She finally noticed Trent’s efforts to escape and laughed heartily. “You’re not getting off that easy.” Sarah re-taped his limbs to the chair and made sure to rip the long hair off his arms in the process. “And I watched your friends leave, so don’t expect any last minute James Bond-type rescues. No, you’re going to hear what I have to say for once in your life. Then you’re going to feel the same pain that I did. And then you’re going to die.”
Chapter 39
Road Trippin’
“Why didn’t she tell me she was pregnant?” Charlie said upon hearing the news.
Left-Nut smirked. “Who says it’s yours?” At least he’d finally stopped cursing at Rob.
Oddly enough, this revelation hit Charlie harder than the recent death and destruction had. “Of all the times to be a dad. And what if I never find them?”
“Maybe you shouldn’t have left her for that rat?” Left-Nut said, and the look he received in return could have melted his face off.
“It’s really touching,” Marquell said as he loaded several Chinese assault rifles onto the back of an ATV. “But this ain’t the place to be sharing y’alls motherfuckin’ feelings right now.”
Rob noticed they were missing members from their group. “Where’s Russ?”
Charlie looked down. “Russ’s gone. He sure went out in a blaze of glory, though.”
“And Trent?”
Charlie’s expression turned from sorrow to anger. “Piece of shit ran off. I knew he’d wind up screwing us.”
“Kinda like the way a monkey always ends up fucking a football,” Smokey said. “You know it’s going to, but it still surprises you when it happens.”
Rob sighed deeply. “He was doing so good there for a while, especially with Brandon.”
“What’s plan B?” Left-Nut asked. “I mean, your first one worked out so great.”
“We could fight our way through downtown. Now we got grenades and stuff,” Rob said and shrugged.
Charlie pointed to the mounds of dead soldiers. “That didn’t help them much.”
“Okay, what then?” Left-Nut said.
Charlie had already weighed the pros and cons of several routes and settled on one in particular. “Main roads and highways aren’t an option. There’s too many zombies and who knows how many Chinese assholes out there, so we'll head south to the Blue Line tracks and take them west to the Metra Tracks. Then we follow the forest preserves and power lines all the way home.”
“Seems like a lot of dicking around,” Left-Nut said. “Why not hit the highways and haul ass? I could be banging your sister by lunchtime.”
“This way we avoid blocked roads and checkpoints. It’s about ninety miles to my parents’ place once we get outside the city. That base Rob talked about is just south of there.”
Marquell seriously considered shooting his new acquaintances just to get them to shut up, but he knew there was no point. Plus, they had saved his life, and loyalty was the one virtue the killer respected. “Good luck with that shit,” he said and hopped on a four-wheeler. “I got my dog’s medicine and food, so I’m out.”
“They all died for your dog?” Charlie said, dumbfounded.
“Didn’t you just risk lives for a damned raccoon?” came the reply. Charlie nodded and Marquell continued. “If ya’ll ever want work and don’t mind getting your hands dirty, come see me. Later Smokey.” With that, The Butcher of Richard Daley Prison left.
The guys would never know how lucky they were to survive their encounter with Marquell, but they were far from being in the clear. For starters, many of those recently dispatched were stirring from their temporary deaths. Rob used his crooked bat to clobber a nearby zombie as it struggled to rise on shattered legs. “We need to decide.”
“It’s my way or the highway, literally,” Charlie said and climbed onto one of the remaining four-wheelers. Smokey jumped behind him and Rob and Left-Nut took the other. His way it was.
Moments later, the survivors sped south full throttle into their next half-baked scheme. They hadn’t seen any foreign invaders, but zombies were a different story. Soon a veritable apocalyptic army swarmed behind them and was growing by the block. One wrong turn and it was curtains.
“How much gas do we have?” Smokey asked while hanging on for dear life as the wind blew his long brown hair straight back.
Charlie looked at the gauge for the first time. “Enough to get to the burbs.”
“We’re running out of gas,” Rob said as he pulled up next to them.
“Oh come on.” Charlie stopped next to an overpass as the crowd drew nearer, three hundred yards and closing. “Go ahead and find a garden hose in someone’s yard and start siphoning. We’ll slow these jagoffs down and meet you at the tracks.”
Rob nodded and peeled out as Charlie and Smokey steadied their machine guns across the seat. “Fuck, how do you shoot this thing?” Smokey said while searching for the safety. Charlie had the same problem as the crowd neared.
TATATATATATATATATATAT!
Smokey’s gun discharged and sent bullets through the windows of nearby buildings. “Here it is.” He fired in earnest and began dropping zombies by the handful. “It’s a turkey shoot!” he added as shell casings sprinkled around them. Unfortunately, many were merely wounded and rejoined the others in their deadly march.
Charlie also blasted away but the enemy kept coming like waves at the beach. Both guns clicked empty. “Um, how do we reload?” Smokey asked.
Charlie shrugged his shoulders. “Cheese it,” he said and jumped onto the four-wheeler.
Smokey turned to follow but was stopped as bodies crashed all around him, falling from the overpass and hitting the pavement with sickening, wet thuds. Heavy breathing and the sound of gnashing teeth came next as the crawling monsters clamored for sustenance, grasping at the stoner’s exposed legs.
Charlie calmly drew his pistol and ended the three ghouls with well-placed headshots. Smokey climbed aboard as Charlie retrieved a fragmentation grenade, pulled the pin, and tossed it towards the surging multitude.
BOOOM! Body parts and shrapnel zipped by while they took off, barely fast enough to avoid the survivors. But avoid them they did, and the maniacs were quickly left behind with nothing to show for their efforts but gaping wounds and internal bleeding. Charlie was on top of his game once again.
The tracks loomed up ahead and gunfire signaled that the area wasn’t as empty as Charlie had hoped. Rob and Left-Nut were busy fending off their own crowd of savages.
Charlie pulled up long enough to watch how Rob reloaded and then took off again with his friends close behind. Soon they zoomed down the tracks, avoiding abandoned trains, dead bodies, and of course, zombies, zombies and more zombies.
Every tunnel brought more challenges now that they had to rely solely on headlights and muzzle flashes to lead the way. Because of this, their trips underground became a blur of shooting and screaming, near misses and carnage. Each subterranean nightmare lasted only a few minutes, and everyone breathed a huge sigh of relief upon bursting into the light for the final time, figuratively reborn. Except for Left-Nut.
“Wow, check out your hair,” Smokey said as they got into the open.
Left-Nut frantically touched his head. “What, what is it?” Miraculously, his already pale locks had turned several shades whiter from the insanity of the tunnels.
“Your head’s whiter than Gandalf’s balls,” Smokey said with a laugh and received a middle finger in return.
Left-Nut’s condition was of no concern other than comic relief, and the trip down the Metra railway continued, growing easier as they reached further into the suburbs. Now they went miles at a time without spotting a zombie, and the few stragglers they did see were easily avoided.
They followed the tracks into a thickly wooded preserve where the cover of the forest allowed them to regroup in the shade of some tall oak trees. A swiftly flowing river nearby gave off a calming aura, and the men stretched out while breathing in the fresh ai
r. It had been the longest morning of their lives.
“That’s the Des Plaines River,” Charlie said and checked his tires for leaks. “Which means Maywood is right on the other side of the bridge. We can cross over and follow the power lines that go by two-ninety. Those will run all the way to Cantonville.”
“You pulling this straight out of your butt?” Rob asked and drank from a thermos attached to his vehicle. Charlie nodded and Rob slapped him on the shoulder, a little too hard. “Keep it up, muchacho.”
After relaxing and making fun of Left-Nut for several minutes, the journey began again amidst rising spirits. As they crossed a narrow stone bridge, Charlie finally believed they could survive the trip. Then something whizzed past his head and bounced across the water below like a rock skipped by a child.
The crack of the rifle caught up a second later, and more splashes hit the water followed by bullets ricocheting off the tracks. A Chinese checkpoint on another bridge had spotted them and opened fire. Only a hundred and fifty yards separated them.
“Punch it!” Charlie yelled and slammed on the gas as a hail of bullets peppered the ground all around them. They sped off the bridge and lurched down an embankment with Rob’s ATV nearly tipping over in the process. He used his massive frame to muscle two tires back to the ground and kept right on going while Left-Nut clung to him like a terrified girlfriend.
Having solved the mystery of the missing zombies, the guys now had to avoid running into another patrol. So they cruised through the charred ruins of Maywood at top speed. Soon the massive transmission towers loomed dead ahead. In normal life, the hundred and eighty-foot tall structures had been easy to ignore, but seeing the steel behemoths up close for the first time was simply awe-inspiring. More importantly, the open ground below them went on as far as the eye could see. They entered the path and never looked back, leaving the hell of the dead city behind for good.
The group stopped an hour later to let their engines cool down. Having prepared ahead, Charlie cracked open a fanny pack full of teriyaki beef jerky.
“Nice fanny pack, homo,” Left-Nut said, though he didn’t put much effort into it.
“You don’t want any?” Charlie asked, not bothering to point out that Left-Nut actually had engaged in gay sex.
Of course he wanted some, and Charlie divvied up the dehydrated meat as evenly as possible. It was the last of their food and everyone savored each bite of the salty treat.
“It’s time for a celebration bitches,” Smokey said while pulling out a thick joint from his pocket. “Marquell hooked me up for old-time’s sake.”
“I’ll pass,” Charlie said. “But go ahead and blaze up. You earned it.”
The others partook and within minutes were coughing and blowing smoke rings into the wind like bored high schoolers. Time slowed and their stress levels dropped. It seemed Marquell still had good shit.
They finished smoking and saddled up for the last leg of their fantastic journey, a fifty-mile straight shot through the countryside. Five minutes later, however, right as they had achieved maximum buzz, several figures appeared in the distance. Zombies, five burly construction workers to be precise, milled about the base of a transmission tower.
“Go around,” Charlie said. “No need to waste ammo.” As they got closer, though, it appeared there was more to the story. Two men were perched thirty feet up the structure, and they were shouting for help.
The zombies turned and gave chase when they heard the four-wheelers approach, scrambling past each other in their bloodlust. Charlie and Rob pulled over and dropped them in an instant with a volley of bullets. It had become trivial.
Smokey noticed something odd as the strangers climbed down. One zombie, a half-naked woman, had been motionless before they got there. He verified she was dead as Left-Nut peeked over his shoulder. “Not bad,” the pervert said with a leer. “Is she still warm?”
The two sweaty men, state troopers as evidenced by their clothing, finally reached the ground. They looked like they hadn’t slept in days and smelled even worse. “Thanks. I don’t know how much longer we could have held on,” the taller of them said. “Do you have anything to drink? I was about to drink my own piss.”
Rob handed over his thermos and the man chugged with gusto, spilling much of it down his shirt. Then his throat exploded like a burst water balloon.
Without warning, Smokey had raised his machine gun and killed the man instantly. He turned to shoot the other trooper but the guy sprang upon him and wrestled for control of the weapon, spraying bullets in every direction.
Rob’s brawny hands wrapped around the man’s neck from behind, and after a quick twist and a loud pop, it was all over but the twitching. The trooper’s body slumped to the ground next to his lifeless partner. Smokey’s heavy breathing was the only sound as he rose and tried to compose himself.
“Well, that escalated quickly, ”Left-Nut said and popped out from behind one of the four-wheelers.
“What the shit?” Charlie said, his mouth gaping open at the actions of his mild-mannered friends. “I mean, what kind of weed was that?”
“I was just following Smokey,” Rob said and looked at his hands in horror.
“It wasn’t the weed.” Smokey calmly approached the girl’s corpse and pointed to underwear wrapped around the dead teenager’s neck. “I’ve seen a lot of dead zombies, but I never saw one strangled with lacy panties before. Plus she has no visible bites and that’s a classic ligature mark.”
Charlie wasn’t convinced by Smokey’s deductive reasoning. “Dude, you just murdered those guys.”
“And check out the uniforms. They don’t fit, and look at the short one’s nametag.” Smokey pointed to the man with the broken neck. “Have you ever seen a guy with curly red hair named Ramirez?”
“So?” Charlie said.
“These guys weren’t law enforcement any more than you’re a cowboy or Rob’s a Viking. They obviously stole the uniforms, raped and strangled that poor girl, maybe not even in that order, and then climbed the tower when these dickweeds surprised them.”
“You killed them on a hunch?” Charlie pressed.
“Wake up. They were gonna waste us and take our shit the first chance they got, guaranteed. Probably would have raped Left-Nut too while they were at it.”
“Okay, Sherlock, explain to me how you know all this.”
“Do you have any idea how many episodes of Special Victims Unit I’ve watched? Like, probably all of them. This is second nature to me.”
“That Mariska Hargitay is a total smokeshow for an older chick,” Left-Nut added. “I use to jerky my turkey to her all the time.”
“A little respect, guys?” Charlie closed the dead girl’s eyes and then covered her up with a reflective vest from one of the dispatched zombies.
Left-Nut’s face turned red in anger as he pointed to the ATVs. “Beautiful.” One leaked gas and the other poured out green radiator fluid. Both were ruined. “And I swear I heard banjoes playing earlier.”
The grim reality that their trip would continue by foot settled in, and nobody talked as they somberly dragged the corpses into a pile. After stacking leaves and tinder for kindling, Charlie said a few words and then put to flame the bodies of the poor girl and hapless zombies. Coyotes and crows would take care of the rapists.
“What do we do now?” Rob asked while the crackling funeral pyre became fully engulfed in flame, bathing them with an intense heat.
“We go home,” Charlie said wistfully, almost to himself. Here was that change of scenery he’d wanted. They silently unloaded their gear and headed for the tree line, each lost in his own thoughts.
It was a beautiful day for a walk in the countryside, with the leaves changing and the temperature hitting that magical seventies sweet spot. The sickly-sweet scent of burning bodies followed them across the fields for quite a while, finally replaced by the smells of fall, and maybe a little rain in the distance.
Epilogue
Sarah Birdsong beat
her partner until he passed out. Then she woke him up and did it again. And again. Unluckily for Trent, she was getting bored and there was only one thing left to do. She grabbed the paring knife already used to slice the skin off his knuckles and approached the bound man with a wry smile. “This is it, buddy boy.”
Trent prayed to God for the first time in his life. He didn’t expect an answer.
KSSSSHHHH! The storefront window shattered as a body crashed through it, blinding the two cops with light from outside. Sarah turned to run but Trent used every muscle of his body to kick through the tape holding him back, and he tripped her up with one final act of revenge.
The zombie pounced on her and instantly began to feast. Trent couldn’t see what was happening at his feet but the guttural screaming and kicking told the story in grim detail. The melee stopped and Sarah was obviously dead, which meant Trent was now set to be dessert. He was out of the frying pan and into the fire, so to speak.
The creature stood up, naked and grinning with blood dripping from its mouth like barbecue sauce. Trent instantly recognized the long flowing mullet with a signature bald patch. The zombie was Blake’s Uncle Russ.
Russ nonchalantly pulled the knife sticking out of his arm and then raised his hands up like a caricature of Frankenstein. Mere inches from Trent’s face, Russ opened his bloody mouth wide and… laughed.
“I got you good, man. Did you piss your pants?”
Of course, Trent couldn’t answer with his mouth taped shut. This was a particular problem because Sarah was slowing standing up and an oblivious Russ kept right on blabbering away. The cop tried blinking rapidly to get his attention. It didn’t work.
“Fucking Cliff bit me and I ended up crashing Smokey’s car. FYI, you get a major case of firehole when you become a zombie. Shit myself something awful, so I came here for some new duds. Then I heard the chick going on and on about killing you. It also turns out zombies have great hearing. Who knew?”
Freshly zombified herself, Sarah came to her senses and dove past Russ, landing on top of Trent and knocking the chair backwards with a crash. That was as far as she got. Russ buried the knife to its hilt in Sarah’s heart and then pushed her limp body to the side. She was dead for good this time.
Dead Drunk: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse... One Beer at a Time Page 20