Why would I shoot them? The dead were no threat to me.
And the ones wandering my perimeter — those were free sentries. Let's see anyone try to come this way. I lowered the crossbow, raised the binoculars instead, and found myself genuinely annoyed that there weren't more of them at my gate. Ideally they'd pack the whole road solid.
And that gave me the idea.
Half an hour later I rolled out to the edge of my territory in the armored vehicle, tucked it into the trees, and walked the last stretch toward the highway with Summer at my side. The farther out they went, the thicker the smell of blood.
I stood on a ridge and looked down at the road below. Up close, the scene had a punch no lens could give it — especially the stretch just outside the city. Cars came screaming out in a river, and every single one that made it through dragged a black tide of the dead behind it.
The dead didn't seem to know what exhaustion was. They flew after anything that moved, and any car that slowed — bad luck, a wrong lane, a moment of hesitation — was swallowed whole. They swarmed the hulls like leeches, hammering the windows until the driver's view was gone and bang, into somebody else's bumper. Then the dead got happy, climbing the wreck, feeding where it lay. The luckier cars — good steel, good nerves — threaded the wrecks at full sprint and screamed their way out of the city.
The stretch below me was one of the calm ones: four crash sites, a dozen or so wanderers drifting along the shoulders, latching onto anything that passed. I watched until three cars in a row ripped by and pulled most of them away — then climbed down off the ridge with Summer. Summer's footing was steadier than mine, for the record.
"Grrr—"
One of them — a middle-aged woman — was trapped in a rolled car, and the moment she spotted me she thrashed like her life depended on it. Which was funny, because it didn't have one anymore.
Disheveled, hair long unwashed, face sunken and gaunt — but still recognizable, chest torn open, still wearing her seatbelt, one clawed hand with a diamond ring on it reaching through the gap. Nobody else in the car. When it happened, her husband had simply left her. Bitten before she ever got the belt off. This story is hosted at novelping dot com.
"Be a zombie with some dignity," I said, and swung the shovel. "Go find your husband."
Hazard cleared, I walked to the back of the wreck, took the tow bar, and pulled. Crack — and the dead car came loose, dragging behind me all the way back to the mouth of my trail.
Zombies came at me in twos and threes the whole way. I never raised a hand: Summer hit them like a thrown weight and put them down before I could blink. One good thing about this apocalypse: it doesn't infect animals. Humans only. A human catastrophe. And a German Shepherd with system upgrades, against slow dead things — one swipe, one down. Easiest work in the world.
"Don't kill them, Summer. Wound them."
Summer barked once in acknowledgment, and the zombie Summer had been about to skull-stomp was spared — its lower half was not.
I regarded the screaming upper half, dragging itself along by its fingernails.
…Excellent execution, as always.
Division of labor: Summer handled the dead, I hauled the cars. Site by site, all four wrecks went to the mouth of my trail until the road in was blocked solid — a super-collision of steel that no sane eye would try to enter. Then I had Summer herd the leftover dead toward it too. Sentries, stationed.
A few passing cars saw me doing it. Not one stopped to ask.
Because this was the exodus, and the only rule was faster. Nobody had the strength left to care about a stranger doing strange things. And I didn't care about them either.
One-time audience, all of them. For ninety-nine point nine nine percent of the cars on that road, it was a one-way street into forever — no U-turns coming back. I could have lifted a truck overhead in front of them and it would have changed nothing. No time to wonder. No time to ask. Their own catastrophe was waiting up the road.
Back at the base I washed up with Summer — and the alarm went off.
Up the tower stairs in seconds; I'd moved the whole console up here for exactly this. In the wall of little screens, the one covering the far road was the one ringing. I enlarged it.
A pickup truck loaded full of cargo came ripping from the city direction and braked hard in front of my newly blocked trail. The people inside clearly didn't know what to make of a road sealed by a pile of wrecks. They sat there a dozen seconds — long enough for the half-zombies to gather — then backed up a little, cleared the crawlers, and stomped the gas to force their way through.
My eyes went cold. Well, well. They're not lost. They came for this place.
I raised the crossbow and locked the reticle on the front tire, well inside my range. Thwip. A line through the air — and the tire burst with a bang. The truck lurched on its nose and stopped dead. A moment later, four or five men climbed out.
And among them I saw a face I knew.
The rental agent. The man who'd leased me the bunker.
"You sure it's safe in there?"
"Of course! It's a bunker — nobody for miles in any direction, and almost nobody knows it exists. I leased it out a month ago to some girl growing mushrooms. Who knows, we might even get mushrooms out of it!"
"Alright, boys, let's move! Clear the dead, swap the tire, and we're going in!"