“You can let go of that now,” he said to Collins, who was still holding the fifth wheel release button wide open.
She did, a little jerkily, trying to calm her racing heart, then started winding her hair back up into its tight bun. The shoulder strap on her seatbelt had held her in place through the bucking and rocking of the truck, but had caught her hair and knocked out the clips, spilling it down over her shoulders. Her sunglasses were askew, but she didn’t seem to notice. She stared straight ahead, her hands were on autopilot. Gunny could see why Griz was interested in her, she looked nice when she wasn’t trying to look severe.
They looked out of the windshield at the trucks and cars making the turn, heading south for the other bridge, miles down the road.
A few of the undead were squirming their way through the gaps, but were ignoring the cars and attacking the smoking Peterbilt as it sat there idling.
Collins was getting her composure back after the mad jackknife power slide, her breathing and pulse returning to normal.
“I didn’t know trucks could do that,” she said.
“Well, they’re not actually supposed to, that’s why I had to have you pull it, I didn’t have enough hands. I hadn’t got around to disconnecting the safeties on the knob. I didn’t think I’d ever need to let my trailer go while I was driving down the road,” he said.
“You normally in the habit of bypassing manufacturers safeties?” she asked.
“Doesn’t everybody?” he asked, goading her a little, feeling a little giddy at the success of surviving.
“Normal people don’t bypass safeties,” she stated flatly.
Gunny grinned. She was probably right. When he offered to ‘fix’ Lacy’s new car by tearing the dash out and getting rid of that annoying seat belt beeper, she had been very, very clear...he was not to go near it, or even look at it very hard, for that matter. She hadn’t even given him a key to it.
When Gunny saw Cadillac Jack rolling up the road, one of the last trucks in the convoy, he pushed in the air brake button for the tractor and dropped it in third. He wondered if his hoses were still attached to his truck or had gotten torn off. It didn’t matter. He wasn’t going to get out to check. It was best to make sure it would still roll before they got too far away, so he eased out the clutch. Griz had a big grin on his face as he stopped and motioned them out. The chatter on the radio was excited and the story was already being elaborated when he pulled back into line and Collins started hooking up the external speakers and reorganizing everything else that had been slung around the cab.
“A little warning next time, that'd be great,” was all she had to say about it.
Gunny didn’t want to tell her he didn’t know if the cockamamie plan was going to work. He figured they had an equal chance of rolling over and being eaten by the horde when the truck broke open. Or burning to death. Or crashing into the river and drowning. But he’d just keep that to himself.
“Ok,” was all he said.
Sara had turned off of the blacktop and onto hard pack gravel a few miles up the road. When she saw them coming, she took off again, staying on the dirt roads, leading them away from the towns. The convoy spread out even farther as Gunny made his way back to the front of the line, churning up great clouds of dust that could be seen for miles.
After an hour of eating dust and seeing parts of Oklahoma most people had never had the opportunity to see on the seldom traveled roads, Sara came over the radio.
“We’ve got a problem,” she said. “There’s a road block up here at the river crossing.”
“Can we push it aside?” Deputy Collins asked.
“We could, but there’s a bunch of guys with guns. They put it there on purpose.”
“If they don’t look like friendlies, tell her to come on back, we’ll find another route,” Gunny said and started slowing as Collins relayed the message.
There was no answer as she tried to contact her again. Nothing but static. They brought the trucks to a complete stop and quietly rumbled in the late September afternoon.
“Why is this last hundred miles the hardest?” Gunny griped aloud. “Things were going so smoothly for days.”
“You think they shot her?” Griz asked after a few minutes. “You hear anything from up there?”
“They’re not letting me leave,” Sara came back over the radio, moments later. She sounded scared. “They’ve got their guns pointed at me.”
“Piss!” Gunny exclaimed, then grabbed the mic out of Collins' hand and hailed Griz.
“I’m gonna pop smoke and run a blitz. I’m three or four miles from her position. Get on my back-trail when you’re a mile away, send the teams out. I want flanks left and right. Double time through the woods up to the river. Don’t shoot first, but if somebody else starts some shit, make sure we finish it.”
He tossed the mic aside, grabbed a gear and dropped the hammer. He ran through all of the gears, not skipping any, taching near the redline and leaving the Jake Brake on to give the motor a guttural snarling sound every time he shifted. He churned the dirt and rolled coal until he was going at dangerous speeds for the road. He leveled off at ninety, the oversized front tires shimmying the whole truck, a giant plume of dust, and black smoke from his stacks billowing high into the cloudless sky. He wanted them to know he was coming. Wanted them to hear the roar of his engine, see the miles-long clouds of dust, and feel the ground shake when he came thundering up to them. Nobody pointed guns at him or any of his crew. Nobody. Collins held on and stole glances over at him. She’d never seen him get pissed before, he was usually a little more laid back. She didn’t know if he was planning on ramming through whatever they had set up at a hundred miles an hour, or just putting on a show. After the jackknife trailer fling he did, she didn’t rule out anything. It was too loud in the cab to be heard without yelling. He was keeping the motor screaming, leaving it in 17th and not shifting into the higher gears.
They topped a rise, nearly leaving the ground as they flew over it, and about a half mile away they saw the bridge. It was at the bottom of a sloping valley, the river snaking along the fertile woodlands. Sara’s bike was in the middle of the road and she was a dozen feet away, standing in the knee-high prairie grass.
Gunny slowed using the transmission, keeping the engine revs high and the Jake burping out its raucous thunder every time he double clutched and split a gear down. He wanted to intimidate. To come in like a roaring grizzly bear, bellowing his anger. Let them see a mighty war machine bearing down on them, and make them quake in fear. Make them reconsider their plans of robbery, rape, or murder. Show them they had stirred up a hornet’s nest. He also wanted to make as much noise and create as much dust as he could to give the teams cover.
Sara looked unharmed. She waved to them when they got close and Gunny came to a stop, then set the brakes a few feet from her. He left the truck idling and she started over to his door.
“I see a bunch of guys over there,” Collins said. She was scanning the wood line across the water and the interior of the old school bus that was blocking the bridge.
“I see ‘em,” Gunny said. “I don’t think they hurt her.”
A single man started across the bridge toward them. He was big. Easily as big as Griz, and wearing leathers and a cut-off denim jacket. Bikers. He didn’t appear to be armed, but that didn’t mean anything. There were probably a dozen rifles, from men they hadn’t spotted, trained on them.
“He said they just wanted to talk,” Sara said as she hurried to the door, seeing the anger on Gunny’s face.
“Talk with guns?” he asked.
“They just did that to get me to stop,” she said. “As soon as I did, they quit pointing them at me.”
The man on the bridge turned around and held a hand to his ear, a ‘what?’ gesture to one of his men at the roadblock. One of them was pointing at the river. From his vantage point sitting in the truck, Gunny could see there were a couple of zombies splashing through the water, making their way t
oward the bridge. It was the only point in either direction that didn’t have steep embankments carved by the centuries of flowing water.
“That’s an outlaw biker gang,” Collins said, her hand instinctively dropping to her gun. She hadn’t taken her eyes off of the man, and had seen his patch when he’d turned. “They’re on the BATF watch list. They’ve sent us bulletins about them.”
Gunny hadn’t seen, he had been watching the more immediate danger of the zombies making their way to the shore.
“They the Hell’s Angels or something?” he asked.
“No, the Infidels. Maybe not that bad, but they warned us about them.”
“Whatever,” he said. “They’re in the way. I’m going to go tell him to move. Griz and the teams should be in place in a few minutes. When he radios they’re in position, shut the truck off. If this guy pulls a gun, come out shooting.”
He hopped down and started striding toward the man before she could protest that this really wasn’t much of a plan. It didn’t matter. His mind was made up, and his face was set.
They met near the end of the bridge and pulled up short of each other, just out of arms reach.
Before the man could talk, make whatever demands he thought he was going to extract from them, Gunny spoke first, still pissed they’d stopped and threatened one of his people at gun point.
“Move your shit and we’ll let you live.”
They circled each other slowly, almost casually, in small sliding steps, evaluating each other. Gunny wanted to be able to see both ways across the river and maybe give Collins a clear shot at the big man if he decided to get cute.
“That can be arranged,” he said, sizing up the trucker who was a good 3 or 4 inches shorter and 50 pounds lighter than him. He could hear more trucks coming and saw the miles-long cloud of dust they were churning up.
Gunny already knew what he was going to do. It wasn’t going to be paying a toll, or giving them half their women, or whatever else this guy wanted. This little band of outlaws had chosen the wrong people to mess with. He would delay for a few more minutes to let Griz get the teams in place. Then he would crush this guy’s throat, pull him down as a shield, and start sending lead down range into the bus.
“I know it can be arranged. Now tell your men to get out of our way.”
Some of the undead had clawed their way up the embankment and started running toward them.
The big man had his back to them, and Gunny briefly considered letting them take him out, but his hand already dipped faster than an eye could follow, already had the Glock out of his holster before the thought fully formed. His hands knew the ways of war, his fingers knew how to fight, and they did so instinctively, without commands. He extended and aimed briefly at the man's face before pointing slightly to the left, inwardly smiling at the look of surprise. The gun barked four times, with only a scant half second break between the double taps, as he acquired the next target. He blasted the two running toward them and their heads exploded as they both crumpled in lifeless heaps. He had his arms extended in a two-hand grip and the burly biker took advantage of this and pushed the gun aside and drew a long Ka-bar out of his sheath in a fluid, practiced motion. He was swinging for Gunny’s head.
“Duck,” he said, and the blade slid by his ear and plunged into the eye of a leaping woman, still dripping from the river. Her feet went out from underneath her and he followed through with the thrust, driving the knife out of the back of her skull and into the ground as he dropped to one knee. He hopped back up quickly and spun around, pulling the blade out with a squelching sound. They eyed each other a little differently now. Still wary, still ready to attack, if necessary, but each realizing the other had just saved their life.
“My damn sharpshooter must be blind,” the biker said, as he wiped the gore off of the knife blade on his leather chaps.
“Mine must not be in place yet,” Gunny said, staring him in the eye, then lowered his gun out of the man’s face.
“Are you Sergeant Meadows?” he asked, surprising Gunny.
“I am,” he replied, waiting.
“We heard your radio broadcast. We ain’t looking to rob you, but you coming down these dirt roads put us in a bad situation.”
“How’s that?” Gunny asked, as he heard Collins shut down his truck. The teams were in place. He was confident that the bikers all had crosshairs on their foreheads.
“You said it yourself on the radio message,” he said. “Those things follow for miles and as much noise and dust as you guys have been kicking up, you’ve led a whole army of them down on top of us.”
Gunny considered the words, then holstered his weapon. The man was right.
“How many of there are you?” he asked. “You can join us, you know we’re heading to Lakota.”
The big biker sidestepped the question. Still on guard.
“We don’t have enough cars to transport everyone. Besides, we don’t want to leave. This is a safe area, the way the river loops back and forth, there’s only about a mile-wide patch of land leading in, and it’s fenced. The banks are steep at the water, and there are only two bridges. If there wasn’t a convoy of trucks rolling through drawing those things in, they’d probably never wander out this far.”
Gunny had to agree, it did sound like a good place and he didn’t want to wipe them out by leading hundreds of runners right to them. He motioned Sara over.
“Let Cobb know we’re camping here for the night. Tell him there’s a group of survivors up here, and we need to clean up the mess we’re bringing in on top of them. Scratch will know what to do.”
The biker motioned to someone on the bridge and the bus fired up and started to move out of the way.
“You guys can come on across, it’s safer,” he said. He hoped this group could be trusted. He was pretty sure they could, they’d been the ones to send out the radio message, after all. Besides, he’d seen movement in the wood line and knew they had sent troops to flank his men. It had been a bluff about his sharpshooter. None of them had rifles, just a few old shotguns. It was just few dozen bikers and a hundred peaceful farmers. He didn’t want to get into a shooting war with this group. They would mop them up in just a few minutes.
“You’re Dozer?” Gunny asked, eyeballing the name tape above the “President” patch.
“Yeah,” he said. “You reckon this area is close enough to Lakota to be out of the fallout zone?”
“It is,” Gunny replied. He looked at the dozens of pins on the big man’s cut. He had the usual staple of Harley and “live free or die” pins, but he also had an 82nd Airborne and an infantryman’s EIB badge. Dozer saw his eyes wandering across them.
“Them ain’t store bought,” he said. “I earned ‘em.”
Gunny nodded. “Dozer, I appreciate the offer to camp on your side of the river, but I don’t know what’s over that rise.” He pointed past where they’d moved the school bus. The road could be seen for about a half mile, then disappeared over a gentle hill.
“You remember what Reagan said to the Russians, right?” he asked.
Dozer grinned, his smile cutting through the graying beard.
“Trust. But Verify. You know how to ride that thing?” he indicated Sara’s CBR.
Gunny nodded and he said, “Follow me, then.”
Sara told him to help himself, so he walked it across the bridge while talking to the biker, trying to get a little more information out of him.
“I’ll tell ya how we wound up here once you’ve eyeballed the valley, know we ain’t got a trap ready to spring on you,” he said, as they headed for a saddled horse that was tethered on the other side of the bridge. The man swung a leg over effortlessly and took off at a trot. Gunny fired up the bike and followed along behind.
They stopped once they crested the rise and they could see for miles down into a fertile basin dotted with houses and cattle and crops. No ambush set up for them. Just an idyllic landscape that looked untouched by the events of the world.
&n
bsp; He shut off the bike and Gunny radioed Cobb with the CB mounted on it. It was all clear, bring the convoy over and kill any followers.
Dozer dropped the reins to let the horse graze and pulled out a pack of smokes, offering one to Gunny. He shook his head and pulled out his pouch of makings and started rolling his own.
“How did your group wind up here?” he asked. “You don’t really look like the farmer type.”
Dozer laughed. “Guilty,” he said. “But I grew up here. This is a Hutterite community and when I left for Rumspringa, I never came back. Well, not until last week,” he amended.
“Hutterite?” Gunny asked, scanning the valley, not seeing any cars or pickup trucks. “Something like the Amish?”
“Yeah. Same thing, only different. They’re an offshoot. They’re allowed to use a little bit of technology, but no TV or telephones, just machines that make farm life a little easier. And like the Amish and the Mennonites, they’re pacifists. Don’t know anything about fighting. Turn the other cheek and all that.”
Gunny finished rolling his cigarette then leaned over and accepted the light offered by the biker, asking, “Rumspringa like wilding?”
“Yeah. Go out and sow your wild oats before you settle down on your farm, marry the neighbor girl and start raising a passel of young’uns. But I decided I liked the wild life better. Joined the army and learned how to kill people, not turn the other cheek. I’ve been gone for nearly thirty years, but this was the first place I thought of when things went sideways in Dallas. Technically, I’m still part of the community. I’m the last of my family and I inherited about 200 acres over that way.” He pointed off into the distance at some bottomland near the river.
“There’s no place like home,” Gunny said, drawing the smoke into his lungs. “You’re from Dallas?”
“Yeah. We barely got out of the city,” he continued. “At first we met at the club house, we didn’t know what was going on. Thought it was terrorists or something. By the time we realized it was zombies, it was almost too late.” He shook his head. “Fucking zombies. We lost the van that had most of our guns and stuff. Lost about half the guys on bikes. It just got crazy, man. It was a bloodbath. The group got split up just north of the city and everybody knew how to get here, but we’re the only ones that made it.”
The Zombie Road Omnibus Page 46
