Manel Loureiro - The Wrath of the Just

I thought back to my home in Galicia, a damp, rainy place on the Atlantic coast. It was as green as Ireland and damp three days out of four. It’d been two years since I left. Were the Undead there in the same condition? Tears welled up as nostalgia washed over me. I felt very alone, far from any place I could call home. The euphoria that filled me a minute before evaporated.

I heard a faint meow. Lucullus poked his head up and managed to crawl out of the basket. It was sad to see my frisky cat staggering around like an old man. He hobbled over to me and climbed into my lap, purring. Somehow that goofy cat sensed I needed him. Anytime I wondered why I’d dragged him halfway around the world, I recalled that moment.

Before I settled down to sleep, I bashed in the head of the fuzz-covered Undead with my ax. It wasn’t a danger to anyone, but I didn’t feel right leaving it that way.

Next to the embers, I burrowed into some horse blankets and tried to sleep, but I only managed to doze. The next day was going to be long and hard, but it would bring me a whole lot closer to my friends waiting for me in Gulfport. And closer to my revenge.

I set out early the next morning. The roads were in such bad shape that I couldn’t risk driving at night. I planned to ride until the hottest hours of the afternoon, take a break, then go on till nightfall.

For such a small bike, the Daystar weighed a lot. After a few miles, it proved to be an excellent choice. It handled well and had enough oomph to get me out of a tight spot. Plus its simple but rugged engine was less likely to stall. The bike puttered along cheerfully as I picked up speed, headed for the main road.

I had two choices: drive along the railroad tracks or take the secondary roads. Up till that point, I’d followed the tracks, but the map showed that they veered to the north before heading back southeast into Gulfport. They also ran dangerously close to some large towns and even cut through some of them. That wasn’t a problem for an armored several-hundred-ton locomotive, but it spelled death for a guy on a motorcycle. Only a fool would drive through those towns. On the bike, I could dodge a lone Undead, even a small group, but in a crowd, I’d be dead in ten minutes. One of those monsters would block my path, and I’d go down. So I stayed on the secondary roads that passed through just a couple of smaller towns where I hoped I wouldn’t find too many Undead.

But I had bigger problems. I needed to find gas. And my supply of Cladoxpan was dwindling at an alarming rate.

Lucullus was alert and feeling much better after the antibiotic injections. He wriggled around restlessly in one of the saddlebags, chewing on a leather strap. Beside him was the thermos with half of the Cladoxpan I had left. In the other saddlebag, I’d stashed water, supplies, and the rest of the drug, which I’d poured into an empty whiskey bottle. I’d divided the drug into two containers so that if I lost one, I’d have a backup.

That morning I drove on a deserted dirt road overgrown with weeds. Occasionally I passed a car in a ditch or a lone figure staggering around in the distance. When those creatures heard the motorcycle, they turned and headed for me, but by the time they’d reached the road, I was already gone. If I had to stop or slow down, an Undead might ambush me. But I didn’t dwell on that. I just wanted to eat up the miles. Gulfport was drawing me like a magnet.

The first night, I slept out in the open on a treeless hill. Despite howling coyotes, I didn’t dare light a fire; it would’ve attracted far worse creatures—and not just Undead. Along the way I’d seen signs of human travel. Fresh tire tracks, campfires, and lots of gleaming copper bullet casings. At one crossroads, I spotted the tracks of a convoy of heavy vehicles. I assumed no one out there was friendly and tried not to leave any evidence I’d been there.

To be safe, I tied Lucullus to my wrist with a cord and went to sleep. If someone or something approached the camp, the cat’s keen senses would detect it long before I did, and he’d wake me up when he moved.

Two hours later, my safety precautions paid off. A pack of feral dogs came sniffing around at the bottom of the hill. They were a motley mixture of mutts, a golden retriever, and a huge pit bull. When Lucullus starting hissing, I jumped up, gun in hand. I shouted and threw rocks at them, but they just stared at me. They seemed shocked to find a lone human in the middle of nowhere. They must’ve decided I was too dangerous, because they finally turned and walked away, the pit bull in the lead. I breathed a sigh of relief, but didn’t sleep the rest of the night. I’d pay dearly for that the next morning.

I was going to make it. I was less than fifty miles from Gulfport. The sun was setting, but I was elated. That morning I passed a sign telling me I was entering “The Great State of Mississippi.” I’d traveled two hundred and fifty miles in two days. I was making great time. But as I got closer, I came across more and more towns that were hard to skirt. In some cases I had to race through them at breakneck speed, ducking between houses, not knowing if I’d come to a dead end.

At the same time, it was getting easier to make it through even the bigger towns. Too easy. In towns that should’ve been overrun by Undead, I only saw a couple dozen. I easily dodged them on the bike as I snaked among the ruined buildings and cars. Nearer the coast, where the humidity was higher, every creature I saw was infested with that fungus. On some, it covered just their face or wounds. Others looked like Persian rugs with legs. Many were so consumed that they just slithered along, unable to use their legs. The worst were those whose brains had been colonized by the fungus. They moved erratically, like robots whose programming was failing. And thousands of mounds of bones, each covered by a layer of orange, green, or violet fuzz, marked the spots where Undead had fallen, unable to lift their own weight.

I realized with a shudder that this trip would’ve been impossible just a few months before. The plague was slowly being devoured by one of the oldest, most primitive forms of life on the planet. In a few years, the world would be habitable for humans again. Thinking about that made me angry. I didn’t want to die now. Not so close to the end.

Occasionally I came across towns that were burned to the ground. I passed through one abandoned town that looked like the set of a movie someone had forgotten to film. But I only stopped for ten minutes to fill the tank with gas from an overturned minivan.

Up until then I’d kept TSJ at bay by taking a swallow of Cladoxpan every two hours. The moment I started sweating, I stopped, took another drink, and drove on.

That drug didn’t just keep me in the world of the living. My craving for it got stronger and stronger. I didn’t know if I was physically or psychologically hooked on the stuff, but the craving was as real as the back pain I felt after long hours on a bike with bad shocks.

Still, I was close. Very close. And that made me feel happy and relaxed. Combined with fatigue, that proved to be a lethal cocktail.

I was on a stretch of winding road in southern Mississippi, a region full of swamps, lagoons, and dikes. The Mississippi River spreads out in all directions as it nears the ocean, which made it harder for the Undead to move around. I pictured thousands of them trapped in the muddy waters. I hadn’t seen a single Undead for an hour, and I was starting to feel sleepy. Time to stop and find a place to sleep.