As they approached one of the last strip malls, they saw a vast horde gathered around a Kwik Mart. They weren’t in a frenzy, they were just milling around, waiting. Someone was inside. Someone alive, or the mob wouldn’t be so tightly packed, still mindlessly drawn to living blood. Something was keeping them in the area.
“Pull in close, lead them off?” Lacy asked, searching the parking lot for any sign of the old Merc.
Phil didn’t answer, just made sure he had a clear route out of the parking lot, then hit the gas. He had gotten used to dealing with the mobs, and they didn’t scare him much anymore, as long as they had the protection of the RV. The turbocharged diesel instantly responded, leaped forward through the intersection and into the strip mall lot. He kept the speed up, zipping past the horde as they all turned to give chase. Their keening drew the rest that were behind the building and they spread out for nearly a half mile, the runners reaching and pawing at the rear bumper. The slowest of them were crawling along as fast as they could on broken limbs, or in one case, a teenager’s paralyzed legs. Sheila was near the front of the pack, one of the newest turned, her shrieking the loudest of them all. If Lacy had looked carefully, she would have recognized her multi-colored jacket she had gotten at a flea market. It was now hard to identify through all of the blood covering it, though.
Phil lead them a few miles out, holding the speed to about twenty-five so he wouldn’t lose any of them, before he made a sharp turn and floored it, heading back in on a parallel street. The RV was tough, but he didn’t want to test out just how tough by plowing through hundreds of the undead.
“Gotta be fast, Miz Lacy,” he said, as he pulled back into the parking lot, “they’ll know where we’re at as soon as we start shooting.”
Lacy was already locked and loaded, a pistol at her hip and one of Johnny’s “horse traded” shotguns at the ready. As soon as the Earth Roamer came to a halt, she had the door open and was running for the entrance of the Kwik Mart. There were dozens inside, unable to find their way to the exits until she was right in front of them. She didn’t have time for this, the horde would be back in minutes, and she simply didn’t have the time to pick them off one by one as they came out. She shouldered the Saiga drum-fed .410 shotgun and started pulling the trigger.
Whenever they went to the range together, the boys had usually finished out the day with a “mad minute”, as Johnny called it. They would line the loaded guns up on the table and shoot at the targets as fast as they could, not concerned with accuracy but in just trying to expend as much ammo as possible, in the shortest time possible. She always thought it was silly and a waste of money, but boys would be boys, and they certainly liked explosions and loud noises. She’d usually be sitting in the truck waiting for them to finish up, her earplugs still in. Now she understood where such an exercise would come in handy.
The glass exploded and heads started snapping back as the pellets from the shotgun caved in faces. The .410 didn’t kick hard and was easy for her to control. She didn’t have to be a crack shot to hit the target, either. The shells she’d loaded were number nine birdshot, hundreds of tiny pellets in each one. Phil ran up beside her and they poured a withering hail of lead into the screaming, clawing, mass. The shelves were mostly bare, the junk food dislodged and trampled underfoot, after days of milling zombies bumping up against them. The bullets tore right through them and shattered the glass doors of the coolers, sending cans of soda and bottles of beer spraying. The push bar in the center of the doors kept them from leaping over the falling dead and storming out. They piled up quickly as the two continued pumping round after round into them, exploding heads and sending blood spraying for yards into the store. The pile of them was nearly waist high when the screaming inside the store stopped and Phil turned to the parking lot, the first of the followers already streaming in.
“Jessie!” Lacy yelled into darkened store. “Anyone there?”
“Yes!” she heard a muffled reply. “I’m in here! In the bathroom!”
She didn’t see any of the undead moving around and yelled back, “Come on! Hurry up! It’s clear!”
She was hoping against hope it would be her son running out to greet her, but it wasn’t. It was a lanky, half-starved looking teenager that was leaping over the fallen undead toward her.
Phil swapped magazines then opened up with his M-4 at the closest of the runners. He moved to position himself on the sidewalk, near the safety of the RV, making sure they had a clear path.
“We gotta go!” he yelled. “They’re coming fast!”
“Hurry! Hurry! Hurry!” Lacy shouted, urging the boy as he scrambled over the piles of rotting corpses. Blood and putrid liquids squirted on him, squishing through his fingers as he clawed his way over. She turned, aimed at the runners, and started pulling the trigger again. The Saiga bucked in her grip with each shot fired, but she kept pulling, kept splashing heads and sending bodies flying backward.
The kid finally tumbled over the pile of bodies and sprinted for the open door of the Earth Roamer, diving in and leaving trails of gore behind him.
“He’s in!” Lacy yelled at Phil and they both leaped for their doors, slamming them shut in the faces of the screaming mob pouring into the lot and surrounding them.
“GO, GO, GO!” she yelled and grabbed an AK as they started slamming into the truck, rocking it. She didn’t know how many rounds were left in the .410, but noticed it was getting pretty light.
Phil floored it, the tires barking on the pavement as he plowed over dozens of the runners, the big Ford rocking as it crushed bodies that fell under the oversized wheels.
They cleared the parking lot and Phil kept the pedal down, aiming for the open road.
“The mall,” Lacy said, trying to hide the bitter disappointment in her voice. “We need to check to see if Jessie is there.”
“Jessie?” the boy said from the back. “Jessie Meadows?”
Lacy spun on him, her heart racing. “Yes, you know him? Have you seen him?”
The boy started to say something, saw her eager look and stopped, his mouth still open, but nothing would come out. He knew her from the pictures hanging in the house. He recognized this RV from their raids on the neighbor’s homes. She was Jessie’s mom.
“Well?” she asked, prompting him, her voice urgent.
Doug licked his lips and dropped his eyes. How could he tell her? What could he possibly say? Your son, my friends, are dead because we were bored and wanted some energy drinks. He hung his head and his shoulders started hitching. The days of fear, the adrenaline-charged escape, the idea that he had made it, he was alive, hit him suddenly. This whole thing was his fault. It had been his idea to go raid the mall. When he thought he was going to die, too, it wasn’t so bad. They would all pay for it. But now he was safe, and the person who had rescued him was Jessie’s mom. How could he tell her? How could he admit it?
“Were you at the house?” Lacy asked. “Where are the rest of them? Are they still in the store?”
She grabbed him by the shoulders and started shaking, “Where are they?”
He could only shake his head and cry even harder as he looked into her eyes, the tears and snot running down his face making him look so much younger than his seventeen years. Like a child again.
“I’m… I’m sorry,” he managed to choke out between great, hitching breaths. “They’re… none of them…. They’re...”
He couldn’t finish and he didn’t have to.
Lacy closed her eyes, swallowed hard, and accepted what she’d been feeling for days. Her heart went out to this boy, who had probably watched it happen. He had been with them on their hunt for drugs, she told herself. They left the house to get medicine. Probably antibiotics, and had been trapped at the convenience store. Maybe it was Jessie they had been trying to help, maybe it was his blood she’d found staining the t-shirt and splattered on the deck. She decided she didn’t need to know. Not knowing was better. He was gone. She had answers. She didn’t need th
e details. She pulled the boy into her embrace and he cried unashamedly on her shoulder as Phil piloted the RV west, toward Oklahoma.
2
Jessie
Jessie’s eyes sprang open from the afternoon nap he was taking. He found it hard to sleep at night, he kept dreaming of people. He dreamed of Porsche, and how she looked up at him as he shoved a spear into her face. He dreamed of how Sheila looked, how she smiled, and how everything had changed in just a matter of seconds. One instant she was urging them to hurry, then she looked surprised, then she was screaming as undead teeth sank into her. He hadn’t seen Doug or Gary die, and those dreams were never the same. Sometimes they died fast, with their heads being torn off, sometimes they died slow as their guts were ripped out a handful at a time. But Sheila always died the same: Screaming with the thing he had pushed off of himself and onto her. Porsche died the same, too. Except in the dreams, she was never a monster. She was always looking at him the way he knew her in life. Beautiful and smiling, her brown eyes dancing, before he broke out her teeth and rammed the spear through the back of her head. Every time he drifted off, they died again.
Something different had woken him this time, not the dream. Had he heard something? He was sprawled out in the office of the rehab center, on one of the big leather couches. He had the headphones in and was listening to Twenty-One Pilots on the iPod he’d found in one of the drawers. He stretched and yawned, rotating his sore arms and bending his legs to loosen them up. With nothing to do all day long, waiting for the mob to disappear, he’d started working out. For the past few days, that’s all he would do for six or seven hours a day. He tried to exhaust himself so he wouldn’t dream. It didn’t work.
His old man had told him once that he used to do a thousand pushups and sit-ups a day when he was in the Army. At the time, Jessie had been unimpressed. Now he was trying to match it, there was nothing else to do and he knew he needed to toughen up. His face and hands were healing again. He didn’t do any pull-up type exercises, but there were plenty of other things he could do with all the equipment. He wished there was a swimming pool, that would have been nice, but there wasn’t, so he made the rounds on all of the other pieces of machinery a few times a day.
He had a plan, for what it was worth. He was going to get fit, get recovered, and drive to Lakota. He had enough food and water for maybe a month in here, if he rationed, and surely something would lure those things off by then. If not, he’d been playing around with the exoskeletons. He figured in a few weeks, if the undead were still here, he’d start trying to figure out a way to attach the arms and legs and make the whole thing zombie proof. It was a crap plan because he had tried to get up off the floor with just the legs and found it nearly impossible. He couldn’t imagine getting knocked down in the parking lot and having a hundred dead things piling up on you. He’d probably be like a turtle on its back. That was Plan B, though. Plan A was merely walk out the back door to the car, once all the zombies wandered off.
He heard it again over the music. He pulled an earbud out and listened. It was gunfire! He leaped up and ran out of the office, heading for the front doors. He could hear it clearly now, it sounded like the bark of an AR and the heavy boom-boom-boom of a semi-auto shotgun. Jessie craned his head, trying to see down to the other end of the strip mall, where all the noise was coming from. He couldn’t tell what was going on. He looked for the knob on the door so he could open it an inch or two, but it was a key lock. SHIT! Why hadn’t he noticed that before? He ran back to the office and started searching for a keyring. He didn’t remember seeing any when he was prowling through the drawers, but he hadn’t been looking for them. Now that he was, it occurred to him that there probably wouldn’t be any. Whoever had the keys had used them to lock up from the outside.
“SHIT!” he said again and looked around the room. The windows were fixed, they didn’t open. How could he have been so stupid to have been here for so long and not have an escape plan?
Fire door.
Out back.
He ran into the maintenance room, then stopped just as he was getting ready to push it open. He didn’t have a weapon. He was in a pair of shorts with no shoes and no shirt.
“STOP!” he screamed at himself. “Stop. Think.”
He stood at the door, breathing hard. Afraid to open it and rush out, afraid to wait for another minute while he got dressed.
What if they left?
What if you run out there and cut your foot to bloody ribbons on broken glass?
He forced himself to take a step back.
No more stupid moves.
No more stupid mistakes.
He collected his thoughts then ran back to the office, slipping into his shoes, throwing on a shirt and grabbing a couple of one-pound dumbbells off the rack. Excellent brain bashers if he needed them. He ran back to the door and put his ear to it, trying to hear if there were any directly outside. He didn’t want a repeat of what happened when the door flew open at the Kwik Mart. He couldn’t hear anything so he pushed against the bar with his hip and waited to bust in the skull of anything that tried to force the door open.
It was quiet behind the buildings, he could hear them all giving chase to a diesel engine as it disappeared down the road. He almost stepped out, but remembered at the last second and grabbed the door before it could close.
I thought you weren’t going to make any more stupid mistakes, Stoopy McStupid face, he chastised himself, then grabbed a towel from the shelf. He dropped it in the doorway to keep it from latching, looked around quickly to make sure it was still clear, then ran for the Mercury.
He saw the M-4 Gary had been using laying near the rear wheels and tossed it onto the front seat. There were dried puddles of old blood on the ground and patches of it staining the interior of the car. Sheila’s pistol still lay on the seat, she hadn’t even been carrying it, that’s how confident they had been. He put all that out of his head and jumped in, pumped the gas a few times, pulled the choke and turned the key.
Nothing.
He wasn’t surprised, the radio had been playing for days. He threw it in neutral, got back out, and after a quick look around to make sure he was still alone, put his shoulder into the door frame. He pushed hard, straining, the old Ford was heavy, but once it got rolling it moved easy. There was just the slightest downhill grade but it was enough. He got it going pretty good and jumped in, dropped the Hurst shifter in second and popped the clutch. The big Mercury bucked and sputtered and he put it back in neutral before she ground to a complete halt. He hopped back out to push some more, get some more speed up. He grunted with the effort, and shoved for all he was worth, fear and desperation making him strong. The end of the building was coming up and he didn’t want to be exposed trying to do this out front, and he sure as heck didn’t want to push it back up the hill to try again. He jumped in, jammed the clutch to the floor, slammed second gear and let his foot slip off the pedal. She bucked once, then roared to life, the throaty exhaust snarling out that unmistakable American Muscle rumble. Jessie gave it gas and careened around the end of the last building, picking up speed through the parking lot. The horde had followed the RV out toward the mall so Jessie went the other way, dodging around an old man who was barely pulling himself along. It felt good to be free again. He grabbed second gear and started angling toward home, taking a long and roundabout way. He made sure he wasn’t followed.
Jessie had a better idea of what was happening now. Days of strenuous exercise, the mindless repetitive lifting of lumps of metal, with nothing to distract his mind from thinking about the problem, had made him realize a few things. They hadn’t really discussed it before, they’d just done anything to take their minds off of their losses. They’d played games, they’d snooped through neighbor’s drawers, they’d decided to go to the Mall and go shopping. They’d paid the price, though, for being willfully ignorant. He knew now, thanks to the radio message from his dad, that somebody had caused the outbreak. It wasn’t just some random bir
d flu virus, somebody had poisoned all the meats. Something like that didn’t happen at local levels from some nut-job, it was huge, it was nationwide. Probably worldwide. They had sat around playing games, biding their time. No one said anything about it, but they probably all thought the grownups would somehow fix the problem. Sooner or later the army would kill all the zombies and start rescuing people. Now he knew different. He knew there wasn’t going to be any help coming, no rescue teams. The only way to survive was to save yourself.
3
Gunny
Gunny shouldered his pack and started walking toward the locomotive standing ready outside the barrier. He passed his old Peterbilt as he moved down the driveway toward the wall and paused, taking it all in. He rolled himself a smoke as he remembered the past month, the battle scars on the old 359, and how each one got there. The missing rear tire on one of the tandems that had gone flat and peeled off somewhere along the way, when there was no time to stop. The cracked aluminum wheel on the rear that had broken when he hit the concrete wall, when he and Collins had flung his trailer off while sliding sideways at 50 miles an hour. The busted lug nuts on the front wheel. The bent and broken blade up front, that had plowed its way through countless undead creatures and abandoned cars. The crushed sleeper and headache rack from the jackknife. The holes in the roof from where Scratch had stabbed through it to hang on during a desperate escape in the Salty. The missing battery box step that Tommy had cut off the first day, and he cursed every time he had to climb in or out of the cab.
She’d been a good truck. She’d supported him and his family before the fall, and had taken him to 48 states over the years. He hadn’t been to Alaska with her, he never could book a load that paid enough going up. Everybody said he’d have to bounce the twenty-five hundred miles back down to the Evergreen before he would find freight. There was a puddle of oil leaking out from the transmission, and her road days were over. Time to be put out to pasture, there were other trucks to make the supply runs. Newer and not so banged up.
The Zombie Road Omnibus Page 67
