get back to your bunk. Pack up. I’ll have Cody take up your duties for now. It’s been a stressful day. And don’t you worry, I’ll straighten this mess out with Handley. It’ll never happen again.”
With that Pitts stepped back, saluted, and marched away, heading for the Holiday Inn that had served as command headquarters since they arrived in Roanoke Rapids. All he could think about was that General Bathgate, who never called anyone but him by his first name, called Jackson Cody. Not a good sign at all.
Even after he shut himself into his room, stripped off his jeans and heavy leather stirrups, and splashed water from the metal basin on the table over his face, it was still on his mind. He couldn’t understand why, until the image of Greta Fredericks, the one who got away , popped into his head. That tiny blonde firecracker of hotness had been his on-again-off-again girlfriend for the two years he worked as a DJ at Tiny Bottoms , a lower-end strip joint in Atlanta . They’d spent tons of time together, and he loved the way she said his name, focusing on the “s” in Pitts and drawing it out like a snake. It killed him when he’d hear her speak to other clients the same way she spoke to him, even though she promised that when she was with him, she was with him alone.
Pitts’s cheeks flushed when the realization came over him: he was jealous.
He plopped down in his chair and stared out the window. In the distance he heard gunshots and shouting, coming from the other side of the river. More zombies, probably, wandering down the road the way they always did, mindless as ever. In some ways Pitts envied those undead hordes. He was certain they didn’t let things like jealousy or honor or military procedure worry them very much.
He thought of the first time he saw the general, standing on top of the armored Humvee, assault rifle pressed against his shoulder while he fired on the swarm of undead surrounding him. There were so many of them, a living sea of flesh that seemed to go on forever. Every one the older man cut down collapsed on top of the previous, forming a staircase of human remains. Pitts had watched this from afar, sitting in his rig, an old industrial snowplow his buddy Tree Trunk had purchased at auction and tricked out with thick steel piping, hoping to use it to win the Demo Derby. (Of course Trunk, never one to read the fine print, didn’t take into account that driving a six-ton hunk of steel might be against Derby rules, which was how it came to be in Pitts’s possession.) At first he debated whether to help the guy out or not, but when he saw the first undead bastard realize that if he placed his feet on his dead brothers he could rise up higher, Pitts hit the gas.
His rig slammed into the wall of flesh. The wedged plow blade drove into the mass, jettisoning flailing bodies to either side. The sheer numbers caused the rig to slow down, and the cab lurched each time he ran over one of the fallen unfortunates, but he didn’t let up. Soon he was a few feet from where the strange, gray-haired man was trapped.
“Jump on!” he’d exclaimed, and the military man complied, leaping from the roof of his vehicle onto the hood of Pitts’s rig. He fell down and grabbed tight to the engine compartment seams as Greg steered the vehicle across the sea of undead, his stained-brown plow blade pulverizing everything in his path.
Later that night, as the two men sat before a small fire in the back of a dump truck nestled in the middle of the old junkyard Pitts had come to call home, they became friends. The general introduced himself as Alexander, told him about his service in Iraq and Afghanistan , about how his entire platoon had been macerated by the Wraiths during the invasion. Pitts explained how he’d held his ground at Tiny Bottoms , killing the fuckers with a sledgehammer, even as they slaughtered virtually every other patron in the place. It had been only two weeks since that day, late November