“We stick close. We stay together.”
“Wait! Help me! Take me with you!” A man they recognized from the convoy, but did not know, staggered out of the field towards their voices. It was evident from the way he clasped his eyelids shut and held his hands out in front of him that he couldn’t see.
“What’s your name doo?” Maurice demanded.
“Zach.”
“Zach.” Maurice grabbed the Greek and put one of his hands on Zach’s shoulder. “You stick with my friend Saki here, okay? Do everything he says and keep quiet.”
The man said nothing, but a look of immense relief washed over his face.
An explosion from somewhere within the convoy drew their attention. As they watched, the vehicles were engulfed in fire from left to right and began detonating one by one.
“Panavia’ mou!,” the Greek said, pulling his Kangol back and scratching at the bald spot on the top of his head.
“What the hell just happened?” the blind guy asked.
They looked back before plunging into the field. The clear sky above the convoy filled with a roiling black smoke. There were screams and howls as the living and the dead perished in the fire, entire families trapped and burnt alive between and inside the cars. A few of the sturdier among the undead shambled out of the conflagration ablaze, toppling to burn in the parking lot. In the distance a huge plume of smoke from the city billowed and dissipated outwards.
The field gave way to trees. They moved quietly through the foliage. Eva walked at the front of the line with her assault rifle/shotgun combo at the ready. Lauren held Buckwheat’s hand, leading Sonya who had one hand on her shoulder. Nelson and Nicole stayed close to their mother and Lauren.
“Come on, doo.” Maurice did his best to keep up with the women. He took turns with the Greek, half-leading and half-dragging Zach along. The blind man moaned and rubbing at his eyes periodically. “You too. Don’t drag ass, Stymie.”
The boy protested, “I’m Buckwheat.”
“Whatever. Move your little white ass, doo.”
The Greek brought up the rear spooked, constantly looking back over his shoulder.
By mid-day they reached a point where the red shoots and flowers of the maple trees gave way to another road, a six-lane highway, its asphalt cracked and grown over with weeds. There were no vehicles in sight and the road stretched on in either direction. The mushroom cloud was behind them. If it still hung in the sky they could not see it because of the tree line.
They stopped and ate a small lunch from cans and drank some of the water they had taken from the convoy.
“Maybe we should put all our food in one knapsack and all our water in another?” Lauren asked.
“No,” Eva said.
“Give all the food and water to one person, even two people,” Maurice explained, “then what happens if we lose those people?”
Lauren understood his point and nodded.
“Evangeline,” Sonya asked. “What happened to Edward?”
“I don’t know.”
The children were especially tired, but it was decided without much debate they needed to continue and would follow the road, heading in a general direction away from the city, putting the caravan as far behind them as they could.
They spread out along the road and moved along silently, meeting no one.
“You okay?” Maurice held Buckwheat’s hand and walked beside Lauren and Nicole.
“Yeah, I’ll be okay.”
“Okay.” Maurice thought of Damar and his other friends and wondered where they were and what had happened to them and if they had perished back at the convoy.
“I think I’m getting my vision back.” Zach said. The Greek cursed at him and pulled him along.
Eva crested a rise ahead and held up a hand, waving them forward, signaling the group to keep quiet. Lauren with Sonya and the kids were the last to reach the rise. Lauren looked down upon what had stopped Eva.
“What is it?” Sonya asked.
“Cars,” Lauren said. “Tons of them.”
From where they stood it looked like a parking lot. Thousands of cars of all makes and models stretched as far as the eye could see, carpeting all six-lanes of the highway, covering the grassy median separating one direction from another, covering much of the shoulders on either side of the road.
“Where the hell did that come from?” Maurice asked.
“Apo’ pou sto thia lo? Erthe aufto? Po po?” asked the Greek but he knew no one understood a word he said.
“I don’t like this one bit,” Eva said.
“I don’t see Zed,” Maurice noted.
“Just cause you don’t see any zombies don’t mean they’re not there,” Zach said. “What am I missing anyway?”
As Lauren filled him and Sonya in on the scene Eva and Maurice debated the next move.
“We could circle it,” Maurice said. “Stick to one of the tree lines.”
Eva looked over either shoulder. There was a seamless melding where the cars, packed from the highway to the shoulder, disappeared into the trees. It didn’t look like they’d be able to skirt all the vehicles and Eva wasn’t comfortable doing so. Anything could be lurking in those trees.
She pointed this out to Maurice and he nodded.
“Want to camp here for the rest of the day?” he asked.
“Do you?”
“No.”
“Can’t tell how long those cars go on for. Where they hell are we? Is there a town or a city nearby?”
“I don’t think so.”
“This is a weird fucking place for this. I think we have another hour or two of daylight.”
“We get stuck down there,” Maurice indicated amongst the cars, “we can find a couple vans or something. Spend the night in them.”
“Or on top of them.” Eva had no intention of being trapped inside a vehicle with who knew what gathering around in the night.
“Or on top,” Maurice echoed.
“Okay, listen up,” Eva called to the group. “We’re heading down there. We don’t see anything but that just means we have to be extra careful. I’m going first. Lauren I want you to follow me with Sonya and the kids, including Farina there.”
“I thought he was Stymie,” Maurice said.
The kid laughed and said, “Buckwheat.”
“Greek, listen to me.” Eva signaled with her hands then explained what she wanted him to do. “You stay on our left flank, near the median. Keep an eye on the road over there and the tree-line up on that shoulder.”
“Pragmatika katalava lexi apo ti epeis.”
“Shit. Okay, Maurice, you get our flank on that side. Greek,” she pointed as she spoke slowly. “You-bring-up-the-rear, okay?”
“Den milao-Anglika. Den em ai vlakas.”
“He’s not retarded, Eva,” Sonya said. “He just doesn’t speak English.”
“And you’re blind and I’m standing right over here, so shut the fuck up. I mean, I’m your sister and I love you and all, but right now we’re in some shit, so I need you to listen to me so we can all get through it, all right? Greek, go, now. And take this other blind motherfucker with you.”
“I’m getting my vision back,” Zach said. “I think.”
“You’re flash blind,” Lauren said. “You were looking towards the city when the nuke went off, weren’t you?”
“Dammit, that’s what it was, wasn’t it? Shit.”
“Shit is right. We better get our asses moving,” Eva snapped. “I don’t feel like standing here chatting and waiting to see what reaches us first—a radioactive cloud or a bunch of fuckin’ zombies.”
“Let’s go.” Maurice started forward, walking off towards the left.
The Greek looked at Zach.
“Me vlepeis?” He waved a hand in the man’s face.
“I see shadows. Light and dark. It’s an improvement over what I saw before.”
“Ga mi sou. Ako lou tha me.”
The cars, trucks, buses and vans stretch
ed out around them, tightly packed in places, scattered haphazardly in others. Some doors stood open and the interiors were empty. In other cars skeletal remains cluttered the seats: clothes that had once hung from flesh and muscle and bone pooled about them. Other skeletons and parts of skeletons lay strewn outside the vehicles, often in proximity to a weapon of some sort: guns and knives, a tire iron. All of the tires were flat.
“Lauren, what is that I’m stepping on?” Sonya could feel whatever it was crunching beneath her shoes.
“It’s glass Mommy,” Nelson said.
“From a car window,” Lauren added.
“Something must have broken in,” Sonya said.
“Or something broke out.”
Eva led them, picking a path between the vehicles. Two or three spots proved impassable, cars pressed bumper to bumper, so it was up and over, crossing hoods to the highway on the other side. Lauren was especially cautious with Sonya in these areas, her work doubly difficult as Sonya clutched baby Victor to her chest the entire way.
Like a rabid dog locked in its owners’ car, the zombie smashed itself against the glass of the driver’s door and Maurice involuntarily jumped back into the side of another car, pointing the barrel of his Mini-14 at the window.
“Holy shit.”
The thing was trapped inside. Tufts of its hair were missing and it looked like they had been torn from its scalp. Maurice wondered how long the beast had been locked in the car like that, if it had grown bored and pulled its own hair out. Its teeth and rotten gums were pressed against the glass and the thing snarled at him, just like a dog.
“Damn.” Maurice shook his head and started walking again, turning his head a few times to check on the thing in the car, which pushed up to the windshield and watched him go. He walked with the 14 secure to his shoulder from that point on.
“Damn,” he repeated, when he had put enough cars between himself and the zombie he could no longer see it.
“Eva, wait. Don’t shoot!”
She lowered the twin barrels of the M4/M-26. “Maurice. Fuck.”
He wound his way through the cars towards her.
“I asked you to walk up there for a reason, didn’t I?”
“Stop being a bitch for a second and listen, aight? There’s zombies in some of these cars.”
“Motherfucker.”
“Yeah. I’ve passed three of them now. They can’t get out.”
“We’re lucky these dead bastards are so fuckin’ dumb.”
“Yeah, we are. I guess they crawled into those cars and died, came back. Now they can’t get out.”
“Like I said, we’re lucky. Now do me a favor and get your ass back up there. I don’t like that tree line.”
“I don’t like it either,” Maurice said over his shoulder as he trudged off.
He let out a low whistle that only he could hear. He thought of the possibly thousands of people who had been trapped here at one point, like the skeletons and zombies in the cars. But most of the cars were empty and he couldn’t have imagined the occupants had all met their ends out here on the highway. He pictured them streaming up into the trees on the hills and down the road, fleeing whatever it had been they’d been scared of.
The sun was going down when he stopped and climbed atop the hood of an old Cadillac. He stepped onto its roof and from there reached out and up with one foot, alighting atop the cab of an 18-wheeler. He reached up and swung a leg over and pulled himself from the cab to the top of the cargo container then stood and surveyed all he could.
The cars stretched out in all directions, for miles. He wondered how far they’d come. Had it been a few miles or more, or had it only felt as such because of the constant maneuvering between dead vehicles?
Sonya had an arm out-stretched and was holding onto Lauren’s shoulder. It felt like a flock of children moved with them.
Eva was well ahead of the group, the assault rifle/shotgun tensed on its sling. Maurice thought again how bad ass Eva was, how he wouldn’t want to fuck with her.
The Greek and Zach had fallen behind but were in sight. Maurice couldn’t hear him but he could see the Greek was saying something. He imagined he was prodding the other man, hurrying him forward.
Maurice squinted and looked as far ahead as he could into the slowly gathering dusk but he could not see any zombies…
Sundown was upon them and soon it would give to night. Eva knew it was time to stop and find someplace suitable amongst these cars to wait for morning. She looked behind her, could see Lauren with Sonya, her niece and nephews and that other little boy winding their way through the vast collection of stalled vehicles. She knew Maurice was following off to her left somewhere, closer to or on the median. She could not see the Greek and Zach.
Eva figured they had gone several miles at least. She had noticed a couple of things about the vehicles on the road right away. First, they were all facing in the direction in which her little group was headed. Even the cars across the median on the other three lanes had been headed in that direction. She assumed these vehicles and their passengers found themselves here sometime soon after the immediate zombie outbreak so many months back. She thought they’d been fleeing a city, maybe Pittsburgh, where she guessed the nuclear explosion—what else could that mushroom cloud have been?—had originated.
As she walked among the still cars and trucks, the M4-shotgun combo tensed on its sling, she considered where all these automobiles had been going and why they had stopped. She thought they’d been headed away from the cities, towards the countryside, headed for areas with lesser populations. Though an eleven-month-old like Victor would be too young to remember it, she recalled all too well how the cities had quickly become death traps, teeming with millions of the undead, survivors trapped in apartment buildings and malls and supermarkets and anywhere they could get to.
There was a buzz in her ear. She swatted away something she dismissed as a gnat.
But why had the cars stopped? What, she wondered, was up ahead? And how far was it? Maybe a military blockade? Eva remembered how, early on, the National Guard and the Army had set up barricades and tried to quarantine entire towns and cities, murdering citizens, the infected and uninfected alike, not allowing them access to the areas that had not yet been contaminated. In the end all areas had become contaminated and the barricades had fallen. The soldiers and police officers abandoned their posts, seeking safety and their own families. The ones who had not run had died at the barriers.
She passed a yellow school bus and had to go around it. A van had been parked flush against the side of the bus, directly behind the door where she imagined kids not much older than Nicole and Nelson had gotten on and off every day on their way to and from school.
That was another thing she had noticed about the cars. There had been numerous fender benders and small accidents. It looked like some drivers had tried to drive through other cars, attempted to push them out of their way, all to no avail. At times she and the group had to circle around small groups of vehicles that were joined bumper to bumper.
She swatted at the gnats again.
Eva thought they’d be safe enough if they spent the night out here on the road, maybe inside or on top of some of the higher trucks. Inside would be better. If something or someone passed by in the night there’d be less of a chance of them being spotted. They’d spent months in the relative safety of the convoy. Their numbers and the sound of their band had drawn zombies nearly every day, but it had also kept them safe from other human beings. Eva had heard enough stories from people who had joined the convoy to know that not everyone you met on the road was a friend. At the very beginning of this thing she had sworn to herself she would do whatever she had to do to protect Sonya and Nelson and Nicole and Victor.
If she had allowed herself the luxury she would have felt how terrified she was. But she didn’t. Instead she imagined how Sonya must feel, blind, three kids in tow, now that little kid, Buckwheat, and Sonya’s husband dead and gone.
&n
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Crusade (Eden Book 2) Page 17
