Mark Tufo - Whistlers

I slowed down even more so that I wouldn’t fall on my ass when I spun around. They’d yet to see my ruse and had crept even closer. I could have aimed and hit individual shirt buttons at this range. I turned, my rifle was right by my side. Lucy was first to catch on. The gun was about chest level, and she did something wholly unexpected. She grabbed Desi and pulled him towards her while also propelling away. Like most guys, he was completely clueless to his woman’s intentions, at least up until I plugged him three times. None of the three shots stopped him. But it kept him still long enough that I was able to put the fourth into his face and subsequently his brain. I’d like to say he had a look of betrayal on his face, but he probably knew it was coming. After all, he had paired up with a woman.

I’d just added another clueless male to the long list of men that had been used and discarded by a woman for their own means. Here was a Deneaux in training. Desi always was the dead weight in that relationship. The only reason 1950’s America put up with him was because of Lucy. I debated for a second putting an RPG round into her last known whereabouts and, if I could have been convinced it would kill her, I just might have. I noticed the farther I kept running, the less of the shoulder was clear. More and more, I found myself running on the side of the roadway. More times than not, that was filling up with cars too. These people that were fleeing the city for whatever reason were becoming increasingly desperate in their bid to get away. They may have gotten away, but not in their cars, that was for sure. I was wishing I could kill Lucy so I could stop and look for some water…which I desperately needed.

Soon, I was going to have to go on the active hunt for her or I was going to have to rummage through cars quickly, always keeping one eye on the lookout for the sneaky ginger. In addition to whatever skull damage I had done, the dehydration was adding to the throbbing. I went another tenth of a mile. I knew I had to stop and seek out liquids when I realized I’d stopped sweating. This was a pretty serious indicator of how bad off I was. I pulled up to a mini-van. Odds were there were little kids, and wherever there were little kids, juice was sure to follow.

“Bingo,” I said as I stuck my head through the open sliding doorway.

I did a quick search for an unopened juice bag. When that came up empty, I grabbed one that was on the seat, a straw already poking out of the side of it. I wasn’t a fan of touching anything kids had, because they were Petri dishes for all manner of germs and bacteria, but right now, sun-stroke was of bigger concern than dysentery. The juice was tepid, stale, and had almost reverted back to a syrup state. Yet, in my current condition, it was perfect. I sucked the thing so hard I was in danger of pulling the aluminum packaging through the straw.

Lucy had not yet shown as I tossed the empty container away. I reached down and grabbed two more from the floor. Each only held a sip or two, which I greedily drank down. It wasn’t much, but it was more than I’d had in a long while.

I had a suspicious feeling that Lucy was sneaking her way to me, I did a quick scan and got moving again, feeling somewhat renewed with the fluid and sugar coursing through me. I would turn every so often and look for my zombie friend…or any sign of Jack and Trip. I did not get a glimpse of any of them. There was a down slope to the roadway coming up, and on the rise on the other side, the traffic jam mysteriously stopped. There was clear roadway for as far as the eye could see. At the meeting point between a tangled mess of cars, trucks, and all manner of motorized vehicles, was once again the familiar olive drab of military vehicles.

“What happened here?” I asked; not for the first time.

There were cars and motorcycles on the shoulders, even on the grassy sections. They looked like they had been trying to circumvent the roadblock and had met resistance in the form of a hail of bullets.

Why were they trying to keep them contained? A virus? A terrorist cell? What?

Maybe there were some answers up there? More likely, there would be additional questions, but at least I was confident there’d be some water. There wasn’t a soldier in any place I’d ever been that didn’t carry copious amounts of water. Killing others was a parching business. I wanted to believe I’d lost Lucy, or that she’d gotten sick of this game, but I could sense her eyes on me from time to time. Like a lioness patiently stalking a zebra, she was biding her time.

Bodies were everywhere—the aftermath of a heavy battle. Shattered remains were lying in the grass, on the road, across car hoods, leaning out of open doorways. Heavy caliber rounds had done their best to dissuade these poor refugees from their present course.

Did any of them make it? I thought as I looked at the open expanse before me.

The trees had pulled back, and I was looking at vast fields as far as the eye could see. I wondered how many families had entrusted their safety to these same military men who had haphazardly cut them down. When all was somewhat right in the world, I’d let anyone that would listen, know that, in the event of a crisis, men in uniform were not to be trusted. Their sole mission at that point was the preservation of the government, not the ones governed. Most would look at me as if I were a radical revolutionary, anti-social, paranoid, militia prepper with delusional overtones. Nope, I was just a realist.

I was right about the questions part as I approached the military blockade. I’d seen impressionist paintings make more sense than what I was looking at. It started off innocently enough. A helmet was on the roadway, well not so much on it as in it. It was sunk down about an inch or two like it had been run over by a tractor-trailer. I honestly didn’t think too much on it, even with the leakage of blood coming from the sides of it.

Some unlucky bastard had been shot and lost his helmet. It wasn’t the first time and, unfortunately, wouldn’t be the last. Well…shit…maybe it would be. This world seemed to be running out of regular people as fast as the ones Jack, Trip and I had come from.

I paused. Were they all connected somehow? Was that possible?

From the limited amount of time Jack and I got to talk, I was pretty sure his and my world was mostly the same. I mean at least the locations, yet his was being overrun by night runners and mine zombies. This place certainly looked like any highway in the states, yet the names were different, and probably whatever was afflicting this place was different as well. Something niggled at the back of my head.

Were the night runners and zombies we’d encountered here indigenous to this place or had whatever brought Jack and me through brought some undesired guests as well?

This was a path I did not relish going down. If the zombies and night runners were ours, then what was here? Maybe whatever it was had snagged Lucy. That would solve at least one of my problems.

I was about to travel farther down this mind-path when the next thing I encountered stopped me in my tracks. It was a leg. Now, yes, normally a random unattended leg in the middle of the roadway would be cause for concern, and definitely something you might investigate. But I’d been in the midst of a zombie apocalypse for close to half a year, an arbitrary encounter with a discarded limb was not that big of a deal. I mean, I guess it was for the person that had lost it, but these days it was more of a background prop, relegated to the status of street sign, or tree, or telephone pole. In and of itself, it generally held no value. This one was different, though, and not because the person who it had belonged to was wearing camouflage pants and black military boots, but rather the way it was planted in the ground. The leg was sticking straight up and down, the knee on the ground the booted foot up in the air, as if someone were trying to grow a human.