Not wasting any more time trying to figure out what’d happened back there he settled for being alive. Now he needed to plan out his next move since getting picked up back at the guard shack was no longer an option. He supposed he could just keep going and assume a patrol would pick him up eventually. He also realized he now had a pretty good excuse to turn around and head out of Georgia. He could be back at the island in a few days. He’d have to go through the woods or something to get around the Zombie infested guard shack but that shouldn’t take him too long.
The screeches of the Zombie pack at the guard shack slowly faded away as he cruised south. He was weaving in and out of cars here and there but mostly the road was clear. He kept an eye out for another outpost or more Zombies but all there was to see was mile after mile of trees. He stopped at a rest area that had a couple of cars parked in the lot in front of a large welcome center. He parked the moped and walked around to the back of the rest stop. In the parking lot behind the welcome center area he found a parked road ranger truck. He broke the back window out and helped himself to a red container full of gasoline. He also grabbed a pack of road flares because why not?
He walked back around to where he’d parked the moped right as a nice-looking black F-150 with heavily tinted windows rolled into the rest area. Kyler made sure his pistol was where he could get at it without making it too obvious. It suddenly occurred to him these men might think he’d killed the guys at the guard shack to get past them. Even if they just thought he’d snuck past them he’d still be in trouble. Just because the recon teams that’d been sent down here to gather intel had seen the people crossing the border get handcuffed and taken away didn’t mean these were nice, hospitable people. They could’ve handcuffed them and driven them away to use as target practice. Kyler suddenly suspected that the whole recon story had been spun for him. He was here because he was expendable. He’d accepted that back at the island but now he really felt it.
Too late to worry about that now. There was no way the guys in the F-150 hadn’t seen him. Kyler wondered why he hadn’t bothered to ride the moped around to the back of the rest area behind the bathrooms. He’d had an idea about being able to get out of the parking lot quickly in case the rest area turned out to be full of Zombies. In retrospect, he realized that plan hadn’t made a whole lot of sense. The truck drove over to within twenty feet of him. Kyler let his hand wander down to his pistol but didn’t draw it.
The windows of the extended cab were tinted so dark Kyler couldn’t see what was going on in the cab. He was idly thinking about that being pretty useful in the event you needed to pull over and let a bunch of Zombies run past you while you sat in the car eating a sandwich or whatever. As long as you didn’t make any noise, they probably wouldn’t notice you were there. The driver’s window rolled down at the same time as the rear driver’s side window did. Kyler also heard the doors opening on the other side of the truck. One man went to the back of the truck with a rifle and another one walked over and stood on the other side of the trucks large hood.
The men were all wearing camouflage. Two of them had on baseball hats and one had a cowboy hat he’d put on when he got out of the truck. Kyler noticed one of the men looked Hispanic and another was black. So much for the intelligence they’d gotten that parts of the south were run by white supremacist groups. Or, maybe it was a different part. At this point Kyler was hoping he’d live long enough to gather those kinds of details.
“Please move your hand away from the pistol if you don’t mind. It makes us a little nervous when people do that.” The driver of the truck said.
“That’s understandable.” Kyler said as he moved his hand away. It wasn’t like he’d have time to draw and kill all four of them before one of them shot him anyway.
“That’s better. Now we can have us a quick conversation. I’m Tom. What’s your name?” Tom asked. He’d stuck his hand out the window of the truck as he was asking. Kyler noticed the man was wearing gloves. A smart move he’d seen lots of people adopt who were in frequent contact with the Zombies. Kyler wondered if his aversion to having sweaty hands was going to end up getting him killed. He really hoped not.
“Kyler.” He said as he stuck out his ungloved hand. The driver took it and pumped it up and down a few times. Kyler half expected the man to shove a gun in his face and take him prisoner. The man didn’t disappoint.
“Great to meet you. Kindly put both your hands on the side of the truck while my men here take your weapons for safe keeping. While they’re doing that why don’t you tell me how you got past the guard post at the state line?” Tom asked him. Once Kyler was covered by the other men and stripped of his weapons Tom lowered his pistol back out of sight.
“The outpost up the road is overrun with Zombies. Looks like there was a good fight there but the Zombies won.”
“Ok. We’re going to go ahead and handcuff your hands behind your back and take a little drive. Assuming what you’re saying is true we need to see how bad it is before we go back to the base.” Tom shifted his attention to the entrance to the rest stop getting ready to roll out once Kyler was in the back. Kyler let himself be handcuffed. The man who handcuffed him helped him climb into the bed of the truck. As Kyler and the man were getting situated in the back Tom started driving.
“What about my moped?” Kyler asked the man in the back with him.
“What about it?” The man asked. “You’re not going to be needing any kind of vehicle for a while. When you do need one again the base commander will provide it. Where were you headed anyway?”
“I was going to check on my parents down in Orlando.” Kyler lied. He felt like the man would be able to see right through him. Honestly though, the guy didn’t care whether he was lying or not. No one really told the whole truth anymore anyway.
“Well, just so you know you’re going to be taking a bit of a detour to get it sorted as to how you fit in down here. I suggest you do your best to get picked to fit in really well. People who don’t seem to fit in or be good at anything tend to lead a really messed up life. People who ain’t afraid to work for a living can do alright. Or, at least as alright as it’s possible to do in this brave new world.”
Kyler leaned back and took a deep breath. He was off to a different start than envisioned but it sounded like he was still headed in the right direction. All he had to do now was keep his eyes open and try not to die.
Chapter 12: Maximum Carnage
There was enough of a moon out to tell that they were totally screwed. The Zombies may have broken into some of the town homes and nested but there was so damned many of them wandering around below that it didn’t even matter. It was like Woodstock for Zombies. Randy felt like Jimmy Hendricks looking out at the massive crowd of screaming, drugged up fans waiting for him to start playing. Except these fans were infected cannibals who were randomly screaming as they looked for humans to eat.
They were completely surrounded. It was like the whole city had turned Zombie and come to this particular subdivision to hang out. The field separating the subdivision from the Publix was literally crawling with the pus leaking human shaped bags of insanity. They did a circuit on the roof and it was Zombies for as far as the eye could see.
“So, this is working out great.” Kelly stage whispered in Tony’s direction.
“We’re not dead at least.” Randy interjected. He wanted to break up the argument before it happened. He recognized the edge to Kelly’s voice. He’d been on the receiving end of that tone enough times to know it was time for Tony to duck and cover.
“We might as well be. How the hell are we going to get down off here? How are we supposed to look for our kids?” Kelly had switched her anger over to Randy now. Randy wished he’d just let Tony take the brunt of the abuse. Give him a little life lesson in marriage and understanding the mystery that is woman. Recognizing she needed him he went over and tried to hug her.
“Get off me and look for a damned way off these stupid houses you geniuses managed
to get us stuck on top of. We need to be moving before daylight. I’m not sitting up here for days waiting for them to wander off. Figure something out.” With that declaration Kelly shrugged off Randy trying to hug her and went to stand by herself looking down at the mass of Zombies writhing around in the field below.
Looking extremely scared of Kelly, Tony pulled Randy over to the side. “We’ve got backpacks full of grenades and ammunition. I know I didn’t waste much space on water or food so we actually can’t plan on spending too much time on the roof anyway. What if we toss a bunch of grenades off one end and then hope that opens up enough room on the other end for us to make a run for it?”
It was a pretty standard tactic they’d developed in Zombie fighting. The Zombies always surged towards the noise. Randy thought back to the Woodstock feeling he’d had earlier. Too bad they couldn’t get a band to pull up and start playing some heavy metal up on the toll road. He thought of all the noise they’d made getting here already. It was due to all the grenades and gunfire that they’d attracted the crowd they had out there.
“Do you have any grenades left? You were tossing them out left and right for a little bit there.” Randy asked. They started in on an inventory to see what they actually did have instead of just assuming they still had a lot of stuff. It turned out Tony’s math had been completely off. He’d just taken what he crammed into his backpack and multiplied it by three. He hadn’t accounted for the ammunition they’d already expended and the grenades he’d used to open up all the walls and get them safely up here on the roof. Randy had a ton of explosives in his pack, but Kelly hadn’t been carrying even half as much. She was a lot smaller than either of them, so her pack wasn’t as big, plus she’d actually packed things like food and water and medicine.
“We need a mariachi band being burned alive in a dumpster fire kind of distraction. Something big and loud. As many Zombies as there are, I’m not sure now if tossing a few grenades off the roof is going to get enough of them to move to give us the room we need to run.”
“Propane tanks?” Randy was walking around the roof looking down into the backyards. A few of them had propane tanks in them hooked up to grills.
“Nah. I saw a Mythbusters where they shot up a propane tank and it didn’t do anything. Stupid things are way too safe.”
“Throwing the grenades under cars?” Randy tossed out another idea.
“I don’t know. Maybe?” Tony said with a shrug. He didn’t seem really keen on the idea.
One end of the townhouses butted up to a wooded area with a fence running through it. Zombies were packed in the area between the fence and the houses, but it looked empty on the other side of the fence. Staring down off the roof at all the different places they could make a run for it that one looked the best. Assuming they could make a loud enough noise on the other side to get the Zombies moving they should be able to get out and over that fence pretty quick.
“Why aren’t they nesting?” Kelly asked. Randy almost fell off the roof. Him and Tony had been staring down at the Zombies and not expecting Kelly to walk up behind them and start talking.
“All the houses they’re able to break into are full?” Tony guessed.
“Seems like a bunch of them are just laying down where they’re at. Kind of hard to tell from up here but like out in the field they seem to be sleeping on top of one another. We probably screwed up their Zombie plans with all the noise we made. They stormed over here looking for some uninfected to eat and all they found was a field and a bunch of houses, but they don’t want to leave just in case.” Randy expounded on Tony’s guess.
“So, what’s the plan?” Kelly asked.
“Throw a bunch of grenades off the other end of the row of houses and try to get to that fence and over it before we’re eaten alive.” Tony answered.
“Who’s going to throw the grenades and how are they going to get down to the ground before the Zombies lose interest in the grenades going off?”
They hadn’t thought that far ahead yet. In his head Randy was still thinking of the plan as the ‘throw grenades off one side of the roof then get eaten alive by Zombies on the other side of the houses’ plan. He was hoping inspiration was going to strike him. It didn’t seem like that was happening any time soon though. He thought about the garages in the townhomes and wondered if they could get a car out of one of them. The problem being the roads were all clogged with the Zombies down below. Even if they got one out, they wouldn’t get very far.
“Ok. So, either me or Tony will end up being the one to sling grenades. The other two need to get down to the balcony of the house closest to the end of the row and check to see if there’s a car in the garage and if they can get keys. They’ll need to make sure first there aren’t a bunch of Zombies nesting in that townhouse. Grenades start going off and we all meet up in the car and drive straight into the fence. We hop out and run through the woods.” Randy said. He thought it was probably about the best plan they were going to get.
“Let’s do it. I’ll be the grenade tosser. I’m thinking about five should do it. Be ready when I catch up to you. If there’s no car in the garage or that doesn’t seem like it’ll work for whatever reason, then let’s us plan on running and gunning. Either way we’ll be out of here in a few minutes and back on the way to find your kids. I’ll give you two a ten-minute head start to get it all figured out.” Tony said.
Tony gathered ten grenades total and split the rest of his loose gear between Kelly and Randy. He’d be coming down from the roof fast so wanted as little stuff to hold him back as possible. Once that task was complete, they found the house with the balcony on it closest to the end of street and lowered Kelly down to take a look. They were able to fashion the bandoliers from their rifles into a rope that let them lower her almost all the way down quickly and quietly. Then they waited for her to check out the house. They kept the rope dangling down in case they needed to pull her back up quickly.
She came back out on the balcony ten minutes later carrying a ladder. She folded it out so that Randy could dangle off the side of the roof and touch it with his feet. Once he had his feet planted, he carefully climbed down. They’d planned on moving a dresser out there and doing that trick again, but the ladder was a way better option. Tony gave them a thumbs up and disappeared. Kelly and Randy went down the stairs to see if they could find the keys to the Nissan Sentra sitting in the garage.
The keys were hanging on a peg right inside the door. A quick test showed the battery was still working on the car so they could be pretty sure it’d crank up once they started it. Keys ready and lever found to manually open the garage door they waited.
They didn’t have to wait too long. Before they’d really settled in, they heard a series of loud explosions coming from the other end of the townhouses. The explosions were immediately drowned out by a deep and throaty roar that seemed to reverberate off the walls all around them. The army of the damned had come to life and were screaming out a challenge. It was primal. Whatever part of the human brain the virus opened up in the infected was tainted with pure evil.
It was loud enough that Randy signaled for Kelly to go ahead and start the car. Then Randy grabbed the red and white string to the manual release to the garage doors and waited for Tony to show up. He was staring at the garage door trying to will Tony to come through it when something tapped his shoulder. He spun around swinging his fist as hard as he could. Kelly ducked and he ended up throwing a haymaker into the garage door hard enough to leave a dent and hurt his wrist.
“The car died!” Kelly yelled to him over the noise of the Zombies.
“What?” Randy said with his mouth slightly opened in confusion. The damned car had been running fine like five seconds ago. Tony chose that moment to come sliding into the garage spinning his finger in a let’s go motion. Seeing Kelly sitting in the driver’s seat he piled into the back seat and sat there staring at Randy. He was waiting for him to open the garage door. He finally noticed Kelly shaking her head and
making weird motions with her hands that in her mind indicated the car was dead.
Zombies began slamming into the garage door. Randy punching it must’ve been noticed by a few of them. Kelly got out of the car followed by Tony.
“We have to go now! What’s wrong with Kelly’s arms?” Tony said.
“I think she was trying to tell you the car wouldn’t start.” Despite the danger they were in, Tony took the time to give Kelly a look about the hand gestures.
“Let’s go!” Kelly said. She knew they needed to get the hell out of there. Also, she was hoping they’d forget about the hand gesture thing. Fighting their way through a mob of Zombies should take care of that.
Zombies! (Book 3): Violence Solves Everything Page 12
