It wasn’t an emotional departure for most of them, the vets were stoic and grim-faced. Pragmatic. A soldier was doing his duty. A hard duty, yes, but a mission that had to be done. Some of the women had tears in their eyes when he waved his goodbye. They knew the sacrifice he was making. Knew he was going to his death willingly, to prevent a meltdown in the heartland. Even though most of them only had passing ‘hello’s’ with him, their hearts ached at the enormity of what he was doing for them. For their children. For everyone. They’d only read about things like this in their romance novels, never dreamed they’d see it happen. Never thought they’d see an honest to God hero smile at them, and then drive away to his certain death.
Shakey felt good. It was about the best send off a man could have. Better than dying a month from now in a diabetic coma, a burden to everyone. Brothers in arms had nodded their respect, and women had wept openly, as he was going into an uncertain future, doing a selfless act of valor. He would be remembered. Maybe Stabby would tell tales about him. He smiled and pushed one of his CDs into the player. Merle Haggard set the mood just right for him, and Bastille filmed the whole thing until his taillights disappeared down the road.
10
New Arrivals
Day 8
“Here ya go, Preacher,” Gunny said, and handed him the keys to Shakey’s truck. “Grab yourself a trainee, we’re rolling out in a few.”
“Mount up, Ladies!” Cobb yelled to the gathered crowd. “Next stop is Crow City. We’ll be there all night and it’s too close to town to be outside of the trucks, so pack your pee bottles.”
As they headed back toward their trucks, they noticed a couple of rigs coming toward them over the horizon.
“Stay alert!” Gunny yelled to them. “And spread out until we see who it is.”
He hopped up in his truck to try to raise them on the CB, but Deputy Collins was already talking to them.
It was the men and women they had rescued from the roof a few days ago, and a few others traveling in pickup trucks and cars. They had just followed the trail of dead bodies, or the telltale signs of faint tire rubber left at the turns along the road, to find them.
They went to greet them, welcome them to the group, and let them know if they needed a break or to fuel up, make it quick. They were trying to make Crow City before it got dark. One of the cars stood out from the rest, it was armored like most of their trucks. The windows had mesh over them and the windshield was reinforced with steel bars. It had oversized off-road tires, and a push bar from a truck welded across the front. Gunny and some of the guys walked up to admire it. Collins rolled her eyes. ”Boys and their toys,” she thought, quietly calculating the myriad of vehicle code infractions the car had.
It was an old Mustang, a Mach 1, and the owner had spent some time in his garage welding and bolting steel to it. Gunny introduced himself and nodded his appreciation at the old Muscle car that had been repurposed. It was almost as if it were an ordinary day and a nice car pulled into a gas station, every car guy there made their way over to admire it. They could forget where they were, and what they were up against, for a few minutes. It turns out the guy was a big Mad Max fan and a survivalist. Stuffed into the car were dozens of guns and food supplies, along with his wife and baby. He had kept this old car for years, afraid of an EMP blast, he said. The old points style ignition would still work in the event of a nuke being set off, he explained. He’d made the rough armor additions to it after they realized it was a zombie apocalypse, not a nuclear holocaust, that was ending the world. The motor sounded healthy so he popped the hood and they started chatting about cam lift and valve sizes, Cleveland’s vs Rats, and Gunny almost forgot about their whole situation once he started talking with another gearhead. The man’s name was Sammy and he’d barricaded his house, planning on sheltering in place since he didn’t know where else to go. Then he’d heard some of the trucks come by and chased them down. When he found out about the convoy to Lakota, he’d gathered up his family and joined in.
His wife was standing with a few of the other ladies, getting to know each other, and they were cooing over the baby. He was beautiful, a shock of dark hair and big inquisitive eyes. She was so relieved they found this group. She and Sammy had been alone all this time, they thought they were the last. This group was strong and well-armed. They were good people. She could tell. When she stopped talking in mid-sentence and choked up, unable to say anything else, they understood. Words weren’t enough, and they spoke the silent language of women. Hands reached out to touch her, to stroke her back. They understood the tears that tracked down her cheeks while she had a smile on her face. They understood the ache in her bosom that was so much more than just gratitude. She didn’t have to explain.
They knew.
They knew about the days of fear and uncertainty. Of not knowing if your baby would live another day.
They knew.
They had all felt it, and they all counted themselves lucky to be with this band of honest and decent men. In the quiet that fell over the group, they overheard the guys talking cars, speaking a language none of them understood. Her tears passed, her heart swelled, and they shared another look that women have. The one that is inscrutable to men, but other ladies read with ease. The tilt of the head. The lift of the eyebrow. The sardonic curve of the lips. The one that quietly tells them who the real boss of the family is. The one that said, “He’s a good man, he provides for us, so I let him play with his toys.” But she had to admit, this time he was right. The bars on the windows had kept them safe from those things. The oversized tires had run over some of them and they hadn’t got caught up in the undercarriage, or the car didn’t high center and get stuck. Sometimes a woman had to step back and let men take care of man things. She just wished he would have built them a car with air conditioning.
Cobb clomped up after a few minutes and broke it up, grumbling at them to get back to their trucks. They had five minutes, and they could ooooh and aaaawwww at the pretty car all they wanted later
11
Crow City
Day 9
619 Miles to Go
Cobb had called it right. The sun had disappeared over the horizon, and twilight was already darkening the shadows, when the convoy rolled into the grain elevator a half mile outside of town. They circled the trucks, bringing them in tight, with the cars in the middle and Scratch’s truck on the outside, so it could make a run to take out followers as needed. It was a long night for most of them, but Gunny was on cloud 9. The General had told him they had satellite pictures of his wife and kid calmly drinking coffee on the back deck of his house. It was secured, fortified, and zombies were milling around below, but they appeared to be in no immediate danger. He’d demanded they describe the people, he had to be sure it was them, but how do you describe someone’s face? Blonde woman with a ponytail, wearing a multi-colored jacket, and a long haired dirty blonde male, in a hoodie. It sure sounded like them, and who else would be at his house anyway?
Cobb had set up a minimal guard on top of the trailers. It was too dangerous on the ground, runners from the town a half mile away kept showing up through the night and attacking the trucks. They’d take them out with a suppressed .22 and the noises were sporadic, but went on until dawn. No one knew what kept drawing them. Maybe it was just their stunted curiosity, chasing after the keens and breathless screams they heard every time one showed up, and it took them a half hour to figure out where they were. Everyone was practicing light and noise discipline, but nearly fifty people gathered in a small area made noises, even if it was only snoring.
Once the sun-pinked the sky in the East, Gunny called Scratch over to pick him up.
“Let’s go do some killing, see how bad it is,” he said, and the boys were ready. Scratch had a double bunk in his new Western Star, but one of them still had to sleep on the floor. He had used the guaranteed loan program Uncle Sugar had for disabled vets starting a business, and ordered the most expensive truck they had. He still o
wed $160,000 dollars on it when it went under Tommy’s cutting torch and welder. It was the 5700XE with the Stratosphere sleeper and every available option. It had an automatic transmission, adaptive cruise control, heated leather seats, a flat screen TV, a PlayStation with a one-handed controller, and a sound system nearly as loud as Stabby’s band. The boys usually slept pretty good, but with the quiet gunfire and the screams of the undead all night, they were ready to take their bleary-eyed annoyance out on something.
Scratch ran through the town loud, pulling on his air horn and revving the motor every chance he got. It wasn’t much of a town, really, but it was a little bigger than most in the area. It was the county seat so it had the court house and police station, along with the three schools. There was a gas station and a grocery store, an antiques store, a folk-art store and the post office and that was about it, other than a few repair shops. They drove through most of the streets, gathering followers then leading them all back out of town and onto the state road. Scratch’s automatic shifted up through the gears. He got some distance ahead of the mob and then came back at them, slicing and dicing his way through the masses. There were at least a hundred of them, maybe as many as a hundred and fifty.
“Run through the central part again, by the American Legion Hall,” Gunny said. “That’s where they seemed to be bunched up. Probably where the survivors are.”
The roads were laid out on a grid so a truck with a wagon wouldn’t have any trouble getting in. Just seven streets deep, and maybe twice that many wide.
Scratch wound his way back down to the main street area, zig-zagging through the neighborhood to try to pick up more stragglers. When they went by the town hall a little slower this time, they noticed a huge group of the zombies still trying to claw their way into the brick building.
“Yep,” said Lars. “Definitely survivors in there.”
Scratch blew his horn again, trying to pull them away, but they weren’t having any of it. The flesh inside the building was too tantalizing to them.
“Alright,” Gunny said. “Let’s kill our fan club, then we’ll come back in and pick those stubborn bastards off with rifles. Unless you want to go in with blades.”
“I’d rather have coffee, if it’s all the same to you, mate,” Stabby said, still bleary eyed. “I don’t do my killing before caffeine.”
“You know, saying something like that just last week would have made you a very deranged person,” Lars said.
As Scratch played the Piper again, and added another twenty or so to his kill count, Gunny got on the radio and called in a squad of shooters from the grain elevator.
“Just head for downtown, you can’t miss them. But be careful of your background, there are survivors in the building.”
They were getting good at this, Gunny mused to himself, as Scratch came back into the town after his splatter spree on the main road. Griz, Collins and a handful of others had pulled up, climbed onto the top of the trailer, and methodically put the rest of the mob down with carefully aimed headshots. They had wiped out a whole town of maybe two or three hundred people in about a half hour. It was too easy. When the last shot echoed into silence, he climbed out of the truck and hailed the crowd that had gathered on the roof to watch the spectacle. They had guns, but hadn’t joined in the shooting gallery. Out of ammo, or couldn’t bring themselves to shoot friends and family, he supposed.
He approached the building, the boys were at his side making sure the dead were actually dead. They were stepping carefully over the corpses and poking holes in the heads of ones that didn’t look dead enough. He noted the county sheriff was there, covered in bite marks, and the gun was missing from its holster. ”At least he went down with guns blazing,” Gunny thought. Nobody wants to die, but if you’re a fighter, it’s best to go with an empty magazine and spent brass piled around your feet, than to be taken by surprise and never get a chance to pull your weapon.
“That’ll be far enough,” a voice came from the roof of the two-story City Hall, and an older man still wearing a suit moved his rifle over to cover them as they stopped. From the top of the trailer behind them, Gunny heard the sound of a half dozen rifles being shouldered, the distinct click of metal on metal as safeties were disengaged. He smiled. Griz had trained them well.
Before anything else could escalate the situation, a woman in a torn sweater pushed the rifle away from them and loudly exclaimed, “What are you doing, Mike! These people just saved us from those things!”
“I know that!” he fired right back. “But we don’t know who they are. Maybe they came to rob us and take our supplies! Look at them.”
Gunny looked over at Stabby. “You do look like you’re up to no good,” he said, his voice carrying in the quiet morning.
Stabby hadn’t plastered his hair up into its usual Mohawk and it was a stringy, black mop all over the place. He was dressed entirely in black leather, and had long red-stained spikes strapped to both arms.
“MEEEE?” he asked in a hurt voice. “Look at him!” he whined, and pointed at Lars, who was wearing his Steve McQueen sunglasses and had all four of his Berettas strapped to him. “Now he looks like he’s up to some nefarious skullduggery.”
“Oh, right,” Lars cried in mock outrage. “Blame it on the black guy! Hey!” He yelled up to the man. “Who’re you talking about? It’s him, isn’t it?” he asked, pointing at Stabby.
“Wait a minute, what about me?” Scratch jumped in, waving his bloody spike. “I look like a bad guy, don’t I? I’d make a good super villain I’m pretty sure he’s talking about me, not you two inter-coursing sphincter muscles.”
“You look like a choir boy. He probably thinks you’re the Pope come calling,” Lars told him.
“And you look like you have unnatural carnal knowledge with your own mother,” Scratch shot back.
The man on the roof looked perplexed as he listened to the exchange. They were each trying to out insult each other in the most ridiculous and archaic language they could, ever mindful of Kim’s curse jar, even if she was nowhere around. If these guys were some outlaw gang come to rob them, they sure didn’t act like any he’d ever heard of before.
“See what you started?” Gunny yelled up at him, laughing. “We’re not here to rob you. We’re here to help. If we wanted supplies, we’d probably just go over to the grocery store.”
“Don’t you nevermind him,” the lady said, as she unbarred the doors at the front of the building. “Mr. Rivers has forgotten his manners. We keep losing people. There’s hardly any of us left, and he’s just a little upset. I’m Brenda, welcome to Crow City.”
Gunny shook her proffered hand, introduced Deputy Collins and Griz as he glanced over her shoulder at the small group of men and women gathered behind her. She was all business, like this was just an ordinary day and she was apologizing for some minor social faux pas. Like there wasn’t a full yard of dead bodies in front of the building, corpses strewn along the road all the way down Main Street. It was her coping mechanism, how she dealt with everything without going completely insane, like most sane people would.
“They keep breaking in?” he asked, wondering how they could “keep losing people.”
“No, they can’t get in, we’ve done a good job of securing the building, but people keep getting sick. Every day we have to… um… put more down.” Her façade of calm was starting to crack. She was blinking rapidly, trying to dry the tears that were threatening to overflow her eyes, and her small smile of greeting was only held in place by sheer will.
“Oh, no,” Collins said, almost in despair. “They still have electricity,” and their eyes slid upward to the ceiling lights. They were all on.
“Yes,” the man who didn’t quite trust them yet said. “We’ve been running the generator. Why is that bad?”
“The infection is coming from tainted meats,” Gunny said. “You’re still eating stuff that came in a delivery last week?”
The gathered people didn’t have to answer, it was evident
from the horrified looks on their faces.
There was only a handful left alive from nearly one hundred that had survived the initial outbreak of violence. Like the tourists and truckers who had been at the Three Flags when it all began, there had been a few among them that were quick on their feet, and had moved fast enough to save half the town. As it turned out, most of the school had been at the City building for a field trip. Some of the old vets from the American Legion Hall, most of the town officials, and a few of the volunteer firefighters had been there for the 9/11 remembrance and government studies day. The class was much smaller than usual, many of them had been sick and missed school. It was a heartbreaking story. Even though they had managed to barricade themselves in, even though they had natural gas generators to keep the lights on, even though they had plenty of food from the planned grill-out in the freezers in the basement, they kept losing people every day. Friends and family and children. These people were at the breaking point, another few days and they all would have been dead of the virus or sorrow.
“We didn’t know…” Mike said and trailed off, a look of abject horror on his face.
“How?” the woman in the tattered black and white sweater asked. “Who would do such a thing?”
The building reeked of death and smelled of old blood. Gunny could only guess what they were doing with the dead they had to kill every day. He imagined a room in the basement stacked high with them.
The Zombie Road Omnibus Page 41
