Run_Book 3_Long Road Home

by Rich Restucci

  “No,” Danny added patiently. “I mean, why don’t they attack you? I’ve never seen that before.”

  “Told you before, Chief; I have no idea. That’s why Cyrus and his band of vicious nut jobs are after me.” Billy shook his head. “They’re crazy. And I know crazy!”

  Joy looked back over her shoulder into the darkness of the garage. “We need to move.”

  “Where’s Tim?” Danny asked suddenly, pausing in his ministrations.

  “He’s in a big house over on Perine. He said you guys cleared it already and there’s dead folks in the courtyard or something.”

  “Yeah, I know where it—”

  “Oh!” Billy exclaimed. “You should have seen him hiding in the coffin! It was epic!”

  “Danny…” Joy questioned.

  Billy continued, unperturbed. “He got into a hearse. Then the zombies—”

  “Danny!”

  Everyone looked at Joy.

  “We have to move! Now!”

  The living inside the garage were just starting to make out the sounds of the dead outside. Even with the car alarm still sounding, it seemed they were still hunting nearby for food.

  “We go to the bank and wait it out. I’ll call Tim when we get there. Everybody stay close.”

  They made to leave and Kyle jumped off the last few rungs of the ladder. He yelped and went down hard holding his ankle. He stood quickly.

  “It’s okay,” he said through gritted teeth. “I just twisted it.”

  “I’ll carry him,” Danny told everyone.

  Billy shook his head no. “I’ll carry him. Piggyback time, Kyle.”

  They were out the door and moving left, Tina limping slightly and Kyle on Billy’s back holding the sword. Even though he was in some pain, Kyle had a gigantic smile on his face. Billy had forgotten how exhausted he was and carrying Kyle while holding Vanessa’s hand quickly became difficult. Danny, Joy, and Tina had outdistanced them by fifty feet or so when the trio of adults rounded the side of a large city bus. They were instantly set upon by a large group of infected that had been hidden behind the bus. One grabbed Tina, Danny shot it, and they ran. The entire herd of dead began to follow Danny’s group.

  Danny looked back to see Billy and the kids on the other side of Steiner Street with a few dozen infected between the two groups of three. “Get to the bank,” he yelled. “We’ll hole up there and go for Tim tonight!”

  “We’ll meet you at Alcatraz,” Billy shouted back and to his horro, several of the dead reversed direction and came at him. “We’ll meet you!”

  He didn’t know if Danny heard him or not, but waiting to find out was not an option. The dead behind them were a hundred yards back, but the ones in front were much closer. Billy plodded down Steiner Street, the dead in tow.

  “I know a place, but it’s three blocks. Darn it, you’re heavy for a skinny kid.”

  Both kids were in no mood for talking, as they saw what was hot on their heels. They made it to St. Dominic’s Church before a horrendous scream ripped through the air. Sprinting at them up Bush Street was an infected of the quicker variety. It was coming extremely fast.

  “Gotta put you down, Squirt. Vanessa, help him walk, head up that way, I’m right behind you.” The kids moved down the street slowly, Kyle a bit heavy for the younger girl.

  Billy drew a bead on the Runner and fired off one quick shot with his M4. He hit the thing center mass and it stumbled, skidding on the pavement. Billy shot it again, but missed the head. The creature was crawling toward them, but it was done. The young man jogged up to the children and passed Vanessa the rifle.

  “It’s on safety,” he told her. “Pass it to me when I ask.”

  She nodded and Kyle hopped up on Billy’s back again. By the time they reached Fillmore Street, the dead had gotten a bit closer. Billy checked both ways before he crossed the westbound lane and entered a ditch between the east and westbound lanes. They moved up the ditch until they found a culvert with an iron gate.

  “I used to live here for a while,” he told the kids and produced a key for the locked gate.

  In ten minutes, they were sitting on the second floor in a classroom with IKEA furniture, staring at a playground.

  “We’re just over a mile from the water. We’ll move tonight and I’ll get us to Alcatraz by morning.”

  The kids looked at each other and broke into huge grins.

  Beneath the Sagamore Bridge, Cape Cod

  “And you did this? With a hypodermic and some tape?” The doctor pointed to Seyfert’s chest as he lay on the bed in the Galapagos’ main stateroom.

  “Yes. He was in rough shape,” Anna answered.

  The doctor stood and nodded. “Damn fine work. You saved his life.”

  Anna raised one eyebrow. “Hear that, Jarhead? I saved your ass.”

  “I’m a SEAL,” Seyfert admonished one more time.

  They let Seyfert rest and moved into the main cabin, where Rick, Dallas, and two more men sat talking at a round table. Dallas had his foot up on a chair; he had a high ankle sprain as diagnosed by the doctor. Rick had been properly bandaged as well, the doctor disinfecting his chest and abdominal lacerations.

  When the two boats had come upon the Galapagos, they had appeared hostile at first. Weapons were aimed on both sides, but there had been nine people and consequently nine rifles between the two incoming vessels. When a man asked if anyone on board was injured and then had informed Rick’s group that he was a doctor, Rick and Anna allowed him to come aboard alone and unarmed. His name was Richard Gormli.

  The doctor had diagnosed Seyfert and Dallas quickly, but Anna told him they already knew the issues. He had smiled and repeatedly told Anna how well she had done. Two other men were allowed aboard and they began to discuss the best route overland with Rick and Dallas.

  Simon, a tall man with a Scottish accent, and Chico, a smaller, portly man with a wicked scar extending from above his left eye, cutting through both lips and ending at his chin, pointed at a map of Cape Cod. Chico also sported a black eye patch, complete with skull and crossbones over his left eye. He caught Dallas staring and the Texan quickly looked away.

  “I got caught by a horde. One of the dead scratched me,” Chico said with a smile. “Bit me too, but I was wearing a leather jacket.”

  “You can make land here,” Simon pointed, “in North Falmouth. But I wouldn’t recommend heading inland at all.” He drew a forearm across his forehead. “Damn dangerous in there. Might want to stay on this pretty boat.” Simon’s pronunciation of boat consisted of two syllables and at all had sounded like a’tall.

  “Yeah,” echoed Chico. “It’s bad in there. Especially near the Air Force base.”

  Dallas and Rick looked at each other. They had specifically left out their destination and were wondering how this man had known where they were headed.

  “It’s the only place anybody would want to go,” Simon added. “But whatever you’re looking for, it’s probably not there. The place was overrun at the start of the plague, or so I heard.” He put his finger on the map. “The base is here.” The tall Scot glanced at Rick and Dallas. “But again, it’s Hell in there.”

  “I would have thought,” began Rick, “that the vehicles on the bridge would have provided some sort of barrier against the dead when they came east.”

  Chico and Simon appeared to fill with incredulity. “You’ve got it backward, pal.” The shorter of the two said, “The bridges were blocked to keep the dead on the Cape, not off it. There were almost a million tourists on-Cape when the plague hit. They blew the Bourne Bridge up, but they never got to blow the Sagamore.” He pointed up. “That’s the Sagamore.”

  Dallas looked confused. “We thought you fellas was from the Cape.”

  “We’re from…elsewhere,” Doctor Gormli interjected, wiping his hands. “We don’t set foot on the mainland.” He glanced out one of the portholes to the port side of the Galapagos. “Because of that.” The doctor pointed and everybody followed his fing
er. The beach to the Cape side of the channel had filled with milling bodies and more were streaming across the sand from inland. They had heard the sound of the boats.

  There were hundreds of them. Some ankle-deep in the surf and others pushing for the front like teenagers at a rock concert.

  “You’re ten miles or so from North Falmouth,” the doctor told them, “but the distance isn’t the problem. What my friends told you is the truth. Cape Cod crawls with the dead. On top of that, your friend shouldn’t be moving too much. His lung has come back pretty well from the trauma, but if he exercises too much, it could collapse again. The needle should be able to come out tomorrow,” he added. “You could come back with us and rest for a day or so at our place, although he should wait at least a week before doing anything strenuous.” Gormli indicated the resting Seyfert. “Then you could be on your way.”

  “We appreciate the offer, Doc, but we need to get where we’re going pretty soon.” Rick looked at his watch.

  “I understand. You should understand, however, that you’re going straight into Hell itself and your friend isn’t going to make twenty steps before he collapses. Leave him or postpone your trip, but you can’t bring him in there.”

  Anna closed the stateroom door. “He’s right, Rick. Seyfert is as tough as nails, but he’s hurt pretty badly.”

  There was some more discussion, but in the end, Seyfert weighed in with a raised voice through his room’s door and said they would wait on the boat for a day then head overland to their destination.

  “Good luck,” Simon told Rick. “Use the codeword Nachos if you come across any of our people and they’ll know you were the folks we met.”

  Rick had one more question, which he asked the doctor from his back in the bed, “Any hostile breathers around?”

  “You mean living humans? We came across a group about four months ago. They weren’t hostile and we absorbed them into our community. I know there were some holdouts at the nuke plant, but we haven’t heard from them in a while.” The doctor shook his head. “Everybody else is dead.”

  “Great intel, Doc, seriously.” They shook hands and everyone filed out of the cabin and onto the deck.

  Dallas gazed into the cloudless Cape Cod sky and breathed in the salt air deeply. He regretted it, as the stench of the hundreds of dead on the shore reached him. “They just gotta wreck every darn thing.” He fanned his hand in front of his nose.

  “Good luck,” Chico encouraged and he stepped over the gunwale of the Galapagos onto his own boat. Nine folks waved a brisk goodbye, the two vessels continuing east on their original course.

  Dallas got the Galapagos going again and she cut the waves to the southwest. The group was silent, anticipating what would happen when they made landfall.

  Seyfert was out of bed that night at 10 PM. “Both the doc and you know your craft,” he confessed. He raised his left arm and ran his fingers over the wrap the doctor had applied. “I feel worlds better.”

  Anna produced a stethoscope from the new set of supplies furnished by Doctor Gormli. He had given her some choice items from his medical bag. “I’ll tell you how you feel, Jarhead.”

  Seyfert just shook his head at the misuse of the nickname. She listened to his breath sounds, nodding. “Sounds normal. Do they give you SEALs some kind of super-soldier drug in basic training or something?”

  “Not Basic, BUD/S, and I wish. Still hurts.”

  “Ya done busted yerself up, kid. S’gonna hurt fer a bit.”

  Seyfert glared at Dallas. “I know.”

  They rested for a full day on the boat. Five in the morning saw some light mist, but it was easily discernible that the fog would burn off in an hour, at most. Seyfert was about to attempt some pushups and Anna told him she would shoot him if he tried. After a quick granola breakfast, Rick and Seyfert scanned the shore on the mainland to the south of Amrita Island in Falmouth. The thick tree line was only a few feet off the rocky beach and this is where they would go ashore. No infected seemed to be in the area, but that didn’t mean there weren’t thousands just ahead of them, unseen through the foliage.

  Keeping the Galapagos at anchor, Anna found an emergency raft the four of them would use to get ashore. The auto-inflate capability of the raft had it inflated in seconds and the group had their feet in the wet sand in short order.

  “Is it weird that I’m instantly terrified?” Rick asked.

  Seyfert rubbed his injured ribs and made a face. “That’s what’s kept you alive through all of this.”

  “That and shit-tons of luck,” Anna added.

  “Alright, we need to keep it down,” Seyfert chimed. “Only talk if we have to. Like Androwski used to say: constant contact, zero chatter. Hand signals only, I’ll take point.”

  They crept up the beach soundlessly, their movements muffled because of the sand and surf. Anna pointed to something on the edge of the sand. The bleached bones of several partial skeletons greeted them. Not fifty feet into the trees they came across a small road running north to south. A small red car and a dirty white van sat abandoned, paint blistering in the heat. The doors were open on both vehicles, so appropriating one was out of the question.

  They continued quickly across the road and into the greenery on the opposite side. Seyfert threw his fist up immediately upon stepping into the shade of the canopy. Not fifteen feet in front of them, a horrible specimen of the dead stood with its back to the survivors. Shirtless and wearing now black shorts, the creature was missing its left arm. It had no scalp and the remaining ribs on its left side protruded where skin and organs should be. The light in front of it shined through several holes in the thing.

  Seyfert drew his knife, but Dallas put a hand on his shoulder and the SEAL nodded. The big Texan stole up behind the creature and ended it with a single swing of his rebar. They continued through the forest until it opened onto a destroyed Shell gas station and convenience store. A large propane fill tank off to the side of the building had exploded and burned two vehicles to charred husks along with most of the structure. More skeletons and assorted bones littered the area. Two more infected, both shiny black from rot, plodded away from them. A white sign on the road in front of the station listed 28A.

  Hugging the tree line, Seyfert slunk west, crossed Route 28A and entered more forest, his friends following. This area appeared residential as well with houses down the street in both directions. Once again, they entered the trees and were relieved to get into the shade. A neighborhood which used to be quaint sat in a break in the foliage. A dozen or so houses in a cul-de-sac with more dwellings left and right on the street. An eerie silence, interrupted only by the faint sounds of the waves on the beach a thousand feet back, made Seyfert nervous. Where were the dead? Were there any Runners nearby?

  The SEAL decided they would skirt the houses and keep to the trees. In a few hundred feet, they came across an overgrown swath of land which had been cleared at one time for high-tension electrical wires. Several undead squirmed as they hung by their necks on ropes from one of the transmission towers. A few more headless bodies littered the area, rot and gravity having separated the hanged from their nooses.

  A few hundred feet further saw a four-lane highway split the land as far as the eye could see to the north and south. The highway was bisected by a fifty or so foot long median strip with trees and shrubs in the center. The asphalt steamed in the heat, as did the hundreds of dead stumbling and shuffling along the road in every direction.

  “Well,” Dallas whispered, “them folks from the boat weren’t lyin’ about this place.”

  “Why the hell are they on the road like this?” demanded Seyfert, shaking his head.

  “Doesn’t really matter, does it?” Rick asked. “We need to get across and we aren’t doing it in the daylight unless we move laterally down the road and find a clean place to cross.” Rick looked at his watch. “Not gonna get dark for another fourteen hours. We either wait here or backtrack and hole up in one of the abandoned houses, or we go bac
k to the boat.”

  Anna wiped her brow, looked directly at Seyfert, and said in a whisper, “Abandoned houses have beds and chairs.”

  “They also have infected,” Seyfert admonished. “Let’s go clear one and wait until dark.”

  The house they chose did indeed have infected. Two dead women outside and one inside the small, sea-foam green split-level ranch greeted them. Rick and Dallas quickly dispatched the ones outside and Dallas was able to destroy the one locked in a bedroom in the back of the dwelling. The two friends cleared the rest of the building quickly while Anna tended to a fussy Seyfert, who was seated in a recliner in the living room.

  Seyfert was growing impatient with her ministrations. “I’m fine.”

  “You are decidedly not fine. You have broken ribs and fucking tension pneumothorax, dumbass. I thought you Navy guys were smart?

  “Finally,” he said with a smile.

  She shook her head. “We shouldn’t even be here. We should have waited a week.”

  “Waited for what?” Dallas demanded as he and Rick re-entered the living room. He gingerly set his large frame on a brown sectional couch. Rick pulled shades down over a massive picture window in the front of the house then closed blinds or shades on all the other windows he found.

  “For this ninny to heal properly.”

  “Shh!” Rick said and snapped his fingers lightly. He peeked out of the right side of the shade and held his fist up.

  Noises from infected entered the house, putting everyone on edge. A small crowd of dead shuffled through the yard and followed the street to the east. When the sounds drifted away, Rick rested his rifle on the arm of the couch and plopped down next to Dallas.

  They talked in hushed tones about the mission and about how they needed to get back to Alcatraz in order to deliver mission-critical information. Rick talked about his daughter, Samantha. Dallas brought up their friend Chris Rawding, who they had left in Nebraska to help with an old missile silo and another friend named Mark Teems with his friendly biker gang.