First Activation

“I don’t have a plan. I just wanted to find somebody who was alive. If you doubt me because my car isn’t wrecked,” she pointed back towards the vehicle she had approached in, “this isn’t my car. Mine couldn’t be driven after the accident. Check the documents inside if you don’t believe me.”

“The documents don’t prove anything,” Bernie shouted back.

“I’m not sure how we are going to resolve the situation,” I whispered.

The woman remained kneeling on the road.

“She could come along with us, but we keep her under armed guard until we build up some trust,” Lea replied in a lowered voice.

“No way. Why risk letting her get close to us?” Jack said.

“Please, guys, stop fucking around,” The woman cried.

“Why don’t we send her away in the opposite direction? It might give us enough time to shake her off,” Bernie said.

“She could quite easily turn around and start following us again in a different car as soon as we were out of sight. Let’s ask her some more questions, but not take all day about it,” Jack replied.

“Okay, I’ll ask her a few more, but if she comes for us, we shoot, right?” I said.

Everyone behind the car nodded in agreement.

“If you want to kill us, you’re welcome to try. But one of us will then kill you, so there is no chance that you will be able to kill yourself. Do you understand?” I shouted.

“Why would I want to kill you or myself? What are you talking about? Is that what’s been happening?”

“Strip to your underwear,” Jack shouted.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Lea whispered.

“I am just making sure she has no concealed weapons.”

Lea shook her head. “Are you trying to get a cheap thrill?”

“Fuck you,” the woman answered.

“There’s another car coming towards us,” Bernie said.

In the distance, from the direction we had travelled, was a silver car.

“Let’s see if the next car can sort it out with her,” Jack said.

“What do you mean?” Bernie asked.

“We stay where we are and let the car approach. The woman and the other driver can talk, and we’ll see what happens.”

“What if she isn’t a killer and the other person is?” Lea said.

“We’ll shoot whoever attacks. If they are killers, one of them will slip if they get close to each other.”

“You’re going to use me as bait?” the woman screamed.

We all looked at her, then each other.

“Please, let me come behind that car with you.”

“Stay where you are or we’ll shoot,” I shouted.

The silver car approached slowly and pulled up alongside the woman. Inside sat an elderly looking man. He took a moment to look at us pointing our weapons at him and at the woman on her knees in front of us.

He wound down his window and shouted, “What the hell are you doing? Lower your guns.”

The shout seemed to be directed towards us.

“You don’t fool us, make one false move and I’ll blow your brains out,” Jack shouted back.

“Don’t be so absurd man, now lower your weapons,” he replied.

The woman jumped up and ran up to the driver’s window.

“Please let me come with you. These fucking perverts wanted me to strip-off at gunpoint. Please help me.”

I watched in astonishment as the woman jumped into the passenger seat and the car started to move away.

As it passed us, the elderly man leaned out of the window, “Haven’t you seen the mess around you? You should be ashamed of yourselves.”

The woman raised her middle finger out of the passenger window, and the car disappeared into the distance.

“What was that? They didn’t to want to kill each other,” Bernie said.

I was trying to think of a logical reason behind it.

“Had they both been on flights like we had?” Jack replied.

“The woman said the last thing she remembered was being in a car crash. Maybe being unconscious had left her unaffected and the man had been on a plane? I don’t know, it seems unlikely,” I said.

“Do you think the killer thing has stopped?” Lea said.

“If everyone is okay again, shall we go back to my place?” Bernie said.

“Guys, don’t forget what happened on the Long Island Expressway,” I replied, “I think we need to come across more people before coming to any hasty conclusions.”

“There’s no way I am going back to the City,” Jack added. “The place is in a complete mess and will be absolutely stinking in a day or two.”

I looked around for any other moving vehicles but couldn’t see any. I turned to face the group who were still stood by our cover vehicle, “We stick with the plan and keep heading to the countryside. It will keep us away from the smell of thousands of rotting corpses and gets us into an area of low population.”

“Agreed,” Bernie nodded.

“I said I wanted to go to the farm in the first place,” Lea shrugged.

Bernie drove us away from the scene of the incident, which seemed to have left us all confused, but I comforted myself with the thought that is was actually a positive sign. The others might have been feeling the same, judging by the silence in the car. If it really was over, it would mean facing up to the state of the world we were left in, which would be a different kind of challenge.