Deadlocked: A Novel of the Zombie Apocalypse Page 3

  In the fading light of the setting sun, Roland went to the bodies of the men he’d killed by the road to retrieve their guns and ammunition. He left the SUV where it was, though, and didn’t venture down to it, for the engine, which had been smoking ominously, suddenly burst into flame. No one got out of the burning vehicle. He didn’t venture down to get a closer look, fearing that it might blow. There was some haste to his looting of the dead creeps, for he thought that they might have comrades within easy distance, and he surely did not want to be caught there, alone with the people he’d just gunned down.

  Looking at them, he realized that at least three would likely rise within the next quarter of an hour or so. He’d failed to take out the brain in those men, and he knew from experience that about fifteen minutes would pass before those dead bodies would begin to twitch and lifeless eyes would open and unfeeling limbs would start pulsing in an endless quest to find a living body to consume. For a second he thought that he should probably take out the heads of these men, but he rather liked the idea of them shambling about, perhaps surprised at finding themselves dead, or maybe encountering their fellows who would arrive to ask them how work was progressing.

  In the very last of the light, he tossed his loot into his jeep, turned back the way he’d come, and searched for a graveled side road he’d seen a couple of miles before. He was going to have to hide and he was going to have to lay low, and he was going to have to be exceptionally careful.

  It was wabbit season.

  That night he took his jeep down an abandoned logging road. Of course he had no idea what a logging road was in those early days. All he saw was an overgrown track that led off of a poorly maintained gravel road and into the piney woods. He was afraid to drive south in the dark, having witnessed the scene of mass murder. And he knew that he could not drive north through the county packed, he feared, with crazed white boys.

  The four-wheel drive took him up the logging road, over a high hill, to a clearing of red clay looking rusty in the dark. He drove the jeep until the young pines trees bent before it and snapped back into place behind him. Roland drove until he thought he was very well hidden, and then he drove a little bit further.

  Then, in the night, he shut the engine down and, for the first time since coming upon that mad scene of racist murder, he took a long, shuddering breath. It was, as far as he could recall, the last time he cried.

  He didn’t sleep in the jeep, instead taking out a beaten old sleeping bag his parents had given him years before, and which he hadn’t used in quite some time. It was a bit musty, but in decent shape. In the night, he found a place on the forest floor and lay down, his back propped against a pine tree, hoping no biting bugs found him. He had the shotgun beside him, loaded this time with buckshot, the boxes of shells in the sleeping bag with him.

  But he did not sleep well. He could only doze, off and on, thinking of what he’d seen, the dead men and women, the tiny fingers and toes of infants in the stacks of bodies. And, of course, his thoughts kept drifting back to his parents. He had hoped—foolishly, of course—that he’d have been with them by now, in their embrace. They needed him. He was certain of that.

  Every sound in the forest woke him. Bugs screaming their incessant mating calls kept him up. Small mammals sniffing about in the dry tinder beneath the flaking pines made him alert. He kept straining to hear the shuffle of approaching undead, but at least that sound never reached him. And he kept trying to hear the voices of white men whispering in the dark, trying to figure out where he was. There was none of that, either.

  After a while, he extricated himself from the sleeping bag, stuffed some shells in his jacket pocket, picked up the shotgun and went back to the jeep. He unlocked it, making sure the lamp was off before he opened the door. Covering the face of the radio with a towel, he switched it on to see if he could find a station that was on the air that might provide him with any important information. FM seemed completely silent, so he switched to AM and began tuning the dial.

  Initially, there was only static. He started on the far left of the dial and moved slowly to the right. He got a station in Cleveland that was looping a Civil Defense message that ordered people to stay put and remain in their homes. He kept trying; passing frequencies that he knew were assigned to Atlanta area stations, but found nothing. Just that same hissing white noise. But, finally, he heard a voice coming in loud and clear.

  He squinted, puzzled. He stared blankly at the radio in the darkness, trying to figure out what he was hearing. What the hell? It seemed to be a language he couldn’t place. Roland had taken French, German, Spanish, and had learned a little Portuguese. But this was something unknown to him. Slavic? Hebrew? He couldn’t place it. It was just mindless rambling and raving and…

  Glossolalia. He had heard it before. In a comparative religion class he’d taken a few years before. The class had listened to the rantings of fundamentalist Christian sects who engaged in an act called Talking in Tongues. This is what he was hearing. Someone was “talking in tongues”. He waited, breathlessly, the signal so clear and so strong he might possibly be sitting right under the radio tower from which it was emanating.

  And then, finally, there was a break in the insane voice, a voice that had spoken with some strain, but as if it was indeed spouting a completed, logical series of words, as if conveying sane thoughts. The air was dead just for a moment, broken by heavy breathing, the crackle of an old-fashioned microphone. “This is WSAV here in Elijah, Georgia. Sounding out the word of God from here in the mountains of north Georgia, telling one and all to heed the teachings of Jesus and the prophets here in the End Days. Jesus has come to us to kill the wicked. To smite the Jews and the coloreds and the ungodly.”

  “Shit,” Roland whispered. The voice lapsed into silence for just a moment and then that same raving glossolalia once more. With some morbid fascination, he kept listening to that insanity, until he realized that it had been going on for a while, for almost thirty minutes, with no sign of letting up, and he’d been hypnotized by the voice and by his own fatigue. Reaching over, he switched off the radio and slipped out of the jeep, moving very slowly and very quietly toward where he’d left the sleeping bag.

  He was sliding down into a sitting position against the pine tree, the sleeping bag a softness under his legs when the bullets began peppering his jeep.

  Roland’s first impulse was to run, but he kept his wits about him and he merely hugged the ground and crawled into the thick underbrush of the surrounding pines, crabbing backwards as he pulled the shotgun and the sleeping bag filled with shells along. There were shots, and he quickly picked out several points from which the fire was coming. Strangely, he figured that if the shooters had just slightly altered their aim, they’d have had him triangulated perfectly. But for some reason they had focused on the jeep.

  Feeling that he was about as safely covered as possible considering his position, he lay flat on the ground and watched the view that was available to him. Why the hell were they firing at the jeep? And then he saw the shambling feet on the other side. It was hard to miss the big white sneakers that were visible on the opposite door of his jeep. The guns fired again and the figure above those feet staggered out into full view, and Roland saw that it was one of the undead. It had been a black kid—maybe sixteen or seventeen years old—just a high school youth, still wearing his letter jacket, a logo of white on a garish orange felt with white leather sleeves. The kid must have played football.

  He couldn’t tell if the shooters were just lousy aims, or if they were sick bastards having fun with the stumbling corpse. Every time there was gunfire, Thompson could see the bullets striking the dead kid’s torso or thigh, but never the head. And it was just wasted effort to shoot at anything other than the brain. He had all but decided that they were, in fact, just living out some sick fantasy when finally one of them fired a shot that hit the dancing form of the zombie high and center and sent a piece of jacketed brass through its brain. The zombie landed in a heap, unmoving.

  As Roland watched, breathlessly, three men appeared from the forest moving boldly onto his jeep as if they were sure it was a safe bet. Surely they hadn’t thought the zombie had been the driver? It had obviously been one of the living dead. And that sent a shiver through Roland, realizing how close had had been in the night to one of those things, and how easily it could have attacked and bitten him. But now he had to worry about these three, still among the living.

  He lay there, doing his best to become invisible as the trio of rednecks assembled and stood around his jeep. They were reaching inside it, looking at his stuff. One of them found something he liked and put it in his jacket pocket. Roland couldn’t see what the man was stealing. He knew that they’d soon notice his full gas can and walk off with that. But he couldn’t hear what they were saying to one another. It might as well have been the glossolalia from the nighttime radio broadcast.

  One of the men walked around the jeep and stood where Roland could clearly see him. It was the first good look he’d had of any of the three. He was a big guy with a beer gut, dressed in flannel and jeans and boots. He was wearing a Levi jacket with an old STP logo stitched on it. His face was covered in a reddish blonde beard of recent vintage and his eyes squinted here and there as he cast about, looking for anything that might move and offer a target. Stuffed into the chest pocket of the jacket was a pair of sunglasses. When the sun came up a little higher, Roland was sure he’d put them on.

  About the time Roland began wondering what the other two were doing, he suddenly heard the jeep’s engine cough to life.

  They had hot-wired his jeep! As soon as the engine flared, the man on Roland’s side of the vehicle turned and put his hand on the door handle. Just as he opened the door, Roland stood up and fired the shotgun. The slug plowed a hole in the big man’s back, continued up at an angle as it destroyed his spine, and exited through what had recently been his face as a tremendous and deformed wad of metal. It had lost so much momentum on its meaty pathway that the slug actually bounced off the jeep’s roof and came to rest there.

  “Fuck!” He heard one of the others scream it. By then, Roland had dropped his shotgun and was on a dead run at the jeep with his pistol hand extended. In the night, he’d tried to familiarize himself with the gun, but wasn’t sure how well he could fire it. He didn’t even know what model it was, but it looked like something that could do the job, and he’d chambered a shell in his paranoid and fitful night.

  The man still standing on the other side of the jeep had appeared above the roof by stepping on the rear tire. He’d tried to draw a bead on Roland and when his gun roared Roland actually felt the bullet pass by the left side of his jaw. His response was to keep running toward the jeep and he returned fire. Either luck or intuition put the .45 caliber shell into the shooter’s throat and he went down soundlessly, sliding in a squirming pile where Roland couldn’t see him.

  But then the fellow behind the wheel had the thought to put the jeep into drive and he hit the gas. Roland was watching his only real chance to go to his parents peeling away from him through the forest. “Shit,” he screamed. Kneeling, he aimed the pistol, led the jeep, and fired.

  Goddamned if I’m not good at this, he thought, seeing a bright flower of red explode on the opposite window.

  However, as with the SUV the day before, the jeep continued to move, pressed forward by the sudden dead weight of the pilot’s now truly leaden foot. Roland looked on with complete horror as his jeep leapt through evergreen saplings, picking up speed until it rammed full on into a large tulip poplar growing amidst the pines. The engine ceased to mutter and a cloud of either steam or white smoke began to creep out from the crumpled hood of the jeep.

  “Oh, damn,” Thompson muttered. Slowly, he walked toward the jeep, keeping his eye on the slumped figure in the front seat, and peering around every second or so to see if he could detect any other people looking on. He seemed to be truly alone, now. But he knew it would only be a matter of time before someone else showed up. There seemed to be no end to these crazy mountaineer bastards.

  At the jeep he carefully crept around to the driver’s side. The man was most definitely dead. He hadn’t gotten a head shot, but the slug had opened a hole in the man’s chest big enough to put a size thirteen boot into. Bone and bits of internal organs decorated the wound. His bearded face bore an open-eyed expression of complete surprise. For some reason, his face was not unpleasant to look upon, Roland thought. The feeling of satisfied vengeance, he supposed.

  Knowing that it was pointless, but needing to try at any rate, Roland pulled the dead body out of his jeep, climbed in, and tried to restart the engine. There was nothing there. It was ruined.

  He looked around, trying to decide what he should take with him. There was the jerry can of gas. He’d have to stash it somewhere. No point in attempting to lug twenty gallons of gasoline cross-country. As quickly as he could, he grabbed up the satchel and pulled out some of his clothes. He had a few cans of food that he’d tossed into the jeep, so he put those in the satchel, too. There was his flashlight; that went in, along with a hammer and screwdriver. He felt in his pocket to make sure he still had his pocketknife.

  Soon after he’d finished going through the dead man’s pockets, finding some more .45 caliber cartridges for the pistol he already had, the figure began to stir. As it opened its eyes, Roland was standing over it with a twenty-pound chunk of quartzite that he sent smashing down on that dead skull.

  As quickly and as methodically as he could, he retrieved the jerry can and half-buried it in the pine grove, covering it with branches and pine straw. He hoped that he could come back for it. Knowing that he might have only seconds more, he went back to where he’d been sleeping and retrieved the sleeping bag and his ammo. Going through the possession of the other two dead men, he found four more rounds of twelve gauge shells, but neither of them had been carrying a shotgun. Figuring they would have a vehicle hidden nearby, he was preparing to look for it when he heard the engine.

  He was out of time.

  Shouldering the satchel, he picked up his shotgun, feeling to make sure he had a pocket filled with shells, and trotted off into the woods, aiming for higher ground. Off to his right, he noticed a shuffling movement and was surprised to see a pair of the undead lumbering downhill. They didn’t seem to detect him and were instead intent on the same engine noise that had sent Roland hurrying away.

  When he got to the top of the ridge, he hunkered down below a low rise of earth where a tree had fallen and pulled up a mound of dirt and rock, and looked back. Through the pine trunks he saw a huge Chevy SUV pull up to the where he’d first parked his jeep. Four men got out and began to slowly scout. They were screaming and pointing. It only took them a few seconds to find Roland’s kills and the volume of their screams increased.

  “Sorry about your butt buddies,” Roland muttered.

  Soon after, the pair of zombies lumbered out of the forest toward the four and were summarily gunned down. This seemed to quiet the four mountaineers for a minute or so before they began screaming again, raving at Roland, whom they could not see, but suspected was still nearby. One of the four peeled off and began circling the small area that had been beaten down by the violence of the morning. After a few minutes he started walking toward the ridge where Roland was hiding.

  Roland’s guts froze.

  The mountain man, wearing a red cap and blue overalls, was staring directly at Roland’s position. From this distance, Roland could not believe that the man actually saw him, but it was obvious he had noticed something, some evidence of Roland’s movement through the pine plantation. Slowly, the man turned and walked back to the others.

  Roland did not wait to see what he was going to do, and merely ducked down the other side of the ridge and began to move with all speed down into the cove beyond and the next ridge above it. He was all but running, and so gave himself a half-mile head start before they were on his trail. Even so, they almost caught him.

  By the time he finally fought his way free of Gilmer County, by the time it was all over with that place and those folk, Roland had killed dozens of them. By the time he was something they feared rather than something they hunted, he had learned how to repack and reload his spent shells. He’d learned how to find what he needed. He’d learned how to kill better than he’d ever learned anything else. By the time he was free of that place; the denizens there breathed a sigh of great relief and were glad of his going. And, by that time, he’d lost all hope of saving his parents.

  That was why he’d actually lingered there, taking a measure of revenge for the inexcusable delay visited upon him.

  He’d completed his education.

  BC: On the Trail:

  When the family had first left him, BC hadn’t known just what to do. For a while, he entertained himself by herding the three zombies away from the house. It was easy to do. Just a nip there and a tug here, a push, barking to attract their vague attentions, and he soon had them moving in the right direction. Even the one he’d initially felled had been easy to move along once the object of its desire was gone. There was nothing in the house that they wanted. Even BC knew that much. After he had them shuffling off toward parts unknown, he went back to his old home.

  First, he went to the only bathtub in the house. Tilly had filled it for him before she’d left. She’d told him that the water was for him, so he knew it to be true. Steadying himself, he hopped up and dipped his snout into the cool water, lapping it up steadily. Mainly, he wanted to cleanse his mouth of the taste of the dead thing with which he’d struggled. It wasn’t like putting one’s fangs into normal flesh, or even into rotting flesh. This was different. Nothing seemed to want a part of these things—not even microbes after an initial attack on the reanimated bodies. After a few days they ceased to rot at all and it was most unpleasant to bite into them.