by David Smith
"I don't think they can get in. Let's get an ammo count."
We counted and it didn't look good. He had only four mags left for the M4. In my backpack I had 76 shot shells but the gun was on the floor somewhere beneath the mass of walking dead. I had two clips left for the 9mm and 60 rounds for the 700. Not nearly enough to shoot our way out, even if we could get that many shots off before being overrun.
We could see them through the glass doors, smashed up against them, smearing them with blackened blood. They hadn't even noticed we were just a few feet away and all they had to do was open the door or smash through the glass. Then something occurred to me.
The racks the drinks were on had no wheels and were far too heavy to slide, as full as they were. I took the 700 from Dad as he sat, thinking, and stuck the barrel in between two of the shelves. I fired and the window spider-webbed in front of the barrel before the bullet even reached it. There was a back-splatter that painted the cracked glass around the bullet hole dark red and four of them fell.
Immediately, every dead thing that was within arm’s reach lunged for the door, shattering the glass with their bodies, shaking the rack I was hiding behind. It swayed, but didn't bend or slide, as their arms reached between it and the door jambs. Dad leaned against it to brace it as I gathered up all the plastic I could find, from the floor, and wrapped it as well as I could over the barrel of the gun, making an improvised splatter guard. Dad stepped back and with the plastic to protect my face from back spray, I lined up shot after shot. The way they were packed into the small space it was easy to take out four or five with each shot, no hurry, all about the timing and the angles.
As the bodies fell they piled up higher and the rest just kept crawling over the others until they were piled so high that it was getting harder and harder for them to get to us. Everything was covered and dripping with black, thick blood. All the bodies seemed to be one tangled mass of flesh, blood, brains and bones. The smell was so thick in the hot, stale air of the old cooler that it felt as if I was breathing them in and I got sick. There were still a few hands sticking in between the stack of drinks we had piled up and the door but other than that, all was quiet.
"How many rounds you got left?" Dad asked.
"Maybe ten, I think."
"Alright, let's find a way out of here."
He shot the last few behind the stack of drinks and we began unstacking. Once the stack was moved, we realized there was still just enough space to get around the pile of dead if we clung to the wall and walked on top of the bodies. Ducking our heads to keep from rubbing the ceiling, we made it out.
The town was even quieter than before and the fresh air was like a second lease on life.
"We must have killed everything for two miles.” He said. “If we drew those in there will be more though. We need to get moving. How you holding up?"
"I'm fine." It didn't really hit me how much danger we were in. "Where we going now?"
"Back to where we started."
Looking back the way we came there were several dead coming up the highway at a quick pace, too many and they were closing in fast.
"Can't go back that way. It’s about three miles if we go toward the interstate and go around. Think you can run that far?"
"If you can I can, old man." I said and he laughed. He seemed to be more carefree out here where it was more dangerous. I had never seen him laugh or be this easy going.
"Don't underestimate the value of experience, young man.."
I don't know if you'd call it a fast jog or a slow run, but we made the three miles in about 24 minutes and he talked the whole way in a relaxed tone as I struggled to catch my breath.
Chapter 5: Dad’s Story
President Trump had broken up every terrorist cell in America in his first year in office then went after their counterparts overseas and the democrats were still crying that torture was inhumane and ineffective. He then turned the leaders of every country suspected of harboring and training terrorists to join the fight against them by staging intentionally botched assassination attempts and framing the very same radical Muslim groups they supported. In two years he all but ended a war that had lasted, in one form or another, for five thousand years. His methods were unethical but effective.
The one holdout was Palestine. With the support of Israel and Israel alone, the President finally took his war on radical Islam public by planning a full scale invasion. The American Congress, most of the American people and every other Christian country in the world saw this as too aggressive. Other Muslim countries were afraid they would be next and without their government trained terrorist, knew they had no means of fighting back effectively. Finally, someone close to Trump turned on him and revealed his methods. This was enough to bring the Christian and Muslim countries together and they demanded that Trump be impeached with the threat of their own full scale invasion. Congress had been looking for a justifiable reason and this was it. Before they could though, he was assassinated by a black lives matter member. Since he had taken office, unemployment in black men and women had dropped by 20%, police shootings of black men had dropped by 60% along with the crime rate in some of the worst cities and he had the consistently highest approval rating of any president since Roosevelt but they killed him anyway because the Clintons and the media said he was racist.
A few months later, I was on a deployment to Pakistan, just South of Karachi, where we weren't supposed to be. Our job was extraction. We didn't know the specifics of the mission because it wasn't necessary to know. All we knew was where to pick them up when the mission was complete. It was supposed to be a one night rescue mission, drop off six and pick up seven. After two days of sitting on the deck of an aircraft carrier in the Arabian Sea we lost contact with the team. Three days later we intercepted a fishing vessel, commandeered by the only surviving member of the team. With him, he had three dead fisherman, half-eaten and shot in the head, and one undead scientist, locked in the hold. He had a hard drive too with a recorded video message on it, just a few days old.
The man on the video was young, maybe twenty, and we couldn't find a match for him in any database. He was an unknown, a nobody, and claimed to be the leader of a terrorist organization no one had even heard of. So even though the hard drive contained twenty-something computer simulations of how this thing could spread and we had seen first hand, what it could do, the democratic controlled congress ignored the threat. They left no clue to the method of delivery but the video said that in a matter of days, "the dead would walk the Earth." He called it " the final judgement from Allah on all non-Muslim people".
This was supposed to be a small island with a training camp on it and instead, it was just the entrance to a massive underground facility. The Lieutenant who survived said that the entire place was overrun with infected. For two days they fought their way through, lost five men and the government wanted to sweep it under the rug to avoid war with Pakistan.
Of course, it didn't stay swept for long.
When we got home we were placed under a gag order and ordered not to leave until we had been debriefed, more like so the government could create a cover story unless we didn't keep our mouths shut. That's when I left. I felt strongly enough about the threats that I didn't see any reason to stay and I was right.
Good thing is, these things are a lot slower than they used to be. When they first turned, they could run at a sprint for miles. I guess when you're not breathing you can't run out of breath. Once something got their attention they wouldn't stop until they caught it or something easier caught their eye...and if you did make it to safety, they would beat at the doors until they broke, even if it took days. That's probably what happened to that one we saw at the store earlier. He probably caught a whiff of someone in that building then couldn't get in so he's been banging on the door ever since. One thing they don't lack is persistence.
I remember those last few days before we came to the bunker. They pounded and clawed at the plywood day and night. T
he only time they let up was when they stopped to eat other people who were trying to make a run for it. You could tell that's what it was from the screams.
I couldn't believe it when the Captain came for me. All was lost and this bastard was still pissed enough about me going AWOL that he tried to burn the house down around us. Some of the men he had with him were my friends and I hated to do it but we just laid low, let the dead tear them apart and took off. When he saw they were fighting a losing battle he just left them for dead. Part of me hopes he's still alive so I can kill him myself one day. Another part hopes he's walking around like the rest of these freaks, rotting on his feet.
Our house was just a few miles north of here so we passed through that intersection on the way to the bunker. It pretty much looked just the way it does now only, there were a lot more dead walking around and all the burned out cars you see were still burning.
What? Yeah, that's where it happened. That woman, she... Took me a long time to get over that. Finally, I had to realize that it doesn't matter if you succeed or fail. All that matters is, you try. Sometimes, you'll save people. Sometimes you'll get them killed trying but the one thing you can't live with, that'll eat you up till you're dead inside, is being afraid to try.
These things are peculiar. They don't fight over the carcasses like animals do, but it's not like they share either. As long as each of them can tear off a leg or arm or a fist-full of innards and sit down by themselves to eat it, they don't even seem to notice each other. They don't notice us either until whatever they're chewing on gets cold and as long as we don't make too much commotion. With enough of them eating on one body, there's never enough left of their victims to come back later, so that's a good thing. Yeah, as long as there are three or more sharing one body, they can eat enough before it gets cold to keep it from being very mobile, that's when they stop eating and go looking for more. And they never stop looking for more, never get full, never sleep. That's why you see so many with their insides blown out. They eat till their bellies are so full that they rupture then just keep eating, the chewed up mess going down their throats and pouring out down their legs. If you ever see one that has a bloated gut, one that hasn't ruptured yet, don't shoot it in the stomach. You won't get the smell out of your nose for days.
I knew that bunker would be a good place to stay. The only people who even knew about it were a few civilian contractors. We used to do training exercises in the woods around it and I had never once seen anyone working in the area. There was nothing out there that would be of any value to anyone trying to survive either so I knew no one would try to take it from us. My one mistake was thinking it was secluded enough that the dead would never find it. I figured, if no living person knew it was there, there'd be no one to lead them and no reason for them to come. Then one morning, after being there for about two weeks, little by little, more and more of them just started wandering up.
Those first two weeks though, I spent all day out in the woods hunting, trapping and fishing. It was the best two weeks of my life. Once the dead started showing up it was too dangerous to sit still in one place long enough and that's when I started scavenging. The first place I went was that Walmart we saw earlier.
I broke in only to have a gun stuck in my face. I guess I was off my game, being in such a hurry to get in and not expecting there to be anyone inside, because they really got the jump on me. I learned that day to always recon a big place like that for a few days before going in. Could have been worse though, I guess.
They wanted to shoot me for looting at first but when I told them your Mom and grandpa were counting on me to come back, their leader took an interest. Turned out, he was the manager of the place and everybody living there were the employees and their families. He said he invited them all there and locked them in a week before the outbreak made it here so they could protect the place from looters and survive until things got back to normal. He came off as very friendly at first, or tried to but it was pretty obvious he was a prick so when he invited us to live with them in the store I turned him down. I still stayed in contact with them for about a year. I helped them secure the place better than it was and taught them how to defend themselves and in return, they'd give me a little food or other things we needed. I never told them where we lived though. I never told your Mom about them either. She would've loved to have other women to talk to about woman stuff and I didn't want to have to fight her on it. I just never trusted that manager or his people. They weren't really the kind that were cut out for survival, weren't tough enough, smart enough. People like that get desperate and do desperate things. Besides, he ran that place and everybody in it like they didn't have the mind to make any decisions for themselves. I quit dealing with them when people started going missing from their ranks and nobody seemed to know why. As it turned out...
Don't act like you do but, do you hear that? That's an engine. I wasn't sure at first but we're being watched. I saw tire tracks on the ground outside the gas station. They had to be fresh, any tracks left by vehicles before the outbreak would have been weathered away for awhile. It has to be the same ones who cleaned out the store, they would have to have had a running vehicle to move that much supply that fast. We can't lead them back to the bunker. We're gonna leave the highway up here and go down onto East Canal Street. We'll have to move slow so we can listen for their engines. Then we’ll cut back north staying in the woods next to the interstate till we can get around behind them.
Chapter 6: Into the Dark
There were more dead congregated on the interstate than any place I had seen before but they were spread pretty wide, all of them walking slowly in different directions. Anytime we got close enough to draw one's attention they would turn toward us and start to shuffle in our direction but were too far away and slow to be of any real threat. Some tripped over other, more completely, dead bodies and fell as they tried to come after us. Others bumped into each other and fell or knocked the other one over. We cut a zig-zagging path trough them for more than a mile, keeping our distance as much as we could but they were all slowly, collectively, closing in toward us as the commotion grew louder the further we ran.
We crossed an overpass that was grown up underneath with foliage so thick I could barely see the street running underneath. Dad veered off and down the hill past the bridge and I followed. Once down in the woods we never stopped moving. We moved quickly but quietly, turning back to the north, staying as low as we could, only going up the hill to get around piles of broken limbs and only when they were too low and thick to crawl under. After moving about a quarter mile dad stopped and laid low in the ditch. I could hear a lot of noise far behind us; branches breaking, leaves crunching. It sounded like a bulldozer with no engine being shoved by a silent force through the thick woods.
Over the noise I could faintly hear a diesel engine at a distance through the woods. We listened for a moment before I heard branches snapping and looked to our left to see three corpses moving towards us through the woods. Struggling clumsily, they were closing in quickly despite being hindered by the thick underbrush. I raised the pistol up to fire and dad stopped me.
"Don't give away our position!"
I really didn't care about our position since it was quickly going from bad to worse. Instead of having an unknown number of what could be dangerous or friendlies on one side, we now had that on one and a much less reasonable force pursuing us on the other. They slowed as they reached our position, some seeming to sniff the air. Some walked right past us, almost falling in the ditch, distracted by the engine sounds on the highway. When the main herd was less than ten feet away the engine finally revved and began to move away from us. As soon as it did we moved toward the highway and quickly away from the herd, knocking over from behind, the few that had passed us by. We stepped out of the woodline, staying low and saw the truck heading south away from us.
"I'd be willing to bet that's who took all our food." Dad said. "They've either got a large population of surviv
ors near here or they're hoarding it. I know one thing. It'd be good to know where they're getting fresh fuel from."
Once the truck was out of sight we started moving again, following them. This time we stayed close to the woods in case they doubled back. When we made it back to the overpass we had walked under earlier that morning, we had a clear view to our left of the vast parking lot and the big gray building marked Wal-Mart Supercenter in faded ten-foot-high letters that I had not noticed when we were here before. We walked up on top of the overpass and below us, to our right, was the boulevard, the route we had used earlier. We could see the truck in the parking lot and a few scattered dead following it as it circled then headed around towards the back of the store.
"This is our chance, come on." Dad said then took off, leaving the interstate and sprinting down the grassy hill. As soon as we reached the bottom he dove into the ditch and started low-crawling up the opposite embankment which was much shorter and ended with a rusty chain-link fence at the top. There was a frontage road immediately on the other side of that, another ditch and then the parking lot. We found a hole in the fence, slipped through and sprinted across the road to the other ditch undetected. The sound of the truck held the attention of the dead so we were able to lie unnoticed in the ditch and watch.
The truck was lifted, equipped with oversized tires and heavily fortified with add-on parts; a push bumper and a make-shift guard all the way around made from some kind of steel framework with sheets of tin fastened to it. The only way into the truck was an opening in the back. Inside was the driver and two other men, and two in back with automatic rifles.
