Zombie Road IV: Road to Redemption Page 16

  To get away from all the people standing around watching them, and to get their minds off of the danger, he finally just told them to load up and follow him. He wasn’t much for classroom teaching. He’d rather show them how to kill the undead with a demonstration. Both trucks needed fuel, so they drained some out of the Merc, and one of them had to be jumped to get started. These people really were on the edge of reverting back, he thought. If the lodge didn’t have the ham radio, in a few more years Jessie could imagine them living life like it was the 1800s. They would be wholly forgotten up here in the mountains and would have quickly reverted to a basic lifestyle. Kind of like the Hutterites, but without hundreds of years of knowledge and practice behind them. They would have had to eventually leave their compound to survive, if they made it at all. Without the trucks, it was a long hike out.

  An hour later they were idling a mile outside of Cascade, the nearest village with a gas station. He had the map spread out on the hood of a pickup and had pointed out where he wanted to make a stand and a fallback position. They were both at bridges on the opposite sides of town. The dead were dumb, they didn’t try to flank you, and they came straight down the path of least resistance. They weren’t concerned about getting shot, but they didn’t seem to like water. They avoided it if they could. The little burg was barely a dot on the map, much smaller than Lakota, and Jessie was pretty sure they could clear it of the milling horde in a few hours, if there were one still in it, if they hadn’t chased some car down the road months ago.

  “Wait here,” he told them, pointing at the first bridge. “I’ll go in and lead the zombies out. They’re pretty slow now, they’ve been out in the weather all winter. Just shoot them as they stumble down the road. Remember, headshots are the only ones that count.”

  They nodded and angled their trucks across the road, using the hoods and beds as a platform to steady their aim. It couldn’t be this easy, they told themselves. The kid had to be wrong, the dead wouldn’t just follow him right into their line of fire. They couldn’t all be slow and shambling like he said. They drew strength from each other, though. None of them were going to let some teenager show them up.

  They got ready and waited as he disappeared across the bridge into town. The water coming from the lake feeding the Payette River was running fast and cold with the spring melts. Once the kid came back through, the zombies should bunch up in the bottleneck on the bridge and be easy pickings. No chance of them getting too spread out. That was the plan, anyway.

  His taillights disappeared around the bend in the road and they waited until the rumble of his engine faded. They could still barely hear him over the splashing of the rushing water, when he would shift gears and it sounded like he was making a zig-zag pattern through the town. Like he was just cruising around. All of them had their heads cocked, trying to hear better, when they heard AC/DC come blaring to life over the loudspeakers in his car. They occasionally heard the squalling of tires and screams of the dried out undead over the music. They followed the sound as it wound up and down the roads, then they all got ready when they heard it coming right for them. The kid grabbed another gear as he drifted around the last curve, and they could see a horde of hundreds right behind him. Some were running, most just stumbling along as fast as they could. Falling, being trampled, and getting back up a little more broken than they had been. They watched a little in awe at what he had done, gathering them all up, pied piper style. He was racing right toward them and at the last second, pulled the handbrake and went into a slide, winding up coming to a screeching halt as he gently bumped into the trucks.

  “Let ‘er rip, boys!” he yelled, then put on a set of shooter’s muffs, released the pins from his M-60, and pulled it around in front of his side window. It hung suspended from the roll cage on a swivel mount, right at eye level out of his driver's window. He charged the handle and started lighting them up, joining the hunters and militiamen already aiming and firing as fast as they could. Highway to Hell was still cranked at full volume, the thundering of the guns unable to drown it out. It drew the undead forward, their husky keens and dried out screams for blood coming closer and closer. The sixty chewed them up and Jessie kept the tracers right at head level, blowing brains and brackish blood all over the pavement. They fell in droves and the chattering of the machine gun kept up until the barrel started turning red. A hundred had dropped, but they were still coming, climbing over the fallen and stumbling ever onward.

  They were halfway across, too many to eliminate before they swarmed them. Jessie cut the music.

  “Fallback to the other bridge!” he yelled and linked up another belt of ammo as they dove for their vehicles.

  The six men and women rushed for the relative safety of their trucks, and took off down the dirt access road that disappeared into the wood line. Jessie cranked the music back up. Next on his Follow the Leader playlist was Black Sabbath, and Ozzy started telling the undead that fairies wore boots. He dropped it in gear and nailed the gas, the tires smoking and throwing the back of the car around so he was aiming straight for the oncoming horde. He had to admit, the old timers had some pretty banging music back in the day. It really set the mood. He plowed into the fastest of the runners, sending them flying in broken heaps over the railing and into the rushing water. The car bounced over the splattered corpses and the big tires churned through rotting flesh, spinning trails of blood and skin and hair along the sides of his Mercury. The Cobra Jet roared louder than the zombies, and almost as loud as Ozzy, when he slammed into the piles of flesh he’d cut down with the sixty. The car launched into the air and landed softly on a carpet of dead, snapping bones and splashing blood for yards. Bob bounced around and slid onto the floorboard, but was back in his seat, barking his head off, adding his voice to the riot of screams and roars of engines and guitars. Jessie jagged the wheel and sideswiped a line of undead with the sharpened mower teeth attached to the cage. Reaching arms flew free and bellies were ripped open. Faces were annihilated and more blood and brains painted the sides of his car. He plowed a path through the middle of the shamblers, butchering and smashing. Cutting and slaying, leaving mangled, broken heaps in his wake. Any of them that still could, turned to follow the music.

  Jessie took a spin around, picking up a few more followers and giving the survivalists enough time to get situated on the bridge at the other end of town. On the second pass of the school, he saw the doors spring open and a swarm of kid-sized undead come boiling out.

  Crap, he thought, as they swarmed toward him, those little boogers are quick.

  They came into the road like fast-moving water, their preteen clothes still colorful and bright. This might get dicey, he thought. He wasn’t too concerned about himself, he would be safe inside the car and he had enough ammo to pick each one off individually if he got stuck. He was worried about the survivalists. This horde would swarm over them, smash right through their windows if they didn’t get away fast enough. You couldn’t fight this many first day zombies with rifles. You’d be overwhelmed.

  Jessie grabbed the emergency brake and slid the back end of his car around in a rubber-screeching power slide. He threw it in first and feathered the gas, not trying to burn rubber, but grab traction and get away. The crowd that had been behind him cut down a cross street following the noise and caught up, reaching out in their slow, stumbling way. Jessie ran them down, amputated limbs, and ripped open bodies with the blades. He cut the wheel hard and powered into another slide down Pine Street, trying to put some distance between them. He could outrun them easily enough, but he needed to secure this town. Those things would be fast and vicious for months. He needed to take them out so the survivalists could get off the mountain and in a better place. During his passes through it, he’d realized the layout was a lot like Lakota. There was a dam they could use for power, and a river snaked around the whole place. The only vulnerability a narrow band of woods, and that could be walled off with trucks or rail cars or shipping containers. They needed this to
wn.

  The school kids were fast and they quickly overtook the broken horde he had been leading to the kill zone. This is what the men and women at the trucks had been afraid of. The day-one zombies, as Scratch called them. The ones that had been indoors the whole time. They weren’t sunbaked and broken and slow. They hadn’t run after prey for days, tearing down tendons and muscles, wearing their feet down to the bone. They hadn’t been feasted on by carrion animals and insects. They had been inside, swaying back and forth or gently bumping around, until they heard something that caused them all to run toward it, slamming into the doors and flinging them wide open. They wanted blood. Any blood would do, but they were after his at the moment.

  Jessie shot over Main Street, ignoring the stop sign, and headed for the dirt roads near the river. He spun around again in the library parking lot and this time Bob managed to hang on, crouching low in the seat. They were ten-wide, screaming down the street, when Jessie opened up with the M-60. He walked the tracers in to head level and sprayed back and forth. Faces caved in, skulls popped, and little bodies went sprawling. There was a tracer every fifth round and he kept the solid lines of red tearing into them until they got too close. He slid the bars up on the window and hit the gas, both wheels spinning out in the dirt and raising billowing clouds of dust. Jessie gunned it down the path toward the river, getting air when he flew across the railroad tracks. He was trying to keep ahead of the screaming little hellions and in open areas so he could get turned and gun down some more. He thought maybe he’d killed thirty or forty with the sustained burst, and probably severely damaged nearly as many. He roared down the narrow lane, looking for a wide spot. He only had to do that one more time, maybe twice, before it was safe to lead the slow ones out to the bridge. The survivalists could mop them up, then he’d show them how to clear house to house. If he could teach them that, then…

  The path ended abruptly as he rounded a bend and he slammed on the brakes, going into a slide across the T intersection.

  “Hold on!” he yelled at Bob, or maybe it was to himself. He watched in slow motion, foot mashing the brake, hands in a death grip on the steering wheel, as he went straight across the path and into a thicket of bushes. He plowed through them and the nose of the car angled down, toward the fast-flowing water. Jessie fought the wheel, trying to angle toward the shallows and not fly out into the deep. The big tires bounced over the rocks and the machine gun slammed against the bars on the window. The river was wide and shallow near the banks, with very little mud. It was mostly sand and gravel in the bed this close to the dam. Waves of water shot up on both sides of the car, washing away gore and old blood, and steam hissed from the headers. Jessie dropped a gear and kept his foot on it, causing the Merc to go into a power slide. He got sideways, a wall of water cascading away from him, and aimed the nose back up the embankment. If he could keep his speed up, he should be able to keep traction so he could clear the top. Get back on flat ground. They hit the hill, plowing down bushes and churning up the grass, and held on for dear life as the old Merc shot up the incline. They cleared the top of the embankment and grabbed big air, the tires spinning across the faces of the screaming horde. The nose of the car came down hard, the oversized shocks and reinforced a-arms taking the brunt of the impact on the undead bodies. Bob went sliding off the seat again, and yelped when he slammed into the floorboard. A dozen undead were crushed under the car and Jessie bounced cadavers off the push bar. Scores of hungry hands reached for him, grabbing for the fresh meat, and he ran them down. The car bumped and bounced over little bodies, knocking them aside as he gained traction again, grabbed second gear, and took off for the bridge.

  There were some that were still fast on his tail when he cleared the roadblock and hit the brakes. The survivalists were quick on their triggers and had most of the runners cut down when Jessie joined them with his M-4. The battle was over in a few minutes and all they had to do was pick off the stumblers and crawlers one at a time. There were a lot of them, but the team was getting good at placing headshots. Jessie went back over to his car and crawled under it, checking for damage. The steering had felt fine, so he was pretty sure he hadn’t broken anything, but wanted to check for busted or cracked welds. He drove it hard on occasion, but this the first he’d been airborne in it.

  Everything looked good, the hybrid Raptor truck suspension his dad had welded in had held up just fine. All the extra plates and bump stops had seemed like a bit of overkill, but he was glad they took the extra time to reinforce everything. He had a better idea of how hard he could push the old Merc, now. She was built like a tank. He just needed to fix something for Bob, so he wouldn’t get slammed around so much.

  After a half hour, they walked in among the dead and finished them off with quick thrusts to the head with their knives. They cleared the gas station and the supermarkets, the men and women growing more and more confident with each kill. It was like Jessie had explained: the dead were predictable, they couldn’t think. If you were careful, if you kept constant perimeter vigilance at all times, you would be safe. If you didn’t make stupid mistakes and worked in teams, you would survive.

  Jessie had made a lot of stupid mistakes in the beginning and he knew he was only alive from pure dumb luck. He’d made one earlier, back at the river, but he’d never been in fear for his life from the zombies. He had a plan B, stay inside the safety of the car, and it would work in nearly every situation. The Mercury was a fortress and he had enough ammo to kill thousands. Enough food for weeks. It only got dangerous when you were on foot, that’s when you had to be ever-vigilant.

  They fueled up their cars and trucks at the gas station, and Jessie replenished his supplies from the grocery store. More chocolate being the most important. As they loaded up their vehicles with canned and boxed goods for the people back at the lodge, Jessie pulled their leader over to the hood of his car and spread out his map.

  “This town is laid out a lot like Lakota,” he said, and pointed out the river on one side and the lake on the other, almost turning it into a two-mile-long island “If you build a wall here, either out of timber like the lodge, or semi-trailers or something, you’d have a pretty secure area.”

  The man nodded and stroked his beard, seeing the possibilities. Once they cleared the houses, it would be plenty safe. It was so lightly populated and there were no major cities nearby, they would be able to start living again, not just surviving in a single, cramped building.

  “We’ll try to talk Colonel Norris into moving down here,” he said. “It’ll be up to him.”

  “Pete,” Jessie said, “the lodge is unsustainable and you know it. If you don’t have anything to trade, no one is going to make the trip up here to bring you anything. Traders have to have a reason. This town can be a new beginning for you. You guys can start a fishing industry or something. My dad is laying out trucking routes and I’m telling you, you want to be on it. If you’re not, you’re completely on your own.”

  The bearded man was reluctant to say anything until the others had moved back inside to get more shopping carts of supplies.

  “I hear you,” he said. “It’s just that we owe our lives to Colonel Norris. If he hadn’t been there with all the freeze-dried food, we never would have made it through the winter.”

  “There’s a new day dawning,” Jessie said, starting to fold the map. “Don’t get left behind. If the Colonel won’t move, think about moving without him.”

  The man looked around quickly to make sure the others weren’t in earshot and lowered his voice.

  “Look, we’re not soldiers. I was a manager at Home Depot, Jessie. I volunteered for this mission because I didn’t have a wife or kids in the lodge. None of us that came do. We thought half of us were going to die, we really did, but we came anyway. We know we need to get out of there and now that we see how easy it is, we’ll convince the rest. The Colonel will come. He’s a good man, just takes a little getting used to.”

  Jessie nodded, understood. People livi
ng in safe areas didn’t want to leave to face the unknown. No matter how bad it was, it was better than being dead. But now they knew, now they had a town that was cleared. They should be all right.

  23

  Jessie

  Jessie was at the Whippy Dip Parlor, a little standalone building with a sign declaring they made the world’s best homemade ice cream daily. He was on the outskirts of some tiny tourist town in the mountains of Oregon. It was desolate. The harsh winter in the high altitudes had done a lot of damage to the undead and the few he’d seen were shambling wrecks that even old Mrs. Parsons back home on her walker could probably outrun. He’d raided a horse stable and a pet shop over the past few days since he’d left the survivalists back in Idaho. He didn’t go back up the mountain to the lodge with them, he wanted to get rolling. Maybe he’d check back on the town in a few weeks if he was still in the area. See how they were doing. Maybe help out a little. He had no desire to go back to the lodge, it was too claustrophobic and the food sucked. The Colonel hadn’t really been all that enthusiastic when he found out there was a working government and fortified towns. Probably thought he might lose some of his people. Jessie didn’t worry about it too much, after his run-in with the Anubis Cult, and the stories he’d heard about Casey, he just chalked it up to the world was still full of petty jerks wanting everything to be done their way. Probably even more than before, because sometimes you really had to be a jerk to survive.

  He laid the hammer and punch rivets he’d been using down on the picnic table and whistled for Bob. He was sniffing around, looking for something to chase or bark at, but came bounding over at the call. The zombies didn’t attack him like they did people, but he’d been scratched pretty badly by a few of them during his attacks, going for their necks on instinct. Jessie was afraid that one of them might get lucky and do some real damage to him, maybe sink their claws into his soft belly, so he was building the Shepherd some armor of his own. Bob sat obediently and suffered through the adjusting and fitting. It was basically just a harness but made out of some durable leather stripped from a horse saddle that covered his shoulders and most of his back with a pliable section over his stomach. Jessie had unscrewed the studs from a handful of collars, sharpened the points, and added them to the back and shoulder pieces. With a wide one around his neck, Bob looked pretty menacing and anything trying to bite him would get a face full of needle-sharp steel.