The Zombie Road Omnibus

by David A. Simpson

  The men looked at each other and both shook their heads.

  “We’ve got family here. We’ve got to check, Sir.” He paused, gathering his thoughts as he glanced around at the littered corpses of men, women and children.

  “It sounds like a good place, we’ll be down, but we’ve got to check. We can’t just leave without knowing.”

  “Understandable. I’d do the same thing. You boys know how to handle a gun?” Cobb asked.

  “Yes, Sir,” the taller said. “We’re from Kansas.”

  “Hollywood, go grab them some rifles, some pistols, and ammo,” he said, looking around and seeing Lars standing there.

  “Jellybean’s got a bunch under his bunk.”

  The men started to thank him, but he cut them off.

  “I’ll see if I can round up some volunteers to go with you. Get your families if you can, and get on the road down to Lakota,” he said. “Bring that bucket truck, we could use it down there. We’ll need you boys, too, if we want to get the electric going again. Don’t get yourselves killed.”

  With that he turned and clomped off, yelling at everyone to get mounted up, asking for a crew of volunteer guns to go on a rescue and for Preacher to get the fuel tanker up here.

  Lars handed them the guns then hustled off. Gunny and Collins shook hands with them, said they’d see them in a few days, and headed back to the Pete.

  They stopped a few miles from a sprawling cattle depot north of the Oklahoma border that night. Julio was still riding the touring BMW, and had been making it a point to open the gates of any of the meat plants or holding yards they passed, and this one was no exception. The cattle were already starting to die, the automatic feeders and waterers no longer working. He turned them out to fend for themselves. There might be great herds roaming the plains someday, if they weren’t too domesticated to survive. If they learned how to be wild creatures again.

  They had plenty of people now for guard duty, and Cobb didn’t hesitate to add any of the newcomers to the roster. No one complained and there was a festive atmosphere around the campfire that night. One of their last nights out in the open, they hoped. The new people that had fallen in with the convoy joined them and were introduced all around. Stabby and the boys kept everyone entertained with tales of the Crow City Radio Raid. Highly exaggerated, extremely inventive, with all of the depressing parts conveniently forgotten.

  Gunny and Collins quietly went around and rounded up all of the Three Flags fighters, and a few of the newcomers that claimed combat experience. They met at Griz’s lowboy and used it as a makeshift table, and with a few chem lights to illuminate the maps, Gunny gave a brief rundown of what they’d come up with as a battle plan for tomorrow. The General had given them a better breakdown on Lakota and it sounded idyllic for what they had in mind. It was near the dam, on the upriver side, and there was a small hydroelectric plant generating electricity for the surrounding communities. The town was old, originally in Indian Territory, and hadn’t changed much since the 50s. It was the county seat and still had slant parking at the courthouse. The GPS units still worked fine for mapping, but they wouldn’t pull up any of the points of interest or gas stations. All that information was stored in some massive computer somewhere, and was no longer available. The General said there were 1,900 residents, according to the last census, and from the looks of it they were all infected. The satellites hadn’t spotted any smoke from chimneys, or any lights on at night. Cobb said as long as they didn’t run into any trouble, they should be there by early afternoon. They were less than 300 miles away, which could be easily covered in five or six hours.

  The newcomers wanted to know how a handful of fighters were going to clean out that many people.

  “We let the rigs do the talking,” Griz said. “Same as Crow City.”

  “We’ll stop a few miles outside of town and drop the trailers,” Gunny added. “Scratch can run in and take out the majority of them. The rest of us will go in with a half dozen trucks and run a cross pattern through town. We’ll need to send rigs out on every road for miles around, pull any stragglers in and eliminate them.”

  “That’s the plan,” Cobb said. “Anybody got anything to add? Something we missed?”

  “We’ll have to clear, house to house,” one of the new guys said. “There will still be plenty of them trapped inside. It’s something we ran into when scavenging.”

  His friend, a dozen years his junior, nodded in agreement. They were both well-built and had their hair trimmed short. Both had been soldiers and then worked in the oilfields. Their own version of what Gunny and a lot of the truckers had done when they came back from the wars. Get a job where you didn’t have to deal with people all day every day. When everything went south, they’d been out in the field. They heard warnings of what was happening over their two-way radio and came back in with the varmint rifle out of the gun rack in their hands. The older of the two had lost his whole family. His wife had driven their kids into town to drop them off at school. They found her car wrecked into a pole and the doors standing open.

  They found the younger man’s wife and kids still at home, in their house out in the country. They hadn’t even known anything was wrong in the world until her husband came barreling up the driveway in the company truck, home three days earlier than she was expecting him.

  “We’ll probably start house to house the following day,” Gunny said. “Clearing with the trucks is easy, no risk involved. Door kicking will be dangerous. We’ve had some close calls and must be careful, or we’ll lose people.”

  They agreed. The plan they had was simple. Simple was good. It should be an easy run into their new hometown tomorrow morning. There were no large towns in the way, and the few smaller ones shouldn’t be too bad to bust their way through. After that, just easy two-lane blacktop all the way there.

  13

  Lacy

  Day 9

  The Elevator

  They awoke with a new determination, drank their coffee, and ate their soup and granola bars with purpose. Today was the day. It had been nine days since they’d been trapped. They had felt hope and hopelessness. They had made wise decisions and bad choices. They had drowned their sorrows, had given up all expectations of escape and drank like there was no tomorrow. They had bounced back after the blindingly drunken day of trying to forget, and the next day of trying to recover. They sat facing each other at the conference table once again as they ate. Optimism was in the room.

  Today was the day.

  Lacy HAD to get out of here and get her son. If he was still alive. It had been over a week, and she was still trapped in this damned building. He could still be stuck in the detention classroom. It was possible, although, in her heart she had mourned him the last few days. How could a teenager possibly survive all this on his own? That was the real reason why she drank to forget. But the new day brought new confidence. New hope. She would never forgive herself if she didn’t make every effort to get to him. Johnny wouldn’t forgive her either, when he came home and it turned out she gave up and just stayed in the high rise.

  Phil had quietly slipped out into the hall and listened at the emergency exit door. He hadn’t heard anything. Zed had wandered back down the stairs. They went over the plan one last time, looking for any flaws. It was a simple idea, and the biggest weakness was the improvised cord they were using. The six strands of braided Ethernet and electrical cables made for a stiff, and slick, rope. It was strong, though. Phil was the heaviest among them and he had swung on it, bouncing his weight. It would hold, and the knotted hand grips would help whoever drew the short straw to hang onto it.

  Phil would swing over onto the ladder and climb up a little way and tie himself off. He would pull in the slack of the rope from above, and hopefully whoever led the horde in would be quick enough to not get bitten.

  There were three long straws on the table and one short. Phil picked them up, hid his hands from them, then held them out. Short straw got to dangle as bait. The
other three would barricade themselves in the offices and stay quiet.

  Lacy was closest to him so she drew first.

  “I win!” she said brightly, trying not to burst out in tears while holding up the one straw that was half the length of the others. “With luck like this, I should have played the lottery.”

  There were grim smiles as everyone stood up to do their job. Mr. Sato and Alex went out into the entry hall to help Phil get swung over to the ladder at the back of the elevator shaft, while Carla taped carpet strips to Lacy’s arms and legs. They hadn’t found any gloves, wasn’t much call for them in sunny Atlanta, so she wrapped her hands and wrists loosely with the tape, reversing it the last few twists so the sticky part faced out. It may help her with the grip on the slippery rope. The carpet would act as padding, too, because she wouldn’t be wearing an extra guideline to stop her from smashing into the back wall. The idea was to outrun the dead once she propped open the door and got their attention. When they were suitably interested and came screeching in after her, she would run and leap into the open elevator doors. Phil was there to keep the slack reeled in, so she wouldn’t actually fall, just be dangling in front of the doors. All the undead would reach for her and fall lemming-like into the black chasm. She hugged Carla and walked a little stiffly out into the hallway. Phil was on the ladder. He’d tied himself securely to it, with both his hands free to reel her in once she started running. They helped her tie the makeshift rope into a harness they’d built, going from Carla’s memories of the one she’d used the last time she went zip-lining. It would do. It would have to.

  Alex, from accounting, hugged her and Mr. Sato bowed deeply, but she wasn’t going to let him get away with just that. She pulled him in tight and squeezed, trying to calm her fears, then pushed him away and back toward the law firms’ entry so they could bar the doors in case something went horribly wrong.

  “Okay, Phil,” she said once they were safely away. “Let’s do this.”

  “I gotcha, Mizz Lacy,” he said, “I won’t let you fall.” His voice fading as she walked toward the door.

  She opened it quietly, ready to spring back if any surprises were waiting for her, but it was all clear. Just random bits of clothes and shoes strewn about, and the smell of bodies a week dead. She used a man’s discarded wingtip oxford to wedge the door, then made sure the rope behind her wasn’t going to get caught on anything. No use being quiet now.

  “Get ready to pull me in!” she yelled back to Phil, then stuck her fingers in her mouth and whistled down the stairwell. The response was instantaneous and the roar was nearly deafening in the confined space. Lacy felt the rope go taut against her as she turned to head back to the open shaft doors. Phil, thinking she would already be running at top speed, gave a mighty yank to reel in the slack and pulled her off her feet. She landed hard on the slippery tile floor and screamed.

  The roar of the undead echoed down the corridor as the first of them were already running through the door straight at her. She tried to stand back up, to flee, but Phil was reeling her in too fast and keeping her off balance. She was in a half dragging crawl, trying to get her feet under her, but he kept jerking her down every time she almost had her balance.

  “Stop pulling!” she shrieked. “Stop pulling!”

  Three men were fighting each other to be the first to sink their teeth into her. Keening or screaming, they all had their mouths open wide, black eyes locked on her. Arms reaching, legs sprinting, fingers clawing the air.

  She managed to leap back up once he stopped pulling on the rope, and ran for the elevator, the stinking undead things screeching and grabbing for her only a few feet behind. The gibbering thing in the gore-splashed pinstripe suit stomped on the trailing rope and she was pulled up short as she leaped through the doors and out into the abyss. The plan of swinging over to the ladder with no slack in the rope was completely forgotten in the panic. She hung in the air, halfway to the ladder, for a second before she started falling. It followed, clawing and screaming at her as she reached for the greasy cables running down the middle of the shaft. Phil looked on in horror and tried to reel the rope in as fast as he could, but she was already on her way down. There was a good ten or twelve feet dangling and he braced himself for the jarring impact, both hands gripping as tight as he could, his face already in a grimace in anticipation of the searing pain that he knew was coming. The hungry mouths dove for her as gravity took over and she started plummeting. Her squeal of terror was cut short as the rope jerked tight, forcing the air out of her and slamming her into the cables. One part of the harness snapped and she found herself upside down and sliding out of it. She reached up and tried to right herself, but their arms were clawing at her, grabbing her hair, as they fell past and into the darkness below.

  They were coming out of the opening, some fifteen feet above her, leaping and reaching. She struggled furiously to pull herself upright, locking her legs so she wouldn’t fall out of the make-shift harness completely, trying to grab onto the slick cables. The onslaught of undead kept grabbing for her as they fell, bouncing her against the wires, swinging her back and forth like an out of control pendulum. One of them managed to land on her, further stretching the already tortured plastic rope, and she felt its teeth bite into the heavy carpet armor. Phil struggled to hold on, the line tearing into his hands. She shrieked and pounded at the undead thing until he was knocked off by another hungry body. They both went spiraling into the darkness before he could tear through to her skin. They smashed onto the growing pile of rotting flesh ten floors below with an exploding liquid and bone cracking sound. The greasy cables rubbed against her when she swung back the other direction, spinning out of control. The zombies kept rushing out of the door, her cries of terror drawing them forward. She was hanging upside down on a flimsy homemade rope, ten stories above certain death, with an undead horde leaping for her as she bounced and spun, pin-balling back and forth. She finally managed to grab a cable to stop her dizzying swings, the undead still flying past her. She squeezed through them and wrapped her arms and legs around the wires, head still spinning. She heard Phil then, yelling down at her, his voice frantic.

  “I’m good!” she hollered back up the shaft. “I’m clear of them now.”

  The bodies were still falling, and she could hear the splattering and squelching sounds they made when the impact would echo up the chamber. She managed to flip over so she wasn’t upside down, then pushed off the cables toward the back wall, and to the relative safety of the ladder. Her hands were greasy and she wiped them as best she could on the carpet strips, then started climbing back up toward the opening. They had stopped diving in after her in a bloodlust, but were still falling as they were pushed from behind. She didn’t know how many had plunged down into the darkness, it had been a rain of undead for a few minutes, but something in their brains finally registered that the first step was a big one. They stood on the threshold, peering into the black, but unwilling to leap into it.

  They tried calling to them and a few more were pushed over the edge, but the rest simply reached and keened. A most delicious treat just out of their grasp.

  “I’m going to have to give them a little incentive,” she told Phil after a few minutes. “I need to re-tie this harness then I’ll swing over toward them, let them get a good look at me.”

  She winced as she pulled the rope away from her chaffed and raw skin. It had bit and scraped her bloody in places.

  Phil nodded and started rewrapping the rope around his arms, getting a better grip. She found the break after wiping as much grease as she could off of her hands, and was retying it when she felt a warm drop of rain splash down. Except it wasn’t rain. It was red. It was blood. She looked up at Phil and saw him wrapping his hands with pieces of his shirt. The blood was soaking through and dripping down.

  “Oh, Phil,” was all she could say, her heart aching, when she saw his grimace of pain and determination. The rope had cut deep into his flesh when he had stopped her out of c
ontrol tumble. He didn’t utter a single word of complaint, just winked at her, and she saw his smile bloom in the dim light.

  “I told you I wouldn’t let you fall. We’re almost done, Miz Lacy. Just a few more minutes. We can deal with this.”

  When they had her securely fastened again, and Phil was set with the coils wrapped tightly around his arms, she took a leap of faith and swung out to the cables. They heard her and a few more fell into the abyss, but she needed to get them into a frenzy again. To have them charge at her. With Phil supporting most of her weight, she slipped back through the cables, got her feet against them and leaped right at the crowd standing in the open door, screaming at them. They roared in answer and the push for her was instantaneous. They reached and fell, each maddened by their need to bite, heedless and unaware of the 100-foot drop that awaited them. Lacy kept it up, taunting and swinging for them, coming within inches of their outstretched arms, actually grabbing some of them and pulling if they were a little reluctant to die the second death. She didn’t know how long they kept it up. The homemade ropes were cutting into her, and Phil could only support her for short periods before they both needed to rest. It seemed like it took forever, with the undead screaming and reaching for her. Something in their simple minds kept them from taking the first step over the edge, unless they were so frenzied they forgot and took the next step. There were hundreds of them and after the first frantic rush, the rest had to be lured and taunted over the edge. She repositioned her carpet pieces to make the harness more comfortable and tried to help Phil by padding his arms. She would leap out, pull a few more down, or get some in the front to fall from the crowd behind. It was tedious and painful work. She wished she just had a shepherd’s crook to pull them toward her. It took hours and she and Phil both were utterly exhausted by the time the last one reached out and then disappeared below. It fell into the squishy pile and suddenly the doors to the lawyer's offices across the hall sprang open. Mr. Sato, Carla and Alex were there, reaching for her to help pull her back to the safety of solid ground.