“Want me to drive?”

I shook my head. “Maybe in a few hours. I’d like to stick with it for a bit. Thank you.”

“A few hours,” she said.  I didn’t reply and knew she was not happy with my silence. “You need anything?”

“Big Mac, fries? Maybe an icy Coke?”

She laughed. “I’ll see if I can dig you up a bottle of warm water.”

“Mmmm. Sounds perfect.”

I saw the sign for the Hernando de Soto Bridge. I knew that it stood just over a hundred feet from the water, and spanned 20,000 from end to end.

I slammed on the brakes. The bus came to a screeching halt. Tires had to be kicking up black-rubber smoke.

“The fuck, Chase,” Dave said.

“Chase?” Kia said.

Dave came up to the front. He rested a hand on the dash. “What is it?”

“Look.”

The “M Bridge,” as it was often called, was overrun with zombies. Six lanes, three in each direction, were swarming with walking dead, littered with disabled vehicles, and looked damned near impossible to cross.

“Holy shit,” Dave said.

“Now what?”

“Charlene, you have that map?”

Paper ruffled. “There’s another bridge just south of here, Route 55 goes over it,” she said, my navigator.

“Do we turn it around, head for Route 55?”

No one said a word. I wanted input. I did not want this to be my call.

“We can plow right through them.” I turned around. Melissa was directly behind me, her hands on the back of my seat. “Gene made this thing so that it would cut through anything.”

I bit my lip. She was in mourning. She missed her man. This was Gene’s bus and I was worried she just felt like there was something that had to be proved. There wasn’t. No one doubted the validity of this bus. It was a monster.

“I say we go around,” Kia said.

In the oversized rearview mirror, I saw Melissa stare at Kia, as if she’d just unleashed a string of obscenities. “Dave?” I said.

The zombies didn’t seem to notice the bus yet. There was time for us to discuss the decision this time.

“We plow through them,” he said.

“Go around,” Andy said. “We don’t need to hurt those things.”

Charlene stared at Andy like he might be out of his fucking mind. “Give it some gas,” she said.

I didn’t know the temperature, but sweat beaded on my brow. I felt it drip from under my arms. “We go around, we could easily encounter the same thing, or worse. I’m inclined to just keep moving forward.”

Andy shrugged. Kia moved out of my sight, toward the back of the bus.

“You should all buckle in,” I warned. For the most part, I’d used the cow-scoop to gently push vehicles out of the way, to clear a path on the road for us to pass. I’d hit zombies. No second thought given, at the time.

I didn’t even attempt a head count; there had to be over a thousand. They prevented us from reaching the next state, were a barrier keeping us from getting to Mexico. That was what I told myself as I gently pressed my foot down on the gas pedal. The things were halfway across the bridge. It wasn’t that they came at us, as much as they just seemed to mill aimlessly about.

As the bus approached, we gained interest among the herd. They turned toward us, arms out, as they stumbled forward.

“You’re going to have to gun it,” Dave said. “There are so many, we could risk getting stuck.”

“Buckle in,” I said.

“You want me to get us across?”

“I have this.” I stomped my foot down on the pedal. The engine let out a whine as it picked up speed. Gene must have tweaked things under the hood. This bus had some serious pick up.

I held the large steering wheel in both hands. I switched from the center to the left lane. Seemed like less disabled vehicles, as if most drivers had tried to pull over to the side before turning into zombies. How very thoughtful.

I sucked in a deep breath and held it.

The bus gained momentum. The speedometer indicated we were going nearly fifty. I looked at the road.

The cow-scoop was made of steel. It came to a nice point. It would plow these monsters easily out of the way. I braced for impact.

They looked up at me. All of them. The bus barreled into them, but I saw it happen individually.

The front of the scoop sliced into a woman who’d looked too thin, dressed in clothes that were tattered and worn. Loose skin hung from her face in jagged flaps. Large yellow pus boils oozed on her forehead. Both congealed eyeballs, white, cloudy and lifeless, stared up at me as her body was split in half.

The man next to her was shredded. The scoop caught his feet, knocked him onto his back. I imagined the steel peeling back flesh off his legs, and gut. With a bump, he was gone, under the scoop.

The rest of them I saw differently.

I saw lawyers and doctors. There were construction workers and waitresses.  I ran over coworkers, peers. I was crushing fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, sons, daughters. There were grandparents. Friends.

I couldn’t keep doing it. The screams filled my head; resounded like hollow echoes inside my skull. My mouth was open. My jaw ached.

I was screaming, too.

I know I was. I heard me. My voice mixed with the lost voices of all the beings I ran over.

All the lives coming an end.

They may have been dead already. Monsters. Zombies.

No. They were dead. Dead, and gone.

I cut the wheel to the right, and avoided an SUV, and a VW. I knocked more creatures out of the way. They fell under the tires. The bus bounced over corpses. We lost the road many times, riding solely on limbs and torsos and innards.

And I screamed, but I had it. I kept control of the bus. We were safe inside, safe as I decimated the herd, the horde of zombies. Destroyed them.

“Chase! Don’t stop.” Dave was beside me. He braced both hands on the dash. “We’re almost there. We’ve just about made it!”

My foot must have come off the pedal. Subliminal, or something. I wasn’t going to stop. I couldn’t. This was a curse. It would be a part of me forever. I knew I’d never be able to bury the memory. Instead, I finished watching the destruction unfold. I would never forget it. These were more images added and burned to memory; more material that would wait to play out in nightmares destined to keep me from ever again getting a full night’s sleep.

I used my forearm to wipe away tears, as I punched the gas pedal. The bus picked up speed, climbing back toward fifty miles per hour.

Chapter Twenty-Five

2227 hours / 305 miles to go

Any time I think of Waco, all I can remember is the Branch Davidian shoot-out. It took place in 1993. Four ATF agents and six members of a cult were killed. What followed was a fifty-day standoff that the entire world watched. I recall being riveted to my television at home, and it was on at work, even though little to nothing happened during those days, just a ton of views of the infamous compound at Mt. Carmel. It came to a head as the explosive climax erupted for everyone to see. A fire was started and David Koresh, the cult leader, along with seventy-three of his followers, including men, women and children, perished.

It seemed fitting that this was where the bus broke down. Waco, Texas.

Steam spat from the radiator. We’d been riding the bus hard for over a thousand miles. The few stops we took along the way did little to let the engine rest and recoup, if, in fact, engines rested and recouped. Andy, Dave and I stood at the front of the bus with the hood lifted and played flashlight beams over a broken engine.

“Overheated?” Andy said.

“Seems like it.” Dave shook his head. “We just add water?”

“I guess,” I said. “We should let it cool down before we remove the cap.”