by Jon Schafer
After tying the pontoons together, he told the refugees on the tug to transfer to the other boats. At first Sean objected until Steve explained what they were going to do. After that, he and the others couldn’t move fast enough. Steve told Brain, Sheila, Mary and Connie to watch Cindy and the supplies as he headed up the river with Heather and Tick-Tock.
Approaching the bridges, Heather could see a train stopped halfway across the trestle.
Nothing odd there, she thought. When the world stopped, it stopped where it stopped.
She noticed something different about the span of I69, but it took her a few seconds to put her finger on what it was.
“It’s empty,” she said.
Steve noticed too. “There are no cars or trucks on it.”
“Do you think the road is open?” Tick-Tock asked.
“I doubt it,” Heather said. “This is a main run into the city, so it would be jammed with traffic just like all the others.”
Raising his binoculars, Steve studied the area for a minute before saying, “I can see a couple Humvees at the top. My guess is there was a roadblock. They were trying to contain everyone who was infected.”
“We can use those Hummers,” Tick-Tock said. “They run on diesel instead of gas but we shouldn’t have any problem getting it.”
“But that means we have to go back down the river to the storage tanks and find some,” Steve pointed out.
“Maybe not,” Tick-Tock told him. Pointing to the train, he said, “That thing uses diesel. We can siphon it from the tanks if there’s anything in them.”
“Brilliant,” Steve said.
Heather pointed over to a sandy area, “That looks like a boat launch. I don’t see any Z’s around, so we can pull in there. Then we’ll hike up to the bridge and check out the Humvees.”
After dragging the anchor onto shore, Steve wedged it into the sand. Tick-Tock and Heather joined him and they made their way cautiously through the woods leading to the Interstate. The area was deserted of anything living or dead, but they still spoke in excited whispers. Despite the circumstances, it was invigorating to be off the boat and on land again. From setting out on the sailboat and boarding the Dead Calm, then back to the sailboat and a short stay on the Battleship Texas, followed by travelling on the tug and pontoon boats, none of them except Tick-Tock had set foot on dry land in weeks. Angling slightly to their right, they started up the embankment to the bridge, mentally preparing themselves for anything.
“I only saw a couple Humvees on the bridge so it won’t be enough to carry us all,” Steve said.
“Maybe we can grab a couple pickup trucks,” Heather offered.
“We’d need a whole convoy to carry all of us, along with the food and water we have, and that’s not counting what we’ll pick up along the way,” Steve said.” Trucks would be good for carrying the supplies, but we can’t put anyone in the back because they’d be too exposed.”
“We could leave the others to fend for themselves,” Tick-Tock offered hopefully.
“The others,” Steve asked, “is that’s what you call them?”
“It is what it is,” Tick-Tock replied.
After crossing an access road, they climbed the steep grade to the Interstate. Peeking over the top, Steve could see they were at the edge of a service road that paralleled I69. He also saw exactly what they needed.
“Or we could take those,” he said.
As Heather and Tick-Tick joined him, they saw what he was looking at.
The bridge was actually six different spans, including the service road they now stood on. To their right, the approach was jammed with vehicles behind a roadblock of two National Guard trucks. Massive in size, they sat high off the ground on six oversized tires. Even from a distance, they could see the heavy-duty undercarriage and suspension. On the near side of them lay some bodies in various stages of decomposition. From the shreds of fabric still clinging to them, it was plain to see they had been soldiers.
On the far side of the truck, they also saw a dozen or more dead wandering aimlessly as they wove back and forth between the cars.
Dropping out of sight as Heather and Tick-Tock followed suit, Steve said in a low voice, “I don’t think they saw us but let’s make sure.”
They waited tensely to see if they’d been spotted. From the angle they were looking down the ramp, they could just barely see the tops of a few of the Z’s heads in the far distance as they wandered between the cars. They didn’t hear any of the things whine like they did when they saw food, so after a minute, they cautiously made their way across the road to the nearest of the trucks.
“This is exactly what we need. We take both of these and one of those Humvees and we’re set,” Steve said quietly as he crouched next to one of the wheels.
Eyeing a rifle dropped by one of the dead soldiers that had turned into a rod of rust next to the body, Tick-Tock said, “But if we leave the ass-monkeys from the battleship behind, we’ll only need one.”
“We have a deal with them,” Steve said in reply. Changing the subject, he asked, “Do you think we can get these started?”
Climbing onto the step-up, Tick-Tock looked inside before quietly opening the door of the cab while Steve and Heather took up position behind the front and rear tires to lay down fire in case the dead spotted them. Reaching in, he flipped the power switch and looked at the gauges. After a second, the needles slowly reacted.
Dropping back down, he said, “This one’s got about a quarter tank of fuel but the battery is almost dead. Everything else looks good though.”
They checked the other truck and found it was in the same condition. Motioning for them to follow him, Steve backed away and led them down the berm and into the woods. Once safely in the trees, he stopped and said, “We can do this.”
***
Moving the fuel dolly across the deck, Sean said to Steve, “There’s no way we can do this.”
“Why, because you have to work?” Steve asked with a laugh. “Maybe in the old days you had the luxury of letting everyone else work while you reaped the benefits, but you don’t anymore.”
“We have a deal,” Sean said indignantly.
“And I’m abiding by it, but that doesn’t mean you can sit on your ass while we do everything,” Steve told him.
“But we agreed that we wouldn’t have to carry guns or put ourselves in danger,” Sean insisted, “and your plan is putting us in danger.”
Steve stopped as he lifted a case of bottled water, “And how do you figure that? My people are doing all the dangerous work. We’re the ones exposing ourselves to danger while we siphon the fuel from the train. And when we go to get the trucks, we’ll be in plain view of all the Z’s up on the bridge. All you and your people have to do is unload the supplies from the boat and load them on the trucks when they get here.”
“And that’s exposing us and putting us in danger,” Sean said with a slight tremor in his voice.
Looking around at where they’d landed in a wooded area below the railroad bridge, Steve could see Sheila, Denise and Tick-Tock standing guard with their weapons at the ready. Above him, he heard Brain curse as he struggled to pull one of the fuel dollies they’d taken from the Dead Calm across the trestle. A second later, he heard Connie tell him to keep his voice down and to relax since this was their last trip siphoning fuel from the abandoned train. To his left, he saw Mary lift Cindy out of the tugboat and hand her a case of soup before grabbing two of them herself. Together, they stacked them neatly with some other boxes as Pep circled them. Heather was nowhere in sight, she’d gone up to the highway to scout a place where they could cut across from the service road to the railroad tracks.
Of Sean’s people, only a few of them were in view. He watched as they would dart from the pontoon boat with a random item and drop it haphazardly in a pile before running back to huddle with the others hiding at the stern.
Shaking his head in disgust, Steve said, “And by the way, when you’re done unloading, you
and your people have to bring everything up the embankment.”
CHAPTER NINE
I69:
“What’s sixty-nine in Chinese?” Tick-Tock asked the others as they lay prone a short distance from where the trucks sat.
From behind him, he heard a low groan followed by Brain saying, “Not another sixty-nine joke. Come on, you’ve been telling them ever since you made the connection between the interstate and sex.”
“I made the connection a long time ago, Pork Chop,” Tick-Tock replied. “Don’t you get it though? I sixty-nine? Hell, if I was double jointed at the waist and had someone dropping off beer and cigarettes, I’d never leave the house. Now answer the question.”
“I give up,” Brain told him.
“Two can chew,” Tick-Tock replied.
Steve and Heather laughed quietly.
Rising up, Steve said, “It’s about as clear as it’s going to get, so come on.”
He, Tick-Tock and Brain picked up the batteries from the boats and carried them across the road while Heather covered them with her CAR-15.
Moving quickly in crouch, the group was only half way to their objective when Tick-Tock said, “A guy comes home from work one night and tells his wife, ‘We’ve done sixty-nine so let’s try sixty-eight.’ ‘What’s that?’ she asks, so he says ‘That’s where you blow me and I owe you one.’”
At this, Brain let out a short bark of laughter.
Tick-Tock reached the first truck, setting his battery down next to its front tire, then unwound the jumper cables that had been hanging around his neck. Handing them to Brain as Steve set his battery down next to it, he said, “Wire it up, Pork Chop. Let me know when you’re ready.”
He climbed up to the cab, opened the door and slid into the driver’s seat. As he looked out the passenger side window, he could only see a few Z’s wandering around, but knew that would change in a few minutes. In front of him, he saw Brain climb onto the front bumper and raise the hood. He disappeared from view for a second and then reappeared, flashing him a double thumbs up that the jumpers were connected and the engine primed.
Tick-Tock reached down and switched on the power. He was relieved when the needle on the amp meter went up quickly, along with those on all the other gauges.
Seeing Brain crouched next to the front of the truck, he rolled down the window and said, “Hey, Pork Chop, what’s the speed limit of sex?”
Brain looked up with an odd expression on his face and said, “I don’t know.”
“It’s sixty-eight, because if you go sixty-nine, you’ll blow a rod,” he said and pushed the start button.
The engine turned over a few times and then roared to life. Goosing the throttle, he saw Brain run to the other truck parked nose to nose with his and raise its hood. He watched as Brain attached the jumper cables and then climbed into the cab. Glancing to his right, he saw they had attracted the attention of the Z’s wandering the onramp to the bridge. Before they started the truck there had only been a few, now there were at least a hundred, all heading towards them. As he watched, car doors opened, disgorging the dead hidden within. Even with the passenger side window rolled up, he could hear their hungry whines.
From his left, he heard the crack of rifle fire as Heather and Steve opened up on the dead closest to them. Turning his attention back to the front, he heard the starter of the truck Brain was in. The engine caught and died. Once again it seemed to start but then went silent. He saw Brain lean down beneath the dashboard and pop back up a few seconds later. He heard the starter kick in again, and this time the engine caught and held. They looked at each other as they revved their engines.
Tick-Tock heard a hand slapping the top of the cab, which told him that Heather had climbed in the back. Above that, he heard the sound of gunfire. In a second, he saw Steve hop up on the bumper of each truck and disconnect the jumpers before dropping the hoods and securing them. He then climbed in the back of the truck driven by Brain and pointed his M4 at the advancing dead.
This was their cue to go, so Tick-Tock pushed the gearshift into reverse. He backed up as he twisted the wheel to the left, moving slowly until he felt the rear bumper nudge the guardrail. Now with enough space in front of him, he shifted again and took off, this time twisting the wheel to the right and heading toward the dead. The guardrail ended a short distance later, so he turned off the road, bouncing down the berm at an angle until he could turn onto the access road at the bottom. He took a quick look in his rearview mirror and could see Brain right on his tail.
Tick-Tock stopped for a few seconds and switched the vehicle into six-wheel drive. Turning to his left, he cut through some scrub brush at the side of the road and started weaving his way through a grove of trees. It was only a short distance to the railroad tracks if he went in a straight line, but to make it more difficult for the dead to track and follow them, he headed north for a hundred yards before turning back to the Interstate. After doing this zigzag maneuver one more time, he headed for the tracks.
As he reached them, he gunned the engine enough to make it up the steep grade, twisting the wheel sharply when he reached the top. When he felt the wheels bump over the rails, he drove forward fifty feet and stopped. Looking out the small rear window set in the canvas top of the cab, he saw Brain follow him and fall in behind. Motion in the right side mirror caught his eye and he turned to look just as Heather jumped down from the bed of the truck.
Now comes the tricky part, he thought as he shifted into reverse.
With Steve and Heather guiding them, they started driving backwards. There was no room to turn the trucks around at the railroad bridge, so they had decided to back up to the loading point. At first slowly, and then speeding up as they gained more confidence in handling the huge trucks, it took them thirty minutes to travel the distance to the bridge.
With Brain’s truck blocking his view, Tick-Tock didn’t know they had arrived until he saw Denise walking up the side of the tracks. After he stopped his truck, she jumped onto the step-up and opened the door.
“Ass, gas or grass,” he said to her with a smile, “no one rides for free.”
“Then I guess I know how I’m paying for this trip,” she said as she slid into the passenger seat. Looking around at the stark interior of the vehicle, she said, “I think you need to take this thing to Pimp My Ride. A little fake fur on the dashboard, get some hydraulics so you can bounce the front end up and down, hang some fuzzy dice from the rearview, and you’d be the shit.”
Tick-Tock laughed and replied, “Paint some flames on the side, too. Green is so unbecoming.”
“Although it does go with my eyes,” she pointed out.
Looking back over his shoulder, he asked, “Where’s the pit crew? I need to fuel up.”
“They should be here in a few minutes,” she told him. “Steve is making Sean and some of his people do it.”
“Then I might as well do it myself,” Tick-Tock said.
Sliding over next to him until their hips were touching, Denise said, “But it’ll give us some time.”
“Time for what?” He asked with a smile.
“Let me show you,” she said.
***
Steve was standing guard, looking down the railroad tracks while the last of the supplies were loaded on the trucks. With Sean and his crew doing most of the work, it felt like it had taken an eternity. He glanced at his watch, surprised it was still early. Gauging the time it would take, he felt they still had plenty of daylight left to go after one of the Humvees parked on the bridge.
He turned to look for Tick-Tock so they could get going when motion from down the tracks caught his eye. Steve squinted and saw a rabbit as it gingerly made its way out of a line of trees on his right. Entranced by the sight, he stood motionless as he watched it look both ways, its nose and ears twitching as it tried to sense any predators. Finally deciding it was safe, it hopped forward.
Even before its furry little paws hit the ground, a whining noise filled the air as a n
aked form leaped out of the brush and threw itself on top of it.
Steve watched in horror as the dead thing wrapped its hands around the rabbit’s neck and lifted the poor creature to its mouth before sinking jagged teeth into the bunny’s throat. Even from a distance, he could see that the rabbit’s eyes were huge with fear. Beyond this, he could see a flurry of motion. At first he thought it was shadows from the sun shining sideways through the trees, but then his mind registered the fact that it couldn’t be shadows since the sun was directly overhead. His eyes then focused on the first of hundreds of the dead coming down the tracks toward them.
“Z’s!” He called out loudly.
Standing nearby as he supervised the loading of the last of the fuel cans, Brain rushed forward as he un-holstered his pistol.
Seeing this, Steve called out, “There’s too many of them, get everyone on the trucks.”
Brain changed direction so fast that he almost tripped as he shouted, “On the trucks. Everyone get on the trucks.”
The people on the Battleship Texas, busy arguing with each other about who carried the most supplies, had no idea their lives were in danger. When they finally noticed Steve and Brain yelling to them, they called out to each other in confusion and fear. Steve screamed to them again at the top of his voice, “Get on the damn trucks or you’re dead!”
This caused more frightened cries of, “What’s happening?” and “What is it?” but at least it got them moving.
For whatever reason though, they ran in the wrong direction.
Steve saw them heading for the river and screamed, “No, no, no! Get on the trucks,” until they halted their stampede. But once again, instead of doing what they were told, they stood there in shock and fear, their eyes like that of the rabbit he’d just seen slaughtered.
Heather ran out from behind the rear truck with her rifle at the ready and he called to her, “There’s a shitload of Z’s coming down the tracks. We need to go.”
Instantly assessing the situation with the refugees, she smacked the nearest one on the back of the head before grabbing him by the upper arm and shoving him in the direction of the nearest truck while yelling, “Move!”
