900 Miles: A Zombie Novel (6 page)

Final message.

“John, you need to get here right away.  Owwwww!  The contractions have started.  The baby is coming!”

Nothing like
“incentive” to push a man pass his limits.  A man with the right kind of motivation can do anything.  Anything.

The phone felt cold in my sweaty hand.  Stunned, I remained with it pressed against my ear long after the final message ended.

Gazing down over the railing,
spinning my wedding ring on a shaking finger, my mind raced as I watched the waves spin off from the wake of the ferry.  Nothing would stop me.  Nothing could stop me.  I needed to get down to Atlanta.  Just 900 miles to go.

Kyle walked over.  Hesitant to say much, he mentioned that we were about twenty minutes from the drop point at the I95 in
Jersey.

Not making eye contact, I started to speak. The words just came pouring out. I explained to Kyle that my motivation to get home went beyond my wife.  I told him about my
unborn or maybe now-born child, and then went on to dissect the series of voicemail messages I had just received.

Having made that drive to the Blue
Ridge Mountains many times, I knew there was just a short period of time that Jenn would have been on I400.  If she only made it that far, then she’d have to make the decision to either turn around or head somewhere else.  They would never make it to the cabin with all the traffic and those things already running wild in the streets.

I noticed some movement in my peripheral vision to my left.  A man on the other side of the
ship appeared to be very agitated, incessantly looking into his car.  He was wearing a blue jump suit.  It was the kind you’d see on someone working in an auto garage.  Someone flipping out, I thought.  He wouldn’t be the last.

Still staring out at the ocean, I muttered to Kyle that Jenn was eight months pregnant.  She was pissed that I was leaving for this trip, and kept telling me that I’d really feel like shit if I missed the birth of our first child.

She was right.  I did feel like shit.

Neither of us said anything for a moment.

Changing the subject, I sighed heavily and said, “We really haven't talked about what we do next.  We only have one car.  Do you have someplace to go?  I understand if you need to get to someone or someplace different from where I’m heading.”

Kyle paused for a moment.  “I’ve been thinking about that actually.  My buddies down in
Augusta at Fort Gordon are the closest thing I’ve got to family. I’d like to go join up with them.  If you’re good with it, I figured we could travel together as far as Georgia.  We’ve gotten this far with each other, and besides, I don’t have any place to go. My apartment is under twelve feet of zombie shit by now.”

I always liked that about Kyle.  He had a way of making you laugh even during the
most tense situations.

I smiled, and
said, “I was hoping you wouldn’t make me get down on my hands and knees begging to come with you.  It’s a long trip to make by myself with all this madness.”

There was a shout from across the deck now. We both turned to look, as a few people were trying to hold the guy in the blue jump suit down.  He tore
loose, his jump suit sleeve tearing completely off, as he jerked his car door open.

In that instant, another guy in a blue jump suit jumped wildly out of the car.  He approached a woman who was sitting in awe watching everything go down, and took a giant chunk out of her shoulder.

She dropped to the ground, with her blood soaking into the wooden deck of the ship.  She twitched a few times, before she sat right back up, and ran over to the closest person to her.  Before anybody knew it, there were seven of those things running loose on the ship.

I could see the shore where we were heading.  We must have been less than five minutes from our destination.

Pulling my hammer from my belt, I glanced at Kyle, and then toward the crowd.  He nodded, and then we both advanced on the zombies.

Kyle had left his metal weapon in the
Hummer; a mistake he would not repeat.  He searched around for a moment, and found a gaff, a metal pole that was clearly for pulling things out of the water.  It looked about five feet long, and had a pointed hook on the end.

Today, it would serve a slightly different purpose than originally intended.

A newly turned Paker, dressed in his now blood-soaked black uniform, started right towards me. I could see the gouge on his neck where he’d been bitten, and knew I had to act fast. Drawing my arm back, I paused only slightly at the thought of killing one of the guys who had just earlier saved my life.  My body contracted as I arched up and then down swinging the hammer through its skull, making a deafening crack as it broke through the bone with the ease of a spoon cracking through an egg. It was so deeply embedded, that I had to put my foot on its shoulder to pull the weapon out of his skull. I closed my eyes, and shuttered as it popped out with some brain-like flesh hanging from the metal end.

I could hear a few bone fragments clang to the wooden floor
, as I looked up to see two women and a man sitting in their car with the doors locked.  Three of the creatures were beating the car with their bare, bloody hands before the first window shattered.

Fear gripped me. I thought of Jenn and our neighbors as they ripped one of the women right out of her seat.  She let out an
ear-piercing scream as all three of the creatures began to dig in. The other two passengers fought to escape the vehicle, only to step into their own deathly demise upon exiting the vehicle.

One heavier set guy not far from me was wearing a life preserver over a brown suit.  The preserver was literally pulled so tight around his waist that you could see fat rolls folding over the straps.  Two of the creatures saw him standing there, cowering in the corner. As they started to move towards him, he crawled up on the side of the boat, and simply rolled over the edge.

He bobbed up and down in the wake of the ship for a few seconds. I could see him doggy paddling toward the shore, when his whole body submerged below the water. He popped back up, arms waving frantically, screaming, “They are down there!”

He was pulled under again, and the water turned a dark red right where he was last seen. All I saw, before I turned back to the carnage on the deck of the ship, was the blood soaked orange life preserver bob up out of the water.

Despite our best efforts to fight them off, there were over a dozen of these things, and only a few of us left.

Mr. ’Stache had a
handgun. He was screaming that he was almost out of bullets, as he followed a few of the creatures up the stairs to where the captain of the ship was driving the ferry. I heard a number of shots echo in the cabin, and then a few more screams.

Less than two minutes from land, I thought.

Looking over at Kyle, and then toward the stairs, I said, “Best to head up there.”
“Yep, we’ll be able to guard the stairs as a choke point if needed,” he agreed.

“We’ve got to make sure this ship gets to shore,” I snapped as we darted to the upper deck.

As we turned the corner at the top of the staircase, it was Mr. ’Stache we ran into first.   He was still holding his gun, his finger locked on the trigger, but it was clearly out of bullets and pointed at the ground. His eyes moved slowly up to meet mine.  His mustache blew in the wind.

Kyle said, “They got him.”

There was a pause, as I realized what we had to do. He ran towards us with that wild look in his blood shot eyes. Kyle apologized out loud before delivering that final blow to his head.

No time to think about it.

We both headed to the cabin of the ship and quickly discovered that Mr. ’Stache had taken out the two creatures before they took that chunk out of his leg.

The captain was curled up in a ball in the corner of the cabin. He kept repeating,

“Not the water! Not the water! Not the water!”

He was right; the water must have been filed with those creatures
and there was no way in hell any of us wanted to wind up in it.

I grabbed the steering wheel, and aimed the ship at the nearest shore where there was a road. Kyle ran back out to the staircase. I could hear him grunting as he swung his metal pole at each creature that tried to make it up the stairs.

Thirty seconds to ground. Thirty seconds until we could escape.

I reached into my pocket pulling out the car keys to the Hummer. There was no slowing down this boat. We were
going
to make land.

Kyle ran into the cabin empty handed. He explained that he had dug the hook, at the end of the pole, into one of the creature’s brain, and couldn’t get it back out before it tipped overboard taking his weapon with it.

Ten seconds to ground.

“Anybody still alive,
you should grab on to something, and don’t let go!” I screamed out the cabin window.

Five seconds to ground.

There was a point just before we hit, where everything literally stopped.  My arms were clasped tightly around the steering wheel of the ship. I could see Kyle bracing himself in the doorframe.

I didn’t feel us hit ground as much as I saw it.  Anything not nailed down, or holding on for dear life, simultaneously flew into the air crashing towards the front of the boat. I watched a red fire extinguisher shoot above my head
and through the glass window; the captain of the ship followed it.

I swear we made eye contact as he flew over. His eyes were wide with a look of surprise, mixed with horror, as he passed above. He was lucky; the
extinguisher had shattered the glass, so he flew straight through the window frame unscathed.

He passed right beyond the front of the boat, over our Hummer, and rolled into a ball as he hit a patch of grass. It was a million dollar landing. I watched as he stood up, brushed his clothes off, and looked back up at the boat from which he came. He gave it a look as if to say, “I friggin’ made it?”

It was in that instant that all of the zombies that had flown off the boat with him started to stand back up as well. He reached for the closest object, a wooden paddle that had landed next to him, and began swinging around his head.

He was doing a decent job of warding the zombies off, when it became clear that the boat crash had caused enough noise to catch the attention of every other creature in the area as well.

He began to cry out for help as he slowly retreated towards the water’s edge. The dead relentlessly followed him. For every one he knocked down with that paddle, three replaced it.

Kyle and I were already moving towards the stairs when the captain decided to step into the water.  We began screaming toward him to stay on land.

“Do not go in the water!” Kyle yelled.

With no choice, the captain waded in waist deep, still swinging that paddle for all he was worth. We saw multiple sets of
waterlogged arms reach up out of the water behind him.

There was a loud scream, then silence as they pulled him under. There was a fury of thrashing before bubbles arose. The paddle was all that was left, floating in the now calm surface,
as if it never happened.

Keys in one hand, and my hammer in the other, I began a cautious decent easing
past the dead zombie slain on the steps.  The deck looked like a war zone. We had to navigate across a sea of blood soaked, shattered wooden planks before we got to the Hummer.

Being the last vehicle to have boarded the ferry, it wasn’t blocked in like some of the other cars.  However, it
was still parked in the entry position, so it became rather obvious that we’d be making a reverse exit.

I stepped towards the
gate, which was still locked in the upright position, and I noticed that just beyond the ship’s walls were at least fifty of the undead.  They were reaching up towards the railings, trying to get on board.

I watched as they started to crawl over each other to get to the top, a trait beaten into mankind over time. A trait that these creatures now carried with them even into death.

Unfortunately, they were really making progress.  One of them had its hands on the railing. She had her hair pulled back in a ponytail, and was dressed in the kind of clothing one would wear camping.  She had a small abrasion on her arm where another zombie had bitten her.  Aside from that, she could have been confused with a living woman, except for her eyes.

They call it having a ‘tell’ in Poker. 
A tell is a change in a behavior or demeanor that gives a clue as to the hand the player is holding. In this case,
some of these things could easily be confused with being “alive” if it wasn’t for their clear tell.  Each zombie had blood-red eyes that were glazed over with a clear white film.  A person always knows if they’re up against the living or the dead once they get close enough to see their eyes.

I walked over and cracked
its skull open with my hammer.  It fell limp, and dropped back into the crowd.  I could feel it with each one.  It was getting easier each time I had to kill. I was starting to feel distanced from the act, as if it wasn’t my arm swinging the hammer.