The End: A Post Apocalyptic Thriller (26 page)

Jenny ran off toward the chopper. Ashley and Victor followed, still helping Kieta along, one person under each arm.

Ahead of them, she looked up seeing the pilot and Phillip both with weapons drawn and pointed in the direction they had just come from. Ashley looked back to see that she had made one fatal flaw in the escape plan. She left the rooftop door wide open. She was so focused on getting people out that she overlooked the most important detail.

Zombies poured out onto the rooftop behind her. The pilot motioned for them to get onboard, and as she passed, the pilot and Phillip opened up a torrent of fire on the relentless undead that followed in their wake.

Victor and Ashley helped Kieta get into the helicopter. Jenny was nowhere to be found. As Victor jumped into the bird, checking on his woman and comforting her, Ashley stepped down to one knee of the rooftop scanning the grounds for the little girl.

There she was! The girl was off to the corner, crouched down in fear. A small cluster of the large mob approached her, breaking away from the main group that still seemed focused on the two men shooting in on them.

Ashley screamed for Jenny to run to the chopper. It didn’t work. The girl couldn’t hear her. Ashley watched as the little girl’s dress danced in the violent helicopter wind. Ashley broke away from the chopper and ran for the child. With each of her steps more than twice the pace of any of the living dead, she reached Jenny well before the small mob descended upon her.

Ashley yanked her up with both arms, turning to make it back to the chopper. What her eyes instantly witnessed almost made her drop to her knees.

The helicopter had been breached. The mob of zombies made it past the fire that the pilot and Phillip had been laying down. As she watched them descend upon the only way out, Phillip lay dead. Several zombies hovered over his remains, feasting on his bones. The pilot was missing, obviously fallen to the same fate.

Something caught Ashley’s peripheral to the right. She quickly glanced over and was relieved to see Victor helping Kieta down a fire escape ladder. Ashley quickly followed suit and made her way to their side, passing the little girl down the ladder to Victor. Behind her, Ashley took one last look at the helicopter. Over thirty or forty of those things had fallen upon the bird and were now devouring the remains of her pilot and a man who she was sent to save. First Chadwick, and now this. She had failed.

Several zombies headed for Ashley. She turned and began to climb down the fire escape before they had a chance to get her.

Ashley pulled free her handgun aiming it up at the zombies. After two quick shots, one zombie fell.

Once Ashley’s feet met the cement, her head went heavy and unfocused. The ladder reached down from the left side of the building and overlooked the employee parking. As she tried to focus, she felt one foot stepping in front of another. Ahead of her, she could barely make out Victor getting into what looked like a truck. The girls looked like they were already inside.

Her focus began to fade even more as she reached the truck. She was losing it.

“Get in, get in,” Victor’s shout seemed muffled and cloudy in Ashley’s head. Her vision started to blur. The events unfolding before her were too unreal to grasp. So much loss. So much chaos and confusion.

As she reached up and climbed into the bed of the truck, a rancid face filled with maggots and dried blood lunged forward, grabbing her by the throat. It’s green and black-stained teeth reared open, and a putrid stench of rot and festering flesh puffed out into the air. Ashley’s stomach recoiled.

As the creature’s teeth bit down into her cheek, tearing out a large chunk of her eye, beyond the pain Ashley imagined it was Chadwick. The blood sprayed from her face as the creature tore the flesh away. Then came the pain and warm sensation of blood spilling forth.

She reached up to cover her wound, everything coming into focus now. With a loud scream, she leaped back, jerking wildly.

As she opened her eyes with one hand covering her hot cheek, she realized where she was. In the truck’s cab, with Victor in the driver’s seat, heading down the road.

“Ashley? You zoned out and dozed off after you climbed in. Bad dreams?” Victor asked, not taking his eyes off of the road.

Still a little out of it and caught up in her delusion, Ashley jumped up in her seat, looking back at the truck bed. The girls were safe. Kieta sat leaning against the tailgate with the wind in her hair. And Jenny was dead asleep sprawled out on the bed of the truck.

Ashley’s cheek was fine. It had all been in her head.

5

The piece of junk for a truck sped down the highway headed east from Lake City, Florida. With plenty of miles already behind them, Ashley and the others simply waited. The white lines as they passed could seem like seconds and hours all in one. The Chevy zipped along at a steady 80 mph, passing abandoned cars, vans, and trucks of every make and model. The highway was nothing more than a remnant of the last lingering few days that had just ravaged the coastlands of the southeastern state. How far had it spread?

“How long was I out?” Ashley asked.

“Eh…not long really. Maybe twenty minutes give or take,” Victor said.

Ashley sat up, back cramping and head still in a bit of a fog. Way too much had happened way too fast. Her mind struggled to catch up. Processing her thoughts, she brushed her hair aside and out of her eyes. In the passenger side mirror, she could see herself and part of Kieta’s hair flapping in the wind. She looked like hell. She had just been through it too. She lost a pilot, a civilian, and her partner all within the same twenty-four hours. It had been rough on her, and her mind was careworn with stress and disbelief. How could any of this be real?

“So let me get this straight. Before you dozed off on me again, you mentioned that the coastline was quarantined and that the rest of the planet was okay. If that’s true, then where do you think they are going to send us once we get cleared by the base?” Victor asked.

“What?” Ashley asked, still focusing on the road as it moved away from her in the side mirror. She hadn’t caught half of what Victor had said.

“Where do you think we are going to get shipped once this is all said and done?” Victor restated from behind the wheel, only taking his eyes from the road for a second. “You know…
us
,” he said pointing with his thumb at the passengers in the bed of the truck.

“No idea. I just do the field work. There haven’t been many survivors, and that was what we expected. So hypothetically, you three are a miracle. Probably get the same basic treatment we’ve been getting. Once we get to the base, they will end up running half a day worth of tests on us just to ensure we didn’t catch the death-walk thing, and then who knows? A fresh set of clothes and a meal, for sure.”

Victor’s reached up with one hand, cupping his belly, giving it two good slaps with a smile. “One thing at a time, I guess.”

*

In the back of the truck, Jenny had finally awakened from her little nap. It was hard to actually fall to sleep in the bed of the truck, with the wind blowing so hard overhead and the engine roaring so loud. Squinting into the daylight, in an attempt to take a nap, Jenny leaned against the back of the cab facing Kieta. Her golden-brown hair danced about out in front of her, the shorter strands occasionally popping her in the eye. She was tranquil and quiet, too quiet.

Kieta was worried, worried about Jenny in a bad way. She was acting odd when they had found her screaming her head off. Victor was her neighbor and could hear her screaming from the driveway. She had been locked in her house and he rushed over to help. Her parents were nowhere to be found, which was odd to leave a child that age alone. But after Victor broke a window and rescued Jenny, they spotted a half-eaten woman in the garden. Thank goodness Jenny hadn’t noticed it too.

It was then the three of them made for Victor’s work, feeling that it would be a secure place to hide. They had met up with Phillip along the way, but that didn’t matter anymore. He was gone.

It took Jenny almost the entire day to quit heaving and crying before she calmed down and passed out. After she awoke, locked away with the others in the office of Victor’s work, she never came to her total senses. Kieta had known the girl well enough with her soon-to-be husband living next to the kid’s parents. Needless to say, Jenny was once a vibrant child filled with laughs and love. And now, every bit of that was gone. All that was left was dried up to dust. The girl looked as if she had aged rapidly. Across from her, Kieta watched as the girl blankly stared off at nothing. A somber expression plastered to the child’s face.

Behind Jenny, in the cab, Victor and Ashley were talking and pointing at something out ahead of them.

Looking over the roof of the truck without taking her butt off of the rusty bed, Kieta saw what they were pointing at. The sky was graying, with thick, dark clouds some ways out. Kieta scooted up, tapping on the glass to get the front passengers’ attention.

Ashley reached and slid the back window glass of the truck open.

“Looks like it’s going to rain pretty hard,” Kieta yelled, holding one hand on top of her head to keep her hair from getting too out of control.

“Yeah,” Ashley shouted in response. “But, that is the least of our worries.” Ashley pointed out past the light drops of rain already hitting against the windshield to the road ahead.

It was then that Kieta noticed the truck had been slowing down. Looking out at the winding interstate ahead of them, she could see the worries Ashley had referred to.

The road a few miles up was congested with cars, and the small overpass was utterly impassable.

As the truck moved closer to the mountainous wreckage blocking their path, the raindrops turned into rainfall. The steady sheets of rain became heavy within moments, the clouds finally deciding to open up right on top of the Chevy and the passengers within and without.

“What do you want to do?” Victor asked leaning forward and looking up at the dark clouds overhead, the rain steadily falling.

Not even the slightest bit concerned with the rain, Ashley scanned the surrounding road filled with parked cars. There was no way around them. They were four and five cars deep, wall-to-wall leading up to the overpass. And from there, who knew? Ashley couldn’t see that far. A large semi blocked the view. It wasn’t like that really mattered anyhow. It was too bad for them to care about making it across.

Ashley glanced over at the truck gauges. “How are we looking on fuel?”

“We have half a tank. There’s no reason we can’t get there on that. We might cut it close, but it will get us there for sure.”

“I hate to interrupt your little chat, but I’m getting drenched back here!” Kieta grimaced and pulled the back part of her shirt over her head. The rain fell a little harder now than it had when they stopped.

Jenny seemed to enjoy the rain. With that same blank stare and an awkward smile like something sinister, she stared into the clouds. With her neck cocked back at a 90-degree angle, the girl just looked up, eyes wide and not blinking. The heavy rain fell on her face, soaking into her hair and dress. The little beads of loose droplets ran down her cheeks and forehead onto her shoulders.

Ahead of them, less than a quarter mile, the pile up of vehicles stared back at them.

“I think I saw an off-ramp a couple miles back,” Victor said.

Glancing at the gas gauge again, Ashley shrugged. “Not like we have much of a choice. If we feel like gas is going to be an issue, we’ll just stop and fill up on the way. If it comes to that, I want to fill up before we get into Tallahassee and the more congested areas. We can handle a few of those things here and there, but it’s the massive crowds that are going to be the death of us.”

Victor agreed.

“Look,” Kieta said shifting more into the cab from the window pointing out past the first few parked cars ahead of them. Her wet head dripped into the cab, and no one seemed to notice or care. What she was pointing at definitely took precedence.

Amongst the wall-to-wall automotive blockade, scattered and spread, ghastly figures started to appear. First, it was one, then three, and then a dozen. Ghoulish faces popped out from behind abandoned cars and open truck doors looking right at the passengers of the idling Chevy. The rain beating down on their rancid flesh bounced off the shoulders and heads of the approaching undead as they made themselves known. One by one, each zombie sluggishly crept out from the parked cars, trucks, and vans pressing forward. Several of the walking dead quickly broke past the cars out into the open street. With heads up high and arms out, their fingers reached with the intent of digging and tearing away at fresh tissue. The highway street at their feet instantly ran red and gray from the beating rain. Blood and chunks of rot, decay, and grey matter washed away from their putrid skin and bones onto the pavement.

“About that exit a few miles back, any time would be good,” Ashley calmly said as she pulled up the M-4 into her lap, mostly just for comfort’s sake.

“I hear you,” Victor replied. “Sit back, Kieta.” Victor looked over his shoulder and popped the truck into reverse.

After making an impromptu U-turn, the truck and its passengers made for Tallahassee and the military base. Ashley Fox sat back watching the rain slowly get a little worse.
How was she going to explain losing her partner, the pilot, and the chopper?
The closer the truckload of survivors got to Tallahassee, the more her stomach began to turn.