He had to be almost there, had to be almost to the train and the center of the horde. He’d slowed a lot, he was going less than twenty, and couldn’t force any more speed out of her. The tires were churning up dirt and blood and guts, and spraying rooster tails of gore. Gunny wasn’t even trying to steer arcs around them anymore, to spread the fuel to engulf as many as possible. He could barely steer as the tires rolled over the undead, half the time they were in the air, or squishing through gut-slick bodies. It was like driving on ice, and there were so many on the hood, it made seeing where he was going nearly impossible. From what he could see out of the side window, he knew he was bouncing his way toward the trench. The truck was straining and he split another gear. It wouldn’t be long before they ground him to a halt. He pulled on the mask, it was going to be soon now, and reached for the road flares. He knew if he popped the brakes to drop the trailer, he’d never get moving again. There were too many of them, he’d never grab traction in the bloody mud. Once he stopped, it was over. Should have disconnected that safety years ago, he thought. If he could get to the trains, if he could add their fuel to the blaze, he might kill enough of those things to give the town a fighting chance. There were still thousands of gallons left in the tanker, though. When it blew, maybe it would send flaming debris into the diesel spills.
He hadn’t planned to go out this way, blown up in a fireball while fighting zombies in a truck with the engine over-revving, temperature gauge climbing fast, white steam hissing from under the hood, tranny out of oil, the gears protesting, and black smoke belching out of the stacks. He wanted to die at home in his bed, surrounded by family. He felt weightless for a second, like that feeling he got when the roller coaster slowly made its way over the first and tallest hill and started its descent. Gunny floated out of his seat before slamming back down as the truck flew over the edge of the trench. The blade caught the dirt and crumpled, the hood folding in and the cab twisting, breaking the welds on the rebar and sending them flying. He felt the trailer splash open and pull the truck violently over on its side, whiplashing him through the shattered windshield. He slammed into a pile of the undead jammed between the crumpled hood and the twisted blade. They recovered fast and were coming at him with shattered legs and crushed bodies, but he was faster, leaping away from their reaching hands. His heart was in his throat as he looked around for the road flares. He had let go of them, they could be anywhere.
Plan B then. Or was it C?
He sprang to the edge of the trench and threw himself over, getting away from the thousands of gallons of gas splashing out of the tanker. Griz’ll shoot it with the flare gun, he thought. He just had to get far enough away that the blast wouldn’t blow him to bits. He might actually live through this, after all. He started running, but only made a few yards before he stumbled over a rut cut by his spinning tires and was tackled to the ground, a snapping biting thing trying to tear through the heavy fabric of the fire suit. He punched out but another body landed on him. Then another and soon he couldn’t even move as dozens of hands and teeth tried to tear into him. It was getting hard to breathe, he was being crushed.
“Shoot, Griz. Shoot,” was all he could think. “Man, don’t let me die for nothing.”
53
Lakota
Griz mounted the ladder next to the gate, his black and blue bruised knees protesting with every step, but he ignored them. This was almost over. One way or another, it was almost over. If those things swarmed over the walls, they’d be swarming through the courthouse a half hour later. Cobb stuck out his hand and helped him up the last few rungs. Scratch was there, linking machine gun ammo into long belts, something he could do without tearing his stitches open. They acknowledged each other with a half nod and he went back to linking. Lacy and Martha were among the teams clearing a path between the containers. Some of them that had machine gunners on them had been hit with the LAWs. They had their tops blown open, the contents spilling everywhere. It made running across them treacherous, so they were doing what they could to clear a path. They tossed pots and pans and Christmas toys aside to hammer torn open steel back down flat.
They heard Gunny’s Pete ripping through the masses, clearing a path, leading them away from the wall and dumping hundreds of gallons of raw hi-octane fuel every minute. When Lacy looked up from her work and recognized Johnny’s truck tearing through the screaming horde, she knew he was behind the wheel. He always liked to blip the throttle every time he shifted, and no one else could drive that fussy old truck the way he did.
She looked back toward the gate, where Griz and Cobb were shoving parts of the destroyed guard shack aside, looking for the flare gun.
Griz found the case and popped it open, holding the big orange plastic gun in his hand like a toy as he watched the masses of undead pile up deeper and deeper around the rig bouncing across the field.
Lacy had stopped working and just watched his progress as he laid waste to hundreds of the dead, and thousands more ran straight for him. It was the first time she’d seen her husband since before all this started, months ago. And she knew it would be the last.
She knew what Johnny’s hair-brained plan was.
It came to her in a flash.
It was something he would do.
The tanker.
The flare gun.
The fire to incinerate the horde.
It hurt.
It hurt so hard she thought she might get sick. It was a physical thing, felt deep in her chest. Her face crumpled, sorrow and anger ran freely down her cheeks.
Why you, Johnny?
Why you?
They could smell the gas from where they were, nearly twenty feet above the path of fuel seeping into the ground. All guns on the wall had stopped firing at the repeated shouts of Cease fire! Cease fire! over the radios. They all watched now, the only sounds they could hear were the unending keens and screams of the ten thousand, and the angry bellows of the old Caterpillar Gunny was pushing to her limits. The broken old Pete rolled coal from her stacks, kicked up dirt and blood from all of her drive tires, and he fried the clutch mercilessly in the fight for traction. He was pulling a fully loaded tanker, and the wall of bodies was five hundred deep as he kept cutting them down, the blade breaking bones and mixing their poisoned blood with the earth.
They ran along the top of the wall, following the progress and watched the rig disappear under the onslaught. It became a writhing, screaming, thing as every zed coming in off the tracks attacked in a fury, trying to rip open the metal to get to the meat.
Others on the wall saw the flare gun in Griz’s big hand, smelled the gasoline and knew how all this was going to end. It became painfully obvious the rig wouldn’t be coming back through the gate, it was buried with undead bodies.
This was a one-way trip.
This was Gunny’s last ride.
They watched in horror and dread and fear, and with prayers in their hearts.
Lacy couldn't stand to see it and covered her face, but couldn’t look away. She peered through her fingers as the wagon dumped its contents, Johnny still managing to keep his rig rolling forward, still bouncing over bodies and saturating the soil with blood and fuel.
Griz knew he was trying to get to the trains, to add their thousands of gallons of diesel from shot open tanks to the mix, but he wasn’t going to make it. The Pete was slowing, fighting for every foot, and being ground to a halt. Once he popped the brake valves so he could release the trailer, the truck wouldn’t be moving again. He knew Gunny knew this, too. Griz’s face was contorted, his bared teeth clenched as he willed the truck to keep moving forward. For Gunny to make it to the train. Maybe somehow, some way, they could shoot enough of them so he could get to the roof and start running back to safety, but he was angling toward the trench.
They stood on the wall and watched helplessly as the truck went airborne and seemed to hang suspended for a moment, the engine bellowing one last diesel powered, black smoked, defiant roar as the turbo spun up a
nd the tires clawed at nothing but air. Gunny still had his foot to the floor, the airhorn still blaring, riding forty tons of steel out of this world, and into the next.
They watched the tanker crumple and break open, the thousands of gallons still inside drenching every undead thing and splashing down the trench. Griz brought the flare gun up, ready to shoot if Gunny didn’t light his road flares. He knew he should fire it off before the masses lost interest and started storming the wall again. He knew Gunny was probably already dead, or trapped inside the cab. He knew, but he wavered. He waited.
He was rewarded a few seconds later when he saw a silver clad figure spring off an oversized front tire and out of the trench. He started running for the wall, but their cheers stopped before they even got started. They watched him fall, tripping over a rut, struggle back to his feet, then become buried under a pile of raging undead.
Griz raised the flare gun again, aiming for the tanker, but he couldn’t do it.
He lowered it.
They watched helplessly at the silver man still fighting, still trying. The horde was pouring into the trench, filling it and trampling down bodies as they fought their way toward the town. Many were already clawing their way out, soaked in gasoline and reaching for the silver man. Cobb looked at Griz who had raised the gun again, aimed at the tanker, but stood staring at his friend still fighting for his life. He couldn’t pull the trigger.
The ten thousand undead screamed as one and kept pouring into the trenches, filling them in their race toward the meat on the walls.
Lacy screamed in agony.
In sorrow.
In fury.
In a pain so real it nearly buckled her knees, she reached over, put her finger on Griz’s, and pulled the trigger.
The little ball of fire hit the tanker and the world turned orange in a deafening explosion. The blast knocked them off their feet, some of them nearly tumbling backward over the wall, and the heat singed their hair, even at the distance they were. The inferno spread quickly as flaming debris and walls of fire rained down. The months-old clothes and dried out skin of the undead were like kindling, and thousands lit up immediately, stumbling into others with blinded eyes melted by the flash. Gunny made it to his feet, the undead that were piled on top of him had been blown off. He limped blindly, through the blazing hell, his mask filthy and askew, but felt burning arms grasping at him. Another pair joined them and he stumbled back to the ground. The flames followed the trail of the Pete all the way back to the gate, where it burned bright but harmlessly, in the dirt. The blaze found the diesel of the train and the smoke burned black and oily. The undead running down the tracks were still coming, but most of them never made it through the wall of flames. They joined the burning horde, their screeches short-lived as vocal cords melted. The inferno danced high into the night sky when the locomotives caught, and there were more explosions as discarded rocket launchers and boxes of ammunition were touched by the fires.
54
Jessie
Jessie had cut his way through the shamblers on the road, avoiding them when he could, eviscerating them with the old Mercury when he couldn’t. He was almost there, almost home. The bag was empty, he’d squeezed the last little bit of the morphine concoction into his vein a few miles back and had pulled the shunt out. He was riding high, a trace of a smile on his scarred and kicked-in face. His eyes were still puffy blackened slits, his nose still crooked and smashed, his hair still matted with days-old blood. His ribs were still broken, his arm still shattered, his shoulder still full of buckshot holes, but he felt fine.
The pain was far, far away, almost forgotten.
He was nearly home.
He had made it.
It would be good to see his mom. She’d make him feel better, she always had. She’d fix him. That’s what moms did.
He was close, he could see the road opening up ahead of him to the fields and the gate was just beyond them. When he came into the clearing, bouncing over a slow-moving zombie, he saw his old man’s truck tearing off through the field, heading toward a parked train. There were hundreds of zombies chasing him, intercepting him, and piling onto the old Peterbilt. Jessie rolled to a stop and watched. His mind was moving slow, he couldn’t figure out what his dad was doing. If he wanted to lead them off, make them follow him away from the town, why was he driving through the fields? Why was he pulling a tanker? Silly old man. He’d have to teach him a thing or two he’d learned these past weeks. Jessie smiled at the prospect of showing his dad some new tricks, then watched as the truck disappeared into a deep trench. It took him a moment to register what happened, why the old Pete was gone. Some of the zombies that had been chasing him started pounding on his car, screaming through the glass at him. Bob growled and gave a sharp bark from the bloody bed in the back seat. He bared his fangs and had a rumble deep in his throat. He still had some fight left in him.
“Good dog,” Jessie said and turned to pat him and scratch his ears. Bob liked that.
“Good dog,” he repeated. “We’re almost home, boy. Almost safe from these things. Maybe we can find you a girlfriend. What do you think about that? We’ll find you a nice Mrs. Bob.”
More bodies slammed into his car and he came back from the happy place in his head, where Bob was romping with a bunch of puppies in a field of flowers. He stared into a dead woman’s black eyes as he slipped the shifter back into gear, trying to read her lips. She was saying something. Maybe something important. A blinding orange explosion rocked his car and the world went mad, with flaming debris raining down.
“Whoa,” Jessie said and watched in fascination as the dead woman still clawed and scraped for him, but now her hair was on fire. Her face was melting away, her eyes bubbling in their sockets. She was still saying something, but it was beyond him to understand what it was. She didn’t have lips anymore.
This can’t be real, he thought. I took too much of that stuff. I’m tripping balls! I must be overdosing.
He reached for his bottle of Trucker Speed, it helped him think straight, but it was empty. He laughed, then slipped the clutch and drug the flaming zombie for yards before she finally let go. Out in the field, he saw a silver alien stumbling towards the gate. His brain was fried and he knew it. First melting women trying to give him urgent messages from beyond the grave, and now silver Martians. He watched as flaming zombies attacked the alien, driving it down to the ground and piling on. So, zombies ate Martians, too, he thought. Wonder why they don’t like dogs. Or cows. If you ate a clown, would he taste funny?
He snickered at the joke and remembered when his dad had told it to him at the dinner table. It would be good to get home again. As Jessie shifted into second, heading for the gate, his eye caught the dog tags hanging from the rear-view mirror, and it all came to him in an instant of drug-addled clarity. That was his dad in a fireproof suit. His dad had driven his truck out to burn them, and something went wrong, he’d wrecked into the trench. The truck had caught fire, now the zombies had caught his dad and were trying to tear him to pieces.
He forced himself to hang onto that thought, repeated it in his head so he wouldn’t forget, and mashed the pedal as he turned the wheel, aiming straight for the flaming mass of undead trying to rip into the meat trapped below them. The big block Ford channeled its six hundred horses through the nine-inch pumpkin, down the Strange Engineering axles and into the oversized Jeep tires. The Hush Thrush exhaust spit out its distinctive deep growl as the off-road tread dug in the dirt and kicked up rooster tails. He could see glimpses of silver at the bottom of the writhing pile of flaming bodies and centered the hood on him. Zombies flew, bouncing off the bumper and fenders, and fiery body parts spewed rancid blood that sizzled and hissed. Jessie threw it in reverse and backed up, the oversized tires easily crushing zombie heads and breaking zombie backs. More were coming, a few thousand were clawing their way out of the trench, but a lot of them were dropping, too damaged to continue. Their flaming hair finally liquified their brains to the poi
nt they could no longer function. He was out in a flash, moving faster than he had in days. There were continual cracks of gunfire coming from the wall. Heads exploded all around him and bullets whispered death mere feet from his face as they passed by, seeking their targets. Kim-Li had her .308 and was clearing a path.
Jessie kicked at the few remaining zombies near his dad, as he remembered to cradle his broken arm. Both arms were nearly useless for fast and physical work, so he used his boots, shielding his face from the inferno, singeing his hair with the arm that worked. Bob came out of the open door, ignoring his wounds, and launched himself onto the remaining face-biters trying to sink their teeth into Jessie. He was savage, and his snapping barks and growls were mixed with yips of pain as his wounds tore open again, and fresh blood covered his hindquarters.
Jessie stomped a kid’s head, splashing sizzling brain matter into a patch of flames as Gunny shoved the last undead thing off of him and climbed out of the shallow depression he’d tripped into. Ruts from the spinning tires of his rig. The wall of fire in the trench was close, threatening to set them alight and Bob was quick to jump back into the car when Jessie whistled. His dad was too hot to touch, the silver suit leaving blisters on his hand when he tried.
“We gotta go before the car catches fire!” Jessie yelled over the roar of the blaze just yards from them, his battered face already pouring sweat. Gunny was on his feet and stumbling for the car, dragging a crooked leg and trying to pull the mask off so he could see. The face shield was smeared with black blood, zombie slime, and dirt.
They both fell into the car, smoldering from the heat. Jessie's arms were burnt and singed and Bob was whining and panting from the back seat. Jessie dropped it in gear and nailed it, not bothering to drive in a circle to get turned around. He let the churning wheels spin them in a circle and grabbed second as soon as they got straight. The fire was all around them, burning the gas hot and fast. Gunny lay his head back in the seat, barely registering what was happening, gritting his teeth and trying to get control over the spasming jolts of pain shooting up his leg. He knew it was broken, had felt it snap when he’d been tackled into the tire ruts.
The Zombie Road Omnibus Page 98