Stabby hadn’t plastered his hair up into its usual Mohawk and it was a stringy, black mop all over the place. He was dressed entirely in black leather and had long red stained spikes strapped to both arms.
“MEEEE?” He asked in a hurt voice. “Look at him!” he whined and pointed at Lars who was wearing his Steve McQueen sunglasses and had all four of his Beretta’s strapped to him. “Now he looks like he’s up to some nefarious skullduggery.”
“Oh, right.” Lars cried in mock outrage. “Blame it on the black guy! Hey!” He yelled up to the man. “Who’re you talking about? It’s him, isn’t it?” he asked, pointing at Stabby.
“Wait a minute, what about me?” Scratch jumped in, waving his bloody spike. “I look like a bad guy, don’t I? I’d make a good supervillain. I’m pretty sure he’s talking about me, not you two intercoursing sphincter muscles.”
“You look like a choir boy. He probably thinks you’re the Pope come calling.” Lars told him.
“And you look like you have unnatural carnal knowledge with your own mother.” Scratch shot back.
The man on the roof looked perplexed as he listened to the exchange. They were each trying to out insult each other in the most ridiculous and archaic language they could, ever mindful of Kim’s curse jar even if she was nowhere around. If these guys were some outlaw gang come to rob them, they sure didn’t act like any he’d ever heard of before.
“See what you started?” Gunny yelled up at him, laughing. “We’re not here to rob you. We’re here to help. If we wanted supplies, we’d probably just go over to the grocery store.”
“Don’t you nevermind him.” The lady said as she unbarred the doors at the front of the building. “Mr. Rivers has forgotten his manners. We keep losing people. There’s hardly any of us left and he’s just a little upset. I’m Brenda, welcome to Crow City.”
Gunny shook her proffered hand, introduced Deputy Collins and Griz as he glanced over her shoulder at the small group of men and women gathered behind her. She was all business, like this was just an ordinary day and she was apologizing for some minor social faux pas. Like there wasn’t a full yard of dead bodies in front of the building, corpses strewn along the road all the way down Main Street. It was her coping mechanism, how she dealt with everything without going completely insane, like most sane people would.
“They keep breaking in?” he asked, wondering how they could “keep losing people.”
“No, they can’t get in, we’ve done a good job of securing the building, but people keep getting sick. Every day we have to… um… put more down.” Her façade of calm was starting to crack. She was blinking rapidly trying to dry the tears that were threating to overflow her eyes and her small smile of greeting was only held in place by sheer will.
“Oh, no.” Collins said almost in despair. “They still have electric” and their eyes slid upwards to the ceiling lights. They were all on.
“Yes,” the man who didn’t quite trust them yet said. “We’ve been running the generator. Why is that bad?”
“The infection is coming from tainted meats.” Gunny said “You’re still eating stuff that came in a delivery last week?”
The gathered people didn’t have to answer, it was evident from the horrified looks on their faces.
There was only a handful left alive from nearly one hundred that had survived the initial outbreak of violence. Like the tourists and truckers who had been at the Three Flags when it all began, there had been a few among them that were quick on their feet and had moved fast enough to save half the town. As it turned out, most of the school had been at the City building for a field trip. Some of the old vets from the American Legion Hall, most of the town officials and a few of the volunteer firefighters had been there for the 9/11 remembrance and government studies day. The class was much smaller than usual, many of them had been sick and missed school. It was a heartbreaking story. Even though they had managed to barricade themselves in, even though they had natural gas generators to keep the lights on, even though they had plenty of food from the planned grill-out in the freezers in the basement, they kept losing people every day. Friends and family and children. These people were at the breaking point, another few days and they all would have been dead of the virus or sorrow.
“We didn’t know…” Mike said and trailed off, a look of abject horror on his face.
“How?” the woman in the tattered black and white sweater asked. “Who would do such a thing?”
The building reeked of death and smelled of old blood. Gunny could only guess what they were doing with the dead they had to kill every day. He imagined a room in the basement stacked high with them.
“Let’s go outside.” he said “Get some air.”
He led them out and towards the trucks, giving them a minute to wrap their heads around the fact that their imprisonment was over and let it sink in that they had been killing themselves by what they’d been eating over the past week.
They stared at the piles of dead on the lawn and Gunny knew they must have known every fallen body they saw. As hard as it was on the Three Flags survivors to see the bodies everywhere those first few days at the truck stop, this was much worse on these poor people. He had more bad news to tell them about the nuclear reactors and he hoped they wouldn’t crack completely with it. There was nowhere they could stand without seeing the dead strewn around town from their bullets and blades so he told them all to load up, they would take them out to the grain elevator, get some hot coffee in them. Get away from the carnage. He radioed ahead to let Martha know they had a shell-shocked group coming in and told Jellybean to make sure there weren’t any dead bodies from last night laying around. “Drag them off behind the buildings.” he said. These people had seen and lost enough.
None of them wanted any breakfast but they relaxed a little inside the circle of trucks and the ministrations of Sara and Stacy. Martha fussed over them and insisted they drink tea as they gathered around the campfire in the center of the ring.
As it turned out, this small group had survived because they had denied themselves the meat, saving it for the kids and teenagers from the school. Parceling a little out each day, trying to make it last. Their kindness had killed. A few of the men from the American Legion had done what was necessary to all of the victims of the infection and they had indeed stacked them up in the basement. Nearly ninety people, most of them under the age of sixteen. As their story came out over coffee and tea, there wasn’t a dry eye listening. The women in the tour bus held their children close and openly wept. It had all been so avoidable and that made it even worse.
Gunny was in a hurry to continue but he knew this was important, this had to come out now because it was therapeutic in in its way. He could only hope Jessie and Lacy weren’t suffering the same fate, eating meat infected with the disease. These few remaining men and women had to understand it wasn’t their fault, they needed the hands on their backs, the tears of the survivors to blend with theirs if they were ever to heal and not bite a bullet a week from now when the guilt became too much. There were many hugs, many wails of sorrow and when he told them how the meat had been infected, many promises of revenge. Bastille was there, filming everything, but he was actually decent about it, keeping his distance and being unobtrusive.
When Wire Bender finally asked about the radio transmitter, the man who had been waving the gun at them stood and left the small group of Crow City survivors. It turned out he was a council member and was familiar with the workings of the courthouse. “Let’s go back into town, I’ll show you what we have.” he said.
Gunny quietly got Collins and the boy’s attention and nodded them over to Scratch’s truck. He wanted backup in case more unwanted guests wandered in from somewhere.
It was an old civil defense emergency broadcast system that had been repurposed as the high school football and farm report radio station. If the locals couldn’t make it to a Cougars game, they could listen in on the 5,000 watts from the city hall. Wire Bend
er poked around at the equipment. It was all very old, maybe last upgraded in the 70’s but functional.
“What’s powering your generator?” he asked
“Natural gas feed, right off a wellhead.” he said. Collins, still in her uniform and professional looking as ever, gave a slight frown. Gunny doubted if she even knew she was telegraphing her disapproval of ‘lawbreakers.’ He almost smiled to himself at Griz’s ongoing tweaking of her every chance he got, doing things that would have been blatantly illegal last week and now she had to ignore it. Like teaching the kids how to file down the sear on their .22’s and make them full auto.
The Councilman noticed though and quickly started to assure her that city hall was exempt but caught himself. It didn’t matter now. Most of the rules and laws they once abided by that kept society civil and functioning were irrelevant now. He supposed the Ten Commandments were still in effect but not many of the others.
Wire Bender was looking at the cables and had the panel open at the primary transmitter, blowing the dust off of the breakers and wiping at other components with the sleeve of his shirt.
“You know this was originally a 50,000 watt CONELRAD station?” he said as he looked into their blank stares. “From the Cold War.” He went on to explain. “Back in the 50’s and 60’s when we thought the Rooskies were going to nuke us at any moment. These transmitters were all across the States and would broadcast on the AM band to let you know you were getting ready to die.”
“Will it still work?” Gunny asked. “Is there some way to get all those watts flipped on again so the signal will get out farther?”
“How big a genny you got running this place?” Wire Bender asked.
“I’m not sure,” he said “but it runs the whole building, it’s a pretty big one.”
“Only one way to find out.” He said as he opened more panels and started throwing circuit breakers and adjusting dials. The lights darkened and the generator strained under the sudden load but they came back to normal. They all glanced up, watching them but after the initial dimming, they seemed just fine.
“It’s pumping out 50,000 watts now.” Wire Bender said then after a minute shut it back down. “A couple of you come with me outside, I need to check the antenna. Gunny, if you want to record a message, we can set it up in a continual loop.”
The Councilman showed them to the little studio and set up a Fidelipac cartridge for Gunny to tape his message on and he sat down at the microphone. Councilman Mike hit the switch and gave him a nod to let him know it was recording. Gunny didn’t know what to say, he hadn’t thought this far in advance, just as far as getting to the town and securing the studio. He felt a little like some third world guerilla taking over the local station and broadcasting a Marxist message that it was time for the proletariat to rise up against their bourgeoisie oppressors. His brain was drifting off into weird tangents again.
He stared mutely at the microphone, not knowing where to begin. Not knowing where these crazy thoughts that ran through his head came from. He didn’t want to say too much because the enemy would hear it also. If he told them where they were going, they would know where to attack the survivors. If he didn’t tell them, the survivors might just run from one danger zone to another, maybe one even worse. They watched him and as Mike reached to flip the switch, to let him gather his thoughts, Gunny started talking.
“This is Sergeant First Class Meadows of the 1st Special Forces Operational Group, recording this message on the 22nd day of September. I don’t need to tell anyone listening what is happening, you already know. We figured out that the contamination is in the meat so if you have any, throw it away. What you may not realize though, is that you are all in danger of radioactive fallout from the failing nuclear power plants scattered around this country. You have less than a week to get out of the danger areas. That’s a best-case scenario. You may only have hours. There is a region the United States Government has determined as a Safe Zone in Oklahoma and the President is relocating there. It is lightly populated so we will be able to eradicate any of the undead easily. There is a large group of us leaving Crow City in Kansas and heading to the town of Lakota, Oklahoma. We are reestablishing our country, starting there. It is an area out of the fallout zone when the power plants melt down. Anyone within the sound of my voice, we urge you to make your way to us. Be careful when you stop, the undead will follow for a long time. Expect them to show up, even if you’ve left them behind miles ago. We hope to be there in two days, on the 25th. We are monitoring the Citizen’s Band radio’s on Channel 9 and if you have Ham, we are on 27.185. We’ll see you there. Good luck and God Speed.”
He looked up and Mike turned off the recording switch, loaded it into the Cart player and set it to repeat. Gunny just couldn’t bring himself to say “This is the President speaking” so he fudged it a little. If anybody was disappointed when they found out the truth, too bad.
“It’ll loop that same message until the generator dies or the tape breaks.” He said. “Those Cartridges are ancient so I imagine it will go before the genny.”
Wire Bender and the boys were coming back in as he finished.
“We’re good” he said. “I’ll throw the switches back to 50,000 watts and we can get out of here.”
“What about all of our dead?” Rivers asked. “We can’t just leave them laying around. They’re our friends, our family. We need to bury them.”
They all looked at him then to Gunny, leaving it to him to say what needed to be said. The tape was on its second loop and the part where he was saying they only had a week, maybe only hours, to get out of the fallout zone was playing. They listened and he looked at them looking at him. He lowered his head, closed his eyes and accepted a hard truth.
“You’re right.” He said. “We should leave.”
As they made their way back to the trucks, Gunny bent over the Sheriff and closed his glassy and unstaring eyes. He unpinned the shield he had worn over his heart and pocketed it. He was thinking it was time to promote Deputy Collins.
Chapter 12
Back on the Road
Councilman Mike Rivers insisted on driving his own pickup truck. He thought it would be safe enough if he traveled in the middle of the convoy. Besides, he needed to start exercising his authority, he was on the city council, after all. These men had come into his town and run roughshod over him and even if they were right, it stuck in his craw that they hadn’t asked his permission to do anything. They just came in like they owned the place. It may have been petty, but he didn’t want to be stuck without his own means of transportation. Once they got to this Lakota town, they would need a mayor, or maybe even a governor it there wasn’t one to be found. This General they kept talking about should know who had survived and who hadn’t. The president was going to be there, according to the truckers. Maybe he could appoint him to a governorship. He just needed to start showing these folks he wasn’t one to be pushed around so easily. He’d take his own truck, thank you very much, and scout out the town once it was safe. He needed to establish a new headquarters, after all.
By the time they got back to the rigs it was going on early afternoon. They could get another few hundred miles down the road, maybe the other side of Dodge City, if they hustled.
Sara already had her route planned out and as they pulled in, she took off to start scouting. The rest of the cars and trucks were already lined up and idling, eager to get rolling. Within a few minutes, they were leaving the town behind to quietly rot in the Kansas sun. Let the dead bury the dead.
They zigzagged through the high plains of Kansas on the secondary roads, rarely seeing anything moving. The houses were spread far apart and the endless fields of sunflowers or wheat did little to break the monotony of the drive. It was quietly beautiful, the tens of thousands of unharvested acres they passed. The wheat was dancing like water on the breezes and the drying sunflowers had their heads bowed, most of the yellow petals gone. The few small towns they passed through were empty, doors open
and curtains flowing in the shifting of wind. Even out here in the middle of nowhere, the delivery trucks had brought their toxic load. Gunny knew there were still survivors in the various secluded farms. They picked up an occasional faint transmission on channel 9 and a few more big rigs joined the convoy when they crossed over Interstate 70. The radio loop Gunny recorded was coming in strong, even in the daytime and they knew it would blanket the whole country at night. Anyone scanning a dial hoping for something would be able to hear it.
Their convoy was growing, nearly eighty people in all. The bus was at capacity and newcomers in their cars and hastily packed pickup trucks joined in on occasion. All of them fleeing the fallout they thought was coming from the reactors melting down. Gunny had intentionally left out any mention of the organized teams decommissioning them, they didn’t want the Muslims to know that they knew, it would tip their hand. It would let them know that the sleeping giant wasn’t quite ready to roll over and be dead. They would learn the lesson the Japanese had known 80 years ago.
Admiral Yamamoto had said, “You cannot invade the mainland United States. There would be a rifle behind every blade of grass.”
Gunny wholeheartedly agreed. There would also be heavy machine guns, artillery and tanks. A few Apaches with Hellfire missiles and 70mm rockets too, if they could find a pilot. But he needed an army. It was a little deceptive of him not to mention that the nukes might not melt down but he thought it was worth it. It was better for the people to be gathered and strong than spread out in tiny groups all over. They were already putting together tentative plans to take out the mosques one at a time. Their own version of Jihad. Kill them all and salt the earth with their blood. Crush their enemies, see them driven before them and hear the lamentation of the women, as Conan would say. Now that he knew Lacy and Jessie were safe at home, he wasn’t feeling the pressure to rush. If they were alive now, they’d remain alive. The infected meats were all long spoiled by now. He’d get this group to Lakota, make sure they were settled in and could survive, then he’d go to Atlanta.
Zombie Road II: Bloodbath on the Blacktop Page 10
