Since The Sirens Box Set | Books 1-7

by Isherwood, E. E.

  “But what about the guy?” Liam asked in the same conspiratorial low voice.

  She thought it over for a few seconds. “If he's alive, how is he even in there with the zombies?”

  “Hmm,” was Liam's reply.

  They drove for a few more minutes in total silence before Liam said something.

  “I have an idea that will keep the zombies far from any town and also minimize the risk to us. It won't work unless we can find the right place to do it safely.”

  “I'm listening,” Dave said from behind the wheel. He tapped his video camera. “If you guys have any ideas, leave them in the comments.”

  “That's off, right?” Victoria asked immediately.

  Dave let his hand sit on the camera for a few seconds before replying. “Yeah, it's just a habit, I guess. I hate how I can't record this for posterity.”

  “Can you record it but not put it online,” she asked.

  “That might not be safe,” Liam added.

  “Said the boy with the world after him,” Elise remarked without looking back.

  Dave seemed to decide. “Yeah, as long as I don't dump the files onto my channel they will stay on my laptop. If I promise not to upload them will you let me at least make a record of this journey? This is 100% spicy, am I right?”

  Victoria rolled her eyes. There were some people who always had to make a production of everything. She wondered if Dave recorded himself making breakfast just so he could report that to his channel or post it to social media. A lot of her friends from school did that, too.

  Liam looked over as if searching for her opinion on the matter. It flattered her whenever he did that, and she appreciated that he saw her as his partner. There was no question Liam was better than her last nightmare of a boyfriend, but he was also a better person than most boyfriends she or her close friends had ever had.

  She smiled at him, content to know he understood that smile as saying “I'm cool. Whatever you think.”

  Liam gave a small nod and a big grin.

  “All right. Go ahead and record.”

  Dave jumped in his seat like he'd been given mom's approval to pick out any candy he wanted from the checkout lane.

  “Hells to the yeah! I'm back in business.” Dave turned on the camera, which still pointed forward to show the viewers the road. “Greetings fellow travelers, I've got something to show you today. I've just learned that I'm hauling a load of zombies.”

  He paused in his dialogue.

  “Whoa! Don't bite my head off. Har har. Get it? I didn't know what that last pickup was all about until my friend Lia--Leslie pointed out there is a living person trapped in the back of my trailer. Only then did I find out it is also full of those infected bastards. Scary, right, guys? This is 100% legit BS, right here.”

  Liam snapped his fingers while looking at the highway out the front window. “There! See if that bridge has water under it.”

  Dave turned around with a smile, then talked to the camera. “That's Leslie again. He comes up with all the good ideas and, uh, he's a little young to be giving orders but he has a look to him, you know guys, like he's been up to his knees in the dead portion of my audience.”

  Liam seemed a little flustered to be described as such, but he was all business once he explained his plan. As they neared the bridge, Dave pulled onto the shoulder to confirm what was below.

  “Yep, water.”

  “Perfect,” Liam replied.

  “Tell my audience what you have in mind.”

  Victoria paled when she heard her boyfriend explain what they were going to do.

  He's read too many zombie books.

  2

  The interstate was built to have two lanes in each direction with a large grass median between them. Where it crossed a stream, like the scene in front of the truck, there were two bridges set about twenty feet apart from each other. They got out of the rig and walked to the edge of the bridge to look at the water about thirty feet below.

  “It's a drainage canal,” Sabella said when she walked up with Susan in tow. “I see these all the time in the countryside around Sikeston.”

  “What do they use them for?” Liam asked.

  “Drainage?” Sabella replied with a bit of humor. “I really have no idea.”

  “It's perfect,” Liam said. “It is far enough down to give us plenty of time.”

  She listened to his plan and only added suggestions where she thought he was putting himself into too much danger. At first, he was going to do it all on his own, but she politely insisted she go with him.

  Liam got the olive-skinned woman's attention. “Hey, um, Sabella, would you and your two oldest want to keep watch on things? You know, hold the rifles in case of emergency.”

  “We'll stay in the truck,” Elise said, “while you guys get yourselves killed out here.”

  “Yeah, despite what I did back at the farm, I'm scared of guns,” Leah added with clear embarrassment.

  “You did great,” Victoria said with encouragement.

  “Bless her heart,” Sabella said of Leah. Then she turned to her and Liam. “I'll have my shotgun, you can count on that, but I have to be in the truck with them. I didn't agree to this, and I don't want to risk my children for anything. You understand that, right?”

  The family walked off to get back in the cab. Leah and Susan both held their mom's hand, but Elise was several strides ahead.

  “Okay,” Liam said with a wedge of defeat in his voice.

  Victoria didn't blame them for wanting to stick together. It was risky to try to save the man in the trailer, but Liam was obviously committed to doing what he could for him. The safest place for the squeamish was going to be inside Dave's truck.

  “Come on, Rambo, let's get our guns.” She laughed because she knew him too well.

  “I'm not Rambo! I never-”

  “I know, silly. I just wanted to push your buttons a smidge. Do you hate me?”

  That got him to smile and she knew it worked. She held his hand as they walked back to the truck.

  They didn't waste any time once back. She and Liam scrambled into the cab, grabbed their rifles and emptied one of the pillow cases so they could fill it up with ammo.

  “Good luck,” Dave said as they climbed back down.

  “Thanks,” she and Liam replied at the same time.

  Her raggedy-haired boyfriend carried the bag on his back while they walked toward the far end of the bridge. It was mid-morning on a summer's day during the apocalypse, and he had a spring in his step she'd not seen in a long time, like he didn't have a care in the world.

  “You're having fun out here, aren't you?” she said with playful accusation.

  He looked back like he didn't want to be overheard. “I didn't want to tell the others this or have this show up on an internet video channel, but that creepy farmhouse really got me down. There was so much death and, um, evil, there that it pretty much paralyzed me.”

  “Me too,” she added.

  “Right. But Grandma kept going under much worse conditions for her entire life. She lost her daughter for crying out loud. That is some legit suffering, you know? I've been silently praying a lot. I've been asking what I should do out here. Should I go on? Try to find that cure? Open the quantum computer thingy?”

  They reached the end of the southbound bridge, walked across the grassy median, and headed onto the northbound span.

  “In the end, I don't know if it was God, or my conscience, or whatever, but I realized that if I died shaking in fear and in poor spirits that is what people would remember about me. Grandma went her whole life without sharing that about her daughter and I always thought she was the happiest and most well-adjusted person I knew.”

  “You mean hide the pain?” she volunteered.

  “No, not hide it. Just not be bothered by it. I'm scared as hell right now. Zombies could jump out of any bush along the road. Be behind any tree. But almost every tree out there doesn't have a zombie behind it. I'm choosing to
‘pull a grandma' and adjust my outlook to match what I want it to be.”

  “And what's that?”

  “Happy. Helpful. Positive. If there is a God watching all this action I want to give him every reason to want me on His team. I don't know what Grandma would call it. Heck, I told her I would seriously think about going to church again if we survived this.”

  She interrupted him. “You didn't go to church?” Her voice held mock accusation.

  “I did. And then I didn't. It's a long story.” He laughed and then stopped walking because they'd reached the middle of the span.

  He motioned to the tree-lined banks of the watery canal below them, then out to the flat farmlands surrounding it.

  “This is my new church and for once in my life I'm comfortable being in it. I want to do right by God and help Him rid the world of this, mmm, scourge. Or maybe it's a blight. I'm not sure. Whatever this disease is, I'm going to clean it up.”

  “That's a noble goal, but why are you so happy about it? The world is still a big mess. Powerful people are after us. Your parents ... ”

  Liam set his rifle against the concrete railing and turned to her. He didn't look happy until their eyes met.

  “My dad would kick my ass if I let his death, or anything else, keep me from doing what was right. I realized that after I, uh, killed those two men back at the farmhouse. They were probably seen as good men: a doctor and a reverend. Pillars of the community. But when the shit spanked the fan blades they fell apart. That was two rooms in the infinitely large house of insanity that is this zombie apocalypse.”

  He held one of her hands with both of his.

  “People we love are going to die. Lots of them already have. And so many have died without knowing the joys of life, like little kids, and those no-names back at the farmhouse. I want to fight for them.”

  “How, Liam? How do you fight an entire world of zombies?”

  “I've found two things out here that make all the difference. God has given me the courage to not fear death. And, um, you have given me the courage to not fear life.”

  He beamed at her.

  “And as long as I have no fear of either of those things, I'm going to stay positive and play this game until I'm out of coins, you know? I'm going to fix the quantum computer. I'm going to save who I can. I'm going to own these zombies.” He pointed to the truck parked up against the edge of the next bridge.

  “I don't know that I can ever be as positive as you out here, but I think I can try.” A tear drizzled down her cheek. “And thank you for thinking so much of me. I didn't really know I was that helpful to you.”

  “Yeah, I'm lucky to have found you.”

  “I was thinking the same thing.” She smiled and leaned in to kiss him.

  “Hey, love birds! Let's get this over with. My audience is waiting.”

  She looked at Liam with blurry eyes.

  He stole a quick kiss and then picked up his gun.

  It was time to own some zombies.

  3

  Dave parked his truck, so the rear door of the trailer hung off the edge of the southbound bridge. He and Sabella and her daughters stayed inside the cab. It was the smart play, since the zombies would all be pouring out the back, but at least they could drive off if there was any emergency.

  She and Liam held the AK-47's they liberated from the farmhouse, but if things went as expected they wouldn't need to shoot at all.

  “I don't want to say this is foolproof, but--” Liam began.

  “Don't say it, Mr. Positive. You know what happens. You're going to jinx us.”

  “I don't see how. The doors open, and the zombies see us. Bingo bango as dad used to say. Unless they can jump twenty feet without a running start, there is absolutely no way they can get onto this bridge from over there.”

  She tried to find the flaw in his plan but trusted that he'd thought it through like he always did. The canal below was seventy or eighty feet across and had to be pretty deep. The zombies would fall down there and wash away with the current.

  “You guys ready?” Dave shouted.

  Victoria gave him a thumbs-up, then aimed her rifle at the mysterious lock on the back of the trailer. The women in the bathroom said it was some kind of tracker, but it occurred to her now that the truck was in position that it might fall down into the water. In the movies, that would make hide it from the bad guys.

  Liam's positivity is contagious. Who knew?

  She had the iron sights lined up on the lock twenty feet away.

  “Ready?” she asked him one last time.

  “Go for it,” Liam answered.

  She fired and flinched hard at the noise, despite being the one firing the gun.

  The bullet landed about an inch above the lock.

  “So loud!” she shouted.

  Liam had his hands over his ears.

  She lined up the lock again and exhaled.

  The second crack of the rifle made her ears hurt from the concussive noise, but that didn't matter because she'd hit the lock. It exploded in a satisfying little fireball and fell out of sight.

  “Yes!” she shouted.

  An instant later, two lines of intense fire about six feet apart appeared along the side of the trailer. They moved together like a laser beam slicing metal from near the back doors up toward the front. The burning torch-like lines seemed to compromise the structure of the container because the metal between the cuts warped and bowed outward.

  “Oh shit,” Victoria deadpanned, her effort to keep her language clean momentarily forgotten.

  At almost the same time, the back doors flung open, and zombies lunged for her just as Liam said they would.

  Adrenaline mainlined her veins, and she tensed up like she was going to run.

  Ten blood-soaked zombies fell out the back in one big heap and went into the water below. However, as the side walls bowed ever further outward, hands, feet, and heads appeared in the growing gaps. The first zombie fell out the side and landed head first on the concrete with a solid thunk.

  More followed that first one until the entire side ripped open and zombies got forced through the six-foot gap like sausage from a grinder.

  “We're in trouble,” Liam said in a massive understatement.

  “Yeah,” she said in dream-like agreement.

  Victoria fought the urge to run because Liam wasn't running. Her knees wobbled, and her tummy felt funny, but she raised her rifle and zeroed in on the first zombie she saw. A moment before she let the shot go, she looked behind its head and caught sight of Dave crouching at his window. His cartoon-sized eyes broadcast fear from a hundred feet away.

  “I can't shoot, or I might hit Dave and the others,” she said lamely.

  The two women at the truck stop were right about the locks, but they got the payload all wrong. Whoever set up the transportation of the zombies must have also had a failsafe in case drivers got nosey about what they carried. What better way to eliminate such a threat than a huge swarm of zombies? Since they had trackers installed, they could come in and clean up the runaways and no one would be any wiser about what happened to the driver.

  Liam's plan to get on the other bridge saved them from the immediate onslaught of zombies, but it wouldn't help their friends inside the big rig.

  “Dave, go,” she said while tentatively waving her arm to him. She looked over to Liam. “They should go, right?”

  She felt a little disoriented from the shockwave of the first explosion, and the sun-bright glare from the metal slicers only added to it. However, she felt responsible for what was happening, so she made herself focus on Liam.

  He had both hands on the railing as if similarly awestruck, but her question got his attention right away.

  “Yeah, I would go,” he replied.

  “Dave! Drive!” she shouted as loud as she could.

  Her motions became forceful as well, willing Dave to get the truck moving.

  “Shoot those,” Liam said as he pulled up his rifle and ai
med it to the far side of the truck. Opposite walls of the long trailer had been blown outward by the cutting charges, and zombies tumbled out like bloody mudslides from each side.

  Victoria raised her rifle and carefully lined up a shot but didn't pull the trigger.

  Liam fired off a few rounds but then stopped so they both held the same pose.

  “Um, Victoria?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I was way off on this one,” he said with a breathless wheeze. “There's no positive spin I can give it.”

  Whoever put the zombies inside the truck did it with ruthless efficiency. They'd been stuffed in there like a frozen block of ice which later melted into tiny cubes of flesh. So many zombies fell out, it was a clown car driven up from the deepest circle of Hell.

  Dave finally gave it some gas and pulled the mangled trailer from the edge of the bridge. He blew the horn several times, but Victoria had no idea what he was trying to do. The zombies on the far bridge had already found their feet and swelled toward the head of the big black truck before it got away.

  Liam took a deep breath. “We have to keep our heads, Victoria.” He smiled at her in a way that was totally out of place given the situation. “I love you. Whatever happens from here on out, we'll do it together, okay? We own these guys, remember?”

  “I remember,” she agreed.

  Liam continued, “And God, if you're watching, please take care of my Grandma. She could use a little help.”

  “And maybe a little for us?” she squeaked.

  “Amen,” Liam added.

  He patted his old-school rifle. “Let's do this.”

  4

  The truck slow-rolled across the bridge even as zombies continued to pour out the sides and back. She belatedly realized that as the truck pulled away those falling out the back door hit the pavement instead of the water.

  “How many do you think there are?” she asked as Liam pulled off the metal magazine to reload.

  “I have no idea. There are still a bunch in the truck.” He reached into the pillowcase and pulled out a box of ammo.

  “I think there are a hundred already out of the truck,” she said while watching it continue away. It shot people out the sides and back like her dad's grass seed spreader.