by Rob Horner
Maybe too many for the big truck to break through.
“Bless it, we’re in,” Melissa breathed, squishing up against his right side.
“Let’s go!” the new guy said.
Jeff focused, and the soldier came out.
He shifted into Reverse.
* * * * *
Robbie used to volunteer at a VA Medical Center when he was a teenager, fetching blankets or towels, sitting with confused and lonely old-timers who just wanted someone to talk to, and generally acting as a gopher for anyone who needed him. He loved the work, the feeling of fulfillment in helping others.
But he loved their stories even more.
While the emergency room might be full of the sickly and infirm, or the ones strung out on pain medicine and needing a refill, the physical therapy department was the opposite. These weren’t men coming to the doctor to stave off death; they actively sought life. Sometimes that was a new life, or a new way to look at it. They didn’t mope and mourn about what they couldn’t do; they celebrated everything they could, and each milestone was as good as a birthday.
He spoke to veterans of every age and from every branch. And after all the stories of how they came to be in the medical center or talk about the girl who left and the one who stayed, Robbie always found himself drawn to one question.
What’s the craziest thing you’ve ever done?
A simple question, and one he thought he’d get cool answers to, considering the types of gung-ho men he was dealing with.
Asking Jodie to marry me.
Goin’ drinkin’ in Tijuana with Bobby.
Jumping out of a plane because some other brushcut jarhead told me to.
Putting Devonda’s name on my arm even though all my boys told me not to.
Most of the answers were like that. Simple. Direct. It was something Robbie came to expect from the patients in the unit. These weren’t complicated men and women. Their conditions might be. The steps in their treatment and their long-term prognoses might be. But they’d left complicated behind. Each day gained was a victory; every movement an accomplishment.
One man gave him an answer he hadn’t expected.
I was young, you know? Fresh out of boot and off to see the world. Our carrier pulled into Naples. You know, the armpit of the Med? We didn’t have much time in port so me and my buddies asked our LPO what we could do that was fun. He said to take the charter bus to the base, but don’t take it back. Instead, get in a cab, and tell the cabbie he’ll get an extra twenty bucks American if he can get you back to Fleet Landing in less than ten minutes.
Man, that was the dumbest thing I ever did. I’ll bet that LPO was laughing his ass off as soon as we got out of sight. That cabbie drove like a bat out of hell through lower Italy, riding the rails along those little cliffs, cutting off buses and scooters left and right. Those people don’t merge. It’s not a polite give and take like it is here. It’s a damned swerve into a spot so tight your asshole clamps down and you can’t fart for a week afterward. Scooters make their little meep meep sounds and huge oil trucks about deafen you with their air horns while you’re still picking yourself off the window glass and wondering if you can get a concussion in the back of a cab.
If asked to describe the wild run away from the Wal-Mart, with eight other full-grown adults crammed into a Crew Cab while several hundred zombies tried to bust in the windows and drag them out, that might be how he’d put it.
First off, Jeff didn’t go forward. No. The crazy dude slammed the truck into reverse, backed up fast, and stopped short. Robbie had been mentally and physically preparing himself for the forward rush and thump. Everyone around him was doing the same. They had hands out and ready to brace, but not against the inertia generated from a backward run. Somehow, Jeff knew exactly how far he could go without hitting one of the tall yellow poles meant to prevent a vehicle from crashing into the glass doors. He backed. He stopped. Robbie and seven other poor souls were thrown forward, then immediately tossed backward onto their asses.
In a seat meant for two, he somehow still found the seat belt clasp. Or it found him, driving a bruise into his butt cheek that would have him limping for several days.
That was the least of his worries.
Immediately after feeling the buckle clasp drive into the sensitive space somewhere between his right nut and his butt crack, and before he could even begin to complain about it, Jeff switched to drive, stomping the gas and gunning the V8 Hemi, simultaneously yanking the wheel to the right.
The people in the truck were both pressed into their seats and driven to the left. That moved the clasp away from his asshole but helped it create a new one somewhere to the east of the first.
What happened outside the truck drove the discomfort away.
The zombies were coming in a wedge formation.
Where the fuck did they learn to do that?
Their arms were linked, bodies pulled close, hip to hip. Those that had arms, anyway. Somehow, Jeff had recognized it and was moving to avoid the front of the wedge.
The wheel spun in his hands as he peeled to the right, the forward push of the engine seeking to correct the turn. The little space he’d gained with the reverse served as all the acceleration room he’d get. Almost immediately came the dull thuds of the truck striking flesh, then the jostling hump and bump of the big wheels rolling over those who fell.
“Lock the doors!” one of the women screamed as zombie hands grabbed for whatever purchase they could find. Arms with scratches and bite marks and those ever-present worms of darkness tried to hook over the sideview mirrors. Bodies made daring leaps for the truck bed, a foot here or there touching off a running board. Within seconds the back was full of a literal ton of the undead, and hands began to beat at the small sliding window leading into the cab.
Jasmine reached back, both hands on the little plastic latch, desperate to keep anyone from yanking it open, reaching in, and clawing someone.
Robbie’s eyes were glued to the front, all discomfort in his ass forgotten.
Jeff gained the outside of the wedge, but here a new danger presented itself.
Invisible during the initial rush, the outside zombies each had a hand free. With no other zombie to hold onto, they’d brought…objects…weapons. Each hand clasped a two by four, a brick, a lead pipe…something. Where the massive crush of bodies in the middle failed, the outer zombies almost succeeded. The windshield spiderwebbed with cracks from the sharp, overhand blow of a pipe. The solid thunk of a brick shattered the driver’s window. Jeff cursed and yanked the wheel more to the right, trying to minimize their exposure.
Holy fuck! They’re using weapons! Robbie thought. And on the heels of that disturbing realization came another. If they can be taught or told to swing something, how far a stretch is it until they’re shooting at us?
More bottles and bricks raked and smashed against the left side, a regular tattoo of strikes which hit the zombies riding in the back as often as they did the truck.
Not that they minded.
The interior filled with the sound of people yelling, harsh utterances after each blow.
But they were almost through. The horde was thinning out.
Robbie twisted in his seat. One of the bricks had landed in the truck bed and now a zombie claimed it.
There was no smile on its face, no sense of imminent victory.
It reared back and slammed the brick into the sliding window, sending shards of glass slicing inwards.
“Fuck!” Jasmine yelled, jerking her right hand back, the left already pressing down, trying to stem the flow of blood from a nasty cut.
As much as Robbie wanted to look at it, to help, there was something else he had to do.
He pulled the forgotten pistol from his belt, thrust it into the opening, and fired point blank at the monsters in the truck bed.
The first one was easy; it was already reaching in. The bullet tore into its forehead, dropping it where it stood. The monsters behind it immediatel
y began clawing forward, either trying to climb over the downed zombie or pull it out of their way. Feeling the rush of adrenaline, Robbie cautioned himself to aim. He resisted the urge to shove his arm through the opening, instead firing from within the cab, which narrowed his targets to those directly behind him. He had no intention of slicing his wrist open on a jagged shard if the truck took another huge bump.
“Hold on!” Jeff yelled from the front. “Gotta get these fuckers off the truck before we head back to The Wilds.”
“They can handle them!” Alex said back.
“Not what I’m worried about,” Jeff said, then went into a series of wild left and right swerves. Robbie pulled his finger off the trigger before he accidentally shot someone.
The monsters in the back tumbled left and right, fighting to stand, wanting to reach the cab. It only took Jeff a couple of seconds to send them all over one side or the other.
“Think that’s all of them,” Robbie said, letting out a breath.
“Still one on top,” Jeff replied.
“No way,” Tia replied.
“Look at my window,” Jeff said.
There was a hand gripping the upper portion of the window frame, pale fingers and dirt crusted nails dug in. Robbie had no trouble imagining a stunt man in an action movie, splayed out across the roof of the truck, holding on for dear life.
“Hold on, everyone,” Jeff warned.
A second later, he slammed on the brakes. A rattle and thunk heralded the zombie tumbling off the roof, bouncing once on the hood, then rolling to the ground. Unhurt or too dead to care, the thing started to rise immediately. Jeff gunned the engine and raced forward, turning at the last second to hit the monster with the side of the bumper rather than straight on, sending it flying.
* * * * *
“I’m telling you, those things can think. They can plan. And they can communicate,” Jeff said, his voice harsh.
“Don’t forget use weapons,” Angel added.
Robbie kept silent, holding Jasmine’s left hand while Luna put stitches in two long gashes in the right.
Mullet-headed Ed stayed calm while Jeff blew air like a horse fresh off the gallop. It was his way of dealing with excited people, and it worked. Someone as agitated as Jeff wouldn’t respond well to a frank argument.
“We’ve heard a little bit that sounds like what you’re describing,” Ed said, “but to be honest, we didn’t really believe it. Zombies walking in formation, springing a trap? There’s been nothing like that ever suggested, not in decades of books, television, and movies.”
“Well, that there’s fiction, and this ain’t,” a new voice said.
She was a wrinkled thing plopped in a rocking chair at one end of the double-wide’s living space. Jasmine gave him a brief description of her while they drove to Wal-Mart earlier. She went by the name Granny Lee, as though she was the maternal figure to everyone in The Wilds. And strangely, even Ed seemed to defer to her, though whether that was Southern courtesy or because she was his grandmother, Robbie couldn’t tell. There was a walking stick propped against the wall next to her rocker, a strangely knotted thing which drew the eye. It had a fanciful twisting design carved into it, whorls which started fat near the handle and narrowed as they wound around to the bottom. It took several moments, when he first spied it, to figure out what made it so strange. The twists described the threads of a screw, but they wound backward, as though a dyslexic machinist got hold of the controls.
“Just a’cause you ain’t ever seen something don’t mean it can’t be,” she went on. “Imagine what the ape-men woulda said the first time they saw someone standin’ upright.”
“I didn’t say it was a trap,” Jeff added. He’d calmed somewhat and no longer appeared ready to blow a gasket. “It was more like…opportunistic, you know? We were there so they came after us.”
“Doesn’t explain how they knew to come,” Ed said.
“I saw one outside the store, but he didn’t come after us. Otherwise, it was just the ones inside we had to deal with.”
“And you think those inside somehow…called for backup?” Ed asked.
Jeff spread his hands. “It’s the only thing that makes sense.”
“It don’t make no kind of sense,” Granny Lee said. “But it don’t necessarily have to since none of this does. Damn zombies! Who’da thunk it in our ‘Merica?”
She lapsed into a muted grumbling which Robbie took to be her general way of dealing with the world.
“We could test it,” Robbie suggested, surprising himself. Before anyone could ask what he meant, he pushed ahead, “Bert said there are people trapped in the school, right? And we had to leave the supplies at Wal-Mart, but they’re right inside the doors—”
“My pills, you mean,” Granny Lee interjected.
“Yes. Um…those, too. So, what if we, you know, created a diversion at one of those places?”
“Not bad,” Ed said, nodding.
Jasmine squeezed Robbie’s hand.
“I can do ya one better,” Jeff added. “Let’s go somewhere completely different, draw the fuckers away from both places, then maybe we can get something done.”
Ed thought about it for a moment, then said, “Let’s see what Joe thinks.”
The other five people in the room nodded, murmuring agreement, which left Robbie with only one question.
“Who’s Joe?”
* * * * *
Joe Congel was a fellow prepper who lived outside Atlanta, but whose job was in the heart of downtown. He was there when the explosion spread Avaxx into the atmosphere. He hadn’t been able to see the smoke rising in the air—his office faced the opposite direction—but he’d felt the floor tremble and moved out with the cattle press when the alarm sounded. This is not a drill. Please follow planned evacuation routes to your designated meeting area. From outside, the smoke darkened the sky, but it was miles away. A fine grit fell like invisible snow, sticking to their clothes and cars like pollen in April, but otherwise there was nothing. The alarm turned off and the ants dutifully moved in a line back to their workspaces.
Like everyone else, he stayed glued to the news, both the traditional CNN feed in the breakroom and the blogosphere tabs lining the top of his browser screen, but they were either universally vague, in the case of the “official” channels, or filled with pure speculation, rumor-mongering, and conspiracy theories, in the case of the blogs. By the time the workday ended, the only things he knew for sure were that something bad had happened, some of his coworkers developed a nasty case of the puke-and-poops, and traffic getting out of the city was a horrifically snarled mess.
Fortunately for him, one aspect of his preparations included having multiple routes mapped out in case the worst happened. (In his mind, a “worst case scenario” involved either nuclear war or an invasion from the Mexican army, two things no politician ever told the truth about.) So, while the rest of greater Atlanta—and the hundred thousand through-and-throughs who routinely clogged the highways—languished in the worst traffic jam in a decade, Joe followed one of several alternate routes along the lesser streets, first working away from the Interstate pretzel, then turning north.
Getting home that first night wasn’t the problem.
Surviving it was.
Who knew Alpharetta would be the start of a zombie ground war?
Thankfully, Joe’s prepper operation was a retrofitted mini school bus, what the kids used to call a “short bus,” and which used to be associated with mental disability. As in, “Wow, you’re stupid! You must ride the short bus to school.” It had a single bunk on one side and a propane grill on the other. (Vented to the outside, thank you very much). One footlocker contained a few changes of clothes, while a second held all the tools a man would need to run out into the woods, build a shelter, and begin living off the land. Tucked beneath the bunk was a small arsenal of weapons—shotgun, an AR-15, a .380 pistol and a 9mm, a refurbished .30-06 Springfield hunting rifle, and roughly two thousand rounds of am
munition divided amongst them.
What made the whole thing plausible as a prepper vehicle was the fully integrated CB station just behind the accordion door, where the bitch seat would be in a normal bus. It could run off the battery, of course. But why stop there?
The bus had an outer hatch beside the folding door, a cunning thing of his own design. Behind it was a modified hose reel with two hundred feet of extension cord wrapped around it. If he got to a place with electric service available—or if he found a need to power up the small generator stowed in the back of the bus—he could roll out the cord and run independently of the bus engine.
When the zombies swarmed his house, he took refuge in the bus. He didn’t dare try to drive it away, not the first night. And strangely, he didn’t need to.
Out of sight, out of mind.
It wasn’t just an old saying, not where the undead were concerned. So long as he kept a low profile in the bus, and none of the crazy creatures saw him, he was left alone.
The next day, using a combination of different routes, he drove the bus back into Atlanta.
Every book, television show, and movie with zombies featured the CDC as being an integral part in either the creation of the madness, or the solution to it. Joe didn’t know if he had anything to offer them, but maybe they could keep him safe.
The military guarding the facility never gave him a chance to find out. He was turned away with raised guns and a stern warning that if his bus was seen again, it would be fired upon.
That was two days ago.
He’d thought about driving away, just filling up the vehicle and rolling until the thing couldn’t go any farther.
But he didn’t know where to go.
He had his tools. He had weapons.
He was a prepper.
But he’d never thought about being a solitary prepper.
In his mind, being prepared meant being part of a resistance, able to pull his weight while also contributing to the larger goal of driving the Mexicans back across the border or surviving the first wave of post-nuclear mutations.
