The Zombie Road Omnibus

by David A. Simpson

  Gunny had said that if I don’t help them, then they won’t help me when I go to Atlanta, and it’s a hell of a lot more dangerous than Salt Lake. Stabby was already hopping from one foot to the other, anxious to get going. Scratch was cleaning his fingernails with the long shank he had on his prosthetic. Lars had snagged a pair of drop leg holsters from the pawn shop smash and grab, and had matching Berettas tucked into them, along with the two in Kydex holsters on his belt.

  “You look like a Rastafarian Neo,” Scratch said. “All you need is a leather trench coat.”

  “Nah,” Lars said. “You can call me the four gun kid.”

  “You ladies get over here,” Cobb growled out. “And what’s with the sunglasses, Hollywood? You ain’t got no fans around here.”

  Lars quickly took his shades off, not wanting to get on the rough side of Top’s tongue this early in the morning.

  “Hollywood,” Scratch and Stabby snickered. “Fits you, man.”

  Firecracker was emotional when they all walked up to go over last minute plans. “Fellas, I can’t thank you enough,” he said. “I know you all volunteered, I know you don’t know my wife or kids, but I sure thank you.” He had a little more to say, but he was starting to get choked up and Scratch brushed him off, saying, “We’re only going ‘cause we wanna kill zombies. We’ve got some new weapons to try out!”

  They could hear Bastille grumbling about the best killers they had going off on a fool’s errand, leaving everyone unprotected, but no one was paying any attention to him. Preacher came over and said a prayer for their safe and quick return, then they were mounting up. Gunny had dropped his trailer and was taking his rig, and Firecracker was driving his Kenworth.

  They waved their goodbyes and were soon out of sight of the encampment. Firecracker took the lead, zipping toward his house on the back roads. The plan was to go in fast and hard, get his family if they were still hiding at home, and get out before the inevitable followers caught up with them. The ride in was quick and Gunny took out the few zombies they saw running after the lead truck whenever he could.

  The suburbs weren’t as bad as they had envisioned. Either everyone had already left for work, or they had turned inside their houses and were still trapped there, unable to figure out how to operate a door. They hoped that was the case. Firecracker hadn’t been able to reach his wife since the first day, but had sent her text messages, hoping they would go through. He had told her he was coming and here he was.

  He laid on the air horn as he pulled up and jumped out, sprinting for the door. Lars and Scratch both hopped out, ran halfway up the drive and shouldered their M-4s as they spread out to either side of it, ready to lay down covering fire so the family could run out to the truck. Gunny and Stabby flew by them and made the next right, circling the block, planning to start taking down any followers with the blade.

  Firecracker hit the door at a dead run, pounding on it. “Mary, open up!” he shouted. The door remained closed, the curtains on the windows not moving. He pounded his fists on it again as Scratch started taking head shots at some of the runners coming toward them. “If they ain’t answering, they ain’t there!” Lars shouted, starting to take out runners on his side.

  “Maybe they’re in the basement and can’t hear us,” Firecracker yelled back and fumbled the keys in his hand, searching for the right one.

  Scratch shook his head as he caught a glimpse of him nearly dropping the keys, a little pissed off that he hadn’t even thought past yelling out her name.

  Gunny rounded the last turn and floored it, trying to take out as many of the mob that had started chasing them as he could, before they got too close. Bodies bounced off of the blade and went splattering through the lawns, but he couldn’t get the ones not on the road. Not the hundreds he saw streaming down the street, but peeling off into driveways and front lawns, chasing the sound of rifles over the sound of the big diesel.

  As he plowed through a hundred on the road, fifty in the grass ran past him, heading directly for Lars and Scratch, who were still aiming for the heads as quickly as they could.

  Where had they all come from! Where had they been hiding?

  “I can’t hold,” Scratch yelled a few seconds later, and Lars saw they had made a fatal mistake. They were too far away from the truck to make it back before the horde of screaming, keening monsters would shred them to pieces. Lars took a fast glance over his shoulder and hollered, “To the house! To the house!” as Firecracker finally managed to get in, and they both ran for their lives across the lawn and into the open door, slamming it behind them.

  Gunny spun around at the next intersection and banged gears as fast as he could, heading back to the house. There were already thirty or forty of them in the yard and on the porch, hammering at the door. He grimaced as he realized what they had done, taken cover inside.

  He bounced up over the curb and slammed into the crowd, ripping bodies and sending them flying. He took out a dozen, and a few more started chasing him, but there were still too many attacking the house in a mad frenzy. It was only a matter of time before they smashed a window. Or the door caved under the relentless assault.

  Firecracker ran through the house, yelling for his wife, screaming out his children’s names. No one answered. There were no notes on the table or the fridge as he ran through. The basement was empty. He pounded up the stairs three at a time.

  Empty.

  Nothing.

  The mob outside were trying to throw themselves against the door, but with so many bunched up, it was an uncoordinated effort, at best. Gunny was plowing through the yard again, blasting the air horn, trying to get them to follow him and away from the house, but they were intent. They knew they had their prey cornered, and the madness of flesh so close was driving them into a frenzy of wanton abandon.

  The door shuddered in its frame and Lars ran into the living room and started dragging the couch toward the entryway. Scratch joined in and they wedged it between the front door and the stairs, making a solid barrier that couldn’t be breached.

  Firecracker was near meltdown mode, they saw. “They’re not here! I told them I was coming! I told them to stay here!” he said over and over, still searching the house.

  Lars looked at Scratch. “You got the handheld?” he asked.

  Scratch just shook his head. “Thought this was going to be an easy extraction, man. Should of known better. What a SNAFU.” They could hear Gunny honking his horns and doing his best to kill those that he could on the lawn. They needed to get out and get out fast. With all the noise they were making, every zombie in Salt Lake City would be heading their way soon.

  “Can we blast past them, get back to the truck?” Lars asked.

  “Maybe if you had an M-60,” Scratch said. “We don’t have time to pick them all off, and don’t have the firepower to wade through them.”

  They heard a window break and both immediately ran for the stairs.

  “Firecracker, come on!” Lars yelled and splattered the forehead of some brunette trying to paw her way through the window.

  “They’re not here! They’re not here! I told them to be here!” he kept saying.

  “He’s losing it,” Lars said. “I thought he spent time in the ‘Stans.”

  “Probably never left the Green Zone, damn Fobbits,” Scratch shot back.

  They heard Gunny make another pass at the mob on the front yard, and knew their time was getting short when they heard another window break. They both yelled for Firecracker to come upstairs and they finally saw him climb over the couch and run up toward them. That’s when they noticed he didn’t have a gun. Nothing. Not even a club or a knife. They moved aside as he came up, then immediately went back to their positions at the top of the stairs, ready to shoot anything that came into view.

  “We can hold here until they’re all dead, or the ammo runs out,” Scratch said. “How many of them you think there are?”

  “More of them than bullets, probably,” Lars said. “Firecracker, c
an Gunny get alongside the house? Can we jump out of a window onto his truck?”

  “I don’t know,” he said and stood there behind them.

  “Go check, mother fucker! I wasn’t asking to pass the time!” Lars yelled at him, and Firecracker took off as he and Scratch started targeting the bloodied infected that had made their way through the shattered living room windows.

  Gunny had been trying to raise them on the radio, but never got a reply as he cursed and swung around again, this time nearly tearing the porch off the house. He was trying to whittle their numbers down before they could crawl through the broken windows.

  “Look.” Stabby pointed with his wickedly sharp claws and Gunny followed with his eyes to see what he was supposed to be looking at. Firecracker was waving to them from a window at the end of the house. Pointing to the ground directly below.

  Gunny got it as he roared through another half dozen and swung around again in the neighbor’s yard, clipping the front of their Camaro with the blade. So much for those flower gardens, he thought. The turf was getting pretty churned up by now with the body parts, bloody guts, and spinning tires. He flipped the differential lock switch, essentially giving him four wheel drive, and aimed for the upstairs window. He slid up alongside it, getting as close to the house as he could. It wasn’t much of a drop for them, only a few feet to the top of his sleeper, and he heard Firecracker yell, “He’s here!” to the guys still firing. Gunny lowered his window and started blasting away at the surrounding mob trying to claw their way toward him with his Glock, listening anxiously to hear the team land on his roof.

  “Go go go!” Lars yelled as they backed into the master bedroom. He had switched to his Berettas, letting the carbine dangle across his back on its single point sling. The onslaught had slowed some as the snarling horde struggled over the bodies on the stairs, and the narrow hallway made for a good killing field. When the first gun emptied, he started firing with his off-hand, but he wasn’t getting head shots, the 9mm rounds only slowing them, making them stumble.

  As soon as backed into the room, Scratch was there slamming the door behind him and grabbing the heavy king sized bed to drag it over. The door shuddered as a body slammed into it and Lars put two more through the thin wood at head level, then grabbed the other side of the bed and helped slide it against the door.

  He saw Firecracker on the roof of the truck, waving at them to hurry and he told Scratch to go, telling him, “I’m right behind you.” He quickly dropped the empty mag and sent a fresh one in, thumbing the catch to let the slide go home. He ran to the window and jumped the couple of feet over to the sleeper and crouched down, trying to find something to hold on to.

  As soon as he heard the third body drop onto the top of his truck he heard them all start yelling for him to “Go, go, go!” No family had been passed through the window. No wife. No kids. No time to worry about that now. He eased out the clutch and accelerated slowly, trying not to throw them off, the rear tire tearing up sheets of vinyl siding as he rolled along the side of the house. The crowd of dead followed them, jumping and reaching, trying to get to the warm bodies. “Hold on!” Gunny yelled and bounced back onto the street, shifting gears and picking up speed.

  Firecracker was halfway down the back of the sleeper, using the headache rack to hold on for dear life as the Pete tilted this way and that, through the yards and over the curb. Lars threw himself down flat, looking for anything to keep him from flying off, and Scratch simply reared back and stabbed a hole in the roof with his sharpened spike.

  Lars grabbed on to him and they rode it out until the ride got smooth again on the black top. Gunny stopped about a half mile ahead to let them all slide off and pile back into the cab, but the horde kept increasing in size, every turn they made there seemed to be more running between the houses and taking up the chase.

  “We need a long open stretch,” he said. “Someplace we can outrun them far enough to get turned around and come back through them. We need to get back to your truck.”

  Firecracker knew a place and guided Gunny toward it. He had tears rolling down his face and Gunny didn’t ask. He could only guess at what they had found inside the house. They were nearing the outskirts of suburbia and the roads were becoming rural, so he quickly went through all eighteen gears then wound it back down, looking for a wide drive to get turned around.

  “Plan B,” Gunny said. “We’re far enough away they should all be out of your neighborhood. I’ll take out as many as I can on the way back in. We stop at your truck and you guys hop over, then let’s head back on this same path, kill any more that we can get before we run back up the mountain.”

  “They weren’t in there, Gunny,” Firecracker said over the splat of bodies bouncing off of the blade. “They were alive, I talked to them. I told them I was coming.”

  They were all quiet. Any number of things could have happened. She could have gotten scared and ran out of the house. She could have gone to neighbors for safety. Maybe she thought she needed to run to the store for milk. How do you tell a guy to forget about them, they were gone, when you really didn’t know anything?

  “Maybe she went over to her mother’s place,” Firecracker said as he stared intently out of the windshield, hope blooming in his voice. “She must of. It’s only a few blocks from the house. Let’s check there.”

  Gunny looked over at Lars, Stabby, and Scratch, a question in his upraised eyebrows. Shrugged shoulders, a nod.

  “Okay, man. We’ll go by there, but no screw ups this time. You guys have fresh mags? Swap out your empties, hurry up. Keep your eyes peeled for people waving at us in windows. If anyone is alive in that neighborhood, they should have enough sense to try to flag us down when we come back. These trucks ain’t quiet and we made enough noise to wake the dead.”

  Stabby and Scratch groaned at the weak joke as they raided the box of loaded magazines in the sleeper. “Just when I thought there was some hope for you,” Lars said and shook his head.

  37

  Trapped

  They decided to swing by mom’s house since it was on the way, before they got to Firecracker’s truck, just to see if there was anyone there. It would buy them a little time from the following runners if they did need to evacuate some people. Checking the mirrors and seeing they didn’t have any followers in sight, Gunny brought the truck to a quick stop in front of the house Firecracker had pointed out.

  The three were out of the cab and taking up defensive positions as Stabby took high watch from the truck, and Firecracker ran toward the opening door of the house. She was there! She was there! A dark-haired woman ran out onto the small porch and they embraced with whoops of joy.

  “Let’s go!” Gunny yelled. “Time for that later!” He was on one knee, scanning back the way they had come. Scratch fired off a single shot toward the front of the truck and Firecracker broke the embrace and ran toward the house to grab his kids. “Get in the truck!” he yelled at his wife, “I’ve got them!”

  They were standing in the open door, his six-year-old son holding his smaller sister’s hand. “Come on!” he said, and swung his daughter up in his arm, grabbing his son’s hand with his other and starting to run toward the idling semi.

  Stabby was waving them on, yelling and pointing. “I see some coming! Hurry up, lads!”

  Gunny heard the quick sound of rifle fire from Lars, but kept scanning his area, still nothing.

  He heard Firecracker yell, “What are you doing? Get in the truck!” and took a swift look over his shoulder and saw the woman running back toward the house.

  “I’ve got to get Mom, she can't walk!” she cried as she flew past her husband and back to the porch. Firecracker continued toward the truck to put his kids in, and Stabby jumped down. “I’ll help her. Get them loaded up!” and he took off after her into the house.

  The popping from Scratch’s carbine was starting to get fairly consistent and he heard Lars’ picking up the pace, too. Still nothing in his sector, still no followers catchi
ng up to them yet. He yelled back toward them, “How we doing, boys? Can you hold them?”

  “Magazine,” Lars yelled and there was a short pause in the sound of the rounds going off.

  “Yeah, we good,” Scratch yelled back then, “Magazine,” himself.

  “Ones and twos,” Lars shouted. “We got this for now.”

  Gunny kept scanning, butt stock to his shoulder. He knew when they came in view from his direction, it wouldn’t be in ones or twos. It would be a mob. He couldn’t hear anything, but they didn’t seem to scream unless they spotted prey. They would just be running silently, never tiring, never getting short of breath, and never getting a stitch in their side.

  He saw the first one come around a slight bend in the road. A man with a bathrobe flying out behind him and wearing pajama bottoms, the slippers that had probably been on his feet long gone. Gunny sighted in through iron sights and squeezed, red mist flying out of the back of its skull as its feet flew up and out from under him.

  “They’re coming!” Gunny bellowed. “We’ve got to go!”

  Now there were more and he was right. Not coming in ones or twos, but a bunched up mob sprinting for all they were worth, cutting down the distance between them quickly. Another fast glance over his shoulder showed him the children were in the truck, looking out of the window toward the house. Stabby was half dragging, half carrying an older woman and Firecracker was running back toward the truck with his wife in tow.

  He breathed a sigh of relief. This was going to work. He sighted in on the crowd, who was starting to scream now that they had their prey in sight, and started popping heads. He ran through most of his magazine, dropping at least ten and causing the rest of the crowd to stumble and slow. They were only a few blocks away now and he yelled, “Let’s go, to the truck!” at the top of his lungs as he let the M4 fall on its sling and sprinted back toward the others.