Free The Enduring: Stories of Surviving the Apocalypse by Nicholas Ryan Page B

became thin, and his mouth hooked down. “Somewhere off the coast.”
    I tried one last time, flirting with the prospect of incensing him into violence. “The Gulf of Mexico?”
    He folded his arms across his chest and stared at me with a menacing expression. His body stood rigid, the tension strung along the nerves of his neck and shoulders so the veins showed through the flesh like cords of rope.
    “It’s confidential,” he rumbled.
    “Why?”
    “In case the ‘Affliction’ ever comes back… in case some evil fucking world power decides America is on its knees, and now is the time to attack and invade. It was an island. A small, tiny little island, Mr. Culver. That’s all I’m telling you in case I ever need to take my family back there to safety. It’s a secret… and it’s going to stay that way.”
    I held my hands up in a parody of surrender and tried to look apologetic. I wasn’t, in reality. I wanted to know, but it was clear that Mike Jackson had lines that he would not cross. One was revealing his family for the interview. The other was revealing the location he had escaped to when the ‘Afflicted’ had cut a swathe of death through his slice of Virginia.
    The sun hit its zenith in the sky and I crawled under the shade of a nearby tree with the precious journal. A breath of wind came down through the valley, the air tainted by the smell of smoke. The breeze rattled the dead leaves from the tree and they fell like gentle rain.
    Mike disappeared inside the house and I heard the lilting tinkle of women’s voices, followed by the sounds of furniture being moved, and windows being thrown open. He came back twenty minutes later. He had a couple of bottles of water in his hand. He tossed me one.
    I looked at the bottle quizzically. “It’s not from the poisoned stream, is it?”
    Mike didn’t laugh. He wasn’t that kind of man.
    I drank the water. It was blood warm, sweet and fresh. I had the journal opened to a page that was sprinkled with dry candle wax. I pointed at the first entry that had been written in scratchy ink and I read it out loud.
    ‘Car almost stolen. Michaela and Andrea bruised but okay. Mike had to kill again.’
     
    Mike’s face flickered, like a split-second break in a television transmission, before the wall of stone that was his normal expression reset itself.
    “What happened?”
    He drew a deep breath and turned to look away to the west, staring out into the empty space. “We were on the road near the North Carolina coast,” he said, speaking surprisingly softly so that I had to listen carefully to catch his words. “We had parked out front of a diner. It was deserted. The windows had been broken in and everything inside burned or looted. There was blood on the footpath.”
    “Yet you stopped? Why?”
    “We thought there might be something left worth taking.” He said simply. “Maybe some water or soft drink.”
    “So you went to investigate?”
    “Yes. I left my wife, Danita, and my two girls in the car. Danita had my handgun and I had kept the engine running.”
    “And someone tried to carjack the vehicle?”
    Mike nodded. “Some sorry son-of-a-bitch came from a drainage ditch on the far side of the road. It was a trap. He’d been waiting for someone to stop. He was a scarecrow in tattered rags. He looked like he’d come off a deserted island; messy tangle of beard, straggly hair and wild eyes. He ran at the car.”
    “What did you do?”
    “I heard Danita scream. I was inside the diner. There was a drinks refrigerator in a corner. It had been overturned. I was standing it upright so I could open the doors.”
    I asked again. “What did you do?”
    “I dropped the refrigerator and ran back outside. The guy was at the car door. He had a gun of his own, and it was pointed through the window into my wife’s face.”
    “A rifle?”
    “No,” Mike shook his head. “A handgun. Maybe a Glock. I never bothered to check,” he muttered dryly.
    “Go on…”
    At