by David Smith
We passed under a small junction of highways, the road widened into four lanes and back down to three and suddenly there were scattered cars and walking dead everywhere again. We swerved through them for several miles, past a few exits then they started thinning out again. Finally, we came to a bridge crossing a great body of water. I could see land in the distance ahead of us, a green smudge rising from the water on the horizon, but only water as far as I could see to the left and right. The road surface was rising ahead of us, more than twenty feet above the rippling water, leveling out then rising even higher in the distance. There were long gaps in the concrete parapets where cars had been shoved off into the water below, some still hanging over the edge, ready to fall. The area under the bridge, the entire length of it, looked like a flooded junkyard, the ends of cars or the roofs protruding from the water.
We passed over it slowly, swerving between the remaining cars, a few of the dead bouncing lightly off the fenders or grill. After thirty minutes or more, we finally touched solid ground and I breathed a sigh of relief.
As soon as we were off the bridge, the road was more congested with cars. There were no dead here though as far as I could see, only cars and potholes. Suddenly, I saw a creature that looked like a dinosaur. It looked dead, sprawled out on the concrete, not even breathing and big as a car. As we drove slowly by it, it raised up on its stubby legs, whipped its long, black body around and wobbled off into the trees.
"What was that?"
"An alligator." Jackson laughed. "I almost forgot, you've never been this far south. They're much larger than they used to be. That's why there are no dead this far down. They are the dead's only natural predator. They will follow us from Slidell but once they cross the bridge, will not make it far before one of these hungry beasts swallows it whole."
After a few miles we took an exit to the right then curved left and up a hill, crossing back over a loosely knotted shoestring of roads. From this high overpass, I could see the lay of the land. It was completely flat, a green blanket of trees as far as I could see with only a few structures spread out for miles rising above the canopy. To the left was an old amusement park, the steel and wooden crisscrossing frameworks of a few roller coasters rotting and rusting in the encroaching swamp. To the right, I could see the rooftops of several neighborhoods peeking out in between holes in the blanket of trees. Miles beyond that, through the bluish haze, I could see a city skyline of high rise buildings that seemed to be growing right out of the trees.
"I once lived not far from here." Jackson said over the roar of the engine. "My family moved here from Yemen when I was fourteen. My father had a great hatred for America but not as great as my hatred for him. I would have done anything to get away from my father, out of my neighborhood. He blamed America for all the problems in Africa but when we got here, it was no better; men without jobs drinking and smoking their lives away, children with no parents stealing and fighting and killing in the streets. The government here, paying them to live this way, crippling them, crippling America itself. So when I was eighteen I joined the military, became a Christian, even changed my name, only for this to happen four years later."
His candor eased my mind but I forced myself to focus of what Perez and the farmer had told me. I didn't know why he would open up to me this way, boredom maybe? But I knew that at some point, he would make his move.
We crossed another high, rusted steel bridge from which I could see the city again. There was almost nothing but water between us and it. It was closer now and looked as if it were completely surrounded by water, no visible access except, possibly by boat. The highway became a one road town with bayous on either side then went into another town that wasn't visible from the overpass. After several blocks we came to an industrial area.
There were several intersecting or parallel fences behind which were large, round structures a few stories high, oil tanks. There were towers of steel beams and pipe and conduit and one towering, white, rust covered sphere rising above the other tanks. Down the narrow, four-lane road lined with a railroad track, I could see a rust colored smoke stack some two-hundred feet high with white letters reading, 'St. Bernard Port'.
After driving through an open gate we stopped and got out as a man came to meet us. He was shorter than myself and walked fast, swinging his arms wildly, leaning forward like he was going to fall and his feet were struggling to keep up. He had a scar across the top of his bald head, from one ear to the other and one glass eye. He was short and wiry but with a hard, round belly that stuck out from between the opening of his unbuttoned shirt. The shorts he wore were smeared with oil and grease and the sole of his brown leather work boots were tied on with electrical wire around the toes.
"The truck's all ready to go." He said excitedly. "You got something for, huh, huh?" He talked as fast as he walked, the glass eye glaring forward as the other one jumped from one place to another.
"We have it. Calm down." Jackson told him as one of the others brought a cardboard box with MRE's and a large brown paper bag, stuffed tight and taped across the top.
He snatched the bag, tore it open and stuffed it into his face, taking a big whiff. "Ohhhh, that's some good stuff. He pulled a corn cob pipe out of his front pocket and began stuffing the lumpy, fuzzy, green substance into it. "There you go. All ashore that's going ashore." He said as he packed it in with the fat stub of a missing middle finger. "Fingernails are the dirtiest part of a human body, they say. Thank God for small blessings, heh heh." He laughed then pulled a cigarette lighter out of the other pocket and lit the bowl, puffing a couple times then taking a long drag. "Oooooh," he said as the smoke poured out like a train. "That is some good stuff." Then he started singing and dancing in place, shuffling and stomping his feet in jerky movements, his scrawny elbows stuck out like chicken wings. "I was gonna drink some gasoline, then I got high. I was gonna blow out the rest of my brains, then I got high." then stopped and erupted into a long raspy laugh and started coughing. "Whew! My second favorite bush."
He took another drag as two of the men walked past him and climbed into a semi-truck with a tanker trailer hooked to it. He then turned around and walked slowly back towards one of the oil tanks, leaving the box of pre-packaged food where it lay. There were metal steps curving up and around the outside of the tank with a room built around the bottom ten feet out of steel plates and an old metal roll up door on one side. He walked into the room, rolled down the door then reappeared out of the top of it, going up the stairs.
"What about your food?" I called out to him.
"Oh, just leave it there" he said without looking back. "They don't like it anyways."
"What about scavengers?" I hollered.
"Heh, they see what it is, they'll leave it alone." He said as he stepped up onto the oil tank and disappeared.
In a few minutes, we were heading out the gate, plus one fuel truck. I dozed off several times over the next hour, waking each time with the feeling I was about to be killed, looking over at Jackson to see him staring down the road, scanning the terrain, paying me no attention.
The Captain was right about one thing. Being out here made everything else go away. When I was at the compound everything felt complicated, political, tedious, mundane. Out here, the only worry I had was survival and it made me miss those two days out in the open; kill, run, hunt, hide, eat, sleep, repeat.
I thought about bailing out of the truck when it slowed down and running off into the woods but knew that even though it would raise my chances for survival, it would do the opposite for Beth and Stephanie. If I ran, Jennings would win just as much as if I was dead. Even more so because I would then have to live with the guilt and shame of leaving the others behind.
When we came to the bridge over the Pearl River, by the truck stop, there was a burned out car sitting across the middle of the two lanes, that hadn't been there before. "What the hell is this?" Jackson said as he slowed almost to a stop. He then proceeded around it on the left side, close to the ed
ge of the bridge. As we passed, I leaned forward and looked in the mirror to see the barrel we had given The Vultures that morning sitting in the half open trunk of the car.
"I think that barrel of gasoline was in that car." I told Jackson and he quickly leaned forward to look in the mirror. Just as he did I heard a quick pop and a long boom. I looked in the mirror to see the entire bridge engulfed in flames behind us. The homemade armor truck was laying on its side, hanging over the edge of the bridge, the side facing the sky, in flames. I couldn't see the other two trucks through the flames but I could hear motorcycles and small arms fire from the other side.
Jackson floored the accelerator down the bridge and took the first exit to the right then turned right again on a surface road back toward the river, tires roaring the whole way. He stopped just at the water's edge.
"We must get out and swim across. We can't let them have that fuel truck." He said as he ran upstream in the sand, crossing under the bridge. I grabbed the shotgun and as I ran I could still hear gunfire being traded back and forth and men shouting.
"You go first so I can run downstream and save you if you get swept away." He said. We were alone now and I knew he was about to make his move. My heart raced. I took one step into the water and stopped. "Go, I will pull you out if you get in trouble." I turned around then took another step and could feel the current pushing me already and the bank sloping more steeply beneath the water.
I stopped, getting my footing and slowly, quietly, taking the safety of on the shotgun. I spun around, raising the shotgun hastily and squeezing the trigger. As I lost my footing and fell backwards into the river I saw that Jackson had his hand on his pistol, about to draw when the load hit him in the left side of his chest, spinning him to that side and knocking him down.
I was fighting the current, my feet barely scraping the bottom every few feet. I knew I wasn't going to be able to keep my head above water for very long holding the shotgun so I dropped it and started doggy paddling toward the closest embankment. As the current dragged me violently over logs and sticks under the surface, I thought about the moccasins, then the alligators and prayed they were keeping each other busy somewhere.
Finally, I reached the edge of the water, a sandy, muddy bank rising almost straight up out of it. I grabbed handfuls of roots and pulled myself out of the water, struggling to climb up the eight to ten feet. When I got to the top I rolled over on my back and looked at the sun through the tree limbs. I closed my eyes for a moment and when I opened them, Jackson was standing over me, his left sleeve shimmering with blood and his pistol held out in his right hand.
"Thank you for that. I liked you before so it will be easier for me now." He said but was hesitating.
"You don't want to do this, why?" I asked.
"You didn't know I have a wife and daughter, did you?"
I shook my head.
"That is my deal with the white devil. They stay locked away, safe from the other men and from the Captain. In return, I kill for him."
"Jackson!" I heard someone yell from the other bank. He looked away and I quickly rolled back over the edge of the embankment. I slide down fast, grabbing at roots and clawing at the dirt all the way. Just as I hit the water I managed to get a handhold and stop myself from washing away again.
"What are you doing?" The somebody yelled again. I looked and it was MacAdory.
"He's been bitten." Jackson yelled. "Shoot him."
"I haven't seen any dead around here." MacAdory argued.
"I'm not bit!" I yelled and Jackson fired a round blindly over the edge, unable to lean out to aim.
"He shot me. I'm losing blood." Jackson shouted.
"Jennings told him to kill me!" I pleaded. "Over the girl!"
He leaned out a little further to try to shoot again. I laid as flat against the mud as I could and heard another shot and then a splash as Jackson's body fell into the water.
"When I get over there, you better not be lying about being bitten." MacAdory shouted.
"I'm not. You can look for yourself." I said as I started the climb back up the embankment. We were about a hundred yards from the bridge and I could still hear men talking to each other loudly but no gunfire. As MacAdory dropped his bullet proof vest and waded into the river, I could hear the fuel truck backing down the bridge, the engine roaring and turbo whining.
He emerged from the water twenty feet downstream and came running through the woods. "You got a ride?" He asked as he looked me over for a bite.
"The humvee's parked down by the foot of the bridge."
"Let's get it." He said and I followed him, running along the bank, one row of trees between us and the river. Suddenly, we heard a boat motor and he dove down behind the brush. I followed and we watched as four men in a boat passed by, going upstream. "The hummer's a no go. We're gonna have to walk back."
"What about the fuel truck?" I asked.
"The hell with it." He said.
"What are we gonna tell Jennings?"
"We got attacked. What's to tell?" He said as he started up the embankment toward the highway.
"Hey." I said as I caught up to him. "Thanks for that."
"Don't thank me. I've wanted to kill that racist piece of shit for years." He said without a missing a beat. "Call me Mac."
Chapter 15: Mac’s Story, Part 1
I joined the Army a year before the outbreak. Under Trump, we were finally winning but when he got shot I knew things would go to shit again so, as soon as I graduated high school, I joined. I went to infantry school, airborne, air assault and straight to Ranger school. I got assigned to my unit and was halfway through my first deployment when the outbreak happened.
You just don't get a lot of news from the states when you're in Afghanistan, up to your neck in stuff that really matters. First thing I even heard of it was when we were leaving the COP on a mission. As soon as we walked out the gate we were told to turn around and get packed up to go home. An hour later we were on a chopper heading for the states. I was nineteen and I had no idea what normal was supposed to be like, but the older guys in the unit were freaking out so I knew something was wrong. They were all complaining about the lack of information being passed down. There was just this intense feeling that the world had gone to shit while we weren't looking, but we all tried to come up with other reasons why we were being sent home on such short notice, tried to laugh it off.
It took four days to get there and as soon as we landed at LaGuardia we got to work doing evac and rescue missions. Combat engineers had already blown every way across the Harlem and East rivers and others were starting to evacuate the entire area down through Staten Island and into New Jersey, out to Connecticut or Rhode Island. But our unit, we went right into the heart of it all, or the guts of it, I guess.
We got the op order just before we loaded onto the Blackhawks. 'Over half of the people in the city are infected with a disease of unknown origin. It seems to spread through contact with blood or saliva. Uninfected persons have been instructed to get to rooftops and wait for pickup. The mission is simple. A medic will be aboard each Blackhawk and will inspect each individual for symptoms before boarding then we fly them out. Do not open fire on any civilians. There's a lot of scared people out there so if they get crazy, remember, they are American civilians. We'll fly to a safe distance and let them work it out on their own.' I was wondering, if we couldn't shoot them, why were we armed at all?
When we took off from LaGuardia, the city looked like it did on any other day with the exception of a few fires pouring smoke into the sky, big enough to see then from the airport. As we got closer though, we could see the problem. It was hard to see at first, just looked like almost every street was full of people, packed in like it was some kind of city wide demonstration. As we crossed over into Manhattan airspace we could see more clearly.
On some streets, they were all walking slowly north. On some, they were just packed in, all trying to go in deferent directions and not able to push past each o
ther. Finally, at the north end of Central Park, we saw three people running down 5th avenue and there were thousands of them, pouring out of this traffic circle, chasing them. It was a woman, a man and little boy, maybe ten and they were getting a good lead on them but there was another herd up ahead so they cut through Central Park. We followed them till they came out into a big complex of baseball fields and the pilot put us down in a field right in front of them. They were Puerto Rican or Cuban. The mother was about 5'3", 110 pounds and was carrying the boy, her white t-shirt and jeans, smeared with blood where it looked like she had wiped her hands. The Dad was a heavy set guy with brown, curly hair, white tank top and black sweat pants. The medic jumped out and said, "Don't let them on till I check them out."
"I don't think we got time for that!" Sergeant Brown said as the herd came stumbling out of the woods behind them.
That was the first time I got a good look at them. They were covered in blood, missing arms, hands, guts, you name it. When I saw that I just started shooting.
"Hold your fire! Hold your fire!" Brown was yelling.
"Look at them!" I yelled. I was shooting them and they didn't even feel it. Round were passing through them, you could see the impact but they just kept coming. Brown opened fire too and finally, he put one right in one of their faces and it dropped in its tracks.
"Shoot them in the head!" He yelled.
At this point, I had already reloaded twice and hadn't killed the first one so I jumped up in the chopper and got on the 240 bravo. I just held the trigger down, held it at head level the best a could and started swinging it. There were so many of them, every bullet hit something but they just kept getting closer. Most of them were slow, not as slow as they are now, of course. But one out of every hundred or so , once it had a clear path, would break out of the line and run at us like a track star.
