“Those Expeditions are pretty nice. I bet the keys are still in them.” Bart said from the back. He’d been thinking along the same lines as his daughter.
Drew noticed everyone had kind of turned to stare at him. Sighing he got out of the Traverse and walked slowly towards the police vehicles. They were the nice extra-large Ford Expeditions. They’d be loaded down with weapons and supplies hopefully. Not to mention the Expeditions wouldn’t be the normal ones you could buy off the Ford lot. These would be the supped-up law enforcement models.
The rain began to taper off after he got out of the car. Florida afternoon storms were often like that. They blew in strong then were gone almost as fast as they appeared. The decaying bodies on the road by the police cars were gross. None of the bodies were dressed like cops. Drew quickly surmised that the cops manning the roadblock must have been charged by a large pack of the infected. They’d taken out some of them but been bitten in the process. The cops who’d been bitten were now wandering the countryside looking for brains. He felt vaguely sorry for the police officers. Based on where the bodies had been dropped, they’d held their fire until it was obvious the people running at them were really going to attack them.
He didn’t think any less of them for holding their fire. No one had been prepared for this. Thinking back to the President’s speech there were probably some people living it up in semi-normal circumstances on secret bases right now, but the bulk of humanity was circling the toilet bowl. He got in and looked for the keys. They were nowhere to be found in the first car but in the second they were still in the ignition. A few quick checks later and Drew was bouncing out of the car to run back over to Yue.
“The battery’s dead but otherwise we should be good. I say we dump some gas in the tank and jump it. It’s way nicer than this cesspool we’ve been riding around in.” Drew said indicating the general nastiness of their current ride.
A few minutes later they had Bart transferred to their new ride and were hooking up jumper cables. The powerful engine on the Ford rumbled back to life once they’d let the cables sit on it for a minute. They transferred the rest of their gear and collected an abandoned shotgun and service pistol off the road. They were wet and nasty after lying on the ground in the rain and heat for days. They’d be fine once they wiped them down and got rid of the dead body funk.
“The front of this thing is pretty much built for ramming into crawlerz.” LeBron announced from where he was standing admiring the cow catcher looking steel contraption covering the grill of the big beast of a truck.
“I know you must be tired from carrying the bags of gauze and everything, but can you help get the gas jugs in the back. You can use your non-handicapped hand.” Yue said. She sounded a little pissed off. Between LeBron babying his hand and Drew playing with all the buttons and knobs in the front of the truck she’d been the one carrying the bulk of the stuff from their old car to the new one.
“There’s somebody coming down the road.” LeBron said squinting his eyes to try and see better. He couldn’t tell if it was just some guy running towards them or a blood thirsty adrenaline-fueled monster who wanted to rip their heads off and dine on their eyeballs. When the guy started screaming like a lunatic that pretty much answered the question.
“Help me get the gas in the back!” Yue said nervously. She was struggling with the heavy jugs. All she could think was if they drove off and left them, they were then at the mercy of the random gas gods. They’d already been forced to leave behind way too many of their supplies.
LeBron ran around to the back and picked the jugs up as high as he could with one arm while Yue swung them into the back. Bart was yelling at them to forget the damned gas and get in the truck. Drew was in the truck waiting to floor the accelerator once his brother and sister got back in. He was focused on trying to get past the surger before it bashed in their windows. He assumed it was a surger anyway since it was screaming and running around in the daylight.
Bart carefully aimed and put some holes in the surger when it got close enough for him to feel like he wasn’t wasting bullets. As soon as the surger hit the ground Bart leaned back in his seat to wipe the sweat off his forehead. The act of shooting had sapped a lot of his energy. He was burning up even though the air conditioning vent was blasting cold air directly down on him.
Attracted by the sound of the weapon firing more surgers were emerging from the woods. The roadblock had been in front of a fairly large suburb of Leesburg. The population of that town was in the middle of the nightmarish process of being converted from normal humans to crawlerz. In that transition period there were still plenty of them in the surger phase where they didn’t freak out when they saw the sun. They basically only freaked out when they saw or heard something that told them prey was nearby. They’d begun their permanent acid trip into oblivion.
The surgers ran through the strip of woods separating the highway from the large golf course community. They
