Winchester: Over (Winchester Undead) (6 page)

Maypearl
, Texas

Jack drove across a small section of grass before getting to the dirt road leading to the Royal Rangers campground. The camp was built at a Soil Conversation Service Site Reservoir, which was a decent-sized lake that stocked fish. The water could be made to drink with a little filtration and chlorine treatment, and there were plenty of wooded areas that gave limited trapping for food. However, the most important part of the site was the group’s cache.

The
ir original idea for the cache was to have some sealed containers buried far away from the parade grounds the campers used to hold their church services, but they were afraid that some camper might dig up the cache by accident. They had ultimately decided on buying two large blue plastic water containers, nearly six feet tall and six feet in diameter, but instead of holding water, they modified them to form a single tank.

The modified tank
had a top section that slid upwards, but would sit flush on the ground to prevent showing a seam. The bottom of the tank was buried, and created a watertight enclosure for the group’s supplies. By the end of that three-day long weekend trip, Jack, Malachi, and Bexar had built, filled, and buried their modified tank.

Bexar had a friend
at the City’s road and sign department make a sign that looked official and read: “Property of the U.S. Government Water Conservation Program. Report Problems (888) 895-5553.” That phone number went to a call service voicemail that simply asked the caller to leave a message describing the problem. Malachi had found the number; he wasn’t sure who owned the phone number or the voicemail, but it didn’t matter since the chances of someone calling the number due to a single sign on a secluded property in Maypearl, Texas was pretty remote.

Jack
was glad there hadn’t been a Royal Rangers camping trip this week, since it may have been hard to explain why they were there; then again, would the campers have stayed on site two days into The End Of The World As We Know It, or would they have fled for their homes. In reality, he figured most of them would probably still be here, albeit undead.

After about
ten minutes of slow driving, Jack stopped his FJ by the blue tank. It looked just like they had left it, and he hoped the cache was still intact. Will stayed in the FJ and Sandra held watch with the AR while Jack opened the tank. First, he had to dig out the seam that was just below the surface of the ground, revealing the combination padlock. After entering the combination, Jack slid the lip of his Hi-Lift jack under the hook of the latch and began cranking. It took about a minute to raise the top section of the tank on its tracks, and it took both he and Sandra to push the top over on the hinged track to fully open the tank.

Jack
jumped into the tank and inspected the cache—everything looked like it should. Unfolding the step stool left in the tank, he began lifting out his family’s cached items, followed by the group’s items. The personal items of the other families would stay in the tank in case Jack had to leave before the others arrived.

Malone, Texas, FM 308

Farm-to-Market Road 308—Bexar wondered how many signs the Texas Department of Transportation had to replace each year because someone stole it, or fired a bunch of .308 holes in it. Malone was a ghost town, and Bexar couldn’t tell if it was because anyone left had hunkered down, or if they had fled to some other location, or if they were all infected. Either way, he really didn’t care since it was still better than what they had encountered in Hubbard.

Wary
of another ambush, undead or otherwise, Bexar lay on the roof of his Jeep with the binoculars for nearly an hour for reconnaissance after reaching the outskirts of the town. Not seeing any activity, they moved ahead, keeping the Jeep’s speed at around fifty miles per hour, weapons drawn and ready to go. For safety, they had Keeley lay on the floorboards again covered by his Kevlar vest; Jessie was ready to go with the AR. Malone flew by the windshield, and quickly the Reed family arrived in Mertens, Texas. Ahead of them stood a small group of grain silos, all of which were on fire. Several people stood by the silos, watching them burn.

Bexar slowed by the edge of the group
. “Hey buddy, is everyone okay? You shouldn’t be near those things if they’re burning; they’ve been known to explode.” The man turned, but instead of answering, moaned and lurched towards Bexar and his Jeep.

“
Ah SHIT!” Bexar pulled the 1911 up from his lap, fired once into the face of the dangerously close undead, and let the clutch out on the Jeep too fast, stalling the engine. The loud report of the .45 had caused the other undead to turn and begin towards the stalled Jeep. Jessie opened the passenger door, stood in the door frame, and began taking shots over the windshield with the AR as best she could. Bexar pushed in the clutch, turning the ignition key back and forth to engage the starter while pumping the gas pedal. The motor roared to life, and Bexar took one more shot at an undead through his open window.

“
GET IN!” he shouted.

Jessie sat back in the passenger seat
, and hadn’t even closed her door when Bexar began pulling forward as fast as he could. Two miles down the road, he pulled the spare pistol magazine from his belt and switched the magazine in the well of the pistol. Being down two rounds in an eight-round magazine wasn’t a way to stay, so another tactical reload was in order.

Lake Ray Hubbard
, Texas

The scariest part about driving on a highway that crosses a lake and is semi-clogged with cars disabled by an EMP is not that there’s nowhere else to go and you might get stuck. No, the scariest part is that you might get stuck and eaten by a zombie. Malachi was overwhelmed by the constant stress of the past two days, and found himself driving on autopilot as he crept the Scout and trailer through the disabled vehicles. On his right, towards the heart of DFW, numerous large fires were burning out of control. To his left there wasn’t much to see, just the cold winter sky and the lake.
Where did all the people from those abandoned vehicles go?
thought Malachi.
What happened to all the people
?

As he
neared the end of the bridge, he came upon a smoldering fire in the opposite lane. A semi-truck hauling a trailer full of hogs had run into the K-barrier and overturned. Dead hogs scattered the roadway around the truck, many of them savaged with large chunks of flesh missing from their throats, necks, and bodies.

A
s they inched forward past the front of the wrecked semi-truck, they could see a massive pile-up behind the truck, with at least thirty cars involved in the horrific accident. In his detached state, Malachi observed that major traffic accidents were practically a given after an EMP, because most cars now on the road had power brakes and power steering, all of which would fail when the motor stopped.

Movement on the other side of the barricade brought Malachi back to the present.
Someone in the cab of a lifted F-250 quad-cab pickup truck was waving at them. As he drove closer and began to slow, it became apparent that the person wasn’t waving at them, the person was dead and clawing at the window trying to get to them.

“
Damn,” he muttered, “where there’s one there’s two and two there’s more.”

“
What?” said Amber, still staring open-mouthed at the carnage on the highway.

“
Something Bexar used to say about State Troopers on the highway. If you see one, there’s another nearby. If you see two, there’s going to be a lot more. There’s a zombie in that truck and those pigs were eaten by something. I think we might have trouble.”

Slowing for a moment to plan a route through the wreckage on his side of the highway, Malachi saw
more undead than he could count coming towards the center barrier, and towards his intended escape route. Glancing in the side mirror of his Scout, he saw about another dozen undead shambling towards the back of his trailer.

“Fuck! Okay Amber, looks like we’re trapped. I’m going to charge ahead and hope to clear the horde.”

Malachi downshifted and let
out the clutch. The K-barrier wall was between his truck and the approaching zombie horde to his front; as long as he kept moving he could outpace the zombies coming from the rear. If he’d bought an older-bodied Scout with the flip-forward windshield, Amber could have engaged the undead to the front as he drove, but he hadn’t, so he could only press on and hope for the best. As he gained speed, the lumbering undead on the other side of the highway began tumbling over the concrete divider. Even though they weren’t very coordinated, they were persistent, and they all got back up and continued their chase.

Malachi cleared the last wreck
. Taking advantage of the section of open road, he pushed the old six-cylinder motor with everything he had. Changing gears as they passed the last of the undead falling over the barrier, he knew he couldn’t stop or all would be lost.

Looking back, Amber said
, “I wonder how long they’ll keep following us?”

“
I don’t know Amber, but I’ll let someone else figure that one out. FIDO, let’s just go to 635.”

“
Say what?” said Amber.

“
FIDO—Fuck It, Drive On. I say we go for broke and push on to 635, take the loop and see how I-45 looks. The bottom end of the city isn’t as populated; we might get lucky and have a clear run to the cache.”

For the first time
that morning, Malachi was able to cruise at fifty miles per hour, slowing only to dodge an occasional stalled vehicle. He realized he hadn’t seen any other moving vehicles on the road since this morning, and a dark feeling of isolation descended on the cab of the Scout as hope began to wane.

Denver International Airport
, Colorado

After two hours of feeling his way in the pitch-black darkness of the unfinished spaces between the rock face and the “exterior” walls of the underground complex, Cliff had finally found what he was looking for: one of the thirteen escape passages. He wasn’t exactly sure where this vertical shaft led, but he was sure it went to the ground level and freedom from the super-secret-base-turned-undead-tomb. Cliff hoped it wasn’t the one passage that led to an opening near the symbolic Masonic cornerstone in the Great Hall—the conspiracy theorists had gotten that one right, even if there weren’t any aliens.

Two
hundred and twenty-one rungs later and Cliff was at the hatch, spinning the latch handle to release the door. Once the latch was engaged in the open position, the hatch pushed open with a hiss of hydraulic pistons and locked. Although Cliff was never really sure how deep the facility was beneath ground level, he calculated that if the rungs were twelve inches apart, he had started the climb twenty-two stories below the surface.

He
had spent the climb with his FNP90 slung across his back and out of the way so it wouldn’t catch on the rungs of the ladder, but now the hatch was open to the outside world and since he wasn’t sure what awaited him, the rifle came back around to the front of his body. Leaning back against the wall of the shaft, Cliff checked the face of his Suunto Core watch and saw it was nearly 1500 hours local time. It occurred to him that his electronic watch had survived the EMP event because he had been in a shielded facility.

Reaching into the cargo pocket of his battered TAD operator pants, he pulled
out a pair of Oakley sunglasses and put them on before entering the harsh afternoon sunlight. Easing upwards, Cliff pointed the barrel of his rifle towards the threat of the unknown and scanned the grounds before climbing all the way out of the rescue shaft. Looking through his ACOG, Cliff could see the white and blue tail of the most famous 747 in the world; he also saw that the aircraft lay broken across the ground, parts of it still burning. A pack of undead milled about near the aircraft, and Cliff assumed that the Commander-in-Chief was dead, but it was still his duty to go check.

LBJ Freeway, south of Dallas, Texas

Malachi was surprised to have found the I-635 relatively clear of vehicles and had made good time getting to the I-20. His plan was to try to make it to the I-45 and if that was clear, to push on to the I-35 to get a straight shot at Maypearl. If their luck held, they would be at the cache site in less than two hours. Malachi held his hand to the horizon. “Looks like we have about three hours of daylight left. If we can keep this pace up, we should make it to the group site in about two hours.”

“
What if we don’t make it before dark?” asked Amber.

“
We’ll have to find another safe place to spend the night out in Indian country,” he replied.

He knew
Amber was worried; she did not want to spend another night outside of their group site. If the others were already there, they had safety in numbers. Regardless, they had still gained a little safety getting away from Dallas and all the undead people.

Cache Site near Maypearl, Texas

Jack passed Sandra the last of their personal survival stores and some of the group’s provisions out of the bottom of the tank, but left Malachi and Bexar’s stores in place. The last piece of gear he passed up was in a large, off-brand Pelican-style case. This was Jack and Sandra’s Sunforger heavy canvas wall tent, made from material purchased from Panther Primitives. Malachi and Bexar had purchased similar tents; the group had fallen in love with the tents when they had been a part of the Royal Rangers frontiersman reenactment group, Frontiersman Camping Fellowship. The tents were well-made, and were cool in the summer and warm in the winter. Not only that, they could run a wood-burning stove in the tent to heat and to cook on. Instead of the traditional wooden frame, the group had all opted for the galvanized steel poles that were much more lightweight, and took less time to set up than the wooden poles. They had even taken the time to dye the bright white canvas earth tone colors so they didn’t stand out.

The only thing that
Jack missed was the handmade cots they used to have. With the ground cloth down and the tent set up, Jack and Sandra quietly and quickly put their night’s supplies in the tent, but readied their truck for departure if they needed to flee. They would both feel safer once the others made it.

Sandra took Will inside the tent, set
ting up their small camping table and cranking up the old green Coleman stove. After all the stress and exertion of the day, they needed a good meal tonight, especially since she wasn’t sure when they might have another chance to cook a good meal.

Jack
gathered up the group’s homemade proximity alarms. This was a device that held a ten-gauge shotgun round that they loaded without any shot, only with the powder. A length of high-tension fishing filament and a small spring were used to create a trip wire that set off the shotgun cartridge noisemaker. It was simple, required no batteries or high technology, and worked well. The group had loaded one hundred shells for the trip alarms and sealed them in an ammo can in the cache. Jack set out six of the devices in a loose circle about two hundred feet from their camp, on the more obvious approach routes. For each device, he took a stick of camo face paint and ran the end of the stick down the fishing line for camouflage, making it look more like a small vine than a trip wire.

Milford, Texas

After escaping the zombie horde in Mertens, Bexar hadn’t slowed down much until they’d nearly reached the Milford city limits. The town was empty and on fire; it appeared that only ghosts remained. He didn’t know why it seemed like everything caught fire after the end of the world, but he did know that clearly there weren’t enough living people left to fight the fires.

It was with no small relief that Bexar found that FM
308 crossed over the I-35 and not under it. The Interstate was littered with stalled vehicles, accidents, and hundreds of people milling about between the cars and accidents. At a second glance, they realized that none of those people were alive—I-35 was a tomb of the undead.

“
Holy shit!” cried Jessie, “look at that, honey, we need to get out of here.”

“
Couldn’t agree with you more, Jess,” said Bexar as he let out the clutch and started across the bridge. He guessed they were only about forty-five minutes away from Maypearl with only about two hours of daylight left. They had to make it to the group tonight. He hoped the group was there.