Wow, I'm published way ahead of schedule. I'm slowing down a bit now, partly for the holiday, and partly for technical issues that need a bit more research. IRL stuff has gotten worse too, but I'm hanging in. If any of this next part seems unbelievable, check out the author's notes and the list at the end of this chapter, as I've done feasibility checking and may not have written as believably as I have feasibly. Please enjoy, review, and tell me what you have already thought of and what you didn't realize was possible.
DARRYL GOES WITH OUR UNKNOWN STAR
A peculiar-looking vehicle sped quietly out of the darkness. It was shaped, vaguely, like an upturned knife blade in sections with the lead section tapering downwards to its point. Essentially a battery-powered all-terrain motorcycle under an aerodynamic shell, it was remarkably noiseless and matte black, giving no reflection. The second and third sections, towed along behind, were almost as aerodynamically thin and low. The vehicle plowed through six undead ambling down the road, scooping them so that they were catapulted over and to the sides, and came to a stop just before a wrecked semi blocking the entrance to an overpass.
The cab was crumpled around a barricade on the left. The trailer was jackknifed across the road at a diagonal, its rear sticking out over a slight, rocky drop-off without a guardrail. A panel door swung up on the left side of the front section of the odd vehicle. The masked man stepped out, a pair of night vision goggles over his ski mask. Drawing a long chef's knife in each hand, he deftly put down the three dead standing back up from impact with the vehicle and six more walking around the semi, spinning gracefully. The masked man cocked his head for a moment, sheathing the knives and studying the semi. He stepped to a fallen highway sign, picked it up, and whirled, decapitating a walking dead woman in a bloody dress. Completing his turn, he squatted, scraping the sign under the edge of the trailer's lead outside tire.
Pulling a pack out of the vehicle, he reached in and pulled out a spray can labelled 'Freon.' He adjusted a pair of matte-black gauntlets and walked toward the semi, shaking the spray can. He sprayed the hitch in a slow, back-and-forth motion. Condensation rapidly formed on the hitch. It iced over and cracked, loudly. The masked man collared a dead man in a suit crawling out from under the trailer and shoved him into the trailer hitch. The dead man staggered, started walking toward the masked man again. With a kick to the sternum, the masked man sent the dead man reeling into the hitch again. The two began cycling through the same motions, one shambling obliviously and the other with the precision and efficiency of a seasoned martial artist. After the fifth kick, the dead man cracked on impact with the trailer hitch. His left shoulder caved in. The trailer hitch broke into three pieces, partially separating the tractor and trailer. Two dead climbing over the hitch mount fell onto the pavement. Moving faster, the masked man broke both necks with one well-placed kick and tied one end of a rope to the hitch mount. He strung a length of rope across the street to the concrete barricade the sign had been attached to and tied it off, cutting the end loose from the coil up under his shirt.
He trotted back to the vehicle, stomping a growling head on the way, and pulled out a small bucket, a backpack, and a black, six-inch-wide, foot-long tube with a handle. He hung the bucket from a hook he folded out from his belt. He shouldered the noticeably heavier backpack, pulled a connector out of it, and hooked it to the handle of the tube. A small thumping came from inside the vehicle's second compartment. The masked man hesitated, then stepped over and opened it, swinging it up just like the first section. Darryl leaned out. "Wanta stretch ma legs."
"This way," the masked man led Darryl a few steps to the first compartment. The masked man folded out a grille from waist to eye level and a short treadmill just above the pavement. "Walk on that. I can't spare you a real weapon right now."
Darryl looked doubtfully at the treadmill. "You use walkers on that?"
The masked man cocked his head. "Dead. Yes. The dead walk on that."
Darryl tried it out. It was fairly quiet. Darryl walked on it, studying the setup as the masked man stepped forward and pulled a large, rusty bolt from the bucket. He tossed it up to the handheld tube and it silently fired between the tractor and trailer, downing an emerging dead woman wearing a choir robe. He reached into the bucket and held up a fork level to the ground. He aimed carefully, and the handheld device fired it into the skull of a skeletal man wearing a dress shirt and boxers emerging as the dead woman had. It fell.
"What IS that?" said Darryl.
"Coil gun," said the masked man. "Fires any iron or steel small object with magnetism. Takes a lot of battery power. One moment." The next dead body crawled out from under the semi. The masked man drew a staple gun and a small parcel from the vehicle's first section. He opened a volleyball net and stapled one end to the dead body as it walked into the rope. With two more well-placed staples, the masked man had the undead figure pinioned to the rope near the concrete barrier, spreading the net's end vertically from the rope at waist level to shoulder. The masked man unrolled the net to the trailer hitch and tied it off with a bit of twine from a pocket. The masked man got a second volleyball net out and stapled it from waist to shin. He unrolled it to the hitch mount and tied it off to the undercarriage of the trailer. A second dead man joined the first. The masked man fell back, downing three more dead coming between the cab and the trailer. "Walked enough?" Darryl nodded. "I'll get a dead one to keep charging the vehicle. You look like you have questions."
Darryl sat in the edge of his seat. "Where'd you get this thing?"
Two more dead joined the first three in the nets. "I built it. The plans for the first section, minus the shell and a few tweaks, were on file with an investment company when the dead rose. I used a bit more titanium than the steel they called for, but I needed the weight allowance for other things." The masked man neatly grabbed another dead body, the only one to have come from behind them, spun it completely around, and pushed it onto the treadmill. He rolled out a second grille and snapped it around the dead thing, locking it onto the treadmill. He glanced back, noting three more had joined the five in the nets. He trotted up and stapled them to the net and tested the rope. He broke the elbow of the only arm reaching over the net and walked back. "This treadmill is actually pretty efficient. I get over a thousand feet of travel to the dead-mile walked. Solar array, too." Darryl looked at him doubtfully. The masked man tossed Darryl a long flathead screwdriver. "Just in case," said the masked man. He walked back and silently fired some rusty nails at three more dead walking around the cab. They fell. He walked back to Darryl. Darryl frowned, "So, what are we lookin' for?"
"There are far too many little towns with churches with 'Resurrection' in their names. So I found the only steeplejack in the regional phone book and broke into his home. I was lucky enough he had a well-made map. I broke into the three water companies' offices in this area and took their maps. I resized the maps to match—"
"That's what that light was? A copy machine?"
"Yes. Nobody had taken the office supplies or ruined the equipment in that last office. I have a small ACDC converter unit. I used cheap fax paper for the final copies and did an overlay, eliminating everywhere that didn't have a listed water tower. That left four small townships. One of them had the water tower on the south side, so that left three. This is the second one. It looks promising! The exit off this highway is the fastest way to get there. One moment." The masked man pulled a small tool apron out of the vehicle and put it on, trotting downhill to the retaining pond. Using a pair of wire cutters, he rapidly cut loose a long section of chain link fence, bent the only two posts along its length outward, pulled it off them, and dragged it uphill. He wired one end to the concrete barrier, top and bottom, and stomped a head or a neck here and there as he wrapped the length of fence around the now roiling mass of about twenty dead in the reinforced volleyball nets. He stapled several dead to the fence, legs, arms, and torso, the top corner of the fence nearer the hitch end of the semi and wired the middle to the hitch mount with the cut ends. He pulled the coil gun and ended six more dead just out of sight of Darryl between the cab and trailer. He stapled the legs of three trampled bodies to the bottom of the fence at the hitch end and fired some more shards of metal under the semi and cab. As the dead faltered a bit, he pulled a hammer and smashed the trailer hitch pieces. He picked them up and put them in his bucket. He peeked between the cab and the trailer and sighed. He walked back. "Only about thirty more coming. Six more behind us. We don't want to be here all night."
"What're yew doin'?"
"I prefer to use the dead as mules. Starting an engine could tell a living person where I am. Fifty dead can turn a semi, even a loaded one, if they get it rocking and you put the tires out at the right time. I obviously prefer travel at night. Night vision is all I need. The dead DO register on infrared as about ten degrees higher than the air around them at their cores and brain stems. One moment." The masked man trotted back down the road to return with his left hand on the back of the neck of a dead mechanic holding a crescent wrench. The masked man hurried the mechanic along, neatly breaking the wrench hand loose at the wrist. The masked man climbed up onto the hitch mount and baited the dead mechanic to climb after him. The masked man led him up to the top of the hitch mount and pushed him off behind the semi. He jumped back down. He pulled out a bottle of Purell and went over his gauntlets and the wrench as he fetched it. He put the wrench on his toolbelt. He pulled homemade bullets from the tool apron and used the coilgun to flatten all the tires on the hitch end except the closest one. He kicked the signpost twice, adjusting the sign's placement. He flattened the last tire. The entire semi rocked in place, crumpling the sign around the wheel. The masked man opened fire at the dead coming into view at the hitch mount, felling six more. He motioned Darryl to sit in his seat. Darryl hesitated, but did so. The masked man felled a closing dead man as he trotted back to the vehicle, shut Darryl's door, felled another, and got in. He powered up the vehicle, turned its nose to the left about two feet—and the entire trailer rolled in an arc, missing the vehicle by inches as it crushed the dead to pieces and slid down the hill into the retaining pond. The masked man got out shooting, downing the last fifteen dead able to walk. He flipped a switch in the handle of the coilgun, pulled out a different bucket, and walked blithely around the bodies, using the coilgun to pull small metal debris from them. Each piece made a gentle arc in the air to be caught in the new bucket. The masked man rummaged a bit, pulled out a scratched Swiss Army knife, and came back to Darryl, using Purell on his gauntlets again. He pulled a bottle of Wesson oil out of a lower cabinet in his section, poured some into the debris bucket, and put everything back in its place, capping and stowing everything with practiced motions. He got in and drove them through the half-cleared highway, dawn a good three hours away. The grilles opened as they and the treadmill retracted, the speed of travel tearing the feet off their most recent power source. The body smashed to the pavement and lay still forever.
For those of you who don't know:
Coilguns are real. They are a more efficient variation of the rail gun, and there are internet tutorials on how to make one strong enough to fire a finishing nail twenty feet into wood with no more power than a disposable camera. It strikes me as the perfect weapon in the zombie apocalypse. This model I've imagined uses a trio of rechargeable lantern batteries and the equations for the circuits and specs of wire could be easily derived from any good physics book by any amateur technician.
Freon, such as the masked man uses on the hitch mount, is a real thing too. It used to be used commonly in air conditioners and readily available to retailers with the right permits before it became more thoroughly regulated. It can be used to destroy just about any rigid object if you don't mind messing with the ozone layer a bit.
The vehicle is loosely based on a combination of a speed cycle (aerodynamic shell around a racing bicycle) and a Zero, a battery-powered motorcycle talked up by Norman Reedus himself in "Ride" as the motorcycle of choice in the z.a. The treadmill charging system is my idea, but really—such a convenient source of power? Why IS no one using it in the shows? It's not like anyone has a need for gym equipment for anything ELSE in these shows!
The force required to tip over a semi IS high, but rocking one and putting out the right tires with near perfect timing? Forty people without fatigue or fear should be more than enough force. The only thing just as likely on a solid concrete bridge ramp would have been if the trailer had collapsed first instead of rolled to its side—and that still would've crushed most of the dead and given our two heroes something relatively flat to drive over and possibly still room to drive past.
Thank you all for reading. I welcome readers and reviewers.