Forget The Zombies (Book 2): Forget Texas (13 page)

Even at the distance I was standing away, I could hear her finger depressing the trigger despite the fact that her clip was empty. A shadow moved up behind her and I saw that it was Randell. I jumped onto the back bumper of the pickup and aimed down at the man now cowering in the bed of the pickup.

“Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!” the man cried out.

“Do you have any more weapons?” I asked.

“No, no, no,” the man said. “My rifles out on the road.”

“Why were you shooting at these people?” I asked.

“We saw all them coming by with some assault rifles. Duke said we should get their guns to get across the bridge.”

“So, you were going to shoot my friends and take their weapons?”

“No, we asked for them, but that one fella didn’t want to give them up and he shot at me when I aimed at him.”

“Who’s Duke?” I asked.

“The guy who’s probably dead inside the pickup.”

“Sammy, is he dead?”

Sammy moved cautiously toward the cab, took a quick peek in, and then relaxed. “Yes. Very dead.”

Randell stood with his arms around Carla. Tears ran down her face and I could tell she was trembling.

“Jay, Jane, it’s safe to come out,” I shouted as I jumped down. “Watch him,” I said to Sammy, ”then made my way to Huck who still lay in the road. When I got to him, I saw Jay coming up the small incline next to the road. His face was white and he seemed nearly in shock. Jane moved unsteadily beside him. She looked shaken, too.

Huck lay very still, but I could hear him breathing. It was labored as if each breath were a struggle. I stood over him, frozen in place, just as uncertain of what to do next as they were. This pause in the action lasted for several seconds as if there was a mandatory timeout called by the big guy upstairs.

A crowd of people from other cars started to form around us, but Jane peeled off a profane laced tirade at them that would have made a sailor blush and they dispersed. She also said she’d shoot them and I wasn’t sure that she didn’t mean it from the crazed look on her face.

Footsteps came from behind me and before I could even turn to look, Rosalita steamed by me as fast as her geriatric legs could carry her. I noticed that she was carrying the first aid kit from the truck. She quickly knelt beside Huck and started assessing the situation.

“Grant, down here,” she said. “I need your help.”

I still stood like a statue, locked in place.

“Come now!” she yelled and that knocked me out of my trance and I knelt beside her. She handed me a thick wad of gauze and said, “Press that hard on the wound, there.” Blood pulsed out of small hole midway down Huck’s torso.

I hesitated and she chided me again. “He’ll die if we don’t get the bleeding to stop.”

I pressed the bandage down hard on the wound. Huck looked limp and lifeless, but moaned and his eyes fluttered open as applied pressure. “I got those sons of bitches, didn’t I?”

“You sure did,” I said. “You sure did, buddy.” That was the best of my bedside manner.

“You were a regular Bruce Willis,” Jay said moving in behind me.

“A real badass,” Jane said, but tears rolled down her cheeks.

“Am I going to die?” Huck asked.

“No way,” I said, putting on a confident smile, but not feeling much behind it. “You’re going to be fine. Rosalita’s working on you.”

Rosalita pulled up his shirt and taped the bandage down as tightly as she could.

“It hurts like hell,” he said and coughed. Blood stained his lips and teeth.

“We need to see if the bullet’s still in him,” Rosalita whispered to me.

“How the hell do we do that?” I asked.

“Roll him up,” she said. “I’ll check for an exit wound.”

“How do you know about something like that?”

“My husband,” she said and genuflected, “God rest his soul, was a real hijo de puto. You know what I’m saying, right? He had a bad temper. Not with me, Si. But it got him a lot of fights.” She stopped talking for a moment and focused on what she was doing. “Grab him there, and push him up.” She pointed at a place on his shoulder and his side. I gently grabbed those two spots and pulled Huck up. He groaned but offered no resistance.

Rosalita probed the area on his back, projecting the trajectory of the bullet and guessed where the exit wound was. Her hand came back thick with blood.

“That’s a good sign,” she said. “I think the bullet passed through him.” She wiped some of the blood off her hand onto his shirt. “Roll him over,” she said. “I need to put a bandage on the exit wound.”

I did as she said and she went to work. It only took about a couple minutes and she had him patched up best as she could.

“He’s in no state to travel,” she said.

I looked to the south where I could hear the unrelenting pounding of the .30 caliber machine guns on the Humvees. There was a little war going on down there and I was guessing it was a war the soldiers weren’t winning if my experience with the undead counted for anything. Unlike a conventional enemy, the zombies didn’t care about casualties. Their morale didn’t suffer when a hundred of their colleagues were torn apart by a stream of hot lead. They just kept coming and would down to their last undead man.

“We can’t stay here,” I said.

“We move him too far and he could die,” she said.

“We stay on this road and we all are going to die,” I said.

“I see a light off to the east of the road,” Jay said over my shoulder. “It looks like a house. Maybe we could go there?”

Looking that way, I could see a dim light off in the distance. The problem was how to move Huck.

“Anything in that truck we could use to move Huck?” I asked Sammy who was keeping an eye on our “captive.”

“There’s one of those outdoor lounge chairs,” he said.

“That’ll work,” I said. “Jay, go over and get it.”

After he walked away, Rosalita moved in beside me and said in a low whisper, “If the bullet nicked an artery, that boy is going to bleed out and there’s nothing we can do for him.”

I didn’t know how to respond to that. It seemed that while the zombies wanted us dead, the living were doing a hell of a job in that department, too.

Jay got the lounge chair and it took some doing, but we worked as gently as possible, moving Huck on to the chair using it like a half-baked stretcher. He still cried out a couple of times. The best we had in the first aid kit for pain was extra-strength Tylenol and that wouldn’t cut Huck’s pain much. Jay offered up some pills from his stash and we gave Huck a couple of those.

“Let’s move,” I said, taking a glance southward. The sound of the battle was still going on and I could see the flashes of multiple guns.

“What do I do about him?” Sammy asked, pointing his rifle at the man in the bed of the pickup.

Something in me wanted to say, “
Shoot him,
” but I couldn’t do that.

“Take any weapons left in the truck and leave him,” I said.

“But I’ll need a gun to protect myself against the zombies,” the man cried out.

“You should have thought of that before you started shooting at our friends,” I said. “You’re lucky we don’t shoot you.” We moved forward with Huck in between us, but I stopped our convoy after a couple feet and turned back to the man. “If you get any ideas about following us, just know I’ll shoot you. Got it?”

“Sure,” the man said.

“Count to a million before you even poke your head up,” I said as we started moving again. “Anything less and you’ll get a bullet between the eyes.”

I doubted he could count past fifty, but I had to set some standards.

Many of the bystanders watched as we carted Huck off the road and started across the field, but none of them offered to help or asked any questions. Taking care of their own was taking up all their energy, I guess.

We were halfway across the field when a roaring sound came from the north and we all paused for a moment and looked in that direction, watching the night sky. The roar got louder and became more rhythmic, almost pounding. Lights appeared in the sky, seeming to float in the darkness. Five seconds later, three Huey Cobras whooshed over us and headed south. We kept moving, but slower, monitoring the progress of the choppers.

A minute later, the horizon to the south lit up like it was the Fourth of the July, the Huey’s pouring on the fire. The firing stopped us in our tracks, the lights entrancing us and holding us like fireflies caught in a jar.

Huck groaned loudly and that broke the spell. We continued across the field, but I took glances to the south every few seconds. The helicopters were giving those undead bastards hell. Maybe it would give us time to get across the Red River and into Oklahoma?

We slowed as we reached the house, wary that anyone there might be someone that might not like trespassers. After a few tense moments, Sammy checked the house and found it empty. I could only guess that the people that lived here got out when the
‘getting’
was good. Whoever had been there left in a hurry. Chairs were knocked over and dresser drawers were lying on the floor with clothes strewn about. They didn’t even take the time turn off their generator which must have been powering the lights.

We carted Huck onto a couch. He was looking worse by the minute with blood dripping between the straps of the chair and leaving an ugly trail on the floor.

The place was a sturdily constructed old farmhouse and looked like it had been built around the turn of the 20th century. The ceilings were twelve feet high with heavy plaster walls. It looked lived in, but well cared for with lots of family heirlooms and other items left behind by someone wanting to get the hell of out there, pronto.

We sent a scavenging party out to find any medical supplies and medicine we might need and Jay came back with more bandages which Rosalita used on Huck as soon as she had them in hand. The discarded bandages were thick with Huck’s blood. Carla found some bottled water which she passed out among our crew.

I stayed on watch at a south-facing window in the family room, monitoring the progress in that direction. It didn’t look good. The machine gun fire had dwindled to near nothing during the time we had moved to the house. More and more cars were making desperate attempts to make it northward anyway they could. Only those with four-wheel drive and decent ground clearance had any chance with the rough terrain and, still, many of those got stuck. The most disturbing development was the stream of people coming up the road on foot. Most were looking over their shoulders as if the devils himself were after them and he could be, but only in the form of an army of the undead.

We waited as Jay and Jane refused to leave Huck. Some sort of internal clock ticked away inside me and it felt like a window was closing on us. More and more people were pouring up the road. The light gunfire that had been in the distance was coming closer and closer to us.

I was so transfixed on watching out the window, that I didn’t hear Joni come up behind me and nearly jumped out of my skin when she touch my shoulder.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“It’s okay,” I said, not meeting her eyes.

“Listen,” she said, fidgeting, “about what happened the last night…”

I cut her off, “No, you don’t have to worry. I won’t say anything.”

“Well, it’s not that,” she said. “I’m sort of confused.” She paused and touched my arm. “I thought he was dead.” Again, she paused. “You and I have I have only known each other for a short time. A short intense time.”

“You don’t have to say anything.”

“But I do,” she said and squeezed my arm, grabbing my attention. “Dave, well, he’s sort of a jerk, but he is the kid’s dad.” There was an intensity behind her eyes as if someone had turned up a dimmer. “But there’s you. I, uh, feel some sort of connection, but there’s nothing I can do about it.”

“Please, you don’t have to say any more,” I said. “We can go on like it never happened and…” I stopped because Rosalita appeared in the doorway of the room. “What is it?”

Joni’s hand fell away from my arm and she looked to the floor.

“Huck has passed,” Rosalita said.

There it was. This was one of the times that I can truly say I was conflicted. A part of me mourned this kid’s loss, but another part of me was relieved. He had been in no condition to travel and I’m not sure Jane or Jay would have left him behind. Hell, I’m not sure I could, but the situation was getting very dire. If we didn’t move in the next few minutes, I’m not sure we had a chance to make it to Oklahoma and I still doubted whether we would make it there anyway.

Joni and I followed Rosalita back into the living room where Huck was laid out on a couch. Jane lay nearly draped over him, sobbing uncontrollably. Jay wasn’t doing much better, wiping his eyes with his sleeve repeatedly as he cried.