They had already put the kids back on the bus, and were finishing up with stripping the store of any remaining food. Tal and John had decided that a half a tank of gas was sufficient to get them to Acre, which was only a half an hour away, even if they had a little trouble. So, while the kids were on board the bus, and the rest were finishing up with the scavenging, Elana excused herself out the back door. She had checked though the little window in the door with its wire security mesh to make sure there were no undead about. They were fast and they were vicious, but they were neither clever nor subtle, so if any had been wandering nearby, she felt confident that she would have seen them. It was, therefore, with no small amount of shock that when she’d turned her back to the open expanse of HaSolelim Forest to shield the flame she’d coaxed from a gas station match book, a hand grabbed her neck from behind and the blade of an old hunting knife was placed against her windpipe.
“Scream and you die” one of the two men pinning her against the wall said in Hebrew, his filthy hands holding the blade quite steadily to her throat.
“All we want is your food, your weapons, and the bus on the other side of the building. And if you want to live, you’ll convince your friends to let us have them.” Said the other, a shorter and cleverer looking fellow than his mate. Both smelled of stale sweat and forest.
“Well…” slurred the first, clearly leering at the doctor and brushing the thumb of the hand on her neck along her jaw line, “not ‘all’ we want.” He moved the knife away from her throat, no longer considering her a risk. “Be a shame to pass up the opportunity, what with the world ending and all. How about you slip those pants down, and we…wuhh…whuhhwhu…”
The man never finished the thought. As he was talking, John and Tal had looked through the small window of the door to see what was going on. John had retrieved his axe from Nasir and he and Tal flanked the two would be thieves and rapists while they were focused on the doctor. John had come around the side as soon as he saw the big one drop the knife and buried the axe in the back of his head, his target experiencing a long wait for his brain to realize that he was dead.
“What the hell!?” shouted the other man as hot blood flecked the side of his face. He was unarmed, and Tal came rushing around from behind John to knee him in the stomach. As the short man was crumpled to the ground, Tal grabbed his 9 millimeter pistol from behind his belt, cocked it, and placed the barrel to the back of his head. Even the Jericho was too good for these bastards.
“No! NO!! Stop!” Elana screamed. “I’m alright! They didn’t hurt me! No one else has to die today, alright! Let him go!”
“Are you kidding me?! You know what they were going to do to you? And then to all of us? And you want me to let him live?” Tal asked, the barrel of his pistol shaking slightly as he restrained himself.
“I will not have you murdering anyone on my account! I am a doctor, I save lives. I do not want you to end one over me, especially since you stopped him before anything happened”,she answered
Tal considered the short man on the ground, doubled over and clutching at his stomach where Tal had knocked the wind from him. True, nothing had happened, true they’d stopped it. But he certainly couldn’t just let this go. Rapists were the absolute bottom of the dung heap in his mind, and thieves stood on their shoulders.
“Ok. I won’t kill him. But I won’t let him go unpunished either.” Tal walked over to the dead man and retrieved his knife. Starting from where the short man was just now picking himself up off the ground, Tal measured out ten decent sized paces to the edge of the rear parking lot blacktop, and dropped the knife. He walked back over to stand in front of the short man, who was looking at Tal with a mixture of fear, hatred, and anxiety.
“The world is in pieces, and whatever’s left of us, of people, is sacred. And the doctor here asked me not to kill you. But you are shit. Disgusting, vile, weak and the world would be better rid of you even in its current state. So, we are going to leave you here, alone, with your dead friend’s scent on the wind. His knife is over there, and you can keep it. You’re going to need it.” And Tal shot the man in his thigh.
The short man screamed and dropped once more to the dirt, clutching the wound with both hands to stem the blood. Tal pushed Elana through the door and back through the store, no time to be lost getting back on the bus after that gunshot. John had already gotten to the rear of the bus by going back around the building and was already explaining to Nasir and Omar what the shot was all about.
“He’ll live. At least for a little bit, the rest is in God’s hands. But I need you to hear me. Never. Ever. Ever. Leave the safety of the group without telling someone where you are going. Ideally never go anywhere alone. You couldn’t trust everybody during the best of times and this is decidedly not the best of times. Understood?” Tal asked her once inside the store, the now dampened screams of the man continuing unabated.
“Understood.” She replied shakily, and then noisily vomited on the gas station floor.
The man was still wailing from behind the building, and the kids were all under the bus seats taking cover when Tal and Elana exited the station and squeezed their way toward the rear door of the bus. The tires screeched a little as John whipped the bus around to get back onto 77.
Elana sat in the seat just behind Tal still recovering from the shock of what had almost happened, and in the face of the calm judgment the man in front of her had leveled against her attackers, she was glad she hadn’t asked those questions about his scars last night. The answer might have bothered her given her experience with Syria’s wounded. A few short moments saw the gas station disappear, and the HaMovil Interchange rushing toward them. Since there were no other cars on the road way, well operational cars anyway, John exited by using the on ramp to get onto 79 and headed toward Bir el Maksur.
Once more the group was saved by the previously war torn nature of Israel. Bir el Maksur was not a large town, having mostly a Bedouin population and they having only relatively recently started to leave their traditionally nomadic lifestyle for city living. However because all of Israel was in a constantly tenuous state of peace interspersed with conflicts, wars, or acts of terrorism, most of the road was much higher than the town and the more level parts were separated from the buildings by a wall or fence.
The fence was high enough that the few undead who came out of the houses could not climb over, and the chain link emblazoned with the falcon of traditional Bedouin hunting was too thick to damage. The bus sped past Bir el Maksur with no trouble, the minarets of the town’s prayer towers fading into the white hot sunlight of the Israeli morning. The drive toward Shefar’am was marked only by the rolling of desert hills and the white stones of the roadside.
As it turned out, their fears of Shefar’am were unfounded. Once more the town was walled or fenced off from the road, the Bedouin hawk silhouetted on the chain link. There was a point, when they first entered the city and a few houses stood on a very high hill to the right hand side of the road, that a few undead ran towards the bus from atop the hill. Solely bent on achieving their aim of getting at the moving vehicle, they ran straight off the edge of the hill where the side was made sheer to accommodate the passing of the road. Perhaps five of the beasts leapt or fell, tumbling through the air still trying to run, the sound of that howl preceding them down until their impact upon the highway below.
For all their worry over the city, they mostly only caught sight of it in snatches between the high hills, or over the high walls, some of it spread over distant hillsides. The Somekh Interchange, where 79 crossed Route 70, was a mess, however. Several abandoned cars were littered around the intersection, several in a pile up directly in the path of the bus. John had to weave carefully through the heaps, and struck a few glancing blows with the bus until he was forced to drive onto the median to avoid the tangled mass of steel blocking the road. Thankfully here there was no concrete or fence between the lanes, just patches of dirt with neatly planted rows of greenery, and John
was able to drive directly over with no problem. The dismount was hard, the bus was never intended to go over such obstacles and the shock absorbers protested the maneuver, but the bus was made to withstand no small amount of abuse and took the bumpy ride well.
The rest of the drive down 79 went smoothly, the roadsides now being covered in grass and trees that the Americans would have said were reminiscent of the mid western states. They even passed a few fields of corn that had John wistfully thinking of home. Mainly, he’d taken to growing wheat but he had a few dozen acres of corn. Mostly he grew the crop to sell for production into ethanol. That way if the wheat took a bad turn or stem rust killed a portion of his crop, the government subsidy for the corn would help buffer the loss; though in the last five years he hadn’t had to rely on it. Actually, it had even helped finance his and Christine’s trip.
The thought evaporated as quickly as the fields, however, as the bus pulled alongside the massive sea of white tombs outside Kiryat Bialik and the junction with route 22. All chatter in the bus stopped as they passed the Tsur Shalom Cemetery; the thousands of gleaming white stones reminding them all of their own
mortality, and the jeopardy they all faced in trying to maintain it. At the same time, they were greeted with the huge buildings of Kiryat Bialik rising against the horizon, and the knowledge that they had finally reached the coast.
22 split off here and traveled the length of the coast for a ways, and they turned off there in order to head for Acre. As they did so, they saw the reason that the majority of the inland routes were clear of cars, for directly over the overpass into the city, the roadway was choked with automobiles of every shape and size.
Apparently, they were not the only people who thought to escape by sea, and every person aboard the bus except the children, became apprehensive over their chances of finding a working boat. Hopefully, Acre was small enough that few went that way.
They were only nine miles from Acre now, and some of the undead milling about the city had seen the bus. Perhaps twenty had materialized from the wreckage of the cars on 79 and followed the bus en mass for about a half mile. There were a few wrecks along the side of 22 here, which John was able to maneuver the bus around and the undead quickly lost interest in following after something they couldn’t catch. They simply stopped after a bit and milled around in the middle of the highway aimlessly, as though the bus hadn’t even gone past and they not only had always been in the road, but had no cause to move from it.
22 eventually merged with 4 and the group found themselves driving through the smaller coastal towns just before Acre. The road narrowed considerably here and they passed a huge shopping mall on the right hand side of the road, desolate looking with the parking lot entirely bereft of cars.
Tal had the map out and directed John to take 8510 into Acre, passing the discarded construction engines that had been working on the road. The streets here were very narrow, but thankfully empty of cars. The city thus far seemed like a ghost town. No undead came out to greet them here, and the only evidence that people had ever populated the place were the remains and detritus of meals discarded by the roving dead.
Clothes blew across the road occasionally, and some pieces were anchored to the ground; there was no need to guess with what by the red stains on the cloth. They soon, however, reached Yehonatan ha-Khashmonai Street and saw the Mediterranean Sea for the first time, bolstering their hope that they would find escape in this ancient crusader town. The road ended in a circle, a large blue metal gate blocking their way further straight, so the bus was forced to turn down Derech Ha’Arba. A thin, green, metal fence separated the two sides of the road, but there was no opening through which the bus could fit. Finally, at David Pinkas street, the road was wide enough to accommodate the massive armored bus. They moved slowly down the streets of Old Acre, the streets turning from pavement to cobble and the ancient walls of the crusader knights looming to either side of the road. The Treasures in the Wall Museum gave way to the more modern architecture Knights Hostel and Guest House, and beyond that, the minaret and green domes of the ElMajdilla Mosque.
The streets became a confusion, the bus becoming almost stuck on more than one occasion beneath the ancient archways of the Old City. Always John tried to keep the bus pointed toward the coast, moving slowly to avoid getting the vehicle jammed. Everyone was silent, sweat beaded on the face and forehead of more than one of the survivors. Most unsettling was that there were no undead to harry them as they moved so carefully toward freedom.
Where the hell are they? Tal thought to himself.
They crept down a small road which passed next to an open square, in the middle of which stood a truncated stone pillar with a tarnished copper plaque. To either side were large stone arches built into the walls
surrounding the square, and several overturned tables and broken plastic chairs marked this as a favored eating spot when the city fed living men. Just on the other side of the square, John saw the opening and a sight that made him nearly want to weep.
“Look….masts”.
Chapter Twenty
Slowly, painfully, the bus crept out of the square an onto Zigord Sha’ar Nikanor street. To the left, the road stopped abruptly at the ancient sea wall. The right hand side of the road abutted directly up against the buildings, beautiful wrought iron grates covering alcoves or fencing off gardens. Through the crenellations of the wall, the blue waters of the Mediterranean Sea shimmered with sunlight, separating them from the buildings of New Acre. And above the wall, swaying playfully with the swell and fall of the waves, were a few masts bereft of sails.
The narrow little street was empty, echoes of the bus’ engine reverberating from the stones of the walls and the road. It was unnerving how no undead had shambled from the woodwork, no creatures pounding on the bus, no wails carried on the wind. Following the sea wall, the bus came around a tight turn and drove on to an even narrower road, buildings to either side of the street.
As the group passed the Al-Laz Mazen Ghattas Theater, its distinctive wooden door alone amidst the blue steel of its neighbors, they caught sight of the Ze’ev Frid marina in the distance. There, being watched over by the large dome and prayer tower of the solid Sinan Basha mosque, was the sea. Crowding the sea wall, the group could see the masts of boats that had been moored there in better times, now mostly marking the shallow water graves of their owners. Only a few boats had survived whatever had happened here, perhaps a few fishing boats and such.
More alarming than the few remaining seaworthy boats, was the fact that the quay bent around a few hundred feet further up the coast, where now milled a mass of undead. They packed the quay, as though every single undead denizen of the city had come straight here to stare at the sea. They didn’t even mill about in characteristic fashion, nor were they turned in different orientations, but all stood facing the sea as though mesmerized by it. They stood shoulder to shoulder almost, all the way down the quay, on the stones of the sea wall, around the whale memorial statue; everywhere they could be close to the waves. And just before the Abu Christo restaurant where the undead began to pack together, was a tour boat.
The boat was still seaworthy, or at least it looked to be, and was most likely unmolested because the blue security gate that cut off access to that slip was still in place. If anyone had, in a panic, tried to escape Acre by boat, they almost certainly would have gone for easier pickings, and by the time trying to get to this boat became an option, there was probably no one left to weigh options. All they had to do was make it there.
Yeah. Just get there. Right over there. With a thousand dead bastards a few feet away. And a security gate. And we have kids. Sure, no fucking problem. Thought Tal.
“John. Back the bus up slowly until we’re behind the mosque wall, then kill the engine.” Tal told him. “We need to think. Everybody on the floor, nothing sticking up that can be seen through a window.”
All the survivors did as they were told, sitting on the floor of the isle between
the bus seats while John put the bus in reverse and let it idle backwards. Had it not been for the sound of the waves breaking on the stones of the quay, they undead might have heard the bus’ engine, but thankfully whatever power the ocean had on them held. Once the wall of the mosque shielded them from the closest of the undead and the engine shut off, the group huddled together to plan.
“Tal, there’s no way we can get the bus down there, once they hear the engine they’ll be on us in a second.” Christine was holding one of the little girls as she pointed out the problem.
“I know! But there has to be some way…did you see that tour boat behind the security gate?” John, Christine, and Omar nodded. “If we can just get to that boat, I think we’ll be ok. It’s a tour boat and it’s moored, which they wouldn’t do unless they were waiting for a group, and that means they probably have it gassed up.”
“What about the gate? How do we get around that? The sides of the gate have railings that extend past the pier. If it was just us, we could probably climb on the outside or even drop into the water and swim, but the children won’t be able to do either of those with any speed or without possibly drowning.” Argued John.
“Ok…ok…alright, first let’s get our assets together. Christine has her rifle, I have a 9 mil and…my other pistol. We have the axe, some tools, food and water, and the doc’s AK.”
“I found the rifle…it has no bullets. I thought I eventually I’d either find some or another weapon…” Elana sheepishly added.
“Fuck. Really? Ok. Well, we could still hit them in the head with it so we take it. But how do we get there? Can’t just run or saunter over.”
“I have one grenade left. They’ve proven useful so far. I could lob it at them and in the distraction we could get to the security gate.” Offered Christine.
“I don’t think that’d work. They don’t really get distracted, the ones that don’t go down immediately will just swarm us.”
Seven Days Dead Page 18