by D A Madigan
Skip had... carefully and very professionally... taken one of the pistols from Bennie. He'd ejected the clip from the handgrip and was turning the gun back and forth, looking it over. ".45 caliber Kimber Warrior," he said, his tone admiring. "This is a helluva lot of gun. But it still won't give us the range we need; not if anyone on one of those plows can use an AR-15. The chopper is still the only way we can be sure..."
"You shoulda brought that girl, Derrick," Vivian said. "The daughter. He wouldn't come chargin' in here if his daughter was..."
"First, she'd'a yelled and got us all caught," Derrick responded, hotly. "Second, are you crazy? He'd a come in here with everything if she was here, he'd a come in here like..."
He paused. "Hold on." He stopped, remembering what he'd seen when they'd gotten close to the Walgreen's. Thinking about the General's temper. And how crazy the man was, and how much he probably hated Derrick right now, if he even suspected... "Okay. I got me a idea."
iii.
Dan's hand had started to throb and burn. Having never been badly burned before, he couldn't tell if what he was feeling was normal for such an injury, or if the bite of the zombie was starting to have some effect on him. He was very afraid, though, that it was the latter. Having seen every zombie movie ever made, the idea that a zombie bite was inevitably lethal was deeply ingrained in him.
He knew he should have been cold, but he wasn't, he was sweating. He figured that couldn't possibly be a good sign.
He was standing on the edge of the roof, looking out in the direction of Kroger's. You couldn't actually see the store from here; Bardstown Road sloped up too much, plus there were too many intervening buildings. But he could see there was a lot of light in the area behind where Kroger's should be -- much as if someone had turned some spotlights on up there.
Spotlights... or headlights. Plus, he was hearing some engine sounds. Something was happening, and it probably wasn't anything good.
And all he could do was fling bags of burning charcoal with a catapult made out of pantyhose.
The walkie talkie that Skip had brought up to the roof blipped twice. He picked it up in his unburned hand, hit the button on the side, and whispered into it "This is Dan."
"Dan, you still with us, buddy?" he heard Skip's voice.
"Yeah," Dan said, "those new people get inside?"
"Yeah, and you're never gonna believe who they turned out to be," Skip said. "Listen, buddy, is there any activity up by the Kroger's?"
"Yeah," Dan said, "I was just gonna call you and tell you. There's revving engines and headlights. Somethin's goin' on up there."
There was a pause. Then: "Okay. Probably gonna need you to throw some more fire down in a little while to clear out the parking lots. And let us know if anything starts rolling our way."
Dan said "Do we have some kind of plan?"
Skip came back, after a second: "Kind of. I'll get back to you in a few."
Several minutes later, Dan heard the scraping sound of the bolt on the other side of the trapdoor being drawn. He turned and looked. A crack of light appeared on the roof and widened into a rectangle as someone pushed the trapdoor open from below.
Skip's head and shoulders - Dan could recognize him even in silhouette now - emerged. Skip put his hands flat on the roof on either side of the trap door and hoisted himself laboriously out. As Skip got to his feet, Dan reflected that him coming out without waving a flaming torch around first was quite a gesture of faith.
It took Dan a moment to realize, as Skip stood there in the light flooding upward through the open trapdoor, that Skip was wearing trousers. And his leather jacket. But --
"Sheila," Dan croaked.
Skip tossed something to Dan, a bundle of cloth that hit the roof a few feet in front of him. "Sorry, buddy," he said. "She was a pretty smart zombie... she got into the Galaxy van and waited for me there. Must have listened to us and realized where I was going. I used the oxygen she was carrying on her; she crumbled to dust."
Dan's head was really pounding now. "A.... smart zombie? Setting an ambush? Getting into the van without anyone hearing it? Man, that's..."
"Scary," Skip agreed. "Hope there aren't too many more like that."
Dan took a step and nudged the bundle with his foot. His blue jeans? Must be.
He bent down, picked them up, and awkwardly started to pull them back on, balancing on one leg, then the other.
"So the oxygen works," Dan said, his voice a monotone, as he pulled the jeans up, zipping the fly and snapping the waistband closed.
"Yeah," Skip said. "Works good... although it seems kind of a limited weapon, you know? Still, it's good to know for sure."
Dan knew Skip was watching him intently... as intently as he could in the cold darkness, anyway.
"I think I'm feverish," Dan said. "I don't know... if you need me for your plan, whatever it is, we better go quick."
"I think we could use you at that," Skip said. "Come on down the ladder. We need to figure stuff out."
Dan nodded. . "And someone will keep an oxygen tank handy to use on me while I'm down there, right? Just in case."
Skip slapped at the front of his jacket, which made a metallic clunking sound. "Gotcha covered, good buddy. Come on. We ain't got much time."
iv.
The problem with the God blessed cotton pickin' snow plows was, the little bastards would not roll cold. The engines had to be good and warm before you could start running the gears; those heavy duty trannies would lock up in a heartbeat if you didn't baby 'em. As a general rule you needed a good ten minutes, maybe fifteen or twenty, to go from a cold stop to full readiness.
Heh heh. 'General' rule. The General chuckled to himself. He'd made a pun without even realizing it.
Then he felt sad. If Dorothy had been there and she'd heard him, she'd have said "I see what you did there". But he still had no idea where she'd gotten to.
The General walked nervously around the plows. He had a few enlisted burning broom torches over at the wire fences to keep the soulless hellspawn back, but they were still being drawn by the dozens to the sound of the engines. It was always the way. The demonic creatures had no true minds, but they still remained clever enough to know about the works of man and the noises those works tended to make... and that those noises, these days, meant tender vittles and good eatin'.
Another five minutes. Another five minutes and they'd be ready to roll down and find those deserters. He had three officers out waking everybody up and doing a head count. Pretty effing quick he'd know who the deserters were. They must have kidnapped his daughter. They must have. And where was Captain Cass? She was a homely bitch but she was loyal and goddamn that girl could shoot! The General wanted her with them if they were goin' on a mission...
Then the door to the Kroger's groaned open -- the gennies didn't give them the power to run the doors, so they had to shove them open and closed by hand -- and Jorgenson was pushing somebody through --
Dorothy! By the great and suffering Jesus, he'd found Dorothy!
She looked half asleep as Jorgenson brought her over to him, but still, it was Dorothy and she was alive. As Jorgenson brought her closer the General could see her eyes were unfocused, her hair was mussed up, and she had what looked like a bruised knot of some sort on her forehead. "Good work, MAJOR Jorgenson!" the General barked, putting his hands on Dorothy's shoulders. "Dorothy," he said, shaking her gently, "child, are you unwell?"
"Daddy," she groaned, sounding maybe five years old, "m'head hurts." As she said it, her head lolled forward onto her father's shoulder. He put his arms around her.
"Looks like she took a pretty hard shot to the head," Jorgenson said. "Could be a pistol whipping. I've seen marks like that before. And there's no sign of Captain Cass, or that black officer -- whatshisname -- and his grandmother seems to be missing, too."
"Dorothy must have discovered a nefarious, I say, nefarious plan to desert us and got herself caught a'fore she could give warnin'," the General decla
red. "By God and Sonny Jesus!!! Ah'm gonna find that nigger and whip his ass off for this!"
Captain/Lieutenant/Major Jorgenson forced himself not to roll his eyes. He thought it was much more likely that Dorothy had been surreptitiously providing sexual services to both Cass and the young black officer the General insisted on calling 'Lieutenant Blackface', and one of them had caught her doing it for the other -- with the result that Dorothy had gotten slugged with a pistol butt by one angry lover, there'd been a fight -- doubtless the shots the enlisted had reported hearing fired -- and whoever had survived had taken off afterward rather than risk the General's wrath. And given that the black kid's grandmother was also missing, Jorgenson figured he knew who'd won that particular shoot out -- although he'd have put money it would have come out the other way.
"The fence we put up outside the loading dock has been knocked down," Jorgenson continued. "There's two piles of burned cinders out there, and we found Dorothy wandering around in the back room. There was a fire still smoldering in a drum, or we'd probably have had zombies all through the store by now, as the door to the loading dock was halfway up. I secured the door, posted enlisted to guard it, and brought the girl to you, sir."
"Faaaaaaan TAS tic," the General said. "Awright. Them plows gotta be warmed up enough. Jorgenson, you're in number two, ridin' right behind me. We gonna find that boy and have us a --"
Jorgenson had little doubt the next word the General intended to say was 'lynching' -- the man was just that classy -- but the sound of an engine trying to turn over somewhere in the distance caused him to stop talking as if abruptly unplugged.
Wen, one of the enlisted standing over by the fence with a flaming broom, immediately yelled "Sir! Lights at the end of the parking lots down there, and engine sounds!"
The zombies gathered ten yards back from the burning torches were moaning and swaying. In the light from the plows' halogen head lamps their eyes reflected back redly; Jorgenson could see they were turning their heads back and forth between the people moving around on the other side of the torchlit fenceline, and the new source of manmade noise, like a crowd of concert goers unable to decide which of two simultaneous shows they should watch.
The General jumped up on the plow closest to him, pulled himself behind the wheel, and looked out through the windshield. Hard to see what was going on in the dark -- but it looked as if there were torches about a hundred yards away, down at the other end of the connected parking lots, and headlights, from moving vehicles --
-- and it all snapped into place.
The deserters had hot-wired at least one car, maybe more. They were using torches to keep the hellspawn off of them while they did it. And they would use the cars -- what? To escape him? Maybe, if they mounted torches on the outside of the cars, the hellspawn would stay off them long enough --
And that was when the amplified voice came booming out of the darkness from that direction: "Hey, General! Dorothy sucks nigger cock real good! She loves dark meat! Fuck yeah!"
The General's face darkened from red to purple and Jorgenson thought he was going to have a heart attack on the spot.
He reached his hand down. "Jorgenson, help Dorothy up here, she's gonna ride with me," the General ordered. "And then you get in that second plow and fall in behind me. We got us some black ass to kick."
Figured that boy would know how to hot-wire cars...
v.
Down at the far end of the parking lot, Vivian was running back and forth, waving her lit broom through the cold night air. She had a pile of brooms and mops a few yards away; when this torch started to gutter out, she could run and get another one.
Ten feet away from her, Dan had the hood of a 99 Pontiac Grand Am up and was messing around with the engine. There was a bright blue spark, and then he said "Crank it now". Inside the car, Skip pushed the wires Dan had pulled from underneath the dashboard together, and the engine turned over. Dan pulled the metal rod that held the hood up out, putting it back in place, and let the hood slam closed. "Move that baby!"
They'd already hotwired a van and an SUV and moved them into place. They'd had to look at ten cars before they'd found ones that the battery still had a spark on, and they'd been expecting the crazy General to come roaring down on them at any moment. Apparently, he hadn't even seen their torch until they'd started up the first engine down here.
Near Vivian, Derrick was standing next to a miniature karaoke machine hooked up to a Delco car battery. He had the mike in his hand, and had been prepared to yell sexual taunts at the General for much longer if he had to... but apparently, one was all it had taken. The snow plow engines had stopped rumbling and started to roar. There was a huge soughing hiss as hydraulic brakes came off, and then the bright halogen lights hanging ten feet in the air started to shake and grow larger as the plows began their lumbering progress down the parking lot, their engines ratcheting up to a howl as they came.
They all heard a clamoring clangor, and Derrick said "That'll be the plows smashin' through the fence around the sto'. You get the General mad, he just don't think 'bout shit."
The driver of the lead plow -- Dan assumed it had to be the General -- made no effort whatsoever to avoid cars in the parking lot. The plow was slamming through anything in front of it, knocking whatever it struck off to the side with a huge slamming clangor of breaking glass and rending metal, throwing sparks from under the front of the plow the whole way. Now there's a man with a low frustration threshold, Dan thought to himself as the plows picked up speed.
Derrick stared at the oncoming plows. His original plan had been to make big cardboard signs, or maybe a banner if he could find material for one, that would say HEY GENERAL YOUR DAUGHTER SUCKS COCK REAL GOOD or something like that. He'd figured to set up the sign at the end of the parking lot and light it up somehow so the General would be able to see that motherfucker from the moon.
Skip had liked the basic plan but suggested some modifications, advising that he thought it was very likely that if Derrick were to set up such a sign, the General would just shoot him -- or have someone good with a rifle shoot him -- from the other end of the parking lot. They needed something that would get the General riled up and riding his big plow down here in one helluva hurry, sure... but not something so well lit that it would provide people with good rifle targets.
Dan, being an auto mechanic, had said he could probably hotwire some cars in the adjoining parking lot. Turn the lights on, rev the engines, move them into position as potential barricades. From what Derrick said about the General, if he thought someone was trying to build a wall to keep him out, he'd have to come charging through it just to show that he could. Then Vivian had found the small karaoke machine in a display on the Christmas aisle -- yes, they'd been decorating the Walgreen's for Christmas a few days before Hallowe'en -- and that had added the last little piece to the plan.
And here the motherfucker -- daughterfucker, actually -- came, hell for leather, hair on fire and balls out for the territories.
"Let's get the fuck outta here," Derrick yelled over the roaring of the oncoming plows. He was glad nana was back in the store with the kids.
The other three apparently agreed. Skip ran over and gathered up the mops and brooms they hadn't burned, and then all four of them ran for the edge of the parking lot, Vivian's still lit torch bobbing along ahead of them.
Derrick trailed behind, and as the lead three reached the little area next to the former Blockbuster Video building, he turned, and ran back into the parking lot.
Back into the cone of headlights from the oncoming plow.
vi.
In the bright cones of the plow's halogen headlights, the General could clearly see three cars -- a bright red sports car of some sort, a grey SUV, and an old brown pick-up truck - parked across the end of the lot, in front of a hedge of some sort.
But he also saw what looked like a group of people, one of them bearing a flaming torch, running off to the left side of the parking lot. Deserters! Talking
shit about his daughter! He started to drag the wheel to the left --
And that goddam nigger Lieutenant Blackface popped up on the other side of the middle car in the barricade holding some kind of microphone in his hand. "Hey General how you like my sloppy seconds there BITCH!" came the sonofawhore's amplified voice, blasting over the roaring of the plow's engines. If the General could hear it, he knew everyone back at the Kroger's could hear it, too. God DAMN the jigaboo!
The General floored it, keeping the plow pointed directly ahead, straight at the dancing yammering fucking colored buffoon. Of course the little ghetto bastard had known how to hot wire cars. He'd never touched Dorothy, the General knew he hadn't; he'd probably hit her with the butt of his rifle trying to get her to put out but Dorothy never would, oh no, not his Dot! And now he would grind that miserable black-assed sonofabitch into fucking rice and beans underneath his gigantic fucking B.A.T's -- Big Ass Tires! That's right, boy, the General's comin' and he's comin' HARD --
Derrick watched the plow come straight for him. He'd seen it jig a little when the General noticed Vivian and the other two running for the side of the parking lot. No way to keep him from seeing that; they needed a torch to keep the deadheads offa 'em... but he needed a way to keep the General comin' straight on for the fake barricade they'd set up, and he'd known what he was gonna have to do. He just hadn't told any of 'em.
But now, maybe that goddam Mr. Motherfuckin' Magoo would stop poppin' out at him, all screamin' and on fire, every time he closed his eyes...
The plow hit the central vehicle in the barricade, a grey 2009 Jeep Cherokee, all along its right side, sending it smashing backwards into Derrick and the hedge behind him. The Cherokee didn't even slow the big snow plow down. It and Derrick's already smashed and broken body went back into and through the border hedge and dropped with a resounding crash onto the cars parked at the bottom of the concrete boundary wall of the Walgreen's parking lot, ten feet below. Then the plow itself went roaring out, into space -- exactly as Derrick had planned for it to.