by Ben S Reeder
This time, when I put my head around the corner, the row wasn’t empty. A bright red truck on oversized tires was backed into the row. Several of the units were open, and I could see two men watching the front of the lot. A man in mismatched hunting camo emerged from the left side carrying a cardboard box. Another emerged from the other side with what looked like a gun case. The second one wore brown coveralls and a baseball cap, with a revolver holstered on his hip.
“Whatcha got?” the camo’d man asked.
“Benelli twelve gauge,” the other one answered. “You?”
“Got some stuff for them girls we rescued. I think whoever had this place was a stripper or somethin’,” he said as he set the box down on the tailgate and pulled out something black and shiny.
“Shit, Mike! We’re not at the goddamned mall! Just look for stuff we can trade or use.”
“We can trade the girls. Dress ‘em up nice, maybe we can get more for ‘em. Besides, they’d look better in this stuff.” The man in brown seemed to think that over for a second.
“All right. Put it on the truck, but that’s all. Start looking for stuff we can use!” My eyes narrowed as I watched them go back into the storage units. I wondered if “rescued” meant “kidnapped” or if the girls even knew what these men had in mind for them. Either way, it wasn’t enough to start shooting. As I mulled the moral ambiguity in my head, I darted across the open space to the next row. Whether I ended up confronting these guys or not, I still needed to finish checking the area out before I did anything and I could still hear other voices from the other row. Rule seven applied here: Know your terrain. I holstered the SOCOM and unslung the assault rifle. At the ranges I was looking at, the pistol was useless.
When I took a glance around the corner of the third building, I was reminded of my twelfth rule of survival: Assume people suck after shit hits the fan, and that they’re after your stuff. Somehow, this group had managed to hijack a prisoner transport vehicle from the sheriff’s department, complete with two sheriff’s deputies, one male and one female. The female deputy was handcuffed to the back of the transport, and the other deputy was in the middle of four other guys. Three of the scumbags had baseball bats, and the fourth one had a wicked looking bowie knife. They had backed the transport in at an angle to block off the front gate, and also hide most of the drive between the storage units from view of the street that ran in front of the place. Beyond the front gate, the manager’s apartment was ablaze. Risking exposure, I brought the assault rifle up and peered through the four power optic and trained it on the deputy’s chest. Over his left breast pocket, I could see the badge was a cloth patch sewn on to his duty blouse. The woman’s badge was missing, which meant hers had to have been a metal one. Cloth badges were distinctive to corrections officers, while metal ones were given to patrol deputies. That told me which division they each worked for, and made my job a little easier. The four guys taunting the CO had made a mistake in letting him have his hands free. Corrections officers had to deal with physical confrontations with multiple inmates on a regular basis. This guy was in his element. His attackers weren’t. Since he’d kept his blouse on, I was betting on him still having his vest on, which in a jail environment, was designed to protect him more against getting stabbed than shot. The guy with the knife was the least of his worries.
The moral ambiguity of the situation was gone as I drew back from the corner and made my way back to the other side of the building. Shooting was likely to draw ghouls and zombies, but I didn’t really see any other choice. I waited until the two looters were back at the truck’s tailgate to bring the rifle up and fire at the guy standing guard on the opposite side of the row from me. As he dropped I corrected my aim and fired at the guy in brown, then moved my aim point toward his buddy as he darted for cover. I pulled the trigger as the other guard came into my site picture, then fired again as I got close to my original target again. Four rounds downrange, and two bad guys down. I heard cursing and yelling from the next row over as I brought my aim point back to the guard on the near side and pulled the trigger. Five, I counted to myself as he dropped. The guy in brown was crawling toward the truck’s right rear tire, so I sent a round at him, then ducked back behind the building. No gunfire came my way, so I popped back around the corner to see the camo’d guy scrambling for his buddy’s pistol. I stroked the trigger twice and sent him sprawling, then ducked back and headed for the other side of the building. The CO had one of the bat carriers in an arm bar and was using him as a shield against the only other guy left standing. One of the other bat carriers was laying on the ground with his hands stuck between his legs and the knife wielder had his own blade sticking out of his belly. The rifle went back on my back and I drew the SOCOM again as I came out from the side of the building. I advanced at a walk while the CO spun his human shield around.
“Drop the bat!” I called out as I got closer. The guy turned his head to face me, and the CO shoved his buddy into him. They went down in a tangle of limbs, and before they could get to their feet, the CO had clubbed both of them back down. He turned to face me with a grim look on his face.
“If you’re going to shoot me, then pull the trigger now,” he growled. I lowered the gun.
“If I was going to shoot you, I would’ve done it from back there. Go ahead and unlock your friend. I’m going to go check the other guys. I’ll be right back.” I trotted over to the other truck and knelt by the guy on the driver’s side. He had a pump shotgun with an extended tube and a sling, most likely a Remington 870 he’d taken from the deputies, and a Glock in a holster on his right hip. The other guy had an M-4, and the guy in brown wore a chromed revolver. I undid the gunbelts and took a look in the back of the truck. Tents, sleeping bags and camping gear shared space with a pair of plastic storage boxes and three gun cases. I popped the top on the storage boxes to find boxes of ammo in the first and coins in the second, smaller box. The gun cases held a pair of hunting rifles and a double barreled shotgun. Enough to help a pair of sheriff’s deputies and a few other people stay alive a little longer. I grabbed the four guns I’d taken from the dead guys and headed back to two deputies. The one had uncuffed his partner and they were checking on the four women in the back of the transport. They had the one that the woman had nut-kicked cuffed and on his face on the ground.
“Got ya somethin’,” I said as I held the long arms and the gunbelts out. The guy looked at me like I was trying to hand him a bag of snakes, but he took them.
“Why are you helping us?” he asked. “Not that I’m not grateful. It’s just that almost everyone else we’ve met since this has all started has been trying to kill us.”
“I’m one of the good guys,” I said with a wry smile and stuck out my now empty right hand. “My name is Dave Stewart.”
“Grant Jacobs,” the deputy said, then pointed with his thumb over his shoulder. “That’s Ann Tucker. We were out trying to rescue survivors when this group caught us by surprise. You’re welcome to come back with us. The jail is the only safe place in town right now. We’ve got it barricaded and we have enough supplies to last for a while. We could use all the help we can get.” Ann offered me a brief smile before she came over and squatted in the doorway. Grant handed her the Glock and pulled the magazine from the M-4.
“Thanks, but I’ve got a plan of my own. You’re probably going to want to get out of town yourself. Look, there’s a lot of gear, ammo and some more guns in the truck over there. Take it and get the hell out of here. Be careful when you head toward campus. Most of the dead were heading that way.” I paused for a moment, unsure of how much more I should say. I had seen things in the past twelve hours or so that I was having a hard time believing even after seeing it.
“Thanks,” Ann said as she buckled the sidearm on. “If the dead are heading toward SMU, the route back to the jail should be pretty clear. We should swing north a little to make sure we miss the shambling hordes.” Grant nodded and slid the mag home and pulled the charging handle.
“Okay, you’re gonna have a hard time believing this, but the zombies…a guy named Mike Deacon is controlling them.” They both looked at me with open disbelief.
“You’re kidding me,” Ann said.
“I wish I was, but he pulled every zombie for at least three miles around toward the campus. As far as I know Deacon’s still trapped in McDonald Arena.”
“Mike Deacon? About five nine, dark hair, skinny little fuck?” Jacobs asked. I nodded and he laughed. “I knew that guy. He was a frequent flyer at the jail.”
“Simmons brought him in on a domestic Friday night. I thought he died in his cell or something,” Ann said.
“Yeah, he did,” Grant said. “Guess it didn’t stick.”
“Well, I fucked him up pretty hard before I left the university,” I told them. “Still, staying in town is probably a bad idea in the long run. Your best bet is to find a railroad track and follow it out of the city, then head northwest.”
“Why northwest?” Ann asked.
“Population density’s lower that way. Fewer people mean fewer zombies,” I ad libbed. Nate’s original wording had been that fewer people meant less competition for resources and fewer potential carriers if things went biological. Now I was seeing what he’d really been pointing me toward. I pulled a notepad and pen out of the pocket of my vest and scribbled down a frequency and times. “If you get up Wyoming way, tune in to this frequency. Or channel twenty six on citizen’s band. Take care and good luck.” I turned and started away.
“Hey, Dave,” Grant called after me. I turned back to him. “Thanks again. If we ever get out to Wyoming, we’ll look you up. Safe travels, man.” I gave him a nod and headed back toward the truck. The stash of coins had been too good a find to pass up, so I stopped at the tailgate and pulled the smaller storage box toward me. Most of the coins were old nickels and dimes, but I hit paydirt in a small leather pouch: ten gold Krugerrands. I pulled five out and dumped them back into the box before I tucked the pouch into my vest. A small fortune in gold coins riding in my pocket was enough to put a spring in my step as I headed back for my storage unit. What I had there was worth more than all the gold on the planet just then. The storage unit door opened on my second bug out cache. Inside was my back up bug out bag, an Army ammo case and a binder filled with maps.
The bug out bag had a lot of the stuff I was already carrying, but it also carried more long term survival gear, including a small tent, a ground pad and a wool blanket. I tucked the maps into the tan pack then slung it across my back, grabbed the ammo case and slipped out the door. The sound of a truck pulling away reached my ears as I slipped out the back of the facility the same way I came in, then trucked across the tracks and headed for my bike.
Leo gave me a disapproving look as I stuck the ammo case in among everything else, but he stayed put otherwise. My bug out bag went on top, and he perched atop it like a little king on a padded throne. The bike took more effort to get going, but it was a light enough burden once I got moving. I followed my route back to the dirt road and turned down it. The brown clay rolled past below me, and the road turned to the south as it paralleled the tracks, the curved back to the east. I followed it under Schoolcraft Freeway to the area where the road construction crews that were widening the overpass parked their construction vehicles. A temporary crossing had been set up under the overpass, and I took advantage of it to get my bike on the north side of the tracks. Then came the ride up the hill. In a car, it would have been a pretty gentle grade, but on a bicycle, pulling more than fifty pounds of gear and a miniature lion behind me, it was torture. It finally leveled off and turned to the right, which put me on an access road called Eastgate that ran beside the freeway. Once I was on the street, I kept going north, and I breathed a sigh of relief. I was past the worst of the roads blocking my way out of the city, and even if I could see ghouls pawing at the glass of car windows, I was still away from the worst of the zombie clusterfuck that Springfield had become.
On my right, an empty road beckoned, and I took the turn, heading east again on a quiet residential road. The asphalt strip I was coasting down barely qualified as two lanes, but it was a straight as a nun’s ruler and level. Now that I was free of the city, I could indulge myself a little, and put some miles under my wheels. I set my phone on the pad attached to my front handlebars and activated the app that controlled the electric motor mounted to my bike’s rear tire. It hummed to life and I let my feet stop pedaling as it kicked in. Not much more than a disc inside my rear tire, the FlyKly motor would take me about twenty miles before its battery gave out. Even better, it would recharge as I pedaled or when I coasted downhill if I couldn’t plug it in. I set the speed on the app to fifteen miles an hour and let the motor do its magic.
Once I turned north, I looked back to make sure Leo was still safe on board. He had propped himself upright on my bug out bag and was letting the wind ruffle his fur, his eyes slitted closed so that he looked more than a little smug as he rode along. We passed the Rolling Hills Country Club Golf Course, and I noted the irony that I was back on Cherry. The gentle hills and manicured landscapes on either side of me made it hard to believe that the world had pretty much come to an end not ten miles behind me, until I came across a man in pajamas wandering in the middle of a wide expanse of well kept lawn. Only a black iron fence stood between us, but as soon as he saw me, he sprinted in my direction. As he ran my way, I could see the blood staining his face, hands and the sleeves and front of his pajamas. He hit the iron fence at a dead sprint and bounced back with a meaty sound that left the fence vibrating and left chunks of him attached to the chest high points of the fence’s top. As if only then recognizing that the fence was a barrier, he ran along beside it for a good five hundred yards without slowing down. When the fence curved away from the road, he stopped and watched me roll past, defeated by his inability to grasp that there was an opening less than a hundred yards away because it wasn’t in his line of sight. As I passed him, I looked back over my shoulder to make sure he didn’t get a sudden burst of common sense. He just stood there, straining against the fence, and I felt the urge to stop and put a pullet between his eyes grip me for a moment. From the corner of my eye, I could see Leo crouched down, his ears laid back and his teeth bared in a hiss, looking like I felt just then. One thing certainly stood out in my mind as I turned my attention back to the road in front of me: the ghoul had kept up with me all the way. He hadn’t even slowed down.
Another thought struck me as I turned north again a few hundred yards later. The ghoul who had chased me had probably been in bed when he’d become infected. Had another infected bitten him, or had he come in contact with an infected? How far from a city did I have to go to find pockets of unaffected people? Or was pretty much everyone going to turn into zombies? Was I going to turn into one? Was Maya? Or Amy? Thoughts of them as ghouls and worse, as zombies, promised to give me nightmares as I cruised along the little farm road. The houses out here were set too far back from the road to see, and the prices were too high to purchase without an annual income that was at best stratospheric. I knew from personal experience. I’d tried to buy land in this area when I was setting up Sherwood, and my realtor laughed at me, then suggested I aim at something north of 44. So, here I was, aiming for a destination north of Highway 44. The road started to slope downward and I felt the slight resistance as the SmartWheel started to charge itself as I coasted into the cool, dark shadows of a tree covered stretch of roadway. It curved left, then bottomed out and angled back right as I crossed a creek and emerged from the trees on to another straight section. More green pasture and sporadic trees dispelled the apocalyptic nightmare I’d just survived, and I felt like I was just on another practice run out to Sherwood. I tried to imagine spending the weekend out in the woods with Maya, drinking beer and wine by the campfire. The last time we’d been out to Sherwood in August, we’d laid out on the grass and watched the stars overhead, and made love under the full moon.
Unbidden, th
e image of Maya suddenly turning ghoul and trying to rip my throat out inserted itself into my daydream, and I shook my head in revulsion. It was too early to start getting zombie related PTSD. Half a mile later, I started to doubt that, as I passed a little subdivision. Zombies wandered aimlessly down the side street, all of them moaning incessantly. I heard Leo growl behind me as we went quietly by, and I silently agreed with him. Minutes later, we passed the Rolling Hills High School (Home of the Fighting Spartans!), and I found myself hoping that the ring of unmoving bodies lying near the entrance to the school was the work of someone evacuating a bunch of kids last night. Then we were past, and none of the dead rose to follow me or try to eat me. I offered a silent prayer of thanks for small favors and pressed on, knowing the next two miles were the last easy part for a while.
