by J. W. Vohs
A part of Luke knew he was dreaming, but it was a comfortable dream, and he saw no need to push himself to wake up. He was running, powerfully and effortlessly, across frozen, barren fields of Midwestern farmland. He was moving too fast to make out any images in his peripheral vision, though he sensed that he wasn’t running alone.
Instead of growing tired, the further he ran the more energetic he felt. He launched himself into the air and sailed euphorically towards a smattering of fluffy clouds in the otherwise tranquil blue sky. Before he could reach them, the clouds melted away and were replaced by two rumbling black helicopters. They buzzed by, one on each side of him, and when they passed Luke he heard what sounded like a thousand anguished voices crying out for mercy. Fueled by enmity, Luke propelled himself after the choppers with single-minded purpose. He grabbed the skid of one helicopter and waved it over his head as if it were as light as a lasso before sending it crashing to the ground. He quickly caught up to the second bird and used the tail boom to launch himself into an impressive triple backflip while the chopper sideways-somersaulted into its partner before spectacularly bursting into flames.
Luke felt magically invincible, and he wasn’t surprised to hear thunderous approval from the landscape below. The smoke from the smoldering wreckage obscured his view for a moment, but as the air cleared, Luke saw masses of the infected, spread out to the horizon in every direction, gazing up at him and howling in celebration. He felt his stomach tighten and forced himself awake.
CHAPTER 12
The entire evacuation fleet was finally over the Hosey Dam and moving eastward through the dark night. The snow seemed to be tapering off, but the north wind still raged across the freezing water. Christy and the rest of the people who’d escaped Cleveland with her and David months earlier were now in the lead. They had intimate experience with the Maumee and canoes, and Deb wanted them guiding the refugees now under her leadership. The Utah sergeant and his five soldiers were in the vanguard as well, where they would be able to help the guide-team if they came under attack. Lieutenant Heder had volunteered to bring up the rear of the flotilla. The people in between were armed and armored, at least to some extent, but few of them had much experience fighting hunters.
Deb hoped there was one advantage in the rapidly dropping nighttime temperatures—that Barnes wouldn’t be able to rely on his helicopters to pursue the fleeing settlers until the sun warmed things up in the morning. Now they all needed to focus on trying to stay reasonably dry and warm as they floated downstream. By this point, everybody had been splashed with some amount of ice-cold water, either from poorly executed paddle-strokes or wind-whipped waves spraying over the gunwales. But as far as Deb knew, no one had fallen into the river, an accident that would almost certainly lead to death in the sub-zero wind chill. Then, just as Deb was mouthing a prayer of thanks that her people were reasonably dry, disaster struck the forward elements of the ragged fleet.
Christy and Sal had quietly spread the word from boat to boat that they would be exposed to attack when they reached the gentle rapids they knew were coming, but the assault that hit them at the first lengthy stretch of shallows still almost caught them by surprise. Before night vision picked up anything through the blowing snow, Chewy, the little beagle shared between the Martinez boys and the Alberts girls, began barking furiously toward the southern bank of the river. Christy and the rest of the Ohio veterans immediately stopped paddling and jumped into the shallows, Jade and Tyler following their example. They all carried halberds, including Trudy and Vickie, who’d continued training even after reaching the relative safety of Jack’s settlement months earlier.
Straining their eyes as they peered into the darkness, the fighters finally saw at least a dozen hunters come silently splashing toward the middle of the river, something so out of character for the creatures that Christy was once again reminded of their ever-evolving capabilities. The flesh-eaters attacked from the bank to the right of the boats, which was the direction in which the dog had been barking. A southern approach by the monsters made sense, because the creatures that hadn’t slipped through the wall on the bridge once it was abandoned were still south of the Maumee.
Christy and the rest of the experienced river-travelers stood in knee-deep water as they waited to receive the flesh-eaters. The feet of the fighters were already numb, but if the hunters were cold they sure didn’t show it, howling and snarling when the people came into sight through the storm. The humans enjoyed the benefits of night-vision in this fight, and the fact that many of the flesh-eaters were moving at only half-speed due to their fear of the water. Beyond those two factors, however, the monsters had all of the advantages during the close-quarters combat about to commence.
Unsuppressed firearms were out of the question, as the noise they created would draw creatures to the site faster than they could be killed. Even worse, only about twenty humans, almost all of them at the front of the flotilla, were wearing NVG’s; most of the best gear had accompanied the soldiers deployed to Vicksburg. Christy, and the rest of the group that had fought their way from the ranch, were all standing in a line facing the approaching hunters. Their canoes were tied to guide lines attached to their waists, the children still huddled inside, gripping their short swords as the watched the battle unfold.
The roaring monsters looked frighteningly fierce in the eerie glow of the NVGs, but the veteran warriors with their trusty halberds easily cut down the stumbling, hesitant flesh-eaters as the creatures’ uncoordinated attack failed to exploit the gaps in the line. When one wounded hunter slipped past Trudy, the wiry, middle-aged widow turned to see Jenny Alberts calmly thrust the tip of her blade into the beast’s eye socket. The girl then kicked the corpse into the current, where it quickly floated downstream.
David had kept Christy away from combat since learning that she was pregnant, but the pugnacious former lawyer still maintained her training away from her husband’s worried eyes. When she saw the top of a hunter’s skull part ways with the rest of its body as the axe-edge of her halberd cleaved through bone and brain matter, she realized with a visceral shout of triumph that she had missed the fighting. She stabbed another flesh-eater in the face with the spear-tip of her weapon while keeping one eye on her mother, who, aside from just wounding the monster Jenny had dispatched, was steadfastly holding her position with a strength and fury that belied her age. Christy dropped another howling creature with a half-swing of her halberd; an axe on a shaft over eight foot long didn’t require much of a swing to inflict serious damage to a hunter: whatever it hit was severed or crushed.
Less than a minute after the attack began, Christy found herself free of hunters and looked back toward the rest of the fleet to see how the people there were faring. Some of the fighters had stepped out of the boats when they saw the flesh-eaters stumbling through the rapids, while others had apparently decided that the best course of action was to continue paddling downstream in the hope of escaping the attack. In mere seconds a dozen boats had crashed into those stopped in front of them, some of which began to tip as they turned sideways with the current. The soldiers and refugees were fighting desperately for their lives, but many of them were doing it while still sitting in their canoes as hunters tumbled into the watercraft and began grappling with any human in reach. Hand-to-hand combat was taking place throughout the tangle of boats, much of it occurring in the form of wrestling matches in the ice-cold water of the Maumee. In short, the fleet was on the verge of disaster.
Christy allowed her mother to cover her after all of the creatures to their front had been sent floating downstream. She stepped back a few meters and radioed Deb with a situation report. Before Christy could say a word, Deb was shouting into the small, handheld, radio. “What the hell’s going on up there?”
“Are you still in the middle of the column, Deb?” Christy yelled over the fight and the blizzard.
“Yes!” Came the frantic reply, “but I can see a huge tangle of canoes and people fighting just ahead of me; we’re all b
acking water right now.”
“Listen to me,” Christy demanded. “Lead the rest of the fleet close to the north bank; go around the fight and get free of these rapids. I’ll lead the survivors to you as soon as we get this under control.”
“You shouldn’t have to backtrack—somebody in that pile up needs to take control! ” Deb nearly screamed.
Christy kept her voice even as she firmly declared, “I think they’re doing the best they can just trying to stay alive right now. Do what I told you or we all could die, right here. You hear me?”
After a few seconds Deb finally responded, “As soon as we reach deeper water, we’ll toss anchors and wait for you.”
“Thank you,” Christy sighed without a hint of sarcasm before returning the radio to her pocket. She then looked back over the ongoing battle and saw that the people who’d survived the first wave had quickly realized the need to fight while standing in the river rather than wrestling with monsters in boats or ice-water. The group of hunters attacking the fleet was only about a hundred-strong, but Christy suspected that thousands more were headed downstream from Fort Wayne at this very moment. If she and the others didn’t wrap this up and get moving in a hurry, there would be ambushes waiting for them at every shallow point between here and the Ohio state line. She realized with a jolt of fear that they were sitting ducks out here on the Maumee with an army of hungry, fully-developed hunters led by Barnes’ lackeys ready to chase them all the way to Lake Erie. They had to get out of here as quickly as possible.
Deb led the rest of the fleet around the assorted collection of canoes, johnboats, and grappling fighters without significant losses, though several watercraft were swamped by confused hunters stumbling through the rapids in the dark. Each time this happened, the refugees speared or stabbed the monsters, righted their boats, and determinedly continued downstream. Finally, mercifully, the entire column was past the scene of the combat and bobbing in deeper water just beyond the shallows. Christy and her mom were helping Vickie keep an eye on their canoes, filled with four scared kids and a barking dog, as Sal did what he could to help clear flesh-eaters from the beleaguered fighters behind them.
A quick head count revealed a loss of five canoes and nine people, four of them from the Utah platoon that was now down to just two men. Everyone realized that trying to go back upstream and look for the missing, fighting both the current and an increasing number of hunters to do so, was out of the question. Reluctantly, the boats pulled anchor and resumed their journey downstream, everyone so thankful to have escaped the ambush that they didn’t immediately think about the fact that more than fifty people were completely soaked and the rest were damp. Soon would begin the battle with an even more insidious enemy than the infected: hypothermia.
The canoes and johnboats floated downstream three abreast, and everyone with a paddle was exerting as much energy as possible in a losing effort to stay warm. Sal was pretty sure that the snow had stopped falling, but with the wind velocity picking up, there was still plenty of the white stuff blowing around. Most of the time the refugees couldn’t see more than forty feet ahead, and that was with night vision. Blankets and heavy clothing were being passed back and forth among the people in the boats, but most of those articles were already wet to some degree, especially after being exposed to the elements for a few minutes. A continuous stream of messages arrived at the front of the flotilla warning Deb that many people were shivering uncontrollably, and she knew that they needed to find a place to stop and dry out before the dying began.
Deb didn’t know what to do; the part of Allen County the evacuees were now floating through was full of drainage ditches and streams, as well as small lakes and a water treatment facility with dozens of holding ponds. A few small scale assaults near the rear of the fleet had been reported, but now that everyone knew the steps to take when fighting in the river, nobody was lost to these scattered attacks. But Deb knew, from Christy and Sal’s descriptions of the landscape, that as soon as the horde cleared the water obstacles on the Indiana banks they would find the Ohio lands bordering the Maumee mostly full of farm fields. She realized that the refugees, the people whose safety she had been entrusted with, were caught in a deadly Catch-22: run from the hunters and freeze to death, or go ashore to dry out and risk being eaten.
Once again, the experience of the survivors of David’s Journey provided a partial solution to the dilemma. Christy pulled her canoe up next to Deb’s and offered her advice. “We’re coming up on two bridges near New Haven; one of them is an old rail bridge, and both of them cross water deep enough to keep hunters on shore. People who aren’t freezing to death could tie off on those bridges while Sal and I lead the rest to a couple of islands less than a mile ahead. We’re pretty sure at least one of them is surrounded by deep water, probably both, and they’re covered with flotsam and trees. We could start up a bunch of fires there and get our wettest folks dry and warm. Then they could rotate out with the merely damp people waiting at the bridges, and once everyone is dry we could start this damn evacuation over.”
Deb quietly considered the proposal. “That’ll give the hunters all the time they need to get ahead of us: at the next rapids we’ll be attacked by hundreds, maybe thousands, instead of the dozens that caused so much trouble earlier.”
“Yeah, they’ll get ahead of us, but unless you’re willing to let a bunch of people freeze to death as we try to outrace those monsters, we’re gonna have to stop and dry out.”
Deb was having trouble settling on either option. “Christy, do I let fifty, or even a hundred people die to save four hundred others? What would Jack and Carter do?”
“First of all, everyone’s wet to some degree, and the wind chill is well below zero. For all we know, none of us will make it if we simply try to outrun the choppers and their hunters. Besides, we know that the flesh-eaters can keep going for days—we can’t. Sooner or later we’re going to have to stop and rest.”
“Theoretically we could stay on the water all the way to Toledo,” Deb argued. “At least some of us would live.”
“We still have two dams to get past,” Christy countered. Jack ordered both portages fortified with a palisade, but even if they’re still standing I doubt they’d stop the horde on our tail.”
Deb was silent once again, so Christy decided to force her hand. “Listen, Jack and Carter, David, I know what every one of them would do in this situation: they’d save lives now and deal with future problems when they arrived. We know that we can get our people dry and save a lot of lives right now; we can’t be sure of what’s gonna face us further downstream. Our soldiers in Vicksburg know what’s going on up here, so let’s give them a chance to figure out some way to help us while we focus on keeping the refugees alive.”
That finally made sense to Deb; she released a pent-up sigh and agreed, “Of course, we don’t really have a better option. Let’s do it.”
Michael reached the rendezvous point and dropped anchor just in time to watch Roberto sidle up to the tug and pull a stranger with a large duffle bag aboard O’Brien’s boat. “What the—?”
“Jesus, Michael, are you seeing this?” Robbie sounded concerned. “Who is that guy, and where did he come from?”
“I have no idea,” Michael replied, “but rescuing survivors is a good thing, right?”
Carolyn playfully punched him in the arm. “Why do you always sound sarcastic? Of course it’s a good thing. Can you imagine what it would be like to be alone in the middle of all this? I mean, we need to make sure he hasn’t been bitten—”
“There’s Bruce and Father O’Brien,” Robbie interrupted, pointing over at the tug. “The old guy doesn’t look so good.” Michael, Robbie, and Carolyn watched in silence as Bruce helped the injured priest into a sling-like seat that had been rigged up with ropes and pulleys. He gently lowered him to Roberto’s outstretched arms. Once Bruce was safely on the deck of the yacht, it slowly turned and headed toward the Canadians.
Without a word to ea
ch other, Robbie and Michael each tucked a .357 Magnum under their coats. “I swear, you two think you’re cowboys but you’re really just a couple of negative Nancies . . .” Carolyn sniffed as she dabbed at the tears she was trying to contain. “We’re losing Father O’Brien, maybe fate has sent us someone to help ease our burden.”
“Maybe fate could have steered that ferry somewhere else. Maybe fate could have sent us some warmer weather. Maybe fate could have decided that a zombie pandemic was a bad idea . . .”
“Hey, Michael, knock it off.” Robbie put his arm around Carolyn. “You know that she and Father O’Brien got close these past few weeks. We all grieve differently; don’t make fun of her for trying to cope the best way she can.”
“You’re right; I’m sorry.” Michael sounded distracted as he kept an eye on the yacht from Middle Bass. It cut its engine and floated up to meet them. Michael looked at Carolyn, “I really am sorry, and I’ll try to mind my manners, but I don’t like the looks of that guy.”
The stranger appeared to be in his mid-twenties; he was wearing cammo from head to toe, and he was talking a mile a minute to Bruce while gulping down water and stuffing his face with whatever food Brittany had given him. Roberto was staying close to Brittany, who was preoccupied with Father O’Brien.
The stranger let out a loud, low whistle. “Man, that is one fine fancy boat ya got there.”
Michael had almost forgotten that the hybrid, “Al Gore Special” Carolyn had procured for their trip was a high-end, luxury item. “Yeah, we like it,” he managed to sound pleasant enough. “So where’d you come from? Is anybody else out there in need of help?”
“Naw, man, I’m the only one who survived from my crew. I thought for sure that I was a goner until I saw you all tryin’ to bust outta the bay. I owe Roberto here my life. My name’s Doug, Doug Blevins. I’m from Detroit. What about you?”