Authors: Keith C. Blackmore
The minutes went by, every second lethal and demoralizing, like the flirtatious smile of one’s mate aimed at another. Chairs squeaked, and he heard them get up from the table and saw a shadow behind the window. For a second, fear gripped him.
Fingers pulled the blind down then allowed them up.
Wallace relaxed.
But he tensed up once more when the lights winked out, dreading the next few moments.
He heard noises then, perking his ears, as either Collie or Gus retired to the end of the motor home, to the king-size bed lying beyond those walls. The other crawled up into the bunk above the driver’s seat.
Then… nothing.
A tsunami of relief gushed through Wallace. It lasted only a few seconds, however.
He could tell she liked him.
Wallace remained motionless in the dark, becoming one with it, and felt the terrible ache that all souls experienced at one time or another in their lives.
And final days.
Collie and Gus got up at seven in the morning from their respective beds and assembled at the kitchen table. They breakfasted quietly on dried cereal without the milk and shared a Mason jar of homemade vegetable soup that Collie had received from the townsfolk she protected. After eating, they lumbered outside to better appreciate the cold weather and the overcast sky. The blocked highway could be better seen, and the knots of unmoving cars and trucks below seemed to thin out in the distance.
“Morning,” Wallace greeted them both as he shuffled around the rear of their motor home. Collie and Gus nodded in return, and Gus couldn’t help but watch that slow, steady walk of his rescuer.
Wallace’s visor was down and stared back. “My fly down or something?”
“Uh, no, no, you’re good,” Gus sputtered. “You’re good. Really. Uh, sorry.”
“You get everything last night?” Collie asked, not paying attention to the exchange.
“Filled up what I could,” Wallace reported. “Quiet night.”
“What time did you turn in?” Gus asked, wanting in on the conversation.
“When I was tired.”
“Didn’t see the time?”
Wallace regarded him coldly. “No.”
“Ollie keeps his own hours,” Collie explained as she studied the lumpy padding of cloud covering the sky. “He’s the night shift, you could say. Watching our backs while we sleep.”
“Oh.” Gus thought that was a great thing. “So when do you sleep?”
“When I have to,” Wallace stated and wandered to the overpass rail. Collie followed and Gus hesitantly joined.
“Gonna have to back outta here. Won’t be too much of an ass pain,” Collie observed.
“Not for you.”
She regarded Wallace with a questioning eye long enough for Gus to see concern on her ravaged face. She wiped at her nostrils and studied the lay of the land. “The next question, then. Where do we go from here?”
“There are some tire tracks in the grass about a quarter klick back from the overpass ramp behind us,” Wallace informed her. “We missed them last night.”
“Cars?” Collie faced the soldier.
“Yeah.” Wallace led them to the rail on the south side and pointed, revealing a rough trail about a hundred meters or so back. A small line of cars had crushed the cold grass, leaving a trail in the small fields surrounding the overpass––easy to see from their vantage point once revealed. The trail turned off the highway and looped around the knot of the overpass, avoiding the unmoving traffic, and Gus lost sight of it farther up the highway, where tall firs grew nearer the road. He assumed the trail reconnected with the highway just past the worst of the clutter.
“See? They drove off the highway,” Wallace explained as he pointed. “Across the field, up over the east lane, then down into that field, before linking up with the road underneath us farther on up, well past all that garbage and continuing onward. About three trucks, I’d say.”
“How do you know they’re trucks?” Gus asked.
“Tires and wheelbase,” Wallace answered in that stoned tone of his. “Two or three days old, so the timeline’s right.”
Collie glanced at them both. “Then let’s roll.”
Gus went to the rear of Wallace’s RV and guided the soldier backing his motor home and attached pickup down the overpass’s slope. Gus did the same for Collie, admiring the way they both handled their rigs and the trailing loads. Both operators aimed the RVs toward the beaten path. Once they were off the ramp, Gus walked back to the side door and met Collie as she stepped out and looked across the field to the northeast, fixing upon the corner of the fir forest. She held up a hand.
“Listen,” she said.
“What?”
“Just listen.”
Frowning, Gus did and heard nothing other than Wallace’s engine idling. Collie stepped away from her RV and gestured for Wallace to kill his engine. He complied, and Collie nodded for Gus to try again.
“Still nothing.”
“Follow me.” She went to the ladder affixed to the motor home’s rear. She climbed to the top, and Gus tried not to look at the camouflage design covering her ass, suspecting Wallace wouldn’t be pleased. Still, it was hard
not
to do as she hauled herself up and over the roof, her camos pulling tight.
Gus quickly looked at the ladder and concentrated on climbing.
Once on the roof, he stood next to Collie, who pointed to a section of tall grass. The tire tracks cutting through the overgrown sward made Gus wonder how they missed something so obvious in the first place. The rest of the grassy expanse swayed in the breeze.
Except…
Gus squinted. There was no breeze.
Yet in places, the tall grass moved.
“What is that?” he muttered, straining to see.
“You haveta ask?” Collie chided.
Then he saw, and even though he was sick of the dead, they still managed to surprise him at times.
The nearest violent ripple reached the last thin curtain of grass bordering the truck-made trail. The grass collapsed outward as a discolored hand pushed through the yellow stalks. A head oozed out from the wall of grass. The locomotion of the rest of the gimp’s body pushed its skull into the dirt to a point where Gus thought its spine might buckle free of its shoulders. The corpse crawled into daylight, one arm flopping along weakly as if the zombie had already taken damage to the head.
Even at that distance, from the top of the motor home, Gus managed to see how the face turned toward him and Collie.
“Jesus,” Gus moaned. “Do we have to…”
Watch?
The word died in his throat upon beholding the breadth of the undead charge. The ripples in the field, each and every one, left broken creases in the unassuming grass, and the deadheads at ground level crawled forward at best possible speed.
“They probably caught a whiff of us last night,” Collie said, an eerie ghost of a smile on her face. “Don’t worry. We’ll get through, but Jesus. You haveta just marvel at what they are at times. What they’re capable of.”
More dead things pushed through the edges of the grassy trail and seeped into the light with all the grace of pustules bursting under pressure, resembling hunters or soldiers wearing ghillie suits. They shifted, pausing only long enough to sense the aging trail they crept upon, before slinking toward the highway as if escaping a tar pit.
“I’d say,” Collie continued, “they were lying dormant out there, somewhere in the grass, with no legs to walk on and nothing to tear into. Just regular old meatbags, lying around and waiting for a whiff of something to come along. Or a noise. Hell, they might’ve heard those trucks as they passed through here
two or three days ago
and only now are getting here, just in time to say hello to us. An entire mob of them.”
She noticed Gus’s discomfort for the first time. “You know they can’t hurt us now.”
“Hm? Huh? What’s that now?”
“They can’t hurt us. They’re fucking
ankle
biters, if anything. I had more than a couple reach out and try and grab my foot, and all it took was a kick to put an end to that—and not a hard kick, either. They can still infect us, of course, but look at them. They’re like human-size caterpillars.”
Gus didn’t appreciate the simile.
“We’ll get moving in a second,” she assured him. “Just want to see how many are crawling through the grass. You don’t see this much anymore. Not on this scale. Or maybe I just haven’t come across it in a while.”
“Yeah, I think you might’ve missed a few,” Gus said, distracted, pulling on his beard.
“They freak you out?”
“No, oh, no.” Then he admitted, “But they do make me nervous at times.”
Collie snorted and went back to watching the advance. Some lines deeper in the field slowly curved south toward them with all the speed of tiger slugs, dredging themselves free of their graves. She’d started talking again, but Gus wasn’t listening, mesmerized by the number of bodies pulling themselves through the grass.
“––a tidal force about them.” Collie finished when a horn blasted, startling Gus and breaking him free from the hypnotic pull of the approaching dead. Collie pursed her lips, not unpleasantly, and scowled at the motor home at their backs.
She’s not happy about something.
Then the scowl was gone.
“He’s probably right,” she said and climbed down from the roof. Gus followed. They got into the RV. Collie deposited herself in the driver’s seat and started the machine. Gus jumped into the passenger side, pulled his door closed and locked it.
“Strap yourself down,” she said. “Not sure if this rig’s rated for off-road or not.”
“But you’re gonna try, right?”
“Oh, fuck yeah.”
She steered the motor home off the pavement and into the tall grass, keeping on the previous path already made by passing tires. The front bumper bit into the edge of the field with a teeth-rattling, gullet-raising bump and jostle. Gus leaned forward in his seat, eyes wide at the decomposing faces flashing in the grass––just before the dead went under the RV. The machine rolled over the zombies as if they were crusty pillows. Bones snapped and clattered off the chassis, and the path became even rockier.
“Like driving over fuckin’ beach rocks!” Collie shouted and hollered in pure, adrenaline-fueled pleasure. Beyond the dash and the face of the Winnebago, horrid faces lifted as the machine rattled over and squashed them. A few arms rose, flailing at the monstrosity flattening their ranks, before being squashed themselves.
“Not so bad,” Collie yelled.
The start of a disbelieving smile spread across Gus’s face. Lord help him, he was
enjoying
the ride.
“Hold on,” she shouted.
Just ahead, the cracked, gray lick of pavement loomed, gravel having sprayed to the north where the previous trucks tore off once on asphalt. The motor home hit the soft shoulder, and he was slammed forward. For an instant, Gus thought they weren’t going to make it. The vehicle was too much of a boat and the incline too steep, but then he crashed back into his seat, and the world tilted dangerously.
Collie turned the wheel hard to the right, howling like a hillbilly on a year’s worth of ecstasy.
Then the ride smoothed out.
“More fun than fuckin’!” She laughed and put her foot down.
The RV responded and jumped forward in a burst of raw power. The trailer behind bucked and
whumped
over the shoulder and followed right along.
It took Gus a second to realize he was laughing as well.
His laugh subsided, and he hurriedly checked his side mirror.
Rising from their wake like a metallic whale came Wallace’s RV. The front of the machine hit and rode up and over the shoulder in a spray of crushed stone, clearing it with effort.
“He made it,” Gus said, eyeing the vehicle.
“No doubt in my mind,” Collie declared as she focused on the empty road ahead. “That boy always makes it.”
Gus glanced over and saw a sad sheen of pride touching her warrior’s profile.
Then he looked ahead, feeling oddly at peace for the first time in days.
The motor homes rolled north, past wild meadows and trees shedding their exhausted red foliage. The pastures caught Gus’s interest in particular, remembering how the deadheads had slipped under the motor home’s wheels.
“What?” Collie asked while monitoring her speed.
“Wonder where the hell they all came from.”
“The zombies back there?”
“Yeah.”
Collie smiled. “The dead travel, my friend. Haven’t you realized that yet?”
Gus supposed he had. “Forgot, I guess.”
Captain Morgan rested in a cup holder, the leather twine fallen around the shoulders of the bottle. Gus reached down and adjusted him, making the officer a little more comfortable.
“Wallace and I once drove down the Trans-Labrador Highway,” Collie stated, glancing over her camouflaged shoulder. “Middle of nowhere. This was about two years after it all went to hell. We’d pull over and camp about half a klick off-road at times. Even more middle of nowhere, right? Not even the odd picnic ground or nothing. I got up to take a leak one night, left my sidearm in the truck––first and last time ever, I might add––and while I was squatting, I hear a splashing coming from the nearby river. Thought it was a bear or a moose or elk or even a fucking crazy-assed monster squirrel. It walked that walk, y’know? Would take a step, stop for a second, and then take another step—like it was strolling—and I tell you, nothing more unsettling than taking a leak in the woods and hearing noises coming closer. Anyway, I finished and just waited––another mistake, but I did have my knife on me. Couple minutes later, I hear the thing coming through the woods, branches all snapping and breaking off. No secrecy there. And this fucking Moe comes waltzing toward me. Five hundred kilometers from… nothing, but there it was, and there
I
was, nearly caught with my pants down.”
A red SUV appeared on the right, nosefirst into a ditch, bright cherry ass sticking up into the air, side door open and driver missing.
“Couple of dirt roads coming up,” Collie noted. “I’ll slow down. You look on that side. See if you notice any fresh tracks. Disturbed crushed stone. That sorta thing.”