The afternoon was drifting into early evening, and I climbed onto the top of the cab of the combine, my watchtower position from before. I was irritated, but not surprised, that three of my Whites climbed with me, including the shapely female I'd noticed when I was back at the park in town.
The cab’s roof was plenty big for one person to stand on. With four it wasn’t crowded, but I didn’t appreciate the closeness of my Whites. All I’ll say about that is the absence of toothpaste and toothbrushes, coupled with a diet of carrion and whatnot, didn’t have a positive effect on oral hygiene. Okay, I’ll say two more things: bathroom habits and showers. Two underappreciated benefits of modern civilization.
I was looking to the north, seeing trampled dirt, stomped grasses, piles and smears of human shit, and stragglers, some by themselves and some in groups. It was pretty clear in which direction the horde had gone.
I felt hands on my shoulders, rubbing their way down my back. Then they were on my butt. Instinctively, I spun around and pushed. It was the shapely girl from the park. She stumbled back and bumped a White who should have been paying attention. He got knocked off balance and fell over the side.
It wasn’t an exceedingly long way to the ground from up on top of the combine, maybe twelve or fifteen feet, definitely a survivable height. But the White wasn’t ready for the fall, and when he tumbled, he ended up landing on his head. His body crumpled over on top of him.
That got the attention of some of my posse, who’d been loitering around the combine after we filled it up with diesel.
The fallen guy didn’t move.
It didn’t matter whether he was dead. It was pretty clear to me from the way the others were closing in on him that he was going to be dinner.
The shapely girl reached a greedy hand for my genitals. I swatted her away, scowled, and grunted. She stepped back, and I thought about giving her a shove over the edge, but that suddenly seemed cruel, at least for her.
Hell, we were practically in a relationship.
But she was a beast; a hungry monster in a hot-chick wrapper with poor oral hygiene and a body stink that guaranteed any inappropriate temptation wouldn’t get far.
Still, she had been beautiful, once.
I climbed down from the combine while my posse started feeding on their dead brother. I walked twenty or thirty paces out front and gave the cab a long look. All the glass was tinted to near black. I couldn’t see inside, which meant the Whites couldn’t either, so I’d be safe during the day. At night, it might be a different story, with the LCD screen lighting the cab from the inside. There were plenty of flood lights mounted for illuminating crops to be harvested. Maybe with those blinding the Whites at night, they might not notice the glass-enclosed cab. When they attacked the Big Green Bug—and they surely would—maybe they’d focus their efforts on the metal parts they could easily reach.
That was a shallow hope. I knew they’d eventually come after the glass. I just hoped as my green death machine chewed through the horde I could find Mark and shred him before I had to abandon my plan and run for my life.
Sleep. That’s what I was thinking of when I got myself back into the cab and seated in its comfortable seat. I’d skipped one night already. Could I pull a second? The alternative was to sleep in the cab and let the naked horde get a full day farther ahead of me. Would I run out of fuel before catching up? If that happened, would I then burn another day on refueling, only to find myself two days behind?
Wash. Rinse. Repeat.
Sleep was a luxury I’d have to forgo. I needed to suck it up through another long night and try to catch the white fuckers sleeping in a field again. If I could, I might run down thousands before they realized I was something besides a nightmare. And I might catch Mark in whatever comfy, warm place he had lain for the night.
I guzzled the Dr. Pepper that I'd left in the cab, and as the caffeine and sugar did their magic, I said, “Fuck it.”
I clicked on the glow plugs, and a buzz somewhere back in the engine compartment caught the attention of every White in my posse.
They stared at the Big Green Bug but made no move to attack.
Good for me.
When the glow plug indicator light told me the engine was ready, I cranked the starter, and the diesel fired right up. A nice surprise in what was turning into a string of victories.
The Whites around the machine attacked. Ineffectively, but still, they were a worry.
I needed to get the combine moving. Whether I got any of the spinning machinery working on the harvesting head was a secondary concern. Even with relatively slow movement came a degree of safety. Whites could only chase so far.
Or maybe they could. Who cares? I was already committed.
I flipped something—not sure what—and rows of lights illuminated an acre in daylight. Out in the field, Whites blinked, shaded their eyes, and looked away.
The combine started to roll forward.
“Ha, ha, motherfuckers!”
Without trying, I ran over my first White, apparently one too stupid to run away from the coming sunrise of the Big Green Bug. I didn’t even feel the body hit the harvesting head.
Dull thumps announced the arrival of Whites jumping on the harvester from the sides. That was expected and was a problem I could do only one thing about. Move and harvest.
I played with controls both on the console and the joystick. The combine had four subsystems all driven by its powerful diesel: the drive system that kept my Green Bug rolling, the corn cutters on the harvesting head which I was trying to get spinning, the thresher that moved the harvested corn from the cutting head and separated the grain from the chaff, and the offloading system which transferred grain out of the bin through the huge pipe on top and into a following truck. It seemed straightforward enough—grain went into the bin on the back of the harvester, and the chaff flew out the back of the combine. All controlled from the comfy seat in the Green Bug’s cab.
Did I say it didn’t seem that complicated? If I did, I was lying.
Nevertheless, the harvesting blades spun into action.
Let the mayhem begin.
I accelerated.
Damn!
The combine lumbered along a lot faster than expected.
As I quickly learned, though, I didn’t need to chase Whites. Those out front were drawn to the noise and lights. They attacked.
The first attacker from the front leaped at my combine death machine. I don't know what his goal was, but from where I sat, it looked like he was trying to dive into the spinning saw blades. He disintegrated in a puff of red haze and flying bits of gore that both fascinated and horrified me.
Again, my horribly wonderful death beast didn’t so much as hiccup as it digested that first brave White.
The tenor of the motor changed as chunks of bone and wet muscle flowed up the flume and was sprayed into the storage bin in the back. I flipped a switch and turned on the motor that drove the auger that shunted grain into the boom for offloading grain.
I figured if I offloaded the dead Whites as they came on board, I’d scatter behind me warm, bite-sized morsels of their tastiness for any infected who might be coming up behind me. Surely, from their perspective, those bits would have to be a more appealing meal than whatever might be hiding inside the giant, noisy monster rolling away.
I tried a turn and was surprised by the tight arc of the Big Green Bug’s turning radius, and I found the machine aimed back along the meandering path I’d just driven. Illuminated in my acre-lights—yeah, my new name for them—a good part of my posse was on their hands and knees in the shredded debris of other Whites. Others ran around in aimless loops, apparently overwhelmed with mental inputs and unable to come to a decision on what to do next. Some ran at the combine’s noise, lights, and cutting blades. Some watched, maybe too terrorized to move as the Big Green Sunrise God ate their friends.
I pointed my invincible White harvester at the densest bunch of kneeling Whites and accelerated. With twelve tons of momentum rolling forward, I spotted Touchy-Feely girl in my path, staring. She was one of the frozen, not reacting.
She didn’t run away, neither did she charge. She made no motion with her hands to wave me away, as an unexpected thought occurred to me. Maybe she wasn’t a brutal monster. Maybe she was a slow one like Russell, or maybe one even a little smarter than that.
Was it possible?
After all this time, could any tag-alongs still be alive in a horde of monsters?
The blades cut into her ankles. Her face contorted agonizingly for the briefest of seconds before she was eaten by the harvester in a spray of blood and white skin.
I leaned over and puked on the floor.
The combine scooted along at a pretty decent clip. I couldn’t find a speedometer on any of the display screens, so my speed was a guess. Maybe it was a number not important to the harvest. I had information on all kinds of other things: yield, grain to chaff ratio, moisture, and a whole list of things I didn’t understand or give a shit about. A harvest of actual crops was likely never to be in my future. I only had to worry about Whites and how best to adjust the various parts of the Big Green Bug to keep it from clogging when I finally found my crop of Whites.
Unfortunately, the naked horde didn’t stick to the roads while traveling. I kept finding myself rolling across fields, only to be deterred by fences—or the remnants of fences. I didn’t dare run those over. The last thing I wanted was for my cutting blades to be tangled with barbed wire. I continually had to backtrack to find a gate wide enough to get my monster through. Each time I had to find my way back to the horde’s path, which was never hard to spot.
If a mile-wide glacier had been dragged across the landscape, it might not have looked much worse. Trees were still standing but the lower branches were mostly broken away. Nearly all other vegetation was stomped flat. The dirt itself was damp with human waste spread and tilled by countless running feet. Houses looked like they’d been through a tornado, all glass broken, doors gone. Vehicles didn't usually fare better though my Green Bug had gone ignored when the horde had settled in around it for a night.
So in spite of keeping a decent speed, I felt like I was making slow progress.
At least I was getting practice on running the Big Green Bug over Whites, of which there were plenty, all naked, some lone stragglers, some in groups. Altogether, I may have run down hundreds or I may have killed thousands. Nevertheless, I was getting frustrated.
My fuel was down to about a third full. My head tortured me with irritating pains. My joints throbbed. I was tired to the point of dozing behind the combine’s controls. And with every mile I rolled, I had less nighttime left. At dawn, the naked horde would move again. If I didn’t catch them before they mobilized, I feared I might never.
I turned off the paved road I was following and rode up a dirt road incline, bouncing the big machine over uneven railroad tracks that paralleled the street. Rolling down on the other side, I drove into a field of dried maize about four feet tall. The combine cut the plants on the sides of the road and ran them through the Green Bug’s metallic guts. I kept an eye out ahead for a swath where the maize was stomped down. That would mark the path the horde had taken through the field.
Heads started popping up above the crops on both sides of the road. Stragglers. Or so I figured. I’d been running them down all night.
Then I heard something over the sound of the big engine and spinning machinery.
More Whites came to attention, head and shoulders above the maize.
The sound became a scream, a thousand screams piled on top of each other, a hundred thousand wails.
Maybe a frightening million, with a howl that made me shudder at the inadequacy of my Green Bug.
The great swath of flat crops I’d been searching for confused me when I saw it, because it undulated with what I thought for a second were waves on a wide river, but materialized into white heads, screaming mouths, and clenching grasps, all converging on me.
I’d found the naked horde, and they had found me.
The fastest of the Whites fighting to be the first to get their teeth into the owner of acre-lights and rumbling diesel disintegrated in a spray of blood and severed limbs. A red haze fogged the air and tainted it with the stench of ripped intestines and torn stomachs.
The combine lurched.
I revved the diesel higher, slowed my forward speed, and put more power to the harvesting head with all of its spinning blades and thrashing steel.
The sound of bowling balls being dumped down a water slide startled me as vibrations rattled my Big Green Bug. It had to be bony chunks of Whites and skulls going through the auger that moved corn into the bin on the back.
Blood and flesh flew in all directions as the Green Bug chewed through the horde.
Whites were trying to climb the sides of my green monster, pounding their fists and beating their skulls. They wanted inside, bad. Everything was slick with blood, and the Whites slipped off. I felt them—barely—get caught in the tracks and go under the wheels.
Racket from the back of the combine grew to a dismaying combination of clangs and groans. The engine strained under the load.
Could these fuckers kill my Green Bug?
Did I underestimate them again?
Flirting with panic, I fidgeted with my array of controls.
Necessary! What was necessary?
I slowed some more.
Speed was unimportant to me as long as I didn’t stop.
The only other thing I needed was to keep my cutting blades and thrashers spinning.
Clear the head.
Use your brain.
Calm.
The Green Bug was still inching forward. Whites were still dying.
As brilliant as the combine’s designers were, the thing just hadn’t been engineered to harvest a field full of skinny Whites. It was trying to thresh grain out of the bony, bloody flesh coming through the system and to offload the goodies out the back.
I needed to divert the massive engine’s power away from those subsystems, but I was moving too fast over the controls to truly understand them.
Some things I could power directly. That was clear. Others seemed only to be controlled through setting power ratios for maximizing crop yields.
Dammit!
If I couldn’t turn off the thresher and off-loader, I needed to find the hundred-percent chaff setting. Yeah. That’s what I needed. Where the hell was that?
The whole combine started to shake. A circumstance that wasn’t conceivable until I rolled into the maw of my white nemesis.
I maxed the engine output and thought to look out the window, realizing I’d been completely absorbed in the machine’s controls, trying desperately to make all of those scary mechanical sounds go away.
Whites were fucking
everywhere
.
And what wasn’t a White trying to kill me was a part of a White that seconds before had been shredded by the spinning blades on the harvesting head.
The shuddering in the Green Bug intensified, with all the engine power trying to grind its way through so much bone.
It swayed and the attachments to the cutting head flexed.
Fuck!
How do I turn off the goddamn conveyor dragging the bodies into the thresher?
Oil burned somewhere and mixed in with the smell of shit and blood.
I toggled a switch. I flipped a button.
Behave, you damn Green Bug!
But they still died in numbers I saw, but couldn’t dare estimate.
Whites on the sides of the Green Bug had climbed on top of the cab. They went up on some instinct, thinking they'd find the driver of my great beast up there. None had yet figured out the secret of the dark tinted glass.
I guess.
What the fuck did I know?
A great groan preceded a screech of metal and something big banged deafeningly in my machine. The whole thing jerked hard to the left. If it wasn’t for the harvesting head sticking out so far on both sides, I think it would have turned over.
Big chunks of metal rang as they banged around in the Green Bug behind me. Vibrations rattled through everything. An anvil-shattering smash of steel on steel sent another jolt through the combine. Relative silence. Only the sound of the engine rumbled behind me as it revved higher.
Something in the threshing system had blown apart and whatever drive system connected it to the engine was no more. That was my guess.
The harvesting blades spun blindingly fast.
Amazed that the suffering machine hadn’t exploded in the violence behind me, I backed off on the engine power as I tried to save the Big Green Bug’s life.
For a moment, I was in control and grinding forward through bone and flesh.
A line of trees materialized through the haze of red.
The edge of the field.
I turned in as slow of an arc as I dared. I couldn’t surrender my momentum. I couldn’t get bogged down.
The smell of burning oil was getting stronger. A new worry.
Still, my cutting heads shredded, and Whites seemed more than willing to attack my monster from the wrong end.
I finished my turn and was heading across the field again.
Whites beat on my Green Bug with their puny fists and only succeeded in making a futile din.
My panic evaporated in a swell of confidence. I smiled wickedly at myself and shouted insults through the glass at all the stupid Whites who were dying under my creative cruelty.
I was Null Spot the Destroyer once again. Bringer of death. Reaper of white-ass zombie motherfuckers.
How many Whites was I killing? I tried to do a quick count of the number of Whites who could stand shoulder to shoulder in front of my murder-beast. I tried to guess how long it took to engulf a row before my blades tore into the next.
How many per minute?
How many minutes had I been shredding?
I knew I’d killed at least a thousand.
Ten thousand?
Twenty?
Oh, fuckin’ A, yes!
Now, where the fuck were Mark and his smart buddies?
An explosion jerked my combine and bounced me in my seat.
I looked at the wall of steel behind me as though it might reveal something.
Still, my beast rolled forward.
I discounted the noise as a fluke.
Two more pops shook the beast, and my screen flashed through a series of alerts. An alarm sounded inside the cab.
Uh, oh.
I looked out across the sea of Whites dripping in the blood of their brothers.
The beast’s smooth roll forward turned into a series of jerks.
Not good.
So not good.
Null Spot started to think he might be in trouble.