"Regina, pull off the interstate at Exit 27. There is a small gun shop and a Super Wal-Mart there. Hopefully we can grab some ammo at the gun shop and more supplies at the Wal-Mart." The surprise on Regina's face was evident. We had passed the Super Wal-Mart several times and I had always found an excuse to go elsewhere. She knew why, they all did. And they had respected my choice.
Walking back into the rear trailer, I found Carol and Kim hard at work sorting through the supplies we had salvaged from the supermarket in north Charlotte. The trailer rocked as Regina pushed cars out of the way with the cowcatcher on the front of the truck, but we had all become used to the motion over the past months. Occasionally, you would hear one of the guns fire, but not very often. Most of the dead here would have wandered off or been drawn to other food sources.
It was strange speculating on what factors motivated the dead, if you could call it motivation. They would start chasing you if you caught their attention, but if they lost you they might keep going or just start wandering around. They seemed to desperately crave human flesh and blood, but you would find the dead who had wandered for the past eighteen months in an enclosed space or had stood in one place doing the same thing over and over. Both the recently dead and the long deceased were a danger, though for different reasons. The recently dead were fast, tireless, and aggressive, but they tended to operate as loners and were driven purely by instinct with no thought processes. The long dead were much slower as rigor mortis set in, but they operated in packs. Lately I had been noticing that the packs were becoming more cohesive with obvious leaders and some simple pack hunting tactics.
Looking at the inventory sheet Carol and Kim had started, I could see that we had a pretty good haul from the supermarket. Their pharmacy had been well stocked with antibiotics, painkillers, and other useful drugs. They had also been well supplied with the mood altering substances that the doctors had thought or at least prescribed to cure most problems; Prozac, Effexor, and others of that type. Since the end, those drugs had become all but useless and had been replaced with "get your ass in gear or get eaten".
Carol Hathaway had been a Trenton, New Jersey nurse before the end. Luckily she had just come off shift when everything broke loose. Based on what we had been able to piece together, very few medical professionals survived the end as they were on the front lines in the hospitals trying to help the infected, never knowing that their patients would become their worst enemies. A short, heavyset blonde, Carol's no nonsense attitude had served her well. After the end she had attached herself to a small band of survivors made up of police officers, the only ones around who were armed. A liberal and major supporter of the anti-gun movements like Million Moms March, the inability to defend herself when the end came had taught her a valuable lesson. By the time her path crossed ours and she joined us, she had learned to shoot and survive. No one would ever take her guns from her again.
At the base of the off ramp at exit 27 was a major traffic snarl. It looked like there had been a pretty bad wreck here during the end. A red Corvette was buried into the back end of what looked to have once been a luxury sedan of some kind. Seeing the 'Vette, I wondered if my Dodge Charger was still sitting in the alley in New York City. The 'Vette's wreck had setoff a chain reaction that resulted in a Ford F250 Pickup upside down on top of the sedan. We had cleared much of the wreckage off the inside lanes during previous trips through this area. That had resulted in more cars pushed or piled into the tangle of wreckage.
Regina slowed The Traveler and rolled it forward until the bulldozer like front bumper was against the wreckage. Then she slowly applied power. After she had pushed the wreckage further towards the outside of the road, she stopped and backed up. Then she eased forward and pushed it some more. Over and over, she continued this pattern until she had managed to move the entire tangle of wrecked vehicles off the interstate and the ramp and into the grassy area alongside the road. Finally cleared, we took the off ramp up and turned towards Mount Holly and The Gunshop Express.
The Gunshop Express sits just down what many would call a service road, running parallel to the interstate. Given how small the parking lot was at The Gunshop Express, there was no way to get the rig down into it and if we did, no way to get out quickly. Regina drove the rig on down the road past the store and used the old spinning plant parking lot to turn around. Now facing the way we would need to go to get away, Regina parked the truck on the main road in front of the store.
To an outside observer, The Traveler came to a stop and just sat there, like a predatory beast crouched in the grass. In reality, we were gearing up and making preparations inside. Tito, Maurice, and I would enter the store. Kim, Carol, Mikey, and Sam would remain in the truck manning the guns. They would be able to lay down heavy cover fire if we had to evacuate quickly. Tony, Bob, Thomas, and Phil would be ready to help us move goods once we had secured the shop.
Exactly who Tony and Bob had been prior to the end was a bit of a mystery. They never talked about it or answered many questions. That they were family was obvious, they looked enough alike. Both spoke with the mouthful of marbles accent that one typically associates with the deep south, my guess was the Tennessee mountains. Both of them were young, barely into their twenties, stood just over 6 foot, with dark hair and scraggly facial hair. The ladies on the crew constantly teased them and even offered to help them shave. The boys had proven to be crack shots, strong hard workers, and mean as rattlesnakes in a fight, though half the time they were fighting each other, usually over some girl who didn't really care about either of them.
The Traveler had been sitting still for 10 minutes and no one had seen any of the dead yet. Warily, I opened the side door of the front trailer and then Tito and Maurice moved out. They moved about halfway to the gun shop's doors and then dropped into a crouch, covering the area around the shop. I followed behind them. I had left my M4 behind and carried a gas-powered cutoff saw instead. Once I reached the doors of the shop, I yanked the starting cord and the saw roared to life. Pushing the saw into the center of the doors, it cut through the metal overlap like a knife through butter and then began to throw sparks as it hit the harder locking bar on the inside of the doors.
We had learned that this was one of the most dangerous times in a salvage job. The noise we were making could attract the dead from a pretty wide area. Everyone needed to stay sharp so we would not get surprised. Finally, I felt the lock bar part under the blade of the cutoff saw. Dropping the saw to the ground, I took up the large wrecking bar I had brought and jammed it between the doors. One hard shove and the doors flew open. The inside glass door shattered easily as I hit it with the heavy end of the wrecking bar.
The inside of the store was dark. Breaking several light sticks, I threw them into the store so I could see. Standing behind the counter was a dead man, his cold gray skin covered with tattoos. Even after being dead for eighteen months, I could recognize Donnie. This was why I had stayed away from Belmont since we arrived back in this area.
Drawing the pistol from my thigh holster, I took aim at the man that had once been my friend. "Sorry, man." The headshot dropped the zombie and I moved further into the store. Maurice and Tito moved up behind me and covered the store with their rifles. Quickly we did an efficient sweep of the remainder of the store, finding no additional dead. I guess that Donnie came in on that final morning but everyone else stayed home. He must have already been infected and changed before he could actually open the store.
Rather than spend additional time in the store sorting through merchandise, exposed to the dead, we simply swept the shelves clean. Each of us carried several large duffle bags, what people used to call sea bags, and we filled them as fast as possible. Tito started at one end of the ammo shelves and started sweeping boxes into his bag. I started in the pistol cabinet, grabbing all the guns I could. Everything from inexpensive .32s and .380s to the Express's selection of 1911s, I took them all. Maurice stood with his back against the far wall, keeping watch and ready to shoot any of the dead that we might stumble across. As we filled each bag, we would deposit them just outside the door and Sam, Bob, and Thomas hauled them back to the Traveler. Phil entered the store with us and began transporting armloads of rifles back to the rig as well.
While the rest of the team continued cleaning out the front of the store, I moved back into the rear office. Sitting against the wall, was a large black gun safe. This was where the Class III firearms were stored. Most people don't know, but the old Brady Campaign's favorite term "Assault Weapons" was a bald faced lie. True assault weapons - military grade, selective fire or fully automatic firearms - were heavily regulated under the National Firearms Act of 1934. Before the end, it took approximately eight months and thousands of dollars for a civilian to buy a Class III firearm and then only in those places where the Sheriff would sign the paperwork. What the Brady's fooled most people into believing were assault weapons were actually nice normal semi-automatic rifles that happen to look like their military big brothers. It was never anything more than a campaign against guns that someone thought "looked dangerous". By going after "dangerous looking" guns, they could fool the soccer moms into supporting them and work a process of slowly trying to outlaw more and more guns. The dead put an end to their plans as well. Cranking up the saw again, I cut through the door and into the gap between the door and the frame. Working all the way around three sides of the door, I finally stopped the saw and set it down.
Most safe doors have locking bolts on all four sides. By cutting through three of them, I could pull the door to one side and remove it completely. Once I had set the door down, I gathered up the MP5K submachine gun and selective fire AR15 rifle that was stored in the safe. Sitting in the back of the safe was a black violin case. Removing it from the safe, I laid it on Donnie's old desk and flipped the latches open. Nestled in the red velvet was an original Thompson Submachine gun, made famous by the 1920's gangsters and movies about them. Semi-automatic replicas had been available, but this was a fully automatic version with the fifty round drum magazine. Slinging all three rifles over my shoulder, I moved back into the main part of the store. Many of the semi-automatic rifles could be converted into selective fire with time, effort, and know-how. And I knew just the person to do the job.
We had been inside the store for over an hour when Regina started blowing the Traveler's big air horns. We all knew what that huge bass rubble meant, so we grabbed what we could and headed back out the doors towards the truck. In the hour we had been inside we had cleaned out much of the store; ammo, pistols, rifles, parts, magazines, holsters, etc. Everything that was not tied down went into the bags and out to The Traveler. While we had been in the store, other members of the crew had been moving the bags to the rig.
As I ran back towards the truck, I looked up the hill towards the old burned-out BP station. A group of about twenty of the walking dead was coming down the hill towards us. I figured that I could easily beat them to the truck as they shambled down the hill. Whoever was on the front gun port opened up and began stitching lines of thirty caliber rounds through the group. Being on the outside with that M60 going off nearby was deafening. That was why I did not hear the warnings that Sam was yelling at me from the door of the Traveler.
I realized I was in trouble when I felt the tug on my leg. A dead woman had crawled up behind me and grabbed hold of me. As I fell forward, I twisted to turn back towards her. Rather than landing on my face and having the dead woman climbing my back, I landed on my butt in a semi-sitting position facing the woman. Cursing and kicking at the woman to keep her from climbing up into my lap and biting my exposed flesh, I scooted back towards The Traveler and away from her. She bit into the side of one of my boots and gnawed at the heavy leather. I kicked her face hard with the other boot, crushing one side of her jaw and cheek. Unfortunately the dead don't feel pain or even seem to care, but it did manage to get my foot free of her mouth. Finally coming to my senses, I pulled the cut-down shotgun I carried from behind my shoulder and shot her in the face. The heat and blast from the shotgun singed my boot, but none of the pellets hit my feet. I could have lived with it if they had, since I would have at least been alive. Scrambling back to my feet, I ran up the ramp into the trailer. The machine guns were hammering pretty hard, as my "roll in the hay" with the dead woman had let the incoming crowd of the dead get close.
Scrambling up the ramp and into The Traveler through the trailer's side door, I felt Regina throw the rig into motion the moment I was in. Almost immediately, Tito had his Desert Eagle pressed to my forehead as Kim yanked my pants legs out of my boots. I made myself relax, as I had done this to each of them at one time or another. As cruel as it might seem, we all knew our survival depended on each of us being clean. A hidden wound might mean that someone woke up in the middle of the night as one of the dead and that was a danger to the whole crew.
I could feel Kim's hands as she ran them up my legs, checking for wounds. Once she finished with my legs, I nodded at Tito to let him know that I understood and approved. Standing in front of them, I stripped off my gear, removed my shirt, and dropped my pants down around my boots. Kim quickly gave me a once over, a very thorough once over.
"Geez, Kim. At least take me out to dinner first!" Kim stuck her tongue out at me as she finished inspecting me for any bite marks. Kissing me on the cheek, she patted my ass and pronounced me clean. At one time we had been lovers, if you could call it that, as we fled New York City. Since then we had both moved on, but remained friends.
"Man. I thought you were a goner there for a moment," Tito laughed as he holstered that damn hand-cannon of his. The forced nature of the laugh weighed heavily upon me, my crew needed some down time badly. Hopefully, we could take some R&R at Blacksburg. The single members of the crew all had lovers there, or at least never had a problem hooking up.
The Town of Belmont stretched from Interstate 85 to the curve of the Catawba River. It had once been a typical Carolina mill town, but had become a bedroom community for Charlotte over the last ten years before the end. Downtown had been revitalized with nice pubs and quaint shops, malls to the south, north, and east had taken care of all the heavy shopping. Sitting against Interstate 85 was Belmont's Wal-Mart Super Center, home of most of the local redneck population.
Parked out on the entrance road into the Wal-Mart, I scanned the parking lot with my binoculars. The parking lot was filled with old cars and I could see some of the dead moving about. The number of dead was very light compared to the number of cars and I continued scanning trying to figure out where the remainder might be. One of the dead was a fat old lady who must have weighed three hundred pounds when she was alive. She was trying to get into a green Ford Festiva. The sight and thought of this huge dead woman spending two years trying to get into the tiny car cracked me up.
"Regina, swing us wide around the parking lot and let's see if we can get into the loading docks without too much fuss." Given that I had only seen a handful of the dead wandering around the parking lot, I figured we should be able to slide around to the docks fairly easily. Regina began to ease the big rig we called The Traveler around the road outside of the parking lot and towards the back of the store. A few of the dead in the parking lot saw us and began to come our way, but they were easily destroyed by short, well-placed bursts from our machine guns.
As we proceeded, the bursts from the machine guns kept becoming heavier. Looking across the parking lot, I could see that the few scattered dead we had seen earlier were being joined by more and more dead. From a pair of old Grayhound buses sitting in the center of the parking lot, a stream of dead blue-haired old ladies were pouring forth. The sight would have been hilarious under different circumstances. While the number of dead continued to increase, the parked cars formed a barrier that allowed our guns to thin them out as they approached.
Finally we made it across the parking lot and into the loading area behind the store. Here the dead were limited in the ways they could come at us. But we were also limited in the firepower we could bring to bear against them. Luckily, the dead are driven by hunger with no thought, so we didn't have to worry about any type of tactics being used to pin us in place and overrun us. If it happened it was just pure bad luck on our part.
"Damn, you would think we were a zombie's blue light special!" Leave it to Mikey to make jokes at a time like this. I decided it was just not worth it to tell him the Blue Light Specials were from another of the chain stores. Even as Regina backed The Traveler up to the docks at the back of the store, the guns were still hammering. Unfortunately, once we were backed into the loading dock, only the front mounted M60 machine gun and the roof mounted Mk-19 40mm Grenade Launcher could fire on the mounting numbers of the dead.
Almost immediately, we could hear the dead beating on the sides of the armored trailers. As I got closer to the rear door, I realized they were beating on it as well. Opening a vision slit set high in the rear wall; I could see the Wal-Mart docks were crowded with the dead. Must have been some sale going on at the Wally World that last day. I knew we would never get past all of these zombies and into the store. Even if we did, with this many of the dead here, the store was likely crawling with them as well.
"Regina, pull us out of here! This place is crawling," I yelled into the intercom station at the rear door. Almost immediately, The Traveler lurched forward as Regina shifted into gear and got us moving. The press of the dead in the narrow dock alleyway slowed down our progress, but the raw power and weight of the armored rig meant we could push forward through them. We began to hear the dead pounding on the roof as well as the sides. I thought of Mikey, up in the turret on the roof of the first trailer with the Mk-19. The turret was enclosed so he was safe from the dead, but you could hear him firing his M4 through the gun port built into the turret. The heavy Mk-19 was just not designed for sweeping the dead from on top of us.
As we moved clear of the alley, I moved forward towards the cab and hollered at Mikey as I passed him. "Mikey, lay a volley of fire around us!" Even as I continued to move forward, I could hear the Mk-19 start chugging. The ammo box for the Mk-19 only held 60 rounds, but they were a mix of incendiary, fragmentation, and high explosive. As I strapped myself into the passenger side front seat of The Traveler, the whole rig started bucking from the explosions happening around us. Mikey had fired the grenades into the cement wall of the Wal-Mart, using it to impact detonate them and create a storm of fire and shrapnel between our armored hull and the wall. I just prayed that the armored plating over the tire wells provided enough protection and we did not have a flat tire in the midst of all these hungry dead. If we did, Mikey was going to be the one that got to get out and change it.
As we cleared the loading alley and pulled back into the open parking lot, the ride got a bit rougher. Regina had some speed built up and she used it to plow through the growing crowd of the walking dead. As the gun ports cleared the alley walls, you could hear the crew open up, trying to thin the crowd and cut us an escape route. Luckily most of the dead were behind us as they had still been moving towards the loading dock when we pulled out and through them.
Finally we pulled out of the Wal-Mart parking lot and back up onto the main roads. The vast majority of the dead forgot about us and began to wander off. A few clung with us until the crew destroyed them, one at a time. At the bottom of the hill was a wide intersection and I ordered Regina to come to a halt in the center of it.
Grabbing my gear, I made a decision. There were things here that would haunt me until I dealt with them. Telling Regina to wait here for one hour and planning five additional rendezvous points, I departed The Traveler on foot. The hike up old 273 was simple. This area had become business parks in the years before the end and only a light scattering of the dead were around. When I reached the top of the hill, I stopped at the old laundry mat to take a breather.
I saw the dead old man when he came around the back of the house next door. Staying in the shadows, I remained motionless and tried not to attract his attention. His path was going to bring him within arms reach of me whether he saw me or not, so I knew I had no choice but to deal with him. Sliding my machete from its sheath, I watched as the dead old man came closer and closer. With a swing that started at my knees, I caught him just above the ear with the machete, its razor sharp blade slicing the top of his head clean off and splitting his brain in two. The old man continued walking for two steps before falling to the ground, dead for real this time. As much as I had disliked that old man in life, I would never have wished the curse of the walking dead on anyone.
Moving out, I walked down the hill to the next intersection. The house in front of me had once been a nice blue mill house, with roses growing in the yard. Now, it was overgrown and looked a bit worse for wear. The front door was shut and locked, and a red convertible was parked in the drive. Pulling a key ring from my pocket I walked up to the front door and unlocked it. Knowing the layout of the house made blind ambushes easy, I was very careful as I crept through the front door and into the kitchen. Almost immediately, I could smell the death. Not the still rotting stench of the walking dead, but the lingering smell of true death. As I moved through the house, I found everything like it was when I had left for New York. As I approached the master bedroom at the back of the house, the smell of death got stronger but it was still the smell of old death.
Lying in the bed was the desiccated corpse of a woman, a woman that had once been my wife. No cause of death was apparent, but she had died easily from the looks of things. I found myself relieved that she had died naturally rather than becoming one of the walking dead. When we say the dead arose that is not quite the truth. The dead stayed dead, but those who were infected died and then came back or lived and changed directly into one of the dead. You could usually tell which way one of the dead had come about by the amount of coordination that remained.
Checking the spare bedroom, I opened my gun safes and took out the remainder of the guns I had owned before the end. I wrapped the pistols; two .45 Ruger Vaqueros, a .38 special Smith and Wesson Model 10, and my .38 super Open gun; in rags and dropped them down into the bottom of one of my sea bags and then put the rifles and shotguns into the bag as well. All the ammo I had stored up went into a second bag and I carried both to the door. One of my shotguns was a Remington 1100 with a ported barrel, extended tube, and a red dot sight mounted on top. I loaded it with 00 buck from a case of shells under the bed and set the shotgun aside.
Returning to the Master bedroom, I took an incendiary grenade from my belt. Setting the timer for 60 seconds, I dropped it on the bed and walked out of the house. A proper pyre was about the best I could do for my wife now.
As I departed the house through the front door, The Traveler was parked on the main road. These people were my family now. Regardless of my instructions they had come to where they knew I was going. As the flames began to lick the walls of the old house, I laid my ghosts to rest and walked towards my future.