Sirens of the Zombie Apocalypse (Book 2): Siren Songs (6 page)

Mark spoke to Liam as they both looked down. “Get to livin'
or get to dyin' eh?”

“What?”

“Oh, it's a line from a movie. It's how I feel about setting
up this water stop for people.”

“You set all this up?”

“Well, me and thirty of my closest friends. Yes. We did it
together. The fast food joint over there was the key though,”
he was pointing off to their left, “they still have running
water and the owner got us most of these big containers.”

Liam was impressed. It had only been four days since the world did
its face-plant off the bicycle, but this was the first truly positive
thing he'd seen. It lifted his spirits. “Amazing.”

Phil came running up, and after some introductions, he took in the
operation and could only echo Liam.

Liam looked at Mark. He seemed to be in his 30's or 40's—he
was notoriously bad with ages—with short dark hair with bits of
grey sprinkled in. He was average build and average height. He was
wearing dark sunglasses and an obnoxious deep red Hawaiian shirt with
white palm trees. He came across as a naturally happy person, with an
infectious smile, even in the midst of this terrible scene.

He turned his smile on Liam. “So what brings you guys this
way? Not many cars on the roads these last couple days. You must be
going somewhere—surely not here.”

“I used to work for the Arnold police. I've heard on the
police scanner that some local official from Arnold is rounding up
all his remaining officers, and those from the Jefferson County
Sheriff's Department, and is going to try to turn these people back.”

“Back? That's insane. Where the hell is he going to try this
neat trick?”

“Lucky you. They're coming right to your bridge. 3 p.m.
today.”

Liam looked down at his watch. It was already 2:30.

Saddle up! We're out of here.

5

Liam really wanted to get out of there, but he couldn't force Phil
and he didn't want to lose a ride for Grandma.

“Did you know these folks burned Arnold to the ground?”
Phil nodded in the direction of the massive plumes of black smoke to
the north. The small town was indeed burning.

Mark had already heard about the blockades at the bridges, and how
they fell. He pointed over to his team and said a couple of them had
come directly from the nearest up the highway. Whoever it was
probably wouldn't be too happy an Arnold PD cop was standing right
here on this bridge, though Phil had nothing to do with the bridges
other than the one he managed—and on that bridge he let the
people across peacefully.

“But most of these people are just like you and me. Average
law-abiding people. Parents. Children. They have no more interest in
the violence spinning around them than they did before the collapse.
We set up this system with the water to keep them moving down the
highway. Initially I thought of the idea to keep them from coming off
the highway and overwhelming
my
neighborhood, but now that I
see them—there is nothing that can stop that now. There are
just too many.”

“And they're being pursued by zombies.”

Both men turned to Liam. Phil had briefly witnessed the zombies in
action, but Liam had spent days inside St. Louis trying to fight them
and get out.

“Well I can't say for certain that
these
people are
being pursued by zombies, but my grandma and me lived on the south
side of the city and we had to practically fight our way out tooth
and nail since the sirens went off. We met Victoria and she helped us
get out of the Arch. We met Phil and he helped us get over the last
bridge out of St. Louis. The infected—I call them zombies—are
real, and they're vicious. They wouldn't stop following us even in
the middle of the night while we were on a train.”

Mark looked back to the crowd. “If they're behind this
group, it's going to be an explosive disaster. There's nowhere to run
with people packed that tight.” He put his foot up on the
concrete barrier that was the side of the bridge, like he was
thinking. Liam noticed he was wearing cycling shoes—the kind
that locks a rider onto the pedals. An interesting choice for someone
with that shirt on.

“I just don't know what to do. I can't make these people
move any faster. I can't warn them without panicking them. I also
have an obligation to my wife and family to protect my own house. If
these people leave the highway and zombies are rampaging over the
countryside, my little water station is going to be a skidmark on the
underpants of this disaster. Maybe it would better to just abandon it
and spend time fortifying my neighborhood?”

Phil replied. “There's no clear answer. Once the Arnold
people get here there's going to be a disaster either way. The Mayor
is an idiot if he thinks this tiny intersection can be defended
against this crowd, when an entire river wasn't enough to stop them.
Of course this is
your
town now—he's no longer worried
about destroying his own, because it's already ash.”

Stay or go. Door 1 or door 2. The age-old question of gamers
lining up for quests in his video game world. Only a few days ago
World of Undead Soldiers
was the only thing Liam would think
about for days at a time. Now he was living it. Run away or confront
the local overlord and try to make a difference. Unlike the game
world, Liam had responsibilities. His grandma. Victoria. His parents.
It wasn't simply a matter of finding the right weapons and then
cutting new trail into the wilderness as a loner to find glory. He
found himself getting nervous about being on the bridge when the
police showed up.

“Umm Phil. Maybe we should be going?”

“Yeah, I want to be gone by the time they get here. Don't
worry about that. We have to try to help while we can.”

With less than thirty minutes, and tens of thousands of refugees
on the road below, Liam saw no hope in anything they could do. He
looked at Mark, trying to engage in conversation to hide his
nervousness. “Do you live around here? I live over hill in that
direction, in the Dearborne Acres subdivision. Well, my parents live
there. I'm trying to get Grandma back to them.”

“You got her out of the city huh? That's pretty impressive
for a—,” he hesitated. “Um, did you walk out?”

“Well, we started out in a car, did a lot of walking, and
ended up on a coal train. I left a few things out, but those are the
basics,” he laughed.

“Hmm. No, I live over in the next valley, up Seckman Road.”
He was pointing in the direction west of the interchange. It was near
his own subdivision, but on the opposite side of a low ridge. “It's
a fair piece from here, but we rode our bikes. We—”

Liam heard groans coming from the people on the bridge nearby.
Many of those serving water were looking past Liam and Mark; pointing
at something. Liam turned in the same direction and groaned as well.

Several police cars were turning from a side road, approaching the
bridge. Liam saw a dozen different color patterns on the cars as they
filed along the road. Several dark vans were part of the same convoy
as well as a rag tag assortment of other vehicles—dump trucks,
fire engines, big rigs pulling large container trailers, armored
vans, and others. It looked like a parade. A parade of government
departments.

Liam took a few steps back. Phil turned to him and said, “We
have to get off this bridge. Go!”

Liam walked backward, but couldn't take his eyes off the unfurling
procession. He couldn't see the end of it from his vantage point—only
the ominous beginning. The lead silver police cars were recognizable;
they were driven by the Missouri Highway Patrol. He immediately
thought of Captain Osborne, a Missouri Highway Patrolman who had led
a group of survivors out of the tunnels underneath the Gateway Arch.
He wished Osborne was in one of those cars, but knew that was
impossible. Osborne died saving him and many others.

Still, he hoped someone
like
Osborne would get out of those
cars. Otherwise—

He looked down on the packed highway below. Those people were too
low to see the trouble arriving on the road above them yet. The water
buckets were being pulled up one last time, as the workers began
moving off the bridge. That would get their attention. He imagined
himself down there in the throngs. What would he do if someone told
him he could go no further?

He and Mark were the last two off the bridge. They ran to join
Phil and the others on a nearby hill. He was happy to see Victoria
running up from the far side.

“Liam! I saw all those police cars in the distance and
wanted to warn you before they got here. I was too slow, I had to
make sure Grandma was comfortable before I left her back in the car.”

“That's OK. Thanks for keeping an eye on her. I'm glad
you're here though.”

“You seem to have a knack for getting into trouble.”
She was grinning, though her face was bruising badly from her ordeal
fighting the gang members up in the Arch.

“Maybe it's you? My life was smooth sailing until you came
along.” He was trying to be funny to dial back his fear at what
was about to happen on the interchange below them.

“Nope, that was the old Victoria. From now on, only good
things are going to happen.” She crouched next to him on the
reverse slope of the hilltop with all the others. They watched as the
police line started to creep onto the deck of the bridge, like
gasoline washing toward the spark.

“Liam, do you think it's a good idea to stick around and
watch this?” Victoria was fidgeting on the ground next to him,
as they both watched what was happening on the highway overpass below
their hilltop perch. “It looks like things are going to be
violent.”

He couldn't argue with her. She'd been right to be wary back at
Phil's house. Things had been “getting” violent for days
now. Whatever was going to happen down there wasn't going to surprise
him. When he didn't respond in a timely fashion, Victoria seemed to
take offense.

“Liam? We have to do something. Are we going to leave or try
to help those people.”

Liam still hadn't made up his mind when Mark spoke up. “Help
the people. We have to try to stop the police from turning these
people back.” He paused for a moment and introduced himself to
Victoria while Liam continued to ponder.

Leave or stay?

Leaving looked pretty good. His loyalties were to Grandma and
Victoria, and to a degree his new friend Phil. While he felt sympathy
for the people down on the highway, he didn't know how he or those
around him could possibly interfere with the police presence without
getting hurt or even killed. The police had already battled with
refugees like this on bridges miles back up the highway—and
lost. Were they ready to fight harder here?

He took another look at those down on the highway. He noticed
people carrying mattresses over their heads, looted from one of the
ubiquitous mattress stores in town. Two guys were pushing a heavy
chipper-shredder in the breakdown lane; it was bathed in the heavy
orange of the home improvement store where it was liberated. He could
see survivors carrying flat-screen televisions, dragging kiddy pools
filled with clothes, and wheelbarrows full of DVDs and video games.
He even saw one group of teens rolling a giant metal chicken ahead of
them—Liam thought it belonged to one of the chain restaurants
up in town.

The police arrived and fanned out up on the overpass. Would the
transients below ever survive if they were still operating in a world
where pushing giant chickens passed as a survival instinct? It made
him less enthusiastic about the future, both at this bridge and
whatever would come later. Ever since he'd walked out his door with
Grandma he'd only seen remnants of humanity, always on the run. Here
he was looking at the biggest group of living humans he'd seen in a
long time, and the word that popped in his head was “lemmings.”
Lemmings that would keep walking down this highway until they dropped
dead.

He imagined himself down there. With Grandma. With his parents.
How would he feel if he made it this far only to be turned around by
“the authorities.” The same authorities who had done
nothing to protect him or advise him how to survive when the sirens
first sounded.

“I'm going out there.” Liam was getting up, brushing
off the dust and grass from his pants.

“What?” He heard several people ask that question.

“I have to go out there and try to save those people down
there. What if it were us? What if Grandma were down there?” He
was looking at Victoria, but talking to everyone. “We can't let
anything happen to them.”

Mark was the first to respond, standing up as well. “He's
right. We've been trying to help those people. We shouldn't abandon
them now.”

Victoria and Phil joined them. Victoria asked, “I'm with
you, but what are we going to do? I don't think they'll be too
anxious to listen to a couple kids and an ex-Arnold police officer.”

Mark came up with a plan on the spot. Liam figured he must be
military or something because he was so methodical. Liam didn't like
his part in the outline, but he knew it was the best way to help
given the resources they had available.

Mark and Phil ran off to do their thing.

The kids walked toward the bridge, ready to do theirs.

2

Liam felt the eyes of the law enforcement people immediately as he
entered their “jurisdiction” up on the overpass. They
walked by several dump trucks placed across one of the exit
ramps—though no cars were on the road. They had put the heavier
equipment out on the edges of their roadblock, and kept their own
police cars and supplies closer to the middle. A couple of small
surveillance drones were humming high above.

To Liam's untrained eye he saw many tactical faults. They didn't
control the high ground adjacent to the interchange. His friends
controlled that. Liam noted they had no men on the back side of the
bridge. What if someone paid them a visit from their 6 o'clock? Is
that where Mark and Phil were going? And finally, being on the bridge
now, he could see much of this force was made up of civilian
government bureaucrats such as water department officials, park
service employees, and some out-and-out civilians.