“This isn’t going to be pretty,” I warned him. “Do you trust me?”
“You don’t sound like you’re planning something truly crazy when you ask that or anything,” Benji sarcastically replied.
“I am,” I promised. “Let’s just hope it’s crazy enough to work.”
I took my gun out and held it in my left hand. I held my sword up in my right. Benji, who didn’t have a weapon, got behind me again, using me as a human shield.
I took off at a solid run toward Tank. When I got close enough I aimed the gun at the zombie’s head he was holding. Tank’s eyes grew wide. I think for a minute he thought I was going to shoot him. He turned as if he was going to throw the snapping zombie at me, but before he could I shot the creature right between the eyes. Thick, gooey, black decaying blood and dark brain matter splashed across Tank’s face. He dropped the writhing corpse and it went still. I sprinted past Tank while he screamed hateful curses at me, wiping the mess from his eyes.
A long haired teenage zombie in a Slayer shirt moved up along the side of John’s truck. With one downward motion I cut him in half with my sword. His mouth and arms kept reaching up for me. The dead thing was so determined to feast on my flesh that it didn’t even notice it had been sliced in half! Before the top half could topple over, I snapped my blade back and severed the spine from the head. It fell over in three pieces at my feet.
“Nice one,” Benji said encouragingly.
I grabbed the door handle to John’s truck and yanked it open.
“Get in fast!”
Benji scrambled past me and up into the passenger side. By the time I shut and locked the doors, he was buckling himself in. I turned over the ignition and, without hesitation, the engine purred to life. Benji smiled at me.
You gotta love Ford trucks, I thought.
I looked up to see Tank staring at us with fire coming out of his eyes.
Geez, I thought. You’d think the guy would be happy we just saved his life.
I glanced in the rearview mirror. There were about a hundred feet of zombies behind us. Once again, we were between a rock and a hard place.
“Hang on,” I warned. “This is gonna be one rough ride.”
Tank reached down with his good left hand and brought up a handgun. He pointed it at us just as I threw the truck in reverse and plowed down a row of zombies. The gun went off and Benji and I automatically ducked down. The bullet went into the truck’s grill, hitting something metallic but not stopping us. Another shot went off and punched through the top of the windshield, spraying us with a fine mist of glass shards.
“Stay down!”
Behind us, the loud sound of clanging rang out again and again as we mowed down one zombie after another. We were surrounded on all sides now by the walking dead. They beat their slimy hands against the truck, pressing their bodies against the doors. I could still hear the gun going off, but the shots weren’t reaching us now. They were hitting the dead and being absorbed. The zombies didn’t even seem to notice.
Well, I thought. At least we have one less problem now.
“We’re stuck on something,” Benji shouted.
I knew without looking he was right. We’d run down over a dozen of the creatures at least. The rags that were once their clothes were coming off of the zombies and getting twisted up in our axle, preventing us from backing up farther and escaping.
“Hold on,” I said, shifting into drive. “I’m going to try to dislodge him.”
Loud thumping on the back window of the truck scared both of us. We hadn’t expected them to get into the vehicle. Usually zombies can’t climb.
I must have accidentally popped some of them into the truck bed when I floored it, I thought as I drove back through the zombies, freeing the one trapped under our wheels.
“Look out!” Benji shouted, pointing out the front window.
Tank was standing just outside the edge of the zombie horde pointing his gun directly at us. I was going too fast to stop. It was too late to duck. He was going to shoot me and I was going to run him down. I saw the look of fear in his eyes as we came down on him. He pulled the trigger again and again, but nothing happened.
He’s out of bullets! He used them all up when he was trying to kill us earlier.
The front of the truck slammed into Tank, knocking him over. It sounded like the grill cracked. Steam poured up from the headlights.
“Aw man,” I groaned. “He is gonna be pissed if he lives through this.”
“Serves him right,” said Benji.
“Let’s try this again,” I said, putting it in reverse and backing up again. This time we had more of a path. We cleared the zombie horde with almost no resistance. The last thing I saw was them climbing over each other to get at Tank.
“They got him,” Benji said.
“Looks like it,” I agreed, turning the truck around to face south on the highway. “Better him than us.”
We drove off and, as we picked up speed, I could hear the damage we had done. It sounded like metal was grating on metal. Every couple of minutes the whole truck would shake with a violent tremor and give off a high pitched squeal. Still it ran. I intended on taking it as far as the thing would carry us. No way we were going on foot after that last zombie horde.
“That doesn’t sound good,” Benji said. “Are we going to be able to make it all the way to Hueneme in this?”
“We’ll be okay,” I assured him, despite thinking pretty much the same thing. “We’ll see how far this thing can take us, then swap it for another ride when one becomes available. Just try to relax. The worst is over for now.”
“The sound is driving me nuts,” he complained. “Makes me think the whole truck is gonna come apart at any minute.”
I remembered John telling me he kept a Metallica tape in the cassette player of the old truck.
“Let’s see what John left us for tunes,” I said, turning on the switch.
Heavy metal music poured out loud and clear. Lightning fast guitar picks and pounding drums filled up the cabin and blocked out most of the grating sounds. And Justice for All, one of my favorite albums. Benji and I lost ourselves in the music for over an hour without either of us talking. I beat out the rhythms on the steering wheel and he sang all the lyrics he could remember. It was probably the most fun I’d had since we left the base.
I was afraid to take the truck up over 45 mph. Every time I got it going that fast, the whole chassis would shake violently and Benji would unconsciously dig his nails into the paneling on his side. I knew at this rate we wouldn’t get anywhere near the base until the next afternoon, but I didn’t mind. I was so happy to be away from New Lompoc in one piece that I couldn’t complain.
We saw a couple of drifter zombies in various states of decay along the way. One of them looked more like a skeleton than a human. Its skin hung off it like loose sheets in the wind. It was missing part of its left arm, and its face was sunken in and decayed so badly, with just wisps of what must have been hair left on its rotted skull, that it was nearly impossible to tell if it had been a man or a woman when it was alive. It wandered into the middle of the road like a lost ghost looking for the way back to heaven or hell. It was so close to true death that it didn’t even take notice of us as we came barreling down on it from the higher grade. I took my foot off the gas and let us drift by, getting a closer look as I swerved around it. As we rolled past I noticed it didn’t have any eyes.
We passed plenty of other cars as well, but not one of them looked suitable to drive. Even though the pickup was on its last legs and barely limping along, I wasn’t going to chance swapping it for another car that might strand us out in this no man’s land.
Most of the cars were smashed up in some way or completely burned out. They looked like they had gotten into accidents with thin air. I wondered to myself if the drivers had hit other cars on the road in their panic and abandoned the vehicles or if a zombie horde like the one we encountered had overrun them as they sat in traffic.
When Z-day came, everyone had tried to flee at once. People up north thought if they could just get down south they would be safe. People down south tried to flee up north to get away from the zombie outbreak. Everybody thought they could run to some other place, some magical land that hadn’t been affected yet. They thought they could wait it out. They were wrong.
When we got to Vandenberg, we learned that the outbreak had happened all over California at almost the same time. No one knew how it had started but there were rumors. One story said that it came from China, from a sick traveler who brought it with him when he landed at either LAX or SF. They say he attacked a stewardess on the airplane who then took it with her to several places around the world on an international flight.
That’s the “patient zero” theory any way.
Most people believe that it spread first among the homeless population in California. So many transients flock here to escape bad winter weather and they are virtually unprotected out on the streets, forgotten and abandoned. The city of Los Angeles had a ‘no questions asked’ bus-out program to ship homeless people from skid row to the Las Vegas Strip on a one way ticket. It wasn’t really legal but it wasn’t quite illegal either. With the economy taking a crash, there were too many needy people who actually wanted help and not enough shelters. No one on the City council thought they would be shipping the zombie virus to a tourist destination. It hit Vegas after it hit California, then spread like wildfire all over the Midwest and eventually the East Coast.
It’s funny, I thought. In every major movie the end of the world always starts in New York City. But in reality it all began on the West Coast, in California. Seems kinda ironic.
People don’t talk about it much, but the truth is the virus went haywire south of the border even before it hit Vegas. Migrant workers carried it with them back to their homes in Mexico. Once it got in, it was impossible to stop. It spread down to Mexico City almost overnight, then out to the rest of Latin America and the Caribbean. People in Florida could see the black smoke out over the sea from fires burning in the lost island of Cuba long before Vegas was lost.
One of the last acts of Congress was to place travel restrictions on Europe, stopping foreigners from coming in and banning visits to or from Mexico, along with a halt on all imported products. The fact that they thought this would stop it, after years of poor border enforcement, only underscored just how screwed up our political system was in the end. By then it was too late. It spread up into Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona in less than a month. After that, well, we just don’t know what happened. No one does. The whole world went offline.
The tape ran out with the final licks of Dyer’s Eve, the frenetic, unrelenting drum track chasing the lightning fast thrash guitar to the end like a galloping horse. I reached up and shut off the radio before the cassette could flip again.
“You don’t like Metallica?” Benji turned to me surprised.
“Who doesn’t love Metallica?” I answered. “I just thought we could use a break is all. We’ve played it straight through now twice.”
“I used to play them nonstop before Ever Rest came out.” Benji said it like a confession. “I forgot how good they are, how much I love them.”
“You a big fan of Jax?” I asked.
“The biggest,” he said.
“So did you buy the album the minute it came out on iTunes, or just download it from the Pirate Bay?”
“When that first album came out, I was like six,” Benji said. “I was barely getting over The Wiggles, you know? I got into metal a little over a year ago. Listened to everything I could get my hands on. A lot of it on Youtube at first. I didn’t want to pay for stuff I didn’t like.”
“Piracy never occurred to you?” I said. “You know, test drive it and if you like it buy it later?”
“I didn’t trust it,” he said. “You never know what you’re really getting when you download a torrent. One time my friend Craig accidentally got some real nasty stuff.”
“You mean like a virus?”
“He got one of those,” Benji said. “Eventually. Wiped out his whole hard drive. I’m talking about illegal stuff, the kind of stuff that would get you sent away before Z-day.”
“Ah,” I said, not wanting to push.
“Really gross stuff with kids.”
“Got it,” I said, trying hard to change the subject. Even after everything I’d seen, the thought of coming across some horrible image from the dark side of the deep web just made me super uncomfortable. There were plenty of sick people in the world before Z-Day. They just weren’t as easy to spot is all.
“He wasn’t even looking for it,” Benji said. “That’s the worst part. It was hidden in a download labeled as music. After I heard that, I lost all interest in downloading.”
“So what kinds of bands did you get into?”
“At first it was like Van Halen and Motley Crue. I dabbled in Alice in Chains for a bit.”
“They are good,” I agreed. “You gotta be in the right mood. Like Soundgarden or Rage Against the Machine.”
“I tried harder and harder music, like Pantera and Slayer and Helloween,” Benji said. “I used to think they were the greatest bands in the history of music.”
“Yeah? What happened?”
“All that went out the window when I heard Ever Rest,” he said. “Jax did things with a guitar I didn’t know were possible. It was like hearing Jimi Hendrix for the first time or Randy Rhoads. Amazing. I stopped listening to anything else.”
“A real fan, huh?” I said. “I remember that feeling.”
“Did you feel like that when you first heard Jackson?” Benji pried.
“Well no,” I confessed. Benji looked disappointed. “Don’t get me wrong, I love his music. He’s like Slash in a lot of ways, but more moody and complex.”
“Exactly,” Benji said. “So who made you feel that way?”
“Rob Zombie,” I blurted out. Benji gave me a confused look. “You never forget your first love. My brother tells me his was Foreigner. Says he fell in love when he heard the song Jukebox Hero on 45.”
“What’s a 45?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Some kind of recording they used to use to listen to music, I think.”
“What’s the story with your brother anyway?”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know.” He shrugged. “You talk about him all the time but I still don’t know a thing about him.”
“Where do I start? I don’t want to bore you to death with it all.”
“It’s not like we have a whole lot else going on right now.”
“Except being in the middle of a zombie apocalypse fleeing for our lives?”
“After the last few days, I could use some boring conversation,” Benji admitted. “I’m starting to feel like I will never see normal again.”
“I understand. Well I told you he is a corporal in the marines, or at least he was before Z-day. Now that all the armed forces are working together, I don’t really know how ranks work anymore.”
“Yeah you told me that,” Benji said, suddenly taking a big interest in my family life. “Is that his real name? Moto?”
“No.” I laughed. “It’s kind of a joke, but it isn’t at the same time. They used to have those commercials for Motorola cell phones on television all the time, you know . . . the one where the guy’s voice goes all high pitched? He says ‘Hello Moto!’“
“I remember,” he said. “Did he have that phone or something? Why did that stick?”
“You don’t understand,” I told him. “His real last name is Ishimoto.”
“I thought your last name was Macnamara?”
“It is,” I said. “My dad was stationed in Japan when he was in the marines. He was married to his first wife, Jane. I never met her.”
“Isn’t that weird?” Benji asked. “Thinking that someone else could have been your mom? I never really got that.”
“Stay focused,” I
interjected. “This story gets a little complicated and I don’t like telling it all that much so I really don’t want to have to repeat it.”
“Sorry,” Benji said.
“It’s fine,” I went on. “Now where was I?”
“Jane?”
“Right,” I said, picking up my train of thought where I had left off. I hadn’t told the story in a while so I was trying to remember the best way to tell it without confusing him.
“So I guess Jane got tired of waiting for my dad to come back from Japan. She sent him a letter saying she wanted a divorce and that she had found another guy—like some traveling businessman, I swear I’m not kidding, to run off with.”
“Wow,” he said. “Harsh.”
“They were high school sweethearts, the way my dad tells it,” I continued. “He was devastated. He started drinking more than he should have and running around bars in Tokyo. That’s where he met Aiko, Moto’s mom. I never understood if she was a singer at the bar he went to or if it was just karaoke.”
“So what happened?”
“I guess they started running around together. Dad said she really helped him turn things around when he was in a bad place. I asked why he didn’t stay in touch with her after he was transferred to Germany. All he told me was that she was busy with her singing career.”
Benji was completely absorbed in my family history.
“I wish I would have asked him more questions,” I said. “It’s too late now. There are so many things I would have liked to know. When you’re a kid they tell you what they want you to believe and you never think to pick apart the answers, not until later when you’re older. By then it’s old news.”
Benji nodded.
“My dad met my mom when he got out of the service. She was a car service girl on roller skates at one of those retro hamburger stands. He said he used to go there all the time. He’d brag about the amazing onion rings and how thick they were, but now I think he just went there to check out the girls in short skirts.”
“I don’t get it,” Benji said.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “You will soon enough. He said it was love at first sight. They were married in under a year. He spent a good chunk of his military money on a house and a new car. He used to joke he spent more time in the car cruising than he did at home before he met my mom. She hung up the skates when I came along.”
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