ROUTE 40
FAYETTE COUNTY, PENNSYLVANIA
“What do we do?” asked the driver of the bus.
The lead bus idled in the short curving driveway, the others were still around the bend. So far the infected in the parking lot had not reacted to the bus. They were all close to the building, which was hundreds of yards away.
“We have three choices,” Sam said quickly when Dez joined them. “First choice is we bug out now and take our chances with the supplies we have. It’s less than a day to Asheville.”
“Sure,” said Dez bitterly, “if the roads are clear. If people are going apeshit—and you know damn well they are—then those roads could be jammed and those buses can’t exactly go off-road. It could take a day or it could take a week. And we don’t have a week’s worth of food and water. Nothing close to it. Most of that stuff got left behind at the school.”
“Okay … second choice is my team draws the dead off to one side, away from the building while you park the buses and off-load everyone through the loading bays. Then we make this home base.”
“Good call,” said Trout. “Right, Dez? You said this place has plenty of food and water and their own generators.”
Dez chewed her lip as she considered it. “There’s probably enough fuel in the generators for maybe a week. Ten days at the outside. After that the lights and heat and everything else shuts down. There are also no windows. Good for security, but once the lights are out it’s a big, black box. And there are two bathrooms but no showers. If it was a week, maybe, but since we don’t know how long … and since we have no way of telling how many of those things are going come sniffing around, we could be well and truly fucked if we get trapped in there.”
“Agreed.” Sam sighed and nodded. “Then that leaves the third choice. Plan A, I guess. We load as much as we can and we get back on the road.”
They watched the zombies in the parking lot.
“Can we actually do that with them hanging around?” asked Trout.
“No. We’d need to take them out. I count—what? Thirty, thirty-two? They’re spaced out … we can take them down.”
“And how many more will come looking to see what all the shooting’s about?”
Sam nodded. “Which means we need to work mighty damn fast.”
“Hey,” said Trout, snapping his fingers. “You black ops guys do assassinations and stuff, right? Don’t you have silencers?
“First,” said Dez impatiently, “they’re called sound suppressors.”
“And second,” said Sam, “we didn’t bring them because this wasn’t that kind of job.”
“Oh.” Trout felt foolish, but then something else occurred to him. “Don’t we have to check the building first before we go in? Who’s going to do that while you clear out the yard?”
“My team gets to do both,” said Sam wearily. Then he brightened. “And I think I know a way to speed the process.”
He outlined it to Dez, who approved. Then Sam touched his earbud and explained the situation and the plan to his remaining team members. Trout couldn’t hear their replies, but he doubted they were any happier about this than he was.
But it all began happening very fast.
Dez told the driver of the first bus to go into the lot. The other buses followed. Sam jumped out and began walking alongside the bus, which proceeded at a pace slow enough to keep pace with him. Boxer, Shortstop, and Gypsy did the same.
The plan was simple. The buses would enter, cut right, and follow the inside of the fence all the way around the building, staying so close that none of the infected could get between the fence and the buses. The engine sound drew the infected like a bright light draws moths, and soon the dead were shambling across the lot toward the lead bus. Sam and the Boy Scouts walked without haste toward them and as each zombie came within twenty feet, one of the soldiers put it down with a single shot to the head. It quickly became a rhythm. Easy and mechanical. Though to Trout, watching from the lead bus, there was a different kind of horror to this. The zombies closed in, they were shot, the convoy inched along, over and over again. Aboard the buses, people started cheering with each kill. As if this was a game and the number counter jumped up with each death. As if the infected were no more real than animated monsters in a video game. As if each of those infected had not been a person hours ago.
It shocked and repulsed Trout.
Lucifer 113 had stolen the life from these people. And this … the necessary killing took away their posthumous sham of being alive. But the reaction of the people on the bus, the cheers like spectators at the Roman circus, seemed to strip away the humanity of each infected. It reduced them to things rather than people.
Somehow this indifference, or detachment or madness or whatever it was, frightened Trout every bit as much as the plague itself. As each cheer went up, louder than the first, Trout thought he could glimpse a future where the survivors of this placed no value whatsoever on human life.
He knew that this was shock, that this was a shared traumatic stress reaction. He knew that. But he feared it, too.
It took over an hour to clear the parking lot.
It seemed like a year to Trout.