Crusade (Eden Book 2) (23 page)

“I’m getting my vision back,” Zach said. “I think.”

“You’re flash blind,” Lauren said. “You were looking towards the city when the nuke went off, weren’t you?”

“Dammit, that’s what it was, wasn’t it?
Shit
.”

“Shit is right. We better get our asses moving,” Eva snapped. “I don’t feel like standing here chatting and waiting to see what reaches us first—a radioactive cloud or a bunch of fuckin’ zombies.”

“Let’s go.” Maurice started forward, walking off towards the left.

The Greek looked at Zach.

“
Me vlepeis
?” He waved a hand in the man’s face.

“I see shadows. Light and dark. It’s an improvement over what I saw before.”

“
Ga mi sou
.
Ako lou tha me
.”

The cars, trucks, buses and vans stretched out around them, tightly packed in places, scattered haphazardly in others. Some doors stood open and the interiors were empty. In other cars skeletal remains cluttered the seats: clothes that had once hung from flesh and muscle and bone pooled about them. Other skeletons and parts of skeletons lay strewn outside the vehicles, often in proximity to a weapon of some sort: guns and knives, a tire iron. All of the tires were flat.

Eva led them, picking a path between the vehicles. Two or three spots proved impassable, cars pressed bumper to bumper, so it was up and over, crossing hoods to the highway on the other side. Lauren was especially cautious with Sonya in these areas, her work doubly difficult as Sonya clutched baby Victor to her chest the entire way.

Like a rabid dog locked in its owners’ car, the zombie smashed itself against the glass of the driver’s door and Maurice involuntarily jumped back into the side of another car, pointing the barrel of his Mini-14 at the window.

“Holy shit.”

The thing was trapped inside. Tufts of its hair were missing and it looked like they had been torn from its scalp. Maurice wondered how long the beast had been locked in the car like that, if it had grown bored and pulled its own hair out. Its teeth and rotten gums were pressed against the glass and the thing snarled at him, just like a dog.

“Damn.” Maurice shook his head and started walking again, turning his head a few times to check on the thing in the car, which pushed up to the windshield and watched him go. He walked with the 14 secure to his shoulder from that point on.

He let out a low whistle that only he could hear. He thought of the possibly thousands of people who had been trapped here at one point, like the skeletons and zombies in the cars. But most of the cars were empty and he couldn’t have imagined the occupants had all met their ends out here on the highway. He pictured them streaming up into the trees on the hills and down the road, fleeing whatever it had been they’d been scared of.

The sun was going down when he stopped and climbed atop the hood of an old Cadillac. He stepped onto its roof and from there reached out and up with one foot, alighting atop the cab of an 18-wheeler. He reached up and swung a leg over and pulled himself from the cab to the top of the cargo container then stood and surveyed all he could.

The cars stretched out in all directions, for miles. He wondered how far they’d come. Had it been a few miles or more, or had it only felt as such because of the constant maneuvering between dead vehicles?

Sonya had an arm out-stretched and was holding onto Lauren’s shoulder. It felt like a flock of children moved with them.

Eva was well ahead of the group, the assault rifle/shotgun tensed on its sling. Maurice thought again how bad ass Eva was, how he wouldn’t want to fuck with her.

The Greek and Zach had fallen behind but were in sight. Maurice couldn’t hear him but he could see the Greek was saying something. He imagined he was prodding the other man, hurrying him forward.

Maurice squinted and looked as far ahead as he could into the slowly gathering dusk but he could not see any zombies…

Sundown was upon them and soon it would give to night. Eva knew it was time to stop and find someplace suitable amongst these cars to wait for morning. She looked behind her, could see Lauren with Sonya, her niece and nephews and that other little boy winding their way through the vast collection of stalled vehicles. She knew Maurice was following off to her left somewhere, closer to or on the median. She could not see the Greek and Zach.

Eva figured they had gone several miles at least. She had noticed a couple of things about the vehicles on the road right away. First, they were all facing in the direction in which her little group was headed. Even the cars across the median on the other three lanes had been headed in that direction. She assumed these vehicles and their passengers found themselves here sometime soon after the immediate zombie outbreak so many months back. She thought they’d been fleeing a city, maybe Pittsburgh, where she guessed the nuclear explosion—what else could that mushroom cloud have been?—had originated.

As she walked among the still cars and trucks, the M4-shotgun combo tensed on its sling, she considered where all these automobiles had been going and why they had stopped. She thought they’d been headed away from the cities, towards the countryside, headed for areas with lesser populations. Though an eleven-month-old like Victor would be too young to remember it, she recalled all too well how the cities had quickly become death traps, teeming with millions of the undead, survivors trapped in apartment buildings and malls and supermarkets and anywhere they could get to.

There was a buzz in her ear. She swatted away something she dismissed as a gnat.

But why had the cars stopped? What, she wondered, was up ahead? And how far was it? Maybe a military blockade? Eva remembered how, early on, the National Guard and the Army had set up barricades and tried to quarantine entire towns and cities, murdering citizens, the infected and uninfected alike, not allowing them access to the areas that had not yet been contaminated. In the end all areas had become contaminated and the barricades had fallen. The soldiers and police officers abandoned their posts, seeking safety and their own families. The ones who had not run had died at the barriers.

She passed a yellow school bus and had to go around it. A van had been parked flush against the side of the bus, directly behind the door where she imagined kids not much older than Nicole and Nelson had gotten on and off every day on their way to and from school.

That was another thing she had noticed about the cars. There had been numerous fender benders and small accidents. It looked like some drivers had tried to drive
through
other cars, attempted to push them out of their way, all to no avail. At times she and the group had to circle around small groups of vehicles that were joined bumper to bumper.

She swatted at the gnats again.

Eva thought they’d be safe enough if they spent the night out here on the road, maybe inside or on top of some of the higher trucks. Inside would be better. If something or someone passed by in the night there’d be less of a chance of them being spotted. They’d spent months in the relative safety of the convoy. Their numbers and the sound of their band had drawn zombies nearly every day, but it had also kept them safe from other human beings. Eva had heard enough stories from people who had joined the convoy to know that not everyone you met on the road was a friend. At the very beginning of this thing she had sworn to herself she would do whatever she had to do to protect Sonya and Nelson and Nicole and Victor.

If she had allowed herself the luxury she would have felt how terrified she was. But she didn’t. Instead she imagined how Sonya must feel, blind, three kids in tow, now that little kid, Buckwheat, and Sonya’s husband dead and gone.

It was at that moment something in the back of her head clicked and she stopped where she was. The sun was down behind the trees but there was still a great deal of light in the sky. Off in the distance there was the buzz of cicadas.

She looked around in all directions and didn’t see anything amiss. The cars and trucks stretched on as they had. To her left, beyond wherever Maurice was, the shoulder of the road angled up through waist high grass and ended at the tree line.

She got down on one knee then lay flat and looked under the car to her right then the van to her left. She didn’t know what she expected to see but seeing nothing did not assure her.

Eva got up and climbed on top of the hood of a car then the vehicle’s roof. She looked back and saw Sonya, Lauren and the kids and she signaled to them to stop. Lauren said something to Sonya that Eva could not hear but their small group halted where they were near the bus Eva had passed a few minutes ago.

Maurice saw her signal to the other women and he stopped too.

Eva squinted in the growing dusk and looked around and saw nothing, but, no, that wasn’t quite right, there was
something
up ahead three or four cars. She watched it but couldn’t figure out what it was. A growing sense of unease welled up inside her. She turned back to her sister and Lauren, signaling to them to stay where they were. She carefully stepped down from the roof of the car onto its hood, and from the hood to the trunk then roof, then to the hood of the next one, and so on until she had crossed three cars this way. Now she stood on the roof of a Volkswagen Rabbit looking down on a mess.

A man was lying there on the road between the car on which Eva stood and the next. His face was ravaged, a mask of red and raw muscle and sinew laid-bare. From his neck up the only identifiable parts were a tongue and an eyeball. The man’s nose, ears, lips, the entirety of the skin on his face, most of his scalp, was all gone. There was some hair plastered to the back of his head and the road.

A few things hit Eva at once. The blood was fresh. This was a recent kill. He wore a blood-stained t-shirt that said
I am the Man from Nantucket
. She knew this man. He was from the convoy.

And those weren’t gnats, they were
flies
. There were hundreds of them, many buzzing around the man, but too many to be drawn by the corpse alone. Eva knew where there were flies there were—

“Uggghhh!” the man uttered a gargled cry. She jumped back and lost her footing, slipping on the hood of the Rabbit, her ass slamming into the windshield, her body rolling off the car. She hit the road with one hand out to break her fall then quickly scrambled up. As she did so she heard a gunshot from somewhere behind followed by “
Ska ta
!” and more gunfire. She knew the Greek and Zach were in trouble.

“Eva!” Sonya screamed but she couldn’t see her sister. She backed away from the space where the mess lay and wondered if the man in the t-shirt was still alive, or was coming back from the dead, when Maurice yelled out “Fuck!” She looked up. There were dozens of bookers sprinting down from out of the tree line towards him and the cars. He turned and ran, disappearing from her view.

“
Raaaaaaah
!”

The growl turned her around. A zombie, one of the smart ones, squatted on the roof of a car, looking down at her. As Eva watched, the thing cracked its mouth open and a gob of bloody spittle descended from its maw to the road surface in an unbroken line as it tensed to pounce.

She hit it with a slug-load from the shotgun mounted under her carbine. It wasn’t a head shot but the blast lifted the creature off the car roof and deposited it somewhere on the other side of the vehicle. She didn’t stick around for it to come back. High-tailing it between the cars, trucks and motorcycles back towards her sister and the others, she screamed: “Get in the bus! Get in the bus!” She was aware of movement from many sides now, more things like the brain she had just blasted moving amongst the vehicles, coming for her, shrieking and hopping on and over cars.