by Jones, K. J.
Getting out of the ambulance would be tricky. At least one hostile above.
He heard the Beast stop nearby, followed by loud gun fire from a rifle.
Matt pulled the door handle and the lower door flopped open by gravity. He lifted the upper sideways door.
A Gollum-bark from above.
Julio yelled, “Contact topside.”
Matt dove forward and rolled on the blacktop. He had a split second to aim. The hostile began to dive. A body shot to the chest at the approximate heart location. Blood spurted from the hole. The man stumbled back from the sheer force of impact, then regrouped and went for the dive.
Matt worked on getting out of the way. The bloodied man came down on him. He pushed against the jaw with one hand and struggled to position the gun with his other.
The man suddenly died. Laying motionless on top of Matt, eyes still open, but the lights had gone out.
“Holy crap.”
Matt shoved the dead man off him and got to his feet. The dead man’s arterial blood stained the front of Matt’s uniform.
Julio stood on top of the Black Beast's roof with a M110, high-powered rifle. He made body shots, as military snipers most often did.
Matt looked at the bodies on the blacktop, expecting them to be dead or close to it from the gaping holes in their chests from the high caliber rifle at such close range. But they were still moving around.
The M110 turned at Matt. Julio aimed through the scope. Matt heard the screams of a hostile coming at his six. The bullet whizzed past his head and made impact.
“Shit.” Julio took aim again.
Matt turned around, gun rising. Despite the wound, the infected young woman was up and running towards him in a bizarre sprint-lope. Her movement reminded him of how little kids ran when released to the playground, overexcited and spastic with no form. Except she ran fast. The next bullet zipped by and hit her in the sternum. She flew backwards from impact. On her back on the blacktop, she was still moving and trying to get up, but her spine was damaged from the bullet and her legs wouldn't move.
“What the fuck?” asked Julio. “Why don't these pendejos die, hombre?”
No more of them ran around. There were no more coming inbound.
Matt walked up to the crippled young woman with two body shots to her chest. Arms moving, she snapped her jaws at him.
“Go to Jesus, miss.”
He aimed at her forehead and fired. She shuttered, but still moved. She didn't move well, but she was still alive.
He looked at Julio with a shrug. Julio shrugged back.
Matt then aimed at her nose and fired. She fell silent and still.
“This is fucked up,” Matt said to Julio. “Weird. I found the same thing with the one in the ambulance.”
Julio scanned the perimeter and seeing it clear of mobile hostiles, he jumped down off the top of the Beast. Together, they checked out the squirming infected people.
“They shouldn't be doing this,” said Julio.
“They're bleeding out.”
“But why don't they stop attacking until they bleed out?”
“The hit has to be at the brainstem or else it takes a while.” Matt stepped near a man who laid in a growing pool of dark liquid. The man tried to grab Matt’s leg. He merely stepped away to avoid being touched.
“Should we shoot these?” asked Julio.
“Probably. Shooting them in the face seems to work out well. Aim for just below the nose.”
“Let's do that then.”
“Cool.”
Julio switched to a handgun. A shot from the M110 at this distance would explode their heads, and that was a waste of bullets.
Once they finished, Matt returned to the ambulance. Julio kept a look out. Matt stole the first response jump bag and the medication bag, and any medical supplies and equipment he could find in the mess. He loaded all of it into the Beast.
“Are you done?” Julio asked. “No more work?”
“I don't see how to continue, do you? How do I save lives out here?”
“Think that's best done by shooting the zoms.”
“Zoms?”
“Zombies, hombre.”
“Oh, don’t tell me. Sully came up with that.”
“Nuh. He started the zoms, yes, but everybody’s calling them zombies.”
“They aren’t dead. They are sick.”
“Infected are zoms, too. Never seen 28 Weeks Later?”
“I’ve seen some episodes of Walking Dead. They were corpses.”
“That’s just Romero. Can’t have no dead people running around in real life.”
“Are you sure we’re in real life?”
“Think we’re dreaming?”
Matt waved his arms around at the carnage surrounding them and wrecked ambulance.
“We can’t dream all together,” said Julio. “But I get what you’re saying, man. I thought I was hallucinating again until Sul told me I wasn’t.”
“Sully telling you that actually reassured you? He could share your hallucination.”
“I’d like to think we are close enough brothers to share a hallucination.”
“I’m not even going to comment. Let’s go.”
“Okay,” agreed Julio.
“Should I ask you how you got a M110 military sniper rifle?”
“No.”
“Okay then.”
Chapter Two
Run
1.
A monster held on to the hood of the little blue Honda. He slammed his head against the windshield, cracking it into a spider webs and leaving blood on the glass. The reverse gear went in on the third try. Phebe hit the gas pedal. The car bucked into reverse. Tires squealed out of the driveway. She turned the wheel hard. The monster flew off the hood.
Monsters rushed at Syanna's side of the car. Hitting the window with their fists. Ramming their heads.
Into first, Phebe floored the gas pedal. Tires burned rubber on the pavement. The car bucked into drive and fishtailed.
Monsters sprinted alongside. Hands reached out to grab anything they could. First gear screamed. She shifted to second. Her feet moved fast to press pedals. A monster seized hold of a sideview mirror. Second gear screamed. She shifted to third. Over forty miles per hour, the monster held on to the mirror. His feet dragged along the blacktop. The mirror broke off at the base. He fell onto the street.
The little car sped forward.
A walking catatonic in a stained nightgown shuffled along the street. Phebe swerved to avoid her. The woman turned around. She was one of them. She dove on the hood and grabbed the wiper blades. Phebe slammed on the brakes. The woman hurdled onto the road. Into first, Phebe floored the gas pedal, turning to get around her. The woman lunged and the front of the car clipped her legs. Half of the hard-plastic bumper dragged along blacktop.
The Honda raced through the neighborhood grid towards South College, the closest way out.
Syanna stared in shock.
“Shit.” Phebe screamed, “What the fuck!” She wanted to hit something but feared unclenching her fingers from the steering wheel.
They approached the traffic light to South College. Phebe slowed behind two cars stopped at a green light.
Ahead, vehicles stopped in haphazard positions blocked the intersection.
Across the street, fire engulfed the stately brick buildings of the university. Vehicles strewn across the sandy lawn. A fire engine against a bent pine tree.
A mob of monsters ran at the first car at the green light. A half-dressed girl climbed on the hood. She jumped up and down on it like it was a trampoline. Others smashed out the windows. They dragged out a kicking and screaming, middle-aged male professor-type.
A huge bull mastiff walked past that car. Foam dripped from its mouth.
“Oh my God!” Syanna shrieked.
The brake lights of the car ahead turned into reverse lights. Phebe worked on reverse.
“Hurry!” Syanna shrieked.
The mastif
f moved into a trot.
The car in front tried a one-eighty turn. It clipped the rabid dog. The beast turned its attention to the terrified occupants.
Foregoing reverse, Phebe hit first gear. She made a fast one-eighty turn, running over the curb. The little car took off flying down the street with fast up-shifts. Phebe took turns by riding the clutch to minimize deceleration. She drove as a racecar driver would.
Through the neighbor grid, the Honda sped out onto the other main artery.
Like a driver in an action film, Phebe weaved in and out of traffic, heading west towards Carolina Beach Road. The bumper skidded along the pavement.
The traffic grew as packed as Manhattan at rush hour. Vehicles with their stuff piled on top of roof racks honked like they were city cabbies.
Uninjured cars didn't honk at her when she cut them off. Despite the Honda’s unintimidating size, one look at it, and drivers let her in. Even backed up a bit and waved her in. Shock on their faces. Blood on a spider-webbed windshield, windows cracked, sideview mirror missing as was the windshield wipers and radio antennae, and the front bumper dragged.
It helped to have a lunatic riding shotgun, waving around a pink gun and screaming at the top of her lungs, “Y'all, get outta our way!”
Half the self-evacuators headed east. The direction of Interstate 40, north of the campus, connecting the peninsula to the rest of America. The other half headed west, towards Carolina Beach Road, to the bridge on Route 17 and out to the mainland. But that was also direction the girls needed to go to reach Chris Higgins’s house.
“Turn on Independence,” Syanna directed, manically pointing her finger at the sign. Pillars of smoke rose from Independence Blvd. “Wait. Maybe not.”
“Crap. Directions, Sye.”
The honking persisted.
“Weirdly,” said Syanna. “The GPS on my phone is working.”
“I think it bypasses the cell towers and hooks up with the satellite directly, like the GPS units.”
“Well, thank Jesus for that. Except, the live traffic says we are royally screwed in every direction. Look at all those red lines.”
Syanna flashed the display at Phebe.
“My Lord,” Syanna continued. “I've never seen all these hazard signs on the red lines.”
“Yeah, well, when have you looked at it in the middle of a catastrophe?”
“Good point. Not like I ever looked at traffic conditions in Rwanda. Check that out. It's warning about traffic accidents and fires on Independence Blvd.”
“Then we know that's worse than this road.”
An explosion ripped into the sky with a mean black mushroom cloud.
“Holy shit,” Syanna exclaimed.
“Maybe a gas station blew up.”
“I reckon.”
A helicopter flew low over Independence Blvd.
“That looks like channel five,” said Syanna.
“Aren't they being eternal optimists?”
“Why's that?”
“If all our communication is cut off,” said Phebe. “Think they'll be able to get this story out? Think about it.”
It flew closer.
“But then again,” said Syanna. “News helicopters don't normally have snipers hanging out of them.”
“What?” Phebe craned her neck to see through the broken windshield.
It flew over them. The side door open. A long rifle jutting out of one side.
“We're totally going to die,” Phebe stated.
“If you would just pray, Jesus would get us out of this.”
“Oh yeah, that's it, Sye. The total difference.”
Syanna shrieked, “Monsters!”
Phebe's face whipped around to see out Syanna's cracked window. They looked like a group of possessed marathon runners coming down a side street. Except they wore pajamas or just underwear or some even naked. All ages, sizes, shapes, and colors. They ran as a group with only one goal in mind: to attack.
Phebe reversed two times before the grinding gear caught. She pressed down on the gas pedal and reversed into the car behind.
Into first gear, the little car turned on a dime. Just before the mob reached the lane, the beat-up Honda sped away.
The tires jumped a curb. The Honda drove through front yards, smashing garden gnomes and squashing azalea bushes. Next side street, she turned left and went off the curb back on to blacktop. A hubcap rolled off.
“Where the hell are we?” asked Phebe.
“Some stupid neighborhood. Wait. This is Chris Higgins’ neighborhood.”
“Okay. Where?”
2.
Julio Reyes waited outside Matt’s apartment complex, covering an eerily quiet off-campus housing parking lot.
Inside the apartment, Matt felt the emptiness. His young roommates’ bedroom doors sat open. The living room remained the wreck of the attack days before. Coffee table flipped over. Tom the pothead’s bong lay on the carpet next to a cracked tablet and fast-food wrappers.
He wondered how they were.
With a heavy heart, he realized they were probably dead, and their young bodies in those body bags he had seen the other night, going off to be incinerated somewhere. Would their parents be notified? Would they ever know what happened to their sons.
He shook off the feeling. There was no time to mourn or lament what was past.
In his room, sunlight shined between the blades of the window blinds. A surfboard leaned in a corner. An acoustic guitar rested against a dresser near his cowboy boots and hat.
He scooped up a necklace from the nightstand. It held a modest golden cross pendant. He had forgotten it at the crack of dawn in the dark. Securing it around his neck, he removed a photo of his family from its frame and scooped up a well-warn small Bible, and then moved to the closet.
His army duffel, with his last name painted on the side, lay crumpled in the corner. He took it up and rushed to fill it with clothes. A box of ammo thrown on top. Before heading to the bathroom, he grabbed his boots and hat.
A second bag carried all the toilet paper in the apartment. Toilet paper was always a problem in the wars. He added granola and protein bars and any over-the-counter medications and first aid supplies he could find. He grabbed the last of the beer and bottled water from the fridge, hoisted his bags and headed to the door.
A last look around and he closed and locked the apartment he shared with two young men who died before their time.
“Ready, hombre?” Julio sat on the top of the Beast, ready to shoot things.
“Ready, brother.” Matt unlocked his Jimmy and threw his gear in.
“It’s weirdly quiet out here. I don’t like it.”
Matt rolled down his window with his engine running. “You know where Syanna lives? It’s two seconds away.”
“I’ll follow you, man.”
3.
As the Hondas sped through Chris’s neighborhood, indiscriminate carnage of the catastrophe unfolded. Pillars of fire in all directions on the horizon. The wind brought the stench of smoke from houses burning. People barricaded windows of their houses from the inside.
On a front yard, an infected Weimaraner viciously attacked a yelping German Shephard, twice the size of it. On another lawn, a frothing at the mouth Dalmatian looked to be having a standing violent epileptic seizure. An overweight white man jumped, partially fell, over a wooden fence to escape something chasing him. Vehicles stood wrecked every few blocks. Some abandoned. Some holding the dead. Others contained a fight for life as the infected attacked the occupants.
“Oh God,” Syanna wailed. She turned her face away and covered her eyes. “Jesus, help us!”
A teenage black kid shot from the roof of a house and bodies collected on the front yard. Gunshots rang out from other houses. The smell of gunpowder wafted through the Honda’s vents. A man manically beat at a door like he was a psychotic wife-beating husband trying to get at his target. A Hispanic man on his knees on a front yard, holding a baby as he wept. A three year-old
girl who looked like she was his, punched him in the back of the head and bit his shoulders.
“Sye, you must help me!”
“Okay. Turn right here. I think I recognize where we are.”
“I hope so.”
A middle-aged white man walked down the street with blood down his torn shirt. He shot handguns from both hands. Phebe swerved around him. The girls ducked as he shot everywhere at everything. A fifty-something-year-old white woman did a demoness striptease dance. An old black lady in a nightgown and her wig cockeyed, walked in an uncoordinated Thorazine shuffle, carrying something that looked like a dead cat. She jerked every few minutes. A Hispanic man ran as fast as his short legs could take him with a frothing at the mouth large dog chasing him. It tackled him at the back. People ran around and through yards and across the road; some infected, some victims, some neither and had simply lost their minds.
An old black man walked down the center of the street holding a big wooden cross in one hand and a Bible in the other. He yelled about being in the valley of death and he shall fear no evil.
“Oh my Lord Jesus,” Syanna cried. “It's the End of Days. It’s really here!”
“How much further?” Phebe asked. “Sye, directions.”
“I don’t know. It all looks different now. I was only there once.”
Phebe took another turn and slammed on the brakes, throwing them forward.
A shiny big black SUV, with spinning silver rims, blocked the way. Windows shattered. A dozen human crazies around it. Three big pit bulls tried their best to fight the monsters away from their wounded master, who lay on the ground. The dogs bit arms, whipping their heads back and forth. But that allowed the infected to grab them.
The screech of the tires from the fast brake caused monsters to notice the little Honda and break from the horde. Monsters closed around the pit bulls and the horrible canine yelps began, followed by a man-scream of excruciating pain. Other monsters ran at the Honda.
Phebe’s hand shifted the stick into reverse and the gears grinded. The sound quickened the monsters pace, exciting them further.
“Reverse!” Syanna shrieked.