by Kirk Allmond
"You've already shown us you have automatic weapons. Any women and children will come with us. You can keep your side arms and rifles. Any explosives will be seized."
"I don't mean to kill any living people. There aren't enough around. We're good people; we're heading across the country to gather some people. I'd much rather work out a friendly trade than have us keep shooting at each other. You'll lose a lot of men, and I'll probably lose a couple. That's an outcome I'd like to avoid." That was his usual response to this type of situation. Today, standing on this train, his cockiness was coming on strong.
"What, do you think you're Victor Tookes or something?" came the shouted response.
Victor couldn't help but grin. He wasn’t sure what that meant about his reputation, but he rather liked that he had one.
He shouted back, "What do you know of Victor Tookes?"
"Had a run in with him one time. Folks around here say he moves like a ghost and will kill a man with his mind. Half the folks say he's a zombie. The other half swear they saw him breathing."
"You think this Tookes guy is someone we should watch out for then?"
"You'd best steer clear of him if you meet him. We tried to have a friendly conversation with him. He killed Roger, and he cut my hand off for no reason."
"He sounds like an asshole," Vic said, grinning to himself.
"Next time I see him, I'm going to kill him," the one-handed man shouted back.
Victor shouted, "What's your name?"
"Tyler Doyle. What's yours?"
"We're from up near Alexandria," Victor said. “I tell ya what, Tyler. If you'll let us pass, I'll see if I can work out some way for you to talk to this Tookes guy. Also, I'd be willing to toss you a few pairs of shoes. We have some extras. Maybe ten pairs in common sizes would buy us passage?"
A minute passed while he considered the offer. It started to snow, just light flurries, but it was the first time they'd seen snow this year. Shelton turned off the engine to conserve fuel. The cars were now running off battery power.
He replied, "I'm still going to need to search the train."
"I'm afraid that isn't going to happen. I've been pretty straight with you. We're carrying a lot of ammunition and combat supplies. We're going to need that ammunition. We have some pretty major cities to pass through. We're taking the southern route. That'll take us through Atlanta and Houston. Our plan is to do as much damage to the hordes as we can on the way though those cities. Every bullet we're carrying has a target already. We just have to deliver them."
"How do I know I can trust you?" he asked.
The tension in the air was thick. Victor was about to either blow the opportunity or make it happen.
"I'm about to tell you something. You can take it two ways. One reaction would be to start shooting. The other reaction would be to consider the whole conversation we've had here and realize that I'm really not interested in killing you. I hope you won't start shooting," Victor said.
"What are you going to tell me that would make me either shoot you or trust you?"
Stepping down to the platform between the cars, Vic said firmly, "My name is Victor Tookes." He jumped to the soft grass at the edge of the train tracks and put his hands palm-out to show he had no weapons. John swore under his breath from the platform on the caboose.
"Come on out, Tyler. The hardest part about making new friends is having the courage to let bygones be bygones. We had a misunderstanding before," he said, extending his hand out to the empty space in front of him. "Now let’s shake on a new future."
He waited for a little over a minute, counting the seconds in his head before Tyler blurred up and grabbed his hand. As he shook Victor's hand firmly, he looked him in the eye and said, "I'm going to take a risk and trust you, Victor. We're all going to have to work together to survive this. Don't fuck me."
"Good! Now let’s get you those shoes," Victor said. "Do you have enough food?"
Tyler asked, "Does anyone have enough food?"
All told, they gave Tyler and his people about two hundred pounds of food and twelve pairs of shoes. They might have to stop and forage some food along the way now, but they had plenty, and Victor really was happy not to have to kill anyone. It took about an hour to get everything off the train and for them to get underway again. They cleared the tracks with the bulldozer while Tyler was picking out shoes.
It was nearly dark by the time they were back up to speed, clacking down the tracks past where they picked up Renee.
"Dad, you did good with the crazy man. He is not so crazy anymore," said Max as they were drifting off to sleep.
"Thanks, Max. I feel pretty good about the day."
"There are lots of bad guys in the world, Daddy. We're heading for a lot of them."
The next day would prove Max was a master of understatement.
Chapter 22
Missing
Things were quiet all night. Max and Victor slept on the bed of the warm rail car, Victor's arm wrapped protectively over his little boy. Max's hair smelled faintly of lavender. Ever since his very first bath, Victor and Candi used lavender shampoo on his hair. Candi always said it was one of the reasons he was such a good sleeper. Victor thought he was just born that way. The second night home from the hospital, they put him in his crib and had to wake him to get him to eat. Ever since that night, Max had slept well. Of course, there was the occasional night where Victor walked the floor holding him while he cried himself to sleep with an ear infection. There were those nights where Candi cried, worried about a high fever. On those nights, Victor always pulled her close and whispered, "It's always worse at two in the morning. It'll be better tomorrow."
It was the first time Victor had slept in a heated room in months. One of the worst things about the apocalypse was the lack of central heat. That luxury was something Victor would miss until the day he died. I suppose that’s one of the million beautiful things about the world before that Max won't remember. He'll never know what it's like to turn a dial and warm your whole house in a matter of minutes. He'll never drive through McDonald's for a Big Mac, fries, and a Coke. He'll never Google something or go to a stupid teenage "coming of age" movie with his girlfriend, thought Victor.
It took the better part of an hour to get the chill out of his bones. Max and his father laid there snuggled down in their warm bed under three heavy blankets and slept soundly until the alarm on Victor's watch woke him for his turn on the roof. He eased himself out of the bed and layered his clothes as quietly as possible. On the way out, he gave Max a kiss on the forehead and left their cozy compartment.
Renee warned them before they left that all the zombies in Charlotte had been gathering up on the north side of town when she left. John was up on the roof with night vision goggles as the train passed through the city at about three o'clock that morning. It was a few minutes after five when Victor went up to relieve him. Victor stopped off in the dining car to make two cups of coffee. The coffee on this train was delicious. They'd found a case of vacuum-packed, dark-roasted Colombian coffee beans in the pantry of the dining car. Victor added two creams and two sugars to one and left the other black. When he reached the top of the ladder, he handed John the cup of black coffee.
"How'd the night go, John?" he asked.
"Not a bloody zed all night, bud. Not any. There are always stragglers, always. Keep both of ya sets of eyes turned on, mate," said John.
"I will. I'll need the night vision goggles for my regular vision. I've never played with trying to see auras through them though, so I might have to turn them on and off a lot."
"Ever tried splitting the vision in either eye, mate?"
"Never tried, I've got a few hours ahead of me to play around with it though. Maybe I can. I'll let you know in the morning. For now, I'd suggest you go inside and warm up. Try and get some sleep. I think it’s going to be an ugly day."
"Another shitty day in paradise, nothing new. Later, bud," he said, putting his coffee cup in his teeth t
o climb down the ladder.
"See you in a few hours, mate. Thanks for all you do, John."
Tookes sat there on top of the locomotive in the frigid wind as the train roared down the tracks. It was well below freezing, and several times before daylight, they passed through areas of falling snow. Every fifteen minutes, he got up and walked the steel catwalk a few times to keep blood pumping in his legs. It was a lonely, miserable way to pass the night, but someone had to keep watch. He thought back on the memory of lying in bed with Max to keep him warm.
It turned out that night vision goggles destroyed his ability to see auras. He also couldn't switch one eye at a time, although he did give himself a hell of a headache trying. It didn't really matter; there wasn't anything out there, living or dead. The only life he noticed was a herd of deer off on the left side of the train. There were at least fifty in the herd standing in a field eating the long grass.
They passed by an entire town that was on fire. It looked like it had been on fire for a long time. The blaze must have started near the middle of town, because the town center was completely burned out, then it had spread outward towards the edges of town, decimating everything in its path. The smoke was so thick that Victor had to pull the wool blanket over his nose and mouth while they passed through the cloud. He spent an hour of his watch wondering how it could have started.
Maybe it was an old zombie woman, dressed in a housecoat with curlers still in her hair. She could have knocked a nine-volt battery off her cheap Formica counter-top into a pile of steel wool. On the other hand, perhaps it was a middle-aged handyman-zombie in overalls and a dirty trucker cap that read "Fred of all Trades." Victor imagined him kicking over a bucket of oily rags which then spontaneously combusted.
A lightning strike was among the most probable, but Tookes ultimately decided some dumb survivor fell asleep next to a lit candle or smoking a cigarette. He chuckled at the irony of someone surviving months into the apocalypse only to kill themselves by smoking in bed.
By daylight, he was getting concerned. Just like John, he hadn't seen a single walking corpse all night—not a single solitary zombie in over a hundred and fifty miles. When Marshall came up to relieve him at eight o’clock, he explained his concern to him.
Having had less time to sit and think, he didn't immediately share his concern.
"What do you think about the lack of undead along the way? Where do you think they've all gone?" Victor asked.
"Maybe they know winter is coming. We saw some snow yesterday; maybe they know they can't survive the cold. How great would it be if they all went to Florida for the winter? It could be an annual zombie migration. Better yet, if a bunch of them froze in place, it would be like shooting fish in a barrel."
"I doubt it, although I have no idea what they'll do when it’s below zero. I'm sure they have a plan for that, though. Last night before we went to sleep, Max told me that there were many 'bad guys' ahead. That's been playing in my head over and over all night. I'm thinking Atlanta is going to be ugly."
Marshall considered that new information for a second before saying, "We should go tell the others. You go ask Shelton to stop the train. Max has always been right before."
"Good idea. Let’s meet on the ground in ten minutes," Victor said, climbing down the ladder.
He was getting good at navigating the platforms, ladders, and catwalks that John and Marshall had welded all over the train. When he got to the locomotive, Shelton was sitting on a stool reading a book. He had a heavy black wool pea coat on and a blanket over his shoulders.
"Stop the train please, Corbin," he said.
"Yes, Sir," he said, jumping up off his stool. He disengaged the electric motors and pushed the brake forward a couple of clicks.
Victor asked, "Any idea where we are?"
"Somewhere near Gainesville, Georgia. I think we're about ten minutes north of the town."
"There's a military school there. Riverdale? River-something. My father threatened to send me to it when I was a kid," Victor said. "We toured the facility once; do you think it’s worth checking out? I bet there's an armory there. Maybe it’s still intact."
"Riverside," Shelton replied. "I graduated top of the class of '83."
"Oh wow. Do you think there's anything there worth checking out? I have a very bad feeling about Atlanta. Neither John nor I saw a single walker last night. Charlotte was deserted. Every small town since then has been deserted. Marshall and I think they all headed south."
"Why would they do that all the sudden?"
"Well," Vic said. "We've seen examples of super zombies gathering up large groups. I think it was a super that gathered up that huge horde that attacked our house, and I think it was a super that gathered all those zombies we ran into in Mount Pony and posed them in that scene. I think another super has gathered up all the zombies within range in Atlanta."
He paused for a minute to consider what he was about to say.
"I think they know we're coming, Corbin. And I think they're ready for us."
"You think some super knows we're coming," he said.
"I know we were super quiet about this mission, but I think maybe Laura knows where Sean was heading. I wouldn't put it past her to connect Sean and John. Apparently, they look identical. If she had someone watching us, she'd know which tracks we were on. Renee said all the zombies in Charlotte were moving to one part of the city; she said the horde was massive. We didn't see a single zombie when we passed through town."
"That's a lot of circumstantial evidence," Shelton said.
"I know, but that and gut instinct are what I have to go on. I'm telling you, we need to be ready for something major."
"All right. I think we need to train some other people on the cannons to leave the six of you free for other things."
"I think that's a good idea, but I think John will want to be on the top gun. It is a good idea to have some backup for him, though. We have a meeting beside the train in a couple of minutes. Let’s head out."
Shelton and Victor hopped down out of the locomotive and joined the rest of the group on the ground. Everyone had a coat on except Marshall, who was wearing his typical cut-off cargo pants, boots, and a t-shirt. Over the t-shirt, he wore the leather harness that held his short-handled hammers and his shotgun to his back. Around his waist was a huge belt full of shells for the shotgun. On his leg, he carried a pistol in a plastic thigh holster. Victor had never seen it before, but he would have bet his life it was a Desert Eagle.
Tookes started talking the minute his feet hit the ground. "Last night, right before we went to bed, Max said to me, 'There are lots of bad guys in the world, Daddy. We’re heading for a lot of them.' I'm worried now that they're all in Atlanta."
Leo asked, "What makes you think that?"
Tookes explained the situation in even more detail than he did to Shelton, and he explained Shelton's thoughts about training some other people to run the train's gun turrets.
"John, I want you up in the top turret. That gun fires about five hundred rounds per minute, and it's belt fed. We have ten belts of ammunition for it, each belt holding a thousand rounds. If you burn through ten thousand bullets, you're going to need to replace the barrel anyways."
"Yeah, mate, ya gotta keep that thing under forty rounds per minute if you don't wanna melt the barrel," said John.
"If we get into deep shit, don't worry about the barrel. Just mow the lawn. We have a couple of spare barrels in storage," said Shelton.
Victor added, "I'm hoping that we'll pick up some more new toys in Atlanta anyway. The train tracks go right by Fort McPherson. It was due to be closed in September of this year. I'm hopeful that there weren't that many soldiers there when all this went down. I'm also hopeful that we'll find a full armory there."
"I don't see how we can pass that up," said Marshall.
"But I think we're going to have to fight our way through the north side of Atlanta, maybe around Roswell. Any desire to stop by Dad's old house?" Vic
tor asked Marshall.
"No, but if we're going through Roswell, I might get off the train here and catch back up to you on the south side of Atlanta for the run into the army base," said Marshall.
"Let’s talk about that privately," Vic said. He was sure he knew where Marshall wanted to go.
Kris was next to speak. "Do you people do crazy shit all the time? Do you ever just do anything the easy way?"
"I believe that getting access to military weapons and ammunition is doing it the easy way. I'd much rather go through Houston with a couple of tanks strapped to the back of this train or maybe a dozen more of those Browning M2's," Victor said, pointing up at the cannon mounted on the roof of the locomotive.
"I guess. I lived this long because I ran like hell and only fought if I had to," Kris said.
"That's how I survived too, Kris," said Renee. "But now it's different. You're not alone. Marshall, John, and Leo are warriors. Vic's a good general. We need to take the fight to them. There's somewhere near three hundred million zombies in this country. If we can kill half a percent, I'd say we're doing something."
"Yea, you're going to get Laura's attention. Do you remember that we couldn't kill her last time?" Kris asked.
"Kris, if all the zombies from Charlotte have moved down here, I think we already have her attention," Marshall said.
"Then we're going to need you on the train!" she answered.
"Not as much as we're going to need what I'm going after," Marshall said.
"All right. John, can you pick some of the crew to man the guns and give them a crash course?"
"You got it," he said.
"Leo, can you get Marshall to a car or truck and stick with him until he gets it started? Then I need you back here to scout ahead of the train. It’s going to be a long day today."
"Happy to help however I can," she replied.
"Kris, have you had any luck controlling your endless knowledge? I would like to know anything you can come up with about Atlanta. I think we're also going to see National Guard here. There's a CDC facility downtown that would have been one of the most well-defended places in the country."
