World of Ashes (3 page)

Keith, who was a much better mechanic than Ethan,
spent some time inspecting the vehicles the theme park had in its parking lot with the hopes someone had abandoned something that could be hotwired. The most promising was a newer model Chevy Impalla that still had the keys on the seat next to blood streaks where the occupant had been dragged out and eaten behind a pile of broken roller coaster cars. Ethan slid in and turned the key. The car started and they breathed a sigh of relief when cold, soot free air blew over them. They loaded all their stuff and slowly pulled out of the parking lot. Deciding to avoid the highway Ethan turned right to travel the back roads. That was perhaps not the brightest idea he ever had, as the ash was already so thick the car couldn’t maintain traction. It slid into a ditch and downed a fence at the top of the hill and sputtered until it died.

There was a moment of silence in the car while
both took a deep breath in frustration, astounded at their bad luck and the sheer idiocy of the situation. Ethan had learned long ago never to ask what else could go wrong. He might get an answer. The men were about to get out when they saw movement in the mists. Ethan raised his M4 and held very, very still, knowing that some of the Undead would completely bypass them if they were as indistinguishable as their surroundings. Zombies aren’t super human after all, they just don’t feel pain or fatigue. The shape grew larger and more defined. In a ghostly scene straight from the Iraqi oil fires of the movie
Jarhead
, a horse that someone tried to saddle stepped slowly up to what were probably the first living people he’d seen in a while.

Keith got out of the car and went
up to the horse. There were no reports of the virus jumping species, whatever it was seemed to attack only people. A reigning theory was the virus was only attracted to higher brain functions. Zombies would eat an animal, this was true, but only if there was nothing else. Keith petted the mustang and looked it in the eyes. Ethan kept his distance, he liked horses even less people, having been beaten rather severely by one as a child.

             
"Looks thirsty. I'll bet his trough is completely saturated with ash." He reached into the car and pulled out a bottle of water and poured it into a dog bowl half buried nearby. The horse lapped the water up, and just as quickly as it had appeared, the animal disappeared into the ash storm across the hole they’d put in the fence. “Good luck, pal.” Keith whispered as the horse faded from view.

             
"Let's check the house. The people might still be home." Ethan stalked up to the mansion sized ranch house and thoroughly checked the outside before knocking on the front door. Minutes later no one answered and they tried the knob, just in case it was unlocked. There was a notion to kick it in, but in the last moment before Ethan let his foot fly Keith jabbed him and pointed to a window that was unlocked.

The
soot covered men climbed into the house, a beautifully maintained upper income home. The inside was a refreshingly clean space, well taken care of and free of ash. As if they were covered in mud or snow the muddy looking men stood in the foyer for a long while, unwilling to pollute this pristine palace before they wordlessly stripped down to their underwear and cleared the house as silently as possible in socks and skivvies before going through the owner's closets. The man who lived there was at least a little overweight because nothing fit either of them without having to poke new holes in a belt.

The kitchen was like something out of a magazine, and if the magazine covers framed on the walls were any indication, it was. The refrigerator still put out ice and cold water, and they took a moment to eat a magnificently prepared chicken salad that was in a container marked Monday, four days ago.
Out in the garage, along with a brand new Dodge Ram 1500, was a corner devoted to farming, hunting and equestrian pursuits. Keith found the tiger striped fatigues the man had used for deer hunting to be a better fit for them both, even if forty year old tiger striped camouflage was just a bit goofy looking.

             
"We look like South Vietnamese ARVN’s.” Keith joked, pulling out two boony hats. He tossed one to Ethan, the wide brimmed hats would be good for keeping ash and falling particles off their faces. The sun was already nearly gone, dropping the global temperatures drastically.

             
"Give it ten minutes and these will look as bad as our Multicams." The inside of the truck still smelled of rich leather and pine. Ethan had to hand it to the previous owner. The man had had taste, assuming the past tense since no one was home.

             
“I just thought of something funny.” Keith said before Ethan started the truck.

             
“What?”

             
“Before the Multicam uniform the Army issued ACU’s. They were grayish blue and white and blended into absolutely nothing…. And now the world ends, and everything is gray and white… and the uniform is long retired.”             

             
"I try not to remember those shit-fuck rags." Ethan sighed. "History will note the original Army Combat Uniform as an abysmal failure caused by the Army’s hard-on for copying every the Marines already did, only poorly. But you are right." He started the truck, grateful yet again that the man had been so well-to-do he could afford a $40,000 truck with an automatic transmission and a full tank of $8 a gallon gas. The garage door opened and in front of them stood the man who had owned the house, the horse, and the truck. His chest was ripped open, a pace maker dangling in a stream of blackened, gooey snot that swung from his exposed ribs. There was a child's arm in his hand, gnawed to the bone. The child he had mostly eaten stood behind him, a good portion of her face gnawed away. The poor thing was completely naked, a rubber ducky in her remaining hand and mud that had hardened all around her where the ash had collected on the blood.

The child dropped the rubber ducky and Ethan slammed the accelerator down. They plowed the two of them under with an incred
ible
whump
sound. Despite the initial adrenaline dump, hitting the two zombies kept the truck under better control by giving them traction on the ash. The truck wound through the back roads at a snail’s pace until Ethan found Old Highway 100. By then the truck was filthy, but the roads weren’t as bad and they could actually do the posted speed limit if there was nothing blocking their path.

A
n Army roadblock sat atop a plateau where the road curved around a steeply sloped farm and an old barn with a massive flag pole in the middle of the yard. The garrison flag at the top was tattered and faded, barely visible through the warm, gray faux snow. No one was left to lower it, and no anarchist scumbags had yet to cut it down. There were no trucks at the roadblock, no soldiers or FEMA workers either, just a few infected people looking the other direction in a cattle coral off to one side. Disturbing reminders that the Government had once been jailing people for euthanizing zombies littered the countryside. For a brief time the government had then gone to trying to jail the zombies themselves. The result had been much the same as taking zombies to a hospital. “Smorgasbord” might be a good description.

Ethan
flew past the coral, wishing he hadn’t seen it. Keith opened the door once to hit a zombie and laughed hysterically. “I’ve always wanted to do that.” He said when he was done laughing long enough to catch his breath. If that was what tripped his trigger, Ethan figured, let him have it. There were worse ways to spend the apocalypse.

             
Checkpoints were at every overpass over Interstate 44. The Gray Summit staging area was just as abandoned as any other, ash drifting in the wind, but thinner as they got farther from the city. Ethan stopped the truck and watched through a hunting scope for hidden elements, dead or alive. They saw nothing and after their approach collected several more boxes of ammunition left in a supply tent. Radios were left on in the command post, and computers displayed Blue Force Tracker information that basically outlined the fact that there were no more “Blue” forces in the area. Just Red.

T
he speakers on the radios were either humming, hissing, or broadcasting the moans of the undead operators on the other end. One radio let them listen to an air traffic controller in charge of directing planes and choppers out of the Sullivan, St. Clair, and Cuba airports to… somewhere. The destination was in code, and neither knew how to decipher it. The evacuation was going, but to where? Only every other word was audible, but “Green Zone” was repeated several times, giving some false ray of hope.

             
"We'll stick to the back roads until we get there. We stop for no one we don’t have to, especially not for other Soldiers, I don’t trust them not to turn us in or try to pull rank. We want to go back on our own terms if we have to, not because we're made too. Agreed?"

"Absolutely." Keith nodded
, his eyes as wide as Ethan’s while they listened to the dead consume their world. Ammunition loaded, Ethan continued driving through the remains of a town he’d once known well. They didn't see a single living soul until the Twin Bridges Underpass that split from I-44 toward the college town of Union. Local's had already overrun and taken control of the Army’s TCP there, using what had once been a Harley Davidson store and it’s dilapidated storage facility as forward observation and gun positions.

How in the hell had
the Army lost accountability of so many weapons? Ethan mused. Things had to have gone from bad, to worse, to full a blown clusterfuck. The Army had been obsessed with keeping track of every weapon and every bullet for as long as Ethan could remember. He’d spent countless hours “policing” expended brass in grassy fields and foxholes that had been there since M1 Garands were in service.               Punishments for misplacing a weapon could be severe, unless of course you were an officer, then everyone had to politely pretend they didn’t know you’d been whackin’ it in the porta-shitter, forgot your 9mm when it fell out of your holster because you couldn’t get comfortable for that final push, and the Indian KBR worker cleaning up after your gross ass found your weapon hours later. If the Army had lost this much equipment some officer somewhere was covering his ass like he was Fresh Fish at Ft. Leavenworth.

Unable to avoid the checkpoint
now that they’d been spotted, Ethan slowed to a stop so they could talk to a gangly looking kid in florescent yellow “Sk8er” shoes and a soot gray hoodie. His hair was dirty and dangling in his face, white iPod headphones were dangling from his neck and he didn’t seem very concerned with camouflage. The kid was armed with a .308 hunting rifle and an expensive scope he probably didn’t even know how to use. Ethan had, unfortunately, been a Military Policeman once upon a lifetime ago and was astonished at how brazenly the kid just walked up to the truck and stuck his face right up the driver side window. Even in the old world approaching someone’s car window was a good way to get shot in the face. He also didn’t seem to care Ethan had a pistol on his lap, as if that were normal now.

             
"They're letting people past, man, but don't give ‘em any shit.” The kid said as if he’d already said it a thousand times and was bored. “Are either of you hurt?" He wasn’t unfriendly, just not very sociable, probably still going through cell-phone withdrawal.

             
"No." They lied. Keith was still beaten up pretty good, but they didn’t want to get stopped for some other medic to check him out. If Keith thought he’d make it, he probably would. That was a good way to lose what items they’d already collected, someone might decide those weapons would be of better use to them. "We were hiding in the countryside. We found this stuff. The owner blew his own head off.”

             
"Whatever, man. They'll probably try and bribe you to stay and help fight. They figure the corpses from St. Louis will follow the highway here in a couple of days." The kid jumped into the bed of their truck without asking. He didn't make any threatening gestures, he just didn't want to walk the quarter mile to the checkpoint and miss all the action if his people decided to blow Ethan and Keith’s heads off.

             
The truck was guided to a halt in a Sally Port surrounded by bomb proof barriers called Hesco Bastions. The bastions had saved countless lives in Iraq and Afghanistan, and that was only filled with the crap dirt that existed over there. Filled with solid Missouri river clay the barriers could stop a small tank. A woman approached the truck in woodland fatigues, though they could tell she’d been a cop once too. She still had her shiny leather utility belt. "Is this your truck?" She asked.

             
"It is now." Ethan said, looking at the skill tabs sewn onto the lady’s uniform. Airborne, Air Assault, Combat Action Badge, 10
th
Mountain Division Combat Patch and a faded boony hat with salt stains where staff sergeant’s rank had been long ago.

             
"I see. Does the legal owner know you have their truck?”

             
Keith froze, he didn't know what to say to that. Luckily, Ethan did. “Ask him if you want. Whatever’s left is probably still stuck to the suspension. Let’s just say he had a wicked case of the munchies and wasn’t in the negotiating mood.”

             
There was a brief moment where Ethan and the woman in charge of the traffic control point locked eyes. This was it, the game was up and they were going to be eaten alive in jail or shot. The woman burst out in an unexpected laugh that was horribly out of place in the dying world around them. Keith and the people at the checkpoint were mildly disturbed, but to Ethan it was a relief to meet someone who understood sarcastic nihilism. “So where are you coming from?”