The Zombie Road Omnibus

by David A. Simpson

  By the end of the second day they had lost electricity, and with it, the water pressure. Among the stores of supplies they had searched the floor for, they had discovered the maintenance closet with some five-gallon jugs of water for the two water coolers they had. The food supply was critically low, however. There weren’t many leftovers in the break room refrigerator, and the only food they had were snacks scavenged from desk drawers.

  Lacy had tried to text different people a few more times, but most of the time they wouldn’t send and on the rare occasion they did, she didn’t know if anyone received them. She never got anything back. The message from Johnny was the only one that came through. He was fine, he had said. He was at a truck stop near Reno and was going to wait till things settled down a little and then head back to Atlanta. He’d do it, too. This she knew.

  She was sitting at her desk, thinking back to years gone by. He was an obstinate ass sometimes, but he was as tough as they came. Had some hard bark on him, as they say back home. He’d been blown up, shot twice, had shrapnel from grenades in him, went down in a helicopter once, had been gassed… she couldn’t recall all the times he’d been hurt, and he always went back.

  Always seemed to be the guy who escaped with only a minor injury, while others had legs and arms blown off. All that from a boy who had only wanted to turn wrenches at a local car dealership, maybe do a few odd jobs on the side for extra money. Then that incident at the tire shop and him having to join the Army.

  Of course, Johnny couldn’t just be a cook or something, do his four years and get out. He had to go all gung-ho and join the infantry. Then he went airborne. Then the Rangers because all his buddies were. After that, he had to be a Green Beret. Be the best of the best he said. Special Forces. Might as well, he said. The rest of his friends he’d been training with were signing up. And you got hazard pay. Then he got recruited into Delta, and again, he didn’t say no.

  So more training, more missions he didn’t talk about, more deployments around the world, doing who knew what to God knows who. She was proud of him, he had turned the old proverbial lemon into lemonade. He was taking out terrorists and doing his part to keep the world safe. All he had to do was keep himself alive and whole for another five years and it would have all been worth it.

  They were already planning the ‘retirement at thirty-eight’ party. But then that incident in Afghanistan happened. She didn’t think she knew the whole story, but she knew enough to know that the military didn’t want the world to know what had happened. They had kept him out of jail, out of a trial. They just wanted the whole thing to be forgotten, so they got rid of him and told him if he ever went public, they would press charges. Murder didn’t have a statute of limitations.

  If he ever said anything, he’d be facing life in prison. She couldn’t even be mad at him for what he did. She probably would have done the same thing if she had walked into a room with a bunch of men raping a group of crying, bleeding, boys.

  It didn’t matter that they were the local religious leaders and the police captain they had been training to fight the insurgents. It didn’t matter that in the eyes of local Islamic law, they weren’t doing anything wrong. He had killed them all. It hadn’t mattered to him, either. He had his regrets, though. Whether from that, or other things, she didn’t know. He wouldn’t tell her everything, but she knew he had nightmares for years. He had lost his whole team shortly after, and he didn’t talk about that either. He came from the Solitary Meadows part of the family. They kept themselves to themselves where he grew up, way up in a holler. Getting him to talk about his feelings was damn near impossible.

  The creatures in the hallway had stopped their pounding after a while, and as long as everyone stayed quiet, they seemed to have forgotten there were people inside the offices.

  On the third day, the city was eerily silent.

  The city was dead.

  The only life they saw was the occasional flicker of candlelight from the windows of nearby buildings.

  They heard no more screams, no matter how faint or distant. No sirens wailing. No horns honking. Mr. Sato’s satellite phone hadn’t been able to reach anyone since yesterday, no matter how many numbers he tried. If they peeked carefully around the curtains and stacked up office furniture, through the glass doors, they could see the ceaseless wanderings of the creatures in the hallway. They just seemed to shuffle around aimlessly, bumping into each other or the walls.

  Eric, and one of the ladies that had come in with ,Phil had put a bit of effort into making everyone dinner that evening, with the last of what they had scrounged. Lacy was pretty sure a few of them were holding out, had hidden power bars or peppermints from everyone else, but it didn’t matter. A few more bites of granola wouldn’t have made a difference. They needed to get out of here. This was their last meal and in a week, they would be as good as dead if they didn’t move out.

  As they ate the last of the beef jerky and protein bars with the juice concoction the “cooks” had whipped up from the liquor cabinet in Mr. Sato’s office, Lacy brought up leaving. She was trying to get a feel for where everyone stood. In the end, it didn’t matter because she was going whether anyone else was or not. She just wanted to know if she was going alone, or with a group.

  “We’ve got to get out of here,” she said abruptly, loud enough so all of the other people could hear her. “Has anyone given it any thought? How do we make it down to the bottom?”

  “We can’t go!” the plump lady from the architectural firm nearly squealed. “The Army will be here soon. We just have to wait. They won’t leave us like this.”

  Lacy had dealt with these types of people before, as a military wife. She had rammed her shopping cart right through protesters during a rally at a mall once, had tried to debate people at the opposite end of the political spectrum online, but in the end their philosophical differences were so far apart, there was no middle ground. She was from the backwoods of Kentucky, where everyone had a strong independent streak and disdain for people who wouldn’t help themselves.

  “No one is coming,” she said, and turned her back to the woman, who probably had a whole stockpile of diet bars hidden away somewhere, she thought to herself. She had dismissed Eric as any kind of help, he had completely frozen up and shut down the first day. He would be useless. She knew she was being cynical, but she didn’t want everyone to go. Most of them would just slow her down.

  But a few of them would be an asset. Phil, for one. He had the only gun. Carla. She was pretty fit, young, and into hiking and biking. Alex, from the accounting firm twelve stories above. He looked to be in pretty good shape. Robert… Maybe. Middle-aged and withdrawn, but not too flabby. Mr. Sato was pretty spry for an old guy, they had talked about how he had beat one of those things off with his briefcase in the stairwell, smashing in its head.

  “Phil?” she asked. “You have any ideas? Mr. Sato?”

  “Sure, try to get the only man with a gun to go with you,” the annoying woman chimed in.

  Lacy was starting to think she knew how Johnny felt now, when he would just haul off and punch someone for talking shit. She ignored her and kept her gaze on the two men.

  As it turned out, they did have some ideas. For some strange man-logic notion of chivalry, or some such nonsense, the men had been going over plans for the past day or so, running ideas past each other and trying to formulate something solid to get them down to the parking garage.

  Their plan was pretty simple. Open the doors just wide enough to let one monster in at a time and kill it with one of Mr. Sato’s golf clubs. They do that until all are dead, and then make their way down thirty flights of stairs to the sub-basement. The emergency lights should still be on. No one knew how long they would stay that way, but Phil said they had all been upgraded to LED lights a few years back, so the emergency batteries should last a long time. Once down the stairs, they could determine the next best plan of action, depending on what they found.

  It was a pretty good plan a
nd now that it was out in the open, the rest started to bring up ideas the men hadn’t thought of. They decided to break the ends off of some of the putters and make stabbing objects out of them, so they wouldn’t have to depend entirely on swinging a heavy driver in the confined quarters of the stairwell.

  They were going to use both the head gripped in their fists as a stabber, and the shaft as a short lance. Lacy found her fist spikes she had made from the shelf brackets and worked on them some more, so they fit her hands better, using a lot of duct tape until they felt comfortable.

  Phil went through the secretaries’ drawers until he found a half dozen letter openers and taped the handles to make some pretty lethal daggers. In the end, they had hashed out something they all thought was workable, even the annoying woman whose name Lacy could never seem to remember. They were sure they would find some heavy duty SUVs in the valet parking.

  Once they decided which vehicles they wanted, it would be easy to grab the keys from the office.

  27

  The Three Flags Truck Stop

  Day 3

  The President. What a joke, Gunny thought as he woke up to the alarm clock on his phone. His one, and probably only, presidential order that he had given was a good one. He had made General Carson Vice President. It was all legal and constitutional, so if he got killed on his trek back home, or even if he decided to disappear with his family, there was an established hierarchy again. Or chain of command. Or whatever it was called.

  Carson would make a good president, if he ever got out of the bunker. He was sure the General would pick all kinds of cabinet members from different areas, so the “government” would carry on. It was on the bottom of his worry list, he had done what they asked. It was all official and if he made it back here, he’d worry about acting presidential or something. Meanwhile, he had a long way to go and he’d already wasted too much time.

  He glanced at his phone again, checking for messages out of habit. None of the apps he had downloaded worked except solitaire. He switched it back over to airplane mode so it wouldn’t search for a signal all day and run the battery down.

  The sun was just below the eastern horizon as he threw on some clothes and headed towards the diner. He had told the guys he was convoying with that he was rolling at seven. Be there or be left behind.

  The little apartments they were planning on building weren’t finished yet, but most of the people had bedded down in the empty broker’s offices, so the diner was nearly empty. Martha was up and poured him a cup of coffee as he approached the counter. Gunny could smell biscuits baking in the oven and nodded his ‘good morning’ to Cookie, who was at his griddle.

  Cobb came out of the back and stomped over to where Gunny was sitting and took a stool beside him at the counter.

  “We’ve got a problem,” he said. Typical Cobb. No pussyfooting around.

  “What’s that?” Gunny asked.

  “That General said we’re in a fallout zone if the reactor in Washington goes up.”

  “Yeah,” Gunny said. “But didn’t he say there were teams that were going to take care of it? Remove all the rods?”

  “Yup, but the nearest muzzie mosque is 150 miles away from it. I can’t risk staying. Besides, there’s no future here. We couldn’t get the well to work yesterday. It's bone dry, so in a couple of days we won’t have any water.”

  Gunny looked around at the truck stop, at all they had, and all Cobb’s family had built over the last half century.

  “That sucks,” he said. “Your family has had this place for what? Fifty years?”

  “Just because all the good land was taken,” Cobb said. “This ain’t nothing but desert scrub nobody wanted. Now there’s plenty of land available. And it’s all free.”

  “What are you planning on doing?”

  “There’s a big reservoir near Latoka, Oklahoma according to the General,” he said. “It’s in a safe area if everything goes wrong and the Hajji’s can’t get all the rods out everywhere. Good water, good land, good hunting, good fishing, and not in the wind path of any reactors. We need to get there.”

  “Who’s we?” Gunny asked.

  “Everyone,” Cobb replied. “After you took off to your truck to crash out last night, we had a little powwow in here. Wire Bender had flipped the coms on in the diner once you said you’d take the job as President, and everyone heard you do the swear in thing with the General. Everybody knows we have to leave, and everybody agreed the best way was to convoy down with you and the rest who were taking off this morning.”

  Gunny grimaced. He wanted to leave soon and didn’t want to be responsible for a bunch of drag-ass civilians.

  Cobb saw the turmoil on his face, guessed at what he was thinking. “You have a bigger responsibility, now, than just yourself,” he said. “Like it or not, all of us are going to depend on you.”

  Gunny sighed and rubbed his hand across his eyes. “Okay,” he said. “You’re right. It’s smart to leave anyway, even if you did have water. If they screw up with getting the rods out, you wouldn’t know it until it was too late. How soon till we can roll?”

  “Realistically?” Cobb asked. “Tomorrow morning. Griz and that deputy you brought back are going to run a refresher course for the vets this morning, make sure everyone is up to speed on communications and tactics and road procedures. Going to be a big convoy. We don’t want to lose anyone. We’ve got a lot of packing to do.”

  He continued in his rusty voice, “We’re never coming back and we need to take as much as possible with us. I wish we still had the internet, I could see what kind of businesses were down there so we wouldn’t have to pack generators or welders if there were a bunch already there. But we’re going in blind, so we need to take everything.”

  “Right,” Gunny said. “I’ll grab my maps and start planning a route, avoiding the cities. But seriously, Cobb. I need to be on the road tomorrow morning. My wife is trapped in a high rise and my kid is stuck in a room at his high school.” I hope…he added to himself.

  “Yeah, about that. I got to thinking and had Wire Bender get a hold of Cheyenne Mountain this morning. You being the president and all, I told him to see if they can pull your wife’s phone records from NSA. She may have emailed or texted you some more, and it didn’t deliver. If it uploaded though, they should be able to find it. I told them to check your kid’s, too.”

  “But they don’t know their numbers,” Gunny said.

  Cobb just laughed cynically. “They know everything,” he said.

  Gunny gave a sideways grin. “You’re pretty savvy for an old timer,” he said. “Thanks, Cobb. I didn’t even think about something like that. You should be the president, not me. I don’t have the brains for it and you know it. Hell, everybody knows it.”

  “Feeling sorry for yourself?” Cobb rasped, glaring at him.

  “No,” Gunny replied. “But you know you’d do a better job of it.”

  “Probably,” Cobb said. “But it ain’t me. It’s you. And I don’t reckon you’ll screw it up too bad. Just don’t get so big for your britches you forget to take advice from people who are smarter than you.”

  Gunny nodded and the old man grunted, grabbed his coffee cup, and clomped off.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  The morning started out slowly, with the night shift guards coming off duty and the people sleeping in the temporary apartments waking up and wandering in for coffee. Of course, when Scratch, Lars and Stabby came in and noticed Gunny sitting at a table going over his maps, they immediately ran over. They started bowing and scraping, calling him your Royal Highnessness, offering to shine his shoes and “Shall I comb your eminence’s golden hair” and “Shall I wipe your royal butt, your most esteemed one”.

  Gunny’s ‘Piss off’ only brought more bowing and scraping, with profuse apologies for being so inadequate for his Majesty’s most magnanimous Royal Greatness and the world was blessed because they were impotent and wouldn’t curse the planet with their inferior offspring. Eac
h was trying to out-bow and out-grovel the other. The gathered people were much amused.

  Cobb clomped in and put an end to it with a list of everything that needed to be done. Gunny wondered if he ever slept. He started assigning tasks to everyone, including the kids, and told them to all hurry up and eat, no time to sit around jack-jawing.

  Gunny had an idea and stood up to ask if anyone could fly a plane? A helicopter? It would make things so much easier. But no one could. The closest was Carl of the Prius, and he only had experience on a computer flight sim. He and his girl had seen the mayhem when they left and managed to get turned around and made it back to the safety of the Three Flags.

  Later in the evening, when most of the tasks had been completed, when all the materials they had on hand was used to up-armor the trucks and they were loaded and were ready to roll, everyone was called in from their jobs for a hot supper. They were having the last full course meal for the next week or so, and Preacher wanted it to be a little something special.

  This may be their final supper, they were facing the unknown in the morning. He said a prayer over their meal and everyone dug in. Cookie and Martha and Kim had outdone themselves, making a dinner to remember. Forty people ate with gusto, with the only ones not able to join being the unfortunate few who had guard duty.

  Scratch, Stabby, and Lars had worked on improving the designs of the stabbing weapons they had used the previous day and made as many as they could for everyone; the wicked, spiked knuckle dusters being a favorite because they left the hands free to handle guns easily.

  Stacy had commandeered much of Lars’s cocaine stash, saying it was originally used as medicine and it was going to be used as medicine again. She left him a small bucket of it and gave them very stern warnings that if she ever suspected their use of it endangered anyone’s lives, there would be swift and serious old west style justice coming at them from the end of a rope.