Dead Highways (Book 3): Discord

by Brown, Richard

  We weren’t lucky.

  Bowser was pinned under the overturned golf cart.

  Not lucky at all.

  Chapter 90

  “Jimmy, help me lift the cart!” Robinson yelled. “The rest of you try and hold them back.”

  I hurried over, got in position on the same side as Robinson, the top end. Bowser lay on his side underneath, wedged between the cart and the concrete curb. I didn’t hear him crying out in any real pain, though it was difficult to hear anything over the crack of gunfire provided by Ted and Peaches. Naima remained in our cart, watching helplessly as the horde of infected moved in. She hadn’t been allowed a weapon by her father, and now we were paying for it.

  Below me, Bowser began squirming around as much as the tight space would allow.

  “Try not to move!” Robinson shouted to him. “We’re gonna get you out brother.” He turned his attention to me. “Okay, Jimmy. Lift on three.” I nodded that I understood. “One…Two…Three.”

  The golf cart came up easier than I expected. Perhaps the last few apocalyptic weeks had strengthened me, or more likely, Robinson (the out of shape cop sporting a spare tire around his midsection) made up for my lack of muscle. The cart bounced a little as it landed back upright on all four of its small tires.

  Robinson and I knelt down next to Bowser. He rolled over on his back and looked up at us.

  “Motherfucker,” he said, his lips pulled back in a grimace.

  “Can you move?” Robinson asked.

  Bowser exhaled deeply. “Yeah, I can move bitch.” He pulled himself up to a sitting position, crying out a little as he did. “My leg hurts.”

  “The bad leg?”

  “What do you think?”

  “Don’t gotta be an ass,” Robinson said, offering a hand. “We ain’t got time for that.”

  Robinson helped lift Bowser back to his feet. Once up, the big bearded guy hopped around on one leg. I noticed fresh bloody scrapes on both legs, likely caused when he fell against the curb.

  “Everyone okay? Only got a few shots left!” Ted yelled, looking back at us. He had the butt of his rifle planted against his shoulder. “We need to go now!”

  Peaches had already run out of ammo. Anticipating a quick exit, she scooted back into cart number thirteen next to Naima—the accidental vampire with zombie potential. I squeezed in on the other side.

  Bowser waited in the passenger seat of the reclaimed cart while Robinson bent down and pulled the female zombie he’d quieted moments before out of their path.

  Ted fired off his final shots and then stepped onto the back of our cart. “I’m on.”

  Not to wait a single second longer, Peaches floored the accelerator.

  I glanced back as we sped away. Robinson and Bowser sat in their cart, but their cart wasn’t moving. The growing pack of infected were almost upon them. If they didn’t get moving soon, they’d be history.

  Ted noticed this too. “Stop!” he shouted from the rear of the cart. “We gotta go back.”

  Peaches acted as though she hadn’t heard him. Ted hopped off the moving cart anyway.

  “Peaches stop,” I said. She sighed and finally hit the brakes. “Jesus, what is your problem?”

  “Nothing,” she said, shaking her head. A moment later, tears began streaming down from her eyes.

  No time to get all emotional, I thought as I leapt out of the cart. “Turn this thing around and follow me…please.”

  I started running after Ted. Robinson and Bowser had abandoned their cart and were heading our way on foot—very slowly. Bowser limped along with an arm around Robinson for support. Right behind them a hundred or more zombies nipped at their heels. I wasn’t sure if we could all safely fit inside the one cart, but if not, we needed to at least get Bowser off his feet. The rest of us could go on foot for a while if it came to that. I took Sally out, fully aware I only had one round left in the chamber, perhaps the only round between us that was ready to fire. I wouldn’t hesitate to part with it if I absolutely had to. One shot was better than nothing. One shot could take a life (if a zombie could be considered alive) and save a life at the same time.

  Ted caught up to the two men and helped support Bowser. Now they limped along at a slightly faster pace—fast enough to at least put some good distance between them and the growing number of dead trailing behind packed together like sardines, and smelling just as bad.

  “Jimmy, see if you can find a car with the keys in it.” Ted nodded toward a large parking lot to my left. “And plenty of gas.”

  Peaches pulled up about ten feet in front of them, and they started to help Bowser into the passenger seat next to Naima. I went off alone, climbing over a short iron fence barrier that separated the street from the parking lot of a large fresh market. Before I even had a chance to try the handle on a piece of crap Dodge Neon, a silver-colored SUV screeched around the corner on the other side of the lot, its backend fishtailing, and started coming my way.

  I froze.

  My first thought was what the fuck?

  Then…

  Who the fuck?

  I bent down beside the Neon, used it for cover against the out of control vehicle barreling my way. It sped past me without even a courtesy tap on the brake, throwing dust in my face. The SUV slid out into the street, its suspension bouncing along, and came to a hard stop a few feet in front of the gang. They had just finished loading Bowser into the cart.

  The door opened and Aamod jumped out of the SUV.

  “Daddy!” Naima ran up to him and into his arms. “You’re alive!”

  It was the most energy I’d seen her display since that zombie tripped over her. Maybe she wouldn’t get sick, die, and become one of those things after all. Maybe she’d be okay, like her father, a man she was no doubt shocked to see alive. I’m sure everyone in the group shared that feeling.

  I know I did.

  Chapter 91

  The SUV had three rows of seats. Aamod drove, with his daughter sitting next to him, while Robinson and Bowser occupied the middle row. I sat in the last row between Ted and Peaches. In the rush to get the hell out of there—to narrowly escape the rotting clutches of a hundred dead—I jumped into the SUV having totally forgotten about my bug-out bag sitting in the golf cart’s storage compartment. Ted, as was his usual way, bailed my ass out. Now I had my backpack open on my lap, reloading Sally’s empty magazines. Freckle face, to my right, was doing the same with his empties.

  “Should I keep going north?” Aamod asked, peeking in the rear view mirror.

  “Yes. Keep heading north for now,” Robinson replied.

  There were cars parked along the side of Dublin Street, even a rare few beaters left in the middle, but nothing Aamod couldn’t maneuver around. He drove slow and careful, quite the contrast to just moments before when the threat was much greater. I noticed only three or four undead walking alongside the road or passing between homes. They seemed to wander about aimlessly, without purpose, as though they’d once been a part of a larger group and had become lost. Eventually they’d probably happen upon one of the major highways and rejoin the million-man parade still migrating west.

  Peaches had her head turned toward the window, looking out solemnly. I put my hand on her arm but she didn’t acknowledge me.

  I leaned into her. “Hey…you okay?”

  She nodded. Kept her head turned away.

  I wondered if she was crying again and didn’t want me to see. Was I in the doghouse? I couldn’t remember doing anything specific that would have set her into this most recent funk. All morning she’d sort of drifted in and out of it, beginning on the dock with the argument over what to do with Olivia, and I was sure she was still feeling the aftershock of that decision. When she was ready to talk about it, assuming she didn’t just keep her feelings bottled up inside, I’d be there for her. Squeezed in an SUV with five other people after we’d almost been killed was definitely not the right time.

  I finished loading Sally’s magazines, popped one in
to her bottom side, and stuffed the spare back into my bag. Ted was still going strong, continuing the slow and tedious process, pressing each round in one at a time. He had quite a few more magazines to load than me.

  “Need any help?” I asked.

  Ted smiled, letting me know he appreciated the offer. “No, that’s okay.”

  I really couldn’t blame him if he didn’t trust me, even though he was the one who had trained me. He was protective over his gear, not in the sense that he wouldn’t let you borrow it, but in that if he had to depend upon a weapon for his own protection, he wanted to load it—maintain it. I could relate. I hadn’t forgotten the brief period in the early days of the infection when I’d been without Sally. I’d left her in the house where Diego had murdered that innocent kid. She’d only been out of my possession for half a day, but during that small time she was gone, I felt incomplete. I was so happy Robinson had returned her to me later that night in the woods.

  In a zombie infested world, developing a close relationship with your weapon of choice was crucial for survival. These simple tools of destruction were often the difference between staying alive or tumbling into the vast unknown that followed the final heartbeat. Much like how soldiers in military field training don’t go anywhere without their gun, the weapon becomes a part of you, another appendage, and reaching for it becomes instinct. The more you use it, the more comfortable you become, until one day you don’t feel weird carrying it anymore. The opposite becomes true. Without it, you feel weak and exposed. That was the unfortunate reality we dealt with every second of every day—kill or be killed. We traded bullets for air to breathe—for a little more time on Earth. We were all soldiers now stuck on a never-ending battlefield, fighting skirmish after skirmish, trying to beat the odds and win an unwinnable war, knowing in our hearts sooner or later we’d be choked from existence by the cold hands of a painful death, but hoping that maybe—please God maybe—we would find peace somewhere on the other side, and those we’d loved and lost would be waiting to welcome us.

  More on that later.

  “So…how’s the leg doing?” Robinson asked Bowser.

  “I don’t know, nigga, how’s your shoulder?” Bowser snarled back. “Good enough to drive?”

  “Oh, whatever. It was an accident. Did you forget the lady with the slack jaw blocking my view?”

  “You should have let me drive the fucking cart. I told you that one handed shit would get us into trouble, and I was right.”

  “What you want a cookie?”

  “Yeah, you got any?” Bowser replied, smirking wide.

  “No.”

  “Already ate them all, huh?” Bowser’s face remained lit up in a smile. “That don’t surprise me.”

  Despite being in some serious discomfort, arguing with Robinson always seemed to cheer Bowser up. I could sense that the negative feelings that had existed between them when Bowser joined the group were becoming a thing of the past. Their relationship now was more like that of two brothers picking on one another, love hate love. Gradually, they were finding their way back to the place they began, twenty years earlier when they were good friends, back when they used to bet on sporting events and Robinson wasn’t pregnant with a food baby.

  We all perked up in our seats as Aamod began to slow down and then finally stopped a hundred yards back from a busy intersection.

  Even from the third row of seats, from a good distance away, I could see the bodies—the dead people far ahead heading west down another highway not unlike the last one we’d nearly died attempting to cross.

  Naima sighed. “No, not again.”

  “I could get us a closer look,” Aamod said, starting to let his foot off the brake.

  “Forget it. We’re not going through that again,” Ted replied. “Is there another way around? How close are we to Dixon?”

  Robinson turned around to address Ted. “You still got that map with you?”

  Ted nodded. “Sure do.” He rummaged through his backpack. A moment later, he came out with the crumpled up map of New Orleans.

  Robinson folded the map open, started looking for other options. “All right, so the road ahead should be Earhart Blvd.” He ran his index finger north on the map to a spot near interstate 10. “Dixon is here.”

  I leaned closer, poked my head over the seat. “What? That’s where we’re going?”

  “Yeah. Right here is where my ex lives,” Robinson said, tapping the same spot as before.

  “But that’s right next to the interstate.”

  “It’s close,” Robinson agreed.

  “Maybe too close.”

  “Nah, I think we’ll be fine. We won’t have to cross the interstate. We’ll stay west of it.”

  I relaxed back. “Okay.”

  “Aamod, go ahead and turn around,” Robinson said. “Looks like we need to go back a few streets. Stop when you see Belfast.”

  A minute later, we turned right down Belfast Street, heading west. Ever since crossing Claiborne, we’d entered a residential housing area. Most of the homes were old and falling apart in a myriad of ways, especially the farther we went down Belfast. Chain-linked fences enclosed unkempt lawns where grass and weeds grew to new heights. Cars and trucks long past the point of realistically being restored sat on concrete blocks. Everything needed a fresh coat of paint.

  One thing that surprised me about New Orleans was how just about every house had a front porch. On the east coast of Florida, where I had lived all my life, it was rare to see a house with a front porch. Florida people liked their porches in the back of the house, with an inground swimming pool and a seven-foot privacy fence to make sure they never had to see or talk to their neighbors.

  “Let me know when to turn,” Aamod said.

  “I will.” Robinson consulted the map, still open in his lap, as we continued to plow forward. “We’ll be turning soon.”

  We turned right at the end of Belfast and went north along a narrow road that ran beside a concrete irrigation ditch. The ditch was almost as wide as the road. The water was a greenish-gray color, impossible to see how deep it went, at least from the backseat of a moving vehicle.

  We came upon an overpass. Hundreds of the undead shuffled along twenty feet above us as we rolled by underneath them.

  “That was Earhart we just passed,” Robinson said.

  “Well, that wasn’t so hard,” Ted remarked. “Just took a little rerouting, huh?”

  “So we’re almost there?” I said.

  “Yeah, only one major highway left to cross,” Robinson replied, his face buried in the map. “Can’t just drive around this one, or under it. But don’t worry, I’ve got an idea.”

  I had learned in no short time that if someone tells you not to worry…

  Start worrying.

  Chapter 92

  “That’s your idea,” Bowser said. “Hell no, man. You’ve gotta be kidding.”

  “You got a better idea,” Robinson snapped back. “Go ahead, spit it out.”

  The narrow road we’d been traveling north down curved to the east and ran alongside a major highway. The last and final highway we needed to cross in order to reach Dixon looked to be the largest we had come upon yet. It was six lanes wide, all clogged with bumper-to-bumper traffic. A huge number of zombies, larger than the horde back on Claiborne, trudged westward, weaving in and out of the parked cars.

  With no way to cross in the SUV, or by foot, we turned around and went back to where the narrow road had curved to the right. And it was there that we now stood on the side of the road, huddled around the outside of the SUV, looking into the drainage ditch and considering Robinson’s suggestion.

  I stared into the swampy-looking water, speechless. This was not what I had expected.

  Peaches grumbled. “I don’t really want to go in there.”

  “Neither do I,” Robinson said, laughing. “But it can get us across safely.”

  Bowser shook his head defiantly and crossed his arms. “You don’t know that. Some
thing could be in the water. Maybe a snake…or even a gator.”

  Robinson snickered. “A gator? Come on man. There’s no gators in there.”

  “He’s right,” Ted chimed in. “Not likely to be gators in there.”

  “Even if there was a gator in there, which there isn’t,” Robinson began, “I’d still rather take my chances with a gator than the hundreds, maybe thousands of people on the highway.”

  Ted sighed. “We all agree we can’t cross that highway on foot, right? Can we veto that idea right now?”

  I nodded in agreement, considering it vetoed. I glanced over at Aamod, expecting him to propose another hero campaign, but he remained silent, listening. Crossing that six-lane highway safely would require more than a clever diversion and a huge helping of good luck, as it had went down twenty minutes earlier, it would require a miracle of God. And given the current conditions of the earth, the big guy in the sky wasn’t handing out many miracles these days. If anything, he’d send another flood.

  “We don’t even know how deep it is,” Peaches said. The hesitation to jump into the nasty water was still very apparent in her voice.

  “Well, let’s go see,” Ted said, wandering off toward the ditch. He scaled a short concrete wall and disappeared on the other side. The rest of us followed him, stopping at the short barrier. We looked down at Ted below, wading through the knee-high water.

  “Look at that. Not deep at all,” Robinson said.

  We stayed quiet, waiting as Ted carefully stepped out of the water and climbed out of the ditch. “It’s fine,” he said. “A little cold, but I’ve been in much worse before.”

  “What about his leg?” I asked, speaking of Bowser. “Is he gonna be able to walk in that?”

  Ted shrugged. “The bottom is kinda slick, but I think if we take it slow, everyone should be fine. Even him. Worst case scenario someone slips and takes a cold dirty bath.”

  “Might not be such a bad thing,” Naima said.