Beyond the Barriers

“Shoot it!” I yelled, and then fired off another magazine of ammo. The machine gun was meant to be mounted on a bipod and shot while lying prone. Firing it meant constantly fighting the upward pull of the gun.

“What?” Pat called back. I looked behind me, and Katherine was changing magazines.

“Get to the car, Kat!” I called.

“Don’t fucking call me that,” she said, and a smile quirked her lips. She was breathing hard and flushed. She was enjoying this, the danger. She and I would make a fine pair if we survived. The chances of that were pretty slim. I tried to swing the gun around and use it judiciously, but there were just too many of them, and in the way were my two new friends.

Pat fell down as three of them grabbed him.

I tossed the machine gun at one crawling up the side of the truck and dragged my 9 mm out. I studied the valve then put the gun close to it, angling it away from the tank. Then I fired, knowing that there was every chance I was about to detonate the fuel.

The gunshot rang out, and the valve turned an inch from impact. I kicked it with the heel of my boot, and the thing moved. I kicked it again, and this time was greeted with a burst of air. Gas spewed out the top as the air bubbles mixed with the noxious fluid.

Katherine had reached the car and crawled into the driver’s seat. I picked up the egg timer with the wires running out of it and pounded it against the butt of my gun a few times. It started ticking. We had about 45 seconds to get the hell out of there.

Pat managed to unsling the shotgun from his shoulder, turn it at the things and open up, but there were too many, and they dragged him off the car. He screamed and thrashed as they tore him apart.

I yelled out for him, but it was too late. He screamed and kicked, fought with everything he had. I’d put a bullet in my head before that happened to me.

She gunned the engine, and several of them latched onto the side, so she shot them in the face. I leapt onto the hood of the SUV, cursing myself for leaving the goddamn lid closed. I held on for dear life while yelling at her to just take off. She started to back up, but we hit a patch of the things. I looked behind, and there was an army of them coming at us, just as we had hoped.

They swarmed, and I could see the convoy leaving the compound in the distance. There was no way we could get through that press of bodies. We would have to go the other way. I banged on the top and yelled as loud as I could, “Just go for the open road. It’s our only chance!”

One of them grabbed an arm, and one latched onto my ankle, as she gunned the engine. I shook off the one on my foot, but the other one had somehow wedged his foot in the side of the car, and he was good and stuck. His face was a nightmare of scars and damage, his eyes the same luminous green as the others I had seen. The first one I had seen up close.

“Die,” it hissed, then snapped at my hand. I jerked back, twisting my forearm in a violent downward motion to break free. He snapped at my exposed fingers again, and I punched him in the face for his effort. My right hand held onto the turret for dear life, using the small slot they had cut in it. The metal was dirty and jagged, and I felt it bite into my forearm with each movement. I thought of the last time I had a tetanus shot, and smiled stupidly at the ghoul. He was about to make my life a lot worse than having lockjaw.

He slithered onto the top of the car as Katherine swerved around the last of the barricade. It seemed like my whole life the last few days had been made up of barricades, from this one, to the fence, to the space inside the store. I missed the freedom to do what I wanted, when I wanted. I should have stayed at the cabin and hunted. Read that book on tubers and mushrooms. There was plenty to live off the land. I could have probably survived for years up there.

I pulled myself to my knees and held on with my left hand as she punched the engine. We must have been going thirty-five or forty miles an hour. The wind whipped past me, and the smell of clean, cold air filled my nose.

A blast behind me drew my attention, even as I punched the ghoul in the face and snapped his arm with a vicious knife-hand strike to his forearm. He howled in fury, so I hit him in the nose, and that took a lot of the fight out. Dust rose in the air, but it wasn’t the explosion I had expected. If the rig didn’t go up, it might make for a bad escape for the refugees, but at least they had a head start. The sound had been familiar, though, and I wondered if …

He stood up on the doorframe. His foot was most likely in the slot they cut in the galvanized steel panels for me to shoot through. I planted my right foot, and then thrust my left in front of me in a kick that caught him in the chest. He fell back with a scream that was drowned out by multiple loud thumps. I hazarded a look over the side of the SUV and saw that his foot was still stuck, but his upper leg and body were completely gone.

The latch popped, and I slithered into the seat next to Katherine. She shot me a wide-eyed smile, which clearly showed how amped up she was at the escape. She was wallowing in the danger; she seemed made for it.

“So what happened to the tank?”

“I don’t know. But that small explosion might have been Pat.” I took a deep, shuddering breath, and the shakes set in. I had been running on pure adrenaline for the last few minutes, my body guided by instinct more than logic.

“Pat?”

“He had the frag grenade I tossed you. I think he blew it up while they ate him.” I shivered.

“Poor Patrick. He was a brave man.” She sighed.

“He was a good man. I owed him.”

“Now what do we do? Wait a while and try to …” She jerked forward as a massive, orange blast of light lit the daylight sky. It didn’t take long for the sound wave to reach us. I looked behind me, through the hole in the metal over the rear mirror, and was greeted by a tiny mushroom cloud as about a thousand gallons of gas exploded. We were probably three quarters of a mile away when it happened, but she hit the gas anyway, accelerating around the cars and trucks abandoned on the road.

She pulled over a few minutes later, and we stood in the road, watching the smoke as it rose into the air. The explosion had been massive, and some of the trees along the road had caught fire.

I got into the driver’s seat, and we talked over our options. We could go back to town and attempt to follow the caravan. We could go back to the Walmart and hide until help came back, or we would go to the cabin and do our best to survive.

It started to rain when we reached the abandoned store I had seen earlier. Was that just a few days ago? We stopped, and I chased off a couple of mongrel dogs. The door was locked, but the glass in it was shattered. I held a pistol in front of me and called out that we were friendly—and alive.

The store was empty of any goods, but something in the back caught my eye. The floor had an old wooden section that creaked when we walked over it. Except for one spot.

I felt around the edges until I found a hidden latch. It snapped open, and I lifted a cleverly built hatch.

We found a lot of canned goods in the small space, so we loaded them up. I found some bags of flour, as well as a few large canvas bags of rice and dried beans. I wondered what happened to the people who managed to collect this much food and never eat it.

There was another hidden door in the floor in the storage room, which led to a room with an old TV and radio. I took the radio and raided the supplies, which consisted mainly of powdered milk and cereal. It was a weird combination, but I was betting I could live on Cheerios.

We made it to the cabin before night. It was raining hard—a sheet of turgid water turning the night a gray that pulled at my view and made it hard to see. We had some slow going for part of the ride, because the windshield wipers had been removed to make room for the metal plates.

The first night, Katherine and I spent an hour heating water to near boiling and pouring it in the old tub. But it was worth it. She said she hadn’t had a proper bath since the epidemic began.

The barricades were down for now—the ones that had hindered my life for the past half year. The barricade at the city, the barricade to my existence, and, so it seemed, the barricade to my heart. I smiled when I joined her in the tub, and told her I was glad she was with me. She smiled in return, and it broke down the last barricade. I wept for the first time in many years.