by Dalton Wolf
From the street corner Quinn waved a blue armored hand out his window and turned north, heading for the river. Tripper turned off his mic, leaned over the seat and quietly spoke into Calvin’s non-mic ear. “You think he’ll be there when we get back?”
The smith could just turn his vehicle any direction and head out of town. Calvin wanted to give him that very chance. “I think he’ll be there,” he responded confidently.
“Why?”
“Because a deal is a deal. And I don’t think he’s got any place better to go.”
“Yeah. Athena said he has a daughter who hates him.”
“Apparently. But we do not hate him. At least, not yet.”
Tripper laughed. “Let’s hope it stays that way.”
“Which way, Calvin?” Felicia asked.
“Let’s try Oak/Gilliham.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“We’ll show you, just follow my directions.” He pointed and she pulled out.
“That’s awful close to the parade route, again,” Tripper warned.
“I know, but it will bring us out three blocks away from the tower.”
“Fair enough.”
“And it gives us more Intel on the city.”
Calvin had ordered them to keep notes on their phones regarding anything they noticed throughout the city. No one minded, because they had all become accustomed to texting and only the Sprint and AT&T phones were going through, probably because the government couldn’t shut them down yet as the main buildings were in the area
Oak appeared abandoned all the way to 22nd street, where it became Gilliham. No cars—burned out or otherwise—blocked their path and no people looted or guarded street corners. No dead tried to eat them. No animals played in the yards or trees going about the business of nature. Noticeably absent were the smoking pyres for bodies or body parts they had become so used to seeing on every street. Their sharp, paranoid eyes spied nothing but fading asphalt, concrete buildings and dark, eerily empty windows.
“Ok, this is one creepy street,” Felicia muttered quietly, hoping whatever was out there didn’t hear.
“I’ve arrived, Calvin,” Quinn informed him, coming in clear and crisp from at least five miles out and making Calvin jump in his seat at the sound of the man seeming to come from over his left shoulder. “I’m safe inside. Your friend says he has some upgrades for my ambulance. And he just explained to me what you have only been hinting at...that I am going to have to give her up because you will need to take her out on your rescue missions. I will have the keys ready when you return. I’m sorry for being so slow on the uptake, and stubbornly selfish.”
“Thanks for the gift, Quinn.”
“It’s not a gift. I’m just letting you use it out of necessity. I expect you to remember where you got it and treat it as if it belonged to your dad.
“I promise,” Calvin promised. “And thanks again. I was wondering how to talk you into that. I’m afraid we’re short on cash. You see, we spent a lot of money today at the Ren Fest.” The big man turned off his mic, but just before it clicked into silence, they heard his hearty bellow rolling free.
Calvin checked the monitor again, scanning the streets ahead where the view wasn’t obstructed by trees or buildings. “I can’t believe it looks so clear all the way to the tower. Step on it, Felicia,” he ordered. “I’ll try to let you know if something is coming.”
They reached 31st street in little time. Felicia slowed to a crawl when they rounded the corner, much as they had the last time. This time, however, it was not Sarah who stopped them; it was the mass of dead milling around filling every square foot for the entire three blocks between them and the tower. The camera above couldn’t tilt far enough down to look at the streets below, so they only had Gus’ original statements on which to base their visuals. But because he grunted a lot when climbing he’d turned off his mic, and so had Scaggs. He had told them there were zombies in the back lot of the station, but had said little about the streets. Needless to say, he had woefully under-prepared them for the reality they were now facing.
“Jesus.” Boomer exclaimed quietly over their headsets. “Not again.”
“It’s ok, Boom. The armor makes all the difference,” Joel tried to assure his friend, but the decided shiver in his voice belied his confidence.
“Go very slowly, Felicia,” Calvin cautioned. “Stay off the guns. No one make a sound. Let’s see if we can just sneak by.”
“How about if we just cover our eyes so they can’t see us?” Tripper asked snarkily.
“We’re coming in, Gus,” Calvin whispered with a glare for Trip.
Felicia creeped along at roughly 3 mph and the masses simply seemed to instinctively move out of the way, almost as if there might still be some bit of humanity left, some faint shadow of their former survival instincts. Occasionally they would knock down a few or a Hopper would bounce up the hood. The worst incidents for everyone were when Infected fell under the tires, but it was unavoidable. Felicia would cringe an apology to everyone and the vehicle would hop a few times as if going over speed bumps in a parking lot, although with considerably more crunching than is generally expected from your average speed bump. The distinct popping of the skulls only seemed to interest a few of the dead, and they were drawn more to the crunching noises rising from the ground than the quiet vehicle passing through.
“I thought there were thousands back there in the park around Boomer and Brick. That must have just been hundreds,” Calvin whispered. “This is thousands.”
“I’m sure it’s just your imagination, Calvin. This is also only hundreds,” Felicia assured him uncertainly.
“Sure seems like more,” he argued.
“You want me to get an accurate count?” She shot back with a flippant, casual attitude belying her revulsion at the thought.
“I think we’ve got a bit more to worry about right now.”
“Whatever.”
Felicia was right. It was only hundreds. These were mostly Shufflers, Gimps and the noisemakers—the ones they would eventually call Moaners. Filling the space between the tower and the Hedgehog, the mass appeared thinner on the southern street next to the back lot entrance, but only because a demolished car blocked half the intersection, its smashed front end leaking green antifreeze and reddish transmission fluid over the street. Felicia creeped the Humvee past the smoking wreck, up to the spot with the drain pipe.
“Hey, that car wasn’t here when we went through the first time, was it?” Tripper asked as an afterthought.
“No,” Felicia answered. “Maybe that’s who opened the gate?”
“We’d better keep an eye out for survivors again,” Calvin cautioned them all.
“The Bus is leaving, Gus,” Felicia announced into her mic.
“We’re out front,” Calvin added, but there was no reply.
“Gus?” he called again.
“Hey, it’s pretty tight here,” Tripper announced. “You wanna step it up a bit?”
“You coming, Gus?” Calvin asked.
“Abort! Abort!” Gus called back, sounding stressed, but not quite panicky.
Felicia jammed her foot on the gas, pushing through the mob ahead, the bumper and tires crunching bones as they were knocked down before her advance.
“What are you doing?” Calvin demanded in a hushed whisper.
“He said abort, that means clear out and scrub the mission,” she hissed back.
“Not in this case. We still have to pick them up. It just means abort that particular escape route.”
“Oh, right.”
“Yeah…” Gus eventually said in his best Bill Lumbergh imitation. “If it’s not too much trouble…we’re gonna need you at the back entrance. Yeah, and you might as well go ahead and plan on fighting through here too, ok? That’d be great, thaaanks.” Then in his own voice he added, “This doesn’t look good. We might be stuck here for a while, Scoot. Unless you can find a way to get us down.”
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�Damn it. You’d better find us a way back there,” he spat at Felicia.
Ignoring the ‘noises off’ order, the beautiful actress pulled out wide and turned the vehicle through the ocean of grasping dead, leaving a morbid wake of crushed and twisted limbs and gore spreading out behind. She yanked the wheel, slammed on the gas and spun them tight between the smoking wreck and the corner of the building and into an only slightly smaller sea of death. The waves quickly became harsher than the ocean they had just left, at least for a few very noisy seconds. The first wave of the dead sea broke across the bow of their craft and the seas calmed as Felicia guided them through the worst parts with full sheets to the wind, and both turrets firing broadside and windshield washers going full-speed. The Hedgehog rocked and shuddered over the gruesome whitecaps, between the open gates and into the much emptier back lot of the station. “Any port in a storm, right?” she quipped.
Zombies trickled into the lot through the wide-open gates. Shufflers, Moaners and Gimps wandered around outside the fence and covered the field as well as the parking lots of the neighboring buildings. The building was now literally surrounded by zombies and many more were pouring in from somewhere.
“Jesus,” Boomer said again. “It’s too tight. They’re getting on the car. Found a downside to the nail guns…we can’t finish the ones who won’t look at us,” he warned everyone. “Gotta do something fast,” he suggested.
“Felicia, Tripper, we need to go out there,” Calvin snapped at the other two.
“I’m on it,” Tripper called, flipping open the back door and leaping out. One of the leather straps on his boots caught on the bumper and pulled him up. But his plant foot was standing in a dark puddle of ex-humanity and he crashed face-first into the pavement.
“I’m ok!” he called out, jumping up and swinging his bat into a balding elderly man with a baby blue Sporting KC jersey, crushing its skull with one blow.
“Let’s try to get a fifteen foot cushion between the Hedgehog and the dead coming in off the street,” Calvin panted. “Tripper, you take the north side, over there behind the building. Felicia, you and I will try to get to the gate and clear it.”
“Ok,” Felicia replied shakily and opened her door without further discussion. “Coming out. Don’t shoot me, Joel Sweetie,” she cooed at Joel.
“Roger that, my queen.”
Although scared, she was feeling pretty invincible. The nice big blacksmith guy had given her a lightweight chainmail dress and she had picked out a thing the man had called a Lucerne Hammer, a long pole as tall as she was with three weapons at the end: A hammer head near the tip; a standard spiked tip; and a Cornicello style spike opposite the hammer head. She decided to just call it Freddie, because it looked wicked like that Nightmare guy.
Clutching Freddie firmly but loosely, she jumped out and ran around the vehicle to the driver’s side. The stench of roadkill clogged her senses, but she didn’t’ have time see what caused the smell. With a scream, she swung Freddie’s Cornicello over the top and into one of the zombies crawling on the hood. The snaked blade punctured the base of the skull of the dead guy, and she gave it a twist to make sure it stirred up the brains a bit, yanking the coil free just before the body could drop and rip the blade from her grasp. She did not throw up. And for that she was grateful. She was not, however, grateful for the flood of dead-guy juice that sprayed onto her armor from Calvin’s side of the hood. Revulsion left her gaping in horror across the vehicle.
Across the hood, Calvin danced back and forth, sweeping zombies from the hood and windows with his axes as if he were cleaning snow with an ice scraper and he was late for work—blood, bones and brains flew in all directions from his frenzied chopping. At this point she would have stopped to vomit if she thought she could do so without becoming lunch for a dozen Gimps. Instead, through an incredible force of will, she breathed deeply through her mouth behind the plastic face shield, gagging but keeping everything down.
Both turret gunners dropped Shufflers around the walkway so the stranded couple could descend. Gus and Scaggs were keeping their zombies at bay with the light weapons the smith had given them. Between the turrets, Gus and Scaggs, the team was fighting an even battle against the incoming zombies. It was the trio of Tripper, Felicia and Calvin that tipped the scales.
Tripper swung his bat like he was fighting for a spot on the bench. The first of the half-dozen dead on the North side didn’t have much of a chance. This zombie was the first man in a suit they’d seen since the event had begun, wearing an ugly brown polyester blend with a gold tie. Probably even worked today, Tripper empathized with the poor dead guy, before bringing his bat across to slap at a fastball and popping the skull like a water balloon. Something flashed on the man’s chest and he glanced down and read a small black tag with gold writing that said ‘Director of something’, but the something and the man’s name were obscured by dried flesh.
“Hmph.” He Hmphed. “Should have taken a day off, man. Not that you’d be alive, but at least you would have been dressed better.”
A shadow loomed over his shoulder and Tripper spun quickly sending a left-handed uppercut at a highball that shattered the jaw and consequently the neck of a mindless eating machine that used to be a teenage boy in a powder blue KC ball cap.
“Slider! Sorry kid. You gotta pitch better than that to keep Trip Grissom from taking it to the house,” he said, watching an imaginary ball sail out of the lot.
Stepping forward and choking up, he sent a blast to the side of a small Hispanic man in an SKC jersey who was so old the disease probably hadn’t changed his look very much at all. Trip pulled up short as the bat contacted the side of the man’s skull. There was a pop and it dropped, but there was no blood. If only I could do that every time. Wait, is he dead? With a sigh, Tripper swung at one in the dirt just to make sure, spilling brain goo all over his new leather boots. No time for Mr. Nice Guy where the dead are concerned. That’s how people get killed, he thought.
Without speaking or planning, Calvin and Felicia advanced side-by-side, but far enough apart not to overlap swings or drench each other in too much gore. The pair grunted and huffed as they fought to the edge of the back lot and delved into the mass of dead pressing in through the open gates. With the nail guns shooting over their shoulders and taking out the more energetic dead, the Leapers and Moaners that were still out of reach, the pair of armored warriors slowly progressed to the fence. The pair separated a few feet from the street and each fought their way to one of the tall, rolling gate halves. It took even longer to pull them together with each pausing intermittently to dispatch two or three zombies, enough to make room to pull the gate another foot.
Already fatiguing, Calvin shattered one skull with a downward swing of his right arm, jabbed the spike tip of his other axe into another zombie with the left and was already swinging on a third face with his right arm again. Decaying flesh and blood that stunk of three-day-old roadkill clung to the chain links of his armor.
Everyone was disgusted with the constant slaughter.
“How did those old time warriors do this?” Calvin breathed. “This is sickening. And they fought for whole days sometimes. I’m worn out after a few minutes. And our enemy isn’t even fighting back.” He also fought a constant battle for breath.
“You’re doing alright,” Tripper told him. “And I’ve got motion cameras in the car filming this so the girls can watch us later. Maybe we’ll be famous one day.”
“You’re more likely to film me falling down and being ripped to pieces. Athena will enjoy watching some zombie shucking my armor like I’m a crab,” Calvin panted.
“Nah. If it gets that desperate, I’ll come help,” Tripper assured him.
“If that’s an option, why aren’t you already here?” Calvin huffed.
“You said you wanted me to clear the north side.”
“I don’t see any more dead over there,” Calvin wheezed, taking a second to glance over his shoulder.
“Just wait
a second,” Tripper told him, and on queue another zombie walked out from under a walkway on the southwest side of the building. “See. Every time I think I’m done, another one hobbles out.”
“Where are they coming from?” Calvin panted, sliding the bar across the gate as the last zombie died…again. Died again…Dead again. Damnit. We have to figure out a better way to say that, part of his mind complained bitterly. Why won’t they just stay dead like they’re supposed to? Both he and Felicia leaned back on the heavy chain link gates for a breather, high-fiving each other with a heavy clank of their weapons.
“There,” Tripper closed a little access door in the fence around the electronics shack underneath the tower, wondering how the dead managed to think their way through the half-sized hatchway.
Calvin walked the fence quickly, not finding any holes. Felicia gave him a thumbs-up from the other side. “I think we’re secure over here.”
“Why are they even around the tower?” Felicia wondered aloud.
“Must be something about the radio waves that is drawing them…or something,” Gus suggested.
In his defense, he was a little distracted as three gigantic former Chiefs fans picked that moment to lumber across the walkway to where he and Scaggs stood.
“Watch out!” Scaggs shouted, spearing one in the eye with an actual spear. She watched in fascination as the body sank to the walkway and slide off into the pit below. Two others continued to lurch towards them.
“Hmm. The bigger ones usually fall off,” Gus noted, before he lunged in to drive his own spear into another brain.
Scaggs finished off the third by stabbing the opposite eye from her last victim.
“And left again,” she said.
“What?”
“Gotta change eyes,” she explained to Gus. “Otherwise it’s too easy. Uh-oh, uh-oh, no, no, no, no, no!” she begged as the big dead guy didn’t fall off the platform as she’d planned, but instead tilted straight at her, onto her, driving the spear deeper into its own head as he fell. Unable to hold the weight, she was buried underneath the hefty corpse, only one arm free to wave for help, silently promising to give proper thanks to the beautiful Greek god for making the plastic face shields as malodorous, sticky fluids coated the mask. Without the face shield and powerless to protect herself, she would have already been zombified. That’s assuming the disease isn’t transmitted only through saliva or something, she corrected her internal narrator. But I don’t want to find out first-hand.