by David Rogers
“If we’re over that way, and have to fall back into the swamp, we’ll probably be okay as long as there’s not already a heavy number of the bastards in there waiting for us. But if we can steer clear, that’s our best option.” Austin said.
“You want to take a look at this?” Jessica asked him.
“No, but what do you think; take a look at the east side of the town first, or the west?”
“West.” Jessica said automatically, changing the way she had the map folded to glance at the area east of Belle Glade again. “It all looks pretty open to the east, more farms I bet, and there’s a lot more room to maneuver over there without the canal hemming us in if we have to start fading back. But the outer edges of Palm Beach are … hmm … less than twenty miles from here.”
“West it is. We’ll take it slow the whole way around, and just hope the east side hasn’t got too much spillover from the coast.”
“Carefully.”
Austin winked and mouthed some words to her voicelessly. She took a moment to both lip read and guess what he was saying, then shook her head at him with a small smile. “Your Royal Highness my ass.” she thought. Aloud, she merely said “Glad you approve.” as she started folding and stuffing the map back into its bag.
“Alright, you heard the lady.” Austin said to Milo. “Let’s skirt east some, until we get into view of Belle Glade, then we’ll cut up between it and South Bay to have a look at the west side of the town.”
“How are we going to handle the, you know, zombies?”
“By avoiding them whenever possible.”
“Not … not shooting them?”
“Noise.” Jessica said as she sealed the bag.
“Shots will draw attention.” Austin said, nodding. “We’re not here to clear the area out. As much as we can, we want to stay quiet and avoid contact. If we’re spotted, we just keep moving, outpace and leave them behind.”
“What about when we go into the town?” Milo asked.
“One thing at a time. Step one, we recon, take a look, and decide what we think.”
Milo was quiet for a few moments, then nodded. He waited for Austin, who waited for Jessica to finish putting the map away, then stepped on his pedals as the big man got going again. Jessica brought up the rear, reminding herself to keep checking the area to either side of them since she knew Austin would be focusing more on what was ahead. It wouldn’t do for some stray pack or horde to work in too close to them somehow.
Austin took the next farm path that left US-27 going east, then cut north at the first path that intersected it a few minutes later. A couple of minutes after that he stopped again and lifted his binoculars.
“That’s gotta be the south end of the town.” he said.
“How’s it look?” Jessica asked as she scanned around the rest of the circle.
“A little thicker, but you could get through even on foot if you stayed alert.”
“Nothing else?” Milo asked.
“Just zombies.” Austin said, dropping the binoculars to hang from their strap again. “Okay, this way, and we’ll shade west a little to skirt up that side.”
Jessica got her first look, with her own eyes from a distance she could resolve details at, a few minutes later when they came out on SR-80, or Florida-80 as the state routes were called here. The open and flat terrain came to her aid, letting her feel pretty comfortable that there weren’t many — if any — hiding surprises in Belle Glade. Even with waist high grasses and other spreading groundcover having gone as wild as they had in the four months of sun and tropical climate since anyone stopped having the slightest amount of time or energy to care about how things like lawns and fields looked.
The divided road that fed right into Belle Glade broke up the vegetation, and gave pretty good sightlines. So did the road that bordered the town to the west; pavement was still proof against what the plant kingdom could assail it with. For now, anyway. Here on the outskirts, the town was marked most prominently by the street lights on their poles that abruptly appeared. Most of the structures she could see here on the edge were trailer homes. Automatically she looked for any sign of inhabitation — breathing habitation — but it all looked dead.
Except for the zombies. Technically, as far as Jessica was concerned, they counted as dead too; but zombies had carved themselves a unique category out with teeth and appetite. She stopped counting in her head when the number passed thirty, and stopped estimating when she got into the hundreds. It wasn’t quite what she felt fair to call a horde, but the town was crawling. So much so that she’d definitely put it quite a ways down on any list of targets for any scavenging run she was planning with Austin.
The creatures were milling about in their usual aimless fashion. Some standing or slowly swaying, occasionally making a little unsteady forward progress. Others were staggering ahead with what passed for zombie purpose — zombies without an actual target like a warm meal they’d locked onto anyway — in most of the possible directions. These more mobile, more active, ones would pass each other head on, at right angles, headed this way or that, with no sign of recognition or organization.
When they bumped into each other, the zombies treated it like they did any other obstacle; completely ignoring it. If a zombie fell, it would shove itself back to its feet like the most inebriated drunk imaginable; except Jessica actually had an excellent long-term complete drunk to compare them to, and even Happy at his most soused showed better coordination and control than most of the zombies.
If one was knocked off balance for where it was going, it would stagger, often going into a weave, that sent it curving back and forth along whatever base line course it had set for itself. Or it would change course entirely, sometimes in mid step which inevitably caused it to topple over as its feet struggled to catch up with whatever spark of direction left in its brain had ordered.
She was past shuddering at the sight of them, past shrinking or fighting down revulsion, past even normal reluctance and hesitation at the sight of them. Even though every zombie she could see showed decay ranging from shredded and missing skin, to absent limbs, wounds of just about every sort imaginable, and even worse horrors. Gaping holes in their bodies, formerly internal organs exposed or even spilling forth into the air or dragging along the ground.
One had an eye dangling from its socket, the long strand of optic nerve and blood vessels creating a swing point that caused the dislocated eye itself to bounce and judder about gruesomely. Another had an arm that looked completely shattered, with jagged bone showing in three places, constantly working the split and lacerated decayed skin back and forth as the limp length of mangled bone and flesh swayed with its movements.
Missing jaws. Cracked skulls or faces. Every bone imaginable from head to toe visible depending on where one looked. It was a walking horror show that even the hardest core horror movie fan prior to the apocalypse would’ve perhaps squirmed a little in their seat while watching. Except this was real, and the damn zombies never quit.
Jessica took it all in, but all she really saw was possible threats, almost colored in her mind by how immediately dangerous various areas would be. She’d been through the apocalyptic school of hard knocks and learned her lessons on the brutal scale of live or die, even before Austin began specifically helping her master what was necessary in this new and terrible world the living were left with.
“Why don’t we try the road there.” she said evenly, gesturing at the north-south stretch of pavement that bordered the west side of the town. “Looks like we can get up it okay. If it gets worse, we can step over the railing and go cross country.” The now familiar fields, overgrown and abandoned, covered the land on the non-town side of the road.
“Looks good to me.” Austin agreed. “Come on.”
Milo’s face was white and drawn with stress when Jessica glanced at him, but he got his bike into motion when Austin pushed off. The three of them cycled closer and made the turn from FL-80. They drew attention from the nearest
zombies almost immediately, but even if they’d been on foot the creatures had no chance of closing the distance fast enough to catch them. Those zombies ahead of them were spaced out enough that Jessica was comfortable weaving back and forth across the road to bypass them, following Austin and Milo as the trio headed north.
The buildings started to give way from trailers to actual houses, most of them still the standard single-story structures Florida residents seemed to favor. The tallest, and biggest, building they saw as they pedaled north was a college, labeled Palm Beach State College, which alarmed her.
“This is Belle Glade, right?” she asked, staring at the sign long enough that she finally had to kick herself mentally in alarm and go back to paying attention to the zombies she was avoiding. The building beyond it, the closest of several on the campus, looked to be three or four stories, and had the inevitable high number of windows Florida construction also favored. It was host to a couple dozen zombies just on the front portion of the grounds, nearest the road, and surely had room for plenty more to be staggering around further back in and among the other buildings.
“Gotta be.” Austin said. “We’re on -715, and I remember the major roads. This is Belle Glade.”
“Then why’s that college say it’s Palm Beach?”
“Stupidity?” he suggested innocently.
“Oh don’t start with that.” she protested, managing a faint silent chuckle. He was ever fond of expecting the worst from people when it came to reason, and claimed he’d rarely been disappointed.
“Never try to explain with logic and reason what sheer abundant stupidity can make clear.” he reminded her.
“Why does it matter?” Milo asked.
“Because I don’t want to be any closer to the coast and actual Palm Beach than we have to be.” she said.
“We’re in Belle Glade.” Austin assured her.
“Good.”
The monotony of zombies and residences started to shift into zombies and businesses, none of them major franchises except for gas stations and the occasional fast food joint. They passed salvage yards, churches, small hardware stores, little three and four slot strip malls, standalone offices, and other little stores that often bore someone’s name — either a family name or a first name — in the title along with whatever descriptive appellation had been attached to indicate Bob was selling Farm Produce here, or The Johnsons were hawking insurance there. The zombies got a little thicker, and Jessica broke out the map again to help navigate alternate routes when the road ahead got too thick for comfort.
They backtracked twice, and swung over to side streets, dipping just a little deeper into Belle Glade as they avoided worrisome concentrations of hungry teeth attached to eager dead bodies. That was the worst of any sort of drama, as they continued working their way north, until they got to another divided road — this one with a canal running along between its paved lanes — that Jessica saw from the map cut right across the town diagonally from the main canal in the northwest.
“Stop!” Milo half shouted, abruptly compressing the brakes and pitching forward on his bike as he slowed.
“Quiet!” Jessica snapped as she struggled to stop without falling over; either sideways or forward over the handlebars.
“That. There.” Milo said, putting a foot down as he managed to avoid wrecking. He pointed at something lying on the street to the right.
“This isn’t the best place to stop.” Austin said, his hand drifting up to the sling on his carbine.
“Milo, we’ve got a couple dozen zombies around us.” Jessica said, forcing herself to be a little calmer.
“And a pile of dead ones over there too.” Austin said, gesturing to the west side of the meridian divided street intersecting the one they were on.
Jessica looked, changing what she was scanning for from upright humanoid figures to things on the ground, and blinked. There were a number of dead zombies — really dead ones, that weren’t getting up and trying to eat anyone now — scattered around on the pavement. From the grouping of the bodies, it looked to her like they’d been triggered and coming after someone; that was generally the only thing that pulled the every-which-way aimlessness of the mindless hungry things into that sort of shared purpose.
“I make at least thirty.” Austin said. “Shot, all of them that I can see. And a trail of another ten or fifteen down across the intersection, over there.”
A clatter brought Jessica’s head around, and she saw Milo had left his bike to topple over as he ran in the other direction from the pile of bodies and the other dead stragglers to whatever he was fixated on over that way.
“Goddamnit.” Austin muttered, dropping his kickstand and lifting the fire axe out of its loop on his belt as he stepped off his bike.
“Austin if he’s going to be this stupid, we’re done.” Jessica said urgently to him in a low voice as he gripped the axe and headed for the closest zombie coming at the bikes. She stuffed the map back into a convenient pocket, not bothering with the bag in her haste to clear her hands in case she needed to fight.
“No argument, but give it a few seconds.” he grunted before he hefted the axe and swung. He was quite tall, and in fantastic shape; with all the reach and strength that went with it. Jessica watched as the blade of the axe crunched into the skull of a woman who’d died months ago while working a shift at a café or diner; the tattered and dirty apron and waitress dress marking her as a server somewhere now closed and abandoned. She, now it, went down well out of reach of Austin, its body shutting off like a switch had been flipped when the head was caved in under the power of Austin’s blow.
He tugged and wrenched to free the axe and stepped sideways to chop another one down, this zombie wearing nearly destroyed jeans and t-shirt, with a flattened nose that looked like it’d been smashed back into its face. Again Austin freed the axe without trouble as the blade bit into the dead man’s head, and he stepped back to look around quickly.
Jessica had drawn her pistol, a Beretta Austin had suggested to her when it had been determined the best weapon they had available to arm Candice with was her M&P Shield. The Beretta was a larger gun than the Shield, but Jessica had adapted to it easily enough and found she liked it just as well as the one she’d surrendered. So much, in fact, that she’d replaced Brett’s Taurus with another Beretta; both M9s according to Austin.
This helped her in a number of ways, not the least of which was they still had a good store of 9mm rounds to feed into them. Both also used the same magazines and rounds, so she didn’t have to worry about carrying differing sets of either to supply her weapons. And she got to focus on just the one model of gun, which reduced the likelihood she’d reach for a safety, or magazine or slide release, and find she’d mixed up which gun she had out.
She habitually carried the pistols fully loaded, with a round in the chamber, anytime she wasn’t in the house; so all she had to do was click the safety off and aim before she was ready to shoot. But as she got her hand on the gun, she looked around again and judged she had at least ten seconds before any zombies would be into what she thought of as too close. Instead, she raised her voice.
“Milo, get back here and let’s go or we’re leaving you.”
The Houseboater had picked up a bag, a backpack she thought it looked like, from the road. He was looking at it, turning it over in his hands, when she called. His head came up, then turned back and forth as he looked around and seemed to remember the zombies that were not merely distant threats. Behind her, Jessica heard Austin cleave down a third zombie with the axe; the stomach-turning crunch of a splitting skull unmistakable and yet one more thing she was inured to these days.
Still clutching the backpack, Milo sprinted back. He arrived panting slightly, and it had to be from excitement or panic since the run, even there and back, hadn’t been very far.
“This is Arcelia’s.” he got out as he stopped next to his bicycle, holding the backpack out for her to look at.
“Great, whatever. Ge
t on the bike.” Jessica said.
“But—”
“Get moving or die.” Austin said in a voice firm with flat threat before there was another crunch.
“Austin, come on.” Jessica said, kicking the bike into motion. She kept the Beretta in her hand, and swung the handlebars over to curve around on the east side of the intersection that bridged the canal in the middle of the road, away from the closest zombies.
“Coming.” she heard Austin grunt, punctuated by another faint thud-crack of breaking bone as he hit another zombie. She didn’t dare glance back, as she focused on staying as clear as possible of the congregating zombies ahead of her. But when she reached the far side of the intersection, bridge, and had a bit more breathing room, she looked and saw Austin on his bike. Milo was mounted too, both of them pedaling quickly to catch up with her.
Jessica changed course, not just dodging, and started up the divided road that led out of Belle Glade. She maintained a fast pace for two minutes, counting steadily in her head, before she slowed down and looked behind her again. Slowing further, she took a good look around the area, in all directions, and saw the nearest zombies were well away for the moment. Braking, she angled the bike around a little sideways on the road and put her foot down to steady it as she came to a halt.
“Are you crazy?” she demanded as Milo got near enough for her to yell at him without having to actually yell.
“This is Arcelia’s.” he said, waving the backpack he still clutched in one hand.
“So you said. Zombies. Zommmmmbieeeeees.” Jessica said, drawing the word out. “Didn’t you see how many there were back there?”
“We made out okay.” he said suddenly, some of his eagerness subsiding as he registered the look on her face. She noticed his eyes flicking to the pistol she still gripped, and made herself slowly holster it.