by Dirk Patton
She nodded her head and moved back in front of the truck. I shifted the transmission into park and handed the shotgun to Rachel. “Safety is off and there’s a round in the chamber. Open your door and stand on the running board. If any of them pulls a gun while I’m unloading some food you shoot them. Understand?”
Rachel stared at the shotgun in her hands like she didn’t understand why she was holding it.
“Understand?” I asked, hardening my voice into a deep growl.
Rachel snapped out of it and after checking to make sure the area was clear opened her door and stepped out onto the running board, shotgun held at the ready. The three kids stepped back when they saw the shotgun, but Rachel called out to them, “I’m just making sure we’re ready if any infected show up. Stay right there and we’ll get some food out for you.”
The kids were calmed by a woman’s voice and stopped moving away. I did a check of the area and stepped out and opened the back door of the truck. Dog hopped out and trotted to the closest tree while I gathered half of the canned and boxed food we had taken from the house we’d spent the night in.
The food was in a bunch of plastic grocery bags we’d found under the kitchen sink, and I quickly had two heavy bundles of grocery bags swinging from my hands. I walked a few feet in front of the truck and sat the bags on the ground. All three kids had their eyes glued to the food.
I let out a deep sigh and glanced back at Rachel. As if knowing what was on my mind she gave me a quick nod then turned her attention back to keeping watch on the kids as well as looking for approaching infected.
“Do you guys want to come with us?” I asked. “It’s pretty bad out there and- well, your parents- I’m just saying you might be safer with us. We could leave a note at your house for your folks.”
All three started shaking their heads and Gwen spoke up, “No. We’ll wait. They’ll be home soon. Thanks for the food.”
I nodded my head and returned to the truck cab, closing the back door after Dog hopped in and resumed his spot. I got in and closed my door, Rachel doing the same on her side after making sure the shotgun was on safe.
As soon as we were back in the truck Gwen dashed forward and grabbed the grocery bags, then all three ran to the open door of a small white house. They disappeared inside and the door closed. I sat there for a minute looking at the house and was glad to see that they had done a good job of covering windows from the inside. The house looked empty. As long as they were careful and quiet maybe the infected wouldn’t find them.
“Think they’ll make it?” Rachel asked quietly.
I shook my head, then answered when I realized she was looking at the house and not me, “For a while. Until the food runs out, or they run out of water and have to go out and scavenge.”
“We shouldn’t leave them,” She said, a note of distress in her voice.
“Unless we force them, they’re not going to come with us.” I put the big truck in gear and slowly accelerated down the street.
We kept heading northwest, finally coming to the road that led to the overpass that would hopefully get us safely over the 575. It was a narrow four lane road with a center turn lane. The road was lined with small businesses- mainly fast food joints, liquor stores, convenience stores and auto repair shops.
As we approached the 575 the number of abandoned vehicles increased and we were frequently forced to steer through parking lots to get around. More and more infected were also present, the shambling males that tried to catch us and the much swifter females that sprinted at us. More than one female bounced off the side or front of the truck, but I kept the speed up enough that they were unable to hold on for a ride.
We finally made it onto the overpass with a respectable sized herd following. Despite their presence I braked to a halt at the apex of the bridge, maneuvering the truck close enough to the guard rail to allow us a good view of the 575.
Both directions of the interstate were hopelessly jammed with cars. Some had apparently been involved in accidents and abandoned by their owners, but most were just stuck in gridlock and were now sitting empty. Flowing through the maze of steel and glass were thousands of infected, looking like a river flowing through rocks.
We were noticed immediately as we sat there idling, infected from every direction turning to make their way towards us. Several females, apparently frustrated with the pace, leapt up onto car hoods and roofs and raced towards us using the stalled vehicles like stepping stones. In my mirror I could see the leading edge of the herd following us and decided we’d sat in one place long enough.
The road we were on ran west for a bit through sparsely populated countryside, then swung to the north and we began to see more homes and businesses. Along with more buildings came more infected. We pushed on and I raised our speed slightly, eager to move beyond Atlanta’s sprawl and out into the country. My hope was that the farther we moved away from the city the less infected we would encounter.
As we continued, this seemed to be the case. The road swung to the northwest and other than a road that ran to the south with a sign for a marina there was nothing but the blacktop cutting through forest. The road was smooth and well maintained with wide, grassy shoulders and the terrain began rolling as we drove.
Relaxing slightly I asked Rachel to double check her map for our next turn and pushed our speed up close to sixty. It was a beautiful day, the sun shining brightly as the afternoon wore on and for the first time since arriving in Atlanta my spirits started to lift. We drove through a series of dips in the road as we gained altitude, then climbed the biggest hill yet. Cresting the rise it took me a moment to realize what I was seeing and another to react and jam on the brakes.
The tires screamed in protest and left smoking black marks on the pavement as I held the brakes down, finally stopping but not before we plowed into the back of a herd of infected so large that we couldn’t see the far edge.
19
“Oh, shit,” I heard Rachel say under her breath as thousands of heads snapped around in our direction and hands started beating on the truck. I could only see males around us, and for as clumsy and slow as they are they were quickly surrounding us and pressing in. We would rapidly be enveloped in such a large mass and I was afraid the truck wouldn’t be able to move.
Throwing the truck in reverse I stomped on the throttle and the big diesel roared as we surged backwards. We had slid a few feet into the herd when we stopped and I kept the throttle down and crashed through and over bodies until we reached clear pavement. With thirty yards of open space now in front of us I spun the wheel and turned us sideways in the road, stopping with the back bumper against the berm that rose up from the edge of the shoulder and grabbed the gear selector to put the truck in drive.
I tugged, but the lever didn’t move. Staring dumbly at the little red needle that indicated the gear I pulled harder with no luck. I hammered the lever with the palm of my hand trying to move it to P or D, I didn’t care which, but it wasn’t moving. The truck was stuck in reverse and we were backed up against a berm of rocky soil. Didn’t look like the truck was going anywhere.
“Get us out of here!” The stress in Rachel’s voice snapped my attention to the herd of infected that were lumbering towards us, now only twenty yards away.
I made one last desperate attempt to move the gear selector, but it was stuck fast in reverse. Probably a two dollar pin in the transmission linkage, but it didn’t matter what the cause was.
Popping my door open I jumped down to the pavement, glad that I’d had the foresight to have Rachel and I load all our magazines into the tactical vests we were wearing. While Rachel scrambled across the seat and out my open door I yanked the back door open and grabbed our back packs, shrugging into mine quickly then helping Rachel into hers. I grabbed the shotgun out of the front seat, slammed the door and we started running just as the faster males reached the far side of the truck.
I didn’t know where we were going, just knew that we had to get away from the her
d before any females spotted us. Loaded like we were there was no way we could outrun them.
Setting a steady fast jogging pace that would put distance quickly between us and the herd we headed back east. I ran with my assault rifle slung across my back and the shotgun held ready across my chest. The Mossberg was loaded with buckshot alternating with slugs and any infected I engaged would go down with one shot. The kinetic energy of either buckshot or slugs delivered at close range would be enough to stop anything smaller than a grizzly bear, and the bear would think twice about continuing an attack.
We opened some distance between us and the herd, Rachel slowing when we had a good hundred yard buffer.
“Don’t slow down,” I said without breaking stride. “There’s got to be females in that herd and we need to get as far away as fast as possible.”
As if my warning had been prophetic there was a scream from behind us that made the hair on my arms stand on end. I glanced over my shoulder to see two females sprinting after us. They must have been further up in the herd when we first made contact and it took them this long to force their way through the crush of bodies and break out into the open where their speed made them such dangerous hunters.
"Keep going,” I shouted to Rachel as I reversed directions and raised the shotgun.
The lead female was about twenty five yards away when I fired the first round of buckshot. The mass of BB sized pellets slammed into her chest and very nearly stopped her cold in her tracks. She stumbled then fell to the pavement without a sound. I racked the shotgun slide, ejecting the spent shell which hit the asphalt with a hollow plastic sound then feeding the next shell into the chamber. This was a slug and I fired at the second female that was racing towards me and no more than twenty yards away.
The slug tore into her left shoulder causing damage that would have put any normal person down and most likely out for good. Her body jerked to the left with the impact and when she turned back I could see that her left arm was being held to her shoulder by only a few tendons and strings of flesh. The slug had completely destroyed the bone and muscle at the socket, but other than momentarily slowing from the impact she ignored the wound and continued on.
I racked the slide again, firing at no more than five yards. This shell was buckshot and the full force of the blast hit her in the face. Her face disappeared and most of her head disintegrated, her body continuing with forward momentum until it came to rest on the pavement at my feet.
I noted the lesson about severe injuries not being enough to stop an infected, scanned for more females then turned and ran after Rachel. I ran at a fast pace and caught her quickly, passing her and urging her to run faster to match my pace.
Rachel looked like she was in good shape, but I didn’t know if that was dancing muscle with poor cardio conditioning to back it up. So far she was staying with me, but we hadn’t run a quarter of a mile yet and adrenalin will carry you a good distance before poor conditioning becomes evident.
Ahead of us several males stumbled out of the woods, most of them losing their balance and falling onto the pavement before stumbling to their feet and coming towards the sound we were making as we ran down the middle of the road.
“Behind me,” I said to Rachel as we approached the group. They were spread out just enough to effectively cover the road from shoulder to shoulder, and I didn’t want to take us into the woods.
Rachel fell in close behind me as we neared the first infected, a scrawny man wearing nothing but filthy white underwear. Without breaking stride I smashed the shotgun barrel into the side of his head, knocking him to the side and to his knees. The group started to collapse in on us as I hit two more infected with the shotgun. We were almost clear when I heard a clatter and cry from Rachel.
Stopping and spinning around I saw her on the ground. One of the infected I had knocked down had grabbed her ankle and was trying to pull her to him with grunts and hisses as she kicked at his head with her free foot. She couldn’t get a good angle and the kicks were bouncing off with apparently no effect.
I fired the shotgun at an infected coming at me with his arms raised like a kid pretending to be a Halloween ghost. His head dissolved in a spray of blood and bone from the heavy shotgun slug and I snapped a kick into the chest of another infected that was shambling at me. He fell backwards and I stepped over the infected that had grabbed Rachel, pulled my pistol and fired a single shot into his head.
The grip on Rachel’s ankle immediately loosened and she kicked free and scrambled to her feet. We stood back to back at the center of a group of eight infected. I had wanted to move quickly and conserve ammo, but the scream of an approaching female spurred me to action. Raising the pistol I fired five shots and five bodies hit the ground like sacks of wet sand.
“Move!” I shouted to Rachel and we ran east again. Another scream from behind lent wings to our feet and Rachel began to pull away from me, long hair flying behind her in the wind. I made a mental note to have her tie her hair up in a bun so an infected couldn’t get a handful of it and drag her to the ground, then I had to spin around to fight when another female screamed right behind us.
The female had been closer than I thought and as I turned I was hit in the chest by a body that knocked me flat on my back, whooshing all my breath out of my lungs. I landed with the shotgun across my chest and I was able to get it up and between me and the snapping teeth of the female infected that was on top of me. I pushed for all I was worth and she flipped backwards off of me.
I scrabbled around on the ground, trying to get my breath and my feet back under me. I had only risen to a knee when the female launched at me again. Twisting to the side I clubbed her with the shotgun and knocked her to the ground in a tangle of limbs. As she struggled to get back to her feet Rachel stepped behind her and shot her in the back of the head with her 9mm pistol. The body flopped to the ground and twitched once then lay still.
Behind us the herd was closing the distance, now down to less than fifty yards. More males were coming out of the woods and behind the leading edge of the herd I could hear multiple screams from females as they worked their way towards us. Picking myself up I started running again, following Rachel who didn’t need to be told this time.
We ran for what felt like an hour but was actually probably closer to ten minutes. The herd still followed, but was dropping further and further behind. The occasional male was still coming out of the woods, but we were able to either dodge them or knock them aside and keep up our pace.
We crested a rise and I called a brief halt to survey our situation. Behind us a good half a mile was the leading edge of the herd that was in pursuit. Between us and the herd were a few dozen lumbering males that had stumbled out of the woods. What concerned me most were the figures out in front of the herd that were sprinting towards us. I couldn’t make out details at the distance, but they had to be female infected, and I counted at least twenty of them before I turned and started running again.
Twenty or more females would run us to ground and overwhelm us if we were caught in the open. I’m good with a gun, but I don’t know anyone that’s good enough to fend off that many attackers on the open road. We needed somewhere to not only make a defense, but hopefully hide from the herd so that we didn’t become trapped.
Ahead I could see a road that cut into the woods at a 90 degree angle and a small blue sign with white lettering. I wasn’t close enough to read the sign, but I remembered passing it earlier and that it was a road to a marina on a large lake. The same lake I had seen on the map that we were trying to get around.
I pointed at the road and Rachel nodded her head in agreement or understanding. I didn’t really care which one at the moment. As we approached the intersection the shoulder widened out into a level, grassy field. Cutting the corner off the intersection we charged into the field. I was slowing, but not as much as Rachel who was starting to drop behind. Between weapons, ammo and packs I had at least one hundred pounds distributed across my body, and Rachel prob
ably had close to seventy. I used to train with this kind of weight, but it had been a lot of years.
We cleared the field and pounded back onto the pavement just as a chorus of screams broke out behind us. I risked a glance over my shoulder and saw a group of females that had cleared the rise in the road and was in hot pursuit. I dug deep and pushed harder, taking advantage of the slight downhill slope of the road as it dropped down to the lake. Rachel matched my pace but she was breathing like a steam engine and I knew she didn’t have many reserves left.
Several infected and three shotgun blasts later we pounded around a curve in the road and I dropped the Mossberg on the pavement. It was empty and I needed to shed some weight. I brought the assault rifle around to my front, made sure the safety was off and ran for all I was worth.
Screams behind us sounded much closer than I would have thought possible, but I didn’t want to lose speed by looking back. Ahead we could see the road ending in a large marina, over a hundred boats moored on the blue lake.
More screams and I knew we’d have to fight. The females were closing and would be on us before we made the marina.
“Find a boat and get it started,” I yelled to Rachel as I started to slow.
“What are you doing?” She looked over her shoulder at me, terror in her eyes.
“Buying us time. Now go. I’ll be right behind you.”
I skidded to a stop, turned and dropped to my right knee as I brought the rifle up. There were nine females in close pursuit, danger close as we used to say, a larger group perhaps another two hundred yards behind them.
Just like I’d been trained so many years ago, I kept both eyes open, brought the rifle up and acquired my first target at which I immediately fired. The closest female dropped to the pavement, a neat red hole in her forehead. I acquired my next target and fired, noting in my mind that it was down as I was already acquiring my next target.
