Sara’s blind terror ratcheted up another notch. She had to get this thing OFF! The next lunge would tear her throat wide open. She got a handful of the woman’s flying black hair as she spit out the neck collar, but the leather of her gloves was slick, not doing a very good job of holding her head back, they were slipping and she was lunging with inhuman strength.
The banshee saw the unprotected skin of her throat and screamed again, diving in to tear it open. Then Brian was there, ripping off his helmet and using it as a weapon. He smashed it into the side of her head at a full run and a crushing swing, hopping over the two flailing bodies as it dove for Sara’s neck.
With the momentum of the devastating head blow and her own adrenaline-jacked strength, Sara was finally able to shove her off and scrambled to her feet, breathing hard, her eyes finding Brian’s, both of them with stunned looks on their faces.
“What the fuck!” Brian yelled “Dude… what the actual fuck?” he whispered, almost to himself, staring dazedly at the blood splatter on his helmet. Sara was starting to get the shakes. She looked over at the inert body of the slim Hispanic girl, sprawled where she had fallen. Her head was caved in on one side, blood trickling out of her nose and mouth into the sands. Grayish bits poking out of the crack in her skull.
“Oh man. Oh man. Oh man,” he whispered. “Oh man. I didn’t mean to kill her, Sara.” He sat down abruptly, like his legs had just come unhinged.
“It was self-defense, Brian. She was trying to rip my throat out,” she said unevenly, trying to get her breath back, her hands shaking as the adrenaline fled her system.
“It was all so fast…” he said. “I mean, the way she took you off your bike... It looked like she was trying to eat you. I didn’t mean to kill her.”
“Maybe she’s not dead,” she said, a quaver in her voice, and started to walk over to her to see if there was anything she could do, but stopped after only a step. Her head was crushed. Horribly misshapen. Her brains were leaking out.
Sara was an EMT for Saint Mary’s Regional in Reno and she knew dead when she saw it. That poor woman was definitely dead. She looked away, flipping up her visor and breathing deeply to get fresh air before she got sick. She was used to seeing blood and the aftermath of violence in her job, but not used to having any of it perpetrated on herself.
She looked instead at her bike. It was laying on its side a few feet off of the road and she started toward it, trying to clear her head. She had to step away; her stomach was really churning around the sausage and eggs she’d eaten.
The back of the truck stop they had just left was still visible, only a few hundred yards down the road. This was all so surreal. They would have to get that cop that was there, explain what happened. They hadn’t meant to hurt her, everything happened so fast. Surely they wouldn’t get arrested for this. It was an accident, and that girl had been seriously whacked out of her gourd.
Brian looks messed up. Geez, is he crying? Maybe he’s going into shock. All these thoughts, and more, were rattling through her head as she picked up her Fireblade. It was a big bike and heavy, but she stood it back up the way she had learned years ago, using her legs, and checked the damage. It still looked rideable, just some of the plastic scratched and cracked. The sand had saved it from any real damage.
She wondered if it would start. She’d never laid a fuel-injected bike down before. She knew from riding old dirt bikes, growing up on the farm in Idaho, that they were hard to start once you laid them down. You would have to kick it over a few dozen times to get the carburetor primed and working right once you fell off after trying something stupid.
She looked over at Brian as she pushed the big Honda back onto the asphalt. He seemed out of it, just sitting there in the sand at the side of the road with his head down. Could they really had been enjoying breakfast just a few minutes ago? A lifetime had happened in the span of time it took to watch a few commercials on TV.
“Brian,” she said, but stopped when she heard an eerie, quiet, howling behind her. She jerked her head around, thinking, “God, there can’t be another one…”
But there was. Two of them, running at full speed straight toward them, coming from a mobile home that was set back into the high desert at the end of a long unpaved driveway. They looked like kids, maybe ten or twelve, still in their pajamas.
“Brian!” she screamed this time, jabbing at the starter button of her bike. Nothing happened, not even a click. “Shit, shit, shit!” the front part of her mind screamed while the more rational part yelled, “Neutral safety, idiot!” She swung her leg over, pulled the clutch lever and jabbed the button again in a single, practiced, motion and the bike fired to life.
“Brian!” she yelled again. “We gotta go! There’s more of them!”
The rational and thinking part of her brain was trying to come up with a reason why this was happening. The woman had maybe been zonked on Spice or something, but kids? No way. But there they were, tearing across the scrub-covered sands, heedless of the thorny bushes shredding their feet, hands outstretched and as crazy as the woman had been. Meth Lab gone bad? Homemade PCP disaster?
The survival part of her brain was saying, “Who gives a shit, get the hell outta here!” She turned to look at her newest friend, whom she’d only known for a few weeks. The guy she thought was cute and had admired his bike. The guy who had just saved her life.
He was still just sitting there beside the dead woman, staring at the sand between his legs. Is it shock? The two kids were fast. How could they be so quick? They were at a full sprint, but faster. No time to get Brian’s bike picked up and started. She yelled again, “Brian! Get on, man. Get on! They’re coming!”
This time Brian looked up from the ground and saw Sara shooting over toward him, fear on her face. He saw the two kids coming straight for them, running right through cactus and tumbleweeds, not even noticing the damage it was doing to their bare feet. He jumped up and started to run away from them, blind panic pushing his body to flee, not even hearing Sara’s screams for him to get on the back of the bike.
The truck stop loomed in the distance.
It would be safe there.
He had to get inside.
That cop was there.
He would help him.
He would know what to do.
He had to get there.
So he ran like he was back in high school, running sprints. No thought of getting his motorcycle. No thought of just hopping on the back of Sara’s bike. Pure, blind, terror. He had seen what that woman did, tearing into Sara like she was some mad demon.
He couldn’t take that.
No way.
Those two little monsters weren’t going to do that to him.
He had to run.
He had to make it to the restaurant.
He had to get inside.
He ran, arms pumping, feet pounding the pavement, blind to anything else except the safety of the truck stop.
Back to the diner.
Back to people.
Back to that cop.
Sara rode up beside him, yelling, “Get on! Get on!” But it was useless. Brian was in full panic mode. Sara looked back at the kids. They seemed to be gaining ground, but they were only about a hundred yards to the corner of the truck stop. Maybe another fifty to the entrance doors. She did some nano-fast calculations. Brian could make it if he kept the speed up.
Without another second's thought, she twisted the wick and leaned into it, keeping the front tire firmly on the ground. She was up to 80 miles an hour and then hard on the binders, leaning into the parking lot. As she shot toward the front doors, she locked the brakes, then let the bike crash to the ground once she had slowed enough to hop off and into a full run.
The cop was there, just coming out of the door with a bag full of biscuits, and watched in stunned amazement as the pretty little biker with the form fitting leathers threw her bike down. Sara ran toward him, yelling and waving her arms, past the shocked faces of everyone looking out t
he windows of the diner.
Billy Travaho reacted quickly, the bag of biscuits fell to the ground. One hand dropped down to the butt of his gun and unsnapped the safety strap in one fluid motion. The other halfway across his chest, ready to go into a two handed shooter’s stance, if need be. The kid was yelling something and pointing back the way she had come.
Had the other rider already crashed his bike? Did they need an ambulance? But when his eyes darted back up the road the way the kid was pointing, he saw the other biker running like his hair was on fire and a couple of Mexican kids chasing after him.
He relaxed his hand on the gun, letting it slide back down into the holster. Something was wrong, that was evident, but not deadly force wrong. But all the same, he didn’t snap the safety strap back into place.
The music from the Chrysler was still blasting, and Billy couldn’t make out what the girl was yelling. Dead woman, drugs, kids trying to kill them...
The other biker had just rounded the corner of the building and was tearing across the parking lot toward them. He looked like he was running for his life, Billy mused, taking in the big picture, assessing possible threats like he’d been trained to do at the academy. Right now, it looked like his biggest threat was the two bikers. Something was wrong with them. Had they accidentally killed a woman down the road? Caused a wreck? The biker that had ridden in was close enough now that Billy could hear her over the racket coming from the Chrysler’s over-amplified sound system.
“The kids!” she was yelling and gesticulating wildly, “The kids are trying to kill us!”
Billy heard this, but couldn’t process it. The two little tweenagers, still in their pajamas, were trying to kill somebody? It was laughable. But this was no prank. The fear in this woman’s face was real. And she had just dropped a $10,000-dollar bike on the ground like it was her brother’s ratty old Schwinn.
The young biker still had her helmet on and it looked like there was blood on the visor. Billy was trying to understand her, but the words just didn’t compute. The kids were on drugs. The kids were dangerous. The kids were crazy. The kids were trying to kill them.
He put a hand up and started to say, “Just calm down and tell me what happened, ” but the words didn’t even get a chance to form on his lips. He was looking at the other running biker and watched in disbelief as the little girl sprang at him from at least 10 feet away, landing on his back and driving him down into the asphalt.
The girl was snarling like an animal, and the man who fell was screaming through a bloodied face. She tore into his neck with savagery more befitting a fighting dog, than anything human. Gouts of blood shot out as she tore a chunk of meat from the back of his head, ripping away a strip of his hair with it.
At the same time, the other kid, a boy of no more than 10 or 11, had veered off toward the gas island and was aiming straight for one of the painters standing next to the cargo van. The kid didn’t even slow the slightest, just tackled the dumbfounded man to the ground and started biting at his face.
Billy had his gun out of the holster and was running toward the little girl, who was going in for another bite, ignoring the flailing hands of the man on the ground.
His mind was racing, “I can’t shoot from here, she’s moving too fast, and the way he’s thrashing around I’d probably put the bullet in him. Shoot a little girl? I can’t kill a little girl.”
He wished he had a Taser, but his department didn’t carry them.
“Get inside!” he bellowed, to no one in particular, and everyone in general. “Get in the building!” It was the only place he could think of for safety until he could figure out what the hell was going on.
As he ran up to the struggling pair on the ground, intending to pull her off, she sprang at him, arms fully outstretched, aiming for his face. Her mouth flew wide open, a chunk of flesh torn from the biker falling aside, ready to tear into him. Billy realized too late he was in trouble. She would be on him before he could level his gun. She plowed into him, her uncannily powerful legs propelling her the distance between them, and she was gnashing and clawing at his eyes instantly.
He managed to get his off arm between them as he fell over backward and she clamped her jaws down on it, instead of his face, but she didn’t seem to care. She ravaged it with abandon, shredding open the shirt sleeve and digging her incisors all the way to the bone. He yelled in surprise and pain and brought his service revolver up to her side, just below the rib cage, and pulled the trigger twice.
Reaction, not thought. Years of training, muscle memory, and redundancy without thinking.
He heard other shots going off, over near the gas island. The rapid fire sound of someone with an automatic, and trying to empty the magazine from the sounds of it. He expected the little girl to go limp, to fly off his arm from the impact of the two .357 hollow point rounds blasting into her at point blank range.
She didn’t even register the slugs, other than a jerking of her body. She dragged her head back and forth, trying to tear the chunk of flesh from his arm, ignoring the little holes in her left side and the two gaping holes in her right, from the bullets’ exit. He was on his back, her on top, his arm in agony and he could hear himself screaming at her. Incoherent nothing words of rage and pain.
He was bringing the revolver back up again to empty it into her when he saw a heavy work boot connect with the side of her head, breaking her jaw and her hold on him. She tumbled off, but was back on all fours, turning to attack again, crouched to spring, spittle and teeth flying from her broken mouth. Billy shot her in the face and she dropped like a sack of potatoes. He turned to see who had kicked the girl off of him.
Gunny was in a protective stance over him holding out a hand, palm toward him, in a “be still” gesture. In the other he held a black pistol, covering the area over by the gas pumps where he was intently staring.
3
Outbreak
Gunny had been in the diner finishing up his breakfast as Old Cobb had basically told everybody to shut the hell up so the deputy could leave. He watched the bikers pull out and smiled as he saw the girl on the Honda goose it a little and bring the front wheel up as they went out of view past the end of the building.
“Cool,” Scratch said. “I wonder if I could rig a bike up to work with this hand somehow.” He held up his hooks and examined them, turning them, thinking of some way he could modify the artificial limb to work a clutch lever.
Gunny thought for a minute then said, “You could always hook both brakes up to the foot pedal, put the clutch over on the right side.”
“How would I give gas then?” Scratch asked.
“Lord, Gunny. Don’t encourage the boy,” Tiny rumbled. “He’ll wind up losing his other arm.”
Scratch ignored him. “Do they make automatic bikes?” he asked. “I wonder if I could get Kim to go riding with me.”
“Boy, when are you gonna work up the nerve to just ask her out?
You two been dancing around each other for months,” Tiny said.
“I don’t know, I will. Just waiting for the right time,” Scratch mumbled, looking almost embarrassed, very unlike his usual bombastic self.
Tiny knew what the problem was. The arm. Scratch carried on like he didn’t care, like his mechanical arm was better than the old one he had. Like nothing bothered him. Tiny knew Kim didn’t care about it, or he was pretty sure she didn’t, but you can’t tell a young buck things like that. Tiny didn’t have the words. No one did. It was a thing Scratch just had figure out for himself.
He looked over at Gunny, saw he was staring at something out of the window. The gal on the Honda was flying back into the parking lot, hell bent for leather. She let the bike just fall over as she jumped off and ran to the front of the building. “What the…” Scratch started, then trailed off.
Tiny turned in his seat to get a better view of what was going on, as were some of the others in the booths. The girl was running wildly toward Billy, arms flailing and pointing back toward the ro
ad. She was yelling something, but no one could hear over the constant thump, thump, thump of the bass pounding out a steady beat.
Gunny saw the other biker come around the corner of the building in a full sprint, two ragged looking kids in pajamas screaming after him, arms outstretched. They all watched in horror as the little girl leaped like a leopard taking down prey.
Watched her land on the man’s back and drive him into the ground, then tear a chunk of flesh out of his neck, spraying blood and ripping skin. All actions ceased.
Martha’s eyes were wide as she stopped in mid-pour of a coffee at the counter. The diner went silent, only the muted droning of the TV and vibrations of the bass in the windows. Forks of food and cups of java held in limbo, halfway to the mouth. The country musicians at the counter had spun on their stools and like everyone else, just stared, dumbfounded.
A mother had covered her child’s eyes. It was like a snapshot, everything frozen in time except for the splash of coffee overflowing the cup being poured by Martha. Then a plate shattered on the floor, dropped from Kim-Li’s hand. That was the catalyst that broke the spell. Somebody yelled out, “Charlie’s in the wire!” As Scratch bellowed at the top of his lungs, “Hajji at the gate!”
These both were triggers, deeply ingrained in many of the men there, and movement was instantaneous and unthinking. They both meant the same thing, from two different generations of warriors. They both meant death was right here, right now and if you didn’t want it to be you, you’d better move right this instant.
No hesitation.
No consideration.
Move or die.
Those words demanded action. Those words meant the bullets were about to fly, the bombs were about to explode and if you faltered for even a second, it would be you the Captain would be writing home to your loved ones about.
Old Cobb’s drill sergeant voice came booming out as he sprinted to the missing man table, and the three rifles with their bayonets in the dirt, “Secure the perimeter!”
The Zombie Road Omnibus Page 4