I reholstered the gun. “Time to try for the four-minute mile,” I muttered to myself.
I began to jog south to where I-30 was. It only took me ten minutes to get there. Thankfully, I only saw a couple of zombies, and they were far enough way I don’t think they even detected me.
After running up the ramp onto the highway, I saw the vista of the blacktop extending off into the distance. Wrecked cars littered the side, and bones were scattered everywhere. Many people had been attacked as they had tried to drive out of the city.
I noticed that there seemed to be a clear lane extending down the middle of the highway, and it was obvious that some cars and trucks had been dragged out of the way.
Was the highway still in use?
I learned soon enough. I began to walk eastward and soon saw a police car blocking the center lane. When I got close enough for whoever was in the car to see me, its lights went on.
A real live cop stepped out.
I picked up my pace and smiled as I came up to him.
He had his hand on his gun in its holster, but smiled back.
“Finally leaving Big D?” he asked.
“Yep, I’ve been holed up since the outbreak,” I said. “I didn’t know there were any police still around.”
“The police department administration collapsed a long time ago—well, fuck, the whole city did—but there’s still a group of us in our own militia, and we try to keep the highway open during the day.”
I looked up and down the highway. “I didn’t know there was any travel between cities anymore.”
“Not much,” he said. “But we get maybe three convoys a day, mainly from the East Coast. Even with a ‘muni survival rate of only ten percent, that left like 800,000 people in New York City alone.”
He followed my gaze. ‘Of course, the shamblers have largely reduced that number, but there are still thousands of people trying to work their way west,” he said. “We have the farms and resources to support them.”
“Are the motherfuckers ever going to go completely away?’ I snapped.
“It won’t be much longer,” he said. “I know a fellow who was a mortician, so he knows the rate of decay of a human corpse. He said in about three more years none of them should be ambulatory.”
“What about the recently bitten or dead?”
He actually laughed. “Most of the people stupid or reckless to have been bitten have already been turned,” he said. “Folks like us—we had the sense to survive.”
He got a serious look. “Where are you heading, son?”
“A small town in East Texas, called Pittston, near the Arkansas border.”
“I know of it. That’s a long way. You planning to go on foot?”
“I have to get a start. The only possible living family member I have may be there,” I said.
“If there is an eastbound convoy, maybe they’ll have room for you,” he said. “Problem is, not many people are heading east.”
He waved a finger. “If no eastbound convoy appears, stay with me until we gather up and head to our place at sundown. You can come back out tomorrow. It’s probably safer.”
“I have plenty of guns.”
He turned me around and looked in my backpack.
“Son, I got more than that in my back pocket. Besides, what will you do when you have to sleep at night?”
“Climb up a tree, I suppose.”
He laughed as his radio came on.
He reached into the patrol car.
“This is Silly Jack, over.”
“Silly Jack, this is Ten of Spades. We have eyes on two jerkies heading north on State Fair Avenue towards you. Over.”
He walked over to the side of the highway and pulled out binoculars. He leaned on the concrete wall and peered into the distance, then walked back to his car.
“Ten of Spades, this is Silly Jack. Target acquired, will terminate with extreme prejudice, over.”
He took a high-powered hunting rifle from the patrol car and walked back to the wall. I joined him.
He peered again through his binoculars and pointed.
“See the fuckers up the road?”
I peered and could just see through the shimmering heat distortion two human-like figures walking away from the ruins of the Texas State Fairgrounds.
“Yes. Do they have any clothes on?”
He kept peering. “Not any more. Look like real jerkies.”
He held up the binoculars with one hand while extending the other one sideway to me.
“By the way, the name is John, John Sillman.”
I shook his hand. “I’m John Joseph Adamcek. My friends used to call me Adam.”
“You can call me Jack,” he said. “When I still had living friends, they called me that. I know how that goes.”
The zombies kept walking towards us. “You want to take a crack at them?”
I shook my head. “I don’t have as large a supply of ammo as I’m sure you have.”
He smiled as he put the binoculars down on the wall and picked up the rifle.
“You’re sharp, kid. I know why you’re still alive.”
He loaded the magazine, peered through the telescopic sight, and pulled the trigger.
You could see the large dark puff of ejecta as one zombie got it in the head and dropped down.
“You’re good at this,” I said.
“I’ve been getting a lot of practice lately,” he deadpanned. He took a second shot.
You could see the small white puff as the bullet struck the pavement behind the second zombie.
He growled. “Fuck, I have to waste a shot. Yeah, we have all the ammo that the Dallas PD had, but God know when there will be any more.”
He looked through the sight again. “Steady, steady,” he said to himself.
Another crack. This time the zombie went down.
“You’re still a crack shot,” I said.
“I was a sniper in Afghanistan,” he said. “That was one good thing I brought back from that war.”
I looked across the landscape. “Hey, where is your spotter?”
He pointed with the rifle barrel. “Straight ahead, top booth on the Ferris wheel.”
I looked and saw that at the top of the Texas State Fair Ferris Wheel one booth was rocking ever so slightly.
“Wow, that’s a great idea! But how does he climb up there?”
“He doesn’t. There is a flywheel you can turn manually with a chain,” he said. “It was a failsafe in case of a loss of power, to get people off the wheel. Each morning we pull up a fire engine and give the wheel a half turn.”
He turned and stashed the hunting rifle back in the patrol car.
“But we don’t supply cotton candy.”
***
As Jack supposed, there were no eastbound convoys that day. There were a couple going on west, to Fort Worth and Odessa. It was good to see clusters of healthy, live people—albeit dirty and often very, very nervous.
One convoy had started in Atlanta. The other had originated in Newark, New Jersey.
After the second convoy left, Jack shook his head.
“God only knows what they saw,” he muttered. “It was really, really bad in the northeast.”
As the sun began to set behind Fort Worth, we got into his patrol car and went to the “fortress,” which was a sturdily-built Sears Roebuck store on Ross Avenue that had been shuttered a few years earlier. It had the advantage of having its own parking lot and was the largest building in its East Dallas neighborhood, so it was easily defended with clear lines of sight.
It was also reinforced by being surrounded with 20 fire engines—an impressive sight.
Generators and propane kept things humming. For better or worse, all the men in the militia that defended the interstate were either single or had lost their families and had no other attachments.
When I sat down to dinner with them, they were genuinely curious to hear of my experience hiding out in Oak Lawn.
“I
cain’t believe you had enough food for over a year,” one said.
“I don’t know why, but a bodega nearby wasn’t looted in the initial riots. I think the Hispanic families left to get back to Mexico, and the white people didn’t even know what it was,” I said. “The signage was in Spanish.”
Everyone agreed that I should be able to catch a convoy eventually heading east on I-30, but getting from there to Pittston would be a problem.
Pittston is 40 miles north of the interstate.
“That’s gonna be a rough hike, 40 miles through the Piney Woods,” said one officer.
“From what I’ve heard, there are hardly any shamblers in the Piney Woods and Big Thicket,” said another. “The black bears came out of the creek bottoms and ate them. The cougars also ate the shamblers.”
A third snorted. “Thank God the virus doesn’t affect animals.”
“So I’m more likely to be eaten by a bear, then?”
There were grunts of affirmation all around.
I pushed my plate away from me. “Well, I’ll die well fed, then. Or the bear will have a good meal himself, I suppose.”
One officer spoke up. “What kind of firepower do you have?’
I told him. He reached under his chair and handed me a small burlap sack.
I smiled and reached across the table to take it. “What’s in here? It’s heavy.”
“Hand grenades. You know the saying, close only counts…”
I peered inside and saw he was telling the truth. “Damn, you all have everything!”
Jack winked and me and said to the others, “Should we tell him about the nuke in the basement?”
I didn’t know if he was joking or not.
***
As hoped for, bright and early the next morning a convoy came down the interstate that had started in Albuquerque and was headed towards Shreveport—specifically, Barksdale Air Force Base.
Jack asked the Captain in charge if they could take me to Mount Vernon—about sixty miles west of Texarkana. I would be on my own the rest of the way to Pittston.
We shook hands as I climbed into the Buffalo.
“Good luck, youngster,” said Jack. “I hope you make it safe.”
“Thanks for everything,” I said. “Maybe some day I’ll be back, when things come back.”
“Things will come back,” he said. “But it will never be the same.”
He looked sad as he turned away. One of the officers back at the fortress had told me Jack had had a wife and five children—and he’d had to euth them all.
The Captain of the convoy said the Buffalo truck leading the convoy had seen service in Iraq and was being refurbished at the Red River Army Depot when the zombie plaque struck.
Riding in that truck was the most secure, comfortable feeling I’d felt in two years. A Buffalo is a six-wheeled, 38-ton, armor-plated supertruck designed to set off EODs by driving over them. A zombie Godzilla couldn’t have bothered us.
But that was only 90 minutes. Then we reached Mount Vernon.
As I got out, the Captain came to me and asked if planned to go to Pittston on foot.
“What choice do I have?” I felt it was a stupid question.
He smiled in a knowing way and pointed to a ruined building on the frontage road. The sign read, “Piney Woods Bicycle Shop.”
“That place is still full of bicycles,” he said. “Grab one, it will get you on your way a lot faster.”
I thanked him and walked onto the frontage road as the convoy pulled away. I went over to the building.
There were the usual bones and signs of carnage, but it didn’t appear to be looted. To anyone who had to travel any kind of long distance, I would think a bicycle would seem insufficient transportation. But I only had to go 40 miles—probably less, since my brother had said the bridges into the county had been demolished.
Still, a bicycle could get me to the county line.
I found a tandem bicycle with its tires still supple and inflated. I took the front seat and headed up the road towards Pittston singing “Daisy Bell.”
***
There were few abandoned vehicles along the way, and no signs of life—or zombies. There were still the occasional piles of bones along the roadside, but that was such a common sight as to be hardly noteworthy.
“This is like the way the pioneers found the landscape,” I thought. “Pretty much empty.”
Except now the emptiness was littered with roads and abandoned homes.
Ten miles up the road I saw a brick house that looked fortified. I didn’t slow down, and I saw a rifle pointing out a slot in a bricked-up window. A hand-lettered sign was tacked on the remains of the mailbox and said, “Move on.”
Twenty miles up the road—halfway to Pittston—I reached the county line: the Sulphur River. The main span had been a heavy reinforced concrete bridge. I don’t know how they blew it up, but they had. I would have to swim across. Because of weight, I would have to leave most of my firearms behind. I put a Ruger SR22 in a watertight pack I had packed, and stowed it in another watertight bag I had brought along, where I stashed my clothes. I would swim across naked.
The water was filthy and full of silt, but the current was weak and I was able to swim and splash myself across fairly easily. Once on the opposite bank, I used a towel (thanks for the reminder, Douglas Adams) to dry off, and I got back on the highway.
I left the bicycle, plus a backpack of firearms and canned goods, behind on the far bank.
My luck ran out at a small crossroads community called Nealey. There had been one store there, which I saw was a burned-out ruin as I walked up.
Three shamblers seemed to come out of the ruins—one woman and two men. I was startled to see how fast they moved.
I pulled out the Ruger and cursed as I saw they were “newbies”—recently turned zombies. The poor bastards must have held out there for years and then someone—or something—had finally gotten to them.
The woman had dark long lustrous hair, like a Native American, and her clothes were all still intact. The men looked enough alike that they were probably father and son. They both wore heavy-duty farm work clothes. None of them showed much signs of decay at all.
Like I said, because of their condition, they moved fast enough that I looked around quickly for a defensive position. Thankfully there was a burned-out gasoline tanker truck right there.
I climbed the ladder and got on the top. As stiff as he was, the “father” still tried to climb the ladder. Since I was overlooking him, it made for an easy shot into the top of his head.
The “mother” and “son” staggered over his body and also tried to climb the truck. My next shot hit the mother in the chest. I took a deep breath and aimed again, and my next shot went into her forehead.
The “son” groaned and sniffed loudly. He raised his head and reached for the ladder. My shot went through his left eye.
I slid down the side of the tank and jumped onto the parking lot.
I looked at the dead “family.”
“Poor bastards,” I thought. “To make it so long, and still end up like this.”
Their appearance told me that there might still be shamblers wandering around, so I kept my guard up as I walked the rest of the way into Pittston.
As I neared the town, I could see a recent grass fire had spread unchecked and burned many homes. I walked into the downtown and saw no signs of life or activity there.
It was clear there had been some kind of battle. The skulls of zombies with bullets holes in their brains were all over.
Lots of zombies. Enough that I supposed the small population of ’munis left in Pittston might have been overwhelmed, or at least had retreated.
I found our home. It was ruined, but unburnt. There was no sign of my brother, but also no sign of fighting or violence. He must have retreated to some fortress of his own making. But where? I didn’t see obvious clues. He probably had left in a rush—the kitchen cabinet doors were all open.
&nbs
p; I walked back to the downtown area and walked to the White Oak Creek which ran through the city. It was large enough that it really should have been called a river—but it was a creek compared to the Sulphur River to the south and the mighty Red River to the north. There was an old railroad bridge across the creek. It was an old rusty steel girder thing, and it had been dynamited, also. The remains poked out of the water on both sides of an abutment in the middle of the creek that remained. I looked and saw that the small shack that had been in the middle of the bridge, on top of the abutment, was still intact. It had held railroad switching equipment.
When we were kids, my brother would fish on the banks of the creek. The shack had been there as long as we could recall. It was tin, perhaps six feet wide and twelve feet long. The only concession to modernity was that, a few years earlier, the tin roof was replaced by panels of solar cells so the equipment inside could still operate during a power outage.
I squinted in the dwindling light. There were pieces of the old steel trestle sticking out from both sides of the abutment. As I peered, I realized there seemed to be graffiti written on the rusty girders.
I walked down the bank of the creek to get a better look. I could just make out the writing, spray painted in white on the right side.
“JOKERS,” it said. I looked on the left side of the abutment.
It read “CLOWNS.”
I took out the Ruger and shot into the air. The door opened and my brother stepped out.
He waved his arms and yelled. “Hey, I see you found me, little brother!”
I walked so I was opposite the abutment. “That was a good clue!”
Our father had grown up in the 1970s, and one day, when my brother and I were called on the carpet for some stupid shit we did, he looked back and forth at us, and quoted that song by Stealers Wheel.
We never forgot it, and every so often, even as adults, we’d bring that moment back up again and laugh.
“How do you expect me to get to you?” I shouted.
“Same way you got across the Sulphur River,” he called back.
After I swam to the bottom of the abutment he threw down a rope and hauled me up.
I walked inside the shack and saw he had gutted it. It was tight but he had a hot plate, a small refrigerator and a radio. A bed was propped up against the wall.
Apoc Series (Vol. 1): Whispers of the Apoc [Tales From The Zombie Apocalypse] Page 25