“What? What kind of stupid question is that?”
“No, seriously, answer the question. Why did the dinosaurs die?”
“A fucking comet, you idiot. It changed the face of the planet, and they died. If you’d gone to high school, you would know that.”
“Congrats. You’re getting better at your comebacks in this little game we’re playing. While you’re scientifically correct, there is a part two as to why the dinosaurs died.”
“Ok, genius, what’s part two?”
“They failed to adapt. When their environment changed, they didn’t. Tell me, are you going to adapt or become extinct?”
“What the fuck? That has to be the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”
“Just mull it over. Let that sink in for a few days.”
Phillip had the truck almost full when the others returned from their little potty break. Cliff was the first to open the back door, trying to be gentlemanly. As soon as he did, Steve snarled and jumped out.
While he’d been alone, Steve had died and reanimated. When he surprise attacked, it was more than Cliff’s heart could handle. Michelle was next to her dad. When Cliff stumbled back and grabbed his chest, Steve landed on Michelle. She fell backwards, and there was a sickening wet smack like a watermelon when her head hit the pavement.
Bill ran around the back of the truck at the sound of Steve’s hunger call. When he saw Michelle, he was pretty sure she was unconscious and going to die because of the blood that was spraying out of her neck and onto Steve’s face.
Brandy hesitated and just stared at Steve as he pulled off a chunk of Michelle’s neck and chewed on it loudly. Bill couldn’t wait any longer and sent Steve to his final death. He turned his focus on Cliff, who was unconscious and slumped onto the ground by the back tire. Bill hurried over and began to administer CPR, hoping to get his heart back on track. Phillip was standing there whimpering about whether or not his dad would be ok. Between breaths, Bill looked over his shoulder and told Phillip if he really wanted to help, he could finish filling up the tank so they could make it to Fort Wayne without stopping again. That was where the only medical help they could rely on was.
“We can take him to the local hospital here.”
“No. Hospitals are hotbeds for thrillers. Going to one is guaranteed suicide. Look, man, I need you to help me, help your dad, by filling up the goddamned truck. We’re not stopping at a hospital here and making ourselves targets.”
“Fine,” Phillip huffed, and he stomped back to the pump.
“Bill, we have bigger problems. There is a herd coming this way, probably attracted by all the commotion.”
“All right, y’all get in the truck while I lift up Cliff.”
“No, let me say goodbye. You did what you could, but it’s been over five minutes already. This is not the first heart attack Cliff has had in the last year. The doctor told us that the next one would be worse than the last,” Doris softly explained.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, we need to get the others to safety. Thank you for trying.”
Bill checked for a pulse one more time and then walked around the truck to tell Phillip to go talk to his mother. Phillip just nodded like he had expected it.
“Bill, we gotta go. What about Michelle?” Brandy pressed as Bill put the pump and hose in the back of the truck.
“She’s gone. I knew it the second I saw her jugular tear open.”
Michelle had bled out while Bill had been trying to save Cliff. He hadn’t bothered to try and triage her because he’d seen the blood loss when he’d put Steve down. She was another loss that Bill chalked up to the ZomPoc.
“Doris, Phillip, we have to go now. If you need to say goodbye to Michelle, now is the time.”
Phillip just looked at Bill. Then he exploded up from a crouched position and sucker punched Bill in the jaw. Bill’s teeth clacked together, and his face rocked back.
“What the fuck is wrong with you, man? You left that guy in the truck to die! Now my dad and sister are gone because of you!”
Bill recovered quickly and kicked Phillip in the stomach. He doubled over again but turned, expecting another knee to the face. Bill kicked him in the side of the ribs, and Phillip let out an oomph when all the air rushed out of his lungs. Then Bill pulled his AR up and pushed the barrel into Phillip’s left cheek.
“Next time you pull some bullshit like that, you better make goddamned sure you knock me out and I don’t get back up. We have thirty seconds to leave before we’re all eaten alive. So stop fucking around, and let’s go. Your mother needs you now more than ever. She just lost her daughter and husband. You’re right, it’s probably my fault for not keeping a better eye on Steve. But you have to take part of the blame as well. If you weren’t a worthless drain on our resources, I wouldn’t have had to babysit your dumb ass. Now move.”
They loaded everyone up. Brandy sat up front with Bill this time. Going through the next few towns and toll booths, they were going to need all the eyes they could get.
A few miles up the road, Bill could hear Brandy sniffling, but he pretended that he couldn’t. He gave her the space she needed to grieve. The southern portion of Toledo proved to be pretty easy. Thrillers abounded, but with the weight of the truck, they were hardly noticed. Mouth breathers were about the same: several times during the trip, they heard gunshots and the sound of a small-caliber bullets ricocheting off the side of the truck. They got on Highway 24 and made a beeline for Fort Wayne. Hopped up on energy drinks and a desire to be far away from nuclear fallout, Bill continued to push the truck as fast as it would go.
Just outside the neighborhood of Charity’s childhood home, Bill tried to hail anyone on radio.
“Convoy night watch, this is Bill. Do you copy?”
Chapter 4. Fort Wayne. Still.
Q and D stood there and watched Team Buffalo drive away. They prayed that everyone would return with the family of their other close friend. They turned with arms around each other and looked at the small gathering that had seen the team off.
“All right, everyone,” said Q, “we have work to do today while we wait for them to return. Priority number one is getting Shane’s RV window swapped out. Probably be easiest to swap out the whole RV. Mike and his crew need a home on wheels also. Then we need to see if there is anything useful we can appropriate while we’re there. I’d like to take Mike, Shane, Andre—”
“I’ll go,” Jane said, interrupting. “I need to do more to help out. You guys were right, and I want to learn.”
“Ok, that’s settled, then. There is an RV Center north of here a bit, but from what I could tell from the small amount of cell service I was able to get this morning, it doesn’t have a lot of what we would want. I say we save that for last in case we can’t find everything I want at the other place. I propose we head down to Wabash. There is a good RV dealer down there. And it’s less than an hour away in pre-ZomPoc time.”
“Oh yea, and also Huntington, which is on the way there, has a Sportsmobile dealer. You will want to check it out because they will have all kinds of things that you’re looking for,” Charity interjected.
“Sweet. Good call on that.”
Team Wabash loaded up in Mike’s new—to him, as of yesterday—truck. It was not connected to anything, and they didn’t have to clear a house and hope for the best. They headed south down Homestead Road, and everyone was thankful the apocalypse had started on a Saturday as they passed a high school across the street from a middle school. As they passed through Roanoke, the big F-250 rolled right over a smattering of thrillers that got in the way.
“I want to drive by the Sportsmobile shop and draw away any thrillers that might be lingering in the area. Their building is right downtown,” said Q
“Sounds good. Direct the way,” said Mike.
They drove through downtown Huntington and made the circuit around the historic district a few times. Then they went super slow one last time to get everything following them.
Then they led them across the river into the south part of town to the Wabash River Bridge before speeding off. Shane estimated that there were about two thousand thrillers following them by that point.
Everyone breathed a sigh of relief when they found the RV lot on the northern edge of Wabash proper in the business district, although Andre kept eyeballing the cemetery next door.
“Dad, you sure the dead aren’t going to claw their way out of their graves and come after us?”
“Yes, I’m sure. That’s not how it works. It has been proven already that digging your way out is impossible. There was a TV show about breaking old myths, ah, oh hell, I can’t remember what it was called, but they proved it false. Not only because of the wooden box a body is placed in, but where are you going to put the dirt you dug out?”
“Ok, good point, but being this close to a cemetery still makes me nervous.”
“I get it. People are just dying to get in there.”
“Oh lord, you sound like my ex-husband,” Jane remarked.
“Well, we are good friends for a reason. Ok, Shane remembers, but here is how this will go down. Shane, Mike, and I will go in and clear the building. Jane, you and Andre go clear the lot and make sure the outside is secure.”
“Awesome, I like it,” Jane said, and she and Andre didn’t waste any time heading towards the line of RVs along the street side.
The three others headed to the building. Q slowly opened the door while Mike and Shane stacked behind him. This building was much larger than the last RV dealer Q had cleared out. It had a showroom floor, and forming the long side of the “L” was the repair shop, with parts storage to the back.
“All right, you guys follow me. Just please don’t shoot me in the back.”
After the building was cleared and the lot secured, Mike picked out a nice thirty-foot bumper pull trailer. It was used, and on the inside, it had a solar charge controller.
“Guys, I found a sweet deal. I gotta get on top and see how many solar panels are up there.”
Mike climbed up the rear ladder, and as soon as his eyes crested the top, he let out a long, slow, approving whistle.
“Holy shit, y’all, this has to have at least a thousand watts of solar up here. Look in the storage cabinets and see if there is a battery bank somewhere.”
“Found it!” yelled back Shane. “It doesn’t look like much. There are only two batteries. They are kind of big though.”
Mike scampered back down the ladder to see what Shane had found.
“Holy fuck. Shane, you don’t know much about solar, do you?”
“Naw, man, I graduated high school last year and had just started collage right before ZomPoc started.”
“All right, lesson time. You’re going to be my new apprentice when we start this new community of survivors y’all got me sold on. Look here. These are six-hundred-amp hour lithium batteries. There are hooked up in parallel. We will get more into that later. Basically, what you’re looking at is enough battery power to last for a couple of days without recharging—if you’re carful with how much you use. With the solar panels up top, as long as they are wired correctly, you will never run out of power and never need a generator. This is the way of the future once all the gasoline expires.”
“How do you know all this stuff?”
“It’s what I did before.”
“I think you and Bill have more in common than you think,” Q added.
“I thought he was military or something.”
“Yea, he was, but he’s kind of a jack of all trades. That guy will spout off knowledge about shit I’ve never even heard of. But I was saying y’all will get along great because he has a very similar setup on his trailer.”
“Oh yea, he does. Before you guys joined us yesterday, we would do a lot of hanging out and stuff at his trailer. He always had a movie going, or we were playing video games,” Shane added.
“Awesome. I’m already starting to feel more like part of the team.”
“Good,” said Q. “We need guys with your skill set. Bill has been talking about the shit he wants to do once we get there. All right, let’s see what we can scrounge from inside, and we still need to get Shane a new RV.”
There was a gold mine inside. Mike found a pile of solar panels, six new batteries, three charge controllers, and a box full of wire, fuses, and connectors.
“Well I’ll be hog tied,” said Mike. “Looks like these boys here were about to get into the install business. We need to load all this stuff up in the back of my truck, and later, while we wait on the other guys to get back from New York, we can hook up someone’s RV and do the other two later as we have time.”
“Fuck yea,” said Q. “I say we hook up the Behemoth first. Memaw and Papaw need it before any of us do. I was talking to Papaw yesterday morning, and he was saying what a pain it was when their battery gets too low. None of us have been running a generator because of the noise and pretty much living in the dark. So, we all have little time with our current house batteries that get charged during the day while we drive. But it’s going to be getting cold soon, especially the further north we go.”
“Good point. We’re going to have to find some electric oil heaters too. Most home improvement stores have wall-mounted ones that draw very little power and would be perfect for the RV life we’re going to be living.”
“Cool, we will add that to the growing to-do list.”
Two hours later, they had everything loaded up, including a few more trailer spare tires. Mike had his haul, and Shane had gotten a comparable RV to what he already had, because he was comfortable driving it. Before they left, Q made sure that they’d bolted old tires to the back of Mike’s trailer like they had done to the other ones.
Cruising along the Hoosier Heartland Highway was uneventful on the return trip to Huntington. This time, they rolled into town on Business 24 and cut through the center of town, making beeline for the Sportsmobile shop. Mike hoped to find more solar items there since that company had been big on green energy. They also hoped to find some electric cook tops they could retrofit the other RVs with, because they all knew that one day very soon, the propane was going to run out.
They parked the vehicles on Court Street, and this time, Q took Andre and Jane to clear the building while the other two secured the gate and cleared the lot. This place was a lot smaller than the last one, and the task was completed quickly. In the shop was a red Sprinter four-wheel drive that was brand new and complete. Jane instantly called it for her and Sasha.
“Finally, something I can drive, and we can have our own place again. It has been nice riding with my parents in Behemoth, but sometimes it’s not,” she said with a touch of humor.
“Well, ya picked a good one,” Mike said. “This one has solar, an electric induction cook top, and everything you need to be completely self-contained for the rest of your life—as long as you take care of it.”
“Sweet. When we get back, you’re going to have to show me how to use all this stuff.”
“No problem.”
In the storage room, they found a few more solar setups. They were smaller than the last ones, but Mike knew that they would fit most people’s requirements until they got more permanent living conditions. Everyone carried armloads of stuff out and added it to the growing pile in the back of Mike’s truck. Q was helping Jane open the bay door so she could get her new ride out while the other three were loading the last of the haul.
“Everyone, heads up. We have a metric shit-ton of thrillers headed our way,” Mike said into his com mic.
“Damn it, where did they all come from?” asked Q.
“I don’t know how this is possible, but it looks like all of them we led away are coming back with some friends.”
“What the hell? There must be something that is drawing them this way.”
Q looked to the west, where the road that crossed the river merged with the one they were on, and about shit himself. As wide as the street, as far back as he co
uld see, was a sea of undead bodies. He was thankful the wind was blowing the opposite direction.
“We gotta go!” Shane yelled, sounding panicked.
“You guy head out. We will catch up in the Sprinter. I want to see if this thing lives up to its name,” Q said.
“Ok, we will wait for you on the edge of town. Be safe.”
“Jane, get in and get it started while I finish getting this door up.”
“Uh, ok. I gotta go to the office and find the keys first.”
“What? You didn’t already do that?”
“No, I was helping you guys load all that crap.”
“Fuck. Ok. I’ll close this down. If they get in here, we’re fucked.”
Q reversed the door and started pulling the chain in the opposite direction. He had it almost down when the first thriller stuck its head under the door and looked at him. Q pulled as hard as he could, but two more stuck their heads under. He continued down with the door, pinning their bodies to the ground. Because the door pressed into the thrillers’ necks, he could not get it all the way down. He slid the chain into its keeper to prevent the door from being moved from the outside. Then he pulled out his hunting knife and re-deaded the three shit eaters stuck under the door.
“Anything yet?”
“No, where would they be?”
“Some shops have a clear plastic pouch with a strap. That way, it keeps all the paperwork with the keys.”
“Ah, found it.”
“Thank god,” Q said as he started rummaging through the pockets of the employees they had put down for final death when they’d entered the building.
“Oh, gross, what the fuck are you doing? Now is a fine time to rob the dead.”
“Keys, I’m looking for keys, damnit. Ah, here we go. Look out that window and tell me if the side street is still clear.”
“Yea. Oh, I see. You’re going to drive that guy’s truck and draw them away again.”
“No, you’re going to drive while I operate the gate. We circle around town a few times before we come back for your van.”
“Ok, sounds reasonable.”
Beginning of the New Beginning, Vol. 2 Page 5