Revenence (Novella 2): Dead Tired

by M. E. Betts

  "No," he said. "Do you?"

  "Settlement over in Texas," Theresa said. "Place called Amarillo. You familiar with it?"

  "Not in particular," Adrian said. "But I'll have a look at the map."

  "No need, really," she said, pointing out west. "You can take 66 straight there, if you want to make it easy."

  "How far?" Adrian asked.

  "Oh," she said, a low whistle crossing her lips, "a ways. At least three hundred miles from here, I s'pose. There's a dude there, I'm not sure if you're familiar with him--name's Pfeifer. He's some sort of bigwig, from what I've heard."

  "Interesting," Adrian said. "So the headquarters you mentioned earlier, it's this place in Amarillo? Some kinda settlement for these sadists?"

  Theresa smiled, the deep laugh lines stretching wide across her weathered face. "Sadists," she said. "I like that. It fits them. As far as it being their headquarters, that's pretty much my understanding of it. I don't know too much, other than they were headed to Amarillo and that's where Pfeifer's at, and yeah, it seems to be some kinda settlement for their sort. That's all I've really heard on the grapevine since I got tangled up with those guys back in Missouri. Oh, and that Pfeifer dude is apparently both important, and also a major prick. Good luck dealing with him. Don't hold back with him, either--from the stories I heard, whatever punishment you can imagine doling out to him, he's got that coming, and then some. Me, I'm gonna try and get as far away from this hell-fire as I can," she said, referencing the burning complex across the street with its billowing clouds of black, poisonous smoke pouring from the windows and vents.

  Adrian started his engine. "All good stuff to know," he said, nodding at Theresa. "My name's Adrian, by the way. Maybe I'll see you around when I pass through here again with my daughter."

  Theresa nodded, her eyes clouding up with tears. "I hope so," she called over the purr of Adrian's motorcycle. "I really do. I never wanted to have anything to do with those kinds of people. That's why I left. I hope you believe it."

  Adrian shrugged as he backed his idling motorcycle around to point north. "I got no reason not to. Take care of yourself."

  "'Bye," Theresa called as he started down North Denver Avenue.

  He took the first left after emerging from the series of bridges running overhead, heading west down Edison Street. He would continue down the road until he hit Sand Springs. At that point, he would take 51 south across the Arkansas River and toward Sapulpa, about 10 miles away. On the outskirts of the city, he would run into route 40/44, which continued to coincide with the local stretch of Old Route 66, He would take the route once again and continue west in pursuit of the sadists. He supposed that the the group may have already passed through Sand Springs, though in a city of that size, there was always the chance of getting detained by someone or something, and also the chance of finding something worth looting. Either way, if the middle-aged blonde had been truthful, he should expect to run into them as long as he kept to 66 and kept up the pace.

  He reached Sand Springs uneventfully, merging onto 64. He continued for a few miles until he reached an exit ramp. Following the signs, he exited to his right, taking the first left onto 51. As he continued south, he noticed that the sparse numbers of undead along the road seemed to be headed to the south, at least until they noticed his presence and changed direction to pursue him. He took it as an indication that the sadists had likely passed through town and left, taking the road south across the river.

  As he neared the waterway, he saw that the southbound lanes would not be passable. They were both packed with, by Adrian's estimate, a Tetris-worthy configuration of vehicles beginning halfway down the bridge and stretching up past the river's northern bank. It appeared that many of them had been pushed from the rear, going off of the road and down a steep hill into the dense band of woods lining the river. He surveyed the northbound side, which appeared to be clear enough to enable his passage. He would have to clear the two lanes of undead first, however. He counted at least twenty, turning to shuffle back to the north toward him as they noticed his presence, distracted from their former targets far to the south.

  He unslung his AR-15 from its sling upon his back, then stood with his engine rumbling low as he listened to the evading sadists in the distance. The collective, distant howl of their retreating motorcycles was carried northward up the road to Adrian, who stepped away from his bike and glanced around him, surveying the area through the scope of his assault rifle. It appeared that any mobile undead in the vicinity were already on the bridge, having been drawn down the road in pursuit of the sadists. There was also no sign of human life, other than the sadists far to the south, beyond his range of vision. The woods and the shopping district to his rear had appeared to be devoid of activity, other than the birds, squirrels and insects.

  He started down the northbound lanes of the bridge, approaching the first few undead individuals around the point where the water line began beneath him. As they got within twenty feet of him, he saw that one of them was not only decomposing, but also charred, and yet still somewhat mobile. The combined factors of rotting and burnt flesh gave off a distinct stench. Adrian raised his shotgun as he began to back away, his stomach spasming within his abdomen as he fought off the urge to regurgitate the beef jerky and trail mix he had consumed earlier in the day. He spit out a mouthful of excess saliva as he loaded a shell into the gun and unloaded it into the zombie's seared face. It crumpled where it stood, and he continued to back away. His pace and demeanor were casual as he loaded another shell into his shotgun.

  "Christ almighty," he told the other two well-rotted undead nearby, approaching him at a fast walking pace, "I can't even smell the two of you, after that burnt pile of shit. Like someone shot a deuce on a rotten hunk of pork and then lit that fucker on fire." His voice was monotone and his expression neutral as he spoke.

  He decided to hold off on using his guns again for the moment, wielding his wrecking bar instead. He held it like a baseball bat, swinging the wrench/sledge end so that the sledge face was leading. He threw its weight toward the closest of the undead. The face of the implement made contact with that of the zombie before Adrian, splattering chunks and fluids onto his boots and pant legs. The neck broke, causing the head to flop backward onto the rear shoulders.

  Adrian was already swinging at the next one, using the same perfected stance, swing and release he had used in high school baseball some two decades earlier. If the zombie's head were a baseball, it would have likely flown out of the park. As it were, however, it detached at the top of the soft, thoroughly decayed neck, the spine having snapped from the force of the sledge face. The skin ripped, and the head detached and spun end over end until it landed on the overgrown grass to his right, which sloped slowly down toward the trees lining the river's edge. The decapitated extremity rolled down the slope, gaining speed as it descended. Adrian watched it for a few moments, then averted his attention to the rest of the undead advancing down the bridge, hooking the wrecking bar again onto his belt loop in order to wield his shotgun.

  The next cluster was comprised of four relatively slow-moving undead about ten yards to the south, although there were two roughly halfway down the bridge who seemed to be narrowing the gap between themselves and Adrian at an alarmingly fast rate. He reached into the outer pocket of his backpack, taking out a buck and ball shell. He loaded it into the gun, then assessed the positions of the various undead to his south.

  He began to backstep on the pavement, evading ever so slightly to the north as he waited for the two faster-moving of the undead to reach the general vicinity of the slower-moving group ahead of them. The first of the former group to reach the latter raised its arms to clear its path of the undead individual it was pushing down and out of its way, continuing to speed toward Adrian as he steadied his shotgun. He unloaded the large-caliber lead ball and its six accompanying buck pellets, his sight trained on the closer of the two fresher, faster undead now about twenty feet away. Although the lead
ball struck the target, sending it crashing pavement, it was in the chest cavity, not in the head. The ensuing injuries kept it from standing, let along running, but it continued its attempt at slithering down the pavement in Adrian's direction using its arms.

  The buck pellets took down two of the more slow-moving ones, leaving two who were well decomposed in addition to the single fresher one remaining. He reached into his jacket pocket, taking out a buckshot cartridge. He jogged lightly backward as he loaded, then fired on the undead man who was moments away from being within reaching distance. Adrian saw that the revenant was even fresher than he had expected, not noticeably rotted at all. He fired on what was, likely at most a day before, a human man, the buckshot going through the face at such close range. The body crumpled, and Adrian traded his shotgun for the wrecking bar, not intimidated enough by the two approaching rotters to use his shotgun.

  He targeted the one on his left, taking the length of the bar to the side of its head. It stumbled into the one next to it, causing them both to topple over the two-foot wall capping the edge of the left lane. They tumbled into the strip of swollen, flooded river through the gap separating the northbound lanes from the southbound, and they were immediately whisked away, back toward Tulsa to the east, in the quick-moving current.

  Adrian looked back down the bridge to see what was next. Several were nearing the end of the bridge, attempting to push past one another to get through a two-foot gap between two cars, the narrowest thruway on the span of road over the water. Adrian dealt with them one at a time by way of his pry bar, swinging at the head of the first one to reach him, then the next.

  As the third and fourth approached, one behind the other, he held the pry bar out straight in front of him, around sternum level, with the wrench and sledge facing the oncoming undead. As they came within reaching distance of the implement, Adrian pushed hard, slightly upward, into the chest of the leading zombie. It was knocked back into the one to its rear, causing the pair to tumble gracelessly together onto the pavement, where Adrian raked their heads with the pry bar in the hopes of disorienting them until he could finish them. He took the prying end of his bar to a cranium, swinging down into the crown as he loomed over the two undead tangled together in the road beneath him, dazed and struggling to get to their feet.

  Leaving the bar momentarily in the neutralized zombie's head, he turned to the next one, wielding his shotgun. He turned the butt end down toward the face of his target, touching it briefly to the face to get the positioning lined up for his strike. Raising the gun for a moment, he brought it down into the zombie's upturned face. When he lifted it away, he saw that not only were most of the teeth knocked out, but he had enlarged the entire orifice of the mouth with the end of his shotgun, splitting and tearing back the lips and cheeks and pushing in the softened gums. He shifted the pry bar back and forth to loosen it from the first of the pair, then yanked it free.

  Holding his shotgun in his right hand and the pry bar in his left, he stood facing south and gazing down the bridge, ready to confront those who remained so that he could get past the obstacle of the bridge and continue on his way. There were eight more in two separate clusters, three in the closer of the two and five in the one around fifty feet to its rear. The lead group neared him, and he reached into his pocket for his last buck and ball shell. He tucked the pry bar onto his hip, then loaded the shell into his gun as he glared over his thick, dark brow at the advancing horde.

  "Don't worry," he told the crowd as they squeezed through the narrow space between the two cars near the northern end of the bridge. "I saved one of the special ones for you. No need to push, should be enough fire power here to go around."

  He allowed the group of undead to choke up for a moment, struggling against one another to crowd through the narrow passage, while those to the rear began to catch up. Just after the first ones pushed through, Adrian lined up his shot, going for roughly the center-most of the group as more poured through the passage behind it. The brunt of the blow, the lead ball, tore off the top half of the target's head, then proceeded to drive into the one behind it. The buck pellets scattered around it, neutralizing or crippling another four undead aggressors, and Adrian once again traded his shotgun for his pry bar.

  Of the three who remained, the one in the forefront lunged in Adrian's direction, gnashing its teeth and unleashing the powerful stench of undead rotmouth. Adrian responded with the shaft of his titanium bar to the side of its face, causing a hard, blunt trauma that caused its body to go immediately and fully inert, buckling into a heap at his feet. He turned to the last two, one of whom had stumbled badly over a corpse ahead of it as it ran with wild abandon, sprawling as it went briefly airborn, then bore some of the brunt of the fall with its face.

  He focused on the other one, who was running full-tilt at him with a body that was still relatively intact, but with dead, unseeing eyes. As it approached Adrian, who was standing just north of the choke point between the two cars, he opened the passenger side door of one of the vehicles. It creaked loudly as he stretched it open so that it took up the entirety of the thruway with its exterior side facing north. The undead runner seemed to realize at the last second that there was an obstruction in its path, but it was too late. It struck the unyielding steel door on its interior side, falling through the open window, striking the ground and skidding on its face across several feet of asphalt. Adrian jogged over while it struggled to collect itself, planting the pointed steel toe of his cowboy boot into its temple. It reeled from the impact, but it still wasn't ready to quit. Adrian lifted the end of his pry bar above his head, then brought it down with the sledge head leading, coming to rest within the cavity created in the back of the undead person's skull.

  Adrian yanked the wrecking bar free, then made his way to the one who had taken a spill after tripping over a corpse in the road before it. It lay jerking and writhing in the road, apparently having caused itself a good deal of brain damage from its fall. Adrian reached out with the prying end of the bar, poking at the rotten forehead. The skin was like hamburger where it had skidded on its face. Not only was the tissue soft, but the bone itself seemed rather weak and pliable. He lifted his foot, not bothering to look down as he brought the hard sole of his boot straight downward into the face below. He felt the skin and connective tissue give way, and he knew without having to look that the head was ruined.

  Adrian looked up and down the bridge, gazing again through his scope. The only one who was still moving was the one he had injured earlier, having shot it in the chest and left it to slither in vain toward him. Having cleared the area, it was the last minor, untied loose end. Re-slinging his rifle and wielding his wrecking bar in its stead, he strode up to the doomed undead man, inserting the pry end of his bar unceremoniously into its lower rear skull.

  He straightened his stance, surveying the bridge once more. After having stood motionless for several minutes, he was reasonably sure that the area was safe for the time being. He began to check the bodies, nearly two dozen of them, for whatever provisions were valuable enough to spare room for them. What he took was mainly ammunition, plus some general survival items such as bacitracin, a small, portable water filter and a few mylar emergency blankets still folded within their plastic sleeves.

  Having collected what he wanted and confirming that none of them would be rising again, plunging his pry bar into their skulls if he was unsure, he moved the few bodies that would impede his motorcycle's passage across the bridge. He dragged them by the feet off to the sides, then walked down the length of the bridge to ensure that there was nothing lurking in the cars past which he would need to drive. He peered into each one, noting mostly corpses, if anything. Many cars were empty. In one SUV, the body of a small dog lay on the back seat, having tried in vain to claw through the closed windows after its master came to rest forever behind the steering wheel. As he got toward the front of the pile-up, the southern end of the bridge, he saw that the first several cars had been on fire at some
point, burning away to husks.

  Satisfied that there were no undead waiting in any of the vehicles, Adrian walked back north across the bridge to his waiting motorcycle. Turning his key, he brought the engine to life, the sound and rumble beneath him leaving him feeling energized and anxious to get moving once again. Looking around him in all directions, he waited a few minutes while his engine idled. If there were any more undead nearby, he wanted to give them time to show their faces, lest they should sneak up on him while he made his labored, cumbersome way down the bridge. He would have to navigate through the wrecks and down the only path left open, parts of it just wide enough for his motorcycle.

  After a few minutes with no signs of activity, he started south onto the bridge, making his way cautiously across its length. To the east, which was on his left, he saw the panorama of Tulsa with its cluster of high rises, several miles down the river. The toxic, black cloud of smoke emanating upward from the jail dominated the skyline, pouring into the cloudless, deep blue sky. His expression, too, was smoldering as he continued south. The backdrop varied from sprawling, rural residential and commercial districts to grassy fields here and there. He saw oil derricks with wild orange lilies crowded around them, left to rust away.

  Looking at his gas gauge, Adrian realized that he would soon need to fill his tank. There was a point roughly halfway between Sand Springs and Sapulpa which was relatively remote, with large, grassy fields to either side of the highway. Adrian waited until he was more or less in the middle of the clear stretch, with at least a half-mile to either side of him before the treeline started. He pulled up near a two-car, head-on collision involving a sedan and a mini-van. He approached the vehicles cautiously, noting that all the bodies contained therein seemed to be very much at rest, seemingly still in the same positions in which they had died.