The Fast and the Dead - Day 18

The road was quiet when they left the car. Ben did a cursory check of the vehicle’s interior, finding nothing much of interest; a few coins, a pack of gum, scattered trash in the center console storage.

Claire checked the mass of cars ahead of them, giving as many as she could a quick glance; many were too dirty to see through easily, but those she paid more attention to. She didn’t spot any trapped bodies, but did notice how tightly the cars were packed in, and how many had open doors.

“I guess back then when these were abandoned they got trapped, tried to leave the cars behind and make it on foot,” she said quietly.

“Let’s hope we have better luck.”

Their options were limited. They could hike back the way they’d come and hope for the best, but that would lead them back to the Core eventually. Probably not the best way to go. They could try to get off the highway, but that didn’t seem likely until they got closer to ground level. It was a long drop onto a hard surface covered with who knew what.

They took the only reasonable option open to them. They started picking their path through the sea of cars, imagining all the while the chaos of years gone past as people sat in locked traffic, frantic with panic, finally leaving vehicles and homes behind to escape on foot, at risk from people both living and dead. For a while, it was said, the living had been the bigger threat.

Ben realized with a sinking feeling that in this part of the world at least, that was certainly now true for them.

Their slow progress had lasted long enough that it was well and truly dark. “I’m so glad there’s a moon tonight,” Claire commented. Without it they’d have been truly sunk. With the effective end of civilization had come the end of light pollution. The number of stars visible in the night sky was breathtaking, but did nothing to light the way when the moon was new, or covered by clouds.

They stuck to the edge of the highway, keeping hands on the raised side for guidance and keeping an eye on the closest cars. The moon lit their way, but not terribly well; it was a crescent, only a few nights away from leaving them in the dark. They couldn’t see into the more distant cars well enough to check what was inside.

They’d been picking their way carefully through for at least an hour by Ben’s best count when Claire spotted one. “Psst! There,” she said, pointing. She seemed to have better night vision than he did; he couldn’t see what she meant.

“There!” Her voice was barely more than a whisper, but even that seemed suddenly loud. He sighted along her arm and moved forward a bit; several cars ahead, maybe the top of a head slumped to the side of a headrest. He couldn’t see well enough to be sure.

The Fast and the Dead - Day 17

Ben ran into the eroded hulk slowly, raising an ear-piercing grinding squeal as the metal undercarriage of the wreck broke and dragged across the pavement. Once he’d gotten it pushed out of their way, he drove around it and headed off down the highway and away from the Core.

They’d gone about fifty meters when their tires blew.

“Oh no. Oh crap.” Ben started sweating. After all that noise, it couldn’t be long until they had company.

“The highway’s raised here, it’ll take a long time for anything to get to us,” Claire said. There was an edge to her tone that suggested she was reassuring herself as much as him.

He let the car roll to a stop and let his head hit the steering wheel, then just sat there. Claire sat and looked at him a moment. “What…”

Ben got out and walked around behind the car. There, stretched across the width of the road, difficult to see from the car in the growing twilight, a long chain of tire spikes like the police used to use. “Where’s a tank when you need one?” Ben asked. Claire didn’t respond, instead moving over to the edge of the highway and peering down to the road below.

“There’s a few starting to gather, but they can’t get up here.” She looked almost … relaxed. Or maybe resigned. He joined her at the edge and looked down and out in all directions. There weren’t nearly as many here. He judged there probably wouldn’t be another huge horde. He also planned to be far away before he could verify whether he was right or wrong.

He sighed and looked at the car. The tires were shredded, and service stations weren’t of much use these days. “Driving like this will destroy the wheels fast,” he said.

“Maybe, but we can’t stay here all night. They’re slow, but they’ll get here eventually.”

He looked back at the chain of tire spikes. There was no rust, he noticed, no worn-away paint to speak of. They’d been put down relatively recently.

“You’re right,” he said. “Let’s go. We’ll keep going till the wheels won’t go anymore.”

They’d gone about a kilometer, roughly a third of the way to the next exit, when they started spotting cars on the road again. They were in as good condition as the ones used for barricades had been; they hadn’t seen a living passenger for many years and the weather had taken its toll.

The wheels made a horrible amount of noise as they ground along the road, but the highway was still raised, and remained so for some time if Ben remembered correctly, so he tried not to worry about it. It wasn’t easy; if this day had taught him anything it was that silence really was golden.

Another loud, painful kilometer later, they stopped. They still had almost a kilometer left to go, but no more road to get there; instead there was just a great sea of ruined cars blocking their way. “Well,” he said, a lump in his throat as he peered into the growing darkness. “I guess we walk.”

The Fast and the Dead - Day 16

They drove for a half hour by the car’s clock, though it felt like hours. The sun was getting too low in the sky for Ben’s liking. It was going to make navigation difficult without using the headlights, and increased the chances they’d attract unwanted attention if he turned the headlights on. Even the running lights were iffy.

“Hey,” he said suddenly. “Did we miss a turn back there?” He wasn’t looking at street signs; there were so few intact that there was little point.

“I have no idea. Where are you trying to get to?”

“I was trying to head back west so we could get north. I remember the streets in that area better. Or at least I thought I did,” he said.

“Do you really want to risk running right back into that mob?” Her voice was low but incredulous.

“No, but still, I’m not seeing ANY open paths to the west, no matter how far we—” he slowed the car. Now north was blocked. “I’m so confused.” He turned east.

The roads were a bit better here, fewer cars strewn to the sides. Instead they all seemed to be blocking side-streets, forming one relatively clear path. They could go forward or back, but couldn’t turn aside.

This continued for several blocks, Ben and Claire both keeping their eyes peeled for any sign of an alternate route anywhere without success. Finally they came to what had been a major intersection, with the northbound route unblocked—but now the path further east was closed off.

“This had to have been intentional,” he growled. He tried to relax; time and time again he’d seen what happened to people who let the stress get to them. He stretched and worked his bad ankle. Could be worse; they could still be on foot.

“Let’s just keep going, the sun’s almost down. Maybe it was part of the containment plans?”

“Maybe… I never heard of any long paths like this though, just streets blocked off all grid-like to try and keep them from moving around or grouping up at all.” They continued north a short way before they were again shunted onto a different path; an on-ramp to a major highway running across the city. It had been a toll route once upon a time. A string of lights lit a strip of pavement across the ramp where once cameras and sensors had detected cars ramping onto the highway and photographing their plates. “The lights are still lit.”

“Why would anyone bother keeping power going out here? What a waste,” Claire groused.

He started forward again, rolling up the ramp. The cameras were all in place, as far as he could tell. “No way to know if those cameras are still working,” he said. At the top of the ramp they found the route east blocked once more, while the west was clear.

“This’ll take us back closer to the Core.” Claire didn’t sound especially overjoyed.

“Yeah. No thanks. I’m tired of being railroaded.” He eyed the line of wrecked cars. Most of them were rusted piles of junk after years of exposure. “We can probably push our way through that. There must not have been enough cars on this part of the road to block all 4 lanes heavily. This is going to make some noise though.”

Claire nodded in agreement, going more alert.

None of the cars used in the barricade had been occupied, he noticed, or at least none still were. He picked a spot where the only wreck in the way had been a smaller car. He aimed theirs at it. 

The Fast and the Dead - Day 15

They were several blocks out from the city core when Ben brought the car to a stop. “Have you seen any? It’s been a while since I last saw one.”

“No. And we’ve gone too far for them to have left on account of us back there,” Claire said.

“I knew the roads were bad out here but I didn’t know they were this bad.” Ben’s face was white with worry.

“Do you think …”

Ben bit his lip. “We may have to abandon the car.” He sighed. “The roads are getting impassable the farther we go, and so covered with crap that we’ll make too much noise while we crawl along. It’d be faster and quieter on foot.”

“There has to be another way! Can’t we backtrack, cut out to the side, then head back down to the lake when we’re not cutting so close to the Core?”

“There aren’t many places to get boats out that way, and the Core runs close to the water—” He stopped talking at the sight of movement further down the road. “Damn. Looks like a few of them.” He looked at her questioningly. She was squinting further down. With a sigh, she turned to him.

“Let’s turn around. If we can,” she looked at the crumbled debris around them. This area looked like it had been bombed. They both knew there were parts of the old city where that was literally true. “Road’s blocked further ahead anyway. Head back up and away and we’ll figure out what to do then.”

He started the awkward process of turning; the rubble and wrecks of other cars left him little room to maneuver. They felt a jolt as Ben backed the end of the car into the side of another vehicle, but both started violently at the gnashing moans that came after. They craned their necks; Claire blanched. “There’s one in the car. It looks like it’s buckled in,” she said quietly.

“Buckled in? But how would a … Oh.” He shivered. That ex-person must have been in the car and belted in when he or she — it was hard to tell now — died, and still buckled in for the rising.

He started off again at the best speed he could manage, being very careful about every other car he passed. That was sure to draw more in and he couldn’t take being that close to the center of another horde again so soon. Or ever again, for that matter.

He started paying more attention to the windows of cars as they passed them; the number of corpses in them was disquieting. It was impossible to tell if they were just unfortunates who’d never been properly tended to, or if they were risen and ready to kill.

A feeling began to settle over Ben, a drifting accumulation like grave dust. He needed to just get out. Out of the city, away from the core, away from this craziness. “There was a major highway back this way wasn’t there? How badly do you think it’s clogged?”

“I wouldn’t bother, they were all pretty choked up with wrecks.” Her voice was as tight as his thoughts felt.

The Fast and the Dead - Day 14

The pounding and rocking of the car brought him back, dazed, from unconsciousness. The first thing that his mind seized on was the fine powder over everything. He stared uncomprehendingly at the deflated airbag in front of him. A loud bang to his left grabbed him, and he nearly jumped out of his skin at the sight of yellowing, putrid-looking eyes in a gooey, rot-darkened face staring at him through the glass.

Reacting purely on adrenaline, he slammed his foot on the gas pedal; the car was halfway through the bent and buckled garage door, almost to the dealership’s back alley parking area. With a screech of metal that would’ve woken the dead, had they not already awakened, he jolted the car free of the door and turned sharply to point toward the road. Behind him followed not one but a half dozen of the things, pouring into the light of the late afternoon to join the beginnings of a crowd as the engine’s roar and crashing exit from the bay drew the attention of zombies slowly making their way to the main body of the horde.

Beside him Claire began to stir to consciousness. He looked up the path ahead; there were only a handful coming their way off the street and into the lot. He hit the gas again, less energetically; working cars weren’t a dime a dozen these days.

“Up inland, or down to the water?” He was pretty sure that’s what he said, but his head was still a touch fuzzy from the impact.

“Boat. Try for a boat. With a car we can try to leave the city if we can’t find anything.” Her voice was a little thick; she was still clearing her head too, apparently.

She was right; the inhabited, semi-normal part of the city amounted to little more than 4 square blocks of the downtown core. People crammed into the tallest buildings that over the years had been painstakingly fortified and turned into living spaces. There were even rooftop gardens extending across the city for blocks around the core; fertile soil was the second-most most valuable commodity that existed in the city. Those gardens, with the aid of hydroponics, were enough to keep people fed.

Clean water was the first. Not a lot could be spared for the purpose of hydroponics. It had too many uses. “Water it is then.”

He neither slowed nor stopped for the zombies as they got in the way of the newest source of noise in the area; he avoided them if he could, but if he couldn’t, he left them broken in his wake.

The first couple of minutes were tense and quiet. The sheer number of them was staggering. They couldn’t hear the commotion over the sound of the car, even after they opened the windows, but every walker they passed was headed in the same direction, toward the monstrous horde.

“I’ve never seen anything this big before.” Those they passed were turning to the car, but they sped past as quickly as they could; Ben didn’t check to see if they kept following them or turned back to their interrupted journey.

They were getting closer to the city center and the going was getting slower. Even at the farthest outskirts of the city toward what used to be suburbia the roads weren’t exactly clear. This close to the center of the chaos of the end, they had to go slowly to drive around wrecks, avoid fallen street lights, power poles or other debris, sometimes even turn aside entirely to find different, unblocked routes. There were plenty of routes that were intentionally blocked to prevent or at least slow down exactly the sort of giant cluster they were leaving behind them.

The Fast and the Dead - Day 13

A low, hungry moan told screamed at him that time was up. They ran to the nearest car, a midrange sedan that would’ve been entirely uninspiring in the old world but now inspired visions of solid metal and glass between them and oncoming death.

The doors were unlocked; they scrambled in. Hands shaking, Ben tried each key in the ignition in turn as shadows began to move in the murky darkness behind them.

“The doors! The doors are closed!”

“Do YOU want to get out and open them?” He asked, finally slotting the key in and turning it. Mercifully, the engine started; it was loud, very loud, especially by the standards of the time immediately pre-fall. “Why couldn’t this have been an electric? Even a hybrid?”

He jammed it into reverse and backed further into the room. A solid, meaty thump told him all he wanted to know about how close they were. Claire locked her door; there’d never been a known instance of a zombie being able to open a door that didn’t swing freely, but this would be a lousy time to learn they were more capable than people assumed.

Slow pounding began on the back of the car as Ben stopped and put it in drive. Claire snapped her seatbelt in, staring at the large doors ahead. Ben took a deep breath. “This is really gonna suck,” he said, then jammed his foot on the gas.

The car started forward, and as he’d feared, it wasn’t a roaring burst of acceleration. They slammed into the door with enough force to break through, but the impact triggered the front airbags.

Everything went black.