Forget The Zombies (Book 3): Forget America (18 page)

The sound of the tires on the road filled the next few minutes of silence. I could tell he was holding back his next question, but it was coming.

I preempted it and said, “Then her husband came back into the picture and that was it.”

He exhaled loudly his dissent and used a fake cough to cover the word, “Bullshit.” I saw the corners his mouth turn up in a grin, but it was his turn to look down the road avoid direct eye contact.

The storm hit about an hour later.

The driving only got worse as we made our way across North Carolina. At times the truck would sway from the force of the winds. A driving rain battered us so fiercely, it was a wonder we stayed on the road at all. The storm finally got so intense that Joni woke up and demanded that she take back over at the wheel. I didn’t fight her because I was near collapse. I couldn’t remember the last time I had slept, but despite the crushing fatigue, I wasn’t able to go to sleep because either the flash of lightening or a crack of thunder would wake me up.

“Check the radio again,” I told Robbie.

“There’s been nothing but static since they they dropped the bombs,” he replied.

“Maybe we’re far enough north that we’re going to get some reception.”

He flicked on the truck’s radio and started tuning through the static as Joni white knuckled our way through the storm. I could tell through his body language that he was about to turn it off when the hint of a transmission came through. It was indistinct and unintelligible at first, but as we drove east, we could make out words, but these words brought us no comfort. The first word we heard we could clearly make out was, “Hurricane.” This was followed with the words “Category 4.”

It wasn’t bad enough that we were running away from the zombie apocalypse and nuclear strikes. We had to have a hurricane to make life even more interesting.

There was no turning back and I wanted to turn off the radio because it was blurting out nothing but more bad news. But they say information is power. (Sometimes, I think information is sort of scary.) So, we kept the radio on and the good news just kept coming as the announcers reported that despite the limited nuclear strikes, the spread of the virus and the undead seemed to be expanding.

“What does all this mean?” Robbie asked as he fidgeted with his hands.

“Nothing good,” I said.

“So, what’s the plan then?” Joni asked.

“Onward and forward, I guess,” was the best I could come up with.

We forged ahead passing abandoned cars of people who had more sense than us and got off the road. We saw a few people still huddled in their cars, riding the storm out.

We were dry in the cab, but I imagined that the people in the trailer were getting soaked as the rain lashed at the truck from all sides. I played with the idea of having Joni pull over and possibly looking for an alternate mode of transport, but the truck was taking everything the storm was kicking out, so I decided to stick with the ‘horse that brought me,’ as they say.

The radio broadcasts cut out again, so we were flying blind for another hour as the rain pelted us so hard that it sounded like hail pinging off the truck. The windshield wipers barely kept up with the pounding rain and our visibility was next to nothing. Joni, to her credit, kept us on the road and moving forward. Still, I could see the tremor’s in her arm muscles as she fought to keep the truck under control. To make matters worse, I could see the needle on gas gauge getting closer and closer to the big red ‘E.”

Despite the frightful danger of the storm, the rain pounding relentlessly against the windshield was almost hypnotic, lulling me into a lesser state of consciousness. In this state, I ruminated about all we had been through. I revisited the faces of those we had lost along the way. Chuck had given his life to save us. Carla had walked off into the night, half insane from grief and anger. Mo had been sacrificed to the crazy cult who worshipped Satan and the undead. Those were just the most recent ones. Sammy’s loss on our final run out of Texas had been devastating. Before that I had had to kill one of our own because he had lost it and shot another one of our party. This partial list didn’t include the man I had to shoot because had been bitten by a zombie.

The body count was daunting and a few had died because I hadn’t made better decisions or had made outright mistakes. I knew that everyone around me would comfort me, saying that I had done the best I could, but that was little solace because those faces and those decisions haunted me like phantoms in the night. Doubts and questions swirled in my mind, making me question our current course. Would this end in the same disastrous way all my past decisions had? Would this trip into a hurricane and onto an island get us all killed?

These and other questions could only be answered by reading my autobiography available wherever fine books are sold, scheduled to be out only if I survived.

There was no use questioning why. We went on, doing the best we could and getting by, and this, by the grace of God, was how we survived. Or, at least, the ones I didn’t get killed.

Something boney nudged me in the side and I jerked awake, disoriented and ready for a fight.

“Hold up, big fella,” Joni said, a sly smile on her face.

It came back to me fast. We were traveling north to the coast. Zombies swarmed the planet like ants, nuclear bombs were dropping to the south of us like rain, and a category 4 hurricane was trying to sweep us off the road like we were in a toy truck. My semi-sleep was a lot better than reality, by a wide margin.

“Where are we?” I asked, my voice still thick with sleep.

“Wilmington’s over there,” Robbie said, pointing with his thumb over his shoulder to the east of where we were. “I think it burned.”

Despite the storm, a thick, dark smoke cloud hung over the ground in that direction. I thought I saw the flicker of flames when I peered into the distance, but decided not to inspect it any further. I had a lot of fond memories of driving down to Wilmington from our place on Hatteras Island as a teen. There were the battleships and the all the coastal businesses and tourist attractions. I would imagine that all of them were gone now just like about everything else in my past. Sleep was looking even more attractive when I thought about it.

“We’ve seen a lot of that,” I said, and we had, up close and personal.

“Robbie’s guided me around the worst of the traffic jams while you were asleep,” Joni said. “There were some pretty horrific pile ups at the border. It reminded me of getting out of Texas.”

That sent a shiver up my spine.

She added, “I think we have enough gas to make it, but we could be on fumes by the time we get there.”

“How about undead?” I asked.

“A handful, at most,” Robbie said.

“And the living?”

“We’ve seen a lot of cars heading inland, but I think most people got out before the storm hit.”

“So, we’re moving against the tide?”

“It looks that way,” he said as he rubbed his face. “I think most people are heading north or west.” There were deep dark circles under his eyes. While Joni and I had dozed, I don’t think he was able to. He was just wound too tight for that.

“We’re going to have to head north of the island and come in via 264,” I said as I studied the map, getting reacquainted with the area after not being there in over five years. 264 was a major highway artery that lead onto the Outer Banks. During heavy tourist season, it was usually crammed with cars. I doubted whether the tourist season would be all that thriving this year.

“Are you sure this place is even going to be there?” Robbie asked. “I mean, after the hurricane and everything.”

“It was built by my great grandfather and it was built to last,” I said. “It’s withstood everything that nature has thrown at it and then some. Hell, it even withstood me as a kid and I was a force to be reckoned with.” More memories flowed in, taking me back to all the family vacations there, fishing with my dad and playing with my cousins. I loved the sight of the ocean every morning, just out there and going on forever and ever. The sounds of the surf coming in was one of the most relaxing things I could think of as we drove along. I only hoped I got to hear it again.

We drove in silence for the next few miles and only saw a few people out driving. Most were moving inland while we made our way to the shore. The most disturbing thing was that there were no police or military presence in the area at all. It seemed that we were on our own along with the other poor saps deciding to stay put.

I kept one eye on the road and the other on the gas gauge as the needle dipped lower and lower with each mile. I hoped and prayed we would make it to the island. The rain had cut back from torrential to driving, but it still wouldn’t be pleasant to be out in it.

We got a break and the highway leading to the Outer Banks wasn’t too clogged with cars. Although, Joni had to slow down considerably to weave our way in between the few abandoned cars we came upon. Only once did she had to use the big truck like a battering ram to muscle our way through a tangle of cars.

She made a wide arcing turn just as we made our way onto the highway next to the shoreline. The highway paralleled the beach and even in the rain, I could make out the long thin line of the Outer Banks running just two miles off the shore.

The Outer Banks were a long thin line of islands that sat just off the shore of North Carolina and stretched upward to barely touch the Virginia shore. It was made up of five main islands strung together with long thin strips of two lane road for nearly two hundred miles. Much of it was uninhabitable, but where there was a will there was a way and people had made little communities out on the islands over the years, making a life of it.

But the whole name of the game on the Barrier Islands was tourism. Developers had made the most of the places wide enough to get beach houses on and planted them the way a farmer plants seed, only these growths never died or withered. Unless a hurricane came along to knock them down. Those powerful hurricanes came in once a decade. I didn’t keep track of them, but I was guessing we were due.

On the islands, when the weather was with you, it was like a little paradise, only you were sharing it with a crap-ton of other tourists. When the weather was against, though, it could be a damn scary place. In my years of vacationing there with my family, I only experienced one powerful hurricane and it left an indelible memory. Even my grandfather, who spent a lot of time on the island, was nervous, but we rode it out unscathed and let the terrible storm become a distant memory lost in all the fun times we had there. Somehow I felt that the good times were at an end, but maybe I was just being optimistic and the good times had really ended when that first zombie came on the scene just a few months ago.

The rain slacked considerably and nearly stopped completely by the time we passed into the wildlife refuge on the shoreline. If my memory served me we were on the glide path to the islands, but somehow I didn’t think the storm was over. A part of me suspected that this was a brief respite and more bad weather was still to come. My optimism was running at a low ebb about then.

I continued to guide Joni along and we made it to Mann’s Harbor without any incident. The first consequential transition from mainland to the islands was the Virginia Dare Memorial Bridge. This was one of the engineering marvels that left me in awe. It was four lane highway spanning five miles over the Croatan Sound reaching to Roanoke Island. It was truly a man made triumph over nature. There must have been a million tons of concrete and steel in the thing. A tremor of fear ran through me as we approached the bridge.

“That’s a lot of water between us and the mainland,” Robbie said.

“It sure is,” Joni said.

“Are we sure the zombies can’t swim?” Robbie asked.

“The Rio Grande stopped them when we were trying to get out of Texas,” I replied.

“But what about us being trapped out there?” Robbie asked.

“Robbie, my man, sometimes you have to take a chance,” I said putting on my best confident mask, hoping I pulled it off. Confidence was a waning commodity for me, but I sure could fake when I had to.

Joni looked to me and grinned weakly, but went with me like she always had and for that I was glad. I only hoped her confidence was well warranted.

The bridge was a hot mess. The rush to get off the island had turned the inbound lanes into outbound lanes with everyone wanting off the island as fast as they could. There had been several collisions and burnt vehicles. Joni was forced to a crawl at times. On several occasions, we heard the harsh screech of metal against metal as the trailer scrapped by wrecks. I would imagine the people in the back were less enthusiastic about this new turn events than we in the cab were, but they knew they were just along for the ride.

“There’s no getting around that,” Joni said pointing down the bridge at an ugly tangle of cars. What was left of a high priced sports car was wedged under a dual cab pickup truck and the pickup was perpendicular to the road. Both vehicles had been burned, leaving a blackened charred mess blocking our way with no way around.

“You know what you have to do,” I said.

“Is it the hard way or the soft way?” she asked.

“Try soft and use the hard way only if you have to.”

Robbie asked, “What is the soft way?” His voice quavered a little when he asked.

I put up a hand and said, “Just wait and see. Joni is a master driver. We’ll be fine.”

She let the truck idle up to the mess and we barely tapped the back of the sports car, but the impact still sent a psychic ripple through us in the cab. Joni gasped.

“It’s okay,” I said, “just a little push.”

She applied gradual pressure to the gas peddle and the mass of metal in front of us protested at first, digging into the concrete. I’m not sure we were making any progress when Joni decided it was time to goose the gas pedal. The car started to move, but the dual cab held fast. Joni gave it a little more gas. The pickup had been an impressive and formidable vehicle in its day, but when it faced off with our truck, it gave up the ghost and started moving. Joni expertly maneuvered the truck as if she were driving a Mini-Cooper as we pushed the sports car and the pickup truck up and over the guardrail and into the ocean. It was a quite impressive display of driving.