The Zombie Road Omnibus

by David A. Simpson

  Jimmy Winchell was heading out with his crew to get another day of dozer work in when he stopped by the trucks to wish them well and tell them the pathway would be ready by the time they got back. He’d done a little heavy equipment work before he made it big in the music business and they had most of it graded smooth, ready for the containers. Tommy had spent a few hours making a rough rebar cage over the windows of the new D6 dozer. It may have been overkill, the glass was construction grade and thick, but they’d lost a few men and had some close calls underestimating the undead. An hour of effort now with a welder might save someone’s life.

  Sammy was coming in off of guard duty and told them, “If you see him out there, please kill that bastard that stole my Mustang.”

  Collins was in her neatly pressed uniform, hair in a tight bun under the cowboy hat she found, her mirrored shades reflecting Griz’s nervous grin.

  “Well, I’ll, uh, see you around uh, in a few days,” he stuttered to her.

  “You’d better,” she said, her face unreadable. “I’ll be waiting.”

  Griz smiled, and not knowing what else to say, turned and started for the trucks, nearly skipping along. She said she’d be waiting. For him. He almost started whistling.

  Scratch and Carl were both saying their goodbyes to the women in their lives, Carl a little more expressive with Tina, locked in a deep and long kiss. With Cobb and Martha both standing there, Scratch didn’t dare try anything like that and was surprised when Kim stood up on her tiptoes and kissed him hard on the lips, then ran back inside the café.

  Griz grabbed them both by the backs of their shirts as he walked by.

  “Come on, lover boys. We’ve got work to do,” he said, while pulling them toward the trucks.

  Carl and Scratch rode with Gunny in the modified F-250. Once they got it lined up with the tracks and the steel wheels lowered, all they had to do was set the cruise control and watch out for obstacles. He didn’t have to steer, the rails kept them going in a straight line, and Carl insisted they shouldn’t go more than 35 miles an hour. After about 10 minutes of that, Gunny started bumping the cruise control up and soon they were moving along at a pretty good clip, edging right up to about 50. The miles clicked and clacked by, with them taking turns with the binoculars to look for long distance blockages. The Missouri-Kansas line became the Union-Pacific as they paralleled Route 69, steadily rolling south. They ran into their first trouble a half hour later at a rail crossing in McAlester. It was blocked by a car on the tracks with its door standing open. It was a small city and there were many intersections. Gunny hoped they all weren’t going to be jammed. The town was crawling with the undead and they started making their way toward the trucks when they heard them roll into town. It had been two weeks since the infection started and most of them weren’t as fast or agile anymore. They were slowly starting to deteriorate, some of their movements jerky and uncoordinated. But not all of them, not the ones more recently turned. Gunny could hear some of them screaming from blocks away as he hurriedly pulled on his heavy canvas jacket.

  “The battery is likely dead, but I bet the keys are still in it,.” he said as Scratch opened the sunroof and stood on the seat.

  “I’m going to push it out of the way before we get too many showing up.”

  He jumped out with the modified Wal-Mart shotgun and started blasting at the three running in from the left as Scratch started sending spent brass dancing across the roof from his AR.

  The keys were in the ignition, still in the on position. The driver had put it in park, then opened his door to see what was going on. It had sat there idling until it ran out of gas, the door chime dinging for days before the battery finally gave out. Gunny dropped it in neutral and cut the wheel hard, hoping there was enough room to clear the car in front. With a quick glance over his shoulder to make sure there wasn’t anything about to tear his face off, he put his back into it and shoved the little Toyota off the tracks and into the oncoming traffic lane. It rolled down the slight incline and came to rest as it bumped into an old Dodge. By the time Griz and Lars pulled up behind him in their trucks, Gunny was already back in the cab and rolling again.

  The rest of the intersections were clear and soon they were back up to speed, leading a herd of zombies out of the town and stumbling down the tracks after them.

  “This might get dicey once we get to Dallas,” Lars said over the CB. “We might have hordes of them coming at us from both ends.”

  Carl took the microphone from the dash and using his best trucker lingo said, “Breaker One Nine. That’s a negatory, Hollywood. Once we hit Dallas, most all of the crossings are bridges or tunnels. Over.”

  Gunny tried to hide his smile as Scratch told him he was really good with the trucker talk. He should check on Griz. His CB handle was Grizzly Billy and make sure to say “good buddy”.

  Carl did and was shocked when the radio lit up again with a string of profanity, most of it directed at Scratch, who was braying loudly and spraying a mouthful of potato chips on the window.

  “What did I do?” Carl asked, and Gunny could only shake his head, his shoulders moving in quiet laughter.

  “You called him queer,” Scratch finally was able to answer when he got it under control. “A bend-over Billy is a truck stop prostitute. Like a lot lizard, but a dude. And a good buddy is a gay guy.”

  Carl was aghast and his face showed it.

  Gunny took pity and quickly told him not to worry about it. Griz knew who the culprit was. It there was going to be any payback, Scratch would be on the receiving end of it, not him.

  He lowered the binoculars and reached for the mic.

  “Hand me that, will you? I’ve got something to put him in a good mood.”

  “Hey, Griz,” he said, when there was a pause in the tirade. “Look to your right in about a half mile, tell me what you see.”

  He acknowledged and went back to ripping Scratch a new one. When he was still in the middle of letting him know about a rumor he was going to start about a certain one-armed cretin and his incurable crotch rot problem, he stopped and they heard him exclaim in pure joy.

  “Can we stop?” he asked.

  “We need to stick to plan A for now. But guess where we’re going as soon as we get those containers back?”

  They all watched as their trucks rolled down the tracks past the McAlester Army Ammunition Plant that had its own rail lines going into the base. Every type of military ordnance they could ever want was right there, only a short ride from Lakota. Gunny hadn’t even known this place was here, but thinking back, he was pretty sure the General had. Cobb, too, probably. Another instance of people smarter than him making sure he had the tools to get the job done. He bumped the cruise control up another notch. They still had a long way to go before they got to the intermodal yards of Dallas.

  The morning turned to afternoon and other than switching a few tracks in the right direction to take them on the route they wanted, it was a peaceful ride. Carl had all of his notes organized and the truck GPS they were using was easy to follow, the train tracks were shown on it as well as the bridge heights and steep crossings that lowboy trucks couldn’t get over. The path to the freight yard they wanted was well marked and easy to read. They were a little surprised they hadn’t run into any trains stopped on the tracks, but the way Carl explained it, with all the safety protocols of the rail industry, it was unlikely an engineer would turn while operating a train. With all of the uncertainty that first day of the outbreak, the trains would have been sidelined until they knew what was going on.

  They needn’t have worried, though. The tracks were clear all the way in. They didn’t know if they were incredibly lucky, or the railroad protocols were just that good. The intermodal yard they chose was huge. There were thousands of containers stacked three and four high, the empty ones even higher. It was deserted, but they were sure there were some of the undead lurking, making their way toward the noise. As soon as they got the trucks off the tracks, Lars went
down to the main entrance gate to close it. The terminal was in a heavy industrial area and there probably weren’t too many people around when the virus started taking over. Hopefully the undead would have a hard time getting to them once they started making a racket. There were a lot of fences, buildings and walls surrounding them, and the whole train yard itself was enclosed, except for the tracks as they came in. It would keep most of them out. They went in pairs everywhere, one man always watching for danger while the other did the jobs they had to do. Within twenty minutes they met back at the trucks for an assessment of the situation and to start the next steps. Everything looked good. They had killed a couple of zombies, but the place seemed empty of them now. The locomotives hooked up to the rail cars under the gantry were AC 6,000’s and Carl was sure he could operate them. He’d qualified for them on the train sim he played and the controls looked the same in real life. Gunny and Scratch had been doing a container and railcar count and there were more than enough to get the 400 cars they needed. The train under the gantry was over 100 long and there were hundreds more empty cars in the rail yard adjacent to them. Dallas-Fort Worth was the primary staging and transfer area to all points of the map and the yard stretched for miles, row after row of cars lined up on the tracks waiting to be coupled with the train going their way.

  A few hundred containers were waiting to be unloaded, already on cars parked on the side tracks. Carl and Griz went to find locomotives to join them with the train already on the main line. Gunny and Scratch went to find the best reach stackers they could and try to determine some way to load them onto a flat car. This was a huge facility and they had their choice of a half dozen of the “Big Reds”. They picked the two that looked like they were in the best shape. The newest ones. The others looked pretty rough, like they’d been ridden hard and put up wet. Lars and Julio went for the gantrys and began trying to figure out how to operate them to start loading the empty railcars.

  Within hours, they had built the train on three rails, ready for the last two connections in the morning. The odd zombie that came running in got crushed with either the stackers, or by the huge tires of the gantry cranes. Most of the cars had already been coupled, so that saved them a lot of time joining each one and hooking up the air brake hoses. It would be four hundred and twelve cars long. Over eight hundred of the forty-foot containers and a few cars of twentys. Four flatbed railcars, with two reach stackers strapped to them, and all three pickup trucks were in the middle of the line. The plan was to stop the train so the stackers could be unloaded quickly and start building the wall, one on either side of the tracks. If they could get thirty or forty containers down in either direction, it would probably be enough to stop the followers. Put some guys with guns on top of the containers and that would keep their attention so they don’t spread out and find the end of the wall. Carl was going to put two locomotives up front, two in the middle, and two on the end to act as pushers. They could have left the train split into three, using a pair of the 6,000-horsepower twin turbo locos on each, but Carl said it would be better to put them all together. Something about tractive values and slippage. None of them understood, just nodded their heads in agreement. They could uncouple later if they needed to. The train would stretch out over four miles when they put it together and although there were minor differences in the models, they were similar enough that he could talk them through any problems they might have after they were under way. They were making outstanding time. Gunny had planned on three or four days to make this trip but here it was, the evening of day one, and they could be home by midnight if they wanted.

  They were in the high offices of the rail-yard, the first chance any of them had had to slow down all day. It was almost like an airport traffic control tower with all the windows overlooking the yards. They were eating the food that Martha had packed, picking through it for their favorites since there was plenty. Carl had gone over the controls of the diesel-electric locomotives with all of them and had made note cards on how to do everything from operating the throttles, to emergency braking procedures. They had all played with them a little, driving them forward and backward and it looked like it would be a pretty easy job tomorrow. Gunny didn’t want to roll up on Lakota at night with a horde of undead screaming in behind them. When he spoke to Wire Bender on the Ham, Cobb was planning on having every gun they had on the outskirts of town ready to blast away until the wall was in place.

  “One other thing,” Wire Bender had said before they signed off. “Tommy is chomping at the bit here. He needs to know how high the rail car is that you put the forklifts on. He said he can weld up a couple of portable ramps so we can drive them off and get that wall started ASAP. Maybe even get a lot of it done before the horde gets here.”

  There weren’t enough couches to go around. Even though they played a game of rock, paper scissors for them, and Scratch won, he only mumbled vague threats under his breath when Griz rolled him off of it and onto the floor.

  “I owed you that,” was all he said as he got comfortable and soon the five of them were nodding off into sleep. Julio had drawn first guard shift so he settled himself in with a good view out of the windows.

  32

  Train to Lakota

  Day 18

  They were up at dawn and within an hour they had the trains coupled and were struggling to get up to speed. Carl was in the lead engine and by using the com’s system in the locomotives, he had everyone accelerating evenly and giving him a constant update on the readouts on the computer screens. Although the trains were complicated to master, they were simple enough that nearly anyone could make them go or stop. In another half hour, they were moving along at a steady 35 miles an hour, slowly picking up speed and had an anticipated arrival time of high noon. There were only two real curves they had to go through and Carl had them slowing down miles in advance. The undead were coming for them in droves. The train engines and the clacking of the tracks could be heard for miles, since they were the only sound. The zombies couldn’t find their way through the maze of flood ditches and fences when they heard them at the train yard, but now that they were rolling through the city and ‘burbs there were thousands of them coming. Just following the sounds. Maybe ten thousand by the time they got out of Dallas.

  Gunny was in the last pusher locomotive and he could see them all along the length of the train, being shredded to bits under the wheels, or careening off when they slammed into the cars. They were killing hundreds, leaving a path of splattered bodies in their wake, but there were thousands more joining the chase. He tried to estimate how fast they were running. The tracks were uneven and causing them to stumble a lot, but they never quit. They never tired. By the time they left the city, he couldn’t even see the end of them. The horde disappeared into the distance. They were running as fast as they could, but it looked like it was maybe jogging speed. Six or eight miles an hour. He pulled out his phone and opened the calculator app. They would beat them by about twenty hours if nothing went wrong. The wall had to be up. They couldn’t withstand ten thousand of them without it. No way. They could get the first mile of it built without too much trouble, but every container they placed meant the round trip took that much longer to get another one. Twenty hours was for the horde from Dallas. How many would they pull from the little towns they went through? McAlester was only a half hour away and how many people were in it? Ten thousand? How many would they pull? This wasn’t going to work. Why hadn’t somebody run the numbers before they came up with this idiot idea? Maybe they should have loaded all the lift trucks. Even if the junky ones broke down an hour after they started, that would have been that many more containers stacked. Damn. Coulda, shoulda, woulda. The trucks running into Dallas had been fairly quiet and they quickly outdistanced the runners, and with plenty of places for them to get distracted, very few had followed them all the way to the rail-yard. Running on the tracks was difficult and slow. But the thunder this behemoth made shook the ground. It was over four miles long. Every undead
thing that could run, walk, or crawl had plenty of time to latch onto the trail and follow the vibrations. He was going to get the whole town killed. He needed a Plan B.

  He checked his inventory again. He had his M-4, his Glock, and a few hundred rounds. It would do. Hopefully he wouldn’t even need it. He picked up the note cards Carl had made up and started thumbing through them, trying to memorize all the steps to braking and reversing so he wouldn’t have to consult them if he was under pressure. He set the controls, wiring the Deadman’s switch open, and left his seat. The train would basically drive itself until it ran out of fuel now. Ordinarily dispatch would have taken over and shunted it off to a siding track with the quick hack he did. They would have known. But there was no more dispatch. No one was monitoring for safety protocol violations. He thought about how Collins would react and grinned. Ol’ Griz was gonna have a handful. He opened the door and stepped out onto the catwalk, walking to the rear of the engine and onto the platform. They were still coming. He couldn’t see the main horde anymore, but the undead were coming in from both directions, following the sound of thunder. He wanted to speed up, even five more miles an hour would give them that much more time before the main body of undead came slamming into Lakota, but he had to trust Carl on this one. If he pushed him and the train derailed somehow, they would never get the tracks clear. They would probably have to leave Lakota for somewhere else. His mind was made up. He just hoped he could make the train do what he wanted.

  It was nearly noon when they barreled through McAlester, the tail end of the train not even in town by the time Carl was already out of the other side. On the long straight stretches, he had inched it up to 50 miles an hour, but wouldn’t go any faster. Fifty seemed plenty fast in a train, Gunny had to admit.