by Tracey Ward
Almost immediately I hear more explosions coming from the north. Then the rain starts, hot and jagged. Pieces of shrapnel are falling all around us. I hear them land on the pavement and ping off the metal of the police car and the RV. A couple of pieces land on me, pelting my back, none hard enough to hurt. I hear Syd swear near me but I keep my head down like he told me to. More thunder rumbles. It’s becoming distant again, rapidly reaching north.
“Are you hurt?”
“No,” I tell Syd. I wince as I push off the ground. My arm is hot and sticky under my shirt. I have no doubt I’m bleeding again. “No new injuries, anyway.”
“Al! You okay?!”
“I’m fine!” she shouts, standing up from her place in the grass beside the car.
“Good.”
Syd gazes at the smoky remains in the distance. There’s a long line of fire blazing happily. It can’t be more than two miles away from us, just on the outskirts of Lebanon. Highway 34 and all of those people running for their lives are only a couple of miles north of here. All of these people so close and they’re bombing us.
“What’d they blow?” I ask Syd. “It’s not a bridge or the freeway, right?”
“No. It was the airport. There was a small one over here. Few more north and south of us.” He takes Alissa’s hand to help her up the last incline out of the ditch. “You sure you’re alright?”
“Yeah, I’m fine. But Jordan’s bleeding.” She points to my arm where I can see my shirt darkening.
“I thought as much,” I mutter, glancing at it. “So they’re blowing all the airports?”
“They blew the seaports already, airports weren’t going to be far behind. And those bombs weren’t big enough to destroy the runways. They were meant for the hangars.”
I nod in understanding. “A plane can take off from a straight stretch of highway if it needs to. You don’t strictly need a runway. They’re eliminating planes in general.”
“They can’t possibly get all of them,” Alissa says. “What about farmers with crop dusters? They wouldn’t store those at a local airport. People could have them on their property.”
“Float planes would be a problem too. Did you see the one on the river when we were heading down?”
“If anyone takes off from anywhere,” Syd tells us, “land or water, they’ll blow them out of the sky. They know Corvallis was flooded with people and they know it’s falling. They have eyes in the sky so they must have seen the zombies coming for us. It’s why they acknowledged the wall in Eugene and started broadcasting images of it before the power went out. They want us to know it’s useless to head down that way.”
“People will still go there,” Alissa insists. “They’ll still hope the government will help them.”
“It can’t and it won’t,” Syd tells her plainly. “It’s a harsh reality but we’re in this alone. We have to plan accordingly and that means not expecting handouts from Uncle Sam.”
I stifle a smile because the guy sounds so much like my dad when he’s gearing up on a rant. He loves to go on about handouts from the government and welfare and unemployment, how all of it is creating generations of lazy hippies. Hippies, yes, he uses that word. It’s hilarious. He even gave me a hard time about my scholarship. Told me to work a job and go to school, pay my own way, because that’s what he did. Walked to college two miles uphill in the snow both ways barefoot carrying his sister on his back and ate a lunch of hardtack and ale. In my mind my dad is a pirate cowboy. I miss him terribly. My mom too. And Beth…
“We should get moving.” I say abruptly. “The bombings are going to make people crazier. This is going to get worse before it gets better.”
“You’re right,” Syd agrees with a sharp nod. “Let’s go.”
Alissa falls in step between us. She gingerly touches my arm as we walk.
“You must have reopened your stitches. We need to bandage it.”
“On the road,” Syd says gruffly. “Right now we’re getting out of here.”
I notice he’s cradling his left hand with his right.
“What happened to your hand?” I ask.
“Nothing, just a burn from the shrapnel. It’ll heal.”
“We have to bandage it before we go anywhere,” I tell him firmly, not caring that he’s decided he outranks me. “If any of an infected’s anything gets in there, you’re toast.”
“We don’t have time,” he says dismissively, climbing into the RV.
I climb in as well, eying him hard. “We also don’t have the luxury of letting you die. Bandage the wound.”
“He’s right, unc—dad,” Alissa says awkwardly. “You can’t go on like this. We can’t afford to lose you.”
“If that’s the case then his arm has to be bandaged too,” he tells her, pointing at me while somehow still acting like I’m not really there. It’s dismissive and impressive. “If we start playing doctor, we’ll never get out of here. We’ll do it later.”
I can’t stand this. I pull out a roll of duct tape I saw earlier in the glove box along with a handful of spare fast food napkins.
“Give me your hand,” I tell him coolly.
He scowls at me now. I’m glad he’s branching out with his expressions of distaste for me. Gotta mix it up, keep it spicy, otherwise I’ll stop being offended by it. Tired of waiting, I take the napkins and slap them down on his hand where it rests on the steering wheel. I am not gentle.
“Hold that there.” He surprises me when he does. I pull the duct tape free from itself and wrap it around his hand quickly. I rip the tape, toss it on the dashboard. “Done.”
It’s taken under ten seconds.
Syd doesn’t say anything. He throws the car into drive, spins us around, then we’re heading north. I’m antsy heading this direction, back toward the massive swarms of infected, but I stay quiet for now, letting myself get lost in my own head as I mull over our situation. I flinch when Alissa touches my arm to look at it again.
“We need to take care of you too. Your rules,” she tells me quietly. Firmly.
I grab the duct tape and offer it to her with a grin. She smiles but shakes her head.
“Not my style.”
“But duct tape solves everything.”
“I think I’ll go old school, if you don’t mind,” she says, pulling gauze and med tape out of her bag. She raises her eyebrows suggestively at me. “Are you ready to play doctor?”
“I know what that means,” Syd warns.
“Then why did you say it? It was creepy.”
Alissa motions for me to take my shirt off. Syd glances over as I lift it over my head.
“No,” he says glumly, “this is creepy. Watching a boy get naked in front of you.”
“It’s nothing I haven’t seen before.”
“Alissa,” he warns again.
I’m with him on this one. Statements like that aren’t exactly going to help us become bros.
“Calm down, dad,” she says wryly. “I’ve seen it before in general. I’ve never seen his it before, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“I don’t want to talk about this.”
“You know I’m not a virgin.”
I cringe. “Now I don’t want to talk about this.”
It’s not that I thought she was a virgin. A girl who looks like her, no way a slew of guys haven’t been trying to sleep with her for years. Statistically speaking one or two were bound to succeed eventually. That’s not to say she’s easy or loose, that’s just simple mathematics. And that’s not what bothers me. What I don’t want to talk about is how many. What’s your number?, that’s a woman’s game. Men don’t willingly play that game. It’s a no win. Either our number is higher than yours and you assume we’re players or our number is lower than yours and you think we’re lying. Either way, no one is happy. Your number is private. Keep it to yourself.
Alissa emits a small moan as she probes my arm. “Oh, Jordan, you opened up almost every stitch.”
I inhale sharpl
y when she presses against the back of my bicep.
“It feels like it.”
“I can’t see the front wound. Is it torn too?”
I glance down, taking in the neat line of stitches Syd put in me last night. “Nah, it’s still closed up here. I must have ripped the back when I stretched my arms over my head for cover.”
“I’ll re-stitch you tonight,” Syd says. “Assuming we find somewhere safe to stop. For now, we need to move out of here and fast.”
As with all things in the zombie apocalypse, it’s easier said than done.
Chapter Three
Alissa is still wrapping gauze around my arm when we reach highway 34 a few minutes later. It’s pandemonium. Cars facing every direction, cutting across lanes, trying to escape through fields. People are in the street running while others lay on their horns to encourage cars to move. Cars that may not have anyone left in them, or anyone with a working brain anyway. The worst of it are the infected. They’re everywhere. They’re milling around with the people who are running, reaching out to make halfhearted attempts to grab them as they sprint by. Some are at the sides of parked cars pounding on the windows trying to get in. There are screams everywhere, coming from every direction. Just in front of us there are three infected kneeling on the ground tearing into a motionless, desecrated body like a pack of wolves devouring a kill. The sight is sick enough. I’m grateful we aren’t able to get the audio from here.
“Mother of God,” Syd says, his voice low and awestruck.
He hasn’t seen it yet. Not like this. Not the way Portland was in the first days.
“We can’t cross this,” I tell him. “I imagine that’s what you were planning, but we can’t. No way.”
“We have to. There’s no other choice. Otherwise we go south where we’ll have to cross another highway and the river.”
I grab the map from where it lies on the dash. “Yeah, but if we go north we have to cross two highways to get east anyway.”
“And going your way, how will we cross the river? By the one bridge? The same bridge everyone else in this entire area will be trying to cross. If we cross here and head north a ways, we might actually be able to get on the highway heading north. It will be clear because no one will be doing that.”
“Yeah, with good reason. The infected are that way. Ground Zero is north. We are not going back there,” I tell him firmly. I can’t believe we’re debating this.
“The infected are already here,” Alissa argues, pointing at the chaos. At the mass of zombies swarming in front of us. It’s only a matter of time before they become aware of us and we’re surrounded. My hands are starting to sweat at the idea. “And we can’t run south from them. We’ll only be trapped by the wall. At least if we go north we can try to fight our way through, maybe even get to where they used to be. There can’t be that many up north anymore.”
“Yes, there absolutely can be,” I say emphatically. “You have to remember, they gain numbers in every city. When they finish rolling through Corvallis, this swarm will be bigger than it is now. Think about that, Ali. This swarm is bigger than the one we got away from in Portland because it’s grown. It consumed every town along the way. We cannot fight through that. We were lucky to make it out of Portland when we did. Our best bet is to head east as hard and fast as we can and get on the outside of this thing. Right now, this close to I-5, we’re at the heart of it. If we head southeast we can make it to the mountains. The mountains will slow them down. We’ll have a chance.”
“But we’re here now,” Syd says impatiently. “Let’s just do this.”
“We were in Corvallis two hours ago,” I remind him calmly, “but we got out because it was stupid to stay there. Crossing this if we don’t have to is stupid.”
There’s silence in the cab of the RV while chaos roars outside. I hear a gunshot followed by more screams. I wonder if the bullet was meant for an infected or a human. There are no guarantees anymore.
“We should listen to him,” Alissa tells Syd grudgingly. “He knows what he’s talking about and he’s gotten us this far.”
I don’t know what Syd is going to choose to do. Listen to me or do things his own way. I’m leaning toward the former but I’ll never know for sure. The decisions is made for us when another car comes racing up the road behind us. It crashes into our trailer that’s hauling the quad, sending us forward into the traffic. Our front end smashes into a small black sedan, crushing its front end and probably popping its tire. It doesn’t matter, there’s no one alive in it. The truck that rammed us backs up then lurches forward, passing us to head into the ditch on our right. In a flurry of dirt and rock it’s gone.
We’re in the thick of it now. We’re trapped by surrounding cars and just our luck, the infected are aware of us. Several begin lumbering our way. I glare at Syd. I told him this was a bad friggin’ idea.
“What do we do?” Alissa asks apprehensively.
“I don’t know,” I tell her honestly. “Can we go through the ditch like the truck did?”
Syd shakes his head as he throws the RV into reverse. “The suspension on this thing couldn’t handle it. We’d either lose a tire or get marooned on something.”
We try to back up but something’s wrong. We don’t make it very far. Not far enough to turn around.
“The trailer,” Syd spits out angrily. “They must have jacked it up when they hit us. I can’t back up. We’re stuck.”
“Oh God,” Alissa moans.
More infected are coming. We’re going to be surrounded.
I snag the duct tape off the dash and violently wrap it around my arm, covering the bandages Alissa just applied. I’ll need the extra protection. This is about to get ugly.
I grab the gun she gave me and my bat, switching it to my left hand. I throw my door open then sprint for the back of the RV. I can see the infected taking notice, catching my movements and my scent on the wind. They’ll follow me now. I quickly survey the damage to the back of the RV. Luckily I can see the situation in no time because that’s exactly what I have; no time. The trailer is detached from the RV, the hitch wedged under the back bumper. We’ll never back out over it. We have to move forward somehow.
Three infected are coming at me. I swing my bat with my left hand, creating a wide arc meant to buy me some space, nothing more. I’m pleasantly surprised when I’m able to knock two of them down with that one move. Not dead, just down, but that’s enough. I run back to my door to find an infected already trying to get in. I press the muzzle of my gun to his temple, turn my face away and fire. Gore is everywhere, especially on me. I realize as it hits me that my shirt is still off and I’m thankful for the duct tape. I have to take a swing at another infected as I make my way toward the black sedan we hit. It’s a feeble effort and my aim is crap this time, but it still makes contact with the girl’s chin, knocking her head back with a sick crunch. I take another swing, then another, each one connecting with cheek bones or a nose. Dark blood bursts from every blow and eventually she goes down. I’m not interested in completely killing her, just stopping her from biting me while I get inside this car.
There’s no one in the driver’s seat but I check the back real quick because I’m not an idiot. I’ve seen my share of horror movies. Empty. I slam my foot on the gas and plow forward, shoving the car ahead of me forward as well. I back up a ways, backing over the girl I took to the ground with my bat, and repeat the process. An infected gets in my way when I go to back up again so I slam the gas a third time and smash him between the trunk of this car and the hood of the one behind me. There’s a small cracking sound combined with a meaty thud. He’s not dead but he’s not going anywhere either. Just to make sure, I apply the parking break.
When I leap out of the car, Syd is pulling the RV forward into the space I’ve created. People and infected are running around them like ants, some slamming into the side before bouncing off and continuing to run. Alissa is in the passenger seat leaning out the window with her handgun to pr
ovide me coverage. It doesn’t surprise to know she has my back.
A gunshot rings out, the bullet landing in the side of the RV not far from where Alissa leans out the window. She disappears inside, taking cover on the floorboards. I hunch down behind a car that looks to be filled with a terrified living family and I look for the source of the shot. Shooting at the living at a time like this can only mean one thing; they want what we have. Syd continues to pull forward, carefully using the RV as a battering ram to get them the rest of the way across the highway. People don’t even care. Most of them have bailed out of their cars in favor of fleeing the area instead of saving their stuff. A lot of them are running in the wrong direction, heading north into the swarm. I have to remind myself that that’s what we’re doing too.
This is all such a bad idea.
The RV is almost to the other side when I see our shooter. It’s a tall guy with a sideways baseball hat and a TapouT shirt standing in the bed of a huge red truck. He’s leaning forward using the roof of the cab to steady his shotgun. Under normal circumstances I’d dislike him based on his shirt alone. Today it’s because he’s one more thing I’ve got to worry about in a world where I already have way too much to worry about.
I run wide around him, becoming just another part of the scenery that he’s ignoring. Other people are still running and screaming as well. Infected are everywhere, grabbing at everyone. He’s unconcerned, however, and I wonder if he’s an idiot or if he has other people covering him that I can’t see. I take the chance anyway. I don’t have another choice.
As I near the back of his truck he takes another shot at the RV. Just as I’m about to lunge at him I feel fingers grab at my back and slip off. I spin around to find myself face to face with someone’s sweet old grandpa. His mouth hangs agape dripping with dark fluid, his teeth (most likely not originals) coming at me. I press my gun in his open mouth, right between his dentures, and I pull the trigger. I don’t look away and I regret it. At least I flinched in time to keep his blood out of my eyes, out of my mouth. I don’t want to find out what zombie tastes like.