Snake grabbed it, saying, “Might as well.”
Jackson picked up some cables and a few odds and ends and stuffed them into his backpack. “That should do it,” he said.
“Okay, let’s get out of here,” Snake said, moving to the door as he keyed his radio. “How are you guys doing?”
He had a brief conversation on the radio as he walked down the stairs then he ended the call as they reached the lobby. When they stepped outside, he saw that the group of survivors had dwindled in numbers. Wolf and Smiley returned moments later and Snake stepped over to speak to them.
“This is going to take too long and I can’t stay to help. I need to get to the warehouse,” he said. He counted eight left in the group of survivors plus Lindsey, who all would need transportation back. “Five more trips back. Not sure there’s gonna be time.”
“Maybe one of these cars has keys in it,” Jackson said, nodding toward a few vehicles in the parking lot.”
“You should check the ones that look like my grandma parked them,” Wolf said, pointing to one that was sitting in the middle of the driving lane. “I’m betting that some of these vehicles were left in a hurry and may have the keys still in them. While you do that, we’ll take a couple more of these guys back.”
“I got a call from the boys and they’re running out of ammo,” Snake told Wolf. “I don’t want them trying to make it back without a way to defend themselves. I need to get to the truck and get some ammo to take to the warehouse.”
Wolf went to his bike and dug through a compartment, pulling out several magazines. Turning to Snake, he said, “Here, take these if you want to go now. Seems to be a pretty standard round with the guys. We can bring the ammo to the warehouse after we drop everybody off.”
“Good idea, Snake said. “See you shortly.”
Wolf nodded, motioning for the next two in the group to join him and Smiley.
Lindsey and Jackson began to search for car keys with the six remaining survivors.
When Wolf and Smiley returned, the others were still trying to find a car with keys in it. Wolf scanned the lot and saw a late model pickup that was parked with one wheel in a grassy median, like the driver had left it suddenly.
Approaching the truck on the passenger’s side, he reached out and grabbed the door handle, but hesitated after easing it open a couple of inches. The windows were tinted, making it difficult to see inside, so he pressed his face close to the glass and peered into the cab. Seeing a set of keys dangling from the ignition and a fuzzy set of dice hanging from the mirror, he grinned as he mused at what the owner must have been like. He was about to pull the door open the rest of the way when a rotting corpse flopped up from the seat and slammed its ashen face against the window, breaking a couple of teeth as it bit in vain against the glass. Startled, Wolf jumped backwards and stumbled. The creature’s weight caused the door to open, and it tumbled to the ground and began to crawl toward Wolf, who was now scooting backwards at a much slower pace than the ghoul was moving forward.
~*^*~
~39~
Oblivious to what was happening on the other side of the parking lot, Lindsey was thrilled when she finally got one of the cars to start. She smiled broadly and rolled the window down, telling the others to get in. As the last of them got into the car and closed the door, Lindsey noticed Wolf and his plight. The creature was gaining on the biker and it didn’t look like Wolf would make it to his feet in time. As he continued his crab walk, Lindsey saw that he was in a good position to kick it in the head, at least, if he still had the strength. The guy was in his sixties and she was sure he had to be feeling it.
“Hang on, everybody,” she said, gunning the engine. The zombie had almost reached its prey and Lindsey’s window of opportunity was closing quickly. Barely missing Wolf, who instinctively pulled his feet back, she rolled over the ghoul with a sickening crunch then backed up over it again.
After one more pass over the corpse to make sure it stayed dead, Lindsey stopped the car several yards past Wolf and threw it into park, though she did not turn the engine off. When she was sure that her shaking legs would hold her up, she got out and walked over to check on the biker.
Wolf lay on his back, catching his breath as she approached.
“Getting too old for this,” he said. “I think I’ll let the younger guys go on the next excursion.”
“Are you all right?” Lindsey asked, looking down at him.
“I’m fine. I swear, I’ll never say anything again about woman drivers.”
He reached his hand out for her to pull him up.
“And my high school Driver’s Ed teacher said I’d never be a good driver,” she scoffed as she took his hand and pulled. “He tried to tell me that it was inappropriate to hit a pedestrian but I guess he never took into account the possibility of a zombie apocalypse.”
Wolf grunted as Lindsey pulled him to his feet.
“I think most judges would take that into consideration,” he replied. “As long as the judge ain’t no zombie.”
Lindsey didn’t like the thought of a zombie judge and jury. And while it would never happen in the literal sense, what they had at the present wasn’t much better. Their world could be completely overrun by the undead, leaving the zombies in charge of the fate of humanity. It could very well be happening already if Lansing was any indication of how things were in the rest of the world.
“That’s a scary thought,” she said, glancing around now to see more of the infected approaching. “Guess we’d better get moving.”
She jumped back into the car and let Wolf and Smiley take the lead.
~*~
When Snake arrived at the warehouse, the smell of burning rubber permeated the air. The heat and the smoke were making the men constantly back up, forming an ever widening circle around the building.
“Can’t be much left of ‘em,” one man said.
“We’ll see,” another replied, hopeful that his friend was right.
One of the bikers was so intent on watching the fire, that he didn’t notice what was sneaking up behind him. The sound of the roaring flames and the falling timber covered the sounds of the shuffling footsteps, and it wasn’t until one of the others yelled and pointed behind the man that he knew. He whirled around to find not just one, but two of the undead within arm’s reach. He dropped the first one with a bullet between the eyes, but there was no time for a second shot before he was grabbed.
This one was huge. He looked like he could have been a body builder when he’d been alive, and death hadn’t done much to decrease his strength. The biker struggled to get away but he was losing the fight as the hulking creature’s teeth moved closer and closer to his neck. He could smell its rancid breath as he fought with all his might to hold it back.
The ghoul forced his teeth inches away from the biker’s face and was about to clamp down when its jaws suddenly slackened and it dropped to the ground.
Snake pulled his skewer from the corpse’s ear with a yank and wiped the blood off on its clothing.
“Ain’t no time for dancing,” he deadpanned.
“Hey, now, I was just starting to enjoy that little two-step,” the biker said, looking down at the body at his feet.
“Good timing,” another said to Snake.
“Speaking of timing,” Snake said, “it’s going to be getting light soon. We’re almost out of time.”
The smoke was so thick that the building was totally obscured. The smell of burning rubber nudged the men farther backward.
“Not quite that campfire smell,” Snake commented as they turned to leave. Suddenly, a crash reverberated throughout the parking lot.
“I’m guessing that was the roof,” Snake said, pulling his shirt over his face to filter out the billowing cloud of smoke and dust. They stopped to watch in silence for a few moments. Slowly, lumbering forms emerged from the murk.
When the figures appeared in the smoke, one of the bikers swore under his breath, an old habit he’d never been able to break.
The image was the most terrifying one the biker had ever seen and his heart was pounding as he waited to see just how many of them there were.
The first few were charred and smelled like cooked meat. They moved even more stiffly than the rest of the undead, but they still moved. Perhaps they’d been protected from the worst of the flames. The ones that came next were still burning, the light flickering through the smoke as they emerged. They didn’t even seem to notice they were on fire.
“We’ve got to put these guys down,” someone said. “They’ll have the whole city in flames before we know it.”
“I don’t think that matters now,” Snake said. “They’re bombing the city anyway.”
~*~
As Lindsey approached the hospital, she saw a large crowd of the undead near the wall where the new gate was going to be installed. A couple of people were up in the Crow’s Nest, playing sniper, but they were barely making a dent in the numbers.
“What could have drawn so many of them here?” Lindsey asked, mostly just thinking out loud. A light on the dashboard caught her attention and she glanced down to see that the car was on empty. Her car always warned her in advance when the gas was low, so she assumed that this car was the same. Still, it was one more thing to worry about.
Wolf pulled up next to the car and Lindsey rolled down her window when she saw him.
“I don’t know what happened,” Wolf said. “There was hardly a zombie in sight a few minutes ago.”
One of the passengers in the car pointed. As some of the crowd began to surge toward the vehicles, Lindsey caught a glimpse of the wall. A couple of people were working on the pins for the gates with a welding torch, while several others, including some of the newcomers, were fighting to keep the growing horde back.
“Guess the work on the gate must have made some noise,” Wolf said.
“I thought they were going to block off the area with cars so they could work on the gate,” Lindsey said.
“They were,” Wolf told her, “but they decided to leave it open so we could get through with the survivors. Snake was worried that we might have some people with injuries or too weak to crawl over the cars. Guess it wasn’t really necessary, but with everybody coming back soon, there’s no point in trying to move the cars in place now.”
“Right,” Lindsey said, glancing at the gas gauge again.
“Let’s try to lead them away and come back,” Wolf said. “It’ll help the guys at the gate out as well as giving us an opening to get through.”
Lindsey followed Wolf and Smiley as they drove around the block then began to make their way back to the hospital. She could see that some of the dead were following, but it didn’t look like near as many as had been at the gate. As they turned the last corner and approached the hospital again, the car started to sputter as it drank up the last bit of gas.
“Come on,” Lindsey whispered. “Just a little bit farther.”
As she had suspected, a lot of the crowd had remained near the gate. The noise must have kept many of them from following the vehicles when they’d left, Lindsey thought. The two bikes dodged some of the dead as they raced through the open gates and Wombat motioned for Lindsey to drive through.
Lindsey moved the car through the gate slowly, since there were bodies everywhere, ranging from dead, to undead, to alive and fighting.
Once she had the car inside the wall, a couple of the men struggled to get the gates closed. Others rushed over to help but they were having a difficult time of it as the zombies outnumbered the humans.
“Back up!” Wombat yelled to Lindsey. “Use the car to push the gate closed!”
She nodded, watching her rear view mirror as she carefully backed to within inches of the men that were struggling with the gate. Wombat hurried over to talk to them and two of them climbed onto the trunk and kept pushing while the others moved out of the way of the car. Once she was sure that nobody was in the way, Lindsey edged the car back farther, finally stopping it when Wombat gave the word. The gate was quickly latched and Lindsey pulled forward again once the two men jumped off the trunk.
The battle continued inside the walled parking lot as the remaining ghouls were killed.
Lindsey decided to just stay put until it was safe, since she was the only one in the car with a gun. She knew that she didn’t dare use the weapon with so many living humans in the parking lot, so she just waited and watched. The dead circled the car and pushed against it from the front and the passenger side. They slapped their hands on the glass, leaving blood and chunks of flesh as well as the green slime that many of them seemed to bear.
“Hey, I think we need to get out of here,” someone said from the back.
The sound of cracking glass emphasized their point but Lindsey said, “We’re better off in here than we would be out there right now. Let’s wait until we have a path to the door.”
The zombies around the car finally began to drop then Lindsey’s door was suddenly yanked open. She shrank back, instinctively, before her common sense reminded her that a zombie wouldn’t have the dexterity to open the door. When she saw Wombat, she quickly unbuckled her seatbelt, telling the Australian, “I am so glad to see you.”
“I get that a lot these days,” he said, turning to use his machete again before looking at her. “You all ready? We’re going to run for the door.”
“I’ll help,” Lindsey said stepping out.
“How did I know you were going to say that?” he grinned. “I’ll get you a crowbar.”
The others unbuckled quickly and when Wombat saw that they had a clear shot to the door, he told them to go. Jackson and the others hurried to the entrance of the hospital, one carrying the extra laptop. Once they were safely inside, the door closed. Lindsey turned her attention toward helping to clear the parking lot, though it wasn’t easy with all the smoke and dust.
“Where are the others?” Wombat asked.
“Snake had them lead the infected to a warehouse,” she replied. “He went to check on them and he wants us to bring them some ammo. They’re almost out.”
Wombat got on the radio and updated those in the Crow’s Nest.
“Go ahead, we’ll finish clearing the lot,” one of them replied.
“Let’s go,” Wolf said. “We need to hustle.”
“I need to get my bike out,” Wombat said. “Why don’t you and Smiley go ahead and I’ll bring Lindsey with me. We’ll bring as much ammo as we can carry.”
“How are we going to do this?” Smiley asked. “We’ve got about a hundred infected at the gate.”
“Maybe the others can draw them away,” Lindsey said.
Wolf turned to one of the bikers and told him what they needed. Soon, several of the residents who were unable to fight went to the fire escape and began to yell, drawing the crowd toward them and away from the gate.
When the gate was clear, two men opened it quickly, allowing the two bikes out before closing the gates again. Once they were at the truck, Wolf jumped into the back and grabbed all the ammo he thought they could carry, while Smiley used his .44 to pick off the dead that were coming their way. Within a couple minutes, they were hurrying toward the warehouse.
~*~
Snake watched as the burning creatures waddled toward his men. Some had their faces completely charred off, leaving nothing but a smoldering grimace.
“If anything, it at least slowed them down,” Snake told Fish, who was standing next to him. “Still, I hope these are just the lucky few that survived.” He speared an approaching creature in the eye and watched it fall to the ground. “I don’t know if we’ll be able to drop them all. We need to get back.”
“If we started out with about a thousand of them,” the other biker started, “and half of them got run over, we’d still have to kill fifty or sixty of ‘em, huh?”
Snake gave the man a sideways glance. “Math ain’t your strongest subject, is it, Fish?”
One of the other bikers rolled his eyes. “Great. He’s been doing my in
come taxes for the last five years.”
“I don’t think you’ll have to worry about an audit,” Snake said, putting bullets into a couple of burning bodies.
A light breeze started to blow, fanning the flames and sending the smoke away from the bikers long enough for them to see the pile of rubble where the building once stood. Snake was relieved to see only a few more figures staggering from the accumulation of smoldering debris.
“Dudes. Looks like this may have actually worked,” he said with a grin. They quickly put down the smoking corpses. Soon, they realized that there were more dead coming from behind them than crawling from the rubble.
“How many can there be left in this town?” one of the bikers asked in obvious frustration.
Fish was counting on his fingers and spouting out numbers.
Snake shook his head. “There’s over a hundred thousand people in Lansing alone. I’m guessing that most of them are zombified by now. We got, oh maybe a thousand, as Einstein pointed out. That’s a drop in the bucket, boys.”
He glanced at the lightening sky. “I really don’t want to head back while we’re low on ammo, but we can’t wait any longer. We’d better go and hope for the best.”
He looked up to see two bikes approaching, to his relief.
“Good thing,” he said, when they arrived. “I only had a couple rounds left.”
Several of the others nodded in agreement, as they were all low on ammunition.
Smiley got off his bike and began to unload the saddlebags. After handing out the ammo he’d brought, the big biker stepped away and frowned, rubbing a spot on his chest.
Snake noticed right away that Smiley didn’t look right. The man had a sheen of sweat on his face and he was out of breath.
“You all right?” Snake asked him. “You didn’t get bit, did you?”
“Me?” Smiley asked. “Nah, I’m fine. Just a little indigestion, but don’t tell Theresa or she won’t keep letting me have seconds.” He took a step and staggered, grabbing the back of his bike.
Snake grabbed his arm to help steady him.
“You sure you’re all right?”
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