Aftermath (Book 2): Chicago Calling

by Duncan McArdle

  At that point, out of the corner of his eye, John caught sight of a particularly energised member of the undead community emerging from the confines of the darkened store. The being looked like it could have been a basketball player in a former life, and a tough one at that. It looked close to, if not more than, seven feet tall, and didn’t shown the slightest sign of flinching when it cut open its left arm on a shard of glass, as it rushed to exit the building in search of flesh.

  Before John could even warn Harvey, the monster started to run, and then to sprint, and within a split second leapt right at its much smaller opponent, knocking him to the ground underneath its huge mass. Instinctively, each of the nearby biters turned to face the now vulnerable meal, sensing a better opportunity to finally find that nourishment they’d dreamt of for so long, and went down in Harvey’s direction.

  “HARVEY!”, John yelled in desperation, as he tried to make his way round the group.

  But it was no use, those that had kept their sights on John were now pushing him back, and were starting to encircle him in what he knew would be an incredibly dangerous situation if he allowed it to happen. If John wanted any hope of helping Harvey, he had to sort out his own problems first.

  Back on the ground, Harvey struggled with the large body on top of him, trying repeatedly to throw its weight off to one side. The problem with such situations was that once the first body had piled on, your attention was then drawn to how you planned on removing it, which in turn meant you were no longer defending yourself from others. Sure enough, in a matter of seconds, two more biters had joined the fight, and Harvey was now pinned to the ground by a weight far greater than he could possibly hope to simply shove off.

  Desperately he tried to manoeuvre his blade into the head of the nearest attacker, without relieving the pressure he was exerting to push it upwards, done in order to keep a gap between its teeth and his neck. But it was no use, he had no hope of getting the right angle before its ever-snapping teeth got close enough to make contact, an eventuality that seemed mere moments away. In one desperate last attempt to survive, Harvey looked around in the hope of finding John, ready to admit defeat and call for help.

  But much to Harvey’s dismay, what he saw was not the typical, ever-controlled John Parker. It was not an incredible warrior, ready and waiting to pick up the slack of others and to put himself into harm’s way for Harvey’s life. Instead, John clearly had problems of his own, with a number of the undead now wrapped around him in a semi-circle, and John running out of room to move backwards. Harvey was not about to get help from there.

  Looking back up at his attacker, whose drool was now dripping unceasingly over Harvey’s face, he found his arms running dry of the strength needed to hold up three people, and then noticed a fourth attacker making a beeline for his exposed feet, locked in position under the weight of the undead. Harvey mouthed a few final words of anger at his defeat, but knew nobody was around to hear them.

  But unbeknownst to Harvey, one other person had heard him, a fact that promptly made itself apparent. Suddenly four gunshots sounded out across the car-park, the first of them landing dead centre in the would-be basketballer’s head, and causing him to drop instantly into a limp, lifeless state. The second buried itself in the chest of one of the two other attacker’s, followed by a corrective shot to the head that promptly finished it off, and the third did much the same job to the final body atop of Harvey.

  Without even knowing the identity of the shooter, Harvey stopped trying to repel the bodies above him, allowing them to drop down just so that he could finally free up a hand, and point to the fourth figure, now centimetres away from feasting on his exposed feet. Before Harvey could even explain the situation, another two shots rang out, and Harvey heard the body slump down to the ground.

  Relieved, Harvey tried once more to pull himself free of the immense weight on top, but to no avail. That was of course, until a hand appeared from above, the owner’s face obscured by what little sunlight was coming in from the cloud-filled sky above. Without even thinking, Harvey grabbed the hand and continued to try and push himself free of the bodies, now with the strength of two people. Soon thereafter, he slid free of the pile and was able to clamber onto his feet, quickly turning to identify the Good Samaritan.

  “Andrew!?”, he exclaimed, to which Andrew smiled proudly.

  But before either man could speak again, the sound of the ongoing struggle to their right caught their attention. Realising things were still ongoing, both men immediately sprang back into action to help John – opting for knives now that the severity of the situation had died down – and assist in removing the few remaining biters of the once thirty or forty strong group.

  Soon the final member of the undead dropped to the ground having met with John’s blade, and he looked away from the remains of the corpse to see Andrew, stood by Harvey, both men also having just taken care of a body each.

  “What took you so long?”, John asked of Andrew.

  “Traffic”, Andrew joked.

  “You knew he was coming!?”, Harvey asked cutting in, confused as to just what exactly was going on.

  “Course I did,” John replied plainly, “I told him to come”.

  “What, why didn’t you tell me? And why is he even here?”, Harvey demanded, “You know what, forget it I don’t care, let’s just get in there”, he insisted, turning away from the men and walking towards the supermarket’s entrance, before stopping and spinning back round after a few steps once he had realised he wasn’t being followed. “Well?”, he asked, “Are we going in or what?”.

  “Actually”, John replied, smirking with Andrew, “I had a better idea”, he said, looking over to the eighteen-wheeler still parked at the rear of the store.

  Chapter 31: Start

  The dust coated, eighteen-wheeled supermarket owned truck had been sat on the edge of the car park for some time, having been stopped mid-delivery of the goods the group so desperately wanted. Since the start though, it had been made abundantly clear – by John no less – that such a machine would almost certainly have a flat battery, if not an empty fuel tank too. For that reason, Harvey was particularly confused by the sight of John himself now walking towards the front of the truck.

  “You’re kidding me?”, Harvey said, before realising his companions weren’t stopping, and so following after them. “What are you planning on doing with it?”, he asked.

  “Driving it back”, John replied happily, “Once we get it going”.

  “And you’re going to do that… how exactly?”, Harvey questioned.

  “That’s what he’s here for”, John said, still not turning round or stopping his movement, but now pointing towards Andrew.

  Suddenly it clicked for Harvey. John had known since before they’d left that he wanted to come here instead of the marina, and had even known he wanted to bring the truck itself back, rather than just moving its cargo into another vehicle. That’s why he’d asked Andrew to come out and meet them, and that’s why Andrew had turned up in a separate car; to get the truck moving.

  “You know you can’t jump that from a car right? Not without charging it for a while or something?”, Harvey asked, as John and Andrew arrived at the scene of the stricken vehicle, Harvey following close behind.

  “Oh I know”, John replied smugly.

  Harvey wanted answers, but sensed he would be better off waiting to see what was going to be done, rather than asking in advance, not least due to the ever-pressing issue of time. Every minute longer they stayed there was another minute of danger, where anybody or anything could come lurking out of one of the many buildings surrounding the large open area they stood in. In fact, as Harvey conducted a quick sweep, he spotted that two more biters had already emerged from inside the supermarket, and had now begun making their way over.

  “I’ll be back”, he announced as he moved off in the direction of the approaching figures.

  Back at the truck, John was in the process of clambering up
the side of the cabin. Upon reaching the top, he briefly inspected the insides to make sure it was empty, and then dropped back down to the ground again. However unlikely it was that a biter might have somehow made its way into the truck since the last time he’d checked – not least without causing some visible disturbance to it – John wasn’t about to take any chances. The last thing he wanted to do was spend precious time getting the thing moving only to get bitten the second he tried to drive it away.

  “Do you know much about these things?”, Andrew asked, clearly nervous about the potential dangers of operating such a huge machine without the proper know-how.

  “Yeah”, John replied, “Drove one a few times for an old job”.

  “So you know how they work?”, Andrew asked.

  “I know… about the bare minimum on how they work”, John pointed out, “But that should be enough for me to get it back, unless of course you happen to be a trucker?”, John asked, only half joking.

  Andrew shook his head feverishly, much preferring the idea of driving the Tesla back, and finding even that prospect a little intimidating.

  “Yeah”, John said, smiling, “You didn’t strike me as the type”.

  Back by the entrance, Harvey was equipping himself for what was about to happen. Readying his blade in one hand and his pistol in the other – in a bid to prevent himself becoming pinned down again – he locked on to the nearest of the two undead, and began his approach. The first figure was more or less gender-neutral by now, whatever defining features it might once have had having long since rotted away. Thanks to this state, the monster was slow, and so Harvey was able to approach with caution and perform the fatal manoeuvre with little difficulty. Of course, he waited a moment in preparation to perform a second and potentially third move, knowing it was likely to need more than one, but was shocked to find it dropping to the ground just barely after initial contact had been made.

  “You assholes are getting harder and harder to predict”, he said sternly to the body below, before turning his attention to the second.

  The next target looked to be in a National Guard outfit, just one of the many that had been brought in to make a final stand in Milwaukee. Though the effort had of course been unsuccessful, it had created a huge influx of weapons to the city, which had ultimately given the camp a plentiful supply. In a way, the once patriotic Harvey felt bad felling a man who had been tasked with protecting his homeland, but realistically, he knew that now it was just another member of a species in desperate need of extinction.

  Harvey then began his final approach, sizing up his mid-height yet largely-built opponent, and opting for a move which John had displayed expertly a little earlier. First he allowed the being to lunge, before sidestepping out of its way, and then twisted round and grabbed it by the back to prevent it from getting out of reach. Finally, Harvey embedded his blade into the back of the corpse’s head and sent it dropping quickly down to the ground.

  Quickly Harvey knelt beside it and quickly emptied a few of the pouches attached to the vest wrapped around its body, a source of ammunition he knew better than to ignore. As expected, he soon found a series of STANAG magazines he was sure they could find a use for, as well as some 9mm rounds, and then rose back to his feet, happy he’d somehow profited from the experience.

  Walking back over towards the truck – whilst also regularly checking over his shoulder to make sure his services weren’t needed elsewhere – Harvey quickly noted that John had set about attaching the jump leads. Such cables had more or less lived in the back of every vehicle since the start of the infection, and had proved useful on numerous occasions. But unlike all previous uses, John was attaching them between two batteries of significantly different size.

  “You know that won’t be enough right? It’ll probably just empty out the pickup”, Harvey announced as he arrived back at the scene.

  John looked at Harvey, and then without speaking any words to suggest he’d acknowledged the statement, looked instead to his accomplice.

  “Andrew”, he said, to which the man span round and went jogging away, clearly already aware of what he was being asked to do.

  Harvey watched as Andrew ran over to the car he had arrived in – the beautiful Tesla that they had first retrieved from this very car-park – and proceeded to climb in. Harvey smiled slightly as he watched Andrew fumble nervously with the many controls of the vehicle, before eventually clicking it silently into life, and then quietly rolling it over to the men, parking it right alongside the Nissan, each vehicle now next to the large battery on the right-hand side of the much larger truck.

  Climbing out of the Tesla, Andrew quickly rounded the front of the car to open up its storage compartment and grabbed its own set of jump-cables, these looking a little less rugged than those that had come from the Nissan.

  “You sure these will do?”, Andrew asked of John, as he handed over the leads.

  John proceeded to stretch and bend the thin cables, a look of doubt obvious on his face.

  “They’ll have to”, he said unconvincingly.

  Over the next couple of minutes, John set about connecting the three vehicles together, allowing the circuit to flow through the Nissan and the Tesla and into the huge truck as one big input, which John hoped would be powerful enough to start the massive haulage vehicle. After finishing, John checked over the connections to make sure all was well, and then walked back over to the cabin.

  “You sure about this?”, Harvey asked as he watched John start to climb back into the truck.

  “Got a better idea?”, John stopped to ask, to which he received no response. “Right then”, he said as he finally climbed into the driver’s seat.

  Andrew took a step back from the triangle of machinery, as if expecting it to blow sky high, and then waited for either the engine of the truck to kick into life, or the engines of the other two vehicles to somehow spark into flames.

  John sat nervously in the seat of the truck, his fingers wrapped around the ignition, holding the key they’d recovered from the driver’s pocket their previous time here. If this worked, they would be heroes, returning to camp with mountains of supplies and another building cleared out. But if it didn’t work, and worse still, if doing this damaged the vehicles they’d arrived in, they’d have a long and dangerous road back on foot. John stared forwards to the spot where they’d originally found the Tesla, knowing they wouldn’t be so lucky if things went wrong again, and then cautiously twisted the key.

  “Click… click… click… click”, came the sound of the truck, followed by silence.

  “Is it empty?”, Andrew called up to John, who didn’t reply.

  “Click… click… click… click… crunch…”, came the truck again, this time sounding a little worse for wear.

  “Don’t kill it”, Harvey called out unhelpfully, attracting a glaring look from John.

  “C’mon John, let’s just clear the place out and put the stuff in the cars”, Andrew said, “We’ve already taken care of most of the biters”.

  John leant back into the chair, feeling defeated. He’d known from the start that driving this huge monster back to base was an unlikely outcome, but he’d allowed himself to almost expect it, and so now felt particularly disappointed.

  “We got a group here”, Harvey yelled over, himself having spotted a more pressing issue, in the form of five bodies now traipsing out into the open air from inside the supermarket’s darkened depths.

  “God damn it”, John said, directing his anger half at the truck, and half at the biters which were now interrupting progress for what felt like the hundredth time. Things were going far from how he’d hoped.

  Andrew quickly set off in the direction of the approaching group, and as John watched him go, he realised he too should go and help, if only to reduce the risk. Should they return from this raid with whatever supplies they could fit in the smaller vehicles, this would still be a successful job. If however they returned a man down, it would most certainly not be. W
ith that in mind, John quickly scrambled out from the cabin and ran to catch up with his fellow scavengers, who were just now arriving at the scene.

  The trio approached at more or less the same time, each of them spread out around the group in a more coordinated manner, now that Harvey seemed to have calmed down a little. To the other men’s surprise, Andrew moved first, striking the nearest biter to him dead centre in the middle of the face, using the kitchen knife John had found for him a few months back. The blade was getting blunter and blunter with every impact, but thanks to the ever diminishing bone-condition of the dead, it had yet to cause him any issues. Soon enough, the body dropped lifelessly to the floor.

  Next up, John and Harvey went about their own kills in almost perfect tandem. Both men were facing up to a much smaller attacker, and so each struck downwards from above, dealing devastating blows on both counts. Even the toughest of biters would have struggled against vertical stabs quite like those, and these were certainly not the toughest the undead had to offer.

  Andrew now went again, holding his blade tight in both hands and pointing it towards the slowly approaching skull in front. However, just milliseconds before Andrew was due to lunge, the beast beat him to it, diving frantically in his direction having seemingly found some energy at the last possible second. Andrew went down hard to the ground, losing his grip on the blade and letting it fly out of reach, leaving him with only his own strength to defend himself.

  On Andrew’s left, Harvey was getting to work on the last body, and was having a struggle of his own due to its particularly large frame, so it became up to John to help. Seeing his friend fall to the ground, he immediately reached for his rifle, knowing Andrew was just far enough away for his small pistol’s accuracy to be an issue. But to John’s horror, he suddenly realised – as his hand clasped limply at his empty back – that the rifle he sought wasn’t there anymore, left instead in the eighteen-wheeler’s cabin, removed from his shoulder in order for him to climb in.