DEAD: Reborn (34 page)

The big bike was heavy, awkward, and ran funny like it had molasses mixed in with the fuel. It would rumble and sputter and then cough with a burst of black smoke that spewed from the tailpipe, but it made it home.

After Jody had been seen to, Danny spilled everything he knew, which really was not all that much when it came down to it. A few people grumbled that it all seemed too convenient for Remar to end up dead and the first one that did so in Danny’s earshot was still rubbing his jaw.

“My friend almost died going out there thinking that we were trying to save that piece of crap!” Danny roared as he stood over the man with clenched fists.

Thankfully—for the man on the ground, not Danny—George was on hand to calm the angry soldier down. That night as Danny sat next to Jody’s bed, his mind went back over everything from the events of the last part of that peculiar twenty-four hours. He was certain that something was brewing out there.

Those bikers were not just some random encounter for R
emar and his group. He’d driven through the burnt down development before wheeling it back to Cash. He could not be certain, but he was almost willing to swear that he had seen the remnants of a secured area. Somebody was setting up a home or a base in that place. Also, that night while the fire burned and battled with the rain in its losing war, he was almost certain that he’d heard what sounded like a bunch of firearms being fired at once—an ammunition cook off would be the likely culprit.

Danny sat by Jody’s bed all that first night…and the nights that followed. He refused to leave and practically sprinted there and back
any time he had to use the restroom. On the fourth or fifth day, Selina insisted that he go take a shower. He agreed only if she promised to stay with Jody until he got back.

He helped spoon mashed plates of unidentifiable stuff with the consistency of baby food into Jody’s mouth. He helped change out IV bags and even became proficient at sterilizing the old one and refil
ling it with the solution that Selina and another woman said he needed.

On the eleventh day, Jody opened his eyes. The first words that he heard were from his friend Danny.

“Sergeant Bill Pitts is alive.”

18

Geeks on Two Wheels

Kevin turned to his group. They looked anxious, even a little scared. After the last several days, he could hardly blame them. Already they had lost five of their numbers. More than once, Kevin wondered if he was doing the right thing in bringing these children with him.

The journey to Chicago had looked much easier on the map. However, they just had not planned for so much urban sprawl. They had stayed well south on their approach and, as it was, had not actually reached Chicago proper
when they suffered the first of their losses. Yet, Kevin pressed on. He had made up his mind…or so he thought.

Kevin took them
north all the way to Interstate 90—the Indiana Toll Road according to the few signs that remained. With Lake Michigan to their right, they found a huge sporting goods store. Kevin had almost bypassed it due to the exterior damage. However, Catie had taken a small group in and come out in such a hurry that Kevin waited for an army of zombies to emerge like ants from a kicked anthill.

“Not a weapon to be had…but the bicycles and camping gear are untouched!” she announced.

They spent the day equipping themselves and making sure that every single bicycle was ready for the road. Kevin was very thorough in making sure that they would be able to repair or replace anything that might go wrong. By the time they were back on the road, everybody was feeling as if Christmas had come.

Kevin had not realized how ragged the children’s footwear was until one of them came up with a pair of hiking boots and asked if she could have them or if they were too expensive. It had taken him a moment to actually understand that the conc
ept of their reality had perhaps not sunk in entirely.

He gathered everybody around and told them that they could take anything they needed if they could pull it in his or her own trailer. He cautioned them that they would be needing food and that they would be taking only what they could carry as indivi
duals.

When they resumed their journey, Aleah had come up b
eside him. “So, are you sure about Chicago?”

“I think the city itself is probably a gold mine,” Kevin said. “But I don’t think we are going to make it that far. The maps r
eally do not show how dense the area was with people. I guess I never thought it out.”

“Wait…am I hearing this correctly? The great mind of Ke
vin Dreon has made a…mistake?”

“Happens to the best of us,” he said with a shrug.

And so as they passed through the almost completely destroyed and burnt remains of Gary, Indiana, Kevin kept them on Interstate 90, where they passed what had to have been some sort of massive fuel depository. None of the huge tanks remained, and the ground had a glassy sheen to it as well as a lingering smell of fuel even after all this time.

A huge neighborhood just to the west had been utterly wiped out by the resulting fire. Kevin could not begin to wrap his mind around the size of the
blaze that had to have burned for perhaps months.

They passed another, and then another tanker farm. Each having vanished in what had to have been a hellish conflagr
ation. Each causing utter destruction to the surrounding landscape.

They’d finally crossed a large lake and eventually passed th
rough what had once been a massive toll gate complex that spanned the interstate. It looked like the military had done its best to make some sort of stand here. Leading up to the toll gate, the litter of corpses was horrifying. It was so bad that they had to actually leave the highway and travel along an access road that ran parallel.

And just that suddenly, they cleared a wooded area and di
scovered themselves on the Indiana/Illinois State Line and an expansive neighborhood that looked like it went on forever. This community sat across from what one sign proclaimed to be ‘Eggers Woods Forest Preserve’.

“This is the rally point,” Kevin had announced.

He had divided them into groups. He took one, Aleah took one, Heather and Deanna took one and Sean was paired with Trent. They each were given twelve kids in their detail. They had been assigned a specific street and told to search one block at a time and return to the rally point with the gathered spoils and await the others.

Looking down his street, Kevin saw very little activity. A few zombies could be seen, but not many. And considering that they were looking at an area with perhaps thousands of homes packed in tightly amongst one another, this was exactly the blessing he’d hoped for.

Sure, there would still be a few zombies to deal with, but the ratio of houses to zombies looked to be very favorable. After one more lecture about being cautious and sticking together with your assigned group, Kevin wished everybody luck, kissed Aleah, and headed to his street. He would begin at the intersection of ‘E 112
th
ST’ and ‘S Avenue B’ according to the surprisingly intact signage.

The first obstacle was a five car mess. It looked as if ever
ybody had tried to exit the neighborhood at the exact same time. One car had the remains of the driver jutting through the windshield. The blood had long since been washed away, leaving a barely visible stain. This was proof that the undead had no interest in eating an already deceased individual. There were signs of trauma from the accident, but not so much as a single bite mark.

Kevin chose to go down the left side of the street and then come up the right side so that they would end their search closest to the park. The first house was a disappointment. It appeared that the place had likely been up for sale because it was empty except for some now moldy furniture in the living room obv
iously meant as a display.

The second house was picked pretty clean as was the next few. Kevin was beginning to doubt his logic. He had simply a
ssumed that a majority of the former residents would have evacuated to an area shelter or FEMA center. The likelihood that the zombie population in this sort of area would be fairly dense would have dissuaded most looters…or at least that was his logic going in.

The long row of brick homes was starting to look like a bust by the time he reached the sixth home on the street. It looked just like all the others.
Graffiti scrawled on the front, a busted front window. But when he opened the front door (not all of the homes had intact front doors, but this one just happened to), he saw a stack of boxes just down the entry hall. They had been knocked over and some of their contents had spilled on the floor.

Cans! He hurried inside. Looking back, he saw the children staring back. They were hesitant and scared. That was when he smelled it.

At almost the same moment, a strange howl came from somewhere behind one of the closed doors down the dark hallway that led off from the main entrance. Everybody already had weapons in hand, but a few of the kids were backing away.

“It’s okay,” Kevin whispered. “There are probably only one or two. I
will go down and deal with them. You guys get this stuff outside and start loading it into the trailers. Don’t worry about what goes where for now…we will sort everything out once we get back to the rally point.”

“Don’t go in there,” one of the kids pleaded.

“It’s no big deal,” Kevin said dismissively. “You guys act like you have never seen a zombie before.”

He could not believe that these same kids who had been ready to turn him into a human pin cushion were suddenly so scared.

“That doesn’t sound like a zombie,” one of the kids whispered.

The sound came again. It sounded like a mix of a howl and a wet sort of growling. He cocked his head and listened carefu
lly. The sounds came once more, and this time there was obviously more than one of whatever the hell was making that noise.

“You guys just get the food. I’
ll go check it out.” Kevin headed down the hallway, not bothering to see if his group did as they were told.

The noise continued, but when he stepped on a loose floo
rboard and a high squeak pierced the air, it stopped instantly. A second later there was a terrible crash from behind the second door on the left.

As he moved down the hallway, he could smell something foul, like rot and ammonia swirled together. It was bad enough that it made him gag and his eyes start
ed to water. He pulled his shirt up over his nose, but it did little to block the pungent stench from invading his olfactory sense.

He reached the door and
listened. He thought he heard a scuttling sound, but his own heart was suddenly beating louder than any ambient noise…or at least that is how it seemed. He looked back up the hallway. The children were clustered close; none of them had yet started to pack out the boxes of supplies that the residence’s former owners had so generously left for them.

Taking one more deep breath and bringing his machete up and ready to swing, Kevin threw the door open and jumped back. More than a dozen feral cats bolted from the room, brin
ging with them a stink so thick that it caused his eyes to physically burn. As one, the children all shrieked and bolted for the front door.

Kevin looked in the room and discovered that it had basica
lly become a nest. Animal carcasses were strewn about, along with…Kevin felt his gorge rise. The room was littered with random body parts. A hand here, a foot there…and was that an entire head stripped almost clean down to the skull?

Kevin staggered back down the hall. He made it three steps when a yowl and hiss caused him to jump back. One of the cats was apparently not afraid of this sudden intrusion and was pr
epared to do battle. The feline crouched low and sprung, its claws seeking purchase in the protective welder’s leathers that he wore over his jeans. On reflex, Kevin went to bat the animal away and it latched onto his gloves. The mesh inside was effective at repelling human teeth, but did little to stop the needle-like fangs of the angry cat.

Kevin yelped in pain and slung his arm, slamming the cat attached to his fingers hard against the wall. This did little more than cause the creature to bite down harder. Kevin slammed it again and fumbled for one of the knives at his belt.

Seeming to be able to sense the coming attack, the cat let go and darted away. The shouts of surprise from the children let him know it had exited the house. Seconds later, several of the children shrieked again. Kevin rounded the corner and stared out the front door. Just in the narrow field of vision that he had of the outside, at least a dozen walkers were in view as well as creepers that were emerging from under some of the defunct vehicles that littered the street.

“Don’t wait for them to get up on us!” Kevin barked. “Take them
down…closest first and work your way out.”

As Kevin stepped
outside, he quickly discovered that the problem was not too serious. At most, forty undead were converging on them. He had a private interior chuckle at that thought before planting his machete in the crown of the closest zombie.

He was scanning the undead as they were killed, searching for any signs that they may either be relatively fresh or having a recent meal…or whatever it was when zombies ate people.
These were all old and ragged. Many had missing digits, multiple signs of having been shot, stabbed, or hacked at, and their clothing was almost non-existent.

“There’s something old George missed,” Kevin sighed as he plunged his knife into the temple of a nude woman that had probably been in her twenties, but now looked well over fifty the way her skin was all sagging and loose, thinking back to what now felt like a ridiculous obsession with all things zombie rela
ted.

It only took a few minutes and all the zombies had been put down. Kevin noticed with just a bit of unease that cats peered at them from all around. Some perched on cars, others under shrubs, and the more brazen, right out in the middle of the street. They showed no fear, just apparent annoyance at having been disturbed.

By the time they had the supplies loaded up, several of the cats were lurking about the downed corpses. Wiping the sweat from his face, Kevin looked to the sky and scowled. It was cloudy, and he had not remembered it being so hot. He shook it off as his body’s response to the cats and then the quick battle with the undead. While they were just not as frightening as they had been early on, he couldn’t deny that it did not get his heart racing just a bit when he had to deal with them.

They continued their trek up the street, stopping at each house. From what he was seeing, he figured that the first houses had probably been looted. However, nobody had wanted to ve
nture much further into a neighborhood area in those first months. House after house now yielded random but plentiful bounties. Of course they were picking through the items that the former residents had left behind when they evacuated. Still, they were finding a hefty amount of non-perishables, as well as cleaning supplies, medicines like aspirin and AB ointments with plenty of soaps, shampoos, and dental products for added measure.

Having been reduced to simply scrubbing at his mouth with a finger and then rinsing his mouth with whatever poor subst
itute they were using for coffee when they even had the luxury of a substitute, Kevin was most excited about toothpaste. He’d even found a few toothbrushes still in their packages!