by Bobby Adair
Crap.
I got out of the car, crept back out of the garage and took up a spot beside Murphy and his bush.
“No luck?” he asked.
I shook my head.
“I thought I heard you saying something in there.” Murphy turned to me and grinned. “Did you try asking nicely for it to start?”
“Yes.” Lies are always a good defense against sarcasm. I stepped out from behind the bush and jogged to a house about fifty yards across two unfenced backyards. Murphy followed, trying to suppress his chuckles as he kept his rifle at his shoulder.
A peek through the windows showed stacks and stacks of blankets, sheets, and pillows. “What is up with this crazy place?” I asked, not expecting an answer.
We crossed a few more yards.
We came to a row of houses in various states of disassembly. Not destroyed, but methodically taken apart. One house had little left except concrete block foundation pillars, pipes, and a fireplace. One was torn down to the frame. In another, much of the wood used to frame it was missing, leaving mostly just the floor.
Still, we saw no more Whites, no living humans, and no houses stocked with food. Given the separation of items in each house by type, I figured we'd maybe come across one filled with canned goods, or bottled soft drinks. Hell, one of the houses might be full of liquor. I found myself looking at all the homes in sight, trying to guess which one was hiding the beer.
I thought I saw something moving between the houses in the distance. It was getting late in the day, and with the overcast sky, it was hard to make out shapes in the dimming light. Maybe they were bushes moving in the wind.
Murphy nudged me and pointed at the grain silos. A rusty ladder cage ran up the side of one, all the way to the top, where an unusual metal tower with numerous platforms stood precariously on the edge. Two of the towers appeared flat across their tops. Three others had some irregular constructions on the roofs.
I didn’t indulge Murphy’s pointless worry. Movement in my peripheral vision caught my attention and I looked, but saw nothing.
“What?” Murphy asked.
“Not sure,” I said, even though I was thinking pretty hard in that moment anything with enough energy to move probably had enough energy to try and eat me. “What’s your thing with the grain silos?”
“Might be a place to go up and spend the night in safety,” said Murphy. “Only one way in and one way out.”
I turned to Murphy. “I thought you wanted to get out of this creepy little village. Besides, with all the wind, I’ll bet it’s cold as shit up there.”
Murphy pointed back at the house with all the blankets. “Plenty in there to keep us warm.” He tensed as he finished his sentence.
That alarmed me and I looked toward the blanket house.
“Did you see that?” he asked.
I shook my head and pointed in the other direction. “Nope. But I’ve been seeing some other things. Over there and over there.”
“Whites?”
“I don’t know.” I looked around again. “If it’s Whites, they’re being sneaky.”
“And you saw them over there,” Murphy looked around behind us again, “and now back there. They’ve got us surrounded.”
“Run for it?” I asked.
“It’s worked for us so far.”
I heaved a big sigh and leaned on the wall of the house as I thought about our situation. “If it’s Whites, there’s got to be Smart Ones with them.”
“’Cause?”
“They haven’t attacked yet.”
Murphy nodded. “Okay, Professor, but make this quick. I’m getting itchy feet.”
“I don’t think this is the bunch that chased us this morning,” I said. “If it was, they wouldn’t be sneaking around. They’d come right for us.”
Murphy shrugged and nodded. “I’ll give you that. Or it’s the creepy people who live here.”
“Either way,” I said, “I don’t think there are that many of them. Again, if they had overwhelming numbers, they’d have come at us already.”
“Whatever,” said Murphy. “What direction haven’t you seen anything moving in?”
I pointed.
“You ready to scoot your ass?”
I nodded.
Murphy gestured in that direction. “We’ll run as fast as we can that way.” He paused and looked at me. “As fast as you can. To that blue house way over there. That looks like the edge of town. If I stop by the garage to look around, stop with me. If I don't stop, it'll be because I spotted a White, and I'll keep hauling ass to the woods on the other side."
“If I see a White?” I asked.
“Same deal. Don’t stop. I’ll keep running with you.”
“Got it, Sarge.”
“Stay close.” Murphy took off running.
A White howled to warn his buddies of our attempt to flee before we'd made it a dozen steps.
Shaking his head, Murphy muttered, “Motherfucker.”
If the situation didn’t feel so suddenly dire, I’d have laughed. We were having a run of shit luck.
Chapter 35
Way off to our left, in the gaps past the houses, I saw a trio pacing us, running parallel to our path.
Off to our right, Whites were scattered, maybe six or seven of them, trying to close in before we got to the blue house. More Whites were behind, but I didn’t spend a lot of time looking over my shoulder. It’s damn difficult to maintain a sprint while looking backwards.
As we got close to the blue house, Murphy panted, “How many do you see?”
“Maybe fifteen.” I glanced around. It was mostly a guess.
“Two choices,” he said. “In the house or in the woods.”
The advantage of either choice was dependent on the number of Whites coming. If many more than my guess of fifteen were out there, any benefit of using the house for defense would be negated by so many attacking through the doors and windows all at once. If we ran into the woods, well, that might put us back in the situation we’d been in for most of the day, being chased by an ever-growing mob of infected boneheads.
Or, I suppose, we could have stood our ground and spent a good deal of Murphy’s last two magazines, while I hacked and stabbed as many as I was able.
“The woods,” I told him.
We ran past the blue house without pause.
Despite the cold temperatures, I wished I was still naked and able to fit in with our pursuers. That one thing would give me a lethally stealthy advantage that, so far, the naked horde hadn’t been intelligent enough to counter.
Murphy crashed between bare branches growing over a narrow path. I tore in behind him.
Whites were in the yard we’d just crossed. Moments later, they burst through the bushes to get on the path behind us.
I listened for Whites in the trees, skipping the path altogether. I knew they would. They had to. It was an intelligence thing. If a regular White saw you on the other side of a fence, he’d try all day to go through the fence before it occurred to him to go over. It was a different story with Smart Ones. I knew at least some of the Whites had to see us among the trees and wouldn’t go to the path to chase us, but rather, would run a beeline from where they stood to the spot where they saw us, even if bushes and vines were in the way.
Advantage us. Those Whites would come more slowly and be dispersed.
The ones bright enough to follow the path would get strung out in a single-file line. Whites are easier to kill that way than when they all come at you at once.
I don’t know why, but that made me think of the attack by that mob of white-skinned motherfuckers when Steph and I were caught on the shore of Lake Travis a few months ago. And like every time that memory found its way into my mind, it hurt. A fresh dose of adrenaline pumping through my veins mixed with that pain, and blurred into a rage with a biting hunger for revenge.
My rationality switch flipped to fuck it.
I skidded to a stop on the trail. I turned to face the W
hites coming up behind me and roared all of my hatred into a dead, gray sky.
I ran back up the trail, swinging my machete-shaped best friend.
Predators hate it when the prey turns and says, “Fuck you!”
The first White in line fell onto his ass as he tried to come to a stop. The two Whites behind him tripped and tumbled over.
Too bad for them.
I slashed and cut a chunk from two heads as I leapt over.
A fourth White, this one with a blade in hand, made a running Tarzan leap at me. I spun and ripped out his guts with a two-handed swing of my machete as I sidestepped his momentum.
The White who’d been leading the line on the trail struggled through the bodies of his three dying buddies to reach for my leg. He caught a big mouthful of steel-toed boot and went limp.
A quick little woman came around a curve in the trail before I had my blade up to hack her down. She made a quick move to get her face out of my fist’s way, but earned a throat full of elbow instead. Her larynx collapsed and the crunchy noise of it followed the gobs of spit on the last breath out of her wide-open mouth.
My blade found another White woman coming up the trail.
I ran further, seeing no Whites, only hearing them in the woods around me. I shouted, “C’mon, fuckers!”
I was full of victory and invincibility, thinking I could handle any number. I was loving the taste of revenge and the feel of warm Whites’ blood on my face and hands.
A big fellow tripped out of the trees and fell onto the trail a few paces away. Too bad for him, I was faster at covering the distance than he was at regaining his feet. I hacked him across the back of his neck and he collapsed face first onto the muddy path.
“There you go, motherfucker!” I shouted. “You want some more? Come on, I’ll kill every one of you shits!”
No more came.
Murphy said, “They’re dead, dude.”
I caught a big breath and found that the pace of my breathing was uncomfortably fast.
“You got most of ‘em,” he said, with his bloody hatchet in hand. “I finished off the ones who needed it.”
I nodded and pursed my lips. “Thanks.” Rational thought slowly returned as my anger settled to a simmer. “You have to shoot any of ‘em?”
“A few.” He turned back up the trail. “What do you say we get the hell away from Creepy Town and see if we can find us another barn to crash in tonight? Oh, and next time, let me know if you decide to run off in the other direction. I was a long way down the trail when I figured out that you weren’t behind me.”
I nodded and started to follow as Murphy moved up the trail.
Murphy said, “That was some shit.”
“Needed to be done.” It was the first excuse I came up with, though I wasn’t entirely sure I needed an excuse.
Murphy grunted noncommittally. A moment later, he asked, “You get hurt?”
“No.” I did a quick mental inventory of my parts—wiggled my toes, bent my elbows, swung my shoulders, and flexed my fingers. “I’m good.”
“None of that’s your blood, then?”
“You know how it goes sometimes,” I answered.
“Yeah.”
We’d gone a piece up the trail when I thought to ask, “You didn’t get hurt, did you? Bit or anything?”
“Nope,” said Murphy, as he held up his hand and flexed his fingers. “Something in the bushes got me.” He looked closely at his palm. “Maybe thorns or a scorpion, or something.” He shrugged and put the hand back on his rifle. “The ones coming through the woods weren’t hard. The ones on the trail were dazed, or too busy dying to pay me any mind after you tore through ‘em.”
“Yeah,” I said. “About that.”
Shaking his head, Murphy turned. “Don’t sweat it. You gotta do what you gotta do.” He reached up and tapped the side of my head with a big finger. “Before you can deal with some of the crazy that lives in here.”
I had no response. He was right.
Murphy turned and started forward again. “You forget, I’ve been there. There’s only one way past that shit for people like you and me.”
“To kill Mark.”
Murphy nodded.
Somewhere in the shadows far off to our left, a White screamed an alarm. Another added her voice. One by one, all through the woods, in the direction we were moving, White voices joined in.
“I knew we didn’t get them all,” whispered Murphy. “But—”
“But there’s always more than you think,” I finished.
The hunt was on again, and there were way too many Whites in the forest for me to kill, no matter how manic I let myself get.
We needed to evade them until dark. With Murphy’s night vision goggles, nighttime was the advantage that could save us.
We turned and ran back up the trail toward Creepy Town.
Chapter 36
We bolted out of the woods and ran past the blue house, fixing our bearing on the grain silos. Whites were crashing through the trees behind us, across a wide front, driving us with their frightful howls, but not gaining any ground.
But then, relatively few of them could have been on the narrow trail. The rest had to be moving slowly through the undergrowth.
Right?
Of course it was right, but damn. Something was fucked with that logic, but I was hauling ass too fast and my adrenaline was coursing too thickly with residual rage for me to put clear thoughts together.
Not good for me. Not one bit. I often kept a cool, analytical distance through a lot of this kind of shit, and it made me one lethal motherfucker. It was probably the only reason I was still alive and pounding the crumbly asphalt through the center of Creepy-ville.
Then it occurred to me.
We were being hunted.
An ambush was coming.
Holy shit.
The clarity of that thought slapped me so hard I nearly stumbled.
I had to act.
Right the fuck now.
I stopped and Murphy plowed into me from behind.
“What the fuck, dude!” He pointed at the grain silos, just three blocks ahead, on what passed for Creepy Town’s main street.
“Ambush,” I said in a matter-of-fact tone, though I hadn’t yet spotted one White, now that we were back in town. “Follow me.”
I bolted into a gap between two closely spaced houses and leapt over big, plastic kids’ toys hiding in the tall brown grass. I rounded the back of a house and turned right to see three Whites at the other end of the house’s backside, peeking around the corner, looking in the other direction, at the road Murphy and I had been running down moments before.
I ran full-speed at them with my machete out at knee level. “Hey, assholes,” I said, just as I passed. I couldn’t resist. The blade ripped across the tendons on the backs of their legs.
I missed one, but Murphy, taking up the rear, elbowed her in the skull and slammed her into the house.
I turned further away from the silos and ran across a dirt road into a quarter-acre collection of rusty cars, aging propane tanks, and pieces of metal so old they looked like giant, bent flecks of rust. We burst through a web of twisted branches, each displaying rows of small dead leaves, and found ourselves in a fallow field on the edge of Creepy Town.
We were still a good three blocks away from the silos, but hopefully, out of the scope of the hunting Whites. I made another hard turn and ran toward the silos.
“I hope you know what you’re doing,” Murphy said through labored breaths. “You’re gonna wear us out before we get there.”
“I know,” I said. Cool, quick thinking and an absence of hesitation had just earned us a life-saving advantage. The Whites didn’t know their prey had given them the slip.
We stopped behind a house two short blocks from the towering silos and scanned the area. More Whites had to be waiting in ambush. I needed to find out where.
Murphy pointed and whispered. “By that yellow house. Four of ‘em.”
“I see.” I looked left and right. “Over there, back the way we came,” I pointed. “A couple behind that tractor.”
“They’re all still looking the other way for us,” said Murphy. “Was that a lucky turn back there? Or did you know?”
“What do you think?” I took off at a run and crossed behind two more houses.
A block and a half to go.
Panting, I stopped behind a dense honeysuckle vine growing through a chain-link fence, looking for Whites ahead.
Murphy ran by, slapping me on the shoulder, “C’mon. I think they saw us.”
Shit.
It was a race.
Another race.
Murphy, being faster on his feet, put some space between us, but slowed as we crossed the last street. He stopped, swung his rifle around, and spent a half-dozen rounds at Whites he figured were too close. And if he figured they were, he was probably right.
I crossed the double railroad tracks first. My feet slipped and twisted through the big, loose rocks that made the tracks’ foundations. I thanked myself again for my decision to keep my boots. We passed a utilitarian cinder block building beside the tracks and ran beneath a pavilion with a twenty-foot roof overhead, pierced by a dozen wide pipes, the place where grain from the silos was filled into train cars.
With Whites screaming a hundred feet behind us, we rounded the last silo in the line, and spotted our salvation.
Murphy spun around and leveled his rifle at the closest infected. “Go!” he shouted, as he popped off several rounds.
I jumped onto the ladder and started to climb.
Before I was so high up that a jump back to the ground would injure me, I stopped and looked to make sure Murphy was coming.
He fired two more rounds and bounded over to the ladder.
I put myself in speedy monkey mode and started up as fast as I could climb, figuring before I was halfway up, Murphy would be right on my ass, because as with everything else, he was faster than me.
At about fifteen feet up, I entered the ladder cage, a round tube of mesh and braces, which I guessed were there to keep climbers from falling off. I laughed as I climbed. If a high wind blew me off, there was plenty of room inside the cage for me to do my falling without ever touching the ladder or cage.
