The Apocalypse Crusade 2

by Peter Meredith

  Benjamin and Cheryl squatted in front of the TV. He had a hand on her back; she wasn’t wearing a bra. They watched until there came an explosion from somewhere north of them. Cheryl ran to the window and stared out. “I think it’s the hospital,” she said and again there was that airiness to her that made it seem as though she was made of helium, like some sort of balloon, and that a stiff breeze might send her floating away.

  “Get down!” Benjamin hissed, pulling her to the floor and getting in a good feel in the process. She didn’t seem to notice. “If you’re seen they’ll come for us,” he said directly into her ear. He then pulled his gun, theatrically—the only way he knew how—and went to the edge of the window and peaked out. “It’s the hospital alright. It’s on fire. Ho-lee-shit the flames are all the way to the top of the building.”

  “So what do we do?” Cheryl asked again, pulling him down into a squat. When Benjamin started to shrug she snapped, “You’re the expert. That’s what you said. So what do we do?”

  She was right, he was the expert. He wanted to stay put. Hiding in the apartment with her had a lot of possibilities. Then he remembered the Ex saying: I can smell you. Benjamin didn’t think a person could hide from their own smell. “We make a break for it,” he said, feeling the shakes threaten to come back. He put his hand on her back again. “There may be other survivors.”

  He stood, went to his kitchen table and finished off the first beer of his life. Next, he went to his bedroom and grabbed a box of shells. Behind him, Cheryl watched on tippy-toes as he used his thumbnail to dig out the spent shells from the cylinder. They bounced on the hardwood floor and rolled away under his bed. He reloaded and stuffed the remaining shells into his backpack.

  “What should I bring?” she asked.

  He considered for a moment trying to weigh all his fears. He desperately wanted to get out of the city as fast as possible, but all his reading told him to expect the worst: a full on calamity that would stretch from coast-to-coast, meaning they should be packing every last can of beans.

  He compromised. “I think we should bring only one bag each, like a backpack. Take only one change of clothes and fill the rest of it with food and water. But be quick! I want to go in five.”

  She was ready in three; in jeans and a leather jacket, she minced her way around the corpse of her Ex and together they slunk down to the lobby where they stood just inside the doorway, afraid to go any further. There were “people” on the street, moving restlessly. But they weren’t people, they were zombies of course, just like the dead Ex. They would stare up at the streetlights as if they’d never seen them before or they’d rush at moving cars, throwing themselves across the hood or beneath the tires. Sometimes Benjamin caught a good look at them when the light was right and their black eyes were like deep holes in their faces.

  At the sight of them, Cheryl froze with her face to the cracked lobby door, but Benjamin had the gun and was feeling the beer. “Follow me,” he said, heroically, and then like a mouse, he crept out into the night, his eyes darting all about. He reached for her hand but she refused him, holding her purse in both hands, keeping it close to her bosom.

  In seconds, they were in the parking lot hunched down between the cars. He led her to his ‘97 Tercel; she took one look at the rust and the flame decals on the hood and turned up her nose. “We’ll take mine, it’s way better.” She had a 2012 Nissan Juke, an odd little two-door vehicle that was in fact better in every way. For one, there wasn’t duct tape holding the driver’s side mirror in place.

  He put his hand out for the key to which she only snorted, “No way. It’s my car, I’ll drive.”

  “What the hell?” he hissed. He didn’t care for this new, assertive Cheryl. First not holding his hand and now this? She seemed too full of herself. “Are you forgetting I saved your life?”

  With the night air damp on her cheek, all the airiness seemed to have leaked out of her. She looked down her narrow nose at him and said, “Yes…maybe. We don’t know that for certain, but…but it doesn’t matter. This is my car. I drive my own car and if you don’t like it, well, you can leave.”

  Benjamin was outraged. He had put his life on the line for her! He had killed for her. “Maybe I will leave,” he hissed, turning for his Tercel. He stuck the gun under one arm and was digging for his keys when her fear got the best of her.

  “Wait, I didn’t mean that. Don’t go. We should go together, right? It’ll be safer, right?” Fear didn’t sit well on her features like it did for the leading ladies in Hollywood. She looked contorted again: lips askew, her forehead lined like a rake had been run across it, her eyebrows all cock-eyed. Even her hair, normally a golden run of honey-blonde that flowed like a river, was plastered down looking as dirty as his always did. He didn’t like it. This wasn’t how his fantasy was supposed to be.

  “Alright, I’ll come with you, but only if you do what I tell you and you let me drive. I know how to drive in these situations. It takes skill and precision. It’s not like going to the store.”

  “Then I should hold the gun, right?” she asked. “You know, just in case we get attacked. You drive and I shoot.”

  “No…wait. What?” he answered. “I…I…maybe you’re right about driving.” He knew he was, at best, an average driver and he had already proved that he was a piss-poor shot. How much worse would he be at both if he tried them at the same time? “You can drive. A gun like this is a bit much for a girl to handle. It’s got a kick to it like a mule.”

  She didn’t argue or say anything concerning his chauvinism, she just jumped into the Juke and gunned the engine into life. He was barely in his seat before she was peeling out of the lot.

  “Take it easy,” he admonished in his superior manner and then not a second later cried, “Floor it!” as two zombies came rushing from around the building.

  Cheryl leapt a curb, ripped up some grass, and made it to Parker Avenue and then, two turns later, they were on I-44, buzzing east. There were zombies in the road and many more on the side streets and in the lawns of people’s homes. Wherever they went there were screams and gunshots, fire and smoke…and bodies. There were so many bodies, scattered about like discarded trash, littering the city of Poughkeepsie. They were everywhere.

  Benjamin kept a firm grip on his gun until they cleared the first police roadblock just outside the city limits. Here there were more bodies and more zombies, many in the blood stained uniforms of state troopers.

  “Don’t stop!” Benjamin ordered. “Don’t even slow down!” There was a car in front of them that was being attacked by a dozen or more zombie-cops. They were bashing in the windows and dragging the people out. The screams went right to Benjamin’s soul, freezing it.

  Cheryl glanced at him and his gun and he took the look as a challenge to his manhood. “They’re already goners, damn it! You don’t understand about zombies, they’re infected and everyone they bite gets it too. You see? It doesn’t matter what we do, they’re gonna die.”

  “Why are you getting so mad? I didn’t say anything.”

  The screams were so loud and shrill, they were like drills in his ears. “Just keep driving,” he moaned.

  She drove along the shoulder, hitting something that felt like a downed telephone pole. It could only have been a person. Benjamin cringed and Cheryl made a mewling noise in her throat—then they were back on the road and it was clear.

  “We made it,” Cheryl said, giving him a sour, sick grin.

  “Yeah,” he replied. For a time, the car was quiet as the road hummed under them, until an idea came to him. “We should probably find, like, a police station or some…” He paused as a car came speeding around the bend in their direction. It flashed its headlights and Cheryl flashed hers right back. “Slow down,” Benjamin suggested.

  She did, however the other driver swished right past without stopping. “What do you think that was about?” she asked.

  He knew it meant trouble. Everything meant trouble. “Maybe we aren’t o
ut of this yet.” Ten miles further on, he was proved right. They crested a low hill and saw before them four police cruisers blocking the road, their lights whipping the night. In front of the cruisers on the two-lane highway were thirty or forty cars and trucks lined up.

  Cheryl pulled up behind the last one and then looked at Benjamin expectantly. She wanted him to get out of the Juke and find out what was going on. He wanted to stay put and double lock the doors if possible. But he was the hero and the expert.

  With a shaky breath he stepped out of the car. The night was chill and he blamed that for the case of the shivers that struck him. He had his gun, which he held out in front of him and it was little wonder that the people in the truck just ahead of the Juke refused to talk to him. No one would. The people in the cars were of two frames of mind: hysterical and weeping or panicked and dangerous.

  Most pointed their own guns his way and the rest either hid beneath coats and blankets or sat, staring at him in horror.

  Feeling alone and vulnerable, he made his way to the front of the line where there was shouting and more guns being pointed in every direction. A small mob was gathered on the road in front of the police cars. It was impossible to tell how many there were because the police had spotlights trained in their faces. The glare was so bad that Benjamin moved to the shoulder of the road so that he could see properly.

  “Stop right there!” a policeman with a loudspeaker yelled. The order was directed at Benjamin; he had been pinned beneath the powerful strobe of one of the spotlights.

  Benjamin froze in place. Even the features of his unpleasant face seized up, causing someone to mutter: “Is that one of them?”

  “Get back with the rest!” the policeman with the loudspeaker demanded. “No one leaves the road or you will be shot. You are in a quarantined area and cannot leave. Turn your vehicles around and go home.”

  A man in a yellow sweater yelled back, “You have no right to hold us here against our will! This is a free country, damn it.”

  The loudspeaker blared in response: “Under sections 1169 and 1170 of the Greater New York Charter we have the authority to uphold this quarantine. You are being asked to return to your homes until it is safe. Disperse now!”

  “Or what?” Yellow-sweater demanded. “You’ll shoot us? We have you outgunned.” He waved his arm to indicate the men around him.

  The beam of light on Benjamin was like something out of a sci-fi book. It seemed to have powers beyond illumination—Benjamin felt immobilized by it as though it were a freeze ray. He wanted to drop his gun and hightail it out of there but he couldn’t budge.

  “I say we get these pigs,” the man in the yellow sweater said to the others on the road. “What do you say?” When he turned to look for agreement he did so with eyes that were ugly and dark just like the dead Ex’s had been.

  Benjamin was afraid to say no to him and more afraid to say yes. Thankfully, being frozen as he was he couldn’t do either.

  Two of the men were equally jazzed up to rush the police, a few others were conflicted and only stared around in confusion and the rest were backing away. Benjamin wanted to back away as well, only the light held him in place like a tractor-beam. It wasn’t until the man in the yellow sweater charged and guns began to bang and roar that the light pivoted away.

  Then there was blood spurting and screams and muzzle flashes blinking in the night like huge and angry fireflies.

  The man in the yellow sweater was hit by a hail of bullets and yet he kept going, charging the police cars while dragging what looked like a Gordian Knot of intestines on the ground seven feet behind him. Benjamin flung himself into the ditch on the side of the road and began to crawl and whimper back toward where he had left Cheryl and her long legs, hiding in the Juke.

  When the shooting died down and there was nothing but awful gurgles and ugly growls, and a single man crying, Benjamin jumped up and raced for the car. Behind him came a monster. He heard the slap of feet and harsh breathing. Fear had Benjamin by the throat and when he turned, his face was drawn back in a rictus of fear and his hands were taut claws.

  It was a man after him…or what had been a man once. Its face was covered in blood and its teeth looked long and white and very sharp.

  Without thinking, Benjamin shot him the chest.

  The man stumbled into Benjamin’s arms and suddenly gone was any sign of the monster—the man’s eyes were very blue and the gums of his mouth nice and pink. He had been covered in someone else’s blood but now there was a hole in him and his own red blood was coursing out.

  “Why?” he asked in a soft, confused voice.

  “I…I…” Benjamin couldn’t spit anything else out, and it didn’t matter. The man died right there. His head fell back to hang loose and long as if a lynch mob had gotten him and not the cowardly bullet shot by a cowardly man.

  “Oh, jeeze!” Benjamin moaned and then dropped the corpse onto the street where its head smacked against the pavement sounding like a fallen coconut. “Oh jeeze!” Benjamin said again, this time feeling his dinner rise up into the back of his throat.

  He thought for sure he’d throw up, but when he bent at the waist he saw movement off the side of the road. There were real zombies coming out of a grove of hemlock. Further back were others, mere silhouettes but they were zombies, Benjamin knew.

  There were so many.

  Forgetting the man he’d just murdered and the acid of vomit in his mouth, Benjamin ran for the Juke, making it just ahead of the first creature.

  “Go! Get out of here,” he yelled, his voice creeping over the edge of hysteria. Cheryl started to head down the road toward the police cars, but he grabbed her wrist. “No, not that way. Just…just turn around. We can’t get out this way.”

  When she made the turn, she drove over the leg of the man Benjamin had shot. He could hear bones break like snapping twigs. This time he did throw up and because of the zombies all around them, he didn’t dare roll down the window. He puked in Cheryl’s backseat.

  Chapter 2

  A Disappointing Meeting

  4:41 a.m.

  General Collins of the 42nd hated to be kept waiting, and this was especially so when the fate of the country had been thrust into his lap. The last thing he needed was to be cooling his heels in the Governor’s mansion while the night went to shit and the zombies multiplied and swarmed like locusts.

  According to his watch, he began his meeting with Governor Stimpson at 03:41. It wasn’t a long meeting. They were in the same room for all of six seconds, just long enough to shake hands.

  Stimpson was the living embodiment of a politician: he wore a beautifully tailored, dark blue suit, was soft-skinned, tanned, smooth and glib, full of empty but pretty sounding words; he had a wide toothy grin and was a good hand-shaker—in other words, a complete fake.

  He had breezed into the room with that phony smile cemented in place, gave the general a firm shake of the hand and said: “I’ll be right with you, General. I have some things to take care of.” He started to walk away but turned swiftly, catching Collins wiping his hand on his BDUs; there had been something decidedly slimy about touching the politician. Stimpson pretended as though he hadn’t seen. “Make yourself at home. The kitchens are open if you’re hungry.”

  Kitchens? How many were there? “No, thank you.”

  “Suit yourself,” Stimpson said, giving a second, even brighter, professional smile and hurrying away.

  General Collins stood for a moment wondering what could be more important than a city the size of Poughkeepsie being destroyed. With a weary shake of his head, he settled himself down on the plush leather couch and took out the smart phone he barely understood. The logistics of calling up a division sprawled over six states was daunting; there were plans in place, however they read like a repair manual for the space station. He had a tiny PDF version on his phone; it was a thousand pages long and the wording was hell on his aging blue eyes.

  An hour later, he was still seated on the couch
and still staring at the phone. He yawned for the hundredth time and there were tears dripping from the corner of those tired eyes when the Governor re-emerged, still sporting the slick-as-oil smile despite the hour. He offered a second, over-warm handshake and started walking the general back the way he’d come.

  “I’m frankly a little surprised you’re here,” the Governor said. “Why aren’t you—what’s the word—marshalling your men?”

  “I have people for that,” Collins assured, not realizing the division call-chains were riddled with old and unused numbers and that the entire process was well behind schedule. “My job entails a broader spectrum. I have to oversee the entire situation, from the lines of battle to logistics. I also have to deal with politicians.”

  The Governor gave him a new smile, he seemed to have a hundred of them in his back pocket that he could whip out at a moment’s notice. He pointed the general to a chair opposite his desk. It was a magnificent beast of a desk, a vast expanse of Honduran hardwood, but far too big for one man, even a man with the ego of Stimpson.

  “Ahh, yes,” he said around the smile. “I bet you dread the politicians.”

  “I dread the waste of time,” Collins answered, curtly. “In battle, and let me be perfectly clear here, we are in a battle, minutes or seconds can be pivotal.”

  “And yet isn’t the motto of the army hurry up and wait?”

  Governor Stimpson’s smile was now at its widest; Collins wanted to rip it off his face and stomp it under his boot heel. “I don’t have time to wait and neither do my men. I need shoot on sight orders,” he said bluntly. Stimpson’s smile began to unravel. Collins went on: “These…these infected persons are far too contagious and more deadly than I realized. They’re like something out of a movie or a nightmare. I’ve seen them, Governor; I’ve seen them up close. You have no idea what they’re like. We need to kill them and we need to kill them at a distance.”