“And what plan is that?” Lucinda asked, starting to relax a little.
Casey smiled and started to explain.
34
Jessie
The dog was excited to be in a car, excited to be around a real human again. He would go from trying to lick Jessie's face, to sticking his muzzle between the bars on the window and lolling his tongue. For Jessie, he went from happily scratching the dog behind the ears and viciously berating himself. That had been a close call in the house, he’d let his guard down and it had almost cost him his life. He learned something else from the experience, too. He understood something. That desperate battle had made him realize he didn’t want to die. He had fought with everything he had, with absolutely no intention of ever giving up. He fought dirty and he fought mean. He had tried to beat a mother to death with her own daughter.
He tried to put it out of his head and started looking for a place to refuel. He was getting low since he’d run out at the petting zoo without gassing up. Or getting his Ho-Ho’s.
The dog seemed to be smart and Jessie went through the refueling process a little more comfortably. The mutt stayed close and acted like he was on guard. Maybe he was. Jessie just knew he would start barking if anything living or dead came around, and he wasn’t afraid to attack the zeds, either. He’d proven that back at the petting zoo. With the tanks and spare cans full again, Jessie just let the steering wheel lead him on the back roads, generally heading north. The Mercury was running smooth, the oversized tires sang on the pavement and him and the dog munched on beef jerky as the miles rolled on. He watched for survivors, for hordes of the undead gathered somewhere, but didn’t see any unless he came to a town. They congregated there, probably because that’s where the last survivor had been. He found himself nodding off at the wheel more than once. He wasn’t sleeping well, even naps during the day. Faces in his dreams kept jolting him awake.
At the next country store he came across, he stopped to see if they had what he needed to make some imitation trucker speed. His old man listened to hillbilly music sometimes, and one of the songs that always stuck in his head, because it was about truck drivers, was one called Trucker Speed. The guy sang about mixing up Benzedrine, Percocet’s, amphetamines, Black Beauties and West Coast Turnarounds together in a can of coke and washing it down with coffee. The little store wouldn’t have all that, but it would probably have a whole display of those over the counter wake-up pills and some five-hour energy shots.
The parking lot was empty when he shut off the car and there was a hand-printed sign in the window, faded and curled now that it had been months since it was taped up.
“Gone Fishing. We’ll be back Saturday.”
He could see a few houses down the road but nothing stirred, the crows on the electric lines cawed to one another, but nothing else was around. It didn’t feel right to smash in a big window and let everything go to ruin from the weather, someone else might need the food inside. He limped around back and a few hard kicks with his good foot broke the door open. Aside from the lingering odor coming from spoiled food in the coolers, it didn’t smell bad. It didn’t smell like death. The dog agreed and was the first one in.
Jessie grabbed a can of Alpo and plopped it out on the floor then found what he was looking for right next to the register. A whole rack of Yellow Jacket energy pills, some Mr. Extreme Energy Boosters and a bunch of others. He grabbed the spare change bowl and dumped some of each into it, crushing the pills, pouring out the capsules and stirring the contents with an ink pen. When he had a big pile of the yellowish powder, he emptied out a quart of Gatorade and poured it all in, filling nearly a quarter of the bottle. Next, he started dumping in Five-Hour energy drinks until it was almost full. He topped it off with a little bit of Monster to give it flavor.
He nearly gagged with the first swallow, it was so bitter it made his eyes water.
The dog looked up at him, questioning, still licking the last remains of the food from his whiskers.
“Good stuff,” Jessie gasped out and put the lid back on the bottle. It would definitely do the job.
He looked down each of the isles, vaguely curious at the mix of items they had in the store, then saw something that made him smile. There was a couple of shelves of work boots near the hardware section. He found a pair that fit and tossed the Vans. The steel toes made for much better zombie stompers than the skater shoes. They snacked, Jessie on spicy buffalo jerky, the dog on plain old jerked cow, as he idly looked over a map spread on one of the tables. He saw a town called Atlanta, out in the middle of nowhere Kansas and on a whim, decided that was the next stop. He asked the dog what he thought. He just wagged his tail and didn’t seem to mind.
It was a one-red-light town, laid out in a grid five or six streets deep. The tallest building was the grain elevator and when Jessie idled in, he noticed a huge gathering of the undead at the community center noticing him. The building was a fairly large two-story brick structure with a rounded roof like a Quonset hut. There were crowds of listless zombies milling around it, baking in the sunny fall days and chilling in the nippy fall nights. Jessie wondered if there were any survivors still inside and asked the dog what he thought. The dog ignored him, he was too busy growling at the mass of undead who were turning to stare, taxing their pea-brains, trying to figure out what the noise and movement meant.
“I think there is,” Jessie said. “Want to try to save them?”
The dog continued ignoring him, the deep growls in his throat letting the undead know he was not one to be messed with.
It looked like there was maybe a hundred dead people staring at him now and the first of them were starting to keen, utilizing muscles and a voice box that hadn’t been used in weeks. They began to run toward him and the quietly rumbling Mercury in a stagger step kind of way.
Jessie smiled, wiped his chin with the back of his hand and revved the motor. The car rocked back and forth as the big block barked out its throaty rumble.
“Hold on, boy,” he said and put it in reverse. He gave gas and kept just ahead of them, driving backward at about fifteen miles an hour. With his arm thrown over the passenger seat and looking through the slots in the metal covering the back window, he kept it in the center of the road. The crowd followed. All of them starting to stretch out barely used leg muscles and reaching for the noise. The noise meant fresh blood. The noise meant they could reproduce and repopulate. They ran with everything they had, picking up speed and screaming their hunger into the bright Kansas day. He floored it and cut the wheel hard, spinning the front end of the car around. Before the tires had quit screeching, he’d slammed the shifter into first and popped the clutch. White smoke rolled and the tires squalled as the back of the car got loose and he had to countersteer a little to keep it straight. The dog righted himself in the seat and started barking his defiance at the dried out undead. Jessie laughed out loud and grabbed second, keeping the pedal mashed and the tachometer right up near the redline. His dad was a lousy body man but he knew how to wring raw horsepower out of a motor. Jessie wished he would have paid more attention growing up, wished HE could make a sixty-year-old big inch motor scream out in triumph like this one did. He grabbed third gear and let up on the gas a little, the cloud of white smoke covering the running horde. The tires finally bit and he rocketed down the road with nearly the entire population of Atlanta, Kansas in hot pursuit. He led them for miles before he made a few right turns and hammered on it back to the little town. He wanted to see if there were anyone left alive. There were a few crawlers who hadn’t made it a mile down the road and he dodged around them. It was easier to just kill them when they made their pitiful way back, than risk breaking something on the car by running over them.
When he pulled back in front of the Community Center, there were a dozen people just breaking through the wood that had been nailed over the door. They waved, all smiles, as he approached and cut the engine.
“Hey, y'all,” he said from his open window. “Doing al
l right?”
“Much better now, mister,” a grinning Indian said as he approached. “It was starting to get serious in there. Food was nearly gone, who knows how much longer the water tower would have kept us from drinking our own piss.”
Jessie grimaced. “T.M.I., dude,” he said and got out and shook hands heartily with the survivors, all of them thanking him profusely. They’d been trapped for nearly a month, having fought their way into the solidly constructed building when all hell broke loose at the Lil Red Rooster café. They had food in the building, it was the distribution center for the senior citizens and the poor who came for their weekly food baskets, but they didn’t have weapons. No guns of any kind and by the time they realized the dead weren’t going to wander off on their own, it was too late to get out of the building. Nearly everyone in the town had surrounded it. The survivors were a mix of men and women, all of them locals, most of them with at least a little Native American blood coursing through their veins.
Jessie told them the horde might be back, he’d only led them off maybe five or six miles and they should get guns if they had any. The town was tiny, covering no more than a half square mile, the farthest house only a few minutes’ walk away. They should go now while things were quiet to get anything they needed, no telling when another horde might wander in.
Jessie always zig-zagged when he drove now, always turned for no reason whenever he could. He knew those things would chase after you for hours, maybe even days, and many times you wouldn’t even know you had a following. There might be twenty or thirty of them bunched up at a farm, down a long driveway, and you’d never even see them. They would hear you though, and start the chase. Once they lost sight and sound of you, they’d keep going in a straight line until they got distracted. That’s what he was worried about now, more than the horde he’d led away. A group he’d picked up somewhere arriving unannounced.
“I’ll stay here on the main drag,” Jessie said. “Why don’t we meet at the post office in about a half hour,” he added, “there’s some stuff I need to tell you guys. There’s a safe haven not too far from here.”
“You shouldn’t go anywhere by yourself, though,” he yelled as they hurried off. “Stay in pairs, at least.”
They nodded and took off toward their houses to get cars or trucks and clothes.
And guns.
It was rural Kansas.
Everyone had guns.
They didn’t have to be told about the dangers of the undead trapped inside houses. They’d come to know quite a bit about them, about the dangers they posed, in the past month with nothing to do but watch them mill around their building.
Jessie and the dog left the old Mercury parked on the street in front of the community center and walked toward the post office, taking in the town. There wasn’t much to it, the tallest structure was the grain silo, or maybe the water tower. The dog was panting as he walked beside Jessie, sniffing the air. He had given a low growl at the clutter of broken shoes and discarded bits of clothing that had surrounded the Center but seemed content there were no immediate threats. He’s probably a better judge of danger than me, Jessie thought and let his own guard down a little, lowering the M-4 and letting it rest on its sling.
“I bet you’re thirsty, huh, boy?” Jessie asked him.
The dog just panted and looked up at him.
There was a second-hand shop across the street in the retail district, which consisted of the thrift shop, an insurance office, and a handful of buildings that had been converted to apartments. They walked over, Jessie still favoring his foot, and found the door unlocked.
“Hello!” Jessie called out, but nothing moved inside. He checked the dog’s reactions and he didn’t seem too concerned. He’d walked in and was sniffing at an old hamster cage. Jessie found what he was looking for, a couple of plastic bowls, and headed back to the Merc.
By the time the dog had finished lapping up nearly a whole bottle of water, the other people were starting to show back up, looking fresh and clean. They’d taken a few minutes to use washcloths and water, now that they had some to spare. Farm trucks pulled in and the men and women spilled out armed and looking determined. Jessie was self-conscious, he knew he must look horrible with one whole side of his face pulled into a barely healed scar, the slobber sometimes leaking out and he had to keep wiping at it. He was trying to grow a beard but had nothing but a little peach fuzz, so far. That, and he was young. Barely seventeen. Most of these people were old enough to be his parents. What if they just dismissed him as a dumbass kid and wouldn’t listen?
He was a little nervous, he’d never told a bunch of adults what they needed to do. He’d never had grown-ups staring at him, waiting for instructions.
Joey Tallstrider stood waiting with the rest of the townspeople, his face freshly scrubbed, a .38 special on his hip, his neighbor’s new truck parked behind him. His wife had taken theirs into work a month ago and had never returned. He’d seen old Bobby Clemons trying to claw his way through the bricks of the Community Center to get at him for about the same amount of time. He reckoned Bobby didn’t have any use for his new Chevy anymore. Joey was pushing fifty and had grown up in the area. He’d done his time in the Air Force when he was younger, it was one of the few ways to escape rural Kansas. He’d done a little wandering after that, but had come back home to settle down. He liked the quiet life, liked working at the grain elevator, and liked the fact that he was no longer trapped in a giant coffin, just waiting for the water or the food to run out.
He liked this plucky kid and his dog, too. The boy was young, but from the way he carried himself, the way he’d easily led a whole pack of the zombies off, the kid was much older than his years. Joey took in the jagged, half-healed scar, the dark circles under his eyes and the calm way the boy kept those ancient eyes wandering, constantly searching for danger, seeing things they didn’t. He saw the rifle slung over a shoulder, the pistols on each hip, and the knives tucked in his belt and boot. He was too young to have been in the military, he was barely out of his milk teeth, but he carried himself like a soldier. Like a veteran who had seen too much.
The car was an odd choice though. Joey wondered why he didn’t just get himself a four-wheel drive truck, there were plenty of them everywhere you looked, but it had been extensively customized. Fairly crudely, with a barred metal headboard over the windshield and a gold-plated brush guard protecting the front end, but they worked. He could see bits of dried hair and chunks of meat still clinging to them. There was old blood splatter covering most of the flat black car and the oversized tires looked like they’d been dipped in gore at some point. The kid had put this car through the wringer and he knew how to drive it, they’d all witnessed that as they watched from the upstairs windows. The smoky burnout and reverse spin to lead the undead away pretty impressive.
The kid had a map spread out on the hood of his car and was waiting for the last of them to show up before he got started with whatever it was he had to say.
Joey Tallstrider had seen forty-year-old boys and fifteen-year-old men in his time. There were some so-called men who still lived at home with their parents when they were thirty. Some who had two or three kids from two or three different women, and didn’t take care of any of them. Some men who wouldn’t hold down a steady job and were just a drain on everyone around them. He’d also seen what he considered real men as young as this boy. Teenagers doing a man’s work, taking on a man’s responsibilities, putting away childish things. This was one of those boys. He didn’t know his story, but Joey knew this boy was a man. He would listen to whatever it was he had to say, he wouldn’t dismiss him as ‘just a kid’. He had saved their lives and he knew how to survive in this crazy new world.
Once they were all gathered, Jessie told them everything he could and it only took about five minutes. He showed them where Lakota was, told them about the new capital and the radio station, told them everything he knew about the habits of the undead and how they reacted to sound. He told
them how to avoid the hordes and how to lose them if they started chasing you.
Joey asked him why he wasn’t there, at the new city, why he was out wandering the roads.
“I’ve got a job to do,” he said, unconsciously echoing his dad’s words, “and it’s not finished yet. I’ll be there when it is.”
He spoke with such gravity and confidence the men and women didn’t question it. This wasn’t the same high schooler who was playing video games and complaining about taking out the trash just a month ago. This was a hard young man on a mission. They accepted that the same way they accepted his instruction on how to arrive alive in the only town left in America that wasn’t overrun with the undead.
A few of the crawlers were making their way back into town and the dog noticed first, with a quiet growl deep in his chest.
“Go,” Jessie said, handing the tall Indian the map. “It’s only about three hundred miles. Stay together.”
Behind the crawlers, there were a few limping shamblers hurrying back to town as fast as their broken bones would allow.
“Don’t stop for anything until you get there,” Jessie hollered at them. “You’ll be safe as long as you don’t stop!”
Jessie watched as the little convoy of pickup trucks took off down one of the side roads, kicking up dust in their wake.
“C’mon, boy,” he said and opened the door of his Merc.
The dog was happy to comply and watched the undead until they were out of sight before he turned to stick his head out of the window to enjoy the wind. Jessie watched the dust cloud from the trucks in his rearview mirror until it dissipated once they hit the county road leading them to Lakota. There seemed to be fewer haunted eyes staring back at him. The crowd of accusing ghosts seemed smaller.
35
Jessie
Zombie Road III: Rage on the Rails Page 21
