Apocalypse Atlanta (34 page)

“Y’all drag them bodies over here closer to the car.” EZ said without pausing what he was doing with the can of lighter fluid.

Darryl blinked, then decided he didn’t care, and didn’t want to take the time for argument or explanation.  He used his foot to roll the second cop’s body over, which put it right at the bottom edge of the car.  Needles went around the front of the car, and Darryl was moving to help when he saw Needles was moving the first body okay.  He instead checked the back of the van, which was getting full.

“Close up, load up.  We going.” Darryl said, then raised his voice.  “EZ, you done?”

“Yeah, roll out.” EZ said.  Darryl glanced behind himself as he opened the passenger door of the Chevy, and saw EZ squeezing the last of the lighter fluid onto the remains of the towel.  The towel had a fat knot, bigger than fist sized, in the end, which was where EZ was directing the stream of liquid.  Darryl slid into the truck next to Low, and engines started up as Burnout and Needles kicked their bikes to life.  The truck was still idling, since EZ was the one who knew how to hot wire it.

EZ, holding the dripping towel out from himself, opened the driver side door of the van and got in while making sure to keep the towel over the pavement.  Darryl heard him shout again.  “Y’all go, I got this.”

Darryl exchanged a look with Low, then leaned over and hit the horn briefly.  When Burnout and Needles glanced back at him, he made shooing motions through the windshield.  They both dropped their bikes into gear and accelerated down the side of the building.  “Go.” Darryl told Low.

As the truck started moving, Darryl watched in the side mirror.  He saw the van’s exhaust start puffing smoke as the engine turned over, then the reverse lights flashed briefly as it was shifted into drive.  EZ’s other hand emerged from the still open door, beneath the towel, and suddenly there was fire licking up from the towel.  EZ swung the towel back against the side of the van, then forward as he tossed it into the rear of the cop car.

“Fuck.” Darryl breathed as he heard the whoomp-woosh of all that lighter fluid igniting at once even from a couple dozen yards away.  The van peeled away from the cop car as it started burning.  Darryl couldn’t tear his eyes away from the sight.  Flames were roaring out of the open doors a good ways past the roof, and the side of the car was on fire as well.

As Low neared the corner of the Wal-Mart and made to turn down the back of the building so he could circle around and get out of the parking lot on the far side, Darryl saw and heard the cop car explode as the gas tank went up.

Darryl exchanged another glance with Low, but said nothing as the van raced down the open area behind the building that was normally used by the fleet of trucks that supplied the store with the thousands of items it sold.  Low took the other corner pretty fast, but under control, and a minute later they were back on 78 and headed east.  Darryl remained tense until they were several miles away without having seen any cops, but didn’t fully relax until they were turning onto the lake road.

When they pulled up, Darryl saw a pair of Home Depot rental trucks were being unloaded into the barn.  And the van, along with Burnout and Needles, had beaten them back as well.  When Low finished angling the van back to the open barn doors, Darryl got out and paused to tap out a smoke and light it.  He reminded himself he needed to make sure some cigarettes, a lot of cigarettes, got grabbed from somewhere.

He’d tried quitting once, about seven years earlier at the urging of a girl who’d been trying to move herself into the role of his girlfriend.  It hadn’t taken, the quitting or the girlfriend, but he remembered how irritable and angry he’d been for that week.  The slightest thing seemed to enrage him beyond reason, and nothing made him happy.  He didn’t want to go through that, not now, and was pretty sure it wouldn’t be good for the club either if they did.  Most of the Dogz smoked.

“Stone Cold Dee Jay!” Joker said with a huge grin as Darryl put his lighter away, dragging out Darryl’s nickname into far more than two syllables.  “Ice Man Dee Jay!”

“What?” Bobo asked from the back of one of the Home Depot trucks, pausing as he shoved bags of powdered concrete toward the edge.  The trucks were basically heavy duty passenger trucks that had big engines, massive suspensions, and flatbeds instead of box beds.  Both were heavily loaded down, their contents being slowly emptied into the barn where bikes were normally parked.  The bikes not in use were all up against the back of the clubhouse to make room in the barn.

Darryl looked briefly at the bikes, then involuntarily toward the back of the property.  He didn’t see any flashlights back there, and wondered if that meant the burials were done.  Ratboy had died before they could get organized and rolling on the supply runs, as had one of the kids who’d been attacked.

Bobo had detailed four Dogz off as guards to watch over the clubhouse, and four more to drag the bodies, the kids who’d been shot as well as the two other dead people, out to be buried.  Darryl was kind of glad he’d drawn supply runs.  He wasn’t sure he wanted to handle the bodies, and he damn sure didn’t want to be standing around in the moonlit darkness burying any.  It was too damn creepy.

“County PD showed up at that last Wal-Mart.” Darryl said, a lot more calmly than he felt.  He dragged on the cigarette to cover his nervousness.

“And?” Bobo asked after a moment.

“And DJ took ’em out.” Joker piped up with a laugh, making a gun with his finger and thumb.

“You get away clean?” Bobo asked sharply.

Darryl hesitated a moment, then nodded.  “Yeah, I think so.  They both dead, and EZ torched the car.  Weren’t no one following us on the way back.”

“Good.” Bobo grunted.  “Come on, help get this shit into the barn.”

Darryl waited a minute, finishing his cigarette quickly, then pitched in to help with the unloading.  When all four vehicles were empty, he lit another cigarette as he studied the interior of the barn.  He noticed a row of gas cans sitting near the front, flinched, then got close enough to nudge at one with his boot.  It rocked easily; empty.  He walked over to Bobo.

“Them cans full yet?” he asked.

Bobo looked up from his own survey of the supplies, then grunted.  “Not yet.  An I got three barrels that’ll hold gas too.”  He pointed, and Darryl saw a trio of brand new metal fifty-five gallon drums sitting in one of the barn’s corners.

“I’ll take care of it.” Darryl said.

“You sure?”

Darryl glanced at Bobo, but in the dim light of the barn’s single inadequate bulb, the older biker’s features were too shadowed for him to make much out.  “Yeah.” Darryl replied.  “You going out again?  There anything else we need?”

Bobo shrugged.  “The barn ain’t full, but Big Chief doing good.”  He waved a hand at the clubhouse.  “Perv say he done been back once already, with a full load.  I more concerned about whether we got enough shit here to fence us in tomorrow.  It ain’t light; took us a long time to get it all loaded up.”

Darryl didn’t even bother trying to evaluate exactly what Bobo might mean by ‘fence us in’.  He just nodded.  “I’ll grab them cans and drums and get ’em filled up.  We can strip the gas station we hit at the same time.  That ought not take too long.  We’ll run them back here, unload everything, then head back out and join up with you.  Help you get another batch of shit on the trucks and back here, then we see where we at.”

Bobo nodded.  “It’ll go quicker with more on it.  Thanks bro.”

“It all good.” Darryl said, then raised his voice.  “Yo, my guys.  Get them empty gas cans and them barrels.  Cans in the van, barrels on the truck.  We gonna go fill ‘em.”

* * * * *

Jessica closed the lid on her laptop with a shudder, then lifted the remote and killed power to the entertainment center.  The television and speakers shut down, and she sat there for a moment.  She didn’t know how she was going to sleep, when all she could think of was shaky cam footage of crowds of people running from other, slower, crowds of victims.  Of zombies.

Online she’d found her favorite news sites were doing the same thing the radio and television stations were doing; covering nothing but the disease outbreak.  And they were linking to sites that were more interested in posting anything relevant, rather than perhaps using editorial discretion to try and censor the more horrific imagery and stories that were happening today.

The internet wasn’t bothering with euphemisms and extra words to describe what was happening.  They threw the term zombie right out there, and any discussion about it was only over the kind of zombie that had appeared, not whether or not they were zombies.  Most of these debates were meaningless to Jessica, at best a waste of time, and in the worst cases full of people who threatened to drag focus away from how to deal with and resolve the problems the zombies were creating.

So far, the most often suggested plans seemed to involve everyone figuring out how to barricade themselves up somewhere, alone.  That way, if they turned, they couldn’t hurt or infect anyone else.  Jessica wasn’t sure how feasible that idea was, even discounting how everyone would manage to keep feeding and clothing themselves if the machinery of life stopped being operated.

The proponents of this plan also seemed to make no allowance for children.  Some of them even pointed to the enormous numbers of outbreaks in the nation’s schools as a reason to abandon all children.  Said they were risks, that they were a threat to everyone else.  Jessica couldn’t do that.  She just couldn’t.

She might be able to let go of Joey and Sandra, though she still harbored a faint hope, desperate though it might be, that someone would figure out how to fix the ‘zombie’ problem.  But Candice . . . she would rather die than let her only remaining child go.

Sighing, Jessica set laptop and remote on the table next to the recliner, then rubbed her face tiredly.  She was tired, and she knew she needed to sleep, but it was going to be hard.  And she refused to take something to aid her sleep; she didn’t dare.  Someone might call about Joey or Sandra, Candice might need her in the middle of the night, or something else, something worse, might happen.  She shuddered involuntarily, then got up.

Her parents had retired about half an hour ago, with her mother promising to handle breakfast.  Jessica knew that was really just a courtesy notification; you just about had to threaten violence to keep Sharon out of the kitchen when there was a meal that needed to be prepared.

Dinner had been an anomaly, purely for Candice’s benefit, to have been an unwrap and bake meal rather than something involving what Sharon termed as “real cooking”.  Jessica knew that no matter when she rose tomorrow, her mother would have whipped up something far more elaborate and involved than what Jessica normally managed for the first meal of the day.

Walking into the kitchen, she poured out the last inch of undrunk tea in her glass, then stuck it in the dishwasher.  It was only half full, but considering what Sharon was likely to do tomorrow . . . Jessica bent under the sink and pulled out the box of dishwasher detergent.  Filling the soap slots, she replaced the box, then closed the dishwasher and got it started on its cycle so it could be unloaded in the morning, ready to be filled up after Sharon tore through the kitchen making breakfast.

Jessica went through the house, double checking the doors, then quietly went upstairs and half crept down the hallway.  The door to the spare bedroom was closed firmly, and no light shined from beneath it.  Her bedroom door stood half open, and when she got to it she saw Candice had dragged the enormous stuffed panda bear in with her.

Pausing in the doorway, Jessica took in the sight and smiled.  Her daughter lay on her side, both hands and one leg flung over the stuffed bear that was almost as big as she was.  Brett had won that for her four years ago, when Candice was six and had gone berserk when she’d seen it at the Gwinnett County Fair.

Jessica leaned her head on the doorframe, remembering.  Brett had turned to her, and given her a knowing look, then bent down and suggested a couple of rides they both knew Candice, and Sandra too, who had only been ten back then, would eagerly enjoy.  He said he needed to go to the bathroom, but they should go ahead without him.

When Jessica and the girls got off the Ferris wheel, which had followed the merry go round, a kiddie roller coaster that did little except go up and down without being too fast, and a spinning car ride, Brett had been waiting for them with a big smile on his face.  Candice took one look at the panda bear beside her father and shrieked in delight, tackling the bear in a full on charge, wrapping her arms around it and laughing.

Jessica felt a shimmer of tears forming, and wiped at her eyes quickly.  She was done with crying, she’d done far too much of that already today.  Brett had been so pleased with himself, especially later that night in bed, when he’d told Jessica how upset the carnival game operator had been when Brett had spent less than six dollars winning the bear at the baseball throw.  She remembered laughing when Brett told her how much more angry the operator had gotten after Brett had won the bear, and then told him that he’d been an all-state pitcher in high school.

“I miss you.” Jessica whispered, then blinked and shook off the memory.  Crossing to the bed, she pulled the covers Candice had kicked off back up, making sure to cover Mr. Bear as well as her daughter.  Working by memory and feel, she quietly opened drawers, finding one of her nightgowns and changing for bed.  She was just finishing brushing her teeth in the dark at the bathroom sink when she heard a car alarm go off outside.