by Dirk Patton
Striding back to the third row of seats I waved the kids sitting there out of the way and straddled the aisle, standing on the edge of the seat on either side. A small handle, just like older houses had for opening their windows, stuck down and I grabbed it with my damaged hand and cranked several turns. The cover over the opening was hinged at the front end and the crank moved a rod at the unhinged end that pushed it open to a 45 degree angle, the crank stopping when the cover reached the limit of its travel. The opening itself didn’t look very large, but I thought I could work my shoulders through and get my upper body above the roof so I could shoot the infected off the grill.
Turning my rifle muzzle down I used the stock to batter the cover off its hinge and out of the way. Opening ready I shifted my feet until I was standing on the tops of the back rests, and rifle in hand shoved an arm and shoulder through the opening. That was as far as I got. I was just too large to work my head and other arm and shoulder up through the roof. Cursing, I retreated and started trying to think of a way to enlarge the opening. Rachel had come back when I’d started battering the cover out of the way and stood looking at me trying to figure out if I’d gone nuts.
“What are you doing?”
“The infected hanging on to the front of the bus are blocking the radiator and we’re going to overheat,” I said, dropping back into the aisle. Understanding dawned on her face and Rachel shooed me out of the way.
Climbing up onto the seats then the back rests she wormed her head and shoulders out of the opening. That was as far as she got, the back rests she was standing on not high enough for her to get her upper body above the roof line. With only head and shoulders in the clear she couldn’t effectively use her rifle. Stooping I moved in between her legs, wrapped an arm around each thigh and took her weight onto my shoulders as I stood up to my full height. Rachel crossed her ankles across the small of my back to stabilize her perch and she gained over a foot of elevation and was in a good shooting position. I was facing the front of the bus and watched out the windshield as she started picking off the infected riders with head shots.
Unfortunately it wasn’t a one and done exercise for as soon as she shot an infected that fell away from the grill and under the wheels of the bus, another one took its place. Rachel kept up the fire. She was slow and methodical with her shooting and as far as I could tell she didn’t miss a single shot. A couple of times female infected climbed over the mass of bodies riding along with us and made it on to the hood, charging Rachel’s position, but she was able to drop them before they climbed fully onto the roof. I was getting occasional glimpses of the engine temp gauge over Betty’s shoulder when she swayed to her left as we ran over bodies, and while the temp was still high it had stopped flirting with the red zone of the gauge.
Rachel kept up the shooting for what seemed like hours but was closer to fifteen minutes. I was focused on staying as steady as I could as I supported her while the bus rattled, shimmied and swayed and it didn’t register at first when her rate of fire started slowing. When I did notice I was relieved to note the infected in front of us were thinning out. Then they were gone, seemingly as if a line had been drawn. Rachel shot the last one hanging on to the grill then shifted and dispatched the two females that were still clinging to the mirror on the fender.
“Spin me in a circle. Slowly.” She shouted down through the roof.
I made a slow circle, feeling her body tense slightly as it absorbed the recoil of another shot, then I completed the circle and was facing front again. Rachel uncrossed her ankles and I took this as a sign she was ready to come down. Sliding my aching hands down her legs I guided each foot to the top of a back rest as I squatted. When I felt her weight shift off of me and onto her legs I ducked out from under her and reached up to help her down. Holding her just above the hips I steadied her as she worked her body back into the bus then stepped away so she could drop down into the aisle.
“Good shooting!” I said with a grin. She smiled, pleased with the compliment, and then led the way back to Betty. A glance at the speedometer showed we were up to over 25. Looking out the windshield I was pleased to see nothing but dark pavement ahead of us. Looking back at the dash I noted our current mileage on the odometer.
“How far do you think, Betty?” I asked.
“Not sure. Maybe another 20 miles to the center of town, but we should start getting to the edge of town in about 10 to 15 miles.”
“Half an hour, roughly.” I commented.
“Maybe longer.” Betty replied. “This old tranny isn’t sounding so good and I think I’d better slow down a bit.” I watched as the speed dropped to 20 and Betty seemed satisfied for the moment even though the grinding sound from beneath my feat was growing louder.
Betty held our speed steady, driving through the dark night. Twice we saw animals dash across the road in our headlights, a coyote moving fast and a skunk moving as fast its short legs could propel it. The road carved gentle curves through the heavy forest and we had been driving for 55 minutes, only covering 18 miles, when we came out of a curve and saw the roadblock just ahead. Red road flares defined a line across the pavement in front of a line of six wheeled military transport trucks. Behind the trucks I could see the red and blue pulses of police lights flashing in the night. Lined up behind the trucks was a row of men armed with all varieties of hunting rifles and shotguns. They saw us at the same time we saw them and a moment later dozens of weapons were pointed at us.
Betty slowed, finally stopping the bus a few yards short of the line of road flares. Behind me I heard rustling as all the kids shifted around trying to get a better look through the windshield. Dog growled and I placed a calming hand on his head. He went silent but I could feel the tension in him like a wound spring ready to release. Betty moved the gear shift into park and we sat there for a long moment before a voice sounded out in the night, amplified through one of the police car’s PA system.
“Step out of the bus without your weapons and your hands in the air.” It commanded. Rachel looked at me and I shook my head. No way was I going to disarm myself.
“It’s OK,” Betty said, having seen the exchange between Rachel and me. “I think I know that voice. Sit tight.”
Rachel and I stepped back out of her way and she leaned into the door lever to open the doors. They moved a couple of inches and stuck. Stepping around Rachel I added my weight to the lever and they popped free of whatever was obstructing them and slammed open, the glass that had been cracked by the female infected shattering and falling free to the pavement. Betty smiled at me, patted me on the arm and stepped out of the bus where she was immediately spotlighted. Raising a hand to shield her eyes she called out towards the roadblock.
“Is that Jonathan Jackson I hear?”
There was silence for a moment, then the same voice without benefit of the PA system answered, “Ms. Jasinski?”
“Indeed it is, and I have a handful of youngsters and a couple of survivors on this bus.”
Within moments the spotlight shut off and four men emerged between two of the trucks and walked forward. All four were wearing police or sheriff uniforms, I couldn’t tell which, and the one in the lead rushed up to Betty and hugged her. She hugged him back and they talked for a minute, her gesturing to the bus and him nodding his head as she talked. Conversation completed Betty came back to the doors and called all of us out. I stepped aside and let Rachel lead the kids out, shouldered into my pack and followed the last kid out with Dog at my side. Moving over to where Betty stood with the four cops I nodded a greeting as I approached. My rifle was slung in front of my body, my hand on the pistol grip which was a natural carrying position for me and not intended as a threat, but two of them placed their hands on the butts of their holstered pistols as I approached.
“I come in peace,” I said as I came to a stop directly in front of them. I caught a look from Rachel out of the corner of my eye but ignored her. Betty introduced us but I declined to shake hands due to my wounds and heavy
bandages. It turned out that Jonathan Jackson was a sergeant with the Murfreesboro Police and had grown up two doors down from Betty. I could tell from his body language that her endorsement of me was all he needed to accept my presence. He was full of questions and Betty was starting to tell him our tale, but I interrupted the reunion.
“Sergeant, we’ve got a lot of infected on their way here right now. 18 miles back, probably less than that by now, there’s a big herd with lots of females at the front that is headed right here. They’ll swarm over this roadblock in a hot minute and keep on going right into town. Please tell me you’ve got better defenses set up closer to town.” He looked shocked and turned to Betty who just nodded her head in validation of what I was saying. “We’ve got three hours at the most.”
Standing there in the dark, his features washed with the red flickering light from the flares I could still see the panic and indecision on his face. He glanced over his shoulder at the other three officers, all younger, and they looked just as panicked.
“OK, tell me your situation here. Who’s in charge?” He just stared at me until Betty reached out and grabbed his arm, shaking him.
“I guess I am,” he said, looking at the other officers for support. They nodded agreement. “We’ve lost a lot of people and the mayor, the city council, the Chief of Police, they’re all dead, and I haven’t seen or heard from my lieutenant in days.”
“OK, then.” Time to take charge. “What’s this road block all about?”
“Uh, well,” he stammered. “We’ve been hearing about some crazy shit The Reverend is pulling so we thought we’d better set up here in case he and his followers decided to come to town.”
“The Reverend is dead,” I said. “What you need to be worried about are the millions of infected that are headed this way. We just drove through the leading edge of the herd that’s coming up from the gulf. How many people are we talking about in town? Can you evacuate?”
“No way!” He shook his head for emphasis. “We’ve got refugees from all over the country side, women and children, and there’s no way we have even close to enough vehicles to evacuate to Nashville.”
“What about the National Guard?” I asked, waving at the trucks blocking the road.
“They all got pulled out of here by the regular Army and went south,” he answered. “I heard rumors they were setting up a defense down on the ‘Bama border, but that’s all I know. These were trucks left behind at the armory that we grabbed for the roadblock.” Shit. Was there any good news? These people were about to get overrun.
“What’s left in the armory?”
“I don’t know. It’s locked up tight and we didn’t try to get in.”
“Get me to the armory,” I said and turned to Betty. “Miss Betty, thank you for everything.”
“Don’t thank me, young man. Save us. That will make it worth everything.”
Chapter 29
Minutes later I was in the front seat of Sergeant Jackson’s cruiser, Rachel and Dog stuffed in the back behind a wire barrier, and we were screaming through town with lights and siren. Behind us were the other three officers, each in their own car and we made a very conspicuous convoy that was attracting a lot of attention. Everywhere I looked were people. Mostly families. They were camping on the front lawns of homes, in the parking lots of businesses and as we roared past a large park I could see a sea of tents covering every inch of open ground. Fuck me, this was just one big buffet waiting for the infected to show up and select the all you can eat option. I glanced over my shoulder at Rachel and she met my eyes and shook her head. There were just too many people and the infected were way too close. The Sergeant was right. There was no way to evacuate in the amount of time we had, but we could still save a lot of these people. Minutes later we flew past a rail yard, the cruiser nearly catching air as we blasted over multiple sets of rails embedded into the asphalt. The rail yard was massive with a long row of orange cargo cranes stretching away into the distance looking like skeletons of dinosaurs in the dark. I looked at the hundreds of rail road cars sitting on dozens of tracks that crossed the area and had an idea.
“Sergeant, do the tracks from this yard go to the west?”
“Yes, they do. Not quite sure where, but they head west out of town.” He glanced over at me as he drove.
“OK, we’re going to see what we can find at the Armory to slow down the infected. I’ll deal with that. I want you to find whoever you need to find to get a train hooked up and start loading people on it. There may not be enough vehicles to evacuate, but you can sure as hell shove a lot of people into those livestock cars.” For some reason my mind flashed on another time in human history when men dressed all in black who thought they were the master race shoved livestock cars full of people to haul them to their doom. I didn’t like the thought and shook my head, ignoring Rachel’s question of what I was thinking.
Once past the rail yard Sergeant Jackson slowed enough to make a tire screeching left into a huge parking lot that was full of civilian vehicles that had been driven there by the National Guard soldiers who had been called up. He gunned the car down a long row of what was mostly pickups then came to a tire smoking halt in front of a large building that looked like it had been built during WW II. A large sign read ‘Tennessee National Guard Armory’ and under it was a large yellow sign with the radiological symbol that advised the building was a fallout shelter, next to it another faded sign that was white with the symbol for Civil Defense barely visible on it.
Piling out of the car I trotted to the double front doors which were locked tight. The doors were steel and built to the specs one would expect from a cold war era fallout shelter. I rushed back to the car where my pack sat on the front seat and dug through until I found the remainder of the plastic explosive breaching charges. Back at the door I pulled out the rope-like charge but my hands couldn’t work the material and remove the waxed paper from the adhesive side. Thrusting it into Rachel’s hands I talked her through how to set it up and where to place it, where to insert the detonators and we all moved away from the doors and took shelter behind Jackson’s car. Thumbing the remote I involuntarily turtled my head into my shoulders when the explosion ripped through the night with enough force to shatter the windows on the side of Jackson’s car that was facing the building as well as the closest row of parked vehicles.
Standing up I rushed into the dust cloud and up to the damaged doors. The right door was still hanging by part of a severely damaged hinge and the two doors were still attached to each other by the padlocked chain that had been fed through each handle. A swift kick on the right door and the overstressed hinge gave completely, the heavy doors falling to the ground with a loud bang. I stepped quickly into the building, Dog at my side with Rachel and the cops following. Moving through the structure I came to an area in the back that was fenced off with a heavy duty chain link fence that went all the way to the ceiling. The double gate was reinforced but was only secured with a standard duty padlock you could pick up at any hardware store. Inside the cage I could see row after row of older weapons, older defined as what appeared to be 20 year old M16 rifles which would have been passed on to the National Guard as the regular Army upgraded to the M4. Stepping back I waved everyone around a corner and fired two bursts from my rifle into the padlock which shattered and fell away.
“Sergeant, get on the radio and get those Deuce and a Half’s - the military trucks at the roadblock – on the way over here. Also have someone start rounding up able bodied men.” I moved into the cage as Jackson started making radio calls and issuing orders. Besides the rifles lined up neatly in racks I found dozens of crates of loaded magazines, more crates of bulk ammunition and another rack of pistols. Yanking cabinets open I was happy to find uniforms, boots, belts, vests, and more goodies. Grabbing replacements for what I had lost I quickly changed clothes, laced up a new set of boots and loaded my new vest down with magazines and a shiny new Ka-Bar knife. My Kukri was strapped horizontally to the small
of my back in the new sheath that Rachel had fashioned for me from the vinyl seat material from the bus. I took a moment to look for a pistol to replace the one I’d lost when captured by The Reverend, but all I was finding were the new 9 mm pistols the Military had switched to. Not my preference, but you fight with what you got. Outfitted again I went to check up on the loading of the rifles into the truck.
Jackson had worked quickly and a veritable mob of men and women had showed up, quickly forming a bucket brigade that was passing rifles, crates of magazines, ammo and grenades out to the waiting truck. As I was watching a couple of crates at the back of the cage caught my eye and I walked over, very happy to find two M60 machine guns. Both looked well used but well maintained. Stacked next to them were thousands of rounds of ammo, ready to go. I whistled to get the attention of the work gang leader and pointed at all the crates I was standing next to. He nodded and immediately sent half a dozen men in my direction to start grabbing and loading.
Dog and I followed the chain of frightened looking people who were passing the crates along to the waiting trucks and squeezed our way out the doors into the night air. Rachel stood at the edge of the parking lot, watching men load the truck. Another truck turned into the lot while we stood there, pulling up behind the first one and waited to start loading. I looked around and saw hundreds of people streaming into the parking lot. I didn’t have a watch but I’ve always had a good internal clock and knew we’d already spent half an hour of our three hour window before the infected arrived. People kept pouring in as word spread amongst the townspeople and refugees that a fight was on their doorstep. Watching the people file in I looked up to the horizon where the cranes in the rail yard were faintly visible in the moonlight and had another idea. Looking around I spotted Jackson and trotted over to him.
