A minute later, the horizon to the south lit up like it was the Fourth of the July, the Huey’s pouring on the fire. The firing stopped us in our tracks, the lights entrancing us and holding us like fireflies caught in a jar.
Huck groaned loudly and that broke the spell. We continued across the field, but I took glances to the south every few seconds. The helicopters were giving those undead bastards hell. Maybe it would give us time to get across the Red River and into Oklahoma?
We slowed as we reached the house, wary that anyone there might be someone that might not like trespassers. After a few tense moments, Sammy checked the house and found it empty. I could only guess that the people that lived here got out when the ‘getting’ was good. Whoever had been there left in a hurry. Chairs were knocked over and dresser drawers were lying on the floor with clothes strewn about. They didn’t even take the time turn off their generator which must have been powering the lights.
We carted Huck onto a couch. He was looking worse by the minute with blood dripping between the straps of the chair and leaving an ugly trail on the floor.
The place was a sturdily constructed old farmhouse and looked like it had been built around the turn of the 20th century. The ceilings were twelve feet high with heavy plaster walls. It looked lived in, but well cared for with lots of family heirlooms and other items left behind by someone wanting to get the hell of out there, pronto.
We sent a scavenging party out to find any medical supplies and medicine we might need and Jay came back with more bandages which Rosalita used on Huck as soon as she had them in hand. The discarded bandages were thick with Huck’s blood. Carla found some bottled water which she passed out among our crew.
I stayed on watch at a south-facing window in the family room, monitoring the progress in that direction. It didn’t look good. The machine gun fire had dwindled to near nothing during the time we had moved to the house. More and more cars were making desperate attempts to make it northward anyway they could. Only those with four-wheel drive and decent ground clearance had any chance with the rough terrain and, still, many of those got stuck. The most disturbing development was the stream of people coming up the road on foot. Most were looking over their shoulders as if the devils himself were after them and he could be, but only in the form of an army of the undead.
We waited as Jay and Jane refused to leave Huck. Some sort of internal clock ticked away inside me and it felt like a window was closing on us. More and more people were pouring up the road. The light gunfire that had been in the distance was coming closer and closer to us.
I was so transfixed on watching out the window, that I didn’t hear Joni come up behind me and nearly jumped out of my skin when she touch my shoulder.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“It’s okay,” I said, not meeting her eyes.
“Listen,” she said, fidgeting, “about what happened the last night…”
I cut her off, “No, you don’t have to worry. I won’t say anything.”
“Well, it’s not that,” she said. “I’m sort of confused.” She paused and touched my arm. “I thought he was dead.” Again, she paused. “You and I have I have only known each other for a short time. A short intense time.”
“You don’t have to say anything.”
“But I do,” she said and squeezed my arm, grabbing my attention. “Dave, well, he’s sort of a jerk, but he is the kid’s dad.” There was an intensity behind her eyes as if someone had turned up a dimmer. “But there’s you. I, uh, feel some sort of connection, but there’s nothing I can do about it.”
“Please, you don’t have to say any more,” I said. “We can go on like it never happened and…” I stopped because Rosalita appeared in the doorway of the room. “What is it?”
Joni’s hand fell away from my arm and she looked to the floor.
“Huck has passed,” Rosalita said.
There it was. This was one of the times that I can truly say I was conflicted. A part of me mourned this kid’s loss, but another part of me was relieved. He had been in no condition to travel and I’m not sure Jane or Jay would have left him behind. Hell, I’m not sure I could, but the situation was getting very dire. If we didn’t move in the next few minutes, I’m not sure we had a chance to make it to Oklahoma and I still doubted whether we would make it there anyway.
Joni and I followed Rosalita back into the living room where Huck was laid out on a couch. Jane lay nearly draped over him, sobbing uncontrollably. Jay wasn’t doing much better, wiping his eyes with his sleeve repeatedly as he cried.
I leaned into Joni and whispered, “We can give them a few minutes to mourn, but we have to get moving. Can you pass the word to the others and I’ll handle getting them moving?”
Joni nodded, but I could see a part of her was stuck with our conversation. She wavered back and forth and then broke away from me and headed into the back of the house. I slowly walked over to Jane and Jay.
It was so hard to interrupt their tears, but it had to be done. “Guys, I know you’re torn up inside, but we have to get moving.”
Jane whipped her head around and shouted, “Our friend is dead! Can’t we have some time with him?”
I went to her and knelt beside her, looking into her eyes. “I know what you’re going through,” I said. “We’ve all lost some people close to us in the past few weeks. It can almost break you, but this new and ugly world doesn’t leave time for us to stand still.”
“Ahhh, man,” Jay said, looking up to the ceiling, fighting back more years. “I miss him so much.”
“We all do, but I can tell you that he would want the two of you to live and he’d be pissed as hell if you died because you didn’t get out of this house in time.”
“Is it getting that bad outside?” Jay asked.
I nodded my head.
“Okay, okay,” he said, reaching down and grasping Jane’s shoulders. “Babe, we’ve got to go.”
She resisted for a moment, but then gave in to it and slowly rose to her feet, her eyes never veering from Huck’s face.
“Can we have one more minute?” Jay asked.
“Sure,” I said and backed away hoping we truly did have another minute.
Jay reached in his bag and pulled out baggie. He gently laid it on Huck’s chest. “Some of the good stuff for the other side, dude.” He choked up for a moment and Jane leaned into him, crying hard again. “Fly high, bro. Fly high.”
We stood in silence for another few seconds and then Jay nodded. “We’re ready now.”
A moment later, gunshots sounded off in the distance and someone shouted, “They’re swarming over the people on the road.” It was Sammy.
I ran to the family room and looked out the window again to see people running at top speed up the road from zombies that were shambling between the cars and taking down stragglers. Screams of those too slow to get away filled the night.
We were out the door and moving north as fast as we could, the mayhem behind us spurring us on. Rosalita struggled to keep up with the rest of us as her energy waned from all that we had been through this night. She didn’t complain or ask us to slow down, but subconsciously, I could feel myself pulling back to allow her to keep up. So did Sammy and Joni. Dave plowed ahead with the kids in tow. Randell had the lead with Jay and Jane, but they didn’t get too far ahead. Still, I didn’t like us getting spread out the way we were.
We passed beneath an overpass and moved past some low scrub bushes, ending up at a long row of taller bushes that seemed intentionally planted that way. We pushed our way through them and saw the moonlight illuminating several vehicles lying about in different states of disrepair. More lay past them. This obviously was a junkyard. Cars, trucks, and even a couple RVs littered the ground. All of them looked weather beaten and rusted out. Rutted paths from car tires lead between the dilapidated wrecks.
We passed between two cars and took the first path northward. A bank of clouds passed overhead, dropping our visibility down to a min
imal distance. As a group, we slowed considerably, the hulking broken and battered hulls of the vehicles taking on menacing dark silhouettes as we passed by them. At times, it looked as if some of the broken jagged metal pieces reached out for us with mangled and rusted arms.
We made it about fifty yards in when someone started shooting at the head of the group.
“Stay with Rosalita,” I said and ran forward. The shooting continued. I heard someone scream, but couldn’t tell who it was.
Running blindly in the dark was a bad idea, but I charged forward nonetheless, passing by Dave who was cowering next to a car with Jessica and Martin.
“Keep them here,” I shouted as I passed by them.
“No problem,” Dave said.
I broke past a rotting school bus and saw two people standing and firing off into a grouping of vehicles. From the muzzle flashes, I could see it was Randell and Jane, standing side-by-side facing eastward. I could also see zombies coming from between the gaps of the rusted out cars. There weren’t that many of them, but there were enough, and I really had no idea if there were dozens or hundreds more stacked up behind them. We were lucky that they were only coming at us from one direction.
I raced up to behind Randell and Jane and found Jay sitting on the ground behind them, his mouth wide open as he stared at the zombies. I had no idea what was wrong with him, but I just hoped he wasn’t bitten. I had had my fill of putting people out of their misery on our way out of San Antonio. Finding out his condition would have to wait, though.
Jane fired wildly, burning off rounds at a dizzying pace. Randell aimed and fired, mostly in single well aimed shots.
I cautiously moved up behind Jane and placed a hand gently on her shoulder. She jumped at the touch and nearly dropped her gun.
“Sorry,” I said. “You need to watch your rounds. We only have what we have and once we’re out, we’re out.”
“But they’re coming,” she said, verging on hysterics.
“Yes, I know,” I said, “but watch Randell for a moment. See how he targets and fires. See. Target and fire.” Doing on-the-job shooting instruction was not very ordinary for sure, but it was necessary.
She nodded her head and turned back to the oncoming zombies and gulped down some air. She brought the rifle back into the firing position, targeted the closest one, and squeezed off a round. It struck the undead thing in the chin, exploding blood, brain, and bone out the backside of the creature and dropping it.
“See,” I said.
She nodded again and fired. The next zombie took one in the chest and fell, then struggled to get back up. She put a bullet in its brainpan and it went down permanently. Randell maintained his measured and deliberate rate of fire taking out a zombie with each shot. I watched as the two of them thinned the herd and backed up beside Jay.
“You okay, Jay?” I asked.
At first he didn’t say anything, then he said, “Yeah man. It’s just that these zombies freaked me out.”
“Was it you that screamed?”
“Yeah. Sorry about that.”
So, you’re not bit or anything?”
“No.”
Randell put down another zombie and Jane did likewise. I caught some movement out of the corner of my eye and looked to see the rest of our merry band coming in our direction. Joni and Sammy were both poised, ready to shoot. Rosalita, Dave, and the kids stayed a safe distance back.
“Can I ask you something, Jay?”
“Yeah.”
“Why aren’t you shooting?”
“I’m a pacifist, man. I don’t want to shoot anyone.”
“You know they’re dead, right?” I asked.
I watched that sink in. “So, you’re saying that it’s okay to shoot them because they’re already dead?”
I nodded.
“Are you sure?’
“I'm absolutely sure.’
“I can see the logic in that,” he said and rose to his feet. It took a second, but he moved in next to Jane and targeted an oncoming zombie with his pistol and fired off a round. It thudded into the chest of the undead thing, causing it to stagger, but it kept coming. His second round caught the thing in the forehead blowing away a considerable amount of if its skull and it collapsed but not before it sent a geyser of blood and gore into the air as it went down.
“Gross!” Jay said.
“Just keep shooting,” I said. And he did.
They dispatched the rest of this pack of zombies in another minute. It was somewhat awe inspiring to see the carcasses of the undead lying among the corroded wrecks.
“Randell, where’d you learn to shoot like that?” I asked.
He looked over his shoulder and said, “Boy Scouts.”
I should have known.
“We had better get moving,” I said. “There could be more of those things around.”
“Just where are we going?” Dave asked.
“To Oklahoma,” I said.
“Isn’t there a river up that way?” He responded.
“We’ll head for the bridge and see if we can cross it.”
Randell navigated us through the rest of the junk cars and we eventually ended up on a paved road. The town of Ringgold lay just three hundred feet to the north.
It wasn’t much of a town. It didn’t even rate a stop light. While I didn’t stop to take a census, I guessed it didn’t have more than two dozen homes and that number could be high. If the population broke a hundred, I would be completely surprised.
There were open grassy fields on either side of the street. We walked down the center line as if staying away from the grass at each side could keep us safe. When you’ve been through the horrors we’d experienced, your mind starts making up any rules because there really are none in a zombie apocalypse, other than don’t get bit.
The place was eerily quiet which set me on edge. Living most of my adult life in Washington, D.C., I was used to lots of activity and city noise. We walked by the first house we’d seen in town. It was a large two story place with an expansive barn-sized garage attached to the back. The place was completely dark. Just across from it was another big house shrouded in darkness looking just as abandoned as the other house.
We passed by another house and went around a soft curve and started down a straight away that went on for a good distance. We passed by two more dark houses until we came to an intersection. While all other houses were dark, the house at the southwest corner had a couple dim lights on and I could hear the rhythmic chugging of an engine that signaled someone was using a generator to power the lights. Lying around at the edge of the yard were several bodies. That didn’t bode well.
From the distance we were away, I couldn’t tell if they had been living people or the undead before they got taken them down. I called for our group to stop and moved to the front beside Randell.
“What do you think?” I asked
“I’m guessing there’s someone there,” he said quietly. “Those bodies; do you think they were zombies?”
“I think so, but I’d hate to have whoever’s in the house shoot us first and ask questions later.”
“So, how do you want to handle this?” he asked.
“Well, I’d think with all the shooting we did in the junkyard, these people would be awake and on the lookout. So, it’s a good sign we’re still standing because we’re awfully exposed standing out here in the center of the road. I’m thinking if they were shooting indiscriminately, they’d have done it already, but to be safe, let’s move the group back behind this house.” I said pointing to a house back in the direction had just come from. “I’ll go check this house out.”
“But what if they shoot you?”
“Maybe they will, but did you get a look at Rosalita and the kids? They’re exhausted. I’m guessing we’re two to three miles for the bridge into Oklahoma. They might make it, they might not. I want to find us some wheels. Maybe they have some we could use?”
“And you’d think they’d give them up?”
/>
“We’re about to find out.”
Randell took charge of getting our people back out of eyeshot and I watched the house for a two minutes. Nothing moved inside from what I could see, but much of the house was masked in shadows from the trees and bushes situated around the yard. Still, I watched for another full minute and saw nothing but shadows. I put down my rifle and slipped my pistol in the waistband of the pants at the center of my back and pulled my shirt over it.
I took a deep breath, pulled back my shoulders, and started across the street toward the front of the house all the while feeling like a walking, talking bullseye.
I made my first step into the yard when a voice came from the shadows, “That’s far enough, mister.” The voice had the feeling of confident authority behind it and I immediately obeyed leaving with one foot in the air. I slowly let the foot down and waited for the next command.
“You’re a careful, man,” the voice said. I had no idea where it came from.
“I try to be,” I said.
“By the way, I know about the pistol you have tucked in your belt behind your back.”
One moment he was a disembodied voice and the next he was a man in full, standing against the backdrop of a bush, camouflaged in ghillie suit wearing night vision goggles. I could make out a human form as the suit covered him from the top of his head to his feet. I could also make out an M-16 decked out with a night scope.
“I know what you’re thinking,” the man said. “I’m some sort of nutcase wearing a suit like this stalking around the night, but I saw this coming. I’m ready.”
“A zombie apocalypse?” I asked.
“It was this or something else. An EMP, a nuclear bomb, a total economic meltdown.”
“So, you’re one of…” I let that trail off, not wanting to insult the man who could very easily blow my lights out at any second.
“One of what?” he asked, but there was something almost playful in his voice. “One of those doomsday preppers? Yes, I am. And I was right, wasn’t I?”
Forget The Zombies (Book 2): Forget Texas Page 10
