Welcome To Strange: There and Back.

 

Sunday, March 19th, 2084, 22 miles east of Santa Rosa, New Mexico.

The thing that I truly enjoyed, for the most part, about Texas and New Mexico, was the fact that if you stuck to the smaller highways and avoided the larger more populated cities there were plenty of wide open spaces, and you could see trouble brewing from a long ways off in any direction. Highway 40 had been good to us, and we could follow it all the way to Flagstaff, Arizona before we had to turn toward Utah on 89. We still had a long ways to go, 3 miles down the road we came upon two overturned vehicles in the road, we pulled over at a safe distance, Ashley and I stepped out to survey the scene through our binoculars, beside the road there were two mangled bodies not moving, Grendel appeared on my left, he looked concerned at the bodies, and then back at me. 

"So what's the deal, man? are we going to do something or just leave them lay?" He said in an almost annoyed tone.

Something didn't feel right to me and Ashley was in total agreement, as we zoomed in with the bino's you could clearly see three single file tire tracks leading away from the road.  I handed Grendel the bino's and pointed toward the tracks, He looked at them with growing interest. He lowered the glasses and looked at me.

"Motorcycles?" He asked.

"Probably." I answered.  "They're waiting for someone to stop and investigate."

"And then?"

"And then they kill them and take whatever they have."

Something or someone was waiting for whoever, to stop and try to help those people, and then they were in for a rude awakening. We weren't going to risk it, we were going around, Ashley and I got back into the truck and I crossed over to the other side of the highway with the Land Rover right behind us, as soon as we cleared the pavement we hit the gas and barely gotten past the wreckage when the first two motorcycles roared up onto the road between us and the Land Rover. Ashley and Henry went through the pass-through from the cab to the bed of the truck. They pulled back the tarp away from the tail gate of the cage and began opening up on the two motorcycles, before the passenger could even raise their gun, Ashley shot the one on the left through the helmets' visor causing the bike to flip several times violently throwing both riders into the air crashing into the road violently. On the other bike, Henry aimed first for the legs of the driver, but when that didn't work he went for the headshot, with the same result, both bikes had crashed and burned.

Two more showed up on the about 250 yards behind the Land Rover, we'd thought that they might persist, but seeing the fate of the first two bikes caused them to break off the chase. apparently whatever they wanted from us wasn't as important as they thought. A mile and one half outside of Santa Rosa we turned off the main highway and found a small rest area with bathrooms, we all took turns using the restrooms and cleaning up as the water was still working. As I was checking my map, Grendel appeared on my left, a look of concern in his eyes.

"Ummm Crash, I need to talk to you about something." He said.

I gave him a sideways glance.

"So talk." I answered.

"Well, you know, we don't want to seem ungrateful for everything you've done for us, but some members of our group have expressed concerns over your children." He said nervously.

"You mean Ashley and Henry? first of all, they are not my children, they lost their parents to the virus, and now they are traveling with me to try and survive."

"Well, it's just that you and them are a bit too violent for our tastes.  a member of our group has a friend living in Santa Rosa, and well, we think it would be best if we went our separate ways from here on out."

I didn't even look at him. 

"So go. Good luck to you." I answered.

"So that's it? you're not even going to try to compromise? or at least admit you're wrong?"

I turned to face him more aggressively.

"Let's get something straight Grendel, neither Ashley, or Henry, or Me, owes you a fucking thing, let alone an apology. Compromise? I'm not compromising The safety of those two kids so you can look at yourself in the mirror. You want to go to Santa Rosa? Be my guest, but know this, you aren't getting out of there alive. So, anytime you're ready to leave? by all means, please leave." 

Grendel walked over to the Land Rover, and turned and gave me a scowl. They loaded up and headed back to highway 40, and turned toward Santa Rosa. Ashley appeared on my right. She rested her right hand on my fore arm as she watched them disappear down highway 40.

"So we're not going to Utah anymore, I'm guessing." She said.

"Nope." I gave her a sideways look, neither smiling nor frowning. "and neither are they."

She didn't answer.

"Ashley, there were over 10,000 people living in that town, and if our experiences tell us anything, well then, I'm guessing over half of those people aren't people anymore. and Grendel and his whole crew? Their dead too."

I patted her on the hand and folded the map and put it in its folder. there was a frontage road that would take us most of the way around Santa Rosa. I emptied what was left of the extra fuel we were carrying into the main tank, so we had a tad over three quarters of a full tank, two full reserves and all the extra cans were empty. Thirty-five minutes later, we were almost all the way around Santa Rosa, when a familiar sight made our stomachs turn, we turned back onto highway 40 from frontage road, there with one front tire in a ditch sat the now empty Land Rover, we grabbed our weapons and got out to survey the scene, it was deserted, but there was fresh blood on the fenders. I moved to the back of the vehicle and reached under to tap on the gas tank, almost full. So I retrieved the siphon pump and empty cans and drained it. "We have to stay off of the main highway for a while," I thought to myself. Ashley gave me a concerned look. I looked back at her.

"This wasn't zombies, and whoever did this wasn't after fuel." I said.

"What's more important than fuel?" She asked.

"Women."

As difficult as it was to think about, Merci and the two other girls of their group were all still reasonably young and quite good-looking, and what Henry found while checking the ditch only confirmed such suspicions. There lying face down in the ditch were Grendel and the other three men in the group. All shot in the back of the head. Executioner style, The wind began picking up, so we all loaded the gas cans and got back in the truck and headed back to the frontage road. We had put Santa Rosa 15 miles behind us, it was sometime around sunset, when something caught Ashley's eyes as she looked through her binoculars. We cautiously pulled over and got out to see what Ashley saw, there below us, on highway 40, lying beside the road were the bodies of Merci and the other two girls. Their pants were removed, clearly they were raped and shot and left to rot like roadkill, with no remorse or afterthought. Regular people, it seemed, were becoming as bad if not worse than the zombies themselves. 

~Scratch. A.B.T. Copyright © 2025~