by Jacy Morris
Amanda looked away ashamed.
Epps, leaned forward, his forehead resting against the barrel of the rifle leaning between his feet, and said, "She fought like hell to get us to take you with, but the Sarge, he said we couldn't have you dying in the back of the truck and attacking us without warning. It's hard enough to deal with the ones that are right in front of our face without another sneaking up on our ass."
It made sense, but he was still mad. He was alive, that was the important thing. And Amanda had fought for him... maybe that was even more important. He didn't know how to say what he was feeling, and even if he had the words, he wouldn't be able to say them in front of the soldiers, so he just squeezed Amanda's hand to let her know it was ok. She turned to him with tears in her brown eyes, and she smiled at him. He smiled back.
Then he noticed that most everyone else was missing. Chloe, Lou, Blake, none of them were there, except for the kid from the movie theater who watched him with cold, dark eyes. "Where is everybody?" Rudy asked, afraid to find out the answer.
Amanda was silent for a second, and then she said, "They all left."
"Left?" Rudy repeated, trying to understand how that could happen. "Left to where?"
"They wanted out of the city," she said. He could tell that there was more to it, but he didn't press her on it.
"And why didn't you go?" he asked.
"I couldn't just leave you here all by yourself."
At that moment, there was a huge clang, followed by the sound of grinding gears. The truck slowed to a crawl, and the soldiers gripped their rifles tighter.
"Fuck. We didn't even get ten blocks," Allen said.
"Keep your shit together," Epps responded to him. Even as he said this, Rudy could see both soldiers tense up on the bench, their hands clutching rifles tighter. A window that divided the cab from the bed of the truck opened, and a red-faced man with a square head, square jaw, square everything peeked through.
The man spoke with an air of command as he yelled, "Be ready to abandon ship."
Adrenaline shot through Rudy as the fear of the dead settled on his shoulders once more. He knew he was back where he had always been. He was dead weight. There was less of him, but he was exhausted. He didn't know if he would be able to keep up with the soldiers around him as they moved through the city. They may have saved his life, but for how long? Even sitting up had been tiring him out.
"Epps, Allen, you two keep those civvies safe," the man in the cab yelled again.
Epps and Allen looked at Rudy, and he could see what was running through their minds. Why me? Why did I get stuck with the worthless fat man who would probably collapse ten feet from the truck?
"Stay between us," Epps said, "and everything will be alright."
"Your life is your own. If you value it, keep up," Allen added.
Rudy nodded his understanding. They would protect him as long as he could keep pace, but once he fell, he was on his own.
The truck yawed to the side, the rear of the vehicle bouncing over crushed bodies, the gears grinding one final time before it shuddered to a stop.
"Go! Go! Go!" the man in the cab yelled.
And with that, the vehicle come to a dead stop; everyone in the back of the truck jumped into action. They rose, their rifles slung over their shoulders, and they moved toward the eye-blinding brightness at the rear of the truck. Rudy was in the middle of them, Amanda at his side. He watched as the first two soldiers hopped over the lip of the truck, their heads disappearing below its height. Gunshots rang out, but they couldn't drown out the moans of the dead.
More soldiers hopped out to add their own rifles to the symphony, and Rudy made it to the edge of the truck. It was a long way down, but the adrenaline pumping through his body gave him the courage he needed to throw one meaty leg over the railing and then the other. He landed with a thud, falling to the ground and rolling over on his shoulder.
He had no time to see if he had hurt himself. The nightmare around him wouldn't allow such a luxury. All around him, the dead swarmed, a slowly closing vice that threatened to crush them between the wave of dead from the bridge and the wave of dead coming from the city.
He recognized the street as Burnside Street, a couple blocks west of where the bridge ended. The remains of a helicopter, the metal black and twisted, sat there looking as if it were the corpse of a thousand-year-old mechanical vulture. Rudy used his arms to push himself off of the hot asphalt. It was still summer, and the sun was high overhead.
The smell of the day cloyed its way up his nose.
"Come on," Amanda said. "We've gotta move." Then her arm was under his, and they propelled themselves down the street. Epps and Allen were at their sides, their rifles cracking now and then as they stopped to put down any of the dead that got too close. They headed west up Burnside. The street was wide enough to allow them to see in all directions. The gunfire and the noise of the truck breaking seemed to have attracted every shambling corpse within earshot. They poured from the side streets as if taking part in an obscene parade.
How long would this go on? How long could they survive against such ridiculous numbers? Rudy didn't give them much of a chance. Once the soldiers were out of bullets, they would all die. Despite this fact, he continued to move, his arms and legs struggling to move forward, buoyed by Amanda at his side.
At least he wouldn't die alone.
****
Sergeant Tejada cursed as he threw open the door of the transport, smashing an Annie square in the face. He didn't hesitate. He hopped out of the vehicle, pulled his sidearm, and executed the floored creature, its blood spraying across the pavement. He took stock of the situation around him and emptied his magazine into the closest threats to give his men room to breathe. Every target he aimed at fell to the ground, and Tejada reloaded his M17, slamming home another 14 round magazine.
"We have to move!" he yelled. Then he turned and began making his way up the street, scanning it for any sign of escape. He knew that they were in a trap, and he knew that time was slowly running out on him and his men. He never looked back to see if his men would follow. He knew they would, just like he knew that the clock was ticking on their lives.
The only way to move was forward. The side streets were teeming with Annies. They came pouring out of the streets by the hundreds, clogging the lanes. But Burnside was bigger than the side streets. It was four lanes across with a divider running down the middle. It would give them the room to move, and as a bonus, it was headed in the right direction.
The right direction. That's a laugh. He silently cursed himself for being so stubborn. He should have left when he had the chance, but something in him wouldn't allow him to simply give up entirely on the mission. That the people that had commanded that mission were most likely in an Annie's stomach by now didn't matter. He was a career soldier, and breaking the habits of the soldier had been more difficult than he could have ever imagined.
He knew what he should have done. He should have abandoned the damn mission the day that they had let the other survivors leave. They could have been out of the city by now. But no, Will Tejada simply couldn't face the fact that this situation was one that he and his men couldn't handle. And some of his boys were going to die for that stupidity.
After the survivors had left, Tejada and his men had waited on the bridge, hoping that somehow there were even more survivors making their way through the city. But if there were, Tejada hadn't seen them. They had seen no one. It had begun to feel like they were the last people on Earth.
Even worse, he had sensed a change in his men. They were no longer joking, giving each other shit and arguing about who had banged more broads. Whiteside stopped swearing about everything. Allen stopped questioning the world. Epps stopped talking to his closest friends. They just sat on the bridge, killing any Annies that got too close and then lapsing into thoughtful silence. They were becoming cold, withdrawn, and that's when the suicide had happened. His name was Jason Carter. They found him in an old
abandoned car, his brains still sliding down the vinyl upholstery.
The next day, Tejada ordered everyone to start packing their shit. As they had finished loading up the trucks, Izzy Allen, the poet of his motley crew, had called him over to the barricade. There, using a pair of binoculars, he saw the largest horde of Annies they had ever seen making their way down Burnside towards their position. They didn't have enough bullets to take on such a mass. It would rumble over this city leaving nothing but death in its wake, like a swarm of Biblical locusts.
He had spent a good part of their last day arguing with Amanda about the unconscious fat boy. But in the end, though he hated to do it, he had to err on the side of his men. He hadn't done enough of that since the end of the world had happened. His only goal in life was to help those boys survive. He thought that was what he had been doing from the moment the government had dissolved, but he had only been clinging to his rigid routines, his training, his inability to let a mission go by the wayside. They should have made their way out of the city on day one, but he was stubborn, and he was old. But he would try to learn this new trick; he would try to learn the trick of surviving.
He hated to admit it, but those damn survivors had been the catalyst for all of his own self-reflection. If they hadn't come along, he and his men would be dying on that bridge, fighting a last stand for the ages, though there was no one around to see it. But those survivors... without training, without half the weaponry Tejada's men had at their disposal, they had made it through the city. His men saw that, and as the numbers of the dead seemed to grow every day, he saw the following thought in their eyes: We're not going to make it. We're all going to die here.
Carter's death was the last straw, and he changed his mission. No longer would they fight the dead. Now their mission was to survive, no matter what. Tejada risked a glance behind him to see how his men were doing.
They were bunched up in the middle of the street, which was probably a wise decision. At the rear of their foot-bound convoy, the large man was being carried between Epps and Allen, the girl plodding along behind them. A knot of three soldiers, Whiteside, Beacham, and Gregg backpedalled behind them, shooting any of the Annies who got too close.
While the speed of the dead could mostly be described as a leisurely shamble, there were always about two out of a hundred that seemed to be able to form some sort of loping jog, like a drunk man with a beer belly running on his toes, letting his own weight carry him forward. These were the most dangerous ones, and with so many of the dead around them, there were quite a few of them.
"Save your bullets!" he yelled. "Only kill the ones that are close enough to be a threat! You don't want your rifle turning into a glorified baseball bat in the middle of a damn horde."
Whether his men heard him or not was inconsequential. That they knew he was still there and that there was still some sort of plan... that was the important thing. Now, the only problem he had was to come up with a damn plan. He lifted his hand and shot an Annie in the face. It slumped into a heap at his feet. How the hell did these things manage to get so close?
****
Andy Broussard stuck to the middle of the pack. On the bridge, Sergeant Tejada had taught him how to use a rifle a bit, but he had not yet "attained mastery" as the gruff soldier liked to say. For this reason, he had only been given a handgun for the escape. He was grateful for it. He was grateful for everything.
Most of all, he was thankful to be alive and away from the other group of survivors. He had watched them turn on their own. He had watched as one was accused of murder, which the woman had freely admitted to. He watched as they sentenced her to death. And he knew that he was on the outside looking in. If they could do that to someone that had been with them from the beginning, then they could do that to him without a second thought.
No, the situation with the army boys was much more palatable to him. They had discipline. They had routines. Most of all, they had someone in charge, and everyone knew where they stood and how things worked. That was a comfort to Andy. He was used to structure. He was used to doing what was expected without thinking.
Sergeant Tejada was a good man. He was the type of person that could make a difference in this world, and Andy had already learned much from the man in the week he had been with him. He watched him and studied him. He saw the way Tejada delivered his instructions and orders without emotion, without anger or panic. He was a calming presence. He knew how things could go. Hell, even the way he walked was cool as fuck.
Though the Sergeant wasn't the tallest man or the strongest, everyone seemed to gravitate to him. Was it just soldiers following orders, or was there something else at play? Andy didn't know. But he knew he wanted to be like the man everyone called Sarge.
He watched the man walk down the street, his handgun held at the ready. Sarge looked like a pitbull. He had forearms like Popeye, and his legs were like tree trunks. How much weightlifting had the man done to build a body like that? Andy suspected that they wouldn't be finding a weight room any time soon, but when they did, he would work to build his body like that.
Even Sarge's haircut meant business. Every morning, he sat looking into a tiny mirror, a pair of small scissors on his fingers, snipping away any hair that looked like it was getting too long. Sarge's black hair stood out like a million tiny needles pushed through his skull from the inside. Around his temples, those hairs were silver. How old was the man? 40? Maybe he was a little younger, but not much. Would Andy even live long enough to be half the man's age? The odds seemed stacked against it, but if he kept following Sergeant Tejada and learned from him, he thought that maybe he could get there. It was only eight months until his birthday... but eight months seemed a whole lot longer than it used to.
From the right side of the street, the Annies began to get a little closer. Andy raised his gun without thinking to shoot them. Just as he was about to pull the trigger, a soldier stepped in front of him, causing the soldier behind Andy to grab his arm and force it to the ground where a bullet ricocheted off the asphalt.
"Whoa! Whoa! Whoa!" the soldier said. "Watch what the fuck you're doing! You almost killed Masterson." Even over the noise of the dead, the Sergeant was aware of what was going on.
"Take his gun, Kazinsky!" Tejada yelled.
Kazinsky grabbed the handgun from Andy, and shoved it in his waistband. "You gotta watch where everyone is, man. Can't be shooting these things off without knowing where the man next to you is and what he's going to do next."
Andy shook his head to indicate that he understood, but he could feel his face reddening. Kazinsky had to be the same age as he was, but the man looked at him like one might look at a five-year-old who had gotten caught with their hand in the cookie jar. He tried to look anywhere but at Kazinsky. He tried to think of something cool to say, some way to play it off like the rebuke meant nothing to him. But he couldn't think of anything like that. So he just had to take it.
Even worse, when he looked over his shoulder the fat man and the murderess were looking at him. At least the soldiers had the common decency to keep their eyes trained on the Annies. Andy's hands clenched open and closed. He was now as worthless as those two were. He was dead weight, and everyone knew it. How could he have been so stupid?
If Burnside Street hadn't been teeming with hordes of the dead, he would have run off to avoid the shame. He felt hot tears welling in his eyes, but he choked them down. He let his embarrassment turn to anger, and then he channeled it towards the only people he knew he could get away with directing it at, the fat boy and the murderess. He wanted to walk to the back of the line and punch them in the face, but he didn't. Instead, he focused on the soldier' targets, watching how they moved and trying to predict which targets warranted a bullet.
He watched as the dead shambled their way towards the soldiers, focusing his attention on the nearest. He waited for the gunshots so that he could see the Annies die, their brains splattered all over the ground, their foreheads caved in by bullets. It
was satisfying to him, and eventually he stopped imagining the fat boy and the murderess' face on the Annies, and he just soaked in the sight of the dead falling to the ground, restoring the natural order of things.
As he faced forward again, he saw that trouble was heading their way. Up the street, there was a traffic jam. Well, it wasn't so much a traffic jam as it was a complete traffic clusterfuck. City buses were stacked in a pile, the paint blistered off of their twisted metal carcasses from a fire that had come and gone. Inside, he could see the dead moving around, their charred carcasses trapped in the jumbled wreckage, blackened arms clawing at the air. Cars were scattered about the perimeter, and the dead, combined with the wreckage, effectively cut off their planned escape route.
Tejada had seen the snarl before him, and, as their window of opportunity began to rapidly shrink, he led them to the only place that he could, the giant pink building. It had held the title of tallest building in the city for a grand total of 24 hours after the original title-holder had burned to the ground. Then a helicopter had ripped through the thirty-fifth floor, killing the man that was supposed to be in charge of martial law in Portland. Now it was just a smoldering ruin from the twentieth floor up, but they had no other choice. The building used to be called Big Pink, but now it was more like a cigar stub, noxious smoke pouring out of the collapsed upper floors. How the fire hadn't spread to the bottom floors was anybody's guess, but it offered them their only means of escape, so he wasn't going to look in that horse's mouth for too long.
Tejada waved his men into the lobby as the noose of Annies closed tight around them. The soldiers moved quickly. The ones at the rear shoved their hands under the flabby arms of Rudy and ushered him forward, his toes barely striking the pavement. Amanda came bouncing along after him, and Andy couldn't help but be disgusted by her.
Andy followed along as well, wondering if the sweat-soaked Rudy was going to have a heart attack. He could only be so lucky.
Chapter 2: Big Pink