Swarm (Dead Ends) (23 page)

After loading the car up with as much as I could, I closed up the store, locked the screen from the inside and climbed up through the roof access and down the ladder. I made up a sign with some supplies from the store and posted it on the window where everyone could see:

Red’s dead baby. Red’s dead
.

Door is locked for security. Access store from roof
.

Two Dead Zeds inside. Sorry about the mess
.

Good Luck
.

-Sam Woods

Even amongst an apocalypse, I couldn’t resist a good Pulp Fiction reference. I also posted one of Jane’s drawings on the door, one of my favorites for one of my favorite spots. It featured a scene ripped right from Little Red Riding Hood with the Big Bad Wolf looming in the shadows behind Little Red, teeth snarling, waiting to pounce. But the Wolf can’t see under the hood, where Red is in fact a zombie, luring the wolf into her jaws. And if you look close enough, you can see what looks like a severed head peeking out of Undead Red’s little picnic basket. God, I miss Jane. Not so much for who she was but for what we could’ve become together. She gave me that feeling as soon I met her, the feeling that people get when they meet someone that they always want to have in their lives. Those little signals from the important parts of your mind that say
don’t screw this up
. I feel like I will end up missing her much more than I want to, more than I deserve to.

Chapter 20

I decided to familiarize myself with the intricacies of the Prius while on the road. I didn’t want to spend any more time here. My childhood memories all but destroyed, I just wanted to leave the Sunrise Market before I got too comfortable with it, before I let myself stay and attempt to believe that everything was going to be alright, empirical evidence be damned. This thing was loaded. Touch screen navigation system, rear back-up camera, automatic parallel park assist, and a hard drive full of music. I attempted to scan for any radio stations several times but not a single station came in. The front seats made it look like I was a college kid on spring break: Red Bulls overflowing the cup holders, beef jerky and Reese’s Pieces littering the passenger seat, bottles of vodka, tequila, and whiskey resting precariously on the floor amongst dusty old t-shirts and sweatshirts taken from the store’s shelves. At some point I’d need to find a Wal-Mart or something where I could get some new underwear and other supplies but for right now, I’d make do with what I had. I plotted the course to Ocean Shores into the navigation system just to see if it still worked and surprisingly it did, though I wouldn’t really need it. There was probably no stretch of road I knew better than the one that led to the coast.

It took a while to search through the music hard drive to find something I liked amongst the classical and folk music. I settled on The Allman Brothers’ Greatest Hits, hoping it would keep me alert. For the first time since this all started, I’m beginning to be affected by the lack of peaceful sleep. I sang along to “Whipping Post” while I carefully cranked the volume to the highest acceptable level considering the circumstances. As I reached for a few stray Reese’s Pieces, I noticed out of the corner of my eye that the passenger side mirror suddenly fell off the car with surprising swiftness. I turned the volume down as I tried to process it and a second later I remembered that I was in fact, driving. I looked ahead just in time to see a bullet shatter the windshield and hiss right past my face and into the back seat. I slammed on the breaks, sliding sideways so I could see clearly what was ahead of me. A bunch of backwoods hicks in one of those ridiculously jacked up monster trucks blocked the road ahead. One man stood atop the cabin reloading his rifle. They were blocking the only damn road into Ocean Shores. Before I could get my bearings, two men on dirt bikes revved out from behind the truck, revolvers in hand, closing in fast on my position. I fumbled to shift into reverse and slammed the accelerator. The Prius jumped to attention and revved off quickly but they slowly began to gain ground. There was no way I was going to hit any of them with a semi-blind pistol shot so I glanced over at the bottle of vodka and the t-shirts and figured,
what the hell
? I steadied the wheel with my knees, grabbed the book of matches I had seen in the center tray and stuffed a t-shirt into the bottle, my only knowledge of how to make a Molotov cocktail coming from a bunch of 1980’s action movies.

Even as I rolled down the window, my confidence in the plan was minimal at best but the fuse had been lit. Now all I had to do was throw it. I let it fly while also keeping my eye on the rear view mirror and the exit that I had passed once going forward and now would have to revisit from the opposite direction. It was my only chance to get away from these morons. If I made it, it would take me north on Highway 101, away from Ocean Shores and towards the depressing depths of the Northwest corner of the Pacific Peninsula. I wasn’t going to see my old beach anytime soon. After arching through the air in what felt like slow motion, the bottle hit directly in front of one of the dirt bikes, covering a patch of road in angry flames. The man panicked as he tried to avoid it and slid out, both bike and body crumpling along down the asphalt like a cartoon. This made the man on the second bike slow down his pursuit. He still followed but at a much safer distance. He fired a few shots but they all missed. It’s hard enough to aim a weapon while standing upright. I can’t imagine how much the difficulty spikes while moving and attempting to balance a two-wheeled vehicle.

I wanted to make another bottle of fire water but the exit loomed in the mirror and I began turning towards it. Another shot rang out, this one shattering the rear passenger window. I panicked and turned the wheel too hard as I reached the exit, flying up and over the embankment. After that it was hard to tell which way was up. Grass defied gravity. Trees took root in the clouds. Candy and dried meat descended from the heavens. Screeching metal and breaking glass surrounded me though I couldn’t hear it. I only seemed to assume what sound they would be making. All I heard was a ringing in my ears as everything finally came to a stop. The world still felt upside down because it was. My body strained against the seat belt as I stared down at the caved in roof. The ringing in my ears subsided. The rumble of the dirt bike got closer and then stopped, followed by the diesel growl of that ridiculous monster truck. I highly doubt they were here to reason with me, especially after I tried to set one of them on fire. I could hear shouting back and forth and then doors slamming as the truck came to a stop.

“Is that sumbitch in there?” one of them asked.

“He better be. If he’s alive, he won’t be for long” another one said.

I heard another rumbling sound that I couldn’t quite place. It didn’t sound like a vehicle. Maybe a helicopter in the distance? I couldn’t be sure. They heard it too.

“What the hell is that? Earl, turn the damn truck off, you hear that?” the first man said. One of them was named Earl. How shocking. I’m sure Joe Bob and Skeeter would be introducing themselves shortly. When the truck’s engine ceased, the rumbling increased tenfold and seemed to resonate through the hills as it got closer.

“Jesus Christ! Get the hell outta here!”

“Leave the bike; just get in the truck for chrissakes! They’re comin’ in hot!”

I sat there listening intently and half-assedly praying that it wasn’t what I thought it was. The next 30 seconds seemed to move in fast forward. Dirt and debris swirled in the air just inside the tree line, announcing their arrival. The swarm I had seen through the telescope had made it to us with disturbing quickness. Before I could react, a pack of hunters trampled over and around the upturned Prius, grabbing onto the guy that was on the bike before he could make it to the truck. The man in the truck wasted no time in getting the hell out of there, running over at least a dozen of them before getting enough traction to take off. The rumbling and pounding was deafening now. The seatbelt cut into me but I didn’t dare move. The sheer force of their numbers actually turned the car at least 30 degrees as they smashed up against it. But the whole time they just kept running, some went after the escaping truck, others just kept going straight across the highway and into the tree line. I was too afraid to even breathe.

Something caught my eye to my right and I looked over to see a zombie that had tripped, some young girl in what looked like a Girl Scouts uniform. As she struggled to get up, she spotted me, her lifeless eyes suddenly filled with passion, anger, and hunger. She began pulling herself inside through the broken window, oblivious to the shards of glass ripping through her arms. I fumbled to find the pistol, knowing it would do no good if I used it. I may kill her but the noise would alert twenty more. My only chance was to try and fight with this girl, maybe try and snap her head off or strangle her with the seatbelt. Her legs were being trampled by the swarm outside but she still soldiered on. She was halfway inside when she seemed to get caught on something. She attempted to shriek and make that horrible call of the dead that I had heard before. If she couldn’t get me she wanted one of her brethren to do it for her. Luckily her vocal chords didn’t seem to work too well with the shard of glass currently protruding into her larynx. She tried again and the smallest of sounds came out. I stretched hard for a large shard of glass just out of the reach of her hungry mouth. She wasn’t close enough yet for me to plunge it into her head so I had to find a way to silently bait her to come closer. I sliced my hand with the glass and squeezed it into a fist, dripping fresh blood directly in front of her face. She got excited and began licking and thrashing to get free. I held my bloodied hand just out of reach for some extra incentive. That seemed to do the trick. I pulled my hand out of the way just as she surged forward and plunged the shard of glass directly into her forehead, letting her own momentum do most of the work. She dropped silently and I waited for the swarm to pass, hoping I would somehow go unnoticed in the middle of this mortifying undead migration.

Another body fell in the same spot that the Girl Scout had a moment earlier. An older man with yellowing teeth and bullet holes riddling his face and neck. I wondered if whoever shot him had any idea how close they were to ending him for good. He glanced first at the Girl Scout’s corpse then at me and looked as though he was trying to get up and continue on with the migration. That was until my seat belt somehow found an inch of slack that I had been fighting for a minute earlier. My body lurched down slightly and as I attempted to brace myself, the man’s attention turned back onto me, his confusion slowly morphing into recognition of a possible meal. Just as his eyes went big and he flashed those ugly yellow teeth, a series of stomping feet impeded his movement. First cracking into his back and neck and finally, what looked like a size 13 army boot propelled off of his skull, leaving behind a concave head pockmarked with what I could only assume was jellied brains and congealed blood. I said a little prayer as I held onto the seatbelt with all of the strength I had left, willing it to just stay put, for its fabric to hold for at least another 30 seconds until the final stragglers made their way away from me and to whatever it was that they were looking for.

Amazingly, the car still seemed to be running, though thanks to the electric motor it wasn’t making any unwanted noise. I stared at the clock on the dashboard, waiting for the rumbling to subside, trying not to think about how much pain I was in. My head throbbed ten times worse than any hangover I had ever experienced and even with a clock in front of me, time seemed to pass differently. Seconds passed in slow motion. Minutes seemed to encompass within them days worth of memories, fears, and regrets. I hoped I didn’t have a concussion or whiplash or some other hellish fate given the circumstances but even if I did, there wasn’t much that I could do aside from drink a big tall glass of Deal With It. There would be no rescue, no warm hospital bed, no buxom nurse to feed me pudding and Jell-o until my wounds healed. It was just me and the meat grinders. And all I could do was fight to survive either until my luck ran out or until survival didn’t seem so appealing anymore. And right now as I sat upside down, fighting hard not to throw up, staying alive seemed to be losing a bit of its luster with each passing minute.

Finally I decided that enough time had passed, more as a result of my nausea than anything else, and used a shard of glass to cut myself free. I landed with a thud and immediately began throwing up everywhere, a multicolored display of panic, fear, and most likely some kind of internal bleeding. I think I might’ve cried a little too and with no one here to witness it, I had no reason to deny it. Crying is better than dying. At least for now anyway. I crawled into the back seat to fish out some Gatorade and drank an entire bottle in less than a minute. The last thing I needed was to die from something stupid and preventable like dehydration or hunger, especially in the Pacific Northwest where there’s water, fish, and fruit trees pretty much wherever you look. If I was going to die, it would be either be at the teeth of a meat grinder or by my own hand. Any other option just wasn’t acceptable to me.

I knew I needed to get moving. I seemed to be in a race against fear and panic and the longer I stayed still the more they gained ground on me. I could feel the chill of defeat brushing over my back now trying to find some place to latch on. And even if I had managed to fight it off on several occasions, the threat still remained. It would always be there, waiting patiently for that moment of weakness that would finally allow it to encompass me. I found my backpack and filled it with a few bottles of water and snacks as well as the pistol and all of its ammo. I needed to travel light so the shotgun and any other convenience items were going to have to stay. I didn’t waste the time being upset by it. Anger gets you nowhere. Acceptance gives you a chance. I wedged out of the car, trying my best to avoid any glass shards as my eyes focused on the trampled dirt bike laying on the ground, its former owner’s body laying still and lifeless ten feet away. The bike looked beat up but the wheels seemed fine and I was convinced that it would start because I didn’t want to deal with the alternatives if it didn’t.