The Great Wreck

by Stewart, Jack

  It was time to go, I thought. Get fucking moving! Now! my mind screamed. Right fucking now! It’s time to go now! If fact, it was past time to go and I needed to get moving but I was still rooted to the ground. Behind me I could hear the steps of the dead approaching. Only my absolute stillness had kept them from seeing me. It wouldn’t last much longer though and still I couldn’t seem to move. My brain was screaming, adrenaline was pouring into my body, but a pure, terrifying panic had frozen me to the spot. Now I know what it feels like to be a dear about to be hit by a truck, I thought when I caught the smell of a dead walker very close to me.

  Then I heard a voice from behind me say, “Hey?” The voice was dry and scratchy like that from a man about to die of thirst or from the throat of a mummy, or the voice of…

  I finally got my head to move and looked back over my shoulder. A clearly dead man stood near the trunk of the car that had kept me mostly hidden from the migrating dead. He wore a pair of tattered blue jeans, a pair of cowboy boots that were falling apart, and a button up shirt that was tore open showing that when he had died, the dead had taken most of his abdomen. On his head was perched a Diamondbacks baseball cap. I could see his spine and the remnants of his back muscles but his abdominal cavity was mostly empty and he was clearly talking to me.

  Talking dead? I had clearly lost my mind.

  How did he support his upper torso? I thought while the panic and madness threatened to engulf me, “Hey, bu…bu…buddy?” he said again. His pale eyes looked at me as though he was concerned. Maybe wondering what a young kid was doing out on my own in the middle of the desert.

  “Yes?” I whispered.

  “Better…get…a..,” he started, then paused and looked around and moved his hand in the general direction of the dead crowds, “Get a move on,” he said. Then he dropped his hand and started walking north again.

  What. The. Fuck?

  I didn’t care.

  With that thought, the paralysis broke and I got moving. I pushed off and began peddling, gaining speed quickly on my significantly lighter bike. I whizzed by a few dead. They looked up at me but I was already flying down the road so they returned to their walk and let me be. This became harder and harder as the number of dead increased and I spent more time weaving in and out of the bodies. It was only a matter of time before one of the less decayed walkers…

  “Hopug!” I head one of they cry out off to my right, “Unnnn buuunn!”

  At least that’s what it sounded like. That got everyone’s attention and hundreds of dead looked up from the ground and spotted me zipping along in their midst. The nearby dead picked up the first one’s yell and the sound spread thought the crowds until the air was filled with the dead crying out and changing their direction to zero in on me.

  They started off as a slow shuffle but increased to a trot, then a jog, and after a few seconds, a good run. I was still moving along far faster than they were so if I kept my head on and focused I wouldn’t run into one. If I crashed into one at the speed I was moving, it would be all over. I’d fly off the bike and land right smack dab in the middle of the masses and they’d finish me off in no time. So I had to stay focused.

  I was able to stay focused for almost thirty seconds when I heard the scream of a sprinter somewhere in the crowds around me. That was followed by two or three more screams of other sprinters. Those screams, so loud and close by jolted me and I jerked the handle bars to the left almost colliding with a dead woman holding a purse. I wobbled dangerously close to her nearly dumping the bike in an effort not to collide with the woman. I managed to regain my balance and started pouring on the speed.

  I couldn’t see the sprinters amongst the dead but I knew they’d find me soon enough. “Soon enough” was exactly ten seconds after that thought. I caught a glimpse of the first one in the left handlebar mirror. The sprinter looked as fresh as they day she had died and was knocking over the less vigorous dead trying to reach me. There we so many of them racing along behind me that it was having a difficult time breaking a path towards me. I laughed like a maniac thinking that for the second time today, the dead were actually saving my life.

  I peddled faster and broke free of the first wave of dead. I could see that I was leaving the sprinter behind when the second one broke loose from the crowds to my right. This one wasn’t in as good a shape as the first and couldn’t work up a good sprint due to most of its left leg having been devoured sometime in the past. Don’t let that fool you, though. The thing was still burning up the road trying to get me. I pushed harder and soon left it behind. I glanced back in my mirror and could see the dead had now clogged the highway and more were heading my way. The sound of them yelling and moaning at me caught the attention of the dead up ahead and I could see them putting on the speed to try to cut me off.

  At some point the desert on each side of me became the town of Deming and every dead person was coming out to see what all the fuss was about. Of course, if your dead, you already know what the fuss is about: the living.

  I flew through the town of burnt out buildings, abandoned cars and trucks littering the road making it an insane obstacle course where one wrong move would send me spilling to the asphalt. Breaking my neck and killing me if I was lucky. Only breaking my leg or an arm if I wasn’t.

  The dead were pouring out of the buildings all along the highway and I knew it wouldn’t be long before more sprinters joined into the fun. I had already forgotten about the third sprinter scream I had heard just outside of Deming. The sprinter reminded me that it was still there with another scream, this time not only very close, but close enough to see. I saw her break free from the crowd and zero in on me in my rear view mirror.

  My legs were already starting to shake with the exertion but I pushed harder trying to put more distance between me and it. I began to hear more screams from the surrounding town and wondered how I was ever going to make it out of this. How far would I need to get from the sprinters before they gave up? What if they were more dead on the other side of Deming marching north? How long could I keep up this pace?

  I don’t know when I passed out of Deming and back into the desert. I was focused on moving my legs up and down pushing the peddles as hard as I could. I was covered in sweat, my legs were burning and shaking, and my mouth and throat were bone dry from the hot, dry air that was tearing in and out of my lungs with each breath. When I began to see little black spots in front of my eyes I started thinking about how quickly I could unholster my pistol, put it into my mouth, and pull the trigger.

  I looked behind me and saw that I had put enough distance between me and the dead who were racing after me that I thought I had enough time to pull that off. That gave me a small sense of relief that I could put a bullet in my head before being eaten alive. Lucky me.

  That was when the road disappeared out from beneath me. One second I was tearing down the road with the dead hot on my heals, the next I was flying over where a bridge should have been but had apparently been washed out sometime after the event started. I caught a glimpse of the remains of the bridge fifty feet below me, the other side of the wash, and the rubble strewn arroyo that was about to become my grave.

  The rims of my bike crumpled as I hit the slope of the arroyo and I found myself flying over the hand bars. For a second I was in freefall. As I spilled over I saw the sky and ground change places, then I smashed into the ground and began tumbling in an avalanche of dirt and rocks. The dead were somewhere behind and above me. They wouldn’t care about the washed out bridge, they’d just spill over the side and tumble down until they landed on top of my broken and battered body and begin to feed. I wouldn’t even get a chance to end it myself since my arms were most likely to be broken and I was likely to be unconscious. Maybe the fall would kill me?

  I hit a boulder with such speed that I flipped over it, felt something crack on my right side, and then slipped over the edge of a twenty foot vertical drop. I dropped like a stone and smashed into the sandy floor of the arroyo f
inally coming to a rest as a smattering of stones and dirt poured over me. I could see far above me the edge of the highway where the bridge had washed out. I expected to see the dead pouring over the edge and following me down to the bottom of the canyon. I did see a few tops of dead heads peek over the side but by then the unconsciousness was swelling up and taking me down. My last thought before the feeding began was that maybe I’d be dead before they got here.

  * * *

  I woke up sometime later deep in the shadow of the arroyo. I expected the feel the searing pain of many dead people biting into me, see them pulling apart my stomach and spreading my intestines across the dry sand. But no pain came. Maybe they had already eaten me and moved on? Maybe I was like that dead guy who still had some brain functions left and I’d soon join the dead heading north.

  I waited for something, anything to happen and when it didn’t, I gingerly reached down expecting to find a gaping hole in my stomach or feel my face gone, or find my arms and legs were missing. But my hands found that my stomach was whole, my face was still there, and I could see all my limbs were still present and accounted for.

  I seemed to be alive. Whoopee for me. I looked up and down the gully where I lay and could see no dead. I could see the remains of my bike now smashed and crumpled from our trip down the edge of the gully. But no dead. If they had fallen down here with me, there would have been at least a few nearby. But there was not a one. I looked up and saw that there were none standing at the edge of the collapsed bridge either.

  I began inspecting my body moving first my arms. They seemed to be OK but sore from riding so hard and for so long as well as the from the fall but I didn’t see any bones protruding from them and I could open and close my hands. Good enough.

  I gingerly sat up and felt a searing pain on my right side and could feel bruises all over my back where I had landed on my backpack. I pulled up my shirt and could see a huge bruise where I had hit the boulder on my way down. It extended all the way around my side and back. I took a deep breath expecting to feel the sharp pain of a brooked rib but only felt a dull ache so maybe nothing was broken after all.

  Then I looked at my legs expecting to see them twisted into new and painful shapes but they appeared to be OK too and after running may hands down each one of them, I gingerly got to my feet.

  I was sore, beaten, and bruised but I was alive. Yay, me.

  I didn’t feel the elation that I’ve heard survivors talk about after surviving a near death experience. Maybe it was because I still had to walk a few hundred miles more to get to Sandia and there was still a world of dead between here and there. Death meant I was finished and could rest for a while, maybe for eternity. At this point I guess it really didn’t matter. I was alive and I wasn’t spending the night at the bottom of an arroyo, so I adjusted my pack and began looking for way out.

  I had to walked nearly a mile to the south where the remains of the bridge had been washed out by a mammoth flash flood. I was able to climb up the rubble all the way to the eastern edge of the arroyo.

  I stood up at the edge and looked east. Nothing. As far as I could see, there was not a single dead person walking. To the west, I could just make out the town of what had to be Deming. In my panic to outrun the hordes of dead, I must have traveled a lot farther that I had realized.

  I turned and started walking east only to see a highway sign an hour later. “Welcome to Sunny! Las Cruces” the vast billboard stated. Really. Just like that with the exclamation mark right after “sunny.” As though any visitor from out of town might miss the roasting heat and intense sunlight hammering down on their heads every second of every moment from sun up to sun down. I walked for another hour until I came across a small gas station with the security gates intact. I dragged myself inside, made sure that the place was empty and rolled down the gate. I pulled an industrial lock from may pack and locked the gate tight, unrolled my bag and dropped on top of it.

  I had made it. Las Cruces, the last town I’d go through heading east. I’d catch I-25 and start heading north. For weeks I had been walking east but no more. I actually felt pretty good about that. Heading north meant moving to cooler climates and out of the furnace that was the Sonora desert. And I’d be there in just a few weeks.

  I was wrong about most of these thoughts. It would turn out I had a little farther east to get to Las Cruces, the burning dessert I had hoped to escape would stretch all the way up to Albuquerque, and it would take me over a month to get there.

  In the morning I woke up and filled my supplies from the nearly empty shelves of the gas station, then unlocked and rolled the gate up after scanning the surrounding streets for the dead. Again it was strangely quiet and empty but I wasn’t going to sit around and wonder why. I headed for the highway just as the sun broke over the horizon. The cars and wrecks were beginning to clog up the highway again and I had to weave around their burnt out hulks, checking frequently for trapped dead hiding in amongst the wrecks so I wasn’t making very good time. I broke through a four car pileup and could see the highway passing through the center of the city.

  Straight ahead I saw a tanker truck and on top of it I saw something glinting in the early morning sunlight. Instinctively I ducked just as the windshield next to me shattered with the impact of a bullet followed a fraction of a second later by the sound of a rifle going off.

  I sat there behind a Honda civic on four flat tires and felt my heart sink. I didn’t even have to wonder who might be shooting at me. It was James. Somehow he had caught up and found me and had decided the best way to say hello was to take a few shots at my head as I walked down the highway. I don’t know how he did it. It really didn’t matter. Somehow I knew eventually James would find me and we’d start our co-dependent relationship up again.

  But I had learned a thing or two as I made my way across the dessert. I set my pack down and unstrapped my rifle. I made sure I had the scope adjusted so the sunlight wouldn’t reflect off of it. I screwed the silencer on so that I wouldn’t attract any dead nearby, then I slowly peered over the truck of the car I was hiding behind. I spotted the tanker and could see a figure laying down on the top behind one of the hatches that had been opened up. I slide my rifle into the butt of my shoulder and peered through the scope. James, larger than life, popped into my line of sight. He had a rifle similar to mine with a small scope and no silencer. He was scanning the area around me but had apparently lost sight of me when I dived behind the pileup that hide me from his view.

  I had his forehead right in my crosshairs. I could squeeze the trigger and send that bastard right into the next life. But I didn’t. How many people would suffer for my inability to shoot a man down in cold blood. I didn’t know but that question would haunt me for a very long time.

  So instead I aimed at the metal tank hatch he was hiding behind and fired. The bulleted pranged off of the hatch so close to James’s head that for a second I thought I’d killed him anyways. James jerked back but not before the hatch slammed down on top of his head. He pushed the metal plate off of him screaming and cursing as he rolled off the left of the tanker and spilled down onto the highway. I carefully aimed again and put a bullet into his back pack. I could see the poof of dust and the bullet tore through the fabric. James scrambled out of my rifle sight. I think he might have decided to kill me right there as he huddled behind that tanker or maybe he had already decided that all along and was just waiting for the right time.

  Apparently, it was not right at that moment since a second later I saw his arm pop out from behind the cab of the truck holding a filthy white tee shirt that he waved frantically up and down. From the quarter mile or so away, I could hear his manic laugh as he yelled, “Whoo-hooo! Haaayooo mother fucker! Jonnie put your gun away!”

  I stood up from behind the wreck and kept my rifle up just the same in case James wanted a little payback. As I approached the tanker he poked his head out from behind the cab. James looked so bad, I actually stopped and thought for a moment that he was d
ead. But even though some of the dead were strange they didn’t take up guns and start shooting at people, so I decided he just looked like shit.

  “You done shooting at me, fuck-chunk?” he said.

  “You started it. Is shooting at people your version of tag or something?”

  “Oh, well aren’t we funny, Mr. Cock-a-Waffle,” he said as he stood up and ineffectively brushed the dirt and grime from his jeans, “Looks like you developed a sense of humor after all since we parted.”

  Then his gaze drifted off to the south and he said almost to himself, “Do you know how many times I could have killed you? Waltzing down the highway looking this way and that. What the fuck were you doing anyway? Playing James Bond?”

  “Looking for dead in the cars. What do you think?”

  “I think you moved slower than a constipated dog taking a shit or maybe a bunch of senile old fuckers with their walkers hobbling across the dessert. Were you on fucking vacation? Saint Stephens on a stick, you took forever!”

  “I was being cautious after you left me,” I said, “With the door to the room open and the dead pouring in to say hello. Thanks for that.”

  “You needed a lesson in survival, penis monkey. And I had some things to take care of. You’d have been a useless ball pooper and just got in the way, so I gave you a little alone time.”

  “I thought you might have headed west again, back to Los Angeles. What were you doing anyways? Checking out property values? Thinking on settling down in the Phoenix area? Maybe take another shit at Chase Stadium.”

  “I needed to take care of some stuff.”

  “What kind of stuff, huh? What in this big fucking world could you have needed to take care of? Visiting old friends? Stopping by to visit the parents? Paying some old bills? What James? What the fuck did you need to take care of you raging cock sucker?!”