by Jeremy Dyson
Fletcher removes the binoculars from his pack and peers into them. “Looks like a semi truck,” he reports. “Overturned.”
He passes the binoculars to me, and I take a look down the road. The giant tanker lays sideways across the pavement. I spot two corpses in police uniforms stumbling around in front of it, but the street is empty otherwise. There’s no telling what might lurk behind it. The safe bet would be to get off the road here and hike through the woods again.
“Want to go around it?” Fletcher asks.
“Let’s get a closer look first,” I suggest.
We approach the truck cautiously, eyeing the woods surrounding the road for any movement but the scene remains quiet. All I can see on the road is several empty squad cars and the tanker. The police officers notice us as we close the distance, and we draw them away from the truck before taking them out. Usually, a tanker truck like this would be carrying fuel or some chemical, and we have to assume it could still hold something hazardous.
I creep along the front of the truck and poke my head out to look down the street. More squad cars barricade the street a hundred yards up the road. Behind the police vehicles is a line of cars as far as I can see. Amazingly, the area seems free of the undead, so I wave to let the others know it’s clear before I move around the corner of the truck. I take a couple of steps, and then I spot the long shadow on the ground from something standing on the other side of the diesel engine. I jump back on the passenger side of the truck and hold my hands up to get Danielle to stop before she comes any closer.
I peer slowly around the bumper and watch the shadow on the ground and wait for it to move. It remains perfectly still. That’s when I realize that it’s a living person, and they are hiding. Whoever is back there could be afraid of us, or this could be a trap. I look back over to Danielle, and I point to my eyes, then to the front of the truck to let her know I spotted something there. I try to think of some hand gesture to explain that they seem to be alive, but it seems too complicated. She steps back towards the rear of the tanker and I wait a moment and consider my options.
“Hey there,” I call out. When I don’t get an answer, a bad feeling begins to set in. “I know you’re behind the truck. I can see your shadow on the ground.”
At first, there is still no response, so I cautiously peer around the edge hoping I don’t get my head blown off. I can see the shadow has shifted and is now pressed up against the truck and looks to be holding a weapon. This situation isn’t going to end well.
“You alone out here?” I probe again and wait for a response. I look around to the tree line across the road for signs of anyone else, but it seems quiet. The person behind the truck likely saw us coming and knows I have company. I can understand being afraid because you’re alone and outnumbered, but I can’t understand why I am getting no response.
“We’re not getting off to a real good start here, man.” I try a little laugh, but it sounds as forced as it is. “This doesn’t have to end badly. I’ll come out, and we’ll just talk this out.” I peer around the corner again, but the shadow at the back of the truck remains motionless. At least, I haven’t been shot at so far. I take that as a pretty good sign.
“I’m going to come out now, okay?” I call out. I wait for a few seconds then shoulder my rifle.
“Okay, friend,” the man says. His voice sounds too calm, measured. And he called me friend, which assures me the guy is totally psychotic. I immediately have second thoughts about trusting someone that isn't as anxious as me.
I raise my hands up to my shoulders with my palms spread and step slowly out around the vehicle and keep my eyes glued to the shadow. The shadow suddenly shifts when the guy pivots around the corner of the truck pointing some kind of submachine gun right at me. He hesitates when he looks at my surprised expression. Then something off to the right catches his attention, and he turns and raises the gun. I look on as several bullets burst into his upper body, jerking his shoulders and causing him to stumble backward. He stands there for a moment stunned, then lets out a yell and makes a desperate move to fire his weapon. Before he can get a shot off his head jerks back and his dead body falls back to the pavement.
Another shadow appears and approaches casually. Danielle emerges with the assault rifle in her hand and stands over the body looking down at the young man that she just killed. I walk over to her and watch her expression change from fearful to angry. Fletcher walks up alongside us and looks down at the body on the ground a moment, then pats Danielle on the shoulder. “Nice shot,” he says and walks away.
Quentin pauses and glances down as well before he puts an arm around Danielle and leads her away. Natalie and Kyle emerge from the rear of the truck. I watch as they walk past and Kyle turns pale at the sight of the body. I linger for a moment and look around as though I might find an explanation somewhere in the trees or the sky or the earth, but things like this just happen now. I pick up the gun next to the body on the ground and follow the others up the road.
“That guy was alive,” Kyle says.
Quentin turns and throws an aggravated look in Kyle’s direction but says nothing.
“I can’t believe we just shot somebody and left them in the road back there,” Kyle goes on. “Doesn’t anyone see how wrong that is?”
The lack of a response from any of us only seems to infuriate him. Somehow he feels he shares the responsibility because he stood by and did nothing.
“I can’t be a part of this,” he insists.
Quentin swivels around, his face filled with rage. He seems like a different person altogether. He grabs Kyle by the front of his collar and pulls him close. “If you want to you can go back there and bury that fucker. I don’t care. But that guy would have shot you down and left you in the road like it was nothing. You better learn that, college boy.”
Kyle tries hard to swallow and nods his head anxiously until Quentin releases him. He gives Kyle a hard stare until I lightly push him on as I walk past. We continue down a slight decline in the road towards the endless line of cars.
“You see that?” Fletcher calls back.
He doesn’t need to be more specific for me to understand. As we approach the cars, we see dozens of dead bodies on the pavement and in the grass. Fletcher stops at the first one of the corpses and bends down to examine it. He uses the barrel of his rifle to roll it over. The smell hits me, and I cover my mouth and nose with my forearm.
“Look at that,” says Fletcher gesturing at an entry wound in the forehead. He stands up and moves on to the next one. It also has been shot in the head. “Somebody already did all the hard work for us.”
Moving past the police cruisers blocking the road, I see hundreds of other bodies among the abandoned cars on the road.
“God damn,” gasps Quentin.
“We missed one hell of a party,” Fletcher notes as he nudges another corpse over with his boot and finds the same wound as the rest.
Something about the scene bothers me, but I can’t figure out what it is yet. I look over at Fletcher and notice he seems perplexed as well.
“Who do you think this was?” I ask. “The cops?”
Fletcher shakes his head. “No, this happened recently. There isn’t a walking corpse left anywhere around here. Somebody was cleaning up.”
“That’s good then, right? Someone is taking this place back,” I say. The thought briefly fills me with the hope that maybe it won’t be as awful here as it was everywhere else we’ve been. But when I look back at Fletcher, he cringes at my optimism.
“Somebody might be taking it back from the dead, but that don’t mean they’ll be interested in sharing it. Maybe your friend back there had a hand in all this, but he wasn’t alone.”
I scan the trees and the road again, but there isn’t anything to see except the endless line of useless cars and the countless bodies of the dead. I can’t shake the feeling someone is watching us, and I suddenly wonder if we should be out in the open.
“But what do I know,
” Fletcher smirks. He must sense my unease as he tries to lighten his tone to express less concern. “I been wrong plenty of times before.”
I nod, and I look around the quiet road again, but I don’t feel a sense of relief at all. A feeling of dread claws at me and won’t let go. I can’t even figure out what it is about walking down this road that is paralyzing me. I stop suddenly and turn around. I realize I walked right passed Amanda’s car. The black BMW looks like every other high-end SUV, but I had spotted the parking tag from her school district hanging from the mirror as I walk past.
“What’s up?” asks Fletcher.
“That’s my car,” I stammer.
My legs go numb when I stare at the shattered windows, the blood splatter on the rear panel and the open passenger door. I try to will myself to walk over to it and look inside. With each step I take towards the car, I recall my memories of Amanda more vividly. It’s so intense I almost expect to see her sitting behind the wheel when I lean over and look inside. The sight of the empty seat and the dried blood on the leather is enough to suck the air out of my lungs. I have to turn my head away from it and then I spot her cell phone on the ground. I pick it up and stare at the bloody fingerprints on the cracked screen. The shock is too much for me after everything I’ve gone through to get here. My hand starts to shake, and I drop the phone. I can’t seem to find the strength to stand any longer, so I sit down on the passenger seat of the car.
“Blake,” a soft voice calls to me. “Blake.”
I try to answer, but I can't find the words. The moment seems endless and surreal. Firm hands grab me by the shoulders, and suddenly Danielle’s face snaps into focus. She pulls my head to her chest and hugs me, and I close my eyes and let myself imagine for one last moment that Amanda is alive and here and everything hadn’t gone to hell.
I open my eyes and give Danielle a little nod to let her know I haven’t totally lost it. It still seems difficult to draw air into my lungs, as if my body no longer has the will to function. I look back and take in the empty seat in the back of the car. A small pink jacket on the floor catches my eye, and I pick it up. I try to ignore the flecks of blood on the sleeve. Abby wasn’t in the car when it happened, I tell myself. It’s not her blood. Holding the jacket reminds me that I still have a reason to keep going.
I get out of the car and carefully fold the jacket and tuck it inside the top of my pack. I pull it onto my shoulders and adjust the straps for a couple of minutes. No matter how much I mess with it, the pack seems so much heavier than before. Stitch runs over to me, circles my legs panting excitedly. He turns and sprints back down the dark road to the rest of the group sitting on the bed of a pickup truck. They silently sip from their water bottles while they wait for me. No one says anything to me because there isn’t anything to say about it. This is just the world we live in now, and we just keep finding ways to go on into the darkness.
Twenty-four
We check the bodies on the ground as we pass them, but Amanda isn’t among them. I don’t know if I could handle seeing her like that. Every time we turn over a body with long dark hair, I breathe a sigh of relief.
“She might still be alive,” Danielle tells me.
“Maybe,” I shrug. I try to sound optimistic, but after seeing the car, I can’t convince myself that such a thing is possible.
As we continue our slow approach into town, we find the dark streets are all clear of the dead. There is a faint odor in the air of meat cooking that seems to come and go with the breeze. Just outside of downtown, a pickup is parked on the top of a hill, and there is a heaping pile of bodies in the truck bed.
“I’m getting a bad feeling about this place,” Quentin says.
Fletcher takes a moment to pull out the binoculars and look down the long hill into town. “Looks clear,” he reports.
The school is on the opposite side of the downtown district, which is really just a couple miles of Victorian-style houses and the small-town shops that look exactly as they did sixty years ago. Seeing the town deserted is unsettling. We reach the main intersection, and there is still no sign of anyone alive. I still can’t shake the feeling someone is watching every move we make.
The train station where I got on the train just before this all started is across the street. When I see it, it makes me wish I could go back and do so many things differently that day and every day since. The thought makes me lose focus, and I’m the last to notice the bullet that cracks off the concrete.
Fletcher grabs my arm and drags me into a doorway just as another bullet shatters the window I was standing in front of a moment before. I have no idea where the shots are coming from. Fletcher slowly looks around the brick corner of the doorway and tries to establish the location of the shooter. He makes a gesture that I don’t understand to Quentin, who ducks behind a parked car in the street.
Quentin nods and then jumps up firing wildly and dives back down just before a bullet pierces the hood of the car parked behind him.
“I see you,” Fletcher growls. He points up to the roof of the movie theater at the next intersection. He swings around the corner and fires off a grenade round then jumps back behind the bricks as a bullet strikes the pavement beside me. A few seconds later there is an explosion on the top of the building and bricks rain down on the sidewalk below.
Fletcher pokes his head out cautiously, then steps back out onto the sidewalk. “You messed with the wrong fucking hombre,” he boasts. He slides the action on the rifle loading another grenade in place.
Quentin gets up off the ground and scans up and down the road. He signals Danielle and she leads the others out of the alley.
“You think that’s all of them?” I ask Fletcher. I still don’t feel like leaving the cover of the doorway is a safe bet, but I step out onto the sidewalk anyway and look around.
“Don’t know,” says Fletcher. “But if there’s more, that’ll give them something to think about.” The smirk on his face disappears when we hear the sound of a large engine turning over somewhere close. A second automobile starts, and then the engines rev as the vehicles begin to move.
The dark alley seems like the best option, so we run between the buildings. We cut over to the next street, and we take that in the direction of the school. By the time we cross over the train tracks at the next block, we can hear the trucks getting close and see the headlights sweeping across the building behind us. It’s just a matter of time before they’ll find us on the road. We cut through a church parking lot and make our way down a residential side street.
The thought crosses my mind that we could try to hide out in one of these houses until they give up looking for us, but it seems like our best bet is to get as far away from here as we can and fast. We have no idea what we’re up against, but we do know that we don’t have a whole lot of firepower left.
A pair of headlights turn a corner several blocks behind us. We head up the next driveway and duck around the back of the home and hope to God they didn’t spot us. The truck slowly rolls down the street. I take a look around the corner of the house as they pass and see it is a large blue pickup with track lights on the roof and several guys with shotguns riding in the bed of the truck. I duck back as they sweep a spotlight across the houses and wait until I am sure they have turned at the end of the block.
“We got to get off the street,” Fletcher seethes.
“It’s just a half a mile,” I tell him. “We can make it.”
Since they just patrolled this street, I guess we will have a few minutes at the very least before the vehicles come back around. We run back out to the sidewalk and keep going down the street. Up ahead the lane ends at an old newspaper printing warehouse. We reach the end and cut back toward Main Street. There is no sign of the pickup, but I can still hear them driving somewhere close by. We get to Main Street and find a barricade with dumpsters lined across the intersection. That must be how they are keeping more corpses from coming into downtown. If we can get past those containers the only way
they can come after us is on foot.
“We have to go over those dumpsters,” I gasp. I take a couple of deep breaths to try and finish my thought. “It’s the only way out of town.”
The headlights appear again several blocks behind us. The only thing to do is make a run for it now.
“Go on then,” Fletcher urges us. He takes up a position behind a parked car and takes aim at the pickup that is creeping down the block. We make it halfway to the barricade before the truck tires squeal and the engine roars. I guess they have spotted us. I glance back to see what Fletcher is doing. He fires a round through the windshield of the truck. The vehicle swerves wildly and Fletcher springs up and starts running towards us. He doesn’t even wait to see what happens next. The pickup strikes a sports car on the side of the road and flips over, throwing the passengers from the truck bed. The truck slides along the street upside down for a couple of seconds then grinds to a stop and lays smoking in the night.
In the aftermath of the wreck, the night is suddenly quiet, and now I hear the corpses moaning beyond the dumpsters. Quentin climbs onto the container and crouches on top of the noisy bags of trash. I hear him curse and know that we have another problem to deal with now.
“How many?” I ask.
His head appears over the edge of the container, and he drops back down to the ground. “About twenty,” he reports. “And they know we’re here.”
The headlights of the second truck appear up the road, but the wreck is now blocking it from coming further. Still, we don’t have much time. I remember the grenade in my pack and how Fletcher got us across the highway earlier. Without time to think it through I climb onto the dumpster and dig through my supplies.
“Move back,” I yell.
I find the heavy grenade and pull the pin out of it and toss it into the middle of a group of corpses then cover my head and wait. The explosion rattles the steel container and a split second later an arm rains down on me followed by a spray of black, coagulated blood. I lift my head up and peer over the edge and see the immediate area is clear, but the noise is attracting every walking corpse for miles.