Riker's Apocalypse (Book 3): The Precipice

by Chesser, Shawn

  Standing ten feet away, Steve-O heard what Benny had said and launched right into a pretty damn fine rendition of The Champs’ smash hit, Tequila.

  Riker said, “Never saw that one. Is it a movie?”

  Still within earshot, Shorty called, “What fuckin’ rock were you living under during the eighties?”

  “I was in the third grade and busy watching Pee-Wee’s Playhouse,” Riker shot. “Never even knew there was a Pee-Wee movie.” Shifting his gaze to Steve-O, he said gruffly, “Keep your eyes on the road, shit-stirrer.”

  Flashing a pretty fair salute, Steve-O uttered one final, albeit muted, “Tequila!” then went quiet, head back to panning the road and embankments and long tangle of burned-out cars sandwiched between it all.

  Shorty returned carrying a trio of plastic five-gallon cans and the “cool little tool” he had alluded to. It was a hand-cranked pump trailing two lengths of rubber tubing, one about a yard long, the other nearly twice that and dragging on the road behind him.

  “Wish I would have had one of those when we came up from Florida.”

  Grinning, Shorty said, “You swallowed some gas, didn’t you.”

  Riker nodded, the memory of the rancid taste kicking his salivary glands into overdrive. “The second I did I thought for sure I was going to start breathing fire.”

  “Don’t worry, nobody’s swallowing anything,” Shorty promised. He nodded toward the pileup. “Let’s do this.”

  Riker put his hand on the shorter man’s shoulder, stopping him mid-turn. Looking him in the eyes, Riker said, “I didn’t want to say this over the phone. Thought it best to wait until you got here so I could say it face-to-face.” He paused for a beat, then, in a funereal voice, added, “I’m sorry you didn’t find your kids. Even though they’re both grown, I imagine it’s hitting you pretty damn hard.”

  Hanging his head, Shorty said, “Getting turned back before I even got a glimpse of Lake Michigan was a punch in the gut.” He swallowed hard. “But I’m a realist, Lee. Chicago and all points beyond are lost to the biters. Leads me to believe so are New York and Jersey. Unlike what I did after I lost Abby to cancer, completely going off the deep end … I’m going to move on from this. Nothing in a bottle is going to bring my kids back to me, let alone ease the pain of losing them.”

  Always the optimist, Riker said, “There’s still a chance—”

  Pulling away from Riker, Shorty stalked off toward the Tahoe, hose skittering along the ground behind him.

  Riker had nothing to say to that. Sticking to the far left of the narrow shoulder, he followed Shorty through the shadow of the EarthRoamer, down the length of the pileup, and to the rear of the Tahoe, where the man set the empty cans and siphon pump on the ground.

  On the other side of the red SUV, Benny was just rising up from the footwell. Meeting Riker’s gaze, he showed off the newly acquired radio, then displayed the knuckles he’d bloodied in the process of prying it out.

  Caught in gravity’s pull, rivulets of red encircled the man’s wrist and flowed down the jacket cuff.

  The sight of blood acting as a reminder, Riker said to Shorty, “How’d you do that to your hand?”

  As Shorty worked at prying off the Tahoe’s gas cap with a Tanto-style blade, he said, “It’s a long story. Happened when I acquired Marge.” He looked up from his task. “It wasn’t pretty what I was forced to do. I’ll tell you all about it when we get to your place.”

  Taking the man for his word, Riker nodded. “I’m all ears when you’re ready to talk about it.”

  Seeing that Benny was still rooted on the other side of the Tahoe, a questioning look on his face, Riker waved him away, mouthing, “It’s OK.”

  After plucking the empty backboard off the road, Riker stepped over the face-shot fireman and picked up the cumbersome Jaws of Life.

  With Benny on the other side of the barrier and already approaching the ambulance, Riker set off for the fire engine.

  Chapter 14

  Riker stopped at the rear of the Santa Fe Fire Department engine to stow the Jaws of Life and backboard. Finished, he noticed the spooled-out hose by his feet. With the task of reeling it back in untenable—both in respect to the time it would take him and the expertise needed to do so—Riker drew his blade and sawed through the hose, leaving maybe a yard or so of it hanging over the back deck and a steady stream of residual water leaking onto the road.

  Sheathing the blade, he looped around to the driver’s door, where he stopped and uttered a prayer only he could hear.

  After stepping up on the running board, peering inside, and finding the cab free of dead things, Riker opened the door and climbed behind the wheel.

  Glancing at the dash, he learned that the first part of his prayer had been answered. The key was still in the ignition. Icing on the cake was the fact that the driver’s last act had spared Riker the grim task of searching for them in the zombie fireman’s pockets.

  Turning the key in the ignition told Riker that his second and third requests to the Big Guy in the sky had also been heard.

  All at once, the instrument cluster lights lit up and the fuel needle rocketed from Empty to a hair below Full.

  Key in the ignition, battery juiced, and diesel in the tank.

  Three batters up, three fastballs smacked over the right-field wall.

  The one ask Riker hadn’t thought to posit during his silent appeal was that the motor would actually turn over and remain running. Biting his lip, Riker turned the key the rest of the way in the ignition and fed the motor some fuel.

  Immediately the motor roared to life. It rumbled and vibrated the cab as Riker stabbed the accelerator pedal a couple of times.

  From the driver’s seat, Riker had a commanding view. At his one o’clock, roughly fifty feet ahead and adjacent to the pair of dead zombies, Steve-O was smiling and flashing two thumbs-up. Behind the man, the entire run of road—all four lanes of it—showed no signs of movement.

  Knowing his tank of good luck was probably trending contrary to the fire engine’s fuel gauge, Riker consulted the massive side mirrors. Though the reflection was a bit blurred due to vibration caused by the thrumming engine, Riker was still able to see the entire passenger side of the ambulance where, inexplicably, Benny appeared out of nowhere. He was falling backward and being pursued by a wheeled stretcher with a thrashing zombie strapped to it.

  While the stretcher was fully collapsed, its wheels were not locked.

  After hitting the road on its wheels, the stretcher wobbled and bounced and nearly toppled over. Somehow remaining on all four wheels, it continued on, spinning a lazy clockwise circle, the end where the zombie’s head lay on a collision course with Benny’s prone body.

  Fearing Benny was about to get bit, Riker kicked his door open, seized the grab handle by his head, and threw himself from the cab.

  After an off-balance landing that saw Riker planting a hand on the ground to keep from pitching over, he rose up and sprinted the length of the engine, along the way drawing the Sig Legion from its holster. Going left at the engine’s back deck, high-stepping to keep from getting tripped-up on the remaining length of hose, he slipped past the ambulance’s wide chrome grille.

  As Riker squirted from between the vehicles, Benny’s calls for help suddenly rose over the rough-idling diesel motor.

  Still moving at a near sprint, his bionic squealing in protest, Riker made a hard right. Going a bit too fast for the maneuver, he bounced off the ambulance, then hip-checked the cement divider.

  With about twenty feet to go, having just caromed off the freeway barrier and about to get slapped in the face by the ambulance’s right-side wing mirror, Riker saw that things had gone from bad to worse as the occupied stretcher pushed up hard against Benny’s left side.

  Seeing as how the undead man completely filled up the stretcher, ample belly riding over the hip straps, Riker had a sinking feeling that once one set of the stretcher’s wheels had left the back of the ambulance, there was no way a p
erson of Benny’s stature had a chance in hell of stopping it.

  Weighing in at maybe one-sixty fully clothed, and having come to rest on his back with the freeway barrier pushing in on him from the right, Benny was a perfect example of someone caught between a rock and a hard place. To put it in Steve-O speak: Benny was in a pickle.

  Though the hard place was still atop the collapsed stretcher and constrained by the strap across its knees and hips, it still strained mightily against the bonds to get to the fresh meat. With each wild swipe the zombie took at Benny’s upturned face, its lower body inched up on the compressed mattress.

  In the middle distance, still turning the handle on his siphon pump, Shorty was just becoming aware of Benny’s predicament.

  On the ground to Riker’s front, Benny was struggling to free his Glock from its holster.

  On the stretcher, the zombie had gotten both arms free of the blanket. From all the struggling to get to Benny, the zombie had succeeded in getting its upper body rotated damn near one hundred and eighty degrees contrary to the angle of its trapped hips. And like one of those possessed creatures in the independent horror flicks Tara was always talking up, this one’s torso kept on turning until a resonant crackle of bones snapping sounded over the throb of the motor and, just like that, its torso was hanging over the stretcher’s side rail.

  To Riker, still a few feet removed from the melee, it looked as if his friend had given up on going for the Glock but instead was focused on creating some separation between him and his attacker.

  Arm outstretched, the difficulty of the shot making the Sig in his hand seem much heavier than its measly two pounds, Riker bellowed, “Lay flat, Benny!” and threw off the safety.

  No time to inspect the mag or press check the slide to ensure a round was chambered. Riker superimposed the Romeo’s red pip over the zombie’s nose and pressed the trigger.

  On the road, his shirt wet and sticking to his back, Benny found himself in a fight for his life. Head dangerously close to the zombie’s snapping teeth, out of the corner of his left eye, he read the script stitched in gold on the left breast of the zombie’s polo shirt: Chief Hickok - Santa Fe Fire Department. He also noted the blood-stained sheets stuck fast to the undead man’s thrashing lower extremities.

  Though it hadn’t been evident in the ambulance’s gloomy interior, it was clear now that the Chief had suffered severe damage to his legs, leaving them both twisted grotesquely inward from the knees down. Also not visible until coming under the light of day were the multitude of ragged, purple-ringed bite wounds running from wrist to elbow up the Chief’s left forearm.

  Laying there on the wet ground, the fire engine’s rumbling exhaust beating a cadence, Benny was gripped by the fear-filled realization that his only backup this side of the barrier was the person responsible for starting the motor.

  From his compromised position, all Benny could see was the gray sky up above, the passenger side and rear end of the ambulance rising up over his outstretched legs, the Jersey barrier in his right side vision, and the zombie and stretcher crushing in on him from the left.

  A hollow moan emanated from deep within the zombie’s chest. Along with the hair-raising sound came a concentrated stench of death the likes of which Benny had never smelled.

  As Benny was making the split-second visual recon, the fingers on both of his hands snapped open and they came under attack by what felt like a million pins and needles. When he went for the Glock, the numb fingers failed to cooperate. Every time he thought he had ahold on the grip, his hand came away empty.

  Feeling a cold hand fall across his face, he gave up on the Glock, planted both feet on the stretcher, and drew in a deep breath.

  Core muscles coiled, fast-twitch fibers in his quads and calves just receiving the electrical impulses instructing them how to act, a whole slew of things happened all at once.

  While the creaking of the ankle joint of Riker’s prosthesis didn’t register to Benny, the barked admonition and single boom of the pistol discharging certainly did.

  On the stretcher above Benny, Chief Hickok’s head snapped violently up and away. As a shudder raced through the stretcher underneath the corpse, the head was already on the rebound.

  Having just been hit full-on in the face with a spritz of some kind of awful-smelling bodily fluids, Benny was then showered with clumps of brain tissue when the Chief’s mangled face reentered the picture. Welcome to the club.

  Cursing and spitting out sticky clumps of ice-cold who-knows-what, Benny thrust both legs out straight, the action sending the stretcher on a slow roll away from him and freeing his trapped upper body.

  Heels kicking the road and with both hands propelling him backward, Benny scrabbled away from the growing puddle of ooze, shredding the seat of his pants and balls of both palms in the process.

  “What the hell were you thinking?” Riker barked. “You were supposed to get the radio.” Voice softening, he went on, saying: “I warned you that thing was in there. Did it bite you?”

  Extending his hand, Benny said, “I don’t think so. Help me up.”

  Just as Benny was getting his feet underneath him, Shorty and Steve-O arrived from opposite directions.

  Indicating the brains and fluids splashed across the front of Benny’s shirt and parka, Steve-O said, “Isn’t that the second jacket you ruined today, Benny?”

  Winded from running, Shorty slung the Shockwave. Fishing a red handkerchief from a pocket, he handed it across the barrier. Back heaving, hands going to his knees, he said, “What the hell happened here?”

  Benny said nothing as he went to work cleaning himself up.

  Having already spoken his mind to Benny regarding the foolhardy deviation from the plan, Riker said, “Someone forgot to lock the stretcher when they put it into the ambulance. Benny was grabbing hold of it to get inside to check for supplies.” He shook his head. “Thing rolled out on top of him. Could have happened to any of us.”

  Obviously skeptical of the story, Shorty shot a side-eye look at Riker.

  Keeping with the everything is alright, nothing to see here attitude, Riker asked Shorty how the siphoning was coming along.

  “I got about ten gallons out of the Chief’s rig and was about to move the operation over here when you went all Wyatt Earp on this biter here.” Regarding the corpse on the stretcher, he added, “Damn fine shooting, Lee.”

  Grimacing, Riker said, “Steve-O, can you help Shorty and keep an eye on the road?”

  “I’ll be OK,” Shorty said. “I’ve grown eyes in the back of my head.”

  That response drew a curious stare from Steve-O.

  Benny said, “It’s a figure of speech, Steve-O.”

  “No duh,” was Steve-O’s response to that. Regarding Shorty, he said, “Just like on Miss Abigail, the First Mate helps with the gas.”

  Clapping Steve-O on the shoulder, Shorty said, “I missed you, man.”

  “Ditto,” said Steve-O. “You need to tell me what it’s like out there.”

  As the pair walked off toward the Tahoe, Riker said to Benny, “Let’s get that hand patched up.”

  Chapter 15

  “Yes, I can drive,” Benny assured Riker. “I don’t care if it’s cut to the knuckle, I can still flex my fingers.” He held his right hand up and wiggled them to prove his point.

  “Can you still shoot?”

  Benny flexed his trigger finger. “I’ll be fine,” he said, the tone none too convincing.

  Nodding, Riker climbed into the idling fire truck. Looking down on his friend, he said, “Two hands on the wheel. And be careful … Steve-O’s singing and constant stream-of-thought conversation has a way of distracting a fella.”

  Benny flashed a thumbs-up with the bandaged hand, then strode off for the Shelby where Steve-O was sitting shotgun with the Tahoe’s radio on his lap.

  Less than thirty minutes had elapsed since their arrival at the pileup. In just fifteen minutes, thanks to the hand-cranked pump, Shorty’s siphoning o
peration had netted them a combined forty gallons from the Tahoe, ambulance, and two compact cars that had survived the conflagration.

  They had burned the rest of the time collecting a second backboard from the helicopter, looting the ambulance of its supplies and removing its radio.

  As Riker took a few seconds to get acquainted with the fire engine’s controls, he caught a whiff of something dead. It was coming from the crew compartment and reeked like rotten fish.

  If there was one thing that gave the stink of the dead things a run for their money in the gut-churning department, it was rotten seafood.

  Holding his nose, Riker craned and searched for the source.

  Turnout jackets, gloves, and helmets were scattered about the crew cab. On the floor was a thick novel: The Stand by Stephen King. Next to the novel was a battered metal lunchbox and matching thermos. Reaching over the seatback, Riker snatched them up.

  The items went on the seat next to the radio he’d pried from the ambulance. The radio was a long-range unit. Mounted underneath the dash, it had come out of the ambulance easily, leaving his knuckles unscathed and all of the attached wiring intact.

  In the lunchbox along with a baggie bulging with Cheez-Its and blueberry Pop-Tarts still sealed in their foil packaging was a tuna sandwich long past its prime.

  Rolling his window down to dispose of the sandwich, Riker scanned the mirrors. Just coming up on the Tahoe was the lone zombie Steve-O had pointed out some time ago. The thing was a slow mover, yet still it had come a long way since leaving its crawling companion alone on the road north of the pileup.

  In the left mirror, he saw the long stretch of highway spooled out behind the engine. Here and there cars and trucks and SUVs were stalled out. Most had been abandoned on the side of the road, some piled high with belongings, all of them coated with a couple of weeks’ worth of dirt.

  Straight ahead, maybe a quarter of a mile beyond the spot on the opposing lanes where the Life Flight helicopter had made its final landing, both northbound lanes were also choked with static cars.