“Carl said this is where it’s going to get dangerous.” Bridget said. “This is all uncharted, nobody has been down these tracks since before the fall.”
“Yep,” Scratch said imitating the college kid’s voice, “a hundred tunnels and rickety wooden trestle bridges, rail beds cut into the side of the mountain with thousand foot drops only a few feet away and who knows how many earthquakes there have been since last year.”
An armored train was the only way to make it to the ocean and get the thousands of soldiers out again. They could hold on for a few more weeks, maybe even a month or more, but the Admiral had made it clear that they wouldn’t survive much longer. They were already on their last stores of rice and beans and spent most of their time fishing or casting nets. There still wasn’t enough.
They had all watched over Carl’s shoulder as he drove them down the tracks on his train simulator game and pointed out different areas to be aware of for potential rock slides. He said the sim was accurate right down to the steepness of the grades and the path through the mountain would be the most dangerous. Once they were clear, they could run the rails to Tecate then cross over into Mexico. It was the quickest route in unless they wanted to go up through Los Angeles then cut back down. The game didn’t have any sim maps of other countries they could traverse but an overhead view of the California map showed the Mexican lines ran along the northern border and crossed back over into the States at San Ysidro. There was a wide swath of wilderness area along the Tijuana River that ran all the way to the coast. It was a five-mile-long protected area on the American side of the wall. No buildings, no industry and no people. The border wall would keep the undead from the overpopulated Mexican side out and the nearest houses on the American side were miles away. The soldiers should be able to come quietly ashore, sneak up the shallow river and slip aboard the train.
“The only unforeseen is what the Mexicans did with their trains.” Carl said. “In the States, the fail safes shuttled them off to sidings leaving the main tracks clear. I don’t know what the protocols are south of the border. You may have to push them ahead of you and hope there aren’t so many clogging the tracks you can’t move them out of the way. Remember, the trains will plow through most anything but if you get stopped with thousands of zombies piled up around you, you might not get moving again until you can clear the tracks. Blood and guts are slick, the train will just sit there and spin.”
The mechanics down at Tommy’s shop had worked overtime to reinforce the biggest locomotives they had, a pair of AC6000’s diesel electrics which put out 6,000 horsepower each. They would be able to shove a lot of cars ahead of them. The train Tommy put together for them had a pusher and a puller locomotive, a sleeping car, the dining car and eight triple decker autorack cars equipped with hundreds of seats pulled from school busses. It wouldn’t be the most comfortable ride for the soldiers but it had porta potties on every level and it was only for a week or so. Carl had also pointed out the areas where they crossed rivers or ran along big lakes. There would be a few opportunities to get out, stretch their legs and get a bath if there weren’t any hordes nearby.
Gunny slowed the locomotive to a crawl, sent spotters out front with binoculars and tensions ratcheted up as they started the long, slow climb through the Santa Rosa Mountains. They were checking for rock slides across the tracks or wooden bridges damaged from flash floods or earthquakes. Even though they were only going about twenty miles an hour, it still took a while for a few hundred tons of diesel locomotive to come to a stop. A small horde had followed them out of Ocotillo and was stumbling along in their wake. They hoped the desiccated shamblers would lose interest and follow the tracks back down once they had passed through a few tunnels and around a few horseshoe bends. There was nothing more annoying than trying to get some sleep with a few hundred undead slapping against your window.
They made it to the Goat Canyon Trestle Bridge before Gunny brought the train to a stop and they decided to call it a night. The undead chasing them up the tracks were miles behind, it was too dark to see very far ahead and it was as good a place as any to shut down and get some rest. He overshot the last tunnel and backed the last few cars into it. It was tight, barely a foot of room between the sides of the cars and the rock walls. If the undead caught up sometime in the night, they’d be stuck at the end of the train, bunched up in the tunnel. A little reverse action would eliminate them once and for all. Ahead of them was a long wooden trestle bridge that had been built in the thirties then another tunnel beyond it. Carl said the bridge should be fine to traverse, they weren’t very heavy, but it would be best to check it out in the day light before committing to the seven-hundred-foot span.
Gunny stood on the forward platform of the locomotive and sipped his morning coffee as the sun turned the mountainous desert terrain from monochrome shades of blacks and grays to baked brown. Griz came out of the cab door with his own cuppa joe yawning loudly. He stopped scratching
