Maybe after he got his wife and son they would come back. The path would be clear if they wanted to. He figured it might take him a week to get there, avoiding the big cities and having to probably plow his way through the smaller towns. But the trip back would be fairly quick. A couple of days.
Hot Rod had been telling stories of the Cannonball Run. Apparently, it was a real thing and he had been in one. Some kind of illegal underground race. He said those guys raced cross country and could get from coast to coast in about 30 hours. The fastest guy had done it in less than twenty-nine hours.
Gunny knew he wouldn’t be making those times in his mad dash across the country but he was going to hammer on it as hard as he could.
The blonde girl started when Gunny stopped at her table and asked if he could sit. She looked a little rough up close, like she’d been awake all night.
“I just wanted to apologize for yesterday,” he said. “I kind of let that go too far. And I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have let it get so close.” He trailed off, not knowing what else he could say.
She stared at him for a minute before she replied. “I’m not,” she said. “I’m glad you did. It showed me something. It showed me that no one will help, no one cares and you’re on your own in this world.”
Gunny shifted uncomfortably in the booth. That wasn’t exactly why he’d done it although it rang of truth.
“Well,” he said, feeling embarrassed and having a hard time meeting her eyes “you weren’t really in any danger, I wouldn’t of let it get to you.”
“I know that now,” she said. “But I didn’t yesterday and no one else did either. We thought you were a killer.”
Gunny grimaced.
She glanced around the room then continued. “None of them would lift a finger to help and I was too afraid to help myself. I don’t blame you or them. I blame me.” She pointed a slim, manicured finger at her chest.
“I want to learn how to do what you did. How not to be afraid of them. If you come back with guns today, I want one.”
Cobb came in and started barking orders and assignments, getting everyone busy doing their various tasks, threatening the last one out of the diner with trailer decoupling duty in the parking lot.
Chapter 20
It was late afternoon when Tommy flipped up his welding helmet and called it done. The Old Pete wound up looking like something out of a post-apocalypse B movie. It started the morning off as a head turner. A 359 Peterbilt painted rosewood with black fenders and striping, gleaming chrome Texas bumper and six inch straight stacks to roll coal. It had enough chicken lights to make it pop rolling down the highway at night and polished aluminum steps and fuel tanks.
A real Rooster Cruiser. She had been a gleaming truck barreling through the night with dozens of amber running lights all lit up… a beautiful sight. Now the steps had been torched off, the shining front wheels replaced with butt ugly steel rims and tires from an off-road dump truck and the fenders cut out to make room for them. The big Texas bumper was gone.
A rude angled blade made from the cattle trailer was now attached to the front of the truck, acting as radiator guard and zombie shovel. A mesh of rebar had been welded over the windows and windshield and Gunny had used every strap and chain he had to secure the remaining lumber after they had unloaded enough for a dozen partitions to be built as small apartments.
He was going to drop the trailer in the junkyard and bobtail into town on the supply run but when he left in the morning, he wanted his wagon. He might need the weight because big rigs were notoriously easy to get stuck if they were running empty. He’d seen guys get hung up and spinning in a gravel parking lot before.
Cobb was there with nearly everyone else after he dropped the trailer and pulled up to the gate. Gunny hopped out to see who was going with him. Griz had volunteered, but Cobb said he wanted a full squad. At least five guys had to go so they would have a fighting chance if things got dicey outside the truck.
“Who’s the ranking man?” Cobb barked as he walked up, eyeballing them both.
“He is.” Gunny and Griz said at the same time, each pointing at the other.
“Figure it out quick, Cupcakes. We don’t need two different people giving orders out there and getting everybody killed in the confusion.” Cobb said, crossing his arms and staring at them, refusing to take sides.
“I was a private,” Gunny said.
“Bullshit,” Griz replied. “Look, I’ve got a lot of trigger time under my belt but I was never the boss. I didn’t make the plans, I just carried them out. I followed orders, I didn’t give them. Hell, Gunny, I was never even a platoon sergeant. I’m good at killing, not so much anything else. You take it.”
Gunny hid a sigh and nodded, held his free hand up for a fist bump and it was settled. They didn’t have much ammo between them and when Stabby came through the crowd with a new set of claws strapped to his arms, Gunny was glad. He’d seen the kid in action and he was definitely a good man to have on your side. Lars was right behind him, his Beretta and extra magazine with him. Scratch rounded out the quintet with an odd attachment in place of the usual hooks he had at the end of his prosthetic arm. It looked like a slim dagger but when Gunny reached out to help boost him into the truck, the missing steps making it difficult to climb in, he noticed it was sharpened rebar.
“Nice one,” he said. “Just be careful picking your nose with that thing.”
Scratch tried to take the passenger seat, but Griz gave him a shove towards the sleeper as he climbed in with the M-4. “Piss off ya skinny bastard,” he said. “I make two of you, I’m riding shotgun.”
So he squeezed in between the others who were already sitting on the bunk, grumbling about old beardy ass fat guys picking on the handicapped. Scratch never played the handicap card around normal people. In his mind, that’s how he saw everyone who wasn’t his friend.
People who would go out of their way to try to help or give him sympathetic looks or just look away, unable to even acknowledge him. With them, he would die before he admitted any weakness of any kind. Among his brothers though, he would do his best to get over on them. Of course, it never worked. They didn’t see him as a man with a missing arm. They just saw him as a man.
They got an all clear from Hot Rod on the roof and the guys on the gate opened it quickly, shutting it almost before they were clear.
“Might as well take out the ones in front first,” Gunny said and swung wide to meet the crowd that had been milling around the entrance of the building. As soon as they saw the Pete coming around the corner of the diner, they all turned and started running towards it, arms outstretched, the strange keening scream forming on their lips.
They didn’t stand a chance. The sharpened blade was about 8 inches off the ground and when he hit them, most of them left their feet bouncing around under the truck as the rest of their bodies skittered off of the plow and flew into broken piles on the side of the road. They weren’t dead. Again. But missing your feet sure could slow a body down. They went from a “Danger, Will Robinson!” to a “Watch where you step” type of threat.
Gunny downshifted and turned the Pete towards town, following the directions on the GPS. He didn’t know how long they would remain functional, none of the cell phone apps worked. Because it ran directly off of satellites, he supposed it would work until they quit orbiting.
He had no clue if they were self-sufficient or if they needed occasional nudges from computers on earth. If that were the case, they wouldn’t be up there for long. He’d have to remember to ask the General about that.
The sheriff’s substation was south of them, near Silver Lake. Well before the gridlock and massive hordes of Reno. Since they couldn’t Google “gun stores near me” they only had some vague directions from Cobb and Tommy. The “there’s a pawn shop on the main drag, near the drug store” type of directions.
The roads weren’t too bad pulling into the small town. There were cars stopped haphazardly, many with doors open. They cou
ld envision what happened, see it all too clearly in the dried blood, the crunched fenders, and the few bodies on the ground that had been savaged too badly to reanimate. It only took one infected to run out into the morning traffic.
Brakes would slam on, traffic would come to a complete stop, and people would open their doors and get out to see what the trouble was. They would see rampaging mobs attacking everyone. Biting and ripping then leaping to the next fresh victim, leaving a mass of bleeding, frightened and angry people in their wake.
Some who panicked and tried to crash their way through, some with arterial wounds which bled out and changed within minutes, many times with someone trying to help them. A whole town dying within hours of the first fried bacon sandwich being eaten.
Once they got off the exit, Gunny dropped the transmission into low range and started testing the strength of Tommy’s blade. It slid the cars away effortlessly, the old Pete not straining at all, neatly shunting them to the side of the road.
“Awww, not that one.” Scratch said as Gunny crunched into a beautiful ZR1 Corvette, cracking the fiberglass, large pieces breaking off as he pushed it out of the way. “Dude, I would have totally drove that back to the truck stop.”
“I just thought about it, but he’s right,” Griz said. “We can have any car we want. Hell, any THING we want. It’s all there for the taking.”
“Hells, yeah!” Scratch said, “Where’s the nearest Ferrari dealer?”
“Monster Truck for me.” Stabby threw in as Gunny negotiated around the last of the pileup at the intersection and hit a stretch of clear road.
“1971 Eldorado, just like in Super Fly,” Lars said.
They all looked at him.
“What? Brutha can’t have a Cadillac?” he asked. “Man, I grew up watching old movies. Moms wouldn’t let me out of the house in our neighborhood. I loved that pimpmobile.”
“Can you dig it?” Gunny asked in the best Youngblood Priest voice he could manage.
“Give it up, Homie.” Lars laughed.
“What about you, Griz?” Scratch asked, “What’s on your bucket list of cars?”
Griz smiled as he answered, his shining teeth showing through his beard. “I’m getting a 1969 Hemi Charger with a 4 speed. Man, I’ve always loved those cars.”
Amid the chorus of “Ooooh, nice one” and “good choice” Stabby directed his question to Gunny “What about you, mate? What’s your driving pleasure?”
“I’m going to get the Batmobile.” he replied. There was an eruption of laughter and questions of which one, which started an argument of which one was the best. The Tumbler won, hands down, as most practical but there was a good debate on which was the coolest. The original from the TV show, the Michael Keaton or the Val Kilmer?
The George Clooney Batmobile was cool but was there even a working version of it? Griz and Gunny let the kids battle that one out and went back to concentrating on their primary mission. The substation was only another half mile and they started looking for it and the pawn shop that was supposed to have a large selection of guns and ammunition.
They had only seen a few zombies moving around but every one of them had started following the noise of the truck, letting out those eerie breathless screams to alert others of the promise of fresh meat. Gunny slowed as they approached the police station. It was on their left and there wasn’t a big crowd around it but there were a few milling about until they heard or felt the big truck coming. They turned to attack it, running at full speed directly towards them, keening and clawing the air.
“I’m going to make a pass, maybe two, there’s a bunch following us now. I’ll try to get far enough ahead of them then flip around and whittle their numbers down.”
It was go-time now and everyone got serious and quiet as Gunny started working his way up through the gears, cutting a few down, leaving the rest of the screaming horde behind. He got about a quarter mile up the road, swung into a gas station to get turned around then headed straight for the mob of at least a hundred running up Main Street.
“Where did they all come from?” Lars asked to no one in particular. “They’re like a swarm. Like ants….”
They didn’t hear the rest of his thought because the first of them had started being cut down with the plow. The sheer numbers of them caused the big Cat under the hood to strain and he split a gear and hammered down, slicing through the middle of the pack. He was snapping bones like toothpicks, severing feet and hands and arms and anything else that came in contact with the sharpened lower blade.
The rest of their bodies were breaking and being tossed aside at 45 miles an hour. The truck shuddered and jounced when the big front tires rolled over one of the infected who had missed the blade but was crushed by the rolling rubber.
“Gonna have to build a deflector so they don’t roll under the tires!” Griz yelled over the noise of the screams and impact of flesh. A few more bodies were crushed under the tires and the truck bounced the three men sitting on the bunk back and forth as they tried not to stab each other with the assorted weapons strapped to their arms.
They finally cleared the small horde and Gunny went another half mile taking out stragglers who had been too slow to participate in the mass slaughter. When he turned the truck around, gore and blood splatter covering the front half of his hood and fenders, they could see the full impact of what just one pass through a horde of them had done.
There were body parts everywhere. There were no standing zombies left, just a wreck of crawling bodies, all with missing feet or shattered lower legs. Most with more broken and mangled bones sticking out at unnatural angles. Gunny drove slowly over them, the big front tires turning them into bloody paste as they were ground under the blade. He stopped in front of the doors of the substation and before they climbed out, he and Griz turned to check on the younger members of their group.
It wasn’t meant as disrespect in any way, just a habit ingrained by years of service. Check your troop's gear, then check your own.
Scratch and Stabby looked similar in their appearance, both clad in leather shirts and pants they liberated from the costumes on the Brutal Retort bus. All of them wore gloves. The new blades they had made were intimidating.
Gunny realized now why he hadn’t seen either one of them all day, they had been creating the stabbing arsenal they now wore. Scratch noticed him staring at his leather pants. “Got ‘em from him.” He cocked his head towards his new British pal, “and he helped me design my blade.”
“Oi,” Stabby said. “I learned last night that thick blades just get stuck in the bones and snap off when you poke those wankers. You need slender, sharp and strong. Like this rebar. It won’t break like my blades did.”
Gunny nodded. They looked wicked. Deadly. No beauty in them, just total function.
Scratch had a single long piece of sharpened rebar attached to his metal arm and they had welded a small hook right about where his forearm should be.
It took Gunny a second but then realized it was a crude barrel lock for the AR. It would hold the gun steady and alleviate muzzle rise. His other arm had an aluminum and steel fingerless gauntlet of sorts with short spikes sticking a few inches beyond his knuckles. It left his shooting hand free to operate his rifle and the spikes were short enough not to interfere with reloading.
Stabby had both forearms wrapped in thick leather with three sharpened rods sticking out like Wolverine claws on each. He also had a clunky looking pair of knuckle dusters that had short bits of sharpened rebar welded to them. Backup weapon. Scratch showed him his pair. “This is still a work in progress, but we should see how well they work today, make some improvements if we need to.”
Gunny was impressed. Griz too. “I might need a pair of those. So don’t go getting yourselves killed,” he said.
“Tryin’ not to, mate.”
The crawlers were getting close to them, still intent on sinking their teeth into human flesh.
As he and Griz opened the doors to hop out, the other t
hree were right behind them. Ammo was in short supply, so they didn’t waste any as they ran for the doors that were propped open by a bullet-riddled body.
He and Griz entered first, breaking left and right, scanning the room, looking for any of the undead. It was an open floor plan, typical of a quiet sheriff’s substation. Some desks, a few glassed in offices in the back. A hallway leading towards the restrooms and the back entrance. A stairway and elevator leading to the basement and the other two stories above them.
“Clear,” said Gunny.
“Clear,” Griz said a second later. Lars kicked the body down the stone stairs outside the building and pulled the doors shut behind them.
“Lars, hold here. Scratch and Stabby, find us another exit. Clear as you go. Griz with me.” Gunny said and headed towards the entrance to the lower level. The cells below were well marked with a sign over the stout metal door that led down the stairs.
He stood to one side and nodded to Griz, who quickly opened it and stepped back, pulling the M4 tight to his shoulder. He covered the high area and Gunny swung around the door in a crouch, covering the low. They could see the stairs leading down into the darkness but not much else. “Electricity is already out?” he wondered. “I thought it took a few days.”
“Judging from all the bullet holes, I’d say somebody hit the breaker box,” Griz said.
Gunny yelled out. “Hey, anybody home down there?”
Instantly they heard a snarl of the undead and the sounds of running feet but also the cries of a few people yelling back up at them.
“Yes! We’re here! Watch out, they’re coming for you!”
“Get ready on the door, I’ll take them out,” Gunny said and stood up and stepped far enough away so Griz could slam it shut if there were too many of them for him to shoot. Griz let the M4 dangle on its sling and grabbed the heavy door with both hands, his shoulder against it, ready to slam it as soon as he started to hear Gunny utter the words.
Zombie Road (Book 1): Convoy of Carnage Page 19