Run (Nola Zombies Book 1) (3 page)

I slid out of the truck, grabbed my pack from the back seat and situated its bulky weight on my back. Then I grabbed my new best friend, the ax, its weight a weird comfort in my hands.
 

“Is that a bug-out bag?” He asked, gesturing to the monstrosity on my back.
 

“Yeah, a girl has to be prepared.”

“Holy shit, I think I’m in love now.” I blushed. I couldn’t help it. I think I might have wiggled a little at the compliment.
 

Crap, there goes my strong independent woman persona.
It flew right out the window the moment a hot guy stepped up to the plate. My self-defense instructor would be so ashamed.
 

“Don’t get too excited, Mr. Hot Pants, we just met...”
Hot pants?
I was a fool.
 

He just smiled in response and then with a head jerk headed to the front door of the Harbor Police Station, expecting me to follow his lead. The front door was open and Blake called loudly, “Hello?” There was no response.
 

“There has to be someone on duty,” I whispered as he crossed the threshold and pulled the door behind us, his gun drawn, his movements all sexy and stealthy.
Er...just stealthy.
I had to cool it with all the drooling. I had zombies to worry about.
 

“Maybe they can’t respond,” he whispered back.

“Let’s hope he’s just in the bathroom.”
 

He wasn’t in the bathroom and it wasn’t just one of them. It was three of them, still in their uniforms, each one showing obvious traumatic wounds, gray skin, and hungry mouths.
 

“Aim for the head, just like the movies,” I called as he actually walked toward the fuckers, eager to take them out. He did as told and fired off six shots. The three zombies went down, each one with a precise double-hole head wound.
 

“You’re a good shot.” I complimented.

“Years of training.”

“Military?”

“Yeah.”
 

“Thank you, for taking care of that.” I motioned to the dead officers.
 

“No, problem.” He walked over to the fallen police officers and disarmed each of them. He slipped one gun into his pack and handed over two handguns to me. I checked the weapons, they looked like a Glock 22 and an M&P 9, but I wasn’t a big gun expert. I put them in my pack after checking the clip and making sure there wasn’t a round chambered. I was semi-competent − it had been the next thing on my prepper checklist: Become Gun Expert.
 

“You know how to shoot?”

“I’m competent,” I exaggerated.
Close enough.
 

“Good. It might be a good idea to check their weapons locker. I think the shit has hit the fan, better safe than sorry.”

“Good thinking.” I looked at the corpses at my feet and noticed one with a set of keys. I had to take them off his belt. It was a nasty task, the guy was sticky with drying blood and the smell of piss was rank around him. It would have been easy if I had the stones to kneel down and get all close but I wasn’t that courageous. I finally managed to yank his belt off and then get the keys off the stupid retractable string. When I had them in hand I breathed a big sigh of relief and looked around for an obvious gun locker.
 

The place wasn’t that big, it shouldn’t be hard to find guns and maybe some boat keys. We stealthily made our way down a long hallway, passing offices and a break room. We found the evidence room in the back of the warehouse and we were rewarded with sets of keys hung neatly on a pegboard near the front, each with a tag identifying what they were for. It was easy to spot the boat keys, with their large flotation key chains affixed to them and Blake grabbed them all, shoving them in his pocket. There wasn’t much else in the room, no weapons or other useful items, so we moved on.

We moved down the hall and found a safe where we assumed the guns were held. None of the keys I had taken off the officer matched the safe though, so we had to make do with just the boat keys and the guns we had taken from the officers.
 

“I think this is about all we can get from this place, let’s go get ourselves a boat.” Blake said, walking toward the back of the building.

There was a back door to the building, and through the glass we could see a pedestrian bridge that led up and out to the river from the back lot. There were a few recreational boats and police boats parked at a large dock that was our obvious destination. I also noticed that about a dozen zombies had made their way into the parking lot, probably drawn by the gun shots and my mad rush through the gate. It wasn’t going to be that easy to get to the bridge.

“We can do this,” Blake said. “There are only a dozen of them. Can you handle head shots?”

“Yeah,” I nodded but I wasn’t that sure of myself. He was so sure of himself. I wanted a little piece of that confidence because I didn’t think I could do this. Head shots were hard. My instructors always told me to aim for the chest which was a bigger target.
 

“Okay, we are heading for that big civilian boat, the one with the American flag. I think that is the one that is labeled 45 foot Carver. If I remember my boats correctly.”

“You know how to drive that thing?”

“Like driving a motor-home.”

“If you say so.”

“Well, in theory. You ready?”

“No,” I gulped at the strain in my voice and he moved a little closer to me.
 

“Hey.” His big hand cupped my cheek and he ran his thumb intimately over my face. Where he touched me my skin flamed. “You got this. I can’t believe my luck in running into you. I can tell just by the way that you handle yourself that you are strong and capable. I couldn’t have asked for anyone better at my side. We can handle this and then we’ll get on that damn boat, because I need to learn your last name and your favorite food and what else might bring that sexy blush to your cheeks again.”

Holy shit. That was unexpected.

I couldn’t help but smile at his words and he smiled back and wow, we were flirting. Zombies roaming about, a gun in my hand, flirting with an uber hottie and I knew I had this. There was no way fate would deliver the man of my dreams on the day the world ended just so we could be taken down by some asshole undead fucker.
 

“You got this?” He asked, looking into my eyes.

“Yeah, I got this.”

“Yeah you right.” He patted me on the back. “Now here’s the plan. Hit the door hard and head straight for the bridge. When we get to the entrance they should be right on us. I’ll have your back, just turn around and aim. We’ll fall back to the boat once we drop the ones in the parking lot. The gunfire will draw more, so we gotta make this count.”

“Okay.”

“Well then, let’s do this.”

We pushed out of the door. I led and went straight for the bridge. Blake’s gun fired twice, but I didn’t look back until I made it to the bridge. I turned and faced the oncoming zombies. Blake was close on my heels, when he made it to my side he turned and faced the incoming dead.
 
I aimed and fired at the closest zombie, taking it down on my third shot. My second zombie went easier with only two shots. The third, only one.
Alexis the zombie killer!
Blake took out the rest in quick succession. But, I noticed there were a few more coming through the broken fence. They were about 200 yards away so we would have plenty of time to make it to the boat. I turned around and ran as fast as I could, Blake hot on my heels.
 

The boat was a big, motorized yacht and sure enough it had a Carver logo, so we had the right keys. Blake went to one end of the boat and I went to the other, untying it from the dock. He unhooked a few cables that were locked into a box at the end of the dock and threw them on board. He motioned for me to board and I followed him to the cockpit, both exclaiming in relief when the key worked and the engines started.

“Full tank too. They must use this one often. It’s clean and well-maintained from what I can tell.”
 
Blake didn’t even look back as he pulled into the intimidating Mississippi River and began heading south just as the first zombie shuffled onto the dock.

THREE | Preppers Ain’t So Crazy After All
 

The calm of the river was at such odds with the chaos of the land that I didn’t know how to wrap my head around the gentle peacefulness of it all. I set my pack down and sat down in the passenger seat with a sigh.
 

“Are you injured in any way?” Blake asked looking over at me in concern.

“No, just mentally,” I laughed lightly, but it was probably true.
Can you say, PTSD?

“Yeah, this is fucked. Where were you when it all went to shit?”

“The Higgins Building, downtown. Luckily there weren’t a lot of people working, that would have been insane on a regular workday. There are 500 people in the company I work for. I think the building holds about 7,000.” I shivered just thinking about it. “You?”

“I was dropping off paperwork at my office. It’s not that far from here, right around the corner.”

“What do you do?”

“I own a private security firm. We do private details, some investigation work.”

“You, Blake, might be a good person to know in the Zombie apocalypse.” I really meant that. I couldn’t have latched on to a better bug-out partner.
 

“I have a feeling you might be an asset too.” He looked over at me and I didn’t think he was just talking about my skill-set. His eyes had gone all hungry and predatory, like a dog eying an abandoned plate of dinner. He cleared his throat and the hungry look was gone, making me both disappointed and relieved. “You seem prepared, you a prepper?”

“I guess you could call me that. I don’t really consider myself one, not one of those hard-core people waiting for doomsday. I just like to be prepared, I utilize their forums and get ideas from hard-core guys that post online. Mostly, I make sure that I’m ready and aware. I knew deep down inside that something was going to happen, that at some point the shit would hit the fan. I just didn’t know what or when.”

“How old are you? How does a girl like you become obsessed with preparing for the end of the world? I’ve watched the reality show about preppers, all those people seem pretty out there.”

“That’s putting it lightly.” I couldn’t help but laugh. The people on the show were a bit off the charts. Not all of them, but it was a reality show and they do profit from drama so they went for the most colorful personalities. “I’m twenty,” I said, answering his question, “and it’s not a big jump. Are you from New Orleans?”

“Yes, but I’ve been gone a long time. I moved back about two years ago.”

“Well, I’ve lived here all my life and I was ten when Katrina hit. My parents were musicians. Didn’t have a care in the world. They didn’t prepare and refused to evacuate for hurricanes. Katrina was no different. We spent two days in a very hot attic when the waters rose. My parents completely broke down during that time. No water, no food, not even an ax to chop our way out of the roof so we could be rescued by the choppers. If my dad had a gun, he probably would have used it on himself. I finally just jumped in the water and swam out of the flooded house. I couldn’t take their bickering and blame.
 

“There were air pockets at the ceiling in our house and I was a really good swimmer, if not I would have drowned. I knew my neighbor had a pirogue in his back yard. It was disgusting polluted water, and I’ll probably get cancer in a few years, but I got my parents out. We would have died in that attic because my parents didn’t even have the forethought to put supplies in the attic, which is a must in New Orleans. It kind of makes an impression on a girl. I swore I wouldn’t be unprepared for a catastrophe again.”
 

“Jesus, Lex.”
 

“We were sent to Austin,” I continued with my Katrina story,
 
“and lived there for a few months, but when we came back I made sure that I had at least one week of preps. When I got my own place I increased my prepping. I don’t really stockpile because if another flood were to happen any stores would be ruined. But I have about six months of food, weapons, water, a generator, and I keep a bug-out bag in my vehicle at all times.”

“That’s smart. How about your parents, they still around?”

“Yeah, but they didn’t learn. They fell right back to life as usual when we moved home. They even got a house in Musician’s Village so it’s always a party. I know this is terrible, but I have no hope that they would survive something like this.
 
I’ve resigned myself to just letting them go if things went south. I tried to get them to at least store some food, but they would just eat whatever I brought over. Plus, my mom would rather shoot herself than shoot another human, undead and trying to eat her or living and trying to rob her, and my dad would grab his bag of pot and gin, nothing else. I love them, but they don’t work well under pressure.”
 

“So you don’t want to try to get them out?”

My scattered thoughts tried to formulate any kind of plan, but it wasn’t coming together. I saw no hope for my parents and it hurt. “Their neighborhood is on the other side of the Quarter. I don’t think I could get there right now even if I tried. I’ll get my preps and then make a plan to just go check on them if it’s even possible. I should probably try and get information. Maybe the National Guard mobilized or something, maybe they’ll contain this. Maybe they got in a car and ran for safer ground.”
 

“Maybe.” He looked about as convinced as I was.

“Do you know anything? I just saw one broadcast and it was cut off.”

“I think the government shut down the feed, they don’t want anyone to panic. That’s what I’m assuming, at least. I couldn’t even get an internet signal on my broadband connection at the office. The infrastructure wouldn’t crumble that quickly, someone, or more likely our government, did a media blackout so images couldn’t get out to the unaffected areas of the country.”