The respite was over, and without a word of command, the entire camp hastily packed their belongings and formed up to start moving again. On they trudged, across the hard-packed earth, now heading northeast toward Jensen, Utah.
*
At first, only a handful of undead peeled off the crowd and started moving towards the Jeep. A roar from behind alerted everyone inside that the fast ones were still in pursuit, and catching up. Tim hesitantly laid his palm on the center of the steering wheel and pressed. The sound of the horn cut through the still quiet, drawing the attention of all the undead around the building. The gathered mob’s attention immediately turned from the two atop the roof. The undead spun about, shambling towards the previously unnoticed Jeep. Tim put the transmission in reverse and crept slowly backward, keeping the vehicle just out of reach of the crowd as they moved in pursuit.
“Holy shit!” Will exclaimed from the passenger’s seat.
“What?” Tim said, stress and concern apparent in his voice as he had to fully concentrate on guiding the Jeep using only the side-view mirrors.
“Look at the windows, man!” he called, his voice full of awe and terror. “Look at the fucking school.”
Tim hazarded a quick glance to the building. Framed by every window within sight were the countless faces of the undead, pressed against the glass. Hundreds of undead teenagers jockeyed for position and mouthed hungrily at their presence, pounding at the glass.
“Holy fuck!” Tim said, genuinely shocked by the sight of so many undead schoolchildren.
As soon as the Jeep came clear of the building, he spun the wheel, coming out of the turn facing down the hill, towards the village of Hancock. The three fast undead following from the Top’s store were still about a hundred yards distant, closing quickly as they tore up the road, even with the heavy snow underfoot.
“Target practice for someone,” Tim offered to the rest.
“I got it,” Laura said, shifting past Bjorn who had already started to move forward. She stood up through the moon roof and brought the pistol out from the large bag she carried that doubled as a carry-all. Tim kept his speed slow and steady, moving down the hill toward the approaching dead. Laura started firing her pistol at about twenty-five yards, missing with her first three shots. Tim let the Jeep drift to a halt, growing nervous as the gap shrunk. He didn’t want to get any closer until to the terrifying, savage things, until they were neutralized. Laura’s next shot took one of the things in its shoulder, spinning it down to the ground with a puff of white snow. The other two had a full head of steam and were closing in on the Jeep rapidly. Laura fired again hitting one square in the forehead, dropping it face down, sending up another puff of powder.
“Yes!” she exclaimed with a fist pump.
“Concentrate. Please, Laura,” Tim called to her, his voice filled with tension as the first one, the one she had hit in the shoulder, regained its feet and again started running towards them..
“Yeah, yeah,” she replied, taking aim at the nearest one, only ten yards away.
She fired, hitting this one on the side of the face, taking its ear off in a bloody plume. It ran on, unfazed by the flesh wound.
“Shit,” she said under her breath, steadying herself as it roared in at speed.
“Kill it!” Jen shrieked from below as Laura pulled the trigger again.
The shot hit the thing in the top of its head as it dove for the windshield, laying it out, immobile on the hood. Laura took careful aim and fired three more shots, dropping the last one at a distance of twenty-five feet. Tim slammed on the accelerator as the first of the slow mob caught up and started pressing around the vehicle, slapping and mouthing at the windows.
It took ten minutes, but finally, they led the mob of slow dead to the bottom of the hill. Tim looped around the park a block south of the Top’s and drove back up the hill to the school building at speed. There were still a few undead milling about, but most of the remaining undead were trapped behind the glass, inside the classrooms. Bjorn popped his head out through the moon roof and called to the two.
“You guys are gonna have to jump for it!”
The boy nodded and beckoned for the girl to come forward. He helped her to the edge of the roof and did his best to lower her to the roof of the Jeep. The girl slid down into the vehicle with the help of Bjorn’s guiding hands. As the boy spun and hung from the lip of the roof, Bjorn could see that he wore nothing but cardboard and rags on his feet. He was immediately concerned that this bode poorly for a nimble landing. Thinking quickly, he moved out in the open, on top of the roof of the Jeep, in order to help guide the boy down as he dropped the last few feet.
Nick didn’t see the man moving out to help him. His total concentration was on keeping his grip on the edge of the roof as he kicked off the wall and spun about. He was planning on landing on all fours atop the roof, figuring he’d have a better chance of not sliding off. As he spun in mid-air, he struck Bjorn’s shoulder heavily, sending the man backward off the roof, landing painfully himself on his side atop the vehicle. Nick was horrified as he saw the man land heavily on top of one of the undead below.
The wind blew out of Bjorn’s lungs as he collided with the dead thing, carrying them both down to the ground. A sharp pain in the middle of his back lit fear in his heart and he rolled off the undead as quickly as possible, not bothering to get a good idea of his surroundings. He rolled clear of the undead and onto another set of feet. His roll came abruptly to a stop when his ribcage hit the shins of another undead.
“Bjorn!” came Tim’s muffled voice, screaming from inside the Jeep.
Time seemed to slow down as he looked up. He could see the face of the boy that knocked him off, leaning over the edge of the roof of the Jeep, his mouth an “O” of surprise and fear. At least two undead were leaning down towards him, hands reaching and mouths open, leaning in hungrily. In the background, through the legs around him he could see the hundreds of hungry, dead faces, pressed against the windows of the school. They seemed to grow more agitated, almost in a frenzy. Bloodlust? he thought.
Time snapped back to normal as one, then a second window shattered outwards, spilling dozens of the dead out onto the blacktop, barely a dozen feet from Bjorn. His stupor broke and he jumped up, slapping hands away and pushing at the things around him. One of the dead fell away while two others clung to him with talon-like hands. The one he had initially crashed into, dressed in janitor’s coveralls, gripped his ankle and pulled itself towards his single-booted foot. Its mouth hungrily reaching for him, the other undead, a pimply teenager, had a two-handed grip on his forearm and was trying to lean in for a bite. He swung his arm violently, trying to shake free of the teenager as he felt a sharp pain in his toes. Looking down, the janitor had clamped its mouth around the toe of his boot.
The pain was excruciating. Bjorn kicked once, twice then three times with his other, shoeless foot, connecting with the undead’s face at eye level each time, until he was finally able to pry his boot out of its mouth. It was at this moment that he felt the brush of skin on his arm. He spun and recoiled from the sensation just in time to rip his arm away from the teenager’s closing mouth.
Bjorn had no concept of the fact that he was shrieking like a wild animal during the struggle as the pimple-faced undead growled hungrily and pushed hard into him, driving him backward. The rest of the group watched in horror, Laura clasping her palm over Sophie and Luna’s eyes, as Bjorn’s heel hit the body of the janitor, still struggling with his other ankle. He and the teen toppled backward over the prone form of the janitor. Bjorn felt the unyielding concrete curb hit the back of his head and then everything went black.
*
From a distance of five miles, they could see that Jensen was ablaze. The flames billowed black smoke into the cloudless azure sky. The small group of able-bodied men and women gathered in a tight knot around Yen, watching the black smoke for many minutes in silence. Finally, Yen spoke.
“I need a volunteer to sco
ut ahead.” He looked at Joseph hopefully, but the man had taken a fever over the course of the day’s travels and looked pale and weak atop his horse.
“I’ll do it,” Ti answered, cantering his horse forward a few steps.
Yen knew his younger brother was able and eager to move out from the shadow he cast, but his protective nature over the boy he had helped to raise, caused him to hesitate. He stared long and hard into his younger brother’s face, as if willing him to change his mind. Finally, when no other voices lifted to volunteer, he nodded assent. He understood that if he were to refuse Ti, he would let the rest of the group know that he placed his brother’s life above theirs. That was something he knew that a leader would never do. As much as he hated the idea of sending his brother alone into danger, he knew that he had no choice in it.
“We need to cross the river using the bridge here, there’s no way around that. We need to find out what we are riding into, though. Approach the town from the river and see if the bridge and surface roads are navigable. We’ll avoid venturing into town altogether, if we can.”
“What about Walker?” Ti asked.
“If Walker is still alive, he will have to find us,” Yen replied quietly.
Ti nodded and urged his mount forward.
“Ti!” Yen called to him.
Ti slowed, looking to his older brother.
“We’ll be coming behind you, obviously slower due to those on foot. Be swift and take no risks.”
Without further acknowledgment, Ti rode off, urging his stallion to speed. Yen started his mount off at a trot, allowing the people on foot to keep up, or at least stay within sight, as he watched his little brother ride off into the unknown. They had just reached the outer edge of a state-run conservation area when the sounds of heavy hooves ahead caused them to pause. After a few moments of waiting in silence, Ti came bursting through the shrubbery ahead, skidding to a stop in front of them.
“The town is in ruins. Those things are all over the place.”
“The bridge?” Yen asked eagerly.
“Still there, looks navigable. There are a lot of cars and the afflicted on it, though.”
Yen paused and dismounted; he wanted a moment to ponder their options. They might be able to find a ford in the river that the horses could cross, but those people on foot would be stranded or swept away by the river’s strong current. At last, he ceded that the bridge was the only option; unless they were willing to travel hundreds of miles further to reach the next crossing. He dismissed the idea without even considering it as an option, knowing that the eldest among them wouldn’t survive that kind of journey through the high desert. Already, he could see the short trip from the reservation had sapped the last of the strength from many of them.
“We have to chance it,” he stated flatly to the crowd that had gathered on Ti’s return. “Everyone take a few minutes to collect yourselves, make peace with the danger we are about to face. Try and find a weapon if you can. We leave in ten minutes.”
He moved to the edge of the river, seeking a few moments to himself. He found a seat atop a large rock on the river’s edge, where he sat holding Petal’s reins loosely in his hand. He stared with eyes unseeing, twenty feet down to the churning green water below. He focused on his breathing to center himself. Alone, with just the sound of the river and the wind occupying his senses, he found peace. This was the closest thing he had ever known to meditation, allowing the sights and sounds calm his nerves and rejuvenate him. As the deadline to their departure neared, he forced his attention away from the river and back to the impending task.
He checked his rifle and pistol, making sure they were both ready for a fight if he needed them; both were fully loaded and loose in their holsters. With one more deep breath and glance back to the roiling waters below, he mounted Petal and trotted her back towards Ti and the others. The rest of the Ute, upon seeing him mount up, slowly drifted back towards him, gathering to continue their pilgrimage. Yen kept the horsemen at the same pace as the pedestrians, choosing to move as one cohesive unit, rather than strung out over a half-mile of open land as they had in the open country.
Twenty minutes of silently picking their way through the dense brush and vegetation and they finally moved clear of the waterfowl area. The bridge came into sight, a mere quarter-mile ahead and fifty feet above them. The sight of dozens of the afflicted milling about across its span unnerved the more prone to panic among them.
As they began their final approach to Route 40, shadows lengthened with the afternoon blending into evening. As they stepped onto macadam, leading through a huddle of houses, up to the bridge, the obscured shadowy features of the afflicted that were milling about on the roadway started coming into focus, showing obvious signs of malady. Their heads lolled at strange angles, obviously broken limbs dragged along, and as they pressed in ever closer, their breathless moans drifted over on the stagnant air. The tension was building as they moved among the homes. Even the horses showed their unease, needing to be reined in constantly.
A roar split the air, sending a ripple of fear through the group. The first roar was followed by another and then more cascading away into the distance. Yen couldn’t be sure, but it seemed to him that the afflicted on the bridge above started actively looking about, almost as if they were searching. Their milky white eyes eventually turned on the cluster of forty people approaching from below. Yen hoisted his rifle to his shoulder in anticipation as the afflicted started their sluggish gait, moving towards them. A violent flurry of noise and movement came from ahead, and Yen turned to watch as two of the fast things tore around the side of a building, running headlong towards them. Panic started to well inside him; these were the same kind of afflicted that had stormed into the reservation two days previous. They hadn’t seen the fast afflicted since, and Yen was beginning to hope that it had been a trick of the eye, or an anomaly. He took aim quickly, firing his .35 Remington directly into the chest of the first one. His jaw dropped when the hole appeared, perforating its chest, right where its heart should be and the thing didn’t slow. It didn’t even acknowledge that it had received the mortal wound. Not even breaking stride, it continued sprinting toward them, roaring in with its head thrown back. He forced the bewilderment from his head and took aim again. His second shot was hurried as it closed the distance to a hundred feet, striking it in the leg, just above the kneecap. It toppled heavily, face-first onto the roadway. No sooner than the afflicted had slid to a stop on the pavement, when it lunged to its feet once again, started back towards them again at a quick hobbling limp.
Raoul came up next to him on foot as the second afflicted blazed past the first, injured one. He shouldered his rifle and fired a shot, scoring a hit in the right side of its head. It immediately dropped to the dirt and lay unmoving.
“Head shot!” Raoul called, swinging his weapon to bear on the remaining afflicted, limping toward them.
He fired again with the same result. Yen looked down at his hands that were shaking with nerves, and set them about reloading the two shells he had spent. He set them about the task to keep them busy, hoping that no one else saw them tremor. The group hesitated, none of them wanting to risk moving nearer to the bodies. The dozen slow afflicted had moved off the bridge and were coming down the side road. Raoul started picking them off with the precision of an expert marksman. He had served two tours in Iraq and the hours of practice came through, his marksmanship impressed them all. Yen forced the fear aside, gathered the reins, and spurred Petal to move forward. He checked to make sure the rest of the group was falling in line to follow. Raoul, now atop his horse, was busily firing his rifle into the approaching afflicted, trying to keep the path ahead clear so that the pedestrians could follow along after in relative safely.
They climbed the gentle rise and moved out onto the wide flat surface of Route 40, pausing for a few moments so that the last of the stragglers could catch up. Yen, atop Petal, scanned the roadway. Looking eastward, he could see dozens of the things
strewn about, milling around aimlessly on the bridge. As he scanned the area, Raoul started clearing the afflicted off the bridge, or at least the ones he was confident of a head-shot on. It was when Yen looked westward down the roadway towards the heart of Jensen, and the reservation many miles beyond, that his heart sank. A quarter-mile down the road a solitary man on horseback rode towards them, and behind him trailed what looked like thousands of the afflicted.
“Run!” he screamed at those around him, urging them towards the bridge as he watched the horseman gallop towards them. “Get across the bridge, now!”
Yen lingered as the procession moved past, onto the bridge. He watched as one of the fast afflicted came out from between two parked cars at the rider. The horse the man rode on shouldered through it, blasting it down to the pavement. Its reaching hands managed to get a grasp on the horse’s front leg, tripping it up. The horse collapsed violently to the roadway, spilling the man to the ground ahead of it. Yen watched in silence as the scene unfolded, while the last of the elderly in his group shuffled around him, onto the bridge. He strained his eyes, struggling to see if he could make out whether the man was Walker, Javier, or just some other unfortunate soul, but the lowering sun was in his eyes and he couldn’t be certain. In the span of two heartbeats, the afflicted enveloped the man and his horse. His worst fears were confirmed as they swept over, around, and past, continuing down the main thoroughfare towards them.
Harvest of Ruin (Book 2): Dead of Winter Page 16