The truck slid another dozen yards before it came to a stop, its rear tires resting atop the waist-high concrete wall, and the motor coughing a few times before it died. It was balanced there, five wheels in the air, five on the ground. Griz groaned and shoved at the door so he could get his legs free. A few of the horde that hadn’t been crushed or thrown free were still trying to climb over the wreckage, still clawing their way toward them. Gunny scrambled back up to the front of the cab and stood on the side of the passenger seat to pull Griz back in, so they could close the door. The truck had come to rest at a forty-five-degree angle and they could hear the fuel gurgling out over the sound of screams and claws on the metal. They both glanced around in the dim light, taking stock of the situation, weighing options, and disregarding anything that wasn’t immediate and practical. They didn’t have enough ammo to shoot their way out, the truck had too many entry points to be defendable. Maybe against twenty or thirty, they could probably use guns and knives to keep them out of the windows, but not against hundreds or possibly even thousands. The noise of the crash and the keening of the creatures could be heard for miles in the night. If there was another horde nearby, they’d already be on the way. They both came to the same conclusion in about two seconds.
“We’re going to have to jump,” Gunny said. “We’re not over the river anymore, but the trees should be close enough to reach.”
Above them a face appeared in the broken door window and started screeching as it pawed its way inside. Gunny pulled his Glock and fired, exploding its head and it collapsed, half in and half out, arms dangling.
“Go,” he said over the ringing in their ears. “I’ll get the rifles.”
Griz pulled the corpse down into the cab, tossing it over his back and onto the passenger side door. He started climbing, his .45 in one hand, and shot two more as he pulled himself out to stand precariously on the side of the truck. Gunny tossed his M-4 and bug out bag up to him and Griz started clearing a path for them as Gunny climbed up beside him and shrugged into his pack. The horde was encircling the truck, trying to climb up from the front and the rear. They couldn’t get up at the moment, it was too tall, but that wouldn’t last long. As soon as another fifty or sixty bodies piled on, they’d climb over each other and there would be dozens scrambling across the hood and sleeper at them.
They made their way past the chrome exhaust that hissed when the raindrops hit it, and stood on the side of the sleeper. Gunny looked over the edge of the bridge. They had almost made it back to solid ground, another couple hundred yards and they would have been home free.
“They’re just going to jump over the wall after us,” Griz said, eyeballing the nearest treetops through the falling rain and kicking a businessman in the face, sending him sliding over the edge into the darkness.
“We’re a good forty feet up,” Gunny said. “They won’t be chasing after us very fast. We just gotta climb down and head down river. We’ll find a boat or something to get across.”
“It those branches hold my fat ass,” Griz said. “And they don’t decide to just skip coming on the bridge and head through the fields after us.”
“Oh, quit being a Negative Nancy,” Gunny said and sent two more raging faces tumbling back down into the crowd below with two quick headshots. “Besides, I’ve got an idea.”
“Great,” Griz said. “Let me out of here first, I’ve seen some of your ideas.”
He shot another man climbing up the rear axle and slung his rifle.
“I thought we agreed to no jumping off of bridges,” he groused and slid down onto the tire, using it as a springboard to leap over the edge and into the swaying branches, crashing down through them until he finally managed to grab onto one big enough to hold his weight.
Gunny didn’t wait to see if he lived or died. There was nothing he could do about it, one way or the other. He had a moment of breathing room, nothing else had made it to the top of the truck. They were still piling up and it wouldn’t be long before they reached the top, though. Another twenty or thirty seconds, at most, to see if his plan B would work. He slung the rifle over his back and pulled his pistol, sending a round into the lock of the toolbox door on the sleeper. He dropped to his knees and ripped it open, peering inside, trying to see in the dimness. Lightning flashed far off, the wind picked up, and the rain started pelting down harder. The thunder rolled, but the flash had let him find what he was looking for. He pulled out a handful of road flares and kicked a grasping hand away from his ankle. The thing was almost on top of the sleeper, almost gaining purchase. Gunny put a boot to his snapping jaws and sent it back down into the others, knocking a few more off. The road was teeming with them now, the fastest ones nearly on top of their prey. He pulled the caps off the flares and tossed them aside, only keeping one and started striking at them with it, trying to get them to light. They were old, they’d been riding around in the toolbox for years and one of them was soft enough to feel like it would crumble in his hands. They hadn’t gotten wet though, the flint in the cap struck true and the nitrates ignited immediately. Gunny tossed two into the spreading puddle of diesel fuel and one inside the cab of the truck. He was hoping for a bright fire to draw the crowds onto the bridge, so he and Griz could slip away unnoticed in the confusion. The diesel nearly snuffed out one of the flares, but it caught and the fire started to spread. As soon as he saw it was going to take, Gunny slid down the side of the sleeper and followed Griz over the edge, leaping for the nearest rain-slicked branches.
38
Gunny
When Gunny got to the ground, Griz was wiping his Ka-bar on a piece of shirt ripped from one of the undead that had tumbled over the bridge after him. A half dozen or so were crumpled in heaps, broken bones sticking out at odd angles, and holes in their heads from the quick thrusts of Griz’s knife. He put it back in the sheath and started massaging his knees where the door had slammed into them. He would have huge black and blue bruises by morning, but for now he was just trying to loosen the muscles so he could walk without hobbling. They moved under the bridge, out of the rain and the occasional flaming body that was forced over the edge, as they caught their breath and allowed jangling, adrenaline pumped nerves to settle down. The fire fifty feet above them lit up the night and drew every undead thing toward it.
“Maybe we should stay under here for a while,” Griz said. “We seem to be safe enough and to be honest, I don’t think I can outrun any of them if we get spotted.”
They climbed up on the concrete wall, each helping the other with grunts of pain, and tucked themselves back in the girders. They were out of sight and out of the weather. Gunny pulled off his jacket with difficulty and checked the wound in his arm. He had torn it open again, Casey’s bullet hole refusing to heal with the constant strain he kept putting on it. Griz was moving slow and favoring his left side. He’d landed hard on a branch in his fall, and bruised it up pretty good. He probed it with his fingers and declared it fine, nothing broken. Gunny pulled out his bottle of Tramadol and shook a handful out for them both.
“I’m getting too old for this shit,” Griz wheezed as he took a couple and tried to find a comfortable position.
The river stretched wide and muddy before them, nearly a half mile across, with a strong current. They could see a coal barge that had beached itself a little way downstream when the lightning flashed.
“Must have been what took out the main support,” Gunny said when he noticed it. “I bet a whole flotilla of those broke loose. Just one probably couldn’t have done that kind of damage.”
From their position, they could see the bridge was destroyed, a section of a hundred feet or more missing near the middle, the concrete support snapped off by a hundred thousand tons of coal barges slamming into it.
“Let’s hope it takes out the rail bridge while those scumbags are on it,” Griz said in short breaths and leaned back, still kneading his aching legs.
Gunny wrapped his arm with another bandage and pulled the knot tight with h
is teeth. He would have liked to push on, but knew it was senseless to do so. Griz was in a lot of pain and he wasn’t feeling 100% himself. They were safe where they were, the fire would keep the undead away from them, and there was an escape route if they needed it. The abutment they were on ran the width of the bridge, a good twenty feet. If the horde found them in the middle of the night, they could create a diversion and jump off the other side. They could make it to the water and get away. Not the greatest situation, but with a plan B hammered out, Gunny tried to relax and leaned back into the shadows, making himself comfortable on the concrete. They’d rest up some, head down river at first light. In the dark, they might walk right past a boat pulled up on shore and not even notice it. Or a horde of undead might see them before they saw it. Gunny stilled his breathing and willed the medicine to work faster, to kill the throbbing pain in his arm. And his shoulder where he’d slammed into the wall of the sleeper. And his ankle where he’d thumped it against the steering wheel. And his hand. He couldn’t remember bashing it on anything, or why it hurt, but it did. He closed his eyes and eventually fell asleep to the screams of the undead and the smell of their cooking flesh. It smelled like hamburgers on a grill.
They awoke stiff at the first hint of dawn and took a few minutes to work the kinks out. Gunny offered another Tramadol, but Griz refused. Both men were used to sore muscles and pain. It would pass as they limbered up and neither wanted to have their senses dulled. They listened and could still hear the occasional moans of the undead above them. The fire hadn’t burnt all of them.
“Upstream or down?” Griz quietly asked after they were on the ground.
“No idea,” Gunny said. “I don’t remember which direction the nearest town is. I reckon north, that way we can float back down this way, toward the truck stop, that’ll be our best bet to find a rig already fueled and ready to go.”
They kept to the woods, swatting mosquitoes and working up a sweat as the sun rose. The ground was marshy in places and soon their feet were soaked to the knees and their boots muddy, adding weight to each footstep. They trudged for hours, expecting any moment to find a fish camp with a canoe or Jon boat. They dug a few power bars out of the pack around noon to snack on. They had been hard at it for half a day and hadn’t come across any signs of civilization on their side of the river.
“This is crazy,” Griz said, chewing on a peanut butter and chocolate bar, his limp becoming more pronounced the longer they walked. “How can a river not have anybody living on it? Maybe we should head inland, just find a house with a boat in the yard. Gotta be plenty of them around.”
“You would think,” Gunny said, mystified himself why this section of the river had no signs of habitation. Wasn’t riverfront property highly sought after, even way out in the country? They kept thinking they would see a cluster of houses around the next bend. They finally had to admit it just wasn’t going to happen and headed inland, hoping to find a road and follow it until they found a car and then use it to find a boat. They were tired of walking and needed to get to Lakota. If Gunny remembered right, the next bridge across the river was in Memphis, and they didn’t want to try to bust their way through there, no matter what they were driving. They needed a boat. Neither man wanted to chance swimming across, the river was wide and the current fairly swift. Maybe if they had life vests, but if they found those then they would find a boat, too. Gunny was frustrated. Who would have thought it would be so damn hard to find a damn boat on one of the biggest damn rivers in the world? They were both aggravated, insect bitten, and nearing exhaustion. After a half hour of cutting through the swampy woods, they came to another river. Actually, it was the same river, the Mississippi snaked all over and had many long, narrow islands and inlets that were unbuildable because they flooded with regularity.
“What the hell?” Griz asked, kneading his legs. “Have we wandered off into the twilight zone?”
The water was moving slow and sluggish. It wasn’t very deep, but it was wide and both men dreaded getting soaking wet again. With a sigh, they both waded in and started treading water as soon as they could to get out of the sucking mud that sank to their ankles with each step. They clawed their way up the other bank and through the woods, still swatting mosquitos and deer flies, both men silent in their exhaustion, discomfort, and pain.
When they broke through the trees a few minutes later, they were facing endless acres of farmland, and a tiny dirt road running north and south along the meandering route of the river.
They were tired, the poor sleep they’d had the last couple of days, and the sucking mud they’d been trudging through had pulled the energy right out of them. They could see no signs of buildings in either direction, so they continued north, picking up the speed and ignoring the chaffing clothes as they dried. Both pulled out the little bottles of canola oil and broke down their weapons and cleaned them as they walked, talking softly and making the best of a miserable situation. Gunny shook out more Tramadol and they both chewed them and dry swallowed. They needed them. Griz spotted the first leech on Gunny’s neck and with a sigh of resignation, they stripped down in the middle of the dirt road. They both pulled their knives and quickly slid them under the bloodsuckers, loosening their nasty little teeth, then flicking them off to the side. They checked each other out, getting a few more from their backs, before climbing back into damp clothes.
With the sun dipping low in the late afternoon, they found what they were looking for, a little settlement of forty or fifty houses and trailers on a grid of dirt roads. They had finally found their fishing village east of Tunica, nearly twenty-five miles from where they started out. They had missed a few places hidden in the woods on their long trudge, but not many. It was a desolate part of the country, if you were on foot. The tiny burg was situated at a bend on the county road that ran on up to highway 61, which would take you to Memphis. Most of the houses had been damaged, they could see the broken doors and windows. Apparently, at least one person in this no-name town had bought some Haji bacon.
39
Gunny
They listened, watched, and kept alert as they crept into the tiny town. Now was not the time to get careless and have to make a run for the river to get away from a horde. Neither man wanted to get wet again, since they were just now drying out. They just wanted to maybe grab a little something to eat, find a boat, and get across the river. They went past the ski boats and pleasure craft, skipped the trailers of jet skis and Sea Doos. In the middle of the town, they came across a canoe on a back porch, the paddles conveniently tucked inside of it. The front door of the house was half open, and there was an old smell of death coming from the rear windows. Gunny peered carefully through the sliding glass of the back door and saw a dried-out husk of a corpse lying in the kitchen, half its head missing. Nothing else moved and they figured it was safe enough to slip inside to resupply the backpack. They found some canned goods, but the boxes of cereal, crackers, and chips were all infested with ants. It looked like cats or raccoons had been inside tearing up the place, searching for food. Griz handed Gunny a can of fruit cocktail and they both sat on the barstools at the counter and relaxed for a minute, finally taking a break after the grueling hours of hiking in the bogs. Neither man spoke as they ate, Gunny the fruit, Griz working on a can of peas. It felt good to sit, they’d been hard at it for nearly twelve hours, the only break off their feet they had was when they’d been treading water. The pack was a lot lighter than the ones they’d carried in the Marines or Delta training, but they were both a hell of a lot older. It was a lot harder than it used to be. The shadows were getting long as they ate, it would be full dark in another half hour.
A few dogs ran by, catching the men’s attention. They both stared out of the open front door and saw a couple of cats go darting after them.
“That was weird,” Gunny said. “I thought dogs chased cats, not the other way around.”
As they watched, a few more animals ran down the road, heading for the woods outside of t
own. Opossums, a few more cats, and a couple of raccoons.
“Something ain’t right,” Griz said and they both stood, setting their cans aside and drawing their pistols.
Before Gunny could answer, Griz threw up his hand in a quiet gesture. They both cocked their heads to listen to the barely heard rustling noises. Silently, they slipped into the living room and peeked past the curtains. If the horde had been running and keening, it would have froze their blood. It was disquieting enough seeing what they were seeing. There were thousands, a massive horde that filled the road and spilled out among the buildings. The mindless, lumbering wrecks bumped into each other, bounced off cars and houses and shambled straight into town, instead of following the curve on the main county road. They were a rough looking crowd, most of them had strips of flesh dangling and were missing chunks of meat, mostly from their legs. They stretched back as far as the eye could see, in an undulating, slow-moving mass of tattered gray. Maybe a hundred thousand, stumbling south out of Memphis. Ashen figures baked by the sun, with bare feet being worn away by the road. At one time, they had probably been chasing something. Maybe days ago, or even weeks. They had lost the urgency, but they were still traveling and would keep going until something else caught their attention.
It was too late to slip out the back door, by the time Griz had heard them, the silent mob was enveloping the town.
Zombie Road III: Rage on the Rails Page 24