by Chris Lowry
Sharp led them on a zig zag course through the small town, hoping they didn’t run into any additional large groups of Z.
He and his men could fight free, they’d done it before, but the cost of civilian casualties would be high. And they needed the old man before his heart gave out. There were no mechanics in his unit.
“Right,” he snapped as he led them around another corner.
He thought about it in squares. It would have been an easy enough run to go right, then right again and circle back toward the factory.
But the town wasn’t set up on a grid and the first two roads they passed were blocked with burned out automobile wrecks.
The third only turned left as the wrong careened ninety degrees in the wrong direction.
He cursed under his breath and kept them moving.
They could no longer hear the Z, no longer hear the metal banging of the pipe.
It should have been simple to get back to the gate.
But it wasn’t.
The road banked to the right and kept going straight for what looked like miles.
“Which way?” he asked Turner.
The man bent over at the waist, hands on his knees as he gasped and struggled for breath. His cheeks were the color of cherry tomatoes, his neck a shade of violet over the open collar of his shirt.
Sharp wasn’t sure the man heard him or understood and was about to repeat the order. Turner beat him to it, pointed with a shaking finger in the direction up the long straight road.
Sharp got them moving again, slowed his trot to a fast walk to let them rest and recover in case they needed to run again.
They marched a mile and half over again before it hit a crossroad.
By that time, Tuner was a pale shade of red and the purple had receded from his neck.
“Here,” he still gasped, as if conserving breath for another sprint to escape.
Jess jingled the chain as they walked. Sharp almost snapped at her to wrap it around her wrist and forearm to keep it quiet.
They went another mile and there it was. The back of the factory. Sharp could see the buses parked in a row, grimy yellow paintjobs splashes of color under the cloud filled sky.
“Shit,” he muttered.
No one bothered to ask him why. The fence along the back was folded down, hanging on a broken pole, ripped open and trampled flat.
There was no sign of Javi or Bear.
Sharp bit back a retort. He wanted to curse, to blame Turner, to vent on Jess and go hunt for his men.
But they were good. They were trained. And if they could get away, they would make their way back to the town wall.
He had a mission to complete.
“Let’s get ‘em moving,” he said and led them across the fallen fence.
CHEN
SHARP
Javi and Bear were gone. But he had the buses and six people to drive them.
“Keys?” he asked Turner.
The man pointed to a metal door in the side of the brick building. There were two panes of large glass in the doors, each with a pressed sheet of wire mesh between them for security.
He could make out movement behind the glass, black shadows moving in the darkness. Bodies bouncing off the glass, leaving behind streaks of goo and gore as they tried to batter their way through to the yard beyond.
“Damn it,” Sharp muttered.
“I can get one started,” said Jess. “Maybe we can jump the rest?”
She looked at him with hopeful eyes. Sharp nodded. It was as good of a plan as any.
“See what you can find,” he ordered Turner and Chip to start looking around. “Check for strays.”
SOLDIER and SOLIDER nodded and readied their weapons to sweep the yard. Sharp didn’t tell them not to shoot. They knew the noise would draw the Z back.
Jess tried to pry open a set of bus doors but they wouldn’t budge. Sharp had to put all of his weight against one of the folding sides of the door and force it open. Too much time in the elements with no use had turned the hinges into effective locks.
She stepped up into the bus and began working on the wires underneath the exposed dash.
The bus was designed to carry children to school, and probably for cash strapped school districts he decided. The driver’s seat was a small thin vinyl cushion on metal springs, the dash little more than three gauges that showed fuel, speed and rpm.
It was automatic, at least, so he didn’t have to worry about teaching anyone how to handle a stick, but there was no heat, no air. Maybe this was the base model and they customized each order.
Still, it would do, he thought. So long as it ran.
He did a quick count of the seats, up one row and down the other while Jess fumbled a set of wires from under the dash and began to manipulate them. Forty eight seats.
The engine turned over and whirred, then died with a click.
She sat up and brushed a strand of hair back from her face.
“Battery,” she sighed.
“Next in line,” Sharp kept her moving.
If all the batteries were as dead as this one, he was going to have to force march Pam Ballentine away from the town and the people in it would have to survive and make it on their own.
Her idea to transport the village to safety across the country hinged on working vehicles.
They forced the next door in line as Tuner and Chip completed their search. It turned up nothing they could use, which meant Jess was going to hotwire them all, if they could get any to work.
She worked her fingers on the wires again, and this time, got a spark that turned the engine over. She let out a small, triumphant whoop.
Sharp let her celebrate for all of three seconds before moving her toward the next bus.
It was a dud, but the next three fired up, and two more after that.
While she was working, he searched for Javi and Bear so they could carry eight buses back.
But his two soldiers stayed gone, which left the six of them to line up and drive out.
“Follow me,” he ordered. “Keep it slow, steady and tight.”
He ordered SOLDIER to the last bus to keep up the rear and led them out in a line toward the compound on the far side of town.
SHARP
SHARP
Twenty miles an hour seemed fast in the bus as it rattled along the abandoned city streets. The wheel jumped and bucked in his hands. No power steering, which would make the turns a little tougher.
He took the first corner with no problem, and swung around four stalled cars on the side of the road.
His eyes flicked across the gauges. The needle in the gas gauge hovered over empty.
Sharp opened his mouth to curse his luck when the bus behind him honked two loud fast bleets.
He glanced in the rear view and saw it crawling to a stop as his engine sputtered and bounced. It cut out and he coasted another fifty feet before stopping it.
He grabbed his rifle and jumped out.
The other four buses were jammed up behind Jess in bus number two. She opened the door and waited for him to get closer before calling out.
“Gas.”
“Me too,” he nodded.
Turner and Chip hurried to join them.
“I’m sorry,” Tuner mopped his forehead with the palm of his hand and spread the sweat back into his thinning hair. “We always kept the gas low in the yard. Just enough to move them around if we needed.”
“My fault,” Sharp grunted. “I wasn’t thinking.”
He hadn’t been. He had been too worried about Javi and Bear, too concerned with getting back to Pam and had his mind working three steps ahead of the problem.
So far ahead, he chastised, that he didn’t see the step in front of him. An important step that landed them stranded in the middle of the road.
“Check those wrecks and see what we can find.”
Scavenging was going to be a way of life on their cross country trek, he knew. He wondered if they would find enough to help
them make it all the way.
“Land of plenty,” he said to himself, but loud enough for Jess to hear.
“I don’t know,” she shrugged. “There was a lot of panic at the end, a lot of people making runs on gas, food.”
She shrugged again, as if that were explanation enough. Sharp knew what she meant. LA had been just as bad. Worse even. There were thirteen million people there fighting to survive when the Z hit the fan.
“What do these things get?” he asked Turner. “Ten miles to a gallon?”
Turner nodded.
“Loaded,” he said. “A little more with just us in it.”
Sharp didn’t bother to remind him that it would be more than just them. Each seat would be full, plus provisions. He didn’t want to do the math and would need a piece of paper to calculate it, but twenty buses packed with over eighty people and gear would mean the lower end of ten mpg.
And LA was almost three thousand miles away.
Soldier gave him a thumbs up as he lifted a gas can from the car.
Sharp glanced at the houses just off the main road a block away. They were in a commercial district, but there were homes one block over.
“Take him and go find a garden hose,” he told Jess. “Check the first two or three houses, then double time back. You see trouble, you come back here first.”
“Got it,” she said and hefted the chain wrapped around her arm.
“You’re sending us out there unarmed,” CHIP complained. “You could at least send one of them with us.”
Sharp started to argue, but Jess grabbed CHIP by the collar of his shirt and dragged him with her.
He sputtered a protest for a dozen steps before he gave up and fell in behind her.
Sharp watched them sneak up the block until they disappeared into the yard of one of the houses.
Soldier poured a quarter of the gas can contents into the lead bus and divided the other three parts into the next three buses in line.
“I don’t know if that will even get us there Cap,” he said.
Sharp grunted but didn’t respond. He kept an eagle eye on the street, waiting for Jess and Chip to either come running or call for help.
They did neither.
Five minutes after he sent them on the search, they popped around the corner. She had a green rubber garden hose curled around one shoulder and carried a two gallon metal gas canister in hand. CHIP had two red plastic containers in his hands.
“We checked the garage,” Jess grinned in triumph.
“Smart,” said Sharp and she beamed under the compliment.
He thought the smile looked good on her face, something he hadn’t seen before. Maybe there hadn’t been much to smile about.
One of the red containers had fuel in it. Sharp let Soldier and soldier siphon gas from the wrecks into the three empties while he and Turner filled up the last bus with it.
“This one is getting a lot more than the others,” Turner said.
“Because this one has a plan,” Sharp answered.
They took all the fuel from the wrecks and divided it among the first five buses, enough to get them to town and little further.
Sharp instructed them to fill the last bus with the rest.
“Soldier, Soldier,” he commanded. “Find as much gas as you can in as many containers as you can. Bring it all back to town. Do not engage, do not take risks. You read me?”
“We read you Cap,” said Soldier.
“One hour,” he circled his finger in the air and sent them to find fuel.
He climbed back into the driver’s seat and stared at the dash.
“Shit,” he muttered and waved for Jess so she could hotwire them all over again.
Find keys, or starter buttons, he thought. One more thing they would need to do.
He didn’t dare teach all of the drivers how to hotwire. They might lose a bus or more on the journey if he did.
They got the four buses running, left one for later and rumbled toward the compound.
PAM
The growl of engines bouncing off walls echoed across the compound. Here, so far in, it was muted, but so unique against the normal silence that surrounded them, it was easy to pick out.
Pam joined the rush of citizens as they hurried toward the gate.
The doors folded back to let in four dirty yellow buses. She felt a small thrill in her heart when she saw Sharp in the front of the convoy with the civilians he took with him driving the rest.
For a moment, she wondered where his men were, the soldiers who went with him.
He pulled to one side of the main street and killed the engine. She watched him climb down, rifle strapped across his chest, ready for action. He always looked ready for action, eyes on constant movement as he scanned the crowd, her, the buses. Everything.
“It’s a start,” he said before she could say anything. “I’ve got two men missing and two more gathering fuel.”
“Sorry about your missing men,” she said and watched a flash of pain cross his face.
It was gone in an instant.
“We don’t know what happened to them,” Sharp explained.
Jess, Turner and Chip took congratulations from the crowd and made it to the duo as Jacob joined them.
“We’re going to need more than that,” he said as he eyed the buses. “How many will they hold?”
“Eighty,” Sharp answered. “We need a tech guy to rig up starters. He can work with Jess on how to close the circuit.”
“No keys,” said Tuner. “The dead were standing guard.”
Jacob nodded.
“We’ve found that a lot around here. People locked themselves up, or loved ones and turned it into booby traps for the rest of us.”
“We still have a lot of work to do,” said Sharp. “How are you coming along here?”
Pam sent a sidelong glance toward Jacob.
“There’s a lot of debate,” she said.
“Put the kibosh on that,” Sharp snapped. “Fuel. Food. As soon as we have it, we’re loading up and moving out.”
“We need to discuss the logistics,” Jacob said.
“The logistics are we move out at first light,” Sharp answered. “We’re not wasting daylight.”
Pam set herself between them and moved her head from one to the other.
“We’re doing this Captain,” she assured Sharp. “And we’re going to make sure everyone stays safe.”
She said the last to Jacob, and he nodded, fear still evident on his face.
“We can continue the discussion while you retrieve the other buses,” she told Sharp. “What’s the plan?”
He studied the vehicle, and then glared over her shoulder to Jacob.
“Scrounge up a dozen more drivers. There were twenty we could move, by my count.”
He nodded to Turner as the man scurried past.
“We’re going to need gas to move them too. And batteries.”
“There’s a pump on the site,” Turner stared at the ground as a flush crept up his neck. “I wasn’t thinking.”
Sharp took a deep breath to yell at the man and rip him a new one, then let it out and shook his head.
None of them were thinking straight, and no plan survived contact with the enemy. The yard full of Z had spooked the man, and he was forgetting things.
Hell, to be honest, Sharp had forgotten to check too. If he was ripping new ones, he would be first in line.
“Can’t blame you, Hoss,” he said to Turner. “I wanted out of there and back here too as fast as we could haul ass and we overlooked it.”
Turner lifted his gaze from his worn shoes and let a half smile flitter across his pursed lips.
“We’ll do better next time?”
“Damn right we will,” Sharp barked. “You three grab some more drivers and we’ll ride back together.”
Jess, CHIP and Turner went into the small crowd of villagers who were gathering to start recruiting.
“That was nice,” said Pam.
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