The Complete Deadland Saga

by Rachel Aukes

  My heart felt like it was going to jump out of my chest, and I found myself on the verge of hyperventilating. I punched in another radio station, only to find the same barrage of stories. No one had any useful information, just more of those horrific tales. I leaned back, tried to tune out the radio, and focused on the traffic outside. With every mile, the number of vehicles on the side of the road increased. Some cars were in pileups, others looked like they had stopped haphazardly, as though their drivers had decided to simply stop driving.

  I sucked in a deep breath. “I think I killed Melanie,” I said quietly.

  “Melanie Carlson?”

  “What?” I glanced at Alan. “Oh. No. The other Melanie.”

  “Oh.” He frowned. “Did she try to hurt you?”

  “Of course she tried to hurt me. She tried to eat me.”

  Alan was quiet for a time. “I bet she could eat a lot.”

  I belted out a laugh. Not because it was funny but because my adrenaline high was coming down, and with it, my shock. Alan laughed, too, though the stress was getting to him. He wiped his sweaty forehead with his arm and kept driving.

  I’d killed someone today. The truth really hit me just then, and I let my head fall against the headrest. I hadn’t even thought about the repercussions. Would I go to jail, even though it was an open-and-shut case of self-defense? I closed my eyes and rubbed my temples. I’d lose my job. That was a given. How the hell would I pay the bills?

  And then there was Melanie. That poor woman’s final minutes were in a bathroom of all places.

  “No, no, no, no,” Alan chanted.

  Startled, I glanced up to find a massive pileup of cars dead ahead. Vehicles were mashed together, filling up every inch of open space in the four lanes in front of us. An ambulance and two police cars were on scene but no tow trucks yet. Concrete prevented us from getting into the lanes of oncoming traffic, and a deep ditch prevented escape off to the right.

  “Can you turn around? Take the last exit?” I asked.

  He was staring in the rear-view mirror. “I don’t think so. It’s getting pretty crowded back there. Maybe we can find a way around this mess.”

  Doubtful, I scanned the wreck as we drew closer. People were running away, but not everyone. One cop was handcuffing a man who kept twisting his neck, trying to bite him. Several others were standing by cars, helping free the drivers and passengers. I narrowed my eyes.

  Hell. They weren’t helping free the people still in cars. “Oh, God,” I whispered.

  “What is it?” Alan asked.

  “We have to get out of here,” I said, staring at the crazies attacking the people in cars. It was like the entire world decided to go cannibal at the same time.

  He frowned, pointing ahead. “Exactly how do you think we are going to get past this mess?”

  “I mean now, Alan.”

  A man jumped out of his car and started firing his pistol into the mob. The sound must’ve finally registered what was underway because Alan’s eyes widened, and he yanked the car around. Something slammed into our car and an explosive force threw me against the seat. Dazed, I blinked to see that we were now facing another direction.

  Powder from the airbags sent dust flurries in the air. I shoved at the deflating white bag. The driver of the car that had t-boned us was still hidden behind his airbags. I glanced back at the horde of crazies to find them looking in our direction.

  I unlatched my seatbelt and tugged on Alan’s arm. “C’mon. We need to get out of here.”

  He muttered something, and shook his head as though to clear it.

  “Stupid idiot!”

  I looked outside to see the other driver climb groggily out of his car, shaking his fist. He stepped up to Alan’s door, and pounded on the window. “Moron! What were you thinking turning around in the middle of the road like that?” he yelled.

  “Back off!” Alan growled right back.

  Alan was not a large man. He was my height and had maybe thirty pounds on me. To see him yelling at a pissed off guy only added fire to a tinderbox. Then I saw them coming our way. “Uh, Alan?”

  “What!”

  I pointed at several crazies with pallid skin stumbling toward us, their jaundiced sights homed in on the man standing outside our car. Their faces and chests were blood-soaked, and a few sported violent injuries of their own. One hobbled along with a broken leg. Another was missing an arm. Still another looked like half her throat had been ripped out. They moved slowly and jerkily but were relentlessly closing the distance. Alan looked and gasped.

  The man outside continued to yell until he realized Alan was no longer paying any attention to him. He followed Alan’s gaze. He cried out and took off running back to his car but was too late. All of the crazies attacked him at once. The driver screamed. It was an awful, bloodcurdling scream, but I couldn’t see what was happening under the pile of writhing flesh and gushing blood. Not that I wanted to.

  I glanced at Alan, and then opened the door and ran.

  Chapter II

  Tires squealed as cars rammed into the bottleneck. Gunshots rang though the air. With Alan at my back, we sprinted away from the crazies and into the oncoming traffic.

  I headed straight for the midnight blue eighteen-wheeler just rolling in, with an American flag painted on its trailer, dwarfing the vehicles around it. Even though the truck was still moving, I jumped up on the driver’s side step, pulled on the locked door handle, and pounded on the window. “Please let me in!”

  The driver scowled. His eyes were covered by aviator-style sunglasses, and I couldn’t see if he was watching me, the crazies, or something else. His lower lip bulged with chew, and with a wave of his hand he motioned me away.

  I tried the handle again. No luck. I risked a quick glance behind me to see that, sure enough, the group of crazies that had been huddled around a small truck was now headed this way. I swung back to the truck driver. “Please!”

  After a long second, the window opened, and the barrel of a shotgun pressed against my chest.

  I didn’t fall back. I didn’t jump to the side. Instead, I stood there as though waiting for him to shoot me. “I’ve got nowhere else to go,” I said weakly.

  He scowled even more, causing lines in his five o’clock shadow. He kept the shotgun level at my chest. “You bit?”

  I gave my head a fervent shake. “No.” Then I frowned, confused. “Why?”

  He seemed satisfied with my answer, though he also didn’t seem in the mood to elaborate. He cranked his head around mine and nodded toward Alan, who was hanging on right behind me. “How about you? You don’t look so good.”

  I glanced back to find a sweaty, pale Alan.

  “I’m f-fine,” Alan replied with a stutter. When the trucker didn’t respond, Alan threw up his hands. “I was just in a freaking car accident, man!”

  The crazies were less than thirty feet away and quickly closing in. I snapped my gaze back to the trucker, pleading. “Mister, please!”

  He moved his head slightly to check out the crazies closing in. He spit off to my right and pulled in his gun. “If you want to live, you’d better climb in.”

  I heard the pop of the door unlocking, and I stepped to the side to open it. “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” I murmured as I crawled over him, knocking his cap askew, on my way to the passenger seat. Once there, I fastened the seatbelt as fast as I could in case the trucker changed his mind and tried to shove me out. Alan came in right behind me, only he collapsed in the cab behind us. The driver slammed the door shut, set the gun between him and the door, and grabbed the long shifter. Air shot from the brakes.

  A crazy rammed the door and clawed at the now-closed window. The truck lurched forward, and the man in a bloodied business suit tumbled off the truck.

  “Damn zeds,” the driver muttered, his hat still crooked.

  “Zeds?” I frowned, recognizing the term. “You don’t mean…”

  He pointed outside where several crazies stood litera
lly dead ahead of us. “You know damn well what they are.”

  What the trucker had said made perfect sense, but it shouldn’t be possible. Yet, not only did one of the infected try to eat me less than an hour ago, they moved like zeds—zombies—clumsily and relentlessly. No different from the crazies in front of us now. With no regard to their well-being, they kept shambling toward the truck barreling down the road on its way to meet them.

  “I guess you’re right,” I said softly as the realization of fiction becoming reality hammered at the tension headache already pounding behind my forehead.

  The driver stepped on the gas, and I sucked in a breath. The heavy rig rammed through the group of crazies like a bowling ball, only these pins left behind goo and flecks of skin.

  “Holy shit,” I muttered as the trucker ran over zeds like they were nothing more than small speed bumps. The windshield wipers smeared brown streaks across the glass. He kept picking up speed, setting us up for a bull’s-eye approach to the roadblock. I braced my legs against the dash the instant before he rammed into a small car jackknifed between an SUV and a minivan. Something heavy slammed against the back of my seat, followed by a muffled moan.

  I looked back to find Alan crumpled on the floor. “You okay?”

  “Nnnh, yeah.”

  The truck shoved the car to the side with metal-on-metal screeching. As we carved our way through the wreckage, the rig knocked around the sedan the zeds had swarmed earlier. The driver, still strapped inside, reached out to us with his only remaining arm. Even though he no longer had a face, the man watched us with unblinking eyes while his mouth opened and closed.

  I shivered and turned away.

  Once we broke through the bottleneck and put distance between us and the zeds, the road opened up. In the distance, a few cars entered from the next ramp, but most of the traffic was headed in the opposite direction.

  I grinned. “Hot damn! We got through!”

  In response, the trucker glared. “I’d be surprised if I didn’t bust something,” he growled out. “She’s not made for this sort of abuse.”

  I glanced in the side mirror to see a line of vehicles following us, though the zeds were closing in on the cars on both sides. The woman in a convertible never stood a chance. I snapped my gaze straight ahead to the open highway. After a moment, I found my voice again. “What you did back there…thanks. I mean it. You saved our lives.”

  He grumbled something under his breath.

  The open road looked like freedom, and for the first time since getting mauled by Melanie I let myself relax. I felt halfway in control again even though I knew it was a false feeling. Too much had changed since this morning. I loved routines. I hated chaos.

  Five days a week I sat in a small mushroom-colored cubicle in a sea of mushroom-colored cubicles, at the same desk I’d sat at for over five years since college. I was an actuary, which my parents thought was a pretty big deal, but really it just meant I ran a lot of reports and analyzed spreadsheets.

  Two years ago, I’d saved up enough money to make a decent down payment on a fixer-upper in the Gussdale district, and most of my free time went to renovating the old bungalow. Well, to that, and flying. My Piper Cub was the one splurge I’d allowed myself after college. Dad had been a pilot, and I got my pilot’s license the same week I got my driver’s license. I rubbed my bare arm where the Cub logo tattoo—a fuzzy teddy bear—looked up at me.

  After today, I’d probably never get the chance to log another hour in the Cub. The entire world had fallen apart before my eyes. After running a finger wistfully over the teddy bear, I looked out the window.

  Startled, I pointed to the sign. “My exit is the next one coming up.”

  A small nod was the only acknowledgement I got before the trucker picked up a soda can from a cup holder and spit in it.

  Another grunt from the back seat reminded me that I wasn’t the only passenger. I turned around. Alan was lying on the floor, his face covered by his arm. “How are you holding up back there?”

  No response. I frowned. He hadn’t hit the back of my seat that hard. “Alan?”

  Still nothing.

  “Alan,” I said louder.

  Alan looked at me then. His tongue was hanging out as though he was panting. His eyes had yellowed, and his features morphed from confused to dull. Then he moaned.

  “Oh, shit.” I unlatched my seatbelt. The trucker was watching me, and he caught on fast.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” he said, taking his foot off the gas and reaching for his shotgun.

  My intent was to grab Alan and toss him out of the truck before he went crazy. It seemed like there was a short window when Melanie had been out of it before going into raging attack mode. But I didn’t get the chance.

  I was halfway to Alan when the shotgun went off.

  The next split-second was a blur. The shot blasted my eardrums. Alan’s face literally split in half. Brownish blood and brain matter sprayed the cabin and me, and Alan’s body slammed against the back wall. I may have yelled, but I couldn’t hear it if I had. The only sound in my world at that moment was a loud, throbbing, constant ringing.

  Even though I thought I’d just recovered from shock, it was amazing how quickly I was thrown right back into it. I stared at Alan’s crumpled body in a daze. Dark liquid spread out from his head. I felt the truck come to a stop.

  The trucker leveled the gun on me and said something.

  “What?” I asked, his words nowhere near as loud as the ringing in my ears.

  “I said…one good reason…blow your brains out.”

  It took a moment for his words to make sense in my head. Then I watched him, numbly, for a moment. “I can’t.”

  A flash of genuine surprise crossed his face, but the expression was lost all too quickly to anger. “I asked if you were bit, goddammit.”

  “I’m not bit,” I said, before shaking my head.

  He motioned to Alan. “And him?”

  “I thought Alan was just freaked out from everything.”

  The driver sat there and scrutinized me for what seemed like an eternity. “Are you cut? Did you get any blood in your mouth or eyes?”

  I looked down at my clothes damp with Alan’s blood. With my black clothes, the dark blood blended in but the flecks of skin and brain dotted my shirt. “I’m okay.”

  “You sure?”

  “Pretty sure.”

  “You better be more than ‘pretty sure,’ Cash. Because this thing spreads through contact. Blood-to-blood, saliva-to-blood. If you got it, you’re going to be like your boyfriend before long.”

  I didn’t answer.

  He motioned over my shoulder. “Get out.”

  I looked out the window. I was still at least three miles from home. I thought of my tiny bungalow in a neighborhood full of tiny houses. How many neighbors were already sick? With my car still back at the office, where could I go?

  Outside was already turning into a war zone…

  A man boarding up windows on his house just off the interstate.

  Two people running down a street.

  The occasional pops of gunfire becoming constant echoes of rat-tat-tat.

  A shape stumbling around a tree.

  How many zeds stood between me and home?

  The only thing I knew was that I would never even make it to my front door, let alone to my parents’ house on the other side of town. It was both a miracle and luck that I’d already made it this far. Out there, on foot, I didn’t stand a chance.

  Operating on autopilot, I opened the door but couldn’t make my legs obey. I lowered my head, and the tears came. It wasn’t an act. I didn’t want to cry, I never cried, but the tears just kept coming. My shoulders shook from exhaustion as much as from adrenaline and hopelessness.

  Silence filled the cab for what seemed like an eternity, before I heard a heavy sigh. “I know I’m going to regret this. If you start looking sick, I swear to God I won’t hesitate to fill your brain with bucks
hot. If you’re not sick, I’ll give you one day.” He held up a finger. “One day. Then you’re on your own. Got it?”

  Sniffling, I nodded vigorously. “You won’t regret it, I swear.”

  “I already do,” he grumbled.

  I went to pull the door shut; he nudged me with the barrel. “Nuh, uh,” he said. “Get rid of your boyfriend first. And be quick about it. He’s stinking up my cabin.”

  I looked back and winced. “He’s not my boyfriend,” I said weakly before my gag reflex kicked in. I twisted and reached out the door just in time to throw up the pepperoni pizza I’d had for lunch. After several heaves, I was able to sit up again. Taking a deep breath, I glanced at the trucker. He was watching me carefully, but at least he didn’t mistake my retching for getting “sick” and shoot me.

  I wiped my chin and headed to the back of the cab. Fortunately, Alan was slouched over, his face hidden in his lap, which made it a bit easier to pretend that this wasn’t someone I’d worked alongside every weekday. Dark, brownish blood and brain bits were splattered everywhere. Dazedly, I noticed the blood around Alan seemed darker and more congealed than it should have been, but I was no expert. My parents would know that kind of detail. I nudged him with my toe to make sure he was really dead, as though a shotgun blast to the head hadn’t been convincing enough. No response. Some of the tension in my spine released.

  Once I could breathe without gagging, I glanced around. A stack of folded bedding sat neatly in the corner, and I grabbed the top sheet already speckled with dark spots. Breathing through my mouth, I knelt by Alan and none-too-gracefully rolled him into the sheet. Frowning, I noticed his pants had been ripped, and I nudged the material aside to see a jagged wound in the shape of a human mouth.

  “He was bit,” I said, taking a long breath to keep from throwing up. “In the calf.”

  “Figured something like that was the case,” the trucker replied.