The black SUV they’d seen when they were leaving the subdivision, on the way to the mall, was parked in the garage. He thought about taking it instead of the Mercury, but he liked the old car. He wanted to bring it back to his dad, that would sure surprise him. He had almost left immediately to try to chase them down, but knew it would be a stupid move and he kept telling himself; no more stupid moves. There were a thousand roads they could have taken. Instead, he had pulled most of the four-wheel drive stuff off of the Range Rover and bolted it on the Mercury. He didn’t care if it looked dumb. This car had saved his life, he knew enough about it to keep it running, and besides, it was a stick shift. A dead battery wouldn’t mean you were dead in the water. He didn’t need four-wheel drive, he wasn’t planning on going mudding, so if he had something up front to protect the radiator and some sheets of metal over the windows, he’d be safe in it. Besides, his old man loved this car. He’d be happy to get it back.
Jessie stripped the tin from the roof of the carport and covered the side and back windows, just leaving slits to see through. He didn’t have electricity for the welder, and the battery was run down on the drill, so he had to punch holes with a nail and screw it all on by hand. He stole the wheels off of a Jeep a few blocks over, and the oversized tires fit nicely, after a little fender trimming with a pair of tin snips. He had the most trouble with the windshield and finally settled on the big iron headboard from his parents’ bed. It was a fancy job, with lots of ornamental scroll work, but after he hacksawed the frivolous stuff off, he was left with a heavy-duty, barred, windshield protector. He set the ends up on chunks of firewood and ran over the center of it with the car to give it the proper curve. He laboriously drove holes where he needed by using nail after nail, until he finally got one to punch through the metal, then held it all together with drywall screws and zip ties.
He found some more ammo and a few guns, after closer searches of neighboring houses and with a couple of spare gas cans, he was ready to go.
That was yesterday. Today, Jessie had the music blasting in his ears from the iPod, steering with one hand and feeling better than he had in days. He didn’t sleep much, just catnaps, but the black cloud of guilt was finally starting to fade and there were times he could almost forget.
He nearly missed seeing the kid running out of the brush toward him, only just caught him out of the corner of his eye. That was enough for his mind to process what he saw, instantly, though. Bedraggled boy, maybe ten or twelve, careening through the last of the kudzu hanging from the trees and waving his hands frantically at the passing car.
Jessie hit the brakes.
He came to a hard stop, the Merc rocking back on its shocks, and hopped out, shouldering Gary’s M-4. The kid stumbled to his knees over the vines, looked over his shoulder and whatever he saw in the woods made him scramble back to his feet and continue running toward Jessie. He didn’t even notice the gun pointed in his direction, or if he did, decided what was behind him was more dangerous than what was in front. They came pouring out of the woods after the kid, a few dozen runners, screaming and getting caught up in the kudzu vines that were covering nearly everything at the edge of the woods. Jessie popped off a few rounds when he had good shots, but didn’t waste any ammo. He didn’t have enough to spray and pray.
“Hop in, kid!” he yelled and dropped a few more of the screaming undead struggling through the vines. The boy made it to the door and wrenched it open, throwing himself inside. He was breathing fast and hard. Huge gasping breaths came from his tortured lungs as the sweat poured down his dark face in the October heat of central Alabama. Jessie hopped in and dropped it in gear, leaving the running horde behind him. He looked over at the frail-looking kid, still struggling to suck air into his lungs, still not believing he’d been saved from the monsters. Jessie was looking for blood. Looking for signs of a bite.
He didn’t see any and relaxed a little. The kid had a close call, but he’d be okay.
“We have to go back,” he finally said, when he could speak without the heaving gasps.
“If you outran any of your friends, they got taken down. I mean, those zoms were right on your tail,” Jessie said, not sugar coating it.
“No, back at the Home,” the kid panted. “We’re surrounded, the kids made a bunch of noise up front so I could get out, but the monsters outside the fence saw me.”
Jessie slowed the car down to sixty while his mind raced. Forgetting about them wasn’t an option. How many times had he hoped and prayed for someone to come along and lead the pack off when he was trapped? They had waited for days in the trees, and no one came. He was surrounded in the strip mall for days, too. It didn’t take much to pull a crowd of those things away and make them follow. He didn’t know how much the car could take, though, plowing through a horde of them. The gold brush guard he’d mounted off the Range Rover was better than nothing, but it wasn’t like it made the car invincible. When he’d plowed into a few of them leaving Atlanta, they still did damage to the car, and had bent the guard a little. He was leery of trying to run down hundreds of them. He needed a semi-truck for something like that, and he didn’t know how to drive one of those.
“How many of you are there?” Jessie asked, expecting a reply of two or three. Maybe a few more, if a couple of families were holed up together.
“I don’t know,” the kid answered. “I think about thirty, if you count the Sisters.”
“Sisters?” Jessie asked, not following the kid's train of thought.
“Yeah, Sister Mary and Sister Andrea are still there. We’re all out of food. Father Rupert went after some a few days ago, but he never came back.”
“Wait a minute,” Jessie said, swinging into the parking lot of a volunteer fire department sub-station. “Are you an orphan? Are you talking about an orphanage?”
“Yeah,” the boy said. “Saint Sophia’s. You ain’t heard of it?”
“I’m not from around here,” Jessie said, watching the mirrors for anything running up behind them. “What’s your name, kid?”
“James Robert Jones,” he said, and stuck out his hand. “Pleased to meetcha. But the Sisters call me Slippery Jim because they say I can wiggle my way out of anything. What happened to your face?”
Jessie had to grin, which still hurt, at the kid’s name and brashness. There was a redneck joke in there, somewhere, about a poor Alabama orphan named Jim Bob Jones, but the kid seemed earnest. The nuns were right, too. He’d slid past a horde of them and was smart enough to know they’d be slowed down by the kudzu.
“Alright, Slippery Jim,” said Jessie as he shook with him. “I’m Jessie and zombies happened to my face. Let’s find us a safe place and we’ll figure out a rescue plan.”
Not seeing anything running up behind them, Jessie grabbed a crowbar and sprinted for the door of the fire station. He banged on it, but didn’t hear anything screaming at him from the other side. A few quick twerks with the four-foot bar and the door popped open. Jessie sprang back, his Smith and Wesson already out of its holster and pointed into the gloom, but the sub-station was empty. So was one of the bays, so he threw open the door and hurriedly backed the car in, telling Jim to get the overhead door down fast.
They quickly laid a few lockers over to block the door and wedged them in place tight against the office wall with stacks of training manuals. Once the building was secure, they ran up to the loft and watched carefully out of the windows, waiting for the runners to show. After another five minutes, they did. Sprinting down the road, following the sound of the car long gone. They waited until the last few, that were stumbling along on broken or shredded legs, shambled by before they started looking around, taking a quick inventory of the place. Other than the old forest service pickup truck in one of the bays, there really wasn’t much else. No food stores. No barrels of water. Just random firefighting equipment.
Jessie went to the desk and tore a page from the calendar blotter and flipped it over.
“Draw me up a diagram of t
he orphanage,” he said. “Make sure to show all the roads in and out, and what kind of defenses you guys have.”
While the kid worked on his map, Jessie prowled around the small building. It was basically an oversized garage with a few offices in the half loft upstairs. Not much more than a gathering place for volunteer firefighters to train, or meet in the event of a fire in the Talladega Forest. He found a few axes on the truck, but couldn’t think of a use for them. Too slow and cumbersome to kill zombies. Maybe if there was only one or two, but they always seemed to run in packs. All the ones he’d seen, anyway. He grabbed his siphon hose and cans and started on the pickup. Might as well get something out of this place.
When he finished, Jessie leaned against the door and watched the kid work. He had his tongue stuck between his lips in concentration, his dark skin still shining with sweat. His hair was cropped pretty close, although the afro was growing out. He was rail thin, maybe twelve or thirteen years old. He looked up and Jessie tossed him a piece of beef jerky. He caught it one-handed and tore the wrapper off, smiling his thanks. After a few more pencil strokes, he turned the map around to face Jessie.
“This is it,” he said. “There’s only one road in and it’s all gated, but they’re wide open. All the zombies are inside the fence.”
Jessie looked at the drawing. It was pretty crude. The kid wasn’t going to be an artist when he grew up. It showed a large, rambling house in the middle of a meadow, with a circle driveway and small parking lot. The whole area was surrounded by a short wall, topped with a wrought iron fence. Even from the drawing, it looked a little creepy. Like something from a horror movie of some abandoned insane asylum.
“How many zombies have you guys trapped?” Jessie asked. Maybe he could shoot them if there weren’t too many.
“Maybe a couple hundred,” the boy said. “They’re everywhere, all around the building.”
“What!” Jessie exclaimed. “How? We’re in the middle of freaking nowhere!”
“Father Rupert said it’s all the people from the Talladega racetrack,” Jimmy said. “He said if they started chasing somebody down the road, they’d eventually wind up at our place.”
Jessie nodded. Made sense. If there were a race going on, there would have been a lot of people there.
“What’s this?” Jessie pointed to a building on the back fence, farthest away from the orphanage.
“That’s Mr. Keeler’s garage. He’s the lawn mower guy. He keeps the tractors and stuff in there.”
“And this?” Jessie pointed to a strange roundish thing the kid had drawn.
“That’s the gas tank for the lawnmowers and bus and stuff.”
“Bus?” Jessie asked. “You guys have a bus?”
“Oh, sure,” Jimmy said. “For when we go on field trips and stuff.”
“Where is it parked at?”
“Right there, silly,” he said, pointing at another misshapen rectangle.
It was next to the garage along the fence. Jessie was starting to get a plan together in his head. He looked at Jimmy, munching on his second piece of jerky. “Can you drive?” he asked.
The kid shook his head. So much for Plan A. Jessie stared at the map and the gears in his head whirled.
“You got any more?” the kid asked, holding up the empty jerky package.
“Yeah, back seat. Help yourself. There are cans of ravioli and spam, too. Eat one of those if you’re hungry.”
The kid was gone in a flash and Jessie went back to studying the map he’d drawn, and the battered old road atlas he’d pulled from the car. By the time the kid came back, he had a new Plan A.
6
Jessie
Slippery Jim had never held a gun before, but with only a few minutes of instruction, he knew enough to be deadly. He knew where to point and what to pull to send a bullet into a zombie head. Jessie didn’t bother teaching him how to reload. If he needed more than 15 rounds, he was dead. He knew what to do if needed, but if all went to plan, he’d never have to pull the trigger.
Jessie eased back up the road to where he’d picked the kid up and stopped to let him out. They fist bumped, but there was nothing more to say as the boy closed the door quietly and slipped back into the woods. Jessie took off for the driveway a half mile up the road, keeping a light touch on the gas pedal, trying to keep the noise down. Keep the header cackle to a minimum. He wanted to get at least halfway through the looping drive before he opened it up and made some racket. Halfway to safety before he caught their attention and then drew them away.
When he idled through the bottom curve of the loop, he saw them pause in their incessant beating on the doors and walls. Their blackened, undead eyes turned to stare, their attention focused on the quiet rumble. A lot of them were wearing tattered NASCAR shirts of their favorite racers. One guy had his beer hat on, with a couple of cans of Bud Light still in the holders. He hated them and felt sorry for them at the same time. How was that even possible? Jessie took a deep breath, smiled his painful smile, and pushed in the clutch.
He nailed the gas pedal, watched the tach jump up into the red zone and listened to the screaming, deep-throated roar of the Cobra Jet. There were four hundred and twenty-eight cubic inches of barely-tamed Detroit muscle straining to be let loose. Jessie gave them free reign, side slipping the clutch just like his dad had shown him years ago. He’d said every man needed to know how to tie a Half Windsor Knot, how to look a man in the eye when you shook his hand, how to change a flat tire, and most importantly, how to do a proper burnout. After Jessie had put an old set of tires on the Merc by himself, they’d gone out and burnt them down until the metal cords were showing. Jessie hadn’t forgotten.
The tires instantly barked their rubber-on-pavement squall, and the back of the car started sliding gently to the right, white smoke rolling. He feathered the gas, keeping just below redline, and snapped second gear. He couldn’t hear the scream of the undead over the thunder of the motor, but he saw them all start sprinting toward him, sensing there was fresh blood inside the noisy, smoking box. The big block Cobra Jet engine put out over four hundred horsepower in its stock form, when it came from the factory some thirty years before he was born, but his dad was a mechanic. He never left anything stock. Six hundred prancing horses galloped under the hood and Jessie let off on the gas, reining them back in. The undead were coming at him fast and he needed the tires to grip, not sit there and spin until he popped them. They were hot and sticky now, white smoke still rolling off them, and when he slammed the pedal again the car launched. The first of the reaching hands found their way through the cloud of smoke but scrabbled uselessly along the sides. Jessie watched the mirrors and they all fell in line as he led them down the long, tree-shaded drive and back out to the main road. He paused at the end before he turned and revved the motor a few times, making sure even the slowest of them knew where to find him. The cackle from the headers filled the quiet afternoon as he eased out on the clutch and led them away at a steady twenty miles an hour. He had a long way to go before he came to the turnoff that would let him circle back and get around the horde. Hours of slow driving. He’d keep crawling along, leading them, until he was only a few miles away from the turn before he gave gas and lost them. Hopefully they wouldn’t know he changed directions and would keep running straight until their feet fell off.
Slippery Jim waited until after he heard Jessie peel out and the last of the monsters had started chasing him, leaving the grounds empty of the howling nightmares. He quickly shimmied down from the roof of the garage and ran toward the rambling, oversized mansion. He didn’t see anyone at the windows he could signal to let him in and going to the front doors would have been useless, they had so much stuff stacked against them, it would take a hundred years to move it out of the way. He ran to the gutter pipes that he’d come down a few hours ago, making his way back up to the roof and through a window in one of the many dormers. Jimmy flew down the stairs and burst into the reception area, startling everyone who was watchi
ng out the windows at the last of the crawlers making its way down the driveway.
“James!” Sister Andrea nearly shrieked, her hand fluttering over her chest, the flowing sleeves of her habit flapping. “You nearly gave me a heart attack!”
“We’ve got to go!” he said, breathing hard. “Jessie said they might come back. He said we can get the bus and go to Oklahoma.”
It only took him a few minutes to show them Jessie’s old road atlas with Lakota marked on it, as he told them about the capital city that was safe. It only took the Sisters another minute of hurried discussions to decide to go. They were out of food, they had no running water, and Father Rupert had been gone for days. He had joined the masses of undead, there was no other explanation.
With the efficiency of the military, or a strict Catholic school, the children were quickly lined up with their meager possessions and, after ensuring the path was clear, they were running for the bus.
Their maintenance man always kept the equipment in good condition and the old Bluebird was no exception. It was full of fuel, ready for the next field trip, and fired up instantly. Without waiting for it to warm up, Sister Mary took off out of the drive, avoiding the slowest of the crawlers that had turned back toward the new noise.
“Where are we meeting this Mr. Jessie fellow?” she asked as they held on, rounding the last curve and getting on the two-lane road.
“Uh. I don’t know,” Jim said. “We didn’t talk about that. Probably down at the firehouse, where we planned all this out. It’s a good place and we can park the bus inside.”
Sister Mary frowned slightly. This didn’t seem to be a very well thought out plan. She’d have to have a talk with this Mr. Jessie fellow about that.
7
Casey
Casey slowed the Mustang as he neared the Davies prison gates and took another pull from his flask. The euphoria he had felt leaving McAlester had long since worn off. He’d almost decided against coming. He’d tried to find a place to hide out for a day or two, but those dead things kept coming around. He had to keep moving, had to keep trying to find empty places with none of those creeping things. He couldn’t sleep, either. He was afraid they would break in and he wouldn’t hear them until it was too late. In those restless nights, he decided his whole gang idea was dumb, they wouldn’t listen to him. Sure, he was able to boss those pathetic drunks around, but he was going to a prison that had killers and bank robbers and gang-bangers in it, real hard-core dudes. Davies wasn’t some minimum-security country club place for white-collar criminals and guys like him, who transferred there for good behavior. These guys would see right through him. They wouldn’t do what he said. They might even make him into one of their bitches. But after a week of fitful sleep and continually looking over his shoulder, he decided he didn’t care. He had to either take over and run the show, or maybe just fall in line and do what he was told. He couldn’t deal with this by himself anymore. He needed to be in a group. It was too scary out here alone.
The Zombie Road Omnibus Page 69
