by L. ROY AIKEN
I look at the men holding guns on me. One is not holding a gun. “Tell me, is there a reason you haven’t tried going north out of here towards I-70?”
The man nods at Gitmo. “He knows.”
“I need to talk to somebody who isn’t going to waste my time with bullshit. Look, I’m sorry you guys got fucked over here. But I had nothing to do with it. All I want to do is get home to my kids, and the next thing I know some lying whore is drawing me into a trap. Then you go through my truck and steal my stuff. You guys wanna cap me for disrespect—shit! The ultimate goddamned disrespect is I’m trapped here with you, between the fire and a mob of hungry dead!
“Thing is, I can get us out of here! But you’re going to have to get your heads out your asses and work with me. And work fast, because I’m guessing we have ten more minutes before Paulson and his crew show up to picnic!”
There’s a brief pause where we hear the diesel snort a little as Paulson gives it the gas to take a corner.
“I sent scouts north to the highway,” says Gitmo. “They haven’t called back. It’s just a big open pasture before the Interstate. I guarantee you they got snipers waiting for us to cross into their sights.”
“That’s what’s happening, then. Paulson is coming this way. He’s driving us into the final ambush.”
“Not even trusting the fire Brick started to finish us off,” says the man without a gun.
“We’re fucked, then, eh?” says Gitmo. “Think you can let me go?”
“No we’re not. And we have some things we need to understand before I let you go.”
“Come on! You know we don’t have time for this!”
“First, I resent—really, really resent—that I was brought here under false pretenses only to be delayed—again!—and robbed.”
“Look, man—“
“I want my vitamins, I want my crossbow, I want every little thing your thieves took, and I want them at that barricade. Now. Or you and I are riding out to meet Paulson and his crew. By the way, did you know the dead routed into Kerch’s place are now following him? That’s a lot of dead people.”
“Looping them back on us,” says the man without a gun.
I shove Gitmo away from me. “You’re smart,” I say. “Why the hell aren’t you in charge?” The man doesn’t answer. “Paulson has to drive slow to lead them here but he’ll be here in ten minutes, maybe less. We can let Chuckles down there make speeches. Or we can get organized and get out of here. But we’re on the clock. Whatever we do has to be done now!”
“So what do you think we ought to do?” says Gitmo, getting to his feet.
“We can’t go north for snipers. We can’t go east because that part of the neighborhood is on fire. We can’t go south because we’ll run into Paulson and all the dead they routed through Kerch’s place. That leaves west.”
“That’s a big, flowing river of dead on the other side of that barricade!” Gitmo says. There’s no way we’re getting through it!”
“My concern is the barricade,” says the man without a gun. “Even with the grenade launcher we’ve got, we’re not getting through those semis.”
“There’s got to be some construction equipment around here somewhere. Earth movers. Snowplows.”
One of the gunmen runs down the front windshield of the car he’s standing on. He jumps to the street and disappears around the burned apartment building.
“Berto works on a crew,” says the man without a gun.
“Good. We need to get everybody at that barricade. We got to be ready to go in five minutes, maybe less. Nobody’s got time to move households. It’s just like when some of you got here—you’re going to have to move with nothing more than the clothes on your backs!”
Another vato runs away, this one into the building.
“Are we going to help each other?” I ask the man. “Can I get your name?”
“Tracy.” That’s what it sounds like, and it seems absurd given his hard features.
“Like the number 13 in English,” I say.
Tracy can’t help but raise an eyebrow. “¿Habla Español?”
“No. I just know how to count.”
“You have a plan?”
“Nothing more sophisticated than busting through that barrier with the heavy equipment, firing whatever you picked up from the National Guard when they got overrun, and crossing that river of dead people until we get away. Where’s that auto dealership Gitmo was saying you needed to get to?”
“Half a mile on the other side of that street you want to bust through.”
“Then we have a destination. Me, I’ll find the Interstate from there, and you guys enjoy shopping.”
“All we got from the Guardsmen are their guns. They didn’t bring much in the way of heavy weaponry with them.”
“We got that one M203 on the M4!” says Gitmo.
“With all of two grenades!” says Tracy.
“M433s! You’ll flatten everyone in the intersection! At least long enough to bust through the other side!”
I have no idea what on earth Gitmo is talking about. I can only hope they really have stuff like this. “Got any of those tear gas grenades that burn things up?”
“Let’s get down there and find out,” says Tracy. He nods to one of the gunmen. He drops his aim at me and they go to a little white pickup parked by the curb.
There’s nowhere else to go and not much time. I run to the Big Yellow Truck. I noticed Gitmo coming up behind me. “Oh, no,” I say. “I’m done with you.”
“My family’s using my truck. They’re carrying two more families with them.”
“Ride with Tracy.”
“I’d rather not, if it’s okay.”
“Goddamn it, politics is going to be the death of us all!” I say. My eye is caught by two vatos carrying my crossbow and bag of vitamin supplements. Coming my way. They hand them off to me. I nod. They turn and run away.
“Now that’s what I call timing!” I say. “Go ahead, get in!” I have to shift my burden to one arm to get my keys to unlock the truck. The locks click and we climb in.
23
Women and children emerge from the burned apartment building in groups of three and four, assisted by at least one young man whom I presume is somewhat related. This started shortly after we’d pulled up; I was counting on their presence inspiring restraint in the gunmen. So far, so good.
One of these women looks like she’s a hundred years old. She’s moving slow as Christmas. Nor will she let the young men pick her up and carry her as they’ve already done with so many far less needful.
Gitmo rolls down the window and yells at the young men. It’s in Spanish, which I understand only slightly better than his Army terminology. He yells at the old woman, who waves Gitmo off contemptuously.
After a moment bent to snapping the young men say something that sounds like, “Sorry, grandma” and begin walking quickly away. The old woman shouts after them.
“I had a feeling we were going to have a problem with her,” says Gitmo as I put the truck in drive. “Been nothing but a pain in the ass since this got started.”
We quickly cover the three blocks to the intersection. I see the fire truck down the street to the left, maybe seven blocks away. He honks/blasts his air horn when my Big Yellow Truck comes into view.
“Man, I hope you know what you’re doing,” says Gitmo.
“I’m open to better ideas.”
“No, cuz,” Gitmo says, “this one’s on you.”
I pull over to the far side of the street. There are half a dozen little cars and pickup trucks loaded down with bedding and children and toys and God knows what else in the Intersection. I park the truck and jump out. “Get these cars and everything to the side! The plows and earth movers have to be able to get up the middle here!”
The oven ranges and dishwashers and refrigerators have been removed. It’s just the big semis now. You can see the legs of the shuffling dead through the underside of the trailers. The women urg
e the children to lie down on the flatbeds of their pickups before covering them in quilts. The don’t let the children look lest one sees that impenetrable forest of legs and screams.
Between the fire and the dead walking behind the barricade it already smelled bad here. But we can smell the others coming up from behind. Paulson hits his horn, runs his sirens. “Keep cool!” I say, standing on the running board of my truck. “He’s trying to panic us!”
I’m yelling this for myself as much as anyone else. That forest of legs is slowing down for all Paulson’s noise; it’s only inertia that keeps them moving on. All one has to do is peek under, get a whiff of our living meat, and the rest will follow. And Paulson is already another block closer behind us.
I go up to Tracy, who is supervising the distribution of weapons. “I imagine we don’t have a lot of ammo.”
“Actually, we’re fine on that,” says Tracy. “At least for M4s and 9mm sidearms, but we can go through guns blazing.”
“Your people know to aim for the heads, right?”
“We know what we’re doing, Mr. Dead Silencer.”
“Is anyone using that?” I say, pointing to a flare gun in the flat bed of what I presume is our munitions truck.
“What, are you calling for help?” Tracy says. The young vato next to him snickers.
“Testing a hypothesis,” I say. I reach out and take the gun. Bright orange plastic. Hard to miss. With a plastic strip of flare shells, too.
“Test a what?”
“They burn down your shit. Let’s burn down theirs. Did you find any tear gas?”
Tracy’s face turns serious. “Yeah. Yeah, actually we did.”
“You want to get through this, you need to start thinking outside the ammo box. Keep in mind we might run into trouble on the other side of that second barrier. They’re thinking you’re nothing more than a bunch of dumb Glock-carrying gangbangers. You want to hit ‘em with something they don’t expect.”
“Shit, man,” says the guy standing next to Tracy, “you some kinda general or somethin’?”
I look down the street. Paulson has closed another block. “Nope. Just trying to get out of here. Just like you.”
“I hear ya, cuz.”
The clatter of Paulson’s diesel engine is getting louder as it closes the distance. The moans from behind the barricade, from behind Paulson’s fire truck—they’re not so loud, but I can feel them. Feel them in my bones. My bones, and every ounce of juicy, living meat around them….
I wonder why Paulson doesn’t speed up the street towards us. The walkers would keep walking towards us while he cut north along the warehouse road and—well, whose snipers are those at the Interstate? Maybe we’re lucky here. There’s so little I know about the politics here. And if it weren’t for me getting pulled into this stupid, Mean Old Rich Fart drama, I’d care even less.
Paulson is three blocks away. The seething mob massed behind the fire truck and boiling around its sides are visible as individuals now. The remains of those teenage firebugs still drip down the fronts of the ones closest to the truck. I look through the big window of the truck towards Paulson. He’s a little harder to make out through the glass but he shows no expression. Naturally. Nothing personal. Just business.
I glance towards the three big white trucks with the women and children packed in the cabs and lying down in the flatbeds. The women who sit up in the flatbeds watch Paulson’s approach with characteristically hard faces used to grief. No one has died (recently), so there’s no cause to weep. Not much cause for hope, either, but unlike softer souls who would already be losing themselves to hysteria these women will not crack until their doom is actually upon them. Three blocks away is still three blocks away.
Though now it’s two and a half blocks away, and getting closer every second….
Tracy is on his phone. Judging by his expression he’s not getting an answer.
I’m eyeballing the parallel street one block away. I might make a break for it that way. Being shot up by snipers is infinitely preferable to getting pulled apart by grubby, grasping hands and eaten alive.
Paulson is crossing to the second block now.
Then Berto rounds the corner in a large snow removal truck with a de-icer unit. A regular snowplow comes around the corner. Someone else found a tow truck, the kind in which the vehicle goes on the long bed in back. He’s followed by one lumbering bulldozer grinding up the street on wide treads, then another.
I wave the units into position, one eye on the advancing mob. The snowplows and bulldozers line up side by side in the broad intersection before the tractor trailers. Gitmo takes his position many paces back from the middle, reckoning the trajectory of his shell. I look back to Tracy. Berto and the heavy equipment operators are waiting for his signal. And Tracy is waiting on us.
“Think you can get it right between the barricades?” I ask Gitmo.
“I’m working on it,” he says.
Gitmo takes another step back. There’s a terrible hrrrrrnnnnn! behind us. Paulson’s entourage has scented our party.
Gitmo fires. You can’t even hear the soft click of the launcher over the moans of the dead, the unholy clatter of large diesel engines.
The shell goes up, tall and steep. It comes down.
If that isn’t the middle of the intersection it’s going to have to do.
The multi-ton semis rock with the impact. A dozen or so charred limbs whirl out beneath the trailers in smoking pinwheels, banking off the blades of the ‘dozers when not gonging square into them. “All right!” shouts Gitmo, raising an arm. “Let’s move!” He brings that arm down and we hear the terrible grinding and crunching as the ‘dozers and the plows slam into the semis and begin pushing them aside.
I’m turning to go to my own truck. Halfway there I turn and see Gitmo loading the second shell, looking square at the fire truck and the graying cadavers shuffling up behind it. Paulson has stopped his fire truck. He can’t back up; there are too many dead behind him, pouring around the big red machine to get at us. The dead move quicker than you’d think once they’ve got a purpose.
I run for the shelter of the Big Yellow Truck. Gitmo has the M4 pointed up just so. I pray he’s doing what I think he’s about to do.
I jump in the cab and look back towards the fire truck and the hundreds, maybe a good one thousand dead walking tall behind him. I’ll give Paulson credit. He knows what’s coming. And like the rock-ribbed Old Family man he is, he accepts it with dignity. The grenade goes up, and Gitmo throws himself down in the street, his arms about his head. Thank the dark gods Gitmo was smart enough to aim the grenade behind the fire truck, and into that thick scrum of walkers behind it to absorb the blast. The blast is still enough to lift the back of the fire truck slightly and push it forward a foot. It lands a little low on the back end. I’m guessing the rear tires got blown.
Then the diesel tank on the fire truck explodes.
I duck behind my seat. The pressure of the blast wave on the rear window of the cab makes the glazing creak loudly in its frame, but the glass holds. (It helped that I parked along the side of the street instead of in the middle, directly in front of the fire truck.) As the smoke clears I see there are still a lot of dead on their feet behind the burning remains of the fire truck. They’re over one hundred yards back, though. To get at us they would have to wade through wall-to-wall burning and pulverized flesh.
They sway from side to side, shifting weight from one foot to the other, as if trying to build courage to cross, or turn and walk the other way. They can’t smell us, can’t reckon our movement through the heat shimmers off the smashed, burning bodies. An eerie blue-green flame flickers over the denser clumps of blast-smashed bodies. An occasional puff of sickly yellow flame blooms over this hellscape of broken bone and scorched flesh, expanding rapidly as it hits less putrid, more oxygenated air.
These dead won’t be coming back at us. But even if there weren’t hundreds more dead turning away on the other side, we’d never
be able to cross that toxic, superheated mess. Beyond that, the blaze Brick’s people started on the far end of the barrio is creeping up from the other end. We’re still trapped.
The roar of outraged metal fills the air as snowplows and ‘dozers and the big tow truck push against the semis. The blast on the other side was intensified by its containment between the heavy barriers and the heat blew the tires out on the semis all across the way. Only the blades of the huge ‘dozers prevented the rest of us from getting flash burned. A taller pile of bodies and bubbling necrotic flesh presses against the cabs and their trailers, smoking pieces of them blown under the trailers and around the heavy equipment.
Eventually it’s all Berto’s crew can do to push the semis over, cabs, trailers and all. They fall awkwardly across the vast, lumpy carpet of blast-pulped bodies. The young man driving the biggest bulldozer backs up as the other trucks back away. He positions himself in the middle where the cabs lay with their scorched undercarriages facing us. A gap has opened between them in the fall. Not big enough to drive through. Yet. The young man revs the engine once, twice. He charges the gap.
The blade smashes into the cabs. They slide with a sickly ease on their sides across the smoldering, liquefying corpses. For a moment I panic, remembering these semis have huge diesel tanks of their own. Apparently the black ops people drained the tanks—and I can see where they thoughtfully (or carelessly) left the caps off. In any event we were damned lucky. That I didn’t think about this until now…It’s a goddamned miracle we’ve come this far.
As the first bulldozer backs off from his push the second one charges in. He sends the cabs sliding far enough apart that he can plow a little ways in. The mothers in the backs of the white pickups cover their eyes as the gases from the smoldering corpses billow out of the gap. They sit at the edges of the flatbed and draw their knees up close, burying their faces in their skirts. Even in the cab I catch a whiff of the caustic stink. A huge yellow bloom of bubbling putrefaction rises on a stalk and flares out wide and high over us as the ‘dozer’s blade collides with the three-deep carpet of bodies.
