“Um, yeah, if you want.”
“The bus was getting crowded,” she said and took a pull off of her Longneck.
He wasn’t sure if he believed that. He was sure every unmarried driver there had asked her to ride with him.
It was eight o’clock in the morning and she was drinking a beer. She would want to stop to pee every half hour. He was trying to figure out a way to tell her he changed his mind, he didn’t need some drunk bimbo flashing cleavage in the truck with him, and she needed to get out. But in a nice way.
Then the passenger door opened and he heard another woman’s voice. “Ms. Cruz, I’m to be riding in this truck. That big man they call Griz is about five trucks back. He wanted me to ask you to ride with him.”
As Bunny hopped down, happy to be away from the cop who had arrested her on numerous occasions, Deputy Collins climbed in. Still in her uniform. Hair pulled back tightly in a bun. “Do you mind?” she asked.
Gunny smiled. “Not at all. I think you saved me from a major headache. Griz really asked for her to ride with him?”
“Not exactly,” she said, a slight smile on her lips.
Gunny nodded. Women’s games. He wanted to stay out of that. He’d seen Griz giving the deputy an appreciative stare a couple of times and he was pretty sure she’d caught it, too. He bet the big teddy bear hadn’t had the nerve to ask her to ride with him so this was her way of… what? Payback? Testing him? Who knew? They’d figure it out if it was meant to be.
“Cobb tell you to ride with me?”
“No,” she said. “I was on the tour bus and saw her climb in. Thought I would do you a favor and get rid of her. I knew she wouldn’t want to be in the same truck with me, we have a bit of history.”
“Appreciate it.”
“Besides,” she added, “the president needs a bodyguard.”
“Don’t you start...” Gunny groaned. “I’m just a placeholder till they find the right guy.”
She just nodded, thinking to herself, “They may already have the right guy.” She was still grateful that he had gotten her out of the holding cells where they’d been trapped.
“Just help me negotiate through jams if we come to them. Watch for open areas, things like that,” Gunny said. “Keep an eye out for big crowds of those things.”
Cobb’s voice came over the radio, which was surprisingly quiet. No static at all in the background and Gunny had the squelch all the way off.
“Take us out,” he said, and Gunny dropped it in gear as Tommy opened the gate.
As soon as Sara zipped by on her bike and the trucks started rolling past the front of the Three Flags, the dozen or so zombies that had wandered in took off after them and the guys a few trucks back got to practice running them down.
For all of them except Lars, Scratch and Griz, it was a brand new experience, but no one faltered, they all did the grizzly job and none of the walking dead were walking when the last truck rolled by.
Chapter Thirty-Four
By the time Gunny got up to speed, Sara was already out of sight, the tail light disappearing toward the cut off they wanted to use, a few miles up the road. Cobb was riding with Tommy, bringing up the rear of the convoy. After a few minutes, Sara came in on Channel 9 over the second CB Wire Bender had installed, asking for a radio check.
Most of the guys stayed on 19, Cobb had given very direct orders that channel 9 was for the lead and tail elements, if you wanted to blabber on about nothing, then stay on 19. Wire Bender had installed a second radio, along with the Hams and antennas in Gunny’s and Tommy’s trucks, to be dedicated to the emergency channel so Sara wouldn’t have to worry about being talked over.
Before Gunny could reach the mic, the deputy had grabbed it and replied with a “Roger, Lead One. We read you Lima Charlie. What’s your yardstick?” They went back and forth a few times, made sure Sara was within range and her radio was working fine. Sara knew most of the police radio protocols from riding around in her ambulance and picked up on the trucker terms the deputy threw in.
As they drove, they experimented with range and the radios seemed to work fine over a three to four mile area, anything over that and it got a little iffy.
“You’ve got the trucker lingo down pretty good,” Gunny observed.
“Oh, we listen in when there’s nothing else going on. How do you think we bust you guys dodging the scales?” she asked. Gunny couldn’t tell if she was joking. Probably not.
“Making the first turn now,” Sara came over the air.
“Now comes the fun part,” Gunny said as he approached the turnoff a few minutes later and started downshifting.
“You got a name?” he asked “Something besides Deputy Collins?”
She looked at him sideways, hesitated before she answered.
Gunny picked up on it, quickly realized that she probably thought he was hitting on her. He flashed his wedding ring at her as he spun the steering wheel.
“It’s Debbie,” she finally said, a little grudgingly, her eyes going back to scanning for danger.
Gunny slowed at the bottom of the ramp and started nudging cars out of the way with the blade, swinging wide into the oncoming traffic lane to have the clearance for the trailer. He saw a few of them coming out of the strip mall parking lot, running toward them at full speed, the strange warbling screams that seemed to call to the others starting to come from their throats.
Sara was gone, having zigged and zagged through the stalled and crashed cars. Gunny’s trailer caught the front of a Toyota that had been abandoned on the road and pushed it out of the way, the front plastic bumper tearing free as the headlights shattered. “Man, we should have thought of the wide swings,” Gunny said. “Should have built some kind of deflector at the rear wheels of the trailer, hope I don’t get a flat.”
Collins was staring in the mirror as he knocked it the rest of the way aside. “Looks okay,” she said. “You moved it cleanly.”
The first of the dozens streaming toward them had made it through the maze of cars in the parking lot and started to fling themselves at the truck and its occupants, heedless of the danger. Gunny had the rig straight now, and grabbed another gear, trying to ignore them and the bouncing of the tandems crushing them under the tires.
“Save some for us!” Scratch yelled over the CB, still on the main road and seeing everything that was happening ahead of him.
Now that he was rolling in a straight line, the blade easily knocked the few cars he couldn’t avoid out of the way and he kept the speed to an even twenty miles an hour. The jolts weren’t too bad, and it was fast enough to keep most of the runners falling behind. Let the other guys cut them down, get in a little practice.
They wound through the secondary streets, staying on the bigger roads and avoiding ninety-degree turns where they could. The crowd of zombies kept getting bigger, more and more streaming out of the subdivisions, running at them as fast as they could. They were outpacing most of them, but the faster ones kept trying to leap and grab onto the trucks, most of them being ground to paste when they would miss and fall under the tires.
Cobb and Tommy had fallen back a little, letting the rest of the convoy get ahead and then they hammered on it, running down the growing horde from the rear as they chased the trucks, slinging broken bodies yards into the air. They only had about fifteen miles of two-lane before they made their way back to the highway running east. Sara was at the top of the on-ramp with a clear view all around her, waiting for them to arrive. There were a couple of dead ones laying near her bike, bullet holes in their heads.
“Road is clear as far as I can see,” she said over her helmet mic. “How fast can those big trucks roll?”
“Better keep it under sixty,” Tommy cut in. “The over-sized tires we put on don’t like speed too much.”
“10-4,” she came back, spun her bike around and pulled a small wheelie as she took off.
The day passed by in uneventful boredom. There weren’t too many cars on this lonely stretc
h of highway. As they passed exits, sometimes there were some of the undead who would give chase, but they were either too slow and would be easily cut down by the blades, or chased Cobb and Tommy until they were out of sight. They stopped twice during the long day to refuel the bike and let Sara stretch her legs and drink.
She made for a good scout and had alerted them to a pileup under a bridge that blocked the road, and had them reroute over to the westbound side for a while. Martha and Cookie had been utilizing the little kitchen in the tour bus and when she called lunch break, everyone was pleasantly surprised at how good road food could be. Even out in the middle of nowhere, with no other vehicles in sight, Cobb had posted guards and they took turns eating.
Gunny, Griz, and Firecracker went over the maps for the umpteenth time, checking their speed averages for an accurate ETA. There was a good scenic overlook area before Skull Valley with enough room for all the trucks to make a sort of wagon train defensive perimeter on one side. With the steep cliffs on the other, it was as safe a spot as they were likely to find to spend the night. The trucks could stay there in an easily defensible position as a crew of them bob-tailed into town with Firecracker to check his family.
“We’re making real good time,” Griz said, tapping the overlook they were heading toward. “We’ll make it there before nightfall if we can keep it up. I want to be able to scout the area before it gets dark.”
“I could have made it in twenty minutes,” Richard Bastille said quietly, but loud enough for them to hear. “If somebody hadn’t smashed my car, that is.” He had been making snide comments like this every chance he got, and not just about his Ferrari. He was a generally negative guy who was having a hard time adjusting to the new reality that his big shot days were over. He had been a movie producer and liked to name drop whenever he was talking to anyone.
Although he had been deferred to and treated with the respect he deserved during the first hours of this nightmare, all the people who had been his new friends had taken off in their cars the first day. The rest of these people didn’t seem to care who he was. He had been rich, successful and a part of the ‘in’ crowd who went to all the right parties and knew all the right people. Now he was stuck with these truckers and mechanics, and his gal pal still wouldn’t have anything to do with him. He just didn’t want to believe the good life was over, and no one would jump and grovel to him like he’d been used to most of his adult life.
He wasn’t a complete ingrate, he knew on some level that he was lucky to have fallen in with this crowd, but he just wasn’t used to having to deal with these kinds of people. They had rough hands and rough manners. They didn’t respect him at all. If he yelled at one of them that his coffee was too hot, they would probably toss it in his face.
He knew he should be trying to make friends, not alienate everyone, but he couldn’t help himself sometimes. In his mind, he had lost so much more than all of them had. They hadn’t lost a twelve bedroom house overlooking the ocean. They hadn’t lost millions of dollars. They hadn’t lost the ability to sleep with a different wannabe starlet every night.
Griz turned to look at him, but of course the guy wouldn’t make eye contact and was busying himself acting like he was doing something important.
“Forget it,” Gunny said, and they went back to the maps, determining the best route into and out of Firecracker’s house on the western part of town.
They had been there about an hour and were making their final cleanup and checks to take off again when Shakey hollered out from the rear, where he had been standing guard. “We’ve got incoming! I can see some on the road!”
The people who had been riding in the tour bus dropped everything and ran for the doors to get back in, leaving Martha and Kim the only ones left packing away the dishes. Griz didn’t even look up. “How many and how far?” he asked nonchalantly as the crowd at the bus tried not to push and shove, and were barely able to contain themselves.
“They’re about a mile off,” Shakey said. “But there are quite a few of them.”
When they realized the danger wasn’t imminent, a few of the men looked chagrined and stepped aside to let the ladies and the children go in first. Richard Bastille was already in his seat, looking out of the barred window. The vets continued to clean their plates, feigning extreme indifference. Scratch stretched and yawned loudly. Cadillac Jack pulled out his tobacco and slowly rolled himself a smoke. Lars pulled his hat down over his eyes and leaned back on the tire he was resting against. It was a little game they all played, had played their whole military careers.
We are not afraid.
We do not run.
We do not hide.
The Jarhead Marines were trying to outdo the Dogface Army guys in their uncaring attitudes. The Army guys going overboard to show the Jarheads they were even MORE unconcerned. But if you watched closely, you saw their eyes dart to their weapons, knowing exactly where they were and where their hands would fall on them, even if they were looking in the opposite direction. Saw them casually brush their pockets, double checking the number of magazines they had, mentally weighing the pull of each one, ensuring themselves each was fully loaded. Stabby watched all this unfold and sat back down, smiling to himself, feeling safe with these bunch of Yankee showoffs.
The mechanics from Tommy’s shop had never seen G.I.s in action out in the field, and they were a little confused as they watched the guys just lay around when there were zombies coming. The rest of the people on the bus were as confused and concerned as they were. Peanut Butter just shook her head. She’d been around these kind of men long enough to know it was only an act. She winked at Buttercup, told her under her breath not to worry. Believe it or not, it was all under control.
Gunny wasn’t immune to the game and he ambled slowly to where Shakey was standing at the back of the convoy, stopping by Jack to bum a smoke. Shakey handed him the binoculars when he walked up. They were about a half mile off now, running at full speed, stretched out as far as he could see. He wondered where they had come from. Surely these weren’t the same ones they had driven by miles ago. They couldn’t still be coming after them. They had passed the last exit with any kind of zombie activity some twenty miles back.
“Scratch!” he yelled back to the soldiers. “Get your rig turned around and take these guys out!”
The three boys, who were all riding in the big Western Star, were on their feet and running toward Scratch’s truck before he had even finished yelling. It was one of the few that didn’t have a trailer. Scratch couldn’t think of any reason to drag a whole load of squash with him. He was hoping to find a wagon full of exotic cars he could hook up to and take along. The zombies were untiring, running at full speed and a steady pace, whittling down the distance. They were mostly in single file so they would make easy targets for the big blade on the front of Scratch’s truck, but they were disturbing in their single-minded intensity. Their unflagging efforts to get to fresh human flesh. This would be a serious problem, if every single zombie they passed started chasing them and never gave up. They would have to send a truck back every time they stopped to do cleanup, but that wouldn’t always be an option. If they got bogged down in the front and after a half hour, hundreds came in from the rear….
He would worry about that later. The rest of the guys had come up to see, some of them grabbing the deer rifles from the pawn shop haul out of their trucks. They watched as Scratch aimed straight at them, slamming fifteen tons of heavy metal, fronted with a wicked sharp plow, into the line of undead at fifty miles an hour.
Bodies exploded and parts went flying. At those speeds, he didn’t have to worry about anything getting tangled up under his truck. They watched him until he was around a bend and out of sight, the sound of the big Detroit Diesel engine finally fading from hearing also. After a few minutes and he wasn’t coming back, Gunny walked up to Griz’s truck.
He had a Big Radio with a linear and he grabbed the mic and hailed the boys. They came back faint, but he could m
ake out that they were still on a killing spree, the line of stragglers went on as far as they could see. “That’s enough,” Gunny said. “Get back here ASAP. We’re rolling out.” He heard their acknowledgment and circled his hand in the air to everyone watching. “Mount up!” he hollered. “We’re rolling as soon as they get back.”
The General wanted a check-in every evening and Gunny thought this single-minded determination the infected exhibited would be worth mentioning to him. They needed all the survivors to know that, even if they think they escaped, the zombies will chase them for a long, long time.
Sara took off on her CBR again as soon as she saw the blood and gore splattered truck come up over the rise. The rest of the trucks pulled out and ran up through the gears as the convoy spread out over nearly a mile. The next few hours of the trip were uneventful, not even a wrecked car to skirt around. “I guess nobody had a Hajji Sausage sandwich through here,” Gunny quipped when Deputy Collins had commented on it.
“There’s a big Mosque in Salt Lake,” she said, her hands involuntarily clenching into fists. “I guess we’re supposed to avoid it. No payback allowed?”
“Right,” Gunny said. “Let them decommission all the nukes. After that, it’s open season. Of course, if the survival numbers I’ve heard from Cheyenne Mountain are true, they outnumber us probably ten to one if all the Mosques are full of them.”
“A lot of them will be women and children,” she said. “They’ll be easier to kill.”
Gunny cut his eyes over to her, trying to see if she was joking. She was so intense, it was hard to tell, but he didn’t think she was. As the sun went down behind them, the scenic turnout where they were going to camp out was coming up and Gunny grabbed the mic to let the rest of the convoy know. He was glad for the diversion because he didn’t know what to say to the deputy.
The Zombie Road Omnibus Page 28