Bobby Akart - Armageddon

Then opportunity knocked in the form of a hayseed with a hideous Southern accent. Patricia could barely stand the guy, who seemed to talk like he had a mouthful of nails. Be that as it may, he was more than drunk enough and certainly frisky, too.

The young guy spun around playfully on the black barstool and ran his fingers across the green marble inlaid bar top as he spoke. After a while, Patricia actually took a liking to the guy and considered leaving him there. Then he made a couple of remarks about the other patrons in the bar that annoyed Patricia. They were out of line and inappropriate. The shiny new toy had lost his luster, and it was time to get down to business.

Patricia whispered in his ear and provided him all kinds of promises of debauchery. The young man easily took the bait. They left the bar arm in arm and wandered the dark, mostly deserted streets of Key West toward the bank and its newly repurposed vault.

Only, they weren’t alone. They were being followed.

Patricia feigned being entertained by his jokes. She playfully swatted away his clumsy groping attempts. They made their way slowly down Duval Street until they turned by St. Paul’s Episcopal Church. The red wooden doors to the historic church established in 1832 remained open, as they had since the day after the nuclear attacks. The parishioners did the best they could to feed and clothe displaced travelers. Throughout the night, people arrived seeking shelter.

Patricia and her new friend stumbled across Eaton Street to avoid a swarm of people who were breaking into the Tropic Theater, looking for a place to sleep. The two men who followed lurked in the shadows and used the people wandering the sidewalks to blend in.

When the seemingly drunk couple made their way to the front of the Island State Bank, they were laughing and talking about all of the sexual acts they intended to perform on one another. Patricia held the railing and her guest, whom she helped up the steps to the front doors. Having practiced the maneuver the night before, she learned how to handle her man while unlocking the entrance. Once inside, if he face-planted onto the rug, all the better. He’d be in for some real pain soon enough anyway.

Once the doorway was opened, the young man stumbled forward. Only, he didn’t hit the floor.

Patricia did. It would be the beginning of the worst day of Patrick Hollister’s life.

Wednesday, October 30

Central Virginia

Peter awoke rested but extremely sore. He’d used muscles that he didn’t know he had, although his upper legs suffered the most. He cursed as he made his way to the bathroom to relieve himself. With each attempted step, his hamstrings and quadriceps hit the floor with a jolt. If he pushed off too hard, his calves joined in the torturous motion, drawing more verbal assaults from Peter.

These were the primary muscles used to move the bicycle forward, but he found his shoulders sore from tension as well. His constant firm grip on the handlebar had resulted in his upper body being tense. The old adage sore all over certainly applied to Peter.

He swallowed three Aleve he’d secured from the pharmacy and repacked his gear to include some of the things he’d found at the golf course, including batteries, kitchen knives, and several tools out of the shed that might assist him in repairing his bicycle. He also packed a bottle of Chivas Regal scotch and several bottles of Fiji water. Somehow, the thought of a nightcap at the end of a long day of riding gave him a rewarding inducement to keep going.

Before he left, Peter took the time to bury the dead man. There was a mound of topsoil behind the mechanic’s shed. The man’s grave was shallow, but he was covered with both a tarp and the topsoil. Peter located a small cart trail sign and used it as a grave marker. He found a can of white spray paint to cover over the green and gold stenciling.

Lastly, using a black Sharpie he found in the shed, he simply wrote R.I.P. It was the least he could do for yet another victim of the nuclear war. Little did he know, it would not be the last one he’d come upon that day.

Peter locked the clubhouse as he left and started his day as an experienced long-distance cyclist. By his calculations, he’d traveled sixty miles that first day. If he didn’t pick up the pace, it would take him three weeks to get to Driftwood Key. After the muscle soreness wore off, he did just that.

He rode steadily through small unincorporated communities like Locust Grove, Mine Run, and Belmont. It was a mostly pleasant ride through the vast farmland of Central Virginia. He rarely encountered a stalled vehicle, and it was only occasionally that he noticed people on horseback riding across their farms.

The number of living refugees walking along the road were few. The number of dead who’d been rolled onto the gravel shoulder or into a nearby ditch were far greater. Their lifeless eyes stared toward the sky. Their mouths were agape, as if their last breath had been a plea for mercy.

As for the living, they were close to joining the dead. Their eyes were sullen, filled with sadness and despair. Their faces were gaunt, and their bodies had withered to the bone from lack of nutrition.

Peter fought the sense of decency within him to stop. Everything he’d been taught growing up and learned as a young man compelled him to do something. But he couldn’t. There were too many in need for one man on a bicycle. He barely had enough supplies for himself to make it a few days. Soon, he’d have to forage again.

Plus, there was the inherent danger of being ambushed. This happened to him after he’d been riding for several hours that morning. He’d studied the map of Eastern Virginia as he rode, to confirm his anticipated route. As he made several turns on one county road to another, he realized Lake Anna was coming up ahead of him.

Peter knew nothing about traversing a dystopian landscape other than what he’d watched on The Walking Dead or imagined on his own when he was a teen. One of the things that concerned him the most was crossing a bridge, especially if it was over water. This had always been the case for Peter, as he routinely drove up and down U.S. 1 in the Florida Keys. The Seven Mile Bridge, not far from Driftwood Key, was an example he often gave when expressing his safety concerns.

Bridges leave no place to bail out to, he’d explained. If you suddenly approach an accident on most roads, you could drive off into a ditch and run into the woods or a field to avoid trouble. What do you do on a bridge? Jump in the water fifty or sixty feet to your possible death?

All of these things were going through his head as he rode up to the Belmont Road bridge over Lake Anna. There were several men walking south toward the other side on the two-lane county road. As was typical for back roads, there was no shoulder, and the concrete barriers seemed to squeeze any traffic toward the middle.

The wind was blowing that morning from the north, causing temperatures to drop lower than the day before. The men were hunched over with camouflage hunting jackets wrapped around them. From that distance, Peter couldn’t make out any weapons, but as a precaution, he retrieved his pistol and gripped it with his right hand as he approached them.

Peter hoped the windy conditions would mask the near-quiet sound of his pedaling. His bike made very little noise as it rolled along the concrete pavement. Unlike many bicycles that produced a slight clicking sound when the rider coasted, this Schwinn model did not.

As he got closer, he saw that one of the men was carrying a rifle in his right hand. Then suddenly one of the men turned toward Peter just as he approached the trio. He, too, had a rifle and was beginning to raise it in Peter’s direction.