Snareville (2 page)

Then it was over. We looked down the road. From one bridge to the next, the way was paved with corpses.

More folks came up. They went around and put bullets in the skulls of the Zeds that still moved. The ones we dropped along the canal went into the water for a drift downstream. I passed Jack in a bucket tractor as I walked the girl back to town. The group at the barricades loaded the corpses, took them out into a little pasture beside the creek, and threw them in a pile. They covered the dead with a bunch of driftwood, topped them off with five gallons of diesel fuel from the trucking company, and lit them up. Greasy, black smoke rose in a thick column.

“
What’s your name?” I asked the girl as we walked into town.

“
Jennifer,” she answered. “I live up in the house a couple miles back along the canal. What’s yours?”

“
Name’s Dan.” I held out my hand. She took it in hers—small, soft. Not the hands of a girl who worked in a factory. “No offense, Jennifer, but are you nuts?”

“
I didn’t figure any of those things would find me. I wasn’t worried about it. I figured the government would take care of it.”

“
Didn’t you figure something was wrong when you lost power?”

“
We’ve got a backup generator. Rick made us get one after that ice storm when we were out for a week.”

“
Ah. And is there anything on the TV?”

She sniffed and looked away. “To tell the truth, we never watched much TV. Rick was gone on business a lot, and I have a garden. And I have my horses. I wasn’t in the house much.”

Great. A rich girl who doesn’t like to hang around us paupers.

“
Where’s your husband?”

“
I don’t know. I haven’t seen him in about ten days. He called me from Chicago and said he was having trouble getting out of town. All the roads were blocked, and the trains weren’t running. That was the last I heard from him.”

I looked at her. She was near tears. All scratched up, but I didn’t see any major wounds on her. At least she didn’t look like she’d been bit or anything.

“
So you just decided to go jogging this morning?”

“
Look. I’m human, okay? I was going stir-crazy in that house by myself. I didn’t figure I’d run into any of those… those things.”

“
Where’d they come from? How’d they get on our side of the canal?”

“
They were east of me when I saw them. From down near the highway, I guess. I don’t know how they got on this side. Probably same way I did.”

Damn. We hadn’t thought of that. We had some bridges to blow.

In the meantime, I took Jennifer into town. Kenny talked to her some, then sent her to quarantine with some of the women. We’d changed the quarantine area to the old high school. At the time, we had only two rooms in use. Some people made it home from out of town. So far, no one had developed any symptoms. The girls gave Jennifer a bath, cleaned her cuts, and gave her a room of her own with clean clothes. I went back to the bridges to help out there.

We’d done a hell of a job out there between the bridges. One hundred and seventy-eight deaders sent to the burn pile. Jack dug a deep hole in that cornfield and shoved in everything that was left. When he covered the mess, I wondered if that ground would ever grow a crop again.

We didn’t realize until we talked to Kenny in his after-action report that we were going to see some issues real fast. Even with decent shooters on the line, we’d burned up nearly five hundred rounds of ammo. We didn’t have much in the way of uniformity among us when it came to our arsenal. Everyone in my squad had a rifle that fired the 5.56 NATO round, but we were the exception. Everyone else had a mish-mash of guns, everything from Garands to AK-47s to SKSs to shotguns. The Soviet rifles interchanged ammo no problem. Biggest challenge was how to keep the guns fed. Some of the guys had battle packs. I had a couple, plus reloaded ammo to use on coyotes. But we weren’t an armory. We couldn’t survive a sustained Zed attack if they swarmed us bigger than they did that day.

“
I might have a solution,” I told Kenny.

“
I’m open. Let’s hear it.”

“
There’re three gun manufacturers within sixty miles of us. Two are in the same town.”

“
You think they’re just going to supply us?”

“
I think the buildings are probably sitting empty. I figure they’re in the same boat as everyone else, and I don’t reckon anyone’s showed up to work in a few days.”

“
You don’t think the looters have hit the places yet?”

“
I don’t know about the one. It’s pretty public. The other… I had a buddy that worked there. He’s the one who built my rifle and tweaked it out. His shop just looks like a bunch of brown buildings. You have to know Geneseo and know what you’re looking for.”

“
Okay. Figure something out.”

For the next three days, we made plans: how to get to Geneseo and back with the supplies. We had to go after ammo for sure, along with guns if there were any in the warehouse. We also disassembled all the footbridges over the canal from us to the river. It was a hairy job. We took quad runners and hand tools. Three people stood guard while two people tore the bridge apart. We just needed to pull the wood floor, so it only took a few turns with a wrench to take care of it.

The closer we got to the state road, though, the more Zeds we started to see.

At the landing just off the highway, three folks had to keep shooting almost the entire time we tore up the crossing. We decided we didn’t need to bother with the one closest to the river, since anything could cross the highway bridge. We figured we might need to blow that eventually. Fifty deaders got tossed in the river that day. We washed off in the canal, upstream from the spot where we threw them in. I didn’t want to leave much in the way of clues for any other Zeds to follow.

I visited Jennifer after every run. She hated sitting around in the classroom we kept her in. Just hated to be locked up, I guess. Couldn’t blame her, but talking to her took my mind off the missions and helped me unwind. We talked about nothing, mostly. Just two people getting to know one another. Her husband, Rick, was a lot older. He’d been a teacher at the college she attended. She was twenty-five, same as me. Rick was forty. After they got together, he left teaching and started his own software company. That’s why he was gone all the time.

Me? I lived in Snareville because it was cheap. I could buy a house there cheaper than I could rent in Princeton. I told Jennifer I had some school, but not much. It helped at work. I was off the floor—or had been—and I didn’t have to fill orders all day. Broke up with my girlfriend a few months ago, and since I was on third shift, it was hard to meet anyone new. Easier to just go to a strip joint and get a look than it was to find someone for keeps.

I put off the trip to Geneseo for five days. Then they let Jennifer out of quarantine.

“
I want to go with you,” she said.

We walked down Main Street toward the trucking company, where a rig idled, ready to go.

“
Why?” I asked.

“
I’ve been cooped up here for a week. Before that, I was cooped up at home for a couple weeks. I want to get out, Dan.”

I looked at her. “Can you shoot?”

She glanced away. “A little. Not much with a rifle like yours.”

“
Okay. We’ll get you a shotgun and a box of shells.”

She smiled at me, and I guess I must have lit up pretty good.

“
I don’t want to have to babysit you,” I said. “Make sure you do as you’re told and pull your weight.”

She saluted and gave me a mock-serious look. “Yes, sir.”

We rolled past the barricade north of town. Once we were over the creek, we were on our own. The road we needed lay right at the base of the canal. The guys on guard duty at the canal bridge waved at us as we made the turn and headed into the countryside. A mile up the road, we came to the second creek roadblock. Manning all these barricades really sucked, but we didn’t want to blow them unless it was our last resort.

I checked the rearview and caught a glimpse of the back edge of a white truckbed behind the trailer. I keyed the two-way radio.

“
You boys keep tight on us. We’re not stopping until we get to the plant.”

“
Hey, you don’t just have boys on your crew, Boss.”

In the cab of the semi, we grinned. “Yeah, Chrissi. I got one of you girls up here, too. Don’t get your hair tangled up in your gun.”

“
Funny.”

“
Just watch the taillights for turns and brakes. We don’t want to get stranded.”

“
No shit.”

That was Bill. Jeff Rissati drove the rig. We had Bill and the rest of my team in a crew-cab pickup behind us. We didn’t know what we’d run into, but we wanted to be ready. Guns were stoked. Magazines were loaded. Everyone had a rifle, except for Jennifer. She sat in the sleeper behind me, the butt of a shotgun planted between her feet. One of the guys in town had volunteered his turkey gun. It was shorter than the other bird guns and fit her better. We’d dumped the plug out and stoked her up with six buckshot shells. After those six, she’d be down to birdshot. I hoped it wouldn’t come to that.

We buzzed down the back roads with no problem. We passed silent farms. No one moved in the farmyards, as far as I could see. No one stood between the barns; no tractors worked the fields. We slowed a couple times to let cattle or hogs cross the road in front of us. Didn’t know if they got out on their own or if someone let them out. It was eerie.

In Buda, we saw the first signs of the insanity that still swept across the country. Several cars protruded from the sides of buildings. A few had caught fire and burned both the cars and the structures. We eased through the two-block business district. Corpses dangled from windows, skulls shattered. The deaders went for the tasty parts. A couple bodies sprawled in the road. Looked like someone ran them over on the way out of town. The dead thumped under our wheels as we mashed them down a little flatter.

Jeff turned us out onto the state road. Buda is a tiny town. The only thing keeping it alive is the main connecting road between Peoria and points north. The town’s got a little tavern, a library, and a convenience store with gas pumps. Just a bunch of houses otherwise. It wasn’t much before. Now it’s nothing.

Bill’s voice came over the radio. “Hey, Dan?”

“
Yeah, Bill?”

“
You boys might want to get moving. We got a group of deaders comin’ up behind us.”

I looked in the rearview. A block back, a small swarm of Zeds followed the trucks. I glanced over at Jeff.

“
I’m on it,” Jeff said. He put his foot on the throttle. The rig growled forward as the diesel came to life. Within a quarter mile, we left the Zeds behind.

At the main intersection of two state roads, we came upon a mess. Cars were piled up at the intersection, three crashed and a dozen others backed up. No one remained in the cars, except for a couple of ripe corpses belted into their wrecks. Looked like folks must have left on foot.

We checked the vehicles, all of which had keys in the ignitions. Jeff and Bill stayed behind their wheels as the rest of us started backing the other vehicles off the road. Pretty soon, we had them all lined up in the ditch. I decided to leave them there, where we could get to them easy. Most held a half tank of gas or better; one of the pickups was full. I debated about taking it, but I decided we didn’t need to get any more strung out just yet.

The three wrecked vehicles in the intersection were a problem. One car sat with a body hanging halfway out. Older lady. Apparently, she blew the intersection and T-boned a pickup. Someone had pulled open her car door, and she’d fallen partway out. The deaders must have gotten to her then. She had a lot of meat missing.

We dropped the smashed pickup into neutral and shoved it into the ditch. The old lady’s car was locked in gear. We fired up one of the beater cars, swung it out of the ditch, and shoved the wreck out of the way with it. We left the lady where she rested.

I saw Jennifer walk up to the third car, which was hung up on a busted stop sign. A woman still sat behind the wheel. This one was younger. She looked to be in her twenties. Jennifer held the shotgun in her hands.

“
Dan, this one’s still alive.” I could hear the tears in her voice. “We have to help.”

I walked up beside her. The woman in the car was beating her head against the glass. Her eyes gleamed white and opaque. No soul in there.

It was an older car. Must have had a bumper jack in the back window. When the younger woman slammed into the back of the old lady’s car and went spinning, the jack flew free and impaled her through her seat. No telling if she was infected before or after the wreck, but she was a deader now.

“
We have to move that car,” I said. “We can’t do it with her tryin’ to get at us.”

“
Can’t we just leave her in it?”

“
Not like that,” Chrissi said. “We have to get to the wheel.”

Jennifer raised the shotgun. The young woman in the car snapped her bloody jaws like a mad dog. With a little sob, Jennifer pulled the trigger. Buckshot blasted through the window and filled the car with black mist. The deader flopped aside.