Drink in case of Emergency (27 page)

The group of friends woke with the sun, everyone surprised at how good they felt, from their night without binge drinking. They spent the morning traveling South on foot, hoping to meet up with the SUV they had abandoned in the suburbs on the way into Chicago. When they decided it was around noon (nobody had a watch, or any idea of what time it actually was), they stopped for lunch. Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, washed down with fruit punch flavored gatorade.

Late in the afternoon, they came upon the SUV’s, right where they had left them, with their supplies undisturbed. With the light failing, They decided to wait out that night in the suburbs of Chicago before pushing West towards San Francisco. The roads were mostly clear, but nobody wanted to risk driving at night with cars potentially wrecked all along the road.

They found a six story office building with a parking garage beneath. The doors actually still worked, which initially surprised everyone in the party except Scott, who explained that garage doors go on the same backup power supplies as emergency lighting, in case people need to get out in an emergency.

They went through the usual routine of securing the building, cooking dinner, and socializing. It was a night like any other, and spirits were high to get on the road in the morning.

Everyone was surprised at how good they felt.  It is surprising how much healthier they felt when, instead of dealing with the daily stress of a job, they rose with the sun and spent the day hiking.

The next morning started much like the previous one had. They woke with the sun, ate a quick, light breakfast of granola bars and had instant coffee to wake up. Then they climbed back down the stairs and piled into their SUV, pulling out into a gray, damp morning.

The windshield wipers squeaked back and forth, clearing away the mist that was drizzling down from above. Scott drove, but everyone in the car was awake and alert, pointing out potential hazards in the road, as well as commenting on changes they saw in the overall environment. There was a little less to see once they made it onto the highway, and this led to everyone zoning out.

After a few hours of driving through empty roads, they passed a sign letting them know they were pulling into Iowa.

Tyler wondered, now that humans were out of the picture for the most part, how long would it take to reverse all the environmental damage they had inflicted. Decades? Centuries? He had a feeling that it would likely take much less time than this. It had only been a few days, but he could feel the world moving faster, now that people were out of the way. He thought of pictures of abandoned buildings he had seen. Many were completely dilapidated after only a few years without use. When nothing in the entire world was being used, how much faster would these changes occur?

Tyler was about to bring this question up for the group to discuss, when he felt the car slow down.

“What’s up, Scott?” Tyler was sitting in the middle row of seats, directly behind the driver’s seat.

“Road’s blocked.” Scott said, a note of wariness in his voice.

Scott pulled slowly up to a semi that was blocking all three lanes of the highway. A semi-truck and trailer was parked at an angle, blocking half of the highway.  The other half of the highway was blocked as well. There were three cars that had somehow collided and intertwined with one another as well as the guard rail on the far left side of the highway. From the front passenger seat, Amy saw a look of confusion on Scott’s face as he took in the scene. It only took her a moment to catch up to his confusion. The semi truck wasn’t smashed, but intact.

Nobody crashed the semi, they had parked it.

It was at this moment that Amy started analyzing the rest of the scene. She registered that they were in a man-made canyon. Rock walls ran up either side of the highway at least fifty feet. Someone, a few dozen years ago, had to choose between running this highway over the surrounding hillside, or simply blasting through it, and they had decided on the more direct route, making the canyon. Amy was just coming to the conclusion that this would be a perfect place to set up an ambush, when she heard Scott, who was peering into the rearview mirror.

“Shit. We’ve got company.” Everyone spun around in their seats to see what Scott was responding to.

“Is that…” Justin trailed off before continuing, “a dumptruck?”

The dumptruck, as it turned out to be, was hurtling toward them at somewhere around seventy miles per hour, by Amy’s estimate.

“Scott, you gotta get us out of here, we’re sitting ducks.” Chris’s voice sounded panicked. Amy looked back to see Brooke, who had been sitting silently next to Tyler in the rear row of seats, quietly began to assemble her rifle. There was a look of focus on her face, but Amy could see there was panic in her eyes as well.

Scott put the car into gear and did a ninety degree reverse, so he was now facing the truck that was hurtling toward them, now only a mile away. It had entered the mouth of the canyon, they had forty-five seconds, at most.

“I don’t think this is the right moment to play chicken, Scott.” Justin said, panic now thick in his voice.

“Well what do you want me to do? Maybe I could outmaneuver him?” Scott suggested, although everyone could tell from the tone of his voice that he didn’t like the idea.

“Back all the way up to the accident. We can climb over and around it. It’s not much, but it would be more protection that sitting out here in the open.”

Scott didn’t wait for everyone to agree with Amy, he just pinned the SUV in reverse and slammed on the brakes when he came within a few feet of the wrecked cars. The rear bumper still made contact, but it was only cosmetic damage.

“Out! out! out!” Scott shouted, although everyone else was already a step ahead of him. By the time his feet hit the pavement, Chris, Justin, and Jessica were out of the car, and Tyler and Brooke were climbing over the seat and about to hit the street as well. Amy looked back and saw that the dump truck had not slowed, it must be twenty seconds away now.

“C’mon!” Behind the cab of the truck.” Brooke was shouting and leading the way, her red hair shimmering in the afternoon light.

Tyler took one last glance behind him before taking off at a sprint after his friends. All seven in the group had barely made it through the mess of broken cars and over the side guard rail when Tyler heard a deafening crash.

The sound reverberated off the stone canyon walls, and Tyler worried for a moment if the walls could start to crumble from the noise. At the sound, the whole group ducked and covered, expecting the worst, that a giant dump truck would barreling down on them in another moment.

Peeking over the edge of the guardrail, Tyler saw that the truck had actually driven through the trailer section of the blockade. It hadn’t simply crashed into it, but had plowed through it, cutting it nearly in half. As his ears slowly stopped ringing, Tyler realized that the dump truck had pulled to a stop only fifty yards away. It had stopped, and was dumping its load.

Tyler could faintly hear Justin shouting “What the fuck…” but he couldn’t make himself look away from the scene before him.

At first his eyes couldn’t make out exactly what he was seeing. The shapes were too numerous, and there were too many colors to make it all out. Then when the pile that was dumped began moving, he put it together. The dump truck had been full of zombies.

There must have been at least two hundred, piled together like firewood. They began to scatter almost immediately, like ants fleeing from their hills. Their scattering happened much more slowly, but they still began to fan out. Those that had hit the ground first had broken legs, and some were forced to pull themselves with only their arms, but Tyler could tell that they would have spread out enough to close that way as an exit in only a few minutes. If they wanted to continue heading west on this road, they would have to move immediately. In two minutes there would be a mob of zombies blocking the way.

Tyler was about to shout for everyone to turn around and go back the way they came, when Brooke shouted and pointed, pulling him from his thoughts.

“Shit. The trailer” Tyler followed her gesture and saw that it was true. There was a dozen or so bodies broken on the ground around the point where the dump truck had sliced through the trailer, but more were spilling out of the remains of it.

If Tyler had any doubt in his mind that this was a trap, he was certain of it now. Someone, likely whoever had been driving that dump truck, wanted them to be trapped in here with hundreds of zombies.

But we can still go back out the way we came in. Tyler thought to himself. He was about to shout for everyone to run back to the SUV when he looked up and saw that Chris was climbing on top of the cab of the truck.

“Dude, c’mon. We can still get out of here. Back to the car.” Tyler shouted, and everyone began moving for the SUV. Chris continued to climb, and peered back to the east, in the direction they had originally come from.

“Fuck.” Tyler could hear Chris mumble, before he spoke up louder. “He’s got that way out blocked too. Two dump trucks just like this one. Parked to block the way into the canyon. It looks like those ones were filled with zombies too. It looks like there’s a couple a piles.”

“Well we can at least get the guns.” Jessica shouted, still moving for the SUV. Amy and Justin followed her. Chris continued to survey the scene from atop the truck. Scott, Tyler, and Brooke stood on the ground and watched as the trap closed slowly around them. With each shambling step, the zombies came closer, and their chance of escape shrank.

Twenty seconds later, Amy and Jessica began passing out firearms to everyone. Tyler knew the score. There had to be at least five hundred zombies closing in on them from all sides. Between all seven of them, they had maybe a hundred rounds. There just wasn’t enough time. The zombies from the broken trailer had already begun to notice them and their shambling became focused in their direction.

“Can we climb out of here? Jessica asked, a note of hope in her voice.

“This is all limestone, I wouldn’t trust it. You could be halfway up and then the wall gives way,” Scott responded. Tyler wondered for a moment how on earth Scott could know that geological makeup of Iowa.

“Well what the fuck are we going to do then?” Amy asked no one in particular. “Just take down as many of them as we can?” With Amy’s last question, she fired a round, hitting the closest zombie in the neck. A purple stream of blood squirted out and onto the pavement. Another two shots and the zombie fell dead.

“Conserve the ammo.” Chris shouted, climbing down from the cab. “I figure we’ve got only one shot at this, and it’s going to be dicey.” Everyone went silent and looked to Chris, ready for his directions. Amy and Scott kept one eye on the advancing wave of zombies.

“I figure we have two options.” With this statement, Chris raised each arm and pointed in the direction of the two ends of the canyon. His right hand was facing east, and he nodded with his head to emphasize that direction. “Option number one is to get back in the car and drive the way we came in. There’s fewer zombies out in the open down there, we could pretty easily shoot our way through.” Chris reversed his motions, and nodded toward his left hand, toward the west.

“Then there’s option two. There’s a lot more zombies, and it’s a lot more dangerous, but we have the chance to find out who the fuck wants us to be eaten by zombies.”

“How do you know that someone set this up?” Jessica asked, her question causing stunned silence among the group.

Jessica looked up at six pairs of eyes that stared at her in stunned disbelief.

“Oh hunny…” Brooke started to say, but she was cut off by Amy.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” Without breaking her gaze on Jessica, Amy raised her arm to the side and fired at a zombie that had closed within ten feet. Her bullet crashed into the skull, just above the left eye. “I will give you the benefit of the doubt that somewhere in this world there is some strange circumstance in which hundreds of zombies climb into a dump truck, and maybe even into three semi trailers. Maybe a one in a billion chance for each to happen.” Amy lowered her gun and glowered at Jessica as she spoke these last words, “but to have all of those things happen at once, in the middle of fucking Iowa?”

Jessica looked at the ground sheepishly. Amy continued to speak, but to Chris this time.

“I had my fill of survivors in Chicago, where I almost got murdered or raped, probably both. Fuck that, I vote we go the other way.”

“I don’t want to deal with this psycho either. But it’s either deal with it now, or sleep with one eye open from here on out. I just inherited a majority of the world, I don’t really want to worry about weird fucks who want to watch us get eaten by zombies. I’ve got more important things to do.”  Chris said, making his point.

Tyler hated to admit it, but he agreed with Chris. Whoever this was, clearly had something out for them. He would much rather face them in the open here, as opposed to facing them some dark and stormy night six weeks from now.

“I’m with Chris.” Scott said, echoing what Tyler was thinking. “I don’t want to be watching over our shoulder for the next five years.” Tyler looked around the group and could tell from the determined look in their eyes that Jessica was the only one who wasn’t completely on board. Amy had come around, Tyler expected that it might have something to do with getting a little revenge, as Brooke was the one who got to kill her would be murder-rapist.

“Okay. Before we get into the plan. Amy, we’ve got two bottles of vodka in the back seat. I have a feeling we’re going to need both of them.”

***

Father O’Connell watched the group of young people. They were just standing around in a circle. He expected them to run back to their car and try to drive out the way they had come in, only to find that way blocked as well.

Instead of fleeing, they were just standing around. Maybe they were resigning themselves to their fate? Maybe they were readying themselves to meet their maker? Father O’Connell felt a tinge of pride as he watched the scene unfolding. He had spent a full day and a half loading up these trucks from the nearby cities.

The semi’s weren’t too difficult. He just parked them in front of apartment buildings and lured the first few vessels in. The rest followed suit. They each took only an hour or two to load. The dump truck had been more difficult, as the vessels, made in the image of god, but missing that spark of life that now joined him in heaven. They kept falling off the ramp he had built for them. It wasn’t easy, but it was worth it.

The vessels he had unloaded were milling all around the truck. He had hoped they would all instinctively find their way to the group of young people, that it would be a sign from God that his course was true, but there was no such luck.

His faith would have to remain true without a burning bush.

They were milling so widely, that Father O’Connell began to become nervous. Twice he heard hands clambering on the doors to the truck. Thankfully, the truck sat up high enough that they wouldn’t be able to break through the windows.

Father O’Connell watched as one of the women in the group began shouting and firing at a nearby vessel. It fell to the pavement in a heap.

Such a waste. But, where you’re going soon, it won’t much matter.

Father O’Connell could imagine meeting these young people in heaven. How grateful they would all be for the effort he had put into setting them free. Looking over, he noticed that they were passing out firearms. They were going to fight until the end then.

It didn’t matter, he knew there were more than enough of God’s chosen to save the group. They might pick off a few, but just as Sodom and Gomorrah fell before God’s wrath, these young souls were going to heaven today, even if he had to drag them kicking and screaming the entire way.

Justin could feel his stomach drop. His arm still itched a lot where he was bit. He wasn’t sure if it was from the bandages, or just because it was healing. He was not especially excited about Chris’s plan, and the high probability that he was going to be bit a few more times.

“What if it doesn’t work this time? What if we need more time for the alcohol to protect us?” Justin heard himself asking as the two bottles of vodka were being passed around the circle.

“That’s why we went with the hard stuff, to get it in the system faster.” Chris replied, before Amy chimed in.