Given their collective survival skills, I was pretty sure that Bertha’s gang would make it… for a while anyway. Just as I figured Ray, my Cajun Marine buddy, and his two kids would be OK.
Again, at least for a while.
Twenty minutes later, Clete guided the barge toward the eastern shore of the bayou, not far from Airline Highway. Apparently, we had reached Prairieville, essentially a southern suburb of Baton Rouge.
The town had surely seen better days. As with New Orleans and the other places I’d traversed over the past day or so, I could discern slowly moving cars contending with small groups of zombies, plus charred vehicles, dead bodies, and living people running from the undead monsters. Some managed to outrun them, some didn’t.
And all I could think was… if Baton Rouge had become a similar living hell, I couldn’t even imagine what the major cities looked like. Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles must’ve been filled with millions of flesh-eating creatures.
“Son,” Carl asked, “sure you wanna get off the boat?”
Just then, Azazel unleashed a long, pleading caterwaul from behind me. Turning around, I spotted her green eyes staring at me through the slits of her carrier.
Grinning, I faced Carl again. “Can’t let the kitty down. She needs to be with her mama.”
Despite his long, scraggly beard, I could see his face clearly, which wore the same skeptical expression that, over the years, many people had displayed whenever Clare and I referred to Azazel as our furbaby – or us as her parents.
“Hate to interrupt,” Clete said from the helm, “but if ya still plannin’ to leave, now’s da time.”
Taking the hint, Gretchen and Sally hugged me goodbye, then scurried toward the starboard side of the barge and slid the railing aside. Apparently, Clete had installed two ramps on his customized vessel, one on each side.
How handy. Turns out I’m facing the right way after all.
“You be careful,” Bertha said. “And give that wife of yours a hug for us. Hope I get the chance to meet her someday.”
“Thanks,” I replied. “For everything. It would’ve taken me a lot longer to find my way through that mess. Hours Clare might not have.”
“No, thank you, Joe. You helped me get Carl back.” Her eyes watered, belying her initially tough exterior, and she hugged me fiercely.
Funny how fast two strangers can become friends. Turns out Clare’s right: I don’t hate everyone. Just most people.
Then, Ellen, Tonya, and Ally embraced me as well. They were good people, and I sincerely hoped they’d make it.
Shit, I hope I make it, too.
As Clete veered the barge toward the landing, I spotted a sizable contingent of zombies waiting to greet me.
“You’d better get a running start,” Carl said. “We’ll unload on those up front, but you’ll need a head of steam to push through the rest of ’em.”
Nodding, I climbed into the van, shut the door, and buckled myself into the driver’s seat. As I started up the engine, I noticed that Azazel had settled down on her blanket inside the carrier. Perhaps she knew we were about to disembark, and she was just as ready as I was to get on with the rest of our journey.
Slowly, the barge drifted toward the boat landing. Bertha and her people opened fire on the closest zombies while Gretchen and Sally extracted and secured the ramp. As soon as I heard the telltale thunks below my van, indicating my tires had been released, I made sure the deck before me was clear of passengers, then I hit the gas, drove up the ramp, and rolled onto the landing.
Glancing in my side-view mirror, I watched as the ladies retracted the ramp, and the barge drifted back into the water. Tempted by all that fresh meat, a sizable herd of zombies bypassed my van and headed for the landing, but a barrage of well-placed bullets mowed them down before they even reached the water.
Thank God they’re good shots. Cuz I’m in the fucking line of fire.
As I sped away from the bayou, I could see hands waving in my direction. I’d miss my new pals, but not enough to turn around. I simply headed north on Airline Highway and focused on seeing Clare soon.
While maneuvering around various obstacles, I checked my phone. No new messages from my wife, but I noticed it was seven o’clock. The sun had nearly risen. Roughly thirteen miles lay between me and my mother-in-law’s house, and I sincerely hoped that nothing would prevent me from getting there in the next twenty minutes.
Of course, what I hope and what I get are often polar opposites.
Chapter
11
“Please, I wouldn’t wanna shoot you. I might need the bullets. Back off!” – Spence, Resident Evil (2002)
Before the zombie epidemic spread to southern Louisiana, New Orleans had boasted a considerably higher population than Baton Rouge – almost twice the number of permanent residents. But that didn’t make the traffic situation near the state capital any easier for me.
Unfortunately, survivors without boats or planes only had so many options when attempting to leave the Big Easy, a city virtually surrounded by water. You could head north via the Causeway or the I-10 Twin Span Bridge, and possibly end up trapped somewhere across sizable Lake Pontchartrain. You could cross the Mississippi River and venture onto the Westbank, but then you’d be stuck trying to navigate small eastbound roads alongside the bayous ringing the Gulf of Mexico or westbound roads through the marshland toward Baton Rouge. Or you could take a more direct route to the state capital, via the parking lot that resembled the westbound I-10 or the slightly less-crowded Airline Highway, which happened to be my chosen route.
Here was the rub, though: Fleeing the mess that had descended upon New Orleans resembled no evacuation that had ever come before. Survivors like me weren’t striving to escape a terrible yet temporary hurricane churning up trouble in the gulf. We were trying to evade a zombie apocalypse that had made landfall everywhere and wouldn’t dissipate anytime soon – if ever.
Since both the I-10 and Airline Highway had been blocked at some point during the last two days, most of the present traffic was composed of either people hailing from the Baton Rouge area or those who’d made it westward before the Gonzales assholes decided to go all tyrannical and blow up the overpasses on the two main routes.
While I’d reluctantly rammed into several empty vehicles and ambling zombies in my ongoing effort to reach Clare, I hesitated to collide into other motorists. Sadly, though, many survivors had no such qualms. Many people were simply using their vehicles as weapons and battering rams – not to smash zombie skulls, but to force their way through traffic jams. I slowed down, slid into the right lane, and tried to stay clear of the insanity, watching as cars continued to crash into each other. Even worse, I observed two separate incidents during which motorists emerged from their entangled vehicles, shouting and punching each other amid the steam and twisted metal, only to be overtaken by zombies and turned into the screaming main course of an impromptu undead feast.
Frankly, the madness and mayhem didn’t shock me. I’d always expected as much from humanity. Sure, I’d figured it would take a little longer before fucktards like the Gonzales cops started their bids to take over or at least take advantage of the situation, but apparently, I’d always overestimated my fellow men and women. It didn’t make me happy to witness the desperation and violence, and it made me even less happy to experience it myself.
So, when a lowlife walked up to my driver’s-side door and used a handgun to tap on the cage that covered my window, threatening to carjack my van, I realized I’d had enough of driving on Airline. Though the punk bolted when he saw the barrel of my shotgun and the determined scowl on my face, I knew the odds were good that some jackass would eventually go for broke and blow a bunch of holes in my ride – and perhaps me or Azazel as well.
Although Clare and I had usually visited her mom via the I-10 and I-12 (not the surface streets), I vaguely recognized the area – enough to attempt driving across the parking lots instead of the jam-packed roadways. At
the first opportunity, I veered into a loading dock area behind a strip mall.
Unlike the rear access lane at Walmart the previous day, I didn’t encounter any minivan blockades or similar obstacles, but I did manage to run down a few zombies as they stumbled from the back exit of a store. A couple of them even had shopping bags hanging from their wrists, oblivious to the purchases they’d made only a couple days earlier.
When I reached the end of the lane and skirted the edge of the parking lot, I spotted another lot across the street, with an opening directly opposite me.
The bad news: To reach it, I needed to cross a narrow roadway packed with meandering zombies and pissed-off drivers.
The good news: Most people still seemed reluctant to run over former human beings. So, as soon as the next zombie attempted to cross the street, halting the traffic in both lanes, I hit the gas, slammed into the hapless creature, and hopped into the opposite lot.
The squirming zombie’s name was Rita. It said so on the pink name tag she wore. I got a good look at it while she was stuck to the front of the van. According to the same name tag, Rita had worked at a nearby candy shop. As she clawed at my windshield, groaning and hissing, I couldn’t help but wonder what might pass for zombie taffy. When the disturbing image of Rita pulling, stretching, and devouring human intestines popped into my exhausted brain, I decided I’d hauled her disgusting ass long enough.
I stopped in the middle of the parking lot, grabbed my trusty axe, and stepped down from the van. I embedded the obsidian blade into Rita’s skull and, with the handle, yanked her motionless frame off my windshield. Easier than you might think, since I’d apparently hit her so hard with my vehicle that I’d split her body in two at the waist. In fact, all that remained of her was the head, torso, and arms. Her pelvis and legs obviously lay somewhere behind me.
Turning at the sound of moans, thumps, and hisses, I realized that several zombies were headed my way. As usual, I had little time to waste, so I braced my foot on poor Rita’s face and, with a horrendous sucking sound, tore the axe from her foul-smelling skull. When blood, brains, and black zombie goo flew upward and onto my jeans, I shook my head in disgust – and silently applauded my decision to wait on changing my clothes until I’d gotten to Clare.
Still, I didn’t think I’d ever get used to the sights, sounds, and especially scents of the new undead world. At least, I hoped I never did.
Quickly, I climbed back into my van, secured the door, and tore across the parking lot. I had to swerve around several abandoned cars and wandering zombies, but at the far end, I managed to dart through a gap in traffic to reach the next lot.
While Azazel occasionally chirped in protest against the bumpy ride, I continued that method of travel as long as possible. Although I tried to keep to the rear access lanes behind giant stores and strip malls, I usually had to backtrack due to parked vehicles or enormous dumpsters blocking my route – and venture across the debris-filled customer parking lots instead.
Thank God we were a consumer society, or there wouldn’t be so many handy strip malls.
I wondered why no one else had decided to adopt my method of bypassing the crowded roadways via the obstacle-laden parking lots. Perhaps most people were afraid of taking a chance and being on their own, away from the other survivors. Whatever the case, every time I crossed into a new lot, I could see the line of slow-moving traffic beside me, like a spectator coasting along the sidelines of a Super Bowl showdown between stumbling zombies and panic-stricken motorists.
After exiting my fifth lot, I finally picked up a tagalong. A beat-up Chevy station wagon followed me onto the property of an utterly vandalized shopping center and started tailing me through the latest zombie obstacle course.
Between my two side-view mirrors and the ever-brightening sky, I could make out a scruffy-looking kid in his late teens behind the wheel. An older woman, who resembled him enough to be his mother, sat in the front passenger seat, aiming a rifle through her partially open window and shooting any zombies that got too close. Even as our two-vehicle caravan rolled across the lot, she managed to take down at least three of the undead ramblers alongside us. After shooting a short, heavyset lady in the head, the woman finally retracted the rifle and rolled up her window.
The station wagon followed me across two more parking lots before I finally reached the outskirts of my mother-in-law’s subdivision. When I turned into the residential neighborhood, I thought the odd pair might abandon me there and continue the parking-lot scheme across the city, but they stayed on my tail. I could see the woman pointing toward my van, while the kid gestured back to a road we’d just crossed. The woman must’ve won the argument because they kept following me at a close distance as I continued toward my wife.
Chapter
12
“Dude, be thankful. Those things are terrifying. And the cleanup on them is a nightmare.” – Sitterson, The Cabin in the Woods (2011)
My van and the station wagon weren’t the only two moving vehicles at that end of Jill’s subdivision. A few trucks were ahead of me, but luckily, the drivers kept a decent pace as they steered around parked cars and active zombies. Good thing, too, because if the roads there had been as packed as the main ones, I would’ve had no choice but to drive across people’s lawns.
When I was a kid, folks had called that farming – illegally driving your car across someone else’s property and cutting unsightly tire tracks through the grass. Back then, TPing had been a popular prank, too. You’d visit the home of someone you didn’t like (or even someone you did) and throw a dozen rolls of toilet paper through the trees in the front yard, draping the branches with long white streams of paper that would take forever to remove, especially if it rained during the night. I admit, my friends and I had done that on a few occasions.
Good times.
Some of my pals had also gotten their kicks from egging people’s houses, but I never really understood that particular prank. It was sticky and nasty, didn’t look all that cool, and certainly didn’t serve the same purpose as, say, setting a bag of dog shit on fire on someone’s porch, ringing the bell, and concealing yourself to watch your target furiously stamp out the flames. To ensure a maximum mess, you could even have a fellow prankster knock on the back door. Of course, knowing your target would traipse through the house, leaving shitty footprints along the way, was pretty cruel.
OK, truthfully, I’d done it one time as a teenager, but the guy was a complete dick and totally deserved it.
As for farming people, I’d never actually gone that far. Always struck me as one trick that could land you in jail for trespassing, vandalism, and property damage – and force you to pay some big bucks to repair the person’s lawn. I wondered if teenagers even did crap like that anymore… and then remembered where I was. Most teenagers would be lucky to still be alive.
The trucks ahead of me continued to move through the subdivision, and eventually, my next turn appeared. I was grateful I wouldn’t have to farm any lawns in the neighborhood because the last time I’d inadvertently done that – the previous morning in the Tremé – I’d busted my own goddamn radiator. True, I’d been trying to avoid a flaming, bright-yellow Mardi Gras Indian, but I didn’t have time for that shit now. My wife needed me.
I kept driving carefully through the subdivision, my shadow staying ten yards behind me. Although I only spotted a few other moving vehicles in the vicinity, I noticed a disconcerting number of zombies milling about. Some were even banging on people’s doors and breaking their windows. Naturally, the numbers increased as I neared Jill’s end of the subdivision, and by the time I’d reached her street, a sizable herd of undead blocked my path. When the zombies started drifting toward me, I noticed my shadow reversing away from the van.
“Fuck!”
I shifted my rig into reverse, stepped on the gas, and surprised my tagalongs by pulling alongside the passenger side of their station wagon. The woman rolled down her window a few inches as I did the same with
mine. The boy leaned downward so he could see me, too. Then, the woman slid the barrel of her rifle out the window, though she politely avoided pointing it directly at me.
“Listen,” I said, “I don’t know who you folks are, but my wife is in a house on the other side of that herd, and I need to find a way…”
Without letting me finish, the woman rolled up her window and motioned for the boy to drive. I assumed she didn’t want to risk her son or herself for someone she didn’t know – which, to be fair, made total sense. The boy hit the gas, and his station wagon shot forward, but instead of careening down one of the cross streets, he drove toward the edge of the herd, pivoted the car slowly through one of the neighborhood’s overflow parking areas, and drove away, honking the horn.
Even as the zombie herd aimed for the station wagon, the teenage driver maintained his casual pace, and the horn continued to belt out. Whenever the undead horde drew nearer, he would drive slowly away, still pressing on the horn. As the station wagon came toward me, I could see the mother looking back, as if keeping track of the approaching zombies. It was an amazing, terrifying sight to see: at least four hundred zombies trailing the station wagon as it turned down a cross street and kept on going. Like the Pied Piper, leading away hordes of unwanted rats from a supposedly ungrateful town.
Only, I was very grateful.
Although I lost sight of the wagon, I could still hear the horn blaring as the last of the horrifying herd vacated the area. Part of me felt guilty for asking two total strangers to put themselves in danger for me and my wife, but then I recalled that I had done exactly the same thing in a Home Depot parking lot in order to help the Summers clan – and again near a church in Gramercy.
Zombie Chaos Box Set | Books 1-4 Page 39
