by Gibb, Lew
“Any time you want a rematch, you got it,” Holly said, still smiling.
Jerry rubbed his upper arm again. “Where’d you learn to punch like that anyway?”
“My two older brothers used to pick on me a lot, so my dad showed me how to hit right. Plus a couple of police wrist locks. Once I could fight back and make it hurt, my brothers thought twice about picking on me.”
“Where are they now?”
Her face fell, and her voice became somber. “They both died in Iraq.”
“I’m so sorry, Holly.”
“Joe, that’s my older brother, his Humvee ran over an IED three years ago. Then last fall, Carl died in a rocket attack.”
Jerry could only nod as he continued wrestling the ambulance through the scattered zombies appearing regularly from between houses and behind the abandoned cars littering the road.
“But they only picked on me sometimes. Most of the time, they were the best brothers ever. They helped with my homework and drove me around. Plus, they both did track and football, so they used to take me running with them and give me pointers. By the way, I could keep up with Carl most of the time, and I took third in the state for the hundred and second in the two hundred, so maybe you aren’t all that slow.” This last bit was said with a small grin.
Jerry concentrated on the road for thirty seconds, then he reached out and gave her a pat on the shoulder before he had to wrench the wheel to avoid hitting a motorcycle lying on its side. He knew there was nothing he could say that would really make anything better for his new friend. “Thanks, Holly. I don’t know what it’s like to lose two brothers, but I have lost both my parents. All I can say is that it really helped me to talk about them and tell stories about all the great times we had together. Made me feel like I still had something of them with me. If you ever want to talk about your brothers, or anything else, I’ll listen.”
Holly nodded her head and looked out the window. Jerry left her to her thoughts while he navigated. He ran over a couple zombies he couldn’t dodge in time and winced. The dull thud of a body hitting the front of the ambulance made him nauseous. He gritted his teeth and drove on while Holly continued to look out her window. After a while, she seemed to gather herself, and she took a deep breath and turned toward him.
“So, where exactly do your parents live?” Jerry said.
“In the Old South Pearl neighborhood. Just this side of the highway.”
“That should be okay.” He was already planning to stay out of the city center—it was almost sure to be clogged with hordes of zombies—and her parents’ house wasn’t too far off his original route. With any luck, he could still make it home that night and hopefully find Rachel and the dogs safe and sound.
Holly pulled her phone out and looked at the screen. “My cell isn’t working. I hope they’re okay.”
“I’m pretty sure we won’t be making any phone calls for a long time.”
They passed a Toyota Tacoma with a live zombie inside. The guy started to bang on the windows as soon as he saw the ambulance, and his eyes locked onto Jerry like he wanted nothing more than a Jerry sandwich.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Through the occasional gap in the canopy of pine trees, Rachel could see a few wispy clouds drifting across the otherwise empty blue sky. “Not a single vapor trail,” she said, in a soft voice. The feeling of emptiness and loss that had followed the 9/11 attacks came back along with the feeling of loneliness and despair for the human race she had felt that day, and multiplied many times. She wondered if she would ever feel safe again.
The clear blue sky and lack of wind were typical of Denver in the early fall, and the sun had warmed Rachel as she walked for nearly two hours through patches of pine trees alternating with meadows of bushes; the mountain ash and little bluestem’s brilliant red leaves twinkled in the sun, standing out against a background of nearly chest-high prairie grass that had grown taller than usual during the wet spring and cooler-than-normal summer. Each time she went from sun to shade, the sweat soaking her t-shirt cooled, and she shivered beneath the pine tree canopy. It felt like sixty-five, maybe seventy degrees—no more whether app or TV forecasts. Before 9/11, fall had been her favorite season. Now she wondered if the approach of fall would send her into the depths of depression.
Rachel tried not to focus on the negatives. Instead, she imagined she was making the trip with Jerry and the dogs. Kodi would be running ahead, crisscrossing the trail and smelling everything, then peeing on it. Mandy would be running back and forth, wanting to explore with her best friend but not wanting to get too far away from Rachel. The image pushed feelings of futility and doom away for a moment, and then she was focused on scanning every tree and bush for potential attackers. The time passed quickly, and before she realized it, she was at the edge of the tiny town of Eldorado Springs, about two miles south of Boulder.
Rachel surveyed the collection of ramshackle cabins, renovated houses, and tiny shops that scraped by selling snacks and drinks to hikers and climbers heading into the state park at the far end of town. She was crouched behind a reddish boulder just a little shorter than her on the wooded slope to the north of the tiny town. Near the east end, she could see a collection of blue trucks with rolling doors on their sides where the bottled-water operation named after the town sat. She’d always hated the way water bottles had pictures of mountains or a South Pacific island or whatever people associated with health and purity as if generating a piece of trash, not to mention the energy required to make the bottle and then truck it around the country was a good thing. Especially since the taste was indistinguishable from tap water.
“Well, we won’t have to worry about all that anymore,” Rachel said, standing up and heading off to the east with the intention of bypassing the town. Nothing she might find there would justify the risk of encountering undesirables, either zombie or human, and judging by the cars littering the streets and the road heading east, the decision to avoid driving to Denver was still looking like a good one. “Or carbon footprints, global warming, or any of those other environmental calamities for a long time now. Now we’re going to be worrying about not getting eaten and not catching any of the diseases that were eradicated before this.” She smiled and shook her head. “We will still have to worry about talking to ourselves too much.”
Rachel’s inner caretaker wondered if there were people inside any of the houses waiting for someone to come rescue them. It would mean going down there and searching every little shack and building, putting herself in additional danger every time. Her pragmatic side finally won out, and she tried to console herself with the knowledge that she couldn’t help everyone.
Staying in the trees and trying to move without making noise, Rachel skirted the town. Crossing the two-lane road, she dodged vehicles scattered along the blacktop that were skewed at odd angles and protruding into the roadway from the ditches on both sides. Abandoned cars, with their open doors gaping like the empty mouths of some metal-skinned Venus flytrap, luring their unsuspecting prey with leather interiors and heated seats. Amongst the cars, bodies lay on the ground, their torn clothing and exposed white bones shining in the sun as if the metal monsters had spit them out after devouring the choicest cuts of flesh.
A lot of the cars still had stationary drivers and passengers staring through blood-splattered windows and waiting for the end of the macabre traffic jam. Rachel tried not to look at them. She didn’t want to imagine who they had been or where they were going.
But then she passed a little too close to the window of a black Range Rover. She glanced in at its driver, a blonde, well-coifed thirty-something woman staring sightless at the desolation ahead. Rachel took one more step forward, and the lower part of the woman was revealed—what looked like a brown wig rested in her lap.
Then the hair moved. Rachel jumped back and let out a surprised yelp when the hair rose, revealing a young girl’s face, the familiar bloody got around her mouth fresh and shiny. A head-sized crater in t
he woman’s stomach spilled a pile of mangled intestines into her lap. The ten- or eleven-year-old girl’s eyelashes were dark and lumpy with globules of bloody flesh. Stinging bile raced up Rachel’s throat. She leaned to one side to spew what little was left in her stomach. She had only eaten a part of an energy bar, as the sight of her knife sticking out of yoga-mom’s eye socket had left her with little appetite.
The hungry girl pounded her fists on the Range Rover’s window as Rachel retched and staggered into the cottonwoods lining the road. She leaned against the rough bark of the nearest tree until the sensation passed, then dug through her pack for a water bottle and rinsed her mouth. The girl’s rhythmic pounding slowed and finally stopped. Rachel nearly vomited again when she realized what that must mean. She staggered away from the tree, still heading south, and hoped she could avoid seeing anything like that ever again but knew it was unlikely she would get her wish in the new world she was living in.
For the next three hours, Rachel made her way south toward Coal Creek Canyon, a path she could have walked in an hour and driven in less than ten minutes on a normal day. Today was anything but normal. Rachel continued hugging the base of the foothills and staying well inside the cover of the pine forest. A deep ravine sliced across her path once and forced her to move out of the safe embrace of the forest to find a place to cross it. The rest of the time, she remained at her slightly elevated position in the dense pine forest where she had a good view to the east, would have plenty of warning if anyone approached from that direction, and was camouflaged from observers. Even with these advantages, her nerves were on edge, and she stopped every couple of minutes to listen for pursuers crashing through the brush toward her and scan three hundred sixty degrees for threats she couldn’t hear at every stop. It was a good thing she was wearing her protective clothes since the slightest sound had her diving off the trail and burrowing into the bushes. The Kevlar kept her from ending up with scrapes but was going to have bruises. Rachel wished she hadn’t been so quick to discard the knee and elbow pads.
When she finally reached the creek trickling out of the canyon—barely flowing this late in the year—Rachel wondered if she should fill her empty water bottle. But she had another full one and really didn’t want to risk getting giardia on her first day in the new world.
Why hadn’t Jerry put a water filter in the emergency kit? It wasn’t like him. She shook her head. She could ask him when she saw him. She was about continue south when the sound of voices made her dive behind a tree.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
“God, I hate that sound,” Holly said when another zombie thumped beneath the ambulance. Holly craned her neck to look out the side window as they passed over the latest in a long series of zombie collisions. “They’re like, suicidal, just running straight at the ambulance that way.”
Jerry jerked the wheel and cursed. “I guess they’re attracted to the noise. Like a zombie dinner bell.” It wasn’t so bad if they went under between the wheels—then there might be a small thud from something hitting the differential between the wheels, which wasn’t so bad. Worse was when they fell to one of the sides and the front wheel rolled over them; in this case, it was hard to keep control of the ambulance. The first time it happened, the steering wheel had almost been wrenched out of Jerry’s hands, and he’d barely managed to avoid T-boning an abandoned Dodge Dakota when the ambulance careened to one side. He hadn’t even had time to think about the death he had caused before another one charged them. And that wasn’t even the worst part. The sound was terrible. He could almost see the bones breaking as the zombie’s limbs were twisted and broken between the chassis and the road.
The back wheels bounced over the latest unfortunate loser of the battle between man and machine. Everything in the supply cabinets went airborne then came down for a noisy crash landing. Sometimes they hit a zombie in such a way that Jerry would have hit his head on the ceiling if not for his seat belt—something he wasn’t a hundred percent committed to, as he could be trapped in the ambulance if they crashed in a particular way. There was a reason firefighters carried seatbelt cutters. Jerry watched the zombie body roll to a stop in the street. He had mostly stopped using the side-view mirror after watching the first few. He would rather not have the images of so many mangled bodies in his head.
Holly turned away too and looked at him. “You think they know there’s people in here or are they just coming after the noise?”
“You mean, can they still think?” Jerry shook his head. He was having a hard enough time with the morality of killing zombies with the ambulance. He guessed that was why he tried so hard to avoid them when possible. It was one thing killing a zombie who was trying to eat him or Holly. But just running them over seemed wrong, especially if they could think. There was still a part of him that empathized with the living beings crushed beneath his vehicle. If they were thinking beings, what right did he have to kill them?
The constant assault by zombie bodies worried him, too. He was positive the engineers at Chevy hadn’t been anticipating an apocalypse when they’d designed the front end. He could extrapolate the condition of the grill from the dents in the hood. Its top edge was just the right height so that when a zombie’s torso connected with the front of the ambulance, the head whipped forward like a bobble head, pounded the expanding divot into the hood, and splattered it with blood and more-than-a-little brains. The hood was starting to look like a two-toned Jackson Pollock painting.
“How far from the hospital are we?” Holly asked. She was looking out her window, twisting her neck and pressing her forehead against it.
“Only about two miles to the west,” Jerry said without turning his head. His earlier feeling of relief at being free of the carnage inside the hospital had disappeared as they fought their way down roads so jammed with cars they were barely making positive headway.
Rachel was a big advocate of taking the highway in nearly all situations. He would love to talk with her about the way I-25 had looked. He had headed that way initially, but things had gotten worse and worse as they’d gotten closer. It seemed like everyone in town had driven onto the freeway and abandoned their cars, many with their doors open. Then hundreds of zombies seemed to materialize from between the cars and along the road’s shoulder, forming into a wall as they approached. Jerry had wrenched the ambulance around in a three-point turn and sped away from the area as zombies spilled into the street behind them. Even two hours later, he imagined them just one or two turns behind, following like a pack of foxhounds.
The surface streets hadn’t turned out to be much better than the freeway. Abandoned cars and trucks clogged the major avenues, even spilling over onto the sidewalks and surrounding yards. It made him wonder if they would be better off on foot or on a bicycle like they recommended in a couple of books he’d read. The theory was that bikes were the most efficient mode of transportation and quiet to boot. Jerry shuddered, thinking how he would have fared on a bicycle at the hospital. Holly might have been able to do it, but he would need some serious training before he was ready to ride all day.
Jerry stopped at an intersection, trying to decide which way to go. His knowledge of the street layout this far south was nearly nonexistent, and they had yet to make it through a neighborhood without several diversions. The suburban developments had been designed to slow traffic and discourage people from cutting through, so they had a tendency to circle back on themselves or end in cul-de-sacs. Jerry had even risked stopping at a couple of convenience stores to look for a map, but he couldn’t find anything on a scale smaller than the state level. What he wouldn’t give for a functioning GPS. Just one more thing they had lost.
Holly leaned toward the center of the cab and looked at the dash. “Is the gas gauge broken?”
“Crap.” The needle was pointing directly at the “E.”
“So it’s not broken?”
“Unfortunately, not.” Jerry slammed the dash with his fist. “I’ve been so worried about the zombies, I
never looked at it.”
“So what do we do?”
“We need to siphon some gas.”
Holly looked around, eyes narrowed and frowning. “How long does that take?”
“Too long.” Jerry shook his head. “Should have put a pump in here.” He was starting to think he and his fellow preppers had missed more than a few important things. I’m thinking we find a house with a car in the garage. Then we should be able to siphon without being attacked.”
“If we can get in without being followed by every zombie in the neighborhood.”
“Let me think.” He squinted and looked up, something Rachel teased him about, saying he looked like a TV preacher listening to the Lord. “They can’t run as fast as we can.”
“At least not as fast as me.” Holly punched him in the arm again.
“Funny.” He was beginning to sympathize with her brothers. “Anyway, we should be able to outrun them. But we need to make sure they don’t surround us.”