As soon as Gunny heard the third body drop onto the top of his truck he heard them all start yelling for him to “GO, GO, GO!” No family had been passed through the window. No wife. No kids. No time to worry about that now. He eased out the clutch and accelerated slowly, trying not to throw them off, the rear tire tearing up sheets of vinyl siding as he rolled along the side of the house. The crowd of dead followed them, jumping and reaching, trying to get to the warm bodies. “Hold on!” Gunny yelled and bounced back onto the street, shifting gears and picking up speed.
Firecracker was halfway down the back of the sleeper, using the headache rack to hold on for dear life as the Pete tilted this way and that through the yards and over the curb. Lars threw himself down flat, looking for anything to keep him from flying off and Scratch simply reared back and stabbed a hole in the roof with his sharpened spike.
Lars grabbed on to him and they rode it out until the ride got smooth again on the black top. Gunny stopped about a half mile ahead to let them all slide off and pile back into the cab but the horde kept increasing in size, every turn they made there seemed to be more running between the houses and taking up the chase.
“We need a long open stretch,” he said. “Someplace we can out run them far enough to get turned around and come back through them. We need to get back to your truck.”
Firecracker knew a place and guided Gunny towards it. He had tears rolling down his face and Gunny didn’t ask. He could only guess at what they had found inside the house. They were nearing the outskirts of suburbia and the roads were becoming rural, so he quickly went through all eighteen gears then wound it back down, looking for a wide drive to get turned around.
“Plan B,” Gunny said. “We’re far enough away they should all be out of your neighborhood. I’ll take out as many as I can on the way back in. We stop at your truck and you guys hop over then let’s head back on this same path, kill any more that we can get before we run back up the mountain.”
“They weren’t in there, Gunny,” Firecracker said over the splat of bodies bouncing off of the blade. “They were alive, I talked to them. I told them I was coming.”
They were all quiet. Any number of things could have happened. She could have gotten scared and ran out of the house. She could have gone to neighbors for safety. Maybe she thought she needed to run to the store for milk. How do you tell a guy to forget about them, they were gone, when you really didn’t know anything?
“Maybe she went over to her mother’s place,” Firecracker said as he stared intently out of the windshield, hope blooming in his voice. “She must’ve. It’s only a few blocks from the house. Let’s check there.”
Gunny looked over at Lars, Stabby and Scratch, a question in his upraised eyebrows. Shrugged shoulders, a nod.
“Okay, Man. We’ll go by there, but no screw ups this time. You guys have fresh mags? Swap out your empties, hurry up. Keep your eyes peeled for people waving at us in windows. If anyone is alive in that neighborhood, they should have enough sense to try to flag us down when we come back. These trucks ain’t quiet and we made enough noise to wake the dead.”
Stabby and Scratch groaned at the weak joke as they raided the box of loaded magazines in the sleeper. “Just when I thought there was some hope for you,” Lars said and shook his head.
Chapter 28
They decided to swing by Mom’s house since it was on the way before they got to Firecracker’s truck, just to see if there was anyone there. It would buy them a little time from the following runners if they did need to evacuate some people. Checking the mirrors and seeing they didn’t have any followers in sight, Gunny brought the truck to a quick stop in front of the house Firecracker had pointed out.
The three were out of the cab and taking up defensive positions as Stabby took high watch from the truck and Firecracker ran towards the opening door of the house. She was there! She was there! A dark-haired woman ran out onto the small porch and they embraced with whoops of joy.
“Let’s go!” Gunny yelled, “Time for that later!” He was on one knee, scanning back the way they had come. Scratch fired off a single shot towards the front of the truck and Firecracker broke the embrace and ran towards the house to grab his kids. “Get in the truck!” he yelled at his wife, “I’ve got them!”
They were standing in the open door, his six-year-old son holding his smaller sister’s hand. “Come on!” He said and swung his daughter up in his arm, grabbing his son’s hand with his other and starting to run towards the idling semi.
Stabby was waving them on, yelling and pointing. “I see some coming! Hurry up Lads!”
Gunny heard the quick sound of rifle fire from Lars but kept scanning his area, still nothing.
He heard Firecracker yell “What are you doing? Get in the truck!” and took a swift look over his shoulder and saw the woman running back towards the house.
“I’ve got to get Mom, she can't walk!” she cried as she flew past her husband and back to the porch. Firecracker continued towards the truck to put his kids in and Stabby jumped down. “I’ll help her. Get them loaded up!” and he took off after her into the house.
The popping from Scratch’s carbine was starting to get fairly consistent and he heard Lars’ picking up the pace too. Still nothing in his sector, still no followers catching up to them yet. He yelled back towards them “How we doing boys? Can you hold them?”
“Magazine” Lars yelled and there was a short pause in the sound of the rounds going off.
“Yeah, we good.” Scratch yelled back then “Magazine” himself.
“Ones and twos,” Lars shouted. “We got this for now.”
Gunny kept scanning, butt stock to his shoulder. He knew when they came in view from his direction, it wouldn’t be in ones or twos. It would be a mob. He couldn’t hear anything but they didn’t seem to scream unless they spotted prey. They would just be running silently, never tiring, never getting short of breath, and never getting a stitch in their side.
He saw the first one come around a slight bend in the road. A man with a bathrobe flying out behind him and wearing pajama bottoms, the slippers that had probably been on his feet long gone. Gunny sighted in through iron sites and squeezed, red mist flying out of the back of its skull as its feet flew up and out from under him.
“They’re coming!” Gunny bellowed “We’ve got to go!”
Now there were more and he was right. Not coming in ones or twos but a bunched-up mob sprinting for all they were worth, cutting down the distance between them quickly. Another fast glance over his shoulder showed him the children were in the truck, looking out of the window towards the house. Stabby was half dragging, half carrying an older woman and Firecracker was running back towards the truck with his wife in tow.
He breathed a sigh of relief. This was going to work. He sighted in on the crowd who was starting to scream now that they had their prey in sight and started popping heads. He ran through most of his magazine, dropping at least ten and causing the rest of the crowd to stumble and slow. They were only a few blocks away now and he yelled “Let’s go, to the truck!” at the top of his lungs as he let the M4 fall on its sling and sprinted back towards the others.
“What the hell were they doing?” Lars and Scratch were both shooting steadily towards runners coming in from the front but Firecracker, his wife, Stabby and the old lady were all still standing outside the truck, waving frantically at the kids inside.
Before he took three more ground eating steps towards them, he realized what must have happened. The kids, looking out of the window towards their running parents, had pushed down the door lock. He kept running, aiming for the driver side door but there were already five or six of them making a beeline for it and they would beat him there. He brought the carbine up to his shoulder at a full run and emptied the magazine but none of them went down. Zero head shots.
He could hear Scratch yelling at the kids, “Get down, get down, get down! He was going to shoot the window out but they were too sc
ared to move, just kept crying and reaching for their parents, not even realizing what they had done. It was too late. They were being surrounded. Even if the door opened right now, there wasn’t enough time to get all six people into the cab before half of them were pulled down by the undead masses.
“Back to the house!” Gunny roared as he ran by them, grabbing the other side of the old woman Stabby was still supporting and they both flew up the sidewalk carrying her, her feet barely touching the ground. Firecracker pulled his wife after them with Scratch and Lars trying to keep the horde of zombies off of their backs. Gunny sent Stabby reeling off towards the living room with the old woman and was waiting with his shoulder against the door, ready to slam it as soon as Lars cleared the threshold. He no sooner got the deadbolt turned when he felt the first impact against the door.
It wouldn’t hold long but probably longer than the windows. The house was full of them: big picture window in the living room overlooking the porch, big windows in the kitchen. Big windows in the bedrooms. All the curtains were closed and Gunny shushed everyone. “Don’t make any noise.” He whispered loudly. “If they don’t see us, maybe they’ll settle down. Forget we’re here.” The door shuddered violently.
The single-minded infected had seen them come in through it and they continued to try to follow. Gunny motioned towards the kitchen table, indicating to Lars and Scratch to bring it over. They hurried, quietly pulled the chairs away from it and hustled it back to him, settling it in on its side against the door and the first riser of the staircase. It was a little short, so they filled in the gap with a few books, kicking the last ones in tightly to form a solid barrier against the door, making it impossible to open.
The old lady lay on the couch, pale and strained from all the exertion and Firecracker was trying to calm his wife, telling her the kids were fine, the truck was armored, the zombies couldn’t get in.
“Perimeter check,” Gunny said. “Stabby, upstairs. Make sure they don’t see you from any of the windows.”
Lars and Scratch split off, going in opposite directions to circle the inside of the house and Gunny went to the back door, see if there was an escape there. There wasn’t. There must have been hundreds by now. All the zeds in the immediate area drawn to the gunfire and the mob that had followed the truck.
This was a disaster, Gunny raged at himself. They had two close calls on just this one simple mission. Dumb ass mistakes had been made. By him, by Firecracker, by his wife. By the kids. He was going to get them all killed if the mistakes didn’t stop. It all came back on him, though. He was the one calling the shots.
He knew Firecracker didn’t have any combat time. He had never left the Green Zone when he had been in Afghanistan. The kids didn’t know any better and the wife…well she was a civilian. She didn’t know what they knew. Didn’t have any experience. Now the safety of the truck might as well be a million miles away. None of them had radios on them. It was supposed to be a quick in and out.
They had plenty of ammo, more than enough to snipe the hundred or so outside then walk through the piles of dead to get back into the truck but every shot fired would draw more towards them. They all carried M-4 variants and they were loud. They couldn’t blast their way out. The door shuddered again but it wasn’t budging. The ones swarming around the back of the house weren’t really trying to find a way in, they were just the overflow from the undead in the front still trying to go through the door.
Lars and Scratch came back, both started shifting magazines around in their pockets, moving empties to the off-hand side, making sure the loaded ones were where they wanted them and facing the right way. They hadn’t brought any extra ammo, just the loaded magazines. It was only supposed to take a minute, maybe two to get them out of the house and into the truck.
“Indefensible,” Lars said.
“Concur. Too many windows. They’ll break sooner or later just from the sheer weight of so many of them pressing against the house.” said Scratch.
“Agreed.” said Gunny as Stabby came quietly down the stairs.
“All clear up here,” he said, “The truck’s surrounded, but if the kiddies would get away from the windows, maybe go take a nap, those bloody rotters will lose interest.”
“Right. Hope they have the same courtesy for us. Let’s get upstairs, fortify the stairwell and hope they go away in a few hours.”
Lars and Firecracker went to help the old woman up the stairs as his wife wrung her hands and quietly cried. Gunny felt for her. She had managed to keep her family safe for nearly a week and when the cavalry shows up to rescue them, her kids are locked in a truck surrounded by monsters and she’s in a house about to be overrun by them.
He went over to her, to offer a few words of reassurance that the kids would be fine, the truck was impossible to get into, when he noticed the bandage on the old woman’s leg. Her housedress had pulled up some as they carefully stood her on her feet to guide her to the stairs.
“Hold it,” he said and changed his path from the wife to the mom. “What happened to her leg?” he asked, pulling the floral print dress up to the woman’s knees. When Lars and Firecracker saw it, both of them quickly set her back down on the couch. Lars put the back of his hand to her forehead. “She’s burning up,” he said. She was breathing fast and shallow. Barely coherent. Gunny grabbed the bandage and ripped it off, exposing a half circle bite mark of infected flesh trickling blood, angry and red with black runners leading away from it.
“When did she get bit?” he whirled on Firecracker’s wife, a little more forcibly than was probably necessary.
His eyes were angry and she hesitated, still sobbing.
“When?” Gunny asked again, dropping the old woman’s dress back over her ankles. He stood to face the idiot woman who may have just gotten them all killed over an old lady who had already been served a death sentence.
“This, this morning.” She stuttered. “She went out to check the mail and a little kid attacked her.”
Gunny was stunned. How utterly ridiculous. They were all going to die because some ditzy old lady wanted to check the mail?
They were all staring at her with the same incredulous looks on their faces. “There was no one out on the streets when she went. We thought it would be okay,” she said defensively.
“That junk mail cost her life,” Lars said
“Probably ours, too.” Scratch added.
“But don’t you have medicine?” she asked plaintively. “It was a small bite, nothing major.”
There was the sound of breaking glass in one of the bedrooms, the big picture window overlooking the back yard would be Gunny’s guess.
“Upstairs,” he said and they didn’t have to be told twice. Firecracker’s wife was pulling against him, towards her mom. “She needs help,” she said.
She just didn’t get it. How could she? She hadn’t seen what they had.
“Go!” Gunny said. “I’ll take care of her.” and Firecracker finally drug her up the stairs.
As soon as their feet went around the landing midway up the stairs, Gunny didn’t waste any more time. The old woman was barely breathing, the poison killing off the last of her humanity. He flipped her roughly onto her stomach and pulled the Gerber from his leg sheath. He didn’t hesitate, plunged it in at the base of her skull like the Sisters had shown him. It sank to the guard and he gave it a little jiggle before pulling it out.
“You coming?” came a stage whisper from up the stairs.
Gunny slipped over to the bedroom, peeking in from the side of the door. He wanted to know if they were coming in or was the breaking glass just incidental to the milling crowd.
It wasn’t incidental, there were many hands trying to claw their way in and he heard the sound of another window breaking elsewhere in the house. He ran for the stairs and as soon as he cleared the top, the boys muscled a mattress into the stairwell and down towards the landing, essentially erecting another wall. Next came box springs and a dresser to wedge it in place a
nd by then the first floor was full of screaming infected, all rampaging up the stairs and trying to force their way to the living.
They all started grabbing whatever they could and filling up the stairwell with anything that wasn’t bolted down. Firecracker’s wife’s face was still tear-streaked, but she hadn’t asked about her mother. Gunny could only assume she was quickly schooled on the new facts of life in the few minutes it took him to take care of business downstairs.
When everything they could toss down the stairwell had been thrown into it, she ran over to the window looking out over the street, at her kids in the truck. They were still at the window looking out and she caught their attention and waved to them, trying to give a mother's comfort from fifty yards away.
Gunny did a quick look around the upstairs, at the horde below that could be seen out of every window. Maybe two hundred and they were still screaming and keening, drawing more.
“Can the boy read?” Gunny asked Firecracker
“Some.” Came his reply. “Mary has been teaching them. Why?”
“They need to get back in the sleeper. Out of sight, out of mind. They should leave them alone if they just stay quiet.”
“He reads Dr. Seuss, he knows all the words to most of them,” Mary said
“Make a sign big enough he can read. Tell him to hide.” Gunny said. “That wall of junk won’t hold them off of us for long. The kids can last a long time, there’s food and water in the cabinets. The guys from the camp will come looking in a day or so if we’re not back. They’ll find them.” He turned away before she could see the lie in his eyes. Nobody was coming after them. That wasn’t part of the plan.
If two trucks and some of the best men were lost on a simple rescue operation on the outskirts of town, Cobb wouldn’t be sending anyone else on a suicide mission. He caught the eyes of the others as they stationed themselves at the head of the stairs, guns at the ready. They knew the truth. They had known there was a chance of this being a one-way trip when they volunteered to go.
Zombie Road (Book 1): Convoy of Carnage Page 30