The End: A Post Apocalyptic Thriller (10 page)

She just looked back at him as confused as he was.

A zombie lunged out from the shadows beside the house and landed on top of Eric. The creature wrestled Eric to the ground, snarling and biting. His back to the floor, he had his arms out trying to keep the thing’s teeth at bay. Both Eric’s and the attacker’s shadows stretched across the driveway from the headlights. With the headlights beaming down right in front of them, Eric could see everything perfectly clear.

The zombie’s skin was white as a ghost and tight to the bone. Its cheeks caved into its face, along with its eyes. Both of the creature’s lips looked as if they had been torn off, or even eaten off, revealing most of its teeth, and a good amount of its gums. The corpse’s gum line was discolored. No longer its natural red, they looked puffed up, a grayish purple. Blood was caked around its mouth and chin. Its thin frail arms reached out at him, Eric held onto them both without much trouble.

The zombie must have been small to begin with, because it didn’t seem to weigh much at all. It was more being startled that brought Eric to the driveway than the actual attack. With its arms stretched out, Eric saw that it was missing an index finger and thumb on one hand. It didn’t seem to be bleeding. The area around the flesh was a puffy gray and red. The blood was clotted, preventing it from bleeding out. Then again, this thing could have been dead long enough that it already bled out everything it had.

Eric heard the sound of the passenger door open and footsteps headed in his direction from behind the car. The steps passed him and kept on going. While still wrestling with the small zombie, Eric caught a glance of Kent in the yard swinging his crowbar.

The frail zombie flew from atop Eric and onto the driveway beside him. As Cynthia’s aluminum bat came crashing down, her legs in a wide stance practically straddling Eric, he flinched covering his face with his left arm. A cold, wet fluid splattered across Eric’s arm and chest as the bat slammed into the ground beside him. After only a few swings, the bat made a pinging sound as cement met aluminum. It had only taken two solid hits for the zombie’s rotting skull to collapse, shattering in two. The remaining hit from her bat cleared the zombie’s skin, bone, and brain colliding with the driveway beneath it.

“Fuck, me,” Eric spat as Cynthia helped him to his feet in front of the El Camino.

Kent still stood in the yard, swinging his metal club furiously, attacking the lingering zombies that had finally started to make their way up the road. Several other zombies began to gather from the other end of the street as well, making their way toward the Micson household.

“Let’s go,” Eric shouted dashing around the open driver side door.

Kent quickly turned and made for the car. The three of them jumped into the vehicle, slamming both doors simultaneously. Eric gripped the steering wheel, and hit the gas, taking them out past the driveway into the street.

More than a dozen zombies littered the street in front of the house, something Eric was unable to see before from the garage, the street pitch black, no streetlights to brighten them.

As the car barreled down the neighboring streets toward town, Eric frantically took turns left and right, speeding past stop sign after stop sign, the gas gauge well past
E
. The car slammed into a wandering zombie as it reached out for the oncoming car—sending the zombie barreling over the hood of the car into the back bed. As the zombie stood up in the back of the car, it instantly lost its balance and fell out of the car, smashing into the road.

The gas light suddenly lit up, getting their attention as they flew down the street at nearly 50 mph, passing house after house with not a single sign of life.

4

The Rhino Runner tore down Highway 231 southbound at a steady 65 miles per hour, which was saying a lot for the oversized armored bus. The two-man extraction team consisted of Megan Linkouscie and Luke Beal.

Megan was a spitfire of a woman with more skeletons in her closet than Saddam Hussein. She had served two terms in Iraq, dealing in civilian and VIP transport in and out of the Green Zone, without a single fatality to count against her during each term. That is if you are only counting the lives she was commissioned to protect. The truth was, she had more kills than skeletons. Her favorite weapon of choice had been the M-4 carbine compact rifle, with its variable selective fire rate and lightweight casing, never left her side.
It’s my visa
, she would always say, knowing she could hold her own in any situation.

Luke wasn’t quite as cocky as Megan; it wasn’t part of his personality. He had an inborn air of confidence. He had worked one term in Iraq alongside the infamous Linkouscie, transporting civilian contractors, military personnel, and the press, generally from one base to another. Although Luke was a natural marksman, he usually took the wheel when handling missions involving the Rhino Runner, leaving Megan to handle the odds and ends of each extraction. Of course, that had been years ago. The Rhino Runner they piloted was military surplus. These vehicles weren’t meant to be driven on American highways. But with the rise of the undead and the situation becoming critically chaotic both politically and globally, they had been sent in to help the Tallahassee base contain the spread. But they both knew better. Something this viral would eventually be uncontainable, and quite possibly already was well beyond the borders they were sent in to help protect.

“Slow it down some! You’re going to need to veer right onto Fifteenth Street in a second.” Megan sat in the passenger seat bouncing up and down, pointing at the road ahead of them, as the massive civilian cargo bus barreled down the highway.

Even though they were both equal in rank, Luke didn’t mind that she barked orders at him. He actually liked it, even when in front of other officers. Sure, he caught some flak for it, but it didn’t bother him because he knew where Megan’s heart was. And at the end of the day, he was the one who reaped the rewards. Luke was the one who held the cards both on the job and in the dark.

They had been a serious item for the last eight years. The trash-talk attitude Megan had toward Luke in public was their attempt at keeping up politically correct work-related appearances. They both found that the closer they became, the smoother the operations went on the job. Funny thing was everyone knew about their relationship. No one cared. Not even their commanding officer. The Commander knew a good team when he saw one.

With the Rhino Runner now racing down 15
th
street after veering right, Megan scanned the GPS tracker to determine the next turn they might need to take.

“I think we’re going to be on this road a while,” said Megan, eyes examining the gloomy city streets as the scenery rapidly changed from an emptiness of the murky highway to a ghost town of congestion. Wrecked cars and abandoned storefronts all without power sat in wait, ghouls lingering in its wake. As the armored bus drove deeper into the city toward the Panama City Beach Hathaway Bridge, a presence of the living dead became more and more manifest.

Zombies staggered in the streets and in abandoned parking lots, all turning their gazes toward the oncoming vehicle, high beams lighting up the night as it rolled down the winding road. 15
th
Street was dead; Panama City was dead. It was exactly what they had expected to see and had seen for the last few days.

In the still of night under the half-lit moon, the bus slowly came to a halt, parking in the middle of the street. The bridge was in sight. The bus headlights revealed what they didn’t hope to find. So far, the zombies they had passed along the way had been relatively spread out and low in numbers, but this was no longer the case.

“It never can just be an
in and out OP
, can it?” Megan said looking over at Luke behind the steering wheel.

“Well, shit. What do you suppose we do now? I haven’t seen so many in one place like this before,” Luke replied.

“Ha… You remember when we escorted the U.S. Secretary of Defense across the Baghdad International Airport and the confinements?”

Luke smirked, nodding, gripping the wheel a little tighter. “Yes, but don’t forget we had two Humvees with us. Let’s also not forget that one of those vehicles blew the hell up.”

“Oh come on, Luke. You act like there’s going to be landmines on that fucking bridge.”

Megan and Luke sat there, bus idling, the engine’s hum lightly roared at a steady rate. Beyond the headlights, what they could see was unmistakable. An ocean of the dead slowly made their way across the bridge, most likely headed to the same destination as the Rhino Runner. Easily a couple hundred rotting corpses meandered across the manmade construct. There were so many of them it was hard to tell if the bridge was congested with vehicles too. With the way things had looked on their way in, it was more than likely going to be the case.

With more undead still pushing against the passing hoard that hadn’t made it onto the bridge yet, some attention toward the idling bus started to form. Several stragglers in the streets making their way to the bridge took notice of the Rhino Runner, quickly making a U-turn. Their moans and hissing helped attract the attention of several others as the inevitable trend began to take effect. A steadily growing mob of zombies trekked in their direction, features becoming clearer with each step forward as the bus lights beamed down on the growing crowd of putrid flesh and bones.

The milky-white gaze of a handful of zombies lit up from the headlights of the bus as they crept closer and closer to the idling vehicle. Megan and Luke glared into the eyes of death as the creatures slithered toward them and surrounded the front of the bus. The zombies’ torn flesh and bones visible. All hands stretched out ready to attack the people inside.

One zombie walked toward them, with only one hand outstretched, unlike the rest. The lights divulged its reason. It diligently kept hold of a severed limb. As it paced toward them, it instinctively refused to release the partially devoured arm.

Megan glanced at Luke again as they both witnessed in horrifying detail the atrocious mob falling upon them. Luke reached for the bus radio and clicked the receiver while holding it to his face. “Blue Bravo, this is Red Tango come in…”

Static, and silence.

“Blue Bravo, this is Red Tango come in… Over.”

The undead mob reached the vehicle pressing their bodies into it, beating and pushing against its sturdy hull. The bus shook violently from side to side.

“Blue Bravo, this is Red Tango, come in…”

More static, and silence.

“Red Tango to Blue Bravo, what’s your E.T.A?” the voice said.

*

Nothing had changed at the radio station. Gus, Willy, Seth, George, and Billy sat upstairs twiddling their thumbs, waiting for the extraction to happen. Seth had run out of cold beers by this time. Between him and Willy, they had both drunk a good eight or nine beers apiece.

Gus refused to have any alcohol, knowing that things were going to get a little hairy once the secondary team arrived. Gus originally didn’t feel it to be a good idea that anyone drink before getting back to the base, but Seth was persistent, with saying
Might as well drink up, don’t want to let them go to waste
.

Gus had also opted out on telling Willy not to drink, against his better judgment, but knew that he had taken Bo’s death a lot harder, so Gus let it slide.

Billy had fallen asleep on the floor surrounded by tons of open discs. He had decided to sift through almost every last record in the room, feeling the need to pick out the best song to listen to before they were rescued. This, of course, was only if Mr. Seth was willing to let him do all of the button pressing. He had fallen asleep before even picking out the song.

George stood by the window watching the steadily growing mob outside. “Hell,” he said.

“What?” Seth asked.

“They had to come from Hell,” George said with one hand in his pocket holding tightly to something.

“Ha… yeah, that and then some, old man,” Seth said slurring his words a little as he leaned over the empty mini fridge.

Willy had passed out on the couch in the same spot he had been laying when they first arrived upstairs.

“We’ve got another delay,” came the robotic monotone voice on the other end of Gus’ handset. Familiar grunts and hissing came from the background noise of the radio. Moans of the dead echoed beneath the static.

“Details,” Gus replied.

“We are approximately thirty clicks out but have a delay. There’s a mob of zombies who would like nothing better than peeling this vehicle open and eating us like sardines,” Luke said.

“Take your time. Don’t compromise the mission. Just be safe. I’ll inform the base of the delay,” Gus said.

“Roger that, Red Tango out.”

Gus immediately radioed in headquarters speaking directly with First Class Lieutenant Rob Foster. While he relayed details of the extraction delays, he couldn’t help but wonder what was in George’s pocket. The man had pulled it out eyeing it several times but had turned away from Gus preventing him from seeing it. Not only that, but the old goat kept fidgeting with it.

*

“You ready to light these mothers up?” Luke asked.