Books of the Dead (Book 1): Sanctuary From The Dead (15 page)

“Joel, get his pack and his pistol,” Greg said.

The man put up his hands in a gesture of surrender, but his posture said something different.  “Are you going to leave me here without a weapon?”

“No,” Greg said. “We’ll give you a ride out of here but we need to get to know you.  I promise.  You’ll get them back.”

  Again, he took a leap of faith and handed his backpack and holstered pistol over to me.  The pack was deceivingly heavy and nearly pulled me over.  This guy was strong because he made it look like a kindergartener’s backpack in terms of the effort he put out to move with it.  I decided to maintain a small amount of humility and grunted it over the back of the SUV where I tossed it in the back -- with some effort.

Greg ushered him into the back seat and Chuck punched the gas just moments before the mini-horde was about to descend on us.  Chuck
headed west to make sure not to lead them back to the church.

“Where are you taking me?”
the man asked.

Greg held up a finger in a ‘wait a minute’ gesture and brought up his walkie-talkie.  “We have the package and it is safe.  Why don’t you head back to base and we’ll be along shortly.”

Mike responded affirmatively, and Greg put the walkie-talkie away.

“We need to lead these zombies away from our home base,” Greg said.

“You didn’t answer my question,” the man said.

After getting a safe distance from the pack, Chuck slowed to a crawl allowing the zombie
s to trail behind us. 

“No, I didn’t,” Greg said.  “Listen, we’re not bad people.  We just have to be careful abou
t who we allow into our group.  These are dangerous times.”

“You don’t have to tell me that.  I was the one being chased by zombies.”

“That wasn’t too smart,” Greg said.  “Why didn’t you just run?”

The man took a moment to answer.  “I’ve been on the run for so long.  I guess I sort of lost it.”  He ran a hand through his hair and looked down at his feet.  “I hate these damn things.  They killed everyone I ever cared about.  I got overwhelmed by it and just started shooting
, and I couldn’t stop.”

“We’ve all been there before,” Greg said sympathetically.

Chuck slammed on the brakes.  A zombie stepped out from between two parked cars and blocked our path.  An abandoned car blocked the other lane so it was through this beast or nothing.  In most cases, I’m sure Chuck would have run the thing over, but there was always the chance that the SUV could be damaged.  It was a long shot -- a bone could puncture the radiator (it had happened to us once before) -- and with a mob of zombies not too far behind it was better to avoid entanglements. 

“Joel, can you take care of that?” Chuck asked.

“With pleasure,” I said.  I rolled down my window and pulled my pistol.  The zombie had been significantly overweight in life and waddled along slowly as he closed on on the front of the SUV.  I leaned my head out of the window and shouted, “Hey, Jabba the Hutt, I’m over here.”

“A Star Wars reference in the zombie apocalypse,” Chuck said
scoffing.   “Tsk, tsk.”

I gave him a sideways glance as the zombie course corrected and started in my direction.  When the thing got within five feet of my pistol, I shot it in the head and it toppled like a tower of whale blubber.

Chuck started forward again.  The zombies stayed in hot pursuit.  Well, they followed as fast as they could.

“I guess it would be good to get to know each other,” Greg said.  “I’m Greg.  Chuck has the wheel and Joel is in the shotgun seat.”  Last names had become mostly
superfluous.

“My name is David Hackett.  My friends...” The man started by trailed off.  “People call me Hack.”

“Okay, Hack it is,” Greg said.  “What’s your story?”

“I lived west of here on the river just outside Maysville.  You’ve been through there if yo
u’ve been to Cincinnati. ” 
              Greg nodded and Hack continued his tale as Chuck weaved around wrecked and abandoned cars with our zombie fans following.  Hack said he had tried to go to Cincinnati, but it was swarming with the undead.  So, he decided to head east to try to find some relatives in West Virginia -- if they were still alive.  As long as he stayed off the main roads, he had avoided the clusters of zombies and the roaming gangs of armed rednecks. 

“We’ve had our share of both,” Greg said.  “I noticed that you’re pretty good with your rifle.  Where’d you serve?”

“Afghanistan.  Korengral Valley.”

“That was some pretty heavy fighting.”

“Yes.”

“Well, you’re welcome to come back with us.  At least
, for the night.   Then you can decide when you want to head out.”
              “I’d like to be around people for a change,” Hack said with a faraway look in his eyes.  “That’d be nice.”

“Take us home
Chuck, when you think we have our friends far enough away,” Greg said, pointing a thumb back at our trailing mob.

CHAPTER 21

The Bridge

Hack decided to stay with us after a couple days and turned out to be a great asset.  His military skills were equal to, if not better than, Greg’s and Mike’s.  The only downside is that he turned out to be quite a loner, spending much of his downtime on his own or patrolling the area.  Greg surmised the wounds of war must have been wide and deep.  For my part, I left him pretty much alone.

Days
turned into weeks and our routine became just that, a routine.  Pastor Stevens fed us spiritually and the warriors kept us safe.  We did our best to bolster our defenses.  We even took proactive measures to decrease the numbers of undead in the city by systematically tracking and killing smaller groups.  This helped reduce the chance of them grouping into larger, harder to handle herds.

Time worked against us though.  The now fractious nature of our coalition was strained.  Sometimes people decided that cooperation was the best way and sometimes, not so much.   Pastor Stevens
’ force of personality kept the worst of it from boiling over, but things were not the same.

To make matters worse, Frank’s predictions started proving true.  We started runni
ng low on food by mid-October, but the real issue was medicine.  There were several diabetics in our ranks and a couple people who needed critical meds or else they wouldn’t last the winter. 

Doc Wilson was the only real doctor in our midst, but he was too old and too valuable an asset to risk sending out on foraging runs.  Since I had been training to be
an EMT in college, and worked at my mom’s pharmacy, I had been tasked with leading small crews to scour the local pharmacies and hospitals.  The problem was that we had stripped our local resources, so our foraging runs had to broaden their reach. 

Up until October, we had been able to keep our medication runs within the reach of our walkie-talkies.  The latest runs were stretch
ing that reach.  At least for me, the walkie-talkie was a tether back to home, back to help, back to safety.  If we ran into a horde of the undead or some particularly well-armed marauders, having the ability to call in back-up provided a sense of security that was worth its weight in gold. 

By November we had to give up that sense of security.  Our medical supplies were running at dangerously low levels.  Greg put together a foraging te
am that consisted of two warriors, Kara, and me.  With Kara’s training in nursing, and the time she has spent around Doc Wilson, she knew enough to be useful on the mission.  The warriors were Mike and Logan.  

Greg outfitted us with lots of weapon
s and had selected an old SUV as our ride.  Back in the day, I would have laughed at this gas-guzzling beast, but now I felt blessed to have its muscle and ground clearance.   As a general rule, all of our vehicles were older models without the modern computer technologies that the newer cars used.  Since computers were a thing of the past and we were living a near stone-age existence, we needed something that anyone could keep up-and-running.   We had more than our share of backyard mechanics in our midst.

Greg had wanted Hac
k to be on the mission, but he was out on one of his solo missions and didn’t return in time to go.  So, Logan was picked. 

Wheelersburg
, which was east of the city, was our goal.  There were two pharmacies in Wheelersburg -- one national chain and a small independent.  Our hope was that they were still standing and had some usable medicine left.  

When I was in high school, Wheelersburg had been our arch rival in sports.  Each football season the schedulers made it a point to put the Portsmouth vs. Wheelersburg game as the last game of the season -- a titanic struggle between two rivals.  It seemed no matt
er how bad one of the teams was both were able to get themselves up for the game and make it a match.  That rivalry was now ancient history much like the battles between Sparta and Athens.  

Two small towns sat between Portsmouth and Wheelersburg -- New Boston and Sciotoville.  I always considered New Boston an extension of Portsmouth because there was no clear geographic distinction between them.  One second you were in Portsmouth, the next you were in New Boston - just drive east on Gallia and you went fro
m one municipality to the next.

New Boston had been the home of the steel mills.  Detroit Steel was the biggest player pumping out steel that moved a nation.  The mill was long gone and torn down.  A Walmart took its place, but it was
now just as obsolete as the mill. 

Sciotoville, to the east of New Boston, was now scorched earth.  I hadn’t been that way, but r
eports from people who had, said a fire burned nearly every structure in its downtown to the ground.  The smoke from the fire hung over the area like an ominous cloud for weeks.  The only thing that kept the fire from racing to New Boston and then Portsmouth were our lovely Southern Ohio hills.  That and a monsoon-like rain storm which quelled the fire.

State Route 52 is the main east-west conduit running through the city.  It wound along the river from Cincinnati in the west to Huntington, West Virginia to the east.   At points the hills squeezed down on the road claustrophobically, threaten
ing to press the road into the waters of the Ohio River. 

It was slow-going through New Boston as the road was clogged with abandoned and wrecked cars.  Mike drove while Logan rode shotgun, his window down and M-16 ready, constantly on the watch
.  The cold air from his window froze my face and hands, but I thought it better not to complain and decided to grin and bear it.

Lo
gan’s vigilance paid off.  As Mike hopped the curb to navigate around two abandoned cars in the street, Logan spotted three zombies shuffle our way from between two houses.  A waist-high fence boxed them in the front yard of one of the houses as they lunged over the top of the fence at us.  They seemed frustrated as the fence blocked them in.  I knew they weren’t frustrated, but it was hard not to humanize them -- they were humanoid; two arms, two legs, a head, but they were far from being human.  They were eating machines with no other impulse than to find their next mouthful of flesh. 

They rammed insistently against the fence, the metal clanging.  
Their meager mental skills didn’t provide them to know-how to do those simple tasks like climbing over the fence or opening a gate.  Score one for the humans. 

Mike brought the vehicle to a stop less than fifteen feet away from the creatures.  We could hear their guttural moans and the rattle of the fence as they clawed
in the air, desperate to get at us.  Logan looked to Mike and a tacit communication passed between them when Mike gave an almost imperceptible nod.  Logan took careful aim from his sitting position, his finger tensing on the trigger, then popped off three quick shots -- each one on the money, direct hits to their foreheads.  Blood and brains blew everywhere as they toppled back on into the yard, their eternal hunger ended.

I was so focused on Logan’s marksmanship, that I hadn’t noticed that Kara was gripping my arm with a fierce intensity.  I looked her way and saw that her face was locked on the zombies in the yard.  I had no idea what was going through her mind, but I put my hand on hers.  Her grip relaxed some as she turned to look at me.  Mike popped the car into drive
, and her hand slipped away from mine.   

We made it through the rest of New Boston without incident. 
We passed the Walmart on the east edge of town and its parking lot looking like it had been the site of a demolition derby.  Cars were rammed against each other, some even overturned.  A small congregation of cars was nothing but blackened and charred mass.  Obviously something had gone amiss and set the cars aflame but the fire had been contained to only a half dozen vehicles.  

My best guess was that people must have surged to Walmart for supplies when the shit started rolling.  I wondered how many really made it out in the chaos.  There seemed no way to even squeeze a bicycle thro
ugh the tangled mess.

Mike deftly navigated us through the cars on 52.  We were just about past the last set of abandoned cars when
Kara jerked forward and slapped Mike’s head rest. 

“Over there,” she said pointing at
a minivan blocked on by a Honda against its side.  The Honda sat perpendicular to the van with a small Ford crammed against its back end.  From my angle, it looked like the minivan had been T-boned by the Honda and was pushed back against the guardrail, effectively trapping the minivan and its occupants inside.

The windows were smeared with what looked like melted chocolate so it took me
a few seconds, to see what she had pointed at.  A zombie was trapped inside the van, clawing at the windows, trying to escape.  It looked like a child of no more than eight or nine.  Its fingertips were nothing but bone from the incessant scratching at the interior to get free.  I also noticed what looked like a desiccated and ravaged human torso still strapped into the driver’s seat.  

“Shou
ldn’t we do something?”  Kara asked.

“Like what?” Mike asked.

“Shouldn’t we shoot it?” She asked.

“The ones back in the yard were still free to roam,” Logan said.  “From what I can see, there’s no way for this one to ge
t out.”

“But we could put it out of its misery,” she said.

“For the trouble these things have caused us, I say let it rot.”  Logan said and Mike must have agreed because he punched the gas.

Kara looked to me, but I just shrugged giving her my best “
What can you do?
” look.  She exhaled loudly, crossing her arms and looked away from me. 

It was the
next part of the trip that made Greg and the warriors nervous.  We were approaching a long overpass which spanned over a set of railroad tracks.  The bridge extended a good quarter mile.  Once we were on it we had no lateral escape routes.  In the planning stages, Greg tossed out the idea of taking an earlier exit but neither Mike nor Logan liked the idea of going through the burned out town.  Any other possible route would take us miles out of the way and keep us in the field too long.  So, it was the bridge or nothing.

M
ike used the bumper of the SUV to push a couple cars into the passing lane just as we were about to ascend the bridge.  We moved along at no more than five miles per hour.  As he tried to squeeze between two cars, a harsh screeching sound came from his side.  The bumper of one of the cars scrapped along the side of our vehicle sounding like the claws of a dinosaur trying to open us up like a can of beans.

Just as we reached the top of the bridge
, Mike let out a small groan. Both Kara and I leaned forward. 

About fifty feet from the top sat a real cluster fuck.  Nearly perpendicular to the road sat a dual axle, double cab pick-up truck, the back of it raised off the ground by a mid-sized Nissan that had plowed into it.  The two vehicles effectively blocked the road.

We got out of the SUV, using the bridge as an observation post, as the pungent aroma of burnt wood assaulted our noses:  the smell of a burned out and dead city.  Sciotoville looked like a bombed out city from World War II.

“What now?” I asked. 

Both men shrugged at once.

“That’s not helpful,” I said.

“Well, we could back down the bridge and take the exit into Sciotoville,” Logan said.

“Nah, that won’t work,” Mike said pointing towards the town.  “Gallia’s blocked in at least four or five places by cars.  And look,” he said pointing towards what used to be downtown Sciotoville,.”  Half of the blackened front wall of a building lay across the street.  

Logan held up a finger in a ‘hold on a minute’ gesture as he fished a map out of the glove compartment, laying it out across the hood of the SUV.  “Our other choice would be to head back to New Boston and take Milldale Road out to the county roads.  There’s a couple ways to go.”

“I don’t like it,” Mike said. “We have no idea what it
’s like out there.  Plus there are more than a couple places out there where if we ran into trouble, I’m not sure we’d be able to turn around and get back.”

“Like this is not one of those?” I asked.

“How badly do we need this medicine?”  Mike asked.

“Mrs. Stapleton won’t last the winter if we don’t get her heart medicine,” Kara said.  “And the Benson twins will drive us all crazy if we don’t get them some ADD meds.”  Maybe she was trying to lighten the mood, but Mike and Logan weren’t biting.

We sat in silence for a few seconds.  Mike rubbed his chin as he thought.

“Well, I have an idea.  You see how the pickup has knocked through that side rail a little?”
he asked pointing at a large break in protective side rail of the bridge.  “I’m thinking if I can get enough momentum, I might be able to knock it off the bridge, but first I’d have to get the Nissan out of the way.”

“What do you mean - enough momentum?
”  Kara asked.

“I’ll have to ram it pretty hard.”

“Won’t that risk ruining our ride?”  I asked.

Mike put up his hand and shook it in a wavering fashion.  “50/50, maybe less.”