by Wood, J N
THE ROAD TRIP AT THE END
BOOK TWO: BORDER
J N WOOD
Copyright © 2019 J N Wood
All Rights Reserved
Again, thank you to my wife and my parents.
I should have been going home today.
The last two weeks should have been a road trip with my friend Jack, taking us through Colorado, Wyoming, South Dakota and Nebraska.
Only our holiday was ruined, when almost everybody died from an apocalyptic virus.
Then, to make matters worse, the dead rose up and tried to kill the few survivors.
Quite understandably, Jack wanted to get back home to his pregnant wife in California. Due to the fact I had no immediate way to get back to England and my wife, I decided to join him.
I’ll be honest, it’s been a bit of a struggle, and we’ve almost died more times than I care to remember. At one point, I was forced to continue on to California without Jack, with no idea of his fate.
When I finally arrived in Mountain View, California, I found it had succumbed to one of the many fires that had ravaged America after its fall.
Good news though, Jack was there, still very much alive.
Contents
Prologue: Friends Reunited
Chapter 1: Slowly
Chapter 2: World’s Strongest
Chapter 3: Shrapnel
Chapter 4: Good Shit
Chapter 5: River Of Blood
Chapter 6: Barbie
Chapter 7: Zombies Don’t Hide
Chapter 8: One Step At A Time
Chapter 9: Gayter
Chapter 10: Maps
Chapter 11: Lost Souls
Chapter 12: Pub
Chapter 13: Vegas
Chapter 14: Eavesdrop
Chapter 15: I Am Batman
Chapter 16: Holiday
Chapter 17: Wrecking Balls
Chapter 18: Smile
Chapter 19: Weary
Chapter 20: Weak
Chapter 21: Not A Night
Chapter 22: Painful Death
Chapter 23: Flashing Lights
Chapter 24: Barricade
Chapter 25: Distant Rotors
Chapter 26: Idiot
Chapter 27: Sacrilege
Chapter 28: Dancing
Chapter 29: Two Weeks Ago
Prologue: Friends Reunited
I looked around Jack to the charred remains of the house behind. ‘Shit Jack, I’m so sorry. I was too late. It took me too long to get here.’
Jack did something I wasn’t expecting. He smiled.
‘Don’t worry Chris. Beth left me a message, just like you did. They set off for Canada six days ago.’
‘What? Really?’ I blurted out.
‘Yes, she left me a message outside our apartment.’
‘Thank fuck for that,’ I said. The relief made me almost forget about the amount of pain I’d been feeling. ‘Although…’ I began, but managed to stop myself.
‘What?’ Jack asked.
‘Well…’
‘What?’ he asked again, sounding annoyed.
I’m gonna have to say it.
‘I said she might set off for Canada before we got here. Didn’t I?’
Shaking his head, Jack spun around and walked towards his three companions. ‘Come on Chris. We need to get underground before the sun comes up.’
DAY FOURTEEN
Chapter 1: Slowly
‘I will not carry you,’ a gruff, heavily accented voice said.
Was the accent Russian maybe? Shit, did the Russians cause all of this? It must have been them that attacked America. What the fuck? Why have they captured me?
The Russian invader’s hand painfully gripped my shoulder. I desperately tried to squirm away from my captor.
‘Help! The Russians have got me!’ I shouted.
‘Chris, shut the fuck up,’ a familiar voice called out.
I followed the voice in the darkness, to see Jack approaching me through the smoke.
Fuck, this is embarrassing.
I twisted my head around to find the huge Lithuanian guy called Gee looking down at me. Jack had of course introduced me to him earlier.
‘Shit, sorry Gee,’ I said. My cheeks suddenly felt very hot, like they were beginning to flush red. Luckily my embarrassment was hidden by the t-shirt wrapped around my face. ‘I think I must have nodded off,’ I told him, trying to explain.
‘Were you sleepwalking just then?’ Jack asked. The bottom half of his face was covered, but I noticed a slight smile creeping up to the corner of his one visible eye.
‘Yeah must have been,’ I responded.
‘We cannot carry him,’ Gee said. ‘He is slowing us down.’
Above his mask, Gee’s cold eyes stared straight at me, not showing an ounce of emotion.
‘Gee, stop being an asshole.’ This time it was the guy called Michael speaking. ‘Now come on, we have to get to the parking lot.’
Gee pointed his finger at me, just a few inches from my face. ‘I am not fucking Russian,’ he said. ‘Never call me Russian.’
‘Yeah I know,’ I said, leaning away from him. ‘Sorry mate.’
The big Lithuanian stared directly into my eyes. It was beginning to get very uncomfortable, when he suddenly spun around and walked away. The others followed him, leaving me to try and keep up.
I should maybe avoid calling Gee a Russian again.
The woman, Jack had introduced her to me as Shannon, dropped back to walk alongside me. ‘Don’t worry about Gee,’ she said. ‘It takes him a bit of time to warm up. Give it a couple of weeks and you’ll be the best of friends.’
I couldn’t see the smile through her mask, but I could hear it in her voice.
‘Brilliant,’ I said, tripping up on a curb but managing to quickly regain my balance. ‘Sorry, I’m not normally this pathetic.’ I was exhausted.
‘That’s okay,’ she said, chuckling. ‘Not far to go now, five minutes maybe.’
After the Crossbow Crew found me outside the charred remains of Beth’s friend’s house, Jack told me we needed to get back to an underground car park. They’d been using it as their base for a couple of days. I had a million questions for him, but I barely had the energy to say hello when Jack introduced me to everyone.
It had been a long night.
The person who shot the first zombie turned out to be Michael, and Shannon was his wife. Gee was just a huge miserable bloke, who seemed to hate me already. He definitely wanted to leave me behind.
Jack grabbed me around my arm, dragging me from my thoughts. ‘We’re here Chris, it’s just through there,’ he said, pointing with his other hand to an arched entrance in a concrete building.
Burnt tree stumps lined the pavement. The building itself looked a bit singed from the fires, but as far as I could tell in the darkness, it looked structurally sound.
‘I thought you said it was underground?’ I asked, as we walked under the arches.
‘There is another level down,’ he said. ‘We’ve been staying in the security office down there.’
Michael and Shannon were in front, leading us down a sloping ramp. Jack and I followed, with Gee at the rear. Ground level was full of burnt out vehicles.
At first I thought Jack was holding my arm to help me, but I soon realised he was using me as a crutch.
‘Are you okay?’ I asked him.
‘Yeah, I’m fine,’ he said. ‘My ribs start to hurt if I walk any distance. I’ll take some painkillers when we stop.’
Once we were all in the security office on the basement level, Gee closed the heavy door behind us.
‘Does it lock?’ I asked Jack, pointing at the do
or.
Jack was rummaging through his bag. ‘Yes!’ he hissed triumphantly, pulling his hand out of the bag and shaking a plastic bottle of pills. ‘What did you say? Oh, the door. You can’t open it from the outside,’ he said.
‘Then how–?’ I started.
‘It was open when we found it,’ he quickly answered.
Jack passed me a bottle of water and then opened his own. I thirstily gulped the whole bottle down, while watching Jack’s new friends removing their weapons and head gear.
‘I needed that Jack.’ I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. ‘Cheers.’
‘Hey, time for proper introductions I think,’ Michael said. He was stepping towards me, his hand outstretched. I took his hand in mine.
‘Hi Chris, I’m Michael Presley.’ He stopped shaking my hand and gestured towards Shannon. ‘This is my wife, Shannon.’
She smiled and waved. ‘Hi, again,’ she said, before giving her husband a quizzical look.
‘Hi everyone. You do know I wasn’t actually asleep when Jack introduced us half an hour ago?’
‘Just doing it properly, that’s all,’ Michael answered.
‘Yeah sorry, good to meet you all,’ I said. ‘And thanks for helping me back there. I was pretty fucking knackered at the end. Don’t think I’d have been able to finish off the last few zombies.’
‘No problem at all,’ Shannon said, laying her crossbow and bag on the desk in the windowless room.
‘I do not understand single fucking word he say,’ Gee said, in his stilted English. He was leaning against the door and pointing at me.
‘You don’t understand me?’ I asked him, dumbfounded.
‘What you say?’ Gee asked, his face still deadpan.
‘Come on kids,’ Jack said. ‘We all need to sleep. Chris, you look like you’re about to collapse.’
Pulling my tired eyes away from the huge Lithuanian, I said, ‘Yeah okay. Could someone make sure Lurch doesn’t kill me in my sleep please?’
‘What he say?’ Gee asked, looking at Shannon. ‘I do not understand single fucking word.’
Shannon shook her head, before stepping towards me. ‘I need to clean the wound on your face before you collapse,’ she said, briefly glancing at me before picking up her bag.
I touched the left side of my face. It was tender, and a bit sticky around my eye and cheek bone. In my exhaustion I’d almost forgotten about my altercation with the tarmac.
Shannon leaned in closer to me, inspecting my face. I awkwardly looked over her shoulder at a wall of blank monitors.
‘It looks like there is still some of the road in there,’ she said. ‘Sit yourself down and I’ll take care of it.’
‘Okay, thanks.’ I’d been really looking forward to sitting down all night.
When I opened my eyes, Jack was sat in the only chair in the room, his unobstructed eye staring at the plain white wall behind me. It took me a couple of seconds to realise I’d been asleep.
‘Alright?’ I said. ‘What time is it?’
Jack seemed to blink back to life. He looked down at me, then eased himself out of the black leather chair and crept over to sit by my side.
Michael and Shannon were lying about four or five feet to my left, still fast asleep by the looks of it. The Lithuanian was slumped against the door, almost sat up straight. Every couple of seconds, an incredibly loud and angry sounding snore erupted from his wide open mouth.
‘It’s half three in the afternoon,’ Jack told me, after he’d made himself comfortable. ‘Shannon said she couldn’t believe you slept through your face getting messed around with.’
‘Oh shit yeah,’ I muttered, lifting my hand up to feel a bandage on my face. ‘I was pretty tired.’
‘It’s just some gauze to try and keep it clean. She keeps going on about things getting infected. She must say it to me twenty times a day.’
‘Is she a doctor?’ I asked.
‘Yes, but not medical. Something to do with bioengineering, or biochemistry, or bio something. She seems to know what she’s talking about though.’
‘So?’ I asked
Jack shook his head. ‘So what?’
‘So what the fuck happened to you? I couldn’t find you, I thought you were dead.’
‘Quiet Chris, they’re still asleep,’ he said, pointing at the other three.
‘Okay,’ I whispered. ‘Where were you? And who the fuck are Michael, Shannon and Lurch? How are you all together?’
‘Well, to be honest, I don’t know what really happened. I remember being in the truck, and us getting slowly turned over by a load of zombies. Then I woke up in what I thought was a hospital, but it turned out to be a school.’
‘What school?’ I asked him.
‘Austin School.’
‘Where the fuck was that? I covered every inch of Austin looking for you.’
‘It’s on the outskirts, just after the graveyard.’
‘I didn’t see a fucking school on the outskirts,’ I said.
‘It wasn’t a fucking school Chris. It was just an ordinary school, for kids,’ Jack replied, a smirk on his face.
‘Yeah, very fucking funny. Honestly though, I thought I searched everywhere around there.’
‘Well, I don’t know. It was well signposted. I saw the signs for it when we headed back into Austin, which was also when we saw your messages.’
‘Fuck’s sake,’ I muttered.
‘What happened to you then? And us I suppose?’ Jack asked.
I took a deep breath and slowly let it out. ‘So, the truck rolled down a hill and we finished upside down at the bottom. I dragged you out through the broken windscreen, which I had to kick out by the way, and carried you to some buildings in Austin, but then I lost you.’
‘What do you mean? You lost me?’ Jack asked. ‘You just misplaced me?’
‘Well, after very carefully placing you in…’ I trailed off and gave him a sideways glance, before continuing. ‘And don’t forget the very carefully part. I very carefully placed you in a bin.’ I stopped and waited for a reply. He looked fairly nonplussed, so I carried on. ‘Then I climbed on top of a building to wait for the swarm to pass by.’
‘Yep, kind of knew about the bin,’ Jack said. ‘Michael and Shannon said they found me in a dumpster. I had no idea what they were talking about. I kept asking them if they meant a truck. They got very annoyed.’
‘I thought you’d be safe in there. I pushed it into a corner, but there were too many zombies. They smashed down a fence, and you and the bin just rolled away. I really am sorry.’
‘Don’t worry about it,’ Jack said. ‘It can’t have been easy getting me out of the truck. I’ll forgive you for dumping me in a bin.’
‘It wasn’t fucking easy. It was really fucking hard in fact.’
‘Seriously, it’s fine,’ he said. ‘Shannon took care of me. I was out of it for a few days. By the time I’d regained consciousness and gone back into Austin, you’d left.’
‘What’s actually going on with your eye?’ I asked.
‘Shannon thinks I’ve fractured my eye socket. She told me I’ll be fine, but I think she’s just trying to keep my hopes up. It’ll alright, I’ve got another eye.’
‘You were almost blind anyway,’ I said. ‘Losing your sight in one eye probably won’t make much difference to you.’
Jack looked at me with a confused look on his face. ‘Surely it would be worse if I lost an eye? Rather than if someone with perfect sight went blind in one eye.’
‘Actually, yeah, you’re probably right. You’ll be fine though. I’ll get you a stick if not. Also, it means you won’t run out of contact lenses as quickly.’
‘That’s true,’ he said, with a grin. ‘What happened to you after Austin?’
‘Well, a few hours after leaving Austin, I bumped into a huge fucking swarm.’
‘Why were you out during the day?’ he asked.
‘I wasn’t. It was the middle of the night.’
‘A
re you sure it wasn’t during the day?’
‘What?’ I answered, giving him an incredulous look. ‘What the fuck? Of course I’m sure it wasn’t during the day. There was a big silver thing in the sky. Not a big yellow thing. Oh yeah, and also, it was fucking dark.’
‘Were you asleep and dreaming maybe?’ he asked.
‘Are you taking the piss? I wasn’t dreaming.’
‘Just a few hours ago, you were sleepwalking and talking about Russians attacking you.’
‘I didn’t fucking dream the swarm. It was real. Zombie parts were still on my car the next day. Unless I dreamt that as well?’
‘Did you?’
‘Fuck off,’ I replied.
‘Shit,’ Jack slowly said. ‘We’ll have to tell everyone when they wake up. That’s really going to mess everything up.’
‘That’s the only one I’ve seen, I haven’t seen another one at night since then. I think that one just had too many zombies, so they couldn’t stop to sleep. Maybe.’
‘Yeah maybe,’ he said. ‘So what happened after that? How did you get here?’
I told Jack everything, the night in the mechanics workshop after escaping the tsunami swarm, and my failed plan to find a snow plough. I described my meeting with Gurbinder and the racist duck hunters, culminating in them chasing me into the hills. Then the trek through the snow and witnessing the zombie clean-up crew on the other side. All the while Jack nodded and made agreeable noises. He said they’d also seen, and travelled through, the burnt remains of California.
‘And that was it,’ I said. ‘Piece of piss really.’
‘Yeah, sounds it,’ Jack replied. ‘You killed some people then? Actual people, not zombies.’
I shrugged. ‘Maybe. I mean, I didn’t actually see them die, but maybe.’
‘Okay,’ Jack said, turning slightly to look directly at me.
‘What?’ I asked, leaning away from him.
‘No long term psychological effects? Even if they were racist rapists.’
‘I don’t know. It’s not been long term yet. And the world is better off without those arseholes, if they are actually dead. And I never mentioned anything about them being rapists.’