by Shane Woods
Rich was now only three blocks away from us and I could see a dozen runners in pursuit of his truck, as well as the lumbering figure of one of the behemoths. The truck would slow, and Dave would rake the ground with his AK. The behemoth reached the truck on one occasion and smashed flat into the back of it, nearly lifting the rear wheels off the ground before Rich mashed the throttle and the vehicle lurched forward again.
Rob left his spot with the rest of the people from the school, leaving just me and Willy. I made my way through the gap and Willy and I paused momentarily to watch as the truck approached.
As Rich hit the intersection that put him two blocks away from us, a second massive infected freak barreled down the side street, meeting the side of the dump bed with a massive crash of steel, raising one side of the truck and nearly throwing Dave out of the back before Rich gained control.
“We got two now!” Rich called over the radio.
“Yeah, yeah I see, keep to the plan, one more block and punch it!” I yelled, ducking my head as another handful of rounds whizzed overhead in both directions. “Gate’s still closed, hit it fuckin’ hard!”
“Roger!” Rich called back.
He cleared the next block and the truck picked up speed as I darted across the street, with Willy just a handful of yards behind me. I burst through the front door of the dentist’s office just as Rich crashed through the main gate to the school compound. The truck shuddered as it smashed through the chain link and continued on, taking out one unsuspecting gang banger. It hit the man dead on and he got caught by the front bumper, soundlessly leaving a streak on the pavement as the truck entered the compound, now with well over 20 infected, and a pair of behemoths still giving chase.
I reached my hand out to Willy just as he neared the door, and his eyes widened with surprise as three or four rifle rounds stitched their way across his back and exited out of his chest, leaving ragged holes in his shirt. He careened toward the door and hit me like an accidental linebacker as he collapsed face down.
“Willy!” I cried as I rolled from my back and moved to meet him.
Tony also rushed to my side as we rolled Willy onto his back. The damage had been done as his torso was already blotched with angry patches of blood. The bleeding started quickly, as where he’d landed, there were bright red patches lined across the floor in the path he slid.
He coughed up a spray of more blood, and it began to trickle from the corner of his mouth as a tremendous crash could be heard over the gunfire. I craned my neck to witness a cloud of dust and debris at the side of the school. The swarm of infected began spreading out, and the behemoths zeroed in on the closest people to them left out in the open.
I turned my attention back to Willy as he coughed and gasped in only to cough again, more blood mixing with the air around us in a fine mist. Tony was busy coaxing him, telling him to take it easy as he ripped his shirt free and began dumping water on the wounds to evaluate him.
Willy locked eyes with me and uttered a single question.
“Did…” more coughing, another gasp, “I do good?”
“Yeah, man,” I replied, feeling the hot sting of a tear as it formed in my eye. “You did your best, dude. We’re all proud of you.”
Before I had finished, Willy had already gone still. Tony felt his neck for a pulse, and turned to me, his blue eyes meeting mine as he shook his head in the negative.
The moment was cut short by another burst of nearby gunfire and a new string of yelling and expletives out on the street. I turned my attention to see Dave picking Rich clean up off the ground and putting him into a fireman’s carry over his shoulder. My blood went cold until I could hear Rich telling Dave off and yelling at him to put him down, but the stream of blood running from Rich’s leg was already apparent as they made their way into the dentist’s office.
Their entry was followed by another salvo of gunfire that ripped through the doorway behind them and found homes in the walls and reception desk near us.
Turning to view the outside again, I witnessed infected falling as the full attention of the gang bangers was brought to bear on the new intruders. The gunfire stopped coming our way and instead chased those who used to be human.
Smaller infected fell to the copper and lead as readily as they always had.
One of the behemoths picked a man clean off the ground with one hand and bit into his chest, arcing blood and tissue like someone had tossed a bucket of it into the air. The man’s screams cut off instantly. Another guy began dumping everything he had into the massive beast, only to have the body of his own recently dead comrade thrown at him.
I could view the second giant making its way through the rest of the compound, chasing anything that moved, completely frenzied as it ignored the gunfire sent its way.
“Hey guys?” Rich called as we were engrossed in the scene outside, “Remember that bomb I made and just drove into there?”
“Uh shit, yeah,” I replied, peeling my attention away. “Oh shit, that’s right. Everybody down, find heavy cover!”
I pressed my earpiece and began speaking loud and clear into it as we scrambled around.
“All teams, all teams,” I ordered. “Cease fire and find cover! Get to cover right now! Over!”
Dave and I dragged Rich by his armpits as he held pressure on the nasty looking bullet wound in his lower leg. Tony and Rogers began instructing everybody else to seek cover as far back in the building as they could. This left the break room full, and the furthest dental room mostly full as everyone dug in and crouched. As instructed, everyone got low, hands protecting their ears, eyes closed, and mouths open.
“How long did you set the timer for?” I asked Dave as we put Rich down in the dentist chair itself and got low.
“I don’t know,” he replied flatly.
“Fuck do you mean you don’t know?” I shot back, knives in my tone.
“I mean I don’t know!” he snapped back. “Dingus here used a dryer timer, no minute marks.”
“I didn’t think that through,” Rich grimaced as he continued putting pressure on his own wound.
“Well, what did you set it to?” Tony broke in.
“Wrinkle free,” Dave replied, shrugging.
Tony fell over laughing. Rich just stared blankly at him, so did pretty much everyone else in the room.
“Let me get this straight,” I clarified, wincing at the bellow of a behemoth as another burst of gunfire sounded, “you set a thirty-five-hundred-pound bomb, to wrinkle-free? Dave? Fucking wrinkle free?”
“Yeah. I thought it was a nice touch,” Dave replied, a bit indignant.
“Jesus fu-” I began, but never finished.
I’ll be honest with you. To this day, I’ll swear the world collapsed, then expanded again.
Time itself may have shifted, I’m not quite sure.
What I know to be fact, is that the entire front of the dentist’s office blew inward. What followed was a crack that sounded like all the thunder in the world hitting at once. Even mouth open and ears covered, the ringing I experienced nearly drowned everything else out in an instant.
The shockwave could be felt immediately after. It swept clean through the area we occupied, followed by an oven blast of heat.
Debris large and small pelted the entire area. I witnessed what appeared to be the metal fuel cap from a truck zip through the wall next to me and embed itself in the far wall. Other various items crashed into the building we occupied as smaller bits fell across the entire area. It rained down on our shelter like a hail storm.
We began to regain our senses just in time to be overtaken by a rolling dust cloud.
I could still hear essentially nothing. I nodded and directed Tony away as he made it to me in his rounds of checking on everybody. As best I could tell, everyone felt the explosion much the same as I had, but there were no major injuries.
As my sense of hearing came back to me bit by bit, I found my feet.
“All teams, check in,” I spoke into
my earpiece.
Hashman’s team reported much the same as we had. Some wounded, a handful of dead from the fighting, but nothing more than hearing loss and minor scrapes, cuts and contusions from the bombing.
Clara, to the east, and the far side of the school, reported a few wounded from the fighting, but almost no effects from the explosion aside from collective tinnitus.
“Okay good,” I replied into my earpiece, then, as much to the other teams as everyone else, “Okay, let’s waste no time. We rendezvous in one minute at the main gate. Weapons hot, everyone not wounded and with a flashlight meet up. Sweep and clear.”
We gathered ourselves and made our way out of the ruined dental office and to the front gate.
Having figured the time for stealth was over, I slung my new rifle to my back and brought forth my shotgun. Clicking on the light in front of the fore end, I led the way out of the building and across the street, cutting a bit over and making my way along the fence line with a dozen guys behind me.
The beams from our lights danced all over, keeping watch inside the fence line for anyone left, as well as outside the fence line for anyone infected. The entire path of the lights could be seen through the heavy haze that the dust cloud had left in the air.
In a few more beats, these beams were met with many others, converging from two directions besides our own, as we met with the other two teams at the front gate.
“Check it out!” I called to everyone gathered, about 35 in total, give or take. “Two teams, every other person through this gate is on me. Those not with me, are with Tony. Tony’s team will work up this side and cut across the North. My team cuts across the south and up the east side. We’ll meet at the northeast corner and sweep the school.”
“We killin’ everyone, boss?” Hashman asked, a bit too eager to pull the trigger some more.
“We aren’t these assholes, dude,” I replied flatly. “If they’re being hostile, kill them. If they aren’t, leave them face down with one or two to watch them, we’ll round up any survivors and figure out what to do after.”
Everyone voiced their agreeance and understanding, and we began to sweep the grounds.
My team found and rounded up four that were no longer in the mood to fight and we killed none. We met at the northeast corner and joined Tony’s team to split up once again inside the school. Six more in total were found alive in the school. They were in such bad shape that they needed to be carried out. One man missing half his leg from a hallway collapse. A chunk of the floor above had fallen flat and caught him from the knee down.
We wrapped the leg and applied a makeshift tourniquet and brought him outdoors with us. The dust had nearly faded and let the entirety of the scene around us be known. I was in full-on disbelief at the devastation our very own Rich Lester had cooked up.
Where there once was a full, intact, brick and mortar school building, there was a disaster scene. I’d joked with Rich about taking inspiration from Timothy McVeigh, and the Oklahoma City bombing, but what we were seeing was actually a pretty good representation of that scene.
It was like a God-sized ice cream scoop was taken out of the side of the building. This missing space was matched by a crater in the ground as deep as a man was tall.
Debris was spread out as far as our lights could let us see. So were the bodies. Ironically, the largest piece left of the truck that we could find was the tailgate, which appeared to have ripped clean through one of the behemoth infected and scattered its inner workings like candy from a child’s piñata. That was somehow worse than the human bodies that were left behind. The large monstrosity, once made into a freak lasagna, put off a horrible rancid fish odor that overpowered everything else around. It was all any of us could do to keep from gagging because of it.
The other behemoth was nowhere to be found, having been so close to the epicenter of the blast, there likely wasn’t anything left.
We rounded up the handful of people that survived. Twelve men, four women in total. Placed them all near the main gate on their knees.
“Hey Scott,” Tony called to me. “This one looks familiar!”
“Well I’ll be damned,” I stated, as I joined him, “Big Tyler, is it?”
The man just stared at me, his brown eyes wide, mouth slightly agape showing a few gold front teeth.
“I asked you a question,” I restated, staring into his eyes.
“Don’t think he can hear you,” Tony said, and he moved Tyler’s head to the side with the barrel of his rifle. He was right. The explosion did its job in a different way. Both of Big Tyler’s ears had thick streams of blood and fluids running from them. At a glance, I could see several more members present had the same condition.
“That’s a shame. Poor bastard won’t be able to hear his own trial,” Dave interjected with a toneless laugh.
“Those of you that can hear, raise your hands,” I called out. Nine hands went up.
“Those of you who witnessed Big Tyler take part in the torture and slaughter of a good man, before crucifying him to the back of a tow truck,” I continued, no emotion in my voice as I eyed the small group, “keep your hands up.”
Three hands stayed up.
“Very good,” I began again. “Bear with me, it’s almost over.”
I eyeballed Big Tyler as he started to look around, quite nervous, at what was left of his old crew. He may not have been able to hear us, but I had the feeling he was beginning to comprehend.
I moved forward to a position directly in front of him. I planted my feet and made sure there was a round of buckshot in my shotgun. Closing the breech on the weapon, I began to speak loudly, clearly, and with the tone of a professional.
“Big Tyler, you have been found guilty of murder by a panel of your peers. As we are not in the prison business, you will be summarily executed without further trial or process. I’ll give you a moment to get right with God or what have you.”
Upon realization of what was happening, one of our captives began to wail.
“He’s gonna kill us all anyway!” cried a woman no more than 20 years old. Blonde hair tipped in the faded remains of blue dye that had long since grown out.
“No, I’m not,” I replied in a firm, business-like manner. “Just him, because he killed our friend.”
“You’re not going to let any of us go, you piece of shit!” she continued. “Don’t you fuckin’ lie to us! We’re as good as dead!”
“Maybe,” I replied, “but I will let you go, and I won’t be the reason you die. Wayne, you’re closest, shut her up.”
Wayne nodded and approached the woman, who began to fight and try to flail until Wayne backhanded her one time. It knocked her loopy and calmed her long enough for her to be gagged with a kerchief from Wayne’s pocket.
“Anyway,” I said to nobody in specific. I proceeded to raise my shotgun, and without further process, leveled it at Big Tyler’s chest. The trigger broke through as clean as ever, and the lightweight shotgun came to life in my hands.
It sent eight double-ought buckshot pellets forth, right into the center of Big Tyler’s chest. The rounds ripped through his chest cavity, exiting, and taking blood, tissue, and even bits of spine with them in a dramatic display. Big Tyler hit the pavement like a sack of potatoes. Wisps of smoke leaving the wound as he twitched once, twice, and then lay completely still after the third.
“The rest of you, get the fuck out of here,” I instructed dryly. “Head east, west, south, wherever you want, but I want you out of my city forever. Don’t even look back, but you’re free to go. We don’t do prisoners.”
Some of them got up and took a few nervous steps before breaking into a dead run. Others stayed, looking confused, and watching their peers leave. I assumed they were making sure nobody was getting shot in the back before making their own escapes.
Wayne took the cloth from the girl’s mouth and she spoke again.
“Are you at least going to give us a weapon?” she asked, this time, nearly pleading.
Looking down near my feet, my eyes fell upon what I needed. I kicked the piece of rubble from the school toward her.
“Take this brick,” I offered, to which she scoffed, and was led away by two friends before she could run the risk of becoming aggravating again.
***
We got our crew, the rescued people from the school, our wounded, and our dead out of the area and back to the complex.
THIRTY-NINE
There was much hustle and bustle as the dead were interred. We had no way to preserve them, and it was decided it would be more dignified to do it now instead of waiting. I waited in place for the burials for each of them as the closest to each person mourned. Out of eight dead, the only one of ours to be lost was Willy, and even that felt like too much, though his sacrifice allowed us to free nearly forty innocent people. A half-dozen adults, the rest were children from the school. I say children, but teens would be more fairly worded. To each their own.
Whatever you wish to call them, these people truly were rescued. Underfed, overworked, abused and mistreated. Big Tyler’s gang had run them like slaves. They lived in all weather in a series of worn-down camping tents with concrete under them. The girls, and even some of the boys, had been used by Tyler’s men for whatever purpose they saw fit. They were basically fed table scraps. Never new clothes, or personal care. They were forced to live in fear and squalor. I was very pleased we were able to give them a new lease on life.
As they would heal and recover, the extra hands would be a blessing around our compound. They weren’t even forced into quarantine, despite Shannon’s protests. They’d lived as prisoners and slaves, and as it was, they were clearly not infected at any rate. The best thing they had going for them previously was safety from the outside world.
Shannon, Ashley, and Jennifer triaged the wounded and provided the best care they could. Henry filled in and gladly helped bandage and care for any of the teens that had minor injuries.
As our group had nearly doubled in size now, the already established members settled into sleeping in shifts, while those awake spent the night helping in whatever way they could.