Chapter 5: Spawn Camper

I slammed on the brakes.
The car skidded to a halt just short of Rodney's pick-up truck.
I had been driving for forty-five minutes, if you could call what I was doing driving. I sped when I could, crept when I had to navigate abandoned cars, stopped when I had to put something in neutral and push it out of the way. The whole time my hand ached and burned. I cradled it against my belly when I could, driving with one hand.
Forty-five minutes out of Shipley, where everything had fallen apart, and not sure where I was. I knew that I hadn't yet reached Lincoln, the halfway point, yet, but otherwise I could be anywhere.
I put the car in park and, leaving the headlights on, jumped out and ran up to the abandoned pick-up. I could see that the doors were flung open. I stopped just short of the cab. Closed my eyes and swallowed hard. I almost could not bring myself to look inside.
I took a deep breath and looked. The truck was empty. The windows weren't broken and there was no blood.
“Thank God,” I said aloud. Why had they stopped? I walked past the truck to where a row of cars sat abandoned. I'd stopped so many times to move abandoned cars that my mind immediately jumped to that conclusion. I looked over the cars trying to decide how to start moving them to get through.
Wait a second.
The cars were parked perpendicular to the road. End to end from one side of the road to the other, even into the ditch and up onto the hills that flanked the road. There was no way around. I climbed up onto the hood of one of the cars. For a second, I wondered if I could ram my way through, if not with my little Toyota, then maybe with Rodney's truck.
There was another four layers of cars beyond the others. What the hell? Someone had arranged the cars like this. Why, though? The zombies would just crawl over it.
I looked back at my car. I could go around another way. I looked ahead the way I was headed. I had hoped to catch up to the others and this was the first sign that I might be able to do that. How many hours head start did the others have on me?
Maybe I could find another car farther along the path. I climbed across the hoods of the car until I reached the inner most row of cars. In the the glow of my headlight high beams, I checked the other cars. They all had flat tires.
I walked the line of cars as my eyes adjusted to the dark. That's when I found the first body. I rolled the it over and discovered that the entire bottom of his jaw was missing, part of his throat torn out. A zombie.
He had a large bullet hole in his head. A dead zombie, then. Dead-dead.
I would have to go back and go around. I did not have a map and I'd only come through the area once. Rural road 9 snaked from Shipley back home to Blakefield, but it made some truly bizarre twists and I just didn't have time for this shit. I turned to go back to the car and saw the other bodies. I squinted in the dark as I inspected the next one. A woman. She wore a large hiker's pack. A flashlight lay on the ground next to her. I snatched it up and flicked it on. I was surprised to find that it was already on, but it did not light up. I smacked it a few times against the palm of my good hand. It flickered. I shook it again and it put out a passable light. “Good enough,” I said.
By the light of the flashlight, I checked her body. She had the same large bullet hole in her face, but I couldn't see any other damage to her body. Human, then. Somebody shot a human dead. Not for her supplies, thought. Her pack was still strapped on her back. A dispute, maybe? I had purposefully avoided others during all of this, so maybe stranger things happened during human on human interactions than I had witnessed. That's why I had avoided other people to begin with. I told the universe a big I told you so and went about my business.
I drifted from body to body. Twice as many humans as zombies. I could see that the humans were dressed to travel, backpacks and in some cases, weapons.
They all had been on foot. Why? They hadn't even reached the blockade yet, and the road on this side was perfectly clear.
It occurred to me too late.
The road was blocked on this side, too.
This was a trap.
The flashlight exploded in my hand.
I ran back toward the car, but one of the headlights exploded and then the other. I had been facing the headlights as I ran, so I was struck nightblind as I was dropped into total darkness.
I threw myself on the ground beneath one of the cars, a high-clearance SUV. Fat blobs of light burned behind my eyelids. I slid under the next car, a much tighter fit, and crawled on my belly to the next one. That's why Rodney's headlights had been off. They'd been shot out.
I inched through the four rows of cars, almost getting stuck under the last one, until I reached the edge of the blockade. I had no doubt that the shooter could hit the car, but he'd shot out the headlights, so I was hoping that I could use the darkness to cover me until I got to the car.
My hand burned from all the climbing around. I pressed it against my lips. Kissing my own boo-boo. I examined my other hand to make sure that motherfucker hadn't shot off any my other fingers off. They seemed to be okay. The smell of motor oil and gasoline filled my nostrils.
I waited until my eyes adjusted to the dark and then I tried to get a look around. On the right side of the road lay an empty field beyond the ditch. I couldn't see far enough to know how far the field went, but out here, between the towns, the fields could go on for miles. On the left side of the road, a smaller field sat between the road and the treeline, which presented me with a wall of impenetrable darkness.
I missed my good flashlight that I had left in Rodney's truck. I stared at the truck and wondered if it was still in there. Hell, the darkness had started to hurt my eyes and even that piece of shit the dead woman was carrying made me feel better.
Until, of course, that fucker shot it.
Question: What kind of person shot a human being in all of this?
Answer: A cold-blooded fuckrag who just didn't care.
This Q&A wasn't making me feel any better. Pain screamed in my bad hand and shot up my arm. I had to cram my face into my forearm to keep from screaming. My head swam. Trying not to pass out, I took a few frantic breaths.
Okay, I really needed to focus on this.
Question: What kind of person shoots out the lights at night?
I heard a crunch on the pavement. I reached down and slid my pistol out of the holster. If the shooter came down here, maybe I could get a shot at him.
I listened for awhile, hard to do over the car's idle, but I didn't hear anything. The cicadas and the crickets seemed to be having a battle of the bands, their nighttime noise growing louder and louder as I strained to hear over it. A bullfrog belched startling me and I bumped my head on the car's exhaust pipe.
I nodded my head. He wasn't coming down here. He was hidden and happy to stay that way. I, on the other hand, was certain to come out eventually. It was only a matter of time. He was happy to stay and wait and shoot me dead when I did. That was reassuring in its own way.
Okay.
Back to the Q&A.
Question: What kind of person shoots out the lights at night?
Answer: Someone who can see in the dark.
Night-vision goggles. You could probably buy them online. I was impressed and a little surprised that I hadn't thought of it. Come in pretty fucking useful right about now.
I had the fleeting image of the thermal images from the movie Predator. I could feel my heart beating wildly against the pavement. I was reasonably sure, though, that it wasn't an alien predator with x-ray vision. I almost laughed.
I looked at the car again. I would not make it to the car no matter how fast I ran. I could not see how far the empty field stretched, but I imagined it went pretty far. Wouldn't make it that way either. Wouldn't make it to the car, and to continue the way I was going would just add me to the pile of bodies.
Where then?
I couldn't see the shooter, but I imagined that he was on the left side of the road. The dead woman had been carrying a flashlight. She had been shot at night.
I wondered if I could see the shooter during the day. The sun rose in the east. That meant, that come the morning, it would practically be coming up the road behind me. Didn't really help me, unless the angle was right and it was in his eyes. I didn't feel that counting on good luck was the way to go.
Could I just sit here all night? He would expect me to run, to panic. He shot the flashlight and the headlights to scare me. It was a game. I don't think I was playing right. If I ran, he would shoot me. If I stuck my head out to look, he could shoot at me and maybe get me to run. But, if he just started shooting wildly, he would be admitting that he didn’t know where I was. Just sitting here, I took away all the options. If he wanted to kill me, he would have to come down here. I was betting my life that he wouldn't.
I was just going to camp here, then.
Either he would risk coming down here, where he didn't know where I was or we'd would just have to wait and see what morning brought.
I meant to stay awake, but I fell asleep after a few tense hours. I dreamed of Elise. We were eating at a Waffle House, but the waitress was my third grade teacher and served us Spaghetti-O's. Weezer was in a booth behind us, but they wouldn't share the ketchup. Dicks.

I woke up for the second time with my face pressed against asphalt. The sun had only just begun to come up and for some reason I was alive to see it. I stretched my arms and legs out, got the circulation working. Next, I slithered my way to the shooter's end of the car blockade and was able to squeeze out from under the bumper of the final car.
I found myself sitting in a dry ditch. Queen Anne's lace and dandelions choked the ditch above dried and spiky grass hacked crew-cut short by some road crew. A large, roundish rock sat half buried in the baked mud. I dug my fingers into the ground and finally pulled it free.
The sun wasn't up all the way and the ground and air held a damp, coolness in the gray half-light.
If ever, then now.
I sprang from the ditch and ran toward the treeline.
It wasn't as far as I thought and I reached it quickly. I drew my arm back and let the rock fly as hard as I could in the other direction. It hit the ground and rolled for what sounded like forever. It hit a few trees, other rocks and a lot of leaves and sounded like a poor, scared bastard running through the woods.
I sat still, though. I was where I wanted to be.
Above me, in what I imagined was a deer stand, a kind of camouflaged hunting platform, sat the shooter. I couldn't really see him, but he jerked when the rock rolled. Maybe he'd nodded off. I hope he had a nice dream.
I took out my pistol and unloaded it up his ass.
I stopped pulling the trigger when his body tumbled out of the tree. Tethered to the stand by some kind of safety harness, the body dangled just above my head. Kid looked maybe fourteen. Smoothy baby face dotted with acne and patches of unshaven hair. His gun didn't fall.
I walked back to the road in time to hear my car run out of gas. I took what I needed from the other bodies, found some rounds for my pistol and started walking in the direction I had originally been headed.
In the daylight, I could see piles of bodies spread out across the road, but I could also see the car blockade on the other side of his little kill zone. I figured that I would find a car there and maybe a map. I didn't know much about sniper rifles, if that was even what he had, but I bet he used the cars to mark off his range.
Just as I reached the edge of the blockade, I found Rodney's body. He was facing the wrong way. I looked back at where the shooter had been. Rodney had run interference. He had taken the shot that allowed the girls to get away.
“Sorry man,” I said, pulled the cap off his head and covered his face with it.
On the other side of the car blockade, I stopped and puked my guts out. I had never killed a living person before. “Fucking kid,” I said, wiping my mouth. I drank from a bottle of water, spit it out, splashed water on my face, in my hair. “Fucking kid.”
I found a green Ford pick-up with a full tank of gas and the keys in the ignition. I found a cooler of pop in the back. I guzzled six Pepsi's, searching for a map in the glove boxes. If I had to, I would get through the apocalypse on caffeine alone.
On the map, I traced Rural road 9 with my finger from Shipley to Lincoln. I found where I had turned off and I figured out where I had to go to get back on track. I still had about a half-hour to get to Lincoln, assuming there was no more abandoned cars and then another hour to get to Blakefield and back to The Fort. This would be the hardest stretch. I wondered again how far ahead of me Elise was.
I dropped the pickup into drive and sped away kicking up gravel and dust as the sun rose behind me. Lonely, I turned the radio on for background noise and got only static on every station. I almost turned it off, but at the last second, I decided to leave it on. Something was better than nothing.