Drink in case of Emergency (29 page)

             
In the cab of the truck, Tyler wasted no time. He turned the ignition and threw the truck into reverse, backing into the crowd of zombies that he had just fought through. He felt his stomach turn when he heard the first ‘pop’ of a skull being crushed beneath the heavy tires, but he kept his foot on the accelerator, trying to reach his friends before it was too late.

             
He backed up ten yards, then twenty, then thirty, then he began slowing down, not wanting to run them over accidently. He felt himself giving up hope when he saw a pile of zombies. At a distance it looked like a pile of bodies, and up close it was clear where his friends were. Under that pile.

             
Tyler pinned his foot on the accelerator and spun the wheel, aiming to back up only a few feet away from his friends, determined to save them. To help shield them as they loaded, Tyler backed up alongside the pile, coming within only a foot or two on one side.

             
Tyler threw the door open and jumped into the fray, knocking down a half dozen zombies as he threw himself from the cab.

****

Brooke watched from the rear of the dumptruck, transfixed at the scene before her. Tyler had jumped from the cab and began braining one zombie after another with the hammer he found in the toolkit. He worked quickly, too quick for any single zombie to bite him.

             
As soon as he had cleared a space around himself, he began pulling zombies from the pile that surrounded their friends. Brooke could hear him shouting “I’m here guys. We’ve got the truck. Let’s get the fuck out of here.” She felt her heart sink when there was no immediate reply back.

             
“About fucking time!” Brooke knew the voice instantly, Amy’s snarky tone. Almost all at once, the scrum of zombies lifted, and her friends crawled out. Brooke realized what happened. When they fell,they killed the zombies that had climbed atop them. Instead of pushing the zombies off, they just killed the next wave, causing more and more to pile atop them, creating a turtle shell of flesh to hide themselves.

             
Tyler helped pull them free, lifting Justin, Chris, and Jessica into the back of the dumptruck with herself, before taking Scott and Amy into the cab of the truck.

             
They had survived.

             
A week and a half later, they were driving across the Golden Gate bridge, first at the breakneck speed of 5 miles per hour. Brooke was driving, and she insisted that everyone roll the windows down and feel the cool sea air on their skin. The Iowa incident had put them all a little on edge, and nobody wanted to be in tunnels, canyons or bridges anymore, if they could avoid it. In this case though, Brooke had insisted.

             
This slow crawl across the bridge seemed to take away all the tension that had built up since Iowa. Wounds had begun to heal, and their frayed nerves would as well, in time.

             
Halfway across the bridge, Brooke stopped the car. Everyone climbed out and took a long look around. It was a sight that not many people had a chance to enjoy, as the bridge was normally full of traffic going both ways. The crisp sea air cooled tensions further, and the sound of the water moving hundreds of feet below brought a sense of peace.

             
Tyler thought about how strange this was, to feel so peaceful standing hundreds of feet in the air over freezing water. Thinking further, he realized this wasn’t all that strange. Stopping in the middle of this bridge was the perfect metaphor for their situation. Each one of them had a life they had left behind weeks ago, but hadn’t yet reached the next stage of their lives. He knew that this stage, running around drunk and acting like a kid on a shopping spree, wouldn’t last forever. There was no chance they would ever make it back to the way things used to be. Too many people had died, too much had changed. They had inherited the wealth of the world in what many could consider the prime of their lives.

Tyler genuinely thought about how lucky they all were that they were over the angsty teen years. They could have had a serious issue on their hands in terms of lovers’ triangles and hurt feelings. As it was, they all seemed to be handling things very adultly. Jessica and Scott had been building a relationship more and more since Iowa, and spent more nights together alone than with the group as a whole. Amy and Chris seemed to get along, which was a little comical when Amy revealed that she had decided to kill him a month ago when they first met. The only reason she hadn’t taken the shot was that Jessica had stepped in the way. Brooke and Justin seemed to be growing on one another more and more on this cross country trip.

None of this had really bothered Tyler. Knowing that there were other survivors out there, he knew that he would find a special someone someday. He hoped he would find her when they were on these adventures, so they could share in some of the stories that his group of friends were creating, but if he didn’t find her until he reached the edge of his bridge, that wasn’t so bad either. For the first time in his life, Tyler was completely and utterly at peace with the world. He breathed deeply, inhaling the salty cool ocean air into his nose, and let it out slowly.

Tyler was broken out of his daze by a shout from the car, it was Brooke’s voice.

“So we still need to find some sports cars. But this is going to be the starting line.”