Author’s note:
Thanks for your patience, all. It’s about time I posted something. Some writer become more creative when they are sleep deprived. I am not one of those authors.
For those of you who have never read any of the Journey Of St. Laurent before: You are now reading an online serial pulp novel. If you didn’t start at the beginning, you may want to do so. Chapter 1: Down By The Bay. In fact, if you are new to the site, you probably want to start with the first novel, Oasis. If you want to know just as soon as I’ve posted something new, you can watch the RSS feed or follow me on Twitter.
56: Options
I opened my eyes and I must have been delirious. The right side of my head throbbed and my side ached like nobody’s business. I sat propped against the wall. Did London sit me up?
Her second and final glow stick lay on the ground next to me and cast an eerie green light about the room. I couldn’t hear anything echoing in from out in the corridor. Of course, my ears rang like crazy, so that might have explained it.
And then there was London.
London stood in front of me peeling off her t-shirt. The sight of her faded to black and again unconsciousness claimed me. Like I said, I must have been delirious.
When I came to the second time, London was again seated, but now my head was in her lap.
London must have shoved the glow stick in a pocket or something, because the room was dark again. The dull pain in my side kept pace with my heartbeat. My chest felt tight.
I grunted and did my darnedest to sit up.
London yawned and gave me a little push. “Hey there, sleepyhead.” She sounded like she had just woken up, too.
Once seated, I reached up and felt my chest and injured side. Everything felt weird. It must have taken a good twenty seconds or so for me to realize why.
I was no longer wearing my shirt. Well, I still wore it, but London had pulled it off me, torn it into strips, tied the strips together, then wrapped it tightly around my chest as a bandage.
I stretched my legs. “Dang it.”
“Dang what?”
“Well, I was almost lucid for a few seconds a while ago and I thought I saw you taking off your shirt. It would have been cool if you had used that to bandage me up instead.”
“I almost did.” She chuckled. “But after I got it off I realized two things. One, my skinny butt would freeze if I didn’t have on a shirt. Two, your shirt was already gross anyway. So I put mine back on and patched you up the hard way.”
“Right.” I winced and turned myself until my shoulders rested against the cold wall. “How long have I been out?”
“I don’t know. An hour? Two? I think I drifted off there for a while.”
Everything hurts when I move.I tried to sit very still.
“Have you heard anything happening out there?”
“Not since that original rush.”
I attempted to not worry about the fact that we had no door to keep out angry aliens or soulless zombies.
Waking from the short nap ushered back in a little clarity of thought. Unfortunately my imagination instantly seized that clarity and was using it to paint gruesome and vivid death scenes.
I’ve got to focus.“So, how are you doing?”
She touched my arm with ice water fingers. “Honestly, I’m kind of kicking myself for ever getting into your Jeep. If we get out of this, you owe me a very nice dinner. ”
I covered her hand with mine. “What about all the shooting and stuff, I mean you didn’t even talk for a while after you shot that guy-”
“After the car accident? That was different. He was a dirtbag, but he was still a person. Shooting these things is like putting down a coyote back on the ranch. If you don’t take care of the problem, it’ll kill calf after calf.”
I nodded and then wondered why I would do that. After all, it was pitch black in there.
She leaned over and put her head on my shoulder. “Oh. And I’m hungry.”
“Me too.” I scooted a bit closer to her. “I wonder if they left all those MREs back in the hall.”
“MREs?”
“You know, meals ready to eat?”
“I know what it means, but what MREs are you talking about?”
“Oh that’s right, I didn’t tell you yet. You know that room they were in when Rhett tripped?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s full of supplies the government gave them. I only had time to look at a couple of pallets, but they had a bunch of MREs. Once they got your screaming self into that lockable room, three of them went back for more. We ran into that group during our, uh, glorious escape.”
“So those were the boxes they dropped?”
“Yep.”
London stood, revealing the glow stick that had been jammed under her thigh. She picked up then grabbed her shotgun. “I’ll be right back.”
“Wait, I’ll-”
She was gone before I could finish.
I thought about standing but decided my head wasn’t quite ready for it yet. Besides, she’ll be back soon or call for help.
A minute later a green light burst back through the door.
“The big box was smashed, but there are plenty of these in good condition out there. Edible condition anyway.” She dropped two small card stock boxes into my lap. “Two for you and two for me. There, now you owe me two very nice dinners.”
I don’t remember eating the meals. I certainly don’t remember how they tasted. I’m not even sure I tasted them at all. All I remember is that a moment later the ground around me was littered with empty plastic envelopes.
A full stomach goes a long way toward improving morale.
Now that we were fed, it was time to plan our next move.
For up, we needed to take an inventory everything we carried. It turned out to be an easy task.
For London’s shotgun, we had a total of twelve rounds. Eight in the gun’s extended magazine, and four additional shells.
After reloading, my little pistol I had full magazines of seven shots each and about thirty loose rounds.
“So besides the guns, what else do we have?” London leaned over and dug through her pocket. “I swiped Rhett’s lighter.”
“Well, I’ve got this alien cut-” My heart froze. The cutter. Where is it?
I hit the back of my head against the wall and cursed myself for being so clumsy. “Nevermind, I must have lost it in the chaos.”
“In other words, we’re about ready for anything.”
I wanted to laugh, but wasn’t quite feeling up to it. “Right.”
“So what should we do now?”
“Get out if we can.”
“Any idea how to do that?”
“Not really.”
“So again, I ask you, what do think we should we do now?”
“Well, let’s see. We’re sitting in a doorless room with way to barricade it, so we can’t stay here forever. We’d be overwhelmed the moment any group came in here. Outside in that maze of tunnels is an awful lot of aliens. A few of them are probably zombies or will become zombies pretty soon. Every entrance we know about had been blasted shut. I guess we could try to hole up in the supply room, assuming we can find it again. Of course, we still need water soon, and who knows if they have any of that in there.”
“Aren’t you just a bright ray of sunshine?”
“I think I’m just trying to convince myself that to keep exploring is the best option.”
“You might be right.” She bit her lip. “And that Jex guy did mention another entrance. You never know, maybe we can find it.”
“You never know.”
I had learned to deal with high stress situations because I had been in so many of them. Those come with the paycheck when you’re in emergency medicine.
But, London, wow. She was something else. I wondered if all girls raised on a ranch were that tough. Yeah, she had freaked out when we first met, but since then she had been a better support than I could have ever hoped for.
We rested a few minutes more, then stood and headed back into the corridor.
Before we walked out, London stopped me. “Oh, and if you see a floating green thing, Rhett’s behind it.”
“What?”
“Well, he was wearing dog tags, so I pulled them out of his clothes and hung the other glow stick on the chain.”
“Well, at least we’ll see one of them coming.”
A dim but warm glow entered the corridor down by the main hallway.
I started back toward the light. “What do you say we see what they left behind?”
Keep Reading! Chapter 57 is here.
