by Kirk Allmond
"Ouch! Fuck!" Marshall limped around in a circle; Victor's patented charlie horse maneuver was successful again.
"That move has worked since I was ten years old! I can't believe you fell for it!" Victor laughed.
"I'm gonna smash you!" He reached for him and wrapped him in a hug.
"I love you, big bro. I'm glad you're here with me. Once we get Renee, we'll just be missing Bubba. I sure wish he was with us too."
"We'll find him. If anyone is alive, Bubba is. Shit, he's probably bigger than me. He was strong as a moose before all this shit."
They worked all day on the train car. Victor built sliding windows in the side of the cargo container by cutting the sides out with the plasma cutter and welding three sets of brackets in place. The first set held the piece he cut out in its original position, closing the window. The second allowed it to slide down about an inch, leaving a small gap to shoot out of. The third set held the steel wide open for maximum airflow. Marshall found a sleeper sofa in the employee lounge of the train yard. It was ragged but clean. Victor found a dining table and four chairs, a couple of lamps, and a rug. They could easily get electricity from the locomotive back to this car, but wiring the car for it was going to be a little more work, and they didn't have the stuff they needed. That would have to wait for another trip.
"Marshall, we're going to need more rugs. It’s cold in here."
"Dude, you put rugs in it?"
"Hell yea! We're going to be living in this thing for a few days. Max is going to be living in this thing for a few days. It has to be comfy, 'cause he's not getting out of it. I'd like to put book shelves and a TV and an Xbox and whatever else would make him happy."
"You're crazy."
"Maybe, but it’s kept all of us alive until now."
"True," said Marshall.
They both whipped their heads towards the rear doors of the shipping container. Outside, closing in on the back of the train, four zombies were lurching their ways forward. They were having a hard time on the tracks, stumbling over the rails and the ties. Behind them was a larger group; Victor quickly counted eight.
"Marshall, we need to get out of here."
Victor hit the ground and rolled, smashing his shoulder into a railroad tie. When he stood back up, it wasn't just twelve of them. They were closing in from all sides.
"Marshall, get ready to do some work," Victor shouted up to his big brother.
Victor drew his hatchet out of its belt loop and his pistol out of the holster on his left hip and had just stepped up when he felt Marshall land on the cross tie behind him.
The two Tookes brothers waded into the mob, back-to-back, ready to commit some violence.
Chapter 5
Conundrum
Marshall swung his bat at the first zombie, smashing its skull, spraying brains and gore on the crowd behind it.
"What's our plan here?" Victor asked with a grunt as he buried the hatchet in one's skull.
"I was thinking we'd kill these zombies," replied Marshall.
"Thanks, smart ass."
Fighting back-to-back like this, Victor couldn't use his normal side-step-and-cleave method. Marshall had the strength and height to smash through their arms and still destroy their skulls, but Victor didn't have the right angle. It wasn't too hard to get inside their range, but every time he stepped past their arms, there was a chance they'd get a hand on him.
"What the fuck are they doing?" asked Marshall.
Victor took a second’s pause from concentrating on his strategy to look up. He and Marshall were at the back of the train. The zombies had formed a semi-circle around them, almost pinning them to the train. The circle went from the side of the train car, all the way around the yard to the other side of the train car.
The dead weren't moving; they weren't advancing at all. Victor killed one and Marshall two. Now the edge of the semi-circle was about ten feet from them. The zombies stood shoulder to shoulder, forming a solid mass. Vic searched the yard for the super that had to be controlling them but found nothing. He couldn't see one that was less decomposed. He couldn't see one making any decisions. They were all just standing there, arms down at their side. They couldn't go anywhere, but they weren't attacking.
"Are they holding us?" he asked.
"Let's make for the truck."
The two brothers moved as one, back-to-back towards the truck. No matter how much one trained or drilled, no one could touch their level of communication. They had a lifetime of figuring each other out. The circle around them moved, each zombie keeping roughly ten feet away from them. They allowed them to move.
"What do you think this is about?" Marshall asked as they climbed into the truck.
"I don't know. Do you think we should kill them? I hate to leave zombies standing."
"Let's just get out of here and come back with Leo and John."
"I'm worried that there's a lieutenant out there somewhere that's going to wreck our train."
"Hmm," Marshall said, thinking. "Maybe you're right. What's the plan then?"
"Let me think. What's in the box left on the back of the truck?" Vic asked.
"Mostly hand tools. A hand saw, hammer, nails, screws, nothing I would consider really useful."
"Any chance there's a second hatchet?"
"I think there's a machete in the bottom. It’s old and rusty though."
"That'll be fine; I just need it to help me keep their hands off me. I'm not as tall as you; it’s hard for me to get a clean head shot with their arms up in my way."
Marshall chuckled and reached back to unlatch the small window in the back that led to the bed of the pickup. Victor reached through the glass and opened up the lid of the rusty job box. He couldn't reach much, so he squirmed out the window and stood up in the back of the truck.
When he stood up, the zombies closed their circle a little bit. Not much, just a half a shuffling, stumbling step forward, but it was enough to worry him. "Marshall, they just closed the circle by about a foot."
"Hurry up then!"
"Let's get the truck out of here. Do you think we can take a few out with the truck?" Victor asked, having finally found the machete.
"Hold on, let's find out!"
Marshall started the truck. Victor sat down in the bed with his back to the cab, wedging himself as tightly as he could. The big job box was on his right. It stood a couple of feet taller than the sides of the truck bed. He felt reasonably safe, except the only thing he had to hold on to was the rope holding the big toolbox in place.
Marshall jammed the gas pedal, spinning the wheels in the gravel. The zombies immediately behind the truck were pelted with rocks and debris. The truck lurched forward when the tires found purchase on a railroad tie, and the brothers were off like a shot, the big diesel motor propelling the nearly empty truck up to speed in a short distance before they plowed the first zombies under the truck, their corpses ground to a bloody pulp between the truck and the railroad ties.
When they were clear of the group that had hemmed them in, Marshall slowed the truck and bounced across the tracks until they were clear of the rails. He parked the truck on the blacktop, and they got out as the zombies approached. The two men waded in to the rush of zombies, hacking and slashing. The machete and hatchet combo was very effective. Victor was keeping pace with Marshall for the first three zombies, then Marshall cheated by picking up a ten-foot length of train track. He swung the thousand-pound length of track like a club so hard it whooshed through the air. Marshall was crushing the skulls of four or five undead at a time.
Overall, it took the brothers a little more than ten minutes to clear the dead from the rail yard; Victor counted forty-six corpses. Marshall hadn't even broken a sweat; Victor, though, was drenched. I should really learn not to try to compete with him, thought Victor. His strength was one on one; no one could take supers down as well as Victor. Marshall's talent was traumatic brain injury on a grand scale.
The pair paused for a few minutes to catch
their breath and then dragged the corpses over to a pile. Within an hour, they were headed home with a small stop at the house they saw on the way in. Tomorrow they would be back to start the trip south.
-----
A skinny blonde woman ran as fast as she could across the street. She leaped off the curb, crossed the blacktop without even a glance left, right, and then left again. Her dirty, stringy hair blew back behind her as she ran towards a car that had long ago crashed into the side of the building in the next block. The straps of her backpack were almost as tight as they could go, and the chest strap was fastened above her breasts to hold it solidly against her.
When the woman was past the demolished red car, she ducked down and checked the gun in her hand once more. She pressed the magazine release button and looked at the bullet on top. She could see that there was only one left. She put the magazine back in the gun and pulled the slide back, inserting the bullet into the firing chamber.
"Maya! Run!" she half yelled, half whispered. A little black-haired girl came running out from between two cars. She was about three and a half feet tall with long curly hair and a beautiful round face. She ran to the blonde woman's side and crouched down. Without a word, she wiggled herself into the space between the wrecked Honda Civic and the wall.
"Okay, we're going one more block," the blonde woman said. "We can rest here for a minute, but we need to keep moving, okay?"
"Okay, Mommy," said the small girl.
They sat there for a minute, catching their breath, leaned up against the wall of the skyscraper. The blonde nodded to her daughter and took off running. She ran to the edge of the gigantic building and rested her back against the light orange granite blocks. She peeked quickly around the corner, at first just looking for a sign of movement. On a second peek, she studied a little harder, her eyes searching for anything that looked vaguely human. A third peek satisfied her that there weren't any infected out in the open.
The woman looked at the little girl and motioned to her. Maya ran like the wind; she was fast for such a small child. She ran with coordination, a well-practiced gait that came when someone had spent a lot of time running. She leaned tight against the wall, squeezing behind her mother's leg. She was skinny, although not as skinny as her mother was.
The woman ducked around the corner, squatted down, and put one hand on the concrete sidewalk, presenting the smallest possible target.
"Maya, remember this is the street where the man was shooting at us. We have to stay small. We're going to run together this time, first to the car, and then we're going to run down into the parking garage. We'll be safe for a little while there. As long as no one has followed us, I can put this gas in the truck, and we can go look for some food. Are you hungry?"
"Yes, Mommy, I'm very hungry," whispered the little girl.
"Okay, let’s go!"
The two ran for the garage at top speed. The little girl was fast but not nearly as fast as the mother. The woman loped easily alongside the little girl, their footsteps making almost no noise on the hard sidewalk. They turned right into the garage and ran down the ramp of the underground parking garage.
At the bottom of the ramp, they slid behind a round concrete pillar. The woman knelt down again, pulling the little girl close to her.
"You did so good! I'm so proud of you," the woman whispered.
The little girl beamed. "We're safe from the bad people here?"
"Almost, baby. We have a little bit more work to do today, and then we can go back to our room where it’s safe."
"I don't like it up there. Can't we use the elelator?"
"Elevator, with a v, and, no, there still isn't any electricity."
"Oh, bother. So many steps."
"I know, Mymy. But the bad people have to climb them to get to us, and we can move faster than they can. All those steps keep us safe," the woman said, repeating the line she had used several times each day for the last four months.
"It's getting harder and harder to find food for us here, and we're running out of water. We have to go farther every day here, and we only have a couple of hours a day to get gas for the truck and find food and water while baby Holly is asleep. I can't carry her out here, and she doesn't know how important it is to stay quiet."
"What if the bad people come while baby Holly is asleep?" asked the little girl.
"We can't let that happen, Mymy. That's why we have to run so much and be so quiet."
They moved quickly and quietly to a black suburban. The huge sport utility vehicle had a few scrapes down the side, but it had been good to them. They'd parked here on the night of the outbreak, looking for somewhere safe to stop for a few hours rest on their trip from Atlanta, Georgia, to the farm in Virginia. All they really wanted to do was get a couple of hours of sleep and get back out on the road. In hindsight, they should have pushed on to get through the city of Charlotte, North Carolina. Neither she nor her husband had expected the entire city to become infected overnight. They fell asleep in the truck down there in the parking garage. When they woke up the next morning, her husband had gone outside to check the road. He never came back.
The woman poured the gas out of the one-gallon can into the truck and put the key in the ignition. She started the truck and let it idle for a few minutes to keep the battery charged. Once a week, she'd started it for exactly four minutes. For the last week, she'd been struggling to find a gallon of gas every day. Siphoning gas out of cars was more work than she expected. In the movies, people just stuck a hose down in the tank, sucked on it, and gas came out. Most of the time all she got was mouthful after mouthful of horrible gasoline-flavored fumes. She knew some of the cars had to have fuel. There must be some sort of device to keep people from stealing gas. She'd only had luck with older pickup trucks.
Two weeks after that, she gave up hope that her husband would come back, and she'd started coming up with this plan. It took her a week to find the gas can and hose. It took her another three days to find a suitable truck to siphon the fuel. Finally, she had managed to carry half a tank full of gas to her truck. That was enough to get her about a hundred twenty-five miles. She was still twice that distance from her destination, but she knew they had to go before she could find that much gasoline, one gallon at a time.
At first, they lived on food from the refrigerators in the break rooms on every floor of the sixty-two story building they now called home. When that ran out or went bad, they'd switched to chips, candy bars, and sodas from the vending machines. After nearly a week of that, she'd gone out in search of food that was more wholesome. Across from the building, there was a small burrito shop where she'd found some canned beans and rice. When that was gone, she'd been going farther and farther every day. One day, she'd found the backpack, which made life much easier than trying to put number ten cans in her purse and run with them.
Lately, every restaurant she came across had been looted or everything had spoiled. This far into the city, there weren't any animals and very few plants, not that she would know how to prepare them or which plants were safe to eat.
They'd gotten their fuel for the day, but they had a long way to go to find some food. Yesterday, all she'd had to eat was a bag of M&M's. That day's scavenging had only produced a small can of tomatoes and a cup of applesauce. The best part of yesterday had been finding the gun. Even though it only had one bullet, and she'd spent nearly three hours figuring out how it worked, she felt safer with it.
The two of them headed back up the ramp, out into the cool fall air in search of food for the day. Renee checked her watch; the baby would sleep for another hour or so. Tomorrow, they were leaving this hellish place, one way or another.
Chapter 6
The Sheltons
Marshall and Victor rode back exactly the way they came until they got to the spot where they had cut through the blue two-story house's back yard. There was about an hour of daylight left; the sun was casting long shadows across the back of the house. The brothers stopped the truck a
little way back from where they drove through the yard the first time. The muddy tire tracks were a dead giveaway. If someone was living in that house, those tracks were an indicator that someone had passed through. Victor couldn't get over the feeling that he was supposed to be there.
The Tookes brothers got out of the truck, and each closed their door silently. One of the things John had done to every vehicle they had was disable the door chimes, the interior lights, and all the lights in the rear of the vehicles. He left the headlights operational, although it was rare that anyone used them. A pleasant side effect of living with little or no electric lighting: all of their night vision was far superior to what it had been prior to the outbreak.
Marshall and Victor stopped at the edge of the trees and watched the house. Marshall had binoculars; Victor used the scope on Sammie, his beloved high-powered rifle. Every one of the windows had shades drawn and curtains closed. They watched for any flutter around the edges or any light passing by the shades. If they had every shade drawn, it had to be really dark in the house, meaning they'd have to carry lights.
"Let’s go knock. I have a gut feeling that there's someone in there," Victor said.
"Just because there's someone in there doesn't mean that they're good people. I have a better idea. Let’s go play ding-dong-ditch. Remember when we used to do that to the neighbor? How many times did he answer the door and threaten to call the cops on us 'hoodlums'? We can leave a radio on the porch right in front of the door."
"I don't think they're going to answer. I think they're holed up, I think they're afraid, and I think there are way more bad humans than good ones. I don't think they'll answer at all without seeing us standing there looking very innocent," said Victor. Then he cracked a grin and said, "I'm not sure that's possible for you. You're pretty intimidating."
"Whatever," replied Marshall.
"You take Sammie. Keep an eye out for any movement, and keep me covered. If you see anything, give me a heads up. I'll try and get to cover," Victor said, handing Marshall his rifle.