Crawlerz: Book 3: The Mountains Are Calling

by R. S. Merritt

  “Let’s turn off here.” Yue said from the sleeper.

  “At the town center shopping plaza? We can look for some fresh underwear tomorrow. Right now, we need somewhere secure.” Harley said obviously still fixated on the whole concrete tomb idea.

  “Yeah. Shopping malls are a horrible idea based on every zombie movie I’ve ever seen.” Gus chimed in uselessly.

  “They managed to stay alive a long time at the mall in that one movie. The one where the zombies were superfast. Remind you of anything?” Drew piled on top of what Gus had brought up.

  “This isn’t a movie!” Yue snapped shutting everyone up. In a calmer voice she continued. “Shopping centers have loading docks where trucks drop off stuff. I say we look for a trailer to spend the night in. Then we can wake up in the morning and look for cute shoes since we’ll already be here.”

  “I’m in.” Lisa said holding her thumb up and smiling for the first time in a long time. She’d taken losing her dad really hard. Drew shot Yue a smile from behind Lisa. He appreciated that Yue had made the effort to include her.

  “Whatever. I could use some new Timberlands.” Harley said turning down the off ramp towards the shopping center.

  They cruised down four lanes of nothing until they got to the turn into the plaza. The parking lot was barren. They drove around to the loading dock area which was also barren. The plaza was made up mostly of a Walmart and a Belk’s. There were some smaller stores lining the plaza in between the two as well. Harley drove slowly past the storefronts noticing that many of them looked like they hadn’t been disturbed in forever. In a world where every store they passed looked like a bomb had gone off inside it that was weird.

  The Walmart windows were smashed in and they could tell the store had been looted. That was to be expected. The smaller stores being untouched, and the general tidiness of the parking lot were odd. Odd but also promising since it meant there was some prime looting that could still be done here. The only problem was the growing sense they all had of being watched.

  “I think we need to get out of here.” Yue said. It’d been her idea to come here in the first place but now she was a hundred percent on board with hauling ass in the opposite direction.

  “Yeah. I feel it to.” LeBron backed her up. Everyone else was also in agreement. Harley didn’t admit he was unnerved but he did start driving faster as he headed for the exit. It was starting to get dark out. This detour around the shopping center could end up costing them dearly. Yue willed Harley to speed up. She felt like the crawlerz were all leaning against the surrounding doors and windows just waiting for the sun to drop low enough that they could rush out and attack them.

  They pulled back on the four-lane section of road leading to the highway. They were now about thirty minutes from being out in the open when the sun set. No one said anything. Everyone in the truck was acutely aware of how screwed they were. A wild hope at this point being to press on to the Interstate then spend the night driving down it at top speed. If they didn’t run into any random packs of crawlerz they might even survive the night. If they survived until morning, they’d realize they’d left all their coffee making paraphernalia in the back of the blood coated trailer they’d abandoned.

  Driving too fast down roads clogged with ice and snow Harley was rushing to get them out of the little mountain town. Lisa and Yue were nervously tossing jokes back and forth about the quality of the footwear they could’ve purchased at Belk’s. Drew loudly proclaiming Walmart was good enough for him while LeBron and Gus were both channeling Harley’s growing sense of urgency to find somewhere to hole up. The tension in the cab was getting thicker by the second.

  Drew wasn’t used to driving around without Mikey. Every time he looked over at the driver’s seat, he was abruptly reminded his friend was dead. It also dawned on him that the man driving them now may very well have been the guy who killed Mikey. Harley had been on the wrong side of that ambush. They had nothing but his word for it that he hadn’t opened fire on them. The word of a convicted felon who’d worked as muscle for a traveling band of gypsies. The word of a man who’d watched them shoot down his girl. Harley had admitted that he’d talked his way into the patrol going to setup the ambush because he wanted revenge.

  “Does this crap town ever end?” Harley asked in a flustered tone of voice. Gus and everyone else who could see out the windows were studying street signs like crazy looking for somewhere they could hide.

  The houses slowly grew sparser as the big truck ground its way down the snowy pavement. The chains had turned out to be worth their weight in gold. Not that gold was worth anything anymore. The chains were worth their weight in spam. The naked limbs of the trees around them growing a little harder to see in the fading light. Gus the first one to cuss out loud when the truck lights automatically came on in the dim light of dusk. He started rocking back and forth and cussing under his breath urging the truck to move faster.

  Why he thought moving faster would help was anybody’s guess. They’d been hit hard the night before and that’d been out in the middle of nowhere. Maybe they’d have better luck further up the Great Smoky Mountain Expressway. Judging by all the houses they’d seen along this stretch of highway they could expect to get hit pretty hard once the sun dipped below the horizon.

  LeBron was furious at himself for allowing the group to get in this mess. Harley had the truck skills down, Gus was on watch keeping them safe, Drew and Lisa were busy staring at each other, and Yue’s job was keeping the peace. LeBron knew he was the one who was supposed to be doing things like keeping track of what time it was and thinking through where they should spend the night. He’d been sidetracked working on the problem of where Jeff may have been taken. Taking his eye off the ball like that could have some serious repercussions.

  He’d taken the iPad from Yue and scrolled through the files and notes. Three of the names had stood out to him as possibilities. Jeff had even bolded two of them. There was Mount Weathertop, Cheyenne Mountain and Raven Rock. All three of them were bases that could be used as headquarters for the continuity of government. They were all highly militarized well-known secrets. If they happened to survive the night and everyone was still onboard with looking for Jeff, then LeBron had decided to recommend they head towards Weathertop first. Mostly because it was the closest of the three.

  Surviving through the night was the immediate problem. Where they wanted to go tomorrow didn’t matter if they died that night. It was pitch dark outside. The sun was nowhere to be seen and the moon hadn’t bothered making an appearance yet. The lights from the truck glared off the endless snowy road ahead. Harley was squinting and leaning forward in the seat trying to keep the truck centered on an invisible road. The drive got really exciting when they drove over an overpass covered in snow. It was almost like they were driving across a puffy white cloud high above the earth.

  They continued to chug along at about thirty miles per hour. The moon and stars gradually taking their places in the night sky. It wasn’t until almost an hour after the automatic headlights decided it was dark that they saw the first crawler. It was a poor representative of the normally fearsome fast-moving monsters. Harley had grunted and pointed ahead so everyone could see the shadow of what looked like an old man limping across the snow towards them. The shadowy figure abruptly shifting into high gear to skate over the ice and snow straight at them.

  Harley sped up slightly as the old infected man slid on the ice disappearing into the giant grill of the truck. That first encounter seemed to break the seal. It was never more than one or two of the crawlerz running after them though. Something everyone in the truck was extremely thankful for. One or two crawlerz coming at them when they were in a moving truck surrounded by a metal cage was something they could deal with. Even though the cage was starting to show signs of the hits it’d taken. It squealed and squeaked every time the truck hit a bump, or a crawler slammed into it.

  The road they were on merged into another road that turned i
nto an even bigger road with signs saying the interstate was coming up. Harley asked which way they were turning on the interstate. LeBron told him to go east. Harley didn’t bother asking why which was actually kind of annoying. The giant of a man in the driver’s seat kept acting like they had a plan they weren’t letting him in on. It was infuriating because Harley thought he was winning points with them by not asking too many questions. All they were really doing was chasing down Lebron’s hunch based on an entry in an iPad Jeff had left behind. Everyone else was just along for the ride.

  Yue glanced over at LeBron when he gave the order to go east. There hadn’t been any sort of formal discussion of who was in charge of the small group. With Jeff gone everyone had naturally turned to Yue to lead them. Gus had no desire to be a leader and Harley seemed content to follow along with whatever plan it was they had in mind. Neither Drew nor LeBron were dumb enough to try to boss their big sister around. The only one who had no real idea of what was going on from a power dynamic point of view was Lisa. She’d thought Tom was in charge. She’d been completely thrown off when he drove away in the Humvee with the other survivors.

  Not that Lisa regretted her choice to stick with Drew and his little family. They seemed to be pretty good at surviving. She was also in full on teen love for Drew and he was returning that love with puppy dog intensity. One of the last things her dad had ever done was warn her about getting too close to Drew. That made their relationship feel a little bit like a betrayal. That was life in this new normal.

  Chapter 23: The Not-So-Secret Secret Base

  “We’ve got to find somewhere safe to sleep tonight.” The announcement from Harley was accompanied by a jaw cracking yawn. The sun had finally come up after an infinitely long night packed full of boredom interspersed with brief periods of completely unwelcome excitement. They’d had more than one crawler appear out of nowhere right on the cage. The damned things were so fast and quiet that if they hadn’t had the cage, they’d have been dead ten times over.

  Everybody in the sleeper section had nodded off at one time or another. Most of them woke up anytime Gus or Harley started firing off live rounds from the front seats. The only real injury overnight was Harley adding a new scar to the side of his head. One of the rounds he’d fired had ricocheted off one of the steel bars surrounding the cab and grazed his head. It was easy to say to avoid hitting the steel bars when defending the cab. It was hard to do so in practice. Harley was driving through the snow while shooting sideways at a demonic crawler ripping at the cage and attacking him psychically. It was completely understandable that his aim might be off a few inches every once in a while.

  Drew hadn’t been super happy when another ricochet hit him in the foot. The bullet hadn’t penetrated the military style combat boot he was wearing but it’d hurt like hell. With the sun coming up they realized they’d made a tactical error in where they’d positioned everybody. Harley and Gus were the only two who knew how to drive the truck. Harley and Gus had both been awake for over twenty-four hours straight at this point. Driving the truck through the snow and ice wasn’t something anyone should be doing if they were in danger of dozing off.

  “Why don’t you two take a short nap? From now on when one of you is driving the other person should be in the back resting.” LeBron made it sound like a suggestion and everyone agreed. Harley looked around and decided that this middle of nowhere was as good as any other middle of nowhere. He slowed to a stop without bothering to pull to the side. Everyone in the back moved to the front seats while Gus and Harley crammed themselves into the sleeper.

  “Harley’s going to need to sleep in the passenger’s seat or something if you want to fit anybody else back here.” Gus said from the back. He looked extremely uncomfortable smooshed into the tiny compartment with Harley. LeBron hadn’t thought of that when he’d been coming up with ideas for the two to drive in shifts.

  “Any reason we still need to drive this truck around?” Yue asked.

  “We have all that diesel and it’s got this really cool cage welded to it.” Drew answered from the passenger’s side where Lisa was sitting in his lap with her arms draped across his shoulders.

  “Those big ass tires with the chains are good for driving through the snow without sliding all over the place.” LeBron added. Both LeBron and Yue were doing their best to avoid looking at Drew and his new girl. Drew and Lisa were completely oblivious to the fact that their PDA was making everyone uncomfortable.

  LeBron and Yue continued discussing next moves while trying to ignore the make out session happening three feet away from them. Occasionally Lisa or Drew would throw out suggestions in between trying to bruise each other’s tonsils. The immediate concern was where they could go to be safe at night. LeBron had been thinking about that a lot and had some ideas. Drew’s ideas were mostly from an old TV Series he’d watched religiously the first few seasons.

  “How about a prison?” Drew asked for the umpteenth since this had all started. The concept was pretty solid. They’d just have to find a prison and figure out how to break into it. A solid concrete infrastructure with lots of solid doors should be pretty good at keeping the infected out. Prisons were built to keep people from tunneling out so that minimized the worry about the crawlerz digging in to get at them.

  “That could be good for a long-term solution. It’s a lot of work to break into one of those for a night or two though.” Yue answered.

  “I’m thinking we look for tall buildings. We can sleep on the roofs at night.” LeBron said. It was an idea he’d been mulling over the last day or so. He hated to admit he’d actually gotten the idea from a zombie movie as well. If he recalled correctly it hadn’t ended well for the people in that movie.

  LeBron’s comment kicked off a whole debate on the feasibility of sleeping on roofs. What if it rains? How do they get on the roof it there isn’t a bunch of stairs leading to an easy to open door? How were they supposed to block the door once they get up there? The questions encouraged LeBron. Everyone was taking his idea seriously. They were able to work out the answers to most of the questions. The biggest missing piece being how often was there going to be a tall building conveniently available when they needed it? Not to mention the excitement of running into a dark stairwell that could be a crawler hangout. It’d suck to figure that out halfway up a dark staircase.

  “Do we really need to stay on the move? We could find a safe place like a prison somewhere with supplies and rest there for a while. We might even find a place we could stay permanently. These mountains seem pretty desolate.” Lisa asked.

  Yue started to snap off an angry retort. She was one breath away from telling Lisa to get out and walk back to the dam then caught herself. She could tell by the way Drew stiffened up that he knew Lisa had just shoved her foot directly into her mouth. Taking a deep breath Yue reminded Lisa that they were trying to find and rescue Jeff.

  “I know you miss him. I know he was your friend and everything. How do you expect to find him though? Don’t you think he’d want you to find somewhere safe and survive instead of throwing your life away out in the open trying to find him?” Lisa asked. She was so earnest and open about the way she was asking that Yue couldn’t get angry with her. The truth in what Lisa had just said made Yue feel more than a little guilty.

  “We think we have a good idea where they’d have taken him. Jeff called out three specific bases as the main ones. These things were built to withstand nuclear attacks. It was probably where the Vice President was before he flew out to meet the President on the carrier. We’re on our way to the first base now.” LeBron said in a hushed voice. He’d leaned over to look into the sleeper compartment and make sure Harley wasn’t being nosy. Unless Harley could snore and listen to them with his face shoved into a pillow, they were good.

  “Are they close?” Lisa sked. Drew was starting to look a little uncomfortable with Lisa’s persistence. In his mind if Yue loved the tall nerd then they should go rescue the tall nerd. The rest was just
details.

  “Two of them are less than six hundred miles from here. That shouldn’t take too long.” LeBron answered with a shrug. He didn’t mention the third place was in Colorado. He figured he could bring that up if they actually made it to the first two without dying.

  “Aren’t these bases controlled by the guys who ordered the ambush on us? I’m sorry. I’m not trying to be a bitch. I’m just wondering what the plan is when we get there? Won’t they just take us prisoner too?” Lisa asked.

  “Did he happen to type in the street addresses on that tablet? If these are secret bases, I’m guessing there aren’t signs or anything?” Drew asked. LeBron shook his head a few times to indicate that was a no. Jeff had written the city down and that was it. The city next to the entry marked Raven Rock had three question marks beside it.

  “I get it ok. Lisa, you barely knew Jeff and we didn’t make it big time apparent our plan was to go after him when you decided to stay. Mostly because sleeping beauty in the back might or might not try to kill Jeff when we find him. There’s a lot going on here. I’m going after Jeff though and my brothers are coming with me. I assume you’re planning on staying with Drew, right? Or are you just using him now that your dad’s dead?” Yue asked. Her tone had started out nice and even but as she talked, she’d slowly lost control of her emotions. Who the hell was this little twerp trying to butt in?