Winchester: Over (Winchester Undead) (14 page)

Cliff cleared the rest of the store, including the storeroom and back office. Finding no one else, he let out a deep sigh and pulled open the front of the beer cooler. Just as he grabbed a six-pack of
Sawtooth Ale, a hand reached through the beer bottles from the back of the cooler and latched onto his hand, sending the beer crashing to the floor. The hand was half-rotten and blackened, with bone showing through chunks of missing flesh.

Cliff’s free hand dropped to his pistol, and he thumbed on the X300 light as he brought it up. He could see the dead orbs of a zombie’s eyes looking back at him through the cooler. The undead creature moaned while trying to pull him into the cooler. Cliff fired three times and the zombie’s grip fell free.

He couldn’t believe he hadn’t checked the walk-in cooler. Checking his arm and hand, he didn’t see any scratches that had broken his skin, so he grabbed another six-pack of Left Hand beer and shut the door. With an arm full of bags from the stockroom, he began “shopping.” Placing the bags by the store’s front door, he took the beer, a windshield scraper, a jug of freeze-rated windshield wiper fluid, and four three-gallon red plastic gas cans. Packages of Pop-Tarts, Slim Jims, Combos, and beef jerky also went into the bags. In the storeroom he found a garden hose the clerk had probably used to spray off the parking lot, and cut off two four-foot long sections of hose. He was going to need them to siphon gas.

Storing his scavenged items in the truck, he started looking for cars to siphon gas from. To the north he saw a sign for a car rental agency; that would be his destination. Most rental companies didn’t keep their own fuel tanks, but rentals were rented out with a full tank of gas, so maybe his luck would continue.

A quick drive to the rental car company’s lot where, as he’d suspected, he found a handful of small and midsized vehicles. Hose section and gas cans in hand, Cliff first approached a red Dodge Avenger. He broke the driver’s window, reached through to unlock the back door, pulled out the bottom of the back seat of the car, and unscrewed the fuel pump from the gas tank. The Dodge held just enough fuel to fill three of his gas cans, which he used to top off the truck’s gas tank. He repeated the process on another car in the lot before driving back to the gas station, happy he had a full tank of gas and four full gas cans for tomorrow’s drive.

Again parking the truck at the side of the gas station, he walked over to the Holiday Inn to begin his quest for blankets and a pillow. He had no intention of going in the front door, so he walked along the outside of the hotel looking for a room with open
curtains so he’d be able to see if the room was devoid of undead. The sixth window he passed had the curtains open, and it didn’t look like anyone was inside. He tapped the barrel of his rifle against the glass to see if there would be a reaction in the room; hearing none, he broke the window and climbed into the hotel room. This time he made sure it was actually empty; that had been a close call in the gas station.

He pulled the blanket off the queen bed and found a spare blanket in the closet, along with a spare pillow stored in a zipped up bag. He was about to crawl back out the window when he had a moment of clarity, the kind that could change the world, and he quickly darted back into the bathroom to take two unopened rolls of toilet paper and three large bath towels.

He had intended to sleep in the gas station, but the smell was so bad he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Instead, he hung his new towels up on the inside of the windows of his truck to keep himself out of view, opened a beer, and tried to enjoy his dinner of Pop-Tarts and beef jerky as the sun set.

December 31
st

Outside of Comanche, Texas

Bexar took the binoculars out of his bag and made his way down the hill towards the road leading from the group’s campsite. It was the last watch, and already the horizon was glowing orange to the east. He was about two hundred yards south of the camp, which was blocked from view of the road by a cluster of trees near a stock pond.

In the distance, the distinct rumbling pop of a group of motorcycles with straight pipes emerged from the east. A few minutes later the sound grew louder, and a single rider appeared, riding past the entrance of the cow pasture at about fifty miles per hour, joined a short time later by a group of seven riders rolling up the roadway from the same direction. They were traveling slowly, about twenty miles per hour, revving their motors, and stopping and looking behind them. The first rider returned to the slower group, discussed something with someone who appeared to be the leader, then continued on in a westerly direction.

Bexar could see that the group had on cuts—leather vests with the group’s club logo in yellow and black—identifying them as the “
Pistoleros,” a one-percenter group that Bexar had had run-ins with as a peace officer. There were always rumors that they were heavily involved in major crime, but it seemed like their hangers-on were the ones getting caught with meth, stolen property, and illegal guns, never a club member. The group continued on their western trek, and about thirty seconds after the last motorcycles had roared off, the moaning sound of the undead reached his ears at his look-out post. Zombies, hundreds of them, were shambling up the road, following the motorcycles.

Bexar stuffed the binoculars in his cargo pocket and began low crawling up the hill back to the
camp, praying he wouldn’t be noticed by the lurching stream of undead passing on the road below. By the time he had reached camp, Sandra was boiling water for coffee on the Coleman stove, Jessie was feeding the kids, and Jack was already loading the trucks.

“Guys, we’ve got a problem, we need to leave, and soon,” he reported. “A pack of
Pistoleros just passed on the way towards Comanche, but they had a large group of undead following them. It was like they were deliberately leading the zombies towards the town.”

Jack shut the door on his FJ and turned towards Bexar. “How’re we supposed to leave soon if there’s a pack of zombies on the road?”

“I don’t know, we could cut some fence and cross fields to get some room, but nothing good can come from this,” Bexar replied. “If they stop in town for any amount of time, those walking corpses will eventually spread out. We can wait, but I don’t think we should wait long; we need to get out and away from that damned town.”

Jessie picked up Keeley,
then turning to Bexar said, “Babe, we’re in the middle of cow country. I bet most of the dirt roads around here end up back on that same highway. Those guys might keep riding; why don’t we prep to bug-out and then wait and see what happens?”

“Well okay,” Bexar said. “Jack, what if we cut the fence behind us, I’ll move forward and try to see what happens from a safe distance. We can always stay here another night, but if those one-
percenters or the zombies start this way, we’ll have to move fast or we might get overrun.”

Grand Junction, Colorado

Cliff woke up slowly. Those few beers had been a jolt to his body, and his head was a little fuzzy as the sun rose outside of his blanket-covered truck cab. Trying to make as little movement as possible to keep the truck from shaking, Cliff reached up and gently pulled back a corner of the towel to look out the windshield. Nothing appeared to be moving, so he unlocked the door and climbed out to relieve himself on the side of the building. Today was a big travel day. He knew he had to gain more ground and gain it faster than the previous day, but he absolutely couldn’t afford another wreck with a walking corpse.

At least once the mountains were in his rearview mirror he knew the drive would open up—there wasn’t much of anything on the highway until he was well into Utah. He hoped the road would be reasonably clear so he could maintain something resembling highway speed for most of the day.

The road was fairly clear of abandoned vehicles and debris, and he was able to push the speedometer past fifty miles per hour a few times before he had to slow and drive on the shoulder to dodge vehicles. It also hadn’t snowed again last night, so all in all it was an uneventful drive, which he was grateful for. It took ninety minutes, but he made it to Green River, Utah. He wasn’t sure the people who lived in the area had even noticed that the world had ended; tough to notice that all electronics had ceased to work when you’re a modern day mountain man living a rough life in the woods.

Five hours later, Cliff stopped outside of Beaver, Utah to fuel up the truck from his gas cans. The truck’s tank was full but now his red plastic gas cans were empty. Everything seemed quiet on the highway so he grabbed the empty gas cans and began searching for a suitable candidate from a number of vehicles abandoned haphazardly across the highway. Between his truck and a couple of semi-trucks sat an old Ford Ranger pickup, from the days when the Ranger was a full-sized truck. He knew it would have easy access to the gas tanks, so he got to work, leaving his rifle in his Chevy because it would get in the way trying to climb under vehicles. In short order the fuel filler hose of the Ranger was cut free, the garden hose inserted, and the first gas can filled. Switching gas cans, he began to fill the second one, not noticing that he had attracted the attention of a high school marching band that had been driving back from a Christmas parade when the EMP hit, and whose charter bus was hidden from view on the other side of the semi.

Cliff squeezed the garden hose together to stop the flow of fuel so he could switch containers again. Without the noise of the fueling, he could now hear what sounded like shoes dragging across the cold pavement. Lying flat on his back under the old Ford, he tilted his head back and saw dozens of feet shuffling in his direction from around the front of the semi-truck ahead.

Quickly pulling the garden hose out of the gas tank, he screwed the cap back on the gas can and shimmied out from underneath the truck. Turning to pick up the gas cans, he came face-to-face with a large, fat teenager, his left eye missing and skin hanging from his left cheekbone. His blackened fat hands grabbed the garden hose that Cliff held out in front of him.

People often believe they will rise to the occasion when danger confronts them, but Cliff had learned from his years in combat working for an Other Government Agency that, when placed in a high-stress situation, people will only fall to their level of training. His training had been exceptionally good, as were his skills, but he had only been trained to fight living people.

His first instinct was
to give a strong palm heel strike to the band member’s solar plexus, because that maneuver gave you time and distance to fight your way to your primary weapon and to safety. But then he remembered that it had not worked very well on the undead maintenance worker at DIA, and was therefore unlikely to be any more effective against an already dead teenager whose grip strength would rival a power lifter.

The teenage zombie pushed Cliff onto his back. Cliff’s left hand shot up and grabbed the zombie’s stiff neck, while with his right hand he grasped the knife in his back right pocket. The Emerson CQC-7 opened up as it was pulled from his pocket, as it had been designed to do, and Cliff drove it into the left temple of the band member. The knife stuck firmly in the kid’s skull and Cliff pushed the dead weight off of him.

Bounding to his feet, he drew his pistol. He didn’t have enough rounds to engage the thirty or so remaining members of the undead marching band. Moving in a quick combat crouch, rolling his feet heel-to-toe to keep the muzzle of his pistol level, he quickly shot the four closest to him before reaching his Chevy truck and his primary weapon. The FNP90 in hand, Cliff jumped into the bed of his truck and stepped onto the roof. Kneeling for stability, he began to slow his breathing—
just like my training at the Farm
, he thought,
breathe in through the nose, aim, breathe out slowly and press the trigger to the rear
. The breathing helped to slow his heart rate so he could focus and regain the fine motor control in his fingers. The fight-or-flight reflex affects everyone, even the highest trained Tier-1 operators, and like them, Cliff focused on his breathing and relied on his training to overcome the situation. It took slightly longer than five minutes, but once he was done the marching band had permanently left the field.

He climbed down from the roof of his truck, and this time he properly cleared the vehicles in the area. All he found was the band’s bus driver, who had been mostly eaten by the teenagers.

A cool breeze blew up the highway from the town below, carrying the faint moans of more undead. Trouble was coming; he needed to un-ass this spot, get moving and fast. But first things first—Emerson wasn’t going to make another knife again and Cliff loved his CQC-7, so he jogged over to the fat teenager to retrieve it. Then he loaded the fuel cans in his truck, hoping the three full cans would give him enough fuel to elude the approaching horde. This was an unacceptable situation, but he had to evade before he could regroup.

Outside of Comanche, Texas

Judging by the position of the sun, Jack guessed it was nearly noon when Bexar walked back into the camp. Although the temperature was in the low forties, Bexar was soaked with sweat.

“After a bit I thought I’d try to keep count of the passing undead, but after about four hundred of them shambled past, I couldn’t keep up,” he reported. “They’re all headed towards the town, and I haven’t heard anything more than some sporadic gunfire since the first outbreak. My guess is, that was the rest of the living in the town trying to fight the bikers and their zombies off. They probably lost, or are hunkered down. I haven’t seen a single zombie come back from the town. I also haven’t seen any stragglers or others passing in about the last half-hour. I say we load up and haul ass while we can!”

Jessie gently shut the door on the Jeep and joined the group. “Keeley’s down for her nap in her seat in the Jeep, so now would be just as good a time as any to leave.”

Jack nodded. “No good can come from those bikers running a pack of zombies like that; we don’t need to be anywhere near those guys.”

Heading back to their vehicles, the group, with Jack in the lead, started down the dirt trail running along the fence towards the highway. Turning left, they drove away from the bikers’ zombie horde. The road was reasonably clear and they were able to settle into a fifty-miles-per-hour cruising speed. They needed to get far away from Comanche, but fuel was still a precious commodity, and driving any faster would only burn their gas up faster.

The night before, Jack had used Malachi’s GPS to plot a route around Comanche. Crisscrossing the countryside on small Farm-to-Market roads, his plan would take them to Highway 183. The sooner they could get out of the Texas back country and to Big Bend National Park, the better their chances were of surviving.

Their gas supplies had already been low when they were nearly ambushed in Comanche. Now that they had some distance between them and the bikers, Jack started looking for a safe place to siphon gas. Reaching the tiny town of Zephyr, Jack pulled the convoy into the parking lot of a surprisingly nice new high school football stadium. Parked in the stadium parking lot was a big Ford work truck, which was of no use to them since it burned diesel, but what was useful was the lawn equipment and the big red gas cans on the large trailer. Between the commercial lawn equipment and the gas cans, they gained nearly forty gallons of gas. Their vehicles were topped off and the newly acquired gas cans strapped down to the roof racks.

Bexar held his hand up to the horizon; he had only four fingers of sunlight left. “Less than two hours until sunset,” he said. “We need to get hidden and set up for the night.”

Jack nodded. “Yeah, but if we keep this pace up, it’ll take us a week to make Big Bend.”