by mike Evans
Shaun thought of the bus they’d taken from the blood bank and how badly that had gone at one point. He wished they had a tank; not that he knew how to drive one, but was confident that, given the time, he would be able to figure it out.
They drove for what seemed like forever. Shaun was paying attention to an ancient map that their grandpa Pete had in his glove box. Brandy came up, patting him on the shoulder. “You know where we are?” she asked.
“Still in Iowa, but not for much longer. We are going to hit Davenport real soon. I think that it might be smart if we fill up the tank before we hit there. Last thing I want to do is stop in the city. It hasn’t done me good in the past; lots of dead, lots of cars in the way, not very user friendly.”
“So, you think it would be smart to try to go around? It isn’t like we are on a schedule, right?”
“No, we aren’t, and you are right. But we are worried about gas. I know we have a lot of it now, but that doesn’t mean that we are going to stay that way. We only have as much as is in that tank. Once that is gone, we don’t have anything, or the guarantee to get more. If we do find a station in town, I think it’d be smart to try to fill it back up. I'm sure we could syphon some out of the wells they keep it in under the pumps.”
“Do you know how to do that?” Brandy asked.
“No, but I bet we could figure it out. Can’t be too hard. I’ve seen my dad do it before for a lawn mower, how much different could it be? Besides, if it means having gas over not having it, I think we can figure it all out between us.”
“I don’t know. Guess we'll find out, won’t we?”
“Seems that way, Brandy.”
Brandy sat down next to Shaun, scooting closer. “You know it’s been a really long time since I’ve been able to hang out with a boy that wasn’t my cousin or brother.”
Shaun, who’d been a little slow to how close she was getting, finally saw things line up. “I can only imagine how that was. At least you have all of us now. Good thing, right?” Shaun said with what sounded like fear and hesitation in his voice.
She scooted a little closer, placing a hand on his thigh. “I don’t think you understand quite what I'm talking about. You’re seventeen aren’t you? You aren’t gay are you?”
“No, I most definitely am not. God willing, if someone is, I don’t really care, though. To each their own and stuff.”
“Uh huh, well then do you want to maybe hang out a little later after everyone goes to sleep? Maybe you could help me take my mind off of all this?”
Shaun thought of Ellie a few hundred miles away and what he wouldn’t do to get a squeeze like this from her. “I'm sorry, it isn’t anything personal, but I’ve got a girlfriend… a live one, back where I'm from. We didn’t end things when I left. I don’t think it would be right. I’d feel guilty, and I kind of love her. Not kind of, she’s everything,” he confessed.
“And she’s left back at the base without you? You did tell her you were leaving, right; you didn’t just go off on your own without her, did you?”
“Look, it’s really complicated, and it isn’t that easy to talk about.”
“I just know that if my boyfriend left me without telling me he was leaving, that I’d be done being his girlfriend. All I'm trying to get across is that I think you might be more single than you think you are.”
“Look, I'm good right now. I'm more worried about keeping you all alive than getting in your pants. That might come to a shock to you, but there’s more than that to life,” Shaun looked up to see the rest of the boys looking at him, with a very determined and pissed off looking Talon staring him down in the rearview mirror.
Ben and Jay both laughed a little. “You know how old you sound, talking like that, Shaun? It’s, like, all I think about even when we are being chased. I'm like: hey, maybe we will meet a girl, and we can go live on that beach, and chill, and swim, and do whatever the hell we want,” Ben said.
Brady laughed, adding, “Yet he has the one girl in a hundred miles hitting on him, and he’s more worried about the one he left behind. I wouldn’t leave a girl behind for-”
“Jay, Ben, shut up or I'm going to kick both of your asses. You want to know why I was able to leave a girl that I loved behind? Why I don’t want anything to do with you, Brandy? Okay, let’s open that awkward can of worms. We’d been collecting blood for a long time. Everyone on base had been up for the challenge. The previous winter, when I’d gone out on my own, I’d taken a lot of bags with me. I hung them in the street, letting them drip into the wind. The results hadn’t been small. I had single-handedly shot more than you guys have ever seen. I’d insisted that the others try it, but that we needed to have more blood. Well, for one reason I don’t want to get into, we had a lot of blood on our hands from a donor business. We went out, and it was beautiful; we had silenced rifles and all the ammunition that we could ever use. There was three of us. We’d shot and shot, and were making a video of it so that one day, we could show the others in the world how to do it. We’d wanted to upload it and stream it for anyone that could see what we were doing, maybe make it a global fight, not just our individual fight. We knew there were probably people that were out there trying to kill these things too, but if we could collectively do it, then we would be even better off.”
“So, what happened, that made everything so bad?” Brandy asked hesitantly.
“What happened? Well, when we were taking a break because we didn’t want the barrels to melt from firing too much, two shots rang out back to back, throwing me off guard. By the time that it registered that someone else was shooting, and it wasn’t one of us three, I looked to see the man who taught me everything I’ve ever learned about using a sniper rifle, and a girl that I was very close to as a friend, both laying lifeless with bullet holes through their skulls. It was only the order this man had picked that saved my life. I had to see that and figure out what to do in a matter of a second. That isn’t easy to do when a pile of brains from two people you care for are right next to you.”
“What’d you do?” Talon asked.
“I took my gear and ran, I jumped off the roof. When I saw where the guy that had been shooting at us was, I crashed into him and left him for dead.”
“You didn’t, like… get revenge and shit?” Talon asked.
“I cut open a full set of blood bags and dumped them on him, then drove off, leaving him for the dead to eat. He’s either running around as one of them or, as I hope, he was picked clean by them. We had a hell of a horde—at least what was left of it. They would have been dying for a bite of anything after smelling the blood for hours. It didn’t make me feel any better though. It was after that, I had decided I couldn’t stand being responsible for anyone.”
Brandy laughed a little. “Well, I don’t think that you did a very good job getting rid of responsibility. You got rid of Seal trained teens for a bunch that have been trapped for a year. You think we have any chances of making it further than this town?”
“If we don’t, it’ll be quick. Those things don’t take a long time to try to savor their food. The suffering is usually over within seconds or minutes.”
“You couldn’t have been the popular one on base with that attitude,” Brandy replied.
“Lucky for me, Brandy, I am not trying to be anyone’s best friend. There’s plenty of other boys here if you can’t live without a companion. If fate takes me back to Ellie, then so be it; but if not, I'm not going out of my way to look for it again.”
“I'm not desperately looking. I just thought you seemed like a nice guy. No offense you three, I'm sure you are great and whatever. Just drive, Talon. You’re an asshole, Fox!”
Shaun tried to think of something to say, but nothing that was going to make this less weird came to mind. Talon brought the RV to a sudden stop, squealing the wheels. Shaun turned around, ducking down so that he could look out the window. “You see something, Talon? What is it?”
“Uh, yeah, I see a lot of something. Like a big a
ss town. Is that Davenport? I think I missed a few signs while you were giving us such a motivational speech just a few minutes ago.”
Shaun walked forward, ignoring the poke and looking between the map and at the white and green mile marker on the side of the road. “I’d say it is Davenport, unless we got abducted by aliens and dropped somewhere else.”
Shaun hefted his rifle, flipping the cover off the scope up, and focused down the road, seeing a blood covered sign that said, “Welcome to Davenport,” on it. He sat up, looking around with the rifle, trying to ensure that there was no one or thing that they needed to worry about. The large bridge they needed to cross did not fill him with any confidence.
“We need to fill the truck one more time; I don’t want any gas out of this beast that doesn’t need to be,” he ordered.
“Are you really that scared, Fox?” Talon asked.
“Scared or rational thinking, whatever you want to call it. You get a horde of them and we need to be driving fast, we aren’t going to stop. This is a big town and we might have a map, but that’s a map from before zombies. The bridges might not be there, the streets might be blocked, the dead might have parts of the city taken over. I have no idea, but I want to get through it and out of it.”
“Because Chicago is going to be so much safer? Let us stretch out what we know, see if we can even do this, or if we need to figure out something else,” Talon said.
“We have one vehicle as it is, Talon. We aren’t going to be splitting up anytime soon. You aren’t backing out on me already, are you?”
“You’re the one who doesn’t want to stay in town and see if we can take some of these things out. If you’re the zombie genius, let's take some of them out. We get in the city, find somewhere safe, and try to do our thing, maybe grab supplies.”
“There is nowhere safe, there’s just places that we have less chance of being killed. I'm fine; it’s always someone else that dies, or that we lose. If you guys aren’t worried, then let's find somewhere good to set up. Somewhere visible that we can see what we are doing.”
Talon put it in park and they topped off the tanks from what they had left. When they were ready, they loaded back on the RV. Ben did the sign of the cross as he got back on, wishing quietly that they had stayed at home with their parents like he knew they should have. Talon started the RV and they came up to the first of two bridges to get into town.
“We just keep going, right?” Talon asked nervously.
“As long as we can,” Shaun said. He ushered Timmy out of the co-captain seat and sat down, machine gun in hand and ready to go.
They drove slowly, weaving in and out of cars. Talon winced as the grinding of metal echoed when he hit a parked car. Everyone in the car winced as if it was a knife scraping down their backs.
“Sorry!”
Shaun watched as heads in front of them slowly came into view, rising from their spots. He looked down at his machine gun, hit the safety, and switched it out for his sniper rifle. “Put it in park for a minute, Talon.”
“Don’t we want to get off of this bridge first?”
“We do, but we don’t want to leave it as one of them. Put the fucking thing in park for a minute and let me clear out what is up there. There’s no way those things aren’t going to try to take us down.”
“What about the armor?” he asked hopefully.
“No reason to use it, Talon, if we don’t need to. Now, give me two minutes and shut up, please, while I work.”
Talon wanted to say something back, but his inexperience in the matter at hand made it difficult to try to debate anything. He checked that he had his pistol next to him, as well as his hunting rifle. Shaun pulled out his silenced rifle, tossing the backpack style case on the floor, and aimed down on the first one of The Turned.
Brandy watched. “Hey, superstar, are you going to be able to hit one of those from this far away?”
Shaun took a large breath and squeezed off the trigger. They cheered when the top of one of the dead’s skulls looked like someone ran a zipper down the middle and blew brains out from the inside. The other dead looked at it confused as Shaun ejected and loaded another shell, repeating the process. By the time the last one had turned to run, Shaun had his sights set dead on it, and blew off the rear of its skull, sending it forward and face planting into the street.
Talon admiringly looked at the rifle. “It’s too damn bad that you aren’t able to make some more of those rifles, Fox,” Brady said. “You decimated those things. I mean, like, totally blew the shit out of them, and by the time they figured out what was going on, they were gone.”
Talon went to drive, but the RV would not move. Shaun looked at him and all he did was rev the ancient engine and shrug. “Hell if I know, all I'm doing is punching the gas,” Talon said.
The thud of metal being punctured echoed. Shaun ran to look out the rear of the RV, only to see a group of The Turned behind them, all holding onto the rear of the RV. A few had their arms buried bicep deep into the small tank of gas that had once been their hopes for driving as long as they wished. The tires on the small makeshift pull behind cart had been chewed until they had popped.
“Guys there’s a bunch in the back. We are going to have to get them off of there,” Shaun yelled.
“Why don’t you just shoot them?” Brandy asked.
“Because there’s a shit ton of them, and they are soaked in gas. They put a hole in that little tanker we are towing behind us. You want me to hit that, or do anything remotely stupid to start a fire, then just speak up, please. Besides they already chewed the tires,” Shaun said.
“What are we going to do then?” Talon yelled.
“Give it some gas, see if we can get them to lose their balance. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”
“That’s your best option?” Timmy yelled, jumping up and down on the couch.
“Shut up Timmy, this is important,” Brandy barked. “Someone figure out something!”
Shaun shouldered his machine gun, walking through the RV. He watched them for a second, seeing that they weren't letting go of the tank, and then began to wonder if it was that they weren’t letting go, or if it was because they were stuck. Shaun looked where they’d put the tools, grabbing a hammer and an oversized wrench. The group watched in awe before the thought ever hit that maybe, just maybe, someone should go with him.
Brady thought about how stupid it was, and that it was in no way a good idea to volunteer, but could practically watch the words come out of his mouth. “You want me to come with, Shaun? What are you going to do with that stuff, anyways?”
“I’m going to go out there and pray that they are stuck in that gas tanker. If they are, I’m going to unhook it, and we are going to continue on. We are going to have to be a helluva lot more worried about how much gas we are wasting now, and exactly where we are, or we’ll end up somewhere shitty and not have a way to get back out of there. You stay here; if you see me come running, I want you to fire off a full magazine at anything that follows me. You able to handle that?”
“I’ll do my best,” Brady said as he took the rifle from Shaun, running to set up and look out of the back, ready and able.
Shaun opened the door, not looking back. He jumped as far as he could, not wanting to have something come out from beneath the RV. Too many flashbacks from his time before he was on his own, which also served as lessons. The dead were screaming at him at the top of their lungs.
Shaun looked the opposite way quickly to see if they had friends. The screams made it hard to tell, but he was confident that maybe, just maybe, they had friends coming. Shaun walked close, waiting to see if they could get loose. When nothing moved, he deemed it safe for only a moment. He unhooked the trailer hitch. The Turned were screaming as loudly as they could; it was not difficult to see that they were insane. He wanted nothing more than to blow these bastards up but knew if he did that, there’d be a horde of devastating numbers on the way towards him.
The four were still dying
to get loose, but they were unable to free themselves. Shaun walked behind each of them, ignoring their screams and snapping mouths. He brought the hammer down as hard as he could, sending one of The Turned to its knees. Its head wobbled, and Shaun brought it down one last time. The black sludge from its skull sprayed his shirt, and it made a squishing and cracking noise that he did not wish to hear again. This infuriated the other three, and Shaun brought the hammer up once more, doing his best to avoid a sliming by the sludge dripping from the hammer. He moved quickly, burying it into another skull.
