“There's a little town ahead called CooterLique. It's just over this rise. People who lived there were pretty poor. Most of them lived in public housing or apartments and commuted on buses to work in surrounding bigger cities,” the captain said, then paused to listen to the howling sounds before adding, “Get this thing out of second gear and punch the gas pedal. I think we’re about to find something very bad ahead.”
George had the tractor up to fifty miles per hour when they crested the hill. Renault quickly rolled his window back up as the stench of rotting undead came on with all the subtlety of a fist punch to the face.
The little town on the other side of the hill was like any of hundreds George had seen before, in better days. There were side streets lined with modest-looking houses, a gas station, two churches separated by a few blocks, a grocery store with a smiling cartoon pig on the facade, a school adjoining a medium sized park, apartment complexes made up of several large buildings - and that's where the similarities with anything he'd seen before abruptly ended.
George wanted to ask how many people had lived here but as the thousands of undead noticed the rig rolling into town and began moving toward it at varying speeds, he understood that it just didn't matter and realized - as he shifted into the next highest gear - he really didn't want to know.
If there were still people alive somewhere in the town, they obviously weren't among the multitude of undead people crawling, shambling, walking (and even a few trotting) toward the rig. Despite having the windows rolled up, the howls and screams issuing from many of them was almost deafening. Frito only made matters worse by sticking his paws up on the dashboard and barking savagely at them.
“Don't you dare stop for anything! If we stop, we won't have a prayer!” Renault yelled over the undead yells and George nodded as the rig started hitting the closest figures.
The plow edges welded onto the rig's bumper sliced into as well as shoving aside the undead. Bloated from the heat, many of the undead popped when the plow hit them. A few splatters of grayish-black liquid splashed against the windshield and George flipped on the windshield wipers - very glad he'd remembered to make sure the wiper fluid container was slap full of the blue stuff.
“Go through the supermarket parking lot! There's something blocking the road ahead!” Renault yelled over the undead noises and the dog's barking.
George quickly saw he was right. A long mostly burned-out bus with a big gray dog logo on the side was taking up most of the road and, inexplicably, three ice cream trucks were blocking the rest.
The dog's barking was making it hard to concentrate and George yelled, “Frito, Shut up!” as he turned toward the supermarket.
Frito stopped barking but continued to growl fiercely while looking in several directions. His neck was twisting back and forth so fast George absently wondered if dogs could suffer whiplash.
There were a few cars in the supermarket parking lot, but George thought he could easily drive past them. Unfortunately, because there were so many undead in the way, he didn't notice the first speed bump until after they hit it.
The rig left the ground briefly.
When it hit the pavement it bounced and jerked so powerfully and violently George yelled, “What the fuck was that?!” as he struggled to keep from slamming in to one of the cars. He was forced to slow down to regain control. Things were complicated even further when Frito landed on the stick shift, making changing gears much more difficult.
“Speed bumps! Watch out for them! I don't think we can take another hit like that!” Renault yelled as he tried to pull the big scared dog away from the stick shift.
In doing so, the dog's butt bumped into an eight track cartridge and knocked it into the player.
As thousands of undead townspeople converged on the slowly moving tractor trailer rig, the somewhat loud yet also somehow relaxingly mellow voice of Barry Manilow began singing, “I can't smile without you.”
If George weren't struggling to get the rig moving faster - while also trying to avoid more speed bumps and parked cars - he would have turned it down at the very least.
His mom had always been a big fan of Mr. Manilow and often played his greatest hits when George was growing up - before she left her husband and young son in search of something they apparently couldn't provide. He'd never admit it to anyone, but when he was seven years old, his mom had found an instrumental version of Copa Cabana and worked with George until he could sing a fairly good version of it.
Yesterday, as he'd been starting to freak out as night fell and it got dark, he found the eight track cartridge and played it. He was singing “Copa Cabana” along with Barry until he spotted the lights of Willows Bend Estates.
Captain Renault was still pulling Frito away from the stick shift while giving George an odd look as the eight track player made a kachunk sound and an energetic disco-era beat began playing.
The plow snagged a grocery cart with an undead baby securely strapped into the seat.
It was wearing a badly-rotted bonnet and bib. The bib had the faded and bloodstained words “Mommy's Little Monster” printed on it.
The baby had horrible patches of missing skin - so much so that bones could be seen along its small slender and wildly wiggling arms. It glared up at the windshield, but neither man looked down at it.
As Barry Manilow started to sing “Copa Cabana,” George joined in as he steered the rig back into the main street - beyond the blockage of the bus and trio of ice cream trucks.
Frito stopped struggling and growling to watch George singing while tilting his head slightly.
When the rig got up to forty-five miles an hour, the grocery cart broke loose from the metal struts of the plow and rolled down a side street. Unlike most grocery carts in the world, this one had four wheels that actually worked fairly well - without the usual annoying wobbles and shimmies - and it picked up speed rather than slowing.
When it hit the curb that ran alongside the park, the cart flipped and somersaulted until finally coming to a stop near a long-unused slide that was covered in dust and spider webs. The heavily weathered and severely weakened safety belt held together when the shopping cart crashed, but the equally weathered and rotted undead baby didn't.
The legs and most of its maggot-infested lower half of the infant remained securely hanging in the baby seat. Whereas the head, torso and arms flew several yards through the air before landing unharmed (other than the fact it was already dead) in a sandbox near some long-forgotten plastic toys. The baby lifted its face from the sand and squished its tiny rotted fingers through the granules of loose sand and grunted grumpily.
When they were nearly through the small town and George almost had the rig up to seventy miles an hour, Captain Renault turned down the eight track stereo, rolled down the passenger side window and the sound of a church bell ringing could be heard clearly - even over the rig's roaring engine and the howls of the pursuing mob.
The old man muttered, “Damn” and looked over at George.
“What? Yeah, I hear it too... but get real. We're almost out of here and you want us to turn around and go back? You can't be serious.”
Captain Renault sighed and pointed at a store half a mile ahead that bought car titles for loans that didn't seem to have anyone around it. “Stop over there.”
“I thought we were going to look for the caravan,” George said in disgust as he slowed and pulled into the parking lot. He got the rig turned back around and ready to leave in case they had to go in a hurry.
They could see that the street back toward town was teeming with undead. There were so many that very little of the road could be seen.
“We got about a minute until they get here, so let me make this quick. There are two reasons we need to go back and find that church or whatever it is ringing that bell. The first is that it's possible the caravan might be there, but the second reason is more important. What if it were you or me ringing that bell?”
George sighed and quickly look
ed at his wristwatch before reaching down and pulling out three pipe bombs from the small compartment beside his door. He handed them to Renault, who nodded and produced a lighter from his shirt pocket.
“When we drive back through them I'll toss them into the crowds.”
George nodded and said, “I think we may have another problem. There's a check engine light flashing on the dashboard. When we hit that speed bump, something might have gotten busted.”
“Then we probably wouldn't have made it much farther anyway. Let's get moving while we still can. They're almost here - try to stay as far to the left side of the road as you can.”
George revved the engine and started out of the driveway. It felt like a hopeless situation but he couldn't resist saying, “Don't worry, we're on a mission from God.”
Captain Renault grinned at the young man and got ready to light the first fuse.
The engine coughed unsteadily for several seconds before it roared - at least temporarily - back to life. It was running rough and choppy by the time he managed to coax it into second gear.
“Get this damn thing going faster! I can't toss these things unless we can outrun the blast. How long are these fuses set for?”
“Five seconds, maybe.”
The old man grumbled under his breath and watched the speedometer slowly creeping up.
When they were heading through town earlier, they'd had speed and momentum on their side, but now they had neither. Each undead body they struck made the rig shudder and even as the plow tip continued to cut, slice and shove the undead aside, the rough-sounding engine had to work even harder to keep them moving.
They didn't seem able to go faster than twenty-five miles an hour and Renault finally said, “Here we go” as he lit the first pipe bomb and tossed it through his open window, then lit the next one, and the next.
George nervously watched the explosives being tossed out and prayed the old man didn't accidentally drop one inside the cab. He knew from personal experience just how bad doing such a thing would be. When he was in high school, a friend of his gave him nearly a dozen homemade M-80's as a birthday present.
Being a typical teenager with high explosives at his disposal, George had been riding around in his dad's new Mercedes, tossing them out through the passenger window. He hadn't thrown them at anything of particular importance or value (except perhaps to the owners of the mailboxes, trashcans and bird baths he destroyed), but then he blew up something he hadn't intended to - his dad's car.
He had the passenger side window rolled down and the bag of M-80s in the seat. When he lit the fuse on the sixth one and tossed it toward the window, it hit the roof of the car and bounced back into the bag full of highly-illegal and destructive explosives.
George had been driving slowly, and as he dove out of his dad's Mercedes, which was probably the only reason he didn't get seriously hurt from the fall. He ran and quickly climbed over a low retaining wall and didn't look back at the car until after a long, loud, and very bright series of explosions rocked the quiet neighborhood awake at two in the morning.
What was left of the car was not salvageable - except for the hood ornament, which had been blasted into the trunk of a nearby oak tree. The insurance company and police were equally un-amused with his idiotic shenanigans. But because he was only fifteen years old, there was no jail time. But his dad saw that George was more than adequately punished.
It was with all that in mind that he prayed fervently the old man would not have an accident with the pipe bombs. Plus, even if they could dive out of the rig, they'd be torn to shreds by the masses of undead just as assuredly as if they'd remained seated.
George looked out the driver’s side window and just hoped he didn't hear the old man say, “Oops.”
There was a day-old bakery building with a sign in the window promising all the savvy shoppers of CooterLique that they could purchase assorted flavors of frosted fruit pies at the remarkably low price of five for a dollar. George briefly wondered about the quality of such a low-priced product before glancing down at the dashboard. The temperature gauge was inching upward and he whispered, “Vito, you got any advice?”
A moment before the first pipe bomb detonated the ghostly voice of Vito whispered inside his head, “Other than questioning the wisdom of letting a one-eyed old man with undoubtedly poor depth perception handle high explosives, nope. Sorry.”
The explosive force shook the truck and blew apart the undead in a roughly forty-foot diameter. Many more were knocked to the ground by the shock wave, but it seemed like a drop in the bucket of walking corpses as more and more closed in to fill the newly-created gaps.
George spotted an alley between the day-old bakery and a thrift store with a loading dock full of unsorted donations along one side. There weren't many undead in the alley, so he steered for it. The rig's plow tip scraped against the slight rise between the road and alley, but a second later they were rolling downhill between the buildings.
The other two pipe bombs exploded at almost the same time and Renault looked through the rear window. He noticed that the window could slide partway open and said, “Quick, give me another of those fire crackers. If we get through this mess, someday, I want to try these things next time I go fishing.”
George reached down and the rig started scraping along the side the loading dock. He quickly corrected the steering wheel, grabbed another bomb and handed it to the old man.
Renault was actually laughing as he lit the bomb and tossed it as far and as hard as he could. It arced up in the air toward the tightly-packed wave of undead streaming into the alley.
At the bottom of the alley, a gravel road went left and right, while straight ahead there was about thirty feet of tall grass that ended in a lake which stretched off for a few hundred feet.
George chose right and prayed it didn't end in a dead end.
When the pipe bomb struck against a medium sized metallic tank that had been left near the edge of the loading dock, it made a fairly loud gong-like noise that attracted the attention of a shuffling undead woman with dirty neon red dyed hair. She saw the small metal thing clatter to the pavement near her torn and maggot-infested feet and stopped to pick it up. Staring at the smoke and sparks issuing from the fuse through her gray glazed-over eyes, she made an “Mmm” noise.
Others continued streaming by and jostled her, but she was mesmerized by the pipe bomb and glanced over at the metallic tank before rapping the piece of metal against it. It made the same gong-like noise, so she whacked it over and over again.
Sniffing the smoke coming from the burning fuse, she opened her mouth and more maggots spilled out as she made an “Umm” noise.
She brought the short length of pipe down once more against the tank, and as the gong sounded, the pipe bomb detonated.
If the thrift store manager hadn't committed suicide when the dead first began attacking the living (over a year earlier), he would have most certainly ordered the staff to get rid of the old propane tank Buford Gilmore had left as a donation.
Buford had been a well-meaning idiot and thought the thrift store would be able to find someone who could use the half-full tank of propane.
It was a fairly large, badly-rusted tank that had sat outside Buford's old trailer home on the outskirts of town. And while it may have outlived its usefulness to its former owner, the propane tank found a new purpose as a massive bomb set off by a much smaller one.
As the rig finished turning on to the gravel path, the alley exploded in flames. The concussive force of the blast knocked down large sections of the brick walls of both the day old bakery and the old two-story thrift store. The structural integrity of both buildings was completely compromised, and the walls along the length of the alley collapsed like a massive tidal wave. The hundreds of undead who were tightly packed along the alley were either roasted and buried, or just buried - under several tons of brick and masonry.
The temperature gauge needle was creeping into the red zone and bil
lows of steam trailed behind the rig as the engine coughed harder.
The gravel road seemed to end at an eight foot tall chain link fence which extended left about fifty yards and butted up against a three-story brick building to the right.
“I like them firecrackers, son. They got a Hell of a kick,” Renault said.
* Look for Chronicles of the Undead- The Emperor of Bayonne Prison for more of George's story.
The horrible conclusion to Southwestern Road Trip
There was a brief moment that Sheriff Guiteriz thought the worst was over. It was very brief.
As the helicopters remained overhead, two National Guardsmen rappelled down from the CDC chopper and dragged the handcuffed Keith Dudley a few dozen feet from the SUV.
Deputies helped lead Bo to the ropes they’d used to lower themselves into the canyon. Autry was dazed and drifting out of consciousness but was actually feeling fairly good except for his bullet wound. It hurt each time he put weight on the injured leg and he hissed through his teeth with every step.
One deputy that had served as a medic in Afghanistan, before coming back to New Mexico, took a quick look at the bullet wound and slapped Autry gently on his shoulder. He had to shout to be heard over the sound of the helicopters and the voices going back and forth over his walkie talkie. “You’re one lucky son of a bitch, Bo! It looks like the bullet missed the bone altogether! We won’t know until they get some X-rays but I think you should be fine!”
Bo nodded and allowed his fellow deputies to strap him one of the climbing rigs and was soon being hauled up to the access road.
The sheriff told the man in the back of the SUV to calm down as he shouted about his wife and son who had both been seriously injured. Guiteriz radioed Captain Lopez to send for a Med-Evac helicopter and went to the rear of the vehicle where there was no infected blood. He definitely didn’t want the family members trying to crawl through the glass and razor sharp metal that was coated in the ICE agent’s blood. While he wasn’t certain that was how the illness making people go insane was spread, he didn’t want to take any chances.