by Jim Rudnick
Behind them, the zombies turned to stagger down this side road, and in the mirror, Javor could see that already some of the upright ones had noticed there were bodies on the ground and had turned to stoop and eat. He cringed inside but said nothing. The fact that the Boathi had a virus that killed most of the Ceti4 citizens was one thing; the fact that it turned some into zombies, because Javor thought their genes somehow kept them alive, was another.
Ahead, a sign on the right, still held up by one corner, read that it was three miles to Regional 21. Javor hoped that it would run northeast like Regional 17. In any event, it was the road they’d take.
“Something to remember,” Bruce said from the back seat as he stroked Bixby lying between him and Wayne, “We went back. And the zombies were already trying to follow us down 17. So in future, going back may mean that we run into zombies …”
He had captured and said that which all of them had thought to themselves.
And he was right. Zombies would respond to the sound of the truck, but the zombies were so slow, they’d be miles ahead all the time. But going back could mean troubles—a good thing to remember.
Regional 21 came up and Javor slowed the truck, as there was a minor pileup ahead. Someone in a truck much like theirs had slid off the road on the left to smash into the gas station. When that truck had hit the pumps, it looked like there had been a big explosion, judging by the size of the crater the truck loomed over, hanging half-in and half-out of too. Up on the roof was a large bank of solar panels that someone had used for target practice.
Another gas station, kitty-corner to the cratered one, had a lineup of cars still in line but long ago abandoned too. No solar panels, he noted, but there had been a set of four large wind fans to generate power—again the victims of potshots. While Javor didn’t know the brands like a Bones native would, he pointed out that the station might be worth a look, and he turned a bit to the right, slowed, and then stopped the truck half on their lot.
Not a zombie in sight, he noted, so he stepped down and went cautiously toward the gas station store right at the front of the building.
“Mind me asking why we’re stopping here?” Sue asked.
He nodded. “Because in my haste to get out of the Motor Pool back in Walkerville, something I never thought of was oil. We need oil for the truck often—and they may have some right here—so let’s check, okay?”
Sue nodded and went along for the walk. The station store was a mess inside, of course, but a whole wall held what should have been cold drinks. Wall-to-wall cooler doors stood before them. The coolers had run until the power had gone, so anything within those coolers might have gone bad long ago. But depending on what was in the sealed bottle, eight years of sitting in the dark might not have meant the same degradation of product. He touched the glass and found it at room temperature before he pulled open one of the cooler doors.
The intense concentrated blast of rotting flesh hit him like a brick, and as he slammed the door shut, he turned and gagged. He stooped over against the now closed cooler door.
“Must have had some folks in there when the bombs came down,” Sue said as she pinched her nose shut, her breath coming in and out of her mouth.
He gagged one more time, trying to keep those eggs still down, and he slowly stood.
“We all learned that one a while back, as folks, for some reason we don’t know, figured that being in a cooler with its own AC could protect one from the virus. Didn’t work, of course, and there are stories of hundreds being found in big food store coolers. Even ones that folks did power a bit past the Boathi with solar or wind power. Shame really, but AC in cooler isn’t a closed system,” she said as she was still shaking her head.
He slowly felt a bit better and left the coolers for the half-torn-down racks of store items. It took a minute but he found the plastic bottles, and there were at least a few that seemed right. He hadn’t checked under the hood, but he figured a gas engine could use the 10W or 5W grade, and he grabbed three of each. One had a hole in it and leaked over his hand, so he dropped it and said, “We’re good to go.”
Back at the truck, he opened the rear and used a bungee cord in the bay to hold the five bottles against the wall. He closed it up, went to the front of the truck, and hopped in his seat. Smiling at the group, he started up Nutty. They slowly drove off the lot, turned north, and took Regional 21. Javor figured they’d go at least five miles, and by then, they should be past that huge pileup they had to find a way around on Regional 17…
#####
The Sophon came out of FTL and the sub-alternate at the helm announced their next planet in their search pattern.
“Captain—this one is named Ceti4,” he said with what might be called a non-smiling face on a reptile. His green skin was lying flat, all the scales horizontal, with the resulting message to all that saw him that he was compliant and obedient too.
The captain nodded and said, “Full planet scan from high orbit will be fine.”
The sub-alternate knew that such a scan, if empty, would show that this was the eighth of their nine-planet search, which would then mean the human ship must lie on the final planet. Simple math, really, he thought, happy with himself.
He nodded, complied, and turned to get those tasks done.
From high orbit, the Boathi scans would be broad, but any powered sources would show up on their scans. Not, he knew, for small little power plants that might power a village or small town. But major hydro, coal-fired, nuclear, solar, wind, or tidal plants would show up easily. And one way he knew was to go to the dark night side of the planet and let simple lights show him visually. He moved the Sophon toward the terminator and set up the scans to show power-generating areas.
The ship cruised slowly in high orbit, taking an hour to go all around the nighttime side of the planet. There were some huge mountains and rivers with no dams at all, yet a couple did spark a note that they could be in existence, but there were no large light sources nearby. There was a desert that seemed to go on and on too, and not a single power source came from that entire large area.
Heavily forested northern areas too, but no lights. A district with many lakes had a basic sprinkling of power and matching lights, but it was very, very small, he noted.
He changed the gain on the scans and asked the filters to phase out the smaller power sources, and the view-screen on the bridge wall slowly rotated as the high orbit continued.
At the far edge of the northern continent, he swung the helm below the equator and yawed the helm to go back through the nighttime space over Ceti4. Again, forests, plains, and deserts too … but few lights and only one mid-sized power source generating at a dam it seemed. He scratched his scales below one of his ear openings, and the scratch was loud in the quiet bridge. He stopped immediately as he knew that the captain was the only one who was supposed to be able to scratch on the bridge, and he jockeyed the helm a bit more north.
When the nighttime tour was over, the helm was once again yawed to the daytime side, and the Sophon moved back across the northern continent one more time.
The sub-alternate heard the captain scratching and smiled but only to himself. He watched, as did the whole bridge crew, as the blue and green and brown continent below slid by, hundreds of miles at a time.
No real power could be seen. Yes, a few of the larger cities, some that had taken the Boathi bombs, he noted, appeared to have power coming from somewhere. And yes, there were some hydro power stations too, as well as a massive solar panel array out in the desert too.
But no nuclear meant that there was no human ship either. All ships were powered by some kind of nuclear reactor—that was the basic science that the Boathi had learned from the war with the humans. No ship.
“Scans showing no human ship, correct, Sub-alternate?” the captain boomed out.
He turned and his tongue flicked out twice and he said, “Aye, Captain. No nuclear at all.”
The captain nodded back and made a few presses
on his captain’s console. The screen on the bridge showed the search map of the worlds they had chosen to look at—and now there was only one more left.
“Helm, let’s leave this Ceti4 and go on … the last system please …” he said as he scratched his scales below his collarbone area, and the scratching sounds were very loud.
“Captain’s prerogative,” the sub-alternate said to himself, and he made the course corrections to the Sophon’s next port of call and said, “Ready to depart, Captain,” and he got the good to go from him and hit the FTL button to leave Ceti4.
#####
Wayne said, “Slow down a bit, Javor,” as the upcoming sign was again mostly off its pylons. He opened his window and stuck his head out. He was on the passenger side of the rear crew cab seat, and he said, “Slower … a bit more,” and then he yanked his head back in.
“Says that the town of Raleigh ahead has a regional that goes back to Regional 17—only six more miles too,” and that got a smile from them all.
As the truck was moving along at a bit more than forty miles an hour, they covered the distance through the farmlands quite quickly, and the town of Raleigh came up in a small valley ahead.
It had the same as always main drag with the angle parking that Javor thought must be a rule here on Bones.
This town was big enough to have a real downtown movie theater—what a great asset that must have been in the past. Now it had a bunch of cars and pickups lined up in front. He wondered when the Boathi bombs might have come down here, but he had no way of checking on that. He propelled Nutty down the main drag avoiding the occasional vehicles that were in the way. Once, he had to climb the curb to force a path through, but after a few minutes, they sat at the only stoplight in town.
On the curb, the sign read Dermody Street, and it pointed off to the left. A sign just below that read to Regional 17.
“That’s us,” Sue said, and she aimed her forefinger to their left.
Javor turned and the truck cruised down the new street with a small commercial district first. He noted a few restaurants came first and then what looked like a library and a funeral home too. Bet they were busy, Javor thought and smiled.
They proceeded slowly at first, as the commercial areas changed to big houses that sat well back from the street. Posh area was the feeling that they all got. On some large grassy front lawns were burned hulks of cars, and in one case, a hearse too, which was something to not even take into consideration.
Ahead at an intersection, there was another gas station, and Javor slowed down as the huge fans on top of the building were still turning and sounded like they were running smoothly. He pulled over to the curb, turned off the truck, and listened.
“If those fans have been turning for, what, eight years, then they must have had no grease and maintenance either. Yet there they are ...” he said and that got a hesitation in all their faces.
He got out, took his Colt out, and whistled for Bixby to join him. Moments later, he entered the open front door of the service station store and looked around. Bixby walked right over top of the broken glass and store fixtures that had been destroyed years ago. Old magazines, too, pop cans that had been smashed, and a whole rack of gum and cough drops were strewn across the floor. Bixby nosed them a bit and found something to chew on, and Javor hoped that it wasn’t going to make the dog sick.
He went down an aisle and then back up another. No goods really were worth even a second look, and he made his way past the snack-bar area to the rear of the store. At the corner before he turned same, he slid along the last cold cooler door on his right and slowly pushed his head around the corner.
Ahead was a long hallway back to the washrooms.
It dawned on him that the cooler door had been cold.
He reached back with his left hand and placed it flat on the glass door. Cold. It was cold rather than room temperature. Cold meant it was getting power, probably from the wind turbine fans up on the roof. Cold meant that someone was using the power to run the cooler.
He yelled out to the rest of his group. “Hey, we got power here. Come on in.”
He walked around the corner and up to the cooler door. He waited for Sue to be just behind him, and then he opened up the thick doors and clicked the light switch.
Inside was a cooler that was obviously looked after. There was a long table off to the right of the door with stacks of food items and drinks. There was an area too that held food items—same as the food items they’d already seen back at the Motor Pool building in Walkerville. A cot with blankets and a stack of what looked like jeans and sweaters was in the corner.
On the table was a large map of the area, which Javor wanted to take with him right away. It had small blue circles drawn about some of the towns locally. Others had a red circle, but there was no legend to let him know what the colors meant. Around Raleigh, the circle was blue. So, maybe blue meant okay?
There was something odd too. A hairdryer was plugged into a power bar on the table.
Maybe just odd to me, he thought as he pointed to the red hairdryer.
Sue nodded. “Hairdryer—must be a woman here among others maybe,” she said as she pointed at the cases of beer in the corner.
He grinned. “We should liberate a case, yes?” and that got a resounding pair of yeses from Wayne and Bruce.
He hauled one off the top and put it up on his shoulder.
“I should take the hairdryer,” Sue said as she combed her own short hair with a set of fingers, which got a laugh from them all.
They made their way back out of the cooler and the station too and were in the truck a few minutes later, chugging along Dermody Street toward Regional 17.
In three more miles, they turned right onto Regional 17 and were back on their way to Arlington…
CHAPTER NINE
Nutty was making good time, Javor thought, as they came up over a rise with a small four-corner intersection ahead.
“Zombies off to one side,” Sue said as she pointed out to the right ahead.
Javor slowed the truck. Something had come through here earlier, they figured, and killed some.
Dead zombies get eaten, they all knew, and few of the twenty or so even raised their heads, blood and torn flesh dripped out of their mouths. The number of corpses couldn’t be counted from the cab, but as no one offered to get out to take a body count, Javor drove on.
“Okay, thing is,” Sue said, “bodies mean someone was here recently to kill some of those zombies. And we have no idea which way those killers went from the four corners.”
That got a trio of nods.
Wayne spoke up.
“Then as we’re going straight through on Regional 17, we gotta just hope that they were on that side road is all …”
As he drove, Javor wondered what kind of time had gone by since those zombies had been killed.
He wondered as the farmlands stayed on either side of the road. Farms that once had been farmed, growing crops and helping to feed Bones. But now, they lay in anything but working order. Barns had been burned, outbuildings wrecked, and paddocks and corrals were missing boards and posts too. At some time in the past, livestock had been killed and butchered—the bones now lay in piles that anyone could see. Occasionally, a silo had fallen, and the grain from inside lay all about, rotting now and unusable as seed for a new crop.
Off to the left, coming up a rise in the road, there was a fire somewhere behind a barn as smoke was drifting up. That looked a bit suspicious, Javor thought. That also made him slow down to just twenty miles an hour, and he moved over to the farthest part of the road on the right side.
As Nutty cleared the top, they saw four vehicles in the ditches. The closest one, they could see, was a bright blue pickup truck that had been twisted off the road somehow on the other side. As Javor motored by same, he could see that the truck’s tires were ripped with shards of the rubber hanging down over the rims. The truck had not a scratch on it. It was in pretty good shape except for the t
ires. It had been carrying something in cardboard cases, as the cardboard now lay flattened all over the road ahead like it’d flown out at speed and had been run over too.
A few yards farther down the road was a small compact type of car with its snout buried on this side of the road in the ditch. On the road itself, the asphalt had been gouged somehow by the car before it left the road.
Javor was now only going fifteen miles an hour as he approached the garbage and detritus of previous accidents all over the road.
As the truck crunched over some of the pieces of metal, plastic, glass, and those flattened cardboard cartons under the tires, the sounds of the front two tires exploding broke through the crunching noises.
Bam! Bam!
And the steering got suddenly more difficult and then the rear tires too both exploded.
Bam! Bam!
“Damn,” Javor said as the truck lurched to the left, and without tires, it slowly drifted down into the deep ditch. As he jammed on the brakes, what little of the rubber was left on the wheels gouged the asphalt and the dirt, and Nutty tipped over on her side.
Sue ended up on top of him, and she was cursing as she slowly lifted herself back up onto the passenger side. In the back crew cab seat, Bixby was barking as both he and Bruce had ended up on top of Wayne.
The driver side doors were within a couple of feet of the ground, so Wayne opened up his door, and Bixby scampered out, but Wayne was too big to fit. With Bruce’s help, they were able to clear themselves out the passenger side door and were soon joined by Sue and Javor too. Bixby was looking at Javor with what he thought was a look of how could you do this to us, and Sue nodded too.
“Was that some kind of booby trap?” she asked.
Wayne had gone back the few feet to the roadway and had picked up a few of those flattened cardboard cartons.
“Yup, sure was,” he said, “what’s called a spike strip in some places. Course, this one is homemade but good enough to end Nutty’s days,” he said, and what he said was true. With no tires, Nutty wouldn’t be moving again.