by Ricky Sides
The unenviable task of examining the corpse fell to Ed, who had the most medical experience among them. He squatted beside the vehicle and peered inside, but wasn’t able to determine the cause of death. “One of you guys, watch my back. I’ve got to stick my head inside,” he said as he donned a pair of latex gloves.
“I’ve got you covered,” Jason assured him.
Ed leaned inside the vehicle. The odor assailed his nostrils immediately and he withdrew his head in disgust. “This is going to be tougher than I thought,” he muttered. He took a deep breath and then plunged his head and upper body back inside the burned out auto.
As Ed was examining the body, Herb continued his inspection of the vehicle. When he came around the back of the car and stepped toward Jason, he said, “I didn’t see any other bullet holes entering the car, though I did see a couple of exit holes on the passenger side front door. That means someone was firing high powered weapons.” He frowned and added, “I did learn something disturbing.” He paused for a moment, and then he added, “This car wasn’t wrecked. It looks to me as if the driver stopped and was then attacked, or maybe it was sitting still when whoever did this came upon them.”
Ed withdrew his head from the vehicle and turned away from it. His face had grown flushed from the effort of holding his breath. He exhaled loudly and sucked in a breath of fresh air. He shook his head as he continued to breathe rapidly for a moment as his body sought to oxygenate itself. “Whew! I got lightheaded there toward the end!” he said. Then his face turned grim as he said, “I think he was killed during the night, or maybe it was early this morning. It’s hard to tell. The driver was shot in the side and through the side of the head. Either gunshot would have killed the man.”
“You’re sure it was a man?” Herb asked.
Ed held up a wallet that had survived the fire. He opened it and showed Herb the driver’s license photo that depicted a man who appeared to be in his mid-forties. He handed the billfold to Herb and said, “He had this in his back pocket.”
Herb opened the wallet and looked through the few pictures that it contained in an attempt to learn more about the man who had died on the side of the road. It contained three photographs. One depicted the driver standing with a woman and a young girl. Another had the same woman, looking a bit older, and the child, who appeared to have aged a few years. The third photo was of the same girl who now appeared to be in her early teens.
Herb closed the wallet and asked, “Were the keys in the ignition?”
“I didn’t look,” Ed responded.
Herb nodded and turned toward the window. He took a deep breath, and then he leaned inside and looked at the steering column. He found the keys dangling from the ignition on a steel key ring and extracted the key. He tossed the keys to Jason and said, “Check the trunk.”
Jason moved to the back of the automobile and soon had the trunk open. He found two canvas bags that had survived the fire. They contained articles of clothing, which he reported to Herb.
“Is it all for the same individual?” Herb asked.
“I’m checking. Give me a second,” Jason replied. It didn’t take him long to determine that the two bags contained articles of clothing for women who were several sizes apart. He reported to Herb that he thought one bag was for an adult female and the other for a girl in her teens.
“Damn,” Herb said.
“Whoever did this, took the females,” Jesse said.
“I get so tired of this shit!” Randy said. It wasn’t the first time they had encountered such a scene. In fact, they had investigated several similar incidents in the past, and had been unable to locate the guilty parties.
“Listen!” Jesse said, and held his hand up in a gesture for silence.
The team grew still and listened intently for several moments. Finally, Jesse lowered his hand and shook his head. “Sorry, guys. I thought I heard a woman scream.”
In the silence that followed his comment, they all heard the sound of a low-pitched undulating scream.
“On the bus! Now!” Herb said with a sense of urgency.
Jesse was the last man to board the bus. Hernando had the vehicle in motion before he even reached his seat.
Herb equipped his headset, adjusted its boom microphone, and switched on the voice-activated radio. “Randy, can you hear me?” he asked. The equipment was a new addition to their standard gear that they had acquired on a recent scrounging expedition. Herb was supposed to wear one so that he could communicate better with Randy when he was deployed in his gunner’s chair, but he couldn’t remember whether or not his friend had had his equipped when he went topside.
“I hear you loud and clear, buddy,” Randy replied.
“Use your binoculars and scout ahead of us. That scream sounded as if it was coming from the road in the distance. Let me know at once if you spot trouble.”
“You’ve got it,” Randy promised.
Less than a minute later, Randy reported that he could see a vehicle ahead in the distance, and that several people were outside it. He added that they appeared to be struggling. He said, “I think we can drive right up to them. No one seems to be standing watch. It looks like they are all involved in some sort of brawl or something.”
“Maybe we can, but should we? No, I think we need to deploy a couple of men here,” Herb responded to his second-in-command, and then he ordered Hernando to stop the bus.
Jason and Ed made their way to the front of the bus. Herb handed Jason their remaining hands free radio set and watched as he equipped it. “Get into position to take them from their flank if we have trouble with them,” he instructed the former sergeant who had served in Iraq.
Jason nodded his understanding and stepped toward the door as Hernando brought the bus to a smooth stop. The door opened up and the two team members disembarked quickly.
Hernando had the door closed and the bus back in motion within seconds of their departure. “How do you want to play this?” he asked Herb as he concentrated on driving.
“Roll past them and stop about forty yards from them,” Herb responded. Then he ordered Randy to lower his chair, explaining that he was a sitting duck up there against armed humans.
As Randy’s chair began to descend back into the bus, Herb used his scope of his rifle to examine the truck as well as the group of people they were approaching. The pickup truck was nothing special. It was a red, extended cab, Dodge with faded paint. Three men on the road about twenty-five feet from the truck were struggling to drag two individuals back to their vehicle. The two women were thrashing around and putting up such a fight that it was impossible for Herb to determine if they were the two women in the dead man’s photographs as he suspected.
“Hernando, cut them off from their truck!” Herb instructed when he saw that their vehicle was between them and the men. “Randy, get back topside!” There was no time for Herb to explain his sudden change of heart about using the gunner position. He was too busy getting to the door and preparing to exit the bus as they barreled down on the roadside drama. Jesse was quick to step up behind Herb with his rifle.
“Braking!” Hernando warned. A split second later, the team felt their bodies lurch forward as the bus slowed to an abrupt stop, swerving to the right to cut the strangers off from their vehicle in the process.
Herb was out the door a second after it opened. He moved around the front of their transport and brought his rifle to bear on the men who had stopped struggling with the women and were reaching for pistols in holsters on their belts.
“Freeze!” Herb heard Randy shout in warning. A warning shot followed.
“Whoa, Whoa, Whoa there, man!” one of the men shouted as he raised his hands in the air. “This isn’t what you’re probably thinking!” he added.
“Keep your hands away from those weapons!” Randy warned as Jesse joined Herb. Now all three team members were aiming their weapons at one of the three men.
The men had thrust the two women to the pavement when they saw t
he bus bearing down on them. Their eyes darted fearfully back and forth between the two groups of men.
“Are you ladies okay?” Herb asked.
“Are you going to shoot my husband?” asked one of the women. She was dressed in denim jeans and a red flannel shirt. Her brown hair was tied back in a ponytail. Herb could tell that she wasn’t the woman in the pictures. She added, “Don’t kill him. He’s an asshole, but he’s all I’ve got left in this shitty world.”
“One of these men is your husband?” Herb asked the woman.
“I am,” the man who had spoken earlier said.
“We were just having a family disagreement, and my wife demanded we stop. When I did, she bailed out of the truck with her sister and started walking. My brothers and I were just trying to get them back in the truck. It’s not safe for women to be walking alone. You know that, man.”
“Hell, man, you know stuff like that was dangerous before the world went to hell,” another of the men said.
Herb relaxed a little, but kept his rifle pointed in the direction of the men as he turned to the women and asked, “Is what they are saying true?”
“Yeah, it’s the truth,” said the other woman, who was dressed similarly to her sister and bore a strong family resemblance to her.
Herb tilted his rifle up and shook his head. “I’m sorry folks. We just passed a car where a man had been murdered. He had pictures of two women on him. When we heard a woman scream, we thought that perhaps the people who killed the man were nearby with the women.”
“Are you talking about that corpse in the car that was burned?” asked one of the men.
“That’s right,” Herb said.
“Then I hope you find out who did that shit. That was gruesome as hell. We didn’t stop, but we slowed down and checked it out.”
Herb nodded in understanding. He heard Jason’s voice breaking radio silence when he said he was in position. He knew that the two men were waiting for him to cue their next move. Jason would have noted his relaxed demeanor and would have taken that to mean that the emergency was over. He used the radio to let him know he should come to the bus.
The three men with the women looked tense when they saw two more men step out into view and begin to approach them. Herb noted their anxious expressions and said, “Relax folks. We’re about to load up and continue our journey.”
“You should ask them for directions,” the woman who was married to one of the men said pointedly.
“I doubt they’ve ever heard of the place we’re looking for, babe,” the man said stubbornly.
“Oh, for God’s sake. Are we going to argue about this again?” asked the married woman’s sister. Then she turned to Herb and said, “We’ve heard rumors about a place where people can settle long term. We heard the government set up a safe place with housing and supplies. It’s supposed to be near here, but we’ve been driving around this area for days without finding it. Now the truck is on its last few gallons of gas and we need directions before we end up walking.”
“You’re looking for the refuge?” asked Randy.
“We don’t know what it’s called. That’s what I tried to tell my wife when she insisted I stop and ask the next people we came across about where the place is located. How can they know the answer to that when we don’t know the name of the place?” the husband explained.
“We’re from the refuge,” Herb replied. “We’re on a mission right now, but we can give you directions to get there.”
“My name’s Albert, but my friends all call me Al. Ah, I’m afraid we might have a little less gas than my wife thinks,” the man explained.
“How low are we?” his wife asked.
“We’re on empty, babe,” the husband admitted sheepishly.
“Asshole,” she said as she crossed her arms angrily. “If you’d only stopped and asked for directions like I wanted you to do, we wouldn’t be in this mess.”
Herb sighed and said, “I guess you folks will need to ride with us, but I’m afraid we’ll have to ask you to surrender your weapons, and we still have to complete our mission.”
“I don’t know about turning over our firearms,” one of the brothers said hesitantly. “Can you spare some of your gas?”
“I’m afraid we don’t have any gasoline with us,” Herb explained. “Our bus uses diesel fuel.”
“I don’t know about turning over our guns to these guys, Terri,” Al said reluctantly.
“If they meant us harm, I think we’d be hurting by now,” the spunky woman said.
“Sorry to rush you people, but we need a decision. We still have a long way to go before we finish this mission today, and then we need to get back to the refuge before dark,” Randy said from his perch atop the bus.
It took only about ten minutes to transfer the meager possessions of the five people to the bus and get everyone aboard, and then they were able to resume their mission.
They soon reached the turn to Highway 40 and turned east to head toward Forest City. They had traveled ten miles in that direction before Bill got a hit on the tracer that had been attached to the visitor’s van.
Herb studied the map overlaid with the known locations of the van that they were seeking. The steady red line that led from the refuge ended at the same location as before, and a red dot was situated outside Forest City. An amber line connected the two known locations. That line represented the most probable route the van had taken. By Herb’s estimation, they were now about seventeen miles from it. “Good job, Bill,” he said, praising the work of the computer programmer and technician. “Keep an eye on it for me and let me know if it moves.”
“Will do, Herb,” Bill promised. He was proud of his contribution to the mission.
Herb consulted with Randy. Their original plan had called for them to locate the camp of the visitors, and then proceed on foot to a location as close as possible where they would observe the camp in an effort to determine the nature of the people staying there. Yet, things had changed with the addition of the five newcomers to their party. It would be unthinkable to leave them in the bus while several members of the team exited it to conduct a mission. Therefore, the two team leaders agreed that they should try to get as close as possible in order to observe the camp without leaving the bus.
***
Dana looked out the window of the RV at the camp. “Are you expecting someone?” Big John asked her.
Dana turned around and stared at John for several long moments before she shrugged and said, “Have you ever had the feeling that something was hunting you?”
John nodded his head and said, “Oh yes, and I was right too.”
“Well, that’s the way I’ve been feeling for a couple of days now.” She then related her bizarre encounter with the zombies and the anizombie at the church.
“You think those zombies are hunting you? Or were they the ones that hit my camp last night?” asked John.
“I didn’t see the one that I’m talking about at your camp,” Dana said. “You’ve never seen her, but I’ll bet you’d know her if you saw her. There’s something different about that zombie.”
“Different? In what way is she different?” John asked.
“It’s not something I can pin down or put into words,” Dana said with a shrug.
“Maybe she just scared you.”
“She did give me a scare, but it’s more than just that. I’ve encountered hundreds of zombies in the past months, but not one of them made me feel the way she did.” Dana paused and thought about it for a moment, and then she asked, “Have you ever heard a zombie make a sound, other than a moan?”
“No, I don’t think they make any other sounds,” John responded.
“Well, this one did. She screamed at me.”
“Screamed at you? You didn’t mention that earlier.”
Dana shrugged and said, “I didn’t think you’d believe me. Like I said a minute ago, I’ve seen hundreds of zombies, but I’ve never heard one make any sounds other than moans. I
knew when she screamed that something was different about her.”
“Not necessarily. She may not have turned completely. She could have been in the last stages of the sickness before they die and become a zombie,” John argued.
“Don’t you think I know a zombie when I see one?” Dana asked with an acidic tone to her voice. “She was eating the bodies you people left behind, for God’s sake.”
John laughed and said, “Hell, we’ve encountered several cannibals since the country disintegrated. People are going to eat when they get hungry. If they run out of food and can’t find any, a lot of the survivors wouldn’t hesitate to eat human meat.”
Dana glared at John in anger, but didn’t respond. Instead, she turned back toward the window and looked out at the surrounding countryside. She was looking in the distance because she sensed danger and her mind kept returning to the female zombie she had encountered. Her eyes scanned the road in the distance, half expecting to see zombies walking toward their camp. Instead, she saw a vehicle sitting on the side of the roadway in the distance. “John, bring me your binoculars,” she said.
“Why?” asked the marauder leader.
“I think we’ve got company, and if it’s who I think it is, then we may have a problem.”
John’s curiosity was piqued. He got up and retrieved his binoculars that were stored in a small closet, along with the rest of his gear. “Here you go,” he said to Dana as he nudged her arm with the binoculars.
Dana grabbed the device and used it to study the vehicle sitting hundreds of yards away, near the top of a small rise. “What are you up to, Bennett?” she muttered.
“What are you going on about?” John asked, and then he said, “Let me see those things.”