900 Miles: A Zombie Novel (9 page)

“It’s pinned between one of the seats and a wall, but it’s getting loose!” the guy yelled breathlessly.

I made my way up beside Kyle. The platform we stood on was actually part of a pretend pirate ship, complete with a skull and crossbones flag waving in the air.  Quite fitting, if not a bit ironic.

Peering in, I could see the zombie pilot, still wearing his helmet, pinned at the front of the chopper.  His arms were just inches from the guy, who appeared to have a gut wound.  He had one bloody hand on his stomach, and the other on a metal case.

I looked nervously around the park.  The crash had been loud, too loud.  The sun was just peeking up over a large hill and I could see a bunch of the undead’s silhouettes moving towards us as they came charging over the hill along with it.

“Now or never,” I muttered. Kyle dropped in through the open side door. The pilot had his hands clutched around his would-be victim’s shoe when Kyle kicked the thing in the face, knocking the zombie’s helmet off.

After unlocking the guy’s shoulder strap, Kyle lifted him up to me.  I reached down and hefted him through the side door. Trying to stand at the top of the
play set, the man’s legs buckled causing him to collapse to the wood.  Just as I started to pull Kyle up, the dead pilot ripped his own leg off in an effort to get at him. Kyle gave several hard kicks as his eyes urged me to hurry. I gave a final heave just as he hooked his foot on the edge. We slammed back against the play set, scrambling to get away. I didn’t know how long that thing would stay in there, but I certainly wasn’t going to find out.

With a grunt, Kyle slung the man, still clutching his metal briefcase over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry.  Down the stairs, and around a tire swing, we made it to the Hummer just as the horde of creatures began to close in around the chopper.

I opened the back door, and Kyle threw him in.  We both climbed into the front seats just as the first zombie reached us.  It was dressed in a suit, not unlike the one I was wearing. We felt the front and back tires sequentially bump up into the air as I drove over Mr. Suit.

We traveled a number of miles, passing various groups of zombies; some of which had a couple
dozen; others we passed only had a two or three.  Knowing that we would not be able to stop for any real length of time, we tried to put as much distance between the last one we saw and ourselves before we pulled over to tend to our passengers wound.  In the meantime, I had handed him my boss’s old coat, and Kyle applied as much pressure as possible to his stomach to slow the bleeding. I wondered how long it would take him to change from human to zombie. I couldn’t shake that thought.

A mile or so in, the guy stopped screaming.  I glanced back, sure that he was dead. He was an older gentleman, still in great shape for his age, and had a full head of silver hair.  He lay bleeding all over the back seat, clutching his briefcase as if his life depended on it.  Kyle and I were discussing where to head when the man began to speak.

“Water.  Do you have any water?” he croaked.

I looked back at him, and saw blood pooling on the floorboards, as Kyle reached into the small cooler and pulled out one of the bottles we scavenged the day before.

Twisting off the cap, he tried to hand it to him, but the old man couldn’t lift his hand to grab it.  Instead, Kyle reached over and poured some into his mouth.  He tried to swallow, immediately choking on the liquid, and shot blood splatter across the back of the front passenger seat.

Minutes later, he passed out from shock.

Kyle and I drove for twenty minutes or so in silence.  We passed a number of wrecked cars, a downed power line and the remains of a small house that had burned to the ground.

When we were convinced that we had taken enough turns and detours to shake even the smartest zombie, we began looking for a place to pull over. We finally found a small bridge that had an access road, which twisted down to a sewer drainage system below.  Agreeing that it would be a good place to hide, we parked under the bridge and positioned the Hummer so we could see one hundred yards or so in both east and west
directions.

We pulled the old man out of the back of the vehicle, and laid him down on the concrete floor of the bridge. He was breathing, but just barely.

Kyle tore open his shirt, and we saw that there was something lodged in the right hand side of the old man’s stomach, keeping the wound open, allowing the precious red-black liquid to pour from his body.

Kyle pulled out the less
than adequate emergency kit that we had scavenged, and rummaged through the Band-Aids and Neosporin before he found a small needle and thread.

Taking a nearby stick, and shoving it sideways into the old man’s mouth, he asked me to put my hands over the guy’s face to keep him from screaming too loud and alerting any nearby creatures.

The gentleman’s eyes went wide, as he woke up in that instant, and realized what we were about to do.  Kyle reached down, and grabbed the end of the metal object in his gut and carefully pulled it out.  The man’s eyes closed hard, and he tried to scream through the stick and my hands, his entire body tensing and arching into the air.

Kyle fell back before he regained his balance and began sewing up the wound with the needle and thread.  Still trying to scream, the man’s face was bright
red, and had a mix of tears and sweat running down to the pavement, when he finally passed out again.

Kyle was no expert, and this guy was going to have a nasty scar, but he was able to close up the hole.  Only time would tell if we did it soon enough.

Enjoying the finer things in life.

We used the water under the bridge to help clean out the Hummer.  Washing away dried blood, old food wrappers and that half-eaten sandwich from my boss.  I found myself wondering which was really more disgusting.

Not spending too much time in that particular spot, we used the rest of the day scavenging through more cars for food and siphoning more gasoline.  We had a good system down, and were mindful to keep an eye out for any zombies moving around to avoid the situation we had at the gas station.

The old guy was unconscious in the back seat the entire time.  Every once in a while, I could hear him grunt in pain, but his eyes never opened.

We were making okay progress given the circumstances.  Using back roads and the navigation system to move south through
Jersey, we were able to avoid most of the congested roads.

A few creatures popped up from time
to time, but they were easy to take care of.  We noticed on the third day that most of the zombies were quite slow.  Kyle and I agreed that it was probably because the bodies were dead, like in the movies, and that they had gone through rigor mortis, causing all the limbs to tighten up and keeping them from being able to do much more than hobble around.

A fact that, I would learn later on, was correct.

In small numbers, this was a big help. However, we knew we needed to avoid swarms of these things.  No matter how slow they were, they were still lethal.

With much of the morning eaten up, we were able to make approximately fifty miles south that day.

In the evening, Kyle and I found what looked like an old lumber warehouse.  Upon first glance, it was clearly abandoned, but then I noticed a creature that had its brains bashed in, laying near one of the machines.

It was wearing blue jeans and a white button up shirt that was covered in dirt and blood.  It was a few days ripe. After I parked the Hummer in the building, we immediately threw it outside before closing up the sliding doors.

The warehouse was relatively open, with a high ceiling that appeared to have a series of railed bridges running through it.  We spent the next hour exploring the place to make sure that we were able to “secure our position,” as Kyle put it.  In other words, we were double checking to make sure that none of the roaming zombies outside would stumble across us by walking through an open door in the back of the building.

Luckily,
in the guard shack, we did happen across a refrigerator, to which electricity no longer ran.

“Looks like the place had a night security watch,” Kyle said.

He walked up to the fridge holding both hands up in the air with his fingers crossed.  He told me that he had heard stories from others that were part of the same security company he had worked for, about the guys who were lucky enough to get this type of gig, and how they usually sat around and drank beer all night.

He opened the refrigerator, and yelled, “
Eureka!” as he pulled out a twelve pack.

“We’re drinking like kings tonight!” he exclaimed
, as he held up a bottle of warm Miller High Life.

A smile came to my face, as I shared his excitement.  Even warm beer was welcome. Besides, High Life instantly reminded me of the good times I’d had drinking with some of my old buddies in college.

Back at the Hummer, which I had parked squarely in the middle of the place, we checked on the wounded man, who was now tossing and turning a bit. His bandage was fresh, but already showing signs of blood soaking into it. His skin was a tone too pale, and I noticed that he felt a bit feverish.  Reaching down to reassure myself that my hammer was still resting securely in my belt, I decided to keep a watchful eye on him.  We had done what we could at that point, and I needed to make sure that we’d be ready for a sudden turn for the worse.

During the course of the day, my cell phone had charged up to two full power bars.  However, we hadn’t had any luck finding a cell phone tower that worked.

I later learned that most of the power grids in the US wouldn’t last more than three to four days without anyone operating them.  In rare cases, there were wind and hydro-powered generators that could power small rural areas for longer, but after a few days, everything else went dark.

We were on day three.

As Kyle and I started to pull out some of the camping gear we had stowed in the trunk of the Hummer, our patient woke up.

He slowly opened his eyes, and in a daze, asked where he was.  Sitting in the vehicle with him, Kyle and I walked the old man through the course of events that had taken place since his crash.

By the end of the story, he was regaining his wits, and he began to sit up.  He clutched his stomach and asked, “What the hell hit me?”

Kyle reached into the glove compartment and pulled out the small metal shard.  Handing it to him, he explained that it looked like it was part of the rotor blade from the back of the helicopter.

The gentleman held it up in front of his face, and then thanked us for pulling him out and stitching him up.

“That damn metal beast,” the old man murmured out loud.  “I knew we should have
never gotten in that thing.  We were assured safe passage out of the city.  My people paid off some pretty high level officials to get me that ride.”

“What happened?  I mean, what happened in the helicopter?”  I asked.

He took a deep breath, obviously thinking back to the event.  He sat up, holding his side with a grimace.

“The chopper took off with five people in it.  The pilot, a copilot, my assistant and I, and an army sergeant who thought he was lucky enough to catch a ride.  The copilot took a liking to my assistant immediately, and invited her up to show off the control panel.  None of us could have known that the pilot had been bit.”

I looked at Kyle.  We knew where this story was heading.

“He turned mid-flight, and took a quarter
sized bite out of Judy, my assistant, as she leaned forward.  She took two steps back and fell to the metal floor, holding her neck.  Blood was squirting in short bursts across the window and wall to her right.”

He stopped for a moment, panting shallowly as he wiped his eyes.  Blood from his own wound streaked across his cheek.

“As she sat there slowly dying, the pilot turned his sights on the copilot.  I could hear so much screaming, and watched the infected man waving his hands while blood shot all over the front windshield.  That’s when I looked over at the sergeant. He had strapped on a parachute and was pulling the door of the chopper open, which opened sideways just as Judy started to…re-animate.”

He stopped again, catching his breath.  There was much sadness in his voice as he continued.

“Judy started to walk towards me.  I was frozen with fear.  In that instant, the sergeant jumped out the door.  Having caught Judy’s attention, and without hesitation, she ran over to the opening and leaped after him.  In some ways, I believe that sergeant saved my life, but I recognize he was just trying to save his own ass.”

Thinking back to the figures we watched plummet to the earth, I didn’t think it was necessary to tell him how it ended for the sergeant and his assistant, Judy.

“I watched the head of the copilot rolling around in the belly of the chopper as we started spinning in the air just before the crash.  I had no idea what the hell hit me in the stomach, but I knew it was bad.”

He coughed, and I noticed some blood dribbled out of his mouth. He went on to tell us that his name was Michael Hoskins, a
high-powered CEO of a technology company headquartered in New York. He held out a weak hand, which I grasped and shook.