He checked his inventory again. He had his M-4, his Glock and a few hundred rounds. It would do. Hopefully he wouldn’t even need it. He picked up the note cards Carl had made up and started thumbing through them, trying to memorize all the steps to braking and reversing so he wouldn’t have to consult them if he was under pressure. He set the controls, wiring the Deadman’s switch open and left his seat. The train would basically drive itself until it ran out of fuel now. Ordinarily dispatch would have taken over and shunted it off to a siding track with the quick hack he did. They would have known. But there was no more dispatch. No one was monitoring for safety protocol violations. He thought about how Collins would react and grinned. Ol’ Griz was gonna have a handful. He opened the door and stepped out onto the catwalk, walking to the rear of the engine and onto the platform. They were still coming. He couldn’t see the main horde anymore but the undead were coming in from both directions, following the sound of thunder. He wanted to speed up, even five more miles an hour would give them that much more time before the main body of undead came slamming into Lakota but he had to trust Carl on this one. If he pushed him and the train derailed somehow, they would never get the tracks clear. They would probably have to leave Lakota for somewhere else. His mind was made up. He just hoped he could make the train do what he wanted.
It was nearly noon when they barreled through McAlester, the tail end of the train not even in town by the time Carl was already out of the other side. On the long straight stretches, he had inched it up to 50 miles an hour but wouldn’t go any faster. Fifty seemed plenty fast in a train, Gunny had to admit.
As soon as they cleared the town, Gunny set his plan in motion. He’d taken the Ham radio out of his engine and carried it up to Julio directly in front of him and helped him get the antenna mounted and the radio wired into a power supply. He let Cobb know they were a half hour out, make sure they had everyone ready to swing into action.
“You just get stopped in time, don’t worry about us.” was his reply.
“What are you going to do?” Julio asked, knowing there was a reason behind bringing the radio up to him.
“Plan B.” he said and walked back outside on the catwalk towards his engine.
He knocked the throttle up a little more so his loco was pushing hard against Julio’s. He quickly went back out the front door to pull the pin on the coupler now that the pressure was off. Laying on his belly, he worked it free and turned off the air valve. He hopped up, slipped back into his engineer compartment and pulled the throttle back to zero. He grabbed the brake lever and started applying it, slowly at first. The two engines disengaged and he watched the rest of the train pulling away. He hauled the brake lever down harder and his wheels started shrieking as he quickly decelerated and came to a stop. He found reverse on the electric transmission, engaged it and pushed the throttle. The big locomotive started picking up speed, heading back to Dallas. The screaming horde from McAlester was only a half mile away when they started exploding in showers of splintered bone fragments and splashing meat. He had two hundred and ten tons of finely engineered American Iron bearing down on them at sixty miles an hour. Body parts flew hundreds of yards in every direction. Gunny got off the catwalk, away from flying body parts, and notched the throttle down to 50. That seemed plenty fast enough. He sat in the engineer’s chair and started rolling himself a smoke. Staring backward out of the windshield, he could see the ones he’d missed turning to chase after him. Good. The wind from the open window was fluttering his paper, making it hard to tuck in the tobacco so he reached up to push it closed. There was an explosion of sound as a hail of bullets shattered the glass and ripped through the cab. One caught him in the arm he had extended. He dropped to the floor, cursing at the bastards who did it and the pain in his forearm. Bullets continued to rip through the windows, the shattering glass fragments raining down on him. They spanged and ricocheted off the steel of the locomotive then careened off in the distance.
Gunny gritted his teeth and chanced a peek over the dashboard and out of the windshield, now cracked and bullet-riddled. On top of one of the buildings in downtown McAlester, he saw a group of men. What kind of asshat would shoot at a train, he wondered but just as they slid out of view, he noticed an old blue Mustang with an American Flag painted on the roof parked in front of the bar. Sammy’s Mustang. The one Casey had stolen.
The diesel locomotive kept a steady 50 mile an hour pace while he peeled off his jacket to inspect the damage. It screamed at him with every heartbeat but the bullet hadn’t hit the bone, a clean through shot. Blood was pouring out but not pumping so it had missed the artery, too. He fumbled open the first aid kit, hoping there would be a packet of clotting agent but it was the standard OSHA approved box found in most work environments. A few gauze pads and tape but mostly band-aids, ointments and aspirin. There was a bottle of eye wash though and he used it to flush the wound, cleaned it with the antiseptic wipes and then wrapped and taped it the best he could. He’d live. He’d had worse. His fingers still worked, that was the main thing. No tendon damage. Payback was going to be a bitch. Casey and his clowns had just gone from an aggravation to number one on his ‘People to Kill’ list. He chewed on a handful of the aspirin and smiled at the memory, despite the throbbing in his arm.
Lacy had come home from the office one day when he was helping Jessie with his homework at the kitchen counter. She was ranting about a driver who had cut her off and then had the audacity to flip her the bird. She was in high spirits, her dander was up and he’d been trying really hard not to show his amusement at her anger. He didn’t want it to be redirected at him. He’d grabbed a piece of Jessie's paper and wrote PEOPLE TO KILL in bold letters across the top then added:
1. The jerk in the BMW.
He took one of the magnets from the fridge and hung it there on the door. When she saw what he’d done, she stopped in mid-rant and after a few seconds started laughing. He added a few names of his own. Like the shipper that had kept him waiting for hours on a single pallet or the woman at McDonald's who messed up his order. Jessie had a couple, too. The teacher who gave too much homework. The jock who hit him in the face with the dodgeball. It became a running joke for years and also an outlet to vent frustrations and talk about them. He always wondered what visiting friends thought about the list if they noticed it. Especially the church ladies who came over sometimes.
He washed the chalky taste of the aspirin down with a water from his cooler then made his way back out to the catwalk to check the zombie population situation. They were sporadic in the country outside of town. A lot of them were running along the gravel at the base of the raised tracks, the engine missing them altogether. Without fail, though, they turned and started chasing. This half thought out plan was going to work. He was leading them away. A few hundred might have followed the train into Lakota but they could deal with them. His concern was to butcher as many as he could on the trip back to the depot, get reversed and do it again. He tucked in under the overhang and pulled his collar up. It wasn’t exactly cold but the wind had a bit of a nip to it at the speed he was going. They were still coming down the tracks, straight at him. The train had passed through here hours ago and they were still coming. He wondered if they could feel the vibrations of the tracks. Place an ear to them like the Indians did in the old Westerns? He watched for a while then went back to the engineer’s cabin. It was out of the wind, at least. He finally rolled the smoke he had started before all the shooting began and watched through the shattered windows.
The sound of the impacts and the keening screeches of the masses brought Gunny out of a light doze. The constant click-clacking of the tracks, the peaceful scenery, the ache in his arm and the noise of the engines had lulled him. He was hurtling through a town somewhere north of Dallas. Durant if his memory served. The horde was thick. He had caught up with the runners out of Dallas. He hung his head out of the window and as far as he could see, they were spread out across the tracks and down both sides of the rig
ht-of-way’s. They turned towards the sound of the diesel, all of them clawing for a chance to get at the living flesh inside of it. It was insanity. Wholesale slaughter. Body parts and blood trails burst out from the unrelenting steel bearing down on them and they kept coming. Even though this was his plan, even though he had only hoped it would work this well, Gunny still had a hard time wrapping his head around it. How far gone the brain must be to just mindlessly throw itself into a meat grinder. He pulled his head back in, barely missing a spinning leg that bounced off the cab. He watched the gauges for any indication of slowing but the loco didn’t even know they were there. It cut them down by the hundreds and as the miles rolled on, it became thousands. He had come to the main horde of them streaming out of Dallas. Not the fastest runners, not the slowest crawlers, they ran as fast as they could as they jostled and bounced off of each other. They were spread out wide but none of them losing sight of the metal road. Something had clicked in their rotting brains. Something that said there was fresh meat on this path. Would they chase it forever? Running until their feet actually wore away to the bone and then crawling? It was insanity. Gunny wondered if something as simple as a car crossing the tracks in front of them would get them to turn off and chase it down the street. The mob would break up, then. Too many choices, too many roads to go down and they would resume their aimless wandering. As long as they were on the tracks, they would chase until they either ran out of track or they caught their prey.
Staring out the broken windshield, watching the shattered dead and the little town retreat behind him, he saw them follow. He blew the train horns to make sure they didn’t lose interest. They had been blasted away from the engine, sent sprawling and whirling against buildings and cars and asphalt. The once proud livery of CSX was barely readable now, the hundreds of gallons of blood and brains and intestinal glop covering the lettering almost entirely. It was a literal bloodbath. But they kept coming. Some still running, some hobbling on damaged limbs, some pulling themselves along on the ground. They all turned and followed. Single-minded. Relentless. Persistent. He smiled grimly and tried to ignore the smell. Knowing your enemy made it that much easier to kill them.
Chapter 33
2nd Battle of Lakota
Carl had the scientific calculator app open on his phone, triple checking his numbers again. He had tried a number of different ways to calculate how long it would take them to stop. He knew exactly where he wanted the flatbeds: on the rail crossing of Black Creek Road. That was the optimal location to quickly get the stackers unloaded and the wall building started. The problem was, even in the game, he’d never had a train of unknown tonnage over four miles long. He came back to the same answer every time so he was going to go with it. He would need to start applying the brakes about four miles out. Taking into consideration the length of the train, hopefully he could get it stopped in about six miles. That would put the stackers close to where they needed it. He had been afraid at first. Not so much of the zombies, the men he was with were a little crazy but they were really good at what they did. He was afraid he would screw it up somehow. Playing a computer game wasn’t the same as real life. He knew any second something would come up and he would have no idea what to do. But the controls were the same as in the sim. Everything seemed familiar, he even knew there was a bathroom behind the middle panel door without looking. I wish you could see me now Dad, he thought, not for the first time, All those hours of playing games wasn’t just wasted time.
It was an odd concept to start trying to stop so far away from where you wanted but when they crossed the bridge over Coal Creek, he got on the call box and let everyone know to start engaging their brakes. All five engines did and miles later, as Carl waved out of the window at the waiting residents, they had slowed to twenty miles an hour. They continued to decrease speed and when Scratch said his engine was coming up on the crossing, they all flipped the emergency brake levers. The wheels started screeching on the rails, sparks flying. They slid to within a hundred yards of the road crossing and Tommy’s mechanics already had the trucks pulling the ramps they’d made towards the flatcars. Men were running alongside and jumping on, knives out and sawing through the tie downs while others were climbing in the cabs and firing them up. Sammy and Jimmy Winchell were the two men with the most heavy equipment experience so they were hurriedly familiarizing themselves with the controls, moving the levers, seeing which did what. The train shuddered to a halt and they were maneuvering them off the ramps within seconds, one to the left and one to the right. Cobb had the dozer and track hoe on either side also, ready to push the containers in tight as the Big Red reach stackers brought them over as fast as they could. The train was uncoupled at the front of Scratch’s engine and they radioed for Carl and Stabby to get theirs fired up and out of the way. They needed to get a few miles down the track so the rear 200 rail cars could be brought up to the crossing. It was going to be a lot of starting and stopping but with Julio pushing, Griz and Lars got them moving and stopped without too much trouble. Every container removed made the train that much lighter and easier to get rolling. They worked at a feverish pace picking them off the cars then hustling the stackers over to the graded spot in line and dropping the container. After a half dozen times, both men had it down to a science and they were slamming them solidly against the one they just dropped. The dozer and track hoe weren’t needed. They had this. The wall went up fast.
Two men were jumping from car to car uncoupling the stacked containers twist locks and tossing them aside. They only double stacked the first quarter mile of the wall on either side of the tracks and men immediately climbed up and set up shooting positions. Once they started single stacking, it expanded even faster, the train moving up in hundred foot increments, trying to keep the stackers from having to travel any farther than they had to. Cobb had sent teams of shooters to the end of the line and they climbed on the last engine and waited for the runners that were headed their way from McAlester. That’s when they noticed that Gunny wasn’t there. His locomotive was missing. When Griz and the boys found out, they immediately wanted to unload the modified pickup trucks and go after him but they couldn’t. The wall was top priority and they didn’t have time to teach someone else how to start and stop the engines.
The shooters didn’t have to wait long. The first of the runners came sprinting in within ten minutes of them getting into position. They cut the first few down with ease but a wave came on their tail, spread out as far as they could see and running or staggering down the line at different speeds. They opened up as soon as they were in range but there was only so much they could do. They could only line three guys up on the roof, a man on either side on the catwalk and a pair of men on the platform at the back. Soon they couldn’t kill them all, there were just too many. They were leaping and stumbling over the bodies, running as fast as they could, screaming and keening for flesh. The bodies no longer looked human. They were weeks old now and the gaseous bloating had popped their buttons and torn their clothes. The swelling had gone down on most of them but stretched out skin hung loosely. Most of them were barefoot, their shoes burst at the seams or lost in the mad run down the tracks. Their eyes were sunken and black, the hair matted, festering wounds were crawling with maggots. The first wave slammed into the back of the engine and leaping hands clawed for the men. They broke and ran for the safety of the engineers’ cab, pulling the doors shut behind them. They all opened outwards and were heavy steel. They’d be safe. The men on the roof continued firing, putting round after round into the horde until their shoulders ached. Julio tried to ignore the relentless pounding on the doors and keep track of the radio so he’d know when to accelerate and brake. The train jolted forward and stopped every few minutes. The runners that were still streaming in paid little attention to the men in the steel box and ran for the sound of the stackers and their plumes of black smoke as they moved around behind the walls.
Within minutes, the men on top of the containers opened up and started cutt
ing them down as they ran, faster now that they were on the flat ground and not on the railbeds. The sight of so many made their blood run cold. There were enough to smash into the wall and swarm over it. Even the double stacked containers. Thousands were pouring across the fields and straight for them. Cobb yelled down for everyone to get on top of the wall. Every gun, every box of ammo, every swinging dick! He watched them following the sound of the stackers and the smoke billowing from their exhaust as the men worked them hard, pushing them as fast as they would go. Tommy saw it too and climbed down the wall. He had a little something he could do to even the odds. Many of them were at the opening where the containers met the train, screaming their hunger through the tiny gap. The containers were mere inches from the sides of the railcars and the reaching arms were ripped off every time they pulled forward. Men with shotguns aimed down the gap and continued to blow heads apart every time a new one popped up. Tommy jumped into the dozer and fired it up, pulling the rebar mesh reinforced door closed and locking it. He raised the blade on the Caterpillar, twisted the throttle control all the way over to rabbit, the fastest speed. He shoved the gear selector joystick forward and took off at a blistering top speed of seven miles an hour. He was heading for the end of the wall so he could get to the other side. He passed the empty Big Red on its way back to the train and waved. Neither man slowed, just kept pushing their machines. Of course, the stacker had tires, not tracks, and he zipped along at double the speed of the dozer. At least fifteen miles an hour. Tommy mentally kicked himself for that oversight, also. He should have sent Cortez with them. He could have overridden the speed governor and got another ten or fifteen miles an hour out of them. Too late now, the thought. Another lesson learned the hard way. He hoped his oversight didn’t cost lives.
Zombie Road (Book 2): Bloodbath on the Blacktop Page 27