by J. Thorn
He held a long barreled shotgun pointed between me and the dog who had stopped a few feet in front and to my left. A quick glance around spotted three of the other four guys that I had seen with him. One of them was behind me with a bolt action rifle pointed at my back, one was behind the talker keeping an eye out for infected and the third was in front of the truck with a scoped rifle pointed directly at Rachel as she sat behind the steering wheel. Where the hell was the other guy?
“So what we got here?” The talker asked with a big grin that revealed tobacco stained teeth. “Looks like a looter. What you boys think?”
The guy behind me spoke up, “Looks like an asshole to me, Danny.” I heard him spit followed by a wet splash when what I figured was a stream of tobacco juice hit the sidewalk.
“So whyn’t you go on and put them bags down, Mr. Looter. And that fancy rifle while you’re at it. We’ll just hold on to everything until the rightful owner claims it.” He was grinning, but the smile didn’t make it to his eyes. He had eyes like a pig, small and dark, the pupil and iris so close in color that you couldn’t see anything except dark.
I slowly flexed my knees and half squatted, lowering the more than 200 pounds of duffel bags to the ground, never taking my eyes off the leader.
“You sure you want to do this?” I asked in a low voice as I straightened back up.
The grin didn’t falter, “Evan, you get that fancy rifle off his back for me. I think it’s time to upgrade from this scatter gun.”
I prepared myself, but didn’t tense as Evan stepped up behind me. I felt him grab the rifle barrel and tug and I turned slightly and let him pull the sling over my head. He now had a rifle in each hand and couldn’t use either one.
As I had turned and ducked for Evan to pull the rifle off my shoulder I had slipped my hand under my shirt and onto the butt of the pistol I’d picked up in the outfitter store vault. An FNH FNX45 loaded with 16 rounds of .45 caliber hollow point +P ammo was in my hand and ready to go.
I leaned to the other side and brought the pistol up and put three rounds into Danny, two to the chest and one to the head. He dropped like a sack of bricks. The other three froze, but I didn’t.
Three more rounds dropped the look out, but the other two had started moving again. The guy in front of the truck shifted his aim to me but before he could fire the engine roared and the truck shot forward with a screech of tires. He bounced off the push bar and flew backwards, landing on the pavement with a sickening crunch of breaking bones a second before the three ton Ford rolled over him and crushed his skull.
The dog attacked at the same time. He hit Evan just above the waist and drove him to the ground on his back, both rifles flying out of his hands and clattering away. Evan started screaming as he fought the dog but I silenced him by stepping up and planting the toe of my shoe into his balls as hard as I could.
All the fight and screaming went out of him instantly and he curled into a ball with a pathetic moan. The dog backed off a foot, but stood over him with hackles raised and teeth bared. I was really starting to like this pooch.
A squeal of tires caught my attention and I ran to the corner of the building to see the rusty Taurus disappear down the road. Mystery of the last guy solved. He’d stayed with the car.
I motioned Rachel to unlock the truck and I loaded the three duffel bags into the back seat. “Lock it back up. Gotta grab a couple more things.”
Back in the vault I picked up two more M4 assault rifles I had set out as well as a box full of empty 30 round magazines. I took one more look around but didn’t spot anything else.
The dog was still guarding Evan when I got back outside. I heard the door locks thunk open as I approached the truck and I quickly stowed the rifles and magazines in the back seat.
“We’ve got company coming,” Rachel said, pointing down the street at a couple of dozen males shambling towards us.
I whistled for the dog and he looked up at me. I gestured at the back seat and in a flash of fur he bounded across the sidewalk and into the truck. I slammed the door and turned and looked at Evan. He wasn’t moving and the infected males would be on him in less than a minute. I had a momentary thought that I should do something to help him, but dismissed it as quickly as it came to me. Hopping behind the wheel I closed and locked the doors and drove away without another thought.
15
We drove for another half hour then stopped when we found an open park that was deserted. We stopped in a parking lot that was surrounded by soccer fields on all sides, giving us at least 200 yards of open space to the nearest tree line. Two roads led in and out of the park providing reasonable escape routes if we needed them, but I was confident we could just drive across the fields if necessary.
Heavy clouds were building to the north as the afternoon wore on, black and swollen on the bottom and I expected a big storm within the next few hours. I’d experienced the kind of summer storms that can blast through Atlanta and I wanted to keep our stop short and find some shelter for the night.
The first order of business was to water Dog. Not ‘the dog’, just Dog. I didn’t know his name, but decided to name him after the dog John Wayne had in my favorite movie, Big Jake. So Dog it was.
I dug through the duffel bags until I found the mess kit I’d looted from the outfitter. A shallow aluminum bowl worked great and I only gave Dog a little water at a time, giving his stomach a chance to absorb rather than cramp and make him throw the water up.
Rachel watched me in silence and I realized she hadn’t said anything since we’d left the outfitters. “What’s on your mind?” I asked, scratching Dog between the ears as I poured a little more water into his bowl.
She watched me another minute before asking, “Who the hell are you? You killed two of those men in less than two seconds, you left one to be killed by the infected and here you are petting a dog like nothing has happened.” She stared at me closely with not exactly fear in her eyes, but concern over the psychopath she’d hooked up with.
I sighed and gave Dog some more water that he greedily lapped up. “I’m just a business man that happened to be here and not at home when the shit hit the fan.”
“Bullshit!” She turned sideways in the seat to fully face me and crossed her arms over her chest. “Business men don’t know how to kill two men with a hand gun faster than I can blink, then go on about their day like nothing happened. Business men don’t even look like you for Christ’s sake. I haven’t seen arms like yours anywhere other than on TV or in magazines. Now tell me the truth. I need to trust you and right now I don’t.”
I faced forward and sat for a minute, staring out the windshield at the gathering clouds. Dog, satiated for the moment, stuck his head between the two front seats and put his chin on the arm rest between them. He could feel the tension in the truck but didn’t seem inclined to take sides, rather kept looking back and forth between Rachel and me.
Rachel reached out and put a hand on his head while she stared me down. Finally I pulled out my wallet and handed her a business card. She took it and looked at it for a bit.
“You’re a program manager for Tatushima?” She asked, the doubt clear in her voice.
“Yes, I am,” I answered. “But I’ve not always been a program manager. Army Special Forces, Green Beret, and then a tactical assault trainer for the DEA before I got into a more boring line of work.”
She handed me the card back and I replaced it in my wallet before returning the wallet to my pocket. I looked at her and shrugged my shoulders.
“Don’t know what to tell you. At best, those guys would have taken everything we had and left us standing there with no way to defend ourselves. At worst, well… I think you can imagine what the worst would have been.
“Guys like that were kept in control, mostly, by the police and the threat of jail if they let their urges get the best of them. This is their big opportunity to finally behave the way they want to, not the way society tells them they have to.
“I
didn’t start it. I didn’t go looking for trouble with them. All I did was finish it. Permanently. Unfortunately I expect we’ll run into more people like them than we will good people. I’ve spent a lot of time in places in the world that were coming apart at the seams and there’s always assholes like these guys that see opportunity to prey on the week. I don’t like bullies much, and that’s all they are.”
This was probably the most I’d said to Rachel at one time since I had rescued her the previous morning. I expected her to take some time to digest what I’d just said and then try to argue with me and tell me why I was wrong.
“OK then. Thank you for telling me. Now we’d better find some place to shelter for the night before that storm gets here. I really don’t want to spend the night…”
We both jumped and Dog leapt to his feet and started growling when the whole truck rocked from the impact of two infected females slamming into the right rear door. We’d been so absorbed in our conversation that none of us had seen them coming.
Looking around I spotted several more running towards us across the empty fields. At least 20 males were shambling along behind them.
“Time to go,” I said, putting the truck in gear and hitting the throttle. We quickly pulled away, but one of the females that had slammed into the truck had a grip on the mesh covering Rachel’s side window and was pulling on it, trying to rip it off the truck and get inside.
“Get on the floor,” I shouted at Rachel who instantly complied.
Hitting a button on the driver’s door, the passenger window buzzed down and suddenly the cab was filled with the roar of the diesel and the snarls of the infected woman. Raising the .45 I fired a single shot that took the top of her head off, the body dropping away and a heartbeat later a bump as the rear tire rolled over her. I rolled the window back up and Rachel climbed back into her seat looking shaken.
“What the hell?” Rachel asked. “Where did they come from? There weren’t any around when we pulled in.”
I slowed at the end of the access road to the park and turned back onto the main road. Immediately ahead about a quarter of a mile was an overpass and signs said we were approaching I-575.
The visible portion of the freeway was jammed with cars as was the surface street and on ramps. Hundreds, if not thousands, of people wandered amongst the stalled cars. As we got closer I recognized the uncoordinated walk of the infected and jammed on the brakes.
“That’s where they came from,” I said, staring in horror as the crowd seemed to notice us all at once. Males started slowly turning and shambling our way but too many females to count started sprinting down the road directly at us.
“Oh shit,” Rachel muttered, a hand over her mouth.
“Oh shit is right,” I said and hit the throttle and threw the truck through a screeching U-turn.
Heading back the way we had just come from we quickly encountered the females that had raced across the park and followed us out onto the road. They ran straight at us with no fear.
As we reached the front of the pack I backed off the throttle and dropped our speed to just under 30. Even the heavy, welded push bar on the front of the truck could only take so many impacts from all the human bodies running at us. The first two were bulled aside by the truck with stomach clenching thuds, but the third female was young and looked to be in excellent shape.
With a leap she cleared the front of the truck and slammed into the wire mesh covered windshield. The wire did its job and absorbed the impact. If not for it we’d most likely have had the female in our laps as she’d have crashed right through the already compromised glass.
I kept driving, mowing down females as we went, then we were clear of the pack. But we still had our passenger who had a death grip on the wire mesh. I tried slamming on the brakes at 40 miles an hour, but all this did was get a yelp from Dog when he was thrown against the backs of the front seats. The female still clung like a barnacle.
“Shoot her!” Rachel’s voice was up a couple of octaves and I could hear the stress in it.
“I don’t want to put another hole in the windshield,” I said as I tried swerving the big truck from side to side to shake the infected loose. The maneuvers had about as much effect as when I slammed on the brakes. Dog, with no seatbelt, was definitely getting the worst of it.
I had an idea and kept my eyes open, finally spotting a large, empty parking lot. Roaring in to the lot I spun the wheel and jammed on the brakes, the truck coming to a stop in a cloud of tire smoke after sliding sideways for twenty feet. The female was thrown off balance, staying on the truck with the grip of only one hand.
In a flash I had my door open and jumped out, raising my pistol to acquire my target. I was shocked to see that the female had already regained her balance and had her feet under her ready to spring. Without hesitating I fired and the heavy hollow point slug nearly decapitated the body. She flopped dead onto the hood and I had to walk around and drag the body off the truck.
“Fuck these things are fast!” I said to myself as I hurried back to the driver’s side of the cab.
Back in the relative safety of the truck I checked the area and saw no immediate danger. A quick search of the duffel bags yielded the GPS I’d found as well as an old school road map. I handed Rachel the GPS and some batteries and asked her to get it running while I checked the map. I also reminded her to keep watch so we didn’t get surprised again.
The map was hard to see and I reached up to turn on the reading light before I realized how dark it had gotten. The clouds had made it to us and the low bellies were swollen with rain. As I watched, the first drops struck the windshield, slowly at first then quickly becoming a torrential downpour.
The noise of the rain on the metal roof of the truck was almost deafening, but nothing compared to the bone jarring blast of sound from thunder that cracked right over our heads. The thunder had blasted at the same time as we saw the brilliant flash of lightning so it had to be very close.
Dog started whining and Rachel turned to comfort him as another blast of lightning lit the world around us with a strobe effect. In the strobe I could see shambling and running figures coming towards us. Damn it, I just needed two minutes to look at a map.
Stomping on the throttle we roared out of the parking lot and turned north away from the main road that seemed to have a good population of infected. We were quickly in residential neighborhoods, most of the houses smaller ranch style homes that had been built in the 70s and 80s as Atlanta continued to sprawl and the northern suburbs boomed.
The rain was relentless, now driven at an angle by the rising wind. Water was coming in around my duct tape reinforcement of the windshield so the glass was wet inside and out. Visibility wasn’t much more than to the end of the hood.
We passed another park, barely visible in the rain, then back into another neighborhood of single story homes, these slightly newer and mostly constructed of the brick that is so common in construction in the Atlanta area. We didn’t see a light, movement or an infected anywhere and I started to think we should shelter in one of the homes for the night.
The problem was that we had no way of knowing if a house was occupied by people hiding out, full of infected, or sitting empty. I had no desire to shoot it out with a homeowner who was just defending his home. Neither did I really want to open a front door and have to deal with the infected lady of the house.
The storm made my decision for me. The rain increased in volume and the wind picked up, rocking the three ton truck like it was a Tonka Toy. Lightning continued to flash overhead and we watched a tree explode on a ridge line directly in front of us when lightning stuck it.
“OK, enough,” I said. “See any good possibilities?”
Rachel peered through the storm as I drove, then suddenly sat up and pointed, “There! The one with the garage door up.”
I spotted the house she pointed out. It was a small brick one story with an attached two car garage. The house was dark and the front door closed, but t
he garage was open and empty. I was willing to take the odds that this house had been abandoned in a hurry.
I turned into the driveway and continued into the garage. There were no hiding places to check or worry about so I jumped out and released the garage door from the automatic opener track then pulled it down. The truck was still running, quickly filling the garage with stinking diesel exhaust fumes so I rushed to disconnect the wires and shut the engine off.
The fury of the storm lashing the aluminum garage door was so loud I could hardly tell the truck was no longer running. I made a mental note to find an electrical switch to wire into the truck so we didn’t have to twist two wires together every time we wanted to start it.
It was dark in the garage, but I brought out my looted flashlight and pulled the pistol.
“Dog,” I called, and he jumped to the front seat then down to the garage floor through the door I’d left open.
Rachel stepped out of the truck, Glock in hand. I looked at her and she glared back at me. “Don’t say a word, Mr. Bad Ass. I’ve saved your life twice now, and I’m getting a little tired of being left behind in the truck.”
I looked at Dog who seemed to be smiling at me, shook my head and moved to the door into the house. Dog came up beside me and gave it a good sniff then stood still looking at me, waiting for me to do something. I didn’t know how he’d react if there were either people or infected on the other side of the door, but I didn’t think in either case he’d be as calm as he was.
16
Clicking the safety off on the pistol I quietly turned the knob and eased the door open. All was quiet, or at least any sounds within the house were masked by the raging storm outside. As the door swung open I paid attention to Dog, trusting him to be an early warning if the house was inhabited.