Zompoc Survivor: Exodus (15 page)

“Got ya somethin’,” I said as I held the long arms and the gunbelts out. The guy looked at me like I was trying to hand him a bag of snakes, but he took them.

“Why are you helping us?” he asked. “Not that I’m not grateful. It’s just that almost everyone else we’ve met since this has all started has been trying to kill us.”

“I’m one of the good guys,” I said with a wry smile and stuck out my now empty right hand. “My name is Dave Stewart.”

“Grant Jacobs,” the deputy said, then pointed with his thumb over his shoulder. “That’s Ann Tucker. We were out trying to rescue survivors when this group caught us by surprise. You’re welcome to come back with us. The jail is the only safe place in town right now. We’ve got it barricaded and we have enough supplies to last for a while. We could use all the help we can get.” Ann offered me a brief smile before she came over and squatted in the doorway. Grant handed her the Glock and pulled the magazine from the M-4.

“Thanks, but I’ve got a plan of my own. You’re probably going to want to get out of town yourself. Look, there’s a lot of gear, ammo and some more guns in the truck over there. Take it and get the hell out of here. Be careful when you head toward campus. Most of the dead were heading that way.” I paused for a moment, unsure of how much more I should say. I had seen things in the past twelve hours or so that I was having a hard time believing even after seeing it.

“Thanks,” Ann said as she buckled the sidearm on. “If the dead are heading toward SMU, the route back to the jail should be pretty clear. We should swing north a little to make sure we miss the shambling hordes.” Grant nodded and slid the mag home and pulled the charging handle.

“Okay, you’re gonna have a hard time believing this, but the zombies…a guy named Mike Deacon is controlling them.” They both looked at me with open disbelief.

“You’re kidding me,” Ann said.

“I wish I was, but he pulled every zombie for at least three miles around toward the campus. As far as I know Deacon’s still trapped in McDonald Arena.”

“Mike Deacon? About five nine, dark hair, skinny little fuck?” Jacobs asked. I nodded and he laughed. “I knew that guy. He was a frequent flyer at the jail.”

“Simmons brought him in on a domestic Friday night. I thought he died in his cell or something,” Ann said.

“Yeah, he did,” Grant said. “Guess it didn’t stick.”

“Well, I fucked him up pretty hard before I left the university,” I told them. “Still, staying in town is probably a bad idea in the long run. Your best bet is to find a railroad track and follow it out of the city, then head northwest.”

“Why northwest?” Ann asked.

“Population density’s lower that way. Fewer people mean fewer zombies,” I ad libbed. Nate’s original wording had been that fewer people meant less competition for resources and fewer potential carriers if things went biological. Now I was seeing what he’d really been pointing me toward. I pulled a notepad and pen out of the pocket of my vest and scribbled down a frequency and times. “If you get up Wyoming way, tune in to this frequency.  Or channel twenty six on citizen’s band. Take care and good luck.” I turned and started away.

“Hey, Dave,” Grant called after me. I turned back to him. “Thanks again. If we ever get out to Wyoming, we’ll look you up. Safe travels, man.” I gave him a nod and headed back toward the truck. The stash of coins had been too good a find to pass up, so I stopped at the tailgate and pulled the smaller storage box toward me. Most of the coins were old nickels and dimes, but I hit paydirt in a small leather pouch: ten gold Krugerrands. I pulled five out and dumped them back into the box before I tucked the pouch into my vest. A small fortune in gold coins riding in my pocket was enough to put a spring in my step as I headed back for my storage unit. What I had there was worth more than all the gold on the planet just then. The storage unit door opened on my second bug out cache. Inside was my back up bug out bag, an Army ammo case and a binder filled with maps.

The bug out bag had a lot of the stuff I was already carrying, but it also carried more long term survival gear, including a small tent, a ground pad and a wool blanket. I tucked the maps into the tan pack then slung it across my back, grabbed the ammo case and slipped out the door. The sound of a truck pulling away reached my ears as I slipped out the back of the facility the same way I came in, then trucked across the tracks and headed for my bike.

Leo gave me a disapproving look as I stuck the ammo case in among everything else, but he stayed put otherwise. My bug out bag went on top, and he perched atop it like a little king on a padded throne. The bike took more effort to get going, but it was a light enough burden once I got moving. I followed my route back to the dirt road and turned down it. The brown clay rolled past below me, and the road turned to the south as it paralleled the tracks, the curved back to the east. I followed it under Schoolcraft Freeway to the area where the road construction crews that were widening the overpass parked their construction vehicles. A temporary crossing had been set up under the overpass, and I took advantage of it to get my bike on the north side of the tracks. Then came the ride up the hill. In a car, it would have been a pretty gentle grade, but on a bicycle, pulling more than fifty pounds of gear and a miniature lion behind me, it was torture. It finally leveled off and turned to the right, which put me on an access road called Eastgate that ran beside the freeway. Once I was on the street, I kept going north, and I breathed a sigh of relief. I was past the worst of the roads blocking my way out of the city, and even if I could see ghouls pawing at the glass of car windows, I was still away from the worst of the zombie clusterfuck that Springfield had become.

On my right, an empty road beckoned, and I took the turn, heading east again on a quiet residential road. The asphalt strip I was coasting down barely qualified as two lanes, but it was a straight as a nun’s ruler and level. Now that I was free of the city, I could indulge myself a little, and put some miles under my wheels. I set my phone on the pad attached to my front handlebars and activated the app that controlled the electric motor mounted to my bike’s rear tire. It hummed to life and I let my feet stop pedaling as it kicked in. Not much more than a disc inside my rear tire, the FlyKly motor would take me about twenty miles before its battery gave out. Even better, it would recharge as I pedaled or when I coasted downhill if I couldn’t plug it in. I set the speed on the app to fifteen miles an hour and let the motor do its magic.

Once I turned north, I looked back to make sure Leo was still safe on board. He had propped himself upright on my bug out bag and was letting the wind ruffle his fur, his eyes slitted closed so that he looked more than a little smug as he rode along. We passed the Rolling Hills Country Club Golf Course, and I noted the irony that I was back on Cherry. The gentle hills and manicured landscapes on either side of me made it hard to believe that the world had pretty much come to an end not ten miles behind me, until I came across a man in pajamas wandering in the middle of a wide expanse of well kept lawn. Only a black iron fence stood between us, but as soon as he saw me, he sprinted in my direction. As he ran my way, I could see the blood staining his face, hands and the sleeves and front of his pajamas. He hit the iron fence at a dead sprint and bounced back with a meaty sound that left the fence vibrating and left chunks of him attached to the chest high points of the fence’s top. As if only then recognizing that the fence was a barrier, he ran along beside it for a good five hundred yards without slowing down. When the fence curved away from the road, he stopped and watched me roll past, defeated by his inability to grasp that there was an opening less than a hundred yards away because it wasn’t in his line of sight. As I passed him, I looked back over my shoulder to make sure he didn’t get a sudden burst of common sense. He just stood there, straining against the fence, and I felt the urge to stop and put a pullet between his eyes grip me for a moment. From the corner of my eye, I could see Leo crouched down, his ears laid back and his teeth bared in a hiss, looking like I felt just then. One thing certainly stood out in my mind as I turned my attention back to the road in front of me: the ghoul had kept up with me all the way. He hadn’t even slowed down.

Another thought struck me as I turned north again a few hundred yards later. The ghoul who had chased me had probably been in bed when he’d become infected. Had another infected bitten him, or had he come in contact with an infected? How far from a city did I have to go to find pockets of unaffected people? Or was pretty much everyone going to turn into zombies? Was I going to turn into one? Was Maya? Or Amy? Thoughts of them as ghouls and worse, as zombies, promised to give me nightmares as I cruised along the little farm road. The houses out here were set too far back from the road to see, and the prices were too high to purchase without an annual income that was at best stratospheric. I knew from personal experience. I’d tried to buy land in this area when I was setting up Sherwood, and my realtor laughed at me, then suggested I aim at something north of 44. So, here I was, aiming for a destination north of Highway 44. The road started to slope downward and I felt the slight resistance as the SmartWheel started to charge itself as I coasted into the cool, dark shadows of a tree covered stretch of roadway. It curved left, then bottomed out and angled back right as I crossed a creek and emerged from the trees on to another straight section. More green pasture and sporadic trees dispelled the apocalyptic nightmare I’d just survived, and I felt like I was just on another practice run out to Sherwood. I tried to imagine spending the weekend out in the woods with Maya, drinking beer and wine by the campfire. The last time we’d been out to Sherwood in August, we’d laid out on the grass and watched the stars overhead, and made love under the full moon.

Unbidden, the image of Maya suddenly turning ghoul and trying to rip my throat out inserted itself into my daydream, and I shook my head in revulsion. It was too early to start getting zombie related PTSD. Half a mile later, I started to doubt that, as I passed a little subdivision. Zombies wandered aimlessly down the side street, all of them moaning incessantly. I heard Leo growl behind me as we went quietly by, and I silently agreed with him. Minutes later, we passed the Rolling Hills High School (Home of the Fighting Spartans!), and I found myself hoping that the ring of unmoving bodies lying near the entrance to the school was the work of someone evacuating a bunch of kids last night. Then we were past, and none of the dead rose to follow me or try to eat me. I offered a silent prayer of thanks for small favors and pressed on, knowing the next two miles were the last easy part for a while.

The next half hour was quiet as I rode along, following the route Maya and I had spent three weekends perfecting, both in our cars and on our bikes, until I finally came to the last choke point. Maya had probably led everyone through here while it was still dark, which would have made things a lot easier for them. But as I pulled up to the overpass that covered 44, I found things a lot less convenient. In the daylight, I could see at least a dozen infected wandering around among the solid line of cars that blocked the road over the highway. There were narrow gaps between cars, but the dead filled a lot of them. A long, empty, open length of asphalt stretched between me and the overpass, so sneaking up on them in broad daylight wasn’t an option, either. In fact, as I braked the bike to a stop, one of the dead turned my way and started shuffling in my direction. Others turned as it moved and followed it. A low, dreadful moan rose as more and more of them began to make their way toward me. A dozen became twenty, and I saw another group start my way from across the overpass, doubling their numbers. With the subdivision full of them behind me and this group in front of me, and God alone knew how many were on the highway, my options narrowed themselves down to only one: shoot my way through.

My first rule of survival was that staying alive is ninety-eight percent mental. Up to now, I’d been able to play things pretty smart, but I was pretty sure I’d finally been forced to make a dumb decision. I hopped off the bike and grabbed the Ruger plus a spare magazine from my vest. For what I was about to do, I needed its light weight and higher powered scope more than I needed the HK’s higher powered rounds. The Ruger also had an almost non-existent recoil, which made it very easy to keep it on target, and it had the advantage of being the more familiar gun. I’d spent hundreds of hours practicing with it, and I’d put thousands of rounds downrange at Sherwood, aiming at cans and six inch targets. If there was one gun I knew I could pull off fifty consecutive headshots with, it was the Ruger, and with forty grain Velocitor rounds, I wasn’t likely to need more than one shot for most of them. The sight picture came up and I brought the crosshairs down on a zombie forehead, then stroked the trigger. My trusty little 10/22 barked, and zombie number one dropped. The recoil was minimal, another reason I loved the .22 long rifle round, and I was able to put my sights on another zombie head in a heartbeat. Two shots, two really most sincerely dead undead. I took aim at another one, and it dropped, then moved from target to target until the first magazine was empty.

When the hammer fell on an empty chamber, I brought my right hand back and flicked the extended magazine release with my left middle finger. The empty mag dropped into the palm of my right hand and I popped the full mag in, then pushed the bolt back with my thumb to put the first round in the chamber. The closest one was still ninety yards away. Fifteen seconds later, I had nine more really dead zombies and two empty mags in hand, and the shambling horde had almost covered another ten yards. I dumped the empties in a pocket and pulled another one out, popped it in and cycled the bolt back again with my thumb. Almost half the zombies were down, but they were getting closer, and my targets were getting bigger and easier to hit. Again, I emptied the mag, trying to keep my breathing even in spite of the rising sense of panic as they just kept getting closer, now less than sixty yards away. As I popped the fourth mag in, I looked over my shoulder to make sure nothing was creeping up behind me. The coast was clear, but the movement had let them gain another five yards before I put the lead shambler down. When the hammer clicked the fourth time, only a dozen or so were left standing about thirty yards away from me. As close as they were, they were also spread out further, and it took longer to get the scope on them. When the eighth one fell, the last five were twenty yards away, and I was almost out of time. The SOCOM would have given me more rounds, but it was in the holster on my right leg, and I didn’t want to just drop the Ruger. I slung it across my shoulders as fast as I could right handed and pulled my Colt from its holster, then dropped into a Weaver stance and walked my fire from right to left, the forty five caliber skull-busters making paste of zombie brains from about ten yards away. Even that close, I managed to miss twice, leaving me with only one round in the mag when the last one fell.