by Jim Rudnick
“There he is,” Bruce called out and added, “Head to shore, Wayne … head to shore,” and then he too began to kick in the growing noise of the river.
They were closing in on the chute, Javor knew, as he kicked hard and harder still with his right foot. The alien tissue in his right knee helped immensely as he kicked and slowly gained on both Bruce and Wayne. Finding himself closer to Bruce, he grabbed the man’s backpack and pushed him closer and closer to the riverbank. Ahead only a few feet, Wayne had somehow been able to take off his backpack, and he too pushed it now in front of him, kicking up a storm as he too was almost on the shore.
The three of them hit the rocky bottom of the river shoreline with only feet to spare from where the river dropped down into the chute, and they were all glad to grab rocks and shoreline undergrowth to clamber up on the land.
Sandy? Javor thought as he grabbed the roots of a riverbank tree and turned to look behind them.
No Sandy. Not a head could be seen upstream, and with a feeling of uh-oh, he turned to look downstream and into the chute. He searched from where they were all the way through the chute itself.
No Sandy. Neither a head nor a backpack was seen anywhere. Nothing at the top, in the chute, or at the bottom of the chute.
No Sandy.
Below the chute, there was much calmer water, but no Sandy bobbing there either.
He coughed up something and closed his eyes to spit whatever it was back into the river. He pushed on the bank and slowly crawled up the bank as the rest of the group arrived from upstream, and he helped them all get up the bank and away from the river.
He doffed his backpack, rolled over onto his back, and gasped for more air.
Sue eventually reached him too. “Javor? How you doing?”
He nodded to her that he was fine and pointed at Bruce and Wayne.
“They’re fine … all soaked and got scrapes and bangs. Sandy?” she said.
He pointed out at the river and said, “Out there somewhere,” and his tone said it all.
Jon came over and knelt at his side. “Sandy? Did you see him go down the chute?” he asked, and all Javor could do was nod.
Jon stood and looked down the river, shading his eyes, and he turned his head as he searched the river from side to side as far as he could see. He turned to Sue and said, “Let’s camp here tonight. I’m going to walk downstream for a mile or two … see you later.” He hoisted his backpack, and he Kyle, and Randy all left and went downstream, past the chute, to search for Sandy.
The rest of the group sat for more than ten more minutes to get some strength back, and then Javor remembered Bixby.
He said to Sue, “I’m going across again for Bixby, can’t leave my dog on that side. But I’m going well upstream, swim across, then swim with him back over to this side. Should end up just a bit upstream, I figure,” he said, and before she could talk him out of it, he left his pack and shotgun and went upstream. He called to the dog when he got about even with Bixby and then went upstream another hundred yards to where a large willow grew over the edge of the riverbank.
Good enough, he thought.
Walking in, he quickly was over his head, and he swam with strong swimmer strokes over to his dog. He grinned as Bixby licked his face all over, and then they both walked back upstream to the willow. This time the water was a bit shallower, and he could walk a bit more into the water, holding the rope still attached to the dog, and they both swam across with some ease.
Walking down the riverbank, they joined the rest of the group still waiting for the patrollers to return, but they couldn’t even see them as the river below curved off to the left.
He dug the bag of dog kibble out of his pack to feed Bixby first. As the dog chewed, he looked at his MREs and chose the top one—he’d try the lasagna—and he yanked the cord on the side to mix the chemicals within the packaging to warm the contents. As he waited, he noted that the sky was clear, yet there was a ring around the moon already.
I’ve forgotten what that means too, he said to himself and then worried about getting too old to be an explorer anymore. Most of the best, he figured, would know what that meant in respect to the weather. At the same time, he thought that he’d also heard about fishing and how a ring around the moon meant something to anglers too—and then he just grinned at himself.
The patrollers returned in another hour, and the look on their faces said it all.
“Found him—seems a rock in the chute did the damage, and he drowned, it appeared to us,” Jon said as he dropped his pack and sat heavily on a log nearby. “We found a place to bury him and did just that,” he said, his voice cracking.
He made a small fire and watched as the pine and spruce branches they’d picked up, which still had plenty of resin, flared up at first. He had found an older log and had jumped a few times on branches to break some of the dead gray wood off, and when he added it to the fire, he watched it and tended it so that the fire was soon just the right size.
Javor let Bixby watch him as he ate the lasagna, cutting it into squares and slowly masticating it down. Not the best for sure, but then he remembered MREs were a modern convenience only. Not a single thing within the gray bag tasted good, he’d found … though a couple he almost liked. But they gave enough energy to the consumer to keep you alive and fighting.
He half-smiled once more, fished out the remaining piece of the pasta, and flipped it to Bixby.
“You know, there’s a lot of folks who’d say that feeding your dog human food is a bad thing,” Randy the patroller said. “In fact, there’s folks that think that doing so will harm the dog—something to do with their diet maybe,” he said.
“Good advice, but I didn’t feed Bixby human food—just some MRE dreck,” he said, and that got smiles and a chuckle around the fire.
Sue clapped her knee and said, “Good one, Javor!” and then they all were chuckling.
That had broken the somber mood around the fire a bit. Javor nodded and then tossed the now empty gray bag into the fire-pit. They relaxed and after a bit, Jon asked Sue about their progress.
She nodded and then fished into her pack and brought out her map. “From our distances over the past six days now at about fifteen miles a day, we’re about ninety miles into the hike. Which would mean, if I can sort of figure that here on the map, we’re about here …” she said as she pointed to the solid green areas northwest of Arlington.
“So, if I’m correct, we’re about one-third the way to the Forest Empire city—if I’m correct. I do note that there is another major river coming up, we’ve not yet gotten to it, and it looks like it’s about halfway to the city. We should hit the river in about three or four days, I’m figuring,” she said, and that made them all nod.
They finished their evening meal and watched the fire like most humans do. Sleep would come quickly tonight, and yet another river was the thing that kept some awake well past the time when the embers went out.
#####
Anqas hadn’t worried as much about a mission more than the one he was on right now. He barked at his team, he swore at the floater pilot, and he cursed at every big building or garage that they floated above. They landed, and the away team went into them all, one by one, and found no trucks.
For the first few days, they had tried to find keys or a way to start some that were parked legally on town streets, but if they were parked legally, the owners had, of course, walked away with the keys. They had also tried to find some trucks that were out on the streets and had been in accidents when the Boathi had bombed them, but they wouldn’t start at all.
Some had corpses still inside, long ago eaten by scavengers and the like, empty corpses of blood and flesh and even their souls were gone, he thought. Non-believers always had a chance to come over to the real God—his God. But seldom did they ever see the light …
He looked down in the floater’s pilot area and smiled.
While Maxwell had been a real disaster, perhaps Walkerville, the next b
ig town down the interstate, might be a better spot. Maxwell had no large institutions like an army base or even a regional jail to look at, but they’d still scoured the whole town. At every bridge across the river, every strip plaza and mall, and every church lot and library, they’d looked for a truck that would start. They’d tried them all, every one of his team jumping up to look into the cab, searching for keys, and in those few cases they found keys, only two had even started. Started was the word he used; however, they didn’t truly start. Those two had coughed, the starter motor had turned the engine over and almost caught, but both never started. They moved on, taking the full week to clear Maxwell of a working truck.
He had thought to try the larger industrial parks, and they’d flown over some in the outskirts of the city. It was on one such a side trip that someone below had fired up at them a few times. He’d commanded the co-pilot to rain down a fusillade of their .50 caliber machine guns, and that took out a whole side of a three-story building below. He smiled at that, and then he had the gunner lay down a spread that would take out the next two buildings between the floater and the road. The resulting smoke and sounds felt good.
No trucks so far, but we can knock down a building if we need to, he thought.
They had run into zombies. Being up so high meant they hadn’t attracted these flesh eaters, but he didn’t think that fact mattered. Once, on one of the bridges, he was able to see that a pack of them had cornered a group of what looked like a family traveling together. They had an old mule pulling a cart with a woman, most likely the mom, doing the driving with some young kids in the back. A man, probably the dad, and a couple of older boys walked along. The small caliber rifle shots had attracted the floater over, and as they came up over the bridge just a few hundred feet up, only the family looked up in awe.
The zombies were not interested as they couldn’t smell them up that high, but they were all stalking the family and jamming them up against the corner of the bridge and a bunch of cars piled together where the bridge met the street.
He motioned for the pilot to swing her around so that the zombies were right in front, and he had their gunner lay down a barrage to take out as many as he could. Of the dozens of zombies below, only ten or so fell, but that had given the surviving ones enough flesh to eat for now. He had the floater take a position up between the family and the remaining zombies until they were able to get their mule turned around. They took off quickly down the street alongside the river.
We helped non-believers, he said to himself. That was a good thing. Too bad we don’t have any kind of a flyer to toss over so that they’d know who just saved them and that we’re always looking for new converts.
Maxwell, on the whole though, had not been a good start to the mission.
Walkerville loomed on the horizon, and he had the pilot take the floater up to a few thousand feet so they’d get a good look at this small town and what lay below. In its prime, the town had probably held about ten thousand inhabitants. The first things they noticed were a single downtown main street and a few side streets with what looked like commercial buildings. It had been years since anyone sold anything here, so as they knew, those areas would most likely not hold any usable vehicles.
They thought the huge area off to the side that held the army base might hold fruit. He directed the pilot to take her down to about a thousand feet and float above the major road into the base.
As they did that, some figures came out of what appeared to be rows of barracks, and some pointed up at them.
“Zombies, I’d guess,” the pilot said. And while he was right, there was something else to consider.
“We’re too high to smell, the engines make little noise really, so what did we do that attracted their attention,” he asked.
“Those ones,” the co-pilot said, “are smart zombies. Notice the rifles over their shoulders?” he added.
That got immediate attention from them all. Smart zombies, unlike their dumb cousins, could talk, reason, and use weapons, and they kept up a semblance of a society too. While they were still flesh eaters, they didn’t do the same blind stalking their dumb cousins did all the time. That, and they were very, very few in number, Anqas said to himself.
He motioned to float right over them and told the co-pilot to film this and record same to send back to Empire City too.
The floater gently wafted above the ten smart zombies, and they noted the group on the ground just followed the U-3 with their eyes at first, slowly turning as the floater went over. Down the road, they floated, still at a thousand feet, and eventually they reached the end of the barracks area and turned in a big curve to come up on the next major road back into the base.
“Let’s look for trucks, it’s why we’re here,” he said, and the floater crisscrossed the whole of the base slowly and methodically.
The co-pilot said, “Them smart zombies are still right there, just watching us is all they’re doing,” he said, and he was right. While it had taken almost a full twenty minutes to cover the base, the group had not moved.
“Let’s look for buildings where they might have trucks inside,” Anqas said.
The pilot nodded and went back up to the front of the base where it joined the town street. He turned the ship around there, and they once again went down the same street, but this time, he went down to only two hundred feet. “Coming up on the right,” he said as he looked at the map pinned on the dash, “is their general admin building, besides which is the Provost building—that’s the army police,” he explained.
“Next on the left is a strip of smaller trailers—dunno what they are ‘cause the map doesn’t even have them on the base at all, and then on the right—uh-oh.”
As he said that and the eyes in the pilot’s area all turned to the right, an enormous building, the size of many football fields, with the words Motor Pool on it came up. A massive door had a pile of what looked like broken-up wooden pallets in the opening. There was an orange dumpster there too, and while they were up at two hundred feet, one could see there were at least a couple of trucks too.
“Bingo,” Anqas said, and he added, “We need to get into that building with no zombie intervention, so maintain this height, and bear down on them. Co-pilot, I want you and the gunner to take those zombies out—every single one of them.”
The floater continued to bear down on the rows of barracks still ahead. As they got closer, barely within range of the .50 caliber guns, he’d already gotten ten of the team members ready to disembark and to finish off what the big guns left behind.
“Time, co-pilot—clean the street, lad,” he said, and the thunderous tumult of those .50 caliber guns opened up.
The gunner outdid himself, he thought, as those less than a dozen smart zombies started to fall, from right to left. He watched as a couple of them tried to get their rifles off their backs, and they too fell as those huge rounds drove through them like a hot knife through butter. They fell like cord wood, and in less than half a minute, all were down.
He waved off the barrage and noted they weren’t moving. He considered the smart zombie issue at the base as over.
“Fine, spin us around, pilot, and put her down right beside those broken-up pallets, please. Team members, looks like we shan’t need your help with the zombie problem, but you’re off the ship first. I want a full inspection of the whole Motor Pool interior. No surprises, shoot to kill, and watch out for zombies, of course,” he said.
The floater spun, and in a few more minutes, the ship had settled upon the road pretty close to the building.
Those mission members were off right away, not even bothering with the ladders, and entered the building quickly, while the floater landing crew tied her down a few feet up and off the road.
They sat and waited, and he made sure the pilot had the rear-facing cameras on the pilot area view-screen so they could see behind them and down the road to where those zombie corpses now lay in the road.
He had to wait for five minut
es, but then the away team leader came over to stand beside the side windows to report.
“Disciple Anqas—the building is secure. There are at least one hundred trucks in there—all kinds and sizes and styles. We noted both army ID on some and commercial food products signage on others. There are also what I know is called flats, I believe—they’re trucks with low profiles that can carry heavy, heavy loads, Disciple.”
“Fine, let’s see if we can’t get one of them to start, shall we?” he said, and as he did, from inside, the vroom, vroom of a truck starting up surprised them all. He grinned and said, “Let’s go!”
It took only a minute to find a smiling team member sitting in a commercial food truck of about twelve feet in length that he’d just started. He grinned at them, and they grinned back. Anqas mimicked turning the truck off, and he did just that.
“Nicely done. Were the keys in the ignition?” he asked, and that got a nod.
Turning to the team members but then remembering the zombies, he stationed six of the team members to patrol the doorway and the floater, and to the other six, he gave instructions: find us bigger trucks—trucks that could be used to haul the huge stones from the Empire quarry to the pyramid, and off they went.
Around him stretching off for at least another hundred yards or so, there were all kinds of trucks parked in neat orderly rows. Probably more than a hundred of them, Anqas thought. Some were definitely army trucks, the dull green and camouflage tops easy to identify. Others were retail delivery trucks with smiling customers grinning from the side. Some advertised some kind of cookie, two thin black rings around a white icing center. Others had families in their cars, snacking on some kind of a chip and more too. Besides those trucks were even bigger trucks with eighteen wheels and plain tarps protecting whatever cargo they carried or had carried.
Around him in the Motor Pool, Anqas heard engines starting up. Some started right away, but some didn’t start at all. As he stood there, he looked over at the big dollies interspersed with the trucks and wondered what purpose they served.