By the time he tore his attention from the horrible sight and looked up, many corpses were coming for him. He turned around, but the door was already closed. He was on his own.
§
The dancers were all on the bus. Given the choice of running naked into the dead city or staying at Costco and screwing for food, they chose the Costco. Life would be pretty much the same; besides, Banjo had showed them the saddlebags full of what they needed to motivate their loyalty and performance for the douche and his friends. A couple of the girls were starting to sweat and vomit. Banjo led them all to a caged area where the expensive Costco shit was kept and locked them in. He had each one stick her arm out and gave each a big dose of the black tar.
Banjo, Fats, and Jeeter got to work on their new home. Soon a fire was roaring in the middle of the large building. There was food and booze aplenty. One or two girls were brought out at a time. Fats had held a giant plastic jug of cheese balls for over an hour, and now it was empty. His hands and face were orange as well as the front of his shirt. Banjo shook his head.
Good old Fats
, he thought.
It occurred to him that he didn’t know anything about the fat bastard. He knew a good bit about Jeeter, and Jeeter him, as they had ridden for years. But Fats! He had been with the both of them almost as long, and Banjo knew next to nothing about him. He shrugged, probably nothing to know about a guy who does nothing but eat and shit. Fats never talked. Banjo had heard a few words from his mouth over the years, but very few, and what he said was more retarded than even he expected. Hell, Fats had never even asked to be in the gang. Jeeter just showed up with him one day, gave him a cut, and started teaching him how to ride. The fat bastard never really learned, either. Banjo smirked to himself. A second of random thoughts, and then Banjo was on to more important things.
He walked around the darkened store, the skylights allowing in enough light to see fairly well. Banjo checked for any entrances or exits and made sure everything was closed up tight. He had to leave to run an errand and needed Jeeter and Fats out cold during his absence. He was sure the Costco was a magnet for survivors and didn’t want anyone getting into his home while he was away, but there was nothing more he could think to do.
Banjo was just itching to get his ass over to the van and reap unholy vengeance, but he decided he needed to make a few preparations first. He was already planning the attack in his head. He would amp up Jeeter and Fats with some white wonder and take a hit himself, and then they would all three come down like ancient gods from above. No one would stop them, there would be no mercy, and the only directive from Banjo was that the coon was his.
All in good time
, he thought,
all in good time
.
Back to the business at hand, bro
, he scolded himself. The glorious assault is for later. He had much to do this day and needed to get moving. These plans, should they pan out, would make delivering payback to the spook and his friends swift, savage, and sweet.
Savage
, he thought and chuckled at his word choice.
27.
The highway was clear, even though Cooper was moving through a densely populated area, because it was separated from the large neighborhoods by a twenty-foot-high concrete wall.
The thoroughfare was enormous, the largest Cooper had been on yet. It had multiple lanes, commuter lanes, shoulders, a wide median, and two tree-filled buffer zones. It had been a long while since he’d seen a soul, living or dead.
At the peak of an overpass, he stopped to look around. In contrast to the quiet and desolate highway, he saw several areas where massive hordes of the dead numbering in the thousands packed every available space. He hoped to avoid ever having to deal with such a large crowd. He pulled out the scope to have a closer look.
They seemed to be swarming one central target and while tightly packed in the center, they thinned out toward the edges. There was evidence of a few major fires, but they seemed to have burned out. The commercial districts and business parks were clear. There were signs of survivors on a few of the roofs; sheets painted with “HELP” were most common. As he scanned the area, he saw thousands of faces, but one made him backtrack, as it stood out from all the rest. It seemed to be the face of a living person, and it was.
Cooper lowered the scope and his head with it. He looked at his feet and exhaled in frustration. This time he knew the name of the person in need of rescue. Lisa sat in a minivan about a quarter of a mile from the highway, surrounded by thousands and thousands of deadheads.
This could be a funny story to tell later, if we both live,
he thought.
He jogged down the overpass, almost a quarter of a mile just to get to street level. At the bottom, right off the highway, was a large, fenced-in parking lot with about a dozen medical emergency vehicles parked in it. He decided one of them would make a perfect rescue vehicle. He found a large piece of cardboard first. He needed it to climb the high fence that was topped with a coil of barbed wire.
Laying the cardboard over the top of the fence prevented him from getting seriously injured, but a few of the barbs poked through the cardboard, snagging his clothes and scratching him.
Once in the yard, he started checking to see if the vehicles were locked. These vehicles were massive trucks, more like armored trucks, converted for the job of emergency rescue. He had checked about ten of them, and they were all locked, when he noticed one parked away from the others. One of the vehicles was closer to the building, a white piece of paper taped to the inside of the driver’s-side window. It was a maintenance checklist. The door was locked too. He tried the building, locked, so he used his baton to take out the glass, or tried to. It was thick tempered glass with wire mesh embedded in it. He pulled a pistol to shoot out the glass. He stood at an angle so the bullet wouldn’t ricochet straight back into him, pulled on his hood, turned his head, and closed his eyes. He fired three shots until he heard the glass hitting the concrete.
He stepped back and kicked at the glass, sending chunks of it clattering to the ground, but the embedded wire security mesh remained intact. He kicked harder, but the mesh did its job and held fast. He was momentarily frustrated but remembered the multi-tool he had picked up at the gun shop. It clipped through the wire in seconds, and he was inside. The keys for all the vehicles were on hooks behind a counter.
Ah crap
, Cooper thought as he stepped out of the office and was confronted by a corpse in a security guard uniform. It was tottering up the steps, but Cooper wasn’t worried. He had time to snap out the baton and brain it. It toppled back, and two more came from around the side of the vehicle. He raced to meet them. He had a feeling there were more on the way. The baton sliced into the skulls of two more security guards like they were butter. He heard the dragging of feet from the other side of the vehicle and was in the driver’s seat before he saw a fat security guard in the passenger window.
He started the ambulance. The beast of a vehicle had an engine to match. It was called a Triton v10, or so the chrome badge on the front fender said. He could feel the power when he pressed the gas and heard the throaty rumble. The fat security guard heard the engine roar when he was right in front of the vehicle and turned to look into the windshield.
“Sorry, bud,” Cooper said as he dropped the vehicle into gear and jabbed the pedal. The vehicle shot forward, and Fatty dropped from view as he went under it.
Cooper drove to the main street that ran under the overpass and took a right. Soon he was plowing through bodies. The
thunk, thunk, thunk
of skulls hitting the hood was almost relaxing at this point. The heavy vehicle barely registered the bumps as it drove over bodies.
He had to slow down after a bit as the bodies thickened. Rolling over too many of them at once caused the ambulance to buck uncomfortably and the wheels to spin. As they thickened, he was worried he wouldn’t make it to Lisa and would only succeed in getting himself trapped in the same predicament she was in. He kept pushing on, slowly as possible, as this allowed the bodies to get pushed to the side by the bumper instead of having all of them go under the ambulance.
He pushed on until he came up to the intersection. Lisa’s face was shocked and happy as she waved at Cooper, Ana was leaning over and waving too. He pulled up as close as he could next to the minivan and rolled down the window. The dead couldn’t squeeze between the two vehicles, but they were trying, and the vehicles were rocking.
Lisa rolled down the window halfway. “We’re here to rescue you.” She smiled.
Cooper just smiled. After he took a look at the minivan, he knew he couldn’t get the girls out safely in the intersection.
“Look, I’m going to push your vehicle out of here. Look for a place where you can pull in and get out safely. I have no idea what that might look like.”
“I have a idea,” Ana said. “Start pushing us.”
Cooper backed the ambulance and positioned it right behind the van. A few of the dead wouldn’t get out of the way, so he had to push with them in between vehicles. They didn’t seem to notice that they were getting smashed and ground to pieces. The powerful engine had no trouble pushing the smaller vehicle forward.
Ana steered as Cooper pushed for a few long blocks. Then suddenly she cut the wheel. The minivan coasted into a gas station, and she aimed for the car wash. She coasted into the tunnel as Cooper raced to the other side before the dead could get there.
The girls came out of the tunnel at the same time, just as Cooper was opening one of the rear doors. Ana was at the vehicle in a flash, grabbing Cooper’s hand as she placed a foot on the bumper, and hopped lightly up and inside. Lisa was only about halfway. The second door opened, and both he and Ana were waiting with arms ready to pull Lisa in.
A moan came from nearby and startled them. Cooper thought the area was clear, but a corpse was coming from around the corner of the car wash. It was covered with thick black mud, as if it had been lying in a puddle. It came at Lisa.
Cooper hopped down to help, but Lisa saw it coming. She turned to face the zombie, not sure what she was going to do. She needed to learn to deal with these things. An arm shot past her, and the zombie’s head split in the middle. A chunk of putrid flesh hit her cheek.
“That was too close,” she said as she turned.
“Yeah, almost got you.” Cooper held his baton at the ready. He thought he heard more coming.
“No, I mean that was too close,” Lisa pointed at the gore on her cheek, “to my mouth.”
Ana was there with a large piece of torn sheet from the vehicle. She gave it to Lisa to wipe her face. Cooper grabbed an edge and wiped his baton clean and collapsed it. Two more mud-covered zombies came from around the car wash.
“Crap, man, I just cleaned this thing.” He snapped it open and went at the large black figure and split its head. It dropped like a sack. He whipped the baton over at the smaller of the two mud-covered figures. The baton made a loud clack and didn’t penetrate the skull. The zombie kept coming. Cooper was so certain he would drop it he was totally unprepared for the attack.
The deadhead grabbed his shoulders and latched on. They had amazing strength, and it hurt as its dead fingers dug into his shoulders. He was too close to use the baton or kick the zombie away. He pushed it with both hands against its rib cage. He heard a cracking as the zombie pulled harder, straining to get its mouth on the food before it.
Suddenly the corpse’s ribs cracked and gave way. Cooper’s hands went into the chest cavity. He could feel the jagged edges of broken bone, the organs slipping over his fingers, and black fluid running down his arms. The corpse was in his face, inches away, hissing and clicking its teeth. Cooper kept pushing as the zombie pulled. With great alarm, he felt the ribs in the rear of the corpse giving way.
Cooper was about to drop to the ground on top of it and try to get away, when suddenly it stopped moving. The corpse went limp and dropped to the ground. Cooper backed up.
Lisa held one of his guns and let it drop back on its tether. “There’s more coming. We have to go.”
Cooper looked over and saw a lot more coming. The zombies were all crawling from a large pipe that opened into a deep ditch. The ditch was filling with them, and they had a difficult time getting out of the slippery mud. A few had escaped already, and as the ditch filled it looked like more would follow, using their fellow corpses as stepping stones.
Back in the vehicle, Cooper took the wheel. “Thanks for saving my life, by the way,” he said to Lisa as he maneuvered the large vehicle back onto a path for the 101.
“I kind of owed you. I still owe you.”
He and the girls got caught up, and a few minutes later he was rolling toward an overpass. He was going slowly because the dead were getting much thicker. He was slowly pushing them away, rolling many over. He suddenly stopped and turned off the engine.
“What are you doing,” Ana asked from the rear of the van. Neither girl wanted to be in the passenger seat, so close to the window where the dead beat and slapped the glass.
“I thought I heard something, an engine, maybe motorcycles.” They sat quietly, and he heard the sound a time or two more. Loud sounds could bounce off the large glass buildings and seem to come from somewhere else, but as they listened the dead started moving as one, away from them and toward the highway.
A few moments later, they could hear rumbling in the distance. As it grew louder, the dead grew more agitated. They were streaming away from the vehicle and toward the sound.
Quickly, the rumbling turned to a loud roar that continued to grow louder ever second. There were several motorcycles racing down the highway. The dead weren’t heading straight for the overpass, but toward the noise, which was coming from the right. As they poured between buildings and all but disappeared, Cooper waited for things to clear then started the ambulance. A few of the dead turned toward him, but the deafening roar was still the main attraction for a vast majority of them.