by M. Lorrox
Inside the truck, Tomas hears Team One calling on the walkie. “Team Two here. Over.”
“Team One approaching Rendezvous Two in a half mile. Over.”
Tomas looks at the map. Roger must be ahead, but not by much. “Craig, can we pick up speed?”
He nods.
Tomas picks up the walkie. “Team One, we’re on track with you. See you in a minute! Over.”
“Ten-four. Out.”
Craig lays on the horn for a couple seconds, then yells into the backseat, “We have to pick up speed; look sharp!” He steps on the gas and pulls away from the zombies.
Bill clears his throat and yells to the zombies behind them. “Hey, you filthy bastards, come and get me! I’m so tasty! Come have a bite!”
Eddy looks over at him. Bill holds on to the truck with his right hand and leans far out of the truck. In his left hand, he holds the 45-70 rifle and is lifting his shirt, exposing his chest. He’s lean and strong. Whenever they pass under a streetlight, the hard orange glow of the sodium vapor lamps cast stark shadows, accenting his ribs and ab muscles. Dang. I should work out.
In Roger’s truck, Joe studies the map while Sophia and Jess chat and laugh.
Jess checks that no zombies are getting too close to the truck, but she doesn’t see any. She leans the barrel of her shotgun against the truck and continues talking to Sophia. “Where’d you learn to shoot?”
“My mom.”
“Nice.”
“Yeah, she was a pro. Puts me to shame.”
“Where is she now?”
Sophia shrugs. “I was camping in the mountains when the outbreak came. When my friends and I got back, zombies were everywhere, and the house was empty.”
Jess’s face freezes. I should have known better than to ask something like that. The west was totally wrecked. “I’m sorry. Where was home?”
“Just northeast of Albuquerque.” Sophia glances over to Jess, who looks away awkwardly. “Oh shit! I’m sorry, the ’rents aren’t zed or anything; they just left.”
Jess looks relieved, but also confused. “Oh, did they…try and find you?”
Sophia smiles and slow-blinks at Jess during an inhale. Must be nice to be a normal person, with normal ’rents, and a normal life expectancy. Nothin’ normal about growing up in my house. “Naw, that’s not their style.”
“Um, any idea where they may have went?”
Sophia shakes her head. “Nope. But they left me a sort of message, though—this heirloom that’s been in our family a long time.” She shrugs. “I think that’s their way of telling me it’s time to go out on my own. I doubt I’ll see ’em again, at least for a long while.”
Jess tries to look like she’s not completely confused. “Okay. Well, I heard you’re headed to Atlanta. Good luck!” Jeez, her family sounds freakin’ nuts.
“Thanks.” Sophia smiles at her. Enjoy your normal life while it lasts, kid.
Roger yells out his window, “Time to merge up!”
The girls turn and look ahead. The road they’re on curves to the right as another road merges in from the left. They can see a beam of headlights shining across the pavement.
Joe points to the light. “That should be them, right?”
Roger nods. “Better grab that walkie.”
Joe hadn’t let go of it. “Team One to Team Two, come in.”
“Team Two here. Over”
“We’re about to merge. Over.”
“Perfect timing! Over.”
“Awesome! Well, get ready. We’ve got a ton of zombies on our tail! Over.”
“Us too! Over.”
Cool! This is so freaking cool. “Alright, see you in—five, four, three, two, one, zero! Over.”
The roads merge together and place the teams side-by-side on the four-lane road, with Craig’s SUV on the left and Roger’s SUV on the right. Everyone cheers and celebrates when they see their friends in the other truck. Joe waves across at Tomas, who waves back. Bill leans out from his window and reaches his fist toward Jess. She reciprocates, and they execute a fist bump for the record books as the trucks align.
-Pewgh!- They blow it up, of course.
Now that the roads are fully merged and the trucks are headed straight, Roger glances out his window—past Tomas in the other vehicle and over to Craig—then sends him a thumbs-up. Craig responds with a military salute. Eddy and Sophia look into each other’s bright-green eyes from the opposite sides of the two trucks, and smile.
June is trying not to cry. She has told Skip what she knows, and he is acting angry and erratic. She can’t help but feel like she has disappointed him in some way. The beaded necklace her grandfather gave her is off her neck and in her hands, passing bead by bead through her fingers.
“I can’t believe this.”
June shrinks into the couch even more. “I’m sorry, Dad.”
“They’re going to get themselves killed.” He looks at June. “I’m glad you’re not with them.”
Wait, you’re not mad at me? “Are you mad at me for not saying something earlier?”
Skip pauses and thinks. He notices family pictures on the wall. Pictures of just him and June, pictures of Monica and all of them together from long ago, and one picture taken last year at a barbecue the Costanzas threw. Eddy has his arm around June, Sadie has her arm around him, and Charlie is waving from the grill in the background. How could Eddy be so irresponsible? No wonder June’s acted off today. “I’m not mad at you, dear, just…concerned.”
June looks up at Skip. He’s sweating.
“I bet it was supposed to be some secret act of heroism, right?”
She nods.
“Some secrets shouldn’t be kept. Some secrets end up blowing up in your face.” He sits down on the couch next to June. “You can always talk to me, even if you think I’ll be upset.”
She nods.
He sighs. “Okay, do you have any idea where they are or where they’re going?”
“No. I told you: I don’t know.”
“Alright. Well, I have to tell Charlie.”
“You can’t! Eddy will know that I told.” She can imagine the look of disappointment on Eddy’s face—the way he’d frown and dip his head as he turned away from her. Her stomach turns.
“June, Eddy and those other kids could be in serious trouble. If there’s anyone I know who can handle a situation, it’s Charlie and Sadie. And besides, they’re nervous.” He notices a tear in June’s eye. “We all love Eddy a lot. We don’t want him to get hurt.”
She wipes the tear away and nods. “Okay, let’s go.”
Skip tilts his head. “You want to go over there?”
“I’m the person he talked to; I should be the one to tell his parents.”
Skip half smiles in satisfaction. “I’m proud of you. I’ll tell them we’re coming over.”
June lets the last 25% of air out of her lungs—the air that she’s been unable to release. I can do this.
A few minutes later, Charlie manually opens and closes the gate for them as Skip pulls into the driveway. Skip hadn’t said much, just that the two of them were coming over. Charlie considers how odd this evening is becoming. Something must be going down.
Skip hops out of the truck first. “Can we all talk? With Sadie as well?”
Charlie nods. “She was finishing up putting Minnie to bed. She’ll be down in a sec. C’mon inside.” He sees June walking around the back of the pickup. “Hi, June. It’s good to see you.”
June forces a smile. “You too.”
Sadie can hear Charlie outside, and she’s waiting for them in the living room. When they come inside, she notices June and how drained she looks. “June, would you like some water?”
She smiles. “Yes, please.”
While Sadie heads to the kitchen, Skip moves into the living room. “Can we sit?”
“Of course.”
Skip and June sit next to each other on the love seat.
Sadie comes back with a glass of water and han
ds it to June.
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” Sadie sits down on the couch next to Charlie.
As soon as she sits, Charlie breaks the ice. “So…what brings you two over tonight?”
Skip frowns. “Well, Eddy—”
June cuts him off. “Eddy is doing something stupid, and he didn’t want me to tell anyone.”
Charlie rolls his eyes. Of course he is. Of course he did. What a brat.
Sadie sighs. “Hmm. I’m sorry he put you in this position. That wasn’t very kind of him. Please tell us what he’s up to.”
June looks at Skip for some strength and encouragement. He smiles and puts his arm around her.
She looks down for a second, then straight up into Sadie’s eyes. “He went with the Kingston kids and some others to hunt and kill zombies.”
Sadie’s eyes grow wide, and her lips tighten. Her pupils dilate, and it seems as though she’s looking straight through June the way a sniper from hundreds of yards away might look at a target—cold, detached, and distant.
Charlie’s reaction is almost the complete opposite—he half closes his eyes and forces his tongue through the tiny crack in his jaw, feeling, and hearing, every little nub tearing against the inside of his teeth. He clenches his fists, and the knuckles crack. He looks like he could explode into a fiery rage of fists and howls in an instant.
Skip is scared, and he correctly assumes that June is as well. He squeezes her shoulders, telling her a variety of things that range somewhere between I’m here / we’re in this together / holy shit, I hope we survive the next ten seconds.
Eventually, Skip’s courage returns. “Charlie, Sadie, we don’t know where he is, but we wanted you to be ready in case he needed help.”
Sadie comes back quickly; Charlie more slowly. She places her hand on Charlie’s knee.
He looks down at it, and then up to her. He blinks a couple times and relaxes. He turns to Skip and June; they’re petrified. They look like cornered prey, waiting for the final attack. He raises his hand to them, open palm facing toward them. “Thank you for telling us. You two are good friends.”
Sadie removes her hand from Charlie’s knee. “I bet this was very hard, June, but you did the right thing. Eddy had no right to ask you to keep such a dangerous secret. You must be disappointed in him.”
June thinks about that. Me disappointed in him? Yeah, he did really let me down… June finds the ability to open her mouth and clear her throat. “You’re right. Thank you, Mrs. Costanza.”
Charlie raises his eyebrows briefly to Skip, then tosses his hands in the air before returning them to his sides. He shakes his head and lets out a small sigh. “I’m gonna kill that kid.”
Now that the order has been given to unload on the zombies, nobody is holding anything back. There’s plenty to go around; there are between a hundred and a hundred and fifty zombies behind the two side-by-side trucks. They are out of town now and have turned on a typical two-lane road heading up toward the mountains. There isn’t any oncoming traffic, but if someone was driving the other direction toward town, there are plenty of places a car could pull off the road and let the trucks—and zombies—pass them by.
Jess and Bill are having a blast wrecking the zombies in the front line of the horde behind them. There are so many zombies running and clawing toward the trucks that whenever one falls within the tightly packed group, a couple others inevitably trip on it and go down as well. Eddy and Sophia are still tasked with taking out any that fail to return to the pursuit, and they’ve been busy.
Eddy watches a zombie that fell. It’s having a hard time getting back up. Either the man was old when he got turned, or he was turned a while ago, because now as a zombie, it’s pretty messed up. Eddy thinks it still has a lower jaw, but it’s hard to tell in the deepening darkness. Now that they’re out of town, there aren’t any streetlights, but luckily it’s a clear night, and the moon is close to being full. And very lucky for the teams is that the two sharpshooters are vampires that have exceptional vision and aim.
Eddy raises his rifle’s scope to his eye to find the target. -Click- “Sophia! Get that old one! Gotta reload!”
“Gotcha covered!”
Eddy returns to the truck to reload his magazine. He’s surprised to see Tomas in the backseat. “Tomo, what are you doing?”
“I’m organizing the ammo and reloading magazines. Need one?” He holds out a fully reloaded mag of 30-06 bullets.
“Actually, yeah.” Eddy removes his empty clip and trades. “Is Joe reloading for them over in the other truck?”
“Yup. It was Roger’s idea.”
Craig, listening in, snorts. “Hey, get back out there and pull your weight!”
Eddy smiles at Tomas. “Going!”
After Eddy is back at his post, Craig orders an ammo count.
Tomas reloads the new clip from Eddy and starts to count. “Only three bullets for the 45-70. Thirty-five for the 30-06, and, I dunno, maybe forty or fifty shells of different kinds.”
Craig adds them up. “Sweet. If the other truck has about the same, then we should have enough to take out all of these sons of bitches!”
Bill slides into the truck. “I wanna switch back to the 12-guage for a while. This old beast kicks like a mutha!”
Tomas takes the 45-70 and hands Bill the shotgun. “I’m organizing bullets. Give me any that you have for the 45-70.”
Bill loads the shotgun, then reaches in his pocket. He pulls out two of the big rifle cartridges, but also a shell or two. “Oh, let me keep those babies.” He slips the shells back into his pocket and hands Tomas the rifle bullets, then grabs another handful of shells from the neat rows Tomas was making on the seat. He shoves them all into his pocket as he climbs back out the window. “Keep it up, buddy!”
Tomas sighs at the mess Bill made of his organization. He starts to separate the shells again by type and lines them back up.
Outside, bullets fly and zombies fall. A few more zombies occasionally are drawn out from the surroundings and join up with the group, but it’s not as frequent as when the trucks were closer to town. The mood between everyone is oddly light, even though they’re exploding the skulls and splattering the brains of what used to be people.
The zombies can’t be thought of as people, though. They have no humanity, only animal instinct. They don’t care about anything. They’re like a blind plague of rage, relentlessly pushing forward—an oncoming storm of death, pain, and loss. It’s hard to imagine something more devastating than seeing regular-looking people losing their minds, their spirits, their souls, and mutilating or killing others without regard. Fathers eating sons, daughters eating neighbors, friends eating your dog. Everyone and everything is at risk from their hunger.
The group of kids shooting them right now understands this more than most. With every one they dispatch, they might be saving a dozen lives, or more. Maybe they end up saving their own life, or maybe they save the lives of their whole family. They’re fighting back, and they feel different for it. They don’t feel like the bunch of misfits that they used to feel like. They feel like heroes—like there’s nothing that can stop them.
Bill runs out of shells in his magazine tube, so he reaches into his pocket and pulls out some spares. He has two buckshot and two of the wax slugs. He alternates the shells into the magazine. -chick-chick- He loads a shell into the receiver, ready to fire. “Jess, how you doin’ on ammo?”
-BOOM!- She fires her 12-gauge and reloads. “I think we’re doing fine. I don’t know for sure, though. Joe just keeps handing me fresh shells!”
Inside Roger’s truck, Joe hears Jess talking to Bill, and he pokes his head out of the back window—just above Jess’s thigh. He looks at Bill. “We’re still in good shape!”
Bill looks at him, a head just floating above a leg, and he laughs. “You look like one of those gophers or groundhogs that pop up in that arcade game!”
Joe and Jess each raise an eyebrow while looking at him.<
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“You know, the one where you have to bop them on the head as soon as they pop up.” Craig mimics the action with his gun; his strength allows him to single-hand the gun and flail it up and down like it was a hammer.
Joe turns his head to look up at Jess, and she looks down at his head, just a few inches away. They both shrug, then Jess starts laughing at seeing Joe’s head from that angle.
She looks up to Bill and winks. “Musta been before our time, old man!”
Bill shakes his head, then smiles big and broad. In an old-timey voice, he yells back at her, “Shut up, you little whippersnapper!” Laughing, he raises his gun to take out another zombie.
He pulls the trigger.
Inside his gun, one of the special wax slugs is being shot. The trigger activates levers and springs that launch a firing pin toward the very center of the back of the shell. The primer is here, and when the pin strikes it, a chemical reaction burns quick and hot inside the shell. This reaction ignites the gunpowder—the hand-loaded, ultra-packed-in gunpowder—that is smashed up against the primer.
The ignited gunpowder creates enormous pressure, and it pushes against the wad—a barrier that separates the actual damage-causing projectiles of the shell from the gunpowder. Sitting on top of the wad is the conglomeration of the tiny steel balls held together by wax.
But this shell isn’t like the others they’ve been firing; this one has been in Bill’s pocket for the past hour. The wax loosened its hold as it warmed. When Bill jokingly shook his gun up and down, the wax slug deformed and slid out from the wad, allowing a pocket of air in between the wax and the wad.
When Bill pulled the trigger on this bullet, the shell short-started, causing an explosion in the barrel and blowing it apart. Thin strips of the barrel’s metal flies through the windows into both trucks; a piece almost six inches long slices across Jess’s thigh before stabbing into Joe just under his collarbone, pointed down to his lungs. It just misses his subclavian artery and vein.
Another piece of shrapnel blows past Bill’s side and into Craig’s truck, striking the pile of bullets Tomas had arranged on the seat. One or two of the shells explode, sending other shells flying, tossing plastic shell casings everywhere, and filling the cab with thick white smoke. Some plastic casings blown off the shells strike against Eddy’s leg, but luckily nobody was hit by the projectiles from the exploded shells. Craig’s truck took that damage; a large hole is blasted into the seat and through the floor.