by Mark Tufo
Although, where on the road they would come out was a mystery. We could be within a mile of each other on the road and never know it. I couldn’t let that weigh me down. If I waited here for them to show up, there was still a fifty percent chance they’d be ahead of me. I was never one for inaction. Right or wrong, I would be the master of my fate. Normally, that was Tracy’s gig, but she wasn’t here. I stood up, wavered for a second, and looked around. There were still five zombies around the bus; something I was going to have to take care of, and quickly. I let a window down.
“Zombies, hey, zombies,” I called out to them.
I started rapping on the side of the bus to get some of the thicker ones to pay attention. Within the span of half a minute, the five of them were snarling and snapping under my window. I felt like some twisted world’s version of the ice cream man, although instead of frozen treats, they wanted me. This had to happen fast. I once again threaded my barrel through the opening.
“Stay still, dipshits.”
Four shots later, three of them were dead or dying. Two moved out of range.
“Dammit.”
Wherever I moved, they moved away. It was like they were dogs and they thought I was trying to give them a bath. I would have just shot from where I was, but the screening was pretty thick.
Could it stop a bullet?
I wasn’t sure, but I didn’t want to keep making noise. More zombies would come, that was a given. I grabbed the RPG, I’ll be damned if I knew what I was going to do with it, but no effen way was I leaving something like that behind. Dumbass probably blew his entire wad on this. Who am I kidding? I probably would have done the same thing if given the opportunity. I moved the nun-chucks from their bracing position and did a quick glance to see if Lucy and Desi had moved to intercept. The female was a red-head, so it seemed appropriate to name her that even if ‘Desi’ was far from Hispanic. He looked like a skin-head, truth be told. The door opened with a loud squeal. I placed the RPG strap over my back, and got ready.
And they’re off, came to mind as I first looked both ways and then stepped down.
I started at a jog, weaving through cars making Lucy’s approach as difficult as possible. When I turned to look, it appeared that Desi was the runner in the family. He wasn’t more than two cars away.
“I always liked you, although I never saw in you what Lucy did.”
The first round hit him in his tattooed arm. I think I’d done some serious damage to his inked-in koi fish. The second caught him in the shoulder, and his arm hung uselessly to the side. He dropped down suddenly. It wasn’t from the damage I’d inflicted, he just didn’t want anymore.
“I hate smart zombies.”
I was about to turn tail and run when I saw Lucy standing still. She was looking at me. I don’t know if hatred even remotely conveys what she was directing toward me. She dropped down as well when I brought my rifle to bear.
“Shit.”
This time I went a little faster. I was not a fan of this new iteration of Lucy, remakes always suck. I’d gone for nearly a quarter of a mile when I turned to look over my left shoulder. Nothing. I was hoping they had gone in search of something easier to eat. It was when I turned over my right shoulder I saw them easily keeping pace with me. Unlike me, they had gone to the shoulder of the road where there weren’t any cars. While I was banging my thighs and bruising my shins as I ran into things, they were out for a Sunday stroll in the clear. I couldn’t even get my gun around fast enough before they ducked down.
I started cutting over so that I could also get in the clear. By the time I did so, they had melted back into the tangle. I got chills at the level of skill their pursuit displayed. They did not seem overly interested in closing the fifty or so yards that separated us, but I knew that I’d have to deal with them later. One of us would screw up eventually. Mistakes in this game ended up in death. I did the only thing I could, I kept moving, albeit at a slower and slower pace. It wasn’t that I was winded; it was just that every footfall sent vibrations of pain into my skull that reverberated back in intense pain. It had begun to take over my thought processes so completely that I almost missed the fact that Lucy and Desi had halved the distance between us. If I played this right, I should be able to get a shot off before they could hide.
I slowed down even more so that I wouldn’t fall on my ass when I spun around. They’d yet to see my ruse and had crept even closer. I could have aimed and hit individual shirt buttons at this range. I turned, my rifle was right by my side. Lucy was first to catch on. The gun was about chest level, and she did something wholly unexpected. She grabbed Desi and pulled him towards her while also propelling away. Like most guys, he was completely clueless to his woman’s intentions, at least up until I plugged him three times. None of the three shots stopped him. But it kept him still long enough that I was able to put the fourth into his face and subsequently his brain. I’d like to say he had a look of betrayal on his face, but he probably knew it was coming. After all, he had paired up with a woman.
I’d just added another clueless male to the long list of men that had been used and discarded by a woman for their own means. Here was a Deneaux in training. Desi always was the dead weight in that relationship. The only reason 1950’s America put up with him was because of Lucy. I debated for a second putting an RPG round into her last known whereabouts and, if I could have been convinced it would kill her, I just might have. I noticed the farther I kept running, the less of the shoulder was clear. More and more, I found myself running on the side of the roadway. More times than not, that was filling up with cars too. These people that were fleeing the city for whatever reason were becoming increasingly desperate in their bid to get away. They may have gotten away, but not in their cars, that was for sure. I was wishing I could kill Lucy so I could stop and look for some water…which I desperately needed.
Soon, I was going to have to go on the active hunt for her or I was going to have to rummage through cars quickly, always keeping one eye on the lookout for the sneaky ginger. In addition to whatever skull damage I had done, the dehydration was adding to the throbbing. I went another tenth of a mile. I knew I had to stop and seek out liquids when I realized I’d stopped sweating. This was a pretty serious indicator of how bad off I was. I pulled up to a mini-van. Odds were there were little kids, and wherever there were little kids, juice was sure to follow.
“Bingo,” I said as I stuck my head through the open sliding doorway.
I did a quick search for an unopened juice bag. When that came up empty, I grabbed one that was on the seat, a straw already poking out of the side of it. I wasn’t a fan of touching anything kids had, because they were Petri dishes for all manner of germs and bacteria, but right now, sun-stroke was of bigger concern than dysentery. The juice was tepid, stale, and had almost reverted back to a syrup state. Yet, in my current condition, it was perfect. I sucked the thing so hard I was in danger of pulling the aluminum packaging through the straw.
Lucy had not yet shown as I tossed the empty container away. I reached down and grabbed two more from the floor. Each only held a sip or two, which I greedily drank down. It wasn’t much, but it was more than I’d had in a long while.
I had a suspicious feeling that Lucy was sneaking her way to me, I did a quick scan and got moving again, feeling somewhat renewed with the fluid and sugar coursing through me. I would turn every so often and look for my zombie friend…or any sign of Jack and Trip. I did not get a glimpse of any of them. There was a down slope to the roadway coming up, and on the rise on the other side, the traffic jam mysteriously stopped. There was clear roadway for as far as the eye could see. At the meeting point between a tangled mess of cars, trucks, and all manner of motorized vehicles, was once again the familiar olive drab of military vehicles.
“What happened here?” I asked; not for the first time.
There were cars and motorcycles on the shoulders, even on the grassy sections. They looked like they had been trying to circumvent the
roadblock and had met resistance in the form of a hail of bullets.
Why were they trying to keep them contained? A virus? A terrorist cell? What?
Maybe there were some answers up there? More likely, there would be additional questions, but at least I was confident there’d be some water. There wasn’t a soldier in any place I’d ever been that didn’t carry copious amounts of water. Killing others was a parching business. I wanted to believe I’d lost Lucy, or that she’d gotten sick of this game, but I could sense her eyes on me from time to time. Like a lioness patiently stalking a zebra, she was biding her time.
Bodies were everywhere—the aftermath of a heavy battle. Shattered remains were lying in the grass, on the road, across car hoods, leaning out of open doorways. Heavy caliber rounds had done their best to dissuade these poor refugees from their present course.
Did any of them make it? I thought as I looked at the open expanse before me.
The trees had pulled back, and I was looking at vast fields as far as the eye could see. I wondered how many families had entrusted their safety to these same military men who had haphazardly cut them down. When all was somewhat right in the world, I’d let anyone that would listen, know that, in the event of a crisis, men in uniform were not to be trusted. Their sole mission at that point was the preservation of the government, not the ones governed. Most would look at me as if I were a radical revolutionary, anti-social, paranoid, militia prepper with delusional overtones. Nope, I was just a realist.
I was right about the questions part as I approached the military blockade. I’d seen impressionist paintings make more sense than what I was looking at. It started off innocently enough. A helmet was on the roadway, well not so much on it as in it. It was sunk down about an inch or two like it had been run over by a tractor-trailer. I honestly didn’t think too much on it, even with the leakage of blood coming from the sides of it.
Some unlucky bastard had been shot and lost his helmet. It wasn’t the first time and, unfortunately, wouldn’t be the last. Well…shit…maybe it would be. This world seemed to be running out of regular people as fast as the ones Jack, Trip and I had come from.
I paused. Were they all connected somehow? Was that possible?
From the limited amount of time Jack and I got to talk, I was pretty sure his and my world was mostly the same. I mean at least the locations, yet his was being overrun by night runners and mine zombies. This place certainly looked like any highway in the states, yet the names were different, and probably whatever was afflicting this place was different as well. Something niggled at the back of my head.
Were the night runners and zombies we’d encountered here indigenous to this place or had whatever brought Jack and me through brought some undesired guests as well?
This was a path I did not relish going down. If the zombies and night runners were ours, then what was here? Maybe whatever it was had snagged Lucy. That would solve at least one of my problems.
I was about to travel farther down this mind-path when the next thing I encountered stopped me in my tracks. It was a leg. Now, yes, normally a random unattended leg in the middle of the roadway would be cause for concern, and definitely something you might investigate. But I’d been in the midst of a zombie apocalypse for close to half a year, an arbitrary encounter with a discarded limb was not that big of a deal. I mean, I guess it was for the person that had lost it, but these days it was more of a background prop, relegated to the status of street sign, or tree, or telephone pole. In and of itself, it generally held no value. This one was different, though, and not because the person who it had belonged to was wearing camouflage pants and black military boots, but rather the way it was planted in the ground. The leg was sticking straight up and down, the knee on the ground the booted foot up in the air, as if someone were trying to grow a human.
I was looking around as I came closer to the leg. I lightly touched it with the toe of my boot. When it didn’t immediately fall over, I applied a little more pressure. It didn’t budge. I did a quick three-sixty around my perimeter. If anyone was around, they were doing a damn good job of hiding themselves.
I got down on my haunches to get a closer look at the leg. It was seamless where the pavement met the leg; it was not broken up or dug out. I looked completely around the leg. There was no reason this thing should be standing like this; at least, none that I could discern. I poked it with my barrel. Besides disturbing a squadron of flies, it did not move.
“Super Glue?” Was all I could come up with as I stood. “For what purpose?” I was going to stick with the glue theory for a little while longer. My alternative was that it was imbedded in the ground. That just wasn’t going to fly.
Getting to the military vehicles was not as easy a task as one might assume. There had to be two or three inches of brass casings on the ground. I wasn’t a fan of making so much noise, but I had no choice other than to kick them away, giving me a relatively clear spot to put my foot down. Falling over with a twisted ankle would have been worse. The civilians had fought back. The truck I was heading for was peppered with ineffectual divots in its armored hull.
Hunting rifles and handguns versus machineguns and armored transport is not much of a fight. That they’d even tried showed just how desperate they’d been. What was on the other side of this that made it worthwhile, or worse, what was behind that drove them to it? If I looked hard enough, I could still see smoke from a distant burning city.
How long could a metropolis burn? A few weeks I guess.
Yet I’d seen no living humans besides the ones that had been dragged into this mess for some reason. I could only hope I would get some answers, but right now, I was preoccupied with survival as I rooted around the trucks. I found a little more ammunition, which I gladly took, and more water than I could possibly drink, although I did my best as I bloated my belly with the wonderful wet substance.
Then I hit pay dirt, sort of. A brown, nondescript box was in the back of one of the Hummer-like vehicles. It was stamped with ‘FTE’ and then, in typical military fashion, it felt the need to spell out the acronym.
Why bother with the acronym to begin with?
No time to question it. Now that I’d slaked my raw thirst, I had another powerful need to take care of. My stomach was twisted in knots from lack of food. Two force-fed Phrito’s from Trip nearly two days ago and the sickly sweet Pop-Tarts knock-offs wasn’t going to cut it.
FTE stood for ‘Food To Eat.’
I tore open the package like I was expecting filet mignon. The heavy plastic was gray. My guess, it mirrored the food. Right now, I didn’t care. As I tore into something called Protein Mass, I discovered that it was like beef stew, but without the catchy name, actual flavor, or taste. I ate that one and one just like it. I then grabbed a couple more and stuffed them in my pockets. I wasn’t full of hope and confidence, but I felt better. I’d eaten and drank. Taking care of those base needs had greatly improved my disposition.
“Time to follow the yellow brick road I suppose.”
I shielded my eyes to look at the grand openness ahead of me.
“Lucy, you coming?” I shouted behind me. “Maybe I should have called you Dorothy. What’s that make me?” I asked, looking down at my pink sneakers and poncho. “I’m guessing I’m the Scarecrow. My geometry teacher was always saying how I was lacking in the brains department. Betcha that fat fucker got eaten on day one. This one is for you, Mrs. Weinstedder.” I looked up and flipped her the bird.
I maybe should have turned that gesture towards myself as I brought my gaze down, I saw a giant blue road sign:
Atlantis 25 miles
“You have got to be kidding me. Right?”
Was this where the fabled city had gone? Had ancient visitors from my world somehow found a portal that had brought them to this strange place?
“What is going on? And can I make twenty-five miles before dusk?”
I didn’t think so, but I was going to Atlantis. How could I not? That would be
like someone asking if you wanted to see the center of the earth. I mean, you were sort of compelled to go, weren’t you?
I was a good half mile away from the tangle of cars. The day was beautiful; a deep blue canopy overhead with some wispy clouds. The sun was bright but not hot. A stirring breeze kept it cool enough that I was in no rush to shed my heavy-knit poncho. My guess was that, wherever I was, the fall season had just started. Birds were chirping, and some of the more industrious ones were migrating. Bugs were minimal to non-existent. If I had some beer and some decent company, it would altogether be a really great day. I turned to look back to Lucy, who was just emerging from the line of trucks.
“I was wondering where you’ve been,” I said.
She paused when she saw me. I raised my rifle. Five hundred yards with iron sights for a head shot was not mathematically impossible. Highly improbable, though. I was a fairly decent shot, and if I had unlimited ammo and time, I think I’d set myself up to take a crack at it. She was not an immediate threat, and time was definitely not on my side. The sun had already made its apex and was on the decline. That meant my other buddies would be coming to the party soon enough and I was about as much in the open as one could get. My priority was now going to be to find a place to hole up for the night.
Easier said than done, I thought as I looked around.
I walked another mile or so and I’d seen nothing bigger than a grassy knoll as a means of defendable position for the evening. It was looking a lot like Kansas, minus the corn stalks and billboards proclaiming that ‘I’m loved.’ If you’ve ever been to Kansas, that would make way more sense.
