Taking It Back (11 page)

“What’d you find?” Tommy asked.

“Ammo. About 600 rounds. You?”

Tommy patted his find. “Got a small output generator here. Found it in the office of the garage over there.”

I nodded. That was a good find. “What do you mean ‘That was close’,” I asked Charlie.

I heard a crashing and looked back towards the barracks. Two soldiers, obviously dead, stumbled out of the building and lurched slowly towards us. They were dressed in full battle gear, complete with Kevlar armor and helmets.

“Oh,” was all I could say.

Charlie shrugged his shoulders and I pointed to the office window, which was nearly bursting with zombies. Two of them were being squeezed out the window and grimy handprints covered the glass and wall.

Movement on our left caught our attention and we looked over to see Sarah, Martin and Rebecca heading our way and fast. On their heels were Jason and Casey and they were moving at a dead run.

A couple of seconds later a horde of zombies came pouring out from between the two main buildings, stumbling and tripping, but moving forward, nonetheless. The graying mass surged forward when they saw additional victims
,
and we all gaped for a second before I found my voice.

“Run! To the cars now!” I grabbed one end of the small generator and Tommy and I bolted for the cars, followed by Charlie and the rest. Sarah and Rebecca actually beat us to the cars and jumped into the driver’s seats, getting the cars ready for a quick exit.

Charlie dumped his ammo into the back seat and climbed in, followed by the others. Tommy and I actually wound up bringing up the rear. As we passed the gate I shocked the heck out of Tommy by dropping the generator and running to the left, dragging the heavy gate into place. Tommy saw what I was doing and ran to the other side, swinging the right hand gate into place.

The dead were advancing steadily with a particularly gruesome individual leading the way. It was a middle-aged man who had been eviscerated, his guts hung out of his body and dragged along the ground. He jerked every time another zombie stepped on his entrails, which would then snap off, leaving bits behind. His dead eyes remained fixed on us, however, and he was going to hit us any second.

I moved the gate closed and Tommy did the same. I slid a zip tie through the bars and secured them, stepping back just as the first zombie slammed into the barrier. The gates strained the tie, but didn’t break it. Tommy and I knew we needed more ties to secure the gate, but we didn’t want to get caught by the grasping hands that tried to get through the gap between the gates.

Tommy came up with the answer. He waited until the push subsided, then charged the gate, keeping his hands on the reinforcing bars. The sudden push knocked down several zombies which tripped the ones coming up from behind. Using the opening, I quickly threaded three more zip ties before the hands came grasping again and I had to step back.

The zombies surged again, but the gate held. Tommy and I exchanged a look then picked up the generator and took it to the cars. We didn’t have room in the back, so we used a length of cord and tied it to the roof, threading the cord through open windows. It wasn’t pretty, but it worked.

Behind us, the zombies groaned and strained at their prison and I decided we needed to get out of sight before they broke free. We jumped into the cars and drove away, heading back the way we came, leaving behind yet another dead zone. Maybe we had the answers I was looking for riding with us, maybe not. I rummaged through my pack and dug out the binders and handed the one marked “Solutions” to Tommy to look through while I browsed through “Communications”.

Sarah drove back the way we had come and headed south at the appropriate crossroads, leading our little convoy towards our new neighbors. I thumbed through the binder and found a few interesting pieces.

July 9 Communication from State Center Bravo: Infection spreading through housing units. Troop desertion increasing. Need reinforcements.

July 18 Communication from Governor: Contain all infected citizens.

July 29 Communication from Maryland Central: Capital has fallen, designated dead zone. Congress disbanded. President dead.

August 15 Communication from Colorado: Military in full retreat. Fall back to Cheyenne Mountain.

September 3 Communication from New York Central: UN collapsed.

October 18 Communication from California Coast: US Navy evacuate San Diego.

November 4 Communication from Houston: Dead Zone List update.

I ran down the list of Dead Zones but after four pages I gave up. I figured we were pretty much on our own and it was up to us to decide whether we lived or died. I shook my head as Sarah gave me a questioning look and turned my attention to Tommy.

“Anything good in there?” I asked, tossing the binder on the floor.

“You wouldn’t believe some of the stupid things they wanted to try,” Tommy said, shaking his head.

“Try me.”

“Well, one of the suggestions was to douse the zombies in anti-bacterial gel, figuring it would kill them as they are walking disease factories.”

I snorted. “You’re kidding”

“Nope. Here’s another. Use incendiary bombs on all population centers to burn out the infection.”

I shook my head. “Good thing we missed that one.”

Tommy laughed. “Here’s my favorite. Develop an anti-zombie spray as personal protection against the undead. There’s even a chart describing the effects of pepper spray on zombies.”

“And?”

“All failed. Test number four resulted in the researcher getting bit.”

“Figures. They’d have saved themselves a lot of trouble by just writing ‘Shoot in head, then burn.’” I turned back to the front.

“Any info in the ‘Communications’ binder?” Tommy asked as he put away the ‘Solutions’ binder.

I nodded. “It all went to hell too fast for them to get a handle on it. Congress and the President are dead and the list of Dead Zones is longer than Jacob’s Christmas list. The military might be somewhere in Colorado or Wyoming and there might be a bunch of people on boats in the Pacific Ocean.”

Tommy and Sarah digested the news, then Sarah spoke up. “In all honesty, I’d rather be where we are than looking for help from the government.”

“Amen.” Tommy and I spoke together.

9

We drove for a few minutes, then Sarah slammed on the brakes, tossing the car into a shambles and nearly causing the cars behind us to pile up.

“What the hell?” Tommy yelled, pushing a pack off his head.

Sarah didn’t say anything, she just pointed out the window.

A grey mist was undulating on the horizon, ebbing and flowing like a grim tide. Staring closely at it, I realized it was not a mist at all. It was a mass of zombies and they were headed in the same direction we were. I looked ahead to their destination and my heart sank. They were going to Coal City. The town was going to be hit sometime soon.

Sarah looked at me and my mind was racing. We needed to get to the town to warn them of the approaching swarm, but I didn’t want to just drive ahead of the masses just to bring them to their dinner. I looked at my map and followed Dresden Road which led to Coal City. If we followed that road, we would surely be seen by the horde and they would follow us to the town. Looking at the size of that swarm, we were facing two or three thousand undead.

I stared at the map until the answer came to me. I turned to Sarah and told her to turn around and go back to the last intersection. She looked at me quizzically, but hurried to comply. When we had started east again, and were moving away from the horde, I outlined my plan.

“We’re heading to the railroad. The line runs alongside the town itself and we should be able to stay out of sight of the main horde,” I said, pointing to the rail lines coming up fast. “At most, we will have a few miles to go.”

“Are we walking?” Tommy asked.

“Have to, unless there is a service road,” I said.

As luck would have it, there wasn’t any road, so when we reached the railroad, we had to ditch the cars. We packed up as much as we could, taking every weapon and round of ammo we had. We put the generator in the car and packed as much food and water as we could. Hopefully the supplies we left behind would be here when we got back, if ever.

We moved along the railroad track at a steady clip, walking briskly, but not so fast we would be exhausted if we had to run. We had about two miles to go, if I read the map correctly. Sarah walked behind me, followed by Tommy and the others. Charlie brought up the rear.

Tommy spoke up. “I really hate being exposed like this. I feel like we’re going to suddenly be surrounded.”

I pointed to the graying horizon. “We will be if we don’t get to that town.”

“What if the town is already dead?”

“We’ll burn down that bridge when we come to it,” I said.

“Backup plan?”

“Got one.” I did, but it was iffy at best and required more than my allotted lifetime share of luck.

Tommy went silent again. We moved closer to the town, and I could see a multi-colored barrier sticking up out of the ground. It stretched for about two miles off to the west and out of sight to the south. I wondered what it was made of for a while, but when we got closer, I realized it was made of the same thing that we had made our first fence out of. Surrounding the better part of the town was a line of cargo containers. I noticed some containers standing away from the fence and wondered briefly what they were out there for, but I figured they must have been leftovers.

We moved closer to the town and I started to see people standing on the containers, watching us approach. There were three of them, all armed with what looked like to be scoped rifles. If it came to a shooting, we were going to catch the short end of it. I hoped it wouldn’t but I had learned a while ago that things weren’t always as they seemed.

We picked up our pace and headed towards the group. The cargo containers paralleled the tracks, so we didn’t have to go far. When we were about fifty yards out one of the men raised a hand and we stopped.

“That’s far enough. Who are you and what do you want?” The speaker was a graying man, about fifty years old and carrying a decent paunch. He had a badge pinned to his jacket and was keeping a hand on his sidearm.

“I’m John Talon,” I called out, “and these are my friends. I believe one of you has been talking to my friend Nate Coles?”

“I’m Sheriff Tom Harlan and these two are my deputies. Come on up. We’ve been expecting you.” The sheriff motioned to one of his deputies and the man lowered a ladder for us We quickly climbed up and introductions were made.

From our vantage point, I could see the town was well cared for and I could see several people moving around and just going about their daily lives. It was a picture of the community I was trying to build in Leport. The line of cargo cars stretched out and I could see they had encircled a water supply as well as large swaths of farmland that looked like it had been recently tilled and planted. If any town was going to succeed, it was this one. That is, if the zombies let it.

The sheriff told his deputies to see to our group and the rest of the crew headed down a ramp that went down the side of the container. I could see many of these ramps and realized they were better than ladders because there was less chance of tripping either up or down.

Sheriff Tom and I started walking along the top of the containers and I could see several spots where zombies had been killed and disposed of along the perimeter. “Looks like you managed to weather the storm better than most, Sheriff,” I said.

The Sheriff grunted. “We got damn lucky. Our high school kids were the first ones to let us know something was happening and for once us adults actually listened to them. We had meetings about what to do and how to save our town. Several of our ‘ol boys were survival nuts of a sort and they had some pretty good notions. We figured we needed a quick fence, something we could put up and take down if it turned out the plague was not as bad as everyone expected.”

“Where’d you get all the containers?” I asked as we walked close to the reservoir.

“One of our guys is a train driver for the depot north of here and he told us about all the containers that were sitting there, doing nothing. I guess the companies that made them found it cheaper to make new ones than pay to have the old ones shipped back. Anyway, he started bringing them down and here we are.”