by Lundy, W. J.
The car, a newer Toyota Camry with dents and dings along the front bumper and a spider webbed windshield, stopped and the passenger side window slid down as the rest of the vehicles stopped as well. “Hey, everything all right?” a dark-haired woman asked with a thick Spanish accent.
“Yeah,” Sidney replied. “I just stopped to go to the bathroom and stretch my legs.”
“That’s not too smart, you know,” the woman chided her.
“I can’t pee in my car.”
She nodded in agreement and pointed behind the car with her thumb. “We make our kids pee in cups and then just toss it out the window. A few days ago, we were attacked by those crazies and almost didn’t get away. Some of us didn’t…” she trailed off.
Sidney glanced apprehensively at the other cars. “Is one of you bitten?”
The woman looked toward the driver, who said something that Sidney couldn’t hear, and then looked back at her. “You’re welcome to join our little group. It doesn’t look like the horde is too far behind, maybe forty or fifty miles.”
“Horde? I—” She clamped her mouth shut and rearranged her thoughts. “Is that what the big dust cloud is?”
The lady nodded enthusiastically. “We seen it up close this morning. We had to camp out to take care of our wounded, and they came across the plains just west of Fort Worth. Millions of ’em.”
Sidney’s eyes drifted above the car to the south, where the dust cloud began, and traced it northward where the wall of dust rose hundreds of feet into the air. She pointed at the cloud, and said, “That’s from them? From the infected, I mean.”
“Yeah, we think so.”
“Why? I mean, how?” Sidney asked.
“They’re chasing after us, sweetie.”
“You?”
The woman cackled loudly. “No, not us,” she gestured to the people in her car. “Us.” She pointed at Sidney, then back at herself.
“Oh. Well, that’s depressing.”
“We stayed way too long in Florida. I told Ramón that we needed to go weeks ago, but we stayed to ‘let it pass by us.’ You can see where that got us.” She held up a pistol that must have been in her lap. “We almost didn’t make it past New Orleans, but I shot our way out. Cabrón.”
“You guys headed to El Paso?” Sidney asked as she tucked a strand of hair behind her ear.
“Yeah. You?”
“Yeah. The Internet said that was the place to be, so that’s where I’m headed.”
“The Army has the city completely protected,” the woman stated matter-of-factly. “The CDC moved there when things got bad in Atlanta—but you know, there wasn’t much military in Atlanta, just the National Guard. There’s a big Army base in El Paso, so they’re gonna hold this time.”
“Mmm…” Sidney answered, not really listening. There was some type of commotion coming from one of the vehicles farther back in the line of cars.
“They say there’s a cure already,” Ramón’s wife continued. “All they have to do is field test it and then mass-produce it.”
“Huh? How would they cure—hey, there’s something going on back there.” She pointed to the Jeep with its top down and the two passengers who jumped away from it.
“What?” the woman asked and turned in the car.
“Shit, that’s Jimmie,” Ramón said, looking into his car’s side view mirrors. “Stay here, Connie.”
Ramón opened the driver’s side door and walked quickly back toward the Wrangler, where shouts of alarm were now beginning to spread along the column. He held a pistol as well, carrying it pointed low to the ground. It looked to Sidney like he knew what he was doing with firearms, not like some of the others she’d seen along her trip.
Someone, Sidney couldn’t tell who, gunned their engine and then a silver minivan jerked out of the line to the left and sped down the road alongside the column. It reached thirty or forty miles an hour and then the screech of brakes echoed across the open desert as a plume of white smoke billowed out from underneath the vehicle.
Sidney cringed when she heard the wet thump of the van hitting flesh, and a body flew through the air.
Connie screamed and threw open her door. She ran around the car and had to press up against the side as the van resumed its flight, passing dangerously close to her. The older woman shouted obscenities for a moment before remembering why she was in the road in the first place.
Sidney watched, only mildly interested in the misfortune of the woman. She’d seen so much sick and depraved shit since leaving DC that nothing surprised her anymore, and a wife losing her husband to a simple hit-and-run was nothing to bat an eye at. Connie’s deep, guttural wails of agony spurred the younger woman into action; she had to get away from here.
On cue, the woman’s cries were joined by shouts. Sidney slipped into the driver’s seat of her car and started the engine, pulling off the shoulder and onto the road slowly. A dark form flashed in her periphery and the little car rocked hard as something slammed into the side of it.
Sidney gunned the engine, shooting the car forward. In her rearview, she saw a man stagger to his feet, his shoulder clearly dislocated. And then he began to run toward her, his screams of rage reaching her over the sounds of the car’s engine. She pressed the pedal down further until it wouldn’t go any more.
The infected man faded quickly in her rearview, and she chastised herself for letting anyone distract her. After a mile, she eased up on the gas, and on her self-berating.
“It was a lesson,” Sidney told herself as her eyes darted rapidly back and forth between the road ahead and the rearview mirror. “Don’t allow others to get you killed. All it takes is for one person to hide a bite and then Bam! Game over, man. Game over.”
She smirked at her inadvertent Aliens reference and focused on the road ahead, driving for several more miles. She wasn’t too far outside the city now. There must be—
The silver minivan lay on its side as she crested a hill. It had made it to within a football field of a line of four tanks on the next hilltop. Several other cars and trucks were pulled well off the road in various places, parked haphazardly. She slowed down, noticing the signs along the shoulder that warned her to do so.
SLOW DOWN AND PREPARE FOR INSPECTION
VIOLATORS WILL BE SHOT
NO QUESTIONS ASKED
“Well, that’s pretty fucking clear, huh, Rick James?” she mumbled.
Her butthole felt like she was squeezing it tighter than gnat’s ass as she eased her car slowly past the minivan and the point where it’d wrecked. The windshield was shattered and the hood was pockmarked with bullet holes. The driver sat, unmoving, in her seat, kept in place by the seatbelt across her chest. The back half of her head was missing.
She rolled forward at five miles per hour until one of the tanks—or maybe it was a truck with a gun, she didn’t know the jargon—moved out of line, driving toward her. The massive eight-wheeled vehicle turned to block both lanes about fifty feet in front of the main line, and several soldiers climbed out of the back.
One guy walked to the centerline and waved her forward slowly. Sidney couldn’t help but stare at the six other soldiers, who had their weapons aimed at her head. She crept forward and stopped less than ten feet from the tank-thing.
“I’m gonna need you to step out of the car, sir,” the soldier who’d directed her stated loudly when she was fully stopped.
“I don’t have any weapons,” she answered, holding up her hands.
“Oh! Uh, I’m sorry, ma’am.” He pointed at her hair. “I didn’t realize you were a woman.”
She smirked. “I get that a lot.”
“I don’t care about your weapons,” the soldier continued. “There are civilians running around here with .50-cals. I need to verify that you aren’t infected.”
“I’m not.”
“Ma’am, step out of the vehicle.”
“I—” She began to panic as another soldier appeared beside the passenger window and pointed his rifl
e at her head.
“Ma’am, this is just the first checkpoint out of six,” the soldier stated. “You need to calm down and step out of the vehicle. If you’re clear, then you can go on down this road to the next checkpoint, where they’ll do the exact same thing to you.”
“What happens if—”
“Get out of the car!” He jerked the handle and the door swung open.
“Okay!” Sidney yelled, hands up once again. “I’m sorry. This is all so new to me.”
“You don’t have anything to worry about as long as you’re not infected.”
She reached slowly across her body, unlatched the seatbelt, and pushed herself out of the car. The soldier motioned her forward to where another waited with a strange handheld device. It looked like an old-school walkie-talkie with a metal rod sticking out of the end of it. On the end of the rod, a bulbous piece of white rubber or plastic looked like a marshmallow stuck on the end of a stick.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“Thermometer,” the new soldier replied. This one had a red cross on a white band around the shoulder of his body armor. “Don’t worry, I’m just going to place the read probe against your forehead, and it’ll give me your temperature within a few seconds.”
“I’m pregnant,” she blurted out, worried about her body being out of whack from the pregnancy.
“Congratulations,” the medic said. “Once you make it through all of the checkpoints, you can be seen by a doctor.” He glanced at her car and then back at the readout. “Did your, uh… Did the father not make it?”
“No,” she answered. “Not that it’s any of your business.”
“I’m sorry, ma’am,” the medic said as the machine beeped.
“What? What’s that mean?” She pointed at the thermometer.
“Huh? Oh, this? Your temp is normal. I meant that I was sorry that your friend didn’t make it.”
“So am I free to go?”
Car doors opened behind her and Rick James hissed. She turned to see the soldiers searching inside her car and the trunk very briefly while another ran around the vehicle with a large round mirror mounted on a pole.
“Car’s clear,” a soldier yelled. “Nothing’s hitching a ride with her.”
The medic smiled and said, “Okay, take your clothes off, ma’am. Just down to the underwear.”
“What?” It reminded her of the creepy motel attendant back in Kilgore.
“We have to make sure you aren’t bitten.”
“I want a female search,” she replied.
“We ain’t the goddamn TSA, ma’am,” the first soldier barked. “My platoon doesn’t have any females. You can request that shit a few checkpoints in, but for now, you’re gonna get checked out or you’re turning around and—”
A rumble echoed across the desert, causing the man in charge to stop and look eastward. A massive dark cloud erupted and began to billow skyward slowly. Then several more appeared as more booming sounds reached the checkpoint. The soldiers cheered.
“What? What is that?” she asked.
“The Air Force is bombing those fuckers about fifty miles from here,” the leader replied. “They’re putting up a wall of lead between us and them.”
“Bombing? You mean the giant horde of infected?” she asked, using the word that Connie had used a little while earlier.
“Yes, ma’am. That’s the only way this is gonna end. We’ve got to stop them out there,” he pointed to the desert, “before they get to us here. My platoon is damn good, but my UBL for the Strykers would only get maybe ten or fifteen thousand of them. That horde is supposed to be millions strong. We’d be overrun in minutes.”
“Strykers? Is that what you call these tanks?”
He laughed at her naivety. “These aren’t tanks, ma’am. You’ll see those when you get closer to the city. They use up too much fuel to be this far out. These are Stryker Infantry Fighting Vehicles.”
“So…tanks with wheels?” she clarified.
“Yeah, something like that.”
“Hey, LT!”
The soldier looked over at a man holding a little black handset out the top of one of the Strykers. “What is it, Corporal?”
“The CO is on the horn. Says we need to collapse the perimeter and reestablish Checkpoint Foxtrot one mile from our current position. The Air Force is gonna bring in a couple of Bones to really fuck some shit up.”
“Okay. Time hack?”
“They’re inbound,” the man holding the handset replied. “We’ve got about thirty minutes until they start droppin’ bombs all over the fucking place.”
“Send up an ack. We’ll move as soon as we finish processing this refugee.” The soldier nodded and dropped back down inside the vehicle. “So, let’s finish up, ma’am. I believe you were about to strip down to your underwear.”
“Is this really—”
“Yes. Unless my medic checks every inch of you, you aren’t making it past my checkpoint.”
Sidney sighed and slipped her shirt over her head, then she untied her tennis shoes and started to step out of them.
“Oh, hold on,” the medic said as he unrolled a small mat on the pavement. “It gets hot; step onto this.”
“Thanks,” she answered, genuinely appreciative of the young soldier’s thoughtfulness. She stepped out of her shoes and pulled off her socks as more booms echoed in the distance.
“Is that the Bone?” someone asked.
“No, those are still the fighters. You’ll know when the B-1 drops its ordnance.”
She glanced back at the soldier in charge. He had a black stripe beside his name. “So, uh, Murphy, what does that black line mean beside your name?”
He looked down at his body armor and pointed to the bar. “This?”
“Yeah,” she said, unbuttoning her blue jeans.
“It’s my rank. I’m a first lieutenant.”
“Oh. Is that high up there?” She shimmied out of the jeans and kicked them off of her foot. “You’re in charge of all these guys, right?”
“Spread your legs and open your arms out to your side, ma’am,” the medic stated.
She opened her legs and held her arms out at shoulder height while the medic passed an odd blue light close to her skin, examining every inch. “What’s this?” he asked, pointing at the inch-wide scab below her bra where the knife had stabbed her.
“I got into a fight with a wannabe rapist and my knife fell. Stabbed me in the chest.” She glared over at the lieutenant, who’d squared up with his hand resting on the pistol at his waist. “Then I pulled it out and killed the fucker.”
“Doc?” the lieutenant asked.
Sidney’s head whipped around when she felt hands on her ribcage. “What are you—”
“Just doing my job, ma’am,” the medic said, leaning closer to her as he probed the wound with his thumbs. “It’s not a bite or a scratch, sir, and the UV doesn’t register a hit. I think she’s telling the truth about getting stabbed.”
The lieutenant relaxed and continued, answering her question, “No, a first lieutenant is pretty low in the officer ranks, but I am the highest ranking man here.”
“Oh,” she replied, watching the top of the medic’s helmet as he knelt in front of her. She could feel his hot breath along her panty line. “So, uh, what’s a B-1?” she asked, trying to ignore the invasion of privacy.
“A B-1 Bomber. We call ’em ‘Bone’ because, well, if one was spelled out…”
“I get it. So what does a Bone do?” She felt utterly stupid and had no clue about any of the military stuff that she was surely going to have to deal with all the time in the safe zone.
“It’s a giant plane with a lot of bombs. The bombers are going to try to put a serious dent in that horde, give us guys on the ground a chance.”
“I saw a bunch of wire,” she said as the medic lifted her ass cheeks. “Hey! My ass is little; you don’t need to move it out of the way.”
“Sorry, ma’am. I’m— It’s just ea
sier, and faster, this way.”
“So, all those bombs,” she gestured with her head until the medic’s fingers started touching her scalp gently.
“Looking for wounds in your hairline,” he told her.
“Those bombs,” she continued. “There isn’t a cure, is there?”
“No, ma’am,” the lieutenant replied. “The only thing that cures them is death.”
“Hmpf,” she huffed. “I met a woman a few miles back that said they had a cure in El Paso— Oh! There’s a bunch of cars coming. I forgot to mention them.”
“How many?”
“I don’t know. I think there should be ten? There were twelve, but it looked like one of them had an infected person in it, and they had to abandon it. That van right there was with them, but took off.”
Lieutenant Murphy pointed down the road. “You mean there are infected only a couple of miles away?”
Sidney nodded. “She’s good to go, sir,” the medic stated.
“Okay. You can put your clothes back on, but I’d recommend keeping them loose because they’re gonna make you take them off again at Checkpoint Echo, five miles from here.”
She started to put her pants on and then muttered, “Fuck it,” before simply slipping her feet into the sneakers without tying them.
The lieutenant shouted something about “First Squad” and pointed eastward. “Eleven vehicles. Clear it, and return to the new checkpoint site, one mile west of here.”
An older man tossed a lit cigarette to the ground and began barking orders. Several soldiers hopped into the back of a Stryker, and it tore off down the road.
“Are they going back to where I left those cars?” Sidney asked.
“Yes, ma’am. Staff Sergeant Gallegos will figure out what’s going on and take care of the situation.”
Sidney watched the back of the vehicle for a moment before Lieutenant Murphy said, “Ma’am? It’s time for you to get moving. Remember, approach all the checkpoints slowly and follow their directions exactly, okay?”
“Yeah. Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me. Just stay safe, and protect that baby once it’s born, yeah?”