Snareville II: Circles by David Youngquist

pavement.
    The Mongols rolled into town. Before they even had targets, half of them were blasting rounds into space. Shell casings flew away to bounce on the pavement. A deader stepped out in front of the Venom’s truck. He plowed the man over, ground him underneath and kept on.
    He stopped before they entered downtown. Zeds shuffled toward them from different stores around them. Guns began to find targets in earnest. Some died easy; some twitched and jerked as they were blasted to pieces before the kill shot. A storefront of one of the downtown brick buildings had collapsed outward as it burned. The street was blocked. With a tank, they could get through. Venom backed up a few feet, turned down a side street and plowed his way through a pack of zeds that stumbled down the street to the sound of the noise.
    One was lucky enough to grab the bed of his truck as he passed. She started to drag herself inside as the convoy continued through town. Havers screamed and kicked at the woman. She moaned as she pulled herself further into the bed. The barkeeper screamed louder, kicked up as hard as he could and caught her under the chin. Bones ground, tendons popped and the zed lost her grip as she fell backwards out of the truck. Shitter’s vehicle rolled over the top of her. She squirted black slime from her orifices as he drove on. Several other trucks did the same, until someone drove over her skull and put an end to her.

Chapter 11
    Two days later, we had a map spread out on a big oak table in the main room of the library. Illinois took up about half the table, as we picked out our own little flyspeck of a town. We had never amounted to much to the mapmakers before. I figure they’d have to make us bigger on the map someday, but it wasn’t going to happen any time soon. Cindy highlighted our little dot.
    “Okay,” Wallace said, “When I was going to drill, I’d come down, hit Interstate 80, head east, pick up I-74 and go straight into Galesburg.” He ran his finger over the route. “It was a straight shot in, fast and easy. You can pick that up from here. You’d just have to hit 74 going west from here.”
    “What’s out there?” Cherry asked. “Beyond your town and Princeton, I mean. I don’t know much about around here.”
    Pepper straightened, rubbed the small of her back. “We don’t know much that far west. Kewanee is wiped out.” She put her finger on another dot of a town. “Beyond Galva, it’s wild and wooly. We don’t have any contact with anyone that way. We’ve built up mostly along the rivers and up into the north like with you guys.”
    “Out on the prairies, defense was a lot more difficult. There was no water at your backs, nothing to keep the zeds out,” Kenny said. He sat at the head of the table. I glanced at him. He was pale, washed out looking, but a tiny bead of sweat ran down his forehead. “We know that after the zeds ran through Kewanee, the humans that survived spent the better part of a year killing one another. Same in Peoria. I figure it happened a lot in other towns.”
    “Good old human nature,” Cherry muttered.
    “Galesburg’s a pretty good sized town,” Wallace said. “Lot of highways run right through town. Spoon River does too.”
    “Can you navigate it?” I asked
    “Small boats, Boss. Canoes, john boats, that sort of thing. Nothing much bigger.”
    “It’s going to have to be overland, Dan,” Kenny said.
    “What about Colonel Tom’s birds?” Cindy asked.
    “We need to haul a lot of specialized ammo, canisters and a few artillery pieces,” Wallace said. “We won’t be able to fly them out.”
    We looked at the map some more. I turned it toward me and got a closer look. “I don’t like the idea of running down interstates I don’t know. I could run out to Des Moines and not worry a lot, but going southwest like that, we’re in the dark.” I turned and looked up at Wally. “You don’t know anyone there?”
    “Lots of folks actually, I just