BATTLEFIELD Z SWEET HOME ZOMBIE

by Chris Lowry

  We probably could have done that five more times and stacked the inside of the trailer from floor to ceiling and maybe that's what the hillbillies expected.

  But two hundred cases of beans and corn we loaded in five trips plus whatever they had inside the trailer already would be enough.

  It had to be.

  We still had to find a tractor and hitch it.

  Malik locked the trailer doors and we peeked out of the open roll up beside it. Four Z were in the bay moaning to get back in at us.

  I motioned Malik to follow me three closed doors down, we rolled it back and jumped down into the empty bay outside. The Z turned toward us, but we jogged up the narrow grade and started hunting for one of the big diesel engines.

  “You know how to hot wire a truck?”

  “I don't know nothing bout stealing a truck,” he said in an indignant voice.

  “Just checking,” I told him. We could always hope for keys.

  “How bout that one?” he pointed.

  There were three trucks lined up on a road, trailers attached and pointed toward the open gate.

  We jogged over to the first one in line, popped open the trailer doors and Malik began cursing. It was filled with cases of canned beans.

  He locked it closed and we checked the second trailer. It was full of canned peaches.

  “We didn't even have to do that trailer,” he said.

  I thought it could have been left unsaid. A little over an hour gone while we worked to put boxes into the half empty trailer, and another hour spent running around the outside of the warehouse.

  All because I forgot about these trucks, and checking them when we got inside.

  Malik opened the driver's door on the first truck and climbed up.

  “Keys inside,” he called out.

  I turned around and sent four shots into the heads of the closest Z as they approached.

  “The noise,” he said.

  But I didn't care. We could have been back at the camp by now, maybe even on the road with the freed group.

  “Do you know how to drive this thing?” I grunted.

  He shook his head and kept his eyes locked on my face. I could see a reflection in the shiny chrome of the truck, but I couldn't tell if I really looked like a monster or it was just the distortion.

  “I can learn,” he muttered.

  “Scoot over.”

  I hauled myself up into the cab beside him as he scrambled over the middle console and into the passenger seat. I studied the layout in front of us.

  Ignition. Keys in it. Wheel. Gas on the right. Clutch, two pedals and brakes in the middle.

  I gritted my teeth, sent up a silent prayer and shoved the clutch to the floor while I turned the key. The engine started up with a belch of smoke. The gear shift was set up in 18 speeds, a standard H pattern I was familiar with.

  The gear did a little grind as I ratcheted it into first and eased off the truck. The tractor bounced forward against the restraints of the trailer, then caught and slowly gained speed. I shifted through second and third while we kept moving in a straight line up through the gate and up the drive to the main road.

  There was an occasional splat of Z as we ran over one. I tried to feel bad about it but couldn't. I was still fuming at myself for not thinking the plan through, fought the diesel around the turn onto the main road and settled into a steady thirty miles per hour headed back to the hillbilly camp.

  I glanced over at Malik watching me, his tongue darting in and out of his mouth across his chapped lips, eyes wide in fear and apprehension.

  “We're almost done,” I told him.

  “I know.”

  He turned away then, ducking his head. I wondered what he meant by it.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  I found out what he meant after ten miles. The truck was cruising along at a steady twenty miles per hour, the engine sounding labored but steady, as if it wanted to go faster but was held back by inexperience and accidental restraint.

  We passed between two trees when a rubber balloon exploded against the windshield and spread what looked like used motor oil across the glass. I fumbled for the wipers and noticed Malik buckling up.

  The wipers smeared the oil, but I still couldn't see and slammed on the brakes. We shuddered to a stop in a hiss of air and smoking tires.

  No sooner had we stopped than my door was ripped open and a kid with a bandana pulled up over his face pointed a gun through the door.

  “Get out,” he squeaked.

  “He's got a gun,” Malik called over me and slid out of the passenger side.

  “Gun!” the bandito screamed and shoved his rifle in even further.

  I held up both hands.

  “I'm getting out,” I told him.

  He backed away and I could see his hands twitching like Malik's. Behind him four more boys were masked and armed. They stared at the tractor trailer and me as I slid out onto the ground and moved away from the driver's side.

  Malik jogged around the front of the truck and met a couple with high five's.

  “We got it,” he told them. “We did it.”

  The boys cheered and I could see they were all teens, like him, maybe just on the south side of twenty. All emaciated and twitchy.

  Malik stared at me and shrugged.

  “Sorry man.”

  “Don't tell him anything,” the guy who pulled me out the truck said in a high-pitched voice.

  “No man, he's cool,” said Malik. “He ain't gonna do nothing.”

  He was right.

  There were five guns against the six-inch buck knife I had in the pouch. It may be the only thing I brought to a gun fight, but I wasn't about to use it.

  I took two steps back from the group, further away from the trailer.

  “What did you get?”

  “Beans,” said Malik.

  “Gross,” the one next to him offered.

  “Better than nothing,” said the leader. I pegged him as such because he was the one who forced me out of the truck and the others seemed to defer to him.

  “They's way more back there,” Malik told him. “We can go back and get it cause he done cleared out all the zombies.”

  He was right again.

  Except they were still going to be shy one truck. I took another couple steps back and away, closer now to the edge of the road and woods. It would take me a couple of hours to make the trip back to grab the next truck in line.

  “What do we do with him?” one of the boys asked.

  “Kill him?”

  A couple of guns swiveled my way.

  “No man, he been good to me. Fed me and everything.”

  “You ate?”

  It sounded like et. A twitchy redneck accent, full of backwoods and meth.

  “Soup,” Malik swirled his tongue around his lips. “It was good too.”

  “Man, I sure am hungry,” a boy whined.

  “Let's get this back home then,” said the leader and he swung up in the truck. The boy next to Malik hopped onto the hood and began wiping down the windshield with a dirty rag, clearing out a view hole in the muck.

  “Just leave him out here like that?” Malik asked.

  Talking about me.

  “He ain't coming with us.”

  Malik gave me a look then and shrugged his bony shoulders as the rest of the boys ran for the passenger door.

  “Sorry man,” he said again and jogged around to join them.

  I didn't have to make a break for the woods.

  I didn't have to dodge bullets, just exhaust as the truck rumbled to a start and I watched it drive away.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  That was the second time in one day that someone took my gun away from me and I was getting pretty tired of it. All I had to defend myself for the trip back to the food depot was a six inch folding buck knife, and I hadn't seen any cars stranded on the side of the road in the drive out here.

  I could almost hear the clock ticking as I took off down the roa
d, halfway between a fast walk and a jog. The soup had given me a little energy earlier, but I started to feel the effects of not eating after about a mile. My stomach started gurgling, then knotted up and that just made me even angrier.

  I passed a gravel road after the third mile and stopped.

  There were really only two reasons to build another road off a county road like this one. Either it led to a house or it led to a deer camp. I decided to investigate.

  The gravel crunched underfoot as I made my way about three quarters of a mile to a sprawling house next to a pond in the woods. It reminded me of Tyler's cabin we had left earlier, though much larger.

  The front door was wide open, the windows busted out. Someone had been here before me.

  I investigated still, but the cabinets were empty and the house was trashed. I found a gun cabinet overturned and just as bare as the kitchen shelves. I took a trip through each room, but the results were the same.

  Someone had been through here and cleaned it out.

  I stepped out onto the back patio. There was a fence that separated the house from the woods, green six-foot metal stakes that held barbed wire. I worked off the three strands of wire from two of the stakes and hefted them in my hands.

  The only thing they had going for them were sharp ends and length.

  They were weighted wrong and awkward, but would work in a pinch.

  I jogged back up the road, ignored it when I stumbled a little and kept going back toward the depot with new found weapons in hand.

  It was the rule of order in the Z world.

  Weapons. Food. Shelter.

  I guess I'd throw water in there before food and silently cursed that I didn't check for water in the house. The run was making me a little parched.

  The only thing I had going for me was that Malik and his band of merry boys took off in the other direction.

  If they were going back to the depot to claim a couple of more trucks, I still might beat them. I kept quiet as a ran, but my footsteps attracted some of the worker Z I had let loose from the fence and they wandered down the road in my direction.

  I skipped around them to save my strength and frankly I didn't want to get zombie juice on me. I'd hit them with the truck on my way back.

  I wasn't tired of killing, just tired.

  The stiffness in my back and shoulders was coming back, and I could feel the aches starting up again in all the places I had been wounded. Headache. Backache.

  That reminded me of a comedy routine my dad played on an album a lot, Cheech and Chong I think. Kid says he has a headache and doesn't want to go to school. Dad screams out, “Headache my eye, how would you like a butt ache.”

  I sent up a silent prayer of thanks and gratitude. At least my butt didn't hurt.

  I hadn't plopped back on it in a week or more.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The depot was exactly as we left it, trucks still in a line, random zombies wandering in the yard. They seemed to ignore the gate now that it was open, falling back into familiar patterns worn in the gravel by a thousand steps before them.

  I jogged up the driveway to the line of trucks, used the metal stakes to stop two Z who were a little too interested in what I was doing, and checked the cab of the truck. Unlocked, keys in the ignition.

  I wondered again how this all went down that last day when the workers turned. Did they come in, fill up the trucks and get ready for the route, then someone started biting and they locked down the gates?

  But even the old security guard had gone Z and locked himself inside the guard shack.

  I pushed the pedals, cranked the engine and squashed down a few more Z as I rumbled through the gate and stood on the air brakes once the truck was past the fence.

  I hopped out of the cab with stake in hand and closed the gate.

  There were still more trucks inside, and I had the beginning of a plan in my head. I just had to let it marinate to figure out how to make it happen.

  I kept my eyes open on the way back, watching the side of the road for shadows that might indicate an ambush. I was thinking about Malik, how he led me along. I went over each interaction in my head and thought it was a pretty good plan. They must have been watching me for some time, and figured I could get them into the depot and get them fed.

  I slowed down to make a turn on the road that would take me to the hillbilly camp. It was a straight shot into the little berg that straddled the road and I slowed down as I approached.

  The school bus was still parked on one side, the kids sitting quietly in the shadow it cast on the ground. The rest stood around them, a human shield blocking the hillbillies.

  Even through the glare across the windshield I could see the looks of relief on their faces. And the victory smiles on the men guarding them.

  I crunched to a stop and opened the door. Three of the men trained their rifles on me.

  “Toss down your gun,” Overalls said.

  “No weapons,” I said. “I'm clean.”

  He didn't believe me. Nobody goes out against a herd of Z unarmed and comes back alive. I didn't have to tell him I was only recently relieved of my rifle.

  “Get out down here.”

  I moved deliberately out of the cab of the diesel and dropped onto the ground, both hands up in the air so they could see I was unarmed.

  “What you got back here?”

  Overall led a couple of the men to the back of the trailer and watched me open it. He gawked at the floor to ceiling boxes.

  “That is going to hit the spot, I tell you what.”

  He turned to me with a gap-toothed grin.

  “You done good boy. We might have even thought about letting you go now that you done fed us twice,” he glanced back into the trailer. “Heck even more than twice now.”

  “Thought about it?”

  “See here we had us a meeting while you were gone. Me and Bubba and the rest done put our heads together and we figured something out. We says to ourselves, if this fella makes it back with a truckload of food for us, that's going to buy him a mighty big heap of goodwill.”

  The men around him nodded their agreement.

  “Goodwill going to get you all the way in our good graces.”

  “Good enough to let us go,” I said. “You have our food, our weapons. We'll just get out of your way.”

  “Don't you know interrupting is rude?” he glared.

  Bubba jammed the butt of his rifle into my stomach and I folded over to my knees, gasping for air.

  “Don't be rude,” Overalls continued. “Now that you're in our good graces we was just talking about letting you go. But Talladega wants a ransom you see. That's our job. That's why we're out here. Only we was thinking you don't got to pay your ransom to Talladega if you pay it to us. Right men?”

  His men muttered agreement.

  I struggled to breath because the dumb redneck plowed his gun into the bruise I got from falling out of a tree onto my pistol and it hurt. It didn't hurt enough for me to wonder why I kept running into power hungry madmen. Was that all that was left in the world?

  Did the zombie Armageddon create a power vacuum where petty small minded men saw an opportunity to carve out little potentates?

  Where were all the guys like me, who just wanted to find their kids or save their families and live quiet lives growing food, catching fish and rebuilding the world in a better image?

  I tried to dip into the red, touch the rage and pull it up. Maybe I could do some damage with my bare hands, get them on a weapon and make them pay. But I was tired.

  My stomach hurt. I was finally catching my breath, and Overalls was still talking.

  "Some men is born to lead, you see. I'm one of those men. I'm the George Washington of the Zombie revolution."

  Was I talking out loud just a minute ago?

  "Washington didn't want to lead," I told him.

  He socked me across the jaw. I saw it coming, tried to pull my head back and fell with it so the only thing it hurt was m
y pride. The two men that were supposed to be holding me jerked me up off the ground.

  "Want us to hold him still?" one slurred.

  "No he's alright. A man is allowed to hold his own opinion," he turned a bleary eye toward me. "Look here Professor. I done studied a lot of history myself. The real history of the United States and not that malarkey you was teaching in your classes. Washington was a Southern gentleman, a real one, and he did want to lead. He took the bull by the horns and lifted the reins of this nation so it started on the path to greatness."

  "And here we are," I couldn't help myself.

  "That's right," he agreed. "Here we are. We are at another revolution, only this time instead of Redcoats, we got Zombies. From the ashes of this apocalypse, we're gonna rise up, like a Phoenix."

  "The South will rise again?"

  "Exactly."

  The men beside me giggled their agreement, alcohol tainted breath washing over me. I wanted to take a shower.

  I grew up surrounded by that mindset, the Confederacy will never die crap. Didn't much care for it then, and certainly didn't think it had much place in just trying to survive now.

  But I was going to keep that opinion to myself.

  "You know what a revolution really needs?" Overalls leaned in and whispered like we were co-conspirators.

  "Moonshine?" I guessed.

  He tossed out half a grin and slugged me in the stomach to remind me of my place.

  "Guns."

  I took a breath and tried to stand up straight.

  "You've got guns."

  They did. Each of the hillbilly platoon had a rifle or shotgun. Some were in worn and battered shape, but a weapon was a weapon. Z died either way, and the guns they had did a good job in ambushing us.

  "Army guns," Bubba said from behind me.

  I got a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach and it wasn't where he hit me.

  We'd had a few encounters with a militia group, what was left from an Army Reserve unit in Florida that had gone rogue and turned into bandits. They shot some of my people, we blew up some of theirs, killed some more. I think I killed their General, but I never saw a body. I was too busy running away.