by Edward Crae
“Natural Light?” Cliff said with a grin.
“Better than nothing,” Dan said, handing one over. He cracked one open himself, and the three of them chugged happily.
“Oh damn,” Cliff said. “That’s better than I remember.”
“Sadly, it will eventually run out,” Dan replied.
He leaned back in his seat, raking his hair back with his hand. Outside, the moonlit landscape passed by, and he watched the horizon for any odd shadows or signs of movement. He thought back at what the preacher in Oolitic had said about the dead, and about the mutants dying off. He was likely right—about the dead, at least. But there were obviously still stalkers around, and probably worse.
“What’s the weirdest thing you’ve seen, Cliff?” he asked.
Cliff shrugged. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, as far as… monsters go. We’ve seen mutant coyotes, horses, other things…”
Drew glanced at him through the rear-view mirror, probably wondering why he had not mentioned the Robert-thing. Dan briefly wondered that, too, but kept quiet.
“Mostly just the infected humans,” Cliff said. “The moldy ones that stumble around, plus a few of the quicker ones.”
“No animals?”
“Not that I know of,” Cliff said. “Our place is pretty isolated. We haven’t had many encounters, but I’ve heard strange things in the woods around us. Max says he’s seen some dogs that got infected. Travis, too.”
“Who’s Travis?” Dan asked.
“One of the older people,” Cliff said. “He’s a doctor—or he used to be. He’s kind of a hippie dude with long hair and a beard. He came with his son, Eric.”
“Who else is there?”
“Them, Max, me, Melanie, a lady named Lena, and her boy.”
“And the dog,” Dan added.
Cliff nodded humorlessly, “Yeah, that damn dog.”
Dan noticed that Cliff’s expression had changed to one of anger. He wondered what could be so bad about this dog that it made Cliff angry. Cliff answered before he could ask.
“There were two others before,” he said. “Jesse and her sister, I forget her name. They were outside the gates gathering wood for the fires. The dog got out and alerted some of those things that were wandering the woods. When the girls ran back inside, Melanie wouldn’t close the gates until her dog was safe. Three of the things got inside and the girls were killed before we could help them.”
“All because of a stupid dog?” Drew asked.
Cliff nodded. “They were good people, too. Jesse was a nurse. She helped out Travis a lot. Now she’s gone.”
Dan scowled, imagining the looks on the two women’s faces when they realized that they were about to die because of Melanie’s obsession with her dog. What kind of person would risk their entire group just for an animal that had no real value anyway?
Melanie sounded dangerous.
“That’s fucked up, man,” Dan sighed, sitting back again and staring off into the darkness. “Fucked up for sure.”
Chapter Seven
“The turnoff is just a few miles up the road here,” Cliff said after they turned north. “There’s a little bit of a drive after that, but it’s nice and secluded.”
“It’s an impound lot?” Dan asked.
“More or less,” Cliff replied. “It’s a big fenced in lot with a small building and a bunch of fabricated sheds. It’s pretty secure. It was a junk yard at one time. There are tons of old cars outside the fence, all rusted and useless.”
“How tall are the fences?”
Cliff clicked his tongue. “Shit, about ten feet, maybe. But there’s about a foot and a half of barbed wire at the top.”
“Hmm,” Dan said. “That’ll keep out the shufflers and the shamblers, but I don’t know about the others.”
“We haven’t seen many of those,” Cliff said.
Dan hoped he was right. Stalkers and possibly others could vault high barriers. Even the coyote things were able to get onto his deck at the house. The horse thing even got onto his roof. Who knows what the hell a Robert type creature could do?
Cliff rolled down the window; holding up the drone’s remote to show Dan. It was worthless now, he knew. He nodded, and Cliff tossed it out the window.
“Goddamnit!” Drew cursed. “We’ve got problems.”
The Hummer ground to a halt. Dan leaned up to look out the windshield, seeing a massive horde of cars blocking the road. The bulk of them seemed endless, stretching as far as the headlights could shine.
“Shit,” he said. “No way around?”
Drew shook his head, moaning in frustration.
“Let’s see if we can clear the way,” Cliff said. “Grab some melee weapons. We don’t wanna shoot out here in the open.”
Dan grabbed a pair of knives from the back, handing one to Drew. Cliff drew his own blade, and the three of them quietly exited the Hummer. The headlights lit the way, but each of them took a flashlight to search the cars. If they were abandoned, most of them would likely still have the keys inside.
Dan went to the nearest car, shining his flashlight inside. There were two corpses inside, one in the passenger seat and one in the back. Both were mostly decomposed, with only a thin layer of dried flesh stretched over their bones. Dan quietly opened the driver’s side door, looking around at Drew and Cliff as they searched the other cars.
The corpse in the passenger seat was still, but Dan eyed at it as he slid into the seat. No keys.
“Fuck,” he said. The driver had probably taken them when he or she escaped.
The car, however, was a stick shift. Dan pulled the gear shift into neutral and got out. It was a Toyota Echo; fairly light and easy to push. He placed his hands on the hood, digging his toes into the road, and pushed. With a creak, the car slowly rolled backwards. He gave it one final shove, clearing it out of the way, and went to the next car.
The driver was in it, leaning against the window. Its head had been somewhat fused with the glass as the flesh putrefied. Dan opened the door slowly, hearing the sickening wet, glopping sound of the skin being torn away. He cringed, stepping back as the corpse slid out and splatted onto the pavement. The smell was overwhelming.
“Jesus,” he whispered stepping around it to put his right foot into the car.
The corpse reached out and grabbed his ankle. Dan’s heart jumped, and he pulled away just in time. The rotting teeth barely grazed him, and the corpse moaned, rolling over to attempt to drag itself toward him. He poised his knife, shining the flashlight directly into the corpse’s decayed and sunken eyeballs. With a grunt, he thrust downward, stabbing the creature directly in the head. It slumped down, lifeless once more.
Cliff was there right beside him. “You alright, man?” he asked.
“Yeah,” Dan replied. “It’s one of the rotters.”
Cliff examined the body closer, groaning at the smell. “Yeah, man. No fungus or anything.”
Dan looked around, seeing Drew a ways away shining his flashlight in Dan’s direction. Dan gave him a thumbs up.
“Something new is happening,” Cliff said.
“Yeah, the preacher back at the church must have been right after all.”
“That horde smelled like rotting corpses instead of fungus,” Cliff said.
Dan nodded, shining the light back into the car. The seat was covered in gore—flesh that had decayed and melted from the heat and time. The keys were in the ignition, but Dan felt no desire to sit down. He reached in, turning them to the accessory position, and then stepped on the brake to put the car into neutral.
He and Cliff pushed the car to the side, seeing Drew standing there when they turned around. He held a crossbow in his hands, flashing a grin.
“Look what I found,” he said. “Two arrows, too.”
“You know how to shoot one of those?” Cliff asked.
A shuffling sound caught their attention. The three of them turned, and Dan shined his flashlight into the shadows. A rotting corp
se appeared from in between two cars. Drew set the crossbow on the pavement, stomping the brace to cock it. He raised the crossbow and loaded an arrow, taking careful aim. The crossbow clicked and the arrow instantly fixated the corpse right in the forehead. It fell with a groan.
“Nice job,” Dan said. “Now get your arrow back.”
“There’s some deadies in this motherfucker,” Cliff said. “We should probably just find a way to roll through.”
Dan heard the squish of Drew’s arrow being retrieved. Drew stood and turned to them.
“The cars are spaced pretty far apart from here on out,” he said. “Let’s move up, at least.”
They returned to the Hummer, and Drew began inching forward through the maze. Most of them were full of bodies, likely ready to pounce on them if they opened the doors. From the corner of his eyes, Dan swore he could see some movement among the bodies on the ground. He ignored them for the most part, knowing they were relatively safe inside the vehicle.
As they rolled on, however, the smell became more and more overwhelming; almost to the point of triggering a gag reflex. Drew stopped, turning on the high beams. Ahead, there was a bus blocking the way, parked diagonally across the road. The only way around it was a treacherous path to its front, barely wide enough for the Hummer to slide through.
“I’m goin’ around,” Drew said.
He maneuvered left, slowly going over the embankment. Dan kept his eyes out his window as they approached, watching for any movement near the bus. He heard the driver’s side panel scrape against the sandstone walls, and gritted his teeth as they squeezed through.
“Careful with the paint job,” he joked. “That took us a whole ten minutes.”
The driver’s side mirror snapped off, and Drew chuckled. “Oops.”
“Hey,” Cliff said from the back. “What did you guys do before this?”
Drew grunted a little. “I managed a bar,” he said.
“What about you, Dan?”
Dan snickered. “I managed a buzz, mostly. That’s about it. What about you?”
“Shit,” Cliff said. “I was gonna be a cop in Indy. That didn’t work out too well, though. All this shit started right before I was gonna ship off to the academy.”
“So, do we have to hide our drugs?” Drew joked.
Cliff chuckled. “Nope,” he said with a smile. “As long as you share them.”
“Oh, shit,” Drew whispered, stopping the Hummer.
Around the corner, just on the other side of the bus, there was a huge pile of corpses in the road. There were dozens of bodies, all twisted and rotting, clumped together like a giant game of dead Twister. The smell was unbelievable, and there looked to be no way around it. The only way through was to just drive right over them.
Drew stepped on the gas, his face scrunched up in disgust as they mounted Hamburger Hill. The squishing, cracking sounds of flesh and bone were audible even through the closed windows. The Hummer managed it, though, only pausing when the driver’s side tire got stuck in a slick swamp of glopping gore and spun for a few seconds.
Finally, they felt pavement again, seeing that the way was still fairly clear. The cars were spaced a little wider on this side, and it looked like they could make it through.
That is, until the tall, gangly form of something alive appeared in the headlights.
“Jesus Christ,” Drew said, stopping with a slight squeal of the tires.
The pale, withered creature stood in the center of the road, swaying slightly. Its face was turned down, and its arms hung limply at its sides. It was naked, filthy, and rotting, with strips of flesh hanging from its strangely firm and sinewy body.
“What the fuck is that?” Dan whispered, his heart thumping.
Though bathed in the headlights, the creature seemed oblivious to their presence. Only the slightest movement could be seen, as if it were sniffing the air. Its head slowly turned from side to side, and its fingers curled in anticipation. Maybe they could slip past it.
Or maybe they could just run it down.
Drew gunned it. Dan braced himself on the dashboard, gritting his teeth as they rapidly approached. There was a thump as they slammed into the creature, then a crash when the Hummer collided with a car behind it. They were thrown forward with the impact, and the creature’s stunned face turned up as it was wedged between the two vehicles.
The creature’s mouth opened wide, revealing a dripping row of crooked and knife-like teeth. Its eyes were fiery red, and its spindly claws scratched against the hood as it tried to climb loose. Dan could hear the strange, bellowing cough that came from its maw. The hideous thing seemed to stare right at him. He had to stop it.
“Give me that crossbow,” he said.
Drew handed it to him, keeping his foot firmly on the brake. Dan pulled back the string, locking it in place and loaded up an arrow. He climbed up through the sunroof, aiming at the creature’s angry face. A snake-like tongue began to wiggle its way out, bringing with it a few mouthfuls of glop.
Dan shot it right between the eyes.
The arrow went right through, breaking the window of the car behind it. The creature convulsed for a moment before slowly slumping onto the hood. Dan climbed back in, setting the crossbow back onto Drew’s lap.
“I’m not retrieving that arrow,” Drew said.
“Me neither.”
“Damn,” Cliff said, leaning up to examine the creature. “I’ve never seen one of those before.”
Drew put the Hummer in reverse, backing away and going around the right of the smashed car. They stopped to look at the creature as it slowly flopped onto the pavement, its innards leaking out and spilling like a slow-motion rain storm. To Dan, the creature resembled the Robert-thing, only lacking the huge maw and the four tentacles on its back. Still, it was frightening and bizarre.
“Something new, I guess,” he said. “Maybe the preacher was wrong about that part after all. The mutants aren’t dying, they’re just changing.”
Drew shook his head, turning back to the road and continuing on. Dan’s mind flashed back to his fight with Robert back at the parking garage. He remembered the alien nature of the creature, its ability to speak and think like before, and its high tolerance for physical damage. He had emptied an entire magazine of rounds into it, and still it came. It took a small horde of shadowy things—or maybe his own imagination—to destroy it. Even then, he had to splat its brains onto the pavement after chopping it in half with the car.
But then it was gone…
Was this new thing another variation of the psycho? Or was it just an evolved form of something else; a shambler maybe, or a shuffler? The human flesh was still there, albeit sluffing off like rotting banana peels.
“You see that big tower up ahead,” Cliff asked Drew. “That’s where you turn off.”
“Man,” Dan said, “that’s awfully close to this wreck. How did you not see it on the way through?”
“The highway is clear in the other lane,” Cliff said. “Besides, I didn’t come this way, remember?”
“So why go all the way to that little shit town?” Dan asked.
Cliff sighed, shaking his head. Dan could tell he was stalling, or just trying not to give any details. But Cliff shrugged and spilled it.
“I didn’t really wanna go back,” he said, finally. “I thought maybe I could find another place to go.”
Dan nodded. He could understand that. From what Cliff had said earlier about Melanie, he couldn’t really blame the guy.
“That bad, huh?” he said.
Cliff grunted. “Yeah,” he said. “But I didn’t want to leave Travis and the others. They’re good people.”
“Maybe things can be different,” Dan assured him. “After all, Drew and I are some pretty cool dudes.”
“And we have beer,” Drew added.
Cliff chuckled, watching out the window as Drew turned off near a large cell tower. The road was gravel, and twisted up into a hilly, forested area. This was, apparently,
some kind of private junkyard, or something similar, inconveniently located in Bunfuct, Egypt. What a great place to hide. And with the cell tower nearby, maybe they could get connected if there was some way to power it. Surely, there was someone out there who was trying to get things up and running again. Maybe this Max could make it happen with the right equipment.
“Keep it slow,” Cliff said. “We don’t want to scare them. I left in a pickup and now we’re rollin’ up in a Hummer.”
“But we have beer,” Drew said.
Chapter Eight
They pulled into the gravel parking area at the top of the hill. The fences that surrounded the place were just as Cliff described them. They were at least eight or ten feet tall, double-rowed, and topped with barbed wire that was slanted outward. Around the fences, spread out randomly, were the rusted husks of hundreds of old cars. There was a wide gate, also protected by barbed-wire, and a house-sized building with a flat roof; most of the windows were boarded up.
Inside the complex were many wooden sheds arranged in a random fashion. They were probably fifteen foot wide and ten foot deep. In their midst, the glow of a small fire projected flickering, orange light on them. Two large men sat by it, warming themselves from the chill. Cliff stood up through the sunroof, directing Drew to approach the gate.
“Max,” Cliff called. “It’s me, man. Open up.”
Dan watched another shadowy figure approach the gate from the inside, fiddling with a chain. He slid the gate open, and Drew slowly drove in, stopping near the man who had let them in. Cliff rolled down the window.
“Cliff,” a younger, portly man said. “I thought we lost you.”
“I’m good, man,” Cliff said. “These guys found me up in Oolitic. They’re good guys, and they have supplies.”
Max peeked in the driver’s side window. Drew grinned widely. Dan did too. Max nodded in greeting and stepped back to wave them in.
“Park anywhere, I guess,” Cliff said.
Over the growl of the engine, Dan could hear Max say, “Melanie will not like this at all.”
Drew put the Hummer in park and the three of them exited. They were greeted by the large men that were by the fire. One of them, a much older man resembling a tall Jerry Garcia, was the first to greet them. His companion, an equally large but younger man, stood behind him, shyly nodding.
