by Rich Baker
Twelve
D-Day rests the bike on its kickstand and gets off.
“What are you doing?” Carmen says, shouting more than asking.
“I’m going to lead them away. Be very still, only shoot if you have to. When the crowd thins out, get the bike going up the embankment and come get me!”
Before she can respond, he’s up on the hood of the closest car, rifle up and shooting. He spends a full magazine, dropping fifteen for good and wounding another ten enough to slow them down. The rest seem not in the least bit affected.
He walks onto the roof of the car as the horde turns toward him and away from the motorcycle, and more important, away from Carmen. He drops to the trunk of the sedan and moves to the next car, crossing the roof and trunk and onto the roof of an SUV. The driver and passenger in this one have been turned but remain seat-belted into the vehicle. They come to life when he lands on the hood, their eerie shrieks drawing the attention of the last few members of the horde who were still looking at the motorcycle where Carmen sits hunched down. The beige backpack sticks up more than her head as she peers through the handlebars of the bike, and if you’re an unthinking, rotting corpse instead of a human, you might not realize her form is that of a living being. In any case, the shouts of the trapped undead are too much for the stragglers to resist, and D-Day now has a horde of more than a hundred undead in pursuit of him.
He moves sideways across the river of dead cars toward the inside lanes of traffic. The dead follow, but where there’s room between vehicles to move, they can only go single file. Just like with the concrete K-Rails, they haven’t figured out how to climb onto and over the cars. D-Day swaps magazines and shoots a few of the dead, further hampering their progress. He works his way back over another couple of cars, then pauses to do some shooting, taking care that he keeps Carmen out of the line of fire. The farther back he goes, however, the more acute that angle becomes, and the more likely she could get hit by a ricochet or a missed shot. He’s going to have to let them get closer to him to shoot them.
He climbs to the roof of another SUV and stands as tall as he can, letting the horde see him and the lead zombies to draw nearer to him. There are still a few on the hillside, trying to find their way through the cars in their pursuit of a meal. He fires down on the closest of the undead, emptying a second magazine. He runs over a few more cars, pulling the horde after him like a demented Pied Piper. He cycles a full magazine into the rifle and runs over a few more cars. To keep their interest, he starts shouting at them.
“Come on, you dead fucks! You won’t find a tastier morsel this morning! Breakfast is served! COME AND GET IT!!”
The ones nearest to him respond with their weird screeching, and that causes others behind them to do the same thing. If they were wrapped in rags, he’d believe it if someone told him they were Sand People in the desert of Tatooine. It makes him shiver, hearing them communicate. It indicates more intelligence than he’s apt to give them credit for.
On his right, the divider for the HOV/TOLL lanes is ending. Before the world ended, this is where a southbound car would exit to avoid traffic. The special lanes are open going south, going INTO Denver in the morning, and they switch to northbound traffic in the afternoon as people start leaving the city. Someone has run through the gates and gone south during the northbound cycle. They saw the resulting impasse of traffic a couple of miles back, but here there are two cars wedged in the opening, keeping any other cars from getting through the entrance. It also leaves a nice wide gap behind the two cars as the drop-down gates are still intact farther back.
D-Day hears his motorcycle rev and turns to see Carmen riding it up the hill, a flume of dirt kicking up behind it in spots as the wheel spins in place on the steep incline. He has a flashback to her crash just a few short days ago. The crash that blocked the west doors of their building open and allowed the dead to get in. He hopes she doesn’t crash again here because they’re both screwed if she does.
He turns his attention back to the dead, and shoots the ones closest to him, clogging their pathways and frustrating the ones behind them. He runs over the last car by the entrance to the HOV lanes and then hops off on the pavement. He sprints up the road, slowing down to duck under the HOV gates, or squeeze around them, and then he’s free of the cars, or at least the thickest bit of them. Now across four lanes, counting the Highway 36 exit lane, there are only a few cars, and they’re no longer bumper to bumper. Some have their doors open and are empty. Some have seat-belted zombies inside, and some have people who, by the looks of them, blew their brains out. Maybe they were infected and shot themselves before they turned, or maybe someone else did it, but there is a lot of ‘days-old’ brain tissue sprayed inside these cars.
He turns to shoot some of the undead that have broken free of the cars behind him, but he’s breathing too hard to aim accurately at this distance, which thankfully is growing as he runs.
Carmen has gotten the bike clear of the worst of the traffic and has stopped it a hundred yards ahead. She leans it on the kickstand and gets off. She gets her AR-15 up and lays it on the rear bike seat, using it as a bench rest so she can aim better. She waves at D-Day to get to the inside lane as far as he can, and once he does, she starts shooting.
He hears the pops from the rifle as he closes the distance between them. He steals a glance over his shoulder and sees three of the undead lying motionless on the ground, and another one crawling with a broken leg. She keeps shooting until the rifle is empty, and then gets up, loads a fresh magazine, and re-slings the rifle as D-Day runs up to her. He grabs her shoulders and kisses her hard and full on the lips.
“Great job!” he says, breathing hard. He steps around her and straddles the bike. “Let’s go!”
She gets on behind him, and he gets the bike moving, leaving a diminished horde of undead in their wake.
Thirteen
“What’s it look like?” Carmen asks.
D-Day hands her the monocular, and she looks through it for a minute.
“Holy shit,” she finally says.
A mile ahead the interstate rises thirty feet over a small river. The northbound, southbound and frontage lanes of the interstate split into three individual bridges, all three of which are gone. In their place is the still smoking remains of a jetliner. They can’t tell for sure, but it looks like the jet tried landing on the northbound side of the interstate and crashed instead. The northbound lanes are gone completely, as is the frontage road. The southbound side – the side D-Day and Carmen are on – is only about halfway destroyed, but the remaining section of roadway isn’t wide enough for a car, and D-Day wouldn’t trust it to support his bike. It’s not an option though because that side of the road is jammed with abandoned cars and part of the wing from the plane.
From their perch on the overpass above the east-west running Highway 119, they can see that they have only one choice. North is out because of the plane, south is out because there’s nothing but the dead behind them, and to the east, there’s another snarl of traffic blocking the road by the Wendy’s and Popeye’s Chicken, and at least one hundred zombies mixed among the cars.
“West it is,” Carmen says, looking at the open road leading into Longview. “Even in the zombie apocalypse, no one is trying to get into Longview.”
“Why do you say that?” D-Day asks. “It’s a little suburb. How bad could it be?”
“The only time it’s on the news is when there’s a murder, or a kidnapping, or a major drug bust. The town has its issues.”
“Well, we don’t have much choice. Besides, I think all towns are equally shitty now, don’t you?”
“Fair point,” she agrees.
They climb back on the motorcycle, and D-Day drives it a quarter mile forward, then U-turns onto the exit for Longview.
They encounter a pattern on this road that mirrors what they saw on the interstate. At every intersection, every stoplight, every crossover, there’s a crush of metal and flesh where people we
re either too panicked or too impatient to wait for other drivers, and chaos ensued. D-Day can see it in his mind. Someone slows down – for a stop light, a zombie on the road, hell, even a raccoon – and they get rear ended. Maybe they stop, out of habit. Maybe they go sideways into another car, but the crash brings traffic to a halt. People start to go around the crash, but here, too, they aren’t rational, and more crashes follow until entire intersections are clogged. Every one of these scenes has cars with zombies inside. He’s able to get his bike to the edge of the road, or just off the road, to get around them. Once he almost dumped it in a drainage ditch, well hidden with an overgrowth of weeds, but he recovered and kept them out of it.
Their luck runs out when the divided highway crosses a river. Both sides of the bridge are clogged with cars headed east. On their side, a Hummer H2 has gone over the edge into the water, and another car hangs precariously on the edge. Based on the skid marks it looks like the H2 was trying to force its way past the car and they got tangled up. Someone slammed on the brakes, someone else hit them, and the dominoes kept falling.
“Why is it always at bridges or underpasses?” Carmen asks.
“I guess people freak out when the road narrows. Hell, I don’t know.”
“So, I hate to sound like a broken record, but what now?”
D-Day looks at his watch. It’s just 10:00 AM. A drive that would have taken about forty-five minutes before the turn has taken them more than four hours today. Looking around, he doesn’t see any zombies, other than the ones in the cars. He gets down on the ground, looking under the vehicles for any crawlers, but sees nothing. He stands back up and brushes the dirt from his hands.
“We eat a snack, drink some water, and figure out how to move enough of these cars to get through the wreckage,” he says.
“No other options? If any of those cars on the other side of this mess will start, we could just put everything in there and not spend a bunch of time trying to move these wrecks.”
“We have no zombies nearby – other than those trapped in the cars – and the bike has gotten us through some places a car wouldn’t have made it,” D-Day says. “I think we keep it for now. All the stuff we see here is bound to be worse up by Loveland and Fort Collins. There are probably two hundred and fifty thousand people between Wyoming and us. Once we can get clear of the major population centers a car might be better, and we’ll have plenty of chances to take one.”
Carmen acquiesces. She takes the backpack off, and D-Day digs some protein bars and dried fruit from it and hands her a bottle of water. They eat and drink in silence for a few minutes.
“There haven't been any survivors,” Carmen says.
“What do you mean? We survived,” D-Day says.
“No, I mean, at every place we’ve stopped, there’s no sign that anyone got away. Everyone still in a car has been turned, and the people who got out of the cars are nowhere to be seen unless they’re part of the hordes we’ve run from. But beyond that, I didn’t see any people looking out of any of the houses or apartments along I-25, no one on the roofs of stores or malls, no signs painted on sheets that read ‘we’re alive.’ We haven’t seen any other cars or motorcycles. It’s like we’re the last people on earth.”
“There have to be other buildings like ours. Half of the state’s population is in the Denver metro area. We can’t be the only two to make it out. And I bet in Wyoming and points north there are places completely untouched by all of this.”
Carmen looks at D-Day, squinting at the sun in her eyes. “That better be true, Romeo, since this is your plan.”
“Oh, that’s how it is, huh?” he jokes.
“That’s how it is. Until my feet are up and I have a drink in my hand with no undead assholes in sight, you’re on the hook for saving this damsel.”
“Well, let’s get working on that, shall we?”
D-Day gets up and studies the cars for a few minutes. Carmen likes to watch his mind work. She can tell that he’s visualizing each move in his head, and what the consequence of each move will be.
“Okay,” he says, turning back to Carmen. “If we move the cars on this side,” he points to the outside edge of the road, “then we should only have to move five or maybe six of them to clear a path wide enough for the bike. With the amount of fluids leaking from these cars, I’m probably going to need to find a car with a tow rope in it, or something like that so that we can pull the cars out of the way. Which means at least one of these things has to start too.”
Carmen looks over the scene and spots an older Jeep Rubicon on the other side of the road.
“D-Day, let’s check out that Jeep. It might have a winch on it. And it’s got the power to pull any of these cars out of the way.”
“I’ll check it out. You stay here and watch our stuff, just in case.”
He starts to head toward the Jeep, then stops and returns to his backpack. He reaches into a side pouch and pulls out a Ruger 22/45 with a suppressor screwed onto the barrel. His face lights up.
“I almost forgot about this little guy!” He smiles at Carmen. “Silent is safe,” he says as he grabs a spare magazine from the pack and heads off toward the Jeep. He stops by one of the cars with a zombie trapped behind the seatbelt. The creature reaches for him, but he extends the pistol and Carmen hears the slide racking but doesn’t hear the gun shot. The zombie’s head spasms and slumps over.
D-Day gives her a huge grin and climbs over and around the cars, popping the trapped zombies as he goes. He’s making more noise climbing over the cars than he does when he shoots the .22 pistol. After he’s gone ten yards, she can’t even hear the gun. When the breeze shifts, she can smell the fresh spoor leaking from the holes in the zombie’s heads. It makes her wrinkle her nose.
D-Day reaches the Jeep and walks around it, checking for zombies, Carmen supposes, when she hears a familiar sound. She turns and sees a couple of dozen zombies coming from the interstate. They’re growling and making their horrible sounding noises, muffled by the shifting breeze. The closest one is less than one hundred yards away and closing fast, just shy of running speed. She raises her rifle, gets this lead zombie in the scope, breathes out, and squeezes the trigger, just like D-Day taught her. She hits it in the shoulder, and it knocks it off balance enough that it falls. She fires again while it's down, the puff of fluids telling her she hit it, but she doesn’t know where. It’s struggling to get to its feet, and her third shot hits it in the head.
“Lights out,” she says, repeating D-Day’s mantra he uses whenever she kills one of these things.
The others are closing, but none of them are runners, so she turns to see what D-Day is doing. She has a moment of panic when she finds both the black Jeep and D-Day have vanished, but then she sees him a quarter mile up the road making a U-turn and headed back her way.
She turns back to the zombies. A few have passed the one she killed, shuffling their way after her. She doesn’t want to get pinned back in the auto graveyard where any number of things could result in her getting caught and bitten by one of these things, so she advances on them. As she does, they get more agitated and start shrieking that horrible sounding noise. D-Day has a holographic sight on a forty-five-degree angled mount on this rifle. Carmen clicks the power on and raises the rifle, turning it so she can see the green dot in the middle of a green circle. She stops when she’s about twenty yards from the closest zombie puts the circle on its head and lights out. She turns to the next one. Lights out. Next. Lights out. She records thirteen kills on the next eighteen shots.
Footsteps come up behind her, and she whips around with the rifle barrel leading the way.
“Whoa!” D-Day shouts as he does a running limbo, trying to get out of her line of fire.
“Jesus, D-Day! You can’t sneak up on me like that! Christ!”
“I wasn't sneaky at all, but point made, I’ll sound off next time. Fall back to the bike; I’ll get the rest.”
He trots down the road with his .22 and makes quick
work of the last dozen, even with a magazine change. He’s breathing hard as he runs back.
“Carmen, I’m sorry I left you in danger like that! I can’t believe I didn’t see them coming. I won’t do that again.”
“I was doing fine,” she says. “That was really intense though. I completely tuned everything else out. If you had been a zombie, I would have been in trouble.”
“Well, I wasn’t, and you’re right, you did great. You should swap mags while we have the chance. If you’re okay, then I’m going to go start moving some of these cars, and you can keep watch again. I’ll watch your back and come running if anything starts to go down.”
“Sounds good,” Carmen says as she drops her magazine and loads a full one.
D-Day climbs on top of a Mustang, walks over the top of it, drops to the ground and weaves through the remaining cars. He takes the winch cable and finds the tow point under the car and hooks the cable to it. He goes around to the driver’s side and makes sure the car is in neutral, and the brake is off, then gets in the Jeep and uses the in-cab winch controls to take up the slack in the line. He puts it in reverse and gives it some gas.
The car refuses to move at first. The front end is wedged into the car in front of it, and the driver’s side tire is flat. As he gives the Jeep more gas, the car breaks free, and he drags it backward and towards the median, then goes out and sets the parking brake on it, just in case, unhooks the winch cable and spools it in, then drives up to the next car.
