Black Tide Rising - eARC (4 page)

Rochelle Lewis wasn’t exactly “young.” Andy wasn’t sure of her age but the restaurant manager looked to be somewhere in her late thirties or early forties. But given that their group did have a high percentage of older people—Pedro’s mother was in her
eighties
—she could see Tom’s point.

What the hell. She liked Rochelle herself and the idea of leaving the woman all alone in a shuttered restaurant was just…

Creepy.

“Okay,” she said. “We’ll swing by the diner and pick her up too. Now get in. We’re in a hurry.”

As if to add emphasis to her words, they heard a screech coming from somewhere nearby. Several screeches, in fact. Zombies weren’t exactly pack hunters, but from what she’d seen on the television they did usually come in groups.

Sam hurried over to Pedro’s truck and the caravan was on its way again.

Fortunately, the diner didn’t take them very far out of their way. When they pulled up outside, Sam hopped out of the truck and went over to the door and started slapping it with her hand.

“Open up, Rochelle! Open up!”

A few seconds later, the door swung open. The African-American woman standing there was not much taller than Sam herself and just about as pretty, although her good looks were more on the elegant side than what you’d call “cute.”

She seemed a little startled when Sam gave her a fierce hug. Technically, the younger woman was Rochelle’s employee, after all, not a close friend or relative. But within two seconds she was returning the hug.

Tom leaned out of the window. “Come on, girls! We gotta
move.
Rochelle, there’s room in the Haywood’s SUV since they just got their daughter with them.”

Rochelle looked at the vehicle in question, then back at Tom and Andy. “Where y’all going?”

“Just…call it ‘up on the roof.’ Best place we can think of—and sure as hell a lot better than being holed up by yourself in there.”

The manager still hesitated. Andy leaned over and shouted past her husband.

“Damn it, Rochelle—
come on!
That door you got on the restaurant’s mostly glass. It won’t take zombies more’n a few seconds to smash their way in.”

After a moment, the woman nodded. “Okay.” She gestured behind her. “Anything in here I should bring with me? The owner’s off visiting his folks in Ohio and he’s a shithead anyway.”

Apparently, Tom had already been thinking along those lines because his answer came instantly. “Yeah, there is. Grab whatever big knives you got and toss ’em into the biggest pots you got. Then—you’ll need help”—he gestured with a thumb to the vehicles behind them—“because we want all the table cloths you can bring.”

“Table cloths?” Rochelle frowned, obviously puzzled.

“Yeah. They’re some kind of plastic, right? We’ll want them to collect rainwater. Ain’t no Artesian wells where we’re going.”

Andy heard the sound of more screeching. It seemed to be coming from a distance—but no distance was great enough to suit her, in a zombie apocalypse.

“Do what he says, Rochelle! And please—
hurry.
”

* * *

It seemed to take forever, but it was probably less than five minutes before they were on their way again. They’d managed to stuff the Haywood’s SUV with all the table cloths in the restaurant and both Rochelle and Jayden now had big pots on their laps filled with cutting implements. Rochelle had added some ladles also, Andy was glad to see. Men could wax poetically about the wonders of duct tape but any sensible woman knew that a ladle was God’s true gift to humanity.

Next stop—finally—was the tank farm. It wasn’t more than a couple of miles away now.

Freddy had quickly figured out that trying to go straight down Indianapolis would be hopeless. The big boulevard had too many places on it where looters would be congregating—and where there were looters, there were bound to be zombies. The huge Cabela’s store just south of I-80 had to be a lunatic bin by now.

So, he detoured down Kennedy. There were plenty of commercial strips on that street also, but none of the really big stores that would be drawing whole crowds.

Even then, driving was tricky, between reckless drivers and even more reckless pedestrians—not to mention a zombie here and there. They were the worst, in a way. Naked as they were and unarmed, Freddy wasn’t worried that a zombie could smash into his big commercial van before he got away from them. But what he
was
worried about was simple contact between a zombie and his vehicle. God forbid he should run over one and have zombie blood splattered all over the underside of the van and its wheels. Freddy wasn’t sure exactly how the zombie virus got transmitted, but he figured zombie bodily fluids were pretty much guaranteed to be a vector.

So, he had to weave around the zombies—three of them, north of the interstate; thankfully, they got sparse once he crossed I-80—which required some driving that you could either call “artful” or “crazy,” take your pick. Ahead of him, on his motorcycle, Eddie Haywood had to do the same, of course. But dodging zombies on a motorcycle was a piece of cake compared to doing it with a van designed for industrial work.

They probably couldn’t have avoided one of the zombies at all, except that Freddy had had the foresight to insist that Ceyonne ride with him and Jack instead of behind Eddie on his motorcycle. Neither Ceyonne nor Jack had been happy with the arrangement—Ceyonne because she’d rather have been with her boyfriend and Jack because no fifteen-year-old boy thinks it’s proper for a man to be riding in the middle, dammit—but it put Ceyonne at the passenger’s window.

With a gun and the temperament to match.

“Fuck you, asshole!” she’d yelled at the one zombie impossible to dodge. After Freddy brought the van to a screeching halt, Ceyonne hopped out of the vehicle, took a shooter’s stance she’d clearly learned from her father, and brought the zombie down with four shots.

And then complained about it for the next mile.

“Dinky little .380,” she groused, as she reloaded. “Took me
four rounds.
Coulda done it with one—okay, two; Dad trained me to always double-tap—with the nine millimeter. Which is stuck inside Eddie’s saddlebag where it ain’t doing any good at all.”

Sitting next to her, Jack’s face was even paler than usual. Truth be told, Freddy was a little shocked himself. The girl was only seventeen and he was sure this was the first time in her life she’d ever killed anyone. Yet she seemed no more rattled by what had happened than she would have been by shooing away flies.

Something in their expressions must have registered on her, because Ceyonne’s expression became half-defensive and half-belligerent. “Look, guys, they ain’t
people.
They got no brains left—hell, not even as much as a dog or a cat. My Dad told me not to think of ’em as anything except targets.”

“It’s okay, Ceyonne,” Freddy said, trying for as soothing a tone as he could manage. “I’m just glad you’re along.”

Which, he realized, was the plain and simple truth.
Focus, Freddy. Zombie apocalypse, remember?

“Yeah, me too,” said Jack.

* * *

Cutting the padlock on the gate leading into the tank farm took but a few seconds. Within a minute, the entire caravan was inside the grounds, as Andy looked for the best storage tank she could find.

She picked one right at the center of the facility, which was at least two hundred yards away from the nearest road. It was one of the bigger ones, too, which would give them the most space.

“Don’t park right next to it,” warned Tom. “Otherwise zombies might climb up on it trying to get to the rood. They won’t manage anyway, but they might wreck the truck and we’ll probably need it again.”

That seemed good advice—for later. Right now, she wanted to be as close to the base of the staircase as possible. They had a twenty-foot moving truck to unload, along with two pickups and an SUV—and then had to haul everything more than fifty feet up a narrow steel staircase. With, as her husband had pointed out, way too high a percentage of old farts to do the work.

Not to mention that getting
him
up there was probably going to be the hardest work of all.

Tom knew it himself. “Don’t worry about me until Freddy gets here,” he said. “Just get me out of the truck and onto my wheelchair—and hand me the rifle in the case behind the seat. I’ll keep guard while the rest of you do the scut work.”

It would have been nice if he hadn’t been smiling like a damn cherub when he said it.

Damn old fart. This was going to be
exhausting.

First, they hauled the tents and tool sheds up to the top. When Andy got to the roof for the first time, she was a little stunned by how big
it was. She’d never seen one of these storage tanks from up close before.
One hundred and ten feet in diameter
doesn’t sound like much until you’re standing on top of it. Whatever concerns she’d had that they might not have enough room vanished instantly. They had about as much in the way of square footage as a fricking
mansion
—a real one, too, not a McMansion.

Not so much in the way of furnishings, of course. Still, she was cheered up a lot.

* * *

Her good mood faded, as the work progressed and she got more and more tired. The tank, as it turned out, had a functioning crane hoist that was capable of lifting more than a ton. But it couldn’t work that fast and they needed to get everything up on the roof as soon as possible. So while the heaviest items got brought up with the hoist, that still left most of the stuff to be hauled up the old-fashioned way. All sixty-eight of her years were complaining loudly and bitterly, before too long.

Having a husband who spent his time providing advice—while
he
was perched on a wheelchair—didn’t improve her mood. The fact that it was mostly good advice didn’t make it any better.

“Don’t bother setting up the tents and the tool sheds yet,” Tom said. “No point in it until we’ve got insulation down. Speaking of which”—he pointed to the south—“on the way in, I spotted a big stack of wood pallets over by the asphalt plant. We oughta use them for our base flooring. They’ll not only help insulate against electric currents but they’ll keep us above water when it rains.”

Andy might have snarled at him, but Luis and Pedro nodded and took off in the now-emptied pickups to get the pallets.

It
was
good advice. And so what? Andy knew she loved the old bastard, even if sometimes—like right now—she couldn’t remember why.

Trying not to curse out loud, she started up the staircase with another load. Maybe she’d get lucky and have a heart attack before she died of exhaustion.

* * *

Just as Tom had foreseen, the Office Depot was empty of people. There was a mob across the street looting the Meijer’s store—hypermarket, they were sometimes called. Like a Wal-Mart’s, it combined a supermarket with a cut-rate department store. Filled with stuff that people would need to survive a zombie apocalypse.

Unlike an office goods store. Quiet as a church mouse.

Until an alarm went off when they smashed in the door. Freddy was a little concerned, then. Not because the alarm would draw cops—he doubted if any were still on duty besides Ceyonne’s stubborn father—but because it might draw zombies.

“Ceyonne, you stand guard out here while the three of us gather up the stuff we need. Come on, guys. We may as well start with the cases of paper.”

As he’d expected, that work was a genuine bitch—and hauling the cases up a fifty-five foot staircase later was going to be even worse. But he was a big, strong man and his two helpers were both good-sized boys and, best of all,
teenagers.
Use all that energy for something more useful than what teenage boys usually got into.

Loading fifty cases didn’t really take that long. Tossing in the floor mats took even less. And while it was going to take a bit of time to gather up things such as tape and bubble wrap just because there was a lot of it, the stuff seemed lighter than feathers compared to the paper.

And even the time spent wasn’t that much, once Eddie figured out they could use big plastic containers to hold all the tape.

The only problem came at the very end. Just as they were carrying out the last rolls of bubble wrap, they heard Ceyonne hollering outside. She had a very loud voice, as you might expect from a girl with her impressive chest.

“
Get the fuck away from here, you assholes! I’m not fooling wit’ you! I will shoot you dead!
”

Freddy dropped his bundles of bubblewrap and raced outside, fumbling at the pistol he had holstered to his own hip.

When he passed through the door, he saw that Ceyonne was confronting three zombies. Two females, one male—but with zombies, even naked like they were, gender distinctions didn’t register much.

He finally managed to get the flap undone on the holster. But before he could draw the pistol, Ceyonne started firing.

She was using her big Smith & Wesson M&P now, not the little Ruger. The nine millimeter rounds packed a lot more punch than the .380, but the recoil wasn’t as bad because the gun was more than twice as heavy as the Ruger. That probably didn’t matter all that much, though, given that Ceyonne had big hands to go with her overall size.

Bam—bam. Bam—bam. Bam—bam.
Three double-taps and all three zombies were down. Down, and either dead or dying. He thought she’d missed one of the shots but it hadn’t mattered.

Ceyonne stepped forward a few paces, aimed carefully, and shot all three in the head.

“Gotta shoot zombies in the brain or they don’t stay down,” she explained.

By then, Jack was outside too. “Uh…they’re not actually undead, you know. Just people infected by a virus that makes them insane. I don’t think you really need to shoot ’em in the head.”

“I seen it on
The Walking Dead,
” Ceyonne insisted. “Hell, watch any zombie movie.”

“It’s not worth arguing about,” Freddy said forcefully. “Come on, let’s finish loading and get the hell out of here.”

“I’m riding with Eddie on the way back,” Ceyonne said, even more forcefully.

Freddy didn’t contest the issue. Ceyonne was looking more and more like Annie Oakley or Calamity Jane and who in their right mind is going to argue with women like that? Much less seventeen-year-old girls.