A gun shot. Michelle fell. Blood spurt from the back of her thigh.
Dave and I came out from behind cover, and ran past Megan.
“Run,” I said.
Megan knelt next to Michelle, who was screaming. She writhed on the pavement, threw back her head and reached to hold her leg with both hands. I slid my sword into the scabbard, and squatted down beside them.
“I’ve got you. I have you,” I said. Dark blood sprayed from her leg in time with each rapid beat of her heart.
“My God, Chase, it hurts. I mean, it really stings,” she said, and smiled.
“Grab onto me,” I said, and Michelle wrapped her arms around my neck.
“I can help,” Megan said.
“Get her rifle,” I said. “Megan, the rifle.”
I saw the hole in the center of Megan’s forehead. Small. Round. Blood trickled down her face. She fell forward. Michelle screamed.
Dave grabbed the two rifles. “You have her?”
“I got her,” I said.
He opened fire. I don’t know if he saw who he was shooting at, or if he just fired blindly into the darkness stretched out in front of us.
We made it back to the side of the bus. Kia was in the driver seat, the door opened. “Get on, get on!”
“What about Gene?” Dave said.
“Get on the bus, Dave,” I said.
“We can’t leave him out there,” Dave said.
“I want you to listen to me. Gene’s head was blown off. His wife is on that bus. We’re not bringing him on the bus. I don’t want to leave him out here either. You know that. You know it. Look at him, Dave. Look at him.”
Dave cried as he looked down at Gene’s remains. He did not wipe the tears that fell from his eyes.
“Let’s go,” I said.
Michelle was getting heavy. Hot blood coated my arms, and was wet against my shirt and pants. I glanced back, and saw in the bus’ headlights where the two vehicle-corpses lay tangled in a knotted metal mess.
Dave opened fire. I didn’t expect anyone to shoot back, but you never knew. I climbed onto the bus first, with Dave right behind me.
The bus lurched forward. I heard the engine grind and groan, but power up and accelerate until the purr was steady and rhythmic. It was the only sound for a few miles, the only sound, until Char spoke up and directed Kia onto I-264 West.
We put Michelle on a bottom bunk.
Charlene was ready with water and some clean rags. “I have a bandana you can use as a tourniquet.”
“Thank you,” I said. I attempted to tie the bandana around Michelle’s thigh. It wasn’t going to fit. She was losing a lot of blood. “I need something else. Something bigger, longer,” I said.
Dave took off his shirt. “Try this.”
It worked. “I need a stick. A knife. Something long.”
Charlene grabbed a snow brush. “This?”
I snatched it out of her hands. “Perfect.”
I used the snowbrush to torque the tightness of the tourniquet.
“Now what?” Charlene asked.
Kia was at the wheel. We droned on and on. “We wait,” I said.
“Wait for what?” she said.
I did not have an answer.
Chapter Twenty-Four
1202 hours / 750 miles to go
It was my first time in Memphis. I’d never seen the Mississippi. Now here I was on Interstate 40, and cruising through Tennessee. That mighty river was coming up, and in no time at all, we’d be in Arkansas. There were so many places I’d have liked to have stopped. So many places to see. My life had been so limited to Western New York. Canada and Niagara Falls were the places outside of New York that I’d visited most. Sixty miles from where I’d lived my whole life. That was sad and pathetic.
Gene’s bus saved us more than once. The thing had the power to push through anything blocking the road.
The mid-sky sun lit the land like nothing was wrong with the world, like people weren’t dead, dying or turning.
“We’ve made good time,” Kia said. “You want me to take a turn at the wheel. We’ll keep on going. No stopping.”
The river was just ahead. There were signs.
“Everyone doing okay back there?” I asked.
“Melissa is kind of a mess. She’s still on a bunk, her back to us,” she said. “And Michelle is hanging in there. Your daughter has kept up on cleaning the wound.”
“We’re going to have to get that bullet out,” I said. “Can’t leave it in there.”
“You keep saying that,” she said. “We’re going to need to stop to do that.”
“I know, but not yet.”
“When?”
I didn’t want to stop. Stopping exposed us to danger. If it wasn’t zombies, it was motherfucking bandits. There were seven of us now. Seven. If we were going to stop, it had to be somewhere safe. I didn’t know the area, had no idea where it was safe. “I don’t know.”
“Want me to drive?”
I shook my head. “Maybe in a few hours. I’d like to stick with it for a bit. Thank you.”
“A few hours,” she said. I didn’t reply and knew she was not happy with my silence. “You need anything?”
“Big Mac, fries? Maybe an icy Coke?”
She laughed. “I’ll see if I can dig you up a bottle of warm water.”
“Mmmm. Sounds perfect.”
I saw the sign for the Hernando de Soto Bridge. I knew that it stood just over a hundred feet from the water, and spanned 20,000 from end to end.
I slammed on the brakes. The bus came to a screeching halt. Tires had to be kicking up black-rubber smoke.
“The fuck, Chase,” Dave said.
“Chase?” Kia said.
Dave came up to the front. He rested a hand on the dash. “What is it?”
“Look.”
The “M Bridge,” as it was often called, was overrun with zombies. Six lanes, three in each direction, were swarming with walking dead, littered with disabled vehicles, and looked damned near impossible to cross.
“Holy shit,” Dave said.
“Now what?”
“Charlene, you have that map?”
Paper ruffled. “There’s another bridge just south of here, Route 55 goes over it,” she said, my navigator.
“Do we turn it around, head for Route 55?”
No one said a word. I wanted input. I did not want this to be my call.
“We can plow right through them.” I turned around. Melissa was directly behind me, her hands on the back of my seat. “Gene made this thing so that it would cut through anything.”
I bit my lip. She was in mourning. She missed her man. This was Gene’s bus and I was worried she just felt like there was something that had to be proved. There wasn’t. No one doubted the validity of this bus. It was a monster.
“I say we go around,” Kia said.
In the oversized rearview mirror, I saw Melissa stare at Kia, as if she’d just unleashed a string of obscenities. “Dave?” I said.
The zombies didn’t seem to notice the bus yet. There was time for us to discuss the decision this time.
“We plow through them,” he said.
“Go around,” Andy said. “We don’t need to hurt those things.”
Charlene stared at Andy like he might be out of his fucking mind. “Give it some gas,” she said.
I didn’t know the temperature, but sweat beaded on my brow. I felt it drip from under my arms. “We go around, we could easily encounter the same thing, or worse. I’m inclined to just keep moving forward.”
Andy shrugged. Kia moved out of my sight, toward the back of the bus.
“You should all buckle in,” I warned. For the most part, I’d used the cow-scoop to gently push vehicles out of the way, to clear a path on the road for us to pass. I’d hit zombies. No second thought given, at the time.
I didn’t even attempt a head count; there had to be over a thousand. They prevented us from reaching the next state, were a barrier keeping us from getting to Mexico. That was what I told myself as I gently pressed my foot down on the gas pedal. The things were halfway across the bridge. It wasn’t that they came at us, as much as they just seemed to mill aimlessly about.