The Great Wreck (4 page)

           
I boarded up every window of the
single level ranch house starting on the outside. I shot nails and drilled
screws until my hands, arms, and shoulders shook from exhaustion and still I
kept pounding. When I had finished the outside, I moved inside and did the same
thing leaving just enough space on each window to peek out but not enough space
for those things to get a finger hold on. Then I closed up the doors sealing
Georgie and I in. It was well after midnight when I was done. Georgie had
fallen asleep in front of the television a few houses earlier. I plopped my
trembling body down next to her and watched the destruction unrolling on the
television before I too fell asleep on the couch next to her.

           
I woke with a start the next morning
with the girl from the supermarket’s scream in my ears. I strapped on two nine
millimeter handguns and a vest stuffed full of ammunition. The TV showed the
symbol for the emergency broadcast system. I flipped through the channels.
Nothing. Every station was broadcasting the same thing. I flipped on the radio
which was still broadcasting and listened to the reporter describing the chaos
in the city. I left it on and went to the kitchen where Georgie was making
breakfast.

           
“Morning, Daddy.” I notice Georgie,
too was wearing the two Glocks around her hips that I had bought her as a birthday
present. She hated them when she unwrapped the present and said they
represented violent sexism. I didn’t know what the hell that was supposed to
mean but luckily her mother, much better at gift giving than I was had bought
her an iPhone and iPad too so all was well.

           
“Daddy.” That was bad. Georgie had
stopped calling me Daddy when she was ten switching over to the more hip Dad.
She reverted for a while after her mother had died but was back to Dad after
about a year. I took it as a good sign that she was healing.

           
And now back to Daddy, “Morning
sweetie,” I said watching her as she fried up a few eggs and slip them onto my
plate as I poured myself some coffee. She looked so much like her mother it
hurt.

           
Arli and I had met at Texas A&M.
She was pursuing a degree in Veterinary Science. I was pursuing a degree in
pussy. Arli’s family were descendants of hard working Catholic Korean
immigrants who came to this country sometime in the last century and made a
life for themselves in west Texas. I lived in Arbero County and came from a
shiftless, no good red neck, white, Anglo Saxton protestant family that worked
hard at alcoholism and adultery. But I refused to follow my forebears into the
same trap of alcoholism and poverty and somehow manage to get my ass into
college. There I avoided the booze but couldn’t avoid the women. I was a
strapping two hundred and forty pound, six foot five, and good looking rough
neck and those pretty little college girls just threw themselves at me.

           
Then I met Arli. She was tough and
beautiful, so confident and sure of herself and the things she wanted out of
life. And a two hundred and forty pound Casanova was not one of them.
 
Her skin was light brown with the lightest
gray green eyes I had ever seen. She had a small button nose and full lips that
had a perpetual “fuck you” type of smile on them. I fell in love with her
immediately. It took me the better part of a year pursuing her before finally
landing a first date
 
but only after one
of the horses she was treating kicked me square in the head knocking me cold
and sending me to the hospital for a full two weeks.

           
As I lay recovering with a severe
concussion, she visited me. I must have been charming even as drugged up as I
was because when I asked her out for the umpteenth time, she smiled as said
yes, “It’s the least I can do after my horse kicked you in the head.” We were
married two years later, right after graduation, bought the ranch, and started
our horse breeding business. Then we had Georgie. Things were so good for those
few short years. Then came the economic meltdown, then the cancer, and now
this.
 

           
Georgie stood at the stove peering
through the peep holes on the boarded up windows. She was growing up into a
beautiful young lady. I knew that soon I would have to start beating back the
hordes of young men that would soon start piling up at my doorstep chasing
after her. But that thought slipped from my mind as I remembered the other
hordes running through the streets of Albuquerque and thought that normal young
men chasing Georgie would be far better.

           
“Daddy,” she said in a whisper that
made the hairs stand up on the back of my neck, “Something’s at the fence
line.” Something, she said, not someone.
 
I pushed my uneaten breakfast away from me, joining Georgie at the
window. The front of the ranch sloped gently away from the house and through
the slot between the two by fours I cloud see all the way down to the fence
line nearly a mile away. At first I couldn’t see anything but the pine and
juniper trees on the other side of our fence and the dry grass that populated
the field in front of the ranch. Then something moved near the main gate. It
could have been a man, I couldn’t really tell at this distance. Whatever it was
it moved along the fence weaving back and forth but even from this distance I
could see that it was covered in bright red blood. Either it had been killed
recently or it had killed someone else recently. Behind it something else moved
a bit deeper into the tree line, “Two more over there,” Georgia said.

           
I could see them moving in and out
of the trees, a few more bumping into the fence or walking along to the east,
“How the fuck did they get her so fast?” I said aloud.

           
I felt an elbow in my rib and heard
Georgie say, “Language,” in an absent manner.

           
 
“Pack up everything you can fit on the ATV’s
trailer. We might have to leave here in a hurry,” I said. Georgie nodded and
went into the other room while I watched a few more of the things drift out of
the tree line. They bumped aimlessly about seemingly harmless but I figured
that one of them would stumble over the low fence and eventually catch their
scent. One good scream would bring them all running towards the house and I
didn’t know if all the wood in the world would hold them back.

           
I made my way to my bedroom and
started packing the bare minimum I would need to take with us up into the
Sandia mountains. The ranch ran all the way back to the steeply rising
foothills. Behind the back fence there was an old logging road that had been
widened and turned into a firebreak. That would lead them up into the mountains
and to…where? I didn’t know. I just knew that they weren’t going to be able to
ride out whatever was happening here at the ranch if many more of those things
showed up. I went into the basement and grabbed all of our camping gear, water
packs, propane stoves, and tents. I hoped to God we didn’t have to sleep
outdoors anywhere but if we couldn’t find a cabin or something else, a tent
could mean the difference between life and death up on the cold mountains even
in the middle of summer.

           
We finished packing everything we
could carry on our quad runners and the small trailers that I could hook to the
back end of them, then took up watching the dead from the house’s front
windows. By midmorning there were ten of them. By noon a hundred with more deep
in the trees. Worse they had begun moving to the left and the right along the
property line. At the rate they were moving, that would put them at the back of
the ranch by sundown.

           
So many of them. Whatever was
happening in the city had spread with frightening speed for these things to
have made it out to the ranch so fast. I watched in horror as the first one
stumbled over the fence and plopped down inside our property, “It’s time to
go,” I said. Georgie nodded. We made our way out the back of the house locking
the doors as we did after we piled all of our gear onto the back porch.

           
We trotted across the back yard to
the barn where we kept the two quad runners, our heads rotating back and forth
watching for the things, terrified that at any moment we would hear their
screams and they would come pouring around the corner of the house. But all
remained silent as we opened the doors of the barn and grabbed the two small
trailers. We wheeled them back to the porch and loaded up our gear, strapping
it down tight on the trailers, then, much more slowly dragging the full
trailers back into the barn. I closed and locked the doors behind us after
carefully scanning the entire area around the house. The barn was directly
behind the main house and blocked the view of the front of the property line.
That was good as it kept the things from seeing us but was bad as well since I
couldn’t know how many had fallen over the fence while we were loading up our
gear.

           
We hooked the trailers onto the quad
runners and pushed them back to the rear doors of the barn. Again, I slowly
slide one door back and peeked through the crack. The back of the property was
clear all the way to the rear gate that would take us to the fire break and up
into the mountains. I pushed the door all the way back, wheeled the two quad
runners out of the barn, then closed and locked the door behind us. Everything
was locked up tight. All the supplies they couldn’t carry with them were sealed
and stored waiting for us should we ever come back.

           
We began to slowly push our rigs
towards the back fence. The quads were heavy enough by themselves but with all
the gear piled onto the trailers, they were even heavier and it was slow going
with many stops and breaks along the way until we finally reached the back
gate. I undid the lock and got our cycles through and onto the other side. I
had decided that if the coast was clear, we’d start up our bikes here and make
a break for the hills. No matter what those things were, they were still just
the remains of human beings and were unlikely to be able to catch us once we
got rolling.

           
I snapped the lock on the gate shut
when I felt Georgie’s hand on my shoulder. I looked back at her and saw the
fear etched into her face. She slowly pointed off to my right a hundred yards
or so down along the fence. A person was standing there looking back away from
us. A women from what I could tell, maybe an office worker from the way she was
dressed. Or had been dressed when she had been attacked. Her clothes were in
tatters: blouse torn open and covered with blood and viscera, her skirt
shredded and hanging from her belt. Her head had been badly damaged with most
of her skull and brains exposed and eaten. She stood there swaying back and forth
sniffing the wind like a dog on the hunt. If we started up our rigs now, she’d
be on us in a flash. Shooting her would just bring the others running. I had to
take care of this as quietly as I could.
           

           
I slowly slid an axe with a long
handle out of my trailer and began creeping towards her. When I think back to
that day I realized that the only thing that saved us was the damage done to
the thing’s brain. It had been a fully alert creature, we would have never made
it out the back gate. It would have been on us in an instant screaming and
bringing others to our spot and we would have never made it out of there. As it
was she just stood there in her bare and ravaged feet swaying back and forth,
unsure of what to make of her surroundings. I slowly closed the distance until
a was just a few feet away from her when her head snapped to the left. I froze
waiting for her to turn on me. We stood like two statues waiting. Finally her
head drifted back to the right and she resumed her swaying. When I was within striking
distance, I arched the axe back and brought it down cleaving deep into her
ruined skull splitting it down to her neck. She dropped like a bag of bricks to
the ground. I let out my breath and pulled the axe from the ruins of her head
and wiped the blood and gore from the blade. Quick and silent. Now we can head
up into the mountains and away from this horror, I thought as I stood up. Then
I heard a branch crack off to my right. Deep in the trees to my right there
were three of the things all looking directly at me. I don’t know what caused
them to hesitate, what caused them to freeze for the fraction of a second it
took me to realize they were there, but freeze they did and in that second my
hand acted on its own accorded grabbing the handle of my 9 mm and firing three
quick rounds directly into each of their heads. They dropped to the ground
before they could even take one step but the damage was done. Far away to the
south, I heard all the other things scream as one and begin their mad rush
towards us. I ran.

           
I made it to Georgie and our quad
runners just as the first thing rounded the corner of the house. It spotted us
and screamed in what sounded like rage and bolted towards us. We both fired up
our scooters, gunned it, and flew down the road. Or I should say, Georgia’s
flew down the dirt road. I gunned mine too hard and as I lurched forward the
front tires came up, “Jesus Christ!” I shouted as I tumbled off the back end
first hitting the trailer, then the ground. I rolled over onto my stomach in the
soft, dry dirt and looked back towards the house. I could see under the bottom
of the trailer and spotted the many legs of the things as they raced towards
me. I scrambled up and saw Georgie had stopped and was looking over her
shoulder, “Go!” I screamed and she turned around and raced down the road. I
mounted my ride, started it back up, and much slower this time, released the
clutch and began moving down the dirt road.