Adaptive Instinct (Survival Instinct) (66 page)

Suddenly the truck broke free of the mass, blasting out into full sunlight and open road.  They could have floored it now that the zombies weren’t packed around them, but they kept their pace.  It was probably so that the trucks behind them would have a chance to catch up once they pushed through the mass as well.

Some time later, the sound of helicopter blades finally pounded past overhead.  Nicky was on that chopper.  Riley hoped she was okay.

“So how many people will be at the airport?” Cameron asked.

“Hard to say,” Brunt answered her.  “There was a fairly large group at a motel that was supposed to be on their way there.  We haven’t heard from them since they left, but they’re not due for another few hours.”

“Will we all fit in the plane?” one of the men next to Riley asked worriedly.

“Planes,” Brunt corrected him.  “There’re two planes.  And yeah, we’ll all fit.”

“What kind of preparations are they doing on the boat?” Riley asked next.

“I don’t have the full details on that.”  Brunt looked to their driver, hoping he did, but he shook his head.  “I know a helipad has already been established.  Maybe even two.  They’re loading up on supplies for the long run, is what I heard.  Air lifting in soil to plant gardens in, bringing aboard livestock.”

“They’re checking the livestock for infection right?  I have some friends who were attacked by zombie pigs.”

“Yeah, they have their blood checked before they’re even loaded in the choppers and then again on the boat.”

“Zombie pigs?”  Cameron looked at Riley.

“Yeah.  Tobias even took some film of them and showed it to me.  They’re vicious.”

“Are any of the scientists going to be there?” one of the men spoke up again.  Riley wasn’t quite sure if she heard a trace of fear or hope in his voice.

“Do you mean the scientists from Marble Keystone specifically?”

“Yeah.”

“I think there may be a handful.  None of the ones that worked on the virus though.  All of them were in the White Box.”

“What happened to the White Box?” the man asked, confused. 
Clearly, he didn’t know the same things that Brunt, Cameron, and Riley knew.

“It got overrun,” Brunt put it bluntly.  “Nicky’s the closest thing to a survivor from that place.”

The face of the man who had asked suddenly collapsed into an expression of despair.  The man between him and Riley looked uncomfortable about it, like he should do something but didn’t know what.

“My wife worked there,” the upset man whispered, explaining his distress.  “All this time I thought she’d be safe.  She was called into work the morning it happened, which isn’t unusual; she always worked a lot of strange hours.  She said it shouldn’t take long, that she’d be back in time for our dinner date.  All this time I assumed she was safe.”  He turned away from the group in the truck and placed his forehead against the window, trying to privatize the rest of his grief.

Part of Riley wanted to give him some hope, to say that maybe she wasn’t in the Box when the zombies were let loose.  She couldn’t though.  She couldn’t lie to the man like that.

The inside of the vehicle fell silent.

***

The convoy had started making good time once everyone was out of the prison, and had caught up.  Word came from the back that they had gotten out of there just in time.  Zombies had started pouring over the walls just as the big,
long haul trucks were leaving.

At no point during the drive could Riley really relax.  She learned why no one wanted to ride in the front truck.  They didn’t head down busy roads, but on the other hand, they didn’t pick empty ones either.  Every few minutes, they’d come across some cars stopped too close together for them to squeeze through.  Not that they ever tried to squeeze through.  The plough would slam into one, and with a screech of metal, knock it to the side.  The truck would shutter from the impact but never slow down.  Riley had learned these trucks were powerful, but not how powerful until now.  As long as the centreline of the plough blade could fit between things, they were smashed to the sides.

A few times, Riley caught glimpses of zombies trapped inside the other vehicles.  Their decomposing bodies would get battered around the inside, like a penny inside a plastic jar, leaving smears of blood and rotted flesh on the windows.  Then they’d be gone, the cars disappearing down the sides of the truck as they zoomed past.

It wasn’t always other vehicles they smashed out of the way.  The sound of many engines drew zombies out from all sorts of nooks and crannies.  They were run down easily with a splat and crunch, occasionally leaving behind speckles of blood and other substances on the windows.

Looking at the feed from the rear camera, it seemed as if their ride was a bit smoother.  The front section of the truck took the brunt of the impact, leaving only minor tremors for those in the back.  Part of Riley wished she could be in the back with them, but she hated not being able to see and knew she’d be just as uncomfortable.  Cameron might even hyperventilate if she were packed in with that many people.  The backs of the trucks had been okay for her before, because they had been relatively empty.

“The road ahead is about to get bumpy,” their driver suddenly warned.

Riley looked up from the camera feed and between the front seats.  Their driver hadn’t said a word the entire time, so what did he see that made him decide to warn them?

Trudging down the road ahead of them was a mass of flesh.  The truck had risen over the top of a hill, and they had a good view of the massive horde below.  They shuffled and stumbled around stalled cars, swallowing them with their bodies so that only the tallest roofs could be seen.

“Jesus Christ,” Brunt muttered.

“Where the hell did they all come from?” the man next to Riley asked.

“Toronto,” Riley answered him.

“Toronto?  How could all those things come from Toronto?”

“Easily,” Cameron answered this time, leaning into Riley for a better view.  “There are over two and half million people in Toronto, more than double that of Leighton, which reached the million mark last year, if I remember right.  Did you see how many zombies gathered around the prison?  A lot.  This is the Toronto horde, which likely formed by following survivors north.”

“There’s no way they kept up with the survivors,” the man commented.  The closer they got to the group, the easier it was see how slow and shambling they were.  Yet as they noticed the trucks speeding toward them, they picked up the pace.

“They didn’t,” Riley took over the answering again, her thought process totally in sync with her sister’s.  “They’re not bright, not most of them anyway.  The survivors headed this way, the horde followed after them, probably killing most of them and assimilating them into the group.  Once the survivors were out of sight or dead, the zombies didn’t have anything to focus on.  That doesn’t mean they were going to stop walking however.  My guess is that in such a large group, as long as one zombie continues to move forward, remembering that this is the last direction in which they saw anything moving, the rest will just follow suit, assuming that first zombie knows what it’s doing.”

“Ever been to a sports game?” Brunt added.  “One person starts chanting and everyone else joins in.  It’s like that, isn’t it?  But with walking?”

“Yeah.”  Riley was never one for sports analogies, but it sounded about right in this case.

“Here we go,” their driver said as the first zombie staggered toward the front of their rushing vehicle.  It bounced off the plough and was thrown into the side of a Buick.

The truck was surrounded instantly, although it was nothing like escaping from the prison.  The driver kept his foot to the floor, smashing his way through the zombies as quickly as possible.  The shear mass of them threatened to slow, and even worse, stop their forward movement.  If zombies had been built of tougher stuff than flesh and bone, they never would have been able to make it through.

Riley had spent a good portion of her life wishing that people were tougher, that the body could take more damage without falling apart.  At this moment, she was wishing for the complete opposite.  She wished that the zombies were more decomposed, dried out, and rotted; then they would have fallen apart so much more easily.

A few grabbed onto the plough and the sides of the truck as it went by, but the bodies of all the other zombies whipping past always managed to scrape them back off.

The first car appeared out of nowhere, slamming off them harder than any other cars had previously.  While earlier they had been sort of trying to steer around abandoned vehicles and therefore hitting only the edges of them, this one was hit nearly full on.  Riley reflexively grabbed the seat in front her during the impact, sparing herself from getting launched up onto Brunt’s lap.  Her bag didn’t stop though and was thrown into the windshield.  Brunt quickly pulled it out of their driver’s line of sight.

Cameron pulled Riley back.  There wasn’t enough room to get her seat belt on properly, so she wrapped it over one shoulder, and then wrapped her arms tightly around Riley.  Riley held onto her sister as well, hoping they could both manage to stay in their seats.

Another car appeared from nowhere, and then another.  Every impact threatened to be their last.  All it would take was the right set up of cars piled up against a cement barrier and they’d be fucked.  It seemed like each impact was worse than the last, trying to throw those in the backseat out through the windshield.  At least it let them know they hadn’t wandered off the road, which would have been entirely possible considering it couldn’t be seen for all the corpses standing upon it.

There was a particularly bad impact with a mini-van and Riley heard Cameron’s shoulder pop out of place because of the seatbelt wrenching it.  She screamed through clenched teeth but the Bishop girls kept holding on to one another, knowing they couldn’t do anything until they were out of this mess.

Just like the departure from the prison, with a burst of sunlight they were suddenly free.

“Deep breaths, Cameron, deep breaths,” Riley told her as she leaned over her sister and began to carefully remove her arm from the belt.

“Woo,” Brunt sighed with relief, looking back with a goofy grin on his face.  “Glad that’s over with.”  He was sweating from the effort it took to keep all the bags, rifles, and other loose articles from interfering with their driver.  Pretty much everything but the people from the backseat had ended up in the front.

“I’m going to be with my wife,” the man near the door suddenly said.

Before anyone could comprehend that he had even spoken, the door next to him was swung open, and he jumped out.

Everyone was so shocked about what had just happened that it took nearly a minute before the man next to Riley leaned over and shut the door.

“What the fuck?” Brunt shouted.

The driver didn’t stop or even slow down.  Not only could that result in suicide or the deaths of those behind them, he also knew it was pointless.  At the speeds they were going, an impact with the pavement was crippling if not fatal.  If he had managed to survive his jump, the horde would be upon him soon.

In silence, the remaining man shifted over into his seat and buckled up.  Riley helped Cameron into the middle position, climbing over her, and taking the other window seat so that she could take a look at her shoulder.

“I’m going to need some help popping this back in,” Riley told the remaining man.  She had put on her clinical voice, detaching herself from what she had just witnessed.  It was so sudden and unexpected that she had no idea what to think of it.

With the man applying counter-traction, Riley was able to pop Cameron’s shoulder back into place.  Her sister moaned loudly with the sound of the snap.  Brunt then looked through her bag and found Riley a bandage she was able to use as a sling for Cameron.

Once that was done with, those in the back buckled in, now having enough room and enough seatbelts to do so, and Brunt handed their things back.

“There might be some injuries in the back,” Riley said to their driver.  It was hard to tell if what she was seeing on the camera was injury, or just fright.  The man who shared the rear seat with them had gotten a pretty bad fabric burn on his arm from one of the seat backs, so it was likely that at least some minor injuries had also
occurred in the rear compartment.

“We have a scheduled stop in another ten to twenty minutes,” the driver said.  “It’s to top off our fuel and allow everyone a bathroom break.  You can check out the other passengers then.”

Riley nodded.

They continued to ride in silence, with Riley still wondering about the man who had so suddenly jumped.

***

Much of the drive was uneventful after that.  They still hit vehicles and zombies, but didn’t run into another horde like that massive one.  When they stopped, things went smoothly and efficiently.  Everyone disembarked, stretched their legs, and used the flat, barren farm fields all around as a toilet.  Many people were embarrassed, several complained, but no one tried to argue for some sort of change.  Riley checked all the people from the back of their truck for injury.  The worst was another dislocated shoulder, and a woman with a head laceration.  Both of them would be fine.  Thank
God, they had no elderly in their truck, or else there could have been broken bones and heart attacks to deal with.  The handful of kids was scared, but they were resilient and had taken their few bumps well.