my hand, but I’d gone deep enough, the added weight on the back of that zombie pulled
him neatly in two. Okay, neatly might be a bit of a gross exaggeration. I guess as
neatly as a human body can be severed. Every internal organ spilled to the ground,
it looked like a dog food processing truck had rolled over.
BT was able to pull his leg up as the two other zombies rolled away when their ride
ditched them. It was two more strides before I could stop my forward momentum. Now
I was the one that had a problem. I was running headlong into the zombies and my ride
was taking off the other way, plus I had lost the knife I hated using so much. I sure
would have loved to use it now. I didn’t have the room or the time to turn back around,
and getting to my rifle was out of the question.
It was time to play unpadded football. I tucked my head in and lowered my shoulder.
I caught the first one in the chin with the point of my shoulder. I heard his teeth
shatter right after he severed his tongue off. The flap of meat smacked wetly against
my forearm.
I somewhat had the element of surprise as they weren’t expecting me to be where I
was, but I sure wouldn’t have minded a big blocker to lead the way. They take all
the big hits, and I take all the glory getting the touchdown. It was a working formula
in high school. Why not now?
I was through my second or third row of zombies, each hit beginning to take just a
little more of my forward thrust away. I could hear the back-up warning coming from
the truck. Gary had thrown the rig in reverse and was thankfully coming back. I was
beginning to see the light at the end of the zunnel (zombie tunnel) when Gary crashed
the truck into a street pole. The truck didn’t give so much of a shit as the pole
toppled noisily to the ground. I hazarded a glance behind me as I finally broke free
from the zombies. The truck was weaving all over the roadway, I think it would have
been better if he had just ghost-driven the thing. No one at the helm would have been
better than his maneuvers. I started timing when I should dodge to the side, getting
eaten by a zombie all of a sudden seemed like the better alternative than being run
over.
BT was off the ladder. For a moment, I panicked that maybe he’d fallen off, but he
was waving at me from a hole cut into the side of the dump.
“Glad to see you’re alright. Now get me the fuck out of here!” I yelled.
Rifles pointed out of two other slots and bullets began to take down zombies that
had turned and were beginning their pursuit of me. Gary was pulling even with me,
which was a good thing, because a bend in the road was coming up and I was certain
he’d never be able to navigate it. I jumped, grabbing the ladder in flight, my head
striking the side of the truck as Gary had given the wheel a quick twist. He’d rung
my bell. I had to hold onto where I was for a moment until my brain stopped sliding
around inside my skull. The wheels started squealing and jittering along the pavement
as Gary hit the brakes. I swung against the side of the truck. What the zombies had
started Gary was going to try and finish. I swung back the other way as we were once
again going forward. BT reached his arm out of the firing hole and grabbed my shoulder.
Unlike him, I was thankful for the help. I’d been a human piñata for the last few
seconds and my body hurt.
Gary drove another half mile with me like that until he once again stopped short.
If not for BT holding me in place I would have gone through the same cycle.
“Nice driving,” I said to Gary. I added ‘asshole’ at the end, but quietly. He had
saved me after all, even if he wanted to crack me open and see if I housed any internal
goodies.
“You’re welcome,” he said, beaming.
We didn’t have much time; I could already see the zombies coming. I climbed up the
rest of the ladder and onto the top, which was made of tarp-covered plywood. There
was a small hatch up there, which I climbed through and into the dump truck equivalent
of an RV.
A dark red industrial carpet was glued to the bottom of the bed; two rows of bench
seats were bolted or welded there as well. The entire area was framed out with two-by-fours,
which held up the ‘roof’, that was covered with a tarp in case of inclement weather.
Gun wells had been cut out of the metal body on the two sides and the rear. He’d even
gone so far as to weld on small channels so that the murder holes could be covered
up by sliding a thick piece of metal back into place. In the front, he’d cut out an
actual window, put his channels back in and fitted it with Plexiglas. This way, the
folks in the back could see up front and, if need be, we could move back and forth
from the cab of the truck to the dump part. Now, if this thing had a wet bar, we’d
be all set. My earlier irkdom to my brother was completely forgotten. He’d created
something pretty unique and fucking awesome.
“Good job, man!” I said, smacking the glass.
I could see his grinning face in the rearview mirror.
“Thanks, guys,” I told my boys and BT.
“We’re even now,” BT said. “For today.”
“Fair enough. How you doing?” I asked. “Come on, man, sit down.”
“Better now.”
He looked like shit. Finding Doc was of paramount importance, but there were still
a bunch of huge problems with that. Odds he was alive and well were slim, and even
if he was, would he have a ‘cure’? Would he succeed where others failed? He had to.
There was no other answer. I would not watch BT die and after that, Justin’s steady
decline. That was NOT an acceptable outcome. This mission was as much about them as
it was about me. I know I’m flawed, I was doing this in part because I didn’t want
to be put through the suffering. Is there such a thing as reverse altruism? Would
God make the distinction that I was doing good for others for my own good? Same fucking
thing, right?
Stop looking at me like that. You think Mother Teresa was a completely selfless person?
I don’t think so. Now I’m not saying she wasn’t worthy of Sainthood, but don’t you
think she took great pleasure in helping others? Helping others made her feel good,
absolutely nothing wrong with that. In a nutshell, that’s exactly what I was doing.
Getting Justin and BT cured would make me feel great--two big birds one huge stone.
Bullet-proof argument once I needed to present it to the Big Man.
We had been driving for a while. BT was strapped in to his seat, sleeping contentedly.
I smiled when I noticed Henry’s head was parked in the big man’s lap a decent sized
puddle of drool leaking from the dog’s muzzle. I was pacing a bit, it was slightly
claustrophobic in the back, and the roof was maybe an inch from the top of my head.
I was going to see if anyone wanted to come back here so I could go up to the front.
I pulled the Plexiglas back and knocked on the back window of the cab. Tommy looked
back at me, his smile laced in the red of what looked like strawberry. He shrugged.
“Wanf fwon?” he asked, holding up the familiar foil packet.
“Yeah actually,” I told him when he slid the glass back. I was thankful when he handed
me the entir
e packet. My hands were encrusted in filth so much so that I thought the
crap might be able to find its way through the protective packaging.
“You want up here?” Tracy asked as I was enjoying my pastry treat.
“I’m busy,” I told her, sticking my hand up.
“I’d kick your ass, Talbot, if I wasn’t so tired,” Tracy told me. “Gary can you pull
over? I would like to get in the back.”
Gary looked at her quickly and then at the window I was at.
“Oh I don’t think so,” she told him. “I’m not crawling through two windows on a moving
truck no matter how much fun you think it would be.”
“It actually does look like fun,” I said.
I stuck my head out of my side and was looking down at the pavement blazing by. I
thought about maybe Gary hitting a bump and me losing my footing and then I’d find
myself stuck upside down in the hydraulic cabling as my head started to wear away
on the ground.
“Yeah, maybe you should just stop,” I told him, getting a little sick to my stomach
just thinking about it.
Gary almost tossed me out the damn window he laid on the brakes so hard. “What is
your problem with the pedals, man?” I asked him once I realized my heart wasn’t going
to burst.
I went back to where the hatch was, stepped up on the small ladder welded to the side
and then down the other side. Gary had gotten out and was stretching.
Tracy came around and gave me a hug. “How you doing, hon?” She looked up at me.
“I’ve been better. At least she’s at rest now. I can at least tell Ron that much.”
She got up on her toes and kissed me. “Thank you for that,” I told her.
“Maybe we’ll have to find a stack of books soon.”
“Works for me.”
I’d never before equated literary tomes with sex, but I was open-minded. The constant
danger we were in had some inherent benefits, one being that it made you want to be
more in contact with those you loved. There is comfort in intimacy.
“Next stop is Barnes and Noble,” I told her before I helped her on the ladder, not
that she needed it, but it gave me the chance to cop a feel or two.
I’d never once considered Tracy anything other than beautiful, but the hardness of
the apocalypse had sculpted her into something almost otherworldly. Any chance I had
to grab onto that, I was going to take it.
“Want me to drive a bit?” I asked Gary once my favorable view was gone.
“It’s not as easy as it looks,” he told me.
“I know, man, I just know you pulled some long hours and worked your ass off to get
this done. Great job by the way.”
“Thank you…and you’re right, I could use a little shut eye.”
Gary went up the ladder as well. I didn’t help him, if he fell off and bruised himself
up a bit, I would consider it a fair measure of payback. Gary had stopped at the interchange
exit for 495, which was basically a route that skirted Boston and went down through
Connecticut and picked back up with its parent route. So I could stay on 95 Southbound
or take 495. It wasn’t like Boston was going to be a hotbed of traffic, so that wasn’t
really a factor. And in terms of distance, I think it was about the same mileage.
Route 95 stayed closer to the coast, so one way bowed to the east, the other the west.
“Any reason to take one over the other?” I asked Tommy. He shrugged. “I liked it a
whole lot better when Ryan would at least give you some vague clues.”
I hopped up into the cab. I was driving somewhere in the neighborhood of five miles
an hour, looking back and forth at the route signs. I could not figure out why this
was such a big deal, they led to exactly the same place. I cut the wheel at the very
last moment, taking 495. My final reason was that if I was that close to Boston on
95 and saw a zombified Dustin Pedroia it would make this day just that much worse.
I’d been on 495 for fifteen minutes or so and nothing untold was happening. There
was a build-up of more abandoned cars as we got closer to the outskirts of Boston,
but nothing that we wouldn’t be able to navigate through quite yet. And unless we
started seeing tanks, I didn’t think there were too many things this truck couldn’t
get through anyway. For about the fortieth time, I asked myself why no one had thought
of this sooner, least of all me.
“You see that?” Tommy asked.
But unless he was talking about the small pile of crumbs he was creating in his lap,
I didn’t know how he could see anything else. He had not looked up from his parade
of junk food the whole time I’d been in there. I wasn’t complaining; he’d given me
a Mallo Cup and a Devil Dog. From where? I didn’t care. Sometimes it’s way better
to allow the mysteries of the universe to remain just that. What good has it been
for science to remove all the mystery in life? Isn’t it cooler to think that the Northern
Lights are the gateway to the Spirit world and that the crackling sound it sometimes
makes is that of the spirits talking? Or would you rather ‘know’ that its charged
particles from the sun reacting with the earth’s magnetic field?
“See what?” I asked, realizing that Tommy had even spoken.
“The smoke.” He pointed through the windshield.
I could see a small funnel of it. It didn’t look like much more than a small campfire
throwing it off. Campfire meant people, though. I took a small glance through the
back windshield. It seemed my driving had been relaxing enough for all of them to
get a little much needed sleep. We weren’t yet under attack; I was going to see how
this rode out before I awoke them.
“Buckle your seatbelt in preparation for a bumpy ride,” I told Tommy.
“Had it on since Gary started driving,” he told me.
“Okay so it wasn’t just me.”
“Nope.” He shook his head. “I thought he was trying to kill a snake on the floorboard
every time he hit the brakes.”
It was the further I drove that I realized this wasn’t just a marshmallow roasting
fire. Something was going on. Now I’d wished I’d taken 95. I was slowing down looking
for the best place to turn my truck around when I saw it.
“Oh shit,” I said as I saw the bus heading our way. “He’s gotta be doing seventy.”
That was fairly miraculous considering all the vehicles on the roadway. Smoke was
billowing out of the front, luckily, the driver was going so fast that the smoke was
traveling down the sides and to the back.
“Where’s he in such a rush to get to?”
“I think it’s what he is in a rush to get away from,” Tommy said.
A bevy of bikers came into view. I did not want to get involved. First off, because
I didn’t want to expose anyone to the danger; and secondly, how did I know who the
good guys were. Just because bikers were chasing a bus didn’t necessarily make them
the evil ones, now if it was a school bus that might change the equation. Sure…it
cast them in a worse light, but by no means was it a definitive answer. No matter
what I decided, I couldn’t stay where I was; the path through the cars was too narrow
for us and a bus. The ear-irritating sound of metal squealing on metal pretty much
woke everyone up as I pushed against some cars in an effort to mak
e room.
The herking and jerking of Gary’s braking had nothing over what I was doing. Professional
rodeo riders would have been complaining. I had created a sort of dugout through the
cars and at the same time made myself vulnerable. There was always the chance the
bus would race on by and the bikers would stop to check us out.
“Shit,” I said just as I decided this was a horrible plan.
The bus was within a quarter mile or so when I threw the truck in reverse. I was pinging
the back of the truck off of more than a few cars.