Chapter 7: Hax

I stood on the rocky banks of the Hoosier River, skipping stones across the sparkling water. On the opposite bank, there were more zombies than I'd ever seen before. A hundred? Maybe more. They moaned and clawed at me with reaching hands.
The zombie's eyes were full of dumb cunning, a quality that I always attributed to a voracious appetite, but that wasn't right, they didn't want to eat me, they simply wanted to hurt me.
I'd been so psyched when I passed the WELCOME TO LINCOLN BRIDGE, INDIANA sign with its obligatory AN HONEST PLACE TO LIVE. It only took me twenty-four hours to make an hour drive. “Fuck yeah.” The halfway point.
Lincoln Bridge was a bit of an fluke in Indiana: it was an island. The Hoosier River flowed from North to South on its way down to the Ohio River passing Lincoln Bridge on the East side. Abraham Lincoln had once stopped to drain his stove pipe hat there and they had to actually build a bridge to let him get across the river. The Chamber of Commerce took that and ran with it, changing the town's name. A shallow creek on the west side of town was dredged until the Hoosier actually split, transforming the city into an island in a river. I found all this on Wikipedia when I had to write a paper about a facet of Indiana history.
Now, the bridge was gone.
I leaned over the crumbled edge of the concrete where broken off pieces of rebar poked out of the pavement like earthworms. I spit and then watched it fall to the river below.
It had been here a week ago when I'd passed this way heading for Elise's sister's place in Shipley.
“Well, fuck.” I quietly took in the scene. The support columns still stood in the middle of the river, but the road itself was gone. It had been bombed.
I guess the military bombed it to contain the eastward spread of the zombies. The zombies wouldn't cross the water. I don't know why.
The religious people said that the water, like a baptismal font, represented rebirth in the light of the Lord's love and the vile evil of the zombies could not bear said love in their damned souls. The scientists, on the other hand, said that the limited intelligence of the reanimated nervous systems could not process the difference between the liquid and solid states of matter, so the zombies would not cross the water as it represented to them an anomaly to their spatial reasoning.
I don't know if I believe either of those explanations. Maybe they are just afraid of the water. God knows, I am. I can't swim a stroke.
I took a deep breath and threw another stone. Splash. Splash. Splash.
Every zombie in Lincoln Bridge seemed to be standing on the other side of the river with more joining the crowd every minute.
I picked up another flat rock, brushed it off. I felt the heft of it, swinging it a few times in my hand. The zombies watched my every move. I faked throwing the stone and they all flinched like a German Shepard chasing an imaginary tennis ball. “Made you look, dirty crook,” I said.
I paused halfway through throwing the stone. I wondered how long they would stay there. If I could find a place to cross the river, somewhere else I mean, maybe the coast would literally be clear.
I tossed the rock into the water, backing up, away from the river. I scooped up a few more stones as I crawled backward up the grassy slope toward the road. When I got to the top, I tossed another stone.
The zombies continued to stay put.
Maybe this would work. The real test was yet to come.
I stepped out of their field of vision, waited until a hundred count and then peeked.
They were still standing there. When they saw me, they moaned in a frenzy.
“How do you keep an idiot in suspense?” I stepped back again, out of their sight. “Tell you later,” I said and ran.
I'd seen something when I was crawling up the hill.
I'd seen a boat.
I ran across the street and down the hill on the other side, where a housing development sprawled along the river. As I slid down the hill and hopped the chain link fence, I could see the rowboat sitting on top of a pair of sawhorses.
Halfway across the yard, I stopped running. “Fuck.”
The side of the rowboat was missing. They must have been repairing it. I shoved it off the sawhorses. It hit the ground and rocked. “Piece of shit!”
I glanced back the way I'd come. I couldn't see them, but I knew they wouldn't stay put forever.
Panicking, I looked around. Broken boat. A pair of oars. An orange life vest. An anchor.
A big, fat lot of good that was going to do me.
Unless.
I stood on the edge of the river in my orange life vest, watching the swirling green water beneath me. I tried to choose a relatively shallow, narrow part of the river just around a slight bend and out of sight of my fan club on the other side of the river.
I took some rope that I found in the shed, tied it to the ring at the end of the anchor. I felt the weight of it in my hand. It was much heavier than the rocks that I had been skipping.
But, if I was lucky...
I swung the anchor around on the end of the rope, trying to get some decent centrifugal force on it. I let it go. It splashed down in the middle of the river, taking half the rope with it.
So much for luck. “Try again, dipshit,” I said and reeled the rope in. I brought in maybe ten feet of the wet rope and then it stopped. I tugged on it. It didn't budge. The anchor was stuck.
I waded into the water a few steps, yanking on the rope, but it still didn't budge.
I took a deep breath and leapt into the water. I went straight to the bottom. My life jacket gave me enough buoyancy a moment later and I bobbed up coughing and sputtering.
I gasped for air, frantically wiping the water from my face with my free hand.
I grabbed a hold of the rope with both hands and dragged myself along, headed toward the middle of the river as the current battered me, trying to pull me under, sweep me along.
I reached the point of the river where the rope went straight down into the water, where the anchor had gotten stuck. Now came the hard part. I would have to inch my way to the other side, without the help of the rope.
The anchor came free and I was swept down river.