Short Story, Un-Life in a Small Town

Hello, and welcome to my first twisted short story, at least the first I'll post here. I've written a lot of short stories, but for some reason, I seem to be on a Zombie kick lately. This is the first in a series that I'm working on. I only planned on three stories, but Danny, Jen, Kenny, Pepper, and the group have grown on me, and I'm up to six right now. The name of the town, Snareville, takes its name from a cemetery in Stark County, Illinois. It actually used to be a town, but time and main roads passed it by. Now, there are only a few houses there, but one huge cemetery, dating back into the middle 1800's. I thought I'd revive the name for the town, much like the one I live in, for my stories. Besides, no one can sue me for libel. Enjoy. Right now, I'm off to grill some raw meat.


Un-Life in Small Town
By
David M. Youngquist


We ignored the stories at first. It didn’t have much to do with us, clear out here in the sticks. Small towns are that way. Unless it affected someone we knew, or our own family, it wasn’t really news. The hemorrhagic fever was bad. We wondered how it got here. How it got loose. Then military nuked Macomb. Ten days later, Champaign was turned into a glowing hole. That got everyone’s attention. Some of us lost family there. Government said they didn’t have a choice. It was a terrorist attack. We couldn’t believe there were actually zombies out roaming around. Until one showed up in town.
Jake Prichard did a lot of business up in the Quad Cities since he was in agribusiness. He was gone on an overnighter up by Milan, came home sick. His wife Tami said he was throwing up blood, when he wasn’t shitting it out. She tried to get him to the hospital, but he wouldn’t go. She called an ambulance, but he was dead before it got there. Crew showed up, saw all the blood, and geared out in their hazmat suits. First time they ever had to use it.
As the EMT’s loaded Jake up on a rolling gurney, he snapped awake. At least they thought he was awake. He just woke up growling, snapping, and snarling. Katy, one of the crew tried to calm him down and take his vitals. Jake just bit a hunk right out of her face. She jumped back with a scream while he chewed the meat and reached for more.
That’s when Denny strapped him down. He threw a belt over Jake’s chest and snugged it tight. Now they had a hungry zombie on the stretcher, a wounded EMT, and a crowd standing outside trying to figure out what was going on. Denny started pumping Katy full of whatever he thought would clean out her system and keep her from getting sick. It might have worked if Jake hadn’t wiggled free and chewed a chunk out of Denny’s throat.
Denny went down, flopped like a stranded carp, and died. The house quickly emptied. Katy and Tami first with Jake close behind. Denny staggered to his feet, and joined the chase. Outside the crowd scattered. Old Bill Terrance wasn’t fast enough though. He was damned near seventy, and gimpy from working on the railroad. Jake and Denny jumped the old man, ate their fill, and went looking for more.
We don’t have a full time cop here in Snareville. Not big enough, so we share an officer with Buda. It wasn’t our day to have him on duty. What we do have though, is more guns than people. Kenny Roberts was the one who took things in hand. He did two tours in Vietnam, and never was quite right when he came home. Not spooky crazy, but just a little off. He was one hell of a shot though. He told us later he’d been watching the news, and wasn’t a bit surprised what was going on. Blamed it on the government though, not terrorists. Not that it means shit anymore. Everything happened just the same. Kenny came out of his house with one of the old military guns he has. Saw Jake running down the street covered in blood, and put a bullet through his brain. The shot dropped Jake on the run.
Denny turned and came at him, so Ken dropped him too. Katy was standing in the street throwing up blood, and another bullet put her down. Three shots: three fucking kills. It amazes me to this day.
People were pissed that he’d shot Katy. Kenny asked if they’d rather have her running around chomping people. That kind of shut them up. A couple more vets came up, guns under their arms. Those of us that were there were sent home to get our own guns, and come back to the post office on the square. I went home and got my AR-15. I shoot competition in the summer. Or I did. Before. . . .
Well, we came back, and there were a dozen vets now, from various times. Some were from Vietnam. Some were from Korea. Some were from the Gulf. I grew up between gulf wars, but my dad was a vet. He served after Vietnam. First thing we did was quarantine the bodies. We found a place by the sewage plant. Someone got the village truck to haul them out. We dug a hole with the backhoe the city kept there, and covered them with lye.
It took a couple hours. By then, people started to get home from work. Busses came in from school. Only reason I was home is I worked third shift. It wasn’t time for me to go to work. Didn’t figure I should go in after what happened. Town was filling up though. We started to block roads. Snareville is a small place. Only eight hundred people live here, but we have bigger towns a few miles away. We’ve got a creek and a canal to the north that separates us from Princeton. Roads cross in two places. We parked pickups crossways at the mouth of the bridges, and people manned them with guns.
We did the same on the other roads. Al Capone ran booze through this town because the cops could never catch him. There’s seven ways out of town. Cops could never cover them all. They’d still have a tough time doing it. All of this freaked a lot of folks out, but it suddenly hit home that this was serious. We didn’t know how long it would take for things to get out of hand. We didn’t know if the government was going to step in. We didn’t know anything. Kenny called the county sheriff’s office. They were less than useless. They couldn’t tell us anything either. They did threaten to take our guns away though. Kenny told them they could try, but we already had about a hundred people on patrol. They decided they had bigger problems to worry about. We found out later that Princeton already had Zeds wandering through town. Two cops were infected. Armed zombies are not a good thing.
Kenny and the other vets organized us into round the clock patrols. They gave me command of a squad of five people. We were to patrol the north edge of town, on our side of the creek. Anything that looked infected or dead we were to put it down. It was a two mile hike from one road to the next. Timber grew thick along the creek. We didn’t find anything on our side the first day. Or on the second. We’re a little off the beaten path. You actually have to be going to Snareville to get there. We don’t have any through roads, so I think that kind of slowed the zeds down. They couldn’t find us.
Not that we didn’t have a few infected pop up in town. Tami was the first. She got the virus when she took care of Jake. Kenny quarantined her at the school. She started to get sick, same as her husband and the others He asked for volunteers to execute her before she turned. No one volunteered, so he walked her out behind the building. I could hear her as she cried, so I peeked around the corner of the school. She calmed some, and started to pray. As she finished, she seemed to vomit half the blood in her body. Kenny put a bullet through her brain. We put her in the pit with her husband and the others.
Two more staggered down main street the third morning. It was couple of teenagers who were dating in high school. One must have been sick, and passed it to the other. They saw Ted Gibson and took off after him. Their lips were gone. Who chewed off whose, we never knew. They chased Ted down main street, snarling and snapping. Blood and some kind of black ooze ran out their mouths. They ran past the convenience store parking lot. All the retired farmers stood there, coffee in one hand, bird guns in the other. One of them dropped his mug when Ted ran by, grabbed his gun and dumped the boy in a heap. It was a lucky shot. Just a few pellets of shot scrambled the kid’s brain. The girl turned on them. Five or six blasts of birdshot didn’t slow her much. Then one of them adjusted his aim, and blew her skull off.
Killing wasn’t easy. Like I said, we’re a small town. Even if we didn’t know a person by name, we knew them by sight. We managed the best we could. We dealt with death in different ways. Some drank. Some withdrew. Some threw themselves into building up town defenses.
There was a heavy equipment operator just outside town. We pulled his tractors into town and used them to block the bridges. We had a tree surgeon in town too, and we used his bucket trucks as spotting platforms. A trucking service called Snareville home as well, but we held his semis in reserve. Through the first week, the people in town who were infected ended up in the pit out by the sewage plant. We figure the lye killed any virus that was in the blood. Names were inscribed on a bulletin board in the town center we used to post notices.
On the tenth day, we lost power. We’re on a co-op out here, so our power didn’t come from a big company. A few cities along the river went together to put up a hydro-electric plant. It had always been reliable, but we figured that there just wasn’t anyone there to man the plant. There was only one TV station out of Peoria who still broadcast at that point, and the news was the same all over. The only help it was was to notify folks where the safe areas were. We were too far from the nearest center, so we decided to hunker down where we were. City water was out without power, but there were enough people on the edge of town who had wells, so we were okay.
It was fifteen days into it when I was on patrol along the canal. Bill Henderson and me as well as the rest of my crew walked along one of the locks when we saw her. She was a young gal, somewhere in her twenties. She had long black hair and wore a pair of those multi-colored bicycle shorts and a grey sports bra. She was drenched in sweat, mud, and blood. I put my rifle up, but she screamed for help right then. I knew she wasn’t infected. Zombies ain’t the most talkative bunch. About fifty yards back though a pack of Zeds ran after her.
I hollered at her to get across the little foot bridge that went over the lock. The Zeds started to gain on her, so I started popping rounds. Bill joined in with his Min-14. My whole crew uses rifles that use the same round as mine, so we could keep each other supplied with ammo. Black blood blossomed out of the bodies as they got closer. There must have been a couple hundred of them in that pack, some on our side of the canal too. She tumbled into my arms. I lost my shot, and the Zeds got closer.
“We have to go!” Bill shouted.
“No shit,” I said back. “Can you make it a little further?” I asked the girl as I picked her up off the ground.
She gasped and nodded. We took off for the barricade on the road a half mile up. We waved our guns as soon as we could see the guys on the barricade. I saw one of them run towards town. I figured he went for backup. I didn’t bother to look behind us. We dove behind the trucks about a hundred yards ahead of the Zeds. Seven of us opened up on the moldy bastards. Rotted flesh and blood flew in the air. It splattered all over the ones who came up behind. The shit splattered all over the trees and the white gravel on the bike path.
Sure as hell, they don’t go down with body shots. They barely slowed down. We found out later that the older the corpse, the slower they moved, but these were all pretty fresh deaders. We sent the girl back to the next barricade. It was only fifty yards behind us. We couldn’t slow the swarm much, so two guys buttoned up in the big five ton truck, and the rest of us fell back to the second bridge.
We put down some fire then. Ten of us with some pretty heavy caliber guns. We calmed down enough to take head shots. Even then, we had twenty laid ten yards off our guns. Some of them fell into the creek, and got swept away. Three got into our lines, and tackled some of our guys. Bill had one about to take a chunk out of his throat when I stuck the muzzle of my rifle in the deader’s ear and splattered him. He went over the side and down to the Illinois River. It was over then. We looked down the road. From one bridge to the next, it was paved with corpses.
Some folks came up then. They went round and put bullets through the skulls of the Zeds that still moved. Those we dropped along the canal went into the water for the drift downstream. I passed Jack in a bucket tractor as I walked the girl back into town. The group at the barricades loaded the corpses, took them out into a little pasture beside the creek and threw them into a pile. They covered them with a bunch of driftwood, topped it off with five gallons of diesel fuel from the trucking company, and lit them up. Greasy black smoke rose up in a thick column.
“What’s your name?” I asked the girl as we walked into town.
“Jennifer,” she answered. “I live up in the house a couple miles back along the canal. Or did. . . . What’s yours?”
“Name’s Dan.” I held out my hand. She took it in hers. They were small, soft. Not the hands of a girl that worked in a factory. “No offense, Jennifer, but are you nuts?”
“I didn’t figure any of those things would find me. I wasn’t worried about it. I figured the government would take care of it.”
“Didn’t you figure something was wrong when you lost power?”
“We’ve got a backup generator. Rick made us get one after that ice storm when we were out for a week.”
“Ah. And is there anything on the TV?”
She sniffed and looked away. “To tell the truth, we never watched much TV. Rick was gone on business a lot and I have a garden. And I have my horses. I wasn’t in the house much.”
Great, a rich girl who doesn’t like to hang around us paupers.
“Where’s your husband?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t seen him in about ten days. He called me from Chicago and said he was having trouble getting out of town. All the roads were blocked and the trains weren’t running. That was the last I heard from him.”
I looked at her. She was all scratched up. Near to crying, but I didn’t see any major wounds on her. At least she didn’t look like she’d been bit or anything. “So you just decided to go jogging this morning?”
“Look. I’m human okay? I was going stir crazy in that house by myself. I didn’t figure I’d run into any of those. . . those, things.”
“Where’d they come from? How’d they get on our side of the canal?”
“They were east of me when I saw them. From down near the highway I guess. I don’t know how they got on this side of the canal. Probably same way I did.”
Damn. We hadn’t thought of that. We had some bridges to blow. Until then, I took Jennifer into town. Kenny talked to her some, then sent her to quarantine with some of the women. We changed the quarantine area to the old high school. At this time, there were only two rooms in use. Some people made it home from out of town. So far, no one developed symptoms. The girls gave Jennifer a bath, cleaned her cuts, and gave her a room of her own with clean clothes. I went back to the bridges to help out.
####
We’d done a hell of a job out there between the bridges. One hundred and seventy eight deaders sent to the burn pile. Jack dug a deep hole in that cornfield, and shoved in anything left. When he covered it, I wondered if it would grow a crop again.
We didn’t realize until we talked to Kenny in his after action report that there were going to be issues real fast. Even with decent shooters on the line, we burned up nearly five hundred rounds of ammo. There wasn’t much in uniformity among us with guns. Everyone in my squad had a rifle that fired the 5.56 NATO round, but we were the exception. We had a mix mash of guns. There was everything from Garands to AK-47s to SKSs to shotguns. The Soviet rifles interchanged ammo, no problem. Biggest problem was how to keep everything fed. Some of the guys had battle packs. I had a couple, plus reloaded ammo to use on coyotes. But we weren’t an armory. We couldn’t survive a sustained zed attack if they swarmed us bigger than they did today.
“I might have a solution,” I told Kenny.
“I’m open. Let’s hear it.”
“There’re three gun manufacturers within sixty miles of us. Two are in the same city.”
“You think they’re just going to supply us?”
“I think the buildings are probably sitting empty. I figure they’re in the same boat as everyone else, and I don’t reckon anyone’s showed up to work in a few days.”
“You don’t think the looters have hit the places yet?”
“I don’t know about the one. It’s pretty public. The other, I had a buddy that worked at. He’s the one that built my rifle and tweeked it out. His shop just looks like a bunch of brown buildings. You have to know Geneseo and know what you’re looking for.”
“Okay. Figure something out.”
For the next three days, we made plans how to get to Geneseo and back with the supplies. We would go after ammo for sure, guns if there were any in the warehouse. We also went and disassembled all the foot bridged over the canal from us to the river. It was hairy. We took quad runners and hand tools. Three people stood guard while two people tore the bridge apart. All we needed to do was pull the wood floor, so it usually only took a few turns with a wrench to take care of it.
The closer we got to the state road though, the more zeds we started to see. At the landing just off the highway, three folks shot almost the entire time we tore the floor up. We decided the one closest to the river we didn’t need to bother with, as anything could cross the highway bridge. We figured we might need to blow that eventually. Fifty deaders got tossed into the river that day. We washed off in the canal up stream where we threw them in. I didn’t want to leave much in the way of clues for any other zeds to follow.
I visited Jennifer after every run. She hated to be locked in the classroom she was in. Just hated to be locked up I guess. Couldn’t blame her, but every time I talked to her it took my mind off the missions, and helped me unwind. We talked about nothing mostly. It was just two people getting to know one another. Her husband, Rick, was a lot older. He had been a teacher at the college she went to. She was twenty five, same as me, Rick was forty. After they got together, he left teaching and started his own software company. That’s why he was gone all the time.
Me, I lived in Snareville because it was cheap. I could by a house there cheaper than I could rent in Princeton. Told her I had some school, but not much. It helped at work. I was off the floor, or was, and I didn’t have to fill orders all day. Broke up with my girlfriend a few months ago, and since I was on third shift, it was hard to meet anyone new. Easier to just go to a strip joint and get a look, than it was to find someone.
I put off the trip to Geneseo for five days. Then they let Jennifer out of quarantine.
“I want to go with you,” She said.
We walked down main street toward the trucking company. A rig idled, ready to go. “Why?” I asked.
“I’ve been cooped up here for a week. Before that, I was cooped up at home for a couple weeks. I want to get out, Dan.”
I looked at her. “Can you shoot?”
She glanced away. “A little. Not much with a rifle like yours.”
“Okay, we’ll get you a shotgun and a box of shells.”
She smiled at me, and I guess I must have lit up pretty good. “I don’t want to have to baby sit you. Make sure you do as you’re told, and pull your weight.”
She saluted and gave me a mock serious look. “Yes, Sir,” she said.

#####

We rolled past the barricade north of town. Once over the creek, we were on our own. The road we needed was right at the base of the canal. The guys on guard duty at the canal bridge waved at us as we made the turn and headed into the countryside. A mile up the road, we came to the second creek roadblock. It sucked manning all these barricades, but we didn’t want to blow them unless it was a last resort.
I checked the rearview, and caught just the back edge of a white truck bed behind the trailer. I keyed the two-way radio.
“You boys keep tight on us. We’re not stopping until we get to the plant.”
“Hey, you don’t have all boys on your crew, Boss.”
In the cab of the semi, we grinned. “Yeah, Chrissi, I got one of you girls up here too. Don’t get your hair tangled up in the gun.”
“Funny.”
“Just watch the taillights for turns and brakes. We don’t want to get stranded.”
“No shit.”
That was Bill. Jeff Rissati was driving the rig. We had Bill and the rest of my team in a crew cab pickup behind us. We didn’t know what we’d run into, but we wanted to be ready. Guns were stoked. Magazines were loaded. Everyone had a rifle, except Jennifer. She sat behind me in the sleeper, butt of a shotgun between her feet. One of the guys in town volunteered his turkey gun. It was shorter than other bird guns. Fit her better. We dumped the plug out, and stoked it up with six buckshot shells. After those first six, she was down to birdshot. I hoped it wouldn’t come to that.
We buzzed down the back roads with no problem. We passed silent farms. No one was in the farmyards that I could see. No one was between the barns, no tractors in the fields. We slowed a couple times to let cattle or hogs cross the road in front of us. Didn’t know if they had gotten out on their own, or someone had let them out. It was eerie.
In Buda we saw the first signs of the insanity that still swept across the country. Several cars were stuck into the sides of buildings. A few caught fire, and burnt both the car and the structure. We eased through the two-block business district. Corpses stuck out through windows, skulls shattered as the deaders went for the tasty parts. There were a couple bodies in the road. Someone ran them over on the way out of town. They thumped under our wheels as we mashed them down a little further.
Jeff turned us out onto the state road. Buda is a tiny town. The only thing keeps it alive is the main connecting road between Peoria and points north. They’ve got a little tavern, a library and a convenient store with gas pumps. That’s it. It’s just a bunch of houses otherwise. It wasn’t much before. Now it was nothing.
“Hey, Dan.” Bill’s voice came over the radio.
“Yeah, Bill?”
“You boys might want to get moving. We got a group of deaders comin’ up behind us.”
I looked in the rearview. A block back, a small swarm of zeds followed the trucks. I glanced over at Jeff.
“I’m on it,” Rissati said. He put his foot in the throttle. The rig growled forward as the diesel came to life. Within a quarter mile, we left the zeds behind.
At the main intersection of two state roads, there was a mess. Cars were piled up at the intersection. Three crashed, backed up a dozen others. No one was in the cars, except a couple ripe corpses belted into the wrecks. Looked like folks left on foot.
We checked the vehicles. Everything had keys. Jeff and Bill stayed behind the wheels as the rest of us started them and backed vehicles off the road. Pretty soon, we had them all lined up in the ditch. I decided to leave them where they could be gotten at easy. Most had a half tank of gas. A tank on one of the pickups was full. I debated on taking it, but decided we didn’t need to get strung out further.
The three wrecked in the intersection were a problem. One had a body that hung half way out a door. She was an older woman. Apparently she blew the intersection and t-boned a pickup. Someone opened the door, and she fell out. Deaders must have found her, ‘cause she had a lot of meat missing. We dropped the smashed pickup into neutral, and shoved it into the ditch. Her car was locked in gear. We’d fired up one of the beater cars, swung it out of the ditch, and shoved the wreck out of the way with it. We left her body where it was.
I saw Jennifer walk up on the third car. It was hung up on a busted stop sign. There was a woman behind the wheel. This one was younger. She looked to be in her twenties. Jen had the shotgun in her hands.
“Dan, this one’s still alive.” I could hear the tears in her voice. “We have to help.”
I walked up beside Jen. The woman in the car beat her head against the glass. Her eyes were white, opaque. No soul in there. It was an older car. They must have had a bumper jack in the back window. When she slammed into the back of the old woman’s car and went spinning, it came out of the window and impaled her through the seat. I didn’t know if she was infected before or after the wreck, but she was a deader now. She pounded her head against the window again, as she tried to get at us.
“We have to move that car.” I said. “It can’t be done with her tryin’ to get us.”
“Can’t we just leave her in it?”
“Not like that,” Chrissi said. “We have to get at the wheel.”
Jennifer raised the shotgun. The girl snapped her bloody jaws. With a little sob, she pulled the trigger. Buckshot blasted through the window and filled the car with a black mist. The deader flopped over to the side.
As I reached in through the shattered glass for the shifter, I glanced into the back seat. “Shit,” I whispered. I dropped the car in neutral.
“What?” Jen asked.
“Nothing.” I pulled out of the car, and signaled for Tom to push it out of the way. I turned to Jennifer. “Don’t look in the back.” I told her.
“Why?”
The image of the dead toddler flashed into my head. At least his death was quick. The tire iron brained him and shattered his little skull. It ended up in the car seat with him. Flies crawled across his little face. “You don’t want to know,” I told her.
“Oh.” She turned, and mounted the step to the semi as Jeff brought it up. Everyone climbed into their vehicles as we moved through the intersection. Another mile and we rolled onto Interstate 80.
It was forty five miles to Geneseo from Snareville. We were more than half-way there. We headed west. I’ve never seen that road so quiet. We were the only ones on it that were mobile. We’d pass a car now and then that was in the ditch. Others stuck in the median where some idiot tried to turn around. We saw a yellow and white state trooper squad plastered to the supports of an overpass. Intentional or not, he’d been headed east pretty fast. I didn’t look inside as we passed. The trooper was either zombie chow or a greasy spot on the column. Either way, I didn’t want to see.
I’ve heard the rural areas of this country called the “American Outback.” It’s appropriate. What urban people don’t understand about being out in the sticks is that you can travel for miles without coming across another town. More people have moved to town, than live on the farm. So unless you get into an urban area, you’re not going to find a lot of people. It’s one reason there’s not a lot of traffic, even on a normal day. You can buzz down I-80 pretty fast, until you get into Chicago or the Quad Cities.
Geneseo is one of those decent sized little towns. Jeff geared down as we turned onto the ramp to go into town. Half way down, he stopped.
“How many people lived in this town, Dan?”
“Little over four thousand. How many you think are still here?” I said.
“Dead and chompin’, or alive and hidin’?”
“Both.”
“Don’t know, man, but we gotta do this. There another way to do it?” Jeff asked.
“Only if we go all the way around town and circle back. Adds about twenty miles. I want to save some fuel.” I said.
“Alright, lets do this.” Jeff gave me a weak smile.
“Just drive around what you can, and don’t stop for anything.”
Jeff took his foot off the brake, and we rolled forward. We didn’t bother to stop for signs. It was easy going at first. On the edge of town, businesses catered to interstate traffic. They were modern buildings of eateries, gas stations and video stores. No traffic, of course, and very few cars in lots or along the road. There’s a lot of state and county roads that come into Geneseo, and it was a thriving community before all this happened. We didn’t come across any choked areas until we got closer to the residential sections.
As we got closer to a clot of cars stuck in the road, Jeff slowed. It was another wreck. We stopped a couple truck lengths behind the mess. Looked like it was about a half block long, and involved all directions of a main intersection. Matter of fact, it was the intersection we needed to turn left at. Damn.
I keyed the radio. “Bill, you back there?”
“Yeah, Boss.”
“We gotta check this out. We’re goin’ have to find a way around. You stay behind the wheel. Keep it running. Jeff’s going to do the same up here. Chrissi, John, hop out and help cover.”
I checked all directions. So far so good. No deaders. Maybe we got lucky and they all left. Right. I popped the door on the rig. “Jeff, you keep this thing runnin’. Lock your door. We come back running, you be ready.”
Jeff nodded. I could feel the flop sweat roll down my back. It prickled like a million ants. “Let’s go, Jennifer.” She had hold of that shotgun hard enough to strangle it. We hopped out of the cab. John and Chrissi slid silently down the side of the trailer. I held my finger over my lips for silence. We’d worked out a system for hand signals a week ago. Now, I stepped around the front of the truck.
My crew knew their jobs. Rifles at half-port, we quick stepped through the yards. I didn’t want to get up against a house, and have a door pop open with a surprise. Jennifer was the only unknown factor. She could handle the shotgun, but she’d never been in a fight before. I didn’t want her to get killed, but she had to pull her weight.
We got to the last yard before the intersection. The ground was solid. Hopefully it was solid enough to support the semi. Maybe we should have brought a bunch of pickups. Less weight, but I wanted to get as much as I could in one trip.
We stood in front of the house. I hadn’t rounded the corner. One last breath, and we stepped into the west yard. The pileup went on for almost a whole block, but there was room to get the rig back on the road. I started to relax, until Jennifer’s shotgun boomed. I swiveled my attention to her. She pumped the gun, and fired another round. From the north came a swarm of zeds. John started to light his up, then Chrissi fired to the east. We were about to be surrounded. Most of them were fast movers too. I cranked up my rifle. I watched the head in my sights explode, and moved on to the next.
“Back to the trucks!” I shouted.
We fell back in order. We were a small cluster with controlled fire. One came running at us. It was a young guy, in his teens, missing an arm. He got past the rifles. Jen dumped him at our feet with a shotgun blast.
“I’m out,” she said. It was a simple statement. No panic in her voice. I turned to look at her. Her brown eyes darted around us. I wasn’t about to let her die.
“Go!” I barked the order. We turned and ran to the trucks. It was only a few feet now. I snagged the door on the rig, flung Jennifer inside, and jumped in behind her. I slammed it and hammed the lock. Jeff looked at me, eyes wild. We’d stood down some small swarms before, but that was with the entire group.
“Around to the left,” I said. Zeds were all around us now. “Go to the left, turn the corner and hit pavement.”
“What about these things?”
“What about ‘em? Drive over the top of ‘em. Just don’t let Bill get cut off.”
“Right.” Jeff pulled his foot off the brake, and gave the beast some throttle. He eased across the street, and over the curb. I heard Jennifer behind me slide shells into the shotgun. She pumped the action, and stuffed in another. Ready.
Jeff cussed as we got onto grass. The truck started to sink, but he feathered the throttle and it moved. I heard shots behind us, and figured it was John and Chrissi as they cleared a path. Jeff plowed through the swarm. We could feel the thumps as the wheels rolled over them. They started to climb onto our truck. They banged on the windows, grabbed the mirrors. Jeff picked up speed, as much as he could, and we rounded the corner of the yard. Some of the more rotted deaders splattered against the grill. Jeff smiled, shouted, and gave it more gas as he aimed for the open road. He cranked the wheel, and the zed on his side lots its grip. It fell off, and we ground it under the wheels of the rig.
He picked up speed as he rolled through the yards. We were at twenty miles an hour by the time he jumped over the curb back onto pavement. Then he really gave it throttle. A deader still hung on my side of the rig with the mirror and door handle.
“Get that fucker off us!” Jeff shouted.
The zed licked the glass with his rotten tongue. He left a smear of black slime behind as he snarled at us.
“I don’t want to break the window. We’ll just let more in that way.”
The muzzle of Jennifer’s shotgun poked past my face. “You crank, I’ll shoot ‘im.”
“Right.” I ducked down, grabbed the window crank, and lowered the glass. I got about four inches down, and the shotgun boomed. The zed’s body went limp, and he fell onto the sidewalk. “God, they stink,” I said as I rolled the window up. Jeff turned on the air conditioner. That helped, a little.
In the mirror, I could see Bill’s pickup. We gained speed now. Didn’t drive through town at sixty very often, but we did today. A couple of zeds still hung onto his truck. He whipped the wheel, first one direction, then the other. The last one fell off and rolled like a rag doll along the pavement.
“That it?” Jeff pointed at a building with a sign out front. A shooter held his line of sight on a distant target. They made good guns there. Rifles and pistols both. An office window was busted in, the front door open. Someone beat us to it.
“No, not this one. Keep going.”
Three miles further down, a small Mormon church stood on the corner of an unmarked city street. Down this street was the main industrial area of Geneseo. We turned in there. A cluster of brown and grey buildings took up the second block. We pulled in, and Jeff back toward the dock. I told him to wait, as I didn’t know which door we’d use. Bill pulled in beside us. The building looked tight. I didn’t see any broken doors or windows. We waited some more. No deaders.
I popped the door and stepped out. Jen followed. I told Jeff to back in when he saw a dock door go up. Not to leave the truck, and keep his rifle handy. Chrissi met me beside the truck. There were tears in her eyes as she handed me her rifle.
“What’s this for?” I asked. Neither Bill or John would answer as they walked up. “What’s going on?” I looked at Chrissi. She had a bloody bite mark on her neck. They had tried to stop the bleeding, but fresh red blood still pumped from the wound.
“Deader broke out the back window, Boss. I blew its head off, but it got Chrissi first.”
“Chrissi. . . .”
“Dan, I can’t be one of them. You have to do it.”
“I can’t. . . Chrissi, don’t make me do this.” I felt tears start up in my eyes. I’d known Chrissi nearly six years. We’d dated for awhile when I first moved to town. We’d made love wrapped up in a sleeping bag.
“I’m Catholic, Dan. Not a real good one, but suicide is a straight ticket to hell. It’s already close enough here. I don’t want it in the afterlife. I can already feel that junk in my system. Come on.”
She walked away toward the front of the building. Around the corner, under a big maple tree, she kneeled in the soft spring grass. She looked out over the cornfields, bowed her head, and started to pray. She whispered for a few minutes, as she made her peace. Tears streamed down her eyes. I felt a few run down my face. My hands shook. I could feel them tremble on the grip of the rifle. Chrissi crossed herself, and opened her eyes. “Sure is a pretty day,” she said. “You’re a good man, Dan. I’m ready.”
I brought the gun up. The muzzle was only a foot from her temple. A shot, and death would be instant. My hands shook. The damned sight danced around. I couldn’t breath. Chrissi started to hum. A little tune I’d heard in church as a kid. First song I’d ever learned Jesus Loves Me. . . . I started to hum along. The rifle fired. The sound shattered the morning. I turned and walked back to the trucks.
They all stood around, staring hard at the gravel parking lot. Jennifer dragged the tow of her boot through the limestone dust. No one looked at me.
“Next time we go out, these trucks have armor over the windows. I don’t want to have to do this again.” I looked at my crew. “We came here to supply. Let’s get it done.”
Bill and Jeff stayed with the trucks as we headed inside. The windows were barred here, and the doors were steel. Locked with deadbolts and door handle locks. We walked around to the employee entrance. It was locked too, but the door was barred glass. I busted it out with the butt of my gun, reached inside and turned the lock. No electricity no alarms. We passed through a second door inside the same way. Then we were in.
At the end of the manufacturing line, were racks of rifles. The racks themselves were labeled model and caliber. I knew how their system worked. Those guns at the end of the line hadn’t been test fired. Off to the south was the loading dock. We walked out there, and found pallets of boxed rifles. Again, the pallets were marked with the make and caliber. We wanted two types of rifle, in two calibers. I rolled open a dock door, and signaled for Jeff to back up. Bill locked the trailer in, and chocked the wheels so it wouldn’t go anywhere, Jennifer marked the pallets we wanted. Back in one corner, we found a pallet of pistols; we marked them too.
I jumped on a fork lift. That’s what I do at work, I load trailers. In fifteen minutes, I had five pallets of rifles loaded, along with the pistols. Bill found a pallet of the big fifty caliber rifles, and passed three out to John to put in the pickup. The trailer was still mostly empty, so we unlocked it from the dock. We hopped out and I pulled the door down. Jeff followed me around back. In a large grey building, there were two more dock doors. I told them both to back in.
It took a little more doing, but we found a way in through a side window. There, stacked floor to ceiling were pallets of ammunition. We took everything we could load on the two trucks. Pistol and fifty cal ammo went on the pickup, feed for the rifles went in the trailer. Two pallets of magazines for the guns went into the trailer as well. It wasn’t everything in the warehouse, but it was everything we needed. We pulled away from the docks, buttoned up the trailer, and headed out of the drive.
Zeds found us already. We were out there no more than an hour, and the bastards stumbled down the road at us.
“I’m not goin’ back through town, Boss.” Jeff said. We sat in the drive and watched them come. Bill popped rounds. I watched the deaders go down. I was glad Chrissi wouldn’t be among them.
“Turn left out of the drive,” I told Jeff. “We’ll make the twenty miles extra.”
That we did. As fast as the rigs would go loaded down. We stopped at the intersection outside Buda, and grabbed the extra pickup. By the time we got home, we were exhausted. The adrenaline had run through our bodies. We were wrung out. It was all Jeff could do to back the rig into a small warehouse. We watched as the rest of the group unloaded the trucks and buttoned up tight. We made it home.
I walked to my pickup, dug the keys out of my pocket and climbed in. Jennifer climbed into the cab opposite. She didn’t say a word, just rode with me to my place. We washed in a bucket of room temp water I had in the bathroom, and collapsed into bed together.
“I ever get bit, do the same for me as you did for Chrissi.”
“Okay.”
It was the last thing I remember before we fell asleep.