“She’d risk herself for me,” he said, and there was an ache in his voice that nearly broke Molly’s heart.
“Please. She doesn’t even want you to try,” Molly said.
Henry shook his arm free from Molly and made a quick visual inspection of the gap in the wall, and that led him back down to his mother’s face. It was contorted in pain. Excruciating agony and he knew it and it was killing him inside.
Despite the pain, she had her eyes locked on his and waved a hand in the air. Her mouth moved, and it was clear to him that she was saying, “Don’t come down. Don’t come down.”
But that was his mom. He had to save her. He grabbed the lip of the wall and lifted his leg in the air to make that first step to go down when a gunshot sounded next to his head. The concussive force of the shot nearly ruptured his eardrum and brought on a wave of vertigo, causing Henry to partially lose his balance. The only thing that prevented him from falling backward was his grip on the wall.
When he steadied himself, he took a moment to look down at his mother and he saw she had a very neat and very ugly hole in her forehead.
Chapter 64
Battle Damage
Garver was beside the helicopter, looking at it as if it were a wounded animal, and that animal was his most loved and favorite pet. The hole in its side looked like a giant flying beast had taken a bite out of it.
“Garver!” Jones yelled from inside the chopper. “We’ve got to get this bird back in the air.”
Garver took a fumbling step away from the chopper and put both of his hands to the side of his head. “That is fucking crazy. We barely made it back alive.”
“The only thing that might save all our asses is this bird,” Jone said as he swiveled in his seat to stare out at Garver.
“The collective is shaky,” Garver said almost mournfully. “There’s a little fuel leak. I think the tail boom looks like it has some damage.”
“The next thing you're going to tell me is that you’re running low on dilithium crystals,” Jones said.
Garver’s face scrunched up, and said, “What the hell are you talking about?”
“Didn’t you ever watch Star Trek, because you are doing one hell of a Scotty impression?”
“I still don’t have one fucking clue of what you’re talking about?” Garver asked, sounding more than a little pissed.
“You never watched Star Trek?” Jones asked. “I thought all white people watch Trek?”
“And I thought your people never did,” Garver said.
“Watch it, that ‘your people’ comment could get you written up,” Jones said.
“Really, what the hell are you talking about?” Garver asked.
“You always say the chopper isn’t good enough to fly, then up we go,” Jones said.
“This is a whole lot different from a little shimmy. There’s a damn hole in the side of it.”
More gunfire sounded in the distance, sounding like the drums of a thousand marching bands, but instead of cheerful, it was an ugly, mean noise.
Jones pointed toward the front wall and said, “You hear that? I’m telling you that there are worse things than dying in a helicopter crash. I really think those things are coming over that wall.”
Garver’s shoulders fell, and he refused to look at Jones.
“There it is,” Jones said. “You just conceded that you can get the chopper back up in the air.”
“No, I didn’t,” Garver said with his hands in his pockets and his head down.
“Yeah, you did.”
Garver finally lifted his head and looked at Jones. “Well, maybe.”
Chapter 65
Over the Wall
The first zombie toppled over the wall about fifty feet from where Donovan and Mason were fighting their own battle against the rising tide of zombies building up against the wall. It flopped onto the catwalk just inside the lip of the wall, and the man next to its arrival let out a high-pitched yelp and jumped away. Too bad, he jumped backward, sending him off the catwalk as he fell to the ground ten feet below. The impact knocked the air out of his lungs and broke his arm in two places. When this happened, he cried out again, but this time in pain.
The zombie rolled over twice in an effort to get on its feet, to get a delicious bite of the woman right next to it on the catwalk. Her name was Willow, and she had curly hair and leathery skin that had seen a lot of sun. Unlike the man, Willow kept her head about her and pulled the revolver holstered on her hip and plugged the thing in the head. A spray of blood shot onto her leg, and she grimaced. For the second time in a matter of seconds, the zombie landed face down on the catwalk. She stuck a foot in its side and rolled it over. It flopped off the wall, and its body landed right next to the injured man.
“Donovan,” Mason yelled as he tapped Donovan’s shoulder. “They’re coming over the edge.”
Donovan stopped firing and looked down the catwalk along the edge of the wall. Zombie’s hands clawed at the top of the wall, trying to find a way up. “Shit.”
Until that moment, the two of them had managed to take down zombies so that they were able to prevent a pile-up of bodies in their section of the wall. Still, despite their effort, zombies were only two-feet from reaching the top.
Donovan looked over the sea of undead still coming in toward the wall. The forces on the wall had taken down several hundred of the dead, but it seemed as if there were an endless supply, fresh and ready to make their way to the wall.
The flames in the moat were nearly out as the first wave of zombies had sacrificed themselves so that their undead brethren could get to the tasty humans.
“We need to switch to hand-to-hand weapons,” Donovan said. “We’ll run out of ammo if we don’t.”
Mason visibly gulped, then picked the hand ax he had stowed on the catwalk earlier. When he hefted it in his hand, it felt heavy and full of dark portent. The thought of taking on this many zombies turned his blood cold.
“Hey, fella, what are you doing?” An older man with wiry gray hair sticking out in all directions asked.
“We’re running low on ammo,” Mason said. “With them climbing over the bodies, we can start using hand weapons now. It’ll save bullets.”
“Have you boys done that kind of thing before?” The old man asked, his face caught in a worried frown.
“Only when we had to,” Mason said. “I’d advise that you do the same.”
“Holy Mother Mary,” the man said, and he swooned a little. “I didn’t think it would come to this. No, siree.”
Donovan lifted up an extra-long pry bar, which was pointed on one end and turned at the other. It was made of steel and weighed close to fifteen pounds. From the heft of it, he knew it could deliver an enormous amount of damage, and that filled him with a sense of satisfaction.
Mason stepped toward the old man and gripped his arm in one hand. “You can do this. I know you can.” He stared into the old man’s eyes, hoping to infuse him with some courage.
It must have worked because the old man steadied himself.
“Yeah, yeah, I can do it,” the old man said, nodding his head maybe a little too enthusiastically.
Mason bent over and picked up a mattock that had been sitting against the wall, then handed it to the man. “Go for the head.”
The color drained from the man’s face, but this time he remained standing, albeit not as firmly as he had before Mason’s statement.
“Gotta get at it,” Mason said as he gripped the hand ax, feeling its weight in his hand. Just below him, a pair of hands slapped against the wall. Mason leaned down and hung over the lip of the wall, gauging his timing. The zombie wavered back and forth on the uneven pile of zombies below him and fell forward, slapping his hands on the wall.
Mason reared back with the hand ax and slammed it down onto the crown of the zombie’s head. The ax bit deeply into its skull, making a sharp thudding sound. The zombie’s body jerked, and the dark light behind its eyes went out. A second later, it fell ba
ck into three other zombies, sending the whole mass of them tumbling down the pile.
“Sweet Jesus,” the old man said, looking unsteady on his feet.
Another zombie in front of Donovan pawed the wall, its hand inches from the top. Donovan pulled back his pry bar and speared down onto the zombie. At that very moment, the zombie looked upward at Donovan and snarled. The end of Donovan’s pry bar pierced deeply into the zombie’s eye, making an ugly sucking noise. Its body went limp, and it slid off the end of the pry bar, tumbling down the pile.
“Someone’s got to tell Eli that we need to get everyone to switch to hand weapons,” Mason said as he looked along the wall and watched people still firing away at the zombies.
Donovan said, “I’m glad you volunteered.”
Mason rolled his eyes and sighed, but his mock annoyance didn’t last long as two sets of fingers grasped the top of the wall. He slammed the edge of his ax down onto one set of fingers, chopping them off at the hand. The severed fingers fell onto the catwalk, looking like bloody carrots. The zombie ignored the injury and tried to pull itself up with the other hand. With a vicious backswing, Mason sliced off its other set of fingers, taking off part of its hand, too.
That didn’t stop the zombie, though. It slapped its stumps against the wall, making long reddish-black smears. Mason used his ax to take off the top of its head, and it went down like the others. The problem was that a long line of deaders was waiting to take its place.
“I can’t leave this spot,” Mason said. “There’s too many of them.” He turned to the man and asked, “What’s your name?”
“Roy,” the man replied.
Donovan crashed his pry bar down onto the head of another zombie reaching for the top of the wall, making a deep dent in its skull. Even over all of the gunfire, it was easy to hear the loud crunching noise.
“Roy,” Mason said as he stared directly into the older man’s eyes. “You need to get down the wall to Eli. Tell him that we need to get everyone to use their hand weapons.”
“Okay,” Roy said as he nodded his head.
“Listen to me, Roy,” Mason said. “You’ve got to convince him, and the others or we are all dead. You got me?”
As he waited for another response, a zombie gripped the edge of the wall with one hand. Mason laid his ax on the lip of the wall and raked across it sideways. It slid onto the zombie’s hands and neatly sliced off all of its fingers.
Unfettered, the zombie laid its other hand on the edge, and Mason used a wicked backswing to take off the fingers on that hand.
Mason whirled back toward Roy and said, “Get going.”
Roy’s eyes were wide with fear, but Mason said, “Now!”
That broke the older man out of his trance of terror, and he started down the wall, walking cautiously.
“Do you think Donovan will listen?” Mason asked as he chopped down onto another zombie’s head, dispatching it.
Donovan paused to pierce another zombie’s skull, then he said, “I sure as hell hope so because I’m not sure if we’ll make it if he doesn’t.”
Mason accentuated Donovan’s words by chopping down onto another zombie skull, ax digging deep and dispatching the dead thing.
Chapter 66
Aftershock
Time slowed down for Henry. Each second stretched out so long that time became almost distorted, turning in on itself. There was a dull tone in his ear that made him think of an enormous cast iron bell. One like the Liberty Bell, but someone had elongated the sound of the clapper hitting the side of the bell. The note it played was sustained, and it resonated inside Henry’s head.
As he turned his head, the world seemed to tilt sideways, and he felt a wave of nausea sweep over him. The mere effort of trying to look at the source of the shot took a monumental effort.
The firefight going on around him faded into the background. The horde of zombies headed their way became bit players in the drama being played out on this section of the wall.
What he saw when he finally got his head turned rocked his world almost as much as the gunshot wound to his mother’s head. Molly stood there, her pistol in her hand still aimed down toward the ground. Down at his mother. A thin wisp of smoke drifted up from the barrel.
“What?” Henry said. “Why? Why?”
“Henry,” she said. “You’ve got to believe me. I did this for you. And your mother.”
“No,” Henry said, his voice sounding far off, even to himself. “No. I could have...there was time. If I got down there…”
“There was no way to get her free,” Molly said, and while she was nowhere as shaken as Henry, she was in the proximity. “They would have got to you.” Her mouth opened and closed, but no words came out for a few seconds. “She didn’t want you to try.”
Tears formed in Henry’s ears and then fell down his cheeks. “But...maybe...I could have…”
The slender man was still there, and the world was moving too fast for him, but he finally caught up to it. “Son, even if you got down to your mother, there was no way you could have gotten her out from under all of the stuff on her. They would have gotten to her and you. She didn’t want that, and you didn’t want them to get her.”
Henry’s face twisted into a mask of anger. “BUT, you didn’t give me a fucking chance!” He shouted so forcefully that Molly took a step away from him. “You took that away from me.”
“Henry, please,” Molly said, putting up her hand in a defensive gesture. “I cared for your mother. I did. There was no way to save her, and I would have lost both of you.”
“You killed her,” Henry shouted. “You shot her.”
“There was no other choice,” Molly stammered out.
“There are always choices!” Henry yelled.
“Henry!” A voice shouted from the ground inside the wall.
Henry made a whip turn to find the voice. Down on the ground, Jo stood just outside the driver’s door of the Humvee, her hands on her hips.
“We have to do something about this hole,” Jo yelled as she pointed at the crack in the wall. The undead outside the wall clamored over the bodies of the zombies that Clayton had mowed down with the .50 caliber.
Henry pivoted and looked down at the ground outside the wall, about to be swarmed by the undead. It was only a matter of time before they started pushing their way through the hole. Henry knew that should be his focus, but it was hard to shake off the fury and pain he felt.
“Henry, they’re recovering,” Jo shouted.
He knew what she was saying was true, but still, he wanted time to grieve. Time to truly come to grips with the loss of his mother.
The problem with living in the apocalypse is that you didn’t have time. It was merciless that way. It ground every essential moment down to one thing -- survival. Each moment you spent mourning or giving time to anything but surviving is how you got dead yourself.
“They will get through,” Molly said.
Henry whirled toward Molly with one finger raised, standing rigid in the air. “Don’t you say a word. Not a word. You don’t get to speak to me.”
Molly’s shoulders fell, and she said, “But Henry, I only did what I thought was right.”
“Shut up,” he snapped it off so sharply that it felt like a slap. Molly’s head actually jerked to the left.
There was a definite shift in Henry’s body language as he stood a little taller, and his face went flat. “This discussion is over for now. We need to take care of them.” He pointed down at the zombies shambling over the bodies of their undead colleagues on their way to the wall.
He shifted his focus back to Jo and asked, “Can Clayton blast them back again?”
“We can do that for now, but we need a better solution in the longer run,” Jo shouted up. Then she looked up the Clayton, who looked more than ready to mow down some zombies.
Clayton’s eyes narrowed, and he flexed his shoulders. A moment later, he opened up again on the zombies. The results were the same as his first vo
lley of bullets. Zombies literally exploded, their undead bodies nearly disintegrating from the impact of the high caliber bullets. The problem was that there were more zombies than bullets.
When Henry surveyed the aftermath, he saw a swath of blood and broken bodies, and he knew they had gained a little more precious time. Something his mother no longer had.
Chapter 67
Like a Phoenix
Not everyone got the message. It wasn’t a message anyone wanted to hear, and certainly not one you wanted to act on.
Donovan and Mason had faced down zombies many times. Going hand-to-hand wasn’t something they had done all that often, but apparently,they had more experience than the people at the Sanctum. Taking zombies on head-to-head with guns seemed somewhat new to most of them. From what Donovan and Mason knew, it seemed like Eli and his security team had handled most of the dirty work when it came to dispatching the dead. The mere idea of having to whack a deader with a hand weapon was beyond the pale for most of them.
Mason grunted loudly as he slammed his ax down onto the head of a zombie. The impact split the dead thing’s skull open like a watermelon. Its arms, which had been reaching up toward the top of the wall, fell useless and dead. The zombie slid off the ax and collapsed on an ever-growing heap of zombies.
Before, the undead had only been able to get their hands on the top of the wall. Now, they were able to get their arms over the top all the way to the elbow.
Donovan rammed his pry bar into the face of the zombie, knocking out its teeth and pushing its nose back into the thing’s brain cavity. The devastating impact was enough to end the zombie for good as it fell backward.
“The pile is getting too high,” Donovan said, working to keep his voice calm and even. “They’re going to make it over soon.”
“These people are going to run out of ammo soon,” Mason said, looking down at his own paltry supply of ammunition.
The Deadland Chronicles | Book 4 | Siege of the Dead: Page 29