I could hear James smashing about the liquor store inside. Every few seconds he’s smash something and yell, “Hidee ho!” The dead girl was getting closer. She hadn’t locked in on me and James but she would in just a few minutes.
I finished packing up my gear, then edged back into the alley between the stores. I checked to make sure the alley was empty. It wouldn’t be any fun to back into the pack of shufflers.
I crept deeper back into the alley and looked for a drainage pipe. I’d learned that these things could be scaled up with practice. And we’d practiced a lot so before she got any closer, I climbed up the drain spout, flopped myself over the edge, and lay flat on the roof top. I checked my surrounding and to ensure it was clear of shufflers and seeing none peeked over the low wall to see what the dead girl was doing.
She had moved halfway down the street and now had a few buddies with her. James must have overturned a whole shelf of booze judging from the crash that came from the liquor store.
The girl’s head snapped on to the sound and she was off. The other four followed and I could see farther down the street a few dozen more wanted to join in the fun and were beginning to move towards the store.
I quickly propped up my rifle, screwed on a silencer, and sat up on one knee. My first shot took out the dead girl’s head turning it into a cloud of rot and bone fragments. The rifle only made a small pfft! sound but the bullet passed right thought her head and into the window of another shop behind her making a load crash. That got James’s attention.
“What the fuck?!” I heard him cry out. He raced to the front of the store and took in the now forty or so walkers moving down the street, “Oh, Fuuuu-aaaaauck!” he sort of sang out. Like I said before, James was a real character.
While James was assessing the situation, I was busy picking off the leading edge of the walker wave. James poked his head out of the store and saw where I was shooting from, “I’m going out the back, dickhead, and head towards the freeway. Once I’m clear, you head there too and catch up. Don’t get eaten!” he yelled then darted out the back. I should have let the fucking dead have him but I couldn’t imagine being on the road alone, exposed, and on my own so I saved him. And now he was boogying. If I got caught and eaten, so what? James didn’t give a crap. The best thing I could have done for the world right then was get James in my rifle’s site and remove his head with a well-placed bullet.
Instead, I stayed up on the roof and picked off as many of the shufflers as I could. After about twenty minutes of firing and reloading, the wave petered out. I waited another ten minutes just to be sure, then climbed down the rainspout and made my way back to the highway. I could see him about a mile east of the onramp. He was waiting there sitting on top of an RV. I saw a flash in the sunlight and knew he had me in his rifle sight. A split second later, a bullet whizzed by my head followed by the very loud crack of a rifle. I ducked behind a truck and could hear him laughing in the still air. I glance around and saw that his shot had attracted the nearby dead. A lot of them.
I got up and started running towards him when another shot cracked out. This time it struck a car’s side mirror shattering bits of glass and plastic into my face. Now more dead were coming and they were in a hurry.
I head James whooping and hollering as he shouldered his rifle, “Better get a move on, shit kicker, ‘cause it looks like you’re on the menu for lunch!”
James was right. There were at least a hundred walkers closing in on me. I pulled out my pistols and put a silencer on each one as I moved through the tangle of cars. All I had to do was keep my head on and keep moving and I would be OK. Then another shot rang out and shattered the windshield beside me. I decided I had had enough and sent a few shots back at him.
“Oh, you mother fucker! You nearly hit me!” he said
If I had not had a few dozen of the dead flowing around the cars behind me, I would have hit him. As it was he climbed down off of the RV and started running east laughing like a madman. I picked up the pace too and soon had outstripped the wave of dead following me.
When we finally ran out of steam the sun was low in the west, “Holy fuck, rabbit anus, we’d better get off the street.” James said and we found a three story building that we could climb up on the roof of.
James was still laughing as we made our small camp and I could hear him mumble, “Best fucking day. Ever!” as he drifted off to sleep.
* * *
In the morning we headed east as soon as the sun broke over the horizon. By ten o’clock it was sweltering. I could see James was being baked alive in his full set of fancy armor. Secretly I hopped he passed out. Finally he gave in to the inevitable and shucked off most of his getup.
“Fuck you,” he said to no one in particular, “Take my fucking armor, bitch!” and he tossed it off of the side of the highway. He glared at me but I was looking far down the highway. James followed my view and saw them too: a small group of people headed our way.
When they were a hundred yards away from us, they stopped. We stopped too and stood there, each group evaluating the other. The other group had four people in it: a man and a young woman, and two girls about my age. Each one carried a pack and at least two firearms. Finally the man raised his hand and waved at us and James and I did the same. Then we quickly closed the gap.
The man’s name was Tom Fallon. I could see that he and the girls were happy to see us. I was happy to see them too. James introduced himself and shook hands with Mr. Fallon.
“And whose this?” he asked, turning towards me.
“I’m Thomas,” I said taking his hand.
“Hey, two Toms meeting in the middle of the desert. Do two Toms make a right? Ha, ha. What are the chances?” he said as he shook my hand. I like him immediately and smiled. All the women were Tom’s daughters. Alicia Fallon, the oldest, was twenty three. Taller than her father with straight black hair and green eyes that looked right through us and into the desert beyond. The next oldest was Kalie with the same black hair and piercing green eyes. She had a button nose and dirty white skin with two pistols strapped to her hips with her jeans tucked into the top of shin high black boots. And the youngest, Neera, looked like a little carbon copy of her sisters. She had a shotgun strapped to her pack and wore a set of army fatigues that had been cut down to her size.
We all shook hands and were for a few brief minutes happy to see other people. Then James opened his mouth.
“No mother, then?” he said looking over the girls like he was picking out a cheap hooker for the night.
Mr. Fallon blinked hard twice and glanced at his girls. They all shuffled back towards their father, “No,” he said, “She didn’t make it out of Scottsdale.”
“Well too bad, mister. She must have been a real looker. Good things the girls got her looks instead of yours,” James said. I could see that dead look come back to his eyes as he looked at the women. Mr. Fallon could see it to and I knew we wouldn’t be traveling together very far.
The look on the newcomer’s faces said as much too. I could see the fear and revulsion in their eyes when they looked at James. When they looked at me I could see they were wondering why I was with him.
James must have sensed something change as the group looked at me and quickly said, “Well, how ‘bout we make a camp for the day at that rest stop over there. We can swap information about what we’ve seen and be on our separate ways in the morning.”
I could tell that the Fallons wanted to just move on and put us a few miles behind them but the father kept looking at the girls who all looked at me. And we did have information about where we had come from so instead of running away from us as fast as they could, he said, “Sounds good. We’ll swap stories and be on our separate ways in the morning.”
There were no cars parked at the rest stop and even better, it had a small Highway Patrol station attached to the back with a three story observation tower. We checked out every room, every closet, and every nook and cranny of that place before we sealed it up
. The station was completely empty.
“Don’t see that too often. Usually you’d find one or two dead one walking around,” Mr. Fallon said, “I guess this place was just too far out in the middle of nowhere.”
“And the government closed down every public place once the outbreak started getting out of hand,” Kalie said dropping her gear and plopping herself down right next to me. I could feel her looking at me, feel the heat from her body as she leaned against my side.
James looked fit to be tied and mumbled something that sounded like, “Goberment, goberment, thinking about the pavement,” the went down stairs. The Fallons watched him go then looked at me again. I thought they might ask me to come with them but Mr. Fallon seemed to think better of it. I might have gone if they had asked. Might have followed them back into the Great Wreck. But they didn’t, not there anyways, and my wagon was, as they say, hitched to James.
So we set up camp on the third floor of the observation tower. The five of us unpacked our gear and looked out the windows while James wandered around the outside of the rest area kicking cans and throwing rocks out into the great void of the desert.
To both the east and the west there were only a few abandoned cars on the road and no dead to be seen walking in and out of them. Mr. Fallon had guessed right. It was just too damn far away from everything to have had many dead reach it.
Later as the heat baked us all into an oily sweat, we huddled around a small conference table on the third floor of the station and shared what we knew. Mr. Fallon started it off.
The Fallons were from Scottsdale, a small town north of Phoenix. They had stayed huddled up, barricaded in their basement during the initial outbreak. Mrs. Fallon had worked in the Emergency Room of the local hospital and had gone to work before anyone really knew what the outbreak was about. She never came home.
Then the sprinters came and went. Then the walkers. Then the shufflers.
After that the dead seemed to clear out of the town. After a few more weeks of relative quiet, Mr. Fallon had decided they would need to find others if they were going to more than just survive by hiding out in their basement. First he and his oldest daughter would scout around looking for other survivors, dodging the dead, and finding supplies. Thankfully their town was small and many of the dead had wandered off into the desert. But they found no one, not a single soul alive other than themselves. Most people had fled during the initial outbreak. Those left behind had soon been infected.
After a few weeks of searching, the Fallons gave up looking and began preparing to leave town themselves. Each night they’d pour over maps, read about dessert survival, and clean their guns and rifles. Then they’d listen to the radio and hope someone, anyone was out there gathering up survivors.
They had listened to radio stations in Phoenix for the first few weeks, then one by one they went off the air for good. If the weather was good, they sometimes could pick something up from Albuquerque but it was rare and they hadn’t been able to hear anything for the last week before they left. But they were getting something from Burbank, California. It was faint and sporadic, but as they had moved west, it was getting a little stronger and every few days they would pick up a smattering of garbled talk deep in the static of their little solar powered receiver.
“Ain’t nothing back there, day-o, I can tell you that,” James said, “The Great Wreck was burning day and night. The highways clogged with the living and dead in one big old orgy, traffic jams blocking every major highway out. It was chaos and burning and death,” he said wistfully as though leaving LA might have been a mistake, “We got out by piss blind luck. There’s no Burbank, no walled in safe haven, nothing but a sea of dead. I guess they’d be glad to see you seeing as though there can’t be anyone else left alive there,” he said.
The Fallons said nothing.
“Where are you guys headed?” Kalie asked.
Before I could tell them anywhere but Los Angeles, James jumped in, “Albuquerque,” he said, “Yeah, we heard them on the radio too and thought we’d head there, you know. Live way from everything else.”
He was lying of course. We had no radio and hadn’t even heard of Albuquerque until we met the Fallons.
“We’ll you folks sure have a long way to go,” Alicia said.
“What about Phoenix?” I asked.
“Not as bad the Los Angeles, sounds like, but still bad,” Mr. Fallon said, “We stayed out of the downtown area knowing that it would be packed with the dead. I’d recommend you do the same. There’s no government, no hold outs, no havens, and no Green Zones. Just a burned out graveyard. There is a belt route you can take that will keep you clear of that mess. After that, who knows? Tucson is probable gone and after that it’s just desert until you hit Las Cruces in New Mexico. I can’t imagine it’s any different there.”
“Well, if you’re really going to try to make it to Burbank,” I said, “I’d head up north into a place called the Mojave Desert, then take I-14 south. That way you’ll avoid the west half of the LA basin and come into Burbank from the north. The desert seems to disagree with the dead so maybe you’ll be able to avoid them better.”
“What do you know, Captain Pike?” James spat at me, “Could be more dead to the north. You don’t know nothing. Just trying to impress the girly girlies here.”
An uncomfortable silence settled over the group until Mr. Fallon cleared his throat and said, “Well, we’ll keep that in mind Thomas. In the meantime, I’ll take first watch so the rest of you can get some sleep.”
“Yeah, sleep. I’m going down into the barracks,” James said and huffed his way out the door.”
I sat there looking at my hands, then said, “I think I’m going up on the roof,” and made my way to the ladder and room hatch that lead to the top of the observation tower.
As I climbed up, I could hear Mr. Fallon whisper, “Lock the door after I’m gone. That James is a few eggs short of a dozen and what he’s got left are completely scrambled.”
“We will, Dad,” I heard Alicia reply as I closed the hatch.
Up here on the roof I could see for miles in every direction. I rolled out my sleeping back and laid out a pistol, my rifle, and a hand axe, then stripped down to my shorts. It was still blazing hot even as the sun approached the horizon and the sweat was pouring off of me. I sat near the edge of the roof and scanned the surrounding area with my binoculars and was relieved to see nothing moving in any direction. I heard Mr. Fallon climb up on a nearby roof and take up watch and the girls giggling below me followed by the heavy click of a bolt locking the door to the conference room.
With Mr. Fallon watching over us, the girls safely sealed in below, and James locked away in the barracks, I felt safe for the first time since the whole shit storm had taken off. I laid my head down on top of my pack and watched the stars come out one by one as I drifted off to sleep.
I woke sometime after midnight and sat up. Mr. Fallon had gone to bed and I could see Alicia sitting on to roof scanning the surrounding area. Far to the west, I could see a bright glow on the horizon. It must be Phoenix. I didn’t think the power was still on so it must have been burning. I looked back west and saw the horizon was glowing there too. Seems Los Angeles was still burning as well. But above me, the stars were out in force. I had grown up in Los Angeles and even on the darkest night you could only see a few of the brightest stars. Here, out in the middle of the Sonora desert, the stars were crowded so close together it looked like a glowing river arched across the sky.
The temperature had dropped considerably and I shivered as I lay back in my sleeping bag. I couldn’t get my head wrapped around the desert. In the morning, I’d find a fine scrim of frost across my gear and be freezing my ass off as I got dressed, then be roasting to death by ten as the sun turned the desert into a furnace and try its damnedest to bake me to death. But for now it was just cool enough that I could bury myself deep in my sleeping bag and watch the stars.
I heard the creak and scrape of someone openin
g up the trapdoor in the roof. I didn’t think it was James coming up here or one of the dead but I slipped my hand over the grip of my pistol all the same.
“Thomas?” I heard a female voice whisper, “It’s me, Kailee. Are you awake?” she said as she climbed up on the roof and quietly closed the hatch.
“Hi Kailee. I’m awake,” I replied.
She stood fully upright and stretched her arms into the night sky, “Oh my God it’s beautiful up here,” she whispered. She was wearing a white tank top, a pair of cargo shorts, and her hiking boots. Between the light of the stars and the glow on the horizon, I could see perfectly in the dark.
“And secure. Nothing can get to us,” I said.
I could see her silhouette against the stars and could see her head turn towards me, “You’ve been out in the middle of this a long time, haven’t you?” she said and walked over to where I was laying.
“Almost since the start,” I replied realizing for the first time that I was clad only in my boxers. At least I was under the covers of the sleeping bag. I thought about it a minute, then said, “Almost a year, I guess. My parents were killed within the first few weeks. I couldn’t stay in our house, so a friend of mine, Pix, and I hit the streets trying to find any place that was safe. We ran a lot, picked up James, then Pix was killed, and we decided to get out of LA,” I said in a rush.
Kailee had brought a pillow with her and set it next to me, then sat down on it, “We’ve only been on the road for about three weeks. Are you really heading towards Albuquerque?”
The Great Wreck Page 17
