The feminine voice screamed back, there was impatience pouring out of her voice. She said, “What the hell do you think I'm doing you moron? These freaks are trying to kill me. This was the only place I could find that was unlocked early this morning. If I didn't get in here I'd be one of them right now, or just be gone.”
Jude saw the silhouette of the woman screaming at him and screamed, “Just stay there. I will, or we will find a way to get to you.”
She said, “Where the hell do you think I am going to go?”
Jude went to say something but realized there was little chance of him saying something she wasn’t going to have a very quick sharp answer to return with. He ran back to Joanne and Chuck and said, “We need to get to her so we can get the hell out of here. Our only option might be to just take those things out. I prefer to keep my distance, but we don't have a lot of options if they won't leave the only vehicle we have access to alone.”
Chuck said, “Well that option sucks brother.”
Joanne nodded her head and Jude said, “Hey if there is anything I can do to make this cleaner I would but as you might have noticed these things don't exactly cooperate with our plans. They actually seem like they enjoy setting our plans on fire.”
Joanne said, “So then what are we going to do? I mean we have two options the way that I see it.”
Jude motioned with his hands for her to keep going and she continued, “Well option one, we get these saws running and take them out. Option two, we leave her in there and she can pray that at some point they get bored or something else comes by that seems to be an easier meal to gather. I am in favor of option one being that, well there is a hell of a lot of them and who knows how many people are going to survive this thing. Can you imagine if these things make it to other towns what it’s going to be like?”
Jude said, “When I called home it already had made it there. I think it has got to be in the rain, just like we had suspected. I don’t think any of these things made a four hour trip from Missouri to Iowa yet.”
Joanne yelled, “Really? My God do you realize how much distance there is between here and Iowa. If it’s raining and it’s being spread that far, that is a lot of dead people, how many cemeteries do you think you guys passed between here and there?”
Chuck said in a very defeated voice, “Too many, way too damn many.”
Jude said, “Christ we need to make sure we get a car, like we really need a car that can make it more than a couple of blocks.”
Jude set the saw down for a minute checking it and seeing that they were beginning to get pretty low on gas. Jude said, “We are going to need to figure this out here pretty soon or we are going to have some problems to deal with. I don’t have much gas left.”
Chuck checked his and Joanne’s tanks and realized they had the same issue as well. Jude could see by the look on his best friend’s face that he was seeing the same thing in the tanks Jude had seen in his own.
Chuck said, “So we need to do this quick. We start these and we hurry and take them all out.”
Joanne said, “No we don’t take them all out. We take out just what we need to so we can get up and into the van where we can get it moving. I’ll leave the testing stuff here, and then we can drive over and pick it up. The quicker we let someone know about what it is, the better. I can’t imagine what it's going to take to figure out a way to make the dead go back that way again. I mean Christ it had to have been something crazy that made them come back. I can’t imagine someone would have done this on purpose.”
Jude said, “I don’t know, but I do know I'll kill every single one of those things if it means that I am going to get back to my little boy and my sister-in-law.”
Chuck said, “Oh, we’ll get back to them don’t you worry buddy. We are doing just as much good by helping to figure what made this start as opposed to turning a blind eye to it and hitting the road. The things we figure out today might be what solves this reign of hell. If something happened to us and no answers were given out we would be sentencing the world to a never-ending hell. We do this, we get Joanne where she needs to be with the information she needs and then let them know about what is causing it. From there we get our asses headed out and toward home no, two ways about that.”
With that being said and out of the way they picked up the chainsaws and slowly made their way toward the dead. They did not give them any attention until they got much closer and started to pull back and start their saws. Jude ran by five of them keeping just enough distance back that none could grab him with their bony outstretched hands. He cut behind their knees sending them falling backward their arms waving wildly as they fell to the ground. Chuck and Joanne came forward running the saws in and out of their skulls sending brain and stiff, brittle white hair everywhere and painting the side of the van with it. A woman looked over the edge of the window slowly seeing the carnage taking place beneath her and started to scream at the top of her lungs. Joanne snapped at her, “You aren’t helping anything, do you realize that?”
She quickly retorted, “I am very sorry, how should I react to seeing a group of people chopping heads in half with fucking chainsaws?”
Joanne realized looking down and at the door that she very much would have shit herself if she had seen someone doing the same thing. Jude and Chuck pushed at some of the dead cutting hands and then heads off as they reached.
Joanne screamed, “Open up the door. Do it now!”
The woman hesitated a moment and Joanne yelled, “You open the goddamn door now, or I'm going to throw your skinny little ass out of there, and then you can try and find someone else that knows how to deal with these fucking things and is willing to take you with. Open the door now!”
The door swung open a millisecond later and Joanne climbed in killing the chainsaw and threw it into the back. She started the van and Jude and Chuck retreated back running for her gear. The woman said, “Oh my God, are you kidding me? You aren’t leaving them behind are you? I thought they were with you, can you please explain to me what the hell is going on here?”
Joanne laughed hysterically looking like a mad woman. She said, “I’m not leaving them behind. Get your ass into the back and get the doors open. We just needed enough of the dead to be cleared out so I could make it in. This was the only way. They wouldn’t leave with you in there they weren’t going anywhere. Now get back there, and do it now, go!”
She stared blankly and realized this really was happening and there wasn’t anything she could do about it. She climbed through the seats into the back and swung open the doors hanging on to the bars in the van to keep from losing her balance as she fishtailed the van.
Joanne screamed over her shoulder, “Hey what is your name?”
She replied, “Leslie, Leslie Bryant.
”
*****
Jude and Chuck slammed the door shut behind Joanne and nodded to each other running backward and retreating away. Jude’s saw died, and Chuck yelled over his shoulder, “What the hell are you doing turning that thing off? We still might need to use it brother, this ain't the best time to go killing that thing.”
Jude looked down seeing he was indeed right and it was dead. Jude said, “I didn’t kill it I think it is finally out of gas.”
Chuck’s died seconds later and the two made it back to the alleyway where they grabbed Joanne’s gear. Chuck watched as the van was being driven like a maniac. He said, “Well we need to get some more gas. But I'm serious when I say one of us needs to be the one who drives because she is fucking insane, look at her, she’ll crash that damn thing for sure. You realize we are zero for one so far with cars.”
Jude agreed easily with the fact that she was not looking like the world’s greatest driver. They waited ready and when the van circled around the men started to run alongside the van and tossed in the saws and the medical equipment and dived into the van. Leslie slammed the door shut once they were in.
The dead were starting to follow and Joanne took the first street she could to get out of there that wasn’t filled with the dead. Jude pushed up and sat against the side of the van. Leslie said, “So are you the genius of the group? The one that was telling me not to get out of the van and get eaten?”
Jude nodded he said, “Wow you are a sassy thing aren’t you?”
She smiled and said, “My name is Leslie. I guess I should say thank you at some point.”
Jude stood there staring and realized she wouldn’t be saying it anytime soon. He smiled and said, “Real charmer huh?”
They made it to the edge of town heading up a hill where Joanne brought it to a stop. They put the van in park and stepped out to take a look behind them and look at the map and directions they had gotten from the doctor and figure out what their next move was going to be. They stared at the town realizing there weren’t any cars to be seen moving through the streets, those that could escape and figured the rest were either hiding or had become the walking dead or only a meal. Chuck looked at the directions and realized they needed to get to the other side of the town.
Jude cursed and looked at Leslie and said, “Hey is there a chance that you are from around here? What I mean is do you have any idea where we are or where we need to go?”
She shook her head no and said, “I was just passing through. I was staying at the hotel and left early to go get breakfast and well, hell was waiting for me when I got outside.”
They drove slowly taking back roads happy to see no one, or thing walking around. They hit the first cemetery not seeing anything out of the norm with the exception of fifty plus empty graves.
Chuck said, “Well that is quite disturbing now isn’t it?”
Jude said, “There’s a lot of things that are disturbing going on today. I think we need to get moving, it's going to take forever to get anywhere if the rest of the state is like this.”
Joanne said, “Well, we are going to have some serious shit to deal with if the rest is like this. I can't even begin to think of what we are going to have to do. I mean those bullets do little to them. So if you have a thousand troops trying to take those things out shooting them in the chest can you imagine how they are going to react. It’s going to be chaos, trying to take things out and not able to, that is something that is going to wreck those soldiers. Then when the dead move in it's just going to be horrible. Plus if the soldiers are taken out in their gear they are going to be hard to take out.”
Jude said, “Sounds like they need to do some mass distribution of the chainsaws here huh?”
Joanne said, “I have a feeling you don’t give America enough credit for how many people pass away daily. I mean, good God, there are so many graves being dug daily you can’t imagine. There’s going to have to be more than just the army. The citizens need to know and they need to know how to stop these things. We might be the only ones who know how to stop them at this point.”
Leslie laughed and said, "So how is it that we are able to let the nation know how to kill these things? I mean is there a news station here real close we can go hit up and let people know about this?"
The three shrugged unsure none of them natives. Jude said, "Well maybe once we get the answers we need, it might be time that we try and find the place we can tell people where we first found them, and how to kill them. There have to be more people than the dead right?"
As they drove they saw a man whose clothes didn't look like they'd been made in the last hundred years. Chuck said, "Shit would you look at that one? He's been under the ground longer than you can probably imagine. Hell longer than we've been around anyway."
They ran past another who was dressed in a gray army uniform of the confederate army and the civil war. Joanne was running through things in her head, thinking of flu and diseases that had hit America like a punch to the gut.
She said, "If there's no age cutoff on how long these things have been down and dead we are going to be seriously in trouble. It might not be as bad the further west you get but on the east coast to Central America like you know where we are, my God can you imagine what we are talking about for numbers? All the soldiers sent home from war, the numbers would probably be hundreds of thousands, hell millions I would bet you."
Jude watched the man knowing deep down Joanne was hitting it on the head perfectly and it was going to be a slaughter if they couldn’t at least warn people that the dead were getting out of their graves and the issues with the rain.. By now there had to have been the dead rising further than just Iowa. He looked out the van window taking in the dark clouds and how they looked like they stretched to heaven and back. But in another way he was thinking maybe they went all the way to hell. When they came up to a cemetery that stretched for as far as the eye could see they saw there were still many of the dead who hadn’t made it to town or were still climbing out of their holes.
They drove slowly looking around the cemetery not seeing anything to make them suspect any wrongdoing had taken place. When they made it to the rear of the cemetery grounds they could just barely see the top of a long white tanker parked down below. Jude tapped Chuck on the shoulder pointing and said, “Hey Chuck pull up over there let's go see what that is.”
Chuck said, “Uh it looks like bad news to me Jude.”
Leslie said, “You guys really like pointing out the obvious don't you? Do you really think there's a chemical out there that brings back the dead? Do you realize how stupid that sounds?”