The big New York Police Department SWAT command van we had been traveling in was a bit battered and needed a lot of repair work, so we planned to stay in the shop for a couple of days while Maurice and Regina fixed the van. The front of the van had taken a beating, even though it was protected with the heavy ramming bumper. The inside was also getting a bit ripe from having people living in it night and day. But the poor van, which had brought us so far, was beyond repair. Then Regina approached me with an idea.
"James," Regina started. "Maurice and I have an idea we would like to discuss with you." Looking up I could see Maurice behind her. It was pretty obvious that the idea was Regina's but Maurice liked it enough to back her. He was not much of a free thinker himself, but he was great at taking an idea and pondering on it for a while and finding the flaws. But anytime snap decisions needed to be made he always deferred to someone else.
I had met up with Regina after Kim and I crossed the George Washington Bridge escaping New York City. She had been driving a big rig for Toys-R-Us and was stuck in the wrecked and abandoned traffic that littered the interstate. Unlike most of those on the road, she stayed in her vehicle rather than trying to make it afoot. That was the only reason she was alive. Standing 5 foot 4 inches, weighing 120 soaking wet, and blessed with long red hair and a redhead's temper, she was fit to be tied at being trapped in her cab by the wandering dead. When Kim and I came along in the appropriated NYPD SWAT van, we had cleared out the dead long enough for her to get to us. She had proven to be an experienced and highly capable driver. For a while, I had shared both her attention and Kim's, but Kim had latched on to others as the group grew.
"Go ahead." I had been studying a Rand McNally road map to burn time. I knew where I wanted to go and how we needed to get there. I had known for some time, and the rest were just along 'cause we were surviving. But I hate sitting around with nothing to do. Studying the map gave me time to plan where the dangerous places would be, as well as take inventory on what supplies we would need to get through.
"The van is pretty much done for." Regina smiled, since she had never liked the old SWAT van anyway. It lacked a lot of amenities, but it was there and it ran when we needed something that fateful night in New York City running from the zombies. Carl, the last member of the SWAT team that had called the van home before us, had fallen to the zombies covering our escape from the building to the van. "But we think we can convert the semi cab and trailer into a rolling fortress with the material we have here in this shop. It would give us a heavy vehicle capable of plowing through obstacles and plenty of space on the inside." Regina laid out some sketches that she and Maurice had drawn up of what they thought the truck could be made into. "And we will never get a better chance to do something like this than now, with this shop and the fact that it still has power."
Power. Electricity. The lights coming on when you flipped the switch. We had taken it for granted when the world was still ours. Sure, storms knocked it out on occasion, but crews were out to fix it quickly. But since the night the dead started walking, power had become a rarity. Some places still had electricity and running water, while others did not. I could just imagine some nuclear power plant somewhere inhabited by zombies until that fateful moment when one zombie stumbled against the wrong console and the plant blew itself apart.
When the dead had started walking, the United States Government threw up quarantine lines manned by the Army or National Guard trying to stop it from spreading. While the soldiers slaughtered a lot of the dead, in the end most of them became dead themselves. Finally, in desperation, the President ordered the use of a nuclear weapon on the city of Chicago and for the fourth time in less than a hundred years, a mushroom cloud came to life over a city. Not that most people would miss Chicago. Mayor Daley and Governor Blagojevich had pretty much made it the most crime-ridden city in the world through a serious of debt-creating financially ruinous legislations that created a handout program larger than even the old Soviet Union. Plus their absolute hatred for firearms had created a city and state where most people could not defend themselves from crime, much less the dead.
The next day work began on the truck. Regina and Maurice started by welding up a cage of supports around the cab body from the large pile of tubing that was stacked against the back wall of the shop. A thick metal body made from boiler steel was welded into place over the original body, using the tube cage as support. A second pair of seventy-five gallon fuel tanks scavenged from one of the rigs sitting in the yard behind the shop was mounted into place behind the original set. Regina had cut the tanks open and welded barriers of metal mesh inside them. Supposedly this was to prevent the tanks from exploding if they were shot.
The other issue Regina had to tackle was the truck's suspension. It had to be reinforced to handle the additional weight. We raided a stripped semi-truck cab that was in the fenced in rear-yard for additional shocks and springs. Regina and Maurice welded supports onto the suspension and mounting points for the additional shocks and springs. They also stripped a rear axle from one of the trucks in the yard and mounted it as a third axle on the rear of the truck. The result would handle the additional weight but would not provide the smoothest ride in the world.
In the end, the work on the cab took two weeks. A Caterpillar V-12 engine was salvaged from a bulldozer in the yard behind the shop and installed. The oversized sleeper was also remodeled on the inside. Gun ports were cut on either side of the sleeper, as well as one through the windshield on the passenger side. The armor would hold up to most small arms fire, and with armored fenders and shields over the tires, we would be hard to stop.
The trailer started out as a low-boy flatbed, but Maurice and Regina started by building a frame from steel tubing for it as well. Once they got the frame built and reinforced, they began to weld the boilerplate onto it, to form the armored walls. For the most part, the rest of us just acted as dumb labor. Maurice had the shop skills and Regina the ideas, but Tito, Kim, and I were nothing more than available muscle.
Based on the transit buses that Maurice drove before the fall, he and Regina came up with a solution to a problem we found. Those in the truck's cab were cut off from those in the trailer. They cut the back out of the cab and built a flexible tunnel between the cab and the front of the trailer.
We cut gun ports into the sides of the trailer. Currently we had a mix of firearms picked up along the way, mostly older M16s from National Guard and regular Army troops that had been overrun trying to stop the zombies. I wanted something heavier to mount in the gun ports but for the moment, just having a safe place to shoot from was an improvement.
After six weeks of sweat, Maurice and Regina had the cab and trailer finished. While they took a well-deserved break, the rest of us began outfitting the inside of the trailer. While construction had been going on we had made several forays into town to gather supplies. Luckily, the zombies had pretty much ignored us and we only had a few encounters inside the shops we were raiding. We mounted bunk beds in the trailer; three high and two wide on either side at the front of the trailer. Kim, we discovered, was a pretty good seamstress, so we stole a sewing machine from the local Singer store and she made curtains so each bunk had some privacy. Between the stacks of bunks on either side we mounted some lockers we found in the local hardware store. Now everyone had a place to store his or her personal gear.
Just behind the bunks was the first set of gun ports. After them we built two rooms. The one on the left side was our armory and the one on the right was to be our bathroom. From a local sporting goods store, we got several gun racks and mounted them on the wall, along with padded hooks. A tan and green outdoor storage building was bolted in the back corner. Its shelves gave us places to store magazines and ammo. Tito proved that he was actually worth the effort it took to save him. He plumbed the bathroom with a working shower, toilet, and sink. He mounted water tanks on the roof of the trailer with cistern openings to catch rainwater. Under the floor he mounted 55-gallon drums to act as gray water storage. Wastewater from the toilet he dumped directly out the bottom of the trailer.
From the two rooms to the rear of the trailer we built a community area. Propane stoves and heavy pantry storage cabinets gave us an area to cook in. Tito plumbed in a valve that would allow water from the cisterns to be run through an electronic water filtration system and into the drinking water tank. The filtration system used electrolysis rather than a filter and we wired it into the truck's electrical system. As long as the truck ran, we could filter water. A table and chairs, and two couches completed the area. The table and couches were bolted into place, but the chairs were left loose. Regina came up with an idea to mount window locks; half to the chairs and half to the table, allowing the chairs to be locked in place.
On the roof of the trailer, Maurice fashioned a turret. Basically it was a dome made of steel mesh on a revolving collar. While a small gun port was cut into turret, he left it closed up since what type of weapon we might find to mount there he did not know.
We had been living in the machine shop for almost eight weeks when the decision was made to pull a second trailer into the shop. With the first outfitted as living space we had left ourselves very little space for cargo or anything else. We maneuvered one of the trailers parked in the yard into the shop. This went smoothly as we saw no zombies the entire time we were working outside. When we opened the door to the trailer, a zombie; most likely some poor soul who had been bitten and then crawled into the trailer seeking a safe haven; fell out. Before the thing could even stand up, Tito had shot it in the head.
After cleaning up the inside of the trailer, Regina started laying out plans for how she wanted to build it up. She started out by building a frame inside the trailer from the same welded tubing we had used on the cab and first trailer. While the framing was inside the trailer, she extended it through the body to the outside. There she welded more of the boilerplate we had used before as armor. For the rear trailer, we again cut four gunports into the trailer, two on either side. Underneath the trailer's body, Regina and Maurice welded several metal lockers and then welded up covers over the tires.
The rear half of the trailer was left empty. That gave us enough room to store a lot of heavy supplies and large items. The front half was divided into large bins for sorting and storing supplies. This would allow us to store enough supplies to keep us for extended periods of time.
With the construction approaching completion, we sat around talking over a supper of pork and beans one evening. The one thing we all felt The Traveler lacked was more aggressive defenses. The armor over the body and tires would protect us from impacts, but we were still worried about being swamped by masses of the dead. Tito devised an amazingly simple solution to the problem. He welded up shallow steel boxes filled with twenty metal tubes and in each tube he placed a 12-gauge shotgun shell. A spring-loaded plate fired the entire box at once. The entire contraption was then hinged so that it could be swung out and reloaded. Three of these where mounted on either side of each trailer and two on either side of the cab. Three hundred and sixty shotguns shells could be simultaneously detonated to clear space around the armored rig, or each box detonated individually.
With the rig and both trailers complete, we decided it was time to move on. We had started seeing more of the dead moving around lately and we had cleaned most of the local stores out of supplies. Our last run had filled the storage bins inside the rig we had named The Traveler and all our preparations were complete. Given the overall jovial mood of everyone, I decided that a feast was in order.
That Friday, I spent most of the day cooking. When we all sat down to eat that night, it was probably the best meal any of us had eaten in months. Chopped ham and pineapple, vegetable salad, rolls, water, and sweet tea were on the menu. Everyone ate and talked, and for just a short while the horror that our world had become was pushed aside.
Later that night, Regina came over to the area I had set aside for myself. We all had grabbed some spot in the shop and put down our bedrolls and personal gear. Some of the crew had already moved inside the first trailer, but I was still sleeping outside in a corner of the shop floor. When I looked up she was dressed in a long t-shirt with her legs bare and had two bottles of beer in her hands. When she handed me the beer and sat down beside me, I said nothing. We sat there in silence for a while, sipping the lukewarm beer and enjoying peace and quiet.
I still am not sure who kissed whom first. But suddenly, we were in each other's arms entangled in a kiss, then another one. Before long we were both naked. Regina's body was tight with muscle, the result of fighting to survive for the past months. I did not resist when she pushed me onto my back and straddled me. Finally we fell exhausted into each other's arms. As Regina snuggled close and fell asleep, I laid there awake and thinking. Did this mean something or was it just two survivors looking for comfort and celebrating the fact that they were alive? In the end, I decided it did not matter. In time it would work itself out.
The next morning arrived with the sun shining bright. The conversation over breakfast was tense, but hopeful. Having a heavily armored home like The Traveler would increase our chances of survival, but two major challenges still faced us - getting the rig assembled and fueling it. The only way to assemble it would be to open the doors to both service bays, pull the cab and first trailer out from the first bay, and back it up to mate with the second trailer. This exercise would leave us exposed for some time.
"Alright everyone, here is the plan." Everyone had gathered around the front of the cab. "All the gear goes into the front trailer. No one carries anything but arms and ammo. Tito and Kim on the roof, Maurice and Carol in the first trailer. The only person exposed will be me." Before anyone could argue, I raised my hand for silence. "No argument, this is the way it's going to be. Once everything is hooked up, Tito and Kim can jump onto the roof and get in through the roof hatch. I will climb aboard and we will get out of here." While many of the team wanted to argue, they knew that it was going to do no good.
Everything went well for a short time; we got The Traveler pulled out from the service bay without any problems. I was directing Regina as she backed the rig up to mate to the second trailer when I heard a shot ring out. Looking over my shoulder, I could see one of the dead falling to the ground about half a block away. Others of the dead were appearing, but at the moment they were still just a scattering of individuals.
We got the second trailer hooked up with only a few scattered dead appearing. Tito and Kim jumped off the roof onto the top of the trailer and entered through the rear hatch, while I ran around the rig and climbed in the passenger door of the cab. Pulling away from the concrete building that had been our home for the past three months; I think we all felt a little sadness. We had not gone but a few blocks when we ran into our first crowd of the dead.
The Traveler passed its first test with flying colors. Regina simply kept the hammer down and plowed through the crowd of the dead like they were grass to her lawnmower. I could hear the rest of the crew taking a few shots from the gun ports and then we were through the crowd.
As we approached the intersection with Main Street, the number of the dead roaming around began to increase dramatically. At first they were not an issue as the crowd was thin enough to just bull through, but the crowds kept getting thicker. Soon we were slowed to a crawl, with the dead crushing against us.
"Shit!" I could hear Regina cursing over the sounds of the dead beating against the armored sides of The Traveler. She had missed the turn she wanted to make and was trying to work us back around to Main Street. Main Street headed west out of Fairfax and became US 50, which intersected Interstate 95 to take us south. But the hordes of the dead that had appeared when we entered this section of Fairfax were making it difficult.
While the size and weight of The Traveler was causing Regina problems maneuvering, her design was proving its worth. The weight and power plowed through the crowded dead, while the gun ports gave us access to fire on the dead without exposing ourselves. I continued to fire out the front gun port as Regina used the plow blade front end to sweep the dead aside. After the third left turn I thought we were done for. Two police cars were wrecked with another vehicle in the middle of the road and there was no way to back The Traveler up on this narrow street.
A group of the dead including two police officers started towards the rig. Most moved with the slow shamble of those who had died, but one of the police officers moved much faster. Based on what I had seen since New York, he had been bitten and changed without ever dying. My first burst took him in the shoulder, but even with his arm hanging he kept coming. I walked the second burst up his torso and saw his head snap back as rounds destroyed his brain. He fell and was trampled by the dead behind him as they continued their relentless march towards us. Regina downshifted and put the pedal to the floor. While The Traveler was not capable of gaining a lot of speed in the short distance that much weight in motion has a tremendous amount of power.
She slammed the rig through the crowd of walking dead, throwing bodies left and right. One of the dead held onto the front of the truck and began trying to climb up onto the hood. Then we impacted the wrecked cars. Regina had lined us up so that the pointed center of the front blades hit between two of the cars, splitting them apart and pushing them to the sides. The dead man on the front of the truck was squashed into a greasy paste by the impact, his remains bouncing across the hood to fall to one side. You could hear the wrecked cars scrape down the sides of The Traveler until finally we were through them and Regina threw the rig into a hard right turn to get us back on the road we started on, just headed back to the turn we needed.
Moments later, she threw us into a hard turn to the left as we dropped down the ramp onto US50. By now she had the armored rig up to speed and was bulldozing her way through the wrecked and abandoned vehicles that littered the roadway. Several times the whole rig shook as she hit something that was more resistant to moving than most, but she kept us headed in the right direction. As we moved away from Fairfax, the dead began to thin out and finally we stopped firing, as the lone dead we saw were no threat.
It took us almost three hours to make the mile and a half journey down US50 to the Interstate 95 interchange. Pushing wrecked and abandoned vehicles out of the way to clear the roadway enough so that we could pass through took up most of that time. Once we reached the overpass at Interstate 95, we spent some time pushing wrecked vehicles off to the side of the bridge and then parked for the night.
Our night was rather sleepless as we all stayed on watch most of the night. I knew I would need to make a rotation schedule so that some of us could sleep while the others kept watch. But for tonight, we were all too wound up to sleep.
In the morning, we all gathered in the common area of the first trailer. Before we hit the road, we needed to fuel the rig. What fuel had been in the tanks was largely consumed by our escape from downtown Fairfax. Plans were made to minimize exposure, but this time the crew would not let me be the only one exposed.
Since we had to fill four fuel tanks and the pumps would be dead with no power, we decided that we would switch off who was outside the rig regularly. Pulling forward off the overpass, we pulled into the Flying J Truck Stop that was at the top of the southbound exit ramp. A quick bit of scouting found the tops to the truck stop's underground fuel tanks and Regina pulled the rig up next to them.
Tito and I hopped down, lugging a heavy crank operated pump between us. While Tito opened the top of the underground fuel tank, I setup the pump and put the filler hose into the first of the right side tanks. Handing Tito the long hose, he dropped it down into the tank and I began turning the crank to work the pump. At first it just spit air, then diesel fuel began to flow from the underground tank and into the rig. Tito backed off and unslung the M16 from his shoulder. He would cover me while I cranked the pump. Looking down the side of the rig, I could see barrels sticking out from the gun ports as the rest of the crew covered us from the inside.
After about 45 minutes, the first fuel tank overflowed. Stopping with the pump, I pulled the filler hose out and inserted it into the rear right side tank. Tito handed me his rifle and he took over the task of working the pump. By this time my arms were screaming, but I maintained the watch. After about 30 more minutes, Maurice and Phil opened the side door of the front trailer and relieved us.
Once the two tanks on the right side were filled, Regina started up the rig and pulled it around so we could get to the left side tanks. Maurice and Phil continued with the first left tank, switching places with each other. Once the first tank was filled, Tito and I exchanged places with them and started working on the last tank.
While Tito worked the pump, I kept a watch for the dead. About 15 minutes before I estimated that he would finish, a dead man came staggering from around the back of the truck stop itself. Hoping he would not notice us, I kept still and watched him. At first he took no notice of us at all, just staggering along like he actually had some place to go. Then old man Murphy decided to bite us in the ass. Tito's hand slipped off the pump handle and when his knuckles crashed into the iron frame of the pump, he cursed loudly. I saw the dead man's head lift.
"Hurry the hell up!" I yelled at Tito as I took aim on the dead man. A single shot to the forehead put him down, but a fat dead woman in an old faded pink waitress' uniform came staggering out from the truck stop. Even as I fired on her, I could see more of the dead coming out.
I could hear another M16 open up from inside the rig, one of the crew firing from a gun port. While I continued to fire two and three round bursts to the heads of the coming dead, whoever was inside was spraying the front of the truck stop with fire.
"How far are we?" I yelled at Tito.
"Close damn enough not to risk our asses!" he replied while pulling the filler hose from the tank and replacing its cap. While he unhooked the hoses and coiled them up, I kept the dead at bay. Once he finished, I grabbed one side of the pump and we hauled ass back into the rig, slamming the door of the armored trailer behind us.
When we first began our travels I was worried about being able to refuel this monster, thirsty rig. This fear soon dissipated by just how much refined fuel was left out here. Since there were very few people still alive to drive, finding a fuel station with available diesel was remarkably easy. Every town had multiple filling stations and the interstates were filled with truck stops. Each one had thousands of gallons of fuel available for the taking. We were very careful to never go below 30 full, and started looking to refuel when our tanks are about half empty. Still, we could go a long way before having to fill up. Thank goodness our old fuel-thirsty economy left behind this legacy of virtually limitless juice for The Traveler.