Race to Refuge

Chapter Six: Charlie

The main problems with driving the ambulance around were that it was impossible to maneuver in heavy traffic, that these poor victims kept trying to flag me down for help, and that the thing sucked down gas like a Slurpee. I needed to ditch it. Ideally, I needed to ditch it and trade it for my motorcycle. That thing would zip through traffic like a song, use a fraction of the gas, and nobody would be trying to get me to help them.

It was killing me not to stop and help. That was the whole reason I changed jobs and became a paramedic to begin with. Right now, right here, I was in no position to help. I had no weapon. Plus, we were all quickly becoming vastly outnumbered in a short period of time. The city was no place to hang out during a zombie outbreak.

I drove up to my street. I'll admit that there are some neighbors that I'm not wild about. The guy that leaves his dog outside to bark all day while he's at work—that's very annoying. And then there's the neighbor who leaves his trash dumpster out on the street for days after the garbage man has emptied it. Just roll it back to the house, dude. It's not that big of a deal. People are lazy.

But even though I wasn't crazy about these neighbors to begin with, I definitely liked them a lot less when they'd turned into zombies. Maybe they disliked me too, because when these neighbor-zombies spotted me in the ambulance they immediately eyed me with a gleam in their eyes with arms outstretched. Wanting to welcome me to their corrupted clan.

I had other ideas. First of all, I needed to get my dog out of there. I love Mojo like a brother—a big, furry, German shepherd brother. He trusts me and loves me and I couldn't leave him shut up in my house to starve or dehydrate. That wasn't fair to him. It also wasn't totally fair to just open the door, let him outside, and allow him to be consumed by zombies. I didn't know for sure if the zombies would attack animals, but I didn't want to take the risk with Mojo.

The only problem was that I really needed my motorcycle. Could I throw the bike in the back of the ambulance along with Mojo? The bike was a couple of hundred pounds, though, who was I kidding? Even with adrenaline pumping through my body, I wouldn't be able to lift that much weight. The only choice left as I saw it was to see if a German shepherd and a nearly two-hundred pound, forty year old man could fit on a motorcycle.

Besides Mojo, all I wanted was my bike. Sure there was a lot of other stuff in my house that I could use or would like to have, but it all mostly boiled down to my bike. Besides, if I took off on my motorcycle, I wasn't exactly going to have the space to put a bunch of things. No. The idea formulating in my head was this: get out of town first. Then next maybe I could scavenge around for supplies. Maybe by then, I'd even get rid of my bike and hotwire a deserted car or something.

This was all going through my head as I sat in the ambulance and watched my former neighbors stagger toward me on lurching legs. Did they have any intelligence, these things? No. Very likely not. They honestly didn't have any intelligence back when they were human, so why would that have changed now that they weren't? I put the ambulance in reverse, slowly luring the two zombies after me. They eagerly followed, clothes splattered with blood—theirs—some poor victim's?

Once we all got to the very end of my street, I quickly changed gears and punched the ambulance's accelerator as hard as I could. The ambulance shot forward and I steered it to my house at the other end of the street. I jumped out of the rig and then promptly dropped my keys in the driveway as if I were in some kind of B-movie. Glancing up, I saw the things start to stagger my way from several houses down. I took a deep breath, got myself together, ran up to the house and let myself in.

Mojo was at the door, as usual, to greet me. But this time his fur was standing up on the back of his neck. He knew something was up. And his large nose was working overtime, which made me wonder...could he smell the zombies? Did they put out a particular, distinctive smell? I reached down and gave Mojo a quick rub. His amber eyes were worried and I patted him, and then stood up quickly.