easier.
“Are they…?” Amy almost asked.
“Cannibals? Don’t know. After us? Maybe. We’ll know if they try to follow us. Right now, I need you to crawl in the back and grab the pistol and as many magazines as you can for me, then I need you to load the shotgun.” I risked a glance in the rearview mirror, but the other vehicles still hadn’t made it to the turn off.
“On it,” Amy said as she crawled over the seat and through the opening in the rear window into the truck bed. A few seconds later, she leaned across the back of the seat with the pistol in hand. “There were only a couple of shots left in the magazine in it, so I loaded the last one in it. There’s a round in the chamber.” I took the gun with a nod and she pushed herself back into the camper shell. With nothing but straight road ahead of me for half a mile, I took the chance to see what I was shooting. The boxy design was characteristic of a Glock, and sure enough, when I turned it to look at the left side, I saw the trademark Glock brand and the number 22 engraved on the slide, with .40 to the right of that. I hadn’t had much experience with the .40 Smith and Wesson, but Nate had spoken highly of it. I set the Glock down and drew the SOCOM, remembering that I’d fired four rounds from it. Keeping one eye on the road, I dropped the mag out of it and pulled a fresh one from the tactical holster. With a full mag and a round in the chamber on both pistols, I had twenty nine rounds to hand without having to reload. I hoped it would be more than enough. While I was hoping, I went for broke and hoped I didn’t have to use either gun.
My optimism died a quick death as I saw movement in the rearview mirror. The bike swerved and kept coming, but two cars behind it didn’t look so lucky. The first one swerved left but the second one just kept going straight across the strip. A third car went the opposite way, and I wasn’t sure if it managed to clear the spikes or not. Either way, I was pretty sure at least one of them wasn’t going to catch up to us. We were coming up on an intersection, and I looked along the road crossing it by habit. Both sides were clear, but a railroad crossing on my left caught my attention. It factored into my plans as I thought that over. Railroads didn’t just stop in small towns. They usually went straight through them, which meant there was probably at least one road on this side of town that ended up running right alongside it. If I could find it, I had a route all the way through Perry.
The blue roof of the car wash that stood on one corner of the intersection was a blur on my left as I sped through the stop sign, and I heard the buzz of a street bike behind me. Trees lined the left side of the road on the far side of a shallow drainage ditch as we sped past the intersection and into the edge of town. The bike’s buzz became a muted roar as it sped up and came around on my side. I caught my first glimpse of the rider, all black leather with a helmet that only left his eyes visible. For a moment, it settled in my side mirror as the rider drew a sawed off shotgun from a holster on his hip. My right hand fell on the Glock and I brought it up to my chest. The rider twisted the throttle and drew up beside me, lifting the shotgun as he came.
It was a tactic that had probably worked several times before, drawing up beside some unsuspecting driver and just unloading both barrels before they could react. It relied on surprise and reluctance in other people to shoot first. Neither was the case now, and the look on the rider’s face when I pulled the trigger was probably the same expression he was used to seeing on the other side of the gun. I fired several times and watched his body jerk twice as I got really lucky. He veered off to the left, then disappeared from view when he hit a parked car.
“Dave, we’ve got one behind us!” Amy called out from the rear of the truck. No sooner had the words left her mouth than