Home sounded like the best possible reason.
*****
Despite crushing what ifs and nearly overpowering fear, a week later everything was packed. The kids were scared at first. The world outside the white fence was scary. There were dead people out there. Lots and lots of dead people. Inside the fence they had food and water, warmth and shelter. Outside the fence, they had none of that. What they did have outside the fence was the hope that they had living fathers somewhere, and that hope trumped anything a walking dead person could put on the table. The kids were onboard in short order, and worked feverishly to help get everything ready to go.
Joe McGreevy lived his life firm in the belief that if it wasn’t broken, you didn’t fix it. He also believed that if something was actually broken, then you fixed it. Replacing old things with new things was the quitter’s way, and Joe McGreevy was no quitter. As a result, Joe had very old things that worked very well.
The two families gathered everything they’d need and got it placed in the back of Joe’s perfectly functional old Army diesel truck, and Amanda’s cardboard covered minivan. The giant olive drab truck that Joe called ‘old deuce’ was a beast. It was in perfect running order according to him, but both women found the monster nearly impossible to steer. A few precarious spins around the yard behind the wheel over their few remaining days gave Angela enough practice so that she could effectively maneuver the truck. The internal combustion powered behemoth would serve as their pack mule and road-clearing juggernaut. It wouldn’t be the first war the truck rode in.
Nothing potentially of use was left behind. Sheets, clothing, tools, nails, screws, rope, light bulbs, every last bit of Gladys’ canned food, and most importantly, on the very last day, they ripped up the entire burgeoning garden. Wherever their cards fell, the McGreevy garden would be with them. More food would not be far away if they could replant the fledgling crop.
The mothers and their children gathered in the front yard on the spot where they’d smashed old Joe McGreevy’s head in. The blood stains in the grass were gone now, but the memories would linger like an incurable cancer. Hands and fingers searched for their neighbor’s counterparts, and after a tearful goodbye the deuce roared to life. Angela dropped the beast into first gear, gently released the clutch, and the little white fence that could, and the handful of undead standing pressed against it, were obliterated by the truck.
Next stop: The McGreevy family’s home.
*****
Angela steered the massive green beast alongside the curb in front of her house. Sitting in the small driveway was her husband’s cruiser. After dropping her off at his parent’s home in it, he’d taken it back here. He said he would return to her with his small truck. The truck was gone, which likely meant he was somewhere else.
Ignoring the small handful of undead wandering down the street, she leapt from the high cab of the military truck just as Amanda put her comparatively tiny van in park behind it. She hollered out to her sister. Angela had her blinders on, and ran up the porch anyway. Amanda looked back at Daniel Junior and told him to watch over his cousins, and she bolted after her sister.
Amanda stopped in the doorframe of the family home and listened as her sister went room to room upstairs, urgently calling out to her absent husband. First her voice cracked. Then it faltered. Then she collapsed into her sister’s arms, wracked with grief. They stayed like that until they heard Daniel Junior call out the undead menace approaching outside.
Angela snarled and bolted out the door of the home. She reached down and snagged a brick from the edge of her walkway and gripped it in a clenched hand.
“Rrraaaaaa!” And the glorious, rage-filled smashing began. Her wrath flowed through her flesh like the purest adrenaline. Her red brick turned black. Daniel shut the minivan door as his mother lashed out at the threat to her family with more anger than he’d ever seen. He held his aluminum bat in shaking hands, just as fearful of his mother as he was of the dead she was slaughtering recklessly.
Angela stood in the street surrounded by flattened dead bodies. She panted like a feral animal, eyes darting up and down the empty street. Amanda was frozen on the edge of the curb, watching as her sister regained some semblance of human composure. After a minute of gritted teeth Angela caught the eyes of Amanda, and she dropped the blood soaked, sticky brick. It hit the pavement with a moist thud.
“Nothing touches my family. Not my kid, not your kids, and not you. No fucking way.”
*****
What they found shortly after at Amanda’s home was far more disturbing. Inside were three bodies that had rotted until they burst. Amanda’s obese father was in the kitchen on the floor, with her tiny mother crushed and mauled under him. Both of their heads were obliterated. The stink was beyond wretched, and the house was teeming with flies.
Near their carcasses in the living room was Andrew, Amanda’s husband. The rug below his ankle was stained with blood from a bandage, and his head had been shot. Something powerful had done the deed. There was little remaining above his jaw. She was only able to recognize him by the gold wedding band on his finger, and the stained, faded yellow button-up shirt he was wearing. She'd bought it for him for his birthday. It was the same shirt he was wearing when she left him on July 4
th
. It had maggots all over it now.
Amanda didn’t cry. She didn’t sob, and she didn’t get angry. She turned inward, emotionally folding like an origami made of sadness. When Angela put her arm around her shoulder she stood passive, looking down with blank eyes at the body of her husband, roped to the radiator next to her father’s recliner, duct tape across his mouth.
“At least someone shot him. I mean, he didn’t get to hurt anyone,” Amanda said softly, trying to comfort herself, trying to rationalize the truth.
“Yeah. I don’t know, but… I think this happened not that long ago. Look at your father and mother, they’re mostly gone but he’s still kind of fresh. I think he was shot recently.” Angela channeled her cop husband, trying to put the crime scene together.
“That doesn’t change anything Angela.” Amanda sounded despondent. She covered her mouth and nose, trying to fight away the smell. The gesture helped to keep the flies away, but even that was impossible.
“It most certainly does. Did you look around outside when we got close to here? There are dead, dead people all over the place. In yards, on the street, all over the place Amanda. There are people in this town. They’ve got guns, and judging from the looks of all the busted open heads, they’re good fucking shots. If we can find these people, I think we can be safe.” Angela leaned in close and kissed her sister on the side of the head.
“Yeah. You think they might be at the school? That’s as good a fairytale as we can hope for now right?” Amanda laughed sadly.
“Hey, we’re as close to Princesses as anyone can get now. Might as well go see if there’s an empty castle waiting out there for us.” Angela’s arm slipped off her sister gently, and she left to search the house for anything useful.
Amanda sighed softly once more, and turned away. She needed fresh air. She'd had enough of the smell of her husband rotting.
*****
Angela and Amanda stopped in the middle of Route 18. They hadn’t seen a single zombie since leaving Amanda’s house, which they thought was odd, and quite eerie. The small green street sign for Auburn Lake Road was a stone’s throw ahead. Everyone piled out and looked at the burned out gas station they had hoped still had gas. The minivan had run dry just as they approached, and only by the grace of God it coasted as far as it did.
Joe’s old truck still had fuel enough though, and once they had everything moved over, kids included, Angela got the beast roaring again, and with a mighty tug, she turned the truck left, and up Auburn Lake Road towards the private school that was hidden away.
Auburn Lake Road was lush and green. The curving road sloped up and down along the ridge of the valley, heading upwards toward the Lake that gave the road its name. The kids in the back were drawn in by the silent sway of the trees in the breeze, and the smell of fresh lake water ahead. The angle of the late afternoon sun cast golden beams of light through the branches. It’d be night soon. The tough truck groaned in protest on the steeper portions of the road, and Angela downshifted to give the motor the power it needed. When the engine swung in between gears, she heard something over the motor's groan in the distance that set her nerves to alert. She slowed the truck to a stop, put the truck in reverse, and killed the motor as fast as she could. Everyone listened.
Pop-pop.
Pop-pop.
POOM POOM. POOM POOM POOM.
It was gunfire from ahead. Amanda knew the sound instantly, and the kids did too. The intensity grew rapidly until everyone was flinching. It sounded like buzz saws ripping the sky apart. The sound of that much gunfire could only mean violence. Deadly violence.
Angela turned to Amanda beside her in the front of the truck. “Holy shit, you think they’re shooting at zombies?”
Amanda sat listening to the gunfire for a few long seconds before she responded quietly, “we need to get off the road. I think it’s getting closer.”
Angela started the truck once more and looked back and forth, trying to find a place to hide the green behemoth. Out of pure instinct she put it in first and drove ahead a hundred yards. The sound of the gunfire got noticeably louder. Directly ahead, crossing the road was a large semi truck and trailer. It was parked specifically to block the road to vehicle traffic, and that’s what it did. In front of the truck was a large pickup and flatbed trailer facing away from their approach. Ramps had been lowered from the back of the trailer.
Angela saw a good sized home on the right, and yanked the wheel hard, pulling the truck into the driveway. She hollered out to the kids to hold on, and then plowed into the overgrown hedges, pulling the truck around into the backyard roughly. She killed the motor and grabbed the pump shotgun from the floor of the cab.
“Stay low in the truck kids,” Amanda said as the two women hopped out to investigate. Angela recalled they had six shells left in Dan’s police 12 gauge. No chance that was enough firepower to fend off what was making all that gun clatter down the road.
They sneaked around the side of the house keeping low in the bushes they’d just ran over in the deuce. The side of the house dipped inward abruptly, and the two women noticed a gaping hole in the side. It looked to them as if someone had removed the wall to get at a large appliance on the inside. They entered the home through the breach, and carefully went to the front windows, crouching down to peer over the sill.
The sound of gunfire abated as six men and women riding on three all terrain four wheelers dashed around the back end of the semi trailer. They couldn’t be more than 200 feet away. The women knew instantly some of them were wounded. An elderly man with snow white hair opened the passenger side of the pickup and went to their aid. He had a bible in one hand, and held it with the sincerity and conviction of a man of the cloth.
“What the fuck?” Angela asked her sister in a whisper.
Quickly they figured out that two of the six riders were injured. They got the two wounded into the bed of the truck and the vehicles onto the flatbed. After a minute or two, the large pickup swung around, and sped away. It seemed very much like the proverbial dog running with its tail between its legs.
The two women stood in the abandoned, ransacked home and exchanged glances. The unspoken question hung in the air as loud as the gunshots they’d just heard.
What made those people run away like that?
*****
They were moving in the truck moments later. It spoke to Angela’s quick capacity to learn that she somehow managed to maneuver the deuce around the giant semi blocking the road. The massive truck nearly tipped over in the drainage ditch, but good military engineering and a little bit of Angela’s luck stopped that.
Once they got back on the road it was less than a half mile before their forward progress was halted again. A small bridge crossing the stream feeding Lake Auburn was blocked by a large cargo van. Amanda instantly knew it was the same Dodge van she saw drive by her house on July 4
th
. The last day she saw her husband and parents alive. She didn’t know what to make of how she felt.
Angela parked the truck right in the middle of the road at the edge of the bridge. Digging the shotgun out once more the sisters warned the kids to stay low, and they started across the school’s bridge. Step after careful step took them across the stream and closer to the strong odor of gunfire on the breeze. It reminded Angela of the days Dan would take the family to the gun range. She had a sudden pull of nostalgia.
Around an office building ahead she heard a moan of pain. The two women started jogging towards the sound, both noticing the enormous amount of brass casings on the ground. It looked like someone had spilled box upon box of spent shells on the ground.
“DROP THE FUCKING SHOTGUN!” A male voice boomed suddenly from ahead. Angela reacted with absolutely no thought. The gun dropped from her hand reflexively and clattered on the pavement, abandoned.
A tall, thick man wearing a half open military style ballistics vest walked like a predator out from around the corner of a school building. His face was bloodied, with tears forming clear lines running down his cheeks. His Mohawk haircut made him look like a mad savage from a post apocalyptic western. His dark brown eyes shone with an intensity that made both women tremble. His assault rifle’s sight was fixed on the dark spot of his eye, and Amanda’s chest. His movement changed nothing about the weapon. With a twitch of his finger her chest would explode. Amanda felt her jaw tremble as the man slowly closed to within ten paces.