by Zack Archer
Soon, there were only three zombies left. Layla took down the first, I dropped the second, and Scarlett brought the phaser up and closed one eye. She squeezed off a burst of light that pierced the fiend’s chest and set it on fire.
Soon there were only three zombies left.
Layla took down the first, I dropped the second, and Scarlett brought the phaser up and closed one eye.
She squeezed a burst of light that pierced the fiend’s chest and set it on fire.
I raised my hands to high-five Scarlett when the zombie stumbled back, smothered in flames. The monster wheeled around and then smashed through the door on the wood shed. In seconds, the entire structure was on fire. Exactly what we didn’t want to happen.
Evidently there was fuel or lighter fluid stashed inside because as we neared the building, there was a blast of fire and greasy banners of smoke filled the air. The smoke drifted back and through the woods and when was left of the zombie emerged from the inferno, I put a metal dart right between its eyes.
“How long do we have?” I asked.
“Ten minutes,” Sharla replied.
“I’d advise getting going,” Deb said.
Everyone nodded. Lucy shouldered her staff as we gathered our gear and began the two-mile walk to the refueling depot.
“Hurry,” Lucy said, some steel in her voice. “We need to hurry.”
Before I could ask what the rush was, she threw up a hand and pointed. There were forms toiling in the shadows cast by the woods. Zombies, hundreds of them, had apparently been drawn by the black smoke and were coming to investigate.
“Maybe they didn’t see us,” Lexie said.
Several of the zombies howled and gestured at us.
“Maybe they did,” I replied.
We picked up the pace, jogging at a rapid clip through the fields, fighting to make it to another section of dense forest before the flesh eaters cut us off. We were headed north and they were swinging in from the west—I hoped like hell that we’d be the first ones into the tree line.
Lucy was at a full gallop by this point, waving her arms and urging us to run faster.
The zombies double-timed it as well.
We made it into the woods first, but the forest was soon swarming with the undead and we were forced to fight a running battle with them.
“Give ‘em hell!” Raven shouted, dropping to a knee and firing a wave of explosive bullets that burst into the trees, toppling several specimens. Hollis stood over her, spraying her machine-pistols, while Deb aimed at anything that moved with her mini-gun.
We advanced, but the trees became so dense that they forced us to move sideways, which hampered our ability to shoot at the zombies.
Hollis dropped her pistols and clenched her tomahawk. A one-armed zombie sprang at her but she sidestepped the thing and planted her blade deep in its skull. The devil dropped to the ground and she planted a boot on its chest, levering the blade free before she bashed in the skulls of two more zombies.
“Let’s go!” I screamed.
She crabbed back as I grabbed her hand.
We reeled forward and the zombies raced after us.
“Almost there!” Sharla shouted, running ahead of everyone else. “We’re almost out of the—”
Sharla disappeared from view.
Sprinting ahead, I saw, to my horror, that Sharla had fallen into a trap—a hole dug in the ground that was covered by a camouflaged tarp.
The hole was full of sharpened pieces of rebar and famished zombies who swarmed toward Sharla as soon as she hit the ground. Two pieces of rebar had sliced open Sharla’s legs as she screamed and kicked at the infected.
I dove to the ground and stabbed my hand down into the hole. “GRAB MY HAND!”
She clawed at the sides of the hole, terror in her eyes. My fingers touched hers, but she slipped from my grasp. I crawled forward, nearly sliding in as well before someone grabbed my feet.
“C’MON!”
Sharla ran and jumped and I grabbed her wrist! “PUSH!” I screamed.
She did, planting her feet against the side and muscling herself up. The others were busy fighting off the approaching zombies and taking shots at the ones down in the hole.
We blasted all of them down but in the confusion, one of them, a nude woman with nearly-translucent flesh, stabbed her jagged fingernails into the back of Sharla’s neck. Sharla’s hands reflexively went to the wound and I lost my hold on her.
She slipped and tumbled back into the pit as the zombies fell on top of her.
Fighting to her feet, she struggled valiantly as we fired down at the zombies, cutting all of them down, but it was too late.
Sharla stood on unsteady feet, strips of flesh peeled away from the areas where she’d been mauled by the zombies.
“Go,” she said, waving us on, trying to staunch the flow of blood from her neck wound. “GO!”
Lucy leaned down and grabbed Sharla’s hand, tears in her eyes as Deb urged everyone to flee. Hollis was the last one to go, handing Sharla a pistol as we ran out ahead of the approaching zombie horde. A gunshot echoed a few minutes later and I knew Sharla had mercifully crossed over.
“It’s there!” Lucy said, pointing to an opening in the woods. “Right there!”
We exited the tree line and swung across a field.
The helicopters were already powering up. I saw Bo and the others waving at us. Crouch-running, we climbed into the bellies of the choppers.
“Where the hell’s Miss Frost?” Bo asked.
“She didn’t make it,” Lucy said.
Bo scowled and made a circle in the air with his finger while climbing aboard. I looked out to see hundreds of zombies emerge from the trees. I aimed my cannons at them and Deb, who was flanking me, shook her head.
“Don’t waste your ammo. Something tells me we’ll need it later.”
We scooted our backs against an inner wall and grabbed handholds as the helicopters pulled up and banked hard. The helicopters sliced over the heads of the zombies and the farm which was being overrun by the dead, heading south toward Florida.
13
Nobody said anything for a good long while. We were all still in shock from the day’s events, especially losing Sharla. Bo eventually sat next to me as we flew over the treetops near the edge of the Shenandoah Valley.
“Somebody gonna debrief me on what went down?” Bo asked.
“We were nearly eaten,” I said.
“How’d it happen?”
“Good question.”
“’Cause we saw some smoke.”
“The shed caught on fire.”
“Where’d the biters come from?” Bo asked.
“They’re all around.”
“Yeah, but they’re kinda like wild dogs. They don’t usually come runnin’ unless someone fucks up and rings the dinner bell.”
“I guess they got our scent,” I replied, unwilling to reveal what really happened. Raven caught me in conversation and glared.
“Question is, how did they get your scent?” he asked.
“You’re asking a lot of questions.”
“That’s what happens when you don’t get any goddamn answers.”
“I’ve told you everything I know.”
“I never did get your name,” Bo replied.
“Nick.”
“Bo.”
“I know.”
“What’d you do back in the world, Nick?”
“Worked at Fort Detrick, but I wasn’t a soldier.”
“I could tell by your hands,” Bo replied.
“What about them?”
“They’re not the hands a soldier would have.”
Men have this thing about comparing hands, kinda like how women do with feet. Bo’s hands were big, like mallets, and lumpy with callouses and busted knuckles. One had a date tattooed across it. They were hands that had seen hard work and many a fight. Mine weren’t like that at all.
“If you fuck up again on this mission, you’re gonna an
swer to me,” Bo said.
“I’m in charge of this operation,” Lucy said, overhearing our conversation.
Bo spat on the floor. “Yes, Ma’am, you are in charge once we reach Miami. But while we’re in the air, I’m the head honcho.”
“Bullshit,” Deb said.
“Don’t fuck with me, lady,” Bo replied, pointing his glow cigarette at Deb. “I’ve been keeping an eye on you and there’s something off. I mean you’re hotter than a goddamn firecracker, but you’re a few bubbles off plumb and your skin, well, don’t even trying telling me it’s got a normal hue.”
“Mind your own business,” I said.
“Survival is my business,” Bo replied, tossing his smoke outside. “And if there’s someone on this flight who jeopardizes my safety and the safety of my men, they will be put down. Terminated with extreme fucking prejudice.”
And with that, he tipped an invisible hat and moved back up through the helicopter where he sat on a milk carton near the pilots.
I’ve always been a pretty good sleeper. Even when I was a kid, I could sleep through almost anything as long as there was some kind of white noise. The rotor blades created this rhythmic whomping sound that lulled me to sleep. Where do you go when you sleep? I mean figuratively of course. Some folks go to imaginary worlds or places that they’ve only ever dreamed about. Me? I’ve always gone back to a summer when I was twelve years and my home life was relatively stable. We lived in a decent neighborhood, and there was food on the table, and I was becoming quite the baseball player. We had a cat named Clyde and I had the best friend in the world, a kid named Ricky Jackson who lived across the street and used to let me come over and watch horror movies in his basement. Someone once told me that the fact you dreamed about something is a very good thing because it means you once did something that was worth remembering. I remember that time in my life because I was happy, and more importantly, I felt safe. That’s a goddamn important thing when you’re a kid.
I woke to the sound of the rotors thumping.
There are many kinds of good thumps, and this wasn’t one of them.
The green lights on the ceiling suddenly turned red and Bo and another guard slid back next to us.
“SECURE YOURSELVES!” Bo shouted.
The helicopter banked hard and Lexie slid over next to me. I grabbed her and held her tight against my chest.
I strapped both of us in to five-point harnesses as the helicopter dipped low, screaming over a gap in the woods. I could see signs of civilization in the distance. Buildings at the edge of a sweep of woods and a large swamp.
I tried to mentally connect with Slade. “Slade, what’s going on?”
Nothing. No response from my supposed A.I. guru. For all of his talk about turning me into some kind of half-assed superhero with internal supercapacitors, neural networks and the like, I couldn’t even communicate with him.
The chopper leveled off and the red lights flashed green again. Some smoke was filtering down from somewhere overhead.
Bo caught my look and patted the side of the helicopter. “Would it surprise you to learn that this baby’s hybrid?”
“Seriously?”
He nodded. “Burns fuel and oil.”
“We going to be okay?”
“We are five nines uptime,” he replied. “But we’re gonna make a pit stop just to be sure.”
“Where are we?”
“Thirty miles outside of Columbia, South Carolina.”
Both helicopters landed on top of an old auto parts superstore. We were worried that the roof might cave under the weight, but it held and we exited the ‘copters to survey our surroundings.
Peering down over the lip of the building, I mentally catalogued everything I saw including a parking lot dotted with a few abandoned cars, some corpses that were slowly turning to jelly in and around said cars, and pine and palmetto trees. There was a little fringe of green around acres of blacktop and concrete that curled down and around a strip mall and a neighborhood of vinyl-clad single-family houses beyond that.
“They sure as shit paved over paradise and put up a parking lot,” Scarlett said.
“Pretty sure this was never paradise,” Layla replied.
The air filled with the thud of footsteps and I looked back to see Bo. “We’re checking the powerplant and main rotor system.”
“How long?” Hollis asked.
“Forty-five minutes, maybe less.”
Layla whistled and signaled for us to move over next to her. She was lying on the roof, staring down through a vent. “Checkity check this,” she said.
We gathered around her and she pried the vent back to reveal a space below us. There was something down in the space.
“What is that?”
“A muscle car,” Layla said, grinning.
“What kind?”
“The kick-ass kind.”
Gritting her teeth, she grabbed the edges of the vent and pried it back in full, creating a space that was big enough for even me to fit through.
She positioned her palms on the side of the vent and measured her weight.
“There’s no way you can make that,” Deb said. “It’s gotta be twenty feet to the ground.”
“There’s a shelf,” Layla said, angling her chin. “Grab my feet.”
I held her feet down as she lowered herself through the vent, reaching out for an enormous metal shelf positioned down and approximately three or four feet away from the opening. If she was lucky, she’d be able to swing out, grab the edge of the shelf and then monkey down to the floor.
Scarlett pointed. “Before you do that, shouldn’t we see if there’s anything lurking below?”
Layla pushed herself out of the vent. “How do you propose we do that?”
Scarlett removed a jawbreaker from a pocket and tossed it down through the vent. The hard candy hit the concrete floor and broke apart into a hundred pieces. We waited, but nothing reacted to the sound.
Layla lowered herself again as I held her legs.
“Yeah, this is real smart,” Raven said as Layla said something under her breath and began swinging back and forth.
“On the count of three, let go!” she said.
I watched her swing back and then rocket forth as I counted three and let go! Her momentum carried her forward and she smacked into the front of the shelf and managed to grab hold. I smiled.
And then the shelf tore away from the wall and pitched to the floor like a felled tree, until it landed with a terrific crash.
Miraculously, Layla had managed to squirm through a gap in it to avoid being crushed. She was scratched and would probably sport a few nasty bruises but was otherwise unharmed. Bo and the other security personnel looked over.
“Sorry!” I said, raising my hand. I smiled and got withering looks in return.
Looking back down the vent, I saw that Layla had found a tall ladder and was dragging it over, positioning it so that we could descend.
“Come on down,” Layla shouted.
Deb made a face. “Why the hell would I go down there?”
“Because there’s a Mustang down here. A sixty-six Ford Fastback Mustang.”
There’s something about a classic muscle car that gets the juices flowing. I didn’t know about the ladies, but I was going down to check things out.
With much effort, I eased myself down onto the top of the ladder, which was four feet below the vent, then made my way down.
Deb, Raven, and Lexie followed, and Hollis, Scarlett and Lucy stayed on the roof.
Layla was grinning ear-to-ear as she led us toward a car that was partially concealed by a tarp. It was clear that the room we were in was a private space built onto the back of the auto parts store. I imagined it was a hidden sanctuary for the manager or somebody who owned the place, a secure spot to stash their Mustang for a spell and then come back to retrieve it. Apparently, they’d yet to come back for it.
We pulled the tarp off and while I’m no expert in classic cars, it was ind
eed a 1966 Mustang. I could tell this by the license plate and the retro shape of the car, which was burgundy in color and had a front grille centered by a running horse in a corral. The sides of the car were festooned with what Layla said were faux air scoops. Somebody had sawed the top off the thing to make it a convertible, but otherwise it looked in mint condition.
She opened the door and leaned inside, popped the hood, propped it up and declared it a piece of vehicular divinity.
“Hot damn, it’s got the optional V-8 engine.”
Deb’s eyebrows arched. “So?”
“So, this little lady has a 289 HiPo engine that provides 271 horses under this hood.”
“She’s fast?”
“Faster than a bullet from a gun,” Layla replied. She pointed to a variety of plastic containers littering the ground. “And somebody was smart enough to use fuel stabilizer, which means she probably still runs.”
“Too bad there aren’t any keys,” Lexie said.
Layla wiggled her fingers. “Who needs keys.”
She asked me to time her and I did. It took Layla approximately seven minutes to hotwire the Mustang which sputtered, coughed, then roared to life. Layla cheered and threw mock punches at the steering wheel.
“How much longer do we have?” she asked.
“Thirty minutes or so,” I replied.
“Who wants to take a test drive?”
When we balked, Layla pleaded with us. “C’mon, guys, this could literally be the last chance any of us ever have to drive a car like this.”
“That’s not a good enough reason to risk our asses,” I said.
“We can scavenge some supplies,” Layla said, still pleading.
Bo leaned his head down through the vent to ask what was going on. When we told him what we were planning to do he barked a nasty laugh and said we were on our own.
“The birds are lifting off in twenty minutes whether you’re back or not,” he said.
I looked up to see a rollup door at the back of the space. Lexie and I moved over, inspected it, pulled back the security bolts and heaved it up. Layla put the Mustang in gear and rolled toward the door as we climbed inside and drove off. It was December in South Carolina but still fifty degrees, so the air rushing through the convertible was chilly but invigorating.