Survival Instinct: A Zombie Novel (61 page)

Riley didn’t know what to say.  Her first thought was that he must be wrong, because from her understanding, flame-throwers had been deemed illegal.  Then she realized that if Chant was right about them releasing the virus on purpose, they weren’t beyond using flame-throwers.  Both the boys had seemed to react solely to the sound, suggesting they had heard it before.  Riley didn’t want to think about in what capacity.

“I guess you didn’t know,” Riley spoke at last,  “about the deliberate release.”

Cole continued to stare at his fists, his face beginning to show the pure fury she saw in his shaking.  LeBlanc just shook his head.

“We would have done something if we knew,” he told her.  “We were told some rats had escaped the lab, and the moment that happened, a bunch of us wanted to inform the outside about what was going on.  I guess that’s how they weeded out whom to trust.  They even sent everybody on a facility-wide search to hunt down the rats.  They must have actually released some inside because we caught a few.  Three, I think.  They probably weren’t even infected.”

They sat in silence once again, each with his own thoughts.  It was broken by Cole suddenly slamming a fist into the dashboard.  It left a small dent, and Riley jumped slightly in her seat.  He slammed his other fist next to it, making a slightly larger dent.

He turned to Riley looking perfectly calm.  “So what do we do now?”

At
first, Riley had no idea what he was talking about.  It seemed so strange after the sudden outburst.  “I’m not sure,” she admitted.  “I guess we grab all we can and walk.  Maybe there’ll be a car on the other side of the truck we can take.”

“Sounds like a shitty plan,” Cole grumped.

“Better than no plan.”  LeBlanc punched him in the arm.  “So Doc, what should we take?”

Riley climbed into the back with LeBlanc and started sorting out what they needed.  Cole stayed up front looking miserable.  Riley remembered that the first thing he had said was something about Chant not being the sniper.  When they had first run into each other, Cole had been shot with a fairly high calibre round.  If he hadn’t been wearing a protective vest, he would have been dead.  So a sniper shot him, but it wasn’t Chant.  This suggested that Chant was at least present when the shooting occurred.  And she knew about the shooting beforehand if she gave him a vest.  They probably knew each other rather well.  As well as worrying about his little brother, Cole was probably mourning the loss of a friend now.  Riley couldn’t imagine what that felt like.  She had never really had any ties to another person before.  She had never even had a pet.  Her whole life was spent waiting for something to happen, even if she didn’t believe it would.  Now it was happening and she was lost.  She had to hold together though.  LeBlanc and Cole needed her and she reluctantly needed them.

They packed up LeBlanc and Cole’s packs with new supplies.  Luckily, Riley had remembered to grab at least one bag and they packed that up for her as well.  Every time Riley had to put something in the abandon pile, it was almost painful.  She knew just how important everything was: how much longer each piece of food would allow them to last, each drop of gas to keep the generators going, each piece of clothing to keep their body temperatures up.  Riley’s dad had taught her three things that were supposed to keep her ahead of the game.  The first was to know what was coming and take action before everyone else; she failed that one.  The second was to have a plan and she at least still had that but there had to be a lot of improvisation along the way.  The third was always to have supplies, and now those were being severely limited.  There was no choice though.  There was no way they could take everything on their backs.  Just over four fifths had to be left behind.  She hoped her family was doing better than she was.

“What do we do about the rest?”  LeBlanc looked at the boxes after the bags were stuffed.

“There’s nothing we can do,” Riley told him.  “Maybe when we go, we should leave the doors open so others can take them if they want.”

“That might start fights over it,” Cole mumbled from the front seat.  It was the first thing he had said in nearly ten minutes.

“I’d rather start a fight than think someone who really needed it couldn’t find it.”  Riley went to the back of the ambulance and opened the doors.  If she couldn’t use her own supplies, then she didn’t want them to go to waste.

LeBlanc followed her out and handed her his
packsack.  She gave him a confused expression with a glance to her own bag.

“My bag’s lighter than yours.”  LeBlanc threaded his arms through the straps of what had been Riley’s bag.  “So I’m carrying yours and you’re carrying mine.”  He then looked at the old woman in the car behind theirs and winked.

Riley didn’t bother to turn to see her reaction.  She just swung the pack onto her back and reached into the back of the ambulance one last time to pull out her rifle of choice.  It was a bolt action model 70 Winchester rifle with 30-06 Springfield rounds.  The reason for this choice was because of its accuracy and the bolt action would force her to make sure she aimed every shot.  What was the point of firing hundreds of bullets if only one to the head mattered?  Automatics were a waste of ammo when body shots were worthless.  It only held five rounds a magazine but she had been reloading guns about as long as she could walk so she was pretty quick at it.

“Do your guns have a single shot setting?” Riley asked LeBlanc.

“Yup.”  LeBlanc showed her.  “As soon as we knew we were coming out here, we flipped it to that setting and on that setting it will stay.”

Good, they knew single shots were best.  Riley couldn’t help but notice the gun. 
She had never seen that kind before.  At first, she had mistaken it for an M4A1 carbine, but with a closer look, she saw that there were a lot of subtle differences.  The barrel was shorter and the magazine was wider, possibly to hold more rounds.  The end of the stock that you would butt up against your shoulder was padded which suggested to Riley it had more kick.  She could see smaller detail changes as well, but without a thorough study, she couldn’t say for sure what they were.  It must be one of the perks of working for Keystone: you get all the neat toys before they come out on the market.

Around them, the mass of people was starting to catch up.  Only the quickest of the groups so far, most of them in ones and twos, the largest group consisting of just four.  Cole hopped out of the front seat, slinging his own pack onto his back as he went.  The three grouped together at the back of the ambulance, looking inside to make sure there was nothing else they could take.  Riley grabbed one more loaded mag and a box of latex gloves and put them in the cargo pockets on the sides of her shorts.  Then she decided to grab her stethoscope and slung it around her neck.  She didn’t think she would be able to carry any more than that and so stepped back from the open doors.  It was painful for her to do it, worse than leaving her house.  Already she noticed some people looking at the ambulance with curiosity.

* * *

The trio climbed over the barrier and started weaving their way through traffic.  Although the moving cars on this side posed some threat, it would get them past the truck and out of its danger zone faster.  The truck was currently more worrisome than the creeping traffic.

Riley looked around.  It seemed the Jeep had made its way through the crowd and taken off because she couldn’t see it anywhere.  Further back there must have been a safe route to get off-road without ending up in a ditch, because more and more cars were making their rough way next to the tree line.  Riley guessed a fair number of people were going to be run down by those cars, especially as the drivers became more impatient.  Once the first zombie, or someone mistaken for a zombie, got close enough to one of those cars, it would start an automobile stampede that no one would be safe from.  It could happen on this side of the highway too, but because there were more cars than people, they were actually safer.  The bulk of the cars would offer some protection, but they would still have to be careful not to get their legs pinned between them.

When they made it to the top of the hill, they could see the truck billowing smoke at the bottom of it.  There was even more than before.

“I don’t like the look of that,” Cole frowned.

“I don’t either,” Riley agreed.

“What do you think?  Should we make our way to the tree line and pass over there?  That’d be further away than we could get on this side.”  Cole looked down at Riley.

She hadn’t realized until just that moment how much taller he was.  She only made it up to about his chin.  Riley was a little on the short side and Cole was a little on the tall side.  “Yeah.  Even further though.  We’re going to walk through the trees; if that thing goes, I want something solid between us and it.”

Cole nodded his agreement and crossed over the barrier once again.  It would have been nice to avoid the faster moving cars on the other side of the ditch, but they had no choice.  Their side of the road didn’t have trees. It still had housing developments along it and a large stone wall separating them from the highway.

Riley and LeBlanc followed Cole back over the barrier and wove their way through the stopped vehicles.  Nearly all of them had been abandoned by now.  In the few that were still occupied, the owners clearly didn’t know what to do; couldn’t decide on the best course of action.  The group climbed down the ditch and stopped once they had scrambled up the other side.  Checking first that no cars were going to come tearing along, they hurried over to the tree line.  This close to the turned-over truck, Riley could smell gas over the perpetual stink of exhaust.  She was surprised it hadn’t gone up in a great whoosh of flames already.  Everybody in the area had been lucky about that, so far.  The hoard that was coming up might not be though.  If this day continued to be as unlucky as it had been, the truck-turned-bomb was likely to go off just as the masses surrounded it.

They entered the trees and began putting some distance between them and the highway.  This side of the highway had never been developed because it was a national park.  Keystone probably could have found a way to buy it out and develop all they wanted but they had decided not to.  In fact, they donated a lot of money to keep it a park and had made sure that no trees in it were harmed when they widened the highway.  It was something about helping with the pollution, although Riley doubted it would do much good.  Then again, Leighton was a very clean city as far as cities go.

Marble Keystone had built it from the ground up.  Nearly forty years ago, they had decided to place their headquarters and main labs in the middle of nowhere off highway 533.  Then they had to build homes for their workers to live in because commuting would be ghastly.  After
that, they needed shops so the workers could buy necessities, and other businesses so that their families could live and work there as well.  The place was pretty much always under construction, but everything had been planned out rather well.  Leighton could just as easily be called Keystone City.  The only reason it wasn’t was because the people had decided to vote for Leighton instead.  There were other locations around the world where Keystone was doing this kind of thing as well, but Leighton was the first and the oldest.  The others couldn’t be considered cities yet.

The trees and brush were thick next to the highway, but after pushing through the worst of it, it cleared out a bit.  There was enough brush though, that Riley wished she had attached the bottoms of her pants.  Other people were tromping their way through the woods as well.  Not a lot, but a few.  They looked very wary and scared.  Riley bet that each of them had had a zombie encounter.

They went far enough into the woods to make out some glittering off the lake on the other side of the trees.  Coming across a deer trail that ran parallel to the highway was a bit of luck.  It made the going easier but Riley’s bare shins were still brushed by bushes every so often.  It was a good thing she had grown up in the woods and was used to having various parts of herself scratched up.

They walked in silence, each in their own thoughts.  Riley’s were mostly about what to do next and trying to do an inventory from memory of the things they had in the cabin.  Occasionally, thoughts of her family invaded and she wondered how they were handling things.  She also wondered how Cender was doing.

It was while she was lost in these thoughts that the explosion happened.  The trees dampened the shock wave, but a great flock of birds exploded out of the bushes all around.

“The truck.”  Riley instinctively ran toward the highway.  Her training as an ER doctor kicked in and she felt a need to make sure people were okay. 
Apparently, she could turn that part of her off when it came to zombie infection, but not to other sorts of accidents.

She leaped over brush and darted around rocks, ducked under branches and swerved around tree trunks.  Her childhood times spent running through the woods with her sister and brothers came back to her in a flood.  Her feet knew where to land with only minimum input from her eyes.

Behind her, she could hear the boys plowing after her, more like charging bulls to her graceful deer.  She squeezed out through the thick stuff and into the bright, clear sunlight.  It took her a moment to get oriented to the highway again but it didn’t take long to spot the truck.  A wall of black smoke rose up from the highway behind them obscuring everything past it.  Riley headed toward it.

“Wait.”  LeBlanc caught up and placed a restraining hand on her arm.