by Brown, TW
“No fuel,” Jake said. “The little we were able to salvage was enough for the truck. Those tanks would gobble that down in no time.”
“Where do you think this train was headed,” Shelly asked.
“If I had to guess,” Jon brought his own binoculars back up and resumed scanning the length of the train, “I would say Fort Lewis up towards Seattle.”
“So if those things came back so quick,” Carol joined in on the discussion, “then how did you get a truck, all those supplies, as well as so much fuel?”
“In short bursts,” Jon answered without taking his eyes off the train below. “They still reacted to the noise, but only temporary. Funny thing is…we thought initially that something must have happened that we were not aware of to bring them back. It wasn’t until Jake repeated the action that we realized something was off. Each time, the zombies wandered away, but they would turn around and come back…almost like they were on a tether, because it was very consistent.”
“I marked it,” Jake spoke up. Everybody looked his way and he acted all embarrassed. He wasn’t fooling me, though. I had learned that the soft-spoken good-old-boy he pretended to be was a front. “They were pretty consistent with where they would stop pursuing and just return to the train.”
“So they seem concentrated around those four cars,” I pointed out, using my ability to state the obvious to lead into my next question. “So why didn’t you guys just stick to the cars in the rear and make the big score?”
“Because,” Jon gave me a harsh look, I don’t think that he cared much for me challenging him in any way, “they have no problem coming down the length of the train to pursue a living target. They just won’t go far, and they always return to those cars. Plus, a few of the ones up close to those cars they seem so fixated on don’t budge. It’s like they don’t care about anything except what is in those few cars.”
“And not a sound,” Carol spoke up again. “I think we can rule out that there is anybody inside. If there were, we would be hearing some sort of racket. Plus, I’m sure that had anybody actually been inside, they would have heard you boys making your fuss and called out to you for help.”
“So we need to take these things down. With the bunch of us, we should be able to make short work of them, but I think you can agree that there are definitely too many for just two people.” The whole time he spoke, Jon kept glaring at me.
Did he think I was some sort of threat? Or was it something more? Was he hiding something? He had been acting different ever since that whole thing with Steve dying. And now, with Jon and Dr. Zahn at odds with each other, it was almost like they were two politicians trying to win some sort of election. They spent a lot of time talking bad about each other when the other was not present. Of course they were all smiles around each other when members of our little community were watching, but I had seen a few of their encounters when they thought that they were alone. It was not pretty.
Seeing what I had witnessed between them made me realize that Steve was really the glue that held us together. He was our voice of reason. He didn’t have an agenda, and when it got right down to it, he didn’t want to be anybody’s boss. That was probably what made him such a great choice. That begged the question: Why do adults feel that there always has to be somebody in charge? Why can’t we just work together and decide as a whole what is best for the majority? Just let everybody do their own thing, and if something important comes up, put it to a vote.
“Are you listening?” Jon snapped his fingers in front of my face making me jump.
“Sorry…” I stammered.
“So, if I circle around with Erik, Jamal and Jerri, you wait for the signal and we hit them from both sides,” Jon continued after shooting me just another in a string of annoyed looks.
I had a grandmother like that; she never had a good thing to say about anything or anybody. It got to the point you just learned to ignore her and go about your business.
Jake made a sound that I assumed to be an affirmative and started down the hill and towards the front of the train. Jon took his group and went to the rear—which was closer to where the zombies were all clustered. I just could not shake the odd feeling that something was definitely wrong here. All those zombies gathered around the last few cars, and even more peculiar, they seemed to have no interest in the caboose. It was definitely something in those few cars.
I followed along with Jake, Shelly, and Carol. I could not get over how well that old lady moved through the woods. She was like a ninja despite being so—
“Everybody freeze!” Jake hissed, raising a hand.
I froze, but not before stepping on a pencil-thick twig that made a snap I am pretty sure was heard by everything in a ten mile radius. I looked up and saw Jake’s disgust, Shelly’s annoyance, and Carol’s…pity? Great, now action-figure granny is giving me the stink-eye.
Up ahead were about twenty walkers. They were coming down the same hill as us just a bit further to the west. Until I rang the dinner bell, it looked like they might have been heading for the train. A glance down at the main herd showed that my noise had done nothing more than get a few of them to look our way, but they weren’t coming to investigate…and some were already turning back to the train and reaching for it like kids at an ice cream truck.
The four of us quickly fanned out. I realized just as we moved in that I had not actually seen Carol in the field before. I guess I was about to discover if all the talk that I had heard up to this point was just a bunch of hype.
She drew the blade at her hip and moved in between a pair of the leading walkers and in a flash jabbed her blade into the eye of the one on the left, twisted, pulled back, and then lopped off the top third of the skull of the other.
That ended my questions; however, it did reveal something. For one, she has to keep that blade awfully sharp. A skull does not just slice like a tomato. And nothing can prepare you for the jarring sensation in the wrists that make your hands feel like they are full of angry bees. The other is that the time it would take for me to describe what she did took a lot longer than the action itself. I guess she was worth the hype.
The first walker that I reached was a man who looked like he had quite a backstory. He was wearing that full leather get-up that you see in some of those dirty movies. I mean, this guy had it going on all the way to the leather bikini bottoms. However, and this was almost sad, he had a ball gag wedged in his mouth. It was jammed so deep into his mouth and looked to have contributed to a few missing teeth. His attacker had really gone to town on one thigh. You could see what I was almost sure had to be bone. I dropped him quick and moved on, but I think that image will stick with me for a while.
As I came up to a cluster of five, I noticed something really strange. It was like they were watching a tennis match. They would lock on to me for a second and then look towards the train; specifically, they were seemingly drawn to those cars. Something was definitely wrong here. They made it easy to step in and put them away. A couple sort of pawed in my general direction, but they just did not have their hearts in it for whatever reason.
Truthfully, I was feeling the hair on my arms and on the back of my neck start to stand up. First those child-zombies, and now this. If the zombies were in fact evolving, I doubted that we would see next winter…heck, I doubt we will see this summer.
In almost no time, we had put the group down for good. I moved over to where Jake was cleaning off his blade and saw something on his face before he was able to turn that switch or whatever it is that he does to become the “stupid redneck” persona that he passes himself off as to everybody.
“Did you notice something…off about these zombies?” Shelly asked as I took out my rag and wiped my own blade down before slipping it back into the sheath at my hip.
“Like how the zombies seemed…pre-occupied?” Carol asked as she tossed her cleaning rag into the brush and put her blade away.
“Zombies would have to think to be pre-occupied,” Jake countere
d. I could tell he was doing his best not to break from the character that everybody else knew him as, but he wasn’t doing a good job of it.
“Drop the act, sonny,” Carol snapped. “You can play stupid with these other folks, but your eyes are about as easy to read as a newspaper headline.”
“What are you—” he began, but Carol cut him off.
“Save the crap, kid,” she snapped. “I sat around a card table or two in my day…and you might be able to shine the kids, but not me.” And then she shot a look my way. “And you already know somehow…I’m not sure how somebody as clueless as you tend to be figured out Hee-Haw’s secret…unless you are a really good actor, which I doubt.”
Shelly stayed quiet through the entire exchange. However, I did notice that she was watching Jake very intensely. Did she know something?
“Okay,” Jake nodded and spoke in that voice that I’d only heard a few times before, and never around anybody else. “My question is this, there is obviously something that is bringing the zombies back to those cars despite any efforts to draw them away. We are not hearing or seeing anything…so what the hell is going on?”
I guess Carol didn’t have any answers. We rounded the front of the train and headed down the length of it using the brush alongside the tracks as cover. I could see where they had pulled open one of the cars and grabbed some of the supplies. It was also where I could see where the original occupants of this train had met their death.
From what I could tell, for whatever reason, they had stopped and then were using a crane that was now on its side and looked a bit mangled to try and unload the vehicles on the first five cars. Obviously it had not gone well. As we moved along, Jake signaled for us to be careful. The ground was covered with brass casings that had become embedded for the most part into the ground. However, there were still some loose ones.
As we moved along, we came across a lot of dead, decomposing bodies—many with visible head wounds from handguns and rifles. A few were missing substantial parts of the head, obviously shotguns. Some were in ragged looking soldier’s uniforms, others were just garden variety citizens. I bet there was a hell of a story to go along with this place.
From what I could put together by guessing, it looked like they stopped for whatever reason and at some point decided to try and unload the military vehicles. During that evolution, the crane they were using ended up being knocked over. There were three of the big trucks like the one that Jon and Jake had shown up in. I think it is a deuce-and-a-half. Also, there was another vehicle that was heavily armored and had a decent-sized gun mounted on top. I imagine that the crane was just not up to the task of off-loading one of the four tanks chained into place on their cars.
We continued down the side of the train. As we passed a few of the cars, I noticed that the windows were almost all busted out. I say out and not in because the glass litters the ground. From the way it is all in little pieces like cubes, I imagine it was some sort of safety glass.
Once we got within about fifty feet of the cars where the zombies were gathered, I started noticing a few other things. For one, there was a really odd smell. I can’t describe it any better than to say that it was as if somebody was cooking rancid meat. I even heard Carol gag a little bit. At least now I know she is human. Shelly actually got sick and had to heave into some nearby brush.
I don’t know what prompted me other than the fact that something just did not look right when I scanned the crowd of zombies. I brought my binoculars up to my eyes and took a closer look.
“Holy crap!” I breathed, doing my best to make sense of what I was seeing.
“What?” Jake turned to me with a concerned expression.
“Take a look.” I handed him my binoculars. He scanned the zombies and by the way he seemed to scan and freeze, I could tell that he was seeing it as well.
“What the hell?” he said mostly to himself.
Carol didn’t ask, she simply tapped Jake and he handed the binoculars over. She spent a moment getting an eyeful of what was yet another mystery.
“Are they melting?” I asked after Carol handed the binoculars back to me and wiped at her eyes like she could somehow magically erase what she had seen.
The zombies gathered around at least the closest car, because that was all we could see at this moment from our current vantage point, all seemed to be suffering from some sort of…melting. That was really the best way to describe what we were seeing. The problem was that we were mostly getting the profiles of the ones on the outer edge of the crowd. However, the group was like any swarm. Some would push their way forward, and then eventually be cycled back by others doing the same thing. So they were sort of in a bizarre type of rotation where they would get closer and closer to the actual car, but then they would be jostled and forced back by others trying to get to the front of the crowd.
“You three stay put.” Jake turned to me, Shelly, and Carol. He started peeling off his gear except for a few weapons. Also, he unslung the M4 from his shoulder and did a quick inspection. He opened the pouch at his side and checked the four magazines he was carrying and seemed satisfied.
It was both strange and wonderful that we had guns and bullets again. However, I think we all knew that these were precious commodities and needed to be treated as such. In the early days, I think it was just a matter of trying to stay alive. Now we had learned that just spraying bullets was a really poor use of a very finite and valuable resource.
“You all hang back and keep watch on the hill to make sure that I don’t get trapped,” he said as he pulled his big knife. I personally preferred the machete, but Jake was a whiz with his blade and could do things with it that were beyond description.
He slipped away before we could say anything. I noticed Carol consider the situation for a moment before bringing her own rifle up and clicking the safety off. Shelly seemed to just take everything in stride.
I followed Carol’s example and then brought my own rifle up to sight through my scope and get a good look at what Jake was doing. He was moving in with a lot of caution. I can’t say that I blamed him. There was a nasty feeling starting to spread from the pit of my stomach and I don’t think it was just the rank stench that was coming from these zombies.
Jake had covered about halt the distance when Jon and his group came into view at the corner of the caboose. I got a really good look at Jon’s face through the scope and could tell that he was not exactly thrilled with discovering his number one man moving in on over two hundred zombies all by himself.
I watched him say something to Jerri, Jamal and Erik before peeling out of his gear to the essentials and moving around behind the zombies at the rear car so that he could close in on Jake. When the two finally hooked up, I was surprised that I could not hear what was being said considering the fact that, at least visually, it looked like Jon was damn near screaming at Jake.
Eventually they seemed to chill out and converse at a more normal level. Using hand signals, they popped up and let us know that they were moving in on the car closest to where Carol and I were positioned.
I only had a moment to consider how to take a supporting role. I guess they were putting a lot of trust in our ability to shoot. I thought it was a bit hasty and could have possibly been handled differently, but I guess the fact that we were faced with another strange development in the world of zombies, made them anxious to get at the answer.
Oh well, so much for ammunition conservation.
Jon popped up from the brush and shoved his blade in the back of the head of the closest zombie. Jake was right on his heels going to work with his blade in a way that you could not help but take a moment to appreciate.
Carol gave me a light elbow in the ribs when the two soldiers began backing away from the horde that were able to finally tear themselves from the train cars and try to get their hands and teeth on these two tempting zombie treats.
“They took the bait,” Carol whispered just before squeezing off the first short burst fro
m her M4.
It happened pretty fast, but I almost swear that her three round burst took out three different targets. I know that is unlikely, but she was so efficient and deadly that I did notice Jon and Jake both pause to watch her work. Shelly didn’t need any prompting and started picking off all the ones on the fringe. I guess she didn’t want there to be even the slightest possibility about being accused of endangering Jon and Jake. A moment later, I brought my weapon up and joined in, followed almost immediately by Erik, Jerri, and Jamal.
We had a near perfect killing field as Jon and Jake scooted back and then joined in. What happened next is probably why Jon had made the decision not to try this with just Jake. About a dozen had managed to get within an arm’s distance of the two. Jake took them down, but then the creepers came. Because of the crowd, I had not even seen them.
Jon was quick to start firing into them as Jake swapped out magazines. Together, they were pretty wicked, but I can say with certainty that they would not have stood a chance trying to take that mob on by themselves. Carol, Shelly, and I had to move forward and start firing into the writhing heap that was oozing along the ground towards the two warriors.
When it was done, there was a cloud drifting skyward from all the gasses ejected from the weapons. Also, I didn’t know about anybody else, but I was out of ammunition for my M4. I would be sure to bring up the fact that we needed to be more frugal in this regard. I get the need to make sure that we all survived, but I think Jon and Jake’s curiosity had actually caused them to act uncharacteristically careless.
Jon was moving towards the middle car—which seemed as good of a choice as any—and Jake was covering him. He got to the big sliding door on the side and had to actually shoot the lock off.
I tensed as he yanked on the latch and heaved the huge steel door open to reveal what was inside. I expected something to pop out. I expected something…anything to happen. What I did not expect was for one of the biggest bad asses I had ever known to stagger back like he had been punched in the throat. Even more disturbing was how Jake suddenly began to back away in a hurry to the point where he actually stumbled.