by Dalton Wolf
“Ew!” Felicia gagged.
“I’ll have Hef figure something out later,” he said. “Drives over them real easy, though, just like little piles of mud in a field,” he added.
“Just stop, Trip,” Sarah insisted quietly.
“Ok, you can go,” Gus said before they’d gone halfway around the block.
“You sure?” Calvin asked.
“Yes. I’m fine. It’s not much harder than a regular climb. I don’t think we need to worry about any zombies climbing up here.”
“How’s Scaggs doing?” Felicia asked.
“She’s fine. She’s a monkey. I think you need to go back and check out the Hedgehog. I can see a stream behind you from here and it doesn’t look like blood.”
“He’s right. You are leaking something.” Athena announced ominously
“You sure?” Scooter asked.
“No. That’s why I said ‘I think’ instead of just ‘you’re leaking something’. Oh, wait, no I didn’t say ‘I think’ at all, did I? That must mean I’m pretty damn sure.”
Calvin bit off the reply that first came to mind. “Right.” He said flatly, turning to Trip and mimicking choking her. His friend laughed.
“You know I can see you up there, don’t you?” Athena asked from directly behind them, waving at them as they looked back through the big rear window.
“Of course we did,” Calvin lied. “Let’s go, Trip. Better go a bit faster this time.”
Tripper sped up almost to the speed limit, but then upped it to 45mph when he noticed how fast the fuel gauge was dropping.
“Punctured the fuel tank,” he hissed.
“Damn!” Scooter spat, the smell of gasoline had just reached his sensitive nose. Yes, there was definitely a leak.
Tripper slowed to 35mph as the familiar rough housing of the occupied editions approached, mostly to ensure they didn’t run any of the looters over and incur the wrath of the armed escorts. Again the armed men with dark brows and anger in their eyes showed them a lot of attention, but let them pass unhindered. Crossing the river without any further mishaps, Calvin grabbed the radio and called Hephaestus.
“Adventurers to Dungeon Master,” he called, using the call signs his friend had forced upon them.
It was his equipment, after all. Gus and Scaggs had been dubbed Frodo and Sam since they were the ones taking the ring to the big red volcano. Calvin was Party Leader, and whoever drove the ambulance would be called Cleric or Healer ‘because it is an ambulance’, Joel had pointed out dramatically when Tripper had asked.
Scooter repeated the call several times before they received a response.
“Dungeon Master to Adventurers,” Hephaestus replied eventually, his breath coming in rapid gasps. “Apologies, I was using the Dungeon Privies and did not take a mic with me,” he explained.
“Ew, luckily,” Sarah gagged.
Hephaestus laughed. “How is your quest going?” he inquired
“One of our steeds has a stone in its heel. We need someone to remove it.”
“What did you do to my Hedgehog, Calvin Hobbes?” Hef demanded in mock anger, though Calvin was unsure how much was really mock.
“How do you know it was yours?” he asked.
“Because if you were talking about that ambulance of Quinn’s you would have called it an ox or bull…and now you did not deny it.”
“I think we ruptured the fuel tank.”
“How did you manage that? The tank has three-quarter Titanium Plating over it.”
“Not important right now,” Calvin snapped.
“It will take a few hours to empty, repair and replace,” Festus sighed.
“I know. But the alternative is trying to drive without fuel.”
“That would be difficult,” Hef laughed. “Where are you?”
“We’re about two minutes out.”
“Oh. The screens are clear. Your Detect Animals spell is up and working, you do not notice anything out of the ordinary. Do you enter the Dungeon?”
Calvin laughed. The shadowy alley was already lighting up as the doors lifted.
Five minutes later Hephaestus stood before him with a thin metal tube about two feet in length that was mashed and split in the middle.
“It is not the tank, Calvin. It is a fuel line. That was a one-in-a-million accident. This one spot I left open on the entire undercarriage so that I can get a tool in there to remove the plating. There is a bolt right next to the line there.”
Calvin stood next to the vehicle with a grave look on his face.
“How long to fix?”
“Well, I have the parts here, luckily, so…fifteen minutes, maybe. And I will tack a plate over that hole so it does not happen again.”
“Thanks, Festus,” Calvin patted him on the shoulder.
“Just be more careful with my toys, Calvin,” he smiled down and patted Calvin back affectionately. “I must gather the parts. Grab a snack or something,” he suggested.
The Liberty Memorial
Thirty-eight minutes later both vehicles were back on the streets gunning south for The Liberty Memorial. Without a video feed, the group had taken a chance and driven south past the Memorial first, but burning floats and wrecked vehicles blocked parts of the eastern side streets. The area could be traversed, but not easily. So they had bypassed the area and flanked the park to the west and were attempting to come in from that side, where the traffic cams they’d accessed had showed very little activity and all traffic had been forbidden during the parade. Roving bands of scattered Infected wandered the streets, but nothing blocked their path.
“The next street should be it, Calvin,” Athena said hesitantly. GPS wasn’t working and all of the usual map apps were blocked. She had been guiding them in the ‘back way’ from memory. Quinn kept the big ambulance within two car lengths. Calvin had explained to Hef that they still needed the big Armorer until Boomer and Brick were rescued. Hephaestus had looked only slightly disappointed, admitting he was used to working alone most of the time, anyway.
“There! About time!” Felicia crowed.
The video feed finally loaded and everyone in the Hedgehog craned to see the monitor. Panning the camera around from east to west, Gus then centered in on a stone column book-ended by a pair of squat buildings and a pair of griffen-looking statues on either side. Having found the memorial, he focused in on the area. Spotting something specific through his telescopic lens, he panned slightly to the southwest of the monument, centering in on the grassy west side of the large park.
“How are we going to get through that?” Trip grumbled.
“I’m working on it,” Scooter mumbled, rubbing a chainmail finger along his jaw as he planned. “I’ll have something by the time we get there,” he added.
“We’re there.” Quinn informed him happily. “It’s on the other side of this hill,” he pointed up a tree-filled hillside.
“Shit.”
“Do we go on up the hill?” Quinn asked.
“No. Absolutely not. Pull in here. We need to find a way around that.”
But Quinn and Athena didn’t have a monitor and therefore had no reference from which to draw a proper conclusion. The ‘that’ they were referring to was a roiling mass of walking corpses several hundred strong covering a great portion of the playing fields and the surrounding grasslands of the sports park around the memorial. There were open spaces, but mostly the zombies trudged only a few feet apart from each other. Many of the fences had been torn down as had the netting on the tennis courts and the soccer goals. Anything not welded or bolted in place had long since been torn free and stomped into the muddy grass.
The main mass of Infected seemed to be circling around a shelter in the center of the park that covered two picnic tables adjacent to the western of two parallel driveways that led to the Liberty Memorial. Two figures could clearly be seen lying flat and unmoving on the green tin roof of this shelter, about eight feet off the grass. The broader, shorter of the two figures appeared to be
a black man wearing a red jersey and blue hat with blue jeans, while the other wore a red hat and blue shirt with white khakis.
“Oh my God! Is that them?” Athena asked in horror, looking in through Scooter’s little window. The scene was eerily reminiscent of a maritime disaster, two weary survivors adrift in a roiling sea of death on some broken piece of their downed ship.
“What are you doing out of your vehicle?” Calvin demanded.
“There’s no one around,” she waved her arms around at the vacant dead end street.
“Still, don’t get out unless you have to.”
But she ignored him and studied the monitor, dismissively waving one hand at his unnecessary caution. “It’s like a feeding frenzy down there,” she muttered.
“Feeding Frenzy? Really?” Scooter asked. “Is that the analogy you want to use?”
“What? Why? It seems appropriate. They’re circling around like sharks.”
“Maybe like the frenzy later in the day where the older, beat up sharks get to lazily float around and wait for something already half-dead to eventually float by.”
“What?”
“I’m saying they could hardly be said to have worked themselves into a frenzy, being as how they barely can work themselves into a well-paced shuffle.”
“You’re seriously arguing the semantics of my chosen metaphor when the world is ending all around us?”
“Don’t change the subject,” Scooter needled her.
“Feeding Frenzy might not have been the most…ideal phrase, but it’s all I could think of at that moment. Did you have anything better?”
“Off the top of my head…It’s like someone dropped a contact in a crowded church.”
“How about: It’s buffet time at a retirement home and Boomer’s manning the food cart,” Sarah suggested.
“Ooh, ooh. Something about how many strippers you can get dancing around one pole,” Tripper added.
The others rolled their eyes and Sarah reached over and slapped him on the arm.
“It’s the line around the lone port-a-potty at a Grateful Dead concert,” Joel added. Felicia slapped his leg laughing.
“Nice!” the others agreed. “And you even got dead in there.”
“Hey Spenser, can you zoom in on that roof?” Calvin called over the radio.
“Roger that,” Gus called back.
“Is it too late to go back to stay with the doctor?” Athena joked lightly.
“I’m thinking of joining you,” Tripper agreed with a dry grimace.
“We’re going to have to split up,” Scooter decided.
“That doesn’t sound like a good idea at all,” Quinn mumbled, being alone in the ambulance at the moment.
“Don’t worry,” Calvin assured him. “Athena is coming back there right now,” he shooed her away with repeated, dismissive little swats.
“We’re going to try and attract most of them to the far side of the park.”
“How are you going to do that, Oh Mighty Calvin?” Athena asked petulantly, stomping back to the ambulance.
“We’re going to stick our heads out the window and make a whole lot of noise.”
“That sounds brilliant, genius,” Athena growled. “You gonna go right to the middle and blow your horn?”
“Pretty much,” Calvin admitted. “This thing is so quiet I figure we can drive right through them to the far side, almost out of the pack. Then blow the horn, sing a song, whatever we need to do to get their attention. When most of them follow us, we’ll head out the other side of the park, go around the block and haul ass back here and escort you up the hill to rescue them. We should only have to kill a few around the shelter. Then we should be able to get the jocks down and be gone long before even the fastest in that horde can get back to us.”
“Oh.” Athena said simply. That’s actually a decent plan, she conceded, but only in her mind. She was so annoyed that when the growling zombie leaped out of the alley at her, she shot it in the head without a second thought. The report of the M-16 seemed more like concussions from a bomb, however, as it echoed through the little valley.
“Oh shit,” she said, looking back at Calvin and grimacing an apology.
The report of the shot continued to echo for a long, drawn-out, almost comical moment. “What, are we in the Grand Flipping Canyon or something?” Trip asked no one in particular.
No one replied.
“Here they come” Joel announced needlessly.
Bobbing heads appeared over the rim of the hill above their dead end and Infected slowly stomped down the hill, some rolling.
“More to the rear,” Felicia added.
Calvin craned his head around to look. They were, indeed, in a little valley inside a larger area of the park just down a hill to the west from the nation’s only World War I Memorial. There were mobs of dead scattered all throughout the park and it was clear now that sound did attract their attention. “Ok…that’s not good,” he stated the obvious.
“I’m sorry, you guys,” Athena apologized earnestly. “I wasn’t thinking.”
“That’s ok, Rosebud. Those Leapers and Lurkers hiding in the alleys come out pretty quick. They’re like animals, hiding in wait to spring the trap. You’re lucky it didn’t get you. I told you to keep that visor down any time you’re outside.” He studied the still-twitching remnants of what had once been a homeless man.
“I usually have the panabas, but I was in a hurry to get up here.”
“Face it, your reflexes are quicker than your brain,” Tripper pointed out. “Not that that is hard.”
“Hey!” she shouted defensively, clicking her seatbelt and shutting the door of the ambulance. “It was an accident,” she explained. “Next time I take only Chuck,” she promised.
“Chuck?” Sarah asked.
“My panabas. It’s badass. It was either Rhonda Rousey or Chuck Norris. I went old school instead of girl power. And Rhonda sounds like a guy’s weapon anyway.”
“Nice.”
“What do we do now, Calvin?” Quinn asked, still chuckling.
“Ok. We split up again…or still. We keep the plan to split up, but change our routes You guys head back the way we just came. We’ll go North towards the tracks and Union Station. We’ll cut back up into the park when we get half way there.”
“Halfway where?” Athena asked.
“Oh…sorry. That didn’t make any sense at all, did it? I was picturing the park as a box and…nevermind. Just go slow. Make lots of noise and let them follow you. Try to get as many on your tail as you can. If they start catching up with you or the street ahead starts to fill up, just haul it out of there and angle straight up the hill into the memorial plaza area. Don’t forget to let us know you’re breaking off so we can come cover you.”
“Ok,” Athena agreed.
“Let’s try to get back to the center as close to the same time as we can.”
“I don’t know where it is you’re saying we should meet,” Quinn interjected.
“I saw it,” Athena told him. “I’ll show you when we come back around. I sort of know my way around here.”
“Ok. This is one place in Kansas City of which I have little knowledge,” he explained. “I don’t get downtown much.”
“A lot of people from the outer cities don’t realize how much there is to do down here now.”
“Hey, I’ve got an idea,” Calvin snipped. “Maybe we can push the tourism when the living outnumber the dead again. Anyone have any questions about the plan?”
No one said anything, but he could sense Athena in a huff, which he ignored for now. There were enough distractions out there that he was confident it would blow away on its own. Or it wouldn’t and she’d make him pay. Either way, it would have to wait.
“Ok, then. Trip?”
“On it, Scoot.” He laid on the horn, which surprised them all as it blared out the deep, ear-splitting blast of a massive, triple air horn. Tripper laughed. “What kind of jackass puts a train air-whistle in their
car?” he asked.
“I like it,” Joel bellowed merrily.
“I don’t!” Sarah yelled, holding her ears. “Make it stop!” As the front turret operator, and not having the protection of the triple-thick windshield, she’d nearly had a heart attack. “Please don’t do that again unless you have to,” she begged Tripper.
“Sorry, babe,” Tripper shouted almost-ruefully. “But it’s gotta be done.” He shot her an impish grin and pressed the button again, then frowned almost immediately. Only intending to jerk her chain with a short burst, the horn kept blasting away when he pulled his finger away from the button.
“Stop it!” Sarah shouted, ducking back into the vehicle to be heard. “Stop it! Stop it! Stop it, Tripper!”
“I can’t!” he yelled back. “It’s stuck!” He pounded the silver button several times in a futile attempt to make the sound go away.
“See what you get, Jackass?” She snapped angrily. “Now the horn is stuck! You had to be mister funny man!”
“Quinn, we’re pulling south. See you in a bit!” Calvin shouted. “We’ll try to find a place to stop and fix the horn!”
“Please do!” Quinn laughed back.
The two vehicles pulled out, Quinn driving north and blaring the trumpet on his own vehicle, although the Hedgehog riders couldn’t hear it over the thunder of their own horn, pulling every nearby Infected towards the south.
“When we get to this intersection up here, I’m going to jump out and fix that!” Calvin shouted.
“Ok!”
When they reached the corner, a tiny horde of Joggers poured in from both sides. “Next street. Next street!” Calvin shouted.
“We’re still clear up here, Calvin,” Quinn said over the headphones. “Just pulling them along with us. More are coming out of the park to join them. There’s a grassy hill next to us and they keep rolling down the hill and breaking themselves on the street.”
“This would be great comedy in a movie,” Athena said quietly. Calvin barely heard the second half of her statement as she whispered, “But here it’s just tragic.”