by Hetzer, Paul
Already, the remaining crazies were coming to life and converging on the new disturbance. The ones at the fence were gnashing their teeth, biting at the links while several were rapidly pulling themselves up the fence as nimbly as cockroaches climbing a wall.
Simultaneously, the Stryker came to life and surged forward as staccato blasts from an M4 tore into the creatures climbing the fence, knocking them off onto the ground, dead or writhing in their own expanding pools of blood.
When Heinlich approached the gate he promptly slid his M9 Beretta from his thigh holster and engaged a group of three crazies that were shaking the fence and slamming their bodies into it trying to get at him. Three well-placed head shots scrambled their brains and dropped them like lifeless, rock-filled sacks. He grabbed the chain and soon had it unwrapped and the gate sliding open while the crack of bullets flew by on either side of him, seeking out targets of opportunity. The Stryker rumbled through the open gate and he slid the heavy gate back into place as soon as the vehicle cleared. He climbed up on the Stryker to drop through an open hatch, while the big M2 opened up in loud bursts, decimating the crazies who continued to converge on the big truck.
“Get us to the Kroger lot, the fastest way possible!” he yelled over the comms to Hernandez. The Stryker pitched forward and picked up speed, veered right, and sped up the small two-lane drive, leaving a scattering of crazies lamely chasing after the accelerating vehicle. The guns grew quiet as they sped away.
“Dogwood One, this is Gypsy Hill Mobile, over,” Corporal Hernandez called into the radio mic.
“Gypsy Hill Mobile, we copy, over.” Relief flooded through the Stryker’s men and women when they heard the First Sergeant’s voice again.
“Dogwood One, this is Gypsy Hill Mobile. Prepare for evac, ETA two Mikes.”
Hernandez steered the Stryker to the right onto a dirt farm track that led to a tilled field that bordered Statler Boulevard. The big vehicle didn’t slow when it hit the dried soil of the field and plowed its own path straight across it toward the four-lane road.
“Gypsy Hill Mobile, this is Dogwood One. Be aware that we still have many hostiles at this location.”
“Roger Dogwood One, we are advised,” Hernandez responded.
“Did you hear that, Sergeant?” she asked over the headset.
“I copied,” he replied. “Okay everyone, let’s get ready to rattle and roll. Watch your line of fire to the Hemmitt.”
The Stryker burst out of the field onto the pavement in a shower of dirt and dust, pulling a sharp right toward the shopping center less than a quarter klick ahead.
“I have a visual on Dogwood One,” Hernandez’s steady voice announced over their headsets, “but we have a problem.”
The screen in front of the Corporal showed the parking lot still swarming with a large horde of the crazies, clambering over the eight-wheeled truck in a mad attempt to get at its occupants.
Sergeant Heinlich stared at the scene from where he was standing in the hatch as the Stryker slowed its approach. He licked his chapped lips and muttered ‘shit’ to himself when he saw what he estimated to be four or five hundred hostiles still engaging the HEMTT.
“We didn’t draw them all away.” Nantz hissed from the hatch next to his. He had an M249 with a tea bag of one hundred rounds hanging beneath it aimed toward the shifting crowd of crazies.
“They know there are people inside the truck,” the Sergeant replied flatly.
The sound of the approaching Stryker drew the attention of the crowd of crazies and groups started to break away and rush through the parking lot toward them. Reese engaged with the .50-cal, careful not to sweep too close to the truck that held the First Sergeant and McCully. Nantz joined Reese with his squad automatic rifle and the rest of the squad sent three-round bursts from their M4s into the approaching bodies. They cut huge swaths of destruction though the mob, yet the remaining creatures sprinted onward in a mad frenzy.
More of the swarm of crazies dropped away from the HEMTT, drawn to the sound of the gunfire, and soon the front end of the massive truck was clear of the creatures. Heinlich saw a puff of smoke appear from the truck’s exhaust as the engines started up.
“That’s it, First Sergeant, get your ass out of there!” he snarled to himself while engaging the rapidly closing crazies with his own rifle from the stopped Stryker. “Back it up, Corporal!” he ordered Hernandez over the comms.
The Stryker lurched backwards, hesitated, and then moved again in fits and jerks. Abruptly, the engine sound ceased with a cough and the Stryker stalled in the center of the road.
“Hold them back with suppressive fire!” the Sergeant yelled at the men and woman who poked through the ports around him and ducked into the Stryker’s interior.
He could hear the engine turning over to no avail. This could be evolving into quite the clusterfuck.
“What’s happening, Corporal?” he calmly asked into his mic.
“She’s not starting!” Hernandez screamed at him, and Heinlich could hear the panic rising in her normally calm voice.
“Fuck! Fucking-fuck!” he cursed.
“You need to get everyone in here and button her up!” she yelled at him through his earpiece.
He thought about them being trapped in this metal shell for days or weeks while the swarms of crazies continuously pounded the armored hull trying to get in.
“No! We’re getting out!” He then addressed the rest of the team over the comms, “Everybody out! Head to the warehouse at our 9 o’clock!”
“I need to put the call in to Base first!” Hernandez immediately responded back.
“No time,” the Sergeant ordered. He pushed through the hatch and scrambled out onto the deck, scurrying across to the driver’s hatch and threw it open. He reached in and hastily snatched the Corporal by her arm as she was trying to raise Gypsy Hill Base over the comms unit; she barely had time to grab her rifle as he pulled her up and out of the Stryker. Behind him he heard boots hitting the ground and the sounds of rifle fire moving away. Reese was standing on the deck over him and Hernandez, supplying covering fire while he got the protesting woman onto the deck. Reese paused and looked at the Sergeant questioningly.
“We move, we survive,” Heinlich stated bluntly and followed Hernandez over the side. Reese gave a sarcastic ‘hooah’ and jumped off of the Stryker after them, firing his rifle as his legs moved him in the opposite tack along the side of the vehicle in the direction that the rest of the squad had taken. A skinny young female crazy in tattered and rotten clothing, a plethora of tattoos sleeving each arm, leaped onto the front of the Stryker and used it to launch herself at him in one fluid motion. Reese swung his rifle at her, knocking her sideways with the barrel even as more and more of the creatures bounded toward him with amazing speed.
The loud repetitive blasts of the SAW filled his ears along with the ‘tap-tap-taps’ of three-round bursts from the M4s and the advancing front of the rabid horde were cut down only steps from him. He looked over at Nantz and the rest of the squad, who had formed a defensive line next to him and nodded his thanks.
“Let’s get the fuck out of here!”
They sprinted toward the dark opening of the warehouse which looked so far away, the noise of the pursuing swarm sounding like a cattle stampede closing in behind them.
Chapter Eight
Steven surveyed the road through his binoculars, trying to detect any movement along the north or southbound lanes of the highway. Only a handful of abandoned vehicles sat like colorful, dead beetles on this stretch of road. After a few minutes, he put the binoculars down.
“It looks clear. Dontela, have Katy bring Jane up.”
Dontela slid back down the embankment into the gorge that led down to a deep valley crisscrossed with fallow fields.
“I’ll help her,” Kera whispered and disappeared after her.
They had stayed four days in the camp, nursing the injured woman and also allowing both Katy and Dontela to regain their strength after their rape and a
buse by their now dead captors. Although it had pained Steven to postpone his hunt for his son for such a long period, unless they wanted to carry the woman, or leave her, Jane wasn’t able to travel. The first few days she couldn’t even walk from one end of the camp to the other, let alone begin a mile-eating hike.
He had fidgeted and paced the camp each day, checking on the woman constantly to determine if she was well enough to leave. They had begun calling her Jane Doe, or simply Jane, given that she hadn’t been able to offer up a name. For that matter, she had hardly said two words to them since they had ended her ordeal, lost as she was in the dark horrors that haunted the recesses of her mind. Their food stocks had become critically low and they needed to do some scavenging if they were going to keep from going hungry. There was plenty of game in the forests around them; however, Steven didn’t want to give the girls an excuse to stay in the camp any longer than was necessary.
Steven had convinced them that finding something to eat couldn’t be put off any longer and that was the catalyst that finally forced them to break camp. They set off across the valley floor following the railroad tracks that ran to the southwest. The mountain that they were paralleling separated them from the western suburbs of Charlottesville that lay in the adjacent valley which spread northwards across the interstate. They followed the tracks for most of the day until the line veered off to the south, forcing them to break from the tracks and blaze a path through the heavily forested valley until they found a pass that opened northwest through the mountain. The land plateaued and became interlaced with overgrown farmland. They crossed several small country roads before the land started climbing again as they approached the imposing Blue Ridge Mountains that stretched from horizon to horizon north and south. They saw no homes on their march, which meant that they ended that first day on painfully empty stomachs. They had camped down in the valley last night and now were overlooking State Route 29, which Steven’s map showed running northeast to where it intersected I-64.
The previous day Jane had walked in a trancelike state, continually having to be prodded and dragged along. If someone let go of her arm she would immediately stop and sit down, her eyes focused somewhere far away. This had slowed them down to what felt like a snail’s pace, but at least they were on the move again. Today promised to be more of the same as she shuffled along in her own little world. The swelling in her face had gone down dramatically and the bruising was barely yellowish shadows of what it used to be. Her chest and abdomen were a jigsaw of cicatrices and scabs where the marks of her torture were healing. Unfortunately, her mind was taking much longer to mend itself. Steven assumed she was suffering from a form of PTSD, and that her mind would heal itself as time put distance between her and the event. Hopefully she would learn to deal with that past trauma and sorrow a little more each day.
He scanned the four-lane road again, paying attention to the scattering of trucks and cars. Still nothing moved. Far up ahead on the west side of the highway, he spotted the glass roofs of a greenhouse complex, though other than that no houses or buildings were in sight.
He heard the sound of the group clambering noisily up the embankment behind him.
Kera plopped down next to him breathing heavily and was soon joined by Dontela and Katy with Jane between them.
“Anything?” she asked.
He shook his head. “No movement that I can see.”
“Doesn’t look like a hopping area of commerce neither,” Dontela muttered sarcastically.
“Don’t worry. We’ll find some food,” Steven reassured them.
Dontela harrumphed. “We better. I may have to cook me up some white boy.”
Steven laughed. “I don’t think it will come to that.”
They made their way up onto the asphalt of the road, guiding Jane between them, and headed in the direction of the interstate.
Steven’s watch indicated that it was October 28th. However, he wasn’t even sure what day of the week it was. In this post-apocalyptic world, calendar days had lost their significance. The days of the week were made up entities of civilization to help direct their weekly lives, and with society in ruins, did it really matter if they knew what day of the week it was? When what was left of the human race settled down and formed an agrarian society again someday far in the future, they would at least need to know the months and the seasons, and maybe the days if they were to plant and harvest with any success. However, right now they had been reduced to a hunter-gatherer society.
Fuck, you can’t even really call us a society, Steven thought, just a scattering of hunter-gatherer groups.
The only time-keeping such groups needed would be to determine the onset of winter or summer in order to better prepare for those trying seasons and to ascertain how game would be responding. As for the days of the weeks, bah! Who needed them anymore?
So back to October and what it meant to them and their immediate future. Winter was coming.
The nights were already dipping below freezing and the days warming up to barely above that. The first snows could begin falling in the mountains any day now. They would have to be prepared. Katy and Dontela wore men’s boots that were massively oversized on their small feet; their original clothes and footwear had been nowhere to be found around the camp. Even the multiple layers of filthy socks that they wore would not for long keep their feet from sliding around in the shoes and developing blisters. Poor Jane only had on several layers of socks with pieces of tire rubber duck taped to them, as the only remaining pair of boots pulled off their dead captors had been monster sized and useless for her small feet. They would need to find proper footwear for the three girls and also winter outerwear for all of them for the cold winter days looming ahead.
They walked at a slow pace to accommodate Jane’s shuffling one. The rising morning sun lifted higher into the clear, cloudless blue sky, heating the morning frost and sending tendrils of steam rising lazily into the air. In the valley below, white layers of fog were sitting like a fluffy blanket over the bare fields.
Steven’s stomach grumbled, reminding him of their lack of breakfast that morning and the meager meal of stale nuts with a handful of boiled rice that they had shared the night before.
Finally, after ten or fifteen minutes of walking they spied a house fifty yards or so off the road on the hill by the southbound lanes. Two cars sat silently in a gravel driveway next to the brown, wood-sided home.
“I bet we’ll find something to eat in there,” Katherine stated, eying the house with thoughts of refrigerators stocked full of culinary delights.
“Maybe,” Kera replied, eying the house with different images of what could be in there haunting her imagination.
Steven pointed to the ditch between the two road surfaces and told the girls to get Jane into the depression amongst the tall dead grass. “Kera and I will check out the house. You two wait here with her.”
The group crossed the road and the two girls lay the woman down in the grass and then sat down next to her.
“Don’t eat all the good stuff,” Dontela remarked. “You don’t want my hungry ass coming up there and finding y’all finishing the last of their doughnut supply.”
“If there’s food you’ll be the first to know,” Steve replied dryly. “Wait here until we call for you, and for God’s sake keep down and quiet. And keep an eye out on the road for anything out of the ordinary.”
“Chill, dude, we got it.”
“What do we do if we see something?” Katherine asked, awkwardly unslinging the 30-30 hunting rifle.
Steven had found out that she didn’t ‘much believe in guns’ as she put it. He had told her that if she expected to survive on the road she would have to start accepting their reality and more to the point, becoming very intimate with them.
She had reluctantly agreed to carry the rifle when they left the camp.
“If it’s a Loony, shoot it and kill it!” Kera said, emphasizing each word. “If it isn’t, just point your guns at it and wait
for us.”
Steven nodded. “Yeah, what she said.”
They left their packs with the three women before crossing the road toward the seemingly abandoned home.
The house sat up in a flat clearing on the side of a hill behind a line of leafless trees separated from the road by a dry creek bed. Kera and Steven approached the house cautiously over a small bridge that spanned the creek, carefully choosing their steps to be as quiet in their approach as possible while watching the windows and areas around the house for any movement.
Steven pointed to the walkout basement where a sliding glass door faced the road. Kera nodded and headed toward the basement, her Saiga hung low and pointed at the doors. Steven kept even with her, his Colt AR shouldered. They reached the glass doors and took up positions on either side.
Steven signaled Kera that he would look in and for her to cover him then swiveled to the front of the door. The morning sun was pouring through the glass door, illuminating a large family room decorated with beige carpet and matching furniture.
Nothing moved inside.
“It’s clear.” Steven said. He tried to slide the door open, but it resisted his effort.
Kera reached around him and rapped on the glass with her knuckles.
Steven raised his eyebrows and glared at her with an expression that asked, “What the fuck?”
She shrugged her shoulders at him and then knocked on the glass again louder. Nothing stirred in the room.
“I don’t think anyone is home, lover.”
“Well, if they were they sure know we’ve come visiting now.”
They walked up and around to the front door which stood completely ajar. Leaves covered the entryway in a carpet of browns and tans.
“It doesn’t look like anyone has been through there in a while,” Steven remarked.
Without hesitation, Kera stepped past him and through the threshold into the house. Steven sighed and entered behind her. The house had a musty, abandoned smell to it and mildew stained the walls with patterns of black splotches where moisture had invaded through the open door. The leaves had blown in as far as the living room where they lay scattered and dry on the carpeted floor, crunching loudly underfoot as they walked through the short hallway.