Forget The Zombies (Book 2): Forget Texas (16 page)

“Oh man, I can’t believe this,” Dave said. “We are so screwed now.”

“Dave!” Joni said, looking from him to the kids. Martin’s eyes were getting wider by the second.

“How did you know they were going to blow the bridge?” Rosalita asked as she genuflected.

“I didn’t,” I said. “They lay on the fire, then were quiet. They were pulling back. It was to give them time to get the soldiers off the bridge before they blew it.”

“That’s in the past,” Dave said, moving into my face. “What do we do now, Hotshot?”

That idea that flitted away in my mind, flew back, and I caught a glimpse of it again. Two shining lines leading off into black. What did it mean?

“I said, do you have any bright ideas?” Dave was inched from my face now.

“My first idea would be to punch you in the face,” I said taking a step forward and Dave fell back, nearly stumbling. “My second idea would be to follow those train tracks to the river and see if the soldiers haven’t blown the train bridge that has to cross the river.” I pointed off to my left in the direction of the train tracks that had paralleled the road we had been on.

We were off and moving at a slow jog in less than thirty seconds. We had a quarter mile of open ground and then we’d be entering a fully forested area that ran along the river.

We were barely half the distance when I felt the ground shaking beneath my feet. “Anyone else feel that?” I asked.

“Feel what?” Sammy asked.

“The ground shaking.”

“Now that you mention it, I do feel something.” Joni said.

“I feel it, too,” Randell said and we all slowed.

“Is it an earthquake?” Joni asked.

“I don’t think so,” I said, while having an inkling of what was coming and looked over my shoulder to confirm it. There they were. “Oh shit.”

“Zombies?” Randell asked.

“No,” I said. “Stampede. Everyone, run!”

Coming out of the woods just a quarter mile back was a whole herd of cattle, all running at full speed in our direction. Each one of their hooves pounded the ground like sledge hammers, kicking up dirt and mud. I could see hundreds of steers coming as they spread out for what seemed like a mile.

I dropped my rifle and snatched up Martin in my arms. He probably weighed around sixty pounds. With the adrenaline pumping, he felt more like ten.

Jay and Jane didn’t need any more urging and were off and running. Randell was right behind them. Dave and Joni grabbed Jessica’s hand and pulled her along at a run.

“Rosalita” Sammy shouted, jogging up to her. “Jump on my back.”

“No, I can’t do it,” she shouted as the thunder of the cattle’s hooves got closer by the second.

“You have to,” Sammy cried out and backed up to her. “You don’t climb on, then we both stay here and die.”

"Ay, caramba!" Rosalita said and climbed on board.

An angry bull can top out at seventeen miles per hour. A scared shitless bull could probably do twenty. It was going to be close.

The ground shook like there really was an earthquake and I swear I could feel the cattle’s hot breath on my neck as I approached the first set of trees. Martin clung to me in a vice, gripping with both hands. “Don’t look back, big guy,” I said through breaths. The trees were coming up fast, but I feared the cattle were coming up faster.

I decided to it put in high gear and gave it all I got, heading on a collision course toward a large pine tree.

Boom, boom, boom, went the hooves right behind me.

A pine tree was just ahead of me when I deviated from my course slightly, let go of Martin with one arm and shot out the other arm to catch the tree. My hand clutched on to the scratchy pine bark and I jerked us into the tree in a whip-like motion. My face slammed against the tree and I saw stars for a second. Martin cried out on impact.

Still woozy, I watched as two large bulls ran past us into the dark cover of the woods. I looked past another small group of cattle running full tilt across the field and saw Sammy, with Rosalita on his back, dodging left and right, barely missing the cattle passing him on both sides. It was as if he had the hand of God guided him as he dodged back forth while the cattle rumbled by. Then God’s hand slipped. A large bull clipped him in the side with a horn and sent Sammy stumbling along out of control. He was only fifteen feet from a large tree, but it could have been miles.

Sammy’s arm pin wheeled in the air for balance. Rosalita held on for dear life. Sammy gained five more feet when another bull hit him on the hip and he flew into the air. Rosalita lost her grip and separated from Sammy, spilling across the ground toward the trees.

Out nowhere, Joni shot out from beside a tree and grabbed Rosalita by the arms and started pulling her back. My head had nearly cleared and I dropped Martin against the tree and started out.

It was hard to see Sammy at all in the chaos of speeding fur and hooves. The sound of their hoof beats was almost deafening. Sammy popped up among three beasts, staggering along, but one hit him right in the center of his back and he went down hard disappearing in a plume of dust.

A hand grabbed my belt and pulled me back. I tugged against it, but it pulled even harder. I turned and saw Randell reaching around the tree with one arm and holding fast to me the other.

“He’s gone!” He shouted.

“He’s not!” I yelled back and tried to pull free again, but he held even tighter, his face straining from the effort. Cattle poured past us, one brushed by me, knocking me back against the tree.

This went on for several seconds as the breath shot out of me in deep gasps. The last of the cattle came by us and the field was covered in a dust cloud that looked like a dense morning fog.

“Sammy!” I shouted. Randell released me and I stumbled away from him into the field. “Sammy!”

Randell came up beside me. “Where did you last see him?”

“Over here,” I said, moving deeper into the dust cloud until my feet tripped on something and I went down. My hand grasped onto something warm when I went to push myself up. It was an arm. I grabbed it and felt along it until I reached the body.

“He’s here!” I shouted

Randell came up beside me and reached down as I pulled Sammy up. Sammy’s face came into view, or what was left of it did. There was a large hoof print indention on the side of his head contorting his features in a grotesque way. One eye was missing and his jaw jutted out at an unnatural angle. Randell saw it a second after I did and let go of Sammy’s arm. Off balance, I lost my grip and Sammy’s body disappeared into the dust cloud.

Randell spun away and vomited. I stood feeling listless, unable to reach down again or even move.

Randell stopped vomiting after a few seconds and wiped his mouth. “I should have let you go after him.”

“No,” I said. “You did the right thing. He didn’t stand a chance. I would have been just as dead”

A muffled explosion sounded on in the direction of river.

“Now what?” Dave said from the trees. Three more explosions followed.

My body and soul protested action of any kind as my arms hung at my side. Sammy had been a good kid. He had risked his life numerous times to save people in our group, only to die in a stampede. There was no justice in this universe.

Two more explosions sounded through the trees.

“Grant, should we get moving?” Joni asked.

It took every ounce of my energy to make that first step toward trees, but an anger built with each one after it, empowering me to continue on. Anger was always good that way for me. If I couldn’t beat something, at least I could hate it.

Randell was close behind me, but I had no idea what kept him going. We passed under the first tree when Joni asked, “Where’s Sammy?”

“He didn’t make it,” I said.

“Oh no,” Rosalita wailed. “Dios Mios, Dios mios,” She dropped her head in her hands and began to weep. It almost broke me again, but I saw Dave standing with Martin and Jessica and knew we had to keep going.

I walked over to Joni and asked in a hushed tone, “How is she,” and then added, “physically?”

“Bruised. Maybe something’s wrong with her shoulder,” she responded in almost whisper.

“Can she walk?”

“I think so.”

“Then we need to get her up.”

“Grant, she just lost Sammy.”

“
We
just lost Sammy,” I said. “It’s killing me, but we have to keep moving. Those cattle were running from something and I’m guessing it wasn’t rustlers.”

“You don’t have to be such a hard ass,” she said.

I ran a hand through my hair and said, “You’re right. I’m afraid if we don’t get moving, the Army will blow up the train bridge and then we’re stuck. I don’t like our chances on this side of the river.”

Another explosion sounded and it was followed by two more.

“And I don’t like those explosions,” I said.

“Okay, I’ll see if I can get her up.” She walked over to Rosalita and knelt down beside her, putting a comforting arm around the old woman’s back. Rosalita was keening by now and rocking back and forth in her grief.

Dave broke away from the kids and walked in my direction. As he got close to me, he leaned in and said in a quiet voice, “What are we waiting on?”

“Rosalita needs a minute,” I said.

“You need to get her off her ass and get us moving,” he said, almost in a hiss. “Because if you don’t, I’m taking my family and getting the hell out of here.”

I brought my head up slowly and looked him in the eye and I’m not sure what he saw, but he stepped back.

“Whatever,” he said, throwing his hands in the air, and started to walk away, but leaned back into me, “and I’m not sure I like how chummy you are with my wife.” He walked back to the kids and stood giving me the hairy eyeball for a few seconds.

I brought my attention back to Joni and Rosalita just as Joni was helping the older woman to her feet. Rosalita wiped her eyes and then walked over to me somewhat unsteadily. Just as she got to within a foot of me, she opened her arms and fell onto me, hugging me for strength as she cried some more.

“He was a chico valiente,” she said through the tears. “So, valiente”

“Yes, he was,” I said, patting her back, not knowing for sure that I wouldn’t join in her tears at any second, but knowing that no one needed that, least of all her. We stood like that for many seconds until she pulled away.

“Joni said Sammy would want me to go on,” she said. “She is right. He can’t have died for me to stay behind, so Grant, let’s go.”

I kept an arm around her as we started walking into the woods, the canopy blocking the moonlight, making our walk a very dark one. Moonbeams filtered through the leaves above, dappling the ground with small pools of light. A forest creature scuttled along on the ground out of sight. If I closed my eyes, I might find myself back in the forest journeys of my youth. Unfortunately, another explosion went off in front of us and Rosalita gripped me tighter. I gripped my pistol a little tighter, too.

We followed alongside the railroad tracks for about five hundred feet and came to a place where the tracks became elevated over a large pond of water.

“Do we get on the tracks now?” Joni asked.

“No, not yet,” I said. “We don’t know that the tracks haven’t been blown yet. We can’t be trapped up on a bridge to nowhere.”

We gave the pond a wide berth, as the ground around it was very wet and treacherous in the dark, and continued for the river’s edge. Mosquitos and other insects buzzed incessantly around our heads not bothered in the least by a zombie apocalypse or a stampede of cattle.

A few of the cattle wandered aimlessly among the trees, chuffing and mooing.

When we finally broke from the woods, we came to a short, but steep bank that led down to a sandy narrow shoreline. Cattle milled around at the water’s edge nervously as the water churned by, dark and murky, flowing by at a rapid pace. A few struggled against the current to make it across, but most turned back. Yesterday’s downpour had the water running high and hard.

It was a task to get down to the tiny shoreline, but we made it. Rosalita had to slide down on her butt to prevent any more injury, but couldn’t avoid the insult.

“What the hell is this?” Randell said pushing something dark and meaty with his boot.

“It looks like a cow’s back leg,” Jane said, holding a hand to her mouth.

It was then that a large steer got of the courage to head out of the flowing river to shore on the Oklahoma side of the river. He struggled against the fast flowing waters and strode ashore when an explosion blew him to bits. Parts of the steer showered down around us and into the water.

“Holy shit!” Dave shouted. “They’ve mined the shoreline.”