There was a cacophony of sound as a dozen trucks blasted air and train horns. Some of them had just witnessed what had happened and the radio lit up with chatter, everyone talking over everybody else.
“What… “the man started again. “What the hell’s going on?” He was bleeding freely from a set of nasty looking scratches across his bare chest, one of his nipples was nearly torn off.
“Zombies,” Gunny panted.
The four of them stared at him. It was too unreal to be true. To unreal not to be true. Gunny knew two of them, the others he may have seen in passing. He couldn’t recall.
The man on the ground was moaning and holding his chest that was bleeding through his fingers. He had half a dozen bites on him. Gunny stepped off the dead painter and put a little distance between him and the men.
“Hold on,” Ozzy said. “Zombies?”
“Bullshit.” one of the drivers Gunny couldn’t quite place said. “No such thing. Hopped up on Angel Dust is a better guess.”
“Open your eyes. Look.” Gunny pointed to the painter, to his ripped open neck that was missing half of the throat and larynx. “I don’t care how many drugs you do, you don’t get up and try to eat people after that happens to you. And I just saw that guy pumping gas. He was normal. Until he was killed by that little Mexican kid.”
He was trying to explain. Trying to reason it out in his own head. Trying to figure out if what he was saying was even possible, let alone true. “I saw that kid take fifteen rounds to the chest and still try to bite me,” he said. He was waiting for someone to play Devil’s Advocate. Someone to tell him that he was wrong. That the black kid had missed all those times. That what you saw, you didn’t really see. But no one did.
Gumball looked like he was going to hurl. He was taking deep, slow breaths and all the color had drained out of his face. “I got bit,” Ozzy said. “Does that mean I’m supposed to turn into a zombie?” he asked, eyeing the Glock in Gunny’s hand.
“I don’t know,” he replied. “All I know is what I see. You saw it, too.” He ran his hand through his sandy blonde hair that was getting too long again, curling just above his collar. They were all staring at him. It was hard to think straight with all the noise. Some ass was still blowing his air horn, trucks were firing up, and everybody’s radios were cranked up loud.
Drivers with linears were walking all over each other, trying to find out what was happening. Some of the trucks were starting to pull out, air brakes hissing as they were released. “Let’s get this guy inside, back to Doc’s office,” he said and motioned to the man on the ground.
“Doc ain’t here this early,” Gumball said, wrapping his bleeding arm in his T-shirt, a grimace of pain on his face. “And he needs an ambulance, not some old sawbones that gives physicals.”
“Phones are dead,” Gunny said, bending over to help the fallen man stand up. The smart part of his brain was screaming, “Be careful! Blood! Don’t get any on you! Get out of here while you still can! Run!”
The other part that had been trained from birth to be kind to animals, to be a gentleman, don’t hit your sister, open a lady’s car door, you’ll stand before God someday, never leave a fallen brother on the battlefield, help the helpless… that part was overriding the selfish part of him.
It was making him do what he thought he must. Making him try to help the other man to his feet. But the man had stopped moaning and his hands had slid away from his bites and lay still in the gravel. Gunny stopped in mid-bend. The wounds hadn’t seemed that bad at first glance, but he did have a lot of them. His face and arms had chunks missing. His chest and neck. And there was a lot of blood on the ground.
“Run! Run! Run!” his mind screamed. He looked at him, at his face, at his mangled lip, his torn cheek. He was still. His chest wasn’t moving up and down. Was he still breathing? No way was he going to give CPR. No way. He couldn’t hear him breathe but who could hear anything with all the trucks and horns and radio chatter and...
The eyes sprung open. Black. Pupils fully dilated. Only the slightest orb of blue around the edges. Gunny reacted immediately, springing backward and bringing his gun up in the same motion as the creature that used to be a man uttered a guttural sound and bounded to his feet. The other men ran as the thing sprung at Gunny, who was pulling his trigger as fast as he could.
The Glock was pumping 9mm bullets into the flying form, spent brass skittering across the gravel. The lead passed right through him, ripping muscle and tissue and organs, shattering bones then punching into the truck beside them. The rounds didn’t send it flying backward, they barely slowed its forward momentum.
The thing slammed into him before he could get the gun high enough for a headshot. Panic had caused him to react, but not fast enough to put it down with a brain scramble. He knew that worked, he had just done it to the painter and the little Mexican kid. He had seen Billy drop the little girl with a shot to the head when two to her body didn’t even faze her. It didn’t even know it was shot and Gunny hadn’t been lucky enough to sever its spine.
He went with the attack, falling back, rolling to his left, letting the thing’s inertia and weight carry it away from him and slam into the hood of the big rig, head first. Gunny let go and spun away, toward the door, opening it and slamming the creature in the face as it recovered and lunged again. Its feet flew out from underneath it and it fell over backward as he scrambled into the cab of the still idling truck.
He slammed the door behind him, frantically looked for the lock button. He stared at it through the window as it jumped and clawed trying to get to him, not even registering the five or six holes he had pumped into it. Its intensity was unnerving. It slammed itself mindlessly against the truck over and over, denting the metal, breaking its fingers and teeth as it chewed and clawed.
There was the distinctive sound of a heavy caliber rifle report and Gunny stared through the windshield at Kim-Li, on the catwalk above the main building. She was aiming toward the road and he followed her gun to see a small crowd of sprinters running toward the truck stop, some bounding on all fours like animals.
One of them toppled and fell to the ground. It looked like the man who had just left in the minivan when all this started. Was she shooting at people? Real people? But he saw clearly, then. The blood, the way they were running and keening. Not people. Definitely not. They had been heading in his direction, but when they heard the crack of the rifle, they turned en mass toward it. Toward the truck stop. “Oh shit,” Gunny said aloud. Everyone in the diner was at the windows, staring out at the running horrors.
The windows.
At the speeds they were running, and total indifference to their own injuries, they would hit those windows and shatter right through them.
Gunny hit the brake releases, slammed the rig into 3rd, stomped the pedal and grabbed the air horn. He heard more reports in quick succession as Kim fired up the few rounds she had. The big .30-06 was doing damage, much more than his 9mm rounds had. He saw some of them fall, but they got back up. She was doing body shots. Couldn’t blame her for that, head shots were difficult at the best of times, but she was definitely slowing them down.
He heard the sound of smaller caliber rounds being sent into the crowd from the men at the front door of the truck stop, and the rapid fire from the M-4 that Scratch had. He spun gravel, fast shifting, trying to get some speed out of the rig. It was loaded heavy and he had to wind each gear before he could grab the next.
The creatures heard him, the sound of the air horn blasting and some of them changed course, heading right for him. But some had seen the patrons standing in the windows of the diner, hands to mouths, looks of shock and disbelief written all over their faces. They charged, screaming, howling and keening, full force toward the fresh food.
Gunny jumped the curb and plowed down the shrubbery between the truck parking lot and the automobile gas pumps. He grabbed another gear, foot to the floor, the big diesel roaring in protest at the abuse and speed shifted again,
hitting sixth and pegging the tach all the way over to its governed limit.
He blew past the front of the building, angling in over the handicap parking spots, bouncing the red Ferrari off of the Kenworth’s unforgiving bumper. It went sliding into Billy Travaho’s cruiser, knocking it out of the way, too. He was trying to get close to the building, trying to park the semi in front of the windows, to stop them from being shattered and the people inside overrun.
He scraped along a few other cars, up over the sidewalk, tearing up Martha’s flowerbeds that were directly under the windows. The closest sprinter was ignoring the noisy diesel, seeing only the people standing there, ripe for the taking. He sprung, hands extended, reaching for the woman in the blue shirt, ready to sink his teeth into the flesh, to tear, to rend, to feel her blood in his throat…
He impacted with the grill of the truck, bouncing off toward the windows in a bone broken spin. The woman in the window screamed a high piercing shriek and fell back, away from the monstrosity, and then the truck's tires were there, crushing it to pulp and blocking the view of all inside.
Gunny swung the nose of the tractor out, knocking some foreign car out of the way… or maybe it was American, they all looked the same nowadays, to him. He jammed the Kenworth into reverse and slipped the clutch, maneuvering the trailer tight against the building and up against the main hut. That would keep anything out.
The windows ran the length of the smaller Quonset hut and were set about four feet up off the ground. The seventy feet of this tractor and trailer covered them up nicely, except for the catwalk between the truck and its trailer, but that area was small. Even if they did manage to get up there, they wouldn’t have any force to break the window. It would do for now.
He heard Wire Bender on the radio hollering for someone else to do the same to the Driver’s Alley windows and the front of the store. Gunny shut the motor off and leaned back in the seat. He looked into the side mirror, saw a truck slipping in close to the double doors at the main entrance. It tore off the rest of the awning that he had broken when he came flying in.
There were a few of the creatures left, still trying to get to him, but they were pretty busted up. Kim had really done some damage with the big gun, but they were still crawling or dragging themselves toward the sounds of humans. There were maybe a half-dozen of them, all coming in from the direction of Reno. The two bikers had come in from the other way, so these things must be everywhere.
The bikers...
That one had been bitten pretty badly. So had the deputy.
He grabbed the mic for the CB and keyed it. “Wire Bender! Kick it back stat!” he yelled,
“Yeah, c’mon Gunny.”
“You’ve got to isolate anyone that’s been bitten!” he said urgently. “They’ll turn into those mindless things! It’s contagious!” He couldn’t bring himself to say zombies, although he knew that’s what they were. What else could they be? But he didn’t want to be laughed at, thought of as an idiot.
“I’ll be in in a minute. I think I can get to the roof from the top of the trailer,” he added, thinking it would be easier to explain, maybe convince them in person, rather than over the radio.
“You mean zombies?” Wire Bender came back, laconically. “They’re in Doc’s office and we got it under control.”
Gunny harrumphed. “Should have known,” he thought. “Biggest conspiracy nut I know. He probably heard about this a month ago.”
Wire Bender was an odd duck. Old Cobb had rented him space in the Driver’s Alley and let him plug in his little RV and park it out in the junkyard. He was supposed to be the night watchman, some of those old truck parts had gotten valuable lately. With eBay, you could find a guy who would pay fifty bucks for an original Diamond Reo fuel gauge.
But he stayed on a cot in the back of his radio shop half the time. The internet was better and the bathroom was closer. He had been a radio man back in ‘Nam. Had probably smoked too much, or seen too much. No one really knew, he didn’t talk about his time in-country.
Somehow he had landed here in Cobb’s strange little Truck Stop with the other misfits who didn’t quite fit into polite society, and had been fixing CBs and Ham radios for as long as anyone could remember. His name was known far and wide. Everybody knew if you wanted a Big Radio, Wire Bender from the Three Flags was one of the best. He could tweak things and didn’t give a tinker’s dam if the FCC frowned on some of his modifications.
Gunny ejected the mag from his Glock 19 and counted the rounds. There were five in the mag and one in the pipe. He shoved it back in the well and slid it into his holster. He wanted to put bullets in the brainpans of every crawling thing left out there, he knew they were a threat. But they weren’t an immediate threat, and his life might depend on those six rounds. He had another box in his truck and it was safely tucked away in the shop. He wanted to get to it before he started wasting ammo on half blasted creatures.
Zombies, he corrected himself. They’re zombies. Real, live, honest to God, zombies. Well, maybe real DEAD, honest to God, zombies. He didn’t know how it could possibly be, how science fiction and Haitian horror stories could be real, but he knew what he saw. He thought he knew what he saw.
And good Lord, if he was wrong, if they were really just crazy or drugged up, he was going to be facing a very long prison sentence. He closed his eyes, got his breathing under control, played it all out in his mind again. Not second guessing. He’d learned long ago not to do that. He replayed details, trying to see if there was something he had misread, some clue he’d missed. He was writing an after operations report in his mind. Looking for the flaw in his logic where some POG lieutenant would try to bring him up on a court martial.
He sighed. Plenty, he concluded. It didn’t matter if there was a clear and present danger. In the end, he’d gunned down unarmed people. He knew fear caused hesitation and hesitation would get you killed. But prosecuting attorneys didn’t think like that. If this wasn’t a freaking apocalypse, he was going to need a lawyer.
He pulled his phone out of his pocket, dialed his wife Lacy again. Nothing. All circuits are busy. Please try again later.
He looked at the creatures outside his window. A couple had seen him. One was fairly lively, jumping and clawing at the side of the truck. The other was trying to pull itself up on the steps with a crooked arm and was getting repeatedly stepped on by the jumper. He didn’t sense any real danger, though. He was safe for the moment.
He felt weak, drained. The adrenaline had fled his body and now he just wanted to crawl back in the bunk and sleep for a minute. But there wasn’t time for that right now. He hopped out of the driver’s seat, over into the passenger’s side, and rolled down the window.
He climbed out and onto the long Kenworth hood, glad this wasn’t a new Volvo or Freight Shaker with all the sloping aerodynamics that would have been all too easy to slide off of. These old Kenny’s were just blocks and squares, all flat surfaces. Like driving a brick wall.
He hopped up on the roof of the sleeper and then took a quick run and jumped the short distance to the top of the trailer. Kim was still on the catwalk of the main building, holding the old World War Two rifle down at her side in a one-handed grip. She was talking to the other driver that had blocked the windows on the Driver’s Alley side.
They were trying to figure out how to get over to the catwalk. It wasn’t far, the problem was that the Quonset hut was rounded, and the catwalk was a good fifteen feet higher than the top of the trailer. You could jump, the building’s incline wasn’t too steep this high up, but if you slipped...Well, it was a long slide down to the ground.
As Gunny made his way back to the end of the trailer, Kim turned and said, “I’m going to get some rope or something, I’ll be back in a minute.” Then she was off, jogging toward the other end of the building, and the roof access panel.
The driver who had blocked the main entrance came over to the end of his trailer and hailed Gunny. “What the hell is going on?” he asked.
“I woke up to guns and horns and screaming, and Wire Bender yelling at me to block the doors!”
Gunny recognized Pack Rat, the old gray-haired geezer who definitely lived up to his name. He was the guy who opened his truck door and, more often than not, empty coffee cups or fast food wrappers would fall out.
“Dunno, Pack Rat. I think the riots that have been hitting all the cities just hit Three Flags.”
“Who the hell would wanna riot here?” he asked querulously. “I thought Wire Bender done lost his mind. I wasn’t about to pull up in here till I saw you busting everything up like you was on a Hollywood movie set. Reckoned something boocoo dinky dau must be going on.”
He spat a stream of tobacco over the edge of his truck and into the face of one of the women that had been attracted to their voices. It was clawing at his trailer, trying to get at the bearded old codger. Her sun dress was hanging off of one shoulder, exposing a bra and a big hole in her breast, and a bigger one in her back. There were bits of broken bone sticking out of it where Kim-Li’s .30-06 had punched through. She had a bloody chunk of one of her arms missing and a piece of her neck was gone. Probably bite marks. He watched her for a minute then said, “Looks like we got us a zombie problem.”
6
Lacy
Day 1
Atlanta
Lacy walked into the office, already pissed off. She had caught their sixteen year old trying to hide the fact that he was making a lunch for school. “Why are you doing that?” she had asked. “Only broccoli on the menu today?”
He was surlier than his usual grumpy, morning self and she finally drug the story out of him in monosyllabic grunts and aggravated gestures. He had in-school detention again. Confined all day, in an unused classroom, with the rest of the trouble makers.
The Zombie Road Omnibus Page 6