by Jay Smith
As I mentioned in my previous log entry, a trio of buses arrived looking like they were pulled from the Mad Max/ Road Warrior universe. Either that or they were pimped out by hillbillies with lots of scrap metal and a welding kit. Each bus was grotesquely armored with bars or plates over windows and razor wire twisting through metal hoops welded to the skin at about adult neck level. The lead bus looked like it was masquerading as a steam engine with a turret up top at the front and a rusty-looking metal scoop over the nose. It took me a second to realize the turret was an oil drum welded to the roof.
The lead bus had my number spray painted on its side. I lined up to board with a dozen other people. There were already a lot of people on the bus. And they all looked dead on the inside. An odd collection of soldiers from every service were on hand to help people load up. A majority of them were army airborne, with patches designating them as members of the 82nd. That’s where I met Sergeant Charlie Rock and his sad, sunken eyes. As soldiers took positions inside and on top of the buses, I turned on my freshly charged gadgets, checked the delivery status of the text messages on my phone and noticed that one had sent successfully – to my aunt in Elwood City. Nothing back, though and the phone showed no signal. Still, armed with that hope I was happy to let the battery bleed down again. I was sure we’d stop somewhere for the night, somewhere with a power strip.
My trusty netbook, however, was different. I needed it on the journey to keep sane and distract myself. As the afternoon wore on and the sun dropped below the mountains ahead of us, I chronicled my conversation with Sergeant Rock and tried not to think about the things he’d seen. I tried not to think about the things everyone else on the bus must have seen. So I typed. And I kept checking the wireless tracker. When the green battery icon turned to yellow, I shut down and closed up. I needed to treat it like a canteen. With devices going dark all over the bus for lack of power, I needed to conserve power as much as the water the soldiers had given me at the loading site.
The bus convoy moved along at about 30 miles an hour -- pretty aggressive driving by night-vision on roads littered with wrecked vehicles. Across the aisle, my favorite sergeant kept silent watch on the road, muttering into his headset every so often, probably to the driver up front. I wondered how he kept focused when everything was falling apart. This wasn’t a distant war with a safe home front to reflect on in the downtime. The war was everywhere. My mind lingered on this for a little while. Despite feeling like I would never sleep again, the sergeant’s tired face was the last thing I remember seeing before a hard, dreamless sleep took me over.
Sometime later - it felt like an instant but could have been as much as an hour – the bus had to make a quick stop. The whine of brakes shook me awake and my momentum carried me into the back of the seat in front of me. Something told me to stay low and tune in to the crowd around me. I looked toward my Sergeant Rock, but he was gone.
I listened for a moment. People were whispering. The voices I could make out were talking about people moving around outside the bus in the darkness. Without night-vision or street lights, they were going off glimpses of shapes in the moonlight. I wasn’t concerned right away that there were monsters outside the bus, but whatever it was had a bunch of soldiers on guard and on edge. I was more concerned that these passengers were going to do something really stupid while cramped together inside a locked metal tube. From my perspective, the moonlight turned a group of human beings into anonymous shadows moving uneasily in their seats. They were scared and either looking intently out the windows of the bus or hiding from whatever the others were looking at outside.
Above me, I heard a voice shout “30 seconds to Gap Band! 30 seconds confirmed! Hold fire until the ball drops.” There was more, but that’s all I remember.
The sound my eyes to the open emergency top exit hatch that suggested my sergeant was up there now, too. The driver, far up at the front in his seat glowed in this weird combination of red and green from the light cast off the dashboard and his monochrome laptop display. Over the hushed voices, I could hear the pounding of fists on metal. And they were slapping against the side of the bus as well. Just over the idling engine and muffled chatter, I could hear a desperate, aggressive chorus of snarls and moans, hissing and gargles... coming from all around me, outside the bus.
Suddenly, the bus shook like it hit a speed bump a little too fast and the collective gasp that rose from the passengers seemed to excite the things outside. A hush followed and allowed us all to hear more of what was happening outside. Soon, someone in the shadows said, plainly and clearly. “Holy God. It’s a herd.”
A herd is a group of eaters that, for whatever reason, have decided to move together across open territory in search of food. They may all follow the same scent after groups of refugees or maybe they just prefer the company. Sometimes a herd is a dozen, but I’ve seen them number in the thousands. A herd moves in unison as the name suggests, but they don’t act with any rhythm or organization, so we sat in the dark as dozens of soft fists and bodies slammed against the outside of the bus. In the chaos of the shifting herd, one side took a hit and the bus rocked hard. One of the soldiers above me fell hard onto the roof. Someone yelled to hold fire. Hold fire?? What the hell? The only answer came from above me. “Gap Band Incoming. Hold position. Brace. All points: Brace.”
Around me, passengers asked the same questions in hushed voices. Why had we stopped? Why wasn’t the driver pushing through the herd? Were there too many to get through? Was the road blocked by debris? Were we stuck? Why weren’t the men up top firing their precious explosive hollow point rounds? Why weren’t they doing anything?
Our answer screamed across the sky, lighting up the world around us with a rocket trail that had the men and boys up top screaming and cheering like it was an encore at a Skynyrd concert. Someone up top shouted “Gap Band Confirmed! Target engaged!” The light shifted quickly, but as much as the sound excited the soldiers, the light caused a stir of fear inside the bus. Not the light itself, of course, but what they could see around the bus, extending out into the woods on both sides and up the road in a mob of hundreds of walking corpses.
Even the eaters seemed drawn to the light and sound as it disappeared over the hill. The pounding and the moaning died down for a moment and then had just started up again when something burned off the darkness for an instant, brighter and longer than lightning, followed by an earthquake rolling backwards along the road. The passengers in my bus screamed. I screamed. I could hear screaming from the bus behind us. They dropped a bomb, all right. After the flash died and my eyes recovered, a pillar of fire rose gracefully over the hilltop and tree line on either side. It was bright enough to see reflected on the metal of the roof hatch and outside bars and plates. The rumble that finally arrived seconds later rolled over us and through us, louder than any thunder I’d ever heard, longer than a minute including the faint echo off the rolling Appalachians to the east.
The wind picked up blowing in from the direction of the explosion. Someone asked: “Did we just nuke them?” This lead to someone else asking if we were close enough to get quote-“radiation sick” but the driver tried to address this quickly and clearly. It was a big bomb, he shouted, one of the biggest they had, launched from a command center 40 miles east to a painted target ahead on the road. This put some at ease, but others were quick to call it a lie. Before the debate could continue, the eaters outside resumed their pounding and shaking. Clearly they were unshocked and unawed. Over this came the sound of brakes hissing and the soft growl of a diesel engine behind us.
The next bus in the convoy pulled forward to close the gap between us, thumping eaters out of the way. Our driver got on his headset quickly with a look you find in people who like things done precisely as planned seeing something not going that way. I remember thinking the bus was coming up on us pretty fast. The squeal of brakes came a little later than I expected as well and…boom.
CHAPTER SIX – ABANDON SHIP
The bus behind us struck hard eno
ugh to cause us to skid forward a few inches. The impact was muted by the softness of the bodies pinned between us. A second after the impact came the scream – a clear piercing scream of panic that stretched into a cry of a man in agony; the quick regression of a trained soldier to just another guy screaming for help, for relief and then for his mother. There was a comparable swell in the groaning from around the bus, the kind of aching rasp you’ll hear when the eaters catch scent of blood in the air. A soldier had fallen.
Immediately, the herd shifted toward the source of the scream. For the first time we could hear eaters groaning and snarling beneath our bus, clawing across the only empty space in the direction of the fallen soldier. One body had excited them to a frenzy. Time and experience paints the picture of eaters tearing apart other eaters for the warm blood smeared over their bodies or for the meat caught in their open throats. Eaters hungry enough would rip through the dead flesh of another eater to scoop out undigested, uninfected flesh. The scream ended in a single, sudden pistol shot from a distance behind us. The herd continued to move toward the fresh blood and meat and our convoy shook and shifted as though we were caught in a flash flood. The metal skin of the bus bulged inward as undead bodies crushed forward. Glass cracked in those places where welded metal bars bent inward under the weight of countless bodies. The bus began to move and tilt. Above us, soldiers warned other solders to “hold on” and “keep a grip” – probably meant both physically AND emotionally at that point. I can only imagine what they were seeing was worse than what I pictured in my own mind.
The brakes hissed and whined. The engine growled and we moved forward …by inches at first, haltingly like we were pushing through heavy snow across uneven ground. I think we all knew what our wheels were turning over. Overhead, I heard a sound like a baseball bouncing off a tight awning…then a loud bottle rocket hiss heading away from the bus moving forward. A few seconds later, the world lit up again through the reinforced windshield.
The sudden flash, concussion and noise put people in the bus into a panic. The inside of the bus amplified the sound of a second propelled grenade that landed closer to the front of the bus than I think they planned. The driver swore into his radio over the rising bleat of the sheep. I pulled my legs up to my chest to make myself small in the back corner of my seat and covered my ears. The gunfire was loud and terrible, with muzzle flashes so bright and fast it was overwhelming. I shut my eyes tight and tried to keep my head.
A dozen people rose up from their seats and started to… it looked like a mosh pit… like some awful 90s grunge video of dirty people on a school bus throwing themselves at each other in slow motion. Their expressions of fear burned into my eyes even in the instant of darkness. It was surreal. I kept back against the seat to keep from getting trampled. The bus began to shake and that’s when “surreal” turned “horrible .” The driver tried to avoid something he saw in the road, swerved right and struck something hard. We stopped suddenly and people were thrown forward across the seats.
The shock put two of the soldiers off their feet and over the side. One fell from the front driver’s side of the bus head over feet into the mob of eaters. As he fell, he kept firing. The arc of the rifle sprayed, first, the eaters below him then came around and up the side of the bus, tearing through the aluminum skin, through the glass and across the aisle, kicking up sawdust and cotton, wood and plastic and a mist of blood through dime-sized holes in the skin of the bus. The other soldier fell off on my side, almost right outside my window, so close I could hear the tearing of his uniform and then his flesh when the eaters swarmed him. He screamed for a long, long time.
The soldiers up top continued to tear into the herd with their assault rifles. I knew I had to get out somehow. The passengers were panicking, pushing back toward the emergency exit. They were running from the gunfire and the bodies collapsed in the aisle and across seats. Over the mob, I saw the driver slumped over the wheel. Across from him, I saw the other reason why people were heading back toward me: the door to the bus was slowly bending in and hands – dead, gray hands - pushed through the broken glass and bent metal bars, clawing at the body folded over the front stair railing.
Flesh eating things. Angry mob. Gunfire. Netbook in my pack. Plan, Jill. Keep your head. Don’t follow the mob. They aren’t thinking; they’re reacting. The mob rushed the rear emergency exit. They didn’t realize the door was not rigged to just pop open. The first ranks to reach the door hit hard and were shoved even harder into the metal and glass by dozens behind them. A girl, about my age, hit the frame so hard with her face, blood squirted across the rear window. She slid down to the floor, unconscious.
At that point the quiet part of my brain pulled together a lot of that subconscious…stuff. You know you’re thinking about stuff even when you’re not really thinking. And that part of my brain saw the next few steps. People rushing the door will have to spread out over the seats to try at the windows next – with ME in between. Where did they think they were going? Didn’t they hear? Didn’t they SEE what was out there waiting?? When things got tough I had a professor who used to say “Don’t worry…they can’t kill or eat you.” Well, these things were gonna do both.
That quiet part of my brain took over and I vaulted and hurdled over the seats with my bag in tow. There was a lot of pain and the disorientation of light and sound made me nauseous, but I moved past the screams of panic to my left and ignored the cries of unearthly hunger to my right. I actually rushed toward the shredded limbs and faces pressing through the fractured glass in the bus door. I fought to keep my balance as the bus shook under me. And then I did something so incredibly stupid it never should have worked:
I went UP. Half way up the length of the bus, the mob of passengers thinned out. The injured and the dead lay at the front. The smell of blood and gunfire filled my nose. Behind me, I heard the grinding whine of metal that the back door had been breached and people were pushing out of the bus and into the arms of the hungry dead. The momentum kept the mob moving even as the screams rose from outside. I knew that, in a second, the tide would shift and I’d be mobbed again, so I turned toward the aisle and up to the hatch in the roof. The soldiers up top were concentrating their fire to the rear of the bus. I reached up and grabbed at the bar inside the hatch, pushed up off the back of a seat and just pulled myself up.
My moment as an action heroine was short. Despite the adrenaline and sheer terror, I couldn’t pull myself out any further than the bridge of my nose which I promptly smacked on the metal rim. I didn’t count on there not being a hand-hold outside, so I slipped back down to where I could put a foot on the back of a seat again. I felt a warm stream of blood trickling out of my nose, tasted it on my lips and tried to breathe through my mouth, but ended up coughing up the blood running down my throat over my sweatshirt. I couldn’t try again until I caught my breath.
The only reason why the eaters weren’t inside the bus at the front door was because they couldn’t agree on who would go first. They had wedged themselves in the twisted metal of the door and were slowed even further by the body over the rail. Two of the eaters had chunks of meat in their fists, drawing it to lipless mouths and smearing the gore across their faces. Behind them, other eaters grabbed at the dangling strings or tried to pry it away for themselves. With a healthy tug, the body fell head-first into the stairwell and out of sight.
Behind me, the mob had started to turn back. Light from the muzzle flashes behind them was streaming through a filter of thick splattered blood over the windows and the scene took on a hellish tenor. They didn’t turn in unison as I expected. I guess some of them realized there was no escape with the eaters, but also that the people in front of them were the only thing keeping the eaters from getting inside to them. Others at the rear of the mob turned back to look for other options. One man pointed up at me, another forced his way back up the aisle toward me. Despite not even being able to breathe I tried once more to pull myself up… but of course I didn’t have the strengt
h. My sweaty hands wouldn’t hold me even if did. The way the mob came at me, I thought they would try to use me as a rope rather than push me up so I prepared to boot the shape rushing at me in the head. A hand grabbed the leg still anchored on the seat, then a second…a third and I came off the seat, into the aisle and then UP.
Hands lifted me up far enough that my shoulders rose above the lip of the hatch. I was able to let go of the handle and put both arms up and out of the van, gripping the rim of the hatch on both sides. Two large palms cupped the soles of my shoes and tried to lift me further, but they slipped away abruptly as the mob began screaming and the bus began to shake again from side to side. I almost fell back, but managed to hold on. I screamed as my arms and shoulders strained to keep the rest of my body up. Oh my god, it hurt. Behind me on the roof a familiar voice shouted “Hold on, I’m coming.” But as the voice drew nearer and repeated the promise, another hand grabbed my leg…a cold, wet hand. And it pulled.
CHAPTER SEVEN - HEARTS OF DARKNESS
Even three months removed, I can feel that hand clamping down on my ankle...my “good ankle”, not the one I twisted in the garden the other day… An eater got a good hold of it and tried to pull me back into the bus where I could hear other refugees fighting against a mob of eaters pouring in from the front AND back of the bus. I tried to pull myself up again and the hand gripped even tighter. I can still feel cold glass embedded in its palm and the individual grains and shards lodged in the shredded skin of its fingers. They stabbed and slashed into my flesh, hot blood flowed from the gashes they made and – probably most unnerving – it contrasted the absence of heat and the roughness of the dried skin as I tried to twist my leg out from between pulpy fingers. I didn’t scream so much as gurgle and cough up more bloody drainage from my broken nose.
