Zombies! (Book 4): Nowhere To Hide

by Merritt, R. S.

  Legs spread he didn’t shoot himself in the foot which was more luck than planning. He sat there while the woman’s life leaked out of her body. Disgusted at the new layer of bodily fluids coating him he shoved the corpse out the open door onto the floor with the toddler he’d killed earlier. He didn’t have time to deal with his other passenger at the moment. He ran to the garage door and flung it up. Then he ran back and jumped into the corvette. He tossed his backpack into the floorboards by his dead backseat driver and fumbled around for the headlights. Flicking the lights on he saw a group of Zombies running up the driveway towards the garage screaming their hunting song together. The eerie screeching fueling Kyler’s efforts to figure out how to put the car in drive.

  Feeling naked in the tiny little car with the top down he slammed his foot down on the accelerator once he thought he had it in drive. He was rewarded by the sound of tires squealing as he burned rubber out of the garage. In an uncontrolled fish tail charging straight at the incoming Zombies he once again wished the person who’d owned this home had collected armored Humvees instead of tiny red toy cars.

  He looked for any gaps between the Zombies that he could try and aim for. Not seeing any, he slammed his foot down harder on the accelerator and answered their hunting screeches with his own high-pitched challenge. His zero to sixty in no time tiny hunk of gas consuming metal met the line of screaming meat puppets charging at him. The car got beat to hell on the outside, but metal beats flesh nine times out of ten. Broken windshield, dented hood, missing fender, and making a funny noise when he revved up the engine, he made it through the Zombies and onto the main road. Driving down the road headed in the direction he hoped the interstate was in he enjoyed the breeze hitting him in the face. He may have completely ruined any resell value for this car, but it’d gotten the job done. Now he just had to figure out where the outpost had ended up and join back up with the commander and crew.

  If he couldn’t find them, he could always use his recently acquired big bag of drugs to buy his way into some other group.

  Chapter 6: One Bite at a Time

  Only the passenger side windshield wiper was working. Kelly had no clue where the one on the driver’s side had disappeared off to. She guessed it might be a good thing it was gone since the one on the passenger side seemed to be having issues rubbing itself across the bullet riddled windshield. The rain was starting to come down harder. Behind her the Zombies chasing them had slowed down at the wrecked car to fight over the flesh of the dead and soon to be dead Brotherhood guards. Up ahead she saw headlights at the intersection she was making for.

  “You ok up here?” Randy had poked his head through the small opening in the back window.

  “We’re good. Got some company up ahead. How’s Tony?” Kelly asked.

  “He’s still breathing but I’m worried about him. You really need to stop shooting him.” Randy said it with a smile to take the sting out of it. He knew it was kind of a jerk thing to say but he couldn’t help himself. The stress of all of this felt like it was leaking out of his pores. It’d been bad enough when it’d just been him and Kelly and Tony getting into those scrapes. Now his girls were all in the front of the truck. Everything that mattered to him in this world was sitting up there.

  “The first time he totally deserved it so that doesn’t count. What are we going to do about the lights up ahead?”

  Randy had been mulling that over. The safest bet was to stop the truck and disappear into the woods. They could escape the Zombies and the Brotherhood that way. Then the Brotherhood would know about where they were though. They probably knew that already but with the rain and the Zombies and all the confusion they had a slim chance still of getting away undetected. If they didn’t take this chance, they may not get another one. If they were caught then him, Kelly and Tony were dead for sure and the kids probably weren’t going to have a great future either.

  “I say we go for it babe. Roll up on them like we’re long lost buddies and then just unleash. Maybe they’ll just think we’re the guys they just shot up. If there’s just one of them, we may be ok. I’d say drop the kids off then me and you head up there but anybody we drop off here would have to worry about the Zombies following us.” Looking ahead Randy realized they were already almost on top of the intersection with the headlights pointed at them. Kelly must’ve already come to the same conclusion he had and asked him just for validation.

  “Everybody on the floor. I love you honey! Don’t miss!” Kelly kept the truck moving towards the intersection.

  Randy made sure he had a full magazine and got ready to do some damage. As long as it was just the one truck up ahead, they should be good. In the rain and confusion, they’d get to shoot first. They had the luxury of knowing that anyone they saw was an enemy. Those guys at the intersection had to be sitting there wondering who they were. It’d hopefully make them hesitate. Randy focused on his breathing and moved his sights to rest on the windshield of the truck shining it’s lights on them.

  Two more sets of high beams came on. Randy nervously put a few rounds through the windshield of the original truck he’d been sighting in on. A noise like the finale of a fireworks show hit them out of nowhere. Kelly lost control of the truck as the front tire was blown out and the engine made a weird chugging sound. The truck shuddered to a stop leaning crazily forward on the corner where it no longer had much of a tire left. The men who’d just ambushed them emerged from the woods pointing rifles and yelling for them to get out of the truck or be shot.

  The intensity of the situation was amped up by the screeching of the Zombies coming at them from all directions. Randy dropped his M-16 on top of the pile of corpses they’d accumulated in the back of the truck and put his hands in the air. Two guys dressed in camouflage were shoving guns in his face as he yelled out that he needed to pick up his friend. Hoping he wasn’t about to get shot in the face he bent down and scooped Tony up in a fireman’s carry.

  Now he was standing in the bed of a large pickup truck holding his friend in a fireman’s carry while his wife and kids were dragged out of the cab and shoved towards the waiting headlights. The soldiers on the ground were visibly losing their patience. Randy couldn’t come up with a good reason why they hadn’t already shot him. Realizing he didn’t have the luxury of figuring out a smart way down from the truck he took the dumb way. Since no one was offering to help him get Tony down he put a foot on the side of the truck and braced himself before leaping off.

  It hurt a little bit more than he’d thought it would. His leg and elbow felt like someone had used him as a jackhammer on the road. He was more concerned about Tony who’d gone flying out of his arms when he hit the ground. It looked like the poor guy had landed on his face and slid a few feet. Assuming neither Tony nor Randy died before Tony regained consciousness there was bound to be some comedic gold in that occurrence. Randy was getting close to a full-blown panic attack. He snapped back to reality just in time to take a rifle butt to his face.

  Tasting blood, he staggered to his feet. The guard who’d hit him yelled for him to pick up his friend and move towards the lights. Randy picked up Tony. He cradled him like a baby in his arms as he stumbled for the lights up ahead. The guards behind him covering their retreat by shooting at the Zombies that were starting to come at them in larger and larger groups. Once he got close enough to make out what was going on Randy saw a military Humvee with an M-50 mounted on it. The gunner must’ve been the one who took out their front tire. The gun was currently pointed up the street blasting fire out the end of it. The gunner was blazing away at what Randy assumed was a buttload of Zombies coming for them.

  A deep rumble of thunder rolled through the night momentarily eclipsing the sound of machine gun fire. The only reason they hadn’t been overrun by Zombies yet was the muting effect of the heavy rain on all the noise they were making. The machine gun was the tipping point though. This intersection was a few minutes way from looking like an undead Woodstock. Randy was shoved into the back of
the large white van in the middle of the intersection by another nervous looking guard. Everything being done here tonight broke every rule of staying alive in this new normal. The only thing that would’ve made this worse was if it’d been daytime. They were all guilty of feeding the Gremlins after midnight.

  The guard pushing him into the back of the van got ripped off him and thrown to the ground by a Zombie who’d jumped over the hummer to attack. Randy watched the hummer gunner pour every bullet he had into the encroaching wall of Zombies. It wasn’t enough. One of the adrenalized Zombies jumped up and wrapped itself around the gunner. The vehicle disappeared under a crawling mass of the blood crazed freaks. Another guard jumped in the back of the van with Kelly and the kids and started screaming and banging on the metal separator leading towards the front of the van.

  Sensing there was something wrong Randy ran over to the driver’s window of the van and looked in. Someone grabbed him from behind and threw him down on the road. Randy sprang right back up and grabbed the wiry man who’d knocked him out of the way to get into the van. The man tried to get his rifle around to shoot Randy. Randy blocked the barrel from pointing at him and stepped in close to take a swing at the guy.

  A burning pain bit into the left side of his body. Glancing down he saw a little knife handle sticking out of his stomach. He looked up and saw the man smiling at him and struggling to bring the rifle to bear to finish him off. Randy head butted the man as hard as he could. Completely taken off guard by the ferocity of the attack the man stumbled back a step. Randy jerked him back by the barrel of the man’s own weapon to head butt him again. This time he put his whole body into it. He was rewarded by the dazed man’s hands slackening their hold on the rifle. If it’d been a cartoon there would’ve been tweedy birds flying in a circle around the bastards head.

  A screech directly behind him caused Randy to give up on snagging the man’s weapon. He threw the guy on the ground and started climbing into the cab of the van. The soldier on the ground managed to get his act together enough to point his M-16 at Randy’s back a split second before a fast-moving Zombie jumped on the man’s back and ripped off a nice big piece of scalp with its teeth. Seconds later another Zombie had its teeth ripping into the soldiers forearm. Blood flowed but the man’s screams of agony were lost in the din of the rolling thunder storms and the desperate sounds of machine guns firing all around them as men made their last stands.

  Randy wasn’t interested in a last stand. He shoved the corpse of the original driver of the van to the other side of the large bench seat and turned the key in the ignition. The van started up with no issues. He moved the shifter on the steering wheel column to drive and went around the other Humvee that’d accompanied the van. He watched as the gunner in the Humvee on this side of the van met the same fate as the one on the other side had. A few other soldiers who’d managed to stay alive made a dash for the van. They were all pulled down to the ground to be eaten by the fast-moving Zombies.

  Zombies bounced off the sides of the van as he slowly drove through the big mass of them. Eventually the herd thinned out enough where he was able to start making decent time. They were only a few miles from where they’d used to live so Randy was familiar with the area. He had an idea on which route they should take. He was basing their route on the fact that the Brotherhood seemed to have a bunch of stuff going on the east coast but nothing really going on the gulf side of Florida. He knew it was probably a horrible idea to just get on the interstate and drive straight across the state but in the absence of a better idea that was exactly what he was planning to do. There was also the minor matter of the fully armed Brotherhood soldier in the back.

  With so many problems to deal with Randy focused on boiling down everything to its most base element to figure out what to do next. He remembered the old adage about eating an elephant. If something seems like an insurmountable task at first then you take it bite by bite, you’ll eventually get there. He decided the first thing to do was get them away from the area they were in. They needed to get as far from here as possible. The fact that the Brotherhood was willing to send so many resources out in the night to try and capture them was disconcerting. Randy had expected some pursuit but hummers and machine guns and large numbers of men being moved around in the night trying to capture them seemed like a massive overreaction.

  The second problem he was going to have to deal with was the guy in the back holding his family at gunpoint. If Tony had been coherent then he thought maybe Tony and Kelly would’ve already taken the guy out by the time he stopped. He wasn’t sure if Kelly would be able to do it on her own. Especially now that she had the girls to protect. Having your kids all around you in a confined space like that with a pissed off soldier pointing a machine gun at you was bound to lessen your threshold for risk taking. The soldier in the back would not have any idea that the person driving the van was Randy. Hopefully the soldier would be sitting back there nice and content thinking they were headed home.

  With that thought in mind Randy began viciously driving around Zombies and other obstacles that popped in his headlights. He could hear things thumping around in the back of the van. He was hoping to give Kelly an opening to get in control back there before they drove so far that the guard started wondering why they weren’t at the base yet. With that thought in mind he swerved hard to get on the ramp going up to the toll road. He’d been worried there may be a bunch of stalled vehicles on the ramp blocking them, but it looked like clear sailing up ahead. He put his foot down hard and concentrated on not getting them killed with his crazy driving. He was planning to head south until they hit the interstate then jump on it and drive towards Tampa until they started to run out of gas, or the road got impossible to navigate.

  Two bullets passing through the back of the van into the windshield changed his mind. He slammed on the brakes and got his head down as low as he could without crashing. The van skidded before bouncing off a guardrail and ending up back in the middle of the road. As soon as he judged he’d survive the fall, Randy popped open the door and rolled himself out onto the asphalt. The world went black for a second as he smeared the flesh from his palms across the blacktop. He really needed to start dressing more appropriately for the crap he kept getting himself into.

  Feeling something pressing into his back he stuck his hands up in the air and slowly rolled over. A grinning Kelly went down to one knee and gave him a long, wet kiss.

  “Dad’s alive!” Randy hear Myriah shouting out the news behind them as Kelly let up on the kissing to make sure he was all in one piece.

  “We thought you were dead, and they were taking us back to their base.” Kelly leaned in and told him. Randy pulled himself painfully to his feet.

  “Is everybody ok? What happened to the soldier who jumped in with you?” He asked.

  “Let’s get in the van and get moving. I’ll fill you in as we get out of here. Are you hurt? Can you drive?” Randy held up his bleeding palms to show Kelly she’d be the one driving. She still hesitated. She really didn’t like driving and it showed in the way she was checking out his palms to make sure he wasn’t faking it. Sighing, she finally helped him hop in the van before getting in herself and settling in behind the steering wheel.

  Once they were moving Kelly began to fill Randy in on what had happened in the back of the van after he’d disappeared.

  “I was taking care of Tony and trying to comfort the kids all at the same time. I was worried as hell about you and this moron with a gun was yelling at us all to shut up or he’d kill us. He was waving the gun around like a crazy man and I was freaking out he was going to accidently shoot one of the kids. He kept telling us to shut up and we’d be back to the base in no time where we could all have a nice safe night. He even promised us ice cream. I got the kids to settle down and made sure everyone was being nice and quiet and just tried to look scared and defenseless. Which was pretty easy since I was scared and defenseless.” Randy nodded along with the story. He was trying to focus
on Kelly while wishing he could chop both his hands off because the pain was so intense from the bloody road rash. Seeing he was listening and hoping it may take his mind away from his palms for a minute or two Kelly continued.

  “Then the van started jerking all over the place like we were dodging a bunch of Zombies or something. It was pretty dark in the back with just one of those little dome lights on. We turned really hard and our friendly guard let go of his rifle to keep from falling over. I flew at him as soon as I saw the gun drop. I was screaming for the kids to help. I grabbed his rifle and dropped to the ground hard with it. The van swung again, and he went headfirst into the floor then his legs went over his head. Myriah and Caitlyn were on him. They were like a couple of she-devils ripping into him. He’s lucky he survived. Remember how we taught them if a man was trying to attack them to go for the crotch? Well they tore into that dudes testicles like they were swinging at a pinata at a quinceanera. He screamed way louder than any of the Zombies we’ve been chased by. It was pretty awesome.” Kelly paused to drink out of a bottled water she’d found in the cup holder before finishing her story.

  “We got him down on the ground and used his shoestrings to tie his arms and legs up. Cait is sitting back there now guarding him. Tony’s still unconscious, so he missed out on all the fun. In case you’re wondering it was me who put a couple of rounds through the front of the van to get the driver to stop. I had no clue it was you up here babe although I probably should’ve guessed. I figured if I aimed for the passenger side then I may kill whoever was sitting there so they wouldn’t be able to attack us, and I was hoping the driver would do exactly what you did. How are your hands feeling now?”