For about thirty seconds all they could make out was the faint whisper of the diesel engine, winding up and leveling off. There was a long moment’s quiet; after that, the engine’s growl grew louder until the truck rumbled around the bend and over the rise. It bounced across the field and lurched to a stop next to the foursome.
Danny jumped from the cab, followed by his team. Will blanched when he saw that the Ford sported several new dents and a web of cracks that covered the windshield. A thick, slimy coat of blood and gore splattered across the front end. He felt the bright stab of panic rising again. “Are you bit?” he asked with concern, his eyes searching Danny for bite-marks.
“No, I’m fine,” Danny assured him.
“Then what happened to the truck?”
“Well now, that’s a story. Let me explain,” he said, flashing his trademark smile. “Everything was fine the first five minutes. That’s when I drew three creepers out of the brush behind me, heading toward the bed of the truck. They came straight at me like a hound dog to its supper dish. At first, all they did was circle the truck and lean against it, moaning. But the more I hit the horn the crazier they got. I don’t know if they were reacting to the sound of the horn or if they could tell dinner was inside the truck. After a bit they started banging on it, then they got to where they had it rocking back and forth. So I’m sitting there watching creepers coming from the base in every direction. The ones already at the fence are trying to reach through and get the meat, and my truck’s rocking from side to side.” He chuckled and gave an exaggerated shake of his head.
“This big, beast-like sumbitch-” he held one hand up high followed by both hands far apart to show the creeper’s size- “must have been a pro wrestler when he was breathing. He gets himself up on the hood and clubs the windshield with both hands. After about six shots he spiders the glass and I figure I’d better do something before he reaches through and grabs me. I throw it in reverse and go back and forth a few times, but the sumbitch doesn’t care. He’s not even holding on, he’s just trying to line up another shot on the windshield. So I back up about fifty yards and floor it. When I’m fifty feet from the fence I stand on the brakes- he flies off the hood and goes bouncing along the ground. It doesn’t even faze him. Plus I notice that the fence is leaning my way, angled like this,” he held one hand up at a slant, “and there’s no telling how long it will hold.
“So I back up slow, trying to lead him out into the field. I get a good ways in and back up fast, get about a hundred feet away from the creeper. Then I punch the gas. I hit the guy straight on at forty miles an hour, knock him twenty feet. I line up the truck, run over his head, and here I am.”
Coy, Justin, and Clay all spoke at once, asking questions and cracking jokes.
“Hang on, fellas,” Will said. “Don’t get all worked up. We’ve got a lot to do yet.” He turned to Danny. “How many creepers did we lure over there?”
“A couple hundred at the fence, Boss. With more trudging up the hill.”
Will nodded, pleased that the ruse pulled so many of the dead away from where the first sweeps would take place.
“Do you think there’s any chance they’ll get that fence knocked over?” Justin asked Danny.
“I don’t know. It was leaning like I said, but without knowing how deep the posts are there’s no telling how much give it has.”
“It would be great if it fell,” Justin said. “If it does, we could lead them through and right out of here. Maybe empty the place out.”
Will liked Justin’s idea. To clear the dead off the base would give them time to sweep every building and make doing so much safer. He spent an agonizing few moments trying to decide if they should go see if the fence came down and knock it down themselves if it hadn’t, or keep the plan they had drawn up.
Danny decided for him. He took Will by the shoulder and leaned close. “We have a good plan. Let’s stick to it.”
Will nodded his agreement. “Okay. Go get with your team. See you on the inside.”
Danny drove off to rejoin the other group. Coy produced a heavy duty bolt cutter from the back of the van. Will gave Danny time to get back to his group, then he used the bolt cutter to sever the chain links until he’d cut a large gap in the fence. One by one they stepped through the hole and onto the base.
Will nodded, pleased that the ruse pulled so many of the dead away from where the first sweeps would take place.
“Do you think there’s any chance they’ll get that fence knocked over?” Justin asked Danny.
“I don’t know. It was leaning like I said, but without knowing how deep the posts are there’s no telling how much give it has.”
“It would be great if it fell,” Justin said. “If it does, we could lead them through and right out of here. Maybe empty the place out.”
Will liked Justin’s idea. To clear the dead off the base would give them time to sweep every building and make doing so much safer. He spent an agonizing few moments trying to decide if they should go see if the fence came down and knock it down themselves if it hadn’t, or keep the plan they had drawn up.
Danny decided for him. He took Will by the shoulder and leaned close. “We have a good plan. Let’s stick to it.”
Will nodded his agreement. “Okay. Go get with your team. See you on the inside.”
Danny drove off to rejoin the other group. Coy produced a heavy duty bolt cutter from the back of the van. Will gave Danny time to get back to his group, then he used the bolt cutter to sever the chain links until he’d cut a large gap in the fence. One by one they stepped through the hole and onto the base.
Chapter Seven
* * *
A two-hundred yard wide stretch of grassland ringed the base. Will and his group trotted through the dead grass, on full alert and crouched low. If a few errant creepers saw them and alerted others with their infernal moaning, it could bring creepers in from all around the base. Finding themselves in a full-scale battle before they even got to the base would be a disaster.
They reached the gun club undetected. Will tried the door and found it locked. Clay pulled a post driver from a bag of tools he carried over his shoulder and handed it to Will. Three hard blasts with the driver were enough to shatter door. Will and Clay hugged the wall on either side of the doorway; Will counted to twenty. When no creepers emerged they entered the club, Will first, followed by Clay. Coy and Justin gave them time to get in and take a position, then followed.
The door opened into a large common room with a counter at the far end. The counter ran the length of the room; three creepers were behind it, snarling and drooling. All three wore torn and blood-stained combat uniforms. Decay had eaten at their gums and cheeks, leaving their teeth exposed to the roots and the corners of their mouths pulled back into jagged-tooth yawns. Swollen and blackened tongues lolled over their split lips. Their eyes were cloudy voids with no emotion, dead pools with enlarged pupils that tracked the living with zealous intensity. One had a jagged shard of glass embedded in its cheek. Bite marks riddled the arm of another, and its left ear hung loose, attached only by a thread of flesh.
A hinged door on the counter’s far left side led to the area behind it. The creepers had shared their small space since they’d turned, unable to open the door or clamber over the Formica top. When Will entered the room they were motionless. With no stimuli, the dead seemed to turn themselves off. They stood and stared into the void, day and night, with no movement or action. Occasionally one would rock back and forth a little- that being the only sign they weren’t wax figures from some horrific display.
The team’s sudden appearance reanimated the threesome. They moaned, snarled and bumped against the counter, arms outstretched. Will regarded them warily as he took in the rest of the club.
It was a good sized room, forty feet long and thirty wide. In one corner there was a big screen TV with a semicircle of aged recliners arrayed around it. A leather sofa faced away from the TV. End tables piled high with magazines
and newspapers sat on both sides of the sofa. Three mismatched bookshelves sat against the opposite wall; the shelves held books, knickknacks, and a Bose stereo.
A row of display cases formed the counter that held back the creepers. The cases displayed gun memorabilia, plaques that detailed shooting records, and pictures of soldiers on the range. Gray metal storage lockers lined the wall behind the counter. There was a lull in the row of lockers to allow entry down a narrow hallway that led further back into the building. A sign on the wall by the entrance read ‘Shooting Range’ over a large red arrow.
The side of the room opposite the TV and bookshelves contained a do-it-yourself soda fountain and coffee area. A mix of four-person tables with plastic chairs was arranged in two short rows. Will could imagine the shooters sitting here, drinking their Cokes and coffees and lying to one another about how well they shot that day.
“Kind of messy for a bunch of soldiers,” Clay said, looking around the room.
“It could use a good straightening up,” Will agreed.
“Where do you think the guns are?” asked Coy.
“One of three places,” answered Will. “Behind that counter, down the hallway and in the range, or locked away in a room somewhere.”
“Or not at this location,” added Justin.
“Or that,” agreed Will. He sighed and looked at the creepers growling and mewling across the counter. “Let’s get these three put down.”
Killing a creeper was a remarkably easy thing to do. They were slow, brainless, and predictable. Decay made them weak, and most were gravely wounded or missing limbs. Most times, it was a simple matter of waiting until they reached for you, grabbing them by the neck, shoulder, or top of the head to stop their forward progress, and driving a pointed object into their brain. They didn’t resist or evade, nor did they counter your attack and put you in a full nelson. They mindlessly tried to feed. The problems with killing them were twofold. First, creepers almost always outnumbered the living. The dead tended to move in groups- sometimes herds of hundreds, even thousands. If you were clearing a room or a building, odds are there wasn’t one creeper to deal with, there were three, or six, or twenty. The living had to keep their head on a swivel; if they didn’t, while they were dispatching creeper A, creepers B and C attacked from the rear.
The other, bigger issue is that putting down creepers was a zero-sum affair. You could put down 1000 in a row without incident. But on the 1,001, if you got bit, it was game over. One mistake or surprise, ever, is all you got; then you were no longer among the breathing.
Coy, Justin, and Clay walked to the counter; the creepers reached for them with hungry snarls. Steel flashed three times, gore flew, and the creepers slumped to the ground.
Coy climbed over the counter, checking behind and beneath it. “Nothing back here,” he reported.
“I don’t see any doors,” Will said, looking around. “Down the hall, single file. Justin, you keep an eye on the rear.”
The climbed over the counter and down a long, dank hallway. There was a single locked door on each side of the hall.
There was a single door at the end of the hall. Will gave the handle a try and it turned. He looked back, held his index finger over his mouth in a ‘be quiet’ gesture, took a deep breath, and pushed the door open. They moved through the doorway fast and silent, weapons raised. There were no creepers on the other side; Will breathed a sigh of relief, sheathed his knife, and looked around. Weak, yellowish light filtered through skylights and cast down upon a cavernous shooting range. The door they’d come through was the entrance. It overlooked twenty firing lanes; partitions separated the lanes, and each contained a low wooden shelf for the shooter to use. An electronic pulley system ran to the end of the lanes and shuttled targets back and forth. At the opposite end, piles of sandbags sat in front of a plain gray wall made of concrete blocks. Will’s eyes landed on a long row of glass cabinets along the near wall. He chuckled and closed his eyes. The cabinets were full of guns.
His heart pounded with excitement, and the guys chattered like schoolgirls as they explored. The cabinets nearest the door held handguns- twelve Beretta or Sig Sauer 9mms per container. A shelf at the top of each cabinet held ten boxes of ammo. A sign over a door on the south wall read ‘OUTDOOR FIRING RANGE. On each side of the door were another half-dozen cabinets. These held rifles- M16s and M4 carbines. Along with rifles, each container held two-dozen thirty-round magazines.
They spent a few minutes working with the weapons- inserting and removing magazines, jacking bullets, sighting them. An idea formed Will’s mind.
“Are you boys feeling lucky?” he asked. All three nodded. “Good, because here’s the plan. We’ll take fifteen handguns, fifteen rifles, and all the ammo we can carry. And because they will be too heavy to carry around the base, and will prevent us from having room to carry anything else, we’ll carry them to the van. Then we’ll come back and hit the supply building with our bags empty.”
“That’s two extra trips across that field, Pop,” said Coy, a bit of trepidation in his voice.
“We’ll make it. If they see us, we make the drop-off, kill any creepers in front of us, and sprint to the supply building. The ones we don’t kill we’ll outrun.”
Clay used the claw hammer side of his weapon to break the glass in the rifle cases and they filled their bags with guns and boxes of ammunition.
Danny led his crew through the fence and across the open field, same as Will but from a different starting point.
Before the outbreak, the grounds were no doubt pristine- manicured and precision-cut to the eighth of an inch. Now, though, horseweed and crabgrass choked out the Zoysia grass and waist-high thistles scratched at their arms as they hurried through the overgrown field.
They encountered a lone creeper shuffling through the meadow. Danny rushed forward and thrust his knife deep in its head before its awful ken could alert other dead to their presence.
Reaching the base, they left the abandoned and weed-infested grassland behind for abandoned and dirty streets. They followed Danny north on Minnesota Avenue, keeping to the middle of the street and avoiding the houses on either side. Unless you were doing a sweep and trying to clear the creepers out of an area, it was best to avoid things such as parked cars, houses, or anything else that denied you an unobstructed, 360-degree view of your surroundings. Everyone in the group had a story about rounding the corner of a house and finding themselves nose to nose with three creepers.
They turned right onto Nebraska where it intersected with Minnesota Avenue. Their first objective, the base commissary, sat a block away. One more cross-street ran between the commissary and the team- Replacement Avenue. Three creepers loitered a block south on Replacement, staring into the cloudless sky. The group crossed the avenue without making a sound so as not to alert the dead.
Danny was surprised to find the commissary looked like any suburban grocery store. It was a rectangular building made of dark brown brick. The front had two entrances thirty feet apart, with twelve-foot high plate-glass window panels between them. A large white arch that doubled as an awning hung over the recessed entryway.
“Well, it won’t be any problem getting in,” Danny said. They huddled behind an abandoned Toyota at the far side of the parking lot. “I just hope there’s a way to do it that doesn’t make a shit-ton of noise.”
They hurried across the parking lot and approached the windows with caution. Danny pressed his nose against the glass and cupped his hands around his eyes to peer inside the store. He had been in a few dozen grocery stores over the last six months and they almost always looked as if a herd of buffalo had rampaged through, followed by a troupe of inept splatter-paint artists. Picked-through stock strewn throughout the aisles was the rule, along with shelves askew or laying on their side, meat and vegetables rotting on the floor, and blood and gore splashed on the walls and the shelves, and pooling on the floors.
It took a moment for his eyes to focus through the interior glo
om, but when they did, what he saw delighted him. The shelves were standing and full of goods. The floors were clear of debris. He couldn’t see any blood or fluid anywhere. Best of all, there were no creepers shuffling about inside.
“Boys and girls,” he said, turning away from the window, “I guess we’re the only people crazy enough to break into a military base and go looting.” Jiri and Casandro laughed, and Tara did a little cheer.
“Yay us!” she said with a laugh. “It looks like coming up here is turning out to be a hell of an idea,” she added.
Danny groaned and rolled his eyes. “God help us. Can you imagine what Will’s going to be like if this pays off? Big Dog will be unbearable.” He began a mock conversation between himself and Will. “Will, would you pass me the peas?”
He satirized Will’s voice, speaking in a faux baritone, “You mean the peas we got because I had the idea to sweep the army base?”
“Will, can I have a new blanket?”
“You mean a blanket we got because I had the idea to sweep the army base?”
“Good shot, Will. You took that creeper’s head right off its body.”
“Thanks. You know, I made that shot with a gun we scored when I had the idea to sweep the army base.”
They roared with laughter. Jiri was bent at the waist and Tara laughed so hard there were tears in her eyes. Danny, eying the creepers down the block, could tell that they noticed the commotion. Two of the dead looked in their direction, sniffing the air with rotting noses.
“Okay, sober up,” he said, still smiling. “Let’s find our way in before our friends come over to play.”
Casandro Valladares was a day laborer who came to the U.S. from Mexico at the age of sixteen.
His father started working in the coal mines in Coahuila as an eight-year-old; at forty-two, blood from his blackened lungs dribbled over his lip when he coughed. One day, agents from the mining company showed up at the Valladares family’s home in the slums of Saltillo. The agents had noticed Casandro’s size and muscular build, and they informed the teen that he was to report to work at the mine the following day.
Journey Page 4