They had finally come to a compromise after the General had described the satellite image of the two people on the porch for the third time. It sure sounded like he was describing Lacy and Jessie. The multi-colored jacket they had picked up at the Flea Market. Her blonde hair in a ponytail. Jessie’s unfashionably long blondish hair and that black hoodie he wore until it started smelling and Lacy made him wash it. There had been no more pictures of them outside on the daily passes but the house was still secure and there was only a small crowd of the undead milling around. They were safe. He supposed he could wait a few more days and help get security set up.
Shakey had made it to the coast with his load of plutonium rods. The satellite had tracked him with every pass. There were scores of modified trucks already there and a lot more getting close. Their initial guesses were right. The trucks were being offloaded to a boat and it was ferrying the casks out to a ship anchored in deep water. It was easy to keep track of the progress, now that they had a specific location to target.
The next morning, Griz unhooked his Kenworth from the lowboy since nobody else knew how to drive the three stick transmission. Then one of the other drivers used his own truck to pull it into town for the cleanup crew. He and Gunny borrowed the pickup truck from the Crow City Councilman, loaded the boys in the back for security, then headed out to scout the town’s perimeters and try to figure out the quickest way to erect some fencing or barriers.
The town was laid out adjoining the lake. It was high above the water and the shoreline was very steep where it was close to the dam. They considered it unclimbable for nearly a half mile until the natural terrain started gently sloping and made access easy. The main road that crossed over the dam would be easy enough to seal off with a few trailers blocking it. The rest of the area, however, was a problem. They could string barb wire pretty quick but it would only slow the undead down. They would need a serious number of guards posted 24/7 to keep it safe. The whole town would have to rotate in three shifts. Even then, if a crowd of a few thousand happened in from Dallas or somewhere, they’d be overrun.
Scratch banged on the roof of the truck to get Gunny’s attention. “What’s that?” he asked. “Are those train tracks?”
Gunny looked out of the window, across the plain, to see where he was pointing then headed in that direction.
It was train tracks. They were running straight as an arrow, heading down into Dallas and points beyond. They went on the outskirts of town and then paralleled the highway across the dam before branching away from it to run due north.
“Doesn’t help us much, unless you’re thinking of laying track all the way around the town and parking a train on it.” Griz said.
“What if we ran into the next town with a freight yard and snagged a trainload of containers.” Scratch asked. “We could get an intermodal forklift on your lowboy.” he indicated to Griz with his spike. “We could put them in a line, make a big circle around the town. Plus, we’d have whatever was inside them.”
Gunny was nodding as he listened. He’d pulled containers for a little while, he was familiar with the process and those trains carried a few hundred boxes on them. “I wonder how many we’d need to circle this place? It’d probably take a mile of them if we wanted to leave some room for a killing field, just in case they were breached.”
“Anybody got a calculator?” Griz asked, eyeballing the terrain, already building the wall in his mind.
“How long are they?” Lars asked then closed his eyes for a moment when Gunny told him 40 feet.
“We’d need 132 per mile.” he said and they all turned to look at him
“Easy math.” he said. “Try calculating grams and kilo’s and exchange rates while negotiating in Spanish when you’re buying a pound of the good stuff.”
Gunny shrugged. “That’s easy enough.” he said. “How many rail cars would we need? Two boxes per car.”
“Sixty-six.” Lars came back almost instantly.
Griz raised his eyebrows, obviously impressed. “I think you found the new Secretary of Math Stuff, Mr. President.” he said, grinning at Gunny.
“Piss off.” Lars said. “Besides, it would be Secretary of Treasury. Look at that narrow part.” he pointed to an area on the map that was only a few miles wide between the lake and the river. “Wonder how far it would be to run a line of them between the waters. We can get the dozer to cut a smooth path, knock down any trees in the way. We can run the containers from the edge of the lake over there all the way to the river below the dam.” Lars looked up from the map and traced his arm in an arc, indicating a large semi-circle that probably encompassed two, maybe three miles.
“It would be like a fortress, even with loads of room to plant fields or have cows, if we wanted.” Stabby said. “A bit like a stronghold from the King Arthur days.”
Griz took it all in and counted on his fingers, doing some quick math. “We could pull that in one trip. We’d only need a hundred rail cars. Trains pull longer than that all the time don’t they? Hook two or three engines up and it would be easy.”
They had a plan. It was a quick way to build an easily defendable wall. The land was mostly flat so the dozer work would be minimal, the walls would be 8 feet high and should keep anything at bay, they could set up roving guards on top of them and as an added bonus, they would have all of the supplies that were stored inside of them.
“I think we should double them, though.” Gunny said. “I think I’d want more than an eight-foot wall between me and a swarm of those bastards. How many we need for that, Lars?”
“Gonna need about 800 containers for the whole perimeter.” He said. “That’s 400 train cars.”
“Damn.” Griz said. “That means 3 or 4 trips doesn’t it?”
“I think we can do it in one go.” Lars said. “I saw a documentary when I was a kid, they pulled like 700 cars full of iron ore over in Australia, in the Outback.”
They had all gotten used to him spitting out weird trivia. Being raised on boxes of VHS tapes his mom got from the second-hand stores and church rummage sales and having a naturally sharp mind lead to all kinds of useless knowledge bouncing around in his head. Except some of it wasn’t useless anymore. It was a shame Billy Travaho had died when this all started, those two would have been unbeatable in Trivial Pursuit.
“How many engines would it take to pull it?” Gunny asked
“I don’t remember that.” Lars said after a moment. “I guess all we can find.”
“Is there going to be enough there?” Stabby asked “That’s a lot of boxes.”
“Yeah, there’s thousands in the railyards, they’re stacked high and deep.” Gunny replied. “Let’s hope there are enough railcars there to haul them. Maybe we can get a train that hasn’t been offloaded. Save us a bunch of work putting them all back on.”
They had a rudimentary plan. They’d hash out the details back at camp, see if they had somebody that knew something about trains. If not, how hard could it be. Put it in gear and go. You didn’t even have to steer.
Gunny figured if all went well, they could get into the railyards in Dallas, steal a train and have this whole thing done in a week. Then the General wouldn’t have any more excuses for him to stay. Cobb could figure out the other details, maybe run strands of barb wire in the water to keep that area of access safe from the off chance of an undead swimmer. He’d let them worry about that. He needed to get this part of the job done so he could get on the road to Atlanta.
They spent the rest of the day mapping out the path the bulldozer would clear and setting out stakes. It turned out the shortest path across the peninsula already had a few dirt roads they could use for parts of it.
They didn’t have to kill anything out in the open, the area was zombie free. They cleared any houses they came across. They weren’t many, they were nearly five miles from the center of town. The trucks zigzagging up and down all the surrounding roads had drawn the infected to the noise over the last few days.
In the end, they decided to expand the area to be contained to enclose a portion of a ranch. It would add nearly a hundred containers but they would gain a working farm that had a large peach orchard and numerous berry bushes. While they were there, they fed and watered all of the animals, most had done okay by themselves. The dog was happy to see them and the even the barn cats gave them some love when they found the bags of food and poured it out for them. The chickens ignored them, the goats only cared about the grain. Gunny hoped there was a vet or at least a farmer in the groups of people that were showing up. Some of the cows had dried up but a few didn’t look well at all. They were lowing pitifully out in the fields, probably had mastitis from not being milked. The only dead animals were some of the horses that had been trapped in their stalls and died of dehydration or starvation.
Gunny dropped the crew off at the camp as it was nearing dark and headed out to the mass grave where the dozer was finishing up, covering the last of the townspeople. He wanted to see it for himself. See the tomb of an entire town. He thought he owed them that.
Preacher was there, singing prayers for the dead.
When the bulldozer operator and his security team finished the grizzly work just as the sun was dipping below the horizon, Gunny waved them on and they left in one of the cars. They were eager to be away from so much carnage and the smell that still lingered in the air.
Gunny waited, leaning against the truck, as Preacher sang. His old-time gospel preaching voice rang out strong and clear in the gathering gloom, the night birds and occasional early coyote howl joining him in the mournful hymn. His lament was reaching out for the Gods of the Christians, the Jews, the Indians and the non-believers alike. He beseeched them all to gather these souls in their embrace and welcome them home. He sang in English and Latin and something else Gunny didn’t recognize.
When he finished the sorrowful song, he bowed his head for a few moments then turned away from the thousands he had buried today.
“It’s the devil's work.” he sighed. “Everything God did, he tries to copy and pervert.”
“God made zombies?” Gunny asked
“No, Son. He brought Jesus back from the dead. Perfect and uncorrupted. So the Devil, that wily old Serpent, copies him. Mocks him. He walks to and fro on the earth roaring like a lion, seeking to devour.”
Gunny nodded. He could see where Preacher was going with this, could see that so much death had hurt him deeply. Preacher wasn’t like the guys doing the killing. He hadn’t learned how to shut it all off, to compartmentalize. He still felt the pain. Still cried when he buried unnamed babies in unmarked graves. Gunny didn’t want an argument but he figured it was Man who created the virus that reanimated the dead, not the Devil. Maybe ol’ Scratch whispered in somebody’s ear but some psychotic human had created it. He still found it hard to believe the Muslims had the scientific know-how to do it. Someone had to sell it to them. Some full-fledged idiot if they thought the Jihadis wouldn’t employ it to kill everybody. That whole religion of peace was a death cult. Maybe they thought they would just use it among themselves. The Sunni killing the Shiites or something. Whatever. In another week or so, all of them would be dead if the Russians let their nukes fly. He wondered about the soldiers still in the sandbox, if they were still alive and fighting or if they’d been overrun by tens of thousands of frenzied Islamists. He wondered about his Muslim friends, if Hasif was still alive. If he was still inside the safe areas of the Middle East, wreaking havoc on the extremists. He hadn’t talked to him in a long time. He suspected he was one of the guys he’d followed on Facebook that reported atrocities from Mosul or kill counts of the Yazidi women fighters or anywhere else he was. He wasn’t sure, it wasn’t something you could ask online but some of the phrases he used sounded familiar. Slang he had picked up from the Americans and his dark sense of humor had Gunny fairly sure it was him. He hoped he was surviving somewhere. Maybe he was on vacation, he always talked about visiting the Bahamas. It was his dream. He was getting older, maybe he had extracted enough vengeance from what ISIS had done to his family. Maybe he had gotten out.
They leaned against the front of the pickup, staring at the ball of fire settling below the horizon. It was beautiful in its simple glory.
Gunny pulled out his poke and rolled one up, offered it to Preacher. He took it and Gunny rolled another for himself before lighting them both, the warm smell of the tobacco masking the odor of death.
They smoked in silence, burying the dead in their hearts in their own way.
Chapter 25
Hasif
Cairo, Egypt
Day 14
Hasif had made sure he wasn’t followed but still waited for long minutes standing quietly in the darkened doorway, watching for movement. When he was certain he was alone in the alley, he knocked softly three times. He waited for a ten count then knocked again. Twice this time. He heard the bolts being thrown and the door opened into a dim room. He nodded to the guard then made his way to the stairs leading down. He was amazed at the number of people who chanced death by stoning to be here. Worried, too. He had his doubts that a group of this size could keep a secret. Sergeant Meadows had told him a saying that a biker group in America had. Three could keep a secret if two were dead. Maybe they could keep these assemblies to themselves, after all their lives depended on it. Hopefully no one would be stopped by the wandering Sharia Patrols. They were everywhere and each group was enforcing conflicting laws. You never knew what you could be fined or beaten for. One day short pants were a sin against Allah. The next day they weren’t. Hasif had an idea that only the most fervent were actually happy. The rest of the people were quietly afraid of this new world. Their joy at getting what they had always wanted quickly turned to fear when they realized they had gotten what they wished for.
This new Caliphate would never survive, the cracks were already starting to show after only two weeks. After the most successful war ever waged with the most undisputed and decisive victory in the history of the world, the internal arguments would tear the new government down. It happened too fast. Wars weren’t supposed to be won overnight. There were no great battles, no mighty heroes to be sung about. No time to plan or consider what would happen the day after the victory.
The validity of the self-proclaimed Mahdi was already being questioned. He didn’t fulfill any of the prophecies. He didn’t have a seven-year peace with Israel. He rode around on a white horse like it was written but he looked ridiculous on it, not noble and conquering. Hasif gave it another month, if that long, and the wars would start up again. Sunni against Shiite. Strict Wahabis from Saudi Arabi against those who didn’t want to live in the thirteenth century. A government couldn’t be run by religious leaders. They only knew the words of the Prophet, not how to manage a country.
There were only a few hours before the first calls to prayer and attendance at them was no longer optional. In the few short weeks since they had conquered the world, many things had changed. The gathered men and women had already spoken at length of their outrage and horror at what had been done in the name of their religion. By the time they realized what was happening, it was over. They went to bed as usual and woke up the next morning with the radio and TV telling them of the great victory. Too late to do anything but tear at their beards in lament. These dozens of clerics, civic leaders and shopkeepers were just a small part of the resistance that quickly sprang up when they learned about the death of the rest of the world. But they learned just as quickly not to speak out or show their anger publicly. The roundups of moderates, or infidels as they were quickly labeled, was instant and permanent. All of the warriors had been called home and they had no more enemies to fight, no more Westerners. The streets ran red with public beheadings and the frenzy of the fanatics was insatiable. It wasn’t a Night of Long Knives, it was an entire week of Bloody Scimitars eliminating anyone who wasn’t a true believer. Everyone joined in the celebrations the first few days. The Western World was dead, conquered overnight. The new
Caliphate that had been dreamed of since the days of Mohammed was finally at hand. The long awaited 12th Imam had declared himself. No more American Soldiers occupying their lands, no more drones killing whole families at wedding parties. The West got what they deserved and if you weren’t on board, if you weren’t joyous in the streets, then maybe you were the enemy. The societal madness was far worse than it had ever been in Germany at the height of Nazi furor. That was for Country, for the Fatherland. This was for Allah, for religion. The few rational voices who tried to decry what the small handful of self-appointed leaders had done were quickly silenced. Publicly and permanently. If you valued your head, you learned to keep your opinion to yourself and not miss daily prayers. The foreigners in their lands had been eradicated, their military bases quickly destroyed. Those installations had fallen with the rest of the world. Or so the radios and televisions were broadcasting.
Hasif knew better. He had been a translator for the Americans and British for many years and fought tirelessly with the Yazidis and Christians. He’d even had the honor to meet Prince Harry when he was fighting in Afghanistan. He had military and ham radios, now an offense punishable by death, and he had been spending nearly every waking hour scanning the dials in all the bands, trying to determine what the situation was really like. He didn’t trust the news on the state-run radio or televisions. How could the victory have been so decisive? How could it have worked on every single living person outside the safety zones of barricades protecting the Middle East? Iran had their own satellites orbiting the earth and the Rasad-1 had been sending down a constant stream of images as it circled the globe. The only lights showing at night were in the Arabian and Muslim countries, the daytime pictures showed the great western cities in flames. He didn’t know how they were planning on keeping the hordes of undead out of the Northern African countries. There was no way to wall off nearly four thousand miles of desert land across the top of the continent and keep them away from Egypt and Libya. Maybe they thought the zombies wouldn’t wander through the desert to get them, but they probably would. They never should have infected South Africa. Hell, they never should have infected anyone but it was too late now. Much too late.
Zombie Road II: Bloodbath on the Blacktop Page 21