To his right, Ted grunted something and the two men hopped out. In the back seat, Wayne looked at his gun and wondered if he should have shot them both as soon as Zach threw the vehicle into park.
The opportunity passed, Wayne stepped from the Jeep and into the early morning light. Not even nine o’clock, and already the Louisiana air was cloying. The interstate sliced through a dense pine forest. They’d stick to the shade for as long as they could.
At the rear of the Jeep, they suited up: backpacks stuffed with supplies (in case they got separated and were unable to return to the Jeep), gloves, hinged face-shields, filtered dust masks, and wooden baseball bats. There was also a furniture dolly, for boxes. Wayne grabbed it.
“Cars are tight here,” Zach said, real low. “Keep quiet and watch your asses. If you get bit, I’m calling the Doctor.” He patted the .357 Magnum on his right hip. The bastard had actually painted it white. There was a small red cross on the grip. A .40 Taurus rested beneath each arm.
“What if you get bit?” Wayne asked, grabbing a bat.
“Then I’ll see the Doctor.”
“That one is mine,” Ted said, pulling the bat from Wayne’s hand. His dark eyes, darting leftrightleftright, resembled empty zoetropes. There was more than a little crazy there.
“Oh-kay.”
“It’s the marks right here.” Ted pointed at some deep gouges in the business end of the bat. “That’s how I can tell. This is the one I always use, it has the marks.” He turned and trotted off.
Wayne looked at Zach, who nodded once and walked away. Wayne grabbed another bat, slipped it through a loop on his belt and, pushing the dolly, followed them onto the interstate. Since their little community of survivors had come together four months ago outside of Baton Rouge, they’d searched over forty miles of I-12. They now moved along the choked northbound lanes of I-55, and were less than fifty miles away from the Mississippi border.
Zach and Ted walked shoulder-to-shoulder two paces ahead of him, chuckling over stories they’d told each other several times before. They’d been buddies before the outbreaks, and it didn’t seem fair.
Wayne didn’t have any real friends among the three-dozen men in the warehouse. Ian was trustworthy enough but pretty unpleasant to be around, always talking about needing *, always picking at his ears and nose and fingernails and scalp. You’d think with a perpetual hygiene jones like that, he’d smell a little better than he did. Then there was Sue, who he hardly knew, really. It was hard to talk about things now in any normal way, but he guessed he wasn’t really interested in her religion or her favorite music, anyway.
But goddamn Ted and Zach went on chatting about the Saints and the niggers and the fucking Waffle House like any of it still mattered. Scanning the area for dead folks, Wayne wondered again if he should just pull his piece and pop each of them in the back of the head. He wondered if he could.
“That one there,” Zach said, indicating an 18-wheeler a few hundred feet away.
“What about those?” Ted was talking about the four smaller delivery trucks between them and the semi. “Could be some good shit in there.”
“Could be. Probably is,” Zach said. “But we try the big truck first. Find what we need and get the hell out of here.”
Wayne looked around. No movement anywhere, only cars and trucks bumper to bumper for all-time, some of them unscathed, some blackened and twisted, others glass and steel tombs whose misshapen and sun-baked occupants watched soundlessly as the three men strode between them.
It would be so damn easy now. A little later, and he’d lose his chance to get the drop on them. The whole thing could fall apart. And if his suspicions were true—if the last five guys to die on supply runs with Zach and Ted had been popped to keep rations fat back at the warehouse, couldn’t they already have the drop on him? Could he be walking toward his execution?
“Slow day,” Wayne said. Ted grunted again.
“The fuck you talking about?” Zach asked. Wayne could hear the disdain in his voice.
“None of them around yet.”
“Yeah,” Zach said. “So far so good, I guess.”
About twenty feet from the semi, Zach cursed. The loading door was partially open, and the ground around the truck was littered with rusted and broken kitchen appliances—toasters, blenders, indoor grills—sitting among the faded and disintegrating remains of cardboard boxes. They lifted the door and peered into the trailer. The boxes near the door were weathered and rippled. Toward the back, they were intact, their contents as useless as the trailer in which they sat.
“Okay,” Zach said. None of them were surprised. “We’ll go back and check the smaller trucks, and then we’ll—damn.”
“What?”
“Here we go.” Zach nodded in the direction from which they’d come. A few hundred feet away, a lone form shuffled toward them.
“Ah, jeeze,” Ted said. He scampered onto the cab of the semi, shielding his eyes and scanning the area. “Three more. Half a mile or so north.”
“No problem,” Zach said.