Dead Drunk: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse... One Beer at a Time (20 page)

Chapter
39

Road Trippin’

“Why didn’t she tell me she was pregnant?” Charlie said upon
hearing the news.

Left-Nut smirked. “Who says it’s yours?” At least he’d
finally stopped cursing at Rob.

Oddly enough, this revelation hit Charlie harder than the
recent death and destruction had. “Of all the times to be a dad. And what if I
never find them?”

“Maybe you shouldn’t have left her for that rat?” Left-Nut
said, and the look he received in return could have melted his face off.

“It’s really touching,” Marquell said as he loaded several
Chinese assault rifles onto the back of an ATV. “But this ain’t the place to be
sharing y’alls motherfuckin’ feelings right now.”

Rob noticed they were missing members from their group.
“Where’s Russ?”

Charlie looked down. “Russ’s gone. He sure went out in a
blaze of glory, though.”

“And Trent?”

Charlie’s expression turned from sorrow to anger. “Piece of
shit ran off. I knew he’d wind up screwing us.”

“Kinda like the way a monkey always ends up fucking a
football,” Smokey said. “You know it’s going to, but it still surprises you
when it happens.”

Rob sighed deeply. “He was doing so good there for a while,
especially with Brandon.”

“What’s plan B?” Left-Nut asked. “I mean, your first one
worked out so great.”

“We could fight our way through downtown. Now we got
grenades and stuff,” Rob said and shrugged.

Charlie pointed to the mounds of dead soldiers. “That didn’t
help them much.”

“Okay, what then?” Left-Nut said.

Charlie had already weighed the pros and cons of several
routes and settled on one in particular. “Main roads and highways aren’t an
option. There’s too many zombies and who knows how many Chinese assholes out
there, so we'll head south to the Blue Line tracks and take them west to the
Metra Tracks. Then we follow the forest preserves and power lines all the way
home.”

“Seems like a lot of dicking around,” Left-Nut said. “Why not
hit the highways and haul ass? I could be banging your sister by lunchtime.”

“This way we avoid blocked roads and checkpoints. It’s about
ninety miles to my parents’ place once we get outside the city. That base Rob
talked about is just south of there.”

Marquell seriously considered shooting his new acquaintances
just to get them to shut up, but he knew there was no point. Plus, they had
saved his life, and loyalty was the one virtue the killer respected. “Good luck
with that shit,” he said and hopped on a four-wheeler. “I got my dog’s medicine
and food, so I’m out.”

“They all died for your dog?” Charlie said, dumbfounded.

“Didn’t you just risk lives for a damned raccoon?” came the
reply. Charlie nodded and Marquell continued. “If ya’ll ever want work and don’t
mind getting your hands dirty, come see me. Later Smokey.” With that, The
Butcher of Richard Daley Prison left.

The guys would never know how lucky they were to survive
their encounter with Marquell, but they were far from being in the clear. For
starters, many of those recently dispatched were stirring from their temporary
deaths. Rob used his crooked bat to clobber a nearby zombie as it struggled to
rise on shattered legs. “We need to decide.”

“It’s my way or the highway, literally,” Charlie said and
climbed onto one of the remaining four-wheelers. Smokey jumped behind him and
Rob and Left-Nut took the other. His way it was.

Moments later, the survivors sped south full throttle into
their next half-baked scheme. They hadn’t seen any foreign invaders, but
zombies were a different story. Soon a veritable apocalyptic army swarmed
behind them and was growing by the block. One wrong turn and it was curtains.

“How much gas do we have?” Smokey asked while hanging on for
dear life as the wind blew his long brown hair straight back.

Charlie looked at the gauge for the first time. “Enough to
get to the burbs.”

“We’re running out of gas,” Rob said as he pulled up next to
them.

“Oh come on.” Charlie stopped next to an overpass as the
crowd drew nearer, three hundred yards and closing. “Go ahead and find a garden
hose in someone’s yard and start siphoning. We’ll slow these jagoffs down and
meet you at the tracks.”

Rob nodded and peeled out as Charlie and Smokey steadied their
machine guns across the seat. “Fuck, how do you shoot this thing?” Smokey said
while searching for the safety. Charlie had the same problem as the crowd
neared.

TATATATATATATATATATAT!

Smokey’s gun discharged and sent bullets through the windows
of nearby buildings. “Here it is.” He fired in earnest and began dropping
zombies by the handful. “It’s a turkey shoot!” he added as shell casings
sprinkled around them. Unfortunately, many were merely wounded and rejoined the
others in their deadly march.

Charlie also blasted away but the enemy kept coming like
waves at the beach. Both guns clicked empty. “Um, how do we reload?” Smokey
asked.

Charlie shrugged his shoulders. “Cheese it,” he said and
jumped onto the four-wheeler.

Smokey turned to follow but was stopped as bodies crashed
all around him, falling from the overpass and hitting the pavement with
sickening, wet thuds. Heavy breathing and the sound of gnashing teeth came next
as the crawling monsters clamored for sustenance, grasping at the stoner’s exposed
legs.

Charlie calmly drew his pistol and ended the three ghouls
with well-placed headshots. Smokey climbed aboard as Charlie retrieved a
fragmentation grenade, pulled the pin, and tossed it towards the surging
multitude.

BOOOM
! Body parts and shrapnel zipped by while they
took off, barely fast enough to avoid the survivors. But avoid them they did,
and the maniacs were quickly left behind with nothing to show for their efforts
but gaping wounds and internal bleeding. Charlie was on top of his game once again.

The tracks loomed up ahead and gunfire signaled that the
area wasn’t as empty as Charlie had hoped. Rob and Left-Nut were busy fending
off their own crowd of savages.

Charlie pulled up long enough to watch how Rob reloaded and
then took off again with his friends close behind. Soon they zoomed down the
tracks, avoiding abandoned trains, dead bodies, and of course, zombies, zombies
and more zombies.

Every tunnel brought more challenges now that they had to
rely solely on headlights and muzzle flashes to lead the way. Because of this,
their trips underground became a blur of shooting and screaming, near misses
and carnage. Each subterranean nightmare lasted only a few minutes, and
everyone breathed a huge sigh of relief upon bursting into the light for the
final time, figuratively reborn. Except for Left-Nut.

“Wow, check out your hair,” Smokey said as they got into the
open.

Left-Nut frantically touched his head. “What, what is it?”
Miraculously, his already pale locks had turned several shades whiter from the
insanity of the tunnels.

“Your head’s whiter than Gandalf’s balls,” Smokey said with
a laugh and received a middle finger in return.

Left-Nut’s condition was of no concern other than comic
relief, and the trip down the Metra railway continued, growing easier as they
reached further into the suburbs. Now they went miles at a time without
spotting a zombie, and the few stragglers they did see were easily avoided.

They followed the tracks into a thickly wooded preserve
where the cover of the forest allowed them to regroup in the shade of some tall
oak trees. A swiftly flowing river nearby gave off a calming aura, and the men
stretched out while breathing in the fresh air. It had been the longest morning
of their lives.

“That’s the Des Plaines River,” Charlie said and checked his
tires for leaks. “Which means Maywood is right on the other side of the bridge.
We can cross over and follow the power lines that go by two-ninety. Those will
run all the way to Cantonville.”

“You pulling this straight out of your butt?” Rob asked and
drank from a thermos attached to his vehicle. Charlie nodded and Rob slapped
him on the shoulder, a little too hard. “Keep it up, muchacho.”

After relaxing and making fun of Left-Nut for several
minutes, the journey began again amidst rising spirits. As they crossed a
narrow stone bridge, Charlie finally believed they could survive the trip. Then
something whizzed past his head and bounced across the water below like a rock
skipped by a child.

The crack of the rifle caught up a second later, and more
splashes hit the water followed by bullets ricocheting off the tracks. A
Chinese checkpoint on another bridge had spotted them and opened fire. Only a
hundred and fifty yards separated them.

“Punch it!” Charlie yelled and slammed on the gas as a hail
of bullets peppered the ground all around them. They sped off the bridge and
lurched down an embankment with Rob’s ATV nearly tipping over in the process.
He used his massive frame to muscle two tires back to the ground and kept right
on going while Left-Nut clung to him like a terrified girlfriend.

Having solved the mystery of the missing zombies, the guys
now had to avoid running into another patrol. So they cruised through the
charred ruins of Maywood at top speed. Soon the massive transmission towers
loomed dead ahead. In normal life, the hundred and eighty-foot tall structures
had been easy to ignore, but seeing the steel behemoths up close for the first
time was simply awe-inspiring. More importantly, the open ground below them
went on as far as the eye could see. They entered the path and never looked
back, leaving the hell of the dead city behind for good.

The group stopped an hour later to let their engines cool
down. Having prepared ahead, Charlie cracked open a fanny pack full of teriyaki
beef jerky.

“Nice fanny pack, homo,” Left-Nut said, though he didn’t put
much effort into it.

“You don’t want any?” Charlie asked, not bothering to point
out that Left-Nut actually had engaged in gay sex.

Of course he wanted some, and Charlie divvied up the
dehydrated meat as evenly as possible. It was the last of their food and
everyone savored each bite of the salty treat.

“It’s time for a celebration bitches,” Smokey said while
pulling out a thick joint from his pocket. “Marquell hooked me up for old-time’s
sake.”

“I’ll pass,” Charlie said. “But go ahead and blaze up. You
earned it.”

The others partook and within minutes were coughing and
blowing smoke rings into the wind like bored high schoolers. Time slowed and
their stress levels dropped. It seemed Marquell still had good shit.

They finished smoking and saddled up for the last leg of
their fantastic journey, a fifty-mile straight shot through the countryside.
Five minutes later, however, right as they had achieved maximum buzz, several figures
appeared in the distance. Zombies, five burly construction workers to be
precise, milled about the base of a transmission tower.

“Go around,” Charlie said. “No need to waste ammo.” As they
got closer, though, it appeared there was more to the story. Two men were
perched thirty feet up the structure, and they were shouting for help.

The zombies turned and
gave chase when they heard the four-wheelers approach, scrambling past each
other in their bloodlust. Charlie and Rob pulled over and dropped them in an
instant with a volley of bullets. It had become trivial.

Smokey noticed something odd as the strangers climbed down.
One zombie, a half-naked woman, had been motionless before they got there. He
verified she was dead as Left-Nut peeked over his shoulder. “Not bad,” the
pervert said with a leer. “Is she still warm?”

The two sweaty men, state troopers as evidenced by their
clothing, finally reached the ground. They looked like they hadn’t slept in
days and smelled even worse. “Thanks. I don’t know how much longer we could
have held on,” the taller of them said. “Do you have anything to drink? I was
about to drink my own piss.”

Rob handed over his thermos and the man chugged with gusto,
spilling much of it down his shirt. Then his throat exploded like a burst water
balloon.

Without warning, Smokey had raised his machine gun and
killed the man instantly. He turned to shoot the other trooper but the guy
sprang upon him and wrestled for control of the weapon, spraying bullets in
every direction.

Rob’s brawny hands wrapped around the man’s neck from
behind, and after a quick twist and a loud pop, it was all over but the
twitching. The trooper’s body slumped to the ground next to his lifeless
partner. Smokey’s heavy breathing was the only sound as he rose and tried to
compose himself.

“Well, that escalated quickly, ”Left-Nut said and popped out
from behind one of the four-wheelers.

“What the shit?” Charlie said, his mouth gaping open at the
actions of his mild-mannered friends. “I mean, what kind of weed was that?”

“I was just following Smokey,” Rob said and looked at his
hands in horror.

“It wasn’t the weed.” Smokey calmly approached the girl’s
corpse and pointed to underwear wrapped around the dead teenager’s neck. “I’ve
seen a lot of dead zombies, but I never saw one strangled with lacy panties
before. Plus she has no visible bites and that’s a classic ligature mark.”

Charlie wasn’t convinced by Smokey’s deductive reasoning.
“Dude, you just murdered those guys.”

“And check out the uniforms. They don’t fit, and look at the
short one’s nametag.” Smokey pointed to the man with the broken neck. “Have you
ever seen a guy with curly red hair named Ramirez?”

“So?” Charlie said.

“These guys weren’t law enforcement any more than you’re a
cowboy or Rob’s a Viking. They obviously stole the uniforms, raped and
strangled that poor girl, maybe not even in that order, and then climbed the
tower when these dickweeds surprised them.”