by Smith, S. L.
Lee laughed as he saw what was attached to the silver chain. It was a cross – No, he thought, a crucifix.
After a short spin, he stopped the Bobcat and reversed an extra twenty feet down the roadway, even with Padre’s Humvee. “Cover me,” he called over to the priest, as he flung the door of the Bobcat open. He jumped between the tines of the fork and onto the asphalt roadway. As a precaution, he had removed a pistol from one of his underarm holsters. He slid the silver chain and cross into his free hand, knocking off chunks of meat and congealed blood as he did so.
Padre was eager for the change of pace and went about his task without a word. The priest’s arm and the rifle’s lever moved together fluidly. It required the use of a precious resource, bullets, but the rifle was another efficient machine to clear away the zombies. Zombies seems to drop two and three at time as Padre swung into action.
It didn’t take long from Lee to remove the chain and drop it around his head. He was back in the saddle just in time for when Padre needed to move farther down the road. The horde had shifted toward its new target and was beginning to grow thick around the Humvee.
Lee raised the fork back to neck height and rolled the Bobcat into the oncoming horde. Still spinning toward his right, the Bobcat seemed to grow even more efficient.
Two heads clanged against the side of the Humvee and Padre re-parked it down the road apiece. After the flurry of rifle fire covering Lee, he didn’t to fire another shot. Over the course of the next two hours, they reversed foot by foot way past the school. When they could again see sunlight breaking through the dense horde, they were nearly back to the airport and the gas station.
Lee didn’t need to turn the forklift’s motor off when it was all over. The motor just sputtered off on its own. The Bobcat’s fuel gauge had long since hit the zero mark. The Bobcat was completely coated in a deep red scum. When Lee finally kicked the door back open, the swinging door launched a bucketful of gore into the air. It was nothing, however, compared to what lay across the roadway. The black asphalt of the roadway was barely even visible. The Bobcat looked like a clot of blood along a massive spliced artery. The road stretched back to the horizon as one long swath of human wreckage.
After kicking the door open, Lee slowly rose from inside the cockpit. His knees creaked audibly. Padre was leaning against the outside the Humvee, waiting for him with one rifle still unslung. “Man,” was all Lee could say as he stood stretching and looking back down the roadway. Padre, never much one for words, just nodded in appreciation.
Lee started scanning the area now that he had an unobstructed view of the fields surrounding the roadway. He looked at Padre in panic. “Where …? You haven’t seen the girls?”
Padre shook his head grimly. He told the other man about the last time the girls had checked in, when Gill said don’t radio them. “She had said they were going dark, into ‘stealth mode,’ she said. And something about some ‘bad hombres’ following them.
“That’s it?” Lee suddenly regained his nervous energy. He began chirping incessantly with questions.
“Nothing more on the radio, either.”
CHAPTER TEN: PURSUIT
“Come on,” Holly said tugging at Gill’s arm. “Let’s get back to the other road. Padre and Lee gotta be over there, right?”
Gill wasn’t moving. She had felt a sudden foreboding at seeing the school in the distance. “Shhh, just listen,” she said. She was having difficulty focusing due to a sudden pounding in her head.
Holly shifted back and forth on her feet. She was willing herself to keep quiet despite the pounding in her chest. She tried breathing softly, but found that she was having difficulty catching her breath. Her heart was beating faster. Her fear was mounting. She felt relief as Gill finally broke off toward the ditch on the far side of the levee road. Gill dropped down and just lay on the cool grass there for what seemed like an eternity.
Holly suddenly grabbed at her glasses. They had been fogging up as they ran around. She wiped the moisture away with a piece of her shirt. She hated the way she sweat in all this humidity. She looked down at herself and wished she was in better shape. She sat wondering why the apocalypse, with all its starving and running, running and starving, had not yet given her the body she always wanted. But she could fight. That was something, she thought, something that was about to be again put to the test.
Gill suddenly rocked back onto her heels. Her back had stiffened at a sound that Holly couldn’t hear. Gill looked back up the roadway to the school and then hunched back down, cursing under her breath. She grabbed Holly’s hand. “Come on, we’ll run for the road.”
“The road?” Holly whispered. “The road’s right here,” she said cocking her head behind them.
“No, the first road, stupid. The highway.”
“Why not the school?”
“They’re close, very close. Too close. We’d never make it in the open like that.”
Holly nodded grimly, knowing that she wasn’t about to win any foot races. “Let’s fight these guys, Gill. There’s only two.”
Gill shook her head. “They’ve got us outgunned, probably outnumbered, too. But be ready. We’ll probably be fighting either way.”
Holly nodded and heaved herself up and into a crouch. Gill closed her eyes one last time to listen. She then leaned just a bit towards the roadway. She checked both directions before leaping in the opposite direction, across the ditch and into the woods beyond. The thin woods ran along the edge of the field and eventually to the highway maybe five hundred yards on the far side.
Holly twitched at the suddenness of Gill’s movements. She moved like some kind of small animal that had been startled back into hiding. Though quick at the other girl’s heels, Holly didn’t slice through the woods and brush nearly as quietly. Nevertheless, Holly could now hear the sounds of their pursuers. There was something crashing through the woods after them. It was living, too, Holly knew. The dead didn’t move so fast.
They sounded so close, Holly thought with rising panic. She could almost feel hands closing around her arm or neck or ankle. Why don’t they yell out? Tell us to stop or they’ll shoot? Holly quickly decided she didn’t care. Her lungs were already starting to burn with the exertion.
Gill, Holly noticed, was running through the woods holding her bo staff in one hand. She was slicing through the smaller vines that criss-crossed their path like a thick spider webs. Holly decided that now was not the appropriate time to break the rules laid down in kindergarten. She would not be running with her knives drawn.
Moments later, Gill whipped her head back to check behind her. She realized that Holly was no longer back there. She saw the younger girl’s shadow not far off. The light was starting to break through the woods as they were nearing the far side.
Her eyes were adjusting to the light. The slim line of the road was emerging through the trees. She had been expecting to see the Humvee as soon as the road appeared. She hadn’t realized until that moment that she had pinned all her hopes on the Humvee being there. She suddenly felt very foolish. It was as if she’d expected Padre to be waiting for them with arms open and guns blazing.
Gill could hear their pursuers crashing through the woods behind them. Nevertheless, when she finally emerged from the woods, she slowed and stopped. Holly kept running and ran right past her. She cast a look of bewilderment in Gill’s direction, and kept running.
Her red hair swung back and forth as she searched up and down the road for Padre and Lee. The Humvee was nowhere to be seen. There was something that looked like a forklift down the way, but she dismissed it without another thought. She decided at that moment that they would need to stand and fight. Any second now, the men would burst from the tree line and out into the open. With Holly still running, Gill thought, she could be just the diversion she needed.
Gill fell back against a tree. She stood just inside the shadows behind the tree line. She held her bo vertically to conceal it along the shadow of the tree. She was rea
dying herself to bring it down hard against anyone passing within range. She listened as their pursuers closed in on them. Both of the men were making plenty of noise. Gill could hear them perfectly now that she was still and forcibly slowing down her breathing. One was coming near. She could tell now that they each had their own pursuer. She could hear Holly’s, as well as her own. She wondered if hers would come near enough. She would be swinging blindly, or mostly blind. There were vines everywhere. She hoped that the path of her staff would be clear.
He was within feet now. She turned and swung in one fluid movement. Their eyes locked for the thinnest slice of a moment. She saw the rage in his eyes. The emotion she saw there wasn’t a reaction to her ambush, it was just there. Like rage was etched inside him.
The crack of her bo staff making impact was the next thing she knew. The staff had slid up the side of his neck along his carotid and had kept going. It went much too far up the neck. It went past the place where a small nerve, a pressure point, curled out midway along the jawbone. The jawbone should have stopped the staff from going further. The momentum of the impact should have knocked the man sideways, but it didn’t. Not exactly.
Gill looked away from him sharply. Whether it was the spray of bullets erupting from the man’s automatic gun or the sight of her bo staff somehow lodged in his face, she didn’t know. The end of her bo staff had broken clean through the man’s jaw bone. He looked on in agony as the long stick protruded from his sinus cavity, somewhere deep within his cheekbone. Even then, as the life drained from his eyes, the rage remained.
The red hair jumped from one shoulder to the other, as she heard a squeal of fear not far away. It was Holly. Between this and the horrific scene she had just caused, she didn’t notice the soft fall of the radio into the wet mud at her feet.
Gill watched as Holly’s pursuer locked one arm around her neck. Holly’s screaming suddenly stopped as it lodged in her throat.
Gill’s heart jumped with a mixture of hope and fear. She turned back to the dying man, hoping it wasn’t too late. She crawled over to his where he lay. He was beginning to seize. Her bo had notched something critical deep inside the man’s skull. She lunged for the automatic rifle still slung across his shoulder. Her movements were wild, though, and grasping.
“That’s enough,” a male voice said behind her. Gill stopped. She had dropped her staff as she lunged for the gun. Not only that, the rifle was still tangled around the man’s arm. As he thrashed about in his death convulsions, the dying man had unwittingly tricked and disarmed her.
Still, it wasn’t enough to stop the berserking redhead. She uncoiled her body and made to strike. She would launch herself against the last pursuer head on. But he was too far. She soon stilled, as he sent a spray of bullets whizzing past her body and into the soft earth beyond. Gill had become a skilled fighter over the last few weeks, since the apocalypse began, but she was not accustomed to being shot at. Zombies didn’t shoot back.
If the last man had been just a little closer, or if she hadn’t dropped her bo, or if she hadn’t hit that guy so hard, or if Holly had just struggled a little more, or if the dead man’s rifle had just come free – these would be the questions that would haunt her over the coming days. In the end, she would realize that she had just lost her nerve in the last, critical moment. She hadn’t been prepared for the moment. She had grown too accustomed to fighting zombies. She had been outmaneuvered and would pay a terrible price for it, but she would never let it happen again.
The man staring back at her was still holding Holly around her neck. The girl was still squirming, but her eyes were now lolling back in her head. In another moment, Holly’s body fell slack as she passed out. He let her fall, crumpling into a heap on the ground. All the while, his cold, predatorial eyes never left Gill’s face. Gill couldn’t tell if he was one of the first two guys that had climbed out of the car or not. They all had the same look. She cursed at herself for being so completely beaten.
He was pale, Gill saw. His hair fell down to his shoulders in dark, greasy clumps. His eyes were just small points of light. She couldn’t tell, in the half-light of the trees and brush, whether there were whites to his eyes at all. She knew instantly that he reminded her of a rat. His nose didn’t help. It was more like a flaccid, pale snout. “Rat man” would be her name for him always, no matter what she later learned.
Soon, both of the girls were unconscious. Their next memories would be of flitting in and out of consciousness and of traveling by boat along the river.
*****
“You mean they’re just gone? Just poof. Nothing?” Lee was peppering Padre incessantly with unhelpful and repetitious questions from the passenger’s seat of the Humvee. It was as if Lee’s internal monologue switch had been snapped clean off.
“Not nothing,” Padre said growing irritated. “She said ‘bad hombres’.”
Padre had been in constant radio contact with Isherwood and St. Mary’s during the lulls of their battle with the double horde, that is, the combined hordes from inside the school and around the airport fence. Isherwood had created a secondary defensive line back at the gas station. His precautions, though, had proven unnecessary following Lee’s heroics with Bobcat. Isherwood had posted five rifles across the highway, but these would be quickly converted into search parties now that the threat had been eliminated.
Chet had been keeping an ear to the radio transmissions all along, not straying far from Isherwood’s side. He was a fool, Chet had thought, to let himself be parted from Gill in the first place. She had kissed him. He had thought it would never happen, but it did. Afterwards, he had wanted her to have her space, not wanting to scare her off. She was so fiercely independent. And now, she might be gone forever or worse.
Isherwood wouldn’t have been able to hold Chet back, even if he’d wanted to. Chet was off in a dead sprint towards the levee as soon as Padre had passed on the message about ‘bad hombres’. Padre hadn’t passed on the message immediately, though. It was an oversight that he’d soon learn to regret.
Isherwood had called out for Justin to follow Chet, but Justin was already jumping in his Escalade. Isherwood’s party had watched Justin catch up with Chet along the Airport Road, but hadn’t heard from them since.
Isherwood was just finishing catching Padre up all this over the radio. Throughout it all, Lee was still muttering to himself off and on.
“Glenn is coming now from St. Mary’s,” Padre interrupted Lee’s ramblings. “He’ll be able to track the girls. The dirt is soft enough.”
“Keep driving. Don’t just give up,” Lee said.
Padre dismissed the comment as irrelevant. Lee had just performed what amounted to a miracle, Padre thought. He had killed thousands of zombies, possibly, and with just a forklift, but he clearly needed time to decompress afterwards. Despite some efforts at charity, Padre had begun using the military vehicle’s horn to interrupt Lee’s ramblings. The horn didn’t seem to matter, either to Lee or to their safety. The place had been nearly perfectly emptied of zombies. Before joining back up with what was left of Isherwood’s group, they would make three circuits back and forth between the airport and St. Anne’s church in Morganza and along both the highway and the river road. Through all of this, there had been little to no sign of leftover zombies, despite Padre hammering on the horn, and none at all of the girls.
CHAPTER ELEVEN: CROSSROADS
Isherwood held his small group back at the gas station as he waited for Glenn to join them. There were now only two others, besides Isherwood, now that Chet and Justin had left them. These were Patrick and Wilson. Wilson had really just come along for the target practice. He was only a novice with a rifle and still kept his trust makeshift spear near at hand.
Patrick called out that Padre’s Humvee was approaching. Near about that same time, Isherwood heard the first rumblings of Glenn’s diesel truck approaching. Once his strength had returned, Sara’s dad had been quick to visit Lieux Chevrolet and go truck-shopping. When the
truck finally came into view, Isherwood was relieved to see Sara’s brothers, Micha and Eli, riding in the cab with Glenn. He saw that his father-in-law had picked out for his new truck one that was nearly identical to his old truck: a silver Dodge Ram.
“So where should we start?” Micha asked the gathering of older men. The boy’s voice was just a little too excited, given the circumstances. Isherwood and Glenn exchanged glances, smirking at each other, before turning to Padre. Padre, for his part, looked briefly at Lee. Lee was standing beside him, but staring off into the distance. Staring without seeing, Padre observed.
“It’s hard to say,” Padre began. “There was a zombie up the road apiece. Something had driven through its rib cage. There were tire tracks still in it and leading away from it. Smallish car from the look of it. That’s likely what the ‘bad hombres’ got out of. There might be a trail of viscera leading away from it, if we’re lucky.”
“You’re saying some of the ‘bad hombres’ got out of the car and started after the girls from there?” Glenn asked.
“Yeah, there was a driveway. Most of those houses just have a gravel drive, but this one had a concrete-looking drive. It was in front of a brick house. Nothing special. You’ll see it. Only …”
“Only what, Padre?” Patrick asked.
“Only I doubt there’ll be much of a trail,” Padre continued. “A few hundred, maybe even a thousand, feet trampled around that house from the look of it. They eventually all came back our way, but not before flattening every bush and blade of grass around that house first.”
“Wait,” Micha asked. “That doesn’t make sense. The bad guys drove their car after the girls? Through the yard?”