The Buzzard Zone

by Kelly, Ronald

  Billy seemed to be having a harder time. For some reason, the Biters had attacked the Mercedes en masse. There were at least twelve running alongside the vehicle or hanging on to its fenders, roof, and trunk. An overweight Biter who must have been nearly three hundred and fifty pounds, lurched from the side, his bloated arms tucked to his hips, like a whale breaking the crest of an ocean. He hit the hood of the Mercedes hard, snapping off the circular ornament and put a large indention in the metal. The weight of the zombies seemed to have dragged the car down to a creep. Levi could see the concerned faces of Billy and his wife through the windshield, unsure of what to do. He could also see the frustrated face of Tyrone in the Yukon, wanting to jump out and spray the crowd with his Thompson, but aware that he might kill the Tauchee family in the process.

  Then Billy leaned on the horn. The blaring confused some of the Biters, causing them to let go and stumble backward. However, some hung on as stubborn as ticks. Minus the weight of six or so zombies, Billy stamped on the gas, shot forward, and bumped into the rear of the Yukon with enough force to dislodge the rest of them. Then both Kate and Billy sped up and joined Levi on the bridge.

  “Looks like we’re gonna make it,” Levi told his wife when they were halfway across. The Biters—nearly fifty of them in all—were rushing across the southern end of the bridge, but not nearly as fast as the three vehicles. Before long, they seemed small and insignificant in the Ram’s side view mirror.

  “I wouldn’t count on it, Papa,” Jem said from behind him. The boy reached across the seat and pointed directly through the windshield.

  At the far end of the bridge, crowding through the northern entranceway was a multitude of Biters. It was impossible to tell how many, but it could have been as many as seventy or eighty.

  “What are we gonna do, Levi?” Nell asked. “We can’t go through them. It’ll be like hitting a brick wall.”

  He knew she was right. He lowered his window and looked behind him. Others had joined the Biters at the rear of the bridge. Now there were as many behind them as in front. Within a matter minutes, the two groups of undead would meet at the center of the bridge and they would be hopelessly surrounded.

  Levi parked the truck and grabbed his shotgun. He left the vehicle, followed by Nell and the boys. Soon, the others were also out of their vehicles, holding their weapons at the ready. They looked overhead. Beyond the steel girders of the bridge, the sky was obscured by a swirling black cloud of buzzards.

  “What’s the plan, Papa?” Avery hollered. The moans and growls of the advancing Biters grew louder and louder, until it was hard to hear each other speak.

  “I’m not sure!” replied Levi in frustration and uncertainty. “We’ve got three automatic weapons and two scatterguns, but we’d have to make every shot count as a headshot. It would be simple if we could mow them down with body shots, but we don’t have that option.”

  The zombies to the north were gaining ground, as there was scarcely a hundred feet between them and the front of the Dodge. The ones behind them were farther away, but also closing the gap.

  “Should we jump over the side?” Nell wanted to know.

  He looked his wife in the eyes. “We grew up in the mountains. You know very well that neither of us can swim worth a lick, and neither can the kids. We’d all drown.”

  Kate stood holding the Uzi in both hands, looking pale and frightened. “Compared to the alternative, maybe that’s not such a bad idea.”

  Tyrone jacked the bolt on his Tommy gun. “I say we take down as many as we can. Maybe one or two of us can slip through without getting bit.”

  Levi knew he was right. But what good would that do the survivors? On foot with little ammunition and no food… and Biters all over the place? They would be dead before nightfall. Still, there was nothing else to be done. He jacked a shell into the breach of his twelve-gauge. “Okay… half on this side, half on the other.”

  The nine split ranks, facing to the north and south. They lifted their guns, aiming toward the bobbing heads of the advancing Biters, praying that their shots would hit more than they missed.

  But, before they could begin firing, something happened. On the northern side, halfway between the Biters and Levi and his family, something dropped from the top of the bridge.

  The first thing that popped into Levi’s mind was someone’s done gone and hanged themselves! Then as the object reached the end of its nylon rope, jerked to a halt, and dangled there, swaying back and forth, he saw it for what it was. It was the headless carcass of a white-tailed deer, a buck from the size of it. It hung from its back legs and the hide had been slit and sliced, leaving broad patches of glistening meat exposed.

  Ten seconds after the first deer fell, a second one dropped behind them, falling between them and the Biters at the southern end of the bridge. The bait was immediately seen and taken. Both groups converged on the sides of fresh, raw meat. They grasped at the venison with bony fingers, grabbing hold and sinking their black teeth into the meat, grunting and slurping as they devoured what they could. For a long instant, the nine trapped in the center of the bridge were completely forgotten.

  Then another form dropped from the top of the bridge, directly above their heads. It was a man, rappelling down a length of black nylon rope. He landed atop the cab of the Dodge and stood there in a crouch, surveying the carnage around him.

  He looked like something out of an adventure movie, tall and muscular, with short blond hair and military tattoos decorating both arms. He was dressed in an olive drab vest with a dozen flapped pockets down the front, camouflage pants, and black combat boots. He had two automatic weapons slung across his back—an Armalite AR-18 and a SIG SG 516—and had a holstered Heckler & Koch HK45C combat pistol on his right hip.

  “Everyone take cover!” he ordered.

  At first everyone simply stood and stared at him.

  He took a grenade that was clipped to his vest and pulled the ring. “I said move your asses!”

  His urgency and the sight of the explosive device in his hand broke the spell. They all ducked behind their vehicles as he tossed the grenade toward the northern end of the bridge. He followed suit, dropping and flattening himself against the roof of the camper. The grenade hit the pavement, bounced twice, and landed directly under the ravaged carcass of the deer. It went off seven seconds later. The explosion ripped through the tight knot of Biters. Shrapnel tunneled into their bodies and heads, sending arms and legs spiraling into the air. Out of the eighty from the north, only twenty remained standing, staggering from the brunt of the impact. The man in the military garb stood and, taking the Armalite from behind his back, mowed them down with a volley of well-placed headshots.

  “G.I. Joe to the rescue,” Avery uttered in amazement.

  He sent a burst of 5.56 mm slugs over their heads, taking down several zombies from the south, who had abandoned their deer in favor of the ruckus before them. The man centered his attention on Levi. “Jump in and let’s get to the far end of the bridge.”

  Levi looked at the pile of motionless Biters, four deep in some places. “We won’t be able to go around them. There’s not enough room.”

  “Then we’ll go over them!” As they began climbing into their vehicles, the soldier pointed at Billy. “Hey, Geronimo! Grab your squaw and the kid and jump in the Yukon. That Benz won’t be able to make it over.”

  Billy simply stood and looked at him, stunned at his choice of words.

  “Do what I say before I jump down there and put the toe of my boot up your red ass!”

  With a glare, the Cherokee did as he was told. He and Enolia grabbed a few bags of clothing from the back seat of the Mercedes and, taking Jessie by the hand, climbed into the back of Kate’s SUV.

  “What about you?” called Levi as he jumped behind the wheel of his truck.

  “I’ll ride up top,” he told him. “Lay down suppressing fire until we get off this bridge.”

  “Thinks a lot of himself, don’t he?” said Jem.


  Levi shrugged and put the truck into gear. “He pulled our butts out of a sling. I’ll give him that much.”

  He drove the big pickup forward. When they reached the heap of mangled Biters, he gunned the engine and sent the truck climbing upward, the tread of the tires gripping and taking hold. As the Ram advanced, Levi thought of that old commercial—the one where the pickup truck climbs a mountain of boulders with ease. The Dodge did just as well on flesh and bone. Above him, the continuous report of automatic fire rattled as the soldier exchanged the Armalite for the SIG and shot over the roof of the SUV at the zombies that advanced from the south.

  A moment later, the truck had made it over and was on solid asphalt again. The Yukon did much better. Kate switched to four-wheel drive and sent her vehicle bounding over the mound of bodies as though she were going over a speed bump.

  They made it to the opposite end of the bridge and parked their vehicles. As everyone got out, they saw that twenty or thirty Biters from the south side had crawled over the mound of fallen zombies and were beginning to make their way toward them. The blond man in the military garb hopped down from the top of the camper and quickly made his way to the very edge of the bridge. He opened a pocket on his vest and brought out a black object that resembled a beefed-up TV remote. He withdrew an antenna from the end and directed it across the bridge. “I’d turn around, if I were you,” he told them. “This might fry your eyes.”

  They did as he said. Only Avery chanced a glance as the man placed his finger over a large red button and pressed it.

  The gas tanker exploded in a fireball that engulfed the middle of the bridge. Concrete and steel were torn asunder and the center section was completely obliterated, along with the Biters who occupied it. Slowly, the remaining ends of the bridge collapsed and dropped with a great crash and splash of muddy water into the French Broad River. A few moments later after the debris had settled, they turned and studied the devastation. All that was left was the two entrances of the destroyed bridge hanging off each end of the riverbank.

  “Shitfire!” declared Avery with a big grin. “He’s got all the big-boy toys!”

  Levi walked over and stood next to the soldier. “A little drastic, don’t you think? Now there’s no access way across the river.” He thought of the Newman family and Abe, and their planned trip to Durham. If they were going, they would have to find a different route.

  The man grinned. “I believe in burning my bridges behind me.” He extended a strong hand. “Captain Frank Gentry. I’m from Special Forces out of Fort Bragg.”

  Levi shook his hand. “Levi Hobbs from Tennessee. This is my wife, Nell, my sons, Avery and Jem, and my daughter, Kate.”

  Avery stepped forward eagerly and shook the man’s hand. “Freaking Green Beret! Now we’re talking.”

  “And this is Tyrone Jackson and the Tauchee family—Billy, Enolia, and their little girl, Jessie,” Levi continued.

  Frank glanced in the direction of the black man and the three Cherokees, but neglected to acknowledge them. It was then that they began to see what sort of man the soldier really was.

  “My camp is a quarter mile down the road,” he said. “Let’s rendezvous there and have us some grub. Fragging zombies gives me a hell of an appetite.”

  As everyone returned to their vehicles, Frank stepped off the highway and pulled cut brush and tree limbs away from a military Humvee. It was painted olive drab with U.S. ARMY stenciled across the hood, and had a .50-caliber Browning M2 machine gun mounted on a swivel rig on top of the roof. He threw his automatic weapons in the back, climbed in, and headed down the road, leaving them to catch up.

  Levi put the Ram into gear and followed. “Cocky fella, ain’t he?”

  Nell shook her head. “I can’t say I like him much. Did you see how he looked at Tyrone and Billy and his family? Like he’d stepped on a dog turd. You know I don’t cotton to that kind of person.”

  “Aw, he’s just a dyed-in-the-wool bad-ass, Ma,” said Avery, still grinning from ear to ear. “I don’t think he means no harm.”

  “I reckon we’ll see about that,” said Jem, picking up his horror novel from off the seat. “Seems like a first-class asshole to me.”

  “He did pull us out of a sticky situation,” Levi reminded them. “So we need to give him the benefit of the doubt… at least for the time being.” He stared ahead at the Humvee and its armaments. “Besides, he’d be a handy one to have along on the way to Asheville.”

  “I’d just soon go alone,” his wife told him. “He’s trouble, through and through. I can feel it in my bones.”

  Levi said nothing else as he drove, but couldn’t deny that he felt the same way.

  Chapter 21

  Evening slowly settled into night as Levi and the others set up camp in a leaf-strewn clearing a hundred yards off the main highway. Frank Gentry had been there for several days and it showed. A makeshift shelter of canvas tarp secured between two trees faced the road and the soldier’s Humvee, which was parked a short distance from the clearing, seemed to watch sentry over the surrounding woods. Empty food packets and crumpled beer cans littered the place. Apparently, the man wasn’t the tidiest person on the face of the earth, or he just didn’t care anymore. Common courtesies and a regard for simple laws had gone the way of the Earth’s rapidly-dwindling population.

  There was tension after they reached the camp. Some of it had to do with the Biter attack earlier that afternoon, but a fair share was due to their host. Apparently, Nell wasn’t the only one who felt reservations concerning Frank Gentry. The Hobbs family, Tyrone, and Billy Tauchee and his wife and daughter sat at one side of the fire-lit clearing, while the Green Beret occupied the other side. They stared across the dancing flames of the campfire as Frank downed one can of beer after the other and told his story.

  “Fort Bragg was secure for a while,” he told them. “Nearly a month and half. We spent our days playing pool, watching porn, and taking potshots at zombies from the sentry towers. It was like a freaking, non-stop R & R. Then a couple of our guys turned. Don’t know how they got infected. It could have been something they ate or drank. Maybe they got it from a skank we had around the barracks.” He winked at Nell and Kate, who sat side by side. “You know, to service our needs. Whatever the cause, they turned and turned quick. None of that lying in a corner and hibernating shit. We woke up in the middle of the night to screaming and gunfire. By daybreak, most of the camp was bitten or half-eaten. I made it out alive… just me and a dozen grunts. We stuck like glue for a week or two, then half of them went AWOL and headed out on their own. I came across a couple of them a few days ago, zombified, not knowing me from Adam but wanting to eat me anyway. I popped a cap in their skulls and left them where they dropped. I would have given them an honorable burial, but they didn’t deserve it. They’d turned traitor on me and they deserved what they got.”

  “What about other bases?” asked Avery. “Lejeune, Mackall, Cherry Point?”

  “Deserted from what I heard. Or overrun with Biters. It’s a dead man’s world. We’re just interlopers in their territory now.”

  “A scientist friend told us that they aren’t actually dead,” Levi said. “He claimed that the parasites devour certain portions of folks’ brains, turning them into mindless eating machines. Decomposing shells of their former selves, but still alive.”

  Frank laughed. He took a long swig from a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon and shook his head. “That scientist fella was full of shit. There ain’t no life in those sick-ass sons of bitches. You can tell by looking in their eyes. There’s no soul left in them, just a burning need to eat and kill… and breed more of their kind.”

  The others said nothing in rebuke. Levi looked over at his daughter. Kate sat cuddled next to Tyrone. Her eyes met her father’s and she shook her head slightly. Levi understood what she meant. The man’s mind was set and there was no changing it.

  The soldier crumpled his beer can, tossed it away, and then popped the tab on another. “S
o, where are you folks headed?”

  “Asheville,” Levi told him and instantly felt Nell’s fingernails bite into the meat of his arm. He looked over at her and saw a warning expression in her eyes. It was clear that she didn’t trust or like this wandering soldier of fortune.

  “And what business do you have up there?”

  “We’re going to find my mama and daddy,” Tyrone spoke up. “Haven’t seen them since this whole sorry thing started.”

  Frank turned hard eyes toward the black man. “Now was I talking to you? When I do, you’ll know it. Right now this conversation is between me and the man here.”

  Tyrone tensed as he glared at the man in the camouflage fatigues. Kate tightened her grip on Tyrone’s massive arm. “Just ignore him,” she whispered.

  The soldier took another pull from his Pabst can. “And what are you folks planning on doing after Asheville?”

  Levi shrugged. “Truthfully, we haven’t really thought that far ahead.”

  A little smile crossed Nell’s face. “Florida would be nice. I’ve never been to the beach before.”

  Frank snickered harshly. “Lady, have you ever read The Road by Cormac McCarthy?”

  “No, can’t say that I have.”

  “The beach isn’t the paradise you might imagine. In fact, it’s probably a freaking dead end. If those Biters come shuffling down the shore, there’s only two ways to go: back inland or out to sea. If you ask me, the ocean is probably swimming with those damn parasites by now.”

  Nell lowered her eyes. “Well, it was just a thought.”

  Levi patted her on the knee. “Florida sounds good to me.”

  “Well, if you decide to take that route, I’ll be taking my leave,” Frank told them flatly. “The best place to go is the mountains. The Rockies… Colorado or even Canada. Isolated and not nearly as populated as the lowlands.”

  Levi stared at him. “Mister, we’ve just come from the mountains. These Biters are all over. Doesn’t matter where you go, you’re going to have to deal with them.”