I got down beneath the truck, pulled my Glock, and waited. They were running up the slope of the lot, straight for me. I steadied my sights on the lead guy and dropped him with my first shot. My next three shots weren’t aimed. I just sprayed the crowd to make them duck for cover.
It worked. They dived behind an old boat trailer, giving me enough time to pull my motorcycle out of the bushes, start it, and go racing up the road. They fired after me, but they never got close.
I slowed long enough for Heather to jump on the back, and then we sped off into the night.
We were still wet from the swim, and it was cold on that bike. What had been a lovely cool breeze while we were dancing was now a fierce cold snap, biting through us to the bone. Heather wrapped her arms around my waist and squeezed, and I could feel her body trembling.
I slowed the bike down enough for her to hear me. “Are you okay?”
“Uh huh.”
“Why is he after you?” I asked.
“Anything to hurt Daddy,” she said, her voice coming in quick, breathy stabs. “His people are always ambushing Daddy’s shipments. Maybe he’s upping the ante now to kidnapping. Or assassination.”
“What do you want to do?” I asked.
“Warn my father,” she said. “Daddy told me Nessel always attacks on two fronts at once. If he’s coming after me here, he’s probably trying to attack Daddy somewhere else too.”
“The radio?”
She nodded. “I tried back at the lake. Nobody answered. We’ll have to get closer into town and try for my father’s safe houses.”
“You got it,” I said, and laid into the throttle.
When we got closer into town, I pulled off the highway and parked in a lot on the top of a small hill and Heather called Naylor on the radio.
“Are you sure it’s Nessel’s people?” he asked.
“I’m sure,” she said.
He told us not to use the radio any more than we had to. Besides a good share of the gasoline market, Nessel controlled the sale of most of the electronic equipment in the area. The radio Heather was using was probably stolen from one of his shipments, and there wasn’t much doubt he’d be able to overhear her transmission.
“Can you get to the pickup point?” he asked.
Heather gave me a sidelong glance and a smile. “I’m pretty sure we can,” she said.
We moved out, and as we rode, I thought about this old-timer I used to know who told me what life was like before the outbreak. He said people were pretty much the same then as they are now, and that turning into zombies hadn’t changed them much. What was different, he said, was the noise. It was noisy back then. There were cars and planes and trains everywhere, not to mention all the crowds. He said you couldn’t escape it.
But these days, there are so few cars left you can drive around all day and never see another driver. Heather and I hadn’t seen any all night. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d heard a plane fly overhead. I’d never seen a moving train. Life in the Zone was quiet, even though it was rarely peaceful.
That’s how I knew something was wrong. Heather and I got up on the highway again and started driving, but we hadn’t made it very far before I heard the high-pitched whine of a pack of sport racing bikes.
We glanced around, looking for them. They were behind us, coming down from an overpass and getting onto the freeway at top speed. I didn’t need to ask if they were Nessel’s men. All of them had machine guns slung over their backs, and the way they were riding, they clearly knew who we were.
I got my bike up to top speed, but they were faster. My bike was just a beat up Harley Sportster, but they were riding Honda CXRs-top of the line racing bikes. I didn’t have a snowball’s chance of outrunning them in a dead sprint, so when they got close enough to take their shots, I did the only thing I could think of and veered over to the far left lane, let them come up on us, then downshifted and banked the bike hard to the right, taking the connector ramp to the Connelly Loop at almost a hundred miles an hour.
Heather yelled out in surprise. Nessel’s men overshot us. I saw them lock up their brakes and slide, but none of them reacted fast enough to take the ramp with us.
Their mistake bought us a few valuable seconds. The Connelly Loop led right into the heart of the Zone. There was nothing in there but crumbling buildings and legions of the infected. As a result, it was a low priority for the bosses who made it their business to keep the roads clear, and so it was still choked with long lines of abandoned cars.
My old-timer friend told me that rush hour traffic used to be so bad the freeways would turn into parking lots, and when it was really bad, you could sit in your car for half an hour or more and never make it more than a couple of miles. Looking out over the abandoned cars ahead of us I felt like I knew what he meant. It was a three-lane bumper-to-bumper junkyard as far as I could see.
As I slowed down to thread the gap between the cars Heather yelled in my ear, “What are you doing? You’re going the wrong way.”
I looked behind us and saw Nessel’s men coming for us. They looked like a squadron of mad hornets buzzing down the ramp, shooting the gaps between wrecks at fantastic speeds.
“Hold on,” I said.
A zombie was stumbling along between two rows of cars about a hundred and fifty yards ahead of us. I dug into the throttle and went straight for him, darting through the narrow gap, feeling a thump thump thump echoing in my ears as we passed all the cars.
Zombies are predictable. When they see you, they stumble after you. They don’t care if you’re on foot or driving a truck, they stumble after you just the same, which is exactly what the zombie ahead of us was doing.
And about ten yards ahead of the zombie was a gap in traffic. It looked like a driver in the middle lane had tried to turn into the lane to his right, and had hit another car in the process. The car was stuck at a forty-five-degree angle, with just enough room for me to slip alongside it and cross over to the gap between the middle and right lanes. But I had to time it just right. I had to get there just a fraction of a second before the zombie if I was going to make it work.
It was close.
When I got to the gap I hit the brakes, rocked the bike hard to the right, then hard to the left, feeling Heather gasping as she squeezed me. We threaded into the opening and took off at full speed.
I looked back just as one of Nessel’s goons hit that zombie. He must have been doing at least ninety miles per hour when he realized what was happening and hit his brakes. But at that speed, not even the Honda’s oversized racing brakes could help him. He hit the zombie, and both bodies went tumbling over the wrecked cars. The bike went sideways, hit the trunk of a car, and shot twenty feet up in the air, spinning end over end the whole way back to the ground.
That slowed the other three down, but not by much, and I knew I couldn’t play those games forever. I took us up another hundred yards or so until we came to a small box van. There I slowed, turned the bike around, and headed back the way we’d come.
“What are you doing?” Heather said.
But I didn’t have time to answer. I ducked my head and charged.
One of the remaining three riders was in our gap, and even though he was wearing a full helmet and face shield that kept his face hidden, I could tell by the way his body stiffened that his eyes were going wide.
I pulled my Glock and fired. I’m not sure if I hit him or not, but the bike shimmied beneath him, he lost his balance, glanced off a car, and crashed out.
I saw his head smack a bumper as he fell.
I stopped the bike and told Heather to get off. She looked panicked, but she did like I asked.
“What are you going to do?”
I pulled out my other Glock. “Just stay down, okay? I got this.”