Everyone swung forward. Mark scrambled to grab Texaco so the dog wouldn’t collide with the back of Brett’s seat.
Brett spun around in a panic. “Survivors!”
A white pick-up truck was behind them, closing the distance between them rapidly.
Houston slowed down a little, but didn’t pull over. He narrowed his eyes at the vehicle, the sun brightly beaming off its surface. Although it was white, blood was splattered across the hood. From what he could see, there were two men in the cab, and he could make out a few more sitting in the bed of the truck.
His heart pounded against his chest, and he inhaled a deep breath to calm his nerves. A part of him wanted to talk to them, to see if they had any supplies they could spare, to find out where they’d come from, to figure out the roads to avoid en route to West Virginia.
But as they neared, he noticed something else that made the hair on the back of his neck stand up.
Several severed human heads were fastened to the grill of the truck.
“Houston,” Haven warned, her voice raspy. She’d seen the same thing he had. “Don’t slow down,” she whispered.
Mark propped himself up to get a better look at the truck.
“Mark, stay down,” she said sternly. She hoped he hadn’t already caught sight of the decapitated heads, imagery that would certainly add to the horrors of what he’d already seen.
But then again, anyone who had survived this long was bound to have nightmares for the rest of their lives.
Brett looked at her and readied his Glock. Houston leaned forward and pulled the revolver from his belt and held it out of sight below the window.
The truck whizzed past so suddenly that it startled all of them. The men in the bed of the truck clambered to their feet and whooped and hollered at them, waving their rifles in the air.
Texaco protested loudly, barking and leaping from Mark’s lap to Haven’s.
The men stared at them as they yelled. Their gaze was fixed on Haven, and one of them elbowed another and grinned.
Then the driver stepped on the accelerator, and in a matter of seconds, their boisterousness dwindled down to a buzz that barely carried on the wind.
Haven exhaled loudly and slumped in her seat. Mark popped his head over the armrest from where he had been hiding on the floor of the truck.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, looking to each of them for a response. “Why didn’t they stop?” He sounded very concerned.
“Don’t worry, buddy,” Brett responded. While his words were encouraging, his eyes were cold and untrusting. “They probably had families they were headed back to, people they had to take care of,” he added, feigning cheerfulness. “So,” he offered, changing the subject and removing the magazine and ejecting the chambered round from his handgun, “let’s test how much you learned about the Glock yesterday. Show me how to load it?” He was trying hard not to frighten Mark, who blissfully proceeded to demonstrate what he’d learned, the truck quickly forgotten.
Houston’s jaw was tight. He squeezed the steering wheel until his knuckles were white and then turned on the stereo. Country music from the CD player filled the Jeep. He twisted up the knob that controlled the volume, then reached back for Haven’s hand, feeling slightly comforted as she wove her fingers through his.
Her palms were sweaty, but she didn’t let go.
The road forked ahead a little later. Houston checked the map folded in the cup holder beside him and veered right.
“Let’s hope they went the other direction.”
“There’s one on the left, car two!” Jeremy Higby shouted to Colin.
“I got him,” the Scotsman called back, switching the spear from his left to right hand as he jogged over the tops of cars five and four.
The zombie was on the side of car three by the time he got to it, eagerly watching him with white eyes and black pupils while slamming its bloody hands as high as it could reach. Colin made sure his boots were firmly planted before stabbing the spear through the top of the zombie’s head.
Colin was on Team Alpha, but today, Kennedy, Johnny B., Grady, and Jackson were helping train Team Bravo on how to fight and shoot so they could eventually join Team Alpha. Since Colin was already comfortable with both things, he offered to help Jeremy thin the undead crowd that had started to gather around the train, drawn by the gunshots as Team Bravo fired at still targets first until they were ready to practice with real, moving ones.
Jeremy came over to him as Colin yanked the spear from the cracked skull with a sickening slurp. Shaking off the brains and blood, Colin smiled at him. “Is it wrong how much I love this stuff?”
“Hey, I’m not one to judge,” Jeremy replied good-naturedly.
Jeremy was Colin’s roommate and was younger, in his early twenties. He had just graduated from college a few months before the outbreak. The economy wasn’t exactly thriving for new college graduates, but to add zombies to the fray… talk about having a rough start.
Colin had automatically taken a liking to Jeremy. He reminded him of Haven’s brother, Brett.
And being paired with him for guard duty was never a chore. Jeremy carried his weight each time and was intelligent and capable, especially with his idea of using the spears. Colin admired his ingenuity. The spears were easy to make, a clever way to save ammo, and most importantly, kept the living out of harm’s way.
Jeremy pulled a little tin can out of his pocket and sat down, his feet dangling off the side of the train car. Colin joined him, but kept looking around for more zombies.
Opening the can, Jeremy took out a tiny pouch of chewing tobacco and pressed it under his bottom lip, then offered the can to Colin.
He grimaced. “No, thanks.”
“You sure? It’s not as bad as it looks.”
“Yeah, that brown shit you keep spitting out looks downright delicious.” He stared down contemplatively at the body beneath him. “Where do you think he was when all of this started?”
Jeremy sighed and glanced around to be sure no zombies were in sight. “I try not to think about it too much.” After a moment, he added, “I remember where I was though.”
Colin didn’t want to think about that fateful night when the virus came to him, when his father attacked him and tried to eat him. But he sensed that Jeremy wanted to vent and said nothing.
“I was camping with my college girlfriend. Old Rag out in the Shenandoah Valley.” Jeremy shook his head wistfully. “It was a gorgeous day. Bright sunshine, fall was setting in, leaves were changing. Camping was kind of our thing since we started dating. We’d go hike or visit vineyards during the day and then have a big bonfire at night and eat hot dogs and s’mores. Did you ever do anything like that in Ireland?”
“Scotland,” Colin corrected. “I used to camp with my friends when I was a kid. Stayed in a lot of hostels later on. Good times.”
Jeremy nodded in agreement. “Stayed in a hostel in Switzerland with my friends the summer before my junior year. Some great memories.” His eyes quickly lost the enthusiasm they’d held only a moment before. “Bianca and I had been at our campsite for a few days. We’d taken a long weekend to just get away from everything. D.C. is one hell of a city, but it’s stressful. You’re like a gerbil on a wheel all day, every day, sitting in hours of traffic, competing with thousands for that ‘dream’ gig on the Hill, paying over a grand in rent for a room in a house full of other strangers... You get the picture.”
“Sounds like a great place,” Colin commented sarcastically. “I always wanted to visit there, but you’re not painting a beautiful picture.”
Jeremy shrugged. “Sorry, just my experience. I don’t know why I wanted that lifestyle so badly, but I did, or I thought I did. I’m a small-town kid. Making it big in D.C. was my dream since middle school. I just wanted to… I don’t know… make my folks proud.” He spat on the ground, the brown blob of saliva and tobacco landing near the corpse. “So here we were, no cell phone reception, our car miles away in a parking lot a
t the entrance of the forest, and it felt like paradise, just to unplug from it all. I think we saw maybe two other people the whole time we were out there—two guys having a bro weekend away from their wives. They only stayed one night before heading back. We had no clue, no warning about what was waiting for us.” He shut his eyes. “On the fourth day, we got up pretty early and packed all our gear because Bianca needed to get back to GW to study for an exam. She was a year behind me, but we’d been dating since I was a sophomore,” he explained. “She wanted to be a veterinarian. And she would have, too, had things been different. She was so smart and good. The nicest girl you’d ever meet. I wanted to marry her and planned to ask once I got a job and had money for a ring.” His voice trailed off, and he looked like he’d been trying to erase the painful memories of love lost for a long time. “Anyways, it was an easy hike to the car, all downhill, so we were happy. About halfway there, we saw an orange backpack on the trail, covered in blood. I recognized it instantly with all of its sewn-on patches. It belonged to one of the guys we had seen a couple days before. I remembered because I’d asked him about the patches—he was a world traveler and had a patch from each country he’d visited. I thought that was pretty cool,” he remarked. “The blood freaked us out. We were paranoid, thinking a bear had gotten him, and that it might still be around. We started running down the trail, going too fast. We turned a corner, and suddenly there was a massacre in front of us, covering the entire trail from one side to the other, blood and guts all over, even into the trees. We were sprinting so quickly that we stopped only a few feet ahead of them, those… things. They were eating hikers, just hunched over bodies, shoving flesh into their mouths. Some of them were still wearing hiking gear themselves. Have you ever seen a zombie with a backpack? It’s kind of comical now, but back then…” He chuckled ruefully. “Bianca screamed like any normal person would in that situation, and all of them looked up and stared at us, still chewing, skin that wasn’t theirs hanging from their mangled lips. Then, in unison, they started to stand up and stumble in our direction. We tried to run back up the mountain, but we could see ones in the distance headed toward us. We thought about getting off the trail, but the sides were too steep. Bianca and I were trapped.” Jeremy swallowed hard, his hands trembling slightly as he described the scene. “One of the corpses they’d been feeding on suddenly reanimated. I remember seeing it happen from the corner of my eye, but I was too busy trying to think of a way around the ones approaching us. Its eyes just flew open, and it sat up and turned and looked right at her leg, fixated on that and nothing else. It grabbed her ankle and sank its teeth into her calf. Ripped a big chunk of skin and muscle away, like a shark.”
“Damn,” Colin whispered and shuddered involuntarily. He could imagine every grisly detail as Jeremy relayed it.
“I kicked at it and took her hand,” he continued, “and we hustled to the closest tree I could find. I gave her a leg up and then climbed up beside her. I almost didn’t make it. The branch I’d reached for was too weak, and it snapped when I pulled on it. If Bianca wouldn’t have been holding onto my wrists, I would’ve fallen right into the lot of them. They all congregated at the base of the tree, reaching and clawing at the wood so determinedly there were fingernails in the bark of the trunk. Bianca and I still had our packs on, and I was able to tie some strips of cloth from a t-shirt around her calf to slow the bleeding. Neither of us had any appetite, but we had enough food and water to last us a couple days. Still, it’s not like we could go anywhere. They wouldn’t leave our tree, even as day turned to night. And Bianca was getting worse by the hour; she had a really high fever I wrongly assumed was just from her wound becoming infected, human mouths being so dirty and all. We tied ourselves to the tree with some bungee cords so we wouldn’t fall in our sleep… well, the little sleep we could manage anyways. I don’t remember what time it was, but I woke up to see Bianca inches from my face. Her eyes were milky-white, and her skin had turned so gray that in the moonlight, she looked like the kind of corpse you’d see in a funeral home. As soon as I jumped back, she started thrashing at me, hissing and growling and gnashing her teeth. I was so scared I climbed higher into the tree to get away from her. I knew she’d become one of them, and that the woman I loved was gone.”
Colin placed a hand on his back. “I’m sorry, man.”
Jeremy thanked him and rubbed the bridge of his nose with his fingers, as though it would prevent him from crying. “I don’t know what caused the others to leave, maybe someone else caught their attention, but after a couple of days, it was just Bianca and me left. And not for even one minute did she ever stop trying to get me. I didn’t know back then that you had to kill the brain to put them down. And regardless, I couldn’t have brought myself to hurt her. So like some chickenshit pussy, I shimmied down the tree and ran back to the car. I left her there like that, strapped to the branches.” He fixed his gaze on the horizon. “I wonder if she’s still there today.”
Chapter Ten
Houston backed into a parking space in front of a CVS. It was one of the last places they hadn’t searched, and he was hopeful they’d be able to find something to get them through the drive to West Virginia so they wouldn’t need to stop again.
Haven and Brett had grown up in a place that looked like it came right out of a nineteen-fifties movie. Across from the pharmacy was a hardware store and an old movie theater, the kind with only a couple of screens. A little further down were a diner, a used bookstore, and a few boutique shops. A dark expanse of woods sat behind the movie theater.
Mark stared at the trees with anxious anticipation, waiting to see if anything would shamble out to attack them.
Houston felt his muscles tense when he realized he wasn’t just worried about zombies anymore.
Haven suddenly gasped, and everyone jumped in their seats.
“We have to go back!”
They turned to look at her.
“What? Why?” Houston asked.
“I forgot it! We have to go back,” she repeated.
“Forgot what? Haven, you’re not making any sense.”
“I forgot Colin’s sword. I can’t just leave it at the house. He gave it to me. It was his father’s,” she reiterated in desperation.
Houston rubbed his eyes tiredly. “He left it behind. Clearly it wasn’t that important to him.”
“He left it so I’d have it to keep us safe. It’s a good weapon.”
“Okay,” he acquiesced. “We aren’t that far. We can get it after we find supplies. Worst case scenario, it gets too late, and we spend one more night on the farm.”
She seemed relieved. “Thank you. I’m sorry I forgot it.”
“It’s okay,” Houston assured her. “Alright—”
“Looks good. Let’s go,” Mark announced, reaching to open his door.
“Nope, you’re going to stay here and guard the car,” Houston told him.
Mark straightened abruptly. “Wait, what? I’m coming with you guys!”
“No, you aren’t,” Houston insisted. “Haven and Tex will stay with you.”
Haven’s hands hovered over the door handle, and she frowned at him. His eyes met hers in the rearview mirror. “If you see anything, honk the horn, and we’ll come running.”
He walked up to the pharmacy windows and peered inside. Waiting a few seconds, he rapped on the glass.
“Door’s unlocked.” Brett shrugged and was about to open it when they heard a crash coming from the back of the store.
A zombie with track marks all along its arms and a strip of rubber wrapped tightly above one elbow, the syringe still buried in a vein in its arm, tumbled out of the pharmacy and lumbered over to the window. As it slammed its hands against the glass with ferocity, Brett wondered if the zombie had been a local junkie looking to score one last high as the world fell apart.
“I got this one,” Houston said and pulled out a knife from a sheath on his belt. “Just keep it distracted while I get in there.”
Brett tapped on the glass and waved at the zombie while Houston silently opened the door and walked over to the decaying creature. Before it could turn around, he sank the blade into its temple and yanked it out. As it collapsed, he wiped his knife off on his jeans, then gestured for Brett to join him.
They each grabbed a few baskets from the entrance and started rummaging through the aisles.
Back in the car, Mark sighed in frustration beside Haven.
“I’m not a baby,” he argued, petting Texaco.
Haven gave him a small smile and began shifting the gear around in the back seat so Texaco would have more room. “He knows that. He’s just trying to keep us safe.”
Mark cocked his head to the side. “What is that?”
Haven stopped when Texaco started whining. “What?”
Squinting, Mark strained to listen. “That…”
She heard it, too. The sound of an engine rumbling in the distance. Haven quickly reached forward and honked the horn, alerting Brett and Houston inside.
Seconds later, the same white truck from before sped past the pharmacy.
Haven breathed a sigh of relief when it disappeared, but her respite was short-lived when the truck came back into view.
She grabbed her gun, ready for a fight, and started to move to the car door, but Mark hastily took her hand.
“Please don’t leave me all alone,” he pleaded.
She stared at him, torn between helping Houston and Brett and not leaving Mark. Grinding her teeth, she grabbed a blanket from the seat and pulled Mark and Texaco down to the floor of the vehicle, wedging themselves between the seats and using the blanket as cover.
The truck pulled in behind them, blocking them from pulling out. Heavy doors opened and slammed shut, and male voices cut through the agonizing silence.
Texaco growled and was about to bark, but Haven clasped the dog’s muzzle shut.
“You need to come down here. I think we found her,” one voice said.
Her? The hair on the back of Haven’s neck stood up.
The Good, The Dead & The Lawless (Book 2): The Hell That Follows Page 12
