by SP Durnin
If the charred remnants of what was once the greatest country on Earth they passed through affected Kat at all, she didn’t let on. The blue-haired young woman sat beside O’Connor, seemingly oblivious to the mess speeding by outside the Humvees armored window. She lounged in her seat, one biker-booted foot propped upon their ride’s military issue dash, wearing a lazy smile, rocking back-and-forth while she quietly hummed various vintage pop tunes to herself. As the miles crept by she steadily worked her way through Joan Jett and the Blackhearts Greatest Hits, moved on to Concrete Blonde, Shakespeare’s Sister, The Clash, Run DMC, and—finally—every last song by Van Halen. Both the Dave and Sammy incarnations.
For the first time in, well, forever, Kat felt completely relaxed. Clear. Yes, they were still living—or trying to live, as best they could—in the middle of the apocalypse. Yes, there was an excellent chance they wouldn’t make it to Pecos, let alone the Rockies. And yes, they were Target Number One for an insane military dictator.
But she and O’Connor were together.
Finally, after months of standing on the sidelines wringing her hands, of fighting to stay away for their sakes and for Laurel, of nearly being driven insane from watching Jake suffer and nearly die so many times over, they were together. For however brief a love affair that might be, no one—not the zombies, not man, not even the gods themselves, could take that from her.
But the nasty things sure did try…
* * *
“Shoot that bitch in the face!!!” Jake bellowed.
He swerved left, crossing the dry, grassy median to avoid a pair of eighteen-wheeler trailers that blocked the westbound lanes. Doing so was made a tad more difficult, what with a slobbering zombie obscuring—and trying to bite its way through—the Hummer’s windshield, but he managed to dodge the obstructions while keeping their vehicle from flipping in the process. Cho finally put a round through the dead woman on their hood’s head with a lucky shot and dropped back in from her location on the roof. Elle slammed the locking bars for the turret hatch in place as Kat scurried into the navi-guesser seat again, while Leo dealt with another pair of creatures outside the grid of rebar covering the rear passenger window. The horrors had been nearly rabid to breach the vehicle’s confines, going so far as to gnaw on the metal bars, but their teeth shattered against the steel like so many moldy Chiclets. Until, that is, the Leo sent their frontal lobes all over the landscape with a pair of well-placed .223 rounds.
“Thank you! Holy shit! There’s even more of them up ahead.” O’Connor veered for the shoulder of Route 20 and snatched at the Humvee’s radio, silently thanking the gods it was finally working again “George! There’s a shit-ton on the road up here, so I’ll have drop back behind Bus One to play rearguard. Are you ready?”
“I was fuckin’ born ready, you snot-nosed punk. Hell, I’ve been waiting ta’ do this again ever since we snuffed them Purifier clowns. What a bunch of pussies they turned out to be.” The glee in the older man’s voice was obvious. “Watch me work, boy.”
As the Screamin’ Mimi moved forward on their right, Cho flicked her gaze back to Elle. “Is it just me, or does George really scary sometimes?”
“It is not just you!” The blonde sergeant was a bit wild-eyed as she shoved a fresh magazine into her own rifle.
The Pepto-pink transport accelerated with a speed defiant of its size, and Jake again marveled at the ugly titan’s capabilities. Nothing so large that didn’t have wings or booster rockets should be able to build up velocity that fast. Also for the hundredth time, as the Mimi shot by, O’Connor noted it was like being passed by a mini-mall. During some long conversations with Rae and George about the Mimi’s construction (most of which went right over his head) the ex-writer had learned a hydrogen drive cell provided Foster’s “baby” with an obscene amount of power. So long as they remembered to change out the water in its fuel tank once a month or so. It had been developed as a prototype Mobile Armored Troop Transport and Command vehicle (MATTOC for short) due to the Y2K scare at the turn of the millennium. While never put into production thanks to military cutbacks during the “Clinton-ista Years,” their group was undoubtedly thankful for the flamingo-colored behemoth that had become their home.
Once the modified tour bus carrying Langley’s citizens passed, Jake dodged into its wake. He was fairly certain Mooney and his remaining people were fairly safe within the slap-dash touring tank, but unlike the Mimi it was still vulnerable. It didn’t have run-flat tires. Its exterior included no armor. The transport was simply sheet metal and rebar, with chain-link bolted and welded beneath. Most importantly, it didn’t possess the Mimi’s frictionless hull coating that allowed Foster’s pride and joy to slough off nearly any impact.
“Guys, we are so screwed if this doesn’t work!” Leo called hastily.
“Get ready.” Jake didn’t like their chances, but they were hip-deep in it now with no way back.
“Did you see the size of that crowd up there?” Leo buckled his harness with quick hands. “There’s hundreds of them on the road!”
With a white-knuckled grip on the steering wheel Jake nodded in reply. “Then it’s a good thing we have the Mimi, but regardless. This is going to be bad. Really bad! I hope everyone went to the bathroom earlier, because I do not want to have to clean piss off the upholstery once we’re inside.”
“No promises!” Kat tugged at her own seat restraints until they were painfully tight. “If this goes pear-shaped? We for sure won’t have to worry about Hess and his goon army!”
O’Connor nodded and accelerated towards the rear of the bus until there was barely a single car length between the two vehicles.
Upon their arrival in the outskirts of Pecos, Jake and his companions had finally managed to make contact with the South Texas haven. Their collective relief, however, swiftly turned to desperation, upon learning a medium sized horde—medium for Texas, perhaps—was closing on the refuge and if they didn’t hurry, they’d be stuck outside with it when the city secured its defenses. The prospect of having to deal with staggeringly large numbers of hungry ghouls that led Foster to suggest an insane strategy. One that could readily get all of them killed but, since no one else could think of anything better, Jake decided they had to run with it.
He hoped he wouldn’t regret doing so. At least if it turned out he did, he—and everyone else in his party—wouldn’t have to suffer for long. They’d be consumed by the horde.
Then, even over the noise created by Bus One and their own Humvee’s roaring engines, Jake and company heard external speakers on the Screamin’ Mimi begin to blare rock and roll. At a truly impressive volume.
Even while trying to throttle the steering wheel, O’Connor broke into a grin. “Well, at least George is consistent.”
“Oh, hell yeah!” Cho had both arms raised towards the windshield and was head banging enthusiastically.
The horde before the reinforced northern gates took notice of the music. Hundreds upon hundreds of them turned from their drunken assault to gaze stupidly at the pink machine as it raced closer. Not a one threw up a rock-hand in agreement with Kat’s sentiment, however.
Few people are aware of this fact, but the human ear is quite sensitive. Anything sound louder than ninety to ninety-five decibels has commonly been known to cause permanent hearing loss. Those levels are often attained by jackhammers or subway trains, let alone your average rock concert. Those run at about 115 decibels. Foster went straight to 120. Just below the point where sounds becomes actually painful to the human ear. That didn’t matter at all to the dead, but he’d always wanted to “crank that bitch up to eleven.” And hey, you only lived once.
“That man is out of his fucking mind!” Elle had to shout over the music.
Kat shot the sergeant a shocked look but didn’t stop head banging. “What are you talking about? How can you not like Anthrax? Turn it up, George!”
“You know he can’t hear you? And I think my ears are bleeding!” Leo called. “Holy shit, t
hat’s loud!”
“If it’s too loud you’re too old,” Jake clenched his jaw and hunched slightly in the Hummer’s driver seat. “Now hang on to something, because we’re going through!”
While over a kilometer full of zombies—not quite staggering shoulder to shoulder, but close—stood between their group and the imposing gates, there was no way the survivors were stopping now. Not when the sight of Pullman Standard freight cars and industrial shipping containers stacked three high, forming a solid, thirty-six-foot wall that encircled nearly a square mile, was in sight. Not when they were so near their goal. Not when somewhere safe from the dead was finally Right There. So close they could almost smell it from within the sweltering, steel confines of their vehicles. So, the three transports sped on. Jake and company in their Humvee at the rear, Bus One in the center, and Foster’s ugly baby in the lead.
Anyone upon the walls of the Pecos enclave (if they weren’t already being nearly deafened by The Hardest Ever) wouldn’t have been able to keep Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries from playing whisper-like in their ears at the sight of such a desperate charge. They would have believed those in the vehicles outside were doomed. That they’d be bogged down in the press of creatures long before even nearing the gates. That there were simply far too many of the mobile dead. And, in any other scenario, that would’ve been exactly the case. But today, they would’ve been wrong. Yes, the zombies had numbers on their side. Yes, the hellish legion stumping north to meet the MATTOC would disregard any damage they took and any of their members who fell. But Jake’s party had George Montgomery Foster and no one, no one on the face of this now-overrun Earth, knew what the Mimi was capable of better than he.
He heard how her heart—the hydrogen drive humming behind his niece’s seat to his right—pulsed rhythmically. He felt how her claws —the combat grade tires that didn’t require inflation—gripped at the earth. He felt it as she leapt forward in anger—independent drive axles revving smoothly as he pressed a booted foot down to give her power—at their foes. At the rotting things who’d stolen humanity’s home-world. At the miserable, fucking monsters who wanted to devour the entire human race.
Yes, George Foster knew the Screamin’ Mimi.
And he knew she was mighty.
Stomping his foot to the floor, George bellowed, “Chew ‘em up, baby!!!”
As if in reply, the Mimi proceeded to kill zombies. Not just kill them. Annihilate them. Its plow-like nose-blade slashed into the crowd like the scythe of a Godzilla-sized Grim Reaper, dismembering rank upon rank upon rank of the dead. Turning scores of them into horrid Jackson Pollocks in the span of a few heartbeats. Dozens at a time became nothing but bad memories and corpse-flavored goop that splattered briefly across her prow before running off, unable to find enough purchase on her surface to even leave stains, thanks to NASA engineered SEP skin. Yet more fell under her thick wheels, bones pulverized and their ragged flesh smashed into rancid pasted to coat the Texas asphalt.
Behind the wheel, Foster cackled madly. He’d done the same thing back while escaping the Cincinnati Gas and Electric Lake Power Plant, right after their group had exterminated the Purifiers—a pack of Neo-Nazi pussies if there ever was one—and had been dying for the chance to do it again. The Mimi’s nose literally acted like a snowplow, throwing plumes of half-liquefied zombies out to each side of the transport that sent more flying, adding to the body count. The foul waves knocked countless numbers of the dead from the survivors’ path, sweeping them right off their feet and smearing them over the guardrails along the side of the road, resulting in yet more bisected creatures.
Seeing the carnage left in their wake Foster howled and nearly smiled widely enough to split his head in half. His niece Bee sat beside him, shrieking happily, like a teenage girl at a boy-band concert, as zombie goo streaked up past the windshield. Even the normally serious Rae got into the spirit of things.
“Aim for the left!” she called from her seat at the cabin communications and cyber warfare console. “They’re thicker on that side!”
“I’ll overlook yer back-seat drivin’ just this once, woman, because I fuckin’ love the way you think!” George cranked the wheel to port.
Back in the Hummer, O’Connor didn’t have time to appreciate the older man’s contribution to impressionistic art. Leo and Elle were cheering the Mimi on, and Cho was happily singing I’M… CAUGHT IN A MOSH!!! along with Joey Belladonna at the top of her lungs, but the ex-author was a too busy to join in. While he agreed it was a great song, someone had to keep their vehicle from hydroplaning through liquefied zombies. And he was scared nearly shitless besides. So Jake ground his teeth together and did his level best to remember the basics from the tactical driving course he’d gone through while attached to Britain’s SAS. They were halfway to the gates of Pecos. The Mimi was cutting through the moldering crowd like a tank-sized food processor, Mooney’s modified bus was right on its ass, and their Humvee didn’t seem to be having any major problems, but the horde was filling in behind them, albeit slowly. Back at the crowd’s edge, less damaged Maggot-heads were beginning to rise and stumble into the soupy path Foster created in his passing.
The rear wheel of Bus One tossed a zombie arm up from the pavement. It arced up and impacted harmlessly off the mesh of rebar protecting the Hummer’s windshield, and Jake cringed. The still attached hand became caught under the steel bars at the wrist, causing the half-limb to flop about with their vehicle’s movement.
“No hitchhikers!” Kat reached over and hit the wipers. The decomposing hand broke off at the wrist and flew over the roof, leaving a smear of nastiness as the wind took it away. The rest of the arm rolled along the mesh, finally vanishing past the driver’s side mirror.
“I will never get used to things like that,” Jake half-mumbled.
Cho yelled back, “What?”
“Never mind! Just keep watching your side!” The Mimi’s speakers were still going full-tilt. “Tell me if you see any big piles I’ll have to avoid!”
They were almost there. Only a few hundred yards—and a shit-load of zombies—stood in their way. While Anthrax was overpowering nearly every other sound, Jake could see a fair amount of gunfire coming from along the top of Pecos’s wall. The people within were attempting to thin out the dead before the entrance, to give the survivors a small window so they could enter and escape. There would still be zombies to deal with after the trio of vehicles was inside, but Pecos had been very specific about what to do after reaching their gates.
Be sure not to slow down until you pass through. If ya’ll do, too many of them will be able to stagger inside. The voice on the radio had told them. Once you’re in? Well. Yeah. Don’t wanna say too much on the air ‘cause you never know who’s listening, but you’ll understand. Just be ready to turn. And then hit the brakes…
Jake quickly glanced in the rear view mirror and almost panicked. While the horde was quite a bit smaller than the one currently on the way towards the southern haven, it was swiftly filling in behind them. He couldn’t see the edge of the dead crowd any longer due to the press of rotting bodies. It looked like every slow-moving horror in the whole goddamn world was staggering after them.
If anyone is listening up there, he thought, we could really use some help. Please? Just this once?
As if in reply, with the horde concentrated upon Jake and companies oncoming vehicles, the sturdy Texas-built gates of Pecos began to ponderously swing outward.
“Go-go-go-go-go!” Leo was pounding on the back of Jake’s seat, nearly hopping into the front with excitement.
Then they exploded from the edge of the crowd.
Elle was kneeling on her seat still clutching her rifle, staring back at the mayhem in their wake. “Holy shit! We made it! I can’t believe we made it!”
All of them were cheering as they followed the Mimi into Pecos proper. Speeding through the gap with the crash plate of his Hummer nearly touching the rear bumper of Bus One, Jake saw the pair of bulldozers cha
ined to either side of the gate already drawing the huge doors shut. A few dozen zombies made it to the entrance as the barriers swung shut again, but their combined mass was nothing compared the tonnage of the gate and were mashed into funky paste. A lone arm hung briefly from the narrowing gap until the doors boomed together, then—sheared off cleanly at mid-forearm—dropped twitching to the pavement. Men on the second level of the interior walls worked in tandem, sliding a trio of foot-thick pipes from one container, through massive brackets along the gates, and into a container on the opposite side, effectively making the barrier as solid as the rest of the wall.
There were more cargo containers running length-wise inside the entrance, leaving space for what amounted to a small, two-lane road for a short stretch. That narrow byway opened up into a barren courtyard one-hundred yards square, which Jake immediately recognized as an outer bailey.
Medieval lords throughout Europe once used the same technique. It entailed allowing enemies to gain entrance through their main gate, only to find yet another gate and walls just as solid, but within a far, far more narrow space. This turned the bailey into a kill zone. Archers along the top of the its walls —and behind the narrow window slits at ground level—would then begin to decimate the encroaching force. As long as the walls held, and the defenders had an ample supply of arrows, or even more useful a few cauldrons of heated, or burning, pitch, such an area could be held nearly indefinitely.
And that was exactly what Jake and the rest of his party had just sped into.
He wasn’t that concerned. They’d been in touch with Pecos, so the defenders knew exactly who they were and when they’d be arriving. Besides, while Bus One wasn’t armored, Jake’s Humvee, along with George and the others in the Mimi were well protected. Even if someone on the walls had an itchy trigger finger they’d never crack open the Mimi, and it would take some serious firepower to make a dent in the Hummer. Rae had long ago tricked it out with heavy, bulletproof windows under a grid of welded rebar, additional armor over the body itself, and a two-inch crash plate protecting the front that covered nearly the vehicle’s entire bumper.
