The Week of the Dead (31 page)

“But you were defending the soldier?”

“That’s right, I was. That helped me not get executed. As it turned out, the soldier was some politician’s kid. They accused me of ‘excessive force.’ So I was court-martialed, got thrown in prison for awhile, dishonorably discharged, and your dad was the first person in a thousand who gave me hope that I wasn’t being abandoned.”

They both exchanged glances. Devin stuck out his hand palm up. She turned and put her hand on his, and they squeezed fingers. “If you tell anyone, I’ll straight up cut your nuts off!” Erica said jokingly.

“Likewise, babycakes.” They shook hands, and Devin went back to the back of the van.

A sign came up: “Clarksdale 10 miles.” Devin clicked on the radio. “
Attention. Attention.
We need to pull over.”

“What for?” Tara asked.

“We’re almost to town,” Isaac said.

“I know. That’s the problem. Pull over,” Devin said. Walker, not caring about the others’ whining, slowed the transport truck to a halt and turned off the engine. Since the biggest vehicle was stopped, everyone behind him had to. “Meet up,” Devin said.

“What’s up?” Jamison asked as they met up with Devin and the Vikings. “There’s no way but straight through the town. I want everyone armed,” Devin said as he opened the back door of the van. He began handing out rifles and shotguns to the unarmed civilians, who took them and checked them out. Jamison started handing out the bombs they made in the hardware store. These IEDs were a jar of nuts, bolts, screws, or whatever they could find, strapped to a propane canister, with a rag sticking out of it. The Vikings took these crude weapons with their melee weapons. “We could be walking into a shit storm, or we could be walking into a nice neighborhood with lemonade and old people playing badminton,” Devin said.

“While we’re there, we should see if there are any supplies left,” Isaac said. Most of them agreed. They hardly had been eating. They were trying to make their supplies last while on the road. “We’re going to take the highway into town. We’re going to stay on the highway. Hopefully there will be some supplies along the highway. The highway goes straight through town, so I hope we can make this quickly and quietly.”

The motorcade continued to Clarksville. Devin neglected to tell them the true reason why he gave everyone weapons. He did some research on the still-working Internet, and he discovered that Clarksville is a small town. However, not everything is in a name. The town’s recent population stood at 150,000 people. Devin didn’t know if the population stood that high after the monsters came out. He figured something was going to happen in Clarksville.

When they crossed inside the city limits, it looked like everything other town they had seen. There were buildings that were still on fire. Trash blew in the wind. A path had been cleared by something. They followed the wide path in between crushed, mangled, and otherwise abandoned vehicles. There weren’t any signs of life in the dilapidating city. There wasn’t any sign of the creatures either. The convoy checked out the first store they came to. Its sign had fallen off, and the radio antenna of the next building was in its place haphazardly.

The Vikings waved one of the SUVs over. Redbeard, Tank, and Ferret looked around. The glass doors were locked from the inside. Ferret knocked politely and waited for something to happen on the other side of the glass doors. Nothing happened. He nodded to Tank who took out his baton and smashed the glass. Devin and Jamison looked around to see if anything responded to the unfamiliar shattering of the glass in the city of stillness. Nothing stirred. “Huh? It’s like this place…a ghost town,” Jamison said.

There was a scream coming from down the road. There came a man running toward them. He had what looked like a fireplace poker waving it back and forth as he trotted down the road. Then behind him came a multitude of zombies following in his footsteps. “On me!” Jamison said as he put the man in his sights. He knelt down and opened fire. Jamison picked off two of the faster zombies. Those who weren’t helping Ferret and Redbeard load supplies came to the firing land. The humans had set up a barricade of themselves.

The sharpshooters of the group were picking off targets. Jamison and Walker were using their M14s while an old man was using a bolt-action deer rifle. The running man tripped on his own feet. He tumbled to the ground, rolled on his back, and then got back up. He twisted his ankle in the process, causing him to have a painful hobble. “He’s not going to make it!” one of the civilians said. “Advance!” The line of humans stepped closer. They were closing the gap between the two armies. “Throw them!” Devin ordered. Tank and Jericho took the extra IEDs out of the container. They laid it down between them.

Jericho lit up a cigarette and Tank held the object next to Jericho’s lighter. “Take cover!” Jericho said as he watched the smoking object fall to the ground behind the running man. “Cover up!” Jamison said as he slammed his body into a stationary mailbox. There was a deafening boom followed by the whizzing of spare parts being launched in every direction. “Loose!” Tank called as he and Jericho threw their I.E.D’s. Tank threw his so hard that the jar of bolts came undone from the propane canister. The propane canister slammed to the ground and then shot off like a spinning top until it went under a car parked on the side of the street. The car was forced off the ground with a belly of fire and landed top side down onto the pavement. “Hold those!” Jamison shouted as the man was nearing the new kids in town.

As the man came to the center of the intersection, half a block from Jamison, the man bent over, out of breath. He was panting as he tried to hold himself up. Suddenly there was a horn sounding from the right side of the intersection. The man turned to see an eighteen-wheeler that slammed into his body. The tractor trailer flattened the man under its wheel. The truck driver blew his horn again. Jamison looked to see men standing on the back of the trailer. The men upfront threw something out of the door that exploded in the air. The air was filled with a white cloud. Jamison instinctively covered his face, fearing biochemical weapons. Devin put his hand on his shoulder. “It…it tastes like sugar,” he said as the sugar began to fill his mouth and throat. The beeping sound of the eighteen-wheeler backing up came from the other side of the cloud. There were shadows forming through the fog. “Scavengers!” someone shouted.

“Get back to the vehicles,” Devin whispered to those around him. Most were crouched down, and some were crawling on their hands and knees. The shadows came through the fog, and one of them fired wildly into the fog. Regrettably for him, the sugar-smoke grenades didn’t affect the Vikings. The man with the pistol screamed as he saw the arrow sticking out of his eye. The gas mask on his face didn’t do much for him now. Tank and Redbeard walked along the sides of the walls. They counted their steps, and at the sixteenth step, they turned in and swung their heavy clubs and batons connecting with another human target. Its head was pancaked between the two mighty objects colliding with it. When Redbeard and Tank got to the end of the fog, the truck had disappeared. As they walked back, Jamison heard the booming voice of Redbeard, “Don’t fucking shoot me!”

Ferret’s voice rang out. “Help! I need help!” Redbeard, Devin, Isaac, and Jamison followed his voice. There, on the ground, they found Jericho. He still had a cigarette barely hanging out of his mouth; he and Ferret were holding a bleeding wound on his abdomen. Dark blood was mixed with green bile as it flowed from the wound. Isaac knelt down and examined the wound. “You’re going to be fine!” Isaac said, trying to keep his new patient, and those around him, calm.

“Bullshit, Doc, I was an EMT!” Jericho said as he huffed on his smoke. Isaac turned to Devin and Redbeard. Isaac slowly shook his head. The truck horn was heard off in the distance. “I have a final request,” Jericho said.

“Name it,” Redbeard said solemnly.

“Get me back on my bike.”

The group packed their things and loaded up. As promised, they put Jericho on his motorcycle. He said his final good-byes to his friends and family. The Vikings did something new. From the armored car, they pulled out their shields. All of them had mixed-matched colors, and all of them had a skull with a knife sticking through the frontal bone. They strapped their shields on their backs, covering them. Jericho rode past Isaac who was packing up the ambulance. He shook his hand; after all, Isaac bandaged the gunshot wound. Jericho even grabbed one of the females in scrubs and gave her a very long, blood-soaked kiss. He rode off in the direction of the truck horn.

“Where’s he going?” the nurse with blood on her lips asked.

“To fulfill his destiny,” Tank said in a monotone.

“He can’t do that!”

“What?” Tank set his puffy eyes upon her. Devin grabbed her by the arm and pulled her away.

“He’s doing what he feels is right. He knew he was going to die, so he’s going out the way he wants to, in a blaze of glory.”

“We could have saved him!” she said as she watched the motorcycle fade away.

“No, we couldn’t,” Isaac butted in.

“The bullet pierced his stomach. Even if we stopped the bleeding on the outside, he would have hemorrhaged internally. The gastric juices would have melted his internal organs.” Devin gave him a nod. “It’s what’s best. End of discussion,” Isaac said as he went and shook hands with the rest of the Vikings.

They loaded up what they could find and went back to the road. Tank, who had taken Jericho’s situation for the worst, stopped in front of the caravan. All vehicles stopped to avoid him. He sat and listened. In the distance he heard the sound of Jericho’s engine. The rest of the Vikings stopped next to Tank and dismounted. They drew their shields and respected weapons. They heard the horn of the eighteen-wheeler. There were sounds of miniature explosions.

The tanker truck was throwing the sugar-smoke concoctions. Jericho weaved his cycle through the smoke and dust. He rode alongside the tanker truck. There were four men on the truck. All were humans; all deranged. With his shield on his back, he took out a pistol from his saddlebags. The men on the truck tried to drive him off the road. Jericho sped up and got in front of the truck. He pulled a 180 and charged at the truck. The truck stopped in the middle of an empty street. Reanimated corpses came out of the buildings.

Jericho stopped as well. He revved his engine. It was no match against the massive diesel engine. Jericho closed the lid of his saddlebag. He took out a knife and poked a hole in his fuel line. He put the knife in his mouth and held down the acceleration. His teeth held down the knife, and he screamed as he aimed his bike at the grill of the truck. When he got closer, he saw the “
What the hell
” look upon one of the men. All they saw was a smiling maniac on a motorcycle, firing a pistol wildly.

What they didn’t know was that Jericho had packed a couple of IEDs in his saddlebags. The fuel had drenched the saddlebags. Jericho ran out of ammo. He tossed the pistol. The pistol clattered against the asphalt. Jericho moved the knife to his free hand as he held the throttle down with his right. He popped a wheelie and slammed the bike down. The truck wasn’t stopping, and Jericho planned on it.

The caravan on the interstate watched as they heard a loud explosion, followed by a mushroom cloud of black smoke billow into the air. The Vikings let out a victorious cheer. Jamison silently shook his head. Erica shielded her eyes from the truth while Devin let a tear roll down his cheek. They moved on. They made it out of Clarksville without any more interactions.

Back on the Road

Chapter 66

Thursday 1300 CST

Elizabethtown

E
than sat quietly as Jenna patched up his wound. Phil followed the vehicles that remained in front of him. Little Paul had finally calmed down and calmly looked out the window. Harrison held his piece of rebar against his leg. He looked around the school bus. He saw faces he had never seen before. He didn’t care as long as they were human. Some of the drivers didn’t know where they were doing, or maybe they had their own plans, but the road got scarce once they made it out of the forest surrounding the Fort.

They spent the night in Radcliff. Phil, who was being aided by Harrison as a navigator, set the bus in motion toward 65 going south. “We’re coming up on Elizabethtown,” Harrison said.

“Maybe everyone will meet up there?” Ashley said from one of the seats.

“Or maybe it’s a goddamn death trap,” Ethan muttered as he sat up. His leg was still aching, but Jenna stopped the bleeding. Phil looked at Paul who turned his head at the sound of foul language.

“It doesn’t matter. We’re going,” Phil fired back.

Reynolds checked the gear in the back of the bus. Luckily, Phil had planned ahead and grabbed supplies. Reynolds grabbed a bottle of water from a flat and placed it on Ethan’s shoulder. “Sorry about your friend. He was a brave motherfucker.” Ethan took the bottle and nodded at Reynolds. “It never gets any easier kid.” Reynolds placed his hand on Ethan’s shoulder and went to the front with Phil. “How are the roads looking?”

“Not so bad. There are a few obstacles, but nothing we can’t deal with.”

“How long until we reach our destination?” Reynolds asked.

“The GPS says an hour and a half, but there’s no telling.”

“How much fuel do we have?”

“We should be OK.” Reynolds patted the back of the seat and moved to the back to continue sorting out what was in the bus. It helped him take his mind off all that just occurred. He didn’t know how many men he had lost. He didn’t know the status of the very hot Nurse Amy. He didn’t even know what happened to those who hid within the fort.

The Vault

Chapter 67

Thursday 0900

Fort Knox

H
enry took a group of survivors and locked themselves in the vault. After the explosions on the surface had stopped, the sound of a banging began. The creatures that had survived the onslaught of advance human weaponry were now inside the fort. The creatures began smashing through doors and walls trying to find a meal. Their bodies were beginning to run dry from famine. Henry left the giant metal door cracked. He knew the layout of the vault. There was only one way in and one way out. He couldn’t lock the vault door from the inside. Besides, if he had, there would be no way of getting out.