by Kirk Allmond
"What do you want us to do here then?" asked John.
"Mostly, I want you to stay in the house and guard the boy. Let the fire teams on patrol handle anything they can. If anyone gets inside the house, kill them. If they get to Max's room, Leo, I want you to grab Max and get him as far away as you can go in one hop.
"Speaking of that. What did you learn up in the national forest, Leo?"
"Well. By myself, I can go about fifteen miles," she said. "If I'm carrying a fifteen-stone adult, it drops to about eight miles. If I'm carrying two adults, it’s only about one mile. I can move a rock the size of a small garden shed about five feet, but then I couldn't even run for a few minutes. My power comes back pretty quickly, but it does appear to be finite. If I use it all in one shot, like when I moved that huge boulder, it took about five minutes before I could move it again. The last interesting thing I learned, the more different things I take with me, the harder it is. Carrying four humans is a hundred times harder than two humans. I'm not sure what that’s about, but I could move all of us plus Max maybe a hundred yards," she said.
"Can you teleport someone or something and not go with it?"
"I've never tried that, but I don't think so. I think I have to be there to guide the re-entry."
"Okay, anything else you learned?"
"I'd been in the same spot for about an hour when a zombie came stumbling out of the woods. I don't know how far he came from, but I moved the big boulder first. I think he'd been walking that whole hour. He felt me move it from as much as three or four miles away."
"Thanks for doing all of that. I know it was dangerous work," Victor said.
Max slept most of the afternoon. He woke up for about an hour to eat some more and then went back to bed for the night. Marshall and Tookes spent the rest of the afternoon planning the next day’s visit to the train yard.
Chapter 4
The Train Yard
Victor woke up early that morning, just before dawn. It was a cool fall morning; he had on a pair of heavy canvas pants, a T-shirt, a flannel button-up shirt, and a fleece vest, and he was still cold when he walked outside. One of the worst things about living without modern conveniences was that in the fall, winter, and spring, he stayed cold. No matter how many blankets he slept under, he always woke up cold. It took him until well after sun up to get warm.
He walked into the kitchen and packed up a bunch of food. Victor found Marshall out by the diesel F-250 Victor recovered from the Haversham farm. It seemed like an eternity ago, although in reality it hadn't even been two weeks. Marshall was loading all kinds of tools in big steel toolboxes into the bed. They were toolboxes they always called job boxes. Roughly the size of a chest freezer, they were the type of thing construction companies used to keep hand tools locked up at a job site. At the end of a job, the construction company would use three or four men to push them up onto the back of a truck at a loading dock. Marshall lifted each one easily up into the back of the pickup by himself. Each time he set a box in the bed of the truck, the truck sank a little lower on its springs.
"What time did you get started? Why didn't you wake me up?" Victor asked, putting the small cooler of food in the back seat.
"I was going to in just a minute. I wanted to get all this stuff packed while I was thinking about it."
"What is all that?" Victor asked.
"If we're going to armor up a train car, we're going to need tools. I figured it would be easier to bring them than to find them there."
"That's why you're the smart brother,” the younger Tookes said with a grin.
"You brought the food," Marshall replied, laughing.
"That's why I'm the fat brother. Or used to be."
The two of them climbed up into the cab of the truck. It got terrible gas mileage, but Victor thought they might need the power, and they had a lot more diesel than gasoline in the tanks down at the barn. The truck held more than enough fuel to get them to and from Charlottesville, where the train yard was. In addition, the pickup truck was wide enough to straddle the train tracks if they had to.
"I know that this place is somewhere near Renee's high school on the back side of town. I'm not really sure where it is, though. I know where there is a bridge over four or five sets of train tracks; it’s got to be somewhere near there."
"All right, let’s head there. Worst case, we can drive down the tracks until we find it," said Marshall.
The drive into town was fairly uneventful. They made it all the way through the town of Orange before encountering the first zombie. It was a leg dragger, one of the easiest kinds to put down; Marshall hopped out with an aluminum bat and knocked its head off. Most of it exploded into a fine pink mist of gore and bits of bone, but the top half flew as if he was swinging for the fences. It flew across the street and crashed through the plate glass window of a bakery. The hand-painted window of Hats Off Cakes and Pastry crashed down onto the sidewalk.
Marshall climbed back in the truck, and now it was Victor's turn. There were two fat, bloated corpses stumbling towards the now-broken plate glass window. The first one fell out of the window, landing flat on its face. Its ass followed with more momentum, folding its spine in half. The fetid corpse sat on its own head.
The second made it out of the window with much more grace, only falling onto its side before scrambling back to its feet. The glass did a number on its hands, slicing the flesh open, releasing a putrid pus-looking fluid. When it regained its feet, it started limping towards the truck. Victor's typical style was to push their hands out of the way as they inevitably grabbed for his neck, but he didn't want to touch this one with that goo oozing out of it. Victor could smell the rotten flesh from across the street, and he had plenty of time to work. The first zombie was still trying to unfold itself.
Rather than standing in the path of its hands, he sidestepped and swung his favorite hatchet as hard as he could at its shoulder, severing one arm. His follow-up swing landed squarely in the rancid creature's temple. It fell limply to the ground, and Victor levered his small hand axe out of its skull.
"Nice one, little brother!" called Marshall. Victor looked up at him and grinned, thinking about when they were kids. Victor remembered playing catch with Marshall in the front yard of the house and hearing the same thing after a good catch. That whole world was dead now, and Victor felt like he had to fix it. He got his wife killed; he'd let them get Max's mother. They'd lost their house. All of Max's things. Max would never get to play football with the neighborhood kids. He'd never go to the prom. He would never go to college. Victor and Max had lost virtually everything.
The second one successfully unfolded himself and rolled over on his belly to stand up. He was on all fours when Victor's hatchet cleaved its head off in one clean sweep. The head rolled about two feet, stopping right beside Victor's boot where the disembodied face clamped its jaw down on his toe. It couldn't penetrate the boot, but Victor yelled out in pain at the pressure. He shook his foot, but the head would not come loose. Finally, he kicked the curb and smashed the back of the skull inward. The last of the un-life faded from the creature.
On the north side of Orange, the undead population was much higher. At first, the brothers were stopping every half mile or so killing a zombie. By the time they were ten miles above Orange, about halfway to the Charlottesville city limits, the undead were getting too thick to take out so easily. They saw them wandering in groups, fours, fives, even one group of eight. On a couple of occasions, Victor was able to nudge them down with the truck and drive over them without too much trouble; most of the time he was too worried about damaging the truck, so he just swerved around them. They would be there another time when they were in less of a hurry or had more backup.
The University of Virginia was in Charlottesville, about twenty thousand students. Victor wanted no part of a super-horde of hoodie-wearing half-rotten college co-eds. The university was right in the middle of old town, which was the most direct way to their destination. That route was
clearly out of the question, so they stuck mostly to side streets and back roads.
"Keep an eye out for houses that look looted," said Marshall.
"That's a good idea; do you think there could be any survivors this close to town?"
"You never know, doesn't hurt us to look for signs. None of our people have been this far yet," said Marshall.
As they drove along, Victor watched the houses along Marshall’s side of the street. Mostly they all looked the same, but every now and then they'd pass one that had been boarded up. Most of those that had been secured had their doors standing wide open with the boards sticking out at odd angles.
"Marshall, look at that one," Victor said. "Do you think that was zombies? It looks different than the rest."
"I don't know. Why that one? Why one in the middle of the street? If a group were looting houses, don't you think they'd be a little more systematic about it? Start at one end of the street? We mark every house we loot and close it up when we're done, hoping to keep it fairly safe from zombies. I'd like to think that somewhere someone has holed up for the night in a house that we cleared and had some safety because we'd been there before. It’s the same reason we don't take every single scrap of food out of the houses. We always try to leave a little something behind, whatever we can find that will last the longest."
"I don't know, but the door doesn't appear to be broken. It looks different than all of the others."
"Do you want to stop and check it out?" Marshall asked.
"Nah, but let’s try to remember it and check it out later."
The Tookes boys followed the neighborhoods around the outskirts of the city until they were on the north side of town. When they got to the street Victor thought merged with the main road, it was actually a dead end. There was a hundred yard section of dirt and grass between the street they were on and the main road Vic thought he was heading for.
The truck was powerful, and it hadn't rained in more than a week. Without hesitation, Vic put the truck into four-wheel drive and bounced slowly up over the curb onto the overgrown grass. They drove at an idle between the two houses and through the back yard.
"Oh shit, Vic! Check that out!"
Victor craned his neck around and saw a monstrous pile of trash on the ground underneath the kitchen window of the blue house to the right.
"Survivors?"
"I think we have to check it out. Do you want to do it on the way in or on our way back out?"
"Let's go on to the train depot. It’s not even eight in the morning, seems kind of early to come calling."
They both chuckled at that thought while the truck idled along through the back yard and bounced down onto the main road. Another mile down the road, they were at the tracks.
The bridge crossed high over the tracks. Victor stopped the truck in the middle of the old rusty steel truss bridge so he and Marshall could get out and try to figure out which way the train yard was. There were five sets of tracks running under the bridge. Within a quarter mile of each side of the bridge, the tracks curved out of sight, but on the east side of the bridge, it looked like two of the tracks merged just before the curve.
"It looks like it must be west of here," Victor said, pointing eastward towards the merging tracks.
"Seems as good a guess as any, Vic. Let’s see if we can find a spot to get the truck down there."
The younger Tookes backed the truck up to the entrance of the bridge, and the brothers looked down the embankments on either side. On the west side, there was a very steep hill, reasonably free of trees and rocks but with a chain link fence at the bottom. On the east side, the trees were thicker, and the hill was steeper, but there wasn't a fence.
"There was a road heading west about half a mile back," said Marshall.
"Let's go back and see if that gets us any closer. I don't want to risk turning the truck over or getting stuck. You might be able to carry these massive toolboxes, but I don't think I could even budge one. With all that weight up in the bed, we're pretty ripe for a rollover."
The side road led them right to the loading depot. It was a huge train yard, way bigger than either of them expected. Off to one side was a red train garage with tracks running up to four huge rusty steel roll up doors. At one end of the yard, there was a gigantic metal warehouse with tractor-trailers backed up against the loading docks and giant cranes on the train-side for loading shipping containers onto the flat bed rail cars.
"Holy shit, Marshall. This is better than I expected. Look!" Victor said, pointing up by the cranes. There was a train half loaded, and the huge black diesel locomotive was already facing east. Victor was sure they needed to go a few miles east to get to the main north-south tracks that ran from Virginia to North Carolina.
"Vic, do you think you can figure out how to get the rear cars uncoupled? I'll work on unloading that shipping container. It’s already half armored. All we need to do is cut slits to look out of, armor up the bottom few feet, and protect the windows on the locomotive."
The truck lurched and bounced as Victor jockeyed it over the first sets of rails. He spun the tires a couple of times when the front and back tires were both against a rail, but it wasn't anything the powerful pickup couldn't overcome. He stopped even with the locomotive, just one full set of rails away.
Neither of them had ever seen the way trains were coupled before. It turned out it was simple. There were large S-shaped pieces of steel attached to either end of a train car. On the underside was a lever that released the bottom of the S. Then there was a cable, which passed electricity from car to car. Connecting or disconnecting that was just a matter of twist and pull. The last piece was a hose; Marshall suggested it was probably hydraulic fluid. At either end, there was a lever valve. Victor turned the valve to “off” before unscrewing the fitting. It was just hand tight. No tools required, fifteen minutes to figure out how to de-couple a train car. "Marshall, I’m pretty sure we could get that in less than two minutes now that we know how," Victor said proudly.
With the locomotive and one car, the rest of the cargo would be left behind. Victor moved up to the locomotive. He read in one of the books that this kind of engine had three gears, two forward and one reverse. This locomotive was diesel powered but not a diesel engine like in their truck. This was technically an electric train. Two huge diesel-fed electric generators powered electric motors that turned the wheels.
Inside the cab of the locomotive were hundreds of gauges, dials, knobs, levers, switches, and lights. Victor searched gauge by gauge until he found one bank labeled "Fuel." There were two indicators, one of them "Head End Power Unit." Victor knew that was the electric power for the rest of the train, only necessary if towing passenger cars. The second was labeled, "Thrust Power Generation." Both tanks read full. Luck is with me for once, he thought.
He pulled a huge book out of his backpack and flipped to the first dog-eared page labeled "Start-up procedure." He read through the procedure for what seemed like the twentieth time to make sure he had every step committed to memory.
The batteries were very low but enough to start the pony engine. The pony engine was a smaller gasoline-powered engine that turned the flywheels on the gigantic generator. He flipped the lever that engaged the gennies. They struggled but started after just a few seconds. Victor let the batteries charge for about fifteen minutes with the engines running before increasing the throttle. The ammeter needle bounced in sync with the increased revs.
"I'm gonna pull forward a few feet. I need to test the brakes and get us decoupled. Be ready, I have no idea how to stop this thing!" Victor yelled to Marshall over the loud engines.
He pushed throttle back to idle and looked over the entire train for anything labeled "Parking Brake." It took him almost three minutes, but he finally found it. The last book he read had him looking for a lever, but in this train, it was just a small toggle switch. When he flipped it, a huge air hiss rushed from the dump valves over the wheels, and he felt the train rock a little bit. He m
oved the engine control switch from "Idle" to "Run" and felt the train jerk forward. One single click of the throttle lever caused the train to lurch forward, rolling about five miles per hour. A few seconds later, he pulled the throttle back and squeezed the brake lever handle, ratcheting it back. The wheels locked up, stopping the lightweight train in about a foot, throwing him into the control panel.
"Shit!” he yelled, laughing. "The brakes were made for hauling a lot of weight!"
As Victor picked himself up off the floor of the locomotive, Marshall was standing in the doorway.
"Freaking idiot!"
"Tell me about it. Note to self, the brakes work!"
With the train idling, he reversed the start-up procedure, shutting the huge generators down. It was a complete success as far as he was concerned. He started and drove a locomotive. Now they had real work to do - armoring the shipping container that was the only car behind the locomotive. Marshall handled the heavy work. Victor helped cut two shipping containers apart with an oxygen and acetylene torch from one of Marshall’s job boxes. In the time it took Victor to cut one side, he noticed Marshall had cut an entire container apart.
"Dude, where the fuck did you find a plasma torch? And give it the fuck over, I wanna play with it!"
Marshall grinned at him. "Come get it, little brother!"
Victor ran up towards him, cocking his fist backwards. Victor watched Marshall's decisions, waiting for him to be tricky. Victor hit his brother squarely in the jaw at about quarter power. Marshall didn't move. He grabbed for Vic to put him in a bear hug, which of course Victor saw coming. He ducked under Marshall's arms and punched Marshall as hard as he could square in the thigh.
