The Zombie Road Omnibus

by David A. Simpson

  “What the hell were they doing?” Lars and Scratch were both shooting steadily toward runners coming in from the front, but Firecracker, his wife, Stabby, and the old lady were all still standing outside the truck, waving frantically at the kids inside.

  Before he took three more ground-eating steps toward them, he realized what must have happened. The kids, looking out of the window toward their running parents, had pushed down the door lock. He kept running, aiming for the driver side door, but there were already five or six of them making a beeline for it and they would beat him there. He brought the carbine up to his shoulder at a full run and emptied the magazine, but none of them went down. Zero head shots.

  He could hear Scratch yelling at the kids to “Get down, get down, get down!” He was going to shoot the window out, but they were too scared to move, just kept crying and reaching for their parents, not even realizing what they had done. It was too late. They were being surrounded. Even if the door opened right now, there wasn’t enough time to get all six people into the cab before half of them were pulled down by the undead masses.

  “Back to the house!” Gunny roared as he ran by them, grabbing the other side of the old woman Stabby was still supporting, and they both flew up the sidewalk carrying her, her feet barely touching the ground. Firecracker pulled his wife after them, with Scratch and Lars trying to keep the horde of zombies off of their backs. Gunny sent Stabby reeling off toward the living room with the old woman and was waiting with his shoulder against the door, ready to slam it as soon as Lars cleared the threshold. He no sooner got the deadbolt turned, when he felt the first impact against the door.

  It wouldn’t hold long, but probably longer than the windows. The house was full of them: big picture window in the living room overlooking the porch, big windows in the kitchen. Big windows in the bedrooms. All the curtains were closed and Gunny shushed everyone. “Don’t make any noise,” he whispered loudly. “If they don’t see us, maybe they’ll settle down. Forget we’re here.” The door shuddered violently.

  The single-minded infected had seen them come in through it and they continued to try to follow. Gunny motioned toward the kitchen table, indicating to Lars and Scratch to bring it over. They hurried, quietly pulled the chairs away from it and hustled it back to him, settling it in on its side against the door and the first riser of the staircase. It was a little short, so they filled in the gap with a few books, kicking the last ones in tightly to form a solid barrier against the door, making it impossible to open.

  The old lady lay on the couch, pale and strained from all the exertion and Firecracker was trying to calm his wife, telling her the kids were fine, the truck was armored, the zombies couldn’t get in.

  “Perimeter check,” Gunny said. “Stabby, upstairs. Make sure they don’t see you from any of the windows.”

  Lars and Scratch split off, going in opposite directions to circle the inside of the house and Gunny went to the back door, to see if there was an escape there. There wasn’t. There must have been hundreds by now. All the zeds in the immediate area drawn to the gunfire and the mob that had followed the truck.

  This was a disaster Gunny raged at himself. They had two close calls on just this one simple mission. Dumb ass mistakes had been made. By him, by Firecracker, by his wife. By the kids. He was going to get them all killed if the mistakes didn’t stop. It all came back on him, though. He was the one calling the shots.

  He knew Firecracker didn’t have any combat time. He had never left the Green Zone when he had been in Afghanistan. The kids didn’t know any better, and the wife…well, she was a civilian. She didn’t know what they knew. Didn’t have any experience. Now the safety of the truck might as well be a million miles away. None of them had radios on them. It was supposed to be a quick in and out.

  They had plenty of ammo, more than enough to snipe the hundred or so outside then walk through the piles of dead to get back into the truck, but every shot fired would draw more toward them. They all carried M-4 variants, and they were loud. They couldn’t blast their way out. The door shuddered again, but it wasn’t budging. The ones swarming around the back of the house weren’t really trying to find a way in, they were just the overflow from the undead in the front, still trying to go through the door.

  Lars and Scratch came back, both started shifting magazines around in their pockets, moving empties to the off-hand side, making sure the loaded ones were where they wanted them, and facing the right way. They hadn’t brought any extra ammo, just the loaded magazines. It was only supposed to take a minute, maybe two, to get them out of the house and into the truck.

  “Indefensible,” Lars said.

  “Concur. Too many windows. They’ll break sooner or later, just from the sheer weight of so many of them pressing against the house,” said Scratch.

  “Agreed,” said Gunny as Stabby came quietly down the stairs.

  “All clear up here,” he said. “The truck’s surrounded, but if the kiddies would get away from the windows, maybe go take a nap, those bloody rotter's will lose interest.”

  “Right. Hope they have the same courtesy for us. Let’s get upstairs, fortify the stairwell, and hope they go away in a few hours.”

  Lars and Firecracker went to help the old woman up the stairs as his wife wrung her hands and quietly cried. Gunny felt for her. She had managed to keep her family safe for nearly a week and when the cavalry shows up to rescue them, her kids are locked in a truck surrounded by monsters and she’s in a house about to be overrun by them.

  He went over to her, to offer a few words of reassurance that the kids would be fine, the truck was impossible to get into, when he noticed the bandage on the old woman’s leg. Her housedress had pulled up some as they carefully stood her on her feet to guide her to the stairs.

  “Hold it,” he said and changed his path from the wife to the mom. “What happened to her leg?” he asked, pulling the floral print dress up to the woman’s knees. When Lars and Firecracker saw it, both of them quickly set her back down on the couch. Lars put the back of his hand to her forehead. “She’s burning up,” he said. She was breathing fast and shallow. Barely coherent. Gunny grabbed the bandage and ripped it off, exposing a half circle bite mark of infected flesh trickling blood, angry and red with black runners leading away from it.

  “When did she get bit?” he whirled on Firecracker’s wife, a little more forcibly than was probably necessary.

  His eyes were angry and she hesitated, still sobbing.

  “When?” Gunny asked again, dropping the old woman’s dress back over her ankles. He stood to face the idiot woman who may have just gotten them all killed over an old lady who had already been served a death sentence.

  “This, this morning,” she stuttered. “She went out to check the mail and a little kid attacked her.”

  Gunny was stunned. How utterly ridiculous. They were all going to die because some ditzy old lady wanted to check the mail?

  They were all staring at her with the same incredulous looks on their faces. “There was no one out on the streets when she went. We thought it would be okay,” she said defensively.

  “That junk mail cost her life,” Lars said.

  “Probably ours, too,” Scratch added.

  “But don’t you have medicine?” she asked plaintively. “It was a small bite, nothing major.”

  There was the sound of breaking glass in one of the bedrooms, the big picture window overlooking the back yard would be Gunny’s guess.

  “Upstairs,” he said and they didn’t have to be told twice. Firecracker’s wife was pulling against him, toward her mom. “She needs help,” she said.

  She just didn’t get it. How could she? She hadn’t seen what they had.

  “Go!” Gunny said. “I’ll take care of her.” And Firecracker finally drug her up the stairs.

  As soon as their feet went around the landing midway up the stairs, Gunny didn’t waste any more time. The old woman was barely breathing, the poison killing off the last o
f her humanity. He flipped her roughly onto her stomach and pulled the Gerber from his leg sheath. He didn’t hesitate, plunged it in at the base of her skull like the Sisters had shown him. It sank to the guard and he gave it a little jiggle before pulling it out.

  “You coming?” came a stage whisper from up the stairs.

  Gunny slipped over to the bedroom, peeking in from the side of the door. He wanted to know if they were coming in, or was the breaking glass just incidental to the milling crowd.

  It wasn’t incidental, there were many hands trying to claw their way in and he heard the sound of another window breaking elsewhere in the house. He ran for the stairs and as soon as he cleared the top, the boys muscled a mattress into the stairwell and down toward the landing, essentially erecting another wall. Next came box springs, and a dresser to wedge it in place, and by then the first floor was full of screaming infected, all rampaging up the stairs and trying to force their way to the living.

  They all started grabbing whatever they could and filling up the stairwell with anything that wasn’t bolted down. Firecracker’s wife’s face was still tear-streaked, but she hadn’t asked about her mother. Gunny could only assume she was quickly schooled on the new facts of life in the few minutes it took him to take care of business downstairs.

  When everything they could toss down the stairwell had been thrown into it, she ran over to the window looking out over the street, at her kids in the truck. They were still at the window looking out and she caught their attention and waved to them, trying to give a mother's comfort from fifty yards away.

  Gunny did a quick look around the upstairs, at the horde below that could be seen out of every window. Maybe two hundred and they were still screaming and keening, drawing more.

  “Can the boy read?” Gunny asked Firecracker.

  “Some,” came his reply. “Mary has been teaching them. Why?”

  “They need to get back in the sleeper. Out of sight, out of mind. They should leave them alone if they just stay quiet.”

  “He reads Dr. Seuss, he knows all the words to most of them,” Mary said.

  “Make a sign big enough he can read. Tell him to hide,” Gunny said. “That wall of junk won’t hold them off of us for long. The kids can last a long time, there’s food and water in the cabinets. The guys from the camp will come looking in a day or so, if we’re not back. They’ll find them.” He turned away before she could see the lie in his eyes. Nobody was coming after them. That wasn’t part of the plan.

  If two trucks and some of the best men, were lost on a simple rescue operation on the outskirts of town, Cobb wouldn’t be sending anyone else on a suicide mission. He caught the eyes of the others as they stationed themselves at the head of the stairs, guns at the ready. They knew the truth. They had known there was a chance of this being a one-way trip when they volunteered to go.

  It just seemed so stupid to go out like this. To have such a simple thing, a door locked by a couple of frightened kids, be their downfall.

  The mattress below was slowly being shredded. The screaming horde would tear it apart inch by inch until they got to the stacks of tumbled furniture and start tearing it apart one piece at a time.

  By then, the boys would be taking careful aim at heads and stacking up corpses for the rest of them to have to tear their way through, but they would. Slowly but inevitably, they would make it through all barriers placed in their way.

  There was no running water, but the fresh water tank on the back of the toilet had a good four gallons in it and they all took turns, drinking thirstily from the toothbrush cup.

  Mary had finished her sign, printed in simple words on the backs of animal posters that had been hanging on the wall. The kids were out of sight and hiding, waiting for rescue.

  They had all circled around the upstairs rooms more than once, looking for a way out. The closest house was too far away to jump. Wishing for a helicopter didn’t seem to be doing any good.

  Mary had apologized so often, and with such heartfelt sorrow, they all felt bad about blaming her and kept telling her it wasn’t her fault. Each one trying to come up with some way the whole fiasco was all their doing, and the responsibility should be placed squarely on their shoulders.

  The boys kept trying to outdo one another to take the blame, and some of the reasons were bordering on ridiculous. Especially Stabby’s. He had declared he was completely at fault because he had been distracted by the three Indians in silver tennis shoes teaching him sign language. As they quietly laughed at his antics, he suddenly stopped.

  “Attic,” he said.

  “I looked. There isn’t one,” Lars said, realigning his magazines for the hundredth time on a night stand.

  “Course there’s one,” Stabby said. “This roof ain’t flat, now is it?”

  “He’s right,” Gunny said and sprang up from sharpening his Gerber.

  38

  A Way Out

  Gunny jumped up on the narrow banister at the head of the stairwell and balanced himself with one hand on the decorative newel post going up to the ceiling. He poked his Gerber through the drywall over his head. He smiled down at them, then started tearing out chunks of it, making a hole wide enough to fit through the two by sixes it was nailed to. It really wasn’t an attic, just an insulated crawl space, only about four feet tall in the center. It would be hot and itchy with all the open batted insulation, but it was better than being dinner for a party of two hundred.

  “It’s good,” he called down over the snarls and howls of the zombies. “Hurry and get up here before they break through. Maybe they’ll give up if they don’t find us.”

  One by one, they scrambled up the narrow opening with helping hands from above and below, until the last man was up and they covered the hole the best they could with strips of insulation.

  The zombies were still battling each other and the stacked furniture, trying to get through, but they were packed so tightly, forward progress had nearly ground to a halt. With the ninety degree turn in the landing, the crush of bodies from below couldn’t force through the improvised barrier. They were pushing against the support wall of the house, not the flimsy wall of cheap wood from heaped furniture.

  “Maybe should have stayed down there a bit longer,” Scratch grumbled. “It’ll take them days to get through. And I’m allergic to fiberglass.”

  “Nah, mate,” Stabby said. “It’ll go like a dam bursting. Once they get a hand hold of a chair leg or sumpin’, it’ll all come crashing down.”

  Gunny hunchbacked his way over to the end of the roof and tried to see out of the aluminum gable vent. It was futile, all he could do was look down at the ground, the way the slats were. He pulled his knife out again and started working it around the edges, bending the soft aluminum frame away from the screws that had been shot into it years ago. It was slow work if he didn’t want to make a lot of noise, but there was nothing else to do. One more avenue of escape, another chance to live five more minutes if they got out on the roof.

  They hadn’t been up there for more than half an hour or so and Scratch announced he had to take a dump.

  “You couldn’t have gone before?” Lars asked, working on the other gable end of the house.

  “Please tell me you can hold it,” Stabby said. “I don’t want to be smelling Martha’s cooking coming out your backside.”

  “I’m going back down,” Scratch said. “I ain’t planning on squatting up here with you clowns.”

  They pulled the insulation back from the hole in the ceiling, but what they saw stopped them. Hands had finally pulled the mattress apart enough to reach through, and they were scrabbling for anything to grab. The first of them was halfway through the pile, pulling and fighting its way to the top of the stairs.

  “Crap,” Scratch said, and quietly put the insulation back. Stabby snickered at his choice of words and got the bird flipped at him for his troubles. “I really gotta go, man,” Scratch whispered, cutting a glance toward Mary, who was sitting next to her hu
sband a few feet away. Calm now, talking quietly with Firecracker.

  Gunny hunchbacked his way back over to the group. “Plan B,” he announced.

  “I thought retreating to the house was plan B,” Scratch said.

  “Okay, Plan C then,” Gunny started, but was interrupted by Stabby.

  “Wasn’t Plan C barricading ourselves upstairs?”

  “Fine,” Gunny tried again, getting exasperated. “Plan D.”

  “Thought that was climbing up here,” Lars chimed in, the three boys grinning.

  “Would you friggin morons shut the hell up?” Gunny growled. “Next time I’m bringing Bastille and Bunny with me! Better than you useless tits.”

  That got them chuckling and Scratch finally got serious. “What’s up, Boss?”

  “The electric and phone lines run right over the top of the truck,” he said. “All I have to do is shimmy out there on them, drop down on the roof, get in on the driver’s side, and lead this pack off. If you stay quiet, they should all chase the truck. I’ll get turned around up the road, do the zombie snowplow thing and pull up next to the porch. You guys just hop over and climb in. Can of corn.”

  “A what?” Stabby asked.

  “Hillbilly vernacular for easy as pie,” Scratch said.

  They were looking at him like he’d lost his mind. “You got a better idea? Wanna stay up here and smell what Scratch is planning on leaving for us over in the corner?”

  That got them falling all over themselves agreeing that it was a genius plan, best one ever, it should have been Plan A all along, and they started duck walking their way over to the end of the house.

  They climbed out onto the roof as quietly as they could, the milling crowd around the house never looking up. Now that he was out here and looking at it, Gunny was having second thoughts about his idea. He wondered how long the horde would stay gathered around the house before they wandered off. Basing what he knew about them from the three days at the truck stop, probably never, unless they were drawn away by something. He wasn’t going to stay cooped up in an attic for days with no water, in the hopes they would wander off on their own.