Zombies! (Book 7): Still Standing

by Merritt, R. S.

  Chapter 32: On the Road Again

  “Well that’s not good.” Phil said looking at the twisted metal and concrete that used to be a bridge going over a large lake.

  “Virginia’s already turning into a pain in the ass.” Bryan said. Randy was busy looking at the map.

  “This explains those signs we saw for Roanoke Rapids.” Randy said pointing at the map. Phil and Bryan both leaned in and looked at the spot on the map Randy was pointing at. They’d seen signs at each of the main intersections for the last thirty miles that read ‘Roanoke Rapids’ in handwritten letters. Phil held the map up right in front of his face squinting at the tiny writing.

  “Great.” He announced after putting the map back down. “Let’s drive to the super narrow river crossing our mortal enemy’s holding for us. Hopefully they’re not checking identification again. I don’t see what could possibly go wrong with this plan. You guys sure you don’t want to just find a boat? We can always find a car on the other side. Maybe something a little more inconspicuous. I mean a bullet riddled luxury RV isn’t the most subtle thing to try to sneak across enemy lines in. Maybe we could find one of those wiener mobiles somewhere.”

  “It’d take too long to find a boat. I think the RV is fine for now. Especially since we have plenty of diesel.” Kelly chimed in from a few feet behind them where she’d been listening to the whole conversation. After the whole gas station fiasco, she wasn’t up for letting them come up with plans on their own anymore. They couldn’t be trusted to operate without adult supervision.

  Roanoke Rapids it was. They topped off the tank with one of the jugs of diesel and backtracked to the last intersection they’d passed. They wound up driving along a smaller highway headed east parallel to the lake. They were trucking along dodging the occasional Zombie when a group of six armed men emerged from the forest and waved at them to pull over. Phil slowed down and started to pull to the side.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Randy asked loudly.

  “Picking these guys up so they don’t just shoot us as we drive by.” Phil answered tensely.

  “Tell the girls to stay in the back room and have them lock the door.” Bryan ordered. He was eyeballing the guys on the side of the road. A couple of them had that indefinable swagger that revealed they were ex-military. The rest of the small group looked like your average idiots playing dress up in soldier suits. Opening the door and shooting them probably wasn’t going to work. They were going to have to take the hiding in plain sight plan to a whole new level.

  Kelly and the girls disappeared into the master suite in the back of the big RV. Randy heard the lock click shut as they coasted to a stop. Bryan opened the door and greeted the men standing there. None of them made any move to approach the RV. The squad leader had returned Bryans greeting with a simple nod of the head. None of the squad were acting aggressively towards them. They just weren’t acting super friendly either. Randy got worried they were expecting some sort of secret handshake or something.

  “You guys need a ride?” Bryan asked after a long awkward silence.

  “Where you headed?” The squad leader asked.

  “Up to Roanoke Rapids then across the river. I can’t really tell you much more than that.” Bryan answered.

  “Sounds good. Mount up boys.” The squad leader ordered his men. The order served to break the ice. The next few minutes were spent shaking hands and passing out drinks and snacks. When they had the new crew settled in Phil sat back down and continued to drive them east.

  One of the men had gotten up to check out the RV. He was stymied by the locked door in the back. Randy had been watching him the whole time praying the locked door didn’t pop open. It wasn’t like it was the door to a bank vault. More like the cheap lock you’d expect on the interior door of an RV.

  “That’s the part we can’t talk about.” Bryan said loudly staring back at the man by the locked door. “Do me a favor and stay up towards the front of this thing if you don’t mind.”

  Randy waited for the men in the squad to start questioning what was going on. Instead the squad leader gave his own man a pissed off look. The look easily conveying the message that they were guests on the RV. They all needed to sit down and respect the men who’d picked them up to give them a ride. Otherwise they’d have been spending the next two days hiking through the forests of North Carolina trying to find a car that still ran.

  The dodgy way Bryan had implied they had some other mission going on did wonders for keeping the conversation away from that topic. The men from the squad had varying guesses as to what was going on. Most of them thought the men on the RV were transporting either concubines or actual family members to the battalion leadership. The family members to be used to reward good behavior or punish bad behavior. There was also a good chance the back room of the RV was filled to the brim with drugs. They’d all noted the fact that the windows on the back room in the RV had been shot out. That just led to more creative thinking as to what or who might be hidden back there. Not that any of them thought it was a good idea to actually find out. Curiosity killed cats left and right in the Senator’s militia.

  They drove on in silence following the tense exchange. No one wanting to risk saying anything that may set off any of the strong personalities in the RV. Being a group of men with shared experiences and similar backgrounds though the silence didn’t last too long. Before they reached the turn off to Roanoke Rapids the conversation had picked back up again. The bulk of the talk revolving around what each of them had done before the apocalypse. Bryan wasn’t surprised at all by the men who talked about having been in various positions in the armed services. They were the ones he’d already pegged as operators. They were the ones he’d shoot first if something went wrong with this plan.

  Bryan was cautiously optimistic that they may actually pull this off. They drove through a town consisting of mostly burnt down buildings. The road gradually leading to a series of bridges passing over a swampy swath of land. Parts of the road and bridge network up ahead had been destroyed. The Brotherhood had sent in construction crews to repair the bridges. Those had been destroyed a week later. That’d been anticipated so the materials to rebuild the bridges up to five times had been shipped up to the site. They’d only had to do it twice. Which was good since those materials had come in handy at other places farther north. The settlements had gone on a bender blowing up bridges to slow the advance of the Brotherhood.

  The men in the RV had no clue about all of that. They were just happy the bridges were there. When they finally made it across the temporary crossings that’d been put in place Bryan considered asking Phil to pull over so he could kiss the ground. A few of the temporary bridges had shifted around in a way that had not inspired confidence as they crossed them. One of the newcomers to the RV shut them all up with a simple statement he blurted out with no thought whatsoever.

  “Sweet. I thought it was going to take us forever to get to the place where the people would be trying to kill us.”

  “Way to bring down the party bro.” One of his fellow squad members said. He punched the man in the arm to show he was joking around. It did put a more serious spin on everything though.

  It put Randy and Bryan a step closer to having to somehow eject the hitchhiking squad from the RV. On top of that they had to figure out how to get themselves through enemy lines, cross the no man’s zone and avoid getting killed by friendly fire while trying to rejoin the side they were actually on. They had to get that done while under a massive time crunch to get to the Naval base as soon as possible. If they arrived there too late this whole trip was pointless. On top of being pointless it’d also leave them in the unpleasant predicament of having to fight their way back through all this mess or end up stuck in the Brotherhood camps after all this work to escape them.

  After the bridge crossing it was smooth sailing. Other than the occasional Zombie and some wild horses they didn’t see anything on the road for the next hundred miles. The wild horses gr
azing by the road had been an interesting sight. Not something you expected to see after driving through a forest that was gradually eating the road you were on for an hour. Surrealness was becoming an everyday occurrence though. It reminded Randy of the time he’d seen a massive alligator crawling out the broken doors of a dilapidated Wendy’s back in Florida. With skin too rough for Zombie’s to easily bite through and a penchant for dragging their prey into the water to drown it the alligator was clearly hovering around the top of the food chain in this new normal.

  A brief halt to pick parts of a Zombie out of the wheel well and beat the bumper back into place saw them finally getting on HWY-58 well after it’d turned dark outside. HWY-58 was a straight shot to Norfolk. With nothing between them but the dismal swamp and a few thousand enemy combatants Bryan was feeling pretty good about their chances. Randy was way more focused on the men sharing the RV with them than he was on the threats in the outside world.

  Where Randy saw the men in the RV as a threat Bryan saw them as extra camouflage. The three of them driving the big RV didn’t make a whole lot of sense. Now anyone looking in would see the passenger area filled with soldiers. The squad sharing the space with them knew the right passwords to use and they had their identification on them as well. They’d make it a million times easier to get through any checkpoint that may be coming up. Considering they were on one of the main roads leading to the current objective for the entire Brotherhood army there should be check points coming up soon.

  The squad leader let them know that because of how late they were they’d like to be dropped off at the Hampton Roads Executive Airport. That was the staging area for the second phase of the assault. From there they’d pick up their new orders. Bryan had made a big deal of checking the map before telling the squad leader that worked out fine since they were pressing on even farther to their objective. No more questions had been asked. They’d ridden along in silence with most of the men taking advantage of the dark air-conditioned interior of the RV to catch a nap.

  It was late when Phil slowed down at the sight of brake lights up ahead. Phil was so tired at this point that the brake lights appeared blurry to him. He rubbed his eyes to make sure he wasn’t just seeing things. He’d taken a couple of hours off from driving earlier to rest. It hadn’t been long before he’d ended up right back in the driver’s seat when it became obvious no one else really had his touch when it came to dodging Zombies in the big RV. The decision to put him back up there had coincided directly with the incident that’d led to them beating the bumper back into place and peeling the bio hazard out of the wheel well.

  The brake lights turned out to belong to one of many big rigs hauling large trailers. A long line of them were pulling onto the highway. There was a break in the convoy that Phil took advantage of to get themselves planted firmly in between two of the big trucks. In the glow of the headlights they could see the truck ahead of them was hauling an open-air load that looked an awful lot like a massive tank covered by a whole lot of tarps. Phil sped up a smidge and they verified it was a big tank covered by a bunch of tarps.

  “Bringing in the big guns!” Bryan said aloud. He forced himself to inject some enthusiasm in his voice. Unfortunately, he knew he’d be one of the people those tanks may be shooting at. He hated to think what might be on the backs of all the other trucks around them. It kept his level of excitement ratcheted down considerably. The squad leader opened his eyes at the mention of tanks. He was way more excited about it.

  “Hell yeah! That’s what I’m talking about. Let’s get some armor in there and waste those scumbags. The infected can crawl all over those things and they’ll just keep shooting.” The man said with a big grin.

  “You really don’t like those settlement guys?” Randy asked tiredly. He’d been dozing off here and there while trying to stay awake in case anything happened. He hoped Kelly and the girls were sleeping soundly in the back. They may need someone who could think clearly. He knew Kelly was probably wide awake with her ear to the door trying to snoop though. He wanted nothing more than to go back in the back and talk to her. He was sure she’d have lots of things to say about the fact that they were now driving along in the middle of an enemy convoy loaded down with tanks and who knew what else.

  The convoy passed into the dismal swamp. All the vehicles still trucking along at a steady fifty miles per hour. There was no dodging Zombies at that speed. Assuming the rules of being in the convoy included no slowing down they took each Zombie that showed up right on the chin. Luckily the number that ran out in front of them was relatively small. The first few trucks in the convoy must be outfitted with massive metal grills to take the abuse they were getting though.

  In the headlights they started catching glimpses of occasional fencing that’d been put up on the sides of the road. The gates had been thrown open to allow the convoy to pass through. Once the convoy passed by then the men hiding in the swamp would run out and secure the gates. The idea being to limit the number of infected that made it to the rally point up the road. One of the reasons the airport had been chosen was that it was in the middle of nowhere. The Zombies would eventually get there, but the hope was they could keep them away long enough to use the area to organize all the squads trickling in and get the final assault launched.

  There was no checkpoint of any sort until they arrived at the turnoff for the small executive airport. A couple of hummers sporting very large guns were sitting on the side of the road behind a large fence. Soldiers in body armor walked around with swords and bats patrolling for any infected that made it this far. A harried looked officer in combat gear waited impatiently for Phil to pull up.

  “What the hell are you all driving this thing for?” The officer asked.

  “We found it sir. We pulled into the middle of this convoy back in Suffolk sir.” Phil answered.

  “Ok. What are your orders?” The officer asked.

  “We’re dropping this squad off at the airport then continuing to Chesapeake to rendezvous with our platoon sir.” Phil answered. Bryan had coached him on that response earlier and it came out perfect. The officer looked like he might ask for paperwork or identification or something but there was a long line of big trucks waiting to get in. The gate was open and with all the noise the Zombies wouldn’t be far behind. Stepping back the officer waved them through.

  Randy reminded himself not to celebrate making it past the check point. That’d definitely strike their guests as odd. The trucks in the convoy were all pulling into the airport, so Phil followed suit. Up ahead one of the trucks disgorged what looked like an entire platoon of armed men. The men immediately started forming up into squads. A small group of men walked out to meet up with the platoon commander to give him his orders. The squad leader reached up and tapped Phil on the shoulder.

  “Thanks for the ride. You can drop us off here. Stay frosty.” The squad gathered it’s gear together as Phil pulled off to the side to let them out. When they’d all left Randy immediately leaned back in his chair and let a loud sigh. Bryan looked over at him with a grin.

  “Agreed. That whole experience rated very high on the pucker factor scale.”

  “What now?” Phil asked. He was turning the RV to get it back on the road.

  “Let’s keep pushing our luck. Roll with the whole secret mission to drop some people off and see if it gets us all the way to no man’s land.” Bryan said.

  “How will we know we’ve made it?” Randy asked.

  “Both sides will start shooting at us.” Bryan answered with a grin.

  “Is there a plan that doesn’t end up with all of us dead?” Kelly asked. She’d emerged from the backroom to join in on the planning session. In the dim light cast by the LED lighting embedded around the inside of the RV she looked exhausted. She had bags under her sleep deprived slightly reddened eyes. So much for having at least one person who could think straight.

  Phil took the turn that said it’d lead them to W Military Hwy. Up ahead there was a check point
like the one they’d passed through to get on the base. A small group of soldiers were engaged in beating down a shadowy figure that’d walked out of the swamp. The officer in charge of the checkpoint walked towards them. He held his hand up for them to stop while simultaneously trying to keep an eye on the woods to see if any more surprises were forthcoming. Phil stopped and rolled down his window.

  “Nice wheels.” The officer said looking at their banged-up Winnebago. “Where are you headed?”

  “We’re on the way to Chesapeake sir.” Phil answered.

  “Orders?” The officer asked looking at Phil expectantly.

  “No sir. This isn’t the kind of mission where they give you written orders sir.” Phil replied.

  “I can’t let you leave without some sort of authorization. Who gave you your orders?” The officer asked. Randy decided to take a gamble on this one.

  “Commander Krantz.” Randy said from the backseat. He was careful to keep his face in the shadows and very deliberately left off the formal ‘sir’ salutation. He knew Krantz had reported to some other guy, but he couldn’t remember what that other guy’s name had been. Kyler had told them the name of the officer chasing him and it had stuck in Randy’s head. Mostly because he’d tried to link Krantz to a joke about Kraft Mac and Cheese chasing them. None of the pasta related jokes he’d thought of had met even his low threshold for being funny though.