“No, we don’t fight them.” she said earnestly. “We teach the settlements how to do it. We have to warn all the small groups to go to the walled towns. You’ve been mapping them for months, you know where they all are, even the ones without radios. We have to tell them about the zombies and how the Movement controls them. We have to let them know about the enhanced strength and speed of the officers so they know who to target first. There is much we can show them so they won’t be conquered.”
She gripped the table and stared deep into him, searching for something beyond the surface, looking for the core of his being, his very soul. Appealing to it. Imploring him to understand and help her to right the wrongs she had helped create. This meant everything to her. It was her way of cleansing her own soul, beating back the guilt. Try to clean some of the blood off her hands. Jessie knew what she felt. Knew the despondency of realizing mistakes you had made cost the lives of others.
“Okay.” he said simply. “We back track. We’ll train them. But after breakfast.”
She sat back in her chair with an exhalation of breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding and stared at him. “Really?” she asked “You’ll help? You’re not joking me?”
“If you cook like this every day.” he said, shoving another forkful of spam in his mouth. “I’d help you rub jalapenos on Satan’s toilet paper.”
“Don’t get your hopes up.” she replied but with a relieved smile and started eating again, her appetite returned.
Jessie made a mental note to look for a pharmacy, the slashes on her cheeks weren’t healing very well, they were still red and a little inflamed. They needed to find some penicillin powder or pills.
75
Slippery Jim
They stayed hidden at the first stop in the Hutterite community. They heard them working but knew they were safe, everything on the trailer Tony and Lizzie were in was going all the way to the Tower. Jim and Gage had a scare when they heard Dozer say he wanted to look inside the Bradley’s. They didn’t have them when he was in the Army. Luckily, they went to the other one, though. The tools and equipment were off loaded quickly, many hands making light work, and the trucks were rolling again within the hour.
The plan was to lay low until they got past Tombstone. At the first rest stop beyond that, they could show themselves. It would be too late to turn around. They’d show them the Bullet Brigade wasn’t a bunch of useless kids. They could pull guard duty so all the drivers could get some sleep. They could help keep watch for bandits or zombies during the day. Once they left Colorado, it would be new roads. Uncharted territory. Jimmy and his crew could help clear away debris or stand guard while the men did it. All of them were pretty good shots, they’d spent a lot of time on a gun range they’d built out in the woods, practicing for hours with bb guns and airsoft pistols. They spied on the soldiers in the militia when they trained and could do everything those guys could. Jimmy and Gage had stolen manuals for all the real guns and they studied them harder than any math or science book. They’d broken into the armory and had practiced on the real guns, too. They could tear them down, put them back together, knew how to clear a jam and reload all of them, even the heavy machine guns on the Bradley’s.
They dozed through the night, the rocking of the trucks lulling them to sleep, and woke when they heard the hiss of airbrakes as they stopped. Something was wrong. There was yelling and screaming and it sounded like panic. The walkie talkie crackled to life with Tony and Lizzie both asking what was going on.
“Can you see?” she asked “Are we under attack?”
Jim and Gage both scrambled for vision blocks, trying to find the danger.
“Over here!” Gage shouted “I think we’re at Tombstone.”
The trucks were on a road outside of a line of train cars pushed up tight to each other in the fields. They formed a wall that completely encircled a small town and there were gunners on top of them firing at something. The wall was on a dirt road maybe a quarter mile off of the blacktopped county road and the trucks were stopped on it, waiting to be inspected before going through the gate. Jimmy and Gage were in the Bradley on the last drop deck in the line and they could see what was coming down the road, what the guys on the wall were shooting at.
A wheezing, lumbering, blood splattered school bus was struggling to keep moving. Steam was pouring out from under the hood, one of the front tires was missing completely and the rim sparked against the asphalt as the driver kept his foot to the floor, the engine coughing and trying to give up. It was covered with the undead, keening and screeching, trying to climb through the windows to get at the fresh meat. They were being kept out by wild and desperate thrusts of sticks and metal bench legs and anything else the people inside could use. The bus was barely moving, maybe going eight or ten miles an hour, it was on its very last bit of gasping life. The dead were being knocked off by the blows from inside or drug down by one of their own trying to climb over them to get to the new blood. The roof and hood were crawling with the corpses, each fighting to get in and knocking more of their own off than the people inside. Behind the bus spread out nearly as far as they could see was an uncountable horde running, shambling and crawling in their wake, lunging for the bumpers and windows.
A clanging bell was ringing and more people were running with their guns to climb the train cars. Jimmy and Gage had never seen so many zombies at once, the bus must have run into the monstrous horde and got torn up trying to plow through them.
“What do you want us to do?” Antonio yelled at them over the noise of the gun fire on the two-way “Do you want us to stay hidden?”
The truckers had hopped out of their rigs before they saw what was going on and at the sight of thousands of undead chasing the bus, the guards hurried them inside the closing gates. The town was being sealed.
“Get out!” Jimmy yelled back into the mic. “We’re got to do something, come back to the last trailer. You’ve only got a minute or two before the horde is here.”
He slid down out of the commander’s seat and into the cargo area as he hollered at Gage to fire it up.
“I’ll get us untied!” he shouted and swung open the back door. The truckers had crisscrossed the chains in the tow pintles and locked them down with binders. Jimmy was quick and had the back ones unhooked and was racing for the front ones when Tony and Lizzie came running up, out of breath from their dash three trucks up in the line. They still had their Texas can openers in their hands, the oversized Rambo knives they’d used to saw a small hole in the roof. The thin aluminum was easy to slice and they only needed an opening big enough to shimmy through.
“Lizzie, you’re gunner.” Jimmy said, “Tony keep her fed! I’ll be there in a second.”
He got the front chains released and climbed aboard, jumping down into the commander’s hatch and putting on the helmet. He keyed the mic, asked Gage if he was ready.
“Roger.” came the nervous reply.
“It’s just like the books and the games.” he said to his crew. “We’ve practiced everything, now we just gotta do it. That bus load of people ain’t gonna make if we don’t help. Let’s go, Gage.”
Gage turned the yoke all the way and hit the gas. The Bradley spun in place, tearing up chunks of wood from the trailer until it was facing the struggling bus. Gage got the yoke centered, hit the gas again and the M2 launched off the low trailer and aimed straight for the horde. Jimmy dropped down and closed the hatch, he knew they were about to get buried in bodies. He also knew they were safe. There was no way the undead could get at them, no way they could get stuck, no way they couldn’t crush them under the tracks for hours until they were all really dead.
The bus had finally stopped when they turned onto the dirt road. The bent-up wheel without a tire had sank into the dirt, the crossmember under the motor dug in and the back tires just spun. The dead piled on, faces smashed against unbroken windows, teeth gnashed and bit, the aching hunger for blood driving them into a frenzy. Sharpened sticks poked
at them through broken glass and the screams of the living were drowned out by the screams of the dead. The fighting was frantic and desperate, they could see the goal, the safety of the town, the security of the walls just a thousand feet away. It might as well be a thousand miles.
There were fifty guns on top of the wall now but they couldn’t shoot into the monsters climbing all over the bus, their bullets would kill whoever was inside. The booming of repeating rifles and semi-automatics filled the air as they took down the ones still running for it but there was nothing they could do about the hundreds already clawing their way in.
“Get close!” Jimmy yelled into the mic. “Run right along the edge of the bus, scrape them off.”
Gage adjusted his path and the metal of the tracks clanked against the tin of the bus dragging the undead down, crushing them under fifty thousand pounds of Uncle Sam’s steel. The Bradley was slow and cumbersome, Gage being careful not to tear the side of the bus open like a sardine can and the dead piled on.
“Drive right into the horde!” Lizzie said. “We can lead them off and those people can get inside.”
It was a good plan, but the undead could smell the blood and fear of the people in the bus. They couldn’t sense any of the living from behind the thick steel walls. A few seemed to know there was flesh inside but most kept rushing for the screams coming from inside the bus.
“It’s not working.” Jimmy said in frustration. “They won’t follow us.”
“I’ll push the bus inside.” Gage said. “Once it’s in their walls, we can deal with the horde. Those people won’t last much longer.”
He spun the Bradley on a dime, crushing dozens more and grinding their bones into the asphalt.
“The gates are closed and they won’t open them! Not with all these zombies that will rush in when they do!” Tony yelled and hung on, staring through the port at a biting face staring back.
“They have the same gate system we do in Lakota.” Jimmy said. “A sally port. They can close the gate behind the bus and they have a kill zone to take out the zombies. We watched Phil practice the same thing a few months ago, remember?”
They did and knew it would work. Once the bus was safe, they could go to town on the thousand zombies still stumbling down the road. They could blow them to hell and back, all four of them were eager to try out the 25-millimeter cannon and see what kind of damage it could do. Gage ignored the bodies he ran down and those that were squished, some cut in half, as he nosed up against the back bumper of the bus. The Bradley didn’t even strain as he started pushing. He could see surprised faces in the rear windows and he waved but they couldn’t see him through the periscopes. The people inside went back to beating the undead, smashing arms and faces, breaking grasping fingers with frying pans.
Gage kept pushing and then he could see the men on top of the wall yelling and motioning towards the gate.
“Light ‘em up!” Jimmy hollered over the racing engine and clanking of the tracks. “Shoot the ones behind us!”
In his adrenaline filled excitement he forgot the proper commands they’d practiced but Lizzie knew what he meant. She spun the turret, yelled “I’m shooting now” and pulled the trigger. The cannon boomed and bodies imploded, they watched the 25-millimeter chain gun spit out death and dismemberment. The rounds punched through the soft bodies and kept going. A hundred zombies deep into the horde were flying apart from the impact but it barely made a dent in thousands still coming.
“Wrong ammo!” Jimmy said. “Switch over to the explosive stuff.”
“Switching.” she yelled back, the official jargons and terms they had spent hours learning completely forgotten in the heat of battle. She tore her eyes away from the sights to find the right button to push to swap rounds.
“Shoot! Shoot!” Jimmy yelled from the commander’s position and seeing the hundreds of undead still running and stumbling towards them.
“I’m working on it!” she yelled back and clicked the button that fed the high explosive incendiary rounds into the gun.
Gage kept pushing, sometimes having to adjust where he was putting pressure to keep the bus straight. The zombies were being bashed off of it from the people inside and some sharpshooters from the wall were carefully taking aim where they could, exploding heads when it was safe to do so.
The gate was slowly opening, the train car being rolled back on its tracks by sweating men cranking on the cable wheel. The explosions from the new rounds Lizzie was sending into the horde had fiery body parts raining down, flying hundreds of feet. She kept the trigger pulled and raked back and forth across the mob that was already an inferno. The heavy thump thump thump of the cannon drowning out the small arms gun fire, the racing engine and the screams of the undead.
“Stop firing!” Jimmy yelled when he saw the entire horde splashed all over the country side, mostly in small flaming chunks.
“Want me to get the rest of them with the machine gun?” she asked, already switching over to the seven six two.
“Can you see any still moving?” Tony asked “All I can see is fire and giblets.”
“Hold on!” Gage yelled through the mic “I’m backing up!”
He found reverse and crushed more of the keening, clawing monsters under the tracks as he backed away from the gate. The bus was inside the kill zone and the men started cranking the cable wheel the other way, shutting them in. The men on the wall gathered around the boxed in bus and from their vantage point above it, started carefully picking the zombies off when they would get knocked to the ground by the people inside. There was still a lot of screaming coming from inside the battered and broken yellow school bus and they feared the worst; that all their efforts had been for nothing if one of the horde had gotten inside and was tearing through them.
Gage shoved the yoke all the way over and the Bradley ground more broken bodies into the dirt. Lizzie had the turret locked on target and it spun automatically, the sights staying on picture, the two forty chattering and spitting lead into anything that moved.
“Cease fire.” Jimmy finally remembered the right command. “Save the ammo. Gage, go mop up, Stabby style.”
“Roger dodger.” he said and hit the go pedal again, sending the heavy armored vehicle flying down the road into the smoke and flames, smashing the body parts and undead things into paste.
76
Tombstone
Now that it was all over, the kids started to feel a little fear. Not of the zombies, they knew they were never in any real danger. They’d all lived through up close encounters with them, fighting them off with their bare hands or running for their lives as others died around them. Being inside the Bradley meant they were invincible. They were afraid of the truck drivers and what they were going to say. They might really be in trouble, they might be really mad.
Gage pulled up next to the wall, crunching more bodies under the treads, sending spurts of rotting intestines and spoiled blood into the grass kept short by the wandering herds of sheep. He shut the noisy engine down and they popped the hatches to stick their heads out. The shooting from the top of the rail cars had stopped and there were crowds staring down into the area between the gates. Into the killing field. It was eerily silent after the cacophony of cannon fire, the revving motor, the screaming undead and the sound of a hundred rifles. Someone saw the kids and slid a ladder down to them. There were nods of acknowledgement as they climbed to the top but no one yelled at them, no one scolded them for doing something reckless and dangerous. The men that noticed them seemed to approve, seemed to think they were supposed to be manning the Bradley. A few even clapped them on the back, quietly said good job, as they squeezed through to see who they had saved.
Only one man had come out of the smoking, broken-down gore splattered bus. It was a bearded guy speaking in careful, stilted English that carried in the hushed silence. Everyone was trying to hear, none of the men on the barricade made a sound and the Slavic accent was unmistakable. Russian or something similar. Mayor Tackett w
as reading the note again and looking at a piece of Lakota gold.
“We understand, sir. Doctor must check for bite.” he said. They were standing a little aside from the door in a clear spot that wasn’t littered with undead bodies. “But ladies would like opportunity to present themselves in favorable manner. Please follow, I show.”
Did he say ladies? The men on the wall all tried to crowd a little closer, to see what the Russian was talking about. Tackett followed the man up the steps and saw for himself what he was talking about. There were about fifty women, hair in disarray, torn and bloody clothes streaked with black blood from the desperate battle. They had been on the road for days and were covered in grime and dirt. Some looked shell shocked; some defiant, some hopeful, some afraid. They were all races and colors and nationalities. Asian, black, white and everything in between. All young and probably pretty under the layer of dirt and gore.
They had been fighting for their lives for endless hours, ever since they had run into the horde nearly a day ago. The bus had taken damage trying to get through it but they’d managed to keep ahead far enough to refuel and add water to the leaking radiator. They fought them off with sticks and fists, beating them away from the windows as the Russian kept them moving. They never had more than a few minutes rest, the tired old bus barely managing to go more than twenty or thirty miles an hour. When he ran over a chunk of metal in the road and the tire blew, they thought they were finally going to die. They were so close, they had come so far, lived through so much and they would be torn to shreds within sight of the walled city they had hoped and prayed was real.
Mayor Tackett read the note again and shook his head. It wasn’t the original, it had very carefully been copied, right down to the smiley face.
“Welcome to America.” It started out then went on with radio frequencies they monitored, the names of a few fortified towns and a crude map of where they were. It ended with “handsome devils looking for wives.” And the smiley face. It seems Jessie had found them something that had been unobtainable at any price. A boat load of women.
Zombie Road: The Second Omnibus | Books 4-6 | Jessie+Scarlet Page 50