We found more of the same in Ransom with the populace being cowed by the group of renegades. Ransom had actually put up a fight against the group and had several people hanging outside town as an example to the rest. Another score to settle.
Ransom had about three hundred or so people living in it and they were all looking for a way out. I pointed them in the direction of the tracks and when we pulled out, a long line of people and belongings was headed northeast. None of the gang showed up, so I imagine they were in for a surprise when they came back to a ghost town.
Kernan was similar to Ransom with the exception that we managed to get into a little firefight with the representatives of the renegades. Charlie took a graze to his upper arm and I got nicked in the leg because I wasn’t bright enough to get myself fully under cover, but neither was serious. We killed four of the group with the remaining two beating a hasty retreat to the north. I came to the conclusion that we were not going to finish this unless we went after the rest of the gang, so after a brief powwow, it was decided that Charlie was going to take the survivors of Kernan over to Streator, if anything was left of it, and establish connections there. We did manage to find Tim Harlan, who was overjoyed to hear his brother was still alive.
For Tommy and myself, it was time to go hunting. We had a pretty good idea where our quarry was, but it was still going to take some doing to find them and deal them a blow they would not forget. As Machiavelli once said, “If you must do injury to a man, it should be so severe that his vengeance need not be feared.” So it would be.
I pulled out the map that had brought us this far and I outlined what we knew so far. “The farmhouse was about here,” I said, placing a small pebble on the map. “The group had extended its activity over these towns here.” I placed additional pebbles on Kernan, Ransom, and Kinsman. “Everyone says that the scumbags always went north in some fashion. Since most scumbags rarely show any incentive beyond really lazy, I’m going to hazard a guess that our little friends are probably here.” I pointed to a spot labeled LaSalle Lake Fish amp; Wildlife Area.
“What’s there?” asked Tommy.
“As far as I can tell, water. But without any serious intelligence or someone telling us where to go, we have to start somewhere.” I wasn’t sure, but I did have a gut feeling about the place.
“Are we leaving in the morning?” Tommy wanted to know.
I hesitated. “We may have to do this one at night.”
Tommy stared at me. “Are you nuts? We never go out at night. The Z’s are always more active at night. It would be suicide!”
I shrugged. “What choice do we have? We go in the morning, they’ll see us miles before we will see them. We at least know that they won’t be out at night, for the same reason we shouldn’t be, so we can move around without alerting anyone.”
“Fine.” Tommy said grudgingly. “But I get the shotgun.”
“Deal. But get some rest. We move out in 3 hours.”
“Oh, like I’m gonna sleep now.”
We moved out just as the sun was setting. It was the best time to be moving since it was hard for zombies’ vision to adjust between the light of the sky and the dark of the ground. With any luck, we would be past any problems before they could figure out where we were. We couldn’t find a vehicle to take us where we wanted to go, but we did manage to scrounge up a couple of usable bicycles. In all honesty, if I had to travel at night, I would rather have the bike. It was quiet, it was quick, and could go overland much easier than a car could. Besides, with the way my luck was running, we probably wouldn’t have been able to find anything better than a beat up Cutlass with a bad muffler and out of time cylinder.
Tommy and I pedaled north and based on the map we had roughly ten miles to go, five miles north and five miles east. We were going to stick to the roads since we were not sure of the overland route and we really didn’t want to have to sidestep any natural barriers.
I didn’t relate this to Tommy, but I had a dark suspicion that wherever we wound up, the local ghouls might be out in force because these yahoos had been tearing up the countryside for a while with their travels back and forth. Too much activity tends to cause zombie investigation, and if they had been taking shots at the Z’s they’d come from even farther away.
We pedaled quickly on the road, passing by untended fields and empty farmhouses. I didn’t feel the remotest desire to check out any of the farms, the memory of the last one we checked out too fresh. The evening air was cooler and the moon hadn’t risen yet. The land was darkening with the sky following suit. I was hoping for a clear night sky to give us some light to work with, but that was really out of my hands.
We passed the first crossroads without incident and moved along the road towards the next. The nice thing about country roads in Illinois is they are laid out in one mile square increments. At each mile was a crossroad. If you didn’t know where you were going, you could still do a decent job just following the pattern of the roads. I told this to Tommy who seemed dubious.
“How do you know this stuff?” He whispered as we worked our way past another farm.
“My wife’s family is from downstate. They own a farm and she told me. Never thought it would be useful.” I swerved around a large pothole.
“Never thought the world would end, but here we are.”
“Yep.”
Our conversation seemed normal, but underneath we were both wired as tight as snare drums. I knew we were being heard by Z’s in the area, and in all likelihood many zombies were rousing themselves out of their holes and on the prowl for prey.
We traveled down the road, glancing briefly at the dark homes that rose up out of the darkness like gravestones. Not a light was seen, not a sound was heard. I felt like a trespasser, like we were intruding on a world no longer ours. Stay in the light children, for the dark hides monsters.
Tommy raised a hand as we approached the second mile road crossing. The stop signs looked lonely and out of place, and the street lamp that once lit this little intersection stood silent and dark, watching sentry over its little corner of the world. We slowed to a stop in the middle of the intersection. I looked over at Tommy, and his eyes were locked on the road ahead.
“See something?” I asked
“Hang on.” He looked off to the left a little bit.
“Yeah, there it is. It’s in the ditch on the left side, about fifty yards up,” he said, pulling out his blunt weapon.
I squinted into the darkness. “What’s that weird glow?”
“I don’t know. Never saw that before.”
I shrugged and pulled out my own weapon, the handle-modified pickaxe. “I guess we should go see.”
I pedaled a bit forward, then parked the bike. I was not about to engage a Z while still straddling a bicycle. I got off and stood in the center of the road, figuring it gave me the best purchase for fighting. I listened as the zombie made its way along the ditch, aware of me now, and zeroing in for the kill. As it approached, I could see more details in the waning light. Its clothes were in tatters, hanging off more than hanging on, its dead skin stretched over its dead features. Its nose had been torn off, giving its face a more ghastly, skeletal appearance. Wispy hairs stuck out from its head, and its glowing eyes focused on me as its mouth opened to reveal jagged teeth.
I did a double take. Glowing eyes? When the hell did that start happening? I didn’t think it was possible to make a creepy dead thing creepier, but here it was. The eyes of the zombie actually glowed with a mild luminescence, like a glow in the dark toy that was starting to fade.
As twitchy as glowing zombie eyes made me, I was actually curious how it happened. Was this a side effect? Had it always happened and we just never noticed because we didn’t go out at night? On the plus side, it sure made it easier to spot them at night. On the minus side, it gave me the willies.
The Z scrambled up the ditch and crawled out onto the road. Before it had the chance to get up, I ran up to it and hit it on the head with my pickaxe. The new handle worked well. I didn’t take as large a swing as I normally did, but the additional weight carried well and the pointed end crushed the ghoul’s head easily. I pulled out the pick and noticed that the zombie’s brains were glowing as well. Stranger still. I wiped off the pickaxe and climbed back about the bike. Tommy stepped down to inspect the corpse.
That’s just wrong,” he said, getting back on his bike.
“Makes them easier to spot at night, now, I guess,” I said, putting my weapon back into its place.
“Some consolation,” Tommy said. “Can you imagine hiding in a dark room only to see glowing pairs of eyes coming at you from the blackness?” He shuddered for effect.
“You mean like that?” I pointed to a very dark spot in a small grove of trees. Sure enough, three pairs of glowing eyes could be seen, weaving back and forth, unblinking, unwavering. They had seen us and were now coming for us.
“I will never look at fireflies the same way again,” Tommy said as he started his bike. I pedaled after him. We could have stayed and killed the converging dead, but we had places to go and we only fought when we really had to. I had run into lunatics who felt it was their mission to eradicate the undead threat and wound up taking chances that got themselves killed.
We moved steadily north without further incident, although Tommy and I saw several more zombies in the countryside as the sky grew darker and darker. No doubt, there were a lot more we couldn’t see, since the glowing eyes weren’t like flashlights, more like a slow dull glow. If they had hair falling in front of their faces we could not see their eyes.
Still, it was creepy as all hell to be riding through the dark country and seeing spots of lights dancing in my peripheral vision and I knew they weren’t little harmless insects.
We reached the five mile crossroads and finally turned our bikes east. The sky was even darker and the stars were coming out in force. Without the glow of civilization muting the light of the stars, the night sky was amazing. We could see thousands of stars and a couple of planets low in the sky. The arm of the galaxy could be seen, something I had only seen once a long time ago when Ellie and I visited the southwest deserts.
We pedaled steadily for another twenty minutes and with the night breeze coming out of the east, I could smell water on the wind, enough that I knew we had to be coming near a significant body of water. Remembering the map, I reasoned the LaSalle Fish amp; Wildlife area was getting close.
I let Tommy know we were getting close and he just nodded in the dark, his eyes straining and his hands gripping the handlebars tightly. I didn’t blame him. Up ahead was a pack of zombies, around ten of them, walking along the road, and headed towards us. Their glowing eyes marked each one and I had to decide what to do. We were near enough to where I thought the renegades were that I didn’t think we could risk a shot and there were too many of them to take out in hand to hand combat. There was no cover and the Z’s would simply overwhelm us.
“I’m going to head right at them to bunch them up, then I’m going to swerve to the edge of the road and go around them,” I said to Tommy as I pedaled faster. I could hear the groans of the dead as they saw us coming, carried on a wind that brought also the scent of decay and death.
“Gotcha.” Tommy braked a little to get behind me and then pedaled to catch up so he was only a foot or so behind me. He had the more dangerous position, since the zombies would be reacting to me, but Tommy would be closer to their reaching hands. I pedaled quickly, staying close to the right side of the road, as I approached, I could see several of the zombies moving to the right, trying to cut me off. A couple moved too far, falling into the ditch on the side of the road. I sped towards the groaning mass, then just before I would have plowed into them, I swerved sharply to the left, veering away to the other side of the road. Tommy followed closely behind and we pedaled furiously away from our now confused pursuers. I chanced a glance back and saw they had turned around and were now chasing us, although they were fading quickly into the darkness.
I breathed a sigh of relief. “That went well,” I said, as Tommy resumed his place next to me.
“If we never do that again it will be too soon. I swear that last guy nearly caught my shirt. I felt a tug as I went past.”
“Any encounter you walk away from uninfected…” I said.
“Yeah, I know.”
“Did you notice the eyes?” I queried.
“What about them? Were they different colored this time?”
“Only four of them were glowing.”
“Perfect,” Tommy said, bouncing over a bad repair to the road.
I smiled as we went farther east, passing the fourth mile crossroads. I began to wonder if I had guessed wrong and we were risking our sorry necks for a wild goose chase. If that was the case, we were going to have to find a place to spend the night and in the middle of nowhere that would present a few problems.