I wasn’t sure.

  “Hey there!” he said in a happy voice that sounded fake. It seems he didn’t know my name either. “You’re back!”

  “Yes,” I said and tried to match his cheerful tone.

  “Man, we all thought you were dead!” his hands were on his hips and he was really sweaty as he arched back to a series of loud cracks.

  “Nope, not dead. Just a real bad car accident,” I lied. “Been out of commission for a while.”

  “Your car?” he asked.

  “Yep, the very same.”

  “Huh,” he said slowly, like he was confused. “That’s a real shame,” he shook his head. “I liked that car.” He looked at the closed garage door a moment before looking back at me, “Hey listen, I’m glad you’re okay, real glad.” he hesitated like he wanted to say something else.

  “Thanks.” I said.

  “So the thing is, I didn’t think you were coming back so I uh, I took…I borrowed some of your fence wood. You know for my windows and such.”

  We just looked at each other for a moment.

  “For your barricade?” I asked and flipped my head back toward his house.

  “That’s right,” he said. “Just being cautious. Not sure how much you know about what’s going on but people are acting real damn crazy out there. We’ve got no other place to go, so we’re just going ride it out here.”

  “Ride out the sickness?”

  He nodded. I told him I didn’t care about the wood. I really didn’t. All I could think about was a hot shower and going to bed. I was a dead man walking at that point. He offered to help me barricade my house but I told him I’d take care of it. I told him to spread the word that I would be cutting my grass soon as well. At that he just chuckled and told me he didn’t think that kind of thing would matter much anymore. Then we said good-bye and I headed up to my porch to retrieve my hidden key from under the mat.

  My door creaked open as I stepped inside. The musty smell of dusty furniture assaulted my nose. My feet slapped heavily on the floor as I made my way across the dark hardwood headed for the kitchen.

  A letter stood propped against my corncob butter tray in the middle of the kitchen table. “George” was written on it in fancy script. I recognized my father’s handwriting with a sigh but decided it could wait.

  Shower first.

  Fifteen heavenly minutes later I was freshly washed, dried and fully clothed. I grabbed a three-month old beer from my fridge and took the letter out on the porch to read it.

  My neighbors were still at it as I sat down in my wicker chair and kicked my feet up. No one spared me a
glance, though I was hard to see behind my overgrown lawn. I tore open the letter expecting some form of half-assed emotional apology.

  George,

  I don’t know that you’ll ever read this letter or what the world will be like if and when you do. If you are reading it, it means you woke up and have found your way home. For this I am profoundly grateful as you are my only child and I do love you.

  I don’t expect you to understand what I did to you so I’m not going to bother with an explanation. You will have to figure things out on your own. Actually, the less you know, the better off you’ll be.

  Know this, you’ve been given everything you need to stay alive. How long you stay that way will be entirely dependent on you. You’ve always been a weak boy. You got that from your mother.

  In any case, be sure to look in your basement. I made sure you had some stuff to survive. I assumed your place would be empty and I wasn’t surprised.

  Always,

  Dad

  p.s. Your house is shitty and so is this town.

  p.p.s. The 90’s called, they want their home décor back.

  I read his letter eight hundred more times, growing angrier with each refrain. William J. McCloud, my dear old dad, was an utter asshole.

  For some reason the most enraging parts were the post scripts about my house! It was typical behavior from my father. He was always playing mind games with me. His cryptic letter was entirely confusing and made me afraid. What did he do to me? Whatever it was clearly had something to do with our night of drinking. He wanted to catch up he told me, try to work things out. A father and son should have some type of relationship.

  I didn’t want to go but finally relented. I played right into his hands. With great disgust, I tore the letter up and threw the pieces violently over the porch railing, smacking my wrist in the process.

  I was trying to rub out the pain as I went back inside. I tried calling him on my landline but it just went to voice mail. I tried again and again over the next few hours until I finally filled his voice mail box with hate and could leave no more messages.