Resident Evil_ Extinction - Keith R. A. DeCandido [25]
The walking, lumbering, feeding corpses were very real. And they were growing in numbers, in direct proportion to how the human population was shrinking.
A part of Claire was convinced that the thirty of them were the last humans left alive.
She looked up briefly at the sun visor. The picture she’d clipped there was ragged at the edges and had faded after a few years of exposure to sunlight, but it was still clearly a picture of Claire and her brother Chris from their trip to Florida.
Then she fixed her eyes back on the road. Not that it was necessary. Aside from the occasional zomboid that the Hummer smashed into, they were alone on the road, which, in the California desert, was pretty straight.
Claire wasn’t entirely sure that zomboid was a better alternative, but Otto used it once, and it stuck.
The Hummer bounced slightly. The suspension was such that a simple pothole wouldn’t have been that noticeable—although, given that the roads hadn’t been maintained in a few years, even simple potholes got pretty large—so Claire figured it was another zomboid.
That was fine with her.
Quickly, she checked the side-view to make sure everyone was there. She could see everything except the 8x8, bringing up the rear. And she could only see the news truck because of the gigunda antenna poking up past even the oil truck.
But, assuming Carlos hadn’t veered the 8x8 into a ditch without telling anyone, they were all there: the ambulance they’d found abandoned in Dallas, furbished with medical supplies they’d looted from everywhere they could; the school bus from the Omaha public school system, which served as the main living accommodation and had been tricked out with gun ports and armor plating taken from both the San Diego Naval Yards and Fort Irwin; an Enco oil tanker that was jackknifed on I-70 somewhere in Missouri, three zomboids at the wheel, and full when they’d liberated it; and a news truck from a Denver TV station.
Bracketing these vehicles in the front and rear were two more gifts from Fort Irwin: a Humvee leading and an 8x8 guarding their backs. By the time they had reached Irwin (at that point, the convoy consisted only of the school bus, the ambulance, and the news truck), these two were the only vehicles that weren’t wrecked or stolen—or, in one case, blown up in order to stop the zomboid soldiers that had overrun the place. Claire would have preferred a tank, but there wasn’t one available. She also would’ve preferred that Otto and L.J. had used some of the base’s munitions to blow up those zomboids instead of one of the three remaining working vehicles, but beggars and choosers and all that.
Claire was just grateful to be alive.
She looked up at the sun visor and wondered again what had happened to Chris.
Then she shook her head, as she always did, and told herself to stop thinking about it. There was no way to know and no sense beating herself up about it. Thirty people were counting on her and Carlos to keep them alive, and she couldn’t do that if she was moping about Chris.
Keeping her left hand on the steering wheel, she palmed sweat off her forehead. Aside from the news truck—which needed to keep the equipment inside cool—none of the vehicles in the convoy used air conditioning anymore, as it used up the gas too quickly. As it was, the Enco truck wasn’t much more than a big metal can of air storage. They needed to find a refill of gas, and soon.
Their difficulty in doing so was one of the things that gave Claire hope that there were other humans still living: somebody else was looting the remains of human civilization besides them. How else to explain the number of small towns they’d gone through that had already been stripped clean of gas and food and weaponry, like bones after the vultures were