Roads Less Traveled (32 page)

“Oh, yeah, baby! Kickin’ evil in the ass, one rotten bastard at a time! Woo!” Jake screamed, laughing like an insane clown.

That’s when things got desperate. We had to literally kick and claw our way to the pharmacy, still firing our weapons as we fought. More than once I thought
Thank God they’re slow, thank God they’re slow
. But their sheer numbers made up for their lack of speed. If they got you surrounded, totally engulfed you, there simply wasn’t much you could do. Jake and I saw we were very close to that point, hence our psychotic kickboxing.

We finally reached the pharmacy and I screamed for Jake to hold them off one second so I could get the door open. Good thing it only took a second, and that it hadn’t been locked. I stepped inside and grabbed Jake by the collar, ripping him out of the hands of four deadheads. I slammed the door shut and Jake stumbled around trying to find something to push in front of it. That’s when the obvious hit me in the face and I flipped the deadbolt.

“Jesus Christ,” I croaked, bent over with my hands on my knees and panting so hard I thought I would pass out. Jake still looked for something to brace the door with, and finally came across a perfume display. He pushed and dragged it over to the door, slid it into place, then joined me in panting and cursing.

“We’re screwed! I mean totally screwed, dude! How the hell are we gettin’ outta here?” Jake was close to hysterics as the zombies outside beat and thumped against the door. And the moaning! How the hell does anything make a sound like that? You would think their lungs would be in such a state of decomposition by now that they would barely be able to eke out a whisper, let alone that spine-tingling, deafening, horrifying moan. And the more that joined in, the more it sounded like a roar. A long, steady, endless roar.

“Hey! Get ahold of yourself, goddammit!” I shouted in his face and shook him by the shoulders. He stopped freaking out and fixed his eyes on my face.

“Alright. Okay. Now listen, we’re inside now, so let’s get what we came for. We’ll figure out the rest later,” I said and began leading him towards the back of the store.

* * *

Night had fallen and we were still trapped inside the CVS. Having forgotten the backpack on one of our horses, we had to stuff our jackets and pants pockets with as much antibiotics and pain medicine as we could and hope it was enough. We sat behind the pharmacy counter, drinking Pepsi’s and eating some chips we had taken from the snack aisle. We had yet to come up with an escape plan, but for the moment we were safe. That had to count for something.

To kill time until one of us had an epiphany, I asked Jake about Teresa and the directions he had given her back to the house. The route was slightly different than the one we had taken, in order for her to bypass the obstacles we had run into. He said she was familiar with the area, and knew where Matias was, so she didn’t have any trouble understanding his directions. Assuming he was right, I figured she should arrive at the house sometime the next day, and hopefully we would be out of the pharmacy and on the road home by then as well. We decided we would take the route Teresa was taking, and barring any further “problems,” would arrive home a day or so after her.

I glanced at my watch: 11:27. I didn’t want to spend the night here. We had already been gone too long, and the clock was ticking for Mia. I stood and paced the floor, focusing and bringing up the layout of the street in my mind. Somehow we needed to get around the deadheads surrounding the store, no doubt in the hundreds by now, make it two streets over to the edge of town, then book it to the woods. We also needed a way to stop the zombies from following us. No amount of scent-block was going to help us now that we’d been located. Every zombie between here and the edge of town would be broadcasting our location as soon as we were on the move.

And that’s when it hit me. This was a pharmacy, and like every pharmacy, it had a cooler section filled with another type of medication. I had seen it when I got our Pepsi’s.

“Jake, follow me,” I said and made a beeline to the liquor aisle. He jumped up and followed me, and once seeing where I was headed, understood immediately what I was thinking.

“Of course! Why didn’t I think of that? Hell, that’s how I started this nightmare - blowin’ shit up,” he said and laughed. He grabbed a beer from the cooler as I walked up and down the aisle, looking at all of the champagne, wine, and whiskey bottles.

“We need something to carry these in, and see if you can find some matches,” I instructed as I began taking several whiskey bottles off the shelf and setting them on the floor. He came back with some plastic bags and several rags. I didn’t even ask where he got those, but told him we wouldn’t need them.

“Aren’t we makin’ cocktails?” he asked. I shook my head and started filling the bags with the bottles, triple-bagging them so hopefully they wouldn’t break on our way out of there.

“No, these aren’t for our escape. I already have a plan for that. We need a way to stop them from following, so we’re gonna make a firewall.” I smiled up at him as I finished up, then stood and handed him half the load. He looked confused for a minute, raising an eyebrow at me when he finally figured out where I was going with it.

“Come on, we need to get on the roof,” I said and headed towards the stock room.

* * *

“Ok, now what, Boss?” Jake asked as we surveyed the area from the pharmacy rooftop. The street on both sides of the store was absolutely clogged with the walking dead, the stench so thick you could almost see it, and the moaning even louder from our vantage point. We stayed low to avoid being spotted, and it being nighttime also helped. We stood at the edge of the roof next to the neighboring store, estimating how far a jump it would be.

“These buildings are as close together as the houses are, so if we can’t jump a few feet, there’s something wrong,” I said, clearly more confident in our agility than Jake was.

“If we can do this, all the way down to the last building, we’ll be in the clear to cross the street and get outta here,” I added. Jake rubbed his chin and turned to me.

“Yeah, but say we do make it. Just how the hell are we supposed to get down?” He pointed down the row of buildings, then to the street. Obviously I had not thought this through.

“Well, how much of a drop do you think that is?” I said. So far, staying low and talking in hushed voices hadn’t alerted the nasties below. Jake leaned his head over the side, then turned back to me.

“Looks like about twenty feet. No way I’m jumpin’ down that,” he said. I looked down the street to the last building, and then pointed something out to him.

“Well, shit. I didn’t see that,” he said and chuckled. The last store on the street had a large awning that spread the entire storefront. So if Jake was right, and it was twenty feet to the ground, the awning should break our fall at about ten, leaving another ten to the ground. Theoretically speaking, of course. I personally had no experience in awning-jumping, but I’d seen it many times in the movies. No problem.

“Alright, so let’s get jumping,” I said as I stood and took a few steps back. Jake stayed low, waiting until I cleared the ledge before jumping himself. Knowing there was no better time than the present, and that if I stood there too long I would lose my nerve, I took a running leap over the edge. I cleared the next roof by almost four feet and fell on my face when my feet hit and my knees buckled. I panicked, thinking that I had broken the whiskey bottles, so I pushed myself up onto my knees and checked the bag. Not even a chip.

Jake landed with a thud almost on top of me, but I grabbed and steadied him so he wouldn’t make as much noise as I had when I fell.

“Only three more to go,” I said as we crawled to the far edge. It seemed we were still moving along the rooftop undetected; so far so good. Building after building we jumped, with little or no mishaps. By the time we made it to the last building, our knees were torn open and bleeding and the palms of our hands were scuffed to hell, but the whiskey bottles were okay.

“Damn, these were my favorite jeans,” Jake said. “I thought you said this would be a piece of cake?” He was grinning when I looked over at him from the front ledge of the store. I smiled and shook my head, then motioned him over. We had succeeded in giving the deadheads the slip; they were still closed in around the pharmacy. Granted, there were so many of them that the body of the horde stretched pretty far up and down the street. But they were crammed in so close, smashing and crushing one another in their desperation to break into the store, that the end of the horde was well to our left.

“This is going to hurt, but try to tuck and roll or something. Maybe try to land close to the edge of the awning, so you can grab hold and steady yourself before jumping to the ground. And for God’s sake, don’t break the bottles,” I said as Jake prepared to jump. He smiled and winked before climbing over the edge and letting go. I watched him fall, hit the awning like a rubber ball, bounce off, and land with a thud on the street below. But, the bottles didn’t break; he had them clutched tightly to his chest with both arms wrapped around them.

I didn’t wait to see if he was okay. I climbed over the ledge as Jake had, except I positioned myself closer to the awning’s edge - as I had instructed him to do, by the way – and let go. As soon as my feet hit the awning, I reached out blindly and grabbed for anything to hold onto. Luckily for me, I grabbed the edge of the awning. See, I knew that would work.

Jake was rolling around as I was hanging from the awning. When I hit the pavement, he was sitting up and rubbing his back. I tucked and rolled when my feet hit, doing as Jake had done and holding the bottles tightly against my chest. I got to my feet quickly with relatively few injuries and hurried over to help him to his feet.

“Can you walk?” I whispered as I dragged him upright. My eyes were fixed ahead on the zombies who had taken an interest in us. Jake was swearing, as usual, and bending his arms and legs.

“Yeah, but I think I broke a fuckin’ rib,” he said, still trying to recover from getting the air knocked out of him. I began pulling him across the street and towards the houses.

“We have to go, now,” I said firmly. He turned his eyes in the direction of mine, saw what was coming, and promptly started limping and skipping his way across the street. I had put the last clip into my gun before we jumped, so as we struggled through the first walkway, I instructed Jake to have the matches ready and in his hand. I would keep my gun up to take down anything that got in our way. And besides, he was out of full clips.

Thankfully the next street was entirely devoid of zombies; no doubt they were all over at the pharmacy. We could hear the groans as the horde tried to follow us, but as I turned to look back down the way we came, I had to laugh out loud. The idiots were trying to cram into the walkway, all at once. This was unexpected, and would definitely work to our advantage. I made another mental note about these things having a one track mind, no matter what was in their way, and took the lead with my gun raised as we entered the space between the next row of houses.

“Almost there,” I said to Jake over my shoulder. I could see the short distance of abandoned field at the end of the walkway, and the woods on the other side. I did a quick mental calculation, figuring out which direction we would need to go once we got into the trees, and roughly how far away we were from the horses. I stopped at the end of the half-assed alleyway, looked around the corner quickly to make sure the coast was clear, and took off running across the field. Jake was trying to keep up, but he was really hurting now and falling further and further behind. I waited about twenty feet from the tree line for him to catch up and watched the walkway we had just left. So far, no deadheads. They were probably still trying to cram themselves down the first one.

When Jake finally made it to me, we started taking one bottle of whiskey at a time from each of our bags, walking away from each other in a straight line, and pouring it onto the ground. When we finally ran out of liquor, I whistled, giving him the cue to light his end up. I did the same; taking a matchbook out of my pocket and lighting one. I tossed it on the whiskey dampened grass, and waited a terrifying moment for it to catch. I heard a whoosh, looked over, and saw Jake hurrying as quickly as he could in my direction, still lighting matches and tossing them to the ground as he walked. His end was already burning, the flames rising high in the night sky.

Just as I was about to light another match, my end caught. The fire fed on the whiskey, eating its way down the line as Jake and I continued throwing matches in. Soon, the entire field would be a blazing firewall between us and the thousands of deadheads slowly coming our way. I didn’t plan on sticking around to watch. I grabbed Jake as soon as he reached me and threw one of his arms around my shoulders.

“It worked. I think we’re in the clear. Let’s get home,” I said as we ran into the trees together.

Part Three

Road to Nowhere

Chapter Eighteen

October 20
^th

As the sun set behind the mountains on the twentieth day of the zombie uprising, Nancy, Zack, Ben, and Kyra stood around the living room lamp and watched it flicker. An hour earlier, the power had gone out, only to come back a few minutes later. Now it seemed it was in its final death throes, alternating between brightness and dimness, then flickering like a flame.