ROTD (Book 3): Rage of the Dead

by Dyson, Jeremy

  “Behind you!” I yell.

  As soon as I realize what is happening, the corpse lunges in the passenger window and bites the gal with the auburn hair that was taking care of Scout. Blood spurts out of her neck. She howls in pain and swats feebly at the mangled face of the rotting man. Crimson splatters across the windshield and conceals what happens next inside the vehicle.

  We were so focused on the ones coming up the road, that none of us spotted the one creeping up on our six.

  “Fawn!” Scout screams as she turns and realizes what is happening to her friend. She stops shooting and turns to limp back and help Fawn.

  I raise the Honey Badger to fire, but I don’t pull the trigger. The doctor is in the seat right behind Fawn. I don’t want to risk hitting the gas pump either. Besides, the fact is, that gal is already dead.

  Fletcher intercepts Scout before she can make it back to help Fawn. “Scout,” he says. “You can’t.”

  She tries to fight him off but she gives up quickly and collapses into his arms, erupting into tears.

  Hoff hurries around the truck, grabs the lanky corpse by the collar, and flings it back against the pump. It lunges at him, so Hoff raises his arm to fend the thing off. He pivots and shoves it down on the ground and then raises a big boot to stomp down on the decomposing face of the thing until it stops moving.

  “Let’s get the hell out of here,” Hoff yells as he yanks the nozzle out of the tank and tosses it aside.

  I climb back in the truck and start the engine and wait for the rest of them to get in their seats. After Fletcher climbs aboard, I stomp on the gas and peel out of the station. Dozens of dead gather in the middle of the road, so I swerve into a parking lot on the opposite side of the street to get around them.

  Then we’re gone. We speed out of town and back onto the highway in the quiet, desolate desert.

  Twenty-eight

  The sign alongside the highway tells me we are still a hundred miles from Santa Fe, but my knuckles are already clutching the steering wheel after leaving Corona. If we ran into problems in a dinky little town like that, what chance will we have in a major city with a population in the hundreds of thousands?

  This isn’t like before when I was with my platoon. Most of these people are pretty fucking useless, at least as far as I can tell.

  Steven consoles Scout as she mourns the loss of Fawn. It must hurt to cry with her face in the shape that it's in, or maybe the pain is just making her cry even harder. It gets on my nerves pretty bad after a few minutes, but I guess it would be rude to say something about it, so I just grip the wheel harder and keep driving down the empty highway.

  The dog hangs his head out over the side of the truck and opens his mouth and catches the desert air on his tongue. The shaggy thing must be dying in this heat. Although he has managed to survive this long in the apocalypse, so I imagine he must be a little fighter, too. It almost makes me smile to see how carefree he looks back there until I notice the blood on the windshield of the SUV behind us.

  “I’m sorry about your friend,” Claire says to Scout.

  “Her name was Fawn,” Scout says.

  “She seemed like a very kind woman,” Claire offers.

  “She was,” says Scout. “That gal wouldn’t ever even hurt a fly.”

  Claire smiles. She probably feels like she is helping.

  “I guess she had this coming,” Scout sniffles as she wipes away the drips from her nostrils. “Some people just aren’t cut out for all of this.”

  Claire’s smile falters. Maybe she realizes she is one of those people. Not knowing what else to say, she turns back around and stares at the road ahead of us.

  “I don’t mean to sound like a dick,” I say. “But everyone needs to find a way to set that all aside. We’re going to be hitting Santa Fe in a little over an hour.”

  “Don’t worry, kid,” Scout tells me. “I’ve had a lot worse days than this.”

  “The day ain’t over yet,” I remind her. “Don’t jinx us.”

  Scout sits back in her seat and rubs the little boy’s messy hair with her hand. He snuggles up against her and she winces as he lays his head in her lap, but she lets him do it anyway. I know right then that the only thing that might ever really kill this woman would be losing that kid.

  “Your son is really cute,” Claire says to Scout. “How old is he?”

  Scout hesitates for a second. I’m pretty sure that kid is not hers, but I decide to pretend I’m not listening. I don’t really feel like talking anyway. The less I know about these people, the less it will bother me when they all die, too.

  “I’m seven,” Stevie says without lifting his head.

  It’s the first thing I’ve heard the kid say since they got here. I was actually starting to wonder if he was deaf or mute or something. Just thought it would be rude to ask.

  “It gives me hope to see a whole family still together through all of this,” Claire says.

  I glance over at her. She must not have noticed the way Fletcher and Scout look at each other. It isn’t hard to see there is something between them. Claire does seem even a little more clueless about people than me. That’s what spending your entire life in a lab will do, though.

  Scout lets out a laugh.

  “What?” Claire says.

  “Steven is just my friend,” Scout tells her.

  “Well, it’s a little more complicated than that,” Steven says with a wink.

  “No,” Scout says, swatting Steven. “It’s not more complicated than that at all actually.”

  Claire turns back around. She leans back in her seat with her fingers laced together on her lap. Then she stares at the dwindling highway in the vast desert that seems to disappear into nothing when it reaches the horizon.

  The tension begins to mount as we near the city. I mess with the air conditioning to try and cool down the cab, but it still feels warm to me no matter how high I turn it up. It isn’t bad enough that we have to deal with the dead, but I’m not even entirely sure how to get to Los Alamos.

  All I know is Los Alamos is somewhere in the mountains on the opposite side of the city. I don’t want to get lost and go too far west because that would bring us too close to Albuquerque. We’d risk running into half a million of those things out there.

  To hell with that.

  “Check the map,” I tell Claire. I grab the road map off the center console and toss it in her lap. “I’m going to need you to help navigate me through this.”

  Claire unfolds the map and scans the area around Santa Fe.

  “Looks like it will be easiest to go around the west side of the city,” Claire says.

  “East,” I tell her. “East is better.”

  “Okay,” she sighs. “I guess we’re going east then.”

  She runs her fingers along the lines on the paper, then brings her finger up to her lip and searches the page again.

  “Make sure you have alternate routes in mind, too,” I tell her. “Something tells me we’re going to hit some traffic along the way.”

  “Yes, sir,” Claire mocks me.

  “Hey,” I snap. “Don’t fuck around. Screw this up and we all die.”

  “I know,” she sighs. “You don’t have to tell me that.”

  “He said fuck,” Stevie says as he sits up in the backseat.

  I keep forgetting there is a kid around.

  “Sorry,” I say, glancing at him in the rearview mirror. “You probably should try not to listen whenever I’m saying something, kid.”

  “Is he a bad guy?” the kid asks Scout.

  “No,” Scout says. “He isn’t bad. He just talks like he is.”

  The kid looks at me, and then he lays his head back down in her lap. Scout gives me a small smile and then turns her head and stares out the window. I turn my attention back to the road, but the way the kid looked at me lingers with me. It was like he sensed something nobody else realized when he looked into my eyes. He looked afraid of me.

  Maybe I hav
e just been awake too long.

  “Stay to the right up ahead,” Claire tells me.

  I snap out of it and notice several abandoned vehicles sitting alongside the road. Traffic means we’re getting close. Instead of turning on to the highway, Claire points me to a smaller road that runs adjacent to it.

  “You sure about this?” I ask her.

  “Yes,” she tells me as she points to the map. “It goes the right way.”

  “It’s the best route though?” I say

  “I don’t know, Chase,” she throws her arms up in the air. “How am I supposed to be sure about that?”

  “I’m just asking,” I say.

  Maybe I’m being too hard on her, but she is supposed to be the smart one here. It isn’t that hard to read a map and find a route that won’t run us into any major clusterfucks.

  I follow her directions and take the road that runs alongside the mountains to the east of Santa Fe. The dead wander among the houses and strip malls along the outskirts of town. The best way to do this is to get it done as quickly as possible, like pulling off a band-aid. If we stop in the middle, it may just end up being more painful.

  The pickup weaves between stranded and wrecked vehicles in the road. Most of the shops and homes appear to be abandoned and long ago raided for anything of use. The only thing left in this town are the dead.

  “Turn up here,” Claire points to an intersection ahead.

  I follow the finger she is pointing and turn on to a wide road with a large sandy median separating the traffic. The nearby houses are elevated and set back from the road, so I am able to keep the truck above fifty miles per hour and avoid the obstacles in the street.

  I check the mirror to make sure Hoff is keeping up and see him back there. His face is focused as he eyes the road through the blood-smeared windshield.

  “Take the next exit,” Claire tells me. She points to the sign to clarify. “Saint Francis.”

  “You’re doing fine,” I assure her.

  I steer the truck up the ramp and follow the road that curves around to the north. The small houses over here are more tightly packed together and run right up against the street. It feels claustrophobic immediately. Corpses wander along the road and on every side street that we pass. I tap the brakes and reduce my speed as I focus on the possible threats before we get too close to them.

  The feeling comes over me that things are about to get very bad, as I swerve through the gauntlet of death and destruction on the road.

  That scruffy mutt starts barking while Fletcher and Blake open fire on the dead. They better be sure to hang on back there, because I’m not getting through here without smashing through some shit along the way.

  A woman up ahead is on her hands and knees devouring a dead body between an armored truck and a pair of wreck sedans. I have no choice but to plow over her. She turns and snarls just before her face smashes into the grill of the truck.

  The crack and thud as the truck hits her is strangely satisfying as a small measure of revenge, but along with it comes the fear of messing up the truck. The last thing I want is to get stranded in the middle of a fairly large city.

  The dead flood toward the gunshots and the growling engines of our vehicles. They emerge from the side streets and shops alongside the road. I hit the gas and am able to drive fast enough that most of them arrive too late and merely raise their arms as they watch us speed away.

  In the back of the truck, that stupid dog continues to bark at all of them. It’s almost like it is trying to taunt them. It is hard enough to concentrate without that thing annoying the fuck out of me.

  “Shut that damn thing up,” I yell.

  “Quiet, Stitch!” I hear Blake holler at the dog.

  The dog keeps barking like an asshole back there. I have to wonder why they keep that thing around.

  It almost seems like we will be able to slip right through this town, until we hit a crowd of several hundred corpses that clog the road between the capital building and a large shopping mall.

  I bring the truck to a stop.

  “Where do I go?” I ask Claire.

  “Straight,” she says.

  “I can’t fucking get through that,” I inform her.

  “We’re not moving!” Fletcher reminds me as he fires at the dead that are quickly closing in on the truck in the middle of the road.

  “Umm,” she stammers and scans the map. “Left.”

  “Are you sure?” I ask.

  “Yes,” she doesn’t seem sure, but I spin the wheel and steer down the side street.

  Blake nearly tumbles out of the back of the truck. Fletcher stops shooting and grabs on to him to keep him from landing in the arms of the dead. They crouch back down in the truck bed and resume clearing away the corpses that grab on to the vehicle. The two men kick at the dead, or smack them in the face with the rifle stocks. When all else fails, they shoot them in the head to get them to release their grip on the pickup.

  Hoff has to work extra hard to avoid the bodies we leave in our wake. The sport-utility vehicle swerves from one side of the road to the other, but inevitably ends up bouncing over the bodies as they fall to the pavement behind us.

  “Talk to me, Claire,” I remind her. All of the threats on the street keep pulling her eyes and attention away from the map.

  “Right! Right!” She yells as we enter an intersection.

  I take a hard right, bouncing over the curb as I swing around a burned out sports car in the street. The guys in the back of the truck are knocked around and I can hear the dog's claws scraping the metal as it slides from one end to the other. I pull back onto the road and steady the truck again.

  “I’d appreciate it if you’d stop driving like a dang lunatic,” Fletcher yells through the back window.

  I shoot a glance in Claire’s direction, but she is busy trying to find the best way out of the city.

  “Go left in two blocks,” she tells me.

  I make the turn and let out a relieved sigh. The roads clear again as we head out of the city center. After a few more blocks, we reach the entrance to the highway and leave Santa Fe behind us. The road opens up. Fewer structures are situated close to the pavement and the number of abandoned cars and corpses diminishes. I finally relax my grip on the steering wheel as we start our climb up the mountains toward Los Alamos.

  “You did good back there,” I tell Claire.

  She smiles and looks back down at the map.

  “I mean it,” I say. “We couldn’t have gotten through there without you.”

  “Thanks,” she says.

  “So,” I say. “Any idea how we get to this lab from here?”

  “Not exactly,” she says. “But we’ll figure it out.”

  Twenty-nine

  The convoy rolls through several miles of barren desert until we come to a massive resort casino. It looks like a luxurious pueblo surrounded by unkempt golf courses. Hundreds of corpses wander across the massive parking lots. The lavish facility slowly withers away like an enormous monument to a lost civilization.

  Towering pillars of imposing rock rise up out of the earth in gravity defying formations along the road. Massive escarpments along the east side of the highway turn crimson in the afternoon light.

  “This place is amazing,” says Claire.

  Stevie leans over Scout so he can get a better look at the landscape out the window. His elbows hit her in the ribs and cause her to grunt in pain.

  “Wow!” Stevie says. “Mountains!”

  “That’s the Sangre de Cristo mountains,” Fletcher says through the window. “This is just the southern tip. They run all the way up into Colorado.”

  “Kind of makes you forget everything has gone to hell,” Scout adds.

  While everyone else is distracted by the rock formations, I keep my eyes on the road. Good thing, too, because I spot a sign for Los Alamos just before the upcoming intersection. We pass by another pair of rundown casinos along the outskirts of a town with a name I can’t pron
ounce.

  “This must be an Indian reservation,” Blake says into the back window.

  “You guessing that because you can’t pronounce the name of the town either?” Steven says.

  “No,” Blake says. “This whole area is casinos. Seems kind of obvious.”

  I round a curve and head out of town, but I slam on the brakes when I spot a pair of vehicles on the road ahead. It isn’t like it is out of the ordinary to come upon vehicles blocking the roads now, but these trucks are different. They weren’t wrecked or hurriedly abandoned. They were parked sideways at the edge of a bridge to create a blockade. I squint my eyes but can’t see anyone around the vehicles.

  “What’s wrong?” Claire asks me.

  “I know a trap when I see one,” I explain. I gesture to the trucks in the road. “That’s a trap.”

  I hit the gas again, crank the steering wheel around, and wave a finger around as I pass by Hoff in the SUV to tell him to follow me. He nods and starts to turn back, but then I stop when I see another pair of vehicles on the road back the way we just came.

  We’re boxed in.

  Trapped.

  “What do we do now?” Claire asks.

  “Get ready to kill somebody,” I say.

  Scout loads a new magazine into her Glock as a group of men get out of the trucks and start walking toward our vehicles. More men on horseback ride out from the surrounding buildings. All of them are armed, mostly with guns, but a couple even carry spears or bows and arrows. Still we’re out numbered. There must be thirty or forty of them.

  “Hold on,” Blake says. “Let me try to talk to them first.”

  “You want to get yourself scalped, go right ahead, buddy,” I say.

  “I like my chances,” Blakes smirks. He turns and hops down from the truck and starts walking toward them with his arms raised. Dumb ass didn’t even take his rifle along with him.

  I decide I better get out there. He might like his chances, but I’m willing to bet he is going to need my help.

  Sure enough, the guys raise their weapons as we get close.

  An older man with long black hair steps out in front of the group. The rest of the guys are in worn jeans and filthy shirts, but the man who approaches us wears a dress shirt and pants. I’m guessing he is the one in charge.