Mortal: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse

by Shawn Chesser

  “And if you bust an ankle ... how are you gonna work the clutch so you can shift through all those gears?”

  “We are running out of time, Captain. So please ... just slow down and I’ll jump,” Cross said, popping his head over top of the cab to get a better view. “Besides, the rest of the walkers are on to us now. And real soon they’re going to be coming at us thick from our twelve o’clock.”

  “How many?” asked Cade.

  “Too many to count,” Cross said at once. “Definitely too many of them to take on toe-to-toe. Looks like the pilot was right ... the window is closing on us.”

  Cade grimaced and nodded. Then, still smarting from the sting of the answer, took a quick mental inventory of their weapons and ammunition. The latter of which they were already low on after having had to fight their way out of the NBL in Winnipeg. They’d lost the other two M4s along with his backpack and the satellite phone when the fuselage had ripped open upon impact. With the dead moving in from all corners, there had been no time to search the area around the crash site. He considered it a blessing they were able to recover Tice’s body before fleeing. Hicks and Lopez had completely burned through their spare magazines, meaning both of their M4s were out of the fight. So that left them with the SCAR Cross had adopted as his own, and however many magazines were left from the ones they’d taken off of Gaines’s body. “Almost there,” Cade said as the gleaming semi loomed near.

  Gripping the bed rail with one hand, Sig Sauer pistol in the other, Cross planted a boot on the fender well and coiled his leg muscles, preparing to make the leap.

  Chapter 38

  “Didn’t think this little guy could push that big ‘ol Chevy, didja, el Capitan? So instead you give me this clown car of death to deal with,” Lopez muttered under his breath as he approached the car in a combat crouch, pistol leading the way. Once he reached the car’s rear quarter panel, he peered inside, keeping the ‘B’ pillar between the front and rear passenger doors between him and the Zs.

  There were purple-ringed bite marks up and down both arms of the male demonio nearest him. He couldn’t miss the deep crack running vertically from near the top of the glove box to the defroster vents where it had beaten on the dash. And there was a haze with all the opacity of Vaseline coating the windshield and side windows, everywhere the rotting cadavers could reach.

  Lopez went to a knee, craned his neck, and sized up the undead woman. At some time in the past, blood had cascaded over its chin and chest and then dried to black, obscuring whatever silly saying was on the tee shirt. After determining there was nothing lurking in the backseat save for stale Cheerios, tiny articles of clothing and the two car seats, Lopez performed the sign of the cross over his body armor and wrenched open the passenger door.

  Instantly a swarm of small black insects fled the overwhelming pong inside the car that started the contents of his stomach—however little existed—on an involuntary upward journey. No vomiting for this hombre, he told himself. And though he’d been nearly immune to the untoward effects of the stench of carrion since the first days of the apocalypse, the ripe nature of these two festering corpses nearly made a liar out of him. Fighting the urge to vomit, he stepped back from the invisible wall of stench and drew a bead between nose and brow. The black pistol roared two times as he delivered a perfect double tap.

  With nothing but open road around the compact, and flatland around everything else, the tremendous noise from the closely-spaced blasts set his ears to ringing.

  Breathing through his mouth to keep the vomit at bay, he ducked his head inside the car and peered past the destruction he’d caused. But there was no way to avoid having to look at the gray matter and splintered cranium that had peppered the female Z.

  As he looked in, the creature hissed and strained and bucked, causing more of the dead passenger’s scalp and brains to take flight, further sullying the interior. Must have turned quickly, thought Lopez, noticing the three-inch-length of jugular snaking from a fleshy crater on the driver’s neck. He stuck the pistol across the male’s corpse and put two quick shots through the female Z’s temple. He said a quick prayer for the twice-dead duo and added a few words for whoever normally rode in the empty kiddie seats. He closed the passenger door and looped around the back bumper, and happened to glance down the interstate to see Hicks running towards him, arms pumping, black combat boots beating the hot roadway. Behind Hicks, a number of Zs littered the ground, sprawled out motionless in ever-widening pools of blood. And to make matters worse, he could see at least two dozen more picking their way slowly through the phalanx of blackened vehicles.

  The driver’s door was locked, so he pushed in the spiderwebbed glass with the reinforced plastic cap on his tactical elbow pad, hooked an arm inside, and popped the door open. He reached across the leaking corpse and poked the seatbelt release. The restraint reeled back of its own accord before snagging on what was left of the Z’s face. Thankful he was wearing two pairs of the purple surgical gloves Cade’s wife had given him, he grabbed the corpse by the neck and yanked it out onto the roadway. Then, anticipation mounting, stepped over the leaking corpse, literally slipped onto the gore-covered seat, and reached blindly around the steering column. “We have keys,” he blurted over the comms a beat later. “On the move,” he added after the engine caught and he slipped the car into gear.

  Hearing this bit of good news, Cade prayed out loud, asking God for more of the same.

  “He ain’t listening,” said Jasper in a funereal voice. “Hasn’t been receptive to pleas of any kind for quite some time.”

  Making no reply, Cade brought the Chevy to a near crawl beside the beer truck and watched via the side mirror a surprising display of agility as the tight-end-sized Cross vaulted fluidly from the pick-up, planted both boots dead center on the big rig’s running board, and grabbed a chromed bar affixed vertically head-high to him just aft of the driver’s door.

  Impressive, thought Cade as he cranked the wheel left, and as insurance against Mister Murphy, who had been absent for an inordinate amount of time, looped around behind the semi just in case Cross couldn’t get it moving. Waiting for word either way, he looked left at the Honda which Lopez had already parked on the grassy median.

  “The cab is clear but there are no keys.”

  Cade’s heart sank. This was exactly what he’d been afraid of. And the reason he’d parked behind the semi. If a strongman can make the Guinness Book by pulling a 747 with his teeth, Cade reasoned, then pushing it aside with Jasper’s truck shouldn’t be outside the realm of possibility.

  “Think your truck can push that truck?” Cade asked Jasper.

  The undertaker shook his head. “Negative,” he said. “No way.”

  Cade was about to call bullshit and give it a try when Dover’s voice crackled in his ear bud, warning him that at the very least the eighteen-wheeler and the Zulus at the east end had to go. And to further ramp up the tension, he mentioned they were on final approach and counting down from two minutes.

  “The semi will be gone in ninety seconds,” Cade assured the pilot.

  “And the Zs?” asked the co-pilot.

  “We’ll take care of those as well,” Cade responded. “Anvil out.”

  He jogged the transmission to the lowest available gear and nudged the throttle. A groan, metallic in nature, emanated from the Chevy’s front end where the bumper and grill met up with the semi-trailer. Simultaneously two things happened: The eighteen-wheeler rumbled to life and began to slowly pull away, and Cross said in his ear, “At Rawley they taught us more than just how to protect the principal.”

  ***

  While Cade had been conversing with the aircrew on the Hercules, Cross had been busy.

  In the span of two seconds the operator had taken a quick glance inside, seeing if it was empty. Two more ticked by while he broke a window and climbed into the vacant cab. A dozen more seconds were burned searching the visor, glove box, and various cubbies looking for a hidden spare. Upon finding no
thing, he wasted no time bemoaning his bad luck. Instead, he popped off the plastic shroud surrounding the inner workings of the steering column—two more gone. Then he unceremoniously yanked a number of multi-colored wires into a bar of sunlight where he could see them. They had been secured together with some kind of thermal shrink-wrap and were connected by a group of white plastic male-into-female couplings. Three more seconds were on the books by the time he located the correct wires. Then another ten rolled by while he stripped them using his multitool and touched them together.

  He had broken into the truck and started it without a key in a hair over thirty seconds. A hell of a feat if he were being measured against a common car thief. Surely not the best time amongst his peers at the JJRTC—(James J. Rowley Training Center) just outside of Washington D.C. where he’d learned and perfected the fine art of Presidential protection—but hopefully quick enough to move a bomb-laden vehicle from the path of a Presidential motorcade if necessary. Which was exactly why he’d been taught how to hotwire every kind of wheeled vehicle, and why he’d continued to perfect the particular skillset even after the rigorous eighteen-week Special Agent Training Course he’d endured at Rowley.

  Thankfully Valerie Clay was at Schriever safe and sound, he thought, working the clutch, gas, and the arms’ length shifter like he’d been driving long haul his whole life. But the reality of the matter was that he and the others were here, in harm’s way, with a large number of dead tightening around them like a noose on a horse thief’s neck. Not to mention the added pressure of the multi-ton mass of metal that looked about as aerodynamic as a brick and much too plump to get airborne—let alone stay aloft—was relentlessly bearing down on them from the east.

  After getting the eighteen-wheeler hot-wired and moving, Cross upshifted quickly, putting a head of steam behind the old Peterbilt cab-over. He eyed the maroon minivan, upshifted and then glanced down at the speedometer and saw the needle pass the thirty-miles-per-hour mark. Keeping the static vehicle positioned off the right fender, he upshifted again. Thirty-five. Then in no time the eighteen wheeler’s speed surged past forty and there was no turning back.

  ***

  Inside the Chevy, Cade and Ari had watched, mouths ajar, as the looming tailgate vibrated and the truck pulled smoothly away. With the shrill whine of spooling gears fading, Cade turned the Chevy back into the center of the interstate, looped around to the east, and steered straight for Lopez; at the last instant, he jogged the wheel a degree and slowed to a crawl, allowing the visibly-winded operator a chance to hook an arm on the bed and get ahold of the tailgate. Feet moving as fast as his bulky boots would allow, the stocky operator got a toe on the rear bumper and threw himself over the tailgate.

  “Good work, Lowrider ,” said Cade, looking into the mirror.

  Flashing a thumbs up, Lopez said, “You are going to have to pick up Hicks ... fool’s high school conditioning is long gone.” Then he spun around on one knee, looked eastward at about a twenty degree angle to pick out the gray speck on the horizon and said, “Better make it fast ... or Oil Can Five-Five is going to land on our heads.”

  In his ear, Cade heard the pilot say in his subtle Texan drawl: “So far so good, Anvil Actual. Wheels down in ninety seconds. Great job, miracle worker.”

  Hoping the pilot was understating the time to touchdown, Cade said, “Roger that,” and pointed the truck towards Hicks, who was moving like his boots were made of lead, not leather. In a matter of seconds Cade had covered the distance, but when he pulled alongside and stood on the brakes, the Chevy’s radiator finally went Old Faithful

  Chapter 39

  South Dakota

  Aboard Oil Can Five-Five

  Taking into consideration the elevation, pressure altitude, current outside temperature, present wind direction, and Oil Can’s weight—which was considerably less after the high flow fuel dump—the flight engineer aboard the Hercules had been busy crunching numbers in order to work up the data necessary for his pilot to nail a successful Max Effort Landing.

  After consulting the data written out on a sheet of paper in the flight engineer’s easy-to-read hand, Dover watched the altimeter slip through one thousand feet AGL (Above Ground Level) and begin ticking down towards five hundred feet AGL. About to perform one of the most difficult maneuvers to pull off in the KC-130 platform, he strained against his straps, testing them in advance of the looming rapid deceleration. That he wasn’t being shot at in the process was a plus. That he could see too many Zs to count slowly threading their way through the stationary vehicles at both ends of his runway set the hairs on the back of his neck at attention. Two birds with one stone, he thought as he looked through the portside glass and watched the eighteen-wheeler pick up speed on a collision course with the last remaining obstacle on his runway. And though his senses were overwhelmed by the plane’s vibration and engine sound and the voices filtering in and out of his headset, he knew the impact between the truck and the smaller vehicle had been catastrophic. Glittering in the sun like some kind of an airburst firework, the silent eruption of broken glass bloomed and fell to earth, then bounced and skittered across the far lane. Next, the windowless shell of the van, its chassis shortened by at least three feet, followed the rapidly-spreading carpet of broken auto glass; after three full rotations across the black top, it bounced down the shrub-covered embankment, finally stopping with its grimy undercarriage pointing skyward.

  Down on I-90, at the same time Hicks was being helped into the back of the Chevy by Lopez, the explosive sound of breaking glass and crumpling metal garnered Cade’s attention. He jerked his head around towards the noise and then bellowed into the comms, urging Cross to bail out of the runaway rig. Too late, he thought as the Peterbilt with Cross behind the wheel pushed the minivan over the shoulder and into space.

  Meanwhile, aboard the Peterbilt, Cross had just popped the door latch when Cade’s voice sounded in his ear bud ordering him to bail out. With no time to reply, he dove from the cab, catching a glimpse of the speedometer on the way out. Fifty miles per hour. Shit, this is going to hurt, he thought as everything seemed to slow to a crawl. Taking note of every pebble and shard of gravel as the ground rushed up at him, he made a conscious decision and whipped his head left, hoping his body would follow suit. From the corner of his eye he registered the flash of chrome and paint as the semi barreled over the edge. Then he hit the sloped hillside like a missile, his right flank absorbing most of the impact. Instincts kicked in and he pulled his arms and legs tight and rolled, letting his helmet, tactical elbow, and knee pads take the brunt of the trauma as his speed bled off and he came to a grinding halt, on his back, head downhill, bruised and dusty—but alive.

  He looked downhill; everything was topsy-turvy and upside down. His eyes picked up and followed the furrow of churned earth and broken bottles and dented cans, some still spewing geysers of foamy beer. His gaze walked the glittering wet trail all the way to the tangled jumble of metal where the tractor trailer had come to rest atop the newly flattened minivan. And there, staring him straight in the face, rendered in white, red, and black on the trailer’s rippled sheet metal was a giant-sized bottle of Budweiser complete with golf-ball-sized beads of condensation. Suddenly reminded of how thirsty he was, he fumbled for the spout on his hydration pack and took a long pull. He dropped the spout and swished the water around in his mouth, letting it linger there, allowing the dehydrated pores to hungrily absorb the liquid for a second before swallowing. He ran his hands up and down his legs and inspected his arms one at a time, fully expecting to find a fracture or three, but discovered nothing obvious. Nothing bad enough to keep him from clawing his way back up to the interstate. But before he started his ascent he needed to get his wind back. He closed his eyes, breathing in and out, shallow breaths at first, listening hard to his surroundings. His heart hammered against his sternum, sending a tidal surge of blood flowing through his head, a whooshing sound that was slowly subsiding. Then, two distinct and very familiar sounds caug
ht his attention—one more so than the other. From uphill and to the right he heard the inbound Hercules—a welcoming noise that came across like the incessant buzzing of an angry swarm of bees. While downhill and to the left came the unmistakable, telltale sounds of the dead—the wanting dry rasp indicative of a first turn, to be exact—and without looking, he could tell there was more than one.

  He rolled to his stomach, extended his left arm, and pushed off the sloping ground. Beads of sweat exploded from his forehead and a cold chill wracked his body as the initial surge of adrenaline started giving way to pain. Craning his neck around a chest-high shrub, prickly against his cheek and smelling like cat urine, he swept his eyes along the debris field and spotted the offending parties.

  But not before they had noticed him.

  Downslope, a dozen feet away, a trio of first turns navigated the shrubs which had been planted with little landscaping forethought in a basic grid pattern at roughly three-foot intervals. Beyond the trio, he spotted another dozen stumbling across the grassy median on the near side of the road paralleling the interstate.

  “This is Cross,” he said between labored breaths. “I’m OK, and making my way back up to the interstate. How copy?”

  Nothing. There was no response. Then he realized he hadn’t heard the usual click from the voice-activated throat mike. The subliminal hiss of white noise usually present in the background was also absent. He felt his right ear for the ear bud and found it missing, torn away presumably from the impact or the subsequent two-second spin cycle he’d ridden on the way down. You’re on your own, he said to himself. He stood nearly erect, left foot planted on the downhill side, and though his right elbow and shoulder throbbed with a low intensity pain that was getting worse by the second, he aimed cross-body and double tapped the nearest of the three Zs in the forehead. And as the near headless abomination slid downhill through the remnants of its own brains, Cross sat down hard, dug both heels into the hillside, and drew a bead on the first turn making most of the racket. That it had recently made a meal of someone’s entrails was a foregone conclusion, made all the more evident by the fact that its dirty blond hair was pasted to its head with a shiny coating of congealed blood and assorted other bodily fluids.