Hunger Driven: A Zombie Short Story (5 page)

So I looked forward to hunting with my Dad and he taught me to shoot.  As an adult, I wasn’t much for the long distance competitions, back before, and preferred participating in the three gun contests instead.  I wasn’t that good, lacking the funds for really high speed weapons or the time to hone my skills.

In fact, the Model 70 was the only rifle I used when I went to the outdoor ranges.  Well, those ladies should be glad I used to get nostalgic for days at the range with Pops.  That was why I opted for the Winchester over the monster in the case.

In my haste to congratulate myself, I lost track of the little car until it was about a hundred yards from my position, and one quick glance told me the driver was having trouble keeping her speed up and her vehicle on the road.  I was no mechanic, but even I knew that white smoke boiling up from under the hood meant trouble.  Whatever it was, pretty soon she was going to find it difficult to maintain that all critical eleven miles per hour headway to outrun the pursuing hungry dead.

Setting the Winchester aside, I grabbed one of the little Rugers and went over to the boombox.  I cranked the volume to ‘ears bleeding’ and started popping zombies.  After horsing that big 30-06 around, firing the 22 felt like I was shooting a paintball gun.  At least my wrists didn’t seem to hurt as much now.  I chalked it up to adrenaline.

I noted some of my undead guests shifted their attention back to the store, but I was focused on thinning the numbers ahead of the car now headed away from me.  I didn’t take offense at their flight, since that driver or her passengers wouldn’t exactly find it safe to hang out here at Zombie Central.  Plus, that whole ‘enemy of my enemy’ thing just means another potential enemy out here in the wilds. 

I don’t pick up survivors when I’m on these jobs.  Finding strays makes me nervous so I fall back on the theory that rescue is a function best suited to the National Guard.  All I’m willing to do is offer directions and wish them well.  Working solo means I work with no backup and I might be suicidal at times but I’ll not willingly let some other jackass take the life from me.  I guess I’m a bit perverse that way.

As I emptied the last of the ready magazines in my bag, I saw the little green car was barely making headway.  I managed forty kills out of fifty rounds, which was pretty darned awesome at over a hundred yards on a moving target the size of a basketball. 

Find a place and hole up, I whispered as I broke away long enough to refill my bag with more loaded magazines.  Crap, I was down to the last four of the twenty five rounders and six of the ten round magazines.  By the time I ran back to the edge of the building, this time on the north facing side, I saw the last gasp of white smoke erupt into a plume and realized the smoke was from an engine fire and not a busted radiator.  Six of one, half dozen of the other.

Reloaded once again, I started potting zombies in the vicinity but took care not to expose them to over penetrating rounds.  The two doors of the small car flew open and I watched in surprise as women started falling out, clown car style.  One two, three…a staggering total of seven individuals emerged from a vehicle which I’m sure would have been uncomfortable for me to fit in one of those econobox seats.

One looked to be holding a tire iron and another clutched a three foot long piece of chain.  No firearms, no bladed weapons.  I figured at that point they were all just going to die.  I was going to be treated to a front row seat as the horror unfolded.  Crap.  That’s why I stick to killing zombies and let somebody else worry about the living.

CHAPTER FOUR

“Get out of the road!” I bellowed, but of course none of these ladies could hear me over the Led Zeppelin roaring out of the boombox.  From where the car ground to a stop, the women had choices about where to fort up.  On the left, a partially boarded up service station and attached mechanics shop offered some cover.  On their right, I spied the only Chinese restaurant in town, a place with the word ‘Wok’ in the title was all I could remember.  Oh, and it had floor to ceiling glass windows in front.  For me, the service station was a no-brainer, but then I knew something these ladies did not.

In the end, panic determined their choice as one of the women seemed to give a little shriek, at least, her face drew up in a mask of terror and darted towards the Chinese restaurant.  She broke for the restaurant and the other women followed close on her heels.

“Fuck” I murmured and kept shooting zombies, hoping to give them some cover for as long as the loaded magazines held out.  At this range, my marksmanship wasn’t spectacular, but I managed to keep the lurching corpses off the women until the group disappeared out of sight through the front door, which, surprise, was still open.  More likely, someone had already broken into the restaurant.  Either seeking shelter or an order of Wonton soup.  If I remembered right, their soup was pretty good, back in the day.

As more zombies began to drift over in the direction of their next Happy Meal, I continued to cut down every one I could safely shoot. The problem being, as the dead drifted between my position and the restaurant, I had to be mindful of those glass windows.  Even with a 22 LR round, over-penetration could still occur as a bullet passes through these rotted corpses.

My strategy worked for a while, but eventually the leakers just got by me.  For every one I dropped, two more showed up to shuffle right into the danger zone where I feared shooting.  I estimated the total was still under four hundred now, but even with my boombox blaring, these zombies were drawn to the sound, and maybe scent, or live humans on the ground.

Looking quickly around my rooftop lair, I decided I would need to handle the rest of these rotting dead heads from a different locale, namely the rooftop of the Happy Wok.  Or Golden Wok.  Or whatever.

Shagging ass, I grabbed the box of empty magazines and dumped them into a duffle bag.  Then, I stuffed four of the 10/22s in on top, since I could only get that many to fit.  Then I snagged a prepacked backpack from the stack of items next to the tent and swung the load on my back.  Looking around, I saw the two rifle cases, the stacks of ammo and the other gear and resolved right then that come hell or high water I was coming back for the rest of my stuff.

For now, I horsed the ladder around until the legs were secured in the truck bed and I carefully climbed down the aluminum length, remembering yet again how much I detested heights.  Standing on the roof was no problem, but hanging on the creaking ladder was a whole other deal.

As soon as I appeared, the zombies stumbling around my truck seemed to look up in unison and start that damned hissing.  Before I set foot in the truck bed I counted at least twenty dead trying to join me there.  They banged on the sides of the truck, arms flailing uselessly, as I barely slowed down to kill them.  Pulling the trigger, pop, pop, pop, became almost instinctive as I tracked and dispatched one animated corpse after another.  This noise and commotion drew more dead our way, which in a way was part of the plan.  At least, I wanted to draw zombies off of their beeline to the Chinese restaurant and in my direction.  As I saw another forty or fifty dead rounding the northwest corner of the building, I figured this was a definite mission accomplished.

Resting my rifle across the roof of the truck, I started making headshots almost immediately.  The range was under 40 yards, which meant these were chipshots, but down here on the ground I felt more vulnerable by far to the undead rabble in the streets.  Even standing in the center of the big truck bed, I could imagine cold fingers and bloody mouths clutching at me from all sides.  That it had happened before did nothing to calm my nerves.

My nerves.  What the hell was happening to me?  I was a machine when it came to slaying the dead, and my bone deep depression kept me from getting too emotionally involved to overly worry about survival.  That was how I felt up there, physically removed from the threat.  Down here, I felt my adrenal glands working overtime to keep me pumped full of vitality.

Worry about it later, I hissed, then once I’d managed to buy a little time I turned and broke down the ladder and fastening it to brackets I’d attached to the side of the truck bed.  Before the ZA, I had only been marginally handy, but necessity meant read the freaking book and learn how to do stuff. 

So, for instance, I taught myself to weld, or at least do enough tack work to build a frame in the truck bed and then add the metal brackets.  My work looked half assed and uneven, and I cared not in the least.  Getting the task completed mattered more than doing it pretty.  That applied to most things after the First Wave rose, where function beat the hell out of form.

Climbing down from the truck bed, I paused to kill a pair of crawlers with shots from my Glock.  Yes, I was just about covered with weapons, like what used to be referred to in some circles as a mall ninja.  I had a Glock in 45ACP, and a long barreled Ruger in a chest rig chambered for 22 LR.  The Glock was loud, the Ruger was quiet with the screw-on suppressor.  Those little subsonic rounds used in the Ruger were not easy to find, so I reserved that one for special occasions.  I had lots of 45ACP, and could reload for more.

The truck had no trouble powering over the piled bodies on this, the back side of the store.  Out front would have been hopeless since some of the places had piles of dead ten deep.  It was a horrible, hellish scene, and I hoped to never see the like again, but I knew I would.  This comes with the job.  Hell, downtown Woodville and the attached hospital compound took weeks to fine clear even after I killed nearly four thousand.  The pre-First Wave population was only about half that, but travelers added to the total.  Just like here in Jasper.  And the burning pits flamed the entire time, casting a horrible haze over everything.

Steering around the bigger body piles, I approached the now fully engulfed getaway car, which I could now see was a Hyundai of some sort.  The front of the car was burning nicely, and the cloud of smoke stank of scorched plastic and half burned fuel.  Actually, the toxic odor seemed a welcome break from the stench of death that clung to everything in the vicinity.  I noted a few dead wandering over to investigate the fire, which would of course mean flaming zombies in the vicinity before long. 

Wheeling into the Golden Wok’s parking lot, I noted my big Ford was the old vehicle present, so I hoped that meant the restaurant was empty.  Those ladies, from my brief snapshot view, didn’t look capable of taking on more than one, maybe two, shamblers at the most.  Not a comment on their sex or skills, simply based on how they were armed.

In the early days, I remember seeing guys going after the dead with baseball bats and machetes.  That worked, for a bit, until the blade got stuck in bone too deep to extract or the bat splintered or became too heavy to keep swinging.  Then those guys died, screaming, as they were devoured alive.

Yes, a machete doesn’t run out of ammo, as I’d read in a popular zombie book once.  Practice showed they lose their edge quickly when trying to split a skull.  I wasn’t a huge fan of the genre before, preferring mysteries or even sci-fi, but a friend had recommended it. 

I found the book interesting in that the author really seemed to hate firearms but felt somehow obligated to include them somewhere at the edges of the story.  Mainly as tools of oppression used by rogue soldiers who wanted to take over the world, taking advantage of the zombie plague.  Well, here in our little corner of the world the military was playing nice, but I was sure there were some bad elements out there.  It was just human nature.

I cut off the woolgathering as I eased to a stop just in front of the doubled front doors.  Though initially made of glass, someone had bolted sheets of plywood onto the metal frames.  That would help, locally, but do nothing to protect the large glass windows facing the parking lot. 

I hesitated before stopping, both because I really didn’t want to attract the remaining zeds to this location and because I just didn’t want to have to mess with these people and their problems.  Did that make me an asshole?  Probably, I decided even as I killed the engine and cracked the door.

As I pulled myself out of the comfy driver’s seat, I noted two corpses laid out on the concrete apron at the restaurant entrance.  The black ichor let me know these were zombies freshly laid to rest.  And not by me.  Well, maybe these ladies possessed hidden resources.

I wondered if I should try to make contact but the parking lot was beginning to fill with shuffling corpses, the dregs of the horde I’d been hired to eradicate.  One thing at a time, I decided.  Gathering up my bags and the heavy backpack, I clambered up into the back of the truck.

The big Ford pickup featured a nice sound system and plenty of cup holders, as well as a full crew cab with plenty of room in the back seat.  Cool touches, but the real reason I’d jacked the vehicle off a used car in overrun Livingston had nothing to do with the amenities.  With a modest lift kit and some oversized tires, my truck stood high off the ground, and with the metal brackets emplaced on both sides, I had a nice shooting platform to work from.  Not as good as a rooftop, and I still dreaded some overachieving zombie managing to flop over the tailgate and get me from behind.  Still, I could use this.