by R. J. Spears
“But it would be a lot faster than these winding country two-lane roads,” Kara said.
“And we don’t have a ton of supplies,” Brother Ed added.
Jason pulled out his notepad and wrote, and we waited. A few moments later he handed me a note and I read it out loud to the others. “We have to think about time. We don’t know how long this trip will take. I feel we need to be there as soon as we can.”
I looked up to his face, creased with concern, then said, “Yeah, there is that. I sense it, too. Plus, the sooner we get to Columbus, the sooner we get to head back to the Manor to help our friends.”
That was if we survived whatever we were going to face in Columbus. I left that unsaid, but I’m sure the others knew it.
It was decided. We would take Route 23 north.
The ride down the hill was so much more pleasurable than the tortuous grind up, although it wasn’t as easy as you would think. You can pick up a lot of speed heading down a hill on a bike, and you had to monitor that and control it, or otherwise, you might end up being broken into pieces in a crash. We also had the added challenge of avoiding a few abandoned cars sitting on the road. These were few and far between, but they were there with some sitting at canted angles, nearly blocking both lanes. Everyone managed to navigate them, but Brother Ed nearly clipped one as he neglected to cut his speed until the last moment.
Still, it was exhilarating to let gravity do all the work as we zoomed down the hill. The wind rushed past my face creating a slight roar in my ears, but it cooled all the sweat I had accumulated on the uphill climb. This small thrill took me back to my childhood, reminding me of times I had ridden down city streets with my friends, feeling carefree and a little roguish, out without any parental supervision. Those had been heady days, but, of course, we didn’t have a world full of the undead to worry about.
The downhill plummet took a lot less time than the earlier endless climb as we sped by a heavily wooded forest on our left and a river on our right. Past the river were several large expanses of farmland with no crops planted, so the weeds had run wild. I ended up out in front of our little convoy zipping past Kara who yelled at me to slow down. I acted like I didn’t hear her as I jetted past her with my head lowered to cut the drag of the wind, some of that childlike thrill returning to me if just for a few minutes as I road free and easy. The air was fresh and sweet intermixing with the pungent aroma coming off the fields. The road leveled out for a mile and we re-grouped, chugging along in silence. I learned that while there was some simple joy of bike riding, it was a pain in the ass.
No, literally. Sitting on that hard seat brought on a terrible ache in my butt. Of course, that was the least of my worries as our lives were about to become interesting again, and not in a good way.
We maintained a steady pace as we came up upon what looked like a small sea of old and rusted out mobile homes on our left. There had to be a hundred of them sitting tightly packed together in among tall weeds that threatened to swamp them. Wandering among the mobile homes were at least a dozen zombies, shambling along aimlessly. If you gave them a casual glance, it might look as if they were shopping for the perfect fixer-upper.
The problem was that a few of these casual shoppers had taken notice of five speeding bicyclists coming their way. Two, in fact, had wandered onto the road to greet us. How nice of them.
We had three choices. We could speed up and hope to dodge them as we zoomed by, but that ran the risk of being thrown off your bike at high speed if one of them by chance happened into a collision course. We could stop and take them out, but that would slow us down. Or we could try option three which was for me to pull out my trusty baseball bat, ride at them with great haste, and cut them down as if I were a knight in a jousting contest.
I considered the more expedient method of just pulling one of my guns and shooting them, but really, where is the sport in that?
I’m sure Kara would have gone with door number two, but I selected door number three.
“Slow down,” I yelled at my riding partners, but I continued forward and even sped up a bit.
“What are you doing Joel?” Kara yelled after me.
“Just taking care of some pesky zombies,” I yelled back as I reached over my shoulder and slid my ball bat from the bottom of my backpack. At the speed I was riding, that was no small feat, but I pulled it free and stayed upright.
The two zombies fully on the road changed their course to meet me, shambling about thirty feet apart. The fortunate thing for me was that they were in a straight line directly in front of me on the road. It was as if the universe had smiled upon me.
I pedaled hard and picked up speed. To get some momentum, I knelt over my handlebars. I heard someone shout behind me, but I couldn’t make out what it was with the rush of winding running past my ears. I clenched my bat in my right hand and made a slight course correction, targeting the first zombie on my right side. It was a thinnish, older man wearing a tattered suit. He held his arms out as if to implore me to give him a hug.
I came at it going full speed, but I stopped pedaling about twenty feet away. The zombie, no check that --I came up quickly, racing towards it. I pulled back my bat in concert with the speed of my bike and the approaching zombie.
This is one of those times I wished I had gone with Brandon’s weapon of choice, a sword. That would have been epic.
I sliced my bat forward with as much force as I could muster with one arm, but in reality, I didn’t need that much as my momentum amplified the force of my swing. The bat connected with the zombie’s face, smashing its skull in, inverting its face like a bowl. I felt the cracking of bone reverberate up my arm. It flipped backward, and its feet flew into the air, and it was down for the count.
After the front swing, I then had my bat across my body without enough time to pull it back, holding it like a tennis player readying for a backhand. I had to do a major jag to my right to properly align the zombie with my path, and that put me nearly on the shoulder of the road. The bike teetered a little under me, and I felt the tires slip some, but I stayed aloft.
Unlike the other zombie, this one had a single arm up, reaching for me. It was missing the other arm at the shoulder with a nasty stump of skin hanging down like a trunk. It looked slightly lopsided as it tottered towards me.
It was coming up faster than the first one as I rolled at it, accelerating for our upcoming encounter. I had to get the timing exact and whipped the bat back across my body just as I whizzed by the zombie. The zombie wasn’t quick enough to reach me with its single arm. The bat smacked the back of its head with a satisfying pinging noise announcing impact. Although I couldn’t see it, the zombie kissed the pavement and never got up again.
I had been so focused I hadn’t noticed that my bike had veered completely off the road, riding in the tall grass.
“JOEL!” Kara yelled, but her voice sounded far off.
I made the mistake of slamming the front brakes and, as they say, that was all she wrote. I was up and over the handlebars and airborne. I saw Kara and the others standing in the road, their faces caught in stricken expressions. The only problem was that these expressions were inverted, turning their frowns upside-down. (And I didn’t fool myself into thinking they were smiling.) Still, I knew what they were thinking, but really only got a snapshot because, in the next second, I disappeared into the tall grass and headed toward the ground.
It’s funny the things that go through your mind in the microseconds before something goes really, really wrong. I thought of a time when I was a kid, and I fell off our front porch into a rose bush. I also thought of something Greg had taught us when we were doing combat training. He instructed that if we were ever thrown by our opponent, it was best to curl your body and roll off your shoulder.
Not that we specifically ever trained for it, but that’s what I did as I fell. I turned my body and landed half on my shoulder and half on my backpack. Somehow that was just enough to absorb the worst of my fall. That
and the fact that the ground was still soft from the punishing storms that had passed through the area, gave me the margin of error to not be crippled by my spill.
My body rolled over, and I released my baseball bat. I saw my rifle flip into the air and disappear into the grass. The bike flew off to my left, clattering loudly as it bounced down and slid away from me.
I rolled over two more times and miraculously ended up on my feet, springing up like I was some sort of circus performer with my arms extended over my head in a flourish, thus proving that pride cometh after the fall. I had to show them that my stunt hadn’t been spectacularly stupid.
I shouted out, “Ta-Da!”
No one clapped.
I remained in my post-performance stance a few seconds longer as I got my senses about me and that’s when I heard the beating of rotating blades echoing off the hills. That’s when I felt a glacier-like chill pass through my body.
Chapter 23
Plans and Betrayals
Maggie looked through the wired reinforced portal window in the door and saw a face looking back at her. The face was missing an eye and pieces of skin hung over the other eye like shredded lace as the undead creature pawed at the window, desperate to get through. It also had a small piece of electrical hardware hanging of the side of its head.
“This wasn’t what I was talking about when I talked about getting to a safe place,” she said.
“We had to use the chaos of the situation to be able to get down here,” Henry said, pushing up next to her, but as soon as he saw the face, he jumped back.
They had used the confusion after the sniper attack to get inside and down into the basement. None of the soldiers even saw them go as they were distracted, firing into the woods at the sniper. Henry had dragged the reluctant Maggie along as she acted like a dog who didn’t want to go to the veterinarian, whining the whole way.
“Well, I sure as shit never wanted to come down here,” she said.
“We needed to,” Henry said, regaining his composure.
“We needed to run down into the basement, navigate through dark hallways, and then risk our lives climbing through a collapsed ceiling to end up looking at those undead goons! I’ve seen lots of these dead assholes before, I didn’t need to see them again.”
“Yes,” was all he said in reply.
“How in all the hell did you even know about this?”
“Aaron told me about it. He said you and Russell found them and he asked me to look at your control vest to see if I could get the battery to work. I found a way to them through the basement.”
Maggie took a moment to calm down and blew out a long jet of air from her mouth while running a hand through her hair. “He shouldn’t have brought you into this. You’re just a --”
He cut her off, “I’m not a kid. I’ll be sixteen next year, and I know a lot about guns and fighting from my dad. And I know a lot about electronics.”
“Well, Mr. Gizmo, did you get my battery to work?”
Henry looked to the floor and said, “No.”
“Then what are we doing down here? We have no chance of controlling these undead fucks if we can’t get my control vest to power on.”
Henry looked up with a sly smile on his face. “Well, I wasn’t able to get your battery working, but I found one that will work. It’s from a cordless chainsaw, and it’s pretty powerful.”
“And you’ve tested this battery and it works?”
Henry just nodded.
“Well aren’t you just one sly bastard.” She smiled at him and followed that up with, “But have you tested it with them?”
“No, I have not,” he replied, “That’s where you come in.”
“Shit.”
Kilgore paced back and forth in their makeshift comm center situated in a room on the second floor that had been intended to be a recreation and exercise room. All the equipment had been either removed from the room or pushed into a corner. Stacks of treadmills and weight benches piled nearly to the ceiling. An expanse of windows, as wide as the wall, gave them a view out onto the southeast lawn next to complex where they had kept their most of their vehicles and helicopters.
A set of sturdy tables sat in front of the windows and were filled with technical equipment ranging from communication stations to surveillance and monitoring. One soldier sat with a headset complete with a microphone while another one peered intently at a set of monitors. Corporal Lodwick leaned against the end of the table, watching the two men work while not making eye contact with Colonel Kilgore.
“Give me a report, Samuels,” Kilgore barked.
Private Samuels was a mousy man with a squeaky voice and nervous eyes. “The choppers are just fifteen miles out to the north, sir,” he said. “No sightings yet.”
This wasn’t pleasing news to Kilgore, and everybody in the room knew it, but didn’t say anything and made every excuse not to look his way. Samuels focused on his instrument panel while Lodwick looked at his fingernails.
With the way Kilgore had been acting lately, the slightest thing would set him off, and none of them wanted to be even close to the reason why. They had watched him backhand a soldier for not moving fast enough earlier in the day. It was best to get along by keeping your head down.
“Give me the damn headset,” Kilgore said, smacking Samuels on the shoulder and making him jump.
Samuels complied so quickly that he nearly knocked his chair over while jumping up and handing over the headset. Kilgore snatched it out of his hand before Samuels was fully out of the seat and pushed them down over his head.
“Apache 1, this is base, give me a status update,” Kilgore said.
The voice of one of the pilots came back over the headset a few seconds later, “We are heading north. No sign of any live ones out here.” There was a pause. “Plenty of dead ones, though.”
Kilgore exhaled loudly, then said, “Apache 2, give me a status.”
Again it took a couple of seconds for the pilot to respond. “Nothing here either, sir.”
That didn’t seem to make Kilgore any happier, but he contained the near eruption just waiting under the surface. “Let me know as soon as you see anything, ASAP,” Kilgore said.
Both pilots responded affirmatively
“Samuels, did you check with Wright-Pat to see if we can get the drone up?” Kilgore asked.
“Sir, I contacted them, but they said the drone is down for service and they’re not sure when it will come back online.”
Kilgore slapped his hands on the table, and Samuels jumped. “The next time you’re on the line with them, tell them to make that their top priority.”
“Yes, sir.”
Kilgore drummed his fingers on the tabletop while everyone else in the room took shallow breaths and exhaled quietly, sitting motionless.
The quiet stretched on for nearly a minute, and the tension seemed to increase with each passing second like some sort of magnetic resonance, echoing back on itself again and again. For Kilgore, it was the tension of finding Jason Carter. Or worse, the fear of what would happen to him if he didn’t.
For everyone else in the room, it was Kilgore himself and the fear he might just explode.
Kilgore didn’t want to seem impatient, so he reached down deep into his reserves and restrained from pressing the microphone switch every ten seconds, but after another minute of quiet, his reserve seemed to be running dry. His eyes darted over the monitors, watching the progress of the helicopters as they flew northward, a couple of miles apart on parallel paths.
It was Lodwick who broke the silence after another full minute of tense silence.
“Sir, what should we do about Sergeant Jones?” he asked.
Kilgore didn’t respond immediately, still locked on the little dots on the screen moving along at a snail’s pace. A new level of tension arose, one that made Lodwick feel even more anxious and wishing he had kept his mouth shut.
“Keep him confined to his quarters,” Kilgore said through tight lips. �
�I’ve got bigger fish to fry for now, Corporal.”
“Yes, sir,” Lodwick said and used the command as an excuse to leave, not feeling at all sorry for the other two men left in the room with the rabid tiger that was now Kilgore.
When the door snapped shut, Kilgore decided that was his cue to reach out to the pilots.
He pressed the com-button and spoke, “Apache 1, Apache 1, this is base. Have you seen anything?”
Nothing but static came back for about ten seconds, then the pilot from Apache 1 responded, “Negative, base. Nothing but trees and zombies.”
He had barely finished when Kilgore pressed his com-button again and asked, “Apache 2, what is your status?”
This pilot responded more quickly and said, “Nothing here, base.”
“Keep looking,” Kilgore said. “Fly lower if you have to.”
The Apache 2 pilot was quick to respond, “Sir, that would increase the danger of the mission, sir. As we spoke about before, there is an extremely limited chance we will find our objectives. I would advise against flying lower because--”
Kilgore cut him off, “You’ll fly lower if I tell you to fly lower, Airman Peake. Or are you a big pussy?”
Peake didn’t take the bait. He had flown missions under Colonel Kilgore for years, and while Kilgore had always been tough and sometimes a bit playful as he prodded his men to go the extra mile, the way he was acting was beyond reckless. Peake wasn’t sure if his commander was working with his full faculties and while he was afraid of the zombies and dangerous missions, this new side of Kilgore was getting to be quite disturbing. The fact he had witnessed Kilgore nearly beat one of his fellow airman unconscious still resonated in his memory.
Neither of the pilots liked this mission much. It seemed like a waste of time at best. The chances of finding someone was a million to one. Plus they were burning valuable fuel, and the supply truck at the Manor was running dangerously low. So low, in fact, that one of the choppers was going to have to return to the Wright Patterson base to refuel. This was proving to be a tantalizingly tempting excuse to get some distance between himself and Kilgore. Maybe forever.