The Great Wreck

by Stewart, Jack

  But Nicky had asked me to go on. Gave her last moments of life so that I could escape. I wouldn’t betray her like that. I turned towards the door and ran up the steps just as the sound of automatic gunfire shatter the air. The dead had reached the top of the stairs and Tony was mowing them down.

  “Let’s go!” I yelled and ran into the gondola. Tony began backing away from the doorway still shooting down the dead as they reached the top of the stairs. In the parking lot below us, the dead flooded around the sided of the building and spotted us up on the gondola platform. I could see their dead faces contorted in rage as they tried to scale the twenty foot walls to reach us but to no avail.

  Tony fired off his last round just as he stepped into the gondola. He slammed the door shut and yelled, “Go, Greer!”

  Greer pushed the gondola control lever forward and we surged out of the station. Behind us, the dead flowed out of the doorway and jumped at us, plunging to the parking lot below as the gondola quickly pulled away and up from the station. Greer, Tony, and I looked out the back window as the dead continued to swarm out and around the station filling the gondola platform and the parking lot below. The gondola rose to a hundred feet, then five hundred, then a thousand feet.

  We watch as the tram station receded into the distance as the dead howled and scream at us as we rose up above the ground looking at the burning wreckage of Albuquerque. I wondered if anyone would survive down there and if we might be able to help. We would see what we could do up on the mountain first. Then we would be back to see if there was anyone left to help.

  Out of the Great Wreck

  Pix and I were only teenagers when the epidemic started. We thought that the first few weeks of the Event were the worst. Death and dead everywhere. Holing up in basements, running through the streets with half eaten stiffs charging after us. We were so wrong.

  But ignorance is bliss, right? And man, was I ignorant.

  Let me tell you about Los Angeles during the initial pandemic. When the infection swept through the major urban centers, non-infected fled to the suburbs, then the exurbs, then the outlands. This is what it means when millions of people all at once clog transportation systems that were designed in the fifties to carry a few tens of thousands; a vast, metal carnage that turned cars into glass and steel charnel houses. The resulting mega jam trapped the vast majority of those people in their cars, trucks, RVs, rattle traps, junk heaps, and whatever else they could climb into and tried to flee. Some made it out, the early adopters you might say. The others, Darwin’s children, the ones that panicked or were just in the wrong place at the wrong time smashed into each other at the endless pinch points of the California Interstate Highway System creating the largest traffic jam of all time. Those trapped in the vast pileups of mangled cars, wrecked and smashed human remains, and infected gave new meaning to the phrase spam in a can. Most of these were eaten, infected, and walking again within the first few days of the event.

  Let me tell you about the infected: At first everyone bit was a sprinter. They hauled ass after the living like they were trying to make the zombie Olympics. They never got tired, they never got distracted, and they never stopped. It was like they had this crazy radar in their head and they could follow a living human until they ran them to ground. Then the feeding would begin and a new sprinter was born.

  After a few weeks though, their bodies began to decay and the sprinters became walkers. The radar in their head wasn’t as good but they could still follow you if you made too much noise, spot you if you were close enough, and smell you if they were right on top of your hiding spot. A month or so later, most of the dead had ground down into shufflers who weren’t much of a threat unless a bunch of them cornered you.

  Pix and I were lucky and learned the rules of the New World quickly. Most of the people we were with at the beginning weren’t as lucky.

  I don’t remember how we picked up James. Pix and I went to school together and when the epidemic cut through Los Angeles we tried to hide with our parents until they were caught, then our friends until all of our friends were dead, then acquaintances, and finally, complete strangers. We survived by blind luck managing to make it out of whatever house, hotel, gas station, or shack that was our temporary refuge until the dead found a way in. Then it was running with small groups of anyone who was still alive until they were dead too. And after that, there was just Pix and I. Then one day, through the Brownian terror of running and hiding, we picked up James.

  James was the worst kind of human being if he was human at all. At the end, I came to think he was a demon loosely draped in a human body, something spawned by the epidemic that took over whatever soul James had at the beginning. I knew it from the first time I saw him hacking apart a few Walkers with an ax, laughing and screaming like a mad man. I could see it in his eyes. The world was burning and he had a front row seat. Hell, even better, he was part of the show. James was in heaven. But the dead were too many even for an animal wrapped in human skin, even for James and the flow of dead just kept coming. He saw Pix and I as we bolted in the opposite direction. He chased after us and followed us into a gas station where we were able to slam the security door down.

  Pix and I were terrified, not of the hoard of dead that we had managed to just escape but of the monster that now crouched in the shadows of the gas station with us.

  In the darkness we could hear ourselves breathing and James would giggle now and then. Finally he caught his breath and said in a sing-song voice, “So tell me a little about yourselves.”

  We stayed in the gas station until the next morning, then hit the streets. We had no idea where we were going and hopped from building to building hoping to find some sort of refuge. For the next few days we just ran and James ran with us. Dodging the dead, hiding out on rooftops, scavenging any shop we could come by for food until we ended up in a wrecked mobile home partially buried under a collapsed building with a small pack of dead trying to get in. They knew we were there but couldn’t get in. James kept yelling at them, “Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuuuuck youuuu!”

  I kept telling him to shut up, that maybe they would go away. James just looked at me with those cold dead eyes and said, “Shut you’re fucking gob you twat while I fuck your girlfriend,” and then he did.

  They didn’t even bother closing the door. He just grabbed Pix by the upper arm pulled her to the back of the RV. There he tossed her on the bed, pulled her pants down, and fucked her. And by fucked her, I mean, fucked her for hours. She came so many time I lost count. I tried to close my eyes, look away and cover my ears but I couldn’t. In that small space there was just no escaping what was happening at the other end. The sight of Pix being fucked over and over again crushed anything still human inside of me, anything good that was untouched by the dead world outside. I should have just stepped outside right then and there and let the dead have me, but we were all animals by then and animals want to survive.

  Finally Pix begged him to stop. He pulled out of her and pulled her up roughly. Looking over his shoulder at me he said, “Watch this, pecker head,” and bent Pix over the table and forced his cock up her ass. Pix cried out but spread her legs further to let him in. He rammed her for a few minutes then blew his load up her ass. Pix came again. I nearly puked and decided I had had enough. I stepped outside hoping there were hundreds of dead to put me out of my misery but sometime during James and Pix’s fuck fest, someone else, someone living must have gotten the dead’s attention and the streets were empty. I could hear James laughing and Pix crying inside the RV.

  So they were a couple. James was an asshole, and animal, but he was alive and that made him slightly better than the dead. James, Pix, and I finally found a good spot to hide out at the Magic Kingdom.

  The park had been closed for weeks as public gathering places were shut down to halt or slow the spread of the disease. The place was empty, walled off, and secure from the chaos of the LA basin. We thought we had it made. For a few weeks we saw no one dead or alive wandering
around the park. The power was still on but was starting to fade sporadically, there was food (of a sort) and water and separation from the chaos and burning outside our haven.

  Then we saw the first Walker on Main Street.

  She was so fucking hot, for a dead chick. And weird, too. Walked around like she had a purpose. Changed clothes from time to time. We thought it was Ok to have one wandering around. We thought we could dodge her. It became a kind of game of hide and seek. James tracked her across the park. In and out of the shops, watching her from the roofs. James would obsess over her telling me how much he wanted to fuck her. Fuck the dead chick. He’d laugh and say he’d fuck that pussy so hard she come back to life. Get it? Cum back to life. James was a real character.

  I began to plot my escape from him with Pix. Better to take our chances out in the Wreck than stay another day with this beast. That is, if Pix would come with me. Maybe she’d choose to stay with James. I didn’t care anymore. I wanted out and I was leaving. Just as soon as I could muster up the courage to leave.

  Then James told me Pix got caught. James said he watched the whole thing, masturbated while Pix was devoured. He said it was the best snuff flick he’d ever seen. He said it was like watching Pix get raped as the Walker tore off her clothes and bit into her over and over again. He said her screams sounded just like an orgasm. Pix always had a bite fetish and maybe she did cum before that strange dead chick bit into something really painful, then Pix knew the game was over and the real pain was about to begin.

  James said it lasted for about ten minutes before the walker hit something vital and Pix bled out. James watched the Walker eat every little bit of Pix and knew that she wouldn’t be coming back. I was thankful for that at least.

  I didn’t even both asking him why he didn’t try to help Pix. After the first bite, it was over for her and James would never put himself at risk if he could help it. I didn’t cry for Pix either. We were all dead when the epidemic broke out. It was only a matter of time before the fact caught up with us. Like I said, by the time we had met up with James, we were already animals. So I didn’t mourn her passing. At least she was gone for good. Thinking about her and the other walker wandering around the park for all time might have just pushed me over the edge.

  So I stayed with James.

  After Pix bought it, James was quiet for a long time after that. I don’t know if he felt guilty for not trying to help Pix or maybe for spanking off while she died in agony. He never said. But a few days after Pix bought it, we boogied from D-land and out into the Wreck.

  “Grab your cock, Junior, we’re leaving,” and just like that we were back among the screaming, the burning, and the dead.

  During those weeks, the city was still burning, people still running everywhere, the military flying this way and that. Burbank was just getting closed off from the rest of the Wreck but we didn’t hear about it until we were halfway to Phoenix otherwise we might have gone there.

  We should have died so many different times then. It was like the worst game of Robotron you could imagine. And we didn’t even have guns. Fuck, I’d never even touched a gun let alone fire it with a platoon of dead running me down. But somehow we made it. James said, statistically speaking, with all the uninfected walking out of the city on foot, some were bound to make it. I guess we won the lottery then. Whoopee. Think I’ll buy me a football team.

  Remember all of those dumb fuckers in their SUV’s heading toward the city exists all at once? Well James and I found a big old cluster fuck of them blocking I-10 East. We stood at the outskirts of the LA basin where one of these incredible vehicle and human dams was. We must have stood there for nearly an hour with our dicks in our hands wondering how we were going to get over the unstable pileup stinking of rotting bodies, gasoline, and burning rubber with nearly every vehicle containing a hidden trove of walkers trapped in there just waiting to grab your foot or a hand and give you a smooch.

  Behind us was eight million walking dead. Ahead of us was…well less than that so we climbed. It took us hours to climb over the wreck and tangle of cars, people, animals, trailers, trucks, and everything else that tried to move down a ten mile stretch of road all at once. The smell was ungodly and every few minutes a half rotted arm would shoot out and try to grab us.

  James laughed and hooted all the way up whacking off any limb that stuck out of the smashed cars laughing like he was playing some grotesque game of whack-a-mole.

  Like I said James was an animal in his element. Let the good times roll

  Eventually we made it over and headed out in the Californian Outback. Turns out that was a blind stroke of luck. The majority of infected were held inside the basin by the clogged highways and those that made it out and deep into the desert found that the sun didn’t agree with whatever it was that animated their dead flesh. The ultraviolet radiation would burn off their rotting skin layer by layer unit the deep nerves, the home of the virus, were exposed. Eventually the virus would lose control over the body.

  But the brain was still intact. It would take years for the skull to rot to a point where it would split open exposing the virus and a few more years after that before the virus was finally exposed completely and the UV rays killed it. The necro-virologist at Sandia Station would estimate that under normal circumstances, it could take up to ten years for the virus to naturally decay away and die.

  James and I didn’t know anything about that at the time. All we knew was that after the first few weeks in the Great California Outback we didn’t see many more sprinters and the number of walkers dropped significantly. They were still there of course. Tens of thousands of them walking around waiting for the living to wander by, but if we were careful, we could out run, out climb, and generally out maneuver them.

  And we were careful.

  Maybe I should say I was careful. James was a maniac. I swear to you I’ve never seen someone so happy that the end of the world had arrived and took no greater pleasure in hacking apart dead people or in turn, running for our lives when there were too many of the dead closing in around us.

  We walked during the day and stuck to the main highway. The small towns we passed through had hundreds of dead shuffling around but many of them were in such a bad state of decay that, if we were quiet and stayed out of site, we could move in and out of the shops, get what we needed and make it back to the freeway undetected.

  Most of the time though, James neither wanted to stay quiet nor out of site and would run screaming into a small group of dead and whack away at them until he was covered in gore and viscera. Yeah, James was a real party animal.

  I, however, chose the stealth method. As James launched on his one man crusade, I snuck around the stores, grabbed what we needed and slipped back into the shadows until James was done. After doing this a few times, we got proficient. We were able to get new cloths, hiking boots, food, weapons, and ammunition.

  In some small, isolated town on the edge of California, we even found a truck that had smashed into the a local National Guard Armory. Inside was everything we could hope for. Guns, ammunition, fully automated rifles, grenades, claymores, night vision gear, helmets, you name it. It was a toy store for the Apocalypse.

  There was also tons of body armor. I stuck to the arm and leg gauntlets but James went all out and dressed himself from head to toe in the stuff. He looked ridiculous. I wanted to ask him if the dead were likely to shoot at him but he had the dead look in his eyes again so I kept my mouth shut. We left the large explosives and rocket launchers. There were useless against the dead. I did however grab a package of small square shaped claymores; a small, powerful antipersonnel mine. Later that night I’d read the instructions about placing the claymore face out, the sticky side to the wall. After you stuck it to the wall and little laser trip sensor came on and the next thing that broke the laser line was turned into paste. I thought they might come in handy as booby traps so I kept them. James laughed at me, called my Sargent Slaughter and James Bond. Said I’d just blow
my dick off. I just shrugged and tucked them in the outer pocket of my pack. Then I snuck a few grenades into my pack as James crawled out of the armory. I don’t know why I did that. Maye just to have them. Maybe I already knew I’d be using them against living humans.

  On the way out, I found silencers for my handguns and our rifles. These were industrial grade and meant to last. Of all the gear we pulled out of the armory, I think these saved our lives the most times. That night I cut down a piece of chest armor and fitted it around my neck. Now as long as I didn’t let a bunch of them corner or overwhelm me, I should be safe from their bites.

  On our way back to the highway, we stopped at a sporting goods store and swapped out our old, battered packs for new ones, James picked out some knives, while I hunted down a pair of goggles. Sun glasses were great but had a tendency to fall off when you were running. The goggles I found were polarized and comfortable. They also didn’t fog up or slip down my nose when I sweated. James laughed as I put them on but after a few minutes, grabbed a pair of his own. Next to the sporting goods shop was a liquor store. I could see James’s eyes light up, “Wait here,” he said.

  I waited, watching the street around me, repacking my stuff but ready to make a break for it. Down the street I could see three of the dead milling about. A fourth one rounded the corner. A female, maybe sixteen when the epidemic struck and she was bitten. And not nearly rotted enough to slow her down. This one was trouble. I could tell by the quick way it moved, by the way it rotated its head around. It wasn’t a fresh kill, not full a sprinter anymore, but one that still had that weird radar in its head. And it knew we were close.