Stabby McStabsalot was riding shotgun with Scratch and navigating. He called out the turns on the CB for Gunny, and the rest followed in his trail, eating up the miles.
“Our reserve tank is down to a quarter,” Bridget announced over the radio. “We’re going to need to refuel in the next fifty miles or so.”
She rode with Hollywood in his ’71 Coupe DeVille. He said he always wanted a pimp mobile like Super Fly had in the movies he’d watched as a kid. Now he had it, loaded with luxuries, and built like a Baja race car.
“Next little town is Mountain Home,” Stabby called out. “It looks big enough to have a few stations, small enough we won’t get mobbed.”
“I see it coming up,” Gunny said. “Stay sharp, people. Just like we practiced.”
Gunny flew in at eighty miles an hour, then slowed as he approached a gas station on the outskirts of town, pulling in fast next to the drops. He was out of the old Chevy and sliding his hose in the tank when Scratch zipped around him in his Skylark and made a run at the store, pulling any undead toward the sound of death metal blaring from his loudspeakers. Griz flew by on the road, making his pass and picking off any runners coming toward them from town. Lars circled the lot in his Cadillac, taking out the stragglers. He was ready to swing in and drop his hose the second Gunny pulled out, taking his place in the orchestrated ballet of armored cars swarming like bees.
Gunny flipped the switch on the bilge pump and started pulling gas out of the underground tank and into his. He crouched with his back against his quietly rumbling Chevy, pistol out, making himself inconspicuous with the din of blaring music, screeching tires, and revving engines drawing all the undead attention.
The dead ran in.
The dead were cut down.
Iron bumpers with sharpened steel running their width sliced through the zeds and sent them sprawling, dismembered and ruined. Some of them chased the Cadillac in circles around the parking lot, until he pulled back on the road in time for Griz to run them down, sending broken boned bodies flying away from his truck. Gunny finished refueling in minutes and tossed the hoses back in the rack, the big magnets on the nozzle holding them secure. He cranked his radio, blasting 80’s hair metal, and roared out of the parking lot taking Griz’s position. Hollywood and Bridget zipped in and started their refuel. The cars circled in and out, confusing the undead and running them down, never stopping for longer than the few minutes it took for the high-speed pumps to fill their oversized fuel tanks.
Griz was the last in line and when he finished, he closed the lid. It was a good supply, no sense leaving it open to the elements. He climbed back into his old Dodge panel van and got sideways peeling out of the parking lot. The Hemi under the hood squalled, and the tires rolled smoke. Fifteen minutes after they’d swarmed in, they were hammer down again, leaving scores of dead bodies scattered around the station. They had miles to cover and were hitting it hard, jacked up on adrenaline and a sense of urgency.
“Wonder why they chose a Jehovah’s Witness church to hole up in?” Bridget asked an hour later, looking at the barely legible note from Wire Bender and her own state map of Arkansas, tracking their progress.
“Most of them don’t have windows,” Gunny said. “Big places, usually brick. This town is a dot on the map, it’s probably the strongest building they have. We’re almost there. Keep an eye out for a horde. They may be way off the road so we might miss them.”
They slowed as the country houses and farms started getting closer together and the yards got smaller. They didn’t have an address, just the name of the town. The church could be anywhere. They passed a FedEx freight warehouse and a small Walmart, still no sign of a mobbed building. The streets were empty, just blown-in litter and a few haphazardly abandoned cars. There was a roadblock ahead, semi-trailers parked nose to tail, running down a cross street. Underneath them were cars with their roofs flattened and crammed in place with bulldozers and forklifts. It made for a solid wall, thirteen-foot-tall, taking up one lane of the road for blocks in both directions. There were little guard shacks built on top, every few hundred feet. Gunny took a left and paralleled it, crunching over the bits of safety glass that covered the road, remains of the car windows as they were crushed and jammed into place.
“Pretty good defenses,” Griz said. “Quick and easy. Wonder how they got breached?”
The little convoy of cars followed the wall, their rumbling exhaust the only noise as they made their way along trailers that enclosed the center of town. When Gunny rounded a corner, they saw how it had been overrun. Where the wall crossed Route 67, there was a huge horde of milling undead still slapping and clawing at it. There were hundreds of trampled bodies, discarded shoes, clothing and spent brass casings littering the area, evidence of a fierce battle.
“Looks like they got swarmed,” Hollywood said, staring at the broken guard shacks on the roofs, the blood and gore covering the sides of the trailers all the way up to the top.
“Sixty-seven runs straight into St. Louis,” Scratch said. “I bet a horde got to running this way and just never stopped. Must have been a big one if
