Slow Burn: A Zombie Novel (61 page)

For the return trip we added five more shooters in the bed of the truck for added security after what we saw. Sure enough the truck stop was crawling with zombies upon our return. At least fifty to sixty of the living dead were crawling around and were immediately drawn to our vehicle as we pulled up.

There must not have been much in the way of human survivors up there for our little group and the noise we brought with to get this much attention so fast.

The extra guards opened up with long guns, and in a few minutes had the zombies down for the count. The smell of rotting flesh now hung in the air, mingling with the smell of cordite as we pulled a small perimeter while Eddie loaded up the second tanker.

“
Hurry up, man,” I pleaded. “We’re drawing a lot of attention to ourselves out here.”

It seemed that with every zombie we dropped, two more would appear. All around us now the undead shuffled in our direction. They came from open doors and popped up around fences. They would almost gaze wonderingly at us for a moment, and then close the gap with a determined stare.

“
Hell, I’m trying!” Eddie yelled. “Fucker won’t turn over.”

The revving starter of the truck only added to my stress level.

A nearby scream made me whip around, and I saw one of the guards had failed to notice an injured zombie who had crawled up behind him from under the tanker and bit him in the leg. The man just stood there frozen in shock and then turned and looked at me in a panic. I quickly shot the crawling zombie in the head with my rifle and then hesitated until the man gave me a knowing look. As the man started to shake from the virus setting in, I fired a round into his head.

I didn’t even know his name. And Dan was right; it did make it a little easier.

Just then the large truck roared to life.

“
Let’s get the fuck out of here now!” I yelled when Eddie gave me the thumbs up from the cab. Tyler was sobbing in the passenger seat. We probably should have left him this trip.

Another heavy burst of gunfire accompanied our hasty withdraw from the parking lot. We were finally able to break contact with the relentless, ever pursuing horde well south. The return trip was made in silence. We had lost yet another man.

We arrived back at the prison, solemnly going about the task of setting up the trailers. I assisted Eddie with transferring fuel from the tankers and topping off all the gravity tanks. The tankers were then parked in their permanent locations next to the machine shop. We would still stress pulling gas from all the wrecked and abandoned vehicles around the city in order to acquire as much as possible before it went bad. There were no other immediate leads on any tanker trucks in the area. However, the two we had gave us a big head start, albeit at the cost of another life.

“
His name was Roland,” a woman told me with tears in her eyes after hearing the news.

* * * * * * * *

Dan found out that Eddie and his son Tyler already had an interest in radios and decided to take them along with Frank and an older guy up to the command center for a lesson on the radios and how they worked. Dan was in the process of setting up a regular radio schedule for the network and would need extra hands to help cover all the radio traffic around the clock. Tyler stared in wonder at the large maps marked with Dan’s contacts and traced their locations with his finger. It was immediately evident that there was no radio contact in the City of Chicago itself, including the area where Dan's initial radio contact, Phil, had been located. It was assumed that there were just too many zombies packed into a small area for anyone to hold out. But at least four new contacts had been made, including a large holdout in the area of Toyota Park in Bridgeview, Illinois, some twenty-five miles or so away.

After showing his students the basics of the radios and making several contacts, the group learned some interesting developments nationally. Rumors were spreading that the surviving United States Armed Forces were starting to reorganize. They also heard several stories relaying that all of the ships that were at sea, and of course unaffected by the virus, were coming home to assist in the fight. Two ports had been designated as arrival points, the one on the West Coast being the Whidbey Island Naval Air Station near Seattle, Washington. The military personnel on that base had reacted quickly and blew the two bridges connecting the island to the mainland. The larger ships would anchor out in the Strait of Juan de Fuca, safe from the zombies as well. From that facility, they could safely keep an eye on Seattle and Olympia, the two cities themselves being dead zones, and send out continuous rescue missions.

The East Coast stronghold was at the Cherry Point Marine Corps Air Station. The Marines there were not having any problems keeping the zombies at bay. All surviving military units east of the Mississippi were being ordered to that location. An area covering several square miles was already cleared and reinforced by barriers. And the nearby docked ships themselves also provided living space. The Navy alone had eleven carriers with nuclear reactors capable of producing electricity for decades. The resources they had made the prison operation look like child’s play. The only things they were lacking in the slightest were food and medical supplies. Those items were being used up at a rapid pace by the large groups of refugees pouring in. It sounded like they were doing some of the same things as everyone else, going on scavenger missions, grabbing anything useful from the nearby cities and towns.

“
That’s all well and good,” Dan remarked. “But from our location in the Midwest, they might as well be on the moon. We are on our own here.”

And he was right. The rest of the news that Dan heard was not as promising. More horror stories from survivors around the country and pleas for help. Many were sealed in by thousands of undead and running low on vital supplies. Dan decided to get off the airwaves and turn them over to Eddie for the night after he was confident he had the hang of it. Dan grabbed Betty and headed to one of the guard towers that saw most of the action. As he walked up to the guards in the tower I met up with him and asked what he was up to.

"I’m going to pop the cherry on Betty," Dan said. “You want to watch?"

“
Hell yeah!”

The guards in the tower just looked at Dan with puzzled looks on their faces as he took the massive rifle and placed it on a table near one of the windows without saying a word. While I looked on, he peered through the scope and found a group of zombies that were standing at about three hundred yards. He took one of the .375 H&H shells, which looked like a cigar, and placed it into the rifle. As Dan looked through the scope at the group of disheveled zombies, he couldn’t help but laugh when two strange creatures came into focus. A guy wearing a giant diaper and a woman standing next to him dressed up in a leather and chain outfit. It was obvious that their evening had been interrupted at the wrong moment. We all chuckled as Dan provided commentary.

"You boys might want to watch this," Dan mumbled, and with an enormous bark from the rifle, the head of the zombie wearing the diaper disappeared in a red mist of micro particles.

The guards started to let out cheers of excitement.

“
Let me try!" one of them foolishly asked.

I cringed.

The look that Dan gave him would have unnerved even me.

“
The only one that rides Betty is me!” Dan snarled “Even if she’s the last one with any ammo left, and I am dead. Do you understand?"

The guards just stood there shaking their heads up and down like bobble heads.

"Okay, enough girly shit,” Dan said, “let’s see what this baby will do."

After vaporizing several additional zombie heads at increasingly impressive distances, he decided to save “Betty” and her precious rounds for more important targets. His last targets were an older couple that at first glance was moving much better than they probably had in years, albeit while dead. This knocked the fun out of the exercise, and Dan headed back to his trailer to give Betty a proper cleaning before putting her to bed. Literally… he put her in his bed.

Just as dark was again setting in, Stephen returned with the large raid convoy. I met them inside the gate with Mattie. Everyone in the returning group looked exhausted, but Stephen was glad to report that they had suffered no losses on the raid and had managed to locate seven survivors, all of whom agreed to return to the prison with the group. One of them was a doctor who was holed up in a clinic and had flagged down the convoy in desperation, as he was completely out of clean drinking water. Stephen explained to him that we were fortunate enough at the prison to have our own well and water tower. Now that we had power, there was plenty of water for everyone.

“
Any sign of that priest?” I asked.

“
None at all,” Chris answered as he walked up, covered in grime from a long day of scavenging. “I’m glad too.”

“
Very good,” I decided. “It appears like we’re beating him to the punch yet again.”

I filled them in on the trip to the truck stop and the loss of our guy. They were subdued by the news but grateful for the fuel.

"I got something for you," Stephen said to Dan, changing the subject. "Nearly lost my neck to a zombie myself, but I got you a nice 60 watt solar panel off a railroad switching station."

"That's a start, son,” Dan said unimpressed. “I will need a lot more to set up a proper backup for the radios."

"I nearly lost my life for that damn panel," Stephen said, sounding exasperated. "I should just throw it over the wall."

"What do you want, a kiss?" Dan replied, now walking towards Stephen with puckered lips. "Come get your reward."

"That's close enough!" Stephen yelled, now back-peddling and reaching for his pistol.

Mattie and I both laughed before finally changing the subject.

“
Hey, Stephen, you need to talk to the guy named Eddie upstairs manning the radio,” I suggested. “He’s an over-the-road trucker and came through your neck of the woods in Wisconsin a few weeks ago. Said it looked pretty bad.”

Without hearing another word, Stephen bounded into the command center and up the stairs to find Eddie.

Chris gave me the list from today’s run, which contained an impressive mixture of food, medicine, clothing, batteries, camping gear and even a few guns and ammunition.

“
I do have some concerns though, Mike,” Chris said as I looked through the list. “The zombies are getting thicker again, and we ran into a lot more today than even yesterday. We need to start figuring out a way to thin them out without bullets. And we’re going to need to double down on keeping our perimeter around the prison clear of bodies on a daily basis.”

It was true, and I had noticed a slight pickup in the gunfire coming from our perimeter guards and would need to check in with Casper, Logan and Kleaner later to come up with a solution to the bodies, which were piling up fast.

An almost comfortable routine had been in place for the last two weeks, and everyone was attacking the list of chores with a sense of urgency. Some chores were more appealing than others, but they all needed to be done. Nearly every retail store in town that had anything of value was cleaned out, and all grocery stores in the area were picked clean. The house to house work was progressing well. Many additional supplies had been put away and a new batch of survivors had just been cleared from the observation cells to join the general population. That brought our total population to 158, and our prison was becoming a small community.

One raid to a local farm several days ago proved successful, and tonight we had been treated to an old fashioned pig roast. The farmer had survived the onslaught of the zombies to this point and agreed to come back to the safety of the prison with us. One large storage building in the northeast corner of the prison yard had been converted into a barn of sorts with a nearly two acre barnyard, and we now had a few cows, pigs and chickens along with piles of hay and feed. The farmer had the idea of maybe even doing some harvesting of corn in several of the surrounding fields to use as food for us and the animals. The outbreak happened before any harvesting could be done, and now the fields sat full of produce going to waste.

Pondering just such a mission while cleaning my rifle around a large community fire pit that Stephen set up complete with benches, I got a chance to visit with people as they paused for a moment to warm up. It was not too cool today, maybe around 50 or 55 degrees, but the fire was cozy and Stephen was right, it quickly became a place of congregation. I listened to both gripes and compliments from the people I spoke with and tried to help out when I could. One guy in particular was not happy about his assignment of burning corpses outside the wall. Mattie was able to talk him down. She always had a way with people.

Mattie had asked to go out on a raid today as well. We had taken a couple days off to rest and were now planning on hitting the Ridgewood neighborhood. I agreed, and she was on time for the briefing, with her rifle in hand, dressed and ready for battle. During our morning briefing I felt the need to ride everyone’s asses extra hard. I knew the more routine it became, the more complacent everyone got. And that would get people killed.