Zombie Road IV: Road to Redemption Read online

  Gunny rolled a few more times and finally managed to draw his pistol. He was breathing hard, mostly from the shock and adrenaline-fueled fright he’d just had, not from exertion. He watched their clumsy attempts to come after him, the few that managed to stay on the roof. They stood on unsteady legs, took a step and fell, unable to compensate for the slope. A few were crawling as fast as their withered arms would allow, jaws snapping in anticipation. They didn’t anticipate the boot to their face, though, and they followed the rest over the edge. The waterfall of undead slowed to a trickle and Gunny took a second to look around. The others were all staring, guns at the ready.

  “This works pretty good,” Gunny yelled. “You guys should try it.”

  Griz shook his head and holstered his gun.

  “You go, girl. Think I’ll pass,” he said, watching the broken dead try to crawl back into the house.

  Gunny closed his eyes and realized that it had worked out pretty good, desperate fall and all. At least a hundred of the zeds were now so broken, they weren’t much of a threat. He sighed, stood, and then readjusted his armor. It had worked well at softening his falls, the modified plastic football and soccer pieces serving double duty.

  He keyed the mic to tell them of his new idea, but they all shook their heads or held hands to ears. He checked the two-way attached to his Molle vest and saw it was shattered.

  “Y’all stay quiet!” he yelled at them. “I’ll try to lure more over here, see if we can do a repeat performance.”

  He made his way over to the dormer and climbed back up toward the widow’s walk. The flood had slowed enough that the handful on the decking were just watching, looking for him, but not plunging off through the broken rail. Gunny kept low and quiet, sneaking up out of their sight. He reached up, grabbed a leg and pulled, making a face at the way the flesh felt, soft and saggy, like bread dough. He showed himself and waved, starting another rush and tumble over the edge. He grabbed a few more crawlers, dragged them over, and watched them bounce out of sight. He could hear the crunch of the impact, even over the muffled keening of the undead in the other houses.

  When the walk was clear, he dragged himself up, pulled his knife and started clearing the house of the slow movers as he made his way back down three flights of stairs. A quick poke to the eye dropped them where they stood or crawled and he pushed them through open doors, leaving himself a clear path back to the roof.

  He went to the stately old home where Griz was stranded first, walked up to the rear of the keening and clawing undead still trying to force their way up the jam-packed stairway. After brief consideration, he pulled his Glock, lined himself up so he could get two headshots with one bullet and pulled the trigger. The mob surging up instantly became the mob surging down.

  Gunny ran.

  They stumbled and staggered after him, reaching arms and gnashing teeth seeking his blood. He led them up the stairs, jamming doors shut behind him so they would stack up and not be too spread out. It wouldn’t take them long to force the already broken doors open, but that was the plan. He wasn’t trying to stop them, just slow them down. He waited for them on the widow’s walk, knives in hand, crouched and ready. He needed to get them into a frenzy, get them howling for his flesh. Get them angry, if they could feel emotions anymore.

  “What are you doing?” Griz yelled over. “You’re not going to fight them, are you? Don’t be a dumbass! Just jump off the walk, they’ll follow!”

  They wouldn’t, though. Maybe some of them. Maybe the ones that got pushed from behind, but these creatures had a basic sense of preservation. Gunny waved at him to be quiet. To keep still. The zombies couldn’t reason, they were mindless, but they had some instinct that prevented them from walking off cliffs if they noticed them. They wouldn’t go into the water unless they were chasing something. They knew just barely enough to try to preserve themselves when they weren’t in a frenzy. When they were, all bets were off. They’d run into a burning building chasing after someone.

  Gunny waited, flexing his fists in his shooter’s gloves. He had to make the battle bloody. Had to get them worked up. They had reached the last door and slammed against it, shuddering it in its frame. The broken railings he’d jammed against it were already buckling. A few more bodies piling up and they’d burst through. He reached up with his clean blade and sliced himself on each arm between where the plastic armor joined together. He barely felt the sting, or the warm blood start trickling down his biceps. The undead smelled it, though, and their howls became even more intense. It was so close, so tantalizing to them.

  Bridget and Hollywood watched in helpless fascination as Gunny cut himself. The undead in their houses were starting to stream out, to join the keening screams and pounding across the street. They, too, could smell the blood.

  The door slammed open and Gunny sprang, slashing at gaping mouths and jabbing blackened eyes. They rushed out, their eagerness causing them to stumble over the fast falling bodies. Long dead skulls were easily punctured with the heavy trench knives. The blades sank all the way to the cross guards, and the knuckle duster grips kept the brain-slicked handles firmly in his grasp. Gunny punched and stabbed, dodging the rotten teeth when he could, smashing them with the pommel or the spiked metal of the knuckles when he couldn’t. He slowly backed up, making them pay for each foot they advanced. The push from behind was reaching a fever pitch, bodies were piling over the dead and trying to leap for him. He’d reached the broken railing and swung down, still slashing as they boiled over the edge after him. He stepped aside, finding his balance on the roof, and continued to taunt them. They were barely recognizable as people anymore, many of them only had tatters of clothing left after months and months in the harsh northern winter, sometimes encased in frozen snow. They screamed at him and he screamed right back. They reached, tumbled and fell, only to be replaced by the next set of snarling faces, half rotting skin sloughing off bones. They were coming fast, some of them crawling toward him on the shingles, reaching hands trying to grab him over the rails. He heard the crack of wood a second before the decades-old railing broke and a tumble of dozens reached for him as they hit the roof and rolled over the edge. Even above the keens, he heard the constant squishing thud of bodies dropping and breaking into the piles of dead below. They kept coming and Gunny kept taunting, never letting them stop and realize the first step was a big one. He was just out of their reach, they could see him, smell him, but they couldn’t grab him.

  He was nearly panting, his arms aching from so many stabs and punches, but the horde pouring out the door had slowed to a trickle, most of the ones left hobbling badly or crawling with grim determination. A few still spilled over the edge, but the frenzy had died, the slow ones weren’t forced over. They reached for him, grasped at him, but didn’t move to take the plunge. He stood, hands on knees, trying to get his breath back when he heard the sound of wet thumps coming from inside the house. A glance over at the other roofs told him Griz, Bridget, and Hollywood were off of them. They were mopping up the stragglers, making their way up the stairs.

  Gunny chuffed, wiped at a splash of spoiled blood dripping from his beard, and sat down. He was getting too old for this crap.

  2

  Gunny

  Griz was the first through the broken door, tossing a hissing old woman over the railing. Gunny watched as she landed on her shoulder, heard it break, and saw nothing but rage and hunger on her face as she slid over the side to splash into the pile three stories below.

  The look of concern on Griz’s face turned to relief when he saw Gunny sitting on his haunches, calmly smoking a hand-rolled.

  “You get bit?” he asked, kicking at the last of the crawlers, sending it over the edge.

  “Nah. You?”

  “We’re all good,” he said as the other two stepped over the remains of the hanging door. They were breathing heavy also, having fought through the crawlers all the way down out of their houses and back up to him.

  Gunny absently wiped gore from h
is hand, only smearing it around on his filthy pants. He was staring at the church. At the still closed and barred doors. The others tried to clean themselves off a little, but arms were stained up to the elbow, legs were splashed to the knees. Killing the dead was a messy business.

  “Well,” he said, tossing his smoke. “Let’s go see how bad it is.”

  Griz extended a hand, helped him up on the walk and they made their way back down, stepping over or on dozens of still forms, finally laid to rest.

  The town was quiet, no more moans or screams of the undead; they had managed to kill them all. They made their way around the church, slogging through the thousands of bodies on the street. There were only a few laying near the front entrance, those having been trampled by the horde. The ground was littered with bits of clothing and an occasional body part. Only a few odd shoes were laying around, most of them had long since been lost in the run from St. Louis. The doors to the church were still firmly in place. There were no windows, no other way in. The Kingdom Hall was solid brick and mortar. The doors large, heavy, and thick: the only slightly decorative flourish on the church. The parishioners tended to spend their tithes on mission work instead of ostentatious decorations.

  “Suicide pact?” Bridget asked, as unsure as the rest of them. “You think they gave up and killed themselves? Some kind of Jim Jones thing?”

  “That, or they’re a bunch of ungrateful louts,” Hollywood fumed and kicked at the door.

  “You want to bust it down or forget about it?” Griz asked, running his fingers through his beard, trying to get the drying blood to flake out of it.

  Gunny pounded on the door and yelled, “Open the door!” in Arabic. The others shot glances at him, backed away, and pulled their pistols.

  “You think it’s Hajis in there?” Griz asked, taking cover behind a column holding the entryway roof.

  “That or they’re all dead,” Gunny replied. “There’s no other explanation.”

  He raised his fist and pounded again, this time calling out in Farsi. “Open up or we’ll smash the door!”

  “We don’t want trouble,” came a muffled reply in accented English. “Please. We don’t want trouble.”

  “OPEN!” Gunny yelled again and stood aside, drawing his own gun when he heard the locks start disengaging. He leveled it, head height, and waited.

  There was a crowd of people, all shielding their eyes from the early evening brightness. A few candles burned inside the sanctuary, the only light they’d had for days. It was mostly women and kids, with a handful of men at the front of them. Brown skinned, black hair, dark eyes. The enemy that had tried to kill them all with the infected meats.

  They stood, eyes downcast, the men with their hands raised. They said nothing, just waited for judgment from the Americans. These fierce warriors who had killed thousands with their guns, then killed the rest with their knives. Only four of them, armored and angry, bloodied and soaked in gore. The people standing in the church looked tired, hungry, and lost.

  Defeated.

  Lips were cracked from dehydration, cheeks were hollow from starvation. The children were lethargic and uninterested in what was happening, most of them looked like they wanted to go back to sleep. To retreat to a place where they didn’t hear the monsters moan and their bellies didn’t hurt.

  These people were nearly finished. Another day, two at the most, and they would have started dying. Gunny could smell death coming from inside the walls, so some of them had already succumbed. Probably the oldest and youngest, he thought.

  He had a situation and wasn’t sure how to handle it. These were the same ones that had nearly killed the whole world. They had known what was coming, they had all been hidden away in one of the fortified mosques, and they did nothing to prevent the outbreak or warn of it. The women had been waiting for their Jihadi fighters to destroy Lakota and they would have moved right in. Hosed the American blood off the streets and set up their new society. Gunny didn’t want any prisoners of war, there was no one to take care of them. He thought of Tiny and his last, dying, moments. He thought of Gumball and Ozzy and Billy Travaho. He thought of Jessie and his permanently scarred face, and the darkness inside of him now that hadn’t been there before. He remembered nuns nailed upside down to church doors, the children raped and beheaded. Shaytan wanted to make them pay. His finger hovered on the guard, part of him wanting to move it to the trigger and finish this. These people were the cause of the thousands of rotting corpses he had just helped slaughter. The undead that had nearly killed him and his friends. The undead that should have killed these people, too. That would have been justice.

  Griz and Lars kept their guns steady, unwavering in their aim, they were ready to open fire, ready to follow Gunny’s lead.

  Bridget lowered hers. She wouldn’t kill unarmed people, not women. Not kids. It didn’t matter who they had been. The war was over, it was time to bury the hatchet, not continue the hate.

  “Gunny,” she said softly. Hesitant, afraid of the wrath on his face, the way he kept his gun centered on the man’s forehead.

  Gunny closed his eyes, took a breath, and lowered his Glock. He holstered it and the others followed suit.

  “Thank you,” the man said, finally raising his eyes. His voice trembled with emotion.

  “What’s your name?” Gunny asked.

  “Mohammed Shammas,” he said, slowly lowering his hands.

  “Not anymore,” Gunny said. “In the past, when immigrants came to our shores, they took Americanized names to help them blend in. Pick an English name. Do things our way. Don’t draw attention to yourselves. Practice your English. If others find you, they won’t be so forgiving.”

  He stared into the man’s eyes, trying to see if he understood. If he was defiant. If he was just playing possum and waiting for an opportunity to strike again. Gunny didn’t think so, the tears flowing down his cheeks would be hard to fake. His relief, and everyone else’s, was real.

  “Welcome to America. Don’t make me come back,” Gunny said and turned to leave. His business was done here.

  As they neared the ladders to climb back to the top of the trailers, the man came rushing up, clutching the nearly empty water bottle he’d been chugging. They waited, hands near their guns, as he approached.

  “My friends,” he said, looking at each of them, speaking in his accented English. “I wanted you to know, we are grateful. We will not squander this chance you have given us. You are Johnathan Meadows, yes? The president, yes?”

  Gunny nodded and the man rushed on. “You need to know, the soulless were led here by the living. They walked among them and were not attacked. They brought them to our walls and slipped away. We did not shoot at them because we did not understand.”

  “You mean some people were running in front of the horde, they were being chased?” Griz asked.

  “No,” the man clarified. “There were three of them. They walked with the pack and were not disturbed by it. They controlled them, brought them to us, and then left. We thought it was you at first, taking your revenge.”

  Gunny cocked his head at this news. “Are you sure?” he asked. “It wasn’t some well-preserved zeds that looked human?”

  The man was insistent. Adamant that someone had learned how to be among the dead and not be attacked.

  He thanked them over and over, all the way up the ladder, until they were over the top and climbing down the other side.

  “What do you make of that?” Griz asked as they dug more ammo out of the panel van and started reloading their magazines. “Somebody knows how to control the zeds?”

  “Dunno,” Gunny replied. “Doesn’t make sense. They were probably imagining it, freaked out from the sheer number of them slamming into their walls.”

  In the distance, they heard the oncoming roar of a muscle machine coming down the road.

  “That’s Scratch,” Hollywood said. “Man, this place creeps me out. Let’s get loaded up and get the hell out of here before that horde comes b
ack.”

  “I second that,” Bridget said.

  3

  Jessie

  Jessie was sweating in the crisp morning air as his feet pounded out a steady rhythm on the dirt road that ran along the inside of the container wall. Bob panted at his side, easily keeping pace, his wounds healed and not seeming to bother him at all.

  “Take it easy,” they said.

  “It’s only been a few months,” they said.

  “Don’t overdo it, you’ll hurt yourself,” they said.

  He ignored all of their advice and pushed himself. He knew he should be finished, should be exhausted, should be gasping for every breath and ready to barf up breakfast, but he was barely winded. He felt no worse than he would after a hundred-yard dash: breathing hard but feeling good. He didn’t know what was in that morphine drip he’d been given by the weirdos in the cult, but the SS Sisters were beside themselves to get to the bottom of the mystery. They said it was a miracle drug. They said broken bones didn’t knit themselves back together in a month. Gunshot wounds didn’t scab over and scar in a matter of weeks. Bruises and cuts didn’t heal and disappear in days.

  But they had.

  His dad had hobbled around on a broken leg all winter. The other people he’d met, Hollywood and Bridget and all the rest, spent long months recovering, but Jessie had felt fine by Christmas.

  Healed.

  The best shape of his seventeen years he’d ever been in.

  He’d started off that morning with his daily routine at the gym turned rehab center but needed to get out and stretch his legs. He’d done some running with the rest of the guys, the soldiers who had been hunting Jihadis during the big Lakota battle back in November, but they didn’t go this far. They usually just jogged around town or maybe a little way along the shoreline. He had continued straight, along a guard path worn along the water when they all turned and headed back toward the gym. He ran the beach trails toward the wall, some four miles distant. He could see the coils of concertina wire staked out in the water a dozen yards offshore. Triple rows that would stop any undead trying to stroll up the banks or any boats if the radicals tried to attack again. He’d heard all about the prison escapee called Casey, how he had a huge price on his head. No one seemed to think he’d be back around, though. The last they saw of him, he was high-tailing it west.