by Z. A. Recht
“Move! Move!” Harris shouted. “Get to the exit! Go!”
The group double-timed it, firing as they went. Most of their rounds went astray, but a few struck home. Here and there a shambler fell, pegged through the head or neck. The majority, however, absorbed the fire and continued their advance, arms held out in front of them, moaning incessantly.
Hal leapt up onto the roof of a wrecked car and scanned the scene. Shamblers had cut off their retreat, and even more were between them and the far end of the bridge. One, with a bloody stump for a hand, tried to climb up on the car, but Stiles took careful aim with his weapon and fired. The round tore through the infected’s head, and it slumped against the hood, slowly sliding off to the pavement, leaving a trail of brackish, congealed blood in its wake.
“We can’t win this!” Hal said.
“Fuck winning this!” Allen shouted, firing into the shambling hoard. “I just wanna live!”
Stiles took stock of the situation, and realized Hal was right. They were vastly outnumbered, and on the confines of the bridge, they had no room to maneuver. Another shout from Hal, atop the car, solved the problem for them:
“Jump for it!” he yelled, gesturing wildly at the edge of the bridge. “It’s only a few feet!”
“They’ll just follow along the bank!” Smith protested.
“They’re shamblers! We swim fast enough, we live!” said Hal. “You do what you want. I’m out of here!”
Turning and saying the quickest prayer he ever had, Hal leapt from the bridge and hit the water, sinking down under his splash, the heavy pack he was wearing pulling him under. Stiles followed shortly after.
“Come on, you assholes!” Allen shouted. “Basic water survival! Find something that floats and follow it into the drink!”
He pulled a five-gallon bucket from the back of a nearby pickup truck and emptied it onto the tarmac before throwing it over the side and throwing himself after. Stiles smiled at this, even as he fired round after round at the approaching death.
Navy training, God love it.
Rico and Hillyard each grabbed ice chests and followed them over the handrail, and Wendell had found a basketball somewhere.
A hard hat came sailing over to Harris, and he stopped his barrage of bullets to catch it.
“One for you, skipp—” Jones’s yell was cut off by the sudden appearance of a hand from the bed of the utility truck he’d liberated the hard hat from. It sat up out of the back, a desiccated and dry bundle of infected sticks, and ate a chunk out of Jones’s shoulder.
Smith dove at the dead thing, knocking it away from his shipmate with screams of rage before emptying his clip into the infected’s skull.
The mass of hungry dead gathered and Stiles could wait no longer to see how the deckhands’ tragedy would resolve itself.
He could swear, as he hit the water, that he heard a pair of gunshots ring out.
Hal Dorne kicked in the water, cursing himself for an idiot while his chest burned.
Out of the frying pan, into the river.
A strong hand closed over his and pulled him up. As he burst from the depths, he caught a glimpse of his rescuer. Quartermaster Third Class Allen, grinning from ear to ear, held the retiree up with one hand, the other wrapped around a yellow five-gallon bucket.
“Come on, old man,” he chided. “Plenty of buoyancy in this here piece of plastic for the both of us. Good idea, using the river. Bad idea, not taking anything with you but your heavy-ass pack.”
Hal shook the water from his eyes. “Whatever, punk. Where’s Stiles?”
“Right here,” Stiles said from four feet away. He floated on his back, the bottoms of his boots tucked in his underarms, helping him stay up. “I think I lost my crutch.”
“Enough chatter,” Harris said on the way past, holding a gray construction hard hat to his chest. “We have to get to the opposite bank and outrun this group of infected if we want to make it.”
The group turned and linked arms where they could, kicking together as a team and working to the bank of the river. The whole way, Wendell kept coughing, spitting up water.
“Fucking monsters,” he said, finally loud enough for Hal to hear. “Goddamn abominations. Shit-sucking assholes!”
This last was screamed out, causing most heads to turn his way, those of the sailors and the infected on dry land.
“That’s torn it,” Stiles said, looking at the shambling mass of undead idiots trying to wade in for a hot mouthful. The unliving, unthinking bastards were walking out into the water, arms out and oblivious to the current. One by one, they stepped in, and as they got about waist-high in the water, the river swept them away.
“Holy shit,” Allen said. “I think we got one of them, whaddaya call? Strategies?”
Harris’s face was grim set, and he nodded. “Good job, Wendell. Take up the call, men, and keep kicking!”
Again working as a team, the group turned into the current to maintain their relative position to the shore and started yelling obscenities at the infected still on the muddy bank. What started as a game for most turned sour quickly, as the cathartic shouts began to release some of the pent-up frustrations of the past six months. Throats that were calling out witticisms were rapidly going hoarse as real emotions brought out the agonies each of the men was carrying with him. For a full five minutes, until all of the slow-moving infected had stepped into the water, the seamen (and Hal, Stiles, Katie, and Ron) shouted and raged into the uncaring blue sky.
Panting, crying, half-sick with swallowed river water, Wendell turned to the nearest sailor, Rico, and smiled.
“Well. I feel better.”
The loss of Smith, Jones, and Brown weighed heavily on the group, but Hal knew it was more so on Wendell, as he was their Sea Dad on the USS Ramage; in doing their indoc and teaching them the ship’s damage control systems, he’d gotten to know the trio of deckhands. Of the almost three hundred men that the Ramage carried, the deckhands were all that was left of Wendell’s seafaring family. Hal knew he didn’t really feel better, but he got it out, and that would have to be enough until they reached Omaha.
Harris, as was befitting the group’s leader, was the first to reach shore and start the mad scramble up the muddy slope. One by one, the survivors helped each other out of the water.
“Fuck,” Rico said, slumping down against a tree stump. “What now? Our shit’s all wet, our ammo might be ruined, and we’re out our truck. We still got, what, two hundred miles to go?”
“Stow that bilge, sailor,” Harris said, looking out thoughtfully. “US 283. We follow this to get to 80, then . . .” The Commander trailed off.
Hal tried to remember something, a detail that was just mentioned in passing. “What’s over here?”
“Besides Lexington?” Katie asked. “I think Wes said there was a military—”
“Museum!” Harris finished with a laugh. “The Heartland Museum of Military Vehicles.”
“Very nice,” Hal said. “Boys, we have a little more hiking in front of us, but pretty soon we’ll be riding in style.”
Stiles nudged Hillyard. “‘In style,’ he says. Like a six-by-six is the lap of luxury.”
“The museum is just on the other side of I-80,” Harris said. “Not too far from here. And then we have, yes, two hundred miles to go. So get up, wring your socks out, and let’s get a move on.”
“Yeah, you bunch of Navy sissies,” Stiles said, hopping on his one good foot. “This is no time for a sit-down, or sit-in, or whatever you hippies call it.”
True to Harris’s memory, the Heartland Museum of Military Vehicles was just across I-80, less than a mile from where the group came up out of the water.
They lay on their bellies, taking turns looking through the binoculars and feeling the wind go out of their sails.
“Have I already mentioned that I do not like this?” asked Rico.
“Man, shut the fuck up,” Wendell said. “We’re about to get us some wheels and get off our goddamn fe
et, all right?”
“Whatever you say, Pollyanna. What I want to know is, how are we going to get in there and back out in one piece?”
Wendell sighed, dropping his chin to his chest.
Harris knew Rico had a good question; directly across US-283 from the museum stood a giant Wal-Mart whose parking lot looked like a war zone. Cars were crashed into each other, burned out and overturned metal husks littering the black pavement, and the sun was on its way down. In the utter still of post-Morningstar Nebraska, the group could hear the stirrings of infected in the wreckage of the parking lot.
“I don’t care how good the prices are,” Allen said from the back. “I don’t want to go to Wal-Mart today.”
“Bet your ass,” Stiles said. “How many people do you think bought it in there?”
Harris looked west at the sky. “However many are in there, or in the parking lot, we’ve either got to backtrack and find someplace safe to bed down for the night, or try to slip past.”
Hal shook his head. “Why are we even using the freeway? If we cut across there”—he pointed at a parking lot full of tractors and back-hoes—“we should come out in the museum’s lot. Shouldn’t we?”
“No room to move,” Stiles said. “If there are any infected in that lot, we’ll be hemmed in on all sides. At least on the asphalt, we’ll have someplace to run. Or, limp, in my case. Lots of shadows, too . . . plenty of places for an infected to lie in wait.”
Ron got a light in his eyes. “Well, what if we sent a runner around the back of the Wal-Mart? Someone that could make a lot of noise—”
“I tried that once, remember?” Stiles said, pointing at his wounded leg. “Look what it got me.”
“It got you bit, but it bought us the time we needed to escape Hyattsburg,” Ron said.
“No,” Harris said, shaking his head. “There are no heroes here today. We’ve already lost three people. I don’t want any more blood on my hands before the sun sets.”
That subdued the talk for a couple of minutes, but every second that passed brought the sun that much closer to the horizon, and everybody knew it.
“We go,” Harris finally said. “We’ll go quietly and in single file. Rico, you have the best eyes at night, so you head us out. I’ll follow you, then Hal. Katie, Ron, Stiles, Wendell, Allen. Hillyard, bring up the rear. Watch where you put your feet, and keep one hand on the shoulder of the person in front of you. If there are any sudden stops, we don’t want a train wreck. Ron, you keep a hand on Katie and one on Stiles, since he’s got his hands full. Any questions?”
“Like how come we don’t have any night-vision gear?” Allen muttered to himself.
“I heard that. Now line up, and let’s get the hell over there.”
Everyone linked themselves up according to plan, and they headed out to cross I-80. The overpass was almost as badly jammed as the Platte River bridge, and the group stuck close.
“Where are they?” Allen asked in a whisper.
Wendell, immediately in front of him, shot back a dirty look. “They’re back on the bridge, eating my deckhands. But shut up anyway.”
Allen bit his lip. He nodded, and they continued across the overpass.
Rico stepped off the shoulder and into the deep grass on the eastern side of the highway, across from the large parking lot. He held his MP-5 at the ready but kept the safety on; Harris knew the incident at the bridge had carried its lesson to him. Stepping carefully, he moved the group ahead, first bringing his back foot up to the heel of his front foot, and then advancing the front foot again. Walking that way, the group made slow, torturous progress toward Heartland Road.
“Holy shit, we’re gonna make it,” Allen breathed at Wendell, who turned back again.
“I told you, shut the fu—argh!”
Wendell lurched back, almost pulling Stiles and Allen to the ground with him as he flailed his rifle butt at his right boot. Attached there, teeth sunk deep into leather, was a quarter of an infected. Besides the head, which was busily gnawing at Wendell’s foot, there was part of a torso and half an arm, which spun circles in the air, slapping a stump on the calf muscle in front of it.
Its mouth full of government-issue leather, the infected couldn’t moan its findings to all its brethren, so the group relaxed. Except for Wendell, who was still stabbing down with his rifle at the head, which refused to let go. Allen did fall then, both hands clamped over his mouth suppressing a mad giggle.
“Stop it,” Stiles said, moving over to poke Allen with his Winchester. “Quit that laughing right now. You think you’re the only one that wants to get ahead?”
At that, Allen turned a dark red and rolled onto his face, coughing into the grass, and Stiles started giggling, too. Rico looked back, a smile creasing his face, and soon Allen’s laughing fit had spread to everyone in the group.
Except Wendell, who was unable to dislodge the tenacious infected from his shoe.
“Come on, you motherfuckers,” he bit out. “Will someone give me a hand here?”
Allen fell into another fit. “He, he’s already got a head, n-now he wants a hand!”
“Oh, fuck you,” Wendell grunted out, lunging and swinging his rifle butt at Allen instead of the infected.
“All right, all right,” Allen said, getting to his feet. “But just this once. I don’t want you to become too dependent on—”
“Will you just fucking do it?”
Allen reared his left leg back to boot the side of the infected’s head.
“Not again,” Rico said, catching his boot. He tilted his head in the direction the head might have gone, and Harris saw in the brush a square of metal. Laughter died down quickly, replaced with somber expressions. Rico let go of Allen’s leg and, from the ditch next to the fence of the farming equipment yard, pulled a speed limit sign.
He handed it to Hillyard, who gripped the sign and twirled it in his hands. Measuring, he laid the end of the 55 on the infected’s neck and stood on the other end of the sign. With a squelching sound the metal sign bit into the dead man’s flesh. Right away it met resistance, and Rico had to stand on the sign with Hillyard to get it to go through the spine. Breaking past, it went through with a rush. Satisfied, Rico laid the sign down and held up the unanimated head by the hair for Allen to see.
“We quiet now, fool.”
The sliding gate in front of the Heartland Museum of Military Vehicles was closed and locked. Razor wire, newer than the rest of the fence, was looped along the top of the gate and all along the front. The metal and the asphalt in front of the gate were all burned and greasy, and Hal knew what had been happening there, remembering the mound of cremated dead in Abraham.
“Might be trouble here,” Wendell said. “This gate is still closed, and there ain’t any dead around, littering up the place.”
Harris tightened his jaw. “If there are people here, then maybe they’ll help us.”
Allen turned to the Commander with a look on his face. “How do you figure?”
A grim smile grew on Hal’s face. “It’s a military museum, right? People who put these things together are known for supporting the troops, kid. And if they know we’re toting along a possible cure for all this mess . . .”
“Hoo-ah,” Stiles said. “I love being a bargaining chip.”
“Hey,” Hal said, abashed, “that’s not—”
“I know, I know,” Stiles said, waving the retiree off. “It’s just a bit more responsibility than I’m used to, is all. You people act like I’m the second coming or something.”
“Might be,” Hillyard said quietly. “Back from the dead . . .”
“All right, all right,” Harris said. “Stow it for later. Right now, we need a way into this place that won’t get any of us cut up.” He reflected for a moment. “Or shot up. Any ideas? I’m open to suggestion.”
“You don’t want to get shot,” a new voice rasped from the encroaching darkness, “you keep your hands away from those guns.”
The sudden stillness i
n the group was as if each of them had been turned to statues. Slowly, very slowly, Allen let his MP-5 hang by its belt around his neck. Just as slowly, he put his hands up.
“We come in peace,” he said.
A soft click answered him. “You better.”
Soundlessly, the razor-wired gate began to pull back. Hal, looking down, saw that it ran in a well-greased track instead of on wheels. He nodded in appreciation. “That’s a good idea, right there,” he said. “Keep it quiet on the way in and out.”
“Right,” the voice said. “Everybody in, and put your hands up like the smart boy there. Nice and quiet, and real slow.”
“I can’t keep my hands off my rifle,” Stiles said, one hand in the air. “I’m kind of using it.”
“Hop.”
Grumbling, Mark Stiles slipped the strap of his rifle over his head and hopped toward the gate, hands up in the air. As soon as they had all filed in, the gate began to slide closed again.
“Well,” Hal asked, annoyed. “Where to now?”
Silence greeted him. Then the returning sound of crickets.
“How do you like that?” Allen said. “We let one guy get the drop on all of us, and then he doesn’t even stick around to gloat.”
“Shut up,” Harris said. “He’s still there.”
“Too right,” the voice said, this time from the shadows inside the perimeter of the fence.
“And who says he’s alone?” said another, from behind the group.
A pair of men, dressed in matching khaki fatigues, came out of the shadows on either side of the gate, each brandishing an assault rifle. The man on the left of the gate looked to be in his mid-forties, square of shoulder and slim. His military haircut was showing streaks of gray on the sides of his head, and there was some gray showing in his neatly trimmed beard. He held an M-16 on the group. From the other side was an older man, a mane of shaggy white hair barely held back into a ponytail that draped over one meaty shoulder. In his hands was an AK-47.