The Zombie Road Omnibus

by David A. Simpson

  Bastille had his video cameras, and like an actual war correspondent, was capturing the horror of the undead and the fierce determination of the survivors. He filmed it all: the thunder of the guns, the screams of the zombies, and the gunpowder smoke curling around everything. After they had spent weeks trying to train him with different weapons, Griz and Collins had given up. He was more of a danger to everyone else than he was to any zombies. It was a one-sided battle. The forces of the undead were sustaining heavy losses with the Lakota team still at full strength. No casualties incurred.

  The killing field stretched out nearly two miles. It started a little past where they had stopped hours ago and went all the way to the wall, the bodies getting thicker the closer they got. By the time Julio’s engine made it to the barrier, the dead were only straggling in, limping and dragging uncooperative limbs at odd angles. The sun was getting low in the sky and each trip from the train to place a container was now taking long minutes. They had unloaded nearly 400 of them, working at top speed, never resting. They stretched for nearly a mile in one direction and two in the other. The first layer of the short side was complete. The path they had laid out dropped off sharply to the water and teams already had row after row of barb wire strung on the hillside and far out into the lake. They would devise something better in the coming days, but with a guard or two for now, this would be effective. Both men were working on the long side now, enclosing the farm and stacking along the county road for a while until the path turned and headed back for the shoreline.

  When the first half of the train was empty, they disconnected the engines from it and left them attached to the two hundred cars still loaded. Julio put it in reverse and rolled them back down the tracks for a few miles, making sure there was enough room for the rest of the train as it started inching its way out, one railcar at a time.

  It was an arduous process. Everyone was exhausted and their ears were ringing. The 2nd Battle of Lakota, as Stabby started calling it, was over. The dead were spread out in the thousands. Most of them from McAlester had ignored Gunny’s single locomotive and followed the noise of the train. Men, women and children. All of them in varying states of decay and clothing. All of them with holes in their heads, leaving the faces that weren’t obliterated wearing a grim mask, permanently fixed in a snarl.

  34

  Gunny’s Return

  As Gunny was approaching the rail yard, the bodies of at least ten thousand splattered, broken, and shredded zombies lay behind him. Even with that success, he still wished he had planned this out a little better. If he had a railroad map, if he knew where these tracks led to, he’d take a chance and try to get the rails switched and send the train rolling slowly out into the desert. Let it pull ten thousand more out there and then run out of fuel. But he didn’t know. If he chanced getting out of the cabin and forcing the rails over, it might only lead him to a dead end. There was no way to tell. By the time he rolled slowly into the rail-yard there were only a few following him. He eyed the fuel gauges and saw there were nearly two thousand gallons left between the tanks. More than enough to get him back home. Ideas of leading massive herds of them out to the desert to wither away and die would have to wait.

  His arm was killing him. He wanted to get Stacy to look at it and make sure there weren't any threads of cloth, or any other debris, in the hole before it started healing up and he wound up with gangrene. He slowed to a halt, switched back to forward gear on the electric transmission and started rolling back toward Lakota. He built up speed, but kept it at 50. He did a lot more killing on the way. He couldn’t believe it was this easy, slaughtering them by the thousands. He had thumbed through one of the operator's manuals to pass the time and found out just this locomotive engine alone weighed over four hundred thousand pounds. It could carry five thousand gallons of diesel and the twin turbo engine put out nearly five thousand horsepower. No wonder he couldn’t feel the bodies flinging themselves against it, or being sliced up under the steel wheels. There had to be a way to work this to their advantage. They were going to have to keep a few of these loco’s inside the wall and ready to make some noise if they ever had a massive horde bearing down on them. Theoretically, they would be able to draw them away. They were unstoppable and easily defended. With a little armor over the windows and no drunken idiots with a death wish shooting at you, one of these things might even be a good way to get to Atlanta.

  When he came back through McAlester, he kept the speed up and stood in the little bathroom at the back of the cabin, watching out of the broken windshield. Anyone wanting to take a shot at him wouldn’t have much of a target. He didn’t want to crouch down on the floor, the safest spot, because if those numbskulls blocked the track with some cars or something, he wanted to see it coming so he could brace for impact. He didn’t see any sign of them though. There was still a good number of the undead wandering the streets and they made a beeline for the train as it thundered through. He wanted to get about twenty miles outside of town, out in the country. He could stop the engine there and he’d be far enough ahead of the followers to be long gone by the time they showed up. Lakota would only be another five miles down the tracks. With a little luck and a hard jog, he would make it back before nightfall.

  Just as he was getting ready to start slowing down, he saw the tail end of a train far ahead of him on a long, straight stretch of track. He instantly throttled it down and reached for the brakes. Thank goodness he wasn’t running at night. With the headlights shot out, he would’ve plowed right into it before he even knew it was there. This meant at least half the wall was in place. Four hundred containers had been on this half of the train. He knew they planned on pulling empty cars outside the wall, but hadn’t expected them to go this far out of town. He got it stopped in plenty of time, nudging it all the way up to the back of the other engine, then went through the shutdown procedure.

  Gunny tried to go out of the front door, but it was blocked with something so he ran back to the rear and climbed down. He adjusted the set of the bugout bag on his shoulders and started a slow jog along the median toward town. When he went past the front of the engine, he saw why he couldn’t get the door open. The catwalk and stairs were piled high with broken bodies and various arms and legs. The train was painted in gore, dripping with peoples’ insides hanging from the railings and safety chains. He looked away and picked up his pace. “Would have been nice if they left me a car,” he complained to himself, then set his mind to block out the pain in his arm that jolted with every footfall.

  The carnage started miles from the wall, from where they had begun shooting them from the train. Bodies were everywhere and by the time he came to the last empty rail car, it was getting harder to dodge them along the tracks. They were stacked up and strewn everywhere. He spotted an old county road through the trees and took off toward it. As soon as he cleared the last of the woods, he called himself a couple of different kinds of dumbass and started walking up the driveway across the street. The one with the gray Buick sitting in it. He should have thought of this earlier, saved him a half hour of running. He approached slowly, utilizing what little cover there was, using the last of the waning light to make sure nothing was going to jump out at him. He crouched against the back of the car, peering around it, then stopped. He shook his head then stood up. “Old habits,” he thought to himself and banged the butt of his rifle on the trunk.

  “Hello the house,” he called out. He heard a snarl coming from inside and approached the porch carefully. Nothing was moving around in the yard so he banged on the door. When he heard the body thump against it and start pounding, he judged it to be a grown male, only one, so he took a step back, brought up the M-4 and fired a burst through the wood at head level. It hit the floor with a thud. The door was unlocked and he pushed it open, shoving the body out of the way, his pistol at the ready. The only thing deadly in the house was the stink. It was killer. Gunny started looking for a key holder or dish and found one hanging inside the pantry door.
He grabbed the set with the Buick keys then started for the door to get away from the smell of dead flesh. He changed his mind halfway there and diverted for the bedrooms. He was here, might as well check for guns. This was Oklahoma, after all. The man was obviously a bachelor and a quick check of the closets didn’t reveal a safe. The drawer in the nightstand rewarded him with a Ruger P95 and a box of 9s to go with it. “Not bad for three minutes’ work,” he thought, then nearly ran for the fresh air.

  The old Buick fired right up so he flipped on the lights and backed out of the drive. He wondered if they had time to build the gate system yet, or if he was going to have to climb over.

  When he pulled up a few minutes later, the headlights illuminated the killing fields for as far as he could see. The wall stood formidable in front of him. Stretching hundreds of yards to his right and to the edge of the reservoir until it dwindled off in the distance, to his left. No gate, though. It was still only a single stack of boxes in this area and he didn’t want to pull the car up close and climb over with it. If he could do it, some zed wandering in might be able to. It was a moot point because he saw a couple of guards jogging along on top of the wall toward him. They could give him a boost up. They had radios and within a few minutes, there was a car coming to pick him up. He was glad because he was tired, in pain, and needed to find the Sisters to take a look at his arm.

  Cobb and Collins came in the doctor’s office while he was cursing under his breath and trying to breathe steady, but the stabbing pain was intense as Stacy probed the hole in his arm.

  “Quit crying and be still,” she told him. “I gave you an anesthetic.”

  “Well, it sucks,” Gunny said through gritted teeth.

  “What happened?” Cobb rasped, an unlit Lucky Strike in the corner of his mouth.

  “That asshole Casey,” Gunny said. “They set up in McAlester. When I came back through, they were on a rooftop. Shot up the train.”

  “Did you get any of them?” Collins asked.

  “I was too busy hiding from like five hundred bullets aimed at me,” Gunny retorted, a little annoyed at the question.

  “I wonder if he knows about the ammo plant, if that’s why he went there,” Cobb mused. “If he does, we need to beat him to it.”

  Gunny hadn’t thought of that. It wasn’t just bullets at the plant. They made grenades, rocket launchers, mortars… nearly everything except nukes. The walls they built were fine for keeping the zombies out, but if Casey really had gone off the deep end and wanted them all dead for some reason, the whole town could be blown off the map.

  Cobb could see the dawning of realization in Gunny’s expression.

  “Yep,” he growled. “It’s a working military base, too. Even if he only broke into the arms rooms and got some .50s, he could machine gun us into submission without having to break out any real ordinance.”

  “Anybody know if he was ever in the military?” Gunny asked. “Did Liza interview him and those clowns he’s with to get their job skills?”

  “I’ll check,” Collins said and she left, heading to the courthouse to see if Liza and her laptop were still there.

  “No permanent damage,” Stacy declared and moved aside to let Sara wrap and tape the wound. “You’ll have a big pucker scar, the hand will never be as strong, but it’ll function properly.”

  35

  Night 18

  After he had been patched up, Cobb took Gunny on a tour of the wall. The ride was relatively smooth for a dirt path. There was a man with a shovel leveling out the furrows the giant fork trucks made when they spun in place to set the containers tight against each other. They were doing whatever they could to smooth the ride of the Big Reds. The last thing they needed was something breaking on one of them. In the glow of the headlights, it was a formidable barrier, nearly three miles long. He could see guards patrolling the top of it and they waved, welcoming him home. Word had spread quickly that he’d made it back. A little shot up, but still full of piss and vinegar. There was only one main road leading in and out of Lakota, and they were planning on building a sally port style gate at both ends to allow people access. With that system in place, the Sisters could make sure everyone coming in hadn’t been bitten. It would also give Liza the perfect opportunity to interview them. Find out their skills and learn a little more about them. They didn’t need any more madmen, or drunken idiots like the men Casey had brought with him.

  When they came to the train tracks, there were probably a hundred containers or more stacked three high in rows. Once the wall was all the way to the water on one side of the tracks, Jimmy Winchell took his stacker and just started unloading as fast as he could. They wanted to get the train out of the way to seal off that entrance.

  The first layer of the wall on the other side of the tracks stretched all the way to the water, also. The town was situated on a peninsula, jutting almost five miles into the reservoir that was fed by the Canadian River. Although it was isolated, it had become the county seat because of the dam and its hydroelectric plant. Now it worked to their advantage. Like the Hutterite community, the natural lay of the land would help keep them safe. For the moment, they had trucks blocking the road that crossed the dam and led out of town, but they would work on a sally port for that as soon as they finished the wall.

  Gunny was impressed. Cobb and Collins had organized the men and women and everyone had performed nearly flawlessly. They had only lost one man, Cobb told him.

  “He slipped on some spent brass. Fell over the edge. It was like shooting fish in a barrel for the most part, though,” he added.

  “We got lucky,” Gunny said. “I didn’t think so many would follow the trains in. It drew them from all over. It was the only noise that could be heard for miles. That was one of the eeriest things about the city. It was so quiet.”

  “Luck had nothing to do with it,” Cobb said as he dodged around the stacker heading back for another container. “We had an intelligent assessment of the battlefield space and planned accordingly. We executed the way we were supposed to and the victory was a foregone conclusion.”

  “You sound a lot like Carson, now,” Gunny said.

  “I guess it might have been luck that you were in the last engine and decided to run off and get yourself shot,” he conceded. “That took a lot of pressure off the wall before we had a chance to get most of it in place. You probably took a thousand of them with you when you headed back to Dallas.”

  “Speaking of which,” Gunny said and gingerly worked his fingers. “I’ve got some payback to give. They’re cowards and I want to catch them before they’ve disappeared. They’re probably still trapped in McAlester from all the zeds we stirred up there.”

  “Lovely,” Cobb said and fired up the Lucky as they got out of the truck. “You can call it a revenge mission, I’m going to consider it a preemptive strike before they figure out how to get their hands on the ordinance at the base.”

  They looked out over the reservoir in the moonlight. The General said it had six hundred miles of shoreline and was over a hundred thousand acres. It was life: an abundant food source, plenty of fresh water, and a natural barrier.

  “Has Carson mentioned anything about my family?” he asked. “Any more pictures of them?”

  “No,” Cobb replied. “They still get shots of the house every day and they notice little things, like the grill lid being open one day and closed the next, but nothing of your wife or kid.”

  Gunny nodded. They were fine. Probably using the grill to heat up canned goods. Maybe even some fish if the way were clear down to the lake. It had been over three weeks since he’d left home with a load, headed up the Eastern Seaboard, then grabbed that load of lumber. It seemed like a lifetime ago. He knew he was one of the lucky ones, though. How many of the other drivers here even knew if their families were alive? How many families were whole that had joined the convoy? Everybody had lost somebody and they weren’t bellyaching about it. Lacy and Jessie were safe. They could hold for a while. He needed
to take care of business here so there would be a town to come back to when he got them.

  It was nearing midnight and the wall was nearly complete. Tomorrow they would start building sally ports. Tommy already had some ideas about tearing up some train tracks from a spur and welding some railcar axles to a container so it could roll back and forth. It would be infinitely stronger than any metal gate he could build. They hadn’t thought about having problems with other survivors, only the jihadis from the Mosques coming after them. They didn’t know for sure what type of firepower the Muslims had, but were hoping it was only small arms. If it wasn’t, they needed to get to the munitions plant and get some heavy ordinance. Gunny had some ideas for that, too. But first things first. He was tired, his arm hurt, and he wanted a few stiff shots of Gentleman Jack before climbing in bed.

  36

  Preparation

  Days 19-23

  They spent the next few days improving defenses. Tommy and his mechanics were tireless and the moveable gates for the Sally ports were built at both ends of the county road leading into town. They left the empty railcars on the tracks outside the wall. They didn’t construct a gate for the train tracks, but the containers could be moved with the stackers, if needed. They had started building guard towers on the wall every quarter mile to provide shelter from the sun and rain. Wire Bender had asked for Liza to send a crew out to get telephone lines from the nearby roads outside the walls. He didn’t want to strip the infrastructure they had because he was pretty sure he could figure out how to get the phones working again. He wanted the miles of wire to string along the guard towers, so they would have communications without depending on walkie talkies and CB’s. They dug another pit for all the dead, then started digging a trench a hundred yards outside the container wall. This was a project that would take a while, but the sooner started, the sooner finished. They wanted to dig it deep and wide and connect to the lake on either end. Tommy had some ideas for building a drawbridge using the steel from a few of the railcars. One more barrier. They knew the wall could withstand thousands all at once, but if a huge horde of them got started in their direction, for any reason, it wouldn’t withstand the millions from Dallas or Oklahoma City. They had the locomotives to send out to draw them off, but they didn’t want to rely on them so heavily. They were machines and could easily have a mechanical failure. So, they dug the trench. Another layer of protection.