by Bryan James
“What exactly are you referring to?” she asked, voice soft and quiet. I thought I detected a hint of a grin.
I chuckled. “Well, as much as I’d like to relive certain portions of our recent past, I’m actually thinking about the ease with which you took that bitch apart with your hands.”
I was quick to qualify the comment. “And let’s be clear, it’s not just you. Remember that barbell on the ship? I also shredded one of those things on the top of the Humvee when we were bolting from the base. Something’s up.”
She nodded slowly, still looking toward the forest.
“My best guess is that it’s related to the vaccine. Whatever is making us regenerate faster is boosting our muscle conditioning rate and adrenalin functions way past our normal limits. You couldn’t bend that screwdriver in the Humvee, right?”
I nodded, somewhat ashamed.
“Probably because it wasn’t lusting for your man flesh. No adrenalin. The last two times you busted out the Superman act, your life was in danger, right? Same with me.”
It made sense, but I flashed back to the ship.
“Why not when we were pinned down to the beds? Or for that matter, I’ve had this stuff coursing through my veins for months now. In prison, in King’s Park. Why didn’t any of this materialize until now? It didn’t take that long for you.”
She shrugged.
“I’m not sure. Maybe there’s a proximity necessity. Maybe it’s triggered by metabolism, and the neuroleptics you were on counteracted the effects, suppressed them for a while. Maybe you hadn’t been exposed to the right type or amount of radiation to trigger the full effects. But regardless, it can’t be good for our systems. Adrenaline surges like that are fine when they’re infrequent, but consistent surges like that have an effect on blood pressure, on heart function. The whole works.”
I knew there had to be a dark cloud in front of the silver lining.
I polished off the water and stood up. The rain had stopped and the wind was softer now, pushing the tree limbs rather than whipping them from side to side. It was still dark, but there was a hint of light cresting over the Eastern sky. It was time to move.
“So you feel like taking this show on the road again?”
She nodded, standing up slowly and turning to me, face serious but with a hint of a smile.
“Listen, about what really happened in there ...” she began, but paused suddenly, jerking her gaze toward the woods across the parking lot.
“What was that?”
I hadn’t heard anything but turned toward the parking lot, scanning the tree line. The wind pushed the branches above our heads and they scraped against the roof.
“I didn’t ...” I began, but she waved me down with one hand, pulling her rifle over her shoulder with the other.
Commandingly, she gestured to her right as she moved to the left. We moved from the doubtful protection of the covered rest area into the parking lot. My feet pressed deep into the grass, leaving heavy foot prints in my wake. The rain had soaked the ground, and water pressed up from underneath my boots as I moved forward slowly.
She disappeared around the front of the Humvee as I moved behind, fighting the urge to just open the damn door and go inside.
Suddenly, a gunshot split the night air.
That was most definitely not the wind.
Kate screamed and I saw her sprawl forward, crawling toward the cover of a parked car, twenty yards from the Humvee. I backed up, taking cover behind the armored vehicle. Another shot pinged off the side of the vehicle as I shouted out.
“Where’s it coming from?” I yelled, not caring whether the shooter heard.
If there were any of those things within a two mile radius, they were hearing this. No way this sounds like the wind or is covered up by the sound of the storm. And they were most definitely on their way. Probably in a large fricking group.
“In the woods, but I can’t see it!” She yelled back, sounding more angry than scared.
I had to get to her and give her a way to get to the Humvee. She was pinned behind the car, but there was only the sound of one rifle; there was probably only one of them. All she needed was cover for the twenty yard sprint.
Suddenly, I turned, following the sound of a soft moan on the wind. I knew what I’d see and I yelled to Kate after I confirmed my suspicions.
She followed my gaze. The parking lot was on the opposite side of the rest rooms from the road. The gap between the men’s room and the women’s room was open, but for a small booth that was normally used for coffee service, but which was now abandoned. Through that vacant area, I could see at least twenty creatures shambling slowly forward. They were moving at the normal speed, but I was suddenly scared. More scared than I had been since this started.
They were acting different now. They were less ... predictable. And that was frightening. In large groups, they were always dangerous. But if their grouping or herding instinct was indicative of some evolution in communication; if they had formulated or evolved into some sort of collective instinct ... it didn’t bode well for those of us trying to find a cure and stay alive.
I had an idea. Time was running out, and those things would get to us before long. I had to get her back to the Humvee.
My life was movies. Watching them. Talking about them. Acting in them. It was all I knew. So when pressed, I resorted to what I knew. And in times of pressure, I had to go with what I knew. I figured we had five seconds max, from the time I popped out of hiding until the sniper got a bead on me.
I yelled to her to duck down so the sniper couldn’t see my hand gestures. Then I gave her the signal for five seconds, and indicated that she should get ready to sprint for the cover of the Humvee.
She turned toward the rest area, eyes noting the ten creatures moving through the gap between the rest rooms and close to the lawn. They were less than a minute from our position. She turned back toward me, squatting and preparing to sprint toward the front of the Humvee.
I moved in a crouch to the back of the Humvee and hoisted my rifle, pointing the muzzle to the sky.
Taking a deep breath, I pressed the trigger on the rifle, firing into the air to get the attention of our unknown assailant. I then emerged from behind the Humvee, clucking as loudly as I could like a deranged chicken.
Chapter 18
I think it was the flapping arms and the bobbing head that really sold it.
I sprinted for the car twenty yards away, clucking loudly and madly, straining to project deep into the woods where the shots were originating. I held my rifle strategically between my head and the trees. The loud crack of each shot as I fired into the air was painful in my ear.
It was the longest five seconds of my life. A five seconds where I could mentally picture the yokel in the woods staring, confused, at the large deranged man firing an automatic rifle in the air and clucking like an insane bird in the face of an imminent zombie attack.
From the trees, I heard a voice from the distance. “What the fuck?”
Then a shot ripped through the leaves and air between us. I dove for the ground as the bullet slammed into the metal frame of the car, merely feet from my chest. From behind the Humvee, I heard a loud crash, and Kate’s voice.
“Mike, I’m good!”
But now I had a problem. I was stuck behind a car, while she was safe inside the Humvee.
I looked toward the rest area bathrooms, where three creatures were almost to the Humvee, and was struck with a stupid plan. I didn’t have a lot of time, so I was going to have to double down on the stupid.
I whistled, causing the nearing creatures to move toward me, eyes shifting in their heads slowly and training on me. I was crouched below window level of the car as they approached, armed with a rifle and a crazy-ass plan. A volley of single shots rang out from the forest, slamming into the opposite side of the car.
The first creature was nearly on top of me before I lashed my leg out to the side; it fell forward hard, and I grabbed the sli
my, greasy hair on the back of its head and drove its skull into the side of the vehicle. I heard the crunch of bone on metal as it slid to the ground, eyes staring up, inert.
Shaking my arm in disgust, I sought to dislodge the handful of hair that had come off in my hand.
Jesus, zombies were disgusting shits.
Two more shots sounded from the opposite side of the car, and I heard Kate start the Humvee. She couldn’t get to me in reverse given the angle of the cover I was under, but she could get ready to leave when I was done.
My pulse was throbbing in my head, and my vision nearly blurred as I looked up, seeing the second of the three come near. The next zombie was a skinny man with a large beard, whose eyes were red rimmed and dripping with puss. An empty holster hung at his hip, probably from a long forgotten and discarded personal side arm. As he approached, I drew my pistol and took out a kneecap from several feet away. He fell in front of me, mouth still opening and closing in hunger, and I grabbed the front of his shirt in a ball, pressed the barrel of the gun into his hollowed and gray cheek, and ended his afterlife.
I looked up and smiled as the third zombie approached; it was this fat bastard that I was after.
He was a former biker, missing one arm, gnawed off at the elbow. The black leather vest he wore was covered in gruesome red matter, and his tee-shirt bore the vague semblance of a devil’s likeness, obscured by the dirt and grime of weeks of decay. He lunged forward and I rolled to the side, even as I realized there were more than thirty of them closing fast, through the rest stop and around the building, nearly to the Humvee. At the Humvee, two more bullets pinged off the thick armor of the vehicle as the sniper tried to get through the driver’s side door.
The huge creature lunged down for me, and I reached up, grabbing the collar of his vest and turning his massive body. I stood up quickly behind him, dragging him to his feet in front of me, and covering my smaller body with his enormous dead mass. I grabbed the leather vest from behind and dragged him with me as I backed toward the Humvee. His large legs ground into the earth in protest, but my blood was pumping and my muscles were raging. I felt, rather than heard, the bullet that buried itself in his thigh. Another one pushed us back further as it slammed into his enormous stomach.
I very nearly lifted him from the ground in my haste, and as I rounded the corner of the Humvee, making sure to keep my head down behind his massive barrel of a chest, his body shuddered as another shot hit him square in the torso. He twitched and moaned loudly, his remaining arm thrashing above his head. His head lashed backward as the last shot buried itself in his eye socket and I threw the corpse to the ground, jumping behind the cover of the Humvee and into the open passenger door. Behind me, the large pack of creatures were stumbling forward, nearly ten feet from my window.
Kate hit the accelerator, and as we started to move, a parting shot from our gun-crazy friend in the woods tore into the rear window, sending small cracks spider-webbing from the point of impact.
I was really glad the bastard wasn’t using higher caliber rounds.
We were moving quickly now, nearly thirty to forty miles an hour. I knew were already out of the danger zone of the moderately skilled marksman, but I still had an urge to climb to the big gun upstairs and send some lead in his direction. I may have given it a shot if not for the fact that I still hadn’t reloaded it after the flight from the air base.
“Great job,” I said, straining to be heard over the engine as I settled next to Kate in the passenger seat; I clasped my hands together, trying to reduce the palsy that was apparently an after-effect of the adrenalin rush.
She chuckled, “You too. You know, you’re crazy sometimes, but you do get things done.”
I smiled, realized how insane I must have looked.
“Yeah, well, you deal in the fictional your whole life, and you begin to blur that line between real and imaginary. In my movies, I could never get hurt doing something like that, so it seems perfectly plausible that it’s a solution to a problem. Those with more realistic ideas of life and death and fallibility may have slightly different opinions. Although now ...”
I let it trail off, realizing that she and I both had a different concept of what it meant to be alive, and to be dead. If the event of the last few weeks had taught us anything, it’s that dead is not dead, and life was beginning to be a relative term.
She squinted into the distance, and glanced over at me.
“If I remember the map correctly, we go about thirty miles, then turn west on Route 89, right?”
Her voice was calm, and I gave her credit for her composure—literally under fire.
Patting my pockets, I found the map I had hastily crumpled and stuffed in my pocket.
“Yeah, we move west through some farmland, through Bridgeland, and toward the bridge. For specifics, we’re going to need to find a better map. This one only covers Route 1.”
I climbed into the rear of the cabin, finding the extra ammunition for the machine gun and popping the hatch topside to figure out how to load it.
The air was crisp and clean and I inhaled deeply as we drove; it was the kind of weather you expect in the gray day following a big storm. Branches and leaves covered the highway and as we moved south, the road stayed relatively clear and empty. An occasional car was overturned or pulled to the side of the road, sporadically marked by histories of violence, with streaks of dried blood or broken windows.
As we passed a large big-box store to the west of the highway, I noticed a large group of creatures packed around the front doors. There were more than five hundred of them, crammed and writhing in the large parking lot, surging forward as best they could toward the entrance. The doors were closed, and the creatures pounded on them with abandon; there was no sign of life from this distance, but in a store like that, you could survive for years if they didn’t break in. I wished the survivors the best as we sped away, eager to gain distance from the herd.
Other than the one encounter, it was a deserted stretch of road. Fields and isolated stores and housing developments flashed by as we drove south. I fumbled with the ammunition as I disengaged levers and pinched my fingers more than a dozen times. Finally, it looked right, and I tentatively pulled back the trigger. A satisfyingly loud string of bullets spat forth, tearing into a nearby telephone pole as we passed.
The vehicle jerked slightly to the left before resuming its course, as Kate yelled from below.
“What the hell, man? Warn me next time!”
I laughed and stuck my head inside, “Sorry. Just wanted to make sure I did it right.”
I stayed topside, enjoying the fresh air and watching the scenery. It was truly surreal, even driving through an area not normally crawling with people. The world just felt emptier. It was quieter, it was calmer, and it even smelled a little better ... well, if you weren’t within a mile or so of the rotting corpses with the bad hygiene.
Guiltily, I reflected on whether we would be able to build happier lives when and if this was all over. Resigned, I sighed as the reality hit. The world would never be the same again. Even if we were able to find a cure, and disseminate it, and kill all the people already infected, and come together in some sort of unified civilization ... it would all be the same shit again. Political parties. Cable news. Celebrity fucking trials. Pollution. Hatred. Intolerance.
They were all marks of the human condition. They were all attributes and aspects of how we lived. No hungering horde of the undead was going to change that.
We drove for two hours, making the turn west without incident, as the countryside rapidly faded from sporadically populated to fairly empty. We moved into farmland and two lane roads, passing fast food restaurants and gas stations more infrequently. We stopped at the first three gas stations we found, grabbing a map at the first and trying to operate the pumps at all of them with no luck. The power was out, and we had no idea whether or how we could hand pump, even if there was gasoline left. Predictably, the Humvee didn’t have a small tank, an
d it got crappy gas mileage. Environmentally friendly, it was not.
We powered on, driven by our wish to find a safe place to spend the night, and maybe some gasoline before dark. It was close to noon when we hit our first major obstacle since the douche-nozzle sniper at the rest stop.
Reaching a small intersection between two two-lane roads in the middle of four cornfields, we slowed down. A large fuel truck had jackknifed, and lay stretched across our path. Amazingly, the truck hadn’t ignited, but a slow trickle of fuel leaked from a busted metal seam along the rear of the large, stainless-steel tank, and we slowed to a stop at least a hundred feet away, wary of fumes or liquid igniting from our passage.
Kate shut the Humvee down as we chatted quietly in the turret on top while we looked at the problem. It was a tight fit with both of us topside, but I liked sharing the small space with her. And I liked that she didn’t mind it either.
“So I see a problem, and an opportunity,” she said, squinting into the sunlight and shading her eyes.
I nodded, seeing the problem in sharper relief than the opportunity.
“If we get close with the Humvee, we could risk igniting the fuel that’s leaking from the sprung seal in the back, but if we don’t, we’re missing a prime opportunity to refuel.”
She sighed, the inhalation pressing her closer momentarily.
“Well, we need gas. If we don’t refuel, we’re hoofing it in a couple hours. Judging by the number of gas stations that have been out of commission, we don’t stand a great statistical chance of finding an open station on our way. So, we either try this, or we start lacing up our walking shoes.”
Staring ahead, I thought about the problem, realizing that I had no idea how we were going to get the fuel from the tank to the Humvee. Even though I had worked at a gas station as a kid, I had never transferred fuel directly from a tanker to a car.
“Easy,” she said in response to my question. “These trucks have a master valve. We just open it a quarter of the way, fill a can with gas, pour it into the Humvee, and repeat. It’s not the fastest way to do it, but it will get the job done.”
