Something caught his eye. He wondered if any of the others had seen it on the way in, but he figured they’d all been too busy trying not to die. He’d have to tell them right away. Depending on how things went in the garage, it could make all the difference.
He stopped in the doorway and scooped up the two coats. Then he jogged down the stairs to tell the others.
————————————
Blake stood with Morris and Eric, careful to keep his feet out of the puddle of water and antifreeze. The garage stunk of coolant and oil, and it set his stomach on edge. Or maybe the whiskey was responsible for that. He didn’t really care. The scene in front of him only hammered home the fact that they were fucked in a royal way.
“Guess you didn’t see that,” Eric said.
“I was kind of in a hurry,” Morris replied.
The truck’s grill had been crunched inward by the steel toolbox standing against the garage’s rear wall. It was one of those tall, industrial jobs found in body shops and such, and it had won the fight between irresistible force and immovable object.
“It doesn’t look possible. I mean, the truck isn’t made out of tin foil.”
“One in a thousand shot, I guess.”
“Well, did we have to make it today of all fucking days?” Eric kicked the truck’s bumper, and the banging noise echoed through the two car garage.
“How fast were we going?” Blake asked.
Morris shrugged, then immediately winced and grabbed at his shoulder.
“We should make you a sling,” Eric said.
“I might still have to drive later.”
“Drive what?”
“What about the owners’ car?” Blake asked. A Chrysler 300 that was probably silver under a thick coat of dust sat opposite the truck. It looked to be in good shape, though out of use.
“No way,” Eric said. “No room for food.”
“There’s the trunk.”
“We’ll need the trunk for Jeremy.”
He felt like somebody had kicked the wind out of him. The image of Jeremy with the gun in his mouth-fingers tightening around the trigger-flashed through his memory, and it chilled him. He squeezed his eyes shut, and the vision just became more intense. He heard the gun go off and saw blood splatter across the truck’s rear window, felt the vehicle lurch as Morris slumped forward.
The big man’s voice brought him back to reality.
“-should leave him here.”
Eric shook his head. “We can’t do that. We need to take him back to his mother. It’s just… it’s the right thing.”
“You have any idea what that woman’s going to do if we bring her little boy back with a hole in his head? I promise you, it won’t be pretty. It won’t even be close.”
“It won’t be pretty either way,” Blake said. “When she finds out Jeremy’s dead, she’s going to freak. It takes up room, but Eric’s right. At the very least, she should have a chance to bury her kid.”
“We can’t think about that right now. Food. Nothing else matters for shit.”
“That’s how the zombies think.”
Morris rolled his eyes. “Fine. So we can’t use the Chrysler.”
“Why not? Right, so there’s no room for groceries, but we can use it to get back to Millwood, get another truck. We know a little more about the town now, we can come back prepared.”
“No. That’s no good.”
“What? Why not?” Blake asked.
“I’m shot, for one. I go back, they’ll want to send somebody else. They’ll want to replace Jeremy, too. That means another drawing, and that means time. Personally, I don’t think it’s time we can spare.
“We’re here. We’re in town. What we need to do is find a way to get to that store and grab enough food to keep Millwood going until we can figure out something else. We go back now, it’s just going to waste time and break a lot of spirits.”
“So what do we do? Are we going to walk there and try to take everything back in shopping carts? You don’t mind my saying, I think that little plan sucks.”
“How about another truck?”
Blake bristled at the sound of Chris’s voice, but when he turned the man wasn’t making his usual asshole face. He stood just inside the kitchen, two coats draped over his arm.
“I think that’s where we were headed,” Morris said.
“Good to know, because I found one if you guys are interested.”
————————————
“It could work,” Morris said. His voice rumbled in the small bedroom.
“It could work?” Eric replied. “It’s twice as big as the Dodge. It’s perfect!”
“You’re welcome,” Chris said. “I look forward to receiving my medal.”
Blake turned to the doorway long enough to shoot the guy a dirty look. Chris shrugged it off. He was leaning against the doorframe casual as you please, picking at his nails like he didn’t have a care in the world. Nevermind the two corpses in the room. Heartless prick.
He looked back out the window. The Ford Super-Duty sat in a driveway across the road and two houses down. The blue truck looked like the Holy Grail to his desperate eyes. It was a monster of a vehicle, with a cab big enough for all four of them and a bed nearly twice the size of the broken pickup in the garage. If they could get to it and start it up, they could cruise Rundberg without a care in the world.
But first they needed to reach it. Blake didn’t see any zombies, but their first experience with Rundberg had told him the monsters could hide. They’d have to be careful, and they’d have to be quick. With some luck on their side, it might work out okay.
“I’ll go,” Blake said before he even realized he was thinking it. The words just spilled out, and then his muscles went rigid with terror. He hadn’t realized how much of his nerve had dissipated during their time in the house. The idea of going back out in the open filled him with dread.
“Is that how we should do this?” Eric asked. “Just send one of us?”
“Makes sense,” Chris said. “One of us goes down, we have the rest of us still up and moving.”
Blake glared again, temporarily feeling anger replace fear.
“What? I’m just saying. We’re supposed to be thinking of this stuff, right?”
The bastard had a point. Slowly, he nodded. He turned back to the window, eyed the truck. How long would it take him to reach the vehicle? Shit, what would he do once he did reach it? He’d have to get inside the house, see if he could find the keys. The front door hung open. The windows had been busted out. If the zombies came at him, he’d be a sitting duck.
He wanted to go to sleep. Suddenly, the only thing he wanted in the entire world was to curl into a ball and sleep for a month or so. It wasn’t the whiskey making him drowsy, either. He just knew he would die. He’d run across the street in some fool attempt to get that truck started, and he would die screaming. Forget seeing Holly again. He’d never smell the thick scent of her hair or hold her terribly thin body in his arms.
You come back to me.
Sorry. I wish I could.
“We’re all going.”
He blinked as Morris’s gruff voice jolted him from his own thoughts. He looked to the big man, but Morris ignored him. He was looking out the window, eyes fixed on the truck. His chest rose and fell like a giant bellows.
“I don’t know,” Eric said. “Chris has a point.”
“Doesn’t matter. We all go or nobody goes.”
Chris stomped over from the doorway. “Are you serious? We all go or nobody goes? Seriously, just what the fuck kind of sense does that make?”
“The only kind. We send one person over there, they might get the truck started. Bunch of those things come running though, and the rest of us are stuck here. We won’t have time to load up. We’ll be stranded again.”
“Bullshit. So Blake drives the truck around, loses the rotting fucks, and comes back to pick us up.”
“And if he wrecks?”
“I’m not going to wreck,” Blake said. Deep down, he hated that Morris had now given him a new worry. He’d had enough disaster scenarios buzzing around in his brain already. Another just pushed his threshold a little too far.
“That’s not the point. I think this day’s proven that anything can happen. Whatever does happen, I think we all better be there for it.”
“We all better be there for it?” Chris said. “I thought the whole point of this was to get food back to your precious town! This weird honor shit isn’t going to help with that.”
Morris grumbled and took a step toward Chris. Eric reached out to grab the big man’s uninjured shoulder. “He makes a point, Morris. We need to sit down and decide what’s best for Millwood, right? Let’s none of us go off half-cocked. That doesn’t help anybody.”
“I got shot,” Morris said. “I had a bullet in my shoulder. I had to disinfect the fucking thing with Jim Beam because we pulled into the one house in Indiana without peroxide in the medicine cabinet.” He reached into his pocket and dug something out. When he opened his fingers, a misshapen lump of metal lay in his palm.
“You kept it?” Chris asked, disgust in his voice.
“Yeah. Took it out of the trash once you left the bathroom. Got a problem with that?”
Chris shook his head, but his face told a different story.
Morris turned slowly, holding out the ruined bullet for everybody to see. “This went in my shoulder, and I don’t need to tell anybody what it went through on its way there. Jeremy Motts was a kid pushed into something he didn’t need to do, and he couldn’t handle it. We can handle it, though. Goddammit, we can. And we’re going to.
“We’re going to do it together, though. If we all die, we all die. Millwood will send another group, and maybe they’ll get farther than we did. Whatever happens though, we’ll do it together. Does it make a lot of sense? No. Do I care? Not really. I’m the pissed off guy with the hole in his shoulder, and I’m not going to stand by and let one person take a risk all of us can take together.”
“You’re fucking crazy,” Chris said.
“And you’re getting on my nerves. Keep pushing, see where it gets you.”
Chris stuck both his hands in the air, exaggerating his surrender. He backed off a few steps and returned to cleaning his nails. Anger darkened his face.
Blake gave the truck another glance. A gigantic cattle guard protected its front end. If they got the big bastard going, they could probably plow straight through the zombies.
“So we all go,” he said. “How do we want to do that, though? I know I want some kind of plan besides, ‘Everybody run!’”
Morris nodded. His brow furrowed, and Blake could almost see the gears turning in the man’s head. “We need something other than guns.”
“Seriously?”
“He’s right,” Eric said. “One shot could bring a whole stampede of those things. We don’t want that.”
“Right. But now we’ve got to get close to defend ourselves.”
“I found armor,” Chris said. He scooped up the two winter coats that lay at his feet. “It’s not much, but I can’t see anything that isn’t a dog biting through these babies. At the very least, it gives you a second to cock back and swing.”
Blake looked down at his own jacket. The denim was pretty thick. It could keep a bite or two from reaching his skin, but that knowledge didn’t comfort him any. He imagined the feel of teeth closing around his arm, straining against the fabric and trying to break through to the skin beneath. Though he didn’t want to think about it, he couldn’t stop himself. He felt the terrible, hungry pressure, and it made him want to scream.
“You guys take them,” he said. “I’m good.”
Chris snickered. “Big man.”
Blake shook it off. He didn’t want to dignify the man with a response.
“Okay,” Morris said as Eric handed him one of the coats. “Let’s get to work.”
TEN
Morris stared at the claw hammer in his hand-the best weapon he’d found in the cluttered garage-and wished Jeremy had managed to shoot him in his left shoulder. He felt crippled and useless without his right hand. He could move it a little now, could easily curl it into a fist, but he didn’t feel any strength there. He couldn’t throw a good punch or even a bad one. Swinging a hammer to defend himself was out of the question. He wouldn’t kid himself, he had some quickness in his arms, but he relied on brute force more than any sort of finesse. With his left arm he wouldn’t have either, and the winter coat he now wore took away a good chunk of his speed. He’d probably be just as well off trying to bash a zombie to death with his naked arm.
He turned to the windows that lined the top of the garage door. A coat of dust obscured his view, but he could make out the Ford. It looked so far away from down here. He wondered if they’d even reach the vehicle before a herd of dead cannibals came charging after them. They’d decided to leave the garage door open in case they needed to retreat, but he knew the chances of making it back to the house were almost nonexistent. If they got caught outside, they’d be stuck there. Their flimsy plan would collapse around them, and they’d have to rely on instinct to keep them breathing. Maybe that would be good enough, maybe not. He’d find out soon.
Behind him, Blake and Stevenson grunted as they lifted Jeremy’s body out of the truck. They’d wrapped him in a dusty sheet they found in an upstairs closet. The fabric was already soaking through at one end. The rest of it was stained in streaks from the blood in the truck’s bed. He could only imagine the reaction Jeremy’s mother would have when they returned. Maybe she’d hunt the rest of them down, try to take some sort of revenge. He shut down the thought. Just another thing to worry about, and he already had plenty on his plate.
The plan was for Blake and Stevenson to charge across the street and put Jeremy’s body and the rifles in the Super-Duty’s bed. By that point Eric should be across the street with the Dodge’s battery. He’d place the battery on the ground and start trying the doors. If a small miracle took place and one of the doors opened, he’d climb inside and look for a key while Blake got on the ground and searched underneath for a spare in one of those magnetized cases people sometimes stuck under their vehicles.
And where would he be during all of this? Huffing his ass across the street with a set of jumper cables slung over his good shoulder, that’s what. If Eric and Blake didn’t turn up anything, then Blake and Stevenson would enter the house and start searching. He ran through a mental checklist of all the places they might find a set of truck keys: kitchen counter or drawer, on a hook by the garage or front door, dining room table, nightstand, coffee table. If there were more bodies inside, they could check the pockets. Nobody liked the idea, but they’d do it if it needed doing. He just hoped the pair found the keys quickly. He didn’t want to spend more time outside the house than necessary, and once they found the keys they still might need to jumpstart the truck.
Morris flipped the hammer in his grip as he ran through the plan one more time. It all appeared simple enough. All things considered, it should be a piece of cake. He knew how simple things could blow up in your face, though. He knew better than most.
————————————
Morris decided the riots that had taken Cincinnati by storm weren’t race related the instant he saw the first group of psychos.
He spotted them as he charged down Vine Street from the University campus, driving like hell in a stolen equipment truck. Hurtling past Inwood Park and weaving around pedestrians running every which way, anything they could grab in their arms, he saw a dozen figures tear out of the park to his left. He slowed as he noticed they didn’t run like normal people. Their arms didn’t pump up and down but instead flailed as if the limbs had been forgotten. He thought they moved like rabid animals, and when they slammed into the pedestrians like a pack of dogs it confirmed his suspicions.
He slowed the truck a little as he craned his neck to look behind
him. The charging psychos tackled the frightened people and tore into them with hands and teeth, their savagery almost impossible to believe. He heard shrieks of terror and pain mix with screeches that sounded like the angry call of hungry pigs. Shivering, he turned away.
And then he hit somebody.
He screamed as a body crunched onto the hood. The truck fishtailed. He wrestled the pickup back under control, his heart hammering in his chest, and the vehicle straightened as the tires grabbed hold of the pavement once more.
Morris looked through the windshield at the psychopath on his hood. He couldn’t tell how old she was through the thick layer of blood that coated her face and matted her hair, but he saw the madness burning in her eyes. He watched her, unable to look away, awed by her insanity.
She hooked her fingers into the lip between the hood and windshield and dragged herself toward him. She bared her teeth and hissed, and even through the chaos around him he heard her. Amazingly, she rose to her knees and let go of the hood. Shrieking at him, she cocked back a fist and punched the windshield.
The woman’s hand crunched against the glass, and Morris snapped out of his daze. He realized his foot had drifted off the gas, and now the truck was crawling down the street. Something snapped to his left, and he turned to see a bloodied teenage boy wrenching on his door handle. He couldn’t tell if the kid was crazy or not, but he knew he didn’t care. The woman on the hood reared back for another blow, and the boy screamed for help. Morris ignored them and slammed his foot down on the gas. Both bodies tumbled away, and he raced down Vine into the heart of downtown. He glanced to the passenger seat, where he’d placed a tire iron he’d pulled from the rear and wondered if he’d have to use it.
He made it through Over-the-Rhine without too much trouble. The place was a mess, but there was no order to the chaos. Psychos ran every which way, taking down civilians and ignoring him. The truck had proven sturdy enough to plow straight through most of the crazies who did try to swarm him.
Scavengers Page 8
