The Fast and the Dead - Day 23

Ben watched her going over each car for a while before his curiosity got the better of him. “What’re you looking for?”

“Anything we can use if and when we run into more of those things,” she said, not taking her eyes off the interior of the car she was next to. “They’ve all been looted though I think.”

He checked his belt. The plastic bag filled with water bottles and food was still tied there, a reassuring weight on his good leg. “That’s reassuring in a way. It means people still pass through now and then, or did at one time at least.”

Something caught his eye then, and he jerked his head around before even realizing what it was he’d seen. A light?

He scanned up and down the rows of buildings along the road they were following down to the water. Where … There. The tiniest spark of a light, a red blip in the night. He pointed it out.

They moved closer. They’d covered about three quarters of the distance to the light when they were able to make out the source through the gloom. It was an old security camera that had been outfitted with a makeshift cover to conceal it, only now the cover was showing its age and falling apart.

A noise from behind them startled Claire; she covered her mouth and turned with a muffled gasp. A figure stumbled into the street some distance further up the road. As they watched, it turned their way.

Ben’s stomach turned to ice. Individually they weren’t a threat—but they had no weapons to use against it either, and they couldn’t see reliably. They couldn’t move much faster than it could in the dark either, for fear of injury and because of the injury he already had. He grabbed Claire’s arm and together they moved as quickly as they could away down the street.

They were just coming to a major intersection, about 4 or 5 away from the water when off to their left, more movement. More sound. And then to their right.

Ben swallowed, but dared not speak. They kept moving; Claire threw an arm around his shoulders and almost dragged him in their efforts to go faster.

The Fast and the Dead - Day 22

In the end, caution won, and eventually turned out to be quite a few hours with their slow pace and poor sight. The moon was high in the sky and well on its way down again when they finally reached the point where the highway came back down to earth. To their enormous relief, there were no dead in sight.

They hopped over the barrier in a part of town Ben didn’t recognize. It looked like mostly smallish individual homes with the odd apartment building as far as they could see. “This is good,” Ben said. “Low population density.”

“It could be good,” Claire corrected. “They’re slow and mostly don’t travel great distances but that doesn’t mean they’ve all stayed in the same spots all these years.”

It was true, Ben reflected. It was still a pretty good idea to avoid major population centers, and this was still close enough to being one that they had to be very careful, but zombies did move around enough for dispersion to have happened over the last decade. They might run into more than they assumed. They might run into none.

They had departed the highway near an overpass without ramps. Moving as quietly as they could, they made it to the other road. This one had few cars on it, and looked as though they’d spent the last 10 years rusting in place.

“Have you ever seen anyone get this far away before?” Claire’s expression was hard to read in the dark but her voice was weary but with a nervous edge. Ben was flagging as well.

“No. There’ve only been a few who got away without getting caught, and coverage mostly ends long before you get out here.”

She started carefully inspecting every car they passed. Her inspections were visual only after she touched a rear view mirror and barely managed to catch it when it crumbled off the car. The loud sharp sound of breaking glass would definitely bring them bad luck.

The Fast and the Dead - Day 21

They progressed cautiously, passing several more of the truly dead. One feature stood out among all the bodies they saw; many of them had been visibly shot through the forehead, others had damaged facial bones; enough of them that they began to think someone had intentionally come through and put down all of the trapped zombies many years ago.

It had to have been some time ago; zombie flesh didn’t suddenly become more appetizing just because the zombie had been dispatched, but afterward they did fall apart more easily. Neither Ben nor Claire knew why, nor did either care very much at that moment; they were just grateful they could make some progress, even if it would lead them to ground level and into danger again.

When the highway did finally give them the chance to descent, they faced a choice. They’d reached the next off-ramp, this one unblocked and leading down and into a section of the old city some distance from the Core.

“Do we go down now, or stay up here?” Ben put the question to words. They’d relaxed a little on the silence since realizing all of the dead had been put down long ago, but were still keeping their words to a minimum.

Claire frowned in thought. “How long does it go on like this? How far is it elevated?”

“Goes on a few more exits I think. It’s been a while since I drove it,” he added with a sardonic smile.

“Some of the zombies … the dead could be stuck up here with us.”

“True,” he agreed. “But odds are probably not a whole lot of ‘em, and we know for sure there are a lot of ‘em down there, especially so close to the city core.” Ideally he’d prefer to stay above the ground until they were entirely clear of developed areas, but unfortunately the highway just wasn’t built that way. It’d be back on the ground eventually.

The Fast and the Dead - Day 20

As they made their way slowly along the other side of the highway, Ben thought wistfully of flashlights and other modern conveniences, like matches, that once had been taken for granted. It didn’t take much to spawn such thoughts; after they third time bashing your knee on an unseen car fender such thoughts and memories came easily to mind.

At least he hadn’t cut himself. If matches and flashlights were rare these days, antibiotics were priceless even in well stocked enclaves, let alone out in the wilds. Zombie movies used to make a big deal about one scratch being enough to doom the poor unfortunate victim. The reality was that that one scratch didn’t have to come from a zombie to be potentially fatal.

Next to him, Claire froze again and her posture, tense and almost humming with tell-tale fight-or-flight adrenaline, told him all he needed to know about what prompted it. He quickly scanned the windows of the cars within sight, but once again he couldn’t see it. Wordlessly, she pointed.

He moved ahead a few steps, eyes fixed where she’d been pointing, and he froze as well. It was close. He kicked himself for having missed it.

He held still, barely allowing himself to breathe. It wasn’t moving at all, but he didn’t know if that mattered. They didn’t breathe, their hearts didn’t pump, they had none of the life processes that would cause involuntary movement in a person.

He looked back at Claire; their eyes met in the dim moonlight, mirroring anxiousness. They were too close to the last one to cross back over, but this one was even closer.

Ben closed his eyes, and with an apologetic shrug, he started edging forward again. Based on everything he’d seen, if it were risen, they were already too close. Hiding was pointless. So was sitting still. He shot glances at it as he kept his eye on where he was going. Fortunately it was one car out into the road, not in a car right on the shoulder; there was a car between it and him. He didn’t have to worry about it suddenly reaching for him, even though the windows of the car it sat in were all broken out. Or in, he thought.

It was slumped in the passenger side seat, hair all a disarray. As he drew abreast of its position, he tried to get a better look. As the years dragged onward, the survivors had found there were ways to tell the difference between an old body and an old zombie. It was the more recent zombies you had to be really careful about; they were really hard to distinguish.

There were few known living creatures that could stomach snacking on zombie flesh, and that included the majority of scavengers, vermin and even most bacteria that would normally contribute to the decomposition of an animal or human corpse. There were a few that were hardy enough to do it, but so few that the decomposition of zombies was much slower and far less complete than a typical body.

For a body that had presumably been strapped into a car for the last 10 years, that should make telling whether it was risen pretty easy. If it was a skeleton, it was safe. If it still looked like a fleshy corpse, then either it hadn’t been there for 10 years or they were in for more noise and more risk.

He drew abreast of its position and glanced back over, almost sighing audibly with relief; the face was a bare white skull, and what was visible of the body looked thin enough to be in similar condition.

“It’s dead then,” he heard from just behind him.

“Yeah. Lucky for all of us,” he said, including the unnamed victim in the car in the sentiment. 

The Fast and the Dead - Day 19

They froze in place, unwilling to take another step. Ben bit his lip. “We could go around,” he said in a low, whispery voice. “If it’s risen, at least we won’t be within reach.” Most of the cars on the road were in bad enough shape that the glass had long since broken, if it had survived the rioting unbroken in the first place.

Claire’s face was pensive in the moonlight, staring at the ground under them. It looked more like ground than road. The years of disuse had cracked and broken the blacktop to pieces and blown dust and dirt and seeds in enough quantity that there were stretches that looked more like wild lawn gone to seed than like an elevated highway. “I don’t think we have a choice. It’s gonna make a racket if it notices us.”

“Me neither, but if there’s one here, there’ll be more later. Guess nobody cleared the cars of ‘em. With the noise we made getting here I’m not real worried about them moaning themselves hoarse, at least not till we’re closer to the ground. Might even do us some good to have a distraction that can’t move.”

“I guess … as long as it doesn’t pull more up onto the road with us.”

They picked their way carefully to the other side of the road, making as little noise as possible. That ended up being more noise than either of them would have preferred; the remains of cars were packed in close in places, and bumping and brushing them was impossible to avoid. At times this would even cause bits of them to break off and fall to the ground. That wasn’t so bad in places where enough dirt had built up and things were overgrown, but on bare asphalt Ben found himself cringing.