He blew past the front of the building, angling in over the handicap parking spots, bouncing the red Ferrari off of the Kenworth’s unforgiving bumper. It went sliding into Billy Travaho’s cruiser and knocking it out of the way too. He was trying to get close to the building, trying to park the semi in front of the windows to stop them from being shattered and the people inside overrun.
He scraped along a few other cars, up over the sidewalk, tearing up Martha’s flowerbeds that were directly under the windows. The closest sprinter was ignoring the noisy diesel, seeing only the people standing there, ripe for the taking. He sprung, hands extended, reaching for the woman in the blue shirt, ready to sink his teeth into the flesh, to tear, to rend, to feel her blood in his throat …
He impacted with the grill of the truck, bouncing off towards the windows in a bone broken spin. The woman in the window screamed a high piercing shriek and fell back, away from the monstrosity and then the truck's tires were there, crushing it to pulp and blocking the view of all inside.
Gunny swung the nose of the tractor out, knocking some foreign car out of the way… or maybe it was American, they all looked the same nowadays to him. He jammed the Kenworth into reverse and slipped the clutch, maneuvering the trailer tight against the building and up against the main hut. That would keep anything out.
The windows ran the length of the smaller Quonset hut and were set about four feet up off the ground. The Seventy feet of this tractor and trailer covered them up nicely, except for the catwalk between the truck and its trailer but that area was small. Even if they did manage to get up there, they wouldn’t have any force to break the window. It would do for now.
He heard Wire Bender on the radio hollering for someone else to do the same to the Drivers Alley windows and the front of the store. Gunny shut the motor off and leaned back in the seat. He looked into the side mirror, saw a truck slipping in close to the double doors at the main entrance. It tore off the rest of the awning that he had broken when he came flying in.
There were a few of the creatures left, still trying to get to him but they were pretty busted up. Kim had really done some damage with the big gun, but they were still crawling or dragging themselves towards the sounds of humans. There was maybe a half-dozen of them, all coming in from the direction of Reno. The two bikers had come in from the other way so these things must be everywhere.
The Bikers...
That one had been bitten pretty badly. So had the Deputy.
He grabbed the mic for the CB and keyed it. “Wire Bender! Kick it back stat!” He yelled
“Yeah, c’mon Gunny.”
“You’ve got to isolate anyone that’s been bitten!” he said urgently “They’ll turn into those mindless things! It’s contagious!” He couldn’t bring himself to say Zombies, although he knew that’s what they were. What else could they be? But he didn’t want to be laughed at, thought of as an idiot.
“I’ll be in in a minute. I think I can get to the roof from the top of the trailer.” He added, thinking it would be easier to explain, maybe convince them in person rather than over the radio.
“You mean zombies?” Wire Bender came back, laconically. “They’re in Doc’s office and we got it under control.”
Gunny harrumphed. “Should have known,” he thought. “Biggest conspiracy nut I know. He probably heard about this a month ago.”
Wire Bender was an odd duck. Old Cobb had rented him space in the Driver’s Alley and let him plug in his little RV and park it out in the junkyard. He was supposed to be the night watchman, some of those old truck parts had gotten valuable lately. With eBay, you could find the guy who would pay fifty bucks for an original Diamond Reo fuel gauge.
But he stayed on a cot in the back of his radio shop half the time. The internet was better and the bathroom was closer. He had been a radio man back in Nam. Had probably smoked too much or seen too much. No one really knew, he didn’t talk about his time in-country.
Somehow he had landed here in Cobb’s strange little Truck Stop with the other misfits who didn’t quite fit into polite society and had been fixing CBs and Ham radios for as long as anyone could remember. His name was known far and wide. Everybody knew if you wanted a Big Radio, Wire Bender from the Three Flags was one of the best. He could tweak things and didn’t give a tinker’s damn if the FCC frowned on some of his modifications.
Gunny ejected the mag from his Glock 19 and counted the rounds. There were five in the mag and one in the pipe. He shoved it back in the well and slid it into his holster. He wanted to put bullets in the brainpans of every crawling thing left out there, he knew they were a threat. But they weren’t an immediate threat and his life might depend on those six rounds. He had another box in his truck and it was safely tucked away in the shop. He wanted to get to it before he started wasting ammo on half blasted creatures.
Zombies, he corrected himself. They’re zombies. Real live, honest-to-God Zombies. Well, maybe real dead honest-to-God zombies. He didn’t know how it could possibly be, how science fiction and Haitian horror stories could be real but he knew what he saw. He thought he knew what he saw.
And good Lord if he was wrong, if they were really just crazy or drugged up, he was going to be facing a very long prison sentence. He closed his eyes, got his breathing under control, played it all out in his mind again. Not second guessing. He’d learned long ago not to do that. He replayed details, trying to see if there was something he had misread, some clue he’d missed. He was writing an after operations report in his mind. Looking for the flaw in his logic where some POG lieutenant would try to bring him up on a court martial.
He sighed. Plenty, he concluded. It didn’t matter if there was a clear and present danger. In the end, he’d gunned down unarmed people. He knew fear caused hesitation and hesitation would get you killed. But prosecuting attorneys didn’t think like that. If this wasn’t a freaking apocalypse, he was going to need a lawyer.
He pulled his phone out of his pocket, dialed his wife Lacy again. Nothing. All circuits are busy. Please try again later.
He looked at the creatures outside his window. A couple had seen him. One was fairly lively, jumping and clawing at the side of the truck. The other was trying to pull itself up on the steps with a crooked arm and was getting repeatedly stepped on by the jumper. He didn’t sense any real danger, though. He was safe for the moment.
He felt weak, drained. The adrenaline had fled his body and now he just wanted to crawl back in the bunk and sleep for a minute. But there wasn’t time for that right now. He hopped out of the driver’s seat, over into the passenger’s side and rolled down the window.
He climbed out and onto the long Kenworth hood, glad this wasn’t a new Volvo or Freight Shaker with all the sloping aerodynamics that would have been all too easy to slide off of. These old Kennys were just blocks and squares, all flat surfaces. Like driving a brick wall.
He hopped up on the roof of the sleeper and then took a quick run and jumped the short distance to the top of the trailer. Kim was still on the catwalk of the main building, holding the old World War Two rifle down at her side in a one-handed grip. She was talking to the other driver that had blocked the windows on the Driver’s Alley side.
They were trying to figure out how to get over to the catwalk. It wasn’t far, the problem was that the Quonset hut was rounded and the catwalk was a good fifteen feet higher than the top of the trailer. You could jump, the buildings incline wasn’t too steep this high up but if you slipped...Well, it was a long slide down to the ground.
As Gunny made his way back to the end of the trailer, Kim turned and said: “I’m going to get some rope or something, I’ll be back in a minute.” Then she was off, jogging towards the other end of the building and the roof access panel.
The driver who had blocked the main entrance came over to the end of his trailer and hailed Gunny. “What the hell is going on?” he asked. “I woke up to guns and horns and screaming and Wire Bender yelling at me to block the doors!”
Gunny recognized Pack Rat, the old gray-haired geezer who definitely lived up to his name. He was the guy who opened his truck door and more often than not, empty coffee cups or fast food wrappers would fall out.
“Dunno, Pack Rat. I think the riots that have been hitting all the cities just hit Three Flags.”
“Who the hell would wanna riot here?” he asked querulously. “I thought Wire Bender done lost his mind. I wasn’t about to pull up in here till I saw you busting everything up like you was on a Hollywood movie set. Reckoned something boocoo dinky dau must be going on.”
He spat a stream of tobacco over the edge of his truck and into the face of one of the women that had been attracted to their voices. It was clawing at his trailer, trying to get at the bearded old codger. Her sun dress was hanging off of one shoulder, exposing a bra and a big hole in her breast and a bigger one in her back. There were bits of broken bone sticking out of it where Kim-Li’s .30-06 had punched through. She had a bloody chunk of one of her arms missing and a piece of her neck was gone. Probably bite marks. He watched her for a minute then said: “Looks like we got us a Zombie problem.”
Lacy
Atlanta
Day 1
Lacy walked into the office, already pissed off. She had caught their sixteen-year-old trying to hide the fact that he was making a lunch for school. “Why are you doing that?” she had asked. “Only broccoli on the menu today?”
He was surlier than his usual grumpy morning self and she finally drug the story out of him in monosyllabic grunts and aggravated gestures. He had in-school detention again. Confined all day in an unused classroom with the rest of the trouble makers.
They were supervised only by the camera which fed directly into the secretary’s office. They were given their assignments that had to be turned in at the end of the day then left alone. It was a private school and they took discipline very seriously.
It had been a lunchroom fight over something stupid. This was the second time this year and it was only September. If it happened again, they would be looking for another school.
“Text your dad.” She had told him. “Try to explain it to him.” Johnny had been threatening him with military academy, but it was an idle threat because they couldn’t afford it. Jessie didn’t know that, though.
“He’s in California today but he’s got a load back home, so you’ll be having words with him by the weekend.”
That really put a darker cloud over his mood. She hated the whole “wait till your father gets home” routine, but it was the one thing that would set him on the straight and narrow. For a little while anyway.
What annoyed her the most is that he still couldn’t admit he had been wrong. Too much of his dad in him. Punch first, punch second then punch some more. That’s why they hadn’t been getting along very well this past year or so.
They were too much alike. She sighed heavily as she slammed her purse down on her desk. He wasn’t a bad kid, he usually made good grades and he wasn’t on drugs or getting his girlfriend knocked up, but damn if he didn’t have his father’s temper. If he wasn't careful, he would wind up making some of the same stupid mistakes Johnny had.
She grabbed the coffee cup off of her desk and walked down the hall to the break area to start the pot brewing. Lacy was the first in this morning, she had dropped some friends off at the airport for an early flight and came on into work. She had to catch up on some of the environmental reports she had been saddled with.
It wasn’t her job, she was human resources, but with budget cuts, everyone was doing the work of two people. But that damn kid. If he didn’t get his temper under control, he would find himself in a situation like the one that had eventually landed them here in Atlanta. It wasn’t a bad life, but certainly not the one they had planned.
Johnny wouldn’t be out driving a truck and gone for weeks at a time, they wouldn’t have spent all of their savings and a lot of her 401k if his temper hadn’t gotten the best of him over in Afghanistan. Or at the tire store back in high school for that matter. She sighed again. Water under the bridge. Ancient history. Can’t change the past.
She didn’t dwell on it, but life was strange like that. No matter what you planned, it never seemed to work out the way you wanted. They had hoped for a house full of kids and a place in the country near their hometown but their only child came late in life after they had almost given up.
And they sure hadn’t planned on him being a little hell raiser. Well, she hadn’t, anyway. Johnny laughed it off as “just being a kid.” He was probably secretly proud of him. Men!
She busied herself firing up her computer and digging out the files she needed as the pot brewed, filling the little kitchenette and lunch room with the aroma of mountain grown. When it had finished its cycle, she poured herself a cup and walked over to the windows looking out over Atlanta. It was a beautiful view from twenty-eight stories up, the urban landscape of the early morning stretching out as far as she could see.
She watched the ribbons of headlights and taillights on the intersecting freeways in constant motion and the ever changing lights of the digital billboards. She was probably lucky she didn’t have a window in her office, she’d never get any work done. With another sigh, she refilled her cup. Her mind was clear enough from this morning’s argument to get down to doing what she got paid to do and went back to her office, shutting the door behind her.
She looked up when she heard the scream. Had she actually heard it? It was faint, coming from far away. The music from her computer speakers was playing at a low volume, but she had definitely heard something. She glanced up at the clock. Nine fifteen. She did a double take. She should have heard the noise of all of the rest of the office crew coming in a half hour ago.
She stood, grabbing her cup, going after a refill and to see why it was so quiet. It was usually barely subdued chaos around this time of the morning with everyone coming in and getting ready to start the day. No phones were ringing, no printers running, no chatter about last night’s game or who was eliminated in the latest talent show.
Had she missed some mandatory meeting? She googled her brain as she walked to the break area. Was today the awards ceremony? No way. That was always held in December. She walked in to see one of the I.T. guys standing at the window, looking out over the city. It was Eric. Nice enough guy.
She walked up to stand beside him. “Where is everybody?” she asked, but trailed off when she saw what he was looking at out of the window. “What the hell?” was all she could say as she took in the cityscape.
The first thing she noticed were the fires. There were dozens of them, spread out everywhere she looked, the flames reaching into the sky and the black smoke billowing.
“What the hell is going on?” she asked dumbly, noticing more the longer she looked. Eric said nothing, just continued to stare as she took it all in. The freeways were at a complete standstill. Pileups and wrecks everywhere. The secondary streets were jammed, too. She thought she could see people running and attacking each other, but from this high up, it was hard to make out exactly what was going on.
“Are we at war?” she asked, but Eric just continued to stare out at the chaos, in some kind of shock. “Eric?!” She said and shook him by the arm. He ignored her, just continued to stare. She looked back over the city, at the stalled and clogged roads, at the fires burning unchecked in the residential neighborhoods.
“ERIC!” she yelled this time, but there was still no response. She needed information. She left him standing there and ran back to her office, the coffee refill forgotten. She logged on to the network, entered her password for outside access and started searching the web for anything on the local news channels.
There were no local channels. The live streams of the morning shows were down. All of them. And that was scarier than seeing all the fires. One search led to another and all too quickly, she had a world view of what was happening. People coming back from the dead. Invincible to bullets.
; Mad mobs of screaming, leaping hordes killing everything in their path. She tried to call Johnny. All circuits busy. She tried to call Jessie. All circuits busy. She clasped her hands in front of her face as she watched live video feeds from different cameras around the state, then around the country and then around the globe. She tried to call Johnny again. She tried to call Jessie again. She needed to go get him. He was shut up in that room in detention. If the city was in chaos, the suburbs must be too. Her mind raced. The roads were gridlocked, there was no way to even move along them. She needed a motorcycle.
Hell, she needed her gun that was in the glove box of her car down in the parking garage. She watched the live streaming cameras from different cities. She wanted to know what she was up against. She watched them tearing and biting, watched them leap inhuman distances and take people down with inhuman strength.
Her analytical mind went into overdrive, already discarding the simple explanations that didn’t ring true. She wasn’t being pranked. It wasn’t rioting mobs of college kids celebrating a basketball game. It wasn’t a political protest. It wasn’t Black Lives Matter or the Ku Klux Klan. It wasn’t aliens doing this. It was other people. People she saw with grievous injuries, people with arms completely ripped off and still attacking.
She was watching a zombie uprising. She didn’t know if the books and movies were true, that the only thing that could kill a zombie was a shot to the head, but she would take that as a truth for now. And definitely avoid being bitten. Had the government known something like this could happen? Is that why there were so many zombie TV shows and movies and books?
Is that why even the CDC had a “how to prepare for a zombie outbreak” booklet on their website? She was thinking too much like some of her Internet friends now. A conspiracy for everything and everything a conspiracy. Wonder if there’s any tin foil in the kitchen so I can make a hat? She slapped herself mentally. “Get it together, Girl. This is real. Don’t skiz out.”
Zombie Road (Book 1): Convoy of Carnage Page 6
