Zombie Fallout 9 (22 page)

I needed to time my jump out just right, so let's get all the facts straight here: I needed to time my jump with the speed of the moving bucket, the speed of the truck moving forward, the inertia of drag times, the coefficient of time and space displacement calculated by the fractals … yeah I was airborne by now. I jumped out of the side that was already damaged, hoping this time I wouldn't catch my foot. So far, so good; I made it out scot-free. Now, I just had to hope my momentum didn't send me off the truck and onto the pavement, where the trailing zombies would make short work of me. At some point during my flight, I heard the fracturing crash of my home away from home coming to a violent end. The problem of such a destructive hit was that it had the effect of sending the arm back toward me a lot sooner than I'd anticipated. Oh, who am I kidding? I had no idea how any of this shit was going to work. I had jumped and hoped for the best. I was so low on that truck body I could have been considered a second coat of paint. I was grabbing anything that remotely resembled a handhold to slow me down. When I finally came to a stop, I dared not raise my head.

It was like I was stuck under the blades of a helicopter as that arm continuously whipped by overhead. I don't know what Travis ran into this time, but whatever it was, it twisted the entire aperture to the point where the bucket slammed into the side of the truck with enough force to lift us onto two wheels. I was now looking down at the roadway as I held on to a hydraulic hose for all I was worth. A platoon of angels must have sat down on the far side, because somehow the truck slammed back down onto all our wheels. My jaw bounced off the truck body, and I'm pretty sure I chipped a tooth. For the briefest of seconds, I wondered if there were any dentists still around. The arm was imbedded in the side of the truck—well, more like the truck body had melded around it. I pushed away from the edge and got onto my hands and knees. One determined zombie still shared the exterior with me. He wasn't moving forward; much like me, he was holding on for the ride. The trailers were losing ground as Travis was now somewhat driving a straight course.

“Dad, you all right?” he shouted back.

“Fine! One zombie to your six!”

“Should I stop?”

“Not yet! In a couple of miles!”

The ride was somewhat enjoyable after the previous few minutes. I kept an eye on the zombie, as he did me. Neither of us moved, which was fine with me. I was still trying to get my adrenaline levels down to an acceptable level. If a cop gave me a sobriety test right now, I would look like a meth addict in the midst of a giant tweaking. That always goes over well with the cops. The truck started to slow. I took a quick glance behind me. I was happy to see that we were out of sight of our pursuers. I raised up at the same time as the zombie. I waited until we had almost stopped before I hopped off the truck. It was nice to have regular old ground under my feet. I staggered a couple of steps. Apparently, my inner ear had not yet completely stopped its spin cycle. The zombie got down as well, in a very athletic predatory jump if I had to admit it. Back when this started, it would have just walked off the edge of the truck, fallen into a heap of deadness on the roadway, then pushed himself up to a standing position before once again coming at me. Not this one though. I had a start as a rifle report rang out. The front of his head bulged out as the bullet struggled to get out of its encasing. The zombie fell forward.

“Thank you.” I told Travis.

“Where's your gun?” he asked me.

“Get back in the truck.”

“You told me that my rifle is the most important fighting tool besides myself and that I should never leave it behind. But yet here you are, Dad, without your rifle.”

“You're really going to give me shit after that bumper car excuse you call driving? Get in the damn truck before the zombies catch up.” I smiled. It was easy to smile when you'd flipped Death off and were still standing. Of course, he'd be back, but for now, it was Mike four hundred and seventy-two to Death's zero. The sucky part about that was Death only needed one to win.

“Where to, Uncle?” Meredith asked. “Oh my God! Is that you?” she cried as I got into the truck. “You … you smell like maybe bad pickles or something. I thought, like, maybe it was something in the bucket, so I didn't want to say anything. It's horrible … I thought Henry was the worst thing I'd ever smelled. You beat him.” She yanked her hoodie above her nose and drove her face deeper still under the makeshift nose cover.

“Okay, I get it. I stink.”

“Understatement, Dad.”

“Listen, you guys have no idea what I've been through!”

“Yeah, well, just think what we're going through right now.” Meredith's voice was muffled. “I think maybe you should tell us. You owe us at least that much. I think I'm going to vomit.”

I couldn't help but notice her eyes were watering from my stench.

“It's not really that bad.”

“Uncle, just because you've burned a hole in your nose doesn't mean the rest of us have.” Jesse added.

Travis was turning different reddish shades as he tried to hold his breath. Meredith was threatening to shoot out the windshield to get more air in.

By the time I'd recounted most of my tale, they'd made some sort of peace with my funk, or more likely, I'd caused some serious permanent damage to their olfactory senses. When I was done, I circled back around to Meredith's original question, because it was a hell of one. Most of my family was stuck in a bunker under the post office. They were safe, though, and that was something. We needed to regroup. I needed a weapon, and we could definitely use more ammo. Then my thought was to go to Ron's and assess that situation. If we could help, we would. Problem was the easiest store of guns was at Ron's. Maine was a gun-friendly state, but we'd proved over and over again that going into someone's home to look was not a great idea.

“We need a bigger truck.” I headed for a rock quarry a couple of towns over. It wasn't quite the Tyrex' that Eliza had used against us, but I hoped the zombies would have a hard time getting on to it. The trip ended up being half a bust. There were two trucks there. One had its engine out and the other was dead, and dead like not moving, not undead or living dead, meaning it would move. There is a huge gun store in Holden called Maine Military. We stopped. Had to. It's a requirement of all rednecks to stop. It's in the
Redneck Nature Guide
right after the discussion about beer-can chicken. They had been cleaned out like the store had closed and the inventory sold off at auction. Someone had even taken the fake prop guns hanging on the far wall. I felt bad for the idiots that thought those were going to do anything to the savage lines of enemies coming their way. Well, I guess you could always go
pew, pew, pew
really fast in mimicry of a machinegun.

I was saddened by so much nothingness. The people who came through here had been thorough. I would love to see their hideout. I could guarantee they were doing all right. They had enough ammunition that they could hand it down from generation to generation. I was at a loss as to what to do. We were a mile down from the gun store, heading to Ron's, when Travis pointed to another store. It was a fireworks place.

“This is no time for bottle rockets,” I told him right before I locked up the brakes, having all the kids brace against the dashboard in an effort to keep from ruining their expensive dental work. All of their responsible parents would have been pissed at me if I had busted anything.

“And you say I drive bad? Plus, you can't get bottle rockets in Maine.”

“What?” That sounded like blasphemy. One of my favorite Chinese-made products of all time, and it was banned?

“Something about unknown flight path or something.”

“Well, that's the damn point of them.” I drove backward up the road so I could turn into the parking lot. Unlike the cleaned-out gun store, this place looked like it had just been freshly stocked; if not for the heavy coating of dust I would have assumed it was getting ready to open for business. Any other fucking day of my life this would have been like letting a monkey loose in a chocolate covered banana factory. Right now, all I could see were large noise makers. I mean they had rockets, but the odds that these would hurt mass amounts of zombies was minimal. I wished I had Justin around; the kid had the uncanny ability to take some of the most harmless of fireworks and turn them into small bombs. Then I was walloped with that “a-ha” moment. I ran over to the sparklers.

“Which ones, Trav?”

“Which ones, what?” he asked. He was looking at the mortars.

“Remember a couple of years back. July Fourth. Justin had us come outside to check something out. Blew a trashcan to shreds, broke three of our neighbor's windows, and apparently, made Mrs. Durphy's dog so scared he shit all over her expensive couch.”

“Oh yeah, I forgot about that. Didn't you have to go to court?”

“No, I paid for the windows and told Mrs. Durphy if her dog hadn't been on the couch to begin with he wouldn't have shit up there. She only threatened me with court. She did move out soon after. I always meant to thank Justin for that. She was a pain in the ass.”

“Because she didn't want her windows smashed or her dog to suffer near coronaries?” Meredith asked.

“Was anyone talking to you?”

She raised her hands in an apologetic manner.

“It was sparklers.” Travis was thinking. “Colored sparklers. I remember him showing me. He grabbed a handful of them and wrapped them in an entire roll of electrical tape.”

They had a bunch on display and even more in the back. The beauty of having an energy truck was the overabundance of electrical tape they had onboard. We made over twenty handmade bombs before I decided we should check out just how effective a weapon we had. We used one of the sparklers itself as a fuse. I lit the sparkler, and like a seven-year-old, I got transfixed by the shower of blue sparks.

“Dad, throw it!” Travis backed up.

Thing had to be a pound by the time it was all wrapped up. I tossed it a decent distance away and even backed up a few steps. We all waited. I could still see sparks shooting on the ground, then nothing. I was not liking our chances of dispersing a zombie horde with pretty colors. I started walking forward. I about halved the distance when I was rocked by an explosion. A peppering of small rocks and clods of dirt struck me, but that was nothing compared to the concussion that felt like it was shifting my internal organs around.

“Fuck me!” I laughed, brushing myself off.

“You're bleeding, Uncle,” Meredith said as she ran up next to me.

I had an inch long splinter, which looked like a piece of chopstick, wedged in my forearm. I didn't care. If the divot in the ground was any indication of the damage we could do, then I was all in. Actually, I did kind of care about the chopstick, if that was indeed what it was. Who knew whose mouth that thing had been in? I pulled it out. It came loose with a sickly wet smacking sound. When I felt like my organs had slid back into place, I caught up with the kids, who were looking at the eight-inch-deep carve out in the ground.

“I think that will work,” I said while we all looked down. “This time though, we're going to wrap some shrapnel up inside as well.” Again, we had more than we needed in the truck: screws, staples, nails small hand tools … we didn't care as we bundled everything up. By the time it was all said and done, we had nearly a hundred of them.

“Let's go get the Talbot compound back!” I was happy. It was the first modicum of hope I'd had in a while, and I was going to enjoy it. The truck sounded like rocks going through a cement mixer by the time we pulled up to Ron's. That we had everyone's attention was without a doubt. We'd known this was a one-way trip with the truck, so I'd made what sounded like a decent plan on the go. It had more holes than Trip's underwear and smelled as bad upon closer examination. I had let the kids out before I drove closer. Their job now was to creep as close as they could to the horde and climb a tree. I had to hope that zombies hadn't thought to post sentries quite yet. That was a comforting thought as I rolled on. I lit a makeshift fuse, fixed the bungee cord on the steering wheel to keep it straight, and popped a heavy rock on the accelerator to get it closer, then I bailed.

“No, no, no.” I'd gone face first into a poison ivy plant. That was not the greatest way to start a mission off. The truck plowed into and through quite a few rows of zombies before it succumbed to the terrain and the sheer press of dead people around and under it. Zombies swarmed around and even in it looking for a meal. I'd gotten off the long driveway and into the woods. I got to the very outer edges of the zombies before finding a decent-sized tree to climb, and one that actually afforded some cover when the debris started to fly. I was not more than ten feet off the ground when the tree vibrated. A wash of heat and bits of metal blew past me. Then came the wonderful smell of burning corpses. I was downwind, fantastic. I got up higher, hoping to out climb the stench. It sort of worked. I was damn near thirty feet up. I scanned the tree line to my left. Travis was waving his arm back and forth. I acknowledged him then raised my shoulders in a questioning shrug. He pointed to where Jesse and Meredith were. I could barely make them out through the cover of branches, but that they were safe, that was all I needed to know.

I finally got a decent look at the truck, or at least what was left. The heft of the body was fine, but the cab had been shredded, peeled back, in fact—looked like a giant pissed-off ape had stripped it back thinking a banana was inside. Dozens of zombies laid around the wreckage in various forms of body-frayed disarrayed states. Those that weren't outright dead were missing limbs or had large swaths of muscle torn from their bodies, making any form of decent locomotion out of the question. Arms hung at odd angles, legs were bent awkwardly, torsos had gaping holes; it was all the carnage one would expect from an IED, or improvised explosive device. A couple of zombies were even ablaze, which worked in our favor as they sought to share their body heat with others.