by Chris Lowry
The bridge over the swamp was blocked.
“We have to crawl over.”
She nodded and took a step on the grill of the first car, used it to climb onto the hood. She glanced around and ducked fast.
I stared, trying to see what she had seen, but her perspective was four feet higher than mine.
“I don’t think they saw me.”
The moaning grew in volume, suggested otherwise.
“They’re coming,” she snarled.
“Go!”
I jumped up after her and we hoofed it across the hoods and roofs of cars, across the cab of a truck, through the bed and down beside the roadway again. A dozen Z were on this side of the bridge and angling in our direction.
They were trapped on 167, but hit the guardrail, flipped forward and slid down the slick grass to crash into the side of stalled cars. Then they were up again, moving toward us.
We jogged faster, dodging between cars, over them.
I thought for a moment to break some gas tanks, try to set a wall of fire between us like I tried on 1792 in Florida.
That hadn’t turned out as I planned. Brian and I created a mile-long string of cars that detonated in rocking explosions that shook the earth.
It was an accident. I swear.
Jean screamed as a zombie hand skittered from under a car and swiped at her feet.
I smashed its head with the rifle as it peered out and we kept moving.
We were making too much noise, jogging fast now, but the zombie moaning drew more zombies out of hiding. They were coming toward us now, blocking the narrow paths on the roadway.
“There!” I pointed her to a parking lot. It was a church, the lot was full, which meant two things.
Either parishioners were trapped behind the glass doors, their eternal slumber turned into a walking dead nightmare, or the people got tired of waiting on the road and decided to wait in the lot. Or park and make a walk for it.
We ran behind the building and through a vacant lot. The side road wasn’t as gridlocked, letting us move faster.
We ran toward my old neighborhood and saw the damage. Fire station gone. Apartments gone. Houses burned.
I wanted to sprint to their home.
But didn’t.
I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t think, and I needed to think, needed to be calm because even though we gained some ground, Z were on our tails.
So, we walked.
Fast.
To the end of the cul de sac.
I stopped in front of their house. My kid’s home with my ex and her husband. Their stepdad had been in their life for ten years, maybe more. Put them to bed every night in that house. Read them stories. Ate dinner, watched movies, taught my son how to hunt, how to fish. Taught my daughter about being there.
All the things I couldn’t.
All the things I didn’t.
The front door was shut.
“That it?”
I nodded. I couldn’t speak.
The moans behind us got louder again. Zombies didn’t quit.
We had to go in. There were two options. The house was empty. Or it had zombies in it. My zombie kids.
I swallowed. Hard. There was a lump in my throat. I wanted to throw up. I wanted to cry.
I balled it up, tamped it down.
Time for that later.
Right now, we needed to move.
The front door was locked. They kept a key under a potted plant on the table. I had seen my children use it a hundred times dropping it off.
It was still there. The lock turned. I hid the key again, just in case.
Opened the door. Knocked.
It was dark inside. No light through the thick curtains.
“Get in,” Jean whispered, glaring at the zombies moving up the road now.
I knocked louder.
“No one’s home,” she said and pushed.
She couldn’t move me. Nothing could. Not yet. I had to know. Were they inside, were they Z?
“It’s empty,” she shoved again. “Can’t you feel?”
She was right. Empty houses have a feeling to them, I had known that. I could have felt it sooner if I wasn’t occupied with other thoughts.
I stepped in, she followed and slid the door shut. She locked us in total darkness.
I had never been in the house before, but knew the layout from the kid’s description, and from watching the exterior every time I drove up.
There were windows in both rooms that faced the front of the house. I moved right, smashed into a wall.
Felt my way into the room and crashed into a table. Worked my way to the curtains and pulled them aside.
Jumped.
A zombie stood at the window staring inside. It pressed against the glass as I moved back into the shadow beside the window.
The pale light leaked into the room. Jean followed and didn’t bump into anything.
“Can they get through?” her voice was a whisper.
It felt right to speak in hushed tones.
“Not yet,” I lied. They could. We had just bought a little time.
Time enough to explore.
She followed me into the great room, a kitchen living room combo that stretched along the back of the house. I pulled the curtains away from the slider and flooded the room with light from the outside.
It was empty, but had been used. Maybe recently. The trash was full of cans. Water in a bunch of containers.
And a note scribbled on the wall.
It read, DAD.
I started crying.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
She let me cry. I fell to my knees, cradled the rifle and watched the message blur as tears dripped onto the carpet.
“Dad, we are alive and living at the school where we went as kids. Come find us there. Love you.”
Written in my daughter’s handwriting, painted with a sharpie. Like she was drawing a mural on the wall.
They were alive.
Jean let me finish. It didn’t take long. I didn’t have time to blubber. There were kids to be found.
I wiped my face with the back of my hand and stood up.
“Do you know what school they’re talking about?”
“Catholic school downtown,” I said as I checked the cabinets. They were empty.
“They must have run out of food, and went looking for a safe place to stay. I met some other kids who hid at a school too.”
Byron and his group of children who turned his high school into a fortress.
“Let’s go,” I jumped up.
“Wait,” said Jean.
Wait hell. I’d been waiting on this for weeks. They were alive, or at least had been when this note was written. It had to be fresh because the trash didn’t stink.
Thinking of stink made me go back to the slider and check the zombie in the yard. Was it my ex?
Did my kids trap their mother in the back yard?
It didn’t look like her, as far as zombies look like the people we once knew. Sunken features, gray skin, gray hair, black teeth. But the hair was long, and the shape different.
The Z moaned and bumped up against the glass as I looked past it to the broken fence. Just a neighbor then who wondered in and got stuck.
“You know her?”
Jean asked from my shoulder.
I tried not to flinch, tried not to jump and failed. She giggled. It sounded cute on her, and out of place.
“Neighbor I guess,” I shrugged.
“How far to the school?” she asked.
“Ten miles. Maybe eleven.”
She peered up at the afternoon sky, gray clouds covering everything with a dingy glow.
“We might make it before dark,” she offered. “But we’d need to find shelter if something’s wrong or doesn’t go our way.”
She was thinking it out. Which was a good plan. If I ran down the road unprepared, it could lead to disaster. In a normal world, I’d hop over to JFK or the Interstate and make an almost straight shot
into Downtown North Little Rock. Their school was close to the river, and the drive would take fifteen or twenty minutes tops.
But the interstate was blocked as we had seen.
And I didn’t want to explore a major urban corridor in twilight. Too much potential for danger, for damage. I didn’t travel half way across the country to screw it all up at the end.
I wanted to punch the glass and shove a shard through the Z’s head.
Instead I reached up and pulled the curtain closed, then stepped back.
“Good choice,” she said and rubbed my arm.
Then she gave me a hug because I guess I looked like I needed it. She kissed me on the cheek, and then since our lips were so close together we kissed a little more. It lasted for a few minutes and she stepped back, eyes glistening.
“Looks like they ate all of the food,” she nodded to the cans in the trash.
I nudged my backpack.
“We can make do.”
I let her set up a couple of cans and went searching the garage for something we could build a fire in, a piece of metal or trash can, or even a bucket.
“Come look at this,” I shouted.
She pressed up against my back to peer over my shoulder.
“That’s going to make tomorrow a lot easier.”
The kid’s step dad had a lot of toys, boats, campers for hunting and even a Gator the Boy bragged about learning to drive on. Those were all at a deer camp in the woods east of here, and I sent up a silent prayer that the kids didn’t go hide there because I had no idea where it was.
Sitting in the middle of the garage was a four-wheeler ATV.
I checked the gas gauge, which had a quarter tank, and searched under the shelves for a red plastic container. I didn’t find more fuel, but it was enough to get us downtown so I didn’t worry.
I did find a fire pit stuck in the corner in an unopened box, and dragged it inside.
Jean watched me open the box and set up the pit in the middle of the floor in front of the sofa. She looked at me like, congratulations now what can you burn?
“I know, I know,” I grinned and began searching for wood.
I broke apart a shelf, a dresser and a bookcase and we were set. I didn’t even feel guilty about destroying their stuff, since the bookshelf had once belonged to me a long time ago.
We ate canned beans warmed in the flames and Jean pulled a couple of books off the floor from the newly demolished shelf that we perused by firelight. I thought about the legend of Abe Lincoln learning to read and write by the hearth, and wondered about cowboys, and history and what people did before electricity.
Jean had an instinct for the answer.
She reached over and fumbled with my gun belt, but I helped this time. I set the belt within reach and slid my pants down to my ankle. She shimmied out of hers and climbed on top of me, one hand working magic as she squeezed and pulled. My hands worked too, one running over the solid curves of her muscled legs, the other stroking and teasing.
Then she pushed me inside her as she straddled my hips and rocked back and forth. I saw her look around the room and it made me think some more. I never would have pictured doing this in the living room where my ex raised our children with another man.
It distracted me and I was glad it did because what we were doing felt good.
She must have thought so too because a few moments later, she clenched up and so did I. Then she fell forward to rest against my shoulder.
After a minute, I felt something warm drip onto my cheeks.
“You’re a nice man,” she snuffled. “Why couldn’t I have met a nice man like you when this all got started.”
She didn’t want an answer and I didn’t have one to give. We sat there in the quiet house our juices mixed and trickling out to spread across me, and listened to the crackle of the flames. Her breathing went slow and regular as I shrank and slipped out, and closed my eyes to fall asleep with her.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
When I woke up, Jean was gone.
I didn’t hear her leave. I scooted toward the garage door in the kitchen and checked, but the ATV was still there. My hearing isn’t as great as it was before all of this started, after all people kept shooting guns near my ears, tossing grenades at me, and there was an unfortunate incident with a highway full of exploding cars, but that totally wasn’t my fault.
Still I’m sure I would have heard an ATV roar off in the middle of the night.
I stumbled back into the house and noticed my backpack was gone. And my rifle. And my gun belt.
Before this all happened, I was very good at keeping track of my things. But since the Z showed up, people just kept taking my stuff. It was starting to make me pissed.
Hunting rifles and weapons were easier to come by in Arkansas, but that didn’t mean I wanted to waste all my time searching.
I pulled open the slider curtain and looked past the Z bouncing off the glass to check the fence.
Wood.
Wood would not do, not for what I wanted.
I tried to recall if I could remember a chain link fence on JFK, at least eight feet high. If I ran across one and it was safe, I’d stop to take a pole. I would have to find a machete later, and the wire to wrap the end and turn it into a pike.
I could go house to house in the neighborhood, but decided to get moving instead.
The truth of it was, I wanted to get to the kid’s school. I’d burn down Little Rock hunting for new weapons with them by my side, but the thought of them only being five miles away left me lightheaded, and scared.
They expected me though. That’s what I told myself.
The note didn’t say Mom. It didn’t say their step-Dad’s name.
It said Dad. Me.
I slid into my jacket.
It was all I had left.
I went into the garage, but there were no windows in the door, just a solid sheet of metal. I didn’t want to lift the garage and find a horde of Z waiting to snack on me, so I went back to the front room in the house and peeked through the window.
All clear.
I went back to the garage, started the ATV and cranked it up. Then I lifted the door, rolled out, and dropped it back down again. No use in leaving the house open to weather and wandering Z.
We might need it again, or some other traveler.
I wondered about Jean.
She hoofed it out of here, but would I run into her on JFK? She said her people were in Southwest Little Rock and there were only so many ways to cross the Arkansas River.
Six of them, but four of the bridges were within blocks of each other downtown.
I kicked through first and second gear as I made my way across the side roads toward JFK.
If I saw her trying to cross, or ran into her, I might say something. But she did leave. That was her choice, and her reason.
Maybe it wasn’t my place to wonder why.
Besides, I’d been planning to leave her over in the Delta. I almost left her in Stuttgart.
She was gone, my kids were close.
I shrugged it off and decided to concentrate. On the road, on reaching the kids, on watching for roaming Z. Jean could take care of herself, or she couldn’t. Her choice to make.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
JFK meandered south from Sherwood into North Little Rock. My first wife and I lived in Park Hill off the main corridor when we bought our first house, and I drove past the small brick bungalow on Ridge Road since JFK was blocked in a lot of places.
It was a meandering route that carried me to and from the route as I tried to go around stalled traffic, crashes and spots that were impassible because of iron and steel walls made of wrecks.
At the top of Park Hill I stopped to stare at the Little Rock skyline. The kid’s school was five miles away, closer to the river where it cut through town. The ridge I was on was known as a hill, but it really was the first of a series of ridges that led to the foothills of what eventually become the Ozarks.
Lit
tle Rock itself was nestled between two ridges, one to the South of town, and this one on the North side.
JFK stretched into the downtown corridor of North Little Rock, past a National Guard depot and the what once was the new high school. They were both gutted now, cars smashed bumper to bumper between them to create a sea of scorched hoods and shattered glass.
There was no way the ATV was getting through it.
I wasn’t sure I could even walk past it.
I backtracked to Ridge road and took a side street down into the Levy neighborhood and found the River Trail spur.
Arkansas like a lot of the country took old railway tracks and turned them into bike paths. This must have been one of the spurs that ran north into Jacksonville, deeded to the city and parks and rec installed an eight-foot wide black asphalt path.
The trailhead to the road was blocked with two iron posts, but that was no problem for the ATV. It fit easily between them, and I had a clear path that ran behind the ridge straight under the Interstate and into a line of cars on Percy Macon drive.
The rail trail here merged with the road, signs directing cyclists and joggers back to the main road, but I could maneuver around the stalled cars using the sidewalks and parking lots that lined the streets.
I reached four cars tipped over on their sides and wheeled the ATV to the curb. The front left tire popped up on the concrete and a sledge hammer smashed into the engine block, flipped the four-wheeler on top of me.
I don’t know if you’ve ever had a two-hundred-pound kick to the giblets, but it does not feel good. Stars popped behind my eyes, wind whooshed out of my lungs and other places I didn’t even know I could breathe and a dull deep ache throbbed between my legs.
I heard the echo of the shot at the same time I glanced at the engine housing. Something big had blown a hole in the side of the steel.
Fifty cal was my first thought and that made me ignore the pulsating wave of pain radiating from my groin and crawl.
I crawled for the wrecks, trying to get my brain to work on directions. It did, too slowly. Lucky for me, another bullet gouged a trench in the sidewalk in front of my face, showering me with chips of sharp rock and dirt.