George leaned forward to catch my eye in the rear-view mirror. “What the heck are you doing? Why are you stopping?”
“Gotta get rid of the ones out front.” I gestured toward the dozen-odd zombified children—ranging from eight-year-old Brownies to seventeen-year-old Boy Scouts—that I’d inadvertently plowed onto the run-down bridge.
I picked up the Mossberg shotgun and rolled down my window a few inches. “I know you and your son just iced some of their pals, but this’ll be up close and personal. You might not want to watch this.”
George closed her eyes and, in her gentle, motherly way, angled Clare away from the windshield—not that my poor wife was focused on much beyond the din assailing her ears and, worse, the abrupt loss of her mother.
Casey, however, kept his eyes open and trained on the forward view—likely out of a sense of responsibility and camaraderie, recognizing that two pairs of alert eyes were better than one. He was a solid kid—polite and proactive—but he was still a teenage boy, so I suspected part of his “alertness” stemmed from a fondness for bloody video games, plus good, old-fashioned morbid curiosity.
In fact, he did more than simply watch. He grabbed his Desert Eagle, checked the magazine, and rolled down his own window.
I shook my head. “No, Casey. You’ve done enough.”
“But, Joe—”
“I appreciate the help, but only one of us needs to risk himself here. These fuckers are all over the van, and your mom would never forgive me if I let you get hurt.”
“He has a point,” George echoed from the sofa.
Casey sighed in resignation but dutifully rolled up his window.
Turning back toward the zombies crowding my front end, I hesitated to do the deed. Not because I sympathized with the young zombies impeding our escape—but because I still heard a couple of the little monsters stomping around on the roof and, via my side-view mirrors, spied a few clambering along the bridge railings. As I’d suggested to Casey, the last thing I needed was to stick my hands outside, only to be bitten or scratched by the unseen zombies above and beside me.
Quickly, I donned a pair of heavy-duty gloves that I’d stuffed beneath my seat (along with the tire iron, gas mask, and other handy essentials). Praying that they and my jacket would be enough to protect me from an unwelcome encounter, I rose to my feet and slipped the front end of the gun through the bars barricading the glass.
A tactical weapon with no stock, the Mossberg looked as if someone had melded a pistol grip on a pump-action shotgun. While I could shoot it one-handed, I typically didn’t attempt such madness. It had a helluva kick and would hurt like a son of a bitch.
But thanks to the zombies thumping around on the roof and rocking the van from behind, I couldn’t risk sticking the whole shotgun outside the window and holding it as I normally would. So, instead, I pivoted it into a rather awkward angle, aimed the muzzle at the first kid’s face, and pulled the trigger. The adolescent boy’s brain matter exploded from the back of his head, and his limp body slid off the hood, beneath the railing, and into the river below.
As pragmatic and one-track-minded as I might seem, I still didn’t find it easy to blow away the zombified children clawing their way onto the van. True, I didn’t really like children. Hell, I could barely tolerate most adults. But still, exploding their tiny, juvenile heads with each blast from the shotgun was gonna leave me scarred for the rest of my life. Then again, I reflected on how the pint-sized fuckers had ripped apart my mother-in-law—and it suddenly became a little bit easier to take care of business.
Unfortunately, though, I paid a price for my unwieldy position—and the fact that the powerful Mossberg wasn’t exactly a precision weapon. By the time I’d finished dispatching the scouts blocking our way, my fucking wrists and forearms were on fire.
Once I was finished—and at least half of the most problematic undead (including the eager climbers who’d indeed tried to swipe at me) had slipped into the water—I plopped back down into my seat and rolled up the window.
After securing my seatbelt, I shifted the vehicle back into gear and continued our slow crawl across the bridge, rolling over the corpses that had slid off my hood but not into the water. By the time we hit the halfway point—about fifty feet from either shore—the wooden planks beneath our heavy-ass van groaned and cracked even louder.
“Um,” Casey hedged, “about that sound…”
“Please tell me it’s not what I think it is,” George added.
“OK, I won’t tell you,” I grumbled. “But it ain’t good.”
Everyone—with the exception of the almost two hundred or so zombified scouts behind the van—remained quiet as we continued to creep forward. Then, a new noise joined the creaking and groaning of wooden slats—the unnerving, unmistakable sound of splashes in the slow-moving river below us.
Any louder, and I might’ve hoped several zombified children had tumbled into the water.
No such luck.
No, these were the sounds of brittle, termite-infested boards hitting the surface of the river. The sounds, in other words, preceding our doom.
The weight of my fortified zombie-mobile and her five passengers had proven to be too much for the ancient bridge. Not that it surprised me. I just didn’t fancy drowning to death.
My head bowed in frustration, and I sighed with utter fatigue.
As the groaning and splashing loudened, and a couple more zombies scurried onto the roof, adding to our weight, Casey grasped my shoulder. When I looked at him, he merely shrugged.
“What the hell,” he said. “Should probably just gun it.”
Still rolling ever so slowly forward, I glanced back at George. She nodded her approval, her face grim but resolute.
I didn’t consult my sobbing wife, who presently hunched over her own lap, clutching
