The zombies only grunted and renewed their efforts to get free, and the door pushed open again. Their hands, minus fingers, came back outside the door, only this time dark reddish-black blood oozed off them.
Del kicked at the door again. More crunching and cracks could be heard.
The zombies didn’t give up and continued to their attempts to get out, ignoring any of the punishment Del was dealing out. After three hard kicks, Jo grabbed Del’s shoulder and pulled him away from the door as the zombies pounded into the door. More hands and parts of arms pushed through the opening as Del breathed in and out, almost panting.
“Did you recognize anyone?” Jo asked.
“No.”
“Then why are you so pissed?”
“Because.”
The zombies relentlessly pawed at the opening, moaning and snarling. Del broke free of Jo’s grasp and kicked out at the door again, crushing the zombies’ arms and hands. Bones cracked, and one zombie’s arm dangled down at an unnatural angle.
Del stepped back, still breathing hard, and said, “Because they might not be our people, but they were somebody’s people.” He put his hands on his knees and lowered his head, working to get his breathing under control. “I fucking hate zombies. I’m sick to death of them.”
Jo stepped away from him, crossed her arms, and let Del have his moment. She had been there and knew almost everyone in the new dead world reached this point sooner or later.
Del slowly raised his head and looked at her. His eyes were red and raw looking.
Jo uncrossed her arms, stepped toward him, and put a hand on his shoulder.
“You over that now?”
“Sure,” he said.
“Ready to move on?”
“Sure,” he said.
He took another minute to collect himself, and they went on their way, while the zombies fought to get their time at the opening in the door.
“We have two coming through the corn,” Troy said with a slight quaver in his voice.
Casey replied, “That’s to be expected. Just look around the lot. Somebody’s already taken out a lot of them.”
A half-dozen of Donovan’s people stood by or leaned on the trailer. Along with them, Austin sat inside the trailer, his hands lashed to the metal work of the trailer.
For a while, Austin had been the main attraction but not anymore. The zombies had taken center stage. Like Troy, everyone had become transfixed on the two zombies that had just stumbled out of the cornfield. Each of the zombies were covered in dry, long brown corn leaves. In a way, the leaves looked like some sort of Native American garb, hanging off the zombies. This effect only lasted a few seconds as the zombies’ shambling steps shook free the leaves, returning them to their rotting and somewhat frightening forms.
“Those two are still coming,” Troy said, and Casey quickly caught on that Troy was setting up the expectation that somebody was supposed to do something about them and that someone was her.
“They never stop coming,” she said. “And we never stop killing them.”
She shouldered her rifle and reached down into the trailer to pick up one of the shovels they had used to bury Terry just a couple of hours ago.
“Why are you getting the shovel?” Troy asked. “Aren’t you going to shoot them?”
Casey shot him a sideways glance then pointed into the cornfield. “Do you see all that corn out there? How many zombies do you think might be wandering around in there?”
“I have no idea,” Troy responded.
“Me, neither, but we don’t need a couple dozen of those monsters drawn in by my gun shots. Do we?”
“No,” Troy said, looking down and studying his shoes.”
“There are two shovels. You coming with me?”
Troy jerked his head up and looked to Casey, his eyes wide. Drew, their designated tractor driver, caught the fear in Troy’s eyes and just shook his head. Drew was in his early thirties with model-quality blond hair that off-set his soft, plain face. Some people called it an open face. Others said he looked sort of blank.
Being a decent human, Drew said, “I can go out with you. As long as you have the rifle.” He held out his empty hands and said, “I’d be going out without a gun. I like the idea of someone having one in case something goes south.”
Casey said, “I wouldn’t have it any other way. My plan is to use the shovel, but if more of those things come out of the corn or something goes wrong, I won’t hesitate to use the rifle.”
“That works for me,” Drew said as he stepped back and reached down to retrieve a shovel of his own. He hefted it in his hands for a few seconds, just to get a feel for it. If you watched his face carefully, you could track his expression as he went from concern to contemplation and ending at assimilation. The shovel would do. “I’m ready.”
“Let’s do this,” Casey said as she started toward the zombies, her shovel held in her hands and her rifle hung over her shoulder.
The two zombies were as different as they could be. One was formerly a woman, and it wore a tattered knee-length dress that had seen better days. In life, you would have guessed that she had been in her thirties or forties, but the decomposition made that almost impossible to really judge. She had been in shape while alive, but something had taken a chunk out of her right thigh. The wound caused her gait to stutter as she shuffled toward Casey and Drew.
Zombie number two was a tall, lanky, and painfully thin elderly man. He had on a business suit that had probably cost a thousand dollars, but now it wasn’t fit for cleaning off your lawnmower. That is, if you still had one.
He was seemingly unwounded, moving along without any visible impairment.
Casey and Drew didn’t say anything, but split up, each one taking on the zombie that fit their gender. Casey gripped the shovel a little tighter as she closed on the female zombie.
As it turned out, Drew was going to make it to his zombie first. Maybe it was a combination of over eagerness on both their parts. The zombie was unimpaired and wanted a piece of Drew. For his part, Drew just wanted the thing dead as soon as possible.
As Drew closed on the zombie, he contemplated whether to give the zombie the flat of the shovel blade or to use a slicing motion with the side of the blade. After twisting the handle in his hands several different ways, he decided smacking the zombie with the flat end of the blade would be more satisfying. Like everyone in their party and probably in the world, he was sick of zombies.
The male zombie moaned in anticipation and raised its arms to reach for Drew as he closed the gap down to a few feet. In the final couple steps, he pulled the shovel back over his head. In the final step, he swung it forward with everything he had.
The flat of the blade clanged into the side of the zombie’s head, cracking its skull and spinning it around as it fell toward the pavement. It turned out that one whack wasn’t enough, and Drew finished it off with a second blow.
Casey took a different tactic and went to one knee just as she reached the zombie, ducking under its reaching hands. She whipped her shovel across the back of the zombie’s legs, knocking it off its feet onto its back, where it landed hard on the pavement. It wasn’t a killing blow, but Casey knew that and quickly bounced up to her feet, where she flipped the handle in her hands, turning the blade sideways. Once she had it set, she brought the shovel down much like a sword onto the zombie’s neck. The blade hit hard and dug deep. There was a satisfying chunking sound as the blade actually went through the zombie’s neck and struck the pavement.
It didn’t totally decapitate the zombie, but it was finished. Dark, reddish-black ooze dripped off the blade and onto the pavement.
Casey pulled the blade up and wiped it off on the zombie’s already filthy dress.
“Nice work,” Drew said, his face expressionless.
“You, too.”
She heard a sound behind them and turned to see one of the exploration teams returning from their search. She inventoried them and saw only a couple of them
carrying boxes. There had been some hope that they might find some additional supplies, but it looked like they had come up empty for the most part. A pang of hunger she had hoped to ignore made its presence known.
She asked herself, when was the last time she had anything of substance to eat? She honestly couldn’t remember. Sleep was also a remote memory.
She stuffed the hunger away as she also noticed that there were no additional people, so Del and Jo’s people must not have been there any longer. It was that or a darker alternative, and she decided not to let her mind go there. At least not until it had to.
Chapter 17
Rest Break
When all the teams had returned from searching the school, a small meeting was held to debrief each team on what they had discovered. Del and Jo shared first, and a few of the group looked on gape-mouthed. Del caught this immediately.
“Haven’t you guys seen a lot of zombies before?” Del asked.
“You have to realize that our compound was out in the woods,” Donovan said. “I mean remote. We had away teams, but most of our people stayed around the compound. While we saw them, it was usually in little groups. There were a couple small herds, but they were rare. Whenever we saw them, we just avoided them.”
“Well, we saw lots and lots of them,” Del said. “And killed lots of them when we were in the city.”
Donovan’s people looked on Del and Jo with a little bit of awe.
“What do you mean by lots?” Troy asked.
“Hundreds,” Del said.
“Really?” Troy said.
Jo elbowed Del in the side, and he stumbled back a half-step. “Don’t let it go to your head,” Jo said. “The city was full of zombies. To survive, we did what we had to do. Just like any of you would do.”
She looked to Clayton and asked, “Did you guys find anything?”
“No, if you mean people,” Clayton said. “I could tell someone had been here recently. There were empty cans of food in the trash. They hadn’t molded over yet.”
“What about supplies?” Donovan asked.
“We found a box of cheese crackers in the back of a closet in one of the classrooms. A teacher must have been hiding them there. And, oh yeah, they are very stale but edible.”
“It sounds like a real bounty,” Del said. “Here, here. Cheese and crackers for everyone.”
It had been awhile since any of them had even smiled, but Del’s levity brought on a few chuckles.
Clayton retrieved the box, cracked it open, and started passing out the crackers. It wasn’t much, but most of the people hadn’t eaten anything in days. The crackers were quickly devoured, and a small bit of the hunger was abated. Some people savored them, but most people put them away quickly.
There was a noticeable easing of tension, even with zombies in the vicinity. When you’re around a threat for so long, out of view zombies were out of mind in most cases. The massive horde teeming across the landscape behind them was a reality that they all lived with, but as long as the caravan was mobile, things were okay.
Donovan suggested that now was as good a time as any to open the cans of food they had scrounged from the farm earlier. It wasn’t all that much food, but there were several cans of pears. It was enough for just about everyone to get a single deliciously sweet pear half.
For Jo, it brought on a sense memory of eating pears with her grandmother. They had sat around the table as her grandmother shared stories of what it was like to grow up before days of modernity. Like the pear, it was a sweet memory that left her a little melancholy when she came out of it. She wondered if it just might be better to block those memories out but decided that it was best to hold onto something good.
She looked through the crowd of people and saw Donovan talking with Mason. A thought had come to her mind, so she grabbed Del by the arm as she pushed her way through the crowd with him in tow. When she got to Donovan, she asked him if he could come away from the crowd for a minute.
“Is there something wrong?” he asked. His relaxed posture from just a moment ago disappeared, and he was back in vigilance mode.
“No, no,” Jo said. “I just wanted to run something by you.”
Donovan glanced at Mason then back to Jo and said, “Sure, let’s step over there.” He pointed to an open spot in front of the tractor.
Once they were away from the people and settled, Jo asked, “When was the last time you slept? I mean really got even a nap?”
Donovan pursed his lips and looked skyward for a moment as if he could divine some truth from them. When he looked back down, he said, “I can’t remember. It’s got to be forty-eight hours. Maybe longer.”
“Same for me,” she said. “We can’t keep going like this.”
“But the horde is back there,” he said while lifting his hand and pointing westward.
“Yeah, but by my calculations, we have a six to, maybe, an eight hour lead on them,” she said.
Del asked, “Do you have some sort of zombie speed calculator or something?”
She shot him a sideways glance.
“And does it calculate in the fresh ones with the old and broken down ones?” Del asked.
“What are you getting at?” Jo said, sounding a little peeved.
“I was trying to make a little joke, but you obviously didn’t watch Monty Python in your life.” She continued to look at him with a blank stare. “You know, what is the airspeed of a swallow?”
No one took the bait, and Del threw his hands in the air and said, “You’re nothing but a bunch of humorless killjoys.”
“Getting back on point,” Jo said, “and Del is helping me make it. He’s punch drunk from lack of sleep. We all are, and in this condition, any of us could make a mistake.”
“I don’t like stopping for too long,” Donovan said. “We have the horde and the marauders out there.” He paused and looked to the west as if he could see across the miles for a moment. “I was in combat in Iraq. There were times we had to stay awake for days. Sleep just wasn’t an option.”
“But the Army had little pills to help with that,” Del said.
Donovan looked to Del with a raised eyebrow.
“I drove supply trucks up and down that country,” Del said. “Some long ass drives and long ass days. Those little pills may have made me jumpy, but they also kept me awake. We don’t have jack squat now.”
“Should we be looking for some five-hour energy drinks or maybe some diet pills at the next stop?” Donovan asked.
Well, look there,” Del said, putting his hands on his hips in an exaggerated fashion. “You do have a little sense of humor.”
Donovan must have decided to cut through it, “What are you proposing?”
“That we take a short rest stop here,” Jo said. “Three to four hours tops.”
“What if your calculations are wrong?” Donovan asked.
“We put a couple well-rested people as sentries down the road a half mile in either direction with walkie-talkies. If they see something, they hollar.”
Donovan’s face scrunched up for a few seconds, then he said, “Three hours. You pick two sentries from your team. I pick two from mine.”
“Deal,” Jo said.
Clayton had cat-napped in the back of the truck, because he quickly learned as a soldier years ago that you catch sleep when you can. Because he was more rested than most of the others, he agreed to be one of the sentries. Ryan insisted on going along, so that meant that Madison had to go, too.
Clayton was starting to wonder if something was going on between them. She was pretty young in his eyes, but so was Ryan. Still, some of the old rules seemed to be out the window, and the last thing he wanted to be was a chaperone on a teenie bopper date. There was too much on the line, and he was too old to be any sort of father-figure for either of them..
The first member of the second sentry team was nowhere as willing to take on the task. Troy almost whined when he was selected, but everyone had seen him snoozing in the trailer on t
he trip across the deadlands. Casey, despite being exhausted, offered to be the second sentry, mostly because she didn’t trust Troy.
Clayton’s team was sent eastward to watch for marauders, and Casey’s team was sent back the way they had come to monitor the roads for the zombie horde. Neither task was enviable, but Troy had petitioned for the zombie patrol because he knew zombies didn’t shoot back.
“I think a half-mile should be good, don’t you?” Clayton asked as he slowed the truck down to a crawl after just taking a long curve in the road.
“Sure,” Ryan said from the front passenger seat of the truck, but, in reality, he didn’t know. His only quasi-military experience came at the hands of a cruel genius that drove Ryan to do things he knew he would never stop regretting.
Speaking his thoughts out loud, Clayton said, “I’m going to park on the left side of the road and duck behind those tree limbs, so we have the element of surprise on anyone coming our way.”
“Seems like a good plan to me,” Madison said from the backseat while leaning forward.
Clayton edged the truck up against the tree line at such an angle that they had a good vantage point down the road, but it also allowed them some cover from being spotted. At least until whoever was coming their way was very close. Clayton never planned to let anyone get that close.
He cut the engine, and the only noise was the metal tinking sound that engines make when they are cooling down. This subsided when the engine hit a certain temperature, and then the sounds of nature filled the air. Birds flitted among the leaves of the trees and chirped away, telling their little stories. Occasionally, the sounds of woodland creatures could be heard scuttling among the leaves.
All three of the occupants of the truck settled back into their seats and looked down a long straightaway of two-lane road. Trees lined either side for a quarter of a mile then there was a break in the trees on the right side. From what Clayton could see, it looked like another fallow farm field.
After two minutes, Madison leaned forward and said, “This is boring.”
The Deadland Chronicles (Book 2): The Undead Horde Page 10