A Good Distance From Dying

by David Carroll

  “Becca! No! Climb back up! Becca!”

  Becca looked at the man. She seemed unable to decide whether movement up or down would be best for her. Sass screamed, “Hold on!”

  Becca looked to brace herself just as the runner slammed into her. The collision was nasty, the entire fence rocked under the impact. The runner banked off falling backwards towards the ground. It seemed like Becca was going to be able to hang on to the fence for a second, then I saw that he had hooked an arm around her waist. She was ripped off the

  David -M- Carroll

  fence and bounced to the ground landing underneath the runner. The man lost it. He jumped onto the fence trying to climb over.

  Sass was still running for Becca, but I stopped and took aim. I threw my hammer hoping that I had suddenly gained the ability to hit a bull's-eye from twenty feet away. This was not the case. The zombie sat on his knees on top of Becca. My hammer, which had been aimed at his head, struck him on the shoulder. The impact rocked him, but it didn’t put him out of commission. Becca was trying to fight him off as best she could. She put her hands up in an attempt to push the runner off her, but he tilted his head at the last second and bit down on her hand. Becca let out a scream and we heard the man climbing the fence scream “NO!”

  Becca pulled her injured hand back to her body. The zombie lurched forward and buried his face into her shoulder, right at the neck. Sometimes I hate being right.

  Becca screamed out as the zombie tore into her. Sass arrived a second later and grabbed the zombie’s shirt, flinging him backwards off Becca’s blood covered body. He spun around and used the tire iron to cave a rather large gap into the creature’s skull. The man was still screaming, I thought he was simply distraught, but as I turned around I saw that wasn’t the case. The slower zombies had reached him. They had begun eating him as he clung to the fence. Finally, his strength gave out and he fell into the horde waiting below. Becca died on that hill top watching the man she had escaped with being eaten alive by an army of the dead. Sass and I could do nothing to save either.

  I retrieved my hammer and knelt beside Becca and Sass. The zombie had tore into her jugular during one of his bites and she was bleeding out faster than I could have ever imagined. The movies really don’t do the wound justice. We did our best to comfort her in her last moments. You could see she was losing focus; she wouldn’t be with us much longer. I took her hand, “It’s fine,” I said. “It’s okay to let go. We won’t let you turn into one of those things.”

  She seemed to focus on Sass and then me for a second then she simply closed her eyes and quit breathing. There was no last gasp like in the movies. No death rattle like everyone talks about. Just one last shallow breath. Sass looked up at me, but I was looking down the hill to where the truck was. Our little drama had drawn the attention of the locals. I could count thirteen zombies making their way towards us. I was sure there were at least that many more that I couldn’t see. I raised my hammer and brought it crashing down into Becca’s head. She would not return, just as I had promised her.

  “Sass, we need to leave.”

  Sass looked down the hill at the zombies who were weaving through the wreckage on the road. One was already through and starting to climb the hill.

  “Why? What’s the point? How long do you think we’re going to survive before one of these things get us?”

  This was not the time to debate the issues of the day.

  “We will find some place safe. We will survive. But we need to leave. Now.”

  Sass looked at the dead on the other side of the fence. They had finished with the man and were starting to beat on the fence, trying to get to us. Then he looked at the remains of Becca.

  I stood up, “You coming?”

  Sass stood up with me, “This world sucks.”

  “Amen brother.”

  C H A P T E R E I G H T

  When I was in middle school I stumbled upon an amazing movie. It was on one of the late night movie shows on the USA network. I will admit I always enjoyed USA’s “Up All Night”, especially when Gilbert Godfried was the host. Some of the funniest moments of television that I have ever experienced were when Gilbert was flying without a net and criticizing these B horror movies.

  It seems wrong to call these things horror movies because they are comedies in my opinion. I laughed all night long as I watched them. However, the movie that had come back to my mind at this point wasn’t a full on horror movie. It was one of those warped future movies that are half gore, half splatter fest. I guess that’s a good description of it. It was called Deathrace Two Thousand, and I absolutely loved it. I laughed over and over at the insane set up of this movie. I would always consider what kind of world you would have to live in to make it practical to build cars like in this movie. Cars which were used to impale and kill pedestrians as the race wove its way across the country.

  As Sass and I rolled down Highway Seventy-Five towards the crossroads I knew I was now living in a perfect Deathrace Two Thousand world.

  The fight down the hillside had been somewhat anticlimactic. We only had to kill two zombies in order to get to the truck. What I had not factored into my estimations was how much time it would take them to navigate the wrecked vehicles on the road. These corpses may be able to walk, and moan, and eat people, but they simply have very little motor skills. You put a car in between you and them and it takes a good while for them to figure out how to get around it. They will eventually make it, but you have plenty of time to get the hell out of dodge before that happens.

  We both got down to the truck and slid in through the driver’s side door. Sass, who was still a bit pissed over the whole Becca situation, started running over every zombie who had the misfortune of being near us, thus my reminiscing about the Deathrace movie.

  Sass wasn’t talking. I attempted to crack a joke or two, but it was falling on deaf ears. It seemed that I had only stalled the inevitable breakdown. Sass wasn’t ready for this. This world was way too harsh for him. Witnessing the finality of the attack at the airport had sent him to a place in his head that was far too real. I guess this should be the normal reaction to this nightmarish situation. What did it say about me that I’m only concerned with how to best survive this situation?

  The truth is that after watching so many zombie movies, and reading more than a few books over the course of my life, I think my brain was conditioned for this situation. You can’t watch these movies and not ever think to yourself, “If this were to ever happen, where would I go? What would I do?”

  That was as good an excuse as any, but what about the detachment which I seemed to have over the fallen? Was this detachment a declaration of me abandoning humanity in the name of staying alive? Is this what the human race would have to evolve into in order to survive?

  I’m not sure what questions were running through Sass’s head, but I am sure they rotated around a different sun than mine. He was a leader at work. He was somebody that everyone went to for help, myself included. He always had the answers, or knew where the answer could be found. Now being here, in this situation, where he had no answers and all he could do was react to everything life was throwing at him. It had to be hard. He would be stumbling around the question of how to survive. He would need that answer in a bad way.

  I watched out the front window as Sass brought the truck to a stop near some storage buildings sitting on the right hand side of the road. I looked at the buildings gauging if they could offer us some protection, but I knew the fence that ran around the property would bend and buckle inwards in no time.

  “How are we going to do this?”

  I looked over to Sass. Gone was the smiling, happy Sass from when I had arrived to work today. I knew he wanted some answers. I knew I had none. This meant I needed to lie and lie quick. The problem with lying to someone who knows you as well as Sass knows me is that it he knows what my lies sound like.

  “Listen man, I know you’re the kind of guy that needs to have the answers.
I wish I could tell you that I have a fool-proof plan and that everything is going to be okay. But that isn’t the case.” I paused to look out the window before continuing.

  “I think we have a good plan. Get to JC and find someplace to hold up and get our heads together. However, Johnson City is way down the road. We’ve traveled what? Maybe three miles and look at everything that has already happened to us. There will most likely be many more life or death encounters coming our way on the road. But you stay with me and I’ll stay with you and we will make it.”

  “I can’t promise we won’t see more people die. If we get out of this truck to help people, we will always be running the risk of not making it there in time. If I were on my own, I probably wouldn’t even try, but I know you will and I will have your back. Just hold it together a bit longer and let’s make it to Johnson City. Once we get there and climb a water tower, or something, we can break down, or talk, or laugh, or whatever you need to do. Until then we have to stay level headed or we are not going to make it. We will be killed. It will be awful…and painful…and it will suck.”

  All in all, not the best speech I had ever made, but I thought that the honesty approach would help me win some points with the tall one. He looked at me for a moment; it seemed the fact that I didn’t have the answers calmed him some. He realized that he wasn’t the only one that was lost. We bonded over being clueless. This fact echoed in my head and I really wanted to laugh, but I choked that laughter down. Now was not the time to cackle like a mad man. It would destroy any good that my speech had done.

  “How did all this happen so quickly? I mean we were in the factory just a little over two hours after those planes crashed. How could it have spread this far that quick?”

  “I don’t know Sass. Most people would think that the zombies arrived on those planes, but I find that hard to believe. This means that they had to either originate in the area or we were just in the path of the dead hurricane.”

  “Dead hurricane?” Sass asked.

  “That’s the best term I can think for it. Take a big city like D.C. or even Knoxville. If one of those places got infected and the infection began spreading out from the city it could possibly flow right across us. We would be caught in the path of the storm, and we would have nowhere to run. Maybe that’s what happened. Maybe the storm moved so fast that they couldn’t even warn us. Being at work, how could we have even known if they had tried? There is only one TV, in the abandoned break room and cell phones aren’t allowed out on the production floor.”

  “Makes sense I guess. I still don’t understand it though.”

  “I doubt we will ever understand it,” I said. Sass seemed to think about this for a moment and then nodded. I guess he decided that not understanding how this world came to be wasn’t as important as figuring out how to survive in it. He looked at the storage buildings off to the right.

  “That fence is too flimsy, isn’t it?”

  I smiled at how fast Sass could turn the fear on and off.

  “Yeah, they would rip through that in an hour or two. We’ll need something better, like in Dawn of the Dead when they cleared out a mall and locked it down. We are going to need something secure like that. From what I have been seeing these zombies have very little fine motor skills. If we get up over their heads we should be safe. I think they would be able to navigate a set of stairs given the time, but I think climbing a ladder is beyond their skill set.”

  “So, once we get to JC we need to find a building to climb on top of.”

  “It would be a safe place until we can figure out a more permanent location.”

  Sass looked back down the road, like cockroaches in the kitchen once the lights are out; the dead were crawling out of all their hidey holes. Anytime you would sit still for any length of time they would begin to inch their way towards you.

  “How do they know we’re here? We’re in the truck, they can’t hear us, or see us.” I said, more thinking out loud than anything. Sass however must have been thinking the same thing because he already had the answer.

  “They can hear the truck idling. They can probably see us moving in here, not sure if they know it’s people or not, but they know it’s movement, and for them I am sure movement equals food nine out of ten times.”

  “You’re right. Just because they’re dead doesn’t mean that the five senses have stopped working.”

  “I’m not sure just how well they are able to figure things out, but there seems to be some sort of processing going on in those dead brains,” Sass said.

  Sass let a couple get close to us before he put the truck into gear and played Deathrace again. This time I did let myself laugh a little.

  This section of the road seemed clear of the fender benders and full on high velocity collisions that the rest of the road had paid witness to. We were starting to make good time until we saw the billboard man.

  On the road to Gray there is a billboard on the left side of the road. It just kind of appears out of nowhere. As far as I can remember it is the only billboard on the entire road. We most likely wouldn’t have even noticed the billboard man if there had been more wrecks, but it was fairly clear so we could afford to look around a bit.

  The billboard man must have been running from a pack of zombies when he happened upon the sign out in the middle of nowhere. Maybe he was really tired. Maybe he was simply out of options and hoped if the zombies couldn’t get to him then they would leave and try to find food elsewhere. Much too late he realized that as long as he was sucking in air the zombies would not lose interest in him. He then did the last thing that he could do. He left his message to the world and checked himself out.

  When you looked at the billboard you saw that written in blood were the words, “No Love, No God, No Hope.” Under the word hope was a large bloody circle where the contents of what used to be billboard mans head now rested. He had apparently taken the last shell that he had in his shotgun and used it on himself. I wondered how long he had sat up there before he lost hope and ended his life. How many cars had gone up and down this road and saw him up there? How many didn’t try to help him? How could they have just left him up there to die? That’s when I heard myself telling Sass that if it was up to me, I probably wouldn’t stop and help anybody. I looked at Sass wondering if he was remembering my words as well. He shook his head. "Poor guy. I wish he could have made it a bit longer. Maybe we could have helped him."

  "Maybe." I said.

  "I wonder how many people took themselves out before they could get taken out?"

  "Probably a lot more than we would be comfortable knowing."

  Sass gunned the motor back to life. "Yeah, that's what I was thinking as well. Guess we better get moving." Sass took one last look at the billboard man and shook his head before pulling away.

  As we began to move forward again we were greeted with a sobering sight as the bridge loomed into view. Large, metal, and green. This monstrosity was an example of era’s gone engineering as it stood strong against the seemingly unbearable weight that had been placed in its charge to carry for the rest of eternity. We weren’t close enough yet to fully know what had caused the devastation we saw from a distance, but one thing was perfectly clear, the bridge was impassable.

  Cars were lined up and abandoned all around both sides. As we neared the structure it seemed to me that a large camper had somehow gotten slammed under the trailer of an eighteen-wheeler. The corresponding wrecks caused cars and trucks to slam into both of these huge vehicles and the pancaking effect began. Traffic slammed to a halt on both sides of the bridge, and people began to either abandon their cars and flee on foot or they turned their cars around and headed back towards the airport looking for an alternate route but only finding a life ending collision as the residents of Blountville came flying down the highway in search of safety.

  “This, my friend, is a clusterfuck.” Sass said in a disgusted tone.

  “There is no other way. We’re going to have to leave the truck a
nd cross the bridge on foot.” I said.

  “Are you sure that’s a good idea? There has to be a bunch of those things in all that wreckage.”

  “Oh, I don’t doubt that. If you know another way to get us to the other side; I’d love to hear it right about now.”

  Sass sat quiet, thinking, and came up with nothing.

  We drove as close to the bridge as we could then parked and said goodbye to the safety of the pickup truck. Large and imposing metal struts were rising up into the air above the bridge embracing the stacks of cars that had been thrown across its surface. Water, oil and gas were laying in puddles on the surface of the bridge. I was sure that all three were still leaking out of the wrecks. Sass was right in his estimation. This was the biggest clusterfuck I had seen in my entire life.

  “Maybe we should try to stay on top of the cars. Maybe that would help us be a bit safer than just weaving through them.” I said.

  Sass nodded, “We may be able to just walk down the sides of the bridge holding onto the supports to help us keep balance. The only drawback is, if we get attacked, we will only be able to use one arm to fight them off.”

  His idea did have the bonus of being faster and safer as long as no zombies could get to the edge of the bridge and make a grab for us. However, as we evaluated Sass’s plan we saw a zombie lean out from a wrecked car and hang over the edge. Who knew how many zombies would be in a position to take swipes at us that way. The edge wouldn’t work, we were going to have to go straight up the gut. Good or bad, zombie or none, here we come.

  C H A P T E R N I N E

  I climbed onto the hood of the first car. I took a moment to watch the former owner. Her face was covered in dried blood and she was beating repeatedly on the windshield trying to get out.

  When she saw me smile at her, she flung herself into a frenzy.

  “Sass, you see that?”

  Sass was watching her as well, “Yeah, she sped up. How did she speed up?”