What Zombies Fear 3: The Gathering

by Kirk Allmond

"Read the label. Does it have aspirin, acetaminophen, or ibuprofen in it?" he asked.

  "It says Acetaminophen, USP 160 mg," Leo replied.

  "Okay, pour about half the bottle down her throat, slowly."

  "Acetaminophen or paracetamol is a widely used over-the-counter analgesic and fever reducer. It is commonly used for the relief of headaches and other minor aches and pains and is a major ingredient in numerous cold and flu remedies. In combination with opioid analgesics, paracetamol can also be used in the management of more severe pain. While generally safe for use at 1,000 mg per single dose, acute overdoses of paracetamol can cause potentially fatal liver damage. Paracetamol toxicity is the foremost cause of acute liver failure in the Western world and accounts for most drug overdoses in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand."

  "Kris, where can I find other products with some fever reducer in them?" Victor asked.

  "I have no idea. It doesn't work that way," she said, frustrated at her own inability to be helpful.

  "Marshall, can you get the train moving again?"

  "Sure thing, Vic."

  Leo gathered everyone up and brought them down inside the wrecked cargo car. The steel windows Marshall built were popped out of their frames, lying in the middle of the container. The ceiling was crushed down, giving them barely enough room to stand. The left wall was bowed out at least three feet at the center.

  “Marshall, there's an underpass we have to go under a few hundred yards from the train depot. This wall is bent out pretty bad. You'll need to just creep up to it,” Victor sent directly to his brother.

  He turned back to Renee; Maya was sitting beside her with one hand on her cheek, saying, "Wake up, Mommy." Holly was beside Maya holding her other hand looking at Renee.

  Victor knelt down beside Renee and looked at little Maya, being so brave for her sister and mother. "Maya, your mommy is going to be fine. She's just sleeping now, getting better. She got a silly cut on her finger, and it made her go to sleep!"

  "If she's okay, why is she asleep and won't wake up?" Maya asked.

  "Her body had to fight off an infection; it took a lot of strength for her to fight it off. Now she needs to sleep. You know what else, Mymy? When she wakes up, I bet she's going to be so hungry, she's going to eat all the food we have. I bet we'll be at Gramma's before she wakes up though, and Gramma has lots and lots of food."

  "So Mommy's going to be okay?" Maya asked.

  "She's going to be better than okay, Mymy. She's going to be great."

  "Mommy!" said Holly.

  Vic hugged both of his nieces as the train came to a stop. He opened the door outside and said, "You stay here, Max, okay? I'll be right back."

  He hopped out the back of the car and saw they were less than a foot from the tunnel; the train was not going to fit. The crushed wall of the car was hanging almost six inches outside the pillars of the underpass.

  "Not going to fit, Vic," said Marshall.

  "Yea. How far do you think it is to the truck? Think it would be faster to just go get the truck and bring it here?" Victor asked.

  "Yea, I'll grab John. We'll be back in a few with the truck. Try and get the kids ready. It’s going to be a tight squeeze for all of us."

  "You got it," Tookes replied.

  He hopped back up into the train car while Marshall and John trotted down the tracks towards the rail station up around the bend. Marshall had his shotgun in one hand and a sledgehammer in the other, John holding an assault rifle with one slung around his back. The two of them looked like they were ready to invade a small city, and Tookes had no doubt they could.

  "All right guys, we have to get ready to move out of this car. John and Marshall went to get the truck. Let’s make sure we're ready to load up when they get back. Let’s get everything we can pack into Marshall's toolbox and everything else in bags.”

  About five minutes after they started getting ready to move out, Victor heard gunshots from the direction of the truck. First Marshall's shotgun followed by several quick bursts from John's dual H&K rifles. Tookes resisted the urge to run to their aid.

  “Are you two okay?” Victor sent to John and Marshall. “Of course, you can't answer me. Honk the horn or something twice if you need help.”

  He kept loading the toolbox. Gunshots continued. Three round bursts from John, regular shotgun blasts from Marshall. This was a lot.

  “Leo, can you get up there and get eyes on John and Marshall? Let me know if they need some help. This seems like a lot.” As he was formulating and sending the thought to his three closest friends, he heard two quick blasts from the truck's horn.

  "Max, keep everyone here. I need you to be strong for Aunt Renee and your cousins. Can you do that? Kris, with me."

  "I will, Daddy," Max replied.

  "Kris, you know how to use a shotgun, right?" Victor asked.

  Kris nodded at him and held out her hand. "Good, take this," he said, tossing her a black Mossberg 500, his favorite shotgun. "It's got eight rounds in it. Use them well. When you get low, I have a pocket full of shells. Toss it to me, and I'll reload for you."

  Leo was long gone. Kris and Victor jogged up the tracks. "Pick it up, Kris. We have to move. Half a mile, let’s go."

  "I'm not that fast. I'm running as fast as I can," she said.

  "Come on, it’s in you. You're super human. You have to find it," he said, speeding up.

  "This is all I have; I'm not going to make it if I go any faster."

  "Kris, you want to know how we lived so long? How we have killed so many zombies?"

  "Sure," she said flatly.

  "I never hold back. I never save anything for the trip home, because if I do, someone I love may not make the trip home."

  "Is that why you don't seem to ever make it home?" she said.

  "Better me than them," he said. "I'd die for every one of them. I would die a hundred deaths before I'd let anything happen to them. So, sure. Sometimes I get hurt. But I heal fast. Now run, and don't hold back."

  Kris sped up, catching up to him and stepping a pace in front. She was going to fit right in.

  The two of them came around the corner at what, for most people, would be a dead run. They had covered the half-mile in less than two minutes. Victor felt a moment of panic when he saw the three of them surrounded by a group of undead. The rear zombies were pressing in on those closest to Marshall, Leo, and John. It seemed like the outer ones were pushing the inner zombies to their deaths.

  Victor needed to know if there were supers around. "Kris, I need some cover. And we need to draw some of them off," he said. He leveled his pistol and started popping zombies from the outside. When he did, he started looking for those data streams he saw in Laura. The outside world faded away. There were auras and lack thereof. Then he could hear them. He could see the streams, thick amber-colored lightning bolts from dozens of zombies to five distinct points around the group, off in the woods.

  He heard his hollow voice, feeling like it was separate from his body, say, "Watch the two behind us. They're coming up fast."

  “I got them,” he heard Kris think.

  “Fuck, how many of these bloody things to I have to kill?” he heard from John, and at the same time, he heard Marshall thinking, “Two to the left, coming next. Hammer left, shotgun right. It’s not time yet, don't do it yet.”

  Leo was thinking so quickly he couldn't make out anything. Her thoughts were keeping up with her movements; they sounded something like a bee buzzing.

  He followed the data stream back to the first zombie. He floated along the stream, his body back beside Kris. When he got to the source, he drove a spear through the brain of the super. Just before he killed him, he looked up and shot out four thoughts. Victor was focused on killing him, so he didn't have any time to read them. In the future, he would have to try that.

  The remaining data streams converged on a point north of their position. Tookes focused on shifting his sight back to normal, turning off his a
ura-vision, and was back in his body.

  “Two hundred feet north of here. Four supers, we have to take them out. They're up to something. Leo, can you get the three of you to their position?”

  In a blur of movement, Leo sheathed her short swords and put her hands on John and Marshall's shoulders. The three of them disappeared in the normal deep whoosh and swirl of black dust. He heard the low bass whump of them appearing off in the woods. As a group, the horde of zombies turned towards them.

  "Kris, remember how fast you can run? In just a minute, we're going to have to double that speed."

  "Fuck. All right," she replied.

  Tookes fired his other pistol until the slide locked back and ejected the magazine. He replaced it and tossed the pistol to Kris. "Point and squeeze. Don't forget to breathe. Give me the scattergun. Fire as we back up."

  They backed slowly up, firing as they went. He took three steps back and switched to his alternate vision for a second. Just one data stream left. Victor drove forward down the stream, towards the super at the end. As he did, he watched its head cave in as Marshall's hammer connected.

  He shifted back to Kris standing beside him yelling, "What the fuck are you doing?"

  "Sorry, I'm trying to direct the fight. I needed to go check on Leo's crew,” he said, reloading the shotgun as he walked backwards. "We need to curve away from the train; I don't want to lead these last two dozen towards Max and the kids."

  The other half of the team appeared behind the much-reduced group and started wholesale slaughter. Without the supers to direct them, cleaning up the rest of the zombies was no real problem.

  When there were less than ten left, everyone switched to melee weapons; there wasn't any reason to waste the few extra bullets. The fighting was straightforward dodge-sidestep-swing. When they were finished, Kris and Victor rode in the back of the pickup on the tailgate back to the train.

  "See, Kris? You are useful. I would have been in a terrible spot without you there. I believe we all have a purpose. I believe the abilities we have don't make us better or more useful."

  "Whatever, you haven't ever had your ability fail you. You haven't watched someone you love die because you didn't know what to do," she said sadly.

  "I don't know your whole story, but I have watched people I care about die. I watched a close friend be bitten in front of me, just to spite me. He was turned into a super zombie to taunt me. Because I failed. I wasn't fast enough or good enough to stop his death, but one day I will be good enough to give Charlie some peace."

  They loaded up the truck in relative silence. Victor rode in the bed of the pickup with Leo, huddled up against the cab under a blanket to try to ward off some of the fall chill in the air. Most of the leaves were off the trees, and they had a million things to do before they left to get John's family.

  It was after dark when they pulled up the driveway. “Hey, Mom, we're home. Renee is injured but alive. I think she'll pull through. Maya and Holly and the rest of us are fine,” Victor sent to her, trying not to alarm her.

  She was waiting, tears in her eyes, when the big white pickup truck pulled up. She pulled in and hugged Victor tightly when he jumped out of the back of the truck. "Thank you, Vic. Thank you for bringing my daughter home to me. Thank you for reuniting our family," she whispered in his ear.

  "I couldn't have done it without everyone in that truck, Mom. It was a group effort. I love you," he replied. "Eddie died the first day. Renee was by herself with two kids in a city for four months. She's going to need a lot from you."

  Chapter 18

  Cross Country

  Renee woke up two days after they got home. She was ravenously hungry, just like all of them after they'd been infected. Her mother poured food down her throat. The first day, they gave her chicken broth and vitamin pills. After Renee drank almost a gallon of chicken broth the first day she was awake, Mrs. Tookes added boiled chicken and homemade egg noodles. Chicken soup really was good for the soul. Renee had been home for five days when she was feeling good enough to get up and move around. Maya and Holly stayed beside her almost the whole time, except when Max could drag them outside to play tag or hide 'n seek.

  Victor was glad to have her up and moving. He was glad that she was healthy and safe but also because he really needed her input on what to take when they went to get John's family. Renee was a logistical genius. She had a way of looking at a project and seeing exactly what would be necessary.

  A few years before the end of the world as they knew it, Marshall had given Sharon a beautiful globe with semi-precious stones inlaid in each country. Victor spent more than a few hours staring at that globe while Renee was laid up, pondering how difficult it would be to make it all the way around it.

  He was staring at that globe on the fifth morning, holding with a string measuring distances from points he knew. He knew from driving so many times it was almost exactly seven hundred miles from his house in Pennsylvania to his father's house in Atlanta. Seven hundred miles was four inches of string. Australia is a much bigger country than I thought, he contemplated. According to his string, it was about two thousand- five hundred miles across Australia. If I were flying and leaving from Western Australia, I would fly across the country, refueling in northern Queensland, before heading north east to Hawaii, almost five thousand miles, he continued. He knew very little about long distance flying, but that seemed like about an eight-hour flight. From Hawaii, I'd then make the jump to southern California, avoiding Los Angeles at all costs. There had to be a number of southern California airports where they could refuel, but with the population density in all of southern California, Victor had a terrible feeling landing there.

  If they were safely able to refuel there, it was about twelve hours to the east coast, depending on the plane they were in. That meant a stop somewhere near Kansas for fuel, unless they were in a huge 747 or something. Maybe they had a 747 and pilot, but given the percentage of survivors in the world and the number of 747 pilots prior to the end of the world, the chance of finding one seemed slim.

  The leg from Australia to Hawaii had him most worried. The island was a tiny target in the middle of a very big ocean. If the GPS satellites were a degree or two off after almost half a year of not being maintained, John's family would miss Hawaii entirely and have to ditch in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. If they made Hawaii, they'd have to land on a zombie-infested island with no air traffic control. If they made it off Hawaii, they'd have to then land in the middle of zombie-central to refuel in California, with another stop somewhere in the mid-west.

  The more he thought about it, the more certain he was they should just go to southern California to pick up John's family. Ground transportation was safer, and they could clear the runway for them to land. Maybe they could even get runway lights going. Tookes was convinced that was the right course of action; he just needed to convince the others.

  He felt a hand on his shoulder, then Renee startled him by saying, "Whatcha doin', Vic?"

  He practically jumped out of his skin. "When did you get here?" he asked when he'd composed himself.

  "I just walked up. You didn't hear me? The steps are so loud!" she said.

  "Nope, not a sound. I was pretty focused on the globe here. I'm worried about John's family making it here. How do you feel about a cross-country train ride?"

  "Oh, Vern. Look at all the trouble we got into coming just one state north. How would we ever make it all the way across country?"

  "Well," he said, "we weren't really ready for trouble. The train wasn't really designed for the kinds of things we encountered. We learned a lot from the trip to get you. Have you heard what Marshall and John have been doing since we got back?"

  "No, but I know they've been going out there every day, using up tons of fuel."

  That was his sister, always with an eye to the bottom line. "They've been building an invincible train, or as close as it’s possible to get, and from what I heard at dinner last night, its bullet- and explosive
-proof and unstoppable. I'm going to check it out in about an hour. I'd like for you to come. I would like your help with packing, provisions, and what we need to be self sufficient for twelve people for two weeks."

  "Sure, I feel up to a ride. I'd like to see what we're going in."

  "We? Ren, I hadn't planned on you going. I was thinking that you'd stay here with the kids," Vic said.

  "You need me," she said, walking behind him.

  When he turned around, Renee was nowhere to be found. He switched to aura view and looked, but she was gone.

  “You can teleport?” he sent to her.

  "No, I am invisible," Renee said, her voice coming from just a few feet away from him.

  "That is a handy skill. What else can you do?" he asked.

  "I can run fast. I haven't been feeling very well, but I'm pretty fast. I don't think I'm as fast as Leo though."

  "It still doesn't persuade me, Ren. I need people I can trust here," he said. "There are some bad humans in this world, and one of them has already attacked this place while we were gone. We lost a lot of good people, and he lost some of his men. A lot of humans lost their lives that night, and there aren't that many of us left."

  Renee reappeared in front of him, looking pissed off. "Victor, I have run and hidden for the last five months. I'm tired of running, and I’m tired of hiding."

  "Ren, you just got here. If you are killed on a trip with us, I'll never forgive myself. Maya and Holly need you here."

  "Mom said you would say that. She also told me I have to go to keep an eye on you. Apparently you're pretty good at getting yourself hurt," Renee said, dropping the hammer. She knew Victor would never say no if his mother had told her to come.

  "Dammit, Ren, that's not fair," Vic said.

  "Let's get ready and go check out this train," she said. "Maybe I can convince you I need to be there on the way."

  Great, he thought. A whole hour of listening to her convince me. I might as well agree now.

  He left the living room to gather his things for the trip. His pistols hadn't been cleaned in a thousand rounds, so he spent about ten minutes with a cleaning kit. He really enjoyed this time; taking care of his guns was therapeutic. At this point, it was a routine he could do in his sleep. It helped him remove stray thoughts and focus his energies. Gather John's family. It was the right thing to do. They needed them, and they were counting on them. Then deal with Frye. This part of the world wasn't safe, wasn't ever going to be safe with him around.