Marshall swung his bat at the first zombie, smashing its skull, spraying brains and gore on the crowd behind it.

“What’s our plan here?” Victor asked with a grunt as he buried the hatchet in one’s skull.

“I was thinking we’d kill these zombies,” replied Marshall.

“Thanks, smart ass.”

Fighting back to back like this Victor couldn’t use his normal side-step-and-cleave method.  Marshall had the strength and height to smash through their arms and still destroy their skulls, but Victor didn’t have the right angle.  It wasn’t too hard to get inside their range, but every time he stepped past their arms, there was a chance they’d get a hand on him.

“What the fuck are they doing?” asked Marshall.

Victor took a seconds pause from concentrating on his strategy to look up.  He and Marshall were at the back of the train.  The zombies had formed a semi-circle around them, almost pinning them to the train.  The circle went from the side of the train car, all the way around the yard to the other side of the train car.

The dead weren’t moving, they weren’t advancing at all.  Victor killed one and Marshall two, now the edge of the semi-circle was about ten feet from them.  The zombies stood shoulder to shoulder, forming a solid mass.  Vic searched the yard for the super that had to be controlling them, but found nothing.  He couldn’t see one that was less decomposed.  He couldn’t see one making any decisions.  They were all just standing there, arms down at their side.  We couldn’t go anywhere, but they weren’t attacking.

“Are they holding us?” He asked.

“Lets make for the truck.”

The two brothers moved as one, back to back towards the truck.  No matter how much you train or drill, no one could touch their level of communication.  They had a lifetime of figuring each other out.  The circle around them moved, each zombie keeping roughly ten feet away from them.  They allowed them to move.

“What do you think this is about?” Marshall asked as they climbed into the truck.

“I don’t know.  Do you think we should kill them?  I hate to leave zombies standing.”

“Lets just get out of here and come back with Leo and John.”

“I’m worried that there’s a lieutenant out there somewhere that’s going to wreck our train.”

“Hmm,” Marshall said, thinking.  “Maybe you’re right.  What’s the plan then?”

“Let me think.  What’s in the box left on the back of the truck?” Vic asked.

“Mostly hand tools. A hand saw, hammer, nails, screws, nothing I would consider really useful.”

“Any chance there’s a second hatchet?”

“I think there’s a machete in the bottom.  Its old and rusty though.”

“That’ll be fine, I just need it to help me keep their hands off me.  I’m not as tall as you, its hard for me to get a clean head shot with their arms up in my way.”

Marshall chuckled, and reached back to unlatch the small window in the back window that led to the bed of the pickup.  Victor reached through the glass and opened up the lid of the rusty job box.  He couldn’t reach much, so he squirmed out the window and stood up in the back of the truck.

When he stood up, the zombies closed their circle a little bit.  Not much, just a half a shuffling, stumbling step forward, but it was enough to worry me.  “Marshall, they just closed the circle by about a foot.”

“Hurry up then!”

“Lets get the truck out of here.  Do you think we can take a few out with the truck?” Victor asked, having finally found the machete.

“Hold on, lets find out!”

Marshall started the truck.  Victor sat down in the bed with his back to the cab, wedging himself as tightly as he could.  The big job box was on his right.  It stood a couple of feet taller than the sides of of the truck bed.  He felt reasonably safe, except the only thing he had to hold on to was the rope holding the big tool box in place.

Marshall jammed the gas pedal, spinning the wheels in the gravel.  The zombies immediately  behind the truck were pelted with rocks and debris.  The truck lurched forward when the tires found purchase on a railroad tie, and the brothers were off like a shot, the big diesel motor propelling the nearly empty truck up to speed in a short distance before they plowed the first zombies under the truck, their corpses ground to a bloody pulp between the truck and the railroad ties.

When they were clear of the group that had hemmed them in, Marshall slowed the truck, and bounced across the tracks until we were clear of the rails.  He parked the truck on the blacktop, and they got out as the zombies approached.  The two men waded in to the rush of zombies, hacking and slashing.  The machete and hatchet combo was very effective.  Victor was keeping pace with Marshall for the first three zombies, then Marshall cheated by picking up a ten foot length of train track.  He swung the thousand-pound length of track like a club so hard it whooshed through the air.  Marshall was crushing the skulls of four or five undead at a time.

All in all it took the brothers a little more than ten minutes to clear the dead from the rail yard,  Victor counted forty-six corpses.  Marshall hadn’t even broken a sweat; Victor though, was drenched.  ‘I should really learn not to try to compete with him,‘ thought Victor.  His strength was one on one, no one could take supers down as well as Victor.  Marshall’s talent was traumatic brain injury on a grand scale.

The pair paused for a few minutes to catch their breath, then dragged the corpses over to a pile.  Within an hour they were headed home; with a small stop at the house they saw on the way in.  Tomorrow they would be back to start the trip south.

—–

A skinny blonde woman ran as fast as she could across the street.  She lept off the curb, crossed the blacktop, without even a glance left, right, then left again.  Her dirty, stringy hair blowing back behind her as she ran towards a car that had long ago crashed into the side of the building in the next block.  The straps of her backpack were almost as tight as they could go, and the chest strap was fastened above her breasts to hold it solidly against her.

When the woman was passed the demolished red car, she ducked down, and checked the gun in her hand once more.  She pressed the magazine release button, and looked at the bullet on top.  She could see that there was only one left.  She put the magazine back in the gun and pulled the slide back, inserting the bullet into the firing chamber.

“Maya! Run!” She half yelled, half whispered.  A little black haired girl came running out from between two cars.  She was about three and a half feet tall, with long curly hair and a beautiful round face.  She ran to the blonde woman’s side, and crouched down.  Without a word she wiggled herself into the space between the wrecked Honda Civic and the wall.

“Ok, we’re going one more block,” the blonde woman said.  “We can rest here for a minute, but we need to keep moving, Ok?”

“Ok, Mommy,” said the small girl.

They sat there for a minute, catching their breath leaned up against the wall of the skyscraper.  The blonde nodded to her daughter and took off running.  She ran to the edge of the gigantic building, and rested her back against the light orange granite blocks.  She peeked quickly around the corner, at first just looking for a sign of movement.  On a second peek, she studied a little harder, her eyes searching for anything that looked vaguely human.  A third peek satisfied her that there weren’t any infected out in the open.

The woman looked at the little girl and motioned to her.  Maya ran like the wind, she was fast for such a small child.  She ran with coordination, a well practiced gait that comes when someone has spent a lot of time running.  She leaned tight against the wall, squeezing behind her mother’s leg.  She was skinny, although not as skinny as her mother.

The woman ducked around the corner, squatted down and put one hand on the concrete sidewalk, presenting the smallest possible target.

“Maya, remember this is the street where the man was shooting at us.  We have to stay small.  We’re going to run together this time, first to the car, then we’re going to run down into the parking garage.  We’ll be safe for a little while there.  As long as no one has followed us, I can put this gas in the truck and we can go look for some food.  Are you hungry?”

“Yes, Mommy, I’m very hungry,” whispered the little girl.

“Ok, lets go!”

The two ran for the garage at top speed, the little girl was fast, but not nearly as fast as the mother could run.  The woman loped easily alongside the little girl, their footsteps making almost no noise on the hard sidewalk.  The turned right into the garage, and ran down the ramp of the underground parking garage.

At the bottom of the ramp they slid behind a round concrete pillar.  The woman knelt down again, pulling the little girl close to her.

“You did so good! I’m so proud of you,” the woman whispered

The little girl beamed.  “We’re safe from the bad people here?”

“Almost baby.  We have a little bit more work to do today, then we can go back to our room where its safe.”

“I don’t like it up there, can’t we use the elelator?”

“Elevator, with a v.  And, no, there still isn’t any electricity.”

“Oh, bother.  So many steps.”

“I know, Mymy.  But the bad people have to climb them to get to us, and we can move faster than they can.  All those steps keep us safe,” the woman said, repeating the line she had used several times each day for the last four months.

“Its getting harder and harder to find food for us here, and we’re running out of water.  We have to go farther every day here, and we only have a couple of hours a day to get gas for the truck and find food and water while baby holly is asleep.  I can’t carry her out here, and she doesn’t know how important it is to stay quiet.”

“What if the bad people come while baby holly is asleep?” asked the little girl.

“We can’t let that happen, Mymy.  That’s why we have to run so much and be so quiet.”

They moved quickly and quietly to a black suburban.  The huge sport utility vehicle had a few scrapes down the side, but it had been good to them.  They’d parked here on the night of the outbreak, looking for someplace safe to stop for a few hours rest on their trip from Atlanta, Georgia to the farm in Virginia.  All they really wanted to do was get a couple of hours of sleep and get back out on the road.  In hindsight, they should have pushed on, to get through the city of Charlotte, NC.  Neither she nor her husband had expected the entire city to become infected overnight.  They fell asleep in the truck down there in the parking garage.  When they woke up the next morning, her husband had gone outside to check the road.  He never came back.

The woman poured the gas out of the one gallon can into the truck and put the key in the ignition.  She started the truck and let it idle for a few minutes to keep the battery charged.  Once a week she’d started it for exactly four minutes.  For the last week she’d been struggling to find 1 gallon of gas every day.  Siphoning gas out of cars was more work than she expected.  In the movies people just stuck a hose down in the tank, sucked on it, and gas came out. Most of the time all she got was mouthful after mouthful of horrible gasoline flavored fumes.  She knew some of the cars had to have fuel.  There must be some sort of device to keep people from stealing gas.  She’d only had luck with older pickup trucks.

Two weeks after she gave up hope that her husband would come back, she’d started coming up with this plan.  It took her a week to find the gas can and hose.  It took her another three days to find a suitable truck to siphon the fuel from.  Finally she’d managed to carry half a tank full of gas to her truck.  That was enough to get her about 125 miles.  She was still twice that distance from her destination, but she knew they had to go before she could find that much gasoline, one gallon at a time.

At first they lived on food from the refrigerators in the break rooms on every floor of the 62 story building they now called home.  When that ran out or went bad, they’d switched to chips, candy bars, and sodas from the vending machines.   After nearly a week of that she’d gone out in search of more wholesome food.  Across from the building there was a small burrito shop where she’d found some canned beans and rice.  When that was gone, she’d been going farther and farther every day.  One day she’d found the backpack, which made life much easier than trying to put number ten cans in her purse and run with them.

Lately, every restaurant she came across had been looted or everything had spoiled.  This far into the city, there weren’t any animals, and very few plants, not that she would know how to prepare them or which plants were safe to eat.

They’d gotten their fuel for the day, but they had a long way to go to find some food.  Yesterday all she’d had to eat was a bag of M&M’s.  That day’s scavenging had only produced a small can of tomatoes, and a cup of applesauce.  The best part of yesterday had been finding the gun.  Even though it only had one bullet, and she’d spent nearly three hours figuring out how it worked, she felt safer with it.

The two of them headed back up the ramp, out into the cool fall air in search of food for the day.  Renee checked her watch, the baby would sleep for another hour or so.  Tomorrow they were leaving this hellish place, one way or another.

This is the end of the sample, if you’d like to continue reading please visit The Library

Victor woke up early that morning, just before dawn.  It was a cool fall morning,  he had on a pair of heavy canvas pants, a tee shirt, a flannel button up shirt, a fleece vest, and was still cold when he walked outside.  One of the worst things about living without modern conveniences was that in the fall, winter, and spring, he stayed cold.  No matter how many blankets he slept under, he always woke up cold.  It took him until well after sun up to get warm.

He walked into the kitchen and packed up a bunch of food.  Victor found Marshall out by the diesel f250 Victor recovered from the Haversham farm.  It seemed like an eternity ago, although in reality it hadn’t even been two weeks.  Marshall was loading all kinds of tools in big steel tool boxes into the bed.  They were tool boxes we’d always called job boxes.  Roughly the size of a chest freezer, they were the type of thing construction companies used to keep hand tools locked up at a job site.  At the end of a job, the construction company would use three or four men to push them up onto the back of a truck at a loading dock.  Marshall lifted each one easily up into the back of the pickup by himself.  Each time he set a box in the bed of the truck, the truck sank a little lower on its springs.

“What time did you get started?  Why didn’t you wake me up?” Victor asked, putting the small cooler of food in the back seat.

“I was going to in just a minute.  I wanted to get all this stuff packed while I was thinking about it.”

“What is all that?” Victor asked.

“If we’re going to armor up a train car, we’re going to need tools.  I figured it would be easier to bring them than to find them there.”

“That’s why you’re the smart brother.” The younger Tookes said with a grin.

“You brought the food,” Marshall replied laughing.

“That’s why I’m the fat brother.  Or used to be.”

The two of them climbed up into the cab of the truck.  It got terrible gas mileage, but Victor thought they might need the power, and they had a lot more diesel than gasoline in the tanks down at the barn.  The truck held more than enough fuel to get them to and from Charlottesville, where the train yard was.  Also, the pickup truck was wide enough to straddle  the train tracks if they had to.

“I know that this place is somewhere near Renee’s high school on the back side of town.  I’m not really sure where it is though.  I know where there is a bridge over four or five sets of train tracks, its got to be somewhere near there.”

“Alright, lets head there.  Worst case we can drive down the tracks until we find it,” said Marshall.

The drive into town was fairly uneventful.  They made it all the way through the town of Orange before encountering the first zombie.   It was a leg dragger, one of the easiest kind to put down, Marshall hopped out with an aluminum bat and literally knocked its head off.  Most of it exploded into a fine pink mist of gore and bits of bone, but the top half flew like he was swinging for the fences.  It flew across the street and crashed through the plate glass window of a bakery.  The hand painted window of Hats Off Cakes and Pastry crashed down onto the sidewalk.

Marshall climbed back in the truck, and now it was Victor’s turn.  There were two fat, bloated corpses stumbling towards the now broken plate glass window.  The first one fell out of the window, landing flat on its face.  Its ass followed with more momentum, folding its spine in half.  The fetid corpse sat on its own head.

The second made it out of the window with much more grace, only falling onto its side, before scrambling back to its feet.  The glass did a number on its hands, slicing the flesh open, releasing a putrid pussy looking fluid.  When it regained its feet, it started limping towards the truck.   Victor’s typical style was to push their hands out of the way as they inevitably grab for his neck, but he didn’t want to touch this one with that goo oozing out of it.  Victor could smell the rotten flesh from across the street and he had plenty of time to work.  The first zombie was still trying to unfold itself.

Rather than standing in the path of its hands, he sidestepped and swung his favorite hatchet as hard as he could at its shoulder, severing one arm.  His follow up swing landed squarely in the putrid creature’s temple. It fell limply to the ground, and Victor levered his small hand axe out of its skull.

“Nice one, little brother!” called Marshall.  Victor looked up at him and grinned, thinking about when they were kids.  Victor remembered playing catch with Marshall in the front yard of the house, and hearing the same thing after a good catch.  That whole world was dead now, and Victor felt like he had to fix it.  He got his wife killed; he’d let them get Max’s mother.  They’d lost their house.  All of Max’s things.  Max would never get to play football with the neighborhood kids.  He’d never go to the prom.  He would never go to college.  Victor and Max had lost virtually everything.

The second one successfully unfolded himself, and rolled over on his belly to stand up.  He was on all fours when Victor’s hatchet cleaved its head off in one clean sweep.  The head rolled about two feet; stopping right beside Victor’s boot where he disembodied face clamped its jaw down on his toe.  It couldn’t penetrate the boot, but Victor yelled out in pain at the pressure. He shook his foot, but the head would not come loose.  Finally he kicked the curb; smashed the back of the skull inward.  The last of the un-life faded from the creature.

On the north side of Orange, the undead population was much higher.  At first, the brothers were stopping every half mile or so killing a zombie.  By the time they were ten miles above Orange, about halfway to the Charlottesville city limits, the undead were getting too thick to take out so easily.  They saw them wandering in groups, fours, fives, even one group of eight.  On a couple of occasions, Victor was able to nudge them down with the truck and drive over them without too much trouble.  Most of the time he was too worried about damaging the truck, so he  just swerved around them.  They would be there another time, when were in less of a hurry or had more backup.

The University of Virginia was in Charlottesville, about twenty-thousand students.  Victor wanted no part of a super-horde of hoodie wearing half rotten college coeds.   The university was right in the middle of old town, which was the most direct way to their destination.  That route was clearly out of the question, so they stuck mostly to side streets and back roads.

“Keep an eye out for houses that look looted,” said Marshall.

“That’s a good idea, do you think there could be any survivors this close to town?”

“You never know, doesn’t hurt us to look for signs.  None of our people have been this far yet,” said Marshall.

As we drove along, Victor watched the houses along my side of the street.  Mostly they all looked the same, but every now and then they’d pass one that had been boarded up.  Most of those that had been secured had their doors standing wide open, with the boards sticking out at odd angles.

“Marshall, look at that one,” Victor said.  “Do you think that was zombies?  It looks different than the rest.”

“I don’t know.  Why that one? Why one in the middle of the street?  If a group were looting houses, don’t you think they’d be a little more systematic about it? Start at one end of the street?  We mark every house we loot, and close it up when we’re done, hoping to keep it fairly safe from zombies.  I’d like to think that somewhere someone has holed up for the night in a house that we cleared, and had some safety because we’d been there before.  Its the same reason we don’t take  every single scrap of food out of the houses.  We always try to leave a little something behind, whatever we can find that will last the longest.”

“I don’t know, but the door doesn’t appear to be broken, it looks different than all of the others.”

“Do you want to stop and check it out?” Marshall asked.

“Nah, but lets try to remember it and check it out later.”

The Tookes boys followed the neighborhoods around the outskirts of the city, until they were on the north side of town.  When they got to the street Victor thought merged with the main road, it was actually a dead end.  There was a hundred yard section of dirt and grass between the street they were on, and the main road Vic thought he was heading for.

The truck was pretty powerful, and it hadn’t rained in more than a week.  Without hesitation Vic put the truck into four wheel drive and bounced slowly up over the curb onto the overgrown grass.  They drove at an idle between the two houses and through the back yard.

“Oh shit, Vic! Check that out!”

Victor craned his neck around and saw a monstrous pile of trash on the ground underneath the kitchen window of the blue house to the right.

“Survivors?”

“I think we have to check it out.  Do you want to do it on the way in, or on our way back out?”

“Lets go on to the train depot.  Its not even eight in the morning, seems kind of early to come calling.”

They both chuckled at that thought while the truck idled along through the back yard and bounced down onto the main road.  Another mile down the road, they were at the tracks.

The bridge crossed high over the tracks.  Victor stopped the truck in the middle of the old rusty steel truss bridge, so he and Marshall could get out and try to figure out which way the train yard was.  There were five sets of tracks running under the bridge.  Within a quarter mile of each side of the bridge, the tracks curved out of sight, but on the east side of the bridge it looked like two of the tracks merged just before the curve.

“It looks like it must be west of here,” Victor said, pointing eastward towards the merging tracks.

“Seems as good a guess as any, Vic.  Lets see if we can find a spot to get the truck down there.”

The younger Tookes backed the truck up to the entrance of the bridge, and the brothers looked down the embankments on either side.  On the west side, there was a very steep hill, reasonably free of trees and rocks, but with a chain link fence at the bottom.  On the east side, the trees were thicker, and the hill was steeper, but there wasn’t a fence.

“There was a road heading west about half a mile back,” said Marshall.

“Lets go back and see if that gets us any closer.  I don’t want to risk turning the truck over or getting stuck.  You might be able to carry these massive tool boxes, but I don’t think I could even budge one.  With all that weight up in the bed we’re pretty ripe for a rollover.”

The side road led them right to the loading depot.  It was a huge train yard, way bigger than either of them expected.  Off to one side was a red train garage, with tracks running up to four huge rusty steel roll up doors.  At one end of the yard there was a gigantic metal warehouse with tractor trailers backed up against the loading docks and giant cranes on the train-side for loading shipping containers onto the flat bed rail cars.

“Holy shit Marshall.  This is better than I expected, look!” Victor said, pointing up by the cranes.  There was a train half loaded, the huge black diesel locomotive was already facing east.  Victor was pretty sure they needed to go a few miles east to get to the main north-south tracks that ran from Virginia to North Carolina.

“Vic, do you think you can figure out how to get the rear cars uncoupled?  I’ll work on unloading that shipping container.  Its already half armored, all we need to do is cut slits to look out of, armor up the bottom few feet, and protect the widows on the locomotive.”

The truck lurched and bounced as Victor jockeyed it over the first sets of rails.  He spun the tires a couple of times when the front and back tires were both against a rail, but it wasn’t anything the powerful pickup couldn’t overcome.  He stopped even with the locomotive, just one full set of rails away.

Neither of them had ever seen the way trains were coupled together before, it turns out it was pretty simple.  There were large S shaped pieces of steel attached to either end of a train car.  On the underside was a lever that released the bottom of the S.  Then there was a cable which passed electricity from car to car.  Connecting or disconnecting that was just a matter of twist and pull.  The last piece was a hose, Marshall suggested it was probably hydraulic fluid.  At either end there was a lever valve.  Victor turned the valve to ‘off’ before unscrewing the fitting.  It was just hand tight.  No tools required, fifteen minutes to figure out how to de-couple a train car.  “Marshall,  I’m  pretty sure  we could get that in under two minutes now that we know how,” Victor said proudly.

With the locomotive and one car, the rest of the cargo would be left behind.  Victor moved up to the locomotive.  He read in one of the books that this kind of engine had three gears, two forward, one reverse.  This locomotive was diesel powered, but not a diesel engine like in their truck.  This was technically an electric train.  Two huge diesel-fed electric generators powered electric motors that turned the wheels.

Inside the cab of the locomotive were hundreds of gauges, dials, knobs, levers, switches, and lights.  Victor searched gauge by gauge until he found one bank labeled “Fuel”.  There were two indicators, one of them “Head End Power Unit”.  Victor knew that was the electric power for the rest of the train, only really necessary if towing passenger cars.  The second was labeled “Thrust Power Generation”.  Both tanks read full.  “Luck is with me for once,” he thought.

He pulled a huge book out of his backpack and flipped to the first dog-eared page, labeled “Start-up procedure”.

1. First a walk-around of the loco is done ensuring that the loco appears in condition fit for duty. This takes around 10 minutes. All the fluid levels (coolant, lube oil) are checked at this stage. After being started, the loco is checked once again before leaving the shed or stabling area.
2. Close the battery master switch inside the short hood compartment.
3. Close the fuel pump breaker and wait for the fuel oil pressure gauge to start showing some reading. The presence of fuel oil pressure means that the fuel is present at the injectors when the engine is cranked.
4. Close the crankcase exhauster breaker – this blower removes explosive vapours from the crankcase during operation.
5. Ensure: loco brakes on, generator field breaker open, reverser in the neutral position, Engine Control Switch in the Idle position, throttle in the closed position.
6. Press the green start switch – the bell will sound inside the engine compartment warning anyone working there that the beast will wake up soon. I think it takes a second push of the button during which the engine is cranked.
7. The switch is to be held down till all the cylinders start firing.
8. Once the prime mover is running, observe the oil pressure, air pressure, brake pipe pressure being build up.
9. Observe the battery charging taking place. The battery charging ammeter in the electrical panel always shows a (center) zero reading – this indicates the charging and discharging of the battery is perfectly balanced. The charging is checked by operating a toggle switch near the ammeter – this toggle switches off the field to the auxiliary generator (meant for battery charging, etc.) and the ammeter immediately shows a small negative deflection indicating a loss of battery charging. Once the switch is closed, the ammeter swings back to the center zero position.
10. Another check of the loco – some drivers open the crankcase exhauster breaker at this stage – the positive pressure inside the crank sometimes shows up oil leaks faster.
11. The throttle is moved to ensure that loco is responding to being notched.
12. Release the parking brake, remove any wedges, wheel blocks, or rocks placed at the wheels to stop the loco from rolling.
13. Move the Engine Control Switch from Idle to Run position.
14. Observe the signal being pulled off, release the loco brakes and honk before moving!

The batteries were very low, but enough to start the pony engine.  The pony engine is a smaller gasoline powered engine that turns the flywheels on the gigantic generator.  He flipped the lever that engaged the gennies.  They struggled, but started after just a few seconds.  Victor let the batteries charge for about fifteen minutes with the engines running before increasing the throttle.  The ammeter needle bounced in sync with the increased revs.

“I’m gonna pull forward a few feet.  I need to test the brakes and get us decoupled.  Be ready, I have no idea how to stop this thing!” Victor yelled to Marshall over the loud engines.

He pushed throttle back to idle, and looked over the entire train for anything labeled “Parking Brake”.  It took him almost three minutes, but he finally found it.   The last book he read had him looking for a lever, but in this train it was just a small toggle switch.  When he flipped it, a huge air hiss rushed from the dump valves over the wheels and he felt the train rock a little bit.  He moved the engine control switch from “Idle” to “Run” and felt the train jerk forward.  One single click of the throttle lever caused the train lurched forward, rolling about five miles per hour.  A few seconds later he pulled the throttle back and squeezed the brake lever handle, ratcheting it back.  The wheels locked up, stopping the lightweight train in about a foot, throwing him into the control panel.

“Shit! He yelled, laughing. “The brakes were made for hauling a lot of weight!”

As Victor picked himself up off the floor of the locomotive, Marshall was standing in the doorway.

“Freaking idiot!”

“Tell me about it.  Note to self, the brakes work!”

With the train idling, he reversed the start-up procedure, shutting the huge generators down.  It was a complete success as far as he was concerned.  He started and drove a locomotive.  Now they had real work to do; armoring the shipping container that was the only car behind the locomotive.   Marshall handled the heavy work.  Victor helped cut two shipping containers apart with an oxygen and acetylene torch from one of  Marshall’s job boxes.  In the time it took Victor to cut one side, he noticed Marshall had cut an entire container apart.

“Dude.  Where the fuck did you find a plasma torch?  And give it the fuck over, I wanna play with it!”

Marshall grinned at him.  “Come get it little brother!”

Victor ran up towards him, cocking his fist backwards.  Victor watched Marshall’s decisions, waiting for him to be tricky.  Victor hit his brother squarely in the jaw, at about quarter power.  Marshall didn’t move.  He grabbed for Vic to put him in a bear hug, which of course Victor saw coming.  He ducked under Marshall’s arms, and punched Marshall as hard as he could square in the thigh.

“Ouch! Fuck!” Marshall limped around in a circle, my patented charlie horse maneuver was successful again.

“That move has worked since I was 10 years old! I can’t believe you fell for it!” Victor laughed.

“I’m gonna smash you!”  He reached for me and wrapped me in a hug.

“I love you big bro.  I’m glad you’re here with me.  Once we get Renee, we’ll just be missing Bubba.    I sure wish he was with us too.”

“We’ll find him.  If anyone is alive, Bubba is.  Shit, he’s probably bigger than me.  He was strong as a moose before all this shit.”

They worked all day on the train car.  Victor built sliding windows in the side of the cargo container by cutting the sides out with the plasma cutter and welding three sets of brackets in place.  The first set held the piece he cut out in its original position, closing the window.  The second allowed it to slide down about an inch, leaving a small gap to shoot out of.  The third set held the steel wide open, for maximum air flow.  Marshall found a sleeper sofa in the employee lounge of the train yard.  It was ragged, but clean.  Victor found a dining table and four chairs, a couple of lamps, and a rug.  They could easily get electricity from the locomotive back to this car, but wiring the car for it was going to be a little more work, and they didn’t have the stuff they needed.  That would have to wait for another trip.

“Marshall, we’re going to need more rugs, its cold in here.”

“Dude, you put rugs in it?”

“Hell yea!  We’re going to be living in this thing for a few days.  Max is going to be living in this thing for a few days.  Its got to be comfy, ’cause he’s not getting out of it.  I’d like to put book shelves and a TV and an xbox and whatever else would make him happy.”

“You’re crazy.”

“Maybe, but its kept all of us alive until now.”

“True,” said Marshall.

They both whipped their heads towards the rear doors of the shipping container.  Outside, closing in on the back of the train, four zombies were lurching their way forward.  They were having a hard time on the tracks, stumbling over the rails and the ties.  Behind them was a larger group, Victor quickly counted eight.

“Marshall, we need to get out of here.”

Victor hit the ground and rolled, smashing his shoulder into a railroad tie.  When he stood back up, it wasn’t just twelve of them.  They were closing in from all sides.

“Marshall, get ready to do some work,” Victor shouted up to his big brother.

Victor drew his hatchet out of its belt loop, and his pistol out of the holster on his left hip, and had just stepped up when he felt Marshall land on the cross tie behind him.

The two Tookes brothers waded into the mob, back to back, ready to commit some violence.