“Once you ditch him, you’ll come back?” Marti said and lifted her leg up and reached down between her legs to position the head of my dick.
“I don’t know how far north we’ll be when I lose him. I might have to go to Sandia first,” I said quickly losing my ability to talk and think as my head slipped into her. She closed her legs tightly and arched her back driving me deep into her,
She moaned quietly and said, “This is spoon sex,” and started sliding her hips back and forth. It was awkward and my ass kept hitting the wall next to the bed but the sensation was incredible. I could feel another sharp orgasm coming on and grabbed her hip with my free arm and slammed my hips against hers. Finally, I rolled on top of her forcing her onto her stomach with me on top to get better traction. She arched her hips up against me and I plowed into her, ravaged her, and finally blew a tight, hard orgasm but kept going until she started to shake and finally came herself.
I rolled off of her again and said, “I think I just had a stroke.”
Marti laughed and rolled towards me, “You may have been stroked, but I think you are too young to have a stroke,” she said running her finger down my chest, “I’m going to be limping tomorrow and everyone is going to know why.”
“I don’t think my penis has any skin left on it,” I said.
“You haven’t been doing it right, if you have any skin left after fucking,” she said.
We laughed quietly and lay together for a bit longer, then Marti got up and got dressed. She leaned over and kissed me softly and said, “If you can’t make it back to us, go to Sandia. We’ll meet there after they come and get us.”
“I will,” I said and kissed her back. She slipped out the door. I fell into a dead sleep after Marti left only to be awaken two hours later by a frantic pounding on the door.
“Thomas! Thomas wake up!” Birch yelled. The door burst open as all the lights in the building came on, “Get your gear and head down to the garage! We’ve got to go!”
“What happened?” I said as I scrambled into my cloths knowing that the dead had somehow breached the compound walls.
“Those fucking dead from the south started hauling ass sometime after midnight. They are already pushing up against the south wall.”
Holy fuck! I finished pulling on my cloths, then grabbed my gear. I pulled on my two pistols. Checked their rounds were chambers and the safety was on, and did the same for my rifle, then made my way to the second floor conference room. Everyone was there crammed around the monitors looking at the dead jammed up against the south wall. I could see the wall moving back and forth as the dead pushed against it and knew it wouldn’t last more than an hour at best.
Doc was at the front of the group and said, “OK folks, grab what you need and head to the garage and into the vans. Birch, head to the generator room and get ready to flip the switch over to power the east gate when everyone is in. Let’s move.”
Marti had move up beside me as Doc was talking and took my hand, “You can follow me,” she said as we made our way to her room. She ducked inside and came out with a small pack and her weapons and we went back to the conference room where Doc and Birch who were talking amongst themselves looked up at me.
“Thomas,” Doc said looking at me, “Your friend is still locked up in the basement.”
I looked back and forth between Birch and Doc, “Are you asking me if we should leave him?”
Birch nodded, “The dead can’t get into the cells and he could hold out for a few days, maybe longer until we get back.”
“If we come back,” I said, “If we can’t get back, eventually he’ll run out of food, maybe water.”
Doc and Birch nodded then Doc spoke, “It’s your call, son.”
The urge to leave James was so strong, to be free of him. But I didn’t know if I could live with myself knowing I had left him there to slowly starve and likely go completely insane,
“Keys?” I asked.
Birch nodded and handed me a set of keys, “We’ll be leaving in five minutes, so you have to hurry, Thomas.”
“I can go with you,” Marti said. I should have accepted her offer. She knew the way better than I did but I figured I could follow the signs to the holding cells and get back up to the garage without much problem.
I was also worried that James might take advantage of the chaos to do to Marti what he had done to Pix, so I said, “I can get him. He can either come with us or take off on his own from here. I’ll leave it to him but as soon as we are safe, be ready for him to…well…be ready for anything.”
I headed to the stairwell and made my way to the basement. In the holding cell, James was already up and standing at the door to the cell, “If it isn’t the A #1 star student, Mr. Dudley Do Right, top of the class, teacher’s pet.”
I grabbed his gear off the wall and set it down just out of reach of James, “The dead have been migrating north again are breaking through the south wall,” I stated.
“Well, well, well. Looks like it’s going to be a hot time in the old town tonight,” he said doing a small jig.
“The others want to leave you here in this cage.”
“I see,” James said stopping in mid jig and freezing stock still, all the mad look of joy and glee leaving his face. He studied me carefully, realizing that, for the first time, I had the power over his life, “You gonna let me out then?”
“I have three choices, James,” I said, “I can walk away after hawking a huge fucking goober in your face and sleep well every night knowing you rotted away in this very cell. I might even come down every few years to take a look at your desiccated body just to see for myself that you were really and truly dead. It would be like a date,” I said feeling the crazy sweep up out of nowhere and take over my mouth.
“You don’t want to do that partner,” James said with a shit eating grin, “Think of all we’ve been through together!”
“Maybe you don’t want me to think too hard about what we’ve been through together,” I replied, “Second. I could leave the keys and your gear just out of your arm’s reach. Eventually you’d figure out how to get the keys and you could let yourself out. We’d be long gone but the dead would be packed wall to wall in here so that’s just another way of letting you die,”
“No, sir,” James said in his most respectful tone, “I don’t care for that option.”
“Third, I let you out and give you your gear, and you come with us. You help us fight off the dead until we get to the safe hose. There you behave until you and I can head north to Sandia, right?”
“Yes, sir! You and me! Sandia here we come!”
I knew he was lying. James didn’t want to go to Sandia or any other place that could lock him up or keep him from playing in the land of the dead, “Remember this James. It all the fighting and chaos that is coming, a stray bullet might find the back of my head,” I said stepping up to the bars and putting my face between them. James could have grabbed me right there and took the keys from me, but instead he stepped back away from the insanity radiating off of me, “It would be a blessing. I’d welcome it, I’d almost beg for it. But the bullets will be flying both ways, old friend, and I’d make sure you are only wounded and the dead find you before you bled out. So what’s it going to be?”
“I chose door number three!” jumping up and down while clapping his hands, “I’ll be a good little catholic school boy with your little friends, hang out for a day or two, then off to Sandia! Yippee! Let’s go! Right now!”
I opened the door to his cell expecting him to spring on me but James just slapped me on the back as he walked past and grabbed his guns. He geared up and looked at me, “Which way Columbus?”
“This way…” I started and the lights went out.
* * *
James and I stood in complete darkness, “Well fuck me,” James said.
I guess I had taken more than five minutes and the others had switched the generator over to open the east gate.
Fuck.
&nb
sp; We stood there for a few seconds waiting for our eyes to adjust to the complete and total darkness but it wasn’t happening. There was absolutely no light for my eyes to pick up down here in the holding cell basement. I could hear the muffled sounds of the dead moaning and yelling and the grinding of the south wall as it slowly gave way.
“James, give me your hand,” I said reaching out to him.
“What are you, a homo?” he said but gave me his heavily calloused hand.
“Shut up and follow me,” I said and tried to remember where the door was. I found it and moved as quickly as I could running my free hand along the wall. This hallway led to the stairwell where I hoped the emergency lights would be on. The stairs should also lead us up to the parking garage.
I bumped into a door and pulled it open. No lights shown through and I quickly determined it was an office, “Fuck!”
“Where to next Sacagawea?” James asked calmly from behind me.
“Back the other way!” I said feeling the minutes slipping quickly by. We moved quickly down the way we had come as I ran my hands along the opposite wall. I thought we’d end up back in the holding area as panic began to swell up around me when my hand touched a doorframe, “Turn right!” I said tugging James along behind me. James followed along as docile as a lamb to the slaughter. I actually heard him giggle. This hallway should lead to the stairs up and out of the basement. Then it was a right hand turn to the parking garage. I opened another door and…bump right into another desk.
We were fucked.
* * *
“What’s taking him so long?” Birch asked as the others crammed into two shuttles that looked like something out of The Road Warrior. Each van had steel plates welded over all the windows with view slots cut in them just big enough to peer through and shoot out of yet small enough to kept groping hands out. On top, Birch had cut two openings in each van and mounted a .50 machine gun on top. That allowed a gunner to pop out of the roof and clear away any dead that might have gotten onto the sides of the shuttle. On the front and back of each shuttle, Birch had also welded large snow plows to push the dead out of the way of the vehicle. When the Doc saw them, he laughed and said, “Birch, you fixing on needing to push any cattle out of the way?” referring to the “cattle catchers” mounted on the front of older trains.
“The dead,” Birch said without a smile, “I plan on plowing through the dead, so you might call it a dead catcher.”
Doc stopped laughing and had said, “If we need plows to get through that many dead, we are all good and truly fucked.”
“Amen, Doc,” Birch had replied.
Birch had taken one last look at the monitors that showed the tens of thousands of dead pushing up against the south wall and determined that they were good and truly fucked. But he was determined to see that every last one of the people climbing in the shuttles would survive. If he couldn’t manage that, he’d make sure they at least had a painless death.
Unbeknownst to the others, he had rigged several hundred pounds of explosive under each shuttle. If they got into trouble, say the dead managed to get inside or the shuttle ran off the road and got stuck, he could blow either one or both from a little switch he had installed on the dashboard.
He hoped it didn’t come to that. He also hopped he would not have to leave Thomas behind but he could see out of the ground floor of the parking garage past the buildings of the government center and to the south gate. He could see the dead’s arms and legs sticking through places where the gate was breaking free. He could see that the gate was not going to hold much longer.
“Doc?” he asked looking at their leader.
Doc just nodded and Birch jogged over to a jury rigged control planed switching the power from the building to the east gate. The lights in the garage died immediately. Birch hit another button and the east gate began to slowly open up. On the other side, Birch and his crew had spent months creating a miles long corridor of chain link fence as free as possible of cars and other obstructions. There wasn’t anything they could do about the heavy trucks, tanks, busses, and other vehicles that were too heavy for them to move so they left them in place. This created an escape route that looked a little like a car obstacle course and in the early darkness of the morning, it’d be worse. But if they moved slowly, they’d be OK. They’d be able to clear the Green Zone and make it out the east to the warehouse without attracting the attention of the masses of dead swarming up from the south. That is, if they got out of here in time. If that gate came down and they were spotted by the dead, all bets were off.
“Birch!” Marti yelled as she clawed her way out the first shuttle, “What the fuck!? The emergency lights are out in the basement and Thomas won’t be able to see anything!
Birch signed. He knew Marti had taken a liking to Thomas, but he had to think of all the others. And this would solve the problem of what to do with the crazy fuck they had locked up down there.
“Birch!” she screamed again, then turned on Doc, “Doc! We can’t leave him!”
“We’ll give him just a few more minutes,” Doc said, “But then we have to go Marti or we’ll all die.”
“He won’t make it down there without any light,” she said grabbing a flashlight from the shuttle and sprinting towards the door.
Doc yelled after her, “Hurry, Marti! The gate is going to go any minute!” He looked at the gate and wondered if it might fail any second. But he’d wait as long as he could for Marti.
Doc felt Birch tug at his sleeve and point toward the gate, “Doc, tell me I am hallucinating. Tell me that the fear has addled my brain and I am not seeing that,” Birch said as he pointed towards the south wall.
Doc peered through the darkness and could see the south gate bulging inwards and their make shift support of cars beginning to fail. Then he saw what Birch was pointing at: the heads and arms of the dead poking over the top of the gate. And the wall to either side of the gate, “I think we are in a world of shit, old friend. I think that not only is that gate going to come down, but the whole south wall as well.”
* * *
James and I stood in the pitch black darkness. We’d tried every hall I could find for nothing. Each door lead to an office.
We were dead.
“Well, we could go back to the cells and lock ourselves in. Hope the dead don’t find us,” James said. For him to suggest that we go back into the cells let me know just how dead we were. I couldn’t see any better solution and by now the others had to have left.
We slid our hands along the wall making our way back to where we hoped the cells were. My hand came across the metal handle of a crash bar and I pushed it and opened the door to find the dim red glow of the emergency exit sign, “Thank God!” I said and James let out a whoop.
We raced up the stairs in the dull, red light to the first floor. I spotted a sign that pointed towards the parking garage. We sprinted down the hallway towards the garage. The others may be gone but James and I could find a spot on top of one of the buildings and hunker down until the dead passed.
We turned right around a corner and nearly smashed into Marti, “Thomas!”
“Marti! You didn’t leave!” I said as we hugged each other.
“We were about too! The whole south gate is coming down! We need to run!”
We ran.
We bolted down the long hallway turning left and right so often I lost track of where we were. The emergency lights were almost all out. It was a stone cold miracle that there were any on in the stairwell. Without Marti and her flashlight we would have never made it. We followed her down another long stretch of dark hallway, her flashlight bobbing up and down along the walls and floor and burst out into the parking garage.
“My God!” Birch yelled, “The wall’s coming down! Everyone in! James up in the front shuttle and take the roof gun. Marti and Thomas, into the second shuttle and get your rifles out the back ports!”
We jumped into the second van as James jumped in the first and quickly made our
way to the back. I pulled my rifle out, checked the ammunition clip and looked out the back port of the shuttle. Marti did the same as we knelt next to each other and watched out the back.
I could see that the gate was going to fail. I could also see that even if the gate hadn’t failed, the waves of dead would have made it in anyways as the mounting pressure slowly pushed the dead higher and higher until they would eventually spill over the top.
I watched the first of the dead tumble over the sagging gate and land inside the green zone. He stood up and looked around as if surprise that he’d had actually made it in. In any horror movie this might have been funny, a moment of comic relief but the moment was short lived as the hundreds of dead behind him came pouring over the top of the gate.
This lasted for a few seconds as the south gate buckled and finally collapsed with thousands of dead tumbling into the compound. The walls to the left and right gave a few seconds after the gate did and now the whole southern perimeter of the compound was exposed to the dead outside. They rushed in with the force of a flood as the tens of thousands behind them pushed forward. It would only be a matter of seconds before they spotted the two idling vans. And as soon as the first van pulled forward, the dead would lock on and the chase would begin.
I heard the first shuttle drop into gear and begin to slowly move forward. A second later, our shuttle lurched ahead and the two vehicles began to slowly make their way out of the parking garage. Birch must have hopped that by moving slowly, we wouldn’t attract the attention of the dead.
He was wrong.
The hundreds of dead at the leading edge of the wave spotted us and began to moan and shuffle towards us. A second later I heard the first scream of a sprinter, then another, followed by dozens more. After that I lost track. There must have been thousands of sprinters mixed in among all those walkers. Within seconds they had made their way to the front of the masses and were tearing a path towards us.
Doc sat up front of the first shuttle with Harriet at the wheel, “OK, Harriet, slow and easy. Just like we practiced.”
The Great Wreck Page 28
