“I think the car will need a deep-clean once we’re done with this,” I observed when holding my tongue just got too hard.
“A new suspension and upholstery sounds more like it,” Nate snidely remarked when I shifted up and there was that grinding sound again. “And a new gear box, too.”
“Maybe we should upgrade,” I suggested. “Something like a tank. I think those guys around Harristown had the right idea with their ABVs. Think they’d let us borrow one?” They sure would have come in handy in our endeavor. Then I realized there was a good chance they might be waiting for us at the base—but not on our side. Nate seemed to think along the same lines as he didn’t reply, but instead reached for the mic that was still dangling from the radio.
“We’re breaking away to the south, leading a good string of the fuckers along,” he reported in. “Any progress on your end, main group?”
“Still slow going, but they’re not as densely packed as before,” an unfamiliar voice responded. A few more agreed with that, hesitant but overall positive.
More static followed, then a harassed but also excited male voice chimed in, “We’re making a break toward the front! Heading almost straight west. There’s another group going north to northwest. Looks like this might actually work!”
I would have felt elated to hear that, but it was hard to concentrate on anything other than not totaling the car right now. Before I got a chance to speak up, a different voice reported in, the words almost impossible to hear over the screaming in the background. “We broke something. Essential. Car’s not really moving anymore. Banged my head good, I think I have a concussion.” The line went dead for a few seconds, then the voice came on again. “Breaking through the rear windows. I’m not sitting on a shitload of C4 for nothing. Kill some of those fuckers for us, will ya?” The loud boom of an explosion made me jump, and through the rear window I saw a huge plume of smoke rise from behind us, roughly in the thickest of the fray. I swallowed hard, letting air escape slowly only when the jostling of the vehicle underneath me forced it out of my lungs.
“We will,” Nate muttered under his breath, craning his neck to see beyond the sea of the undead, but it was pointless. We were already too far away to make out any details.
“Let’s make sure their sacrifice counts for something,” I offered, just as Gita’s voice came over the line.
“All cars moving. We’re down three more, counting Jeff and Angus.” I figured those must have been the men who had detonated the charges. “The zombies are still pressing in, but that tore a good hole into them. Looks like some of them are happy with an easy meal over a fresh one. Good job, people.”
Nate caught my gaze when he saw me glancing at him. “What are you waiting for? If that’s as fast as you can go—“
Whatever else he’d wanted to snark my way he swallowed as I floored the accelerator, making the car go faster still. Appropriate or not, I couldn’t hold back a bark of laughter, feeling the adrenaline already raging through my body kick my pulse into overdrive. The zombies following us fell back a little, but then something akin to a wave surged through them, a handful, then increasingly more faster ones started separating toward the front.
“Let’s give them a run for their money,” I harped, my eyes on the road ahead. They might see us coming, but I bet whoever was guarding that base wouldn’t know how to handle this.
Chapter 24
What followed was one of the most grueling days of my life, but that was to be expected. Before long we shut off the beacons for good. The mob of zombies hot on our heels would have been hard to shake if I’d tried, but seeing as that wasn’t our intention, they managed to stick to us like glue well enough. Their enraged howls and growls were enough to draw attention whenever we got close to other groups of shamblers, making more and more of them come after us. Most of the weaker ones we lost, but the stinking, half-decayed mass didn’t shrink but rather grew with every mile that we barreled down the roads toward the mountains to the west.
Things got decidedly worse, I realized, when I careened around a corner, barely missing a few overturned dumpsters on the sidewalk, and found myself inside the city limits of something more densely populated than the suburbs. Debris covered everything—including the many obstacles in the middle of the street, like cars, fallen trees, and what remained of a road block.
“Floor it!” Nate shouted, needlessly somewhat as the loud “thunk” of a zombie smashing into the rear of the Rover alerted me to the fact that what little distance I’d had from our lovely followers was all but gone. It had been a good thirty minutes since I’d caught a glimpse of any of the other vehicles, but I knew they were still out there, somewhere. Now my rearview mirror was filled with zombies only. Yet just because I needed to get away from them didn’t mean that I had the means to.
“Exactly where do you think I can accelerate without turning us into pancakes?” I screamed back, doing my very best not to get stuck in the road block. The tires went over the smashed wood well enough, but something struck the undercarriage, making me wince at the screech that followed. I clipped the open rear door of a rusty ambulance before I was back on the street, but wrenched the wheel around a second later, sending us back onto the sidewalk. Cursing under his breath, Nate grabbed a different road map than he’d been using before, leafing through it for a few seconds before he found the right page.
“There’s a highway about three miles downtown, roughly the direction we’re going.”
I scowled, not just because I’d narrowly avoided a hydrant. “And you think that inside the city that’s useable?”
“No, but it’s going right alongside a river, and maybe that’s less clogged up.”
That made me think of New Angeles, but I shook my head. “I don’t think we’ll get that far. Any other bright ideas?”
Nate continued to scowl at his maps. “There’s a park three blocks north of here. You could try that. Might not be too overgrown yet to get through.”
Instead of a verbal reply, I took a hard right next chance I got, hoping that street would lead me to the park. Anything but the narrow city lanes sounded good.
I raced through two intersections, mostly keeping to the sidewalks where they weren’t completely barred, but then a different obstacle appeared before us. “Fucking FEMA camps,” I grunted as I swerved around the flapping tarp of what used to be a tent once, the tires rattling across the broken fence on the sidewalk. And, wouldn’t you know it, some undead fuckers had been hiding in there as well, their uncanny timing getting them to jump the hood of the car just as I ambled around the larger obstacle of two derelict armored vehicles. They were covered in body parts and rags, making me guess that whoever had been driving them had tried to contain the first waves of shamblers coming out of the camp—unsuccessfully.
Beyond the tent the wide space of the park opened up. I went in that direction mostly because zombies came streaming into the intersection ahead of me, likely belonging to the bulk that had been following us and had overshot the crossing where I’d aimed for the park, soon correcting their mistake. Grunting, I gripped the steering wheel harder as the Rover vaulted over some kind of fancy stone boundary, maybe knee-high underneath all that overgrown vegetation slowly breaking out of what had once been a well-maintained park.
“There’s something moving ahead of us,” Nate mentioned. “Whatever it is, I’d avoid it.”
I didn’t really see the paved path until the tires hit it, but decided to stick with it as it ran away from where Nate was looking. “How far does this park go?”
“Five blocks. Then it’s”—Nate counted—“fifteen blocks until we reach a less populated stretch. Industrial area, or some kind of loading dock. Then twelve more and we’re close to where we can hit the mountains.”
“Already?” The Front Range was close enough that I could see that a few peaks were already capped in white, never mind the temperatures out in the eastern half of the state, but I hadn’t expected to be that close already.
My erratic and mostly evasive driving must have taken more of a toll on my concentration than I’d expected.
Nate nodded, or maybe that was just me charring him hard enough to jostle him around. “Still a distance until we’ll actually gain elevation, but two of our possible vectors up there start here.”
That was definitely the kind of news I’d love to hear more of.
“And then up, up, up we go,” I whispered under my breath, smirking at myself. Nate let out a chuff that was somewhere between amusement and exasperation.
“Remind me to pump you full of downers before I give you that booster again. You’re insufferable when you get like this.”
“Same,” I quipped back, taking my attention off the overgrown, meandering path in front of me for a second to grin at him. “You’re just jealous that chemistry can accomplish what your dick cannot.”
“Always with your fascination with my junk—“ he started, but dropped the teasing tone the next second. “Watch out!”
It was more instinct than reaction that made me avoid the fallen tree blocking the path, but I hit the brakes a little too hard, bringing the car to a halt. “Thump, thump, thump” the zombies went as they clashed into the rear of the car, way too hard for my comfort. I jumped when one of them smashed its hand against my window, its growl loud enough to hear it clearly inside the car. I tried to move forward again but the right front tire must have gotten stuck in the branches of the tree. I tried reversing next but the bulk of shamblers had already closed in, letting me back up a few inches but not enough to rock free of the obstacle.
“Options?” I barked, surprised that Nate hadn’t supplied any yet.
“Brace!”
Rather than ask, I did, which left me exactly two seconds until something hit the back of the car, metal crushing shamblers to metal. The impact was hard enough to not just throw me into my belt harness but also to rock the stuck tire free. Before I got a chance to look for what—or rather, who—had hit us, I inched the car forward, then quickly increased speed when it moved the way it was supposed to. My first guess was Andrej, but belatedly I remembered that he wasn’t along for the ride to execute that maneuver that had gotten us unstuck more than a few times already. But it wasn’t even the Jeep, I realized, when the car that followed me in between the slowly thinning shamblers turned out to be green with some camo patterned patches painted over the hood, rather than dark.
“Thanks for the save,” Nate blasted over the open frequency, but when there was no reply I figured that they either were too busy to answer, or…
“Jammed,” Nate guessed when he got nothing but static as he checked some of the other frequencies. That very concept got my pulse to speed up—and it wasn’t exactly slow to begin with—but when he noticed my look of alarm he grunted. “I doubt that it’s a mobile unit. There’s a base not far from here. My guess is they must have raided it last winter when the shamblers were less of an issue, and hooked up the jammer to a solar-powered generator. Sun’s out, so the frequencies are all down.”
“Why would anyone do something like that?”
“To breed paranoia,” he guessed. “By now we all know that jammed radios equal trouble. Or how do you think they managed to put half of the state off-limits?”
“Well, there’s the shamblers,” I suggested. Ever considerate, one of them managed to run straight into the side of the Rover, rocking the car slightly.
“There’s that,” Nate grudgingly agreed.
“Do you really think they raided the base, and then rigged it? Seems like a little too much trouble for not much gain.”
We reached the end of the park, the other car still hot on my heels, both vehicles surrounded by a swarm of zombies. There were more coming from the south, and just when I considered veering north, another car shot out of a street coming from that direction, with yet more undead after it. They managed to skid onto the street just ahead of me so it made sense to close the gap and form a little three-car convoy, whatever good that would do us. Obviously noticing us, the car in front of us lit up its right indicator, making me snort.
“Seems like they want you to lead,” Nate supplied, not even trying to hide a grin. Asshole. I still overtook the other car, after having made sure that nothing could slam into my side and turn us all into so much scrap metal.
“How far to that highway?”
“Should be right before that industrial area. You can’t miss it if you continue heading this way.”
Of course, as soon as he said that, “this way” turned out to be closed off by a firetruck that was locked in an eternal heap of scrap metal that had been a couple of cars and two ambulances. I took a turn right around them, narrowly avoiding becoming part of the spectacle. The cars behind me braked hard but quickly closed the distance to us once they were past the obstacle. That wasn’t exactly hard as the entire street before us was locked down with cars standing bumper to bumper, their doors ripped off and windows smashed. Only rags and debris remained behind, but it wasn’t hard to guess what had happened to the inhabitants of the cars. Rumbling along the sidewalk, I waited until I found a break in the seemingly endless graveyard of vehicles, but none came.
Nate let out a frustrated growl as I went past the second intersection that I only managed to traverse because the cars blocking the crossing were small enough that I was able to push through with my fortress on four wheels. The rusting husks around us had one advantage—they seemed to confuse the shamblers still coming after us, dispersing the mob to downright manageable numbers. Or us going at a crawl made us a lot less interesting.
“Take a turn right at the next corner,” Nate said when the intersection ahead looked just as clogged up as the last. “We’ll backtrack and try to get through further south.”
I didn’t protest, but it occurred to me that on foot we likely would have already made it through half the city, rather than get stuck every which way we turned.
Thirty minutes after we’d gathered up the other cars we were back at the park, exiting it at the southwestern corner this time. We swept up some of our previously shaken stragglers, but the next time I tried to make a run through the city, the streets were clear enough that I managed to scrape through. At this rate, there wouldn’t be much car left after today, but that bothered me less than the prospect of getting stuck for good.
Nate had been right, the highway was hard to miss, suspended on layers of lanes running a good few levels above the street I was ambling along. Even from down here it was obvious that it would have been impossible to use it, the wrecks forever clogging up every available inch. I had to change course a few more times, sticking to small roads—and sometimes gardens—but finally there was just a half-torn fence between me and the graveyard of industrial machinery that yielded easily as I sent the Rover straight through it. My wingmen remained behind me but spread out further as we increased our speed. Any ideas I might have had about opening a window and trying to communicate with them the direct way got quickly shelved as zombies came streaming after us from every possible angle, likely drawn by the howls of their brethren more than the rumbling of our engines. It was the same, really, but made for good motivation to beat it.
We had to veer further south as the route we’d wanted to take was blocked with yet more rusting ruins, the access routes to the highway almost as bad as on the other side of the city. Just before the mob growling at our rear bumpers swallowed us for good I found a somewhat clear street, letting us zoom straight for the mountains.
And then we blew past the last houses, leaving civilization behind us once more. The sun was standing low over the mountains, blinding me more than I felt comfortable admitting. Even though the maze of streets had distracted the shamblers, a good few hundred were still after us. It occurred to me that the zig-zag might have given them enough of a respite to find new energy—or ingest it along the way.
“Which way now?” I asked Nate, who was currently busy scowling at our entourage.
“South. We misse
d the chance to take the more direct route, so scenic it is.” He paused to flash me a quick grin. “You’re not afraid of winding mountain roads, are you?”
I let a badly aimed punch in the general direction of his arm be my answer as I eased the Rover onto a narrow road meandering further away from the city. “Can you try hailing the others again? Provided there’s still someone left from our illustrious revolution,” I suggested.
Nate tried, but the results were the same as before. I tried to remember the exact fallback timetable that we’d come up with last night, but the numbers eluded me. “Think we will make it on time?”
“We have to,” Nate provided. At my sidelong glance he shrugged. “We’re carrying a fifth of the explosives that we absolutely need to breach their perimeter. Did I forget to mention that detail?”
Indeed he had, but I forced myself not to dwell on that. “Keep trying. I’d like to know if I can take my time finding the perfect route, or if we have to wing it.”
“Wing it,” Nate agreed, not even considering option number one. “When have we ever not done that?”
I was afraid that there was more truth to that statement than we both preferred—and the fact that it made me excited as I threw the Rover into another turn that made gravel spew up behind the rear wheels did not bode well. Or maybe it did. Time would tell.
Before long, we switched up the driving order, mostly because my erratic driving made it hard for the other cars to keep up, and not miss turns. I couldn’t remember the last time any of the indicators of the Rover had worked. I wasn’t sure Martinez had put them back in after working on the lights last winter. It wasn’t like anyone would give me a ticket for not using them, and in usual marching order we’d relied on the coms for information exchange. That left me with the random ambitious shambler trying to climb up onto the roof of the car. A few even managed, but were easily discouraged from remaining there.
Green Fields Series Box Set | Vol. 2 | Books 4-6 Page 108