by Jacy Morris
Before he knew it, it was his turn to climb the semi. The cab was blue and plain. Words on the side were only half visible, the other half buried in rock and dirt from the rockslide. He reached up and grabbed Lou's hand, and as he pulled himself up, feeling that damn rifle strap dig into his neck again, he knew why Lou had wanted him to keep quiet.
The others had slowly maneuvered their way onto the top of the rockslide. They were silent as a spider in the corner of a bedroom. There was noise now that the wreckage of the big rig was no longer blocking the sound, but it wasn't coming from them. It was a scraping noise, the scrape of boots on pavement.
The dead were there, on the other side, lined up between the cars like impatient drivers looking to see what was going on ahead. There were dozens of vehicles. In their desperation, some drivers had attempted to drive through the parked cars. Snarled bits of metal and broken taillights littered the ground. But this was all insignificant next to the hundreds of dead that wandered the road. They shuffled slowly, not seeming to go anywhere in particular. As he watched, an eagle swooped down and picked at the shredded flesh of one of the dead. It reached up to grab the bird, but it was off and away before the dead man could seize it. It looked into the sky, reaching to the heavens, and a lone feather helicoptered to the ground.
"How the fuck are we going to get by that?" Mort asked.
"I don't think we can," Lou said.
"So what? We just go back?" Katie hissed.
Lou shook his head, and Mort waited expectantly. Lou was good with plans, certainly better than Mort was. He could swing a hammer and run all day, but when it came to clever things, Mort was more a doer than a thinker.
"We can't go back," Joan said, and Mort knew without looking that Clara would be nodding right along with her. Sometimes it seemed as if they were of one mind these days.
"Let's climb down," Lou said. "I don't want these things to see us and get agitated. If what I have in mind works, we may be able to go around these things."
Silently, they descended the semi-truck's cab, steadying each other as they dropped to the pavement. Mort tried not to look at the dead mother in the red jeep nearest them, her seatbelt locked tight against the rotting fabric of her shirt, the shadow of a child safety seat in the back. How long until all these things would be naked, until the clothes they had been wearing when they died rotted right off them? Somehow, that idea was even more horrifying. He hoped he wasn't around for that day.
"So what's this plan?" Katie asked.
"We're gonna go under," Lou said.
"Under?" Clara and Joan questioned in unison.
"Hear me out," Lou said, holding his hands up as if fending off coming blows. "When we were up there, I got a good look at that road. Now, if we just hop down off that cab on the other side, I figure we got a good chance of getting ourselves killed."
"We can take 'em," Katie said, her eyes fierce and cold at the same time.
"No, we can't," Clara said, and Mort could feel the tension between the two. There was something unsaid, something unspoken there, but Mort didn't know enough about women to be able to figure out what it was. "That road goes straight up. Once the dead see us, they're going to bunch right up, and we don't have enough ammo to put all of those things down."
Mort nodded. Clara made sense.
"We can run over the top of the cars," Katie responded.
"Straight up hill?"
"Listen, we don't have to do any of that." Lou stalked over to the end of the semi-truck. "On the left side of the road, there's this drop-off, right?" Mort nodded as he began to follow Lou's thinking. "But between the drop-off and the road, there's this railing. If we hang down and stay on the railing side, we should be able to sneak right by those things."
"Uh-uh. No way," Joan said. "There's no way we can just drag ourselves up the side of the road. Our arms will give out."
"You don't have to go the whole way," Lou said, "just part. I'll climb on top of the truck, and draw them all over here. While they're distracted, you guys climb along that railing until you're clear of the dead. Leave me with that rifle, and I'll pick off any of 'em that get too close."
"You're a shit shot," Joan said. "I'll stay."
Mort knew she was right. Joan had practiced enough with the rifle. The rest of them were amateurs compared to her, and she wasn't even that great. "I agree with Joan," Mort said, drawing a dark look from Lou. "She's the best shot, man. If I'm gonna dangle off the side of this canyon, I wanna make sure ain't no one bitin' my fingers off while I'm doin' it."
"If Joan stays, I stay too," Clara said.
Katie looked up at the sky as if to say, "How stupid can these people be?"
"You can't stay; that sort of defeats the purpose of one of us hanging back," Joan said
Clara didn't like the idea. "But what if something goes wrong?"
"Nothing is going to go wrong," Joan said, channeling the remains of the reassuring doctor that had once lived inside of her.
"If you die because of this I'm going to kill you," Clara said.
"I would do the same for you."
Clara nodded and that was it. No goodbyes. No tears. Silently they waited as Joan climbed the side of the semi-truck. Her ascent was quick and easy. They watched as she stood on top of the cab of the semi like a Greek goddess ready to rain fire down on Athens, and then she began to holler.
"Here I am you dead fucks! Come and get me!" She stomped on the roof of the truck, producing a hollow clang that seemed as if it would carry for miles. She looked over her shoulder and tossed them a smile. "It's working." Then she turned back to the task at hand.
Mort turned his back and made sure that everything he had was tight on his body. The rifle was tight. He cinched the straps on his backpack; the food and water within could be the difference between life and death. Then he bent down to tie his shoes, pulling the laces tight and double-knotting them. He would have to undo them later, or else he would strangle the circulation to his feet, but he wanted to make sure that he didn't lose a boot over the side of the canyon. There would be no getting it back. A good pair of shoes was as important as water or food in this world. But as a homeless man, that had always been true. Your shirt could have holes in it. Your pants could have holes too. But if you didn't have a good pair of shoes, there wasn't much you could do about it. He had seen men fight over shoes like rabid dogs, homeless men who cared little for the world. A man could lose a few teeth just for staring at another man's boots for too long.
He stood up. He was ready. He crept over to the edge of the pavement. His head swam from side to side as he peered over the edge of the road. He saw red clay, billowing outward at a steep angle. It wasn't the fall that would kill you, it was the rocks that jutted from the side of the hill. Once a person got falling fast enough, those jagged edges would cut skin open like a filet knife, and their guts would be spilled on the side of the mountain until the vultures got to them.
He inched over to the area where the railing hung suspended in the air. The end of the semi-jutted into space. The only way to get around it was to go under. He looked back at the others. They stared back at him, anxiety etched onto their faces.
"Go!" Joan yelled at them.
With that, Mort crouched down and reached underneath the trailer of the semi-truck. He wrapped his hand around a mud-encrusted pipe, and slowly, he inched his way under the truck. As he reached the edge of the overhanging trailer, he became aware that he was going to have to go quite a way without the benefit of the guard rail. He pressed his body against the slope of the canyon, his hands above his head, gripping the edge of the road. He felt as if he were one wrong move from plummeting down the side of the ravine. If he had tried to stand straight up, he would have tumbled all the way to the bottom.
He pressed his chest into the rough earth and inched sideways, never able to shake the feeling that he was going to tumble backwards. His fingers were suspended above him, gripping the edge of the warm pavement. He could feel the strain in
his fingers, and at any moment, he expected one of the dead to see his fingers slowly shuffling along the edge of the road.
He could hear the dead above him, pressing into the wreck of the semi-truck in an effort to get at Joan. Mort imagined one of the dead, walking slowly over to him and dropping to its knees. Achingly slow, it would lean toward his hands and take a slow bite of his fingers, sending him tumbling to his death.
As a rifle shot rang out, the image in his mind solidified. He began to move faster.
****
Joan racked the bolt on her rifle, swearing quietly under her breath. She heard the click of the bolt, and the clang of the shell on the roof of the semi. She drove another round into the chamber and aimed at the dead thing again.
Most of the main body of the horde were there at her feet, pressing mindlessly into the wreckage of the semi-truck. For some reason that Joan couldn't figure out, there were a few inquisitive types that were drawn to the area where the others were trying to sneak by. How did they know they were there? The noise she was making should have been able to cover any sort of sound they were making as they inched their way along. The tips of their fingers were the only parts of their bodies that could be seen, and even she could barely make them out from this distance. Maybe those would draw one or two of the dead, but most of them should be paying attention to her. As she sighted down her rifle, the head of another one bobbed into sight, just a few feet from the guard rail.
"What the fuck?"
They knew they were there. Somehow, the dead knew they were there. She squeezed the trigger, slowly. This was how she had learned to shoot. Aiming at signs from the side of their vehicle, she had learned to slowly depress the trigger as opposed to jerking on it, which would throw her aim off by the smallest of amounts. But when dealing with hundreds of feet per second, that small variation added up quickly. In order to pull off headshots, she had to be slow, deliberate, like a person with tweezers pulling a splinter out of the palm of their hand. A puff of red mist let her know that her aim had been true.
The dead man fell to the ground, and Joan began to stomp harder on the roof of the semi as she lined up another shot.
"I'm over here, you bastards!"
Her cries were heard; the dead turned towards her, their arms held out to her as if she were their savior. She tried not to see them, not to see the humanity on those rotten and scarred faces, but it was impossible. There were children in the crowd, women, the elderly, men who looked like they were as strong as an ox in real life... and yet, here they all were, dead. They pressed against the wreckage of the tanker, splitting their skin wide open on the sharp metal, but they didn't care. They still wanted her.
She squeezed the trigger again, and her rifle tore through the shoulder of a balding old man who approached the area where the others were inching along. He could have been a professor in his past life. Though the bullet wound was large enough to fell a normal human, it did absolutely nothing to the dead man. He continued to shamble forward, his arm hanging at an impossible angle, until he reached the guard rail. He bent over and began pawing at something below, hiding his bald pate behind the trunk of his body. She didn't have a shot, unless she could shoot through his body and hope that the bullet found its way into the creature's brain.
****
The first shot almost did Lou in, not because it had almost hit him, but because he hadn't been ready for it. Inching along, holding onto the road above, he had almost released his grip out of pure shock as the shot echoed across the ravine. It scared him bad enough that he lost his grip on the road with his left hand. While all of his weight was held up by the four fingers of his right hand, his left arm pin-wheeled in the air, until his brain registered that if he didn't get his hand back up on the road, he was going to die. With a grunt, he reached upward, panic flushing his body with fear. Sweat covered his head.
The creature fell to the ground above him with a thump, and black blood with the smell of rot began to drip over the side of the road like syrup off the side of a stack of pancakes. Chalk another one up for Katie. He continued sliding to his left, towards the area where the guard rail was still intact. Life would be much easier once he could grab a hold of it. Until then, he was going to have to fight the exhaustion that was steadily working its way into his arms, like a worm boring its way into an apple.
He could see the strain of Katie and Clara, who had climbed out ahead of him. He hoped they were holding up better than him. His brief moment of dangling had sapped whatever reserves he had. Sweat poured down his face, and he grunted with each shift.
Another shot rang out, and he heard footsteps above him. They were close. He heard the soft patter of blood on the ground. And then he heard a thump as one of the creatures dropped to the pavement above him. It grumbled and groaned, releasing a soggy moan. Lou slid to his left some more, taking the room that was available to him.
"Hurry up," he whispered. The dead thing above him reached out for his hand, and Lou knew he could either take his chances dropping to the ravine floor or getting bit by the leering face of the dead thing above. "Shit, shit, shit."
"Hold on, Lou," Clara said.
He could see the top of the creature's head above him. Its eyes, oddly wet for having been dead for such a long time, still looked human, which made the whole situation worse. It didn't look at Lou. It was fixated on his fingers. As it leaned in to take a bite of one of his fingers, Lou slid left once more, far enough to avoid the ghoul's bite. Its teeth clicked off the pavement above, and Lou could sense the quiet desperation of the people to his left, who knew exactly the danger he was in.
There was another shot, and blood sprayed the air. But the dead man was still active, still hungry, and still eyeing Lou's fingers like a side of breakfast sausage.
The group was halfway across now, and, if Lou was hearing it right, the commotion had drawn several more of the creatures. All he could do was scream in his mind, and that was the most horrible thing. If only he could scream and let loose all the swears that were flowing through his mind, he would be alright. He was sure of that. There was another gunshot, and the bald man's head blew up, spraying Lou's hands with cold blood.
****
Joan smiled with satisfaction as she ejected the spent shell. She had gotten him. She only hoped she had gotten him in time. With her adrenaline pumping, she took shot after shot, thinning out the small pack that had broken off to investigate what was going on at the edge of the road.
They went down, one by one. There was a part of her that felt bad for what she was doing. These were people once, just like her. When the virus had first broken out, she had dreamed of a cure, even dreamed of being the first to find it. But there would be no cure. These people could not be saved.
The world had fallen apart way too quickly. It had been built like that old game with the wooden blocks, the one where you would pull one out and hope that the tower of blocks would keep standing. Only, this time, as the dead had risen, it had been like pulling out five blocks at a time. The world's collapse had been sudden, startling, and absolutely complete. Joan couldn't fool herself into believing that even the largest, most secure labs in the United States had been able to withstand this onslaught. Power was gone; the military was no more. Hell, even the United States was gone.
She squeezed the trigger again, sending a waitress in a pink dress tumbling to the ground. The road was as good a grave as any she supposed. As her thoughts drifted, she found herself locked into a rhythm of fire that seemed almost holy. She acted on instinct, firing, chambering another round, and then sighting, until one moment she blinked, and she saw that there were a dozen bodies on the road. She reached into her pocket to find that she only had a handful of shells left.
The dead were still breaking off in bunches, but the angle they were taking told her that Clara and the others were farther along now. But she still needed to give them more time. Without more ammunition, she needed to think of something else to do.
She looke
d down at the creatures below her, and she knew that she needed to present a more attainable target. She sat on the edge of the semi's cab and waved her feet around, just out of range of the horde's grasping hands. This excited them; they emitted bubbly moans of hunger with an almost fervent desire.
Joan tilted her head back and screamed the way the girls in the horror movies used to scream, shrill and terrified. She didn't feel the terror, but the dead responded to it anyway. It drove them into a frenzy. Their arms waved about faster, and they pressed in tighter to the wreck of the semi-truck, crushing each other until they were nothing but an indistinguishable mass of waving arms and hungry faces.
In the distance, the ones that had broken off from the main pack turned around and began shambling back in her direction. Joan screamed some more.
****
"Oh, God, they're killing her!" Clara said.
"Just keep moving," Katie spat back. There was nothing they could do about Joan's screaming now. Her arms were weak and she was hyper aware of the small bulge of her pregnant belly pressing against the face of the ravine. She couldn't get off the side of this damn hill fast enough, and then, just like that, she was there. The guard rail was back, and with it, they now had something to grab onto. With the last of her strength, she pulled herself up, and grabbed the steel guardrail supports, her fingers curling around them.
They still had to inch across, but it was easier now. Instead of relying on their fingertips, they could now slide along at an angle, grasping the supports of the guardrail. They continued like this for what seemed an eternity. Joan continued to scream in the distance, and Katie assumed that meant that she was alright because if she had been bitten, she would be dead by now.
Katie inched along at a reasonable pace. Soon the sound of the dead was nothing but a buzz in the back of their minds, and she risked a peek over the guardrail. She saw a line of cars, abandoned with their doors thrown open, but little else.
