The Apocalypse Crusade 2 (23 page)

Then the small caravan of cars ran into a traffic jam three miles from where I-9 crossed out of The Zone. The cars were hopelessly locked, bumper to bumper and had been since eight that morning. The line had grown during the afternoon as people had come up on it running on their last fumes only to have their cars die in the deadlock.

It was eerily quiet and still.

On both sides of the highway was a strip of grass, boggy in places from the rain, and then forest, hemming in the black top. The way was completely blocked. Not even the strips of grass were clear; cars filled in every available foot of space. Rules and laws had gone out the window in the mad scramble to leave The Zone, but all for naught, no one had escaped this way.

Courtney stopped a good fifty feet back from the last bumper, her foot ready to come off the brake at the least sign of danger. In the back seat, Sundance growled softly.

“I don’t see anything,” Max said in reply to the dog. The cars were abandoned and the forest quiet.

“Me neither,” Courtney agreed. “It doesn’t really matter, we can’t get through even if we wanted…” her lips pressed together and her eyes opened wide in alarm as she saw sudden movement in one of the cars about sixty feet up the line. It had been just a flash, but it caught her breath right up in her throat.

“Did you see that?” Max asked, edging his weapon up out of the footwell. “Was it human? I couldn’t tell.”

“What?” Will demanded. “What was it? I can’t see anything back here.”

“I don’t know what it was,” Courtney said. “It could have been a dog, maybe.” She was unconvincing, even to herself. It hadn’t been a dog. The movement had been too…
sly
seemed like the right word.

“It wasn’t a zombie,” Max reassured. “It would’ve attacked us by now. It seemed small, like a kid.” He gave Courtney a guilty look. He was a little nervous with the quiet and the dead cars, and he really didn’t want to go investigate, but if she suggested they should, he wasn’t going to puss out.

Courtney felt the same way. “Maybe we should, I don’t know, maybe one of us should go check it out.”

“Yeah,” Max agreed, trying to hide his reluctance. “Will, let’s go do this.”

Will was even more reluctant and he cursed, “Mother fucker,” before he grabbed his mask and his rifle. The two slid out of the Audi, stiff and nervous. They checked their weapons and then slid on their masks. Suddenly, their world got quieter and their vision was reduced, their periphery shrouded. Max pointed at Will and motioned down one lane of cars and then he motioned down the next lane for himself.

There was no need to tell Will to be careful. He jerked his weapon around pointing it at anything and everything. When he came to the edge of a car, he would leap forward as if he was trying to catch a zombie in the middle of taking a dump. Max waved to him and when he got his attention, he motioned for the man to calm down. The last thing he wanted was for Will to accidentally shoot a kid.

The two crept down the line of cars and trucks and vans, passing about thirty of them when Max suddenly straightened out of his crouch and let his gun relax in his hands. “I don’t see anything,” he said to Will. “Let’s get out of here.” Will agreed and the pair tuned back, but only just then, they both heard a sound. Will thought it was a groan and Max thought it was a whimper. It stopped them in their tracks and they looked at each other over the hood of some rusting Buick.

“It sounds infected, Max.”

“It sounds scared to me.”

Will’s mask turned his curse into a mumble and his gun came up. Again, they began creeping along. They passed the Buick, a Rider rental truck, and two Camrys when they finally found the boy. He was just a blur as he tried to hide himself under a truck.

“Hey, it’ll be ok,” Max said, coming down to the asphalt and trying to crane his head around to see under the truck. The boy, who was maybe nine, and wearing a white and black striped shirt over jeans, slithered to the front of the truck, making a strange sound. It was either very heavy breathing, probably brought on by the extremes of fear, or it was a mutated form of laughter. Either way it straightened Max out of his crouch.

Again, he glanced over at Will. The big eyes behind the mask told him Will thought he had heard laughter, evil laughter. Max wanted to dismiss the sound as having coming from his own fear-ridden imagination, but then the boy popped up from the other side of the truck and he was grinning, white teeth and black gums. His eyes had the diseased gunk dripping right out of them.

“Oh jeeze,” Will murmured, bringing his rifle to sight on the boy. Before he could pull the trigger, the boy dropped down, out of sight. There was a blur as he shot from behind the truck to crouch behind another car. Max’s gun was also up and at the ready, however he was no longer as nervous as he had been; it was just a kid and for a zombie he was far from threatening. Max figured he was only recently diseased and probably not much of a danger.

To support this theory, the boy hopped up and in his hand was a rock. Again, not much of a threat since Max was padded in two layers of heavy clothing. The soldier began to draw a bead on the boy when he threw his rock. It was a horrible throw. It traveled in a rainbow arc high over Max’s head to bounce off the windshield of the Rider truck.

Will fired his weapon a second too late. The boy had popped back down and the bullet skipped off the hood of the car. Again, he was a fast blur, running along the stalled-out cars hunched over. Will sent a few more bullets his way, but they smacked harmlessly into tires or blasted out windows to no effect. The echoes of the gun rolled down the highway after the boy.

“That was weird,” Max said. “And a little unnerving. I don’t like how fast he was. Give me a slow zom…”

The honk of a horn startled him and he turned back to the others thinking he would give them a thumbs up to show that they were ok, however they were far from ok. The back of the Rider truck had slid up and out of it poured zombies—real zombies. Adult ones who weren’t playing hide and seek, or throwing rocks or any other games. They were coming to feast, and there was an amazing number of them. The Rider truck was like a clown car from a circus. They came stumbling out and there had to be fifty or sixty and all of them were between Max and the safety of the Audi.

A horrible thought hit him: that kid zombie did this. He had set up the trap. It was a horrifying idea, but…but it wasn’t possible. Zombies weren’t smart enough to do something like this. And yet the boy had, and if he was smart enough to spring this nasty surprise, what else was he capable of?

Max turned back and saw that the trap was more complete than he had realized. There were more vans ahead and their doors were being pulled open by the boy in the striped shirt revealing more zombies. Now they were pinned from the front and the rear.

Will saw this as well and, wasting no time, went tearing off in a dead sprint to the west. It was the worst possible direction to run. The Hudson River was not two-hundred yards away; he was cornering himself. Max tore off his mask and screamed: “Will! No, stop!” The man kept running and didn’t look back. A good number of zombies gave chase. They were, for the most part, slow and stumbly because of their many injuries, however, some were faster and by experience, he knew they wouldn’t stop. Will would, however. Max gave him a minute before his need for oxygen slowed him to half his speed, but the zombies would just keep on rolling right up to the river’s edge. He would be forced into the water and with his two layers, he’d drown or slog along the current, exhausted until the beasts caught him and pulled him under.

It was all very clear in his mind and the panic-inducing vision made Max want to sprint east where there was nothing but forest and where he knew he could run for miles. Max held himself in check, barely. East was a sucker’s bet. He would, undoubtedly, get further than Will, but he would still be caught and eaten as he laid there gasping for breath. No, the only way to safety was to use his wits. He had to be smarter than the zombies, especially the adult ones who were falling all over each other trying to push through the very slim spaces between the cars.

He watched for a moment and saw in their actions the key to possibly escaping. They were too eager. As if mad, he ran forward, toward the greatest danger and stopped just at the nose of a semi-truck. Like ants boiling out of a kicked-over anthill, the zombies rushed up the gap between the truck on one side and a line of cars on the other. With zombies hurrying from behind, Max waited as long as he dared, and when the ones in front were fifteen feet away, he pulled the trigger of his M16 three times, killing the first two zombies. The rest fell over the top of them in a great twisted mound of arms and legs and grunting torsos.

He then fled up the other side of the semi-truck, using it to shield him from the sight of the ones in front. The ones on his tail had a very good view and they were gaining, their eager moans zinging up his nerves, making his chest go fluttery with panic. At the end of the truck, he wanted to turn and attempt the same trick, only there were zombies in front flowing around the obstacle he had created on the other side and he was forced to shoot one almost at point blank range. He ducked to the right around a Jeep but there was another blocking his path.

His M16 came up to fire again, but there was a “crack” sound and the zombie spun partially around. Johnny Osgood was laying down cover fire. A modified version of relief struck Max; Johnny had proven to be the worst shot in the company and a bullet meant for a zombie could very well take out Max instead. Still it was better than being eaten alive.

With a side step, Max slid past the beast and then ducked again to his right, this time hoping to give Johnny a better shot at the zombies coming up from behind.

Johnny fired six times in a row, killing the side mirror of a Lexus, the windshield of an ugly teal Ford Ranger, and a tree stump sixty yards behind Max. He also hit two more zombies, killing neither, but giving Max enough breathing space in order to finish his sprint back to the cars unmolested.

Courtney was already turning the Audi and for a panicked second, Max thought she was going to leave him behind, but after three sharp moves that had Sundance scrambling for a purchase on the leather back seat, she stopped and waved him in. Right in front of her Cheryl’s Juke was maneuvering in the same manner only much slower because she was forced to wait on Alivia who had tried to forego a K-turn altogether and had swung around in an arc. The Windstar nearly got hung up in a deep gully that had been cut out of the earth by rain. Its front bumper gouged dirt as it struck and then it bounced up. Courtney could see Johnny Osgood gripping the handle above the door and mouthing what looked like a curse.

Last was the Cadillac. It was just sitting there, idling. The three cars sped past it, Max in the last car, waved frantically for it to
GO
!

Gary hauled the cumbersome vehicle around as the zombies closed in. The car moved ponderously, almost casually, its turning radius measuring in yards, not feet. The old man behind the wheel was pulling it around two handed in a manner more suited for a tugboat. It hit the gully with a dull thump and then stopped, the metal of its body shivering as though it were alive. Still moving deliberately and with agonizing slowness, the old man put the caddy in reverse.

Just then, the first of the dead arrived. It wore blood-covered hospital scrubs; its flesh was an ugly grey, but otherwise unmarked. As a man, it hadn’t been pulled apart or bitten to death, he had succumbed to the disease, having been fatally infected trying to help subdue one of the first of the Com-cell patients brought into Saint Francis the day before. He had fed during the night and twice that day, but he was ferociously hungry. With one punch, he obliterated the driver’s side window.

The old man hollered and his wife screamed. The Caddy shot backwards, dragging the zombie along with it until it went off the road. It plowed across the shoulder and crashed into the trees beyond. This flung the scrubs-wearing zombie to the ground where he tumbled like a ragdoll. Despite the danger, Gary stared back at it, horrified while his wife beat on his arms and screamed for him to go.

Too late, he put the huge car in gear and began to turn the heavy wheel. More zombies came gibbering and howling up. They smothered the car, attacking windows and doors and even the hood. With the old couple screaming inside, it lurched forward and recrossed the road only to go into the ditch a second time, but it wouldn’t move again.

The undead beasts dragged the couple out onto the grass and, like hyenas, began feasting on their still struggling bodies.

Seventy feet away Max watched the situation in horrified amazement. The attack had happened so fast that he was too slow bringing his M16 up to his shoulder. Courtney put a hand out to him. “Don’t” she said. “Don’t waste the ammo. They’re dead no matter what.”

He knew this was true and he knew their ammo situation was dangerously low and yet…those were people screaming. A part of him demanded that he do something to save them and, another, perhaps greater part demanded that he run away as fast as he could. The two sides vied within him and then rationalizations began to hurl themselves against his moral foundation until it crumbled.

“You’re right,” he mumbled a moment later, allowing Courtney’s words to act as a cover to his cowardice. “We’re too low on ammo. We should go.” The screams were making him queasy and he was afraid he could also hear the far off ones of Will dying. He put his elbow up on the door and pretended to rest his head in his hand. Really, he was hiding the fact that he had a finger stuck in one ear to help block out the sounds.