Road to Riches: Deadline: Book 1 (Zombie Road)

by Wesley R. Norris

  She took off at a dead run to gather her belongings. This place was a ticking time bomb. Being with me would be dangerous, but no more so than staying here. Zack offered breakfast and I agreed. We started for the clubhouse when Sean spoke in his raspy voice.

  “Help.” He croaked. I stepped closer so I could hear him.

  “You need help?” He shook his head no. He bared his teeth and let out a frustrated growl.

  “Help…. you.”

  “Why?” I asked. I could barely make out his words, but I wasn’t getting any closer to him. Another step or two would put me inside the range of his chain if he decided to attack.

  “Protect…. Madi” He slurred. Dribble spilled from his slack jaw.

  “Zack, what the hell is he talking about?” I asked.

  “He wants to help you, I think he knows if he goes with you, he won’t make it back, but since you’re taking Madi, he wants to go too. From what little I knew of him before he was injured, this is something he would volunteer to do.”

  “I’ll take whatever help I can get, but can I trust him?” I eyed Sean cautiously. He was chained up for a reason.

  Zack shrugged, “Madi will be there, I think you’ll be fine. You’re gonna need a distraction to get in the building, it pains me to say it, but I think he’s just what you need.”

  I looked Sean in his dead eyes. “Can you be trusted Sean? You gonna take a bite out of me when my back is turned. Just know that if you even look at me funny, I’ll put a bullet in your brain and won’t think twice.” I knew Zack was right, I would need a distraction when I went for the building.

  “Trust…me…” He groaned. I would be taking him to his death. Distracting the zombies long enough for me to get in the building could only end one way for him.

  I nodded an okay at him but wondered what the hell I was doing. Taking Madi along was dangerous enough but having to watch my back against whatever the hell this kid was bordered on insanity.

  “I’ll bring you some breakfast Sean, sit tight. Come on, Rye, the least I can do is feed you before you go get yourself killed.” I followed Zack towards the clubhouse.

  The banquet tables in the clubhouse held trays of fresh fruits and vegetables. Skewered, grilled iguanas sat steaming on stainless steel trays. Bowls of scrambled eggs and loaves of flatbread were being served to the elderly people sitting at the round tables scattered around the room. My plate was heaped with strawberries the size of a toddler’s fist, slices of cantaloupe and honey dew melon and a skewer with a foot-long iguana. I picked up a plastic cup full of fresh squeezed lemonade and sat down at the table where Zack was busy shoveling food into his mouth while Madi picked at hers, moving the food around with her fork, slipping pieces of melon to the ferret in her chest pocket when Zack wasn’t looking.

  I caught the stare of the old man who’d confronted me on the golf cart. I smiled at him. He leaned over to the blue haired woman beside him, pointed at me and whispered in her ear. She gave me a disapproving frown, probably upset that I was stuffing my face instead of getting their lights back on.

  I noticed that none of the wealthy residents pitched in with the serving. Not all of them were senior citizens, quite a few were in their early forties and fifties. I could tell by their body language and clothing that they were the original occupants of this exclusive community. I overheard snippets of comments from them directed at the men and women bringing the trays of food. Complaints about the hot air, the lack of variety in the menu and the flies that were buzzing around, attracted to the fresh fruit. I tried not to let it get under my skin, but it did. Old Man Cobb would straighten this bunch out once they were rescued. The airs of privilege would be gone in Lakota. Those still able to work would find themselves manning a gun on the walls, working the stockyards and fields, or loading and unloading goods from the big rigs. Those unsuited for physically demanding work would be cared for, but still expected to pitch in however they were able. The tough old Marine would make sure of that.

  I took a bite of the iguana. It wasn’t bad, better than rattlesnake. It was coated in a spicy seasoning that would make Nay Nay proud. I dropped the tiny drumstick bone on my plate and sliced off a piece of the tail. A few minutes later I pushed back my plate and rubbed my stomach in satisfaction. Zack had already finished his second helping and was making notes on a hand drawn map of the golf course.

  It was pushing eight am and I’d lost two days due to delays already. I looked at Madi and her plate of barely eaten food. “You ready?”

  She perked up at the prospect of leaving. “Gimme a minute.”

  She walked over to a girl in her young teens and gave her the ferret. They spoke briefly, hugged and Madi returned to the table. “I’m ready.”

  24

  Bubble

  Jacksonville, FL

  We exited the compound and headed down a rutted trail though the palmetto bushes and pine trees, stayed clear of the seemingly empty subdivision to our west. I held my M4 in my hands and scanned the area for threats. We were exposed out here and if we drew the attention of the undead, there was no turning back.

  “It’s parked about a mile away. We used it to drag stuff around for the walls but had to leave it when we realized it was too heavy for the drawbridge. Hopefully, the batteries are still good.” She spoke in a whisper as we made our way down the service road that bordered the compound. She had a pink camo backpack slung over one shoulder and a Remington .22 rifle in her other hand. I hoped I wasn’t dooming us both, but we were past that point. The cards had been dealt and we’d have to play the hand we’d drawn.

  Stinky Sean lumbered along between us, staying close to Madi, protective like a pit bull. Every time he looked my way, I saw something different in his eyes. Hunger, madness, rage, sadness, resolve, flickers of sanity, there was a battle being waged inside of him for control. I needed him to keep his shit together long enough to get me inside the building.

  We made our approach to a gravel lot surrounded by a chain link fence that once served as a staging area for a construction crew. In a city the size of Jacksonville, construction never ceased. Dump trucks, bulldozers, motor graders and other heavy equipment were lined up in neat rows. Some were sitting on flat tires, all of them were beginning to rust from exposure to the salty air. I stepped around a skeleton clothed in a pair of sun faded tattered jeans, a t-shirt too deteriorated to make out the design on it and a pair of work boots. It lay face down in the sandy soil, still wearing a hard hat on its weathered skull. I rolled the skull slightly with my boot. There was a foot long piece of rebar sticking out of one eye socket.

  “This is where we got the equipment to dig the moat,” Madi whispered, pulling my attention from the pile of bones. She pointed towards the far edge of the lot. “That’s her. That’s the one we’re after.”

  The big green tractor sat beneath a metal pole barn. Big, bold letters splayed across the hood proclaimed it be a John Deere 9620R. It stood twelve feet from the ground to the top of the cab. The tires were nearly six feet tall and were mounted in pairs on all four axles. The chassis was articulated in the center, the only way to turn a machine of this size. The thing was a behemoth. Madi unhooked the set of ten-gauge wires running from the battery compartment to the solar panels mounted on the roof of the metal barn.

  She climbed up into the cab followed by funky Sean, then me. It had been many years since I’d been in a tractor and never one as sophisticated as this beast. The cabin layout was more akin to a space shuttle than what I was accustomed to seeing in a piece of farm equipment. Navigation screens and digital gauges were arranged so the driver could keep an eye on all of them at once. A high-backed air ride leather driver’s seat with a folding jump seat to the side provided seating for two in the roomy cab. Air conditioning and a Bose stereo system added style and comfort. Tractors had come a long way since my days as a kid plowing peanuts with an old open topped International Harvester on my grand pappy’s farm. I slid into the jump seat, Sean thing stood by the door, and
I wrinkled my nose at the smell rolling off of him in the confines of the enclosed cab.

  Madi fired up the six hundred and twenty horsepower Cummins diesel. While the tractor engine was warming up, she pulled a can of Copenhagen from the pocket of her overalls and loaded a pinch in her lip. I took the offered can and took a pinch for myself, hoped the nicotine would calm my frayed nerves. I was headed for the most dangerous retrieve ever attempted with two kids I barely knew. She slipped the tractor into gear and the John Deere lurched forward.

  “Here we go boys.” She wore a big smile on her face. She was at home in the big tractor, at ease, confident and in control. We set off at a crawl towards the industrial park where the MEPS was located.

  Instantly, the wailing shrieks and keening of the undead in the distance could be heard over the noise of the tractor’s engine. They were coming, a lot of them. They appeared a hundred yards away flowing like floodwaters through the trees and hedges, over cars and through weed infested lawns, leaving a wake of trampled grass and scattered toys as they flowed out of the subdivision.

  “You sure this thing will get us there? That’s a shit ton of zombies” I said to Madi. My mind was racing with the possibilities of everything that could go wrong. A busted hydraulic line from running over an unseen fire hydrant, overheating the engine when the radiator grille was covered in zombies, the protective glass around the cab giving way under the assault of the undead. I pushed the thoughts away, it was out of my control. We were committed now, for better or worse.

  “Yeah, nothing to it. These things practically drive themselves. It has onboard navigation and autopilot.” She pointed at a screen with a Greenstar logo on it. “All you gotta do is plot your endpoint, engage the autopilot and sit back and enjoy the ride. It’s how farmers kept their rows consistent when they planted on fields that were curved.”

  “This thing weighs 22 tons and will run 25mph, even with eight tires. I think it can handle a few biters.” She turned the wheel slightly away from the center of the approaching dead, aimed the outer edge where there weren’t as many.

  There must have been fifty, maybe seventy-five thousand zombies descending on us. Maybe more, it was impossible to judge the size of the horde. As far as I could see it was nothing but an unending wave of hungry monsters. I’d never witnessed this many in one place before, but despite their overwhelming numbers, there were only so many who could swarm over us at once. The first wave smashed against the front of the tractor, crushed into goo by the pressure of the ones behind them. One sprung onto the hood and started slamming its head and fists against the windshield while others climbed over the corpses of the fallen, covering the platforms outside the doors, wanting nothing more than to claw through the steel and Plexiglas that surrounded us.

  “It’s unbreakable, relax.” Madi said. I was glad one of us was feeling confident. I suppressed the urge to piss my pants out of sheer terror. She flipped on the windshield wipers to clear the gore slung from the huge tires. Chunks of flesh rode back and forth on top of the wiper blades like some sort of demented seesaw, left smeared black streaks across the windshield. The back and forth motion of the wiper blades momentarily distracted the zombie from trying to smash through the glass and instead it started trying to rip off the wipers. Sean stared in fascination at the spectacle outside the cab. I wondered if he felt some primal urge to join them.

  The four-wheel drive tractor didn’t even slow as more of the undead crashed into the front of it. We were moving along at five miles an hour, a crawl, but we were moving and that’s all I could ask for. I would have never stood a chance on foot. It would take us three hours to go the fifteen miles to the target, if we didn’t have to detour. A lifetime measured in inches. There was too much that could go wrong in that amount of time, and I had no backup plan that didn’t involve a mercy round through each of our skulls if the tractor failed us.

  They went down by the hundreds, ground into the asphalt by the massive, churning tires. There were so many on the hood and cab that I could barely see where we were going. Madi kept an eye on her navigation screen, made sure the tractor icon stayed on the green path projected on the screen. She’d plotted us a route to our final destination and seemed undisturbed by the lack of vision out the windshield.

  After the first two hours, the unending carnage started wearing on us. The shrieking wails of tens of thousands of enraged zombies reverberated relentlessly through the cab. We’d already taken out thousands of them, a drop in the bucket considering how many were out there. They kept coming, drawn by the noise of their kind to throw themselves at the green juggernaut that powered through their ranks. Their incessant pounding against the glass was like a razor blade coated in rubbing alcohol dragged across my nerve endings. I could smell their rotted stench, even through the filtered air of the cabin. One was pressed against the exhaust pipe that rose from the hood of the tractor, its flesh sizzling from the heat of the pipe. I could smell its burning flesh, taste it in the polluted air of the cab.

  I couldn’t hear the engine anymore over the noise of the horde, couldn’t see out the filth covered windows, our slow progress forward the only indication that the tractor was still moving. I’m not a religious man, but I prayed for a respite, a moment of peace to recover from the sensory overload bombarding us. Tears ran freely down Madi’s cheeks, her knuckles white from gripping the steering wheel. I didn’t think less of her for crying, I wanted to scream, to throw the door open and run far away from the onslaught and not stop until I was back at my cabin. It was almost too much, the sight of so many undead, their viscera stuck to the slowly rotating tires, the smell of rotten, roasted flesh, the relentless noise of crunching bone and pulverized bodies, overlaid by the shrieking and keening, the sound of bloodied fists and heads beating against the windows. It had no effect on Sean, he tilted his head like a curious dog and stared at the mutilated face on the other side of the glass. He didn’t flinch when the zombie’s teeth shattered and fragmented as it slammed its face against the window, desperate to rend the last of his humanity from him. He placed a hand over a bloody handprint on the other side of the glass.

  I laid a hand on Madi’s shoulder and leaned towards her ear. “You’re doing great kid. We’ll break through any second now and they’ll be chasing us.” She wiped at her face with a trembling hand and nodded her head. I could see the far edge of the horde, a quarter mile in the distance.

  When we finally punched through the trailing edge of the horde, she opened up the throttle. Gore slung from the tires and landed with dull thumps against the cab and hood as the speedometer crept up to ten, fifteen, then twenty miles an hour. The spray from the windshield washers cut some of the gore away and we could see again through the front glass. The horde gave chase, but we were opening a gap between us and them. I lost sight of them when she turned the John Deere down another street. After the slow slog of the past hour, it felt like we were flying. At least ten of the undead still clung to the cab, relentless in their assault. She jerked the wheel from side to side and managed to dislodge most of them. Any that managed to hang on for the duration, I would deal with when we got there.

  “We’re close now.” She pointed to a building in the distance. It wasn’t anything fancy. A typical government style building surrounded by a ten-foot iron bar fence. She slowed the tractor when we approached a gridlock of vehicles. There was no going around, so she just went through, the rocking motion of the tractor as it crushed cars beneath its massive wheels dislodged all but one of the zombies hitching a ride with us. There was no sign of the zombies I knew were still pursuing us, but they were back there somewhere, plodding along in pursuit. They would follow the noise of the engine and within minutes we’d be asshole deep in them again. We made the last right turn into the industrial complex where the MEPS stood. I was feeling good about my chances until I saw the parking lot in front of the building.

  They turned in unison at the sound of the diesel. Nowhere near the size of the first horde, but seve
ral thousand at the least. They screeched and ran toward us. There was a plan for this eventuality, but it sat sour on my stomach. I looked at the creature sitting on the other side of Madi.

  “You don’t have to do this,” I told him. “I’ll find another way.”

  He shook his head. “My…way.” I could hear the emotion in his voice. Some part of the young man who fancied himself a hero still remained, fought its way to the surface. It was the part I needed, though I was loathe to admit it.

  Madi stopped the tractor and killed the engine. The noise that drew them in had ceased but they still came and would attack, unless something new drew their attention. We had maybe twenty seconds before they would be all over us.

  “Thank you, Sean.” She hugged him tightly, ignored the fetid smell that rolled off of him and the drool that ran from his mouth onto her shoulder. He smiled at her, it was the most terrifying smile I’ve ever seen, but I realized my fears of him were unfounded. He loved her and he’d never let anything harm her.

  “Remember……me.” He growled into her ear. He stuck his good hand towards me, I shook it, ignored the clammy feel of his flesh. I nodded my thanks to him. Five seconds. He broke her embrace and with quickness that surprised me, threw open the door, dislodging the lone zombie still on the ladder and leapt fifteen feet toward the rushing horde. He landed gracefully and ran. He moved like a day one zombie, slowing only long enough to let them press in on him before darting ahead of the horde, faster and nimbler than any professional athlete. The undead howled their frustration at the prey that stayed just out of reach and followed after him.

  Madi fired up the tractor and hammered the throttle towards the iron fence. The noise would attract some of them back, but in seconds we’d be over the fence and inside the building and they’d be shit out of luck standing on the wrong side of the fence.