“Bastard! You don’t touch me! You don’t ever get to fucking touch me, you son of a bitch!” she yelled until tears flowed freely down her cheeks and she collapsed in Christine’s arms.
“I don’t understand…why?” Nasir said, looking up to Tal, a thin line of bright red blood escaping from his left nostril.
“She just needs time, kid. She’s not herself right now, her father’s death is too raw. You did good, we all know it.” He replied to the boy in Farsi.
Everyone was engrossed in the spectacle that had just unfolded, until John looked up and walked into the back room. Moments later, the sound of an axe crushing something dense echoed out of the stock room.
“He started to come back.” Was all the explanation he offered, tearing open a roll of paper towels from a nearby shelf, and wiping the blood from the axe head.
The group slowly dissolved and began returning to the task at hand, until the canvas bags Omar found were full of canned food and bottled water. They all gathered again in the front of the small store and Tal looked through the glass door up the street. Straining his eyes, he could just make out the little parking lot of the school around a hundred and thirty or so yards away, and just peeking out from the bushes at a slight bend in the road was the very front of a yellow and brown municipal school bus.
“Oh, thank God!” he exclaimed. “Ok, I see a bus! Yes! Listen, half the problem is solved. There is a municipal school bus out there, and since a little after World War I armored buses were a big deal around her, and the main bus company in Jerusalem supplies most of the West Bank settlements. They used to use them to ferry soldiers back and forth during some of the wars. That means that the bus is really hard to hurt, but it also means it’s really damn heavy and will eat gas like crazy, so we better hope the tank is full. Once we get inside, we’ll have to figure out how we are going to get more gas when we need it. It’s only about half a day driving to Adana, Turkey though so we may be ok.”
“Why Adana? Why not Istanbul?” asked
Christine.
“Because that pretty much would double
our travel time. Turkey is a big country. And
Adana is a major city with something like
twenty to twenty five good sized hospitals, one
of which is supposed to be among the best, and
Incirlik Air Base is there. The best of all worlds,
big city in a major country, with good hospitals,
and hopefully a functioning military presence. ” “Oh. Ok. Adana sounds lovely this time
of year.” She replied.
“Um, I hate to ask…but doesn’t the whole
‘big city in a major country’ thing also kinda
mean ‘great chance it’s crawling with dead’?
asked John.
“Yeah…well…maybe. But you didn’t
think we’d just get handed the perfect situation,
did you? Besides, where else are we going to
go? What if they held out like I’m hoping they
did? It’s the apocalypse, man, shit’s going to get
dicey about every three hours.”
“Fair point, I was just sayin’.”
Tal was trying not to allow his mounting
anger to color his interactions with any of the
group. He needed to be a fixed point for them,
an unchanging, unmoving force that could
always be relied upon to keep a cool head and
come through. Anything less and they could
break, which meant he’d break the promise that
Ahmed’s shade had asked of him back in the
penitence cell of Faran Monastery. He owed it to
Ahmed to get this right, owed it to himself to
salve some of the hurt he’d wreaked, owed it to
these people. But still, the strain was wearing on
him.
“Duly noted.” He replied with a sidelong
glance at John.
“So…why are we waiting then?” “Because I see three bodies in the road
just before the school.”
That had everyone’s attention. Since they
had left Jerusalem, they had seen relatively few
bodies. Mostly, if there was anything left from
the dead attacking, the remnants were so few
and…varied…that it simply was not enough to
reanimate. Whole bodies on the other hand,
were usually still moving, and hungry.
“Perhaps they are just bodies?” offered
Omar.
“Yeah,” Christine chimed in, “I mean, if
they were…you know…they’d be moving,
right? They’ve never just laid there.”
“That’s not entirely true,” said Tal.
“When I was still in the city, trying to get clear,
there was this girl on some stairs…she was lying
there until I tried to pass her. I thought she was
a corpse at first, till she attacked me.”
“So, why are they laying there then?”
asked Omar.
“Maybe that’s what happens when there’s
no food. Maybe they just have no…I don’t
know…drive? Look, I’m no expert on these
things, I just see three corpses in the road and
that concerns me. I don’t remember them being
there when we got into the store, but then I was
preoccupied.”
“Just shoot them as we pass?” asked
Nasir.
“No,” answered Christine. “If they are
dead and there are any more around, we take
care of the immediate threat but call all their
buddies right to us. If they are just…left over’s,
then we waste ammo for no reason, and possibly
call any walking ones right to us.” She left Omar
to explain in Farsi any of the more complicated
points.
“Ok, so we need a plan.” Said Tal. “Who
can drive a big truck like that?”
“I have a CDL,” John said. “We’d have to
move produce from the farm to some area
stands and stores back in Ohio. You guys put
the wheel on which side of the car?”
“Same as you, the left. Ok, I hate to take
you out of the mix, but I need you to get that
thing going. Hopefully, the keys are in it, but if
not you might need to hot wire it. It might be
good that it’s you anyway, the door might need
to be forced.”
“I can hotwire it if need be,” Christine
said. “Remember, Dad was a survivalist? It was
part of his curriculum. It’s been years so it
might take me a minute, though.”
Shit, John and Christine working on the bus
just leaves me, Omar, and Nasir to do the heavy
work. Isabella’s damn near useless right now.
Well….it is what it is, I guess.
Omar saw the look on Tal’s face and read
it true.
“Nasir and I can handle ourselves, do not
worry.” Nasir’s eyes widened for a moment, but
then he nodded his ascent.
“Fine. John, you and Christine get the
bus moving. Christine, take Isabella with you,
she’s not gonna be a help. Omar, Nasir, you are
with me. Don’t fuck up, ok?”
Chapter Thirteen
Christine and Isabella took the bags of provisions they had scavenged from the store, in order to leave John’s hands free to open the bus’ doors, once he’d passed his axe to Tal. In exchange, Tal gave him the nine millimeter he’d found in Nofei Prat, which John tucked in his waistband at the small of his back, but warned him and Christine not to fire unles
s they had no choice.
The plan was to exit the building with Tal, Omar and Nasir in the lead so they could deal with the bodies if they started to rise, and John, Christine, and Isabella could break off and get to the bus. There was a commercial bus stop just before the school, where the bodies were lying in various states of repose, but all the commercial buses were long gone. The city’s residents probably tried to get out via those buses, unfortunately probably headed right for Jerusalem, but they didn’t even give the school bus a second glance. Nasir still had the bag with the remaining fire arms on his back.
Tal checked everybody for readiness and nodded, opening the door. The group moved at a fast walk, weapons at the ready, and headed right up the road figuring that, with those bodies in the street, if there were others then side routes would be too much risk. Everyone was on a hair trigger, heads snapping left and right to check for movement and possible ambush.
By the time they were abreast of the Secretariat building, Tal started to relax a bit. They were close to the bodies now, barely 100 feet away and not so much as a twitch. He allowed himself some small hope that the bodies were just that, bodies left over from an
unfinished meal too damaged to get back up. But Hope is a fickle mistress and barely twenty feet away, one of the bodies lying face down halfway on the curb, began to quiver. A loud whuff came from the body, dressed in a blue jumpsuit like that which a mechanic or a janitor might wear, and it pushed its top half up and whipped its head to look directly at them. Most of the left side of its face was shredded, the beast’s jaw bone clearly visible in the mass of torn cheek muscle and skin, and its left eye was hanging from the socket. The remainder of what flesh was still visible was dried out nearly to the point of desiccation, the desert sun having evaporated much of the moisture from the tissue.
Once the first body moved, the other two started to wallow around. One was on its back in the middle of the road, her clothes stained and bloodied but otherwise reminiscent of what a well to do mother might have worn about town. The third, a man in a suit with a badge clipped to his breast pocket marking him as a Secretariat employee, appeared almost as if he had decided to take his ease by resting up against the trunk of a desert pine. The three undead looked at the group for a moment as though unsure of what they were seeing, then as one their mouth opened to project the howl that all the damned sang. The sun had worked on their earthly shells, however, to the point where the sound was hampered by drying vocal cords and desert sand.
“Fuck! Move now!” Tal yelled.
Immediately, Christine grabbed Isabella by the arm and pulled her after John toward the bus, now clearly visible from the driveway of the Kfar Adumim school. The three made their way straight to the vehicle unimpeded, but John had to set his shoulder to the door several times before the latch gave and they could all enter. They set about searching for the keys as the beasts rose fully up and dashed straight at Tal and the Palestinians.
Thankfully, the sun seemed to have stiffened their muscles somewhat as well, and the dead moved in jerky and uncoordinated motions. They were still faster than a corpse had any right to be, but some of the verve of their more freshly departed kin was missing, and that gave the men an advantage. The janitor came directly for Tal, hands outstretched like claws and his mouth in a strange rictus of a boney grin. Immediately, Tal ran full tilt at the beast and swung the axe from his knees backwards and over his head, to bury the blade into the things skull. The force of the impact was so great that the thing’s head practically exploded outward in fragments, dried ichor flying in all directions, and the head of the axe lodging rather firmly into its collar bone.
“Shit!” he yelled as the corpse drug his hands down with the axe, and he began trying to wrench it free from the mangled body.
The other two ran pell mell towards Omar and Nasir, but apparently decided on Nasir as their mutual target. The small trickle of fresh blood left behind by Isabella’s punch drew them like iron to a lodestone. The boy, not expecting both undead to charge him, hesitated a moment before swinging his pipe wrench at the head of the man in the suit. He put as much muscle into the swing as he could, and the head of the pipe wrench smashed into the upraised forearm of the man, breaking its radius and smashing into its head. Like the first corpse, this one’s head burst apart with black blood and brain matter flying from its open skull. Unfortunately, the swing lost power from going through arm and skull and connected with the neck of the woman with just enough force to snap the vertebrae. She stumbled off to the side a few steps, her head now resting on her left shoulder and the howl she was making now impeded by the kink in her windpipe. The beast didn’t waste much time however, not caring in the least about the damage to its body and only breaking from her attack long enough to overcome the loss of balance from the impact. She recovered quickly and turned on Nasir once more, grabbing the haft of the pipe wrench he raised across his body to ward her off. She pushed forward and knocked Nasir to the ground, still gripping the pipe wrench, her head flopping from side to side on its useless neck and her teeth still snapping. The bag on Nasir’s back had come loose during the scuffle, and fell a foot away from the boy. Omar quickly ran to his nephew’s aid, kicking his attacker in the ribs and knocking her off of him and onto her back. The woman tried to raise herself, bending at the waist to sit up, her head lounging at an
unnatural angle in between her shoulder blades. Omar drew back his clever and whipped the blade toward her stretched out and exposed throat. The blade whistled through the tissue and shattered bones of her neck, the head rolling away to lie in the gutter, teeth still gnashing to the point of splintering, while the body oozed dark blood from the gaping stump of its throat.
Tal had finally finished pulling the axe from the corpse of the janitor, and looked to see if Omar and Nasir were unhurt. Movement caught his eye further down the street toward the eastern portion of the town, and identified it as more of the undead.
“Get to the bus now! We’ve got more coming!” he shouted.
The two Palestinian men looked at each other, and then towards the direction of Tal’s gaze. They spotted the loping forms of the undead at the same time that horrid wail reached them, echoing off the white stone walls of the houses. The three men ran to the bus and boarded it, seeing that Christine had opened up the front dash to get at the wires. Clearly the keys were not in the bus, and that meant it would be a moment until they could get moving. Tal pulled the map out of his back pocket, and shoved it into John’s hands.
“When she get’s this going, pull out to the left and just go straight! When we are clear, I’ll navigate!”
“Tal, the bag! The ghoul ripped it from me!”
“Forget it! There are too many and it’s not worth dying over!”
He pushed the door of the bus shut and wedged himself against the steps of the bus’ entrance so that his feet pushed against the door and his arm was through the hand rail. Only a few seconds passed before the first of Kfar Adumim’s new residents ran headlong into the door, old blood smearing the glass as it slumped to the ground. Several of the others took its place, faces pressed to the glass, howling, gnashing and beating on it while Tal strained to keep enough pressure on the door hinge.
“Fuck!” Christine yelled, hands shaking as she tried to separate the right wires to bypass the key system.
“Christine! Focus! I can hold it for a bit!” he said, hoping she’d calm down and get the bus started.
There were easily a dozen of the undead now crowding around the bus. They must have heard the shouting and the wailing of the three outside and rushed from their hiding places around the town. There were a few more coming every minute, beating along the sides and the back of the bus, and one trying to claw its way over the front of the hood.
“Shit, shit, shit, shit…” Christine kept repeating as she traced one wire and then another until she found the two she needed.
She pulled the two wires free and stripped back enough of the insulation with her tee
th to expose bare wire. Silently praying that these were the ones she needed, she made contact between the two and saw a large spark followed by the engine trying to jerk to life.
“Hell yeah!” she exclaimed, touching the wires together again and again until the diesel motor roared, and black exhaust blew out into the crowd of undead behind the bus.
She twisted the wires together with her hand wrapped in the bottom part of her shirt and backed away to sit in the first seat, still shaking.
“Good job honey! Now let’s get clear of this shit show!” John yelled, depressing the clutch and throwing the bus into drive.
The armored vehicle was slow in starting, but inexorably it opened a path through the undead, a few of the things being crushed by the front wheels as John turned up the street. Once the bus got rolling, nothing was stopping the weight and the 420 horsepower engine of the behemoth. Undead still ran down the road towards it or from the sides of the buildings, but they grew fewer and fewer and the bus either plowed through or rolled by them with little concern. Nasir had found a fire extinguisher and wedged it between the bottom step and the door, allowing Tal to remove himself from the well and take the map from John. They had traveled a short distance, no further undead assaulting the bus, and what few had tried to follow were fading into the distance behind them, when Tal told John to take the soft right up ahead.
“Take the right here and then the go left. We’ll hit a fork, stay left on that and it’ll take us out of the town. We’ll have to pass Alon, but when we get into the town just follow the road around to the right onto Route 458. That’ll take us to Route 1 and from there to 90 through the desert and give us some breathing room. How’s the gas?”
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