Battlefield Z (Book 4): Zombie Blues Highway Read online

  Right now, I just moved the bucket into the middle of the living room floor, gathered a lot of wood from around the trailer and stacked it inside and beside the bucket.

  I shut the door, blocked it with the overturned kitchen table and stripped off my clothes. I built a small blazing fire in the bucket and when I was warm, hung the clothes across the shower bar that I moved next to the fire.

  I sat naked in front of the flames, and cooked the carrots and peas into a soup, drank it all, ate a package of saltines with a can of cranberry sauce, and wrapped myself in a nest of towels and blankets to sleep, filet knife close at hand.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The next morning, I overslept.

  I know that sounds weird in a world where clocks had no meaning. But ever since the Zombie Armageddon happened, I'd been pretty in sync with the rising and setting of the sun, waking up when it was first light, and ready for bed not too long after dark.

  Not today.

  I opened my eyes to full sunshine leaking through the windows facing east. It must have been a little after mid-morning and I cursed quietly because that meant the General would have had a head start on searching for me.

  If they ran across this fishing cabin, I was toast.

  I checked the clothes and they were mostly dry and smelled like smoke. I guess that's what happens when you burn a fire inside a washtub in a trailer and hang your pants over the flames.

  It made me think Cowboys must have stunk pretty bad, and then I realized most cowboys took a bath on Saturday unless they came across a river or stream, and even then, it was iffy. So, they must have smelled pretty much like homeless people all the time, except with manure and sweat and horse lather thrown in.

  I took a second to appreciate the smell of only smoke and river water as I got dressed. I took the blankets from the nest and folded them in half, then slit a foot-long hole in the middle of that. I put my head through the hole and it made a blanket poncho. I did the same with two sheets tied them around my waist with a strip of towel like a belt. Now I had extra layers over my coat, and was prepared for any cold snaps that might happen if I was caught out without shelter.

  Plus, I could fold my hands up inside the blanket as I walked and keep them warm. The temperatures were dropping into the forties at night, but never climbing out of the fifties during daylight.

  The weather here was fickle. It could be seventy-one day and twenty the next and I wasn't enough of a weatherman to read the clouds.

  Bundled up I slowly opened the door and stood back to one side, just in case anyone was lying in wait.

  But no one was there. I stepped out into the world, slid the haft of the broken lock back into the clasp to keep the shelter intact in case someone needed it in the future, or if I came back this way with my kids, and went to investigate the boat.

  A lot of fishermen store gear in their boats, but this was a weekend trailer in the woods and the boat was just a metal hull Sixteen feet, three unpadded seats, a rotten board on the gunwale where a motor could be mounted.

  No motor.

  No paddles.

  Just the boat on a trailer with two flat tires and a path that led down the cleared lot to the edge of the river.

  I put two packages of saltines and an open can of cranberry sauce in the bottom of the boat on a towel, double checked to make sure I wasn't missing any paddles hidden in the leaves or in the eaves of the carport. I tossed a line of rope into the bow, just in case, then lifted the trailer hitch and pulled.

  It didn't budge.

  I stood up and sighed, then moved the small wooden blocks away from both wheels and lifted again.

  This time the boat scratched through the dirt and made a torturous run for the river. It was slow going, the flat tires grinding against the soft dirt of the path. I grunted and strained and had to stop four times as I dragged it downslope toward the water, but finally made it.

  It took another five minutes to get the trailer turned around, and less than one to slip the boat off the back and into the water with a slapping splash.

  I looked around to make sure I was alone, but all I could hear was the lapping of the water against the hull and birds in the trees.

  I took that to be a good sign.

  I shored the boat hull aground, searched for a board or branch, something I could steer with and came up empty.

  I didn't have time for this. Who has a boat in a river shack and no way to steer it? No rudder, no paddles.

  All I needed was a rudder really, a flat board I could hold in the water and steer across the current. The water would carry me downstream and over to the other side.

  Not pretty.

  Certainly, not efficient, but effective.

  But I couldn't find a board outside.

  I pulled the padlock again, went inside and started looking at the kitchen cabinets to take a door off the hinges.

  Before I did that, I checked the bathroom and found a small shelf with a sixteen inch one by two board, which wouldn't work. Then I checked the back bedroom and there was a six-foot plank horizontal on one wall as a shelf.

  I ripped it down. It was only a one by eight pine, lightweight and would do the trick. I checked outside again.

  Still clear, so the shack got locked up and I got into the boat and used my new multipurpose rudder and paddle to shove off from shore. I sat on the back seat and played with the angle of the board in the water, twisting and shifting it to see how I could steer the boat and after a few moments had the hang of it.

  I drifted out into the river, silent but for the water, watched the shore as it slipped away and shuddered.

  A hundred yards from the shack a couple of dozen Zombies did their relentless march toward the clearing and the trailer. Some kids, mostly women.

  If they had caught me out in the open with just the filet knife, I would have been in trouble.

  Instead, I sent a silent prayer up to the river gods and anyone else who bothered to look out for me as I angled out into the water. The Z didn't even notice my passing.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Mark Twain was a river pilot back before the Army Corp of Engineers decided to try and tame the mighty Mississippi. Still I couldn't help but think of him and old Huck Finn as I crossed the river in a flat bottom boat. Sure, Huck did it on a raft and Twain plied the muddy waters in a steamboat, but a sailor is a sailor no matter how far from shore, right.

  I kept hunched over in the boat to minimize my profile for anyone who might be watching, conscious that the General and his men were still on the Mississippi side of the water.

  Any crack shots in their unit could take me out fairly easily.

  Twain called Helena the jewel of the Mississippi.

  I'm from Arkansas and he must have been talking about the city during it's heyday, because what I knew about the Delta city did not suggest a jewel.

  I gauged I was ten miles north of that bluffs where the town looked down onto the water when I made landfall. There was a wetland creek that emptied into portion of the river behind an island. I began poling in the shallow water with the multipurpose paddle/rudder and now poling board and ventured up the creek until the cypress disappeared and the land turned to cotton and soybean farms. The creek became an irrigation ditch with shallow walls, but still wide enough for the boat and shallow enough to keep pushing.

  It stopped at an earthen dike and I finally had to abandon ship. I used the rope to tie it off to a metal drainage pipe and flipped the boat over to keep out rainwater after dragging it out of the water. If it flooded, the rope would keep it in place, just in case I needed it again.

  It was like the trailer I sheltered in the night before. I didn't want to destroy anything because of who might use it after me, or on the off chance that I came back in this direction and needed it. Boat, shelter, buildings.

  There was a lot of destruction in this new world.

  I was trying to limit mine to Z.

  And the occasional militia man or bandit that tried to s
tand in my way.

  I extra layers had worked well on the water, keeping me warm in the nippy breeze that blew steady from the North and west. I tightened the line snug and climbed out of the ditch to stand in the middle of a vast field of soybeans.

  I checked the sun that was beginning to move toward the west and followed it so my shadow stayed behind me.

  I walked for half an hour until I hit a tractor trail between the rows, a dirt path that sectioned off the overgrown farmland. It ran North, and I knew I-40 was in that direction so I didn't mind taking it.

  Then I saw a centaur.

  I admit I might have been tired, and it was a play of light across shadows and I don't know why I was thinking about a mythical creature from fantasy worlds, but I looked up at a bare road, glanced down and when I lifted my head again my first thought was it's a centaur.

  In a world where zombies roam, then maybe more is possible.

  Turns out it was a man on a horse. That made way more sense, at least until I saw Pan run out from the underbrush and if creatures of myth and legend were roaming the newly apocalyptic earth, I don't think they would make Arkansas their first home.

  I wouldn't have.

  I left the state at eighteen, but kept being drawn back in. First by the death of my mother, which brought me my first ex-wife. I dragged her to California and when she got pregnant, she absconded back to the natural state so our daughter could be raised near family. I followed and we had my son and a divorce.

  A second dalliance gave me a second marriage and third child that created a move to Florida for job security with a growing company, and closer to her parents.

  That divorce left me stranded in mid-level management at corporate America. I escaped in running, escaped in books, fell in love with the winter weather and planned to retire to a beach community after a run up the corporate ladder. I got to see my kids once a month in Arkansas, twice a month in Florida and I watched them be raised by other men.

  My son became a hunter and fisherman, adopting good old boy habits learned from his step-father. My oldest longed to travel and I heard tales of her mother trying to squash that dream.

  And each trip back to Arkansas, I watched the changes as right wing conservatism drifted on a fine line with banana republic politics. It was number fifty out of fifty in almost every category measured. Education. Economic. Open mindedness.

  Even the state's claim to fame as being natural was a marketing veneer as chicken farms dotted the landscape in the Northwest to supply the largest poultry company in the US, and hog farms destroyed the watershed of a dozen rivers.

  The Delta region was abandoned as those who could afford it moved to Little Rock and points northwest.

  That was good for me now, since I hadn't encountered a Z on this side of the river yet.

  I thought going through Arkansas would be easy.

  After all, I had just left Central Florida a couple of weeks ago whose population was higher than the entire state.

  When I saw the man on the horse, I was a little surprised.

  I stopped in the middle of the road and stared for a minute, wiping the cobweb memories of half man half horse from my vision and he started trotting toward me.

  I waited, hand on the filet knife under the serape, which is the name of the way I was wearing the blankets I just remembered.

  He pulled up on the reins about fifteen feet from me and rested his hand on a pistol grip holstered at his waist.

  “Afternoon,” he said.

  Southern thick voice, face not weathered. Smooth skin like he spent more time inside than out. I couldn't see his hands but I bet they were soft. He was thin, but who wasn't these days, extra flesh hanging off his jowls and neck.

  “Howdy,” I said back.

  A flash of anger at just how easy it was to slip back into the accent I'd grown up with, the one chipped away by years out in the world.

  “You're trespassing,” he informed me.

  Hand still on the gun. Eyes flicking around behind me to see if I was alone, running point. No concern for what was behind him or around us.

  “I'm just passing through.”

  “That you are,” he said.

  Still watching.

  “Where'd you come from?”

  “Other side of the river.”

  “You ain't got no guns?”

  Part of a statement, partially a question. He noticed my hands under the blanket, noticed I hadn't pulled them out.

  I did so then and held them up to show him they were empty.

  “That's dangerous round here.”

  “It's dangerous everywhere,” I told him. “But someone decided to take them up by Memphis and I went for a swim.”

  “You swim across the river?”

  He didn't believe me.

  “Found a flat bottom and floated.”

  He nodded.

  “What you doing up in Memphis? There's a lot of the undead up there.”

  “There is,” I agreed. “Looking for a way to cross.”

  “Yeah, they figure out how to use boats or swim and we're gonna be overrun over here.”

  He sat up in the saddle and stared across the fields. Maybe he could see something I couldn't from his higher vantage point.

  “You ain't gonna make it off my land before sunset,” he informed me.

  “I can move faster.”

  “Nope,” he said and wheeled his horse around. “Turn right at the next road you cross. It's gonna bring you to the house. I'll put you up for the night and then you get going in the morning.”

  “Thanks,” I called after him as he began trotting back up the road. Tiny puffs of dust sent up by the hooves drifted back toward me on the cold wind.

  The weather promised a change, something colder in the works, maybe even a freeze. I could see a line of clouds marching across the horizon like a solid wall of gray. I didn't want to be out in it.

  But I wasn't sure I wanted to stay in a stranger's house.

  He was a little too quick on the draw to offer shelter.

  There was southern hospitality, and giving a room to a stranger was something my grandfather might have done. Different world back then.

  Or maybe it was a different world now.

  Maybe he wanted to know where I was on his property, and make sure he had me under control for the night and moved on in the morning.

  I stood thinking about it for a moment, then decided I could consider the possibilities while moving just as well as I could playing statue. I started walking up the road, still damp hiking boots kicking up dust just like the horse.

  I had decided to either keep going or turn left as soon as I found an intersection. There were too many scenarios that ended up with me in a pot, or worse going into his house. I'd just keep moving, watch out for being followed and get clear.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  There was a second man waiting for me at the crossroads.

  I wondered if he was the devil waiting to trade my soul for a guitar lesson, but the deals old Splitfoot offered were always in Mississippi. He didn't travel much in Arkansas or Louisianan, but always in some dusty backwater on the east side of the Big Muddy.

  That's how Highway 61 got its nickname. The Blues Highway ran along the birthplace of the blues, dilapidated cotton farms given over to sharecroppers too broke to be called poor. They scratched out a living from the soil, paid a landowner ninety percent of what they made for the right to do so, and turned to music for solace and relief.

  Things so bad most of the time that they made deals with the devil just to escape. Sometimes just to eat.

  I wondered what deal's Old Sam would offer now, and if this was him.

  “I'm Sam,” he said.

  I nearly pulled the knife, nearly sliced his throat and started running. It wasn't superstition, just one of those odd moments of coincidence that people attune to the Universe and God say is an answer to something.

  Sam was a six-foot skinny man, dark skin with large white eyes.
He wore simple work pants, work shirt and worn boots, leather gloves hanging out of one back pocket, a grimy bandana the other. He looked more like a farmer than the devil.

  “Sam,” I shook his hand.

  He waited for me to introduce myself and when I didn't, started talking.

  “Mr. Boles sent me down here to walk you in.”

  “Boles.”

  Sam nodded and started walking, just expecting me to follow. I glanced up the other two roads and briefly considered making a run for it.

  But Sam could just go get Boles and tell him which road I took. A horse could catch me pretty fast.

  So, I followed.

  The man wasn't much older than me but moved with a slight limp, as if old age and suffering had taken control of his limbs. The average age of a person one hundred years ago, was forty something, and just before the Z plague wiped out the data scientists and bureaucrats who kept up with such things, the average age was seventy-two.

  The average age now was who knew what, but the average time to live seemed to be short.

  The group I was with lost half of our people in Florida just trying to escape. I kept them safe through Georgia and we picked up strays as we searched for a promised land to turn into a new home.

  We lost more then.

  There were just too many dangers in the new world and we were like pioneers struggling across the old paths, trying to make a place where we could live in peace, free from Z, free from tyrants and armies and criminals.

  Sam was older than me and even I was past the age that was once considered old. I didn't feel old, not yet, but this new way of living was harder. It was tougher on the body. Almost starving, fighting, the adrenal glands working overtime to dump adrenaline in the body a couple of times a day, every time a zombie showed up, or a new person with a gun.

  There were just too many ways to die now.

  I caught myself and cursed silently. I blamed Arkansas. It had a way of making me feel morose, of turning me into a pessimist.