by Ben Reeder
A shudder ran through me at the thought of what might have happened to the dead, followed closely by a colder dose of fear as I asked myself another question. Who has the soldiers’ weapons? The thought had barely registered before my feet hit asphalt again, and I was running toward the guard rail. My left hand propelled me over the metal rail and my feet hit the uneven ground hard enough to sink into the soft turf and keep me from tumbling down the hill. Amy kept her eyes on the road behind me until I opened the door and jumped behind the wheel. As soon as the engine turned over, she was in the passenger seat and hitting the safety on her rifle. She had barely buckled herself in when I put the truck in reverse and hit the gas. I didn’t try to turn around on the little one lane road. Instead I just kept going for the three hundred yards between our butts and the nearest driveway. My rear bumper took out part of the split rail fence as I cut sharp into the gravel drive and hit the brakes, then shifted into gear. Rocks sprayed the lawn behind me as I hit the gas again, and I took out the mailbox before I hit the road again.
“Dave, what is it?” Amy asked as she looked back behind us. “What did you find?”
“Nothing,” I said as I blew through the four way intersection. “Way too much nothing. No bodies, no stuff.”
“They’d been looted already?” she asked. I shook my head.
“No, they’d been taken. All of them. I didn’t see a pyre, and I can only think of one reason to take bodies right now if you’re not gonna burn ‘em.” My voice sounded a lot calmer than I felt. In my peripheral vision, I could see Amy’s face go slack as she followed my train of logic, then she grimaced.
“You can’t be serious,” she said. I sped past a school and kept my natural reflexes in check for all of six seconds before I replied.
“I’m very serious,” I said. “And don’t call me Shirley.” She rolled her eyes at the lame movie quote, but her head turned to look behind us again. The road curved ahead of us, and I followed it left, opting to go west as far as I could. It kept edging west, and I kept the gas pedal as close to the floor as I dared. Up ahead I could see where the road doglegged, and I cut the edge as close as I dared, relieved to see a sign for Kansas 59 a mile ahead. As soon as we hit 59, I floored it again, heedless of how much fuel I might be burning. It wasn’t like I needed to worry about the price of gas.
“We need to pass north of Topeka,” I told Amy as I pulled a Kansas map from the glove compartment. “And if we can find another town, maybe we’ll find a roadblock we can check.”
“Where the hell are we?” she asked as she tried to unfold the map.
“North of Lawrence on 59. We just passed an airfield back there.” Her finger hovered over the map for a moment, then dropped to the paper.
“Got it. Stay on this when it goes north and then back west…there’s a little town called Perry not far ahead.”
“Yeah,” I said drily. “About four miles, according to the sign.”
“Smartass,” she said. I didn’t bother to tell her to mind her language. Post ZA, being a good father figure to a teen seemed to be more about teaching her survival skills and less about manners or social niceties. So far, I thought I was doing a pretty good job. We were both still alive, and after getting out of KC in one piece, that was saying something. I still wanted my damn “World’s Deadliest Dad” coffee mug.
The road was pretty clear, with only the occasional car wreck to break up the scenery. Most of those were off the road, with the cars either wrapped pretty solidly around trees or telephone poles. We passed one field where a truck had gone off-roading into a thousand acres of freshly turned dirt. The tracks arced gently toward the only thing for a dozen square miles: a bright green combine. The truck’s front end was lost under the combine’s thresher blades, its rear wheels off the ground. A mile further on, we had to slow down and swerve around a head on collision between a dark blue minivan and a silver BMW. I tried not to look, but I saw movement in both vehicles from the corner of my eye. I wondered how many ghouls and zombies were trapped forever in dead vehicles by the simple barrier of a fastened seatbelt. When the road turned back west, we found ourselves on what looked like the border between Kansas and the rest of the US. On our right, the northern side of the road was dominated by low hills and trees, while the southern side was all open fields and flat as Kansas was known to be.
Less than ten minutes later, I saw what I had been hoping for. Up ahead was a white sheriff’s patrol car. Unfortunately, it was surrounded by infected. I slowed and pulled to the left about a hundred yards away. I made the count about twenty, maybe a few more. Beside me, Amy was bouncing in her seat.
“Can I take care of them?” she asked, the words tumbling out of her mouth.
“Remember, aim for the face, not the forehead,” I said as I opened the door. From my side of the truck, I watched as she steadied her rifle against the door and took careful aim. A crack split the air, and one of the infected fell. I heard her exhale and then she fired again. None of the zombies dropped, and she cursed, then pulled the trigger again. This time one fell. Slowly, the infected turned toward us, and she put another one down. After she dropped three more of them, they started our way. One broke from the shambling walk of the dead into a trot, then a sprint.
“I’ll get the runner,” I said as I pressed the safety and leveled the Takedown at it. “You keep busting heads.” I put the bead in the middle of its blue button up shirt and pulled the trigger. A dark splotch appeared just to the left of the button line, but the ghoul kept coming. I pulled the trigger five more times, and all I did was mess up its wardrobe. The .22 rounds weren’t killing it fast enough, so I tossed the Ruger on the seat and drew the SOCOM from the tactical holster on my right leg, cursing my still wet vest in the back of the cab as I worked the slide. Left handed, I was a decent shot with a pistol. Right handed, my only saving grace was the SOCOM’s Laser Aiming Module. The green dot bounced around on the ghoul’s torso, and I stroked the trigger. The shot went wide, and I aimed to the left, knowing my tendency was to twitch to my gun hand side when I pulled the trigger. The second round caught the ghoul high and on the right, sending it spinning to that side before it hit the ground. I took the brief moment to change hands, and when it scrambled to its feet, I put the green LAM dot on its chest and fired two more times. Both shots hit it just to the right of the breastbone, and it fell on its butt. For a moment, it just looked at me, it chest heaving as blood coated its body. Then its head wobbled and it fell back to the road.
Beside me, the steady crack of Amy’s Ruger paused as she slid a fresh magazine home. There was a click as she released the bolt and a heartbeat later, she pulled the trigger again. As she fired, I holstered the SOCOM and grabbed the Takedown from the seat. By now, almost half of the infected were down. I leveled the bead on the Ruger’s barrel on the nose of one of the infected and pulled the trigger. To my surprise, it dropped like a puppet with the strings cut. Not a bad shot at fifty or sixty yards.
“Hey!” Amy protested.
“Keep shooting,” I told her. “It’s not a contest.” Still, I only dropped three more in the time it took her to take care of another nine. “Good shooting,” I told her as I slid behind the wheel again. My heart grew a couple of sizes when she smiled at the compliment and seemed to mean it when she said “Thanks.”
“I see why you want a bigger gun,” she added as we drove up on the cruiser. I stopped about ten yards away and did a careful U-turn using the little side road to the left of the road so that the truck’s tailgate was facing the sheriff’s car, then backed the rest of the way, rolling over a couple of bodies along the way. The stench hit as the wind shifted, and I got out of the truck wishing for more rain or a little bit stronger wind, say something on the order of an F1 tornado. I heard Amy gag on the smell as we walked toward the cruiser. Once I cleared the rear of the truck, I squatted down to check under the patrol car and saw nothing but daylight. Amy brought her rifle up and scanned the double line of cars that stretched back toward
Perry. She lowered it and gave me a thumbs up a few moments later.
The driver’s side door was open, and the deputy’s bloated body was in the seat with the seatbelt buckled. An AR-15 was on the ground beside him, the magazine well empty. His pistol was on the floorboard, and I could see several bloody bite marks on his hands and arms. More telling was the gaping hole in the top of his head, and the smaller hole under his chin. I swallowed down the taste of bile in my mouth and started the business of stripping what I could from him. His service belt used Velcro instead of a buckle, and I thanked any deity that would listen for that. Once I had the belt and his pistol, I grabbed the keys from the ignition and stepped back, fighting hard just to keep yesterday’s dinner down. The radio was useless, so I pulled it from the belt and tossed it into the car before I walked around to the other side. The passenger seat yielded a duty bag that held a change of uniform, a second pistol and two boxes of ammo for it and a few other bits of gear. I grabbed it and went to the trunk.
On most patrol cars, the trunk was a mobile supply depot, and this one was no different. A Mossberg 500 Law Enforcement model was locked into the rack at the back of the trunk, and several plastic tackle and tool boxes filled the rest of the space. I did a quick visual check of them, finding crime scene gear, a digital camera, binoculars and crime scene tape in one box, and a first aid kit, emergency blankets and a fire extinguisher in another. I grabbed both boxes and put them in the truck bed, then came back and grabbed the guns and ammo. A duffel bag had water, a couple of MREs and some energy bars inside, which I grabbed along with the regular tool box. Lastly, I grabbed the defibrillator and jump box. On my last trip to close the trunk, I picked up the mesh bag with a trio of stuffed animals in it. The only things left were the traffic vest, a set of spike strips and a box of blank forms by the time I closed the trunk.
“Dave,” Amy said as I closed the tailgate and shell top. Her eyes were on the road behind us. Sunlight glinted off the windshield of a vehicle, and I could see the headlight from a motorcycle. Whether it was my potential cannibal horde or another group of people, I had no idea. What I was sure of was that I didn’t want them following us. I ran back to the patrol car.
“Get in the truck!” I yelled to Amy as I popped the trunk open and grabbed the spike strips. My feet couldn’t seem to move me fast enough as I sprinted for the door of the truck. Once again, I spun the tires when I put the truck in gear. The rear end fishtailed as I made a hard right turn and went cross country until I hit the side road that ran west, straight toward Perry. I stopped about thirty yards down the road and got out to spread the spike strip across the cracked asphalt, spending seconds I didn’t really feel like I had. Once I was back behind the wheel, I breathed a little easier.
“Are they…?” Amy almost asked.
“Cannibals? Don’t know. After us? Maybe. We’ll know if they try to follow us. Right now, I need you to crawl in the back and grab the pistol and as many magazines as you can for me, then I need you to load the shotgun.” I risked a glance in the rearview mirror, but the other vehicles still hadn’t made it to the turn off.
“On it,” Amy said as she crawled over the seat and through the opening in the rear window into the truck bed. A few seconds later, she leaned across the back of the seat with the pistol in hand. “There were only a couple of shots left in the magazine in it, so I loaded the last one in it. There’s a round in the chamber.” I took the gun with a nod and she pushed herself back into the camper shell. With nothing but straight road ahead of me for half a mile, I took the chance to see what I was shooting. The boxy design was characteristic of a Glock, and sure enough, when I turned it to look at the left side, I saw the trademark Glock brand and the number 22 engraved on the slide, with .40 to the right of that. I hadn’t had much experience with the .40 Smith and Wesson, but Nate had spoken highly of it. I set the Glock down and drew the SOCOM, remembering that I’d fired four rounds from it. Keeping one eye on the road, I dropped the mag out of it and pulled a fresh one from the tactical holster. With a full mag and a round in the chamber on both pistols, I had twenty nine rounds to hand without having to reload. I hoped it would be more than enough. While I was hoping, I went for broke and hoped I didn’t have to use either gun.
My optimism died a quick death as I saw movement in the rearview mirror. The bike swerved and kept coming, but two cars behind it didn’t look so lucky. The first one swerved left but the second one just kept going straight across the strip. A third car went the opposite way, and I wasn’t sure if it managed to clear the spikes or not. Either way, I was pretty sure at least one of them wasn’t going to catch up to us. We were coming up on an intersection, and I looked along the road crossing it by habit. Both sides were clear, but a railroad crossing on my left caught my attention. It factored into my plans as I thought that over. Railroads didn’t just stop in small towns. They usually went straight through them, which meant there was probably at least one road on this side of town that ended up running right alongside it. If I could find it, I had a route all the way through Perry.
The blue roof of the car wash that stood on one corner of the intersection was a blur on my left as I sped through the stop sign, and I heard the buzz of a street bike behind me. Trees lined the left side of the road on the far side of a shallow drainage ditch as we sped past the intersection and into the edge of town. The bike’s buzz became a muted roar as it sped up and came around on my side. I caught my first glimpse of the rider, all black leather with a helmet that only left his eyes visible. For a moment, it settled in my side mirror as the rider drew a sawed off shotgun from a holster on his hip. My right hand fell on the Glock and I brought it up to my chest. The rider twisted the throttle and drew up beside me, lifting the shotgun as he came.
It was a tactic that had probably worked several times before, drawing up beside some unsuspecting driver and just unloading both barrels before they could react. It relied on surprise and reluctance in other people to shoot first. Neither was the case now, and the look on the rider’s face when I pulled the trigger was probably the same expression he was used to seeing on the other side of the gun. I fired several times and watched his body jerk twice as I got really lucky. He veered off to the left, then disappeared from view when he hit a parked car.
“Dave, we’ve got one behind us!” Amy called out from the rear of the truck. No sooner had the words left her mouth than the truck jerked from impact. Behind me, I could hear Amy cursing, then I heard the camper shell’s rear window opening. The Mossberg boomed, and the car behind us, a late model red Mustang, swung into view in my side mirror. Its front windshield was starred and white around a hole the size of a dinner plate almost dead center in the glass.
“Aim for the front grill next!” I yelled over my shoulder. She didn’t respond, but I heard the shotgun boom three more times in rapid succession, and the next time I saw the Mustang, it was stopped in the middle of the road with steam billowing from the hood. Then the first figures ran out from the houses on the left, and I looked to the road ahead. I couldn’t honestly say I felt bad about leaving them to their fate, but it wasn’t one I felt like watching. It also wasn’t one I felt like making Amy watch.
“Good shooting,” I called out to her. “Close up the window and come back up front. I need your help getting out of town.” The road merged ahead and I followed it west across an old truss bridge over the Delaware River as she slid into the rear part of the cab.
“Looks like that whole getting out of town thing pretty much just happened,” she said.
“We need to head north, and get away from the railroad tracks,” I told her as I handed her the map. “We have places to be…and to not be.”
“Where to be or not to be, that is the question,” she said.
Chapter 2
Rule 23
~ Yes, how many times can a man turn his head/Pretending he just doesn't see?~
Bob Dylan, “Blowin’ In the Wind
“I’ve never shot anyone before,�
� Amy said over her dinner.
“I’m pretty sure you still haven’t,” I said after I swallowed the bite of fried Spam I’d just taken.
“Are you quoting Firefly lines at me, or are you serious?” For all that she was troubled, her appetite wasn’t suffering any. She had finished the Spam and spooned the last of the corn from the can she’d just taken off the fire onto her mess kit plate.
“Not intentionally,” I said. “I mean it, I think you scared them more than anything with that first shot. There will come a time when you’re going to have to shoot someone, though.” I watched her face as I set the Kelly Kettle on the base and dropped a few twigs and leaves down through the chimney. The little fire inside blazed up and showed me the frown that creased her brow.
“How do you deal with it?” she asked. Gone was the enthusiasm she’d shown that afternoon for shooting zombies. I looked around the barn we were in, remembering how fast she’d been in nailing the ghoul that had rushed us as we pulled into the farmstead. Then she hadn’t hesitated. If she was going to survive, she needed to be ready to pull the trigger just as fast with a living person when the moment called for it.
“I know what I’m willing to die for,” I said after a few moments of thought. “Once you know that, you know what you’re willing to kill for, and you can make peace with it.”