“Okay, so she sent them an order and kind of tied it off. Does that make sense?” I was still only talking to myself. “It’s almost like a repeating message and she just has it on loop.”
“You should maybe pull the plug on that machine,” Gary said as he got himself into a proper shooting position.
“No power cord,” I said, intensifying my concentration. I’m still uncertain as to how this is done though. Can you really think harder? I find just thinking about thinking leads me astray. “More like a rope or a cord.” We were seconds away from capture and/or death or vice versa. My senses were so heightened, I could hear individual pebbles as they were crushed under the boot heels of the troops approaching. “I found the knot!” I said excitedly.
“Weeks! I heard something over by the side of the road!” one of the men said.
“Time to die,” BT said, though whether it was about the man that shouted or for us, he did not clarify.
I felt sort of sorry that the last thing that man saw on this planet was most likely the biggest man he had ever encountered, popping up from the side of the road with a rifle.
“Got it!” I shouted triumphantly just as BT’s rifle shuddered from the gas release of two bullets. Weeks’ friend caught the first round in the side of his neck; blood pumped out as the man tried in vain to staunch the flow.
A small piece of hell broke out that day as BT’s rifle kept jumping from the expended rounds. He was screaming a war cry. I watched in horror, almost matrix-like, as return fire began to pass him by, coming dangerously close. I was convinced I was going to watch my best friend die in slow motion. And then the real fun began. Shouts of alarm, pain and terror began to ring out all around us as “freed” zombies began to pour from the troop transport.
Speeders had come to our aid. As Eliza’s men had begun to coalesce on us, the speeders had attacked from behind. They were relentless as they chewed on anything within reach. Shots fired wildly as the men turned to face their new threat. BT was still screaming and firing. I had to get up from my hiding spot to drag him down. Okay, to be fair, nobody really drags BT anywhere. He sort of let me. Watching people, even the enemy, being eaten is not something to be witnessed.
“Don’t kill them all, BT, or the speeders will be looking for another food source, and I know I can beat you in a footrace,” I told him.
“That’s alright. I know I’m faster than your brother,” he said, smiling.
“That’s not cool, not cool at all,” Gary said. “Can we maybe go now?” he asked as the screams intensified.
We ran parallel to the road, making sure to stay deep in our culvert. Now that I had found Eliza’s string and knew exactly where it was, pulling it open was fairly easy. I was like a kid that had just discovered an unlocked candy store. Sounds incredible at first until you’re elbow-deep in salt water taffy and three pounds of licorice are already inside your stomach, oh! and don’t forget about the dozen or so sugar sticks you’ve already eaten. I was sort of drunk with the power of it, not yet realizing how much more danger I was putting us in. Apparently, Eliza wasn’t fond of the slower-ambling shufflers we’d all come to know and love. She was much more interested in the devastation that could be wrought from their faster, more mobile brethren.
Zombies were dropping out of trucks like blood from a pierced hemophiliac. (Think about that for a second.) Problem was, there were way more zombies than food. Some zombies had been shot or simply ran out of room on the roadway or were simply pushed out of the way began to find themselves in our culvert. Some were far beyond making a go at us, others were not.
“Company,” Gary said, looking over his shoulder. He had run up into my back and almost through it.
“You’d better pick up the pace,” I told BT, turning back to see what Gary was looking at.
“You sure I’m the slowest?” Gary asked, jockeying for position on my side.
“Gary, I’d trip you if you weren’t,” I told him.
He stopped to look at my expression. I’m not sure if he was happy with the answer he divined. He began to push ahead of BT.
“What the hell?” BT said loudly.
I started firing. I was well beyond the point of caring if we were discovered or not. Besides, Eliza’s men were doing all they could to merely survive right now. They were in full scale battle mode, whereas we were just a minor skirmish in comparison.
BT took an immediate left, heading straight for the tree line. The zombies had heard the cacophony and started to come into our ditch, further up, effectively cutting off our escape that way. A quick glance to the left had me wondering which avenue would be better, thorns the size of small rhino horns that glistened wetly, each looking big enough to bleed all of us dry or the zombies. Good thing BT was cutting the path first!
I was vaguely aware some of the trucks were starting up and pulling away. Some of Eliza’s henchmen would survive the day, but most, I felt, had met the end they so well deserved.
I almost fell over BT as he slid down like a baseball player going for a triple on a ball that was, at best, a double. Gary was way ahead of the curve on me on this one. He was on his hands and knees, crawling underneath the worst of the brambles. A zombie stepped on Gary’s ankle in an attempt to get at him, and if not for getting hung up in the stickers, it would have succeeded. The zombie kept trying to power its way through and was only rewarded with more piercings. I got down and began to scramble for all I was worth. The top of my hoodie got snagged on a branch and I was hung up like dirty laundry. A zombie grabbed onto the bottom part of my leg and was coming in for a bite when I screamed for him to STOP!
I turned to look at it and see if I had any effect on him. The intensity of my yell forced blood to pour from its nose. Its eyes glazed over for a fraction of a second and then it just stopped. It didn’t move. I would have liked to maybe kick it in the head four or five hundred times, but I wanted to get out of there quickly. More zombies were coming and I wasn’t sure if I could do the same to them. I snapped off the branch I was affixed to and went deeper into the tangle.
BT had pretty much uprooted the fauna as he went through. You could have driven a Geo Metro through the hole he left. The only problem with his passage was that it left an avenue for the zombies to follow. Once we all made it through the ten or so feet of thorns and into the woods proper, I stopped to get an idea of our pursuit. Zombies were haplessly stuck in the path that Gary and I had forged, but zombies were already halfway through BT’s gap.
“Should have been a little more careful about that,” BT said.
“You think?” I asked him.
Gary killed the first two zombies coming through, sealing the hole for the moment.
Zombies began to fan out. Some would be stuck hopefully forever; others were beginning to find inroads toward us.
“We’ve got to get going,” I said, pretty much needlessly.
“I thought Justin was the one with the flair for the obvious?” BT asked.
“He had to get it from somewhere,” Gary added.
I was going to tell them these rifles would be useless in the dense copse of trees, but refer back to the “obvious” banter. Zombies were already in the woods behind us, and were approaching as rapidly as the vegetation would allow.
“BT, go!” I said, smacking him on the shoulder. “Gary you get behind him. “I’ll try to make them stop.”
The gunfire from the roadway had become sporadic and then had abruptly ended. The food was doing what food was supposed to do, either getting eaten or fleeing. As the menu became slim pickings up top, more and more began to find their way down the embankment and joined in the pursuit of us.
I thought I might have possibly heard a woman scream. Eliza in frustration was my hope, but we were being hunted vigorously and we did not have time to gloat.