The biker girl was just standing up from the couch, using a paper towel to wipe off a long metal letter opener in her hand. Billy looked at peace now.
“Why did you shoot?” she asked, staring straight at Gunny. “I thought you were going to do it quietly.”
“I tried,” he said. “The knife kept bouncing off.”
She gave him a look that made him feel like an idiot. “Come here,” she said. “Watch.” She walked over to Ozzy, whose breathing was shallow and quick. She turned his head to one side and placed the letter opener right at the base of his neck, where the cervical vertebra was held to the skull with only a thin layer of muscle and skin.
“You’re not going to wait until he’s dead?” Scratch asked.
“He’s already dead,” she said. “He was dead the second the bacteria from the bite was carried to his brain. There is nothing I can do. There is probably nothing anyone can do, or they would already be doing it, not dying by the millions to these things. You want to wait until he starts thrashing around, maybe bites you while you try to hold him still?” she asked, holding the letter opener out to him.
Scratch looked at her, at Ozzy struggling for each shallow, hitching, breath that he took, and shook his head.
Stacy took it from her outstretched hand. “You did Billy. I got this.” She moved fast, just a quick thrust and wiggle, and she was pulling it back out, wiping it off on the paper towel, then composing Ozzy’s hands on his chest.
She looked over at Hot Rod.
He held his hands up to start to protest.
“I think you’re good,” she said. “You aren’t showing any signs. Sara, you concur?”
She did, but they all agreed that Hot Rod needed to remain visible, stay in the dining room, and everyone was going to be keeping an eye on him. He wasn’t out of the woods, yet, maybe scratches were slow acting, whereas bites were a much faster way to death.
Hot Rod agreed quickly, eyeing the cold-blooded women. One in a doctor’s lab coat and one in leather, thinking he had just dodged a bullet.
Scratch went after more tarps and tape, and Gunny went to talk to Tommy. After a quick discussion, they decided to bury the wrapped bodies at the back of the junkyard. The soil would be soft, and no one really wanted them stacked up in the freezer. Griz grabbed a tire cart and easily stacked all three corpses on it, and took off toward the back with a handful of drivers carrying shovels. Pack Rat followed along, telling them all the best way to dig a grave. “We’ll have one more in a minute,” Gunny called after them
“I’ll be back,” Griz said in his best Terminator voice.
Gunny chuffed and shook his head. Even in the middle of a zombie apocalypse, these guys still hadn’t lost their sense of humor. Probably because as bad as this was, most of them had seen worse. War is an ugly and brutal business, and something about it pulls the survivors together in an unexplainable way.
There are no bonds of brotherhood that are stronger than those of men who have fought together, killed together, and watched friends die together. All were glad when it was over, and hated it when it was happening. But there was a small part of them that craved the intensity of battle. After you had experienced it, every other sensation in life paled when compared to it.
They were almost like junkies, dreading the war, but thriving on the adrenaline rush. Hello Darkness, my old friend.
As Gunny was headed toward the C-store to get yet another tarp, hopefully the last one he would have to use, the biker girl and Stacy came out of the little clinic and fell in beside him.
“I’m Sara,” the leather-clad girl said. “The fellow with the prosthetic, you call him Scratch? He told you I’m an EMT, right?”
“Yeah,” Gunny said. Not sure where this was going.
“Before you euthanize this guy in the freezer, we want to run a few tests.”
Stacy picked up the conversation at Gunny’s puzzled look, “If he’s frozen, he won’t be able to move around much. We need to find out a few things. Like check for heartbeat and blood pressure, see if his pupils react to light.”
She held up a little medical flashlight and indicated her stethoscope. “When Billy died, when he stopped breathing, I had my ‘scope to his chest when he opened his eyes. I didn’t detect a heartbeat, but Sara had the letter opener up into his brain almost instantly, so I really couldn’t tell.”
Gunny didn’t see what it mattered, but he didn’t understand doctor things. Above his pay grade. But they were right, if the guy was frozen, they could check those things in relative safety. “Sure,” he said, grabbing a roll of tape, along with one of the last blue tarps. “I’ll drag him out into the kitchen and you can test away.”
As they entered the kitchen through the back corridor, the argument in the dining room sounded even worse than before. A bunch of people were all shouting over each other, trying to be heard. Gunny ignored them and laid out the tarp, opened the freezer door, and dragged the frozen man out.
He set him on the plastic and then stepped back, letting the girls do whatever it was they wanted to do. They talked quietly, Sara jotting notes as Stacy quickly ran through a battery of tests she wanted to get done. Gunny waited while they poked and prodded and tested things, and looked out over the order counter into the dining room.
The driver’s area was nearly empty, only a few guys still in there watching the argument in the main diner area. The black kid that had helped carry in the man the girls were running their tests on was sitting by himself, staring out of the window through the gap between the tractor and trailer. He was ignoring everyone, and Gunny could see tear tracks on his face. He said he had known these guys.
They must have been close. A corpulent man in a salmon colored polo shirt was waving his finger at Cobb, who was doing his best to be diplomatic and treat his guests with respect. Gunny figured that wouldn’t last much longer when he heard Martha’s voice jump into the mix. This was surprising because he didn’t think she was the type to get fired up and start yelling at customers. Cobb, sure. Cookie, all the time. But she was always polite to her guests. He was paying attention now, trying to follow her angry, broken English as she waved a spoon in the fat man’s face.
“You scare ‘cause you hear gunshot? You mad?” she yelled at him. “You think truck driver crazy with gun? What you think happen here we no have gun? You think zombie peoples not eat you?”
“They’re not zombies!” the man roared. “They are just sick people! How many times do I have to tell you, there are no such things as zombies!” He had a woman half his age by his side. She was drop dead gorgeous and she just nodded her head at everything he said, agreeing sycophantically.
Martha was right back in his face, wagging the spoon, “You think you know better than soldier? All these men who save you life, they soldier! They almost die to save all you and you want call cop to take them to jail for hitting you car?”
“It wasn’t just a car! It was a Ferrari!” he yelled right back.
Cobb reached up to take Martha’s arm, to calm her down, but she whirled on him. “You no say me calm down!” she yelled, her broken English getting worse in her anger. Cobb backed off. The petite little Asian grandmother was fired up, and she wasn’t about to take any more of this man talking bad about her boys, her soldiers, her truck drivers.
The men whose fast thinking and quick actions had saved all their lives, and she didn’t understand how this fat fool couldn’t see that. How most of them in the dining room couldn’t see that. She went right back to telling him how lucky he was that he was here and not somewhere else where he would already be dead, half in English and half in her native tongue when she couldn’t find the right word.
“Damn,” Gunny said to Stacy as she stood, finished with what she came to do. “I’ve never seen Martha so pissed. Even Cobb looks a little scared of her.”
“He should be,” she replied. “You never heard the story about when she almost killed him?”
Gunny looked at her. “No. Really? H
ow did that happen?”
Stacy pulled an antiseptic wipe out of her pocket and started cleaning her stethoscope and other tools she had.
“Well,” she said. “The way I heard it was that it wasn’t long after they first got married, Cobb came home drinking with loving on his mind. They got into an argument and he hit her. Gave her a pretty good shiner, Kim said. After he passed out, she sewed him up in the bed sheets good and tight. A couple of layers, so he wouldn’t be able to break out.
“You can imagine how mad he must have been when he woke up the next morning. She just whacked him with a frying pan, told him to shut up. Every time he started to raise his voice, she would hit him again. She beat the tar out of him. Ever notice Cobb’s crooked nose? That didn’t happen in some bar fight. She broke it with a frying pan. She wasn’t playing. Kim said she smacked on him for days with that pan. When he finally learned not to shout, he started telling her what he was going to do to her when he got out. How he was going to teach her a lesson she would never forget. He struggled for a long time before he finally gave up and realized there was no way he could get free. She left him there.
“He pissed himself, he crapped himself. After a few days, he was begging. She didn’t feed him, or give him water. She told him he was going to stay there until her face was completely healed. If he died before it was, then the Gods had willed it. Cobb knew he wouldn’t be able to last much longer without water. He begged and promised. Anything to get out. She had broken him. Something the toughest Marines, or the wars he was in, couldn’t do.
“You know Cobb doesn’t drink, right?” she asked. “He hasn’t touched booze since then. She finally cut him loose when he was too weak to stand. More dead than alive. She bathed him, gave him soup, told him she loved him more than any woman could love a man, and would until she was old and gray. But if he ever hit her again, or hit one of their children in anger, she would sew him in the sheets and take the children and go back home to her people. He believed her.”
“Good for her,” Sara said.
Gunny didn’t know what to say to that. Wondered how much was true, and how much was family legend. Best not to say anything when women were telling women stories. He watched Martha over the counter, unafraid of the big man, not letting him say anything disparaging about her drivers, her soldiers. Her friends. But other customers, and the blonde in the skin tight skirt at his side, were siding with the man, shouting their own opinions in when they got a chance and he knew this wasn’t going to end well. Cobb was going to blow a gasket and punch the guy any minute.
Cadillac Jack stood by Cobb with an angry scowl on his face, but he was seventy if he was a day. There were only a few drivers in there, mostly guys that had come in for a quick break. The rest were out doing what needed to be done.
Digging holes in the ground and burying dead bodies. Reinforcing the windows and walls. Standing guard on the roof, or patching the fence. Establishing communications with other pockets of people and trying to figure out what was going on. Trying to save the wounded and running tests on dead bodies to try to determine some way to help.
And these spoiled, lazy bastards, sitting in the air-conditioned diner this whole time sipping coffee, were giving Martha and Cobb hell for doing what had to be done to save their sorry asses. He kept hearing the same mantra over and over from the people out there. You are delusional, there are no such thing as zombies, this isn’t a Hollywood movie set, and that truck driver had killed two people. He had smashed up a bunch of cars, and as soon as the phones were working, he would be arrested for murder.
Gunny was getting pissed. They were all experiencing cognitive dissonance. They were refusing to believe what was plainly self-evident, but it was too much for them to grasp. It would shatter their little world of make believe they had created for themselves over the past few hours. They weren’t helping do anything because then they would have to face the truth. They would just sit in here, reassuring everyone and themselves that it would all be just fine.
Things would sort themselves out. The police, or the government, would get things under control shortly and things can get back to normal. Help would be here soon. He heard a moan from the blinded painter who had half of his face missing. He was thawing out. Gunny didn’t think in his anger, just grabbed the edges of the tarp, wrapped it around the thawing corpse and started dragging it through the kitchen and into the dining room.
When they saw him coming through the doors a few of them pointed at him. “There he is,” he heard. The man in the pink polo shirt wasn’t shy, he yelled right at him, “You killed two people! We saw you and none of your trashy trucker friends can cover that up! Where’s that police officer that was here? What did you people do to him? And you destroyed my car! It cost more than you can ever earn! I hope you have insurance, I’m going to sue you for every dime you have, and every dime you will ever make!”
The blonde had her hand on his shoulder and bobbed her head up and down like an idiot bobble-head doll.
There were other comments and shouts at him, but he ignored them all, just drug his struggling load wrapped in the tarp to the middle of the room near the man, where they all could see then, dropped the ends he was holding.
The room got quiet as the blinded thing inside pushed away the ends of the plastic and struggled to sit up, still half frozen.
“He’s been in a sub-zero freezer for the past couple of hours,” Gunny said quietly. “That should have killed him.”
There were gasps, and the scraping of chairs, as everyone moved back a few steps when they realized what it was. Mr. Ferrari grabbed his girlfriend and pushed her in front of him as he backpedaled away.
“He was bitten in the neck, his jugular vein ripped wide open. That should have killed him.”
They all looked on in horror as it tried to stand. Gunny kicked him back down, then pulled out his gun and shot it in the chest. The people screamed and there were shouts of protest.
“That was a nine-millimeter hollow point bullet aimed right into his heart from two feet away. That should have killed him.” The thing had bounced off the floor and continued to try to sit up. Gunny shot it thirteen more times in rapid succession, pulling the trigger as fast as he could, riddling its body, shattering bone, blowing big holes in its chest and bigger ones out of its back.
The roar of the gun and the screams of the people were deafening in the confined space as the bullets went through it, the linoleum, and into the hardwood floor. The last shot’s echo faded away, the cordite smell filled the room, and with gun smoke still curling from the barrel, the blinded thing struggled to sit up again. It couldn’t, its spine was shattered.
It pulled itself over and started crawling toward the blonde woman, who was still screaming. Its forward progress was slow, still half frozen, but relentless. Gunny paced it, just watching as the horror clawed toward the human sounds it heard. Its ruined face half missing, its eye sockets hollow, and the remains of its squished orbs dangling on grizzly stalks.
“Do you still think he’s just sick?” he asked the crowd, who was backing away, their eyes glued to the crawling wreck of a human being. “Do you think he’s still alive?” he asked, looking at them, trying to catch their eyes. “Anyone want to check for a pulse?” He looked around at the crowd, at the looks of fear on their faces as they kept pushing away from it. “Anyone?” he said, barely above a whisper.
There were no takers.
It dragged itself along the floor, trailing blood and slime from its blown open chest, chunks of broken ribs and spine jutting out of its back. “If he bites you, within a few hours, you will become just like him,” Gunny said, walking softly beside it. He didn’t have to raise his voice, the room was deathly silent, except for a quietly crying blonde woman with her hands over her mouth, desperately trying to silence herself.
“He can hear you,” Gunny whispered and the gurgling sound coming from the crawling man’s throat, the rasp of fingers and skin on the floor as it pulled itself along,
seemed uncannily amplified. “It can’t be bargained with,” he murmured.
“It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity or remorse or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, EVER, until you are dead.”
The crowd had moved away from the woman, who couldn’t manage to stop her hitching, crying, sobs. She was against the wall and couldn’t retreat any further. She was alone. Her boyfriend wasn’t helping her. The people she had befriended these past few hours weren’t helping her. The thing on the floor pulled itself toward her, its useless legs trailing behind in a smear of blood and intestinal juices, its teeth starting to gnash in anticipation of food.
“The world has fallen, people,” he said. “I don’t know how, or why, or who did it, but the world we woke up to is gone. The sooner you realize that, the longer you will survive.”
“Please…” the woman sobbed, tearing her eyes away from the crawling thing only a few feet away from her, looking at Gunny. Her mascara was streaked and running down her cheeks, her tears flowing freely. “Please don’t,” she whimpered, still unable to move away, or stop her crying.
“Stop it,” someone in the crowd cried. “Just stop it!”
Gunny grabbed the scrabbling thing by the hair, drug it back to the tarp and placed the gun against its forehead. He used the last bullet to stop its struggles, then wrapped it back up in the tarp. He dragged it out toward the shop to be buried with the rest, feeling like an asshole for scaring the woman so badly. He wasn’t going to let it bite anyone. He just wanted them to understand what they were dealing with, but it probably went too far.
Especially that Terminator quote.
Chapter Eleven
“Prone to theatrics much,” Kim asked when Gunny, Tiny, and most of the rest of the drivers and mechanics came back into the diner an hour or so later, finished with their tasks of burying the dead, repairing the fence, and securing the building as best they could.
The Zombie Road Omnibus Page 11