Day by Day Armageddon: Beyond Exile (27 page)

I left our base of operations just as Saien was lugging the battery back to the wagon. I had a multitool and my suppressed pistol. I made for the V Bug to cut her guts out so that I could start making time south. The explosions and gunshots worried me. Since January, I’ve never seen noise fail to draw the attentions of those creatures in some way. There was always cause and effect. Approaching the Bug I observed one of them on the road facing the other direction beyond the car. The day was cloudy and it looked like I was in for a nagging drizzle. Miserable morale sapping weather.

The creature stood there in the center of the road facing away from me. I arrived at the V Bug just as a loud clap of thunder rang out. The creature stirred and looked about, as if looking for the thing that had created the noise. Foolish thing.

I popped the trunk to get at the wiring around the engine compartment. I used more thunder to disguise my work as I cut
enough wire to perform the wagon’s starter bypass. It felt like I looked up every five seconds to make sure the creature was still unaware of my presence. It started to walk up the main highway to where Saien and the wagon were. Yanking the last bit of wire from the Bug and stuffing it in my pocket, I drew the pistol and started walking quickly to intercept the creature. I was on a side road off the highway. I then heard Saien scream out, “My friend, you need to hurry!”

The creature broke into a trot in the direction of Saien. I had to run to catch the creature. It was moving faster than any of them I had seen. Not sprinting pace, but fast enough to
chill me,
as Saien would say. It was now that I found out how difficult it was to sprint and shoot accurately with a pistol. The creature kept a stiff-legged pseudo-jog going until the suppressed round I fired hit the thing in the shoulder, knocking it down. I took advantage of this and kept up the chase so I could close the gap and get the head shot. Despite the shattered shoulder, the thing was on its feet as quickly as any sacked quarterback would be. It snarled and started a stiff-legged jog in my direction. I aimed my weapon and emptied three rounds into its head before it fell to the ground twitching.

I sprinted for Saien and was so out of breath by the time I reached him that I was seeing stars. He pointed down the road and handed me his rifle. It was damn heavy, which reinforced my respect for Saien’s constitution. He was obviously a tough son of a bitch to carry this thing a thousand miles. I braced the oversized .308 AR on its bipod on the hood of the wagon and peered downrange through the looking glass over a mile in the distance. Past the reticle, I could clearly see battalions of those creatures moving along the highway in our direction. The scope was powerful enough to let me know that we would have a lot of company soon. I asked Saien how far they were. He said “two thousand meters.” This gave us thirty to forty minutes at best. Saien looked nervous so I didn’t think it would do any good to tell him that one of the radiated dead had been about to run up and bite his ass five minutes earlier. In the back of my mind, I knew I had one five-hundred-pound laser-guided bomb left on the Reaper orbiting over my head. I was thinking that there were at least fifty of those creatures in that group. I asked Saien what he thought.

He laughed in my face and said: “No, what you see before you is well into one hundred infidels approaching.”

Working quickly, I explained to Saien what I was doing, “. . . plug wires to the coil wire . . . attach the wire to the . . .”

Saien interrupted with, “Yes, yes, my friend, I know . . . positive end to the positive side of the coil. We must move faster.”

Saien alternated between helping me with the bypass and judging the range of the
infidels
approaching.

“Eighteen hundred meters.”

“Roger.”

I told Saien to run to my pack and pull the treatment out of the side pocket. Now that power was to the dash, I could see the fuel gauge. I quickly turned off the headlights and the heater to save power. I checked the dash. Half a tank. I then disconnected the circuit to save power. I pulled out the owner’s manual and determined that the wagon had about nine gallons of fuel remaining in the tank. Doing the quickest math I could, I calculated that the amount of treatment to add to the tank would be less than one-quarter of the bottle. The gas had been sitting in this tank for at least nine months and was probably nearing a year old. I didn’t guess it to be too far gone, so I decided to put one-eighth of the bottle in the tank. I quickly did this and shook the vehicle back and forth to slosh the solution into the gasoline as best as I could.

Just as I read “must wait one hour prior to combustion” on the bottle, Saien called out:

“Fifteen hundred meters.”

We didn’t have an hour left. Saien didn’t respond when I asked him how it looked. He just shook his head and kept one eye glued to the optic. I was able to see them with my naked eye. It had drizzled and they were still kicking up debris from this distance. Judging from the time it took the creatures to transit three hundred meters, I estimated that we had thirty minutes of useful time before the first wave was on us. I quickly reconnected the solar panels to the battery and laid the panels out on the roof of the wagon. Thirty minutes may not do much but it was better than nothing.

I located the starter solenoid just as Saien called out:

“Twelve hundred meters.”

Everything was set and it all depended on the battery charge
and the gasoline treatment. I frantically packed my things to be ready to go in the event the vehicle failed to start. I had everything prepositioned except for the solar panels on the roof of the wagon. If the vehicle didn’t start I would use my remaining minutes to shoulder my pack and move as quickly as possible out of the area. Saien would be of little defensive use with his sniper rifle. With a nineteen-round magazine and a twenty-four-inch barrel, the .308 isn’t nimble enough for what was headed our way. Nothing really was, short of a GAU cannon.

I started to gather Saien’s things together to place them in the rear of the vehicle for easy access when he told me to leave his bag at his feet and that he would take care of it.

“One thousand meters.”

The creatures were well inside a mile and moving directly toward us on the highway. I felt a strange energy in the air and thought I could hear them crushing debris and moving forward like an undead tank division, hell-bent on destroying everything. I reached into my pack, pulled out my binoculars and hung them around my neck. Cleaning the body grease and dirt from the lens with my T-shirt, I peered through them and saw the fifth dimension of hell.

The creatures were moving forward at comparatively high speed and zigzagging back and forth across the highway as they moved forward as if sweeping and searching for something. Obviously this was not the case but the creatures were moving with a purpose. I dropped the binocs to hang around my neck, disconnected the solar panels and reconnected the dashboard circuit. I then completed the connection between the starter and the juice and the car turned over a couple times but didn’t start.

It had only been twenty-plus minutes since I administered the additive. I disconnected power and reconnected the solar panels to at least get back some of what I had just lost in the start attempt.

“Seven hundred fifty meters.”

His voice was louder and displayed a bit more nervousness than last time. I raised my binocs and had another look. The creatures appeared to be in similar stages of decomposition, but this stage was not nearly as bad as it should be. They looked relatively fresh, not like something that had been dead for nine or ten
months. This fact, combined with the fact that they were moving faster than the undead I had experienced in the past, led me to believe that the radiated
scout
(so to speak) I had neutralized earlier was only the beginning trickle. A river of lethal undead was approaching.

I checked and double-checked my M-4 three times and tested the laser device for beeps just as Saien called out, “Five hundred meters.”

I could hear them. Wailing moans and unearthly sounds were getting louder on the air. I could not keep from looking. Through the lenses I could see them scan an abandoned car for any signs of food and move to the next. The car down the road shook from side to side as the army bumped by. Saien reached down for his pack and began to open the top so that he could get at something inside. I didn’t have time to wonder what he was doing but I knew that he couldn’t hold off the undead with the weapon he was using.

He then started shooting.

I screamed at him, asking him what the fuck he was doing.

“Taking out the fast ones.”

I told him to fucking stop and that he would just let them know for sure we were here. I think I was right, as the sound in the air modulated to a different tone after the report of his last shot stopped echoing.

“Three hundred fifty meters!”

I shook the vehicle, ramming it with my shoulder, thinking somehow it would help the treatment work faster in the tank if I kept it sloshing inside. The creatures were getting close enough that I could hit them with my rifle. I made the decision to deploy the Reaper. It was our only chance to buy some time for the treatment to take effect. Using my binocs to judge the range, and bouncing my estimate off Saien, I lowered the optic down to the creatures. As I peered through the glass I could see that Saien’s estimate of the number of creatures that were headed our way was better than mine.

I activated the laser device . . .

Beep . . . beep . . . beep . . .

. . . a constant tone. Drizzle and sweat was running down my forehead and into my eye, causing it to sting as I kept the device
steady on a piece of ground fifty meters behind the front mass of the creatures.

I thought I saw the warhead for an instant on a ballistic trajectory straight down into the mass of creatures. The explosion rocked the ground two hundred meters in front of our wagon, and most of the creatures hit the dirt in the blast.

I screamed out to Saien that I would explain later, and he nodded and checked his pack again. He kept looking through his sniperscope as I once again made an attempt to start the car. I checked the crowd and estimated that at least fifty creatures were getting to their feet and once again lurching forward in our direction. I ran through the hotwire procedure again, checking to make sure that all wires and points were connected.

“One hundred fifty meters! Hurry!”

Saien was getting very nervous, and this raw emotion was being transmitted to me. My hands started to shake as I checked the wires and began to connect power to the dash. Saien threw his rifle into the backseat and reached into his pack and pulled out a suppressed MP5.

He then said in his Middle Eastern accent: “Get the car started, Kilroy!”

I connected the power to the dash and turned the car over again, probably using every bit of energy the battery had left. The car jacked over once, twice, and on the third time the engine came to life—the sweetest sound I had ever heard. I slammed down the pedal to get the juices flowing in the engine, thinking that it might speed the battery-charging process. I jumped out of the car, grabbed the solar panels and chucked them in the back on top of Saien’s gear.

Just as I got settled into the driver’s seat, Saien opened fire on the approaching undead. I had my pistol in my lap with extra mags ready. Slamming the vehicle into reverse, I started to back up and told Saien to fall back and get into the car.

He acted like he did not hear me as he kept firing at the undead, taking out the fastest one so that another fast mover could replace it. The creatures were very close. We would be overrun in seconds if he did not get into the car. I screamed at him as loudly as I could and threatened to leave him if he didn’t stop.

He finally snapped out of it, fired one last round into a fast mover less than fifty feet in front of our car and jumped in, riding shotgun. I slammed on the gas, driving by rearview mirror, increasing the distance between the creatures and us. Nearly in shock, I made a comment to Saien about how fast those creatures moved.

He replied callously with only, “
That
is not fast, my friend.”

He didn’t elaborate, and I really did not want him to.

I flipped the car around, put her into drive and put the pedal down to escape the advancing mob. The sun was getting low in the sky by this time and we needed to find a place to park the vehicle. As we drove Saien told me of how he saw the C-130 drop and how he observed me moving the equipment around and entering the abandoned house where I reorganized my gear. He had been tracking me for quite some time. Saien was vague about his survival and also about his time in Afghanistan. The Reaper UCAV bombing I triggered with the laser never came up in the conversation, but the man seemed intelligent enough not to miss something of that magnitude. I kept scanning the engine and fuel gauges to ensure that this old wagon would hold up during our journey south.

It seemed that every five to ten miles we had to stop to assess a roadblock. Some of the wreckage was easy to navigate around and some of it nearly stopped our progress altogether. Optimally we’d need a larger truck with a winch or good towing chain to pull debris off the road. The third and fourth roadblocks we came to in our search for shelter were obviously intentional, a throwback to bandits and highwaymen long dead. Large-caliber bullet holes riddled the vehicles, and skeletal remains occupied the defending side of the wreckage. Two rusted AK-47 rifles lay decaying on the ground. We had to stop the vehicle anyway to assess how we would get around the wreckage so I hopped out and picked up the salvageable AK (the other was all but destroyed). The only damage to the weapon was a bullet hole through the wooden stock and rust all over the metal components of the weapon. I couldn’t get the bolt back, so I slammed it against the wrecked car. After two attempts the bolt flew back and a round ejected from the weapon. I walked over to a wrecked motorcycle, smashed the oil indicator
viewer on the side of the engine and flipped it over to spill out the motor oil. Reaching down, I filled my hand with oil and liberally splashed it on the bolt assembly of the AK-47.