The Zombie Road Omnibus

by David A. Simpson

  Sara straddled her bike and cranked the throttle. She was ready to start her scout duties again when the last truck was finished, the fire teams and the refuelers were back on board, and Jellybean had his hoses secured. Five minutes later, she zipped up to the head of the line as Gunny and the rest of the convoy were gearing up and picking up steam.

  They made their way around the Salty and got up to speed, rolling along Interstate 80. Sara ran the road a few miles ahead of them. They were still in the vastly unpopulated areas of the United States, so they didn’t run into any trouble. Tie-ups near exits with restaurants that had served the infected products occasionally slowed them down, but other than that, they made decent time. The first stop was nearly three hours into the trip, to refill Sara’s bike. They did this a few more times, incorporating bike refill and bathroom breaks, and the day passed along uneventfully. They called a halt at twilight, near the Medicine Bow forest. They had come nearly nine hundred miles from the Three Flags. The rest area was deserted and made a good place for Martha and Cookie to set up for dinner to feed the nearly four dozen people. After they had eaten, the kids played a quiet game of tag in the picnic area, under the watchful eyes of their moms and the men and women on guard duty. The campfire was a welcome addition that chased off the September chill in the air, and many of the people had blankets wrapped around themselves. The truckers had grabbed spare jackets out of their rigs, most of them offering them to the women in the group. Jimmy Winchell brought out his guitar and sang a few songs, the members of his band softly picking out chords on their mandolins and banjos.

  “We need to hit a strip mall or something,” Cobb said quietly to Griz and Gunny. “These people weren’t prepared for this, most of them been wearing the same clothes for a week.”

  “I’d rather do a Tractor Supply, or even a little gun store. I need a Molle vest. Everybody can just wear camo,” Griz said. “Pretty good chance we won’t even run into any of those things ‘cause those places weren’t open when this all began.”

  “Yeah, me too,” said Gunny. “But when is the last time you saw one next to a freeway?”

  Packrat had overheard and popped in, “There’s a Wally World outside Cheyenne, kind of off by itself. It would be a good place.”

  “They’ll have guns and bullets, too,” Shakey chimed in.

  “Crap guns,” said Griz, dismissively. “But they usually do have a ton of ammo and hunting vests. They’ll work in a pinch to hold magazines.”

  Cobb glared around. “Is everybody listening in?” he demanded.

  They were. They started throwing out a variety of other things they needed, from shoes and toilet paper, to flashlights.

  “Fine, fine,” Cobb grumbled at them. “What exit is this Wal-Mart at?”

  As the core group of fighters started making plans, brainstorming ways of clearing the store, the rest of their fellow travelers began making their lists of things they wanted to get. Bastille claimed he had never been in a Wal-Mart and was curious to see how “those people” lived.

  Gunny had pinpointed a group men and women he considered capable of keeping their heads in a battle. The two deputies, Hot Rod, Kim, and Stabby being the only ones who weren’t veterans.

  It was only the third night for them to be gathered around a campfire, but it already seemed like an old habit. After Gunny had put a stop to their fantasizing about getting anything they wanted for free by telling them they would only have about five minutes to get in and get back out, some of them started asking Stabby for a story. He was good at telling them and even though nothing exciting had happened today, he quickly started spinning a yarn about Sara, her motorcycle, and the exploits she did while out of sight of everyone. Apparently, the three stooges, as Collins called them, were the only ones who heard these things over the radio. Scratch and Lars chimed in on occasion with comments like, “Yep, we heard her screaming over the private channel.” And “I saw the rooftop of that building she had to jump her bike up to.” Sara, still in her leathers, just rolled her eyes at their antics as Stabby sat astride the boys, pretending they were motorcycles and riding wheelies through hordes of zombies.

  .

  2

  Jessie

  Day 6

  The Lake House

  His cheek was finally beginning to heal enough so that it didn’t start bleeding again every time he ate or yawned. His hands were doing better, too.

  They had slept the entire day away, only waking for a bathroom call, or to eat and drink. They heated up spaghetti-o's on the grill and sipped warm sodas. They slept through that night, too. The following morning they were all feeling whole again, they had cleaned up a little and raided the closets for clean clothes. The boys were similar in size, so Jessie’s t-shirts and jeans fit them and Sheila spent hours in Lacy’s closet, trying different things on and sampling her perfume. Except for the gash on Jessie’s face, and his torn hands, they were about as good as they were going to get. They had tried to sew his cheek back but after the first stitch, he couldn’t stand it. He wasn’t Chuck Norris. Gary had heard you could super glue deep cuts back together, maybe that’s what soldiers did. So that’s what they wound up doing, and with plenty of Neosporin liberally applied, it looked like it was going to heal nicely. Except it was definitely going to leave an ugly mark on his face.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Doug had said. “Chicks dig scars.”

  “Right,” Jessie rolled his eyes. “And broken bones heal, pain is temporary but glory lasts forever. My old man quotes Evel Knievel, too.”

  He went to the gun safe standing in a corner downstairs in the TV room and punched in the code to open the door. It was the biggest safe the others had ever seen, they were amazed at how full it was. Jessie laughed.

  “You should see some of his army buddies’ gun collections. Whole rooms they turned into a walk-in vault. The old man wanted to do that in the spare bedroom but Mom claimed it. Said it was going to be a proper guest room.”

  “I saw stuff like that on TV,” Gary said, “but I didn’t think anybody really did it.”

  They started pulling the guns out and it was evident Doug and Sheila didn’t know anything about them, had never fired one before. They pushed the furniture out of the way and laid everything out on the floor, including all of the bullets that were in various military ammo cans under the bottom shelf. There were a bunch of them, and once they had the safe cleaned out, Jessie and Gary began discussing which would be the best to use. They immediately eliminated the black powder rifles and pistols, and put them back in the safe, along with all of the ball and powder that went with them. They put back all of the big hunting rifles that they figured would be too loud and way too much overkill. All of the .308’s, the .30-30’s and the .30-06’s and their ammo. The old Russian made Mosin Nagants and all their ammo. They eliminated all the big bore pistols, too. The .44 magnum, the .357 wheel guns and a bunch of .45’s. That left them with a pile of shotguns, a handful of AK’s in various configurations, a half dozen AR’s and M-4’s, a bunch of .22’s and a stack of pistols chambered in .38, .380, .22 and 9mm. Gary had a pretty good working knowledge of weapons, his dad was a hunter and they owned a small collection. He’d been around guns most of his life, same as Jessie. Up until a few years ago, when he and his dad started to argue all the time, they’d gone shooting a lot. At least once a month they’d be out at the South River Gun Club running drills, shooting trap, plinking targets, and sometimes entering a competition. He’d fired every gun in the safe on multiple occasions, and he knew how to tear them down and clean them, the worst part about a day on the range. He and Gary argued the pros and cons, the merits and drawbacks of each gun they had left lying on the floor as Doug and Sheila watched, him eating chips and her slowly running a brush through her blonde hair.

  They eliminated the AK’s. Too loud.

  They eliminated any gun that wasn’t from a quality manufacturer. Too unreliable.

  They eliminated all of the long shotguns. They decide
d to load the rest of the short barreled, or pistol gripped, 12 gauges and leave them all over the house. The last line of defense if everything went south. If an outsider were watching, listening in, they would surely be unsettled at how much knowledge this group of ordinary teenagers had about tactics, guns, fields of fire, and killing. They weren’t goofing around. They weren’t ‘playing’ army. There were no jokes, no horseplay. They’d been trapped for days and nearly died, watched all of their friends come back from the dead, and had killed hundreds of them to be where they were. They drew on every TV show, every movie, and every video game they had ever played, for their knowledge. They discussed the different zombie games they had played, the scenarios they’d battled through in the various Call of Duty’s and Doom games. Every Resident Evil and Left 4 Dead encounter that was useful in their current situation. They applied it to real life because now it IS real life. Previously, those same outsiders might have accused them of being dorks at a comic con, living in a fantasy world where video games are real, but they were deadly serious because the zombies outside were deadly serious about trying to eat them.

  They wound up loading all the magazines for the M-4s and ARs to use as emergency guns, placing them in every room of the house so they would be handy. Gary and Jessie chose a 9mm pistol and extra magazines for it, they would teach the other two how to shoot after they got the house secure. They were going to use the .22 rifles for now because they were relatively quiet, and there were plenty to go around. They had 30 round magazines for the Rugers, and they had thousands of rounds of ammo.

  They managed to pull the sheets of plywood out of the rafters in the garage without making too much of a racket. They were loaded with swap-meet car parts that his dad was eventually going to use on the old rust bucket he’d been tinkering around with for years. Fenders and bumpers and things. They stacked the parts in the corner and, using the cordless drill, attached a sheet across the kitchen window and screwed one over the entry door. They kept watch, trying to be as quiet as possible, but they didn’t see anyone stumbling around. Or worse, screaming and running right at them. The neighborhood was quiet, anything wandering the streets had already been drawn off during the past week. With the wood firmly attached, the front side of the house was solid now. They felt secure, it would take a coordinated and concentrated effort to get in, and they knew the zombies didn’t have the brain power to use a crowbar. That only left the lower level of the house, and the windows there. It had windows in both bedrooms and a sliding glass door that overlooked the lake, in the TV room. They didn’t have enough plywood to cover everything, so they unscrewed boards from the lower deck and sealed all the windows and the glass door. It made the lower level dark, with the only natural light blocked off. The other three sides of the house were buried into the hillside. They were saving the deck stairs for last. Once they cut them off, they would be using a ladder to get in and out of the house.

  They all kept watch, constantly looking for danger, listening for the ungodly keening sound those things made when they spotted prey. They had been careful not to drop boards or clatter things around, but now they had come to a point where it was inevitable. The stairs off of the deck had to go. Once they did that, the house was as zombie proof as they could make it.

  Sheila had made a checklist, and she made sure they did everything on it. They didn’t want to cut the stairs, then realize they forgot to bring the ladder up to the deck or something else equally dumb. They were nearing the bottom of the “Secure House” list of things to do, that included Doug and Jessie filling up every bucket they could find in the garage with lake water. There was a Big Berkey water filter on the kitchen counter because his parents complained about the taste of chlorine in the city water. Said it made the coffee taste bad. Well, that wasn’t exactly how his dad had put it, but he got smacked for cursing in the house for that one. Clean water wouldn’t be a problem, as long as they could get to the lake to fill the buckets. They still had running water in the house, but had no idea how long that would last. None of them knew why it was still working without electricity, they expected it to stop at any time. The house was on a septic tank, so the toilets and drains would work fine, as long as there was water to flush with. Jessie knew all about septic tanks because this one had to be pumped out a few years ago and they’d spent many hours digging around with a shovel, trying to find the big concrete lid. By “they”, that really meant him. His old man had found the general area of the tank, then went trucking. He told Jessie to have it dug up and ready for the pump truck when he got home in a week. It took him nearly that long to do it, working for hours every day after school, trying to dig through the rocky soil two feet down to find the stupid lid. Of course, he had nearly dug the whole damn thing up before he finally found the right spot.

  Jessie was telling Doug this story as they were filling the buckets, leaning off of the dock and trying to get clean water without stirring up the mud.

  “Yeah,” he was saying, “I got blisters from that...” but he broke off when he heard Gary whistle from the deck. Something was coming. They looked up the hill toward the house and into the neighbors’ yards.

  Nothing. They didn’t see anything. They looked at Gary, and he and Sheila both were pointing wildly at the water. From their vantage point, they could see all the way across the lake. Doug saw it then, what they were pointing at. The water had a muddy swirl to it about twenty feet out, and they could see small bubbles breaking the surface. The undead must have been drawn to the noises they were making, the splashing of the buckets and the sounds of their footsteps on the dock.

  “I sense a disturbance in the Force, young Padawan,” Doug said, as Jessie hurriedly finished filling the bucket and got to his feet. They grabbed the full ones and started hustling up the hill. Before they made it halfway, they heard the keening from the water as the heads of the undead broke the surface and spotted them. The sounds of splashing intensified, and the boys dropped the buckets and ran for the stairs. Jessie glanced over his shoulder and saw at least eight, maybe ten, waterlogged corpses stumble onto the shore and begin chasing them. They weren’t fast, the days in the water must have done something to them, but they weren’t slow, either.

  Their keening screams were drawing others, though. As they mounted the stairs to the upper deck, they both saw a few running in from the street, tearing across the neighbor’s yard. They weren’t ready for this, the stairs were still in place. Could Zed climb them? They’d find out in a few seconds.

  “Get the shotguns!” Jessie yelled to Sheila, as Gary aimed for heads with his .22.

  He was right behind Doug and grabbed one out of her hands as he heard the first of them hit the bottom of the stairs and start running up them.

  “And the M-4s!” Gary shouted. “I can’t hit shit with this!”

  He was firing away, but the little bullets were sinking into the bodies without so much as a flinch from them. He tried for head shots, but they were running and moving so fast, he was missing. Jessie racked the Mossberg she handed him and shot over the railing at the first of the watery creatures. The top of its head exploded, painting everything red in a 360-degree arc. It fell, causing the others behind it to stumble and then Doug was beside him, blasting away as fast as he could once Gary yelled at him to flip off the safety. The 12 gauge peppered them with shot from less than ten feet away, tearing out huge chunks of waterlogged flesh, and pulverizing faces into misty red mush.

  “Hold it tighter to your shoulder!” Jessie yelled at him, when a quick glance showed him Doug was punishing his arm by holding the buttstock a few inches away. “Tuck it in hard!”

  “Hell of a time for a first shooting lesson,” he replied, but pulled it in and kept blasting away. When it was empty, he yelled for Sheila to give him another and she was right there with it, taking up the role she’d seen a hundred times in westerns. Reload and resupply the shooters. Gary had an M-4 and its rapid barks were hitting some of the runners, knocking them to the ground. Now he wi
shed they would have kept the AKs out, even if they were a lot louder. Once the shooting started, it didn’t matter, and they had a lot more knock down power from their bigger bullets.

  They had to get the stairs torn down, had to keep the zombies off of the deck. If they retreated into the house, those things would break the glass and get in. There would be no escaping them. They HAD to hold the deck. Most of the water zom’s were blown to pieces by the shotguns, but more and more were coming off the road, drawn to the noise and screams of the other undead. Sheila was running all of the guns that they had loaded out to them. When that was done, she started reloading the shotguns from one of the ammo cans as fast as she could, breathing hard. Scared. But understanding like they all did, they had to hold the deck. Had to get those stairs torn down.

  They were coming. Dozens at first, but it didn’t take long before there were scores of them, maybe even a hundred. All following the sounds of fresh meat. Screams of zombies and blasts of guns filled the air. The tumbled dead were stacking up on the stairs leading up to them, and the runners were climbing over, taking rounds to the body and charging forward anyway. Jessie threw down the shotgun when it was empty and grabbed an M-4. They needed more time! He needed the chainsaw out of the garage, but if he left now, they would be overrun. The three guns, firing as fast as they could, were barely keeping them at bay. Where did they keep coming from? Did everybody in the whole damn neighborhood turn into one of those things?

  He grabbed another magazine when his ran dry and hammered away at more of them. He would hit them in three round bursts, triple tapping the trigger, aiming for the chest and letting the gun climb so the third round usually hit the head. It was a trick his dad had shown him out at the range when “multiple bogies” were attacking. Gun held tight, shooting elbow tucked in and not chicken winging, scanning for the next target as soon as the first bullet hit. They kept coming, leaping over the stacked-up dead, and the boys kept shooting. There were blood sprays flying and wood chips splintering from the railing. The wood chips! They could use the bullets to cut the risers! He saw a break in the horde, had a few seconds to spare, and started putting round after round into the top of the wooden riser, near where it was nailed to the deck. When the gun was empty, he grabbed one of the loaded shotguns and continued to blast away, splintering and disintegrating the wood. The zombies kept coming. Kept screaming and climbing. Kept reaching for them. Doug ran out of ammo and fumbled grabbing the next gun laid out at his feet, Gary’s AR ran empty, and Jessie’s shotgun spent its last shell. The quiet was shocking and all four doubled their efforts to reload and send lead down into the horde as it sprinted up the steps.