by R. J. Spears
By the way, we won the battle to the death.. If we hadn’t, we would be dead and not riding in the middle of the night in a driving thunderstorm. But the battle had cost so much. Friends lost, and we were on the run.
I could barely see out the front windshield. It didn’t help that I couldn’t use my headlights, leaving me virtually blind, navigating on a hope and a prayer. The only thing that helped me see at all were the sporadic strikes of lightning which simultaneously illuminated the road and blinded me with their brilliance.
Why was I driving with no headlights, you might ask?
It’s because two attack helicopters were diligently swooping across the sky, ready to unleash their heavy weapons on us. They would turn our truck and us into Swiss cheese if they spotted us driving wildly in the night. We had seen and heard them in the night sky despite the near constant thunder. When you are about to die, it makes you keenly aware of what is going on around you.
We were fugitives from a military contingent that had taken our home base and had taken all of our friends hostage. They had come in like the cavalry, shooting up the place with their flying death machines. They had taken the place in a surgical strike much like the Germans invading Poland in WWII. Now, they were after us.
Periodically, when the thunder and rain let up, I could hear the whomping of their blades in the night sky, distant, but close at the same time. I had seen what the guns on their birds could do and it scared the living shit out of me.
My traveling companions were my girlfriend, Kara, Brother Ed (our resident sour puss), Naveen, a young girl I had rescued from certain death, and one that Kara and I had unofficially adopted. Last, but not least was a young man named Jason. He was special and the reason we were driving in the night with killer attack helicopters chasing us. The military wanted him in the worst way.
Why was he special? Well, he was immune to the zombie virus and maybe the only hope for humanity to survive.
Did I mention that we were in the middle of a zombie apocalypse? Sorry, we were.
Let the good times roll.
Speaking of zombies, one made its appearance just as I ran the truck around a long curve in the road. At that point, I didn’t know it was a zombie. In the darkness and the pouring rain, it was just an inky black form in the road. A humanoid figure with two arms, two legs, and a head, standing erect in the center of the road, arms outstretched as if beckoning us to stop. That was the best I could discern because the truck smashed into it.
“SHITTTTT!” I yelled, slamming on the brakes on pure instinct. In the old world of the living, that’s what you did. Old habits die hard. Of course, then you called the police and your insurance agent. Those habits were now just relics of days gone by.
I did what I could to keep the truck in a straight line but the tires lost purchase on the wet pavement and we went into an uncontrolled spin. My view out of the windshield became a swirl of darkness in which I saw shadowy glimpses of trees, the road, and the night sky, all in a kaleidoscope-like fashion. It almost made me want to toss my cookies. Our little detour ended with a resounding thump on the back fender as the truck skidded to a stop with all of us close to hyperventilating.
“Joel, I think you hit someone,” Naveen said, her voice small and quavering.
When I looked back at her, her eyes were wide in the middle of her light brown face.
“Yep, it looks like I did,” I said, trying to downplay the incident.
After being tossed around inside the truck like a salad, it took a few moments for all of us to get our bearings. Brother Ed, all five foot, ten inches of lankiness, was the first one out of the truck, rifle in hand, ready to take on whatever was out there. There was something about his all-legs and arms appearance that conjured up in my imagination the likes of someone like Ichabod Crane.
I jumped out next, making sure I grabbed my rifle, but not quite as ready and eager as Brother Ed. I looked behind us and saw that the truck had collided with a small sapling, cracking the tiny thing in two, with half of it draping sadly across the road. Brother Ed moved around the front of the truck, sweeping his rifle back and forth, watching for any movement in the darkness while the rain swept across us in sheets.
Kara jumped out behind me, rifle in hand, and let out a small yelp as the shock of the cold rain assaulted her on all sides.
We both moved out in front of the truck to come alongside Brother Ed.
“What was it?” Kara asked, having to almost yell to be heard over the storm.
“I have no idea other than it looked like a person,” I shouted back.
“A live person?” she asked.
“I’m not sure,” I said, feeling a lump of iciness slip into my midsection contemplating the idea that what I hit could have been a real live person.
“No, it ain’t,” Brother Ed said as he raised his rifle and aimed it a mass in the road. The mass was moving our way, pulling itself along on its arms, its legs broken and useless, dragging behind it like a snail’s tail.
Even through the rain, we knew what was coming our way wasn’t human. No living, breathing human could take that kind of hit and still come for us. Only one type creature, feeling one kind of feeling could do that. And that was a zombie, driven by its insatiable hunger.
Some things never change.
I shot out a hand and pushed down Brother Ed’s barrel. “No use advertising our presence to the eyes in the sky,” I said, thumbing toward the night sky.
“I don’t hear any choppers,” Brother Ed said.
“I’m not sure what they can hear over this storm,” I replied. “It’s best not to take any chances.”
I saw him pondering my assertion, but then I heard a slight snapping noise behind me and a beam of light shot through the rain and landed on the zombie in the road. Its face was smashed in, revealing its teeth and an almost inverted nose. It pushed out a broken hand onto the road and pulled its ruined body toward us, one painful foot at a time.
My concern, at that point, wasn’t the zombie. No, that wasn’t shooting up my blood pressure. It was the light. I snapped my head around and saw Naveen standing in the rain beside the truck. She looked soaked to the bone already as she held the light on the zombie, her hands shaking.
“Get that light out,” I shouted to be heard over the storm, immediately regretting the harshness in my tone.
Naveen jumped at my voice and tried to thumb the flashlight off, but couldn’t get the switch to snap to the off position as the beam jumped up and down.
“Let me help,” Kara said, now standing was beside the truck. I saw Jason craning his head out of the window, getting a look at the zombie slowly crawling our way.
“No, I can get it,” Naveen said snapping the flashlight away from Kara’s grasp. The motion was too fast and the flashlight too heavy. It was a large metal flashlight, with some heft to it, good to light things up and also to bash in zombie skulls, if necessary. Slick from the rain, it slipped from Naveen’s hand and hit the asphalt hard with a metal clank and started rolling down the road, the beam flashing up and down again, picking up speed on a slight downgrade.
I ran after it, but the road was slick from all the rain, and I nearly fell after my third step. It forced me to slow down or else I would end up on my ass. The flashlight rolled along the road, its beam flashing on the trees and bushes along the side of the road like a strobe light. I kept after it, my heart racing as I went.
The flashlight finally hit a lip in the road and jumped in the air, sending its beam into the night sky. It flipped over a couple more times before coming to rest in the soggy grass beside the road. I scampered down the road, managing to maintain my feet, and snatched it up, pushing the beam into my stomach. It took a couple of seconds, but I finally was able to get the sticky on/off switch to yield. The light shut off with a click.
No sooner had I flipped it off than we all heard the whomp-whomp-whomp of rotor blades coming through the thunder and teeming rain. The iciness I felt in my gut before became a glacier.
“Oh shit,” I said, under my breath and all of us looked up into the sky as rain splashed across our faces.
Everyone froze in place. The roar of the helicopter came closer as we all hoped it would fly on into the night, off in another direction.
Our hopes went unanswered as a sun-like beam flashed on in the sky and began sweeping the trees off to the west of the road. Like a giant eye, it swept its gaze closer and closer to our group.
All of us remained like statues. If the others were like me, they were holding their breaths.
I weighed our choices. We could make a dash for it in the truck or we could abandon ship. I guessed the helicopter had all sort of advanced devices including night vision and some sort of thermal imaging. I also guessed that the truck, with its hot engine, would shine like a nuclear reactor if they used thermal imaging. The pounding rain and all the territory they had to cover was the only thing that had saved our asses up until then.
“Get out of the truck!” I shouted, breaking our stasis.
The others looked at me with vapid expressions. “Get away from the truck. They’ll target it.”
Jason clamored out of the truck ten seconds later holding a couple of things in his hands. One was my trusty zombie killing baseball bat, and the other was a small duffle bag.
The sound of the helicopter’s engine grew ominously closer as Jason moved away from the truck. All of our eyes went to the sky, scanning back and forth looking for anything that could tell us where the helicopter was, but the storm, which had veiled our escape in the night, made it nearly impossible to see anything as the rain kept falling in torrents, battering our faces when we looked up.
I kept watching while the others grouped up on me. A flash of lightning seared my eyes, followed by a crack of thunder, rolling across the hills. But in that flash, I thought I saw the outline of a large dark form just to the south, hovering in the night sky.
“Get into the woods,” I yelled as I pushed Kara and Naveen ahead of me toward a stand of trees off to our right. Brother Ed and Jason followed close behind. We were barely off the road when the sound of the rain was trumped by the terrible staccato blast of the helicopter’s rapid fire guns.
I watched over my shoulder as a string of bullets ripped down the road, shredding the asphalt, leading in a trail toward the truck. It happened in only seconds, as a river of bullets slammed into the side of the truck, tearing into the metal, sending sparks, and pieces of it into the air like confetti. Given another context, I might have found it awesome, but it was just mind-numbingly terrifying.
I guessed that they were taking no chances and shot up anything moving that night.
The helicopter zoomed overhead and passed by us, but I could tell from the sound of its engines that it was swooping around for another pass.
“Run,” I yelled, but the others didn’t need any urging.
A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR
Thanks for reading Dead Man’s Land: Books of the Dead 3. This series has been a labor of love for me. If you enjoyed the book, or even didn’t enjoy it, please leave a review on Amazon or Goodreads. As an indie author, reviews are necessary for my books to get exposure. They act as social proof that my books are worth reading. You just finished the book, please take a moment to leave a review.
Also, if you would like a FREE collection of short stories; please go to this website:
Free Book
If you enjoyed this book, please consider reading my other series, Forget the Zombies, starting out with Forget the Alamo.
Lastly, if you want to ask me a question or interact with me, please feel free to email me at: [email protected]
Or you can Like my Facebook page at: R.J. Spears
