CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Engaging zombies in hand-to-hand combat is a little like wrestling greased pigs. Your odds of winning are remote, and the pigs, or zombies, seem to like it. At least, that was my impression as these two prime examples of First Wave zombies tried to feed on my face.
The helmet I wore was an old-style motorcycle brain bucket with a clear visor that covered me down to my chin. I avoided the newer style because I felt like it cut off even more of my peripheral vision. Well, my peripheral vision ranked as the least of my concerns as I felt the pair try to wrench the helmet free.
How did they know to go for the helmet? Why weren’t they wasting their time trying to bite through the padded and armored forearms of my suit? All good questions that rattled around in my head, but they weren’t any more use at the moment than the ability to see further out of the corner of my eye. Instead, I needed to focus on keeping my head tucked down so those bone-sharp claws didn’t score my flesh.
A zombie scratch didn’t always turn a recipient, but too often they did. Loaded up with whatever virus, or prion, or unknown contagion that passed for their blood, the claws of these monsters were getting a grip on my helmet, and tugging with all the might in their undead arms.
They were in a frenzy, tearing and clawing with a ferocious energy I hadn’t seen since the first days of the Outbreak. They acted like fresh turns, even though their skin had that leathery, dried out consistency of dried mud. My body was taking a beating under the protective suit, but no punctures I could feel yet. That would come soon enough. Tucking down, I used my left arm as a shield for my neck and my right hand scrambled at my waist for something to stop the attack.
Palming the pistol, I ripped it free of the holster and brought my right arm around … and felt it slam into the raised arm of the flesh-hungry fiend crouched on that side, blocking me. Then clawed fingers tried to draw my hand up to its now raised mouth for a bite.
The gloves would hold, I hoped, but the pressure would still break bones and likely force the pistol from my grip. Unacceptable, I decided, and lunged.
Pulling free in a spastic surge of fear-driven strength, I slammed the barrel of the pistol into the side of the zombie’s skull, rocking it back an inch, and then I got the weapon turned. Trigger pressure, and the sudden ear-thumping bang of the pistol and the flash of the escaping gases seemed to stun all three of us, living and dead. Then the monster wrestling with my right arm collapsed, a puppet with severed strings, and fell.
Distracted, I almost let the other zombie kill me as it reached with digging, bony fingers for the clear edge of the helmet. With its two hands to my one on that side, the creature remained doggedly persistent and managed to slip one curved finger around and under. Less than an inch, and it would have me.
The bullet I fired this time punched through the side of the foul creature’s head at an angle, ricocheted off the side of the Ford, and whizzed past my face with a sharp ping that scared me as bad, if not worse, than the eruption of the pistol this second time near my face.
“Holy fuck!”
The cry drew my attention and I looked up. In the dim light of the tree-canopied sky, I saw Casey. She was coming around the front of the truck, loading a fresh magazine as fast as her hands could move. Jacking a round, she couldn’t seem to figure out what to do.
“Brad, you alive?”
“Yep,” I managed to croak.
“They get you?”
“I … I don’t think so. I can’t feel anything.”
Honestly, I was feeling a little numb at the moment. Or dumb. Maybe both. I’d been in scrums before. Opened the wrong door in a room that had been cleared, only to find it wasn’t. Or had a zombie grab me by the ankle from under a bed one time and yanked me off my feet. This time felt different, though.
“They were trying to get my helmet off,” I said softly.
“Yeah?”
“They were trying to get my helmet off. Working together, sort of. They were trying to get my helmet off.”
“Uhm, okay. That’s bad, right?”
I closed my eyes and tried to cool the shot of adrenalin now running loose through my system. When I looked up, Casey was still casting glances in my direction but was more focused on our surroundings.
“Yeah, that’s bad.”
“Shhh. I think there’s more …”
Then Casey fired and my eyes tracked and my head swiveled. There, were, indeed, more of them out there. A trio of corpses emerged from the tree line only yards away from the side of the road, my side of the road, and came stumbling forward. Offhandedly, Casey gunned them down and then removed her left hand from the rifle stock to give me a wave. Her meaning was clear. Get the hell up, old man.
I got the hell up and grabbed the rifle that had been trapped under my legs when I fell. The scope looked crooked, but the rifle still worked. I tested it by shooting a fourth and then a fifth zombie to emerge from the woods. Yep, still functioned.
“Back in the truck,” I barked, bumping Casey with my hip as I tracked the trees for more dead. Seeing nothing for the moment, I hopped in after Casey and waited a second as she slid across the bench seat.
“Anything on your side?” I asked urgently.
“Clear,” she replied quickly.
“All right,” I said under my breath, “let’s go see what they had trapped in the big whale of a car.”
“That’s a Buick Roadmaster,” Casey volunteered. When I looked over, she had a momentarily flash of a sad expression still on her face.
“My Grammie drove one,” she explained.
“All right,” I said again, “let me pull up and see if there’s anybody still alive. This wreck is recent.”
“How do you know?”
“I thought I saw radiator fluid on the road when I checked through my scope.” That, or blood, but I didn’t add that part.
Just then, I noticed the CB was going full force. Somebody back there wanted answers, and it sounded like Bill.
“Call this in while I pull up,” I said to Casey, and she looked scared for the first time this day.
“What should I say?”
“That we cleared a pod of zombies and then we are proceeding to check the damaged vehicle,” I said, my attention turned back to the road.
“Why can’t you say that?” Casey asked.
“Because I’m busy here. Just do it, okay?”
“Okay. Okay,” she responded sullenly, grabbing the microphone as I brought the truck to a lurching stop. Lurching, because of the pile of bodies now littering the road.
When she finished making the report, Casey hung the microphone back like she was handling a snake and gave me a “poor little put upon me” sigh.
“Don’t give me that look,” I said absently. “My son used to do that.”
Only after the words left my lips did I realize what I had said.
I’m sure Roxy warned Casey. Don’t talk about certain things. Don’t ask about my past. Don’t get the crazy man stirred up.
Trying to diffuse the situation, I stopped the truck with front bumper almost touching the grill of the Buick Roadmaster and cracked my door. If I wasn’t so rattled, I might have asked Casey to check, but I needed to be out of the cab for a few minutes. I suddenly felt a touch of claustrophobia, and a need to kill something. Preferably, something already dead.
“Slide over behind the wheel,” I said, and slid out of the seat without waiting to see if Casey would comply.
Swinging the rifle back up so the familiar weight pressed against my shoulder, I approached the massive sedan in a duck-walked crouch that usually made my knees shriek at the pressure, but at the moment I felt nothing. If I lived, I’d likely feel the pain in the morning when I tried to get up.
I checked under the car and found the probable cause of the vehicle’s demise. The pod we killed might have only numbered less than twenty when we arrived, but what appeared to be at least half that many somehow managed to end up trapped under the vehicle.
Despite the horrible blunt force trauma associated with being overrun by this two-thousand-pound hunk of steel and fiberglass monstrosity, at least some of the zeds trapped underneath still moved. Slowly, and with jerky motions, but even the one with what looked like the transmission resting on his chest made feeble clawing motions in my direction. The driver, apparently, tried to plow through the mob without thinking of what might happen and ended up high centering the car on a pile of corpses.
I’d need the tow strap to get this car moved, but first, I wanted to see what we had in the car. Rising up ever so slightly, I risked a peek inside. Sure enough, there were what looked to be survivors inside. A whole bunch. Crap.
Turning back to the truck, I called to Casey. Softly.
“We have survivors. Call Bill, and let him know we have some business up here to take care of. Maybe get Mike, too, and see if he recognizes any of them from their friends in Conroe.”
Then I looked back at the young teenager sitting in the front seat, his hands wrapped around the butt of what looked like a .44 Magnum revolver. His thin arms shook as he tried to hold up the massive weapon.
The kid looked scared, and starved. Desperate to protect the others in the car. The children. Jesus, all those little ones. I released my rifle, letting it hang on the sling, and held up my hands very slowly. The youngster still appeared panicky, which meant he knew the score. The living were way more dangerous than the dead.
“You got a name?” I asked conversationally, hoping he could hear me through the cracked and starred glass.
“Keith,” he said hesitantly. “Who are you? Who is that lady?”
“That’s my partner. Well, trainee, anyway. Her name’s Casey. I’m Brad. We are with a larger group, out of the Safe Zones just a little north of here. Onalaska and Livingston, actually. We were on our way to pick up some survivors that we thought might need some help.”
“Livingston? Really? You know Mickey? From the radio?”
“Know him?” I said with exaggerated calm. “I was there when we pulled him out of his apartment.” I only lied a little bit. I was across the street on top of the two-story arts supply store, plinking at zombies while the soldiers pulled the handful of survivors out of the apartment building.
“Guy was skin and bones by then,” I continued. “Still is, but you can’t tell it from his voice, can you? Sounds like he’s as big as a bear.”
The kid was still eyeing me over the long barrel of the big revolver, but I knew he didn’t have long. The weight of the weapon was pulling his arms down.
“So what happened here? Looks like you had a bit of an accident.”
What happened was obvious, but I wanted to keep the young man talking. Something I normally suck at, but needs must and all that. I didn’t want to get in a shootout with this teenager, not when he had what looked like eight or nine little kids in the car with him.
“They got in, last night,” the young man said, and as if the weight of his words were too much, he lowered the revolver into his lap. “We were always careful, but somehow the dead managed to get in. Through one of the downstairs windows, I think.” He spoke in a shocky monotone, as if the words came out his mouth without his brain noticing their passage.
“Mr. Chapman was on watch, and he managed to get a shot off before they swarmed him. That and the sound of the collapsing wall woke us up, and we followed the drills. Got the little ones out of bed, dropped the fire ladder, and climbed down. There was more shooting, a lot more, but we didn’t stick around. I wanted to, but Alena made me go. Said it was my job to drive, to get them all out.”
I wondered who Alena was since she sounded like one smart cookie. Clearly, their group was organized and had a go-to-hell plan.
“Alena was right, Keith. You did good, and you got them away. Got the little ones to us. We can help. Heck, that’s why we are here. We are all civilians, but Colonel Northcutt, you’ve heard Mickey mention him, right?”
When Keith nodded to me through the glass, I went on spinning my story.
“Well, the colonel found out there were more survivors down this way, heard it from a group that came out of Conroe. He wanted us to see if we could rescue those other survivors, too. You guys aren’t from Conroe, are you?”
“No. We were in a store in Magnolia. It was a small warehouse or something for grocery stores, I guess, and we had food for a while. It was starting to run low, and some of the folks were going into some of the homes nearby to get more. That was like, a week ago,” the kid stopped, scratching his head as he thought, “just before they started showing up.”
“The infected?” I asked, but I knew what he meant.
“Yeah, the infected. The dead. They just came into town, a few dozen at a time. Following those oldest ones, the prune men I called ’em. So, not too many at first, but they just kept coming. We stopped going out, but it was like they could smell us, or knew somehow.”
“Did ya’ll have to kill a bunch of them, when you first came into town?”
“Yeah. Well, I don’t know what you mean by a whole bunch. There was like fifty or sixty the men put down out front of the store when we first got there, but that was months ago. Nothing like the numbers we saw swarming in Kingwood.”
Interesting, and this news added more weight to my theory. I suspected the zombies could smell where their comrades died, and the scent drew more of them to the site. That was why I dug the pit away from the marina and started potting zombies there. We still had some show up at the gate, but any wanderers we got from the south all first lined up at the kill pit like lemmings.
“I think these new ones, or the oldest ones, like you said, are drawn to the places where others like them died. Maybe it makes them think there are living people around since somebody killed their buddies, you know?”
“Makes sense,” Keith conceded. “But now what happens? I got us stuck here, and I don’t think the car runs anymore. I think I broke something. Underneath, I mean. Shouldn’t have hit them, I guess, but I couldn’t get the dead to move out of the way and they were closing in, beating on the windows. I, I guess I panicked when they started using rocks.”
The candor surprised me. False bravado was more what I expected from a kid in what I pegged was his mid-teens, but Keith was different. And trustworthy enough to send to protect all these children. And using rocks? I’d heard the reports, but the development still made me wince inside, where this scared kid wouldn’t see.
“Keith,” I said placatingly, “I’d have probably done the same thing. I think you are right, though. I don’t think your car will make it any further, but we have more transport behind us. Once I get the road cleared, I think we can get these children loaded on a truck headed back to the Safe Zone.”
“That’s real good,” Keith said, and I noticed he’d laid the revolver down in his lap, and his hands were clutching the wheel. “Because we passed a field full of them last night, and I think they are following us.”
“How far?”
“About twenty miles back, I think, but they were definitely following us. Not forgetting like they used to, because I stopped a few times to check. Given how slow they walk, they may be here any time.”
I felt that cold lump of dread form in my gut, now an old friend making itself home. “When you say a field full, how many do you mean?”
“I dunno. Thousands, for sure.”
Well, shit. We need to get moving and fast.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The other trucks were pulling up by the time I got the tow strap placed and began pulling the Buick off the pile of squirming zombies. I felt unseen fingers brush my hand more than once as I reached under the low-slung car to make the attachment. I ignored the sensation and did the job, like always.
My truck whined about the work but still managed to draw the heavy sedan off the mound of dead but angry bodies. Casey had gladly relinquished the driver’s seat back to me and stood off to the side, potting zombies as the destroyed car rolled cl
ear. The range was ridiculously easy, but I noted she kept good note of her aim points. No sweeping the car still full of kids. Gold star.
While I worked horsing the truck around, I grabbed the CB microphone and gave a quick update on what Keith revealed. We weren’t headed through Magnolia, which was west and a little north of our current position, but the news that a horde of zombies might be bearing down on this position got people moving.
We’d elected to leave the kids in the car while Casey dealt with the undead threat, and Keith wrestled with the steering wheel as I eased the big car into a ditch and cleared the road. The friction between the road and the low clearance on the car meant most of the zombies came out in pieces, but still animated, and though there was a carpet of dead spread out on the gravel, it was no threat once Casey finished her shooting practice.
“Man, this is gross,” she exclaimed. I’d killed the engine once the Buick came clear and walked over to look at the mess. And it was a mess. Pureed, I think was the term that applied.
“Worse than usual,” I agreed, not even sparing the desecrated piece of road a second glance. No, I was watching the woods, and the likely source of our next attack. As the big truck pulled up behind us, I spared a glance to see who they sent.
Not surprisingly, Bill elected to use a converted panel van and the old man was driving. The ten-wheeled truck could just barely turn around in the roadway, where the big rigs would have just been stuck. Completing a five-point turn in the widest spot in the road, Bill jockeyed the truck until it was pointed in the other direction and the reinforced rear door was popped open to reveal a waiting Pineknot and the lady I only knew as Sherry.
“So, what’s the plan, Bill?” I asked, approaching the now leaning Buick as the older man fell in step with me. Casey, I was pleased to see, assumed a guard position facing back south. From where the zombies were presumably marching our way.
“You said it was kids, right?” Bill confirmed, and at my nod he continued. “We load them in the truck and send them back to Onalaska. Pineknot can drive and Sherry’s volunteered to ride in back with the kids.”
Fight the Hunger: A Hunger Driven Novel Page 21
