Eight hundred miles over their heads a mid-orbit satellite snapped their picture in startling clarity, capturing the fortified house and the collapsed stairs. It showed them calmly drinking, and enjoying the view, as a small crowd of undead milled around below them.
The General will be pleased, Sergeant Evans thought. He’ll have good news to tell Meadows. Looks like his family made it home safely.
6
Lacy
Day 7
10th Floor
There was a quiet desperation among them now. They had lost two people just trying to get down to the parking garage. Every avenue was cut off. The stairs had claimed Eric. Robert had died in the elevator shaft. The sidewalks were still packed with them, stumbling around and bumping into things. They couldn’t smash a pane of glass, rappel down, or lower the window washing platform manually. They were trapped, and no one knew what to do. They were out of ideas. Despair settled over them. They sat glumly at the table and Alex poured them glasses of Scotch. It was too early to drink, but the burn felt good, in a bad way.
They got drunk.
It hadn’t been the plan, but as they sat and stared out at the dead city, it had happened. None of them were in the habit of drinking during the working day, but one drink became two as they tried to bury the feelings of hopelessness. Two became three as they toasted the memory of everyone they had lost. Three became four and by early afternoon, they were either giggling at everything, or weeping in the corner. They kept drinking. Hard liquor on empty stomachs.
Cognac, Whiskey and Gin.
Brandy, Rum and Tequila.
Tomorrow, they told themselves…tomorrow we’ll sober up and figure something out.
They drank like college kids on a frat party binge. Too much, too quickly, and with no concern about making fools out of themselves. They threw up and slugged down another shot to wash the taste out of their mouth.
Tonight we drink, for tomorrow we may die.
Mr. Sato told them of his loneliness being assigned to this office in the States. His wife of thirty-seven years was back in Tokyo, with his children and grandchildren. They lived in a city of thirteen million people. He had no hope of ever seeing them again.
Alex told of his failed marriage, and his children that he was a rotten father to. His wife had left him and moved back to New Jersey last year. He had no hope of ever seeing them again.
Carla told of one broken relationship after another, the cycle of abuse, and of cheating boyfriends. She lived alone in an apartment and had lots of acquaintances, but not any close friends. Her family were immigrants from Cuba and were all still down in Miami. She had no hope of ever seeing them again.
Phil was the only person, other than her, that had family in town. It was large and extended, with cousins and aunties and step brothers and sisters all over South Atlanta. Down in an older part of the city. Small, blighted houses occupied by the working-class poor who never seemed to have the money for food and mortgage payments, let alone any extra for home maintenance.
Lacy cried over Jessie, trapped in a room for over a week with other students. They were teenagers. She knew they wouldn’t have stayed and starved to death, so was guessing that he was now one of the walking dead things.
They toasted family members who were surely departed from this mortal coil.
They clinked glasses, spilling whiskey and wiping tears.
They smashed computers and laughed. Screamed in anger, and cried without shame. Had rolling chair races through an obstacle course of desks and bookcases. Mourned for the families they knew were gone.
They drank in a frenzy, trying to forget the reasons they were drinking.
They scattered case files in the air, covering the floor.
They belted out Elvis tunes at the top of their lungs, dancing on desktops.
They read divorce papers aloud and decided who got screwed, and who did the screwing.
They lined up hundreds of law books to topple them like a row of dominoes, then built houses with them like they were decks of cards.
They did everything they could think of, and anything they wanted, to take their minds off of their troubles.
They were in a blind haze by the time the sun was setting over the western horizon.
They forgot to remember, and one by one, they dropped off into a deep and dreamless sleep, passed out on couches or the floor.
It was mid-morning when Lacy awoke, her eyes crusted closed, head pounding, stomach roiling and with a thick, nasty tasting, fur covered tongue. At least that’s what it felt like. She moaned, then made her way into one of the bathrooms, barely in time to prevent another vomitous mess on the floor. After the purge she made her way to the kitchen, filled the biggest saucepan she could find from the water cooler, then went back to one of the Williams and Williams executive bathrooms. She stripped off and lay down on the cool tile of the shower. The porcelain felt good against her throbbing head. She gave herself a sponge bath and washed her clothes, then rummaged around in the medicine cabinet for a toothbrush and aspirin. There wasn’t anything that actually fit her in the closet but a pair of shorts that had a drawstring and an oversized Oxford. It would do. She felt somewhat better and walked around to the others, who were starting to rouse themselves, passing out cups of water and a handful of aspirin.
They sat around the table in the conference room again, morosely sipping at soup or coffee, snacking on crackers or chips, none of them feeling well enough to try to eat anything too heavy. Not that there was much of a choice left in the cabinets. At least no one had died of alcohol poisoning. The offices were still a mess with scattered papers, piles of vomit in the planters, and smashed computers.
“I can’t live like a rock star anymore,” Phil said, massaging his temple. “I’m too old.”
That got a few amens, then talk turned back to the elephant in the room they had managed to forget for a few hours. Ideas from hazy brains on how to escape.
Tumbling the stairwell with copiers and printers, crushing them?
How would we get out then?
Go back down the shaft and try to kill them one by one as they came in the elevator, like we did leaving the office?
There would soon be a substantial pile too high in the elevator for us to get past them.
What if that one zombie was all there was in the garage?
What if it wasn’t?
Burn them all in the stairwell?
Anybody got a can of gas handy? Still have the problem of immovable piles of bodies stacked up against the door we need.
Lure them into the hallway, into the elevator shaft, and let them fall in.
How do you make them do that?
Use bait.
What bait?
They all knew the answer and let that one slide as they kicked around other ideas.
Throw a grappling hook over to another building and climb over?
Yeah, right.
They spent the entire waning afternoon going back and forth with different ideas, some ludicrous, some well-reasoned, and in the end, they circled back to luring them down the elevator shaft. It was feasible. They had the materials to make it happen, and the two banks of elevators were separated by a concrete support wall. If they filled one up, there was still the other to use as a backup plan, if the stairwell couldn’t be utilized for some reason. They still had an escape route if this turned out to be a total bust.
It was settled. They would do it in the morning when they were well rested. Tomorrow, they were getting out of here.
7
762 Miles to Go
Day 8
The next morning as they were getting ready to leave the oilfield, Griz was having trouble with the brakes on his Lowboy. They were locked up.
“C’mon Griz,” Scratch taunted him. “What’s wrong with that old junk? You don’t know how to take care of it?”
Griz was getting frustrated, the whole convoy was waiting on him as he crawled around under the wagon, tapping on the bra
kes with a hammer.
“I don’t know what the Fu…uh, heck is wrong,” he complained, squirming out from under it, adjusting his language after eyeballing Kim, who was with the rest of the people gathered around. Scratch kept looking at an imaginary watch and tsk-tsking, talking loudly about inept truck drivers who didn’t maintain their equipment. Griz was getting red in the face, his clothes were getting all dirty from crawling around under the trailer.
“You’re not helping,” he said. “It was fine yesterday when I parked it!” His annoyance and embarrassment were building at the constant badgering from Scratch and the sniggers from some of the others.
“What do you think, Detective? Is this an arrest-able offense? Willfully detaining the President and his entourage?” Scratch asked Collins as Griz brushed bits of dried grass from his hair.
Tommy walked up to see if he could help and noticed right away that the air lines had been switched. The release line had been traded out with the braking line. Somebody had swapped the glad-hands around, causing the brakes to be locked all the time.
“Think I found your problem,” he said, and switched them, putting them back in their proper order.
Griz was thunderstruck. He just stared with his mouth open in disbelief then started scanning the crowd, his eyes going immediately to Scratch. His embarrassment and frustration had a new target.
“I should have known…” he growled, brandishing the hammer.
“What?” Scratch protested “I didn’t do anything.” But he couldn’t control the laughter bubbling up out of him and the big goofy grins on the other two’s faces made it obvious they were in on it too.
“RUN!” Lars yelled and they all took off for Scratch’s truck, cackling like loons the whole way, with Griz hurtling black curses at them, prophesying their imminent and painful futures if he caught them.
“You better run, you gleeful little bastards!” he yelled after them, giving up after only a short sprint.
“Language, Mr. Griz!” Scratch shouted back from a safe distance. “I’ll tell Kim on you!”
They found a small station that sold diesel later that morning and went through the routine of scouting, perimeter defense, and refueling. Most of the trucks could have driven another 500 miles before they needed diesel, but it was best to keep them full. They were saving the fuel in the tanker truck for emergencies. When Gunny finished topping off, he pulled around to stage for their departure. He was getting anxious, eager to get going, half tempted to try to hurry things up by bringing in ZZ’s truck and having two PTO’s filling the rigs. It had been a week since the texts from Jessie and Lacy. He checked his phone a few times a day still, but he no longer had any hope of receiving more messages. He wished he could just drive nonstop until he got there and forced himself to remember he had to get this crew to Oklahoma first. He couldn’t just hammer down to Atlanta, and then be promptly buried in an avalanche of undead. He needed a good team, a good plan, a good place to take his family and any other survivors he was sure to find.
The phone messages that General Carson’s team had been able to pull before everything went down were promising. Lacy’s bunch had run into a little trouble and didn’t make it to the roof. She hadn’t mentioned what kind of trouble, but how hard could it be to ride the elevator up to the top? They realized no Army helicopters were coming to get them, and they were working on something else. The eventual goal was to get to the house, wait for him there. They’d played the “what if” games around the dinner table over the years. The “what if there was a terrorist attack” and “What if there was an earthquake.” The answer to everything had always been the same in the end. Get to the house. It was in an old subdivision with big lots and many of the original owners had bought two or three adjoining parcels to “give themselves some breathing room”, as they called it. They lived on a lake, and although he wouldn’t actually call themselves preppers, they’d learned a few things from his military career. They were probably much better suited than most of the rest of the families. There was plenty of food, and the house was easily defended with only one entrance door at ground level. If she took a chainsaw or an ax to the rear deck legs and knocked it down, there would be no access from the back of the house. Too bad the house was all electric. If they had a propane gas hot water heater and stove, they wouldn’t even be inconvenienced by the end of the world. They were on city water so, in theory, it could stay running for years. However long it took them to empty out the water tower. It was gravity fed to all the houses, and it was supposed to hold enough to supply the community for a few days. Gunny had no idea how many gallons it held. A hundred thousand? Two hundred? But what were the chances of every water tap in the whole area being turned off? If there were a fire somewhere and pipes got broken, or somebody crashed into a hydrant, the water would just gush out until the tower was empty. They had the lake for fish and water as long as the house wasn’t surrounded, and they had plenty of guns and ammo in the big safe. Gunny was a bit concerned about that, though. If Lacy got in the safe, she would find all the receipts for the guns he’d bought over the years. Maybe she wouldn’t. He hoped not. He had some guns he’d paid $1500 for in there. The same ones he’d told her he’d just done a little horse trading for. But he had to laugh at himself. Even in a Zombie Apocalypse, he was wary of her wrath.
Jessie, on the other hand, he WAS worried about. His first text was basically a WTF is going on, but the second sounded like him and a bunch of kids had a plan to get out. Gunny didn’t know if that was safer than staying in the school or not, he wasn’t there and he trusted Jessie’s judgment, to an extent. “I mean, after all,” he thought, “he was a teenager and they ain’t the sharpest knives in the drawer when it comes to decision making.” But he had a lot of skills kids much older than him didn’t have. They had done some camping and woodcraft over the years. Not so much once he reached his teens and was entirely too cool to be seen hanging out with his parents. He was in good shape, could run circles around his old man on the few occasions they went jogging around the lake. He knew guns, had been shooting them since before he could walk. If they happened to run across any before he made it home, Gunny didn’t doubt that Jessie would make use of them, if need be. He didn’t have a license, but he could drive. Gunny hoped they didn’t try to get a car. The only way you learned that those things would follow the car noise forever, was when you found out for yourself. And by then, it was usually too late. You would have scores of them dog piling you when you stopped.
The teams were getting quicker, they were starting to mesh together. They still did a few drills in the evenings with Griz and Collins, and things were being done automatically, without a lot of unnecessary communication. They were learning each other’s moves and habits. Bridget, the movie star warrior, as they had called her behind her back, was always there, even though she wasn’t on the team. She was turning out to be a quick study, and worked harder than any of them to learn and practice what they taught her. She had been riding with Packrat. Gunny figured she must have thought anything was better than riding in the bus with Bastille. She probably had to fill bags of trash just to find the passenger seat. When he asked him about having her as a passenger, thinking the old codger would make a joke about her boobs or something, he said all she does all day long is practice reloading and quick draw drills. Lars had even shown her the one-handed slide lock trick, and she had mastered it. She’d tear down her gun and reassemble it a hundred times. She did it sitting down, standing up, and one handed. She would even do it with her eyes closed, and then pick his brain about his army days. He wasn’t so quick anymore, but he remembered the things he’d learned in his youth. He taught her about knife fighting and throat punches and everything else he could think of. He was a blow hard and knew it all and had done everything you ever did but better but he did have a wealth of knowledge to go along with the annoying personality. They would talk about movies and what was actually possible, and what she should never try to duplicate. She practiced
incessantly, seven or eight hours a day. At first she got blisters on her hands that broke and bled. Tears danced in her eyes and blood smeared her gun, but she continued with the drills. Her hands started turning hard, blisters turned into calluses, and her speed increased.
Gunny stopped his wool-gathering when he heard Sara zoom past him. Scratch was finished and he saw Collins jogging up to climb aboard. They had plotted a new route for Crow City. It was a little over a hundred miles away, hopefully they would make it in a few hours, if they didn’t run into any trouble. They rolled through the high plains as the morning wore on, the CB chatter light and almost carefree between the trucks. All of the oil pumps they passed were still and silent. They passed a few people walking near their homes, most of them armed and in pairs. The trucks blew by, waving at them and Julio would swing out from his position near the end of the convoy to briefly tell them where they were going and why, Scratch was on constant lookout for any followers running up behind them.
The Zombie Road Omnibus Page 38