A Good Distance From Dying

by David Carroll

  Sass reached out and grabbed my arm, stopping me. “Wait. What happened?”

  I turned to look at him at the exact moment that the pounding began to come from the HR office.

  “Gregg’s pissed. Time to go.”

  No further discussion. We ran. I really don’t remember crossing the parking lot. I was focused only on getting to, and then inside, the pickup. Once safely inside, we took a breath, locked the doors, and looked around. To the right of the front doors was a group of three zombies who had been lingering. I didn’t recognize any of them from the plant, but they could have easily been people from the front office. They noticed our exodus from the building and were heading towards the truck. The world they shambled through was not the world I had last seen as I had arrived at work hours earlier. Wreckage, smoke and fire dominated this new world. I couldn’t bring myself to do anything but look around at all the destruction that had taken place while I had been unconscious under my machine. I was so very glad that Sass was here with me. Truthfully, I’m not sure I would have been able to handle it all by myself.

  Sass was looking around just as I was. Neither of us said anything about the three zombies that were currently about halfway to where we sat. Instead we were taking in the scenery. I was studying the wreckage of the plane. Other than the lack of service people around the debris there was still something off about the crash site. I just couldn't put my finger on what I was seeing.

  Then my eyes settled on the tail section and I saw what had been eluding me. I now knew what had caused the crash. This wasn’t the wreckage of a single plane. This was the remains of two planes. For some reason, they must have collided on approach. So many scenarios flooded my brain. Did one of the planes get overrun by the dead? Was one of the captains locked in his cockpit, infected and desperately trying to land the plane before he turned into a zombie himself? Could some surviving passenger been locked in the cockpit, alone and terrified, trying to land the plane themselves because everyone else had already been devoured. Or could that lone survivor been trying to crash the plane in hopes of taking the dead out and saving the locals?

  What sad tale led to these two planes twisting together and slamming into the ground below? How many heroes would go unknown? It both frightened and saddened me as I looked at the wreckage. So many stories unknown. So many people gone. The return of the dead was the ending to every story that would be told now.

  “Becky was finally turning it all around. She was out of rehab and hadn’t taken a drink in over four months. She was working again and the judge was almost ready to give custody of her children back…then the zombies came.”

  “Jack had just gotten back from overseas. His unit had been there for two years so he had never even seen his daughter, who was now about a year and half. His plane was due to land at one o’clock and we were all there at the airport to welcome him…then the dead showed up.”

  “Danny had spent two weeks on his school project. I had offered to help, but he said he wanted to do this one all by himself. The project was about the Coliseum in Rome. He had really gotten into this topic. He had studied when and how it was built and the different types of games they had there. He had studied about the gladiator fights and even knew how they had flooded the arena so they could have naval battles. I was so proud of him. It seemed to finally click in his head that he truly was smart enough to make the good grades. This was going to be the time we would be able to point to and say that this was where he really turned it all around. I went to his class that morning so I could watch his presentation. He went first and was doing so well…then the teacher screamed as the dead janitor bit her ear off.”

  How many stories such as these would be told for the rest of our lives? How many promising lives snuffed out for all eternity? How could we ever be safe in this world we were now living in?

  Sass turned the key and the truck roared to life. The sound snapped me out of my daze. My thoughts about the sad state of the world disappeared as I saw the dead react to the sound of the motor. It seemed to charge the zombies with more resolve to sink their teeth into us. Sass looked over at me and asked, “Where are we going?” That was the question of the year. I had no clue.

  “First either run over these three or just get us out of here. We need to figure this out.”

  Sass swung wide missing all three of the zombies. I watched out the window as two of the three spun around to try and follow us and instead fell over taking the third to the ground with them. Sass pulled out of the parking lot and kept his speed slow making sure not to hit any of the plane debris that littered the road. He said the last thing we needed to do right now was change a tire. That thought struck me funny, and I began to laugh, that is until I saw the side door.

  When we had left to make our way for the front office, there had been the jawless wonder and three others at the door pounding away on the glass. Now, as we now drove past we could see there were ten to fifteen zombies there. Some were beating on the wall of the building instead of the door. It had been, at most, ten minutes since we had left to make our escape.

  “Did you see that?”

  Sass nodded, “The scary thing is that some of them had to have no clue why they were trying to get in the building. They were only doing it because the others were. That means that a group will grow larger and larger as more and more hear them banging away. Eventually they will beat their way in.”

  “We need to think hard about where we're going. I’m a really sound sleeper.” I said.

  Sass, who had yet to crack a smile, began to laugh. He said the standard, “You ain’t right” comment then pulled the truck to a stop at the main road. The airport access road was directly in front of us. Right would take us towards Kingsport, left would take us towards the airport and Blountville.

  “Okay Crackhead, where are we going?”

  “First I would just like you to know that if you get everyone who has survived the zombie apocalypse to call me Crackhead, I am going to kill you myself.”

  “Yeah, right. Where are we going? We can take the interstate into Kingsport. Maybe they have a safe zone or something set up.”

  I saw two problems with this idea. First, I didn’t want to be on the interstate at all. That is where everybody would be going when all of this hit the fan. In my mind I could see the interstate clogged full of cars. Wrecks would be everywhere. Cars and trucks would even be spilled out into the medians. It would be a feast waiting on the zombies to find it. We would never get through on the interstate. I believed that back roads would be our best bet, but even they would be littered with wrecks. Secondly, Kingsport was home to a chemical plant that was as big as a small city. Sass didn’t see how this would matter.

  “Just think about it Sass. Are the people working there going to take the time to turn their machines off before they flee the building? Eventually one of those concoctions they make is going to go boom. I really don’t think that we want to be in Kingsport when that happens.”

  Sass agreed. The other options were Bristol and Johnson City. I ruled out Bristol as well, it’s just too far away. If the roads were anything like I imagined, it would take us days to reach Bristol. We didn’t have days. We had till the sun went down to find safety. After that we would never see the dead coming and our odds of survival would drop dramatically. This left Johnson City. Turning left I only hoped that there was enough road left for us to get around the war zone that used to be the Tri-Cities Airport.

  C H A P T E R S I X

  Two bridges lead into the airport; arriving and departing traffic would use these to enter and leave the airport from the access road we were currently on. As we got closer to the airport we could see that these bridges had quite possibly been the site of this areas last stand. Police cars were parked crossways at our end of each bridge to block any thing from getting out onto the access road. At the moment the bridges were full of zombies all fighting their way to the front of the line. They all desired to beat on the police cars in hopes
of opening the floodgates and letting a wave of the hungry dead spill out upon the land. To the sides of the blockade there were other police cars and fire trucks.

  The spooky part was that there was no sign of what had happened to the people. Whatever epic encounter had happened here would be lost to history. The battle of the TriCities Airport would go to zombies. It has always been said that history is written by the victors. Here was the contradiction. How would any history be saved now if the victors had no means to write down their side of the story?

  I was so lost in the moment of looking at the remains of the battle that I hadn’t looked at the road for any length of time. I caught movement out of the corner of my eye and when I turned my head I saw a policeman in full riot gear standing in front of us. All I could think to yell was, “WHOA!”

  Sass spun his head around and saw the policeman as well. He slammed his brakes, but it was too late. We didn’t hit him anywhere near as hard as we would have, but it was still enough to knock him to the ground. Sass put the truck in park and opened his door to go check on the man. Before he could get out I grabbed his arm.

  “What?” He asked.

  I looked out the window to where the officer was laying. “You can’t go out there. You don’t know if that guy is human or…you know…one of them.”

  Sass looked at the cop for a moment then shut his door. “So, what do we do?”

  Sass raised a good question. If we do nothing and he

  ends up being human then he’s probably going to get eaten, and it will be our fault. If he’s a zombie and we go check on him then we risk getting infected. This also would be our fault.

  “From my years of watching zombie movies I have found that the three most frequently bitten areas are either the front or back of the shoulder, right near the neck or the back of the calf. With this guy lying on his back we can only see one of the three possible areas of infection. This doesn’t sound like good odds to me. As bad as it sounds, I think we have to assume he's dead and leave him.”

  Sass didn’t like my idea. He had a bit of that military mentality. The “no one gets left behind” mantra. I am very much a self preservationist. Two sides of the coin on this one.

  “Look, every time we get out of this truck the chances of us getting killed increase dramatically.” I said.

  “I have to make sure.”

  “Damn it Sass, then go poke him with a stick or something. Don’t you dare touch him or get close enough for him to grab you. One slip, one mistake, and you’re dead.”

  That had always been the thing about zombies that made them number one on my list of scariest movie monsters. They don’t have to kill you to kill you. One scratch, one bite, that’s all it took and you were dead.

  “What if I just honked the horn? We could see his reaction and know.”

  “Yeah and you’d bring every brain muncher for fifty miles down on top of us. Not to mention what honking that horn would do to those poor bastards on the bridge.”

  “We can’t just leave him there.”

  “We don’t even know if he is a he. He may very well be a corpse.”

  It was around this point in the conversation that Sass realized the body was no longer there. It was as if some magician had set up his vanishing closet and then had the incredible bad luck of transporting our zombie riot cop into his act when he opened the door.

  “And now let’s bring back your aunt

  Flo….AARRGGHHH!”

  Yes, I found the whole idea funny. Don’t judge me.

  I was about to say, “Crisis averted, let’s go” when I heard a loud bang on the hood of the truck. Zombie cop was slowly rising to his feet.

  “Okay, I think that answers our question. He’s a zombie.”

  “How does that answer the question? He’s just standing up.”

  “Look Sass, I know you want this guy to be alive, but if he had a pulse, don’t you think he would’ve said something by now. Something like, “let me in the damn truck!”

  Sass frowned at me. He doesn’t like it when I make sense. The cop had risen completely to his feet. He seemed to sway there for a moment or two, and then he threw both arms up over his head and brought his fists down hard onto the hood of the truck. The loud bang whipped the bridge zombies into an even greater frenzy. I was pretty sure they would have chewed through those cop cars if we had started honking the horn.

  The zombie policeman pulled his arms up over his head to bring down a second strike. Sass turned to me and told me to shut up before I could get out the obligatory “I told you so”. He gunned the gas and drove right over the zombie cop. I hoped his head hit the ground so hard that it turned everything inside his riot helmet into something resembling the Jell-O desert that has the fruit in it. We began to make our way down the exit ramp and onto Highway Seventy-Five which would run all the way to the old road to Johnson City.

  The ramp had just a few wrecks here and there making it easy to navigate down. The road that awaited us, however, had what seemed to be bumper to bumper wrecks. After traveling only five to ten feet Sass noted that the road was soon to become impassable. He swung through a gap and went all the way over to the shoulder on the other side. The left side of the road ran beside the property that was the landing strip for the airport. From the edge of the road the land began to slope up at a very steep angle until it got to the top on the hill, then it leveled off and there was a chain link fence with barbed wire on top of it. The other side of the fence was airport property. On the shoulder we could drive at a bit of a slant and still make it down the road. No other cars had attempted to do what we were doing which surprised me. You could have driven at this angle in a front wheel drive family car. It was at that moment that I heard a woman scream.

  Sass stopped the truck and we began to look around for the source. That was when they came into view. A man and a woman wearing business suits appeared inside the fenced in airport area. They were running towards the fence with a very large group of zombies tailing them. Most of the group was made up of the slow zombies but there were also two runners.

  Sass looked at me, “What can we do?”

  “They’re inside the fence man, there’s nothing we can do.”

  “We have to help them!”

  “Will your truck even climb this?”

  Sass looked at the hill then he shut up and watched the life and death drama that was playing out before us.

  As they drew closer the man took off his suit jacket and threw it to the woman then pointed to the fence. The woman nodded and began to climb. The man spun around to face the runners. He had some type of metal weapon in his hand but I couldn’t make out what it was. As the first runner came at him he side stepped the zombie and brought the weapon down hard into the face of the second runner. The zombies head exploded and he tumbled to the ground.

  The man turned to deal with the first runner and saw that the zombie had never broke stride. The woman had been at the top of the fence and had just put the jacket over the barbed wire when he had blasted into the fence causing her to lose her balance and fall back down to the ground. The runner moved towards her just as the man brought his metal club down onto his head. The zombie fell and the man proceeded to pound on the zombie, turning what was left of his head to mush.

  The woman grabbed her companion’s shoulders and pointed out that the slower zombies were almost to them. The man pointed back to the fence and he ran forward to engage the vanguard of slower zombies. As the woman began to climb again the man brought his club down on the slow movers with a ferocity that I doubt he ever knew he had possessed. It seemed as if they were going to make it over the fence and to safety.

  At that point, we saw a blur from behind the truck. Another runner had seen the action at the top of the hill and was moving at full sprint towards the fence.

  Sass opened his door and I knew there was no talking him out of this one. We were the only hope these two had. He grabbed a tire iron from behind his seat and I grabbed my hammer. Th
e runner zombie was halfway up the hill. The woman was at the top of the fence. The chase was on.

  C H A P T E R S E V E N

  There are times in our lives when we ask ourselves, “What the hell was I thinking?” This is just a by product of being human. We are slaves to our emotions, letting rationality and reason fly out the window with little to no fight at all. As I ran up the hill behind Sass I knew that this would probably end up being one of those times. We were rushing headlong into a confrontation with a fast mover. There was an entire army of zombies at the top of this hill with nothing more than a chain link fence keeping them separated from us. Good lord only knew how many zombies were behind us still lurking or better yet making their way towards the commotion that was loudly taking place at the top of the hill.

  This would be the part of the horror movie where everyone in the audience would be yelling “What are you doing?”, “Get back in the truck you morons!”, and even “Yeah, they’re gonna die.”

  I would have to agree with them on this one. It didn’t look good for the home team. But even though I was able to concede this in my mind for some reason I was still following Sass up the hill. Sometimes I guess you just have to let the current take you and hope it leads to calmer waters. That was something I heard on the learning channel late one night. It was about being lost in the forest. Which is nothing like being hunted by the dead, but it’s still a pretty Zen quote so I clung to it during my exodus from safety and my entrance onto the buffet table.

  About the time we were halfway up the hill I could see we were never going make it. The woman was completely unaware of the runner coming up behind her. She was slowly climbing down the fence as the runner crested the hill. Sass was yelling for her to hold onto the fence. If she could hang on she had a chance of not dying. If she were to tumble to the ground with the runner, it would be game over.

  The woman never looked around. I’m not sure if she was just in her own head or if she was ignoring us. The man did hear. He spun around and saw us closing in on the runner that was homing in on the woman like a heat seeking missile. He began to run towards the fence screaming.