Duncan helped me to my feet and I slapped him on the back in gratitude. I went up to the front of the RV and sat next to Nate.
Nate looked over at me and arched his eyebrows. “No supplies or anything? I’m surprised. Was anything in there?”
I just looked at him and continued looking at him as a thump sounded on the windshield. I didn’t avert my eyes when I saw Nate recoil from the nasty thing that was trying to gnaw its way through the glass of the windshield.
“Nothing too bad,” I said. “Just some art work and school supplies.”
Nate looked over at me like I was nuts, but his eyes drifted back to the horror that was clawing at the glass and snapping its teeth in frustration. I ignored the noise outside the window.
“Oh, yeah. There was some minor difficulty in securing any usable supplies, but I’m sure we could all go back in and sort it out,” I said calmly.
Nate winced as the foul little Z started licking the glass in anticipation of the food it saw in the vehicle and I chose that moment to look over at the little zombie. I looked back at Nate and said, “Got any wiper fluid? You seem to have gotten a pretty big bug stuck on the windshield.”
Nate actually sprayed the washer fluid and tried the wipers before he realized what he was doing and stopped it immediately. The wipers streaked the zombie spit all over the place and made a mess.
I shook my head at Nate and went to the side door. Duncan looked up from the back table and came forward with his rifle. I nodded and we both went outside. I did a quick look around and saw that the noise from the little Z had attracted the attention of several others, who were slowly making their way over to investigate. Duncan moved out to have a clearer field of fire should they get too close and I circled wide to make sure I had plenty of room when my target decided to charge me.
I was about twenty yards away from the RV and circling to the front of it when I saw it had gotten off the windshield and was starting to make its way back to the side door. When it saw me, it let out that weird hiss and charged at full speed.
Ordinarily, I would be nervous about taking out a Z this fast. But this little twit had just chased me out of a building, made me fall on a dumpster and dive for my life into a recreational vehicle. I was too pissed off to care that it was fast.
Bracing myself, I held the pickaxe high and waited for the Z to arrive, timing its steps with my swing. When it got within reach I swung as hard as I could, slamming the chisel end into its temple and sending it sprawling onto the pavement. I didn’t wait for it to get up again, I followed it and struck it again as it slowly climbed to its feet. I was rewarded with a loud crack from its skull from the second blow and the zombie was very slow in getting to its feet a second time. I reversed the pick head to the pointy side and slammed the pick onto the top of her head with a snarl. Her dead eyes rolled up into her skull and she fell in a heap. Dark fluid leaked out of the hole in the top of her head and stained the pavement a sickly brown color. I walked back to the RV as Duncan shot the closest Z, tumbling it into the ditch by the road. Duncan’s rifle cracked again and again, a signal it was time to go.
As I went to the RV, Duncan commented, “Why didn’t you just shoot her?”
I sprayed my pickaxe with kerosene from an industrial sprayer we kept on the back of the vehicle. It misted the kerosene over a larger area and put out less to burn, so we weren’t trying to constantly extinguish our weapons. I touched a lighter to the weapon and it flared briefly red, then went out.
I turned to Duncan when I finished. “This way felt better,” I said.
We climbed back aboard the RV and Nate pulled us out of the parking lot and back onto our preferred route. We passed a lot of zombies and a lot of dead areas, some still having the white flags on their mailboxes, a reminder of a time when people held out the hope that the virus could be contained.
Back in the front seat, I looked over at Nate and sighed. He was savvy enough to say, “What?”
I used my most petulant voice. “I said, ‘Let’s use the waterways, it’ll be safer,’ I said. But you said, ‘No, a land route is better for supplies.’” I shifted and tried to see around the zombie muck smeared on the windshield. “I wanted to be practical and get this done as quickly as possible, but noooo, you had to have your way, didn’t you?”
Nate chuckled. “Cheer up. After this, how bad could it get?”
As we travelled down the road I feared for a meteor to hit the RV.
15
We passed several homes and dead areas and as we travelled I began to realize the enormity of what we were doing and how long it was going to take to even start trying to rebuild. There was so much devastation, so much death and so many zombies, I wasn’t sure we would live to see it pass. I wasn’t even sure we had enough live people left in the country to start clearing out areas in earnest. I looked at the map and saw hundreds of small towns and I wondered if the infection had hit all of them. Maybe it wasn’t as bad as I thought. After all, we had found several towns making a stand in the small area we had been to. Maybe there were a lot more like that, just wondering what to do next.
I thought about Major Thorton and resolved once again to make sure a piece of crap like that would never take over. People needed hope, even a little, to make it through this nightmare and if you took that away then we were nothing as a country, nothing as a people, nothing as a species.
These happy thoughts bounced around my head as Nate maneuvered the big vehicle around stalled cars and dead intersections. We had a bit of a time getting through the Route 30 and Route 41 intersection since there were about three thousand zombies populating the parking lot of the two shopping centers. I looked over at Nate and he raised his eyebrows in a question that I answered with a flat “No.”
He chuckled and continued driving. When we reached the intersection of Route 30 with Interstate 65, we had to find an alternate route. The intersection was jammed with cars and there was no getting around them. On the overpass I could see a long line of dead cars and hundreds of zombies roaming the freeway, too stupid to find an off-ramp.
We swung south on 53, but that took us past a huge hospital campus, which looked like it had been bombed. Every window had been broken out and there was evidence of fire damage from a dozen windows. We could see dark forms shifting from window to window and there were dozens out on the lawn. When they saw us they started moving in our direction and some actually fell out of higher windows, just to land broken on the ground below.
We swung down a side road while I scrambled to find another route on the map. I directed Nate down through a blighted subdivision, then back to the interstate. We took a turn back north on Colorado Street and found our way back to Route 30. That little side trip cost us about an hour and a half and it was getting darker. We were going to need to find a safe place to stop for the night. We drove for a little ways and I motioned Nate to pull into a place on the right. It was Deep River Water Park and I figured it would be as safe as anywhere and not likely to be a place that saw a lot of people seeking shelter.
Nate pulled the big vehicle up to the visitor center, but I pointed at a spot closer to where they seemed to have been doing some construction before the Upheaval.
“Why there?” he wanted to know as he moved the RV around.
“We can probably find some gas for the rig in the tractors and trucks over there,” I said, moving by the door and my gear.
“Good one,” Nate said, working to get the RV as close as possible. “Where are you headed?”
“Tommy and I are going to check the area out, you can look for gas with Duncan.” I beckoned Tommy out of his chair. Duncan was already buckling on his weapons.
Tommy and I moved quickly away from the RV and to the first building, which looked to be a concession/restaurant kind of place. We had to break a small window on the door to get in, which was a good sign that the place hadn’t been open when the world ended.