“Doc, grab a gun and get them off the side,” Short Order screamed.
“I can’t let go of the fuel,” he yelled back as his jump seat swiveled out from under him and he fell.
Chef continued to rev the engine and spin the wheels against the bodies of the zombies lifting us up from one side.
We were surrounded.
The fear stabbed at my memory. My mother had placed me under the bed when I was five. I could almost remember her face in that moment as I was tilting over in the truck. She had backed away as she told me to not say a word until she came back. I was afraid, but I felt safe as long as I did what she said. The zombies had found me under the bed and tilted it over as they lifted it off of me. I remembered their faces clearly as they stood around me. They were all freshly killed and bloodied. My next memory of that night was running from the house with them behind me. I had no memory of how I escaped.
The wheels tore the torsos of the zombies and the truck began to tilt back down. It twisted toward the right and fell back on all four wheels again. Doc scrambled to get off the floor, but slipped on a sleeping bag and fell again. The truck lurched forward once, but halted again against the wall of bodies in front of us.
Short Order was turning the flashlight back and forth at different angles as he grabbed hold of different parts of the interior. The beam passed over hideous faces exciting them outside the windows. I saw the Pluck My Clover, Baby tee shirt with shriveled intestines hanging down from where it was torn open at the bottom. The beam waved back and rested on the grey face and single eye of a zombie with more pine straw and twigs in his hair. The buttons of his shirt had been popped off and it was spread open to reveal blackened gashes and pitted flesh from his recent road rash. I looked for a zombie in a trench coat or one in overalls, but they hadn’t made it yet.
Chef shifted into reverse and spun the wheels pulling the truck back a few labored feet. He shifted forward again and we bucked forward in three harsh jerks. As he shifted back again, he yelled at Short Order.
He said, “Turn that damn light off. You’re killing me, man.”
Short Order turned it off plunging us back into darkness. I heard Doc fall hard in the floor again and curse.
Short flipped on the headlights under their protective grill for Chef. The light was dampened by the bodies pressed on the front of the hood.
Short yelled, “Guns, Doc!”
Doc screamed muffled in the floor. “The fuel is turned over. You’ll blow us up.”
Chef was going forward again spinning on the torn ground and the mangled bodies underneath us. The truck was pivoting around in a circle and was being rocked again. The wheels caught something and we tore through the crowd pressed on our sides. Their hands shuddered against the window caging as they clawed to keep hold and failed. The ones in front leaned over the crash bars and rode forward with us.
We almost T-boned the Ford we had used to cook our snakes. They felt like they were trying to crawl back out of my stomach. Chef slammed on the brakes and pitched the zombies off the front into the side of the Ford. He didn’t have room to turn, so he reversed again just as the dead hands started slapping against the back. The soft slapping was followed by deep thumps and the bounding of the wheels over the bodies.
He turned and shifted forward again. At first, we spun in place, but we finally roared through the circle of dead cars and dead bodies. We bounced a couple more of the moving bodies into the unmoving cars as we scrapped through a gap between the fender of a Chevy and the trunk of a Plymouth.
We dove down the slope sharply spraying light into the tall grass. Equipment in the back clattered and banged. Doc slid forward on the floor and caught himself with his feet on each base of the front jump seats. It felt again like the truck was going to flip.
Chef turned and power slid along the grass as we moved off the slope on to flat ground. He moved us through the wave of bodies hitting as few as possible. He turned and accelerated again as he swerved away from the trees toward the gap of trail leading to the paved road. He hit several bodies from the side jarring the truck as he forced his way through the mob to reconnect to the road.
The shocks smashed against the undercarriage as we bounded up on to the cracked pavement over the low shoulder. We coasted for a moment as Chef wheeled us to the left and then back to the right.
He mumbled, “Which … which side of the …”
Doc and Short screamed over the top of each other.
Doc yelled, “Right, right, go to the right … mostly north to the right. Go!”
Doc couldn’t see from the floor, but he seemed sure.
Short yelled, “Away from the zombies. Go to the right before they pin us in again. Go to the damn right, David, please!”
Chef wheeled us right and drove away just as the fingers of the late arrivals began scratching at our abused fender.
The lights cast shallow beams on the dark road as we sped along with wind rushing through the grating of open windows in at least two places where the plastic had fallen away in the cab somewhere. Short Order slunk down inside his coat to protect his ears from the cold. Chef gripped the top of the stirring wheel with both hands as he stared forward. The lights would get lost in the trees as the remains of the road turned sharply one way or the other. Chef and my heart barely slowed down as we slid through the curves in the blind darkness.
This seemed like the time we would go off the road and have to start walking.
Doc stumbled back up into his seat and strapped in this time. He fumbled with the tanks and gear in the back.
“How bad is it, Doc?” Chef asked.
“You talking about the gear or whether I shit my pants?” Doc called back.
“John, please,” Chef yelled.
Doc answered, “The fuel didn’t spill. Stuff is thrown around and dumped out. I don’t see anything broken, but we won’t be able to tell until we stop or its morning.”
Chef kept driving.
Doc said more quietly to me just over the wind, “Mutt, did you see the one in the ‘Kiss My Clover’ shirt. That looked just like the one Donny Gordon used to wear all the time. I didn’t know they made two of them. If that zombie was fatter, I would have sworn it was him.”
It had said Pluck My Clover, they probably didn’t have many of them, and that zombie had been fatter before we busted his gut open back near the Complex. I didn’t say anything and Donny was probably slowly dragging his guts back to the road to slowly follow us again.
Chef kept driving.
As my heart finally began to give up and slow down again, I wondered if I had been that scared the night I lost my mother or any night since then. If I knew what was going to happen in one week, I wouldn’t have even wondered. Most likely I would have begged Chef to take us back mostly south through the zombies again. After the dead rose, we just survived and figured we knew what scared us most as we ran from them, but then we opened a trunk and found a den of snakes or something much worse.
As the zombies dropped back behind us, we kept driving into the dark road ahead. They were slower, but they would keep coming as we ate or slept. It didn’t matter how far we drove unless we found somewhere to go.
Chef kept driving.
Chapter 4: The Week We Worked on Our Recipes
We fell into a routine of sorts over the next few days.
We slept less in the truck. Buildings were tough to find in any livable condition. Nature had proven to be a tough landlord once people had moved out and the dead had moved into the neighborhoods. We found what we could and stayed inside at night until we got to the park and the deadly standoff.
We also took three hour shifts through the night standing guard while the others slept or tried to sleep. Each of us had an off night every fourth night. That was the plan anyway. We usually had two or more people up at a time and got less than six hours sleep a night. We napped during the day after a mid day meal with someone sitting up on guard in the truck.
We tried to find houses with working fireplaces or patios where we could cook dinner before sundown. The problem was that houses with chimneys tended to start rotting around the flashing as the tar or glues began to give way and allowed rain to seep under the shingles. If there was a hole in the roof, the walls and floors were done. Most buildings were like walking on wet cardboard inside and it was almost worse than just being outside in the woods.
Almost worse.
Walking into the dark ruins I always tried to turn on a light switch out of reflex. I was used to generator power in the buildings at the Complex. The others had the opposite problem. They had walked through the Complex forgetting that the light switches worked from all their years of being outside without power.
Short Order would joke with me about it. He would walk through the other rooms of our abandoned houses pretending to try every switch.
He would say, “Hey, maybe this one. No, I guess this bulb needs changing too, Mutt. Could you check the junk draw, please, for a 60-watt soft light, so I can read?”
Sometimes our feet went right through the rotten floor boards and we just hoped there were no zombies in the crawl spaces. Sometimes the zombies were in closets or hanging from ropes by their necks where people tried to kill themselves after being bitten. People hanged themselves in garages and closets a lot. Sometimes a room of the house was full of them and we had to back out slowly or sometimes quickly.
We made due with whatever we could find.
In a day, we would cover between ten and twenty-five miles typically. We stopped in the middle of the day to rest. We started looking for a place to stop for the night about mid afternoon not terribly long after we left our lunch site. We had to start looking early so that we had time to find something. We could stop for lunch anywhere, but we needed somewhere secure, secluded, and sight-lined for evening, night, and morning. We had to stop in time to finish cooking before dark so we could black out in hopes that our smoke during the day wasn’t enough to attract trouble. If zombies sniffed us out from inside, we needed to be able to get to the truck quickly. We needed more than one viable exit route.
We avoided using guns except in dire escapes or afternoon hunting. We could shoot an animal, load it up quickly, and drive away before the zombies honed in on our location. This worked well until the day we killed the deer. We could drive far enough away to avoid the trouble we had caused. Then, we could cut and prep the meat at our evening stop for whoever was cooking. We didn’t always catch something and if it was big like a deer, we usually couldn’t eat it all for dinner and breakfast. Some was wasted, but we weren’t answering to anyone and it saved our supplies.
It did bother the chefs. They didn’t like to waste food. They also felt like they were disrespecting the life of the animal. Since they didn’t believe in God, I’m not sure about who they were worried. If we didn’t kill it, the zombies would eventually.
Most structures were not built with all these needs in mind. Most structures had not survived the abandonment of the living for all these years. It was tough to stay in badly preserved shelter until morning light and it was tough to leave a precious find while eating a leisurely breakfast in comfort. We managed both as we moved mostly north through the ruins of the walking plague.
We were slowed by blocked roads and detoured by packs of zombies. Sometimes we had to escape quickly; sometimes we had to hide and wait. We found no one alive outside of our own truck in that first week, but we found plenty of dead folks walking around outside it.
One day we stumbled on our first super pack. It was thousands of zombies following a dry riverbed below a washed out bridge on the highway. We spotted it early and pulled off the road at a distance. They hadn’t heard us over their own moaning so we waited and watched. We watched for hours. Finally, we took the chance and started the truck to circle back. If they heard us, none made it up the riverbank before we were out of sight again. We ended up making less than ten miles that day, but we didn’t really know where we were going, so it didn’t really matter when we got there.
Doc and Chef were really unsatisfied with our gas mileage. Chef complained that we had packed too heavy, but he didn’t complain much when Doc cranked on a record quietly in our more secure stopping points. It seemed to help us sleep better.
Doc complained that we could walk in a day what we were making by driving and we could stay off the roads. He thought we were drawing the dead along with our engine noise. Short Order was not interested in walking. Doc believed the canisters of fuel were so heavy that they were negating the benefit of having the extra fuel in the first place.
We kept driving each day anyway.
That week we took turns cooking for the group. Chef had started “The Mother Hubbard Challenge.” Whoever was cooking that night had to use the ingredients in the house or business we stopped in along with any meat we took during our lunch break to create the best meal possible.
Chef found white chicken chili spice packets, pickles, three varieties of canned beans, canned corn, and various spices in a small brick house that still had a decent garage and loft even though the roof had rotted off the rest of the house. He was able to retrieve these items from the kitchen and made squirrel chili with a three bean salad. It was really good.
There was a body hanging in the garage when we got there, but it was dry and still. There was a long message written on the dry wall using a carpenter’s pencil. A lot of it had faded in the middle in an hourglass pattern along the path the square of light followed through the decade of seasons since it had been written. We were probably the first to see it since this guy ended himself for no reason. The edges of the message mentioned walking plague, airborne, hopeless, sorry, God, and chocolate.
We cut him down and dragged his body by the noose into the wet part of his house to finish decaying, so we could cook our squirrel chili.