“I’m turning around and we need to go!” Ginny yelled at us. I barely heard her over the ringing in my ears and the increasing volume of the incoming Zombies. I was trying to remember how many days since my last concussion.
“Snap out of it! Help me grab Frank!” Reeves was right in front of me. He started limping towards Frank, I tried to “snap out of” the head trauma and followed along. I felt like I had done ten shots of tequila and hit myself I the head with a bat between each shot. Ann joined us and said something but I couldn’t understand her. Not sure if it was my concussion, her broken nose, the screams of the Zombies, or what but I wasn’t hearing or computing much of anything very well right now.
“Ann! Get Steve and everybody in the truck. I’ll grab Frank. Hurry!” Reeves yelled this last part. I was wondering why he was being so rude and was fixing to ask him about it when Ann grabbed me and started yanking me towards the truck. She seemed to be mad at me for some reason. I tried to pull my thoughts together but it just wasn’t working. Ginny was driving the truck straight towards us. Ann yanked me around the side and climbed in the back, yanking on my arm to pull me in as well. Thomas was collapsed in the corner of the truck bed. I guess he was tired.
Ann looked like she was going to get off the truck. I grabbed her and told her I loved her. She shook her head and told me to sit down. I sat down. The world was spinning. Looking over the back of the truck I saw Reeves carrying Frank this way. Behind him, but getting pretty close, hundreds of half-naked, blue tinted, red eyed, crusty skinned, pissed off looking Zombies were charging towards us. They kept tripping over the debris from the cars and slowing down the ones behind them as they all tried to fit down the narrow corridor that had been cleared out for traffic down the interstate. Otherwise, we’d already have been Z-Chow.
The screams were loud enough where we could not hear anything. I stood up to go help Reeves and instantly fell over on my face. I tried to get up again, puked, and passed out.
Entry 7: Last Man Standing
I came to, bouncing around in the back of the truck, nauseous as hell, with a pounding headache. I pulled myself up into a sitting position. I figured out the sticky slimy stuff all over me was probably my own vomit. I started trying to wipe that sexy sauce off of me while looking around to figure out what was up.
What was up, was we were driving back the way we had come. Our assault on the highway had not been fast or hard enough to actually get us through. It may take more than some extra containers of gas and a willingness to trash our own bodies to continue North. I briefly considered looking at the map but that made my stomach do a couple more flips so I opted to just sit there and try to breathe instead.
“How are you feeling?” Ann yelled at me over the sound of the rushing wind.
I started moving over to talk to her and a panicked look crossed her face and she held up a hand to keep me from moving any closer. Considering I had chunks of something stuck in my hair I decided not to be offended by her unwillingness to snuggle.
“I feel like I look!” Then, before I had to hear Reeves and Ann and Thomas all chime in with smart ass responses to that statement, “How’s Frank?”
Ann had Franks head in her lap. He was still out cold. Ann had cleaned off her own face and she handed me a fistful of wet wipes and motioned for me to basically wipe them everywhere. She looked down at Frank, then back up at me.
“He’s still breathing. He has a pulse; I think he’s just not as used to being concussed as you are. Hopefully, he wakes up in a few, if we take some time out to lay low and get rested up.”
We drove on, until we were back at the rest stop we had hit earlier. I tapped on the window and pointed and Ginny drove us into the rest area parking lot. She stopped the car and we all just sat there for a minute. Being retrospective and everything is great, but we had just tried something and gotten our asses handed to us. Without the wind blowing around us we could actually talk. I was able to sit up now without dry heaving which was a nice change. Frank was still out cold.
I looked over at Thomas. “Broken?” I asked him.
He looked up at me. “Yeah, it hurts pretty bad. Guess we need to find another hobby lobby to plaster of Paris it up again.”
He was talking brave, but I could see the tear marks through the dust, dirt and dried blood running down the front of his face. I started digging around in my pockets until I found the Ziploc bag that I had shoved some loose Oxy into. I looked at Ann, she nodded, I pulled out two of the pills and handed them over to Thomas.
“Take these and call me in the morning.” He stared at me appreciatively while snagging the pills and dry swallowing them.
“Thanks. I’m going to try and pass out now.”
Ann moved Franks head off her and went to help Thomas secure his arm better. She had a fancy sling and such she had grabbed from some drug store so she worked on getting his arm immobile. Thomas winced every time she moved his arm but he bore it. That was something new in this world. Whining had pretty much come to an end. Now you just bore it and kept going as well as you could.
We passed around some bottles of water and considered next steps. I heard a weird noise so I looked around. Not seeing anything I looked up. Ginny was standing over watch on the top of a dull orange Pathfinder. She was making noises like a bird or something to get our attention. I made a note to teach her how to click her tongue or something so she didn’t look like such a moron. I stared at her.
She pointed off towards the road. Her eyes were taking on the dimension of saucers. My eye probably got a little saucer like too. With the bandages over my one eye, I still had some issues with depth perception but could pretty easily see what looked like a convention of Zombies moving quickly down the road towards us and the rest stop. Must be our ‘wake’ of Zombies from heading this way. Now we were stuck in the middle of two waves washing towards us on the road. As much as I hated the idea, and I really hated it, it was looking like it was wander the woods time.
I motioned for Ginny to climb down and whispered loudly for everyone to gather there gear and head towards the wood line. I strapped on my pack and weapons and went around to help Ann and Reeves with Frank. As I was walking around the truck I heard a scream startup from the Zombies walking by. One of them must have seen something they deemed interesting. Interesting to them, was normally bad for one of us. I jogged to the back of the truck and looked in. Ann looked back at me. She had Franks wrist in her hand. Reeves was squatting down opposite her. Both of them looked choked up.
Frank had died. He held the honor among his men of being the one out of fifty to make it out of Florida but that was as far as he made it. I wish we had the time to burn him but we had to make a run for it now. Franks story was going to end as spoiled meat choked down by ravenous Zombies in the back of a beat to crap truck in a rest stop off I-95. It was similar to how so many stories were so abruptly ending now.
Not wanting anyone else to end up as a Zombie entrée, I motioned for Reeves and Ann to get out of the truck and get moving. Ann did, Reeves just sat there. I jumped in the truck and grabbed Reeves and pushed him out. He landed on the ground and jumped up, ready to punch me.
“Good, you’re back to the living. We need to run now or we’re all going to die.” I grabbed Ann’s hand and started pumping my legs in the direction of the wood line. I had packed my pack with so much crap that it felt like I had a small car strapped to my back. Ann had her weapons and her medical supplies. Reeves, acting as rear guard, had his weapons and pack and a bag full of food in his one arm with the baseball bat in the other.
We were only about ten yards from the wood line when some of the Zombies must have finally zeroed in on us. I heard a loud guttural yell starting up in undulating waves through the pack in the rest area. I began pumping my legs faster than I had realized they could go. Ann and I did not slow down at the wood line to carefully enter it but rather hit the wall of briars and weeds full speed. It wasn’t like the Zombies were going to give a shit about bri
ars. The shouts and yells were getting closer as we burrowed into the woods as fast as we could.
We skidded to a stop in a small clearing where Thomas and Ginny were waiting for us. Thomas looked like he was in serious pain from his arm, his skin looked the color of a dead dolphin’s stomach, washed up on the beach and left to rot for a few days. While I was looking at him he crumpled to the ground and passed out. In the immortal words of Pooh. “Oh bother.”
I went ahead and threw my backpack on the ground and scooped up Thomas and put him into a fireman’s carry across my back and started jogging deeper into the woods. Ginny and Reeves shared the load of my pack between the two of them, dragging it along behind them as they jog-ran behind me. Ann was staying back a bit to watch our six.
I had no plan other than to run until we didn’t hear anything trying to catch, maul, and eat us. Honestly, that seemed like a damn fine plan to me. I ran through the edge of a copse of trees and right off the edge of a concrete drainage ditch about ten feet deep. I did my best to protect Thomas during the fall so ended up with my body taking some excessive abuse. For once, I didn’t get a concussion, but like normal, my damned ankle got twisted.
Entry 8: Whack a Mole
I lay at the bottom of the ditch. Thomas was laid out beside me. He’d had a pretty soft landing so I figured he was Ok. The reason for his soft landing was I had maneuvered my body in the air so that he landed on me. I was much less Ok with the fall than he was. Mainly, my ribs hurt, a lot. The only thing helping with the pain in my ribs was how bad my ankle flared up every time I put pressure on it. Thomas was awake and looking around blearily after the fall. That’ll teach him to pass out from pain so that have to hump his ass through a Georgia jungle and off a concrete cliff.
On the plus side, my manly screech on going over the edge and hitting the bottom had alerted everyone else to slow down. Everyone but the Zombies, who had sped up at the sound of someone screeching. I could hear there scattered yells and grunts coming from the forest getting closer. Ann, Reeves, and Ginny all hung from the edge of the concrete and dropped down into the ditch with us. They were welcome.
Much less welcome were the Zombies that started raining down around and on us. Concrete ditches and steep falls didn’t seem to slow them down any more than alligator infested waters. Especially the ones that actually caught site of us prior to just blindly running off the edge of the ditch. The ones that survived the fall were busy screaming their heads off and trying to get at us. Luckily for us, most of them had broken something or other in the fall and their mobility was limited. Unluckily for us, like always, there was a shitload of Zombies so even if ‘most’ of them got maimed we’d eventually be overwhelmed.
Around me everyone was dropping everything that wasn’t essential. Basically, anything that wasn’t a weapon was getting tossed to the side. It seemed like a good idea to me. I started to try and get up and help out. I promptly fell back on the ground holding my ankle and trying to decide if it would hurt my ribs too much to breathe a few times. With complete disregard for my ribs, Reeves picked me up and tossed me over his back and started running down the ditch.
I saw Ann had Thomas up and running as well. Then I blacked out from the pain for a little while. I came back to reality about thirty seconds later and instantly regretted it. Reeves was still bouncing me around on his shoulders, grinding my broken ribs together and causing me to experience levels of physical pain I had not even known could exist. I still couldn’t breathe without the pain making me want to vomit and go back into unconsciousness. I saw Thomas was doing an Ok job of keeping up. I saw several Zombies were also doing a decent job of starting to catch up with us.
The thing with Zombies is they don’t care about pain. I’ve hit them in the leg with my sword and seen their kneecaps break as their legs buckle and cause them to drop to the ground. They don’t seem to care. It’s like the virus wipes out the part of the brain that gives a crap about self-preservation or pain. The knee cap is broken so they are limited in what they can do but they’ll still keep coming. They’ll drag themselves along with their arms. They’ll hop on the other foot. They’ll do whatever they are physically able to do to get to you. It’s one of their great strengths and also one of their great weaknesses. Because they don’t care about self-preservation, they don’t raise their hands to block blows to the head or try to dodge when you swing a knife at them. You can’t wound one and turn your back to take on another, you have to put them down so they stay down. That is why Thomas was such a crucial part of our fighting strategy by going around delivering the mea culpa with the iron stair pole he carried. We put them on the ground, he made sure they stayed there.
Thomas was currently not in a position to be crucial to anyone’s fighting force. If Ann wasn’t supporting him he would have fallen over already. I was pretty much a big bag of uselessness that Reeves had to expend his energy carrying. That left Ginny to defend us while we hobbled forward like drunk senior citizens trying out ice skating for the very first time. Ginny was up for the challenge. She had a bat in one hand and the pole Thomas liked to use in the other. She still had a small pack on her back as well. She had a pistol strapped on and a rifle slung across her back but we wouldn’t resort to firearms unless it got desperate. Firearms just ended up giving you a lot more Zombies to fight since the noise carried.
I could feel various items still strapped to me and clanking around in my pockets but couldn’t tell you what they were. I was mostly just hoping Reeves wouldn’t drop me while simultaneously wishing he could just drop me on the ground and let me lay there for a while. Speaking of awesome stuff clanking around in my pockets I was pretty sure there was some Oxy or something like that in one of my pockets. Wonder if I could get to that while being bounced around on Reeves back and trying not to cry, too much, from the pain.
I watched Ginny go after a Zombie that was getting a little too close. It was a teenager, looking like he had been in pretty decent shape, who had survived tumbling into the ditch without any easily discernible broken body parts. Ginny went at him with the bat and within a few seconds he had a very discernible broken body part followed by having a stair pole embedded in his head. More screams from behind us indicated that more of the Zombies had shown up to play. We needed to get out of this ditch before it turned into our grave.
Reeves stopped torturing me for a second to slow down and point out stairs up ahead in the ditch that would take us out on the opposite side that we had come from. Seemed like a great idea to me. With the sounds of fresh screams drifting down the ditch and the knowledge that we probably only had a few minutes to live if we didn’t get the hell out of this hole we sprinted. Well, Reeves sprinted, Ginny ran backwards, and Ann and Thomas kind of jogged sideways with Thomas looking extremely wobbly.
Ginny had to take care of an old man the Zombie virus had enlivened with a youthful death dealing spirit. The man had probably been wandering around Walmart in one of those motorized rovers eight months ago but now he was a lean, mean, killing machine. A lean, mean, killing machine who ended his life with a stair pole in his brain plate. Ginny had really turned into a machine. I wondered what psychologists would make of all of us being able to kill so easily and dispassionately now. Maybe only people with sociopathic tendencies and a lack of empathy were able to survive in this new normal?
Whatever, all I knew was that Reeves had set me down and told me to climb up the ladder. How the hell was I supposed to climb up the ladder? I heard the yells getting closer, realized Ann and everyone were standing around waiting for me to climb the ladder, so I climbed the ladder. I put myself in Zombie mode to get to the top. Ignoring the pain, the grating, horrible, blackout inducing pain. I got to the top and rolled away so that the next person could get up. Thomas threw his arm over the top and bounced down beside me to rest.
We both drug ourselves over to the edge to see what was going on. I saw, after a brief argument, that Ginny was the next one coming up the ladder. Reeves and Ann took down two Z
ombies that were danger close and then Ann started scrambling up the ladder. I nodded approvingly to myself at the site of Ginny standing on the top of the edge of the ditch with her rifle pointed down at the Zombies running towards Reeves. There were more of them than he could possibly fight. He started scrambling up the ladder. Ginny held her fire to see if he would make it. When it was obvious he would make it, I saw the rifle dip down a little bit.
Looking around I saw there were no Zombies on this side of the ditch as far as I could see. I didn’t think the Zombies would figure out the ladder so we should be good there. Time to head –
A freaking Zombie poked his head over the edge of the ditch and screamed at us. Ann hit him in the face with the baseball bat and he just looked at her with red eyes and a smashed nose and continued trying to climb out. She beat his head into a goopy red mush and he finally fell backwards into the ditch. Unfortunately, he was not an anomaly, another Zombie poked his head over. Done screwing around, Ann just penetrated the blue-skinned red-eyed screamers head with the stair pole and made sure to yank it out before the Zombie fell backwards into hell.
They kept coming. As soon as we beat one down the next one would clamber right on up. They were making a good deal of noise with all there yelling and screaming so it would not be long before more Zombies started showing up on this side of the road to join the party. We needed to get out of there. The problem being we couldn’t disengage from the Zombies coming up the ladder or we’d get overwhelmed pretty fast trying to get out of there. That was one of the problems anyway.
Zournal: Book 3: Scorched Earth Page 5