Dead Hunger V: The Road To California (14 page)

The speedster shot back to full height like a piston driven up by a crankshaft.  She was now almost alongside Serena, as Nelson directed a stream of urushiol in her eyes.

The thing let go a muffled scream-cry of some kind, its bony palms slapping its eyes, and I felt a lightning bolt shoot down the back of my neck as the creeps came on full strength.

Nelson then sprayed the tiny hand.  It erupted into spasms instantly, melting before our eyes, and dripping away until no more of it protruded from her.  The zombie then clutched at her stomach and shrieked as red-black, bubbling, foam and goo erupted out of the hole in her abdomen, dripping into a puddle of gore at the thing’s feet.

“Drop, Serena!” I screamed, and she did so immediately.  The second she was safely out of my way, I fired two rounds into the red-eyed creature’s face and she flew backward off her feet, landing flat on her back.

With one last hiss-pop, her stomach flattened and she lay still.

Nelson breathed hard as he helped Serena back up and pulled her away from the zombie’s body.  I kept my eyes on her as I walked backward, even though I knew she was dead.

The creatures that had been following us disbursed now, spreading out and moving without direction, nothing left to guide them toward us.

Their leader was dead.  The once-pregnant, enhanced female had gone down, and we knew we had to get the hell out before another of her kind showed up.  We mounted the bikes, put our helmets on and wasted no time.  First stop would be fuel.  The next, after we put some miles between ourselves and this bad experience, would be food and rest.

As I started the Harley, I realized with some level of dread that we had just begun our 3,000 mile journey and were only 10% there.  With the estrogen enriched females out there, with highly tuned senses that could obviously detect the whereabouts of human flesh and blood, we would find it difficult to locate truly safe havens along the way.

She had obviously sniffed us out in the night, so by the time we took the WAT-5, it was already too late to mask our presence.  I wondered to myself why she hadn’t unleashed her horde of walking dead minions on us, ripping us to shreds when we were in their midst; could it have been her selfish desire to have us to herself? 

Perhaps this one had no prior knowledge of weapons, only sensing the danger our guns posed as we emerged from the crowd and aimed them at her?

I pulled out, preparing to roll the bike around a male rotter wearing a tattered Hard Rock Café tee shirt.

“Serena,” I said into my communication headset.

“What is it?” she asked.  I saw her eyeing all the zombies that were now milling aimlessly around the parking lot, some of them converging on another of the hotel room doors.

“Let’s try out these machine guns,” I said.  “Spin it around.”

I got Nelson’s attention and pointed toward the street, then pointed at Serena and myself, the gun on my bike, and the zombies.

“Go at it,” he yelled, starting his bike and riding toward the street.

“You take left and I’ll take right,” Serena said, and that sounded just fine to me.  Holding onto the right handlebar and using minimal gas, I rolled toward them and grabbed the modified Uzi with my left hand.  “Ready?” I asked Serena.

“Ready,” she said.  “Got about ten lined up right here.”

“Have at ‘em,” I said, and pivoted the machine gun side to side at near perfect height for my first time firing it.  The rounds met their marks, chopping caps off skulls sending the coagulating blood-goo spitting into the air with biohazard-filled chunks of decayed meat and brains.

The windows of the hotel rooms behind them took several rounds, shattering and crashing inward, and rows of holes punched through the doors and the stucco walls.

Serena was having similar success.  My gun fell silent, now empty.  Because there were only three creatures left on my side, I reached down to my drop holster and withdrew the Walther.  With a careful bit of steering around the muck and piles of bodies, I carefully aimed and sent those three walking dead amigos to their final resting place, which turned out to be the parking lot of a Knights Inn.

I had to remember the cardinal rule, and not make decisions that went against it no matter how
done
I was with the process or how tired I was of doing it.

Kill them all.
 

The world would not recover if they were allowed to roam it forever.  Serena had clearly been more efficient with her weapon, for she had been able to take down the entire rotter crew assigned to her with her bike-mounted gun.

“Nice job,” I said.

“You, too,” she said.  I looked over at Nelson, who gave me a thumbs up sign.

“Let’s hit it,” said Serena, and as we both started rolling our bikes toward the driveway, we heard a voice calling over the Harley engines.

“Hey!  Wait!”

It was a man’s voice.  I turned back toward the hotel, and saw a man and what appeared to be a female child standing inside a hotel room just four doors down from the room where we had spent the night.

The window of their room was shattered, and the curtains now blew inside.  They stood there, the female with a baseball bat in her hands, and the man with what looked like a rope.  I could see what appeared to be a holster on his waist.  Maybe two.

“Hello!” I called, scanning the lot again before turning my bike toward them.  “Cover me,” I said to Serena, who stopped her bike with the front pointed toward the pair, lifting the customized gun up.  Her expression was fixed and stern as she eyed the two.

“Hold on a second, David,” she said.  She put the kickstand down and got off, opening the seat.  She took a spare magazine out, ejected the empty one from the gun and put a new one in.  “Okay,” she said, getting back on the bike.  “You’re good.”

Our experiences had been both good and bad with strangers – mostly good – but taking chances and counting on goodness went out the window quite a while ago.

I motored toward them and pulled the Harley as close to their room as I could get before cutting the engine and putting the kickstand down.  I removed my helmet and called to them.  “Were you here last night?” I asked.

“We were,” said the girl, whom I could now see was a woman.  She was a very short woman, but the baseball bat she gripped in her hands gave her a very serious edge.  Her face was neither frightened nor aggressive, but I could clearly see she was harrowed.  She was so thin I wondered if these two had eaten very much in the last few months.

“I’m Dave Gammon,” I said.  “Serena Casteneda is on the other bike, and the guy down by the street is Nelson Moore.”

“So Serena’s the one with the gun pointed at us?” the man asked.

“She is,” I said.  “You’ll excuse us if we’re a little jumpy.”  I called to Serena.  “We’re good.  Come on over.”

She tilted the gun back down and parked her bike.  I turned back to the couple.

“Jumpy?” said the man, suddenly angry as he pulled off his cowboy hat and slapped it against his leg.  “Well, you damned near killed both of us,” he said.  “You shot out that window and let these pieces of shit almost crawl through.  Not like we were asleep with all that racket, thank God, so we took ‘em out.”

I put my helmet on the seat of the bike and walked toward them, my palms held up.  “Just coming over to talk,” I said.  “I’m sorry – oh.  I see what you mean now.”

When I got closer, I saw there were two dead rotters just inside their room.  They must have made their way in after Serena or I had shot out the glass of their hotel room.

The fluttering curtains covered a foot that hadn’t quite made it over the sill of the broken window, and on the other side of the window, a hand was impaled on a shard of glass jutting from the window frame.  It did not move. 

Now I knew why the two strangers had been standing so far back from the window.  I couldn’t see further into the room, because the curtains were only open about four feet and I was standing toward the door.

“Sorry about that, guys.  I really am,” I said.  “We didn’t know you were in there, and we were basically just doing cleanup.  It’s one of our personal directives not to leave any of them alive.  Anyone else with you?”

“Just us,” said the woman.  She must have been significantly less than five feet tall, maybe 4’8” or 4’9”.  The baseball bat she held casually over her shoulder removed any perceived vulnerability I might have automatically attributed to her because of her size.  She held it like she had used it often, and indeed, the Louisville Slugger was darkened and splotchy with stains I did not wish to consider at the moment.

Her hair was long, wavy and brown, and her deep, brown eyes were a match.  Freckles adorned her tiny nose, and I saw suspicion and exhaustion in her expression.  She wore what appeared to be khaki pants and a white, v-neck tee shirt, and I estimated her to be somewhere in her mid-thirties.  This didn’t mean shit, because I sucked at guessing ages anyway and everybody in a zombie apocalypse tended to look slightly older than their actual years.

The man had put his straw cowboy hat back on his head.  Before he did so, I saw that he had a full head of mostly grey hair, accompanied by a full beard and mustache.  He was a big man; probably 6’3”.  He was on the thinner side, but his arms showed zero sign of weakness.  His muscles were pronounced, and I guessed he was somewhere in his early sixties.  The rope he held was actually coiled and over his shoulder, attached via some sort of strap sewed into the shirt with a metal snap.  The rope looked stiff, like a rodeo cowboy’s.

I turned and saw Nelson hold his hands out and give me an exaggerated shrug, so I waved him to come up.  He immediately started his bike and rode toward us, stopping with a bit of a jerk beside my bike.  He got off and removed his helmet.  Serena was beside me first.

“Did I get here in time to warn you about his awkward moment jokes?” asked Serena.

I shook my head and held out my open hand to the man, because the woman was currently eyeing Serena and did not look willing to relinquish the grip on her baseball bat just yet.  “It’s good to meet fellow survivors,” I said.  “Sorry for the almost killing you thing.”

I clasped his hand in mine and shook it.

“Don Weston,” he said.  “This here’s my friend Rachel Reed.”

I held out my hand to Rachel. She gave Serena an almost imperceptible nod, then released the bat and clasped my hand and shook.

Her grip was strong and her handshake brief.  I estimated her to be somewhere in her late twenties or very early thirties, but she was very fit, at least at first glance. 

She looked me directly in the face and offered a tired smile, and I realized she was very pretty.  I was sure to smile back.  Smiles were a nice thing to see when terror was a more common facial expression.  I thought I saw a sense of relief in her eyes.  Perhaps because we did not seem to be a threat. Weston and Rachel then said their hellos to Serena and Nelson.

A horse suddenly whinnied.  It was loud and sounded as though it were mere feet away from us.  I whirled around, pulling out my PPK, expecting to see someone on horseback directly behind me.

“Get your hearing checked,” said Serena, pulling the curtain aside and looking inside the room.  “Wow,” she said.  “Beautiful animals.”

I reholstered my gun, feeling like an idiot.  I moved beside Serena and looked deeper into the room.

One horse stood between the dresser and the end of the two queen sized beds.  He was a gleaming, almost red color, with a shining mane and alert eyes.  Another smaller  horse, this one pure white with an almost silky mane, stood directly in front of the double vanity in the back of the room.

“The big male’s Duster,” said Weston.  “Lucky he was behind the door or you’d have shot him for sure.”

“The white one’s Snowball,” Rachel offered.

Weston gave a sad smile.  “My daughter Sally named her Snowball as a foal” said Don.  “Dang horse was white, so that’s what five-year-old girls do,” he said, the smile that had formed on his lips when he’d said Sally’s name fading away quickly.

“You’ve been riding them since this started?” asked Nelson.

Yep,” said Weston.  “Came out that Sunday morning and the damned corral was a mess.  The neighbors on either side of me had a lot of hired hands and a few sons, too.  They weren’t all out there, but the ones I saw were either face-deep into the belly of my dead horses or stumblin’ after these two.”

“After Snowball and Duster?” asked Nelson.  “How’d they get away?”  He looked like a child being told a fairy tale.

“My most skittish horses,” Weston said.  “No way to get near ‘em.  Not even me.  I could see Snowball was tirin’ out by the time I killed the rest of those freakshows and got the rope on her, but Duster never woulda got caught.  He could outlast anyone.”

“You can rope?” asked Nelson?  “Like a cowboy?”

“Since I’m six years old,” he said.  “Rope like a sonofabitch.”

“Cool,” said Nelson, pulling a brass star from his pocket and holding it up.  “I throw Ninja stars.  We should team up sometime.”

“Not much call for a wild west Ninja show these days, son,” said Weston, looking at me, a question in his eyes.  No doubt a question about Nelson.  I shrugged and smiled.

“I lived next door to Don,” said Rachel.  “But I was temporarily stationed at the Bolling Air Force Base in Washington, D.C.”