Dawn of the Apocalypse: A Zombie Apocalypse Novel (9 page)

            "It's not full, but it's all we have," Charlie shouted as he dropped behind the wheel and cranked the engine.

            Mike and I jumped in back.  I thought he'd turn around and get the hell out of Dodge.  Nope.  Charlie drove straight ahead and over the zombies.  Mike fired them up on the right side, and I covered the left.  He drove us up to the main road, and straight through the town.  We shot any zombies we saw.

            "How much juice do we have?" I asked, finally able to relax.

            "Three quarters of a tank," Charlie said.  "I suck at math, so can't tell you how many gallons that is."

            Neither could I.

            "It's enough," I said, still huffing and puffing.  "Keep an eye out for eighteen-wheelers on the side of the road.  They are our new gas stations."

Chapter 12

            We heard the gunfire before we saw topped the hill and spotted the battle.  It looked like seven survivors were looting an abandoned eighteen-wheeler.  They had five ATVs with trailers to take their treasure away.  It was a plain silver trailer, so I had no idea of its contents.

            We rolled to a stop atop that rise in the road.  The battle was a good two hundred feet down the road.  There was a city on the horizon, which our map showed was on the Mississippi River.  There was a bridge over the river according to the map.

            I rode shotgun, with Mike driving and Charlie in back.  We were cold, wet, and miserable due to rain and an open vehicle.  It was amazing how cold you could be in the middle of summer.  I blamed the far northern climate.  It wasn't that cold in Georgia.

            I watched the zombies attacking them for a long moment.  There were a lot more zombies than men, but those guys were good at killing them.  Under normal conditions, I'd dive into the fight without a second thought.  We were not dealing with normal circumstances anymore.

            "Outlaw bikers," Charlie said.  "Why am I not surprised they thrive in an apocalypse?"

            I didn't know if they were outlaw bikers or not.  They could've been big, muscular men who liked long hair and beards.  Of course, the blue jean jackets with the sleeves cut off, with patches all over them, made me think they were indeed bikers.  Outlaw bikers? 

            "They may be the perfect men to survive this," I said.

            More zombies came out of the woods north of the 18-wheeler.  The bikers started backing toward their ATVs when one of their number went down under a flood of zombies.  One of them jumped on his ATV, only to be tackled off of it by two rather large black zombies.  As we got closer to the Mississippi River, I'd noticed more racial diversity within the zombie hordes.  One of the other bikers shot both zombies in the head, and then his comrade.

            "Damn!  Why'd he do that?" Mike asked.

            "I guess he thought his friend was going to become a zombie," I replied.

            That was the only reason I could think of to justify his action.  Memories of those cops changing in the back of the SWAT armored car returned.  It made me think about us.  Should we have a plan in place?

            "People change pretty fast once bitten.  I've seen it," I said.  "It probably only takes a minute or two."

            "That's scary," Mike said.  "You guys have my blessing to shoot me if I get bitten and start to change.  But, um, make sure I'm really starting to change first?  Okay?"

            "Deal.  Same applies to me," I said.  "So, do we help them?  Or backtrack and look for a way around?"

            "We need gas," Mike said.  "We're down to a quarter tank."

            "Diesel," Charlie corrected him.

            "I know what the fuck we need."

            Mike always called it gas.  He couldn't break himself of the habit.  But he was right.  We were low on fuel, and that 18-wheeler might have full tanks.  The question was if the bikers would fight us over the fuel?  And did we really need the fuel bad enough to kill?

            "They're survivors," I said.  "We should help them against the zombies."

            Neither of them offered any argument.  We stood up in the vehicle.  Mike and I used the window to steady our shots, and we opened up on those crazy bastards.  Zombies started dropping like flies.  We were actually getting pretty good at killing them.  Unlike in war, we were shooting an enemy that did nothing to save or protect himself.  They didn't duck, run, or hide.  Most of the time they turned toward us and gave us easy heart shoots, too.

            The bikers ended their retreat, and returned to slaughtering zombies, too.  It only took a few minutes to kill all of those poor infected people.

           
Pap-pap-pap-pap!
As the bikers turned their guns on us.

            My first thought was to shout that we were friends, but then I saw the evil grin on one of their faces.  So I shot him in the head.  Charlie picked up the SAW and mowed them down in a flash.  I saw incredulous looks on a couple of faces as they died.

            "Those idiots!" Mike screamed, hands curled into fists.  "We saved their lives, so they try to murder us?  What the fuck, man?"

            "Some people will turn into savages when law and order go out the window," I said.

            "Savages.  Exactly.  They were savages," he said.

            I wasn't that surprised.  Everyone knew how people reacted with just a power outage that lasted too long.  Or the local team won a championship.  Why should they act civilized during an apocalypse?  Maybe I'm just more cynical than him?

            "We have a problem," Charlie said.  He was standing in the back of the Humvee and looking down the road through binoculars.  "They weren't alone.  There were two bikers heading this way, and they just turned around."

            "If there are more of them, then they will be coming after us," I finished it for him.  "Shit.  Let's fuel up fast."

            The 18-wheeler was parked in the middle of the road.  Mike pulled up next to the driver side tank, positioned so we could siphon straight into the Humvee's tank.  We were getting pretty good at it due to our terrible fuel mileage.

            While Mike took care of topping off, Charlie and I checked out what the bikers were taking from the trailer.  And as I expected, it was food.  Not the best food, but still long shelf life sugary breakfast cereal and oatmeal.  It was too bulky for us to take, though the oatmeal tempted me.  If we only had a pot to cook it in.

            "Do we want to take their weapons?" Charlie asked.

            I looked them over.  Four Uzis, a deer rifle, and the rest semi-automatic pistols of assorted makes and models.  None of them had more than four magazines.

            "Not worth it," I said.  "We're standardized now.  This crap will just take up room and be hard to resupply with ammo."

            "We're full," Mike said.  "And more bikers are coming."

            Mike was the king of understatement.  There were a boatload of bikers coming, both astride big Harleys and ATVs.  They started shooting way out of range.  I didn't know if they wanted to kill us, or just chase us off.  I was more than happy to be chased off.

            I jumped into the passenger seat, with Charlie in back again.  Mike tore out of there.  We headed back the way we'd come, and then turned south on another blacktop.  It was just a single-lane road through farmland.  The bikers slowed down at the 18-wheeler, and then accelerated after us.

            "I guess they don't appreciate us defending ourselves," Charlie said.

            "They're bunch of suicidal idiots," I replied.  I crawled in back with him, and we lay facing the rear.  The ride was too rough to steady our rifles on the back, but we held them as steady as we could and started shooting.

            We didn't hit shit.

            "Cease fire," I said.  "They are too far away and we're just wasting ammo."

            "What about the SAW?"

            "Our two M-4s put together spit out more than the SAW," I said.

            If we had a mount for it, the M-249 SAW would eat them alive.  It would also go through way too much ammo.

            "The road ends!" Mike cried.

            "That sucks," I whispered.  "Okay, use the SAW."

            I crawled back into the passenger seat.  We were approaching the end of the road quickly.  Farmland, mixed tilled land and cow pastures, surrounded us.  Not a lot of trees for cover.  The road dead-ended at a metal gate, with gates flanking the end of the road, as well.

            "Smash through the gate on the left.  Go east."

            "Brace yourselves," Mike said.

            The gate was aluminum or some other light metal.  It ripped apart when the Humvee plowed into it.  I worried about damaging our vehicle, but it was better the Humvee than us.

           
Ratta-tat-tat-tat!  Ratta-tat-tat-tat!

            The bikers closed on us quickly once we went off road.  Charlie fired them up.  They were firing back with Uzis and other small automatic weapons, but it's hard to hit anything while riding a motorcycle at the same time.  The SAW, though, was hitting its targets.  One shot hit a gas tank or something and the ATV exploded.  That fireball took out two motorcycle riders.

            Mike found a dirt path through the woods.  The Humvee was barely fitting between the trees.  After just a few minutes we smashed through another gate and into another cow pasture.

            "We have company!" I cried, scrambling forward to hang onto the windshield as I opened fire on what looked like a fight between bikers and zombies.  There were about two dozen men and women on Harleys, dirt bikes, and ATVs.  There were an equal number of zombies attacking them from the woods on the other side of the road.

            I aimed exclusively at the bikers.

            "Go straight across," I said.

            There was another gate on the other side of the road.  It closed off what looked like a better dirt road or driveway.  There was a mailbox on a post by the gate, at any rate.  That gate was open.  Mike had to crash through the gate on our side of the road, and it was the sturdiest of them all.

            "Damn," I cried, slammed into the windshield by the crash.  The gate gave, but I could see damage to the front of our vehicle.  Then we hit two zombies.  That horde was mostly young people, appearing to be in their late teens.  They were all in shorts and bathing suits.

            Bullets were whizzing by from all directions it seemed.  Charlie and I opened up full auto on the bikers, while taking more than a few zombies in the crossfire.  I think the bikers were torn between fighting off the horde and killing us.

            Mike hit the gas once past that backwoods street fight.  I dropped back into my seat to put a full magazine in.  I was expecting more bikers or zombies up ahead.

            "Shit's getting hairy," Mike said.

            Oddly enough, he looked more excited than afraid.

            "They're following us," Charlie warned us.  "And gaining."

            Then I remembered something important.  I felt like such a fool for not thinking about it before.  I changed out my rifle for Mike's.  He gave me a sharp look, but nodded when I broke open the M203.  Putting a 40mm HE shell in, I snapped it closed and turned around in my seat.

            "Watch out!"

            Charlie ducked to the side.  I took aim at the lead motorcycle, which was the only one close enough to see.  And I fired.

           
Poof!
  And a second later,
BOOM!

            I heard the following bikes crash into him, but more got around them.  I loaded a fragmentation grenade.

            "I never saw a frag grenade before," I said.  Taking aim, I fired. 
BOOM!
  Three bikers went down.  "I like it."

            After that they dropped back.

            A few minutes later we drove into a clearing.  There was an old, white farmhouse.  It was a two-story, with multiple outbuildings scattered around the clearing.  The barnyard looked like a massacre site.  Bloody corpses covered in black flies were everywhere.  I spotted hunting rifles and shotguns scattered about.  There had to be the remains of a dozen people.  The stench was unbelievable.  And zombies were still feasting on a few of them.

            We kept right on going.

            Gunfire sounded behind us when the bikers passed by the farmhouse.  I hoped the zombies were attacking them.  Anything to slow them down.

            "Water!" Mike screamed and hit the brakes.

            We skidded to a stop just feet from the shore.  I stood up and stared.  The Mississippi River stretched out before us.

            "Oh shit."

Chapter 13

            It looked like a campsite by the river.  There were coolers, two tents, and a fire pit.  Everywhere I looked were empty beer and soda cans, and even a few beer and specialty drink bottles.  I really wanted to check those coolers for beer.

            "We have to abandon the Humvee," I said.  "Grab all of the ammo you can carry, and let's get out of here."

            "No, look," Charlie said, pointing downriver.  "A marina."

            "Awesome," I said.  "We can float down the river."

            I started stuffing magazines for my rifle in my pockets and in my shirt, while cursing myself for not bringing the rucksack I was issued back at the 110th Brigade camp.

            "There might be a boat that still runs.  One of us should go over and check before we give up all of our stuff," Charlie said.  "I'll go."

            I paused to look at the marina.  We could barely see the end of one pier.  The chances of finding a boat with a working motor was slim.  Then I wondered if boat motors had electronics.  Maybe the new motors.