Haven (Book 1): Journey

by Switzer, Brian M.

  “Guns,” Jiri asked, “Or keep it quiet?”

  “It’s not a secret we’re here. Fuck it- use the guns.”

  Tess raced back up the highway and Andro herded the women and girls into a spot behind the Jeep. Jiri and Tara headed toward the creepers already moaning to the north and Will motioned Danny and Coy to head off with him in the other direction. Armed with M-16s, they hustled through the ditch and crossed a short, grassy easement, stopping when they came to a barbwire fence. The creepers were in a pasture on the fence’s other side.

  Erratic rifle fire exploded behind them as Jiri and Tara went to work.

  “We should have gone to the other side- there’s no fence over there,” Will said with a wry smile.

  The four creepers in front were twenty yards away, with the other pair trailing them by about the same distance.

  “Do we need to worry about them with this fence up?” Danny asked. “I don’t see how they’ll get through.”

  “Better safe than sorry. Coy, take the two in the back.”

  Will raised his rifle and aimed at the creeper on the far left- it was tall and skinny and naked from the waist down. At this distance a head shot was a breeze; he popped the creeper and the one next to it. Danny fired at the same time and dropped the other two. Coy’s shot was farther, so he took longer before he shot, but he put down the pair in the back a few seconds later.

  Danny beamed “Six bullets, six headshots. Shit, fellas, we should get paid for this.”

  “Not me,” said Coy. “I don’t want to lose my amateur status.

  Tara and Jiri were waiting back at the trucks when Will’s trio returned. “Tara, you and Andro go around and check on David, get me two more sets of eyes over there.”

  He spun on his heel, talking over his shoulder in a loud voice. “Come on- we’ve got to make a hole in this checkpoint.” He pursed his lips and ran a hand through his hair. Making a hole was going to be a bitch. The front end of the transport trucks extended out over the ditches on the sides of the road. Their rear ends were flush against the guard shack in the middle. The military hadn’t wanted anybody driving past this point. “Jiri, Justin- get the winch hooked up to the rear of this truck on the left. Pull the ass end out away from the shack. The rest of you guys come with me.”

  He opened the guard shack door just as David, Tara, and Andro came back from the other side of the checkpoint. Tara’s words froze everyone in place.

  “You’re not going to believe what’s over there!”

  Will’s balls shriveled up like two slugs on a hot stove. If they were blocked in front and a herd was coming at them from the rear, the only thing to do was leave the trucks and head off through the fields. “How many?” He demanded, steeling himself for the number.

  Tara squinted her eyes and pulled her head back, puzzled, then shook her head. “Not creepers. I mean, there’s a bunch over there but they’re way down by the lake.”

  It was Will’s turn to look puzzled. “Well, what then?”

  “More military equipment. There’s more of these trucks, two crashed helicopters, a bunch of Humvees, backhoes, and tractors... Will, there are tanks down there!”

  Will, nonplussed, shrugged his shoulders. “That’s interesting, Tara, but it’ll be a lot less interesting if we’re all creeper turds. Come on, we’re in a hurry.”

  He turned his attention back to the guard shack. It was eight feet across by ten feet deep, with an entryway in the back and glazed window panels on the sides. Its construction was simple- a three-foot panel made of concrete on the bottom, with a five-foot upper panel of thick metal sheeting on top.

  “Jesus,” Danny said in a pained voice. He gave the shack a half-hearted kick. “This fucker looks like it weighs more than the trucks do.”

  The winch on the Jeep made a loud, high-pitched whine and the rear end of southern-most truck vibrated. They were trying to pull the transport sideways, dragging the wheels against the pavement, rather than pulling it forward or backward. The transport’s back-end bucked and bounced, and ever-so-slowly an opening appeared between it and the guard shack.

  Will lined up his people alongside the shack and they tried to push the building in the opposite direction of the truck. In the space of a minute, the six of them pushing together moved it a few inches. Will gave it a hard shove and quit pushing. “Fuck this,” he said, breathing hard. One by one the rest quit pushing and either leaned against the shack or bent over with their hands on their knees, panting.

  The winch pulled the truck another inch and Will looked at the size of the gap they’d created- it wasn’t nearly big enough to drive the caravan through. “Let’s go”, he said in a strained voice. “We’re running out of time.”

  “What if we pushed up at the top and shoved it over?” Danny said.

  “What good would that do?”

  Danny shrugged. “Maybe as it fell, its own weight would pull it further that way.”

  Will blew out a breath and nodded. “It’s worth a try, I guess.”

  They reassembled against the side of the shack and pushed again, this time directing their effort at the top of the wall. With effort, they could rock it a bit and moved it a few more inches. Will heard the sound of tennis shoes slapping the asphalt over the grunts of effort and the whine of the winch’s motor. Tess was hurrying back to the checkpoint.

  He walked from the guard shack to their line of parked trucks and Tess ran to meet him. He looked her with admiration. She had just run a quarter-mile at a full-out sprint, twice, and she was barely breathing hard. He opened the back of the Tahoe, dug around for a bottle of water, and tossed to her.

  “Thanks.” She took a long pull on the bottle and wiped her mouth with her shirt sleeve. “They just started around the curve. They’re moving slow.”

  “How long will it take them to get here?”

  She thought for a moment. “I’d say six or seven minutes. Is there any chance that where the curve gets sharp, they’ll keep going straight instead of making the turn?”

  “I doubt it,” he said with a tight smile. “And the odds against it are too high to take a chance and see what happens. Good work, Tessie. Start getting these folks in the trucks.”

  Will looked at the opening between the truck and the guard shack. It was about two-and-a-half feet wide. He sped over to the Jeep, where Jiri and Justin ran the winch. “We’re out of time, fellas. You’ve got to pick it up. Crank that thing up three times faster.”

  “It’s rated for 9,000 pounds, Will,” Jiri yelled over the winch’s whine. He pointed at the olive-drab troop carrier. “This baby weighs about 15,000. If we go any faster, we risk burning up the engine or breaking the cable. How much time have we got?”

  “Five or six minutes. If we end up walking, I don’t want it to be on account of no doing everything we could to get through here. Crank it up.”

  Jiri gave him a thumbs-up and turned to Justin behind the wheel of the Jeep. He made a circular turn it up motion with his hand, then held up three fingers. Justin looked at him bug-eyed; Jiri nodded and held up three fingers again. Justin’s lips puckered, his head bobbed, and he bent over out of sight. The winch’s whine turned into an ear-aching squeal and the truck’s tires buckled harder as its rear end moved faster.

  There was nothing more Will could do, so he watched the road where it disappeared around the curve. A little further up the hill, the landscape on both sides of the road turned to scrub wood. Just past the woods, on the opposite side of the road, ran a long asphalt drive. With the trees empty of leaves he could the drive led up to a huge brick and stone house. It had a breezeway that connected the house to an equally enormous five-car garage. I’d love to scavenge that place, Will thought.

  Four more minutes passed, and for the first time, the gap in the barrier looked like it might be big enough to drive through. Will’s eyes picked up motion on the curve. He glanced in that direction and the hairs on the back of his neck stood up- the creeper vanguard was rounding the curve.
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  Even at this distance, there was something fundamentally wrong about the approaching mass of dead. Not even a man unfamiliar with the outbreak would confuse them for a crowd leaving a baseball stadium after the home team recorded the last out. A man who woke up from a coma having never seen nor heard of a creeper would look at that roiling mass and feel his balls shrink up into his belly. He’d shiver and break out in a cold sweat; his adrenalin would kick in and his mouth would fill with bitter spit. His body would tingle as his brain responded to two billion years of evolution and screamed one word to every nerve ending in his body: RUN! The heard was the epitome of wrong, of something that should not be.

  Will yelled to get Jiri’s attention; when he looked up, Will pointed to the east. The professor looked up the highway and grimaced. He and Justin detached the winch from the truck.

  “Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go!” Will cried. “Load up!” The few people not already in a truck scrambled to get in one until Will and Jiri were alone on the pavement. He looked back again; the horde of dead had advanced a quarter of the way down the hill.

  Jiri finished winding the winch’s cables; he snapped the hooks into place and stood beside Will. They watched the creepers in silence for a moment. Will turned to look at the gap they created in the barrier. “Do you think we’ll get the trucks through?”

  Jiri, eyes still on the roiling mass of dead staggering towards them, shrugged. “The Jeep will squirt right through. The Tahoe and the F-250? I don’t know, Will. Might have to tear the shit out of them and still abandon ship.”

  “Then we’ll roll the last three miles with everybody in the Jeep. It will be like one of those rafts coming up from Cuba in the old days- people hanging off the sides and clinging to the mast.” Will paused, a whisper of a smile on his lips as he imagined the Jeep bounding down the highway with his friends standing on the running boards and laying prone on the roof and hood.

  Jiri broke him out of his reverie. “It looks like we’ve got about two minutes, boss.”

  “All right.” They clasped hands for a moment, then Jiri hustled to the Cherokee.

  Will stopped to talk to Coy in the Tahoe on the way to his truck. “It’ll be a tight fit, Son. It doesn’t matter if you tear up the truck- we’ll get another one. Just pound the sucker through there.”

  “That’s the same advice you gave me before my prom,” Coy said with a smile.

  Will laughed and shook his head. “I’ll go after the Jeep. If you get hung up, get your people out of there and on the other side of the checkpoint.” He dipped his head toward the dead. “It will stop most of them and slow the rest down. We’ll meet at the bottom of the hill, right by the turnoff, to make sure everybody’s together and see where we go next.”

  “See you there, Pop.”

  Will glanced at the creepers before he got in the truck. A minute away, they clumped up at the middle of the highway as their target grew near. It looked as if the Earth had cracked and the denizens of hell came tumbling forth. The mindless stares, the mouths stretched into rictuses, the disheveled hair, and torn clothing were bad. Then you focused on the dried blood, the shuffling gait, the mortal wounds, and the spittle-slicked chins, and that was worse. But as they get closer, you refocus and noticed particular horrors- a bloody and empty socket where an eye should be; another eye, this one with the root-end of a thumb sticking out of it; a creeper with its own guts swinging between its knees as it shuffles forward; a neck with a foot-long shard of glass embedded in it; a back cleaved open to where the white, knotty spine is visible. Your brain receives these images and rebels, refuses to compute. You are in mortal danger then. Will saw it often in the early days of the outbreak- men and women whose brains had locked, as frozen as a tilted pinball machine. They’d stand and stare until the dead took them to the ground, screaming.

  He got in the Ford as Jiri drove the Jeep through the gap. He looked to have a couple of inches clearance on each side. Coy was right behind in the Tahoe. The boy drove a tractor at six years old, and a hay truck at ten; by now he could back a trailer up a gnat’s ass in a hurricane. He hit the gap dead center and still produced a shrill, grating sound from both sides of the Tahoe rubbing against the barrier as it went through.

  Danny was next, behind the wheel of the Hendrickson’s Expedition. He could back a trailer up the same gnat’s ass as Coy, blindfolded and twice as fast. Sheet metal shrieked against concrete and the big SUV came to a near-stop. The back wheels screamed and smoked as they fought for traction; finally, they found it and the truck inched through.

  Will had the Ford lined up and ready to go. He took one last look in the rearview mirror; the front of the herd was less than twenty feet away. He goosed the accelerator and the truck shot forward, hitting the gap at fifteen miles an hour. Metal screeched against metal and he and his passengers flopped against their seat belts as his speed was cut to near-zero; his reaction was to push the pedal to the floor. Nothing happened for a three-count, and then the truck shot through the gap to the other side. The passengers whooped and hollered, and Will pounded the steering wheel with savage satisfaction.

  “Let’s get the fuck down this hill,” Will said with a laugh. He took Becky’s hand in his and sped towards the trucks waiting at the bottom. Behind him, the creepers piled up against the barrier as the few that made it through the gap stumbled mindlessly on.

  It was a lot to take in over a quarter-mile stretch of highway.

  The checkpoint had been effective- there was no civilian traffic on the other side. There was a smattering of military vehicles- a few more jeeps, another Humvee and some armored personnel carrier that Will didn’t know the name of. None of them contained soldiers, living or dead, and most were left in a scatter-shot fashion. Vehicles sat in both lanes and one of the Jeeps was parked on the shoulder. Some faced east, some west; the Humvee was parked crooked and across both lanes. The Jeep and the personnel carrier doors were left hanging open as if the soldiers left in a hurry and never returned. The only thing they had in common was faded, rusty-brown, blood splatters on the vehicles and the pavement.

  Will looked wide-eyed at the helicopter as they motored by. It didn’t break up when it hit the ground; instead, the cabin sagged inward, as if someone placed a weight on top of it that was too great for it to bear. The rotors broke off and dug deep furrows into the earth from the crash site to where they came to rest sixty feet away.

  An ominous-looking tank sat near the crashed ‘copter. Drab green from top to bottom, it sat in the eastbound lane, facing east but with its turret pointed behind it to the west.

  George spoke up from the back seat. “There’s the right-hand turn, down yonder.” He motioned toward a county road that ran North off the highway. A dilapidated motel took up one side of the road and a small gas station on a big lot was on the other. The station was atop a short but steep hill and Will turned right into its lot, the other trucks trailing in behind him. He parked so that the truck overlooked the highway, a lake that sat on the other side, and a scene of unimaginable destruction.

  A quick glance towards the creepers showed they were still far up the hill. Will pulled a pair of field glasses from the Ford’s middle console, got out of the truck, and walked around in front of it. The other trucks emptied as well and the group lined up alongside Will. He looked out past the lake, and his mind slowed to a crawl at it tried to process the images in the glass’s viewfinder.

  The man-made, twenty-five-acre lake was shaped like a triangle with rounded off corners. A river twisted and turned behind it. The river advanced on the lake from the south, turned, and ran parallel to the lake’s far side. A meadow about fifty yards wide ran between the two bodies of water until two-thirds of the way across the length of the lake when the river curved away. The space between them continued to grow until the river curved back east, running even with the lake’s north shore. On the opposite side of the lake, where the bodies of water were the closest, a large copse of woods ran to the river’s edge and to th
e lake shore. All this together created a natural cone-shaped piece of land with an enormous entrance near the highway, narrowing to small knoll at the far side of the lake, and closed off by the woods that ran behind it.

  That cone is where the military made its stand. It was a killing field. A mishmash of craters scarred the grassland- small cavities left by grenades, bigger depressions created by mortar fire, and several giant blast sites that Will thought must have been made by tanks. The decaying bodies of soldiers littered the ground. Ordnance blasts tore some apart: the dead ate so much of the others that they were just pieces of meat with bones sticking out of them. Some soldiers turned but were so torn apart they could only lay in the muck and struggle to rise or right themselves. Three or four hundred creepers lurched about, stumbling over the craters and bodies. Most wore filthy, ripped, and ragged Army uniforms. More jeeps and personnel carriers were left on the battlefield, haphazardly and with no rhyme or reason. Dead creepers were piled in long rows six-feet high, probably to be burned after the battle. Dogs, coyotes, and swarms of flies gorged themselves on the dead, and the barely living. Rats by the thousands skittered in and out of view.

  Will handed the field glasses to Jiri, then checked the advancement of the creepers on the hill.

  “Lot of creepers down there,” Justin said in a soft, nervous voice.

  “Don’t worry. They’re too far off to notice us, and we’re going that way.” He screwed his thumb toward the road behind them, the opposite direction from the field.

  Jiri took a deep breath and handed the glasses to Coy.

  “I see it,” Coy told him in a flat voice, refusing them. Danny took them instead.

  Jiri looked at Will and shook his head. “That’s a lot of dead soldiers.”

  “Counting the creepers, the dead soldiers, and the ones that wandered off to turn or die, I bet there’s around a thousand of them,” Will agreed.

  “It was a good idea,” Jiri mused. “You’ve got a natural funnel there with barriers on three sides. Use the funnel to control access to the kill zone and you can’t get overrun. You use soldiers as bait, the creepers chase them into the mouth of the funnel and walk right into the kill zone. Pop-pop-pop-pop, you stack ‘em up, firing from both sides and the end of the funnel. Wipe them out.”