by Ben Reeder
“Okay, it’s your ass. Where to next?” she asked as she started the engine.
“Brentwood Street. It’s just the other side of Glenstone,” I said while I pulled the M9 out of its holster. The mag dropped into my hand, and I pressed the round I’d stripped from the other magazine into this one to bring the magazine’s count back up to fifteen, with number sixteen in the chamber.
“That goes right past Battlefield Mall. That’s kind of the opposite of avoiding crowds isn’t it?” Porsche asked as she backed up.
“Yeah, we’re going to have to thread the needle there. St John’s is a little ways north of there, too. Of course, the cemetery is just on the other side of the road, so that’s convenient.”
“Let’s hope we don’t need that.” She pulled out onto the road and wove her way back toward Sunset, heading the wrong way down the split causeway. Shapes began to emerge from the darkness as the fire drew infected to it like moths. We stayed on the road until it rejoined itself, then followed our own treadmarks back into the grass. When we reached the spillway under Campbell, Porsche barely slowed down. A couple of infected jumped over the railing at us, but hit the cement with grisly crunching sounds as the driver’s side mirror snapped off in a shower of sparks. When we burst out the other side, we left a few infected picking themselves up from a cement faceplant on the other side as well. Only one got to its feet. The other three limped along on legs that bent in a couple of extra places. The mostly whole one could run though. Porsche got us back on the Greenways trail, and Flash the Infected Sprinter came up with us. I could hear the slap of his feet against the concrete over the hum of the truck, and a rhythmic grunting. We were pulling away, but not fast enough. The minute we slowed down, he’d be on us. I needed to slow him down or kill him.
I brought the M-4 up and tried to sight in on him with the scope. Between the bouncing of the truck and the way his head bobbed around, there was no way I was going to get a clean kill without wasting a ton of ammo. Orange light from the streetlamps filtered through the trees, and I could make out that Flash was wearing a white lab coat over a suit coat, slacks and loafers. In the dark, it was hard to tell much more than that. The truck angled left, and I lost sight of him for a moment. I risked a moment I didn’t really have to look over my shoulder at the path in front of us. We had under two hundred feet of straight-away left, and I was guessing only half that in lead time on Flash. When I looked back, he had rounded the curve and was headed our way. Why are some of them so goddamn fast? I wondered. Most of the ones we’d seen were slow, like you’d expect from the walking dead. It was why they were called the “walking dead” after all, right? But a few were crazy fast. Like the ones from the hospitals. A half formed theory started to spin in my head.
“Slow down!” I yelled over my shoulder as I flipped the M-4 to burst mode. The truck’s engine dropped a pitch, and Flash started getting a lot closer a lot faster. Suddenly calm, I brought the rifle up to my cheek again and tried to place the red dot on Flash’s chest. When he was close enough that I was pretty sure I’d hit, I pulled the trigger. The rifle bucked against my shoulder and muzzle flare blotted out everything in front of the scope for less than a second. When I brought the barrel back down, Flash was tumbling along the trail about a hundred feet behind us. He slid to a stop, and I reached back with my right hand to slap against the glass. Mentally I counted off three rounds.
“Stop!” I called. The truck slowed and stopped. Behind the infected doctor I’d just dropped, I could see the rest of the ones who’d jumped after us limping along slowly. There was no way they were going to catch up to us, but I couldn’t just leave them up and walking around. I thumbed the fire selector to single shot and took aim at a man in bright red workout gear. My first shot blew the left half of his head away, and I went to the woman in a miniskirt and a tight blue top behind him. Four, I counted as I stroked the trigger. She lurched at the last second, and I missed cleanly, then adjusted and fired again. She dropped on the second shot, and I went to the next one. Five, six, seven, I added to the count as I put a bullet into the head of a kid with his hat skewed sideways. It took three shots to hit a guy in jeans and a black concert t-shirt, bringing my shot count to ten. Recalling Nate’s coaching on one of my weekend trips up to Wyoming, I took a long, slow breath, then brought my sites down on one of the last two. He lurched along, and after a couple of steps, I could predict his rhythm. The gun bucked against my shoulder, and he went down. Eleven. The last one rounded the corner, a woman in nurse’s scrubs. My breath caught as I saw a flash of black hair like Maya’s. Was it her? Too skinny, too tall, no tattoo on her arm. My finger stroked the trigger, and she went down. Twelve.
Finally, Flash started to move. His head came up and he slowly pushed himself to his feet. The front of his white lab coat was stained dark with his own blood, but when he started moving, it was with the slow, lurching movements of the six infected I’d just killed. I put round number thirteen through his forehead and turned to Porsche.
“Alright, let’s go,” I said with a sense of satisfaction. She gunned the engine and the truck surged forward. We sped across the road and back onto the grass again. From both sides of us, I could hear screams and the occasional gunshot from a distance. The road to our right was eerily quiet, though. I kept my eyes on the line of cars as we sped along the concrete trail. The line was more random now, and there were gaps in it that hadn’t been there before. A few cars showed body damage, and more than a couple of them were burning. As we passed a dark colored Volkswagen, I could see someone inside, flailing at the glass. There was a pop and the almost musical tinkling of glass as the driver’s side window shattered, then the sound of an enraged, inhuman scream ripped through the night. Even as I felt a shudder run between my shoulder blades, I put the new knowledge into a spot in my head, and gave it a name. The fast, feral infected were ghouls. The slow ones were zombies. The most frightening thing was that the ghouls still seemed to be alive.
We were close to the line of trees that marked the drainage ditch we’d skirted when I heard a deep bass sound, like the rapid thumping of a helicopter, but not like the St. John’s Life Flite. This was faster sounding, and louder. A black shape loomed over the houses across Sunset and flew north, blotting out a part of the night sky for a few seconds as it went overhead. Twin rotors at the front and back held the long body aloft, and I heard the familiar whine of a turbine engine. A Chinook, flying with no running lights and no markings that I could see. I filed it away as one more entry on a list of weird shit that was getting longer and longer by the second. We cleared the edge of the trees and for some reason, I felt a little safer as soon as we were out of the black chopper’s line of sight. Porsche wasted no time getting back on the trail, and soon we were heading toward the cover of trees.
We slipped past the first branches and found ourselves looking at more asphalt. The Greenways trail paralleled a residential street here, and for almost a quarter of a mile, it looked like we would be exposed on the left. I leaned forward and stuck my face near the opening in the cab’s rear window.
“Turn your headlights off and stay on the trailway,” I said softly. “Go slowly.” Porsche nodded and switched the lights off. The trees grew thick enough overhead that the trail was mostly in shadow, but the streetlights gave us enough illumination to see where we were going. I stayed hunkered down by the back window as we coasted along. Off to our left, a row of apartments loomed, the windows darkened and eerily silent. We crept past quietly, and an agonizingly slow two or three minutes later the trail led back into the trees. Sunset angled closer on our right, and I could see more movement on the road through the trees. Porsche kept the headlights off as she sped up a little, trusting to the narrow bands of light that bled through the leaves to show us where the trail was. Ahead, we could hear the screeching of tires; it ended with the unmistakable crump of cars hitting each other at speed.
When the trees began to thin out, we could see a knot of cars stopped on National and
the sound of raised voices. The road itself looked clear on either side of them, and as we got closer, it looked like your average pileup. A light colored little hybrid was on its side in the middle of the road, with the rear end of a Caddy sticking out from behind the front of it. I could see the back end of a truck jutting out from behind the rear end and another car with its nose buried under the truck’s rear bumper.
Gunshots shattered the argument, and I saw a body fall to the pavement on the far side of the truck as I looked under it. A skinny guy with a jumble of tattoos on his lanky arms in a loose wife beater shirt and ripped jeans that threatened to fall off his hips walked around the back of the Caddy while someone else walked behind the truck. The tattooed gangster wannabe peered in the windshield of the hybrid, then stepped back and pulled a chromed revolver into view. The gun boomed four times as he pumped his arm into each shot. Five more pops from another gun corresponded to five flashes of light from the other side of the car jammed under the truck’s bumper.
“You’re dead, bitch!” the skinny guy crowed as he gestured with the gun. The other guy came around from behind the far end of the pile up with an automatic held high and sideways in his right hand. He was wearing loose pants of his own that drooped around his hips, and a button down shirt over a white wife beater, with a baseball hat worn with the flat bill off to one side.
“Killed that motherfucker!” he yelled to his friend. The two examples of Rule Twelve met near the middle of the vehicles and started talking. From fifty yards away, I couldn’t make out what they were saying, but they gestured at the cars. I was guessing their wannabe pimp-mobile was totaled. Judging by the headshaking that was going on, I was willing to bet that the other three cars were out of commission, too. Porsche and I stayed still as they started looking around. The skinny guy with the revolver pointed to the north, and I glanced that way. Movement caught my eye, and I uttered a whispered curse.
“Dumbasses,” Porsche hissed from in the cab. I agreed silently and hoped they were going to take off running. But then the kid in the button down shirt turned toward us. He started walking our way and raised the pistol homey-style, gun sideways, held up almost over his head.
“Bitch, you better get out my truck!” he yelled as he strode toward us sounding like a walking stereotype. It was time to introduce this would be bad-ass to Dave’s Rule Number Fourteen: Guns are not magic wands. Pointing one at someone didn’t mean they were automatically going to do what you told them to.
“Get down,” I whispered, “and light him up.” She leaned across the seat and reached for the light controls on the steering column. The headlights caught Hat Wannabe flatfooted and he squinted against the sudden light. Then he started popping off rounds our way.
“You did NOT just flash that shit in my face, bitch!” he said as he fired. Bullets whizzed by us, but only one actually hit the truck, proving that readiness to pull the trigger did not equal any ability to actually hit what you were shooting at. The gun stopped making noise, and I surged to my feet. Unlike the two thugs, I was not too cool to use the sights, and I knew how to hit what I shot at. They were about to learn a hard lesson in cause and effect: shooting at someone means that they just might shoot back. Hat Wannabe was framed in the cone of light as he tried to drop the magazine from his pistol. Behind him, I could see his buddy bringing his hand cannon up. Time slowed for me as I brought the M4 up and tried to put the red dot in the optic in the middle of his chest. When I got it dancing around more or less where I wanted it, I pulled the trigger twice. He dropped like a rag doll, and I moved the sight to Six Gun. Fourteen, fifteen. His gun boomed and I heard a bullet whine by as it ricocheted off something. I pulled the trigger again, but he stayed up, so I tried again, and this time sent him spinning. Sixteen, seventeen.
“You okay?” I called out to Porsche, my heart hammering in my chest.
“Yeah, I’m fine!” Porsche said, relief plain in her voice as she got herself upright again.
“Get us out of here!” I said as I dropped back down. She wasted no time in putting the truck into gear and leaving fresh ruts in the grass. We bounced off the curb and onto National, then she was making a hard right as we went around the nose of the hybrid. Six Gun was trying to crawl toward his shiny pistol, and Porsche swerved in his direction. He gave out a strangled scream as the front wheel hit him, then went silent when the back wheel got him.
“Asshole,” I heard Porsche call out as she powered the truck into a sharper left than I thought possible under the laws of physics as I understood them. Once I was done bouncing off the side of the truck bed, I pulled myself up to see that we were barreling down Sunset. The street was empty, so even though we were going the wrong way down the divided road, there wasn’t much chance of us hitting someone else coming the other way. We crossed over to the right side of the road as soon as it merged back to four lanes again, and slowed down enough to make sure we wouldn’t get sideswiped when we crossed Fremont, the next big road. Porsche turned her headlights off as we blazed through the intersection, and we coasted forward quietly.
More screams came from our left, but to our right, it was silent. Trees lined the street on that side for about two hundred yards, cutting off my view of the park. I knew from countless past trips that an empty swimming pool took up this corner of the park. A little further down the road was a playground and a parking lot. I hoped that there was no one out tonight. The thought of zombie kids in softball uniforms sickened me. It took me a moment to realize that it wasn’t just the thought of dead kids lurching around. It was the thought that followed: I’d shoot them to stay alive. It bothered me that my brain was even able to envision doing that. Still, I kept sweeping left and right for movement.
Porsche slowed to a stop as we got past the edge of the trees, and I focused forward. Nothing was directly in front of us, but up ahead at the Glenstone intersection, I could see what made her stop. Truth was I should have expected this. Glenstone was one of the major roads through town. It made sense that it would be one of the most backed up roads right now. I could see three cars on fire, and the glow from more fires flickered through the windows and off the paint of other cars further to the south. Silhouetted against the glow were several figures that seemed to be wandering back and forth among the vehicles.
“Well, we’re not going that way,” Porsche said with an upbeat tone.
“Damn straight. Fremont looked pretty clear, and I think we can get past the hospital by taking one of the side streets.”
“We can,” she said as she shifted the truck into reverse. The back tire bumped over the almost nonexistent curb before she stopped and shifted back into gear. “I used to live in the apartments at the corner of Fremont and Seminole.” She took us back toward Fremont and turned right. According to the mental map I had of this area, she would have lived caddy-corner to the southeast corner of the hospital campus. I hoped she knew what she was doing, because I’d only been through this area a few times, and I didn’t trust my memory of it in the dark.
As we pulled even with the first street on the right, screams pierced the night, and we could see shapes emerging onto the road. Porsche straightened the wheel and hit the gas. The next road looked deserted, and she took the turn. As we started down the street, movement on either side caught my attention, but we were going too fast for me to make out what it was. I had a sneaking suspicion, though. Frantic barking broke out ahead of us, and I felt the truck slow. As we got closer, I could see something moving up ahead of us, and the barking got louder. Then I heard something in the dog’s barking that made my gut clench up. In between barks, it would let out a whine, then bark again. We pulled up until the dog was to our right, and I dug my flashlight out of my backpack. The cone of light showed a Rottweiler in front of one of the infected. The infected was sitting up slowly, and the dog was down with its forelegs in front of it but it’s haunches up in the air. I caught sight of its tail, and gave a smile of approval for its former owner. Most people bobbed the tails on Rot
t’s, but this big fella had his intact. I felt a surge of pity for the poor creature. The Rottweiler was a very devoted breed, and if I was any judge, this one was trying to make sense of what its human had become. It looked at me, then back at the thing that was struggling to its feet in front of it.
There is a saying from the Hagakure, The Book of the Samurai, that one should make decisions within the space of seven breaths. It took me less than one to jump over the side of the truck. I went around to the back and pulled the tailgate down. The dog backed away from the infected, and I let out a whistle.
“Come on, boy!” I called out. It gave a low whine, then ran toward a pile of things in front of the house behind it. My jaw dropped in disbelief as it carried a rolled up green wool blanket back in its mouth. Barely breaking stride, it jumped into the back of the truck, then turned around and dropped the blanket at its feet. I closed the tailgate and hopped back in, fighting the urge to go back and bash his former owner’s skull in.
“Picking up more strays?” Porsche asked as she gunned the accelerator. I could hear the smile in her voice. The dog gave my proffered hand an experimental sniff before laying eight feet of slobbery tongue across it in what I guessed was his canine approval. I chuckled as I patted his shoulder. A thick leather collar encircled his neck, and I followed it around until I found the tag.
“Sherman,” I read aloud. He gave me a short bark in reply. The name fit. Up close, I could see how broad he was across the shoulders. Like the tank he was named for. He laid his head down on his paws and looked up at me with big, soulful doggy eyes, and I imagined I could see the sadness behind them. I ran my hand along his back as I looked out the front windshield at the perilous new world that was being born around us.