Zomblog Saga Box Set (Books 1-6) (70 page)

That’s where the plan fell apart. The third guy jumped up and kicked away the fire. How was he t
o know that it was just l’il ‘ol me? Then I heard an awful shriek and a gurgle.

“Hope you don’t mind fucking a corpse!” the man yelled in the darkness.

I played it safe and stayed put a few minutes before I began creeping closer to where I remembered their camp to be. When I got there, I found three bodies. Feeling around revealed that the woman’s throat had been slashed. Unfortunately, there was no sign of the third man.

Having no desire to stumble around in the dark looking for him, I crept back to the semi that I had been ready to bed down in. It took me a while to cycle down from the adrenaline rush, but when it did subside, I collapsed from exhaustion.

I slept way too long.

When I woke, I was bathed in sweat which added to the yucky feeling from the dirt and dried blood all over me. A pair of roamers were on the road coming my direction. I considered staying put and letting them pass, but if they caught even the slightest hint of me, they’d just turn around and follow.

When I came out of my cab, I waited until the closest one—a teenage girl and way too fresh to be anything other than hours old—made her approach. The strand of intestines slapping against her denim overalls still looked wet. I put her down and had enough time to reload for a point-blank shot at the other desiccated corpse that made a weird rasping sound that reminded me of a playing card in the spokes of a bicycle for some reason.

The first thing I did after that was drink my water and refill both canteens before getting back on the move. Of course I had my eyes peeled for any sort of movement or any sign of that third man’s camp. And that is why I diverted my course and left the highway just as it started to cut through this mountain pass. I went north and it slowed me way down. But by nightfall, I was up high enough that I thought I might have a chance at seeing something if that guy made any sort of campfire.

What I wasn’t prepared for was over a dozen!

Like a really spread out
star field, the pinpricks of light were scattered below me. In one spot there was a cluster of several. It caught me completely off guard. It made me wonder how many singles, or small, nomadic groups, I had passed by completely unaware during my travels. It also made me recall that young girl that I put down the day before. How similar to my story or Jenifer’s, or even Gabrielle’s was hers? Was she alone? Did she wander away from a larger group?

The only thing I now feel with a sense of certainty is the feeling of doom that hangs over humanity like the Sword of Damocles.

It wasn’t that I felt any safer, but I did find a spot where I could curl up that night. I slept, for all intents and purposes, out in the open. Under the stars, above all the little fires that burned in the night. The strange thing was that in the morning when I woke and looked around, I couldn’t see a sign of anything that indicated people were camping in the area. I knew the general locations of all of those fires, especially the big cluster, and there wasn’t even a wisp of smoke that morning.

Down on the highway, I could see singles and small clu
sters of zombies. It’s like they’re drawn to any place where there are survivors. Even out here in the middle of godforsaken nowhere, they roam. I guess they’re looking for those last living souls to feed on. Their biology makes no sense. They should have fallen over long ago…starved.

Staying in the hills all day as I walked probably slowed me way down. But I found myself in a funk and I couldn’t shake it.

Then I saw him.

Even though I never got a look at the guy who escaped that night, I knew it was him. He was walking just as bold as you please down the middle of the highway with a naked wo
man on a leash. I guessed him to be, at most, a couple of miles ahead of me.

The first problem I ran into was coming down onto the highway. I lost sight of my target at some point, and by the time I was on the washed out remnants of the highway, I couldn’t see him at all. As hot as it was, I did not want to jog. Then there was the inconvenience of putting down the occasional zombie.

I discovered real fast that tracking somebody is not as easy as it looked on television. Between the drag/step mark of the zombies and whoever else passed through these parts, I had no idea which set of tracks belonged to the man I was hunting. Then I reached a T-intersection with another highway heading straight south. Looking each direction it was like being given the choice of which doorway you’d like to use when entering Hell.

After taking out this particularly nasty creeping torso with only one arm that came of some brush beside the road—scaring me to the point that my bladder lost control just a teensy bit—I decided on south. The biggest benefit was the tiny stream that allowed me to stop and freshen up a bit while filling my ca
nteens.

A few miles along, I began to think that I may be onto som
ething. I started coming across an assortment of military vehicles. Late in the afternoon, I turned east off of the main road and found an old, abandoned air base.

The place obviously tried to set itself up as a safe zone of sorts. The fences all had makeshift towers scattered along the perim
eter. Unfortunately, it also looks like a horde took down their fence. The good news is that this seems to have happened quite a while ago. There are literally hundreds of corpses—and parts of corpses—all dried out. It also looks like the animals came through for quite a buffet.

I couldn’t pass up the chance to snoop around. After all, I did say that, before all of this zombie stuff, I’d never done much of anything. To go into a military airbase replete with: “RESTRICTED ZONE! DEADLY FORCE AUTHORIZED!” signs all over the place…you tell me you wouldn’t go in and take a peek.

Liar.

I was never much on the UFO thing. I wouldn’t know Area 51 from the Ronald Reagan International Airport, and any ai
rbase I found out here could be something interesting. When I ducked through the gaping breach in the fence, I didn’t have any idea what to expect. I think I was secretly hoping to find some hangar with a spaceship parked inside like in the movie
Independence Day
. Instead, I found a lot of planes, jets, helicopters, and big pieces of machinery that I had absolutely no idea as to their function.

I think I found some sort of workshop where missiles were put together or taken apart. The coolest find was this bunker with stacks and stacks of what are obviously bombs. They wouldn’t do me one bit of good, but it was strangely cool to see them; stacks and stacks and rows and rows of bombs.

I imagine some of the empty rooms that I found were once full of guns and ammunition. And I imagine that if I were Angelina Jolie or some other female action hero in a movie I would have hit the weapons jackpot. No such luck for Meredith Gainey, child abandoning, angel-of-death to all she meets (especially if they were friends). I found zip. At least when it came to weapons. I did score one major find:  MREs and cases of bottle water! That was what made me decide that I was being stupid chasing some ‘Bad Guy’ all around the Nevada desert. I’d already come to grips with the idea that I can’t save everybody.

I’m a little ashamed to admit what happened next. Since I’ve decided I was going to hang out a bit and explore, I found a big basin. I don’t know what it was used for in the past, but I filled it with some of that bottled water and took a bath. I couldn’t do anything about my legs or armpits, much less the Enchanted Forest growing between my legs, but at least I could be clean. I found some liquid soap that smelled like melons and I gave m
yself a good scrubbing. Then I emptied the basin, refilled it, and just soaked in the lukewarm water.

Before you rush to judge my obvious waste of precious water, unless you’ve gone days or weeks without a proper clea
ning, AND had to use ripped up t-shirts during your period, then just shush! It’s not like this place looked to see any living inhabitants in at least a year. Besides, who else would be stupid enough to wonder around in this wasteland? Sure, I saw all those campfires scattered about, but strangely enough, I’ve only actually seen that one sign of a living, breathing person during the day.

And that is why it probably took me a while to realize that I was hearing a child’s laughter. When I came out of the water and quick-changed back into my still-wet clothing that was hanging in the window to sun dry, my first thought was that the zombies had evolved. It would just figure that those bastards would learn how to make a new sound now that everybody pre
tty much knew about the baby cry noise.

I grabbed my crossbow, which due to recent events and my in
ability to do some searching, was down to eight bolts. Granted, you only need one, but that makes for a fairly useless weapon. Then I strapped on one knife and snuck down the stairs of the building that I had made camp in. If zombies were around, I wanted to put them down in a hurry before others came.

When I stepped outside, the last thing that I expected was a “family” of four. Of course it was obvious that the children were not from the two adults. Primarily because she was Black and he was Asian and the two little girls were White. Very tan, but white.

Alicia and Min were both from Texas. They were part of a much larger group of survivors which had dwindled down due to some folks simply going off on their own, others dying—of course—and some outright vanishing. They found the girls in Provo, Utah last year when they got stranded due to a fierce winter.

The two are like any married couple I have ever known. They bicker, finish
each other’s sentences, and fret over ‘their’ children. It was Min’s throwing knife that I had barely managed to duck as I stepped out of the doorway. I think the only reason he missed, is because Alicia screamed “Breather!” just as he threw. I think that because I have seen him throw a couple of times since. He doesn’t miss. Ever.

Min and his family are headed north. I told them all that I could remember. After some discussion, he and Alicia decided that they would try to winter in Winnemucca before pushing on in the spring. They said that their ultimate goal was Alaska. A bit too cold for my taste, but I imagine that its small population, miles of empty space, and months of heavy snow has its appeal to some. In fact, they seemed more than a little dubious in r
egards to
my
plan of trying to get to Vegas. I guess they’ve heard some wicked stories. Still, I’m one of those people that, once she gets an idea in her head, have to see it through.

Of course I made their day when I showed them the cache of MREs and bottled water that I’d found. To their credit, neither said a word about my bathtub. Of course Alicia and the girls e
njoyed it themselves. Min was fine with a sponge bath. When they joined me outside, they all looked and smelled much better.

I have no explanation for it, but for the next couple of days, the five of us just hung out around the now-defunct military base. Sometimes we went around together, and sometimes I would wake up and think that they had left. Then I would go downstairs and see their backpacks lined up against the wall. At some point the family would stroll in with a couple of odds and ends or knick knacks in their hands. The girls found a pair of model jets one day and played with them just like a couple of boys their age might. It was actually somewhat pleasant.

Once, I watched the girls so that Min and Alicia could “go for a walk”. They came back looking like they had just run a marathon. Well…except for the ear-to-ear smiles on both their faces. Alicia probably thanked me fifty times.

Then, on a morning no different from any other, they said they needed to get moving. I actually felt a strange loss. Is this what it’s like every time
I
tell folks that I’m leaving? I went up on the roof and watched them go. When the little girls looked back and waved…I cried.
What in the hell was that about?

The next day I wandered around the base alone. When I came back to my little camp, I knew that it was time for me to get moving once again. I had ended up staying one day too long. I heard the sounds of breaking glass. That was what jarred me awake a couple of hours before sunrise. My first thought was kind of stupid:  The family is back! Then my brain flipped a switch and more sounds of breaking glass had me up and gra
bbing my weapons. I don’t know why, but something made me grab the bag that had my books and the MREs along with both of my canteens.

There was a voice in my head that was screaming for me to run. I ignored it and listened to the muffled voice that told me to go see what was happening.

In the shadow of one of the giant hangars that housed a pair of jets, I saw movement. The laughter gave them away as living. I stayed put as they cranked open the big doors. The hangar was dark, but those five morons had torches and lanterns. They were like kids who’d been let into Disneyland early and had it to themselves. They climbed all over the jets making quite a scene. Of course they had no idea what to do, so the jets were really nothing more than a pair of giant play structures.

I stayed back and kept quiet as the sun came up. Event
ually I staked out a spot in one of the admin buildings. There was no reason to do anything. These guys weren’t taking anything that I cared about. One of them had found a uniform and put it on. Another seemed content just to sit in the cockpit of one of the jets. The only real negative side of this situation was that I was stuck hiding and watching. I knew better than to show myself to a group of men.