The Zombie Road Omnibus

by David A. Simpson

  Daniel crossed the Canadian River a dozen miles south of Lakota in another U-Haul pickup. He’d never noticed before, but the little rental agencies were everywhere. The keys were easy to get, and the trucks were always full of fuel.

  He was getting close and he wasn’t sure if he had gotten here fast enough, that delay in Missouri had cost him days. He could see heavy, black smoke on the horizon ahead of him. The battle had already started.

  Daniel was watching the billowing smoke as he drew closer, looking to see if there was fire dancing in it. Trying to determine how bad the situation ahead of him was going to be. He slammed on his brakes at the last second, barely avoiding an old blue Mustang that came tearing out of a dirt road. Daniel slid toward the shallow ditch and bounced through it, skidding to a halt and killing the engine as he bumped up against a telephone pole. He watched as a steady stream of cars came out of the dirt road, all heading for Lakota. Most were driven by women, and they weren’t wearing head scarves or burkas. They weren’t Muslims from the looks of it, they must be going to join the battle on the good guy's side. He started the truck back up and slipped in behind the last car as it came out and took off up the road, chasing the sounds of war. He could hear it now, the occasional boom and flash of explosions, of rockets or grenades. He heard the steady hail of small arms fire and the rapid machine guns chattering, and he didn’t know which side was winning. The cars merged onto the main road and when Daniel looked to his left, he nearly swerved back into the ditch again. There were thousands of zombies running as fast as they could down the railroad tracks, heading straight for the sounds of battle. They were spread out and stumbling and falling over the uneven rail bed, but they were coming. Never stopping. Never tiring.

  He looked over his shoulder and the horizon was black with them. At the rate they were running, the lead elements would be at the town’s wall in fifteen or twenty minutes. Daniel rode the bumper of the car in front of him, urging it to go faster. If they had a plan, it better happen fast and without a hitch.

  49

  Gunny

  Gunny opened up while he was still at a full run, spraying bullets into the group of radicals that were jumping out of the trench and running for a freshly blown hole in the wall, now that the chain gun was silenced. They dove to the ground and crawled quickly back toward the safety of the dry moat. The men and women with him started firing and the Muslims were caught in the crossfire from the wall. None of them made it back. The ex-cons ran hard, out of breath and gasping for every lungful, but the element of surprise was up. They had to make the ditch before the Muslims figured out what was happening, or they would be caught out in the open.

  Gunny made it first and rolled in, coming up firing, sending a dozen men dancing before they understood what was happening. Within seconds, Casey and the others were jumping in and adding their own lead to the mixture. Gunny knew Griz and his team was opening up on the other side of the train. The noise was deafening in the confined space, but Gunny didn’t hear it, he had shifted into battle mode, everything extraneous shut out. His eyes darted, found targets, pulled the trigger. There were hundreds of radicals in the trench, stretching out in both directions.

  Most of the prisoners went to the right, he took the left with a handful and they ran straight into the fray, teeth bared, guns barking, eyes narrowed. Gunny took the lead and they fell in behind, mopping up anything he left living. When the first magazine was empty, he had the next slapped in the well before the spent one hit the ground. His barrage of bone-shattering bullets cleared a path, with curtains of blood showering frightened, desperate faces. The Muslims returned fire, but there were too many of them, in too confined a space. They were shooting each other and he was jumping over falling bodies he hadn’t killed. Gunny put two rounds into the chest of a black-bearded man screaming Allahu Akbar over and over until his lungs blew out of his back. His last gasping action was to reach blindly at Gunny’s M-4 and grab the barrel in a death grip, ignoring the sizzling of his skin as it melted on the red-hot muzzle. Gunny let it fall, had his Glock out and up and spitting death, breaking heads without breaking stride. He put a round into the face of a snarling man and used his body as a shield, making the others hesitate long enough for him to send them collapsing backward, with 9-millimeter chunks of hollow point ripping through their chests. An explosion rocked the trench, sending him flying, and dirt rained down. One of them had pushed the trigger on his LAW when a bullet tore through his forehead.

  Gunny’s ears rang and the smoke was nearly impossible to see through, and the fog of war worked to his advantage. They had to make sure they were shooting at the right person, not one of their own. All he had to do was kill anything that lived. They were all enemy. He shook his head and threw himself back to his feet, drawing his Gerber. He ran at the hazy wall of bodies and carved his way through them, the blade finding eye sockets and jugulars. Kidneys and femoral’s. He dove when he saw guns come up, watched flame wicker over his head as he sliced through Achilles' tendons, or plunged the eight inches of steel through knee joints. He was quiet, fast, and efficient, ignoring the screams of pain and fright all around him. Ignoring the “Allah Akbars” shouted in panic or the dua prayers begging for mercy. He cut into them all, the acrid dust and smoke obscuring everything, blinding them to everything except the fury of the angry American, as bellies were laid open, skulls were shattered and throats were slit. Shaytan was in a high blood-lusting frenzy, and the supplicants to whet his blade were legion.

  The sound of rockets exploding had finally stopped, from both sides of the trench, only to be taken up by the fast and heavy chatter of AKs that the Muslims preferred. The screams of the wounded and dying could be heard for miles and the undead hordes sensed they had living meat, and lots of it, just a short way ahead. They ran as hard as they could, clumsy feet stumbling over the tracks and rails, falling and reeling. Trampled by others, ankles broke, wrists snapped and hair was jerked out in clumps, but they kept coming, relentlessly chasing the smell of spilled blood in the air.

  Gunny rammed his shoulder into a desperate man trying to reload his rifle, fear making his fingers dumb. The wind rushed out of him as they slammed into the wall of the trench and the man felt a rib crack. He never felt what killed him though, the long blade sliding in and out before his brain even registered the prick of pain. His heart was speared and sliced in half with finely honed American made surgical steel. The man didn’t know why his knees buckled, or why he couldn’t make his hands reload so he could shoot the crazy, blood splattered Yankee in the back as he raced off into another group of men. He never felt the blood trickle down his belly, just wondered why he was so tired all of a sudden.

  Gunny was at the end of the trench, just a short distance from the lake. He was at the end of the wall that was closest to his house. He heard the roar of car engines and their drivers running down any of the jihadis they caught out in the open, fleeing for their lives and breaking for the cover of the wood line. Trapped between an unrelenting barrage of bullets from the Americans who didn’t know how to quit, the blood-frenzied men and women diving into their ranks, the cars circling and chasing them down as they ran, and the uncountable horde of zombies that could be seen now, they knew all was lost. They threw down weapons as they ran, anything to gain an extra ounce of speed. It didn’t do them any good. They were dead and they knew it.

  Madam President knew it, too. When the second chain gun had been silenced, she climbed out of the bathroom of the rear locomotive and ran to the engineer’s seat. She had to get away, she had to get this thing moving. She stared helplessly at the controls, looking for a key or ignition switch in the mess of tangled wires and shot up computer screens. It was hopeless, the train was dead, too.

  Daniel bounced over a man running for the woods, his black-bearded face showing surprise as the rental truck’s plastic grill exploded when his head crashed through it. There was a hiss of steam as the tires spun over the lifeless body and the radiator started spraying out a
fine mist of antifreeze. He kept going, aiming for the very end of the wall that disappeared into the lake. He’d spin around there and head back, picking off stragglers. Extracting his revenge. He skidded to a halt a few yards before the water and turned, only to see a blood-soaked man with just a knife for a weapon leap out of the trench and run toward him. There were a handful of equally fearsome men and women behind him. Before he could punch the throttle and run them down, he recognized the dirty blonde hair and the grinning face.

  “Gunny?” he asked incredulously. “Is that you?”

  “Hey, Daniel,” he said, as he jogged up to the truck and looked over the hood. The first of the zombies could be seen as they came down the tracks out of the woods.

  “I need you to get to the main gate. I promised these people and their cars safe passage through town. They have to go now, before there are too many zeds. Get them out of here.”

  “Roger that,” Daniel said as they started climbing in the back.

  “What about you? You need a lift?”

  “No. I’ve got some more business to take care of,” Gunny said. “Go.”

  Daniel hit the gas and started honking his horn at the nearest cars that were still running and gunning down the panicked and chaotic Islamic Army that was fleeing for the trees, and maybe the safety of the lake.

  Gunny scanned the immediate area, looking for Casey. He still owed him a death and he meant to pay in full today. The rest of the prisoners he didn’t care about, most of them may be decent people if they didn’t have a man like Casey in charge. He needed to nip this problem in the bud, right now, while he had a chance. He ran for the trench and jumped in, landing on the back of a gut shot man and hearing it snap. The man cried out, but Gunny barely heard. He picked up a discarded AK as he ran and checked the action. The magazine was almost full. He put bullets into any radical he saw that was still moving, that still had a gun in their hands, but there weren’t many. The cons that had been following his path had done a thorough job. He came across a few of the prisoners, but they were beyond help. He jogged on, searching for Casey as he heard the tooting of horns and the sounds of the cars picking up their fellow inmates, then racing for the gate. The shouts of joy and whoops of delight could be heard over the slamming of doors and the revving engines. For many of them, it was the first taste of battle and they had won a fast and decisive victory. They were celebrating life.

  Gunny was starting to think Casey had gotten away, there was no sign of that bald-headed bastard.

  50

  Casey

  Casey ran along the dining cars in a crouch. They were shot up like swiss cheese, not a window intact, gashes and tears in their aluminum sides from the mini-guns Blood seeped through the floors and dripped onto the tracks. He was trying to make his way along to the back of the train. This day wasn’t turning out the way he’d planned, but that was okay. If he couldn’t have this town, nobody could. He was going to get to the rear engine, he was going to fire that bitch up, he was going to cram the throttles wide open and just ram the other trains blocking the track right through the wall. They were already repairing the breaches the camel jockeys had blown in it with sandbags and big rigs. The Muslims had tried to be careful, they didn’t want to lose the town to the zombies. Casey didn’t give two shits. He just wished he could see the look on Little Miss High and Mighty’s face when he busted a huge, gaping hole into her precious little town. A hole big enough to drive a train through. He snickered at his little joke. Let the zombies have it. He hoped they ate her slow. Stupid sheriff deserved every bit of what she was going to get. Everybody else, too, for letting her run him out of town.

  He heard that distinctive cackle of headers before he saw his Mustang and grinned to himself. He waved Lucinda up toward the last engine, indicating where he wanted her to go. She flashed him a smile and gave gas. She loved driving Casey’s car, it had so much power and with all the roll bars welded to the outside, she felt invincible. She had run down three of the bastards fleeing for the wood line. It felt good to hear their pitiful screams, see them break as they were crushed by the brush guard and feel the car bounce over their filthy, murdering bodies. For every one she slaughtered, she thought of Cindy and tried to remember her as she was in life, not as a strangled, blue-faced corpse. She would never be able to kill enough of them to even the score.

  She pulled to a stop by the blasted engine. The mini-guns had really done a number on it. Diesel had soaked everything from the shot-up tanks, and there were thousands of holes punched through the cab. It looked like a giant can opener had been used haphazardly. She looked back for Casey, what was taking him so long? She could see the horde getting closer, she could make out individuals now in the lead, that stood out from the mob behind them.

  Casey had seen the damage to the engine and knew his plan wasn’t going to work, but he spotted something on one of the corpses. He smiled. He had himself a better plan. He had himself a Plan B, as that peckerhead Gunny would say. He struggled to free the rocket launcher from the dead man’s hands and quickly looked around for more. When he glanced under the train, he could see the main gate about a half mile away and his crew was already going through it. He could hear the screams of the undead getting closer. For now, he was out of time, he had to go. He took off toward the Mustang, but a frumpy, silver blonde woman came running down the steps of the shot-up locomotive and started screeching at Lucinda. She had a gun in her hand.

  Casey almost laughed, and probably would have if the situation weren’t quite so dire. Lucinda was being car-jacked in the middle of a war zone, with ten thousand zombies only minutes away. Lucinda threw up her hands and started pleading for her life. Until the middle-aged woman shoved the gun through the open window and yelled at her to get out. Lucinda quickly grabbed it, twisting it out of her grip and breaking the woman’s finger in the process. She really screeched then, in pain and rage.

  “Do you know who I am?” she shouted, cradling her broken finger. “Do you have any idea who I am?”

  “Yeah, bitch. You’re zombie food,” Lucinda said and slid over as Casey threw a right hook at the screeching woman, knocking her to the ground. He tossed the rocket launcher in the back seat then hopped in behind the steering wheel. In all the chaos, in the middle of the blood and guns and mayhem, he realized he wasn’t afraid. He wasn’t paralyzed with fear. He felt invincible. He actually felt good in the midst of the carnage. He felt alive!

  The zombies were close, they could smell the blood and their keening was filling the air.

  “I’m the president!” the woman shrilled at them. “I’m the president! You can’t do this to me! This wasn’t part of the plan!”

  “Everybody has a plan until you get punched in the face,” Casey laughed at her as he pushed in the clutch. “Better start running.”

  He reached for the door to pull it shut and looked at her closer. She did look familiar, he’d seen her on TV, on some of the news channels. CNN or Fox or something.

  “Well, now,” Casey said, giving her a wicked grin. “A President! Ain’t that something? Me and you’s gonna have a little fun. Get in.”

  He leaned forward in the bucket seat and pulled the seat lock so she could climb in the back.

  She looked at him, at his bloody hands, his scraggly beard, his bald head and crude prison tattoos, and suddenly she was afraid. She backed up against the train, more afraid of him than death at the hands of the zombies. Lucinda watched, her tongue darting out between her lips. She was right about him. She knew it. He liked it rough and rapey. Knowledge was power, and she knew just how to keep him under her control now: with girls that wouldn’t be missed, their used-up bodies carted out in the middle of the night. She knew his dark little secret and she knew as long as she kept him happy, she’d always have a seat at the head of his table. The others didn’t need to know, this was a thing that some would ignore, but all would talk. What he did in private needed to stay private and now they were a team. Or they would be, as soon as she dr
ug that fancy-ass bitch into the car for him.

  She only had a minute, the zombies were getting closer and Casey was just sitting there, still unsure of himself. Still not the Warlord she could help him become. That was okay. She’d handle this. Every strong man needed a stronger woman to have his back. She jumped out and ran around the car, grabbing the woman by her hair. She screamed and Lucinda drove a fist into her nose, breaking it and splashing blood down the front of her thousand-dollar blouse.

  “He told you to get in the car, bitch!” she yelled, rabbit punched her on the side of her head and shoved her into the back, a hard boot to her ass to help her along. “When Casey tells you to do something, you do it! You need to be taught a lesson, bitch? He’ll teach you! He’ll teach you good!”

  She ran around to the other side and slid in. She noticed Casey’s tiny erection and it confirmed everything. She reached over and gave it a little squeeze.

  “That’s right, Mrs. President. Casey is gonna have to teach you a lesson,” she beamed at the cowering woman. “You’re gonna learn to do what you’re told.”