by Rich Baker
“Okay, okay. So, did he know these punks? How’s he know their name?”
“He said they left one of their cars and it was registered to Benjamin Puckett. The address was in Fort Collins, but apparently, they had words with them, and they said they were headed into Longview.”
Lucky scratches the back of his head, thinking.
“So, we don’t know for sure that they’re even going to see someone named Puckett, just that the owner of the car was named Puckett,” he says. “We don’t even know for sure that they didn’t steal the car from this Puckett guy. I mean, this could be a bug hunt, man.”
“Look, Lucky, just do it, okay? If you don’t find anything, so be it. But we need to know what’s up. For Addie’s sake, I can’t let this go.”
“Sure, Max. Got it, we’ll take care of it.”
“Also – don’t tell Frankie about this, and don’t talk about it over walkie-talkies or the CB. I don’t want to give away that we’re looking for them, and you never know who’s listening. Use this to get in touch.”
Max hands Lucky a police radio.
“It’s programmed for a specific frequency and has a unique security code, so the odds of someone listening in are beyond slim and none. When you know something, you can call it in. Someone should be listening on our end.”
“Okay, Max. You got it, man.” Lucky puts the radio in his coat pocket and heads over to Little Nicky and Jessie, who have finished loading the bed of the Ford with the bags of supplies from the Dodge. Their business settled, for now; they get into their respective trucks. Nicky opens the gate, and Jessie pulls the Ford through, the cow-catcher sending a couple of zombies off into the drainage areas on either side of the access road. Lucky pulls through, and Nicky closes and locks the gate, then hops into the bed of the truck. When they get to Highway 287, Max and Jessie turn south and head back to the Montero compound, while Lucky and Little Nicky head north, back into Longview, to begin their search for the Pucketts.
Four
“DJ, what did you hope to accomplish by doing that?” Virginia Nelson asks her son.
DJ looks at his younger brother Bill.
“Why did you tell her? I asked you to keep that quiet!” he says.
“You never mind him, DJ. You put a bounty on those people’s heads! Humans are going extinct, your own family is running out of food, and you’re more concerned with getting revenge on people who only defended themselves against YOU! What’s the matter with you?” Virginia says.
“They killed our family, Mom! They killed Dad; they killed Roger, William, and Hector. They have to pay! Who’s going to bring them to justice? There no law anymore. We can’t call 911. We have to take care of things for ourselves.”
“I know damn well who they killed. MY husband, MY son! I don’t need you to remind me! I also know they’d all be alive if you hadn’t been so eager to fight. And for what? To stop people from escaping this…undead menace? They weren’t bad people, they weren’t coming for us, and they didn’t shoot at us until WE shot at THEM! All because they were running away from the end of the world, DJ, because they wanted to live, and for that, you’ve put a price on their heads. That Montero boy will have blood, just like he did with those cops a few years back, and you put him on the scent. I just don’t know what to do about you, boy.”
“Maybe those cops deserved it, mom. Justice wasn’t done! Max sees things the way I do. The way we MUST look at things now.”
DJ stares at his mother, seething. She just can’t see reality staring her in the face! She stares back at him, with that look – the one she gave him throughout his childhood, the one that made him wilt like a plant that hasn’t been watered in weeks.
“Would it be better if I just left?” he asks. “Then you can stop worrying about what to ‘do’ about me.”
“Maybe you should,” Virginia says. Bill’s mouth drops open at this statement from his mother. He wishes that he hadn’t told his mother about DJs conversation with the Monteros. He thought it was the right thing to do, a necessary thing to stop additional killing, but now it’s breaking his family up.
“Mom,” he says.
“Bill, you’ve done enough. Just shut up,” DJ says. “If that’s what you want, Mom, I’ll be gone today.”
“Deej, you have always been hot headed. You never met a battle you didn’t want to fight. Now we have a battle – against these things outside – and you can’t stay focused on that. We’re running low on food. We’re running low on water. You can’t go more than a hundred yards outside without one of those things popping up and trying to eat you. Humans are becoming endangered. And yet your concern is about killing more of them rather than keeping your family alive. I know what those people did. I was there if you’ll remember. What we didn’t know then was WHY they were crossing our land. Now we know they were trying to escape the dead. If you were in their position, you would have done the same thing and said it was the right thing to do. Now you want to kill them for doing the very thing you would have done. Killing them won’t bring your father back, DJ. Where does all that hatred come from, son?” Virginia speaks in a calm, even voice that makes DJ want to scream.
“I don’t know,” he says. “I just have a low threshold for taking shit from people I guess. Always have, always will. A leopard can’t change its spots.”
“And not taking shit was worth your father’s life? Your brother’s life? Hector’s life?” she asks.
“ENOUGH, MOM!” DJ erupts. “I get it. I’m the designated asshole. I got everyone killed. Well, fuck me!”
Virginia keeps her cool exterior. “DJ, I do want you to leave. Go to Bonnie and Steve’s and see how they’re doing. We’ve still not been able to raise them on the CB, and they haven’t checked in for four days now. See if they need any help, call us on the CB. Stay there a few days, get some perspective. I do love you, son, but I need you to go. You can come back when you have your priorities straight.”
DJ turns and walks out of the room, pausing to glare at Bill before he exits. There’s a long uncomfortable silence. Bill tries to think of something to say, but before he can say anything Virginia says “Bill, go on now. I need to be alone.”
He gets up and limps to the doorway, grabs the doorknob and shuts the door behind him. Before he takes another step, he can hear his mother sobbing on the other side of the door.
* * *
DJ grabs his backpack from his bedroom, slings his AR-15 over his shoulder, grabs the ZAK, and heads down the stairs. He stops in the kitchen to grab a hard-boiled egg and some beef jerky.
“Where are you going?” his brother Tim asks.
“Out.”
“Out where? What’s going on?”
“Ask mom.”
DJ walks toward the door that leads to the barn.
Tim persists. “Dude, what does that mean? What the hell is going on?”
“It means ask Mom!” DJ shouts over his shoulder as the door shuts behind him. He takes long, angry strides through what he’s started calling ‘the chute’ – the sixty feet between the house and the barn lined on each side by twelve feet tall hay bale walls.
He enters the barn and flips on the lights. They glow more orange than white with the generator off and the jury-rigged batteries not fully charged. He lets out a breath he didn’t realize he was holding and feels the tension leave his body.
Pick a vehicle and get moving.
The Voice gets him moving again. He walks through the barn, looking at his options.
He stares at his truck, with the flat tire and the bullet holes in the radiator, sustained in the battle with the Puckett assholes, and his anger stirs up again.
You can fix it if you take the time, the Voice whispers in his head. He shakes his head no. He wants to leave now. He looks over at the tractor with the backhoe attachment.
Too slow. He looks at his dad’s old pickup truck.
Diesel is a risk. We may run out of fuel and never find more.
He keeps walking u
ntil he gets to the Polaris Ranger, or what his Dad used to call a ‘field truck.’
Bingo!
“It has zero protection from zombies,” he says aloud.
It drives over anything. Goes 60 miles-per-hour. Can haul 1500 pounds. You can fit it in places a car can’t go. You can put the solid doors on it if you’re worried about protection. You know why Dad bought six of these things. Take it and go!
He fills the ten-gallon tank, puts the solid doors on it, puts his backpack, rifle and the ZAK on the passenger side, and climbs in.
He gets the remote from his truck, and with a press of the second button, the big door rises. A half-dozen undead turn and start advancing on the movement. He winds his way around the tractor and hits the gas, pressing the big button again and watches the door slide down behind him, making sure none of them get inside.
He decides to go to his house first, before going to the dairy farm. He keeps his speed to forty or forty-five miles per hour. It’s fast enough to outrun any zombie but slow enough he won’t lose control on the sometimes-bumpy dirt road. After five minutes, he sees the roof of his house projecting over the edge of the Nelson’s farmland. He slows down for the curve in the road that descends to his driveway. Across the road, his neighbors - the Millers – house has is a pile of rubble; the brick facades have collapsed onto the wooden frame and siding, which has been consumed by fire. The charred heap is still smoldering, wisps of smoke curling up in several spots.
He makes the wide turn into his driveway, pressing the largest button on the remote and realizes that there’s no power here and his opener won’t work. Before he can get out of the Ranger, he sees a pair of zombies coming toward his house.
Look at that back brace. You know this one.
The Voice is right. This creature is old Mr. Miller from around the bend. Some of his clothes have burned away, and his hair and some of his flesh are gone, but that back brace is unmistakable. DJ gets the ZAK and goes to meet Mr. Miller.
The point of the ZAK pierces the creature’s face just under the left eye, easily penetrating the skull and the brain on the other side. The de-animated body starts to drop, and the ZAK comes out at a different angle. He has to pull harder than he thought he would to get the bladed tine out of Mr. Miller’s head, but it isn’t too hard to do. As long as he knows what to expect, he can see it being an effective weapon.
He turns to Mrs. Miller and readies the ZAK. When she’s in striking distance, he thrusts the ZAK at her, but she lurches at the wrong time, and the blades on the tine graze her cheek, exposing her teeth. He makes an adjustment and extends his arm to his left on the follow through, crashing the steel ball into her jaw.
He hears her jaw snap and sees multiple teeth take flight. Her head rocks sideways, and her knees buckle. DJ pulls the ZAK back toward him, hitting her on the opposite side of the head this time. With her lower body going one direction and her upper body going another, her joints can’t take the torque, and her right knee gives out. She crashes to the ground, and DJ brings the steel ball down on her forehead, crushing bone and breaking through to the soft tissue. He brings it down again, and again, and again until there’s nothing left of her head but black, pulpy brain tissue and splinters of the skull.
He’s out of breath, standing over the destroyed shell that was Mrs. Miller when he realizes he lost all situational awareness while he was savaging her corpse. A bolt of fear surges through him, and he spins around, head swiveling, looking for the next threat. He’s lucky, and there are no additional zombies nearby, though there are a few at the top of the rise a few hundred yards to the north. He uses Mrs. Miller’s sweater to clean off the steel ball and runs to the Ranger. He turns it around, so it faces down the driveway, presses the main button on the garage door opener, grateful he sprang for the one with the battery backup and backs the Ranger into the garage. Another press of the button and the door closes, leaving him in the dim light cast down from the opener.
He sits in the quiet, nearly dark garage for a few minutes, catching his breath. For the first time, he’s afraid for his sister. Both his house and the Millers are off the beaten path, away from the main roads. He never really cared for the Millers, but if something got to them and turned them into zombies, what are the odds that his sister is okay? The dairy farm is off one of the main roads. The county just widened it a year ago, making the lanes wider, adding bigger shoulders to the road, and putting in a center lane for people to make safer turns into places like the dairy. There’s a lot of traffic up and down that road, and that means the potential for a lot of zombies.
He gets up and heads into the house and gets a backpack and two duffel bags. This way Steve and Bonnie can each carry one of the bags, and if one gets lost, they won’t lose all of the supplies. He puts some clothes in each one – socks, underwear, a couple of t-shirts and a pair of jeans – tosses his overnight kit in the backpack, a roll of toilet paper into each of the bags and then heads to his office.
In the office closet, he opens his gun safe and puts a few hundred rounds of .223 ammunition in each bag. He puts on his tactical vest with the modular system that lets him add and subtract pockets and pouches and configure them exactly the way he wants. He has two extra magazines for the AR15, thirty rounds each. He stocked up before the Colorado legislature banned them in 2012. On the right side is the holster for his .45 pistol. He puts a couple of boxes of .45 ammo in the backpack and holsters the pistol. He shuts and locks the safe, and heads down to the kitchen.
He goes to the pantry and grabs a box of single-serving packets of peanut butter and throws a few into each bag, doing the same with bags of sunflower seeds, and granola bars. A bag of beef jerky, a bag of raisins and, for good measure, a pint of tequila, go in the backpack.
He holds his breath and grabs six bottles of water from the fridge and tosses two into each bag.
Finally, from the drawer under the phone, he grabs a headlamp, shoulders the backpack, grabs a duffel bag in each hand and heads back into the garage.
He clicks on the headlamp and puts the duffel bags on the floor of the passenger side of the Ranger. He sheds the backpack and puts it on the passenger seat, running the seat belt through the straps to keep it in the seat no matter what crazy maneuvers he makes while driving.
Next, he heads to his work bench and reaches underneath it. He reaches around, blindly feeling his way until he finds what he’s looking for. He pulls out two eighteen-inch PVC tubes. They’re improvised suppressors he made for his AR15. He smiles, thinking about how his mom was incensed when he told the family about the online video he’d seen detailing now to make them. “That’s all we need in the middle of the trial,” she said, “is for you to get arrested for something illegal like a homemade silencer for your gun!” His brother Tim had piled on. “DJ, you can’t be serious right now. You know we’re being watched, you know any slip-ups will cost us this case. Use your head, man!” He assured them that he was only telling them about the video because he found it interesting, not because he was going to make them.
He made them anyway because fuck them The Voice had said, and he agreed with it. He would not be bossed around by them. If you ever need these, the Milford lawsuit will be the last thing you’re worried about, The Voice assured him. And, The Voice was right, as usual.
Inside each tube is an alternating series of rolled steel wool and five steel washers. One end is sealed with a plastic cap with a quarter-inch hole drilled through it. The other is open but has a two-inch length of foam pipe insulation pressed into the opening to hold the contents inside. The outside of the pipe is covered with fiberglass tape to add some strength to the plastic. He’s tested each one to make sure they work, and he was surprised by how effective they are. It’s not a whisper-like ‘pew pew’ like they show on TV, but it cuts the noise way down. He lines up the J-shaped notch he cut in the pipe with the front sight on the AR and slides it four inches over the barrel, turns it an inch, and slides it forward an inch, locking it in place.
He starts the Ranger, takes a deep breath, and raises the garage door, knowing there will be zombies out there by now, but it doesn’t matter. He must get to his sister.
There are a lot of zombies out there. A dozen or so are on the driveway, so he brings his rifle up and starts shooting. Before he realizes it, his magazine is empty, and there is still a half dozen zombies too close for comfort. He retreats to the Ranger, hops in and gets the door shut just as a zombie reaches him. She starts pounding on the glass, and he realizes how little protection the door offers.
Better than none. Now get moving!
He listens to The Voice, puts the Ranger in gear and hits the gas. The zombie tries to grab on, but she just gets pulled forward and falls over. He hits another one head-on, and it falls against the plexiglass windshield with such force DJ thinks it will break through. He brakes, and it falls forward, then he hits the gas and runs it over, grateful for the ground clearance the APV provides.
Now clear of the horde right in front of his house, he can look around a little. He can’t count them this quickly but estimates there are seventy or eighty zombies in the area surrounding his house. It’s more than he’s seen at one time around his parent’s house. The ones that followed him must have been picking up strays along the way. He’s pissed he didn’t have time to close and lock his garage door. The thought of someone getting in and rooting through his stuff bothers him. He pushes that thought out of his head and focuses on getting to the dairy. It’s more than 10 miles to get there, and he has no idea what waits for him on the road, so he needs to be sharp and focused.
He drives for a few minutes without incident and reaches the end of his road. He stops at the T intersection and ponders his choices. If he goes right, he eventually will get to his parent’s house, Tim’s next door (well, a quarter mile away, but technically the next house), and Roger’s next to that, also about a quarter of a mile down the road. But he’s not going back there. Not today, and maybe not ever. Maybe he finds Bonnie and Steve and then heads out on his own. He’s a good fit for this world. Yeah, that’s what he’ll do. He’ll take one of Steve and Bonnie’s trucks and head out on his own.
