by Ricky Sides
Dusty’s men would have kept the women prisoners until they tired of them or they died from the abuse, but that wasn’t what happened. As they ran out of food, the people had raided a farmer’s field and taken some of his vegetables. Vulture droppings that contained the Akins’ parasites had contaminated the tomatoes in that field. The parasites were in the tomatoes. The acidic fruit was resistant to them, so they were not plentiful, but they were present in small numbers. On the second day of their captivity, all of the women took sick. They died that night and the next morning seven female zombies were waiting when some of the men opened the door to drag them out of the room in order to continue the gang rapes. This time, the zombies did the dragging. Four of the men died before the rest arrived and killed the zombies. After that, the remaining outlaws avoided keeping prisoners for extended periods of time.
Dusty’s crew was a ruthless bunch of killers. So ruthless, in fact, that Big John had decided to form a pact with them when they wouldn’t join his group. They had worked together twice in the past and Big John had dealt fairly with them. So when he contacted them about his need for additional men to take the refuge, Dusty agreed to the deal in exchange for a share of the supplies.
Thus, it was that Dusty Rutledge and his men were driving down I-40, heading for the refuge. They were riding in a school bus that they had converted into an armor plated transport, not unlike the Mercedes used by Herb’s team in some regards. It had a cutaway section of the roof where a man acted as gunner. They had also installed sections of chain link fence over the windows and doors.
As the driver approached the top of a hill on the highway, he saw the stragglers from Shaunna’s group. Dusty felt the bus braking and he got up to go and see why they were stopping. The gunner fired several shots at the zombies on the highway. By the time he reached the driver, the gunner had cleared out the four stragglers.
The driver got the bus underway again as Dusty instructed. He crested the top of the hill and shouted a curse as he once more slammed on the brakes.
“What now?” Dusty asked as he turned back toward the driver and stared in annoyance. He was forced to grab the back of one of the seats to keep from falling as the driver locked down the brakes and twisted the wheel to the left, taking them across the median into the eastbound lanes. The gunner was firing shot after shot, as rapidly as he could pull the trigger.
The bus came to a screeching halt. Dusty righted himself and stared out the window in shock at the throng of zombies spread along the interstate in close proximity to their bus. “Get us turned around!” he ordered the driver.
“I’m trying, but I think we’re stuck on something!” the driver responded.
“Here they come!” one of the men shouted above the rhythmic firing of the gunner atop the bus.
The driver tried to back the bus up, but couldn’t get the passenger side front tire back up onto the surface of the freeway because the shoulder of the road was several inches lower than the asphalt. That section of the interstate had been under construction and hadn’t been completed before the road crews abandoned their labors due to the zombie outbreak.
“Try rolling it forward and get a running start at it!” Dusty ordered the man, as he rolled down a window and began firing his pistol at the oncoming zombies. His men followed suit, adding their weapons fire to the defense.
The noise level inside the bus grew so loud that no further instructions would be possible. The driver followed Dusty’s instructions and rolled forward several feet. The driver’s side front tire dropped off the asphalt with a sharp jarring motion. The driver knew that getting the vehicle back up onto the road wasn’t going to be possible, but he had his orders, so he tried. Despite his misgivings, he put the bus in reverse and jammed the accelerator pedal all the way to the floor. The heavy vehicle gathered momentum as it lurched backwards, but came to an abrupt halt when the front tires slammed into the edge of the road.
The gunfire inside the bus was so intense that no one heard both front tires blow from the misguided attempt to get it back on the road. To their credit, the men had killed dozens of the approaching zombies, but they were facing hundreds. Soon, they reached the bus and began clawing at the steel wiring that covered the windows.
The driver knew he had to do something before the zombies swarmed over their vehicle and forced their way inside. Backing them back onto the road wasn’t working, so he changed tactics and drove the bus off the road onto the wide shoulder.
Over a dozen zombies had their fingers interlaced in the wire protecting the windows and the doors. The vehicle dragged them along as it gained momentum. The men voiced a ragged cheer and went about the task of shooting the zombies that were clinging to their transport.
The driver, relieved that the intense danger had passed, voiced a nervous laugh as the bus bounced along the shoulder of the road. His relief was short-lived because he soon saw that there was no way to get the vehicle back on the road.
Behind the driver, Dusty cursed as he shot the last zombies that was still trying her best to get inside the bus. “This is going to screw up our schedule,” he said angrily. “By the time we get this thing fixed and make it to the refuge, they will have already taken the compound without us. We can kiss our share of those supplies goodbye. Not to mention the cure John says they have there!” He paused in his rant and shouted, “Get the damned bus back on the highway, you fool!”
“I can’t! The shoulder of the road is too low, and we’ve blown both front tires!” the driver responded.
Dusty cursed their luck as he reloaded his pistol. “Then keep us moving away from all those zombies at least. We’ll eventually come to a place where the shoulder levels out with the road again,” he said in a calmer tone of voice.
The driver didn’t bother to respond. After all, there was nothing else that he could do.
“Hey, they are following us!” one of the men in the rear of the bus shouted.
“Of course they are. That’s what they do, idiot,” Dusty responded.
“Yeah, well, they are gaining on us!” the man countered.
“What?” Dusty shouted incredulously. For the first time, he noted the low rate of speed at which they were traveling. “Speed up, moron!” he screamed at the driver.
“We’re running on two flats! If I’m not careful, we’ll lose the rims too, and then we’ll really be screwed!”
“If those zombies catch us and swarm over the damned bus, we’re as good as dead,” Dusty said as he approached the driver. “Floor it. We’ll get ahead of them and abandon the bus if we have to, but we need to be out of sight long enough that they don’t follow us.”
“Okay, man, but if this blows up in our face, don’t say I didn’t warn you,” the driver argued as he floored the accelerator. This caused the bus to careen from side to side wildly, as he battled the wheel in an attempt to hold a steady course.
“Oh shit!” the driver shouted a few moments later when he saw that they were approaching a bridge. He knew at a glance that getting back onto the interstate before reaching the bridge was not going to be possible.
“Stop!” shouted Dusty who had also seen the problem.
To his credit, the driver tried his best to stop, but the heavy bus had too much momentum for the brakes to bring them to a halt in time. The driver’s side front bumper met the guardrail in a bone jarring collision that caused the rear of the bus to rise in the air a couple of feet before slamming back down to the ground. The force of the impact threw around most of the men inside the bus. The man acting as gunner was thrown clear of his position. He landed on the hood of the bus where he lay still and groaned in pain.
“Out of the bus, men!” Dusty shouted. He grabbed his rifle and ammo satchel that contained loaded magazines for his pistol and rifle. “Let’s go, you assholes!” he yelled again when his men were too slow to respond to his instructions.
The gang leader was the first man out the door. He saw that the bridge spanned a narrow creek that didn’t l
ook too deep. He reached up and grabbed the gunner, who was one of his best men, and pulled him off the hood of the bus. “Get to the creek,” he instructed the man as he held him steady for a moment.
“Okay,” the man responded as the rest of the gang gathered near them.
“Hit the water, men. We go downstream and hope the water covers our scent,” Dusty said. In the distance, he could hear moaning, and thought he even heard a scream.
The men scrambled down a steep embankment and plunged into the waist deep water. Fear lent strength to the men as they sought to escape a veritable army of zombies that was closing in on them.
As he hit the water, Dusty did a quick head count and realized that one of the men was missing. “Where’s Freddy?” he asked the man closest to him.
“He didn’t make it. His head went through the windshield,” the man explained.
“So, he was dead?” asked Dusty.
The former convict shrugged and said, “Wasn’t time to check for certain, but yeah, I think so.”
“Damn, well, maybe they’ll stop to worry with his body for a while before they hunt us,” Dusty replied.
When the leading edge of Shaunna’s army reached the bus, several of the zombies stopped to get the driver who groaned and woke up in time to see death coming for him. As blood flowed down his ruined face, he felt the teeth of more than one zombie tearing into his flesh.
Then Shaunna arrived with her anizombie German Shepherd. They both ignored the lone man who was being eaten alive in favor of the fresh scent trail of the rest of the men. They led the rest of the army down to the creek bank. The quarry they sought had rounded a bend in the stream, so they had disappeared from view, but Shaunna could smell them and knew which direction to take. Her anizombie didn’t even hesitate. It ran along the edge of the creek in the direction the men had taken.
Dusty Rutledge led his men in a desperate attempt to elude the zombies. The men waded through the water as quietly as possible, ignoring the bone chilling cold. In the distance, they heard the screams of the doomed driver as he met his fate. The gang leader looked at the man who’d claimed he was dead and said, “I guess he wasn’t quite dead.”
“Damn, man, I hate that. I’d never leave any of you to the zombies if I thought you were still alive. I really did think he was dead,” the man said defensively.
Dusty nodded as if he believed the man and accepted his word on the matter, but secretly, he was glad that they had left the driver to his fate. That had bought them all precious time to make good their escape.
“Hey, man, there’s a dog on the creek bank behind us,” one of the men said.
“Better a dog than a zombie,” quipped one of the men.
“Not if the bitch barks and draws those dead freaks down on us,” Dusty said. He considered his options. A shot would bring the zombies to the area, so shooting it was out. They could stab it, but the odds favored the animal barking, growling, or yelping, either of which would draw attention to them. “Well, it’s not barking so leave it alone and ignore it,” he decided when a good option eluded him.
“Do zombies get in the water?” asked one of the men.
“How the hell would I know?” asked Dusty irritably.
“I was just wondering if we might be better off getting on the other bank and going cross country to make better time,” the man explained. He was referring to cutting across open land to their east.
“We’d stand out like a sore thumb out there,” Dusty said. “There’s no cover. It’s just open grassland and farm fields. The zombies would see us for sure, and if they do, then they follow you. You know that.”
“I think I heard a moan,” one of the men said.
Dusty listened, but heard nothing over the gentle splashing sounds his men were making as they strode through the water that was varying between waist and chest deep. The cold was starting to get to the men who were by now in the first stages of hypothermia. Their movements weren’t as fluid as they had been a few minutes earlier. He knew then that they were going to have to get out of the water soon. The men needed to get dry and warm up, and so did he.
A high-pitched scream sounded from somewhere nearby and as one the men turned their heads to stare behind them. They saw a female zombie sixty yards away and coming after them in the water. A few others who seemed to be having trouble keeping up with her followed her.
“Hey, that dog is in the water and coming our way. He must be scared of the zombies,” one of the men said.
“The stupid bitch probably led them to us,” another of the men said. He was right of course, but for all the wrong reasons.
“Hold your fire. We don’t want to draw more of them down on us. Get to the other bank. We have to take our chances on dry land,” Dusty said. “We have to kill these quietly.”
The men slung their rifles and drew their fighting knives. These were hardened ex-cons, who had fought in the prison with shanks made from toothbrushes or anything else available. None of the men was afraid to use their fighting knives. Some of them relished the opportunity to do so at every opportunity against other men, though they weren’t so keen on doing it with zombies that could infest them with the parasites.
The men made it to the bank and turned to face the approaching zombies. They paid scant attention to the German Shepherd that was swimming toward them because they didn’t consider it a threat. The zombies, on the other hand, were an obvious source of danger that was approaching them rapidly.
“Oh shit,” said one of the men who had spotted other zombies in the distance heading toward them in the wake of Shaunna’s closer group. “Here come some more!”
Dusty cursed and sheathed his knife. “Okay, boys, we have to use the rifles. We can’t risk getting surrounded by a mob of these things.” He was raising his rifle to his shoulder to shoot Shaunna when the German Shepherd anizombie emerged directly in front of him and clamped its jaws on his genitals in a savage attack. The hapless man dropped his rifle in shock as the dog shook its head vigorously and took a few steps back as it attempted to pull the man off balance to get him off his feet.
One of Dusty’s men saw what had happened and reached out to stab the anizombie in the side with his knife. The dog ignored the wound and continued to tear at Dusty’s body. The wounded man staggered and then lost his balance on the slippery rocks. He fell forward, toward the dog that released her grip on his body and turned to attack the man who had stabbed her.
The other men began to fire their rifles at the approaching zombies. Shaunna was hit in the side, but of course, she kept going toward the men. Although the former convicts were brutally efficient when it came to fighting humans, they lacked experience when it came to fighting zombies. They had made it a point to avoid conflicts with them out in the open. Instead, they preferred to fight them from the comparative safety of their bus. In those instances, they had never cared how many shots it took to bring the zombies down, and considered it good sport to take them out little by little. That sadistic approach came back to haunt them as they fought for their lives on the bank of the creek. It caused them to waste time hitting the first spot their weapon targeted on their bodies. Had they been fighting humans, they would have been brutally effective, but they weren’t fighting humans. Their current foe ignored such wounds.
By the time the men realized their mistake and began targeting the heads of the zombies, it was too late. Shaunna’s original group had reached them. As the gang leader’s men began to fall under the onslaught of the zombies, he saw Shaunna squat down beside him. He was near death, having all but bled out due to the attack of the anizombie. His last thoughts as he felt his consciousness begin to fade were that in life she had probably been a pretty woman. Now she looked like a monster out of his worst nightmares.
The anizombie nudged Shaunna with its head and she reached out to stroke it. Then she followed her instincts, leaned down, and bit Dusty on the ear to transfer additional parasites closer to the brain, and thus speed up his transformat
ion. She then took charge of her zombie pack, forcing them away from the bodies of the dead ex-cons. She bit each of the bodies on the ear, and then she settled down to wait for their resurrection as zombies. She showed Lily her handiwork and crooned as she rocked back and forth. Her anizombie Shepherd lay down beside her and watched.
Chapter 15
Night battle.
Darkness had fallen, so the only light available was that produced by the quarter moon and stars. All afternoon, Herb had expected the enemy to attempt another attack. Yet, they hadn’t and that puzzled him. Waiting benefited the defenders because they were safe behind their defenses. In the post zombie world, it was dangerous to be outside in the dark, because it made it that much harder to detect their approach.
Herb made the rounds checking on the men manning the defensive positions. None of the men had anything to report. They were in good spirits. He sent volunteers, under the cover of darkness, back up into the watchtowers. They had pulled the men out after the initial attack because they were so vulnerable to enemy fire. That would still be the case, if they drew attention to themselves. For that reason, he encouraged the men not to fire at the enemy unless it became apparent that they were about to breach the defenses. Their primary mission was to warn the rest of the defenders about enemy movements and impending attacks.
All afternoon long, the men inside the refuge had heard screams of pain erupting in the woods around the refuge. They knew that something was happening, but had no idea what that might entail. Herb now regretted his decision to permit Bernie and Hernando to leave the refuge without a radio. They had felt that a message at the wrong time could put them in jeopardy, but it would have been nice to get updates from them. He felt certain that the screams from the woods would have something to do with that two man team. He just hoped it hadn’t been them screaming. He didn’t think it would have been, because there had been screams upon four distinct occasions separated by several minutes and spread far apart.