The Dead Road: The Complete Collection (10 page)

I shook my head and walked out the door.  "We have to save her, because we're not fucking animals."  I tossed the map into the driver's seat.  Eli was tightening the lug nuts on the new tire.  Roger was putting the flattened tire, the bullet hole clean through the side of it, back onto the bracket.  "Why are we saving that?  Isn't that dead weight?"

Roger looked at me.  "Do you know where we can get another wheel that fits this thing if one of these gets bent?  Easier to find new tires than a new wheel."

"Fair point.  We're rescuing her because those animals have her, and we're not them.  They're probably going to rape and use her like some sort of breeding machine.  Those back-country survivalist types, you don't know what's in their heads.  Hell, I bet they're happy civilization's fallen to shit so they get to be the disgusting creatures they always wanted to be."

Eli let the jack down, the Jeep falling back into place.  He tossed the jack into the back seat and climbed into the driver's seat, tossing the map to Roger before he sat on it. "Let's get the fuck outta here, man!"

I turned and saw the horde plainly now.  It was twice the size as it last was, a mass of bodies shifting and moving down the road.  I tapped Eli on the shoulder, "Go to 67 and take a left.  That's where the pickup went that took Amy."

Roger got in the passenger side.  "I'd like to officially say this is a bad idea.  We're going to get killed for a girl we met six hours ago."

"Just drive, Eli.  I have an idea.  It may be a crazy one, but I have one none the less."

Eli nodded and turned out of the lot, driving to the end of the road and taking a left.  I looked behind us.  Hospital gown was barely a hundred feet away.  I could see him change his stance, turning to move towards us, instead of towards Stapleton's.  Our scent shifted, and the horde shifted with it.

"Where are we going, man?"

"Go a few miles then pull over.  We gotta look at the map and figure out where we're headed.  Put some space between us and the crowd."  Eli nodded.  Roger sighed and shook his head.  "Your disapproval is noted."

"We should head up into the mountains now, while the getting is good.  Let those bastards forget we even exist."

"It's only a matter of time before they come looking for us.  They saw we had guns, food, water, and a good off-road vehicle.  We're going to be their next targets.  No, Roger.  We leave now, we'll be looking over our shoulders forever."

"Oh, you mean, like we will for walking corpses?"

"Rather them than gun-toting crazies."

We drove the next ten miles in silence.  I thought about the newspapers.  Worcester.  I didn't want to tell the guys what I saw.  I needed them to have some hope because mine was faltering.  There were no hospitals in Stockton.  Hospital gown had to shamble a dozen miles to get here.  A dozen miles of open country, with no one alive to put a bullet in his head and stop him.  We had to find someplace remote, someplace people never went so that there were no corpses to put back down.  Someplace we could hold up for the winter, and wait for the cold to freeze these things in place, and make our trip south that much easier.  The plan was in my head now.

But step one was finding Amy.

~Volume Four: Survival
~

The Jeep was packed with as much food and supplies as we could carry. We had jugs of water, cans of food, a backpack full of ammunition, even a portable fire extinguisher. Eli drove, following the wide path of Route 67, the noise from the engine reverberating off of the rock faces we passed between. Roger sat in the passenger seat, a shotgun cradled in his arms. I was in the back, two rifles lying in the floorboards at my feet, two handguns on the seat beside me. I had checked and loaded all of them, preparing for the worst. But something was missing.

Behind us, somewhere in the distance, following the scent of our sweat and the Jeep's exhaust, was a horde of over a hundred walking corpses, groaning and wheezing as they shambled along the road, arms outstretched. They were following the scent of fresh meat, following the trail they knew would lead to prey. They were following two vehicles that took the same road within minutes of one another - ours, and a white pickup truck holding at least six people. One of those people was a boy, maybe eighteen years old, named Zack. Zack was a local. He lived on Birch road. I had committed his face to memory. I repeated his name and address to myself like a mantra,
Zack, Birch road, Stockton Vermont.

In the back of that truck was Amy. Amy was with us before. Zack and his people took her. They grabbed her, kicking and screaming, and drove away after shooting at us. They wanted her, so they took her. I picked up the rifle lying beside me and checked it again, opening the bolt to peer inside, making sure it was loaded.

Roger looked back at me as he heard me fiddling with the rifle. "Do we have a plan?"

I glared at him. I didn't want to, but the sarcastic tone in his voice just set me on edge. "How am I supposed to have a plan when we don't even know where Birch Street is? Don't be an asshole, Roger."

"You're the one all gung-ho to rescue her, Alex. You want so bad to get her back that you're putting us at serious risk. Those guys were armed. They were organized. What are we besides three idiots, only one of us that can shoot worth a damn?"

Roger was at least partially right. The guys in the white truck had a perfect setup. They used Zack as bait. They spotted us looting Stapleton's and sent Zack out to lure her. He wandered, apparently aimlessly, down the hill, casually approaching the reunion with his supposed friend. Amy ran up to greet him with open arms. She was so happy to see another survivor, another familiar face, she didn't hesitate to go to him. Zack was also a connection to her dead brother, Parker. Parker was another casualty of the outbreak, but by his own hand. He and his friends committed suicide rather than face the bleak future the world presented. We found them in Amy's parents' house, sprawled out in the living room, looking like a party that got way out of hand. She screamed and cried while we looted the house for supplies.

She wanted to bury them, but we were in no shape to dig graves. We hadn't slept, hadn't eaten. To stand out in the summer sun and dig hole would have weakened us to the point of useless. We would be corpse food. So we left. We took Parker's jeep and left them there to rot.

Amy was excited to see Zack. The pickup truck came out of a side street and drove right towards her. The men in back reached out and scooped her up. I thought they were going to take Zack too, but when he raised his gun and pointed it at us I knew he was just the decoy. It was too late before I realized what was really going on. Amy was in the back of the truck and they were speeding past before I could react. They fired at us as they went by, putting a bullet through one of our tires, leaving us unable to follow with a horde of monsters coming our way.

Eli and Roger changed the tire like men in a NASCAR pit crew. We were off and running before the mass of dead things got too close. Before we left I grabbed a map of the county from inside of the store. Amy had said Zack lived on Birch Street.

"We're three smart guys, Roger. That's what we have over them. Eli, I think we got enough distance between us and the things back there. Pull over."

Eli pulled to the side of the road and turned off the engine. Aside from the faint ticking noises from under the hood all we could hear was the wind in the trees, birds singing and insects buzzing. I stood up in the back seat of the Jeep, peering behind us through the binoculars we took from Stapleton's. Nothing but empty road. I knew there was a mass of hundreds of hungry mouths somewhere a few miles back, making their way slowly up the hill towards us, but we had some time to recollect.

Eli rubbed at his face with both hands. "How long do you think those things are going to chase us, man? I mean, are they going to follow us until they're all dead?"

"Until they can't smell us anymore. We keep stopping. We keep letting them catch up. If we just hit the road and don't look back, eventually they'll lose our scent."

"But they didn't follow us off the mountain like this, man. They got lost in the parking lot once Roger got in the car."

I nodded then looked back at him, "Open-top Jeep. They can still smell us. Once Roger got in the closed off car, they lost his scent."

Eli frowned and hopped out of the Jeep to stretch. "We should get something else then. And soon."

I sat back down. "I have my eyes on a nice white pickup."

Roger scoffed. "You're insane, Alex. You really are."

"Look," I began, leveling my gaze at Roger, "Amy was part of our group. Yeah, it was only for a few hours but we busted up a car to rescue her. It was her voice, her message that kept us from rushing headlong into this town and getting killed. We owe her for that. She risked her ass to get to the radio station and it almost cost her. Then we come along, rescue her, let her cry on our shoulder over her brother, and now we're just going to abandon her to a bunch of redneck hicks? No sir, not me."

Roger threw up his hands, "How do you know they're abusing her? How do you know they aren't just grabbing up familiar faces to bring to their fortified position? You ever think they were putting on a show to ward us off, and once they got out of sight they calmed her down?"

I shook my head. "No way. That was not at all friendly. They didn't even pretend to be doing anything other than kidnapping her. They shot at us so we couldn't stop them. She was kicking and yelling when they put her in the back of that truck. I heard them laughing at her distress, not trying to settle her in. No, they grabbed her because she's a pretty girl and they..."

I couldn't finish my thought. My words caught in my throat. My mind went to New York, to a city full of millions of zombies, walking down Park Avenue, people in tall buildings living like autonomous states, each one only as safe as their first floor. Things would get desperate quickly. I imagined my girlfriend, Katie, trapped in her 7th floor apartment, a street full of zombies below her window, armed men banging on her door because she's the only living woman in the building.

Roger put his hand on my shoulder. "Ok, Alex. Ok. We'll do this. I just don't have any idea how we're going to pull it off."

I grabbed the county map out of the front seat and unfolded it. It had been a long time since I had to use a paper map, having been relying on the Internet for all of my navigation for the past few years. I remembered the days of my youth poring over the atlas of Fairfield County and the street map of Manhattan. I used to be able to visualize entire neighborhoods, the way the streets intersected twisted, just from studying the maps. It didn't take me long to find Stockton town center, then trace Route 67 to where we were. There was a lot more white spice in Vermont, vast tracts of hills and forest that would encompass ten city blocks in New York. Scanning the scattered yellow lines of roads through the empty space was easy once I got my bearings. I tapped the map. "Birch Street."

It was a small winding road that cut through the white emptiness around it like an infection. Somehow the road looked poisonous to me, that the yellow ink was more grotesque than the rest of the map. The S-shaped road looked like a scar on the face of Vermont.

Roger and Eli looked over my shoulder. Roger said, "It's a dead end. Only one way up. They'll see us coming."

Eli pointed at the tiny blue dotted line that ran perpendicular. "Not if we take that."

Roger narrowed his eyes, "Is that a river?"

Eli chuckled, "No, man, it's a bridle trail. Horses. Usually wide enough for a car but too rough, but this thing can handle it. I used them all the time when I got on my photography trips. Usually rent an ATV or something."

Roger nodded, "Alright, so, we take the bridle trail, then what? We still have a house full of presumably armed men that will be rather unhappy to see us. How do we handle that?"

I folded the map up, leaving the single panel that held Birch Street visible. "One step at a time. Let's find that bridle trail and do some scouting."

*****

Eli's assessment of the viability of a tiny dotted blue line on a map was a bit optimistic. We slowly made our way through the edges of Stockton, trying to find the few spots where the trail actually emptied onto a road of some kind. It took us almost an hour of driving in circles before we found it, a barely visible path through the woods, marked by a simple wooden sign marked with the seal of the State of Vermont Department of Wildlife. The opening to the road was overgrown with grass and weeds, and further into the woods the trees were decidedly close together. Roger let out a long, exasperated sigh.

"How the fuck are we supposed to drive up that?"

Eli gave him an angry look, "How the fuck was I supposed to know it was a nature walk?"

I looked down at the map as they argued, mumbling to myself as I trace the dotted blue line with my fingertip. Roger was yelling about Eli being stupid. Eli was responding by insulting Roger's parentage. Their voices echoed off of the trees and rocks, and I could hear the wings of bird flapping noisily as they fled from the crescendo of yelling.

"Guys..." I said. My voice did little to penetrate the wall of sound as the two shouted back and forth. "Guys!" I repeated. Their yelling continued. "GUYS!" My voice reverberated around us. They stopped, turning to look at me.

I let out a short sigh, "Assholes, there's a fucking mob of undead chasing us, can you not aid their pursuit? And let's not forget the compound of armed rednecks somewhere over the hill."

They remained silent, but still seethed in anger. I could see their frustration plainly on their faces. Everything was beginning to wear at them - the stress of trying to survive this, combined with a lack of sleep, was enough to make anyone go over the edge. I put my hands on both of their shoulders. "Listen, we cannot let ourselves fall to pieces. We have a job to do." Roger rolled his eyes and shook his head. Every obstacle that was placed in front of us became another reason why we shouldn't even be attempting this. I ignored his silent protest and continued. "The trail is just under two miles long according to the map. Uneven ground will slow the corpses down too, and dense enough trees may make a few separate from the rest. If we're really lucky the smell from the woods will mask our scents and make us that much harder to follow. So go in, Eli, slowly. Just ease our way up, and cut through any gap we can find. If we get to a point we can't drive anymore we'll take the rest on foot."

Eli looked back at me in the rear view mirror. "What about your foot, man?"

I flexed the toes of my right foot, feeling the cut on the sole pull against the bandages. It throbbed a bit, but the pain was a hell of a lot less than it was after it first happened. "I'll be alright. As long as you don't need me to run a marathon, I can hack it, and will probably fare a lot better if we found boots that fit." I was still wearing Big Earl's boots, taken from the freshly killed reanimated tow truck driver we found on the station outside of town. They were at least a size and a half too big, and no amount of tightening the laces kept my feet stable in them.

"So we charge in guns blazing, Alex? That it?" Roger's derision was at an all-time high.

"No, Roger, that's not it. We go get a look. We see where this house is, how Birch is laid out, and where they have people posted. If they've been out here since the outbreak they have to have barricades set up to keep corpses out. Maybe there's a weak spot, or someplace we can sneak in under their radar. We don't know 'till we can see it for ourselves."

Eli put the Jeep in gear and started our sow climb up the bridle path. It was slow going, the Jeep bouncing violently over rocks and roots. At one point some of the supplies bounced right over the side and I had to climb out and pick them up before we could continue. As it stood every can and bottle was precious. We had no idea when or if we would find another store we could loot within reasonable levels of risk. There may be grocery stores still loaded, but odds were they'd have a few dozen monsters milling around the aisles, attracted by the smell of rotting meat.

We reached the top of a small bluff. It was about a ten-foot drop, with a small path cut out of the rock along the front of it. It was wide enough for a horse or a bicycle to navigate without any trouble, but there was no way to drive down. I climbed out of the Jeep and grabbed my rifle, one of the hatchets, and the pair of binoculars. I slung the rifle over my shoulder, hung the binoculars around my neck, and let the hatchet hang out of one of the pockets of my BDU's. "Alright, you two stay here. If I'm not back in an hour..." I shrugged. I couldn't finish the sentence. If I wasn't back in an hour, then what? Come see if I'm captured, or dead? Leave? Try to find shelter and hole up, or make your way south and look for help? There was no easy course, no quick fallback, no Plan B.

I turned and started to walk down the path. "Hey, Alex man?" Eli was standing up in the front seat, leaning on the top of the windshield frame. I looked back up towards him. "Uh, if that mob catches up to us... I mean, if we see them coming through the woods, we're in a bad spot here. I'm going to turn us around where I can, and at the first sign of being boxed in, we gotta light out."

I nodded. "Worst case I'll make my way back to Stapleton's. If you guys have to run, head there. Just beep the horn a couple of times. Maybe I'll hear it, know you're gone."

Eli nodded back and sat back down. Another pointless contingency. If I got cut off from them, the odds that I'd ever see them again were remote. We were a long way from Stapleton's now, and that horde was somewhere in between here and there. If I could make it there on foot without being overrun by corpses, shot by rednecks or just not get lost in the Vermont hills it would be nothing short of miraculous. It didn't matter how realistic it was, because it was still a plan. It was something to cling to in case everything went sideways.

Traversing the trail on foot was almost easier than driving it. I didn't have to worry about narrow passes between trees or bouncing over outcropping rocks, and the ground, while steadily up hill, was solid and steady beneath my feet. Knowing that if the mob followed us, they would have to go through Eli and Roger first was also a comfort. They were my early warning system.

I had contemplated asking one of them to join me, but it just didn't seem prudent. If I left Roger alone he might just take off and leave us. He wasn't the kind of guy to stand on sentiment, and he already proved once that when the chips are down he's looking out for himself. When he got to the parking lot of the campgrounds first he took off. He waited not too far away, but something tells me if that group of dead things followed him he would have just kept going.

Eli, on the other hand, was on the verge of cracking entirely. I was worried he'd either succumb to the stress and just fall asleep sitting there, or go off on some rampage trying to take as many of them down as he could, forgetting about the Jeep full of supplies. Eli was great to have at your back, but he was proving to be a bit uncertain in a crisis.

Leaving them there together kept them both in check. With any luck they'd mend whatever rift was opening between them and make for a much more peaceful rest of our lives. I paused as I let that thought sink in. These two guys may be the only people I see for the rest of my life. That's why I was so desperate to get Amy back. She liked us. She was going to be part of the team with us. She was someone we could talk to, someone we could enjoy getting to know for a while. I couldn't help but think that by surviving somehow we'd failed all of our friends and loved ones that didn't make it. It was now our burden to make sure we didn't fail anyone else.

I could see the end of the trail up ahead, marked by another wooden post, the rounded ends of two guardrails visible to either side of the path. I paused to empty my bladder against a tree before heading up, making sure I didn't have any unwanted distractions while I was looking around. I kept low as I approached the road, crouching as I walked, my rifle at a ready position. If there was someone keeping guard I had to make sure I was ready to handle it.

My line of vision reached the level of the road. I peered back and forth carefully, trying to keep to the shadows of the trees. Nothing. The road looked as abandoned as all the rest. I could see a few houses through the foliage, a shock of white siding here, a red wall there, the eaves of a roof peeking up over the treetops. I lay down in the dirt behind one of the posts of the guardrail and brought the binoculars up.

From behind me I heard a groan. I froze. I held my breath. Was it getting closer? My hands shook. The rifle was lying in front of me. If it was closing in, I had to decide fast if I was going to turn and fire. Wait too long and it would be on me. Turn too early and possibly attract attention I could avoid. It groaned again. It wasn't closer, but had moved laterally. It was off to my left before. Now it was more directly behind me. I slowly turned, trying not to make a sound as I shifted.

I could see it, stumbling its way through the underbrush. It was a woman, probably in her forties, wearing a pair of jeans and a bloodstained T-shirt. Her long hair was tangled and snarled, hanging off of her scalp like a Halloween wig. Her mouth hung open, her jaw at an unnatural angle, tongue lolling out, black and shriveled. My stomach churned. I was disgusted, and it was all I could do to keep from vomiting. I slowly reached back and grabbed the rifle.

She staggered perpendicular to the path, but its moaning and hissing noises told me it was on the trail of something. In all of the encounters with these things they only made noise when they were on the hunt. Usually they just stood, silent, or milled about as if they were lost and confused. I brought the rifle up to my shoulder and clicked the safety off with my thumb.

She crossed the trail, then stopped, just on the far side of it. She turned around, head held high, scenting the air. Her dead eyes swept over me. I didn't move; I gave no indication I was a living thing at all. I felt a trickle of sweat roll down my spine. She turned to face the tree again. She groaned loudly, letting out a frustrated sound, pawing at the tree with her ragged fingertips. I watched as she turned in a circle. Her trail clearly led her to that spot, and somehow she didn't catch my scent even though I was less than a hundred feet away.

Then I recognized where she was. That was where I stopped to urinate. The scent from the puddle of urine had attracted her, and now it was strong enough that it confounded her. She knew there was something alive nearby, something that had left this marker for her to find, but it was gone, lost to her senses. I lowered the rifle and got to my feet. One of my boots shuffled against the dirt. She paused, but not for very long, resuming her search for the source of the scent.

I took a careful step forward, then another. Step by agonizing step I crossed the distance between us, laying each foot down with utmost care, trying not to make any noise. I hefted the hatchet in my right hand. I kept my eyes glued to the woman, watching for any sign that she heard me coming, or that I was suddenly more interesting than a urine-soaked tree. I got within an arm's reach before she turned to face me, a curious hiss escaping her wide-open mouth. I brought the hatchet down right on the middle of her forehead. She let out a quiet shriek and collapsed in a twitching heap. I put my foot on her head as I pulled the blade free. Her skull cracked with a satisfying crunch, spilling black, rotten brain matter in a sticky mass. So they could smell urine better than they smelled sweat, or engine exhaust. They knew it meant someone alive, someone that could be food. I wiped the hatchet off on her t-shirt and climbed back up the hill.

The houses in sight all looked empty. I looked from yard to yard, looking in windows, trying to catch some semblance of life. Nothing moved. Some of the windows were broken or cracked, a good indication that whoever once lived there had either struggled to keep something out or the windows were now holding them in. There was no evidence of anyone at all, let alone an armed group. But off to the left, above the trees, I could make out a faint wisp of white smoke.

The road sloped uphill in that direction, so I began making my way up, keeping off of the road, sticking to the trees, wanting to keep myself out of sight as much as possible. I stepped carefully, trying not to let the fallen leaves crunch under my feet as I moved, keeping my eyes open for the source of the smoke.

I walked along the curved road until something came in to view that made me duck down behind the guardrail. Further ahead, blocking the road, a pair of SUV's, parked nose to nose. Two men sat on the hoods, one holding a shotgun, the other twirling a Frisbee on one outstretched finger. They looked to be in their twenties, wearing shorts and heavy boots, their t-shirts dirty with road dust. I scowled as I lifted the binoculars to get sight of their faces. I didn't know them, but a part of me was sure they were two of the men in the back of the white truck. They had a rugged, country look to them, the kind of men that probably spent most of their youth in these woods, hunting, fishing, or whatever other outdoor sports caught their fancy. They probably skied in the winter and hiked all summer. This collapse of civilization was probably something these guys dreamed about, able to live as lawlessly and as viciously as they wanted.