Chucklers: Laughter is Contagious

by Jeff Brackett

  Matt looked at her, then followed her eyes skyward. “Yeah.” His eyes drifted back to the freeway before them. “Road’s starting to come back down to street level. Keep your eyes peeled.”

  An apartment complex bordered the freeway to the right, and sure enough, the sound of the engine seemed to attract the attention of the occupants. At first just a few, then more than a dozen bodies began pouring out of the buildings. “On the right,” she said.

  He looked over, grunted and sped up, leaving the small group chasing behind them. Erica looked back at them as the Xterra passed. She was still looking back when Matt slammed on the brakes. “What the hell is…?” Her voice trailed off as she saw why he had stopped.

  About a quarter of a mile ahead was a strip mall, and whether it was the sound of the engine, or the frenetic shrieks and laughter of the chucklers behind them, something had alerted a larger crowd ahead of them. Hundreds of laughing, jumping, frolicking, and running maniacs were running toward them.

  Matt threw the Xterra into reverse. “This is not good!”

  “Really? You think?”

  But he ignored her sarcasm. “Get your shotgun ready. You might have to use it.”

  Erica swallowed and rolled her window down as Matt tried to maneuver the SUV around the closest wrecks in some semblance of a three point turn. She chambered a round in the shotgun, the way Matt had shown her… was it really just a few hours ago? She looked at the wrecks he was trying to maneuver through. “You’re not going to make that turn in time, Matt.” She pointed the shotgun at the quickly approaching crowd.

  He looked away from where he had been concentrating on trying to turn around on the crowded freeway. “Shit.” She saw him look back to the larger crowd coming from the opposite direction. The leaders from that group were getting close, too. “Not good,” he muttered. “Not good at all.”

  Matt cut the wheel back the way they had been going. “Roll your window back up!”

  That was all the warning Erica got, as he suddenly threw the engine back into drive and rushed the last few yards straight at the leader of the pack before them. He slammed the brakes and cut the wheel to the left just as he hit the man, knocking him to the pavement. Erica screamed as Matt, now clear of the wrecked vehicles behind them, threw the stick into reverse again, turning in his seat as he steered back through the narrow path between the other vehicles. It was the same pathway they had just passed through, only this time, Matt was driving much faster… in reverse… while several lunatics rushed at them from both before and behind.

  Erica swallowed. “Matt?”

  He ignored her, and the rear of the Xterra clipped the bumper of one of the already-wrecked vehicles. He didn’t slow.

  Erica winced as the first person in the smaller group behind them jumped into their path. The SUV jolted, then lurched as first the back tires rose, then the front, as if driving over a speed bump. She shuddered, refusing to think about what they were driving over. The rear window cracked as another chuckler dove in front of them, and he went the way of the first one. After a few more rear impacts, the back window was starred and bloody in three places, but it was clear enough to see when they cleared the wreckage.

  She looked in front of them. “They’re still coming.”

  Matt kept moving in reverse, cursing steadily as he tried to keep moving quickly enough that their pursuit wouldn’t catch up. Erica looked at the outer edge of the freeway, searching for the nearest exit ramp, but there was nothing within sight. She turned back to Matt to see if he had any ideas and her eyes caught sight of a ramp on the inner lane. “There!”

  He slowed and looked where she pointed. A ramp led upward, toward a high, raised section of concrete. Above the ramp was a sign that read HOV LANE - 2+ CARPOOLS ONLY. “Can you make it?”

  They both looked back at the approaching mass of laughing death. “Absofuckinglutely!” Now that they were past most of the wreckage, he threw the Xterra back into drive and stomped on the gas pedal. The tires squealed as the SUV jumped forward, and Matt cut the wheel sharply to the left. He clipped another of their pursuers but didn’t slow as he drove the wrong way up the freeway until he reached the ramp leading to the HOV lane. He cut the wheel sharply to the right and swung them back in the right direction, moving up the ramp to the elevated carpool lane.

  Looking ahead, Erica braced her hand against the dashboard and stomped down hard on her imaginary brakes. “Matt?”

  But Matt never slowed as he crashed the Xterra through the flimsy traffic gate that was designed to keep HOV traffic flowing in the other direction. Suddenly, they were in the clear and climbing up the overpass, leaving the chucklers behind them.

  Eyes wide and heart pounding, Erica allowed herself to finally lean back in her seat. “Oh my God.”

  “You can say that again.”

  The HOV lane was narrower than the main interstate. As the name implied, it was only a single lane wide. But it appeared to have been almost empty when everything went to hell. There were only a few wrecks and they were simple instances of vehicles that had been driven into the concrete barrier to the side. Once he squeezed past them, Matt was able to make a little speed as they climbed the ramp, actually passing forty miles an hour for the first time since they had passed under the west loop of the 610 Freeway. Erica glanced at her watch and was surprised to realize that was almost an hour ago.

  They approached the apex of the elevated lane, and it curved gently to the right. Near the top, two cars had wrecked into one another, making Matt slow down again. But there was room to make it past on the left, and Matt negotiated the tight opening with hardly any trouble. Erica looked down over the side of the freeway. They were only about thirty feet over street level, but her relief at being free of pursuit, if only for the moment, made her feel as if they were miles above the destruction below.

  Then they topped the rise and downtown Houston came into view. “It was nice while it lasted,” she muttered.

  “What?”

  She sighed. “Nothing.” She looked at the smoky destruction before them. Much of the street level below was pretty much invisible, enshrouded in a drifting ethereal curtain through which she could occasionally glimpse death and destruction all over. Wrecked cars and bodies littered the streets, one as motionless as the other. Movement caught her attention at one point, and she saw a man run across the street, pursued by a crowd of dozens. The smoke from one of many burning cars hid them from her sight before she could tell whether or not he escaped.

  More smoke streamed from random, jagged holes in the mirrored exteriors of several skyscrapers. Erica was so busy trying to peer through the smoke that she was caught by surprise when Matt began cursing again. She looked up, placing a hand on the shotgun again as she looked for danger. “What is it?”

  He stopped the SUV, looked in the rear view mirror, and put the vehicle in park. He pointed at the GPS screen on the dash. It was flashing and a progress bar across the top indicated that it was recalculating their route.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Come over here,” he told her, then stepped out onto the freeway.

  Brows furrowed, she stepped around the Xterra and joined him where he stood at the concrete barrier overlooking the city below. Glancing down, she no longer felt as if they were only thirty feet above the ground. Suddenly, she wanted to step back, away from the edge.

  Matt pointed through the smoke to where two other strips of concrete intertwined and passed beneath them. He pointed at the lowermost one. “See that? That’s I-10.”

  She raised her eyebrows at him. “And this is important because?”

  “I-10 is the road we want to take to get to Alabama.”

  Erica looked back at the concrete strip they were standing on. It curved away from the interstate beneath them. “Damn. How do we get back to it?”

  Matt looked back the way they had come. “Well, this carpool lane only goes two directions. And we’ve already seen what’s behind us.”

 
She looked down the road before them. “But this is going to take us farther away from where we want to go. And to get back,” she waved her hand at the smoky streets below just as a small crowd of people ran across a street in the distance, “we’re going to have to go through part of that, aren’t we?”

  Matt simply nodded.

  Chapter 69

  Charles Griffe

  Ship’s Bridge

  There were several computer monitors hanging from ceiling mounts on the bridge, as well as on various desk mounts. Charlie wrinkled his nose at the stench of the darkened room. He was well used to the smell of death on the ship, and recognized it immediately. But in an enclosed room, the smell had no opportunity to disperse, and Charlie forced himself to breathe through his mouth so as to keep his nose as disengaged as he could. He cast his gaze around the room and quickly found the source of the smell. Off to the far right lay three bodies, just beginning to bloat. Chris ignored them and went unerringly to the right-hand seat at a central, U-shaped console with a desktop full of controls down the middle. He started to sit, then cursed.

  “What’s wrong?” Tabby asked him.

  He held up what was obviously the remains of a radio transceiver. “Radio’s out.” He waved his hand at the console. “Monitor’s smashed.” He looked around the room, then got up and went to sit in front of another panel. Charlie noticed that this one appeared to be undamaged, and Chris reached behind the console and felt around for a moment. “Tabby, you still have that flashlight?”

  She brought it over and handed it to him.

  “Thanks.” Chris dropped beneath the console for a few minutes, and Charlie could hear him doing something before crawling back out and placing the edge of his meat cleaver under the monitor’s bezel. A moment of prying and the monitor slipped loose in the console. “There we go.” He pulled, and the screen came completely out, wires dangling behind it.

  He repeated the process back at the original station where he had started to sit earlier, and within a few minutes had replaced the damaged screen. “All right, cross your fingers.” With that, he pressed a button on the monitor, then another on the console. They could hear the sound of a computer starting up, and within seconds the cruise line’s logo spun into existence on the screen, followed by a logon screen.

  “Yes!” Chris swung a keyboard over in front of him and typed rapidly. He grabbed a trackball on the console and clicked an icon on the screen. Seconds later, the screen was filled with something resembling a radar screen.

  Charlie watched over his shoulder. “What’s ARPA?”

  “Automatic Radar Plotting Aid.”

  “So I guess it’s safe to assume you know what you’re doing?” Charlie asked him.

  Chris didn’t even look back at him. “Just another day at the office.” The screen changed, zooming out to show the Gulf of Mexico coastline. “Okay, looks like we’re way off course.”

  “How bad is it?” Shane asked him.

  Chris was silent for a moment. Then he nodded. “Actually, it’s not bad at all.” He started to type, fingers moving confidently on the keyboard. “We’ve been drifting for five days and the current has been moving us closer to the coast of Louisiana.” He called up another screen. “Unfortunately, there isn’t any place on the Louisiana coast deep enough for the Bahama Queen to dock.” Moving back to the original screen, he tapped a joystick and moved the cursor past what Charlie could recognize as the Louisiana coastline, moving farther west. “Maybe Galveston?” Fingers flew once more. “The cruise line has a port of call in Galveston, but the Bahama Queen is too big to dock there, too.” A few more keystrokes and he nodded. “There we go. Did you know that Houston has a major shipping lane that connects directly with the Gulf of Mexico?” He pulled up another screen, reading rapidly through a screen of text.

  “Houston? I thought that was like in the center of Texas,” Shane said.

  “I can see geography wasn’t your best class in school.” Chris frowned. “No, Houston is about fifty miles inland, and it’s connected to the Gulf by the Houston Ship Channel.”

  “Is it deep enough?” Tabby asked him.

  “According to my web search, it’s just over forty-five feet deep. The Bahama Queen has a draft of forty feet. We’ve got room to spare.” He typed for a few more minutes, called up another screen and flipped a series of switches. “Thrusters are on.” He then reached across to a set of levers on the central control panel. He eased them forward and suddenly Charlie felt a slight sensation of motion.

  “Are we moving?”

  “We are. I’ve got us on course for Houston. At current speed we should get there in…” he looked at the screen, “…about five hours.”

  Don’t you dare smile, boy. Not when we’re this close to gettin’ home.

  Once again, his dad was right. He reached out and gripped Chris’s shoulder. “Thanks, Chris.”

  Chris nodded. “Now let’s get back to the others.”

  Shane led the way as they opened the door. He barely had time to scream before he was jerked forward and into the corridor where half a dozen crazies fell on him, biting and clawing at him. Charlie, Tabby, and Chris pulled back as a mob of wheezing, smiling, drooling crazies pushed into the bridge. Charlie gripped his knife in his hand and looked at his companions. “Anyone got any great ideas?”

  They were both silent.

  “Yeah, me neither.” With a yell, he rushed forward. He hit the first one with his shoulder, driving his knife home and twisting it as he had seen Tabby do to the woman who had killed Scott. The man fell before him, and he drove into the next one. But these weren’t teens, as the attackers on the basketball court had been. They didn’t give way to his football style rushes as easily. His next target managed to get a hold on his shirt and pulled Charlie off balance. He staggered forward, then regained his footing just as Chris swung his cleaver down. The man’s hand came off at the wrist. To Charlie’s horror, that seemed to make him laugh even more, and he reached toward Chris with his other hand.

  Tabby slipped in and slashed, once more going for the neck. Blood sprayed as she jumped back and slashed at another woman who leapt at her. Charlie kicked at the dying hulk Tabby had slashed and the man fell back, grinning and bleeding. He stomped on the man’s chest and jumped at another attacker. Snarling in anger, he rammed the knife into the man’s chest several times, feeling the blade slide on bone as it slipped between ribs.

  As he pulled the knife free, something slammed into Charlie’s back and the impact threw him forward, into the mob, further separating him from Chris and Tabby. He flailed about with knife and fist, and his eyes fell briefly on Shane’s feebly twitching body. A ragged hole in the man’s throat leaked a crimson pool onto the floor.

  The sight distracted him for a second, and someone else hit Charlie from behind and he stumbled to his hands and knees, barely managing to hang on to his knife. A growling in his ear warned him of the impending bite, and he jerked his head to the side just as another body landed on him. He struggled beneath the weight of his attackers, trying to push up against them, but between the cut in his chest and the bruising of his forearm from Felicia’s strike with the chair leg, he simply didn’t have the full strength of his right arm. He realized he was going to go down.

  Reversing his grip on the knife, he held it in his left hand like an ice pick, and gave up struggling to rise. Instead, he collapsed his right arm beneath him and spun onto his back, landing on his back with his attacker beneath him. He jabbed back with his knife, feeling the blade slide into its meaty sheath just as teeth latched into the muscle of his shoulder. He screamed, withdrew the blade and stabbed blindly behind him over and over until the teeth released their hold.

  You’re bit, boy. You’re fucked seven ways to Sunday, now.

  “Shut the hell up!” he shouted. He started to roll off the body beneath him and looked up to see an obese woman in a bloody and stained floral muumuu diving at him.

  Charlie screamed as he realized his knife
was still in the body of his other attacker. Four hundred pounds of muumuu woman landing on him stopped his scream as the air was forced from his lungs with a loud whoof. As he fell back again, he briefly saw his knife sticking out of the other body. It was only five or six feet away, but might as well have been across the room. He punched at his new attacker ineffectively with his left hand as he tried to hold back her gnashing teeth with his weakened right, but he was losing the battle. Straddling his hips, she used her greater weight to hold him in place as she leaned in, grinning, wheezing, teeth snapping at him, drawing closer and closer to his face. He shoved his hands out to hold her back, inadvertently getting a double handful of her massive breasts as she leaned toward him. He shifted his grip, reaching for her throat with his right hand, pulling his left back to punch again.

  “Chris! Tabby! Help!” But he heard only the sounds of more fighting, incoherent shouting, and over it all, the susurrus wheezing and occasional chuckling of their attackers. And to make matters worse, the woman on top of him began grinding her groin into him in an obviously sexual manner, even as she laughed hoarsely and tried to bite at his arms.

  “What the actual fuck is wrong with you?” he screamed.

  Anger flared. He squeezed his right hand tight, trying to choke the life out of her, all the while swinging wildly at her with his other hand. And with each punch she only giggled more, grinding away with those huge hips.

  “Well, that ain’t working,” he thought, and changed tactics. Giving up on trying to pummel her into submission, Charlie added his left hand to his right and was surprised to find himself unable to reach all the way around those massive jowls. Then her fingers tangled in his hair, and she pulled his head toward her gnashing teeth. More footsteps approached, and Charlie realized there was no way he would be able to hold off another attacker while his hands were buried in the triple chins of the woman dry humping him. He began to sob in helpless terror as his right arm began to betray him.