Then Richards was there, shoving his weight into the shambler, and off it went over the rail and down the stairwell. I was breathing heavy enough from exertion that I wouldn’t have tried to talk if being stealthy hadn’t still been imperative, so I gave him a thumbs-up—that he ignored as he vaulted past me up the remaining stairs and right into the next shambler that came toward us. I took a second to make sure the stairwell was safe before I followed, ax at the ready. Richards caved in the skull of that one, leaving the next one for me. More and more undead kept pouring out of the doors, a heap of ten or twelve at our feet as the last one went down. I remained in the middle of the hallway as Richards checked the apartments closest to us. Cole and Hill joined us, both breathing heavily and covered in equal amounts of bodily fluids as I was. None of the shamblers had been super smart or strong, but even so they had used up a good portion of my energy reserves. But that seemed to have been the last of them up here, as our more thorough check revealed.
Stepping up to the window at the front of the building, I checked the street first. It was once more looking abandoned, but from my elevated vantage point I could see a few shamblers creeping along behind cars and pressed to the side of buildings. They ignored each other, so clearly, we were what was on the menu. The opposite building was only a single story tall, giving me a good view toward the highway and the destruction beyond. From up here, it was even worse than it had appeared on the ground. Damn, but the Texans didn’t mess around.
Richards came out of another apartment as I returned to the hallway, signaling us to come closer.
“You saw the stragglers on the street?” I whispered.
He inclined his head. “Yeah. Even more lurking on this side. There’s a row of balconies on the southern end of the building. Next door is another apartment building, a few stories higher. I say we try that and see if maybe on the other side or to the west it’s more quiet.”
We were already through the next two rooms and getting close to one of those balconies when I realized what his plan was—and I didn’t much care for it when I saw Hill get a grappling hook and rope ready.
At least if I broke my neck trying to get from one building to the next, it would be quick.
Under different circumstances—say, if I still had ten fingers and full grip-strength—I would have gone first, but Cole got that honor now as the second-lightest member of our team. Agile like a monkey, he had no problem crawling over the balcony railing and onto the rope, hanging suspended from it for a second before he had his feet up and wrapped around it, and over the street below he went. A few equally measured motions and he was on the balcony of the other building, unhooking the grappling hook to secure the rope with a few knots. Richards went next, proving that the knots on both ends held well, and then it was my turn. Because we were already attracting enough attention by hanging suspended in the air, three levels up, I didn’t dare ask Hill about advice, but he gave me a supporting thumbs-up as he pushed me toward the balcony railing.
We’d had a rope in the bunker in Wyoming that the Ice Queen had forced me to scale on a daily basis, even after my upper body strength was at a point where I could do ten pull-ups without dying, but that was a long time ago. I was, without a doubt, stronger and lighter now, even with my pack, but climbing hadn’t exactly been my priority over the past two years. Did I regret that negligence now? Yes, but there was absolutely nothing I could do about that, and stalling seemed more likely to get me killed, so I forced myself to just go for it.
Unlike the two men before me, I didn’t choose the dramatic “dangle from veiny man-hands” tactic but instead sat on the rail—with Hill steadying me—so I could get my ankles wrapped around the rope first before I trusted my hands with it. I was a little surprised when my fingers managed to hold on without my grip slipping, the extra weight of the pack considered. Around one third across they were already hurting like a bitch, and while my left hand was doing moderately well, my right was becoming troublingly weak. I did my best to shift my grip as far into my palms as possible as I pushed myself forward, agonizingly slow. And that wasn’t just my impression, judging from the growls and howls coming from below me. I was starting to become a liability for my team, and that was absolutely the last thing I wanted weighing on my mind. Well, actively getting one of them killed was worse, but that was usually the consequence.
I stopped for a moment to let the rope slip into the crook of my right elbow to take the strain off my hands, and made the mistake of looking down. A small mob had formed below me, which was bad but to be expected. What I also noticed—and what disconcerted me far more—were a handful of shamblers that broke away and aimed for farther down the building, where I expected the door to be. Damn, but if they had learned building architecture, we were screwed.
The need to share the news more than fear gave me a new boost and made me shimmy forward, doing my best to use my leg muscles as much as I could. As soon as I was close enough to grab, Richards and Cole hauled me the last foot or two, also keeping me from some more embarrassing and time-consuming scrambling. As soon as I was off the rope, Hill jumped on, although with less bravado than I would have expected. Whatever he was doing, it was damn efficient, and he reached us in half the time it had taken me to cross the gap.
We left the rope where it was and moved inside, the interior slightly cooler than the outside. My eyes needed painfully long to adjust to the gloom inside—the downside of great low-light vision. The apartment had been a more upscale place than what we’d been wading through in the other building, but little of that remained now. The stink of death and fecal matter made me gag, and I didn’t protest when Richards signaled me to get to the door and out as soon as possible. Something was nesting in here—or had been a short time ago—and there was no need to alert them to our presence.
After fighting without having to watch my every movement, making sure not to stir anything or even breathe too loudly now as we sneaked through the busted door and into another dimly-lit staircase grated on my nerves, my heart still beating a mile a minute. Cole went first, followed by Hill, then me and Richards. My ears picked out sounds of movement from deeper into the house, but the howling outside easily distracted from it. Not knowing whether that came from the undead residents or another group, we did our best not to alert anything to our presence as we aimed for the central staircase—and found it occupied. With the rest of us waiting in the hallway, Cole went forward to check, and almost immediately halted and signaled us to turn back. So into a different apartment we went which was in a similar—and thankfully also empty—state as the one we’d come in through. Richards opted to check the balcony that went out into a small yard between this building and the next, as far away from the street we had been on before as possible. It looked clear enough that the next rope was knotted to a railing, and down the outside of the building we went.
Chapter 12
Cole went first again, but this time they had me go next. Down was easier than across, mostly because I didn’t need that much grip strength and could let gravity help along—which would have been fatal ten minutes ago when we’d made it across the gap to this building. My palms hurt like hell from slight rope burn, gloves or not, but I managed to get down to ground level without cracking an ankle or breaking my neck. As soon as my boots hit the asphalt, Cole and I spread out to secure the area.
Since the front road was a no go, we skipped around the next building and made for the next parallel street, hoping to find it abandoned. It wasn’t—at least not completely—but the shamblers there seemed to be less intelligent than the pack that had ambushed us. These stood, if not quite in the middle of the street, easily visible out of cover, and with lots of patience and deliberate movements, we managed to slowly make our way past them without alerting them to our presence.
We were three blocks further down the street when the howling finally died down. I hoped it was due to the shamblers having lost interest, and not because they’d hunted down enough food to sat
isfy them. With the parking lot of a supermarket ridding us of cover to the right, Richards signaled us to try to detour to the road we’d previously followed, and maybe luck out and find one of our other teams.
The road looked as deserted as when we’d started on it earlier, not a scrap remaining of the two people we’d lost. With the lanes blocked and cars wrecked into those that had been parked on the sides, it would have been easy to hide anything back there—as we’d learned the hard way. Richards had us break into our previous two-and-two formation again, and within moments, I’d lost sight of Cole and Hill both. The heat was unbearable, even with the odd cover throwing shade, and I felt like our progress ground to a halt.
If not for a hand suddenly shooting out from behind a truck, I wouldn’t have noticed that someone was hiding there until after I’d passed by, and maybe not even then. I wasn’t too happy to find out it was Hamilton, but that Sonia and Burns were with him and still alive was good news. While I did my best to get some rest crouching between two mangled wrecks, I watched the road nervously as Hamilton and Richards had a quick, near-silent conversation before we set out once more. Cole and Hill remained out of sight until an hour later, when they dropped back to report that the marines were taking a break ahead of us. All the while, we’d slowly gravitated away from the highway, and if we’d made it more than three miles, I’d eat my despicably stinky socks. Being forced to constantly duck and run for cover with intervals of crouching in between was hell on my hips and knees, and with no chance of a reprieve ahead, the idea of getting torn apart by zombies lost more and more of its inherent horror with every minute that passed.
Ahead, the haphazard maze of buildings evened out momentarily at a patch of green—the spot where the marines were supposedly waiting for us. My stomach sank when I realized that it was a cemetery. Theoretically, not the worst place in the zombie apocalypse since those that were dead for good remained that way, but it meant a lot of open ground. Taking a stroll among the tombstones sounded like a great way to make that our permanent residence. Lo and behold, neither Scott nor Blake were stupid enough to make us all crawl across the overgrown lawn, and using the small mortuary at the eastern end of the cemetery for a gathering spot wasn’t that bad of an idea. Like the shed where we’d waited for the morning to come, it was a small building that nobody had bothered to loot, and it came with an intact door—at least for one of the rooms in the below-ground level in what used to be the morgue, or whatever you’d call the room where the dead were kept before being displayed in one of the two somberly furnished rooms above. There were some signs of carnage downstairs, making me guess that someone had gotten their dead loved one to the mortuary quickly enough that they had reanimated here—but otherwise the room was mostly clean.
Shirking my pack without a word and lying on my back to stretch out my aching limbs seemed like a damn good idea, so that’s what I did. Rest, water, food—it really was a very short list of priorities. I did a quick headcount as the remaining people came filtering in, coming up one short; the scavengers had lost one of theirs, but I hadn’t bothered memorizing his name. None of the others looked more or less shaken up than before, but Eden had stopped with her over-the-top, cracked-up routine. Withdrawal ebbing, if I had to take a guess. Unlike last night, nobody seemed to feel the need to clean up, and what words were traded were few and far between.
I checked my watch—three more hours until sunset. If yesterday was any indication, that would give us less than four hours until we turned back into the city’s main attraction and all-you-can-eat buffet.
Nate gave us twenty minutes. Then we were off again. In my head, I cursed up an exhausted storm but obediently took my place in the single-file exit line.
Not surprisingly, nothing had changed in the time we’d spent underground. The city was still stinking to hell, the air was hot enough to create flickering mirages over the pavement, and in every dark doorway some thing or other could be lurking.
From the slight elevation of the cemetery, the highway was visible once more where it turned true south, the zone of utter destruction coming to an end. About a mile down, part of it branched off to the west. Our destination was maybe four miles away—an easy one-and-a-half-hour walk in the past.
The few hundred yards over to the highway took us a good thirty minutes. Closer to downtown, the entirety of the roads that led to the highway were jam-packed with vehicles, which was a blessing and a curse. A blessing, because without the cover that provided, we would have been dead in no time. But it also worked like that for the shamblers.
I had been the seventh to leave our hideout, only Scott and his remaining marines and my fireteam before me, with Richards remaining plastered to my side. Having paid for the lesson with blood earlier, they fanned out and remained as close to the ground as reasonable, every motion deliberate and as silent as possible. Neither Hill nor I could replicate that level of stealth but Cole had managed to sneak further ahead to test the waters. Since we stirred up no extra attention, I thought I was doing reasonably well.
That was, until a shambler made a grab for my ankles, and a hard jerk later, I was sprawling on the cracked pavement, only the suddenness of the maneuver—and the hard impact that drove the air from my lungs—keeping me from shouting in surprise. If it had been smart and launched itself at me, I wouldn’t have had a chance against the shambler, but it tried to pull me underneath the car instead, fingers like claws digging into my calf hard enough to make me afraid they were already tearing into my muscles. The undercarriage of the SUV it had been hiding under was certainly far enough from the ground that I would have fit underneath. Thankfully, they weren’t intelligent enough to account for the bulk of weapons and packs.
Instinct had me kick out with my free leg, but I didn’t manage to get much force behind that maneuver while my mind was overwhelmingly blank. The pain jump-started my adrenaline, sudden clarity wiping away the fog of confusion. I had maybe three seconds until I would be dragged far enough underneath the car that my pack would get my torso stuck, thus halting my progress but also leaving a lot of fleshy thigh and juicy ass for the undead to get interested in. I was partly on my side which greatly hindered the usefulness of my arms, but since hurling one of my tomahawks under the car—and possibly chopping off what remained of my foot in the progress—didn’t seem smart, that wasn’t much use. My best bet was to wait until most of me was closer to the snapping jaws and then make the next kick count.
Instead, I slammed the heel of my boot up against the back door of the car, hoping that it wouldn’t give, which would likely end with a stuck foot and dislocated hip—which I’d have maybe five seconds to enjoy before becoming zombie chow. Rather than lock my knee to try to remain in place, I pushed as hard as possible, trying to get away. That did nothing to dislodge the shambler, but it got me a few inches back into the glaring sunlight—enough for Richards to grab my pack and left shoulder, and pull.
One giant heave was enough to get me free of the car, but that left the shambler still clinging to my leg. I felt one clawed hand’s grip loosen, yet before I could kick it off, it sank its fingers back into my leg, closer to my knee now. Ignoring the sun, it started pulling itself farther up my body, the other hand now digging into my thigh. Since it wasn’t my left, mostly numb leg, that hurt like a bitch—but also brought the shambler close enough that I could jack-knife up from the ground and slam one axe into the skeletal arm that was attached to the claw that was trying to strip my thigh of vital muscle and fat.
Honestly, part of me was surprised just how well I hit, and that I didn’t narrowly amputate my own leg. It wasn’t a perfect blow that sliced off the limb or shattered the bone, but it distracted the shambler and made its grip ease up. As soon as he’d felt me move, Richards had let go of me, and now used the opportunity to kick at the zombie’s head where it had just cleared the vehicle, putting his boot right through the softer bits of what remained of its face. I had to wait until he cleared the space before I could use my ax
again, and this time the damaged arm split apart, leaving the hand and a few inches of bones attached to my leg. Richards must have done some real damage as I felt the grip of the other claw lessen, and when I pushed myself farther out into the sunshine, he finished off the shambler with a second stomp that reduced the zombie’s cranium to so much mush and splinters. Gore splattered all over my legs but I didn’t care, scrambling backwards onto my feet as soon as I could. From the corner of my eye I saw movement coming from underneath another car, making me whir around to face it with a second to spare. Coming full-frontal for me as soon as it could clear the vehicle, that shambler was easier to fend off, but two more came after it, making me start to back away. Richards picked off one of them but then got busy fighting off yet another that came vaulting over the hood of the car underneath which I’d almost ended up. And as if the sounds of fighting off the undead weren’t bad enough, they took that moment to howl for backup, making the entire blocked street around us come alive.
No, I didn’t really need Hamilton sprinting by me and giving me a clap on the shoulder to realize that it was time to run.
Richards and me getting bogged down momentarily had one advantage: in the meantime, the scavengers and the rest of Nate’s team had managed to sneak by. That left Blake’s group behind us. I didn’t dare check on them as I forced my body into forward momentum, giving up any pretense for stealth in favor of what speed could be gained scrambling over rusting cars. Richards caught up with me quickly but remained just behind me, giving me the odd boost when a car ahead seemed a little too large or high for me to get over it on my own. My ego howled with rage but the smarter parts of my brain didn’t protest, instead paying him back for his efforts by often halting long enough for him to clean an obstacle—and hack at what came after him when he seemed a moment too slow to make it unhindered.
Green Fields Series Box Set | Vol. 4 | Books 10-12 Page 61