Winchester: Over (Winchester Undead) (15 page)

Outside of Parowan, Utah

As indicated by the sharp increase in billboards, Cliff was getting close to a town named Parowan. Following the same plan as the previous nights, the hunt for the local small airport was on. Just on the outskirts of town, the familiar blue and white airport sign appeared at the side of the highway, and Cliff took the exit to see if his luck would continue to hold.

The airport was small, as he’d assumed it would be, so he drove past the fixed-base operators (FBO), then past the hangars out onto the taxiway and to the far end of the field. There should be at least some fencing to help give him a little protection, but he wished it was summer rather than the middle of winter so he could sleep on the roof of a hangar without the fear of being killed by the cold temperatures.

He also needed more gas. A couple of cars were parked at the FBO he’d passed on the way, but it would have to wait until morning; the sun was low on the horizon and he didn’t want to be stuck under a car siphoning gas at night. While he watched the sky turn from orange to a deep blue, he enjoyed another dinner of Pop-Tarts, beef jerky, and a cold beer. As the stars came out, Cliff cleaned his FN and then his pistol. He also changed his socks. Even while in-country in some third world shit hole he’d had access to antibiotics, but now if he let his health slip and got an infection, it could very well kill him. With that thought, Cliff threw his empty beer bottle out of the open window of his truck, rolled the window up and hung his towel blinds, wrapped himself up in his hotel blankets, and tried to get some sleep.

Zephyr, Texas

Bexar looked around at the brand new high school football stadium. He wasn’t the least bit surprised that such a nice facility didn’t even have paved parking. In small-town Texas, football is king.

After their need for a quick exit from the group cache site in Maypearl, Bexar didn’t want to set up the wall tent. It was more of a permanent living quarter that they could use in Big Bend. No, tonight they needed a building they could break into, defend if needed, and leave in a hurry without any loss. The field house on the north end of the stadium looked to be just about as good of a place as any. Although there wouldn’t be any running water and they couldn’t flush, it would be nice to sit on an actual toilet again, sort of like a single-use port-a-potty.

Jessie and Sandra stood rear guard next to the vehicles, which they had pre-positioned facing outwards for a quick getaway if needed, while Jack and Bexar reconnoitered the building for an easy way in. After a few minutes, Jack went to his truck and returned with his old Mossberg 500 Special 12-gauge pump shotgun. He pushed five shells into the shotgun’s magazine tube and walked up to the metal exterior door. Three shots later he had shot the door free using the same technique that the military and police forces the nation over used for door breaching.

Bexar pulled his rifle tight and took position next to the door as Jack pulled aside the broken door. The two stood quietly for about twenty seconds, waiting for a reaction from inside the dark building. If there were any undead inside or nearby, the shotgun would bring them out. As if on cue, deep inside the recesses of the dark field house they heard the sound of metal clanking, then a moan followed by some banging.

They waited, but no zombie appeared out of the darkness of the interior. They were going to have to go in and find it if the group was going to stay for the night. The long-practiced tactics for clearing buildings were changing with the new world order. Adapting, Jack and Bexar didn’t breach the doorway with quickness of action; they calmly walked through the darkened doorway, weapon lights on, shining deep into the dark corners.

They found themselves behind the counter of the closed concession stand, which had no undead but plenty of candy bars, a great find that they would enjoy later. Creeping slowly and carefully, Bexar cleared the locker rooms while Jack cleared the showers. They finally found the noisy ghoul in the dark and dusty weight room. He had probably been the football coach, wearing khaki pants that were too small around the waist and a faded polo shirt with the school’s mascot embroidered on the right breast. The zombie was pinned to a flat bench under the bar of a Smith machine, loaded with three, forty-five-pound plates on each side.

“Guess he slipped and got stuck under the bar,” Jack said, lifting his rifle and firing a single shot into the dead coach’s skull.

Rather than dragging the body through the building, Bexar shut the door to the weight room. The girls brought the kids into the building to one of the locker rooms, while Bexar and Jack brought in the bedrolls and secured the trucks. Night fell to the quiet sounds of Snickers bars being opened and eaten.

December 31
st

Parowan, Utah

Cliff woke with the rising sun lighting the cab of the truck. As he had done yesterday, he slowly lifted the edges of the towels one at a time to peek outside for threats. The passenger side was clear, the windshield was clear, but then he nearly shot through the glass at a dead face almost touching the glass on the driver’s side window. Milky white dead eyes peered at the window, but once Cliff was able to get his breathing under control and his heart rate to settle down, he realized that the zombie hadn’t appeared to see the movement.

He just wanted to get out of the truck to piss, siphon some gas, and get back on the road, but first he’d have to dispatch the undead man. Inching over to the passenger door, he opened it and slid out of the truck as quietly and smoothly as he could. With the suppressor still on his rifle, as it had been since climbing out of that damned hole in the ground in Denver, he made his way around the back of the truck.

Taking three big steps, Cliff moved away from the truck, and with a single shot coughed out of the barrel of his rifle put the zombie down for good. Rifle up, Cliff made a 360-degree check of the area for further threats, then took care of his most urgent step of the morning with a long piss.

Back in the truck, the instant coffee packet from one of the MREs was poured into a water bottle and shaken to mix. It tasted slightly more horrible than usual because it was made with cold water, but he wanted the caffeine. Another round of Pop-Tarts and beef jerky finished out his breakfast.

Cliff started the truck and drove towards the FBO. After a quick security walk of the area, he crawled under an old Dodge truck with his gas cans and his garden hose. Thirty minutes later the Chevy’s gas tank was full, and the four small gas cans were full as well. He guessed that he now had enough gas to make Groom Lake, but with the base being in the middle of
absofuckinglutely nowhere, he thought it would be smart to stop one more time, to be safe.

Zephyr, Texas

Jessie sat the last watch for the night, which worked out well because Keeley woke up early and was hungry. She was down to only a few cans of condensed milk; after that they would be on to the powdered milk. Thankfully, Keeley wasn’t an infant or the need for baby formula would have been overwhelming.

Off in the distance she heard motorcycles rumbling, but she couldn’t get a fix on the direction or how far away they were. But if she could hear them, she was sure they were too close for their safety. The group’s vehicles were obvious beacons of survivors, what with all the gear strapped onto the roof racks. She needed to get the others up and on the road before their vehicles were spotted.

With Keeley holding her hand, Jessie let her AR rest on the sling across her chest and stepped inside to wake up Bexar. “Babe, we’ve got a problem.”

“Huh?”

“Wake up,” she said, “I heard some motorcycles in the distance; I think we need to get the hell out of here.”

Jessie sat Keeley down as Bexar began to wake up the others. Going to the darkened doorway, she stood back in the shadow of the building to hold security while the bedrolls were gathered. In less than ten minutes the group was awake, bathroom breaks were taken, and they were packing the bedrolls in the vehicles. Just then the motorcycle roared by.

At first the rider didn’t seem to notice the group, but then his head snapped to the side to look over his shoulder, and he slammed on his brakes. While the biker was making a U-turn in the road, Jack stepped forward, shouldered his rifle, and fired ten rounds towards the biker. The bike swerved to the side but the rider stayed upright and rode off as fast as he could, although it appeared the motorcycle now had a flat tire and might have been leaking gas.

“Well shit on us Jack, we’ve gotta get; I bet he was a scout with the group from yesterday.”

“Right Bexar, let’s get the fuck out of here.”

The group was on high alert as they quickly left the gravel parking lot. Bexar figured the bikers would give chase. Of course he hoped they wouldn’t, but in his experience with biker gangs, he knew they would come and it would turn violent. Bikers fueled on meth could ride all day and all night without stopping to rest. Bexar spent more time gazing into his rearview mirror than at the road ahead.

Near Brownwood, Texas

Bexar flashed the headlights on his vehicle, and Jessie waved back and flashed her headlights at Jack, who waved and slowed to stop the convoy in the road. They didn’t bother to pull off the highway—there was no traffic, and the only other moving vehicles they had seen in the last two days were the bikers. Jack, Sandra, Jessie, and Bexar all met in the middle of the road for a quick pow-wow.

Bexar started. “Jack, I really think we should get off this highway and head south towards Junction. I’m worried that the bikers will follow the highway and catch up. If we can go a different direction on a different road, we could maybe shake them.”

“Sure,” said Jack, “but what if they take that road as well?”

“Well yeah, they could,” replied Bexar, “but how would they guess which road to take? The sooner we can move off course the better, I think.”

Their wives agreed, so the convoy drove into Brownwood and turned south. In the town of Brownwood, the only movement they saw were undead trapped in some of the gas stations, clawing at the windows to get at the vehicles driving by. They saw a few houses with smoke coming from the chimneys, which seemed like a good sign, but would be disastrous for those people if the bikers followed them into the town. There wasn't anything Bexar could do to help them; he could only hope that the people in those houses would keep safe.

It seemed like days of driving, but it was really only a few hours. The continually high stress of driving around abandoned vehicles and reanimated dead bodies in the road made the trip to Junction, Texas seem exceptionally long. By now they needed to gas up their convoy, so they had to stop. The closer they got to town, the more gas stations and fuel stops appeared, but unfortunately they had no way to get the fuel out of the underground tanks at the gas stations, so they were still scavenging and siphoning gas when needed.

If
we’d chosen diesel-driven vehicles we would’ve had a near endless supply of fuel, with all the abandoned semi-trucks on the highway and their large saddlebag fuel tanks
, Jack thought. He brought the convoy to a stop on the side of a Valero station, hoping to find fuel in some of the vehicles abandoned near the gas station.

Everyone got out of their vehicles except for Sandra, who elected to stay with the kids in the Jeep. Keeley was napping, and even though Will was awake, it wouldn’t be safe to bring him out in an unknown area unless they had to. Over the past few days a new group SOP—
standard operating procedure—had been developed, that they were always armed whenever they got out of their vehicles.

Jack called over to Bexar, “Hey Bexar, how much ammo do you think we have between us for the ARs?”

“Quite a bit Jack, why?”

“I’m guessing it’ll be some time ‘til someone makes any more ammo, and we might run into an issue in the future. I want to try something new. I’m going to try using a hatchet.”

“Heh, well okay, but keep your AR on you,” Bexar said.

Jack’s AR hung across his back by the sling. After retrieving his hatchet from a container on the roof of his truck, he gestured for Jessie to join him in sweeping the area to find suitable vehicles to siphon gas from. Bexar climbed on the roof of the Jeep and stood watch over the kids and Sandra.

Jessie took point with her pistol up, Jack pulling rear guard with his hatchet, and they moved around the corner of the store. The glass front doors of the store were wide open, which was good in that there shouldn’t be anything trapped in the store, but it was bad in that anything that had been in there was now out here with them. The area around the pumps and the parking lot was nearly empty of cars, and the few vehicles near the pumps were diesel pickup trucks.

“Maybe there’s some more over by the McDonalds?” Jessie whispered to Jack over her shoulder.

She led the pair across the front of the store and around the far corner to the McDonalds.  Protruding from the front of the restaurant was a large tour bus that appeared to have traveled out of Mexico. It had wrecked and driven right into the front of the McDonalds, into the PlayPlace.

“Oh shit, this is bad, Jack, we need to fall back,” Jessie said.

Gunfire erupted from the other side of the gas station.

“Fuck, come on Jessie!”

Jessie and Jack broke tactics and sprinted back across the front of the store, coming around the corner of the station to see their vehicles surrounded by a wall of zombies. Sandra was trapped in the Jeep with the kids, and undead were clawing and banging at the windows trying to get at them. Bexar was still on the roof of the Jeep, pulling the trigger on his AR as quickly as he could aim. By a quick count, Jack estimated there were still sixty undead standing.

“Jessie, hold your fire,” yelled Jack. “If you miss you’ll hit Sandra and the kids! Run forward and try to get a safe angle on some of the zombies on the edges, I’ll go around the other side!”

Before Jessie could respond, Jack sprinted away to the right, trying to get around the horde for another angle to engage. On the far side of the convoy he ran into three undead who were slow getting to the party. One had a badly broken ankle that he was attempting to walk on, another had a very badly broken leg, and the third was missing part of his right leg below the knee.

Jack still had his hatchet in his hand, so he ran up to the one with the broken ankle and planted the hatchet firmly in its skull. The zombie dropped with a wet thud, but the hatchet stuck and pulled out of Jack’s sweaty hand. Jack reached over his shoulder and pulled his AR around from his back, ducked his head out of the sling and brought the rifle to bear just as the next crippled zombie got close. A trigger pull and it was out of its misery, the third killed moments later.

Looking back at the Jeep, he saw that Bexar was still firing as fast as he could, but one of the undead had broken the back glass of the Jeep and was trying to claw his way inside the cabin. Jack put the reticle of his optic on the back of the zombie’s head, took a deep breath, and fired.

The interior of the Jeep exploded with blackened undead brain matter, but the threat had been stopped, and the body blocked the broken window. Jessie continued to pick off the edges of the swarm, and Bexar worked as hard as he could, leaving about twenty still to kill. With carefully placed shots Jessie created a gap in the mass of undead, leaving a path to the Jeep. Sprinting towards it, she called out to Bexar as she jumped up and extended her left hand. Bexar quickly caught her hand and pulled her onto the roof.

“If those bastards are going to get my daughter, I’m taking as many as I can with me!” she said determinedly.

Another five minutes of sharp shooting and the horde was all finally down, the barrels of the ARs were smoking, and both kids were screaming.

“Holy Christ balls, Jack,” said Bexar.

“Yeah, help me get this bastard out of the back of the Jeep,” Jack said, pulling on the rotting corpse.

Nobody was sure if the splattered brain tissue on the inside of the Jeep could cause any issues, but to be safe, the tarp covering the gear was pulled out and discarded as well.

“Hey Bexar,” called Jack. “Over by the McDonalds I think I saw an old CJ with some jerry cans in the back.”

“Cool,” said Bexar. “Give me a minute and I’ll head over there, but we need to be quick. All that noise would’ve attracted some attention.”

“Roger that,” Jack called over his shoulder as he trotted off towards the Jeep.

Not only did the old CJ have four five-gallon jerry cans in the back, they were full of gas. On the floor in the back of the old Jeep they found a length of garden hose and a heavy hand-cranked pump, like what they used on farms to fuel up tractors out of fifty-five-gallon drums of fuel, as well as a set of large bolt cutters. This was like finding the Holy Grail.

With these tools they could break into the underground tanks of gas stations and hand-pump the gas out. The tires on the CJ looked like they would fit his rig, which was down a tire from their quest for Dr. Pepper.

Running back to the group, Jack excitedly told them of his find, then led the group in their vehicles back to the CJ. Twenty minutes later all three vehicles had full gas tanks, all their gas cans were full, and Jack had taken the four wheels and the spare off the CJ. The tires, still on their rims, wouldn’t fit on the FJ’s roof rack, so they were spread out over the three vehicles and also lashed to the top of the Scout’s trailer.

Without further delay, the group turned southbound to try and make it to Fort Stockton before dark. It would be impossible to make it all the way to Big Bend that day, and Jack believed that Fort Stockton might be a little far with the daylight they had left. Darkness was once again a curse; if the zombie horde from the gas station had attacked them at night, he wasn’t so sure they would’ve won that fight.

Outside of Groom Lake, N
evada

Shortly after noon, Cliff turned off the “Extraterrestrial Highway” and onto Groom Road, which would take him over the mountains and into the Groom Lake dry lakebed area. This was the infamous “Area 51.”

Cliff laughed out loud; he’d been here a few times over the course of his
career, and believed that the public would be amazed at what really went on. Area 51 was known to be a secret government facility with exceptionally long runways carved into the dry lakebed. Throughout its history, it had hosted testing for numerous top-secret aircraft, including the A-12 and the F-117A. However, its biggest secret was the underground facility that housed bunkers, storerooms, and other facilities with the express purpose of providing for the continuity of government, much like the facility at Denver International, or the publicly outed, obsolete Greenbrier facility in West Virginia.

Some incredible projects had launched and landed at Groom Lake, but contrary to popular belief, none of them involved aliens. One of those projects included the Air Force space program vehicles. If NASA had been able to openly use the technology developed at Groom Lake, the Space Shuttle would have been retired years before it finally was, and if civilians could use it, space tourism would cost about as much as a Southwest flight from Dallas to Denver.

“Holy shit!” Cliff suddenly remembered there were about three dozen Air Force personnel currently in orbit. “Guess those guys are on their own.”

The drive down Groom Road was slower than usual due to the snowfall that was starting to accumulate, but eventually he reached the first gate to the property. He was worried about the status of the facility because the gate was unmanned; in fact, he hadn’t seen any of the standard roving security teams either. These were not good signs. Luckily, the mountains were still between the gate and the facility, so he would have ample cover to recon the site before blazing into the unknown.