me. I looked into those dead eyes and realized once again how people could fall prey to these things. Looking into those eyes was looking at death, both figuratively and literally. But they were lethal in their intent and that was what kept me from succumbing.
The little Z hissed at me and pounded at the door. Behind her the first of the horde was picking themselves up off the floor after they had fallen down the stairs. Some of them had broken bones, so arms were at awkward angles and some feet were twisted in crazy directions.
I had one shot at this so I waited on the other side of the door and watched as the little Z charged again. Just as she hit the door I kicked it with everything I had, slamming her back and into the feet of the followers. I didn’t bother to check my handiwork, I just turned and ran.
As I cleared the gym doors I heard the sound of a door slamming open and the dreaded wheezing again. I ran as hard as I could across the gym and through the open P.E. office doors. I swung them shut behind me, but as the door nearly closed, a thin hand shot through the opening and began to pull the door back open. I bolted up the stairs and had the distinct pleasure of hearing that awful wheezing following me up.
I had no room to stop and fight and so I kept moving, charging up the next flight of stairs with that little demon right on my heels. I swore to myself that as soon as I got some distance and a little room, I was going to unsling my pickaxe and let that little bitch have it right between the eyes.
I jumped through the roof access door and flung it closed behind me, but sure enough, the little stinker hit the door just as I thought it was going to close and started squirming her way out onto the roof. I jumped down into the dumpster and in a spectacular display of agility, managed to trip off the dumpster and land sprawling onto the ground. I picked myself up as the dumpster banged again, this time with the wet sound of a zombie landing on its face. I looked over my shoulder to see the little Z getting back to its feet only to fall off the dumpster onto its face again. I didn’t waste time and ran like hell to the front of the building, closely pursued by the zombie. If it wasn’t the fastest zombie I had ever seen, it was pretty darn close.
I managed to get a little ahead of the Z and was vastly relieved to see the RV idling in the parking lot. I sprinted for the open door and dove through, letting Tommy slam the door shut behind me.
I lay on the kitchen floor panting heavily as the sound of little fists pounding on the door reverberated through the RV. I looked over at Tommy and Duncan and grinned.
“Thanks for the pathway. If I had to stop to open the doors, that little shit would have taken a chunk out of my ass, no pun intended,” I said between gulps of air.
Tommy smirked. “Any more of those little monsters and we all would have been meat.”
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
