An Apocalypse Family (Book 1): Family Reunion (16 page)

“What?”

Thomas pointed toward the roof. “We can get up there and shoot the bastards.”

Between the bunk beds and the restroom was a hatch that led to the roof. “You won’t have much room up there, and be careful not to damage the solar panels, satellite dishes, or any other important-looking stuff up there,” Thomas told Harry as he climbed up the ladder.

He’d changed into a set of black Army ACUs, since he didn’t think his boxers were sufficient clothing for the occasion. A nylon rope was tied around his waist to make sure he wouldn’t fall off—or if he did, so they could reel him back in. Maddie was pissed because she wanted to be the one to go topside, but Harry told her there was no way in hell he was going to let her have all the fun.

He successfully made it onto the roof, and Maddie handed up one of the AR15s with holographic sights that she’d selected from her collection to bring on the trip. He also wore a utility vest with several thirty-round magazines shoved into various pockets made for that purpose.

“Wish me luck!” he said, and disappeared.

Harry had a radio with an earbud and throat mic on. “Can you hear me, Sugarbooger?” he transmitted.

“Yes, I can hear you, and cut the crap. This is serious,” Maddie replied. She and Thomas watched on the monitor as Harry carefully made his way toward the front of the coach.

The creatures continued their attack, shrieking and running at the coach. The zapper had deterred them, but once it had been turned off, they quickly resumed the battering. Once Harry was in place, he watched, trying to discern a pattern. He finally gave up and just picked one. He steadied his aim and gently squeezed the trigger until he felt the rifle buck against his shoulder. The bullet ran straight and true, hitting the thing center mass. It was quite anticlimactic; there was no massive trauma apparent, and the thing just fell to the ground and did not move.

Rather disappointed, Harry called over the radio, “Huh that was anticlimactic. Do you think it’s dead?”

“Give it a minute,” Maddie answered. They all waited, expecting the thing to get back up and renew its attack. After a couple of minutes, Harry just started shooting. He’d pick a target, aim, and fire. The others just kept going on as before, as though they didn’t even notice. It wasn’t until he’d killed about half of them that one of the creatures standing back from the light let out a shriek that sounded slightly different than the others. The creatures ran off into the darkness and Harry safetied his weapon.

“Do you think they’re gone, or just regrouping?” he asked over the radio.

Maddie doused the lights, turned on the infrared again, and searched the area for any heat signatures.

“Looks like they have vamoosed, El Guapo.”

Harry stowed his gear and poured himself a whiskey. He smacked his lips with satisfaction after taking a sip. Maddie and Thomas had recorded the entire episode; they all watched it and reviewed what they could learn from it.

“They are definitely not zombies in the traditional sense of the word,” Maddie said.

Thomas and Harry both agreed. Harry took another sip of his drink.

“I thought for sure they would just get back up after the body shot. I’ve read too many zombie books, I guess.”

“Yeah,” Maddie said. “This brings up a whole different discussion.”

“What’s that?” Thomas asked.

“Is it right for us to just indiscriminately kill them? I mean, what if they can be cured?”

Harry shook his head, not believing what he was hearing. “You’re kidding, right? Of all people, I never thought I would hear that from you.”

“Why? Just because I am prepared to defend myself doesn’t mean I don’t value life.”

Thomas held up his hands. “No need for us to decide the morality of killing zom– these
things
, right now. Let’s see if we can catch a couple more hours of shut-eye before we start our day.”

Thomas and Rico spent the rest of the night in the coach. Thomas slept on one of the comfortable crew bunks and Rico on the other. They woke to the sounds of Harry making breakfast.

“How do you like your eggs, Thomas?”

“However the cook makes them!” he called out as he went into the bathroom. “Man, this bathroom is sweet!” he said.

“Yeah, kind of like staying at Trump Plaza, isn’t it?” Harry half-shouted.

Maddie opened the sliding door that separated the main cabin from the bedroom.

“Y’all are some noisy motherfuckers.” She was not a morning person.

“Oh, calm down and come drink some of this coffee,” Harry said as he stirred the scrambled eggs. He’d added some sausage, some cheese, and a couple of cloves of garlic to the eggs. It smelled wonderful.

They talked while they ate. “Thomas, do you think we could add a catwalk up top? To make it safer to do what I did last night?” Harry asked.

“Well, we could head back down to Coburg and find a welding shop; I don’t want to tackle killing all my old friends back at the plant, even if they are turned.”

“Do you know of any small shops that would have everything we’d need?” Maddie asked.

“Yeah, I know of a couple that might be workable.”

“Okay, let’s get whatever you need from the house and head out. That all right with you, Harry?”

Harry drank the last of his coffee and stood. “Yeah, I’ll clean up the breakfast mess. What are we going to do with those?” He pointed outside at the bodies.

“I have a backhoe; if you guys will help, we can bury them in the pasture,” Thomas said.

They spent about an hour burying the bodies. The smell of the things seemed to permeate their clothes, even their hair.

“Jeez, have you ever smelled anything so rank? We should have held off on breakfast.” Thomas wiped his mouth with the back of his leather glove after losing his eggs.

“I agree,” Harry said.

Maddie, the only one of the three not to have puked, looked at them and grinned.

“Ya pussies!” she exclaimed, then laughed. They both flipped her the bird at the same time, which just made her laugh harder, especially since she’d called dibs on the first shower.

It was still early in the day when they set out to find a suitable welding shop. Thomas was listening to ham radio feeds via satellite as they drove, trying to get more information on the state of the rest of the world. He also set one of the dishes to scan for signals in hopes of finding a live feed that was still broadcasting. He’d programmed the location of his best hope for finding what they needed into the GPS, and Harry followed the waypoints to their destination.

The shop they were heading to was just off I-5. It serviced a large truck stop as well as the public. Thomas had done business with Jerry, the owner, over the years, and hoped to find him alive and well.

Harry pulled up to the front gate and blew the coach’s horn. After several minutes of waiting with no results, Thomas and Maddie disembarked and approached the gate. They found it locked up tight with a large chain and a heavy-duty padlock.

“You want me to get the bolt cutters?” Maddie asked.

Thomas produced a lock-pick kit from his bag. “Let me give it a go first. It’s a behemoth; I’m not sure the bolt cutters would even work.” Several minutes later, Thomas opened the lock with a “Ta-da!” Maddie laughed, and they rolled the gate open and waved Harry in.

Thomas found everything he needed to make the modifications and asked Harry for help taking some measurements. Maddie watched more of the videos on the coach’s display while she cleaned the AR15 Harry had used last night.

An hour later, Harry held a piece of metal in place for Thomas to weld. He told Harry to look away while he welded to avoid damaging his vision. Harry averted his eyes toward the back of the coach and noticed two small boxes. The top on one of them slowly opened. Seconds later, a small, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) appeared. It looked like a white X with a helicopter rotor at the end of each arm and a camera hanging down on a gimbal below it. It came up to Thomas and Harry and hovered over them. Then he heard Maddie over the radio.

“I see you, Sugarbooger.”

“What the hell?” was all Harry could say.

“We have three of these things, two like this and one airplane,” Maddie said. “I don’t even have to fly it. I just click on the map and it goes to that coordinate and waits for its next command. Isn’t that cool?”

Harry laughed, “Yeah, sweetie, that’s cool. Don’t break it.”

“I won’t. I am going to take it out a ways and then use the RTB.”

“Okay,” Harry said, “I’ll bite—what’s RTB?”

He knew what it meant, but he didn’t want to disappoint her. “It means return-to-base, silly.”

Harry laughed, “Oh really, huh, learn something new every day.” The UAV zipped off and Harry went back to helping Thomas.

Maddie clicked on I-5, which was only a quarter mile away, and the UAV flew straight there and went into a hover. She clicked on the “scan” button and it began to turn slowly in a circle. When it pointed south, Maddie thought she saw something moving. She frantically looked for a stop button, but couldn’t find one, so she clicked the cursor on the map a little further south. The UAV spun around and started heading toward the target, and in the distance, she could just make out a vehicle heading their way on the interstate.

They had tried several roads leading off the interstate toward the east. Each time, a downed bridge, dead end, or some other barrier prevented them from making their way east to find a way south. The beautiful mountain conifers like the grand firs and Jeffrey pines had given way to high valley oaks, cottonwood, and alder as they wound their way along the Willamette River. Conner held out hope that State Route 228 would be open. Routes 58, 222, and 126 all proved what the old man told them yesterday.

“It’s only about forty miles to Route 228, Mom,” he said.

“Okay, whatever, would you hand me a water, please?” Carla didn’t think California was in their future, but Conner was dead set on getting back there sooner rather than later. She accepted the water from Lauren and took a long pull on the bottle. It was good, even if it was warm.

“Hey, did you see that?” Conner barked, and Carla swerved, almost crashing into an abandoned vehicle.

“Conner!” she said in her best peeved-mother voice. “You trying to get us killed?”

“Sorry, Mom, but I thought I saw something flying over the road up there.”

Carla immediately went on red alert. “Where?”

Conner pointed straight up the interstate. “Up there.”

“Do you still see it?”

Conner squinted and held up his hand to block the sun. “No, it was just there for a second. It could be my imagination, or even a bird.”

“Both of you get your guns ready. Keep the safeties on, but make sure they are loaded and ready to go,” Carla said, scanning the road ahead for any possible ambush. They drove for another ten minutes without seeing any sign of a confrontation.

They were almost to the place where Conner had spotted what he thought was a plane. Carla stopped the car and they all got out. They searched the skies in all directions, but came up empty.

“Must have been a bird,” Conner said.

They took advantage of the stop. Each of them took turns relieving themselves while the other two stood guard.

“Well, let’s get back on the road,” Carla said, no longer sure of what they were doing. They had just started getting back in the Rover when they heard what sounded like a horn honking.

“Did you hear that?” Conner asked.

“Yes,” said both Lauren and Carla. They searched the area again, looking in every direction.

“There!” Conner said.

“Where?” Carla turned to look in the direction he was pointing. About a mile north of them was an overpass, and on it was someone waving a white flag back and forth.

“What do we do?” Lauren asked.

Carla thought for a moment. “Okay, here is what we are going to do.”

Carla drove the Rover slowly up the interstate. She slowed down even more to weave around a couple of wrecked vehicles as she approached the overpass. She stopped about one hundred yards from whomever it was standing up there. He didn’t appear to be holding a weapon, but it would be the perfect place for an ambush. Carla was shaking and sweating as she exited the vehicle.

“Who are you?” she yelled at the man.

“My name is Harry Towes! I am from Texas. Who are you?” he yelled back.

Carla’s first thought was,
Harry Toes? He has to be telling the truth; no one would make that up.

“Who are you with?” she yelled back, not wanting to give out too much info and trying to feel the situation out.

He rolled up his flag and put it away. She saw that he was standing next to a large dirt bike. He cupped his hands over his mouth again and yelled.

“Can I come down there, so we don’t have to keep shouting?”

She thought for a moment. She’d dropped Lauren and Conner out the back of the Rover as they drove past the wrecked vehicles and was sure that they could shoot well enough to hit this guy if he did anything funny.

“Okay, but walk down and keep your hands where I can see them!”

He raised his hands and walked to the end of the overpass, stepped over the guardrail, and carefully made his way down the slope. When he was on level ground, he raised his hands again and walked down the middle of the northbound lanes. He made it to about fifteen feet away when she said, “That’s close enough.”

“Pleasure to make your acquaintance. Harry Towes at your service, ma’am. Where y’all headed?”

“Just passing through, how about you?” Carla answered his question with a question.

Harry smiled. “Well, me and the missus were headed to Whidbey Island when all this crazy stuff started happening.” Harry figured a lone woman was no threat, and he didn’t see any sign of more people coming up the road. Besides, Maddie had them both under her watchful eye, looking through the scope of a .308 sniper rifle.

Carla was suddenly at a loss for words. These people were headed to Whidbey Island? What were the odds that she’d find someone else heading to the exact same place?
Am I wearing anything that may have given away my destination? We didn’t write “Whidbey Island or Bust!” on the side of the Rover.

How in the hell?
She found herself thinking that several times a day lately.

“Mister Towes, if that is really your name, how do you know where I am going? I will tell you that, right now, you have two rifles pointed at you; one signal from me and you’ll be dead.”

Harry’s smile vanished. “Look, little lady, you are making it hard to be friendly here. I don’t know where you are going because you, as of yet, have not told me! Furthermore, I will be frank with you and tell you that you also are in the crosshairs of a rifle. In the hands of an expert, I might add.”

They stood there in the proverbial Mexican standoff. Neither one of them knew what to do next.

“Harry, hand her the radio, would you? I want to talk to her.” He wasn’t wearing the earpiece or throat mic, so Maddie’s voice seemed to emanate from Harry’s butt. Carla’s eyes widened. Harry held his hands up in front of him and turned slowly so that Carla could see what he was reaching for. He carefully unclipped the radio from his belt and handed it to her.

“Hello?” Maddie said over the radio.

Carla pushed the talk button and said, “Hello.”

Then Maddie started talking a mile a minute. “Listen, honey, we aren’t going to do you any harm. We are just surviving out here like you appear to be, is that right?”

Carla held the button down again. “That’s all we are doing, yes.”

“Well, let me tell you, we have to come to some kind of an agreement about what to do; we all can’t just sit around here waiting for it to get dark, now can we?”

Just the way Maddie said it made Carla relax. “No, I don’t suppose that would be a good idea.”

Maddie came back on. “Are you hungry? We’ve got all kinds of good food, and depending on how many hundreds of snipers you got hiding out there, we can probably feed y’all.” She said it with a chuckle, and Carla finally made her decision.

“Okay, we would love to have dinner with you. Can we put the guns down now and meet?” Carla released the talk button as she saw a figure rise up from the side of the road not more than a hundred feet away, wearing some kind of bush on her back. Carla turned around and gave the all-clear signal to Conner and Lauren. They cautiously poked their heads out from behind the wreck. Maddie shed her ghillie suit, unzipping it and peeling it off as Harry helped her out of it.

She then walked over and said, “I’m Maddie Towes. Glad to meet y’all.”

She was holding out her hand. Carla just stood there looking shocked.

“What’s the matter? You okay?” Maddie looked concerned.

“Your name is M-M-Maddie?” Carla stuttered.

“Yes, and you are?”

“Your name is Maddie, and you’re from Texas?”

Maddie was starting to wonder if this woman wasn’t a few bricks short. “Yes.”

Carla, still looking shocked, said, “Are you related to anyone named Brant?”

Now it was Maddie’s turn to look shocked. “No fucking way!” Maddie squealed. “What’s your name, darling?”

“My name is Carla Wilford. My grandmother’s name was Muriel Brant.”

Maddie just started laughing, and continued to laugh. By this time, Lauren and Conner had walked up, wondering what was going on with this crazy lady.

“You’re my damn cousins!” She was still howling with laughter as she looked at Harry. “They’re my damn cousins!” Now everyone was laughing. “No way! No fucking way,” she kept repeating in between her raucous bouts of laughter.

Carla cringed at the vulgar language but was relieved they had found family and that she now had someone with whom to share the burden of leadership.