Just as the crawler was transitioning from dry pavement to wet, the source of the engine noise revealed itself. It was maybe a half-mile out, coming down the highway toward them, moving fast in the same lane as the zombies that hadn’t survived the plunge from the overpass.
Leaning back into the Shelby, Riker dug the Steiners from the center console. He pressed the binoculars to his face and glassed the road ahead, picking up first the charred roofs of the cars and SUVs in the immediate foreground, then, after dragging the Steiners up a degree or two, he had the oncoming vehicle fully framed.
At first blush—judging by the gunmetal-gray rig’s wide stance, high-rising cabover, and multiple amber marker-lights ablaze on the latter—Riker thought he was looking at a big rig, an eighteen-wheeler to be precise.
As the truck got to within a few yards of the pile of corpses, the driver jinked the wheel, causing the rig to follow the same path Riker had steered the Shelby to avoid the falling zombies.
Afforded a better view of the rig thanks to the slalom maneuver, Riker saw it for what it really was: a supersized pickup fitted with an equally large camper shell.
Instantly Riker’s brain was warning him that the rig might belong to the folks he’d stranded on shore so he could have Shorty’s ferry all to himself. Feeling the first pang of worry stabbing his gut, he dredged the image of Tobias Harlan’s rig from memory.
Both pickups were the same color, but this one barreling down on them was much newer, the blue oval on the grille marking it as a Ford, and the badging on the driver-side fender identifying it as an F-550 model. While Tobias’s pickup had been an older model of American pedigree, it shared none of the design cues like the one currently filling up the rectangle of light below the overpass. Furthermore, Tobias’s pickup was fitted with a vintage Caveman shell. While it had also been framed by amber lights, it was a lower profile item, all sharp edges and right angles.
The shell mated to the F-550 was aerodynamic, rounded and slippery looking. Additionally, the dearth of daylight showing between the top of the shell and underside of the overpass suggested it was much taller than the Caveman shell.
The piece that finally convinced Riker this wasn’t the Harlans’ rig was the single word spelled out in foot-high white letters: EarthRoamer.
“Who is it?” Benny asked.
“Not sure,” Riker answered, “but it’s just the distraction we need.”
In the middle distance, their interest piqued by the drone of off-road tires and rattle-clatter of the EarthRoamer’s diesel powerplant, the zombies that had once been locked onto the Shelby were all conducting an abrupt about-face.
When the last of the slack, pale countenances of the dead were facing north, Riker lowered the Steiners and turned his gaze to the zombies coming down the embankment to their right.
Having been unfazed by the appearance of the new vehicle, the zombies picked up their pace. One was male, the other female.
Regarding Benny over the hood, Riker said, “I’m calling an audible. Get back in the truck.”
Retaking his seat, Riker trained the Steiners on the I-25 overpass.
Benny was clambering aboard at the very moment the EarthRoamer emerged from the second of I-25’s dual east/west running spans.
With the gray sky reflected in the F-550’s curved windshield, determining who was behind the wheel was impossible.
As the truck began to slow, two things happened, one right after the other.
First, a horn sounded. Not a single, short I see you, blue pickup kind of thing. Instead, it was a long, drawn-out affair produced by an extremely loud air horn.
Like an air raid siren announcing an impending tornado, it droned on as the rig’s speed bled off.
Clearly, the driver was trying to keep the approaching zombies on the hook.
Then, coming to a complete stop, maybe two hundred feet short of Chief Hickok’s Tahoe and the stretched-out throng of zombies filing past it, the EarthRoamer’s horn went silent and its brilliant HID (High Intensity Discharge) headlights began to flash.
“What the fu—”
Shushing Benny, Riker said, “They’re communicating.”
Benny looked a question at Riker.
Watching the lights as they switched on and off, Riker said, “Three short. Pause. Four short. Pause. Three long. Pause.” He went on like that, calling out the length of each individual strobe until the driver extinguished the lights for good.
Benny said, “What was all that about?”
“Morse code.”
“You can read it?”
Riker nodded. “I was required to learn it to earn my Signs, Signals, and Codes merit badge in Boy Scouts.”
“What’d it say?”
After a soft chuckle, Riker said, “One word: Shorty.”
Hearing that stirred something within Steve-O. He sat bolt upright and clicked out of his seatbelt. In the next beat, he slid to the center of the backseat, planted his forearms on the shared seatback, and locked his gaze on the EarthRoamer.
After a long three-count, his voice adopting the tone of someone who’d just won a game of Clue, Steve-O said, “As I suspected. Shorty does have a small penis.”
Unsure of whether he should laugh or be truly concerned by the subject matter of the first thing said by Steve-O since the man had received the brain facial, Benny looked to Riker for a cue.
Clearing his throat, Riker said, “It has to do with the direct correlation between the size—or lack thereof—of a man’s penis and that of his vehicle. The larger the latter, the smaller the former. Steve-O, here, has his suspicions. And apparently, the fact that Shorty has traded up from the Tahoe he was driving, to the big ass EarthRoamer he is now, is all the confirmation Steve-O needed.” Looking over his shoulder, he went on, “Am I right?”
Steve-O nodded.
Riker said, “My truck is much smaller than Shorty’s. What does that mean?”
One hand covering his mouth, Benny worked hard not to laugh.
Not really expecting an answer to his loaded question, Riker said, “Good to have you back among the living, Steve-O. How was your time away?”
Steve-O sighed. Adjusting his Stetson, he said, “I’m a changed man, Lee Riker.” Jabbing a finger at the pair of zombies coming up against the Jersey barriers near the static ambulance, he went on, saying: “ Those things out there are no longer Sickos. From now on I am back to calling them Monsters.”
Benny dropped his hand to his lap. Again with the questioning look, he asked, “Another suspicion confirmed?”
“Nah,” Riker said, “he’s just coming back around to my way of thinking. Wearing someone else’s brains does have a way of enacting change within a man.”
Again the EarthRoamer’s air horn sounded. A short blap that started the nearest pair of monsters trudging north, away from the Shelby.
As the leading edge of the storm passed and the rain started falling in sheets, the EarthRoamer’s driver-side door hinged outward.
Not needing binoculars to know what was coming next, Riker said, “Step right up, Monsters.”
The zombies did just that, crowding the open door like kids swarming the Good Humor man.
Instead of handing out Bomb Pops or Fudgesicles, Shorty dealt the dead a fusillade of gunfire.
To Riker’s ear, the soft pops drifting down the road were identical to the reports made by Benny’s Glock.
“Shorty’s got the high ground,” Benny noted. “If it was me sitting up in that truck, I wouldn’t have opened the door.”
“If it was you sitting up in that truck,” Riker said, “you would be able to reach over the window channel. The man is called Shorty for a reason.”
“We see eye to eye,” Steve-O said. “But he is still a grown ass man. Don’t you forget that, Benny.”
More gunfire from up the road. Swinging his gaze forward, Riker saw that the zombies were falling en masse. Maybe ten of the original twenty still stood. The ones dropping to the road were becoming an
effective barrier, which forced the ones still on their feet into a single file line in order to get to Shorty.
“We better help him,” Benny said.
The back to back to back booms of a shotgun discharging seemed to contradict Benny’s statement.
“Let’s go,” Riker said, setting the Steiners aside. “Unlike me earlier, he’s firing away from us.”
Holstering his Glock, Benny asked, “Am I still getting the two by the ambulance?”
Riker shook his head. Not only did he see the two zombies staggering away as contained by the freeway divider, but he also saw them as a perfect learning opportunity. An opportunity for Steve-O to graduate from shooting bottles and cans to becoming someone who could be relied upon should the need arrive. While he didn’t ever see the man carrying his own weapon, it would be nice to know if he was capable of pulling the trigger if it came down to it.
Doing so in a controlled environment, well away from Trinity, seemed the best approach.
Riker opened the glovebox. Inside was a plastic case. He removed the case and popped the lid. Inside the case was a small black pistol and box of shells.
He removed the magazine. Empty.
He pinched the slide between thumb and forefinger and did a quick press check. Clear.
Taking a single .22 round from the box, he thumbed it into the magazine, inserted the magazine into the pistol’s magwell, and dumped the Sig Sauer Mosquito into his pocket.
Having been watching intently, Benny said, “You sure about this?”
Dragging his Legion from its holster, Riker said, “After that last episode, I need to know.”
Benny made no further comment.
Meeting Steve-O’s gaze, Riker said, “You ready to bag your first Monster?”
With zero hesitation, Steve-O nodded, saying, “I shall do my best, Lee Riker.”
Chapter 12
Riker, Benny, and Steve-O remained inside the Shelby and watched Shorty finish blasting his way through the herd. Judging by the booming reports rolling down the highway, it was clear he had stuck with the shotgun to put down the last ten zombies, pausing only long enough, Riker guessed, to load more shells into the weapon.
Once the shooting had ceased and Shorty had again retreated back into the EarthRoamer, Riker said, “While I’d like to wait for the storm to blow by, our friends at the prison are in the thick of it.”
Taking that as his cue to get out and do his part, Benny grabbed his parka from the backseat and shrugged it on. Yanking the hood over his head, he stepped from the Shelby.
When Shorty had fired his final shot into the face of the last zombie standing beside the EarthRoamer, the pair of zombies that were to be used for Riker’s experiment had only managed to cover half the distance to the far end of the pileup.
Dipping his head as he passed underneath the drooping rotor blades, Benny skirted around the helicopter’s rounded nose. A quick peek through the rain-mottled cockpit glass told him that no one was home. He opened the right-side door and liberated the small fire extinguisher strapped to the bulkhead.
At the cement freeway divider, Benny leaned his upper body into the open and began shouting and waving the red fire extinguisher at the retreating zombies.
“Hey pusbags!” he called. “Come and get it.”
If the zombies were the bulls, and Benny the toreador, then the extinguisher was the red cape.
At once, in response to the new stimuli, the rain-soaked creatures halted in their tracks.
The male was first to whip its head around and fix its dead-eyed stare on Benny. As the female zombie took notice, the male was already turned around and on the move, arms and legs working considerably well for having no blood pumping through them.
By the time the female zombie had performed the series of movements necessary for its lower extremities to get pointed the same direction as its cocked head, the male had halved the distance to the tangle of cars at the front of the pileup.
Farther down the two-lane, the EarthRoamer was reversing from the drift of face-shot corpses.
Inside the Shelby, Riker was giving Steve-O one last chance to change his mind.
Using a tone he figured Tara would employ—equal measures of empathy and concern—Riker said, “You sure about this, Steve-O? Because I’m good with whatever you decide.”
“I’ll pretend it’s a NERF gun.”
Riker shook his head, vigorously. Tone all business, he said, “You can’t pretend it’s anything but a deadly weapon. This is the real deal. A real gun shoots real bullets made of copper and lead, not foam.”
At that, Steve-O rattled off the four tenets of gun safety, beginning with “Always treat a gun as if it’s loaded” and ending by saying “And always be sure of your target and what is behind it. My target, Lee Riker, will be a Monster and the dirt hill over there will be behind it.”
“Good memory,” Riker said, clapping Steve-O on the shoulder. “You nailed all the rules. Now put on a coat. I think you’ll find one of Tara’s extra waterproof shells on the floor back there.”
Seeing Benny approaching the Jersey barrier with only a red fire extinguisher in hand, Riker unbuckled and elbowed open his door. Fairly confident his friend wasn’t going to lose it again and put a hole through anything but a zombie skull, he turned up his collar and exited the Shelby.
Benny was just out of the male zombie’s reach when it arrived at the point in the road where he’d been waiting. As soon as the snarling creature lunged for him, it received a short blast to the face from the fire extinguisher, its unblinking eyes and open mouth accepting the lion’s share of the powdery, white chemical.
The cold drizzle immediately began to scour the thing’s forehead and cheeks free of the residue.
Meeting up with Steve-O by the freeway divider, Riker plucked the Sig Mosquito from his jacket pocket.
“Benny,” he said, “give it another shot, then make room for Steve-O to work. He’s told me he wants to put this one down.”
Without a word, Benny sprayed a liberal dose of fire retardant at the zombie’s face. Thoroughly blinded, it lunged across the divider, missing everything but the air where Benny had been standing.
Staking a position behind Steve-O, Riker pressed the Sig into the man’s palm. “Just like you did it at Trinity. Aim, throw the safety, finger on the trigger, then press it—slowly.”
Extending his arm, gun aimed at the growling zombie, Steve-O nodded.
Rain cascading off the Stetson wet the gun and sent a constellation’s worth of droplets onto Steve-O’s waterproofed sleeve.
Taking a step closer, the gun hand beginning to waver, Steve-O said, “I can’t see its eyes. Isn’t that where you’re supposed to shoot them?”
“With this gun, yes,” said Riker, as he positioned the shorter man just out of reach of the zombie’s grabby hands. “Just shoot at where you think one of its eyes should be.”
While all of this was taking place, Benny was watching Shorty maneuver the EarthRoamer to the spot on the highway where Riker had driven the Shelby up the embankment. Certain there was no way the man was going to try and drive the top-heavy beast on the incline, but instead was getting it turned around, Benny turned his attention back to the female zombie. Still a dozen yards away, it posed no immediate threat.
Ignoring the revving diesel engine, Riker drew his Legion, then took a couple of steps back to give Steve-O some room.
Rolling his shoulders, Steve-O leaned forward, gripped the pistol with both hands, and drew in a deep breath. As the seconds ticked away, with the zombie blindly clawing the air directly over the barrier, the Mosquito’s muzzle again began to waver. At first, it was just a subtle little tremor. The tremor soon became a full-blown case of the shakes, the barrel carving a huge counterclockwise circle in the air.
Riker was about to throw in the towel and shoot the zombie himself when the single report sounded. And as Steve-O had done every time a gun he was shooting discharged, whether the target be an empty glass
bottle, soda can, or milk jug, he closed his eyes and a shudder wracked his body.
Amazingly, given his inability to keep his hands steady and his eyes open, the lone round struck the zombie an inch below its right eye socket.
Unlike the many items Steve-O had used for target practice, maxillofacial bone was not forgiving. Instead of fracturing and collapsing inward, the angled cheekbone altered the round’s trajectory, sending it plowing underneath the flesh and into the zombie’s roving, powder-coated eye—exactly where Steve-O had been trying to put it in the first place.
Like a marionette with its strings cut, the zombie crashed vertically to the road.
There one second, gone the next.
Most importantly, there was no blowback whatsoever. No spritz of blood and brain matter went airborne. No flecks of bone or scalp splashed Steve-O. Even the caked-on fire retardant stayed put.
It was a clean kill, the bullet remaining inside the skull along with the brains it had just scrambled.
“I did it,” Steve-O gushed as he lowered the pistol.
“Sure did,” Riker said. “Good job. One down, one to go.”
Engaging the Sig’s safety, Steve-O turned to Riker. “Here.” He handed the pistol back, butt first. “The lady Monster is all yours, Lee.”
Given Steve-O’s reaction after being splashed with brains and bone, slipping into a near-catatonic state for the better part of thirty minutes, Riker hadn’t expected the man to follow through with the morbid task. That Steve-O wasn’t aware that the Mosquito’s .22 caliber round would not inflict the same damage to a skull as the much larger 9mm round, and still followed through with the task, told Riker the man had put the brain facial in the rearview mirror.
If push came to shove, Riker decided as he pocketed the Mosquito, Steve-O could be trusted with something other than a NERF rifle.
Deciding to put his own squeamishness to the test, Riker holstered the Legion. With the female zombie just arriving across the divider from him, he dragged the Randall Model 18 from the scabbard on his hip and warned Steve-O of what he was about to do.
Riker's Apocalypse (Book 3): The Precipice Page 8
