The black shape closed the distance until it hovered about ten feet over the truck, but then it dropped until it was almost next to the driver. The little blue light shined inside the cab, but Victoria didn't think it could see the rear seating area.
“Why did you deviate from your assigned route?” a tinny-sounding male voice asked from a speaker on the drone.
“Had to drop the kids off at school,” the driver deadpanned.
“Come again,” the voice replied.
“I tried to turn a pair of deuces into a royal flush,” the driver said in the same business-like manner.
“Driver 2521, this is a violation of the terms of your contract. No further deviation from your assigned route will be tolerated.”
“Look, I suffered six hours of your rolling parking lot and you wouldn't let me out of my rig, the least you could do was let me crap in a proper toilet. I'm almost back on the road, no harm done.”
Victoria's stomach was rolled up like a sleeping bag at that moment, but the driver seemed to be having fun.
The drone whirred for ten or fifteen seconds without replying. Her heartbeat ratcheted up a few notches as she felt the energy in the air build toward something dangerous. She'd dealt with drones back at Forest Park as well as on the barge in Cairo.
“Just get back on your route,” the tin voice said with frustration.
“You got it, boss,” the driver replied.
The man rolled up his window as the drone shot off into the night. He then turned around and smiled at everyone behind him.
He was practically a kid, probably not much older than her. The dashboard lights illuminated his toothy smile, blue eyes, and long blonde hair pulled into a ponytail. She would have pegged him as a barista at Starbucks if he wasn't already behind the wheel of the big rig.
Before anyone said anything else, he put the truck into gear and got them rolling. He tapped something on top of his dashboard.
“Ok, guys, that was just another hiccup from our friends in the sky. We've seen how insane it was at the port and just when it seemed it couldn't get any weirder, Sabella and Elise jumped in my truck. Now we have more kids with guns. Crazy, huh? Am I right, Internet?”
“Who are you talking to?” Liam asked.
“Oh, no one right now. I need to upload my file to the internet when we get back to civilization. Then, I'll be famous.” He leaned closer to what had to be his camera on the dash. “You'll make me famous, right my peeps? Back me up, here.”
“Mom, who is this guy,” Leah asked in a quiet voice. “What's happening right now?”
Sabella took a deep breath as she sat next to her daughters. “I stole that car and chased after the men who took our Elise.” She motioned to her daughter in the passenger seat. “And they drove as a group to the same place all those trucks were going. I think they figured it was the way to safety.”
She laughed to herself.
“It wasn't,” she added with sarcasm.
“How did you find her?” Leah asked.
“The military set up giant walls along the road and everyone had to stay on the pavement. The big rigs lined up one after the other in the right lane, which allowed the cars and motorcycles to speed by on the left because there was no outgoing traffic. The fools got caught at a military checkpoint before they realized what it was.”
“What was it?” Victoria asked of the mother.
“Yeah, mommy, what was it?” Susan repeated.
“I couldn't see over the walls, but they weren't perfectly aligned pieces of concrete. Whenever I looked through the cracks, I saw men and women walking in a giant cloud of dust.”
“The zombies that were standing around the house,” Liam suggested.
“Yes,” Sabella agreed. “They went to the edge of the river.”
“Why the hell would they do that?” Leah asked.
“I don't know. But once those assholes reached the checkpoint I crashed my car into theirs before any of them could turn around or back up. Some of the bikes escaped, but Elise's driver tipped his bike over and that gave her a chance to run. That's when the men at the checkpoint started shooting.”
Sabella seemed to choke up a bit and she grasped Susan's hands.
“I don't want to get too detailed, because of little ears.”
“Momma, I can handle it,” Susan complained.
“Mm-hmm. I know you can, sweetie.”
Sabella steadied her breathing before going on.
“Russ and I abandoned our car to follow Elise as she tried to get away from both the bad men and the checkpoint guys. We ran along the line of trucks not sure if they were going to shoot us, too. I couldn't take her over the fence because of all the zombies there, so we were at the mercy of the truck drivers on that road.”
The driver chose that moment to jump in. “It's a common misperception that truck drivers are a bunch of losers with tattoos and bad attitudes. The reality is that most of us are pretty normal people. When I see two women running from trouble, I open my door. I even let in the cowboy.” He nodded to Russ in the seat next to him and also pointed to the camera and gave it a thumbs-up sign. “Cuz' that's what the Internet would want, one-hundred percent.”
“Truckaduck opened his passenger door and we snuck inside. He said a couple of the bad guys ran by, but they were chased by the checkpoint men. We hid here in the back until he picked up his freight and then I begged him to get the rest of you.”
“She didn't have to beg. I really did need to stop.” He put his hand over the camera like he was hiding something. “I peed out the door when they weren't looking,” he whispered.
“Yuck,” Victoria replied. She thought about it for a second, then added, “But thanks for coming to get us.”
4
Like a good jog to start the day, the sound of the big rig motor and sight of the passing farmland symbolized a fresh start.
When the truck got onto the paved highway, they had to wait for a couple of big trucks to speed by before they could jump in behind them.
“The loading zone is that way,” the driver pointed to the left, “but they have a big loop you go through, so all the trucks come back to this road. It was lucky for Sabella we passed right by this house. As you just saw, they don't like us taking detours.”
He turned the truck to join the others on the road and he worked through gear after gear to catch up to them. When the speed was where he wanted it, he released the gear shifter. A little yellow duck had been cut open and smashed over the shifter nob.
“So, you like ducks?” she asked the driver. It didn't feel right to talk to the back of his head, so she slid on her knees between the two front seats.
“Oh yeah. Well, sort of. It started kind of as a prank. I used to snap pictures of the duck whenever I traveled to new states, but eventually I hit most of the lower 48 and it just kind of sat there. I get a lot of feedback on my video channel about how I should call myself Rubber Duck after some old trucker movie, but I've never had time to watch it.”
“You have a lot of followers?” she asked.
“It goes up and down. Lately, it's gone down to almost zero, but at one time I had 50,000 views on each video.”
Liam whistled in awe from the back seat.
“Is that a lot?” Sabella asked.
The driver half-turned to her. “For a trucker, yeah. For an internet video star, not really. But I built my following after years of showing this country to my fans.”
“They just watch you drive? Isn't that kind of dull?” she asked.
He looked at the camera by cocking his head to the side. “You guys think I'm boring?”
“I didn't mean anything by it,” she replied quickly.
He laughed. “I hear it all the time, especially from my family. They don't believe I make almost as much money from these stupid videos as I do from the freight hauls, but people are interested to see what it's like out there in the wide-open highway.”
“What's your real name?” she asked
, “or should we always call you Truckaduck?”
“No, that would be kind of crazy. My real name is Dave. Dave Amberleigh, from a little town called Albion, Indiana. This here is Angela,” he patted the dashboard, “my faithful steed. Named her after my mother.”
“So, Dave from Indiana,” Liam began, “how did you end up here in the boot of Missouri and what did they have you pick up back there?”
The truck hummed along at sixty miles an hour and the digital clock showed it was almost five in the morning. The first glint of sunrise crept over the broad horizon. She wanted to think the new day was filled with hope, especially after all the bad luck they'd been having, but Liam's question reminded her that they knew virtually nothing about what was happening in the wider world.
Dave took a while to respond, but when he did he seemed to have rehearsed his answer like it was part of his routine.
“I know I don't look it, but I've been hauling freight for about ten years. Got started right out of school because I had an uncle in the biz. I followed the rules, did my time, and eventually got better and better routes and payouts. But the past few months the transportation industry has been going down the shitter. When the fuel began to dry up, we got fewer and fewer jobs. Toward the end, I spent most of my time at the terminal in South Dakota waiting for a billable job.”
“We heard the fuel dried up about two weeks before the zombies came,” she said.
“Yep. I played a lot of foosball during that time. In fact, I hung out in the rec room for a whole week because almost no freight was moving at all. The jobs that came up paid out like a Caesar's Palace jackpot but those went to the drivers with the most seniority. It was only at the very last moment before the President's speech a bunch of jobs came through. Every driver left in the terminal got sent out that day.”
He sighed.
“Of course, we all thought it was the return of normal. Everyone shared high fives and goodbye's not knowing that we'd probably never see each other again. The next day I was uploading one of my videos to my audience when I realized the East Coast was collapsing from the Double Dog virus.”
“Double Dog?” Liam shot back. “I've never heard that one.”
“Yeah, it's not official. Some of the other truckers called it that because they double dog dare you to deliver freight to those cities. A lot of drivers who happened to be in the affected areas and were fans of my videos posted comments about what they saw there. Their advice was to stay far out in flyover country where the sick couldn't find us. Some drivers linked up and basically took ownership of their freight, so they could survive in little communes.”
“Is that what you did?” she asked as a follow up.
“Nah, my fans wouldn't approve,” he pointed to the camera. “I spent a lot of time in the upper tier of states and out west, far from the action, but eventually I had to go into Iowa, Kansas, and Oklahoma. A couple of days ago hundreds of drivers got notice to head to this new terminal in Wilson City, Missouri. Don't let the name fool ya'. You didn't even notice the ‘city' as we passed through it just now because it's only a couple abandoned restaurants and a few dozen run-down houses.”
“If the town is so small, why did so many trucks get sent?” Liam asked with exasperation.
“I don't know. It was a lightning-fast live load, which is trucker jargon for the shipper shoving the cargo into my trailer, but they didn't let me out of my cab nor did they require me to sign off once they shut and sealed my cargo doors.”
“Has that ever happened before?” she inquired.
“What? A live load? All the time.”
“I meant that you didn't know what they put in there.”
“Most of the time I only need to know the type of cargo, like if it is refrigerated, dry, or liquid. If it's perishable I have to clean out the inside to meet the government standards, so that's a giveaway. If I'm driving for Wal-Mart or one of the other big box stores, I always know it's retail crap. Could be ladies panties or eighty-thousand pounds of bird seed. But to answer your question, I don't get in the back and pop open boxes to confirm what I'm hauling.”
“If they rushed trucks in, it could be something good,” Liam replied as if thinking out loud. “Guns. Survival gear. Army stuff.”
“What are you saying, Liam?” she asked.
“Well, we know the Army just lost control of the other side of the river at Cairo. The survivors are clearing out to escape the hordes of zombies walking all over the place in this region. Seems like a pretty good way to get all their gear and people to safety if they had these big trucks swoop in and get them. They spent the time and effort to build those big walls to keep out the zombies at that exact spot they needed the evacuation. It seems too convenient for anything else.”
“Are all the trucks going to the same spot?” Sabella asked from her nook in the back.
Looking out the front window it sure looked like it. The row of trucks started to clump together as they rumbled along the perfectly flat two-lane highway.
“I don't know, actually,” Dave said with a touch of anxiety.
“Do you have a CB radio?” Liam asked. “Can't you just ask the trucks up ahead?”
Dave laughed. “Now that is another old trucker stereotype. I don't use a CB. Never needed one when I have my GPS, traffic apps on my phone, and fans who report accidents to me in real time. I don't have any interest in a CB.”
“What is your phone telling you right now?” Victoria asked.
He tapped it while it sat in its cradle on his dashboard not far from his rubber duck. She recognized the no internet symbol right away.
“Internet goes up and down depending on the day and what's around me. Out here in nowhere, Missouri, it's been down a lot. But I can easily answer your question when we stop for fuel. They'll have wireless.”
“When are you going to do that?” she wondered.
“In about two miles. We're going to be ‘makin' it' at the Love's travel truck stop in Charleston.”
No one said anything in reply, but she felt the tension become a real thing. All the other girls had just escaped a place where no one made love. Ever.
5
There was nothing to see out the windows except endless flat fields. They'd seen one or two zombies walking in the distance, as if they were lost, but other than those it was hard to tell the apocalypse had reached the farmlands.
Victoria scooted back to the rear seat as the truck continued along the boring, flat road.
“I'm bushed,” she said to Liam.
“Me too,” he replied. “I didn't sleep very well on that roof.”
“No surprise there,” she said with a chuckle.
He put his arm around her and she leaned in to lay her head on his shoulder, but first she gave it a quick inspection. His shirt was covered in blood and gore, but the fabric near his shoulder was free and clear. It did smell horrible, but she had to tune that out because she smelled just as bad. The well-mannered part of her brain worried that the two of them would get kicked out of the truck for bringing in such stink, but there was nothing to be done about it except breathe through the mouth.
She giggled softly as she settled onto Liam's clean shoulder.
They should have reached the gas station in just a few minutes, but traffic slowed them down to a crawl. Dave started and stopped his truck while keeping pace in the long line, and the rocking action and drone of machinery put her right to sleep.
“We're here!” Dave shouted.
She snapped awake. “I'm up. How long were we in that line?” It felt like hours.
“About ten minutes. They keep the hammer down at the bigger truck stops.”
Liam appeared to have fallen asleep as well, and she reluctantly yanked herself from his warm embrace.
“Ug. I need a bathroom break.” He stretched and playfully pushed her.
“Me, too,” she giggled.
“I need to go, too,” Susan said to her mom.
“Okay, why don't we all get o
ut and stretch. Dave, can we go inside while you fuel up the truck? You won't leave us, will you?” Sabella's practical question carried her motherly authority because she was looking out for her girls.
“They wouldn't let me,” Dave replied, once again pointing to the camera.
“Please don't,” Sabella added in a calm voice.
Dave turned around and looked at everyone in the back. “I won't. I promise.”
She kicked at one of the rifles lying on the floor. “Do we need our guns?”
Dave shook his head. “I wouldn't. Gas stations are under the protection of armed guards around the clock. If you took guns out there you'd probably draw lots of attention to yourself. Unless you have a concealed gun?”
Victoria realized why Liam's little handgun might have been useful, but there was no way to go back and get it.
“Naw,” Liam said in a groggy voice. “I saw a whole box of pistols back at the farmhouse, but my attention was focused on the rifles. And the, uh, zombies in the walls. We'll leave the AKs here, so we don't stand out.”
She led Liam and the others toward the front and then followed Elise and Russ out the passenger door. 80's music blasted on the speakers outside, and once the door was ajar, it filled the cab.
“Close it, please,” Dave said while holding his hands over his ears like they were in dire pain.
“I'll get it,” Liam volunteered because he was the last one through.
Russ jumped down onto the pavement and then held out his hand.
“Thanks,” Victoria said as she hopped down.
“I'm going to stay with him,” Russ said only loud enough for her to hear.
“Dave? Why?” She glanced at the trailer of Dave's truck and noted how someone had painted, “Pool Supplies,” all the way down the side using giant black letters.
“I don't trust him. I've seen more shifty people in my life the past few weeks than I ever dreamed possible. Most of them looked perfectly normal, like anyone you'd meet on the street, but inside they were bad, evil souls.”
“Dave seems alright,” she replied.
“Exactly,” he snapped back. “That's why I have to stay and keep tabs on him. If he drives off with our guns and stuff, we're going to be stuck here. I want to get far away from that house.” He looked toward the horizon where the sun was almost ready to peak over the fields. The farmhouse wasn't visible from so far away, but he acted like it was right in front of them.
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