It was a stupid idea, but no one could come up with anything else that was even remotely more plausible. It was getting hot in the overcrowded room and Gunny started edging his way out. He still needed to get rid of the thing in the freezer and watching all the footage and the news reports had left him utterly resolute. He now had no qualms whatsoever about putting one of those things….zombies…. down.
There was no shred of human left in them as far as he was concerned. As he slipped through the door, he pulled his phone out to check for any texts may that have been missed in the noise and confusion and saw that there were. Two of them!
He breathed a heavy sigh of relief and hurriedly swiped the screen to read the rest of the messages. They were both from his wife. The first must have been sent much earlier, but they both came through at the same time.
It read: Dropping Terry and Linda off at the airport this morning. He said you can use his boat but don’t drink all his beer this time. LOL. Your boy has been fighting again. I’m out of oranges, can you pick some up at one of those roadside stands? Avocados, too. XOXO
The other one read: “Been trying to call you for hours. Can’t get through. Thank God you are OK. If you’re reading this, then you know what is happening. Haven’t heard from Jessie but he had in-school detention. If he stays put, he will be OK. I am at work but a group of us have barricaded ourselves on the 28th floor. We have Phil with us. He has killed 2 of them so far. We are OK for now, going to get to the roof. Mr. Sato said the Army would rescue people off rooftops. Once I’m off, I’ll get Jessie. I love you, Honey. Please be safe. We will probably be in an Army camp when you get back. XOXOXO”
Gunny leaned against the wall, almost weak with relief. Lacy was okay. She was at work. That sucked, would have been better if she wasn’t but she was safe. They had 30 more stories to go to get to the roof. He wondered why they just didn’t hop in the elevator and go.
Phil was the security guard and Gunny had seen that he carried a pistol when he’d met him on a few of the occasions he had taken her out to lunch. Her boss, Mr. Sato, was there with them. That was good. He was the CEO and if he said the Army was rescuing people, he must have a connection somewhere. They were setting up refugee camps. He hadn’t heard or seen that on any of the news feeds they’d been watching, but that didn’t mean anything.
Things weren’t as bad as all that if the Army had birds out pulling people from rooftops. And Jessie was in detention. But that was good too. He knew from hearing him describe how isolated, unfair and horrible it was the last time he wound up in there.
Locked up in a dungeon was how he put it. No cafeteria lunch, had to bring one from home or go hungry. Had to beg for bathroom breaks. No phone. No iPod. A camera watching your every move. Just a notebook, paper and one book.
Oh, the unfairness of it all. He’d told him to take his fights off the school grounds next time. Lacy had told him to walk away and not resort to violence. Whatever. He wasn’t raising a Nancy Boy. His family was safe. That was good. Now all he had to do was drive 2400 miles through zombie infested country, find the right refugee camp and collect them.
Piece of cake.
Jessie
Detention
Day 1
Jessie was taking care not to bob his head to the beat of the music, the ear buds ran carefully up his sleeve, out the top of his shirt and hidden under his collar length hair. Of course, the iPod was strictly forbidden in detention and that was why everyone had one. Or their phone.
It was going on ten o’clock and the essay he had to have finished by the end of the day was nearly done. The old man always said if you had a job to do, just buckle down and get it over with. Not that he’d follow any advice the old man gave, but he didn’t want to spend another day in this hell hole of boredom so he’d knock out the assignment and then knock out Kyle Farsons’ teeth after school and off school property.
He’s the bastard that got him in this mess. Then when the old man got home, he’d have to deal with him being pissed off and going on about military school if he screwed up “one more time.” Kyle would pay for that, too. Busted nose. Maybe black both his eyes. Or not. He knew he would just let it go, but it felt good to dream of revenge.
Jessie didn’t think of himself as a badass or anything, it’s just that these private school kids were all a bunch of pansies. He’d been raised up on the military bases and even after his dad got out, he still went to the daycare and school on base because his mom worked there as a civilian. Military kids were pretty rough and tumble, they played hard and weren’t mollycoddled when it came to scrapes and cuts. More than once he’d heard “What are you crying about? I don’t see a bone sticking out.”
When they moved to Atlanta, he kept up with his karate classes and when he got in his teens, the old man had started showing him some really devious fighting moves. Stuff they didn’t teach at the dojo. Stuff that he had to swear never to use unless he was prepared to be arrested and maybe sent to jail. Stuff only to be employed in a life or death situation. Brutal moves his old man said he’d been trained in while he was in the Army.
Things like eye gouging, elbow breaking and neck snapping. Moves designed to kill or permanently maim. With the knowledge that he could crush anyone that came up against him, he had walked away from a lot of fights, had let them push him and call him a pussy or whatever. Because in his mind’s eye, he could see the outcome, could see the jerk laying on the ground screaming in agony in about 2 seconds and that was enough, just knowing he would win.
But Mr. “My dad is a lawyer!” Kyle Farson, III had caught him off guard with a blow to the back of his head, had knocked his lunch tray out of his hands and sent it flying across the floor.
True, he’d called him a cock-gobbling douchenozzle but that wasn’t enough reason to sucker punch him. Jessie had kicked out on instinct and followed up with a few punches before he stopped himself. By then it was too late.
All the teachers saw was him pummeling on the richest kid in the school, it didn’t matter that Kyle had started the whole thing. Poor little Kyle was laying on the floor with the wind knocked out of him and bleeding from a split lip, and Jessie didn’t even have his hair messed up. So unfair.
Jessie looked up from his writing. He thought he’d heard something. Sheila was staring at him with an exasperated look, obviously trying to get his attention. Had he been singing along with the music?
He moved his hand to his pocket and hit the pause button then nodded his head in a “what?” gesture. They never knew when someone from the office would be looking at the monitor or when they would turn the sound up to listen in to ensure there was no talking in the room.
But he heard it now, heard what she must have been trying to get his attention about. He could hear screaming. Faint, but definitely there. They were in the basement of the school, in the mostly unused section now that the new wing had been added a dozen years back.
The only classrooms down here that were still used on a regular basis were the practice rooms. Band, cheerleaders, the Glee Club. Basically, anybody that was loud. And of course, detention.
Jessie glanced around the room. Everyone was listening now, nobody was pretending to do their work while playing on their phones or zoning out to music. Definitely screams. He stood up and went to the door, trying to see out of the frosted window. Nothing. The door was locked but he tried it anyway, jiggling the knob. Sheila had walked up to the camera and was waving her arms at it, saying ‘Hello! Hello! What’s going on?”
Gary rolled over in his wheelchair and cupped his hands against the door’s window, trying to see out, but it was useless. The glass was too opaque to make out anything definite, just a single running figure that darted by.
“Fire drill?” Doug asked, standing behind the wheelchair, looking over his head, also trying to see out of the frosted glass.
“We would have heard the alarm,” Gary said.
Another shadowy shape ran by and he started pounding on the door, yellin
g for them to open it.
Whoever it was kept on going.
“This is so weird,” Sheila said, giving up waving at the camera. “I heard if you even get out of your chair, someone is on the speaker telling you to sit down.” This was her first time in detention, a result of getting caught texting for the third time during class.
“True enough,” Gary said. He had been here a few times before, his “poor attitude” and angry outbursts always seeming to land him in hot water. He had only been paralyzed for a few years, was still trying to adjust to it. The dirt bike wreck that had broken his back hadn’t even been that bad. He had just landed a small jump wrong and woke up in the hospital, paralyzed from the waist down. He couldn’t even remember how it happened.
He was one of those popular kids who got along with everybody: the jocks, the stoners, and the nerds. It didn’t matter to him, he was usually an upbeat and friendly guy and the teachers had let him slide on a lot of things.
Sometimes he went too far and found himself in the dungeon, paying for his outburst with a day of monotony and boredom. His black moods and depression which had plagued him since the accident seemed to be finally lifting a little and his competitive spirit was coming back. He had recently taken up wheelchair racing and was concentrating on more of the computer science classes, finding he had a knack for it.
Doug walked over to the call box and pushed the button. It was supposed to be used to call the office if there was an emergency or if someone needed a bathroom pass. He pressed it repeatedly, but no one answered. He was the jokester of the group, one of his pranks went a little too far and he wound up down in the basement with the rest of the miscreants.
Jessie rattled the door again, jerking on the knob, trying to get it to force open. “This is a load of bull,” he said. “Isn’t there laws against locking people in? What if there really is a fire or something?”
“The Woodland Academy of Higher Learning for the Woefully Inadequate does not have to abide by such pedestrian rules, old Chap!” Doug intoned in his best British snobbery voice.
Jessie grinned despite himself. “Well, I guess if there is a reason for us to bust out, we just throw a chair through the window.” But he was concerned and getting more so. They heard another scream somewhere far away.
Sheila had her phone out and had been trying to call the front office but wasn’t getting anything, just an all circuits busy recording. Everyone else brought theirs out and tried various numbers, all with the same results.
“Try text,” Gary said. “It may get through, the data packet for messages is tiny.”
Jessie’s first text was to his mom and was tongue in cheek. “Something going on. Trapped in the dungeon. Office isn’t answering the buzzer. May have to make a jail break!”
The guys finished a few texts apiece and then watched Sheila as she typed away on her phone, her fingers moving at incredible speed.
“You writing a book?” Doug asked.
She looked up and saw them all staring at her and was getting ready to answer with something snarky when they heard a group of people running by the door with ragged breaths and a guttural howling thing fly by the window after them.
They stared at each other, all humor gone, and edged back over to the door, trying to see anything through the opaque glass. There was more running, more howling things and the sounds of doors slamming and breaking windows then screams of terror and pain at the end of the corridor.
Jessie looked down at the doorknob, now very glad it was locked.
“Was that…” Gary started but couldn’t find the words and trailed off. Not a fire drill. Not a joke of some kind, the screams were real. They were the ‘terrified and filled with pain’ kind of screams that couldn’t be faked. “School shooter?” he finally asked a little lamely.
No one had an answer. Things had just gotten real. Joke time was over. They had just heard people die, they were sure of it. Whatever was going on out there was really happening. As teenagers raised on a steady diet of horror movies, video games and comic books, they probably accepted the unexplainable faster and more readily than the grownups.
“Werewolves? Gary asked in a half whisper, not really believing it could be.
“It’s daytime. No moon.” Jessie whispered without thinking. They could still hear the sounds of the dying.
“Vampires?” Sheila asked
“Not unless they’re the sparkly kind,” Doug said in a hushed tone.
“God, I wish I had those legs!” Gary whispered vehemently, slamming his fists down on his useless ones in frustration.
They all knew what he was talking about. They’d heard him mention them often enough. Where he went to do his rehabilitation therapy, there were a set of mechanical legs that he could strap on and operate with hand controls. He couldn’t actually run in them, but he was able to move around a lot better than he could in the chair.
The only problem was the cost. Insurance didn’t cover them and his parents didn’t have an extra hundred grand laying around. They all glanced at his chair. At his limited mobility. What had been an incredible inconvenience before might now be a death sentence.
A shadowy figure lurched by the door and Sheila gave a short little involuntary gasp. It stopped, as if listening. Everyone froze in place, eyes wide, Jessie making a shushing motion at her. She covered her mouth with both hands, her eyes huge and full of terror.
A hand slapped against the window, leaving a trail of dark liquid in its wake and she jumped, squeaked out a stifled cry. It heard and the door rattled violently as it threw itself against it, hands trying to reach through the opaque glass. It started howling and keening and soon it was joined by more.
They could see the outlines of a half dozen bodies through the frosted glass, all of them clawing at it. It was only a matter of time before one of them swung a fist hard enough to break through and then it would be all over. They backed away, Jessie and Gary both looking for something to use as a weapon then they heard a chilling high pitched scream out in the hall.
It sounded like it was coming from the boiler room at the end of the corridor. The things outside abandoned the door they were trying to get through and ran howling towards the sounds of sheer panic. The screaming didn’t last long.
Chapter 7
Gunny left the CB shop and walked up to Doc’s to check on the Deputy, Ozzy, and Hot Rod. He stepped over to Scratch as he walked in, quietly asking “Everything okay?”
Scratch nodded to the affirmative, but he was well away from the rest of them, near the door, trying to act nonchalant about being in the doctors’ office with a rifle in his arms. His finger was off the trigger but right there near it.
Ozzy was pale now and lying flat on the countertop, his leg bandaged and elevated on a pillow. Billy Travaho had both girls hovering over him and he was completely sprawled out on the couch, breathing shallowly. Hot Rod found a shirt somewhere and had put it on and although he had an apprehensive look about him, he seemed no worse than before.
“I think we should at least tie their feet,” Gunny said to Scratch when he saw they were getting worse. “You saw how fast they moved.”
“Yeah,” he said. “But Cobb told me to stay here. Can you grab some rope?”
“I’m on it,” Gunny said and left, heading towards the mechanic's bays. He noticed Pack Rat and a couple of the drivers in the weight room but kept going towards the garage. He didn’t have any rope on his truck, but he was sure Tommy had some in the shop somewhere. When he walked in, there was a flurry of activity going on, all of the mechanics and a few of the drivers were busy barricading the windows at the back of the shop.
Out of the front windows, there was another rig parked lengthwise, effectively blocking them from any flailing zombie attack. The back windows were within the perimeter fencing, but Gunny knew that fence was old. It had probably been there for twenty years.
He jogged over to his truck, found his box of ammo and reloaded the nearly empty magazine in his Gloc
k then dumped the rest in his jacket pocket. He spotted Cobb’s son, Tommy, helping hold a piece of angle iron over a window while one of his mechanics welded it to the steel wall of the Quonset hut.
He saw that they were doing this for all of the windows, basically making bars close enough together that no human-sized forms could get through. “Hey Tommy” Gunny yelled over the noise of the welders arcing and the hissing of the cutting torches.
Tommy looked up, made sure the angle iron had enough of a weld on it to hold in place, then headed over to meet Gunny in the middle of the shop.
“Got any rope?” he asked. “Some people have been bitten. It’s probably best to restrain them in case they turn.”
“Yeah,” Tommy said. “Over in the parts room. There’s some on a spool.”
“Got it. And if you need any of that wood off of my trailer, take whatever you want.” Gunny said, indicating his flatbed that was in the second bay, loaded with fine New England lumber.
“Thanks,” Tommy said with a half-smile. “But we’re using steel for now. A little stronger.”
Gunny watched him head over to another flatbed a few bays over, loaded with angle iron and rebar, and grab another long piece to drag over to the man with the cutting torch. Tommy was a Marine, too.
Once a Marine, always a Marine, as they say. But he did his four years and got out. Served honorably but it just wasn’t his thing. Tommy was Cobb’s only son and he probably joined just to keep up the family tradition and keep Cobb off his back. His heart was in turning wrenches and building things.
He had grown up in the Three Flags with his mother and grandparents whenever Cobb was off on another of his seemingly endless deployments. Occasionally they would go live with him when he was stationed in the States for a few years at a time but it always seemed temporary. The truck stop was home.
Zombie Road (Book 1): Convoy of Carnage Page 9
