The Great Wreck (13 page)

           
“I don’t
know,” Tony replied taking the binoculars back, “I can’t see a pack and I don’t
think the Johnston’s had any family. And why would they be all the way down
here?”

           
“I don’t
know. See anything else?”

           
Tony
scanned the forest for anther ten minutes before replying, “No. Nothing. Let’s
head back. Tomorrow we’ll go up and talk with the Johnstons and see if they are
OK. Ask them if they have seen anything strange.”

           
“Sounds
good,” We went back to the cabin and talked to the girls about what we saw and
what we were planning. After that, none of us talked much as the sun drifted
down behind the mountain peak. That night I don’t think any of us slept.

*
     
*
     
*

           
The next
morning we were all up early and even Dreysi came to see us off. We walked out
into the cool and still gray morning air and into the garage. I walked over to
the motorcycles and asked, “Motorcycles? It will get us there faster.

           
“Nah. We
need to save the fuel, Evil Knievel,” Tony replied and stopped by the ATVs and
said, “Two or one?”

 
         
“One. You drive, I’ll watch the
forest.”

           
“All
right but keep your hands about the belt line, homo.”

           
“Why do
you have to be like that?” I said, “I’m not taking a helmet. Makes my vision
feel restricted.”

           
“Suit
yourself,” Tony said as he pulled on his helmet, “But when you get thrown from
the bike and spread your brains, what little you have, all over some rock in
the forests, I’ll tell Nicky your final words were ‘Take care of Nicky…’ and by
‘take care’ I mean…”

           
“I know
what you mean,” I said unplugging the ATV, “Isn’t Nicky a little old for you? I
thought you preferred grade schoolers or something.”

           
“Well,
I’d do anything for a friend. And by ‘do anything’ I mean…”

           
“Yeah,
yeah, yeah,” I said as he rolled the bike out of the garage. Tony slung his
rifle over his shoulder and mounted the bike, I quickly did the same and
wrapped my arms around his waist.

           
“Hands
above the belt,” Tony said.

           
“Don’t
make this weird,” I replied.

           
“Is that
a rifle in your pocket or are you just happy to see me,” he said, “Oh, wait,
that is a rifle.”

           
I
adjusted the rifle so that it slung across my back and said, “Can we just go
now, Mr. Homophobe?”

           
“Yes we
can,” he replied, “And away we go,” Tony said as we passed through the gate.
Greer locked it up behind us as I looked over my shoulder. Seeing the three
girls standing there made me feel completely and totally alone. Like I’d never
see them again. Nicky waved at me as we passed around the bend in the road and
I lost sight of them.

           
“They’ll
be OK, right Tony?”

           
“They’ll
be fine. Nothing can get into the cabin. Nothing.”

           
We rode
down the trial, Tony watching the road and me scanning the forest around us but
we saw nothing all the way to the branch in the trail leading up to the
Johnston’s cabin. Tony turned right and headed up the steep trail. We rolled
through the quiet woods unit the trail began to open up and turn into a dirt
road. Far up ahead I could see the road bend and a little beyond that, the top
of an actual log cabin poking up out of the trees.

           
We sped
up a bit as we hit the dirt road and quickly made it to the front gate, “Gate’s
open and it looks like…” Tony said then jerked on the braked so hard the back
wheels of the ATV came up off the ground.

           
“Watch
it Tony, you almost spilled…us…” I started as I looked over Tony’s shoulder and
saw what he saw, “Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior,” I whispered making the
sign of the cross over my chest.

           
I had
never met the Johnstons, only heard about them in Tony’s many stories about his
summers here in the woods. They seemed like nice people. Tony’d tell me that
the old folks would ride their horses down and join Tony’s family for dinner or
have the Garrands up for dinner at their place. They sounded like nice folks,
good neighbors, the kind you’d want around in case you needed help. And they
were quiet dead.

           
At
least, what appeared to be Mr. Johnston was quiet dead having had most of his
upper body eaten away to the bone and gristle. The remainder of his corpse was
sprawled out on the cabin’s front porch with the eaten half hanging over the
steps. I could see that whatever had been at him had spread bits and pieces of
tissue and bone all up the stairs. It looked like a water fall of blood had
flowed down and puddled in the dirt at the foot of the porch.

           
“What
the fuck?” Tony whispered and quickly took off his helmet and unholstered his
pistol. He was about to dismount from the ATV when the front door of the cabin
opened and out stepped Mrs. Johnston and Tony froze where he was. At least what
I thought
had
been Mrs. Johnston when
she was alive. Whatever that thing was in the doorway was no longer her in the
strictest sense of the word and didn’t actually looked to be alive either. In
the strictest sense of the word.

           
The dead
thing that had been Mrs. Johnston looked seriously worse for wear having had
her entire left arm chewed away down to the bone along with a good portion of
her chest. I could see her pale face and head were relatively intact as she
stumbled out onto the porch and looked around as though uncertain as to why she
was there.

           
Tony and
I were rooted to the spot and all I could think of was “city miles” over and
over again as we watched the thing weave back and forth like a hound that had
lost its scent. Eventually she settled on the corpse of the late Mr. Johnston and
decided that was what had gotten her attention. She shuffled over to the
uneaten portion of his corpse, knelt down and began tearing great, fatty chucks
of Mr. Johnston’s lower stomach out of his abdomen. I could hear Tony starting
to gag when I heard something off to my left. I slowly, so slowly turned my
head as saw not one fish or two fish or red fish or blue fish. Nope, just
infected. And not even one or two or three infected my friend, but at least a
dozen drifting in and out of the woods a few yards away from us. To my right, a
bit further away, was another group of infected moving quietly in and out of
the trees. Up behind the cabin, a few more had drifted into sight. None of them
seemed to have spotted us but if we stayed here, it was only a matter of time
before they did. Seconds at the most.

           
I slowly
put my hand on Tony’s shoulder and whispered, “If you puke, we’re dead. Look to
the left and right of us.”

           
Tony bit
down on his fist and looked around us then back at Mrs. Johnston as she snapped
something lose from inside of her late husband and pulled out something meaty
and dripping from his abdominal cavity. That did it for Tony and he let out a
low gurgle followed by a spray of semi-digested food. The greenish liquid
sprayed around his fist and splattered the front of the bike and ground in
front of us.

           
Mrs.
Johnston paused from her feeding and looked around searching for the sound. She
stood up and began to weave back and forth again while I slowly slide my rifle
around and Tony got himself back under control. We sat there, Tony sitting in
his spray of vomit, myself fingering the trigger of my rifle, and Mrs. Johnston
looking for the source of the noise.

           
One of
the other infected, what was once a young woman, dressed in hiking pants and a
filthy flannel shirt, took that moment to stumble and fall over a dead tree.
Mrs. Johnston’s opaque eyes snapped onto the sound and stared intently at the
fallen dead woman for a fraction of a second, then returned to her work on Mr.
Johnston. The other dead seemed to notice something was going on and began to
shuffle around a little more vigorously, grunting, and slowly moving in our
direction, “We need to go now,” I whispered to Tony who nodded and slipped his
helmet back on, “Slowly.”

           
He
slowly turned the ATV around and we silently rolled down the dirt road. On both
sides of
 
us I could see the infected
moving in the forest. How had the gotten here so quickly? Why didn’t we see
them coming up the trail? And more importantly, were they already surrounding
their cabin?

           
It would
be years before we’d figure out what had happened in those first few weeks we
were in the cabin, when those of us who survived what happened next made it to
Sandia. Like I had seen on the road up to the mountain, some of the people who
left town at the first signs of the pandemic had brought infected members of
their family with them or were infected themselves thinking they’d take their
chances and ride out what they thought was the flu. First a few, then a few
hundred, then maybe thousands headed for the hills of Mount Taylor. They died
in droves in tents, campers, and trailers all over the face of the mountain.
And then they…what? Came back? Reanimated? Rose from the dead? Take your pick.
Whatever you called it, they were dead but somehow got back up and started
walking and, eventually, feeding.

           
Our
cabin was located on a part of the mountain far away from the campgrounds,
trailheads, and forest roads. It was an area where the rich built massive
cabins like Tony’s uncle’s to hide away from the world. Roughing it with every
possible modern luxury. Yes, we were far away, but not far enough. Eventually,
all those who had died from the infection ate their way through the population
of uninfected who had also thought the mountainside was safer than the cities.
They were wrong and soon joined the thousands of dead wandering in the forest
eating, like Tony had thought, every living thing they found. It was only a
matter of time before the waves of dead reached us. Greer and Nicky had spotted
the first lone infected man who had crested the ridge via some weird Brownian
motion and had drifted down to the cabin. But he was just the first, the
vanguard of a wave of dead that had in the months since we had reached the
cabin, been working their way across the mountainside. The dead had first
swamped the campers at the head of the trail off the forest roads, then moved
to each of the cabins along the ridge until they hit the Johnston’s.

           
Now they
were here and it was our turn.

           
Once we
had gotten away from the Johnston’s cabin, Tony pressed the ATV as hard as he
could without dumping us. The dead seemed not to notice us as we rolled down
the trial and finally left them behind. We found the turnoff that lead to the
cabin and saw more dead far down the trail towards where our truck was parked.
They drifted onto the trail then back into the woods bumping into trees and
each other, then disappeared back into the woods again.

           
“Christ
among us,” I heard Tony hiss, “How long before one of those things spots us?”

           
“I’d
rather not find out. Keep moving, man,” I said and we pulled onto our trail and
Tony gunned the machine. Occasionally, I’d see one of the dead look up and
grunt at us but we were flying down the trial and none followed us more than a
few steps. That’s what I thought as we blurred by them. What I didn’t know was
that the dead had a small capacity for memory, that they had just seen a meal
flash buy, and knew the general direction they needed to go to follow it.

           
We
reached the cabin a short time later and stopped in front of the locked gate. I
looked around and could see no dead in the woods but that meant absolutely
nothing now knowing they were literally everywhere and would be here soon
enough. Maybe a day, maybe a week. One day they’d wake up and the cabin would
be surrounded by the dead. Could they get through fence? Probably. Could they
get into the cabin? Maybe. But what would happen in six months or a year when
the food ran out and the dead were still here. We’d be trapped inside with
nowhere to go.

           
Tony got
off the ATV scanning the woods around us as he unlocked the gates, “What do we
tell them?”

           
“We tell
them what we saw, pack up our shit, and get the fuck off this mountain,” I
replied.

           
“That’s
all well and good, but where do we go, Casey? Back to Albuquerque? Out into the
fucking desert? Or maybe you have another mountain in mind?”

           
Another
mountain, Tony said. I thought of the tram and the fenced off and locked up
station at the base of the Sandia mountains. I thought of the resort perched on
top of the ridge with its restaurant stocked up with food, the small hotel, the
ski patrol stations with medical supplies, and the huge water tanks built a few
miles away at the very peak of the mountain, “Sandia,” I said, “We could go up
to Sandia.”

           
Tony
looked at me like I had grown a second head, “What. The fuck. Makes you think,”
he said very, very slowly as if to a retarded child or a drunk, or a retarded
drunk child, “That Sandia isn’t crawling. With the dead. Too?”