I woke with a start the next morning with the girl from the supermarket’s scream in my ears. I strapped on two nine millimeter handguns and a vest stuffed full of ammunition. The TV showed the symbol for the emergency broadcast system. I flipped through the channels. Nothing. Every station was broadcasting the same thing. I flipped on the radio which was still broadcasting and listened to the reporter describing the chaos in the city. I left it on and went to the kitchen where Georgie was making breakfast.
“Morning, Daddy.” I notice Georgie, too was wearing the two Glocks around her hips that I had bought her as a birthday present. She hated them when she unwrapped the present and said they represented violent sexism. I didn’t know what the hell that was supposed to mean but luckily her mother, much better at gift giving than I was had bought her an iPhone and iPad too so all was well.
“Daddy.” That was bad. Georgie had stopped calling me Daddy when she was ten switching over to the more hip Dad. She reverted for a while after her mother had died but was back to Dad after about a year. I took it as a good sign that she was healing.
And now back to Daddy, “Morning sweetie,” I said watching her as she fried up a few eggs and slip them onto my plate as I poured myself some coffee. She looked so much like her mother it hurt.
Arli and I had met at Texas A&M. She was pursuing a degree in Veterinary Science. I was pursuing a degree in pussy. Arli’s family were descendants of hard working Catholic Korean immigrants who came to this country sometime in the last century and made a life for themselves in west Texas. I lived in Arbero County and came from a shiftless, no good red neck, white, Anglo Saxton protestant family that worked hard at alcoholism and adultery. But I refused to follow my forebears into the same trap of alcoholism and poverty and somehow manage to get my ass into college. There I avoided the booze but couldn’t avoid the women. I was a strapping two hundred and forty pound, six foot five, and good looking rough neck and those pretty little college girls just threw themselves at me.
Then I met Arli. She was tough and beautiful, so confident and sure of herself and the things she wanted out of life. And a two hundred and forty pound Casanova was not one of them. Her skin was light brown with the lightest gray green eyes I had ever seen. She had a small button nose and full lips that had a perpetual “fuck you” type of smile on them. I fell in love with her immediately. It took me the better part of a year pursuing her before finally landing a first date but only after one of the horses she was treating kicked me square in the head knocking me cold and sending me to the hospital for a full two weeks.
As I lay recovering with a severe concussion, she visited me. I must have been charming even as drugged up as I was because when I asked her out for the umpteenth time, she smiled as said yes, “It’s the least I can do after my horse kicked you in the head.” We were married two years later, right after graduation, bought the ranch, and started our horse breeding business. Then we had Georgie. Things were so good for those few short years. Then came the economic meltdown, then the cancer, and now this.
Georgie stood at the stove peering through the peep holes on the boarded up windows. She was growing up into a beautiful young lady. I knew that soon I would have to start beating back the hordes of young men that would soon start piling up at my doorstep chasing after her. But that thought slipped from my mind as I remembered the other hordes running through the streets of Albuquerque and thought that normal young men chasing Georgie would be far better.
“Daddy,” she said in a whisper that made the hairs stand up on the back of my neck, “Something’s at the fence line.” Something, she said, not someone. I pushed my uneaten breakfast away from me, joining Georgie at the window. The front of the ranch sloped gently away from the house and through the slot between the two by fours I cloud see all the way down to the fence line nearly a mile away. At first I couldn’t see anything but the pine and juniper trees on the other side of our fence and the dry grass that populated the field in front of the ranch. Then something moved near the main gate. It could have been a man, I couldn’t really tell at this distance. Whatever it was it moved along the fence weaving back and forth but even from this distance I could see that it was covered in bright red blood. Either it had been killed recently or it had killed someone else recently. Behind it something else moved a bit deeper into the tree line, “Two more over there,” Georgia said.
I could see them moving in and out of the trees, a few more bumping into the fence or walking along to the east, “How the fuck did they get her so fast?” I said aloud.
I felt an elbow in my rib and heard Georgie say, “Language,” in an absent manner.
“Pack up everything you can fit on the ATV’s trailer. We might have to leave here in a hurry,” I said. Georgie nodded and went into the other room while I watched a few more of the things drift out of the tree line. They bumped aimlessly about seemingly harmless but I figured that one of them would stumble over the low fence and eventually catch their scent. One good scream would bring them all running towards the house and I didn’t know if all the wood in the world would hold them back.
I made my way to my bedroom and started packing the bare minimum I would need to take with us up into the Sandia mountains. The ranch ran all the way back to the steeply rising foothills. Behind the back fence there was an old logging road that had been widened and turned into a firebreak. That would lead them up into the mountains and to…where? I didn’t know. I just knew that they weren’t going to be able to ride out whatever was happening here at the ranch if many more of those things showed up. I went into the basement and grabbed all of our camping gear, water packs, propane stoves, and tents. I hoped to God we didn’t have to sleep outdoors anywhere but if we couldn’t find a cabin or something else, a tent could mean the difference between life and death up on the cold mountains even in the middle of summer.
We finished packing everything we could carry on our quad runners and the small trailers that I could hook to the back end of them, then took up watching the dead from the house’s front windows. By midmorning there were ten of them. By noon a hundred with more deep in the trees. Worse they had begun moving to the left and the right along the property line. At the rate they were moving, that would put them at the back of the ranch by sundown.
So many of them. Whatever was happening in the city had spread with frightening speed for these things to have made it out to the ranch so fast. I watched in horror as the first one stumbled over the fence and plopped down inside our property, “It’s time to go,” I said. Georgie nodded. We made our way out the back of the house locking the doors as we did after we piled all of our gear onto the back porch.
We trotted across the back yard to the barn where we kept the two quad runners, our heads rotating back and forth watching for the things, terrified that at any moment we would hear their screams and they would come pouring around the corner of the house. But all remained silent as we opened the doors of the barn and grabbed the two small trailers. We wheeled them back to the porch and loaded up our gear, strapping it down tight on the trailers, then, much more slowly dragging the full trailers back into the barn. I closed and locked the doors behind us after carefully scanning the entire area around the house. The barn was directly behind the main house and blocked the view of the front of the property line. That was good as it kept the things from seeing us but was bad as well since I couldn’t know how many had fallen over the fence while we were loading up our gear.
We hooked the trailers onto the quad runners and pushed them back to the rear doors of the barn. Again, I slowly slide one door back and peeked through the crack. The back of the property was clear all the way to the rear gate that would take us to the fire break and up into the mountains. I pushed the door all the way back, wheeled the two quad runners out of the barn, then closed and locked the door behind us. Everything was locked up tight. All the supplies they couldn’t carry with them were sealed and stored waiting for us should we ever come back.
W
e began to slowly push our rigs towards the back fence. The quads were heavy enough by themselves but with all the gear piled onto the trailers, they were even heavier and it was slow going with many stops and breaks along the way until we finally reached the back gate. I undid the lock and got our cycles through and onto the other side. I had decided that if the coast was clear, we’d start up our bikes here and make a break for the hills. No matter what those things were, they were still just the remains of human beings and were unlikely to be able to catch us once we got rolling.
I snapped the lock on the gate shut when I felt Georgie’s hand on my shoulder. I looked back at her and saw the fear etched into her face. She slowly pointed off to my right a hundred yards or so down along the fence. A person was standing there looking back away from us. A women from what I could tell, maybe an office worker from the way she was dressed. Or had been dressed when she had been attacked. Her clothes were in tatters: blouse torn open and covered with blood and viscera, her skirt shredded and hanging from her belt. Her head had been badly damaged with most of her skull and brains exposed and eaten. She stood there swaying back and forth sniffing the wind like a dog on the hunt. If we started up our rigs now, she’d be on us in a flash. Shooting her would just bring the others running. I had to take care of this as quietly as I could.
I slowly slid an axe with a long handle out of my trailer and began creeping towards her. When I think back to that day I realized that the only thing that saved us was the damage done to the thing’s brain. It had been a fully alert creature, we would have never made it out the back gate. It would have been on us in an instant screaming and bringing others to our spot and we would have never made it out of there. As it was she just stood there in her bare and ravaged feet swaying back and forth, unsure of what to make of her surroundings. I slowly closed the distance until a was just a few feet away from her when her head snapped to the left. I froze waiting for her to turn on me. We stood like two statues waiting. Finally her head drifted back to the right and she resumed her swaying. When I was within striking distance, I arched the axe back and brought it down cleaving deep into her ruined skull splitting it down to her neck. She dropped like a bag of bricks to the ground. I let out my breath and pulled the axe from the ruins of her head and wiped the blood and gore from the blade. Quick and silent. Now we can head up into the mountains and away from this horror, I thought as I stood up. Then I heard a branch crack off to my right. Deep in the trees to my right there were three of the things all looking directly at me. I don’t know what caused them to hesitate, what caused them to freeze for the fraction of a second it took me to realize they were there, but freeze they did and in that second my hand acted on its own accorded grabbing the handle of my 9 mm and firing three quick rounds directly into each of their heads. They dropped to the ground before they could even take one step but the damage was done. Far away to the south, I heard all the other things scream as one and begin their mad rush towards us. I ran.
I made it to Georgie and our quad runners just as the first thing rounded the corner of the house. It spotted us and screamed in what sounded like rage and bolted towards us. We both fired up our scooters, gunned it, and flew down the road. Or I should say, Georgia’s flew down the dirt road. I gunned mine too hard and as I lurched forward the front tires came up, “Jesus Christ!” I shouted as I tumbled off the back end first hitting the trailer, then the ground. I rolled over onto my stomach in the soft, dry dirt and looked back towards the house. I could see under the bottom of the trailer and spotted the many legs of the things as they raced towards me. I scrambled up and saw Georgie had stopped and was looking over her shoulder, “Go!” I screamed and she turned around and raced down the road. I mounted my ride, started it back up, and much slower this time, released the clutch and began moving down the dirt road.
The things were fast and were soon scrambling over the back fence and had reached the location I had spilled myself just moments after I began to roll. But I was gaining speed and putting more distance between myself and even the fastest of the infected. I thought for a moment we were in the clear until I saw more of the dead pouring in from the surrounding forest to our left and right. That was bad. But worse was seeing them pour onto the dirt road in front of me. Georgie was a good half mile ahead and I couldn’t see if more of the things were coming out of the trees there but they sure as shit were coming out of the woods closest to me. I could try to shoot them down as I drove but I wasn’t that good of a shot. My only chance was to gun the bike and ride right through them.
I twisted the throttle and felt my quad runner lurch underneath me. One of the things was coming in fast from my left. I pulled my pistol and put a few rounds into its chest. It was knocked backwards but immediately got back to its feet and took off after me again but I was past it. I didn’t have time to figure out what it meant that two shots to the chest didn’t kill the thing because the next group was upon me. I lurched through the first one, a young teenage boy with only the remains of an arm and little of his face left reached out to grab me. I bowled him over and nearly tumbled the bike. I twisted the handlebar left and right trying to right myself and kicked out at another of the things as it grabbed onto my left pant leg. I jerked free and put my boot in his face sending him tumbling back along the dirt road. The third was coming at me head on. I hunched down over the bars and twisted the throttle back as far as it could go, I was either going to knock this son of a bitch over or go tumbling along with it if I lost control of the bike. Either way, I wasn’t slowing down.
I crashed into the thing with a bone jarring thud that brought my teeth down on my tongue and felt like my neck had snapped. It was such a massive impact I thought for sure I would lose control of the bike and for a moment it looked like I would as I fishtailed and shagged back and forth trying not to spill over. The thing screamed and flipped back over the bars of the bike, rolled over my back, struck the trailer, then rolled to a stop a few yards behind me. Then it sprung back up to its feet and was running after me again. But I was through the thick of them and putting distance between me and the mass of dead behind me. A few minutes later, as I climbed the progressively steeper road, I was clear.
Ten minutes after that I caught up with Georgie. She was crying, standing beside her quad runner tears and snot running down her face. I pulled up next to her, got off my bike, and wrapped my arms around her, “Shh, shh,” I said, “We’re OK.” She nodded and wiped the snot from her nose and we both pulled water bottles from our packs and sat on our bikes watching back along the road. After ten minutes it seemed like the things had lost our trail. It was all quiet. We mounted our bikes and headed deep into the mountains.
Several hours later as the sun dipped low to the west we reached the top ridge of the mountain. There we found a fire watch station and sealed it up for the night. Out the windows we could see all along the front range of the Sandia mountains. See the fires burning in the city below, see the electrical grid go dark section by section. In the morning we’d head deeper into the mountains, maybe all the way up to Sandia Peak. There was some type of ski lodge up there along with other ranger stations and cabins where we could hole up inside. And we would be far above the death and chaos of the valley below. I didn’t know if it would work out. I didn’t know if the mountain would already be overrun with the infected. But it was a plan and it was all we had. There we would wait out the storm.
But oh God what a long storm it would be.
The Dead of Summer
“What the fuck is going on?” Casey Stofler whispered to himself as he rode the nearly empty gondola down to the tramway station at the Sandia foothills. Riots in the city, martial law, reports of fucking cannibalism? It was all fucked up. And this was supposed to be his last summer working at Sandia Peak before he knocked the dust of Albuquerque off of his shoes and headed west to Los Angeles where the sun never set and ocean waves never ended. Instead interstate travel was restricted to military vehicles and it looked like he would be in
town for the duration of the emergency.
He watched the nearly bare stone peaks dotted with pine trees slide beneath him. He and Dan, the gondola operator, watched in silence as the tram station approached. They were the last two off of the mountain. They had closed up the visitors center and restaurant up on the mountain top and would shut down the tramway station as well before locking up the gates of the facility and heading back to their respective homes.
When they reached the station, they locked up the gondola, then began shutting down all the power and locking the doors to the shops, café, and other tourist areas of the station. They walked together silently down to the parking lot and then Dan got into his beat up ‘89 Honda civic and started it up.
“Good luck, Casey,” he said shaking my hand.
“You too, bud. Stay safe,” I replied as Dan drove out. I never saw Dan again. He must have died like all the rest that stayed in Albuquerque. I started up my Bronco and rolled out of the parking lot, then put her in neutral and set the brakes while I got out and locked up the heavy steel bar gates behind me. I looked at the tramway station. It was sealed up tighter than a vault and would do just fine until the crisis or epidemic, or whatever the fuck it was sweeping the city, passed and things got back to normal. I pocketed the keys and jumped into my Bronco and headed home. On my way to my tiny, one bedroom apartment, my cell phone rang. I picked up knowing who it would be and I didn’t even say hello, “Dude,” I said, “I just closed up shop.”
The Great Wreck Page 3
