by Nathan Brown
Joseph had always thought of zombies as mindless shuffling things with the intellect of a zucchini. He hadn’t been prepared for the speed and strength of Ryan’s attack that first day. Nor had he been ready for the lady that jumped him outside Mike’s house back in Lakeside City. Now the way the freshly turned zombies sprinted around no longer shocked him.
Hundreds of zombies charged around, some attacking in groups, tackling and eating the slow and the unlucky. A handful of citizens were holed up on one of the roofs. Unfortunately, they hadn’t thought to secure the doors to the building on the east side of theirs. Fresh zombies emerged from the roof top exit and made a beeline for them. They clumsily but quickly dropped down from the higher roof and fell upon them with gnashing teeth. One woman backed away from the approaching undead. Two of the zombies haphazardly tackled her. All three of them tumbled off the roof and landed head first; none of them moved again.
Joseph locked his eyes on the road. Under ordinary circumstances, looking around while driving through a town like Post wouldn’t be an issue. The constant motion of people running and the sound of gunfire were distracting to say the least. He forced himself to ignore the distractions and focus on weaving through the stalled, abandoned, and wrecked cars, along with the trees in the median. No one complained as Joseph slung them around the cabin, whipping back-and-forth through the choked road at unsafe speeds.
Just before the junction, Joseph cut across from the eastbound lanes into the westbound lanes closest to McDonald’s, and almost started to ask which way he needed to go.
“Left!” Mike answered before Joseph could get the question out.
Joseph let the Blazer swing a little wider, cut the steering wheel over hard, and stepped on the brakes, yelling “Hang on!” The back end of the vehicle swung around. Before the truck got completely away from him, Joseph rotated the steering wheel back to the right and stepped on the accelerator. The tires caught and pulled the truck out of the fishtail.
It was too late by the time Joseph noticed a pack of zombies feeding in the middle of the road. In a desperate attempt to keep the zombies from latching onto the front of the SUV (or worse, crippling the engine by hitting them head-on), Joseph cut the wheel back to the left. The vehicle plowed over a zombie with a ruptured gut falling out through the shredded remains of what was once a T-shirt. The jolt pulled the vehicle further right, causing it to sideswipe another parked SUV.
Joseph struggled to regain control. He narrowly managed to avoid rolling the Blazer as he took the right turn to stay on US 380.
“Stacy, honey, crawl into the floorboard. Joe, roll down my window,” Walter ordered.
Joseph took one hand off the wheel and pushed the button to roll down the window and said, “I hope you know what the hell you’re doing.”
He heard Walter and Stacy shifting around in the backseat. Wind ripped through the cab. Walter pushed his shotgun forward as the window descended. What was left of a woman started to stick its head into the truck. A single slug from Walter’s shotgun blasted most of its face out the back of its head. The blast threw the body clear of the tires. It rolled to a stop behind an abandoned car.
As soon as they cleared the last of the cars and had nothing but open road ahead of them, Joseph pushed the truck up to 80 miles per hour and didn’t look back.
“Where the hell did you learn to drive like that?” Mike said.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you all.”
“Scare? I was impressed. You handled that like an old pro.”
“This lunatic I went to high school with taught me,” Joseph said with a smile. “He’s a stunt driver in Hollywood now … well, I guess I should say he was before the shit hit the fan.”
Less than ten minutes later, Joseph nearly rear-ended a military convoy. He only narrowly managed to avoid hitting the rear guard vehicle, but not by much. The rear guard, a humvee with a manned 50 cal. machine gun, eased to one side to let Joseph join the convoy.
“Well, what should I do?”
Mike was trying to count the vehicles in the convoy. “I don’t like it, but you may as well pull into the convoy. We’ll peel off as soon as they do something we don’t like.”
They spent most of the next two hours crawling toward Brownsfield. No one in the SUV could relax, not even with the “protection” the military vehicles provided.
Joseph and Mike’s nervousness increased as they approached Brownsfield. They had wanted to blitz through the town as they had in Rule and Post, albeit without running into the zombies on their way out. It looked to them as though the convoy was planning on rolling through town at about the speed it was currently traveling.
“Whatever we’re going to do, we need to figure it out fast, Mike” Joseph said. “Once we get into Brownsfield, it’ll be a helluva lot harder for me to break away from this convoy. We might even get boxed in.”
Mike didn’t answer right away. He rolled down his window and stuck his head out to see around the convoy. The city limits were just barely visible.
The convoy was mostly civilian vehicles. Mike doubted that many, if any, had or knew how to use their weapons effectively. Leading the way were two hummers with mounted .50 caliber machine guns, followed by two five-tons with about twenty-five troops in each. He brought his head back in and rolled up the window.
“Joe, start letting off the gas and hitting it again.”
“What?”
“Make it look like we’re having a bit of engine trouble, turn on the flashers and pull out of the convoy. Let them go ahead of us.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah, trust me,” Mike said with a smirk. “These soldiers aren’t going to stop just for us.”
Joseph did as Mike said then turned off the engine. He turned on the flashers and fought to steer onto the shoulder of the road. Joseph turned the key just far enough to get the starter to make noise but not holding it long enough to start the Blazer. The rear guard started to pull over with them. Joseph rolled down the window and signaled for the driver of the hummer to continue with the convoy.
The convoy pulled ahead as the hummer hesitated. After a moment, the hummer closed up with the rest of the convoy.
“’K. Now what?” Joseph said.
“Now, we wait.”
They watched the convoy slide slowly into the town of Brownsfield. Joseph rolled down the rest of the windows and opened the sunroof so they wouldn’t have to run the a/c.
Blood curdling moaning soon swelled and echoed from afar. Joseph and Mike looked at each other. They knew a bad sign when they heard one.
Koom-koom-ka-koom-ka.
Mike knew that sound well. One of the gunners had let loose with one of the .50 cals. Soon, a second machine gun joined the koom-koom-ka-koom-ka of the first. Both guns fired out a rapid and steady rhythm. From the sound of it, Mike knew that it wouldn’t be long before they’d overheat their gun barrels.
Sharp barks from assault rifles and handguns counterpointed the steady thrum of the .50 cals. A stray round or a dropped grenade must have penetrated a nearly empty gas tank, sending up a fireball like a signal flare.
“That’s our cue, Joe. It’s now or never,” Mike said. “Hit it … and don’t you stop for anything or anyone.”
The SUV accelerated toward the edge of town.
Dead Come Home
Chapter 11
Alien Land
Roswell was going to be a problem. Not in the same way that Brownsfield had been a problem. Joseph and Mike were both impressed with how Joseph had handled storming through Brownsfield, or more accurately, a city turned Hell-on-Earth.
The gunner on the rear humvee had let the lead fly. He hit everything he’d wanted to and a few things he hadn’t—like a couple cars, some innocent civilians who weren’t infected, a couple of his buddies, and the propane and fuels tanks … which had caused a fantastic explosion. Joseph whipped past the gunner while he sprayed rounds at a horde of undead. Oddly enough, Mike had wanted to stop and help t
he men in the overturned lead vehicle. It was Joseph who’d had the sense to step on the gas and close the door in Mike’s face—quite literally.
Joseph had, somewhat accidentally, sideswiped a young man who tried to latch on to the Blazer, begging for a ride. Four zombies had grabbed hold and pulled the young man down as Joseph took a hard corner. Not ten seconds later, he ran over a group of both zombies and people. He wiggled the wheel to sling off anyone who grabbed on. Mike saw the tears that streaked down Joseph’s face, but when he tried to offer consolation, the young man promptly shook his arm off and grunted that he was fine.
“No, really, I’m okay. It was them or us, and I chose us,” Joseph said, a few minutes later, after he’d gathered himself.
Brownsfield was bad, but Roswell. No, Roswell was going to be a problem.
Mike knew it would be a problem … had known it for a while. Since the first time he’d looked at the map, Mike had to acknowledge that Roswell, New Mexico was likely going to be a serious obstacle. For miles and miles, every minute he’d spent in the passenger seat of the Blazer, he had devoted his thoughts to finding a solution. Mike hated thinking to himself. He’d always had a better time of thinking things through when he had someone else around to bounce his thoughts off of. For the last five years, these people had always been Hanse, Fish, or Bennett.
Hanse was, it now appeared, incommunicado. Mike’s former-Marine-buddy-turned-executive-courier hadn’t answered his phone or replied to a text message for nearly 24 hours. That didn’t worry Mike all that much. He figured this probably meant that Hanse had reached his desert safe house, which was well out of the range of cell phone towers.
As for Fish … well … according to the news he’d received from Hanse several days ago … Fish was almost certainly dead. Or, more than likely, undead.
As for Bennett? Mike knew firsthand what had become of his old friend.
Mike had briefly pondered bouncing his ideas off of Joseph, his newly-recruited “partner in crime.” But … Joseph was a civilian. On top of that, in Mike’s eyes, he was still just a kid. Talking to Joseph about this now would only worry the guy and maybe throw their two new passengers, Walter Reuben and his injured (and, apparently, infected) daughter, into a panic.
At the very least, both of these guys are civilians. No training. Certainly no combat experience, unless you count the handful of semi-crippled corpses Joe has managed to take down in the last few days. I need someone who knows how badly a plan can go wrong, no matter how good it sounds. If I try sharing ideas with these guys, who don’t, they’ll probably just agree with me because they don’t know any better.
In the absence of a second party, Mike tried to imagine what Hanse or Fish or Bennett might say were they around. In short, he began talking to himself … in his own mind, of course. He didn’t want to give the other members of his party the impression that he was losing it.
C’mon Mike! Think! You’ve been trained to deal with situations like this. Hell, you have dealt with situations like this.
No, you haven’t. Not like this.
Okay, not exactly like this. But you’ve fought your way out of worse. You know damn well that you can swallow a shit sandwich when you have to.
Okay … so the situation is FUBAR … but don’t overcomplicate things … start simple … what’s the obstacle?
Roswell, New Mexico. A mid-sized metropolitan area, probably loaded with blocked roads, bad detours, panicking civilians, and a welcoming party of who knows how many zombies.
So? Treat it like any other danger area. Find a way around it.
I already thought about that.
And? What’s the problem?
I’ve spent enough time in the desert to know that driving out into it unprepared is a bad idea. I’ve been trained to survive in it, but I also know how easy it is to die in it. If our vehicle breaks down, we’ll have no choice but to abandon it. That means we’ll be restricted to only the amount of food, water, and ammo that we can physically carry.
So? You take what you can carry and head for a built-up area.
Maybe in a normal situation … but not in this one. We’d be totally exposed. And if even one of things were to see us, a mob of ‘em would surround the first building we managed to find shelter in. Besides, like I said, this is the desert. It’s too easy to lose your way on foot.
Then you go around, but keep the city in sight.
And which side do I choose to go around? Left? Right? I don’t know the terrain in this area. Especially once we’ve left the road. The one map we have doesn’t show topography, so I don’t know what obstacles or natural formations might block our way. Suppose we get out there and run across a land formation that forces us to drive away from the city until it’s out of our line of sight? Then what?
Then you use basic land navigation. You use the formation as a landmark until the city comes back into view.
True … okay, but what about the depth perception issue? What about Private Doofus? He was at least somewhat familiar with his terrain … and he had both a compass and a way better map than I do. And we all know what happened to him.
Years ago, when Mike had been through desert survival training at the Marine Corps base in 29 Palms, California, affectionately called “29 Stumps,” there was a story the instructors were fond of telling. Any Marine who spent any length of time at 29 Palms eventually heard this tale of one ill-fated Marine’s death by idiocy.
Mike had always been terrible with names. And no matter how many times he’d heard the story, he could not for the life of him remember the name of the Marine. Eventually, Mike had just dubbed him “Private Doofus.” Because, in Mike’s opinion, the guy must have been a complete idiot.
According to the story, Private Doofus had been mistakenly left behind one night, out in the middle of the Mojave Desert, while standing road guard at the side of a dirt trail. His squad leader, probably tired from days of field training out in the desert, had forgotten that Private Doofus had been put on road guard duty, and reported to his platoon sergeant that all of his men were present and accounted for, without doing an actual head count. The entire infantry company loaded onto a convoy of trucks and returned to the base, each looking forward to a few cold beers and a semi-good night’s sleep on a cot of stretched, olive drab canvas … all but Private Doofus.
After nobody-who-knows-how-long, Doofus came to the conclusion that no one was coming back for him … though Mike decided it had probably been sometime around sunrise. So, he tried to walk back to the main base on his own … in the middle of the day … in the middle of summer … in the middle of the Mojave desert … with nothing but two canteens of water, one MRE, and a lightly loaded pack. As far as Mike was concerned, the guy should have just put a bullet through his head. At least that way, he wouldn’t have suffered so much.
Private Doofus’ squad leader didn’t notice him missing until his squad fell out for the next morning’s formation. The entire platoon looked high and low around the base, thinking maybe he’d had too many drinks and passed out somewhere. However, he was nowhere to be found. They dispatched the entire company when the hummer driver that was sent to retrieve Private Doofus (from the spot he had left only an hour before) radioed back that he was no longer there.
The Mojave Desert, unfortunately for Private Doofus, is extremely big. A widespread search turned up nothing. For years, the mystery of what happened to him went unsolved … until his skeletal, mummified remains were eventually found … less than a few hundred yards from a main road.
Private Doofus had done everything wrong, which ultimately resulted in his slow and grizzly death. His body was found in a makeshift shelter, which he’d constructed by draping a poncho around a dried up bush. However, the fact that the enclosed shelter did not allow proper air circulation, and was covered with the equivalent of a plastic tarp, turned it into a small oven. It was concluded that he had, quite literally, been cooked alive. It also appeared that he had stripped down to his underwear, t
rying to find relief from the heat. At some point, investigators came to the conclusion that he’d probably gone mad by the time he began stripping off his clothes. In the end, he was moving back and forth between two miserable and lethal situations. When Doofus would leave his shelter to get some relief from the heat, the sun would burn his exposed skin. And when he would return to the sweltering shelter for shade, he would get cooked. It was concluded that he died from a combination of exposure, heat stroke, and dehydration.
The saddest thing of all, in Mike’s opinion, was the fact that, when investigators opened Doofus’s canteens … one was still half full. Investigators assumed that he must have been rationing it for some reason. Mike could not, not for the life him, fathom how a person could be dumb enough to die of dehydration before even running out of water.
Mike was fairly confident that, even in the current situation, he could survive a trek through the desert, but he’d kissed away the idea of surviving on his own when he’d picked up Joseph. Then, of course, they’d picked up two more civilians … and infirm ones at that. He might have still risked the desert, had it only been him and Joseph. However, now he had an injured young girl and near-middle-aged man to consider.
Okay … so you can’t risk going around unless you’re willing to accept the possibility that you are likely going to be the only one who’ll make it out alive if anything goes wrong.
