Dead Air (Book One of The Dead Series) (10 page)

With none of the other non-com's willing to order the men to hold their position, and possibly get the same treatment, the terrified National Guard troopers quickly climbed aboard their trucks and headed north, leaving their own dead and critically wounded behind.

Armed with a collection of hunting rifles and pistols, a group of civilians approached the battlefield. Seeing that the soldiers had gone, they cleared the bodies from the Interstate, tossing the unclaimed ones into the ditch at the side of the road.

Jackie Dupree came to end up sprawled on her back in the weed filled gully, her sightless eyes staring up at the Interstate as the first of the cars carrying the healthy, and the infected, rolled north.

Columbia, South Carolina:

It
started as a lark.

Terrance and Billy were sitting on Billy's couch drinking Stroh's beer and watching TV as they always did after finishing their shift at the mill. A breaking news story interrupted Wheel of Fortune, reporting that locals just outside the city of Newberry
had seen a large group of people who were believed to be infected with the snapping fits, as it was being called in the south, crossing a field.

The reporter went on to say that
the Governor vowed to call out the National Guard if any confirmed cases were reported in the state, and at that very minute was waiting at the capitol for word on this latest suspected outbreak.

"Why the hell should we let those soldier boys have all the fun?"
Terrance asked.

"What fun?" Billy replied. He was already on his fifth beer and had trouble making the connection to what Terrance was saying.

"Shootin' them rabid people. Hell, we could do that."

"We could," Billy agreed. "Might even be fun."

"That's what I said."

"What you said?" Billy asked.

"That it'd be fun," Terrance answered, now slightly annoyed.

Billy thought about this for a minute before saying, "Let's go do it
then. I got me that new Remington for my birthday last week and I still ain't had a chance to test it out yet. We could drive out to where them news people said they were and blast 'em."

"Blast the news people?" Terrance asked.

Billy sighed. "No, blast them rabid things."

Terrance ran the idea through his head. He didn't actually believe they'd see anything worth shooting at but he was bored doing the same thing every night
. Beer and television. Maybe a little road drinking was just what the doctor ordered. "Let's do it," he said.

After loading Billy's truck with the rifles, ammunition
and a case of beer, the two men felt they were adequately provisioned. When they thought they had reached the general area from where the reports had come, they found themselves driving aimlessly on a series of back roads. Terrance wasn't quite sure that they were in the right place but the night was warm and the beer was cold and that was all that mattered.

As they drove past an abandoned barn, Billy announced, "
Gotta take a leak."

"Time to drain the monster," Terrance agreed.

"Throw a piss," Billy added.

"Drain the main vein."

"Take a squirt."

"So pull over then, damn it." Terrance said.

Billy obliged and they piled out of the truck to stand shoulder to shoulder at the side of the road.

"Bet
ya a dollar I can go further," Billy stated.

"Why would you want to bet on something like that
? Got to be better things to bet on. Besides, I got volume, not range."

Billy laughed, "Hell, gambling's fun. I imagine in the prehistoric days that if a group of cave men would a been out hunting and come across two lizards sunning
themselves on a flat rock, the leader would have grunted out, 'betcha two arrowheads the one on the right moves first’.“

Terrance contemplated this as he relieved himself. He never realized Billy was such a deep thinker.

When he finished, Terrance returned to the truck and took his rifle out of its case. Laying it on the hood of the truck, he popped a fresh beer and said, "I don't think we're gonna find any of them things tonight, so why don’t we just hang out here and do some shooting? Ain't nothing around for miles so there ain't no one to complain."

Billy agreed and soon they were shooting at trees, rocks, empty beer cans
and a road sign that was already so full of holes that it came apart before they fired half a dozen rounds through it.

Drawn by the shots, t
he dead making their way toward Billy and Terrance didn't realize that they should avoid drunken rednecks firing weapons into the night. But even if they had recognized the danger, their overpowering urge to eat would have squashed any hesitation they felt and kept them moving toward what they perceived as a source of food.

The group of walking corpses had originally been part of a historical tour
, which started out from Columbia early that afternoon with a driver, a guide and thirty-seven members from the Society to Preserve Civil War Battle Sites. They had just reached the halfway point between Columbia and Newberry when the bus driver went into a seizure and started convulsing in his seat. The bus was moving at a fast rate and started to swerve. Disaster seemed imminent, until a quick thinking passenger jumped forward and grabbed the steering wheel. The bus stayed on the road but the driver's foot also stayed on the accelerator, goosing it in rhythm to the spasms that racked his body.

The fit only lasted a few seconds before the driver slumped down dead in his seat
, and his foot came away from the gas. The passenger with a grip on the steering wheel aimed the bus down the center of the road, relief showing on his face as he saw the speedometer needle start to drop. Looking out the front windshield, he saw the two-lane blacktop road was clear of any other traffic. All he had to do was hold on until the bus lost its momentum and slowed to a stop.

The bus was still moving at thirty-five miles per hour when the driver suddenly sat up in his seat. He shook his head rapidly as if to lo
osen it from a bad memory. Then, leaning forward, it sank its teeth into the forearm that stretched in front of it. The man steering the bus screamed and wrenched his injured arm free, leaving a chunk of it in the driver's mouth, before jumping back in terror, pain, confusion and a spray of blood.

The bus was still moving at twenty-five miles an hour when the dead driver, now oblivious to the fact that someone needed to control the swerving vehicle, stood and turned toward the
passengers. Baring its teeth in a bloody rictus, it moved toward them.

Those near the front
that could see over and around the tall-backed seats screamed in terror at the sight that confronted them. Some jumped up to scurry toward the back of the bus, while others stared unbelievingly at what they assumed was some sort of hallucination.

Heedless of the uncontrolled bus veering from side to side, the driver managed to bite and infect five people before the slaloming coach left the road and rolled down into the dry drainage canal. In a cloud of dust, the stricken
tour bus ended upside down in the deep narrow ditch that ran along the side of the road. Two people were killed outright, and in this situation they would soon be considered to be the lucky ones. To die naturally before the disease took control of your body meant that you stayed dead.

Stunned by the crash, the passengers slowly extracted themselves from the strewn luggage and each other before facing the danger still posed by the infected driver. Two brave souls tried to overpower him, only to be driven back in a flurry of teeth. While those heroes were on their way
to becoming walking corpses themselves, the other passengers tried fruitlessly to find a way to escape the death trap the bus had become.

When the bus had flipped and landed in the ditch
, it had wedged itself upside down into the culvert, blocking off any escape through the windows or roof. The infected driver stood between the passengers and any possible egress through the front, where the windshield had popped out during the crash, while the rear exit was blocked by the walled off port-a-potty that the bus company had installed. When the bus had flipped, the enclosure had come loose and now leaned across the width of the rear of the bus, effectively blocking any exit in that direction. Cell phones were tried but no one could find a signal with enough strength to make a call for help.

The dead driver found an unconscious passenger hanging down from where she wa
s wedged under a seat and started to rip chunks of flesh from her upper chest. Some of the survivors tried to distract it from its grisly meal by throwing luggage at it but all this succeeded in doing was to draw its attention to where they huddled near the back of the bus. With a squeal of outrage at having its meal disturbed, it advanced on them, causing them to fall back. The disturbance over, it returned to its meal.

The survivors were then forced to watch the creature eat, vomit up bloody chunks of meat
and then return to gorge itself once again on the wounded woman. With three more people lying alive but immobile between the passengers and the flesh eating being, the passengers thought they would have at least a little time to find a way to escape the abomination that was slowly devouring the tour. This respite was cut short though, when the man who had grabbed the steering wheel when the driver had his seizure died and was reanimated minutes later to rip and tear at the flesh of his former friends and society members. Another woman, who had been bitten in the original attack before the bus flipped over, died and reanimated to join him.

Of the thirty-nine people who boarded the bus, none left it alive.

However, eighteen left through the space where the front windshield had been knocked out. But at this point they were far from alive.

This group of the dead
, having exhausted their supply of available food inside the bus, went in search of more. Darkness had fallen by the time they staggered up onto the field that bordered the ditch, the slope leading up to the road being too steep for them to mount, and spread out to walk across the freshly plowed earth.

A few times
, they heard or smelled what they thought was something edible but by the time they reached the source found nothing. A distant glow in the horizon, the city lights of the outskirts of Columbia, beckoned, so they headed in that direction.

The group s
tumbled across a back road that ran in the direction they were drawn to, so they followed it. They moved at a steady gait, as they had no need of sleep or even a short break. The only need that drove them was an insatiable craving for human flesh. Hearing gunshots in the distance, their pace quickened.

"Well that just ab
out does it, Terry. I'm out of ammo," Billy stated before letting out a resounding belch.

"I been out
for awhile. I been waiting for you to finish up."

"Think we should go on back to the truck and head home
?"

Checking his watch, Terrance said, "Yeah, we got to work tomorrow
, so we best be heading in. Besides, I need a beer and we drank up everything we brought with us. We can stop and pick up a six pack on the way home."

Earlier, the two men had walked up the road to the barn they had passed looking for something interesting to shoot. All the glass had long been busted or shot out of its windows
, but they still found it satisfying to unload on the building. Turning to look back the way they had come, they could see the dim outline of the truck, dark black against the graded road.

Terrance was slightly in the lead as they trudged along
, but it was Billy who spotted the group of indistinct shapes staggering toward them from beyond the truck. Pointing and laughing, he said, "Look at them, they're drunker than we are."

The dead did seem to step and stagger like drunks
, but their disability stemmed from having a primitive nervous system and torn flesh and ligaments rather than from ingesting alcohol. Although running was beyond them, they could move quickly in a loping shuffle, kind of a stutter step, when properly motivated. Seeing Billy and Terrance coming toward them, they were now motivated.

Terrance studied the shapes in the distance
, and was about to join in the laughter, when it suddenly dawned on him what they were. Stopping in his tracks, he said, "Holy shit Billy, I think it's them things."

Startled, Billy looked at his long time drinking buddy as the same thought fla
shed through both their minds. They had shot up all the ammunition for the rifles they carried and were now defenseless.

"The truck, run for it," Billy screamed.

The group of zombies was closer to the truck but the two men could run while the dead couldn't. Three of the flesh eaters even tripped over their own feet and fell to the road in their haste to reach the food. Billy and Terrance could have easily made it to the truck first if they had spent a few less nights eating fried food while chugging beer in front of the television, but their sedentary lives slowed them. Both groups converged on the vehicle at the same time.