Home Sweet Hell by Matt James

Author:Matt James [James, Matt]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-11-13T00:00:00+00:00

15

Watching the upside-down Winnie fade away in my mirror isn’t easy. It feels as if we just lost a member of our little survivalist family. Vinny, Carla, John, the older couple we met in the museum… Uh, what were their names? Oh, right, the Howards… Either way, I know that it’s just a Winnebago and not a person. The emptiness still is there, however.

Jill and Hope are quietly sitting in the back seat holding hands, and I’m up front with Wes, who is behind the wheel of the Chevy SUV. At this point, we’re forced to follow the flow of traffic, weaving in and out of wrecks and bodies. Southern and 441 is an immense intersection. It sits right smack in the middle of three different cities within Palm Beach County: West Palm Beach, Royal Palm Beach, and Wellington. The intersection acts as a sort of natural border between each town.

Wellington sits to the southwest of the intersection, and that’s right where Wes has us headed. He turns south onto 441 and eases over a splintered crack in the road. Suspiciously—nervously, really—the breakage is directly over the C-51 Southern Boulevard drainage canal. The waterway stretches due west for more than forty miles while joining other tributaries before finally emptying into Florida’s principal freshwater body, the ninth largest in the United States, Lake Okeechobee.

What could be in the lake now?

The canal starts at the coast. If something from the ocean made its way in—or if some bass mutated into a variation of an Unseen-Moby Dick… One time, when I was a kid, I hooked a giant snapping turtle while fishing in a canal near my house. It climbed out of the water with my hook in its mouth looking quite upset with me. I guess it really doesn’t matter what’s beneath the surface of C-51, though. As far as I can tell, we don’t plan on going fishing any time soon.

“It’s terrible,” Wes says, talking to himself more than me. “They’re everywhere.”

He’s talking about the dead. We saw just as many bodies between here and the prison, so I’m not entirely sure what made him comment about it now. Maybe it’s the fact that vultures are finally showing up? At least there aren’t as many as you’d typically see when driving past a garbage dump.

Not yet.

“That there are,” I say, nodding as I look out of my crimson-stained window. I glance into my vanity mirror and make eye contact with an exhausted-looking Jill. Her eyes are red, and the bags beneath them look heavy. Being the strong woman that she is, she gives me a small smile, telling me that she’s okay.

I remember feeling the same way back in New York, but now, even though it hasn’t been that long, I don’t feel very much at all. The highway is painted red… Literally. Blood pools in the curbs, backing up the drains along with who knows how many corpses. Every vehicle, including ours, is bathed in the stuff too.

Even worse than Jill’s hair clogging the shower drain.

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