luck before I would even attempt to try to take this town back. That or a deep freeze and sledgehammer.
We ran up past a second abandoned ice cream parlor called the Creamery and we were fifty feet from our sanctuary when a group of fast-moving zombies ambushed us in the parking lot of the business.
There wasn’t time to fire a weapon, they were on us that fast. There were five of them and had any of us fired, we might have hit each other. It was pure hand to hand.
I punched one of them to the ground, holding it down with a foot on its neck while I elbowed another in the head, spinning it away from me. A third got hold of my vest and lunged in for a bite at my stomach, thwarted only by the AR magazines in my front pockets. I tangled my hand in its greasy hair and viciously wrenched its head around, snapping its neck. The second one was on its feet and after me again, coming in low and fast. I stepped off the one on the ground and drew my blade, a simple Buck Nighthawk Tanto. I liked this blade because it could punch through sheet metal and skulls with equal enthusiasm. As the zombie neared, I pivoted away from the snapping teeth and plunged the knife hilt-deep into the back of its neck. The powerful blade sheared through its spinal cord and paralyzed it instantly. I turned my attention to the one on the ground, who had crawled up and was rearing its head back for a bite on Duncan’s calf, Duncan being occupied with a squirmy Z who refused to hold still and die.
“No!” I yelled, reaching down and grabbing the zombie’s ankle and hauling it away from Duncan. The ghoul twisted around and blackened teeth streaked at me like a striking rattler. I swung my blade up hard and slammed it under the chin of the zombie, burying it in the brain pan of the monster. The zombie looked surprised for an instant, then slumped dead.
I pulled out my blade and quickly searched for new threats, not seeing any but watching Duncan and Tommy finish off their enemies. I quickly wiped my blade off and picked up the rifle I had dropped in the fight.
“Thanks, man. I owe you one,” Duncan said, cleaning off his knife.
“No score, brother, you know that,” I said, clapping him on the shoulder.
Tommy spoke up. “More coming.” He pointed down the street. “We gotta get out of here.” His sleeve was torn, but I didn’t see any bites.
“You’re right. Let’s get the hell out of this town,” I said, running over to the RV. We would clean up later, right now, we needed to get away to relative safety.
We jumped inside and stowed our gear, stripping away any clothing that might have zombie virus on it. Tommy took off his shirt and I was relieved to see he didn’t have any bites. Duncan had a welt on his leg, but that was the worst of it. I was very careful removing my vest, since the little Z had gotten its mouth on it.
Nate moved the RV out of the town, heading out again on Route 40. I slumped in the passenger seat and looked over at him.
“Well, that was a bust. Did you manage to get any gas?” I asked, hoping for some good news.
Nate grimaced. “No and they jumped me so fast I left an empty can behind. So we’re going to need another one from somewhere.”
I sighed. I guess this confirmed my suspicions about the place, but something was nagging the back of my mind and wouldn’t let go. I mulled it over for a bit and when the answer hit me, it was like a ton of bricks.
I called Duncan and Tommy up to the front. They had changed clothing and were in regular duds.
“What’s up?” Tommy asked, dropping into a kitchen seat. Duncan plopped down beside him.
I looked at both of them. “Remember when we were walking, we had a bad feeling about the place?”
“Yeah, what about it?” Duncan asked.
“What was your feeling on the situation?”
Duncan looked up. “Let’s see. We were moving through what looked like an abandoned town, but when we got away from our safety, suddenly there were Z’s everywhere.”
“Right,” I said. “What did you think right when we saw all the zombies?” I knew what I thought, but I wanted to see if they shared my sentiments.
Tommy spoke up. “I remember thinking we had just walked into a trap.” His face suddenly fell. “Oh, man.” He said.
Duncan looked stricken as well. “If they laid a trap, then here’s a whole new ballgame.”
I nodded. “It goes in line with the doorknobs,” I said.
Nate piped in from the driver’s seat. “What about the doorknobs?” I explained and Nate responded in typical fashion with eloquent cursing. “Well, that just about finishes off a shitty day,” he said, angling the big rig around a car in the road.
Something in the tone of his voice tweaked my attention and I turned back to him. Tommy and Duncan were lost in their own thoughts regarding what we had just lived through and what we had learned.
“Something on your mind, hoss?” I said to Nate.
“Well, since you asked…” Nate stretched his arms one at a time before he went on. “While I was waiting for you numbskulls to figure out how to get out of the mess you got yourselves into…”
I narrowed my eyes but let it go.
“I was remembering all those communities we saw who were communicating through CB radios. So I decided to turn ours on and see what I could hear.”
I was surprised. “We have a CB?”
Nate pointed to a small compartment above his head. I noticed in a similar opening the cat we had rescued was lounging. Tommy had named it Zeus, since it liked to look down on all us mortals.
“Anyway,” Nate continued, “I turned the thing on and worked my way through the dials, listening in on a couple of conversations, but unable to respond, since their signal strength was low and they wouldn’t have heard me anyhow.”
I kept silent, wondering where Nate was going with this.
“But things got real interesting when I hit what used to be known as the Public Announcement channel,” Nate said.
“Do tell.” I prompted.
“Turns out there was a fella doing a broadcast, sending it out over the airwaves, talking about how everyone should accept the new order of things and he is gonna be in charge and we all had better toe the line if we didn’t want to suffer, yadda, yadda, yadda.”
“Really? Where could he have been broadcasting from?” I asked.
Nate looked over at me. “I thought the same thing, but then I remembered an old retired Army guy talking about how he spent a year of his life being bored to death in a listening post inside the US. Turns out the Army was taking a lot of paranoia seriously and set up listening and broadcasting posts all over the US, usually in out of the way places. They were set up to be nearly self-sufficient to minimize contact with locals. I wonder if this guy found one of those places, figured out how to turn it on and was sending a message out to all us low-life types.”
I remained silent, thinking how useful a tool like that could be for organizing communities to strike out against the zombies.
“Anyway, I was about to shut him off when something really weird happened,” Nate said.
“What could have been weirder than that?” I asked, stretching my legs up onto the expansive dashboard.
Nate looked over at me. “He mentioned your name.”
19
Brother, you could have knocked me over with a cool breeze at that moment. I stared at Nate until he started to get uncomfortable.
“What?” I finally asked, not believing what I had heard.
Nate replied, “I said things got really weird when he mentioned your name.”
Tommy spoke up from the kitchen table. “Who is this guy and how the hell did he hear of John?”
Nate shook his head. “You’re not going to believe it, but it was none other than our good buddy Major Ken Thorton.”
I went from disbelief to downright amazed. My mind worked overtime. How could Thorton have heard of me?
