Installment 1.8

Chapter Four

Walter Yang looked over at Lucinda.  “It is time.” he said.  Lucinda nodded and mounted her bicycle.

Walter had taken the last few minutes to spray blood from the 60cc syringes artfully around the house.  Lucinda had pocketed the syringes and needles at work.  The presence of human blood is always accepted as evidence of foul play. Walter sprayed his own blood in one room and Lucinda’s in another so they would look like co-victims.

It was ten on a Saturday morning. They left the house unlocked and the alarm system disarmed.  They had a week of vacation and had booked rooms in Napa Valley wine country.  They would not be missed for nine days.

They bicycled slowly down the drive.  They were both dressed in long, khaki cargo pants, faded denim shirts and gardening gloves.  Lucinda’s straw hat sported a large flower. Walter wore non-prescription reading glasses. 

They would ditch the glasses and the daisy a couple of miles away from their subdivision.

The seats on their bicycles were low and they had old-fashioned, swept-back handlebars. They looked like hundreds of other gardeners pedaling back home from a morning of landscaping work, eager to beat the heat of the day.

Walter’s bike had a small trailer behind it.  Bike trailers had become popular when personal cars were outlawed.  They were used to haul groceries and small amounts of merchandise.

Lucinda wore a wig that was salt-and-pepper and the braid went down her back to below her shoulder blades.

They rode at a pace best described as languid.  The best way to become invisible is to do nothing that will be remembered.  Old people, moving slowly, are quickly forgotten.

Their first day was their longest.  They rode twenty miles.

At camp that night, Walter pulled an aluminum foil covered package out of the trailer.  It contained two RFID chips Walter’s nephew, an EMT in Orange County, had removed from the decayed bodies of an elderly Asian couple who chose to commit suicide rather than face a slow death by starvation or an undignified death at the hands of the Walkers.

In lieu of a scalpel, they used 16 gauge, hypodermic needles to incise the skin.  Popping out the official RFID capsule was no harder than popping a large pimple.  The sterilized capsule containing the replacement RFID tags was more difficult because of the bleeding.  A single suture closed the skin and was covered with a bandaid.  They used the last of the ice to numb the site before their “surgery”.

They burned their official RFID capsules in their campfire.  Walter and Lucinda Yang were now officially dead.

Their immediate destination was two hundred miles south as the crow flies.  Their route would be much longer.  Again, the way to escape detection was to not hurry and to wander in a semi-random manner that projected the impression that they had no destination.  They worked where there was work.  They moved when they heard of work further south, closer to their destination.

Next Installment