Last Pandemic (Book 2): Escape The City Read online

  Escape the City

  A Post-Apocalyptic Survival Thriller - Last Pandemic book 2

  Ryan Westfield

  Copyright © 2019 by Ryan Westfield

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  About Ryan Westfield

  Also by Ryan Westfield

  1

  Matt

  Matt was behind the wheel of Judy’s sedan. There wasn’t anything special about the car except that the engine seemed to run fine and the gas tank was full.

  The last twenty-four hours had been the craziest hours of his entire life. So much had happened.

  He’d seen his friend’s mother shoot her own son. He’d killed several men himself. He’d seen more dead bodies than he’d ever thought possible.

  There was too much to process. Too much to think about.

  It seemed, for instance, that the virus had brought civilization to a crashing halt. Their cell phones, while still retaining a bit of battery life, did not function, indicating that the networks were offline. The car radio simply hissed static. There wasn’t a radio station that was broadcasting apparently.

  And, last but not least, electricity all over Albuquerque had been cut off.

  None of the traffic lights worked. They were all blank and dead.

  None of the houses or buildings they passed as they drove through the city had lights on.

  And there wasn’t any time, because Matt, Judy, and Jamie were convinced that if they wanted to survive, they needed to get out of Albuquerque.

  The car was loaded up with what they’d been able to salvage. Mia had unfortunately destroyed much of what Judy had meticulously gathered over the years. There wasn’t anything they could do about it. Just deal with it.

  There was food in the trunk. Enough for about a week. A good amount of water. Enough for several days.

  They each had a handgun. Plenty of ammunition.

  “I can’t believe we escaped the city,” said Jamie, from the back seat. “I thought we’d never get out...”

  “Let’s not count our chickens just yet,” said Judy, sitting in the front seat next to Matt. “We’re still technically within the city limits.”

  “And just because we get out of the city,” added Matt. “It doesn’t mean we’re safe. Far from it. Everyone who can, will probably be leaving the city…”

  “...and that means there’s more danger out in the rural areas,” said Jamie, finishing Matt’s sentence for him. “Trust me, we know. You told us a thousand times already.”

  “I’m just trying to think strategically,” snapped Matt.

  “Let’s just settle down,” said Judy, interjecting. “You two can’t be arguing the whole way out there.”

  The sun had come up a couple hours ago. It was mid-morning and it was still rising, traveling across the pale blue cloudless sky. People said there was no sky like the sky in New Mexico. It was beautiful.

  “All right,” said Matt. “We’ll try not to keep arguing. Right, Jamie?”

  He glanced back at her in the rearview mirror. She shot him a horrible look. One of hatred and annoyance. But she agreed verbally.

  Matt didn’t know what had happened. They’d been “getting along,” if you could put it that way, through all the shooting and the deaths. And then? As soon as things had quietened down and they’d reached the outskirts of the city, she’d started laying into him. Maybe it was the stress of the situation. He didn’t know.

  “So do you think your cousin will mind having us stay at his place?” said Matt, glancing over at Judy.

  For having been forced to shoot her son not so many hours earlier, she was holding up surprisingly well. Maybe she’d crack later, but she was putting on a strong front, at the very least.

  “That’s tough to say,” said Judy. “It’s been a number of years since I’ve even talked to him...”

  “But you think it’s worth a shot?”

  “I do.”

  “Good. Because we don’t have anywhere else to go.”

  “What about just heading out into the boonies?” said Jamie.

  “We already went over this,” said Matt.

  “Well, go over it again,” snapped Jamie. “It’s been a little stressful, if you haven’t noticed.... It’s hard to remember everything.”

  “Did I do something to annoy you?” he said.

  She didn’t answer.

  “It’s the water,” said Judy. “If we set up somewhere out in the high desert, we might have the cover of the hills, but we’re going to be hard-pressed to find any water to drink...”

  “Can’t we just get water from, I don’t know, stores or something?” said Jamie.

  “That’s not going to last,” said Judy. “Not for long, anyway.”

  Matt just listened and concentrated on the driving.

  They were driving south, toward Madrid and Santa Fe, on Route 14. The sun was on his side of the car, a bright orb in the beautiful sky.

  Strangely, nothing looked unusual or out of place on the road.

  In fact, it looked like just about any other day at this time. There was the occasional car, coming or going in either direction. Occasionally, someone would zoom past them, entering the other lane briefly in order to pass.

  In the city, there’d been plenty of signs of the virus. There’d been an eerie kind of emptiness to some of the streets. Other streets had been jam-packed with cars, bumper to bumper, some of them abandoned and still running.

  In other areas, they’d passed broken-into stores and hordes of angry people. They’d passed people dying from the virus, bleeding out in the middle of the road or on the sidewalks.

  And now?

  Now it seemed like it was any other day. It wasn’t anywhere near Matt’s typical commute, but he had been this way on various day trips to Santa Fe.

  The three of them fell into relative silence. Matt continued to drive, mostly lost in his own thoughts, which seemed to scatter like the clouds that would, sooner or later, roll in across the pale blue sky.

  What weighed heavily on his mind was the issue of whether or not the three of them were infected.

  It would seem inevitable, given their close proximity to the virus, that at least one of them would have been infected.

  And being infected was a death sentence.

  Or so it seemed.

  Matt did know that there was going to be a certain percentage of the population that was immune to the virus.

  But what were the chances that a
ll three of them were immune?

  Not good. Matt wasn’t exactly a math whizz, but he could do the basic calculations.

  Maybe one of them was immune. Maybe Matt was. He’d had the most contact with infected people.

  Who knew.

  He caught himself periodically looking down at the veins on his hands. So far so good, as they said.

  He’d seen Judy in the passenger seat doing the same thing, and he was sure that Jamie in the back seat was as well.

  There were just so many questions. And not enough answers.

  What if they were immune from the virus’s devastating effects, but carried it within them? They’d likely be capable of infecting others.

  Not that Matt intended to interact with many people. The less interaction the better.

  But what if they killed Judy’s cousin, for instance?

  For something to do, Matt occasionally turned the radio on, listened to the static on various stations for a couple minutes, and shut it off.

  “Will you cut that out?” snapped Jamie from the back.

  “I’m trying to see if there’s anyone out there operating a radio station...that’s the kind of thing that could keep us alive...”

  “Oh, yeah? How?”

  “I don’t know. You can’t forsee how these things are going to play out.”

  “I thought I told you two that that’s enough bickering.”

  “He started it though,” said Jamie, clear irritation in her voice.

  “I don’t know what her problem with me is. If it weren’t for me, where would you be now? Waiting it out in my apartment? Waiting to starve?”

  “That’s enough,” said Judy, raising her voice. “I lost my only son. And now you two want me to act like your mother?”

  That was enough to shut them up.

  Matt thought he’d change the subject. “Tell me about this cousin of yours, Judy,” he said, trying to keep his tone neutral.

  “Well,” said Judy. “It’s hard to know where to start.”

  “What I don’t get is why you didn’t just head right out there,” said Jamie from the back seat. “Yesterday, I mean.”

  “We would have never made it,” said Matt. “The traffic was crazy yesterday.”

  “It doesn’t make sense that it calmed down so much today.”

  “No, it doesn’t.”

  “How was I to know what was going to happen with this virus?” said Judy. “Twenty-four hours ago, I just wanted my son to get home from work. I thought maybe there was the possibility that something could happen...but I never imagined the whole city collapsing…”

  “More like the whole country, probably.”

  “Will you shut up and let her continue?” snapped Jamie.

  Judy turned around swiftly and shot Jamie a look that told her quite clearly to shut her mouth.

  “Anyway,” said Judy. “I haven’t seen my cousin for a while. It’s been, oh, I don’t know, about five years now.”

  “That long?”

  “Yeah, well, he can be a little hard to stay in contact with...hard to get along with too, actually.... Damian always sort of reminded me of him a bit. In a weird way.”

  “How so?”

  “Damian was always getting into trouble. Always somehow going off down the wrong path. He wasn’t a bad kid or anything. But things just never seemed to be easy for him. You might be standing right next to him and see a straight path. Damian would see a crooked path.”

  “So your cousin didn’t take the easy route, is what you’re saying?”

  Judy gave a hoarse little laugh. “That’s putting it lightly,” she said. “He could barely tolerate school. Dropped out as soon as he could. But smart as a whip. Always reading on his own. But coming to his own conclusions. Couldn’t stand having people tell him what was what. Of course, that meant he often drew conclusions quite different from the, well, everyone else.”

  “What did he do for work?”

  Judy let out another little laugh. “Just about anything. But nothing for too long. He’d basically work a stretch at something, save up some money, and quit.”

  “Tell me about his place.”

  “Well, it’s not so much a house as it is a piece of land with some little structures on it.”

  “What is it? Like a compound?” said Jamie.

  “Sort of. Like I said, he’s just always done things his own way. Though I imagine he just never had money for a proper building.”

  “How much land does he have?”

  “Oh, quite a bit. Maybe fifty acres.”

  “Fifty acres! How did he get money for fifty acres but he can’t buy a house?”

  “Have you been out this way before, Jamie?”

  “Nope.”

  “Well, not everyone wants to live out here. We’ll pass through the town of Madrid. It’s turned into a quaint little tourist town, but not that many years ago it was a ghost town. Old mining town. No one wanted to live there. Land was selling incredibly cheaply.”

  Both of Matt’s hands were on the wheel. His gaze was fixed into the distance, on the sky with that blue that people came from all over just to have a chance to paint.

  The sedan’s engine was chugging along just fine.

  They were headed up a long hill.

  Outcroppings of rocks and scrubby trees dotted the landscape on the side of the two-lane highway.

  Matt knew that they’d already climbed about 1,000 feet. He’d felt it in his ears.

  There wasn’t that long to go to get to Judy’s cousin’s land.

  They hit the top of the hill.

  Suddenly, with the nose of the car pointed now downward, a whole different expanse of view opened up.

  “Hey,” said Jamie. “What’s that?”

  “Looks like a car stopped.”

  “They’re blocking the road,” said Matt.

  It was true.

  Up ahead, way down at the bottom of the incline, there was a small pickup truck parked lengthwise across the road.

  “What are we going to do?” Jamie sounded worried.

  “Just keep going,” said Judy, sounding calm.

  “I think there’ll be enough room to just drive right around it,” said Matt.

  “Around it?” said Jamie. “Are you crazy? You’ll have to drive off the road...” She sounded shrill and worried.

  “So?” said Matt. “There’s a good bit of shoulder there.”

  “It’ll be fine,” said Judy. “So long as it isn’t some kind of trap.”

  “A trap?” said Jamie, sounding even more worried, as if she might suddenly start screaming.

  What was going on with her? She’d been calm yesterday. She’d been doing okay.

  “This isn’t the movies,” said Matt. “I’m sure there’s some good reason the truck is parked like that.”

  But the words sounded hollow even to himself.

  Sure, this wasn’t the movies. But that didn’t mean that desperate people wouldn’t resort to desperate measures.

  His hands gripped the wheel tighter. They had about five minutes before they reached the truck.

  Not a lot of time.

  2

  Will

  Will and Stacy had been at home when they’d first heard of the virus. Will worked as a chef and he’d had the day off, since he worked mostly on the busiest restaurant days.

  Stacy was between jobs.

  Not that their jobs mattered now.

  Officials had come by, claiming to be from the CDC. They’d evacuated the entire apartment building. They’d loaded everyone onto what appeared to be confiscated or repurposed Greyhound buses and taken them to a local high school gym.

  The officials had used megaphones to tell everyone that everything was going to be all right.

  But Will would never forget the look that Stacy had given him when the man’s speech was over. It was a look of absolute terror. With a hint of pleading.

  She’d been pleading with him wordlessly to do something. Anything. To get them o
ut of that situation.

  The high school gym was already overcrowded. Already too hot. The humidity had been too high. It had felt sticky.

  The officials had all retreated somewhere, through closed doors.

  “We can’t stay here,” Stacy had said, trying to keep her voice level, but failing. There was panic in it.

  Around them, there were men, women, children, families, groups of elderly people. People of all types. A real cross section of the city.

  Everyone looked scared. Everyone talked in hushed voices. Everyone kept to themselves in their little familial groups. No one talked to strangers. No one looked at anyone else, except for furtive glances here and there.

  “We have to stay here,” Will had said.

  He should have never said those words. He’d regret them until he died. He knew that now. But he didn’t know it then.

  What was his obsession with trying to pretend that everything was okay all the time?

  It was the way their relationship had always worked. When a bill had come that they couldn’t pay, Stacy would freak out, and Will would calmly reassure her that everything would be all right.

  Meanwhile, he’d be boiling up on the inside, either consumed with a secret anger or terrified from secret anxiety and fear.

  He’d felt fear in that high school gym. He’d had the sense that nothing would be okay.

  But he hadn’t known just how not okay things were quickly going to become.

  Will and Stacy had found a little corner of the gym and camped out there, their eyes flicking back and forth between each other, their cell phones, and the others that were crammed into that gym.