Beyond the Barriers (15 page)

“So the grenade won’t do what we want?”

“It’ll accelerate the explosion, but we need to get the gas moving to get the full effect.”

“Shit!” I said and emptied another magazine.

They were at the truck, and Katherine pulled a handgun and popped a pair in the center of their foreheads. I shot at them in earnest as they clawed up the side. She got on top of the cab so she would have a wider view of the field of battle. The problem was that the things were closing in on the front as well.

“Ah fuck!” I said, staring at Pat.

He kicked out as one clawed up the side, but it caught his leg and bit at it. He was wearing double jeans like the rest of us, and a pair of thermals under that. There was no way the things could get through that much fabric. He kicked out again, and it fell back into the crowd. Then he drew his gun and shot the next one in the face, but there were dozens more coming. We had about three seconds before the rush arrived.

“Shoot it!” I yelled, and then fired off another magazine of ammo. The machine gun was meant to be mounted on a bipod and shot while lying prone. Firing it meant constantly fighting the upward pull of the gun.

“What?” Pat called back. I looked behind me, and Katherine was changing magazines.

“Get to the car, Kat!” I called.

“Don’t fucking call me that,” she said, and a smile quirked her lips. She was breathing hard and flushed. She was enjoying this, the danger. She and I would make a fine pair if we survived. The chances of that were pretty slim. I tried to swing the gun around and use it judiciously, but there were just too many of them, and in the way were my two new friends.

Pat fell down as three of them grabbed him.

I tossed the machine gun at one crawling up the side of the truck and dragged my 9 mm out. I studied the valve then put the gun close to it, angling it away from the tank. Then I fired, knowing that there was every chance I was about to detonate the fuel.

The gunshot rang out, and the valve turned an inch from impact. I kicked it with the heel of my boot, and the thing moved. I kicked it again, and this time was greeted with a burst of air. Gas spewed out the top as the air bubbles mixed with the noxious fluid.

Katherine had reached the car and crawled into the driver’s seat. I picked up the egg timer with the wires running out of it and pounded it against the butt of my gun a few times. It started ticking. We had about 45 seconds to get the hell out of there.

Pat managed to unsling the shotgun from his shoulder, turn it at the things and open up, but there were too many, and they dragged him off the car. He screamed and thrashed as they tore him apart.

I yelled out for him, but it was too late. He screamed and kicked, fought with everything he had. I’d put a bullet in my head before that happened to me.

She gunned the engine, and several of them latched onto the side, so she shot them in the face. I leapt onto the hood of the SUV, cursing myself for leaving the goddamn lid closed. I held on for dear life while yelling at her to just take off. She started to back up, but we hit a patch of the things. I looked behind, and there was an army of them coming at us, just as we had hoped.

They swarmed, and I could see the convoy leaving the compound in the distance. There was no way we could get through that press of bodies. We would have to go the other way. I banged on the top and yelled as loud as I could, “Just go for the open road. It’s our only chance!”

One of them grabbed an arm, and one latched onto my ankle, as she gunned the engine. I shook off the one on my foot, but the other one had somehow wedged his foot in the side of the car, and he was good and stuck. His face was a nightmare of scars and damage, his eyes the same luminous green as the others I had seen. The first one I had seen up close.

“Die,” it hissed, then snapped at my hand. I jerked back, twisting my forearm in a violent downward motion to break free. He snapped at my exposed fingers again, and I punched him in the face for his effort. My right hand held onto the turret for dear life, using the small slot they had cut in it. The metal was dirty and jagged, and I felt it bite into my forearm with each movement. I thought of the last time I had a tetanus shot, and smiled stupidly at the ghoul. He was about to make my life a lot worse than having lockjaw.

He slithered onto the top of the car as Katherine swerved around the last of the barricade. It seemed like my whole life the last few days had been made up of barricades, from this one, to the fence, to the space inside the store. I missed the freedom to do what I wanted, when I wanted. I should have stayed at the cabin and hunted. Read that book on tubers and mushrooms. There was plenty to live off the land. I could have probably survived for years up there.

I pulled myself to my knees and held on with my left hand as she punched the engine. We must have been going thirty-five or forty miles an hour. The wind whipped past me, and the smell of clean, cold air filled my nose.

A blast behind me drew my attention, even as I punched the ghoul in the face and snapped his arm with a vicious knife-hand strike to his forearm. He howled in fury, so I hit him in the nose, and that took a lot of the fight out. Dust rose in the air, but it wasn’t the explosion I had expected. If the rig didn’t go up, it might make for a bad escape for the refugees, but at least they had a head start. The sound had been familiar, though, and I wondered if …

He stood up on the doorframe. His foot was most likely in the slot they cut in the galvanized steel panels for me to shoot through. I planted my right foot, and then thrust my left in front of me in a kick that caught him in the chest. He fell back with a scream that was drowned out by multiple loud thumps. I hazarded a look over the side of the SUV and saw that his foot was still stuck, but his upper leg and body were completely gone.

The latch popped, and I slithered into the seat next to Katherine. She shot me a wide-eyed smile, which clearly showed how amped up she was at the escape. She was wallowing in the danger; she seemed made for it.

“So what happened to the tank?”

“I don’t know. But that small explosion might have been Pat.” I took a deep, shuddering breath, and the shakes set in. I had been running on pure adrenaline for the last few minutes, my body guided by instinct more than logic.

“Pat?”

“He had the frag grenade I tossed you. I think he blew it up while they ate him.” I shivered.

“Poor Patrick. He was a brave man.” She sighed.

“He was a good man. I owed him.”

“Now what do we do? Wait a while and try to …” She jerked forward as a massive, orange blast of light lit the daylight sky. It didn’t take long for the sound wave to reach us. I looked behind me, through the hole in the metal over the rear mirror, and was greeted by a tiny mushroom cloud as about a thousand gallons of gas exploded. We were probably three quarters of a mile away when it happened, but she hit the gas anyway, accelerating around the cars and trucks abandoned on the road.

She pulled over a few minutes later, and we stood in the road, watching the smoke as it rose into the air. The explosion had been massive, and some of the trees along the road had caught fire.

I got into the driver’s seat, and we talked over our options. We could go back to town and attempt to follow the caravan. We could go back to the Walmart and hide until help came back, or we would go to the cabin and do our best to survive.

It started to rain when we reached the abandoned store I had seen earlier. Was that just a few days ago? We stopped, and I chased off a couple of mongrel dogs. The door was locked, but the glass in it was shattered. I held a pistol in front of me and called out that we were friendly—and alive.

The store was empty of any goods, but something in the back caught my eye. The floor had an old wooden section that creaked when we walked over it. Except for one spot.

I felt around the edges until I found a hidden latch. It snapped open, and I lifted a cleverly built hatch.

We found a lot of canned goods in the small space, so we loaded them up. I found some bags of flour, as well as a few large canvas bags of rice and dried beans. I wondered what happened to the people who managed to collect this much food and never eat it.

There was another hidden door in the floor in the storage room, which led to a room with an old TV and radio. I took the radio and raided the supplies, which consisted mainly of powdered milk and cereal. It was a weird combination, but I was betting I could live on Cheerios.

We made it to the cabin before night. It was raining hard—a sheet of turgid water turning the night a gray that pulled at my view and made it hard to see. We had some slow going for part of the ride, because the windshield wipers had been removed to make room for the metal plates.

The first night, Katherine and I spent an hour heating water to near boiling and pouring it in the old tub. But it was worth it. She said she hadn’t had a proper bath since the epidemic began.

The barricades were down for now—the ones that had hindered my life for the past half year. The barricade at the city, the barricade to my existence, and, so it seemed, the barricade to my heart. I smiled when I joined her in the tub, and told her I was glad she was with me. She smiled in return, and it broke down the last barricade. I wept for the first time in many years.

I woke to the sound of thunder in the middle of the night. The rain that had set in the evening before was gone, but the sounds of the gods bowling across the heavens tore me out of sleep. I clutched at the warm body next to me and concentrated on her name. Katherine, not Allison. Allison was years ago—a lifetime to me. She was my first true love—and, I thought, the last—but things did not work out the way we planned. I think it was my choice of careers. After Special Forces, I got into security because there wasn’t much else for a guy like me to do. Personal escort was my favorite, protecting minor celebrities.

I moved on to consulting, but the pay wasn’t that great, and I was frequently gone for up to a week at a time. Missed my wife dearly during those days, but she didn’t miss me as much. It was a guy at work who did us in. I remember plotting to take him apart. I had a romantic vision stuck in my head. I would confront him, push him, and when he snapped and took a swing at me, I would separate his arm from his shoulder. Then I would break his jaw, leave him unable to beg Allison to come back. I spent hours and hours plotting. The play ran in my head, but I wised up after a few days and realized it was no use. It would just make me look like an animal to her.

Katherine had a gentle snore that was almost soothing after I’d spent so many months in this place without a soul to talk to. Her auburn hair was a mess in the moonlight, but I didn’t care. To me, she was the loveliest thing I had ever laid eyes upon. I longed to lean over and kiss her neck, but I feared waking her. Instead I lay, content, next to her warm body, breathing in her scent.

Damaged: that was a good way to describe her. Even though she had given herself to me, I could feel a gulf between us. It was as though I stood on one side of a stream, reaching out for her, but she remained on the other side, holding back as if she had a secret. I wanted to ask her about her life before the event, but I was afraid of the answer. She was with me now, and I didn’t want to hear about a past love. Perhaps my reluctance stemmed from my problems with Allison. I was not an insecure person by any stretch. I had always been very confident in myself and my abilities. The fact that I did not hang onto Allison could have torn me in half, but I didn’t let it.

I changed my mind and touched her after all, running my hand over her shoulder, which was bare and pale against the dark flannel sheets. The day had been warm, but nights in the cabin were cool. Thunder rattled across the sky, shaking the roof. Rain started to patter down once again, and I noticed that Katherine’s snores had stopped. She rolled over to face me in the dark, her eyes luminous in the pale light, like a cat’s eyes.

“When did that start?” she whispered.

“About five minutes ago. I’m surprised you slept through it for that long.”

“It’s beautiful.”

“The thunder?”

“After being in that enclosed space, large as it was, with all those people, I can’t believe how much I missed the sounds of nature. We don’t live in the Pacific Northwest because we want year-round sun. We live here for the beauty of the rain.”

“And here I was bored out of my mind with no one to talk to the whole time. Why didn’t I meet you on my way out of town back then?”

“That fickle bitch fate. You know how she likes to mess with our lives.”

I smiled at that and kissed her. She met the kiss but was still holding back, and I wanted to ask her what I was doing wrong. She went through the motions, but something was on her mind.

“Well, thank you for coming back with me. We should really talk about what the hell we’re going to do now. I don’t want to face an army of those things again, but I want to get to Portland.”

“I remember the first ones we ran into, during the whole zombie thing. It was bad enough that we had to put up with these groaning, moaning bastards with no brains that wandered around like lost kids. Alone, they weren’t that scary. I mean, you could see them coming a mile away and put a bullet in their skulls. It was around the third week that we felt like we were getting a handle on them. Masses were rounded up and taken away in trucks while we watched. The fence was just going up, and people were still running around town. Some were even going home at night.”