"I have made her as comfortable as possible under the circumstances," Carol reported after checking on the girl. Looking at the child, I could see the shackle that bound her ankle to a support underneath The Traveler.
"Once the other survivors are far enough away, I will end her life quickly and cleanly. That's the best I can do for her under these circumstances." Carol's face tightened at my response, but she nodded. Like the rest of us, she knew what was going to happen in the next hour or so.
"I don't see any other choice." With tears in her eyes she walked away. The reality of infection with the zombie virus was cruel, but inescapable. If we killed her with an overdose of painkillers, she would just come back afterwards as a zombie.
"James!" I turned when my name was yelled. Walking to Regina, I noticed the disgusted look on her face. "It looks like we took a stray round into one of the rear tires."
Indeed, the left outside rear tire on the second trailer was flat. Opening up one of the outside bins, I pulled free a large jack and a tool bag. "You start unlocking the armored plating, I will go get another tire," I told Regina. Inside the rear trailer were four brand new tires, the heavy ones the rig used. . Back before the end many truckers saved money by purchasing retreads that often shredded under heavy load. We couldn't afford to have a breakdown that might make us susceptible to attack. However, finding new tires was relatively easy, and cheap, and we only went with the best. Dismounting one of the tires from the support bracket, I rolled it out the aft door of the trailer and around to where Regina was unbolting the armored coverings.
"On three ... One ... Two ... Three!" With groaning strains, we lifted the hinged armored covering. Once it was upright against the side of the trailer, I held it in place while Regina threw the latch that would hold it up.
"Alright, give the jack a crank or two," I yelled at Regina from under the trailer. I had placed the heavy jack under the axle. As she used the handle to ratchet the jack upwards, I shifted it until it met the axle correctly. Once the jack had firmly met the axle, I slid out from under the trailer.
"Shit!" The lug nuts on the tire were tight and unmovable. Taking a ball peen hammer from the tool bag, I hit the lug wrench, popping the lug nut free. This was repeated many times until all the lug nuts were broken loose and removed.
"Just a little more, give me one more crank," I grunted at Regina as I pulled the flat tire from the axle hub. Dropping it to the ground, we pushed the new tire into place and started tightening up the lug nuts. Once everything was back in place, all that was left was the cleanup. While Regina locked the armored cover back into place, I rolled the flat into the rear of the trailer and then helped her put the tools away.
"Thanks Lover," she smiled.
Hot, sweaty, and ready to sit in the rig's air conditioning, I remembered the young girl. She was probably a zombie by now, but I had not heard a gunshot that would have ended her suffering. Walking back around to the other side of the rig, I saw Carol kneeling down beside her. Worried, I placed my hand on the butt of my pistol.
"Carol?" I called out fairly loudly. If things had gone wrong, I wanted to know before I got too close. When Carol answered and turned towards me I was shocked. Her face radiated a happiness that was out of place given the situation.
"Come look!" She called. Approaching, I saw the young girl's face. Even though she had been bitten almost 6 hours ago, she showed no signs of turning into a zombie. In fact her eyes were clear and alert. "She hasn't changed. In fact, she seems to be getting better rather than sicker."
"Let's keep her chained and watch her. Maybe she is one of the one in ten thousand that the Doc told us about who is immune. If she is, the Doc will be happy to see her." I told Carol. "He thinks he might be able to make a vaccine or antidote from her blood."
Three hours later, the crew broke for lunch. I took a pair of plates to Carol for her and the girl. The girl was sitting up awake and alert, amazing when she should have been a dead hungering creature. I sat down with Carol and asked the girl some questions. After a few minutes, the young girl, who told us her name was Shelby, started telling us her story.
"I was in school when things started getting strange," young Shelby started. "We were watching the news and they were talking about the bad things happening in the big cities. They closed school early and sent us all home. Mom was home from work and we were playing Candyland when the bad people started pounding on the door. I was scared and I think Mom was too, but Mr. Franks came to the back door and took us away from the bad people. We were living at the old school until the other bad people ran us off."
After we cleaned up from lunch Regina put The Traveler in gear and we once again continued our journey south. Shelby lay comfortably in one of the bunks, but still chained just in case. As we approached the exchange between Interstate 77 and Interstate 20, I had drifted into a half-sleep passengers have used for decades. When Regina slowed The Traveler, however, I sat up quickly, now wide-awake. Ahead of us were the ruins of an old roadblock, probably from the quarantine during the last days. Several military two and a half ton trucks were parked on either side of the road. While we could see various remains, they were all old. No movement was visible anywhere.
"Maurice, Sam! Check out the trucks on the right. Tito, you're with me." Tito and I left the truck by the driver's side door of the trailer, while Maurice and Sam went out the passenger side door. We made a quick sweep through the ruins of the roadblock. Finding no threats, we began to search the military vehicles. While we found several loaded M16 magazines and some spare ammo among the remains, it wasn't until I looked in the back of the last two and a half ton truck that I found what I was hoping for.
"Bingo!" I shouted. Stacked in the back of the truck were metal ammunition canisters. Since this was National Guard, my guess was that it was largely 5.56mm ammo, with some 7.62mm belted ammo as well. Maybe a case or two of hand grenades could be mixed in with all the ammo. There could also be LAW rockets, AT4 rockets, or Stinger missiles in the truck, but none of them would be of much use.
"What have you found, Boss?" Sam came running up, with Maurice and Tito not far behind. When he looked into the back of the truck he whistled. "That should give us a pretty good start on replenishing our stores!"
"Yeap," I replied. "Hope your back is feeling strong!" The look Sam gave me could have melted steel. Oh well, there wasn't but one way to get this stuff aboard The Traveler and that was to carry it aboard. "Sam, you and Tito start hauling this stuff to the rig. Tell Phil and Jeremy to come help you. Maurice, you stand watch and make sure nothing sneaks up on them."
Moving forward, I climbed up on the passenger side running board of the deuce and a half. I was expecting a zombie to jump me as I looked in the window, but the truck's cabin was empty. Opening the door, I climbed in and began searching.
"What have we here?" In the trucks dashboard pocket was a packet of orders. The top one was an authorization to load up the ammunition that this truck had been hauling and bring it to this roadblock. But underneath I found a gold mine.
"Regina," I called over the radios. "I need you to pull the maps and figure us a route to the National Guard Armory at the corner of Assembly and Gervais."
"What's up, James?" While she asked the question, I could hear sounds in the background of papers rustling. She was already pulling the road maps and looking for the route we needed.
"A gold mine, dear. Seems that just before the end, the National Guard moved eleven hundred tons of ammunition and supplies to the Armory to support the troops that were supposed to defend Columbia." Eleven hundred tons was more than we could transport, but it would fill our bins to the tops. "Columbia fell so fast most of it should still be there."
"Looks like a straight run down Interstate 277 into town, then left on Gervais, which is the old US 1." Regina had a trucker's way with finding places. "All major roads, nothing that looks like it would be tight or narrow. James, is it worth the risk?"
"If what I think is there, it'll be more than enough to re-supply us and then some, and also provide the heavy weapons Roy asked for. In fact, if there's enough, we may even be able to start trading weapons and ammo to those outposts that really need them. Yeah, this one's more than worth the risk."
When I finished talking to Regina, I came back around the side of the truck. The guys where hauling the heavy metal ammo cases to the rig, two at a time. Maurice was on the far side of the truck keeping watch.
"Hey James," Sam grunted as he struggled by. "You wanna grab a can or four?"
"Not really!" I yelled back. However, I grabbed cans of ammo and started hauling them to the truck along with everyone else. By the time we finished loading the ammo, we were all tired and the noon sun was beaming down on us. In the end, the load had just been 5.56mm ammo for the M16 and belted 7.62mm ammo for the National Guard's light machine guns.
"All the ammo has been put away and all eight of the M60s are fully loaded." I turned as Maurice reported to me. We had ended the firefight between the refugees and the dead with five of the eight guns shot dry. Now, each gun had a five hundred round belt feeding it. To ensure smooth feeding, the ammunition belt ran inside a flat flexible guide from the ammo bin to the side of the gun. Whenever possible I liked having Maurice load the bins, he had been trained as an assistant gunner during his hitch in the Army and knew how to properly lay the belts into the bins.
Once The Traveler was buttoned back up, Regina got us into motion. We continued down Interstate 77 and then shifted over to Interstate 277 to go into Columbia. As we approached downtown Columbia, Interstate 277 became Bull Street.
On Bull Street is the South Carolina Mental Hospital, and as we drove past I wondered what it was like inside those walls. Was the facility filled with the walking dead? I often wondered about places like that and prisons. The infection would have spread like wildfire through those types of captive populations. Roy told me some pretty wild stories of having to clean out the walking dead inmates from the Blacksburg Outpost before he and his folks could settle in.
As we approached the intersection of Bull Street and Gervais Street, Regina slowed the rig to a crawl. Wrecked and abandoned cars were pretty heavy on these streets and we were having to do a lot of pushing to get through. This was making a lot of noise, but surprisingly, we were not seeing much of the dead. Finally, Regina brought us to a stop in front of the South Carolina National Guard Armory.
"My original intention was to push through and then leave, and come back later." I told Regina. "That way the dead we stirred up would have time to settle back down." Looking around we still saw none of the dead. This was very surprising for the inner city, even one of the smaller cities like Columbia. "Lets wait here for a while and if nothing is moving we will go on in."
"Let's move out," I told the crew a while later. Looking out the window at the National Guard Armory, I had seen no movement in the building's lobby or on the street over about a ten-minute period. As we left the rig and moved across the street to the front doors of the building, we kept a watchful eye out for the dead.
"Tito, cover the high side. Sam, you have the low. 1.. 2.. 3.." I flung the door open to the stairwell, crouching as Tito and Sam swept the stairwell with the muzzles of their rifles. Had anything been moving in the stairwell we would have been well positioned to deal with it immediately. "We go down. If the ammunition is here, it's mostly likely on the floor below us."
Tito took the point as we moved down the stairs, with the team spread out behind me. At the bottom of the stairwell was another door. Tito lay down on his belly as I eased the door open just an inch. "Don't see any movement, boss. Looks clear."
Moving into the open lower floor, we could see stacked pallets covering most of the area, the supplies we were looking for. From the door I could see pallets marked as 5.56mm, 7.62mm, and heavy caliber ammunition as well as crates of M16 rifles and other arms. "Sam, Phil, Carol, Maurice, and Bob. You sweep this floor. Regina, you hear me?" After receiving a reply over the radio, I continued. "Come around to the loading dock on the rear of the building. If after a sweep this floor is clear, we will start loading supplies." I paused and took a deep breath. "According to the signs in the lobby, they had setup a clinic on the second floor. Tito will go with me and we will check it out. Maybe we will get lucky and find a cache of medicine."
The team quickly split up to take on assigned tasks. Tito and I began climbing the stairs to the second floor. As I eased up the stairs, I could hear banging and other noises from the floor above me. Motioning to Tito behind me for silence I crept up to the stairwell door. Listening at the door for a few moments, I could hear the banging, but it was coming from somewhere else on the floor.
"I think the other side of this door is clear," I whispered to Tito. "I am going to ease the door open and take a peek. Get ready to help me slam this door shut if there are zombies on the other side."
Tito nodded without saying a word. He moved around behind the door where he could use his weight to help shut the door if I opened it and zombies tried to come through.
Easing the door just a crack, I peered into the hallway. "Tito, there is an old corpse dressed in scrubs right outside the door, looks like its head was blown off. They must have converted this floor into an infirmary. Let's hold here for a minute." As we sat there, I continued to scan the hallway, watching for any movement that might betray the presence of zombies.
"Give me about thirty seconds and then follow." Tito nodded at my instructions. The ex-gang banger was often brash, but he knew how to be sneaky when he needed to be. I often wondered what his criminal record looked like before the end. As I slid forward through the door, I entered the hallway. Open office doors could be seen in the hallway behind me, but my goal was in front of me. I wanted the drugs and first aid equipment they had brought in for the infirmary.
"Shit! Damn shitty ass zombies!" Even as he cursed, Tito kept his voice down. As we had passed a shut door labeled with a taped up Red Cross sign, a zombie had bumped into the door from the other side causing Tito to jump. It did not seem attracted to us, it was just wandering around the room. We moved on down the hall, keeping our eyes open and rifles ready.
As I approached the door at the end of the hall, two things became apparent. One was the hand written sign taped to the door that read Infirmary and the other was the amount of movement behind the door. An infirmary full of infected soldiers eighteen months ago was now a room full of hungry dead. Motioning to Tito, we began to back down the hallway towards the stairwell door.
"Damn!" I cursed once we were back into the stairwell. I had hoped to be able to salvage any drugs the Army doctors had been using during the last days. "I don't want to tangle with a room full of the dead. What about you?" I asked Tito.
"Sure, let's go. I'm Ready ... Not!" He smiled as he delivered his sarcastic reply. We crouched in the stairwell for a few minutes both lost in our own thoughts.
"Let's rig this door and the stairwell. A couple of grenades should do the trick. That way if the dead come this way we will have a warning and hopefully take out a few as well." Tito nodded and started pulling gear from his rucksack. First and foremost was a roll of silver duct tape.
"The world ends and that stuff still hold's it all together!" We both chuckled at my comment. We quickly taped grenades to the wall on both sides and setup a tripwire so that opening the door would pull the pins. Then we set up another tripwire two steps down. Any of the dead coming down this stairwell would meet a well-deserved end and the blast noise would definitely alert us. When we finished, we moved back downstairs and joined the rest of the crew.
"Sam, see if that forklift will fire up." I pointed to a single yellow forklift sitting on the docks. "That is unless you want to carry more ammo by hand?" After all the complaining he had done when loading the ammo from the deuce-and-a-half, I figured he would find a way to get the forklift cranked up. A loud bang caught my attention and I turned to see the rear end of The Traveler as Regina backed it against the docks.
"Maurice, open the rear end of the trailer up!" Even as I turned I could hear the pop of the propane-powered forklift firing off. Moving among the pallets, I began spraying certain ones with orange paint. We only had room for a small portion of the supplies warehoused here and I wanted to make sure we got the ones that would do us the most good. First was ammunition, 5.56mm and 7.62mm topped the list. I did mark one pallet of 40mm grenades for the Mk19.
"Can't you just pick pallets all in one area?" Sam groused as he drove past me on the forklift. He had to pick up some pallets and move them to one side in order to get to other pallets that I had marked. I noticed that he had stacked a number of the pallets we were leaving against the doors. That should keep anyone from coming into this warehouse from inside the armory.
"Well, what have we here?" I asked myself as I came upon some of the pallets at the rear of the warehouse. One pallet contained four Browning M2 Fifty Caliber heavy machine guns in crates atop twenty or thirty canisters of ammunition. A second contained a GE-built electric minigun, its accessories, and crates of ammo. I quickly sprayed both with orange paint and moved on. Although a bit too much for the mobile Traveler, if nothing else, Roy would pay well for this type of heavy weaponry to defend Blacksburg.
Finally I quit marking pallets and moved back towards the loading doors. Sam was driving the forklift with skill as he grabbed pallets and either set them aside or loaded them into the rig through the open rear cargo door. The rest of the crew had taken up positions in a wide loose semi-circle around the loading door. While the crew looked like they were being slack, in fact they were very alert.
"Hey Boss," Maurice hollered to get my attention. "What are we going to do with all the supplies that we can not take with us?" In fact the question was a good one. "As far as I can see, we can destroy them or try to secure them, maybe booby-trap them?"
I gave Maurice's questions some thought. I did not want to destroy the supplies, not when we could come back and restock from the vast quantity that was stored here. That meant we needed to secure them. Booby-trapping the entrances would work for a while, unless one of the dead stumbled in and set off the traps.
"My only concern about booby-traps is that someone like the survivors we passed on Interstate 77, who needs these supplies to survive, would get killed trying to get to them." Killing some survivor because of a decision I made would not be a good thing.
"True," Phil responded. "But what about assholes like those Mad Max wannabes that attacked us up in Great Falls. We definitely don't want shitheads like that to get hold of military grade weapons like these."
Phil had a point too. The discussion went on for a while. Finally the decision was made to block all the interior doors and disable the exterior one. We would have to pull the door down to get in when we came back, but we had the power to do that easily.
With the door disabled, we headed back to Interstate 77 and made our way around the outer loop of Columbia. Before we got to the end of Interstate 77 and the Interstate 26 exchange, night had fallen and Regina turned on the external lights. Along with the original headlights, now covered with steel mesh to protect them, we had installed large fog lights on the top of the cowcatcher-style bumper, the tops of the fenders, and along the top of the cab. This gave Regina plenty of light to drive by as well as lights pointed far ahead of the truck so she could negotiate the wreckage that cluttered the interstates.
When we reached the intersection between Interstate 77 and Interstate 26, we pulled up for the night. It did not take long for us to set out our defensive perimeter of directional mines, flares, and firebombs, and then we settled in. Since Regina and I had the morning watch as usual, we settled into the sleeper.
"We need fuel bad, we have burned up a lot keeping the engine running even when parked overnight." Regina looked up from where she lay in the sleeper. "I figure by noon we will be dry on all four main tanks and have to dip into the reserve tank. Luckily there is a gas station just one exit up, so we should be able to refuel in the morning."
"Alright, I will let the crew know first thing and we can stop and top off with everything the station has." I ran my hands down across Regina's belly as I spoke. Sliding my hand under the elastic of her panties, I watched her quiver at my touch. "Hmmm, seems someone else needs to be topped off as well," I quipped with a lecherous grin.
"Yeah, now get over here and give me everything you have," she demanded. Laughing I rolled into the sleeper bed and locked my lips against hers. Her hands were already busy stripping off my clothes and I knew it would be a while before either of us got to sleep.
Morning dawned cool and overcast. Winter was coming and I was seriously considering wintering over at the Lancaster Outpost for January and February. But first we had things to do.
"Everyone listen up." The crew looked up from their breakfast as I stood leaned against the inside wall of the trailer. "We need fuel. Nothing new, we always need fuel. The problem is that the closet place to get that fuel is tight." I looked at their faces. They all knew what I meant by tight. Close quarters, no room to see the dead coming and prepare a welcome, and always a chance of getting surprised.
The Petro Express off Interstate 277 is shoehorned into a corner between an Applebees and an office building. Unlike an interstate truck stop, it did not have dedicated lanes for big rigs, instead it had a single diesel pump sitting off to one side, mostly for diesel powered light trucks and cars. The entire contents of their underground tank was probably twenty-five thousand gallons so they would probably have enough left to top us off.
"Rather than getting us boxed in trying to park in there," I told Regina as we surveyed the station from the road. "Park on the street and we will just have to use more hose". My plan was not the best by any means, but parking on the street and running more hose meant The Traveler was free to move if the situation turned bad. But it also meant those of us on the ground would be exposed over the greater distance between the rig and the tanks.
Sam, Tito, Phil, and I exited The Traveler through the side door of the front trailer. While Tito and I provided security, Sam and Phil began unloading the fuel pump lines. Stretching the line from the underground fuel tanks to the rig, took almost every bit of fuel hose we had.
"Sam, we look secure, so fire the pump off." Once the electric pump started, the noise could quickly attract the dead. The manual crank pump we now kept in reserve was quieter, but would take much longer to fill the tanks. I could hear the fuel splashing against the bottom of the tank, a sure sign that we had been empty.
"Shut the pump down and lets fill the second tank." Because we had to use so much hose we could only fill one tank at a time instead of both at once. We had been outside the rig for a while and the first tank was full. Sam shut down the pump and we moved the filler hose to the second tank. One tank filled and three to go with no sign of the dead. With a whir, the pump started back up. Once the second tank was filled, we needed to fill the tanks on the other side. Rather than trying to turn the big rig around, we stretched the filler hose underneath the rig and to the tanks on the far side.
Running the hose underneath the rig, we stretched it to the first tank on the other side and Sam started the pump up again. I was surprised that the noise from the electric pump had not attracted the dead. Tony and Tito came outside and replaced us, but I stayed outside. Hanging on the side of The Traveler's cab, I could see the area around us.
"Shit!" Looking down the length of The Traveler, I spotted motion among the houses and shops beside the gas station. "Hurry up guys, we have company!" Tito and Tony began scrambling to get the pump shutdown and the gear stowed. As the dead came closer, I began to fire single shots taking them down as they approached.
Tito joined me, dropping several of the approaching dead with a quick burst from his M4. "Tony is locking up the gear boxes!" He yelled over the stutter of our rifles. I could hear fire from the M60's on the far side of the rig. That could only mean that we were more surrounded that I had thought.
As Tony cleared the front of the rig, he was firing back towards the other side. Movement caught my eye, but before I could bring my rifle to bear, one of the dead leaped from the hood of the truck and landed on Tony. The zombie had once been a young boy, probably not more that 15. He was freshly dead from the looks of things, still capable of quicker action and more aggressive than the long dead.
As they fell, I could hear Tony scream for us to get the creature off of him. Even as I reached them, Tony's screams faded to a gurgle as the zombie ripped out his throat with its teeth. I fired a short burst, making sure both the zombie and Tony were dead. Tito had already scrambled aboard The Traveler and I dived through the side door as Regina had already gotten the rig into motion.
As we pulled back towards Interstate 77, I had Regina stop the rig in the middle of a residential neighborhood. Normally, such areas would be dangerous, crawling with the zombie remains of the former inhabitants, but this area seemed clear. Dropping to the ground, I ran over to the object that had caught my eye, a white and pink girl's bicycle. I quickly stashed it in one of the cargo boxes on the outside of The Traveler and climbed back into the cab. Regina looked at me in wonder and mumbled something about losing my mind as I grinned back at her.
We stopped on the Interstate 77 to Interstate 26 exchange for the night. The raised roadway gave us the ability to see danger coming, as well as protecting us from attack on two sides. The crew watched and laughed as I gave Shelby the bike. We had removed her chains once we were sure she wasn't going to change. She rode around the truck for a while until we made her come in for dinner and fussed when we locked up for the evening.
"James, wake up!" Regina shook me from side to side to wake me. Normally I was a light sleeper, but the stress from the last couple of days had gotten to me. "Wake up, damn it!"
"What?" I asked as I sat up. The alarms were not going off so we were not under attack. But Regina would not have been waking me up like this if nothing were wrong.
"Shelby has run off! I knew she was homesick and all, but I did not think she would run away from the safety of being with us."