Down the Road: The Fall of Austin (33 page)

All they had ever needed, it seemed, was a
common enemy, a common threat.

Ducky and Mousetrap were in the back of the
trailer, helping people into the crude transport when a young man
dashed up to be included in the exodus. He was lugging a garish end
table with him that they assumed he was trying to salvage from his
apartment.

“What the fuck is this?” Mousetrap asked. “We
gotta have room for
people
, dickhead.”

“Yeah, man, what the fuck are you bringing an
end table for?” Ducky added.

“But, but—it’s an
Ikea
,” the man
said.

“Do this,” Ducky said. “Take your Ikea end
table back to your apartment and fuck yourself while you’re there.
You’re not getting on the truck with it.”

The guy groaned, but seemed hesitant to
oblige.

Ducky made it easy for him. He yanked the
table from his hands and flung it into a pile of flaming zombies.
“Now get on, dumbass!”

Rule change.

* * *

Keri Lawrence and Officer Mike Runyard
finally navigated all three flights of stairs and arrived at the
bottom.

“You really think we can make it to your
cruiser?” Keri asked.

“The cruiser I got here in isn’t there
anymore. But there was another there. I think we can do it,” Mike
said, limping, but more mobile than before the impending explosion
proved an adequate motivator.

“And if there’s no keys?” Keri said,
resigning herself to the hopelessness of the moment.

“Who knows?” Mike said, shrugging his
shoulders with a kind of aloofness. “You still in?”

Keri couldn’t help but giggle. She thought
maybe she was going a little mad. “I’m in. You and me.”

But exposing himself to the general public
would prove more perilous than the trek to the vehicle. Once eye
contact was made, it did not take Sleepy long to identify the man
that had captured him and put him in jail only days before.

“
Ay, chingado
,” Sleepy muttered, his
heart slowly filling with rage, his soul trembling with fury.

“
Que?
What’s wrong?” Tiny asked.

“Holy shit,” Mike whispered with a distinct
shiver. He turned to Keri and said gravely, “Keri, you need to go
now.”

“What?” she said.

“You’ve gotta go,” he repeated. “You’ve got
to run.”

“No chance. I’m not leaving you.”

With a deliberate stride, Sleepy advanced on
them.

“
Ey
, where you going, Sleepy?” Nick
asked.

“Hey, it’s the guy that saved me,” Theresa
said.

“Huh?”

“That guy,” she said, pointing at Mike with
her free hand, the hand that wasn’t attached to the arm tightly
cuddling Laura Jane. “The cop I told you about. He saved me and
L.J. from the looters.”

Nick saw who the cop was. He was the same
person Sleepy was heading towards with his pistol raised.

In the world that had fallen apart like a
stack of dominoes in a child’s toyroom, the one thing Nick had
clung to, the one thing that brought him back to the love of his
wife and the beauty of his daughter, was honor. Despite Nick’s
treachery to his former employer, his dishonor and disloyalty

to his former boss, his new allegiance to
Sleepy was birthed in betrayal, raised in trust, but sanctified by
honor. It was the honor of a jailed drug dealer and gang member.
Sleepy was a man who profited from blood, was fed by the addictions
of others, financed by a shadowy league of aberrant criminals, both
from dark alleys and underground syndicates to elected officials
and public offices. One man whose only code of honor was bound by
his word. Nick had liberated Sleepy, a choice he had not needed to
make, but made anyway. Sleepy had a similar choice he did not have
to make, but did. It had been a choice to travel to this apartment
complex, face extreme danger to honor his word, his code. The
choice was part pledge of allegiance, part death wish. But Sleepy
fulfilled his duty.

But the murder that was about to take place
needed to be addressed. The “pig” had saved his wife from danger,
from death. This man, this stranger, this policeman had defended
his wife when he himself was not there to do so. The cop was the
man he had sworn to be to her in his absence, a swift and able
defender in his family’s time of need. The cop had made a choice he
had not needed to make, took a risk he did not need to take. But he
did it anyway.

This was a previously unheard-of definition
of honor to Nick Lopez.

If honor was the code that was keeping him
and his family alive in this zombie apocalypse, then the cop’s
simple quest to defend his wife in his absence needed to be
honored, respected. Because now, Nick was given a choice, provided
a cruel challenge by a giggling apostle of fate who was watching
over the unfolding situation through the dark clouds of the night.
His choice would be made for him in moments, by default, if he
chose not to act.

Keri caught sight of the advancing and armed
thug in the chaos of the evacuation. He was the only one intently
marching forward with an agenda, while everyone around him was
bouncing in different directions. She understood the situation at
once: Mike was a policeman, and policemen were certain to have many
enemies, and in the anarchy of the apocalypse there was nothing
stopping those enemies from seeking retribution.

She froze up in horror, realizing her only
friend, her salvation in her time of need—her destined love—was
about to be murdered in a blood colder than an arctic winter, or a
Milton-esque hellscape.

Mike, crippled and defenseless, pulled his
only ace, his tazer, and subtly hid it behind him as he fell to the
ground on his ass, submitting to the advancing thug. He wondered if
the opportunity to use the tazer, the ace, would even present
itself on a proverbial
flop, turn, or river
.

“Fate’s a real
puta, ey, baboso
?”
Sleepy said with a sadistic smile, hovering over him.

Keri played the only hand she could.
“Omigod—don’t shoot him! Please!”

It did little to change Sleepy’s mind. “Shut
up, bitch!” he yelled, not taking the gun off of Mike for a
second.

“C’mon, man, don’t kill me,” Mike said,
sounding almost nonchalant. “That bust was a one-time thing. Kind
of like a try-out for me and my partner. If it hadn’t been me, it
would have been someone else.”

There was no reply. Just the smile of a man
seconds away from watching his vengeance unleashed as he squeezed
the trigger.

Keri fell to her knees next to Mike and
wrapped her arms around him. She was crying now, trying to talk
into his ear but instead just soaking his cheek with her tears. All
Mike could make out between her whimpers was, “
We were put there
for a reason, you and me. It can’t just end like this.
”

Mike’s eyes were transfixed on Sleepy’s,
remembering that night of the bust. Before his mind’s eye, he
remembered his first kiss in junior high, his game-winning
touchdown, the embrace of his mother and father. The gentle kiss he
wished he had shared with Keri. A bright light filled his eyes; a
healing, relaxing light approaching him like a soft blanket on a
cold night.

But the light was eclipsed by a dark shadow,
a black angel in the white radiance. The total eclipse of the light
erased it from his view, replaced with the red warmth of flesh and
blood. A sacrifice at the altar of honor. The light was replaced by
the shocked face of Hector ‘Sleepy’ Arana, horrified at the wild
card played on the river, the pocket pair putting his hand in the
muck.

Nick Lopez had made his choice.

He landed on the ground next to the cop. The
bullet, the modern sacrificial knife, had cut through his shoulder,
delivering the tribute to the fickle fingers of fate, making his
right arm lame in honor of the man who saved his family.

“
Que estas hacienda, buey?!”
Sleepy
shouted, wondering why Nick made the choice to jump in front of the
bullet.

Swallowing his pain, Nick pleaded, “Don’t be
mad, Sleepy. Just let me explain.”

But before Nick could utter another syllable,
a section of Sleepy’s head was drilled open by a bullet that busted
a hole out the opposite side of his skull. Sleepy fell forward into
the arms of the man he honored, victim of the same vengeful emotion
he was prevented from unleashing.

Mike, Keri, Nick and Tiny all turned to look
in the direction the unexpected execution originated from. They all
caught sight of the cruel avenger. Tiny considered charging the
killer out of respect for his fallen leader, but stopped short.

Standing by the gate was the hateful
resonating personification of the sin of vengeance: Sgt. Roger
Nickson. His face and clothes were stained with blood, and he
looked for all intents and purposes like the living dead all around
them—a Viral from Hell—his face red and blistering to prove he had
faced the fires of Satan and lived to tell the tale.

He dragged Spc. Garrison by the collar, and
the two satanic disciples advanced through the hole in the gate to
the truck that they were once bound to.

Murdering the driver and passenger with cruel
efficiency, Nickson tossed Garrison into the passenger seat beside
him. Revving the engine and popping the clutch at a high rate of
RPMs, Nickson burst through a weakened section of the chain-link
fence and bounded over the sidewalk, escaping his thug captors and
the FEMA camp.

He still had a mission to accomplish:

Execute Sgt. Martin Arnold.

* * *

When the second truck raced from the falling
FEMA camp, driving through a fence and creating another breach,
Talltree roused from his meditation and made his decision.

He hopped off the McDonald’s rooftop, zombie
scalps that hung from his belt flapping against his thighs,
continuing to bathe his body in gorish camouflage.

* * *

Sgt. Arnold knew what he was doing. He had
commanded the people to go south toward Koehl and San Marcos, so he
needed to move the device north.

He noticed a jimmied CD player and interior
speakers. He turned it on. A techno beat hit the air.

“Pump up the jam?” he whispered, identifying
the tune with an incredulous smile. He shrugged his shoulders and
turned up the volume.

He had barely begun his lip-syncing when he
looked up and noticed a pair of lights behind him—and gaining
fast—shooting down a clear segment of the road in the zombie
wasteland that Austin had become.

Rear-ending the Hummer, Sgt. Arnold’s vehicle
fishtailed before gaining control again.

Sgt. Nickson pulled up beside the Hummer,
deftly dodging stalled vehicles on the road. He made eye contact
with Sgt. Arnold. Both pairs of eyes filled their owners with rage
and both vehicles quickly attempted to sideswipe each other.

“Fire on that vehicle, soldier!” Sgt. Nickson
commanded to a spent and weary Spc. Garrison, riding shotgun.

Garrison feebly attempted to lift his pistol
to shoot out the window, trying to respect the command of his
leader, his friend. But the gesture was futile. Too many of his
fingers were missing and the gun fell to the floorboard.

Specialist Leo Garrison spent the final
moments of his life as an utter failure.

He turned to Sgt. Nickson. “I’m sorry,
Sarge.”

Sgt. Nickson sped up slightly, moving just in
front of the Hummer. He then shifted sideways in his seat,
chambered his leg, and kicked Specialist Leo Garrison out of the
moving vehicle, using him as a weapon against the Hummer.

Garrison plunged headlong to the blurry gray
pavement, eating the grill guard of the Hummer first. The hit
knocked out more teeth and broke his face even more before he
tumbled in a heap under the speeding steel monster. The tires
twisted Garrison’s body like a high school senior twisting a wet
towel to snap the bare ass of a freshman in gym class. His organs
were squeezed out of his belly through his anus, scattering on the
road like a basket of vegetables and sausages falling from a
delivery truck. Legs were twisted and torn away from the pulverized
body, accompanied by a set of arms. His head was crushed under the
back tire, busting like a large tomato crushed under the foot of a
Spaniard celebrating an annual festival in his home country. By the
time Specialist Leo Garrison was spit out the back of the vehicle,
nothing was left of him that was discernable but his scalped
jawbone on a mass of sanguine mincemeat, a mincemeat nearby zombies
were eager to consume.

Detecting the fresh meal on the interstate,
the product of the vehicular massacre, the zombies shambled to the
remains and ate it with greed, shoving whole handfuls into their
mouths, feasting freely in the middle of the deserted highway. The
remains were spread in a line across the road, and ghouls
approached as if moving to the salad bar or buffet table, with just
enough cognitive ability to pick and choose the choicest parts.

Nickson’s cruel tactic had been highly
effective though, as it caused Sgt. Arnold’s Hummer to clip
Nickson’s vehicle in the rear. Both vehicles swerved, fishtailed,
then tumbled in a deadly roll down the access road just blocks from
the Texas State Capitol. In moments, they both stopped rolling,
both coming to rest upside down.

Rattled and dizzy, Sgt. Arnold released
himself from his seatbelt and crawled out of the Hummer. His leg
was hurt and his ribs were bruised, but he was still fully
functional despite the limp. The groans of the dead signaled their
inevitable approach to the potential meal. He looked at the other
vehicle and saw no one in the cab. The broken front window
indicated Nickson must have been thrown from it.

Sgt. Arnold scrambled to his Hummer in search
of the suitcase. The moans of the dead were sounding more like
calls to attract others to the fresh meat.