S. Davis - 900 Miles

Jarvis continued, “This group has me nervous, boys. It’s been a while since we saw someone just driving around outside our gates. A little too fearless, like they were testing us to see what we’d do.”

“How close did they come?” Kyle asked.

“They stayed on the far side of the field, but they just drove around while we watched them from the tower. Didn’t even try to hide, which is what’s got us nervous,” Jarvis said, turning toward Kyle.

“Do you think it’s anybody we know?” I asked with a slight pitch in my voice.

They all knew what I meant.

Jarvis paused and looked over toward Rodgers, then back toward Kyle and I.

“We don’t know if it’s Gordon or not. He wasn’t in the Jeep, but that doesn’t rule him out.”

Gordon. The bastard who ran Avalon before the revolt. He’d escaped during the mayhem seven months earlier, taking a small army with him. Disappearing behind a shroud of broken lives and a twisted landscape, he hadn’t attacked nor tried to return since, but that made us more anxious than if he had. All we could do was assume that the over-bloated prick was either dead, had moved onto another region… or was patiently waiting for his chance to return.

Nobody knew how he escaped. Last time I had seen him, he was being carried out of the Arena by a mob that looked like they were going to tear him apart…

I wish they had.

It wasn’t the creatures you could see that worried me… it was the ones that you couldn’t.

Reaching down, Kyle yanked his gear up over his shoulder with a grunt. Following his lead, we grabbed our weapons and followed him toward the front wall. We set out across the Yard with the pace of men on a mission. It was time to get a better sense of what we’d be going up against.

Eyeing the top of the wall, I could see a number of armed men and women standing guard as we approached. On the alert, they were posted to help take down any of the rotting dead if things got out of hand.

They almost always did.

Taking two planks at a time, I followed Kyle up a steep wooden ladder, which led to the open top of the concrete wall facing the field in front of Avalon. Even before I reached the top, I could hear them. Nearly lost in the background like the steady roar of waves on the beach, it was always there—the slow, methodical moaning of the dead.

We’d been making runs every couple of weeks for at least three months. The people, who built Project Greek Island under the Greenbriar Hotel, or what we now called Avalon, had thought of everything. Food, water, air compressors, energy… you name it. However, in the end, it would only last us so long, and we knew we would need to scavenge to ensure our long-term survival. As a result, we had a system for moving in and out.

“When we get back, we’ll need to clear the Yard,” Kyle said as he reached the top.

Catching up, I peered over the side of the wall, looking out at the dead piling over each other.

“Whoa. No shit! We really should have cleared this last week,” I replied, lowering my hands to the concrete.

As I surveyed the Yard full of mangled heads bobbing up and down, one of the creatures caught my eye. He was wearing a grey t-shirt that prominently said:

“Warning: If Zombies Chase Us, I’m Tripping You.”

I remember thinking how crazy we all were before the world went to shit. I’d seen people posting things on Twitter like “Can’t Wait for the Zombie Apocalypse” or “Wish I was a Zombie.”

Guess most of them were probably granted that wish…

We had hundreds of movies, blogs, radio dramas, and books. We all loved them so much. That is, until the day the first zombie actually stood up and took a chunk out of someone’s neck. It’s ironic if you think about the fact that the “zombie” was kinda famous in a way. Not any particular zombie of course. Just the idea of a zombie. Children would walk around with their arms out, begging for “braaaiiins.” Hell, we got to a point where the number of zombies walking the streets on Halloween night would be hanging in there toe-to-toe with the likes of Dracula, the Avengers and the flippin’ Transformers…

It’s funny how that works. How something gets so big so fast. Before mass media, it used to take a lot more to rally people behind a cause. When America was first built, our “famous people” were the ones who made the world better. Inventors, scientists, patriots, warriors… these were whom Americans looked to as leaders… they were the ones we all looked up to. They had last names like Franklin, Washington, and Jefferson. We read about these heroes in history books, learning about them as the people who changed the world. Flash forward a few hundred years… and suddenly, the fastest way to become famous was to post a dimly lit sex tape on the Web.

We’d fallen pretty far from grace.

“We’ll use the siren to get out of here,” Kyle said as he turned back toward the ladder.

“It’s been doing the trick so far,” I said, nodding in agreement.

Before turning to follow him down the ladder, I took one last fleeting look down to the grass waving up at us from the field. It had gotten tall… too tall. There was no telling how many crawlers were out there, lurking around, hidden from sight. It wasn’t the creatures you could see that worried me… it was the ones that you couldn’t. They’d be the tricky bastards that’d get you.

Our four-person team jumped into the yellow Hummer while another four-man team pulled themselves up into a pickup that was outfitted with a large caliber machine gun bolted down in the truck bed. The weapon was great for protection against the living, but not nearly as useful against the dead. Even the most skilled gunner would find it too hard to aim with any real precision, making it nearly impossible to hit the brain… on purpose anyway.

The pickup held three men in the cabin. They were all Hispanic and roughly five foot four in height. I think they were brothers, but couldn’t understand a damn thing they said. Each of them carried a blade that rested in a black sheath across their chest. I’d seen them take out more creatures with those knives than any other man with a full-on automatic machine gun.

The Three Amigos were accompanied by a guy who had the best mullet that I’d ever seen in my life. It blew in the wind across his shoulders while the trucker hat atop his head kept the bangs out of his eyes. He seemed to have a permanent mark on the right side of his lower lip, where he’d spent the majority of his life with a fist full of tobacco hidden. He manned the turret in the bed of the pickup and was clearly the right man for the job, having been a gunner in one of those military-style, armor-platted Hummers when he was based in Iraq. I had heard Kyle refer to him as a Whiskey Tango one time. When I asked him about that, he told me it was a military code for W.T. or white trash.

Hanging his arm out the passenger side door, Kyle gave the signal to a scout on the cement wall, who in turn stepped carefully over to a small gray box bolted to the cement. Lifting the cover, he revealed a red button, which he slid his hand over before looking over his shoulder back at Kyle.

As I gripped the steering wheel with a set of clammy hands, my eyes fell directly on the metal-reinforced school bus serving as the gate to Avalon. Rising in my seat as I forced a deep breath of air into my tightening chest, my thoughts were on Tyler. This would all be for him, and I knew I had to be strong for both of us. Everything counted on it.

A loud siren, perched on a tree in the far left side of the field outside the wall, shattered the silence as the scout pushed on the button. The Zs loved noise. This was a trick we’d used many times before. The siren would attract the dead away from our walls and over to the far side of the field. Once the Yard was clear, or as clear as we could get it, we’d roll out the front gate.