The sad truth was, raiders needed to see rough men willing to do them harm if they glassed our walls. We were close enough to the Safe Zone to request reinforcements if we were in danger of being overrun, but some raiders either didn’t know or didn’t care. Like I said, I have no problem killing the living if they threatened my home or people. Some people thought me cold or unfeeling for my attitude. Fuck. Them.
Ken had never gone with me on an extermination gig because of our lack of manpower, but I figured he would do okay for a short job and I knew he wasn’t squeamish. Something to get us out from under foot. Hell, when we broached the subject with her, even Patty thought it might be a good idea.
Patty might be a better shot and Roxy was no slouch, but back in his twenties, Ken served a stint in the Army and saw what he liked to call a hiccup of action in the invasion of Panama. Any of our crew could kill zombies, but only the two of us had shown a willingness to kill the living as well. Ken didn’t especially like killing breathers, and I didn’t particularly mind. Of course, I didn’t mind a lot of things at this point.
Anyway, after instructing Casey to keep her camo outfit on and her hat pulled down low while walking the walls, we decided to see if the Guard had any assignments needed doing that didn’t sound like a suicide run. So we took a job manning the checkpoint in Shepherd for three days. Sounded easy, anyway. Now I was having my doubts.
Under normal circumstances, the Guard maintained a visible presence on the road, meaning a squad of troopers and an up-armored Humvee sporting a mounted fifty-caliber machine gun. With the new security arrangement, the troops were busy, and in their place were two middle-aged men and their personal weapons. Purely for self-defense, I might add. We opted to keep a hidden overwatch because we didn’t live this long in the ZA being over-confident.
“We run or stay put?” I asked, already knowing my answer, but I wanted to see if Ken agreed.
“Stay for now, I think. They got the drones, but you know how that goes.”
The Guardsmen had a grand total of two functioning drones, and they were always returning to base for a recharge or down for repairs when you needed the intel right now. I heard tell that the satellites were still up there, whizzing around the world and collecting images of our rapidly deteriorating civilization. If anybody on the ground still had access, they weren’t sharing with our friends in the Texas Army National Guard.
“The colonel is going to need updates, and as long as we are careful, we should be safe enough here,” I agreed.
Here being the roof of the fuel depot about a hundred yards off the highway and situated behind a burned out convenience store. The building itself was a single-story brick structure with tiny security windows situated high up on side walls. Clearing the offices inside had been hairy, but the two zombies locked inside had been in pretty bad shape.
One had apparently gotten in with a bite, turned, and predictably eaten the other one. Fortunately, and tragically, the first infected was a child of about four or five years old. Putting that little one down, placing a shot into that poor baby girl’s delicate skull, had me dry-heaving in the parking lot. Ken, who dispatched the presumed father, looked away in an effort to give me the illusion of privacy with my grief.
The mass of zombies swept forward like an incoming tide, and I wasted no time calling in the SITREP, or situation report. One of the National Guard sergeants tried to teach me some kind of reporting format called a SALUTE, which I thought was a hilarious name and I never could get it right. Ken just took over communications duties and sketched out a terse report that he read over the radio. The most important point I thought was the number, and the speed. We compromised on a figure of fifty thousand and a speed of approximately three miles per hour for the leading edge.
We watched for three hours while the packed mass of dead streamed north. Taking turns, Ken and I observed the horde and took notes on what we noticed, and then compared our conclusions.
“Lot of First Wavers out front,” Ken said, and I agreed. The vanguard seemed mostly made up of those oldest of the zeds. Leatherfaces, I heard someone call them. They didn’t move much faster, but I could tell their gaits were steadier. More of a walk and less of a lurch. If that makes sense. They might look like unwrapped mummies, but I could tell they had something going on. Like a purpose. Again, I felt an unfamiliar sense of dread, of fear, wash over me.
“You hear of any excursion as far down as Houston?” I asked Ken, and the fear made my voice hoarse.
We were speaking in a soft tone. Not a whisper but just loud enough for the other person to overhear while sitting shoulder to shoulder. The biggest chunk of the dead had already moved past our position but countless crawlers and the hoppers still struggled past.
“Nah. At least, nothing sanctioned. Maybe some wildcatters, though.”
As I have mentioned before, salvage was the name of the game. Or resource reallocation, as some wag tagged it. Ten thousand survivors used up a lot of consumables, and since the fields were still months from harvesting, food remained in great demand. But then, so did ammunition, and batteries, and fuel. We lived off the stores of the past, like rats eating from a household pantry, or from the garbage dump.
Despite my generally dismissive attitude, salvagers remained necessary for the short term. They kept the community going, and I am sure other Safe Zones got by much the same way. These mostly civilian ventures radiated out from Livingston and braved the tide of the hungry dead to bring back the bounty, the loot, we needed. Each group was an independent outfit and depended on their leadership and planning to survive and prosper. Or not. I’d run across more than one salvage crew picked to their bones after being overrun by a horde.
Most salvage crews out of Livingston worked out some ground rules for when and where they worked, dividing up the map and trying to play nice. There were always some, though, who went their own way and didn’t bother with things like posting notice of their runs or reporting what they found as far as dead movements. Wildcatters didn’t much care for anything but their own skins, and amassing as much wealth as possible and to hell with the rest of the human race.
“Maybe,” I conceded. In the end, what drew them didn’t matter as much as what could be done. Starting with blowing the bridges back up the road.
“How much longer you want to stick it out?” Ken finally asked.
“I was thinking maybe we needed to start packing up,” I said, and Ken concurred. We’d done our duty, reported in the horde, and now we needed to see to our own safety. With the road home teeming with the dead, I knew we had a long detour around potentially hostile territory if we wanted to make it back to Pederson before dark. There was another route, of course, running on the back roads that would eventually link us up with the community in Onalaska on the other side of the lake.
I was just gathering up the .22-caliber rifles when the sound of engines caught my attention. An echo, that was all I heard at first. Motors, more than one, and still several miles away. Amazing how well sound traveled when the rest of the world lay quiet.
Taking a knee, I followed the distant hum with my eyes, straining to make out the source. Ken did the same, using a pair of binoculars as he scanned the roadway to the south.
“Looks like a convoy,” Ken finally said. “Civilian vehicles. Maybe half a dozen Maxed out trucks and SUVS.”
“Maxed” was shorthand for Mad Max, of course, and meant hardened and modified trucks and tractor trailer rigs altered to better fit our new reality. Makeshift plows in the front, wire-reinforced tires and fencing covers for the windows were just some of the bizarre contraptions I’d seen on the road since the dead started trying to eat us. Some, like the plows, worked better than others, and I was mildly curious to see what was rolling our way. I asked the obvious question first. “Look like any of ours?”
Ken shook his head in the negative. “Not anybody I know. Maybe not salvagers, even. Looks like the Beverly Hillbillies, minus Grannie up in her rocker.”
“What about Ellie Mae?” I asked.
“Nope, not her either.”
Ken and I exchanged a quick look, and I picked up the handheld Citizen’s Band radio and started through the channels while Ken continued to observe. He reported a vehicle count of eight total, with no clue as to the number of souls aboard.
The radio remained silent, so I started broadcasting. Yes, I knew it was possibly a bad idea, but so was letting these folks continue up the road. The road was currently littered with a stream of broken, struggling animated corpses, but that didn’t tell the whole story.
Most likely they would catch sight of the tail end of the horde before they got noticed, but that didn’t mean they would understand what they were seeing. If only part of the horde was in view, they might miscalculate and try to bull through, not realizing the true numbers they faced. Against fifty thousand zombies, even their impressive convoy might disappear under that sea of dead flesh.
I hit every channel, slowly reciting a warning. No response, though. I looked up and saw the lead truck, a tricked-out Freightliner tractor pulling a short trailer with an enclosed box. Maybe four hundred yards from us, I thought.
“We gotta get them to stop,” Ken called out, our need for stealth blown to hell as every straggler on the road turned to check out this new potential source of food.
“Well, nobody responded on the radio,” I replied. “We can try the flares, but I doubt they would notice in the daylight.”
“You can shoot out a window or something,” Ken suggested.
“You can do that, but let me get off this rooftop first,” I replied hotly. “I don’t plan on getting killed trying to play hero.”
Ken gave me a look that told me he knew I was right, but he was running out of options.
“Ken, if I do something like that, even if they don’t light us up, I might end up driving them right into the horde. I start shooting, trying to get them to stop, and they would likely floor the gas and try to outrace the ambush.”
“What about shooting one of the signs? Maybe just do enough to draw their attention without provoking a shit storm of hate back our way. I’d dislike getting killed doing the right thing.”
I shrugged. “Not our problem. I don’t know those people, and I don’t owe them anything.”
“Cold, man. That’s just cold.”
I shrugged again. Ken knew me, as well as anyone did these days. I could fake the human emotions up to a minimal level, but I really didn’t feel it. Not down deep, like I used to before the world, my world, ended. Sure, I’d like to help, but not at the expense of my own miserable life, or endangering my friend.
“Well, we have to do something, Brad. You might be able to live with their deaths on your conscience, but I just can’t do it.”
With that, Ken brought the rifle to his shoulder and leaned in for a shot. Reaching out, striking as quick as a snake, I drove the barrel up and shoved the smaller man back. I didn’t know what he had planned, but if he was determined to act then the least I could do was handle the shooting.
“What’s your target?” I asked softly, not taking my eyes from the convoy as it drew nearer. Now just two hundred yards south on the road, and of course at an angle to our perch.
“The stop sign on the feeder road across the highway.” If Ken was pissed at my high handed attitude, he didn’t show it. “That should be visible to the lead driver but would be far enough away to let them now we aren’t targeting their vehicles. Hopefully they will just think we are stuck up here and come to investigate.”
Ken’s idea sucked, but I didn’t have anything better at the moment.
“All right,” I said, “I’ll take care of getting their attention, but you need to get on the handheld and see if you can find their radio frequency. They have enough antennas going, and they have to be communicating somehow.”
I handed off the radio and picked up one of my little Rugers. Sighting in quickly, I found the target was easily seen despite the relatively low-level optics of this model. Hey, I didn’t need Swarovski glass to shoot zombies.
Pop, pop, pop, pop, pop. I fired off a string of shots in rapid fashion, coring out the O in the word stop. It looked more impressive than it really was, but I got somebody’s attention in the lead vehicle. I saw the black smoke as the driver of the Peterbilt started clawing for acceleration, and I feared I’d triggered the stampede I told Ken would happen.
Then I heard Ken on the radio, and to my secret relief I overheard another, more agitated, voice reply. I sank down, seeking the questionable concealment of the thin aluminum parapet that ringed the roof of the small brick structure. Stupid to get shot now. Or ever, I amended, but especially when we might actually accomplish Ken’s self-imposed mission of mercy.
Peering over the metal barrier, I saw the behemoth Peterbilt slow, then brake as Ken continued to speak. I heard him mention the Safe Zone in Livingston, but I couldn’t hear the response. After a moment, Ken looked up and gave me a nod before he spoke.
“They want a face-to-face. Is that okay?”
“Sure,” I said after a pause. “They want to come over here?”
Ken shook his head. “On the road. I think they figure we are only armed with small caliber rifles. I didn’t correct that assumption. Better not to spook them.”
“They say where they are coming from?”
“They were being a little cagey, but from what the man let slip, I think they are some of the last survivors out of Houston.”
Well, that was something. Before the world went to hell, there were over two million people in Houston. I’d made that run early on, but survivors coming out of that hellhole had been scarce in recent months. I didn’t know if their claim to Ken was a boast, or a subtle cry for help. Like most things, I figured time would tell.
CHAPTER TWELVE
We un-assed the building without too much drama, all in all. The ladder was braced to the back side of the building, and Ken made three trips down while I sat on the edge of the roof and potted zombies. Mostly shamblers, but by the time Ken carried down the last load I was down to killing crawlers. Hey, they can all kill you in the right set of circumstances.
I never understood why it took some survivors so long to figure out how to safely take out the dead from rooftops. If they can’t reach you, they cannot infect you. Claiming the high ground was a military axiom, I learned, but even soldiers overlooked the use of a good perch when killing zombies. Different mindset, I guess. Plus, there was always the chance you would have more targets than you had bullets, and zombies were patient if nothing else. If you play the waiting game, they never called for a time out. Which is one reason it took Ken three trips to carry down everything. I never went anywhere without lots of ammo.
Ken usually drove whenever we went anywhere together, but since he was talking to these folks, I got behind the wheel. My friend continued talking into the radio as I guided the heavy truck over the pile of bodies I’d dropped around our ride. Another lesson I took to heart was that four-wheel drive was a must when trying to tackle a three-foot tall mound of gooey corpses.
“What you think?” I asked, as Ken shut off the radio.
“About what?”
I sighed. “Don’t be an asshole, Ken. Are they right folks, or are we going to have a problem?”
He knew what I meant by right folks. Shorthand for being “the right kind of people.” That didn’t mean the right race, or religion, or even on the right side of the law before everything went to shit. Despite my willingness to cap bikers, we had a couple of Los Lobos members in our community that qualified as right people.
The criterion was simple. Don’t murder, rape, or steal from the living. Get along with your neighbors and work for the good of the group. Private enterprise was encouraged but only after you did your bit for the community. Hence, the militia was volunteer, but everybody was expected to do their time there, or in some equivalent endeavor. These were some of the precepts laid down early on in the formation of o
ur Safe Zone, and most of these rules came from the civilian rather than military side of things.
“They seem legit, but we will probably know soon enough. Glad I replaced the glass in this thing, just in case.”
I laughed without mirth as I crested the last barrier of corpses and approached the small convoy, which by this time had assumed a rectangular box shape, nose to tail, to form a rough fortress of steel sheet and firing positions.
My friend was a master of understatement. When Ken found some sturdy sheets of Lexan on a salvage run, he’d taken every piece of the stuff he could find and spent a week working almost nonstop in his shop. Now we had bullet resistant windows in this truck and in the Behemoth as well.
The stuff wouldn’t stop a fifty-caliber round or even the .338 Lapua, but just about every common rifle and pistol round bounced off without more than a scratch. Yes, he lined the engine compartment, too. Doesn’t do any good to make the truck a pillbox. He even found some run-flat tires, but they would still come apart if you pumped enough bullets into them.
“How you want to do this?” I asked as we closed to within fifty feet of where the lead vehicle was parked.
“My idea, so my ass on the line,” Ken replied as he tugged at the straps of his Interceptor body armor. He wore it under a jacket, but any former cops or military in that group would notice the bulky shape. “I’ll get out, approach the lead vehicle. You stay here and keep the engine running. If they try anything, you get out of here and call it in to the big dogs.”
I shook my head. “On second thought, I should be the one to get out and talk to these guys. Anything happens to you, Patty would just shoot me, you know.”
“Hey, I wanted to help these folks. My call, so should be my neck on the line.”
Ken was serious, but then I always knew he was a better person. But, I was serious, too. No way did I want to explain to Patty that I let her man get killed.
Hunger Driven (Book 2): Fight the Hunger Page 14