Dozer got quiet, staring off into the setting sun, occasionally taking a pull off of his cigarette.
“They didn’t like us here at first,” he continued after a minute. “But once they realized we weren’t kidding, the dead were alive and walking around trying to eat people, we came to an understanding. We’d be security, we’d be the town's eyes and ears and guards and in return, they’d feed us and help us get my farm producing again.”
“Sounds like a good trade-off,” Gunny said. “How many of you made it in?”
“Eighteen of us,” he replied. “I started out with thirty-six full members and a couple of prospects. The van had some of the ol’ ladies in it, the trucks had some more. None of the guys riding double made it. Have you had to fight your way out of a city?” he asked. “It’s a nightmare. I lost my .45 somewhere trying to save our Sergeant-at-Arms. The only thing that kept me from getting infected was they couldn’t chew through leather. It was rough.” He finished, field stripping his cigarette and tucking the filter into his pocket. “It was rough.”
Gunny could only imagine. The worst they’d seen was the outskirts of Reno in a semi-truck. It was rough was probably the understatement of the year, describing fleeing from inside a city of millions on a motorcycle.
“Look,” Dozer said. “Why don’t you guys all come down for a shindig tonight. They’ve got plenty of food, most of the crops they usually sell didn’t get bought before all this went down. If you help us with guard duty, we can all have a little fun.”
17
Lacy
Day 10
The Range Rover fired up instantly, and when the shifter knob popped up from the console, Phil twisted it to drive. He noticed the grips of a gun sticking up, wedged between the seat and the console. A gold plated, pearl handled .45. The tires squealed on the concrete like every car does in a parking garage. He was in control, hadn’t floored it to do a smoking burnout, and kept telling himself slow is fast. Slow is fast. Like a mantra in his mind, trying to keep focused and not panic. Driving like a nut would get them killed. Just like in weapons training, slow sure movements practiced relentlessly became eye-blink quick. Slow is fast. But not too slow. He whipped around the car backed against the stairwell doors that was half blocking the lane. He gave it some gas and above the quiet music coming from the speakers, they could hear the screams and keens of the undead coming for them.
The bar across the exit was down, but Phil didn’t slow. It snapped at the breakaway point when he hit it, smashing noisily against the gold plated bumper guard and sprung out toward the first of the undead running for them from the street. They toppled clumsily, but were leaping back to their feet and giving chase as he zipped down the road, dodging badly parked cars with doors mostly open. If the outbreak had started an hour or so later, this part of downtown would have been impassable with gridlock. As it were, only the earliest of the early birds had made it in. They would run into heavy traffic on the outskirts of town, where the blue-collar folks had to be at work by five or six in the morning. Phil hoped by the time they hit those roadblocks of cars, there would be enough wiggle room to get around them by running on the sidewalks, or through peoples’ yards. Lacy lived in a bedroom community south of the circle freeway and Phil’s family lived in the Lakewood Heights area of older homes and high poverty. They were going to go through his neighborhood first, see if there were any signs of life.
Ten stories above them, there were cheers from the three that stayed behind. They watched as the only vehicle on the streets sped away south out of the city.
Phil was a good driver, expertly dodging cars, bumping up over sidewalks when he needed to, and not getting riled when one of the undead sprang out at them, slamming against the Rover. Even while driving using only his fingers because of his damaged hands, he easily kept the vehicle under control. When she commented on it, he just grinned at her and said, “I wanted to be one of those drivers for executives at one time. I took some of those defensive driving classes. You know, in case of a kidnap attempt or something. They teach you how to use the car as a weapon and stuff like that.”
He swerved around a woman in a flapping house coat and the mailman running beside her, both with open mouths and arms outstretched, reaching for them.
Lacy held onto the grab handle as the jacked-up SUV rocked hard on its shocks. They were out of the high-rise district and running down residential streets, paralleling the main roads where ever he could. They could see the undead swarming in their wake, chasing them as they zig-zagged their way south. As they were nearing Phil’s neighborhood, they could see that it was burnt out. Entire blocks of houses were now blackened shells and collapsed piles of cinder. They had seen the smoke from these fires their first days trapped on the twenty-eighth floor. They had raged unchecked, stopped only by the four-lane road on one side, and the freeway on the other. The flames had jumped from the overhanging trees across the South River and would have still been burning down the city if the ribbon of the highways hadn’t stopped it. The last time Atlanta had been this devastated was when General Sherman left it in smoking ruins when he departed on his March to the Sea, some one hundred and sixty years ago.
Phil was grim-faced as he made his way through the ruins, only an occasional house left mysteriously untouched by the flames. The horde was catching up to them as he kept slowing at different addresses, seeing the shell of a house and moving on.
He finally accepted the truth that Lacy had already seen, as soon as they saw the blackened stubs of buildings. There was no one left. If they somehow survived the initial outbreak, they hadn’t survived the fires. Occasionally they saw charred piles of corpses surrounding a burnt-out shell. The undead had remained at whatever house they were trying to get into, at wherever there had been living people inside. They ignored the flames until they were engulfed by them. The individuals in the houses never had a chance. Run out of the door and be eaten, or remain inside and be cooked alive.
Phil made his way back toward Moreland Avenue, the five-lane wide firebreak that had saved the other neighborhoods, and picked up speed. He left behind the hundreds of followers stumbling over themselves as Lacy gave him directions toward her house, hoping it hadn’t suffered the same fate.
The little bedroom community on the lake was maybe twenty miles south of downtown and they stayed on the backroads. Once they got past the circle freeway and into the industrial areas, the number of zombies charging out after them seemed to trickle down to just a few here and there. Most of these businesses weren’t open when the infection started spreading so exponentially fast. They were approaching a junkyard with its high metal fences topped with razor wire and noticed a crowd of the undead at the gate, listlessly trying to get through it. The Range Rover was quiet and they didn’t notice them as Phil slowed.
“Must be some people in there,” Lacy said.
Phil nodded and they looked at each other. To help or not to help, that is the question.
“Should we help?” he asked.
”Is it worth risking our lives for strangers?” They both thought.
There was a little Mexican cantina next door and as they slowed, the milling score of zombies turned to look at them, still unsure in their feeble minds what they were looking at.
“Hit the horn and we’ll at least draw them away,” Lacy decided. “The people inside can hit up that restaurant if all the zombies are gone.”
“Good plan,” Phil agreed. They would help, but not have to worry about getting killed in the process.
He laid on the horn button and they both jumped in surprise before cracking up laughing. Instead of the blatt they were expecting, the sound of horns playing Dixie came out from under the hood. Lacy couldn’t help herself. She gave a loud, “Yeehaw,” as they sped away, every single one of the undead leaving the gate and giving chase.
Phil kept the speed up, easily dodging around the accident at a red light and past the haphazardly parked cars and trucks. They kept the windows up and the a
ir conditioner was set on refresh, not pulling in air from outside, but it seemed like they could still smell the rotting flesh and odor of burnt plastics and wire from the fires.
As they approached her house, all humor left Lacy and her gut started churning in worry and fear. The neighborhood seemed quiet, but doors were open and windows were shattered. There was the occasional undead milling around in their ceaseless wanderings until they saw them, then the chase was on. Her community had been hit hard, too. One house after another had smashed windows and she could see in her mind how fast it all happened. All it took was one of them to turn. A simple glass window wouldn’t stop them. A lot of people had guns out here in the semi-rural areas, but she didn’t see many of the dead lying on the ground. One of her neighbors even carried when he walked his dog. He said he wanted any wanna-be thugs who might be scouting the area for easy pickings to know they might be leaving in a body bag. But guns didn’t stop these zombies unless you put a hole in their heads. How many people could do that?
“You have your keys ready?” Phil asked. “I’m going to pull in as close as I can to the door.”
When they approached the driveway, they saw the litter of corpses strewn all over the hillside and the garage door standing wide open. Without thinking about why it was like that, she pointed and yelled, “Pull in! Pull in!” and he sped into the empty interior, parking over the oil stain on the floor from the missing Mercury. Lacy had her door open and was grabbing for the garage door to pull it down before he was even stopped. It came down heavily and the automatic lights of the Range Rover came on, illuminating the interior. She ran for the house door, her key out, but it wasn’t locked. She pushed it open, Phil’s gun in her hand and called out. Softly at first, then louder.
“Jessie.” There was no answer.
“Jessie!” she yelled and the empty house mocked her with its soft echo.
Phil came in behind her, his big bandaged hands wrapped around the gold plated and heavily engraved .45 he’d pulled from between the seats. Lacy dashed from room to room, upstairs and down. She noted the plywood over the windows and the front door with cross bracing nailed to it. Johnny’s gun safe was wide open and there were guns spread out everywhere. They had been here. But now they weren’t. What could possibly make them leave? She came back upstairs and saw the look of concern on Phil’s face as he took in the house. The clothes laying around, the guns scattered everywhere, the complete disarray and chaos. It looked like a tornado had come through. Or a band of marauders looking for prisoners.
“It looks like he was here but someone took him, Mizz Lacy. Who could have done that?” Phil asked, checking the doors and windows, ensuring they were boarded up tight.
Lacy pushed some dungeons and dragons maps aside on the table and set Phil’s gun down.
“Nobody took him. This is how teenagers live,” she said, and motioned with her arm at the mess. She looked at the game pieces spread out on the table and the notepads at each chair. “There were four of them,” she declared. “One of them a girl.”
Phil looked at her with a hint of disbelief. “How can you tell one’s a girl?”
Lacy pointed at one of the notepads. ‘Thaleeza: High Elf Warrior Princess’ was written in a neat and looping hand across the top.
“And she’s wearing my perfume.”
“I only smell funk,” Phil said, and opened the sliding glass door to the deck.
“That’s teenage boy smell,” Lacy said, and joined him outside. They saw where the steps had been blown away from the deck and when she looked closer, there were splatters of blood, but just drops, not puddles that would be from big wounds. Someone had been hurt, but it didn’t look serious. They had left in Johnny’s old Mercury, so they weren’t zombies. Just dumbass teenagers. She was starting to get pissed. They had been here. ”They had been here, dammit!”
Why did they leave? Was it something urgent? Did they have no choice in the matter? She started looking around closely. She found the bloody old t-shirts at the bottom of the overflowing garbage can. There were still smears of blood here and there in the kitchen and bathroom that someone had done a half-ass job of cleaning. There was plenty of food still in the cupboards, and the cases in the pantry of Johnny’s favorites from Sam’s Club had hardly been touched. They didn’t leave to get food. They had plenty of water, with it being replenished in the rain barrel whenever it rained. They had dumped all her plants so more could be collected in the pots. She was annoyed when she saw her yucca plants being trampled by the half dozen zombies moaning below. Why didn’t they just use the waste bins from the bathrooms, or either bedroom, for that matter. Damn kids. They didn’t leave because they didn’t have water.
“Why did they leave?” she kept asking Phil. “They had everything they needed right here? It doesn’t make sense!”
Phil was looking over the guns still spread out, each one had the ammo it took stacked up next to it.
“It must have been something really important,” he said. “They were planning on coming back. Maybe we just missed them.”
That’s what Lacy was afraid of. They had taken off to get themselves killed, maybe even going to rescue her. If she could have gotten here a little sooner…
She checked the bottle on the gas grill. It was still heavy, still mostly full. They didn’t leave to get more propane.
She walked over to the sink and examined the unwashed dishes. The mold on the spaghetti sauce was already green and had spread over half the bowl. This was three or four days old, she guessed. If they went out and were expecting to come right back, something had gone wrong.
She picked up the bloody t-shirt and looked at it closer. It had been soaked through, the old blood dried and crusted now. She could see the gauze pad wrappers and the tiny Neosporin tube laying empty in the bottom of the trash bag. Maybe they went after medicine. Someone had a bad cut. She didn’t think it was life threatening. Not so bad they would bleed out, but maybe it was infected. She looked at the mess of the kitchen. The piled high dirty dishes. The counter tops with scraps of food on them. Okay. It was probably infected. Painful and probably filling up with puss. Maybe they went after some antibiotics. She looked at the crusted, moldy dishes. They were from days ago. They could be anywhere.
18
107 Miles to Go
Day 12
They decided to stay an extra day. Lakota could wait. There was much that could be done here to help the community set up defenses with their power equipment, generators, and helping hands. There hadn’t been any more satellite pictures of Gunny’s family, but that one had been enough. They were home safe and sound, so he didn’t mind the break.
They wound up making a run to a farming equipment sales shop a few towns down the road. Griz loaded up a midsize D6 bulldozer and a small track hoe on his Lowboy to aid in digging a deep trench across the only area of land connecting the community to the rest of the continent. In essence, they would be an island. They intentionally went slow and zig-zagged around, drawing in even more of the undead for Scratch to run down when they got near the settlement. The Hutterites had chosen well when they claimed the balloon shaped parcel and surrounding areas in the Oklahoma Land Rush of 1889. They had lost much of the outlying areas over the years, but every acre inside the confines of the winding river had remained in the hands of believers. It was easily defensible, had plenty of water, and the soil was rich. Cobb and Griz had wholeheartedly agreed it was worth the effort to set up defenses to stop the occasional straggler that may wander in over time.
When they departed, with warm goodbyes and assurances of visits and trade, they were only a few hours away from the “Promised Land”, as Preacher kept calling it. By 10 a.m., they were pulling into a grain elevator next to the railroad tracks, a mile out of Lakota. This would be their headquarters until they cleared the town. The trucks lined up in the parking lot and Cobb sent a crew in to make sure the buildings were empty. Scratch and Gunny took their rigs into town to start the process of drawing out
any of the undead and running them down. They zigzagged around the town for a few hours, driving up and down every road and alley, racking up the mangled and broken body kill count that should make for easy cleanup. When they got back to the grain elevator in time for a late lunch, Griz was just returning with his empty lowboy. It had been loaded with the bulldozer and track hoe. They had traveled a few miles out and found a good spot to dig a mass grave, in anticipation of the nearly 2,000 people that had populated the town. Now it was unloaded, waiting to go in and start stacking corpses on it to deliver them to the graveyard. The center deck was only a few feet off the ground so it would be easy to load the bodies and body parts on it. There was probably going to be a whole lot of retching at the carnage the new people would soon be facing.
Gunny didn’t have much of an appetite. He mainly just watched as the last of the men to eat picked over the fixings for the burgers that Cookie and Martha had grilled. The work he and Scratch had been doing the last few hours was disturbing and disgusting. He didn’t even like stomping on a spider in his house, and they’d been mercilessly cutting down humans by the hundreds. Probably a thousand or more. Most weren’t completely dead and would need to be finished off one headshot at a time. They were broken, but still vicious and hungry for flesh. They still had to go through the entire town, one building at a time, searching everywhere for those things. That was going to be dangerous. Who knows how many had been bitten and hid away, only to turn and be trapped in a closet or something. One step at a time, though. Today was ‘clear the streets’ day. They would go through them with all the able-bodied men they had available, and slowly and methodically shoot every single zombie in the head. Then they’d load them on Griz’s lowboy. They had thousands of rounds of .22 ammo and that was all it took to put them down. It would be hard, gut-wrenching work. There were women and children. Old and young. Some horribly disfigured and some looking almost normal. People would have to get used to it. Lose their lunch, if need be, then carry on. If they wanted to occupy this town, it was the only way. It would take a couple of days, then he could take off for Atlanta. He wished he knew how to fly a helicopter, it would be so easy then.
The Zombie Road Omnibus Page 47