by Mark Tufo
“Trip? You really let Trip drive?”
“Relax. You looked like you needed help and we’re going like, four miles an hour.”
BT caught me as I fell backward.
“We’re off road and he’s heading for the water!” Mad Jack, sitting three rows behind Trip, had his face nearly embedded in the screen of his satellite toy and was watching the whole thing from above.
BT lifted me up and tossed me slightly forward, back to the front. “Trip, what the hell are you doing?”
“Funkies don’t like the water. That’s why they smell so bad.”
“Trip, you put this bus in the water and we’ll never get out. This bus doesn’t like water.”
“Isn’t this, like, one of those Duck Boat Tours they do in Boston?”
“No. This thing most definitely doesn’t float.” I pulled him up and away from the seat. He stayed in the same position as if he were still sitting and holding the steering wheel. I ended up putting him gently on the floor that way before I could get behind the wheel. Tracy had helped Trip up before she stood next to me.
“There’s a footbridge up ahead.”
“And?” I asked trying to find a way to get the bus back on the road. We were beginning to bog down in the wet ground as we approached the Penobscot river. I was certain that within the next few seconds my wheels would begin to spin in ever-deepening holes of mud and slippery plant life.
“I thought you should know,” she said a little miffed.
“Can the bus fit?” I was doing my best to scan the ground ahead, looking for potential tire sucking holes. The cars up ahead were a little off to our left, firing from all sides like pirate ships in high-seas combat with a flotilla of zombies. Just as the trailing vehicle was coming to a complete stop, the sunroof popped open and a man came through. He looked around and jumped out, heading in our general direction. I wasn’t so sure I’d let him in, even if he had a prayer of actually making it.
Maybe he was with those quafftoddles, but what happened to him next should only be reserved for the most depraved of us all, child molesters, rapists, and cat lovers. The zombies swarmed in on him immediately, even though he was firing his twelve gauge shotgun to great result. At first, it seemed to be a decent tactic; the zombies closest to him were dead, and were being forced upon him like his own version of bubble wrap, protecting him from the others. But finally the press of so many bodies began to take effect, he became immobilized—his arms stuck over his head as he tried to keep firing, though I think by this time he was out of ammo.
The zombies couldn’t get in close enough to bite, so they did the next best thing: reached over the true dead and grabbed a hold of anything they could. Hair, jacket, ears...it was all torn at and eventually ripped off or out. Then fingers began digging into his cheeks, lips, beard. His face was being stripped of meat one stringy piece at a time. His cries continued long after he was recognizable as a human. I don’t know why I couldn’t resist continually looking in the side view mirrors to check on his fate; it wasn’t like he was going to get out of it. And my bouncing view tended to add to the nightmare quality of what I was looking at. So, we were going to make it to the footbridge. Then what? Just vacate the bus? And go where? Certainly not back to Ron’s.
I pulled up parallel to the bridge, as close as possible. Ah, who am I kidding? I scraped a swath of paint off from the headlight to the end of the door. The torturous squeal of metal on metal was as grating as it sounds. BT looked over at me harshly.
“What? It’s not like it’s a rental and you signed the agreement.” I told him.
“The door opens outward,” he said.
“Shit.” I realized that I’d pinned the door against the bridge, effectively sealing us in. There was more grinding and the bus lurched up and down, back and forth, as I repositioned it. “Happy now?” I asked once I got it moved.
“Yeah, ecstatic.” He really did seem pissed off about the whole thing. One by one the occupants of the bus turned to me. None of them looked pleased.
“Fuck if I know what to do next. MJ, talk to me.” I was thankful that at least in this one instance he did not need an abundance of clarification to understand what I was asking. Normally this would be when he asked what did I want to talk about.
We were going to be encased in zombies on all sides except the river, soon, making us the Florida of food. You know…a peninsula. The bus, once again, began to rock as zombies smacked into it at full speed. There were going to be a lot of broken noses, jammed fingers, and smashed knees in their camp tonight. Driving out of this was about out of the question; the ground was already suspect, and if I got this thing stuck in the mud and we were completely surrounded we wouldn’t even have this small window of escape. Although none of that was going to matter if the zombies started crossing this bridge from the other side.
“They’re coming from the Stockton Springs area. You’re...” he paused, hesitated, swallowed some bile back, and spoke again. “You might not believe what I’m about to show you.”
Unless it was grizzlies flying in on winged pigs, I was pretty open to a myriad of things he was about to show me. Deneaux was first on the scene.
She looked for a second; I might have seen her right eyebrow upturn in a momentary flicker of surprise. “I believe the egghead has discovered where the zombies are coming from,” she said before sitting back down and lighting up.
“There’re children on this bus,” my sister said, referring to Deneaux’s smoke.
“Perhaps you should let them out then,” Deneaux replied.
We were surrounded by flesh eating monsters but my sister, worried about the kid’s lungs, looked to me to do something about it. Now, Deneaux would listen to me as well as she listened to anybody else, which was not at all. Obviously we were going to be pretty lucky if second-hand smoke became a concern.
“Is that a…” I started.
“Cruise ship,” Deneaux finished. “The Neapolitan, as a matter of fact. Largest cruise ship to ever sail the seven seas. Wonderful amenities, as long as you stay in first class. You start to rub elbows with the coach classes if you’re not too careful.”
“Yeah wouldn’t want that to happen,” I said on auto pilot. I was having a hard time believing what I was seeing. An impossibly enormous ship had beached itself in Stockton Springs, which is not really known for its cruise tourism. “What’s something like that hold for passengers?”
“Twenty-five hundred, possibly three thousand if they have a season-end sale. Apparently, even peasants are allowed on ships these days.”
“It’s absolutely impossible for you to speak without belittling someone isn’t it?” my sister asked.
“Not the time sis, and don’t worry, you get used to it. If you filter through the elitism, she actually has a lot of things to say that are worthwhile.”
Deneaux grinned at me with this thing I think she thought was sincere but basically just scared the hell out of me. It was a lot of yellowy teeth surrounded by thin, pulled back lips.
“Even at the high end, that doesn’t explain all these zombies,” BT said.
“I think I can,” Mad Jack said as he hit more buttons. A line of ships was up and down the coast of Maine.
“What the hell is going on? This isn’t for us, is it?”
“You cannot be so naïve, can you?” Deneaux let a plume of smoke go. “There are a dozen large ships carrying tens of thousands of zombies, crashed within twenty miles of here. And they are converging in Searsport. How on earth could you think this is for you?”
I took note that she used “you” while referring to the group. My guess was she was going to try and find out who was responsible for the assemblage and see if she could join up with them. Maybe get in on the bottom floor. Evil internship or something. Although that wasn’t really her thing; she was more of a top-level type. Maybe she’d apply for C.O.O. or something.
“Tommy this has got to be too big for Payne right?” I asked.
He shrugged.
“Shrugging is not going to work right now. Going to need a little more, bud.”
“She’s closed off, Mr. T. You know I’m not as powerful as I was when my sister was alive. I don’t have the ability to force her to show herself.”
“Does it really matter who is doing this, if anyone? Hell, there could have been a huge storm out at sea that forced them all aground,” BT said.
“You keep telling yourself that. Coincidences are for the ignorant and ill prepared,” Deneaux said.
“I don’t know how or what happened here, but BT, you’re right. It really doesn’t matter at the moment. What we need to do is get away from here.” We all looked down the length of the footbridge as I finished saying my words. It was still empty, and near as MJ could tell, the hill and woods beyond were a zombie-free zone, too. But for how long? The bus was moving back and forth as zombies smacked into it, but we weren’t in any immediate danger. The question now was: did we pull the parachute and jump from a perfectly good vehicle? The majority of the zombies were farther away from the action, but would eventually get bored and move on to more fertile grounds; at least that was what happened in theory. These new zombies were about as predictable as a rabid, menopausal, female yeti. Not even sure if something like that could even exist, but holy shit can you imagine the rampage that thing could go on?
“I think we may have a problem,” Mad Jack said.
“You think?” Gary uncharacteristically asked. He was keeping an eye on the kids, and to him, well, to all of us, the idea of taking them outside was pretty unsettling.
“Well, I do think or I wouldn’t have said anything,” MJ replied, clearly confused.
I looked down to the screen; it was pretty easy to see what was going on. “Everyone out, let’s go.”
“Mike, most of the food is down in the cargo holds,” Tracy said.
“Where it’s going to stay. We’ll come back, hon but for now, we have to go. There’s a line of bulkers coming this way; they’ll crush this bus like a beer can.”
We were about as awkward an escape team that was ever produced. We had babies, young kids, old dogs, and Carol, who was relegated to a cane. If we could move faster than two miles an hour I’d be amazed. We could outpace a snail, a turtle, maybe an armadillo, possibly a porcupine, but in terms of the animal kingdom, that was about it. That didn’t even take into account stamina. Henry was as strong as a bull and a fierce fighter when he needed to be, but even on his best days, a mile was about all he could walk. There’d been more than one occasion where I’d had to carry his ass back to the house or call for a ride if one was available. Basically, we couldn’t move fast and we couldn’t go far. Things were looking fucking stellar.
My hope was that if we vacated the bus, maybe the bulkers wouldn’t see the need to smash it up. The zombies would leave, we could get back on the bus, and we would drive away as planned. That was the hope anyway. I waited until everyone was nearly off, I scooped up Angel in my arms, and was about to head down the steps when I caught sight of the bulkers moving through the ranks of zombies. We had a minute, maybe less, to make some space. I know we’re only as strong as our weakest link; that was part of my decision to let Carol off first. I thought she could get a head start while the rest of us packed up. She was about three-quarters over the bridge and the rest of us were backed up like a New York City traffic jam.
I wasn’t more than five feet from the bus when the ground under me vibrated. The bulkers were thundering like a herd of water buffalo.
“Not good,” Angel said in my ear.
“You got that right,” I told her. “BT, pick Carol up, man. We’re going to have to make a run for it!”
I might have heard a slight protest from her saying she could do it on her own. That was drowned out by the mangling of our bus. The thing was starting to resemble a huge horseshoe as it was bent in at both ends around the structure of the bridge. The bridge, which had been designed with pedestrian traffic in mind, was beginning to shudder and sway as the bulkers repeatedly nailed the bus. Nicole had nearly pitched over the side with Wesley in her arms. Odds were she’d survive the fall, we were only fifteen feet above the water, but this was Maine. That water was freezing and there was a current. Retrieving her before something awful happened was slim. Deneaux. It was damn Deneaux that reached out and kept her from hitting the railing and teetering over.
How do I reconcile this shit? I have to thank her, right? Then the cynic in me hit full stride. Nicole, carrying a baby, was slow—slower than Deneaux. When we had to make a run for it Nicole would be in the back, where she would delay the zombies for a few precious seconds. That had to be it, right? No fucking way Deneaux did a one-eighty. I got a clue what the old bat was up to when she turned around to make sure I’d seen what she’d done. I nodded a thank you to her, even if it was all for show...my nod and her moment of altruism both. We were moving a little better now; I had just stepped off onto the other side when a support cable on the bridge snapped. The bulkers had pushed the bus over, so it was resting on the cables. It was still effectively blocking the path, but I didn’t want to hang around to see if they figured that next problem out. Bulkers and zombies were falling over the edge and into the water. A few, upon seeing us, tried to wade over, but were dragged away by the current.
Angel and I were about to catch up with the rest when Jess, Lyndsey’s son, came up and tapped me on the shoulder, pointing back the way we’d come.
“Fuck.” I handed Angel to him. “Get Tracy, Gary, and Meredith.” I unslung my rifle, did my magazine check, slammed it back in and ratcheted a round into the chamber. Speeders were scaling over the upturned bus, presumably using the drive train and tires as a ladder. They were coming up over the top. Most were being jostled off to the side and into the drink, but not all, and those lucky few were now doing what they do best—speeding along toward their dinner.
“Not on my watch.” I got down into a classic Marine kneeling position and pulled my sling tight, giving me a rock-solid firing position. “This is just like bowling,” I said as I fired my bullet down the bridge lane into my lead pinhead. Tracy and Meredith were first on the scene.
“Tracy, find the most secure house you can. We’re only going to be able to hold them so long.” I fired again. Meredith braced up against the bridge and started firing. “You stay to the right, I’ll stay to the left,” I told her. “Tracy, get them out of here. When you find someplace decent, send someone back to let us know where you’re at.”
Gary came next, dragging two ammo boxes.
“Alright brother. There’s only room for two shooters; you take over when one of us is reloading. Or would you rather hand magazines?”
“These are loose bullets, Mike. Most of the magazines were in the cargo.”
“Fantastic. I love a challenge. Tracy, we don’t have as much time as I thought. Get them out of here!” The bulkers would occasionally slam into the bus, sending the speeders atop it sprawling, flinging them forward like they were being launched from a slingshot. It was close to a stalemate. Actually, we were doing a little better; they were having a hard time getting a foothold on the bridge. We lost a little of our advantage as I dropped my spent magazine out and put in my only other full one. When Meredith ran dry it got worse, as she only had the one.
“Uncle! Give me your bullets!” she shouted impatiently with her hand held out, her fingers moving rapidly in a “come hither” motion. He quickly handed the magazine over and started jamming rounds into the empty ones. We once again pushed them back. But when both of our bolts held open at the same time, we gave up almost a quarter of the bridge while Gary fumbled with the rounds.
“Breathe, brother. I’d rather you take your time and get a round in than rush and drop them.”
“Okay, okay,” he said repeatedly as a way to calm his nerves. He kept looking up to see the progress of the zombies.
“Stop looking up. We’ll tell you when it’s time to go. Give me what you’ve got, Gary.”
“It’s only ten rounds.”
“Don’t care.” He handed it over. I took well-aimed shots, doing my best to make sure that the zombie going down would tangle up those behind him. Either Gary was getting better or he’d only given Meredith a short magazine, but she was shooting just as I was ready for more. I wanted to tell her to slow down and make every shot count when I spotted her strategy. Instead of head shots, she was shattering knee caps and breaking femurs. The zombies would crumple and completely disrupt those behind, and because they weren’t dead, they would also reach out—further screwing up the chase.
“I always knew you were smart,” I told her.
“No shit.”
“They make it to the halfway point and you have to go, Meredith.”
“Won’t be enough time for the rest to get away. And what about you?”
“I can run faster than you. I’ll hold them off until they’re almost here.”
She didn’t fight me on this; she knew I was right.
“Gary, that means you, too,” I told him as he handed over a magazine. “You head out with Meredith.
“What good is that going to do Mike? You’ll have maybe ten or fifteen rounds, then they’ll be on us all. I can stay and keep reloading.”
“Just enough to give you a head start, man. I’ve seen you run. You can do a lot of things well. That ain’t one of them.”
“I won the hundred yard sprint in school,” he said indignantly.
“It was the third grade and most of your class was home with the stomach flu. You raced Mrs. Garley, and she was like, a hundred and two.”
“Seventy-three, and she was very spry.”
“You barely beat her, man.”
“I’ve still got the trophy.”
“I’m sure you do.” I noticed the calmer I kept him, the better he was able to load. Meredith and I almost got full magazines our next go around. We were holding them just short of the halfway point, but it was a lost cause as a tidal wave of the damn things were flooding over the bus. This was something like the three hundred Spartans holding back the Persians. I wondered if, sometime in the far future, there would be a tale of the Three Rednecks holding back the zombie horde on McKinley’s foot bridge. Although it was my sincerest hope that we did not go down like the noble King Leonidus. I’d like to live long enough to write my own history. Fuck that revisionist shit. In the movie, I’d be wearing a kilt or something. Nothing wrong with a kilt, but with my proclivity to go commando...things could get embarrassing mighty quick.