Free Loose Ends: A Zombie Novel by Jay Wilburn

and kept going. I heard gear sliding over to my side in the cargo section. Chef pressed the accelerator, but the wheels just spun in the air and against the ground without moving the truck. I had seen this happen before from the outside more than once. We were going to be upside down and trapped at any moment.
    “Doc, grab a gun and get them off the side,” Short Order screamed.
    “I can’t let go of the fuel,” he yelled back as his jump seat swiveled out from under him and he fell.
    Chef continued to rev the engine and spin the wheels against the bodies of the zombies lifting us up from one side.
    We were surrounded.
    The fear stabbed at my memory. My mother had placed me under the bed when I was five. I could almost remember her face in that moment as I was tilting over in the truck. She had backed away as she told me to not say a word until she came back. I was afraid, but I felt safe as long as I did what she said. The zombies had found me under the bed and tilted it over as they lifted it off of me. I remembered their faces clearly as they stood around me. They were all freshly killed and bloodied. My next memory of that night was running from the house with them behind me. I had no memory of how I escaped.
    The wheels tore the torsos of the zombies and the truck began to tilt back down. It twisted toward the right and fell back on all four wheels again. Doc scrambled to get off the floor, but slipped on a sleeping bag and fell again. The truck lurched forward once, but halted again against the wall of bodies in front of us.
    Short Order was turning the flashlight back and forth at different angles as he grabbed hold of different parts of the interior. The beam passed over hideous faces exciting them outside the windows. I saw the Pluck My Clover, Baby tee shirt with shriveled intestines hanging down from where it was torn open at the bottom. The beam waved back and rested on the grey face and single eye of a zombie with more pine straw and twigs in his hair. The buttons of his shirt had been popped off and it was spread open to reveal blackened gashes and pitted flesh from his recent road rash. I looked for a zombie in a trench coat or one in overalls, but they hadn’t made it yet.
    Chef shifted into reverse and spun the wheels pulling the truck back a few labored feet. He shifted forward again and we bucked forward in three harsh jerks. As he shifted back again, he yelled at Short Order.
    He said, “Turn that damn light off. You’re killing me, man.”
    Short Order turned it off plunging us back into darkness. I heard Doc fall hard in the floor again and curse.
    Short flipped on the headlights under their protective grill for Chef. The light was dampened by the bodies pressed on the front of the hood.
    Short yelled, “Guns, Doc!”
    Doc screamed muffled in the floor. “The fuel is turned over. You’ll blow us up.”
    Chef was going forward again spinning on the torn ground and the mangled bodies underneath us. The truck was pivoting around in a circle and was being rocked again.  The wheels caught something and we tore through the crowd pressed on our sides. Their hands shuddered against the window caging as they clawed to keep hold and failed. The ones in front leaned over the crash bars and rode forward with us.
    We almost T-boned the Ford we had used to cook our snakes. They felt like they were trying to crawl back out of my stomach. Chef slammed on the brakes and pitched the zombies off the front into the side of the Ford. He didn’t have room to turn, so he reversed again just as the dead hands started slapping against the back. The soft slapping was followed by deep thumps and the bounding of the wheels over the bodies.
    He turned and shifted forward again. At first, we spun in place, but we finally roared through the circle of dead cars and dead bodies. We bounced a couple more of the moving bodies into the unmoving cars as we scrapped through a gap between the fender of a Chevy and the trunk of a