The Rabid: Fall (8 page)

She kicks her heels out, wipes her face off, and drops her forehead into her hands.

“You disagree?”

“No,” she picks her head up, brushing her hair back out of her face, some strands still sticking to the dampness left behind by her tears, “I agree and that’s the problem. So how do we do this?”

“I haven’t figured that part out yet. We’ll have to see the place first before we can really make any plans. If your brother is there, we’ll get him out; that hasn’t changed.”

“What if he’s not there?”

“One step at a time, okay?”

“I can live with that.”

I kiss her. “That’s what makes you one of the good guys.”

“Girls.”

“Huh?”

“You said I’m one of the
good guys
, I’m not a guy.”

“Oh, sorry, where’s my political correctness? You’re one of the good girls. You sure you don’t want me to call you a woman instead? Doesn’t calling you a girl instead of a woman take away your power as a proud, independent, female adult or something?”

“I like queen better, think you can manage that?”

“Do I get to be one of your knights?”

She draws the burning stick from the embers. “Yeah, get over here so I can make it official.”

I bat the stick away—she doesn’t put up much of a fight. We laugh with our foreheads pressed together and joke about me rising up against her tyranny. In the end, we wind up making out beneath the stars, beside a pile of waning embers; not a bad way to spend an evening, apocalypse or no apocalypse.

10

“You sure you won’t reconsider? We definitely got room for one more.”

Martha smiles at me and shakes her head, shotgun slung over one shoulder. “Like I said, my place is here, but thank you kindly.”

“No, ma’am, thank you; you’ve gone above and beyond.” She loaded us up with the necessities before sending us out the door.

She waves me off, visibly embarrassed by all the acclaim. “Least I can do after shooting you.”

“Nah, don’t be too sorry about that, I think you may have actually given him a bit of character.” Katia attempts to poke at one of my cheeks before I swat her away.

“Thank you, ma’am.” Sonny holds out a hand to Martha, which she briefly accepts.

“You watch out for these two, they’re trouble.” Martha directs Sonny’s attention to me and Katia. We’re still wrestling over her finger as she continues to try to touch my face.

“I’ve gotten used to them, unfortunately.”

“Oh, he loves us,” Katia insists breathily as I duck behind her and lock one of her hands against her lower back. “He’s like a baby; he needs us to feed him, to clothe him.” Her body falls against mine in surrender.

“Yep, that’s me, like a baby, I even shit myself from time-to-time, if you can believe it.” Sonny turns down the road towards the Humvee, a pack of supplies on one shoulder and a rifle on the other.

I release Katia and try to catch my breath.

“You make sure you put the antibiotic ointment on those cuts.”

“I’ll be the one doing it, so don’t you worry.” Katia takes up her pack and starts backing down the road as she speaks, dragging me by the elbow. “Stay safe out here.”

“Thanks again, Martha.”

“Stop it with all that, you just take care of yourselves out there; that’s all the thanks I need.” She’s stands at the top of the road, watching us go, cradling her shotgun, the sun rising at her back.

***

I’m a little pissed at Katia. I told her to just drive back the way we came and grab the interstate from there. But no, she said she could figure a different way out; didn’t wanna have to go back through all the Rabid. Now we’re winding our asses down some back country road in the middle of bumble-fuck-nowhere.

“This is better,” Katia insists.

“Better how? We’re supposed to be heading towards D.C. I can’t even find this road on the map.”

“We’re fine, the sun is…” she pauses while she leans down and checks the sky through the windshield, “it’s on our right shoulder, so that’s good, right?”

“Wait, what?”

“I heard something about it rising in the east and setting in the west,” Sonny pipes in.

“So that’s good,” Katia says as if the matter has been settled.

“Did y’all just become a bunch of nineteenth-century fur trappers, navigating the forest by the sun? You know how you’re always up my ass about stupid ideas, Katia? This is a stupid idea. I want you to really grab this moment and hold onto it so you can reference it the next time you accuse me of having a stupid idea.”

She reaches over and gives me a patronizing little pat on the shoulder. “You’re going to be eating those words very soon.”

Just around the next bend is an overturned chicken truck.

“What are the chances?” Katia gradually presses her foot to the brake pedal, rolling us to a stop.

“Of what? A chicken truck? It’s Arkansas. I’d say the chances are pretty damn good.”

We’re surrounded by thick trees and brush on both sides of the road, the sunlight reaches us in circles and slices, fragmenting the shadows.

“Guess we should see if there’s a way to squeeze around,” Katia suggests, her fingers already wrapping around the door handle.

“Or we could spare ourselves the wasted time, admit that this was a bad idea to begin with, and just turn around.”

She settles back against her seat and turns her head towards me, her hair falling elegantly across her face. “Just grant me this one last thing. If there’s no way around, I’ll admit defeat and we can do it your way.”

“No protesting?”

“Honest Injun.” She holds out a pinkie and I accept it with one of my own.

“Alright, let’s go.”

The breeze is cool and a shiver rattles my spine. We’re still on the edge of winter and the region has been doing that seesaw thing it’s so famous for; fifty degrees one day and seventies the next.  Katia goes for the front of the truck, twirling her katanas. I’ve got my rifle up and shouldered; I’m feeling uneasy. I don’t know what I’m expecting; Rabid chickens, perhaps?

“No way in hell we’re getting around this, it’s all downhill and trees.” I use my hand as a visor to block out the sunbeam attacking my eyes and try to peer down into the woods; can’t see anything, everything dissolves into darkness a hundred feet in. I can hear the sound of crunching leaves somewhere to my right.

A critter of some type; at least that’s what I’m hoping.

There’s a scream and the sound of glass breaking.

Katia.

I turn to see her kicking out and down, her face twisted up in horror. An arm has broken through the windshield of the truck and there’s a pale hand latched onto her ankle. Before I can get to her, she’s already chopped it off at the wrist.

“Are you okay?” I ask, slowing my charge.

“Behind you!” Katia shouts, raising her swords.

There are Rabid streaming around the bend in the road, a whole pack of them, breaking across either side of the Humvee, roaring, their mouths open, their arms up. They begin to spring up out of the woods as well, flowing up from either side of the road, all of them converging like an undead river, rushing straight for us.

“Oh shit!” As Katia goes to leap onto the cab of the chicken truck, the driver begins to emerge from the windshield, absent a hand; she takes his head off in one fluid motion, sticking a perfect landing atop the passenger side door.

My retreat isn’t nearly so graceful. I let off a couple of rounds as I press my back against the payload of the overturned rig—twisted wire cages containing the skeletons of abandoned fowl. Most of my targets fall, except for one; my bullet goes wide and takes a chunk out of his neck. I turn, toss my rifle on top of the truck, and begin trying to climb the cages, wedging my boots in between the pallets, the wire digging deep into my knuckles. It takes a few tries, but finally I get a leg up and over.

“Come on!” Katia grabs me by the shirt and yanks me the rest of the way.

The surge of Rabid slams into the truck, sliding it a few inches down the road, just as my leg gets clear of danger.

“What about Sonny?” I take up my rifle, trying to pick a target from the rising tide of animated corpses.

“Not a damn thing we can do for him!” Katia stabs downward, skewering a Rabid through the top of the head. As she attempts to shake that blade free, she works the other one like some maniacal landscaper, cutting through the dead as if they’re nothing more than stubborn brush, cleaving and cracking their skulls.

Sonny pops out of the top of the Humvee like a jack-in-the-box and begins turning circles, firing into the hellacious mob, screaming, “You pricks want me? You want me? Eat this shit! Take it! Take it!” His gun jams. He drops it and comes back up with a pistol, turning and firing, turning and firing, trying his damndest to push the Rabid back.

I’m doing my best to help him, trying to land headshots on the bastards climbing across the hood, but I’m not too confident in my ability to avoid hitting Sonny and the engine block, so I pull most of my shots wide, winging or missing my targets completely.

Sonny caves to the overwhelming odds and drops back inside the Humvee, securing the hatch; safe for the moment.

“Where the hell did they come from?” The Rabid are shaking the truck, trying to climb up to us. Katia slices through two sets of fingers and sends two bodies falling back into the crowd. Her blades are now dripping with black blood.

“Damned if I know.” I’ve started landing more shots than I’m missing; explosions of bone and sprays of pulverized brain matter herald each success.

“You think they followed us from the city?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. Could be a migration.”

“A migration? Like geese in the winter?” Katia hacks at a skull like a coconut, getting to the meaty center in three swings.

“Yeah, something like that. Saw it on the interstate coming out of Georgia.” One of my bullets tears through the cheek of a Rabid, ripping its flesh like a sheet of paper, the force twisting its body backwards against the grill of the Humvee.

“You better save one of those bullets for me! I’m not becoming one of these bastards!”

“Don’t you worry, we ain’t about to die in Arkansas!”

Katia continues spinning her swords along the side of the truck like helicopter blades, rotten flesh and putrid blood splashing back in her face; her shirt is soaked through, her arms slimed with brains and gray flesh. “What the hell is Sonny doing?”

Sonny is climbing into the driver’s seat of the Humvee. The engine rumbles to life and the headlamps flicker on.

“I think he’s attempting to rescue us, either that or he’s leaving us here.”

“I’m not sure which of those two possibilities I prefer.” Katia executes a nimble hop as an arm coated in sagging, lesion-riddled skin makes a sweep for her ankles. She comes down on top of the limb before it can retract, fracturing the bones and causing them to splinter through the rotten flesh. She cuts the arm off at the elbow and kicks her trophy away.

Sonny guns the engine and barrels straight for us, mowing down the Rabid in his path and obliterating them beneath the tires. He hits the brakes way too late and plows into the ass end of the chicken truck, knocking Katia and I off our feet.

“Are you okay?” I roll towards her.

She groans and sits up, still clinging to her steel. “How’d I know he’d screw that up?”

I jump back to my feet.

There’s a sickly mechanical cough coming from the engine block of the Humvee, followed by billowing black smoke. I guess my bullets didn’t go as wide as I wanted them to.

“Vehicle is out of commission.” I drop to one knee and fire into a small crowd of Rabid climbing the roof of our broken getaway vehicle. My magazine clicks empty. “Changing mags.”

Katia is back on her feet. A Rabid has managed to make it onto the cab of the truck in the short time she’s been down. She meets the monster with a side kick to the chest, knocking it off balance before rending its head in two. “There’s too many!”

She’s right. There are probably two dozen of these bastards left, and that’s a conservative count. Sonny is trapped in the vehicle. I’ve got a mag of rifle ammo and my pistol left. Katia’s got her swords. We’re in a bad spot.

“We go down fighting.” It’s more a timid suggestion on my part than a courageous proclamation. We could always jump off the back of the truck and flee on foot in the other direction. The truck is blockading the road, it’d be a couple minutes before the Rabid found their way up and over; we could make some ground. But that’s something the boy in me would do. That’s something the coward in me would do, the one that couldn’t grant a merciful death to his own sister. His voice is much smaller than it used to be, but he’s still there, prodding at me, churning my guts. Katia would punch me if I even hinted at retreat. She may not be too fond of Sonny, but he’s one of us.

“Yeah, we go down fighting!”

I roll to the left as a Rabid claws for my feet. I come up onto my butt and aim, the barrel outstretched between my knees. The head of the Rabid that tried to snag me emerges over the side of the truck: a woman, blonde sprigs of hair barely clinging to her withered skull, eyes like winter. I pull the trigger and blow her face off. I dodge again, rolling to my left side, using an elbow to steady myself as I blow two more Rabid off the roof of the Humvee. As I come back to my feet, a Rabid surprises me. It swipes for my face and catches the barrel of my rifle, ripping it from my grasp and sending it spiraling into the horde.

“I lost my primary!”

“That’s great! Just fucking great!” Katia is hopping over gnarled claws, beating the Rabid back, but it’s not fast enough; for every one that goes down, two more appear.

Sonny is in the Humvee, crouched between the seats, gun up, shit-scared and battle ready, looking to us for some sort of direction.

The blare of a horn fills the air, drowning out the collective moan of the Rabid.

All of the Rabid seem to pause and turn their heads, their senses drawn away from us for a split second.

A white bus, lined with black stripes, rounds the bend in the road. It’s moving so damn fast I’m surprised it doesn’t just topple over. It’s wrapped in razor wire and the windows are tinted black. I can’t make heads-or-tails of what’s on the other side of the glass. The bus shows no signs of slowing as it barrels towards us.

“Should we move?” Katia is already backing away, her heels hovering over the edge of the trailer.

The bus downshifts at the last possible moment, the brakes squeal, and the ass end kicks out sideways as it slides to a stop inches away from the Humvee, the folding doors facing us.