The biker kept the throttle running hard and the bike sped off down Main Street away from the hardware store and the retreating trucks that Eric watched over his shoulder. The press of putrid yellow and gangrenous grey sacks of flesh and bone pursuing the bike was undeterred. Some of the more intact zombies were looping and jogging in a jangled jerking fashion towards Eric and the mystery biker as they tore down the street littered with broken glass and the tattered remnants of human existence. Crumpled and useless paper and plastic bags not anchored to earth flittered and danced in the wake of the wind the bike kicked up behind its tires as he headed west.
Over the tortured whine of the dirt bike’s engine Eric couldn’t hear the words that the biker was yelling into the wind. The helmet that he wore muffled most of the noise even with the visor up. The zombies were falling behind but despite the growing distance between them and their potential meal they weren’t turning away from the pursuit of the biker and Eric. They weaved past an early 2000’s minivan and as a zombie lunched out from behind the front passenger fender its outstretched arms which missed unseating Eric by inches was crushed and shredded by the bike’s back tire. The zombie screeched in frustration pointing the accusing finger of its cracked and shattered forearm at the fleeting bike and its riders.
The driver steered the bike down the street past 7th and then past 6th street. The driver let up on the throttled as they neared the intersection of Morgan and Harker. As they drew closer to Harker the driver shifted his weight and the bike turned slowly to the right. Leaning up against the side of the building between two dirty crusted cars was a twenty foot ladder. The biker didn’t give any instructions, he hooked the kickstand with his toe and pulled it into place and then jumped like a jack rabbit off the bike. Eric followed suit, the groan and grumble of the zombie horde growing in intensity with each second.
As they had turned the corner Eric had looked back down Morgan Street and knew they had nearly three quarters of a block between them and the lead zombies but with each slow second the dead were getting closer. It was just the added motivation that Eric needed to push down his near crippling fear of heights. He jumped onto the ladder and took off up the rungs like a rocket heading into orbit. The biker was nearly at the top of the ladder as Eric reached the third rung up.
The Bike turned around his helmet still obstructing his face with a heavy duty hunting rifle pointing down into the street. Eric froze feeling the eagle eye of the scope and its crosshairs drift over his face before turning its cold deadly eye on the section of Harker Street that joined with Morgan and the soon to be appearing zombies. He knew it was a phantom sense but Eric swore he could smell the wet rot of decaying flesh in his nostrils as he pushed himself up the ladder.
Eric was just hoisting himself over the top of the roof when the growl of the zombies came around the edge of the street. The biker took a shot; the rifle’s bark overwhelming the wheeze and howl the dead. A zombie near the front of the swell of bodies went down with a gapping black hole in its forehead. The zombies looked up where the biker clad in black riding leather from ankles to neck was staring through his visor down the scope of his gun at them. He fired again and a second zombie paralyzed by the sudden long range death of its companion took the bullet in the right eye and went down.
Eric watched hunkered down behind the small parapet of the roofs brick work watching as the black figure sent death at two thousand feet per second into the horde of zombies. They started to move again pressing and pounding against the store’s brick wall. Their fragile bones and soggy flesh splattered and broke against the red brink.
“Pull the ladder up before they tear it down and we lose it,” A gravelly voice barked out the order and then four cords were pulled taught and then the ladder started to rise up over the lip of the roof like a draw bridge. The aluminum of the ladder rang out a discordant symphony of clangs and clatters as the metal hit the brick wall on the way up and then clattered with wavering echoes as it struck the roof.
The biker took one last shot and then flipped the visor up. “The trucks are clear.” Through the padding of the helmet the voice was hard to understand but Eric did catch the word trucks. He gazed longingly as the four trucks that had come in the convoy he had been a part of earlier took off west a quarter mile away. Even though he would rather have been with his people headed back to the Farmhouse Eric was glad to be alive. The biker had come looking for help but he wasn’t obligated to provide it when shit had hit the fan and Eric had been separated from his people by the zombies. As he watched his friends escaping, he sank to the roof his back pressed to the parapet. The screams and hissing of the zombies below him the only company in his head as he considered his fate and how he would ever get back to his friends.
A sharp kick to his foot brought him around. He looked up into the face of the biker who had removed his helmet. He had oily sandy yellow hair that was just teasing the tops of his ears. The week’s worth of growth on his cheeks looked like two days worth, a patchwork of peach fuzz and coarse hair stuck to his face. The biker looked his sharp nose at Eric. It was in the guy’s eyes and Eric could see it, the biker considered Eric a threat and was going to treat him as such until he had a reason not to. “Take off your shirt; we need to check you for bites.”
Eric met the biker’s angry commands with defiance, “I’d tell you if I was bit, my group has a policy about it.”
The biker looked at Eric like he was shit on his shoes. The biker’s words were sharp and mistrusting, “oh yeah and what kind of a policy is that?”
“We take care of ourselves.” Eric made a gun with his index and middle finger using his thumb as a trigger. He put the pantomime gun under his chin and snapped his thumb down mimicking the hammer strike of a revolver.
The biker seemed to chew on the image for a moment before speaking, “even so we’ve still got to check, you’re with us for now and you’ll do things our way.”
Without answering Eric unbuttoned his red plaid shirt dropping it to the ground and then tugging off his graying white t-shirt. The cool spring air poked at his soft flesh tingling like a foot that had fallen asleep. The biker his rifle held halfway between his waist and his shoulder talked around Eric twice before grabbing each arm and lifting it up and inspecting him from fingertips to shoulders for bites. “You can put your clothes back on,” satisfied with his inspection the biker clapped Eric on the shoulder once and then turned his back on the newcomer.
Even with the crisp air prodding him the chill freezing Eric to the core was the sound of the zombies twenty feet below them still howling in unharnessed hunger for the food that had escaped their mouths just minutes ago. Eric was just finishing buttoning up his shirt when the biker figured turned to look over his shoulder at Eric, “might as well introduce you to the group since. Looks like you’re going to be here for awhile.”
They next ten minutes were spent following the biker as he introduced Eric to the men and women huddled on the rooftops. This part of davenport was a cluster of seven different stores that all shared a single roof, they covered the whole block and it gave people the illusion of privacy. The biker never offered his name and none of the other rooftop refugees mentioned him by name as Eric shook hands and made small talk with the people he met. They continued towards the far end of the rooftop where a younger looking woman crushed under over a half dozen blankets sat propped against the brickwork of the roof. A second woman who was probably only a handful of years older than the first woman but looked almost twenty years her senior was holding a water cup to the younger woman’s lips. Eric noticed she was doing a pulse check on the younger woman’s wrist but quickly tucked the younger woman’s arm under the blanket as Eric and the biker approached.
The older woman turned at the sound of the sledgehammer like thuds of the biker’s boots as he and Eric got closer. The woman pushed a few wayward strands of raven black hair out of her face with the back of her hand before addressing the biker, “I thought you were going to get help from that group of looters at the hardware store. You brought us one guy.”
“There was a pack of zombies ambling around the high school parking lot. They almost swept me away as I came around the corner. Between the small group that was already following me and the group in the parking lot it’s a miracle that I made it back at all.” The biker dropped to a knee and reached under the blankets. He pulled his hand back out, a pale elegant hand was wrapped in his. The fingers looked weak as they curled into a childlike fist. There was a waver in his voice as spoke his eyes locked on the serene ageless face of the woman propped against the bricks, “how’s she doing doc?”
“The aspirin is keeping the fever down which is good but the ankles bad. If we don’t get her to a real doctor and get her on some high grade antibiotics soon she’s going to lose the leg. We don’t have the equipment to amputate anyway and if the gangrene gets much worse she’s not going to make it.”
The biker was still staring into the face of the woman whose hands he clung to like it was last foothold on sanity he had. “We’re going to have to make a run for it aren’t we?”
The raven haired woman shook her head, “It’s a suicide mission. The hospital is going to be ground zero for these things. Plus we have Eddie to think about. You promised him tomorrow you’d get them out of there and it sounds like between him and us there are a lot of creepers to kill.”
“Do you think they can go one more day without food?” Biker still hadn’t taken his eyes off the woman wrapped in blankets. He had started to massage the back of her hand rubbing his fingers tenderly across her knuckles.
“Not likely unless you’re willing to bury some of those little bodies tomorrow.” The raven haired woman kept up the conversation with the biker. Neither of them seemed to notice or care that Eric was there eavesdropping on their conversation. “We need to get Eddie and that bus load of kids and teachers out tomorrow or we might as well leave them all. I’m not okay with that and I hope to hell you’re not either Mal.”
“Can we do both? Can we get Eddie and the kids free and still get to the hospital and get what we need?” Eric couldn’t see them be he could hear tears in biker’s voice.”
The raven haired woman wore a blank look on her face as her eyes drifted first south and then north easterly. When she spoke her voice was frail and hesitant, “we can try, if everything went according to plan then yes we could do it but when exactly in the last week has anything gone according to plan?” She looked at him with soft eyes filled with pity, “I hope you’re a gambling man Malcolm cause you’re betting your life on a handful of guns in less than well trained hands.”
The biker turned away from the placid face of the woman against the bricks and looked at Eric with eyes red from silent tears. “He’s got a gun and he can shoot.”
“Congratulations,” the raven haired woman said looking at Eric with the last few drops of pity she had, “looks like you’ve been conscripted.”