Apocalypse Aftermath (58 page)

Heads shook, most reluctantly, but conclusively.  Three of the senators were crying, visibly shaking, but Peter refused to allow himself to be moved by their fear.  The same as he ignored the faces of the wives and children and brothers and sisters and whoever else shared a last name with those men.  It was the same deal they’d given a lot of others.  They’d have the same chance they’d offered.

“Go.  Now.”

They went.  Peter turned to watch them trudge toward the road, waiting until they were in Nailor’s view as the Guardsman kept an eye out for any wandering zombies, then turned back to Carlson.

“You’re a murderer.” he told the senator.

“And you’re a traitor.” Carlson all but sneered.

“I’ll take my chances with a court if all this gets sorted out.  I like my odds, assuming it ever even comes up.”

“It won’t if you’re going to—”

Crawford stepped forward
with her rifle unlimbered and fired from the hip.  Her first round hit the wall next to him, but she tracked right and put the next two into his abdomen before the man even had time to begin flinching.  Carlson cried out as he collapsed, his hands going to cover the spurting blood coming from his midsection.

S
he screamed at him, her voice so raw with invective and pain that whatever she might be trying to say was lost in the screaming.  She just screamed at the top of her lungs as he looked up at her looming over him.

“Please . . .”

Crawford brought the M-16 to her shoulder and sighted down the barrel before firing right into his face.  Peter looked away as she continued firing.

Darryl’s head turned as he heard motorcycles roaring up to the clubhouse.  He gestured and Stick took the hose from him to continue rinsing off the tarp.  A little tent and pavilion city had been set up in the middle of the back yard.  Leticia had suggested using tarps to cover the ground under all the people laying beneath the tents, and so far it was working well.  Most of the sick people were as delirious as Bobo, and the diarrhea wasn’t turning out to be a temporary thing.

All of them had been stripped and covered with blankets or towels.  When someone had an ‘incident’, they were
cleaned up, shifted to a new spot and the tarp was bundled off and over to the back corner where it was cleaned off with a hose and some dish detergent.  Vivian was starting to think they were all sick from either food poisoning or bad water, but she allowed using the hose just for cleaning, in conjunction with soap, was the best they could do.  They didn’t have enough tarps to just discard them.  And hauling water up from the lake was hard enough without needing to use it for cleaning up.

Darryl didn’t know what they were going to do if the pipes that fed the house stopped.  If Vivian was right, they
couldn’t
use the lake for cleaning.  Not without bringing the water up.  They couldn’t take tarps down to it for washing; that would just move whatever was causing this into the water anew.  As it was they were barely keeping up with the need for water carrying for what Vivian was using to wash the victims directly, as well as trying to get them to drink.

Four
Dogz rolled up next to the barn on their bikes.  Darryl stripped off the latex gloves Vivian was insisting everyone wear if they were doing anything involving the nursing and cleaning efforts and went to meet the just arriving brothers.  He made it over just as EZ swung off his bike and took his helmet off.

“You get anything?”

“Not much.” EZ said with a shake of his head.  “Book on anatomy, another on general first aid, but that it.  We stopped at a drugstore though, loaded up on a whole bunch of shit out of the pharmacy, more gloves, disinfectant, some other stuff too, but that it.”

“Fuck.” Darryl swore.

“This the middle of nowhere bro.” EZ said calmly, but not without a clear sense of regret.  “That why we like it here.  There ain’t but the one bookstore, and it ain’t all that neither.  No libraries; this the Georgia sticks.  We want a chance at finding something she looking for, we gonna have to think about going into Athens.”

“Athens fucking
zombieville.” Darryl muttered.

“Yeah.” EZ nodded.

“Okay, just dump everything in the supply tent for Vivian, but make sure she know about them books.  Maybe there something in them that help her.”

EZ jerked his head at the ones who’d ridden with him.  They shouldered the bags – duffels and backpacks – and headed for the tent city.  Darryl stood looking blankly past
the fence.  He wanted to scream.  No, not true.  He
wanted
everybody to start getting better.  He
wanted
someone who knew how to fix them.

But they had Vivian and a bunch of untrained hands, and him.  He lit a cigarette and stood smoking, trying to think.

He was down to just under forty Dogz.  About a third of the people at the clubhouse were sick, most of them pretty badly.  Allowing for a minimum roof guard of two per shift, with two shifts that swapped off to allow for rest, and a few extras as backup, he had thirty left for tasks that took them away from the clubhouse.  If he did that, and a big zombie horde showed up, it would be down to the remaining healthy women to pick up guns and fight them off.

The question was, what could he do with his brothers who were still okay?  Even breaking them down into pairs, that only gave him fifteen teams that could scatter out to search.  And he didn’t think the odds were very good of a frantic search across the surrounding area would turn up a magic solution.  The
chance of finding a doctor or any kind of information that could explain what was happening to their sick was low.  Just stopping to talk to any survivors they found would burn up time making contact and doing the interviewing.  And even then, there was no guarantee anyone would agree to help.

Ransacking houses for information or drugs or whatever was just as bad; in fact, it would probably take longer.  There were way more houses around than there were people in them.  Talking to the people might take a day or two.  Searching all the houses to the level of
scrutiny necessary would take far longer.  Tearing through for food or bulk supplies was one thing; scouring for books or whatever that could explain how to fix the sickness was something else entirely.

There were hospitals and
clinics in Athens and Atlanta; but as far as he knew, not only were both cities zombie occupied, medical centers had been in the first wave to fall to teeth and blood.  He didn’t even know if – assuming they could get to one, get in, and get back quick enough to help – they’d find anything useful.  EZ might be able to figure something out, but even he’d need reference to interpret the use of any drugs or equipment they came across.

Darryl sure didn’t think hospitals had reference libraries; not in book form anyway.  Everyone who worked at one was supposed to
already
know what they were doing.  And they couldn’t bring Vivian along.  Even if she wasn’t desperately needed here, risking her was out of the question.  She insisted she wasn’t a doctor, but she was the
only
medical talent the Dogz had on hand.  That made her priceless.

The same problem applied to trying to take everyone somewhere.  If Darryl couldn’t be sure of finding something to bring back, how could moving a bunch of seriously ill people in the hopes of finding help be any better?  Odds were it would just make things worse, costing them whatever rest and limited treatment they were getting now.

Pain in his fingers made him realize he hadn’t even taken but a couple of puffs from the cigarette before letting it burn all the way down.  Dropping it hastily, he stepped on it with his boot and scowled.  It was nearly noon now.  He had about seven hours of daylight left before the sun started going down.

Turning, he headed back to the tent city.  Vivian was standing with EZ, sorting through the stuff the biker had retrieved.  Both looked up
as Darryl joined them.

“How bad is this?” Darryl asked, flatly, but softly.

“Bad.” Vivian said, looking around as she lowered her voice.  “I worried about dehydration.  Most of them either vomiting or shitting out just about everything we get into them.  Pills don’t work if they don’t stay down long enough to digest, and neither do water.  This keep on, and maybe a day or two from now, even if nothing else gets worse, they gonna start . . .”

“Can we rig up some way to get IVs going into them?” EZ asked.

“For water, maybe.  I mean, I know fluids in hospitals just saline; that salt and water.  A quart or two over half a day, especially with the way they are now, shouldn’t hurt anyone.  But we need needles, tubing, stuff to hold the water and feed it.  And it all gotta be sterile.  As for putting drugs into them that way, I just don’t know.”

“We can’t dissolve it in the water?”

Vivian frowned and twisted her hands nervously.  “I don’t know.  I think dosage changes when you put stuff in direct to a vein, but I ain’t got no way to know how much.  And I don’t know if everything will be safe doing it like that.  And I not even sure what they need.  I tried some antibiotics, ones I know is pretty common for general stuff, but either they ain’t staying down long enough or they not the right ones to fix whatever’s wrong.

“And they ain’t just shitting and vomiting.  Some of them got blood in the diarrhea, and that ain’t good.  It mean they pretty fucked up for that to be happening, and that’ll kill them quicker than the dehydration if it keep on.”

“We need help.” Darryl said calmly.

“Yeah.”  Vivian nodded.  “You got any?”

“I think I know where to find some.” Darryl said.  “Maybe.  But it don’t sound like we got much choice.  Unless there a good idea someone ain’t told me yet.”

“I flat out.” Vivian told him, looking pained and unhappy.

“I know.  You doing a great job.  Everyone know it.” Darryl said before he stepped away from the tent and cupped his hands around his mouth.  “Everyone gather up.  Right now.”

People working on tarps dropped them and trickled over.  Water was left boiling in the big pots over the barbecue pit, and even the
people moving among the sick under the tents stopped and looked at him.  Darryl waited until everyone was in range to hear him, then shrugged.

“We in a serious amount of shit, and that ain’t no fucking joke.” he began.  No one laughed.  “Everyone helping as best they can, and I know Bobo be damn proud if he weren’t laying on one of them damn mattresses.  But we gotta get some help, fast.

“VD, Door Mat, Zeebo, Shooter; y’all on roof guard.  Spell each other but make sure you paying real close attention when you up there.  Last thing we need is a bunch of fucking zombies getting in here and finishing us off while we down.  Everyone who ain’t patched, keep on helping however you can.  Vivian in charge of all the shit about how to do it.  EZ in charge of everything else.  Ain’t no one been arguing or slacking, and this ain’t the time to start.  What they say, do it.  Don’t fuck with them, don’t go whispering around behind their backs, just fucking do it.

“All the rest of the Dogz, get ready to roll out.  Make sure you bring a lot of ammo for your guns, both pistols and
shotguns.  Shooter, handle that, and make sure you got enough left over in case y’all gotta cover the fence while we gone.”

“Who we going to fight?” Weasel asked loudly.

“I don’t know yet, but we ain’t going unprepared.”

“Where we going?” Low wondered.

“Watkinsville.” Darryl said.  “They got a lot of people there, and maybe some of them is doctors.  We going to find out.”

“What, we gonna take a doctor hostage?”

Darryl shrugged at Mad.  “We gonna start with asking, then try trading, and I’ll figure out what happens next if we get that far.  But we ain’t going if we ain’t ready for whatever need doing.  We coming back with some kind of help, whatever it takes.”

There was some muttering at that, but no one raised any further comment.  Not overtly, anyway.  Darryl gave it a few seconds, then gestured with both hands.  “Arm up, load up, and pull your ride around to the front when you ready.  Hurry the fuck up about it too.  We ain’t got much time to waste.”

The next ten minutes were a whirlwind of activity.  Boxes of ammo were brought out from the clubhouse, where they had been stored as insurance against a last stand sort of situation that drove everyone back behind the building’s stone walls.  Darryl stuffed shotgun shells into his vest pockets, loose nine millimeter bullets into his front pants pockets, and put two more full boxes into his Softail’s saddlebags.  Some cord let him rig up a sling for the shotgun so he could carry it across his back.

The other Dogz followed suit.  There wasn’t much extraneous talk.  The mood got serious as the weapons and ammunition were handed out and checked.  Finally thirty-one bikers were sitting on idling motorcycles in the front yard, spread out to either side of the gravel driveway on the inside of the gate.  When everyone was in place, Darryl nodded to Shooter, who pushed the gate open with Door Mat’s help.

Leading the way, Darryl bumped down the long gravel drive to the road.  He waited for his brothers to shake down into a long double column behind him, then laid on his throttle.  The noise was glorious as the motorcycles blasted down the roads, their engines reverberating off houses and abandoned cars, slicing through the trees beside the roads; but he took no pleasure from it.  They curved and threaded their way through the streets, weaving around zombies at need, and only once needing to reverse course when they came upon about ten of the still-active corpses in their way.