“The Americans are doing it. They’re trying to contain the plague. That’s why they aren’t using nukes—they don’t want to sully their own soil,” Dr. Trowbridge explained.
“Well, thank God we didn’t try to cross that bridge,” I said.
“Indeed.”
47.
We drove a good hundred miles northwest along the river. Every bridge, large and small, was destroyed. On both sides of the river were bombed-out bunkers, half-submerged hulls of sunken ships, wandering zombie soldiers, and abandoned vehicles. Things grew more desolate the further we traveled.
“Stop the car, Alex,” I said.
“What’s the matter?” Celeste asked.
“Look, we need to cross this river, and if the last hundred miles haven’t taught you anything . . . they blew out all the bridges. So, unless we’re going to head back to St. Louis to become cannon fodder, I think we need to swim across.”
“Swim across?” Alex gasped.
“Either that or we can drive all the way to Canada searching for a bridge.”
“What about the van and the food?” Alex asked.
“We’ll just have to resupply on the other side.”
“You’d think there’d be a boat around here somewhere,” Celeste observed.
“Would you let your enemy across the river keep one afloat?” Dr. Trowbridge asked. “I think Royce is right. The further we go, the more time we’re giving the outbreak to spread. We need to get the cure in the right hands before it’s too late.”
“Where though?” Alex asked. “Where are we going to be able to swim across?”
“I saw a place back at the last bend that had a big shallow sand bar on the other side. If we swim across there, it can’t be more than a few hundred yards to the bar. Once we reach it, we can stand and walk the rest of the way. There were some military vehicles near a bunker about a mile south of that. We can drive one of those,” I said.
“I’m in,” Celeste said.
“How about you, Al?” I asked.
“Let’s do it,” he said.
48.
We parked the van half a mile north of the bend. We knew it wasn’t smart to eat before swimming, but we didn’t know when our next meal was going to come. So, we ate a bit, and chugged as much water as we could. Our guns were made out of some lightweight composite material, but still heavy enough that we decided they were all the other three would carry for the swim. I was a strong swimmer so I carried the pair of binoculars. We stripped down to our skivvies so we wouldn’t sink under the weight of our waterlogged clothes. Then we strapped the weapons tightly to our backs.
Alex and Dr. Trowbridge looked hilarious in their underwear. Both were ghost white and covered in body hair. The weapons on their backs completed the odd look. Celeste was a different story. I tried to keep my eyes off her, but it was practically impossible. She looked amazing standing there in her government-issue white cotton panties and bra. They looked like they were designed for an eighty-year-old woman, yet she still pulled it off.
“Who knew this big ugly thing would get us this far?” I asked, patting the side of the van. Anything to shift my attention away from Celeste.
“It’s a shame we have to leave all of this food behind,” she said.
“It is a shame. Though, we just gotta find some friendlies on the other side, and we’ll be eating again soon.”
The muddy brown water of the Mississippi was far more intimidating once we stood alongside it. We watched carefully as it swirled and pulsed downstream.
“You’re all strong enough for this, right?” I asked the crew. They nodded without taking their eyes off the river. “It’s going to take you about ten minutes if you keep up your stroke. Try to keep an even pace and your head down. You don’t want to spaz for three minutes and then panic because you find that you aren’t even halfway across. And don’t worry about moving downstream. We’re in the perfect position for that as long as you keep your stroke up. If for some reason you can’t, go ahead and ditch your gun. We’ll find you another one on the other side.”
“Why don’t we all just ditch our guns?” Alex asked.
“Because it’s another mile to those vehicles and you know there’s going to be freaks waiting for us on the other side.”
We waded into the water as far as we could, took a good long look at each other, and then started swimming. The cool water was refreshing against the summer heat. The weight of the gun wasn’t bad at first, either. The water near the shoreline was calm and gentle, and the pressure of the gun on my back just made it a bit harder to get my head above water to breathe. As we swam out into the center of the river, the force of the current increased, and the water grew cold and choppy—a lot choppier than it had looked from shore.
Alex started to panic and tried to get rid of his weapon. He struggled against the straps, splashing about frantically. Celeste and Dr. Trowbridge were keeping a good pace so I told them to keep going. I went after Alex.
“Just calm down, buddy. I’m going to help you out with that,” I said while treading water beside him. “Just keep your head up, and I’ll get it off you.”
I swam around behind him and started working on the straps. I tried to work quickly as we were still drifting downstream and losing valuable time. I almost had the weapon off when I felt a hand grab hold of my hair. I turned. A bloated naked zombie floated in the water. It was on its back and didn’t seem to have swimming figured out. I kicked it a few feet away from us. This kept it at bay long enough for me to finish removing Alex’s weapon.
“Get going, buddy,” I said. “I’ll catch up to you in a minute. Remember, head down and stay calm, OK?”
Alex started swimming toward Celeste and Dr. Trowbridge. I swam over to the zombie and stuck Alex’s bayonet deep into the skull. The zombie stopped moving and floated downstream behind me, the rifle sticking up into the air. I chuckled at the sight, raised my head high out of the water to see if I could spot any more trouble, and continued swimming.
I caught up to Alex and was crawling alongside him when I heard Celeste scream ahead of us. I caught a glimpse of her arms in the air before she was pulled under. I put my head down and sprinted as fast as I could. When I got there, Dr. Trowbridge was treading water.
“What happened?” I asked.
“I don’t know. I think she got caught on something.”
Celeste popped up a few feet from us, screamed again, and then disappeared back under the water. I dove straight under and swam in the direction of where she had surfaced. I couldn’t see a thing in the murky water, but kept swimming deeper until I felt her hand hit my arm. I grabbed it and pulled my way down her body until I felt the fleshy hands clutching her ankles. I could see the zombie’s face. It was fresh (not bloated and decomposing like the one I’d seen floating), and it was holding her tight as it gradually sank to the bottom. I kicked the zombie repeatedly in the face, which had no effect upon its grasp. When we reached the bottom, I searched desperately for something to hit the zombie with but found nothing. I pulled on its fingers until I’d released its grasp. It grabbed me by the arms. I put my feet on its shoulders and pushed myself free. I was desperate for air as I swam upward, and I gasped loudly as soon as my face broke the surface.
“Are you all right?” I asked Celeste, who was treading water.
“I’m fine . . .” she said before coughing up water. “Really, I’m fine.”
“Go, you two! Go, go, swim for shore. They don’t know how to swim, but it’s floating with the current right underneath us. Just get away from here, and I’ll go for Alex.”
Celeste and Dr. Trowbridge did as I told them. Alex was just ten yards behind us. As I turned to swim toward him, the ghoul beneath me swiped at my ankle.
“Hey, buddy,” I said, treading water alongside Alex, “we need to change our course a little bit. There’s a freak up there, and he’s drifting along underneath the surface—right where you’re headed. They can’t swim so we need to just adjus
t course to avoid him. We’re going to swim against the current for a little while, okay?”
Alex nodded and spit out water.
“Just count thirty strokes with me against the current, and then we’ll head for shore. That’ll keep us away from him.”
Alex did as I told him. By the time we were within eyeshot of the sandbar, Celeste and Dr. Trowbridge were already standing on it. We were too far away from shore to join them. We watched desperately as we drifted downriver past the sandbar.
“All right, Al, it’s time to dig deep. We need to make one last push toward shore before the river gets much wider. Can you do it?” I asked.
“I can do it,” he said.
The river opened up quickly, which added a good hundred yards to our swim. By the time we reached the rocky riverbank, we were well past the sandbar and good and scraped up from our rough exit.
49.
“You did good,” I said, patting Alex on the back. We sat on the edge of the riverbank, trying to catch our breath.
“But my gun . . . it’s gone.”
“Aw, don’t worry about that. Here, you can take mine.”
I took the gun off my back and handed it to Alex. Once we’d had a moment to rest, we walked up a grassy hill near the edge of the shoreline to look for Celeste and Dr. Trowbridge. We could see them in the distance walking toward us. I looked the other way, to see how far we needed to walk to the vehicles. I noticed a bunker hidden in the back of the hillside about fifty yards away.
“Hey, Al, you see that?”
“Yes, yes, I do. Looks like a bunker. Maybe there are some more guns in there. You want to go have a look?”
“Sure, why not.”
The bunker had been built with large stones. There was a short, narrow doorway on the right and a tiny window on the left. It was dark, and we couldn’t see inside. We crept carefully toward the doorway and stopped about fifteen feet away.
“Careful,” I said. “There might be some freaks in there. Better turn on your laser.”
“OK.”
Alex pushed on the button to retract the bayonet. Nothing happened. He turned the gun sideways and held the button closer to his face, pushing on it repeatedly.
“It’s not working,” he said.
Zombies in camouflage army uniforms burst out of the door.
“It’s not working, it’s not working!” he screamed.
“Shoot them!” I yelled.
The zombies were just a few feet away. Alex pointed the gun at them and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened.
“The safety!” I yelled, surveying our surroundings for something to defend myself with.
Alex struggled to find it. I reached over and clicked the safety off. Alex sprayed the front line of attackers with a wild burst of gunfire. It ran across the chests of two before going up into the head of a third and off into the horizon. The head shot took care of that one, but the other two kept coming. I pushed one down, and Alex drove his bayonet into the other’s skull. There were more right behind them, and two tackled me to the ground. I pushed one off with my left hand and held the other at bay by the throat. I looked over at Alex. His bayonet was still lodged in the zombie’s skull. He tried desperately to pull it out, but it was stuck. As he stood there struggling, three more zombies lumbered around their impaled comrade and took Alex down.
I will never forget Alex’s screams. They were so high-pitched, so bloodcurdling that they tore my focus away from the zombie on my left, which bit hard into my rib cage. The rush of pain and my friend’s plight made my adrenaline surge. I rolled the zombie laying on top of me into the other and stumbled to my feet. Three zombies crouched over Alex. One tugged morsels of flesh from his neck with its teeth. The other two dug deep into his abdomen, pulled out his intestines, and pushed them clumsily into their mouths.
I stood there in shock watching those horrible creatures devour my closest friend. Alex was silent and no longer moving. He was gone. The two zombies hunting me lunged. I broke free from their outstretched arms. I didn’t even look at them; survival no longer mattered. All I wanted was to help my friend, but I couldn’t. I stormed over and yanked the rifle from the dead zombie’s skull. I blasted a flurry of rounds into the temple of the zombie on my side of Alex’s abdomen and another burst into the face of the zombie on the other side. Then I turned to the ghoul eating his neck and drove the bayonet deep into the back of its skull. I put my foot on its back and pulled the bayonet out, then held the gun high above my head and swung it down again. I yelled at the top of my lungs as I repeated this over and over until the head was in so many pieces that I didn’t know where to strike. My tunnel vision was so consuming that I didn’t realize Celeste and Dr. Trowbridge had run up behind me and killed the two remaining attackers.
“Oh my God . . . oh my God. Alex!” Celeste cried. She knelt beside him and placed her hand gently against his bloodstained face. One by one, her tears splashed onto his forehead.
I fell down into a heap and wept for my fallen friend. He had saved my life so many times, and I was crushed by the realization that I couldn’t do the same for him.
50.
Dr. Trowbridge searched the bunker but found only several clips of ammunition. We walked from the bunker to the vehicles in a heavy silence. Celeste and I were devastated, and only moved at Trowbridge’s insistence. Through the binoculars, I saw more zombies milling about in the distance. We shambled along in our underwear, our hair still dripping wet. My side ached and bled, but the wound wasn’t life-threatening, as my rib cage prevented the bite from going deep.
My companions’ lasers had also been ruined by the river. We were broken and vulnerable, moving out in the open with nothing but bayonets and a few clips of ammunition between us and untold numbers of walking dead.
51.
“What a hunk of junk! And no keys, either,” Dr. Trowbridge said, slamming the door shut on a Humvee. “They must have retreated as soon as the plague reached this side of the river.”
“How do you know that?” I asked.
“Well, first off, there’s hardly any of them here, minus the infected we saw back in the city, and second, they left nothing behind but the junk.”
To me, the vehicles looked like modern, military-grade Humvees, but I suppose that’s because they were built during my lifetime.
“Why would they even have these things?” I asked. “They’re old as dirt.”
“This war changed everything,” he explained. “The military put anything they could get their hands on along the front . . . anything to keep the Chinese from moving west.”
“Well, they aren’t going west anymore.”
“Not alive they aren’t,” Celeste added.
Her comment was a stark reminder of our duty and the challenge before us. I opened the driver’s side door on another Humvee and was relieved to find the key in the ignition. I climbed inside, pushed the gas, and turned the key. The engine rocked and choked before roaring to life.
“Now this is my kind of car,” I said, leaning my head out the window. “She runs like a champ and has almost a full tank of gas to boot.”
“That’s good,” Dr. Trowbridge said, “because we won’t be able to refill the tank.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“No gas stations. Just charging stations. Nobody uses fuel anymore except the military and aviators.”
“We’ll find an airport then. I bet this thing will run on AVGAS.”
“Once we make it to Kansas City, maybe. They moved everybody away from the front when the war started so there won’t be anything between here and there. Of course, once we get to KC we can probably just get another car. That’s assuming . . .”
“The city is overrun?”
“Yes, and if it is, we’ll just keep on going.”
“Do you think they’ll listen to us once we find them?” Celeste asked.
“Who, the military?”
“Whoever.”
“We need to find the military,
and if we do, they’ll listen to me. Somebody there ought to be able to verify my credentials. I worked for them long enough.”
“You were in the military?”
“No, just a consultant, but I worked for them exclusively for several years before the war. The Chinese sought me out because of that.”
“They trusted you?”
“They had to. I knew our bioterrorism tactics better than anyone. Plus, they threatened me with reeducation if I mislead them. I figured I wasn’t going to be any use to our boys back home if that happened, so I played along all these years in the hope that one day I might be able to help the cause. Now with you two . . . that day is here.”
“That’s heavy, doc. I hope we can find them soon. The longer we take, the more it seems like we’re going to find freaks instead of people.”
We drove southwest through fallow fields until we found a road that linked up to I-70. We could get there more easily through the city, but we didn’t want to go anywhere near it after the bombing. The Humvee was loud and it vibrated wildly, but it felt safe, and it tore right through the uneven terrain.
We barreled down the highway, raising our voices over the road noise.
“I don’t know about you two, but this drive will be a lot more comfortable if we can find some clothes,” I said. “I’m getting tired of looking at you two in your underwear.”
“You’re not so hot yourself,” Dr. Trowbridge joked.
“How about there?” Celeste asked. She pointed toward fallen soldiers at an abandoned checkpoint.
I stopped the vehicle. “You want to wear their uniforms?”
“Might be all we can find,” Dr. Trowbridge said. “Very little between here and KC.”
“But we found all kinds of stuff in Weston.”
“This wasn’t that kind of evacuation. It was a relocation. People had time to collect their belongings. Besides, we don’t have enough gas to go around searching for clothes.”
“All right, then. Let’s go have a look.”