Zombies! (Book 5): Greater Love Hath No Man

by Merritt, R. S.

  “Oh good. Now they can shoot at us.” Kyler muttered under his breath looking around the room at the discarded weapons. Not seeing anything he wanted to grab for himself he followed Bruce out of the room.

  “They got in the shed too sir.” One of the clearers reported to them as they came down the stairs. “Not sure what they took but there was gardening stuff and a riding lawnmower so probably gas.”

  “What about the garage?” Rodriguez asked. No one said anything so they all walked through the house to find the door leading out to the garage. The exterior garage door was all the way down and secured. That explained why they would’ve had to go through the house and kill that one Zombie. The car was still sitting in the garage though. There was so much junk piled on the other side that there was no way another car would have been able to fit in there.

  “They were here. Not too long ago either!” Bruce said. He was getting excited. The thought of capturing the family and getting the promised promotion swirling around in his head.

  “Alright. Get your man out by the road to jump on the radio and let Krantz know. Krantz was just here so tell your man to tell him the targets were last seen where he was last seen by Rover One. That should sound confusing enough if the people we’re chasing do happen to have a radio.” Rodriguez said.

  “True. I’m standing right here, and I can barely figure out what you’re trying to say.” Kyler said with a grin. Inside his heart was racing. How unlucky were these people? There hadn’t really been a valid reason for them to have the clearers check this house first. It just happened to be where they’d pulled over to meet up with Krantz. On top of not wanting to risk having to execute any little kids Kyler had also realized now that the woman could easily blow his cover. If she said anything about one of them having seen her through the window with her kid the previous night. It’d be pretty obvious that’d been him.

  Rodriguez sent one of the clearers to do a second search of the grounds and the house to make sure they hadn’t missed anything. Kyler guessed he was also making room for them to sit in the front seats of the SUV by sending the guy off on a goose chase. It’d started raining pretty hard while they were in the house. Kyler had his suspicions on what the family may have taken from the garage, but he was keeping them to himself.

  “You still think they’re on foot?” One of the men crammed in the back of the SUV asked.

  “Makes sense to me. If they get in a car and drive down a road then we’re going to catch them. If they stay in the woods it makes our job a lot harder.” Rodriguez answered distractedly. He was turning left to go down the long private driveway.

  “What if they’re driving through the woods?” The same man asked from the back.

  “What are you getting at exactly?” Rodriguez asked turning in his seat to stare at the guy.

  “What if they grabbed like a four by four or a three-wheeler or something and they’re going through the woods? They don’t necessarily have to be on foot. Plenty of open space and trails around here.” The man said. Kyler hoped Rodriguez would just blow the guy off since the man had basically been thinking along the same lines as Kyler had. It made sense based on the size of the empty space in the garage next to the sedan.

  “Not a lot we can do about that is there? We probably have the manpower to cover the roads and try to pick them up that way, but I don’t see how we search the woods and monitor all the roads.” Kyler said hoping to divert the direction the conversation was headed in.

  They drove up to a large home at the end of the ridiculously long driveway. This one was a much nicer looking home with an inground pool. The pool had turned into a big hole full of green colored slime with a thick layer of pine needles and dead leaves floating near the top of it. Rodriguez pulled up in the driveway and told the men in the back to get out and search the house. The men dutifully got out and approached the home while Rodriguez and Kyler stayed in the nice dry truck. They leaned forward waiting to see if the men Rodriguez had sent out to search the house started getting shot. When the clearers disappeared into the house without being killed, they leaned back in their seats to wait for them to report back.

  While they were waiting Krantz rolled up beside them. The rain was coming down pretty hard now. Rodriguez didn’t look like he was planning on getting out any time soon even though Krantz was staring over at them. Kyler considered getting out and walking over but thought better of it too. They were both still sitting in the truck with their seat warmers on pretending like they didn’t understand Krantz wanted to talk to them when the back door opened and Krantz slid in.

  “You guys afraid you’ll melt or something?” Krantz asked.

  “No sir. We’re observing to make sure the fugitives don’t make a break for it while the clearers are in the house.” Rodriguez answered straight-faced.

  “Ok. Well based on them having been at the house on the other end of this driveway pretty recently I’m sending word for all the clearers in the other towns to send men this direction. I already sent the rest of the ones we had here up a road. They’re going to take their dirt bikes and see if they can’t flush the family out. If they’re wandering around in the woods, there’s a good chance they’ll bolt if they start seeing guys on motorcycles everywhere.” Krantz said.

  “Or shoot the guys on the motorcycles.” Rodriguez commented.

  “Then we’ll know they’re close, won’t we?” Krantz said. “Anyway, I want you two to get up there where the action is and see if you can help. I’m going to go see the house you think they were in for myself. I’ll get the clearers we have here setup to patrol this road so they can’t double back on us. Then I’ll join you on the other road. I shouldn’t be more than ten minutes behind you. Make sense?”

  “Yes sir.” Krantz and Kyler replied. It made about as much sense as anything else they were doing out here. Kyler was thinking more and more about it being time to make a run for the border. Krantz slid out of the back seat and hopped back in his own truck.

  “That’s a dedicated officer.” Rodriguez said. “I can’t believe he actually got out of his truck in the rain to get in ours. If anybody important finds out he did that they’ll probably take away all of his officer privileges.”

  Kyler nodded and smiled distractedly. He thought Krantz was actually a pretty decent guy. Except for the fact that he was willing to drag a family into the middle of the road and execute the parents in front of their children. Life was cheap in the apocalypse, but it shouldn’t be that cheap. Not if they expected to be able to look at themselves in the mirror. Kyler was stuck wondering if Krantz was a decent guy at heart or just an ambitious son of a bitch. He wondered if Krantz really was trying to find these people and end their lives just to elevate his own standing. The questions around Krantz’s motivation bothered him the whole drive up the highway to get on the next road.

  Rodriguez drove them up the road while Kyler scanned the woods they were passing. They drove for a solid ten minutes before getting to the next crossroad. It was a decent sized two lane that went underneath the interstate with no off or on ramp connecting it. Rodriguez carefully followed in the muddy tracks of the other vehicles that’d come before them to make his way down the slope onto the smaller road below.

  “They could’ve cut across the road back there and been gone. Unless they got screwed and someone happened to be driving by at the exact right time we’d have never known.” Kyler said.

  “Yep.” Rodriguez echoed his thoughts. He’d obviously been thinking about it as well. “What I suspect and what Krantz is probably betting on is that these guys are tired. They just want to get the hell out of Brotherhood territory at his point. They’ve been running for so long that if you drop them out of the sky as soon as their feet hit the ground, they’re hauling ass for the north. It’s not like we have the manpower to find them if they actually get tricky anyway. You’ve got to remember we’re tracking down a family with kids here. Not exactly Seal Team Six.”

  “True. I just don’t know i
f your average Seals could’ve figured out how to escape being tied up in a plane. I bet most the Seals wandering around today weren’t able to keep their families alive through all this crap either. This guy did. Makes him pretty much a badass in my book.” Kyler pointed up ahead. “What the hell?”

  Up ahead in the early pre-dawn light was a couple of Penske trucks with the sides cut out of them and machine guns mounted on the top.

  “I want one.” Rodriguez said as he pulled up to the trucks. A couple of the clearers walked over to greet them.

  After the introductions the clearer told them they’d dropped men off along the road who’d already told them that Rodriguez and Kyler were on the way. They didn’t have the manpower to totally cover the roads, but they were trying to patrol and cover sections of the most likely places for the fugitives to show up. They were busy now unpacking dirt bikes from the trucks to send men into the woods to see if they could flush them out. Kyler thought back to the comment about riding around in the woods on dirt bikes getting shot at by a desperate family with a lot of firepower. A family that’d survived this far into the apocalypse probably had a few members that could shoot straight.

  “Might want to turn the lights off on the trucks.” Rodriguez said. He was thinking about desperate people sitting out in the woods with the high-powered hunting rifles they’d taken. They could be lining up their scopes with the men walking around the trucks getting ready to start shooting at any second. That’s what he would’ve been doing if he found himself getting surrounded like this. Find a place and break through. If nothing else if you shot a few of them, it was going to slow down the others. The noise from the gunfire would also bring in the Zombies. That’d make everything more exciting.

  Taking the suggestion as the order it was meant to be one of the clearers jogged back to the trucks and had them kill the lights. A few minutes after that one of the men came over and told Rodriguez they were ready to send riders into the woods. Rodriguez told them to tell the guys to be careful and stick together. The clearer nodded and waked back over to where the men had setup the ten dirt bikes that they carried with them. The sound of the bikes starting up drowned out the sounds of the world starting to wake up. It also overrode the sound of Krantz showing up.

  “Everything good here?” Krantz asked from behind Rodriguez and Kyler who both spun around not expecting someone to be behind them. Rodriguez had a pistol in his hand and Kyler was holding a knife when they figured out that they were facing a very startled looking Krantz.

  “All good here sir. Except for officers sneaking up on people and scaring the crap out of them.” Rodriguez answered.

  “Sorry about that. It would’ve been a lot funnier if you guys hadn’t almost murdered me. Anyway, I’m going to hang out here. We have men distributed. I need you both to get in the truck and patrol around the perimeter of these woods they’re in. They’ll bolt at some point and we don’t want to miss them.”

  “We’re good to shoot them if we see them, right?” Rodriguez asked. He wanted to confirm what the rules of engagement were. The rules had ranged from them being able to kill these guys to needing to take them alive so some higher up muckety muck could do the honors.

  “If they surrender take them alive. If they don’t surrender call for backup and start shooting until they do surrender. If they all die, then they all die.” Krantz said looking Rodriguez straight in the eyes. Kyler felt chills up his spine from hearing Krantz say out loud to open fire on a group that included a handful of little girls.

  With the rules of engagement spelled out for them Kyler and Rodriguez hopped back in their truck to go drive around until they ran out of gas or got shot in the faces by the fugitives. Rodriguez must’ve thought randomly jerking the truck around and driving way too fast for the road conditions would make them less likely to get shot. Or, he was just driving even worse this morning than he normally did. The possibility of having to get in a gun battle where you’d be throwing bullets at a group that included little girls may have been a good enough reason to drain one of the flasks he always kept on hand.

  They drove a few miles until the road intersected another two-lane road. Rodriguez pulled up to that road and checked out the blacktop in both directions. A man in camouflage yelled the code word of the day out of the woods and waited for them to yell the answer back. Once they’d responded with the correct phrase the man emerged from the woods and walked over. He told them he hadn’t seen anything but there were a few more guys spaced out along the roads looking for anything suspicious. Rodriguez told him that sounded good and to raise them on the walkies if they did engage with the fugitives. He also warned them they’d confirmed the family was well armed.

  They drove back the opposite direction on the road they’d just come down with eyes wide open again. Kyler was keen to spot the men who’d been stationed along the road as lookouts. It was a game that kept him alert even though it turned out to be an exercise in futility. They’d have to be pretty bad at hiding to be seen in the early morning rain by a guy driving by at forty miles per hour.

  They were driving with the windows open to let them hear any gunshots or people yelling or anything like that. A muffled boom in the distance had them both looking at one another trying to figure out where the noise had come from. Rodriguez slowed down and they both did their best to listen harder. Hoping to somehow tune in to some internal biological human triangulation skills they continued to drive slowly down the road. Rodriguez stopped the car by a small driveway that ran down a big open space where the trees and brush had all been bulldozed away. The weed filled open space was a solid forty yards wide and ran in both directions as far as they could see.

  “Fire break?” Kyler guessed.

  “Looks like where they put up power poles and clear the land away from underneath them to me. Except no power poles.” Rodriguez said looking back and forth as well. From the directions of the woods the high-pitched whine of the dirt bikes seemed to be converging on a point somewhere close to them.

  “Rover One this is Clearer Actual. What’s your twenty? Over.” Krantz’s voice came over the radio.

  “Clearer One this is Rover One we’re at Biddy and Marion over.” Kyler responded after checking the sign on the road beside them. He was glad he’d checked since he’d thought the map said Buddy instead of Biddy. He’d been studying the map while they sat there waiting to see if the fugitives and a bunch of dirt bikes broke out into a gun battle on the road in front of them.

  “Roger that Rover One. Maintain position.” Krantz ordered. Kyler acknowledged the order and him and Rodriguez got out of the truck and went around to the side away from the woods. They got setup with their rifles and waited to see what would happen. They’d left the window down so they could hear the radio in case Krantz started barking out new orders.

  The sound of shots fired and motorcycle engines revving up broke out in the woods they were facing. They settled into firing positions with as much of their bodies hidden behind the pickup as possible and waited. The gunshots and sound of a vehicle got louder and louder until a four-wheeler came flying out of the driveway at top speed hauling a wagon that was bouncing all over the place. The wagon had little kids in it struggling to hold on. The four-wheeler was driven by a man with both hands on the handlebars and an assault rifle hanging around his neck. There was a teenage girl sitting behind him facing backwards.

  The teenage girl swung towards them as they came out of the woods and started blasting away in their general direction with her gun. That kind of shooting should’ve made it impossible for her to hit anything. The front window of their truck shattered though, and Rodriguez suddenly had a jagged cut on the side of his mouth that was leaking big globs of blood. He ducked back behind the truck and slapped his hand over his mouth. Kyler joined him on the ground breathing hard. Neither of them had gotten a shot off.

  From the backside of the truck they saw the four-wheeler dip down off the road and drive straight into the weed filled open lane g
oing north. The girl riding backwards on the lead four-wheeler took another couple of shots at them. A big hole appeared in the passenger side door before the four-wheeler and wagon disappeared down the trail. Rodriguez and Kyler had both rolled away from the truck and hit the ground to avoid being shot. Kyler looked up just as another four-wheeler driven by two women flew past them. The woman on the back of that one was also waving a gun around. She sent a couple of shots in their direction as well forcing Rodriguez and Kyler to keep their heads down until that camouflaged four-wheeler disappeared down the trail after the other one.

  Rodriguez and Kyler climbed slowly to their feet. There were a couple of the clearers sitting on dirt bikes in the middle of the road. The radio was going off with Krantz ordering people to converge on the location. Kyler watched as the second four-wheeler disappeared from view in the tall weeds that’d grown up along the trail. He looked over at the men sitting on the dirt bikes. They each had a rifle slung across their shoulders. Seeing only two of them sitting there he wondered how many had just gotten wasted by those girls riding backwards on the four wheelers. It sucked to chase those two sharp shooters when you were driving a dirt bike and couldn’t really shoot back. At least not with a rifle or shotgun. He didn’t think the clearers were allowed to have pistols. That weapon was reserved until you got into the regular army. Too easy to hide a pistol.